She took a sip and then set it back down on the stump. Prophet watched her stare down at his holstered .45. A slight tremor of apprehension passed through him as she reached down and slipped the Peacemaker from its holster.
“My, what a big gun,” Verna said above the river’s quiet gurgling and rippling.
Prophet rose and walked down into the pool. She smiled at him from the bank, hefting the revolver in both her hands. “A big gun for a big man, eh, Lou?”
Prophet swam across the pool, glancing up at the woman smiling down at him, trying but failing to twirl the heavy Peacemaker on her finger. He gained the bank and hoisted his dripping body up out of the water and onto the grass.
“How many men do you suppose you’ve killed with this gun, Lou?”
She pointed the gun in his direction, frowning at him
Prophet hesitated. For a second, the barrel was aimed at his heart. Her finger was curled across the trigger. The barrel wavered, as though the gun was too heavy for her to control.
Prophet walked over to her, closing his hand over the gun. He smiled as he gently pulled it out of her hand.
“Don’t you know it ain’t nice to aim guns at folks? Unless you’re aimin’ to shoot ’em?”
“If that gun could talk—eh, Lou?”
Prophet shoved the piece back into its holster. “Well, it can’t, and that’s probably just as well.” He glanced at her. “You like guns, do you, Verna?”
She moved over to where her clothes lay in the grass. “A girl in my line of work best know how to shoot one if she wants to survive. That’s all I know about ’em.”
Sullenly, pensively, she began dressing. Prophet did, as well.
When he’d stomped into his boots and strapped his gun around his waist, cinching the buckle, she asked for help with the corset. He laced it for her and kissed her neck, resting his hands on her shoulders. She was a moody girl. As though to acknowledge the fact, she placed her right hand on top of his, on her shoulder, and glanced up at him with genuine demureness for a change.
“Thank you for a wonderful afternoon, Lou,” she said quietly as she continued dressing.
Something was bothering her. Prophet wondered what it could be. A general tendency toward darkness? Some of the most beautiful, bubbly women were so stricken. He’d known enough such women to know that it was often best not to press them about their moods. He himself was that way, after all, and when he felt the shadows moving in on him, he didn’t like to talk about it.
“Thank you, Miss Verna.” He ran his fingers through his damp hair, which the breeze was quickly drying, and snugged his hat down on his head. “I reckon I’d best get back to town and look in on my partner.”
As they walked together slowly back through the grass to where she’d parked the buggy, Prophet said, “I . . . uh . . . don’t know how to ask this discreetly, Miss Verna, but . . . how much do I owe . . . ?”
“Oh, you don’t owe me a thing, Lou Prophet.” As they approached the Morgan, she stopped and turned to him, her bright smile in place once again. “Let’s just call this afternoon my attempt to prime the pump, so to speak. Perhaps you’ll stop by my little house on the hill sometime while you’re still in town? If you come before five, I serve cookies and tea.” She gave a husky chuckle at that.
“I’d like nothing better,” Prophet said. “I’ll be here a few more days for sure, and—”
A bullet hammered a box elder two feet to his right. Close on the heels of the crunching thud came the flat crack of the rifle.
Prophet jerked with a start, crouching and bolting forward, covering Verna’s body with his own. He hadn’t meant to run her over but she gave a little scream as she fell backward.
Prophet grabbed her arms to break her fall, letting her settle onto her knees.
As another bullet screeched through the air over his head and snapped a branch off a juniper to his right, the Morgan gave a whinny and leaned into its collar, pulling the chaise along behind it. The buggy’s brake was engaged, its front left wheel holding taut, so the horse jerked it along haltingly, unable to pick up any speed.
As Prophet heard the metallic rasp of another cartridge being levered into a rifle breech, he threw himself onto Verna, and, holding the girl taut in his arms, rolled twice until he and the woman were lying behind a stout cottonwood.
The rifle shrieked two more times, the second bullet chewing into the side of the cottonwood, bark raining down on Prophet and Verna, who said nothing but lay shuddering beneath him.
“Stay down!” Prophet yelled, sliding his Peacemaker out of its holster.
He shot a look around the right side of the cottonwood. He saw the silhouette of a man aiming a rifle from around the side of another tree about forty yards away.
Prophet snapped his Peacemaker up and fired.
He continued firing—one shot after another, the gun thundering and bucking in his hand, flames lapping from the barrel—until the hammer pinged on an empty chamber.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
When the echoing roars of his own gun had subsided, Prophet heard a hoarse, rippling sob. Through his wafting powder smoke, he saw the shooter running away from him, stumbling through the brush and trees.
“Stay down, Verna,” Prophet said, glancing around as he quickly opened the Peacemaker’s loading gate and shook out the spent shells. He filled the cylinder with fresh brass from his shell belt, spun the wheel, clicked the loading gate home, and began walking out away from the cottonwood, following the shooter.
He looked around for other possible ambushers, but saw and heard only the one running away from him. The man was sobbing and grunting, occasionally cursing. The brush crackled beneath his boots.
Prophet stopped.
Suddenly, he’d lost sight of the shooter. He couldn’t hear him, either.
Just as suddenly, the man slid his head out from behind a tree about fifteen feet ahead of Prophet. The man gritted his teeth and widened his dark-blue eyes as he raised his rifle once more.
Prophet jerked up the Peacemaker and fired without aiming.
The shooter’s head snapped straight back on his shoulders. The man staggered, tripped over his heels, and fell like a toppled pine.
Prophet looked around. Spying no signs of more shooters, he strode forward and stopped near the dead man’s boots. The dead man stared up at him wide-eyed, as though he were surprised by his fate. He had a long, gaunt, pale face and thin, gray-brown hair, more brown than gray along the sides and in his sideburns, which dropped to his earlobes.
He was one of the seven. Purdy, Prophet thought he’d heard him called. He wore a brown vest over a blue wool shirt and a blue stone bolo tie with silver tips. He had shit on his boots. Prophet thought he’d seen him around one of the town’s livery barns, giving orders to two young hostlers.
Footsteps sounded behind Prophet. He glanced behind him to see Verna walking toward him, tentatively, holding her hands together in front of her belly. Her rich lips were slightly parted.
She stopped near Prophet, looked down, and shook her head. “Jim Purdy.”
“One of the devil’s seven,” Prophet said gruffly. “Good riddance, amigo.” He glanced around, finding it odd that none of the others had shown up yet. He grabbed Verna’s left forearm and squeezed. “You stay here with Purdy. I’m gonna have a look around.”
“Damn fool,” was all she said, staring reprovingly down at the dead liveryman.
Prophet went back to the chaise. The Morgan had stopped only a couple of dozen yards from where the buggy had originally been parked. Prophet grabbed his Richards out from beneath the seat and held the stout popper in both hands as he tramped through the trees, moving first upstream along the river and then down. He moved out away from the Arkansas and circled back to where Verna stood near Purdy. She was leaning almost casually against a tree.
“Looks like he came alone,” Prophet said, peering curiously down at the dead man, whose eyelids had partly closed, though the eyes behind them s
till looked shocked. “Why in hell would he do that?”
“Silly man,” Verna said, staring down at Purdy and slowly shaking her head. “Whatever possessed you to try such a fool stunt?” She sighed, looked at Prophet, and shrugged. “One down, eh, Lou?”
“I reckon.”
A horse whinnied. Prophet looked through the trees to see a saddled horse standing by the river. He walked over, still looking carefully around him, incredulous, and untied the horse’s reins from a branch of a young cottonwood. He led the sorrel gelding back to where Purdy lay in the grass near Verna and lifted the man up and over the horse’s saddle. The horse shook its head as though not happy about having to carry a dead man on its back. It whickered, blew, and whickered again.
“Easy, boy,” Prophet said, wishing he had some rope. Purdy wasn’t carrying a riata, and the horse wasn’t outfitted with saddlebags in which the bounty hunter might hope to find something to tie the dead man to his saddle with.
“Taking him back?” Verna asked.
“Yep.”
She didn’t say anything but only pooched her lips out slightly, giving a queer, oblique smile.
“Where the hell is it? Where the hell is it?”
Roscoe Deets rummaged around in the bottom drawer of his roll-top desk in the town marshal’s office. He looked under and between old ledger books, tax documents, judiciary dockets, old court summonses, and a crudely put together folder of local statutes. They were all the documents that had come with the job.
Deets had gotten rid of everything that had personally belonged to Bill Wilkinson and his deputies—couldn’t get rid of it fast enough after Wilkinson was dead—but the desk was still packed with wanted dodgers, manila folders, and other paperwork that Deets had been told to leave alone, as the sheriff would need to consult certain documents on his monthly run through Box Elder Ford.
“Monthly run?” Deets had silently scoffed to himself a time or two.
He hadn’t seen old Boss Crowley a single time since he’d been made town marshal. As far as Deets knew, the county outside of the jurisdiction of individual town marshals was left to its own devices. In other words, the ranchers settled disputes between themselves with guns, knives, and hang ropes. Deets had seen that for himself the five years he’d worked for old Jasper McRae up near the Jasper Buttes, not far from the Kansas border. McRae had been as quick as most old-time ranchers to play cat’s cradle with a man’s head if he suspected that that man had been stalking his range with a running iron, doctoring brands.
“Goddamnit!” Deets said now, slamming the bottom drawer and mopping sweat from his cheek with a sleeve of his pin-striped shirt. “Where in the hell is it?”
He knew he’d left a bottle in here. He’d rid himself of most of the whiskey he’d stored here after he and Lupita were married and she’d made him promise to give it up. When he’d met her, he’d been a soak. A common affliction of the range rider. He and some fellow cowpunchers had distilled the stuff themselves. He hadn’t really given it up, however, until he’d shot Bill Wilkinson. He’d had to get half-drunk to confront the tyrannical gunfighter and lawman, and then he’d probably been so quick to shoot him because of the busthead.
And because of the cat.
That damned cat that had given a screech and surprised Wilkinson, distracting him, which Deets, scared out of his wits, had instinctively used to his full advantage. He wouldn’t have done that sober. At least, he didn’t think he would have. He’d intended to confront Wilkinson fair and square and inform the man he was taking his job and let the cards fall where they may.
He’d given up whiskey after that—for good and true.
At least, he’d gotten rid of all the quart bottles he’d kept here and hidden behind the buggy shed at his and Lupita’s place. But this morning, just after he’d watched the undertaker’s boys haul the bulky body of Arnell Three-Bears away in their wagon, he’d remembered a small, flat bottle he’d half-consciously held onto.
In the event of an emergency.
But where in the hell had he put it?
There were two other desks in the office. Rather, one desk—a small roll-top sitting in the middle of the room and abutting a square-hewn roof support post—and a small, wobbly square table of warped, hammered-together planks and with an apple crate beneath it that served as storage. The roll-top and the table had served Wilkinson’s two deputies.
Thinking he might have stowed the bottle in the small roll-top, Deets headed that way.
He’d just opened a drawer when a shadow crawled along the rough wooden floor behind him. He whipped around and looked out the window over his desk to see Miss McQueen’s leather chaise pull up in front of the office from the left. As Deets scowled through the dirty window, he saw that Prophet was riding with Miss McQueen on the chaise’s front seat. The wagon pulled a little to Deets’s left.
It was then that he saw the sorrel trailing the chaise. A man was sprawled belly down over the saddle.
“Oh, no,” Deets groaned, throwing out an arm like a distraught child, letting his fist slap down against his thigh. “Oh, Christ—what now? Who now?”
Deets walked wearily over to the door and stepped outside. Several men were coming along the street, heading toward the marshal’s office, glowering after the sorrel and its grisly cargo. Prophet climbed down out of the chaise. He was smoking a cigarette. He removed the cigarette from between his lips, tapped ashes into the street, and freed the sorrel’s slip-knotted reins from the back of the buggy, letting them drop in the street.
“There you go, Marshal,” Prophet said. “More business for your undertaker.”
Deets stared hang-jawed at the big man. Prophet turned and pinched his hat brim to Miss McQueen, who was still sitting in the buggy, the reins in her gloved hands. She wasn’t wearing the big picture hat she’d been wearing before. Her hair looked disheveled, maybe a little damp, Deets thought.
“Ma’am, I did enjoy the day,” Prophet said, giving a mock-courtly bow.
“And I did, as well, Mr. Prophet,” she said, dipping her chin. “Give my regards to your partner and please relay my wishes for a speedy recovery.”
“Will do.” Prophet turned and walked off down the street.
Deets stared, mouth open, wanting to call out to the man, but something held him back. The man had so much gall; it was off-putting.
“You just gonna stand there, Deets?” This from Neal Hunter, who was holding up the head of Jim Purdy by its hair. Purdy’s lower jaw was slack, his eyes half-open. Hunter let the liveryman’s head slap down against the side of his horse. “You’re not going to arrest him for this?” He canted his head toward the dead man. “He killed Purdy, for chrissakes.”
“Oh, it was all in self-defense, Mr. Hunter—I assure you,” said Miss McQueen. She gave a superior smile and batted her lashes mockingly. She turned to Deets. “Mr. Purdy ambushed him. Or tried to. Might have hit me, the fool. If you ask me, he got what he deserved.”
She turned her head forward, shook her reins over the Morgan’s back, and rattled off down the street. At the next cross street, she swung north and disappeared behind Bly’s barbershop. Bly himself stood outside, his arm in its sling, staring toward Deets and Hunter and the dead man sprawled across his saddle.
Soon, they were all here, gathered around Purdy and the sorrel.
All seven of the eight who’d been in the saloon earlier in the day, being cowed by Prophet. The banker was even ambling up now, huffing and puffing against the walk over from the bank. He was mopping sweat from his forehead with a red silk handkerchief.
“Good Lord, who is it now?” he said, moving up to the horse.
“Jim,” Hunter said. He looked past Deets. Deets followed his gaze to Hunter’s wife, Helen, standing on the boardwalk fronting their hotel to Deets’s right, staring back at her husband.
Leaning against an awning support post, she held a towel. The sleeves of her gingham dress were shoved up her arms. She stared back at Hunter without expression
. Slowly she turned and walked back into the hotel.
What the hell was that all about? Deets wanted to know.
Or, no. Maybe he didn’t. Christ, what kind of a bailiwick did he find himself in here, anyway? He’d thought this would be an easy job. Of course, his having to kill Wilkinson to get it should have been a sign . . .
Damned fool, he told himself.
“What happened?” the banker asked Hunter. He, Tanner, Carlsruud, and big Eriksson were all standing together near Purdy. Bly remained in front of his barbershop.
“What happened?” Hunter said to the banker. “Prophet just killed our mayor. That’s all.”
They all swung their gazes toward Deets.
Deets said, “Miss McQueen said it was self-defense.”
“She did,” Hunter said to the others fatefully. “She did at that.”
Tanner scowled. “What the hell kind of a game is she playin’ here, anyways?”
“Shut up,” Hunter said under his breath, his cheeks coloring. “Just keep your trap shut, L.J.”
Tanner swung around and headed back across the street to his saloon, adjusting his eye patch as he went. He lifted his revolver halfway out of the holster he wore on his right thigh, and let it drop back down again. Lifted it, let it drop, as though he were semi-consciously practicing his draw.
He pushed through the batwings and disappeared.
Deets swung around and went back into his office.
“Where is it?” he asked himself aloud, looking around frantically. “Where in God’s name did I hide it?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Louisa could see one of her pistols beneath her carefully folded clothes piled on an old, sun-faded brocade armchair parked in a corner of the narrow room she was in. Weakly, she stretched her left arm out, but there was no way she could reach the Colt from the bed. She’d thought there might be a chance, but she’d been unconscious so long that she’d lost her depth perception.
To Hell on a Fast Horse Page 14
