Kiljoy blew one of the savages off his horse and, ejecting the spent brass from his Winchester’s breech, glanced at Sugar. She was triggering her own rifle as fast as she could, keeping her pale right cheek pressed taut against the stock.
“For Christ’s sakes, woman!” Kiljoy snarled. “Get on inside the station before them redskins perforate your purty hide!”
All of her shots flew wild. Red Snake was half relieved to see that. A half-blind woman who could shoot a man off a galloping horse would be enough to cause him to lie awake nights. Two bullets blew up the still-damp dust in front of her, and she lowered the rifle, casting those eerie blue eyes at the short, ugly brigand.
“A rare piece of good advice from you, Roy,” she said. “I believe I’ll take it!”
With that, staying low and holding her carbine in her right hand, she ran up onto the porch, tripped the cabin’s latch, and pushed inside, slamming the stout, halved-log, Z-frame door behind her.
Inside, Sugar dropped to her butt and pressed her back to the door. “Hello?” she called, hearing someone triggering a pistol from ahead of her and right. “I’m friendly if you are!” she yelled.
The agent of the Colorado Gulch Relay Station turned his thick-bearded face from the eastern window he was triggering a Colt Army out of. “I’m as friendly as an unweaned pup, miss. To anyone that ain’t tryin’ to lift my hair, that is.”
“I don’t believe Mojaves normally take scalps, mister . . .”
“Hannady!” the station agent shouted above the roar of the Colt he triggered. “Fletcher Hannady. You can call me Fletch. All my friends do. And . . .” He paused to trigger another shot out the window. “What you say about the Mojaves ain’t always true. Since scalp hunters been ridin’ free and easy around here, they’ve sort of adopted the habit. Been more than one Mojave around with white men’s scalps dangling from his sash!”
Hannady pulled his smoking pistol out of the window and dropped his fat bulk clad in a plaid wool shirt, suspenders, and duck trousers down against the wall. His bib beard scraped against his bulging belly.
“I’m Sugar!” the blind outlaw woman called from the door, keeping her voice raised against the din of gunfire continuing outside.
“Sugar,” Hannady said, as he plucked fresh cartridges from an open shell box on the floor behind him and slipped them through the Colt’s open loading gate, slowly rolling the barrel between his thumb and index finger. “You must be sweet.”
He gave her a leering look, winked, then flipped the loading gate closed. He frowned and looked around the room, then slowly turned his head toward the open window above him, the open shutter of which was nudged by a vagrant breeze. The rusty hinges squawked softly.
“The shooting stopped,” Sugar said, still sitting in front of the door and staring wide-eyed but with her customary lack of expression straight down the length of the earthen-floored station house.
With a grunt, Hannady heaved himself up off the floor and edged a look out the window. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly. “They’re hightailin’ it. Two of ’em, anyways. I see three dead.”
“Six followed us here.”
“Yeah, well, there been a whole lot more than them six ridin’ loco around the station. Ranches been burned, a whole gold town sacked up on the California border. There’s a good twenty or so Mojaves jumped the reservation a while back. Joined up with some broncos been holin’ up in the Sierra Madre, and they’re all runnin’ loco together, killin’ every white man, woman, and child in sight.” He shook his head. “That five likely peeled off from a larger war party when they seen you.”
Hannady looked out the window again, still extending his pistol out in front of him. “I been alone here since my two hostlers and cook was killed two weeks ago when they were out cuttin’ wood. Mojaves. Fortunately, them two boys outside are U.S. marshals. They was just stoppin’ for breakfast when we heard you four comin’ hard, like the devil’s hounds were nippin’ at your heels.”
Sugar had just started to rise but let her slender back fall against the door again. Slowly, she turned her fine, blind head toward Hannady, fine lines drawing taut above the bridge of her long, slender nose. “Did you say U.S. marshals, Fletch?”
“U.S. marshals—that’s right. They don’t wear their badges cause the Mojaves find ’em right handy targets. But they’re marshals, just the same. Holmes and Butler been around the ole Mojave merry-go-round a few times. Nice to have gun-handy men around.” Slowly, staring down at Sugar, Hannady walked toward her, stopped only a few feet away. His thick, suety chest rose and fell heavily behind his dirty work shirt. “Say, you’re right purty.”
“Mr. Hannady,” Sugar said in her silky-smooth voice, looking up at him obliquely, “you smell bad.”
“Say, now, that ain’t nice. I was just bein’ friendly.”
“I don’t appreciate your brand of friendliness, Mr. Hannady.”
“Say . . . wait now . . . !” Hannady said as he saw her lift her carbine and press the stock against her shoulder. “You got no cause to—!”
Red flames lashed from the round muzzle. The cracking report was a thunderclap in the close-walled room, causing glasses to clink on the counter to Sugar’s left, and dust to sift from the rafters. The carbine spoke two, three more times, throwing Hannady over a near, round table, overturning the table as he piled up on the floor behind it.
Smoke wafted in the air around Sugar as, gritting her teeth and staring blindly up at where Hannady had been standing a moment before, she ejected the last spent shell casing and pumped a fresh cartridge into the chamber.
Behind Sugar, the men in the yard were speaking. Boots thumped on the porch. A knock on the door followed by Lazzaro’s Spanish-accented voice: “Sugar?”
Sugar ran her tongue along her lower lip. “Antonio,” she said sweetly, “your two new friends are U.S. marshals.”
Lazzaro said nothing. She could smell the sweat, horse, and powder smoke odor of him as he stood on the other side of the door. Other men were talking in the yard behind him. Friendly tones.
Boots thudded as Lazzaro strode back across the veranda. The other men stopped talking.
Then one man said, “Wait! Hold on!”
Lazzaro’s pistol barked four times in quick succession. After a few seconds, a groaning curse was followed by one more pistol shot.
Sugar recognized Red Snake’s devilish laugh.
7
PROPHET WHEELED FROM the waterhole, closing his hand around his Colt’s worn walnut grips and sliding the gun out of it holster and up in a fluid motion of practiced, high-speed action.
Bam! Bam-bam!
The arrow that the Mojave had loosed from his bow at the same time Prophet’s first bullet had torn through his throat ricocheted off a rock to Prophet’s left and dropped into the natural stone water tank with a plop. The Mojave himself—a stocky warrior with many small, white scars on his cherry face, stretched his lips back from his teeth and sucked a sharp breath. He cupped both hands over his bloody throat and stared wide-eyed at Prophet and Louisa, moving his jaws as though he were trying to say something.
Prophet looked around at the stone ridges crowding close in nearly a complete circle, all resembling giant cracked teeth in a leering devil’s grin. He and Louisa stood crouched, Colts extended. They were on the side of an escarpment about forty yards up from the base.
They both held the reins of their nickering, prancing horses whom they’d led up here to drink from the rock tank. The tank was so full after the recent deluge that the water was spilling down over its lip and running down into a natural trough before seeping into the sand around which some sparse grass and rain-beaten wildflowers grew.
Prophet had spied the Indian a few seconds before, while he’d crouched to fill his canteen. His canteen lay at his feet now, the cork hanging from the lip by a rawhide thong.
Neither he nor Louisa said anything as they tensely perused the ridges. It was midday, the sun nearly straight up, and the s
un was a brassy ball, making it hard to see.
“There!” Louisa wheeled in the opposite direction from the first Mojave and triggered her Colt three times.
The slugs hammered a square boulder on a shelf of rock about fifty yards away. Prophet had glimpsed a brown face drawing back behind the boulder a half second before Louisa’s first bullet had plowed into it, spraying rock dust.
Prophet saw another figure stepping between two formations at the top of the ridge to his right. He holstered his Colt and slid his Winchester from his saddle boot, dropping to a knee and raising the rifle stock to his shoulder but holding fire. That Indian—a Mojave, judging by the area and the war paint—had taken cover, too.
The tension hung like a dark cloud. The sun hammered down on them. The water lapping over the stone tank made barely audible jangling sounds.
“I thought you scouted the tank, Lou.” Louisa sounded quietly edgy.
“I did scout the tank, Miss Bonnyventure. And I seen neither hide nor hair of any Mojave.” Prophet spat to one side. “But then, them bein’ Mojave, I like as not wouldn’t.”
“Mojaves, you think?”
Prophet nodded. “I thought I saw smoke talk a ways back. But when I looked again it was gone, and I thought I was just gettin’ nervy, it bein’ Mojaveria and all. I hadn’t heard of any broncos jumping their rez of late.”
“Well, it’s been a while since either of us has seen a newspaper.”
“Point taken.” Prophet looked around, saw a narrow path meandering up through the rocks on the other side of the tank. “Cover me.”
Holding Mean’s reins, he leaned his rifle against the side of the tank, then picked up his canteen and dunked it under the tepid water. It bubbled as it slid down the canteen’s neck. When the vessel was full, he corked it, looped the leather lanyard over his saddle horn, and grabbed his rifle.
“Follow me,” he said, leading Mean around behind the rock tank. “And be damn quick about it.”
“Don’t get bossy, goddamnit.”
“Christ, girl—what a tongue you’ve grown!”
“Still wouldn’t hold a candle to yours.”
“Damn near as bad, and it ain’t proper, you bein’ a girl an’ all.”
Several arrows zipped through the air around him and clattered off the rocks. Prophet wheeled and fired at the shadows moving amongst the rocks around them. Louisa did the same, losing her footing as her pinto jerked warily, and stumbled over a rock.
“This doesn’t look good, Lou.”
“Nothin’ looks good in Mojave country, chiquita.”
He snapped three more shots, then rammed his rifle’s butt against Mean’s left hip. “Hyah, you cayuse!” he wailed.
The hammer-headed dun didn’t need any more convincing. As more arrows clattered around his prancing hooves, and as two Mojaves opened up with rifles, Mean whinnied shrilly and galloped on up the path, shaking his head angrily and trailing his reins. Prophet ran past Louisa and the pinto, and dropped to a knee, shouting, “Head on up the ridge! I’ll cover you!”
Louisa pumped and triggered her Winchester, evoking at least one cry from the rocks behind them, then wheeled and ran, leading the pinto on up and over the rise. Behind her, Prophet laid down a barrage of covering fire.
The Indians were spread out in the rocks on the fire side of the tank, some high atop the surrounding ridges, some low. He wasn’t sure how many, but as he fired he felt the wind of several bullets and arrows curling the air around him, heard the spangs as bullets and wooden missiles hammered the rocks.
Maybe as few as seven, possibly as many as ten. Two seemed to have rifles.
When his Winchester’s hammer pinged on an empty chamber, Prophet rose, wheeled, and ran, crouching low and tracing a slightly zigzagging course up the narrow, meandering passageway up the rock-strewn slope. The two rifles cracked behind him, blowing up gravel around his heels. Arrows made soft screeching sounds, like the rush of fast birds whipping past, before they hammered the rocks, some breaking with crunching noises.
“Hurry, Lou!” Louisa shouted from between two rocks at the top of the ridge.
Prophet sawed his arms, pounded his legs. His breath raked in and out of his lungs. The wind felt like thick copper in his throat. He silently scolded himself for his tobacco habit. Weak lungs were not conducive to a safe run through Mojave country.
“I am hurryin’,” he said between gasping breaths as he threw himself atop the ridge and rolled several yards down the other side as a bullet kissed the seam of his left denim pant leg. “Ow!”
The exclamation wasn’t so much for the slight bullet burn as the sharp rocks galling his arms and legs and the rap of his left hand against the side of a boulder.
“You hit?”
“Nah, just gettin’ old.”
As Louisa fired from between the rocks, Prophet gained his hands and knees and crabbed back to the top of the ridge, doffing his hat and pressing his left shoulder up to a boulder to Louisa’s left. Still trying to regain his wind, he slipped cartridges from the loops of his shell belt and slid them through his Winchester’s loading gate.
“Goddamnit,” Louisa bit out. Her rifle jerked and roared once more. “They keep comin’. How many are there, anyway?”
Prophet slipped the last shell into his rifle, racked one into the chamber, and edged a look around the side of his covering boulder.
Three Mojaves were running amongst the rocks, dodging and weaving between boulders. Beyond them, several more were skipping down a ridge that was just out of rifle range. Most appeared nearly naked except for muslin loincloths, pointed toed moccasins and red flannel bandannas or hats made of hawk feathers. They all appeared to be wearing war paint—three vermillion and blue stripes across their noses, with three shorter slanted stripes on their foreheads.
One just now running up the slope toward Prophet and Louisa wore a white lightning bolt across his forehead, above the painted stripes and just below a green flannel headband. His eyes were spruce green, and they glinted brightly in that cherry-dark face. A half-breed. He yowled now as he dove behind a small boulder, Prophet’s and Louisa’s lead blowing up rocks and gravel behind his fleet heels.
Several bullets and arrows winged in from behind the Mojave with the lightning blaze, barking into the rocks around Prophet and Louisa, driving them back behind their respective boulders. Prophet could hear several more now running up slope—the rasp of breaths, the clatter of rocks under moccasin-clad feet.
A shadow moved on the ground to his left. He saw it out of the corner of his left eye as he hunkered behind his boulder on that hip. He had to roll nearly completely around to face the Mojave who’d just now bolted up past Prophet’s boulder, paused a moment, sweat streaking his dark face.
Prophet raised his rifle.
The Indian grinned. For a weapon he appeared to have only a war hatchet that he gripped in his big, left fist. He wore a tight necklace of porcupine quills.
Prophet had just gotten his Winchester’s barrel leveled when the Indian took one quick stride forward, then lifted his right leg—a knife slash of a kick that ripped the rifle out of the bounty hunter’s hands and sent it tumbling through the air behind him.
“Lou!” Louisa cried.
“Holy shit,” Prophet said.
The Mojave’s green eyes flashed. His face was incredibly broad. His mouth was wide and thick, his dark skin scaly as a snake’s and pocked with white as though the skin had peeled from sunburn. Likely, some disease or a condition the savage had been born with.
And he was a savage, for only a savage could yowl like he yowled, causing Prophet’s ears to ache, a half second before he lunged again toward the bounty hunter, jerking the feathered war hatchet out and up and then swinging with all his might toward Prophet’s head. His eyes popped so wide, showing the jaundice-yellow whites around the green, that for a moment Prophet though that both the demented-looking orbs would pop out of his head.
Louisa yelled again as Prophet ducked un
der the blow, pistoning off his heels and ramming his head and left shoulder into the Mojave’s naked, sweat-slick belly above which an awful-smelling medicine pouch swung from a rawhide sack. The Mojave wrapped the arm that had swung the hatchet around Prophet’s neck, snarling like a grizzly as he held Prophet’s head against his belly with that arm while hammering the bounty hunter’s face with his other fist.
Meanwhile, Prophet kept his feet moving, driving the big man—he must have been as tall and heavy as Prophet himself—straight backward and up off his feet. The ground came up furiously, and the Mojave grunted loudly, the air hammered from his lungs, as his back slammed hard. For a fraction of a second, he lay slightly limp beneath Prophet.
“Get out of the way, Lou!” Louisa cried. He saw from the periphery of his vision his blond partner trying to draw a bead on the big Mojave.
Prophet had started to roll away but then he saw another Mojave rising up out of the rocks and bearing down on Louisa, an arrow nocked to his bow. The girl saw the Indian and wheeled, her hair flying as she triggered her carbine into the man’s belly button from two feet away.
Prophet had the sickening feeling—one that he’d grown far too accustomed to during the war—that they were about to be overtaken. But for the moment he had his hands full with the big Mojave with the white lightning bolt painted across his forehead. No, not painted, he saw now, as he rose onto his knees and swung his right arm up and threw his fist down furiously at the man’s face.
Not painted. That lightning bolt was one massive, white, hideously knotted scar carved by the point of a none-too-sharp knife.
Prophet’s fist smacked the side of the Mojave’s jaw. He felt the impact deep into his shoulder. It was as though he’d punched a wet sandstone wall. The Indian shook his head as though to clear the cobwebs from his brain. Then he narrowed those green eyes under heavy lids at Prophet, gritted his teeth, and slashed at Prophet’s jaw with his left fist. Prophet blocked the blow with his right forearm and slammed his left fist straight down, connecting solidly with the point of the Mojave’s chin.
The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel Page 6
