Lou Prophet 4

by Peter Brandvold

  It was the way of the world, he knew. Survival of the fittest. Dog eat dog. Still, he wanted nothing to do with it. And he’d never wanted anything to do with the Indians themselves, whom he understood about as much he understood little blue men on the moon.

  As he gigged his reluctant horse ahead, he felt his stomach turn sour and his neck grow stiff with fear. Indians killed white men on sight. Everyone knew that. But he couldn’t very well turn tail and run when there was half a chance that someone here could save Louisa.

  Who was it told him that Indians were good healers?

  He kept thinking about that as he rode, Mean and Ugly’s reluctant feet snapping twigs beneath him, the sounds loud as gunshots in the quiet woods. Sweat trickled under Prophet’s arms, down his back.

  Soon the encampment opened before him: five tepees in a clearing traversed by the creek, and three cook fires over which meat roasted or kettles hung. Children stopped their play to stare warily at the visitor. Dogs barked. Old, prune-faced women sat here and there about the ground, sewing or cooking or hammering raw meat with mallets. They looked up as Prophet approached, halting their chatter to frown and stare dully. No braves appeared anywhere in the vicinity. Maybe they were hunting, Prophet thought with relief. But they’d have to return sooner or later, and then what would happen when they saw the white man and the pretty blonde?

  Prophet had to saw back hard on his horse’s reins to get Mean and Ugly stopped. The horse fiddle-footed angrily, not liking the current situation one bit, and Prophet fought him with one tight hand on the reins.

  “Settle down, Mean ... goddamn you, horse!”

  The old man sidled up to the horse and extended his arms. “Here, I take to Ka-cha-e-nee.”

  Prophet looked at the old man warily for a moment. He wanted to carry Louisa into one of the tepees himself; he was reluctant to turn her over to these dark-skinned strangers until he was certain she’d be safe. But with Mean and Ugly acting up, he didn’t think he’d be able to climb out of the saddle with her without falling.

  He eased her down to the old man, who must have been stronger than he appeared, for he held Louisa’s weight easily, one arm under her neck, the other under her knees, and moved off toward one of the tepees, where an old woman stood in a dark blue dress adorned with colored beads, waiting. The woman’s nearly black face was scored deep with wrinkles. Her eyes were tiny marbles in the weathered foxholes of their sockets, but her hair bore not a speck of gray as it fell in two thick braids down her shoulders.

  As the old man approached her, the crone turned and ducked through the flap in the tepee. The old man followed her in.

  Prophet tore his eyes from the tepee and slipped out of the saddle, still holding fast to the skittish Mean’s reins. He turned to the boy, but before he could say anything, the boy yelled, “Wasichu! Wasichu!” and ran off across the meadow. The half-dozen other children, appearing to range from age three to thirteen, followed, repeating the clarion call, “Wasichu! Wasichu!” half in jest, half in fear.

  Prophet turned to the three old women working nearby. A young girl had joined them, a smoky beauty in a soft hide dress adorned with porcupine quills and bear claws and beads arranged in the shape of the moon and stars. Her face was high-boned and softly chiseled, and her eyes and hair were of the same obsidian. Her form was as fine as her face, and nearly all of one supple, brown thigh was revealed by the slit in her skirt as she sat.

  She returned Prophet’s stare with an only mildly interested one of her own, then haughtily covered her thigh with her dress, whispering something to the old woman beside her. The old woman nodded, glanced at Prophet, and turned away, snickering.

  Feeling as though he should introduce himself, Prophet clumsily removed his hat and said, “Name’s Lou Prophet. I come in peace. My friend there—Louisa Bonaventure’s her name—she was wounded by a scoundrel named Handsome Dave Duvall. You probably never heard of him, and lucky for you ye haven’t, but he’s one of the worst badmen currently on the dodge in these parts.”

  Prophet stopped. Only one of the old women so much as glanced at him. The others were sewing and tanning and cooking as though he weren’t even there. The girl was watching him, however, looking him up and down with a hard-to-read expression in those pretty black eyes. She mumbled something to the old woman beside her and smiled. She glanced at Prophet again, appraisingly, and returned to the herbs she was grinding in a wood bowl.

  “Well... okay, then,” Prophet muttered, feeling stupid and self-conscious. “I’ll just put up my horses....”

  He untied the Morgan from Mean’s tail and led both mounts away from the encampment, where the smell of the Indians wouldn’t be as sharp in the wily dun’s keen nose. He tied both horses on long ropes to trees where the bluestem was lush and high, and walked backed to the encampment. He stood around the tepee for a while, trying to listen to what was happening inside, but heard only hushed guttural voices and occasional whimpers from Louisa. As the old women and the girl were not far away, he held his hat in his hands—did Indians recognize such niceties?—as he paced nervously before the tepee, eager to find out whether or not the old woman could help his wounded companion.

  Finally, the flap lifted, and the old man appeared. “Ka-cha-e-nee is with her now. If she can be helped, Ka-cha-e-nee will help.”

  The old man started away, but Prophet grabbed his elbow. “Who’s Ka-cha ... Ka-cha—?”

  “She is medicine woman. The powers of mother earth and father sky work through her for the People. If the girl can be saved, Ka-cha-e-nee will help. If not”—the old man raised his hands and lowered them in a gesture of supplication—”she will pass on.”

  He turned and walked away between the tepees.

  “Where you going?” Prophet called. The old man was the only one here he appeared able to communicate with, and he wanted him near.

  “I hunt. Our cache is growing thin.” The old man turned and said something to the women, then walked away, his Spencer carbine in his arms.

  Prophet turned to the women, feeling alone and out of place and worried about Louisa. The girl got up, went away, and returned with a bowl. She filled the bowl at the cook fire over which hung a large iron pot, and brought the bowl to Prophet. Without raising her eyes to his, she offered the bowl and a wooden spoon.

  Prophet took them, said, “Obliged, miss,” and watched the pretty Indian princess walk away and gracefully retake her seat with the old woman by the cook fire.

  Prophet found a log near the tepee in which Louisa lay and sat down. After examining the food in the bowl— chunks of deer meat and pale, spongy guts in a thin yellow broth specked with green herbs and other things he could not identify—he brought the spoon to his lips and began eating.

  Not bad. Bland, but not bad.

  Time passed slowly. When he finished the food, the girl brought him a weak tea, again without looking at him. When he finished the tea, feeling heady from whatever herb it had been brewed with, he rolled a cigarette and smoked.

  The old woman came out of the tepee, and Prophet stood eagerly, but the old woman did not so much as look at him. She called to the girl, who got up, grabbed a bucket, and walked off toward the creek. Then the old woman disappeared back inside the tepee.

  The girl reappeared a few minutes later, with the bucket now filled with water, and went into the lodge. She came out without the bucket, went to another tepee, and returned with a hide sack and a handful of roots of several different shapes, sizes, and colors.

  Prophet watched, worried and perplexed and wondering what kind of mumbo jumbo was going on in that tepee ... wondering if he shouldn’t just dig the bullet out himself. For all he knew, Louisa would have as much of a chance with him as with these women and their plants.

  The aroma of the smoke wafting through the hole at the top of the lodge smelled musky and fetid and not at all like any medicine Prophet had ever heard of.

  When he couldn’t stand the suspense any longer, he marched over to the tep
ee and swiped the flap aside, peering into the dark depths in which a fire flickered and a pot gurgled. Louisa lay near the fire on a buffalo robe. Her nude, white body shone in the darkness. Her head moved . slowly from side to side, and she was mumbling something unintelligible, but her eyes were closed. The old woman crouched over her, the Indian princess at her side, silently observing.

  Prophet was about to step inside when the old crone straightened, lifting her bloody hands. In her left hand, she held a long, thin knife covered with blood. She looked at Prophet and cackled, showing her near-toothless gums.

  She held up something between the thumb and index finger of her right hand.

  The bullet.

  Relief slackened Prophet’s muscles. “Is she going to be all right?”

  The crone didn’t say anything. She just dropped the bullet in a bowl and gestured to the girl for a spool of gut thread, cackling deep in her throat. Not knowing how else to take it, Prophet took the crone’s laughter as a promising sign, and went back out.

  To pass the time, he took water to the horses, then wandered around the encampment, relieved but puzzled to find no sign of any other men but the old man and the two or three young boys.

  Where were the braves? Where was the rest of the band? Surely this small gathering of the very old and the very young wasn’t all there was.

  Chapter Four

  PROPHET SPENT THE rest of the afternoon near the lodge in which the old healer crooned over Louisa, mumbling and sighing and muttering words Prophet couldn’t understand. They sounded half like songs, half like prayers.

  Whatever they were, they made the hair on the back of the bounty hunter’s neck stand straight up in the air. He felt a bona fide fever chill when she came out of the tepee and circled the lodge while shaking a rattle and dancing to a song that sounded as though the devil himself had written it and was singing it through the crone.

  He checked on Louisa later, though, and she was alive. Feverish, but alive.

  He realized early that evening, when the old women began grumbling over their meager food stores, that the old man had not yet returned from hunting. Since there was nothing he could do here for Louisa, Prophet decided to go looking for the man, and do a little hunting of his own.

  He rigged up Mean and Ugly, who snorted happily at the prospect of getting out of there. Leading the Morgan, he rode eastward across the creek, through the trees, and up a low ridge swathed in midsummer wildflowers including Indian paintbrush and balsam root. He shot a nice buck on the other side of the ridge, gutted it, and draped it over the Morgan, securing it with rope.

  He’d just finished tying the last knot over the buckle when the lineback, having swung around and sidled up behind him, gave Prophet’s back a painful nip.

  “Ouch!” Prophet cried, swinging around. “Goddamn you, Mean. Why in the hell did you do that?”

  The lineback jerked his head back and twitched his ears, a pleased gleam in his copper eyes.

  “Happy to be out of the Indian camp, that it? Well, you got a funny way of showin’ it! You continue that behavior, and I’m gonna offer you up for their stewpot. What do you think of that?”

  As if in reply, a distant rifle cracked.

  Prophet swung around, facing west, where the sun was tumbling, pushing shadows this way.

  The rifle cracked twice more.

  Staring westward, Prophet frowned. Who could that be? The old man? Had he finally shot something?

  Another report echoed on the freshening breeze. This one belonged to a pistol. Two more just like it followed.

  Curious, and hearing a warning bell toll far back in his head, Prophet mounted up and rode westward, trailing the Morgan, the gutted buck flopping against its sides. Twenty minutes later, the bounty hunter climbed out of the saddle and tied Mean to a scrub oak in a purpling canyon.

  Shucking the Winchester, he climbed the gravelly canyon wall to the ridge stippled with sparse brush, pines, and cedars. Staying low and removing his hat, he peered down the ridge into the narrow gorge on the other side, where three men dressed in ratty trail garb surrounded another man—the old Indian—tied to the trunk of a dead tree that had been topped by lightning about twenty feet up from its base.

  Two of the gunmen held pistols. The third held a rifle. Their laughter rose from the canyon floor, which the sun brushed with salmon and gold.

  They’d found an old Indian with only a single-shot Spencer, and they were having a good time out here, where good times were few and far between.

  Hearing the sporadic gunfire and the hoots and howls of the old man’s antagonists, Prophet donned his hat and made his way along the ridge, trying to get behind the gunmen while keeping out of sight from below. When he’d walked a ways, he took another peek over the ridge. Satisfied with his position, he traced a circuitous route through shrubs to the canyon and hunkered behind a rock and a chokecherry shrub.

  One of the gunmen chuckled. “Now lookee here, JC. Watch this shot. I bet I can hit that knot there just left of his big, black, ole, Injun eye!”

  “No way you can, Dick. You’ll take his eye out!”

  “Wanna lay some money on it?”

  “Two dollar.”

  “Jacky, how ‘bout you?” the sharpshooter said.

  Jacky said, “I got five says you shoot the ole redskin’s eye out the back of his head. You ain’t no marksman, Dick.”

  “Well, to hell with you, Jacky,” Dick said. “Watch this.”

  Prophet stood, took one swift step to the left of the rock, and extended his Peacemaker .45. “Watch this, you three brainless wonders.” Their backs to Prophet, the three gunmen stiffened and froze. “I bet I can shoot one eye out of each of ye from the back. Wanna lay money on it?”

  The men jerked and twitched as they turned, their raw-boned, pugnacious faces blanched with fear and surprise. “Hey, now ... who’re you?” one of them said.

  They held their weapons stiffly, having the good sense not to jerk them in Prophet’s direction.

  Prophet’s anger swelled a confluence of veins in his forehead, just beneath his hat brim. “I’m the one wonderin’ just what in the hell you three vermin think you’re doin’ to this old man.”

  “What the hell do you care? He’s just an ole Injun. We caught him huntin’ where we hunt fer the railroad.”

  “Railroad hunters, eh?” Prophet grunted. “Human vermin is what I call you. I s’pose you were plannin’ on killin’ this man when you were done funnin’ him.” The bounty hunter smiled knowingly and without mirth.

  The man in the middle—a short, sandy-haired man missing his two front teeth—said, “What in the hell’s it matter to you? He’s just a thievin’ ole Injun!”

  “Yeah,” the man on the far left said. “Didn’t you hear what they done to General Custer?”

  Prophet lifted his head to speak to the Indian tied with his arms behind his back to the dead tree. “Old man, did you have anything to do with that idiot Custer’s demise?”

  “Nope,” the Indian said without inflection.

  “See there,” Prophet said. “He had nothing to do with it. Not only that, but he helped me out earlier today. And for that reason, my trigger finger has gotten awful itchy.” He half-closed one eye as he aimed down the Peacemaker’s barrel. “I might be able to control it, though, if’n you three dumbasses lay those guns down nice and gentle and get the hell out of here.”

  The three men glanced at each other tensely. Prophet could see the rocks rolling around in their heads.

  “Well, I reckon since ye got us dead to rights, that’s what we’ll have to do, all right,” Toothless said, his bottom lip twitching.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s what we have to do, all right,” the man on the left said.

  “Damn... I guess there’s no other way,” opined the man on the right.

  Prophet smiled and lowered the Peacemaker to his waist.

  The three men before him shared one more glance, sighed and carped again and shrugged, and slowly bega
n lowering their weapons. “Well, here goes,” Toothless said.

  His gun was down around his knees when he stopped suddenly, lifted his head, and jerked the revolver at Prophet. He was dead before he could fire it. And so were his two companions—blown back off their feet with bullets through their foreheads and chests and rolling in dead heaps at the Indian’s mocassined feet.

  Prophet had dropped to a crouch, extending and fanning the Peacemaker till all six chambers were empty. Now he straightened and peered at the dead men through the powder smoke wafting around his head, stinging his eyes.

  “I had a feeling they’d pull something stupid,” he groused. He dropped the gun in his holster and moved to the old man. “It’s been my experience that the born dumb die dumb.” He moved around behind the tree and cut the Indian’s tethers with his bowie. “What do you think?”

  The old Indian stepped away from the tree. Massaging his wrists, he stared down at the three bleeding, glassy-eyed gunmen, then turned to Prophet without expression. “I think you’re handy with a pistol. That’s what I think.”

  The gunmen had shot the Indian’s cayuse out from under him, so the Indian mounted behind Prophet, on Mean and Ugly, who snorted and pranced as he craned his neck around to get a look at the savage on his back.

  “Don’t mind my horse,” Prophet told the old man. “I don’t know why he doesn’t like Indians. I don’t think he’s ever had any run-ins, unless it happened before I got him.”

  “That’s all right,” the old man said, holding his Spencer in his right hand. “I’m used to it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right”

  “Come on, Mean. Settle down and drift, you ornery son of a bitch!”

  “That’s a nice buck you shot,” the old man said when Mean had finally settled into a fast walk toward the Indian camp. “I been out here all day hunting, but my eyes— they’re not so good anymore. My aim is even worse. I should have brought one of my children along. Mad Wolf is a good shot, but it’s not good to depend on your children for game. The women lose respect.”