Hell's Angel

by Peter Brandvold

  She vaguely wondered if that bullet had been an errant shot fired by one of the dwarf’s other men, as she reached down to grab Ruth’s unwounded arm, dragging the woman to her feet.

  “Let’s go!” Louisa yelled.

  But as Ruth gained her feet, clutching her bloody upper left arm, Louisa froze. She’d holstered one of her pistols when she’d grabbed Ruth. Holding the other one in her right hand, she looked around, breathing hard, her heart drumming in her ears.

  Every man and woman in the room had frozen in various positions. At least a dozen had their guns drawn, and they were aiming said guns at Louisa and Ruth. Some were the dwarf’s men. Some were obvious border toughs—Anglos as well as half-breeds and Mexicans. Most of them likely had no idea what all this was about, but they knew that the ugly little man who provided them whiskey and women had been shot by a feisty brunette in a red dress, and that a feisty, hazel-eyed blond had come to her rescue, triggering lead in every direction.

  These men were like coiled rattlers, ready to strike.

  Louisa swept her gaze at the hard-eyed faces set above maliciously grinning mouths. One Anglo was aiming a Remington revolver at her and smoothing his long, yellow mustache with dirty, brown fingers, fairly licking his chops at the prospect of the two women before him.

  The only question on these men’s minds was how to keep the two women alive long enough to gain some physical satisfaction from them.

  An eerie silence had fallen over the room. Powder smoke wafted. One of the wounded men grunted and rolled on the far side of a table to Louisa’s right. Griselda May stood ten feet toward the rear of the room, aiming two derringers at Louisa and grinding her jaws together, dimpling her cheeks and hardening her eyes.

  She held fire as though she, like the men, wanted to savor the killing.

  Someone grunted on the far side of the room from Louisa, in the direction of the horseshoe-shaped bar. She glanced that way to see one of the burly bartenders sag to one side before dropping out of sight. A thin young man with long, red hair and what appeared a nasty scar on his face climbed up onto the bar. He wore brush-scarred chaps over blue denims, a calico shirt, and suspenders. He was holding a pistol in one hand, a Winchester in the other.

  “Now this whole thing has done got way out of hand!” he said, his voice sounding loud in the heavy silence.

  Most of the customers wielding guns had their backs to the redheaded kid atop the bar. The kid stood at a crouch, rifle in one hand, pistol in the other, narrowing one menacing eye as he slowly tracked each gun across the room.

  “First one to trigger another shot gets one through the brisket,” the kid said. He looked a little ridiculous, gangly as he was, freckle-faced, big ears showing through the copper-red hair hanging straight to his shoulders. He even sounded ridiculous, as his voice had not yet reached the pitch of a full-grown man’s.

  There was something commanding, though, in the easy, assured way he held that carbine and revolver, Louisa absently thought. Something even halfway reassuring, though she was also quite certain that the redhead would die right along with her and Ruth Rose tonight.

  A man sitting with five others at a table near the redhead said in a raspy monotone, “Why, I recognize you. You’re that kid with the mark of Satan on his face. You got two thousand dollars on your head, boy!”

  On the opposite side of the table from the speaker, another man jerked back in his chair and thrust up a gun in his right hand. The kid slid his Winchester toward the man with the gun, and the Winchester’s roar sounded like a keg of detonated dynamite in the cave-like room.

  The man dropped his gun and stumbled backward, kicking his chair backward, as well, until he fell over the chair to the floor. He gasped like a landed fish until his breathing suddenly stopped at the end of a raspy sigh.

  “Anyone else wanna buy two thousand dollars’ worth of lead?” the kid asked loudly enough that he could be heard throughout the room.

  Smoke wafted around the redhead’s battered tan Stetson. Louisa could see now that the scar on his face was shaped like an S under his right eye, angled slightly. It looked very much like a cattle brand. No one said anything.

  He turned to Louisa, who found herself regarding the kid incredulously. “If you ladies would like to make your way to the front door, I’ll make sure none o’ these fine gentlemen tries to back-shoot you.”

  Louisa said, “You sure you want a piece of this, kid?”

  “No, I reckon I don’t. Ma always said I tended to act first and think later, and I guess that’s just what I done here, doggone it.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Louisa wrapped an arm around Ruth’s waist, turned her, and began leading her through the tables and the men standing around with their hands in the air, toward the front door. Ruth shuddered a little from the pain of her wounded arm, and she held the wounded appendage across her belly, walking at a slight crouch. She looked around warily, as did Louisa, expecting more gunfire to break out at any moment.

  When the two approached the front doors, Louisa looked at the scar-faced redhead again. He stood as before atop the bar, rifle in one hand, revolver in the other, sliding both guns slowly from right to left and back again.

  The men in the place were still as statues. Most of the whores had gone to the floor. A few were looking up warily over the tops of tables.

  Griselda May held her own pistol straight down by her side as she flared her nostrils at the redhead atop the bar. Her brown eyes were glassy with rage.

  Louisa continued on out the open front doors, extending her Colt straight out in front of her in case any of the men outside tried to make a play for her. She led Ruth across the gallery and down the steps, pivoting on her hips to keep all the men clumped around her at bay. None of these appeared to be part of the dwarf’s cutthroat gang. They were mostly Mexicans—probably freighters, judging by their dusty buckskins and billowy neckerchiefs, as well as their seeming reluctance to make any moves toward a sidearm.

  They watched Louisa and Ruth stonily.

  When the women were out in the middle of the street, right of the well and nearly in front of the Rose Hotel and Saloon, Louisa glanced back to see the redhead walking backward out of the dwarf’s sprawling place, the Winchester and revolver extended before him. He turned suddenly and leaped down the steps to the street, hurried over to a coyote dun tied to one of the hitchracks fronting the place, and slid his rifle into the boot strapped to the saddle. He mounted up and, keeping his pistol in his hand, backed the horse away from the hotel.

  Louisa headed down a break between the hotel and another, smaller adobe-brick building, toward where she’d tied her pinto. The kid turned his horse and trotted up behind her as she continued leading Ruth through the dark gap toward the rear of the Roses’ hotel.

  “I gotta warn you, Kid-with-a-Price-on-Your-Head,” Louisa said, “I’m a bounty hunter.”

  “I’ll take my chances, Miss Bonaventure.”

  Louisa looked at him riding up beside her and Ruth. “You know my name?”

  “Sure, you’re the Vengeance Queen who rides with Lou Prophet—the bounty hunter who done sold his soul to the Devil after the War of Northern Aggression.”

  “I’ll be hanged,” Louisa said, using another of Prophet’s expressions. “We’re just getting too famous for our own good, me an’ Lou.”

  Louisa could hear voices and a general commotion rising from the direction of Moon’s saloon. Apprehension raking her, knowing she’d be hunted soon, she led Ruth toward the pinto ground-tied behind the woodshed flanking the hotel and helped the woman onto the horse behind the saddle.

  “Which way you headed?” the kid asked Louisa.

  She looked at him again, suspicious, as she climbed up onto the pinto’s back. “West,” she said, her voice pitched with a cagey reluctance.

  “If you’ll ride south with me a ways, you two can bran
ch off a mile or so out of town, and I’ll keep heading toward the Rio Grande. We’ll maybe fool ’em for a little while.”

  “Yeah, a little while.” Louisa glanced at Ruth perched behind her. “Hold on tight, Mrs. Rose. We’re gonna ride like the Devil’s hounds are on our heels.”

  When Ruth had wrapped her arms around Louisa’s waist, Louisa batted her heels against the pinto’s flanks. They took off, trotting past the rear of the Rose Hotel and Saloon and up the far side. They turned onto the main street and then continued south along the main trail, heading in the direction of the Rio Grande.

  They galloped hard along the trail that was a pale ribbon stretching out across the starlit night. But it wasn’t long before they heard the thunder of many hooves chewing up the desert behind them.

  19

  A SHRILL SCREAM cut the night wide open.

  Louisa’s scream.

  He’d recognize her voice anywhere, even pitched with horror and agony. He’d heard it pitched that way many times . . . when she’d been having her nightmares, in her sleep reliving the bloody murder of her family back in Nebraska.

  The scream echoed, sounding like a million panes of shattering glass.

  Prophet jerked his head up from his saddle. He looked around, blinking. The fire was out. The cave was nearly as black as the inside of a glove. He looked around, blinking, trying to penetrate the darkness.

  “Louisa?” His own voice sounded eerie in the dense silence.

  No reply.

  He called her name again, louder. Still, nothing.

  As his eyes adjusted, he saw the fire ring about three feet to his left. He lay with his feet toward the cave opening, saddle behind him. Louisa’s gear was nearby, on the same side of the fire, and he could usually see her blond hair in the darkness, but he did not see it tonight.

  Prophet flung his blankets aside, heaved himself to his feet. In the four days he’d been here, he’d healed enough that his head no longer felt like an old, cracked bell tolling incessantly in a bitter wind. He still had plenty of bruises, but they’d heal in time.

  It was his ribs that graveled him. He didn’t think they were busted, but they felt like they were not only broken but grinding around and chewing into his lungs. The raw ache made it hard to breathe. The old shirt Louisa had cut up and wrapped around him had helped some. Now he drew a breath and looked around the cave.

  No sign of the Vengeance Queen.

  “Louisa?”

  The silence of the deep, desert night.

  He walked to the cave entrance and called for her softly, not loudly enough for anyone nearby to hear. Sound carried on such a night as this. It didn’t carry to her, however, which meant she must be a ways away.

  Where?

  He stomped into his boots. Dressed in only his hat, boots, and balbriggans, he walked down the rocky slope to where Mean stood, hobbled in a hollow amongst cabin-sized boulders, head and tail drooping as the horse slept on his feet, knees locked. The horse winded Prophet and gave a wary whicker, swatting his tail.

  “Easy, hoss,” Prophet said, going over and running a hand down the horse’s neck that owned several rough scars from tussles with other horses and, once, a mountain lion before Prophet had managed to shoot the beast.

  That had been up in Montana. How long ago? He couldn’t remember. Sometime before he’d run into Louisa and they’d ridden after the Handsome Dave Duvall gang and she’d acquired her reputation that was now even bigger than his own, her being a beautiful, blond, and especially savage pistolera and all.

  Prophet glanced over to where he’d last seen the pinto, hobbled a cautious twenty yards from Mean and Ugly. The horse was gone.

  Apprehension raked at Prophet.

  He moved back out of the hollow and looked off through a velvety black pass over which stars were sprinkled like Christmas glitter, clear as sequins on a fat whore’s black dress, in the direction of Chisos Springs.

  The stars were bright. They showered the nightscape with a soft, lilac light that seemed to pulse up from the ground itself, but all he could see were sand-colored rocks and cactus spikes dropping gradually away from him before rising just as gradually toward the pass, beyond which lay Chisos Springs.

  Or, Moon’s Well as the little demon was calling it now.

  Louisa had most likely ridden to the town, as he’d suspected she would though he’d tried to convince her to wait until he was able to accompany her, and they’d see about prying Ruth Rose free of the dwarf’s clutches. How long ago had she left? No way to tell. Again, apprehension was a monkey riding his shoulders. He drew another deep breath.

  The ribs were better now that he was standing. Louisa’s bandage had helped more than he’d thought. Could he ride?

  He’d just have to see. He sure wasn’t going to stand around out here with his thumb up his ass while she called down only God knew what kind of hell on herself in Chisos Springs.

  He opened his fly to evacuate his bladder. Then he walked back into the cave, dressed, wrapped his shell belt and Peacemaker around his waist, thronging the holster on his right thigh, and then tenderly hauled his gear out to the hollow where Mean was fidgeting around now, knowing Prophet was up to something.

  He saddled the horse, strapped his rifle scabbard to his saddle, and slung his shotgun over his shoulder to let it hang barrel up down his back. Grimacing, he mounted, drew another breath, suppressed the raw ache like a rat chewing his lungs.

  “Not bad,” he said, touching spurs to the dun’s flanks, heading out. “Not bad at all. I’ll be plum spiffy as a half-growed calico colt in no time.”

  To suppress the pain of his battered ribs and to alleviate his fear of what was transpiring with Louisa, he sang an old song that, with the singing, always made him feel better about whatever situation he was in:

  Away from Mississippi’s vale,

  With my ol’ hat there for a sail,

  I crossed upon a cotton bale

  To Rose of Alabamy.

  He paused. Mean’s hoofs clomped along the rocky trail, shod hooves ringing off stones. Prophet held him to a moderate pace to lessen the risk of injuring the beast on this dangerous night ride. From somewhere near and sounding sad and all alone in the mountain quiet, a lone coyote wailed, yipped wildly for a time, and then gave another mournful wail.

  Prophet increased Mean’s pace a little, and sang:

  Oh brown Rosie,

  Rose of Alabamy!

  A sweet tobacco posey

  Is my Rose of Alabamy . . .

  He was a hundred yards down the pass and heading toward the broad, arid valley in which the town and the well sat, when he reined the horse up sharply.

  He’d heard something. The distant clomps of riders moving toward him.

  He kept the reins taut, listening, looking around to make sure he wasn’t outlined against the sky. Reining Mean off the trail a ways, he stopped in front of a tall stack of boulders and pricked his ears again, listening.

  The riders were moving toward him. The hoof thuds were growing gradually louder. Occasionally he heard the metallic ring of a shod hoof kicking a rock, the clatter of a bridle bit in a horse’s mouth.

  Just one rider. He could pick out each footfall.

  He squinted straight ahead along the old Indian trail he’d been following down toward the valley. Movement there. An inky smudge jostled against the powdery tan of the terrain around it. Amidst the ink was a pale splotch that, as the rider drew closer, appeared blond hair bouncing on narrow shoulders.

  Prophet’s heart began to lighten, but then he heard more, quieter thuds behind the first rider. He shuttled his gaze farther down the grade and saw more inky shapes moving against the dark tan of the surrounding rocks and sand, climbing toward him.

  Prophet eased out of the leather, ground-reined Mean and Ugly, and slid his Winchester from its boot. Quietly
, he levered a round into the rifle’s breech and strode down the slope a ways, about twenty yards wide of the trail, and walked out onto a broad oval boulder cropping out of the slope. This vantage offered a good view of the trail rising toward him from downhill and stretching past his left side and over that shoulder.

  The first rider came on along the trail, the horse showing its fatigue in its loose-legged, lunging gait as it galloped up the hill. It was blowing raspily. Its rider was indeed a blond. The horse was a brown-and-white pinto. A second rider, dressed in red, rode behind the first.

  Prophet dropped to a knee and doffed his hat, afraid it might show against the sky or the upslope behind him. The splay-kneed pinto was near when Prophet yelled, “You make some new friends, Louisa?”

  She whipped her head toward him, hair flying, and closed a hand over her right-side Colt. After a second’s scrutiny, and recognizing his voice, she shook her head. “No friends of mine. In fact, I’d admire if you took care of them fellas, Lou.”

  “Keep ridin’,” he said, keeping his voice low as he dropped prone against the boulder.

  When Louisa had drifted on up the slope and out of sight behind him, he set the rifle down beside him, and swung his shotgun around to the front. He broke the big blaster open, made sure he had a wad in each barrel, snapped it closed, and drew both rabbit-ear hammers back to full cock.

  He hunkered lower, pressing his chest down fast against the rock.

  The riders kept coming, pushing hard. Their horses were fresher than Louisa’s, but not by much. Their gasps sounded like several blacksmith bellows being pumped hard at once.

  The hoof clomps grew louder. Prophet could make out around five jostling shapes on various-colored horses and in various-colored and – styled garb, various-shaped hats. There were a couple of palm-leaf sombreros.