Riding With the Devil's Mistress (Lou Prophet Western #3) (12 page)

‘
Speaking of which,’ he said to Louisa, ‘you think that
cavvy belongs to our boys?’

Louisa studied them coolly,
then turned to Prophet, arching one of her eyebrows.
‘Who
else?’

Prophet nodded and looked
right, and pointed.
‘That must be the jail over there.’ He gigged his horse
toward the sheriff’s office, but stopped when he saw that the girl
wasn’t following him.

When he hipped around in his
saddle, she said,
‘You go ahead. I’m gonna go in that general store over
there and scrounge up some foodstuffs.’ She reined her horse left,
heading south down the street toward the general store, which sat
kitty-corner to the saloon.

‘
You
be careful,’ Prophet yelled.

She didn
’t so much as turn, just kept
riding. Prophet chuffed ruefully at the girl’s independence, then
continued toward the sheriff’s office—a long, low cabin with the
words
richland county sheriff
in gold-leaf lettering on the hovel’s only
window. There was a heavyset young man sitting on the gallery, to
the right of the window. Shaggy blond hair tumbled out of his
shabby bowler hat, and a shiny silver star hung from his ratty wool
vest over an even rattier white dress shirt. He leaned forward on
his bench, elbows on his knees, rolling the barrel of a Spencer
carbine between his hands like a pool stick.

‘
Who
are you?’ he asked, casting his weary, blunt-faced glance at
Prophet reining up at the hitch rail.

‘
Name’s Prophet, and you and me got trouble, if you’re the
sheriff.’

‘
I
ain’t the sheriff, I’m just the deputy,’ the young man was quick to
respond, casting another cautious glance to his right, toward the
saloon at the other end of the street. ‘You aren’t part o’ that
bunch down the street, are ye?’

Prophet said he
wasn
’t.
‘Where’s the sheriff?’

The young man—about nineteen or
twenty, Prophet guessed—measured him from the doughy gopher holes
of his eye sockets, then jerked his head to his right.
‘Out back. He’s
plantin’ his garden.’

‘
Kind
of early for gardenin’ in these parts, ain’t it?’ Prophet said,
crawling out of his saddle.

‘
That’s what I told him,’ the young man grunted.

As he tossed his reins over the
hitch rack, Prophet considered the lad nervously rolling the
carbine between his hands, then, with a knowing smile, headed
around the building to the back. He found a tall, middle-aged man
in suspenders and a
wash worn undershirt raking a patch of freshly turned
earth. The man’s gray hair was thin on top, and he wore a beard,
Prophet saw as the man turned to him.

‘
What
the hell do you want?’ the sheriff asked, narrowing his eyes with
the same wary expression his deputy had offered. Obviously, both
men knew what kind of snakes had ridden into town, and were more
than a little jumpy.

‘
Don’t
worry, Sheriff,’ Prophet said, raising his hands in a gesture of
acquiescence. ‘I ain’t part of that crew down the street. I’m after
them, as a matter of fact. Yesterday, they raided Luther Falls.
Shot a couple and kidnapped a girl of about fourteen or fifteen
years old.’

The sheriff
’s eyes dropped, scouring
Prophet’s chest for a badge. ‘You a federal?’

‘
No,
I’m a bounty hunter.’

The sheriff stared at him,
holding his rake across his chest. His eyes were gray and old, and
his chin jutted like a sharp rock.
‘You alone?’ he asked finally.

‘
Well... not exactly, but close enough.’

‘
What
the hell does that mean?’

Prophet studied the man from
across the black, wet garden that smelled of worms and fresh earth
and which a pair of robins eyed from the eaves of the jailhouse.
Prophet could see the man wanted no part of the Red River Gang, and
the bounty hunter didn
’t blame him. He’d probably farmed most of his
life, and when the sheriff’s job had opened, he’d probably figured
why not take it? Beats following mules around a potato patch. It
was a pretty typical state of affairs, Prophet had found, and one
that contradicted the newspapers and dime novels that had the
easterners believing every town was Dodge City and every lawman was
Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson.

Prophet waved and, turning,
said,
‘Never
mind, Sheriff.’ He should have listened to Miss Louisa, but he
always figured that giving the local lawmen a courtesy call would
save him trouble in the long run.

‘
They
send me federals, I’d go in there after those bastards,’ the
sheriff said.

‘
It’s
all right, Sheriff,’ Prophet said over his shoulder.

‘
Hell,
I have a wife and a daughter, and my deputy just had a
baby!’

‘
I
hear ye, Sheriff.’

‘
If I
wired Bismarck today, they wouldn’t have federals here till next
Wednesday!’

Prophet threw up a hand, waving, and walked
back to the front of the jail, startling the deputy as he
approached the veranda.

‘
Jeepers, you scared me!’ the lad said.

Prophet untied his reins from
the hitch rack.
‘Sorry, kid.’

‘
What’d the sheriff say?’

‘
He
told me you just had a baby.’

The lad grinned.
‘Sure
did.’

Prophet crawled into the
leather.
‘Boy or girl?’

‘
Girl.
Named her Sony a after my mother, God rest her soul.’

‘
Greet
her and her mother for me, lad,’ Prophet said. ‘And stay away from
that saloon tonight.’

FROM THE
SHERIFF
’S
office, Prophet gigged his horse southward, toward the mercantile,
keeping a wary eye on the saloon.

He stopped his horse suddenly
when he heard the general store
’s door open and saw two women walk out.
One was Louisa carrying a small burlap bag. The other was a
silver-haired lady in a brown dress and a crisp white apron. Louisa
and the woman were chatting amiably, though Prophet couldn’t quite
hear what they were saying until they both stopped at the edge of
the boardwalk, before Louisa’s Morgan.

‘
Now,
you go back down the street one block, and hang a left and then
another left,’ the lady said, one hand on Louisa’s shoulder and the
other pointing east. ‘My house is the big white one with the red
barn behind it. You can’t miss it because it’s the only place out
there!’ The woman laughed as though at the funniest joke she’d
heard in years.

‘
Oh,
thank you, Mrs. McBride!’ Louisa exclaimed, gazing into the woman’s
eyes with all the ingratiation the girl could muster. ‘I can’t tell
you how pleased Poppa and Momma will be when they hear how well I
was taken care of on my journey back homeward.’

‘
An
innocent child like yourself should not be allowed to journey so
far from home!’

‘
Oh,
believe me, Mrs. McBride, it was a truly hard decision for Poppa
and Momma to make. But with all their infirmities, they simply were
unable to make the trek themselves. And I really wanted to
go.’

‘
Well,
I’m sorry your grandmother has passed, child.’

‘
Yes,
but, you know what, Mrs. McBride? I think her passing was made more
comfortable by having her only granddaughter at her
side.’

‘
Oh,
I’m sure it was, I’m sure it was,’ the old woman cooed, drawing
Louisa to her great bosom, hugging her and patting her back.
Brushing a stray tear from her cheek, she said, ‘Well, I think
you’ll find mine and Mr. McBride’s home quite comfortable, child.
Run along now. It’s the second-story room to the left of the
stairs. The hired boy will probably have a fire going in the
hearth, so you can heat water for a bath. Have the boy stable your
horse in the barn with plenty of hay and oats.’

‘
Thank
you, Mrs. McBride. As meager as my means, I don’t know how I’ll
ever be able to repay you.’

‘
Your
gratitude is thanks enough, child.’ The old woman gave Louisa a
gentle shove toward her horse, adding, ‘Hurry along now, dear. You
look positively exhausted.’

‘
Yes,’
Louisa said, lacing her voice with a weary trill as she untied the
Morgan’s reins from the hitching post, ‘I do feel a bit worse for
the wear.’

The girl mounted up and, waving to the old
woman, turned the Morgan into the street. When she saw Prophet
sitting atop Mean and Ugly and staring at her with a look of amazed
disbelief on his unshaven face, she stuck her tongue out at him and
gigged the Morgan into a trot.

Prophet turned his head to watch Miss
Bonaventure disappear around the corner, a grim smile on his face.
A survivor, that girl. Turning back to the old woman, who remained
on the boardwalk before the general store, staring at him with her
gnarled fists on her hips and a scowl on her face, Prophet gigged
his horse toward her and reined up.

‘
Ma’am,’ he said with a tug on his hat brim, ‘you have any
idea where a poor, weary traveler might find a soft bed for the
night?’

Brusquely she said,
‘Down by the river
there’s plenty of soft grass, young man.’ She wheeled around on her
stout, black shoes and disappeared into the store.

‘
Much
obliged, ma’am,’ Prophet grumbled at the door slamming
closed.

He turned to the saloon sitting
on the corner of the next block. The horses remained at the hitch
rack, and, knowing what he knew about the gang inside, the poor
animals would probably remain there all night, saddled and bridled.
From the sound of the whoops and muffled laughter from inside the
place, he suspected the gang was having one hell of a time. The
girl they
’d
kidnapped was probably in one of the upstairs rooms, no doubt going
through a hell administered by each of the drunken gang members in
turn.

The thought set
Prophet
’s
blood to boiling, but there was nothing he could do to help her at
the moment. If he walked in there now, he’d be dead in two
minutes.

Prophet rubbed his bristly jaw. Shit.

He thought it over and decided
the first thing he had to do was free the girl, and the best time
to attempt that was after dark, at least three hours away. The gang
would be fairly drunk by then, and his chances of stealing into the
place unseen would be fair to good. His chances of getting
her
out
without being seen were probably only poor to fair, but he
had to try it, and he didn’t have much time.

The girl was living on borrowed
hours. The gang would no doubt head out of here in the morning, and
Prophet doubted they
’d take her along. They’d get all they could from her
tonight, then probably slit her throat and leave her in one of
those upstairs cribs to bleed to death.

First thing he had to do was
get Mean and Ugly stabled, fed, and rested, so
he
’d be able
to ride later. To that end, he reined the horse back along the way
he had come. Seeing a barn and paddock down a side street, he
headed that way and paid a lad to bed the horse down with fresh hay
and oats. He gave the boy an extra dollar to tie the horse before
the general store in three hours. Taking only his shotgun and
leaving his rifle and the rest of his tack with the boy, he headed
back down the street toward the saloon.

Halfway there, he caught a
whiff of something cooking, and followed the smell to a small,
tar-paper shack sitting on a weedy lot behind the general store,
flanked by stacked wood and a smokehouse. On a crude sign tacked
beside the door the word
food
had been painted in white letters. The place was
propped by logs about a foot off the ground, and out from under it
came a dog to bark at Prophet and sniff his clothes.

Tripping over the dog, he made his way to
the door, pushed inside, and looked around at the three hand-hewn
tables and benches surrounding a smoky woodstove. In one corner, an
old man and an old woman worked on a plate of roast beef and mashed
potatoes with gravy, not saying a word and glancing up only briefly
at the stranger. Noting the shotgun, they quickly returned their
eyes to their tin plates, muttering in a foreign language.

The meal Prophet was served turned out to be
as humble as the setting it was served in, and he left the place
fighting down the frothy acid bubbles rising in his chest.
Unsteadily, he made his way back to the main street and stopped on
the corner just east of the general store.

The sun was nearly down, and
there was very little activity on the street. The only horses were
those of the Red River Gang, still tied to the hitch rack before
the saloon. The animals
’ heads hung sleepily.