Blood at Sundown

by Peter Brandvold

  A riflelike crack sounded beneath the wind.

  Louisa set her left boot down with a start on the opposite side of the deadfall, quickly returning her right hand to her Winchester. She clenched as she waited for a bullet, but then she saw a branch tumbling downward in the darkness just ahead of her and to her right.

  She swallowed, drew a slow breath.

  Only a branch, broken by the wind, falling from a wind-battered tree. It crashed with a muffled thud in the brush.

  Louisa continued forward, sliding her gaze across the dark woods around her, keeping one eye skinned on the ground, looking for more prints left by her quarry.

  A stab of flames flashed red-orange ahead and on her left. She felt the heat of the bullet’s passing just off her right cheek. At the same time, the hiccupping report of the rifle reached her ears. She gasped and threw herself to the ground laced with layers of bent, snowy brush, and rolled to her left, toward the cover of another blowdown angling before her.

  Icy snow slithered down beneath her coat collar, and she gritted her teeth against it.

  Another stab of orange flames in the murky darkness ahead of her, maybe twenty feet away. The wind muffled the thud of the bullet slamming into the blowdown. Snow and wood slivers sprayed.

  Louisa rose to a knee and rammed the Winchester against her right shoulder.

  The rifle bucked as she squeezed the trigger, aiming toward where she’d seen the flash of her quarry’s rifle. The Winchester belched again, briefly relieving the darkness with its red-orange flash.

  She fired two more rounds, one after the other, then, ejecting the last smoking cartridge and pumping a fresh one into the action, she rolled quickly to her left, knowing that if she’d missed her target, the shooter would track her by her own gun flashes.

  She couldn’t roll far. A nest of shrubs growing up around a stout trunk blocked her way. She lay on her left side, staying as low as possible, holding her Winchester in both hands up close against her, trying to make a small target.

  Breathing hard from both exertion and anxiousness, wincing against the cold of the snow pressing against her and the million little sharp points of brush prodding her, she waited, staring in the shooter’s direction.

  She lay there for nearly two full minutes, seeing only murky, snow-laced darkness before her, hearing only the wind’s relentless moaning and groaning and the agonized creaking of the battered brush and tree limbs.

  She’d remained in such a position before, for several hours, waiting for the coming dawn to help her with the task of revealing her quarry. She couldn’t remain here all night, however. She probably couldn’t stay out here another hour, or she’d freeze to death.

  She drew her legs up beneath her and, using the butt of her rifle pressed against the brushy ground, slowly pushed and hoisted herself to a standing position. She suppressed the urge to shiver against the cold snow clinging to her, the stuff that had slithered down her back melting with the contact of her bare skin, causing frigid rivulets to roll down along her spine and into the waistband of her flannel-lined denims, finding the crack between her butt cheeks.

  She gave a raspy curse.

  Slowly, she moved ahead through the thick woods, meandering around trees and shrubs, stepping over fallen branches. When she finally made it to where she believed the shooter had fired from, she stopped and looked around.

  She’d been right. The shooter had been here. She could see his dark markings in the snow, by the light of a dull blue ambience radiating out of the snow itself. Louisa looked at the scuff marks, trying to pick out a trail. She stepped quietly straight south of the tree behind which the killer had fired, her eyes scanning the uneven, snowy ground.

  Several split logs lay in a loose pile before her.

  She toed one of the logs, frowning down at it. Firewood?

  A faint shadow slid across the snow to her right.

  A breath that was part grunt sounded behind her.

  Louisa whipped around, glimpsing a man-shaped shadow before her and seeing something that might have been a swinging ax angling toward her from what was now her left. She fired the Winchester, the rifle bucking and flashing and belching a wink before the thing swinging toward her plowed into her left temple.

  “Oh!” Louisa dropped the Winchester, twisted around, and fell, her landing padded by the heavy brush and the snow.

  Her ears rang. Stars burst behind her retinas.

  “Goddamnit!” she heard herself cry—a rare oath for her. She hadn’t been raised to talk like that, but her language had gotten considerably saltier since she’d started riding with a certain blue-tongued ex-Confederate.

  Gritting her teeth against the gnawing pain in her head, she rolled onto her back and pushed up onto her butt in time to see the man who’d wielded the club stumbling backward, both hands pressed to his chest, over his heart. He grunted as he continued stumbling backward, then, getting his boots caught in a tangle of barely covered brush, he fell on his butt.

  He sat there, grunting, writhing, and kicking his legs.

  Louisa looked around for her rifle. Not seeing it immediately, she jerked up the right flap of her coat and shucked her right-hand Colt from its holster.

  Aiming the big popper straight out in front of her, she clicked the hammer back.

  The man before her was winding down like a top, his grunts growing more and more strangled.

  He kicked a few more times, each kick more feeble than the last, then collapsed to lay back down in the brush, hands falling to his sides. His legs quivered a little and then fell still.

  Louisa tried to heave herself to her feet but fell back to her butt, clamping her left hand to her temple from which she could feel blood trickling. The blow had dazed her, made her dizzy and a little sick to her stomach. She drew a breath, pushed up onto her knees, and cupped snow to her face, bracing herself.

  She drew a sharp breath through her teeth. The icy snow cleared the cobwebs. At least, it kept her from passing out.

  Feeling stronger but still a little dizzy, she heaved herself to her feet and, still clutching the Colt in her right hand, moved unsteadily toward the man on the ground roughly fifteen feet away. Blood from the gash on her temple slid down her cheek, becoming sluggish as it froze. She dropped to a knee beside the man she’d shot, and, keeping an eye on his hands, placed her left hand on his shoulder, shaking him.

  His head bobbed. His eyes appeared closed.

  Louisa saw the dark shine of blood on the front of his homemade fur coat. A heart shot, most likely. He was dead.

  Louisa pulled the man’s wool hat with earflaps from his head, to get a better look at him. His face was blunt, with a short, broad nose. There was nothing striking about his features, nothing that set him apart from a million other men. Several days’ worth of sandy stubble spiked his cheeks. There were maybe a few streaks of gray in his straight brown hair, which hung down a short ways over his ears. He appeared to be in his middle to late thirties, maybe early forties.

  Ramsay Willis?

  A voice called out of the windy darkness: “Louisa?”

  She recognized Yardley’s voice. He’d come looking for her, likely followed her trail.

  She would have been annoyed if she hadn’t suddenly, grudgingly found herself needing help.

  She rose and turned to face in the direction of Sundown.

  “Here!” she called, trying to lift her voice above the wind. “I’m over here, Captain!” She waved her arm so he could see her better in the dark.

  An orange light flashed straight out before her, from maybe thirty yards away.

  She heard the bullet whoosh through the air to her right. It was followed by a revolver’s crackling report.

  Two more flashes.

  One bullet thumped into a tree just ahead of the exasperated Vengeance Queen. She threw herself to the ground once more and, snarling more curses taken from Prophet’s repertoire, lifted her Colt to return fire.

  Chapter 30

  It�
�s hard not to feel the blood pool in your knees when a rifle is aimed at you—especially a fancy sporting rifle that appeared more than a little accurate and outfitted with a sliding rear sight and mounted on a tripod.

  Especially when a half-pint devil with a jealous grudge is grinning down the barrel at you . . .

  The barrel of Rawdney Fair weather’s Scheutzen, poking out of the small clump of men gathered under the cottonwoods along the trail to the Indian Butte train station, sixty yards from where Prophet stood crouched, heart thudding, appeared to be aimed directly at the big bounty hunter’s ticker, sure enough.

  Lou stared back along the Scheutzen’s barrel at the fop aiming through the little, vertical, rectangular sight standing up just behind the breech. Rawdney was showing a sly little grin as he adjusted the rifle slightly on the tripod, apparently placing the bead at the barrel’s end where he wanted it.

  Prophet curled his upper lip in an enraged snarl touched with more than a little bare-assed trepidation.

  Devil’s gonna shoot me and leave me here along the trail like a sack of potatoes spilled off a cart!

  With an angry, bellowing wail he hurled himself off the left side of the trail just as the Scheutzen thundered, the little viper tongue of flames lapping toward Prophet. As the big bounty hunter hit the snowy grass, he heard the hiss of the bullet stitching the air if not where he’d been standing a moment before, then within a cat’s whisker, no doubt, before it hammered into the ground with a hair-raising ping.

  Prophet rolled onto his belly and fired a look of keen hatred at the dandy laughing with the big, bearded Russians and his natty assistant, Leo, gathered around the rifle under the cottonwoods. Leo was rocked back on the heels of his fur boots, pointing at Prophet, laughing and tipping his flask to his mouth once more.

  “You son of a buck, Fair weather!” Prophet yelled, his jaws set so hard he thought they’d crack. “I’ll get you for that—mark my words!”

  Fair weather held up a prissy, gloved finger to the others, then crouched over his rifle once more.

  “Goddamnit!” Prophet shouted.

  He rose to his heels and then ran crouching toward the only cover out here—a rock humping up out of the ground ten yards to his left. Just before he reached the rock, Fair weather’s bullet hammered the face of it with a snarling bang followed closely by the rifle’s echoing report.

  Prophet hit the ground and rolled up behind the rock, hearing the men laughing beneath the cottonwoods.

  Prophet glanced to the west. Mean and Ugly was a small brown speck maybe a hundred yards away under the low gray sky, calmly grazing now in the wake of the horse’s having fled Fair weather’s first assault. Nearer Prophet, maybe thirty yards from the trail, Gritch Hatchley lay in the snowy brown grass, grunting and cursing.

  “If only I’d grabbed my Winchester,” Lou fumed to himself, glancing toward Mean and Ugly again and seeing the butt of his rifle poking up from the saddle scabbard. He looked back at Fair weather and Leo and the Russians. “I’d blow that little nancy right out of his tailor-made outfit, and I’d finish with those goddamn Russians!”

  But he didn’t have his rifle. He had only his .45 and his bowie knife. Each would be of equal value from this distance. So when another bullet came screeching toward him, Prophet could only pull his head back down behind the rock and grit his teeth and curse as the heavy-caliber round slammed into it, making the rock shudder against the bounty hunter’s shoulders.

  “Go ahead and have your fun, you prissy coward,” Prophet raked out, pressing his back taut against the rock. “When you’re done, I’m gonna fetch my ’73 and shove it so far up your behind, you’ll . . .”

  He let the words die on his tongue.

  The clatter of a wagon rose. He turned to see a nice two-seat leather chaise with yellow-spoked wheels rolling along the trail out from Indian Butte. Ahead and moving toward him on his left, the chaise was pulled by a handsome dun, and the man sitting in the front seat holding the reins was Pop Schofield. Prophet could tell by the long, tangled gray beard and the long, blue-gray hair spilling from the ratty bear fur hat to dangle down over the old man’s spindly shoulders clad in a molting bear fur coat. Beside the liveryman on the quilted leather seat was Rawdney’s father, Senator Wilfred Fairweather.

  On the second seat, behind the first, sat Count Miranova. Beside him, on Prophet’s near side, was the lovely countess Tatiana. The men were decked out in dark fur coats and tall fur hats, but the countess wore a thick rabbit fur coat with a high collar made of fox fur, the fox’s head complete with open eyes and black-tipped snout dangling down across her left shoulder. On her lovely, dark-eyed, fair-skinned head was a hat also of long, breeze-rippled rabbit fur. Her hands were stuffed into a rabbit fur warming muff.

  Prophet turned his head to edge a look around his covering rock.

  Rawdney was no longer aiming the Scheutzen at him. The sporting rifle had been taken down off its tripod. Rawdney, Leo, and the Russians were walking leisurely along the trail, heading for the train depot, talking and laughing and casting glances back over their shoulders toward Prophet. One of the big Russians was holding the rifle in a fur scabbard over his shoulder while another big Russian was carrying the tripod.

  Prophet turned back to the chaise rolling toward him, within thirty yards now and closing. All eyes, including those of the countess, had found the bounty hunter hunkering down here behind the boulder, like a schoolboy playing hide and seek.

  Prophet’s cheeks burned with embarrassment.

  He winced, cursed to himself, spat to one side, and heaved himself to his feet, brushing snow from his denim britches and from the arms of his buckskin mackinaw.

  Schofield smiled and shook his head, puffing a corncob pipe wedged in one side of his mouth. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a man who attracts more lead than you do, Prophet.” He chuckled and shook his head once more as the chaise slowly rolled past along the trail. “No, I purely don’t!”

  The senator turned and leaned over the seat to say something in a jeering tone to the count. Both men laughed loudly. As the buggy continued rolling on down the trail, now between Prophet and the cottonwoods from which he’d been so reprehensibly assaulted. . . not to mention humiliated . . . the countess turned her head to keep her eyes on the man she’d cavorted with in the blissful postdawn hours of the previous evening.

  She was smiling at him, but the skin above the bridge of her nose bore more than a few skeptical wrinkles.

  Prophet’s ears blazed even hotter behind the muffler knotted around his head. “You’d be cowerin’ like a dog, too, Countess,” he grunted out sheepishly, “if you had that . . . that . . . that big cannon bearin’ down on your purty pink behind!” He spat again as he strode heavy footed across the trail, heading for where Mean and Ugly stood nonchalantly pulling at the dead grass poking above the snow. “Just wait till I see that fancy snot again—the Dan probably wears pink lace frillies—I’m gonna pistol-whip him till there ain’t a bit of skin left on his purty face, and then I’m gonna—”

  “Prophet, I’m in a bad way here—a real bad way!”

  Lou stopped. Hatchley lay in the snowy brush, on his back but half sitting up, his right hand snaked under him to hold the back of his right leg.

  “Yeah?” Prophet gave an angry chuff and continued stomping toward his horse. “Join the party,Gritch!”

  * * *

  Mean and Ugly was second to no one, not even the Vengeance Queen, at reading his rider’s mind.

  The hammerheaded dun always knew when Prophet was feeling a mite off his feed, and he wasn’t at all above exploiting the situation to deepen his rider’s misery. He performed such calculated follies merely for fun. A typically mean kind of fun, but fun, just the same.

  Today, on the heels of Rawdney Fair weather having hoorawed Prophet with the sporting rifle, the horse made himself hard to catch, edging away from Lou just when the bounty hunter, having tramped the hundred and twenty yards or so through the cold and
snow, was about to grab his reins.

  When Prophet had finally stepped on the reins and gotten them into his fist, the horse took the opportunity to give Lou’s right earlobe, poking out from beneath the mouse-chewed muffler, a painful nip. A person who has never had a cold ear nibbled on by a horse should endure such an injury once in his life, because it makes such frivolous injuries as, say, cracking a funny bone against a blacksmith’s anvil or stubbing a bare toe on a stone hearth some cold, dark night when you’re looking for the thunder bucket, seem as insignificant as a brief tickle by an annoying brother.

  Suffice it to say, it was a pallid-faced, weary-eyed Lou Prophet who finally led Mean and Ugly, with Gritch Hatchley in the hurricane deck and cuffed to the saddle horn once more, up to the cottonwood hitch rail running along the side of the wooden depot building nearly a half hour later. As he tied Mean to the rail, he looked around the front of the depot to see Rawdney and his fur-clad cohorts smoking cigars near the vestibule of one of the hunting party’s fancy railcars, talking and laughing.

  None of the hunting party appeared to have seen Prophet. They’d long since forgotten about the butt of their joke, no doubt. Well, he hadn’t forgotten about them.

  Lou stuffed his right-hand mitten into his coat pocket and shucked his Winchester from his saddle boot. He’d calmed down some since Rawdney had used him for target practice. Not much, but enough that he’d managed to talk himself out of marching up and shooting the dandy through his black heart at point-blank range, but only because he didn’t want to face the hangman in Bismarck alongside his old friend Hatchley.

  But as long as Rawdney Fair weather was within, say, a hundred square miles, Prophet wasn’t going anywhere without his Winchester in his hand or on his shoulder. Let the dandy pull that sissy-looking long gun on him again, and Prophet would give him a pill he couldn’t digest. Anyone who didn’t want to call it self-defense would take the second round out of the barrel and follow Rawdney straight to wolf bait.