To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Peter Brandvold

  After the dead killers were lying belly up in the yard and several crows were already waiting in a line along the peak of the cabin’s roof, Prophet and Louisa fetched and mounted their horses. They’d already ordered Savidge into his own saddle, on his dappled gray with one black sock, and cuffed his hands behind his back. His ankles were shackled, the shackle’s chain arcing beneath the dapple’s belly.

  Prophet had built the shackles himself, with the help of a savvy blacksmith, and the chain’s length was easily adjusted. A large key opened each jaw-shaped, iron shackle.

  The ugly outlaw stared down at his bloody brethren from beneath the edge of his flat-brimmed Stetson. He wore a sheepskin coat, knit scarf, and gloves. “Damn peculiar, the way you two are just gonna leave the boys out here. They were friends of mine, goddamnit. They were human, too, just like that family you took so damn long to bury.”

  In her characteristically soft, menacing tone, Louisa said, “Tell me, Mr. Savidge, did that family beg you and these three other dogs for their lives?”

  Savidge looked at her dubiously. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m asking you if they begged you not to kill them. And the girl—I bet she begged you not to rape her. I bet she begged you all the while it was happening, didn’t she? Just as I bet her parents and her brother begged you to stop.”

  Louisa raised her voice slightly. “Didn’t they, Chaz?”

  Savidge chuffed and looked at Prophet. “What the hell’s her problem, anyway? What kind of a question is that?”

  “You killed ’em,” Prophet said. “You should know.”

  Savidge looked at Louisa as though he were watching a hungry-eyed wildcat moving slowly toward him. Then he glanced at Prophet again, laughed mirthlessly, and said, “Just take me to the goddamn marshal in Denver. Hell, I’ll feel a whole lot safer in the federal lockup. That girl there—she’s just plain loco!”

  “I think you just answered her question, Chaz,” Prophet said, reining Mean and Ugly around and touching spurs to the horse’s flanks. “And I think she just answered yours.”

  “You’re both pure-dee, bonded loco!” the outlaw intoned as Prophet jerked the man’s horse along by its bridle reins.

  As Prophet, Louisa, and their prisoner loped out of the yard, heading southwest for the nearest train depot at the little settlement of Cody, in western Dakota Territory, a fine snow had begun to fall. Clouds had moved in while the two bounty hunters had dug the graves, and the breeze had turned cold.

  Prophet thought they should have stayed at the cabin, but he hadn’t bothered suggesting it. He knew enough about Louisa’s haunted past to know that if they’d spent the night at the murdered family’s home, she’d have been hearing the remembered screams of her own mother and sisters as the Handsome Dave Duvall gang had raped them, as well as the screams of her brother and father as they’d been murdered.

  She wouldn’t have gotten a wink of sleep. Prophet wouldn’t have, either. He’d likely have been up all night, rocking the sobbing young woman in his arms.

  Earlier he’d been ready to kill her. Or he thought he’d had. Now, he really didn’t know. But that one rule of his meant a lot to him, maybe even more than Louisa did.

  Nah, he wouldn’t have killed her. He reckoned he’d never know for sure, though. Maybe he loved her enough to kill her at such a time, to save her from ruining them both. She didn’t really value her life all that much, anyway, and he was convinced that deep down she knew why he’d have to kill her, and that she’d even want him to.

  Because she valued his life more than her own.

  Leastways, Prophet hoped he never had to weigh such a dilemma again. He’d been faced before with her killing unarmed men, but most of them had been at death’s doorstep or Prophet hadn’t been in a position to intervene.

  No, he hoped he never had to weigh it again . . .

  The snow continued to fall throughout the late afternoon, gradually growing from bran-like flakes dancing on the wind to cottony snowflakes. As the sun sank behind the clouds, and the light leeched slowly out of the gray sky, turning it a darker and darker blue, they made night camp in a creek bottom sheathed in box elders and cottonwoods.

  As Chaz Savidge sat tied by the fire, Prophet gathered firewood while Louisa got a pot of coffee ready to boil and skinned the rabbit she’d shot late in the afternoon, knowing they’d need supper that night. Prophet was handy with a six-shooter. At least, he’d thought he was, before he’d met Louisa. But he wouldn’t have attempted the shot Louisa had made from horseback with anything but his Winchester.

  The Vengeance Queen, however, had calmly unsheathed one of her fancy Colts, clicked the hammer back, aimed straight out from her right shoulder, and nearly shot the jackrabbit’s head clean off its shoulders from a good forty-five yards away, leaving the meat pristine.

  The rabbit had lay kicking its headless body in a circle.

  “Holy shit,” Chaz Savidge had said with quiet, cautionary admiration.

  “Do you like that, Chaz?” Louisa had said.

  “I like it just fine . . . as long it’s a rabbit’s head you’re blowin’ off . . . and not mine.”

  “Give it time,” Louisa had said, swinging down from her saddle. “Lou’s gotta sleep sometime, doesn’t he?”

  She winked across her saddle at the prisoner, then strode off to retrieve the rabbit.

  Savidge looked at Prophet. “That girl’s plumb—”

  “I know,” Prophet growled, watching her weave among the trees. “Believe me, I know.”

  That night after they’d all eaten—including Savidge, though Louisa had seen little point in allowing a rapist and killer anything but week-old biscuits and water—they sat around the fire as the snow continued to fall, the large, cottony flakes sizzling in the flames and onto the rocks forming a ring around them.

  Prophet cleaned his guns to keep his mind off not having any whiskey. Savidge’s gang had apparently drained all their own bottles the night before, and the bounty hunter had found none anywhere in the cabin.

  The settlers must have been teetotalers, God bless them . . . much to the bounty hunter’s keen disappointment.

  Louisa cleaned her own guns because it was a habit with her, in the same way that good Catholics went to mass every morning and sometimes every evening, and said their Hail Mary’s.

  She performed the task with sober, almost spiritual contemplation, her hazel eyes reflecting the fire’s dancing flames. She even wiped down each of the bullets adorning her cartridge belt, slipping each back neatly into its little leather loop when she was finished.

  Savidge sat against the tree he was tied to, a single blanket covering him from neck to stocking feet. He watched Louisa with fear and fascination until his eyes grew so heavy he couldn’t watch her anymore, though Prophet knew he felt as though he had to keep an eye on her, to make sure she didn’t swing one of those pistols at him, in much the same way she’d done to the rabbit, and blow his head off.

  Savidge’s head fell back against the tree. Then his chin dipped toward his chest, and low, ragged snores began crawling up out of his throat to flutter his lips.

  When Prophet finished cleaning his Richards coach gun, he loaded the sawed-off gut-shredder and propped it against his saddle. He poured himself a last cup of coffee, lifting the pot from its hot stone perch with a leather swatch, and then offered the pot to Louisa.

  “Mud?”

  She looked at him obliquely, pressing the tip of her tongue to her lower lip, and then shook her head slowly, as though she’d had trouble understanding the question. As though she were distracted by the heavy, solid weight of the pearl-gripped Colt in her hands.

  Prophet set the coffee pot back onto its hot rock, then sagged back against his saddle. He drew his blankets up against the steely breeze and gently falling snow, blew ripples on the piping hot brew, and sipped.

  He set the cup on his belly and looked across the fire at Louisa once more.

  She was still running an oiled
cloth over her six-shooter. But she was staring back across the fire at her partner, keeping her tongue pressed to her bottom lip in that funny, distracted way she’d been doing when he’d last looked at her. She was cleaning the pistol in her hands slowly, but she was thinking about something else.

  She was thinking about something else and sort of smiling. At least, it might have been a smile. Whatever she was thinking about was lifting a flush in the nubs of her peach-colored cheeks.

  Prophet frowned. “Girl, what do you have on your . . . ?”

  He let his voice trail off as she shoved her pistol into its holster beside her, and rose. She had a faintly troubled, consternated look on her pretty face. She kept her eyes on Prophet as she stood on the far side of the fire, and shrugged out of her coat.

  “Whoa, now,” Prophet said, glancing at Chaz Savidge snoring against the tree to his right.

  He turned to Louisa, who was now unbuttoning her shirt, her eyes fairly burning holes through her trail partner.

  “Whoa, now,” he said again, quietly, unable to take his eyes off the girl undressing before him.

  He’d seen her naked before. But it always seemed a rare treat.

  He’d made love to her before. But that always seemed an even rarer treat. Especially after an experience like the one they’d had today—an experience that had opened Louisa’s own, soul-deep, forever-agonizing wounds.

  An experience that had opened up a gaping vacuum inside her—a vacuum save for the hammering misery that lived there like some prehistoric monster in a deep, dark cavern in remote mountains.

  When Louisa had tossed away her shirt, she lifted her cotton chemise up over her head, and threw it away, as well, knocking her hat off her head as she did. Her thick hair rustled around her head in the breeze, dancing across her pale, naked shoulders.

  “Christ,” Prophet said as she leaned forward, her pink-tipped breasts sloping out away from her chest as she kicked out of her boots and began peeling her denims down her long, fine legs.

  Either the fire had grown hotter or a fire inside Prophet himself had been kindled. He found himself flushed, heart beating insistently against his breastbone.

  He glanced at Savidge once more. The outlaw was still asleep.

  He turned back to Louisa. She stood naked before him, her denims and men’s longhandles and pink drawers twisted around her bare feet. The flames licked up around her legs, caressing her perfect body with umber light and shadows.

  The shadows rippled across her breasts. The nipples jutted with need.

  Louisa stared at him hungrily, cupping her breasts in her hands, gently massaging them, squeezing them.

  Prophet cleared his throat as he glanced at Savidge once more, and said, “Louisa, not now. Not here!”

  She didn’t say anything. She just folded her long, slender, buxom body into her blanket roll, breasts jostling, and rested her jaw on the heel of her hand, gazing at Prophet from across the fire. Her eyes were painted umber now by the flickering flames. Her jutting nipples brushed the blanket beneath her, the fire dancing across the outside curve of the one nearest the flames.

  She was like some wild animal in heat, lying over there, lust pulsating in her eyes. Prophet could smell the lust on her, the uncontrollable compulsion to fornicate. She moved her legs beneath the blankets, writhing with desire.

  Her bosom swelled as her chest rose and fell heavily.

  Prophet glanced at Savidge. He turned back to Louisa. Sweat trickled down the side of his right cheek.

  “Shit on a pole!” He’d never been able to deny her before, so he wasn’t sure why he thought he could have done so now, Savidge or no Savidge snoring nearby.

  The outlaw had had a long day. He’d likely sleep through it.

  Prophet set his coffee aside, rose quickly, breathing hard now as he stared at the girl’s long body lumping her bedroll comprised of sewn-together, striped trade blankets. She writhed slowly, hungrily, staring at him like a she-wolf in the keenest, most agonizing heat imaginable, a look of grim seriousness making a stone mask of her face.

  Prophet grabbed his Winchester and leaned it against a tree near Louisa. He tossed another log on the fire.

  After glancing at the snoring prisoner once more, he kicked out of his boots, shrugged out of his coat, and skinned out of his shirt, jeans, and longhandles. The air only a few feet away from the fire was cold, but it was so hot inside his skin that the air near the fire—near Louisa—was hot enough to give him the fantods.

  Naked, he moved to her.

  She rose to her knees, letting the blankets slide off her shoulders, down her back. Staring up at him from beneath her brows, she cupped him with one hand, gently massaged him with the other hand. As she did, a light grew in her eyes and her lips very gradually began to slide back from her teeth. Prophet wasn’t sure if it was a smile or a snarl. It caused chicken flesh to rise across his shoulders.

  Louisa bowed her head and closed her mouth over him.

  “Shit . . . on . . . a . . . pole!” he wheezed through gritted teeth, grinding his heels into the ground.

  She toyed with him, bringing his blood to a near boil, for close to a minute. Then, unable to restrain her own needs any longer, she slid her mouth back off of him, and slumped down into the bedroll, extending a hand to him. Her cheeks and breasts were mottled red.

  Prophet dropped down into her blanket roll, and took her in his arms as she rolled onto her back, turning to face him.

  She wrapped her arms around his waist and flattened her hands on his buttocks, scuttling down beneath him and raising and spreading her knees, giving him plenty of room. She groaned. She gasped softly as he mounted her, and when he slid himself inside her hot, waiting portal, she gave a mewl that rose from deep in her belly.

  She arched her back, threw her head back against the ground, and bucked up against him, meeting his downward thrusts, which quickly grew savage as his own desires grew to a vehemence that matched the woman’s own.

  “Those bastards,” she cried, digging her fingertips into his ass, bucking up against him and turning her head from left to right and back again. “Oh, those bastards!”

  “I know, Louisa,” Prophet said, toiling away on top of her, placing his hands on both sides of her face and using his thumbs to slide her sweat-damp hair back away from her feverish cheeks. “Let it go. Let it all go.”

  “Bastards!” she sobbed, groaning.

  “I know.”

  “Bastards!”

  “Let it go.”

  “Devils!”

  “Let ’em go, honey!”

  She opened her eyes suddenly. She lifted her head up off the ground and pressed her mouth hard against his, kissing him as they continued to hammer away at each other like two lovers who’d been apart for a long, long time. She stuck her tongue in his mouth, nibbled his lips until he thought they would bleed, and then she squeezed her eyes shut and gave his right shoulder a violent shove with the ends of her fists.

  Prophet rolled onto his back.

  Louisa climbed on top of him, breathing hard, the sweat dripping down her body showing golden in the firelight. She held his staff, impaled herself on it, began grinding up and down.

  Up and down.

  Up and down.

  She was mewling like a trapped wolf now but Prophet had lost all concern, so enraptured was he, as always, by the girl’s insane, pain-induced desire that always reminded him of a volcano that had been waiting for eons to blow its top.

  At one point in their violent thrashing, Prophet saw sparks rise over Louisa’s left shoulder. A corner of their blanket had leaped into the fire. Flames were chewing away at it, gray smoke rising.

  Prophet rose to a sitting position, knocking Louisa onto her back between his legs, where she lay writhing, a faraway look in her eyes—a golden-skinned beauty bathed in firelit sweat. Her breasts and belly rose and fell and expanded and contracted as she breathed, clawing at Prophet’s broad chest and groaning.

  Quickly, Lou slapp
ed the blanket’s flames out against the ground, and then rolled Louisa onto her back, and finished her.

  He knew she’d finished by the eerie echoing of her scream that always reminded him of the vaulting, catlike cry of some mysterious forest beast he’d once encountered in the Oregon mountains, years ago.

  Prophet held her till she slept.

  Then he rose, dressed, built up the fire once more, and crawled into his own blanket roll.

  The frenzy of the dustup had allowed Savidge to slip his mind.

  He whipped a look at the outlaw now, whom the fire’s built-up flames now revealed more clearly, sitting against the tree he was tied to, eyes open and staring in wary befuddlement.

  The ugly killer shook his head slowly, his lower jaw sagging. “Yessir,” he said tonelessly, “when I see that U.S. Marshal in Denver, I’m gonna give him a big, fat ole kiss on the mouth. You two are loco!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It snowed just enough during the night to make the ground white the next morning. While the squall had pulled out and the sun was rising in a cloudless sky at seven a.m., a deeper chill than yesterday’s now laced the breeze.

  Prophet crunched through the half-inch of fresh powder and dumped his armload of wood beside the fire he’d built when he’d first risen from his blankets. His black enamel coffee pot gurgled where it hung on its iron tripod over the snapping, crackling flames.

  The bounty hunter lifted the collar of his buckskin mackinaw against the chill and turned to where Louisa was draping a feed sack over her pinto’s snout.

  “Coffee’s almost rea—”

  Prophet stopped and turned his head toward the north. He’d heard something. Mean and Ugly must have heard it, too, because the hammerheaded dun, tied to a picket line near Louisa’s and Savidge’s mounts, whinnied inside his feed sack, and shook his head in warning.

  Prophet rose and retrieved his Winchester from where it had been leaning against a box elder.

  “What is it?” Louisa said.