The perfume of the smoke warred against the sweet, gamy stench the wolf had left behind.
Prophet buckled his cartridge belt and Peacemaker around his waist. He tied the thong around his thigh. He shrugged into his heavy buckskin coat, pulled on his knit gloves and then his wool-lined, buckskin mittens over the gloves. Having been caught up here in similar weather before, he’d be damned if he’d leave any fingers behind. His oysters, maybe, but not his fingers. He tramped lightly back along the bar then headed out the roadhouse’s rear door and into the chill air of early morning.
He paused on the wooden stoop, looking around.
The cold air nipped at his nose and cheeks. It was cold, all right, but it could get a hell of a lot colder in these climes. The air was now as still as that inside an abandoned church though a few small flakes were still falling, lazily, like afterthoughts. Sweeping his gaze around the yard, Prophet thought that only an inch or so of the white stuff had fallen overnight, not the good two feet he’d expected.
A rare bit of good luck.
The light was growing, the eastern horizon blushing like a Lutheran bride. Peering up at the sky, Lou spied a few stars flickering wanly between the parting, ragged-edged clouds. He’d be damned if it didn’t look like the sun might make an appearance once it had heaved itself out of the eastern plains. As he dropped down off the stoop and began tramping toward the big log barn, a single crow, larger than some hawks, cawed at him from atop the corral to the barn’s right, shuffling its feet and sending the light dusting of snow from the corral’s top slat to the ground.
The snow glittered like stardust.
Prophet threw open the barn doors and stood staring down at the dead men he’d laid out in the barn’s main alley, shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip, starting just a few feet beyond the door. “Don’t get up, gents,” Prophet said. “It’s just me—Lou Prophet, ex–Confederate freedom fighter from the hills of north Georgia.” He pronounced the last two words, “Nawth Joe-jahhhh,” playfully accentuating his drawl.
He wasn’t mocking the dead. Prophet had just enough hillbilly superstition in him to know to never mock a dead man and risk attracting a possible hex from the dead man’s ghost or from one of the many unknown but very real hoo-doo specters that prowled the earth. In fact, even after all the men Prophet had killed or seen killed on Southern battlefields as well as out here on the western frontier, dead men still made his spine tingle.
That’s why, as he went to work saddling the outlaws’ horses and then hoisting the dead men over the saddles and tying cold wrists to cold ankles beneath the horses’ bellies, he joked aloud and whistled while he worked. He was relieved to finally lead Mean and Ugly out of the barn and into the weak sunlight of the early morning.
Sure enough, it would be a sunny day. Sunny but cold . . .
Five horses, tied tail to tail, followed behind Mean and Ugly. Prophet led the lead horse of the second set of five by the lead mount’s bridle reins.
Also in his right hand were the reins of the spare horse he’d saddled and over which no dead man lay, as well as the reins of Louisa’s brown and white pinto.
The day was cold but clear. A breeze had picked up, swirling the freshly fallen snow so that it glittered in the clean-scoured air like crushed sequins. The horses clomped heavily, slowly behind him, several whickering anxiously at the dead men draped over their backs.
As Prophet pulled up in front of the roadhouse, just off its snow-dusted front porch, the front door opened. Louisa stepped out holding two steaming tin cups in her gloved hands.
She came down the porch steps and held one of the cups up to Prophet.
“Figured you might want some mud before you start for Indian Butte.”
Prophet dropped the reins of Louisa’s horse as well as that of the spare horse and accepted the cup. He salivated at the welcoming smell of the freshly boiled belly wash in his hand, the warm steam wafting up around him. “You’re good enough to marry.”
“Yes, I am,” Louisa said with customary insouciance. “Unfortunately, you’re not.”
Prophet gave a wry chuff. “Ever the charmer.” After he’d taken his first couple of sips of the coffee, blowing on its tar-black surface, he said, “Well, we got ten dead men here. I figured we’d each take five. You take the money. I’d likely get drunk and head straight to Mexico with it.”
Louisa had walked back up onto the porch. Now she turned toward the yard and glanced over the rim of her own steaming cup. “Who’s the calico for?”
Prophet glanced at the spare mount over which he’d strapped a spare saddle he’d found in the barn’s side-shed tack room. “Well, I figured . . .”
“Is that one for me?”
Toni stepped through the open door behind Louisa. She was bundled in a thick blue wool coat too big for her, a gray wool hat, red wool muffler, and matching red knit mittens, the bright red of the muffler and mittens fairly glowing in the crisp sunshine. She held a carpetbag in one hand. On her feet were heavy, wool-lined, deerskin boots that had seen better days but would do just fine, keeping the girl’s toes from freezing. One of the dead hardcases had likely left the boots upstairs, maybe the rest of the gear, as well.
“Yes, ma’am, it is,” Prophet said.
Louisa frowned at the pale redhead moving up to stand beside her. “I don’t understand.”
“She can’t stay here all by herself,” Prophet said. He glanced around at the sunlit, empty yard fogged by windblown snow. “There’s nothin’ here now. Jiggs is dead. Besides, the windows are broken out. And whether you saw it or not, we was almost eaten by a big blue wolf one short hour ago.”
“We could board up the windows before we leave,” Louisa said.
“No.” Toni moved up to stand beside the female bounty hunter, gazing pleadingly at Prophet. “I don’t want to stay here. I can’t run this place myself. I don’t want to. Besides . . .” She glanced around apprehensively. “Lots of bad men in these parts. Almost as bad as them.”
She pinned her gaze on the dead men riding belly down across their saddles, and she hardened her jaws in renewed anger.
“You must know some good folks in these parts,” Prophet said. “I figured one of us, Louisa or me, would drop you off on the way to Indian Butte or Sundown. Some nice rancher? Mayhaps a nice farmer in need of a cleanin’ girl?”
“I know few people in these parts, Mr. Prophet. The few I do are probably not looking for a maid.”
“Nice people are in short supply everywhere,” Louisa said to Toni. “But there must be someone you can . . . I don’t know . . . trust, at least.”
“Trustworthy folks are in short supply, too, Miss Bonaventure. I was hopin’ I could ride with you to Sundown. I won’t be alone there, at least. And I could maybe get a job working for Mr. Emory. Adam Emory. He’s the banker there. Came last year from Bismarck, I heard, thinking the town would grow with the coming of the spur line. I heard he has a nice new house but no wife and no children. I’m thinkin’ he might need a girl to help him clean an’ cook.”
A pink flush touched her cheeks, and she dropped her eyes with vague self-consciousness.
Prophet and Louisa shared a fleeting, meaningful glance. Toni was likely hoping in the back of her mind, or maybe even in the front of it, that the new banker in Sundown might need a young wife, as well. There was nothing unreasonable about that. Many a girl had married for far more nefarious reasons than to have a shelter over her head, food on her table.
Louisa looked at Prophet, frowning. She sucked her cheeks in, not liking the situation. She didn’t want the girl tagging along with her, but she saw no solution to the problem.
“If that’s what you want to do,” she said with a sigh. “Let’s get a move on. We’re burning daylight.”
“Thank you!” Toni set down her carpetbag. “I’ll be right back. I just have one more small bag.”
When the doxie had gone back into the roadhouse, Prophet frowned curiously down at Louisa. “What’s the matter with
you?”
Louisa tossed the dregs of her coffee into the snow and set the empty tin cup on the porch rail. “She should ride with you.”
Louisa stepped back inside the roadhouse and returned a few seconds later with her saddle, saddlebags, sheathed carbine, and blanket roll. A second set of saddlebags contained the loot the gang had stolen from the bank in Wyoming.
“Why should she ride with me?” Prophet said, still scowling down at his comely but moody partner. “She wants to go to Sundown. I’m headin’ to Indian Butte.”
Louisa leaned her rifle against a porch post then moved down the steps and over to her pinto. “Indian Butte’s the larger town. I saw it on the map. Sundown is practically just a water stop for the spur line. Besides, you’re better with people than I am.”
“You can say that again. But the banker’s in Sundown. She wants to work for him.”
Louisa tossed both pairs of saddlebags over her pinto’s rump, behind her saddle. She shook her long, honey-blond hair over her left shoulder and began strapping her bedroll to her saddle. “She shouldn’t get her hopes up about the banker.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know, that’s all.”
“You’re some authority on bankers, now, are you?”
Louisa cast him a wry look then retrieved her rifle from the porch.
“What’s got your bloomers in a twist?” Prophet asked. “Don’t you like that girl?”
“I don’t know her enough to like her or dislike her. I just prefer to ride alone, that’s all.”
“She needs help, fer cryin’ in Grant’s moonshine! That’s what you’re all about—helpin’ women an’ children who’ve been savaged by outlaws like them!” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the dead men behind him.
“I have helped her,” Louisa said, glancing at the dead men. “That’s all I can do. The rest is up to her.”
“I don’t understand you. I know I’ve said that before, but I’ll say it again. I purely do not understand you, Miss Bonnyventure.”
“It’s Bonaventure,” Louisa said automatically, tightly, pulling down on the rifle with one gloved hand as she adjusted the set of her scabbard with the other. “There’s no y in it.”
Prophet chuffed and shook his head. “Just get the girl to—”
He cut himself off as Toni came back out of the roadhouse, carrying another, smaller carpetbag. “I’m ready,” she said, stopping at the top of the porch steps, where her other bag leaned against a post. She stared down at Louisa, who was sliding her rifle back and forth in its oiled sheath, making sure of a quick draw if needed.
“I haven’t ridden a horse in a while,” Toni told her. “I’ve pretty much been cooped up here for nigh on three years now. You won’t ride too fast, will you?”
Louisa didn’t respond to that. Without even looking at the girl, she said crisply, “Get mounted up so we can get a move on, girl. Like I said, we’re burning daylight!”
Toni approached the spare horse tentatively.
“I’ll help.” Prophet swung down from Mean’s back and walked over to where Toni stood beside the spare calico, which had turned its neck to sniff the redhead curiously.
Prophet gave Toni a hand up into the saddle then handed her carpetbags up to her.
“Thank you, Mr. Prophet.”
Prophet pinched his hat brim to her then leaned toward her, muttering with a conspiratorial air, “Don’t mind her.” He jerked his chin toward the Vengeance Queen. “Louisa never did sleep in a bed she didn’t get up on the wrong side of. She’ll come around once the coffee hits her veins and you’re well along the trail. Sittin’ still is what gets to her. As soon as she gets another man in her rifle sights, she’ll be sweet as fresh apple pie.”
Toni glanced at Louisa and gave the ghost of a smile.
As cool as the freshly fallen snow, Louisa scooped up the reins of the first lead horse then swung up onto her pinto’s back. She turned the pinto away from the roadhouse, jerking on the reins of the lead packhorse, and said to Toni, “Come on, if you’re coming.”
“I know, I know,” Toni said, rolling her eyes. “We’re burning daylight.”
Louisa touched spurs to the pinto’s flanks and went loping toward the mouth of the southern trail leading away from the roadhouse. Toni glanced back at Prophet, who said, “Hang on, now!”
He slapped the calico’s rump, and the horse lurched forward, lunging after Louisa. The sudden movement took Toni by surprise. She leaned far sideways over the right stirrup, throwing her left arm high. Prophet winced, thinking she was about to lose her seat. But then she managed to grab the horn and pull herself upright. She hunkered low, holding on for dear life, as the calico bounded after Louisa and the pinto.
They turned around a bend in the southern trail and disappeared behind a clump of snow-dusted brush, only the thuds of their horses’ hooves and the rattle of the bit irons lingering in the cold, sunlit air behind them.
“Go with God, girl,” Prophet said. “Go with God.”
He didn’t mean Louisa.
Chapter 8
Louisa trotted the pinto and her five packhorses down a shallow rise. At the bottom of the rise, she stopped and glanced over her shoulder. The redhead was not behind her.
At least, the redhead wasn’t in sight behind her.
Louisa sighed, waited, tapping her left thumb against her saddle horn, looking around. She was in relatively open country now—the heart of a massive prairie, low, rolling hills carpeted in the fresh ermine of last night’s snow. Fawn-colored weeds poked up above the fresh coat of white, like a man’s tawny beard stubble through shaving soap.
The sun was high and bright, but it was also the color of unpolished brass, a customary hue for this time of year. A depressing hue, to her mind. Depressing, too, was the vast, lonely prairie over which shone the occasional small clump of grazing cattle and the straight line of some rancher’s barbed wire fence, some artist’s ever-thinning pencil line foreshortening into the distance of a vast, empty canvas.
Louisa hipped around in her saddle to cast a look over her shoulder. Just then a lone rider, not the girl, appeared at the crest of a distant hogback. It appeared to be a man. He continued riding up over the top of the hill and then down the near side, heading in Louisa’s direction.
Fifteen or twenty feet down the slope of that hill jutted a single, spindly cottonwood. The rider drew rein beside the cottonwood, pulling his reins up tight against his chest. He was a good two hundred yards away, but Louisa thought he stiffened in his saddle a little. He sidled his horse closer to the spindly cottonwood, as though he thought he could merge his figure with that of the tree, and Louisa wouldn’t see him.
“Oh, but I do see you,” Louisa said softly to herself, narrowing her eyes at the distant rider. “I saw you back a ways . . . and I see you now.”
When she’d first spied the man, she’d wondered if he were trailing her and the redhead. Or maybe he was only heading in the same direction. She’d kept an eye on him for several miles as he’d pretty much matched Louisa’s and the redhead’s pace, staying about a quarter mile behind. Now, however, he’d gotten closer. He must have gigged up his horse when he’d been out of Louisa’s view, on the far side of a bluff well behind them now.
He must be intending to overtake them.
Louisa’s pulse quickened slightly. But only slightly. He was only one man, after all. She’d dealt with such men before. In fact, five such men lay slumped over the saddles of the five horses tied tail to tail behind her.
Louisa swung her head around to stare off over her right shoulder. Still no sign of the girl. What was her name again?
Toni?
Louisa cursed. She dropped the reins of the lead packhorse, hoping it was trained to stay with its reins, then swung the pinto around and galloped up and over the top of the low rise down which she’d just ridden. At the bottom of the rise, the girl was having a devil of a time trying to mount the calico. She had her left foot in
the left stirrup, and she was hopping on her other foot as the calico turned slowly away from her, a devilish gleam in its eyes.
As the calico turned more sharply, snorting playfully, Toni gave a loud, groaning cry as her left foot slipped out of the stirrup. She fell in a heap. The calico gave its tail a satisfied switch then casually dropped its head and began to crop grass growing up around a cedar post from which three nasty-looking strands of barbed wire stretched.
Louisa reined up before the girl, who, sitting on her butt in the snow, leaning back on her hands, looked up at her angrily, narrowing one eye.
“He stopped to eat grass,” she said bitterly. “I pulled his head up firmly, just like you said to do last time he pulled that. He didn’t lift his head a bit. It was his rear end he lifted. He bucked me off! Then, when I tried to mount again—”
“That was quite a dance you two were performing.” Louisa leaned forward, arms crossed on her saddle horn. She rolled her eyes slightly right to see the rider she’d seen before now riding slowly down the hill, heading toward her.
“He seemed to be enjoying it,” the girl said of the calico.
Louisa sighed and stepped down from the pinto’s back. She grabbed the calico’s reins and pulled its head up sharply by the bridle’s cheek strap. Chewing a mouthful of grass, the calico stared at her with a contrary gleam in its eyes. Louisa swatted its snout with her open palm.
“Don’t think you’re going to defy me, you cayuse!” she warned.
Toni heaved herself to her feet. “He’s contrary.”
“Of course he’s contrary. He’s male. Just like males of the human race, he’s dumb and stubborn. You have to show him who’s boss. Once he knows, when you tell him to jump, he’ll ask you how high. Until then, he’ll think he can do whatever he wants to you, and he’ll laugh while he’s doing it.”
Again, Louisa swatted the calico’s snout. The horse jerked its head up and whickered. The contrary gleam in its eyes disappeared and it stared at her slightly askance, warily, ears straight up.
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