.45-Caliber Firebrand (7 page)

“Ah, hell, I'll go,” Snowberger said, dropping out of the wagon's empty bed with a grunt. “Like to tell the man where he can go . . . after I've done smoked his cigars and enjoyed his food and liquor.”

“Hell, I'll throw in,” Serenity said, stomping bandy-legged down the loading dock's board steps. “I wanna tell ole Trent what I think of him up close enough that he can smell my rancid breath!”

“Yeah, well, you're gonna have a bath first,” Cuno grouched as he started removing the sheeting from the second wagon. “So you best spend the next hour or so, while we bed the mules down, getting used to the idea.”

On the other side of the wagon, Serenity dropped his jaw and widened his eyes, flabbergasted. “A
bath
?”

“You heard me.”

“Jesus Christ! Who else the old fucker got dinin' up there—
U. S. Grant
?”

The tips of Cuno's ears warmed, but he kept his mouth shut.

 

In spite of the dustup earlier in the yard, the Chinaman seemed pleased to oblige Cuno and his men with hot-water baths in the open lean-to shed off the rear of the cook shack.

The stocky son of Han seemed downright eager to do it, in fact, in spite of the twenty men he'd just fed and all the cleanup he had yet to do in the kitchen. The man enjoyed a good row now and then, Cuno figured, as he ran a bar of lye soap across his work-sculpted pecs, and the Chinaman dumped another bucketful of steaming water between his legs. The steam billowed in the cold night air.

The Chinese cook didn't seem to take umbrage with the nick Serenity had given him across his fleshy right cheek, for, as the Chinaman filled the tubs and rummaged for towels, the two got on like old army pals, bantering and joking and wheezing deep laughs, though the Chinaman appeared to understand only about half of all Serenity's raspy, half-shouted words.

As Cuno scrubbed at the grime and mule stench en-grained in his brawny hide, Serenity sang as he lathered his bony chest, looking like some scrawny, plucked, bearded chicken in his own corrugated tin tub nearby. Dallas Snowberger, contented to merely soak and let the suds do all the work, hunkered low in his own tub and puffed a long, black cigar from the Chinaman's own personal stash.

Cuno lifted a leg to scrub a foot, unable to extinguish the hauntingly celestial face of Logan Trent's daughter from his mind. A girl like that—all sensuous innocence with a well-filled corset, to boot—could tie a man's loins in knots. Cuno found himself not as eager as he had been to hightail it back to Crow Feather.

“Come on, fellas,” he ordered, rising from the tub, the suds sliding on down his chest and thighs. “Time to haul ass up to the lodge.”

Serenity squawked a mocking laugh. “Wouldn't wanna keep ole Trent waitin', now would we?”

“Trent sure got stuck in his craw,” Snowberger mused aloud as he slitted an eye at Cuno and continued puffing his cigar.

“Somethin' up there did, anyways,” Serenity said, clamping an arthritic hand on each side of his tub and hoisting his bony, pale body up out of the water. “Sorta looks like he seen a ghost, don't he?”

“Or a witch. Maybe one o' them warlocks the Injuns believe in.”

“I'm hungry,” Cuno growled. “Christ, I haven't eaten since noon, and then it was only a handful of Serenity's overboiled beans.”

They dried, then dressed in the only other set of clothes they'd brought along, shivering in the chill night air behind the cook shack, the water still steaming from the tubs, a big moon rising over the high, bulky eastern ridge.

Cuno pulled on a pair of faded denims—old but clean—and a thin doeskin tunic bleached bone-white by countless washings. He knotted a red neckerchief with white polka dots around his neck, stuffed the tails into the tunic, stomped into his boots, strapped on his gun belt, and donned his hat, taking an extra moment to adjust the angle.

He strode back through the cook shack, where the cook was washing dishes on one of the ranges in the back shadows, and singing in his eerie tonal tongue, a cigarette dangling from between his mustached lips. Cuno tossed the man a silver dollar, thanked him for his generous services, and continued on out to the porch.

Impatiently, he waited for his less-eager comrades. When they both arrived—Serenity wearing buckskins that looked no fresher than the ones he'd worn on the trip and Snowberger in denims, brown shirt, and simple black vest—they began tramping across the dark yard and up the slow grade toward the well-lit house hulking atop the hill.

Near one of the several corrals on the south side of the yard, fronting the creek, three horseback riders sat talking to a man standing before them. Cuno couldn't hear what they were saying, but their tones were grave. It took him a few seconds to realize the man on the ground, clad in a black frock coat, wavy pewter hair glistening with oil and smoking a stout cigar, was the foreman, Henry Kuttner.

The aroma of the man's cigar as well as his musky cologne wafted on the chill, fall breeze.

Beyond the men, on the far side of the creek, running hoof thuds rose. Cuno, Serenity, and Snowberger stopped and turned toward the creek, as did the mounted men and Kuttner.

“Jesus Christ!” one of the waddies said, hipped around in his saddle. “Sounds like those boys got the devil's hounds on their tails!”

“What now?” Kuttner said, removing his cigar from his teeth and squaring his shoulders at the ranch's front portal into which a couple of old bison skulls had been nailed. The portal and the bleached skulls were silhouetted against the starry, moonlit sky.

The jostling shadows of the four riders came on across the sage-tufted flat, galloping hard. They thundered across the bridge and pushed on under the portal, and in seconds they were rounding the far corrals and checking their mounts down as they approached Kuttner and the other mounted waddies.

“Trouble, Boss!” one of the newcomers exclaimed, sliding out of his saddle while his horse skidded to a dust-lifting halt and one of the other horses whinnied angrily behind him. The man scrambled around to one of the other men, who crouched low in his saddle, one hand clamped around the arrow protruding from the side of his neck, just behind his ear. “Blackie took an arrow around Wolf Head Canyon!”

Kuttner stood statue-still, fists on his hips, feet spread. His cigar glowed in his right hand.

“He said there was five of 'em, Boss,” one of the other newcomers said, holding the reins of his jittery mount up close to his chest. “Ambushed him at the very bottom of the canyon. Lucky he was on old Tom, or he never woulda made it outta there with his hair!”

“Get him into the bunkhouse,” Kuttner said, jerking his head toward the lighted windows behind him. “Have Riker tend him. Any of you other boys see anything?”

“Just sign,” said a bulky man in a blanket coat, his collar drawn up to his ears. “And what the magpies left of three more dead cows. But I don't like it, Mr. Kuttner.” The man cursed his leaping horse, and when the horse settled some, the man returned his bright-eyed gaze to Kuttner once more. “I got a bad sense o' things. Lots of tracks criss crossin' the range, every which way. Movin' in closer to the headquarters. You know that big cottonwood tree on that saddleback butte by the Three-Fork range? There was a Ute arrow stickin' out of it. Just the arrow. Nothin' else. They're gettin' set for something—I'll guaran-damn-tee you that!”

“You don't know that, Bill,” Kuttner said calmly, just loudly enough for Cuno to hear on the other side of the yard. “Might be they're just tryin' to make us jumpy.”

“They done it,” Bill said. “Yessir, Mr. Kuttner, I don't mind tellin' you—I'm
damn
jumpy!”

The first rider had eased the wounded man out of his saddle, and as they moved off toward the bunkhouse together, Kuttner tapped ashes from his stogie. “Put your horses up and get some grub, Bill. You, too, Reno. I'll be up at the house. Send someone to fill me in on Blackie's condition after Riker has checked him out.”

When Bill and Reno had led their own and the other two horses off to the stables, Kuttner talked to the four fresh riders for another half minute, then sent them galloping out of the ranch yard. Cuno glanced at Serenity and Snowberger standing beside him. Serenity cocked a brow. Snowberger just looked dark.

Kuttner strode up to them puffing his stogie. He, too, looked dark as he regarded the ground as though he'd dropped a quarter.

“Looks like you got your hands full out here, Kuttner.” Cuno jerked his head toward the men just now thundering across the wooden bridge and heading off into the moonlit flats beyond. “Scout riders?”

Kuttner nodded. “Try to keep four out at all times after sunset.”

Cuno introduced Serenity and Snowberger to Kuttner, and after a stiff shaking of hands, the four headed up toward the house.

“How many men do you have on the place, Kuttner?” the graybeard asked.

“Nearly twenty. Enough to hold off Leaping Wolf's band. He don't have no more than fifteen or twenty himself, and, from what my scouts tell me, only a handful of rifles.”

“Well, you got about twenty brand-new Winchesters, now, don't you, Kuttner?” Snowberger growled as they headed up the house's broad porch steps.

“That we do,” the foreman said, opening the front door and waving the others in ahead of him. A frosty smile shone in his eyes. He had a voice like sandpaper raked across a steel file. “All the way back and left, gentlemen. First, don't be offended if I ask you to hang your hats and guns on the pegs just inside the door, and to scrape your boots on the mat.”

Serenity snorted. “You wanna check our teeth and peek under our fingernails, too?”

Cuno elbowed the oldster in the ribs.

When they'd hung up their guns and hats, and scraped the dust and dung from their boots, Cuno led the way down the hallway lit by only a couple of guttering candles in wall sconces. He followed the left fork into a broad, arched doorway that let into a dining room in which a large, timbered table stretched and a vast fieldstone hearth popped and sputtered, pushing heat out around it.

Logan Trent himself sat at the table's far end, dressed as before but without his hat and with his thick, silver, curly hair neatly combed back behind his big, red ears. He was slouched in his chair, staring over the top of an old, yellowed newspaper toward the door, his silver spectacles perched low on his big nose.

“Mr. Massey, gentlemen, come in,” he said, folding the newspaper, removing the glasses, and rising from his chair. “I just talked to Run, and he said all was ready. He's pulling the elk out of the oven even as we speak. When he's carved it, he'll wheel it in.”

Trent tossed his newspaper down on the simple, elegantly appointed table—bone china plates, cups, crystal goblets, and two demijohns of wine but no tablecloth—and limped toward Cuno and the others. After a brief introduction to Serenity and Snowberger, which was as stiff and awkward as the one that had preceded it outside, Trent turned to a stout oak door.

“Run, go ahead and carve the roast! Michelle's not here yet,” he added, lifting his chin toward the ceiling and speaking even more loudly, “but if we waited for her, that elk would end up cold as an old maid's heart by the time we served it!”

He wheeled and threw a hand out at the table. “Gentlemen, forgive my manners, but I don't get much company, and my wife's been dead for seventeen years. I'm out of the habit of entertaining.”

“I'm out of the habit of bein' entertained,” Serenity chuckled, tugging on his damp beard and regarding the table as though it were a coiled rattler he'd just found in his bunk.

“Choose a chair and take a load off, Mr. Parker,” Trent said. “Wine's on the table. Pour yourself a glass and throw down a drink. The grub'll be on the table in six jerks of a hangman's noose.”

After several years of man hunting as well as of being hunted by other men, Cuno preferred his back to a wall, so he tramped around behind the heavy, varnished pine table and sat down at the far end, to the left of Logan Trent. The gimpy rancher stood, awkwardly formal, behind his own chair, eyes flicking around in their sockets anxiously, as though wondering if he hadn't forgotten something important.

“Mr. Trent,” Kuttner said, as he pulled out the chair across from Cuno, “today's four scouts rode in before I sent the others out. Blackie took an arrow in the neck.”

The growth along Trent's nose darkened slightly. “Bad?”

Kuttner hiked a shoulder as he shrugged down in his chair. “If they don't have to amputate, I reckon he'll be all right.”

“Damn,” Trent said, twitching an eye at the table. “Don't wanna lose Blackie. He's the best rifleman we have.”

“Well, if he makes it, he's got plenty of rifles to shoot with,” Serenity dryly quipped as he dropped into the chair beside Cuno. “Yessir, fourteen purty Winchester repeaters made it through that war dance goin' on out yonder.”

“Mr. Parker,” Trent said, leaning over his chair back to hammer the graybeard with a hard stare. “Your grievances have adequately been filed by Mr. Massey, to whom I apologized and awarded a sizable check. I know that doesn't bring back your dead driver, but it should give you a new wagon, six new mules, and more whores than you, sir, can possibly fuck over an entire Denver city winter!”

Serenity slammed his fist on the table and started to rise, bellowing, “Well, you, sir, got no idea just how many—”

“Father?” It was a girl's voice—soft, high-pitched, and slightly raspy.

It cut Serenity off like a pistol shot.

Cuno turned his gaze from Serenity to the room's arched doorway. Michelle stood there, a blond vision in a simple, green velvet dress cut low enough to show off her long, creamy neck and chest and just enough cleavage to start a young mule skinner's heart to turning somersaults in his rib cage.