Prophet turned to the girl sitting naked beside him, not having any recollection of who she was or where he had met her but vaguely amazed at her sparkling, Christmas-morning beauty, and wrapped his left arm around her. “Oh, honey, I’m sooo sorry if I did anything last night that . . . that—”
“Oh, Lou—you’ve ruined me for all men hereafter. Last night was . . . well, it was absolutely magical. I’ve never been treated that way before . . .”
“Honey, who is your pa, anyway? Apparently, he knows me . . . ?”
“Oh, Lou,” she said, rubbing against him and purring like a kitten, “stop fooling around, would you? You know very well my father is Richard Teagarden, governor of Colorado.”
Prophet’s heart hiccupped. He jerked his head up as a rush of disconnected images from last night battered his tender, sodden brain. As disjointed as the images were, they told the story of Prophet recently riding into Denver with the body of Lancaster Smudge draped over the saddle of the horse Prophet had trailed behind his own hammerheaded dun, Mean and Ugly.
Over the past year and a half, Lancaster Smudge and his gang of five other owlhoots had become the bane of the territory not to mention of the Denver & Santa Fe Railroad, whose trains they’d preyed on without mercy, threatening to run the company into the ground and leave Colorado where it had been ten years before—relying on stagecoach services and mule trains for transport and commerce.
Many lawmen had been sicced on the gang, and a goodly portion of those few lawmen who’d gotten close to their quarry had ended up turned toe-down and snuggling with the diamondbacks in a Rocky Mountain canyon. The Smudge Bunch, as the papers had cheekily called Smudge’s gang, were as elusive as Arizona sidewinders.
Prophet, however, working in cahoots with his sometime partner, Louisa Bonaventure, had proven the equals of the Smudge Bunch, and taken them down in their hideout up near the little mining town of Frisco, when the boys had let their hair as well as their pants down to enjoy a romp in Mrs. Beauchamp’s House of the Seven Enchantments.
After Prophet had turned Smudge into the federals for the two-thousand-dollar reward, the jubilant governor had insisted on inviting the bounty hunter out to the Larimer Hotel for a meal on the state’s tab. There, Prophet had met the stately, smiling but distracted-seeming Mrs. Teagarden as well as the governor’s pretty, precocious daughter, Clovis.
Clovis! Her name was Clovis Teagarden! Whew!
Prophet had never been given such grand treatment before. Bounty hunters were more or less considered vermin on the frontier, not all that higher on the human ladder than the men they hunted for the bounties on their heads. So Prophet was more accustomed to being treated like dog dung on a grub line rider’s boots when he wasn’t being ignored altogether by those of a more prestigious link in society’s chain.
He certainly had never been invited out to dinner by anyone as important as a governor.
However, it had turned out that Governor Teagarden, being of a romantic turn of mind as well as a frequent reader of dime novels and the Police Gazette, was a secret fan of both Prophet and Louisa Bonaventure, whom the pulp rags had dubbed “the Vengeance Queen.” Teagarden had apparently followed the duo’s bounty hunting careers in the western newspapers, including Denver’s own Rocky Mountain News.
Prophet suspected that the dapper little gray-haired man, who wore a gold ring on his arthritic little right finger and a giant, gray, walrus mustache on his lean, pasty face, had wanted to meet the comely blond Louisa far more than he’d wanted to dine with the scruffy Prophet. When Lou had informed the man that Louisa would not be joining them, as she’d decided to light out after a trio of outlaws they’d learned about near Leadville rather than accompany her partner back to Denver with a dead man, Teagarden had acquired a fleeting but poignant expression of deep disenchantment.
His sprightly and precocious daughter, Clovis, however, had kept her eyes on Prophet all through dinner, till he thought her smoldering gaze would burn a hole right through him. Still, the bounty man had been more than mildly taken aback when she’d slipped him a room key as he’d shaken her hand after dinner. It turned out the girl often spent nights in her father’s private suite in the Larimer Hotel—under the strict supervision of a female chaperone, of course—because she attended a finishing school only two blocks from the hotel.
It also turned out, to Prophet’s incredulity, that the girl’s chaperone, Mrs. Borghild Rasmussen, who supposedly resided in the hotel, did not, in fact, exist, and that the bank drafts the governor wrote her were, in fact, never cashed. The governor’s private secretary, a male no doubt under the mesmerizing influence of the carnal Clovis, kept it all a secret from the doddering fool.
So Clovis was pretty much running off her leash in the burgeoning and colorful cow town of Denver, inviting bounty hunters—well, one, at least—to her room.
Prophet rubbed the heels of his hands against his temples. “Clovis, I, uh . . . don’t know what to say.”
“You did remember my name!” the girl said.
“How could I forget a girl like you? It was a wonderful night, Clovis, but I tell you, honey, I never realized you were only sixteen. Hell, I thought you were at least twenty-one pushin’ forty-five!”
Prophet scuttled over to the side of the bed that was, he saw now, enormous. It was easily the largest bed he’d ever seen let alone slept in.
“Oh, Lou—where are you going? You can’t go yet! The day is just getting started!”
Prophet scowled over his shoulder at her, trying to ignore the fact that she was naked, not an easy task even in his whiskey-logged state. “You best get ready for school, little girl.”
“Oh, phooey,” Clovis said, leaning back on her elbows, pooching her pink lips out in a pout. “I’m going to skip school today. I often do. Father doesn’t care. Neither does Mother. She’ll be busy with her tea parties and such. Father’s so busy with affairs of state he doesn’t think about much of anything but work, work, work . . . and getting reelected, of course.”
She rolled her eyes then beamed at Prophet. “That’s why we can spend the whole day together, Lou.”
“Doesn’t your father ever check up on you?”
She only tittered an ironic laugh and wrapped her hands around her ankles, pulling her feet back toward her shoulders, giving him a haunting but unwanted eyeful.
Between love bouts the previous night, she’d told him a lot about herself, but he’d drunk so much whiskey, having gone without any skull pop for the past month he’d been hunting owlhoots in the mountains with the teetotaling Vengeance Queen, that he could remember only bits and pieces.
Clovis was a talker, though—he remembered that.
He’d made a mistake when he’d tramped up the Larimer’s broad, carpeted stairs to find the lock that fit the key Clovis had given him.
Having entered a celebratory frame of mind the second he’d hit town, he’d gotten drunk before he’d dined with the governor’s family, so his judgment had been off. And, if the truth be told, Prophet was far too weak a man to be able to ignore the fact of a pretty young woman handing him her room key with a coquettish dip of her chin and alluring glint in her eye.
In such a situation he was not now nor ever had been the type of jake who could shake his head and say, “Sorry, ma’am, but I’m not that sort of fella,” and walk away. Just as he was having trouble averting his attention to what she was teasing him with now . . .
And some day he’d likely be fed a couple loads of buckshot for just that failing . . .
Or . . . maybe that day was here now, he amended the unspoken warning to himself as someone hammered on the room’s door and a man’s angry voice said, “Clovis? Clovis, are you in there?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PETER BRANDVOLD was born and raised in North Dakota. He has penned over a hundred fast-action westerns under his own name and his pen name, Frank Leslie. Head honcho at Mean Pete Publishing, publisher of lightning-fast western e-books, he has lived all over
the American West but currently lives in western Minnesota. Follow his life and works at www.peterbrandvold.blogspot.com and at Amazon.com.
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