.45-Caliber Cross Fire Read online

  “All right, Alvin.” Spurr raised the Winchester to his shoulder. “Go ahead and shake hands with Ole Scratch if you’re in such a dangblasted hurry.”

  Alvin Little Dog laughed then whooped again, louder.

  Spurr’s Winchester bellowed.

  Alvin Little Dog stopped whooping.

  6

  EVEN THE NEAREST Yaqui was still a hundred yards away from him, but as Cuno crouched low over the sleek neck of his galloping skewbald paint, the Indians’ war whoops and devilish yowls seemed to be coming from inside his own head. He’d heard before that no matter what a man had ever been through on the frontier—and Cuno had been through a lot himself, including Indian battles—nothing ever prepared him for an attack by blood-hungry Yaqui raiders.

  Their reputation for slow, excruciating torture was known far and wide.

  Renegade’s hooves thudded. Cuno could hear the horse’s breaths raking in and out of his straining lungs. He glanced to his right and saw the Indians angling toward him across the desert, trying to cut off his westward route. Another pack of three was kicking up dust on his right, a little farther away than those on his left but not by much. He cast a quick glance behind. Five were behind him now, riding in a ragged line abreast of each other, hunkered low over their war ponies’ necks, long black hair streaming out behind them. All five were reaching back to slap their mustangs’ rears, coaxing more speed.

  The war whoops sounded like the warbling of a demented demon freshly loosed from hell, causing the hair on the back of Cuno’s neck to stick straight up in the air.

  He stared ahead of him. He still had another five miles to the first line of hills where, if he could reach it, he might have a chance of losing his pursuers or at least have a fair chance of holding them off from higher ground. But Renegade would never make it that far at this pace. As game a horse as Renegade was, he was no match for the Yaqui’s smaller, fleeter war ponies.

  A low butte crested with a sandstone knob stood on the right side of his trail, about a hundred yards away. It was his only hope, though he had no illusions. Death was near, and it seemed just as cold and lonely as he’d imagined it would.

  He slid his ivory-gripped .45 from the holster thonged low on his right thigh and squeezed off a shot at the Indians racing toward him on his right flank. It was a long shot for a short gun but he’d hoped it would slow them some. It did not. They kept coming, crouched low, whooping and hollering and wildly slapping their ponies’ behinds.

  Cuno triggered two more shots as he reined Renegade off the trail’s right side and pointed him toward the butte. The move made the Indians on that side of the trail and to his right about sixty or seventy yards and closing fast, whoop all the louder and crazier.

  “Yeah?” Cuno said. He holstered his Colt, slid the Winchester ’73 out of its boot under his right thigh, and levered a shell into the chamber. “How ’bout one of these?”

  Holding both the reins and the rifle, giving Renegade his head because the horse was smart enough to know where Cuno was heading to try to get some advantage against the Indians, he twisted back in his saddle, aimed quickly, and fired. His slug flew well wide of the lead rider he’d been aiming at, and blew up dust behind the man and in the center of the fast-approaching pack.

  He aimed again, fired, and one of the Indians snapped his head back and to one side before bringing it forward and swiping a hand against his ear, which Cuno had apparently nicked.

  Cuno grinned. It wasn’t much, but it did appear to slow the riders in that group just a bit and temper their howling.

  Now he and Renegade were within fifty yards of the base of the knob-crested butte. The Indians were behind and to his right, angling toward him, their ponies dashing, fleet and graceful as tigers, through the low clumps of cacti. Now the butte’s rock-strewn base was before Renegade, and the horse drew up and turned sideways, his white-lathered sides heaving, foam licking back from his expanding and contrasting nostrils.

  Cuno leapt out of the saddle and, holding the horse’s reins, jumped onto a flat-topped boulder, and fired six quick rounds at the nearest group of Indians, knocking two out of their saddles and causing a third to check his mustang down so suddenly that the horse nearly turned a somersault, dirt blowing up in front of him.

  The other two groups of Indians were closing fast.

  Cuno jumped off the boulder and, jerking on Renegade’s reins, quickly climbed the side of the butte, his boots slipping and sliding in the loose red rock that sloped down like a stout woman’s apron from the base of the knob about a hundred feet above. The Indians were triggering their carbines now, and bullets plunked into the rocks and gravel around Cuno and Renegade. The horse whinnied and fought the reins, but Cuno held fast. He paused once to trigger two shots at the oncoming riders, then jerked Renegade on up to the knob, around it, and into the cool, blue shade behind it.

  He was dizzy from the fast climb, his chest throbbing. Quickly, he tied Renegade to a stout, dried root angling out of a crack at the base of the towering knob then ran back to the side of it, thumbing fresh cartridges into the Winchester’s breech. He edged a look around the tower of scaled, eroded sandstone.

  The Indians were leaping out of their saddles about twenty yards below the butte’s base and running through the sage and creosote, holding their carbines across their chests. None were howling now, but in the clear desert air, Cuno could hear their breathing and the snap of branches and the crunch of gravel beneath their moccasins. They sounded like hunting coyotes padding around a camp at night.

  Some came running up the slope toward Cuno. Others angled around to both sides, nearly surrounding him. He had little hope, but he’d cull the pack a little, make them pay dearly for his life.

  He dropped to a knee and started hammering away with the Winchester, empty cartridge casings flying over his right shoulder. In five shots he only managed to drill two of the Yaqui and merely slow the others running up the bluff toward him, weaving and dodging and howling as they triggered their carbines. As the Indians’ slugs hammered the rocks around him, Cuno continued firing, pivoting on his hips, until he’d emptied the Winchester and maybe wounded only two more Yaqui.

  Meanwhile, Renegade was screaming and bucking and trying to get loose, and Cuno was wishing he hadn’t tied the horse but let him run. He was too good a horse for these savages to get their hands on.

  The others were still coming, most from behind. As he whipped around to shoot down the backside of the bluff, he saw one warrior drop behind a boulder while another flipped his arm up and forward. The steel blade of the feathered hatchet winked as the grisly weapon turned end over end. It made a whooshing sound as it cut the air, and Cuno ducked and threw his Winchester up a quarter second before the blade would have embedded itself in his forehead, likely splitting his skull in two.

  At nearly the same time, he glimpsed out the corner of his eye one of the other braves drop his own carbine and lunge toward him with a knife, screaming so loudly and bizarrely that Cuno thought his own back teeth would crack. Automatically, Cuno pivoted again and tried to ram the stock of his repeater into the brave’s belly. He missed, only glancing the stock off the brave’s side but avoiding the sharp point of the horn-handled knife in the brave’s slashing right hand.

  Hearing more shots rising from behind, and knowing he was a goner but unable to quit fighting until he was dead, Cuno dropped the Winchester and reached for his .45. Before he could palm the hogleg, however, the brave bulled him over onto his back, and he triggered the weapon wild. He looked up to see the brave suspended over him and his right hand wrapped around the brave’s right wrist, the knife in that hand angled down toward Cuno’s chest.

  The brave’s brick-red face was a mask of animal fury, his chocolate eyes white-ringed, his chapped lips stretched back to reveal his crooked, yellow teeth. Spittle frothed his mouth. The wolf claw necklace and an elkhide medicine pouch that smelled of gunpowder and lavender brushed Cuno’s chest.

  The brave writh
ed and fought against Cuno’s outstretched right arm and clawed at Cuno’s face with his left hand. Meanwhile, the shooting continued and Cuno vaguely wondered why he wasn’t dead or mortally wounded yet when he also became aware of agonized cries instead of war whoops, and bodies falling around him.

  Keeping his concentration on the brave with the knife, he drove his right knee into the brave’s groin. The Indian gave a shriek and dropped the knife. At the same time, Cuno arched his back and twisted his hips and sent the brave tumbling downslope before quickly scrambling to his feet. Before the Indian could make another move, Cuno was on him, smashing his right fist into the brave’s face—hammering the brave’s jaw and cheek and nose.

  The brave was too dazed by the pummeling to do much more than try to bow his head and shield his face with his arms. Propelled by a killing fury, Cuno kept at him, slipping a left inside the brave’s arms and connecting solidly with the brave’s chin. The brave twisted around and fell and was scrambling, beaten and bloody, back to his feet when his head snapped suddenly sideways.

  A rifle thundered—cutting through the silence that Cuno had just now become aware of. A quarter-sized hole shone in the brave’s right cheek. Blood oozed from another, larger hole on the other side of his face.

  His head sagged, and then he fell upslope, rolled downslope several yards, and came to rest against another dead brave who lay on his back, arms and legs akimbo, several gaping, bloody holes in his naked chest.

  Cuno blinked, his head spinning, his chest rising and falling sharply as he looked around. More braves lay dead on the downslope. Beyond them, five men in blue cavalry uniforms sat atop five sweat-lathered horses. One of the men was just now lowering his smoking Henry repeater from his shoulder and ejecting the spent cartridge.

  Another, a tall, red-haired man with sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeves, riding a copper-bottom mare, slipped down from his saddle, slid his Winchester into his saddle boot, and ran up the slope toward Cuno. He veered toward one of the dead braves, gave an Indian-like whoop, and shucked the bowie knife sheathed on his left hip.

  The others on horseback watched as the tall, redheaded sergeant jerked the dead brave’s head up by his hair and quickly and deftly lifted the scalp. He raised the bloody trophy high above his head, and gave another Indian-like howl.

  Cuno watched him blankly, his mind still spinning too fast to comprehend what had just happened. And that he was still alive. Who were these soldiers and where had they come from? He’d thought he was alone out here and about to be dead and forgotten.

  At the moment, the soldiers who’d saved him seemed to have forgotten him. They were all gazing up the slope at the tall redhead still holding the bloody scalp aloft and giving a little shuffling dance.

  “Now, why in the hell did you go and do that, Lusk?” asked a man with lieutenant’s bars on the shoulders of his blue cavalry tunic. He was potbellied and blond, with a brushy dragoon-style mustache, and two silver front teeth.

  “Trophy to show my girl!” bellowed Lusk, leaning down to clean his knife blade on the Indian’s calico shirt.

  Cuno felt naked without his pistol. He looked around, spotted it lying in the rocks, and walked over to it.

  At the same time, a rifle thundered, and a bullet kicked up gravel about six inches right of his ivory-gripped .45.

  Cuno jerked with a start and spun around. The lieutenant was holding a smoking Winchester on him.

  “Not so fast, amigo,” he said in a drawling Texas accent as he ejected the spent cartridge and seated a fresh one. “First—who in the hell are you, and what are you doin’ down here on the wrong side of the border?”

  Cuno glanced at the soldiers staring back at him, squinting against the sun. To a man, they were hard-faced and flat-eyed. But Cuno had the tart vinegar following a close fight burning through his veins.

  “I was about to ask you the same question, amigo.”

  7

  THE LIEUTENANT AND the other soldiers stared flatly at Cuno. The young ex-freighter, dusty and disheveled and bleeding from his lips, held their gazes.

  Finally, one of the soldiers, a corporal, chuckled and spat a wad of chew onto a flat rock near his bay’s right foreleg and glanced sideways at the lieutenant. “He’s got some grit, Sapp. Best let him be.”

  “Might be able to use him,” said the corporal sitting beside the lieutenant. “He done kilt his share o’ them Injuns. Might come in handy, the farther we head into Yaqui country.”

  “He killed his share o’ them Injuns,” said the lieutenant, Sapp, “but he’d be dead if it weren’t for us.” He sat up a little straighter in his saddle, and his silver front teeth flashed beneath his yellow, dragoon mustache as he said commandingly, “I asked who you were, mister, and I expect an answer, or I’ll shoot you in both legs and leave you to die with them heathens.”

  Cuno relented. Whoever these men were—and something told him they were not soldiers despite the uniforms—they had kept him from becoming buzzard bait. Flatly, standing near his .45 on the slope across which several dead Yaqui lay sprawled, he said, “Name’s Massey. Cuno Massey.”

  He saw no reason to use an alias. While the United States government no doubt had a warrant out for his arrest, they wouldn’t have sent soldiers across the border for him. And if these men were soldiers, he was from Mars. “What I’m doing down here is no one’s business but mine. I’m obliged to you for helping me out with these Injuns, and I’ll try to repay you anyway I can. But that’s as far as I go.”

  The lieutenant, Sapp, stared at him, canting his head a little to one side. The brim of his tan kepi shaded his eyes. The men’s horses blew or shook their heads, twitched their ears, eager to be away from the blood smells. The redhead with the dripping scalp shuttled his expectant glance between the two parties. High above the butte’s sandstone knob, a hawk screeched, likely waiting for the killers to abandon the carrion.

  Finally, Sapp’s eyes softened as they flicked up and down Cuno’s muscular frame, and he said, reining his own horse away from the butte, “Bring your hoss, young feller. We got a camp yonder with grub and water.”

  He booted his coyote dun into a gallop to the northwest. The other mounted men glanced again up the slope at Cuno, then turned their own mounts away from the butte and spurred them after Sapp. Cuno stood staring after them, his ears still ringing from his head’s impact with a rock earlier, in his fight with the axe-wielding Yaqui. The redhead stared at him as though taking Cuno’s measure.

  “You alone?”

  Cuno nodded.

  The redhead tucked the end of the Yaqui’s long black scalp behind his cartridge belt. “This ain’t no country to be alone in, partner.” He walked up the slope, dragging his boot heels, his blue eyes friendly in an otherwise broad face with a broad, freckled, belligerent nose. As he extended a gloved hand toward Cuno, he said, “I’m Lusk.”

  Cuno stared at the man skeptically, then shook his hand. “Cuno Massey.”

  “So I heard.” Lusk turned away and began striding down the slope, loosing shale behind him, the dust rising burnt-orange in the fading afternoon light. “And I heard another thing.”

  “What’s that?” Cuno had started tramping up the slope to where Renegade stood tied to the root in the shade of the tall knob, the paint’s eyes still white-ringed with anxiety and wanting to hightail it out of there.

  “I’ve heard the name Massey before.”

  As Cuno grabbed his paint’s reins, he glanced down the butte as Lusk stepped into his saddle. Cuno regarded the sergeant curiously as he led Renegade down the slope, the horse snorting his disdain for the dead Indians, his shod hooves ringing off stones.

  At the bottom of the bluff, Cuno swung up into his saddle. Lusk sat his horse with the U.S. brand on its left wither, leaning forward on his saddle horn, giving a knowing, faintly jeering smile.

  “Ever been to Valoria in the Nebraska Territory?” Cuno asked him as though they were having a normal conversation, not wanting to give anything awa
y.

  “Nope, never been to Valoria. Hell, I was through Nebraska maybe only one time.”

  “Well, I reckon there’s plenty of Masseys around. Common enough name.”

  Lusk kept giving him that cat-that-ate-the-canary look as he booted his army remount in the direction the others had headed, Cuno cautiously spurring Renegade behind him. After they’d ridden a hundred yards, heading for a notch in a dark line of hills in the northwest, Lusk looked at him again as he rode off Cuno’s right stirrup.

  “Federal pen had ’em a prison break a few months back,” he said. “I know, see, ’cause I ran the telegraph office back at Fort Bryce, and I took down the federal telegram ordering all cavalry patrols to be on the watch for escaped federal prisoners heading for the Mexican line. Especially for the young blond rascal that killed him some territorial marshals up Wyoming way. Had just enough of an usual name to stick in my memory.”

  Cuno eyed the man for a time. “Since you know so much about me, how ’bout you tell me what blue-bellies are doing this far south of the border?”

  “Oh, I can’t do that,” Lusk said. “No, sir—you see, that’s a military secret.” He chuckled, bit the end off a tobacco braid, and started working it around in his mouth. He returned the braid to his shirt pocket and glanced once more at Cuno, that satisfied, knowing grin still stretching his mouth. “But there’s no need to worry, young Massey. I for one don’t doubt them marshals deserved what they got, and your secret’s safe with me.” He winked. “As long as our secret’s safe with you.”

  Cuno wasn’t sure he shouldn’t have thanked the soldiers, if they were indeed soldiers, and ridden out. But with the Yaqui on a rampage—and they’d likely be even more ornery when they discovered their fallen comrades on the butte—he might be better off spending the night around these men’s fire, then lighting out first thing in the morning and continuing on to the gulf.

  He cast a cautious glance behind him and was about to turn his head forward when something caught his eye on a low hill to the south.