.45-Caliber Firebrand (18 page)

“Drive a team before?” Cuno asked him, handing the boy the reins.

“Some,” Karl said, looking at the leather ribbons in his mittened hands as though at a book he was having trouble deciphering.

Cuno grabbed his Winchester and sidled to the edge of the wagon. “Just keep 'em moving at an even pace. They're scared as hell in this pit, so the trick'll be to keep 'em moving. Shouldn't have to worry about them running away on you. Don't drop the reins, though, or you'll be in trouble.”

Karl nodded as he wriggled around in the seat and stared straight out over the mules' jostling backs, his back straight and tense.

Cuno dropped to the floor of the defile and quickly untied Renegade's reins from the back of the Conestoga.

“What're you cipherin'?” Serenity said behind him. His voice was low and dark now. “Sounds to me like there's quite a damn few ridin' purty damn fast.”

“I'm gonna ride back and give 'em somethin' to study on.” Cuno led Renegade to the cleft's wall and swung into the saddle as Serenity drew up beside him. “Whatever you do, you keep the wagons moving.”

“Yeah, it's way too early to stop fer a picnic,” Serenity growled, shaking his ribbons across his mules' backs and continuing on down the defile.

16

CUNO HUNKERED LOW in the saddle as Renegade raced back the way they'd come down the narrow, gently winding defile. When they arrived at the main canyon, Cuno jerked the horse sharply right, and the skewbald paint dug its hooves into the scalloped sand and lunged down the canyon toward the mouth.

He could hear the Indians galloping toward him, hear the yips and yowls and the thuds of their racing horses—probably seventy yards away and closing fast. Cuno remembered a ledge protruding from the canyon's north wall. He raced toward it now—it looked like part of the sheer ridge had bulged outward, nearly separating from the rest, and on its crest sat a flat-topped boulder with a scrub cedar growing from a crack in its center.

Cuno swung Renegade toward the knob, then hauled back on the reins. He tossed the reins to the ground, slid his Winchester from the saddle boot, and rose out of the stirrups, placing his feet atop the saddle. He flung his rifle up onto the ledge, the crest of which was about six feet above his head.

“Stay, boy!”

The war cries of the approaching savages were growing louder. One of the Indians shouted a guttural command, and Renegade shook his head warily.

Cuno leapt straight up from the saddle, grabbed a stone knob protruding from the ridge wall, and pulled himself up. He dug a boot into a crack, thrust the other into another crack, and seconds later he was hoisting himself over the top of the knob and scooping up his Winchester.

He dropped to a knee and, quietly racking a shell into the rifle's breech, stared up canyon. The chasm was a light cream swath of sand between velvet black ridge walls vaguely defined here and there by starlight.

Down the middle of the swath, the Indians galloped, four or five jostling silhouettes of horses and long-haired riders clad in animal hides and skins. Starlight winked off rifle barrels and knives and spear blades. Their shadows slid along the pale canyon floor beside them. The Indians sounded like a pack of hungry wolves determined to chill the blood of their prey before they made the final, killing lunge.

Cuno hadn't known how many Utes were trailing him. Half of Leaping Wolf's lighthorsemen might have been back here.

He stayed low until the two lead riders were thirty yards away and closing fast, their horses chuffing, the Indians' yowls echoing eerily around the canyon. Then, remaining on one knee, Cuno raised the rifle to his shoulder, lined up the sights on one of the two lead riders, and squeezed the trigger.

The rifle cracked sharply, loudly, echoing.

One Indian's yowling died abruptly, replaced by a strangled sound. He flew back off his pony's right hip to hit the canyon floor with a thud, his bow clattering against the rocks at the base of the ridge wall behind him.

Cuno's Winchester roared again, leaping and bucking against his shoulder, flames stabbing from the octagonal barrel. The second lead rider screamed shrilly as he tumbled straight back off his lunging pony's butt. One of the three pursuing riders chopped the wounded brave up beneath his horse's hammering hooves. Then, he, too, was blown off his mount's back.

Cuno stood as the trampled brave screamed and groaned and, ejecting the spent brass while seating a fresh one, fired four more quick rounds from his right hip, cocking and firing, cocking and firing, the cartridge casings clinking off the rocks around him.

When all five Indian ponies had galloped up canyon, whinnying and nickering and buck-kicking angrily, and the five braves lay in rumpled, dark heaps, unmoving on the canyon floor, sheathed in wafting powder smoke, Cuno turned and scrambled back down the escarpment.

Renegade had shifted position, sidestepping skittishly at the racket. Cuno whistled. The horse stepped toward the scarp, turning slightly. Cuno dropped down the wall and into the saddle with a grunt of expelled air. Sliding his Winchester into the saddle boot, he leaned forward, grabbed up the reins, and turned Renegade up canyon.

He caught up to the wagons a minute later as they cleaved the narrow chasm, rattling and rocking, hooves clomping like cracked bells on the uneven stone floor.

“Jumpin' Jehoshaphat!” Serenity bellowed as Cuno put Renegade up beside the graybeard's driver's seat. “You're like to give me a heartstroke, comin' up on me like that. I thought you was one o' them Injuns!”

“There were five. I got the jump on 'em.”

“I heard the shootin'. Figured someone got the jump on someone.” Serenity shook his head wearily and sleeved sweat from his brow. “Only five, you say?”

“They must have heard us outside the canyon and savvied our plan. There'll likely be more, but our back trail's clear for now.”

“Any shootin' from back toward the ranch?” Serenity called as Cuno gigged Renegade up along the other wagon, heading for the driver's box.

“Not yet.”

Cuno knew the old graybeard wanted to shout, “That don't mean there won't be some soon!” but he held his tongue in deference to the children and the two older girls.

Cuno dallied his reins around his saddle horn, then stepped fluidly out of his stirrups and, grabbing the side of the driver's seat, onto the wagon. Renegade would keep pace with the freighters not only because Cuno had trained him well but because of the trouble the horse knew was behind them.

“How you doing, Karl?” he asked the older Lassiter boy, tensely sitting the driver's box. He held the reins loosely, though, not all balled up like a greenhorn would do, jerking them this way and that.

“All right, I reckon,” the boy said. “Heard shootin'.”

Cuno saw no reason to mince words. He was close enough to Karl's age to remember how much he'd hated being lied to for his own good.

“Five Injuns caught our scent.” Cuno took the reins from the boy. “They're not on it anymore.”

“That's Margaret's fault, I 'spect,” Karl said, keeping his voice low, the hoof clomps and the clatter of the wagons echoing off the walls around them. “The girl never could keep her mouth shut, mister . . .”

“Cuno. Cuno Massey. Don't cotton to bein' called mister. It sounds like folks are addressing my old man, and he's been dead now nearly four years.”

Karl swallowed as he stared out over the mules' dark, bobbing heads. “Them bastard Injuns killed my old man. Hit him with a war club, then stuck him with a lance.”

“It ain't easy, losing your pa. Especially when you seen it happen right out in front of you.”

Karl glanced at Cuno, and the boy's rawboned features with blunt nose and close-set eyes were drawn taut as a drumhead. He had a thumb-shaped birthmark on the nub of his right cheek and several red pimples spread across his forehead. “That how yours died?”

Cuno nodded.

“Injuns?”

Cuno shook his head. “One was a white man but more vicious than all those sons o' bitches behind us put together. The other was a half-breed named Sammy Spoon.”

“Did the law track 'em?”

Just then rocks tumbled down the wall just ahead and left and shattered on the cleft floor. “Whoa!” Cuno said, drawing back on the reins and standing up in the driver's box, hand on his pistol grips.

As the wagon rocked to a halt, a faint keening whine rose from the sloping ridge. Another rock dropped and broke on the ground before the mules. The team jostled around in their traces, and one brayed, but Cuno held taut to the reins.

He released his pistol's grips. “Bobcat, sounds like.”

“Sounds that way to me,” Karl said.

“Sounded like a panther,” the younger Lassiter boy said behind them, his voice hushed and conspiratorial.

“Shut up, Jack,” Karl said.

“You shut up!”

There was a smacking sound, and Cuno chuckled ruefully. The Mexican girl, Camilla, had rendered the argument stillborn with a quick, resolute slap to the side of Jack's head. There was a soft, plaintive “Ouch!” and then silence.

Cuno looked behind his own wagon at Serenity. The graybeard sat his driver's seat tensely, staring up the ridge.

“Cat,” Cuno said just loudly enough for his partner to hear.

Then he shook the reins across the mules' backs, and the wagon rolled forward once more.

The cleft opened and closed around the wagons. In several places, Cuno saw rock and boulder snags blasted to bits by Trent's men, who'd kept the passage open for wood-hauling expeditions into the mountains. In a couple of places over the next couple of hours, he and Serenity had to lever with jacks and crowbars three recently fallen boulders out of the passage.

About three hours after they'd started into it, the cleft opened on a wide, boulder-and-cottonwood-stippled wash bathed in the light of the recently risen moon. In the milky light, steam snaked up from the mules' backs, and their breath jetted from their nostrils and around their heads.

Cuno and Serenity pushed the teams across the wash, negotiating boulders and fallen cottonwoods and scrub cedars. When they'd reached the other side and found a passage—a broad, intersecting wash—that rose gradually into the mountains, they halted the wagons and unhitched the mules for water and rest.

They picketed the mules amongst a few leafless cottonwoods growing around a spring-fed pool furred with ice. Leaving Serenity to tend the animals, Cuno walked back to the bivouac. He'd put Karl and Jack to work gathering wood and digging a small fire pit, but the girls had stayed inside the wagon, half buried beneath the quilts and hides.

When he'd checked on the boys' progress with the fire, he strode over to the wagons parked in the shadow of a giant boulder, tongues hanging. Inside, Margaret sat on Camilla's lap, her blond head resting against the Mexican girl's shoulder. A couple of feet to Camilla's left, Michelle lay on her side beneath the covers. Cuno couldn't tell if she was asleep.

“We'll have a fire built soon,” he told Camilla. “Best climb out and warm yourselves for a spell. There'll be coffee, and I'll open a can of peaches.”

Camilla glanced at Michelle. “I will carry Margaret. Can you help her?”

“I'll try.”

Camilla flipped the covers aside and shifted the sound-asleep Margaret this way and that as she gained her feet. Cradling Margaret in her arms, she moved to the back of the wagon. She handed Margaret down to Cuno, who held the blonde until Camilla had dropped down from the tailgate. Camilla took Margaret back in her own arms and strode wordlessly off to the fire.

Cuno climbed into the back of the wagon and hunkered down in front of Michelle. She had the covers pulled up so high that he could only see the upper half of her face beneath her hat. Her eyes appeared to be open, staring vacantly at the padded bed of the wagon.

Haltingly, he said, “Miss Trent?”

She offered no response or gave any indication that she'd heard him.

“Miss Trent, boys're building a fire,” Cuno said. “Might do you good to come on over and get yourself warm.”

He didn't think she was going to respond to him this time, either. But then she folded her upper lip down, stuck her tongue out slightly, and said so softly that Cuno could barely hear, “I'd like to stay here, please.”

“Can I bring you some coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“All right.” Cuno looked down at her. She was pressing her body so snug against the wagon bed that she seemed to be trying to disappear. “Let me know if I can bring you anything.”

Cuno started to rise.

“Mr. Massey?”

He dropped back to his haunches.

“Is Jedediah dead?” Michelle's voice was louder than before, but she did not move, just continued staring down at the wagon box as though an enormous weight were holding her down. She licked her lips. “My father wouldn't tell me.”

Cuno filled his lungs. “Yes, ma'am. He's dead.”

She squeezed her eyes closed and tightened her jaws but otherwise did not move. She said nothing more.

Cuno straightened and leapt down out of the wagon, leaving the tailgate open as he turned away and headed for the leaping flames of the coffee fire. He'd been intending to start the coffee, but Camilla was already down on both knees beside the fire ring, filling the percolator he'd set out with handfuls of ground beans from an open coffee sack.

The boys sat around, staring glumly into the flames.

Margaret sat between the older boy's legs, resting her head against his knee, her eyes closed, mouth open slightly as she breathed. Camilla had wrapped her in a striped trade blanket, and it sagged down from the girl's spindly right shoulder.