Helldorado

by Peter Brandvold

  “If you’re still a part of this,” he said over his shoulder, “I’ll see you in town tomorrow. If not, I’ll see you in hell!”

  The thuds of his galloping horse dwindled to silence.

  Gleneanne heaved herself to her feet, sobbing quietly, utterly confused and frightened, and staggered back to the copper-bottom mare.

  20

  “HEY, PROPHET!” ORRIE Hitt called. “Casol’s comin’ like his hoss’s tail’s on fire!”

  Prophet, who was riding ahead of the wagon the next day, with Louisa riding on his right, turned his horse off the trail and hipped around to see Juventino Casol bounding down the rise behind the caravan. The Mexican rode crouched over his saddle horn, sombrero flopping in the wind behind him, dust rising in the wake of his galloping white-socked black. Hitt stopped the wagon, hauling back sharply on the mules’ ribbons and bellowing.

  The other two guards, Sawrod and Brewster, halted their own mounts behind the wagon and turned, shucking rifles from saddle scabbards and levering shells into chambers.

  “What do you think’s his problem?” Brewster said, spitting a cigar stub into the dust beneath his horse.

  “Looks like he seen a ghost,” said Hitt.

  Prophet glanced at Louisa, who returned it warily. The Mexican had been watching their back trail from a half-mile out, and he’d obviously spied something out of whack. Prophet gigged Mean and Ugly back along the side of the trail, skirting the wagon, while Louisa remained ahead of it, her rifle in her hands and her gaze directed up trail in case they were about to be ambushed from the front.

  Prophet was ten yards behind Sawrod and Brewster when the Mexican checked his sweat-silvered black down, breathing hard. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Three riders. Been shadowing us a while. Whenever I ride back to get a better look, they disappear, like phantoms. When I ride ahead I look back and there they are again, keeping pace with the wagon but neither speeding up nor slowing down.”

  Casol sleeved sweat from his black brows. “I don’t like it.”

  Prophet didn’t like it, either. It had all the ear notches of a bushwhack.

  “You fellas keep movin’,” he ordered. “Me an’ Louisa’ll hang back and check out Casol’s shadows. Keep your eyes skinned.”

  Nodding, Hitt shook the ribbons over the mules’ backs, bellowing, “Giddyup there, ya dunderheaded cusses!”

  “We’ll wait for you just beyond the canyon yonder,” Brewster yelled behind him as he, Casol, and Sawrod cantered their mounts after the wagon while Louisa turned her pinto off the trail and held back.

  When the wagon was gone, she turned to Prophet. “Wait here?”

  “Why not?”

  “How’s your neck?”

  Prophet raked his gloved left hand under his shirt collar and winced. “That bitch is really pokin’ me. But it ain’t just recent. She started proddin’ me hard in the middle of the night. Didn’t sleep much after three a.m.”

  Louisa stepped down from her saddle and led her pinto into boulders and brush along the trail’s west side. “You could hang up your guns and start telling fortunes for a living, Lou.”

  “Maybe I’m just gettin’ rattled.”

  Louisa shook her head. “It’s starting to add up.” She glanced back at Prophet, who was leading Mean and Ugly up behind her while peering north along their back trail. “The bushwhackings in Juniper. Now Casol’s three riders. Must mean a holdup’s on the way.”

  “I don’t know.” Prophet scowled as he led Mean around behind a boulder snag and looped the horse’s reins around a cedar branch. “My tail’s up, girl. Somethin’ don’t feel right in my belly, so I got that to go with the cold finger against my neck.”

  “You keep on, you’re gonna need a sawbones soon.”

  “You don’t feel nothin’ unusual?”

  “Maybe I’ve been relying on you too long.”

  “Or maybe you’re just feelin’ all fuzzy and gooey over that banker’s boy.” Prophet set his rifle on his shoulder and stole slowly around the boulder, heading toward the trail but keeping his head down.

  Following close on his heels, Louisa said, “If any man could ever do it . . .”

  Prophet gave a caustic snort. He hunkered down behind a boulder, edging a look over the top. The trail snaking through pinyon pines was quiet, only a jackrabbit nibbling fescue in the shade of a gnarled cottonwood.

  “Let’s hole up here.” Prophet sank to his butt and raised his knees. “Should be able to hear ’em when they pass by. When they’re just beyond us, we’ll haul down on ’em, get ’em off their hosses fast, find out what they’re up to.”

  Louisa sank down beside him, rested her back against the boulder. “You think they’re just gonna come right out and say, ‘Oh, darn, you caught us. Yes, we’re after the gold, all right. Badmen’s what we are.’”

  Prophet gave her a sidelong look as he dug his makings out of his shirt pocket. “I been in the business long enough to know a gold thief when I see one. If they’re drovers, they’ll have shit on their boots. You can tell a prospector from a couple miles out. They smell like enclosed places and bacon grease. Most gotta wild look in their eyes.”

  “And what do gold thieves look like?”

  “Greedy sons o’ bitches,” Prophet chuckled, dribbling chopped tobacco onto a leaf of brown paper troughed in his fingers. “And they’ll be sweatin’ it.”

  “You’re not gonna smoke that?”

  “What do you think I’m rollin’ it for?”

  “You know how I hate the smell of tobacco smoke.”

  “So get downwind of me.” Prophet chuckled again, this time wryly. “Lordy, I hope that young Encina boy knows how easy it is to twist your panties.”

  “It’s only easy for you,” Louisa said, getting up and moving to his other side, upwind of him, before sitting back down against the rock once more. “No one could ever twist ’em like you could.”

  Prophet lit the quirley.

  “You don’t think they’ll smell it?”

  “I ain’t no fool, girl. I know which direction’s the wind’s from. That’s why I’m sittin’ over here and not on the other side of the trail. I can smell them from here—them and their hosses.”

  Louisa looked at him, her eyes crossing slightly with skepticism. “You can really smell a man and a horse from thirty yards?”

  “Thirty yards, hell!” Prophet drew deep on the cigarette, blew it toward the ground, and watched the wind carry it straight out away from him. “I can smell a miner from a hundred.”

  He felt Louisa’s eyes on him. He turned to her. She stared at him, smiling obliquely. She reached over, tugged the brim of his battered hat down a little, and said with the thickness of emotion in her voice, “I’m gonna miss you.”

  “You think so?”

  She nodded. Leaning toward him, she pecked his cheek, then rubbed her own cheek on his shoulder.

  Prophet draped his arms over his knees and stared into the brush and rocks beyond him. “I raise a stink for fun, but that Miguel kid’s a good young man. I got a sense about folks.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “You got a good sense about him?”

  Louisa hiked a shoulder. “I did have a good sense. Last night. But after I slept on it—I don’t know—maybe he just seems a little too much like the young buck from every girl’s dream. Too much of a shine on him.”

  “You’re just nervous,” Prophet told her, filing ashes off his quirley with his thumbnail. “You tried settlin’ down before and it didn’t work out. You don’t think it will this time, neither. But he is only the first younker you met here, so if he ain’t the one, there’s plenty more where he came from.” He chuckled. “But maybe not with as much money.”

  “Money’s nothing, Lou.”

  “To some, it sure as hell is.” Prophet frowned and craned his neck to look around the boulder toward the trail. “Where the hell are them two, anyways? Were we chinnin’ so hard we let ’em get around us?”


  “I would have heard.” Louisa pushed off her hands, climbed to her feet, and stared through the brush toward the trail.

  As she stepped around one side of the rock, Prophet stepped around the other, holding his quirley down low by his side. They met in the trail, glancing back in the direction from which they’d come.

  “Nothin’.” Prophet puffed the quirley absently, sending his glance into the brush off both sides of the trail.

  “Maybe they smelled your quirley and chose a different trail.”

  “Maybe they smelled you, you burr-tailed filly, and decided they wasn’t up to it.” Prophet strode back off the path, heading for Mean and Ugly. “I reckon we’d best check it out.”

  When they’d mounted their horses, they trotted back over the rise, both holding their rifles over their saddle horns and looking around cautiously. They rode a mile back along the twisting trail, with broken, rugged terrain showing on both sides, but no extra sets of tracks overlying their own and the twin furrows that had been ground by the wagon’s steel-shod wheels.

  “Damn peculiar,” Prophet said, scouring the ground.

  Louisa was looking toward a bluff whose crown had been eroded down to bare rock, spying nothing untoward. “They must have left the trail farther back. They gotta be circling around, Lou, meeting up with others farther ahead.”

  “I reckon you’re right, Miss Bonnyventure. We’d best catch up to Hitt and the boys, and we’d best catch up to ’em fast. That witch ain’t only pokin’ me now—she’s snarlin’ in my ear!”

  With that, he neck-reined Mean around and touched spurs to the horse’s flanks. He didn’t stop galloping until nearly a half hour later, at the mouth of a narrow canyon, the trail of which rose steeply ahead of him, between craggy gray walls. Pines stood atop the walls, offering good cover. The lips of both ridges were a couple of hundred yards away, but a good rifleman could make the shot.

  “What is it?” Louisa was looking around, holding her carbine up high across her chest, her lips parted with a worried look.

  “Never liked canyons.” Prophet clucked Mean ahead. “Let’s go easy.”

  They rode single file, Prophet in the lead. Their hooves clacked on the canyon’s pitted stone floor.

  Ten yards, twenty. Up the canyon floor they climbed, Prophet’s heart beating in his ears.

  One good thing was that the cold finger had been removed from the back of his neck. Why that made a difference, he didn’t know, with his heart beating a powwow rhythm. But then, ever since the war, he’d had a fluttery heart. You couldn’t see that many kith and kin killed horribly before your eyes and not come out of that bloody fandango with something fluttering oddly.

  Prophet’s eyes raked the ridges around him. On the ridge on his right, a dark shadow moved between two trees.

  “Hold it!” Prophet jerked back on Mean’s reins and narrowed his eyes at the shadow.

  “What?”

  Prophet pointed. “There.”

  The shadow crouched down behind a rock, and Prophet expected to see a rifle barrel snake out from behind the same rock. He raised his Winchester, pressing the stock firmly against his shoulder, but before he could thumb the hammer back, the rock suddenly leaned out away from the ridge, exposing the man-shaped figure standing behind it.

  Prophet caught a fleeting glimpse of a short, bandy-legged man in a short-crowned straw sombrero—Juventino Casol—before his attention returned to the rock that seemed to float in the air for an instant just beneath the ridge’s lip. Then it slammed into a nest of similar-sized boulders about thirty yards below the ridge, the shotgun-like blast of the concussion reaching Prophet’s ears a second later as the first boulder and several more began rolling and plunging down the side of the ridge.

  Each rock loosed several others. In turn, the others loosed several more, and in a matter of seconds Prophet was staring up the ridge at a hundred boulders crashing, leaping, bounding, and rolling toward him, some cracking in half, others in thirds, the dust of the plunging rocks boiling like steam from a teakettle.

  “Let’s go!” both Louisa and Prophet shouted at nearly the same time, wheeling their pitching horses in tight circles and spurring them back down the canyon.

  Prophet glanced over his shoulder, his loins turning to ice.

  The rocks hit the canyon floor fifty yards behind him and plunged toward him brutally, mercilessly—roaring, causing the ground to leap beneath Mean’s plundering hooves. The rocks doubled, tripled in size in Prophet’s eyes, the rising din turning to merging thunderclaps in his ears.

  Prophet turned forward in his saddle, and crouched low, whipping Mean’s flanks with his rein ends. He flung a hand up to snatch his hat from the wind.

  “Haul ass, you ugly cayuse!” The shout was drowned by the rockslide’s raging fury. He could no longer hear the hammering of the horses’ hooves, either.

  Prophet glanced at Louisa. She rode as one with her horse, stirrups up and back, her head nearly hidden behind the pinto’s extended neck and buffeting cream mane. She held her carbine in one hand over the pinto’s left wither.

  Prophet jerked his gaze forward, willing the canyon mouth closer. Unlike the rocks plunging toward him with the dumb fury of gravity hazing them on, the daylight-filled gap seemed to be standing still.

  The bounty hunter gritted his teeth, feeling the hot, dusty wind of the rocks gaining on him—leaping and lunging and seeming to try to overtake each other as they hammered straight down the pitched canyon floor—snarling, fire-breathing demon hounds hell-bent on overtaking the furiously galloping riders and turning the canyon into a sarcophagus.

  Prophet whipped his head from side to side and cursed.

  Nope . . . they weren’t going to make it.

  21

  PROPHET’S HEART LIGHTENED slightly as though to an unexpected, strangely affecting piano chord. He glanced over his shoulder to see that the rockslide had slowed just enough that he and Louisa were staying ahead of it, with the slide’s front rocks bouncing and tumbling about ten yards behind Mean and the pinto’s hammering hooves.

  The gap yawned like the sunlit door to heaven, birds flicking this way and that.

  Prophet and Louisa careened through it, each turning their horses off opposite sides of the trail and behind the canyon’s jagged front walls. Pointing Mean toward some spindly aspens, Prophet checked the dun down and curveted to see a few gray rocks spilling from the canyon mouth to settle in the trail just beyond it.

  Dust rose. The rumbling inside the canyon sounded like a distant thunderstorm. The rocks shifted as they settled, clattering over one another, a few smaller ones spilling farther out along the trail beyond the canyon.

  A silence settled. It was like the silence after a plains twister, heavy and complete. There weren’t even any bird-calls, and the wind had died as though in awe of the recent calamity.

  Prophet looked over the pile of smoking rubble to see Louisa riding toward him. They met in the trail in front of the rubble, peering over it toward the canyon mouth. The rocks and boulders, with here and there a cedar or pine branch, had sealed the mouth up tighter than a cork in a whiskey bottle.

  Louisa could face five pistoleers and look cool as stone statue. But almost being hammered to pulp and shredded saddle leather under the rockslide had even her rattled. Her eyes were glassy, and strands of blond hair stuck to her sweaty, dusty face.

  “How in the hell did that get started?” she asked Prophet.

  “You didn’t see?”

  “I saw the first rock fall.”

  “Casol pushed it off the ridge.”

  Louisa looked at him, skeptical lines digging into her tanned forehead. “The Mex?”

  “I think I glimpsed Hitt behind him.” Prophet looked around for an alternate route, seeing none. His heart was still hammering and his shirt was sweat-plastered against his back. Mean and Ugly coughed, blew, and rippled his withers as he studied the rocks in front of him, lowering his snout to give the rubble a delicate sniff.
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  “I do believe, Miss Louisa,” Prophet said with a fateful sigh, shifting around in his saddle, “we done been hornswoggled.” He sleeved sweat from his brow. “Yessir, hornswoggled like a whiskey drummer at a church social where nothin’ stronger than sarsaparilly is a served.”

  Hell-Bringin’ Hiram Severin stood on the front porch of the sheriff’s office, smoking a cigar and enjoying the quiet commotion of a controlled but industrious day in Juniper, when he heard the clomp of hooves in the street to his right.

  He turned to see his chief deputy, Frank Dryden, angle toward him while holding a Henry rifle on his shoulder. Dryden’s eyes, hardened by his years in Yuma pen, and shaded by the brim of his brown bowler, looked official.

  “The gold’s on the way, Sheriff,” the deputy said, halting his blue roan at the hitchrack fronting the office, where two more saddled horses stood tied. “Horn gave me the signal from Ute Ridge. Wagon should be pullin’ into town in a half hour or so.”

  “All right,” Severin said with a nod, removing the wet cigar from his mouth with a puff of blue smoke and inspecting the gray coal with a bored, quiet air. “Gather the other deputies and take up your positions. I’ll grab my pistol and head on over to the bank.”

  Dryden pinched his hat brim to the old town tamer, then nudged the roan ahead with his spurs, heading off to summon the other deputies, Brink Moffett and Giuseppe Antero, who would be patrolling the western side streets this time of the day—two in the afternoon. Severin watched Dryden recede into the slow, midweek traffic, heading toward the main drag, then turned and went into his office.

  He liked not wearing a gun most of the time, when he could remember not to put it on. To him, walking around unarmed, wearing only his sheriff’s badge to show he was the law, was a sign of success. Sort of the way a successful businessman wore a potbelly to signify his prosperity. Only a sheriff who had tamed his town could walk around unarmed in it, letting his deputies do whatever minor bits of dirty work needed cleaning up with six-shooters or carbines.