Blood at Sundown

by Peter Brandvold

  When Little Fawn had pumped Coffer’s hand up and down a good dozen times, giggling like a schoolgirl, he pulled his hand away from Coffer and then leaped down off the stoop to stand before Prophet, bare hand extended. He stared up at the tall bounty hunter, slitted eyes flashing delightedly, spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth as he laughed.

  “Go on, Lou,” Coffer urged. “Shake his hand.”

  Prophet switched the Winchester to his left hand, bit off his mitten and inside glove, and closed his hand around the small, russet, femininely delicate hand extended toward him.

  “All right,” Prophet said, chuckling a little with embarrassment as he let the strange Indian boy pump his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Little Fawn. Yes, sir . . . damn tootin’.”

  Little Fawn laughed and laughed . . . and laughed . . . and when he finally had enough of pumping the bounty hunter’s big paw, he ran off to the west and mounted the boardwalk where the barber was sweeping snow from the steps of his stoop and shook hands with the barber, too, laughing his fool head off. When he was done with the barber, he ran laughing across the street to where a man was splitting wood out front of the land office.

  Smiling after the boy, Leaps High urged his horse east along the street, saying, “Good day, Marshal.” He nodded to Prophet as he passed, and he and the other young man—this one taller and older than Little Fawn, and sober as a judge—angled over toward the mercantile just beyond where Little Fawn was pumping the hand of the man who’d been splitting wood.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever look at a handshake in quite the same way again.” Chuckling, Prophet mounted the jailhouse stoop and stomped the snow from his boots. “Well, I reckon I’ll be takin’ my prisoner off your hands, Marshal.”

  “I’ll be sad to see him go.”

  Chuckling wryly, Coffer followed Prophet into the small, stone building warmed nicely by a small potbelly stove standing near the front wall, thumping and fluttering softly, flames dancing behind the soot-stained glass in the iron door. The musty place boasted a battered desk, a map of the county on one wall, and three steel cages running along the back.

  Loud, guttural snores sounded from the middle cell in which Gritch Hatchley lay belly down, one arm and one leg hanging down off the side of his iron-framed cot toward the stone floor. The outlaw’s long hair was thrown back behind his right ear, revealing the small, silver stud in the lobe. A whiskey bottle lay overturned on the floor near his dangling hand, which bore the tattoo of what appeared to be a butterfly.

  Prophet snorted. He wouldn’t have taken Hatchley for a nature lover.

  “Damn, that heat feels good!” Prophet leaned his rifle against the wall. He set his saddlebags on the floor and turned to the stove, jerking off his mittens. He tossed the mittens and gloves down with his saddlebags and held his hands out to the stove, the soothing warmth pushing against him, battling out the cold and thawing the ice chunks he imagined floating in his veins as in a snowmelt mountain stream in the springtime.

  He glanced over his shoulder at Hatchley. “Come on, Gritch. Rise an’ shine, ole son. You’ve done been invited to a necktie party down in Bismarck.” The bounty hunter winked at Coffer, who was hanging his hat on a tree by his desk. “Don’t wanna be late. This one’s bein’ held in your very own honor, don’t ya know!”

  He and Coffer chuckled.

  Hatchley stopped snoring. He smacked his lips, muttered, “Go ’way. I’m sleepin’.” The snores resumed.

  Prophet gave a wry snicker then grabbed a tin coffee cup from a shelf on the wall near the stove. He winked at Coffer again then tramped over to Hatchley’s cage and raked the cup across the door, drawing it back and forth across the iron bands several times, lifting a ringing racket while bellowing, “Wakey, wakey, little one! Time to rise and shine an’ meet the train that’s gonna haul your worthless ass to the hangman, Gritch!”

  Chapter 27

  Hatchley lifted his head and bellowed as though someone were prodding the stab wound near his groin with a glowing hot poker. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop that infernal racket, Prophet, you crazy rebel son of Satan!”

  Prophet lowered the cup to his side. “Just tryin’ to get your attention, Gritch. Haul your bloomers!”

  Hatchley turned his head to glare over his shoulder, dark eyes glistening with fury. “Go to hell! I’m gonna stay right here an’ sleep till I feel well enough to travel. And that, you dog-diddlin’ rebel devil, is that!”

  He laid his head back down on his pillow. He closed his eyes and smacked his lips.

  Prophet sighed. He turned to where Sheldon Coffer lounged back in his swivel chair, grinning with his hands locked behind his head.

  Prophet extended his hand to the marshal, palm up. “Key, Sheldon?”

  Ten minutes later, Gritch Hatchley bounded through the open jailhouse door like a mortar round from a cannon’s maw. His hands cuffed before him, he stumbled across the stoop and down the steps and into the street, where he dropped and rolled, yelling like a gut-shot renegade Comanche.

  He turned his head toward Prophet, his right eye red and swollen from its recent introduction to the butt end of Prophet’s Colt. As the bounty hunter stepped through the door behind him, Hatchley assaulted Lou with a fresh string of curses ribald enough to make the ears of even a ten-cent doxie turn as red as liquid steel.

  The boy who stood near the base of the stoop, holding the reins of Mean and Ugly, lowered his shocked eyes to the ground and blushed. He lifted his gaze to Prophet and said, “Did your mother really . . . really—?”

  “Don’t listen to him, boy,” Prophet said, dropping down the steps to where Hatchley remained cursing in the street. He shoved his rifle into his saddle scabbard. “This one’s bad. As bad as they come. Thank you mighty kindly for fetchin’ my broom-tailed hayburner for me. I hope he didn’t nip you none.” He hoisted the howling outlaw to his feet. “If he did, I’m purely sorry. That hoss is the animal version of this man, I’m afraid. As mean as a striped snake crossed with a scorpion!”

  The boy turned to Mean and Ugly and, backing away cautiously while caressing his right shoulder with his mittened hand, said, “He’s still got some green in him, don’t he?”

  He swung around and ran eastward along the street, probably heading off to the snow shoveling job he’d been heading toward when Prophet had waylaid him.

  Mean watched the boy, owlishly twitching his ears.

  Prophet shoved Hatchley against the saddled cayuse. “Mount up or I’ll give you another big, wet kiss with my .45!”

  Hatchley leaned against the saddle, sobbing. “You’re a devil, Prophet!”

  “So I been told.”

  “I think you opened up my wound again. I’m bleedin’, damnit! I can’t climb up onto this hoss, you crazy fool!”

  Prophet rapped the barrel of his Colt against the back of the outlaw’s head. It was a glancing blow. Still, Hatchley howled. “Oh, now you’ve really hurt me!”

  “Get up there!”

  Yowling and sobbing, the outlaw hooked his cuffed hands around the saddle horn. He tried several times to poke his left boot into the stirrup, hopping on his right foot. Finally, he stuck his boot into the stirrup and pulled his thick bulk into the leather, the horse giving an angry whinny as the weight of the foreign rider settled on his back.

  He turned his ugly head to get a look at Hatchley, showing his large, ivory teeth, like an angry cur.

  “Easy now, Mean,” Prophet said, holding the horse’s reins taut in his left fist. “Can’t you see this poor soul is injured?” He chuckled.

  “Here you go, Proph,” Coffer said, and tossed the bounty hunter’s saddlebags from the stoop.

  Prophet caught the bags with his free hand and slung them up over Mean’s rump, behind Hatchley, who was crouched over the horn, grunting and cursing.

  “See you later, Sheldon!” Prophet said, waving at Coffer as he pointed Mean and Ugly eastward, in the direction of the train station.

  “Not if I see you first!”
Coffer chuckled as he strode back into his warm office and closed the door.

  “Yeah, I get that a lot,” Prophet said, laughing as he tramped down the street, Mean and Ugly clomping along behind him, Gritch Hatchley moaning as he hunkered over the saddle horn.

  “Stop your caterwauling, Gritch,” Prophet admonished the outlaw. “Such carryin’s-on ain’t seemly in a man of your stature!”

  “Diddle yourself !”

  Prophet wagged his head. “Such language.”

  As he approached the hotel looming on his left, the front door opened and none other than the countess Tatiana Miranova stepped out onto the broad front porch, speaking quietly in Russian to someone remaining inside the hotel behind her. She moved out onto the porch, drawing the door closed, and turned to the street.

  Prophet’s heart warmed at seeing the beautiful young lady again, cloaked in a heavy black fur coat with matching fur hat on her lovely, black-eyed head. He also felt his cheeks flush a little with embarrassment over their carnal doings of only a few hours earlier. As her eyes found him leading his horse with the grunting outlaw on its back, Prophet pinched his hat brim to her.

  “A hearty good morning to you, Countess!”

  She stepped up to the porch rail, her rich lips shaping a delighted smile. “A hearty good morning to you, as well, Mr. Prophet.” She glanced furtively behind her, chuckling throatily, then turned to him once more and said, “How did you sleep?”

  Prophet gave a choking laugh as he continued tramping along the snowy street, feeling more warm blood congeal in his cheeks. “Not well at all, not well at all.”

  “No,” the countess said, smiling broadly. “Me, neither!”

  Prophet glanced at the fine wagon with its caved-in roof still sitting in front of the hotel, tongue drooping into the snow. “Oh, uh, once again I sure am sorry about your wheels there.”

  “That’s all right.” The countess chuckled throatily, glancing furtively behind her once more before leaning toward Prophet and smiling alluringly. “You made up for it!” She winked at him.

  Prophet was about to bid her a nice trip home to Russia but then the door behind her opened, and her father the count and the senator and several beefy, bearded, fur-clad Cossacks clomped out onto the porch behind her.

  Tatiana turned to them, and Prophet scowled and swung away, heading over to the livery barn where he spent the next fifteen minutes saddling the five dead outlaws’ horses and then tying the dead outlaws over their horses’ saddled backs. Bidding the somewhat sheepish-acting Pop Schofield adieu, Prophet and Hatchley were once more on their way to the train station, Prophet leading both Mean and Ugly and the lead horse of the five-horse pack team.

  As his boots crunched in the new snow, the bounty hunter stared straight west toward the wooden depot building that sat roughly two hundred yards from the edge of Indian Butte, the tracks curving toward it from over Prophet’s left shoulder, along the south edge of the town, to curve away again on his right, heading southwest toward Bismarck.

  The station appeared little more than a small brown box from this distance, with the dark caterpillar of the train itself slouched on its far side. A finger of gray smoke rose from the stovepipe poking up from the station’s shake-shingled roof. Darker smoke unfurled from the diamond-shaped stack of the black iron locomotive sitting ahead of the tender car. Apparently, the engineer and fireman were heating up the boiler in anticipation of the journey south.

  South. Oh, what a lovely word!

  Ahead, several horses and men were gathered near a couple of winter-naked trees along the trail between the town and the train station, in a swale in the otherwise featureless prairie. One of the men was crouched slightly forward, like a photographer over his camera. But then Prophet saw the man wasn’t taking a photograph. No, he was crouched over what appeared to be a rifle mounted on a tripod, its barrel aimed north, to Prophet’s right.

  Judging by his diminutive stature and garish attire, the man crouched over the rifle appeared to be the senator’s foppish son, Rawdney.

  Prophet could hear Rawdney speaking to the others gathered around him, for sounds carried well in the crisp, infernally cold, post-storm air. Besides, Rawdney’s voice was raised. He was boasting about his prized sporting rifle to the Russians and his assistant, Leo, gathered around him, admiring the long-barreled, fancily carved piece bristling atop its brass tripod.

  As the bounty hunter continued striding forward, Mean and Ugly matching his stride, Hatchley groaning atop the horse’s back, Rawdney crouched over the rifle again. The others stepped slightly back from Rawdney and the gun, tensing slightly, staring off toward the northwest in expectant anticipation.

  Flames stabbed from the big rifle’s maw. The long gun bucked against the dandy’s right shoulder. The report reached Prophet’s ears a second later—a loud, belching report that reverberated in the cold air, the echoes caroming over the town, gradually fading.

  Rawdney fired the heavy gun again. Again, the report rocketed over the prairie and the town, sounding like a near thunderclap.

  Turning the rifle on its swivel and working the trigger guard cocking mechanism, ejecting the spent cartridge and seating fresh, the senator’s son picked out another target through the sight poking up in front of the rifle’s silver breech. He fired again, reloaded, fire again, reloaded, and fired yet again, the heavy, thundering, echoing booms causing Mean and Ugly to arch his neck and tail, snorting apprehensively.

  The five packhorses didn’t like the racket much, either. They whickered and pranced, the lead horse tugging on its reins in Prophet’s hand.

  “Easy, fellas,” Prophet said, keeping a firm hand on the lines, not breaking stride. “It’s just the nancy boy showing off for the Russians. Next, they’ll be breaking out the rulers and dropping their pants.”

  He snorted at that.

  The men clumped under the winter-naked cottonwoods were a hundred yards from Prophet now. Rawdney was clad in pale, fringed, Indian-beaded buckskins complete with broad-brimmed buckskin hat with an Indian-beaded band. He stepped away from the rifle and swung his head this way and that, grinning, crowing to his friends about his German-made, custom-built Scheutzen sporting rifle bored in the .56 caliber “and accurate—in the hands of an expert marksman, of course—up to five hundred yards!”

  The others stood around, smoking cigars, some drinking from silver flasks, looking impressed. As Rawdney’s head turned toward Prophet, the priggish fop suddenly fell silent. He stared toward the bounty hunter for a few seconds. He grinned, his lips stretching back to show the white line of his teeth against the plump, pink paleness of his face beneath the outlandish buckskin hat. His entire costume was like something out of a silly Wild West traveling show.

  Rawdney said something to the others too quietly for Prophet to hear.

  Whatever he’d said, it struck the other men’s funny bones. They all turned toward Prophet and laughed.

  Rawdney stepped up to the rifle again. He swung the gun around on its swivel, which chirped like a bird in the cold air. Prophet felt a tingling in his chest when he saw that the rifle’s slender, dark maw was aimed directly at him. Leastways, it appeared to be aimed at him.

  Nah. Couldn’t be.

  Still, the hair on the back of the bounty hunter’s neck pricked. He frowned, staring at the rifle and the ridiculously attired dandy crouched over it from behind.

  Flames lanced toward Prophet. There was a screeching whine. The whine grew quickly louder until Prophet felt a sudden burn across the outside of his left cheek then heard the thud of the bullet plowing into the ground behind him.

  Mean and the lead packhorse jerked back on their reins and lifted shrill whinnies.

  Prophet stopped, crouching. He brushed his left mitten across his cheek and looked at it. There was a thin streak of red on it.

  Maybe seventy yards away from Prophet now, straight ahead of him along the trail, Rawdney and the other men threw their heads back, laughing.

  Unbridled fu
ry burned through Prophet as he glared across the cold distance at the foppish bastard surrounded by the burly Russians and his ass-kissing assistant, Leo. The smarmy assistant threw his head back again with laughter and then lifted a silver flask to his lips with his black-gloved hand.

  Rawdney spoke to the others, chuckling, and crouched over the rifle, again directing the maw toward Prophet.

  The red-faced, fiery-eyed bounty hunter lurched forward and flung his right arm out, pointing furiously. “Don’t you dare!”

  Again, bright orange flames lapped from the Scheutzen’s maw.

  The rifle bellowed.

  The slug chewed into the ground two feet in front of Prophet, sort of between him and Mean and Ugly.

  “Oh hellll!” Hatchley screamed.

  Mean had already been prancing around, tugging at the reins so hard that Prophet was having a hard time maintaining a hold on them. Same with the lead packhorse. Now, as the German rifle’s echoes rocketed skyward, Mean gave a ferocious tug, jerking the reins free of Prophet’s mittened hand.

  The lead packhorse jerked its own reins free at the same time. With raucous whinnies, all six mounts wheeled and galloped away to the north, some kicking out their rear hooves in anger, the packhorses tied tail to tail.

  “Mean!” Prophet barked.

  To no avail.

  Loosing another shrill whinny, Mean bucked again, nearly unseating its cursing rider.

  “What the hell?” Hatchley bellowed, the chain between the cuffs drawn taut around the horn. He crouched low over the mount’s billowing mane, looking back desperately at the bounty hunter. “Proph-etttttt!”

  As Mean buck-kicked violently, lifting another shrill whinny, Hatchley’s boots came free of the stirrups. His cuffed hands rose up and over the horn, and the man himself gave a screaming wail as Mean bucked again, throwing Hatchley forward against the horse’s left wither.

  Hatchley flopped there for a moment, crouched forward, but after two more of Mean and Ugly’s lurching, pitching strides, the outlaw rolled down over the left stirrup.