Read .45-Caliber Widow Maker for Free Online Page B

a broad, grassy flat bordered by aspens.
    A couple of miles downstream from Buffalo Flats, he followed the wagon trail across the stream at a rocky ford, cleaved a broad canyon, and rose slowly toward a distant saddleback ridge. Glowing stars capped the ridge, kindling brightly in a lilac sky.
    Wolves howled along that ridge, and an owl hooted from a nearby branch or knob.
    As he rode, keeping his eyes skinned for general trail hazards, which included predatory men as well as animals, Cuno realized his thoughts were edged with a generalized unease.
    The dead lawman.
    After all the death he’d witnessed in recent years—from the deaths of his mother, father, and then his stepmother to the untimely going-under of the beautiful young half-breed girl he’d taken as a wife and who’d owned the unlikely name of July Summer—death still managed to wriggle around in his gut like bad meat or spoiled milk.
    It was a good thing. It meant, that in spite of all the hard knocks and all the lives he himself had been forced to take, he’d managed to retain some semblance of a soul.
    Still, he needed no distractions now. After struggling to find a life for himself, one that would honor his dead parents and his dead wife and the child he never knew, he was finally on the trail of a crackling future—one that didn’t teeter at the end of a gun barrel. He needed to hit Crow Feather in two days or less. No more.
    Not just for himself, but for his old friend Serenity, as well. He and the old mountain man and former saloon owner had been through hell paved with goatheads since Cuno’s partner, Wade Scanlon, had been killed by renegade white men in Colorado. Together, they’d hunted Wade’s killers and rescued a Chinese girl who’d been kidnapped by the same group.
    Afterward, out a load of supplies and an expensive Murphy freighter, Cuno had found his accounts wallowing in red and no contracts on the horizon. He and Serenity had spent the winter swamping saloons in Denver.
    Cuno put the skewbald up a steep hill between fast-darkening walls of aspen-sheathed granite.
    The lawman . . .
    Had the group he’d encountered in the saloon killed him? Why?
    Were they after the jail wagon?
    Cuno had thought he’d have overtaken the wagon by now. The fact that he hadn’t made the worm inside his gut wriggle. But he’d heard no gunfire. The marshals might have taken another route through the Mexicans to Crow Feather, foiling any plans the gang might have had of springing the prisoners.
    The thought was still shuffling around in his head when a dull rumbling rose from the thickening night shadows. At first, it sounded like a distant rock slide.
    But as the thumps grew louder and were joined by the squawks of tack and the rattle of bridle bits and chains, the occasional chuff of a horse or the throat-clearing of a man, Cuno reined Renegade off the left side of the trail. He put the horse up a steep grade and drew rein behind a vertical knob of eroded rock spiked with cedars. Leaning forward, he cupped a hand over the stallion’s nostrils, and peered around the knob’s left side.
    The hoof thumps rose like the beat of several Indian war drums. Occasionally there was the ring of a shod hoof clipping a stone.
    Shadows moved, rising and falling behind the rocks and shrubs and sliding from left to right along the trail below. As the riders passed, Cuno swung his head to peer around the knob’s right side. The silhouettes of men and horses flicked behind shrubs and rocks and disappeared behind another squat knob rising from the slope to Cuno’s right.
    One of the riders said something in a tight, frustrated voice, too far away and too drowned by the clatter of the hooves for Cuno to make out. As quickly as they’d risen, the drumming of the hooves faded off down canyon, echoing faintly. As if to punctuate their passing, a horse whinnied, and then the rasping breeze and distant coyote yips filled the night once more.
    The chill breeze slipped down