Riding With the Devil's Mistress (Lou Prophet Western #3) (2 page)

The girl halted on the landing, screaming
and dropping to her knees. The man with the chin whiskers grabbed
at her arm, but seeing Prophet turn the shotgun on him, let her go,
cursing her loudly. He turned and ran to the second story.

Prophet followed him, hurdling the dead man
at the bottom of the stairs and passing the frightened girl on the
landing. When he came to the second story, he slowed, creeping
between the two rows of closed doors in the hall, the floorboards
squeaking under his boots.

There were three doors on each
side. One stood ajar,
the crack bleeding light from a window within the
room.

Prophet extended the
Richards
’s
short barrel, nudging the door wide. Before him stood the man with
the chin whiskers. He held a naked red-haired girl with nubbin
breasts and freckles. He stood behind her, clutching her left arm
tightly with his left hand and snugging the barrel of his Smith
& Wesson to her head with the other.

In the room
’s small bed lay another man,
his head and shoulders pressed to the wall, clutching a wool
blanket to his neck. He lay frozen, expressionless, and pale. His
wide eyes shuttled between the outlaw and the bounty
hunter.

The girl was crying and begging
the outlaw to let her
go—

‘
It’s
all right, Miss,’ Prophet said, staring into the cold, sneering
eyes of the man behind her. ‘He’ll be gone in a minute.’

‘
She’s
the one’s gonna be gone,’ the man spat through gritted teeth, ‘if’n
you don’t drop that gut-chewer.’

Sweat rolled down
Prophet
’s
cheeks as he stared at the revolver snugged up to the girl’s jaw,
its hammer locked back, the man’s dirty finger crooked over the
trigger. Prophet had little doubt that if he didn’t set the shotgun
down, the man would kill the girl.

Of course, giving up his
shotgun would mean giving up his ghost as well—the man would shoot
him outright— but what else could he do? He didn
’t want to be the cause of this
innocent whore’s demise.

As the bounty hunter prayed for a miracle,
his heart pounded, and the sweat glistened on his dusty
forehead.

‘
All
right,’ he said finally, with a distraught sigh. He depressed the
right trigger, thinking, ‘Okay. This is it. It’s been a nice run
...’

As he crouched, lowering the
shotgun to the floor, images of his Georgia childhood reeled
through his brain. The outlaw grinned widely, showing small, hard,
yellow teeth. The man extended his revolver toward Prophet.
The
bounty
hunter stared wearily down the bore, wincing at the imminent,
life-ending bullet.

The outlaw laughed. He squeezed the
trigger.

At the precise moment the gun barked, the
whore screamed.

Prophet
couldn
’t
tell for sure what had happened, because he’d closed his eyes. But
he figured the whore must have nudged the outlaw’s arm, for instead
of pinking the bounty hunter’s forehead, the bullet had seared a
shallow trough along his cheek and notched his earlobe before
thunking into the door behind him.

Prophet stumbled back and opened his
eyes.

‘
You
goddamn whore!’ the outlaw raged, punching the naked girl and
sending her sprawling across the bed with another
scream.

Prophet reached for the
shotgun. The gunman wheeled and fired as the bounty hunter raised
the two-bore; the slug slammed into the Windsor chair Prophet was
crouched behind. Seeing that the fight was going to involve the
shotgun once again, the outlaw turned and dove through the
room
’s
single window, landing on the porch roof in a rain of glass. He
scrambled to his feet, cursing, and ran to the edge of the
roof.

Prophet bolted to the window,
thumbing back the shotgun
’s right hammer. Standing at the roof edge,
shuttling his worried gaze between Prophet and the ground below,
the outlaw squeezed off a wild round at the bounty hunter. Prophet
poked the shotgun through the window and fired as the man threw
himself over the edge.

Scrambling through the window, Prophet made
it to the edge of the roof as the outlaw, clutching his
buckshot-peppered shoulder, gained his feet and started limping
across the yard toward the corral, where several saddled horses ran
in circles, shaking their manes at the gunfire.

Prophet raked his Peacemaker
from his holster.
‘Stop or prepare to meet your maker, you bucket o’ bat
shit!’

His yell was followed by the sound of
screaming horses. Prophet glanced right, frowning.

Two startled Percherons and the blue ice
wagon were barreling across the yard, on an interception course
with the outlaw. There was no driver, and the heavy geldings were
pulling away from a small gray shed as though the hounds of hell
were nipping at their hocks.

Not quite believing what he was seeing,
Prophet stared in awe as the gunman, hearing the horses, stopped in
the middle of the yard and turned to his right. The marauding team
closed on him like a shaggy, blue-tailed comet.

The man opened his mouth but
didn
’t have
time to scream before the horses ran him down. Crumpling beneath
their hooves, he was pummeled and snatched up by the hitch, dragged
a hundred feet east of the roadhouse, and spat turdlike from under
the box.

The rolling, mangled heap came to a dusty
rest under a Cottonwood as the wagon continued over the hill and
out of sight.

Dust sifted down in the yard. All was quiet
but for the breeze, a few spring songbirds, and the muffled sobs of
the whore.

Prophet heard the tentative shuffling of
boots on the porch beneath him, where the woodcutters had gathered
to watch the festivities. At length, someone whistled. Someone else
cleared his throat guiltily.

‘
Guess
I shoulda set the wagon brake.’

IT WAS FULL dark when Prophet
dropped down off a low hill, trailing the horses of the two dead
outlaws, the outlaws themselves hanging belly-down over their
saddles, hands tied to their feet. He walked Mean and Ugly across a
log bridge over a narrow stream and passed the first of
several
tarpaper shanties of the town of Luther Falls.

The bartender back at the
roadhouse had told Prophet that Luther Falls was a mellow little
village where he
’d find the only sheriff within a two-hour ride. So Prophet
had loaded up his cargo and headed northwest.

Luther Falls did, indeed, look mellow
enough, with its tight little houses spewing piney chimney smoke,
the windows lit with the warmth of familial associations. It was an
hour past supper, but the smells of roasted meat and coffee still
clung to the cool night air.

Cows bellowed in corrals,
occasional dogs barked, and chickens clucked in coops not far from
backyard privies. In one window that Prophet passed, well-dressed
ladies sang hymns around a piano, open songbooks in their
hands. The sight
warmed his heart after what he’d been through back at the
roadhouse, and he was glad he hadn’t ridden into this God-fearing
little town, his ghastly cargo in tow, in broad
daylight.

Prophet followed the meandering
road, no more than two pale wagon tracks under a sky filled with
small, hard stars, to the business district. He pulled up before a
clapboard hovel with a peaked roof and a shingle over the boardwalk
announcing
sheriff.
He was happy to see a dim lantern glow in the
window.

‘
How
can I help you, stranger?’ a man’s voice called behind
him.

Dismounting, Prophet turned to see a stout
gentleman in a suit, a long deerskin coat, and a fur hat angling
across the street toward the jailhouse. He was carrying saddlebags
over his shoulder and a full-length shotgun in his hand. A briar
pipe jutted from his mouth, puffing a rich, aromatic smoke.

‘
I’m
looking for the sheriff,’ Prophet said.

The man had stopped to look
over the two bodies draped over the horses on
Prophet
’s
lead line. ‘You found him. And I’d say you have a little explaining
to do, Mr....’

‘
The
name’s Prophet, Sheriff. I’m a bounty man. These two men are wanted
for robbery and murder in Kansas and Missouri. I’ve been following
them since leaving Dodge City three weeks ago. My friend, Wyatt
Earp, put me on their trail. He and Bat Masterson were too busy to
go after them themselves.’

‘
Earp
and Masterson, eh?’ the sheriff said, obviously impressed. ‘They’re
friends of yours?’

‘
Wyatt
is,’ Prophet said. ‘Bat and I... well’—Prophet grinned—’Bat ain’t
too fond of bounty men.’

The sheriff puffed his pipe in
the darkness.
‘Never been too fond of bounty hunters myself.’ He paused.
‘But I reckon if ole Wyatt Earp put you on their trail..
.’

‘
Ran
‘em to ground in the Johnson Lake Roadhouse south of here,’ Prophet
said. ‘You can include that information in your cable.’

‘
What
cable?’

‘
The
one I’m hopin’ you’ll send to Wyatt, tellin’ him I found his
men—Benny Mack and Jack Montoya, last of the Montoya Gang—so he’ll
send me the reward money.’

The sheriff stared at Prophet
thoughtfully, scratched his head, glanced at the bodies draped over
the saddles, then said,
‘Come on. We’ll hash this out inside.’

Prophet turned and followed the
sheriff into the jail-house, a cramped, one-room office with a
battered
roll top desk and a heavy, locked door which no doubt lead
into the cell block at the building’s rear.

‘
Have
a seat,’ the sheriff said as he shrugged out of his deerskin coat
and hung it on an antler rack near the door. ‘Mighty cold tonight.
Looks like ole winter’s raisin’ its hackles one more
time.’

Prophet sat in the hide-bottomed chair
beside the desk, the old chair creaking under his weight. The
bounty hunter sighed, wanting to get this business over with
quickly, so he could relieve himself of the bodies, pad out his
belly with grub somewhere, down a few drinks, and crawl into a hot
tub and a warm bed.

‘
I
forgot how cold April could be this far north.’

‘
Yeah,
we get cold blasting down from Canada pret’ near till May,’ the
sheriff said, rubbing his hands before the stove, which someone
must have recently stoked. ‘If I had my druthers, I’d be down in
New Mexico or Arizona, where I was raised. Problem is, I married me
a woman from Minnesota—one of them ornery Swedes.’ The sheriff
winked at Prophet and curled his white mustache with a playful
grin. ‘She’s due set on stayin’ on here with her family, and
there’s not a thing I can do about it but complain.’

Prophet smiled, relaxing a
little. The sheriff seemed to
be warming to him, and that wasn’t always how
things panned out for bounty hunters. The grisly nature of the
bounty hunter’s trade often made him an outcast, disdained by many.
It always seemed a little odd to Prophet that the ones who resented
him most were lawmen—men whose jobs he presumably made easier by
bringing in the riffraff they themselves didn’t have the time or
resources to hunt.

He guessed it was probably due
to jealousy, for bounty hunters, unlike lawmen, came and went as
they pleased, hunted whom they pleased when they pleased,
unconstrained by time or jurisdictional boundaries. In many ways,
it was a dream life. The only problem was, you had to be a
singular, solitary breed to live it. A man who
didn
’t mind
giving up the comforts of hearth, home, and family for a life lived
on the owlhoot trail, where you could die any second of any minute
of any hour, and no one would be the sadder. .. .

‘
Coffee?’ the old sheriff asked as he poured himself a cup
at the stove.

‘
Why
not?’ Prophet said, glad the man was being friendly but really
wanting to get on with his business.

That didn
’t happen, however, until the
sheriff had given Prophet a full cup of steaming coffee, hot and
strong enough to seal a roof with, plunked down in his swivel
chair, and talked about the evening he’d spent riding out to Mrs.
Larson’s ranch five miles west of town.

‘
She
thinks Indians are stealing her pullets,’ the sheriff said, blowing
ripples on his coffee. ‘She’s been thinking that for the past five
years. I’ve told her over and over again that if Indians were
stealing pullets, why would they just steal hers? I mean, her
neighbors Mrs. Hanson and Mrs. Peterson and Mrs. Munson all have
pullets, too. Why aren’t the Indians getting theirs?’

The sheriff gave a snort and
plucked at the curled ends of his mustache, his face flushing with
amusement.
‘So I
finally ride out there this afternoon, have a look around
the place. I see the dog Mrs. Larson got when he was just a pup,
snoozing on the porch, stretched out like Caesar at his favorite
bath. And I get to thinking, this Indian problem started occurring
about the same time this dog came along. He’s old and fat
now—fatter than most country dogs get on table scraps and
mice.