The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6) (26 page)

When the group’s collective murmur had
died and the horses had settled down, Prophet called, “Crumb, Polk,
your trail ends here!”

The group just stared at him. Finally,
Crumb glanced at Schaeffer, then slid his gaze back to Prophet.
“Ha!”

Schaeffer turned his head to one side,
muttered something to the others, then kneed his black stallion
ahead, until he was nearly directly below Prophet. He looked up at
the bounty hunter.

“
Lou Prophet, I take it?” he
called amiably.

Prophet rolled the quirley between his lips
and smiled.

“
Your reputation precedes
you.”

Prophet shot a look across the canyon,
pleased to see that Ronnie was staying out of sight, keeping his
rifle where the sun couldn’t reflect off the steel. “Eagle, you’re
ridin’ with the wrong bunch,” Prophet drawled.

Schaeffer smiled. He hadn’t drawn a
weapon, but he had one hand on the big Colt jutting from the
cross-draw position on his left hip. “Why don’t you go back to what
you do best, Prophet? You’ll find no bounties here.”

“
You got that wrong, Eagle.
There’re two big bounties on Crumb and Polk.”

Crumb rose up in his stirrups and yelled
angrily up the jagged canyon wall, “There are no bounties on my
head!”

“
Oh, yes,” Prophet said with a
slow nod. “For what you done to Bitter Creek, enslaving the whole
town, intimidating and killing those who bucked you—I got a bounty
on your head. And it’s steep.”

Prophet turned to Schaeffer. “Turn both
men over to me, and I’ll save you for another time and another
place.”

The Eagle smiled. The confidence in the
smile and casual way the Eagle sat his horse made Prophet lift his
gaze along the canyon wall opposite, just in time to see a shadow
move out from between two boulders and level a rifle at Ronnie.

Raising his Winchester, Prophet dropped to
a knee. “Kid, above you!”

The gunman on
the opposite canyon
wall took Prophet’s Winchester slug through his
shoulder.

He spun around, dropping his rifle and
slipping on the boulder he’d lighted on. With a shrill cry, he
tumbled off the wall and plummeted like a potato sack to the canyon
floor, landing with a crack and a grunt only a few feet before
Schaeffer’s horse.

“
Proph!” Ronnie
yelled.

The kid extended an arm to indicate
something above and behind Prophet. The bounty hunter spun on his
knee as a man in a bullet-crowned tan hat and blue shirt leapt onto
a rock and crouched.

He extended a Spencer rifle with a stock
trimmed with brass tacks, and fired.

Prophet had seen it coming and threw
himself against the canyon wall. The gunman’s slug sailed over
Prophet’s head, spanging off the trail below and setting several
horses to whinnying.

Ronnie fired at the sharpshooter, but the
slug smacked into an arrow-shaped rock partially shielding the
man.

Prophet raised his Winchester and fired
two rounds, levering quickly, watching the slugs thump into the
gunman’s chest, puffing dust from his shirt and blowing him back
and out of sight.

Slugs slamming into the rocks and shrubs
around him, Prophet hunkered down behind a boulder and peered at
the trail below. The gunfire had startled the horses, throwing the
gang into disarray. Several men were being flung about by their
shrieking mounts. Others had taken cover behind rocks and shrubs
and were firing at Prophet and at Ronnie on the opposite wall.

Schaeffer was yelling orders Prophet
couldn’t hear above the gunfire, whinnies, and clattering
hooves.

He glanced above and around him, then
scoured the opposite canyon wall. Seeing no other flanking
riflemen, he glanced at Ronnie, nearly straight across the canyon,
and allowed himself a taut smile.

The kid hunkered behind a rock, throwing
lead down at the scattering gunmen, apparently unfazed by
Schaeffer’s two sharpshooters. His slugs had already pinked two
gang members, one of whom was dragging a bloody leg toward a wild
mahogany shrub, while another remained on hands and knees in the
middle of the trail, head hanging sickly. As Prophet raised his
rifle, the man was mowed over by a fleeing pinto and rolled into a
yucca patch, limbs akimbo.

Prophet extended his Winchester and fired
quickly, catching as many riders as he could still out in the open.
Several slugs spanged off the rocks beside him, spraying
shards.

He bolted behind the boulder to his left,
peered around the other side, and continued shooting, levering the
Winchester, taking hasty aim, and eliciting cries and curses from
below.

When the Winchester clicked empty, he ducked
back behind the rock and thumbed shells from his cartridge belt.
Meanwhile, shooting resounded from the trail, and Ronnie was
pounding away with his Sharps.

“
They’re tucked in too tight!” a
man yelled from the trail. “Pull out and—” His sentence was cut off
and punctuated by a warbling shriek.

Prophet thumbed the last shell into the
Winchester’s breech, winced as a slug slammed into the rock a few
inches from his face, then swung out from behind the rock,
triggering two quick rounds while reconnoitering the
trail.

The shooting had all but died, the bodies of
two dead horses and several men littering the canyon floor.

Prophet lowered the Winchester and hunkered
down, whipping his head around, looking for movement.

Silence. Smoke wafted around the canyon
smelling like rotten eggs. Far off, a horse whinnied. Closer in but
up the trail, a man groaned.

Prophet clamped down on what was left of
his quirley and squinted at the opposite canyon wall. Ronnie poked
his head out between two sharp-edged boulders, the rifle in his
hands, his eyes round as saucers. As the kid moved farther out from
between the rocks, a man in a checked shirt and tan vest rose from
the slope just below him, raising a carbine where Ronnie couldn’t
see him.

Prophet snapped his Winchester up and shot
the man through the base of the neck, slamming him against the
slope. He lost his hat and carbine and rolled onto his back, slid
feet-first several yards down slope before a boulder broke his
fall, holding him there, straight up and down against the slope,
chin resting on his chest.

A rifle popped in the heavy silence.

Hearing the slug whistle past his left
ear, Prophet hunkered down and snapped his gaze across the canyon,
where Ronnie stood, staring down his Sharps’ smoking
barrel.

A grunt sounded to Prophet’s
left.

He turned to see a mustachioed man stumble
backward several steps, his rifle dropping in his right hand while
his left rose to his chest. Blood shone beneath his black-gloved
hand as he sat brusquely down on a rock and cursed. Thin lips drew
back from his mouth, raising the waxed mustache and showing the
small, yellow teeth and the gap where one was missing from the
lower jaw.

“
Fuck,” Schaeffer said, his pale
blue eyes twinkling in the west-angling sun. He didn’t look at
Prophet, but stared vacantly across the canyon, pain spoking his
eyes. His voice was deep and strangled. “Tell me... tell me that
ain’t a kid that just shot me.”

Prophet spit out the bits of paper and
tobacco remaining from his quirley. “Well, he’s eighteen. I reckon
it depends on how you look at it. When I was eighteen ... well,
never mind.”

Schaeffer sat there on the rock, wheezing
and sighing and trying to plug the hole in his right center chest
with his hand. It wasn’t working. Blood ran down from beneath the
glove, soaking his collarless, pin-striped shirt and doeskin
vest.

Finally, the man’s face bunched with fury.
Cursing, he channeled the last of his remaining energy into his
right hand, raising the rifle toward Prophet. He hadn’t expected to
get a shot off, however. It was just the way he wanted to go
out.

Obliging the man, Prophet raised his own
Winchester and drilled a round through Schaeffer’s right temple,
knocking his tan hat from his head and draping him back over the
rock he’d been sitting on. The rifle fell against the rock, but
remained in the Eagle’s clenched fist for several seconds before
the fingers slowly released it and it clattered onto the
gravel.

Prophet whipped around to regard the
canyon.

No more shooting. That didn’t necessarily
mean all the shooters were dead. A few could be hunkered down,
waiting.

Seeing Ronnie making his way slowly down
the opposite slope, a rifle in each hand, Prophet said without
raising his voice, “Careful, boy.”

Ronnie didn’t look at him, just threw a
hand up as he approached a dead man sprawled facedown over a shrub
and kicked the man over with his right boot.

Prophet slowly made his way down the slope,
investigating the bodies as he found them. All were dead or as good
as dead.

He met Ronnie on the trail and began
looking around for Crumb and Polk, finding Polk a hundred yards
back up the trail, sprawled on his back with both hands pressed
down on his gut. The trail showed scuff marks from where he’d
dragged himself.

When Prophet’s shadow fell across Polk’s
fair face, dark with two-day beard stubble, the druggist raised his
head. He’d lost his hat and his domed forehead shone pale in the
afternoon sun. Fear etched his gaze, and he panted.

The man gave a choked cry as Prophet
squatted over him, patting him down for weapons. “Don’t worry,
Polk.” He glanced at the man’s torn guts, then raised his cold eyes
to Polk’s pain-clenched orbs. He stared hard, fighting the urge to
finish the man. Better to let him lay here, let the bullet sear him
and the vultures finish him off. “I’ll leave you for the
devil.”

Prophet stood and began turning away to
look for Crumb. Polk gasped. “Please ... you can’t just leave me.
Help…”

Ignoring the man, Prophet walked back into
the canyon, and met Ronnie approaching from the opposite direction.
“Any sign of Crumb?”

The kid threw up his hands. “No sign of
him.”

“
And he wasn’t on your
slope?”

Ronnie shook his head.

His heart increasing its beat, Prophet
looked around at the sprawled Jackrabbit riders and the three dead
horses. Blood and viscera had been strewn around like spilled
paint.

Chest clenching against the death smells,
Ronnie voiced Prophet’s own reluctant assessment. “He musta got
away somehow …”

He hadn’t finished the sentence before
Prophet began scrambling up the canyon’s west wall, heading for the
horses tethered on the other side of the ridge.

Henry Crumb clung to the saddle horn of the
galloping dun, as though to a buoy in a storm-tossed sea.

The horse thundered across a salt lick,
followed a bend in the narrow trail, and dipped into a swale fetid
with a rotting deer carcass. Crumb grunted against the horse’s left
front shoulder, gritting his teeth as the horse’s lunging gallop
thrashed his organs like dice in a cup. The beast bolted up the
opposite slope, barely slowing for the grade, and continued across
the prairie, dusting the sage in its wake.

The horse continued hell-for-leather for
another hundred yards. Then it started to blow and rasp and
gradually stopped. Crumb felt the heavy, musky heat rising from its
back. It turned quarter-wise with a heavy sigh, and Crumb looked
through the gauzy brown dust sifting behind him, eyes spoked with
fear.

Twenty minutes earlier, when the shooting
had first started, bullets buzzing like angry bees around the
canyon, Crumb had frozen in his saddle. He’d looked around in shock
as bullets ripped through bodies, cracking bones and spraying
blood. His head swam and his limbs turned to lead.

In spite of the iron grip he’d maintained
on the town of Bitter Creek, no one had ever taken a shot at him.
He’d never been physically assaulted in any way.

He was, at heart, a timid albeit evil man
who’d managed to keep his stranglehold on Bitter Creek and to keep
making money. But the closest he’d ever come to using force was
simply directing others, like Marshal Whitman and Dean Lovell, to
do so. He’d never actually had to use his fists or his guns and
wouldn’t have known what to do had the need presented
itself.

The gunfire had turned him to putty.
Automatically, his knees had gripped the saddle of his
skitter-hopping mount while his hands sawed back on the reins.

He’d felt the horse beginning to rear
beneath him, and he clamped his jaws down hard, steeling himself.
Just then a ricocheting slug slammed into a silver saddle ornament
a half inch before his left knee. It twanged off the medallion,
sparking and setting the horse to screaming.

Before Crumb knew what was happening, the
horse was rocketing straight up the canyon trail.

Crumb slackened the reins and funneled all
his energy into keeping his head low against the horse’s neck,
wrapping both hands around the saddle horn, and holding on. He
didn’t notice when his gray felt bowler blew off his
head.

Eyes round with shock, he stared at the
jagged line of rimrocks rising behind him, from which the breeze
brought the pops and cracks of the rifle fire to his ears.

The two men Eagle Schaeffer had sent ahead
of the main group, to reconnoiter the canyon and to foil the
attack, were dead. Prophet and his cohort had the high ground. Even
before Crumb had fled the canyon, the Jackrabbit riders were being
ripped to shreds.