Hell's Angel

by Peter Brandvold

  Giving the east, south, and west a thorough measure, he saw no other signs of movement. The main column of at least ten men—no doubt every Rurale Campa had stationed at San Simon, minus the two Prophet had killed the previous night—was a good mile or so away, and their horses were probably as blown as Mean was.

  If he didn’t linger, Prophet had a good chance of making it to the Rio Grande ahead of them.

  Twenty minutes later, he followed a switchback deer trail down into the broad, deep canyon. Since he and Mean had watered at the spring, he didn’t waste much time at the canyon bottom, where the muddy waters of the Rio Grande rippled over gravelly sandbars between the twisting canyon walls. He’d have liked to enjoy a bath with his clothes on, thereby scrubbing himself as well as his trail-sour, dust-caked duds, but he’d taken a whore’s bath back in Ramonna’s room, before putting the so-called wood to the comely senorita. That would have to tide him. Besides, he had no one to offend besides himself and his horse, and Mean didn’t seem to mind.

  When he and Mean were halfway up the north ridge wall, rifles began cracking behind him. He glanced back to see Campa’s men lined up on the opposite rim, aiming their rifles at an angle, triggering lead at him.

  Campa stood off to the right of the line of Rurales, wearing his customary wagon-wheel sombrero with the eagle insignia pinned to the steepled crown. The colonel was shaking his fist at Prophet and shouting. Prophet couldn’t make out what he was saying beneath the crackling of the Trapdoor Springfields, but he had a pretty good idea he wasn’t being complemented on his good breeding.

  Prophet hummed, whistled contentedly. He and Campa both knew he was too far away for those old Springfields to be any danger. The bullets dropped harmlessly in the sand and rocks at the base of the ridge. The Rurales kept firing, however, and Prophet kept whistling as he and Mean continued on up the game trail snaking up the face of the cliff. At the top, on Texas soil, he swung down from the leather, stepped up to the edge of the canyon, turned his back to it, dropped his buckskin trousers and longhandles to his knees, and bent forward, giving Campa’s men a round, pale target to aim for.

  There was a momentary increase in the firing and in the volume of Campa’s tirade.

  Prophet grinned.

  He pulled his pants back up, mounted his horse, and rode off to the north, hearing the crackling of the Springfields continuing only sporadically now while Campa continued to pump his fist and berate him shrilly.

  “Well, it ain’t Georgia,” the big bounty hunter said, swaying easily now in his saddle, gazing around at the vast, forbidding country around him, which looked like an endless rug of irregularly ridged corduroy stretching away for as far as the eye could see, spiked with mean and nasty-looking cacti of all shapes and sizes. “But at least it’s America, by damn, and Campa won’t cross the Rio Bravo less’n he wants to get crossways with the U.S. Army.”

  He glanced over his shoulder once more. Campa’s men had finally now lowered their rifles and were walking off to retrieve their horses. Prophet chuckled.

  And then, to keep his mind off his ruined canteen out here in this merciless desert where no man wanted to be long without water, he started to sing: “In Dixie’s land where I was born, Early on one frosty mornin’, Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land!”

  He didn’t sing for long, though. The parched air soon turned his throat to leather.

  He thought he could feel his tongue swelling, though it hadn’t been long enough since he’d had a drink for that to happen. It was just his imagination, his anxiety over the lack of water, and the sun burning down through his weathered, funnel-brimmed hat and reflecting off the adobe-colored ground all around him.

  He probably should have stayed closer to the river, but a canteen wasn’t going to just rise up out of the rocks. Sooner or later, he had to head north. Chisos Springs was somewhere out here, between the Rio Grande and the Chisos Mountains, but he hadn’t been through the settlement in several years, and he couldn’t recall its exact location.

  He remembered only the humble saloon run by the colorful old desert rat Chisos La Grange, and the man’s well that teemed with cool, dark spring water that issued from cracks in the underlying Texas strata, deep underground.

  La Grange’s well was the only water for a long two-days’ ride in any direction, under a pulsing sun raining liquid fire. Just the thought of a drink from it now made Prophet’s throat all the drier, his tongue feel like a dead, swollen snake in his mouth.

  An hour later, when the sun was about an hour past its zenith, he rode up a low rise and looked around to the north and west through his ancient, Confederate-issue field glasses. He spied what looked like a trail running from north to south a little west of his position. The trail was east of the gentle foothills rising gradually toward the craggy, copper ramparts of the Chisos Mountains shouldering dramatically against the western horizon.

  And in the north, along the trail, there was a dark brown clump of what appeared more regularly shaped objects than boulders would be.

  They were buildings.

  Returning the glasses to his saddlebags, his heart quickening at the thought that he’d just located Chisos La Grange’s settlement of Chisos Springs . . . and that he and Mean and Ugly might not die of thirst out here, after all . . . he rode on down the rise and deadheaded for the place in the godforsaken desert where he’d spied the brown blur.

  When he’d ridden nearly another hour, and he was beginning to sag wearily in the saddle, and Mean’s legs were beginning to splay and give him a jerking gait from the merciless sun and fatigue, Prophet reined up suddenly.

  Straight out in front of him, not ten feet away, lay a dead man.

  Prophet had seen enough dead men to know right away the man had given up the ghost. He lay belly down but twisted back on one shoulder, left cheek facing the sky. The other cheek rested on his outstretched arm. He wasn’t moving even a little; he could have been a lump of man-shaped clay, just lying there, his upper lip and thick, brown mustache stretched back slightly from his upper teeth.

  Prophet slid his Winchester from the saddle boot, and with a sudden spark of caution, he swung his right boot over his saddle horn and dropped smoothly to the ground, cocking the rifle and holding it straight out from his right hip.

  “Kiowa” was a soft, menacing whisper all around him, emanating from the land itself, from a nearby mesquite and the far, red, shadowy Chisos range rising in the northwest. It set miniature snakes of apprehension slithering around beneath the skin of his lower back. He looked around carefully before deeming himself alone—at least within a couple of hundred feet or so—and then dropped to a knee beside the dead man.

  The man was tall and relatively well dressed. His hat was nowhere in sight. His brown hair was thick and wavy though badly mussed and threaded with sand and dust. His long, tan duster was twisted around his legs and the tops of his worn, black boots trimmed with Texas-style spurs.

  Prophet rolled the man onto his back. A five-pointed star flashed in the sunlight, the flash sparking off the bounty hunter’s retinas for a moment, blinding him. Just when his vision had cleared and he found himself staring down at a badly bloodied Texas Ranger, a rifle report sucked back its own echo.

  The slug plumed sand a few feet away.

  A man’s voice shouted, “Hold it right there, you Ranger-killin’ son of a bitch!”

  5

  PROPHET LOWERED THE Winchester’s barrel as the echoes of the rifle’s screech chased each other skyward.

  Behind him, Mean and Ugly snorted and shifted his weight uncomfortably. The bounty hunter looked to his right, saw a hatted head staring at him from over a rifle barrel. The man was belly down on a low, gravely dike about fifty yards away. The maw of the rifle remained trained on Prophet.

  Apparently, he hadn’t checked the layout closely enough. He wondered how long the man had been there. Likely, he wa
s the shooter who’d shot the Ranger, which meant that Prophet, having discovered the dead Ranger, was probably next.

  He scowled at the rifle, expecting it to blossom at any moment. But then it tilted upward, and the man wielding it stood, holding the rifle on Prophet with one hand, using the other hand to brush the red sand from his dark blue shirt, brown vest, and black denim trousers, the tops of which were stuffed down into high, brown boots.

  “Drop the rifle,” the man said. He was young, and a pale Stetson with a braided rawhide band was snugged down atop his head. Sandy hair feathered down over his ears and his collar.

  Prophet squeezed the neck of the rifle’s stock in frustration, then tossed the gun to the ground, muttering a curse. Nothing graveled a man who hunted for a living like being snuck up on.

  “Now, the hogleg,” the kid with the rifle said. “Slow as a winter rain.”

  Prophet slid his hand down to the Peacemaker holstered on his right thigh, unsnapped the keeper thong, and tossed the gun down next to the rifle. As the kid began climbing down the front of the dike, keeping the rifle trained on Prophet, the bounty hunter glimpsed a badge peeking out from behind the left flap of his vest.

  Another Ranger?

  The kid crabbed down the dike, loosing sand and gravel in his wake, and then walked around several tufts of cactus before drawing up within ten feet of the bounty hunter. The kid wore a smug grin, revealing a chipped front tooth.

  His eyes were pale blue. A thin caterpillar mustache stretched across his upper lip, and scraggly sideburns dropped down to his jawline. If you didn’t look closely, both the mustache and the sideburns could have been mistaken for a thin coating of soot.

  The kid was almost as tall as Prophet though not quite as muscular. He was rawboned, with knobby wrists and shoulders.

  “Killin’ a Texas Ranger’s a hangin’ offense, you know, mister,” he told Prophet with a sneering solemnity, glancing down at the dead man.

  “It sure is.”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  Prophet curled his upper lip. “I didn’t do it, and I gotta feelin’ you know that.”

  “How would I know?”

  “When’d you come along?”

  “Just now.”

  Prophet toughened his glare. “Then how’d you know he was a Ranger?”

  The kid looked down at the dead man and then quirked a half smile as he raised his mocking, arrogant gaze again to Prophet. “I seen the badge when you rolled him over. I seen you headed this way, and then I came down to meet you, but when I got to the shelf yonder, I seen you crouched over a dead man. I think you killed him, and I reckon I’d best kill you right now. You wanna put some fun into it?”

  Prophet wrinkled the leathery skin above the bridge of his thrice-broken nose. “Huh?”

  “With pistols. We could go at it fair an’ even-like.”

  Prophet stared at the kid, trying to decide if he was even younger than he looked or soft in his thinker box. “You’re challenging me to a draw. . . .”

  The kid grinned. A lock of thick, sun-bleached sandy hair licked down to just above his right brow. A mole shone just right of his nose, above his mustache. That, with the feral glitter in his eyes, gave him a wild, crazy look. “Yeah, that’s right. I’m challengin’ you to a draw. Just like a Friday night in Tularosa.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Prophet asked him.

  “Me? Why, I’m the Rio Bravo Kid.”

  “The Rio Bravo Kid,” Prophet said.

  “Is there an echo?” The Kid’s arrogant grin faded slightly. “I am the deputy sheriff of Moon’s Well over yonder. I heard a Ranger come up missin’, and I was sent by my superior, Sheriff Lee Mortimer, to come out here and look around, see if I couldn’t scare him up.”

  Prophet studied him again, skeptically. The Kid was both young and daft. He had sharp but stupid eyes, the kind of eyes that could kill a man without blinking. “You keep that goddamn rifle aimed at me,” the bounty hunter said, seething, “somethin’ bad’s gonna happen to you, son.”

  The kid laughed. “Yeah, like you gettin’ gut-shot and left out here with him.”

  Prophet tried a different tactic. “Let’s have us that contest.”

  The Kid’s eyes brightened like it was Christmas and he knew he had a new rifle under the tree. “Yeah? Really?”

  “Sure.”

  The Kid started to raise the Winchester. Prophet lurched forward with more speed and agility than anyone would have expected in a man his size.

  With his left forearm he swept the Kid’s rifle aside while hammering his right fist against the underside of the Kid’s lower jaw with a solid smack. He jerked the rifle out of the Kid’s hand as the younker twisted around and fell facedown in the sand, losing his hat and shaking his head as though a spider were chomping into his chin.

  “Son of a bitch!” the Kid cried, scrambling to his feet.

  As he charged Prophet, head down, the bounty hunter sidestepped, grabbed the Kid’s collar, and jerked him in the same direction he’d been headed, only faster now. His forehead smacked a boulder resoundingly, and he crumpled up at the rock’s base, wheezing and grunting, working his legs as though trying to regain his feet.

  “Ach!” he said. “Oh, shit!”

  Catching his breath, Prophet said, “Where I come from, fair warnin’s as good as a promise.”

  With a shrill sigh, the Rio Bravo Kid sagged against the ground and lay still on his side.

  Prophet tossed the Kid’s rifle away and then went over and plucked the Kid’s silver-chased Colt with gutta-percha grips from the Kid’s tied-down holster. He tossed that away, too, and then walked over to Mean and Ugly and fished around in his saddlebags. The horse craned its neck to regard him wistfully with its brown eyes, which owned an orange cast in the sunlight, as though to say, “Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Way to go, champ.”

  Mean showed his yellow teeth and shook his head.

  * * *

  Prophet found the Rio Bravo Kid’s black-and-white pinto pony ground-tied on the other side of the dike.

  The horse shied a little when the stranger walked toward it but did not run. When Prophet had led the horse back to where the dead Ranger and the Kid lay, the Kid with his hands cuffed behind his back, Lou back-and-bellied both up over the pinto’s back, the Kid across his own saddle, the Ranger behind.

  The Kid was moving his head a little now, but mostly just wheezing and groaning, and Prophet had to smile at what must have felt like a giant fist wielding a smithy’s hammer against the anvil of the Kid’s tender brain.

  “Serves you right, you purple fool.”

  The Kid had only a little water in his canteen, and it was brackish at best. He shared it with Mean but it did little to sate his thirst. He mounted Mean and led the pinto on across the desert across which long shadows were sliding as the sun angled down toward jagged peaks in the west.

  As the town came into view, he was vaguely surprised by how much the place had grown since he’d last been through here. The Kid had called it by a different name than the one Prophet remembered, but, hell, things change. He wouldn’t doubt if old Chisos La Grange was dead and pushing up century plants out here somewhere, or maybe fertilizing the ponderosas up in the Chisos Mountains, where he’d felt more at home.

  Prophet grew more and more amazed as he followed the old Chihuahua Trail north where it broadened into the settlement’s powdery, horse apple–littered main drag. A sign was calling the place Moon’s Well as opposed to Chisos Springs, as Chisos had dubbed it.

  Prophet recognized only a few of the old Mexican shacks that must have been here since the time of the hacendados, before this part of the Southwest was acquired by America. He remembered little else about the settlement. Chisos’s old saloon and hotel was gone, another, grander structure taking its place. Moon’s House of a Thousand Delights was a
garish, wooden sprawl three times larger than Chisos’s old, flea-bit flophouse, and three stories high, with a broad front gallery and two upper-floor balconies.

  The roofed stone well sat across from it, flanked by a good dozen or so business establishments, including a hotel and saloon that Prophet remembered from his last trip through here. A humble, two-story, mud-brick affair, it had been one of maybe three or four other businesses sheathing the trail with Chisos’s hotel at the time, on La Grange’s claim around the well.

  Prophet saw the sign for a TOWN SHERIFF farther on.

  He continued on past the well, wanting to get rid of his cargo so Mean could cool down first before they both drank, and so he himself could give the water the attention it deserved. As he passed the sprawling, peacock-colored hotel, trailing the pinto with the two men draped across it, one dead, the other alive but sporting one hell of a headache, he saw two faces in a second-story window.

  Closing one eye against the sun, straining his eyes, he saw the face of a tawny-haired girl staring down at him from the window. She was crouching beside a little man with an extraordinarily unappealing face. It must have been the angle of the light, but the man appeared no taller than a small child though his round, pasty face was that of an old, ugly man.

  Adding to the oddness of the visage, the girl was holding a sheet to her otherwise naked body, which something told Prophet was fine indeed, while the little man appeared to be clad in only balbriggans. A fat stogie poked out a corner of the haggard, large-nosed face that sprouted a colorless beard from its spade-shaped chin.

  The girl turned to the little man and moved her lips, saying something. The little man merely stared obliquely into the street at Prophet, who turned his head forward as he continued toward the office of the lawman that the Rio Bravo Kid had mentioned.

  It was on the right side of the street, between a livery barn and a small, adobe-brick building sporting a barber’s pole on its stoop. A man who Prophet took to be the barber, a slender gent with even features and pomaded hair parted in the middle, sat on the stoop in a wicker rocking chair, reading a book through round, silver-framed spectacles sagging low on his nose. The barber looked up from his book and over his dusty spectacles as Prophet passed. He wore a small tattoo in the shape of a cross on his broad, tan left cheek. The tattoo looked completely out of place on the man’s otherwise refined features.