Blood at Sundown

by Peter Brandvold

She’d turned her wolf loose, and the devil take the hindmost!

  Chapter 2

  “Louisa, hold on!” Prophet said. “Now ain’t the right time to go in there, damnit!”

  He pulled his head down as rifles thundered from straight ahead of him. Bullets plunked into the face of his covering rock.

  They snapped branches off the shadbush thicket and threw them up over his head. Two tumbled onto his hat, which he’d tied to his head with his spruce-green muffler, covering his ears so they wouldn’t freeze, turn black, and fall off.

  Edging a look around the rock, he now saw five men—three in various states of dress. Four were spread out near the first man, triggering their rifles toward Prophet while another man, with long, bushy muttonchop whiskers and wearing a fawn-colored rabbit hat with earflaps, just then threw a saddle, saddlebags, and a rifle over the top corral slat, into the corral, then climbed in after them. His woolly chaps flapped around his legs.

  Prophet snaked his rifle over the top of the rock and began returning fire, first planting a bead on the man who’d shot the girl, and squeezing the trigger, feeling a lurch of satisfaction as the girl-killer’s right eye was turned to jelly as the .44 slug punched through his head.

  Lou drew his head and rifle back down behind the rock as the other three men, on knees and spaced about ten feet apart outside the corral, threw lead at him. As they did, he heard glass breaking and peered around the rock’s right side to see two more men busting out two of the roadhouse’s side windows and poking their rifles through the sashed frames.

  Those rifles, too, began barking, stitching the air around him with screaming lead.

  Again, Prophet peered around the right side of his covering rock and the thicket. He briefly glimpsed Louisa running toward the roadhouse. Then she was gone from view. She was mounting the front veranda steps, heading for the front door.

  “Damnit, Louisa!” Prophet grated out through gritted teeth as more bullets screamed off his covering rock and flipped broken thicket branches every which way.

  He gave another bellowing curse and then heaved himself to his feet, racking another round into his Winchester’s breech and slamming the butt against his shoulder. He aimed quickly at the three men firing at him from between the rear of the roadhouse and the corral.

  He laid out one with his first shot. As the other one triggered a round toward Prophet, Prophet returned fire, his bullet sailing wide as the man flinched and lost his balance, throwing his left arm onto the ground to balance himself.

  Prophet jogged toward him, grinding his teeth at the lead punching into the ground around him, curling the air around his ears.

  “Prophet, what the hell you doin’ this far north, you Southern rebel sonofabuck?” shouted the man he was targeting just before the hammer of the man’s rifle pinged benignly onto its firing pin.

  The man heaved himself to his feet, pulled the two pistols jutting from the holsters thonged low on his thighs, and, raising them, clicked the hammers back.

  Prophet strode toward him, yelling, “I come to kill you, you blackhearted Yankee devil!” Calmly aiming down the Winchester’s barrel, he squeezed the trigger, and the rifle bucked against his shoulder.

  He fired two more rounds, and then the two-gun pistoleer was rolling backward in the snow-speckled dust, throwing his six-guns high over his head.

  Prophet’s determined walk, resolutely flinging lead while seemingly mindless of the lead caroming around him, had so startled the other two rifle-wielding men that they’d taken off running toward the corral in which the other outlaw was saddling a horse. They fired as they ran, sort of half twisted around and bellowing curses.

  Prophet dropped to a knee and emptied his nine-shot Winchester and whooped in satisfaction as the two went down, screaming and rolling up against the base of the corral.

  The bounty hunter dropped the rifle and palmed his Colt Peacemaker, turning toward the two windows from which the other thieving killers had been slinging lead at him.

  He’d just clicked the hammer back when another rifle began blasting away inside the roadhouse, evoking screams—this time not from women but from men. One of the window shooters came hurling backward out his window in a rain of glass. He dropped his rifle and hit the ground outside the roadhouse and lay still as the man in the other window, left of the first one, shouted, “Oh no—it’s that damn Vengeance Queen!”

  He flew forward out the window, a long, tall hombre in nothing more than a union suit and pistol belt and with long, stringy hair. He dropped the pistol he’d been firing, turned a forward somersault in midair, and hit the ground on his back as the rifle continued blasting away inside the roadhouse, evoking more shrill curses and terrified screams from the remaining outlaws inside the place.

  The long-haired drink of water outside the roadhouse lifted his head, shouted a string of blue epithets that would have set a nun’s habit on fire, then rolled onto his hands and knees. He looked up to see Prophet walking toward him. The outlaw grabbed his pistol out of the dirt.

  He looked up at Prophet again, his two silver front teeth winking in the wintry wan light.

  “Kooch Ringo,” Prophet snarled, and shot the man through his forehead. “Pleasure to put you down like the rabid dog you are!”

  Ringo lay facedown in the dirt, quivering as though he’d been struck by lightning, blood from the hole in his forehead quickly pooling around him.

  “Hi-yahhhh!” a man bellowed behind Prophet.

  He turned as the man inside the corral, now astride a big Appaloosa, came bounding up from inside the corral to hurdle the fence facing Prophet. The Appy’s eyes were wide and white-ringed, its ears laid back against its head. The rider’s eyes, beneath the brim of his rabbit fur hat, were pinched and dark with rage, the hat’s untied flaps bouncing around his red cheeks bristling with several days’ worth of dark beard stubble.

  “Prophet, you’re done for, you fork-tailed devil!” shouted the outlaw whom Prophet, owning a keen memory for men with money on their heads, recognized as Wind River Bob Albright—a stonehearted gunfighter who’d once served in the frontier cavalry stationed at Fort Laramie until he’d been dishonorably discharged for running a prostitution ring involving young, orphaned Hunkpapa Sioux girls.

  The Appy touched down ten feet beyond the fence, and Bob Albright, crouched low in the saddle, sort of hiding behind the Appy’s head, batted his heels against its flanks, directing the galloping mount toward Prophet. The man’s woolly chaps flapped about his legs and high-topped fur boots.

  The bounty hunter raised his Peacemaker, aimed quickly, and fired twice.

  Both slugs flew wide of Albright’s head.

  Prophet could have shot the horse. He should have, in fact. The trouble was, he liked horses better than he liked most men, so he always had to think twice or three times before performing what he considered a low-down dirty deed of last resort.

  This time he’d waited a wink too late. The Appy was on him before he could get his Peacemaker cocked again, the horse bulling into him hard at almost a full run.

  Prophet grunted as the horse punched the air from his lungs. The big bounty hunter flew a good ten feet straight back before hitting the ground hard, losing his hat as the knot in his muffler loosened beneath his chin. He lay dazed and grunting and cursing for three or four seconds before he rolled up onto his left shoulder and hip.

  He’d dropped the Peacemaker. He just then realized that he’d lost the Richards twelve-gauge, as well. Both weapons lay too far away for a quick grab, especially in the bounty hunter’s bruised and battered condition, his ribs barking like wild dogs.

  Wind River Bob was swinging back toward Prophet from fifteen feet away, bringing his gun around, as well.

  Bob aimed and fired, but the horse was moving, fouling Bob’s aim. The shot spanged off a rock over Prophet’s right shoulder. The cutthroat aimed his horse as well as his pistol at Prophet once more and, galloping forward, fired again.

  Prophet threw himself t
o his left, avoiding another bullet.

  Wind River Bob and the Appaloosa barreled on past Prophet once more, dust wafting in the chill air.

  Shaking away the cobwebs from behind his eyes, Prophet hauled himself to his feet. The hip and shoulder that had taken the brunt of the Appy’s weight were sore as hell, as were his ribs. As Wind River Bob checked the Appy down, turned it, and began galloping back in Prophet’s direction, the bounty hunter sucked back his misery and dove for his Peacemaker.

  Bob’s next round plunked into the dirt just behind Prophet’s right boot.

  The bounty hunter hit the ground again, groaning against the agony in his cold, battered bones, and scooped the .45 off the ground. He hauled himself back to his feet and stepped sideways as Bob and the Appy thundered toward him. Prophet reached out with his left hand, grabbing the horse’s bridle and jerking its head toward him.

  The Appy gave a shrill, indignant whinny as its rear hooves plowed dirt beneath its belly, its barrel curveting sharply. As Prophet drew the horse’s head toward him, he rammed his right shoulder hard against the horse’s left side and against Wind River Bob’s left leg. Bob aimed his cocked Schofield down toward Prophet, but the horse was falling sideways as Prophet continued ramming his shoulder against it, gritting his teeth.

  Bob and the Appy fell over hard, and Bob’s bullet sailed skyward.

  “Oh . . . ahhhh!” Bob howled where he lay with his right leg pinned beneath the horse’s writhing bulk. He lifted his now-hatless head, which was bald save for a band of brown hair above his ears, and hardened his jaws. “Off! Oh, get off me, you miserable cayuse!”

  Prophet threw himself back off the horse and onto his butt, away from the horrified horse’s flailing hooves. The Appaloosa gained its feet with effort, awkwardly, its saddle loose, bridle hanging askew from its head.

  Bob gave another squeal as the weight left his crushed right leg. The Appy trotted off, shaking its head as though it had had its fill of such shenanigans. Bob lay inside the cloud of dust the horse had kicked up, writhing on his back while also stretching his left hand out toward the Schofield, which lay about three feet away from his outstretched fingers.

  He stared toward Prophet, his eyes dark with pain and exasperation. He jerked his body back and forth against the ground, inching his left hand toward the pistol while holding his right hand against his right thigh.

  Prophet heaved himself to his feet once more, wincing and spitting grit from his lips, a wing of his sandy, close-cropped hair hanging over his eyes. He held his left arm against his battered ribs. As Bob laid his hand on his Schofield, Prophet clamped his right boot down over Bob’s hand as well as on the gun. He shifted all his weight—two hundred–plus pounds—to that foot, feeling the bones in Bob’s hand grind against the unforgiving steel of the Schofield.

  “Ayeeeeeee!” Bob cried, squeezing his eyes closed and tipping his head far back, so that the cords in his neck stood out like ropes in a ship’s rigging. “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ohhhhh—get off me, damn youuuuuuu!”

  Prophet grinned down at the man. Slowly, he removed his foot from the man’s hand.

  “There you go—feel better?” Prophet crouched down. Bob stared up at him, eyes growing bright in horror when he saw what was about to happen.

  Prophet smashed the barrel of his Colt against Bob’s left temple, laying him out cold.

  Prophet swept his mussed hair back from his eye. He picked up his hat and scarf. He retrieved the Richards sawed-off and slung it behind his back and turned toward the roadhouse. He was breathing hard, sucking air through his teeth, gritted against his sundry aches and pains, and the cold wind nibbling his ears.

  The roadhouse had suddenly fallen eerily silent. As silent as a church, the back door standing wide open, its inner depths as black as a mine. A fine, granular snow angled down. A chill breeze pelted the snow against the roadhouse’s clapboard siding badly in need of fresh paint.

  “Louisa . . . ?”

  Prophet shoved his muffler into a coat pocket, pulled his hat down low on his head, and began stumbling toward the open back door.

  He stopped suddenly when there sounded the shriek of breaking glass. Almost simultaneously came a young woman’s agonized scream.

  A man laughed raucously somewhere up in the roadhouse’s second story.

  “Louisa!” Prophet shouted, and lurched into a sprint.

  Chapter 3

  A little over five minutes before Prophet trimmed Wind River Bob’s wick with his .45’s barrel, Louisa kicked in the roadhouse’s front door and stepped quickly to the door’s right side, where the outdoor light, as fading as it was, wouldn’t outline her.

  As her eyes quickly adjusted to the dingy light inside the roadhouse’s broad drinking hall, she saw a girl with a bruised, Indian-featured face lying across a table to Louisa’s right, her molasses-dark eyes wide and staring straight up at the ceiling. The girl’s throat had been cut. One arm hung down over the side of the table, as did both smooth, copper-brown legs.

  Two men were crouched before two windows running along the wall to Louisa’s left, beyond a crude wooden stairway. The men were shooting rifles through the broken-out windows, angling the barrels back toward the roadhouse’s rear, toward Lou. They were firing quickly, pumping their cocking levers, empty cartridge casings arcing back over their shoulders to clatter onto the floor around their boots.

  A bearded man stood behind the bar about halfway down the room, along its right wall. He was setting bottles onto the bar, as though preparing to load them into the large canvas war bag resting on the pine planks before him. His movements were quick and nervous.

  Boots thumped and men shouted in the ceiling above Louisa’s head. Another man just started down the broad wooden stairs to Louisa’s left though she couldn’t yet see him, for he was somewhere above the second-floor landing. She could hear only the fevered thundering of his boots growing quickly louder.

  The gang, their hideout having been discovered, and not knowing how many had discovered it, was preparing to pull out.

  The bearded man behind the bar had swung his head and his sharp, nervous eyes toward Louisa. He bellowed a curse as he reached behind him, pulling up a long-barreled, double-bore shotgun from where it had been resting atop the back bar.

  “It’s her!”

  Louisa snapped up her Winchester and threw a round at him just as he stumbled backward and slightly sideways, so that the bullet merely shredded his right earlobe before shattering a bottle and the back bar mirror. The man bellowed another curse, hardening his jaws against the pain in his ear, and swung the gut-shredder in Louisa’s direction.

  As the big popper roared, flames lapping from one barrel, the report like the explosion of a keg of dynamite in the close confines, Louisa dove onto a table ahead and on her right. She hit the near end of it, and it sank beneath her to the floor, rising on its far side and becoming a shield—an inadequate one, she discovered a second later, when the man behind the bar tripped the shotgun’s second trigger.

  The buckshot blew a pumpkin-sized hole through the upper half of the table, maybe four inches above Louisa’s now-hatless head. Scrambling onto a knee, Louisa poked the barrel of her Winchester through the big hole, aimed hastily, and sent two quick rounds hurling toward the man behind the bar.

  He was just then tossing the shotgun onto the bar, knocking over several bottles he’d set there, and pulling up two long-barreled Smith & Wessons from holsters strapped around his broad waist.

  Louisa’s first bullet drilled a quarter-sized hole through his left cheek, just beneath that eye. His head jerked backward, nodding as though he were in firm agreement with something that she’d said.

  Louisa’s second bullet drilled another hole through the dead center of the man’s forehead, jerking his head back once more and sending his whole body flying into the back bar. He blinked his eyes quickly as he rolled down the back bar’s shelves, dislodging bottles left and right, and dropped to the floor with a resolute thud.

&
nbsp; The man on the stairs was in full view now as he stopped four steps up from the bottom—a long-faced hombre with close-set eyes and long, lusterless blond hair. “We got trouble inside, boys!” he bellowed to the gang in general, bringing the Spencer repeater down off his shoulder and quickly aiming at Louisa, who swung her Winchester in his direction and shot him twice.

  The slugs punched him backward, firing his own rifle into the ceiling. He fell onto the steps, howling and reaching again for the rifle. Louisa calmly aimed and punched another pill through his forehead, silencing his infernal caterwauling.

  “Ah hell, it’s that damn Vengeance Queen!” That had been shouted by one of the two men who’d been shooting out the windows just beyond the stairs, to each side of the large, fieldstone hearth in which a fire popped and crackled, tempering the smell of cordite in the air with the tang of burning pine.

  The shooter who’d spoken swung his rifle from the window but before he could even get a fresh round racked into the breech, Louisa’s slug punched a hole in his Adam’s apple and sent him hurling back through the window, breaking out what glass had remained in the frame.

  The other shooter, nearer Louisa, had already turned and was crouched over his Winchester, flinging lead at the Vengeance Queen. Bullets screeched through the air around Louisa’s head, thudding into the front wall behind her and into the table, which she’d crouched behind once more, angling the table toward the shooter to act as a shield.

  When she heard the shooter’s rifle click empty, and the man say, “Crap!” she rose to her knees. Instinctively knowing that her own nine-shot carbine was also empty, she lifted her head from behind the table and snatched both her matching, pearl-gripped, nickel-washed pistols from their hand-tooled, brown leather holsters thonged on her thighs, beneath the flaps of her heavy wool coat.

  The shooter flung his rifle away and reached for a pistol tucked into a shoulder holster between his quilted leather coat and his sheepskin vest. “Oh hell!” he cried, his blue eyes sharp with terror, seeing that Louisa had the drop on him.