Free .45-Caliber Widow Maker by Peter Brandvold

was only fifteen minutes or so before he spied the wagon rumbling through another broad canyon rippled with rocky dikes and benches and slashed with small gullies. The wagon was a mere brown speck about a half mile ahead and nearly lost amidst the rabbit brush and clay-colored rocks.
    Cuno rode up past the prisoners, who were sitting or lying in the bouncing box, all as scowling, sunburned, and dusty as a passel of trapped wolves. Hearing Renegade’s clomping hooves, the old marshal jerked with a start, fumbling his rifle off the seat beside him.
    “It’s Cuno.” The blond freighter walked Renegade beside the right front wheel, keeping pace with the slow-moving wagon. “You still kicking?”
    “Ah, shit,” the marshal said, shoving his rifle under the seat. “I cut myself worse than this shavin’.” He glanced at Cuno, squinting one eye. “Cuno, you say?”
    “Cuno Massey.”
    “I’m Bill Landers. Much obliged for the help, young Massey. I reckon I got her under control for the time bein’. I know you got business ahead, an’ I wouldn’t want to hold you up no more than I already have.”
    “That’s all right,” Cuno said. “I got all the time in the world.”
    He pulled Renegade up close to the wagon. He wrapped his reins around his saddle horn, then stepped off the horse and into the wagon in one smooth motion, Renegade keeping pace off the wagon’s right front wheel. The body of the dead deputy flopped behind the saddle, the man’s hair dangling toward the trail.
    Cuno sat down beside the old marshal, who had fashioned a sling out of a leather rifle lanyard, and poked his hat back off his forehead. A quick inspection told him the oldster was in worse shape than he let on.
    The man was of an older, hardier breed—he wore his hard, rich past in the deep lines in his face and neck—but he couldn’t drive the team and endure the wagon’s pitch and sway much more than a few miles. The man’s cheeks were sallow, his eyes glazed with pain.
    Already, fresh blood had begun pumping through the cloth Cuno had stuffed into the hole in his chest. It glistened brightly as it spread out across the shirt and vest, and it rimmed the edges of the man’s badge.
    “Thought you said you had business in Crow Feather,” Landers said, narrowing a skeptical eye at the husky lad.
    “Nah.” Cuno hiked a shoulder. “Just didn’t think I’d look good in a badge. You want me to take over? I’ve driven a few teams.”
    “I got it. You know, during the height of the Injun Wars I was shot seven times—all at once ?”
    “Sioux?”
    “Nah.” The old lawman winced and shook his head. “The noncom I was playin’ poker with at Camp Wichita!”
    He threw his head back and guffawed until he turned linen white and winced at a keen pain spasm. Coughing, he spat over the wagon’s left wheel and drifted into silence.
    “How long you been marshaling?” Cuno asked after they’d ridden a half mile or so, just to keep the oldster alert.
    “Ten years. I ranched in the Chugwater Buttes ’fore that . . . till rustlers and Injuns run off all my stock and my wife up and left me for a saloon owner in Wheatland.”
    Landers shook his head again. “Bitch died of syphilis three years later, and it ain’t to my credit that I rejoiced when the devil took her black soul. I was badge totin’ by then. The feds in Cheyenne needed someone to work the area around here after three deputies got beefed by vermin like these in the back.
    “I done cleaned out a good dozen or so gangs holed up from here clear down to the Laramies, the Mummies, and over west to the Wind Rivers. Been half froze, damn near beat to death, arrowed by Crows and Cheyennes, almost drowned by a whiskey peddler named Vernon Gault, and shot in the ass and the head by stagecoach thieves and bank robbers.”
    Landers chuckled and jerked his head back to indicate the men riding in the cage, just out of arm’s reach, behind him. “You think I’m gonna let these sons