Free .45-Caliber Widow Maker by Peter Brandvold Page A

o’ bitches run the chute after all that? Bullshit!”
    “All four with Oldenberg?”
    Landers shook his head. He was sagging forward over his bony knees. His eyelids seemed to be getting heavy, the skin over his cheekbones growing tighter.
    “King, Blackburn, and Simms. Fuego’s a loner, far as anyone can tell. He was convicted by the judge in Cody of raping a twelve-year-old girl in an old mine shack not two weeks ago, just outside Crow Feather. The girl’s father found the bean eater sacked out, drunker’n a Catholic on All Saints’ Day, near his poor daughter’s cold, naked corpse. Fuego had slit her throat from ear to ear.”
    Cuno glanced over his shoulder to peer into the clattering cage in which all four prisoners dozed. Fuego lay flat on his back with an arm crooked over his eyes. “After what I saw in Bismarck . . .”
    Cuno had started to turn his head forward when the old marshal sagged sideways against him, the reins slithering out of his gloved hands. Cuno snapped the reins up quickly, then straightened as the old marshal, his head on Cuno’s left shoulder, gave a long, shuddering sigh and drifted deep into unconsciousness.
    The man’s chest was bright with amber blood. Both ends of the wound needed to be cleaned out and wrapped with a poultice, or he’d bleed to death soon.
    As the old marshal’s slow, shallow breaths rattled up like a vagrant breeze across cattails, Cuno raked his eyes across the jumbled hogbacks and sandstone dikes rising between two sheer, red stone cliffs over which several hawks or eagles circled, hunting the rims.
    Unfolding on his right was a deep, narrow crease between hogbacks. It was hard to tell, but the crease appeared to lead to the base of the red stone wall. Maybe a box canyon.
    Cuno turned the mules into the crease, and the wagon bounced violently over sharp hummocks, scattered rocks, and wild mahogany shrubs. As Cuno had hoped, the crease dead-ended in a well-sheltered box canyon cut a hundred yards into the cliff face. A thin trickle of water curled over a mossy granite wall, rattling over jumbled boulders on its plunge to the sand-bottomed pool below.
    “Just what in the hell are we doin’?” the prisoner called Brush Simms barked indignantly. The violent passage through the crease had jolted him and the other prisoners around in the cage like dice in a cup. They squeezed the bars in their red fists.
    Cuno stopped the wagon about thirty yards and down a slight slope from the pool, the runoff trickling through a narrow, rocky cut nearby. He set the brake, dropped the reins, and slid to the far right edge of the driver’s box, dragging the old marshal along as gently as he could.
    Planting one foot on the right front wheel hub, the other on a stout wooden brace, he eased the out-cold marshal off the seat. He turned and, holding the man under his sagging arms, stepped onto the rocky ground with the old man sort of dangling off his left hip.
    The lawman puffed out his cheeks and flapped his lips as he blew, cursing in his sleep. “Goddamn . . . sons’bitches . . . the whole friggin’ lot . . . !”
    “You’ll get no arguments from me,” Cuno muttered.
    “Jesus,” Blackburn said, squatting at the edge of the cage and peering gravely through the bars as Cuno led the marshal up the slope toward the rattling falls. “That’s a damn cadaver you’re messin’ with boy. Sure as shit up a cow’s ass!”
    “If you don’t think our boys’ll find us in here, you got another think comin’, young fella!” Colorado Bob King tipped back one of the two canteens hanging from the barred ceiling of the jail wagon. Scowling, he let the canteen flop from its lanyard against a barred wall. “Hey, bring us some o’ that water. We’re bone-dry over here!”
    Cuno resisted the urge to palm his Colt revolver and silence the prisoners with .45-caliber slugs. He eased the old marshal down against a boulder about twelve feet back from the pool and the rattling falls, which