.45-Caliber Firebrand (19 page)

Camilla looked up at Cuno from beneath her dark brows. The long scar along her jaw shone dully in the flickering firelight. “How much?”

“Make it strong,” Cuno said. He picked up his rifle and racked a fresh shell into the chamber. “Good and strong.”

He walked back across the wash they'd crossed when they'd left the cleft, holding the off-cocked rifle high across his chest. On the other side of the rock-strewn wash, which the moon silvered so magnificently that it would have been worth admiring in another situation, he concealed himself in the scrub beside a cottonwood.

He pricked his ears, listening. There was nothing except the occasional tooth-gnashing screech of a hunting owl, the ticking of the frost in the tree's bare branches, and the tinny murmur of a distant spring bubbling out of rocks.

He waited there beside the tree, watching and listening, for a good fifteen minutes. When he figured the coffee was ready, he started back to the fire. He'd throw down a quick cup before hitching the mules again to the wagons.

He stopped abruptly and swung back around.

Faintly, the cracks of distant gunfire rose on the idle, quiet darkness. They were almost too faint to be heard unless you were listening for them, as they were carrying several miles up the mountain from the valley where the Trent ranch nestled.

17

SMOKE ROSE ON the bright mid-morning air.

It was as thin as a hair ribbon from this distance of eight or nine miles as the crow flies, across several ridges and just beyond the right, sloping shoulder of the high, granite peak keeping watch at the western edge of the Rawhides—Old Stone Face. At the opposite base of the hulking ridge, the Trent ranch nestled.

The ribbon was dark enough to distinguish itself from dust or a trick of the high-altitude light, and it rose from where the ranch would be. Or used to be.

Smoke, all right.

Cuno wrapped his reins around his saddle horn, then leaned back to reach into his left saddlebag. When he snagged his field glasses, he slipped them out of their case and, balancing the case on the saddle pommel, raised the glasses to his eyes, adjusting the focus.

The granite ridge slid up close, its fissures and faults revealed, the sun reflecting harshly off its gray surface. To the right of the peak, the smoke appeared not so much like a ribbon now but like a wafting, black curtain, thinning and thickening with the vagaries of the southwestern breeze and the guttering flames feeding it.

It was the smoke of a large, dying fire.

Wheezing, rasping breath sounded behind Cuno. “What do you see?”

Cuno continued staring through the glasses. “Smoke in the valley.”

“The ranch?”

“It's not a grass fire.”

Cuno turned as Serenity came huffing and puffing along the ridge to stand on the left side of the paint, staring toward the ridge. The wind whooshed over the ridges rippling all around them—a hollow sound like a strong breeze through a tunnel. It nibbled at the brim of the graybeard's weather-stained sombrero and lifted the tails of his yellow neckerchief that, while dusty and sweat-stained, almost looked new in contrast to his thin, saddle-leather neck.

Smoke dribbled out around the cornhusk quirley clamped between the old man's lips. “Let me see.”

When Serenity had raised the glasses and adjusted the focus, he shook his head slowly, then handed them back to Cuno. His gray-blue, washed-out eyes were bright in the ten o'clock sun. “My restless liver is flarin' up.”

“Chew it finer, hoss.”

“Them Injuns don't have much else to think about now, with the ranch gone. And we gotta assume it's gone. They'll be trailin' us.”

Cuno stared grimly down at the glasses as he slipped them back into their case. “You don't think Leaping Wolf will satisfy himself with burning the ranch?”

“ 'Pears to me he wants to mop every trace of the white eyes from the area. Now,
maybe
he'll satisfy himself with the valley and leave us, in the Rawhides, alone . . .”

“But you doubt it,” Cuno said with a grunt, reaching back to return the glasses to the saddlebags.

“I pure-dee-damn do.” Serenity drew deep on the quirley, lifting his knobby, brown chin as he sucked the smoke deep into his lungs, lifting his scrawny chest. “Especially with the girl up here. He might even be keepin' ole Trent alive just so the man can watch what ole Dancin' Wolf does to his daughter.”

Cuno hipped around in his saddle to stare back down the sloping ridge at the wagons halted in a rock-lined hollow sheltered by firs and pines. They'd pulled hard all night, following troughs and dry water courses, and it had been too rough a ride for anyone to sleep except in fits and dozes.

When they'd stopped an hour ago to rest themselves as well as the mules, the three girls and the two boys were too exhausted to step down from the wagon. They all appeared asleep now, slumped amongst the blankets and robes in the back of Cuno's Conestoga—too worn out to even pine for all that they had left behind them.

The mules nibbled oats from grain sacks hooked over their ears, the sun silvering the sweat on their backs and withers, the breeze brushing their thick tails. The well-muscled, deep-bottomed beasts had made the climb from the valley floor relatively easily, but they still had a tough climb ahead, up one watershed and down the other.

Cuno, scouting ahead and following Trent's sketchy map, had been picking the easiest routes. But it was rough country, and they were still climbing, the air thinning as the valley dropped farther away beneath and behind them.

Cuno could feel the altitude himself—a faint light headedness and the need to draw extra hard to gain strength from his breaths. The mules, working harder, likely felt it even more than he did.

“I haven't seen sign of us being followed all morning,” Cuno said, adding, “but I know, I know . . . that don't mean they're not behind us.”

The oldster chuckled as he field-stripped his quirley between gnarled, brick-red fingers. “Son, you might learn somethin' from me yet!”

“What do you say we quit jawin' and get movin'?” Cuno growled, neck-reining Renegade around and booting him down the slope toward the wagons as he called over his shoulder, “I'm gonna scout ahead!”

“Don't forget to scout behind us, too, dagnabbit!” the graybeard bellowed above the sighing wind.

Cuno put Renegade up beside the driver's box of his Conestoga. The older Lassiter boy, Karl, slumped in the seat, the reins wrapped around the brake handle.

“Ready to roll, boy?” Cuno said.

He had to repeat the question once more before the boy's head jerked up with a start, and he reached for the big horse pistol on the seat beside him—his father's old gun, which the boy had packed to protect his sister and younger brother. When he saw it was Cuno beside him, he stayed his hand and blinked sleepily, hacking phlegm from his throat and nodding. His face was red from the sun and wind, his brows bleached and his broad nose peeling.

Karl spat over the wagon wheel and nodded again.

“Follow me,” Cuno said. “You see any Injun sign, fire that big iron of yours into the air.”

He glanced into the box. The others were awake now, too, blinking sleepily. Michelle lay back with her robes pulled up to her chin, staring dreamily up at the low, puffy clouds as though trying to read something there.

The Mexican, Camilla, was staring over her shoulder at Cuno, her large brown eyes hooded with annoyance. “We must stop soon to sleep. Michelle and Margaret are tired. The boys are tired.
I
am tired.”

Cuno glanced up the long ridge angling up to a grassy, pine-carpeted peak. “It'll be a while.”

As Cuno rode off, he heard the girl growl behind him in Spanish, something about her wondering if the bull-chested, mule-skinning gringo even knew where he was going . . .

 

They pulled hard up and down the ridges for another twenty-four hours, stopping to rest for only a couple of hours at a time and to eat chunks of roasted venison, biscuits, and canned peaches washed down with coffee.

Cuno saw plenty of deer on the high, short-grass slopes, and he spotted a brown bear lumbering along a beaver meadow, scrounging for the year's last berries. But he resisted the temptation to take the fresh meat; the deer they were carrying was nearly gone, but the shot might give away their position to the Utes.

On their fourth day out from the ranch, they mounted a high, windy divide—a long stretch of camelbacks rolling off to the eastern horizon. Cuno had scouted their back trail and side trails thoroughly enough that he decided it was time to take a break. He led the wagons, driven by Serenity and Karl Lassiter, down through aspens and scattered birch into a deep crease in the ridge.

He estimated from the thinness of the air and the sharpness of the light that they were nearly ten thousand feet above sea level. It would get damn cold up here at night. Hell, it was cold now at three o'clock in the afternoon. But according to Trent's map, they'd be in the high country another day or so before starting the slow, winding descent to Fort Jessup, which wasn't so low itself at around seven thousand feet.

As he put Renegade down the slope through the scattered deciduous forest, squirrels and jays chittering around him, Cuno was glad that he'd seen no menacing clouds. A storm up this high at this time of year would likely prove deadly.

He picked out a relatively sheltered spot to bivouac at the bottom of the gully, between two steep banks with a stream chuckling over ice-crusted stones. There were plenty of scrub trees to help break the wind that would funnel down the gorge. Here, though early, a strange twilight had already settled, with lemon-salmon light burnishing the far ridge about fifty yards up from the stream.

As he put up his hand, Karl and Serenity halted their teams, and the wagons clattered to a slow, grinding halt amongst the creaking, scratching aspens and birches. The passengers in Cuno's wagon didn't so much climb out as crawl, so heavily bundled in blankets and robes that they were almost indistinguishable from each other.

They were all sunburned, windburned, exhausted, and chilled to the bone. Stiffly, the Mexican girl reached up to lift Margaret down from the back of the wagon. When she'd set the little girl down, Camilla helped Michelle down, taking her hand to steady her. The two older girls exchanged a few words, and Cuno was glad to see that Michelle had come at least partially out of her dolor.

To a certain extent, they each needed to be able to fend for themselves.

Cuno set the two boys to gathering firewood while he quickly built a lean-to for the girls. He erected the shelter in the trees against the steep northern bank, using canvas wagon sheeting for the three walls and angling the roof so it would shed moisture.

He dug a fire pit in front of the lean-to, far enough away that the canvas wasn't likely to catch fire but close enough that the heat would reflect off the shelter's back wall. As Camilla began moving the bedding from the back of the wagon to the lean-to, leaving Margaret perched sullenly on a log, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, Michelle moved over to the wagon to help.

Trent's daughter moved stiffly, haltingly, unsure what to do, as if her thoughts weren't completely connecting yet, but it was a good sign. Maybe she'd come out of it.

When the shelter was filled with bedding, Michelle and Camilla each took one of Margaret's hands and led the girl downstream. Cuno, building up the fire and preparing coffee, was about to yell to them to stay close, but he stopped when he realized they were probably just stepping away to tend nature. They hadn't taken a break in a couple of hours.

Cuno looked around, making sure they were still alone down here. The tension, the hunted feeling, was a constant tightness in the back of his neck. It made him jumpy, starting at the slightest unexpected sound and at even subtle changes in the wind.

He'd been through a lot in his young life. But he'd never undertaken such an enormous responsibility as transporting a passel of young'uns to safety across a rugged stretch of mountains, in late fall, with kill-crazy Indians on his tail. Recently, he'd found himself driving a jail wagon loaded with four deadly brigands, including one snarling beast known as Colorado Bob King, across the Mexico Mountains up Wyoming way.

He'd thought he'd had his hands full then.

The husky young freighter chuckled ruefully at the memory as he set a knotted aspen branch on the licking, popping flames. When he made sure the fire and coffee were both going good, he got up to help Serenity with the mules. It was nearly dark in the canyon when they had all the mules staked out on a long picket line near the stream and in deep grass, eating parched corn from feed bags.

Cuno hadn't yet unsaddled Renegade, for he wanted to take one more swing around the camp before good dark. The horse, tied in the trees just beyond the fire, lifted his head suddenly and loosed a whinny.

Cuno was down on one knee, pouring himself a cup of the smoking, black coffee. As the whinny echoed around the canyon, he set both cup and pot down abruptly and laid his gloved right hand on his holstered .45's ivory grips.

Renegade was staring warily upstream.

As Cuno swung his gaze in the same direction, beyond the parked wagons resting single file in the brush, an answering whinny rose on the cold breeze. Three horseback riders materialized amongst the dark tree trunks, coming on slowly along the stream.

They rode side by side, roughly ten feet apart—three bearded men in heavy fur coats, fur hats, and wooly chaps strapped over buckskin breeches. Two wore pistols and cartridge belts over their coats while another had his bearskin coat pulled up over the walnut butt of a revolver positioned for the cross draw on his right hip.