Reloading his Winchester from his cartridge belt, Prophet crossed the creek and moved through its ten-foot buffer of willows and into the clearing. The cabin was thirty yards away. Voices sounded from inside, and Prophet froze as Miguel Encina staggered into the doorway, holding his shoulder with the same hand he clutched a Remington revolver.
He winced, shouted, “Bitch!” at the tops of his lungs, and staggered out into the yard.
Prophet was nearly straight out in front of the young banker, but he didn’t appear to see the bounty hunter.
Louisa appeared in the doorway, boots spread wide across the threshold. Her face was hard beneath her hat brim, and one smoking Colt hung low in her right hand. Miguel dropped to his knees, twisted around, and screamed back at her, “We could’ve been rich, you simple-minded bitch! You and me—together and richer than you could ever dream about!”
“That’d be a rather tricky relationship, don’t you think?” Louisa said. “Seeing as how you’ve been trying to kill me—me and Lou—since we first rode into town.”
“I didn’t order that. Yeah, Big Dick Broadstreet worked for me, but him and his boys set up that ambush themselves. They must have recognized you, figured you’d be trouble and wanted to get you out of the way pronto.” Miguel stared at Louisa with false sincerity. “I was hoping we’d be together, Louisa. We still could be . . . if you killed him.”
Miguel looked at Prophet, hardening his gaze again.
Louisa clucked her disdain and moved out away from the cabin, striding purposefully, challengingly toward Miguel.
Prophet held his ground and didn’t say anything. He knew what would happen. Miguel screamed another enraged curse and raised his Remy.
Louisa didn’t let him get it half raised before she blew the top of his head off and left him jerking there in the sage, turning nearly a complete circle on his back, dust rising around him.
Louisa stared down at him. When the shaking stopped, she looked up at Prophet and blinked. She flicked open her Colt’s loading gate, shook out the spent shells, and replaced them with fresh.
“Anyone alive back there?” she asked.
Prophet was looking in the cabin in which Miguel’s men lay sprawled in pools of their own blood.
“What do you think?”
“Want to bury ’em?”
“I’m gonna bury Miss O’Shay. Not sure why—old-time’s sake, I reckon. Then we’ll go up and bury that girl and the gold. No point in takin’ it back to Juniper with no banker, no law around.” Prophet turned away from the cabin, lowered his Winchester, stretched his back. “Shit, I’m tired.”
“We just gonna leave Miguel and the others out here like this?”
Prophet kicked Miguel’s Remy away from his dead fingers. “I see no point in wastin’ time . . .”
“. . . Burying killers,” Louisa finished for him. “When the hawks and coyotes are right hungry.”
“There you go,” Prophet said and began tramping back toward the wagon.
The next morning, when Sivvy and the girl had been buried, Prophet and Louisa buried the gold well off the trail. They weren’t sure what to do with it yet, but they couldn’t return it to Juniper. Not with how wide-open the town had become in the past few days. Likely, they’d send a telegram to the mines it had come from, let the owners know where it was so they could dig it up and do with it what they would. It was theirs, after all.
Prophet mounted Mean and Ugly and looked around at the cabin sitting quiet in the morning’s golden, high-country sunshine.
“Well, what’s next?” Louisa said.
Prophet rubbed his chin, thoughtful. “How ’bout Denver?”
“What about Denver?”
“Have you been to Denver lately? It’s a right nice town. There’s churches there and folks’ livin’ peaceable, younkers goin’ to school. We could ride on in, get you some nice duds to wear, find you a nice—”
“Lou?”
Prophet looked at her.
“Shut up.”
Prophet glowered at her. “It ain’t nice, tellin’ a man to shut up who’s only lookin’ out for your purty little hide.”
“Shut up.”
Prophet sighed and shook his head with futility.
“Let’s go back to Juniper,” Louisa said. “Get the town on its leash again, collect the bounties on those hard cases still skulking around. Then get the gold back in the bank. Hell, in one or two days we could make several thousand dollars, enough to get us through another Mexican winter if you keep the whoring down and don’t blow it all on cards and tequila.”
Prophet blinked at her. “Mexico?”
“I wouldn’t want to spend the winter in Canada.”
Prophet stared at her. He thought of Montoya, but something in the girl’s eyes—the bright, shiny confidence of the resolute huntress—told him she’d put the prison behind her.
“I ain’t never gonna see you in a church dress, am I?”
“What do you think?”
“Shit.”
Louisa turned her pinto around and spurred him into a ground-chewing gallop. She cast a devilish glance over her shoulder. “Race you back to Helldorado!”
“Ah, shit,” Prophet said again. He heeled Mean and Ugly up the trail, the eager horse lunging off its rear hooves and spraying gravel in his wake. “Here we go, Mean and Ugly!”
And for some reason, while he and the Mean and Ugly hammerhead raced up the trail behind Louisa, Prophet felt his spirits rise like spread wings, and he broke into loud, bellowing song: “Jeff Davis built a wagon, and on it put his name, and Beauregard was driver of Secession’s lovely frame!”
PETER BRANDVOLD was born and raised in North Dakota. Currently a full-time RVer, he writes Westerns under his own name as well as his pen name of Frank Leslie, as he travels around the West. Send him an e-mail at [email protected].
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