Stagecoach to Purgatory

by Peter Brandvold

  Clovis was a talker, though—he remembered that.

  He’d made a mistake when he’d tramped up the Larimer’s broad, carpeted stairs to find the lock that fit the key Clovis had given him.

  Having entered a celebratory frame of mind the second he’d hit town, he’d gotten drunk before he’d dined with the governor’s family, so his judgment had been off. And, if the truth be told, Prophet was far too weak a man to be able to ignore the fact of a pretty young woman handing him her room key with a coquettish dip of her chin and alluring glint in her eye.

  In such a situation he was not now nor ever had been the type of jake who could shake his head and say, “Sorry, ma’am, but I’m not that sort of fella,” and walk away. Just as he was having trouble averting his attention to what she was teasing him with now . . .

  And some day he’d likely be fed a couple loads of buckshot for just that failing . . .

  Or . . . maybe that day was here now, he amended the unspoken warning to himself as someone hammered on the room’s door and a man’s angry voice said, “Clovis? Clovis, are you in there?”

  Chapter 2

  Clovis gasped and drew her knees together.

  The knock came again—two knocks, in fact, much louder than the previous ones. “Clovis? Clovis, I know you’re in there, damnit!”

  Prophet turned to the girl staring in wide-eyed shock at the door. “Who in the hell is that?”

  The man on the other side of the door must have had the ears of a jackrabbit. “Who in the hell is that?” he yelled.

  Clovis drew her hands across her mouth and said just loudly enough for Prophet to hear, “That is Miles Swarthing . . . son of the lieutenant governor . . . and”—she rolled her terrified gray eyes up to Prophet—“my betrothed!”

  “Betrothed?” Prophet said, aghast.

  Three more hard knocks came on the door. They were like three quick belches of a Gatling gun, and they made the stout walnut door bounce in its frame. The reverberation nudged an empty whiskey bottle off a table by the bed to drop to the carpeted floor with a dull thud. “Clovis, I will not ask you again. Who is in your room?”

  “He is supposed to be in military school,” Clovis said in dull shock behind her hands, which she’d steepled to each side of her nose. “He’s supposed to be in Pennsylvania!”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Prophet grabbed his longhandles that were hanging off the carved arm of an upholstered chair. As he did, he looked for an escape route but found none.

  It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t have had time to skin out through one, anyway, because just then the angry Miles Swarthing bellowed, “Clovis, damnit—what in hell is going on in there?” With “there,” the door exploded inward to bang against the lavender-and-gold-papered wall, knocking an oil painting of ships jouncing on a rowdy sea from its nail over a distant fainting couch.

  Prophet had only just grabbed his longhandles but had not yet started to draw them on when a clean-shaven young man in a dark blue military uniform complete with a gold-buttoned cape and leather-brimmed forage hat stormed into the room like a bull through a chute. He wasn’t very tall but he was stocky, and his head sat like a large red roast set atop broad, thick shoulders.

  “Oh my God,” Clovis squealed.“Rape!”

  “Wait,” Prophet said, turning his incredulous scowl to the girl on the bed. “What?”

  Clovis clawed up one of the several twisted sheets on the bed and drew it over her nakedness and, shuttling her terrified gaze from Prophet to her betrothed standing crouching in the open doorway, facing the bed, screamed louder this time, “Rape!”

  “Rape?” both Master Swarthing and Prophet said at the same time, in the same tone of voice.

  “Oh God, Miles,” the girl squealed, kicking her bare legs to scoot toward the far side of the bed, as though to put as much distance between herself and the big man standing naked before her, “I just woke to find this . . . this animal in my room!”

  “Oh, you did, did you?” Miles said, stomping toward Prophet, his beet red face bunched in anger, raising his balled fists. “We’ll just see about that!”

  Prophet dropped the longhandles and raised his hands, palms out. “Now, just hold on there, kid. I didn’t do any such—”

  Clovis held several sheets up to just below her wide, glistening eyes.

  The uniform-clad younker, who was a good foot shorter than Prophet’s six-four, came at Lou like an angry mule, swiping at the air with both fists before swinging his right fist hard at Prophet’s face. The bounty hunter jerked back into the night table, and the kid grunted as his fist whistled through the air where Prophet’s head had just been.

  Prophet took a step back, holding up both placating hands. “Kid, it ain’t what you think!”

  The kid shuffled up to Prophet, moving his feet like a practiced pugilist, and sent a left jab toward Prophet’s jaw. Lou raised his right arm, deflecting the blow. “Kid, it ain’t what she said, and if you don’t get your neck out of a hump, I’m gonna hurt ya!”

  But then the kid landed a solid right to Prophet’s bare belly. It wasn’t much of a blow, really. It might have been for some men, but Prophet had been injured worse throwing the wood to the younker’s girl the previous evening. The punch did, however, bring a hot ball of anger up from the base of Prophet’s spine.

  As the kid tried to land another similar blow to the bigger man’s belly, Prophet rammed his right fist into the younger man’s right temple—two short, swift, hard hammering blows that made resounding smacking sounds.

  The kid stumbled backward, bringing a hand to his injured forehead and saying, “Ohhh!”

  He dropped to a knee, blinking, holding his hand to his head. “Ohhhh!”

  “Rape!” screamed Clovis from the bed.

  Prophet scooped his balbriggans off the floor and turned to her. “Clovis, will you knock that nonsense off?”

  He shook out the twisted garment before him and stepped into one leg. He tried to step into the other leg, but the determined and fiery Miles Swarthing bolted off his heels and came storming at Prophet like a bull at a red cape.

  “Oh, fer Pete’s sake!” Prophet stepped to one side, grabbed the young man by the collar of his cape, and, pivoting on his hips, thrust him into the wall behind him.

  “Ohhh!” cried Master Swarthing, crouched with his forehead kissing the wall, pressing his hands to both sides of his head. “Ohhhhh!”

  His legs buckled and his knees hit the floor, where he knelt, head down, as though in fervent prayer. “Ohhh . . . ohhhh . . . boy!”

  “Someone, please help me!” Clovis bellowed, the sheet drawn up to just below her eyes. She lowered it to her chin long enough to mouth the words, “Sorry, Lou, but I have a reputation to think about! I’m the governor’s daughter, after all!”

  “What about my reputation, Clovis?”

  “Lou, you’re a bounty hunter!” Clovis jerked the blanket back up over her nose and cut loose with another, “Oh, someone, please help me-ee!”

  “Oh, fer chrissakes!” Prophet complained, wrestling with his longhandles once more. Before he could get his second leg covered, a middle-aged woman in an early-morning wrap and hairnet poked her head into the room.

  Her eyes found Prophet in all his masculine nakedness, dong swinging as he wrestled into his underwear, and added a chorus of her own screams to those of Clovis.

  “Ah, Jesus!” Prophet cried as the woman’s screams drifted off down the hall.

  Prophet got his longhandles on and then hustled crazily around the room, grabbing his boots, socks, denim jeans, buckskin shirt, and his gun belt and six-shooter.

  As he did, Clovis thrust the bedcovers aside and scrambled off the bed. She grabbed his hat off the upholstered chair near the still-kneeling Miles Swarthing and handed it to Prophet as he headed for the door, saying under her breath, “Please forgive me, Lou, but my honor is at stake! That said, if you’re ever back in town, do please look me up!”

  She winked, blew him a kiss,
and then shrank back in horror and screamed, “Rape! ”

  “Crazy lady,” he groused, setting the hat on his head and then poking his head out the door to cast cautious looks both ways along the hall. “I’d love to see you again, Miss Clovis . . . and beat your bottom with a willow switch!”

  He glanced at the girl once more. She was hunkered down beside Miles Swarthing, who was still kneeling against the wall by the chair, saying, “Boy . . . oh, boy . . . jeepers, that hurts!”

  Seeing no one in the shadowy hall, Prophet clutched his clothes in a unwieldy ball before him and ran out of the room, heading toward the stairs at the far end. He’d almost reached the wide mouth of the staircase bleeding gray light up from the lobby, when two silhouetted figures appeared, taking the stairs two steps at a time.

  Prophet froze as both figures, reaching the hall, turned toward him. One Prophet recognized as the Larimer Hotel’s concierge, Stephane St. Germaine, a neat, bald, well-groomed Frenchman whom Prophet often played poker with in one of Denver’s livelier parlor houses—between mattress dances with one of the doves, that was.

  The other man was the house investigator, Harry Boyles, a tall, beefy gent with a thick mustache. A pugnacious, hard-bitten former railroad detective whom Prophet had never cared for, Boyles was holding a .41 caliber, silver-chased pocket pistol in his beringed right fist.

  Both men stopped abruptly eight feet from Prophet, snapping their eyes in shock at the big bounty hunter cowering in the shadows near the wall.

  “Lou—is that you?” Stephane said, scowling incredulously, raking his eyes up and down Prophet’s balbriggan-clad, barefoot frame.

  Boyles curled his mustached upper lip into a sneer as he said, “Someone up here’s been yellin’ ‘rape.’ That don’t have nothin’ to do with you, now, does it, Proph?”

  Prophet shook his head. He knew there was no use trying to convince Boyles, who didn’t care for Prophet any more than Lou cared for him, so the bounty hunter turned to his friend Stephane. “No, it sure don’t, though I didn’t realize what a bailiwick I was stumblin’ into when . . . when . . .” He let his voice trail off as he turned toward the gray light marking where Clovis’s open door bled light into the otherwise dark hall.

  “Oh, Lou—you didn’t!” Stephane said in disgust. “The governor’s daughter? You accepted her key?”

  Prophet didn’t know how to respond to that. Feeling like an utter fool, he managed only to move his lips and shake his head, wishing like hell that some unseen door would open in the floor beneath his feet and give him release of this horrific, embarrassing, and potentially lethal situation.

  Stephane jerked his head to indicate behind him. “You see that door that says ‘Private’?”

  Prophet saw the door just beyond the mouth of the stairs, with the word PRIVATE sketched in looping cursive into a gold plate in the door’s upper panel. He nodded.

  “Go through it, you crazy loon. It’s the housemaids’ rear staircase. There’s an outside back door at the bottom. The police have been summoned. They’ll arrive any minute. Take that door and do yourself a favor.”

  “What’s that?” Prophet asked, feeling like a chastised schoolboy.

  “Stay away from crazy young women in general and that one in particular unless you want the governor hanging you by your unmentionables from the nearest cottonwood along Cherry Creek!”

  “Obliged, Stephane,” Prophet said, sheepish.

  “And for God’s sakes, man,” Stephane added as he began striding on toward the girl’s room, giving a caustic laugh, “get some clothes on. You’re not decent!”

  “Hold on,” Boyles said, hovering near Prophet with the peashooter aimed at Lou’s belly. “I think I should—”

  “Forget it, Harry,” Stephane said, slapping the detective’s arm with the back of his hand. “She probably raped him!”

  And then they continued off down the hall, albeit with Boyles giving Prophet the woolly eyeball over his left shoulder.

  Prophet slinked off past the top of the stairs to the door with the gold plate, opened it, and slipped into a narrow, dingy stairwell that smelled like breakfast cooking in a kitchen somewhere on the first floor. As Prophet descended the stairs, his stomach rumbled and his mouth watered at the delectable aromas of fresh coffee, scrambled eggs, and bacon.

  He dropped down two flights of stairs and stopped at a junction with two doors, one in the outside wall straight ahead and one to his right. The breakfast smells were pushing through the door to his right, so heavy and intoxicating that he had to almost physically resist the temptation to push through it and scavenge around for a few strips of bacon and a sip or two of coffee.

  He had to get out of there, though. Not just any girl but the governor’s daughter was screaming “rape” upstairs, and he supposed he could be charged with assaulting her beau, as well, though he’d been trying only to defend himself, for crying in the king’s ale!

  Standing by the outside door, he grabbed his socks from the bunch in his hands and dropped the rest of the clothes on the floor. Footsteps sounded beyond the door to his right. Someone—probably a maid bearing room service—was heading toward him.

  Quickly, Prophet swiped his clothes off the floor, opened the outside door, peered out, and, seeing no one near, slipped out into the back alley abutted by the rear ends of several large, brick buildings and littered with all manner of sour-smelling trash.

  He eased the door closed as he heard the kitchen door click open.

  Turning to the alley, he dropped his clothes on the coal-and-gravel-littered ground, and began plucking individual garments from the pile one and two at a time, until only his cartridge belt, Peacemaker revolver, and sheathed bowie knife were on the ground between his right, booted foot and a large coal pile.

  He kept a wary watch around him, seeing sleepy-eyed pedestrians, carriages, horseback riders, and the occasional coal wagon pass on the cross streets to his right and left. On the opposite side of the alley, a man in the ragged suit of a traveling drummer sat slumped against the rear of a building Prophet knew to be one of the lesser whorehouses in this neck of Denver.

  The man’s legs were stretched wide before him, and his chin rested on his shoulder. He’d vomited down his arm sometime during the night. An empty bottle lay beside him, near where a wild, charcoal-colored cat was foraging around a pile of food scraps likely tossed out of a restaurant, and casting feral, proprietary glances toward the big man dressing hastily at the rear of the Larimer Hotel.

  “No need to worry, Mr. Puss,” Prophet said, strapping his gun belt around his waist. “I’m hungry but not that hungry.”

  Tugging his hat brim down over his eyes, he headed south along the alley, ignoring the cat humping its back at him and giving an angry whine. At the cross street, he stopped. Pressing his left shoulder against the building to his right, he looked up and down the cobbled street and froze when three men in the blue, gold-buttoned uniforms of the Denver police ran toward him from the street’s far side.

  Damn.

  Chapter 3

  Prophet took one slow step backward, not wanting to make too hasty a retreat and draw attention to himself. As the trio of blue-clad men with copper shields pinned to their wool tunics angled across the street toward Prophet’s right, one of them turned toward him.

  The policeman—whom Prophet recognized as Finnegan Walsh, another card-playing, whiskey-swilling crony—slowed to a near-stop and said, “Hey, Lou—didn’t know you was in town!” He slowed his pace as his two partners turned the corner of Larimer Avenue and hustled off to the hotel. Walsh’s accent was as thick and green as a peat bog. “You should’ve dragged your mangy arse into Kenny O’Brien’s. We had us one hell of a stud game a-roarin’, big money fillin’ pockets, and Minnie Winstead brought a couple of her Chinese doves over for a frolic!”

  The gray-bearded Irishman grabbed his crotch, grinned, and yelled, “Gotta be off—some depraved fools is pluckin’ a cherry off an unwilling bush over to the Larimer,
don’t ya know!” He shook his head in sadness. “The world gets more and more depraved every day I’m alive to bear witness to it.”

  Turning and jogging after the others, he called, “See you around, Louie-oh!”

  “Yeah—maybe in about twenty years,” Prophet muttered, relieved to see his old friend sidestep to avoid a young Mexican selling hot burritos wrapped in newspaper from a wooden cart, and disappear around the corner of a hat shop. “That’ll be about when I’ll be able to show my ugly face in Denver again—thank you very much, Miss Clovis!”

  With that, he ran out of the alley, crossed the street, and jogged south toward Cherry Creek. He crossed the creek via a wooden bridge and then ran across an empty lot to Roy Stover’s Cherry Creek Stable and Livery Barn on the corner of Front Street and Second Avenue, so close to Union Station that he could smell the cow pens and hear the panting of the big Baldwin locomotives and the echoing clang of coupling cars out in the rail yard.

  Stover was greasing the hubs of a leather-seated, red-wheeled phaeton when Prophet jogged into the barn, huffing and puffing and sleeving sweat from his forehead.

  “Rope and saddle Mean an’ Ugly for me, will you, Roy?”

  The overall-clad liveryman, bearded and smoking a corncob pipe, glanced over his shoulder at Prophet, and grinned. “What’s her name, Lou?”

  Prophet leaned forward, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. “Huh?”

  “The name of the girl with the jealous boyfriend.”

  Prophet’s heart quickened. But then he realized the man was only funning with him. There was no way that the news of the governor’s daughter’s so-called rape could have stretched this far in such a short time. Word about such things traveled fast, but not that fast.

  Stover turned to Prophet, the stick slathered with wheel dope in his hand. “Ain’t that why you’re breathin’ so hard? You had to skin out on another one before you got a belly full of buckshot?” He laughed and blew pipe smoke out his nose, the aromatic aroma lacing the barn tang of hay and ammonia.