“Sure could use a shot of busthead,” Wanda said, her voice raspy from coughing.
“I ain’t tanglin’ with that old catamount.”
Mortimer took a knee beside the bed, slid Wanda’s hair back from her cheek, not liking how cool and clammy she felt despite the heat in the casa. It meant the fire inside her was dying. Despair was a living thing within Lee Mortimer—a feral cat gnawing on his guts. He’d had her for such a short time, and now he was going to lose her.
Where and what would he be without her?
Mortimer smiled at Wanda reassuringly, but inwardly he cursed. A damn renegade his whole life, and here on the lee side of fifty, he’d fallen in love with a saloon singer from Denver who was nearly half his age. A saloon girl dying from the consumption she’d probably acquired from too many winters as a child living in a drafty, old prospector’s shack up in the Colorado Rockies with her surly father who’d died penniless, leaving his daughter destitute.
“You look good, Wanda.”
“Your left eye rolls inward just a little when you lie to me.” Her voice was gently teasing.
“All right, a slight exaggeration, but I’ll be damned if you’re still not the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in all my days.”
She pressed her lips to the wrist of the hand he held against her face.
There was the flat crack of a distant pistol. Mortimer jerked slightly with a start, but managed to keep his smiling eyes on the girl. Her thin brows pinched as she studied him.
“What was that?”
“Someone shootin’ a snake, most likely. The Kid will see to it.”
“Must be lots of snakes in town today,” Wanda said skeptically. “I heard shootin’ earlier, too.” She paused, held her anxious, probing gaze on his. “What’s happening out there, Lee? I can tell it’s got you bothered. I know you well enough by now to know when you’re rattled.”
She gently squeezed his wrist.
He lowered his hand, leaned against his elbow that he propped on the edge of the cot. “I been thinkin’, Wanda. . . .”
He jerked again at the crack of another pistol shot.
“I been thinkin’ that we need to get you feelin’ better soon, so we can pull our picket pins.”
Wanda cast a dreadful look toward the front of the shack, in the direction of the well. Her voice was forlorn when she asked, “Where to, Lee?”
“You said you wanted to see the ocean. The Gulf close enough?”
The girl nodded, feigned a reassuring smile. She reached up and placed her hand over Mortimer’s left ear. “The Gulf would be just fine as frog hair, Lee.”
There was another shot. She drew a sharp, anxious breath and then coughed into her handkerchief. Blood drops flecked her nostrils. The sheriff muttered a curse.
“Oh, Wanda,” Mortimer said, pulling the dying girl to his chest.
7
MEAN AND UGLY nickered eagerly as Prophet drew rein before the stone well coping and dismounted in the broad semicircle of shade that angled west of it, stretching toward the large hotel that looked like some kind of ungainly bird that had been trapped and painted by a madman.
Prophet could smell the cool, coppery odor of the water issuing up from below. Deep in the purple shade cast by the peaked roof over the stone coping, it beckoned to the parched and weary bounty hunter. His throat contracted and expanded at the thought of a long, cool drink of the stuff.
He placed his hands on the top of the stone coping that Chisos La Grange had laid himself one stone at a time in the hot West Texas sun. La Grange had been a loner, with not even a woman around, as far as Prophet knew. The old desert rat had dug the well and laid the stones himself. Prophet had ridden through here about the time La Grange had finished the coping, and he and a Mexican bull team had enjoyed the first gourd dippers full . . . as well as a good bit of tequila later.
There hadn’t been much out here then. Certainly not the big hotel. La Grange had built a much more modest flophouse. A homey place—albeit a flea-bit one and one without percentage gals—in which a dragged-out traveler could kick off his boots and enjoy a few drinks and La Grange’s pinto beans and roasted javelina.
A strangely silent man, Chisos La Grange. But one who’d been easy to be around. Prophet had liked him, the few times he’d seen him. With his grubby duck pants, deerskin serape, expressionless eyes, and tangled bib beard, La Grange had seemed as much a part of the desert as the coyotes and the hawks.
Prophet started to reach for the winch handle but stopped when he saw the signpost standing before him, along the side of the stonework around the well. He’d seen the signs before, when he’d first ridden past the well, though the brunt of his attention had been on the two faces peering at him from the hotel window.
Now he read the sign facing him. He scowled. He’d expected it to say merely something on the order of, PLEASE RETURN THE BUCKET TO ITS NAIL WHEN FINISHED or DON’T WASTE NONE, AS THIS IS THE DESERT, STUPID! Because, remembering back, that was the sort of sign Chisos had put up.
This one was nothing like those had been. This one indicated that some asshole was charging for water out here in this parched and rocky land.
Prophet looked around, his pale blue eyes spoked at the corners with exasperation, his broad forehead brick red beneath his hat brim, his thick nose with a bulge in the bridge nearly crimson with incredulity. The street was deserted. The fresh breeze was shepherding a small dust devil toward him from the north, and a couple of tumbleweeds were skipping along both sides of the street.
But no one was out. They likely would be soon after supper and the hot sun had finally gone down behind the mountains, and, like Mortimer had mentioned, when the bull and mule trains with their burdens of freight heading either to or from Mexico had rolled in.
Prophet wanted to scold someone for charging for water—hell, why don’t they tag a price on every breath of air a man breathes?—but his and Mean’s thirst drove him to ignore the sign and to winch a bucket up from below. His anger faded, and he smiled as he turned the crank and heard the tinny sounds of the water slopping down over the sides of the wooden bucket and splashing back down into the well below. It sounded like distant coins being dropped on a counter.
The air wafting up against his face was cool and moist, and it smelled like damp earth and lemons. The water flashed like the skin of a silvery dark snake as it rippled below the bucket rising toward him.
Mean shook his head so hard he nearly threw his bridle and bit and loosed an eager whinny. Prophet chuckled as he lifted the bucket out of the well and set it on the coping. He removed Mean’s bridle and bit, hung it on a nail protruding from the signpost, and filled the rusty ladle for himself. He set the bucket down in front of Mean, and then he poked his hat brim back off his forehead, lifted the ladle to his mouth, and closed his upper lip over the side of it.
The tin was cool. The water was cooler. Prophet didn’t think he’d ever tasted water so cool and pure and refreshing. It cut through the leathery dryness of his tongue and plunged on down his throat, spreading its bracing coolness throughout his belly. The vigor instantly began returning to his extremities. Suddenly, he could breathe better, and he could see better, too, as, taking a break to relieve the start of a slight headache at the water’s deep-rock chill, he looked around at the growing purple shadows and the splash of red velvet in the west, where the sun was dropping.
He was only vaguely aware of movement on the broad gallery of the saloon behind him.
He lifted the ladle to his mouth once more, but he saw that he’d nearly drank all the water in it. He’d just started to stoop to refill the ladle from the bucket that Mean was still drawing water from when he heard a froglike, angry croaking. “Griselda said you didn’t pay first, mister, and by God that’s my water, and I say everyone pays!”
He turned to see a man with a child-sized body but a devil’s fac
e—likely the same man he’d seen in the window earlier—standing atop the gallery steps. He was decked out in a clawhammer coat and checked, patch-kneed trousers, a scruffy brown bowler hat with a ragged red feather sticking out of its band.
The little devil man wore a child’s black boots. However, the brown fist he extended toward Prophet now, his index finger jutting angrily out from around a fat cigar, was nearly man-sized. A gold band ringed the middle finger. His eyes were pinched up, and the colorless whiskers tufting the spade-shaped chin completed the little man’s satyr-like appearance. Prophet wouldn’t have been surprised if small horns were concealed beneath the bowler hat.
The girl stood behind him and slightly to one side, arms crossed on her chest. Long, dark brown hair hung in two straight queues forward down her shoulders. Her pale face was rescued from plainness by a patrician nose, prominent chin, and lustrous brown eyes, which were rife with sultry mischief beneath her man’s felt Stetson. Her lips seemed well suited to the jeering smile that now quirked them.
She was a small girl—Prophet guessed no taller than five feet, maybe a hundred pounds—but beside the dwarf she nearly appeared ungainly.
There were three other men on the gallery, but Prophet didn’t pay them much attention except to note they wore shabbily gaudy suits and pistols, and that they seemed to be there to back the little man’s play. They stood like grim giants behind the dwarf and the girl.
Nevertheless, Prophet couldn’t keep the anger from his voice as he said, “You’re the one chargin’ for water?”
“That’s right. I’m the one chargin’ for water,” the dwarf said in his frog-like croak from between gritted teeth. “It’s my well, see? It’s on my land. So I’m chargin’. Now, kindly pay the box.”
Prophet dropped the ladle in the dust at his feet. The thud caused Mean to jerk his head up out of the water bucket, drops tumbling from his snout and beading the dust at his hooves. The horse swished his tail angrily as he stared back at the little man standing atop the porch with the three hard-faced gunmen flanking him. The girl stepped out to one side of the dwarf to have a better view of the stranger at the well.
Prophet’s voice sounded hard and flat and strange even to him. “If it ain’t against the law, chargin’ for water in the desert, especially when you obviously don’t need the money, and especially when there ain’t no other water around, besides the muddy Rio Grande, outside of a two-day ride, it oughta be.”
It wasn’t that Prophet couldn’t pay it. He had a fair-sized pouch of gold coins in his saddlebags. What galled him was the moral injustice of charging for drinking water in the desert. The little man might have had a hard life, being so small and ugly, but he obviously didn’t need the money. Not if the gaudy saloon was his, and something told Prophet it was.
Chisos La Grange had dug the well and never charged a dime for anything but grub, tequila, and his half-dozen beds. Everyone from the Mexicans who lived in the shacks around his place to the bull and mule trains passing through on regular runs to and from Mexico drank for free.
Just like they breathed the air. For free.
The man standing before Prophet now was just a greedy little bastard who thought he could throw his proverbial weight around.
The dwarf glanced over his shoulder at the men behind him, and jerked his head forward. He limped down off the steps, slung the flap of his clawhammer coat back behind the Colt Lightning holstered on his left hip, and stomped toward Prophet, his little boots pluming the dust around his hemmed trouser cuffs. The girl held back, her faintly delighted grin remaining on her red lips, arms crossed on her chest.
The three obvious gunmen tramped leisurely down off the steps and followed the little man with the airs of overgrown attack dogs awaiting the command to kill.
Prophet stood facing the group, his back to the well, head canted to one side, squinting against the red sunset bleeding in over the western mountains and the big hotel flanking the dwarf, the girl, and the dwarf’s lackeys.
The dwarf shook his head sadly. “Mister, I sure am sorry it’s come to this, but . . .”
Faster than Prophet thought the little man capable, the dwarf filled his fist with the short-barreled Colt. A hair faster, Prophet snapped his own Peacemaker from its holster and squeezed the trigger.
The shot exploded the somnolent, late-afternoon silence, and the dwarf stopped in his tracks and gave an indignant scream as his hat went sailing off his head as Prophet’s slug caromed between two of the men flanking the little man to plow into a porch post behind them.
All three gunmen stopped suddenly, dropping their hands to their holsters but apparently knowing instinctively that if they started to raise the weapons, it would be them stopping the next bullets and not the dwarf’s porch.
“Drop it, mister,” Prophet snarled, glaring through his own wafting powder smoke as he aimed his Colt straight out from his right side at the satyr-like creature still holding the Lightning.
The dwarf returned the glare, his pasty face mottled red with exasperation. His head was almost bald; only a few strands of dead-looking hair straggled across the top between slightly thicker, fuzzier patches on the sides, above his large ears whose lobes hung down like thumbs.
Prophet said with quiet warning, “The next one’s gonna give you a second belly button about six inches above the first.”
The dwarf gasped, glanced at the pistol, as though he hadn’t realized he was still holding it, then flung it down into the dust like a hot potato.
The gunman flanking the dwarf on his right jerked his hand toward the pistol he carried in a shoulder holster, under his long, faded blue denim duster. Prophet slid his Peacemaker slightly right and fired.
The bullet slammed through the gunman’s right hand as he began to slide the gun from its holster. He screamed and jerked sideways as the bullet ricocheted off his gun, tore through the side of his coat, and puffed dust in the street beside him, about two feet in front of the girl.
She wasn’t smiling now.
The man clutched his bloody right hand with his left and turned back toward Prophet, bending forward and grimacing, his eyes spitting javelins of raw fury.
Prophet stared back at him, his Colt cocked and ready once more. The bounty man looked at the others, including the dwarf.
They all appeared flabbergasted, indignant. The dwarf’s lower jaw hung in shock. The two unwounded men seemed to be awaiting orders from the dwarf. The little man appeared tongue-tied.
Behind the men, the brown-haired girl lowered her arms, canted her head to one side, and drew a ragged breath. “Mister,” she said just loudly enough for Prophet to hear, wagging her head slowly. “You oughtn’t to have done that.”
Prophet looked at her and then at the men. “Toss those guns in the dirt.” He looked at the girl again—at the pistol riding high on her left hip with the butt angled back toward her hip. “You, too, honey.”
“Don’t honey me, mister.”
Prophet raked his eyes over all of them. They stared back at him, silent and angry, fuming over the prospect of the humiliation of giving up their guns. Prophet knew he couldn’t ride out of here until they did, however. Not without risking getting drilled between his shoulder blades.
He triggered the Colt again, blowing up dust to the right of the gunmen, causing them all to jerk with starts. He waited a few seconds and then plumed more dust to their left.
The dwarf glanced at his men, rasped out a couple of harsh words that Prophet couldn’t pick up against the gusting breeze. Reluctantly, regarding Prophet owlishly, they all tossed their guns into the street.
The girl stood atop the steps as she had before, saucily defiant. The dwarf followed Prophet’s gaze to her. “Throw the iron down, Griselda!”
She waited another couple of seconds, then slid her pistol out of its holster, held it up high by two fingers, mocking Prophet with her eyes, and th
en dropped the pearl-gripped Smith & Wesson into the dust at the side of the gallery steps. It hit with a thump, causing dust to rise.
Prophet glanced at the water bucket a couple of feet from his right boot. Mean had drunk nearly all of it. There might be a half a dipper left. He couldn’t risk drinking it, though, and taking his eyes off the men and the girl.
He’d have to get more water later, though he’d first have to secure a canteen. He wasn’t leaving town without a full canteen, however, or he’d be in the same fix he’d been in when he’d left the Rio Grande.
Keeping his pistol on the group before him, including the girl on the gallery steps, he gathered up Mean’s reins, turned the horse sideways to the hotel, and stepped into the leather. Staring grimly at the crew before him, he backed the horse down the street in the direction from which he’d come. He wasn’t sure where he was going; he only knew he’d worn out his welcome at the well.
As he backed the horse, he spied two men standing on the opposite side of the street from the hotel, up near the jailhouse. The salmon and green light angling over the town from the west revealed the tall, rangy frame and pinto vest of the Rio Bravo Kid. He stood spraddle-legged, thumbs hooked behind his cartridge belt. The barber stood near him, head canted skeptically to one side, watching the grim doings by the well. The barber drew on the cigar he was holding and blew out the smoke as he turned to the Kid and said something that Prophet couldn’t hear.
Prophet looked around. Where was Mortimer?
The real threat here had switched to the unseen sheriff. Was the former gunman, Lee Mortimer, trying to plant a pair of rifle sights on Prophet? Prophet knew the man’s reputation as a cold-blooded killer, so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities that he might try to bushwhack a man.
The bounty hunter looked at the dwarf, whose lips had acquired a faint smile, telling Prophet that he might have the drop now, but this wasn’t finished.
Prophet knew that, too. It could have been finished if he’d had a canteen, but the Rurale sniper had drilled a bullet through the bounty hunter’s flask at the river. The loss of that canteen was even more significant now than it had been before.
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