Riding With the Devil's Mistress (Lou Prophet Western #3) (6 page)

Prophet looked around for a gun, but no one
was wearing one.

More whooping and gunfire
erupted from the men before the mercantile, drawing
Prophet
’s
frantic gaze. They were all mounted now, and starting down the
street, heading his way. They fired at windows and shingles as they
rode, whooping and hollering like mad spirits released from hell,
the hooves of their horses pounding the hard-packed
street.

Prophet shot a glance at
Beckett, taking aim across the side of the wagon.
‘Don’t do it,
Sheriff!’ Prophet shouted.

It was too late.

He heard,
‘Stop! Sheriff!’ and then the
roar of the shotgun. It brought the firebrands to a skidding halt.
Turning their horses toward the wagon, they opened fire, smoke
puffing in huge clouds above their heads, the sound of their
mocking laughter mixing with the racketing of their six-shooters
and the confused whinnies of their horses.

‘
Well,
that does it,’ Prophet thought, the skin on his neck pricking in
earnest, lead filling his boots. ‘The crazy old coot’s
finished.’

As the laughing men resumed
their course down the street, Prophet turned to the four
shopkeepers cowering a
few feet away, behind water troughs and shipping
barrels. ‘Doesn’t anyone have a goddamn gun?’

A little man with a big, waxed
mustache regarded him fearfully behind a stack of crates.
‘I got one
inside.’

‘
Get
it, goddamnit! Move!’ Prophet shouted.

The man ran into his millinery
and was gone for what seemed like a long time as the firebrands
trotted their horses
parade like down the street, shooting every window
they spotted and even killing several horses tied to hitch
racks.

‘
Hurry
up!’ Prophet shouted as the group passed.

He turned around just as
the
hat
maker reappeared, stooped and cowering, his face white, handing an
oily, lumpy rag to Prophet. Crouching behind a water trough,
Prophet opened the rag to find a Navy Conversion .36 with cracked
grips and a rusty barrel. He hefted the gun in his right hand, not
sure if the old cannon would blow his hand off but at the moment
not caring. He bounced up from behind the trough and ran into the
street as the procession made its way westward.

‘
Take
one from me, you goddamn scurvy swine!’ he shouted, thumbing back
the hammer, squeezing the trigger and feeling the old hog nearly
buck his hand off, springing his wrist.

In spite of the pain, he loosed
two more shots before all the riders were out of range. So much
black powder hung before him that he couldn
’t see if he’d hit anything. One of
the riders at the end of the bunch turned in his saddle to return
fire at Prophet, but apparently thinking he wasn’t worth the
effort, he turned back around and followed the others out of
town.

Silence fell as the thunder of the horses
receded in the distance. It was just as quickly shattered again as
a woman commenced screaming.

‘
Arnie! Oh, Arnie!’

Prophet turned to his right and
saw a woman standing
beside the wagon the sheriff had used for a
shield. She wore a gray gingham housedress, an apron, and a
lace-edged bonnet she must have thrown on in a hurry, for it was
untied.

‘
No!
Oh, Arnie!’

Prophet headed that way, hoping
there was something he could do for the sheriff. It
didn
’t take
long to see there wasn’t.

Beckett sat behind the left rear wheel of
the wagon, his back to an awning post. He could have been napping,
his chin on his chest, but for the four holes in his face, another
in his throat, and at last three more in his chest. He was a bloody
mess, and the wagon had been honeycombed with lead, the two horses
killed and lying in the traces, in pools of their own viscera.

Prophet grabbed the
woman
’s arm
and led her up on the boardwalk—Mrs. Arnie Beckett, widowed in an
eye blink.

‘
Take
her home and call the undertaker,’ Prophet told one of the men
who’d gathered at the wagon, looking as jittery as raw recruits in
the aftermath of their first battle.

Unsteadily, the man led the crying woman
off.

Prophet walked around the dead horses toward
the mercantile. When he got there, he stopped before the woman
lying slumped on the steps and checked her pulse. It was an
instinctive move running contrary to logic, for the small, neat
hole dripping blood between her eyes told him she was dead.

He mounted the steps and went
inside to see who else had been the victims of the
gang
’s
violence. Inside the door, he stopped and looked around at the
aisles of clothes and other dry goods, at the upended barrels of
flour and nails and scattered displays of soaps and smoking pipes
and chewing tobaccos. Nearly all the candy barrels and bins had
been upended as well, the rock candy and licorice and jawbreakers
scattered about the floor.

A guttural groan lifted from the back of the
store, toward the counter, and Prophet moved toward it. Down the
aisle he saw a man in a bloody apron sitting with his back to the
counter. A tall, lanky man with short, black hair pomaded to his
scalp and parted in the middle, he held his hands across his belly.
Prophet winced when he saw that the man was literally holding his
guts in his hands.

‘
Jesus
Christ!’ Prophet sputtered, kneeling before the man. Hearing
someone mounting the steps, he turned and yelled through the door,
‘Someone get a sawbones— quick!’

He turned back to the wounded mercantile
proprietor, who was shaking his head. His eyes were vacant and
glassy. Blood bubbled from his mouth.

‘
No
... use,’ he rasped. ‘I’m a ... goner.’

‘
Hold
on, buddy,’ Prophet said, squeezing the man’s shoulder. But he knew
the man was right. Back during the Little Misunderstanding, he’d
seen similar wounds. They were as deadly as they were painful, and
this man didn’t have a chance.

‘
My
wife?’ the man said. His chin was dipped to his chest.

Prophet hesitated.
‘Fit as a
fiddle.’

The man gave a halfhearted
chuff, reading the lie. That
’s . .. that’s . .. what I...
f-figured.’

The man paused as if to
conserve his strength. He took a rattling breath and said,
‘D-daughter?’

The daughter was apparently the blond girl
the lead rider had ridden away with, thrown callously over his
saddle and screaming for her life.

‘
I’m
gonna get her back for you,’ Prophet said. His jaw was set hard as
he stared down at the dying man, his heart breaking for all the
hell that had happened here ... for what? There couldn’t have been
more than fifty or sixty dollars in the cash drawer.

Now the decent old sheriff was
dead, along with most
of a family. Who knew how many those human
blowflies had left dead or injured up the street, before they’d
finished their raid.

The dying man moved his hand to
Prophet
’s
and squeezed his wrist. It wasn’t much of a squeeze, but Prophet
could tell the man had something important on his mind. ‘Get... get
her back ... for me. P-please.’

Prophet squeezed back.
‘I will. You can
count on that.’

Then the man
’s hand slid away from
Prophet’s wrist, and slowly, as though he were drifting to sleep,
he slumped sideways to the floor and lay still.

Prophet stood and turned toward the front of
the store, where several townsmen had gathered in the aisle,
looking shocked and wary.

‘
Ole
Hank,’ one of them said slowly. ‘He dead?’

‘
He’s
dead,’ Prophet said, brushing past the townsmen and heading for the
door. When he got there, he pushed through the screen, descended
the steps past the dead woman, and headed for the boarding house,
moving quickly.

He
’d get his guns and his possibles and
be on the trail in a half hour. Then he’d hunt those renegades and
turn them toe down hard—with not a scrap of mercy and no concern
for monetary reward—if he had to ride all the way to hell and
thrash the devil with a stick to do it.

‘
SHIT!’

Prophet reined Mean and Ugly to
a halt in a
cottonwood copse along the grassy, southern bank of the
Otter-tail River. The sun was going down, but making the sky even
darker was a plum-colored storm curtain beating in from the
west.

The curtain was streaked with pearl rain.
From the size of the cloud topping the storm, it was a mean one,
too, and would no doubt obliterate the tracks of the men Prophet
was following, had been following for the past hour and a half,
since leaving Luther Falls in a wind-splitting gallop.

‘
Lou,
you be careful,’ Cordelia had admonished him from her front porch
as he’d sprinted off down the street toward the livery, saddlebags
over his shoulder. ‘That’s the Red River Gang!’

He hadn
’t had time to go back and have her
fill him in on just who in hell the Red River Gang was, but the
tall Scandinavian who ran the livery barn had given him the quick
lowdown while saddling his horse. Turned out the Red River Gang was
a group of renegades led by Handsome Dave Duvall and Dayton
Flowers—both murdering outlaws whom Prophet had heard of down in
the Indian Nations. Wanted by federal marshals out of Fort Smith,
they’d fled the southern plains to the north, where they’d been
running hog-wild for the past six months, raiding settlements up
and down the Red River between Wahpeton and Grand Forks in eastern
Dakota Territory.

‘
They
always raided more into Dakota than Minnesota,’ the liveryman had
groused as he cinched Prophet’s saddle. ‘No one ever expected ‘em
to show their ugly souls in Luther Falls. I mean, there ain’t
nothin’ here worth thievin’!’

Well they had a girl and some
candy and the satisfaction of having turned a quiet little town
upside down, and that
’s probably a good day’s work for that bunch,
Prophet thought now, as he sat watching the storm growing on the
horizon.

‘
Shit!’ he repeated, knowing he was going to have to seek
shelter soon, probably throw a lean-to together to keep from
getting soaked.

He looked westward, the
direction the gang
’s tracks led. It was a vast, flat, brown prairie out
there, relatively featureless but for the Ottertail River twisting
through, sheathed in high brush and cottonwoods. The gang was
following the river toward the Dakota border, and Prophet figured
they’d hole up, too, probably in a bend much like the one Prophet
sat along now, cursing the weather and the lateness of the
hour.

If he stopped now, he
wouldn
’t be
able to get started again till the morning. No point tracking those
men in the dark and risk losing their trail—a trail that would
prove hard enough to follow after that squall hit.

He turned his horse back into
the trees, dismounted, and stripped the gear off Mean and Ugly, and
hobbled him. There was plenty of tall grass around, and the
river
offered water, so he knew the horse wouldn’t wander far. It
was starting to rain, and the wind was kicking up by the time he’d
rigged a lean-to with the tarpaulin in which he’d wrapped his
bedroll. He’d chosen a campsite in a slight hollow with a big,
uprooted cottonwood along one side, and the shelter kept him from
getting soaked, although wind prevented him from building a
fire.

Fortunately, the heaviest wind
lasted only ten minutes or so. When it had tapered off, Prophet
went out in the spitting rain to gather dry wood, returning with
several small branches that had been sheltered by heavier limbs. He
piled the wood outside the lean-to, then carved out a small hole in
the center of the shelter, surrounded it with rocks he gathered
from the
riverbank, and built a fire.

He didn
’t dally in starting a pot of coffee
heating, with which he’d try to chase the damp chill from his
bones. While the pot gurgled and sighed in the coals, he produced
the bacon Cordelia and Annabelle had packed for him, and started it
frying in his skillet. When the bacon was done, he fished the
strips out of the grease, packed them and several extra dollops of
grease from the pan in three fresh biscuits, and his supper was
made.

He ate hungrily and washed his makeshift but
delicious meal down with tar-black coffee, watching the rain,
hearing the drops clatter on the tarpaulin. What was foremost in
his mind, though, was the image of Sheriff Arnie Beckett riddled
with bullets, and the dying mercantile proprietor feebly trying to
hold his innards in place and begging Prophet to save his
daughter.

That he
’d do, by Ned. If it was the last
thing he did in this world.

Most of
Prophet
’s
man hunting jobs had been pure business transactions which he’d
carried out with cool objectivity. He’d rarely been a witness to
the deprivations his quarries had committed and which had led to
their being wanted by the law.