Or maybe that’s only what the big, kill-crazy half-breed wanted him to think, in hopes that Cuno would get close enough to search him.
He exhaled a silent sigh of relief when he’d finally slammed the cage door and had thrown the locking bolt home. Holstering his .45, he went back to the fire and checked on the sleeping marshal. The man’s wound appeared to have stopped bleeding, and his breathing was regular though sweat beaded his forehead, glistening in the glowing light of the nearby fire.
Cuno drew the blanket up tight to the man’s neck once more, then tended the beans and the salt pork sizzling in a large, cast-iron pan. When the food was done, he shoveled it onto four plates and hauled the steaming plates with spoons over to the jail wagon, handing each through the slit in the door.
He had to make a separate trip for the coffee, silently grumbling to himself over having to play nursemaid to four killers due to hang by the end of the week, with Serenity waiting for him and the bank loan in Crow Feather.
When Cuno had passed the last cup through the bars, Blackburn glanced toward the fading sky above the canyon’s steep stone walls. “Gettin’ dark soon.” Then, as if he were only speaking to his two companions, he added, “Shepherd shoulda got back to Helldorado by now—don’t ya think, fellas?”
Colorado Bob and Simms sat side by side, spooning beans into their mouths. “Oh, yeah,” Bob said between chews. “He’s there, all right. And I’d bet my right nut that Karl Oldenberg is putting a posse together even as we speak.”
Chewing, Colorado Bob grinned at Cuno, those bobcat-like eyes slitting and flashing yellow in the last light angling down over the canyon walls.
“Eat up,” Cuno said. “We’ll be turnin’ in soon. Early day tomorrow.”
He glanced once more at Fuego. The man was staring at him over his steaming plate, that dark look of bemused menace in his eyes. He was like a perpetually coiled snake, rattles hissing softly.
Again, Cuno remembered the mountain-sized bounty hunter, Ruben Pacheca, who’d followed him across two territories. The bearlike savage had been on the hunt for the bounty a rancher from Julesburg had put on Cuno’s head after Cuno had killed the man’s son to save a sporting girl.
Cuno turned away, feeling an invisible knife tickle his loins as he tramped back to the fire. He plopped a few sticks on the dying flames, shoveled food onto a plate, poured coffee, and sat on a rock bench back near the falls.
Stretching his legs out before him, he crossed his boots and rested his back against a flat-edged boulder. He ate while listening to the oddly melodic rattle of the falls behind him, staring out across the fire, the pool, the marshal sleeping left of the pool, to the narrow mouth of the canyon a hundred yards beyond.
The rolling sage-covered hills, scarps, and rocky-sloped mesas were turning deep purple, and several stars kindled dully. Good dark would close down, black as a leather glove, in less than an hour. Soon, the hunt would be on all across the dark, silent land—night predators versus their anxious, scuttling prey.
Cuno should be halfway to Crow Feather by now, angling down through Squaw Butte, heading for the Cheyenne Drum Hills and the little town nestled on the sage flats between the Crow Feather Mountains and the Little Snowy Range.
Thirty yards beyond the pool, the jail wagon sat, tongue drooping, near the narrow brush-sheathed gully through which the stream snaked. Cuno saw the silhouettes of the four prisoners lounging against the barred walls. He could see only Fuego’s legs stretched out from the wagon’s front wall, against which the big half-breed reclined.
They were all done eating, and the three Oldenberg Gang members were talking. Cuno couldn’t hear them above the falls, but he could see their heads turning and jaws moving, teeth showing intermittently between their lips.
Probably planning a way out of their predicament. If their gang didn’t reach them soon . . .
Annoyance reared up again inside of Cuno. How in the hell had he gotten into this bailiwick? These men were destined to die and he, because of the tricky winds of fate, had drawn the unpaid job of hauling their smelly asses through the Mexican Mountains to the hangman in Crow Feather.
Even if he pushed the mules as fast as they could go, and didn’t have to worry about tending the wounded marshal as well as the four prisoners, and watching his back trail, Cuno would make Crow Feather at least forty-eight hours later than he’d intended.
At least a day too late for the coveted freighting contract.
He and old Serenity would end up spending the winter in loud, smelly Denver, swamping saloons and whore-houses or shoveling shit from livery barns.
When he finished his meal, which he had no taste for, he threw out the last of his coffee and walked back down to the fire. The old marshal had rolled onto his side and, in the thickening darkness relieved by the umber light of the flickering flames, he shivered slightly, grunting and groaning softly.
Cuno went over to the wagon for the prisoners’ plates and spoons, which they gave up without argument, regarding him owlishly through the bars. Fuego lay on his side, but it was too dark for Cuno to tell whether the man’s eyes were open or closed. Something told him they were open.
When he’d washed all the plates, cups, and spoons in the stream, Cuno laid several heavy logs on the fire to keep the old marshal as warm as he could. Then he picked up his Winchester and tramped back out along the chuckling stream to the canyon’s mouth.
He stood for a long time, staring across the high-desert plateau jogging out to distant peaks jutting along the horizon like the sharpened teeth of a saw blade.
The sun was down in the west, but several arrows of green-salmon light still streaked the plum-purple sky, small clouds like sand scallops silhouetted against it, and several stars like distant candles were beginning to spark. In the east, good dark had already pushed up from the horizon, the stars bold and lucid.
A breath of cool breeze rustled the rabbit brush and wild mahogany. Beyond that, the night was eerily silent, like the calm before a storm though there was no sign of bad weather.
Cuno spent the night hunkered atop a hogback just outside the canyon’s mouth, watching and listening. He doubted the gang would be able to track him this soon, but he wasn’t taking any chances.
He dozed occasionally between long stretches of looking around and listening for any unnatural sound or movement. Several times he returned to the canyon to check on the marshal and to add wood to the fire. Both times, the old marshal shivered in a restless sleep, limbs jerking and teeth faintly clattering.
Cuno mopped the man’s face with a cold rag soaked in the pool below the falls, drank coffee, then returned to his sentinel perch. He woke from a doze, his back snugged against a rock humping out of the hogback’s crest, to see a faint pearl wash over the eastern bluffs.
He returned to the canyon and had just put a fresh pot of coffee on the fire and started breakfast when the old marshal, still cloaked in dusky shadows, said in a clear, crisp voice, “Marliss?”
The man had lifted his head and was peering at Cuno from the other side of the fire. The flames leapt in his wide, glistening eyes.
Cuno set the salt pork and pan aside and went over and shoved the oldster back down on his bedroll. “Cuno Massey. Remember?”
Landers stared up at him, squinting, as though he were trying to remember not only who Cuno was but where they were and what had got them here.
“I pulled into a canyon to tend your shoulder. Think I got the bleeding stopped.” A deep pang of frustration racked him as he voiced what he’d feared all along. “Looks like you might need another day or two of rest before we hit the trail for Crow Feather. Wouldn’t want you opening up that shoulder again.”
The old man rolled his eyes around in their leathery sockets, then turned his head to glance at the waterfall. “Shit!” He rammed his fists into the ground on either side of him. “I ain’t in the Golden Garter in Tuscaloosa?”
“Sorry.”
Landers lifted his head and turned it slightly to see behind Cuno and down canyon. Snorting, he grumbled, “That’s the damn jail wagon, ain’t it?”
“It is.”
“Christ.”
“How you feelin’?”
Landers pushed up on his elbows and drew a deep breath. “Like I been yanked in every which direction by a herd of green-broke broncs.”
“Who’s Marliss?”
Landers looked up at Cuno wryly. “You ain’t old enough to hear
that
story.” He glanced again at the wagon. “How’s the boys?”
“Mean and ugly.”
“Yeah? Well, just wait and see how mean ’n’ ugly they get when we pull into Crow Feather and they see the gallows waitin’ for ’em, nooses just a-swingin’ in the wind, and the wives of their victims dancin’ around in their widows’ weeds!”
Landers grunted and his face twisted with pain as he pushed up to a sitting position.
“Hold on there,” Cuno said.
“I’m fit as a fiddle.” The old marshal reached over for the whiskey jug and popped the cork. “Well, maybe one with a few broken strings, but”—he threw back a liberal swig and sighed—“a fiddle just the same. You go ahead and make breakfast, then we’ll get the wagon and mules ready to pull out. Gettin’ late already, an’ I gotta piss like a Prussian plow horse.”
Cuno watched skeptically as the old marshal ran a greasy sleeve across his ragged gray beard, flung the blankets aside, and pushed himself to his feet, his creaky bones cracking like air bubbles in a frozen lake.
He tramped off into the brush, and Cuno went back to fixing breakfast. Soon he and the old marshal were letting the prisoners out of the wagon to perform their ablutions, and then handing the surly foursome their breakfast, which was the same as last night’s supper, through the slit in the cage door.
Cuno was amazed by Landers’s recovery. Of course, he could tell the old man was aching right down to his heels, as he drank as much whiskey as coffee with his breakfast, and his eyes were pinched, his cheeks pale and hollow. But if he could bull his way through his misery and help Cuno out with the prisoners and the wagon, they might make it to Crow Feather faster than Cuno had thought.
When Cuno had finished his food and coffee, he hustled off to grain the mules and Renegade and to hitch the mules to the wagon.
“While you do that, I’ll grease the wheel hubs,” Landers said, taking one more pull from his bottle as he grabbed the wooden grease bucket and stick from beside a boulder, and began ambling off toward the wagon.
Cuno said nothing as he headed into the brush along the canyon’s back wall, but he was half conscious of a vague misgiving. He didn’t realize what the basis of the worry was until it was too late.
He’d rigged up the mules and had just thrown his saddle blanket onto Renegade’s back—he intended to keep the horse saddled for scouting and possibly hunting purposes—when he heard a muffled choking sound from down canyon. Then there was the rattling thud of something slammed against the jail wagon.
The choking sounded again, punctuated with a throaty gasp.
Cuno stared into the thick brush and boulders between himself and the wagon, an inner alarm screaming at him. He had his saddle by the horn in one hand. Dropping it suddenly, he bolted forward so quickly that Renegade whinnied and sidestepped away from him, and one of the mules brayed.
“Landers!”
Cuno palmed his .45 and bounded through the brush, weaving around boulders and large shrubs, angling down canyon. Ahead, the jail wagon appeared at the bottom of the gradual slope, the growing light defining it against the far, rocky, pine-clad ridge wall.
Cuno stopped.
Landers, standing near the rear wheel, had his back to the cage. He was slumped against the wagon, knees bent and dangling above the ground, and he was flailing with both arms, holding the grease stick in his right hand. A thick, brown arm angled out from between the cage’s bars.
Landers snarled and grunted, his cheeks balled, teeth showing inside his greasy, gray beard.
The arm was snaked around Landers’s neck, the bicep bulging as Fuego, grinning down near the top of the old marshal’s head, jerked his muscular arm up and back sharply. There was a popping sound that sent pulse beats of horror shooting down all the frayed nerves in Cuno’s body.
“No!”
he shouted again, bounding off his heels and hoofing it down the slope.
“Christ . . . nooo!”
Too late.
Fuego released his grip on the old marshal’s neck and drew his arm back through the bars. Landers, staring wide-eyed straight ahead, dropped his arms to his sides. The stick fell from his fingers to hit the ground with a thud.
Then Landers himself dropped straight down to his knees and knelt there, head wobbling unnaturally, until his chin dipped to his chest, and he fell over sideways.
There was a grisly bulge in the back of his neck where the half-breed, now grinning at Cuno through the bars, had snapped it.
10
CUNO STARED DOWN at the old marshal’s quivering body. The man opened and closed his mouth and poked his tongue in and out, as though he were trying to say something.
But he was dead. There was nothing Cuno could do for him.
Shock freezing Cuno in place, he looked up from the marshal to Fuego, hunkered on his haunches, hands to the bars, and smiling out at Cuno with that mild, taunting smile. He shuttled and lowered his blue-green gaze between the dead marshal and Cuno, and the meaning was clear.
Cuno would end up the same.
The other men, lounging against the barred wall on the far side of the wagon, were grinning, too, like amused, faintly chagrined schoolboys.
“Jesus, Fuego,” Blackburn chuckled. “What’d you go an’ do that for?”
Colorado Bob King leaned forward to peer over the edge of the wagon. “Is he dead?”
“Didn’t ya hear the snap?” said Simms. “Sounded like a dry branch when the breed broke the poor old bastard’s neck.”