He was a short man—his head coming up to just above the horses’ rumps—in denims and chaps, and a black vest over a bloodred shirt. As he turned around to start back through the horses toward the cantina, Prophet saw his face for an instant in the window light—a dark red, shadowy mask with a brushy mustache with upturned ends.
One of the three gunmen he’d seen ride into town earlier.
Prophet glanced at Louisa. “Think I’ll go in the front, get their attention.”
“You want me to go around back?”
“You wouldn’t mind?”
Louisa rolled her eyes and sidestepped away from him, disappearing into the shadows between the cantina and a black hulk of a building whose windows appeared boarded.
When he’d given her enough time to find a back door to the cantina, if there was one, Prophet moseyed forward, stepped between the still jittery, blowing horses, and mounted the cantina’s splintery boardwalk that teetered unevenly on piled stones. He kept his rifle on his shoulder as he continued forward, stopped, and stared over the tops of the double batwings into the cantina.
It was a seedy, smelly place but with several lamps hanging from the low tin ceiling on wires, so Prophet could see into all the corners except the rearmost ones. A short, plank bar ran along the left wall. A stocky Mexican with sunken, toothless jaws and wearing a stained white apron stood behind the bar, staring back at Prophet grimly.
Along the wall to the right, on the floor, slumped several passed-out Mexicans in charro jackets. Another sat at a table strumming his mandolin while a short, drunken whore in a skimpy red dress danced slow drunken circles with a short Mexican in a canvas jacket and slacks, his long, salt-and-pepper hair flecked with lice.
A couple of vaqueros played poker about halfway down the room, keeping their eyes on their game, while the man Prophet was looking for sat just beyond them and to the left, at a round table with two quart whiskey jugs and three shot glasses on it. A cigar had been put out in one of the glasses.
The man in the black vest and red shirt sat there, both elbows on the table, a hand wrapped around a freshly filled shot glass. His hat was cuffed back off his forehead, and his chin was dipped slightly, upper lip curled angrily. Challenge shone in his eyes.
Prophet stepped slowly forward and hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Too bad about the bean eater.”
“Too bad he was cheatin’ at poker. What’re you gonna do about it?”
“Well, I reckon I’ll have to arrest you.” Prophet grinned. “Or kill you.”
The man’s eyes brightened. Suddenly he was sliding back and leaping up out of his chair.
Prophet hadn’t expected the move so he was a hair slow in bringing the Winchester up, and the man’s first shot carved a line across Prophet’s cheek. Prophet fired the Winchester, and a bottle on the table exploded, spraying whiskey and glass shards into the shooter’s face.
He screamed and fired again blindly. The bullet slammed into the batwings behind Prophet, making them clatter and squawk.
The gunman stumbled sideways. Blood streamed from his cut eyes and cheeks. As he brought his big Russian .44 up again, screaming, “You son of a bitch!” Prophet shot him twice through the chest.
Blood sprayed from the man’s back as one bullet plowed into the wall behind him. One of the bullets tore a meandering path through his chest and exited the top of his shoulder to plunk into the ceiling above his head.
Prophet ejected a smoking spent cartridge, racked a fresh round into the Winchester’s breech, and looked around. The cardplayers were on the floor, covering their heads with their arms. The two dancers were still dancing, oblivious of the sudden violence. The bartender was shouting loudly in Spanish and slamming a fist on the bar top.
Prophet turned to him quickly. “Where’re the other two?”
As if in reply, guns roared behind the place.
Louisa.
Prophet bolted down the length of the cantina while the bartender continued to berate him in Spanish and the drunk dancers continued to dance. The bounty hunter hurdled the dead gunman and headed for a timbered door in the cantina’s back wall. He did not slow up for the door. As the fusillade continued out back, he put his head down, dropped a shoulder, increased his speed, and hammered right on through it.
The door blew off its hinges. It and Prophet hit the back-yard hard, dust billowing.
“Ambush!” Louisa screamed beneath the frenetic barks of rifles and bright gun flashes.
Prophet lifted his head as several slugs screamed around him and hammered the adobe wall behind him, making plaster fly. There was a privy straight back of the place, and one shooter was firing from behind it toward where a wagon without wheels sat amongst rabbit brush and rocks. Another shooter was directing his fire at Prophet, flames stabbing from his rifle resting atop the wagon, while the other was exchanging lead with Louisa, who was apparently hunkered down behind the privy.
At least, he hoped that was his partner. It was too dark to see much but the gun flashes.
Prophet’s shoulder throbbed from its impact with the door and the ground. As more lead screamed around him, he rolled wildly to his right and came up shooting, hearing his slugs hammering the wagon. There appeared to be only one man shooting now, the one who’d been shooting at Prophet. As that shooter’s rifle licked flames toward the privy, Prophet emptied his Winchester.
There was a grunt and the thud of what sounded like a rifle butt striking the side of the wagon.
Prophet set the empty Winchester aside and, belly down about ten feet from the cantina door, shucked his .45 from its holster and, rocking the hammer back, extended it straight out in front of him.
The wagon sat hunched in the darkness. No gun flashes. No sounds. The privy, too, was dark, Louisa’s rifle silent.
Prophet called her name.
“What?” she said in a tight voice.
“You all right?”
A pause and then in the same time voice, she said, “Yeah. I’m okay. Are they dead?”
Just then there was a scrape of brush from beyond the wagon and the faint ching of a spur.
Prophet turned toward the privy once more. “You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m all right. Just make sure those bushwhacking dogs have been run to ground. They were moving up from behind the saloon, most likely intending to backshoot us both from the front entrance after we’d gone inside.”
Louisa sounded indignant, as though she’d been cheated at high-stakes poker, though of course she’d never played the game.
“All right, all right,” he muttered, turning to stare over the barrel of his cocked Colt, pondering the situation while worry for Louisa stabbed at him. She might have said she was all right, but she sure as hell didn’t sound all right.
He couldn’t let his guard down, though, until he was sure the other two gunmen were dead.
He got up, wincing at the aches and pains in his hips and shoulders. Leaving his hat on the ground with his Winchester, shoving a lock of disheveled hair out of his eye, he stole into shadows cast by the back of the cantina and the buildings beyond it. When he gained the wagon, moving slowly, Colt extended straight out in front of him, he found one of the gunmen lying dead in a pool of blood still dribbling from the gaping hole in his neck.
The other gunman wasn’t there, but Prophet followed the path of his blood, which shone faintly in the starlight, out across a shallow ravine and into the flatland beyond.
The man sat against a boulder, both legs stretched out in front of him, hands in his lap. Prophet could see blood bibbing his chest, which rose and fell heavily, slowly. His rifle lay in the rocks beside him.
“I don’t know why,” he said in a voice only slightly pinched from pain, “but we never figured on the girl comin’ around to the back.”
Prophet went up and kicked the man’s rifle away, then reached down, grabbed his revolver from his hip holster, and held it straight down in his left hand. He stared down at the man, who looked
up at him blandly from beneath the brim of a high-crowned white hat.
His cheeks were bearded, but Prophet couldn’t see his eyes. The man’s double cartridge belts shone dully under his open denim jacket, moving slightly beneath his bulging belly as he breathed.
Prophet shook his head slowly. “Metalious sure ain’t payin’ you enough.”
The dying man shook his own head and said, “Nope. He sure ain’t.”
He slumped straight sideways, gave a loud, final sigh, and lay still.
Prophet crossed the ravine and paused. Louisa’s shadow was moving near the privy and grunting with the effort. She seemed to be trying to hoist herself up, using her rifle as a staff.
“For chrissakes!” Prophet jogged over to her and dropped to a knee as she dropped back down onto her right hip and let her rifle fall against her. “Where you hit?”
“The other one.”
“Leg?”
“Just a flesh wound. Like the other one. Only, this one hurts worse.”
“I knew you were hit.”
“Did you put those dogs down?”
“They won’t be chasin’ any more gut wagons.”
Prophet looked at his partner’s bloody left leg just above the knee, and worry gripped him. He couldn’t tell if it was a flesh wound or not, but even if it was, she needed a doctor fast.
He ripped off his neckerchief.
“Stuff that in the wound while I get you to a sawbones.”
Prophet slid his arms beneath her, and, pushing off his knees, climbed to his feet and started to head around the cantina.
“Wait—your rifle and hat.”
“They’ll keep.”
“Put me down and get ’em!”
With a frustrated sigh, Prophet switched course, eased Louisa down while he donned his hat and grabbed his rifle, which she held along with her own as he scooped her up again. He looked through the cantina’s open back door to see the bartender dragging the man Prophet had shot toward the doorless opening of the cantina. The bartender was dragging the dead gunman by his ankles, glancing over his shoulder to loudly curse and berate Prophet in Spanish, mostly for the ruined door, it seemed, though Prophet’s handle of the man’s lingo was of the cow-pen variety at best.
“Go easy, Lou,” Louisa said as Prophet jogged across Bayonet Wash. She’d wrapped her arms around his neck, and with one hand she pulled affectionately, reassuringly at his left ear. “I’m gonna be all right.”
“Shut up.” Prophet ran toward Brush Street. “Jesus Christ, girl—we’re gonna have to get you on a diet!”
As he and Louisa turned onto the main street, retracing their own recent footsteps, a gun barked three times quickly from straight ahead.
Prophet stopped in the middle of the street and stared toward the jailhouse a block away. Except for the Mecca Saloon just beyond it and on the other side of the street, it was the only building out there with lit windows. There was another pop! Two shadows moved on the porch, scurrying down the steps and into the street where a pair of saddled horses stood at the hitchrack, snorting nervously.
“Ah, Christ!” Prophet groaned, starting forward at an awkward run with Louisa in his arms. “Doesn’t this town ever sleep?”
21
AS PROPHET RAN toward the jailhouse, Louisa flopping like a rag doll in his arms, he saw the two shadowy figures mount the jittery horses, rein them away from the hitchrack, and boot them hard toward the west and out of town.
They disappeared into the darkness beyond the Mecca Saloon, the thuds of their galloping horses dwindling quickly. There was the muffled thud of something—a rifle?—hitting the ground as though carelessly cast away. Several men emerged from the Mecca—hatted shadows in the light of the oil lamps looking around warily, a couple holding drinks in their hands.
“What the hell’s goin’ on?” one yelled, turning toward Prophet who was angling toward the jailhouse.
“Took the words right out of my mouth,” Prophet muttered as he took the porch steps heavy-footed.
“Careful, Lou,” Louisa said, turning her head to look through the shack’s open front door.
Prophet dropped Louisa into a chair on the porch. “Stay there.”
Unsheathing his Colt and thumbing back the hammer with a ratcheting click, he stepped quickly through the open door and to one side. The rusty lamp over Utter’s desk swung to and fro, illuminating the fresh gunsmoke webbing in the air in front of the jail cell.
Behind the still closed cell door, Prophet saw boots and dusty tan slacks, though the rest of Blanco was concealed in the cell’s shadows. Utter himself was on the floor near his desk, his wheelchair tipped over, the top wheels turning slowly. The marshal was groaning and rubbing the back of his head with one hand while trying to push himself up with the other.
His shotgun was nowhere in sight. The holsters on his wheelchair were empty.
Prophet was surprised the man wasn’t dead.
“What the hell happened?” he said, kneeling down beside the marshal and helping him turn onto his hip.
“That girl,” Utter said, wincing as he continued to rub that back of his head. He’d been brained good. His eyes kept rolling back in their sockets.
“What girl?”
“The Tawlin girl! She came in here offering to fetch me a plate from the hotel. Soon as I turned my back, she brained me with her pistol butt!”
“Rose?” Prophet stared down at Utter, thinking the man must have gotten it wrong. “Why in the hell ... ?”
Utter looked over his useless legs toward the far end of the office. “Her and some hard case ... shot Blanco ... took my keys and ... took the stolen money out of the cell yonder. Son of a bitch!”
Prophet ran over to Blanco’s cell, looked in. The outlaw was on the floor, grunting and groaning and moving his legs in agony. Prophet continued over to the next cell and peered through the open door.
The saddlebags had been taken off the cot. They were gone.
His mind reeling, Prophet grabbed the keys out of the lock of the open door, poked one into the lock of Blanco’s door, and went in to inspect the prisoner. Blanco was holding both hands across a bloody chest wound and stretching his lips back from his teeth.
“That bastard shot me!” he wailed. “Shot me right through the damn cell door!”
Part of Blanco’s left ear was gone. There was another wound in his lower right leg, and blood was oozing onto the floor beneath it.
“Fuckin’ bastard shot me!” Blanco shouted, sobbing furiously as he threw his head back and loosed an enraged scream, rocking from side to side and kicking his legs.
“Who was it?”
“Waylon Adams. Waylon ‘Gopher’ Adams! Get after him—they just left!”
“Shut up.” Prophet walked back out of Blanco’s cell, leaving the door open. The outlaw wasn’t going anywhere. He likely wouldn’t be alive much longer. Prophet’s weathered features were a mask of confusion.
Rose?
Waylon Adams?
They shot Blanco and stole the loot. Why? Heading where?
First things first.
Prophet got Utter back into his chair and then started toward the porch to help Louisa, but she was already standing in the doorway, leaning on her rifle and looking around with an expression much like Prophet’s own.
“So she was bad,” she said. “And she threw back in with one of her own.”
“Go after’em!” Blanco shouted, kicking the front wall of his sell with a ringing bang. “Run that bitch and Gopher down and shoot ’em both!”
“The lobo’s got a point,” Louisa told Prophet.
Prophet looked down at her leg. Blood was oozing down the outside of her skirt. A thin red line of it meandered across her boot. “It’s sawbones time for you.”
He bent down and picked her up in his arms. As he started up the street toward the doctor’s office, he stopped suddenly. A hunched shadow was shambling toward him, a shabby bowler tilted on his head, a black kit in his hand.
“They get Utter?” the doctor asked in a sleep-gravelly voice.
“‘They’ just gave him a headache. Take care of this one first, Doc. Then, if he’s still kickin’, you better go sew Blanco up.”
Prophet brushed past the medico, heading for the man’s office. The doctor stared after him, baffled, then, muttering, started back the way he’d come, following Prophet.
Prophet hung around that night to make sure Louisa was on the mend. At dawn, she was sleeping comfortably there in the doctor’s back room, her leg cleaned, sewn, and bandaged, so he planted a light kiss on her lips, then went out and saddled Mean and Ugly and a rangy gray that he rented from the livery barn. He walked the horses through town, then booted Mean hard for Socorro, his dust rising in the thin dawn light washing up over the tan jog of craggy eastern ridges.
He followed the stage trail for about four miles, then angled southeast, toward a notch in the ridge. There was a feeble horse trail here that had probably originated as an Indian trace. It was a shortcut that Utter had told him about, one which should save him a couple of hours as it pushed straight through the mountains rather than angling around their southern tip.
His intention was to alert the circuit judge and his army escort about Sam “Man-Killin’” Metalious’s gang of rough-necks that would most likely try to ambush the detail somewhere between Corazon and Socorro. It seemed like mighty tough play, attacking a circuit judge as well as army men, but having met Metalious and seen the brand of riders he employed, Prophet felt it was a copper-riveted, lead-pipe cinch that the man would make it.
If the detail commander was as overconfident and arrogant as most young army officers, he’d likely want to stick to his route and rely on his own savvy as well as his men’s to sniff out would-be bushwhackers, but Prophet intended to try to convince the man to take the shortcut. Or, at the very least, to send scout riders ahead of the detail.
Following the faint horse trail that hadn’t been traveled at least since the last rain, Prophet rode up the notch, then down the other side. At the bottom, he switched horses, and leading Mean by the dun’s reins, he followed a canyon between high sandstone walls due south. It was an ancient riverbed with fish fossils showing like broken china in the striated ridge walls.
The Devil's Winchester Page 17
