.45-Caliber Firebrand (11 page)

Arrows whizzed around Cuno's head, punching into the stable wall behind him. Levering a fresh round, he fired at the Indians streaming in from the creek.

They galloped in a shaggy line past the corral to the bunkhouse, loosed a couple of arrows at the drovers now holed up behind rain barrels or stock troughs or kneeling behind the porch rail, then galloped back westward past the stables before which Cuno and Quirt knelt, blinking against the broiling dust as they fired into the horde.

The Indians yowled like wolves on the trail of a bison herd. The drovers cursed and shouted. The arrows made whipping sounds as they caromed through the air, then barked loudly as they slammed into the log walls of the bunkhouse and the stables or clattered through windows.

Rifles whip-cracked, echoing around the yard, and pistols popped. There were the intermittent, thundering blasts of the bearded man's sawed-off gut shredder.

As the drovers got oriented, Indians began to drop, screaming. One splashed into a stock trough in front of the bunkhouse, and the drover crouching behind it backed up, spitting water from his mouth and firing wildly into the trough until the thrashing brave stopped thrashing and sank.

Quirt had emptied his second six-shooter when, on one knee to Cuno's right, his hammer clicked, empty.

“Shit!”

He lowered the gun to his knee and thumbed open the loading gate. The
segundo
hadn't plucked a single shell from his cartridge belt before a bullet tore into his forehead. Quirt flew up off his heels, bounced off the stable wall, and piled up at the wall's base, dead.

Cuno slid his Winchester toward the Indian galloping past the corrals on the far side of the yard, fifty yards away and racking a fresh shell into his Spencer's breech. The brave's dark gaze was cast toward Cuno, lower jaw rising and falling as he shrieked.

Before the brave could raise his carbine to his shoulder once more, Cuno blew him off his horse and slammed him up against the corral gate with a crunching and cracking of strained wooden slats and breaking bones. The brave's horse whinnied and buck-kicked, turned sharply, collided with another brave's horse, unseating the surprised brave, and galloped back toward the creek.

Cuno quickly thumbed fresh shells through his Winchester's loading gate and peered through the dust wafting amidst the gradually receding shadows. Most of the horses around him now were riderless and shaken. Guns continued to pop.

Serenity's high-pitched shout cut through the din. “Cuno!”

The young freighter turned sharply left. A horseback warrior galloped toward him, aiming an old Colt pistol tied to his wrist by a horsehair thong. The Indian's face was a lip-stretched mask of wide-eyed fury as his head bobbed above that of his speckle-rumped black mustang.

A bullet kissed the nap on Cuno's tunic and plowed into the stable wall. Cuno snapped the Winchester to his shoulder and fired once, twice, three times. The brave continued toward him, screaming,
“Aiyyeeeee-yawwwwww!”

The brave's bullets sizzled passed Cuno and into the stable wall. Knowing he'd fired the three fresh rounds he'd managed to slip into his receiver, Cuno flipped the rifle around, grabbing it by its barrel, and stepped up in the Indian's path. As the horse approached, wide eyes ringed with white, the brave aimed the pistol at Cuno once more.

The hammer pinged benignly onto the firing pin, and Cuno felt an icy nip in his bowels, knowing he'd come to within one misfired cartridge of his final resting place.

He smashed his Winchester's butt across the Indian's face—a solid, cracking hit that Cuno could feel up into his shoulders. The war cries died on the Ute's lips as he careened off his galloping black's right hip, turning two complete somersaults before hitting the ground, rolling in the churning dust, and coming to rest on his belly.

The black continued on past Cuno, smelling gamey with bear grease and sweat, and galloped back toward the creek, its rope reins trailing along the ground behind him. Cuno looked around for another Indian to shoot, but there was only wafting dust and scattered dead warriors and dead drovers.

Several braves galloped back across the creek, still yelling.

“Shit almighty!” one of the ranch hands cried, grabbing his right leg and rolling around in the dirt between the bunkhouse and one of the headquarters' two barns. “Someone pull this fuckin' arrow outta my knee!”

Just then a girl's scream rose from the direction of the main house. Cuno had dropped to a knee to thumb more cartridges into his Winchester.

“Christ, that's Trent's daughter!” rasped Henry Kuttner, rising from behind one of the two stock troughs fronting the bunkhouse. He took a couple of steps and dropped to his knee, his lower right leg bloody.

The girl screamed again. It was more like a wail this time. It sent a whipcord of electricity snapping up Cuno's back.

He bolted off his heels and sprinted toward the house.

10

CUNO RAN AROUND the stable in which the mules were braying raucously and thumping their stalls. He sprinted up the gentle grade toward the house at the base of the mountain wall.

The sprawling lodge was purple-black in the dawn shadows, but Cuno could see pale gray smoke wisping from the open front door. Arrows bristled from the log walls and porch posts and from a few of the closed shutters on the first floor. Dust sifted through the gradually lightening air in front of the house, and the ground was freshly churned with the prints of unshod ponies.

Cuno was twenty yards from the porch when hoof thuds rose to his left. He turned to see a horseback brave galloping out from around the lodge's west side. The brave turned his feather-adorned head toward Cuno, then crouched low and squeezed his knees against the horse's sides, urging more speed. He howled wildly, victoriously, as horse and rider whipped past Cuno and headed south toward the creek.

Cuno didn't waste time with a shot at the fleeing Indian. The girl had screamed again from inside the house—a horrific exclamation of bald terror—and Cuno took the porch steps two at a time . . . and stopped suddenly, whipping his Winchester up with a startled grunt.

But it was no Indian standing there in the open doorway. It was Jedediah Gallantly, clad only in white silk longhandles. The man was barefoot. His hair was mussed, and his dark eyes were sunk deep in their pale sockets.

He leaned against the open door, on the other side of the threshold, pressing one hand back against the door behind him while wrapping his other hand against the Ute-fletched arrow protruding from his belly. Blood shone darkly just up from his crotch, and dribbled down both thighs of his longhandles.

Gallantly cleared his throat and regarded Cuno miserably. His voice was so soft that Cuno could barely hear him. “Can . . . can . . . you . . . help . . . me?”

He looked down at the arrow, as if to indicate the problem.

Cuno began to reach for the arrow, but stopped. If he tried to pull the shaft out of Gallantly's belly, he'd pull half of the man's insides out, as well. He was a goner.

“I don't think so,” Cuno said regretfully, stepping gingerly past the dying man.

Michelle screamed again from deep inside the bowels of the house, and Cuno lunged ahead down the dim, smoky hall, following her screams into the large dining room. He stopped just inside the door and squinted his stinging eyes against the smoke.

The drapes on the other side of the table were burning. The smell of kerosene was sharp. In the middle of the room, a figure was down and crawling awkwardly. It was Trent.

He wore a red-plaid robe over a nightgown, and elkskin slippers. He was trying to crawl across the room, toward the kitchen door, using a long-barreled, double-bore shotgun as an oar. He looked like a landed fish trying to make it back to the stream.

As Cuno ran up to him, Trent turned suddenly, bellowing savagely and swinging the shotgun around.

“It's Cuno, Trent! Where's Michelle!”

Trent turned his enraged gaze toward the door on the far side of the room, and, with an enraged grunt, threw the shotgun, which landed just short of the door with a clattering thump.
“Kitchen!”

Cuno had heard the girl's sobs and pleas and the guttural exclamations of the Indians and was already striding toward the kitchen door. His heart hammering and his ears ringing, eyes stinging, he bunched his lips and kicked the door wide, stepping quickly inside and raising his Winchester.

Three Indians had the girl down on a long wooden table against the far wall, in front of a low, sashed window. She was naked, her nightclothes strewn about the floor amidst spilled flour and broken jars and bottles. Two Indians held her arms down on the table above her head. One had his deerskins breeches down around his knees.

The third brave, who'd also dropped his breeches, crouched between her legs, holding her slender, cream thighs in his brown hands while he thrust his hips savagely against her. He wore a crisp black beaver hat that he'd obviously found inside the house, when he was hauling the girl out of her room, no doubt. It looked ridiculous on the brave's savage head.

Spittle stringed from his lips as he leaned forward to shout mockingly into Michelle's pain-racked face, his tightly wound braids jostling down the back of his wolf-skin tunic, the banded tips brushing the oak-colored lobes of his naked ass.

One of the braves at the head of the table cried out suddenly, snapping his head toward Cuno. His grotesquely painted face shown in the growing light pushing through the window, and the beads studding his headband glistened dully. The wild smell of the Indians filled the kitchen with the smell of a bear den.

Cuno drew a bead on the headband and squeezed the Winchester's trigger. The boom filled the room, causing another jar to shatter on the wooden floor.

As the first Indian was punched against the brave to his right, the one raping Michelle jerked his dusky, eagle-featured face toward Cuno, his mixed breed's hazel eyes flashing with exasperation beneath the beaver hat's narrow curled brim, his lower jaw dropping. Cuno drilled a round through his chest, levered a fresh one, and shot the third brave, who'd turned to run toward the open back door.

The .44-40 round took him through his right shoulder blade. He yelped and stumbled forward, twisted around and falling.

The brave who'd been raping Michelle now stood facing Cuno, his back to the window, head turned to one side, stretching his lips back from his teeth as the hole in his chest gushed blood onto his wolf-skin tunic liberally decorated with bone talismans.

Cuno stepped forward, ejecting a spent round, which bounced off his chest and clattered onto the floor around a massive black cook range. Gritting his teeth, he seated a fresh cartridge and shot the half-naked brave once more in his chest and then pumped one more into his left cheek.

The rapist's head slammed back, cracking the window. The beaver hat tumbled off his head. His body spasmed wildly before he sagged forward, knees buckling, and fell face down beneath Michelle's bare feet dangling down the end of the table.

Scuffs and grunts sounded at the right end of the kitchen. Cuno moved around the table to the open timbered door. The shoulder-shot brave was half crawling, half running toward the three Indian ponies tied in the cottonwoods near a large, L-shaped pile of split firewood.

Cuno thumbed fresh rounds into the Winchester's loading gate. Standing just outside the open door, he coolly raised the rifle to his shoulder and drilled three more quick slugs into the fleeing Indian's back, on either side of his arrow-filled quiver—slamming him forward into a long, loose run. The brave hit the ground and rolled, groaning and causing the tied ponies to whinny and skitter-hop sideways.

“Son of a bitch.” Cuno ejected the smoking cartridge casing.

There was a thump behind him, and Michelle groaned. He wheeled and ran back into the kitchen. The girl was on the floor, crawling on her hands and knees toward the door to the dining room. She was sort of mewling and sobbing. Gooseflesh stood out on the milk-colored skin of her curved, slender back and rounded hips.

Before Cuno got to her, she fell onto her side, silently sobbing, tears streaking her bruised cheeks. Her split, bloody lips were drawn wide, quivering. She drew her knees up toward her chafed breasts, and pressed her long, pale, bare feet together.

“Easy now, easy,” Cuno said, looking around. He could hear running feet behind him and men shouting and the whumps of someone trying to put out the fire in the dining room.

A large denim jacket hung on a nearby wall hook. He rushed over, grabbed it, and threw it over the girl, then set his rifle on the table. Kneeling, he snaked his arms under Michelle's neck and beneath her knees and rose with her slowly.

“Easy now, easy, I got you—you're gonna be okay.” Cuno pushed through the door into the dining room. Henry Kuttner was helping Trent to his feet while two other men from the bunkhouse were ripping the burning drapes down and stomping on them, one beating the flames with chair cushions.

Cuno realized he'd been in the house probably no more than two minutes. Time had slowed down. That and the smoke and the horror of what he'd witnessed in the kitchen disoriented him. He felt as though he'd taken a war club to the solar plexus.

Stumbling, he crossed the dining room. Trent wobbled toward him, blood from a nasty gash in his forehead dribbling down his weathered, brick-red face.

“Oh, Christ—what'd they do to my girl?”

“Where's her bed?” Cuno choked.

Kuttner jerked his head toward the dining room door. “Upstairs!”

“Oh, no!” Trent wailed, stretching an arthritic hand toward Michelle's blond head. “What'd they do to her?”