Staring Down the Devil (A Lou Prophet Western #5)

by Peter Brandvold

  Prophet chuckled at the girl. She had the angelic face and countenance of a pious farmer’s daughter from Nebraska, which she was. Circumstances, however, had turned her into an improbably formidable manhunter. The combination, wrapped as it was in such an attractive package, was astounding and not a little discomfiting. To their everlasting regret, hardcases didn’t take her seriously.

  “Law, Miss Bonnyventure,” he said, “you are a caution!”

  “Someone needs to rid the earth of evil men as these,” she said, suddenly pensive as she studied the bodies draped over the horses. “You can’t do it all yourself, Lou.”

  “No, I reckon not,” Prophet allowed. “Where you headin’ now?”

  “I was looking for a place to keep these men until the sheriff’s office opens in the morning and I can file a claim for the bounty on their heads. I need oats for the Morgan, and trail supplies.”

  “I know just the place.” Prophet untied the second horse from the Morgan’s tail and mounted behind the dead man.

  Louisa watched him with a puzzled smile. “What on earth are you doing?”

  “Why walk when I can ride?”

  She grunted a laugh as she appraised his garb. “Do you realize your suit doesn’t fit?”

  “I’d just as soon not get into that, if you don’t mind. Come on.”

  “Where we going?”

  “To the livery barn where I got Mean and Ugly stabled.”

  “I have money, Lou. We don’t have to stay in a barn.”

  “Well, I don’t, and I’m a little sensitive about it at the moment,” Prophet said. “Come on. Let’s go bed your vermin down as well as ourselves.”

  Louisa grabbed the Morgan’s reins and swung onto the saddle. “Lou Prophet, are you trying to sweet-talk me into sleeping with you tonight?”

  Prophet grinned. “Is it working?”

  Louisa gigged her horse down the street. “The good Lord frowns on heathens and fornicators, Lou.”

  “Yeah, but we’ll have a good time, anyway,” Prophet said.

  Chapter Four

  Prophet and Louisa laid out the dead outlaws near a woodpile behind the livery barn. Prophet didn’t think the Mex swamper, stretched out in the barn’s tiny rear office, sound asleep in the arms of a drunk dove, would mind.

  When they’d stalled the horses, Prophet led Louisa into the hayloft, where Prophet spread his soogan. Louisa spread hers out next to Prophet’s, and they sat down, resting against the hay mound looming behind them.

  Prophet had brought up a bull’s-eye lantern, and its buttery glow offered the only light from its nail on a ceiling joist. The air was rich with the smell of hay, horses, wheel grease, and wood smoke from the stove in the Mexican’s office below. Outside rose the night sounds of distant, muffled voices and the occasional, artificial squeals of a working girl leading some miner off to her crib.

  “Drink?” Prophet offered, uncorking his bottle.

  “You know I don’t drink that stuff, Lou,” Louisa said. Fishing around in her saddlebags, she produced a slender bottle. “Cherry soda. Picked it up in Cheyenne. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”

  “You sure know how to kick up your heels, girl,” Prophet said with a grin, studying her doll-like, peaches-and-cream features in the wan glow from the lantern.

  Her face was a perfect oval, the skin smooth as fresh-whipped cream and tinted almond by the sun under which she rode, stalking the West for evil-doers, like those who’d killed her family, as if somehow she could single-handedly purge the world of villainy and even the odds against the devil.

  It was a hopeless cause, but Prophet knew she had to make the effort. It was all she had. He hoped she’d get it out of her system someday, and live the kind of life a girl like her was meant to live — an ordinary life in some small town, with a husband and kids and a house with a porch and a lazy dog asleep by the well pump.

  “Oh, I’m tired,” she said, unlacing her boots. “It’s been one long ride from up north. The Indians are causing problems up there, so I had to be extra careful. Sometimes I only rode at night. And those boys” — she curled her button nose — “were getting a little ripe.”

  “I’ll say they were,” Prophet said, having smelled the bodies himself. He shook his head. Anticipating his thought, she touched a finger to his mouth.

  “Don’t tell me it’s no life for a girl, Lou. I don’t want to talk about that. I just want you to hold me real tight, okay?” She stared into his eyes, her own eyes wide and moist with ancient loneliness.

  He placed his hands on her shoulders and pulled her to him. She scooted down on her blanket, curling her knees under her and snugging her cheek against his chest, holding him tightly around the ribs.

  “Nightmares again?” he asked, remembering she’d been racked by them — searing images of death and destruction following her family’s slaughter.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Should ride with me for a while.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “ ‘Cause you’re a loner, Lou. And so am I. You know it’s true. Besides, if we started depending on each other, we’d likely come to harm. You told me that yourself.”

  Prophet shrugged. “Bounty hunting’s no life for a girl.”

  She lay against him, breathing softly, and he thought she was asleep. But after a while she lifted her head and gazed up at him.

  “Can we do it?”

  “I thought you didn’t want to.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t want to. I just said the good Lord frowns on it when you’re not married.”

  “Then why do you want to do it?”

  “I figure with you it’s different. We pret’ near are married — wouldn’t you say?”

  Prophet smiled. “I reckon we are at that, Miss Bonnyvenrure.”

  “It’s Bonaventure — without the y,” she said. “You’ll never get it straight.”

  “Nope.”

  She lifted his head and stared into his eyes, her own eyes wide hazel orbs in the flickering light of the lantern. “You always make me feel so good, Lou.”

  He reached up and smoothed her honey-blond hair back from her cheek. “Honey-girl,” he said, “the way I make you feel ain’t nothin’ like you make this old Georgia Rebel feel.”

  He smiled and sat back, unbuttoning his shirt. She stood and removed her clothes. When they were both naked, she knelt beside him, her hands over her breasts, a shy expression on her face — an expression he had seen when they’d made love before. It was a bashful, coy look — a look that said, “Here I am; I’m just a girl. I’ll do my best, but I hope you don’t expect too much.” It was such an innocent look that his heart twisted a good three inches counterclockwise, and his desire burned.

  He took her face gently in his hands and kissed her, barely touching his lips to hers. Then he held her away, drew her hands away from her breasts, lowered his head, and kissed each delicate pink nipple in turn. She sighed softly as he worked his tongue over her pert young breasts. He lifted his head and kissed her more hungrily this time, but with a gentleness he reserved just for her, this Nebraska cherub turned bounty-hunting vengeance queen.

  A moment later he laid her gently on his blanket and parted her knees with his legs, lowering himself gently between them and closing his mouth over hers. She folded her arms around his back, lifted her knees, and groaned with passion as he began moving very slowly, very gently. . . .

  When he finally rolled onto his back, drawing her against him with a sigh, she crooked a leg over his and nuzzled his side, her hair fanned across his chest.

  “Oh, Lou, I love you so much. I wish we could be together always.”

  “Well, we could be,” he said, though he knew it wasn’t true. He could never promise himself to one woman, though if he could it would be to Louisa.

  “Shh,” she admonished. “Let’s don’t talk.” She ground her face into his side, smelling him like some frisky animal. She ran her fingers lightly
across his genitals and fell quickly asleep in his arms.

  When he woke in the morning, she was gone. Sitting up, he saw she’d taken all her gear and vanished. The soft dawn light knifing through the cracks between the wall boards revealed several greenbacks on his saddle. Angrily he reached for them.

  Fifty dollars.

  “Goddamnit, Louisa!” he complained.

  He felt like a damn whore. Didn’t she know a woman didn’t leave money with a man? Didn’t she know what such a thing did to his pride?

  No, she didn’t, he decided as he sat naked in the hay and scratched his bristly jaw. She’d known he was broke and was simply doing him a favor, lending him enough to stake him through to his next bounty.

  Damn, but his self-respect had been abused lately!

  Remembering the thousand dollars the countess had dropped before him on the table, as an advance for honest work, he leaned back in the hay and rolled a smoke. When his clothes were delivered to the livery barn a half hour later, by a blond boy in knickers whom Prophet tipped with a nickel he borrowed from the Mexican hostler, he dressed quickly and stuffed Louisa’s fifty dollars in his shirt pocket with an annoyed chuff.

  He needed a job and he needed it fast, and as soon as he saw Louisa again, he was going to return her damn fifty dollars!

  “Sorry to wake you,” he said after he’d pounded on the countess’s door in the Denver House.

  She’d answered holding a silver-plated derringer and wearing a black silk wrapper that molded to her body, which was shapely and amply bosomed, he was a little surprised to discover. She’d removed her chestnut hair from its bun, and it hung straight down her shoulders. When she wasn’t all starched and fastened and trussed-up like an undertaker’s wife, she looked damn sexy.

  She blinked at him groggily and gave a start as he thrust the suit into her arms.

  “I’ve decided to take the job.”

  She just stared at him through sleep-glazed eyes.

  Prophet heard someone breathing behind him. Turning, he saw Sergei Andreyevich standing in the doorway wearing a striped sleeping gown and nightcap, an English-styled .45 revolver in his big right hand, aimed at Prophet’s head.

  “Serg,” the bounty hunter said, pinching his hat brim.

  “How are you this mornin’?”

  The next day Ed Champion sat in the Slap & Tickle Saloon, staring grimly out the window while he stewed over his recent poker loss.

  He’d walked in three hours ago with fifty dollars left from a bank heist he and the boys had pulled in Julesburg several weeks back. But that fifty dollars was gone now, forty of it padding the snakeskin wallet of a sober-faced cardsharp from Abilene and the last ten having gone to the house when his craps dice turned up snake eyes.

  Champion cursed and glowered at the beer the bartender had bought him. He thought the man felt sorry for him, but really the barman had wanted to avoid a temper tantrum. Champion was known in half the saloons in Colorado for busting chairs and jaws after losing at poker.

  He was known to tear up a place pretty bad, and it wasn’t hard for him, standing six-feet-four as he did, and broad as a barn door, with arms and fists like mallets. He’d once skinned mules and placer mined for a living, and both occupations had banded the muscles on him like scales on a fish.

  When the door opened, he looked up to see two compatriots swagger in, shit-eating grins on their hard, unshaven faces.

  “What the hell you two grinning about?” Champion growled as the men approached.

  “We just got laid,” Earl Cary said, kicking a chair out from the table and collapsing into it. He was skinny, about five-ten, with little round eyes under the floppy brim of his filthy bowler hat. “What’s eating you?”

  “I just lost my poke.”

  “All of it?” asked Bobby St. John, a lanky river rat from Tennessee. He had a patch over the eye socket a Cherokee whore had emptied with her fingernails in a Tennessee riverboat saloon.

  “Yeah, all of it,” Champion grunted. “I got fleeced by a damn sharpy that had the good sense to light out after the game, before I had time to think it over.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Ed,” Earl Cary said. “I’ll treat you to that pretty little whore I just did the mattress dance with. She’s only three-fifty, and man, can she buck! Helluva time!”

  “I just poked a bean-eater,” St. John said. He waved to the barman and ordered a rye. “She was the best I had since we got to Denver.”

  Cary was about to say something else when Champion stopped him with, “Shut up.” Champion was staring out the window.

  “What is it?” Cary said, frowning and following his leader’s gaze through the dirty plate-glass window, on which “Slap & Tickle Saloon” had been stenciled in gold-leaf lettering.

  Champion’s attention had been snatched by the stagecoach sitting before the Denver House Hotel. He’d thought it odd that a stage would be stopped so long before the hotel, when the stage station was just around the corner. But now he’d finally figured out why.

  It wasn’t really a stage. Or, to be more exact, the auburn Concord coach no longer served a stage line. It appeared to be privately owned. That much Champion had figured out because the only people gathered around it were a young woman in a cream traveling dress and a stocky, dark-featured gent with a black goatee. The man wore odd clothes — strangely cut twill trousers with large pockets running down both legs, a cream flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up his hairy arms, a string tie, buckskin vest, and moccasins. He also wore a beaver hat. He was stowing steamer trunks and carpetbags atop the carriage and in the rear boot. The woman supervised from the boardwalk.

  Nearby a rangy hombre in a buckskin shirt and flat-crowned Stetson sat a hammer-headed dun. The man was rubbing his jaw and eyeing the Concord like he’d never seen one before.

  “That’s those Russians,” St. John said.

  “Russians?” Champion asked.

  “Sure. They been staying at the Denver House, waitin’ on some bounty man named Prophet. They were askin’ around town for him about every two days. Looks like he showed. That’s him there — the big bastard on the mean-eyed dun.”

  “So that’s Prophet,” Champion said, absently fingering an old scar on his cheek. He’d heard of the Confederate-turned-bounty-hunter, the exploits of whom — regarding women as well as men with bounties on their heads — were gaining fame and legend throughout the West.

  “Yeah, that’s him,” St. John said, sipping his rye. “I for one would like to put about two rounds in his hide. He’s trouble for men like us. Always has been, always will be, till someone beefs him.”

  “What’s he doin’ with those two furriners out there?” Champion asked.

  “You got me,” Cary said, shrugging.

  St. John threw back his rye, slammed the shot glass on the table, and motioned for the barman to bring him another. “They’re lookin’ for the woman’s sister down south somewhere. That’s what the dark-haired gent told me one day I ran into him right here, after he asked if I’d seen Prophet in town.”

  Champion was still staring out the window, his horseshoe jaw hanging. The foreign gent was moving a trunk from the boot to the coach’s roof. The woman was talking and pointing, fully in charge. Prophet just sat on his horse grinning and shaking his head.

  “She’s sassy,” Champion said, staring at the woman. “A damn polecat. Look at her.” He chuffed an admiring laugh.

  Cary shook his head. “She orders the gent around like a Mississippi slave.”

  Champion’s broad nostrils flared and his massive chest heaved, straining the buttons of his blue plaid shirt. “She’s cute. I like ‘em perky.”

  “Cute and perky?” St. John said. “Nah, she’s stiffer’n a damn church pew.”

  “That’s how I like ‘em,” Champion grumbled lustily. “Kinda fun, makin’ ‘em do what I say — after they’re done screamin’, I mean.”

  Cary laughed. “That’s sick, Ed!”

  “Yeah, it is,”
Champion agreed, nodding dully. “Why they lookin’ for the girl?”

  “I don’t know,” St. John said. “That’s all the man would tell me.”

  “Looks like they have money,” Champion said.

  “Well,” Cary said, “they did stay pret’ near a month in the Denver House. And look at that private coach. They have to have money!”

  Champion and the other two men stared quietly out the window for several minutes. Finally the stage pulled away, the stocky gent driving. Prophet following along behind. St. John looked at Champion. He offered a rare, knowing grin.

  “Are you thinkin’ what I think you’re thinkin’, Ed?”

  Champion followed the stage and Prophet with his eyes, till they were both out of sight. Champion’s nostrils flared as he snorted and ran a paw over his head, bald and pale as an egg.

  “Get the other boys,” he said absently, still staring out the window where carriages, phaetons, and rockaways hustled.

  But he was still seeing the coach with all its steamer trunks and the curvy little foreign woman who’d climbed on board and primly closed the door behind her. He imagined how it would be, having her kowtow to him under threat of death, pouring his coffee and rubbing his back and shedding her clothes when he told her to ...

  “Get ‘em now,” he told St. John and Cary, his voice rising urgently.

  As St. John and Cary headed swiftly for the door, Champion called, “Have them ready to ride in twenty minutes, you hear? Twenty minutes!”

  Chapter Five

  Having second and third thoughts about accepting the Russians’ offer to guide them to Arizona, Prophet clutched his Winchester in both hands as he made his way through a crevice in a rimrock, frowning and gazing around warily.

  He and the Russians had been on the trail for nearly a week. He figured they were about a hundred miles south of Denver. They had several weeks of travel ahead, and Prophet thought it pure loco that they had not taken a train as far as Durango. The countess, however, had nixed the idea as soon as Prophet had voiced it. She wanted to be in control of her own schedule. Besides, she didn’t like American trains. They were noisy, smelly, and congested with “simple people.”