Blood at Sundown

by Peter Brandvold

  Lou tried to fight back but the big man beneath him, holding him fast against him, pinned his arms behind his back.

  Prophet stared up in frustration, grunting and groaning as the Russians’ big fists smashed into his face—one hammering blow after another. He felt his brows and lips split. Thick, oily blood ran down his face only to be smeared against his cheeks and jaws by more savage blows. Meanwhile, the Russians’ boots were like railroad spikes hammering his ribs and belly, his hips and his legs . . .

  Vaguely, as though she were standing atop the deep well at the bottom of which he lay, being pummeled by the Russians, Prophet could hear the countess screeching out protests and crying. Just as vaguely, he could see someone, probably her father, holding her back away from the fray.

  The room was beginning to fade around Lou when a man, probably Senator Fairchild, bellowed in perfect English, “That’s enough. You’re making a mess of the place. Get him the hell out of here!”

  Prophet was fading fast when the beating suddenly stopped.

  Several hands brusquely pulled him to his feet. His boots dragged across the thick carpet as two men, each holding an arm, half carried him across the railcar and out onto the windy vestibule. The cold, cold wind and bright sunlight braced him a little, at least enough that he opened his eyes in time to see Rawdney’s assistant, the immaculately tailored and barbered Leo, step out through the door behind him and the Russians.

  “Hold on!” Leo yelled into the wind.

  The two Russians dragging Prophet to the top of the vestibule steps stopped and turned him around.

  His short, dark, carefully cut hair sliding around his head in the cold wind, Leo stepped up to Prophet and curled a menacing smile. With a pale, beringed hand, he removed the cap from a six-inch stiletto with a jewel-encrusted, obsidian handle. The nasty, slender blade glistened in the new-penny sunshine.

  Leo snarled again and gave a prissy little grunt as he lunged forward, sinking the blade into Prophet’s belly. Prophet felt the blade’s sharp bite, like a snake sinking its teeth into him, just above his cartridge belt.

  “There!” Leo shouted. “Now rid this train of that Dixie vermin!”

  The Russians stepped around Prophet, each holding him by an arm, then gave him a shove.

  Prophet flew backward off the vestibule. His arms flopped out around him. He watched in an absentminded sort of horror his moccasins leave the iron platform and dangle in midair. For a long, cold moment he hung there in the air beside the train, glimpsing the snowy, gravelly ground rise up around him.

  The snowy ground engulfed him like a firm pillow.

  “Ohhh!” The exclamation was punched out of his lungs in a burst of wind.

  He went rolling, rolling down a long hill, the snow biting into him like a million cold teeth while the train’s whistle blew somewhere beyond him.

  “Oh! ” he heard himself say. “Oh, oh, oh . . .”

  In the periphery of his blurred vision he watched the train slide away . . . away . . . away along the tracks until there was only silence and a bed of ice around him and a cold night enfolding him in its black wings.

  Chapter 36

  Edgar Clayton snapped his head up off the table with a fierce start. Rising so quickly that he knocked his chair over backward behind him, he bellowed, “Rosie, how could you!”

  That gave Louisa one hell of a start, as well. She’d just walked over to her table to retrieve her Winchester but now she stopped and shucked one of her Colts from its holster and wheeled toward Clayton, lining up the sights on his head and clicking the hammer back.

  Everyone else in the room was similarly spooked.

  Both Mrs. Emory and Toni jerked out of dead sleeps with clipped cries to swing their heads toward the rancher. The town drunk/doctor lifted his head off his own table to stare wide-eyed toward Clayton. Mose and Nasty Ralph, who’d been stretching and yawning in their chairs between Clayton and the bar, now bolted to their feet, reaching for their own hoglegs. Nasty Ralph’s chair went flying out behind him to tip over backward and spin in nearly a complete circle.

  All three drummers were also on their feet, staring in wide-eyed shock toward Clayton.

  The bearded rancher stood facing the bar, where Toni was sitting up, legs curled beneath her, her hair obscuring her fear-glazed eyes. Her mouth hung open in shock.

  Clayton’s mouth was open, as well. Now he closed it slowly. The fury and exasperation with which he’d bellowed the exclamation faded from his eyes. Glancing toward Louisa, he shaped a sheepish smile and raked a hand down his face, smacking his lips and saying, “Oh, I . . . uh . . . I reckon I had me a nightmare.”

  “Must’ve been a doozy,” said Mose with a caustic snort as he slowly removed his hand from his holstered revolver.

  “Christ!” said Nasty Ralph, also removing his hand from his gun and glancing back at his chair.

  Louisa raised her Colt’s barrel and depressed the hammer. She stared at Clayton. “How could Rosie do what?”

  Clayton frowned. “Huh?”

  “What did Rose do, Mr. Clayton?”

  Clayton shook his head and shrugged. “I . . . I . . . don’t know. I was . . . I was dreamin’, that’s all.”

  “I see.”

  Louisa holstered her pistol. Toni swept her hair from her eyes and glanced at Louisa and Mrs. Emory stirring in the armchair to Louisa’s left.

  “I’ll get some water heating for tea,” the redhead said, climbing down off the bar, holding a blanket around her shoulders.

  “Just for Mrs. Emory,” Louisa said. “I won’t be having any just yet.”

  “You drink too much of that stuff?” Mose asked her, sneering. “You got a tea hangover, do you?”

  “Shut up,” Louisa said wearily, and shrugged into her coat.

  She donned her hat, muffler, and gloves, and lifted her Winchester off the table. Resting the rifle on her shoulder, she walked to the door, which Edgar Clayton was already at, bundled against the cold and with his Spencer repeater in his gloved hands.

  “Where are you off to, Clayton?” Louisa asked him.

  Clayton peered out into the street cloaked in the pearl-blue shadows of dawn, under a clear sky in which a few stars still glittered. “He’ll be out again soon, lookin’ for someone else to kill. He won’t rest until he’s killed everyone in town.”

  “Then what?”

  “Huh?”

  “What happens when he has no one else to kill?”

  “Why, he’ll kill himself, then, of course. That’s what they do.” Clayton tapped his index finger to his forehead. “It’s the winter fever.”

  Clayton opened the door and stepped out onto the stoop fronting the hotel. Louisa followed him out and into the street. Louisa glanced at the blue tracks pocking the fresh, sugary snow, which lay over the street in arrow-shaped drifts, where the wind had sculpted it. The captain’s footprints marked several of those drifts, angling to the south and across the street toward the west side.

  “Well, lookee here.”

  Louisa stopped and turned to where Clayton stood about twenty feet up the street to her right. Holding his rifle in both hands across his thighs, the rancher stared down at a body in the street before him.

  Louisa walked over and saw that it was a man lying over one of those arrow-shaped snowdrifts angling out from the street’s opposite side. He wore no coat, only a wool shirt, suspenders, and corduroy trousers and boots. He had a cartridge belt and two holsters strapped around his waist. The holsters were empty.

  It was hard to say how tall he was. Judging by the flecks of gray in his thin, brown hair that blew around his head like dry corn silk, he was in his late thirties or early forties. He appeared to have been lying out here a long time.

  The tracks he’d made getting here had long since been obliterated by the wind. There was a stiff, frozen look about him as he lay there face- and belly-down in the drift, one knee drawn upward as though he’d expired midcrawl.

  Clayton kicked the man onto
his back, making it even more obvious that the man was dead. He was stiff as a board. There appeared to be a bullet wound in his chest, another in his belly. Someone had taken a good chunk out of his left side, likely with an ax, leaving a deep, ragged gash.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Louisa said.

  Clayton looked at her. “You know him?”

  “I recognize him. That’s French’s friend Cully. He’s the new agent over at the train station. At least, he was. Didn’t even make it through his first night and here I thought he’d found his calling.”

  “Been dead a few hours,” Clayton said. “Probably tried to crawl here after Ramsay Willis come callin’ on him.” He glanced at Louisa. “The train station, you say?”

  “Must have holed up from the storm—your friend.”

  “Ramsay Willis is no friend of mine.” Clayton turned to stare toward the north end of town, deep in thought. “Probably long gone by now, but I’m gonna check it out.”

  Louisa watched him walk away down the middle of the street that was growing lighter as the dawn grew over the snowy eastern prairie. Slowly, shadows retreated. The wind was picking up on the lee side of the storm, making it feel even colder than it was.

  Part of the Vengeance Queen wanted to join Clayton’s investigation of the train station, but the captain’s whereabouts interested her more, for some reason. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Besides, like the rancher had said, Ramsay Willis had likely lit a shuck out of the depot building by now.

  Who knew where he was?

  Louisa turned and, picking up the captain’s gradually fading trail, followed it to the west side of the street and then straight south along the main drag. The tracks turned toward the small front door of the livery barn. They stopped at the door.

  Louisa stopped and stared down at the tracks.

  Tipping her head to the rickety plank door, she heard men’s voices inside. She thought she recognized Yardley’s voice and one more, one that she did not recognize.

  She stuffed her right-hand glove into her coat pocket then wrapped that bare hand around the icy metal handle of the door. She drew the door open just wide enough to allow her to pass. She stepped through it quickly and to one side and drew the door closed behind her.

  The men’s voices had fallen silent. A scuffing and rustling sounded somewhere ahead, from around where a light hung from a low rafter midway between the front and the rear of the barn. Around Louisa were thick shadows partly concealing a couple of wagons, one without wheels, and great tangles of tack hanging from ceiling support posts. The smell of ammonia was heavy and cloying on the frigid air.

  From the stable area beyond Louisa came the snorts and shufflings of several horses.

  “Damnit!” came Yardley’s voice from back near the low-hanging lamp. “It’s gotta be here somewhere.”

  Staring toward the light, Louisa saw a man’s shadow move.

  The shadow stopped. There was the click of a gun being cocked.

  “Where is it?”

  “I told you,” said a man’s high, wheedling voice. “I don’t know. I don’t know what she done with it!”

  Voice taut with frustration, the captain said, “You were here. You’re always here. She left the horses and the dead men here with you. She doesn’t have the money inside, so it has to be out here!”

  “So help me God . . . !”

  There was a gagging, strangling sound.

  “Did she pay you?” Yardley asked. “Or maybe you’re just afraid of... ?”

  The captain let his voice trail off as he turned his head toward Louisa walking slowly down the barn alley toward him, aiming her rifle straight out from her right shoulder.

  “Speak of the devil,” he said.

  Louisa loudly cocked the Winchester and continued staring at the tall, darkly handsome soldier standing about thirty feet away from her, shoving the barrel of his cocked Colt Navy into the wide-open mouth of the bib-bearded old man kneeling on the hard-packed earthen floor before him.

  The bib-bearded gent was Ash Graham, owner of the livery barn. He wore only longhandles, deerskin slippers, a blue wool stocking cap, and a ratty, blue plaid robe on his round-shouldered, potbellied frame.

  “So this is where you headed so bright and early . . . and so quietly that I didn’t even awaken,” Louisa said, walking slowly down the barn alley.

  “Hold on.” Yardley kept his gun in the old man’s mouth, crouched slightly forward. “Just hold it right there, Louisa.”

  “I wondered why it took you so long, longer than the others, to return to the hotel’s saloon after you’d hauled Rainy, Sweets DuPree, and Pima Quarrels out to the woodshed. When you returned, you had blood on your thumb. That made me wonder about you, Captain. I wondered if you could possibly be the killer. But, of course, you’d gotten the blood on your thumb from one of the bodies you’d hauled out to the woodshed. You were just a little self-conscious about it because you’re self-conscious about such things. You’re a man who likes to impress others. You wanted to impress me enough that I’d waltz upstairs with you. Were you really thinking that after we’d spent time together in bed you’d find a way to kill me and get your hands on the Hatchley bunch’s bank loot?”

  “Stay back, Louisa. I’ll kill this old man.”

  Louisa stopped about ten feet away from him and Graham, who had turned his head slightly, rolling his eyes, to look at Louisa standing in the middle of the barn alley, aiming her rifle at Captain Yardley’s head.

  “You don’t want to get a defenseless old man killed, do you?”

  “You’re not on furlough,” Louisa said. “You’re deserting.”

  “Put the rifle down, Louisa.”

  “Couldn’t handle the army—eh, Captain? Let me guess—you come from a once well-to-do family. One that isn’t so well-to-do anymore. Still, you think you’re above such rustic conditions you likely faced at Fort Totten, so you decided to haul your freight. The only problem was you didn’t have much money. Oh, you might’ve saved a sizable stake for yourself, but nothing like what the Hatchley bunch took down in Wyoming. After you realized who I was and that I’d trailed half of the Hatchley gang into town, belly down over their saddles, you figured I had their loot, as well.”

  “You’re pretty damn smart,” Yardley said, a pink flush rising into his cheeks above his thick dragoon mustache. “Smart enough to put that rifle down unless you want to see this old man’s brains splattered all over the floor.”

  “That’s why you fired at me earlier. You saw it as a good opportunity to kill me and call it an accident. That way you’d be free to look for the Wyoming bank loot. Ramsay Willis has been a nice distraction, hasn’t he? A nice distraction, that is, unless he puts a bullet or an ax into you, too.”

  “Come on.” Yardley flashed his dimple-cheeked smile. “Just put it down. However cold-blooded you are, you’re not so cold that you’d cause the death of this old duffer.”

  “How do you know I didn’t bury the loot in the country before I rode into town?”

  “In this weather?” Yardley put some steel into his voice. “Put down the rifle, Louisa.” He pressed the pistol barrel harder against the back of Graham’s mouth, making the old man gag violently, cheeks flushing, eyes swelling as he stared up in horror at the soldier. “I swear, I’ll do it!” Yardley warned.

  “No, you won’t. After too many months among men you consider your lessers at Fort Totten, you might be desperate to get as far away from the Dakota winter as possible. You might also be a spineless, conniving thief. But you’re no killer, Captain.”

  “You don’t think so?” Yardley’s cobalt eyes blazed with frustration and fury.

  “If I know anything, I know men. Better than I’d like to. You don’t have it in you to kill in cold blood, Captain. If so, go ahead. But you’ll be dead before that old buzzard’s brains have hit the floor.” Louisa smiled as she gazed down her Winchester’s barrel, drawing a bead on the captain’s forehead, just below the edge of his fur hat.


  “You witch!”

  Louisa’s smile broadened.

  “You witch!” Yardley fairly screamed as he straightened, withdrawing the Colt’s barrel from the old man’s mouth. “Damn you!”

  “Oh God!” Graham choked out, dropping to his hands and knees on the barn floor, wheezing, clutching his throat with one hand. “Oh God—I thought for sure he was gonna do it! I thought”—he swallowed hard—“I thought I was a dead man!”

  “You’re fine, Mr. Graham,” Louisa assured him.

  “Oh God!” Graham scrambled to his feet, face swollen and red, eyes watery. He wheeled and ran toward an open door on the left side of the barn alley. “I need my heart pills! Oh God—my heart pills!”

  Louisa gestured toward the large stall behind the captain—the stall in which Louisa had laid out the dead Hatchley riders. Their horses and her pinto were stabled in the stalls around her. They were all watching the doings in the barn alley with dubious interest. “Toss your gun into the stall there with the Hatchley boys.”

  Yardley cursed again, sighed, and tossed the Colt into the stall, where it smacked a dead man. The captain stood slouched before Louisa, face drawn and pale, not looking nearly as handsome as he’d looked before. Now he resembled nothing so much as the rat he really was.

  “Just tell me,” he said, shaking his head miserably. “Where is it? I gotta know. I scoured every stall for it. I was sure you musta buried it in the hay.”

  “Sometimes, it’s best to hide your valuables in plain sight.” Taking the rifle in one hand, aiming it straight out from her right hip at the captain’s belly, Louisa took two steps to her left. All manner of moldy tack draped with dust and spiderwebs hung from a rusty railroad spike protruding from a ceiling support post. A burlap feed sack hung from the spike, along with several cracked bridles, rotting saddlebags splitting at the seams, and a couple of hames that belonged to a former era.

  With one hand, Louisa stripped the gear off the post, letting most of it drop in a pile at her feet. She peeled the feed bag strap off the post and slung it over her left shoulder, patting the lumpy bag against her hip.