.45-Caliber Cross Fire Read online

  “Leave it,” he told her. “They’ll be on us hard in five minutes!”

  He started running south, toward the low, grassy notch where he and Camilla had picketed their horses the previous night, by quiet starlight in sharp contrast to the dawn’s sudden fury.

  “I bet you wish I’d left you in that Colorado prison,” Camilla yelled as she broke into a run behind him, hefting her saddle and saddlebags onto her shoulders.

  “You jokin’?” Cuno shot her a taut smile as he dashed between two large boulders and into the notch where their horses stood, snorting and kicking and pulling at their picket line, indignant at the recent commotion. “And miss all the fun we’ve had since?”

  2

  CUNO AND CAMILLA pushed their horses hard off and on for most of an hour before Cuno, reining up suddenly, said, “Hold on.”

  He studied their dusty back trail meandering across the flat desert on which only cacti and wiry tufts of brush grew. Camilla checked her own mount down and turned to Cuno. “If we keep pushing, we will make my uncle’s rancho just after nightfall.”

  Cuno shook his head, slowly shuttling his gaze from left to right across their back trail, spying no movement except the occasional jackrabbit or dun coyote slinking around the brown foliage growing up out of the tan sand and gravel. Everything was a shade of brown out here except the black rocks and the lime-green branches of the creosote or the occasional mesquite growing along a wash. “That’s what they want us to do.”

  “They might not be following. We’ve seen no sign of them.”

  “They’re following, all right.” Movement straight back about a mile caught Cuno’s eye, but he eased the tension in his back when he saw a hawk rise up above a hillcrest and trace a lazy circle as it scouted a fox or a rabbit den. “And they’re wanting us to blow out our horses. Be easy to run us down, then, when we’re on foot out here…” He glanced at the brassy sky in which not a single cloud shone. “Under that sun.”

  Out the corner of his eye he saw the hawk rise suddenly, bank, and wing off toward the south, as though something had startled it.

  Cuno looked around quickly. Spying a low ridge about fifty yards north, he said, “Come on!” He touched his dull spurs to the ribs of his skewbald paint mustang, Renegade, and galloped off the trail and up the side of the hill. Camilla galloped behind him.

  Cuno put Renegade up and over the crest of the hill and into a dry wash lined with mesquites and willows on the other side. He grabbed his father’s old spyglass from his saddlebags and ran back up the side of the hill, doffing his hat about ten feet from the top. Hunkering between two boulders at the hill’s crest, near an old rattlesnake skin, he extended the brass telescope and cupped his gloved hands over the lens to keep the sunlight from flashing off the glass.

  He brought the ridge over which the hawk had been hunting into sharp focus just as two Indians rode up and over it through a slight notch in the crest and halted their mustangs beside a one-armed saguaro. Both Indians looked around carefully, holding carbines butt-down on their bare thighs.

  Another rider rode up behind them and then gigged his horse to one side while yet another rode up behind the first two and continued on between them. Cuno adjusted the spyglass’s focus, clarifying the female rider straddling a cream, gold-tinged mustang—almost a palomino. She stopped her horse and looked around, holding her regal chin in the air.

  Cuno’s heart skipped a beat as he stared at the Yaqui queen through his spyglass. It was hard to tell from this distance, but the clean, even lines of her face framed by the stygian hair hanging straight down to her shoulders and secured with a dark pink calico headband told him she was a heartbreaking beauty. She wore a dark brown deerskin vest over a black blouse with white polka dots, but her legs were bare beneath a short, slitted deerskin skirt. Long and cherry tan, they angled down the cream’s sides, knees bent forward and drawn taut against the pony’s ribs. On her feet were the traditional Yaqui moccasins, though, while the Yaqui men rarely decorated their footgear, hers appeared trimmed with red beads.

  She wore a big knife in a beaded sheath on her waist. A rifle of some kind hung down her back by a leather lanyard—Cuno could see the barrel poking up from behind her right shoulder. She dipped her chin as she batted her heels against the cream’s sides and started forward, turning her head back and moving her mouth, as though speaking to the others. As she gigged the cream into a trot down the hill, likely following Cuno and Camilla’s trail, the others fell into a ragged line behind her.

  Cuno collapsed the spyglass, doffed his tan hat, and scrambled down the slope to where Camilla stood, holding her hat while her chestnut bay drew water from it, liquid beads dribbling through the felt crown and onto the ground around her boots. She was looking anxiously at Cuno.

  “We got shadows, all right.”

  “Shit.”

  Cuno grabbed Renegade’s reins and swung up into the saddle, the image of the straight-backed Yaqui queen blazed behind his retinas. It wasn’t lust he was feeling but a knife edge of apprehension. Sharper than before. Yaqui women were known to be even more savage than the men. And the young and pretty ones could be the most savage of all.

  Camilla stepped off a rock onto her bay’s back and neck-reined the mount around until she sat off Cuno’s right stirrup. “What is it?”

  “Nothin’. Let’s ride.” He gigged Renegade up the wash that was paved in fist-sized gravel. “Maybe we can lose them in these rocks and avoid being slow-roasted over a low fire.”

  “That’s a pretty thought, amigo.” Camilla booted her bay behind Cuno. “Who’d you see back there—the entire Yaqui nation?”

  “No, just one girl who reminds me a little of you.”

  He chuckled to ease the tension.

  “Was she pretty?” Camilla asked later that night, when they’d made camp in a narrow canyon about six miles beyond where Cuno had seen the queen. At least, if she wasn’t a bona fide Yaqui queen, she should have been.

  The nights were cold now in October, and because Cuno believed they had finally lost the Yaqui, since they’d seen no telltale dust plume behind them for hours, they built a low fire from branches of the nearly smokeless catclaw shrub.

  Cuno had been with enough young women in his young life to know the importance of treading cautiously in these waters. “Ah, you know—she was Yaqui.”

  Camilla bit off some jerky from the chunk in her fist and frowned at him from across the fire. “That doesn’t exactly answer my question.”

  “She was a long ways away, a couple hundred yards. And you know how a spyglass picks up a glare.”

  “So she was pretty.”

  Cuno sipped from his smoking coffee cup and shrugged as he slid his diffident gaze toward the sandstone bank flanking Camilla. “Well, she didn’t look ugly from that distance. I’m just glad to not be lookin’ at her close up, ’bout now. Got a feelin’ it wouldn’t be a healthy experience, no matter how pretty the girl is.”

  Camilla chewed her jerky slowly, staring into the fire, the orange flames dancing in her round, brown eyes. Her round face was pretty with its small nose and broad mouth. She had a small, white scar on her lower right cheek, and he could see it best by firelight.

  God knows they’d shared enough campfires in their short time together. They’d met in Colorado, when Cuno had guided her and several Anglo ranch children to safety from marauding Utes and before he’d been arrested by Sheriff Dusty Mason for killing four rogue territorial marshals who’d been intending on attacking Cuno’s party, ostensibly because they thought Cuno had been trading rifles to the Indians, though what they’d really wanted were the girls.

  It was remote country up in Colorado and Wyoming, where lawmen were often impossible to distinguish from the worst of the curly wolves.

  Cuno enjoyed seeing Camilla’s face on the other side of the fire from him, though he often wished they could settle down for a while and get to know each other better. For as long as they’d been together, during the long o
ver-mountain run from the Utes until Cuno had surrendered to Sheriff Mason in exchange for the safety of Camilla and the Lassiter children, and then after Camilla and her brother Mateo de Cava had busted him out of the federal pen, they’d been on the run from either red men or white.

  Sometimes he wondered what they’d have to say to each other if they weren’t both about two steps from bloody death.

  “You did well back there,” she said now, biting off another hunk of jerky and chewing it slowly as she stared into the fire. “With the Yaqui, I mean. I didn’t know you could fight so well with a knife as well as a pistol and a rifle.”

  “Like I told you before,” he said a little defensively, setting another slender catclaw branch on the crackling flames, “my pa taught me all about fighting. Fists and knives, mainly.” He paused. “Pa was an old drover, and while he didn’t talk about it all that much, I think he rode the long coulees for a while. That’s Anglo talk for outlawin’. I reckon Ma burned that out of him, set him on the straight and narrow.”

  Cuno gave a wistful smile, remembering the old man whom he hauled freight with until Lloyd Massey had been killed by Rolf Anderson and Sammy Spoon, after Anderson had raped and killed Cuno’s stepmother, Corsica Landreau.

  Cuno glanced over the flames at Camilla. She was still chewing slowly, pensively, while staring into the flames. She’d extended her legs straight out in front of her, cowhide boots crossed. Sometimes it was damn hard to know what what was going on behind those brown eyes, and the thought that she continued to sit in judgment of him burned him.

  “Don’t tell me you’re still tryin’ to figure me out, Miss Camilla.”

  She lifted her gaze to his, wrinkling the skin above the bridge of her small, tan nose.

  He said, “You shoulda done that before you and your brother busted me out of that pen.”

  “I know who you are, amigo.” She smiled thinly. “I found out who you were when you left that stolen money behind with Mason. You could have kept the money. You could have killed Mason…”

  “Like your brother would have done,” he reminded her, letting her know where she came from.

  “Si, like Mateo would have done.” She nodded, still regarding him with that faintly puzzled expression. “But you didn’t. You left the money on the other side of the border, and you left the man alive who saw you jailed for no reason.” She smiled.

  “Did I pass the test, then?”

  “What test?”

  “You know—the one that tells you whether I’m worth hangin’ around with…”

  Cuno couldn’t keep the irritation from building. He wasn’t sure what had caused it—his having left a load of money behind that could have made their lives so much easier, or that it had been her, the sister of notorious outlaw Mateo de Cava, who had convinced him to leave it. If not for Camilla, he would have kept that loot, which made him wonder who in hell he was now.

  Certainly not the man his father had raised him to be.

  Life had become so much harder and more confusing than he’d ever expected it could.

  The frown lines cut deeper into her forehead, and her face reddened beneath her natural tan. “You really think I rode all the way to Colorado to test you? What—you think I need a man so bad that I—!”

  Cuno had scrambled around the fire on his hands and knees, and now he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and clamped his other hand over her mouth. “Easy! You’re gonna bring every Yaqui in Sonora down on top of us!”

  She looked at him over his hand, which he cautiously removed from her mouth. Scowling, she whispered through gritted teeth, “Feel free to leave whenever you want, gringo. I only busted you out of prison because I felt I owed you that much. The payment has been made. Neither of us owes the other anything. We’re both free to ride in whichever direction we want.”

  She grabbed her Winchester carbine and her low-crowned Stetson. “I’ll take the first watch and wake you in a couple of hours.” She donned the hat, the horsehair thong dangling beneath her dimpled chin, and rose to her feet. “If you’re still here.”

  She racked a cartridge into the Winchester’s breech and stomped away from the firelight, the Schofield sagging low on her hip, her spurs chinging softly as she climbed into the rocks sheltering their camp.

  Brooding, feeling guilty for getting angry at her when without her he’d still be in the federal lockup, Cuno poured himself another cup of coffee.

  What the hell was wrong with him these days, anyway?

  He sat back against his saddle with a sigh.

  3

  CUNO HAD THE last watch of the night, and when he came down from his perch in the rocks around dawn, he built up the fire, set coffee to boil, and found himself kneeling beside the crackling flames, watching Camilla sleep.

  She lay curled on her side, resting her face on her hands. Her features were dark tan—almost Indian dark—and smooth, nearly round, though her prominent chin gave her face more of an oval shape. Her chocolate-brown eyelashes rested gently as feathers against her cheeks.

  It was about six o’clock, time to get moving, though where Cuno himself was headed, he wasn’t sure. His intention during most of his and Camilla’s trek south from the federal pen had been to follow Camilla to a wild horse ranch, where an old mesteno, Tio Larosa, who had raised Camilla and her bronco brother until Mateo had run off with banditos when he was only fifteen years old, and whom Camilla considered her uncle, trapped and broke wild mustangs to sell to the Mexican Army as remounts.

  Now, as they approached the Larosa ranch—only about a half a day away, in fact—Cuno felt himself having second thoughts. He’d let little grass grow under his feet in these four years since his father and stepmother’s deaths. Although he’d been married for a short time and had tried to farm and run his own freighting business, he wasn’t sure he was ready to tie himself to one woman.

  Or if Camilla even wanted him tied to her…

  The uncertainty rankled him.

  He stared down at Camilla, who shifted a little beneath her blankets and wrinkled her nose. On their trip down from Colorado they’d discussed settling down together and possibly working on Uncle Tio’s ranch. But did Cuno love her enough to build a home with her, possibly even marry her? Could he love her the way he’d once loved his late wife, July, who, while carrying their baby inside her, had been killed by bounty hunters chasing Cuno?

  Just the thought of her was still a knifepoint in his belly. It was a strong fist clutching his heart. Could he give Camilla the love she deserved for the devotion she’d shown him while he was still in love with his bride left behind in a grave in Nebraska?

  His doubt made him feel tender toward the girl sleeping before him, and he bent over her now and touched his lips to her cheek. She jerked with a start, opening her eyes and staring up at him.

  “Easy,” he whispered. “Just me.”

  She continued to gaze up at him, three small, vertical lines etched into the bridge of her nose. “You’re not coming to Uncle Tio’s, are you?”

  He brushed a speck of fire ash from her cheek with his thumb. “I’ve run a freight wagon with a team of mules, but I’ve never broke horses before. I’m afraid I’d just get in the way at Uncle Tio’s.”

  She lifted her arms from beneath her blankets and set her wrists on his shoulders. “You could learn.”

  “I reckon I could.”

  “If you wanted to.”

  Cuno nodded. “I’m sorry. I should have known my mind well enough before to tell you what you could expect from me.”

  “Shh.” She lifted her face and pressed her lips gently to his, working her mouth slightly, nibbling his lips gently with her fine, small teeth. “We had a good run, as Mateo used to say. But it was a run. What do we really know about each other, anyway? Maybe it’s for the best this way.”

  “You’re not mad?”

  “No, I am not mad. I am sad.” She hardened her eyes and her tone. “Not because I was looking for a husband when we busted you out
of that prison, but because, if I had been, I could have done a lot worse than you.” She quirked an ironic smile. “And you could have done worse than me.”

  He sat back on his butt, drawing one knee up and resting his arm on it and looking speculatively off at the rocks turning pale now as the dawn thickened. “You’ll do better. You lost your brother saving my hide. You’ll do much better.”

  “Mateo was never long for this world. I loved him for the blood we shared, but the last good thing he did was help me bust you out of the prison.” She reached up and gave Cuno’s long, sandy-blond hair a little tug. “Hey, what was her name, anyway?”

  Cuno glanced at her. There was no jealousy in her clear, brown eyes. Only genuine curiosity.

  “July.”

  “That’s a funny name.”

  “She was a funny girl. And she was carrying our baby.”

  “I am sorry.” Camilla wrapped her hands around his upper arm, pressed her cheek against it. “You should have told me.”

  Cuno sighed as he grabbed a leather swatch and lifted the boiling coffeepot off the coals. “Let’s have some mud and hit the trail. I’ll see you off to Uncle Tio’s, then fog the trail for the gulf, maybe. I’ve never seen that much water.”

  She threw her blankets aside and rose quickly, showing her tough side though he knew she felt as badly as he did about their imminent separation. They’d shared a long, hard couple of months, as well as each other’s blanket rolls, and they’d both be leaving a lot behind them when they forked trails.

  But Cuno didn’t see how there could be any other way. He was still searching for something, and he had to find it alone first before he’d be any good to a woman.

  They ate a quick meal of biscuits and beans cooked in the bacon they’d bought in the last village they’d ridden through. When they’d scrubbed their dishes out with sand and dumped the remaining coffee on the fire, they rigged their horses, mounted up, and rode on out of the hollow.