.45-Caliber Desperado by Peter Brandvold Page B

drays were parked around large gravel mounds, and fresh rails were stacked, ready to be laid in the bed that twenty or so men were building with picks, shovels, grading pies, and horse-drawn winches.
    Coffee fires burned, sending up smoke. Mule teams stood tied to picket lines. There was the hum of the men’s raucous working conversation, and the clinks of hammered rail spikes.
    North of where the new rails were being laid, the village sprouted—a shabby oasis consisting of both simple and elaborate frame buildings surrounded by tents of all shapes and sizes. One faint wagon trail led there, and Cuno and Camilla followed the rest of the gang onto the trail and into the railroad supply camp.
    Judging by its two sturdy saloons, so new that the resin from their whipsawed planks made the whole area smell like a pine forest, and a gaudy, two-story building on the second-story balcony of which several young women milled like willowy birds of plumage, the camp had ambitions toward becoming a town.
    Dogs ran out from alley mouths to bark at the large group of dusty newcomers astraddle their sweat-frothy mounts. Chickens scattered. A white horse hitched to a small, black buggy reared and whinnied.
    Mateo’s men whooped and hollered as they thundered on up to the brothel, which was not yet identified by a sign but which could only be a whorehouse, with all the painted girls dancing and smoking and drinking on the second-floor balcony. The girls answered the men’s mating calls in kind, leaning over the wrought-iron rails, shaking out their hair, and letting their wraps and gowns billow out from their bosoms.
    â€œGood lord,” shouted Brouschard. “I do believe we done died and flew to heaven, amigo!”
    Mateo covered his chest with his black sombrero as he halted his big, black steed and regarded the fluttering birds on the balcony with a caballero-like grin. He didn’t appear at all self-conscious of the ugly scalping scars.
    â€œGood afternoon, lovely ladies,” the gang leader said in his heavily accented Spanish, giving a courtly bow, then raking the women staring down at him with his eager gaze. “Are you open for business or just getting some air?”
    Several of the girls looked at each other, vaguely puzzled. A couple were speaking in some foreign tongue Cuno didn’t recognize—French? German?—and then a big blonde stepped forward and lowered both straps of her sheer, purple gown, and let her giant breasts adorned with double strings of fake pearls spill forth.
    That was answer enough for the outlaws. Mateo and the other gang members gave another volley of jubilant yowls, leapt out of their saddles, dashed across the broad front, wraparound gallery, and bulled through the brothel’s open double doors.
    Suddenly, Cuno and Camilla were surrounded by over a dozen riderless horses. Inside the brothel, a din rose, echoing, as the men went looking for the women, some of whom remained on the balcony. Others disappeared, heading for their cribs.
    A little redhead remained, clad in a pink corset and gauzy black wrap. Her eyes were rimmed in seductive black that nicely complimented the burnished red of her hair. She rested an arm on the rail and arched a brow as she regarded Cuno still sitting Renegade in the middle of the broad street. He let his gaze stray to the twin mounds of creamy, freckled flesh pushing up from the top of her corset, and felt a surge of heat in his loins.
    Camilla put her horse up hard against his, leaned toward him, and wrapped a slender, strong arm around his neck. She mashed her mouth against his, held the kiss for a good five seconds, then pulled away and turned to the redhead, who was about her age. Curling her upper lip, she said, “Why would he buy a cow when he gets all the milk he wants for free?”
    Lines cut into the whore’s forehead.
    Camilla hooked a thumb at a hotel up the chaotically laid-out street and winked at Cuno.