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He may be a Confederate turned-bounty-hunter with a predilection for trouble, but Lou Prophet knows you never overstay your welcome in a town that wants you dead. Now, all because a young fool with a lousy poker hand couldn’t hold his temper, Prophet has a bloodthirsty posse aiming to pump him full of lead for murdering the son of prominent cattleman Gerard Loomis.
Unfortunately, before he has the chance to hightail it out of the Dakota Badlands, Prophet is shot and left for dead. Saved by a woman rancher named Layla Carr, who hides him out at her ranch, Prophet realizes he must find a way to finish this fight before Loomis finds a way to even the score ...
DEALT THE DEVIL’S HAND
LOU PROPHET 2:
By Peter Brandvold
First published by the Berkley Publishing Group in 2002
Copyright © 2002 by Peter Brandvold
Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: March 2013
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
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Cover image © 2013 by Westworld Designs
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Published by Arrangement with the Author.
For Keith Blair, whose friendship transcends time and distance
Chapter One
LOU PROPHET REINED his exhausted, stolen horse to a halt on a bluff two miles south of Little Missouri and cast an anxious gaze northward.
Ten dust-cloaked, sunburned horsemen pounded out of the chalky buttes that peppered the Dakota badlands like the temple ruins of some long-vanished civilization. They rode lightly in their saddles, shoulders hunched, hats tipped low against the penetrating summer sun.
Their leather chaps flapped like bats’ wings. Several rode with bandanas pulled taut across their mouths and noses, and their eyes, red-rimmed from the sun glare, shone with the bloodlust of feral dogs.
The leader was a big, broad-shouldered hombre in a black alpaca vest, black shirt, and low-crowned black hat perched atop a hairless, egg-shaped head with black mustaches. Prophet wondered if the man’s underwear was black. His eyes were even black, or so they appeared from Prophet’s perch atop the horse he’d stolen in Little Missouri.
Well, not really stolen. He’d appropriated the mount in a dire moment, you might say, when a herd of gun-savvy cowpunchers, having heard the gunshots in the Pyramid Park Saloon, had come running from the mercantile to find one of their own slumped against the back wall, dead, and Lou Prophet standing there with a smoking Peacemaker in his hand.
Prophet had tried to explain that it was self-defense, but he hadn’t gotten two words out before one of the men said, “Jesus Christ—it’s Little Stu!”
“Who the hell is Little Stu?” Prophet asked. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to like the answer.
“Boss’s son,” a guttural voice announced. “Gerard Loomis’s boy—only boy.” The big cowboy with a Fu Manchu mustache slid his stricken gaze from the body slumped against the wall to Prophet, who still held his gun, barrel forward.
“In other words, hombre,” the man said, “you’re a dead man.”
Prophet turned his gun on the men, several of whom had grabbed the grips of their own six-shooters.
“Just keep those irons where they are,” Prophet had said, slowly backing toward the door. “This was self-defense. That kid claimed I was cheating at cards. I was trying to explain very politely that I wasn’t, when the fool clawed iron. I had no choice but to shoot him.”
“I don’t doubt that, mister,” the big cowboy said. “Little Stu was born with a lifelong colic, but it just don’t matter.”
“Why don’t one of you get the sheriff?” Prophet suggested.
The professional bounty hunter had stopped here on his way to Montana by way of Bismarck. He’d intended to wet his whistle, play a few friendly games of cards, get a good night’s sleep, and head out first thing in the morning in pursuit of rustlers known to be working south of Miles-town.
Now he’d shot a man and had the man’s friends looking at him like a skunk they’d trapped in the bunkhouse.
The big cowboy smiled with only his eyes. “There ain’t no sheriff in Little Missouri. Closest one’s over to Dickinson, seventy miles away. We do our own sheriffin’ around here.”
Prophet had had a feeling that’s what the man was going to say.
“You all stay put,” he said, backing through the batwings. “I’m gonna borrow one of your horses here at the hitch rack, and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Yeah, but we won’t be out of yours,” the big man had called as Prophet jerked the slipknot free of the hitching post and mounted the nervous sorrel. Holstering his Peacemaker, he reined the horse south through the sage and lit a shuck along the river, dust billowing behind him.
His own horse was in the feed barn, and he hated leaving ole Mean and Ugly behind, but what else could he have done? He’d learned a long time ago, since coming west after the war, as a matter of fact, that you never overstayed your welcome in a town that wanted you dead.
Not that there were that many towns that had wanted Prophet dead, but the Confederate-turned-bounty hunter had a predilection for trouble—and not only with the lawmen he rubbed the wrong way or the men he hunted. His penchant for women and three-day benders had something to do with it, as well.
Now, as the posse turned around the base of a slim butte, Prophet slid out of his saddle and hunkered low in the cedars, making sure the sorrel was out of sight, too. He watched as the black-garbed leader—Little Stu’s father, he assumed—raised a gloved hand and reined his steeldust gelding to a halt where the trail forked.
He looked around and bellowed, “Where the hell... ?”
“Here!” one of his men called, jutting a finger at the tracks Prophet had tried to cover with sage branches.
“Ride!” the big, black-clad rider shouted.
“Shit!” Prophet groused, standing and mounting the sorrel.
He jogged the horse down the bluff and back onto the trail that followed the river’s meandering course south through some of the most diabolical-looking country Prophet had ever seen. With its deep ravines, chalky buttes, and treacherous saddles, the region looked like the inside of a dinosaur’s mouth, its tongue being the wide, flat, gumbo channel of the Little Missouri.
It was a country with lots of places to hide, but it was not one friendly to fast travel. The narrow, uneven trail, with its steep rises and twisting declivities, was hard on both horse and rider. Prophet knew he couldn’t outrun his trackers; he’d have to lose them in the buttes.
But suddenly he wasn’t in the buttes anymore. Suddenly, he found himself on a flat, brushy table with no cover in sight.
“Oh, jeepers,” Prophet muttered, hunkered low in the saddle. “Oh, jeepers, jeepers, jeepers ...”
He was going to die out here. All alone in a strange land on a strange horse. And all because some damn younker with a lousy poker hand couldn’t hold his temper.
Damn ... and Prophet didn’t even have a woman here to comfort him.
The bounty hunter tossed a look behind him and felt his heart sink even lower. Loomis and his men had come to a halt on a hillock about a hundred yards away. One of the men was sitting
on the crest of the hillock, the barrel of a long-barreled rifle resting on his knees. Smoke puffed around the gun and around the face of the man cheeked up against it.
Prophet heard a muffled boom. Then the sorrel lurched beneath him and screamed.
Its head dipped, and the horse went down on its knees. Faster than an eye blink, it turned a somersault. At the apex of the roll, Prophet kicked free of the stirrups. He hit the ground the same time the sorrel did, on his ass. The sorrel landed on its head, breaking its neck with an audible crack. It came to rest in an awkward heap, expiring with a monumental groan.
Blinking, his ears ringing, Prophet sat up and looked around. He shot a glance at the knoll. The riders were pounding toward him, whooping and yelling like a frenzied pack smelling blood.
Prophet blinked his eyes and shook his head, clearing out the cobwebs. He bolted toward the horse’s rifle boot, and froze, scowling. A half-ton of horse lay between him and the rifle.
Shit...
His left hand flickered around the six-gun holstered on his thigh, and for a split second he considered drawing the Peacemaker, hunkering behind the horse, and making a stand. But knowing he’d never be able to hold off all seven of Loomis’s men—they’d have him surrounded and riddled with lead in a matter of minutes—he turned and ran.
A line of trees appeared on the prairie about fifty yards south, and Prophet headed for it. With luck, there would be a creek in those trees. If so, he might be able to hide in the creek until dark, then head for safety under cover of darkness.
It was a slim chance, but it was the only chance he had.
Boots pounding beneath him, head tipped low, elbows seesawing at his sides, Prophet ran faster than he’d run since he was a kid in north Georgia, bolting home from school on his birthday or heading to meet his first girlfriend, Lizzy Smothers, at their tree house.
Wind whipped his face, the waist-high sage and cedars crackled beneath his feet, and a stitch grew in his side. A lot of time had passed since he’d walked this far without a horse, much less run, and although Prophet stood six three in his socks and weighed nearly 220 pounds, he carried no fat whatsoever, and was amazingly fleet of foot.
Just the same, pistols cracked behind him. Hooves thundered. Men whooped.
The line of cottonwoods grew before him. He lowered his head even further and lifted his knees even higher, mentally spurring himself faster.
When he was ten feet from the first tree, a bullet spanged off a rock. Prophet felt a sharp prick in his side followed by a generalized numbness and something wet pasting his shirt to his skin. With a deep foreboding that suddenly filled his boots with lead, he knew the ricochet was in his side.
It slowed him for only a step or two. Then he was in the trees, where the buckbrush grew thick amid the cottonwoods. Suddenly his legs buckled, and he was rolling down a steep grade. With a splash he landed in the creek, water closing over his head.
He lifted his head and opened his mouth with a sharp intake of air, shaking the water from his eyes, and looked around. The creek was in a deep bed, about twenty yards across. Cottonwoods and cedars rose on the opposite side.
Prophet crouched low in the water and listened, hand on his Peacemaker. The gunfire had ceased, but he could hear voices. The riders had apparently stopped at the edge of the trees and were fanning out, intending to enter the woods at separate intervals. For all they knew, Prophet was waiting for them in the trees.
Prophet’s heart beat hopefully. He turned to gaze across the creek. He had a little time now before they were upon him again.
He saw the beaver dam and den about twenty yards downstream. Getting an idea, he sank low in the shallow water and headed for the lodge, glancing over his shoulder as he half crawled and half swam across the mud-bottomed creek, tangles of weeds, branches, and tree roots reaching up like hands to impede his way.
The water opened before him and closed behind him, the translucent air bubbles which marked his wake reflecting the sunlight angling through the trees.
He hoped the men wouldn’t see the bubbles. He hoped they’d think he’d run upstream or headed straight across to the other side. He hoped they wouldn’t suspect he’d headed for the dam and the beaver’s lodge. If any of them had spent their childhoods exploring creeks and beaver dams, like he had in his short-lived Georgia youth, before the war, they might savvy his intentions.
As he approached the dam, all of him submerged but his head, he turned for one more look at the steep bank behind him. Two men were descending the slope on foot, rifles held out before them. One of them turned to look his way. Prophet took a deep breath and pulled his head under. All went murky brown as the water pushed against his face. Chunks and flecks of moss and silt swept by him in the current.
To his right, the beaver dam was a big, black hump of interwoven branches. The water was deeper here, at least six feet, and he grabbed the den to pull himself lower as he looked for the entrance. He hoped the den was an old one, no longer used. He wasn’t sure which would be worse, facing the men stalking him or tangling with a beaver in its own den.
He found the small, arched entrance mostly by feel. It was too black to see, for the dam blocked the sun angling through the turbid water.
He hesitated a moment before poking his head through the hole. You never poked your head into a beaver den without some forethought and apprehension.
He set his jaw, denied his fear, grabbed hold of the branches on both sides of the entrance, and heaved himself through, angling upward as he swam, half-expecting a mouthful of razor teeth to take his head off.
Chapter Two
GERARD LOOMIS SAT his steeldust gelding at the edge of the trees and stared through the cottonwoods and cedars.
Exasperation simmered deep within him, making his chest tight, his heartthrob, and his molars grind. It was all he could do to keep his hands from shaking, from throwing his head back and howling like an enraged animal.
His dust-caked nostrils flared above his mustache as he worried the steel-head grips of the gold-plated forty-five positioned for the cross-draw on his left hip. He heard his men snapping branches and rattling brush as they scoured the slope for the man who had killed his son, the man who one of his men had recognized as a Southern bounty hunter named Lou Prophet.
Lou Prophet would be dead very soon. But only after he’d paid dearly for what he had done to Stuart.
Loomis brushed sweat from his brow with an angry sweep of his gloved hand. He didn’t like the fact that his men weren’t saying anything but a few curse words now and then. It meant they hadn’t cut Prophet’s sign. If they didn’t cut it soon, Loomis was going to explode. Just to set an example and to show how serious he was about finding that son of a bitch—just to express his anger and see some of the blood he was yearning to see—he might shoot one of his own men.
He didn’t want to do it. But Gerard Loomis did a lot of things he didn’t want to do when he was aroused.
He spat a curse now and spurred the steeldust forward, into the trees.
“Anyone see him?”
“Not yet, boss,” one the cowboys yelled up from the creek.
The men had dismounted and were kicking through the woods, rifles held at the ready.
Loomis called, “What about in the water?”
One of the men walking along the very edge of the cutbank cast his glance up the slope and shook his head.
“Goddamnit!” Loomis raged.
He spurred his horse down the slope, the horse flexing its back legs to keep its footing on the slippery ground. When it came to the edge of the cutbank, the rancher dismounted, dropped his reins, and frowned at the ground. Several of the sage clumps were flecked with blood.
‘This where he went into the creek?” he asked the nearest man.
“Looks like.”
“So he’s in the water, then.”
“I reckon.”
Loomis looked at the man’s moony, sunburned face. “You afraid of a little water? Get in the
goddamn creek!”
As the man took his rifle in one hand and scrambled backward into the water, grabbing roots to ease his descent, Loomis yelled to the others. “Everyone in the creek! He’s in the goddamn water!”
When all the men were knee deep in the creek, Loomis split them up, sending three upstream and three down.
“First man that sees him gets a twenty-dollar bonus,” he told them. “But don’t kill him unless you have to. You can wound him—hell, you can blow his legs off, for all I care—but I want to finish him.”
When the men had gone, Loomis stood along the bank looking around, sniffing the air like a dog. His senses were as sharp as a predator’s. He could smell the mossy water and the rotting driftwood and the dusty green of the cottonwoods, and he felt as though he were looking through a pair of low-power binoculars.
Prophet was here. Loomis thought he could hear the man’s heart beating from somewhere nearby. But where?
The rancher looked around. He sent his gaze across the creek, brought it left, allowing it to linger on the beaver dam over which the seed-dappled, coffee-colored water poured with a soft rushing sound. Finally, he decided that Prophet might have crossed the creek and that the best place for fording would be the dam itself.
Loomis was fifty-eight years old, but he was a strong, slender man: barrel-chested, broad-shouldered, and agile. On Saturday nights at the ranch he often wrestled his own men, some of whom were young enough to be his grandchildren, for money. More often than not, he won.
The dam, tricky as the footing was, gave him no pause. Leaving his horse ground tied, he simply took his rifle in one hand, snugged the butt against his belt, and began walking, one purposeful step at a time.
He came to the big dome of the beaver’s den, gave it a kick to test its fortitude, and sat down. He jacked a shell into the Henry, then off-cocked the hammer.
“Come on, Prophet,” Loomis called above the muttering water. “I know you’re here. I’m not going to let you get away. You might as well come out and take your due.”
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