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

by Peter Brandvold

  “There’s just the three of us.” It’ll cost you three dollars apiece. That’s including food and a bed with a pillow. Liquor is more.”

  “I have to tell you,” Prophet said, “we may be trailed by long riders. We were attacked last night in our camp. I haven’t seen any signs of them today, but I thought I’d warn you just the same. If you want us to keep ridin’, say so.”

  “Long riders, eh?” the station agent said, flaring his nostrils. “Well, I’ve dealt with road agents before. Out here, they’re a fact of life. That’s why I keep a half dozen rifles loaded and this here greener by the door. Light and tend yourselves. There’s a basin inside.”

  “Much obliged.” Prophet started to climb out of his saddle. Sergei set the coach’s brake.

  The man called across the yard, “Timmy! Jimmy! Get out here and tend this team!”

  Prophet glanced across the yard, where two men appeared in the open shed door, their faces and coveralls black with soot. They both wore visored caps, both were in their mid-sixties, and both were the spitting image of the other. Twins. Their identical faces were long and sallow, their eyes vaguely haunted in deep, wizened sockets. One held a long blacksmith’s tongs in his right hand clad in leather gauntlets.

  “That’s Timmy and Jimmy Miller,” the station agent said. “They’re twins, in case you couldn’t tell.” He wheezed a laugh. “They’ll take good care of your horses, but the feed’ll cost you another dollar.”

  “Sounds fair,” Prophet said.

  “Will they groom their coats, sir?” Sergei asked the station agent.

  Fergus had turned to the cabin door. Now he turned back with a surly frown. “I reckon they can groom ‘em, for an extra dollar.”

  Sergei appeared about to argue. Not wanting the agent’s feathers ruffled, Prophet cut him off. “That’s right generous,” he said, looping his reins over the hitch rack.

  When he looked at the agent again, he saw that the man was frozen before the door, staring toward the coach, a curious light in his owly eyes. “Well, hello there,” he said, a smile wrinkling his mouth.

  Sergei had opened the coach door, and the countess was disembarking, one hand in Sergei’s, the other bunching her skirts above her booties. She blinked her eyes against the dust that was still sifting around the coach. Her sleek, lacy traveling attire with plumed hat was nearly as dusty as Prophet’s and the Cossack’s garb; the coach’s canvas shades did little to prevent dust from seeping in the windows.

  “This is the Countess Roskov,” Sergei said very formally, when the countess had planted both feet on the ground and was gently beating her dress with her gloves.

  “Countess . . .” Fergus said wonderingly. “Well, that sounds some highfalutin, it does!”

  When neither the countess nor Sergei joined in his laughter, the manager flushed and sobered. He gave his gaze to Prophet, who arched his eyebrows wryly.

  Nervously rubbing his hands on his shirt, the manager said, “Well, it sure will be nice to have a woman in the place for a change. It’s been a couple weeks now since me and the boys have seen a woman. Ain’t many that travel this country, what with the road agents and Injuns.”

  “And you are . . . ?” the countess asked the man, daintily extending her hand.

  “Oh, I’m Riley Fergus,” the manager said, giving his right hand another wipe before giving the countess’s a rough shake. “I’m the boss o’ this here crew,” he said, nodding at the hostlers taking the bays off the coach. “If you call two old French bachelors, a half-dozen cats, and a fat ole coyote-dog a crew, that is.” He tipped his head back and guffawed, but Prophet saw his eyes roving the countess’s dress.

  Apparently, Sergei had seen Fergus’s scrutiny of the countess, too. The big Russian cleared his throat and said, “The countess is tired, and we’re all very hungry. . . .”

  “Oh, yes, of course, of course,” Riley Fergus said, clumsily opening the door and stepping back, grinning moronically while the countess and Sergei stepped into the cabin.

  “After you,” Prophet said, waving the manager in ahead of him. He didn’t like giving his back to strangers. Besides, he wanted to take a look around the station, make sure they hadn’t been followed. He stood on the porch until he heard the countess inhale sharply.

  “What is it?” Prophet said, hurrying into the cabin, his hand on his Colt’s butt.

  The countess stood looking silently around, a hand drawn to her mouth in horror.

  Prophet followed her gaze across the two rough-hewn tables littered with dirty plates, cups, food scraps, and cigarette and cigar butts. Two cats were eating off the tables. The benches were covered with torn clothing and leather gear from the barn, which was apparently in the process of being mended. Cobwebs hung from the low rafters. The place was a dump.

  The only sign of civility was a half-dead African violet perched on a windowsill, in a cracked stone pot bleeding dirt.

  A calico cat, sleeping on a stack of yellow newspapers behind the door, lifted its head to scrutinize the strangers. A few seconds later it went to work, languidly bathing its left front paw.

  “What’s the matter, ma’am?” Fergus asked, confused.

  The countess spoke in Russian to Sergei, who merely shook his head. To the agent, he growled, “The countess was not prepared for such squalid lodgings.”

  Fergus glanced around the room.

  “Squalid! What the hell do you mean, squalid? I reckon I ain’t the best housekeeper in New Mexico, but I don’t think it’s fair, you callin’ it squalid!”

  “Easy, easy,” Prophet said, placing a placating hand on the manager’s shoulder. “The countess has had a long, hard pull. I’m sure she’ll be as happy as a duck in a puddle once she gets some vittles in her.”

  “Squalid?” Fergus grumbled, casting his injured gaze around the room again. “This ain’t New York City! Who do they think they are?”

  Prophet urged the man toward the kitchen, slipping him a silver cartwheel to smooth his feathers. When the man returned with a coffeepot and three cups, he pointedly ignored the countess and Sergei and said to Prophet, “You’d think foreigners would know enough to mind their p’s and q’s over here, wouldn’t you?”

  When he went away, the countess leaned toward Prophet, eyes narrowed. “What are p’s and q’s?”

  Prophet got his makings from his shirt pocket and sighed as he began building a smoke. “He means you ruffled his feathers.”

  “What is ‘ruffled his feathers’?”

  “Never mind,” Prophet said, tired of translating.

  She tilted her long nose toward the ceiling. “I will sleep in the coach.”

  “I wouldn’t do that. You’re gonna piss-burn the gent but good.”

  She frowned, staring at the bounty hunter. “What is — ?”

  “Oh, give it a rest, will you?”

  She gazed at him, hurt. “You are angry.”

  “I’m not angry,” Prophet lied. “I’m just tired.”

  “I will get water for your cheek,” the countess said, rising from the bench where they’d taken a seat.

  “The cheek’s fine,” Prophet assured her.

  Ignoring him, she walked into the kitchen part of the cabin and asked Riley Fergus for a bowl, water, and a clean cloth.

  “Oh, you want a clean one, huh?” Fergus said indignantly. “Reckon you want it starched and ironed, too?”

  When the countess finally had a bowl of water and a relatively clean cloth, she returned to the table and sat down beside Prophet. She soaked the rag in the basin, wrung it out, and dabbed at the cut.

  Prophet jerked back.

  “It hurts?”

  Prophet nodded. “A little.”

  She smiled, faint lines forming at the corners of her slanted eyes, which were more lovely than Prophet had thought. He’d never seen them this close.

  “I will be gentle,” she said softly.

  “Why, thank you, ma’am.”

  Prophet grinned a smoky grin and began
rolling a cigarette from his makings sack. He spared a glance at Sergei. The Cossack was staring at him, a skeptical cast to his hide-brown eyes below his black, furrowed brow. He puffed his cheroot aggressively.

  Prophet returned his gaze to the countess, who was wringing the rag out again in the basin.

  “Protective, ain’t he?”

  The countess’s eyes sparked as she smiled and dabbed again at Prophet’s face. “My father trained him well.”

  “I reckon he had his reasons,” Prophet said, sprinkling tobacco on the paper while keeping his chin raised for the countess. “Not the least of which was havin’ a pretty daughter.”

  She looked shocked. “Mr. Prophet, was that a compliment?”

  Sergei grunted under his breath, as though his cheroot had grown nasty. The countess ignored him.

  Prophet shrugged and rolled the quirley closed. He poked the cigarette in his mouth, struck a match on the table, and fired the cigarette. He canted his head to one side and regarded the countess through slitted eyes.

  She did not shy from the gaze, but returned it with a brash one of her own, lids drawn a third of the way down, her hand dabbing gently at the crusted blood on Prophet’s face.

  Prophet lowered his gaze to her smooth, creamy neck, then down her chest to her ample bosom pushing at her finely cut white basque. He dropped it still farther, to her thighs straddling the rough bench, her sage-green skirt drawn tight against their firm suppleness.

  As he ran his eyes back the way they’d dropped, he thought he could hear a slight catch in her breathing. He saw she was still gazing bemusedly at him, apparently unoffended by the scrutiny. In fact, it seemed to warm her cheeks, evoke a sheen on her brow.

  The look stirred him, and to distract himself, he said, “Didn’t figure you to play nursemaid.”

  She shrugged, licked her lips, taking awhile to answer. “I guess I just tired of seeing blood on your face. You said it was nothing.”

  “It is nothing.”

  “You could get infection. Then what would you do?”

  “I got a strong constitution,” Prophet said, inhaling deeply on his cigarette.

  She withdrew the rag and gazed at her handiwork. She pursed her lips, pleased, then returned her sultry gaze to his. “I believe you do, at that.”

  Prophet’s throat constricted with desire, and to temper it, he drew deep on the quirley and turned away from both her and the Cossack, whose eyes Prophet could feel boring into him.

  She was wringing the cloth out in the bowl when Prophet heard a low whine. Suddenly Sergei leaped from the bench and grabbed the LeMatt from his holster. Prophet froze, thinking the Russian was going to beef him.

  “Wolf!” the Cossack cried.

  Prophet whipped his head to the door. A dog — or was it a coyote? — stood in the open doorway, hanging its head and looking in expectantly, wagging its brushy tail. Its bushy, burr-ridden coat was mottled gray, its nose long and sleek.

  “No, no!” Fergus shouted. “That’s ole Miguel, my ole coyote-dog. Raised him from a pup after I found him down by my trash hole one day, all by his lonesome.”

  The agent whistled. “Come on, Miguel. Get your treat!”

  The coyote padded through the door, its fat gut jouncing. Its toenails clicked on the wood puncheons as it entered the kitchen, where Riley Fergus bent over, a scrap of raw meat hanging from his mouth.

  The coyote sat back on its hindquarters, raised its long, pointed snout, and gently took the meat in its teeth. Eyes bright with bliss, the coyote packed the meat quickly to the door and outside.

  The station manager guffawed. “He just loves that trick, Miguel does!”

  “What a hellish place this country is,” the countess whispered, a hand to her chest. “They let wild animals eat from their mouths!”

  Prophet was just finishing his cigarette when the sullen station manager brought three bowls of stew to the table. At least he called it stew. It looked like a few white disks of meat boiled in water with a smidgeon of rice. The biscuits were hard and stale.

  “What is this, Mr. Prophet?” the countess asked quietly, so the manager couldn’t hear.

  “Stew,” Prophet replied, just as quietly.

  “I mean, what is the meat?” She poked at it with her spoon.

  “Oh, that . . . that’s rabbit,” Prophet lied. He knew rattlesnake when he saw it in his bowl. It didn’t bother him; hell, it had been a fast, easy meal for him many times in the past. He had a feeling the countess wouldn’t approve, however.

  “Oh, rabbit,” she said. “I love rabbit.” She spooned one of the disks in her mouth, chewed slowly, and nodded. “It is good.”

  Prophet eased a relieved sigh through his lips.

  When they were through with the main meal, the station manager served apricot cobbler and coffee. The dessert wasn’t half bad, Prophet judged, and the countess and Sergei appeared to agree, for they cleaned their plates. Nothing like traveling to make a man — or woman — hungry.

  They were just finishing when the two old-timers, Timmy and Jimmy, came in, sat down at the other long table, rolled cigarettes, and broke out a deck of cards. They didn’t say a word to each other or anyone else, giving all their attention to their cards and cigarettes. Occasionally the station manager wandered over to refill their cups.

  After a while the coyote wandered in, a half-eaten rabbit in its teeth, and lay down by the fire in the stone hearth. It plopped one paw over the rabbit, rested its snout on the paw, and went to sleep with a weary groan. The cats were lounging here and there; one was eating a food scrap under the table.

  “I believe I will retire now,” the countess said, raking her dismayed gaze around the room and rising.

  When she’d retreated to one of the cots and had drawn the blanket, partitioning herself off from the rest of the room, Prophet asked the station agent if he knew of an Arizona town called Broken Knee.

  The agent ceased scrubbing a pan at the range and turned to Prophet, frowning. Prophet noticed that the twins jerked startled looks at him, as well.

  “Broken Knee?” the manager said.

  “That’s where we’re headed.”

  “What in the hell you want to go there for? No thin’ but cutthroats in that place. Cutthroats and Leamon Gay’s men. One and the same thing.”

  Prophet considered the information and glanced at Sergei, who arched an eyebrow at him. The Cossack was drinking another cup of coffee and smoking another of his black cheroots. He’d loosened his shirt collar, and his chest hair was nearly as thick and black as his well-groomed goatee and mustache.

  “Who is this, uh, Leamon Gay?” Sergei asked, taking the question right out of Prophet’s mouth.

  “Nothin’ but an owlhoot, through an’ through. Used to hunt Indian scalps and sell ‘em down in Mexico. Then he’d steal horses from the ranchos down there and smuggle ‘em into Arizona, sell ‘em to American ranchers. Used to steal arms from the Army and sell ‘em to the tribes.”

  Prophet asked, “What’s he have to do with Broken Knee?”

  “A few years ago a man found gold in the Pinaleno Mountains. The prospector ended up dead — a so-called accident, if ye savvy my drift. All of a sudden Gay moves into the area with a hundred or so wagon loads of hard-rock miners and whores and builds him a town. Only it’s his town, run his way, or he chisels ye a tombstone!”

  One of the twins piped up, growling low, “Many a man, he goes to Broken Knee” — the twin ran a long, gnarled finger across his throat — “and is never seen again.”

  Prophet winced and glanced at the other twin, who corroborated the story with a dark nod, drawing deep on his quirley stub.

  “I’ve heard tell,” Riley Fergus said, “that Gay’s responsible for the deaths of more than fifty men.”

  “Hellkatoot!” Prophet grunted, suddenly wondering what he’d gotten himself into.

  “You folks don’t want nothin’ to do with him or Broken Knee, and they’re one and the same thing. He’s the devil, and
it’s the devil’s town.”

  “We do not have a choice,” Sergei said, consternation straining his voice. “We are looking for the countess’s sister. The last the countess heard from her, Marya was in Broken Knee.”

  Fergus shielded his mouth with his hand, so the countess couldn’t hear from her cot behind the blankets. “She a whore?”

  Sergei looked angry but kept his voice down. “She certainly is not.”

  “Then what’s she doin’ in Broken Knee?”

  “We think she might be lookin’ for gold,” Prophet said. Before Fergus could ask another question. Prophet asked one of his own. “What’s the best way to get there?”

  “There ain’t no best way,” Fergus said. “I reckon I’d go south through Lordsburg, though, and take Pyramid Mountain Pass. Then trail north along the San Simon River. With that coach you don’t have much choice. Watch for Apaches, though. Ole Cochise ain’t actin’ up now like he was a year ago, but I’d still grow eyes in the back o’ my head and do a lot of my travelin’ at night. Should be a full moon soon. Apaches won’t attack at night.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” Prophet said, inwardly cursing the Russians again for not taking the train. Apaches rarely attacked trains. Stretching, he stood. “I reckon I’ll keep first watch on the porch,” he told Sergei.

  “That sounds good, my friend,” the Cossack said. “I’ll take over in a couple of hours.”

  “You still expectin’ those highwaymen?” Fergus asked Prophet. The station manager had gone back to scrubbing his pan.

  “Have to,” the bounty hunter said as he headed for the door. “That way we’ll be ready if they come.”

  “Well, if they come, they’ll be sorry. They might not look like much, but Timmy and Jimmy, they’ll back you in a fight any day of the week, and by god, there’ll be hell to pave and no hot pitch!”

  Prophet glanced at the wizened old pair, over which a cloud of cigarette smoke hung, thick as twister dust. Nearby, ole Miguel, the fat coyote-dog, snored with one paw on the rabbit. The cat behind the door rolled onto its back, kicked its feet in the air, and yawned.

  “That’s right comforting,” Prophet said, sharing a rueful glance with Sergei.