“Why are you telling me this?” Josephina said, jerking again with another echoing blast of that savage weapon.
“Because I want you to know you can trust me. I’m the only one who can get you out of here. Hell, I can get you safely down to Denver and beyond, if you want. A purty young gal like yourself wouldn’t have a chance, goin’ it alone.”
Josephina jerked as another echoing report rolled over the northern ridge. It sounded like the hammer of God. She couldn’t help but imagine the flesh those large bullets were tearing out of Mr. Prophet . . . maybe out of Miss Bonaventure soon, as well.
Savidge said, “We don’t have much time. Whoever’s firing that gun likely has two or three more men sidin’ him. They know where we’re camped, and they’ll come for us soon. Us. You don’t think they’re gonna be very nice to you when they come strollin’ in here, do you? Killers like that? Bounty poachers? Hell, no—they’ll take what they want from you, kill you, take your horse, take my head, and—”
“Were you lying about the money?”
Savidge frowned incredulously at the unexpected question voiced so softly. “What?”
“The money in Arizona. Is it actually there, or was that just one more of your lies?”
“Oh, it’s there. It’s there, all right. I don’t lie about money.”
“Where is it?”
“Shit, you think I’m gonna tell you and let you—?”
“Even if you drew me a detailed map, Mr. Savidge, I couldn’t make it on my own.” Josephina jerked her head toward the hill once more, as another report sounded. Her heart thudded heavily, desperately. “I’ve never been out of Brule County, much less the territory. Even if I knew where Arizona was, I’d never make it there without help. A man’s help, unfortunately.”
Savidge studied her. It was his turn to be suspicious. “It’s outside of a little mining town south of Tucson. Gila Gulch, it’s called. I’ve stowed it down in a dry well behind a mining shaft and an old stone Mexican shack. That’s all I’m gonna say. I’ll show you where it is, but that’s all I’m gonna say.”
“If I turn you loose, do you promise to take me to it . . . and to give me a quarter of it?”
“Just a quarter?”
“A quarter of fifty thousand dollars is all I’d need to make a fresh start. Besides, I doubt you’d give me half. If I insisted on half, I’d probably never make it out of Dakota Territory.”
There was another blasting report. Josephina’s heart skipped a beat, then continued chugging.
“Why, sure, sure. I’ll give you a quarter.”
Josephina rose with her blankets and walked over to Savidge. She dropped to her knees before him. She studied him for a time. He studied her in return, skeptically. There was another gunshot in the north. Josephina merely twitched a little now as she let the blankets fall to the ground, and unbuttoned her coat.
Shivering, she shrugged out of her coat and then unbuttoned her blouse.
“What’re you . . . what’re you . . . doin’ . . . ?”
Josephina opened her blouse and lifted the long-sleeved men’s undershirt and chemise that she wore beneath it. She raised the wash-worn garments to her neck, giving Savidge a good look at her breasts, which were covered in chicken flesh.
Her teeth chattering softly, Josephina said, “My husband never told me what he thought of my body, Mr. Savidge, but I’ve seen it in the mirror often enough to know that I am not ugly. And judging by his reactions when . . . when we were together . . . he was right pleased. Until he got tired of the same woman’s body every night and drifted down to the woodcutters’ camp.” Her voice had hardened on this last.
“No, no . . . hell,” Savidge chuckled. He swallowed as he glowered lustily at her exposed bosoms. “You ain’t ugly one bit, Miss Josephina. I reckon you could please a man just fine. You’d never see me drifting down to no woodcutters’ camp.”
He snorted a lusty chuckle.
“If you promise to take me down to Arizona Territory and share your money with me, you can have me whenever you want. Just you. No one else. I will not sell myself to anyone else. Not ever. Only you . . . for the money and a fresh start. I would wager that freeing you from those chains and making my body available to you whenever you have the urge for it is worth one quarter of fifty thousand dollars—wouldn’t you agree?”
“Hell, yeah.” Savidge swallowed. “Hell, yeah.”
“If you’ve grown tired of me by the time we reach the money, you can kick me loose. I know how men are. But you must promise right here and now not to double-cross me. You must promise me that your word is good, Mr. Savidge.”
“I promise, Miss Josephina. I promise!” Savidge turned toward where another rocketing rifle report echoed. “What more can I do but promise? You’re a purty girl, right man-pleasin’, no doubt, and I’d be crazy not to take a deal like that! Now, you’d best free me before we get caught in one awful nasty whipsaw out here!”
Josephina knew that by trusting a man like Savidge, she was probably making an awful mistake. But desperation tugged hard inside her. She could see no other way to save herself. She certainly couldn’t return to the ranch. She had to leave the territory. And she had to have money to make a fresh start for herself.
The heavy, cannon-like thunder peels minus the reports of any answering shots kept telling her that Prophet would soon be dead, and so would Miss Bonaventure, and she would be left to the mercy of the men after Savidge.
Men who doubtless knew nothing about mercy whatever.
She was taking a risk by trusting this known rapist and killer. But what other chance did she have of making it out of the territory?
She lowered her shirts, buttoned her dress, draped her blankets over her shoulders again, and walked over to where Miss Bonaventure’s gear was piled. She’d seen Louisa place her set of keys to Savidge’s handcuffs and leg shackles inside a small pouch inside her saddlebags. Josephina wasn’t sure why she’d noted that, but she had.
She dropped to a knee and rummaged around until she found the pouch and spilled its contents into her hand.
A brass ring containing two keys dropped out—one relatively small key and one finger-sized key.
Josephina dropped the empty pouch on the ground and turned to Savidge.
“That’s it,” he said, and grinned. “Arizona, here we come!”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Prophet cursed as another slug hammered the ground about eight inches up the slight hollow in which he cowered flat on his back against a bed of cold leaves and dirt. The slug threw loam and gravel on him, showering his face.
He spat it from his lips, blew it out his nose, tried to blink it from his eyes. He didn’t get all of it out of his eyes, which burned. He didn’t want to lift his hands to brush it away. The shooter would key on the movement.
He tried to quell his crazy breathing, but that was no easy task. He hadn’t been in a fix like this since the war, when he’d once been pinned down by Union sharpshooters behind enemy lines, when he’d tried to rescue his cousin, Melvin Prophet, from the farmhouse he’d holed up in after he and Lou had gotten separated from their regiment after the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. Melvin had taken a bullet in the belly, and Prophet had slipped away from the badly shelled farmhouse to find supplies with which to tend him—to no avail.
Because of the snipers who’d kept him pinned down for most of a rainy night, by the time he finally reached Melvin, his cousin merely stared up at him, glassy-eyed in death.
Prophet pressed his back harder against the bottom of the hollow here in Dakota Territory. He’d found the depression when he’d been frantically scrounging for cover from that infernal cannon hammering away at him from a tree nearly directly north, maybe fifty yards away.
The hollow had been formed by the uprooting of a large cottonwood, and the roots of the cottonwood dangled over him now, though several of the thick, snake-like tendrils had been blasted away by the Sharps.
The infernal Sharps.
He held the Richards against his chest. The barn blaster was of no use at this range. His pistol was still in the holster strapped to his thigh, but the Peacemaker wouldn’t do him any good from this distance, either.
Another bullet thumped into the ground a few feet away, blowing more dirt on Prophet. It was only a matter of time, he knew, before the shooter found his mark. At the moment, he was probing a haystack with a pitchfork. A couple more pokes, and . . .
A rifle barked somewhere behind Prophet. It barked again, and again. He recognized the ripping bark of a Winchester carbine.
Prophet lifted his head slightly and saw the rifle’s flash about thirty yards away through the trees. Louisa. Had to be her. She was firing steadily, one shot after another, in the direction of the Sharps, which had suddenly fallen silent.
Prophet’s heart quickened even more than before. It quickened with relief. He’d been no more than a minute away from becoming wolf bait.
Prophet counted out Louisa’s nine shots. Her rifle fell silent.
Prophet stayed where he was, back pressed flat against the ground. He pricked his ears, listening, cold sweat streaking the dirt and bits of shredded leaves on his cheeks. He thought he heard brush crunching in the direction that the Sharps had been blasting from, but he couldn’t be sure.
His ears were ringing from the reports and from the adrenaline coursing through his veins. His heart hammered out a rhythm in time with the ringing. It sounded like a powwow, as though nasty little Indians were dancing around inside him.
He resisted the urge to lift his head at the risk of getting it shot off.
Then he heard the distance-muffled, crunching thuds of a horse galloping through brush, the sounds retreating quickly into the northern distance.
Louisa’s voice came to him like a buoy in choppy seas. “Lou?”
Prophet tried to answer but found his throat constricted.
Louder, she said, “Lou, are you out here?” Her voice trilled with worry.
Prophet lifted his head, wincing against the pain that had left him for a time, drowned by other concerns. But it was back now with a vengeance, kicking up a fierce rhythm in his leg and cheek, two more companion instruments joining the violent symphony in his ears.
He hacked phlegm from his throat, and spat.
“Here.”
Louisa’s soft, careful footsteps sounded to his right. “Where?”
Prophet waved an arm. “Over here, damnit!”
He sat up, brought a hand to his stinging cheek, and felt the dirt mixed with the blood there. He felt the ache of the bullet burn all across his face. The graze across his left thigh felt like a continuous lash of a willow switch, a sensation he’d been all too familiar with, growing up in Ma Prophet’s house in Cobb County, Georgia. If Ma wasn’t up to the all-too-frequent and all-too-deserved punishment, Pa unfailingly was.
But young Prophet had never been strapped this hard.
Louisa walked up out of the woods, her breath frosting in the air around her head.
“How bad, Lou?”
“Grazes, both.”
She dropped to a knee and leaned her rifle against a tree root. She sucked a sharp breath when she saw the cut on his cheek.
“You think it’s gonna leave a scar?” Prophet asked her, ironically.
“A nasty one, but don’t worry, Lou—your face has never been your strong suit.”
“Thanks . . . I think.”
Prophet removed his bandanna from around his neck and started to tie it around the bullet burn on his upper left thigh. Louisa snatched the cloth out of his hands, and performed the task herself, tying it tightly to stem the blood flow.
“We’ll get you cleaned up when we get back to camp,” she said.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Prophet said, scowling at her. “What’re you doing here? Who’s watching Savidge?”
“No one. I heard the report of that big-caliber gun, and . . . come on—let’s get you to your feet.”
Louisa wrapped Prophet’s left arm around her neck and helped the big man up off the ground. He grunted as he rose, his cheek burning as though a hot iron were pressed against it. At the same time, the blood was cold. An oddly uncomfortable combination.
“You shouldn’t have come, girl.”
“If I hadn’t come, you’d be dead by now.”
“There you go again—thinkin’ with your heart instead of your head.”
“I’ll work on it sometime. For now, shut up!”
“Hold on,” Prophet said, moving into the camp where the two dead men lay in dark, unmoving mounds. “Gotta fetch my rifle.”
He picked up the Winchester and brushed it off. He looked into the darkness to the north, listening in case the gunman had turned back around. Prophet heard nothing but the scratching of barren branches.
“Did you get a look at him?” Louisa said, coming up beside Prophet.
“No. Got no idea who he is. Doubt he’s the man I shot back at the ranch. All I know is he’s wielding a Big Fifty, and I don’t ever care to be on the wrong end of a gun like that again!”
Prophet started moving through the trees, dragging his stiff left leg back in the direction from which he’d come. “That bastard’s liable to get back to camp before we do, and cut Savidge’s head off. Damnit, Louisa!”
“It’s this way!” she said, tugging on his arm and adjusting his halting course.
It took them nearly an hour to get back to the rise north of the camp. Even at that rate, they were lucky, for they had no fire to aim for. Only Louisa’s keen sense of direction led them on nearly an as-the-crow-flies course up and over the rise and into the camp.
At camp’s edge, they stopped and stood side by side, looking around.
Prophet racked a cartridge into his Winchester’s breech and aimed the rifle into the darkness before him. Into the vacant darkness where only his and Louisa’s gear remained.
“Hmm,” Prophet said, pitching his voice wryly. “Chaz? Where are you, Chaz? Oh, Chaz?”
Louisa strode quickly forward, gazing down at the tree she’d left Savidge leaning against, as though maybe he were only concealed by the darkness. Nope. Their prisoner wasn’t where she’d left him.
Louisa kicked the shackles, which, along with the handcuffs, were all that remained of Chaz Savidge’s presence here. The shackles clanked as they flew several feet away. Louisa strode around the camp quickly, anxiously, turning this way and that, aiming her rifle, her breath rising, frosting in short bursts around her head.
“Miss Hawkins is gone, too,” she said.
Prophet was moving stiffly around, as well. “Done made note of that, partner.” He dragged his burning left leg into the darkness east of the camp, and stopped dead in his tracks, staring. “Horses are gone, too,” he said, feeling a cold stone drop in his belly.
Louisa chewed out an uncustomary curse, and stomped off into the darkness. She disappeared for a while, but Prophet could hear her kicking around as though maybe Savidge and the girl were hiding out there somewhere. When Louisa returned to the camp, Prophet was sitting on a log and pouring whiskey onto the dirty bullet graze on his leg, sucking a sharp breath as he did.
The bottle had belonged to Ben Ryder. The poacher had packed two. He’d been good for something.
Prophet raised the bottle to Louisa. “They might’ve took the horses but at least they left the whiskey.”
He set the bottle down and began cleaning the wound with a handkerchief.
Louisa stood stiffly on the other side of the dead fire. “The shooter? You think he took them?”
“Nah,” Prophet said, his casual tone belying his concern for their dire situation—alone out here without their horses, the man with the Big Fifty likely on the lurk nearby. “He’d have taken longer to find our camp without a fire to lead him in. And there’d have been a commotion. I’d say ole Savidge sweet-talked that young gal into turning him loose. You must have left your keys layin’ around, like a damn tinhorn.”
“I wasn
’t thinking,” Louisa said, her voice trembling as she tried to keep her emotions on a short leash. “I heard the reports of that big-caliber gun, and . . . I knew you were out there, and . . .” She swung around quickly and said in exasperation, “How did she know I kept my keys in my saddlebags!”
“A right observant girl.”
“I didn’t take her for a fool,” Louisa said.
“She was likely scared. Heard that Big Fifty. Savidge likely convinced her that you and me were wolf bait. So she squirreled your keys out of your bags and turned him loose. They rode off and took our horses so we couldn’t follow ’em. That was likely Savidge’s idea, because he probably knew there was only a fifty-fifty chance that Big Fifty would cut us both down.”
Prophet shook his head slowly as he scrubbed at the burn, both wincing and grinning. “But that girl, Josephina—she’s been through a lot. Fear was talkin’ to her. Fear’s got a loud voice. It clouds clear thinkin’. I learned that in the war.”
“I suppose you’d like to shoot me,” Louisa said. “I’d shoot you, if you did something this stupid.”
Prophet chuckled. “Hell, I’d want you to.”
Louisa stared at him. She was a slender, straight-backed silhouette in the darkness, starlight glistening faintly off the brim of her hat. “How can you be so calm about this, Lou? Savidge is gone!”
Prophet scooped the bottle off the ground. “Because we’re gonna get him back. No one hornswoggles ole Lou Prophet and the Vengeance Queen an’ gets away with it. Especially a killer with a three-thousand-dollar bounty on his head. Especially when he took off with my hoss! Not that that cayuse wasn’t headed for the glue factory, but . . .”
He poured more whiskey on his leg and sucked a sharp breath through gritted teeth.
“We’ll catch up to him sooner or later,” he said. “Hopefully sooner rather than later, but I reckon we’ll see.” He took a swig of the whiskey. “Thanks, partner.”
Louisa scowled at him. “For what?”
To Hell on a Fast Horse Page 30
