“Ah hell,” Yardley said.
“I was going to retrieve them when the train arrived. Now I realize they’re much safer on my person.” Louisa wagged her rifle at Yardley. “Come along, Captain. Back to the . . .”
She’d just spotted Ash Graham standing back in the shadows, in the nook between stalls that led to the open door through which he’d fled for his heart pills. If he had retrieved his pills, they were not the only things he’d retrieved. He’d also retrieved a double-bore shotgun, the butt plate of which he pressed against his shoulder as he aimed down both barrels at Louisa.
He rocked the heavy hammers back.
Chapter 37
Yardley looked at Louisa, frowning curiously. He followed her gaze to Graham and lurched back with a start, raising both hands. “Who-ah!”
“Yeah, I’ll say who-ah,” the bearded oldster said, sliding the shotgun from Louisa to Yardley then back to Louisa.
“Easy with that thing, old-timer,” Yardley said.
“Go to hell with that old-timer crap. I got you both in one hell of a whipsaw, and I’m about to turn the blade.” He narrowed a pale blue eye down the barrel at Louisa. “You, Miss Purty Pants, drop that feed sack.”
Louisa stared back at him.
“If you’re calculatin’ up if I’m as jelly spined as the yellow-livered soldier here, take into account I’ve killed before. For a lot less than what you got in that bag, judgin’ by the bulge.”
Louisa could see that the old man wasn’t lying.
“Toss that Winchester into the stall with the soldier’s pistol. If it twitches one fraction of an inch toward me, purty girl, you’re gonna be a whole lot less purtier pronto.”
Louisa depressed the Winchester’s hammer. She took the rifle in her left hand and tossed it over the stall partition. It landed with a rustle in the hay near the dead men.
“Now,” Graham said, “drop the loot. Straight down.”
Louisa slid the strap of the feed bag off her shoulder. It plopped onto the floor near her left boot.
Graham looked at it hungrily. He licked his lips, swallowed, and gestured with the shotgun toward the barn’s broad rear doors, at the far end of the alley. “That way. Get movin’.”
“What’re you gonna do?” Yardley, still holding his hands up to his shoulders, asked the old-timer.
“What do you think he’s gonna do?” Louisa asked the soldier. “Take us out to breakfast?”
Graham chuckled through his tobacco-crusted teeth—what few remained in his jaws, that was. “‘Take us out to breakfast.’ Ha-ha. I like that.” He wagged the rifle again. “Get a move on, or I’ll burn you both down right here!”
“Don’t get your bloomers in a bind, old man.” Louisa brushed past Yardley and strode back along the barn alley toward the door. Yardley fell into step behind her.
She reached the doors well ahead of Yardley and Nash. She released the locking bar, dropped it to the floor, and slid the left-side door open, grunting with the effort, for the tracks had acquired a layer of ice.
“Hey, not so fast!” Graham bellowed, hurrying along behind Yardley, who was several feet behind Louisa.
“If you’re gonna trip those triggers, trip ’em, you old reprobate!” Louisa strode straight out through the doors and into the barn’s rear paddock. Six feet from the doors, a gust of cold wind pelted her with windblown snow.
She swung around in time to see Yardley step out of the barn behind her, partly obscured by the blowing snow. A murky figure moved from the corner of the barn toward Yardley, swinging something toward the captain. A second later, the captain’s head was bounding through the air toward Louisa, the soldier’s eyes snapping wide in surprise, blood spewing from the ragged hole at the top of his torso, where his head had been sitting a second before.
The head glanced off Louisa’s left shoulder to thump onto the ground and roll.
Louisa stared in shock, her mind slow to comprehend what had just happened. Slow to comprehend the sight of Yardley’s headless body taking two more steps toward her, his hands still raised, before the man’s knees buckled, and the headless body crumpled to the freshly fallen snow.
Another wind gust further obscured what happened behind Yardley. Louisa merely saw two shadows move violently. She heard a man’s agonized wail. The shotgun thundered. Louisa saw the flash. One of the figures jerked to the right and then wheeled and dwindled back away into the windblown snow, quickly fading from Louisa’s sight.
The wind died, the sparkling snow gradually dispersing in the air before her.
Beyond Yardley’s head and his headless corpse, which lay belly down in the snow six feet away from her, Ash Graham lay on his back, groaning, a hatchet embedded in his chest. One leg was curled under the other one. He lay writhing, closing his hands around the handle of the ax angling up out of his bloody chest.
His shotgun lay in the snow to his left. Both hammers were down. If he’d discharged both barrels into the killer, Ramsay Willis was one sore puppy.
Louisa walked around what remained of Captain Yardley and gazed down at Ash.
“H-help me!”
Louisa crouched to place a hand around the ax handle, just above the head embedded so deep in the man’s chest she could see his heart beating. It was beating slower and slower.
Louisa shook her head. “There’s nothing I can do for you.”
Ash sobbed and rested his head back against the ground.
Louisa strode back into the barn. When she’d retrieved her rifle, she pushed out through the small front door through which she’d entered the place. She stepped into the snowy street, the wind blowing mares’ tails of snow into the crystalline air, which the rising sun was now causing to glitter like gold dust.
She walked to the south, spying the killer’s tracks where he’d run up from the side of the barn. Louisa gazed down at the boot prints which the wind was quickly obscuring. She poked a bare finger into the pink slush beside one boot track and held it up to her face.
Fresh blood.
“He got you, all right.”
Louisa straightened, cocked the Winchester, and began following the tracks toward the far side of the street. The killer had fled between two buildings, heading east.
“Hey!”
Louisa stopped and turned to her left. Edgar Clayton stood in the street before the Territorial Hotel, a hundred yards away and waving an arm above his head.
“I heard the shot!” he bellowed against the wind at Louisa.
“He’s out here, Clayton! He headed east! Cut around behind the hotel and I’ll meet you back there! He’s wounded!”
Clayton waved again then shuffled off around the far side of the Territorial.
Louisa broke into a run. She entered the wide gap between a feed store and a boarded-up ladies’ fineries shop. At the rear of the gap, she stopped and studied the tracks beside which more blood turned the snow to pink slush. The tracks continued out of the gap and swung to the left.
Carefully, aiming the Winchester straight out from her right hip, believing the killer might be waiting for her just around the rear corner of the feed store, Louisa stepped out of the gap and turned sharply to her left, tightening her bare, cold finger on the Winchester’s icy trigger.
Behind the feed store was only a snow-covered pile of scrap lumber, bales of feed sacks, and a water barrel also mantled with snow.
Ahead, a rifle cracked once, twice, three times.
A man bellowed as though in agony.
Another rifle returned fire, adding three more belching reports slicing the cold air, slightly muffled by the wind.
The reports were followed by the angry cawing of crows rising from a winter-naked tree just beyond a butte ahead of Louisa and on her left, beyond a low, snow-covered hill. A man stumbled out from behind the hillock, left of the trees from which the crows had taken wing.
Louisa began to raise the Winchester but stopped when she saw Clayton’s dark blue coat and his glinting spectacles. The ranche
r held his rifle low in his left hand. He clutched his right side with that hand.
He took two more stumbling steps toward Louisa then dropped to his knees.
He threw his head far back and bellowed a curse before stretching his gaze out to Louisa and yelling, “The crazy devil done shot me! He’s on the run! East toward the creek!”
“How bad you hit?”
Clayton dropped forward onto his hands and knees and shook his head. “Get after him!”
Louisa jogged forward and into the brush east of town. She crossed the cold gray rail line then a dry creek and jogged up and over the shoulder of another low bluff. At the top, she dropped to her belly and peered cautiously over the crest to the other side.
The crease between bluffs, cut by another shallow creek, was vacant save three spindly cottonwoods and a wagon-sized boulder the wind had blown clear of snow. Louisa gained her feet and moved quickly down the hill, hurrying, knowing she was exposed here on the hill, where there was little cover.
When she reached the bottom of the hill, she dropped to one knee and peered northward along the shallow creek bed between buttes. Nothing moved ahead except blowing snow. Fifty yards beyond was another stand of cottonwoods and then more trees along the creek tracing a serpentine course from north to south through low, rolling hills.
She was at the south end of the woods she’d been in the previous night, when she’d shot Wayne Skogstrum. If Willis was in those woods, she’d never find him. Unless he wanted her to find him. But then he’d have the upper hand.
The Vengeance Queen rose and continued along the crease between buttes, heading north toward the woods. The wind blew, howling like a thousand angry witches, occasionally creating whiteouts of blowing snow before her. On the heels of one such blast, just as the snow was ticking back to the ground, glittering brightly, she stopped suddenly and sucked a sharp breath.
A figure had just stepped out from one of those cottonwoods ahead of her and on the creek’s left side. Louisa snapped her Winchester to her shoulder a quarter second after the shooter’s rifle stabbed orange flames. As she triggered her own rifle, a bullet burned across the outside of her right thigh.
Cursing, she flung herself to her right, rolling up behind a small boulder as the shooter slung two more slugs toward her, one curling the air off her left ear, the other pounding the face of the boulder behind which she now crouched, grinding her back teeth against the burn in her right thigh.
She looked down at her leg. Blood oozed from the long tear in her denim trousers. Some of the snow around her was pink with her own spilled blood. The sight made her queasy. Without blinking an eye, she’d spilled the blood of enough men to fill a canyon. The sight of her own made her feel as though she’d eaten tainted beef. It used to be worse. It used to be she’d turn white and pass out.
“No more of that nonsense,” she grunted, taking her Winchester in both hands, suppressing the throbbing burn.
A bullet sliced the wind with an eerie whine and slammed the face of her covering boulder. On its heels came the belch of Willis’s rifle. Another bullet smashed the boulder. She could feel the reverberation through her shoulder.
Louisa slid over to the rock’s right side. Assuming she was right-handed, the killer might think that that would be the side she’d return fire from. She waved her hand out from that side of the boulder then pulled it back toward her chest.
She smiled as another bullet ripped the wind to slam the rock on that end.
Louisa slid the Winchester around the boulder’s left side. She’d taught herself to shoot almost as accurately from that side as from her right, in the event of just such a situation as that confronting her now. She took quick aim at the shooter, who’d stepped out around the tree, revealing his right shoulder and right leg and that half of his face, beneath the brim of his hat. She couldn’t see him clearly because of the bright sunshine and the shadows cast by the tree, not to mention the blowing snow, but she saw enough of Ramsay Willis to lay a bead on.
As the crazed killer hurled another round toward the right side of Louisa’s boulder, Louisa triggered her own Winchester. She cocked quickly, let three more bullets fly, and watched the slugs punch into the tree, sending bark flying in all directions. One slug must have hit pay dirt. The man jerked back sharply. He staggered, got his feet beneath him, then ran off through the trees flanking the cottonwood.
Louisa rose to her knees and hurled several more rounds, her bullets merely snapping small branches and ripping more bark.
“Coward!” she shouted into the wind.
Quickly, she reached into her coat, ripped off her neckerchief, and stuffed a handful of snow into the bloody wound to stem the blood flow. She tipped her head back, loosing a string of curses blue enough to make Lou Prophet proud.
Sucking air through her gritted teeth, Louisa wrapped the neckerchief taut around her thigh, used her rifle to hoist herself to her feet, then took off at a shuffling, limping run toward Ramsay Willis. The pain in her leg bit her hard, but she was accustomed to pain, both mental and physical. She suppressed it, placated herself with the imagined image of putting Willis down like the rabid cur he was.
When she gained the tree from which he’d fired at her, she dropped to her left knee and looked around carefully, wary of another bullet. Spying nothing in the woods beyond—nothing but Willis’s blue tracks marking the snow—she rose with a pained grunt and resumed limping after her quarry.
She moved carefully through the trees, following the fresh tracks that meandered through the woods. Many of those tracks were splashed with the pink of fresh blood.
“Good—you’re carrying some of my lead,” Louisa muttered to herself.
She stepped over deadfalls and followed the blood-spattered path to the west, back in the direction of Sundown.
She paused, frowning.
Why was he heading back toward town?
Louisa drew another deep breath and set out once more, following the path through the trees, across the train tracks, and back into the outskirts of the town. A couple of gray cabins and stock pens moved up around her. She walked through a gap between the train station on her right and a gun shop on her left.
Willis’s fresh tracks led straight through the gap and out into the town’s broad main street where the fresh, sugary, sun-glittering snow was being blown every which way by the cold wind.
Carefully, holding her rifle up against her right shoulder, aiming straight out before her, she limped up through the gap. She kept her right finger, which she couldn’t feel anymore, taut against the Winchester’s trigger. She waited for Willis to poke his head and his own rifle around a corner of a building on each side of her, and snap off another shot.
When she reached the mouth of the gap, she sucked back the pain in her leg once more and bolted forward, swinging her rifle first right then left.
No Ramsay Willis.
She swung her gaze back to Willis’s tracks. They led out of the gap and swung left, heading south, in the direction of the hotel.
Louisa lurched back one step with a start.
A horseback rider was moving toward her slowly, emerging from a thick curtain of swirling snow. Louisa raised the Winchester, tightened her finger across the trigger again. But then she lowered the weapon slightly, frowned at the man riding toward her.
Wrapped in a heavy blanket, which was draped over his head as well as his shoulders, he slouched lower over the mane of his obviously exhausted horse. The horse’s eyelids were drooping, and ice from its breath had formed over its snout. Frost lay like a pale blanket over its dun withers. It moved very slowly, on wobbly legs, blowing feebly, its breaths raking like a bellows.
Finally, ten feet away from Louisa, the horse gave another ragged blow and dropped to its knees. The man jerked his head up sharply, eyes snapping wide. The horse’s head sagged to one side and then its body sagged, as well, rolling over, throwing its rider into the snow beside it.
With an agonized groan, the man landed in
the street.
Louisa strode over beside the dying horse to stare down at the man who appeared on his own last legs.
“Who’re you?” she asked.
The blanket had fallen away from the man’s head. He lay shivering violently, his face pale, staring up at Louisa, moving his lips but not saying anything. He appeared somewhere in his thirties. He had thick, wavy, dark red hair with a matching mustache. His broad face was lightly freckled.
He gazed sharply up at Louisa and stretched his lips back from his teeth. He tried to say something but he was shaking so hard that the only sounds were the clattering of his teeth.
Louisa dropped to a knee beside him. “Try again,” she urged. “Who are you?”
The man gazed sharply up at her, cleared his throat and said, “I’m . . . I’m . . . R-R-Ramsay Willis!”
Chapter 38
Prophet chuckled. “Say now, that tickles.”
Again, he felt something warm and bristly caress his left cheek.
Again, he chuckled. “You’re ticklin’ me, you naughty girl.”
In a vague half dream, he saw a half-dressed señorita sitting on a bed beside him, in a room with a view through large open windows of dark sand sloping down to the Sea of Cortez shimmering in the hazy afternoon sunshine. The emerald green water was ruffled by white waves unraveling up on the shore with relaxing regularity.
He could smell chili peppers and carne asada cooking on a near fire. There must have been an open bottle of tequila nearby, as well, because he could also smell the tang of that fiery Mexican elixir.
Sitting on the edge of the bed where the bounty hunter took his dreamy siesta, the girl, cool and brown, was slowly brushing her long, dark brown hair, with each stroke letting it dance across his face. After every two or three strokes of the brush, she leaned down and pressed her plump lips to his cheek. He could feel the soft puffs of her warm breath, which also owned the tang of tequila and the peppery aroma of strong Mexican tobacco.
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