To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Peter Brandvold

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Prophet drew a deep breath, held it, and lowered an ear to the girl’s chest. Her heart made a soft hiccupping sound—a slow, shallow beat. He lifted one of her hands to his cheek. It was cool. Not cold but cool.

  He squeezed her hand between his own, rubbed it brusquely, did the same to the other one, and then slid his saddlebags beneath her head for a pillow. He retrieved her blanket roll from the shack, and spread it over her. Seeing her lying slack against the floor, eyes closed, hair in disarray around her head and shoulders, made him sick and weak with grief.

  “Don’t die now, you hear, girl?” he urged her quietly, rising, glowering down at her, silently urging her heart to keep beating. “Don’t you pull your picket pin. You wait for me. We’ll do it together.”

  He leaped off the porch and jogged off into the northern buttes to retrieve their horses. A half hour later he had both mounts saddled. He eased Louisa up onto Mean and Ugly’s back, and then Prophet heaved himself up behind her. Wrapped in her blanket roll, the girl leaned slack against him. He took up the reins and held Louisa on the saddle before him, sandwiched between his arms.

  He glanced at Louisa’s pinto, whose bridle reins he’d tied to Louisa’s saddle horn, and clucked as he touched his spurs to Mean’s flanks. Both horses whinnied and headed out, the pinto following the lineback dun. Prophet headed for the main trail and the crease between the southern buttes. He knew there were settlements to the south, along the Arkansas River. He’d head for one of them—the first one the trail led him to. He hoped like hell he’d find a sawbones there.

  Of course, the trail could very well lead him into another bushwhack, but it was a chance he had to take. The trail would take him by the most direct route possible to a settlement. If he was hit again by the ambushers who had not finished their job—well, then he and Louisa would die together, but he’d be damned if he wouldn’t take at least a couple of those yellow-livered dogs along for the ride.

  The ambushers . . .

  Somehow, though they’d managed to sink two bullets into Louisa, they hadn’t seemed up to the task. They’d been rattled badly when one of their own number had taken a bullet. Amateurs. Now why in the hell would amateurs be after Lou and Louisa on a dark summer’s night way out here at the Ramsay Creek Cavalry Outpost, far from any town he was aware of?

  As Mean made his way through the buttes, Prophet glanced toward the east. A slight lightening against the horizon there. The false dawn would be upon them soon. Good. He could increase his pace a little. Not by much, because Louisa couldn’t take much more jostling than she was already having to take, but a little. The need to reach a settlement and a doctor was a physical urgency inside him, screaming at him, drawing every muscle in his back taut as piano wire.

  Occasionally as he rode, he touched his hand to Louisa’s cheek, gauging her temperature. She was cool and pasty but not yet cold. Sometimes he stopped Mean and lowered an ear to the girl’s side, checking to see if her heart was still beating. A couple of times he broke out in a cold sweat, unable to hear it, but then he heaved a sigh of guarded relief when he detected the faint hiccups from beneath her breastbone.

  Occasionally, she’d groan or mutter very softly, unintelligibly, against his neck, and those noises, too, were hopeful signs that she had not drifted off to the next world without him.

  Dawn became a pearl wash in the east. The paleness spread, blotting out the stars and the darkness, and then the sun rose—a giant, molten yellow ball climbing over low western buttes the tawny dun color of a mule deer’s winter coat. Meadowlarks piped from bending weed tips. A coyote loped off through the brush and followed a winding trail up a sandstone escarpment that peeked up out of the prairie like a half-submerged ship.

  The sun revealed the tracks of several shod horses on the trail beneath Prophet. The bushwhackers’ tracks. Prophet’s heart quickened at the prospect of running into them. He’d have enjoyed nothing more under less dire circumstances. He didn’t want to run into them again now. At least, not yet. Not until he had Louisa to a sawbones.

  The riders were heading in the same direction as he and the Vengeance Queen, but Prophet had no intention of swerving off the only trail out here to avoid them. The trail would likely lead to one of the several settlements along the Arkansas, and, he hoped—even prayed—a doctor.

  From his saddle, he made out eight separate sets of tracks.

  Midmorning, Prophet reined Mean and Ugly to a stop in the trail that meandered through the rolling, sage-covered hills, and held a hand to his hat brim, shading his eyes.

  A horse stood about a hundred feet off the trail, in the shade of a low, shelving escarpment. The horse was saddled, but the saddle and bedroll were hanging down its side.

  Since it wasn’t far from the main trail, Prophet booted Mean into the sage. A man was sprawled in the bromegrass and sage about twelve feet from the horse, only the man’s boots in the shade. He was curled on his side, facing away from Prophet. Prophet could see the man’s shoulders moving as he breathed.

  Prophet ground his teeth, fury burning through him, as he stared down at the man—one of the bushwhackers, for sure. One who’d taken a bullet thrown by Louisa. The bounty hunter slipped his Colt from its holster, clicked the hammer back, and fired.

  The slug plumed dirt and tore up brush six inches from the wounded ambusher’s head. The man’s horse jerked away from the blast. The man screamed and rolled onto his back, lifting bloody hands to his bearded face as though to shield himself from another round. Louisa jerked a little, and whimpered, then fell slack against Prophet’s chest once more.

  “No—wait! Help me!” the bushwhacker pleaded.

  He wore a shabby three-piece suit and a gun belt with two holsters. He had no hat. He was thick-bodied with a considerable paunch, broad-shouldered, and hawk-nosed. His dark-brown hair was so thin that his domelike skull shone through it, but it hung long in back. His pain-wracked eyes stared up at Prophet with fear and beseeching. His face behind the gray-laced beard was sunburned, craggy. Blood oozed from a hole in his side, just above his cartridge belt. He was breathing hard.

  He studied Prophet, eyes dancing around in their sockets. Recognition shone in them. Tears rolled down the man’s cheeks.

  “Oh, hell . . .”

  “Hell is here—you got that right,” Prophet said, glaring at the middle-aged bushwhacker over the barrel of his smoking Colt. “Who’re you?”

  The man said, “Plea . . . please help me. I’m hurt bad.”

  Prophet steadied the Colt and narrowed an eye as he planted a bead on the man’s forehead. “I asked you a question.”

  “I’m Eldon Wayne!” The man sobbed as his hands quivered in front of his face. He stared at Prophet over his fingertips.

  “I know you’re one of those yellow-livered dogs who bushwhacked my girl here last night, Eldon Wayne. I wanna know who those others were, where they’re from.”

  “I can’t tell you that!”

  “They left you here, Eldon.”

  “They didn’t realize I dropped behind. I called out but they must not have heard me. I must’ve passed out, and my horse wandered off the trail.” Wayne glanced around expectantly, hopefully. “They’ll likely be back soon . . . lookin’ fer me.”

  Prophet gritted his teeth with urgency. He didn’t have time for this; he needed to get Louisa to a sawbones, but he was desperate to know who’d shot her. “Who are they, Eldon? Where they from?”

  “Please—I can’t tell you that!” Wayne sobbed.

  Prophet lowered the Colt’s barrel slightly, fired. The bullet slammed through the inside of the man’s right thigh. His leg jerked. Blood gushed from the ragged hole in his broadcloth trouser leg. Wayne yelped and rolled onto his side, clutching his quivering leg with both hands.

  “Ohhh . . . you’ve killed me, you son of a bitch!”

  “No, I haven’t, but I’m about to . . . less’n you tell me where them other dirty dogs is from.”

  Wayne
ground his forehead into the gravel and sobbed. Spittle bubbled over his lower lip. His shoulders jerked, and his wounded leg quivered like a leaf in the wind.

  “Eldon!” Prophet intoned, losing patience.

  “Box Elder Ford!” Wayne screamed, his breath blowing gravel out beneath his chin. “Box Elder Ford, you bastard. Box Elder Ford!”

  He rolled onto his back and once again cast Prophet a helpless, beseeching look. “Now, you help me. Don’t let me die alone out here.”

  Prophet wanted to know why they’d ambushed them but there was no time. Now he knew where to find his and Louisa’s attackers, at least. The answer to why would come in good time.

  Prophet glanced at Louisa leaning slack against him, her hat hanging down off her right shoulder by its chin thong. Another wave of fury boiled up from the bounty hunter’s core. He extended the Colt out and down, and clicked the hammer back once more.

  “No!” Wayne cried.

  Prophet’s bullet blew a quarter-sized hole through his forehead. Wayne’s head bounced like a rubber ball, fell back against the ground in a large pool of liver-colored blood and white skull and brains, and then turned to one side. Wayne’s eyes were half-open, opaque with instant death. He shivered as though deeply chilled.

  He was still shivering as Prophet reined Mean around and booted the horse back to the main trail, Louisa’s pinto following from about thirty yards back, warily twitching its ears at the dead man.

  Prophet continued along the trail for another fifteen minutes. Wanting to give Louisa a break from the jostling, he stopped, dismounted, and eased the girl into the shade of a boulder. While Mean and the pinto grazed together along the trail, Prophet uncorked his canteen and dropped to a knee beside his partner.

  “Louisa?”

  Her head rested back against the boulder, turned slightly to one side. Her cheeks were papery. He could see the faint blueness of veins beneath her skin. He still couldn’t tell just from looking at her if she was breathing.

  Panic wracked him.

  “Louisa?” he said, squeezing her right arm and giving her a little jerk.

  The girl’s eyelids fluttered briefly. That was the only movement she made. She didn’t make any sounds.

  “Louisa, I’d like you to drink a little water,” Prophet said, holding the canteen up to her lips, which were slightly parted.

  She didn’t move or say anything.

  Prophet left her leaning there against the rock, giving her a rest, and watered the horses from his hat. He took a sip himself from the canteen, and then mounted up once more, with Louisa before him on the saddle. He moved out, worry sitting like an anvil on his shoulders, a rusty knife of anxiety stabbing his belly.

  He rode for nearly an hour, dropping into a broad, shallow valley at the bottom of which, he knew from having been through this part of the territory several times in the past, the Arkansas River twisted. He came to a fork in the trail. A post stood in the middle of the fork bearing two badly weathered, arrow-shaped wooden signs. The arrow announcing LAS ANIMAS pointed toward the trail’s left tine.

  The arrow announcing BOX ELDER FORD pointed toward the trail’s right tine.

  Prophet studied the two-track trail. The riders, seven now in number, having lost Eldon Wayne a few miles back, had taken the tine toward Box Elder Ford.

  Prophet did, as well.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Prophet had been through Box Elder Ford before.

  It had grown up some since the last time Prophet was through here, but it still didn’t amount to much—only about four blocks of shabby wood-frame and mud-brick buildings, with log cabins and adobe huts dotting the surrounding hills, which were lush down here near the Arkansas.

  The river, wide and brown and sheathed in cottonwoods, box elders, and willows, twisted between buttes to the south. The river was too shallow this time of the year for hauling gold down from and freight up to the mountain mining camps via flatboats, but Prophet knew it was rollicking in the springtime.

  Now in August, the river meandered between broad, sandy banks and around sandbars, glittering in the harsh summer light. A couple of boys in overalls were fishing with long cane poles from one of the sandbars as Prophet rode down into the town, looking around the broad main street lined with gaudy false fronts.

  The town was mostly quiet on this hot early afternoon, but as Prophet rode along the street, looking desperately for a sawbone’s shingle, a couple of men in bowler hats stepped out of a saloon on the street’s right side. They stared at Prophet dully, one with spectacles glinting in the sunlight.

  Prophet rode with his jaws set hard, both apprehension and barely bridled rage burning along his spine. The tracks of the seven bushwhackers had disappeared in the well-churned dust of the street, indistinguishable from the other traffic.

  “Sawbones!” Prophet yelled at the bowler-hatted gents—local shopkeepers, likely.

  As the batwings swung back into place behind them, they both stopped with starts, scrutinizing Prophet and the girl lying slack against him. They glanced at each other quickly, quickly turned away, and began striding down the boardwalk, back in the direction from which Prophet had come.

  “You yellow-livered sonso’bitches,” Prophet raked out as they hurried away.

  He rode on. The local marshal’s office was a block-like stone building with a high front porch sitting above barred windows on the lower story, and with a brush-roofed gallery. A young, blond-headed young man stood atop the steps in a black suit with a boiled white shirt and billowy red neckerchief. A five-pointed star was pinned to the lapel of his suit coat. He was a tall kid, but his clothes hung on his long-boned, sparely tallowed frame.

  As Prophet rode up to the stone building, the young marshal tried to look appropriately steely-eyed, thumbs hooked behind his cartridge belt, which glistened with polished brass. He wore a walnut-gripped Remington in a cracked leather holster on his right thigh.

  He poked his broad-brimmed slouch hat back off his forehead as he said in a tone that was intended to match the hardness of his eyes, “What you got there, stranger?”

  “I got a wounded young lady here, as you can likely see, sonny, so if you’d direct me to a sawbones, I’ll be on my way. Pronto!” To Prophet, everyone in town was his enemy, and they would be until he’d singled out those devil’s seven.

  A softness in the young man’s mortar shone when he frowned as though indignant—maybe his feelings were a little hurt at the stranger’s obvious lack of respect for the badge on the kid’s lapel. He canted his head over his left shoulder and said, “Doc Whitfield’s down one block and east, by the river. I don’t care for your tone, though. Hey, mister!” the kid scolded as Prophet rode off, the pinto following dutifully from about fifteen feet behind Mean and Ugly.

  Prophet looked around as he turned the corner and started toward the river. He wondered where the seven were who’d bushwhacked Louisa. Were they still in town or had they ridden on? Eldon Wayne had said “Box Elder Ford” as though Prophet would be able to find them there, but could he take the word of a bushwhacker—one who’d been dying from possibly his, Prophet’s, own bullet?

  Prophet saw a neat, wood-frame house along the right side of the street that was little more than a two-track trail out here between the town and the river. There was a lot of green grass and sage around the house. The house, painted lime green with dark-red trim, was set back in a spare grove of cottonwoods and box elders, with what appeared a few fruit trees out back.

  There was a chicken coop, a hog pen, and a stable and small corral back there, as well. Prophet saw a man in shirt and suspenders tossing food to a small flock of cream-colored chickens that converged on it loudly, fighting amongst themselves and squawking. As Prophet rode into the yard, the man swung toward him—a man much younger than Prophet was expecting. Most of the pill-rollers he’d known were old and gray and given to wry witticisms and gallows humor due to the innate darkness of their trade.

  The young man’s round specta
cles glinted in the sun.

  As Prophet rode toward him, the young man set the bucket down and began walking toward Prophet. Limping, rather. He was half-dragging his right foot. Prophet hadn’t seen a boy until the young man crouched through the rails of the hog pen, where he’d obviously been working. He couldn’t have been much over ten, if that. He was dressed in a white shirt, vest, and knickers, with a ragged straw sombrero on his straw-blond head. His face was round and tanned by the sun. The sombrero’s chin thong bounced against his chest.

  Tentatively, he walked beside the limping man, shading his eyes with a gloved hand as he stared toward Prophet.

  “What happened?” the man asked as Prophet approached on Mean and Ugly.

  “You Whitfield?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Doctor Whitfield?”

  “Yes.”

  While holding Louisa on the saddle with one hand, Prophet swung down from Mean’s back. He eased the girl into his arms, and turned to the young doctor and the boy. “She took two bullets, Doc. She needs help bad.”

  Whitfield turned to the boy. Apparently, he didn’t need to say anything. As though he knew the drill, the boy grunted and ran for the house, clamping his sombrero down tight on his head with one hand.

  “Follow me,” said the doctor as the screen door on the side of the house slapped closed behind the boy.

  Whitfield limped to the door and winced as he climbed the three, mortared stone steps and entered the house. Prophet followed him into a mudroom where coats and jackets hung from pegs.

  Whitfield canted his head to Prophet’s right. “In there. I have two beds for patients back there.”

  Prophet carried Louisa through a low, curtained doorway and into what appeared a lean-to addition of the house. There were two beds—one to the left of the door, one to the right. Both were outfitted with white sheets and pillows with crisp, white covers. The walls were papered in red and black velvet with gilt flower trimmings, and there was a large, gold-framed daguerreotype of a woman, her hair in a neat bun atop her head, on the far wall over a bureau and between two red-curtained windows.