They rode up the canyon a ways, both sitting their saddles sullenly. When they reached a broad open park threaded by a chuckling creek sheathed in wolf willows, Prophet reined Mean in again and looked ahead at several piney ridges, blue-green in the distance, dropping into the same canyon another four or five miles away.
The vista looked like a bunch of green paint on some novice landscape painter’s canvas, mountain ridges obscured by other mountain ridges, but Prophet knew there was another canyon there, angling off in the direction of Juniper, so he kneed the dun ahead once more. The land would sort itself out in due time, and maybe he’d find another sign. The trail they were on had been traveled recently, judging by a couple of sets of overlaid wagon tracks, so maybe they’d run into a camp or at least another sign soon.
As they let their horses drink in the middle of the broad park, whose grass rose to their horses’ knees, Louisa broke the silence. “How do you figure it, Lou?”
“What’s to figure? A couple of the other guards, or all of ’em, maybe, hightailed it with the gold.”
“You think they’re the ones who sicced the bushwhackers on us in Juniper?”
“That’s how the cards look to me. Why they weren’t waiting for a bigger truck of gold, I got no idea. Maybe they’d just made up their minds this was the day they was gonna become outlaws and followed through.”
Louisa leaned forward as the pinto drank from the crystal-clear creek gurgling over polished stones. “I think we oughta run ’em down. Work our way around the canyon they tried to kill us in, and track ’em from there.”
“You know how to get there, you take the lead.”
“Don’t get owly. I’m not the one who double-crossed us.”
Prophet sighed with chagrin, leaned back in his saddle as Mean slurped at the creek, and hooked a leg over his saddle horn. “Since we’re lost, we’d best head back to Juniper, tell the Encinas and Hell-Bringin’ Hiram what happened, then head out from there and pick up the wagon’s trail. Hitt an’ them won’t get far if they stay with the wagon. If they transfer the gold to their horses, they’ll make a little better time, but not much. Unless they’ve got pack mules cached somewhere along their getaway trail.”
“Then they could mosey down any little trail between any two ridges, cover their tracks, and be gone before we even reach town.”
Prophet glanced at her, one eye narrowed. “Got a better idea?”
Louisa sighed wearily and looked around. “Let’s build a camp. Our mounts are blown, and I’m blown, too. We’ll think on it overnight, after a meal and a cup of tea, and start fresh in the morning.”
Prophet dropped his boot back into its stirrup. “Sometimes you make sense, girl.”
“One of us has to.”
“Believe I’ll have coffee and rye whiskey.”
“I figured you would.”
Prophet grunted and put Mean across the creek, through the willows, and angled him toward the southeast corner of the park, where a stone scarp jutted from the side of the pine- and fir-carpeted ridge and appeared to offer adequate cover for a night camp.
There was another creek—a freshet, mostly—that tumbled out from beneath the scarp and along the base of the ridge. Along the trickling watercourse, in the thickening shade of the ridge, they unsaddled their horses then took their time rubbing both sweaty mounts down with scraps of burlap. After they’d fed the horses and tied them to short picket lines where they could forage and drink, they set about wordlessly setting up camp.
As Prophet gathered wood for a fire, something didn’t feel right to him and it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the chill finger poking the back of his neck. He wasn’t sure what caused this additional ill feeling until he’d gotten the fire going and had filled a coffeepot at the spring-fed creek.
As he swung away from the stream, he stopped in his tracks, the tin pot made cold by the icy water fresh from the earth’s stony bowels dripping in his hand.
No, it wasn’t that something didn’t feel right. It was that something did feel right—him and Louisa out here, hunting owlhoots like they’d done before they’d split up in Mexico, him going to Monterrey and her getting herself caught in the Rurales’ trap and ending up in Montoya’s prison.
He watched her kneeling by the fire, setting her tin teacup on a rock in the flames, then, turning away from the fire, and reaching behind her to toss her hair out from under her shirt collar. She began untying the leather thongs securing her blanket roll. Her clothes rustled, and her boots crunched pine needles and fine gravel, her pistols moving in their holsters as she worked, one of her spurs reflecting a stray ray of saffron-colored light angling between pines at the peak of the western ridge.
He could smell the nearby horses, the leather tack, the smoke of burning pine, hear the snapping fire, the horses cropping bunchgrass and ferns along the creek. Louisa’s teacup begin to purr as it heated, the water swirling gently in the cup on which a single white ash floated.
Prophet felt a soothing hand wash over him, knowing suddenly that what bothered him was that nothing was bothering him except the stolen gold. But even that felt right. At the moment all felt perfectly as it should be, and deep inside he wished it could remain this way—him and Louisa together, building a camp, her teacup smoking on the fire and the horses stomping and snorting nearby—forever and always.
Why did things have to change? The notion was no less poignant for being so childishly maudlin.
They ate beans and jerky washed down with tea and coffee, sitting back against their saddles on opposite sides of the fire. They each washed their own plates at the creek, then Louisa made more tea and Prophet brewed another pot of coffee. Setting his smoking cup on a rock beside him, he leaned back against his saddle to watch the stars kindle brightly in the black velvet sky over the silent park before him and slowly, thoughtfully built a quirley from his makings sack.
On the other side of the fire, Louisa sipped her tea, then picked up her rifle, running an oiled cloth along its clean lines.
When she’d finished with the rifle, she did the same to her pistols, unloading them to clean the cylinders with a small brush, then filling the cylinders again—five pills in each wheel, then giving each a spin before replacing both pearl-gripped hoglegs in their oiled holsters, which she wrapped over her saddle horn, both guns close at hand.
“I think you’re right, Lou.”
It was the first either of them had said anything in over an hour; her voice sounded fresh and new to him, and imminently welcome and somehow reassuring.
“When have I not been right, Miss Bonnyventure?” he said with a wan, contented smile as he shaped the quirley in his big, brown fingers.
“We’d best go on back to Juniper, let Miguel and his father know what happened. I bet those scurvy dogs are headin’ for Durango. It’s the easiest route south, and from there they’d have a clear shot at Arizona and then Mexico. With that much gold, they’d have to head for Mexico.”
“I hear you.”
Louisa finished her tea and wandered into the brush to answer the call of nature. When she came back, she said, “I’m going to turn in.”
“I reckon it’s about that time.” Prophet took the last puff off his quirley and flipped it into the fire. On the other side of the dancing flames, Louisa kicked out of her boots, unbuttoned her skirt, and let it fall to the ground. “I wonder how cold it’s going to get up here.”
Prophet shrugged and glanced at the sky before returning his gaze to Louisa, who lifted her poncho up over her head and tossed it onto her skirt.
“I’d reckon pretty chilly, this high up.”
“How high up, do you think?” With customary immodesty—they’d been on the trail together too long, shared each other’s blankets too many times, for modesty—she unbuttoned her blouse and dropped it down with her other garments.
Prophet’s voice thickened as she crossed her arms and lifted her cotton camisole. “Oh . . . nine, ten thousand feet maybe. The air fe
els a might thin to me.”
The camisole caught on her nipples for a second, jostling her breasts, as she lifted it up and over her head and tossed it away. Her hair fell back across her shoulders and breasts in a disheveled mess that gripped Prophet hard by the loins.
“I haven’t been up this high many times before,” Louisa said, bending over to pull her socks off. Her breasts sloped down, dancing this way and that, just visible behind the rustling screen of her honey-blond hair that the firelight caught and turned several different shades of gold. “I reckon that’s why I’m so sleepy all of a sudden.”
When she’d removed both socks, she reached down again to gather her clothes and lay them in an orderly pile beside her saddle. She shivered as a chill night breeze caught her, and she crossed a slender arm over her lovely breasts as she dropped to her knees, then, sitting sideways to Prophet, opened her saddlebags and rummaged around inside.
“You sleepy, Lou?” She’d found her nightshirt—a heavy flannel man’s work shirt that was several sizes too big for her and that hung almost to her knees—and held it out in front of her as she turned to him. Her hair looked like a tumbleweed, all mussed and spiking about her head and dangling off her shoulders. The firelight glowed in her hazel eyes, caressed her smooth, tanned cheeks.
“I was.”
She made a face, then, turning toward him as if to punish him, held the shirt out for a moment, adjusting it, before swinging it back behind her, thrusting her shoulders back, breasts forward, and shrugging into the shirt and closing it over her chest and buttoning it.
“No need for that,” Prophet grunted. “Come over here, Miss Bonnyventure, and whisper a sweet-nothing in ole Lou’s ear.”
She looked up between the mussed wings of her hair. She’d only buttoned the shirt’s bottom two buttons, and it exposed her alluringly. She left it like that as she stared across the fire at Prophet, then rose and walked around it to him and dropped to her knees. She leaned forward, ran her hands through his hair, pulling it gently, then closed her hands on his ears and kissed his forehead.
Prophet reached up and peeled the shirt down off her shoulders. She sat before him, her chest beginning to rise and fall heavily, her nipples pebbling. He could hear her breathing, feel the heat rise in her hands still clamped on his ears, as his own breaths grew labored.
Prophet feasted his eyes on her delectable form, from her flat belly down across her well-turned thighs to her little pink feet curled beneath her and then up across her heavenly, welcoming breasts to her lips that seemed to swell with need for his own.
Prophet lifted his head, kissed each of her breasts, the tender budlike nipples, then drew her down to him and closed his mouth over hers.
He kissed her for a long, long time, eating her slowly, like a well-ripened Georgia peach. When he’d undressed, he finished undressing her, then spread her out before him, and buried his face in her belly. She ground her hands in his hair, pulling his head taut against her.
“Oh, Lou,” she cried, writhing, spreading her knees. “I miss you already!”
25
TWO DAYS LATER, after a hard, meandering trek through and around the mountains, Prophet said, “Girl, if I told you once, I told you a thousand times—doesn’t matter how well you think you know a town. You always scout it before you mosey on into it.”
“Shut up, Lou.”
“You can think you know a town, but a town’s like a woman—fickle as hell. Like this goddamn wet mountain weather.”
“I’m scouting it,” Louisa said.
She was on the ridge above and behind him, while he sat on the ground, leaning back against a sun-bleached log, smoking a quirley and lost in his own banter. Their horses grazed, ground-tied, a little farther down the hill. A drizzle had fallen all day though there was now a break in the heavy, purple-bellied clouds.
“I ever tell you about the time I rode into Dog Bone, Wyoming, and ran smack into the Lyle Cretin Bunch. Hadn’t scouted it first, of course. Too much in a hurry. Well, shit, there they were—all four of ’em—sittin’ around outside a saloon, and who do they see ridin’ into town on his trail-blown dun?”
Louisa stared down the ridge, facing away from Prophet, through her spyglass. “You?”
“You guessed it. Wasn’t prepared at all. Not at all.” Prophet chuckled ruefully, drew deep on his quirley, and shook his head gravely. “I paid for it, too. Them boys had me dancin’ in the street, and you know how I can’t dance. Well, I was dancin’! Pow, pow, pow, and I was doin’ two-steps and three-steps and several steps you never seen before. Fortunate that the Cretin fellas was so drunk they didn’t realize I was dancin’ over to ole Mean and Ugly and somehow got my barn blaster off my saddle and managed to fill the whole gang with buckshot while I only took one of their ricochets in my kneecap. Just a glancing shot, but damn, it hurt like hell! A bullet to the kneecap. But my point is—”
“I know—scout a town before you ride into it. You never know who’s there.” Louisa lowered the spyglass and looked down the hill behind her at Prophet. “And if you wouldn’t blow so hard, you’d realize that’s what I’ve been doing. And you’d realize, you big ape, that you’d better come up here and take a look at this.”
“Look at what?”
“Juniper.”
“What about it? It’s still there, isn’t it?”
Prophet chuckled, a little trail-addled, and stuck his quirley in a corner of his mouth as he climbed to his feet with a grunt. He tramped heavily up to the top of the hill where Louisa stood, her hair blowing in the wind, in a notch between two monolithic boulders. She stepped back from the narrow notch, handing Prophet the spyglass.
The bounty hunter took another drag off his cigarette, rubbed it out with his boot, and raised the spyglass to his right eye, adjusting the telescopic focus. The notch offered a clear view of Juniper nestled in the broad, bowl-shaped valley with the creek running along the town’s north edge, through brush and trees.
What caught Prophet’s immediate attention, however, were the large, shaggy birds circling the town from about twenty or thirty feet in the air. What also got his attention was a distance-muffled gunshot carried by the damp, westerly breeze.
“What the hell?” he growled, again adjusting the focus for a better view of the town.
“Do you hear the shooting?”
“I hear it.” Prophet stared through the glass. “Might just be ole Hell-Bringin’ Hiram makin’ some vagrants dance. . . .”
He let his voice trail off as he focused on a gap between two false-fronted Main Street buildings, from their right flank because that was pretty much his angle on the town. What he saw in that gap were two or three men milling around, one swinging something high in the air. He couldn’t see what the man was throwing, but he could hear the muffled pistol report, sort of whipped and torn on the breeze.
“You see the buzzards?”
Prophet raised the spyglass to the birds winging in a shaggy circle over the main street, in the vicinity of the large, ornate opera house that sat like the jewel in the crown of the frontier town. Again adjusting the focus, Prophet picked out one bird, saw the broad black wings and ratty, streamer-like feathers, and the ugly bald head with the long, hooked beak.
“Buzzard, all right.”
“How’s that witch’s finger?”
“Been proddin’ me so regular I’ve sorta got used to the old bitch.” Prophet collapsed the spyglass and gave it back to Louisa. “You stay here. I’m gonna ride down and take a look.”
“Maybe you best wait till dark, Lou.”
“I’d best, but I’m ridin’ in.” Prophet strode quickly down the hill toward Mean and Ugly grazing a safe distance from the pinto. “Somethin’s damn peculiar.”
“Lou?”
He turned back to her standing with the cleft in the rocks behind her. “Miguel told me something about the sheriff and his father. He’d started out bad, and they threw him down a mine shaft to reconsider his evil ways.”
&nbs
p; Prophet canted his head and narrowed an eye at her. “So I heard.”
“Don’t look like that, Lou. People can change.”
“Miss Bonnyventure, if you’re not careful, I’m gonna start to think you see me as a narrow-minded son of a bitch.”
He turned and continued down to Mean and Ugly, grabbed the reins, and swung into the saddle. His trail weariness was gone. Now he was anxious. Something told him he was about to find out why that witch had been rawhiding him.
“You stay here, now, hear?” he told the girl, slinging his shotgun over his shoulder so that the double-bore hung barrel up behind his back, the lanyard stretched taut across his broad chest.
“I don’t like taking orders.”
“You wouldn’t like being taken across my knee, neither, and I can still do that.” Prophet gigged Mean and Ugly toward the canyon’s south wall, where he’d be less conspicuous from town. “I’m just gonna take a quick peek, drift over to Hiram’s office, have a chat with the old hell bringer. If all’s well, I’ll be back for you inside an hour, say.”
“You come back if all’s not well, damn you.”
“Watch your mouth, girl.” Prophet put Mean into a lope, slanting across the hill a good ways down from the rocky crest. “I swear your tongue’s gettin’ as blue as mine.”
A ravine ran along the base of the southern ridge, shallower in some places than others. At the shallow spots, Prophet stepped down from the saddle and walked the horse, keeping his own head down and keeping a careful eye on the town, the southernmost shacks and corrals shifting around in the sage and cedars to his right.
Some came right down to the ravine—mostly the town’s first mining shacks, an old stamping mill, and several sets of Long Toms that had been abandoned when their owners pulled out or went looking for richer color farther downstream.
At one point he’d been so busy watching the town’s southern backside that he’d run into an old trash pile, his boots and Mean’s hooves raising a ruckus with the discarded food tins. He gritted his teeth, stopped, drove Mean to his knees, and took an extra-long gander at the town, spying nothing but one shapeless woman in a bright red scarf, hanging wash along the side of a small, tin-roofed cabin, a washtub in the yard nearby.
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