To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Peter Brandvold

  “He-yahh!” Verna wailed. “He-yahhh, you cayuse!”

  She scowled over the horse at Prophet.

  Prophet said, “Oh, shit,” as the horse, buggy, and raging woman bore down on him. She was a half a block away and coming hard and fast, her hair blowing out behind her shoulders, dust billowing thickly up behind the fast-spinning wheels.

  Prophet’s wounded leg felt as heavy as stone. He couldn’t move.

  “Lou!” someone cried.

  Pistols crackled.

  Verna dropped the reins and sagged in the chaise’s front seat.

  The horse screamed and careened sharply to Prophet’s right. The buggy fishtailed, Verna bouncing around on the seat like a rag doll in a cyclone.

  The buggy’s right side bounced off the saloon’s front porch, breaking apart, wheels flying in all directions. As the buggy, now in two pieces, bounced over L.J. Tanner’s inert form and rolled past Prophet, narrowly missing the bounty hunter, the Morgan galloped off to the west, whinnying shrilly and pulling only the double tree.

  “Holy shit!” Prophet said, blinking against the dust and grit in his eyes.

  As the dust cleared, he saw Verna McQueen lying only four feet behind him, all blood and dust and two staring eyes. She wasn’t moving.

  “Lou!” came the voice again.

  Louisa came from around the far side of the millinery store, hobbling on a pair of wooden crutches and her stiff right leg. She wore her brown skirt, calico blouse, and shell belt with two holsters. She was holding one of her .45s, but now, squinting her eyes to see through the billowing dust, she holstered the Colt and continued shambling toward Prophet.

  She stopped and looked around at Tanner, Verna McQueen, Neal Hunter, and Lars Eriksson. She glanced at Deets, who’d leaped onto the saloon steps to avoid being pummeled by the chaise. Now the young marshal took his carbine in one hand, ran the sleeve of his other arm across his mouth, and shook his head once.

  “Roscoe!” came another female voice.

  A pretty young Mexican woman came running along the street’s right side.

  “Roscoe!” she shouted again, holding the skirt of her red dress above her sandals.

  “I’m all right, Lupita,” Deets said, striding toward her. “It’s okay. I’m all right. You shouldn’t be out here, honey. You don’t want to see this.”

  As Deets hurried over to his young wife, Louisa turned her gaze back to Prophet.

  Prophet gazed up at her. “Don’t you look fit as a fiddle.”

  Louisa looked at his bloody leg and pursed her lips.

  “Now look at what you’ve done to yourself.”

  Prophet gave a snort. Then he looked at Verna’s twisted body, and he frowned, puzzled.

  “Her name was Duvall,” Louisa said. “Doc Whitfield told me.”

  “Duvall?”

  “It doesn’t ring any bells?”

  Prophet’s eyes widened in shock. “Handsome Dave Duvall?”

  “She was his sister. Tight bunch, you southern folk.”

  Prophet sighed, shaking his head. “So that’s what all this was all about. Holy shit . . .”

  There was a muffled crack from the east.

  Prophet grabbed his Peacemaker and stared down the street. The sound seemed to have come from the bank.

  Deets, who was holding his young wife in his arms, glanced over his shoulder at Prophet.

  “Campbell,” Deets said. “I reckon he didn’t want to face that judge I had in mind for him. Don’t worry—Bly and Carlsruud will.” He glanced toward the barbershop, which doubled as a bathhouse. A CLOSED sign hung in its window.

  Deets smiled shrewdly.

  Louisa turned from Deets to frown down at Prophet. “Huh?”

  “Long story,” Prophet said.

  Louisa dropped down beside him, unknotted his neckerchief from around his neck, and tied it firmly around his bloody leg. “Well, I have a feeling we’re both going to have plenty of time to discuss it . . . over at Whitfield’s. Come on—let’s get you over there before you bleed out.”

  “Ah, shit,” Prophet said, heaving himself to his feet. “That uppity sawbones ain’t gonna like this a bit.”

  He limped down the street, angling toward the cross street and the doctor’s house. Louisa shuffled along beside him on her crutches. Whitfield came around the corner ahead of them, driving a buckboard wagon, his medical kit on the seat beside him. He scowled as he looked around, spectacles glinting in the morning sun, and wagged his head in disgust.

  “There’s our ride now,” Prophet said.

  “Lou?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “I don’t want to get shot again,” Louisa said. “It hurts like hell.”

  Prophet laughed and kissed her cheek. “You’re in the wrong line o’ work, darlin’.”

  BRING ME THE HEAD OF CHAZ SAVIDGE! OR THE BOUNTY POACHERS

  CHAPTER ONE

  Louisa Bonaventure pulled one of her pretty pistols and said, “All right, Lou—how would you like to do this?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said—how would you like to do this?” The comely, hazel-eyed blond bounty hunter flicked open the Colt’s loading gate and spun the cylinder, making sure all six chambers showed brass.

  “I’m sorry,” Prophet said, placing a hand behind his left ear. “I thought you said, ‘Lou, how would you like to do this?’ But my hearing has obviously been compromised by all your rants over the years. Probably sawed both eardrums down to nubs. Say it one more time, but speak a little slower and louder, will you, Miss Bonnyventure?”

  Louisa arched a brow at him. “Excuse me for not finding the same humor in you that I’m sure the parlor girls do.”

  Prophet broke open his ten-gauge Richards coach gun, and looked down the barrels. Both tubes were loaded with fresh paper wads.

  The big, ex-Rebel bounty hunter, born and bred in the north Georgia mountains, said, “You’ll have to excuse me for being more than a little surprised that you asked my advice on how to do this job—one I’ve been practicing for a good three times longer than you have, I might add. It’s just that on those too-few occasions that you’ve asked for my advice, you’ve failed to follow it.”

  “You’re just sore that I doubted your tracking skills back there. All right—let me apologize.” Louisa had holstered her first pretty Colt and was checking the second one.

  “All right, go ahead.” Prophet looped the sawed-off ten-gauge’s leather lanyard around his neck and shoulder, so that the barrel of the wicked-looking gut-shredder peeked up from just behind his right shoulder.

  He shucked his Winchester ’73 from the saddle boot strapped to the saddle of his hammer-headed lineback dun, appropriately named Mean and Ugly. As he checked the loads in the long gun, he bestowed upon his curvy, peach-skinned, hazel-eyed partner an expectant look.

  Instead of apologizing, however, Louisa turned her head sharply away and then shucked her own Winchester carbine strapped to the saddle of her brown and white pinto.

  “I’m waiting,” Prophet said.

  Louisa racked a round into the carbine’s breech, patted her horse’s rump, and turned toward the thick copse of autumn-naked box elders and cottonwoods that the gray morning light was just now delineating. She and Prophet were in western Dakota Territory, and it was appropriately cold for mid-November.

  “I said I’m waiting,” Prophet repeated, setting his rifle on his shoulder and brushing past Louisa as he walked into the woods.

  As Louisa followed, cradling her carbine in her arms, she said, “Forget it. I no longer feel apologetic.”

  “That’s more like it.”

  “Huh?” she said behind him.

  Keeping his voice low, Prophet glanced over his shoulder at her, grinning. “You had me worried there, girl. I’ve always held that when Louisa Bonaventure started to feel contrite about anything, hell would freeze over and the devil would get icicles in his beard.” He glanced at the gray sky. “Hope it don’t get that cold!”

&
nbsp; Louisa turned her mouth corners down at him, and flared a nostril.

  Prophet stepped carefully through the woods, trying to make as little noise as possible. He managed to snap a few twigs beneath his boots and cause dead leaves to crackle. He glanced behind him.

  Louisa followed him off his right flank, about twelve feet away. She wore a cream Stetson, a brown knit poncho, and faded blue denim trousers with the cuffs stuffed into her riding boots. Her light-blond hair jostled over her shoulders. She didn’t seem to be taking any more care with her steps than Prophet was, but he’d be damned if she didn’t move as quietly as an Indian.

  She wasn’t the tracker he was, however. She’d lost the sign of the gang they’d followed out from Colton, where the outlaws plundered a saloon for fifty-two dollars three days ago, in a marshy area where several creeks forked in grassy country. She hadn’t believed the killers had come south, because she hadn’t seen the sign where they’d left the bog in rocky country. Prophet had seen it and he’d followed it.

  He supposed they complemented each other that way—him and Louisa. She was pretty and lithe, quiet and stealthy, while he was ugly as sin, big and lumbering, but he could track a June bug across a roiling millpond.

  Louisa was also ornery and impetuous, not always given to caution, whereas Prophet had learned during and after the war he’d fought in, and lost most of his family in, to be mild and cautious. He’d learned that life would end, so he’d learned to take his time. To live lightly, to enjoy the little things like a falling leaf or a pretty woman’s fleeting smile on a bustling street.

  That’s likely why he and Louisa stayed together—or at least kept moving back toward each other after getting sick to death of each other and forking paths.

  They complemented each other.

  That and the fact that he loved the girl.

  That and the fact that she loved him, though it would have taken long, slow Apache torture to get her to admit it.

  That was the hell of it, he thought. They loved each other. That gave their lives a problem. Before they’d met up with each other, they’d had no such problems. They’d joined forces when they’d both been trailing . . . and killing . . . the Handsome Dave Duvall gang that had murdered Louisa’s family down in Nebraska Territory.

  Back then, before Prophet had met up with the pretty, stalwart blonde who had a killing fury burning through her, she’d looked as though she’d been born merely to wear pink ribbons and frilly dresses and to play gentle tunes on a parlor piano. For his part, he’d lived only to whore and play cards and hunt men for the bounties that funded such a devil-may-care lifestyle.

  But now he lived for her, as well. And in this business, living for someone else could get you killed quicker than it takes a hammer to fall on a chambered round.

  Prophet held up at the edge of the woods and stared into the clearing beyond. Louisa came silently up beside him, and dropped to a knee.

  A small log cabin hunched at the far side of the clearing, maybe a hundred yards away. A thin, gray skein of smoke unfurled from the stone chimney climbing the cabin’s left wall. A two-track trail jogged into the clearing from Prophet’s left and ended in the barren, hard-packed yard that included a log barn just ahead and to the right, about fifty yards from Prophet’s and Louisa’s position.

  Several joined corrals angled off the barn’s far side. Prophet could see six or seven horses milling around the corrals, likely waiting to be fed and watered. It was still early but the sun would be up in a half hour.

  A windmill and stock tank stood in the middle of the yard, between the barn and the cabin. The wooden blades clattered lightly in the morning breeze. That was good. The clattering would likely cover his clumsy approach. He just had to hope the horses didn’t alert the men in the cabin to his and Louisa’s presence.

  And he had to hope there were no dogs. Dogs were not a man hunter’s friend. Dogs could get you killed quicker than love.

  He didn’t see any dogs, though. He just hoped none returned from a night of hunting out in the fields to spy the interlopers and lift a ruckus.

  Oh, well, you couldn’t dot all your I’s and cross all your T’s. Life didn’t come all wrapped up in certainty. We were all wolf bait, when you got right down to it. Some of us sooner than others . . .

  A vision of a smoky battlefield covered in bleeding, howling, dying men swept in front of the bounty hunter’s eyes. He quickly brushed it away with his gloved fist and said, “All right—let’s check out the barn first. They might be holed up in there. We’ll slip around to the right, stay close to the trees, and then you take the front and I’ll take the back.”

  Louisa gave him a skeptical, faintly suspicious look. “Why am I taking the front?”

  “You asked me how we’re going to do this, right? Well, that’s how we’re gonna do it.” Prophet started moving through the trees at the edge of the woods but stopped and turned back to her. “But if you’re scared to take the front, just say—”

  “Shut up, Lou.”

  “Right.”

  Prophet continued moving through the trees, stepping over branches, deadfalls, and dry leaves. In truth, he wanted Louisa to take the front because she was stealthier than he was. You needed more stealth to enter the front of a place than the back.

  He wasn’t worried about her handling any incurred fire. There were few better than the Vengeance Queen, as she was called throughout the frontier, with a pair of six-shooters. She was no slouch with a carbine, either.

  Prophet stopped when they were near the rear of the barn, with the barn between him and Louisa and the cabin.

  “All right,” he said, knowing that’s all he needed to say.

  Louisa stepped out of the woods ahead of him and, holding her Winchester in both hands, strode to the rear of the barn. Prophet stayed in the trees, watching her. She canted her head toward the barn wall, listening, then turned toward him and hiked a shoulder.

  She slipped around the corner of the barn and walked toward the front. Prophet couldn’t help taking a moment to admire how the young woman moved—straight-backed, long-legged, and cool. Utterly fearless.

  Louisa moved as quietly as an Apache warrior, as though grass or gravel didn’t dare crackle when she stepped on it. Prophet gave a wry snort at the thought.

  When she’d slipped around the front of the barn, Prophet moved out of the trees. He looked around carefully as he moved to the barn’s rear wall. There was a single, small door back here. It might be locked. He hoped it wasn’t. Especially if the front doors were not locked. That meant Louisa would be on her own until he could run around to the front.

  Quietly, gritting his teeth, he tripped the metal latch. It was rusty and loose, and it clattered a little when he tripped it. The door groaned on old, dry leather hinges. So far, so good. He stepped inside, blinking against the dense night shadows. The usual barn smells of hay and ammonia billowed against him.

  He drew the door closed, so he wouldn’t be outlined against the relative light beyond it, and moved ahead along the hard-packed earthen floor of the barn’s main alley. He walked between two rows of stables that appeared empty. There was the smell of dry rot and horse piss, of straw, moldy tack, and mouse droppings.

  He couldn’t see very far ahead. It was too dark, and the ceiling support posts from which tack hung impeded his view. He heard no sounds except the muffled clattering of the windmill and the soft wheezing of the breeze under the barn’s eaves.

  There was a clipped grunt. It was a muttered, “Oh!” And then there was the thud of a body hitting the floor.

  Prophet quickened his pace and raised his voice, “Louisa?”

  He stopped, levered a round into the Winchester’s breech, and aimed the rifle straight out from his shoulder, blinking against the barn’s dense shadows.

  He took another two steps forward, stopped again, and frowned.

  A large, dark figure hung before him. Some farming or ranching implement, most likely. Maybe a hay harness.


  Beneath and beyond the object, he saw another figure sitting on the barn floor. He could see blond hair falling down from beneath Louisa’s hat. She was leaning back against the barn’s large door, one knee up, the other leg stretched out before her. She reached out and picked up her rifle, and brushed it off with a gloved hand.

  “Louisa?” Prophet said again, his voice sounding inordinately loud in the close, silent quarters.

  His eyes were adjusting, and the light angling through the seams in the barn’s walls and through two sashed windows at the front were intensifying.

  “I’m all right,” Louisa said in a strange, wooden voice as she slowly gained her feet.

  Her attention was on the object hanging from the ceiling before her. Between her and Prophet.

  He moved forward, swung carefully around the object, and slowly realized that it wasn’t what he’d thought it was.

  What he’d thought they were.

  As he moved closer, he saw that they were not one object but several. Four, in fact. He stepped around the right side of the four people hanging from a rafter, and scowled, bile churning in his gut. There were four of them, and they were all facing Louisa and the front of the barn.

  Prophet stopped a fair distance away from Louisa, who also stared up at what was apparently a family hanging there, ropes looped around their necks, strung over the beam and then tied off at the bases of the ceiling support posts behind them.

  A balding man of middle age in worn coveralls.

  A woman of roughly the same age, flecks of gray in her hair, which had spilled out of its once-neat bun. She wore a plain gray dress. She’d been wearing low-heeled black leather shoes but she must have kicked out of them when they’d hanged her. The shoes lay on the floor nearly directly beneath her stocking-clad feet.

  A tow-headed young man of around sixteen or so hung beside the woman, tongue out, eyes tipped up toward the ceiling as though to get a look at his Maker.