Blood at Sundown

by Peter Brandvold

  Prophet jerked his head around the door again, casting his gaze into the weedy, rubble-strewn yard behind the barn. Smoke was just then wafting and tearing on the breeze to the left of a small, dark log cabin hunched against the weather, brittle weeds jutting up high around its stone foundation. A man’s head slid out away from the cabin, to where the gun smoke was being dispersed by the breeze.

  Prophet saw the coyotelike eyes gazing at him from beneath a cap of matted dark blond hair, and the bounty hunter grinned malevolently, triggering the Winchester that was snugged up against his right shoulder.

  On the heels of the ’73’s buck and roar, the blond head jerked back out of sight against the cabin with a sharp yowl. It reappeared a second later atop the short, slender figure of the man himself. The droopy-eyed hombre’s coyote-faced sidekick, clad in a red and white plaid mackinaw, stumbled out away from the barn. He held his hat in his left hand, his carbine in his right hand.

  He gave another yowl as he triggered the carbine into the ground near his right boot. Dropping his hat, he slapped his left hand to his bloody left cheek.

  “You shot me!” he cried, stumbling farther out away from the cabin and glaring at Prophet striding up to him, holding his Winchester ’73 out from his right hip. “You shot me in the face, you son of a buck!”

  The blond coyote stumbled around and tried running away but his right boot came down on a stray chunk of split firewood, partly hidden by the snow-dusted grass. He tripped and dropped to his knees, clutching his left cheek with one hand, clamping his other hand against his right side, just above his shell belt.

  Prophet reached down and pulled the bone-handled Colt from the man’s holster and tossed it away. He pulled a skinning knife from a second sheath, on the blond man’s left hip, and tossed that away, as well. He walked around to stare down at the top of the man’s blond head, as the wounded ambusher writhed in pain, holding each of his wounds from which blood dribbled liberally.

  White lice clung to strands of the man’s matted hair that had been pressed flat against his head by his hat, revealing a small, round bald spot at the crown.

  Prophet flared his nostrils. “Who are you, you gutless, bushwhackin’ privy snipe?”

  “You shot me!” the wounded man bellowed, lowering his head toward the ground.

  Prophet lowered his’ 73’s butt, hooked it under the wounded man’s chin, and raised the man’s face until the two coyote eyes glared up into his. “You shot me in the face, you big bastard!” the wounded bushwhacker bellowed, half sobbing, spitting blood.

  “Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving cur! Tell me who you are, who your friend is, and why you were both out to liberate my soul, or I’m going to take your own knife and go to work on ya slow. You’ll forget all about your face and that bullet in your liver. Trust me on that one, old pard.”

  The blond coyote’s eyes sparked with both fear and exasperation. He spat another gob of blood. “Chauncey Nettles. My pard is Arlen Piper.”

  “Okay . . . ?”

  “You sent us both up the river, you big ape! Three years ago! West Texas!”

  Prophet furrowed his brows, thinking back, sifting through the remembered faces in his mind, riffling through names. “Nettles an’ Piper,” he said. “Nettles an’ Piper. Oh yeah . . . now I remember.” The names were familiar but the face staring up at him was that of a stranger. “That was you two?”

  “Sure as hell!”

  “Damn, you don’t look nothin’ like how I remember. Maybe the sharp nose a little, and your cow-stupid eyes. But . . .” Prophet shook his head, befuddled.

  “Yeah, well that’s what two and a half years in the Texas State Pen, turning big rocks into little rocks, does to men, you big, ugly rebel son of a buck!”

  “If you don’t stop insultin’ me an’ the glorious South, I’m going to cut your ears off an’ feed ’em to you.”

  The man’s pain-bright eyes widened a little, as though he believed Prophet would actually make good on his threat. He spat blood to one side. He was breathing hard, panting. His left cheek looked like freshly ground beef.

  “So that’s what this was about.”

  “Of course, that’s what this was about! We seen you along the trail, an’ . . . You know how long Arlen an’ me been wantin’ to settle up for what you done to us?”

  “Five, six years, I’d fathom.”

  “Sure as tootin’!”

  “You didn’t get much satisfaction, though, did you? Arlen’s dead as a post inside that once-fancy buggy, and you appear to be headed that way yourself.”

  “Christ!” Nettles sobbed as he jerked his chin out from under Prophet’s rifle butt and slowly lowered his head to the ground, jerking as he cried. “I’m gonna die!” he wailed. “I’m gonna die!”

  “I’ll get you to a sawbones pronto if you tell me one more thing.”

  Nettles stopped sobbing. That was the only way Prophet knew the ambusher had heard him. Nettles hung his head over his knees, his forehead only inches above the ground.

  “Do you know Gritch Hatchley?”

  Nettles wagged his lowered head.

  “How ’bout Weed Brougham?”

  Again, Nettles wagged his head.

  Since outlawry was at times a tight fraternity, Prophet had wondered if Nettles and Piper had headed here to meet Hatchley and Brougham. Or had maybe talked to them after the former pair had come to town ahead of Prophet and told the latter about the bounty hunter headed toward Indian Butte.

  Hatchley and Brougham might have suspected Prophet’s dead freight was men from their own gang. In turn, they might have suspected Prophet had come to Indian Butte to add more dead men to his pack train—namely, them.

  “All right,” Prophet said, jerking Nettles to his feet by his coat collar. “Rise and shine, boy!”

  “Oww—it hurts!”

  “Stop whining!”

  “You take two bullets—one to your liver the other to your cheek and see if you don’t whine, you rebel swine!”

  Prophet slammed his right fist into the small of the coyote-faced ambusher’s back. Nettles screamed and dropped to his knees again.

  “All right—hold it right there, you big galoot!”

  The order had come from behind Prophet.

  The bounty hunter sighed and said, “I sure wish everyone would stop impedin’ my progress here in this little town.” He turned to see a young man crouched over a long-barreled, double-barrel shotgun, both large round maws aimed at Prophet’s belly. “I need a whiskey and a hot bath, gallblastit!”

  The young man before him was maybe nineteen, possibly twenty. His fair-skinned face was nearly hairless save for a soot-stain mustache and a just as insignificant goat beard curling from his chin. He was maybe five foot seven, mean eyed, bucktoothed, and wearing a five-pointed deputy town marshal’s star on his patched, butterscotch-colored coat. He wore a red wool cap and a bright green muffler.

  He sucked up some snot dribbling from his nose and said, “Stop beatin’ on that fella and drop that rifle, you big galoot, or I’ll blow a hole through your guts big enough to drive a train through!”

  “Oh, for chrissakes!” The kid had gotten so close to Prophet, wagging the shotgun barrel tauntingly beneath the bigger man’s nose, that all Prophet had to do was quickly nudge the shotgun aside with his left arm.

  Both barrels discharged skyward with a cannonlike roar as the kid’s fingers jerked back on both triggers. Prophet grabbed the gun with his left hand and wrenched it out of the startled kid’s grip.

  The kid screamed as he stumbled sideways, half turning. As he did, Prophet grabbed the hogleg poking out of the kid’s coat pocket. He tossed the shotgun good and far and followed it up with the old Bisley .44 trimmed with baling wire holding the cracked walnut grips in place.

  “What . . . what’re you doin’?” the kid cried in exasperation. “Those is my guns! I’m the deputy town marshal!”

  “Yeah, well, I’m Lou Prophet, bounty hunter, you wet-behi
nd-the-ears little polecat. You’re lucky I don’t take you over my knee and thrash your backside raw for wagging that gut-shredder at me like that! You try it again, and I will!”

  “Ah, Jesus!” the kid cried, throwing up his hands and then running off in search of his weapons.

  Again, Prophet jerked Nettles to his feet. The outlaw grunted, yelped, and snarled.

  Prophet shoved him brusquely ahead. “Get goin’!”

  Prophet stayed about ten feet behind the outlaw, in case Nettles tried anything. He didn’t look capable, however. He was stumbling on the toes of his boots, leaning forward and to one side, clamping his right hand to the wound above his shell belt, his left hand to his bullet-torn cheek. Prophet thought the bullet must have torn through the flesh without penetrating the bone, or the coyote-faced bushwhacker would be fussing even more than he was.

  Or he’d be dead.

  As it was, he left a very clear trail of blood on the snowy ground behind him.

  Prophet followed Nettles around the barn’s right corner. Nettles stumbled forward then dropped to his knees, grunting and writhing. Prophet stopped near his charge and slid his gaze toward the open bar doors.

  The old liveryman who’d sold Prophet down the river to Nettles and Piper was talking to another man a few years younger than the oldster, but only a few. The second man was a little bigger than the graybeard, and he wore a cinnamon beard liberally flecked with gray as well as a high-crowned, broad-brimmed Stetson. As he turned toward Prophet, Prophet saw the town marshal’s star pinned to the lapel of the man’s dark wool coat.

  “There!” the liveryman cried, lifting an arm to point accusingly at Prophet. “There he is now. Trouble! Pure-dee trouble—all two hundred pounds of him! Damn near got me killed!”

  “I saved your life, you old coot! You sold me down the river!”

  “Ah hell!” said the man wearing the badge, scowling up at Prophet.

  Prophet studied him closely, recognition suddenly dawning on him. “Sheldon? Sheldon Coffer?” He smiled. “What the hell are you doin’ this far north? I thought you was down in Nebraska. Last time I seen you, you was sheriff of . . . of . . .”

  “Cottonwood Springs,” Coffer said, still scowling at Prophet as though the bounty hunter were a two-hundred-plus pound of dog plop someone had left on his front porch. “I married a woman up here. Followed her up here, in fact, from down there. Didn’t know we was gonna stay, but then her pa died and left her a little house . . . an’ they needed a marshal . . . an’ Brandy was homesick, though how any woman—or man, for that matter—could be homesick for anyplace in Dakota Territory is beyond me.”

  He beetled his eyes again at the bounty hunter.

  “Anyways, back to you. What in the hell are you doing up here, Prophet? This time of year, no less! You know one thing I thought I’d never see again when I left Nebraska was the big peck of trouble known as Lou Prophet, who skinned through town from time to time, either on the heels of some dastardly owlhoot or with one or two in tow, smellin’ up the place! That was the one thing that almost made the move this far north worthwhile to me. In spite of the skeeter-bit summers and the ass-grindingly cold winters, I thought at least—at the very least—I’d surely never ever have to run into you again and deal with the seven kinds of trouble you’re always packin’. Always!”

  “Jesus, Sheldon,” Prophet said, tipping his head back and scowling down at the badge-toting Coffer. “If you ain’t careful, I’m gonna get the notion you ain’t happy to see me!”

  Chapter 12

  Marshal Coffer shaped a constipated look. He lowered his gaze to the man groaning and writhing on the ground near the bounty hunter, and shook his head. “Do you ever ride into a town without shooting a man . . . or men . . . within the first ten minutes, Lou?”

  He glanced over his left shoulder, toward the fancy carriage parked before the Indian Butte Hotel. Several folks had gathered around the contraption with a caved-in roof. The people, mostly men, had apparently spilled out of the hotel. Several stood out on the hotel’s broad front veranda, as well, staring down at the carriage through the roof of which Arlen Piper had made landfall, ruining the fancy contraption in the process.

  Indignantly, Prophet said, “I’m the injured party here, Shell!”

  “Huh?”

  “I can’t help it if within the first ten minutes I ride into a town and someone . . . like these two low-down, dirty, back-shootin’ dogs . . . tries to send my soul haulin’ its freight to the golden clouds. That one over there in the fancy carriage tried to do so from the roof of the hotel. This here back-alley rattler tried to do it from inside the barn. Piper must’ve been the better shot—that’s why he took the first one. This little coyote-faced jasper wasn’t much of a shot at all—fortunately for me. He must have been Piper’s backup. Not much of a backup. If he had been, you’d be hauling me off to get fitted for a wooden overcoat, Sheldon!”

  The bounty hunter glared at the town marshal scowling at him skeptically. “Where’s the law an’ order in this town? When a feller can’t ride into your fair town without gettin’ shot at within the first ten minutes, you got a problem!” He pulled his head back and to one side, narrowing a curious eye. “Brandy, did you say?”

  Coffer frowned. “Huh?”

  “The girl you married. Her name is Brandy?”

  “That’s right.” Coffer’s frown became a defensive scowl. “So what?”

  Prophet grinned insinuatingly.

  Coffer’s scowl deepened, and his face turned redder than it already was from the cold. “She was a singer! And that’s all she did. She sang!”

  “Oh, I see, I see,” Prophet said, chuckling. “Calm down, Shell, I didn’t mean to climb your hump.”

  Running footsteps sounded from the side of the barn. Prophet glanced behind him, raising his Winchester defensively, as the young deputy ran around the barn’s front corner. He stopped abruptly, slipping in the snow. Breathless and red-faced from exasperation, he jutted his chin and pointed an angry finger at Prophet.

  “There he is! There he is, Uncle Shell! The man causin’ all the trouble!”

  “Easy, Ham,” Coffer said.

  “He threw my guns away!” the kid said, spittle flying from his lips and snot stringing from his nose.

  “Stand down, Ham,” Coffer said, holding up his right, thickly gloved hand, palm out. “Everything’s under control.” He glanced at the coyote-faced Nettles on the ground near Prophet. “That fella there tried to clean Lou’s clock.”

  “No thanks to the liveryman.” Prophet had turned his angry gaze to the old man sort of shrinking back against the edge of the open barn door, looking as sheepish as a schoolboy who’d put a snake in the girl’s privy. “Pop Schofield, I take it?” He glanced at the sign stretching across the barn, just over the big open double doors.

  Coffer turned to the long-haired, bib-bearded old man. “What’s this all about, Pop?”

  “I would very much like an answer to that question myself, Marshal Coffer!” The speaker was one of the two nattily dressed young men striding toward the livery barn from the direction of the hotel, where several men in heavy fur hats and coats were still inspecting the wreckage of the fancy carriage while two others wrestled the slack body of Arlen Piper out of the carriage’s busted door, from beneath the collapsed roof.

  The young man who’d spoken hardened his clean-lined jaws and hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “The carriage. It’s ruined!” He spoke with what Prophet recognized as a phony English accent, common among the moneyed elite.

  He appeared in his early twenties with a delicate, even-featured face some might call handsome though in a feminine sort of way. His pale, flawless skin appeared to have never known the caress of direct sunlight. A dark red mustache of the handlebar variety complete with waxed ends and a carefully trimmed goatee made the popinjay resemble a pretty young lady with a glandular vexation—or whatever caused facial hair on females. The man’s little eyes appeared yellow.

&nb
sp; The man beside him, slightly taller and leaner, though dark haired and mustached, was the same cut of man—a preening dude hailing from what he himself would call “good blood” and toting around a corncob stuck so far up his pale, bony behind that a sawbones could see it when he examined his tonsils.

  The first young man, who appeared the alpha of this two-man sissy wolf pack, turned angrily to the marshal. “Did you hear me, Marshal? That carriage—that expensive carriage—is ruined! It was my father’s gift to the countess!” He turned his fiery yellow gaze on Prophet. “Is this big ruffian the culprit?”

  “Who the hell is this?” Prophet asked Coffer.

  The young man jerked his head back, as though he’d been slapped. His lower jaw hung in shock. “Excuse me? Who the hell are you?”

  “The one you just called a big ruffian. It’s true I crap a bigger pile than you standin’ there, but you best talk nice and grown-up when addressing me, Dan, or I’ll drag you off to the nearest woodshed for a lesson in manners.”

  “Oh, you think so, do you?”

  “I think so.”

  The young man’s face turned as russet as a baked yam. His nostrils flared to double their normal size. Stepping forward, he removed his thick glove from his right hand, clenched that hand into a tight fist, and grimaced as he threw that fist up from behind his right hip toward Prophet’s face.

  “Oh hell!” Coffer lamented.

  Prophet had seen turtles withdraw from their shells faster than this kid could throw a punch. He had ample time to raise his left hand up in front of his left cheek.

  Fancy Dan’s fist slammed into it. Prophet closed his fingers around it, squeezed.

  Fancy Dan yipped, rising onto the toes of his high-topped fur boots. His face turned even redder, puffing up, as the fop stared in anguish at his hand, the little bones of which Prophet ground together in his own fist, bunching his lips, his eyes sparking angrily.

  “Prophet!” Coffer barked.

  “You ever want to use this hand again, Junior?” Prophet asked the fancy Dan.

  “Release me, damn you,” the kid chortled, tightly. He rolled his eyes to one side, glancing back at the second fancy Dan—the one with the dark hair and dark beard, the one who appeared just now like he’d swallowed something he not only couldn’t digest but which was trying to claw its way out of him.