.45-Caliber Desperado by Peter Brandvold Page B

dressed—or undressed, as it were—like Cuno. Just the striped prison pajama bottoms and nothing else. He was staring off toward where Brouschard was holstering his big pistol and walking back toward the group, Ignacio lying dead behind him.
    â€œHelp yourself,” Mateo growled, grinning hatefully down at White Eye. He glanced at Cuno as he gave the dead man before him a savage kick in the ribs. “Go ahead, mi gringo amigo. Help yourself to his boots, clothes, anything. He might have spares in his saddlebags. The only thing you cannot help yourselves to, you and Senor Skinner, is the loot we acquired from our last job.”
    He glanced at one of the other men, jerking his head toward the horses of the two dead men standing to his left. “Divide it up, equal shares for everyone except the two newest members of our party.”
    He looked at Cuno and Skinner, who was walking tenderly on bare feet toward Ignacio but glancing over his shoulder at the outlaw leader. “They will have to earn their keep soon.”
    He narrowed a black-irised eye at Cuno. “Very soon.”
    Â 
    The man driving the ranch wagon had stopped a good ways from the outlaw gang when he’d seen the confrontations with the two wounded men. After the shooting, he’d come on with his cargo of two women—a pretty but sullen young redhead and his Indian wife.
    The man’s name, Cuno learned, was Romer Gaffney. A half-breed who wore an old rag around his forehead under a weathered canvas hat, he’d been in cahoots with Mateo de Cava for years, supplying the man with horses, shelter, and quick meals whenever the bandito shuffled his operations north of his usual stomping grounds and into Colorado Territory.
    Gaffney, Cuno learned as both deer were quickly spitted by the women and coffee brewed, was a dealer in stolen horses and cattle—a fairly easy trade this far off the beaten track. He occasionally sold whiskey. But mostly he provided succor to outlaws on the run, and, while he did not seem to be making an exceptionally good living at it, judging by the squalidness of his ranch headquarters, he seemed a carefree, happy man who took great pleasure in palavering with outlaws like Mateo and smoking his corncob while ordering his wife, Matilda, and his pretty redheaded niece, Wanda, around.
    While the outlaws talked and relaxed around the fire, drinking coffee spiked with Gaffney’s whiskey and ogling Wanda, Cuno dressed in the rough trail clothes he gleaned from White-Eye’s saddlebags—fringed deerskin trousers, calico shirt, red neckerchief, and horsehide vest with a torn pocket.
    The duds were none too clean, and they smelled sour, but they’d do until he could find a mercantile. He donned the man’s undershot boots and his straw sombrero, both of which were a tad on the small side but would do now in this pinch he was in.
    â€œNow you only need a dead eye,” said Camilla, sitting against a tree before him, the creek gurgling nearby. The others, including Frank Skinner, who looked much better now dressed and with food and whiskey in his belly, were a good fifty or sixty yards away. “A blond half-breed—that’s what you look like. One that gets into fights.”
    Cuno finished adjusting the sombrero on his head, letting the rawhide thong dangle down his chest, and touched his tender nose. He didn’t think it was a bad break. He’d had worse. He could breathe through it well enough. His eyes were still half swollen, however. Physically, he was miserable—tired and hungry and sunburned and wracked with the grinding pain in his face.
    But at least he was out of the Pit and still alive, and he knew he had Camilla to thank for that.
    â€œI’ll look almost human in a few days,” he said, lowering his hand from his nose.
    â€œThat will be good. I almost did not recognize you up there on that gallows.”
    â€œHow did you know I was about to