To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Peter Brandvold

  Just then Savidge gave a startled gasp as he lifted his head from a dream. “Oh, Jesus!” He looked around, blinking. “I dreamt a big ole silvertip had just wandered into camp, and here I was, all trussed up like a hog for the slaughter!”

  “Shut up,” Prophet said, racking a round into his Winchester’s breech and moving slowly into the trees north of the camp.

  “What is it?”

  “I said shut up.”

  “You’re actin’ awful owly for someone who got as much as you did last night,” Savidge drawled.

  “Shut up,” Louisa told him, retrieving her own carbine.

  “Heard somethin’,” Prophet told her. “Not sure what . . . but somethin’.”

  Beyond the narrow swatch of woods, a grassy hill rose to a low ridgeline. The snow-dusted, autumn-cured bromegrass carpeting the slope whipped and danced in the breeze. Prophet was halfway through the woods when he stopped and quietly racked a cartridge into the Winchester’s breech.

  A rider had appeared, following the line of the ridge from the east, moving from Prophet’s right to his left.

  Another rider appeared behind the first one, riding out from behind a chokecherry thicket. There was another and another until there were four men riding along the ridge before the first rider swung his horse off the ridge and angled down the slope toward Prophet.

  The others swung their own mounts around to follow the first man down the incline.

  “Hallooo, the camp!” the first rider hailed, waving an arm.

  He was a big man in a buffalo coat wearing a peaked buffalo cap with earflaps tied beneath his chin. Tatters of snow-white hair poked out from under the cap. The man’s face was bright red from the cold. His nose was especially red. Shaped like an ax handle, it glowed as red as a ripe apple hanging from a tree in late September.

  “Friend or foe?” Prophet called.

  The lead rider grinned at that, showing brown-encrusted teeth beneath his sweeping white mustaches. “Lou Prophet, if that’s you down there, you wild Rebel cayuse, I’m foe!” He leaned back in his saddle and bellowed a laugh that sent a pair of crows cawing out of the higher branches.

  “Foe all the way, yessir!” he said through his laughter.

  Prophet studied the man, able to more clearly make out his features now as he approached the bottom of the hill. “Ben Ryder, is that you, you hog-walloping, blue-tongued bastard?”

  Ryder laughed and slapped his thigh.

  Ryder reined his strawberry roan to a stop at the edge of the trees, and swung heavily down from his saddle. He was roughly Prophet’s height—six-foot-four—but he was far heavier in the gut, which shelved out his buffalo coat. “How you been, Proph?” he said, chewing off a glove and throwing out his bare hand toward the bounty hunter.

  Prophet shook it. “I can’t complain overmuch, Ben, and even if I could, who wouldn’t shoot me for it?” Grinning, he glanced at the three other men riding up behind Ryder. “Well—say, you got the same group together. Hidy, Kinch,” he said, smiling at the shortest man of the group, just now reining his steeldust to a halt and leaning forward against his saddle horn.

  Kinch, a rangy fellow with drooping, Mexican-style mustaches, returned neither the greeting nor the smile.

  “Hidy, Coyote—you’re lookin’ no worse for the wear,” Prophet said before sliding his gaze to the third man of the group, also easily the tallest. “Ghost, how you been?” Ghost Callaghan was two inches over seven feet tall. Still, he was known to move with uncanny stealth, like a ghost in the night, thus the moniker.

  Ghost merely shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands as though in surrender to the question. His sharp-featured face was easily as large around as a full-sized dinner plate. His eyes were weirdly spaced a good three inches apart.

  “Still a chatty lot—I’ll give them that,” Prophet said.

  Ryder chuckled. “You know I’m partial to a quiet trail, Proph. I reckon that’s why we never rode together. I couldn’t think straight with all your palaver!” He sniffed the breeze blowing through the trees. “Say, is that Arbuckles I’m windin’?”

  “Sure is,” Prophet said, swinging around and beckoning as he tramped back to the fire. “Oughta be done right about now. Follow me in, boys, and I’ll fill your cups.” He raised his voice. “Louisa, hold your fire. We’re among friends!”

  “Friends, huh?” Louisa scoffed as Prophet and the others, all four leading their horses, moved through the trees.

  Prophet glanced around the group as they tied their mounts to branches at the edge of the camp.

  “Ben Ryder, Kinch Duggan, Coyote Perry, and Ghost Callaghan—you all remember my lovely partner, Miss Louisa Bonaventure.”

  “These men are no friends of mine,” Louisa pronounced. “And I resent your bringing them into camp, Lou. They’re animals.”

  Ben Ryder canted his head to one side in sadness. “Let’s not be that way, Vengeance Queen! It’s been a long time—goin’ on two years now, I s’pect, since my eyes were last allowed to feast on your lovely and enchanting countenance.” He opened his arms. “Come on over and give ole Ben a hug!”

  “Go to hell.”

  Prophet said, “Now, Louisa, that’s no way to act toward trail brothers. Ben and me and Coyote and Ghost go back a long ways. We all turned bounty hunter around the same time, just after the unchecked War of Northern Aggression, and been swappin’ lies ever since.”

  Prophet laughed, though Louisa didn’t crack a smile.

  Prophet broke the laugh off abruptly, incredulously, and said, “Boys, grab your cups and go over and help yourself to the java. Don’t mind my partner. She woke up on the wrong side of the old mattress sack, but she’s not so trigger happy before noon.”

  “Damn near burned her mattress sack right up last night!” snorted Chaz Savidge. “Shoulda seen the way these two was goin’ at it. Like two rabid dogs in heat. I never seen the like! Say, I could use a cup of that belly wash my ownself. You boys have your fill but leave me a swallow or two, will ya?”

  “Say, who do we have here?” Ryder asked, on one knee by the fire and using the leather swatch to remove the coffee pot from the tripod hook.

  He was staring at Savidge.

  “Nobody,” Louisa said, crossing her arms on her chest.

  “No, no. That ain’t nobody.”

  Ryder filled his cup, then turned the pot over to Kinch, waiting in line with the other two men. The fat, older bounty hunter sipped his coffee as he stared across the fire at Prophet’s and Louisa’s prisoner. He sipped again, thoughtfully, then lowered the cup, wrinkling his snow-white brows in recognition, and pointed across the flames.

  “Say, that . . . that there is . . . that there is Chaz Savidge!”

  “Chaz Savidge?” said Kinch Duggan as he filled Coyote Perry’s coffee cup. “Who’s Chaz Savidge?”

  “Chaz Savidge is one of the slipperiest hombres known to run roughshod over the western frontier. Why, if I remember, he’s wanted in a good half-dozen states and territories!”

  “You don’t say,” said Coyote Perry, his steaming cup in hand.

  “One and the same,” Prophet said.

  “Don’t he have somethin’ like two thousand dollars on his head?” Ryder was studying Savidge, who was blushing like a schoolgirl from all the attention.

  “Two thousand, give or take,” Prophet said, standing a little back from the fire, holding his Winchester atop his right shoulder. “Somethin’ like that.”

  Holding his cup of hot coffee in one hand, the hulking Ghost Callaghan had slipped back away from the fire to walk up in his stealthy way behind Louisa. He crouched now, nearly touching his wedge-sized hawk’s nose to the woman’s hair. Drawing in a deep breath, he closed his eyes and quirked his mouth corners in a mesmerized smile, savoring the Vengeance Queen’s aroma.

  Louisa wheeled and buried the toe of her riding boot in the big man’s crotch. She hadn’t pulled the kick a bit but gave the giant all she had.

  Ghost jackknifed viol
ently, expelling a loud, ragged groan of displaced air. He dropped his coffee cup.

  Red-faced, he crossed his hands over his battered groin. He groaned and staggered backward, bunching his lips and glaring up in fury at Louisa from beneath the single, shaggy brow trailing across the ridge above his wide-set eyes.

  “Ghost, what in the hell were you thinkin’, pard?” Ryder regaled the giant. “Where are your manners? Were you born in a barn? Don’t you know it ain’t polite to go stealin’ up on a girl like that? And, in the Vengeance Queen’s case, don’t you know it’s just plain dangerous?”

  Kinch Duggan said, “Ghost, goddamnit, you embarrass us all!”

  Coyote Perry sipped his coffee, chuckling.

  Ghost remained bent forward, groaning and grunting and holding his battered balls in his hands.

  “Well, that’ll learn him,” Prophet said, opening and closing his hand around the neck of his shoulder-propped repeater.

  “I want to be the first to congratulate you, Proph,” Ryder said with a sincere dip of his chin. He turned to Louisa and did the same again. “And you, too, Miss Louisa. That’s quite a payday you got there. A pair of bounty hunters could live a good, long time on three thousand dollars.”

  “Not the way Lou goes through it,” Louisa said.

  “Three?” Prophet turned to Ryder. “I thought the reward was two thousand.” He slitted one eye. “Say, Ben, do you know somethin’ I don’t know? And . . . you weren’t after ole Savidge your ownselves, now, were you, boys?”

  “Of course they were,” Louisa answered for the others. “What else do you think they’re doing way out here in the middle of nowhere? Do you think it’s just a coincidence they rode into our camp this morning? They’ve likely been on Savidge’s trail for months.”

  Silence.

  The newcomers glanced sheepishly around at each other. Even Ghost did as he slowly straightened from his crouch, his broad, craggy face deep-lined and flushed from misery.

  Finally, Ben Ryder laughed and shook his head. “Okay. All right. You got us, Miss Bonaventure. Should have known you’d figure it out. I was gonna mention it sooner or later, but I gotta admit I was a little dumbfounded to see the outlaw here in your camp. I mean, there’s just the two of you and there’s five of us in my group, and we couldn’t snag him, so, hell—I reckon we got us each a slice of humble pie to eat. Big ones. There you have it.”

  He sighed, shrugged, and sipped his coffee. “You two brought down one of the slipperiest hombres on the frontier, and there’s nothin’ we can do about it but congratulate the victors and drink your coffee. I reckon that’ll have to do, eh, boys?”

  Ryder laughed incredulously, and took another sip.

  “I reckon that’s all we can do,” groused Kinch sadly, crouching to refill his cup.

  Ghost, who rarely spoke, spat in his guttural, simple-minded way through gritted teeth while glaring at Louisa, “She kicked my oysters so far up my belly they won’t shake down till spring!”

  “Ghost, you had it comin’!” Ryder said.

  “It hurts like hell!”

  “How ’bout if I kick ’em into your throat?” Louisa asked the savage giant. “Then you won’t have to think about ’em till next Christmas. Neither will the syphilitic doxies down in Deadwood.”

  Ghost flared his large, pitted nostrils at her.

  “Louisa,” Prophet scolded. “That’s enough. Can’t you see the poor man’s in agony?” He turned to Ryder. “Allow me to apologize for my partner’s poor behavior.”

  “Only if you’ll accept my apology for that of the big man, Lou.”

  “Deal. Say, what’s this about a three-thousand-dollar bounty on ole Savidge’s ugly head, Ben?”

  Ryder backed up to a log, pinched his buckskin trousers up his broad thighs, and sat down with a grunt. “They changed the reward, Lou. It ain’t two thousand no more. Uncle Sam upped it a thousand to three.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Prophet said, raking a gloved hand down his cheek and studying his prisoner sitting back against the tree.

  Savidge wore a self-satisfied grin. “Shit, whoever gets a three-thousand-dollar reward on his head? Has Black Bart ever had three thousand dollars on his head?”

  Louisa said, “As far as I know, Black Bart never raped and murdered the governor of Utah’s granddaughter.”

  “That’ll do it,” said Kinch. “I bet that right there’s the reason.”

  It was true. Chaz Savidge and the now-dead rest of his gang had run down a stagecoach on which the granddaughter of Utah’s territorial governor had been traveling with her aunt. She’d been a saucy twelve year-old, and apparently Savidge’s boys hadn’t been able to resist her.

  Nor had they been able to resist killing the girl with a rock once they’d finished with her.

  They’d killed nearly everyone on the coach, including the girl’s aunt. A former Indian agent had survived his wounds long enough to tell the grisly tale to a sheriff’s posse.

  “Three thousand dollars,” Prophet said, rubbing his cheek in awe. “Me an’ Louisa gonna be shittin’ in high cotton!”

  “That’s only four nights in Dodge City for you, Lou.”

  Ryder walked over to the fire to refill his coffee cup, draining the pot as he did and setting it on the ground. “That ain’t all that’s changed about the bounty on Savidge’s head, Lou.”

  “Oh? Pray tell!”

  Kinch was sitting on a rock near Ghost. Grinning devilishly, he said, “You don’t need to take in nothin’ but his head.”

  Louisa hiked a brow. “What’s that?”

  Ryder said, “The reward has been changed to ‘Dead or Alive.’ You can take him in either way. It says in smaller print at the bottom that if ya kill him, you can just bring his head in for positive identification.”

  Coyote said, “Apparently, the governor was gettin’ frustrated that nobody was able to run down the beast, so he upped the offer and made the job a whole lot easier.”

  He and the others turned to the prisoner.

  Sitting against his tree, Savidge looked around at the others staring at him with renewed interest, and blinked in horror. “Don’t none of you get any ideas.” His gaze landed on Louisa. “My head’ll stay right where it is, thank you. You got no cause to go sawin’ it off!”

  “Louisa, stand down!” Prophet said, when he saw how his partner was looking at Savidge.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ryder chuckled. “Temptin’, ain’t it, Miss Bonaventure? Wouldn’t have to feed him or listen to his bullshit. Wouldn’t have to tie him up every night, tie him to his saddle every morning. I assume you’re takin’ him back to Denver. That’s a fair piece!”

  “We’ll manage it,” Prophet said.

  Ryder looked at him. The fat man blinked slowly. He was moving to his right, sort of toeing the ground, trying to look casual as he traced a semicircle around Prophet, moving up on the bounty hunter’s left side, exposing him to the creek side of the camp.

  Prophet also “casually” kicked a stone and moved to stay on the east side of Ryder. As he did, he saw the others spreading out around him and Louisa, their hands hanging down over the handles of their guns. Louisa had noticed the movement. She turned her head slowly back and forth, rolling her gaze around, keeping the men in the periphery of her vision.

  As she did, she backed up, not wanting them to get directly behind her where she couldn’t see them.

  Prophet moved up to stand in front of Ryder, keeping the fat bounty hunter between himself and the creek.

  “Say, Ben, I been wonderin’,” Prophet said, scratching the back of his head and scowling with feigned pensiveness, “where’s your old pal, Spider Dotson?”

  Ben stopped his slow stroll, and smiled, crossing his arms on his broad chest. “Spider? Oh, well . . .” He scowled suddenly, sadly. “Spider’s dead, Lou. Took a bullet down in Wichita. We was takin’ in an owlhoot named Harley Mason, and Mason got the drop on us, I’m afraid. He was sittin’ in a privy and fired through th
e half-moon in the door!”

  “What a way to go,” said Coyote Perry, shaking his head sadly, though he had a tense look on his pale face as he slowly moved his hands down toward the grips of the two pistols on his hips. “Shot by a drunk owlhoot through a privy door!”

  “That’s funny,” Prophet said.

  “Nothin’ funny about it, Lou,” Ryder said, offended.

  “I could swear I just seen ole Spider moving in them trees back there along the creek.”

  He’d just gotten “creek” out when he whipped his Winchester down off his shoulder, aimed, and fired not six inches to the left of Ben Ryder’s left ear.

  The blast evoked a shrill yelp from the woods along the creek. At the same time, Ryder himself screamed and, stumbling back away from Prophet, clamped a hand over his ringing left ear while fumbling a long-barreled Smith & Wesson from the holster on his right thigh.

  Prophet pumped another round into the Winchester’s breech and popped a pill into the fat’s man’s belly. As he cocked the long gun again, he saw and heard Louisa go to work with her two fancy Colts, sending Kinch Duggan and Coyote Perry dancing off into the trees, triggering their own pistols into the air or the ground, bellowing.

  Ghost had just unholstered his own six-shooter and was aiming at Louisa, when Prophet raked out a sharp curse and flung a round into the side of the giant’s head, just above his left ear.

  Ghost’s own shot sailed wild as he staggered sideways.

  Louisa wheeled and triggered both her Colts into the big man’s chest.

  Ghost pinwheeled and stumbled off into the woods before falling with a loud, crackling thump and lay kicking.

  Kinch lay unmoving on his side, but Coyote was trying to heave himself up onto his hands and knees. As he reached for his dropped revolver, Louisa calmly walked up to him and finished him with one round to the crown of his skull.

  Prophet walked over to where Ben Ryder lay on his back, clamping both hands to his bulging belly, which was oozing blood through the ragged hole in his buffalo coat. His red face was pain-wracked. He threw his head back and howled.

  “Why, you wily Rebel sonofabitch!” he yelled, sobbing, casting his pain-bright gaze to Prophet.