.45-Caliber Firebrand (17 page)

Trent shook his head quickly. “I forget. Some orphaned half-breed out of Mexico. Dime a dozen around here. She'll help with Michelle. It might be best if she doesn't wake up from this nightmare until you arrive at Fort Jessup.”

“Don't worry, Trent. She'll be all right.” Cuno heard the lack of conviction in his own voice, but it seemed the appropriate thing to say.

The rancher drew a deep breath, the air rattling in his chest as though several ribs had cracked from sheer emotional strain. “Good luck, Cuno. Farewell. If you get them through, I'll be smilin' down on you . . . bald-headed as I may very well be!”

As Mrs. Lassiter hugged her sons and daughter once more, and the hired girl and Michelle sat placidly against the wagon box, Cuno climbed up onto the Conestoga's driver's seat. The little girl, Margaret, was still crying, and Mrs. Lassiter and the boys were crying now, too.

Behind them all, Serenity sat in his own driver's box, keeping a taut hold on his team's reins and staring around the house toward the open valley.

Cuno followed the graybeard's gaze. A bright glow shone south of the ranch yard, just beyond the creek and partially obscured by the breeze-jostled brush and trees. The ranch hands had lit the bonfire. It sent sparks and bayonet-shaped flames high in the air.

Renegade, standing a ways out from the rear of Cuno's wagon, stared at the flames and nickered worriedly.

“There's your signal,” Trent said. He raised a small uncorked bottle in his hand. “Hurry on, gentlemen. Keep an eye out for the cleft. If we make it, I'll send a rider for you.”

“Luck, Trent,” Cuno said, releasing the brake and flicking the reins across the mules' backs.

The mules brayed.

Behind Cuno, the Lassiter children sobbed and called for their mother, who stood beside Trent, her shoulders jerking. The wagon lurched forward with a thundering rattle, and they were off.

15

CUNO ANGLED THE team toward the vast mountain wall looming on his right, following a shallow ravine that he hoped would muffle the rattle of the wagon and the clomps of the mules' hooves.

Occasionally he looked back over the wagon bed and the trailing skewbald paint to see Serenity pulling the second Conestoga along behind him, about twenty yards back of Renegade, starlight glistening off the oiled tack and metal fittings and off the graybeard's bristled cheeks.

It was good to have Serenity here. He'd hate to have to rely on only himself to get these kids safely across the Rawhides to Fort Jessup. Serenity knew the mountains and the Indians as well as he knew wagons and mules, and Cuno had more than a few times relied on the oldster's wily wisdom.

And he was a comforting, if cantankerous, companion. He and Cuno had been through a lot together.

Cuno kept his Winchester close beside him on the wagon's high seat. The slight knocks it made against the wood were as reassuring as the sound of Serenity's nickering mules and the occasional thud of a wagon wheel nudging a rock. Occasionally, the old man would cough, spit chaw into the brush, or rasp a soft command to his mules. The night was clear, and sound carried crisply on the cold, dry air.

The ravine walls dropped back behind Cuno, and the mountain wall angled toward him, the creased and crene lated slope rising about twenty yards to his right, strewn with boulders and troughs and brush snags.

As Trent had shown him on the map residing in Cuno's right tunic pocket, there was a wagon trail here—two pale lines cleaved by a swatch of spindly buckbrush and sage. It had been carved by Trent's men during roundups and woodcutting expeditions into the Rawhides, and it would lead them to the cleft that would, in turn, grant them passage into the greater range.

Cuno pulled the wagon onto the trail. As the Conestoga began moving straight north along the uneven line of the mountain's base, Cuno glanced to his left and then back toward the ranch headquarters.

Nothing but darkness interrupted by the sparse, starlight-limned shapes of cottonwoods, cedars, or boulders.

So far, so good.

Maybe the Indians wouldn't attack, after all. Maybe they'd done all the damage Leaping Wolf had intended and had headed on back to their lodges. In that case, this would be a short trip, and what a relief it would be to see one of Trent's riders coming for them in a day or two with news that the war was over.

Suddenly, there was a stirring in the box behind Cuno.

“Margaret, no!” one of the boys yelled.

“I want Momma!”
A figure bounded up from the side of the wagon. It was the little blond Lassiter girl. As she scrambled toward the rear of the wagon, one of the boys reached for her.

“Margaret!” the hired Mexican girl called suddenly, bolting forward and throwing out one of her hands.

But Margaret, shedding blankets and a doll she'd been carrying, threw herself atop the tailgate, and before Cuno could begin to haul back on the mules' reins, she'd disappeared over the other side with a terrified, defiant wail followed by a thud as she hit the ground in front of Renegade, who shied away and nickered.

“Hold up, there, little miss!” Serenity yowled, planting his boots against the dashboard and hauling back on his ribbons.

Cuno cursed as he stopped his own team, quickly set the brake, and leapt over the left front wheel. He hit the ground flat-flooted and ran toward the back of the wagon while the boys scrambled toward the tailgate and continued calling for their sister.

Before he'd reached the rear wheel, a figure leapt over the tailgate and hit the ground in front of him. The Mexican girl turned to him sharply, her black hair flying out beneath her hat, and her brown eyes glistened sharply in the starlight.

“I will see to her,” she said curtly, in a heavy Spanish accent.

Cuno watched her stride out to where little Margaret sat in the brush along the trail, one leg straight out in front of her, the other curled beneath her hip. She'd fallen when she'd tried to run back the way they'd come. The girl's mouth was thrown wide in a sob so shrill and filled with such inconsolable misery that it was nearly silent.

The Mexican picked Margaret up in her arms. “There, there, Margaret,” the girl said. “Your mother will be along soon. But she won't come if you're going to act like a baby!”

“She's not coming!” Margaret nearly screamed, causing Cuno to wince and peer off into the eerily silent night, half expecting to see Utes, drawn by the scream, bearing down on him.

The Mexican girl moved back toward the wagon, hugging Margaret tightly. “No, she's not going to come if you act like a baby. Now, you hush and get back in the wagon. You don't want Leaping Wolf to catch us, now, do you?”

Cuno tripped the latch and dropped the tailgate.

“But she's
not
coming, Camilla!” Margaret retorted. “You
know
she's not!”

Camilla lifted Margaret onto the tailgate, then climbed up beside her. Her tone was at once reassuring and stern. “Now we must be very quiet. Come, let's get back under the robes and play a game.”

Camilla drew Margaret back into the wagon box, the boys watching anxiously over their knees. Michelle stared indifferently into the night. Cuno closed the tailgate and latched it.

“Let's see how many stars we can count above the mountain, Margaret. Can you count with me in Spanish?” The girl called Camilla arranged the robes and blankets over Margaret's skinny legs. “I bet I can count more than you can, and even more than Jack and Karl.”

“Hogwash, Camilla!” Margaret would have none of it as she lifted the edge of a robe up beneath her chin, shivering and staring back toward the still-dark ranch. “She's not coming. She's back there, and Leaping Wolf is going to get her, and we're never going to see her or Papa ever again!”

But the girl seemed resigned to sit in the wagon box between Camilla and her brothers. The hired girl wrapped an arm around the little blonde's spindly shoulders. When the boys, too, had settled back under the robes, Cuno glanced at Serenity waiting behind him.

He shook his head gravely at his old partner, then jogged back to the front of the wagon, scrambled up into the box, and they were off once more. Cuno slid the rifle onto his lap and balanced it there as he swung his gaze back and forth between the trail and the western darkness, expecting to see the silhouettes of rampaging Indians storming toward him at any moment, arrows whistling.

The uneven mountain wall moved forward and back on the right, and Cuno kept watching for the large cracked boulder and the lightning-topped pine that, according to Trent, marked the entrance to the gap that led to the mouth of the cleft.

To his left, he watched and listened for the Indians, resisting the urge to whip the mules into a run that would speed his approach to the gap but would also raise a din the Utes might hear.

Anxiety nipped at him. If the Indians came now, he and Serenity wouldn't have a chance against them.

Finally, the cracked boulder appeared. Just beyond, the lightning-topped pine. Between lay a gap as wide as two wagons.

Relieved that he hadn't somehow passed it, Cuno turned the mules into the canyon mouth and whipped the reins across their backs. One of the mules brayed. They all were skittish, not liking the uncertainty of the steep walls on either side and the inky darkness closing around them, relieved only by vagrant starlight.

“Pick it up there, El Paso!” Cuno called softly to the leader.

Removing his blacksnake from its holder, he cracked the whip over the team, the pop resounding like a rifle report in the close confines. In the box behind Cuno, Margaret gave a frightened sob. Camilla cooed to her, shushing her. The boys shifted around, thumping the wagon's floor and muttering to themselves.

Cuno glanced over his shoulder. Serenity's team was trailing close behind Renegade, who followed Cuno's wagon with his head and tail arched, no doubt sensing the humans' desperation.

The canyon angled back into the mountain, at times barely wide enough for one wagon, then opening again to a width of fifty or sixty yards. The floor was scalloped sand and gravel with occasional boulders fallen from above. The smell of minerals and bat guano clung to the cool air, and from one narrow, off-shooting cleft—too narrow to be the defile Cuno was looking for—he thought he heard a brief, distant mewl.

“Panther,” muttered the eldest boy in the box.

“How do you know?” asked the other, his voice low but audible in the canyon's hushed silence.

“Heard one before when I was out with Pa . . .”

“Did not.”

“Did, too!”

The Mexican girl hushed them both with a shrill
“Silencio!”

Trent said the off-shooting gap they were looking for lay about two hundred yards within the box canyon, and that they couldn't miss it on the darkest night. Not necessarily a good thing, because it meant the Indians would find it, too. Cuno didn't want to get trapped in there with a horde of screaming Utes on his tail.

The thought had barely brushed across his brain when a shrill yip rose from the night behind him. Keeping the team moving at a brisk trot, occasionally cracking the whip, he turned his head and pricked his ears.

More yips rose, faint with distance. At first Cuno thought the muffled but raucous cries were the sounds of a hunting coyote pack, but as they grew louder and were joined by several sets of thudding hooves, he knew better.

A bayonet of dread poked at his gut. He looked behind. Serenity had heard the cries, as well, and was turned to gaze along their back trail. Cuno could see the tension in the old man's back and shoulders.

He turned toward Cuno, who could see only the man's gray sombrero and gray beard in the darkness. “Got me a suspicion they're onto us,” he said in a flip tone that lifted gooseflesh across Cuno's back.

The young freighter swung his head forward. At the same time, a gap shone in the wall to his left—just wide enough for one wagon at a time. It was the gap they were looking for.

Cuno glanced at Serenity once more. “Found the crack,” he said, his voice sounding louder than he'd intended, reverberating off the high, stone walls.

Cuno swung the team into the fault, having to use his blacksnake a few times until the lead mules had the wheelers inside the narrow gap, pulling. The air in the gap felt a good ten degrees colder than the air in the larger canyon.

The mules' shod hooves clomped loudly, echoing. The wheels and the boards of the wagon bed clattered beneath the blankets and robes. Tools rattled in the box hanging beneath the swagger bed.

Cuno could still hear the eerie yips and yowls in the distance, and the thuds of galloping horses.

When Serenity had swung his own Conestoga in behind Cuno, Cuno's wagon approached a broad section of the cleft. The young freighter turned to look into the wagon bed behind him. “Which one of you boys wants to take the reins for me?”

Both boys sat against the right side of the wagon bed, the younger, blond kid's head only coming up to the older boy's ear. “I will,” the young one said quickly.

The older boy, who had longish brown hair curling over his ears, beneath a heavy brown scarf securing his felt hat down tight on his head, chuffed and scrambled to his feet.

“I wanna do it, Karl!”

“I'm gonna let Karl drive first,” Cuno said, his taut voice betraying his nerves. “I'll let you drive next time—okay, Jack? It is Jack, isn't it?”

Jack only frowned as his older brother climbed over the front of the box and into the driver's seat. The older boy was probably about five-four, and all arms, legs, hands, and feet, with his big ears protruding from the hand-knit scarf on his head.