Staring Down the Devil (A Lou Prophet Western #5)

by Peter Brandvold

  “A drink might put a little spark back in my veins.” Daws accepted Prophet’s help up and gingerly dusted himself off. He looked at Prophet warily. “But if Gay’s men see me, I’m liable to get us both in a heap of trouble.”

  Prophet offered the gambler a grin. “Let me worry about that.”

  The limping Daws led Prophet to a small canvas and wood tent shack situated near a garbage-choked ravine at the north end of town and slightly back from the main drag. “I haven’t been here,” Daws said. “Ain’t my kinda place. The whiskey’s probably half-strychnine and gunpowder, but they probably won’t recognize me here, either.”

  Daws took a bench at the rough-hewn table near the plank bar. Prophet dropped his gear near the bench, then ordered drinks from the grizzled proprietor — a bottle of whiskey, two glasses, and two mugs of beer — and set them on the table. He sat across from Daws, who’d thrown back his first whiskey before Prophet’s butt had touched the bench.

  Daws rubbed a soiled, beringed paw across his blood-crusted lips. “That’s mighty good.”

  Prophet threw back his own whiskey, then refilled both glasses. “You a gambler by profession, Mr. Daws?”

  The well-dressed gent was glancing around, obviously pleased no one seemed to recognize him. There were only two other people in the place — a stocky young black man in the blue, yellow-striped trousers of a federal soldier and a homespun shirt open to his navel, and an old Chinaman with a patch over his right eye. They sat across from each other at a table near the brightly lit doorway, but they weren’t speaking.

  “That’s right,” Daws said. “I work the mining camps mostly.” He chuckled. “Think I’ll stay away from this one in the future.”

  “Sounds like a good idea,” Prophet said, sipping his warm, flat beer and licking the foam from his upper lip. “So tell me about Leamon Gay.”

  “Hey, keep your voice down, will you?” Daws admonished, leaning toward Prophet and glancing at the barman, who returned the look, frowning askance.

  Prophet saw that the black man and the Chinaman were looking at him, as well.

  “Sorry,” he said to the gambler.

  Daws threw back his second whiskey, then refilled his shot glass. In a low voice he said, “What’s to tell? He’s a penny-ante crook who made it big smuggling horses across the border and selling whiskey and weapons to the Injuns. Also hunted Apache scalps. He put his money into a saloon in Wickenburg and then another saloon and a couple whorehouses in Phoenix, and made a small bundle. When an old prospector discovered gold in these mountains about four years ago, the prospector disappeared of a sudden.”

  Daws looked at Prophet meaningfully. The whiskey appeared to have loosened his mood as well as the stiff muscles in his face and shoulders. Even some of the swelling around his eyes appeared to have gone down.

  “The next thing you know,” Daws continued, “Gay leads a caravan of miners and his own band of hardcases up here and builds him a town. Gay himself took over an old Mexican ranch house — haciendas, they call ‘em down here — on a mountaintop near the mine. I spied it from a distance through field glasses. Fancy place on a big, grassy shelf jutting out of the mountain. Big shots from all over the Territory ride up here to rub shoulders with the owlhoot.” “What money won’t do for a man’s reputation.”

  “They say he has enough for several reputations.”

  “And all the games in the town are fixed?”

  “And all the whores belong to Gay. He gets a percentage — a big one — of every dollar they make.”

  “In return for what?”

  “Protection.”

  “From?”

  Daws grinned without humor. “Gay.” He sipped his whiskey, followed it down with a big swallow of the beer. “Any women who come to town and decide they’re going to open their own businesses, independent like, get closed up real quick. They either sign up with Gay, or end up as part of the trash in that ravine yonder.”

  “Sweet.”

  “Yep.”

  “So why’d you stay here so long?”

  “‘Cause I’m a poor loser. Decided to figure out how the games were rigged. The dealers are damn good — he must’ve sent away for them. But I finally figured it out.” Daws dabbed at a jellied gash over his upper lip, just right of his nose. “My sin, however, was greed. I should’ve just won back what I lost and hightailed it. But, no, not me. I thought I’d hit the mother lode.”

  “Instead, it hit you.”

  “You got it.” Daws was watching Prophet deftly building a cigarette across from him. “So, tell me something. What are you doing here, Prophet?”

  “I’m looking for a girl.”

  “Wife or sister?”

  “Neither.” Prophet produced the picture of Marya Roskov from his breast pocket and showed it to Daws.

  “Pretty,” the gambler said.

  “Ever see her around here?”

  Daws studied the picture, then slowly shook his head. “No, can’t say as I have. She’s pretty. One like that would stand out in this hole.”

  “She’s Russian,” Prophet said, hoping that might jog the gambler’s memory.

  Daws raised his eyes to Prophet’s. He appeared to frown, though it was hard to tell with all that purple swelling around his eyes. “Russian?”

  Prophet waited for the gambler’s memory gears to click.

  In a few seconds they did. “I heard one of the miners mention something about a ‘furriner’ — a ‘purty furriner’ — the other night, in one of the saloons. Something about the girl living up at Gay’s house . . . as his mistress.”

  Prophet studied the gambler, waiting for him to continue, his blood quickening in his veins. Had he found Marya? It almost seemed too much to hope for. He’d nearly convinced himself the girl was dead.

  Noting Prophet’s piqued interest, the gambler spread his hands and said, “That’s all I know.”

  Prophet dragged deeply on his cigarette and sipped his beer. “I reckon there aren’t too many ‘furrin’ girls in these parts.”

  “Mostly Americans and Mexicans and a few Indians,” Daws said. “You think the one up at Gay’s might be the one you’re looking for?”

  “It’s worth checking out.”

  Daws chuckled, the cuts on his lips opening slightly and oozing jellied blood. “Easier said than done, my good man. You’ll learn that. Cheers.” He threw back the last of his whiskey.

  Voices grew outside the tent saloon. Prophet and Daws glanced at the entrance, where two men appeared, ducking inside the flaps.

  Daws turned quickly back to Prophet, his face bleaching. “Oh, shit.”

  “What is it?”

  “Those are two of Gay’s upstarts.”

  “You don’t say,” Prophet said, appraising the two men, who walked between the tables, approaching the makeshift bar. Both were big and burly, one younger than the other by several years. The older man carried a hide-wrapped club from a lanyard on his wide, black belt.

  “Hello, Jake. Hello Dan,” the bartender said nervously as the men approached.

  “Hello, there, Charlie,” the older man with the bung starter said. “You got your tax?”

  “It’s been a week already?” the bartender grumbled.

  “Sure has,” Dan said without smiling.

  “Time sure flies,” the bartender said, turning to a wooden lockbox on the shelf behind him. He extracted five one-dollar bills from the box and tossed them on the bar planks. “There ye are — five dollars. What it’s for, I’d sure like to know.”

  “Why, for your protection, Charlie,” Jake said, as though answering a ridiculous question. “I mean, where would you be if it weren’t for Mr. Gay? Hell, you’d prob’ly be peddlin’ your rotgut whiskey down in Tucson, for a third of what it brings you here.”

  “That a fact?” Charlie said, unconvinced.

  “That’s a fact,” Dan said grimly. “It’d do you to be a little better mannered next time we come for Mr. Leamon’s dues.”

&nb
sp; “I’ll keep that in mind, Dan,” the bartender said. His hatred for these men and for Leamon Gay was apparent in his dark eyes and flushed cheeks. He eyed them disdainfully over the bar planks, leaning on his fists.

  The men bid the barman a mocking adieu. Turning away, the older man raked his eyes over Prophet and Daws. The gambler was crouched over his empty glasses and staring at the table, trying to make himself small.

  Jake froze, frowning at the gambler. “Hey, don’t I know you?”

  Daws closed his eyes and spread his sore lips in a grimace. He appeared to be trying to turtle his head into his shoulders.

  “Hey, Dan,” Jake said, nudging the younger man, “don’t we know him?”

  Dan scrutinized the gambler, who stared at the table, flushing, his haunted eyes like those of a rabbit cornered by two wolves in a privy.

  “Why, we sure as hell do,” Dan intoned. “We done gave him a scoldin’ last night and ordered him out of town.”

  Prophet lifted his voice. “Nah, it wasn’t him.”

  Both men turned to the bounty hunter.

  “Who the hell are you?” Jake asked.

  “Name’s Prophet.” He narrowed his eyes at Jake, who was carrying a double-barreled shotgun. “If you turn that gun any closer to me, friend, you’re gonna be wearin’ it up your ass.”

  Dan’s laugh was shrill. “What are you tryin’ to do, you stupid bastard? Commit suicide?”

  “He sure as hell is,” Jake said as he leveled his shotgun at Prophet.

  The barrel had just come down in his right hand when an explosion rocked the room, blowing Jake two feet in the air and hurdling him back across a table. In nearly two pieces separated by a ragged, red hole in his middle, he rolled off the table and hit the packed-earth floor with a thump and a massive fart.

  The second barrel of Prophet’s sawed-off coach gun, which he’d swung over the tabletop in the time it took an average man to blink, exploded on the heels of the first blast. Dan was reaching for the Remington on his hip. The gun wasn’t halfway out of his holster when a massive, ragged hole opened in his chest. He flew straight backward, slamming his head against a beer keg as he fell. His head hung like a puppet’s from a frayed string. His eyes fluttered, found Prophet, fluttered again as his mouth worked, trying to form words. Then he gave up, dropped his chin to his chest, rolled onto the floor, his head touching Jake’s, and died.

  The Chinaman and the black man had bolted to their feet, shuttling their wide eyes between Prophet and the two dead men. Daws had flung himself to the floor, covering his head with his arms. Now he lowered his arms to peer through the gun smoke. At length, his eyes found Prophet.

  “Jesus H. Christ.”

  The bartender was climbing to his feet behind the bar, lifting his head to inspect Gay’s men.

  Calmly Prophet glanced at the door as he broke the Richards open, plucked out the smoking wads, and thumbed in two fresh. He snapped the shotgun back together as the barman said, “Oh, my god.”

  “Prophet,” Daws said, gaining his feet, his face white as freshly fallen snow, “you have any idea what you just did?”

  “I reckon it was either them or me,” Prophet allowed. His complacent tone belied the fact that he knew he was in a heap of trouble. He needed to hightail it fast, before more of Gay’s men arrived.

  “Quick,” the barman said. “Go out the back.” In spite of the mess in his shack, his eyes were bright and his flushed face was grinning. “I’ll make up a story.”

  Prophet stared at the man, skeptical and puzzled.

  “Call it payment for ridding the town of these two human blowflies,” the barman explained. Turning to the Chinese and the black man, who were still standing, he said, “Will you two back me?”

  They looked at each other. The black man shrugged. The Chinaman nodded slowly, a faint smile on his lips.

  “Quick!” the barman repeated, waving Prophet and the gambler around behind the bar.

  With one last glance at the dead men. Prophet nodded at Daws and hurried out the tent’s back flap. Making his way around the barman’s army cot, clothesline, and several discarded crates and barrels, Prophet hurried down a greasewood-lined path which appeared to angle toward the ravine.

  “We’d better split up,” he said. “How much did you say you needed to spring your horse?”

  He turned, but the gambler wasn’t behind him. Looking around, he saw Daws running through the shrubs farther down the canyon, tripping over rocks and catching the tails of his swallowtail coat on briers.

  The gambler ran as though the hounds of hell were on his heels, and then he was gone.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Prophet paused in an alley between a drugstore and a tack shop to watch several townsmen, including two men wearing five-pointed sheriffs stars, run down the middle of the street and turn a corner, heading for the saloon tent.

  When the men were gone, Prophet waited for an oar wagon and two beleaguered-looking horseback drifters to pass, then hefted his saddlebags on his shoulder, adjusted the Winchester in his right hand, and walked across the street, the ten-gauge Coach gun dangling from the lanyard down his back.

  “What’s all the commotion?” he asked the old gent sitting on the Gay Inn’s front porch, smoking a pipe.

  “You got me,” the gent said. “I heard two blasts come from thataway, and seen men runnin’. Probably a couple miners fightin’ over whores again.” The geezer wheezed a laugh and stuck his pipe back in his teeth.

  Prophet wagged his head with disgust. “What’s the world comin’ to, with men fightin’ over whores?”

  “Oh, I’d say about the same thing it was comin’ to about six thousand years ago,” the old gent speculated, sucking his pipe stem and exhaling smoke from his nose, gazing across the street with a self-satisfied expression on his craggy face.

  Prophet chuckled. “I reckon you’re right, old son.”

  He stepped inside the hotel and paused in the small lobby. An oak desk with cubbyholes and gold key rings behind it sat to the right of the front door. Between the desk and the cubbyholes sat a slender black man on a high stool, reading a Bible open on the desk. He appeared to be in his mid-twenties. His elbows were propped on the desk, pinstriped sleeves rolled up his arms; his brow furrowed and his lips moved as he read, concentrating hard.

  Sensing someone standing there, the clerk looked up, his eyes expectant. “Help you, mister?”

  He stopped, his features frozen. Then his shoulders sagged and his mahogany, moon-shaped face acquired a pained expression, as though he’d just seen the last person he’d wanted to see in the world.

  “Oh, no!” he exclaimed through a half sob, half-shaking, half-nodding his head with great flourish, as though to emphasize his grief.

  Prophet smiled. “Hi, Henry.”

  “Oh, no,” the clerk repeated, still wagging his head. “Oh, Lordy, tell me it ain’t Lou Prophet standin’ there.”

  Prophet walked to the desk, let his saddlebags roll off his shoulder onto the hardwood surface, and stuck out his meaty hand. “How ye been?”

  Reluctantly the desk clerk shook Prophet’s hand. It wasn’t really a shake — more of a halfhearted squeeze — before he let his arm drop to his side, hanging off his slumped right shoulder. His brow was still furrowed, his full cheeks still bunched with despair.

  Prophet fashioned an injured look across the desk. “Henry, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you weren’t happy to see me.”

  “I ain’t happy to see you at all, Lou Prophet,” Henry whined. “Why, you almost got me killed! More than once, too!”

  “Oh, come on now, Henry. Don’t you think you’re gilding the lily just a little? I saved you from prison time. I didn’t have to vouch for you after that holdup you and your gang pulled — tellin’ the jury you didn’t know what your friends were going to do when they walked into that Billings bank. You thought they were going to make a deposit and were just holdin’ their horses!”

  Prophet chuckled and sh
ook his head. “Now that was gildin’ the lily, but I perjured myself because I liked your ma and sensed you had promise.”

  Henry’s ma ran a Billings boardinghouse, the best in town and one which Prophet frequented whenever he was in the area. He sometimes stayed over just for Begonia Appleby’s delicious Southern cooking — honest-to-God soul food — a treat which he had few opportunities to enjoy and which always harkened memories of his boyhood before the war.

  Henry Appleby gazed at Prophet pointedly, his black pupils yawning with antipathy. “You convinced me to testify against that gang, Lou Prophet! And when they broke jail, they ran me through three states before I finally lost ‘em . . . for the time being. No doubt they’re still lookin’ for me. Hell, they’ll probably be lookin’ for me till the day I die. That’s why I’m here — as far as I could get from Montana without slip-pin’ over into Mexico. I reckon Mexico’s next, though, as soon as I see Mad-Dog and Dead-Eye and their passel of polecats ridin’ into town.”

  Prophet glanced away with chagrin. Fingering the flap on his saddlebag, he grumbled, “How was I supposed to know they were going to break jail?”

  “I warned you they were gonna break jail, didn’t I? I know those boys. There ain’t a jail made they can’t break.”

  “You’re a hell of a lot better off here than you would be breaking rock in the territorial pen, old son. And for that you have me to thank, you ungrateful little snot. Now give me a room. I’m tired.”

  His brows ridged with thought, Henry reached under the desk, produced a ledger book, and set it on the desktop with a pencil. He shrugged remorsefully. “I ... I reckon I do have you to thank for that, Lou.” He opened the book and turned the pages. “I mean ... I reckon I would be in jail ‘bout now if you hadn’t lied for me. And Mama — she’d have been shamed some-thin’ awful.”

  “Yes, she would,” Prophet agreed, picking up the pencil as Henry turned the book around to face him. “Imagine her, havin’ to explain an incarcerated son to her boarders.” Prophet shook his head and sighed as he licked the pencil and signed his name.