The Devil's Winchester

by Peter Brandvold

  The bounty hunter was so weary himself from the many miles he’d covered over the past several hours, and from the stress of knowing that a notorious, cold-blooded killer had Louisa, that he was fairly groaning and dragging his boot toes as he worked. But he took his time rubbing Mean down with a swatch of burlap and inspecting the horse’s hooves for thorns and stones.

  He didn’t like to admit it, but next to Louisa, Mean and Ugly was his best friend. He depended on the horse nearly as much as he depended on the Vengeance Queen herself, and he took pains to make sure the horse got the best care possible.

  It worried him that Mean was so tired that he didn’t even try to give his owner a devilish nip. Prophet hoped like hell the dun would be ready to ride again in a few hours.

  Finished with the rubdown and hoof-and-hock inspection, Prophet patted Mean and Ugly’s hip. “Get some shut-eye, pard. Ready or not, we’ll be pullin’ out in a few hours. The girl’s in trouble again.”

  Mean turned his head to Prophet, twitched one ear halfheartedly, and gave a somewhat reassuring snort.

  Prophet was inclined to forgo coffee and just rest his own weary bones, but the brew would do him good. He wasn’t hungry, but he’d gone without food since a rushed breakfast that morning in Corazon, and he had to have something to build his strength back up.

  He gathered driftwood from the wash, and some dry leaves and cedar needles, and dug a little pit in the alcove about six feet from the walls on either side of him. The wind kept blasting down over the top of the ridge, pelting him with sand and blowing out his fledgling flames. He continued to coax the fire until it was going on its own, crackling and snapping and nibbling the sun-cured cottonwood sticks.

  His dented coffeepot was chugging when a spur rang just outside the alcove. Instantly, the double-bore was in his hands and he was thumbing both hammers back.

  A voice said, “Lou?”

  Prophet scowled into the howling darkness beyond the ten-foot-wide mouth of the alcove.

  “Come closer,” he called above the wind. “I got my double-bore cocked and ready to fly!”

  Another spur ching. A shadow moved just beyond the notch. The figure came closer until Rose Tawlin was standing just inside the doorway, a long duster that was too big for her blowing about the tops of her stockmen’s boots. She wore a hat that was likewise a couple of sizes too big and a blue neckerchief blew around her neck.

  She held her hands shoulder high, palms out.

  Prophet’s rugged, heavy-browed, broad-nosed face contorted into an expression of disbelief.

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you shot me.”

  “What the hell are you doin’ here, Rose? Or should I be callin’ you Jane?”

  “It’s Rose.” The girl took a couple more slow steps inside the alcove and glanced hungrily down at the coffeepot.

  “Where’s your friend Gopher?”

  “Dead.” Rose looked at Prophet and licked her lips. She had a sad, lonely expression on her face. Desperation shone faintly in her dark eyes, beneath the wide, bending brim of the weather-stained hat. “He was pestering me, tryin’ to get me to bed down with him. Wouldn’t take no for an answer. Surprising, how easy it was to shoot him.”

  Keeping her hands raised to her shoulders but letting the fingers curl back toward the palms, she looked around the alcove. She wasn’t studying Prophet’s bivouac, however. Deeply perplexed, she was trying to gather her thoughts.

  Finally, she let her gaze slide back to the bounty hunter sitting cross-legged beside the fire, his hat cuffed back off his forehead. He was still aiming the double-bore at her belly. “But it wouldn’t have surprised you—how easy it was for me to kill a man. Would it, Lou?”

  “I reckon not.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I saw the wanted dodger amongst those bundled in Utter’s desk. He hadn’t gone through them yet. I snagged the one with your likeness on it—or, that of alias Miss Kansas Jane, last seen with the cattle rustler and sometime stage robber, Junior Pope.”

  Prophet frowned. “Your bad memory suddenly shook clear, did it?”

  Rose shook her head. “It was gone. Truly. You don’t know how terrifying it is to wake up in a strange place and not know who you are. Then it’s even worse when you suddenly remember, and everything—all the ugly things about your ugly past, at least the past that started when I ran away from home and started running with Pope—came tumbling back into place. I didn’t fall and hit my head again. It didn’t happen like that. I was just sitting there across the fire from Gopher Adams—he used to run with Junior, too—and the memories came fluttering down like a flock of Canada geese in a freshly mown hayfield.”

  Prophet’s voice was hard, his right eye narrowed suspiciously. “Why did Gopher give Blanco that case of lead poisonin’?”

  Rose, or Kansas Jane, or whoever the hell she was now, hiked a shoulder. “Had some past beef with him, I reckon. I just know Gopher hated him. I take it he ain’t dead. Was that him in the back of his old man’s wagon?”

  Prophet heaved himself to his feet. Though his angry expression remained fixed, he depressed the hammers of the double-bore. He reached forward and slipped Rose’s old cap-and-ball revolver from her holster, and held it down by his side. “You got any more weapons?”

  “Just that one. When I shot Gopher I was too nervous to think about his guns.”

  “I won’t frisk you, but I wouldn’t make any sudden moves if I was you.” Prophet’s gaze hardened even more. “What’s your game, Kansas Jane?”

  “I’m done with games.”

  Prophet chuffed his disdain.

  “I am, Lou. After I shot Gopher, I came back to Corazon hopin’ to find you.”

  “And the loot you’d thought you’d stolen out of the jail cell.” Prophet smiled coldly. “I’d like to have seen your face when you saw them saddlebags filled with old wanted dodgers.”

  Rose looked baffled, shaking her head slowly. “You were that certain I’d try to swipe them?”

  “No, but after I saw the circular with your mug on it, along with your phony name, I figured there was a pretty good chance.”

  “You were setting a trap.” It was a cold statement, not a question.

  “I hoped you wouldn’t spring it. But I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

  “I didn’t spring it. It was Gopher who sprang it. He forced me into his scheme, said he’d tell everyone who I really was, since no one around Corazon had seen me in the three years I was gone from Pa’s and Ma’s ranch and didn’t remember. I didn’t want you to know. I wasn’t sure then that I even believed what Gopher was telling me, but I knew there was a chance. And ...”

  Rose shook her head again as she crossed her arms on her chest and turned away from Prophet’s accusatory glare. “I didn’t want you and Louisa to know.”

  “That wasn’t a real good strategy for keepin’ it all a secret.”

  Looking at the alcove’s wall and rubbing her arms as though chilled, Rose said, “He said he’d let me go once he had the Wells Fargo and bank loot. It must have gotten around town that Utter was keeping it in his jail. I thought Gopher was just going to take the loot. I didn’t know he was going to shoot Blanco.” She glanced at him curiously. “Where was the loot, anyway?”

  “Where it still is—in Utter’s beer cellar. I can tell you that, because I’m not letting you out of my sight until we get back to Corazon. You can have Blanco’s cell. The cot’s all warmed up for you. Pardon the bloodstains.”

  She wheeled toward him, a desperate look pinching her eyes and lifting a flush in her cheeks. “Oh, Lou! Won’t you please believe and understand me?” She squeezed his left forearm with both her hands. “I want to help you. I ... I’m not Kansas Jane. I once was. But I don’t want to repeat the bad things I’ve done. Deep down inside me, I’m good. I felt it when I had nothing else but my feelings to gauge myself with. I didn’t know it before, because my thoughts were so twisted and clouded by all the boring years on the ranch, with a fathe
r who hardly ever let me ride with him to town because he didn’t want boys staring at me! And a mother who worked me half to death when she herself was taken to bed with headaches!”

  Rose slumped down against the alcove wall, near the fire. She rested her elbows on her knees and stared bleakly into the dancing flames.

  “Junior had been riding with Blanco for the past couple months while I was holed up in Amarillo, hiding from the law and running out of loot we’d stole over in Oklahoma. I never met Blanco. Anyway, when him and Junior were pulling the stage holdup and then the bank robbery in Corazon, I talked Junior into riding over to the home ranch with me.”

  “Bringin’ the beau to meet the folks, huh?” Prophet said ironically, dropping to one knee beside the fire and filling his tin cup with coffee.

  “You want to hear the rest?” she asked him shortly.

  “Wouldn’t miss it.” Begrudgingly, he slid the coffee toward her, then dug another cup out of his saddlebags and filled it as she continued.

  “I invited Junior because I didn’t want Pa to try to force me to stay on at the place. I was done with that life. I only went to see them and my little brother. But we got there a day too late, just after the Apaches struck. Junior helped me bury them.” Rose’s left eye twitched, and her upper lip quivered slightly. “What was left of them.”

  She paused again.

  “Junior and I stayed in the bunkhouse for a few days. We were staying there together and were fixin’ to light out together to join Blanco for the robberies. I was out of money as well as ideas about what to do with myself, with my folks dead an’ all. Only, Junior lit out late one night after I went to sleep. I reckon he wasn’t ready for fatherhood.”

  Prophet frowned at her over his smoking coffee cup.

  “It wasn’t shootin’ that claim jumper that got me sick to my stomach,” Rose said.

  Prophet continued staring at her over the rim of his cup, chewing his lower lip. Slowly, he nodded. “Bun in the oven.” He grimaced and took another sip of his coffee.

  “When you found me and I hit my head, I’d been trailin’ Junior. I wanted some of that money from the robbery for me and my baby. Claim jumpers crowded me off the ranch.”

  Rose stared at Prophet as though gauging his reaction to all this as she lifted her own coffee cup in her hands and tilted it toward her mouth.

  “You see,” she said when she’d taken a sip, “I’ve got a real good reason to settle down.” She took another sip, licked her upper lip, kept her fire-bright eyes on Prophet. “And to make right what I can make right. I figure helpin’ you get Louisa back is as good a place as any to start.”

  Prophet thought it over. It had been a lot to swallow, but it had the ring of truth. A sad, lonely truth. It seemed sometimes that those were the only kind of truths he knew.

  He took a deeper swallow of the coffee, then dropped another chunk of driftwood onto the fire. “Better fetch your horse. This wind ain’t doin’ him no good out there.”

  As Rose got up and strode out of the alcove, he knew she could be lying about part or even all of it. Gopher could be out there with a rifle. But then, neither she nor Gopher had had any reason to follow Metalious’s bunch, unless they’d thought they had the money. That would have been a tall gamble on such a windy night.

  No, she couldn’t have been lying about all of it. She’d had no reason to lie about the baby, and hell, he’d seen her sick as a dog.

  A baby on the way with no father. A mother with no kin to speak of, and with a five-hundred-dollar bounty on her head for armed robberies in Kansas and Nebraska over the past two years.

  At least she hadn’t killed anyone who hadn’t deserved it. ...

  “Ah, hell,” Prophet said, giving one of the logs sticking out of the fire a frustrated kick.

  25

  “WHOAAAHHHH, THERE, YOU mangy cayuse!” Sam “Man-Killin’” Metalious yelled as he pulled back on the reins of the big roan hitched to the wagon.

  Louisa braced her tied ankles against the dashboard as the wagon jerked to a halt behind the roan’s blowing tail. She bit her lip against the pain in her left leg. She didn’t think the jarring ride had opened up the wound, but the knee felt as tight as a drumhead. Before her, dawn light rippled like quicksilver on the horse’s back and on the low brush roof of the adobe-brick shack sitting at the base of a steep, rocky mountain wall to Louisa’s right.

  The Metalious ranch, she thought. If you could call it a ranch. The Triple 6. She hadn’t seen or smelled any cattle on the way into the box canyon in which the headquarters sat. There were several corrals and a few outbuildings crouched in the brush beyond the shack, which, judging by its L-shape, was a bunkhouse, but the place had obviously seen better days. Better days before Metalious’s crew of gunhands had moved in, using the place as a headquarters not so much for raising cattle as for stealing beeves and horses and selling them across the border in Mexico.

  On the dark trails she rode, Louisa had heard of the man. He was also a vicious killer, as per his name, and a general all-around miscreant. Lou would call him no better than the crust at the bottom of an empty slop pale.

  The man needed killing. That was for sure. And Louisa would do just that at the first opportunity. If he didn’t kill her, as he’d promised to do eventually, first.

  Metalious had set the wagon brake and climbed down the left front wheel and was moving around to the back of the wagon, where the doctor crouched over Blanco.

  “How’s he doin’?” Sam asked.

  “Christ, how do you think after that rough ride? His wounds have opened up. I’m probably gonna have to pull my stitches out and resew his wounds!”

  Sam laughed, little concern for his son’s well-being in his demeanor. “Just keep him alive, Doc. Keep him alive and let him start gettin’ better so he’s at least conscious and knows what’s goin’ on.” The outlaw leader turned toward a couple of the men who’d dismounted and were hovering around the wagon while the others led the mounts toward one of the three pole corrals beyond the bunkhouse. “Bob, Luis, take Blanco into the cabin. Put him on my bed. Want my boy to be comfortable.”

  Sam laughed again.

  The doctor grunted as he climbed wearily down from the end of the wagon. “I don’t get you, Metalious. What’re you talking about—‘just keep him alive’?”

  Sam laughed hard and slapped the doctor’s back. Then he turned and followed the two men, who’d each grabbed an end of Blanco, toward the bunkhouse.

  “What about the girl?” asked a tall man with Mexican features but no Spanish accent, leering up at Louisa from beneath the brim of his flat-brimmed black hat with painted grizzly teeth sewn into its crown. He wore a perpetual, bizarre sidelong grin. “Can I take her first, Boss?”

  He spoke with a liquid-sounding lisp.

  Metalious stopped at the bunkhouse doorway as the two men carrying Blanco, followed by the doctor, disappeared inside.

  “There’ll be none of that yet, Clell. I brought her along as insurance against her big friend with the double-bore gut shredder. And to kill her myself ... slow.” Metalious grinned so that his teeth fairly glowed in the windy darkness against the bunkhouse door. “But first she’s gonna cook and clean up this pigsty. You know—to generally do what women are meant to do. Huh, Clell? If I give her to you first, you’ll break her neck and make me very angry, amigo!”

  Metalious laughed his malicicious laugh. “Bring her.” He disappeared into the cabin, in the open doorway of which a guttering lantern light now shone, washing over the board above the door in which the numeral six had been burned three times.

  Clell turned to Louisa. “You heard the man.” He spread his arms, looking up at her lustily. Louisa saw that part of his upper lip was missing, probably cut off with a rusty knife, for it was hideously scarred, and revealed a grisly portion of his upper gum. Thus the sidelong grin and lisp.

  “I’ll lift you,” he said with a wink.

  “You could at least cut my ankles free. Then I co
uld climb down on my own. I’m just concerned about your back, you understand, Clell.”

  “I could carry you down and then cut your ankles free. I would enjoy that more. I appreciate your concern for my back, but you don’t look much heavier than a sack of parched corn.”

  He snaked one arm behind Louisa’s back, just up from her rump, and slid the other one beneath her legs, causing the wound above her left knee to bark. With a jerk, he lifted her out of the wagon’s pilot box, and although the pain stabbed at her, she maintained a stony expression. He held her there against him, grinning that bizarre grin at her, revealing his decayed gums and the exposed, black roots of several teeth. He slid one hand up under her poncho, gave her left breast a slow squeeze.

  Louisa spat in his face.

  He slid his arms out from beneath her. The ground came up fast to smack Louisa hard, hammering the air from her lungs. She’d hit the back of her head, as well, and she lay there, trying not to show how much pain she was in but blinking her eyes to clear them.

  Clell reached down, slid an Arkansas toothpick from the well of his left mule ear, and hacked through the rope binding Louisa’s ankles together. “You and me are gonna raise us a ruckus later. You might even get to likin’ ole Clell.”

  Louisa swallowed, hardened her lower jaw slightly at the dull pain in the back of her head—it rippled down her neck and into her back—and said in as clear a voice as she could muster with her lungs working at only about one-quarter capacity, “I wouldn’t get my hopes up.”

  Clell straightened and, holding the knife menacingly in his right hand, canted his head toward the bunkhouse. From the open door, Metalious and the doctor’s voices emanated.

  Louisa sat up. Her wrists were still tied behind her, so she climbed to her feet awkwardly. Clell stepped back warily as she glanced coolly at him out of the corner of her left eye before walking along the path beaten into the sand, gravel, and sage to the bunkhouse’s front door.

  There was a slight wooden stoop. She stepped over the rotten wood planks and on into the earthen-floored shack. A long table with a scarred top littered with food scraps and whiskey bottles stood before her, a woodstove flanking it. Bunks stood to either side, most of them lost in the hovel’s deep shadows.