.45-Caliber Widow Maker by Peter Brandvold Read Free Book Online

Cuno’s wool collar to rake the hair over his sweat-damp back, lifting gooseflesh. He quelled the urge to shiver. That worm in his gut lifted its head and flicked its tail.
    They were after the wagon.
    Cuno expelled a deep breath and put Renegade down the slope, letting the horse pick its own path in the darkness, hearing rocks rattle behind. As he turned the horse down trail and nudged him with his spurs, he was off again, angling southeast through the Mexicans, darkness like a thick black glove descending quickly while stars kindled brightly and merged—sequins in bunched, black cloth.
    Since the trail was merely a faint line rising and falling and curving along the ground before him, Cuno held Renegade to a walk. He didn’t want the horse slamming a cannon against an unseen rock or tripping over deadfall. As he rode, he found himself wondering if the dead lawman’s horse had found its way back to town.
    If so, had the man’s family found him?
    Absently, he imagined the scene. The wife, having heard the horse’s snort or whinny, wanders outside to see the vinegar dun standing in the yard, by a stack of split cord-wood. She holds up a lamp and walks around the horse. Maybe a child, or two children, having been waiting for their father since suppertime, run out of the cabin behind her.
    The dull, yellow light finds the body humping up beneath the blanket, hanging belly down across the saddle, the man’s dark brown hair peeking out from the blanket’s open fold . . .
    A sudden, bereaved scream shatters the quiet night.
    Cuno removed his hat and ran his hand through his long, sweat-damp hair. No matter who cared about him, or if no one cared, the man was dead.
    Murdered.
    Cuno rode for another hour, until it was so black he could barely see his hand in front of his face. Then he camped in a box canyon, near a small feeder creek, building a small fire for coffee and to warm some beans.
    He dug a shallow trough for his hip and slept hard, his two blankets pulled up to his chin against the high-country chill and the breeze that settled after midnight. In his sleep he heard an owl hoot, a distant bobcat scream, and the sporadic scratchings of burrowing creatures. Pinecones thudded dully around him.
    He started the next day consciously putting the dead lawman and the jail wagon out of his mind . . . until, around ten a.m., as he took a detour around a section of trail obliterated by a rockslide, a distant rifle shot ripped out across pine-covered slopes, sucking at its own echo.
    It was followed by the muffled, almost inaudible bray of a mule.

5
    CUNO SAT HIS skewbald paint straight-backed and tense, jaws hard as he stared up the razorback ridge on his right.
    Pines covered the slope slashed with charred, crumbling logs from a long-ago fire, and recent deadfall—pines as well as firs, a few aspens. At the lip of the ridge, the forest receded beneath a camel hump of pocked, fluted sandstone.
    As his gaze bored a hole through the sky capping the ridge, another rifle shot cracked in the canyon on the other side. The report flatted out shrilly as it echoed across the valley—muffled with distance but crisp and clear on the high, dry western air. Renegade shook his head and stomped his right foot, then shook his head again.
    Brows ridging his clear blue eyes, Cuno continued staring at the ridge, his heart thudding dully. Finally, when no more gunshots sounded, he snapped his head forward, clucked to the horse, and continued on his way, up through a broad valley cleaved by a winding, slender stream around which tall, tawny grass grew thick and breeze-ruffled. Flood-killed trees—short-branched and barkless—stood in spare groves on both sides of the slow-moving water.
    Keeping his gaze on the trees and the stream, Cuno was practically holding his breath, hoping he wouldn’t hear another report, hoping the shots he’d heard had been fired by hunters and not by the renegades trailing the jail wagon.
    He’d ridden only fifty