Riding With the Devil's Mistress (Lou Prophet Western #3) (17 page)

He tied Mean and Ugly to the hitch rack
before the barbershop and stepped inside. He walked out forty-five
minutes later not only shaved and trimmed but bathed, as well. It
had turned out the barber, trying to drum up business again after
the renegades had given the town a bad name, was running a special,
and the bath had cost him only one extra dime.

‘
I’d
say I smelled some better than you, Mean and Ugly,’ Prophet told
the horse as he gathered the reins from the rack. ‘What do you
think about that?’

He
’d just stepped off the boardwalk
when a shot rang out, tearing Prophet’s hat from his
head.

PROPHET CROUCHED AS he drew his
pistol, holding out his left hand so his fiddle-footed horse
wouldn
’t
trample him. Tossing his gaze across the street, he saw smoke
dispersing in the air over a feed trough.

Prophet fired twice at the
trough, then, releasing Mean
’s reins, he pivoted to his right, ran back onto
the boardwalk, and crouched behind a barrel someone had cut in half
and filled with petunias.

The pistol across the street cracked again,
the slugs plunking into the barrel. Certain that members of the Red
River Gang had tracked him from Wahpeton, Prophet stretched his arm
around the right side of the barrel but held his fire when he saw
the gunman dart up from behind the trough and disappear around the
corner of the millinery shop.

Only one man?

Prophet hesitated, knowing it
could be a trap. If he followed the gunman, he might run straight
into the rest of the gang waiting for him in an alley. But his legs
had already taken him halfway across the street before his
mind decided to go
ahead and chase the son of a bitch.

He pressed his back to the front of the
millinery store, and slid a cautious gaze around the corner. One
man, a stout hombre in a floppy hat and suspenders, was mounting a
dust-gray horse waiting for him in the alley. Vaguely surprised to
not see more men with drawn weapons, Prophet bolted around the
corner as the man gigged the agitated mount southward, and fired
off three ineffectual shots at the retreating figure.

Prophet paused to stare at the
dwindling horseman befuddledly.
Something about the man’s homespun
clothes, crude gear, and heavy-footed horse told the bounty hunter
he was not a member of the Red River Gang. But if he was not, then
who was he, and why in the hell was he trying to kill
Prophet?

Prophet ran back for his horse,
but Ugly was not where he
’d left him. He cursed again, ran down the side
street, and found the dun standing by a trash heap in the alley,
his bridle reins hanging, an owly look in his eyes.

‘
Easy,
Mean—damnit,’ Prophet groused, walking slowly up to the perturbed
mount in spite of his need to hurry. ‘Don’t act like you never
heard gunshots before, you old crank.’

When he got close, the horse
sidled away, but Prophet lunged for the reins, grabbing them, and
jumped into the leather. A moment later he was following the
gunman
’s
path south, tracing a meandering trail around shanties and log
cabins. He stopped at the school, where children paused in their
play to regard him curiously.

‘
A man
just gallop through here?’ he asked, suddenly unsure of the
gunman’s trail.

A boy in highwater coveralls
lifted his arm and pointed southeast.
‘He crossed the river through there!
Wolf chased him!’

‘
Much
obliged!’

Prophet had no idea who Wolf
was, but he found out
a minute later, when a big, black sheepdog loped
toward him from the south, tongue hanging. The dog paused and
hunkered low in a patch of high grass, watching Prophet gallop
toward him. As Prophet passed, the dog leapt at Mean and Ugly’s
hocks, snarling, but was too tuckered to give chase.

Prophet crossed the shallow river and
climbed the sparsely wooded rise on the other side. Raking his gaze
around, he saw a rider cresting a hill in the middle distance,
heading southeast at a lumbering gallop.

Prophet heeled Ugly after him,
and when he
’d ridden a good mile, he topped a high hill on the other
side of a brushy creek. Looking eastward, he saw dust lingering in
the still morning air, but he did not see the rider. Apparently,
the man had ridden over the next rise east. If he held true to his
speed and course, about now he should be climbing the next, higher
hill beyond.

But he wasn
’t.

Prophet turned Mean and Ugly back down to
the creek bottom and tied the horse to a tree. Looping the shotgun
around his neck and holding it out before him, he followed the base
of the hill southward. When he came to a cleft in the hill, he
followed it east.

On the other side of the hill, he paused,
looking around. Several trees and boulders provided good cover. A
horse blew somewhere nearby, and Prophet crouched, quickening his
gaze. Seeing nothing, he moved farther east, staying low in the
brush and looking northward up the ravine.

He stopped when he saw the gray horse tied
to a tree about fifty yards before him.

Prophet sucked his teeth, wary. Was there
really only one man, or was that how it was supposed to look? Was
he supposed to creep up on a man placed as a decoy while others
crept up on Prophet from behind?

Chewing his cheek, Prophet
gazed around with cautious
eyes, and peeled the Richards’s hammers back,
ready to start blasting at the first sign of trouble. Stepping
eastward, he came upon a thin game trail hugging the east side of
the ravine, and followed its meandering path north through shrubs
and bramble.

Birds cried and gophers chattered in the
grass.

When he came to a cottonwood, Prophet
stopped suddenly.

About forty feet before him,
the gunman crouched behind a mossy boulder, keeping his eyes and
rifle trained on the western ridge of the hill looming up before
him. He was waiting for Prophet to come galloping down that hill
and into his rifle fire—lights out, that
’s all she wrote. Fiddler, start the
music.

Crouching, holding the shotgun chest-high,
Prophet started toward the man. His foot cracked a branch, and the
man swung toward him, eyes widening, face coloring up like a
sunset.

‘
Stop!’ Prophet warned.

When the man
didn
’t check
the arc of the rifle, Prophet tripped his right trigger, and the
Richards jumped with the explosion of spewing buckshot. The gunman
fired once, the slug smacking into the tree behind Prophet. As the
buckshot took him through his middle, he flew back against the rock
and dropped his rifle. He stood there a moment and lowered his chin
to stare down at his open belly, losing his hat in the process. He
looked at Prophet, stumbled forward snarling, then fell to his
knees, breathing hard and making high-pitched sobbing
sounds.

‘
Goddamnit!’ Prophet groused. ‘I told you to
stop!’

‘
Y-you
blasted me ... ye ... snake.’

‘
You’re the one layin’ for me in the grass,’ Prophet
reminded the man as he stepped forward, lowering the Richards, and
glancing around to make sure they were alone.

‘
Who
the hell are you?’ Prophet asked, crouching down and removing the
six-shooter from the man’s holster. He had wavy brown hair and a
broad, pitted nose. Half his left ear was gone, leaving an ugly
mess of scar tissue—the result of a knife fight, no
doubt.

‘
I’m
Carlton Mack,’ the man groaned, turning onto his shoulder, his face
bunched with pain. ‘You shot my brother, Benny, and brung him here
for the bounty, you no-good’—the man cried out in
pain—
’bounty
hunter!’

Prophet stared down at the man
wearily, lining up his thoughts. Then he remembered that Benny Mack
was one of the two men he
’d killed in the Johnson Lake Road-house, prior to
traveling to Luther Falls. The corners of his eyes creased with
surprise.

‘
You’re Benny Mack’s brother?’

‘
C-came t-ta ... kill you ... you son ... of a
bitch!’

With that, the man expired, his head
dropping, his mask of pain flattening out and relaxing, tongue
drooping. His eyes remained open, sightlessly studying the ants
that were already moving in to investigate the gift of carnage
fallen here as if from the sky.

‘
You
goddamn fool,’ Prophet snarled.

On one hand, he was relieved
that the man had no connection to the Red River Gang. On the other,
he felt chagrined by the fact that a family member of one of his
quarry had come gunning for him. Not that it
hadn
’t
happened before, and not that it wouldn’t happen again.

He just didn
’t like it. There were too many
ways to get killed at this job.

He didn
’t bother burying the man. The brush
wolves and the bears in these parts would only dig him up in a few
hours, anyway. Besides, he didn’t have time. He had the Red River
Gang to hunt.

Moodily, he took the
man
’s guns
and walked over to his horse tethered to the oak. He slid the rifle
into the saddle boot and dropped the six-shooter in a saddlebag,
then led the horse over to Mean and Ugly.

A minute later, he was heading
back for Luther Falls, trailing the dust-gray for delivery to the
school. No doubt one of those young
’uns on the playground could use a good
saddle horse.

An hour earlier, Tom Taber and Billy Silver
were sitting before the lumberyard across from the livery barn,
smoking and trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, given this
was a good Lutheran town and the two gang members not only had
sidewinder written all over them, but one was Indian and the other
white.

And, of course, there was the little matter
of their raid a few days back.

Neither man worried about any
of that, however. The town was without its sheriff, and thus these
pious folks of Luther Falls were babes in the woods, without threat
and defenseless—except for the man who
’d taken the girl out of the Wahpeton
saloon, that was. That’s who Taber and Silver were watching for
now, believing he’d sooner or later show himself around the livery
barn. They’d recognize him easy enough. A rough-hewn character like
that, clad in trail garb, would stand out in a porridge-and-raisin
village like this one.

Taber was talking in a
desultory way to Silver about the pony drip his brother had died of
last month.
‘Went plumb wild, and even shot a whore, though she wasn’t
the one who gave it to him—’ Taber stopped, noticing that Silver
was staring eastward down the street, where three men were walking
along the boardwalk, headed this way on the other side of
Main.

‘
Well,
well,’ Taber said under his breath. ‘Now who in the hell you s’pose
they are?’

‘
One,
he’s got a badge,’ Silver said in his guttural
Indian-English.

‘
Badge?’ Taber squinted his eyes to see better. Sure enough,
when the trio stepped out from under an awning, something pinned to
one of the men’s vests winked in the sun. ‘Well, I’ll be
damned.’

The three men marched like proud soldiers
home on leave, tipping their hats to the ladies, their jaws
straight, the brims of their hats pulled low over their eyes. Their
black boots shone like obsidian, and the guns tied on their hips
appeared well-chosen and -tended.

As they approached the livery
barn, Taber said,
‘Greenhorns with badges is what they are.’ He waited for
Silver to say something, but the tight-lipped Sioux just stared,
his muddy eyes glinting with kill lust. He got that look every time
he saw a badge or soldier blue.

‘
You
s’pose one of them nabbed the girl?’ Taber said, not expecting a
reply. Around Silver, you did a lot of talking to
yourself.

He was surprised when the
Indian offered a slight shrug. Even more surprised to hear,
‘We know why
they’re here,’ in that flat, low, menacing tone of
Silver’s.

Taber spat, snorted, and poked
his cloth cap up on his pale, bald head. He chuckled at
Silver
’s
laconicism, contrasting it with the war whoops the Indian had given
last night when, half smashed on rye, he’d gone upstairs in the
saloon.

‘
We
sure do,’ Taber said. ‘Well now, I reckon we see what direction
they’re headed ... and follow ‘em.’ He looked at Silver, who’d
stood and was moving toward the lumberyard’s main building behind
them. ‘Hey, where you goin’?’

‘
Gonna
use a grindstone ... sharpen my knife.’

Silver was returning from the
lumberyard and inspecting his freshly sharpened knife blade when
the three lawmen descended the livery barn
’s ramp, two leading duns, the third,
a tall black stallion.

‘
Here
we go,’ Taber said.

Silver stood beside Taber and watched the
three men trot their horses out of town.