He did just that as he followed the bend in the trail, sliding the ’73 out of his saddle boot, cocking the piece one-handed then easing the hammer down to half-cock and resting the barrel across his saddle horn.
The hair on the back of his neck pricked against his coat collar as he remembered that big, round eye in his hand. It had been the clear blue of a spring lake. He couldn’t help wondering what the last thing the poor soul, Chester Thom, had seen through that eye before they’d beefed him.
Stop thinking about it, Prophet, he told himself. Think instead about that sneering look the Vengeance Queen would give you if instead of going after Hatchley and Brougham you rode back to town and spent the rest of the night with a couple of comely girls and a bottle of Taos lightning by a warm, popping fire, which is what you’d really rather do.
He chuckled at that, but it was mostly just his nerves rattling around in his brain.
Fifteen minutes later, he’d dismounted Mean and Ugly and tied the horse to a tree. He’d crabbed to the crest of a small knoll capped with several horse tooth–shaped rocks cropping up out of the snowy earth before him, and stared down into the hollow in which the big cabin, barn, and corral sat.
The cabin’s windows shone with a soft umber light. Someone was playing a fiddle inside. Not too shabbily, either.
“Someone is havin’ a hoedown out here, after all,” said a raspy, breathless voice behind Prophet.
The bounty hunter whipped around, swinging his Winchester around, as well, thumbing back the hammer. He dropped the rifle’s barrel and eased the hammer back down as he saw Coffer crawl up beside him in the gauzy darkness, breathing hard.
“Christ!” Prophet wheezed under his breath. “I thought you went back to town!”
“I got an old fool’s pride, I reckon,” the marshal said, staring through a gap between the rocks at the cabin. He held a Sharps carbine in his gloved hands. “Besides . . .” He turned his dark eyes to Prophet. “Brandy left me last summer for a crazy Canuck. That worthless nephew of mine . . . of Brandy’s, I should say . . . lives with me now. Hell.” The old lawman sighed and shook his head. “I got a long, cold night ahead. I might as well spend it here.”
Chapter 16
“Sorry about Brandy,” Prophet said. “She prob’ly did you a favor, though, Shell. If she’s the kind of girl who’d run off with a crazy Canuck, then you’re better off alone.”
“Maybe,” Coffer said with a sigh. “But she sure could warm an old man’s feet, that girl could!”
“There’s more foot warmers in the sea, Sheldon.”
“It’s a pretty small sea up here, Lou.” Coffer shook his head, glowering as though the conversation embarrassed him. “Anyways, how you gonna handle this thing?”
Prophet chuckled. The question made him think about Louisa, and he wondered vaguely where she was and what she was up to at that very moment. Probably raising hell in Sundown, no doubt. Of course she was. That’s what the girl did. She raised hell.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothin’. You stay with the horses. I reckon I’ll figure this one out as I go. Plans don’t work much in man-huntin’, anyways. With any luck, in a half hour or so, I’ll be back with Gritch Hatchley and Weed Brougham in cuffs an’ shackles.”
He crabbed backward down the hill. At the bottom, he grabbed his Richards coach gun off his saddle horn and slung the lanyard over his head and right shoulder, so that the sawed-off gut-shredder hung straight down behind his back. The savage, double-barreled popper cleaned up well in close quarters.
He edged a look around the shoulder of the hill toward the cabin, which was a one-and-a-half-story affair with a peaked roof and a lean-to addition at the rear. Someone was still sawing away on the fiddle. Through the curtained windows, Prophet saw moving shadows. He thought he could see two people dancing in time with the fiddle.
He glanced at the sky. Nearly all of the light was gone. It was dark out here. Dark and cold. He’d be damned glad to get back to Indian Butte for a hot bath, a steak, a few drinks, and at least a couple hours of shut-eye before hopping the train in the morning with his prisoners, living and dead, in tow.
Hatchley and Brougham were each worth five hundred dollars more alive than dead, so he hoped he could take them with their lights on. Louisa would just go ahead and cap them both and call it money well spent. In cold weather, it was more convenient to haul a dead man, as opposed to one you had to keep your eye on and feed, to his rightful destination. In hot weather, a dead man could get a mite sour.
Then again, Louisa didn’t have Prophet’s spend-happy habits. Nor his urge to hightail it down to Mexico—a long trip that needed ample financing.
No, he’d take Hatchley and Brougham alive if possible.
He jogged out away from the butte, heading directly toward the cabin. It didn’t look like any pickets had been posted, which didn’t surprise Prophet. It was stormy and dark, and apparently lawdogs tended to give this so-called woodcutters’ camp a wide berth. Most, at least.
Lou’s heartbeat quickened anxiously as the cabin loomed before him. He was close enough now that he could hear the hum of voices above the scratching of the violin behind the stout log walls. He was only fifteen feet from the front door, which sat back behind a very small stoop, when a latch clicked.
Prophet’s heart leaped. The front door was opening, showing a slice of weak umber light reflected off velveteen curtains beyond it, inside the cabin. The curtains were obscured by a brocade-upholstered fainting couch on which two people sat, though Lou could see only their legs.
A man stepped into the door’s opening—a tall, slender man, judging by his silhouette.
Prophet stopped, skidding a little in the slippery snow, breathing hard. Crouched slightly forward, he looked around.
The only cover within many square yards was an overturned wheelbarrow to his left, ten feet away. He took two broad, running steps then lofted himself off the toes of his moccasins, hitting the snowy ground with a grunt and then rolling up behind the wheelbarrow, clutching his Winchester before him.
He gritted his teeth, silently cursed.
Had the man seen him?
“Close the damn door!” someone barked from inside the cabin. “It’s colder’n a gold digger’s heart out there!”
The “there” was muffled by the closing of the door and nearly drowned by the click of the door’s latch.
Prophet held his breath, listening. He kept his teeth gritted, awaiting a hail of hot lead. The wheelbarrow was too insubstantial for adequate cover. If the man had spied Lou, the bounty hunter would be feeding the hoot owl soon.
The man on the stoop grunted. Drew a ragged breath. A soft, liquid dribbling rose. Again, the man grunted, groaned, drew a breath.
Prophet’s heart slowed a little. He started breathing again. The man had stepped onto the stoop only to shake the dew from his lily. He must not have seen Prophet. Probably, the man’s eyes had been compromised by the light, weak as it appeared, inside the cabin, so he hadn’t been able to make out Prophet’s dark figure in the murky darkness stitched with falling snow.
Prophet drew a slow, relieved breath, released it, drew another.
He turned his head to peer over his left shoulder and over the wheelbarrow’s snow-dusted wheel toward the cabin. The man was relieving himself, all right. He stood at the front end of the stoop, sideways to Prophet, listing a little from side to side. He was either writing his name in the snow or he was wobbling from drink.
Maybe both.
For chrissakes, Prophet silently complained after the man had been dribbling for nearly two full minutes, you either better see a sawbones about your pinched flow or stop drinkin’ like a fish, you damn fool!
Finally, the man’s flow dribbled to a stop.
The man grunted, drew another breath as he tucked himself back in and buttoned his fly. He swung around and, humming under his breath the lyrics to the tune that the fiddle was sawing away on inside the cabin and which Prophet r
ecognized as “Little Brown Jug,” the man swung around and stepped to the door. He tripped the latch, stepped inside, and closed the door with a click behind him.
“’Bout damn time!” Prophet grunted as he heaved himself to his feet.
But he hadn’t taken one full step before a man’s voice cried inside the cabin, “Someone’s outside, fellas!”
The door jerked open again. The tall, slender gent ran out onto the stoop and loudly cocked the rifle in his hands.
Prophet threw himself to his right.
The rifle in the man’s hands thundered, flames lapping from the barrel. It thundered two more times, flashing brightly, sending bullets screeching through the air over Prophet’s head. He hit the ground and rolled as the rifle belched again, a slug pluming the snow just ahead of him.
He rolled up on his left shoulder, clicked his Winchester’s hammer back, aimed quickly, and threw three quick shots at the cabin. The man standing on the stoop, and who’d been cocking another round into his own rifle’s breech, was punched back inside with a scream, leaving the door standing wide behind him.
Glass clattered in the window left of the door. Another rifle flashed in the broken-out window. As two slugs tore into the ground just beyond Prophet, Prophet slid his rifle to the left and sent two rounds hurling toward the shooter silhouetted in the window there, against the wan light behind him.
One of the bullets plunked into the window casing. The other made a wet crunching sound, which meant it had hit its target.
The man standing there wailed and leaped backward, dropping his rifle out the window and clamping both hands to his face. “My face!” he screamed. “The devil shot me in the face!”
“You’re surrounded!” Prophet shouted. “We got twenty lawmen out here! Another twenty armed and ready soldiers, you sons o’ devils! Come out with your hands up or die wailin’!”
He thought the lie was worth a try. It might freeze the owlhoots for a few valuable seconds.
“Law!” a man inside the cabin shouted. “Soldiers!”
“Oh hell!” lamented another.
There were the sounds of more breaking glass as more windows were knocked out. More rifles started belching.
Prophet emptied his Winchester into the two windows on both sides of the now wide-open door, evoking a couple of exasperated curses, then heaved himself to his feet and took off running. He tossed the Winchester aside then slid the Richards coach gun around to his chest, grabbing the double-barreled cannon in both gloved hands.
Rifles were belching inside the cabin but the fire must have been directed out other windows besides the front ones, because Prophet saw no flashes and was met with no lead. Maybe his lie about the lawmen and soldiers had worked and the tough nuts inside the cabin thought they were sure enough surrounded and were shooting at shadows.
Prophet gained the stoop, thumbing both the shotgun’s rabbit-ear hammers back to full cock. He bolted through the door like a bull through a chute, lifting a raucous rebel yell he hoped would further send ice water through the veins of his quarry. When he was two steps inside, he vaulted off his heels, propelling himself straight into the cabin in a high arcing dive, absently opining that he was lucky to have such a nice, big, thick Oriental rug beneath him, to soften his fall.
The two men shooting out the windows to either side of him, one man to each window, swung around bellowing, swinging their smoking rifles around, as well.
“Company!” the man on the left shouted, pressing his back to the window he’d been firing out of.
He hurled a round at Prophet.
He’d been slow to track the flying bounty hunter, however, and instead of plunking the lead into his intended target, he hit the man on the opposite side of the room from him. That man wailed and also fired his own rifle at Prophet. His aim was no better than the other man’s. No sooner had his partner’s bullet drilled into his brisket, he drilled a hot one into his partner’s neck.
Both men bounced off the walls behind them, bellowing like gut-shot mountain lions.
Prophet hit the rug and rolled just as the man to his left screamed again and fired his rifle at him. The bullet tore into the rug just in front of Prophet, who rolled up onto his left shoulder, quickly aimed the Richards at the man who was now on his right, as Prophet faced the front door and tripped a trigger.
The fist-sized spread of double-ought buck lifted the curly wolf two feet up off the floor while opening a pumpkin-sized hole in his belly and hurling him straight back through the busted-out window behind him.
Just like that, he was gone.
All that remained was his rifle, which clattered onto the floor at the base of the window through which he’d disappeared.
“Damnit!” a man shouted behind Prophet as boots thundered loudly. “What in the hell is—?”
Prophet swung around to see a man running down the stairs to the right of the short plank bar ahead of Prophet and on his left. The man wore only his longhandles, hat, boots, and the cartridge belt he just then finished buckling around his broad, flat waist. The man stopped, eyes widening as he saw the big bounty hunter on the parlor area of the large, timbered room.
The man facing Prophet had long, stringy red hair and a broad, freckled, hairless face. He was maybe five foot seven, but he was nearly as wide as he was tall.
“Howdy, Weed!” Prophet bellowed, his voice echoing in the cavernous room. “How the hell has life been treating you, anyways?”
Brougham dropped his chin. His eyes turned dark. He was thinking through his options. He must have concluded he didn’t have many. He snatched the bone-handled hogleg from the holster hanging down his stout right thigh.
Before he could clear leather, Prophet said, “Damnit,” and tripped the Richards’s second trigger.
KA-BOOMMMMM!
Weed Brougham flew straight back against the stairs, which were already plastered with bloody bits of his heart, which the twelve-gauge buck had shredded as they’d punched the pieces out of his back, along with flesh and bone from his spine. He slammed against the steps with an indignant grunt, his body twisting around and then rolling wildly, limbs akimbo, all the way to the bottom.
Prophet tossed away the empty Richards and cursed again. He’d just lost five hundred dollars.
He’d heard footsteps on the balcony running along the second story on his right, hanging suspended above the first-floor parlor area. He grabbed his Peacemaker from the coat pocket he’d stuffed it into, for an easier reach, and swung his head to his left.
Two men were coming at him from opposite ends of the balcony—one from his left, one from his right. The one on his left had a Colt’s revolving rifle. The one on his right had a big-assed Buntline Special which he was just then cocking as he stopped, dropped to a knee, and rested the barrel on the edge of the balcony rail, narrowing an eye as he aimed down into the parlor at Prophet.
Prophet vaulted off his heels and onto a table covered with coins, bottles, glasses, and playing cards. The Buntline followed him, chewing three lead slugs into the table, each one not more than three inches behind Prophet’s rolling torso. Cards and coins flew in all directions.
Lou rolled off the table and thumped to the floor on the other side, coming up with the Peacemaker talking in the only language it spoke:
Bang! Bang! Bang-Bang!
Both the Buntline and the man who’d been wielding it tumbled straight forward over the balcony rail. The man turned a forward somersault and then landed crossways on the fainting couch, behind which Prophet had just a seen a girl pull her head, her eyes wide and frightened. The man’s back snapped like several dry twigs under a heavy foot and he lay groaning as he died fast but hard.
Prophet had seen the second shooter, the hardtail with the rifle, out of the corner of his left eye. The man had snaked the rifle over the balcony rail. Prophet pulled his head down under the table as the rifle thundered twice, blasting two big holes through the table and scattering what cards and coins Prophet hadn’t disperse
d when he’d rolled across it.
When the Colt had fallen silent, the bounty hunter thrust the Peacemaker above the table, narrowing one eye as he aimed down the still-smoking barrel. The man with the rifle, big and shaggy and clad in only a bear claw necklace and longhandles, widened his eyes a quarter second before Prophet’s .45 round blew away his right temple. The big, shaggy man flew back against the wall of vertical, unfinished pine planks behind him, gave a guttural rattling sigh, then slid slowly down the wall to sit on his butt on the balcony floor.
He tipped his chin to his left shoulder then rolled over onto that side as though he’d just gotten the notion it was time for a badly needed nap.
Prophet looked both ways down the upper-floor balcony. No more movement.
In fact, there appeared no more movement anywhere in the building. At least, nowhere he could see it or hear it.
The only sounds were the fire in the stove in the middle of the room and the wind moaning through the broken windows. A man’s agonized voice said softly, “My face . . . my face . . . the devil shot my face . . .”
Prophet rose.
Quickly, continuing to look around the big, lofty room, at the stairs at the rear and at the second-story balcony above, he flicked open the Peacemaker’s loading gate. He shook out the spent cartridges then reached under his coat for five fresh loads from his cartridge belt. He thumbed the bullets into the chambers, closed the loading gate, and spun the cylinder.
It made a sound like an angry rattlesnake.
He walked over toward the window to the right of the open front door. The man he’d shot in that window lay on the floor at the window’s base. He wore a shabby, mismatched suit and two pistols on his hips. He was in his late twenties with short, dark red hair and a hooked nose. He’d been trying to grow a beard with little success.
He writhed on his back, clamping both his bloody hands over his bloody right cheek.
Prophet pressed the Peacemaker’s barrel against the hardcase’s left, closed eye. “How ’bout I shoot you on the other side, make ya even?” He clicked the hammer back. “Where’s Hatchley?”
Blood at Sundown Page 13
