Stagecoach to Purgatory

by Peter Brandvold

  Something was out of whack here. He had no idea what, but something . . .

  When the riders were within thirty yards of the coach and made no move to yield the trail but kept riding straight toward the stage, grim, vaguely challenging looks on their five faces, Prophet drew back on the team’s ribbons.

  The coach squawked and rattled to a halt.

  Again, the horses stomped and blew. They were close enough to town now that they could probably smell the hay and water awaiting them. The off-front puller lifted its head and loosed a protesting whinny. Its hitch mate angrily shook its head.

  Twenty yards beyond them, two of the five riders stopped their horses in the middle of the trail. One rider rode off the trail to Prophet’s left. Two others rode off the trail to his right.

  One of the two men facing him on the trail said, “Where’s the girl?”

  Prophet hesitated. He wasn’t sure how to answer the question. Trouble had come to call, but it wasn’t showing its true colors so he had no idea how to address it.

  “What girl?” he said, though he wasn’t sure why. Maybe he was just trying to buy enough time to find out what all this—two sets of riders stopping him before he reached town—was about.

  “What girl?” exclaimed the man on the trail, rising up in his saddle and shoving his gray-mustached face toward Prophet, wielding his heavy chin as though it were a weapon. His frosty blue eyes blazed beneath the high crown of his cream Stetson. “What girl, my ass!”

  He turned to one of the riders just now approaching the stage on Prophet’s right. “Kendrick—who’s inside?”

  Kendrick leaned out from his saddle, peering into the coach from roughly ten yards away. “I can’t see no one in there, boss!”

  “No one!” shouted the gray-mustached gent, by at least twenty years the oldest man of the five. “Check the money drawer!”

  Prophet’s heart drummed. He rested his right hand on the stock of the rifle in his lap. The middle-aged man sitting a black horse on the trail straight out in front of him loudly racked a cartridge into his own Winchester, snapped the rifle’s butt to his shoulder, and aimed at Prophet, yelling, “Get your hands off the long gun, you son of a bitch!”

  “Looks like three dead bodies on the stage roof, Boss!” shouted the rider riding up to the coach on Prophet’s left. He was positioned over the bounty hunter’s left shoulder, so that Lou could see him only in the far periphery of that eye. “None of ’em looks the girl’s size, though.”

  Staring down the barrel of his cocked Winchester, “Boss” shouted, “I told you to take your hand off that rifle, mister!”

  Prophet stared back at him. He had him dead to rights. He removed his hand from the neck of the Winchester.

  “Check the slide box in the undercarriage!” Boss ordered.

  The man slipped off his horse to Prophet’s right, and, keeping a hand on one of the two six-shooters bristling on his hips, and one eye on Prophet, he strode over to the side of the carriage and dropped down out of Prophet’s sight.

  Prophet’s heart slammed harder against his ribs as he stared down the barrel of the cocked Winchester aimed at his head. Sweat trickled down his back beneath his shirt. The money wasn’t in the strongbox. After he and Mary had counted it, Prophet had put it back in his saddlebags. He’d placed the saddlebags in the rear luggage boot, where he intended for it to remain until he found out who it rightfully belonged to. It would have galled him no end to turn the money over to owlhoots.

  Prophet couldn’t see the man from his position atop the coach, but he heard a clinking sound as the man rattled the strongbox’s handle. A sudden blast caused the coach’s team as well as Prophet to lurch with a start. There was a heavy, metallic thud. The man to his right had shot open the hidden drawer and pulled out the strongbox.

  Prophet looked at the older man aiming the rifle at him. “If you gents’ll just identify yourselves, we could probably iron all this out. There wouldn’t be no cause for shootin’ irons or harsh words.”

  “Shut up!” Boss ordered.

  “Now, see?” Prophet said. “There wouldn’t be no need for that kinda talk!”

  “I know who he is, Boss,” said the man to Prophet’s left, pointing up at the bounty hunter. “That’s Delmer Cates. One of Creighton’s riders!”

  Prophet looked at the man who’d just wrongly identified him. “The hell I am!”

  “Cates, eh?” Boss said, curling his mustached lip back from his long, yellow front teeth. “Where’s the girl, Cates?”

  “I am not Delmer Cates!” Prophet yelled, incensed. “The name’s Prophet. Lou Prophet. I am not nor ever have been Delmer Cates. Wouldn’t know Mr. Cates from Adam’s off-ox!”

  “The money ain’t here, Boss!” The bellowing yell had risen from Prophet’s right, where he’d heard the heavy thud of the strongbox hitting the ground. When the man on that side backed away from the coach, Prophet saw him drawing both his pistols. “Strongbox is empty!”

  “Cates, you son of a bitch!” shouted the older gent.

  The rifle belched smoked and flames. Prophet had anticipated the bullet. He’d jerked sharply left just in time for the bullet to miss him by a hairsbreadth. He’d felt it curl the air off his right earlobe. A half second later, he heard it spang off a rock back along the trail behind him.

  Prophet snapped his own Winchester to his shoulder, cocking it, and fired just as the old gent’s black thoroughbred curveted sharply, causing Prophet’s bullet to cleanly miss the man and puff dust along the trail beyond him. The stage’s two lead horses loosed sharp whinnies and reared at the rifle blasts, scissoring their front hooves in the air above their heads.

  In the corner of his left eye, Prophet saw the man who’d called him Cates raise his own rifle. Prophet twisted around in the coach’s seat, levering another round into the Winchester, and hastily lined up his sights on the man bearing down at him.

  He fired one blink ahead of his opponent, his bullet punching through the left side of the man’s neck, causing the dead man’s rifle to swing forward of Prophet and send his own bullet into the upper-right chest of the man sitting his horse on the trail by the older gent.

  The man who’d taken the stray bullet yelped like a coyote caught in a trap. His horse whinnied and pitched.

  At the same time, the coach’s two lead horses slammed their front hooves back to the ground and wheeled sharply right. Since there was no brake securing the left-front wheel, the carriage sprang forward without resistance. Prophet flew backward, pivoting left, as men ahead of him and to his right shouted furiously and triggered lead into the air around him.

  The bounty hunter threw his left hand out to grab something with which to break his fall but clutched only air. That’s probably what saved him from taking one of the bullets still stitching the air around where he’d just been. He bounced off the coach’s left panel, twisting around to face the carriage itself, and fell nearly headfirst toward the ground.

  Chapter 15

  Prophet watched the trail slam toward him in a yellow-brown blur.

  He avoided a painful meeting with the backside of the front wheel by the width of a chin whisker but that did not mean his landing was without pain.

  He hit the ground on his right shoulder. His right temple followed his shoulder. And then all went gray and fuzzy, bells ringing in his ears. When his vision clarified, he saw a pair of glassy eyes staring at him.

  The eyes blinked once, twitched.

  They were the eyes of the fast-dying man Prophet had shot in the neck.

  Blood geysered from the hole in the man’s neck as he continued to stare in horror at Prophet, his body jerking convulsively, as though he were trying to fight off the devil tickling his toes.

  “Good luck,” Prophet groused, pushing himself onto hands and knees and looking around, wondering why bullets weren’t chewing into him.

  Then he saw why.

  The stage was barreling off to the south behind the runaway team. The three remaining ri
ders were galloping after it, firing their rifles from their saddles. Two were, that was. The older gent just now got his thoroughbred settled down and was galloping far to the rear of the other two, slapping his horse’s rump with his rein ends.

  In the chaos of the shooting and the pitching horses, they must not have seen Prophet tumble off the coach. He watched the stage and the three riders dwindle into the distance. He blinked and wagged his head, trying to shake the cobwebs from his brain. The riders wouldn’t be fooled for long, he had to assume. Soon, they’d realize their mistake and head back.

  His pulse quickening with the urgency of his predicament, Prophet looked around. Slight relief touched him. His Winchester lay only a few yards away. It, too, had tumbled out of the driver’s boot. The Richards was still hanging from his right arm, as he’d had it slung behind his back, as usual, when the bullets had started to fly.

  He might be on foot, but at least he was armed.

  Prophet pushed heavily to his feet. His neck and shoulder ached brutally. His right arm felt heavy and numb, his fingers tingling. He walked over, bent down with a grunt, feeling as though his lower spine were going to snap and poke through his battered hide, and scooped his Winchester out of a clump of buckbrush.

  He brushed off the rifle with his gloved right hand.

  He looked around. He knew from previous trips to the area that there was an ancient river canyon among the buttes rising in the north. He couldn’t see the cut from here, but he remembered it was only a half a mile or so from the trail.

  Casting a backward glance at where the stage and his pursuing attackers had disappeared, he began striding north. Limping, rather. His hip had taken a good bit of the tumble, and it squawked now like an injured dog.

  The hip loosened up a little the more he moved so that about fifty yards away from where he’d started, he was able to jog. It wasn’t a fast jog, but a slow one, and he still favored his right leg, but at least he wasn’t a sitting duck and he had a chance of making it to cover before the riders came back to finish him.

  He cast frequent quick glances over his shoulder. Ominously, it was still and quiet to the south. All he could see were rolling prairie and distant, cone-shaped buttes. The sun beat down.

  Ahead he could see only buttes and blond prairie grass for another five minutes of jogging. Then he saw the cut. It began as a thin, dark line—sort of like a giant black snake laid out on the ground ahead and slightly right. Prophet quickened his pace, cursing at the increased hitch in his gait.

  Ahead, the dark line grew wider until it became a broad, serpentine gash in the earth. The gash grew wider and wider as he approached. The far slope appeared, vertically streaked with erosions and pocked with large rocks and a few boulders.

  He stopped at the cut’s southern lip and found himself staring down at the deep ravine that some ancient river had carved through the prairie longer ago than Prophet could begin to imagine, to drain the Black Hills. The old canyon curved away to both sides of the aching, winded bounty hunter, meandering along the bases of several chalky, badly eroded, rock-strewn buttes on its south side.

  Where Prophet stood, the cut was about seventy yards wide, but he could see that its width varied widely to both the east and west.

  Distant hoof thuds sounded behind him. He whipped his head around to see the three riders galloping toward him from a quarter mile away, hunkered low over their horses’ necks.

  Prophet stepped over the lip of the ravine and hunkered down on the steeply declining slope. He doffed his hat, set it beside him, and snaked the barrel of his Winchester over the ravine’s tablelike edge. He rammed a fresh round into the chamber and aimed toward the men galloping toward him.

  They were spread out in a ragged line. He recognized the older gent by his high-crowned Stetson and his black thoroughbred. He lined up his sights on the bobbing, jerking image of the older gent.

  Cut off the head of the snake, kill the snake. He took up the slack in his trigger finger.

  The Winchester lurched in his hands. Roared. Flames lapped from the barrel.

  The older gent jerked back in his saddle, whipping up his reins.

  His horse slowed, curveted, bucked. The older gent tumbled out of his saddle with a yell that Prophet could hear above the rataplan of the other two riders, who continued racing toward the ravine. They raised their Winchesters. The long guns sprouted smoke and flames. The bullets thumped into the tableland near Prophet, pluming dust and ripping up grass as the reports reached his ears.

  Prophet winced as he racked another round, lined up his sights once more, and fired. The bullet sailed wide of its mark. The two riders checked down their mounts, slipped out of their saddles, lay belly down in the grass, and commenced firing at Prophet.

  The bullets thumped into the ground around him. One scratched a burn across his right cheek. He sucked a sharp breath through gritted teeth.

  He could maybe hold them off from here, but he was getting low on ammunition.

  Time to pull out . . .

  He pulled his head and rifle down into the canyon, grabbed his hat, and started moving down the slope. It was a steep decline. To keep from falling, he descended at an angle across the slope’s shoulder, holding his rifle in his right hand, gouging his heels into the chalky alkaline soil in which little grew except sparse patches of short, wiry yellow grass. From above he heard the shouts of his pursuers. They were running toward the canyon.

  Prophet quickened his pace. He was a sitting duck here on the slope with no cover. With each downward stride, his right hip felt as though a spike were being hammered into it. His neck was sore. It felt like a warm hand was gripping it, occasionally giving it a painful squeeze.

  “Crazy damn trip,” he told himself aloud, hearing three men shouting now on the rim. “Last stage to Jubilee, my ass. Last stage to hell, more like. And I ain’t even found Lola yet!”

  “There!” a man shouted from above.

  Prophet whipped a look over and above his right shoulder. A hatted head and pointing finger appeared on the lip. Prophet recognized the high-crowned Stetson of the older gent, whom Prophet had not put out of commission as he’d intended. Probably only winged him.

  The older gent angled a rifle down toward Prophet, who lurched into a run. The rifle cracked. The bullet screeched over Prophet’s left shoulder and gave a nasty squeal as it hammered into the floor of the canyon now about thirty yards below him, kicking up dust.

  Prophet lurched slightly with a start. His right boot got tangled up with the left one.

  He fell forward, hit the slope, and rolled.

  More rifles cracked above him. Bullets plunked into the slope around him.

  He rolled wildly, unable to break his fall. The Richards, slung over his right shoulder, beat him about the head and back. He’d dropped his rifle when he’d hit the slope, and it slithered down the slope behind him like a large, metallic snake bearing down on him.

  He struck the canyon floor with a heavy thud and a grunt, dust rising around him. His rifle slid down to smack him in the chest then fall to the canyon floor to his left.

  “This just ain’t my day,” Prophet said.

  Above him, the rifles continued to crack. Bullets continued to screech around him, thumping into the slope above or onto the canyon floor to his left. He looked up, grateful to see that the slope itself, which he was lying snug against the bottom of, shielded him from the shooters. As long as he didn’t lift his head more than a foot or stretch a body part out more than a foot to his left, he’d be all right.

  For now.

  He didn’t have long to savor his slight good fortune. While the shooting suddenly stopped, above him came the sounds of footsteps and a man’s grunts. Gravel clattered and dirt and sand made soft ticking sounds.

  Prophet glanced cautiously up over the cutbank, which had been eroded out of the bottom of the slope, to gaze up the incline. Two of the shooters were running toward him, following his own route across the canyon wall, loosing dirt and
gravel in their wakes, chaps flapping against their legs. Neither was the older gent. The two young firebrands were separated by about twenty yards.

  The nearer one was getting close to Prophet. Damn close.

  Prophet drew his head down beneath the cutbank.

  He grabbed the Richards, whose pummeling had left him further scratched, scraped, and bruised. He closed both hands around the gut-shredder, held it close against his chest, slowly thumbing one of the rabbit-ear hammers back to full cock.

  Above him, the grunts and boot thumps and spur chings grew louder. A stone tumbled down over the cutbank, dropped past his face to land on the canyon floor six inches off his left shoulder.

  Lou jerked to a sitting position, raising his shotgun.

  The man pursuing him stopped ten feet away, straight up the cutbank. His eyes snapped wide as they found Prophet and the savage-looking two-bore.

  “Dang!” the man screamed with a start, bringing up his Winchester.

  Prophet gave a grim half smile as he squeezed the Richards’s trigger.

  The buckshot tore into the man’s chest and flung him up and back against the canyon slope. He scrunched up his face, lost his hat, and dropped his rifle.

  As the man began to roll down the slope toward Prophet, dead or fast dying, the bounty hunter grabbed his Winchester and took off running down canyon, hearing the thump of the dead man’s body hitting the canyon floor where he himself had been lying only seconds before.

  “Son of a bitch!” bellowed the other man on the canyon wall.

  Prophet stopped and whipped around, sliding the Richards back behind him. The second man was near the bottom of the slope, still awkwardly hotfooting it down the canyon wall. Prophet raised his Winchester to his hip and fired three quick rounds.

  The man on the slope stumbled, fell, regained his feet, and kept coming, cursing.

  The older gent opened up from the canyon’s rim. The bullets hammered the canyon floor around Prophet. One blew his hat off. He wheeled again and, scooping the battered topper up off the ground with a curse, resumed his run down canyon. A couple more slugs plunked into the ground around him, one cracking into a sun-bleached chunk of ancient driftwood.