The Devil's Winchester

by Peter Brandvold

  “My head hurts,” she said, sobbing, pressing her fingers into her temples.

  “I don’t doubt that a bit. That’s a nasty gash and a good-sized goose egg. Easy, now.” Prophet stepped closer and turned so that he was beside her, his own back to the shed wall. Very slowly and gently wrapping an arm around her quivering shoulders, he said, “Come on, now. Let’s get you back close to the fire, get you warm. You shouldn’t be out here.”

  “I woke up and looked around,” she said, no longer sobbing but in a pinched, anguished voice. “I didn’t realize where I was.” She let Prophet lead her around the front of the shed, heading toward the hotel. “At first I thought I was dreaming. Then I tried to remember who I was and what I was doing there in that room with that man chained to the chair, and I couldn’t remember anything!”

  She broke down again, the tears flowing freely, resembling quicksilver now in the moonlight angling out around the potbellied cloud.

  “Even now you don’t remember?” Prophet asked her as they continued making their way to the hotel.

  Shaking her head, she continued crying.

  “You don’t know, mister?” The girl stopped and looked up at him with miserable beseeching. “You don’t know who I am?”

  Prophet felt helpless. The girl’s own anguish was catching. He couldn’t imagine how lost she must feel, not only clueless as to where she was and what she was doing here but as to who she was. He didn’t for a second suspect that she was acting. Her desperation was poignant and real.

  Prophet shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know who you are. Let’s go on inside and get you warm, and I bet it’ll come back to you real soon, just as soon as the cobwebs clear.”

  He led her up the hotel porch. Louisa waited by the front door, wrapped in a couple of wool blankets and wearing her boots and hat. “What is it?” she asked. “What happened?”

  The girl stopped in front of her. They were roughly the same height, almost the same build. Prophet guessed the unknown girl was two or three years younger than Louisa, which, as he’d figured, would make her seventeen or eighteen.

  “You don’t know, either?”

  Louisa’s moonlit eyes slid from the girl to Prophet and back again. “Don’t know what?”

  “Who I am?”

  The girl continued sobbing. Prophet led her inside, sharing a perplexed look with Louisa, then ushered her across the room and back to the couch where she’d been lying before.

  “What’s goin’ on?” Blanco said from his floor seat against the post. He ran a hand across his whiskey-damp, colorless chin whiskers that added to his resemblance of a human billy goat. He was working on his bottle again. “She see a mouse or somethin’?”

  Prophet eased the girl onto the sofa. “Shut up, Blanco.”

  “Who’s he?” the girl asked, frowning at the gray-eyed outlaw, who was slumped back against his post, uncorked bottle in one hand.

  Blanco looked at her drunkenly and arched his brows. “What’s the matter, Mary Louise? Don’t you remember your old Blanco?”

  The girl stared at him.

  “Sure, you remember,” Blanco said. “You didn’t hit your head all that hard—now, did you?” He chuckled. “Come on. Jig’s up. Quit pretendin’. Ole Proph here don’t look much smarter than a wagonload of three-cent bricks, but he ain’t that stupid.”

  The girl continued to stare at the outlaw. Prophet shuttled his gaze between them, apprehension rippling along his spine. Louisa had come into the saloon now, too, and she stood near the table littered with cards and coins, frowning curiously as she held her blankets closed across her chest.

  The girl’s voice was tremulous, weak. “Do you know me?”

  “Sure, I know you. You’re Mary Louise Lockhart. You’re from Trinidad, New Mexico, and you done rode with me and the boys out here to Nugget Town after the robbery. You got tired of bein’ a whore, though you were a right fine one—sure enough.” Blanco laughed. “You were holding our horses in the alley across the street from the bank. When we burst outta there, six-guns pop-pin’ like Mex fireworks on All Saints’ Day, you hustled ’em into the street for us. You an’ me”—he grinned lasciviously—“was ridin’ double.”

  The girl looked stricken, horrified, as she stared at Blanco.

  “Forget him,” Prophet said, squatting in front of the girl, placing a hand on her knee. “Don’t listen to him. He’s bullshitting you.”

  “Am I?”

  “Shut up, Blanco.”

  “How could I be riding with you?” the girl asked.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re ugly.” She shook her head slowly. “You’re ugly bad. Mean and stupid. A killer. I wouldn’t ride with the likes of you.” She looked at Prophet, whom she seemed to be trusting. “Would I?”

  Blanco scowled with mock indignation. “That’s no way to talk. No way to talk at all, Mary Louise. Now, I admit I ain’t the best-lookin’ fella right now, on account of this trail dust and three-day growth of beard. But, hell, give me a bath—”

  “Shut up, Blanco,” Louisa said.

  Blanco cast his look of manufactured indignation at Louisa flanking his right shoulder, then turned back to the girl. He showed his chipped crooked teeth as he grinned, pale, sun-mottled cheeks dimpling. “Speakin’ of baths ... you used to like to take ’em with me, Mary Louise. Surely you remember that?”

  The girl grimaced, appalled, and drew her shoulders in. Louisa walked over to Blanco, drew her right foot back, then hammered the toe of that boot into his rib cage. Blanco yelped, recoiling sideways from the blow and pressing his arm against his ribs. “You didn’t have no call to do that, you—!”

  Staring up at Louisa, seeing the hard, threatening look on her stony face, Blanco cut himself off. He turned away from her and squeezed his arm to his side, groaning and cursing under his breath.

  “Any more out of you, and I’ll lay you out with my pistol butt,” Louisa warned him.

  She walked over to the sofa and placed a hand on Prophet’s shoulder. When he’d gone over to the table and sat down with a sigh, pouring himself a drink, Louisa removed one of her blankets from her shoulders and draped it over the mystery girl, who sat slumped on the sofa’s edge, staring at Blanco, likely wondering how much of what he’d said, if any of it, was true.

  As Prophet sipped a shot glass of whiskey, he wondered the same thing.

  “I don’t even know my name,” the girl said, looking down. “I haven’t the foggiest idea where I got those boots. I don’t even remember putting them on.”

  “Don’t think about it anymore,” Louisa said. “After a long night’s rest, you’ll likely remember everything. It’ll be a bright, fresh new day. Your family’s probably up on one of the ridges around here, waiting for you. We’ll find them.”

  The girl looked at the blond bounty hunter, narrowing her eyes. “What do you think I’m doing here alone?”

  Louisa smiled and shook her head. “We’ll find out.”

  “It’s a very lonely feeling, not knowing where you come from.” The girl’s eyes were clear, but tears streaked her cheeks. “I got no memory of anything. I don’t even know what I had for dinner. I’ve lost my mind.”

  “Memory’s not such a terrible thing to lose.” Louisa drew the girl’s head down against her shoulder, smoothing her hair back from her left ear. “Sometimes I wish I’d lose mine.”

  6

  THE UNKNOWN GIRL had trouble falling asleep. She was restless, tossing her head and sighing.

  The physical as well as emotional pain of not knowing where or who she was must have been like the cruelest form of Indian torture, Prophet knew. He tried to find something amongst his possibles to give her some relief from the throbbing pain, but it was Louisa who found some tea amongst her own gear.

  They set a small kettle of water to boil while Blanco, passed out drunk once more, snored deeply with his chin on his chest. When the water boiled, Louisa steeped the tea, then poured it into a tin cup, to which Pr
ophet added a jigger of whiskey. The girl took the cup in her hands and drank, not curling her nose at the snake venom that Prophet had bought in a dusky little saloon in Socorro, when they’d passed through the town several days ago.

  The detail did not go unnoticed by either Prophet or Louisa. The girl had obviously imbibed before. What this meant, however, neither could have said. But it was the little details that would eventually add up and draw a clearer picture about who the girl was. Or, if not who she was, then what she was like.

  Could they trust her? Prophet had found her with a loaded pistol. He didn’t think Blanco had been telling the truth, only taunting them as well as the poor girl herself about a possible alliance. But there was a part of Prophet that wasn’t sure, and he could tell from a few dark, questioning looks from Louisa that his partner wasn’t sure, either.

  The girl may have imbibed before, but she hadn’t made it a habit, as the whiskey and tea went to work on her before she’d consumed half the toddy. When she’d drifted off, Louisa drew the blanket up tight around her, then banked the fire.

  “You go on to bed,” Prophet told her. “I’ll sit up, keep an eye on things.”

  “Cold upstairs without you.” Louisa sat down in a chair across the poker table from Prophet. “I’ll snooze here. The sun will be up in a couple of hours anyway.”

  Prophet was sitting back in his chair, thoughtfully rolling a cigarette in his large, brown, callused fingers. “How you wanna play it?”

  “The girl?”

  “Yeah, the girl. We already know what to do with Blanco. Box him up purty for the hangman.”

  Louisa poured what was left of the tea from the smoking kettle into her fire-blackened tin cup and took the cup in both her hands as though to warm them. “She must be from around here—don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Meaning?”

  Prophet stuck the quirley between his lips, fired a stove match to life on his thumbnail. “Meaning I’ll try to back-track her come daylight, see if I can see how she entered them shrubs. If she didn’t ride in with Blanco, she must have a horse around here somewhere. Unless she lives here for some reason, all by herself.”

  “Even then, she’d likely have a horse.”

  Prophet touched the match flame to the quirley, puffing smoke. “I’ll look around.”

  “And if you don’t find anything?”

  Prophet blew out the match with a smoke puff, drawing deeply on the cigarette. “Then I reckon we take her back to Corazon. Closest town around. Someone there will surely know her.”

  Louisa sipped her tea and looked at the girl curled on her side beneath the blanket, flanked by the popping fire. “And if she really was with Blanco’s bunch ...”

  “Someone from town’ll know. They’ll have seen her, most like. Metalious holes up not far from here.”

  Louisa turned to look across the table at Prophet, keeping her voice low. “What if she was?”

  “Then we do with her what we do with Blanco.” Prophet let smoke dribble from his nostrils and turned to parry Louisa’s gaze. “Bein’ a scared little girl don’t make her innocent of what she took part in earlier.”

  “Might have taken part in.”

  Prophet shuttled his gaze back to the girl asleep on the sofa, his hard bounty hunter’s eyes not betraying the conflict inside him. “All right.”

  Prophet and Louisa dozed in their chairs and rose at dawn the next morning. While Prophet rode out, trying to back-track the girl from the shrubs he’d found her in, Louisa made tea for her and the girl and tossed Blanco a couple of pieces of jerky for breakfast.

  Prophet’s mission ended disturbingly.

  Judging by the scuffmarks that disappeared in the snag, the girl had come from the direction of the saloon. He saw what he thought were tracks the size of her boots near the saloon’s back door, though it was hard to tell as the ground there was rocky. He looked around but could find no other clear sign. Most of the boot prints were overlaid or wiped out entirely by what may have been a brief sprinkle a few hours before he and Louisa had arrived in Nugget Town. There was no one to track from the saloon, much less back to wherever she had originally come from.

  An hour later, Prophet had saddled Louisa’s and Blanco’s horses. He’d also saddled a mount for the girl. There was little to do but bring her back to Corazon and see if someone could identify her. Prophet hoped she was some innocent daughter of a desert-dwelling family, either prospectors or jackleg ranchers, and not part of Blanco’s bunch.

  She seemed innocent enough. A cute kid with a good heart. Could a person forget how to act hardened or depraved?

  Prophet had ordered Blanco into his saddle and was finishing tightening the latigo strap on the girl’s horse when she and Louisa walked out of the saloon. The sun was climbing, and the western ridges were silhouetted against the blossoming, buttery glow. There was a chill in the air, and Louisa wore her heavy, striped serape and buckskin gloves against it.

  The girl wore her brush jacket with a brown wool blanket draped over her shoulders. Her pixielike, pug-nosed features with large, dark brown eyes and a light spray of freckles across her suntanned though fair-complected cheekbones appeared slightly gaunt, with a white, pinched look of pain around her mouth.

  Mostly, she looked worried.

  Louisa had told her where they were headed; likely she was wondering herself if she would be recognized in Corazon and was facing the prospect of learning who she was with trepidation.

  The night’s rest had done nothing to bring back her memory.

  “Well, good-mornin’, Mary Alice,” Blanco said as Louisa led the girl to her horse. “How’d ya sleep? Or don’t you remember?”

  The girl scowled at him with unfeigned derision.

  “I thought it was Mary Louise,” Louisa said.

  “So it is,” Blanco said. “I was just checkin’ to see if you were on the mark today, Louisa. You don’t mind if I call you Louisa, do you? Seein’ as how close we’ve been an’ all.”

  Louisa ignored the remark as she turned the piebald toward the girl.

  “If you haven’t got the drift yet,” Prophet told Blanco, sliding his rifle into his saddle boot, “let me give you one last piece of advice that might just keep you from singin’ soprano the rest of your life, short as it may be.” He grinned darkly up at the outlaw leader whose wrists were cuffed and tied to his saddle horn. “Don’t fuck with my partner.”

  Blanco looked at Louisa, who strode past him without returning his gaze. “Damn,” he said to Prophet. “She’s way too purty to be so mean.”

  Prophet sighed as he reined his horse away from the hotel, the east side of which was bathed in golden sunshine while the rest remained in shadow. He booted Mean and Ugly back out of the ghost town the way he and Louisa had come, his partner hanging back to ride drag behind Blanco, the girl flanking Prophet.

  She’d swung easily up into the saddle, as though she was well accustomed to horses. She was riding well also—straight-backed, light-butted, and with a light hand on the reins. These were automatic things she didn’t need to remember. They were ingrained in her. Her rough-hewn range garb and suntan made none of that surprising. And her hands, Prophet had noticed, were not a town girl’s hands. Wherever she was from, she worked hard, and mostly outside. She’d worked a water pump plenty and likely split wood.

  He continued to think about her as they rode down out of the rocky apron of the No-Waters. There was no need to push the horses as it was an easy day’s ride back to Corazon, which sat nestled between the No-Waters and the San Mateos.

  As they rode, Prophet and Louisa kept a close eye on the terrain around them, as bushwhackings in this country were common. From Socorro westward to the Mogollon Rim in Arizona Territory was prime outlaw country, where badmen of every stripe outran posses and lawmen and disappeared in the No-Waters, the San Mateos, in the Blade Range slightly south, or on the Plains of Saint Augustine farther north.

  It b
eing prime outlaw country made it a lucrative hunting ground for bounty hunters. That’s what had brought Prophet and Louisa up here from Las Cruces, after they’d run down a passel of train robbers and hung around to watch the cuffed and shackled hard cases led up onto a gallows and dropped through trapdoors with a gunlike pop of snapping necks.

  Afterward, there’d been a celebration to rival the annual Fourth of July festivities in Cheyenne.

  “Hey, did you two bury Junior on your way through?” Blanco asked.

  “Why should we have buried him?” Louisa said from the rear of the string. “He was your partner.”

  “Just wonderin’.” Blanco was looking around curiously. “I think this is where we left him.”

  “It is.” Prophet checked Mean and Ugly down and looked off into the brush beyond the mesquite near which they’d found Junior Pope with a bullet through his forehead. “Nature’s been treatin’ him no worse than you did.”

  Blanco drew up beside Prophet and followed the bounty hunter’s gaze to where a carcass clad in Junior Pope’s torn, bloody clothes lay nearly concealed in the mountain mahogany and Spanish bayonet. Deep scuff marks showed where the bobcat—Prophet had seen the sharp-nailed tracks when he’d first ridden up—had dragged Junior off into the brush.

  Judging by the several sets of overlaid coyote tracks mingling with those of the bobcat, there’d been a dustup over the carrion. The bobcat had likely won out and begun dining on Junior in earnest.

  In the morning quiet there was the buzzing of flies that showed in a foggy dark cloud over the glistening carcass.

  “Nature,” Blanco said, scowling at the remains of his partner. “You can have it.”

  “Someone’s gotta clean up our messes.” Prophet glanced back at Louisa and the girl, both staring into the brush. Louisa was stone-faced. She’d seen plenty of death before. More than her fair share. The mystery girl scowled in revulsion. There was no telling how much she’d witnessed of the gang’s doings.