Hell's Angel

by Peter Brandvold

  Prophet backed the horse up as far as the Rose Hotel and Saloon, and then he turned Mean around and booted him on down a break between the saloon and a stone, brush-roofed hovel with chickens pecking around the barren yard. A young Mexican woman stood in the shack’s open back door, holding a small baby to her breast and regarding Prophet apprehensively.

  “Everything’s all right, senorita,” he said, automatically pinching his hat brim to the nervous mother.

  But he heard the lie in his own words.

  Nothing much was all right here in Moon’s Well, least of all himself.

  8

  WHEN PROPHET’S PISTOL had spoken the first time out in front of the hotel, Ruth Rose had been putting a fresh pajama top on her husband, Frank, and she’d jumped with a start, releasing one arm of the top so that it hung off Frank’s bare, pasty shoulder.

  “Oh, god!” she said, backing into the dresser beside the bed, nearly knocking over the unlit Tiffany lamp. “Now what?”

  Ruth looked at Frank as though for help. He stared up at her as if seeing right through her, as though he hadn’t heard the gun report, as though he’d neither heard nor been aware of anything at all. He’d been this way since his stroke eighteen months ago, after Moon had come for his monthly tax payment along with a ghastly amount of rent for the land the hotel stood upon. Frank’s eyes were sunken, his cheeks sallow. If he’d heard the reports of the dwarf’s pistol, as when the vile little man had shot the Rangers only a few hours earlier, he’d shown no sign of it.

  Ruth’s heart thudded as her thoughts turned to what was happening outside, and what it might mean for her and Frank. The town of Moon’s Well was a powder keg that would surely soon explode and take her and Frank and the hotel—all that they’d worked for—right along with it. The hotel wasn’t really theirs, for the dwarf owned the land it stood upon and had even imposed a tax on every penny the hotel brought in. Ruth would have abandoned the place and fled the town if Frank had been able to travel.

  She glanced at him once more, quickly buttoning his pajama top as she listened with a keen, raking dread to the men’s voices pitched with anger up the street toward Mordecai Moon’s place. Frank wasn’t capable of dressing himself or feeding himself. Sometimes he didn’t even use the chamber pot she kept beneath the bed for him. He couldn’t speak. At times, she wasn’t even sure he knew her.

  How could she ever get him across the desert and across the panhandle back to Missouri? In a year and a half, he hadn’t stepped foot outside even once.

  “Oh, Frank,” she said, as though gently calling him back to her. Their home was as far away as Missouri, but Frank was as far away from her as a distant planet. Leaving her alone to run the hotel and to deal with Mordecai Moon and his curly wolves, as Frank had called them before the stroke had taken his mind.

  Quickly but gently, Ruth shoved Frank back down on the bed and against the pillows she’d fluffed for him. When his skinny legs were stretched out against the lumpy corn-shuck mattress, she drew the single sheet up to his chest and felt the searing burn of anguish once more as she stared into those liquid brown eyes that were only vaguely familiar and as opaque as those of a dead man.

  Outside, a gun blasted.

  Ruth gasped, slapping a hand to her chest. She hurried over to the window, stepping to the far left of it so she could see up the street on her right. She frowned as she stared, taking in the scene—a tall, burly-looking stranger in buckskins holding a gun on the dwarf and his men in the street between the dwarf’s House of a Thousand Delights and the well.

  Ruth lifted a hand to absently finger the silver flower-and-leaf locket pendant hanging around her neck. Whoever the man was, he’d had Mordecai Moon toss his pistol down in the street, and the others, even the inscrutable and somehow terrifying Miss May, followed suit with their own weapons. One of the three curly wolves was bent forward and clutching his right hand in his left, as though he’d been wounded.

  “Who . . . in God’s name . . . ?” Ruth breathed, her fear now making way for a buoyant sort of surprise, a hushed and subtle jubilation at the sight of Moon’s men and the dastardly girl being cowed so by a stranger who’d apparently been taking water at the well.

  Was this a third Ranger, an associate of the two who’d ridden into Moon’s Well earlier and had foolishly refused to pay for the water?

  Ruth gasped at a near sound, and she turned sharply to Frank. Her nerves were taut as piano wire, and her heart drummed.

  Frank sat back against the bed’s scrolled wooden headboard, his jaw sagging as he snored. Heart still fluttering, she looked back into the street. The stranger was backing his horse toward her, moving slowly, keeping his pistol aimed at the dwarf and his three gunmen and Miss May, who glared at him with menace.

  Fear nibbled again at Ruth Rose. She’d just started to wonder what this meant, but now it occurred to her that it only meant more killing. Ranger or not, the big man in the skintight, sweat-stained buckskin shirt might have the upper hand at the moment, but it wouldn’t last long. He’d go the way of the other two.

  Mordecai Moon and his curly wolves—there were more than just the three on the street with him now—had a stranglehold on the town. The town’s two lawmen were not really lawmen but merely two more of the dwarf’s hired killers—a gruff-looking albeit aging hombre named Lee Mortimer, and Mortimer’s deputy who called himself the Rio Bravo Kid. Separately, they made a mockery of the law. Together, in the employ of the dwarf, they were like two curs guarding the gates of hell.

  The dwarf had the well, and the well was everything in a land of so little water. He also had a saloon full of relatively good whiskey and the kind of doxies whom men traveling through this vast, hot desert paid good money for, just as they did the water.

  Women and water. With those two things, Mordecai Moon ruled the world out here.

  Which meant the big man wasn’t long for this or any other world. Still, as she watched him back the horse from her right to her left in front of the saloon, she couldn’t help feeling grateful to him, as well as sympathetic. For a moment there, he’d given her hope that there would soon be an end to the dwarf’s stranglehold on the town and on her and Frank.

  Ruth turned away from the window. Frank was sleeping now, lower jaw hanging, his face sagging like a pale sheet hung on a line to dry. Slow, loud snores rose from his open mouth. Ruth smiled sadly.

  He’d been such an alive, handsome man not all that long ago. They’d come out here to forget their miseries in postwar Missouri, to start another life after Ruth’s parents died, and Frank and Ruth, who were not farmers, lost her parents’ farm to creditors. While Frank had not been a farmer, and had looked as out of place behind a plow as would a Missouri riverboat gambler, he had been a man with a strong will, humor, strength, and hope for the future . . . even after their only child, Grace, had died from a milk fever.

  His hope had been for him and Ruth to move west and to start a new life by opening their own business in this unfettered land of opportunity—the western frontier.

  They’d bought a lot from Chisos La Grange and built the saloon and hotel here along the oft-busy old Chihuahua Trail, near La Grange’s old place. Chisos had been growing old and he’d welcomed the competition. But then he sold his land grant to the dwarf, and Ruth and Frank had found themselves slave tenants to a ruthless land baron who not only made them pay rent for the land their business stood upon but for water, as well.

  And then he’d built himself a hotel that their own humble place couldn’t begin to compete with.

  Now, because of Mordecai Moon’s vile business practices, Frank was a mere shell of the man Ruth had married. Fingering the locket in which she’d tucked away a fringe of their dead daughter’s hair, Ruth glanced once more out the window, and then she walked past Frank’s bed to the door.

  She glanced once more at her sleeping husk of a husband. She listened to his quiet sno
res and felt the raw ache of guilt once again. How many times had she found herself wishing Frank’s snores were death rattles, so she would soon be finally free of this place? Turning to the hall, her face pinched from all her sundry miseries, Ruth closed the door quietly behind her.

  A moment later, she found herself hurrying down the rickety wooden stairs, her long, spruce green skirt swishing about her long legs. She walked past her desk and through the small lobby where Chisos La Grange used to sit with the old prospectors who frequented the saloon back when it was the only thing here and the town’s name had been Chisos Springs, and glanced out the window behind the single potted palm between two chairs.

  She frowned, feeling a vague disappointment, and then opened the door and stepped out onto the saloon’s narrow stoop, and looked to her left, in the direction of Moon’s imposing place and the well. Moon and his men were no longer there.

  A bull train was just now thundering into the town from the north, heading straight for the big hotel, of course, as they always did. Dust was billowing as though a cyclone were near, men were bellowing, and the oxen lunging forward against their yokes were braying and trying to get over to the water they smelled.

  Soon the animals would be watered from the well—after the train captains had paid Moon, of course, unless they’d already contracted for the water—and then the beasts would be led around behind the place to the enormous corrals constructed of woven ocotillo stalks, where Chisos La Grange’s old hotel had once stood before the dwarf had torn it down to make way for his own.

  Ruth looked to the south. There was no rider there. Feeling the lines of befuddlement cutting deeper across her forehead, she walked out to the south edge of the stoop and peered down the side of the Rose Hotel and Saloon toward the back. There he was, back by the woodshed. He’d dismounted from his horse and was crouched forward, inspecting the horse’s left front hoof, just now sliding his pistol from its holster and flipping it in his hand to use as a hammer.

  She turned away and, with another cautious glance back toward the dwarf’s place, glad that none of his men were heading toward the Rose, she slipped back inside and walked through the small lobby, between the dusky, vacant saloon on the left and her desk on the right, and into a narrow hall that cleaved two separate storage rooms. She unlocked the back door and went out into the backyard.

  The big man gave the horse’s left front shoe another tap with his pistol butt, muttering to the beast and glancing cautiously back the way he’d come. He jerked around, flipping the pistol in his hand and gripping it by its butt as he faced Ruth.

  “Whoa now,” he said, aiming the pistol at her and holding his left gloved hand up, palm out, in grave reprimand. “Best not sneak up on a man in that fashion, missus . . .”

  “You can put the gun away,” Ruth said. “I mean you no harm.”

  She hesitated, a little frightened now. He was awfully big and sort of crude-looking, with a broad face that was neither handsome nor ugly. There was no Ranger badge pinned to his buckskin shirt. He appeared to be wearing half the desert on that sweaty shirt and on his faded denim trousers, the cuffs of which were pulled down over badly worn boots.

  His nose bulged at the bridge, as though it had been broken several times. The pale blue eyes, however, were pleasant. She sensed a humor lurking far back in them, a funny side that could easily move forward and lighten the grim set of his mouth with a handsome smile.

  He looked around, cautious as a wild animal, his eyes flicking to the open door behind her and then up the break between the saloon and the small shack beside it in which a Mexican family lived.

  “All right,” she said, taking a step back in retreat, reaching for the door handle.

  “Sorry, ma’am.” The big man raised his pistol’s barrel and there was the click-clack of the hammer being depressed. He smiled, and she realized she’d been right about it drawing out his humor, showing a gruff but tender brand of kindness. “There’s just a few more of them than there is of me.”

  He gave the gun, which looked no larger than a derringer in his big hand, an absent twirl before dropping it into its holster and snapping the keeper thong closed over the hammer.

  Ruth released the door handle. “Where are you heading?”

  “Back into the desert.”

  “I don’t see a canteen on your horse.”

  “I lost it to a Rurale bullet and the Rio Grande.”

  When she frowned curiously, he offered his mildly disarming smile again. The expression comforted her. The largeness of him, the muscularity of him, did now, as well, because she sensed no threat in it.

  Only . . . what? Her own female attraction to it?

  A man like that could be a real companion to a woman, she thought. That smile and those big arms would make a woman feel safe, not like she were teetering over a deep precipice every minute of her life out here.

  She’d so vaguely entertained the thought that she felt no shame or guilt for having had it with her bedridden husband only a few yards away, upstairs amongst the for-rent rooms. Even more vaguely, only half consciously, she felt the physical desire awakening within her, like a warm hand on her belly. It had been a long time since any man had made her feel that way. She’d been too busy, too frightened . . .

  “Well, you can’t go off without a canteen, Mr. . . .”

  “Prophet.”

  She nodded at this, liking the name for some reason she wasn’t sure of. Because it sounded biblical? Her parents’ piousness had for some reason never infected their daughter, who’d never really known what she believed in. But Ruth supposed some of the Good Book had rubbed off on her.

  “Don’t worry,” the man called Prophet said, turning to his horse and glancing over his shoulder at her again, as he stepped into the saddle, “I’ll be back to get one. I seen a mercantile down the street. And I’ll be back at that well. I don’t mind payin’ a penny or so for a canteenful to good folks needin’ it, but that little half-ounce son of a . . . well, pardon me, ma’am.”

  His grin spread wider this time, his pale blue eyes slitting with a boy’s delight edged with a man’s righteous anger, and he added, “Don’t worry. I’ll be leavin’ Chisos Springs tomorrow, and I’ll be leaving with a water flask filled from that well, and I won’t be payin’ out any more than I did today.”

  He pinched the funneled brim of his ragged, sweat-darkened hat to Ruth, and then he started to rein the dun away before stopping and turning back to her. “Pardon me,” he said affably, “but I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Ruth. Ruth Rose. I run this saloon, which”—she lifted her chin toward the upper story—“is also a hotel. You’re welcome to stay here, Mr. Prophet.”

  His eyes flicked to the sashed, second-story windows. “Oh, I don’t know. Kind of a tight fit for me. Especially when I haven’t exactly made any friends here in Chisos Springs.”

  Ruth’s lips quirked a smile. She liked the way he stubbornly refused to call the name Moon’s Well.

  “I saw what you did at the well, Mr. Prophet. And you’ve certainly made yourself a friend of mine . . . and of my husband,” she added, feeling another keen edge of guilt, because the invisible hand on her belly was growing warmer and softer.

  “Like I said—pretty tight fit. Wouldn’t want to be responsible for either you or your husband to get whipsawed in my affairs.”

  “Moon won’t look for you here,” Ruth said. “He’s busy over at his own place with the bull and mule trains just now rolling in from Alpine. He keeps a sharp eye on all the faro and roulette games, and he makes sure none of his bartenders are skimming off the top . . . and that every man pays for his girl.” She shook her head. “No, he won’t look for you here or anywhere. Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow.”

  The man called Prophet looked around with a troubled, hunted look. She had a feeling it was one he was accustomed to, because it seemed as at home on his fac
e as his smile.

  “Well, shucks . . . maybe . . .” Prophet looked east across the formidable-looking desert turning dark green and purple now as the sun fell. It would be cold out there tonight, she knew he was thinking. Cold and dry. He probably couldn’t have a fire—not with men possibly looking for him.

  “I have water,” Ruth said, suddenly very much wanting this man under her roof tonight, though she tried hard to keep the desperation from her voice. She suddenly felt so terribly alone . . . even more alone than before she’d met him. “And I’ll walk over first thing tomorrow, and get you a canteen from Soddermeyer’s Dry Goods.”

  Prophet looked interested. “You have water?”

  “Yes. Everyone in town has water. But of course we have to buy it from Moon. On contract. He gives me a break, though, because my husband’s sick, and . . .” Ruth was aware that she was prattling on indecently but couldn’t stop herself; it had been a long time since she’d talked like this. “. . . And because he pretty much owns this place despite our having bought it from Mr. La Grange. Wouldn’t do him much good if Frank and I died of thirst, now, would it?”

  “Well, hell, if you’re offerin’ . . .” Prophet swung down from Mean’s back. “I reckon I’ll light and lay in here. If you really don’t mind. I could take a drink of water. But, like I said, tomorrow I’ll be fillin’ a canteen at Chisos’s old well.”

  “If that’s your pleasure, Mr. Prophet.” Ruth heard herself sigh.

  “How much?”

  “A dollar for both you and your horse. Is that too expensive?”

  Prophet frowned a little suspiciously and canted his head to one side. “That sounds right cheap. You sure that’s all you charge, Mrs. Rose?”

  “I keep my prices low to encourage business, because Mr. Moon, of course, gets most of it. I get only the traveling families, few as they are, and the overflow from Moon’s Place. I make a little more on supper and breakfast, because Moon doesn’t have a very good cook. His Chinaman is a little heavy on the spices for most folks around here.”