To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Peter Brandvold

  As Prophet took another step toward him, crouching and drawing the bowie back behind his left shoulder, Johnson opened his mouth to scream. He got out nothing more than a clipped yowl before the edge of the bowie sliced across his neck, drawing a red line from ear to ear.

  Johnson flopped back against the ground, jerking as he bled out and died.

  Prophet retrieved his weapons, then hurried down into the tunnel mouth, using only two rungs and then leaping to the bottom. He wheeled, raised the Winchester, and fired six quick shots into the darkness, in the direction of the cabin. The screams of the two bounty poachers reached his ears like the distance-muffled yelps of dying wolves.

  “There you go,” Prophet said, ejecting the last spent casing and climbing up out of the smoky hole.

  He looked through the screen of shrubs and brush toward the cabin and beyond. There were three other poachers around here somewhere, waiting for Johnson’s signal, most likely. Someone moved out away from the side of the barn. The hatted figure carrying a rifle was looking toward Prophet.

  The bounty hunter raised his rifle in what he hoped was a sufficient signal, and then pushed through the brush and began moving along the southern edge of the yard, swinging wide around the cabin. He hoped to be mistaken for Johnson, who’d been roughly Prophet’s size.

  He was far enough away from the barn that the man standing there probably couldn’t see much more than his vague outline. If any of the others could see more than that, he’d be wolf bait.

  There were worse things than wolf bait . . .

  Burrow had been lying in the brush atop the bunkhouse, but Prophet couldn’t see him up there now. He’d probably stepped down to prepare for a run at the cabin.

  As Prophet walked, the only bushwhacker he could see remained by the barn, facing him, resting his rifle on his shoulder. The bushwhacker stood behind the front corner of the barn, which shielded him from the cabin . . . and Louisa’s Winchester.

  Prophet hoped Louisa didn’t see him walking out here and mistake him for one of the bushwhackers. She usually identified her targets before dropping the hammer on them, but sometimes you didn’t know what the Vengeance Queen would do.

  Prophet walked with his own rifle hanging casually low at his side. He wondered when the man by the barn—or the other two squirreled away out of sight, including Burrow—would see that Prophet was not Johnson and commence firing.

  He got his answer two strides later, when the man by the barn said, “Hey—that ain’t Johnson!” and jerked his rifle down.

  Prophet stopped, aimed his rifle straight out from his waist, crouched, and threw a .44-caliber chunk of whistling led toward the man by the barn, who jerked back, firing his own rifle wide, and then twisted around to bounce his right shoulder off the barn’s wall.

  “Pull out!” the wounded poacher cried, running away along the barn, clutching his left shoulder. “Pull out! Pull out!” He yelled something else but by then he’d swung around behind the barn, and his words were muffled and drowned by the breeze.

  From the far side of the yard, another man shouted, “Goddamnit!”

  A rifle blasted from the front of the cabin. Louisa fired three, four, then five shots. Prophet heard the metallic rasp as she pumped another round into her Winchester’s chamber, but no more reports followed.

  Prophet broke into a run, dashing across the open yard between the cabin and the barn. He ran down along the side of the barn, noting blood droplets in the blond weeds growing up along the barn’s stone foundation.

  Prophet ran around the barn’s rear corner. He raised his rifle to his shoulder but held fire. Three horseback riders were galloping away through the brush, climbing a low rise and then disappearing down the other side.

  Their hoof thuds were quickly drowned by the moaning breeze.

  “Shit!” Prophet said, angrily slapping his hat against his thigh.

  He’d wanted to lay them all out with Johnson and the two in the tunnel.

  The bounty hunter cursed again, donned his hat, and walked back up alongside the barn. He moved out away from the barn, heading for the shot-up shack. The shack’s front door opened, and Louisa stepped out, holding her Winchester.

  “How’d it go?” she called.

  Her breath vapor was shredded by the wind.

  Prophet felt his ears warm with chagrin.

  He shrugged, scratching the back of his head with his Winchester’s barrel. “Pretty much how I figured it,” he lied.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Earl Burrow galloped his steeldust gelding into a shallow, windblown valley a half a mile beyond the ranch where Burrow’s group had just gotten the shit shot out of them by two bounty hunters.

  Two bounty hunters—one of them a girl!

  At the bottom of the valley, near a partly frozen slough that was fringed with cattails and smelled like a privy, Burrow checked the steeldust down.

  “Goddamnit!” he cried, batting his weather-stained bowler against his thigh.

  Hooves thudded behind him. He turned to see “Whiskey” Charlie Meyers galloping his black mare down the hill, holding his Winchester in one hand and flapping the rifle like a wing as his horse plunged toward Burrow. Meyers’s long, black hair blew back behind him in the wind. He wore buffalo fur earmuffs under his hat, and a big, billowy red neckerchief flopped down the front of his buffalo coat.

  “What the hell was that?” he shouted, red-faced with fury, his nose running, as he jerked the black to a stop beside Burrow. “What the hell was that?”

  “You saw what I saw,” Burrow said, glancing behind him once more as another horse shambled over the crest of the ridge and started down into the hollow.

  The horse’s rider—Kenny Sanchez, a bounty hunter from the Arizona Territory who’d once served with Burrow in the frontier Indian-fighting army—leaned far back in his saddle, making a face. He had his left hand clamped over his bloody right shoulder. His unshaven face was pale and pain-wracked. He stretched his lips back from small, square, tobacco-stained teeth, cursing in Spanish.

  Sanchez’s horse trotted past Burrow and Meyers and probably would have kept trotting clear to Canada if Meyers hadn’t ridden up and grabbed the bit, stopping the mount at the edge of the gamey slough.

  “Whoa, whoa!” Meyers said, the bit clattering against the horse’s teeth. “Kenny, how bad you hit?”

  “Shit!” Kenny yelled, and, as though in response, rolled sideways out of the saddle. He screamed again as he hit the ground with a solid thud and the crackle of brittle weeds.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Burrow swung down from his saddle. He thumbed his glasses up his nose, snugged the bowler down tighter on his red-haired head, and knelt beside the writhing Sanchez. “Kenny, how bad?”

  Sanchez stopped writhing, though not shivering, and looked up at Burrow, his brown eyes cast skeptically. “I don’t think it’s too bad, amigo.”

  Burrow knew that his former fellow trooper was remembering the dictum of their platoon back in Apacheria: “Leave no wounded man behind to die at the hands of the enemy.” Of course, there were no Apaches up here on the plains, and damned few Sioux.

  But the wolves and the cold wind could be almost as merciless. Doctors didn’t exactly grow on trees in these parts, any more than they did in Arizona.

  Burrow opened Sanchez’s coat, lifted the left side to peer under the flap toward the shoulder, and made a face.

  “You’re losin’ blood fast, Kenny.”

  “I got plenty of blood, amigo.” Sanchez chuckled, turning it into a joke, but then he coughed raggedly and rested his head back against the ground, again stretching his lips back from his teeth in misery. “Ah, shit.”

  Meyers swung down from his horse and stood beside Burrow, staring down at Sanchez.

  Sanchez looked up and slid his beleaguered, fearful gaze between them. “Por favor, amigos, don’t kill me. I am not ready. We were so close . . . so close to the money. I wanted to ride west . . . spend the winter in Frisco. I heard the gir
ls there have slanted eyes . . . they’re from the Orient . . . and there’s a tobacco called”—he convulsed, coughing, before rasping out: “opium!”

  He smiled again, dreamily, and closed his eyes. “It makes you feel . . . real . . . good!”

  When he opened his eyes again, his smile disappeared.

  He stared up in horror at the pistol aimed down at him. Raising his hands in front of his face, he screamed, “Noooo!”

  Burrow’s Schofield .44 roared, punching a quarter-sized hole through the palm of Sanchez’s right hand before drilling a similar-sized hole through Sanchez’s forehead.

  Sanchez’s hands dropped to his sides. He turned his head away and gave what sounded like a disgusted sigh as his last breath left him.

  “Great,” Meyers said. “That’s just great. There were seven of us not a half hour ago. Now there’s two!”

  He gave a savage kick to one of Sanchez’s boots, then stomped several yards away and stared out at the partly frozen slough, his fists on his hips. “What the hell happened?”

  “Don’t lose your nerve.” Burrow sat on a rock, removed a glove, and began unbuttoning his coat to dig his makings sack out of his shirt pocket. “We’re still gonna get Savidge. Least-ways, we’re gonna get his head. One way or another.”

  He cursed as he pulled the small, canvas sack out of his shirt pocket.

  “Who the hell’s that?”

  “Who the hell’s who?”

  Meyers glanced over his shoulder at Burrow and then pointed to the northeast. Burrow rose from his rock and stared off toward where a horseback rider was cantering his horse along the edge of the slough, following an old buffalo trail pocked with deep wallows.

  “Hard to say,” Burrow said, nervously fingering the pouch in his hand. “But he’s headed this way.”

  The redheaded, bespectacled bounty hunter walked over to his horse and slid his Winchester out of the saddle scabbard. He pumped a round into the Winchester’s action, off-cocked the hammer, and rested the barrel on his shoulder. Meyers used the thong drooping from the hem of his buffalo coat to tie the flap up above his walnut-gripped Colt holstered low on his right hip.

  Both men watched the rider canter around the curve of the slough and continue toward them—a lanky man in a long, black wolf coat with the head of the wolf still attached and serving as a hat of sorts, with fur flaps sewn on to drop down over his ears. The flaps were tied beneath his chin.

  As he continued to approach, Burrow saw that the lean man had extremely long, dark-blond hair liberally bleached an off-yellow by the elements. His long, thick beard was of the same color. His ruddy cheeks were deep-lined and of the texture of old saddle leather. His blue eyes were set beneath brows thick and shaggy enough to resemble oversized caterpillars well on their way to becoming butterflies.

  He was grinning as he reined up before the two bounty hunters regarding him incredulously. He looked at the dead man on the ground beyond Burrow, then regarded the two bounty hunters once more, pursing his lips and shaking his head in disdain.

  “What a couple of sorry sacks of shit I’m lookin’ at now!” he scolded in a thick English accent. “Rarely, on the Queen’s honor, have I seen the like!”

  Scowling, Burrow lifted his rifle off his shoulder and let the barrel sag in the general direction of the newcomer without aiming the rifle directly at him. “Who in the hell are you—besides bein’ a wise-assed foreigner, I mean?”

  “Yeah,” Meyers said, scowling his disdain, as well, “who in the hell are you—ridin’ in here like you own the whole damn territory . . . ?”

  The lanky man—tall and thin, with no extra tallow that Burrow could see, though he was wearing a lot of clothes, including fringed buckskin trousers—swung down from his saddle. He removed his mittened hand and extended the large, red paw to Burrow.

  “Rutherford H.L Chivington the Fifth, at your service, gents. Call me Squire. Most folks do.”

  He had that big, toothy grin on his face again. Burrow found him more than slightly patronizing, even mocking. The man had a good opinion of himself—that was for sure. And he didn’t have a very good opinion of anyone else. At least he didn’t make much of Burrow and Meyers. That was gallingly obvious.

  When Burrow didn’t shake the man’s hand, Chivington didn’t seem offended in the least. He held it out to Meyers for another rebuff and then shoved his hand back into the fur-lined, elkskin mitten, under which he wore a thin, doeskin shooting glove.

  “You’re English, ain’t ya?” Burrow said, as though he were asking the man if he’d been birthed by a cow.

  Chivington chuckled. “How did you know, my good man?” He laughed again. “Yes, of course I’m English. Born and raised in London, don’t ya know. My mum and pop served the King and Queen, they did.”

  “What’re you doin’ over here, if you’re from such a tribe that served the King and Queen?” Meyers asked, skeptically. “You a remittance man?”

  Chivington pursed his lips to consider the question, lowering those shaggy blond brows and nodding slowly. “I guess you could call me a remittance man. Yes, I could be called that.” He looked up devilishly at the two before him, his lustrous blue eyes twinkling in the washed-out sunshine. “I wouldn’t mind being called that at all, though, truth be known, my family was of the servant class. Dear old Mum and Pa sent me here to this wild new land going on thirty years ago now, when I was only fifteen years old. You see . . .”

  He looked around as though making sure no one else was within earshot, then, keeping his voice as well as his chin dipped low, stepped closer to his two-man audience to confess, “You see, even at that young age, I was hung like a mule and owned the passion of a rogue griz too long in hibernation.”

  He gestured lewdly with his entire body. “I put a bun in the oven of the visiting Princess of Denmark, don’t ya know, one wild night after too much rum punch and the lighting of the palace Christmas tree. Slipped her underfrillies down those porcelain legs in Prince Albert’s study, and went after the lusty little Dane like she was little more than stable trash.”

  He winked as he thrust his hips. “And that’s exactly how young Ingrid took the studding, too, I might add. She yowled like common stable trash and damn near laid my poor pink ass wide open with her fingernails. But she made up for the injury in spades”—Chivington winked, grinning—“if’n you get my drift, buckos.”

  The Englishman roared loudly, then quieted quickly.

  He brushed a sheepish fist across his nose. “Ingrid’s guilt rode her as hard as I had that pie-eyed night, especially when it was discovered the poor girl was with child. She confessed the tryst to her mum, who complained to Victoria, her cousin. After that I was considered a pariah at Buckingham Palace. Fearing for my life, not to mention certain gelding by the palace guards, my folks bestowed their life’s savings upon me and sent me here to the New World to avoid dear Victoria, who, understandably, I reckon, was more than a little miffed at having her beloved Danish niece impregnated by an unshod steed from the cobbled, coal-begrimed slums of east London!”

  The Englishman fell back against his beefy cream stallion, laughing raucously.

  Burrow and Meyers shared a puzzled scowl.

  Burrow turned to the still-laughing Brit, and aimed his rifle at the man’s flat belly. “Thanks for your life story, you fourflushin’, limey bastard. Now, suppose you tell us what you’re doin’ here. You been followin’ us? You a bounty hunter, maybe?”

  He canted his head toward the man’s horse. He’d spied a large, brass-framed rifle jutting from the man’s fur-clad scabbard to which was attached a smaller scabbard housing a brass tripod.

  Chivington looked at the gun. Then he turned back to Burrow and Meyers. “Eighteen-Seventy-Four Sharps sporting rifle,” he said, proudly. “Fashioned and re-fashioned to suit my own particular needs. Outfitted with a Malcolm telescopic scope that makes a man four hundred yards away appear to be dancing a jig within ten feet of the end of the barrel . . . give or take,” the En
glishman added with a smile.

  His pale features flushing with exasperation, Burrow said, “You been followin’ us!”

  “Yes, my good man—I have been following you,” the Englishman said with a patient air, as though he were dealing with a couple of cork-headed fools. “You’ve been following Prophet, and I’ve been following you.”

  “You’ve been followin’ us followin’ Prophet!” accused Meyers.

  “Yes, my good man.” The Englishman smiled indulgently at Meyers. “I’ve been following you following Prophet. However, let me point out, that I was on Prophet’s trail before you were. Before you and several others, I might add. Rarely have I seen Dakota so crowded this time of the year. As soon as I saw Prophet and the Vengeance Queen in Dakota Territory, I figured they were after the same man—or men—I was after. Who else but Chaz Savidge would they be after out here, at this outlandish time of the year?”

  He shrugged, bunching his lips inside his shaggy beard, which was as sleek as the fur of his wolf coat. “When I was hunting buffalo a few years back,” he added, patting the sheathed Sharps, “I’d always follow the Sioux or Cheyenne braves, because they knew where the largest herds were. I’d wait till they were finished taking two or three from a herd of hundreds, and then I’d set up the Sharps here and drop twenty inside of an hour!”

  “You’re a poacher,” Burrow snarled. “A bounty poacher.”

  Chivington glowered. “I don’t like that term. I’m a man of opportunity. I’m a businessman. A good one. You see, I’m not as young as I used to be. I’m neither the tracker nor the hunter I once was. When I see a younger, more capable man or men on the same trail—why not let him do the dirty work?”

  “And then you blast the poor bastard with the long-range cannon there,” Burrow said, “and take his quarry.”

  “Exactly!” Chivington exclaimed like a schoolmaster congratulating the class fool for finally answering a question correctly. “Far easier to bushwhack a man who doesn’t know it’s coming than an outlaw constantly peeking over his shoulder for shadowers. Now, gents, let’s get off our bloody high horses, shall we? Right here, you’ve been doing—or trying to do—the same thing I’ve been doing—successfully—for the past several years.”