.45-Caliber Firebrand (6 page)

“Because I didn't think you'd come. Or might not be able to find enough men to come. It's a gut-wrenching trek through rugged country even without the Indians. You throw them in . . .”

Trent limped back over to his chair and sat down with a squawk. He favored Cuno with an admiring, coyote-like grin. “I knew you'd try to come, given the right pay, and given your reputation for taking on jobs others might shrink from. It was your father and stepmother who were murdered—correct? And you pursued their killers—the notorious Rolf Anderson and Sammy Spoon—all the way up the Bozeman Trail.”

Cuno's general annoyance with the man was aggravated by his cunning, arrogant demeanor, as though he was holding a royal flush and he wanted everyone to know well in advance of his throwing down and cashing in. “Where the hell'd you hear about that?”

“Word gets around one watering hole after another. Eventually even makes its way out here.” Trent took another drink, shuttered an eye, and pointed at Cuno's chest. “That ain't all I know, neither. You killed Franklin Evans—rancher up around Julesburg.”

Stonily, Cuno held the man's gaze. “Trent, you look as happy as a tick on a fat dog.”

“Hey!” Kuttner objected. He'd collapsed into a chair by the fire, facing his employer and Cuno.

Unfazed by the remark, Trent merely shook his head and chuckled. “Bastard ran me off my first homestead up in the Antelope Hills, about twenty miles from Evans's headquarters. That's when I headed here, to the backside of the Great Divide. Always meant to go back and beef the bastard myself, but then I started raisin' herds and kids, and the opportunity exhausted itself. Besides, I figured the old rattlesnake had done bit the wrong dog fox and got his head chewed off.

“Yessir, I heard about all that,” the old rancher continued. “And then, after this powder keg with Leaping Wolf's daughter exploded, and I found myself in dire need of a supply run to get me through the winter, I heard your name mentioned by a few fellas out on the range. Said they'd seen the brawny blond firebrand who killed Franklin Evans haulin' freight for Fort Dixon.”

Trent shrugged his bony shoulders. “So I fired off a telegraph to Dwight Doyle at the mercantile in Crow Feather to hire you on. And I gave him my list to fill.”

“But he left out the part listing the rifles—to me, anyways.”

“Ah, we're back to the rifles.” Suddenly, Trent leaned forward and rammed his fist onto the desktop. His nose swelled with exasperation. “Damnit, with Leaping Wolf runnin' wild across my graze, I needed a good thirty repeaters to get me through the winter. One for every man I got, with plenty ammo for each gun. And by God, I was gonna get it any way I could.

“I knew you could get your wagons through, so I knew you were the one. No, I didn't tell you about the rifles—I didn't tell
anyone
about the rifles except for Doyle—because I didn't want it to get around that Leaping Wolf was on the prod. If that happened, I'd never get anyone to run me freight! If I didn't starve out this winter, I'd be overrun with savages, and old Leaping Wolf's squaws would be mopping out their lodges with my purty silver hair!”

Suddenly, Trent winked as he gazed across the desk at Cuno. “Except you. I knew you'd come. I knew you wouldn't be afraid. Even see it as a challenge. But most of the other freighters I've known are far too concerned about their wagons and their mules—”

“And their men . . .”

“And their
men
. . . for any derring-do!”

“Well, I've got one dead man, a burned wagon, and six dead mules, and if the rest of that ammo had caught fire, I'd be out more wagons and more mules, and I might not be sitting here squawking about it.”

Trent donned his glasses, picked up a pen from a holder, and flipped the cap off an ink bottle. He looked at Cuno over his smudged spectacles. “Will a bank draft do?”

“As long as I make it back to Crow Feather to cash it.”

Trent dipped the pen in the ink bottle and scribbled out the check. He set the pen aside, ripped the check out of the book, and tossed it across the desk to Cuno.

Cuno picked it up. He'd been prepared to get his tail up all over again, but the amount—two thousand dollars—more than covered the agreed-upon figure as well as an additional amount for the mules and the wagon and for the thirty rifles Cuno had been hauling in ignorance.

“I know there's no covering the cost of a dead man,” Trent said, “but it's a tough country. If you look close, you'll see a grave in every wash.”

“I'll tell that to Dutch's woman in Crow Feather,” Cuno said. Rasmussen had lived with an old whore named Glenda when he wasn't hoorahing mules at the end of a jerkline. Cuno would give Glenda a couple hundred dollars to see her through a couple of years on her own.

Stuffing the folded check in a pocket of his buckskin tunic, Cuno rose from his chair and turned to the door.

Behind him, packing his pipe, Trent said, “I'd like to invite you and your men back to the house for dinner later. Say, around seven o'clock? Give you adequate time for a bath and a change of clothes, if you so desire.”

Cuno tramped past the grimly staring Kuttner to the door. “No, thanks.”

“I have a wonderful cook. A full-blooded Sioux with a club foot. Ain't much good for anything
but
cooking, and the cooking he does right well. He's preparing an elk roast with a delightful chokecherry sauce.” Cuno turned from the office door as the old man sat back in his chair, casually touching a match to his pipe and puffing smoke like an old steam engine on an uphill push.

Trent said, “You and your men are welcome to bed down here in the lodge, as well. I have four empty rooms upstairs.”

“We'll dine in the cook shack and throw down with your men in the bunkhouse, Mr. Trent.” Cuno drew a deep, weary breath. “Thanks just the same. We'll rest the mules for a day or two, be pullin' out again by Wednesday.”

Trent lowered the pipe and stared across the room at Cuno, brows beetled. “Please. It's the least I can do to compensate your men—”

Cuno tapped his breast pocket. “The check will do.” He wheeled and tramped back down the dark hall toward the front door.

In the ceiling, he heard the slap-squawk of running, wet feet. The tapping continued beyond him overhead. As he approached the broad foyer of the front door, steps squeaked to his right.

He stopped and turned to see a girl standing halfway down a dark, narrow stairwell—the same long-haired blonde he'd seen in the yard with the cat.

She stood now, dripping wet and holding a buffalo robe around her slender shoulders. With her hair plastered across her head and over the robe's broad collar, she looked like a half-drowned gopher. Only her face was far from gopher-like.

It was, in a word, angelic.

“Mr. Massey?” she said softly, her chest rising and falling heavily beneath the bulky, brown robe.

The robe came down to just below her knees. One bare foot was slightly lifted on one step, while the other had come down sideways on the step below. Her wet calves were peach-pale, smooth, and perfectly sculpted.

Cuno's voice caught in his throat, and he found himself fumbling his hat from his head. “It's Cuno, Miss . . . ?”

“My bathroom is over Father's office, and I heard you talking. I wasn't meaning to eavesdrop.” The girl tipped her head to one side and knotted her brows. “Won't you
please
come to supper? We seldom get company out here, and Father gets lonely. He told me all about how you hunted down the killer of your father and stepmother. He's quite the connoisseur of gunslingers, you see, and he's been waiting to meet you.”

The pretty, blue-eyed waif bent her knees with beseeching and balled her cheeks, which were mottled red from her hot bath and from chagrin at her half-dressed state. “Won't you
please
join us? It would mean so much to him, and he's ordered a big, elaborate meal in your honor, Mr. Massey.”

She fumbled with the robe, which she held from the inside, up close to her throat, with both hands. As she did, the two unbuttoned flaps parted slightly to reveal the deep, inside curves of her creamy breasts. They, too, appeared pink from the hot bath.

The vision bit Cuno deep, and his throat dried. In one fell swoop, his beef with the old, arrogant rancher was gone, and all that remained was this naked, wet vision of young, vibrant femininity clad in a buffalo robe before him.

“I reckon . . . if you think it's that important . . .”

“I do, indeed, Mr. Massey.”

“All right, then,” he stammered, his eyes roving down her delicate body once more before climbing back to those deep, soulful eyes set wide above a long, fine nose. “I'll be back.”

The girl turned suddenly and began padding back up the stairs. “Thank you!”

“Hey, wait a minute.”

She stopped, turned. The robe parted even farther, revealing for a split second all of one pink, bud-like nipple. She seemed totally oblivious of her beauty and sensuality, which was somehow enhanced by that bulky, moth-chewed robe.

“What's your name?”

“Oh,” she said, smiling, the flush rising in her cheeks. Her eyes flashed in the last of the light emanating from the windows on either side of the lodge's front door. “I'm Michelle Trent. I live here most all the time now.”

“You'll be joining us for supper?”

“Of course.”

Cuno felt his lips spread with a shit-eating grin, and he was glad Serenity couldn't see him now. “All right, then.”

The girl continued up the stairs. Cuno donned his hat and stumbled out the lodge's front door.

6

AS CUNO DESCENDED the grade from the big house toward the bunkhouse and stables, he saw Renegade staring at him from over the corral gate at the yard's western edge. The skewbald whinnied and twitched his ears—little more than a silhouette in the last of the twilight.

“Eat your hay,” Cuno said, glancing at the pile of cured timothy mounded at the horse's feet. His mind was on the girl and the flesh peeking out from behind the bulky robe.

The men had disappeared from the branding corral, and buttery light shone in the sashed bunkhouse windows, over the broad porch equipped with a hammock and several stout log chairs as well as a sandbox spittoon. A rumble of conversation emanated from both the bunkhouse and the cook shack, which was still spewing smoke from its fieldstone chimney. The smoke was rife with the aroma of spiced beef and coffee.

The Chinese cook could be heard, berating someone for tracking manure onto his floor then ordering the man outside: “Git! Git! Git!”

A hatted silhouette carrying a plate and a steaming cup of coffee stumbled out the shack's side door, laughing, and mounted the bunkhouse porch. As the waddie pushed into the bunkhouse, Cuno moved up to his two wagons fronting the supply shed's loading dock.

One of the wagons was nearly empty, and Serenity and Dallas Snowberger were winching one of the crates up to the loading dock on the shed's raised platform—raised to keep rodents and other critters from burrowing into the place from under the floor and befouling costly supplies that weren't all that easy to acquire out here.

“You fellas about done?” Cuno said.

“Oh, look who's here!” Serenity said as he turned the winch's squeaky crank atop the loading dock. “Just in time to help us unload the last wagon.”

“Quit grousin', you stove-up ole mossy horn.” Cuno tapped his tunic pocket as he climbed the ramp angling off the wagon's open tailgate. “I got your money. We'll split it up when we get to Crow Feather. Enough here for a nice, long drunk and carouse in Denver on the way to New Mexico.”

“Hazard pay?” asked Snowberger as he headed back to the wagon.

“I reckon.”

“Ain't gonna do Dutch much good,” the graybeard said as Cuno carried a crate of bagged Arbuckles down the wagon ramp.

“Were you expecting it to?” Cuno set the crate on the ground under the winch hook, wrapped the leather harness around the crate, and set the hook. As Serenity winched up the crate, Cuno looked around. “I thought Quirt was gonna send some of his rannies out to give us a hand.”

“That broken nose you gave him changed his mind,” Snowberger said, balancing a bag of parched corn on his shoulder. “He decided we could do the unloadin' ourselves.”

“Hope there's food left,” Serenity said. “The smell o' that beef's been pressin' my belly button ever tighter against my backbone.”

“No beef tonight,” Cuno said, grunting under the weight of a parched corn sack that Snowberger handed over the side of the wagon. “Fellas, tonight we're headin' to a fancy sit-down meal up to the main house. Trent's special invitation.”

Cuno didn't mention the daughter's fortification of the invitation, but the image of her standing on the narrow, dark stairs, sopping wet under that bulky robe with the partly open front, scampered across his mind again like a mischievous cat, flooding his loins with a young man's keen, hot desire.

“You mean we're gonna sit down to a meal with the man that hornswoggled us into carryin' rifles and ammo he didn't pay us for?”

“He paid us.”

“Only after we done carried 'em,” Snowberger grunted.

“And Dutch went under on account o' them savages we weren't warned about,” Serenity added, angrily cranking the winch. “What'd he have to say about that?”

“Not much,” Cuno snapped, annoyed at the question. “He wrote us a check.”

He grabbed the last feed sack out of Snowberger's hands and tossed it down beneath the hook. “But I don't think Dutch would mind all that much if we went up to the house and sat down to a meal with the man. At least, I'm gonna go. You two can stay down here and swap big windies with Quirt's boys, if you wanna be rock-headed about it.”