To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Peter Brandvold

  He pushed himself off the table, blinking as though to clear his vision, and came at Hawkins once more, slashing the air with the knife, his long hair flying out around his head.

  Hawkins was grinning devilishly now as he faced the half-breed. Both men shuffled their feet, shifting their weight from foot to foot and nearly turning a complete circle there at the end of the table, in front of the open door, facing each other like wild dogs determined to tear each other’s throats out.

  “No!” Josephina heard herself scream through the numbness of shock, shuffling around on the far side of the table from the men. “No! No! No! Stop! Please, stop!”

  Otherday jabbed the knife toward Hawkins once more. The rancher stumbled back, getting a funny look on his face. Blood welled from the hole on his left side, between his belly and his chest. He glared with even more fury at Otherday now. He gave a drum-rattling bellow as he swung the log at the younger man.

  Otherday took the blow on his left shoulder and bounced off a ceiling support post.

  “Stop fighting—you’re going to kill each other!” Josephina screamed, wildly shaking her head.

  Hawkins thrust the log backhanded.

  There was a crunching thud as the log smashed into the half-breed’s mouth and nose, splitting his lip and causing two rivers of blood to stream from his nostrils. Otherday plopped down on his rear, eyes rolling back in his head, his hair hanging in black strands down his face and across his cheeks.

  Hawkins bolted forward and, crouching low at the waist, swung the log with a bellowing grunt from right to left. Josephina screamed again when she heard the horrible, crunching thud as the log connected with the hired man’s head.

  She heard the half-breed’s knife clatter to the floor.

  She dashed around the table toward the fighting men. She didn’t know she’d picked up the cast-iron potato pot until she’d swung it with all her might against the back of her husband’s head. It clanged against the crown of Hawkins’s skull.

  Hawkins dropped the log and staggered forward, almost tripping over Otherday, who lay writhing on the floor. Shocked by what she’d done, Josephina dropped the pot.

  Hawkins groaned and closed his arms over his head. He cursed loudly, then straightened and turned to where Josephina stood, staring in horror at her husband. Hawkins’s eyes were even glassier than before as he staggered toward her.

  He didn’t say anything.

  He just glared at her glassily, stupidly. His expression was as flat as an attacking grizzly’s. Blood trickled down from his right nostril. His face was ghostly pale.

  “I’m sorry,” Josephina said, shaking her head and sobbing as she stumbled backward, between the table and the cabin’s front wall. “I only . . . I only wanted you to . . . stop!”

  Hawkins pursed his lips and mewled as he lunged for her, spreading his arms wide.

  Josephina screamed and continued to stagger backward.

  Hawkins pushed his arms out at her, as though they’d turned to lead and he could hardly lift them. His hands raked her shoulders, then fell to his sides. Josephina tripped over one of Hawkins’s feet, and fell backward. As she fell, he fell.

  They hit the floor together, her husband on top of her. She’d slammed the back of her head so hard against the puncheons that the room dimmed as it spun.

  Josephina looked down at her husband. His head lay against her half-exposed bosom, resting on his left cheek. His mouth was slack. His tongue hung out a corner of it. He was drooling. His eyes were like two opaque marbles, staring up at her, unblinking.

  Josephina’s head sagged back against the floor, and she was out.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Tied to his saddle, Chaz Savidge said, “I’m so hungry my stomach thinks my throat’s been cut. You think they’ll give us somethin’ to eat?”

  “We’re only here to buy feed for the horses,” Prophet told his prisoner as he, Savidge, and Louisa rode into the humble ranch yard. “If they have any to spare. Out this far, they probably don’t.”

  The horses clomped through a three-inch dusting of powdery snow that glistened like diamonds in the midmorning sunlight, which was of a weak, watery hue that made the scattered buildings and corrals look bleached out and sallow. Wind gusts shifted the snow around, clearing tan patches of the hard-packed yard.

  A beefy, saddled zebra dun stood at the edge of the yard, cropping brittle cornstalks from a garden patch.

  “Halloo the ranch!” Prophet called, halting Mean and Ugly and Savidge’s horse, which he was leading, a good distance catty-corner from the cabin.

  Louisa stopped her horse beside Prophet.

  Prophet studied the horse cropping the cornstalks.

  Louisa leaned out from her pinto to get a better look at the front of the brush-roofed cabin. “Looks like the door’s partway open. I don’t see any smoke rising from the chimney pipe.”

  “That saddled horse is odd, too.”

  Prophet cupped his gloved hands to his mouth and hallooed the cabin once more, louder. Strangers didn’t just ride up to a cabin this far out on the frontier. Not if they didn’t want to risk getting shot out of their saddles.

  Still, no response. The horse stopped foraging to turn a puzzled look at the newcomers, absently chewing a brown cornhusk.

  “Strange,” Prophet said, swinging down from Mean and Ugly’s back.

  He removed the lanyard of his sawed-off Richards coach gun from around his neck and shoulder, and hung the barn blaster from his saddle horn. The sawed-off ten-gauge tended to put people off. He adjusted the wool muffler he’d tied over his hat and ears, and tramped toward the cabin, looking around cautiously.

  Some folks this far out got skittish from solitary living, and they tended to shoot at strangers before finding out what they wanted.

  Prophet walked up to the cabin, keeping his hand away from the Peacemaker thonged on his right thigh, beneath his buckskin mackinaw. The door was indeed open. It teetered back and forth in the breeze, its hinges creaking softly.

  Snow and dead leaves had blown through the door to litter the crude puncheon floor within.

  “Hello?” Prophet said again as he stepped up onto the boardwalk and nudged the door open with the back of his hand.

  He stepped over the threshold, and stopped, scowling.

  A dark-skinned, dark-haired man lay on the floor about ten feet away from the door. His eyes were open, but the man was dead. Prophet knew what dead eyes looked like, and this half-breed was dead, all right. Blood had dribbled out his nose and ears and from a nasty gash on the side of his head to congeal on the floor beneath him.

  Prophet turned to his left, and his scowl grew more severe.

  Another man lay dead on the floor. A bigger, older man with a horseshoe of gray-brown hair around the top of his otherwise bald head. He lay half atop the young woman beneath him, who was sitting up and looking around bewilderedly, her eyes fogged from a recent sleep.

  The young woman’s dark-brown hair had come loose from its bun and hung in tufts around both sides of her heart-shaped, brown-eyed face.

  The girl looked around the cabin and then lifted her dull gaze to Prophet. She frowned slightly, uncomprehendingly.

  “What happened here, miss?” Prophet said.

  She looked at him as though she hadn’t heard him, as though she were trying to puzzle out who he was, as though she thought she might know him but was having trouble recollecting his name.

  Prophet turned to poke his head out the door. He beckoned to Louisa and then walked over to the brown-haired girl. Her print dress was partway open, exposing a cambric chemise and the high plains of her breasts.

  Prophet pulled the dead, older man off of her and then offered her his hand. She placed her hand in his, and then he wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her to her feet. She didn’t seem able to keep her balance, so he picked her up and sat her on a sofa that lay against the far wall, on the other side of a potbelly stove.

  The dead younger man lay nearby
, still staring. The girl’s eyes found him, and a deeply concerned look passed over her face. Tears glistened in her brown eyes.

  Prophet looked at her. He looked at her partly open dress and then he looked at the dead young man and the dead older man. Vaguely, he heard Louisa pull the horses up in front of the cabin. She stepped inside and looked around.

  She glanced at the girl and then she walked over and looked down at the older man. She glanced dubiously at Prophet and then peered down at the younger man. She turned to the girl sitting on the couch, who was sobbing into her hands now. Louisa sat down beside the girl, glanced again at Prophet, and then wrapped her arm around the girl’s shoulders.

  The girl bawled louder, tears oozing from between the fingers clamped over her face. Her head and shoulders bobbed as she cried.

  Suddenly, she pulled her hands away from her face and looked wide-eyed at Louisa and then at Prophet. “You won’t tell my folks, will you?”

  Prophet and Louisa shared another incredulous glance.

  Louisa said, “No, we won’t tell your folks, dear.”

  The girl placed her hands on her face again and continued sobbing uncontrollably.

  Chaz Savidge called from outside, “Hey, what the hell’s goin’ on in there? Gettin’ a little cold out here, and I’m hungry!”

  Louisa said, “Best put the horses up, Lou. I think we’ll be spending the day.”

  Prophet sighed. They didn’t have a day to spare. They’d likely miss the train to Denver. But Louisa was probably right. There didn’t seem anyone else around, and the girl was in no condition to be left alone. What had happened seemed pretty simple and clear to him—deadly simple and clear—and now there likely wasn’t a man on the place.

  He’d ride out later and see if the girl had any close neighbors who could take her in.

  He left the cabin and pulled the door closed and latched it.

  “Did you hear me, Prophet?” Savidge said from atop his horse. “I’m hungry!”

  “Shut up.”

  Prophet dropped down off the boardwalk, fished keys out of his pocket, and went to work uncuffing and unshackling the prisoner. He stepped back, drew his Colt, and cocked it.

  “Get inside.”

  “That’s more like it.”

  Massaging the blood back into his hands, Savidge swung his right boot over his saddle horn and dropped to the ground. He grinned mockingly at Prophet, climbed the boardwalk, and stepped into the cabin. Prophet moved in behind him, carrying the cuffs and leg irons.

  Savidge stopped just inside the door and looked around. He turned to the girl still sobbing on the sofa, in Louisa’s arms, and he laughed, shuttling his amused gaze between dead men.

  “Good Lord, girl—what you been doin’ in here?”

  Prophet shoved him forward. “Shut up, Chaz. One more word out of you, and you’re gonna look funny with your head turned backwards.”

  “Ouch!” Savidge chuckled.

  Prophet cuffed the prisoner to a ceiling support post in the middle of the cabin, and shackled his ankles together, leaving only a few chain links between them. The bounty hunter would have preferred to keep the seedy killer away from the girl, but he and Louisa needed to keep a close eye on him. Lou had a feeling the girl was too preoccupied with her grief to pay the killer much attention, anyway.

  “If he gives you any trouble,” Prophet said, rising and shoving the keys back into his pocket, “shoot him.”

  “My pleasure,” Louisa said as Prophet began dragging the dead younger man out of the cabin.

  “But only if he gives you trouble,” he wryly admonished his partner.

  When he had both dead men lying out in the yard fronting the shack, Prophet led his party’s three horses to the barn standing just north of the small shack that, judging by the flour sack curtains in the window and the chair sitting beside the door, was the bunkhouse.

  Which of the two dead men had been the hired man? Most likely the young one. The saddled horse had likely belonged to the older gent, the girl’s husband. That’s how it worked on the frontier. Girls married older men more capable of supporting them than your average younger gent. Girls rarely married for love on the frontier.

  It was an old story. As old as folks had been walking the earth.

  What would become of the girl?

  Prophet gave a slow sigh as he went out and retrieved the saddle horse still foraging in the garden patch. When he had all four horses stalled and tended and munching parched corn from wooden buckets, he headed back to the shack with his rifle and the Richards hanging butt-up behind his back.

  Halfway across the yard, he stopped and jerked a look to his right. A man was running at a crouch near a small fringe of trees just beyond the edge of the yard. As Prophet watched, the man, carrying a rifle, dove down behind a low hummock of ground.

  Now, what?

  Footsteps sounded behind Prophet. He wheeled, unslinging the Richards. A bearded man was running down the side of the bunkhouse, heading for Prophet and raising a carbine. He wore a red plaid mackinaw and a flat-brimmed black hat. A yellow muffler encircled his neck.

  As he stopped and slammed the butt of his rifle to his shoulder, Prophet rocked the Richards’s left hammer back, and squeezed the eyelash trigger.

  The explosive thunder shattered the wintery morning quiet of the yard.

  The man in the red plaid mackinaw was blown up off his feet and straight back with a shrill scream, triggering his rifle into the side of the bunkhouse. Another man poked his head out from behind the rear corner of the bunkhouse, glanced down in shock at the quivering form of the man in the red mackinaw, and then snaked his own rifle around the bunkhouse corner.

  Prophet cut loose with the Richards’s second barrel, blasting several large chunks of wood out of the side of the bunkhouse, only inches from where the head of the other rifleman had been before he’d pulled it back behind the rear wall to prevent it from being blasted off his shoulders.

  Behind Prophet, the cabin door opened. Louisa strode out wielding both her Colts, and dropped to a knee on the boardwalk.

  “Come on, Lou!” she said tightly and began flinging lead to cover Prophet’s retreat to the cabin.

  The bounty hunter slung the empty gut-shredder over his shoulder and ran across the boardwalk and into the cabin, turning sharply, palming his Peacemaker and throwing lead back through the door, toward where he’d just seen powder smoke wafting above that hummock near the trees.

  “Come on, girl!” he called to his partner, spying another man running on the far side of the pole corral off the barn’s right wall.

  He triggered another shot and saw his bullet plume dust two feet in front of the man who’d just dived behind a hay crib. Louisa ran into the cabin, and Prophet kicked the door closed.

  “What’s happening?” Savidge said, owl-eyed, “What the hell’s happening? Who is that?”

  As a bullet crackled through a waxed paper window and clanked off a cast-iron pot sitting on the dry sink, Savidge yowled and ducked.

  “Somethin’ tells me it ain’t Santy Claus,” Prophet grumbled.

  He crabbed toward the window right of the door.

  “I got me a feelin’ we’ve been shadowed by more bounty poachers,” Prophet said.

  “Oh, come on!” Savidge said, ducking as another couple of bullets plunked through the paper windows to zing like angry hornets around the cabin. “I’m your prisoner! Don’t you bounty hunters have no honor? Shit, I may be a killer, but I got honor, goddamnit!”

  “I guess these fellas didn’t get the telegram,” Louisa said, poking her Winchester out the window to Prophet’s right. She triggered three quick shots, angling her rifle from left to right, the long gun blasting and leaping in her gloved hands.

  Prophet swung a look back at the girl still sitting on the sofa. She was looking around as though she knew something bad was happening but she wasn’t sure what. A ragged bullet hole shone in the wall over her right shoulder.

  As Louisa cont
inued returning fire, Prophet ran crouching toward the girl in the print dress, and pulled her off the sofa. He shoved her belly down to the floor.

  “You stay down there—all right, honey?”

  “What’s happening?” she said thinly, closing her arms over her head.

  “I do apologize, sweetheart,” Prophet said, running back to the window right of the door. “But I reckon we’ve led some wild dogs to your ranch. Or . . . our prisoner has, anyways.”

  He glanced at Louisa, who’d just emptied her Winchester, the hammer pinging onto an empty chamber. “Did you see anyone on our trail? I didn’t!”

  “They must be savvy.” Louisa turned away from the window, pressed her back to the cabin wall, and began punching fresh cartridges into her Winchester’s breech.

  “You two are careless!” Savidge reproved them, dropping as low to the floor as he could, trussed up as he was. “I mean, really careless! No one ever told you about watchin’ your back trail? Someone really oughta teach you your jobs!”

  “Shut up, Savidge,” Louisa said, gritting her teeth as she continued to reload, rifles crackling out in the yard like Mexican firecrackers, “or I’m gonna remember that all we need to bring back to Denver is your head!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Prophet poked his own Winchester out the window before him, and fired four quick shots, targeting mostly puffs of wafting powder smoke. He couldn’t get a good look at any of the dogs who’d stalked them here. After he’d killed the man in the red mackinaw, they’d become less careless.

  “How many out there, do you think, Lou?”

  Prophet aimed carefully at a man who’d just dropped behind a stock trough at the front of the corral, and fired. He grinned devilishly as he heard a yelp, and ejected the spent, smoking shell casing onto the floor behind him. “Judging by the rifle fire and the smoke I’ve seen, we’ve got a good six or seven out there.”

  The rifle fire tapered off.

  After nearly a minute of tense silence, from somewhere across the yard a man yelled, “Hello, the cabin! Prophet? Lou Prophet?”

  Prophet glanced incredulously at Louisa, who arched a dubious brow at him. “Right famous you are, Lou. Or is it infamous?”