“Ah, shit!” The big, severe-looking woman who’d been playing the flat, boardlike stringed instrument downstairs had cut a rather imposing figure. She had not looked like a woman who would take lightly the compromising of her niece’s honor. Especially not by a hard-tailed western bounty hunter!
In a flash, Prophet saw himself being held down by a half-dozen big Russian Cossacks while Aunt Sonya beat him silly with her gusli . . . or whatever Tatiana had called it.
Several pairs of boots pounded the stairs, growing louder as what sounded like the countess’s entire party—a whole posse of Cossacks—was thundering toward Prophet’s room in which he’d just despoiled their young charge, the countess.
I’ll be damned, Prophet silently reflected, staring at the door shuddering in its frame from the resonations of the thundering herd rushing toward it, toward him. I survived the War of Northern Aggression and a dozen years bounty hunting across the wild and woolly western frontier to be killed in Indian Butte by Russians for despoiling a countess.
“Them two Cossack friends of yours must’ve told your old man where they last seen you!” Prophet said, dropping his feet to the floor and reaching for the sawed-off Richards hanging from the near bedpost.
“I don’t think so.” Tatiana was on her knees on the bed, sitting back on her heels, staring anxiously at the door. “They would have been too embarrassed to tell my father what happened. They are likely cowering like dogs in their rooms!”
“Still . . .” Prophet rose from the bed, the sawed-off in his right hand. “He’ll turn this place inside out. He’ll find you sooner or later. I might have to shoot my way out of here. Don’t worry—I’ve done it before!”
“No, no!” Tatiana leaped off the bed and began climbing into her pantaloons. “I will crawl out a window, make my way to the ground. I will enter through the back door. I will tell Papa that I stepped out for some fresh air and got turned around. Don’t worry, Lou—if I told Papa I flew away to have a few quiet moments on the moon, he would believe me!”
She chuckled throatily as she grabbed her gown and the rest of her undergarments and shoes and padded toward the room’s single window.
“You can’t go out there, Tatiana!” Prophet glanced from the door to the girl then back again, the voices and the footsteps growing louder in the hall. He could feel the reverberations through the floorboards beneath his bare feet. “You know how cold it is out there! You’ll freeze your pretty little . . . not to mention your feet!”
“Cold? Hah! You have never been to Russia in the winter, Lou.”
“No, I haven’t. And if this cold is to scoff at, I reckon I never will, neither!”
The footsteps fell silent outside Prophet’s room.
A fist thundered on the bounty hunter’s door. “Prophet! Lou Prophet, are you in there, you scalawag?” It wasn’t a voice Prophet had heard before.
The countess drew a sharp breath through gritted teeth and cast her bright, anxious gaze at the door. To Prophet, she said just loudly enough for the bounty hunter to hear, “That’s the senator. Maybe you were right, Lou—Papa must have gotten Ivan and Dmitri to tell him where they last saw me!”
“Either that or that damnable Rawdney had his suspicions!”
The pounding came on the door again—three loud thuds, making the door leap in its frame. “Prophet?”
Wearing only her white cotton pantaloons, holding her shoes and gown in a large ball before her, the countess ran back to Prophet, rose up onto the tips of her toes, and kissed his cheek. “All will be well, Lou. Don’t you worry. I am as strong as a bear and lithe as a monkey!”
She kissed him again, giggled, apparently delighting in the excitement, then ran back to the window, which she’d already opened. Windblown snow slithered through the gap.
Three more hard whacks on the door. “Mr. Prophet, open this door or I will have it broken down!”
“Don’t break down my door, Senator!” the barman begged from farther off down the hall. “Doors don’t grow on trees around here. Hell, hardly any trees grow around here!”
The countess, perched on the sloping roof outside Prophet’s window, grinned through the window at him. She blew him a kiss then quietly closed the pane.
“Prophet!” came the voice of the senator’s nancy boy son, Rawdney. “We know you’re in there, Prophet. The barman told us. If you have the countess in there, you’d better not have harmed a hair on her head!”
The Russians were anxiously conferring in their own tongue around the senator and Rawdney Fairweather.
“Let her go, Prophet!” bellowed the senator. “Her father is right here, and if you’ve harmed that girl, I am going to leave you to the count’s men to do with as they see fit! It will not go well for you!”
“Oh, for chrissakes!” Prophet pulled on his longhandles and socks. As the senator and Rawdney and the Russians continued milling around outside his room, pounding on his door and threatening him, he buckled his Colt and cartridge belt around his waist and set his hat on his head. Somehow, the hat seemed to make up for his lack of pants, which he didn’t want to take the time to put on.
Besides, he wanted it to look as though they’d awakened him from a dead sleep.
“Hold on!” he bellowed, feigning a loud yawn. “Don’t get your bloomers in a twist, Senator. I’m comin’. You keep poundin’ on the door like that, you’re gonna turn it into toothpicks!”
He turned the key in the lock and slid the bolt free of the frame.
He opened the door just as the senator threw his fist at it once more, and the man stumbled forward into the room, bulling into Prophet. Prophet was an unmoving mountain. The senator, a foot shorter, bounced off him and stepped back into the hall, scowling up at the brawny bounty hunter clad in only longhandles, gun belt, socks, and hat.
Fair weather’s son flanked him on his right, drawing his father back by one arm.
The stocky, bearded old count stood to his left, glaring up at Prophet through a monocle.
Rawdney’s assistant, Leo, and a half-dozen big, bearded Russians in their crisp red uniform tunics and deerskin trousers stood behind the count, the senator, and Rawdney, looking like wild grizzlies fixing to bust out of an inadequate zoo cage.
“Let her go, you animal!” yelled the senator.
“You heard my father,” Rawdney intoned, holding a small, silver-plated, pearl-gripped over-and-under derringer in his beringed right fist, aimed at Prophet’s heart. “Let her go right now!” He bolted forward, poking his head into the room. “If you’ve hurt that girl, so help me!”
“Hold on, hold on!” Prophet said, holding up his hands, palm out. “Will someone please tell me what in the hell is goin’ on here? You woke me out of a dead sleep, and I got a big day tomorrow!”
Count Miranova stepped forward, monocle dangling by a thread from his left lapel, and cut loose with a tirade of gibberish the likes of which Prophet hadn’t heard since traveling through a mining town populated by Prussians in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado. This particular spiel was directed at him, along with a good deal of spit.
Prophet held up his hands again and shook his head. He cut the old Russian off with: “Friend, I don’t understand a word you’re sayin’, so you might as well save your gas!”
Again, Rawdney poked his head into Prophet’s room, sniffing like a dog. “What’s that I smell?” He sniffed again. “Why . . . why, that’s the countess’s smell, you mangy Southern dog! I’d recognize her fragrance anywhere!” The dandy stepped back and aimed the derringer up at Prophet’s head, hardening his jaws and brightening his eyes. “What have you done with her, you Confederate scalawag?”
“Did someone say my name?” It was the voice of the countess herself, rising from somewhere behind the knot of mostly large, uniformed, bearded men gathered before Prophet’s open door.
All heads turned as though on a swivel.
The old count exclaimed in his own language and pushed through the small crowd of big Cossac
ks, hurrying over to where the countess was just then padding along the hall, wearing her gown, arms crossed on her splendid bodice, shivering. Prophet was relieved to see that she’d put on her shoes. Russian or no Russian, even the countess’s toes would turn to stone after only a few minutes exposed to the frigid winds of Dakota Territory.
“Countess!” Rawdney yelled, and rushed over to stand with the pretty young woman and the count, who had just then taken his long-lost daughter into his arms, hugging her tightly and speaking in his guttural tongue that was all gibberish to the bounty hunter’s ears.
The senator and all the others rushed over to hover around the countess, also. After conversing with her father in their own harsh, nonsensical language, she turned to the senator and his dandified son to explain in broken English and in a pinched, frightened little girl’s voice, “I stepped out to get some air—I was so hot from dancing—and . . . and I must’ve gotten turned around.”
Tatiana’s gaze drifted fleetingly toward Prophet, who could have sworn a devilish little grin tugged at her mouth corners and flashed in her eyes.
Continuing, she said, “As I stepped out, there was a great gust of snow, and suddenly I found myself by the barn. The snow was so thick that I couldn’t find my way back, until . . . until . . . well, I don’t know how I managed it. I guess the snow cleared, and I saw the lights in the windows, and—”
“Oh, thank heavens, Countess!” exclaimed the senator, placing a relieved hand on the girl’s arm. “However you managed to make it back, we’re all soooo glad you did. The snow can get quite thick up here at times.”
The count turned his wizened head to yell down the hall. Presently, the stout woman whom Prophet had seen downstairs bounded out of a room at the hall’s far end. The count yelled again in Russian, and Aunt Sonya, the countess’s rain barrel–shaped chaperone, returned to her room before bounding back out a few seconds later, this time with a thick quilt in her arms. She’d obviously been crying; her fat cheeks were red and swollen.
She’d thought the countess had been gobbled up by the big bounty hunter and spat to the wolves.
Cooing and clucking and pattering in Russian, breathless, the big woman rushed over to where the countess stood shivering with her father, the senator, and Rawdney. Meanwhile, Leo and the Cossacks, who saw that their assistance was no longer required, drifted off down the stairs to the saloon’s main drinking hall, muttering and chuckling among themselves.
Prophet had seen by the brightness of the men’s eyes that they were all, to a man, pie-eyed. Headed as they were back to the saloon, they were apparently in no hurry to sober up despite the lateness of the hour.
They were on vacation, after all . . .
The gently cajoling aunt Sonya wrapped the countess in the quilt, picked the girl up in her stout arms, ordered the men out of her way, and hustled down the hall toward Tatiana’s room. As they passed Prophet, the countess turned toward the big bounty hunter still standing in his open doorway. She gave him a furtive wink and pooched her rosebud lips out in a fleeting kiss before she was hustled away in her aunt’s suety arms.
When the pair had disappeared into a room next door to Aunt Sonya’s, the senator patted the count’s back in relieved congratulations and, conversing jauntily, chuckling and wagging their heads, the older men drifted back down the stairs and likely to a couple of hot toddies.
Rawdney Fairweather, however, remained.
The priggish little mucky-muck turned toward Prophet, looked the bigger man up and down, critically, disdainfully, then sauntered toward him, swaggering a little on the heels of his black, high-topped, fur-lined riding boots. Again, he poked his head into Prophet’s room, sniffed.
He turned to Prophet, who stared dubiously down at him.
“Don’t think I don’t know what went on here, Mr. Prophet.” Fair weather jabbed two fingers against the bounty hunter’s chest. “And don’t think your taking advantage of the countess, an innocent and romantic young woman in a foreign land, will go unpunished.” He jabbed Prophet again, wrinkling his nose and narrowing his priggish little eyes.
Prophet sighed.
“Rawdney,” he said, “let me share some words of rarefied wisdom once expressed by none other than my dear old mother, Ma Prophet, her ownself, may her wise and lovely soul rest in peace.”
“Oh, please, do share your mother’s words of wisdom, Mr. Prophet!” Rawdney said, snickering.
“‘Never dance in a graveyard,’” Prophet recited. “‘And never mess with a Prophet!’”
With that, he rammed the first two fingers of his right hand against Rawdney’s chest, sending the little dandy stumbling backward with a startled grunt. Lou slammed his door, locked it, skinned out of his hat, gun, boots, and socks, and went to bed.
Chapter 24
Louisa followed the tracks of Edgar Clayton down off the saloon’s front porch and into the street. It wasn’t snowing hard, but the hard-blowing wind was quickly filling in Clayton’s tracks, dark dimples in the freshly fallen snow angling across the street.
She followed the tracks through the snow that was around three or four inches deep. It wasn’t the snow that made for hard going. It was the brutally cold wind. In fact, as she peered up at the sky, she could see the dull glow of a pale moon between thinning, parting clouds. The snow would likely cease soon, but Louisa had grown up in the Midwest—albeit farther south, in Nebraska—and from that she knew that savagely cold temperatures often followed a storm.
The wind made the cold doubly bad.
She followed Clayton’s path between two buildings on the north side of the street. The man’s tracks led out behind the buildings and then angled again to the right, toward where a lone, two-story house with a peaked roof sat near a small barn and stable—vaguely outlined against the dark, stormy sky brushed with pale moonlight. As Louisa headed toward the house, a man’s ragged breaths sounded behind her as did the crunching of running footsteps.
Louisa wheeled, taking her rifle in both hands, and quickly racked a round into the action.
The man heading toward her—an inky silhouette against the paleness of the snow lit by the feeble moon—stopped suddenly and raised his gloved hands. “Captain Yardley!”
Louisa lowered the rifle, turned, and continued striding toward the house. Yardley ran up beside her and kept pace with her. She could hear him breathing beneath the wind; she could hear her own ragged breaths, as well.
“You don’t need to be out here, Captain,” Louisa said. “It’s not your game.”
“It’s not yours, either.”
“Yes, it is.”
Yardley looked at her and she looked back at him. She couldn’t read his expression in the darkness but saw only the shimmer of the moonlight in his eyes beneath his thick, dark brows.
Louisa stopped and turned to him. He stopped, too, facing her, his pale breath frosting around his head upon which he wore a round hat made of the same fur as his coat.
“If you’re out here to impress me, you’re wasting your time. It’s not going to happen. We’re not going to happen. Not tonight.”
Yardley flashed his perfect white teeth in a smile, chuckling. “You flatter yourself, Miss Bonaventure. You’re not the only one concerned about justice, you know.”
Louisa wasn’t sure how to respond to that. So she didn’t. She merely turned and continued following Clayton’s dwindling tracks in the snow. She was baffled by the man’s behavior. Most men had ulterior motives. If Yardley did not, he was a rare breed, indeed. She shook her head, ridding her mind of the useless reflections. She had more important things to think about.
Just as she broke into a jog, Clayton’s voice sounded beneath the howling wind, from dead ahead: “Ramsay?” A pause, then: “Ramsay Willis?”
Louisa stopped. She and Yardley shared a look. Louisa broke into a run again, and the captain did, as well.
As Louisa approached the house, which sat sideways to her, she could see a shadowy figure standing behind it. The fi
gure moved off toward the barn and the stable to Louisa’s left, flanking the house, which was a modest, brick, two-story affair. Small and tight but stately, with dormer windows and a shake-shingled roof. Just the kind of house a small-town banker would own.
The figure stopped. Clayton appeared to lower his head slightly and tip it to one side. He raised his rifle.
“Ramsay?” he called, the words ripped by the wind. “I know you’re out here, Ramsay Willis!”
The rifle in Clayton’s hands flashed, stabbing flames in the direction of the barn. The report reached Louisa’s ears a quarter second later, sounding little louder than a twig snapping beneath the moaning, rushing wind.
Louisa quickened her pace. As she drew within twenty or so yards of the rancher, she yelled, “What are you shooting at, Mr. Clayton?”
The man turned to her. His voice was shrill, hoarse with emotion. “I seen him! I seen Ramsay Willis! He just ran around behind the barn.”
“How do you know it was him?”
“Don’t you worry—I know! You best go in and see to the woman. I’ll get Ramsay. He’s mine. He murdered Rose. He’s all mine!”
Louisa looked around for tracks in the snow. The only ones she could make out were Clayton’s own. Yardley ran up behind her as Clayton ran off toward the barn.
“Where’s he going?” the captain asked Louisa, raising his voice above the wind.
“He thinks he saw Willis run behind the barn. Why don’t you check it out? I’ll go inside and see how the banker’s wife is doing.”
Yardley nodded and reached under his coat for a long-barreled Colt Navy revolver. “Right!”
As he jogged off after Clayton, Louisa walked over to the house’s back door. Firewood was stacked five feet high against the back wall. More lay farther out from the wall. That stack, twenty feet long, was covered with several tarpaulins. Between the two stacks of wood was what appeared to be a chopping block now mantled with snow. Near the small wooden porch angling down from the back door were several deep scuff-marks that the wind had not yet filled in with snow.
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