The Devil's Winchester

by Peter Brandvold

  The air smelled so strongly of old sweat and tobacco smoke that Louisa’s gut tightened, and for a moment she thought she’d retch. She’d been around the West a few times, and she’d experienced smells that would choke a dog, but the bunkhouse smelled like an open privy pit.

  “I knew you’d come fer me, Pa,” Blanco was saying on a bunk at the edge of the light shed by the lantern hanging from a wire over the table. “Sure do appreciate the help.”

  “Don’t talk now, son,” Sam said, standing over his son and holding a bottle by its neck in his right fist. “Let the doc tend ya, and we’ll settle up tomorrow.”

  “Settle up?” Blanco said.

  “You know—for not involving me in them stage and bank holdups.”

  “But, Pa, you know how you are. You always wanna run things, and ...”

  “Shhh!” Sam held a finger over his lips, cutting Blanco off. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Make everything right between us. Tonight, you rest.”

  As the doctor, sitting in a chair beside Blanco’s bunk, began unbuttoning the firebrand’s shirt, Blanco said, “Ah, shit! I knew you was gonna be sore. I just knew it!”

  Sam had started turning away from the bunk. Now, he turned back, roaring in a deep, savagely menacing voice: “I told you to shut the hell up, Blanco!”

  Louisa couldn’t see Blanco, as the bunk was in shadow, but she heard him curse and grunt as the doctor administered to him. Sam turned toward her, his big, dark, bearded face still flushed with fury. He pointed his bottle at her. “You git to work, girl! Me an’ the boys need supper, and we need it soon!”

  “I don’t cook,” Louisa said with quiet defiance. “But even if I could, it would be a bit hard with my hands tied behind my back.”

  “You’re a girl, ain’t ya?” Sam growled, kicking a chair out from the end of the table and slamming the bottle down. “You can cook. At least, you can throw somethin’ together better than me or my boys can. And you can clean up around here.” He splashed whiskey into a dirty water tumbler, and threw it back. “Clell, keep a gun on her. Don’t let her outta your sight. She’s a killer! She tries anything, I’ll let you take her out behind the cabin. How’s that?”

  “That’s just fine,” Clell said, returning his Arkansas toothpick to his mule-eared boot, then sliding a bone-gripped Remington from his thigh holster and kicking a chair out from the side of the table nearest the door. “I think we’d get along right well together. I think she likes me.”

  “Well, that’s because you’re a handsome devil,” Sam said. Turning to the other two men milling in the shadows around the bunks beyond the doctor and Blanco, the outlaw leader said, “Bob, make sure we got four men on watch all night. You decide the shifts.”

  “You got it, Boss.”

  “Me,” Sam said. “I’m tired. I’m gonna sit here for a bit and watch the girl cook. I don’t get to see that too often.”

  “Me, neither,” Clell said, splashing whiskey into another dirty glass, then reaching into a shirt pocket for a long, black cheroot.

  Louisa looked around the makeshift kitchen. The table, the plankboard counter running along the back wall, the shelves above the counter, and the stove were greasesplattered and bloodstained. Even back home in Nebraska, Louisa had never been handy with cleaning or cooking. But there wasn’t much else she could do at the moment but appease these men and let them get what dull-witted joy they could at mocking her.

  What she wanted to do was kill them as they sat at the table smoking, drinking, and ogling her. She still had two small knives on her person, hidden under her poncho and in the folds of her underwear. But she’d have to bide her time and wait for the right opportunity to use them. Even if she thought she could get away with using them effectively now, with both her wounded legs slowing her down, she’d refrain from doing so.

  She was in no hurry to leave this box canyon. If Lou was still alive, he’d be along soon, and then she and the big bounty hunter could take down the entire gang.

  She especially wanted to take down Sam and Clell as bloodily as possible, to leave them dying slowly, howling like gut-shot coyotes.

  Finished inspecting the mess around her, Louisa grabbed a ragged straw broom from a corner, and raised it like a club.

  “Hey!” Clell said, jerking forward in his chair and raising his .45.

  “Hold your water.”

  Louisa swept the broom across the top of the table until all the bottles, glasses, cigarette and cigar butts, and tin cups hit the floor with a raucous clatter and a nasty screech of breaking glass. Clell swallowed as he sank back in his chair, slowly lowering the .45 and looking chagrined as Sam laughed and pointed at him, mocking.

  Louisa busily swept the trash from the table out the door, not caring that she’d left a good bit of broken glass behind. She was careful not to limp; revealing that she was gimped up in both legs would do her no good at all. She could imagine such knowledge bringing out the sadism in these killers. As the two owlhoots watched her with a singular mix of wary amusement and guarded fascination, she built a fire in the stove and set about throwing a meal together.

  She picked up an airtight tin of tomatoes and slammed it onto the table between Metalious and Clell, who were now playing a desultory game of two-handed stud. “If you promise to cut yourself, I’ll ask one of you gentlemen to open this.”

  Metalious chuckled as he puffed the quirley wedged in the corner of his mouth, then set his cards down, slid a bowie knife from his belt sheath, and used it to cut the lid off the can. Louisa thanked the man dryly, then dumped the tomatoes into a pot that she hadn’t bothered to wash out first.

  To the tomatoes she added jerky that she found in a burlap sack on one of the shelves, a shriveled potato, and a sprouted wild onion, both of which Metalious chopped for her in lieu of handing over his butcher knife. Since that didn’t look like much with which to feed all of Metalious’s men—she’d had trouble counting them but she thought there weren’t quite ten of them left—she rummaged around until she found a few chunks of brined pork that she suspected had been sitting there in its oilcloth wrap for quite some time.

  She didn’t care. She didn’t plan on eating the vile concoction, anyway. She would have added rat poison if she’d seen a box lying around, and if she thought Metalious wouldn’t catch her at it or force her to sample her own cooking before his men did.

  She set the pot on the stove and chunked another log into the firebox.

  “There. I think I’ll retire to my quarters, if you don’t mind.”

  “What about coffee?” Clell said, looking up from his cards and scowling around his half-smoked cigar. Light from the lamp hanging above the table shone blue in the thick web of wafting tobacco smoke that the cabin’s open door did little to alleviate and that was causing Louisa’s eyes to water.

  It was such smoke as well as drunken male scalawags like the two around her now that kept her out of saloons. Not to mention the fact that she had no taste for liquor of any variety, including beer.

  “I only made the stew to silence the caterwauling,” Louisa said. “Make your own coffee.”

  Clell bunched his lips angrily, closed his hand over his .45 on the table, and began to rise from his chair.

  “You make it,” Sam ordered the scar-lipped hard case. “She probably don’t know how. I bet you prefer milk, don’t you, little girl? Goat milk, no doubt.”

  “That and sarsaparilla.”

  “Figures.”

  As Clell grumblingly walked around the table to fetch the coffeepot off a splintered shelf, Louisa drifted back into the bunkhouse’s shadows, beyond Blanco and the doctor, who continued rewrapping the hard case’s wounds.

  “You stick around, honey,” Metalious ordered behind a fresh smoke puff. “You try to leave tonight, I’ll hear you. I sleep light as a rooster. Besides, I got men posted all about the place. If you try to make a run for it, I’ll feed you to whole the damn pack at once!”

  He laughed.

  As Louisa gl
anced around for a bunk that looked unoccupied and relatively clean, she imagined sliding her knife across Sam “Man-Killin’ ” Metalious’s hairy neck, and her lips quirked with a hard smile.

  The smile died when she found a bunk against the shack’s right wall. As she drew the bunk’s single army blanket up to her neck and rested her head back on the gamey-smelling pillow, her thoughts tumbled to Prophet. The worry that her own dilemma had distracted her from returned, and her stomach dropped hard.

  Where was Lou?

  Obviously, Metalious hadn’t run into him. But sundry other cutthroat packs haunted the broad valley between the San Mateos and the No-Water range. Had he tangled with one of them? Or, if not, would he be able to track her to this devil’s lair in time to save her if she could not save herself?

  She was living on borrowed time. That was certain. Metalious couldn’t keep his men off of her forever, and he probably wouldn’t want to. She’d been savaged before, down in Mexico before Lou had galloped to her rescue with a passel of revolutionarios, and she’d vowed she’d never let herself be savaged again.

  She’d die first, by her own hand or theirs.

  Sooner rather than later her time would run out.

  Louisa closed her eyes. She listened to Sam and Clell flip cards onto the table and grunt and spit and hack phlegm and set their whiskey glasses down. They talked little. Outside, there was the occasional horse whinny, and from time to time the men keeping watch on the surrounding ridges called to each other. More than once, riders rode past the cabin—one scout being relieved by another.

  Men came and went for several hours, dishing up the stew and pouring coffee and joining the poker game or rolling into their bunks. Finally, somehow, Louisa managed to sleep.

  She had no idea how much time had passed, before something woke her. She opened her eyes. The bunkhouse was dark, the air thick with wood and tobacco smoke. To her left, the earthen floor crunched under a stealthy foot. The stench of rancid sweat and horses grew stronger, and she felt the heat of a near man.

  A shadow moved beside her. Just as she began to lift her head, a calloused, dirty hand closed over her mouth, pressing her head down against the pillow. A man grunted. She couldn’t see him in the darkness, but he was big and brutal, and she could hear his heavy, intense breathing.

  Her bunk dropped on the left as he planted a knee on the edge of it and with his free hand fondled her breasts roughly through the blanket. Automatically, she’d reached into her serape for a bone-handled dagger and managed to roll onto her left side while sliding her right hand across her belly, tilting the knife up slightly.

  The man who’d been trying to pull her blanket down and climb onto the bunk with her suddenly sucked a sharp breath through gritted teeth. Louisa lifted the haft of the knife slightly, heard the razor-edged tip saw into the denim at the man’s crotch—a soft, sibilant sound, like the scratch of a burrowing mouse.

  She held the knife there.

  The man slowly lifted his hand from her chest. He lifted the other hand from her mouth, and pulled his head back. “Easy,” Clell breathed.

  The smell as well as the voice identified him.

  Louisa continued to hold the knife firmly in her right hand, angled up. Grunting nervously, Clell eased himself up and over the knife and then dropped both feet down to the floor. He turned away and disappeared in the darkness.

  Louisa slipped the knife back in the sheath strapped to her thigh.

  She closed her eyes.

  Buoyed by this one small victory, she managed to will herself to sleep once more.

  26

  PROPHET LIFTED HIS head suddenly, grabbed his Winchester almost before he’d even opened his eyes, cocked it, and aimed. His heart thudded. Sitting against the wall of the notch, on the opposite side of the near-dead fire from where Rose lay in her blankets, head resting on her saddle, he peered out the alcove’s opening into the darkness beyond.

  Rose lifted her head from the saddle, looking around warily, blinking. “What is it?”

  Prophet depressed the rifle’s hammer. “Thought I heard somethin’. But it’s nothin’ I heard.” He set the rifle down beside him. “The wind died.”

  He’d been sleeping against the notch wall, head on his knees. He hadn’t wanted to get too comfortable because he hadn’t wanted to sleep long. Louisa would be wondering about him, waiting for him. Needing him. Now he stood stiffly, his butt numb, having fallen asleep, and walked over to the opening and stepped outside.

  Silence. Not so much as a breath of a breeze. He stepped far enough back from the ridge that he could see the eastern sky. False dawn was not yet upon him, but the stars just above the horizon were beginning to fade. It was around four, he judged.

  “Time to ride, Rose,” he said when he’d walked back into the alcove.

  Rose flung her blankets aside. She moved as if to rise, then leaned back on her arms, looking straight ahead. Prophet couldn’t make out her face in the shadows.

  “You all right?”

  She nodded. “Just a little queasy, I reckon.”

  “You seen a doc yet?”

  Rose shook her head. “I’ll worry about that later. When I’ve found a place to sink my picket pin.”

  Prophet walked over and extended his hand to her. She looked up at him skeptically. Then she reached out, placed her hand in his. Gently, he pulled her to her feet. As she continued to stare up at him, her eyes filled unexpectedly with tears, and she threw herself against him and wrapped her arms around him, burying her face in his chest.

  Her shoulders jerked as she sobbed.

  “There, now,” Prophet said, feeling a little awkward but finally reaching around her and giving her an affectionate squeeze. “Everything’s gonna be all right.”

  “I know.” Her voice was tight, brittle. She pulled away from him, turned away as though embarrassed, and wiped the tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “I’m just ... scared.”

  Prophet held her arm, turned her back toward him. “You ride on out of here, Rose. Go on back to your ranch. It’s yours now, with your family dead.”

  She studied him for a time, frowning, her eyes sliding to each of his own and back again. Finally, she shook her head. “Not yet. You helped me. Now I’m gonna help you.”

  “Rose ...”

  “You’re alone, Lou. Alone against a gang of just under ten. You won’t have a chance getting Louisa back without someone to at least create a distraction.”

  Prophet thought about it. “Is all you got for firepower that old cap-and-ball?”

  “I had a newer pistol and a Spencer repeater, but Junior took it when he lit out on me and ...” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say “baby” yet. She looked down at her belly as though there were something alien there inside her.

  Prophet squatted by the fire, reached into one of the saddlebags, and pulled out a spare pistol wrapped in a couple of red bandannas. He removed the bandannas and hefted the pistol in his hand—a Smith & Wesson with gutta-percha grips. He rummaged around in his saddlebags again and withdrew a box of shells.

  “Spoils of war,” he said, flipping the gun in his hand and extending it to Rose butt first. “A .44. Here’s some shells for it.”

  Rose took the gun in one hand, the shells in the other. She looked at each, then narrowed an eye as she glanced up at Prophet towering over her. A faint smile pulled at one corner of her mouth.

  “Let’s shake a leg,” he said with a grunt as he grabbed his saddle and started back to where both horses stood near the notch’s back wall.

  Rose’s skewbald paint stood as far away from Mean and Ugly as he could get in the tight quarters, having obviously been cowed by Mean’s evil eye, which the dun was giving even now.

  Prophet chuckled. “Glad to see you got your pluck back, Mean.” He slapped the horse’s right rear hip. “Cussed son of a bitch.”

  A few minutes later, forgoing breakfast, Prophet led Mean out of the notch. Rose followed with the skewbald paint tha
t had belonged to Gopher Adams. Wordlessly, in the predawn darkness, the stars blazing in the wind-scoured sky, they mounted up and booted the mounts across the shallow wash, the clacks of the horses’ hooves sounding crisp and clear in the quiet air.

  Faintly, from far away, a single coyote howled.

  On the trail, Prophet was glad to see that the tracks of the killers, including the two wheel furrows of Sam “Man-Killin’” Metalious’s wagon, had not been so badly eroded by the wind that they couldn’t be followed. He knew roughly where the Metalious ranch was located, but being able to follow the trail straight to it would save precious time.

  Prophet and Rose alternately loped and walked their fresh horses, stopping once an hour to give the mounts a couple handfuls of water and parched corn. The sun was a vast blossoming rose in the east when Prophet saw the tracks of the wagon wheels swing abruptly off the main trail, making four indentations in the spindly buckbrush, then marking the sand and gravel along a single-track horse trail.

  Prophet and Rose rode single-file along the trail that meandered off across the purpling sage and rabbit brush. The San Mateos rose ahead and slightly left of the trail. A jog of nearer, rocky-topped hills humped straight out from the trail, which, Prophet saw nearly an hour later, angled around on the hill’s northwest side. Then it dropped down into a deep, dry arroyo, followed the ravine’s far side for half a mile, then swung north again through the apron slopes of the mountains.

  All the while he rode, Prophet kept a tense, watchful eye on the brush along the trail, not only on the scout for trail pickets but for Louisa’s body. Though the thought was like a log chain in the bounty hunter’s gut, there was always the chance she’d been killed. A good chance, in fact, knowing the kind of men she was up against.

  Used and discarded.

  The farther they rode into the slopes of the San Mateos, the more frequently Prophet stopped and, leaving Rose concealed in a nest of boulders or in a hidden ravine, swung wide of the horse trail to carefully scout the terrain ahead. He didn’t want to run into any pickets Metalious might have posted, or, worse, ride up on the Metalious camp itself unawares.