She splashed whiskey into the glasses on the dresser, and came back and offered one to Prophet. He took it and looked at her, her hair mussed and wild in the soft light of the lantern flickering on the dresser.
He touched her hair, brushed his fingers across her shoulders.
“How often does he pester you to go to work for him?”
“Every time he sees me he just laughs in his seedy way to remind me,” she said, giving a little shudder of revulsion. “He could force me, of course, but he likes terrorizing me, making it my decision. Having to think about what it would be like with him and the others.”
Prophet lowered his hand from her shoulder. She grabbed it with both of hers and kissed it.
Holding it taut against her cheek, she continued in a sad, bleak tone, “I’ve been able to make enough money serving food to the occasional few who make their way over here, and to Moon’s overflow. But I’m just barely making it. I would, however, put a gun to Frank’s head and then to mine before I’d walk over to that demon’s place and throw myself on his mercy.”
Prophet’s mind was reeling from all he’d learned of the dwarf’s depredations here in the town he’d named after himself. A dark voice told him, however, that there was much more to learn.
Ruth looked at him, and her eyes brightened in alarm.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Please forget about what I said earlier. About you killing him. You can’t. He has a dozen gunmen working for him—his old gang from his outlaw days. And the girl. You mustn’t try. I was drunk and feeling lonely and helpless. I don’t want you to die. I want you to ride out of here tomorrow and not look back.”
Prophet was incredulous. “A dozen men?”
“Yes!”
“How does a little rooster like that manage to rule such a large roost? Why any one of ’em could stick a boot so far up his . . .”
Ruth shook her head, genuinely befuddled. “I reckon some men have an air about them. Despite their size. With just a look, they can command others, hold others, hard men like those who ride for Moon, sort of how a snake holds a rabbit with its gaze.”
“Mesmerized ’em,” Prophet said, thoughtful, then adding with a hard edge, “Well, he didn’t mesmerize this old jackrabbit buck.”
“Apparently he’s got quite a grip on Miss May.”
“May?”
“The girl with him. Griselda May. The one who goes around sneering and twirling those little pistols on her fingers. Apparently, she’s plumb gone for that wretched demon. Her soul is as black as his is.”
“That’s even harder to swallow.” Prophet remembered the girl from the hotel steps. She’d been no raving beauty, but she’d been young and sexy in a crude sort of way, and he couldn’t imagine her genuinely finding Mordecai Moon attractive.
Ruth was studying him. She sandwiched his hand in both of hers, drew it to the deep valley between her breasts. “Please?”
Prophet continued to stare up at this pretty, lonely woman so terrorized by a merciless hard case in a town she was trapped in. But he was a bounty hunter, not a lawman. And even if he were a lawman, his going up solo against the dwarf and his men would be certain suicide. He’d likely end up in the same ravine as those two Rangers.
His death would accomplish nothing.
Prophet sipped his drink. “I reckon,” he said without conviction and took another sip of the whiskey.
She leaned forward and kissed him. “Thank you for tonight.”
“Ah, hell,” he said, his ears warming in embarrassment.
“No, you gave me a gift. It’s been . . . lonely.”
“No regrets?”
She smiled and shook her head. Rising from the bed, she walked over and picked her dress up off the floor. “I’d best check on Frank and stoke the range. Some of the business from Moon’s place might be heading over here soon, and they might be hungry.”
“I can get you out of here.” Prophet had said it before he’d even thought it through. “You and Frank—I can get you out of this town. That much I can do.”
She held her dress against her breasts, and she looked beautiful standing there in the lantern light, in front of the door. Her brown eyes sparkled as she furrowed her brows.
She appeared to be on the verge of both sobbing and smiling at the same time. “No.” She shook her head. “Don’t be silly, Lou.” She paused, staring at him, considering it. “How could you?”
“I’d have to leave here first. Just me. I can go up to Alpine, enlist a passel of Rangers. We’ll bring a wagon, park north of town a ways, and then slip in here and fetch you and Frank under cover of darkness. Give me a week, maybe two. Likely, it’ll take that long for Moon to forget about the man who drilled that hole in his hat.”
Ruth stared at him, fear creeping into her gaze now as she considered the possibility.
“Of course, you’d be losing everything,” he said. “You’d have to start over.”
“I’ve already lost everything.”
“Let’s give it a try, then. Like I said, give me a week, two at the most, and I’ll—”
Rising voices cut him off. Beyond the open window, he could hear foot thuds and the ring of spurs.
“They’re coming,” she said, looking at the window. “The dwarf must have run out of rooms. I’d better go.” She came over and kissed him and then pulled away.
He clutched her shoulders as the voices and the spur chings grew louder. “All right?”
She looked nervous, but she smiled. “All right, yes.”
Still clutching her dress to her breasts, she hurried to the door.
“You need help down there, splittin’ wood or anything?” he asked.
“No, you stay here, out of sight.” She opened the door. Downstairs, someone was pounding on the saloon’s front doors. She looked back at Prophet. “Thank you, Lou.”
She gave him another nervous but hopeful half smile, and then went out and drew the door closed behind her.
* * *
Prophet rose just after dawn the next morning. He dressed quietly in his room, in no hurry. The mercantile where he’d buy a canteen likely didn’t open until after sunrise.
With his saddlebags draped over his left shoulder, his Winchester on his right shoulder, shotgun hanging down his back, he stole quietly downstairs and outside to the small barn of vertical pine planks behind the saloon.
Mean and Ugly was happy to see him. The horse tossed his head a few times in greeting before dipping his snout in an oat bucket. When Prophet had tended the horse and saddled him, he led him outside and around to the front of the saloon, where he paused to let the sun climb a little higher over the Del Carmens in the southeast.
He sat on the edge of the Rose’s porch, building a smoke.
He fired the quirley and was smoking it leisurely when one of the bull trains that had pulled into Moon’s Well last night came up from the barn and corral behind the dwarf’s place. The four big wagons with tarp-covered boxes churned the dust in the street in front of Prophet as the bleary-eyed, scowling teamsters wearing broad sombreros and colorful bandannas up over their noses, continued their journey south toward Mexico.
A white, black-speckled dog was loping into town from the south, tongue drooping as though it were thoroughly exhausted from its nightlong hunt in the ravines and washes. It stepped off the trail to watch the teams pass, a malicious glint in its eyes. It lunged at one of the turning wheels and then leaped back off the trail, just beyond the lash of a driver’s blacksnake, and gave the last cabin-sized, double-axle Burnside freight wagon a couple of parting barks.
The dog continued on to the Rose Hotel and Saloon where it let Prophet scratch its ears, groaning and swatting at its shoulder with a hind leg. It gave Mean and Ugly a perfunctory growl before continuing on up the street for a nap under a boardwalk.
Prophet had smoked the quirley
halfway down when he started hearing voices around the town, some rising from the direction of the dwarf’s place. The mercantile was two buildings down from Moon’s House of a Thousand Delights, a man in a long, green apron sweeping the loading dock. Prophet took one more drag from the quirley and had dropped it in the dust when the hotel’s front door opened.
Ruth stepped out, her hair down, squinting against the intensifying light. She wore a powder-blue robe and deerskin slippers. She’d just gotten up.
“Lou? What are you doing out here?”
“Waitin’ for the mercantile to open, which it looks like it just did.” Prophet grabbed Mean’s reins from the hitch rail.
“Hold on,” Ruth said. “I’ll get dressed and fetch the canteen for you.”
“You don’t need to fetch no canteen for me,” Prophet said with a dry chuckle.
She gave him a look of reprimand, shaking her head. “Lou, no.”
“I’ve always bought my own canteens in the past, always fetched my own water.” Prophet swung into the leather. “Don’t see no reason under the sun to let you do it for me now.”
He pinched his hat brim to her and touched spurs to Mean’s flanks. He did not look at Ruth as he rode on up the street, though he could feel her apprehensive gaze on his back. He probably should have let her buy the canteen for him and fill it from her own supply. That would have made more sense. It would have been practical.
But something in him—something stupid and mulish, which too often won out when pitted against his better judgment—wouldn’t allow it.
12
PROPHET RODE UP past the well in the middle of the broad street and looked at the three-story, gaudy, purple hotel with its lime-green gallery on his left. A small Mexican man in a red serape slept in the street, slumped back against one of the gallery’s stone pilings, an empty bottle lying at one of his steel-toed boots. He was a remnant from the previous night’s festivities.
Prophet merely glanced at the hungover Mexican. The brunt of his attention was on the small, brown-haired girl sitting at the top of the steps in a cream blouse and long, wool skirt, smoking a quirley. Her Stetson hat with conch-studded band was hooked over her left knee. She held the quirley between the long, slender fingers of her right hand.
Her sharp, devious face brightened when her eyes found the big man riding past the hotel. “Good mornin’!”
“Good mornin’ your own self,” Prophet said, keeping Mean moving in the direction of the mercantile.
The girl turned her head and narrowed one speculative eye at the Rose Hotel and Saloon at the south end of town, and then turned back to Prophet once more, her smile turning foxy. “Have a good night, did you?”
“Slept like a rock. You?”
“I reckon I did okay for it bein’ so hot.”
“Well,” Prophet said, grinning and pinching his hat brim to the girl he’d seen with Moon the day before, “be seein’ you.”
“Most likely.” The girl grinned again, foxily, and lifted the quirley to her thin lips and took a deep drag, exhaling the smoke through her nostrils as she continued to watch the bounty hunter.
Her grin faded. Her eyes turned cunning.
Prophet continued on over to Soddermeyer’s Dry Goods and reined up in front of the loading dock. The man he’d seen earlier was no longer on the porch but was standing just inside the door he’d propped open with a barrel bristling with picks, shovels, and scythes.
He was lean, bony, his skin tanned a dark, rosy hue. He had thick, black hair streaked with gray, and a mustache of the same color. “I don’t need your business,” he said throatily, canting his head to his left. “Keep ridin’!”
Prophet swung down from the leather, glanced over at the dwarf’s place, seeing only the girl still sitting on the steps, smoking and watching him, and then tossed Mean’s reins over the hitch rail. He smiled affably at the shopkeeper scowling before him and climbed the loading dock’s wooden steps, his spurs ringing loudly in the quiet morning air that was heating up quickly, foretelling another scorcher.
“Mornin’, there, amigo. Looks like it’s gonna be another hot one. Just a few things I’ll be needin’ before I shake a rein.”
Prophet crossed the dock and stood before the lean, dark-haired gent with the bushy mustache. A full head taller, the big bounty hunter loomed over the man, grinning.
Soddermeyer looked up at him apprehensively, his eyes flicking nervously from the Peacemaker thonged on this stranger’s thigh to the fierce double maw of the coach gun peeking up from behind his right shoulder and then to the width of his shoulders that stretched the buckskin tunic taut across his chest.
The shopkeeper glanced toward the dwarf’s place and then stepped back into his shop, beckoning with a quick, impatient sweep of his arm.
“Make it quick. I don’t got all morning to spend on drifters who aggravate Mr. Moon!”
Ten minutes later, Prophet walked out of the mercantile with two canteens for the long ride to Alpine, a bag of Arbuckles, and a pouch of jerky. He slowed his stride as he walked across the loading dock, seeing first the two local lawmen, Lee Mortimer and his deputy, the Rio Bravo Kid, standing in the street to Prophet’s left. Mortimer scowled beneath the brim of his black Stetson, his eyes like steel above his knife slash of a nose and his steel gray mustache. Despite the menace in his gaze, he had a bored, worn-out air.
The Rio Bravo Kid scowled beneath his hat that was tilted up an angle to accommodate the blue goose egg on his right temple. The two men cast long shadows, for the sun had just risen above the roofs on the east side of the street. The Kid didn’t look good, and he didn’t seem happy, either. Eagerly, again and again, he raked his thumb over the hammer of one of his holstered Colts; his teeth shone white between his thin lips.
Mortimer drew up one side of his mouth. “Why couldn’t you just ride the hell out of town?”
Prophet continued on down the loading dock steps and glanced to his right, where the dwarf stood with the three hard cases he’d had out there the day before as well as four others, including the man whose hand Prophet had punched a slug through. The bandaged hand hung down by the man’s side. His other hand rode atop the big Remington holstered on his other hip.
The additional four looked just as mean and hard as the other three. They all wore at least two pistols on their suited frames.
The dwarf stood at the head of the group, only a few yards from the well. He had his thumbs hooked in his vest pockets—a severely ugly child in a very bad mood. As he stared at Prophet, who dropped the coffee and jerky into his saddlebag pouch, Moon rose up and down on the balls of his child-sized black boots that looked as though they’d gotten a recent polish. He wore the shabby bowler with the small, ragged hole in its crown.
Casually sliding his shotgun forward, so that the sawed-off popper hung down to around the middle of his belly, Prophet hung his two new canteens from his saddle horn, swung into the leather, and neck-reined Mean and Ugly toward the well. From his higher vantage now, he could see Ruth Rose standing on the steps of her saloon, one arm hooked around a porch rail as she stared worriedly toward Prophet.
As Mean clomped slowly toward the belligerent group of men standing in a pie-shaped wedge between the well and the hotel, Prophet saw Miss May sitting where he’d last seen her, on the porch steps of Moon’s hotel. She was no longer smoking her quirley, though Prophet could see its stub smoldering in the dust near the empty bottle of the Mexican still passed out beside the steps.
The girl wrapped her arms around her knees, staring at him gravely now, pensively, with none of the mocking humor of before. She almost appeared to be waiting to see what would happen, maybe wondering if it would turn out the same as the day before.
Or different. Almost as though she had a stake in it.
“You got a lot of nerve,” the dwarf said, rising up and down on the balls of his boots, jutting hi
s knobby chin toward Prophet. “A lot of damn nerve . . . hangin’ around my town after what you pulled yester—!”
He cut himself off abruptly and snapped his eyes wide, startled, as Prophet’s two silver nickels winked in the air as they caromed toward him. He threw up his hands a split second too late, and both coins bounced off his chest and dropped to the street near his boots.
Prophet held his shotgun by its neck though he kept the barrel down, not wanting to bait anyone into slapping leather but wanting to be ready in case it happened. He turned his head slightly to one side, and saw the two lawmen standing where they’d been standing before, apparently out here to merely back the dwarf’s play.
Or maybe cut off their quarry if Prophet chose to light a shuck to the north?
“There’s your ten cents,” Prophet said, pulling back on Mean’s reins with his left hand, squeezing the gut shredder’s neck with his right. “Now, kindly vamoose.”
He squeezed his shotgun’s stock even tighter, having a hard time holding his fury in check. Being made to pay for a canteen of water graveled him no end, and the only reason he did it now was so he could ride out of here and return later for Ruth and her husband.
The dwarf glared at Prophet. He looked down at the coins at his feet. He looked up at Prophet again, and both his eyes shone as red as a devil’s eyes.
At that moment, Prophet fully realized the dunderheadedness of his own move. As though to confirm it, the hard case with the wounded right hand jerked his left hand toward the big horse pistol on that hip. With a snarled curse directed mostly at himself this time, Prophet raised the gut shredder’s barrel, thumbing both hammers back, and tripped the left trigger.
The coach gun fairly exploded, the concussion of the blast sounding like near thunder and rocketing around a narrow canyon. The man who’d been going for his revolver was lifted two feet in the air and tossed straight back, as though he’d been lassoed from behind by a cyclone deadheading for the Rio Grande.
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