Helldorado

by Peter Brandvold

  “Dryden’d pull a knife.”

  “Hell, he’s got a knife,” the Mex said, pointing at the tip of the hide-wrapped knife handle barely visible above the collar of Prophet’s shirt.

  The red-haired man with the earring, with Indian-flat facial features, changed the subject in a sharply sarcastic tone. “You’re our new boss.”

  Prophet glanced at Louisa as he eased his grip on his .45. “You’re Encina’s gold guards?”

  “Si,” said Casol. He wore a bull-hide charro jacket and baggy sheepskin leggings tucked inside his worn, brown, copper-tipped boots.

  The man standing beside the red-haired, gold-earringed gent was the oldest of the crew—a large, potbellied man with bulging blue eyes and a large belly shoving his double shell belts down nearly to his crotch. His face was haggard but friendly, as was the light in his eyes.

  “You’ll have to forgive Bronco here,” he said, canting his head toward the red-haired gent to his right. “When the old ramrod Chisos Owens pulled out, Bronco thought he’d get the job. In fact, he was throwing money around at the blackjack tables like he already had it.”

  The older gent laughed, stepped forward, and extended his right hand to Prophet. “I’m Hitt. Orrie Hitt.” With another glance at the red-haired man, he said, “This here’s Bronco Brewster. These two are Juventino Casol and Royal Sawrod. Or Saw for short. Fittin’ if you ever heard him snore, which you’ll likely do since we’re often on the trail a few days at a time, holin’ up together in old mine shacks an’ such.”

  Prophet rose from his chair and shook Hitt’s hand, then that of the other men, saying, “I reckon Casol and Saw here I did meet last night, though not so formal-like.”

  Bronco Brewster chomped down on his stove match as he gave Prophet’s hand a fishy, insolent squeeze before shunting his lustily brightening gaze to Louisa. “And who might this golden-haired little filly be?”

  “This here is Miss Louisa Bonnyventure,” Prophet said. “She’s throwin’ in with us fellas.”

  “That’s Bonaventure,” Louisa corrected. “There’s no ‘y’ in it.”

  Brewster clouded up as he slid his gaze back to Prophet. “You mean, this sprite in a skirt’s gonna help us men guard a gold shipment? A useless girl?”

  Ah, shit.

  The thought hadn’t finished passing through Prophet’s mind before a gun popped. In the corner of Prophet’s vision, he saw Brewster’s sweat-stained cream Stetson fly off his head and tumble into the dirt behind him.

  Prophet looked at Louisa. She’d returned her empty hands to her saddle horn, over which she was slightly leaning. The only evidence that she’d fired one of her pearl-gripped pistols was the blue smoke wafting in front of her expressionless face.

  Brewster had ducked down and was looking around as though for the source of the bullet that had removed his hat. The other two had seen it, though Prophet knew they hadn’t seen much. Probably just a blur and a flash of silver-plated .45 steel.

  Louisa was that fast.

  Orrie Hitt threw his head back, guffawing.

  Casol chuckled through his teeth, bloodshot eyes twinkling as he stared at Louisa. “Christos, I think she’ll do, amigos. And the scenery won’t be bad, either!”

  18

  “SO, TELL ME, Miss Louisa—how’d you get started in the man-hunting trade?” asked the earring-wearing redhead, Bronco Brewster.

  “You mean, besides a general hatred for the whole male race?” Prophet said with a snort.

  Louisa glanced back over a shoulder at him, wearing her customary look of strained but cool tolerance.

  She and Bronco were riding ahead of the empty gold wagon, which was used by the bank for hauling the gold back down from the mines. The wagon was nothing more than a buckboard with a large steel, chained, and padlocked strongbox riding in the back. The guards’ camping gear and foodstuffs rode back there as well, along with two extra rifles, a shotgun, ammunition, and a cream tarp for putting up when it rained.

  “I don’t like most men—that’s true.” Louisa turned her head forward as her pinto stepped smartly to the right of Bronco’s buckskin. “I have no tolerance for brigands of any stripe but especially those who kill women and children.”

  Bronco turned to her, arching a brow. He had a long, black cheroot wedged between his teeth. “You sorta specialize, do ya?”

  “You might say that.”

  “Plenty o’ men out here of that stripe.”

  “There certainly are, Brewster.”

  Prophet was riding up close to the wagon’s driver’s box, leaning out from his saddle to light his freshly rolled cigarette from Orrie Hitt’s cigar stub. Hitt was driving the wagon and leading a saddle horse. The oldest member of the gold-guarding crew looked at Prophet and then at Louisa’s back as she rode about twenty feet ahead of the two mules pulling the wagon.

  Hitt’s fleshy, craggy face acquired a troubled, thoughtful expression as he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, holding the mules’ ribbons lightly in his gloved hands. “Say, you know, my cousins Burt and Jimmy DePaul were taken down by a young girl. ’Bout two, two and a half years ago. Outside a little farming town in Kansas.”

  Hitt glanced at Prophet, his shaggy, gray-brown eyebrows knitted. “Sure, I remember now. My other cousin, Rex, wrote and said they was taken down by a pretty little blond-headed girl who wore two Colt pistols. Just rode right into that town, found Burt and Jimmy diggin’ worms behind their shack for fishin’, and she said, ‘It’s right fittin’ you both got shovels so you can dig your own graves.’ And then that’s what she did—she made ’em dig their own graves while Rex watched, frightened out of his boots. He watched her shoot both Burt and Jimmy through their hearts, bid Rex a good day, and rode off, never to be seen or heard from again.”

  “Oh, I was seen or heard from again,” Louisa said, riding with her back straight, blond hair bouncing on her shoulders. “By quite a few more men like your cousins, in fact, Mr. Hitt. Men who raped children, like your cousins raped the girls they took from that country schoolyard near the Colorado border and abused terribly before leaving them to wander naked and dehydrated back to their ranches.”

  “That was you?”

  Louisa turned her horse off the trail and arched a blond brow at the wagon driver. “You weren’t close to your cousins—were you, Mr. Hitt?”

  The driver stopped the wagon and regarded the girl seriously, his dust catching up to him, sweeping over the wagon. Prophet halted his own horse near the buckboard, drawing on his quirley with a speculative, bemused air as he shuttled his gaze between his partner and the wagon driver.

  Hitt squinted at the girl. Louisa stared back at him. She could have been inspecting a stone wall.

  The other three riders, who’d also halted their horses, looked between Hitt and Louisa. The Mexican, Casol, chuckled softly while Bronco and Sawrod curled their upper lips, eager to see who’d show his hand first.

  Hitt’s face opened, his eyes brightened, and he laughed heartily. “Ah, hell!” His blue eyes dropped to the Colts jutting on Louisa’s slender waist. “I oughta thank you for beefing them two depraved little bastards. Both of ’em was nothin’ but black eyes on the Hitt and DePaul clans.” He turned his head and gave Louisa a wink. “You shoulda taken ole Rex down, too—that’s how I see it, sure enough!”

  “I thought about it,” Louisa said. “He looked squirrely enough. But only Jimmy and Burt had taken the girls.”

  “Yeah, Rex was probably too drunk, layin’ up with a twelve-year-old whore somewhere.” Hitt laughed again loudly. “You coulda killed him, though. No skin off my teeth. And there’s a few more in my family that need beefin’. Me—I’m the only upstandin’ one o’ the bunch!”

  He slapped his thigh and laughed some more and then he shook the lines over the mules’ backs, and the wagon clattered forward. As the others continued ahead with the wagon, Louisa rode back to where Prophet sat his horse, one boot hooked over his saddle horn. He eyed the girl with mild reproach.
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  “Don’t you know that ain’t no way to act?”

  “No.”

  “I reckon you don’t. Couldn’t you see he was just froggin’ ya, to see how you’d react? Probably wanted to see your purty tits heave when you got mad at him.”

  “Were they heaving prettily?”

  “Your tits always heave prettily.” Prophet spat to one side. “We gotta get you a different job. You’re settlin’ down, now. You don’t need to be off with no passel of men who probably don’t get their ashes hauled more than once, twice a month, and when they do get ’em hauled they’re hauled by fat, toothless whores.”

  “I’ve already decided that myself,” Louisa said defiantly.

  “Well, ain’t you special.” Prophet eyed her askance. “When’d you decide that?”

  “Just this morning.”

  “Why?”

  “None of your business.”

  “The young banker, huh? Well, good. Maybe he is the right one, after all.” Prophet dropped his right boot into his right stirrup and kneed Mean and Ugly forward. “Come on. Let’s get this job out of the way.”

  “Hold on.”

  Prophet stopped in front of Louisa’s pinto.

  Louisa was looking around cautiously at the ridges humping on both sides of the gulch they were following into the higher reaches of the Rawhide Range. “I’ve seen the way you’ve been looking around as we’ve been riding. Any particular reason?”

  “Just seein’ shadows of shadows, is all.” Prophet puffed the quirley wedged in one corner of his mouth. “Still got that icy finger pokin’ the back of my neck, just under my collar. Damndest thing.”

  He hipped around in his saddle, sliding his gaze from the western ridge, across the narrow gulch through which Sanderson Creek snaked through wolf willows and boulders, to the eastern ridge that was slightly higher than the other and was cloaked in the fuzzy, spruce-green shadows of midmorning.

  “Maybe this one is just that—a shadow,” Louisa opined. “I mean, Lou, why would anyone fog an empty gold wagon? It’s after we have the gold they’ll shadow us—if anyone’s planning to shadow us, that is.”

  “You got a short memory, Miss Bonnyventure.”

  “The bushwhackers?”

  “We weren’t guarding any gold yesterday afternoon, were we?”

  “For once, you have a point.” Louisa gigged her pinto along the trail, looking around cautiously. “I declare, Lou—if it’s not the Devil tickling your feet, it’s witches poking their cold fingers against your neck.”

  “Yeah, I know—one damn thing after another.” Prophet booted his horse after the girl, field stripping his quirley one-handed and letting the midmorning breeze take the bits of paper and tobacco.

  The Sweet Loretta Gold Mine sat in a broad horseshoe of Sanderson Gulch, at the base of a boulder-strewn ridge that was humped with tailings that had been wrenched from the mountain’s bowels. The stamping mill sat on a plateau just above the mine office, foundry, bunkhouses, and corrals, and the steel pistons that crushed the ore sounded like God laying into the earth every second with a massive hammer. The ground vibrated with the constant pounding, causing the mules to bray and the horses to twitch their ears apprehensively.

  Higher along the ridge, the tramcars hauling the ore out of the shafts clattered and clanged.

  Picking up the gold was a simple procedure. While Prophet, Louisa, and the other guards watched for possible robbers, the mine manager and two other men hauled the gold ingots out of a barred foundry room in a steel lockbox that had a stout rawhide handle on each end.

  When the lockbox was set in the back of Orrie Hitt’s wagon, the manager unlocked the padlock that secured it while Hitt opened the steel box in the wagon bed. The manager transferred the ingots—there were six, Prophet saw as he stole a glance over his shoulder—into the box in the wagon, and then Hitt promptly closed the lid and locked it before slipping the key back under his shirt, where it hung around his neck by a leather thong.

  Hitt scribbled out a receipt for the gold, and with a pinch of his hat brim to the mining supervisor, kicked off the wagon’s brake and shook the ribbons over the mules’ backs.

  The caravan was off once more to snake farther up the canyon, deeper into the Rawhide Mountains.

  Prophet wasn’t surprised that after the gold had been loaded onto the transfer wagon the witch didn’t poke the back of his neck harder with her cold finger. Even after they’d taken on three more ingots from the smaller and less productive Holy Ghost Mine in Squaw Canyon, the witch held steady with that chilly finger of hers.

  She pressed neither harder or lighter but held that finger steadily against the back of his neck, strumming his nerves just enough that he kept his eyes on his back trail or flicking cautiously across the trail ahead.

  He wasn’t sure why he wasn’t surprised. Maybe it had something to do with the fact his unease had started last night even before he’d run into Sivvy Hallenbach, and he figured he wasn’t in any more danger out here than he had been in town.

  Late in the day they circled back toward Juniper via the west fork of Elk Creek and approached an abandoned prospector’s shack where they intended to spend the night before finishing the trip the next day. Louisa put her pinto around behind the wagon to where Prophet was riding off the left rear wheel and kept pace beside him.

  “Did you see that?” she asked.

  “See what?”

  “Reflection off a rock, maybe.” Louisa was peering up the low ridge on the other side of the creek and towering spruce and tamaracks on her left. “Maybe off gun iron.”

  Prophet’s eyes had been sweeping the right side of the trail, where he’d spied a doe and a fawn running into the brush. Now he followed Louisa’s stare up the eastern ridge, the rock of which was bathed in the salmon light of the late-day sun.

  He rode along for a time, sweeping the ridge with his gaze. There was a dull flash between two boulders about halfway up the bluff. As the flash died, Prophet thought he also spied a man-shaped shadow, maybe just an elbow and a rifle stock, a quarter second before there were just the two boulders again.

  His belly tightened. Shucking his Winchester from its saddle boot and keeping his gaze on the spot where he’d seen the flash, he said calmly, “Stay with the wagon.” He told the other riders to keep moving toward the shack and he’d catch up to them later. He reined Mean and Ugly off the trail and through the trees, ducking under evergreen boughs.

  The dun splashed across the fast-moving creek, slipping on the mossy stones. As the horse gained the other bank, lunging with its front hooves, Prophet cocked the Winchester one-handed, then lowered the hammer to half cock. He stopped just beneath an overhang of the ridge and stared up along the boulder-strewn wall. The two boulders around which he’d seen the gun flash were a hundred yards up and to his right, and he could see only one of them from this angle.

  If a man was hunkered down up there, he was good at blending with the rock. And patient.

  Prophet considered heading straight up the slope, which wasn’t too steep for Mean and Ugly. He raked a thumb along his unshaven jaw and chewed his lower lip. No good. A gunman would have a clean shot at him.

  He glanced through the trees, saw the wagon and the other riders including Louisa dwindling into the distance. Looking back the way he’d come through the dense spruces, aspens, and tamaracks, he decided there was a good chance he hadn’t been seen leaving the trail. His inclinations honed from years of man tracking told him he should maybe hunker down right here, let a would-be bushwhacker come to him.

  If there was indeed a man up there, and Prophet and Louisa weren’t merely seeing natural lights and shadows . . .

  He drew the dun’s reins back and squeezed the saddle with his knees. “Back, boy.”

  Mean backed up, lifting his snoot in the air and blowing incredulously.

  “Just do what I tell you without arguin’ for once,” Prophet grumbled, looking up the ridge until his view was blocked by a giant mantle
of weather-polished, brick-red sandstone.

  He lifted his right boot over the saddle horn and dropped to the ground. Holding his Winchester in one hand, he slipped Mean’s bit from his mouth, so the dun could forage, and loosened his latigo strap, letting him blow. As the horse snorted and ambled a ways off through the brush, grinding grass and switching his tail at flies, Prophet hunkered down beneath the rock mantle.

  He waited.

  The sun angled low. Shadows dropped out of the trees like silent, massive birds. The only sound was the quiet rush and chugging of the stream.

  After a half hour or so, a rock clattered down the ridge and dropped into the grass a hundred feet ahead of Prophet. It was followed by one more that barked off a deadfall aspen log.

  Prophet tensed slightly. He drew the Winchester’s hammer back to full cock.

  Hold on, he told himself. Just stay put. Give ’im time to make it down the ridge. . . .

  19

  FROM SOMEWHERE AHEAD, Prophet heard a horse blow. It was followed by the squawk of tack and heavy clomp of hooves. Then there were the crackling thuds of a horse coming down the ridge into brush.

  The hoof thuds dwindled slowly into the distance.

  Prophet jogged over and tightened Mean’s latigo strap, slipped the horse’s bit into his mouth, and swung into the saddle. He rode ahead until he saw the back of the rider about twenty yards ahead of him. The tail of the bay horse the man was riding fluttered in the breeze.

  The man was following the ridge wall, keeping the stream and the trees to his right. He carried a rifle across his saddlebows but he seemed in no hurry. He wore a black coat and a low-crowned black hat, with high-topped black boots shoved into his stirrups.

  Prophet closed the distance between them to fifteen yards.

  “Hold it.”

  The man jerked back on his reins and whipped around in his saddle, swinging his carbine around as he did, gritting his teeth. He fought the reins as he tried to level his rifle barrel.

  Prophet already had his Winchester raised in both hands. The rifle roared, causing Mean to tighten his back muscles and lift his head with a start. The hammer-headed dun was of questionable breeding and irksome disposition, but Prophet had trained him not to sunfish as he fired from his back.