To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Peter Brandvold

  A girl close to the same age as the boy, maybe a year or two younger, hung beside him. She was the only one who was naked save for a badly torn and soiled chemise, one strap hanging down her arm to reveal one tender, pale nubbin breast that appeared raw and chafed from manhandling.

  The girl had a wide-eyed, startled expression. Her lower jaw hung slack. She had thick, curly, light-brown hair that was so badly mussed and spiked with straw and dirt that it didn’t even look like hair anymore. She had many cuts and abrasions on her face. Her fingernails were bloody—likely from the blood of her savage attackers, whom she’d tried to fend off to little avail.

  Feeling sick, Prophet turned to Louisa. It was startling, how she gazed up at the hanged family without expression. It was almost as though she wasn’t really seeing them but was just standing there, gazing off into the distance, waiting for a train.

  Prophet glanced to his left. The tack from four horses lay against the wall over there—four saddles, four saddle blankets, and four bridles. There were some coiled riatas, as well. The saddlebags and bedrolls were likely inside with the men to whom the tack belonged.

  The men whom Prophet and Louisa were hunting.

  Prophet turned back to Louisa. She turned to him, then, as well. Now her eyes were hard and cold, her lips set in a firm, straight line. Her chest rose and fell heavily as she breathed. Her cheeks were mottled red.

  Her eyes bored holes through Prophet.

  He almost thought he could hear the screaming in her ears, the loud thundering of the Vengeance Queen’s heart.

  A family had been murdered here. A girl raped. Not so different from what had happened to her own parents, to her own sisters and brother . . .

  Prophet held up a placating hand. “Okay, now,” he said. “Okay, now . . . just hold on, girl. We’re gonna have to take this nice and . . .” He let his voice trail off as Louisa loudly pumped a cartridge into her carbine’s action and wheeled toward the door behind her.

  “Louisa, goddamnit, pull your horns in!”

  But then she slid the door open with a loud grunt, and bolted outside.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Louisa!” Prophet rasped, lunging for her and missing. He gaped at her from the barn’s open doorway. “Get back here!”

  She didn’t stop. She didn’t even hesitate. She strode straight away from the barn toward the cabin crouched about two hundred feet beyond, thin gray smoke unspooling from its chimney.

  The sun wasn’t up yet. The cabin looked stark and gray against the barren woods flanking it. Many yellow and brown leaves clung to the cracks between the shakes of the cabin’s roof. Some slid around in the breeze, making dull scratching sounds.

  Prophet’s heart hammered as he watched the headstrong Vengeance Queen walk toward the shack as though she were going to join the killers for breakfast, and she was famished. Her blond hair jostled down her slender back. She carried the carbine down low in her right hand but now, halfway between the cabin and the barn, she raised it.

  As she kept walking, she aimed at the cabin and fired.

  Prophet started at the rifle’s hiccupping crash. The bullet blew through the window just left of the door, making the flour sack curtain dance.

  Magpies lighted from the trees behind the cabin, shrieking raucously.

  “Shit!” the big bounty hunter groaned, moving out away from the barn and raising his Winchester ’73.

  Louisa jacked another round and fired.

  That shot plunked through the window right of the door.

  As Louisa kept walking, within twenty yards of the cabin now and closing quickly, men inside the shack began cursing incredulously. One voice rose louder than the others: “Wha—what the hell was that?”

  Thumps rose and furniture barked as the killers scrambled out of their cots, likely reaching for weapons. Louisa stopped, pumped two more rounds through the second window right of the door, and then strode to the door itself.

  As she tripped the latch and rammed the butt of her rifle against the door, throwing it wide, a man appeared in the shack’s far left front window. He was shaggy-headed and he was wearing balbriggans. He looked around wildly, turning his head to his left as Louisa bolted through the door.

  Prophet snapped his own rifle to his shoulder, and shot the man in the window before he could get his own rifle aimed at Louisa. The man yelped and stumbled back out of sight.

  Prophet couldn’t see the Vengeance Queen now, but he could hear the thundering blasts of her Winchester. She fired quickly, methodically. He could almost see her in his mind’s eye, cooling picking out her targets.

  He ran forward, pumping another round into his own rifle, resisting the urge to fire another round into the cabin. He might hit Louisa. Inside, beneath the steady thunder of her Winchester, men screamed and shouted and jumped around, causing chairs or cots to screech against the floor. Glass shattered; there was the wicked whine of a ricochet off an iron stove.

  Prophet ran around the side of the cabin, heading for a rear door, if there was one. He ran hard, holding his Winchester up high across his chest, pumping his arms and legs. His hat blew off.

  “That fool-crazy polecat!” he kept muttering. “That fool-crazy polecat . . . gonna get herself plucked and greased for the pan!”

  Inside, the steady, rhythmic shooting continued. But now there were others shooting besides Louisa. One or two others were flinging lead as well. Prophet recognized the slightly more hollow pops of pistol fire. The rifle fire continued steadily until Prophet reached the cabin’s rear corner.

  Then Louisa’s Winchester must have run out of lead.

  Prophet dashed around the cabin’s corner and then halted, throwing himself back against the cabin’s rear wall. The back door flew open and a man lunged out, bellowing and staggering before he broke into a shambling run. He was short and stocky and tufts of ginger-colored hair stood up around the bald, freckled crown of his head.

  He wore only balbriggans and wool socks. He had a shell belt and rifle in his right hand. He held a bundle of clothes under his right arm. He ran off into the trees, casting a desperate look back over his right shoulder at the cabin, where Prophet could hear only pistol fire now.

  The shouting inside had died.

  “Hold it!” Prophet shouted, leveling his Winchester on the man’s spine.

  The man snapped a wide-eyed look over his left shoulder, then turned his head back forward and lunged into a faster run. Prophet was about to pop a pill through the man’s back, but then another figure lunged out the cabin’s rear door.

  Prophet wheeled as the second man dropped to his hands and knees.

  He was tall, thin, and hawk-nosed. He, too, was only half-dressed. Blood shone on his longhandles and in a deep, nasty gash that ran from the nub of his cheek to his left ear, the lobe of which was gone, leaving only a ragged fringe.

  The man turned his head toward Prophet.

  “No, by god!” he bellowed, flaring his nostrils furiously and raising a smoking revolver in his right hand.

  Prophet lined up his Winchester’s sites on the man’s forehead, and squeezed the trigger. The Winchester leaped and roared. The man’s pistol popped. The bullet slammed into the wall of the cabin to Prophet’s right. The man’s head snapped wildly back, a quarter-sized hole puckering the skin in the middle of his forehead.

  As the man flopped over on his back, a pistol barked once, twice from inside the cabin. The bullets hammered into the man’s chest, causing his body to quiver.

  “Save your lead, you crazy wildcat!” Prophet yelled. “He’s dead!”

  Racking a fresh round into his Winchester’s breech, he took off running after the man who was getting away through the trees. He had to admit he was glad that Louisa was uninjured—or that at least she was still well enough to shoot a dead man twice. She’d dodged another bullet—or two dozen of them, rather. Her luck wouldn’t hold, though. The luck of someone as crazy as Louisa was never did.

  He swept his partner from his mi
nd and concentrated on the killer bolting through the woods ahead of him.

  Prophet was big and lumbering, but the man ahead of him was in his stocking feet, which slowed him down considerably. The bounty hunter gained on his quarry, who leaped deadfalls as he fled through the woods. Prophet leaped the same deadfalls, grunting, throwing out his arms and rifle for balance.

  As the man left the woods and started running along the crest of a low rise, Prophet stopped and aimed the Winchester straight out from his right shoulder.

  “Hold it, Savidge, or you’re crowbait!”

  The man whipped another fearful look over his shoulder but kept running. Prophet drilled two rounds into the ground around the man’s feet. He jumped wildly, as though trying to avoid the slugs. He stopped, dropped his bundle of clothes, and raised his hands. He still had the rifle and cartridge belt in the right one.

  “Turn around,” Prophet ordered.

  Chaz Savidge turned around. Prophet had recognized the bank robber, stagecoach robber, train robber, and cold-blooded killer from several wanted dodgers he’d carried around in his saddlebags for the past several years. Savidge was wanted in several states and territories. He had a two-thousand-dollar bounty on his head.

  A bounty that size made even a seasoned man hunter like Lou Prophet’s mouth water.

  Savidge was an odd-looking bastard. He had a thin, ginger beard that clung to his face in patches. His forehead was high. It bulged at the top, like the crest of a granite crag. His eyes were dark and set improbably close together. His nose was long and hooked, his pale lips thin and chapped.

  He was missing a front tooth, which Prophet could see when Savidge stretched his lips back and said, “You can go to hell!”

  “We all can, Chaz. Drop the guns or I’ll pump one through your belly, watch you die slow.”

  “You the law?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good, because what you did back there . . . comin’ in when we was asleep, blastin’ away . . . that was . . .”

  Savidge let his voice trail as he focused his little, dark eyes on something behind Prophet. Prophet heard footsteps. They grew louder, and then he could hear Louisa breathing as she strode up behind him. The bounty hunter could smell his partner’s distinct female aroma on the breeze. It was laced with the peppery odor of powder smoke.

  Savidge gave a wry chuff and said, “Why . . . that’s a girl!”

  “Good eye, Savidge. Now, drop the guns or I’m gonna send you on to St. Pete and let him decide what to do with you. I doubt he’ll have much trouble . . . once he riffles through all the paper you got on your head.”

  Savidge wrinkled his nostrils in frustrated defeat. He opened his right hand. The rifle and cartridge belt with its holster and Colt .44 dropped to the ground.

  Savidge kept his eyes on Louisa, who stopped beside Prophet. She was thumbing fresh cartridges through her Winchester’s loading gate. She didn’t say anything as she regarded the killer coldly.

  “Why, that’s nothin’ but a girl who . . . came in there . . . done all that.”

  Savidge was deeply confounded.

  “Nothin’ but a girl,” Prophet said.

  “Nothin’ but,” Louisa said, pumping a round into her Winchester’s breech and taking one step toward Savidge.

  “Louisa, take it easy,” Prophet said.

  “I’m gonna kill him,” Louisa said coolly, staring at Savidge.

  “Hey, now, wait a minute!” Savidge said, backing away, holding his hands up higher. “I done tossed my guns down. That was the deal!”

  “What about the folks in the barn?” Louisa asked him.

  Savidge stared at her, his little, too-close-together eyes darting around in their sockets like frightened mice scurrying around in a hole.

  “Louisa, settle down,” Prophet said. “We’re taking him in alive.”

  “Why should he get to live?” Louisa said. “The folks in the barn didn’t get to live.”

  “There’s a two-thousand-dollar bounty on his head,” Prophet told her. “Seems Uncle Sam wants this bastard alive so they can play cat’s cradle with his head their ownselves. Don’t know why Sam should get all the fun, but that’s the way it is. They won’t pay if he’s dead. I’ve dealt with Sam before.”

  Louisa just stared solemnly up at Chaz Savidge. Her blond hair blew around her shoulders in the wind. She had her Winchester aimed at Savidge from her right hip. “I don’t care about the money.”

  “Maybe you don’t, but I do. I, for one, have about three dollars and some jingle in my pockets, and my stomach’s been growlin’ for nigh on three weeks. Stand down, Louisa!”

  “I’ll buy you a meal in the next town, Lou,” Louisa said in her dull, even voice, which she kept so low that Prophet could barely hear her above the breeze scratching around in the barren branches behind him. “I’ll buy you some whiskey and even a whore. I know that’s all you’re worried about. Whiskey and whores and having enough money to gamble away. So I’ll even slip you a few extra dollars to buy into a stud game. How would that be?”

  Her voice fairly dripped with sarcasm.

  Rage was beginning to boil inside of Prophet. “Louisa, you got little more jingle than I do. We do this for a living, not the religion of it. Now, stand down, partner!”

  “I do it for the religion of it, Lou.”

  Prophet stomped up beside her. “Stand down!”

  Chaz Savidge was flushed and flustered. He kept his hands up even with his head, palms out. He was breathing hard.

  “What is she—loco? She can’t just out an’ out kill me. It ain’t right. Especially a girl doin’ it. That ain’t right!”

  “What’s not right is you killing innocent folks. Raping innocent girls.”

  “I had nothin’ to do with that! That was the others.”

  Louisa smiled grimly.

  “It’s true. I had none of that. That . . . that’s just not how I am. I don’t operate that way.”

  “Oh, I think you do.”

  Prophet reached over and jerked the rifle out of Louisa’s hands. Inadvertently, she tripped the trigger. The bullet sailed off behind Savidge but not before drawing a red line across the outlaw’s bulging left temple.

  “Hey!” the outlaw screamed, brushing his hand across his forehead and looking at the blood on his fingers. “She’s goddamn crazy!”

  Prophet tossed her rifle away.

  Louisa glared up at him for a full thirty seconds. Her jaws were so hard they made her cheeks dimple. “I got two more,” she said, lifting the bottom of her poncho above the pearl handles of her pretty matched Colts.

  Prophet leveled his Winchester at her belly. “If you use ’em on him, I’ll shoot you.”

  She stared up at him, her right eyelid dropping slightly down over that eye. “You wouldn’t. What’s more, you couldn’t.”

  “On principle,” Prophet said, “I would. And I could. I don’t do that. I don’t kill in cold blood. And I’m not gonna let you do it, either.”

  “Mighty high principle for a man who has so few.”

  “I got that one.”

  “What about whiskey and whores?”

  “Those I don’t got.” Prophet felt his nostrils flare as he held the Vengeance Queen’s icy stare. “This one I got. I’m a bounty hunter. I stop when the hunt stops. I’m not judge and jury. I leave that up for them more qualified. If I don’t stop there, where do I?”

  “I don’t think there’s anyone more qualified, Lou.” Louisa glanced at Chaz Savidge. “We saw his work. You saw that girl they raped. Probably ravaged her in front of her folks. Why wait for a man who never saw her slam a gavel down on this sick bastard? Besides, a lawyer might get him off. You know it happens.”

  “Then it’ll happen, but we won’t have no part in it.” Prophet adjusted his gloved hand around the neck of the Winchester still aimed at his partner’s belly. “We get Savidge to the train station and we haul his worthless ass back to Denver. We turn him in to the U.S. Marshal in the fede
ral building there. We collect the two thousand dollars and be on our way.”

  Louisa glanced at Savidge.

  She turned her opaque gaze back to Prophet. She walked up to him, stopped where the barrel of his Winchester was pressed taut against her belly, and then hauled off and slapped him. She slapped him so hard that the blow sounded like a pistol shot.

  “Ouch!” Savidge said.

  Prophet stared down at the girl. He grabbed the neck of her poncho, drew her to him violently, and kissed her. She didn’t resist. She mashed her own lips against his, turned her head, placed her gloved hands on his face, and groaned like a wildcat in heat.

  Prophet pulled his mouth back from hers and released her. Spittle stringed between their lips and broke. Louisa’s cheeks were flushed, her chest rising and falling heavily as she breathed. She quirked her mouth corners slightly, then turned away sharply, retrieved her rifle, and strode back in the direction of the cabin.

  Savidge shuttled his disbelieving gaze between the two bounty hunters. “Christ almighty!” the outlaw intoned, his heavy brows ridging above his eyes. “You’re both fuckin’ loco!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Prophet and Louisa buried the dead family in four separate graves in a clearing behind the cabin. The hard work of digging four holes in the cold, hard, late-autumn ground took several hours, but burying the innocent dead was as much Louisa’s way of doing things as not playing judge, jury, and executioner was Prophet’s way of doing things.

  He put his back into it.

  Afterwards, he held his hat down low while Louisa said a few words over the mounded dark soil and the rocks they’d gathered to keep the predators out of the family’s eternal resting place. Prophet had fashioned crosses out of dead branches and strips of rawhide, and sunk them into the ground at the head of each grave.

  As for Savidge’s three dead partners—Louisa insisted that nothing more be done to them than that they be dragged into the yard where the magpies, coyotes, and wildcats could feed. And that was just fine with Prophet. His back was sore from digging, anyway, and all of Louisa’s prattle about whiskey had made him yearn for a drink.