“Je-zuzzz!” he exclaimed.
One of the other drummers laughed softly, derisively.
Vink dropped his quirley and closed his right hand over the Colt on the table. Louisa slapped him again, harder, and he spun the Colt across the table. It dropped over the side and hit the floor with a thud.
Vink glared up at her, a bright red welt blossoming high on his left cheek. The blow had knocked his hat off, and his hair hung in his eyes. Mose and Nasty Ralph, also glaring up at Louisa, had dropped their hands beneath the table. She smiled down at them in bald challenge, holding both her hands straight down over her holstered Colts.
Both men’s faces slackened. They glanced at each other sheepishly then slowly lifted their hands above the table, resting them on the cards and coins piled before them. They sat in their chairs, heads hanging like those of cowed schoolboys.
Louisa returned her gaze to Vink. “If you so much as look at Mrs. Emory again, I will shoot you through your heart.” She arched a brow. “Understand?”
Vink only stared at her, the corner of one eye twitching.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Keeping her face to the man as well as to Mose and Nasty Ralph, Louisa backed over to her own table then sagged into her chair, where she could keep all three hardcases in full view. Louisa glanced at Yardley. He smiled. Mrs. Emory sat looking as stricken as before, hunched as if chilled.
When Toni had brought two mugs of tea and a bottle, Louisa popped the cork and splashed a little whiskey into each mug.
“I thought you didn’t drink the hard stuff,” Yardley said, lifting his own shot glass to his lips.
“Cold night,” Louisa said.
She slid one of the mugs toward the banker’s wife, who sat to her right. “Here,” she said. “You need to drink this. It’ll warm you some, make you feel better.”
Louisa was surprised when the woman turned to her slowly and seemed to meet Louisa’s gaze directly. She studied Louisa for a time and then her lips moved for several seconds before any words came out.
“Is . . . is . . . my . . . husband . . . dead . . . ?” She’d asked the question barely loudly enough to be heard above the wind and the fire in the stove as well as the low rumble of conversation that had risen in the room now on the lee side of the Vengeance Queen’s slap down of Ray Vink.
Louisa shared a quick look with Yardley, sitting across the table from her. Then they both returned their mildly surprised gazes to the woman.
“Yes,” Louisa said. “But everything is going to be all right.”
The woman looked down at her steaming tea and slowly shook her head. “No, it’s not.”
Louisa didn’t have a reply to that, so she said nothing. She just sat slowly sipping her tea laced with whiskey while Yardley sat across from her, nursing his own drink.
Finally, he looked across the table at Louisa once more and said, “You needn’t be embarrassed, you know.”
Louisa glanced at Mrs. Emory to her right. The woman seemed preoccupied with her tea, holding it in both her hands close to her chest and taking small, frequent, but tentative sips. Louisa hoped it would put her to sleep soon and give her some relief from her angst. When it did, Louisa would take her upstairs, to her own room.
Louisa turned back to Yardley. “I’m not embarrassed.” Of course it was a lie, but she found it impossible to talk about her past with anyone but Lou Prophet, damn his big, roguish Confederate hide, anyway.
Yardley gave her a warm smile and reached across the table to place his hand on hers. He squeezed it gently. The warmth of his supple flesh was like a lightning bolt that shot right to her heart. She looked at the man smiling at her from the other side of the table, and then she could hardly see him through the tears in her eyes.
What the hell was happening to her?
She tried to pull her hand away, but he squeezed it all the tighter. Leaning across the table, he said, “There’s no shame in being human, Louisa.”
She felt a tear dribble down from her right eye to roll coolly along her nose to the corner of her mouth. Self-consciously, she looked around the room and found Vink looking over his shoulder again at the banker’s wife. The man’s dark eyes seemed to be boring into the stricken woman, who sat near Louisa, lifting her mug with quivering hands to her lips.
Reading the thoughts going through Vink’s small, mean, stupid mind, understanding that the savage brute smelled weakness and opportunity in the woman whose husband had been so brutally taken from her not yet an hour ago, the sorrow that had welled up in Louisa for her own family was automatically shunted into the raw, blazing fury she knew almost as well.
The Vengeance Queen pulled her hand out of Yardley’s. She quickly brushed the tear from her jaw, slid her chair back, and, heart pounding with iron-hot fury, she stood and closed her hand over the pearl grips of her right Colt.
“Vink!” she shouted.
The hardcase shunted his eyes from Mrs. Emory to Louisa, who slid her Colt from its holster and clicked the hammer back.
Vink’s eyes snapped wide. “Now, hold on!” He lurched up out of his chair and turned to face Louisa, hands up, palms out.
Louisa narrowed an eye and fired three times, drilling three neat, round holes into the blond hardcase’s chest, directly over his heart. The roar of her six-gun sounded like dynamite explosions, causing every man in the room, including Yardley, to leap to his feet, yelling.
Vink gave a shrill scream and flopped back atop the table on which he, Mose, and Nasty Ralph had been playing poker. Both men leaped to their feet, away from the man dying before them.
“Shit in a bucket!” shouted Nasty Ralph, jerking his fear-bright eyes to Louisa.
“Want some?” Louisa shouted back at him.
Nasty Ralph thrust his hands high above his head and dropped his chin to his chest. “Nope! No, ma’am, I don’t!”
Louisa slid her Colt toward Mose. He threw his hands in the air and shouted, “Same!”
Keeping her Colt raised, Louisa looked around the room through the thick cloud of her own pungent powder smoke. The three drummers looked as though they’d each swallowed a snake. Toni stood behind the bar, a ragged towel draped over her shoulder, arms crossed on her chest. She stared at the dead hardcase with ironically arched brows, sucking her lower lip.
Turning to Louisa, she said, “She does clean the rats out of a place.”
Closer by, Yardley stared at Louisa with a vague apprehension, as if he half feared she was going to keep her pistols dancing, emptying both her six-guns into the men around the room. Mrs. Emory sat to Louisa’s right, staring up at the gun-handy blonde in glassy-eyed disbelief, stretching her lips slightly back from her teeth, holding her tea mug up close against her chest.
Slowly, Louisa lowered her smoking pistol.
Silence hung like a pall over the room. A log dropped through the stove’s grate with a thump.
Outside, the wind moaned. The walls creaked against it.
Boots thumped on the front stoop—clumsy, scuffing sounds. The door opened. Louisa raised her Colt again, swung it toward where Edgar Clayton stumbled into the saloon, grunting and groaning. He dropped to his knees, panting, leaving the door standing wide behind him, the wind blowing a mare’s tail of snow over him.
“Clayton!”
Yardley ran over to where the rancher knelt, holding one hand to his head. In his other, gloved hand he held his rifle. Yardley closed the door on the wind and snow and dropped to a knee beside the rancher.
“What the hell happened, Clayton?” the captain asked the man.
Clayton dropped his rifle and raised his head, a gash in his temple dribbling blood around his eye and into his bearded cheek.
Breathing hard and stretching his lips back from his teeth in a grimace, Clayton raised his head and bellowed, “Ramsay Willis!”
Louisa hurried over to him, dropped to a knee. “Where, Clayton? Where’s Willis?”
Just then more heavy footsteps sounded from the
rear of the room. Louisa turned quickly, bringing her Colt around and cocking it. She eased the tension in her trigger finger.
Another familiar figure had just entered the room, moving up along the stairway from the room’s rear. Morris Tutwiler shambled toward the bar. The draft through the open rear door behind the stairs was wreaking havoc with the lamps.
The barman was breathing even harder than Clayton. With each ragged breath, he puffed out his quivering lips. His face was mottled red, and his eyes were bright with misery.
As he neared the large bloodstain marking where Del Rainy had lain dead only a little over an hour before, Tutwiler stopped. He lifted his chin, throwing his bald head back and loosing a grizzly-like bellowing wail that echoed around the cavelike room. He hooked an arm behind himself as though to scratch his back.
The arm dropped to his side. He raised his other arm, pointing an accusatory finger toward Louisa, as though blaming the Vengeance Queen for the recent catastrophes. He tried to speak but the words gave way to another agonized wail.
The arm dropped and then the big barman himself fell straight forward to hit the floor with a heavy thud, landing on his face.
“Good Lord!” cried one of the drummers, leaping back from his table and closing a hand over his mouth in horror.
Toni looked down at Tutwiler and screamed.
Then Louisa, standing with Yardley at the other end of the room, saw it, too.
Angling like a pump handle up from Tutwiler’s back, a hatchet handle jutted out from the steel head embedded in the big man’s spine.
Chapter 26
Despite having been ridden hard and put up wet, as the saying went, Prophet was awake if not at dawn’s first blush, then at least at its broadening grin.
He rose, groaning against the stiffness in his muscles and bones, his bewitching tussle with the countess seeming nothing more than a half-waking dream now in its aftermath, and took a quick, frigid bath from the slushy water left in the pitcher on his washstand. He didn’t bother with a fire in the little monkey stove in the corner. It would no sooner start heating up the wintry air in which his breath frosted plainly, than he’d be pulling his picket pin.
He cut loose with more than a few blue curses when that cold, cold water—so cold that he’d had to bust through the frozen rime on top with his Colt’s butt—hit his extremities. Panting and wheezing against the chilling misery, he vowed for one last time to never let himself get caught in Dakota Territory again after, say, the Fourth of July.
If he were fool enough to ever again let money, even money as good as that which the Hatchley bunch had on their ugly heads, lead him north of, say, the North Platte River.
He dressed in his several layers of cold-weather attire, tied his Stetson to his head with his moth-eaten, mouse-chewed green muffler, and gathered his gear. The Richards hanging down his back by its leather lanyard, his saddlebags draped over his left shoulder, his Winchester secure in his right hand, he stepped out into the hall filled with the night’s lingering shadows.
As he stepped lightly toward the stairs, he could hear men from the countess’s party stretching and groaning behind closed doors, murmuring in their odd, barbaric-sounding tongue. He flashed on the image of the countess herself, still curled in slumber beneath her loving quilts. He recalled several blissful seconds of their own primitive struggle, and groaned.
He made his way to the stairs and stopped above the first step. He’d heard a door latch click behind him. He started to turn his head to one side, to see along the murky corridor, but then the latch clicked softly again as the door was furtively closed.
Prophet frowned into the hall’s dingy shadows.
The countess?
Or her doting friend Rawdney Fair weather?
With a dismissive grunt, the bounty hunter strode down the stairs and bulled his way out the main door and into the blistering cold of a new Dakota morning. The pale sky looked as clear as a dawn mountain lake. That meant the cold would likely be even more intense than the previous night.
There would probably be no more snow, but that cold scratching his cheeks like coarse sandpaper was a bitch on high red wheels. He’d almost prefer the snow. Then, again, in Dakota you never had to name your poison. You’d get a good dose of whatever the crotchety Dakota gods were passing out at any given time.
In summer, it was mosquitoes as large as horseshoes, ticks as large as tarantulas, and mile-wide cyclones that could drop out of a sickly yellow sky, pluck a man up in their devilish arms, and hurl him along with a whole herd of cattle all the way to Canada.
It was a hell of a place any day of the whole damn year!
Prophet hailed a boy in a torn coat and immigrant hat tramping past the saloon and holding a snow shovel, and offered him a dollar to fetch his horse over to the jail office.
“Careful, though, he’s mean as a snake, son, and that’s the god-awful truth!”
When the boy had pocketed the silver coin and run off in the direction of the livery barn, feeling as rich as Jay Gould, Prophet tramped north along the snowy street. He followed his own ghostly breath, the devilish Jack Frost chomping down on his nose.
He walked a block and saw Marshal Coffer standing on the freshly swept boardwalk fronting his jail office, staring toward the northwest. The marshal was all bundled up in his big blanket coat and mittens, his high-crowned Stetson tied down on his head like Prophet’s, with a muffler knotted beneath his chin.
“Good morning, Marshal Coffer,” the bounty hunter greeted the older man, wheezing against the cold as he drew up before the squat, stone jailhouse from the tin stovepipe of which a skein of gray smoke unfurled. “Out enjoying the soft spring zephyrs, are you? Is that agave blooms I’m smelling, or do I just need a stiff shot of tequila to remind me the devil has done called me home to his frozen-over hell?”
Turned away from Prophet, scouring the northwestern sky as though for geese to shoot, Coffer said, “Your prisoner is still sawing logs in yonder. I tried to wake him but he told me to do something to myself I truly wish I could now that my bed is once more empty and likely will be from here on in.”
“Women are overrated, Sheldon. Don’t you know that?”
“Easy for you to say.”
“You need to join me on my journey to Mexico. I’ll introduce you to some young ladies I know down that way.”
“They’d kill me.”
“But what a way to go!”
Coffer turned to Prophet, the marshal’s cheeks rosy above his gray-streaked beard. His face was drawn, his eyes red-rimmed. He’d likely just hauled himself out of his lonely mattress sack, his feet hard as rocks.
He smiled insinuatingly. “How’d you sleep, Lou? Surely, you must have found some harlot to curl your toes.”
Prophet hadn’t thought it possible, but his cheeks actually warmed with chagrin. “It’s too cold to palaver out here. Let’s get inside and wake Hatchley from his beauty sleep—if he’s still alive, that is. I got a train to catch, and . . .”
He let his voice trail off when Coffer turned his back to him to stare straight north along the street. Following the lawman’s gaze, Prophet saw horseback riders just now enter the town, materializing gradually from the dawn’s misty shadows. There were three of them, and they were all riding spotted ponies—two pintos and a paint.
As the trio drew closer, Prophet saw that the riders were decidedly dark-skinned and hawk-nosed. They wore hand-sewn robes stitched together from trade blankets. Long, coal black hair drooped from thick fur hats. Deer hide, fur-trimmed moccasins rose to their knees. The pintos were not outfitted with leather saddles but only blankets, and the bridles were fashioned from rope.
Indians.
“What the hell?” Prophet said.
Coffer glanced at him, saw him lower his Winchester from his right shoulder.
“Easy, Lou. They’re Sioux. Cut-Heads. Hell by the half pound at one time, but they’ve had their horns filed.”
Prophet looked at the raised Winch
ester in his hand then returned it to his shoulder. “Old habits die hard,” he said with chagrin.
“That first man there—the old one,” Coffer said, returning his gaze to the three Indians now approaching on their slow-walking mounts, the lead rider craggy faced and with gray liberally streaking the hair flowing out from under his rabbit fur hat. “He was once a chief, before his people were hazed onto the reserve at Fort Totten. Now he’s just a pathetic old beggar, like the rest of them.”
Coffer’s face broadened with a toothy smile as the old man angled toward him, his pinto’s hooves thudding in the fresh snow. “Good morning, Leaps High! What brings you out in such cold?”
The old man, his face like a dried-up raisin, his nose like a sharp-tipped, crooked stick poking out from beneath the brim of his fur hat, cracked a wry grin of his own, showing a single front tooth—a badly chipped one, at that. “Just ’cause it’s cold don’t mean the people don’t eat.” He glanced at the dead bobcat lying slack across his horse’s rump behind him. “Trapped that one there. Gonna take him over to Ripley, see what he’ll give me for him. Need coffee, molasses for sweet. Good winter hide.” He patted the bobcat behind him. “Make warm hat!”
As the two other, younger Indians reined up behind Leaps High, one of them jumped down from his saddle, grinning broadly, brown eyes flashing in the growing dawn light. He was a slender lad in his late teens, but the folly in his eyes bespoke a squishy thinker box. He jogged up onto the stoop before Coffer, laughing as he removed his thick, rabbit fur mitten and extended his bare hand to the marshal.
He laughed as though at the funniest joke he’d ever heard.
“Hello there, Little Fawn,” Coffer said, chuckling as he removed his own glove to shake the young man’s hand. “How are you this crisp winter morning? Still like to shake, do you? All right . . . there you go. I’ll shake your hand.”
Shaking the laughing youngster’s hand, Coffer winked over his shoulder at Prophet. “Little Fawn loves to shake hands. Learned it from us white folks. The gesture is totally foreign to him, as to most Indians, and he thinks it’s as funny as a fart in church. Can’t get enough of it.”
Blood at Sundown Page 21
