The revolutionarios in the yard were led by Big Tio’s daughter, Chela. The scrappy, hot-blooded Mexican woman would have passed for one of the men in her peasant garb—red calico blouse, red neckerchief, baggy duck trousers, and rope-soled sandals—if not for her nicely curved hips and the two swollen mounds pushing out from behind her billowing blouse. She was directing several men to carry the released girls up into the wagons as she gave each a cursory inspection for injuries.
The youngest was a little, round-faced, black-haired girl of eight or nine, and this one Chela picked up in her arms, cooing to the child as she led one of the revolutionarios with another child in tow to the second wagon around which the wind lifted a tan-colored dust cloud.
Meanwhile, Big Tio was directing a small contingent of his men to haul the Gatling gun down out of the guard tower he’d occupied. The big man, corpulently regal with his gray beard, deerskin leggings, and red sash, shouted Spanish epithets while pointing up at the tower, where three men were rigging the gun with ropes. One, a square-faced gent called Benito, gave back the old revolutionario as good as he was giving, pointing and grunting curses.
Prophet carried Louisa down the steps and over the dead Rurale at the bottom. Hearing hoof clomps, he turned to see a string of saddle horses being led through the open gates by one of the peasant boys, Ramon. Only ten years old, Ramon was as good with horses as any full-grown man Prophet had ever known.
The bounty hunter moved past the small group of battered, terrified senoritas toward his own horse, which Ramon was leading directly behind him on a short lead line, as the lineback dun, whom Prophet had appropriately named Mean and Ugly, did not get along with others. In fact, he’d fight like a grizzly at the challenging roll of another horse’s eye. And if there were mares in the remuda, things could get dusty and bloody rather quickly.
“Where you going, Lou?”
Prophet stopped and turned around. Chela stood behind him. She’d placed the girl in the wagon, and her arms were free. She looked at Prophet now through big, brown eyes that were slightly almond-shaped in a flat, mestizo-featured face that owned the sizzling, exotic beauty of the untamed.
“She’ll ride with me.”
Chela jerked her head toward the wagon. “Put her in there with the others.”
Prophet held Louisa more tightly against him, reluctant to let her go. He’d journeyed a long way for her, traveling countless miles all the while thinking she might be dead. He’d burned with that hollowed-out feeling of a loss you knew could never be made up again. Not if you lived a thousand more years.
“No.” Prophet looked down at the battered blond in his arms and shook his head. “Gonna put her on my horse.”
Chela moved toward him, her red bandanna fluttering about her long, brown neck, and glanced between Prophet’s face and Louisa’s. “She’s special, yes?”
“We rode some hard trails together.”
“Then you want the best for her.”
Prophet sighed. He knew Chela was right. He just didn’t want to take his hands off Louisa’s warm, reassuring form.
The young Mexican woman’s rich lips quirked an understanding smile. “She’ll be better off in the wagon, with me and the other girls. In her condition, she does not belong on a horse.”
She snaked her arms under Louisa. Prophet found himself resisting, keeping his own arms wrapped tightly around Louisa’s sheet-wrapped figure. Finally, he let her go.
“You can ride close to the wagon,” Chela said. “You don’t have to let her out of your sight. But she must ride in the wagon, you crazy gringo.” As she turned with Louisa in her arms, the beautiful revolutionaria cast a flirtatious glance over her shoulder. “I’m jealous now, you bastard. I thought it was only me you had eyes for.”
Prophet followed Chela to the wagon and watched as Big Tio’s comely daughter wrapped Louisa in bobcat hides while the other girls sat around in starry-eyed shock, some sobbing uncontrollably into their hands or covering their heads with skins. Prophet was not encouraged that Louisa did not open her eyes. She groaned, sort of whimpered a couple of times, but otherwise kept her eyes closed, and she said nothing.
It hit him like a sledge, nearly buckling his knees.
She was going to die.
Rage like a flash fire shouldered out the dread, and he resisted the urge to go back into the building and fill Montoya’s lifeless carcass with a few more .45 rounds. He ground his teeth but stepped back as Chela, cooing to the smallest girl, who sobbed uncontrollably, walked around the wagon and climbed fleetly into the box.
“Let’s go!” she yelled to her father and Benito, who were wrestling the Gatling gun onto the back of a mule someone had hauled out of the Rurale stables flanking the prison. “They probably have a couple of patrols out, Papa. We’d best hightail it before they get back. I don’t want any shooting around my girls!”
“Don’t worry, my lovely daughter,” Big Tio yelled as Chela turned the first wagon in a broad arc around the yard. “If we’re pestered, we now have a lovely new Gatling gun to clear any and all lobos from our back trail!”
Laughing heartily and taking the mule’s lead rope in his gloved left hand, Big Tio swung into the saddle of his Appaloosa mustang as his daughter’s wagon thundered past him toward the open gates. The second wagon, driven by a young peasant boy in a broad, low-crowned sombrero and with a savage scar on his chin and a big pistol wedged behind his rope belt, followed Chela’s wagon around the yard and out the gates.
Prophet rode up to Big Tio and several men mounting their saddled horses while a half dozen others continued to strip guns and ammo from the dead Rurales strewn about the yard as though they’d been dropped from the sky. Several other rebels were hauling loot out of the prison building’s gaping doors. Mostly they carried burlap bags of meat, beans, and liquor including demijohns of wine and clear bottles of tequila, pulque, and bacanora. Some of the older peons were smoking good cigars.
They weren’t lingering, but the anticipatory expressions on their Indian-dark, haggard faces—even the boys in their teenaged years looked like well-traveled men of thirty or so—told Prophet they’d have a tail-stomping good time this evening in their village of Rocas Altas, high up in the valleys of the Montanas Olvidadas, or “the Forgotten Mountains.” A remote, forbidding range haunted by both the Apache and the Yaqui as well as many wild, dangerous animals including the puma, it was forty miles by way of several connected barrancas east of here.
“I’m gonna stay with the wagons,” Prophet told Big Tio, looking around to make sure no Rurales had been left alive. He hadn’t needed to. The old revolutionario leader’s men had made fast, savage work of the corrupt rural policemen, leaving several of the worst offenders with bloody gashes where their privates had been.
Before Prophet could nudge Mean and Ugly’s flanks with his heels, Big Tio said, “I see you got your girl back, eh, Padre?”
“So far.”
“How does she look? Not so good?”
Prophet gritted his teeth as another burn of raw fury seared him, and he glanced toward the massive prison building from the open windows of which the smoke of set fires curled like fog. “Not so good. But she’ll make it.”
He wished like hell he could believe it.
As the bounty hunter gigged Mean into the sifting dust of the wagons rattling off across the bench fronting the courtyard, Big Tio yelled behind him, “I’ll stop and say a prayer for her at the shrine of Guadalupe. The saint will look after your girl, Lou. You may want to stop there yourself.”
“I reckon I better not,” Prophet grunted to himself.
Yeah, you’d better not, he thought. Your praying days ended the day you sold your soul to the Devil, you big dumb son of a bitch. Now what’re you gonna do? Louisa needs help, and you don’t even have a god to pray to for her.
He tipped the straw sombrero low and put Mean and Ugly into a gallop, chewing up the sand and sage and looking around warily for returning Rurale patrols. He almost wished
he’d see one. The day was still young, and there were still a good twenty, thirty Rurales from here whom he’d like to kick out with a shovel.
He didn’t know which ones had sprung the trap on Louisa and the peasant girls—the senoritas had all been washing clothes at a stream when they’d been captured, with several older women killed outright—but as far as Prophet was concerned, there wasn’t an innocent Rurale in all of northern Mexico.
The next one he saw would die hard.
4
PROPHET TOOK A swig from his canteen as he rode, wishing he’d given Louisa some water. That might have brought her around. She probably wouldn’t have drunk it, but he should have tried. Soon, he’d have Chela stop the wagon—by Pozos de Cobre, maybe, or Copper Wells—and he’d make sure she got water. He doubted that she or any of the other girls had been given much to drink or eat since they’d been carted off to the prison.
Prophet ground the cork into the canteen’s mouth with the heel of his hand and cursed himself. He shouldn’t have let Louisa part ways with him back in the Seven Devils Range on the Arizona-Mexico border.
He’d last seen her after they’d run to ground the Three of a Kind Gang, who’d killed her cousin and her cousin’s family and burned the entire village of Seven Devils to the rocky ground. Prophet, Louisa, and the young man from Seven Devils, Big Hans, who’d guided them into the mountains after the butchers, had killed the gang bloody, leaving their carcasses, including that of their demonic, beautiful female leader, to the diamondbacks and buzzards in a sunblasted canyon where their gnawed bones were likely now strewn like matchsticks.
Louisa had pointed her pinto northwest, with no destination in that stubborn, independent mind of hers. Just an urge to be alone and to ride. That had been two months ago.
Prophet and Mean and Ugly had headed down to Monterrey, and they’d both stomped with their tails up for a good week, Prophet spending most of his time playing poker and getting to know a big-breasted half-breed puta named Riget right down to the leaf-shaped birthmark on the back of her right thigh, just below the lovely globe of her smooth, tan butt cheek.
Mean and Ugly had torn a stable apart while expressing his affection for a buckskin named Linda. Prophet had had to rescue the ugly dun from a stableman’s bullet twice. Still, he’d intended to stay with the sultry Riget for another week—he liked her digs and the sound of her lusty chuckles—and he’d likely still be tumbling with the girl, and drinking her liquor, if he hadn’t gotten wind of a bank robbery just north of there.
Two young peasant girls had been killed in a hail of gunfire as the banditos had trampled a young pregnant peasant mother and headed north . . . toward the Montanas Olvidadas.
Prophet didn’t know what it was that had warned him of danger. Maybe his own sixth sense acquired from years of man hunting on the western frontier after barely surviving the War of Northern Aggression. Or possibly a weird lining up of certain stars in his and Louisa’s signs—though it was she who believed in such blather, not him. But a prickling between his heart and his spine told him that Louisa would be on the trail of those child-killing wolves, and that it wasn’t a trail the lovely blond bounty hunter needed to be on alone.
Not in Mexico or anywhere else. Sure as hell not in the forbidding Olvidadas.
That’s where he had picked up her trail, after he’d cut that of the banditos—all four of whom she’d taken down in a deep canyon not far from Rocas Altas. Prophet hadn’t learned how she’d handled it. Knowing Louisa, she’d used her charms as well as her guns, maybe even the razor-edged stiletto she kept in her boot. She might have shown up around the bandits’ campfire like a vision straight from a young man’s lusty dream, only to leave all four dancing with El Diablo behind the smoking gates of hell.
She’d laid over in Rocas Altas—coincidentally the village where Big Tio’s revolutionarios had been holed up as well—and that’s where Montoya had gotten her. Likely caught her off guard while she was enjoying a few days in the remote mountains with the innocent village children, tending her tack and gathering trail supplies while letting her horse rest before moving on. Having had her own childhood cut short by bloody murder, Louisa loved being around children—when she wasn’t hunting those that killed them, that was.
Prophet kept Mean and Ugly close to the back of Chela’s wagon, not minding that he was eating its dust. Occasionally, Big Tio’s comely daughter turned to look through the covered wagon at him, over the jostling dark heads of the Mexican girls. Louisa’s blond head was all but covered by the hides, but Prophet kept his eyes on the swatch of hair he could see of her, in case she needed him.
“We stop here,” Chela said an hour after they’d left the prison, the backside of which they could see in the canyon below them, black smoke rising into the brassy sky above.
Prophet also saw Big Tio’s men galloping toward him and the wagon over the low, cedar- and manzanita-stippled hogbacks, their horses looking bulky with stolen Rurale loot.
Chela had stopped the wagon by a stream, and while the lovely revolutionaria and the boy with the horse pistol wedged behind his rope belt helped the Mexican girls out of the wagons, Prophet grabbed his canteen, stepped off Mean and Ugly and into the wagon in which Louisa lay unmoving beneath the bobcat hide. He dropped down beside her and tipped her face toward him.
Beneath the purple bruises, she looked paler than before. Waxy. Prophet’s heart thudded. Had she died on him without so much as a parting word? He doffed his hat, lowered his head to her chest.
Faintly, her heart thumped.
He popped the canteen’s cork and, snaking his left arm around behind her head, tipped the flask to her cracked, swollen lips. “How ’bout some water, girl? Huh? How ’bout it? Why don’t you take a drink for ole Lou?”
Her lips didn’t move. Her swollen eyes remained closed. As swollen as they were, she probably couldn’t get them open if she tried.
Prophet felt as though a sharp knife were poking around in his guts. Frustrated, he sighed and lowered the canteen from Louisa’s lips. As if in response to his sigh, she gave a soft sigh of her own. Her head moved slightly, as though shaking her head. As if to say, not now, Lou. I’ll drink later. At least, that’s what he hoped she meant. That she was conscious enough to refuse the water.
“Okay,” Prophet said, ramming the cork back into the canteen as hope softened the edge on that knife in his guts. “Maybe later. I’ll let you sleep now.”
He glanced over at the creek twisting through sycamores and poplars beside which the rescued girls sat with their knees up and staring or leaning forward to drink from the cool, running stream. Chela sat beside one of the girls, smoothing the senorita’s hair back from her forehead with one hand while offering bits of jerky with the other. Another girl was sobbing against the shoulder of yet another, older child.
Prophet’s heart wrenched. What misery they’d all been through. Yet, they had each other. Soon, they’d be home with their families. Louisa had no one but him. No one waiting for her with a warm fire and a hot meal.
Just Prophet himself—a down-at-heel, bounty-hunting saddle tramp. And all he had were empty pockets, a few pots and one change of clothes in his saddlebags, guns, ammo, tack, and a hammer-headed lineback dun.
That’s all he had, and that’s all she had. The last of her known family had been killed in Seven Devils.
He imagined the anguish being played out behind those swollen-shut eyes, and he groaned. He slumped down beside the comatose girl, wrapped his arm around her shoulders, pressed his lips to her forehead. “Gonna get you well again soon.”
He stared off at the ridge above the stream. “Good as damn new, and then things are gonna change for us both.”
The horseback revolutionarios, several of whom were passing bottles or stone jugs between them, caught up to the wagons a few minutes after the girls had been loaded up and they were moving again. Prophet hung back with Louisa, keeping an eye on her, as they climbed the zigzagging canyon high into the blue reac
hes of the Forgotten Mountains.
The cool air was a welcome relief from the heat of the desert below. As he rode, Prophet remembered he was barefoot. He reached back into his saddlebags for his socks and boots, and then he pulled out his battered, funnel-brimmed Stetson that was stained from salt sweat and the weather of many western lands. While it wasn’t as good protection from the high-country sun as the broad-brimmed sombrero, he was more familiar with it.
He clamped it down on his head and adjusted the curled brim.
They crested the last pass just before sundown, and as Prophet followed Chela’s wagon down the rocky two-track trail, he saw the small village spread out across the boulder-strewn bowl ahead of him. Rocas Altas had once been a small, sprawling city nurtured by gold and silver mines, but earthquakes over the past hundred years had nearly obliterated it.
Ancient adobe and stone ruins hunched in the sage amongst the cracked boulders and cedars, but it was only a dozen or so brush huts, quickly erected so that they could be just as quickly abandoned at the first sign of an Apache, Yaqui, or Rurale attack, that were occupied. On the steep slopes all around the village rode the tawny grass parks on which goats grazed. On the far side of the village, a high, massive stone ridge rose like a giant, dilapidated castle angling away. Its steep slopes were pocked with the tailings of long-abandoned mines.
Because of the frequent quakes, the place was too dangerous to mine. But it was a good place for Big Tio’s band of revolutionarios to hide out from the Rurale and Federale troops as well as the wealthy landowners they intermittently badgered in revenge for the savage exploitation of the land-less peon.
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