Hell's Angel

by Peter Brandvold

  Prophet stepped aside as the blond-headed hombre rolled past him to pile up against a boulder on the far side of the corridor he was in. The dead man had lightly splattered the gravel in his wake with red.

  Colter Farrow had jerked around quickly at the shooting behind him. He looked from Prophet to the dead man, flushed with chagrin, and shook his head. “Shit.”

  “Yep,” Prophet said, climbing the blood-splashed slope.

  “Maybe I can return the favor some time.”

  “Hope not.” Prophet looked over the slight gap in the rock through which the kid had been shooting. “Who you shootin’ at over here?”

  Then he saw the stocky Mexican lying just beyond the wagon-sized boulder he’d apparently been crouching behind, his rifle and a pistol lying nearby. A horse stood ground-tied about fifty yards beyond him, along a rocky wash tufted with lemon green brush.

  “Think that’s all of ’em,” Colter said as he stood beside Prophet, plucking cartridges from his shell belt and punching them through his Winchester’s loading gate.

  Just then another shot sounded from the north, ahead of Prophet’s and the kid’s position.

  “That must be Louisa,” Prophet said, and he slipped between the rocks at the top of the bluff and began slipping and sliding, holding his arms out for balance, down the other side.

  They’d come upon Moon’s riders earlier that day, in the early afternoon, when they’d been traversing the Chisos range looking for another place to hole up while they waited for the furor over the dwarf’s demise to die down in Chisos Springs. The riders had taken Prophet’s group by surprise, and they’d split up in this badland area on the eastern slopes of the Chisos, Ruth remaining with Louisa because they’d both been riding Louisa’s pinto. Moon’s men had split up to come after them, and during his brief game of cat-and-mouse amongst the rocks, Prophet had lost track of the others.

  Until now.

  He and Colter ran through this relatively flat stretch of desert in the heart of the rocky badlands, climbing up and over low hills and dashing across two dry watercourses. Rifles continued prattling before him. A man was shouting. Louisa was shouting back at them though Prophet couldn’t hear what they were yelling beneath the rifle blasts, but he had a feeling that Louisa and the man weren’t complimenting each other’s bloodlines.

  When Prophet and Colter gained the crest of a low hill near the shooting, they dropped to their bellies and doffed their hats. On the far side of the hill, smoke puffed and guns crashed behind two nests of rocks about thirty yards apart from each other.

  A dead man lay in the gap between the two shooting factions, facedown and spread-eagle, his hat lying far beyond him against a clump of Spanish bayonet. Prophet saw Louisa and Ruth hunkered behind scattered boulders to his left, while he glimpsed two men shooting from the rocks clustered on his right—both parties about sixty yards away from him and Colter.

  “Come on out here, you little bitch!” one of Moon’s men shouted. “And sit on my face!”

  The two men laughed as they each triggered another round toward Louisa and Ruth.

  Louisa’s cool retort was, “I’ve seen privy seats more attractive than your face, amigo. They probably smelled better, too! But I’ll make a deal with you. You both walk out here in the open instead of cowering like a couple of yellow dogs back there in those rocks, I’ll sit on both your faces!”

  “You will?”

  “I promise!”

  The two Moon shooters conferred briefly and then one of them shouted angrily, “Lyin’ little bitch!”

  Prophet laughed.

  On his left, Colter said, “She always talk so nasty?”

  “Ever since Mexico. Don’t ask.”

  One of the Moon shooters half stood behind his blocky covering boulder, and raised his Winchester. Louisa triggered a shot at him, blowing his hat off, and he gave a yelp and dropped down the boulder.

  Prophet raised his own Winchester and started firing one shot after another, peppering the rocks and dust and cacti around the two shooters until his rifle’s hammer pinged on an empty chamber.

  During his fusillade, he could hear the men yelling and yelping. They hadn’t expected an attack from Prophet’s quarter. Now they scrambled around and took off running through the rocks and shrubs farther off to Prophet’s right, deciding, the bounty hunter supposed, that they weren’t about to die like their pards had died—for a dead man.

  Louisa leaped to her feet and emptied her Winchester at the two retreating shooters though her bullets merely plumed dust behind them. When her rifle fell silent, she whipped her head toward Prophet and shouted, “Shoot ’em down, Lou! Shoot ’em down like the dogs they are!”

  Prophet lowered the Winchester.

  Colter was staring toward Louisa. “She does have some chili pepper in her, don’t she?”

  “My dear old pa would’ve said she had fire ants up her skirt.”

  Prophet began reloading the Winchester as he and Colter began walking down the hill. Louisa walked out from the rocks and rested her own repeater on her shoulder. “You have a soft spot for slave traders?” she asked Prophet snidely.

  He walked past her to the man lying belly down in the dirt, planted a boot on the man’s back, between his shoulder blades, to see if he was still breathing. He wasn’t.

  “We’ve killed enough of the dwarf’s men to discourage any others, most like. Most outlaws I know aren’t loyal enough to die for a dead man.”

  Ruth walked out from the rocks, dressed in Louisa’s spare trail duds of a wool skirt, checked shirt, half boots, and a yellow neckerchief tied over her head, bandanna-style. Her brown hair dropped down from the bandanna to hang across her shoulders. She had a stricken look on her face as she regarded the dead man and shook her head.

  “He was one of those that Moon sent for me. Probably one of those who hanged Frank.” She’d spoken in a dull, emotionless voice, her eyes opaque. But now she lifted her gaze to Prophet, wrinkling her brows with a faint desperation. “I have to go back and cut him down and bury him, Lou.”

  Prophet shook his head as he plucked the spent wads from his barn blaster. “Too dangerous. We’d best hole up out here for a few days. I’ll head into town soon and see what’s happening at the dwarf’s place, maybe fill our canteens. If I can, I’ll bury your husband, Ruth.”

  “What?” she said. “We’re just going to hole up out here like desert rats?”

  “I’m not leaving,” Louisa said, staring south, in the direction of Chisos Springs. “Not until I’ve seen about the dwarf’s slave-trading operation and done what I can to bring it down.”

  Prophet shook his head wearily. “Leave it for the Rangers.”

  “You saw what happened to the two Rangers who merely wanted to fill their canteens at Moon’s well, Lou!”

  “Most likely, with the dwarf dead, his men will pull out soon. Hell, they can’t run a business! They’ll tire of the girls and probably turn them loose.”

  “Maybe,” Louisa said. “But I’m not going to count on it.”

  She turned and walked away.

  Prophet sighed, scratched his temple with the barrels of his coach gun. “That girl’s gonna be the death of me yet.” He sighed again, turned to Ruth. “I do believe we might have gotten you a horse. You can ride, I take it?”

  Ruth was still staring down at the dead man in that cold, bitter, emotionless way of hers. She nodded.

  Prophet glanced at Colter. “You wanna fetch our horses? I’ll see if I can’t run down an outlaw mount for Mrs. Rose, and then we’ll find us a cave to hole up in for a few days . . . if you’ve a mind to hang around, that is?”

  Colter considered Prophet with a brow raised in surprise. “You’d want me to? Hell, I almost let that fella stick a knife between my shoulder blades!” He scowled with incredulity and kicked a stone.

  “Ah, hell,
I’ve done that! Truth is none of us has eyes in the back of his head. I’d admire if you hung around and helped me watch her back, though”—Prophet jerked his chin in the direction in which Louisa had gone—“because she’s liable to get herself killed trying to free them slave girls from Moon’s whorehouse, and I could use a hand backing her. She’s a handful, that girl!”

  The truth was, Prophet genuinely liked Colter Farrow, who reminded him a little of himself at that age, trying to make his way solo in a strange, forbidding land. The boy had obviously been alone a long time, and he could use a friend, just as Prophet could have used a friend out here at Colter’s age. His only friend, however, had been Ole Scratch . . . and all the doxies he could afford.

  “Well, if you need the help, Lou,” the kid said, hiking a shoulder, maintaining a calm expression but with the light of pride flashing silver in his brown eyes, “it wouldn’t be right for me to pull foot on you.” He narrowed a suspicious eye. “You ain’t just askin’, though, are you, ’cause you think I got nowhere else to go?”

  “Hell, kid,” Prophet said, slinging his double-barreled barn blaster behind his back, “if you had a place to go, I’d have you take me there!”

  Colter smiled. “All right, then.” The redhead held out his hand. “Pards.”

  Prophet shook it. “Pards.”

  Colter walked away. Prophet watched him. After a time, he felt Ruth’s eyes on him, and he flushed with embarrassment.

  She walked over to him, rose up on the toes of her borrowed boots, and pressed her lips to his cheek. “Not hard to see how a woman could fall head over heels in love with you, Lou Prophet.”

  “Pshaw!”

  “Oh, she has.” Ruth glanced toward where Louisa had disappeared to fetch her horse. “She’s been plum gone for you for quite some time.” She gave a wry, almost longing smile. “You must know that, Lou.”

  “Sure, but that’s done and over with,” Prophet said, a little surprised to hear the steel in his voice when speaking of his blond partner. He’d never heard that before. What’s more, he’d never felt it. But the girl’s recent, unforgiveable transgression down in Mexico still raked him.

  It would likely rake and nettle him for a long time to come.

  Down there, south of the border, for some reason that Prophet himself couldn’t quite fathom, the Vengeance Queen had crossed over to the other side. The side of the men and women she and Prophet had always fought against. She might now have returned to Prophet’s side, and she might have returned to Prophet, but he’d never be able to trust her again.

  Not fully. That saddened as much as angered him.

  A bounty hunter couldn’t ride with someone he couldn’t trust.

  He tramped off to fetch Ruth a horse.

  25

  THE MAN HAD been crucified a long time ago.

  Only a few shreds of clothes clung to his bones nailed to the makeshift cross fashioned from cedar logs and stuck in the ground facing south and the heat of the desert sun. His eyes had likely burned out before he’d died from heat stroke and thirst, possibly hunger or blood loss. His hands had been nailed to the crossbar, feet into the upright, and the nails had held him all this time—at least a year, possibly two.

  He was mostly bone thinly covered in jerked skin. His long hair still dangled from his desiccated skull. A green neckerchief, badly weathered and torn, still dangled from around his neck.

  “Oh, boy,” Prophet said as he reined up in front of the grisly spectacle. “Now that ain’t how I wanna go!”

  “Play your cards right, Lou,” Louisa said.

  Ruth, straddling a piebald mustang, scowled up at the dead man. “He obviously didn’t play his right.” She looked at Prophet. “What on earth . . . ?”

  “Bandito justice.”

  “Must be a lair around here somewhere,” Colter said, looking around at the parched hills they’d been riding through. Steep ridges, as bald as anything else out here, rose all around them.

  “Best keep our eyes extra peeled.” Prophet looked toward a thin fringe of green off to the west. “Come on,” he said, touching spurs to Mean’s flanks. “I sorta like how it looks over there.”

  They’d been riding for over an hour since the shoot-out with Moon’s men, looking for a protected place in which to camp, and Prophet had been looking around desperately for water. He knew that this neck of Texas had dried up considerably over the years and had led to the demise of the hacendado who’d once run the sprawling hacienda located around here somewhere, on these northeastern slopes of the Chisos range. But certainly a spring or two, fed by the infrequent rains, had to remain.

  Ten minutes later, reining up in the thin patch of willows, he discovered that one did. The water trickled up out of a layer of shale just beneath the desert’s sandy topsoil, along the bottom of what appeared an ancient riverbed that had probably carved the broad, arid valley they were in and that was hemmed in by forbiddingly steep ridges to the west and east.

  All around were the dingy tan remains of tree groves and patches of dead brush, all of which had probably died during the long drought that had plagued this stretch of western Texas. About all that had remained of living plants were the sotol, pipestem, prickly pear cactus, and the occasional patch of Spanish bayonet.

  The spring bubbled up so slowly from a crack in the rocks to trickle down over the natural stone shelves that it would take them over an hour to fill the seven canteens they had between them. Colter had wisely ridden out of Mexico with two, Louisa had two, and Prophet had the two he’d bought in Chisos Springs. He’d found only one on Ruth’s outlaw horse.

  Letting the others fill their flasks first, Prophet slipped his Winchester from its boot and walked away through the rolling, tan hills to the north. He stopped on the shoulder of a barren hill and saw down the other side, in a broad, rocky bowl, a massive adobe ruin to which dead vines clung like the sun-bleached tendrils of a giant, long-defunct octopus.

  The massive, barrack-like affair with tall, arched windows and red clay tiles on its pitched roof had to be the Spanish land grant’s original hacienda, built around two hundred years ago by the man to whom this stretch of the Chisos had originally been granted by a Spanish royal.

  The ruins of a few outbuildings huddled around the place, as well as that of a bright, white adobe bunkhouse whose roof appeared to have fallen in. There was a covered well on the casa’s far side, in the center of what appeared an old patio paved in flagstones and bearing the remnants of what had once been flowers, shrubs, possibly nut or orange trees.

  As far as Prophet could tell from his vantage and with his naked eye, there was no one around. He saw no sign of men or horses.

  He tramped back to where the others were sitting around the spring, told them about the hacienda, and then filled his canteens. They’d watered their horses when they’d first come upon the spring, so they now mounted and rode off through the thin green brush and over the low, brown hills. They reined up about a hundred yards from the hacienda, and Prophet took another good, long look at the villa.

  “Imagine a place this size,” Ruth said. “Out here on this barren desert.”

  “Wasn’t so barren when the place was built,” Prophet said. “Let’s ride in. We’ll hole up here if it don’t look like banditos are usin’ the place frequent-like for a hideout. We got enough folks to tangle with back at Chisos Springs.”

  He glanced at the sky, the blazing sun just beginning to slump toward the dark, western ridges. It would be damn nice to get shed of the sun for a while. He couldn’t remember when he’d ever been so tired of it, save when he’d been strapped naked to Mean’s back, that was.

  Those adobe walls and the cool shadows they likely harbored beckoned to the sweaty, dusty bounty hunter astraddle his sweaty dun from which a hot, horsey musk emanated.

  “Mean,” Prophet said as he booted the horse on down the last slope, he
ading for the sprawling case, “I do believe you smell as bad as I do.”

  The horse snorted, shook his head, and twitched his ears. Sometimes Prophet thought that Mean and Ugly actually understood what he was saying in his bored way, mostly just to have the comfort of hearing his own voice. A frightening damn thought . . .

  Prophet circled the casa, the others following, looking around warily and glancing frequently up at the two-story building looming over them. Their horses’ hooves clomped on the old paving stones. The horses snorted and blew warily, as though they were unnerved by the place whose arched, casement windows stared out at them like giant, empty eye sockets.

  The building was ringed with a five-foot adobe wall and a patio, but now all the flags were cracked or had heaved up out of the ground. Some had disintegrated altogether.

  Around them were the charred remains of at least three campfires, and many piles of horse apples. The building inside the wall had sheltered men and horses over the years. Probably bandits of one stripe or another, on the run either to or from the border. None of the horse dung was new; the moisture had been seared out of it so that it had returned to more or less spare piles of ground, sun-bleached hay, and white oat specks.

  No recent tracks around, either.

  A hot wind rose. Dust lifted, pelting the riders and the big, seemingly empty building with sand. One of the horses whinnied indignantly.

  Prophet dismounted and dropped his reins. “Ya’ll wait here. I’ll check it out.”

  He slid his shotgun around in front of his belly, held it by the neck of its rear stock, and headed through one of the several openings in the adobe wall. Ten minutes later he came back out of the place, having given it a cursory inspection, finding nothing but a ruined husk of what had once been a grand, Spanish-style casa that had probably known the tears and laughter of several generations of the original patron’s family.

  The place, riddled with the trash of transient men and feces of pocket mice and other animals including rabbits and coyotes, gave him the willies. He had enough of the old superstitious hillbilly in his soul, raised around southern-style hoodoo, conjure, and rootwork, to have sensed ghosts peering at him from every corner of the run-down hacienda.