“Well, hell,” Prophet said, lifting his beer glass. “Here’s to you, Hiram. Looks like you’ve done a real fine job.”
“Si, si!” said Jose Encina, clinking his brandy goblet against Prophet’s and the sheriff’s beer schooners.
“And I do apologize for the foofaraw earlier.” Prophet sipped his beer and, swallowing, shook his head. “And, Louisa . . . hell, sometimes I don’t know what gets into that girl’s head.”
“Why?” Severin frowned at Prophet. “Because she merely shot a man even lower than a chicken-stealing coyote?”
“Well . . .” Prophet shrugged.
He sort of saw it the sheriff’s way. But that wasn’t necessarily the right way. As a bounty hunter, he’d always tried to keep the hunting and judging separate. If he didn’t, he’d likely end up in a state pen, like Severin himself had.
“Speakin’ of them,” Prophet said, sitting back from the table as Dolly brought three steaming platters of roast pork, with rich brown, peppery gravy smothering the fried potatoes, and a liberal portion of garden beans. He made a conscious effort to keep from drooling as his stomach kicked like a stallion against his rib cage. “I got to thinkin’, Hiram,” he continued as the steam from the plate bathed his face, “it seems damn odd that four men gunnin’ for both me and Louisa woulda showed up in town at the same time. Three of whom were known hard cases, the third probably known, too, though not by me.”
Hiram ordered another round of drinks for the table then, tucking an oilcloth bib into the neck of his pin-striped, collarless shirt. He cleared his throat and scooted his chair toward his own heaping platter. “What’re you sayin’, Lou? You think I suddenly had the damn wool pulled over my eyes and become overrun with border toughs?”
Jose Encina chuckled as he gazed with delight at his plate and picked up fork and knife like a surgeon preparing for work.
Prophet hesitated, looking askance at his stubborn old friend. “All I’m sayin, Hiram, is that many bad boys at one time in one place could mean trouble. More than just one back-shot-old-bounty-hunter kinda trouble. Now, I realize you done scooped the shit out of what was once a privy pit here in Juniper. But there are regular gold runs from the mines to the bank here in town.”
He glanced at Encina, who arched a brow at him as he cut into his gravy-covered pork slab.
“I know, cause I’m one of the guards now,” the bounty hunter added wryly. “And not to consider the possibility that they’re here for the gold would be just plum—”
“You’re right.” The sheriff was hunkered down over his plate, chewing a mouthful of potatoes and gravy. “You’re damn right, like you always were, Proph.” He swallowed, and as he buried his fork into his fried potatoes after forking a charred-edged chunk of meat, he added, “Sometimes I get cocky and muleheaded, and that ain’t good. You’re right, Lou. To not even consider that those gents might have been here for the gold would be right foolish. And to make sure there ain’t any more skulkin’ around, waiting for another team to head out on another run, maybe follow ’em and buschwack ’em somewhere in the mountains when they got a wagonload of ingots, I’m gonna turn my wolves loose.”
“How’s that?” Prophet said with a mouthful of the delicious food. He couldn’t remember tasting gravy that good—but then, he never could remember the taste of good gravy after a long pull without a proper feed sack hooked over his ears.
“My deputies.”
Encina chuckled and glanced cunningly at the sheriff as the banker sawed off another slab of the perfectly roasted pork.
“I’m gonna send ’em around to get careful looks at everyone in town. Scour the saloons. Anyone who don’t belong here—and I mean anyone they ain’t seen before and don’t know or even heard of—they’ll slap down and get acquainted with ’em real quick.”
Prophet washed down his mouthful of potatoes and gravy with a healthy slug of beer. “You callin’ them two badge toters I seen earlier wolves?”
“They’re dumber’n a trainload of coal,” the sheriff said, nodding. “But they’re crack shots—both of ’em. And they’re good deputies. Put the fear into folks, which is what a good lawman does. Cows ’em liked whipped dogs.” He shook his head and smiled grimly as he stared down at his plate, both hands working at the food. “I got three more where them two come from—Moffett, Horn, and Giuseppe Antero. They’re out chasin’ claim jumpers in the north part of the county. Them two you seen was Chase Appleyard—he was the tall one—and Frank Dryden. ‘Dry,’ as we call him, spent four years in Yuma. Only safe place for that scrappy son of a bitch is behind a badge!”
The sheriff looked at his friend Encina, and the two men shared a conspiratorial laugh.
As he ate, Prophet glanced at both men skeptically. “I’ll be damned, Hiram,” he said, trying to make it sound like a joke but unable to bring it off. “Don’t sound like you got lawmen on your roll, but attack dogs.”
“Out here, that’s what ya nee—”
“Ah, look what we have here,” Encina interrupted, lifting his head to stare, grinning with satisfaction, toward the front doorway.
Prophet followed the banker’s gaze to where the young, handsome Miguel Encina was just entering the room behind Louisa Bonaventure, who parried Prophet’s incredulous gaze with a coolly arched brow.
13
“WHO LET YOU in here?” Louisa asked Prophet in her snide, ironic way.
“I was invited in.”
“Surprise, surprise.”
Miguel Encina doffed his bowler hat as he walked up behind Louisa, who’d stopped before the table of Prophet, Hell-Bringin’ Hiram Severin, and Jose Encina. “Good to see you again, Mr. Prophet. Father. Sheriff. We weren’t wanting to interrupt your meal but didn’t think it polite not to stop over and say hi.”
“Oh, you mean you won’t be joining us?” Severin said with mock surprise.
“Wouldn’t want to interrupt, Sheriff.”
Jose Encina held his fork beneath his chin, casting his admiring gaze across Louisa. “Miss Bonaventure, do you ever go anywhere without those fine-looking pistolas?”
“Not even to church, Senor Encina.”
“Some would consider it unladylike.” The banker gave her a sidelong, mildly reproving glance.
“What’s unladylike about letting yourself get back shot, Senor?”
Miguel Encina laughed nervously. The sheriff roared and shook his head. “She’s got you there, Jose!”
The elder Encina smiled agreeably and hiked his shoulder. Prophet could see that Miguel wasn’t the only man here smitten with Louisa.
“I don’t suppose we could entice you into joining us?” Severin said with genuine beseeching.
“Sorry,” Louisa said. “I’d feel outnumbered.”
“And I’d feel ganged up on,” the young man said with a laugh, tossing his head toward the door. “And, anyway, I’ve reserved a table in the other room. Shall we, Miss Louisa?”
“Certainly,” the young bounty huntress said in her best civilized tongue, smiling up at the banker’s son with obvious affection. It was a new expression for her. Prophet had never seen her look at anyone like that, including him.
When they’d gone into the other room and the bounty hunter was fighting a jealousy bout almost as severe as the hunger pang he’d felt before digging into the fine, half-devoured supper before him, the sheriff and the banker stared after the couple with wistful expressions.
“I think they make a nice pair,” the banker said. “Of course, if they became serious, she’d have to hang up her guns. I couldn’t have my son attached to a woman so prominently armed.”
“I’d ask her real nice,” Prophet advised.
“She might do that for young Miguel,” the sheriff said, picking up his knife and fork and going at his plate once more. “I think she likes him. I know Miguel likes her. Then, there ain’t much not to like about her, includin’ the way she dispatches coyotes.”
Snorting, Severin glanced at Prophet, who’d resumed eating
with not quite as much vigor as before.
“How’d you two meet up, Lou?”
Prophet told the men, briefly, about how he’d run into Louisa during her vengeance quest for the men who’d killed her family in Nebraska. He himself had gone after the Handsome Dave Duvall bunch after the gang had shot up the town of Luther Falls, Minnesota, and he and Louisa had followed the wolf pack into the far northern reaches of Dakota Territory and taken down every one.
“She didn’t know much about shootin’ back then, but she’s so damn purty and innocent-looking, no one believed she was on the blood trail. Most of the gang she lured away from the others, one by one or two by two, using her looks and girlish charm. Not to mention her guile. She kicked ’em out bloody. Even made one fella stretch his own neck.” Prophet shook his head, remembering how absolutely merciless the girl had been.
“Good for her,” the sheriff said, chewing slowly as he frowned across the table at Prophet, taking in every word. Then his eyes sparked ironically. “Sounds like she’s bein’ wasted as a gold guard. I oughta pin a deputy sheriff’s star on her delightful little frame.”
“I hope she ain’t even gonna be gold guardin’ long,” Prophet said, swabbing the last of his gravy with a last chunk of pork. “I’m hopin’ she’ll settle down here, and that Senor Encina can talk her into hangin’ up her guns.” He grinned wryly at the banker, who was sipping from his goblet, one beringed pinky extended. “Uh . . . in a real nice way.”
The men laughed.
As Encina set his tumbler down and pressed the end of a fist against his mouth to stifle a belch, the banker said, “That will be up to my son. He himself hung up a pair of guns that nearly got him killed, so he’ll likely know how to convince Senorita Louisa to do the same.”
Prophet slid his plate forward to make room for his elbows. “You tellin’ me young Miguel was once in the cold-steel business, Don?”
Encina frowned, puzzled. “The what? The cold . . .”
“It’s a gunfightin’ expression, my dear friend,” said the sheriff. “Proph means pistolero, and I can answer that one: no. Far from it. We got to him—Jose and I—before he got that far out of hand.” He glanced at the banker. “But he was on his way, wasn’t he, Jose?”
“Si, si,” said the banker, shaking his head and pooching his lips distastefully. “He got in with a bad crowd here in Helldorado, before Sheriff Severin came and settled things down, including my son.”
“I was glad to do it, Jose. But I didn’t do it alone. The boy respects his father.”
“Well, at least I believe he has learned to respect me,” the elder Encina said. “As well as our livelihood.”
Prophet shuttled his shocked gaze between both men. “That’s right hard to believe. He don’t look like the type.”
“That’s the thing, Lou,” the sheriff said. “Miguel wasn’t the type. He just got in with the wrong crowd. Lord knows there was enough of the wrong crowd here to get in with. When me and my deputies got the crowd whittled down to just one bad apple here and there every coupla weeks, me and Jose took Miguel in hand, as well. Let’s just say we reminded him of his good upbringin’ and sorta explained to him a life of rustlin’ and pistol poppin’ and carryin’ on wasn’t the life he really wanted for himself.”
“He was a young man,” the banker said, hiking his shoulders and lifting his hands. “No different from any other. Especially one who loses his mother early and is taken away from his home and all that he knows by a father he hardly knew at the time. I had so much to do on my hacienda, you see, back in Mejico, that I had little time for a child. But now my dear Miguel is a respected member of Juniper; I even made him president of the bank. I love him dearly, and we get along superbly. Now . . .” The banker smiled bemusedly. “Now, if he can only find the right woman to raise a family with, to fill our house with grandchildren . . .”
“Maybe he has,” the sheriff said, glancing at Prophet and raising the corners of his mouth slightly.
“That’s right,” Prophet said. He wasn’t overly troubled by what he’d learned about Miguel’s early days. There were damn few young men who hadn’t fancied themselves pistoleros before they grew old enough to learn better or were taken in hand by the right sorts. Still, something was troubling the bounty hunter, and he wasn’t sure what it was exactly.
Louisa? Miguel? Louisa and Miguel?
The bushwhackers?
Or was it just being in a town—any town—that was already getting to him?
Whatever the cause, he tried to keep the unease from his tone when he said, raising his beer glass to drain it, “Yeah, maybe he has at that.”
“Thank you for that wonderful meal, Miguel,” Louisa said when she and the younger Encina were walking out the door of Avril Tweet’s Cafe and into a sparkling, glowing Rocky Mountain sunset.
Miguel set his bowler hat on his thick mop of chestnut hair. “The pleasure was mine, Miss Louisa. Mr. Tweet does throw together a heckuva meal, doesn’t he?”
“And a most welcome one after three weeks of trail food and Lou Prophet’s coffee.”
Miguel turned to the girl, who was staring westward at the fire-colored clouds stretching off over serrated, purple ridges. “Miss Louisa, would I be too forward to ask you to walk with me by the creek? I can tell you’re a girl who appreciates a sunset, and the ones here in Juniper are best appreciated from there.”
“I don’t think that would be too forward at all.”
“Even without a chaperone?”
In a blur of motion, Louisa pulled her matched, pearl-gripped Colts and twirled each on a finger. “What makes you think I don’t have a chaperone?” She dropped the polished weapons smoothly back down into their holsters with a single snick of iron against oiled leather.
Miguel whistled. “My lord, where’d you learn to handle a brace of pistols like that?”
“Here and there,” Louisa said, purposely cryptic.
She stepped off the boardwalk and angled across the side street. She pointed her chin at what appeared to be a deer path stretching off between a livery barn and a wheelwright’s shop and curving into a rolling sage flat bathed in soft opal light. “Will that take us there?”
“It will.”
Walking side by side, she and Miguel started up the path, stepping around trash littering the gap between the buildings. Ahead lay a row of cedars, aspens, and cottonwoods marking the meandering line of the creek, though Louisa could not yet see the water from here.
Neither she nor Miguel spoke for a time. It was the silence, a little awkward but laden with anticipation and expectation as well, of two people just getting to know each other.
The grass crunched beneath Louisa’s worn boots and Miguel’s polished brown half boots. Mourning doves cooed. An occasional blackbird caw rose from the creek just ahead.
“Miss Louisa,” Miguel said finally, bending down to snag a bromegrass stalk when they were halfway to the trees, “about you and Mr. Prophet. You tell me if I’m getting fresh, but are you and him . . . ?”
He let his voice trail off. They both continued walking, meandering along the footpath worn through the sage and fescue, Louisa’s eyes clouded with thought.
Finally, reaching down to pick a slender Indian paintbrush stalk and caressing the tender, red blossom with her palm, she said, “We’re partners.” After a couple of more steps, she added, “Have been for several years now. I won’t lie to you and say that we haven’t been more than that. The bounty trail is a lonely, dangerous place.”
She stopped suddenly, and then Miguel did, too. They stood facing each other under a green sky, mourning doves cooing and the sounds of the town—the clatter of a wagon, the thuds of an ax—hushed and far away. “Does that matter to you?”
“I reckon it does and it doesn’t. I mean, I wouldn’t want to get between you.”
“There’s already something between us, Miguel. There always has been.” Louisa looked down at the Indian paintbrush blossom. “We’re from different worlds,
Lou and me. The only thing we’ve had in common these past years is man hunting. I don’t mean that I don’t love him, and I reckon he loves me, sure enough. We’ve been through a lot together. We’ve saved each other’s lives more times than I like to think about, and he saved mine just a few weeks ago, down in Mexico.”
She paused, feeling a knot in her throat. Prophet was a hard man to leave, but it was time to leave him. “With all that said . . . I realize now it is finally time for me to settle down. Lou—he’ll never settle down. He’d never make a husband. . . .”
Miguel turned away and absently kicked a stone. “No, I reckon he wouldn’t. Can’t see a man like Prophet ever settling down.” He turned to Louisa again, rolling the bromegrass stem between his lips and narrowing one eye. “Not with someone like you, anyways. But you . . .” He reached forward, took her hand in his. “I can see you settling down, appreciating all the good things a more settled life, with the right man, can bring you.”
“You mean a house and a garden and all that?”
Miguel puckered his lips out, nodding. “Sure, all that. And the love of a good man . . . and a family.”
Louisa jerked her hand back suddenly, and she felt as though she’d just been shot at. The reaction surprised even her, and she felt her face warm with embarrassment. Her eyes widened as she stepped back away from the handsome young man smiling down at her, a faint look of surprise in his soft brown gaze.
She slid a lock of blond hair back from her right eye and glanced at the town sprawled a hundred yards away, turning a darker shade of purple as the sun continued to sink lower behind the western mountains. She tried to see it as she might after she’d settled there a while, as a home. But for some reason it only looked foreign to her, like all the other towns she’d passed through on the hunting trail, and loneliness and desolation swept through her like a long drink of bad milk.
Helldorado Page 10
