Gun iron winked in the starlight.
When the riders were at the ten o’clock position before Prophet, he said in a softly menacing voice just loudly enough to be heard above the thudding hooves and the squawking of tack, “Go back home, fellas, or get right with your maker. You got about two more strides to make up your pea-pickin’ minds!”
“Whoa!” the lead rider shouted, hauling back on his reins.
He turned his head toward Prophet. The other riders brought their own mounts to skidding halts behind him.
“There!” he yelled and raised a carbine.
Prophet tripped the coach gun’s left barrel.
Ka-booom!
The lead rider blew straight back off his horse with a scream.
The rider nearest him also raised his rifle.
Ka-booom!
Both riderless horses whinnied shrilly, turned sharply, and galloped off into the desert away from Prophet. Their riders lay behind them, motionless along the side of the trail.
“Hold on!” one of the three survivors shouted, throwing both hands up, including the one holding a Winchester.
At the same time, one of the other two triggered a rifle at Prophet. The slug whistled past Prophet’s left ear. The bounty hunter had already raised his cocked rifle, and now he thumbed the hammer back, squeezed the trigger, and emptied a third saddle.
The third rider’s hat danced in the air for a few seconds and then landed atop the back of its prone rider while its horse shot straight up the trail, whinnying and buck-kicking wildly.
The other man still had his arms and carbine raised. The second survivor wisely tossed his own rifle out away from him. It clattered onto the trail and bounced atop one of the dead men.
“Yours, too!” Prophet shouted, “or your saddle’s gonna get empty mighty quick, amigo!”
The man tossed away his rifle and yelled, “We thought we done kilt you!”
Rage burned through Prophet like a wildfire. He was apparently looking at one of the men who’d given him his sore ribs, not to mention his other sundry complaints, and tied him bare-ass naked over Mean and Ugly’s back. Hazed him off in the desert to die painfully slow. He planted a bead on the man’s forehead, just beneath the brim of his broad-brimmed black hat.
“Best vamoose, friend! My trigger finger is real itchy tonight!”
The one-eyed man glanced at his partner, who looked back at him. At the same time, both riders turned their horses and galloped back the way from which they’d come.
Prophet cursed as he climbed heavily to one knee. He stared after the riders dwindling down the slope in the starry night. Gradually, their hoof thuds died.
“You should have killed ’em both, you stupid bastard!” he grumbled to himself. “’Cause now it’s just a chore you’re gonna have to face later!”
20
TWO MURKY FIGURES milled ahead of Prophet, up the hill and against the inky darkness of the cave mouth. A horse whinnied—a familiar-sounding greeting. Mean and Ugly answered his old friend in kind, the report echoing off the rocks around him and rattling the bounty hunter’s eardrums.
Louisa’s disembodied voice knifed out of the silent darkness. “Name yourself!”
“William Tecumseh Sherman.”
Prophet reined Mean and Ugly to a halt behind the pinto.
“If wishes were wings.” Louisa was helping the woman in the red dress off the pinto’s back. Prophet jogged up to help, wrapped his big hands around Ruth Rose’s slender waist, and dragged her down off the horse.
Ruth slumped against him, her arm bloody. She slurred her words as though drunk. “Oh, Lou—” she said. “You were alive. I couldn’t believe it!”
Prophet picked Ruth up in his arms and groaned against the raking pain in his ribs. “Ah, hell, I been hurt worse fallin’ off Mean ’n’ Ugly drunk.”
He brushed past Louisa and headed toward the cave. “What the hell happened?” he said in a pinched voice.
“Oh, Lou—they killed Frank,” Ruth sobbed, her arms around his neck. “Hanged him from the balcony in his own hotel!”
Prophet crept into the cave, looking around so he wouldn’t stumble and fall with the woman in his arms. Louisa hurried in behind him, her saddlebags over one shoulder, her canteen looped over the other one. He set Ruth down gently, leaned her back against the cave wall. From what he could see in the cave’s near-pitch darkness, her face was pale and drawn.
He felt the oily wetness of blood streaking down her right arm.
“Who shot you?”
“I don’t know.”
“She shot the dwarf,” Louisa said, kicking branches into the fire ring behind Prophet.
Prophet looked at her sharply, certain he must have heard wrong. “Huh?”
“That’s right,” Ruth said, satisfaction in her voice as she sat back against the cave wall, breathing heavily. He saw the line of her mouth twist in a self-satisfied smile. “I drilled him right through his head. It was terribly easy. I wish someone would have done it a long time ago.”
“The dwarf is dead?”
“Got that right.” Louisa was laying a fire. “Mrs. Rose gave him as good as he’s ever given. Walked right into his own hotel, strode up to him barefoot and wearin’ her red dress, and pumped one right through his ugly head!” She leaned forward to blow on the tinder comprised of strips of paper and dry pine needles. “You’d have been proud of her. I know I was . . . though I’m surprised either one of us got out of there alive.”
Ruth said, “It didn’t bring Frank back, though, did it? Oh, well.” She grimaced as she closed her hand over the bullet hole in her upper arm. “Moon killed him a long time ago.”
“I’ll be damned,” Prophet said, shaking his head slowly, slow to comprehend that the little demon was dead. He still harbored so much rage for the dwarf that he felt a slight disappointment, knowing he himself would never now exact his own brand of vengeance on the man.
His selfishness chagrined him.
Behind Prophet, the fire grew. He could see Ruth leaning back before him, wearing only the thin, red dress cut low enough to expose a good third of her freckled bosom that had been full and supple in his hands. Her legs beneath the dress’s dusty hem were bare.
He leaned in close to inspect her arm. He didn’t think the bullet had struck the bone but ripped clear through.
He sandwiched her hand between his own, a little self-conscious about showing affection for the woman with Louisa so near. “You’ll be up and around in no time.”
She frowned, her eyes raking his face and acquiring a tender, horrified cast. “Poor Lou—look what they did to you.” She touched the still-swollen flesh around his right eye, ran a finger along a deep, scab-crusted cut under that same eye. “Poor man!”
“Ah, hell,” Louisa said ironically, kneeling beside Prophet with a red handkerchief, a roll of cotton bandages, and a canteen. “He’s looked worse after falling off his horse drunk. Might even be an improvement.” She shouldered the big bounty hunter aside. “I’ll tend that wound for you, Mrs. Rose, and you can get some sleep.”
Louisa glanced at Prophet. “Any of my medicinal whiskey left?”
“Oh, there might be a drop or two.”
Prophet fetched the bottle, held it up to the fire to see how much was left, shrugged, and handed it over to Louisa, who got busy cleaning Ruth’s bloody arm.
Prophet heard something. At almost the same time, one of the horses whickered. Prophet walked outside the cave and slid his rifle from its saddle scabbard. He levered a round into the breech.
After a short time, hoof thuds rose, clear on the quiet air. Prophet stepped away from the horses, held his Winchester up high across his chest, and gave a silent curse.
Had the dwarf’s men followed him?
“Name yourself!” His gruff voice echoed.
S
ilence.
The loudening hoof clomps stopped. A young man’s voice: “Don’t shoot, Mr. Prophet—it’s Colter Farrow.”
“You’ll like him, Lou,” Louisa said behind Prophet, standing with her own Winchester across her chest in the cave entrance, the fire dancing behind her. “He wears the stamp of your old friend Satan on his mug.”
* * *
“What in the hell do you three think you’re doin’?” Griselda May asked three strange riders the next morning after the sun had risen over the Del Carmens in the east. “I don’t believe I seen any one of you pay the box, like the sign says to. Or . . . maybe you can’t read . . . ?”
The three were winching up the bucket from the bottom of the well out in front of the dwarf’s House of a Thousand Delights. They all wore leggings and ragged shirts and frayed neckerchiefs.
They were dusty enough to have been dragged through the desert at a hard gallop. They looked uncouth and ugly, and Griselda could smell them from where she stood a good fifteen feet away, between the well and the gambling parlor and whorehouse, which, after the previous night’s activities, including Mordecai Moon’s untimely demise, she now considered her own.
They all looked at her incredulously from beneath their sweaty, dusty, weather-beaten hats. The beefiest of the three—a cow-eyed man with a double chin tufted with gray brown beard—said, “We heard the dwarf done gave up the ghost.”
“God rest his soul,” said the man standing to the far left and holding the reins of a skewbald paint gelding and grinning.
“Yeah, rest his soul,” said the beefy man. “So we figured the water was free again . . . just like it was when Chisos ran things out this way.”
Griselda sighed and crossed her arms on her little breasts. “Well, Chisos La Grange doesn’t run things out here anymore. And while the dwarf no longer does, either, I do. I’m taking over the House of a Thousand Delights as well as ownership of this here well. And I fully intend to leave the cost of water the same as when Mr. Moon was alive, though I’ll probably be inching the prices up after the first of the year. So you may consider the prices indicated on the sign there a bargain.”
Griselda smiled icily.
The two drifters let their own smiles droop. The third man, and the tallest of the three, had been scowling from the first. He stood to the right of the other two.
His face was so hairy that Griselda couldn’t see his lips move when he said in a low but distinct voice, “I’ll be damned if I’ll pay a fuckin’ little bitch like you fer water.”
Griselda’s pistols were up in her hands before the last word had left the string bean’s mouth. Both derringers cracked like Mexican firecrackers. They cracked again, in unison, and then all three men were piled up in the street at the base of the well, dust wafting around them.
“And I’ll be damned if you won’t,” Griselda said.
Behind her, a high-pitched laugh rose. She glanced behind to see the Rio Bravo Kid standing on Moon’s gallery, thumbs hooked behind his cartridge belt, grinning.
Other men lounged along the gallery, some sitting on the rail—freighters and drifters who’d decided to stay over another night and see how the dwarf’s killing played out. Several had signed up with the “posse” that Griselda had sent out after the two women—the girl called the Vengeance Queen and Ruth Rose—who’d barged into the place and killed him.
Griselda didn’t mind so much that Moon was gone. She just wished it would have happened later, after they’d sold another batch of whores down in Mexico. Mordecai had known how to deal with the Rurales down there, and the transaction would have gone much smoother if he’d been at the reins.
Also, Griselda hadn’t yet coaxed him into telling her the combination to his office safe in which she knew a good thirty thousand dollars in gold nestled—profit from the House of a Thousand Delights as well as his slave-running business and his water contracts.
No, she didn’t mind so much, really, but she had to avenge his killing just the same, to win the respect of his men. She knew she could only take his place as gang leader and ramrod of the House with their blessing. Even after three of his horses returned riderless to Moon’s Well the night before, he still had a good fifteen on his roll, including Sheriff Mortimer, who was striding toward Griselda now from the direction of his office.
“Good Christ,” Mortimer said, scowling down at the most recent batch of dead men. “When is all this killin’ gonna stop, Griselda? Good Lord—Moon’s dead!”
“No thanks to you, Sheriff,” she said. “Where were you last night when you should have been over at the House, preventing such a thing from happening? In fact, where are you most nights, Sheriff? Does that consumptive have to take up all of your professional time?”
Mortimer’s cheeks flushed above his salt-and-pepper mustache and goatee. “Listen here, you—”
“No, you listen, Sheriff. I run things now. The House and this town and this water are mine. That makes you mine, too.” She looked at the Kid still standing atop the gallery steps, grinning, and jerked her chin.
The Kid strode over to her and Mortimer.
“Sheriff Mortimer, I’m afraid you are now Deputy Sheriff Mortimer.” Griselda removed the badge from Mortimer’s vest, inside his black frock coat, and pinned it to the Rio Bravo Kid’s shirt. She gave the Kid a wink and then removed the deputy sheriff’s badge from the Kid’s vest and started to pin it to Mortimer’s vest.
“Forget it,” Mortimer said, stepping back away from her and waving his hands, palm out. “I’ve had enough.”
Griselda tightened her jaws and put fire in her glare. “Wear it, Sheriff!” She glanced over at the men on the gallery looking on at the doings by the well with mute, vaguely threatening interest. “You will assist the new sheriff in the carrying out of his duties here in Moon’s Well.”
Griselda cast an unctuous smile toward the hotel and the gallery filled with Moon’s supporters, grateful for the whiskey and women and gambling opportunities so far out here on hell’s rear doorstep. “Yes, the name will remain the same, in honor of Mr. Mordecai Moon, the founder of this desert oasis.”
Mortimer glanced at the men. Most were or had been outlaws at one time. They ran in packs. Dangerous packs. If he didn’t wear the badge, they’d consider him a traitor.
Griselda offered another wicked, icy smile. “Think of your consumptive friend, Deputy. How well would she fare here without you?”
Mortimer’s face swelled and his nostrils flared, but he said nothing.
She pinned the deputy sheriff’s star to his vest and stepped back.
She glanced between Mortimer and the grinning Rio Bravo Kid and said, “There, that looks better. Now, won’t you lawmen join me inside for the funeral? Shortly, we’ll be burying Mr. Moon on the hill behind the hotel, under his favorite mesquite.”
21
THE CORPSE OF Mordecai Moon lay on a table inside the main drinking hall of Moon’s House of a Thousand Delights.
Two Apache girls and one Mexican were just now finishing dressing him after they’d given his little, gnarled, pasty body a sponge bath scented with rose water. They’d cleaned the bruised dimple that Ruth Rose’s bullet had made in his forehead. They’d pomaded his three or four fringes of colorless hair, so that they lay pasted against the top of his bullet-shaped, lantern-jawed head. And they’d cleaned and wrapped his bullet-torn hand with a cotton bandage.
Griselda stood over Moon now as the Mexican girl finished wrestling the little body into his age-coppered clawhammer coat, which, like the rest of Moon’s attire, was no different than his customary garb, only they’d laundered his shirt and pants and given the coat and his bowler hat a thorough brushing. The Mexican girl lay Moon back against the Indian blanket spread out across the table beneath him and started to button his coat.
Griselda leaned down and slapped the girl’s hands away. “He never wore it buttone
d, stupid greaser!”
The Mexican girl jerked her hands away with a gasp and regarded Griselda like she would a coiled and rattling diamondback.
There were a dozen or so of Moon’s men in the room, as well as transient freighters, gamblers, down-at-heel drifters, shopkeepers, and Mexican residents of Moon’s Well. They’d come to pay their respects and some were having drinks in Mr. Moon’s memory, but now they all regarded her incredulously, frowning. A Mexican in customary peasant pajamas and rope-soled sandals, holding his frayed sombrero down low before him respectfully, shook his head and sucked air through his teeth.
Many of the residents of Moon’s Well had seen the value in Moon’s being here, despite the water tax. For it was Moon and his small army of gunslingers and desperadoes who held the bronco Indians and other desperadoes from both sides of the border at bay. After Moon had come and built his big hotel and gambling parlor, the Mexican residents no longer had to flee to the mountains at the first sign of trouble, which they’d always had to do in previous years.
Looking around the room, Griselda realized her mistake. She wasn’t looking properly grief-stricken.
“Oh, Lord,” she said, bringing a hand to her temple. “I’m sorry, Esmeralda. It’s just that . . . oh, God, Mordecai!”
Griselda threw herself atop the little, suited body, smashing flat his hat resting beside him.
She feigned a half-dozen or so convulsions and then straightened, wiped her invisible tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands, sniffed, and lifted the dwarf’s little hat still wearing the bullet hole in its crown. She reshaped the crown, set the hat on Moon’s chest, and nodded at the two Mexicans waiting nearby with a five-foot-long box they’d hammered together for a coffin.
The Mexicans—Indian dark, withered, nearly toothless men, one with a corn-husk cigarette smoldering in one corner of his mouth—set the coffin on the table beside the dwarf. They lifted the little suited body with the feathered hat on its chest into the coffin.
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