The Devil's Winchester

by Peter Brandvold

  Metalious looked at Clell. “Hang him. Slow drop, just like always. Let him dangle there so that he can consider all of his sins before he has his visit with St. Pete. Don’t want him forgetting one, now, do we?”

  Sam laughed raucously.

  Louisa looked down at Clell’s gun resting on the edge of the porch. Her heart thudded. Just then, Clell turned to her. He smiled knowingly as he reached down, casually picked up the Remington, and dropped it into its holster.

  His stare darkened. He knew she had at least one knife on her. He couldn’t say anything because then Sam would know he’d gone against orders last night, visiting Louisa’s bunk. Sooner or later, though, he’d have to say something or try to get her hideout pigstickers away from her. Before he did, she’d have to get her hands on a gun.

  Clell reached down for Blanco’s arm. The young outlaw pulled away and sobbed louder, begging his father for mercy.

  “Oh, for chrissakes,” Sam said to Clell. “Give him a Dutch rider over there. You’re embarrassin’ yourself, Blanco. You’re embarrassin’ not only yourself but me, too. You’re just like your worthless mother!” He turned to Clell. “Get a move on. What’re you waiting for? Git him hung!”

  Clell glanced at Louisa once more, warily. Then, moving quickly, he swung up into the saddle of his horse hitched at the rack fronting the bunkhouse. He removed his lariat from his saddle horn, turned his horse away from the hitchrack, and paid out a long loop, dropping it neatly over Blanco’s shoulders. Before Blanco could throw the hondo off his head, Clell took up the slack, wheeled his horse once more, and booted it toward the hang tree.

  Blanco was twisted around and jerked onto his belly. He cursed loudly between sobs as Clell pulled him through the dusty yard, leaving a blood trail from his freshly reopened wounds.

  Sam turned to Louisa and motioned with his arm, wobbling a little, as he’d been drinking all morning. “Get out there. I don’t want you behind me. You got a right sneaky look to you, little girl.”

  Louise’s mind went to the two daggers hidden beneath her skirts. She could get to them quickly, through slits in her outer wool riding skirt, but they wouldn’t be much good against eight men. Glancing at the long-barreled Colt hanging off Sam’s stout, buckskin-clad thigh, she stepped off the porch and moved out into the yard. Sam moved up behind her and gave her a push so hard that she flew forward, tripping over her own feet and the hem of her skirt, and piled up in the dirt.

  Both her bandaged wounds barked painfully. She felt the one in her left leg begin to leak.

  She whipped her head around and cast a malevolent stare at Metalious, narrowing one eye but saying nothing. Sam only laughed.

  “Get on over there!” he ordered, pointing to where Blanco was now being manhandled onto the saddle of Clell’s horse and positioned beneath a heavy, barkless limb of the near-naked hang tree. The tree was so old, had been dead for so long, that it looked little more than a large, skinned log poking up out of the ground, with three large limbs extending from its bole.

  As Louisa approached it, she glanced around at the guns holstered on the legs and hips of the men around her. The three by the barn were coming up to get a good look at the hanging. If she could nab only one gun and ignore the agony shooting up and down both her legs, she could do some damage before they killed her. However she managed to do it, she had to work fast.

  She would not let them rape her.

  Lou, where the hell are you—you big, worthless scalawag? If you got yourself killed over there at the entrance to the box canyon, I hope it was painful....

  She glanced at Blanco now standing atop Clell’s horse, the noose around his neck. The inside of his pants legs were wet. Piddle dripped onto the saddle between his boots.

  “Any last words, son?” Sam said, fists on his hips, a drunken grin on his thick, wet lips....

  The other men stood in a semicircle around Blanco and the horse, passing a bottle and smoking and looking not only pleased but delighted and maybe also relieved that it was not them up there. Obviously, the hang tree had been put to good use before.

  Blanco shifted his boots to keep his footing. Tears dribbled down his cheeks as urine continued to drip onto Clell’s saddle. He opened his mouth to speak, stopped, and cleared his throat.

  He hardened his voice as he shifted his baleful gaze at his father standing just off the horse’s right wither. “Yeah, I got somethin’ to say to you, you old bastard. Fuck you!”

  Sam laughed and nodded at Clell. Clell slapped the horse’s rump. The steeldust lunged forward, and the men parted as the horse ran through them and off across the yard, leaving Blanco dangling in the air behind him.

  Louisa’s heart thudded. Sam was the closest man to her. She’d just begun to edge toward him, when a pistol shot rose above Blanco’s choking and the rope’s creaking.

  Two more shots. Galloping hooves thudded, growing louder.

  Louisa peered into the distance beyond Blanco, toward the ridge about three-quarters of a mile away. She couldn’t see the gap that led to the ranch, but her heart lightened slightly when she saw a rider galloping toward her. Her stomach dropped again in dread when she saw the black hat and the black duster flaps blowing back behind the man in the wind.

  It was the gunman who fancied a black suit of clothes. The others had called him Parnell. He’d been with the two other men, guarding the entrance to the ranch.

  He was riding fast, his black image atop his black horse growing by leaps and bounds. He seemed to have some important news he was in a raging hurry to share.

  Louisa felt her chest go heavy, her mouth go dry.

  Lou had ridden into their trap, got himself greased. She knew it. She felt the brittle chill of it in her bones.

  Louisa’s legs felt like lead, but she managed to kick herself into a slow, side-stepping maneuver toward Sam Metalious while casting quick, furtive glances at the ivory-gripped .45 jutting from the holster on his near thigh. She kept one eye on the rider, gauging his approach.

  When he was within fifty yards and closing fast, head down, the brim of his black hat basted against his forehead, Louisa made her move, bolting suddenly for Metalious’s big Colt.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” yelled one of the men standing on the other side of Blanco’s kicking body.

  “Wait, what?” said another.

  Louisa held her ground, eyes pinched in confusion.

  “That ain’t Parnell!” yowled the first man who’d spoken, crouching as he grabbed the two revolvers on his hips.

  28

  KEEPING HIS HEAD down so that Sam “Man-Killin’” Metalious and his men would believe him the black-clad gunman for as long as possible, storming into the ranch with news about the gunfire they’d likely heard, Prophet holstered his Peacemaker and reached down to slide his Winchester ’73 from the saddle boot jutting up from beneath his right thigh.

  He cocked the rifle one-handed and brought up his double-barreled ten-gauge that he’d concealed under the black duster that whipped behind him in the wind.

  Following the meandering trail, he bounded up and over the last low rise, bringing the ranch yard to within fifty yards of him and moving up fast. The corrals and barn were on the left, a long, low shack on the right. There was a dead tree in the middle of the yard, on the near end. A man hung from it, dancing a bizarre jig as he strangled and jerked this way and that at the end of the hang rope.

  Seven men including Metalious stood around the tree. Two were walking slowly toward Prophet, about ten feet apart and one behind the other, frowning and canting their heads this way and that as though suspicious of the rider galloping toward them. The first man had his right hand on the handle of a pistol positioned for the cross draw on his left hip.

  Louisa stood near Metalious, her right hand angled out away from her and toward the revolver on the big outlaw leader’s right thigh. She’d frozen in midmovement, Prophet could tell, though she and everyone else were bouncing around in front of him as the big black lunged forw
ard along the uneven trail. Her skirts billowed, and her blond hair danced in the breeze.

  “That ain’t Parnell!” yelled the man nearest him—a thin, rat-faced blond gent with his hat dangling down his back by a thong. He wore skintight fringed leggings and a shirt with Mexican-style piping.

  He swiveled his head back toward Prophet, and jerked his revolver from its holster, reaching across his belly with his other hand to grab another. Prophet extended the sawed-off ten-gauge in his left hand, thumbing back each hammer in turn, and aiming the gun at the two men nearest him, both of whom were now slapping leather and lifting iron.

  Prophet squeezed the barn blaster’s left trigger.

  Ka-booommmm!

  The first man, who was extending both his revolvers straight out in front of him and glowering malevolently, was lifted three feet up in the air and thrown straight back, triggering both his hoglegs skyward as the double-ought buck punched a hat-sized hole in his chest and belly.

  Prophet’s wrist ached from the barn blaster’s violent kick, but he squeezed the neck of the stock as tightly as he could, and took up the slack in the double-bore’s second trigger.

  Ka-booommmm!

  The second man, stunned by what had happened to the man in front of him, was treated the same way. He fired one of his own pistols into his own kneecap before hitting the ground on his back and turning two violent somersaults toward a horse corral, bloodstained sage and gravel flying up around him.

  As Prophet and the big black horse drew within ten yards of the dancing hanged man, the other four or five began cursing, throwing liquor bottles and cigars away, crouching and raising six-shooters. A pistol popped ahead and to Prophet’s right, the bullet drawing a hot line across his right forearm. He let the shooter have it, the Winchester leaping and roaring and then its barrel dropping slightly as Prophet recocked it.

  As he galloped straight on through the group, two men dove out of his way while Louisa, unable to keep big Sam Metalious from drawing his own Colt, leaped onto the man’s back and snaked her arms around his neck, trying to drive him to the ground and get his gun.

  As Prophet flew on past the bunch grouped around the hang tree, most of whom, including Louisa and Sam, were on the ground, bullets screamed around his head and thudded into the ground around the black’s scissoring hooves. Prophet drew sharply back on the horse’s reins, then turned him in a great spray of dust and gravel.

  The horse whinnied and tried buck-kicking though Prophet held him on a short leash with his left hand, having let the double-bore drop down his side to dangle there by its leather lanyard.

  Two men were down on their knees, bearing down on him.

  Prophet ground his spurs into the black’s flanks. “Heeyahh!”

  As he bounded forward, the extended pistols of the two men on their knees puffed smoke and stabbed flames.

  A hot slug tore through Prophet’s upper left arm. Sweeping the pain back into a rear corner of his brain, he slipped the black’s reins in his teeth and, as the horse galloped back down the middle of the yard toward the hang tree, Prophet held the rifle to his right shoulder with both hands.

  Shooting from the hurricane deck was no easy task. He’d fired three quick shots before he finally pinked the elbow of one man shooting at him and blew the hat off the other. He thundered back past the hang tree and the man hanging from it—Blanco Metalious, the bounty hunter noted with vague incredulity—and turned the black once more.

  Louisa had Sam Metalious’s long-barreled Colt in her hand while Sam himself writhed on the ground beside her, grabbing at a bloody knife handle poking up from his side and bellowing like a poleaxed bull. Extending the Colt straight out in front of her, Louisa triggered lead toward the two men shooting from knees in front of the barn, one holding the elbow that Prophet had pinked down close to his side.

  She drilled another, taller man with a hideously scarred upper lip who came running at a crouch toward her from behind the hang tree. He flew back, throwing his gun away, and bounced off Blanco’s twitching feet. He piled up at the tree’s base, clutching his chest and screaming.

  Louisa and the two men on their knees exchanged shots. A couple of Louisa’s slugs plunked into the barn behind the men as their shots sliced the air around her or blew up dust at her boots. As one of her slugs slammed the man with the wounded elbow straight back to the ground, the other got up and ran crouching back toward the corral angling off the barn’s far side.

  Meanwhile, the black had had its fill of the lead storm. It reared suddenly just as Prophet had turned it back toward the yard.

  Prophet reached for the horn with his left hand, missed it, and suddenly found himself free-falling off the black’s hindquarters, glimpsing the long, silky black tail waving up beside him a half second before the ground smacked his back so hard that the breath left him in a single, loud grunt.

  His head spun.

  The black galloped back toward the entrance to the canyon, angrily buck-kicking, dust sifting behind it.

  Prophet lifted his head and pushed onto an elbow. Louisa was where she’d been before. Her cheek was bloody, and her poncho was torn where a bullet had grazed her arm. She was punching .45 shells from Metalious’s cartridge belt while the man lay on his back, breathing hard and clutching his bloody belly.

  All but one of the other men were down. The last man was crawling back toward the barn, grunting loudly and wheezing, holding the bloody back of his right thigh.

  Louisa looked at Prophet as she shook the spent shells from Metalious’s .45 and began sliding in fresh ones. “You all right, Lou?”

  “I got a headache.”

  “Took you long enough to get here. I thought you were visiting the soiled doves in Socorro.”

  Prophet rose up on a knee and scooped his Winchester out of the dust where he’d dropped it. Brushing dust from the receiver, he watched the wounded man turn and press his back against the barn’s front wall.

  He, too, was reloading—a redheaded gent with a hook nose and two evil, gray eyes. Two rearing red ponies were piped onto the breast flaps of his bib-front blue shirt. He gritted his scraggly teeth and muttered to himself unhappily.

  “No,” Prophet said, shaking his head and cocking the Winchester. “But I’m gonna head there soon. Never visited no doves in Socorro, but I bet they have nice ones there.”

  He drew a bead on the gent sitting against the barn.

  The man glanced at him over the gun he was busily punching fresh loads into.

  “You’re a whoremonger, Lou Prophet.”

  “Yes, I am, Louisa Bonnyventure.” She smiled at him. He smiled back at her.

  The man sitting with his back to the barn’s closed front doors flipped his pistol’s loading gate shut and spun the cylinder.

  With both hands, Louisa extended the big Colt at him, narrowing one eye as she aimed down the barrel. Prophet took up the slack in his trigger finger.

  Their guns roared at the same time.

  The red-haired hard case said, “Achh!” and slammed the back of his head against the barn, the twin side-by-side holes in his forehead glistening in the brassy noon light. He dropped his cocked pistol down between his legs. His shoulders jerked and his eyelids fluttered.

  Slowly, he sagged down onto his shoulder and, except for one slightly twitching black boot, lay still. Smeared blood and brains formed a downward curving arc on the wall above him.

  Prophet used the rifle as a staff with which to push himself to his feet. He shrugged out of his black duster as he looked around at the seven dead men and Sam “Man-Killin’” Metalious and then turned his befuddled gaze to Blanco, who was now more slowly dancing the same jig as before at the end of his rope.

  “It appears,” Louisa said as she climbed stiffly to her feet and tossed her hair back behind her shoulders, “that Sam and his son had a rather complicated relationship.” She looked down at Metalious, who was clutching his bloody lower left side. “Isn’t that right, Sam?”

  Louisa ang
led the Colt toward Metalious and ratcheted the hammer back.

  “No!” Metalious covered his face with the backs of his hands, as if it to shield himself from one of his own bullets.

  “Hold on.”

  Prophet canted his head toward where a wagon was coming along the trail from the entrance to the canyon. Gradually, the thunder of its wheels and of the galloping horse in its traces could be heard above Blanco’s strangling and the creaking of the hang rope.

  The wagon approached, and Prophet saw Rose sitting in the driver’s box, left of Marshal Max Utter, who drove with his long-barreled, double-bore Greener across his thighs. Utter had bandaged the girl’s arm and gotten her into a sling he’d fashioned from rope he’d found in the back of his wagon, where he was hauling his wheelchair.

  Utter reined the coyote dun to a halt, and the wagon squawked to a stop behind the blowing beast, dust sifting around it so that both Utter and Rose choked softly against it and blinked their eyes.

  Utter looked at Blanco and then at Sam, who returned the lawman’s stare with an incredulous one of his own. The marshal raked his gaze from Prophet to Louisa and then again to Blanco hanging to his left and about six feet off the ground.

  “I reckon I could shoot him down, but he’d never live to see another judge.”

  Prophet cuffed his funnel-brimmed hat back off his forehead. “I reckon you’re right.”

  “Where’s the sawbones?”

  “Dead,” Louisa said.

  Utter scowled.

  “Sam,” he said, “I’ll be hauling your ass back to Corazon, in the jailhouse of which, locked up tighter than the bark on a cottonwood trunk, you’ll await the next judge. I don’t care if it takes a month of Sundays to get another one out here.”

  Metalious told the marshal to do something physically impossible to himself.

  Utter scoffed, shook his head. “You’ve made a mockery of the law in my town for the last time.”

  Utter looked at Prophet. “Git him aboard here, will you, Proph? I’ll send Lester and his boy out for the doc and to clean up this place and turn the horses loose.”