To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Peter Brandvold

  He peered into the deep shadows relieved by amber-yellow light pushing in through windows on the hovel’s opposite side. Nothing moved. The air pushing out of the window smelled like mouse and bird shit and the dankness of the old mud comprising the walls.

  Prophet moved toward the front of the shack. He stopped beside the second of the two windows on this side of the building and again peered inside, seeing and hearing nothing and smelling only mud and wood rot and animal droppings.

  Carefully, he moved to the front of the shack. From the corner, he stared out at the parade ground that was almost blindingly bright. Nothing much grew out there. The southern butte rose about a hundred yards beyond. To its right, a well-worn, two-track wagon trail twisted through a crease between that butte and the slightly higher, steeper one beside it.

  Prophet scoured the grounds before him and to both sides and the bluffs rising in those directions, as well. The invisible bugs creeping up and down his spine and around behind his ears told him someone else was here. The bugs and the horse’s whinny, that was.

  Someone else was here, all right. Who? And were they friend or foe?

  Prophet ducked under the rail of the gallery fronting the post commander’s office and stepped up onto the sagging stoop. The old wood creaked precariously beneath his boots. A cracked clay olla hung from the brush roof. It was covered with dirt and cobwebs as was the rope from which it dangled.

  He looked into the front window left of the door and then he stepped quickly through the door, which, like the windows, was an empty cavity. Every bit of extra wood in the place, save for the gallery, had likely been scavenged long ago. The bounty hunter pressed his back to the wall to the left of the door and extended the rifle straight out from his right hip, squinting into the shadows that lay heavy in the derelict place. The only remaining furnishing was an old sheet iron stove against the adobe brick wall straight ahead of him. The stove was badly rusted and covered in grit.

  The front room, where the commanding officer’s adjutant probably had his desk, was all dirt and old leaves. Prophet stepped quickly through the door flanking the stove and into the room that was probably the officer’s official digs. Nothing here but the same grime in the main room. There was another office, probably for the second in command.

  Empty.

  Prophet walked back out to the main room. He was just ducking his six-foot-four-inch frame back out through the front door, when a thud sounded behind him and to his right. Heart hiccupping, he swung around, clicking the Winchester’s hammer back to full cock.

  He eased the tension on his trigger finger, letting the rifle sag in his hand. The liver-colored cat that had just leaped through the window meowed at him, arched his or her back, and then meowed again as it sauntered forward, copper eyes glowing in the dim room.

  “Damn, cat—you likely spooked two, three years off my allotment,” said the bounty hunter, resting the rifle barrel on his right shoulder.

  The cat folded its body around his right boot, trilling.

  “You’re right friendly,” Prophet said. “I got a feelin’ folks who pass through here from time to time feed you. That right, Puss?”

  The cat purred as it arched its back and stuck its tail nearly straight up in the air. It looked up at Prophet with its copper eyes and meowed again, beseeching.

  Sure enough—the cat was tame. Probably lived out here. He remembered other cats prowling around the outpost, when he was through here last and got to watch the ghostly do-si-doers. This cat was probably offspring of that pack. Folks probably passed through here regularly on account of the well and that’s how the cat got so friendly.

  Prophet turned back to the door. “Anyone else here, Kitty?”

  He stood in the doorway, looking around. He turned his head to stare off to the left and froze. A man’s silhouette faced him from the far front corner of a dilapidated cabin whose gallery roof was sagging at a forty-five-degree angle over its crumbling wooden floor. The man was staring at Prophet through that gap beneath the gallery roof. He stood there for only about two seconds while Prophet stared back at him, and then the hombre disappeared behind the cabin’s far side.

  “Well, now,” Prophet said under his breath, moving slowly out onto the gallery, “who in hell are you?”

  He stepped off the end of the gallery. Looking around cautiously, in case other men were moving around him to take a shot at him, he strode through the rocks and brush toward the cabin. He circled a scrubby piñon and approached the cabin’s front corner. He scrutinized the place carefully, pricking his ears to listen.

  Nothing.

  His heart was beating insistently in his chest and apprehension caused those bugs to skitter faster along his spine.

  He looked behind him. There was only the cat sitting on the gallery of the building he’d just left, casually washing its face with a paw.

  The cat had the life. Wasn’t worried about a damned thing. Prophet envied the furry critter.

  The bounty hunter walked slowly around the front of the collapsed gallery roof and stared down the far side of the cabin. Nothing but sunlit tumbleweeds, clumps of blond brush, and rocks. Prophet walked quietly down the side of the cabin, moving on the balls of his boots to keep his spurs from chinging. He was striding through the shade along the back wall, skirting an empty rain barrel, when he stopped suddenly.

  He’d heard something behind him. Either heard it or sensed something. He wasn’t sure. But he swung around and raised his rifle to his shoulder, slowing ratcheting the hammer back to full cock.

  He definitely heard something now. The slight crunch of gravel beneath a boot.

  Prophet licked his lips, raised the rifle higher, and aimed toward the corner of the cabin.

  He waited, aiming, his heart thudding, sweat dribbling down his back. There was one more crunch of a boot on gravel and then a man stepped out around the corner of the cabin. He held a cocked pistol straight out from his shoulder and she—yes, it was a woman—was squinting one almond-shaped hazel eye beneath the brim of her cream Stetson, aiming down the Peacemaker’s silver-chased barrel.

  Blond hair spilled across her shoulders, which were clad in a green and white calico shirt.

  Prophet kept his rifle aimed at her. She kept her cocked pistol aimed at Prophet. They stood there stubbornly aiming at each other, as though neither could quite believe what they were seeing, and then Prophet depressed the Winchester’s hammer and lowered his weapon to his side.

  “Ah, shit.”

  “My sentiments, exactly,” Louisa Bonaventure said, wrinkling a pretty nostril at him as she depressed the hammer of her Colt and lowered the gun to her side. She wore a snooty frown on her high-cheek-boned face with saucy lips and bold, shrewd eyes. She wore a long, chocolate-brown leather skirt and brown stockmen’s boots. She had a shell belt and two cross-draw holsters cinched at her narrow waist.

  Her full bosom pushed out from behind the loose-fitting blouse, forever taunting him.

  Prophet tried to hide the relief he felt at seeing her alive, but was unable to conceal the fact that he wasn’t overly happy to see her again, as their last parting had been on bad terms. Their partings usually were. He wasn’t ready to suffer her superior, condescending company again so soon after she’d called him a “Rebel carouser and general no-account scalawag who drank too much and broke wind too loudly in camp . . . when he was in camp, that was, and was not frequenting fallen women in the crudest settlements on the western frontier—settlements,” she added, “in which he fit right in.”

  “What the hell are you doin’ here?” Prophet raked out, scowling down at the infamous Vengeance Queen, whose pretty head came up only to his shoulder.

  “I was about to ask you the same question,” she said in her snobby tone, staring up at him as though he were a ragged bear who’d just stepped out of her parlor.

  Prophet stared at her. And then he looked around, the hair once again pricking along the back of his thick neck.

  “What’s y
our note say?”

  Louisa stared up at him and then she swung around and stepped out away from him, looking around and raising her pistol, once more cocking the pretty piece. She unholstered the other one, cocked and raised it, as well.

  “You got one, too.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Mine told me you likely had your neck in another sling and needed my assistance. Why I rode down here to rescue you . . . again . . . when I was having a very nice, comfortable time in Denver, taking in the opera and other cultural events that would only leave you hang-jawed and cross-eyed, I have no idea.”

  Prophet had walked to the other end of the cabin and stared out at the sun-blasted yard that was just as eerily still and silent as before. Louisa was looking out from the cabin’s opposite side, sliding her revolvers this way and that.

  “Yeah, well, I was havin’ a nice time with the pretty doxies in Colorado Springs, too, and was just fixin’ to head up to Cripple Creek, where I’ve heard they’re even better.” Prophet was backing toward her. “Let’s see it.”

  “See what, you cad?”

  “Your note.”

  Keeping her back to him, Louisa pulled her note out of her shirt pocket and gave it to him. He shook it open.

  “Do you need me to read it to you?”

  Ignoring her, Prophet read the note:

  In a woman’s flowing hand, in blue-black ink, it read:

  Miss Bonaventure,

  Please ride to the old Ramsay Creek Cavalry Outpost on Ramsay Creek in Brush County, eastern Colorado Territory. Take the Arkansas River Trail south from Denver. A rider will meet you at the outpost with news regarding your friend, Mr. Prophet.

  Three X’s were the only signature.

  Prophet handed the note back to Louisa. “Same as the one I got. Only yours is in a different hand, looks like.”

  Louisa returned the note to her shirt pocket and then unholstered her second Colt again.

  “So someone wanted us both out here at the same time. Just what I get for riding to your rescue. Live and learn. Next time, I’m going to stay and enjoy another performance of Romeo and Juliet. Mr. Edgar Carr and Sonja Baldwin were in top form three nights ago. Now I’m out here in the middle of Godforsaken nowhere on account of you, and someone’s probably drawing a bead on my pretty head.”

  “Yeah, well, I came down here for you, too—though don’t ask me why—and that same person or persons is likely doin’ the same thing to me.”

  “It isn’t any consolation, Lou.”

  “Let’s spread out and scour the place. I’ll take the southern buttes, you take the northern buttes. We’ll meet back at the post commander’s headquarters in an hour—if we’re both still alive, that is.”

  “Lou?”

  Prophet glanced at her.

  “Be careful, you big ape.”

  He drew her to him, tipped her head back, and kissed her plump lips. “You, too, darlin’.”

  Releasing her, he tramped away around the shack.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When Prophet finished scouring the southern buttes, he headed back to the post headquarters. Halfway across what had once been the parade ground, he whistled for Mean and Ugly. The horse came galloping, dragging its reins.

  As the horse pranced up to the well, having smelled the water, Prophet saw Louisa walk into the canyon through a crease between the rocky bluffs to the north. She was trailing her brown-and-white pinto, which she called simply “Horse.”

  That was Louisa’s way. Like many cowboys, she saw no reason to get close enough to her mount to give it a name. To her and many drovers, a horse was a means of getting around—nothing more, nothing less.

  Secretly, Prophet called the pinto “Peaches,” chuckling to himself when he did. It was just the kind of name the unsentimental Vengeance Queen wouldn’t have named it had she been inclined to name it anything at all.

  The well was nothing more than mortared stone coping over a hole in the ground. It had a stout wooden cover, one whose boards had been replaced by some unknown handyman over the years. The well was obviously valued by everyone traveling the Old Arkansas River Trail between Sullyville, in western Kansas, to Pueblo, which sat at the foot of the Front Range to the west. There were many relatively fresh tracks leading into the old parade ground and marking the area around the well, including the week-old tracks of what Prophet assumed was a stagecoach.

  Prophet removed the cover, dropped the bucket, which was attached to a rope, into the well, heard it splash and gurgle, and then heaved it up. He set the bucket down on the ground, doffed his hat, slurped water cupped in his hands, and then splashed himself with the refreshing goodness. Finally, he dunked his head up to his neck, and blew.

  He pulled his head out of the bucket, water streaming down his face, and shook his head. The eager Mean and Ugly whinnied, nudged Prophet aside with his long snout, and sank his lips in the bucket.

  “Damn, that feels good!” Prophet intoned, letting the water drip down his chest and back, cooling and refreshing him. “Bone-chillin’ cold, too—just like I remember it. Them soldier boys dug ’em a deep well.”

  Louisa slipped her pinto’s bit. “Don’t let your guard down over some cold water. Someone called us out here for a reason. I’m assuming you didn’t come across anyone to the south. I saw no one to the north, but there’s a reason why we’re here, Lou, and I have a feeling we’re going to find out what that reason is soon.”

  “Ah, shit, I’m just enjoying some water, Louisa. Do you mind if I enjoy myself for two minutes?”

  “Two minutes—hah! You live to enjoy yourself, Lou.”

  “You got a point there.” Prophet looked around as the water already began to dry on his face. “Nothin’ wrong with a man enjoyin’ himself. That’s why we’re put here, after all. But don’t worry, Miss Bonnyventure, I know we ain’t here to pay our respects to no belle of the ball. That don’t mean we’re necessarily on death’s doorstep, though.”

  “No? Then how do you account for the lie we were both told?”

  Louisa had pulled the water bucket away from Mean and Ugly and dropped it into the well. Now she was grunting and flushing prettily beneath her hat brim as she fetched it up out of the cool darkness below.

  “I can’t,” Prophet said, scooping his hat off the ground and running an elbow around the inside of the brim, soaking up the sweat from the band. “But I got a feelin’ that if whoever called us out here wanted us dead, he’d have tipped his hand by now. He . . . or they . . . would have been waitin’ here to bushwhack us.”

  “Possibly.” Louisa looked around, concern showing in her pretty, refined features with her clear hazel eyes, straight, fine nose, and delicate, dimpled chin. Her skin was tanned a dark olive, with a light peppering of freckles across her cheeks, but it was still smooth despite all the traveling she’d done, hunting down bad men beneath a harsh, frontier sun. The tan made the hazel in her eyes stand out.

  Her religious-like zeal for hunting men—especially those who harmed women and children, like those who’d wiped out her family, leaving her alone alive to hunt the killers and kill them one by one, hard and bloody—often shone in those pretty hazel orbs, lending them an off-putting sharpness that contrasted bizarrely with her otherwise sweet schoolgirl face.

  “Possibly,” she said again, quietly, as the dry breeze blew her sun-bleached blond hair around her shoulders.

  Prophet slipped Mean’s saddle and blanket from the horse’s back, and set them on the ground by the well.

  “What are you doing?” Louisa asked him.

  “Figure we’re gonna be here a while.”

  “Don’t need to be.” Louisa ran a toe of her boot along the ground in front of her. “We could just ride out of here.”

  Prophet removed a hackamore from a saddlebag pouch. “You really wanna do that?”

  She shrugged and looked off. “No point in us sticking around when we know we were lured here by a lie. For what will most likely turn out to be nefarious re
asons.”

  “What kind of reasons?”

  Louisa rolled her eyes. “Never mind.”

  “Wasn’t really a lie,” Prophet said as he slid the hackamore over Mean’s ears. “The notes just said someone wanted to talk to us about the other.” He grinned. “I for one would like to hear what they have to say about you.”

  “It’s hogwash and you know it.”

  “Yeah, I know it.” Prophet sighed and stared to the south from over Mean’s back. “But, yeah—okay, what the hell. Let’s pull our picket pins. I was havin’ a fine ole time in the Springs.”

  “I’ll bet you were.”

  Prophet looked at her. Louisa was leading the watered pinto back toward the post commander’s headquarters. “What’re you doin’?”

  “Gonna picket my horse out of sight. No use leavin’ him out here where someone could shoot him and leave me afoot.”

  “I thought you wanted to go back to Denver and continue enjoyin’ them opera shows.”

  Louisa gave him a droll glance over her shoulder.

  Prophet chuckled and led Mean after Louisa and the pinto.

  “Yeah, I’m right curious, my ownself.”

  Prophet pulled the quirley down and blew smoke at the headquarters’ low ceiling, watching the blue smoke flatten out against the herringbone-pattern rafters that were coated in dirt and cobwebs in which dead flies and leaves hung suspended.

  “So that’s the story of how my pal Jeff Diddle stole the old planter’s prized Thoroughbred and got himself hitched to that sweet little Belle Pinkett, who didn’t turn out so sweet, after all, seein’ as how she got poor ole Jeff thrown in the Dalton hoosegow.” Prophet chuckled as he stared at the burning end of his loosely rolled cigarette. “My Lord—that was a time ago. Why, that was before the damn Yankees—”

  “Lou, his name was not really ‘Diddle,’ ” Louisa interrupted him in disgust.

  Prophet looked at the woman sitting on her saddle near the front window right of the door. Prophet himself lay back against the eastern wall, leaning against his own saddle, legs stretched before him on the grimy floor, boots crossed. The ten-gauge Richards lay across his thighs, freshly cleaned and oiled, both bores loaded and ready to go. “His name sure as hell was Diddle. Jeffrey Diddle.”