Ignoring the soldiers gathered on the porch, Prophet mounted the steps in a hurry, breathing hard, his face flushed with purpose.
“Hey, hey, hey,” one of the soldiers objected, moving to block Prophet’s approach to the cabin door. “Just where in the hell you think you’re goin’, bub?”
“Get the hell out of my way, old son “ Prophet raged, thumping the soldier’s chest with the flat of his hand. “Or I’ll drop you like a jug o’ bad milk!”
Prophet’s blow threw the soldier against the door. Before Prophet could grab the soldier again and throw him out of his way, one of the others stepped behind him and dealt him a glancing blow with the butt of an army-issue forty-four. Losing his hat, Prophet dropped to a knee, wincing against the pain in his head and neck.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the soldiers closing around him and heard their curses. One kicked him in the side as he reached for his Peacemaker, and he dropped his right hand to steady himself. He turned to the soldiers swarming around him. One drew his revolver and clicked the hammer back, swinging the barrel toward Prophet’s head.
“Hold it right there, boys!”
Prophet couldn’t identify the voice, which came from off the porch. The soldiers froze.
“I’m a United States deputy marshal, and you’re all dead if you don’t toss those irons off the porch and turn around slow.”
Tottering slightly, Prophet gained his feet and cast his glance off the end of the porch, where the deputy marshal stood holding a well-oiled revolver at the dumbstruck soldiers. The deputy was a stylish, red-haired young man in his early twenties, wearing a crisp, snuff-colored hat, black frock coat, and polished black boots. His red spade beard did nothing to add years to his freckled, boyish face.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Prophet muttered, staring at the badge-toting lad. “Where in the hell did you come from, Zeke?”
Ezekiel McIlroy kept his eyes on the soldiers. “Rode into Bismarck last night. I was having breakfast when I saw Louisa ride past the cafe. Followed her here. Figured she was after Duvall. She’s inside, Proph.”
“I know,” the bounty hunter grunted, drawing his gun. He turned to the door and lifted the latch. Locked. Behind it, a girl cursed and glass shattered.
Prophet offered a curse of his own as he kicked the door in, showering splinters from the frame, and stormed inside with his gun held high.
Chapter Thirteen
PROPHET STEPPED TO the side of the door and raked his eyes across the cramped, dusky room. A dark-haired woman was yelling from behind a blanket curtain, a cigarillo in her right hand. To Prophet’s right, a soldier. was struggling with Louisa while another lolled back against the wall, clawing at the broken glass embedded in his bloody neck.
Bunching her skirts in her fists, Louisa lifted her leg and brought her foot toe first into the other soldier’s groin.
“Ah!” he bellowed. “You bitch!” Holding his groin with one hand, he clawed at his revolver with the other.
“Don’t do it, soldier boy!” Prophet warned.
Heedless, the soldier swung around toward Prophet, raising his gun. Prophet’s Peacemaker barked, sending the man back against the wall and curling up in the corner as a washtub fell from the wall and crowned him.
“Oh, that’s just wonderful! Just wonderful!” the woman scolded from behind her curtain.
Prophet looked at the soldier with the glass embedded in his neck. He’d fallen onto his butt, his back to the wall. Blood pumped out of him in waves, cascading down his chest and shoulder.
He looked at Prophet dumbly. “Oh... boy,” he said. His legs and feet twitched, his eyes fluttered, and then he pitched over sideways, shaking until his heart stopped.
Louisa looked at him. She turned to Prophet, brows furrowed with disdain. “He got his due. As for the other, I could’ve handled him, too.” She bent to pick up her hat, snugged it on her head, and brushed past Prophet as she marched to the door.
“Now, who’s gonna clean up this mess? I have customers comin’ in a few minutes.”
Prophet looked at the woman. “That’s a good question,” he said, as he turned to the door and stepped onto the porch.
Deputy McIlroy was still bearing down on the other soldiers, gun extended in his hand. The soldiers’ hands were still raised. The commotion within the cabin had turned their faces stiff and pale.
Louisa elbowed one of the soldiers out of her way as she stooped to retrieve her pistol from the porch floor. She gave it a quick appraisal, dusted it off with her hand, then returned it to the slit in her skirt and descended the porch steps.
“You all right, Proph?” McIlroy asked.
Prophet only vaguely heard him. He was too busy watching Louisa climb aboard the Morgan.
“Where you goin’ now?” he asked her.
“I have a job to do,” she said, angrily brushing her honey-blonde hair off her shoulders. “It may not be the most appropriate task for a girl, Mr. Prophet, but I’ve been called upon to do it. And I will accomplish it in spite of your tricks!” She reined the horse around and with an angry “Good day!” heeled it up the bank and onto the road at a gallop.
Prophet scowled after her, grinding his teeth.
“Where’s that crazy girl going now?” McIlroy asked.
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Prophet groused as he headed for his horse.
“She’s going after Dave Duvall.”
Prophet stopped suddenly and turned to the woman standing in the cabin’s doorway. The woman took a deep drag off the cigarillo and glanced toward Louisa’s retreating figure.
“Where?” Prophet asked.
“Clawson’s sawmill. It’s on the trail yonder, about three, four miles. That girl might’ve been able to handle those two soldiers in there, but if she crosses Handsome Dave all by her lonesome ...”
Prophet marched to his horse and mounted up.
“Hey, wait a minute, Lou,” McIlroy said, looking anxious as he held his revolver on the soldiers. “You have to wait for me. I’ve been assigned to track Duvall and bring him in.”
Prophet looked at him. He didn’t normally care for lawmen, namely because they didn’t normally care for him. His and McIlroy’s relationship hadn’t started out on the best terms, but a camaraderie had grown from an uneasy alliance as they’d tracked the Red River Gang from Fargo to their hideout, and now Prophet counted the young deputy marshal as a friend.
He gestured at the soldiers. “What about them?”
McIlroy stared at the soldiers, wincing. “Damn!” he fumed. “Boys, you ever do anything like this again, I’ll have you strung up by your thumbs, and I would now if I didn’t have more important matters to tend to. Count yourselves lucky!” McIlroy holstered his pistol, told Prophet to wait while he fetched his horse, and ran behind the cabin.
Lowering his hands, one of the soldiers said to Prophet, “Handsome Dave Duvall really in the country?”
Prophet just stared at him, his nostrils flaring with antipathy. It was answer enough for the soldier. “Damn!” he exclaimed, sharing meaningful looks with his friends.
“What I wanna know is who’s gonna drag these two dead soldiers out of my house!” the woman said, fists on her hips.
Prophet didn’t have time to hear the soldiers’ reply to that. McIlroy galloped around the side of the cabin, and the bounty hunter spurred his own horse up the embankment to the road, then south at a gallop, the two men riding abreast, hat brims pasted against their foreheads.
“Nice to see you again, Proph,” McIlroy called above the thunder of his horse’s pounding hooves.
“I reckon it’s nice to see you, too, Zeke, seein’ as how I’d be snugglin’ snakes if you hadn’t shown up when you did,” Prophet replied. “I tell you what, we take down Handsome Dave today, the first drink’s on me.”
“I hope I can take you up on that.”
They rode hard for a good mile and a half. Then the trail forked, and they checked their horses down, eyeing
each fork with consternation. Both looked relatively well traveled.
“You take the right fork,” Prophet said. “I’ll take the left. Reckon we’ll know which one’s right within a mile or so.”
“I reckon,” McIlroy said. “If yours is the right fork, don’t try to take him alone, Proph. I know you’ve been in the man-hunting business a lot longer than I have, but there’s no sense in taking unnecessary chances. Besides that,” the deputy added with a dark look in his young eyes, “I want a part of him.”
“I’ll wait for you if you wait for me.”
Prophet spurred Mean down the trail’s left fork, riding hard around a grassy butte and into a swale through which a spring runout bubbled over rocks. He splashed across the runout, then galloped through a small cottonwood grove and up a hill. At the hill’s crest, he brought Mean to a halt and cast his gaze into the valley below.
A small ranch operation sat in the valley: a dugout cabin, a small, gray barn, and a corral where several ponies milled. One man sat on a stump before the cabin, sunning himself. Another was digging post holes behind the barn.
The trail appeared to dead-end in the hard-packed yard.
“Shit!” Prophet complained, reining Mean around and heading back the way he’d come.
He cut cross-country to the other fork and rode hard again south through several buttes and over a low saddle. The trail cut through a ravine, and when Prophet came out the other side, several buildings opened out before him. They sat in a shallow valley rimmed with buttes. The Missouri River arced around to the west, wide and milky brown in its chalky cut through the short-grass hills spiked with yucca.
Prophet halted his horse and studied the sawmill warily. There was a long, low cabin, its awning supported by posts, and several open sheds filled with firewood, and an empty corral. Zeke McIlroy was near the corral, hunkered down on his haunches and studying the ground. His horse was tied to the open corral gate.
Prophet rode over and reined up. “You were gonna wait for me.”
“Didn’t see any point. He’s gone.” McIlroy gestured at what Prophet had already discovered: a dead man lying by a horse trough in the middle of the yard. “There’s another man on the porch and a woman inside. In the same shape.”
“Louisa?”
McIlroy shook his head in disgust. “She was galloping off just as I rode in. I called to her, but she wouldn’t have any of it. Must be following these tracks here—four horses, not including her own.”
“Four?”
McIlroy just shrugged.
Prophet sighed and dismounted. He tied Mean to the corral and walked over to the dead man by the horse trough. He’d been shot in the side of the head. Walking to the cabin, Prophet found another man lying dead on the porch in a pool of congealed blood. The man’s face was puffed up and purple as an overripe plum.
Shaking his head, Prophet walked into the cabin and found the woman lying nude and dead across a bed. Her skin was already translucent blue. That and the congealed blood here and on the porch told Prophet the killings had happened a good four or five hours ago, which meant Duvall and whoever he was now riding with had a four- or five-hour advantage.
“What do you think?” McIlroy said as Prophet crossed the yard to the corral. “He have about six hours on us?”
Prophet nodded, wincing against the sun glare. “Around that, I reckon.”
“Who do you suppose the other three are?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.” Prophet stretched the kinks out of his neck as he looked down the trail. He felt discouraged and, he had to admit, a little hopeless. He’d never had this hard a time, been through what he’d been through tracking Dave Duvall. He’d swear the man had nine lives. And wherever he went, he left carnage in his wake.
Which meant he had to be stopped ... and soon.
Adding to Prophet’s frustration was Louisa. It was just a matter of time before he found her along the trail with another bullet in her hide or with her throat slit... or worse. He knew he should just give up on her, but he couldn’t. She meant too much to him for that. He wanted to see her through this alive.
He grabbed the horn and crawled tiredly into the leather. “Looks like that drink will have to wait.”
“Looks like,” McIlroy agreed, looking as dark and weary as Prophet. He, too, forked leather and reined his horse out of the yard, falling in beside Prophet. “I hate to leave those bodies there for someone else to find.”
“If we take time to bury them, there’s liable to be a whole lot more where they came from,” Prophet said, giving Mean the spurs.
Louisa had not been surprised to find the bodies. She’d been following Duvall and his now-deceased gang far too long for anything—the most abominable of abominations—to surprise her in the least. The carnage didn’t really even turn her stomach anymore, a thought she found only vaguely disconcerting. She was too busy with the task at hand: hunting down Handsome Dave Duvall and killing him as he had killed others, including her beloved family.
It would not be pretty, what she intended to do to Duvall. Not pretty at all. And the thought propelled her with a venom she’d never known, had never suspected she would ever know.
She followed the trail of the four horses now, leaning out from her saddle to scour the tracks, careful not to lose them as she’d lost them an hour ago, when the riders had tried to elude trackers by suddenly swinging off the horse trail and traversing a grassy butte.
They were traveling cross-country now—or had been four or five hours ago—riding single file to make the tracking harder, across a long, flat divide between creeks. The sun was high and hot, and gophers poked their heads from holes, chortling. Two hawks screeched as they traced lazy circles in the blue sky over a box-shaped butte quartering in the hazy eastern distance.
This was a vast country, she saw as she glanced around, giving her attention a momentary reprieve from the trail. It was all dun grass and rimrocks and distant buttes, and it was scored by ravines, canyons, and coulees. She gave her eyes back to the horse trail, trying to stem the tide of loneliness she suddenly felt lapping at her consciousness.
Damn him. This loneliness was Prophet’s fault. If she hadn’t met him and gotten close to him, come to depend on him more than she’d realized ...
It was his fault she felt not only lonely but doubtful, frightened.
Never again would she come to depend on someone else for her happiness and security. Never. Her family was dead. She had only herself now, and she could survive if she remained strong.
She shook her head to rid herself of the needling doubt and blinked her eyes at the shod hoofprints in the sod. She followed the trail another slow mile, then another, wondering where Duvall was heading. She knew she’d never be able to overtake him unless he slowed considerably or stopped altogether, which eventually he would have to do. He couldn’t run forever. Eventually he’d come to a settlement where he’d stop and rest himself and his horse.
That’s where she’d find him, and the cat and mouse game would be over at last.
In the late afternoon, she lost the trail in a deep, brushy ravine. She rode up the ravine’s other side and back down again, looking for the tracks with a growing desperation. Finally, she turned the Morgan in the direction Duvall had been headed, hoping to pick up the trail again farther south and west.
She rode for an hour without finding it. After another hour, she found herself on a vast, lonely prairie upon which night was closing fast, casting purple shadows among the sage tufts and occasional cotton woods. The air cooled and dampened and became fragrant. Distant rimrocks stood silhouetted in the west. Stars sparked to life in the east.
Looking around, Louisa realized with a shudder that she had no idea where she was. She knew she’d come from the north and east, but how far had she traveled? Finding her way back to the ravine in which she’d lost Duvall’s trail would be impossible in the darkness. But only there did she have any chance of finding it again.
Looking for
the trail would have to wait until morning, and by then it would be a very cold trail indeed.
Whipping her head around and seeing nothing but gathering darkness and hearing nothing but the breeze rustling the grass, she felt panic overtake her. Her heart hammered painfully, and an apple-sized lump swelled in her throat. She was all alone out here, miles from any settlement, with darkness falling fast.
She’d been alone before. She’d camped time after time on a lonely plain. So why now did she feel so frightened?
“Lou,” she said, startled by the thin cry that had escaped her lips as if of its own accord.
Craning around in her saddle, casting her worried gaze back the way she’d come, she said it again. “Lou Prophet, where are you?”
Chapter Fourteen
FIVE MILES SOUTHEAST of Louisa, Prophet squatted on his haunches atop a bluff and stared off across the dark landscape unfolding before him.
He was looking for Duvall’s campfire, but he’d known even before he’d climbed the bluff after he and McIlroy had stopped for the day that he would not find any such light. Duvall was too far ahead. Tracking was a slow process, and Prophet and McIlroy were gaining very little ground, if any.
Still, Prophet scanned the dark land crowned with vivid stars, hearing coyotes and distant wolves, a vagrant night breeze rattling the leaves of nearby shrubs. He realized now he wasn’t looking only for sign of Duvall’s encampment but for sign of Louisa’s, too.
He cursed to himself, worrying about her. In spite of how tough she was, if she met up with Duvall before he, Prophet, did ...
He gave a grunt and, shaking his head, stood. He took one more long look around him, then turned and started down the bluff, picking his path carefully in the darkness, grabbing shrubs to slow his descent.
“It’s Prophet,” he announced as he neared his and McIlroy’s encampment lit by a small cook fire. Stepping into the circle of orange light, he saw McIlroy sitting back against his saddle, smoking a cigar and idly running an oiled rag over his rifle.
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