Stagecoach to Purgatory

by Peter Brandvold

  “You’re forgiven.”

  Prophet stood in the entrance to the dining room, quickly scanning the tables. There were only three customers—two together, one alone. None was either Louisa or Jonas Ford, or both together. For that he was grateful. He didn’t care to see either one of them again for a while. He wanted to make a clean break from Carson’s Wash.

  He turned to Dressler. “Have the judge and the other mucky-mucks from the county seat pulled in yet?”

  “Due in any time. Stage usually arrives from LaVerne between seven and eight in the morning. The rainstorms the past few nights have probably played hell with the trail, so who knows?”

  “Right.” Prophet started to walk into the dining room.

  “Everyone’s waitin’ on the stage, it seems.”

  Prophet stopped, half turned. A worm of unease turned in his belly. “What’s that?”

  With a grunt, Dressler heaved himself up off the floor and made his way over to the clock ticking inside a heavy wooden cabinet leaning against the lobby’s far wall, near the front doors. “You’re not the only one who’s been askin’ about the stage. A couple of my customers inquired not fifteen minutes ago.”

  “They didn’t happen to be part of the Lowry family, did they?”

  “I’m new in town, Mr. Prophet. I wouldn’t know the Lowrys from a bar of soap.”

  Prophet wouldn’t, either, but as his pulse quickened, he said, “Have they been around long?”

  “They were here all day yesterday, mostly holed up in two rooms upstairs. I brought up four bottles of whiskey and several platters of steak and beans. If I hadn’t known which rooms they were in, I could have followed the stench. They obviously have not made use of Mr. Taylor’s bathhouse—pity the poor Chinaman who washes our bed linens.”

  Dressler turned to Prophet and, expressionless, pinched his nose.

  “An older man and a half-dozen younger ones?”

  Dressler nodded as he climbed a chair, opened the clock’s glass door, and began polishing the inside of the window. “One older man and six younger ones. Out-of-work ranch hands, I ’spect. A surly lot.”

  Prophet’s heartbeat increased by a couple more notches. “Has anyone asked about me? Like, where they might find me?”

  “They haven’t asked me.”

  But they could have asked the night clerk. By now, word could easily have gotten around Carson’s Wash that Prophet had been holed up in the Stud. Handy and Gunderson might even have mentioned it themselves.

  Warning bells tolled in Prophet’s ears. He wasn’t sure what the bells were warning him about, exactly, but something told him to get back to the Five Card Stud pronto. He hurried to the door.

  “What the hell’s wrong?” Dressler said, scowling down from his chair.

  “I hope nothin’!”

  Prophet ran outside and retraced his footsteps back toward the Five Card Stud. He kept remembering the two riders who’d ridden past the break between the two abandoned buildings. They’d been heading toward the Stud, as well as the countryside. Why hadn’t they been on the street? The only reason you rode behind buildings like that, sticking to the back alleys, was if you didn’t want to be seen.

  When he hit the first cross street, Prophet broke into a run.

  He ran through an empty lot being used as a trash dump, around a lumberyard, and into the street that led north toward the Stud. He ran hard, holding the Richards in his right hand, the lanyard flopping against his thigh. He startled a mongrel sampling the trash outside a little Mexican eatery, closed at this hour. The dog barked and lunged for his ankles before turning tail and whining off into the brush.

  Prophet stopped in front of the Stud. All was quiet.

  Still, his heart was beating like a war drum, and he didn’t think it was because he was out of breath.

  He jogged around behind the place and stopped when he saw Alfredo Diego standing outside the cantina’s rear door. Diego wore a ratty red robe and a frayed sleeping sock on his head, the tail dangling to his shoulder. Barefoot, his eyes badly red-rimmed, he was smoking a quirley and tipping his head back to stare up at the building’s second story.

  An outside stairs, rickety and in need of paint, ran up the building’s rear wall to the door on the second floor. The door sagged about six inches open.

  When Diego saw Prophet, a look of extreme sheepishness instantly clouded the cantina proprietor’s face.

  Diego turned away abruptly, limped into the cantina, and closed the door behind him.

  “Dang,” Prophet rasped as he lunged toward the stairs.

  He took the steps three at a time, trying to ignore not only the crackling of the steps under his boots but the precarious and dizzying sway of the entire staircase. The contraption moaned like one of Diego’s plump whores, as though it were about to break loose from the cantina wall.

  Prophet gained the top of the stairs, jerked the door wide, and lunged into the building. He turned to his right. Two men were just then milling outside the door of the room in which Phoebe Dahlstrom was likely slumbering in hers and Prophet’s love-rumpled bed.

  The men were moving lightly on their feet, trying to be quiet.

  They each had a pistol drawn and cocked.

  Chapter 16

  One of the men in the hall raised a leg and started to thrust the heel of his right boot toward the door behind which Phoebe Dahlstrom slept.

  Prophet yelled, “Hold it!”

  The man lowered his leg.

  The men both swung toward Prophet, their lower jaws hanging in shock.

  The taller man yelled and raised his pistol.

  Prophet tripped the Richards’s right trigger, filling the hall with concussive thunder that seemed to lift the entire building off the ground for one fleeting second and then slam it back down. The shorter of the two men was picked up and thrown backward down the hall.

  The other danced around, triggering his pistol wildly as the widely scattered buck chewed into him.

  Prophet squeezed the Richards’s second trigger.

  The building leaped once more. So did the second man.

  He was swept back as though by a tornado. He landed atop his dead partner—probably his dead brother, if these were two Lowrys, and Prophet thought they were—and rolled three times before piling up against a rail post at the top of the stairs.

  Prophet ran down the hall.

  “Phoebe?” he called as he pushed open the door to his room.

  She stood on the far side of the bed, wrapped in a sheet. She stared in mute shock toward Prophet. Her voice was husky from sleep. “What in hell was that all about?”

  Prophet opened his mouth to speak but then closed it.

  Distant popping sounds rose from somewhere outside. The din sounded like a Fourth of July celebration. But it wasn’t the Fourth of July. Not even close.

  Horses screamed. A man shouted. More guns popped, and then there were the hiccupping, belching reports of a rifle.

  Another horse screamed. There was a crazy clattering sound.

  The cacophony was originating from the heart of town.

  The stage ...

  Prophet quickly broke the Richards open, plucked out the spent wads, and replaced them with fresh from the lanyard’s loops. He closed the Richards, slid the savage popper behind his shoulder.

  “Lou, what the hell is going on?” Phoebe asked, moving quickly around the bed.

  Prophet was heading for the door. “I think the Lowrys are hitting the stage!”

  “Oh no!” she gasped, cupping a hand to her mouth.

  “Stay here!”

  Prophet ran out of the room. He saw no reason to retrace his steps down the falling-down outside stairs when the front door was just as close to the main street. He leaped the carnage that was once two Lowry brothers and hurried down the stairs. He could still hear some gun reports, muffled by distance, but they were dwindling fast.

  Alfredo Diego stood behind his bar in the main drinking hall. He stared sullenly
toward Prophet as the bounty hunter strode toward him, kicking chairs out of his way.

  Diego was the only person in the place. The two whores were probably cowering in their rooms upstairs.

  “Sometime soon, Diego, you an’ me are gonna have us a talk about why you told those two scumbags which room was mine!”

  “They told me they’d burn the place!” Diego barked raspily in heavily accented Spanish.

  “Yeah, well, maybe now I’ll burn the place, you yellow-livered son of a bitch!”

  “You’re not welcome here no more, gringo!”

  The words reached Prophet from behind as he pushed out the front door and began running south along the street. The only sound now issuing from anywhere around town was the fervent barking of several dogs.

  Anxiety turned to ice the sweat basting Prophet’s buckskin tunic to his back as he ran harder, faster. He gained the main street and skidded to a stop, looking around. He swiveled his head toward the west, and his racing heart hiccupped twice.

  “Goddamnit!”

  He ran toward the town marshal’s office on the street before which half a dozen men lay strewn in bloody piles, as though they’d fallen from the high façades of surrounding buildings. Several townsmen were just now moving sheepishly out of the shops and saloons and walking tepidly toward the scene of what appeared to be a small, bloody massacre.

  One man lay writhing against the veranda steps. As Prophet approached the office, he glanced at the seven men on the ground out front of it. Two were dressed in dust-soaked trail garb. They were the stage driver and the shotgun messenger. The messenger’s coach gun lay near his outstretched hands that were still now in death. He’d taken a bullet through his left ear. His lips were stretched back from his teeth in a silent agony.

  The five others lay in a close group near the veranda, but they were just as bloody and just as dead as the other two. These five were dressed in suits. One gray-haired, gray-mustached, middle-aged man wore a five-pointed sheriff ’s badge. Another, younger man, dressed in a cheap suit, wore a deputy’s star. He was the only one of the dead men on the street who’d drawn a pistol.

  The Schofield still lay in his slack hand. The deputy had taken a bullet through his right cheek and another in his neck.

  They’d all been hit hard and fast, taken totally unexpectedly, it appeared.

  Groans rose from the man writhing with his back against the steps.

  “Jonas!” Prophet said, and dropped to a knee beside the marshal.

  “Lou!”

  “Take it easy, Jonas.”

  Prophet winced. Ford had been hit in the upper-left thigh and belly. He was losing blood from both wounds fast.

  Prophet glanced at the townsfolk, mostly shopkeepers, some still with brooms in their hands, closing in a ragged circle around the marshal’s office. “Someone fetch a sawbones!”

  “The sawbones is here!” called a man approaching from behind Prophet, to the east. He was a tall man hefting a black medical kit.

  As the medico sort of skip-walked toward Prophet, the bounty hunter looked around for his partner, dread biting him. He didn’t see Louisa anywhere. He wasn’t sure if that were good or bad.

  A hand closed around Prophet’s left forearm, and squeezed.

  “They got her, Lou,” Ford said, staring up through pain-racked eyes at Prophet. “They got Louisa.”

  Prophet’s heart hiccupped again. “The Lowrys?”

  Ford nodded. He chewed out a curse as he continued to writhe.

  He’d lost his hat, and his thick, wavy hair was mussed and dusty. “Christ—I hadn’t seen that coming. They were forted up around the office and when the stage pulled in and the sheriff and the judge and the others got out, the Lowrys came running and shooting. Mowed the judge and the sheriff down first, then the deputy and the county attorney and the prosecutor, Mossman. Louisa ran off the veranda, returning lead, but one of the Lowrys clipped her with a bullet and ran her down with his horse. Knocked her unconscious. When they busted Butters out of his cell, they threw Louisa over the back of one of the horses, and they all busted tail out of here!”

  “Which way’d they head?”

  “East,” said the doctor, dropping to a knee beside Prophet.

  Prophet looked east, beyond where the town straggled off into the sagebrush and cactus and scattered mesquites. He could see the stagecoach lying on its side maybe a hundred yards beyond town. The team must have spooked at the gunfire and bolted. The horses had obviously torn themselves free of the hitch and dumped the coach.

  “Jonas!” The woman’s worried exclamation had come from behind Prophet. He glanced over his shoulder to see Phoebe run out from the far side of a women’s clothing shop. She was dressed in her skirt and blouse from the night before. Her hair was still mussed from love and sleep. “Jonas, my God—what happened?”

  Ford looked at the young woman and opened his mouth to speak. No words came out. He froze, staring at her, the light slowly leaving his eyes.

  Prophet’s innards clenched. He’d seen that look too many times during the war and afterward.

  Ford’s lips moved. In a barely audible rasp, he said, “I’m sorry, Phoebe. I’m sorry . . . I never measured up . . . to the man . . . you wanted me to be. A man . . . like the General.”

  Ford’s eyes rolled back in their sockets. His head dropped back against the veranda steps, tipped slightly to one side. His eyelids drooped. His body fell still.

  “Oh, Jonas!” Phoebe cried, and lowered her head over the marshal’s chest, sobbing.

  Prophet rose to his feet. It was as though a spring had been tripped in his body. He staggered backward, mind reeling from grief and exasperation. He hadn’t realized until that moment just how much he had liked Jonas Ford. Suddenly, he felt foolish and contemptible for the jealousy that had racked him.

  Ford had been a good, decent man. Now he was dead. His blood soaked the veranda steps.

  Phoebe sobbed over him. It was as though she felt many of the same things Prophet was feeling.

  Adding to Prophet’s horror was the fact that the Lowrys had Louisa.

  Prophet swept his hat from his head, ran his hands through his hair. He had to settle down. He had to organize his thoughts, figure out how he was going to run the Lowrys down and retrieve his partner.

  “Now, look what you did!”

  The deep, pugnacious voice jerked Prophet’s head west.

  George Hill and his four toughs, one with a white plaster bandage over his nose, stood in the middle of the street, ten yards away. The shopkeepers were all moving out of Hill’s way, cautious casts to their gazes.

  Hill stared down at his daughter, sobbing over Jonas Ford.

  Phoebe turned to him, her tear-filled eyes bright with grief.

  “You got all these men here killed because you wanted to see your old man hang. Ha! Everything you do turns out just like you turned out, Phoebe.” Hill bent slightly forward at the waist, his fat, crude face puffed viciously. “Post stupid, poison mean, and a whore to boot!”

  Phoebe rose from Ford’s slack body and lunged, screaming, toward Hill. Prophet grabbed her around the waist, spun her around.

  “I’ll kill him!” Phoebe screamed. “Let me kill him!”

  “Hold on, girl,” Prophet said gently in her ear, holding her taut against him. “He ain’t worth it. He’s done everything to you he can . . . unless you let him do more.”

  “God, I want so much to kill him!” she sobbed against Prophet’s chest.

  “I know you do.” Prophet glared at Hill over the young woman’s right shoulder. “I don’t blame you a bit. But you gotta let him go. You’re better than he is. He’s nothin’. He’s dirt. Nothin’ but dirt,” he bit out tightly through clenched teeth.

  “Dirt, is it?” Hill said, glowering at his daughter sobbing in Prophet’s arms. Turning slowly away, he said, “She’s just like her mother. Miss High and Mighty. I never could do enough for either one of ’em.”

  He started walking aw
ay, his bruisers turning as though they were attached to the same hidden rope as Hill was. He snapped his head back to shout, “That girl never did have one nice word to say to me. Not one nice word . . . after all I done for her!”

  Her voice breaking, Phoebe screamed, “You killed everything good in me when you killed my mother, you brutal hornswoggler!”

  She sobbed against Prophet’s chest.

  “What the hell’s goin’ on?”

  Prophet looked over Phoebe’s head to see Melvin Handy and Lars Gunderson approaching from the corner of a cross street to the northwest. They both had the red eyes and pasty complexions of badly hungover men. Prophet supposed he himself appeared the same way. They looked to have just rolled out of bed. Handy was knotting a bandanna around his neck and yawning.

  He and Gunderson both stopped at nearly the same time and looked around, wide-eyed, at the strewn dead men.

  Gunderson whistled. “What . . . the . . . ?”

  “Where’ve you two been?” Prophet asked.

  “Sleepin’,” Handy said, tightly, glaring at Prophet. “Like you, we had a long night.” He looked at Phoebe, and his expression instantly turned to concern. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Take her,” Prophet said, gently shoving Phoebe into Handy’s arms.

  “Where are you goin’?” Handy called.

  Prophet didn’t respond. He glanced once more at Jonas Ford slumped in death against the steps, surrounded by muttering townsmen, including the doctor.

  He cast his gaze east, beyond the overturned stagecoach.

  Louisa.

  He cursed and headed for the livery barn.

  Chapter 17

  Prophet had led Mean out of his stall and was throwing the saddle onto the mount’s back when he saw through the open double doors Phoebe, Handy, and Gunderson approach the barn. The woman’s face was tear streaked but her eyes were hard now, determined.

  So was her stride.

  “We’re going to help you track them,” she said, walking past Prophet and down the hay-strewn alley between the stalls in which horses blew and fidgeted.