The thought caused gooseflesh to ripple across Prophet’s shoulders, when, later that night, sitting around a crackling fire along the banks of another shallow wash, he heard the first coyote give its ululating cry. The sun just then teetered over the Rockies, and heavy black shadows spilling out away from those mountains engulfed the plains like stygian floodwaters released by some giant, broken dam.
The green sky darkened. A star winked to life. Then another.
Another coyote added its yammer to that of the first.
Prophet had enough ancient Appalachian superstition in his Confederate bones to hear the cries of the dead in those mournful wails. He fumbled his whiskey flask out of a saddlebag pouch, twisted off the cap, and added a goodly portion of the firewater to his coffee. He capped the flask, set it at his feet, drew the collar of his mackinaw, which he’d donned against the growing night chill, up tighter around his jaws.
Still, he shivered.
“Damn scaredy-cat,” he told himself, and gave a dry snicker.
He sipped the coffee. A breeze lifted, making rasping sounds in the brush, causing the limbs of the gnarled, old cottonwood flanking his camp to squawk like rusty door hinges. A crinkling sound caused him, in his anxious state, to give another jerk, causing some of the coffee to dribble over the rim of his cup. He turned his head to find the cause of the noise and saw the pale envelope lying over a small grass clump near his right boot.
The letter Stover had given him must have fallen out of his vest pocket when he’d pulled his coat on. The breeze tugged at it, lifted it over the grass clump, slid it along the ground so that it made a sound like a small rattler. Prophet reached down and with a grunt plucked the envelope off the ground. He held it to the fire’s flickering orange glow, studied the loopy, feminine writing on its face.
It was addressed to Mr. Lou Prophet, c/o General Post, Denver, Colorado.
The return address was Mrs. Margaret Knudsen, Jubilee, Dakota Terr.
“Margaret Knudsen?” Prophet didn’t know any Margaret Knudsen, much less anyone else in Jubilee, Dakota Territory.
Apparently, however, someone up there in that land of the brutal winters and mosquito-feasting summers knew him . . .
Prophet slid his bowie knife from its sheath and used its razor edge to slice open the envelope. Returning the knife to the scabbard, he shook out the folded piece of lined notepaper and awkwardly peeled open the folds with his thick fingers.
The date written at the top of the single sheet told Prophet that the missive had been written nearly a month ago. He adjusted the sheet to the dancing flames and crouched low over the writing, so he could get a better look at the purple-inked cursive that filled a little over half of the sheet.
He fidgeted atop the log he was sitting on, a nettling chagrin warming his ears as it did at such times he was presented with the need to dredge up his limited reading skills. It wasn’t that Prophet hadn’t had the opportunity to go to school now and then back in the north Georgia mountains, it was just that nearly every time he had, he’d chosen to go fishing instead.
Holding the breeze-nibbled paper up before him with his left hand, he used his right index finger to point out the words as he sounded out each one in turn.
Hello my Dear Friend,
Do you remember me? I am the former Margaret Jane Olson whom you once knew by my show name—Lola Diamond. Lou, I am in terrible need of your help. The problem is too long and complicated for written words. This letter may not even reach you. Just know that if you get this, I am in dire need of the assistance only you can provide, so won’t you please visit me here in Jubilee, in the Dakota Territory? If you remember me at all you probably remember me well enough to know that I would not ask such an enormous favor unless I was in desperate need.
I hope this letter somehow finds its way to you posthaste, and finds you alive and well and in better spirits than I—
Your friend,
Lola
Prophet recited her name again, “Lola,” as he lowered the paper. A smile of fond remembrance touched his lips. “Of course I remember you, girl.”
Longer ago than he wanted to remember, he’d met the showgirl Lola Diamond in Montana Territory. She’d witnessed a murder, and an old lawman friend of Prophet’s, Owen McCreedy, had deputized Prophet. He’d also armed him with a subpoena that he was to use to fetch Lola from where her traveling acting troupe, Big Dan Walthrop’s Traveling Dolls and Roadhouse Show, had been playing in the little mining town of Henry’s Crossing. McCreedy had wanted Prophet to escort the showgirl back to Johnson City, where she’d witnessed a murder, so that she could testify against the accused—the notorious brigand Billy Brown.
It had been supposed to be a routine favor that Prophet was doing for a friend for very little money, but, because Lola had not wanted to testify and incur the wrath of the infamous Brown, Prophet and Lola had not started off on the right foot. In fact, on their initial meeting in the hotel where she and her troupe had been holed up, she’d tried to shoot him with a 41 caliber pocket pistol. When that hadn’t worked, she’d buried her right foot so deep in Prophet’s crotch that he could have sworn he’d felt her toes tickle his windpipe!
The bounty hunter chuckled at that now, though it had been nothing to chuckle about at the time. His oysters had been sore for days. Finally, however, he’d gotten her away from her angry troupe, including Big Dan Walthrop himself, and on the trail headed to Johnson City . . . and things had gone from bad to worse.
Billy Brown had sent his henchmen after Prophet and Lola. They’d been under orders to do everything in their power to keep the showgirl from testifying at their boss’s trial. Brown had sent wave after wave of kill-crazy men until, for a time, alone and on the run in the middle of nowhere, it had seemed that Prophet and Lola were pitted together against the entire world.
There had been no way that a perilous journey like that wouldn’t bring two people close together. In more ways than one. Even two people who couldn’t have started out any farther apart than Prophet and Lola had. But by the end of the trip, Lou was sure that he’d tumbled for the snooty but beautiful, blond, blue-eyed actress, and he had a feeling that she’d tumbled for him, as well.
Of course, they couldn’t have remained together. They’d had no future. He’d been, as he was now, a rough, ex-Confederate frontiersman. A bounty hunter. Margaret Jane Olson, hailing from an upper-class family from Utica, New York, had not only been a rare flower to look at—she’d had the face and eyes of an angel and the body of the most ravishing, irresistible temptress ever to corrupt a red-blooded rebel bounty hunter—but she’d aspired to the greatness of the world’s largest stages.
Apparently, something had happened to prevent her from fulfilling her dream. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have ended up in the tall-and-uncut country of the Dakota Territory. She wouldn’t have become Margaret Knudsen now residing in Jubilee, about thirty miles west of Deadwood. For whatever reason she’d ventured so far off her original path, her luck in Dakota had obviously soured.
Now she needed Prophet’s help.
And in light of his current situation, on the run from a rape accusation in Denver, which would no doubt spread beyond Colorado Territory in days if it hadn’t via telegraph already, his old friend Lola had unknowingly flung him a lifeline.
Sure, he’d ride up to Dakota. He couldn’t think of a better place for him to be right now. Surely, no one would expect him to flee that far to the north. South, maybe. New Mexico or Arizona or Old Mexico, for sure. But not Dakota Territory, where even the summers could be chilly and the opportunity for licentiousness and debauchery, two of the bounty hunter’s favorite pursuits, were few and far between. Dakota was still relatively unsettled. Civilization was slow to stretch its tentacles up that close to Canada. Hell, pockets of Sioux still ran wild up thataway . . .
Making it the perfect place for Prophet to cool his heels.
He neatly folded Lola’s note but not before giving it a sniff and detecting the rememb
ered raspberry scent of the girl, and giving another smile of fond remembrance. He returned the missive to its envelope and stowed it for safekeeping in his saddlebags.
He spent the rest of the night sipping coffee laced with cheap whiskey, nibbling jerky, and building and smoking cigarettes. He stared out across the starlit prairie to the north, remembering his bittersweet time with Lola Diamond, wondering what kind of a woman the former Margaret Jane Olson and current Margaret Knudsen had turned out to be . . . and what brand of trouble she was in now.
“I’ll be there soon,” he said after he’d kicked dirt on his fire and rolled up in his soogan, laying his weary head down on the woolen underside of his saddle. “Don’t you worry your pretty head, Miss Lola Diamond. Ole Lou will be there soon.”
He yawned and drifted asleep with remembered images of the pretty young actress dancing behind his eyelids.
Chapter 5
A day and a half later, tired and dusty but armed with the ticket he’d just bought from the Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage and Express Line office, Prophet slacked onto a bench on the broad front veranda of the Inter-Ocean Hotel in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory.
He’d decided to take the stage to Jubilee for two reasons—speed and safety. He could make better time riding a coach than he could riding his horse, which he’d stabled at the Big Horn Livery and Feed Company flanking the Inter-Ocean. Also, while most of the Sioux had been subdued after their rout of Custer at the Greasy Grass, there were still several bands running off their leashes, and, knowing their days were numbered, they could be more dangerous than hydrophobic wolves.
When the Indians were not making for hazardous travel up in northern Wyoming and across into western Dakota Territory, small gangs of non-Indian cutthroats were. Judging from the urgent tone of Lola’s letter, Prophet had to make it to Jubilee sooner rather than later, and that meant that he could not take time to shoot it out with either Red Cloud’s embittered braves or the brand of curly wolf that haunted the Black Hills and farther north these days, there not being much law in that country to cull the outlaw herds.
Besides, the bounty hunter had a thousand dollars burning a hole in his saddlebags (though half of it was Louisa’s) and he saw no reason not to travel in relative comfort and style—if you could call comfort and style traveling through rough country in a rocking, pitching Concord coach, on a barely cushioned seat and with horsepoop-laced dust roiling in through the windows. Not to mention the stench of human as well as horse sweat fermenting in the summer heat assaulting your nostrils.
But at least he’d have a pillow, albeit a bedbug-infested one, on which to rest his weary head for the two nights it would take him to reach Jubilee by stage, in relay stations peppering the northeasterly route. On Mean and Ugly, it would be a good four-day ride.
When he’d bought his ticket, the ticket agent had informed him he was just in time, as this would be the last time the stage would roll through the remote Jubilee, the last stop before Deadwood. Jubilee was a little too out of the way for the line to continue service to it, and not enough folks were making it their destination. Apparently, most folks had already left town. Avoiding the town would shorten the trip from Cheyenne to Deadwood by thirty miles.
Wondering again what Lola Diamond could possibly be doing in such a backwater, Prophet took his time building a quirley on the Inter-Ocean’s veranda. He pondered the possibility of taking time for an ale at one of the several saloons residing on the far side of the bustling main street. The board-and-batten-fronted watering holes jutted wooden signs on peeled log posts into the street, muddy from a recent passing thundershower.
Each sign—bearing names from THE PARSON’S BLUSH and THE SUDSY BARREL to THE FAT LADY and THE DRUNKEN SKUNK—was gaudier than the last. Fallen angels, unmistakable in their brightly colored gowns and ample samplings of exposed flesh, loitered out front of such places, accosting passing menfolk with ribald invitations, occasionally grabbing one such gent and giving him a good feel of what he could be feeling so much more of, if he’d only spring for a half hour’s tussle in one of the back-alley cribs.
Forget it, old son, Prophet silently chided himself, licking his freshly built quirley closed. You done wore your pecker out the other night and were run out of town for your trouble. Besides, there’s no time. The stage to Jubilee is due any minute now.
He struck a lucifer to life on the sole of the boot resting atop his left knee and was about to touch the flame to the quirley, when a red-wheeled, leather-seated chaise pulled up in front of the Inter-Ocean, a fancily clad, opera-hatted gent with thick mutton-chop whiskers sitting straight-backed on the driver’s seat. It wasn’t unusual to see such a rig carting the obviously moneyed around Cheyenne, for plenty of rich folks lived in these parts now. They were mostly associated with the mining boom in the mountains or the proliferation of large, mostly foreign-owned ranches sprawling across the high plains between the Rawhide Hills and the Big Horns.
What you did not often see among such folk, however, was a full-blooded Indian. At least, not a full-blooded Indian who seemed to be one of them. And certainly not a beautiful, full-blooded, young Indian girl dressed in the silks and taffetas of a very un-Indian debutante.
But that was whom Prophet found his eyes riveted on now.
As the chaise driver set the brake, wrapped the reins around its brass handle, and scrambled down from the buggy to help the girl and her matronly, white, gray-haired traveling companion down from their perches, Prophet became so distracted that the lucifer burned his fingers.
“Ouch . . . goddamn—!”
Prophet let the match drop to the porch floor. As he did, the girl, having heard his clipped exclamation, cast him a fleeting, expressionless glance just before she stepped down from the coach and into the waiting hands of the driver. During that brief time when Prophet’s eyes met hers, he felt a hard male pull in his overworked nether regions.
The girl was a slender, long-limbed, full-busted beauty with coarse, blue-black hair piled into two neat, tightly woven buns atop her regal head. A silly straw hat adorned with fake berries was pinned askance atop the coiled hair. Her face was round and chocolate-eyed, her mouth wide, the dark red lips rich and full. Her nose was long and fine. Her smooth, dark skin owned the copper-cherry sheen of the finest, varnished wood.
Prophet had become familiar with Indians from many tribes on his wanderings across the frontier, and he guessed that this girl hailed from one of the Plains tribes. Sioux, most likely. Something, maybe the heart-shaped face with not overly severe cheekbones, told him Hunkpapa, but she could have been Lakota or Wahpeton, as well.
It was startling to see such an obvious pedigreed American native, a veritable if not literal Indian princess, clad in the attire of a white girl. A rich, blue-blooded white girl, no less, dressed in a fine, spruce green traveling gown and shirtwaist with a ruffled white collar and matching waistcoat. An amethyst-encrusted cameo locket dangled from her fine, brown neck on a gold-washed chain.
She couldn’t have looked more out of place in such a getup than Prophet would have appeared clad in an eagle feather headdress and beaded buckskins from head to toe, a drum in one hand, a rattle in the other. He found himself feeling sorry for the girl. Not only because she seemed so out of place in such attire, but because her much older traveling companion was ordering her around in a voice many reserved for ill-behaving dogs.
“Here, take your carpetbag . . . no, no, not that one—that one’s mine . . . now, go stand here on the porch while I get our tickets. But stay out of the sun. You certainly don’t need to be any darker. And please stop chewing your finger, Mary! Is that what they taught you at Mrs. Devine’s—to stand around chewing your finger?”
The girl dropped the finger in question to her side. She’d started nibbling it once she and the carriage driver had piled a legion of matching leather bags and several accordion carpetbags atop the porch, about ten feet to Prophet’s left, near the Inter-Ocean’s stout, oak double doors. The doors w
ere propped open to allow the breeze, fresh from the recent rain, to filter through the closed double screen doors.
The poor Indian princess with the unlikely name of Mary looked uncomfortable and out of place and it didn’t help that several other people milling on the porch were staring at her, as well, as though she were some rare, exotic captive animal traveling with a circus.
The older woman paid the carriage driver, relinquishing the coins as though they were the last silver she’d ever see again. While the driver climbed back onto the chaise and drove away, the woman adjusted her flowered velvet hat atop her turtlelike head and allowed a gentleman smoking a fat stogie on the porch to open one of the screen doors for her. She acknowledged the expected politeness with a curt dip of her spade-shaped chin and wobbled into the lobby, grunting and sighing as though her hips grieved her.
The old woman had just gone inside when two more women, both middle-aged and attired in similar fashion to Mary’s traveling companion, were deposited in front of the Inter-Ocean by another chaise. They had likely come from the Great Northern Depot at the south end of Main Street, just as Mary and the old woman had, Prophet idly speculated, puffing his quirley.
The women, a little breathless from their journey and looking anxious, as most such folks did when they were far from the security of their tailored gardens and nattily appointed parlors, gave Mary quick, darting glances, muttering to each other in shocked, disapproving tones, as though they feared the circus animal might spring from its cage and tear them limb from limb.
When they seemed to have exhausted the topic of Mary, they turned their attention to their luggage, consulting each other again through worried mutters. One of the women—they looked strikingly alike, both skinny and rat-faced—turned to Prophet and said, “Excuse me, sir, would you mind—?”
Stagecoach to Purgatory Page 4
