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

by Peter Brandvold

  In the harsh sunlight Prophet saw the sweat and blood on his face. It looked as if he’d taken an arrow in his right arm, just above his elbow. He’d broken off the end so that only a couple inches protruded from his bloody sleeve. He’d knotted a tattered handkerchief above it. His broadcloth trousers were dust-caked.

  “Did you find our treasure?” he asked Marya with mocking humor.

  “Please let her go,” Marya pleaded. “Please, Leamon . . . I’ll do anything!”

  “Marya, you will not!” the countess shot back.

  “I will, Natasha. This is all my fault. I didn’t mean to involve you and Sergei. I should not have sent you the map! I only wanted to keep it safe from him!”

  Before the countess could reply, Gay said, “This is all real sweet, but I wanna know where the treasure is. You have three seconds to tell me, and then I paint the walls of this cave with your sister’s brains! One . . .”

  Before Gay could get to two, Marya cried, “It’s back here!” and jutted a hand out behind her.

  Gay stared, blinked. “Huh?”

  “It’s back here,” Marya said, quietly this time. “It’s back here in the cave, right where Bert left it.”

  Gay glanced at Clark. Frowning he stared at Marya. “This a trick?”

  “No, it’s no trick,” Marya said. “We’ve been circling around it. I could not bring myself to —” She shook her head. “Please . . . just take it and go.”

  Gay turned to Clark again. “Come on,” he said. Shoving the countess ahead of him while maintaining a stranglehold on her neck, he took three steps forward, as did Clark. Then Gay stopped.

  “Clark,” he snapped, “kill Prophet. Get the sneaky bastard out of my way.”

  Clark grinned and turned his revolver on Prophet. “Be my pleasure, Boss. Been wan-tin’ to do that for a long time. . . .”

  The barrel of Clark’s revolver yawned wide at Prophet’s face. Prophet’s insides boiled.

  He was trying to decide which way to dodge when Clark suddenly yelled and grabbed his left leg, bending at both knees. His gun barked, the slug ricocheting off the ceiling above Prophet’s head and into the floor behind him.

  Instinctively Prophet ducked and saw Sergei’s hand come away from Clark’s leg, leaving the six-inch arrow Prophet had removed from the Russian’s back in the side of the bodyguard’s thigh. Wasting no time, Prophet dived for his gun as Gay turned his own revolver on him and fired.

  The bullet spanged off the floor behind Prophet. Gay fired again. Prophet grabbed his Colt and rolled right, avoiding the second slug. He stopped and, propped on his right shoulder, extended the gun, aimed carefully so he wouldn’t hit the countess, and fired.

  The Colt jumped, spitting smoke and fire. The bullet took Gay just below his hairline. The crime boss gave a grunt and flew backward off his feet. He landed half in and half out of the cave, his dead eyes staring wide at the sun.

  Prophet turned to Clark, who’d fallen to both knees but who was now cursing furiously as he swung his revolver on Prophet. Prophet snapped his Colt around and shot Clark twice in the chest, laying him out against the cave wall. Clark dropped his gun. His boots twitched, and then he lay still.

  When Prophet shot Gay, the countess had dropped to her knees and covered her head with her arms. Now Prophet looked at her.

  “You okay?”

  Slowly she lowered her arms and nodded. Marya ran to her older sister, dropped to her knees, and engulfed her in her arms.

  “I am so sorry, my sister!” the younger countess exclaimed. “I am so, so sorry. I nearly got you killed!”

  Meanwhile, Prophet turned to Sergei, who had propped himself against the cave wall, wincing painfully but his color improving. “Thanks, hoss,” Prophet said.

  Sergei waved it off. “What was I supposed to do, my dear Prophet? Lie around while you got your ass shot?”

  The Western slang sounded ridiculous, voiced in the halting, Russian-accented English. Prophet chuckled and walked to the cave entrance, looking cautiously around. He saw no other men, no other horses but the two standing about fifty yards up the canyon, nibbling a tuft of bunch grass.

  “Do not feel so bad, Marya,” Sergei said behind Prophet. “At least you did find your treasure, no?” The Russian chuckled.

  Marya pulled away from Natasha, her face brightening. “Yes! It is not all for nothing. I found the treasure. We will be rich forever!”

  Natasha smiled. “At least, you think you found the treasure, ma cherie.”

  “Oh, I did, I did!” Marya climbed to her feet and turned to Prophet. “Will you help me open the chest, Mr. Prophet?”

  “Be happy to, miss.”

  He followed the girl back into the cave shadows. A moment later they returned, Prophet carrying the treasure chest by its two leather end straps. The chest was a little bigger than a good-sized toolbox. Prophet figured it weighed nearly seventy pounds.

  He set it down with a grunt, in the sunlight at the cave’s entrance. He inspected the rusty padlock and drew his Colt. “Everyone turn away.”

  He aimed at the lock and fired. The lock clattered as the bullet pierced it. Prophet gave it a yank, and it fell from the hasps.

  He turned to Marya. “It’s all yours,” he said, and sidled away to give her room.

  Marya glanced meaningfully at Natasha, then at Sergei, her eyes bright with expectation. Rubbing her hands on her thighs, she said, “I am almost afraid to open it.”

  “Open it, Marya,” Natasha urged. She appeared as eager as her younger sister to see what was inside the chest.

  Marya looked up at Prophet, grinning. Then she turned to the chest, placed her hands on the lid, and opened it.

  The girl’s eyes widened and her face blanched. She blinked several times, as if to clear her vision. She said something in Russian which Prophet translated as “Oh, my god!”

  Prophet looked inside the chest. “Well, I’ll be jiggered,” he said.

  “What is it? What is it?” Natasha cried, crawling over to peer inside.

  When she did, her eyes lost their luster.

  “Is it gold?” Sergei asked from his place against the wall.

  Silence hung heavy in the cave for nearly a minute as Prophet, Marya, and Natasha stared dully into the treasure chest. Flies buzzed, the sun beat down, and cicadas whined outside.

  Prophet gave a slow nod, his features flat. “Yeah, you’re rich, all right,” he said slowly. He reached into the chest and dipped up several handfuls of Marya’s “treasure.”

  “Rich in horseshit and rocks,” he said, letting the dried horse manure and stones fall back into the chest.

  Marya stared at it. Slowly her eyes welled with tears. “No!” she cried, dropping to the cave floor and covering her head with her arms. “No! It cannot be!”

  Prophet shook his head, sifting through the rocks and horse manure. “No treasure in here,” he said, feeling sorry for the girl. “Not even a pinch of gold dust.”

  “Bert ... he would not do this to me!” Marya cried. “He would not!”

  “Come, little sister,” the countess said, kneeling down beside the crying girl. “Let us go outside and get some air.”

  Natasha was giving her sister a hand up, when Prophet, still sifting through the dried dung in the chest, said, “Wait.”

  The women turned to him, as did Sergei, who arched an eyebrow.

  Prophet clawed out several handfuls of the dust. “Seems to be a false bottom to this thing,” he said, leaning back to look at the outside of the chest, then clawing out more dung and rocks. He’d thought the chest had seemed inordinately heavy for only shit and stones.

  “Sure as hell,” he said at last. “There is.”

  “What?” Marya said with gravity, her eyes regaining some of their luster as she pulled away from Natasha and knelt down again beside Prophet.

  She sat there in hopeful silence, hands on her knees, as Prophet used his bowie knife to pry up the chest’s false bottom — a thin wood plank. As he lif
ted it out, his eyes widened and the muscles of his face reshaped themselves into soft lines.

  Marya sat with a similar expression, her jaw dropping.

  She said nothing for several seconds as Prophet lifted out one gold bar and then another and another, until four bars, sparkling brassily in the desert sunlight, sat before the awestruck young countess. Marya’s eyes seemed to sparkle of an inner gold light of their own.

  Prophet cuffed his hat back on his head and stared down at the gold. “Hellfire and damnation,” he said, blowing a long breath through puffed cheeks. “Would you look at that!”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “What I want to know,” Prophet said to Marya over dinner two nights later, “is why your prospector friend didn’t take out the Morales gold as soon as he found it.”

  The four of them — Prophet, Sergei, and the two countesses — sat together in the Gay Inn’s posh dining room. They’d made it back to Broken Knee the day before without incident.

  Sergei was still shaky, and he drank vodka with a Russian’s abandon, but the wound was healing nicely. They’d reported to the sheriff only that Gay and the other bodyguards had been killed by Apaches. In spite of the crime boss having owned ninety percent of the town, no one had seemed all that distraught.

  Marya’s gold was hidden away in one of the Countess Natasha’s turtlebacked steamer trunks, awaiting departure for Denver and then back East. Prophet figured the bars were worth at least a hundred thousand dollars.

  Marya wiped her mouth with a cloth napkin and turned to Prophet. “He thought that, with all the bandits in the area, it was safer right where it was, until he mustered out of the army. Unfortunately, Bert imbibed too much too often, and bragged about the find in a Broken Knee saloon. Apparently, one of Gay’s men overheard. I was with Bert when Gay attacked us, on our way here from the fort. One of Gay’s men killed him.”

  Natasha swallowed a chunk of steak and asked, “How was it you found yourself with Bert, cherie?”

  Marya shrugged. “I worked in restaurants and hotels to finance occasional prospecting trips in the mountains. I had a wonderful time…until I ran out of money and couldn’t find a job.” She sighed.

  “I had no money and nowhere to go but back home.” She turned to her sister, a beseeching expression on her pretty, hazel-eyed face. “I love you and momma and you, too, Serge, but I was not yet ready to go home. I wanted still to be in the American West. I love the West, and I was afraid that if I left, I would never come back.”

  “So you stayed without telling us where you were,” Natasha said, her tone lightly castigating. “But I still do not understand how you came to know Bert.”

  “Bert found me camping alone in a dry riverbed down near Bisbee. He was very kind. He taught me how to ride, to pan, and to use a rifle and a single jack, and where to find different minerals. The Indians left us alone. He’d been a soldier, but the Apaches had known him for his kindness and generosity.” Marya’s voice grew quiet and sad, her eyes pensive.

  Brightening, she added, “Once, we even camped with a band of Pimas.”

  The Countess Natasha stared at her sister with mute amazement, shaking her head. “Marya, you are the black goat of our family.”

  “That’s…sheep,” Prophet corrected. “Black sheep.”

  “Whatever,” Natasha said, still regarding her sister with befuddlement and wonder. “You will never cease to amaze me, my sister.” She pulled Marya close to her and kissed her temple.

  “We are rich,” Marya said. “If we invest wisely, we will never have to worry again about money.”

  “Yes, after we give Lou his share, we will have more than enough to make the family secure in Boston,” Natasha said, pouring herself a fresh cup of coffee from the silver pot.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Prophet cut in, turning to Natasha. “I told you, that’s your money. I don’t want anything more than the fee we agreed on in Denver.”

  Sergei spooned sugar into his coffee and regarded Prophet skeptically. “What do you have against money, my friend Lou? You have earned an equal portion of the gold.”

  “No offense,” Prophet said. “But not on your life. Do you realize what that kind of money would do to a man like me? Why, between the booze and the women and the gambling sprees, I’d be dead within the year!” He shook his head. “A man like me needs only enough money to keep him and his horse fed. And for a few drinks with the ladies on weekends, of course.”

  Prophet winked at Sergei, who threw his head back, laughing.

  Later, they filed out of the hotel, Natasha and Marya walking arm-in-arm, still catching up in hushed French and Russian. The countess’s stage was parked before the hitch rack, the two matched bays looking ready and rarin’ for the long trek back to Denver. Prophet had agreed to accompany the trio back north, scouting the way and riding shotgun.

  Prophet didn’t mind. The money was good, and it was too hot for him in this country, anyway. The senoritas could wait. Besides, he’d gotten rather attached to his and the countess’s late-night trysts.

  As he untied Mean and Ugly from the hitch rack, the horse, as he often did, gave Prophet’s shoulder a playful nip.

  “Ouch! Goddamnit, Mean. Why in the hell did you do that?”

  The horse nicked its ears and shook its head, pleased with itself. Prophet was about to give the dun a good sock in the jaw when Sergei sidled up to him.

  “Uh, Lou,” the Russian said in a low voice, watching the women board the stage, holding the hems of their traveling skirts above their ankles. “I just wanted to thank you.” He seemed to hesitate.

  “For what, Serge? Diggin’ that arrow out of your back? You done already thanked me.”

  The big Russian smoothed his thick, black mustache down with his right hand, thoughtful.

  “No,” he said. “You see, I know that the countess Natasha is, well, very beautiful. And I know that she has — how do you say? — eyes for you. I just wanted to thank you, you know, for not letting your man’s lust get the best of you.”

  He clapped Prophet on the shoulder. “You know what I am saying, Lou? I am thanking you for not taking advantage of the countess’s innocence.”

  Prophet arched a brow. “Her innocence. Yes. Well, Sergei, never let it be said that Lou Prophet ever took advantage of a girl’s innocence.”

  “You are a man of honor, my friend.”

  Prophet clapped his hand on the Cossack’s back. “You have no idea how honorable I am, Serge. No idea.”

  Sergei smiled. “Well, shall we kick up a little dust and horse piss, Lou?”

  “Uh, that’s horse sweat, Serge, and I’m ready if you are.”

  The Cossack nodded and climbed atop the stage. A few minutes later, he shook the reins over the horses’ backs, and the stage creaked into the street, heading south where it would pick up the eastern trail to New Mexico territory. The countess stuck her head out the window, smiling at Prophet.

  He gigged Mean up to the stage and took the countess’s extended hand.

  “Later, Lou?” the delectable Russian royal asked with a devilish grin.

  “Oh, yeah,” Prophet said, giving her a wink and squeezing her hand. “You can count on that.”

  Inside the stage, Marya was watching her older sister curiously. “Later?”

  Natasha smiled and cocked an eyebrow at her younger sibling. “Just never you mind, ma cherie. You’re not the only one in the family with a sense of adventure.”

  Smiling to herself, the countess shuttled her gaze back out the window. She watched the big bounty hunter in worn denims and buckskin tunic jog his hammer headed horse out front of the stage.

  As Prophet rode, he threw his head back, singing, “Jeff Davis built a wagon and on it put a name. Beauregard was driver, and Secession was the name…”

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  By Peter Brandvold

  THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET

  DEALT THE DEVIL’S HAND

  RIDING WITH THE DEVIL’S MISTRESS

  THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE

  All from Piccadilly Publishing

  About the Author

  Western novelist Peter Brandvold has penned over seventy fast-action westerns under his own name and his penname, Frank Leslie. He is the author of the ever-popular .45-Caliber books featuring Cuno Massey as well as the Lou Prophet and Yakima Henry novels. Recently, Berkley published his horror-western novel, Dust of the Damned, featuring ghoul-hunter Uriah Zane. Head honcho at "Mean Pete Publishing", publisher of lightning-fast western e-books, he lives in Colorado with his dogs.

  Visit his website at www.peterbrandvold.com.

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