The Devil's Winchester

by Peter Brandvold

  Prophet didn’t know what to say. His tongue lay heavy in his mouth, his rifle a lead weight in his hands.

  Finally, he walked over to her, dropped to a knee beside her, slid his right arm around her shoulders, holding her closely against him. Sobs racked her.

  “I must have survived it somehow. Or I wasn’t here, found ’em later. And then I buried ’em.”

  She was only giving the words to Prophet’s thoughts. It was the best explanation for who’d buried the Tawlins. It wasn’t solid proof that the girl beside him was the daughter, Rose, who’d buried her family, but it certainly pointed in her direction.

  Who else could she be? Utter thought she was Rose. Rose had lived here. Rose’s family had been killed by Apaches, and a surviving family member had buried them.

  But neither Prophet nor, most of all, the girl herself, would ever be satisfied until they were sure. Until they’d been given solid proof. Or until she’d gotten her memory back. Barring that, they needed a close neighbor, someone who’d seen Rose recently and recognized her without a doubt. Then she’d have her identity. Or at least she’d know her name and where she was from.

  But what had she been doing in Nugget Town? That would still take some investigating....

  “My parents are dead,” she said, running the heel of her hand across her nose and sniffing. “And I don’t even feel sad. Just frustrated that they’re not alive to tell me who I am.”

  “Easy, girl.” Prophet gave her another affectionate squeeze. “Let’s get you back to the bunkhouse. Gonna be dark as the inside of a glove out here soon.”

  “You know what I do feel?” she said when he’d gotten her to her feet.

  She was no longer sobbing but only standing there, staring down at the graves dully, in shock, completely overcome by the situation in which she found herself.

  “I feel alone.” She shook her head slowly. “No memories, no name, not even any real sadness at finding my family dead. Just as alone as each one of those rocks piled on their graves.”

  Prophet squeezed her again and gently turned her. They started back toward the ranch yard, arm in arm, but as they started up a rise she pushed away from him and walked off several feet to his side.

  She was silent, but her angst was almost palpable. When they got back to the yard, Prophet took the reins of his dun and began leading the horse to the corral off the barn’s north wall.

  “Why don’t you go inside the bunkhouse? Start a fire in the stove. I’ll tend to the horses.”

  The sun was almost down, silhouetting the western peaks in front of it. The barnyard was all dark purple shadows trimmed in shards of glassy salmon light.

  “No, I’ll help,” she said with dull insistence and began leading her claybank along behind him.

  Prophet, watching furtively, saw that she unsaddled her horse in the same automatic manner as she’d saddled it, not having to give much thought to her actions. When she had the tack hanging over the corral, she carefully rubbed the mount down with a gunnysack, starting at the neck and withers and with purposeful, confident movements, worked her way back to the hips and rear cannons. She checked each hoof when she’d finished, plucking a pebble from the clay’s right rear frog and tossing it over the back of the corral fence.

  She’d obviously thrown stones before, as well as having tended horses. She had a smooth, boyish delivery.

  Prophet had brought enough feed for both horses for one night, and when they’d fed each a half a bucket of parched corn, they headed into the bunkhouse where Prophet built a fire and filled his coffeepot with water from his canteen. Rose sat at the table, watching him though she appeared to have something on her mind.

  When Prophet had set the coffeepot on the range, then opened the stove’s door to add another stick of split mesquite to the fledgling fire, she folded her hands on the table and looked at him seriously, maybe a little challengingly. “I have a holster. I must have had a gun to go in it.”

  Prophet closed the stove door and straightened with a grunt, feeling the day’s weariness deep in his knees. He went over to where his saddlebags were draped over a chair and opened one of the flaps. He pulled out the Colt Army revolver he’d found near her unconscious body, hefted it a couple of times in his hand, a pensive cast to his own gaze. He flipped the heavy gun, a .44, in the air, caught it by the barrel, and held it out to her.

  “This what you’re talking about?”

  She took the gun, looked at it as though trying to nudge the cobwebs away from the secluded canyon of her hidden past. She gripped the gun in her right hand, hefting it some more, pursing her lips and frowning.

  “Here.” Prophet tossed a small leather pouch onto the table in front of her. “That was stuck behind your belt.”

  She frowned up at him for a moment, then set the gun on the table, opened the small flap on the pouch, and dumped onto the table a handful of paper cartridges, percussion caps, and nipples.

  “Had a gun like that when I was in the war. Anyone who hadn’t used a gun like that before would have a devil of a time loadin’ it.”

  Prophet stood at the side of the table, his hands resting on a chair back, as he watched in amazement as the girl picked up the gun and peered down its barrel as though to make sure there were no obstructions. Then she went to work as automatically and as purposefully as she had when she’d tended the claybank, biting the ends off six paper cartridges and smoothly loading them into the pistol’s six cylinders. She drove the .44-caliber balls into place with the loading lever and crimped percussion caps on the nipples.

  She set the loaded gun on the table and, resting her chin on the heel of her right hand, looked from Prophet to the pistol and back again. She appeared as surprised as he.

  “I didn’t even have to think about it. I just let my hands do what they wanted.”

  Prophet gave her a wry look, picked up the gun, and slipped the cylinder free of the barrel. He set the gun on the table and pocketed the cylinder. Rose continued to sit with her head in her hands, thoughtfully tapping the fingers of her other hand on the table.

  The coffeepot hissed and spat, and Prophet went over and dropped a handful of ground beans into it. When it had boiled a minute, he poured in some cool water from his canteen to settle the grounds, then took the pot over to the table where he’d set out two cups.

  “You drink coffee?”

  “I reckon we’ll find out.”

  Prophet tipped the pot over the cup on the table in front of Rose.

  There was a dull, metallic thud. The coffeepot was flung out of Prophet’s hands to smash the door of the range with a loud bang that partly covered Rose’s shriek and the distant crack of a rifle.

  12

  PROPHET HAD SEEN the gun flash out the cabin’s open door. Now, ears ringing, his hand aching from the sudden tearing of the pot from his grasp, he looked down at Rose. She sat back in her chair, eyes wide in shock, not quite realizing that they’d been bushwhacked.

  Prophet lunged forward and threw himself into the girl. They hit the floor with a loud thud, Prophet cushioning her fall with his own bulk and then rolling the girl beyond the open front doorway and into the bunkhouse’s sleeping quarters. He gave her a shove toward one of the bunks.

  He and Rose had opened the other three windows to air the place out; now as two more rifles cracked outside the cabin, bullets screamed around inside, one apparently flying out an opposite window while the other slammed loudly into a kitchen wall, knocking last year’s calendar off its nail.

  Rose sat back against a bunk, eyes wide. “Holy shit!”

  Prophet bolted off his heels, grabbed his Winchester off the table, and racked a shell into the chamber.

  As three more shots hammered into the walls, another into the table, spraying splinters against the kindling crate, Prophet ran at a crouch to the front window left of the door. He rammed his right shoulder against the wall, holding back behind the frame as the shooter in the front yard triggered another round, which whistled six in
ches past the end of Prophet’s nose and buried itself in an open shutter with a loud thwack! that made the entire room jump.

  Rose clapped her hands over her ears and hissed.

  Prophet snaked the gun out the window and fired three rounds quickly at where he’d last seen the front shooter’s rifle flash. Through his own wafting powder smoke, he saw two bulky shadows moving around out there, between the corral and the house, but he couldn’t tell if he’d hit anything.

  A bullet fired from the rear of the cabin screamed through one of the two back windows and thudded into the wall above his head.

  “Jesus!” Rose screamed and bolted to her feet.

  “Stay down!” Prophet yelled.

  Ignoring the order, the girl ran over to the first shutter, slammed it closed, and latched it. She ran to the next one and did the same. To give her a modicum of protection, Prophet fired out his own window and then out the one on the cabin’s south end—hammering blasts that made the cabin leap and jounce beneath his boots, his empty shell casings clattering to the floor and rolling.

  Two more bullets screeched through the bunkhouse, and Rose slid down the wall near the last shutter she’d closed, clapping her hands once more to her ears. “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know.” Prophet fired three more quick rounds out the window left of the door and felt a twinge of satisfaction when he heard a distant, muffled groan. “Not Apaches.”

  “Apaches don’t fight at night,” Rose said. “Somehow, I remember that.”

  “Some do, some don’t.” Prophet quickly closed the shutter over the window he’d been shooting through, then ran past the open doorway. “But these are white men. Non-Injuns, anyway. I can tell by the way they shoot.” He fired two shots out the door, then kicked the door closed.

  “How’s that?”

  “They’re careless. Injuns take their time. They’d wait till we went outside to check the stock. Or they’d run the stock off to draw us out of the cabin.”

  Rose buried her head between her knees as more lead whined through the cabin and splinters sprayed across the table and floor. One slug clattered off an iron skillet hanging from a ceiling joist.

  Prophet sank down against the front wall, quickly thumbing fresh .44 cartridges from his shell belt. “These fellas are right angry. All this quick shootin’ after dark ...”

  “What do you suppose they’re mad about?”

  There was a momentary lull in the shooting.

  “I don’t know.” Prophet was thumbing cartridges into his Winchester’s breech. He turned his head toward one of the two open windows—the one on the cabin’s far end. “What the hell you fellas so sore about? If we crossed you, we shore didn’t mean it!”

  “What’s that?” a man yelled from the front.

  Prophet turned to yell out the front window right of the door. “I said we didn’t mean to rub your fur in the wrong direction! Must be a misunderstandin’ here! Maybe we oughta talk about it!”

  “Talk about this, you claim-jumpin’ son of a bitch!” shouted a man from the cabin’s south end.

  Two bullets hammered the shutter over the south window.

  “Claim jumpers?” Prophet said to himself.

  Still hunkered low against the east wall, arms wrapped around her knees, Rose looked at him curiously.

  “They must have taken advantage of the Apache attack to jump Tawlin’s claim.”

  One of the men out front laughed. The laughter was drowned by a barrage of gunfire from the cabin’s three sides. Two in front. One on both the south and west side.

  Prophet dropped low beside the front window, thinking it over while more slugs hammered the shutters and walls. No telling how much ammo the claim jumpers had. By the way they were going through it, they were either cow stupid or they had enough to throw away.

  On the other hand, Prophet had only half a cartridge belt’s worth, plus a single box in his saddlebags. Not enough to hold these lobos off for long.

  He probably wouldn’t have a chance to cap even half his own arsenal before the claim jumpers moved up on the cabin and tried to burn him and Rose out. That could easily be done, as the pole-and-thatch roof would catch the smallest spark and go up virtually like dynamite.

  And, judging from the angry gun blasts that were causing dirt to sift from the rafters and which had Rose clamping her ears shut again, head between her knees, these claim jumpers wouldn’t stop shooting long enough to listen to reason. Being greedy privy snipes themselves, they wouldn’t even consider the idea that Prophet and Rose might be here on a legitimate mission.

  Prophet had to make a move.

  Quickly, wincing as two slugs screamed off the lip of the windowsill, Prophet reached up and rammed the shutter closed with his rifle barrel. Just as quickly, he dropped the steel hook over its rusty nail, latching it.

  “You keep down and don’t lift your head till I tell you it’s all clear,” he told Rose, crawling across the width of the kitchen to the back window just right of the girl.

  “What’re you going to do?” she yelled above the din.

  “I’m gonna go outside.”

  “What?”

  “Just do as I tell you.”

  “At least give me my gun so I can protect myself. You’re liable to get greased out there!”

  Prophet looked at her, his brows ridged. She had a point. He straightened just enough to grab the pistol off the table. When he’d slipped the cylinder back into place and made sure that all the nipples were still capped, he handed her the weapon butt first.

  “Thanks,” Rose said dryly.

  “All right.” Prophet reached up to unlatch the window in the kitchen’s rear wall. “Just don’t shoot me with the damn thing.”

  “Do I have cause? I wouldn’t remember.”

  Prophet gave a rusty chuff and slid the shutter back against the wall with his rifle barrel and lifted his head above the sill just far enough to see out into the stygian night. There was a rifle flash back there, but the slug hammered the shutter to his right.

  He waited a few seconds, and when the shooter behind the cabin continued firing at the other shutter, apparently not having seen this one open up, Prophet rose to his feet and scrambled through the window, first one leg and then the other but moving so quickly that he got his spur caught on the sill and hit the ground on the back of his head.

  Stars wheeled in his vision, and his neck ached.

  Suddenly the rifleman firing from about thirty yards out sent a slug drilling the cabin wall over Prophet’s head. He must have seen the bounty hunter drop out of the window. Trying to ignore the bite of pain in his neck and the duller throb in the back of his head, Prophet gained a knee quickly and slammed his rifle butt to his shoulder. The shooter’s rifle blossomed. The slug slammed into the cabin left of Prophet, who squeezed his own Winchester’s trigger.

  A yowl. The thud of a dropped rifle.

  Prophet quickly ejected the spent shell casing and seated fresh in the Winchester’s chamber as he took off running toward where he’d last seen the shooter’s rifle flash. By starlight he avoided rocks and low junipers and cedars, and found the claim jumper down on his back and holding one knee that glistened brightly. He groaned and cursed, and as Prophet ran up he released his knee and reached for a sidearm.

  Prophet stopped and fired twice from the hip, his first shot puffing dust just above the claim jumper’s head. The other snapped the man’s head back against the ground, and all his limbs fell slack at once.

  Prophet froze, listening. There was one more rifle report from the ranch yard, then silence. The man beyond the cabin’s south end had been yelling, and now Prophet realized the man had been yelling for the others to stop shooting.

  He could sense the other three claim jumpers’ confusion. There hadn’t been any shots fired from the cabin in the past few minutes. The man south of the cabin had probably heard the dead man’s yelp when Prophet had drilled his knee.

  “Channing?” someone yelled. The voice was
clear in the sudden silence after the fusillade. He was somewhere in the brush south of the cabin.

  Prophet dropped to a knee, looking around and caressing his Winchester’s hammer with his thumb.

  “Hey, Boyle!” the man south of the cabin yelled. “I think the claim-jumpin’ son of a bitch drilled Channing. I think he’s out there. Seen somethin’ move out from the back of the cabin.”

  “You sure?” yelled a man from the front yard.

  A tendril of an idea wriggled in Prophet’s brain. He cupped a gloved hand over his mouth to muffle and disguise his voice. “It’s Channing! I’m hit!”

  Silence.

  A shred of a breeze touched the limbs of a near cedar, rustling them gently.

  “Channing?” came the faintly skeptical call south of the cabin. “That you?”

  “I’m hit!” Prophet shouted into his cupped hand, adding a pinched groan. “But I got the son of a bitch!”

  Either they’d buy it or they wouldn’t. He didn’t have much to lose. He was outnumbered, he had the girl to think about, and it was only a matter of time before they either blasted or burned her out of the bunkhouse.

  Boyle yelled, “He dead?”

  “Yep. Ah, damn—I’m hit bad!” he added, pinching his voice down even tighter.

  “Karl, check it out,” Boyle ordered. “We’ll meet you over there.”

  He’d let it go at that. Let the others come around and see what was happening....

  Scrambling around behind a cedar just beyond Channing, he dropped to a knee and waited, slowly, absently slipping cartridges through his Winchester’s loading gate, then freeing the keeper thong from over his Colt’s hammer.

  He thought about Rose. Did she realize he was trying a ruse? If not, she might try and slip out of the cabin.

  Prophet pricked his ears, listening. In the distance, coyotes yipped and yammered. Faintly, footsteps sounded. They grew gradually louder south of the bunkhouse. Prophet could hear Karl’s strained breaths, heard him spit as he continued walking in Prophet’s direction.

  Nearby, a twig snapped. Prophet stayed low, trying to see the newcomer through the cedar, but the branches were too thick.