Free Serial by Tim Marquitz Page B

displaced wagon wheel and using wrenches to adjust the torque on the axle. Any time now they’d be back on the road. But he’d lost a day.
    “How you boys doing on that wheel?” Whistler called over.
    “It’s repaired, but you best settle in mister,” the old stage driver grumbled. “Because we’re here for the night and pulling out at dawn.”
    “That does not suit me.”
    “It doesn’t matter. We’re not driving this stage in the dark, not through this kind of terrain.”
    “But—”
    “There be cliffs and ruts and ravines everywhere along the trail ‘twixt here and the junction and stage could take a plunge with one wrong turn.”
    The four people grouped by the carriage in the failing light.  
    A huge full moon hung in the sky, clouded with haze.
    They heard the wolves.
    Not like any Whistler heard before. A keening, yipping lupine chorus came from all sides out in the canyons. The howls began low but rose in strident pitch and timber until they became a high shrieking bay. It was a sound to freeze your blood. The bounty hunter looked at the stage driver, who was looking at the Mexican guard with the shotgun, who looked like he was about to soil himself.  
    “Coyotes?” Whistler asked, staring out into the near total darkness that began about three hundred feet from where they stood. The desert spaces that in daylight spread so vast were now claustrophobic and invisible beyond. The full moon was high and bright, obstructed by clouds and oddly cast no light. A tiny trickle of moonlight showed a crag of mountain peak in the gloom.  
    “Sure,” said the old Wells Fargo guy.
    “ Niente ,” whispered the guard.
    “What then?”  
    The guard didn’t answer.
    The big wolves, or whatever they were, roared in unison, a sonic garrote of cacophonic sound tightening around them. Closing in. The hooker was shivering in fear, her eyes huge as her dainty hands covered her ears against the bellowing growls. “Something’s out there. We got to get out of here,” she whimpered.
    “I’m with her,” Whistler confronted the driver. “We best be on our way directly.”  
    The old timer threw down, yelling in the bounty hunter’s face, spattering saliva. “I told you tain’t driving this rig at night on this trail or the stagecoach will crash because I cain’t see!”  
    By now the four horses were starting to panic, pawing the ground with their hooves, long snouts whipping back and forth in their bridles and bits, eyes marbles and ears pinned back at the horrific music in the hills.
    The monstrous roaring echoing around the canyons continued unabated and drew nearer and nearer. The guard, pale and face pouring with sweat, started babbling to the driver in Spanish, and the old man yelled back at him in the local tongue that Whistler barely understood. One thing was obvious. The Mexican knew what those sounds belonged to and wanted out of there. The argument became a shoving match, and the younger man won, clambering desperately up into the driver’s bench by the luggage roof rack, grabbing the reins and gesturing madly for the bounty hunter and the hooker to get into the stagecoach and hurry it up.
    “After you, ma’am,” quipped Whistler to the tart. He opened the door and eased her into the carriage with a helpful hand up her skirt on her firm rear end. Then he put his boot on the metal step and climbed in across from her.
    The old Wells Fargo driver climbed up onto the driver’s seat, cursing the whole way. He shoved the guard aside, grabbing the reigns. “I’m drivin’,” he shouted, “you’ll put us in a damn ditch. YYEEEE—AHHH!” He cracked the reins and the team surged forwards, the stagecoach pulling out.  
    The carriage picked up speed, scared horses hauling the rig at a full gallop. The wagon rocked back and forth on the uneven terrain as it plunged into the desert nocturne. Whistler could still hear the howling, but they seemed to be moving away from it. All he heard were the