Riding With the Devil's Mistress (Lou Prophet Western #3) (21 page)

‘
No!
I—’

Duvall opened the door, grabbed
Cora
’s arm,
and shoved her inside. She grabbed the coat tree, nearly upending
it, to keep from falling.

Her voice was small and tight,
and her lips trembled.
‘Dave ... please ... I can’t have you eatin’ limbs
off my girls!’

Dave smiled again, as affable as a boy at a
church picnic. Then, before Cora could comprehend what was
happening, he balled his right fist and punched her in the
stomach—hard.

Cora bent over with a
deep
‘Uggh!’
as her breath exploded from her lungs. She dropped to her knees,
wheezing as she fought for air.

‘
Ah,
Cora, now look what you made me do!’ Duvall exclaimed, dropping to
a knee and lowering his head to peer into her face.

She rasped, grunted, and coughed.

Smoothing a lock of hair from
her face, Duvall said with mock tenderness,
‘Now, I wouldn’t have had to do
that, Cora, if you’d have shown me some proper respect. I mean, I
don’t see no cause to speak to me in front of my men like you just
did. No sir, not after all the money and gifts I’ve bestowed upon
you and your girls.’

Duvall paused, gave his head a
grieved shake.
‘Now, I’m sorry if I injured little Vivian, but like I
said, I done apologized for that. Why, I even gave the girl a gold
watch with a picture of Mary Lincoln on the lid!’

He caressed
Cora
’s face
gently with the back of his hand. ‘Now, don’t you think I should be
forgiven one teeny-weeny little indiscretion that happened when I
was drunk on your booze pret’ near a year ago?’

Trembling and regaining her wind, Cora
lifted her head and stared at him coldly.

‘
Don’t
you think so, Cora?’ Dave asked her again in an innocent little
boy’s voice.

Cora swallowed and panted, holding her
aching stomach. Sweat streaked her forehead and cheeks, and her
face was as pale as death. She swallowed again, ran her tongue
across her lower lip, and said something inaudible.

Turning his ear, Duvall
said,
‘What’s that, Cora? I couldn’t hear you.’

Giving a shallow sigh, Cora
said weakly,
‘I said... p-please ... don’t do nothin’ ... nothin’ crazy,
D-Dave....’

‘
Cora,
Cora, Cora,’ Dave said, as if deeply chagrined. ‘I would never.’ He
grinned and gently helped her to her feet. ‘And just to show you
how good I can be, I’m gonna let you be the first one to escort me
upstairs.’

He turned her around, slapped
her ample rump, and shoved her down the foyer.
‘What do you say to that, Cora,
old girl!’

AN HOUR AND a half later, Louisa rode along
the wagon trail the Red River Gang had followed north of Wahpeton,
on the west side of the north-flowing Red River. She reined up
when, about an hour before sundown, she came to the point where the
gang had turned westward onto a shaggy two-track showing the recent
semi-circular gouts made by shod hooves.

Now, why would they head west when Fargo was
another three or four miles north?

Then she saw the crude sign
someone had kicked into the grass where the two trails intersected.
Riding over and gazing down at the pink lettering on an
arrow-shaped board, she read:
cora’s place
—1
mile.

Louisa pursed her lips and
nodded knowingly. A brothel. Figures. She had a mind to camp
nearby, see if she couldn
’t carve a few more cadavers out of the gang later
tonight.

She turned it over in her head
and decided not to push her luck. After hers and
Prophet
’s
raid on their party last night, they might be perked for trouble.
She’d continue on to Fargo and try to pinpoint the havoc they’d
planned for the next river hamlet north on the north-flowing
Red.

She
’d learned from a conversation she’d
overheard between two gang members draining their bladders outside
the saloon in Wahpeton that the gang had been planning a job in
Fargo for the past several weeks. From the way the men had talked,
it sounded like a big takedown, involving ‘enough loot to set ‘em
up for several years down in old Mexico with two or three senoritas
apiece.’

Gigging her horse northward along the trail,
Louisa thought it over. What kind of job could be that big in
Fargo? A bank? An assay office? An express terminal? A hotel?

She
’d heard Fargo was a growing river
port. Maybe it had something to do with riverboats and gambling and
such....

Whatever it was, she smelled the town a good
while before she actually saw it, for a stiff north breeze
commenced blowing before sunset, sending southward the pungent
smell of privies and charred trash heaps. It was a familiar smell
and one reason why Louisa avoided most population centers,
especially boomtowns. They smelled bad, they looked bad, and most
of the people populating them were the very epitome of bad—pimps,
painted ladies, confidence men, gamblers, and gunmen.

As she neared the town, farms
with sod houses and fenced pastures gave way to sod-and-log
shanties,
tarpaper hovels, and makeshift canvas affairs clustered
along the shiny new railroad line on its high, black bed. A wide,
muddy street called Broadway appeared to be the town’s hub, and
Louisa halted her horse between the railroad tracks and a loading
dock, watching in amazement as men of all shapes, sizes, colors,
and creeds mucked through the ankle-deep mud-and-dung between the
milled lumber establishments fronting Broadway.

She
’d never seen such a concoction of
white men, red, black, and yellow, or heard so many different
languages yelled, laughed, and spoken in low tones over cigars on
the nearby mercantile stoop.

A gun barked, and Louisa jumped,
instinctively grabbing for the Colt beneath her skirt. She stopped
when, turning toward the report, she saw three men coaxing two
mules pulling a wagon heaped with barbed-wire spools and seed sacks
out of the mud behind a post-and-wire shop. One of the men—a tall,
burly fellow in coveralls and smoking a pipe—held a Civil War-model
pistol in the air. He yelled something and fired the big iron
again, and the mules jerked the heavy wagon out of the mire, the
men around the wagon shouting and laughing with unrestrained
exuberance.

Two of the men clapped each
other on the back and walked into a nearby saloon. The big man with
the gun tossed the revolver under the wagon seat, then climbed
aboard. He grabbed the reins off the brake and hee-hawed the mules
into the street, pulling to a halt before Louisa. Only then did she
realize she must have been staring with eyes large as
‘dobe dollars,
amazed at such a place, half frightened out of her wits. She felt
as though she’d landed on a foreign continent.

‘
Help
you, Little Miss?’ the big man called through a chip-toothed grin.
The accent was either Dutch or Scotch—Louisa wasn’t sure
which.

She was shocked into fearful
silence before thinking of a question.
‘Uh ... is there a feed barn
hereabouts?’

The big man jerked a thumb over his
shoulder.

‘
The
Associated’s down that way, and McMurphy’s place is down t’other.’
He looked her up and down as he sucked on his pipe. ‘You all alone,
Little Miss?’

Louisa hesitated, startled
momentarily by several Sons of Han crossing the street before her
in black pajamas and tassled hats.
‘Uh,’ she hemmed, ‘uh ... no, sir. I’m
waiting for my brother—my brother and my father. They’re bringing a
wagon to town.’

The big man nodded.
‘I see, then. Sure.
Might want to wait for them over by the notions shop, Miss. The
sun’s going down, and ole Broadway, she gets a little rough come
nightfall.’ He gave her a wink and a nod and slapped the reins
against the broad backs of the mules, who jerked their heads up and
lumbered westward along the rails glistening silver and mauve as
the sun slipped bleeding into the sod.

Keeping one hand close to the
revolver beneath her skirt, Louisa neck-reined the Morgan toward
the river, soon wishing she
’d gone the other way. Just about every building
down here sported a sign announcing a saloon or tavern. Painted
ladies leaned against awning posts in their frilly, low-cut
dresses, net stockings, and feathered hats. Some wore boas and
smoked cheroots. All watched Louisa pass on her Morgan with wistful
slants of their heavily made-up eyes.

Louisa glanced away from one
such marvel of chintzy exhibitionism only to see another between
two buildings, bent over a wood pile with her skirts pulled up,
laughing while a grunting man banged away at her from behind. In
the past year, Louisa had been to a lot of places throughout the
West, but she
’d never seen anyplace like this, and she felt a mute,
black dread swath her very soul.

This was the last town
she
’d ever
visit—at least in Dakota. She might even set a match to it on her
way out; it was going to burn sometime, one way or
another.

‘
What
are you staring at, Missy—you want him next?’

Louisa stiffened when she
realized not only that she
’d stopped the Morgan to stare at the copulating
couple in awe, but that the whore was speaking to her, in
Irish-accented English.

‘
No
thank you,’ she said primly, kicking the Morgan down the street as
the whore’s cackle echoed behind her and her face heated like a
skillet.

The livery barn sat dangerously close to the
Red River, which had flooded a half-dozen establishments along its
banks. She negotiated with the dark, wiry little man who ran the
place for the stabling and feeding of the Morgan, then asked if she
could stay there, too.

‘
What,
with your horse?’ the man asked, blinking.

‘
Yes,
sir.’

He looked her up and down in
much the way the big man with the wagon had done.
‘You don’t want to
stay here, Miss.’ He looked around, scowling. ‘This is a
barn.’

‘
I
know it’s a barn, sir. But I’d like to stay with my horse, if you
please. I’ll share his stall and keep to myself. I don’t drink or
use tobacco.’

The little man regarded her
again, skeptically.
‘Are you all alone, Miss?’

She sighed, tired of all the
questions she had to contend with everywhere she went. Tiring of
all the lies and excuses she
’d had to concoct to detract attention from
herself, a young woman alone, she said with an air of great
impatience, ‘Yes—is that a crime?’

‘
No,
it’s not a crime, Miss, but... it might not be safe here for a
girl. I go home at eight-thirty. I have a half-breed who mans the
office, but. .. there’s strange men about, Miss.’

‘
I
know that, sir, but I assure you I can take care of myself. I won’t
be any trouble. You won’t hear a peep out of me, and I’ll tend my
horse myself.’

The man shrugged and looked at
her sadly, piteously. The look annoyed her. Louisa Bonaventure
could take being yelled at and cussed and even threatened bodily,
but pity was something with which she could not, would not,
contend. Wishing
she’d gone ahead and told the lie about meeting her father and
brother here, she said, ‘How much more do you need to house me
along with my horse, sir?’

‘
Nothin’,’ the man said after brief pause. ‘You can stay
with your horse for nothin’ extra.’ Shrugging, he appraised her and
the Morgan one more time, then turned away, grabbed a pitchfork,
and headed out the double doors to the paddock.

Louisa wheeled to the Morgan
and, annoyed without fully realizing why, stripped the tack from
the horse, groomed him, and filled his trough with fresh oats. When
she
’d lugged
in a pail of water from the well and filled the Morgan’s water
trough, she froze suddenly and dropped her head. Her heart wrenched
and tears spilled out from her tightly shut eyes.

Silently, she sobbed, though
she didn
’t
know why. She suspected it was the piteous looks the man with the
wagon had given her, which was then equaled in sympathy by the
dusky-skinned stableman. In their eyes, she saw the reflection of
how she was: alone and pitiable.

She, Louisa Bonaventure, daughter of Kyle
and Marie Bonaventure, sister to James, Elsie, and Donna, was
alone.

She was an orphan, with no home
whatsoever. With no friends or family or prospects for happiness.
All she had in this cruel, barren world were the clothes on her
back and her horse and her quest for the gundogs
who
’d
murdered her family. That’s all that kept her eating and sleeping
and breathing and going....

For nearly a year now,
she
’d tried
to keep her mind clear of everything but the Red River Gang. For
the most part, and aside from occasional nightmares that plucked
her, sweaty but chilled, from deep sleep, she’d accomplished the
feat. But now, suddenly, in this dank barn in this sleazy town
amidst lost souls rutting like pigs in alleys, she thought of her
house and her family and her sisters’ taunts and grins and their
two-mile rides to school on the old spotted pony their father had
received in trade from transient Indians.