Blood at Sundown

by Peter Brandvold

  A long, low depot building ran parallel to the rails in Indian Butte, on its ragged southern end. On the rails sat a train complete with black iron locomotive with a diamond-shaped stack, a tender car stuffed to brimming with split wood, and several other cars, including what appeared to be passenger coaches, a freight car, and a stock car before the obligatory red caboose at the tail end.

  The train, more substantial than what Prophet had expected, was aimed south.

  That fact warmed Prophet’s cold, cold heart. Genuinely cold, not just figuratively cold. He was bone-deep cold. Ticker-deep cold. In fact, he hadn’t heard the old turnip beat a single hiccup in his chest since leaving the blood-washed roadhouse locally known as Jiggs’s Place. He half thought the blood-pumping organ might be frozen to the texture of stone by now, just like his feet inside his fur-lined moccasins and his fingers inside his mittens and gloves.

  He took a good, slow look at the town through the spyglass, sliding the piece gradually from right to left and then back one more time, bringing in the shacks, shanties, stock pens, and corrals at its ragged outer fringes. He saw no obvious signs of anyone lying in ambush for him.

  He could never be too sure, however. He’d been hunting bounties a good long time, and it was only natural that he’d acquired more than a few enemies here and there. A couple of raggedy-assed-looking drifters had passed him a ways back along the trail, giving his freight load of stiff cadavers as well as himself the woolly eyeball. They hadn’t said anything, just looked the dead men and himself over real good, glanced at each other in silent communication, then ridden on ahead.

  Prophet hadn’t been sure, but he thought he might have recognized one of them—a tall, slender fella with a droopy right eyelid. Prophet couldn’t remember the man’s name or where he’d seen him before. That was the problem. The fella with the sleepy eye might be trouble. He and his partner—a younger, blond man with a coyote face—might be waiting somewhere down there in Indian Butte with a rifle. Or two rifles. Maybe they’d talked to Prophet’s quarry down there—Gritch Hatchley and Weed Brougham—and given them the lowdown on the bounty man heading this way with the dead men tied belly down over their saddles.

  Hatchley and Brougham might be waiting to greet him with a hail of hot lead, as well . . .

  Prophet drew a deep breath, wincing at the cold air chafing his tonsils, burning his nostrils, and grieving his lungs, and reduced the spyglass.

  No, there were no obvious signs of trouble in Indian Butte. That didn’t mean there would be no trouble, of course. But all he was doing, sitting out here where it was colder than a banker’s heart, was turning more and more of him to stone and further piss-burning Mean and Ugly, though that didn’t take a whole lot of doing.

  Lou narrowed an eye as he glanced at the sky. Gunmetal clouds had slid over the blue bowl. There was no longer any sign of the sun. It was so gone it might have gone out. In its place, a fine snow was falling again. A building wind was swirling it around, howling morosely.

  Damn Dakota . . .

  “All right, Mean,” Prophet said, leaning back to return the spyglass to its saddlebag pouch. “Have it your way.” He clucked to the horse.

  As he and Mean and the five horses bearing the dead men started down the hill toward the town, he said, “Just keep your eyes skinned. I’m too cold to die today. Why, if I died today, Ole Scratch would have to wait a good year to thaw me out before he could put me to work shovelin’ coal!”

  He chuckled at that. Not because the joke was funny but because he was nervous.

  Chapter 10

  It was the cold that was making Prophet nervous.

  Leastways, that’s what he told himself.

  As Mean and Ugly thudded his hooves down the broad main street of Indian Butte, the five packhorses trudging along behind, the big bounty hunter shivered inside his coat and looked around carefully at the buildings spaced widely apart on both sides of the trace. If he saw a man aiming a rifle at him from one of those stock pens to his left or from behind a barrel of the sprawling mercantile store on his right, and he had to throw himself from his saddle to keep from being perforated, his frozen bones would likely shatter like the delicate china you’d find in a preacher widow’s cupboard.

  The door of Madame Montrose’s Ladies’ Fineries opened. Prophet jerked suddenly back on Mean’s reins, reached for the Peacemaker he’d shoved into his left coat pocket, butt forward, for a faster grab. An old woman clad in a thick mountain lion shawl poked her crowlike head out the door. She jutted her pointed chin at Prophet, her dark, beadlike eyes taking in the big bounty hunter and the dead men hanging over the saddles of the horses behind him.

  Returning her disapproving gaze to Prophet himself, the crone leaned farther out the open door and expertly spat a long, black stream of chaw over the front porch rail before her and into the frozen stock trough on the other side with a dull, wet plop.

  With that she gave an audible harrumph, pulled her head back into her shop, and closed the unpainted, Z-frame door.

  Prophet removed his hand from over the Peacemaker’s grips. The gun wouldn’t have done him much good, anyway, as he’d forgotten to remove the mitten. You couldn’t shoot a pistol wearing a mitten. He quickly pulled the mitten off his right hand with his teeth and stuffed it into his coat pocket. Flexing his right hand, covered in a thin, knit glove that in this severe kind of cold was almost like wearing nothing at all, he cursed the weather and this extreme northern territory, and rode on.

  “Please, Scratch, get me the hell to Mexico,” he muttered beseechingly as he swerved Mean and Ugly toward a two-story livery barn on his left, sitting kitty-corner to the Indian Butte Saloon & Hotel, which occupied the opposite side of the street, on the far side of a narrow cross street on which a shaggy dog was just then ripping a dead jackrabbit to bloody shreds, holding the body down with its front paws, snarling and growling, thoroughly reveling in its meal.

  Raucous piano and accordion music was reverberating from inside the hotel. There was the collective, metronomic clapping of many hands, as well, and the stomping of many pairs of feet. Occasionally there rose a jubilant, victorious bellowing wail and then raucous laughter.

  A single wagon was pulled up in front of the sprawling hodgepodge of a building. The wheeled contraption was sort of a cross between a chaise and a hansom cab. It was constructed of some sort of expensive-looking, dark, polished, ornately scrolled wood appointed with brass window frames and fittings, including a brass gas lamp mounted on the near side, and high gold-painted wheels. No horse stood in the traces, but Prophet bet that when one did, it was a fine one, sure enough. The empty yellow shafts sagged onto the ground that was collecting a fresh, fuzzy layer of new-fallen snow.

  The fancy wagon—as fancy as Prophet had ever laid eyes on—was the only contraption sitting on the town’s main street—or on any street in Indian Butte, as far as Prophet could tell from his vantage. The townsfolk appeared to have secured themselves away from the nasty weather, the purple clouds roiling over Prophet portending even nastier weather still ahead. The fragrant smoke from many warm fires peppered the bounty hunter’s nose and made his bones fairly scream for warmth.

  “It’s a savage world, ain’t it?” The rhetorical question came from the skinny oldster standing between the livery barn’s open doors, pensively smoking a corncob pipe while watching the dog devour the jack, the festivities throbbing from inside the hotel just beyond it.

  “You Schofield?” Prophet asked the old, pipe-smoking graybeard, whose long, blue-gray hair hung down his back from the round bear fur hat perched on his wizened head. A tangled gray beard hung to his chest. The sign above the man, tacked to the barn’s second story, announced POP SCHOFIELD’S LIVERY & FEED.

  The oldster turned to study the five, cadaver-burdened horses behind Prophet, pensively puffing his pipe. “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what you got slung over your horses.”

  “What’s it look like? De
ad men.”

  “That’s what I thought they were.”

  Prophet swung down from Mean and Ugly’s back. “Then why’d you ask?”

  “A man wants to be sure.”

  “Well, now you’re sure. I need a place to house them until the train leaves for Bismarck. The horses, too. Do you know when that will be?”

  The old man seemed a little distracted. “When what will be?”

  “The train leaving for Bismarck.”

  “Oh, that.” Frowning apprehensively, the old man continued to puff his pipe while studying the dead men. “Tomorrow, I think, maybe. If them fancy Dans and the princess is ready to pull out by then, I reckon. They got dibs on the train, don’t ya know.”

  “What fancy Dans? What princess?”

  The oldster lifted his scrutinizing gaze up to Prophet, who stood a whole two heads taller than he. He looked Prophet up and down several times, nostrils flaring slightly as he drew on the pipe, smoke slithering like gray snakes from between his thin, loosely compressed lips. “The ones the senator and his son is entertainin’. They brought ’em out here to hunt. The princess, too. She’s purtier’n a speckled pup. Don’t look like butter would melt in her mouth. But she’s got the blood fever, I hear.”

  “Another one, huh?” Prophet chuffed, reflecting on his comely partner.

  “Another one?”

  “Never mind. Did you say ‘princess’?”

  “Leastways, I think that’s what they called her,” the old man said.

  “You say they got dibs on the train?”

  Prophet held Mean and Ugly’s reins out to the old man, who looked at them as though he were being handed a handful of fresh dog crap. Stepping back uncertainly, the oldster said, “Yeah . . . yeah . . . that’s right.” He took another step back. “Don’t get too close to me, will ya, son?”

  “Huh?” Prophet scowled down at him. “Why not?”

  The old man stiffly shifted his apprehensive gaze toward the hotel and winced slightly around his pipe stem. “’Cause . . . ’cause I don’t . . . I don’t think you got long to live, partner.”

  Prophet turned his head to follow the old man’s glance toward the hotel. Good thing he did, too, or the bullet that curled the air against his left cheek would have connected the canal of his right ear with the canal of his left ear, out of which his brains likely would have dribbled like corn chowder from a broken soup bowl.

  Instead, the bullet slammed loudly into the livery barn’s open door an eighth of a second before the ripping screech of the rifle that had fired it reached Prophet and the old man, echoing.

  Mean and Ugly reared and whinnied, clawing the gray, snow-stitched air with his front hooves, his eyes wide and white-ringed. The horses behind him followed suit, whinnying shrilly and dancing, pulling against the ropes tying them to the tail of the horse in front of them.

  Meanwhile, the man standing on the roof of the Indian Butte Hotel & Saloon’s broad front veranda stared through his own wafting powder smoke toward the livery barn, showing his teeth as he spat a curse that couldn’t be heard above the din in the building below him. He also angrily worked his Winchester’s cocking mechanism, racking a fresh round into the breech.

  For some reason, Prophet’s first impulse was to save the old man.

  “Get down, you old devil!” The bounty hunter bounded forward and hammered the heel of his left hand against the old man’s upper chest.

  The old man gave a squeal and, opening his mouth and losing his pipe, flew backward against the edge of the right open barn door, slamming the door back against the barn and falling to his ass with an indignant yelp.

  Prophet dropped to a knee as the shooter on the hotel’s porch roof loosed another chunk of hot lead, the rifle smoking and stabbing yellow-orange flames from its maw. The shooter was frustrated now, and harried. That and Prophet’s sudden crouch caused that bullet to fly wide, also hammering the open barn door behind Prophet, ripping out several long wood slivers about six inches to the right of the first gouge.

  Prophet rose to his feet and ran out to where Mean and the other horses were dancing in the middle of the street. Prophet grabbed the dun’s reins out of the air, where they were swaying in time to the hammerhead’s movements, and pulled the horse back toward him.

  He reached across his saddle pommel and jerked his Winchester ’73 from the leather scabbard strapped to the saddle’s right side. As yet another round screeched over his head to break a window of another shop behind him, Prophet dropped to a knee, bit off his left mitten, spat it into the street, and rammed a cartridge into the Winchester’s breech.

  He quickly lined up his sights on the murky, gray-black figure on the hotel’s porch roof, whom he instantly recognized by the man’s battered cream Stetson as the droopy-eyed man from the trail. Lou drew a sharp breath, held it, and as he started to let it out slowly, he squeezed the trigger.

  The Winchester bucked against his mackinaw-padded shoulder.

  “Damn!” he spat through gritted teeth, seeing through his wafting powder smoke that his bullet had merely shattered the left knee of the curly wolf on the porch roof.

  The man showed his teeth again as his left leg jerked backward. He dropped to the porch roof on his right knee, dropping his rifle and clutching his bullet-torn knee with his left hand.

  When he looked up at Prophet, gritting his teeth and likely cursing like an Irish gandy dancer though Prophet still couldn’t hear above the din in the building beneath the man, Prophet drew a bead on the pale square of the man’s head—specifically, on the narrow strip between the man’s wide nose and his dark hairline, which was clear now that the man had lost his hat.

  Prophet cursed as he drew a breath. He held the breath and squeezed the trigger, enjoying the reassuring kick of the Winchester’s brass butt plate against his shoulder. He also enjoyed seeing the droopy-eyed man’s head jerk backward then bob forward. When it jerked backward again, as death spasms gripped the bushwhacker, Prophet could see the dark hole in the pale strip between the man’s nose and his hairline.

  The bushwhacking devil sagged forward then rolled down the sloping roof. He dropped over the roof ’s edge and turned a single forward somersault before crashing through the roof of the fancy carriage standing directly below him on the street. The whole carriage leaped as though with a start off all four wheels then settled back down as the bushwhacker made himself deathly comfortable inside.

  “Don’t tell this Georgia boy he can’t shoot straight in cold weather!” Prophet bellowed. He gave a raucous laugh, throwing his head back.

  That sudden movement probably saved him, also. This time from a bullet that came hurling out of the dark depths of the barn itself. The bullet trimmed the several days’ worth of beard stubble along the nub of his chin before making a wet smacking sound as it drilled into the back of the head of one of the dead men hanging down the side of one of the horses prancing in the street behind him.

  “There’s . . . there’s a second one!” rasped the old man, down on his side in the snow and straw-flecked dirt just outside the barn’s open doors. “I’m sorry! They told me they’d burn down my barn and cut my ears off, shoot all the stock! I had to play along!”

  Prophet ran crouching to the left open barn door. From far back in the barn’s dark depths, a gun flashed.

  The bark came as the bullet screeched through the air to Prophet’s left and broke out yet another shop window with a dull clink followed by a man’s bellowing curse. Cocking the Winchester, Prophet edged a look around the door’s right side.

  Again came the flash. Prophet pulled his head back just as the bullet hammered the edge of the door, flinging slivers, the loud smack making his ears ring.

  Cursing, Lou snaked his Winchester around the door and fired several times quickly down the barn’s dark alley, aiming generally at where he’d seen the flash. Empty cartridge casings arced over his right shoulder, smoking, clinking together in the snowy dirt behind him.

  He pulled his hea
d and rifle back behind the barn door.

  He waited.

  Nothing.

  He glanced at the old man lying to his right, on the other side of the opening. The old man frowned, puzzled.

  “You get him?” he whispered.

  “Stop!” came a wail from inside the barn. “Stop! Stop!”

  Prophet edged a look around the barn door. A vague shadow moved around toward the rear of the barn. There was a slice of gray light as a rear door opened. The man-shaped shadow blotted out the light for a second as the man stumbled through it and out the back.

  Prophet heaved himself to his feet and strode purposefully into the barn. “Old son,” he said loudly, angrily racking another round into his Winchester’s breech, “we’re just gettin’ started!”

  Chapter 11

  When Prophet’s eyes had adjusted to the murk inside the barn, which was relieved by only two small windows in the wall to his left, he broke into a jog. Stalled horses whickered to his right, anxious eyes glistening over stall doors.

  A mule brayed raucously.

  “Sorry for the noise, pards,” Prophet said as he approached the rear door, which stood half-open, gray light and flecks of snow oozing through the gap. “I’ll be out of your hair in two jangles of a whore’s bell.”

  He doffed his hat and edged a cautious look around the door frame. Instinctively knowing he was about to have a third eye drilled in his forehead, he pulled his head back behind the frame. Sure enough, a bullet smashed the frame’s edge, flicking sharp slivers against Prophet’s cheek. At the same time, the shooter’s rifle report reached his ears.