.45-Caliber Firebrand by Peter Brandvold Page B

Snowberger, contented to merely soak and let the suds do all the work, hunkered low in his own tub and puffed a long, black cigar from the Chinaman’s own personal stash.
    Cuno lifted a leg to scrub a foot, unable to extinguish the hauntingly celestial face of Logan Trent’s daughter from his mind. A girl like that—all sensuous innocence with a well-filled corset, to boot—could tie a man’s loins in knots. Cuno found himself not as eager as he had been to hightail it back to Crow Feather.
    â€œCome on, fellas,” he ordered, rising from the tub, the suds sliding on down his chest and thighs. “Time to haul ass up to the lodge.”
    Serenity squawked a mocking laugh. “Wouldn’t wanna keep ole Trent waitin’, now would we?”
    â€œTrent sure got stuck in his craw,” Snowberger mused aloud as he slitted an eye at Cuno and continued puffing his cigar.
    â€œSomethin’ up there did, anyways,” Serenity said, clamping an arthritic hand on each side of his tub and hoisting his bony, pale body up out of the water. “Sorta looks like he seen a ghost, don’t he?”
    â€œOr a witch. Maybe one o’ them warlocks the Injuns believe in.”
    â€œI’m hungry,” Cuno growled. “Christ, I haven’t eaten since noon, and then it was only a handful of Serenity’s overboiled beans.”
    They dried, then dressed in the only other set of clothes they’d brought along, shivering in the chill night air behind the cook shack, the water still steaming from the tubs, a big moon rising over the high, bulky eastern ridge.
    Cuno pulled on a pair of faded denims—old but clean—and a thin doeskin tunic bleached bone-white by countless washings. He knotted a red neckerchief with white polka dots around his neck, stuffed the tails into the tunic, stomped into his boots, strapped on his gun belt, and donned his hat, taking an extra moment to adjust the angle.
    He strode back through the cook shack, where the cook was washing dishes on one of the ranges in the back shadows, and singing in his eerie tonal tongue, a cigarette dangling from between his mustached lips. Cuno tossed the man a silver dollar, thanked him for his generous services, and continued on out to the porch.
    Impatiently, he waited for his less-eager comrades. When they both arrived—Serenity wearing buckskins that looked no fresher than the ones he’d worn on the trip and Snowberger in denims, brown shirt, and simple black vest—they began tramping across the dark yard and up the slow grade toward the well-lit house hulking atop the hill.
    Near one of the several corrals on the south side of the yard, fronting the creek, three horseback riders sat talking to a man standing before them. Cuno couldn’t hear what they were saying, but their tones were grave. It took him a few seconds to realize the man on the ground, clad in a black frock coat, wavy pewter hair glistening with oil and smoking a stout cigar, was the foreman, Henry Kuttner.
    The aroma of the man’s cigar as well as his musky cologne wafted on the chill, fall breeze.
    Beyond the men, on the far side of the creek, running hoof thuds rose. Cuno, Serenity, and Snowberger stopped and turned toward the creek, as did the mounted men and Kuttner.
    â€œJesus Christ!” one of the waddies said, hipped around in his saddle. “Sounds like those boys got the devil’s hounds on their tails!”
    â€œWhat now?” Kuttner said, removing his cigar from his teeth and squaring his shoulders at the ranch’s front portal into which a couple of old bison skulls had been nailed. The portal and the bleached skulls were silhouetted against the starry, moonlit sky.
    The jostling shadows of the four riders came on across the sage-tufted flat, galloping hard. They thundered across the bridge and pushed on under the portal, and in seconds they were rounding the far corrals and checking their mounts down