“What?” the young man asked dully, stretching his lips back from a mess of yellow, crooked, tobacco-rimed teeth. Unlike his uncle’s, his eyes were brash, insolent. “You paid two bits—three buckets for three bits.”
“Yes, but you made no mention of how cold the water would be.”
Louisa bent down to drop a hand into the water from which faint steam snakes curled. A scuttling sound rose to her left, and she stayed her hand. Catching movement out the corner of her left eye, she straightened suddenly, palming one of her two pearl-butted Colts that jutted up above her poncho, and wheeled toward the cabin’s far left corner.
There was a twitch of a short, cordlike tail.
Louisa’s Colt barked once. The rat screamed as it was separated from its tail. The Colt barked again and the rat turned a somersault beneath the chair. The third shot tore the creature in half and left both bloody pieces fluttering like yellowed paper in a trash-strewn alley.
Smoke wafted, rife with the smell of cordite.
Junior had scuttled well back out of Louisa’s way and clamped his hands over his ears, lips stretched back from his teeth as he stared at the quivering rat beneath the chair.
Louisa spun her smoking Colt on her finger, one of her few frivolous indulgences, and dropped it smoothly into its holster. “I hope he wasn’t a pet.”
Junior looked at her as though he’d just found a bobcat in the room, and slowly lowered his hands from his head. But it was his father who yelled from the front of the bathhouse, “What in tarnation?”
Junior echoed the exclamation though from him it was little louder than a hoarse whisper.
“You’d do to keep your bathhouse free of rats, Junior. Men might not mind but most women with half a decent upbringing will. Now go fetch another bucket of water—hot water—and I won’t demand my money back.”
Junior looked at her well-displayed guns and backed out of the room with a constipated expression. He returned with two more steaming buckets. He dumped one into the tub and left the other on the bench beside Louisa’s saddlebags.
“Here’s an extry bucket of hot water.” Junior sidestepped to the door with the empty bucket. “It’s on the house.”
“Thank you, Junior,” Louisa said as the blanket curtain fell over the doorway as Junior’s boots thumped off down the hall. “No peeping!”
Louisa quickly undressed. It was Indian summer, and while the front of the bathhouse was warm and humid from the big steam pots, the washroom was cool. Carefully piling her clothes on the bench—she’d turn them over to Junior later for laundering—she grabbed her own soap, a wood-handled brush, and a towel from her war bag, and stepped into the tub.
She lathered the brush with the soap and went to work, scrubbing her face and the back of her neck and then her shoulders, arms, and breasts. When she’d washed her hair, she leaned over the tub to dunk her head in the extra bucket of water, then stood up and washed her legs, privates, and feet. She took her time, enjoying the feel of the brush against her skin that hadn’t been cleaned since she and Prophet had left Las Cruces.
When she was done scrubbing her feet, she ran the brush across her perpetually saddle-sore buttocks then spent an equal amount of time on her breasts, rubbing the lavender-scented soap into them, pushing them up high beneath her chin.
Ah, that felt good. All that sweat and grime washing away.
Of course, a good river bath would have been better, because she wouldn’t be soaking in her own filth. But this time of year most of the rivers were cold. There was nothing like the feel of a good, hot bath with soap you could work into a heavy lather, really open up and scour the pores. Besides, she’d wash the dirty water off later, with the extra bucket she’d only used for her hair.
She was about to sit back down in the tub when she heard a slight rustling sound.
She followed the faint metallic scratching beneath the chair where the dead rat lay. Louisa frowned, squinting to see better in the shadows. Suddenly, her mouth opened in shock, and her lower jaw dropped. A half second later the small, round mirror that had been sticking up out of the rat hole and reflecting orange light from the slotted windows up near the ceiling dropped back into the notch.
Rage burned like acid through Louisa’s veins. Automatically, she reached for her shell belt and two Colts coiled beside the tub. She’d nearly lifted one of the revolvers out of its holster when she stopped. Turning back to the hole, where she could now hear the muffled sounds of heavy breathing, she narrowed one eye devilishly.
“Junior ...” she muttered.
Just a cow-headed kid. Probably outside the washroom selling peeks at his comely blond client to his dull-witted friends. Blasting them all with her .45s might be a little severe. Besides, they’d probably never seen the likes of Louisa before. Maybe a more appropriate punishment would be to make their little hearts shrivel with insatiable lust.
She’d make them suffer for their voyeuristic sins.
She straightened with the extra bucket in her hands, and poured it over her head. The soap and water sluiced off her willowy frame, and her wet, naked body glistened in the light slanting through the window slots.
Again, she lathered the brush and then, more slowly this time, repeated the scrubbing she’d given herself before. In no time, she heard the snick-snick from beneath the chair. She’d turned her back on the hole as she massaged her taut, round buttocks; now she cast a furtive glance over her shoulder.
The mirror was back.
It jerked back and forth as Junior or one of his customers adjusted it from outside. On the other side of the wall near the hole, she heard a boy groan. Then he chuckled.
One of the boys shushed the other and there was a soft wooden thud as one brushed the bathhouse wall. They’d obviously dug a hole beneath the floor and were using the rat hole to snake up a mirror-rigged spyglass. They probably weren’t seeing much of Louisa, but it was likely as much as they could handle.
Louisa took her time with the second soaping, sort of dancing around in the bathwater, kicking, splashing, humming, and tossing her wet hair around her shoulders. She spent some extra time caressing her breasts, rolling her nipples between her thumbs and index fingers, groaning and sighing erotically. From outside she heard several more groans and a snicker.
One of the boys smacked another. Someone cursed.
Louisa smiled.
Then she rinsed again, and by the time she’d pulled on clean clothes from her war bag—another wool skirt and a fringed buckskin blouse—the mirror had disappeared from beneath the chair. The show was over.
“I’ll have these laundered and delivered to the French Hotel, though what’s French about it I have no idea,” Louisa told Talbot, the bathhouse proprietor, as she set the bundle atop his plank-board desk.
Talbot, busy feeding wood to the black iron range on top of which two copper kettles boiled, nodded. Louisa plunked her money down beside the clothes and went out. Junior was coming around the corner of the bathhouse. The boy had a loosely rolled cigarette between his crooked, rotten teeth.
He glanced at Louisa devilishly, giving her a lewd up-and-down.
She stepped in front of him suddenly. Some crumpled bills poked up out of the breast pocket of his coveralls. Quickly, she plucked the bills from his pocket.
“Hey!” Junior objected. He reached for the money but missed.
Louisa unfolded the three one-dollar bills that were sticky from chocolate candy and licorice.
“Three whole dollars,” Louisa observed. “A dollar a peep?”
Junior’s face turned brick red.
“Flattering.” Louisa stuffed the bills back in the kid’s pocket and strode away.
11
A LOW GROWL sounded in the brush on the right side of the trail.
The growl grew shrill until it became a snarl. A creature yipped, and there followed the light thumps of four padded feet, which dwindled gradually as the creature moved away.
“Wait here.”
Prop
het reined Mean and Ugly to a halt on the trail that he and Rose had been following out from Corazon and swung down from the saddle. He left his double-barreled shotgun hanging from his saddle horn and shucked the Winchester ’73 from its boot, then tramped off into the brush, weaving around clumps of buckbrush, sage, and mountain mahogany.
He came to the lip of a shallow but steep-sided dry wash. A cow lay on the wash’s gravelly bottom.
A gray coyote had its head buried in the animal’s rear, grinding its back feet into the gravel as it tugged and pulled. It waved its bushy gray tail like a flag.
Suddenly, the coyote jerked its head out of the gaping cavity and looked at Prophet. Its face was a bizarre blood mask. Its yellow-brown eyes were fierce, but they quickly grew wary. The animal must have expected to see a competing member of its own species, and had been ready to scare it off as it had the other.
The smell all around was like that of a filled privy pit. The beast’s blood-caked nostrils expanded and contracted. Prophet wrinkled his own nose against the stench and lowered the Winchester, off-cocking the hammer.
A second coyote could be seen weaving off through the brush toward a drab rise of hills capped with gold as the sun nudged the western horizon. The nearest coyote gave an angry moan, then wheeled and slinked up the wash’s far side and disappeared into a thick patch of tangled juniper and spindly, leafless shrubs, likely to see what the rifle-wielding stranger would do—remain and dine on the brown-and-black heifer that had likely been dead three or four days, or light a shuck.
“It’s all yours, amigo,” Prophet said softly, looking around, then letting his glance slide northeastward where the powdery white ribbon of the main trail curled on up to the log cabin dug into the side of a low, brown bluff about two hundred yards beyond.
A concerned scowl on his face, he walked back to the trail where Rose sat on her claybank. “Coyotes?”
Prophet nodded.
Rose turned her head forward to study the dugout cabin. “Funny there’d be coyotes so close to the ranch yard.”
Prophet agreed though he didn’t say anything. Keeping the Winchester in his hand, he stepped into the saddle and, feeling uneasy, booted the dun forward.
They followed the trail over several gravelly knolls, spying no more cows either dead or alive though dry gray pies as well as the close-cropped needle grass told Prophet there’d been a herd in here. Where were the rest of them now? This late in the year, Tawlin—if he were any kind of stockman at all—would be keeping them close to home.
And keeping the coyotes away.
As they approached the ranch/mine claim’s entrance portal—two peeled logs with another one nailed between them about twenty feet above the trail, with several sets of deer antlers adorning the crossbar as well as the Circle T brand—Prophet pulled back on the dun’s reins. He held up his Winchester for Rose to stop as well.
An Apache arrow jutted from the cross plank, from the dead center of the Circle T brand.
Prophet looked toward the cabin and the shabby stone barn a hundred feet beyond. Two dilapidated, partially charred corrals angled off both sides of the stone barn, both gates drawn wide and tumbleweeds blown up around them. The ground around both the barn and the front of the cabin was scorched black. The cabin’s door gaped, the log frame around it also black though it was hard to see anything clearly in the quickly fading light.
“You best wait here,” Prophet said and galloped through the portal.
“No!”
He heard the clomps of the girl’s horse behind him as he charged into the hard-packed yard and dismounted in front of the cabin. There was the smell of charred wood, and more arrows bristled from the door frame as well as from the gray wooden frames of the two front windows.
The ground revealed few tracks—dust and rain had obliterated them. The Apaches had attacked the Circle T a good while ago, but still Prophet racked a shell into his Winchester’s breech as he stepped through the open door.
The fire had gutted the place, so it resembled little more than a burned trash heap. There was a small box range with charred pots on the floor around it. The heavy puncheon table angled down into a mound of gray ash from which part of one leg still stood. Hides hung from two walls in tattered, burned ribbons.
Prophet stood looking around for signs of the dead Tawlin family, holding his Winchester low across his thighs. It was doubtful that anyone was in here. This had happened several weeks ago, but there’d still be the unmistakable odor of rotting flesh if bodies remained.
Running footsteps sounded behind him. He turned as Rose ran up to the door, holding one hand to her bandaged, aching head. “Are they ...?”
“I don’t think so.”
Rose walked slowly into the cabin, looking around. Prophet knew what she was thinking. Had this been her home? Hard to tell now, but maybe something here, the layout of the place, would jog her memory.
Leaving her alone in the cabin, he walked outside and scoured the other buildings—there was only the barn and what appeared to be a small, sun-silvered log bunkhouse. No bodies in the yard. No blood, either. Good signs. Maybe the Tawlins had made it out of here alive, sought sanctuary at a neighboring ranch or mine claim.
Prophet was looking in one of the windows of the burned out stone barn when Rose walked up behind him.
“How long ago, do you think?” she asked.
“I don’t know. A month. Maybe a little longer, or a little less. Those arrows are pretty sun beat.”
He turned to her. Her eyes were stricken and yet there remained some hope in them.
“They got away, didn’t they?” Her eyes grew stricken again as her thoughts shifted darkly. “Or were taken ...?”
“Doubt it. Coyoteros wouldn’t have taken any prisoners. They’d have no need. The Comanch—they would have taken the boy, maybe your mo ... or the woman who lived here. This is Apache country, though. Coyotero fletching on the arrows. The Comanche rarely stray this far west.”
He was walking around the yard now, casting his gaze in all directions. The trail seemed to end here at the ranch-stead. Only rough hills beyond. He could see the ravine of a creek snaking around behind the place from the southeast and some mine tailings. That must be where Tawlin had his gold claim.
Since the trail ended here, there would be few visitors. That’s probably why word of the attack hadn’t yet reached Corazon, the closest town. Which probably meant no one had survived it. No point in sharing that bit of reasoning with Rose yet.
Prophet walked toward the bunkhouse on the yard’s north edge, hunkered beneath a tall cottonwood and obscured by rocks and brush. It was built of hand-adzed logs and boasted a roof of tightly arranged branches over sod. The door was closed, and there didn’t appear to be any of the same scorching like that around the barn and the cabin. Both front windows were shuttered, and a quick walk around the place told Prophet that the building’s other three windows were covered, as well.
He wondered why the Apaches hadn’t burned it. Maybe they hadn’t noticed it sitting off here in the brush.
Returning to the front, he saw that Rose was no longer with him. He looked around, but she was gone. Out investigating on her own. Prophet would leave her to own thoughts and worries—she certainly had her share, for a girl so young.
He tripped the leather latch of the bunkhouse’s heavy timbered door and gave the iron handle a pull.
The door opened, giving a bark as it scraped across the threshold and then the packed ground in front of it, the hinges squawking raucously. Stale, pent-up air pushed against the big bounty hunter, who nearly filled the doorway as he stared, ducking his head slightly, into the shadows.
The place hadn’t been burned. Left entirely alone, in fact. To the left was the eating area consisting of a small range, a few shelves, stacked tomato crates, and a square pine table. To the right were two sets of bunk beds and one lone cot.
There was a curled, yellow map of western New Mexico on the far wall, above the cot. On that
wall as well as on the three others were a dozen sets of deer and elk antlers from which odds and ends of tack and leather leggings hung. A soiled, striped cream shirt drooped from a small spread of elk antlers behind the door, the shirt’s cuffs frayed, its collar badly grimed. An empty, soft brown leather holster hung down from behind it.
Prophet stepped inside for a better look around. The place was neat, tin plates, cups, and silverware stacked in their respective tomato crates. A pyramid of airtight tins was on the stove’s warming rack. The table was scrubbed, the cots and bunks carefully made, fluffed pillows propped at their ends, waiting. There was a thin coating of soot and dust over everything, but something told Prophet that the place had seen visitors since the Indian attack.
He set his rifle across the table, doffed his hat, and ran his hands wearily through his hair. It had been a long day and he knew his thinking would be less crowded tomorrow, but the question of where the Tawlin family had gone gnawed at him.
The gnawing was interrupted by a shrill scream.
Prophet jerked his head up, heart thudding, and stared through the darkening doorway and into the sandy light of the yard beyond.
“No!” Rose cried. “Oh, nooooo!”
Prophet clamped his hat back down on his head and grabbed his rifle. Apaches! He ran out the open bunkhouse door and followed Rose’s continuing anguished cries—more sad than terrified—out around the main house, over a knoll, and across a wash that angled off away from the creek.
There in a hollow he found Rose on her knees beside three graves sprouting crude wooden crosses. Rocks mounded the graves. On a slightly higher knoll beyond the graves was a large plank into which had been carved: PA, MA, BROTHER JASON. KILT BY INJUNS JULY 28, 1878.
Rose turned her face toward Prophet. The dying light caught her eyes and shone gold in her tears. “They’re dead!”
Prophet stared, his heartbeat gradually slowing. He was as much surprised as he was heartsick for the girl, realizing what this meant to her.
“Now I’ll never know,” she said, pounding her fists against her thigh and curling her upper lip in anger.
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