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

yards when another whip-crack broke beyond the ridge, the echo drawing Cuno’s gut taut as braided rawhide. Another report sounded, and then another, until a veritable fusillade rose from the far canyon.
    When you knew how to use a .45, there were times when you couldn’t very well not use it.
    Cursing the past that had led to his abilities, he neck-reined Renegade back down the faint wagon trail he’d been following, then put the horse up the gradual western slope. Lunging off his rear hooves, digging with the front, Renegade climbed into the tall grass along the base of the hill and lunged up through the grass and chokecherry shrubs until the scrub thinned and the forest began.
    The horse picked his own way through the thick timber, leaping deadfalls and turning sharply around occasional boulders and the giant root balls of trees uprooted by previous wind storms. Cuno ducked under branches, occasionally breaking one off. Renegade’s hooves thumped softly in the spongy turf, crunching pinecones and needles.
    Gaining the sandstone caprock, Cuno trotted the skewbald along the dike’s sandy base until he found a ragged defile. He couldn’t tell if the cleft offered passage to the other side of the ridge and into the valley on the other side, but it was the only one he’d seen.
    Swinging down from the saddle, he quickly tied the horse to a pine branch and shucked his Winchester from the saddle boot.
    The shooting continued—the revolver and rifle reports sounding like snapping branches, with the occasional whistling screech of a ricochet. Occasionally, a man gave a clipped, angry shout.
    “Stay, boy,” Cuno told the horse as, levering a shell into the Winchester’s breech, he strode back up the slope to peer into the cavern.
    He couldn’t see much but rock thumbs jutting from both stone walls and narrowing the passage to a few feet in places. But the gunfire sounded louder in here. He moved forward, crawling over a couple of stacked boulders and sidestepping around a three-foot gap before angling through a dogleg.
    Seconds later, he crouched behind a stone upthrust at the other end, peering over the rock and into a broad, sun-splashed valley like the one he’d left. Few trees stippled the slope below him, however. Mostly tall, tawny grass, chokecherry shrubs, occasional aspens, and moss-furred rocks and boulders.
    At the far side of the valley, a narrow creek angled along the base of a steep, pine-carpeted spur ridge. Rocks and scattered aspens stood along the creek, and now as Cuno raked his gaze across the canyon, he saw several sets of smoke puffs and orange flashes of gunfire from the rocks and trees.
    The shots were directed up toward the middle of the valley, where the jail wagon was parked along an almost-grassed-over wagon trail. The wagon tongue drooped into the trail, the mules gone.
    The four prisoners cowered inside the wagon, yelling encouragement toward the four or five men shooting toward Cuno’s side of the canyon from the creek.
    Another man crouched behind the wagon’s left front wheel, firing a Winchester toward the creek. A body humped in the grass just ahead and left of the wagon. The sun reflected off something silver on the man’s chest. Likely a deputy U.S. marshal’s badge, Cuno thought with a nettling hitch in his gut.
    He returned his gaze to the man shooting from the wagon. The gray hair on the man’s hatless head, and the rounded shoulders, bespoke the older marshal. The younger one was dead or at least badly wounded. A large patch of glistening red blood shone on the older gent’s shirt, across his left shoulder blade. By the way he was hefting his rifle, as though it weighed ten extra pounds, he was losing blood and strength fast.
    Cuno moved out from behind the rock, crouching, holding his Winchester low so that sunlight was less likely to flash off the copper receiver chasing. He strode down the slope, hoping he wouldn’t be seen from the creek, and crouched behind a spindly