To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Peter Brandvold

  Prophet shouted through the shredded bits of waxed paper hanging from the window’s sashes before him, “You have me at a disadvantage, friend!”

  “Name’s Burrow. Earl T. Burrow. We met in Omaha once. You spilled a beer on me, sucker-punched me, and ran out with the doxie I’d already paid for!”

  Louisa gave Prophet another blank look. “Infamous it is.”

  “I don’t think I ever sucker-punched anyone in my life, friend. Without good cause, leastways. Can’t say as I remember the night in question, but then there’s quite a few nights I don’t remember!”

  “Glassed you a ways back, Prophet! There’s six of us out here. We’re bounty hunters hired by Milford J. Osborne, Governor of Utah Territory. He’s payin’ us each three thousand dollars to bring him the head of Chaz Savidge, the man who raped and murdered his granddaughter!”

  “Oh, Lordy!” Savidge whimpered behind Prophet, scuttling even lower to the floor. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy!” He sounded as though he were actually crying.

  “Not even he can help you,” Louisa told him.

  “Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy!” Savidge gritted his teeth at Prophet. “You can’t let ’em take my head, Lou! You can’t let ’em! You can’t let ’em, you hear? You gotta be man enough . . . and woman enough,” he added, glancing at Louisa, “to stand up to those stinking headhunters!”

  “Shut up, or I’ll start hacking right now just for the peace and quiet,” Prophet drawled.

  He looked over the top of the window frame. A man lay in the brush atop the bunkhouse directly across the yard from Prophet. All the bounty hunter could see of him was a rifle and a black bowler hat. He thought he could see glasses glinting in the washed-out sunlight, as well, but he couldn’t be sure from this distance, and through the bending brush atop the bunkhouse.

  “Sorry, gents,” Prophet yelled. “But you’re a little late to the dance. Me an’ my partner are the ones who took ole Savidge down, and we’re the ones who’ll bring him in. I don’t cotton to bounty poaching, and that’s what you fellers are tryin’ to do. It does seem to be common practice of late, but it piss-burns me right down to my toenails. What’s the world coming to, for god-sakes? I’m gonna kill every last one of you cowardly sonso’bitches unless you pull out pronto!”

  “There you go, Lou!” Savidge cheered. “There you go! You give it right back to ’em in spades!”

  Louisa looked coolly at the killer, the nubs of her cheeks coloring in anger. “One more word out of you, Savidge, and I’m gonna hack your foul head off myself and toss it out there like a rotten cantaloupe, the reward money be damned.”

  “You must not be as hungry as I am,” Prophet said.

  The girl turned a frightened, puzzled look over her shoulder at Prophet and Louisa. “Why . . . why do they want his head so bad?”

  “Never you mind, hon,” Louisa told the girl. “Suffice it to say he’s bad.”

  “He’s not the only one,” the girl said, pressing her cheek despondently against the floor once more.

  Prophet and Louisa shared a glance.

  From atop the bunkhouse, Earl Burrow yelled, “That’s how it’s gonna be, Prophet? I mean, it’s up to you. You can live or you can die. If you choose to live and throw us Savidge, we’ll give you a note for a thousand dollars. We’ll pay both you and your partner five hundred apiece—once we get paid, of course.”

  “How generous!” Louisa shouted through her own shredded window. “How about if you kiss my ass?”

  “There you go—that’s tellin’ ’em,” Savidge said, miserably. “Oh, Lordy—I’m gonna get my head hacked off and shipped to Utah!” He started sobbing again. “Fuckin’ Mormons are gonna do some weird-ass dance around it!”

  The man on the bunkhouse yelled, “Miss Bonaventure, there’s nothing I’d love to do more than kiss your pretty, pink ass. Too bad you’re gonna be dead, so you won’t be able to enjoy it!”

  With that, laughter erupted among the bounty poachers. Then all seven shooters began hammering lead at the shack again, drowning their own guffaws beneath the thundering fusillade.

  The bullets plunked into the log walls and screeched through the windows. Some ground into the indoor walls; every now and then one ricocheted off a pot or pan or off the potbelly stove, screeching wickedly as it bounded around the cabin like a horsefly seeking flesh.

  They were shooting so steadily that neither Prophet nor Louisa could return fire without risking getting their heads blown off. They were merely hunkered low against the wall, gritting their teeth.

  Savidge mewled and writhed on the floor as the bullets zinged around him.

  The girl lay belly down on the floor, covering her head with her arms.

  “That cuts it!” Prophet said.

  He crawled on hands and knees through the kitchen, between Savidge and the girl, and pushed through a curtained doorway. He crawled down a dark hall between two more curtained doorways, one on each side of the hall. At the rear of the shack was a small pantry area stocked with airtight tins and dry goods. He thought there’d be a back door around here somewhere.

  He looked around, keeping low as an occasional bullet curled the air above his head and plopped into a wall or tore a picture off a nail and dropped it on him.

  There was no door.

  Prophet cursed and crawled back into the main room.

  “There’s an escape tunnel.”

  Lying on the floor near the sofa, the brown-haired girl was looking at him, wide-eyed.

  “What’s that?”

  “Mr. Hawkins built this place when the Sioux were still on the warpath. He dug an escape tunnel, in case they burned him out. They were always burning folks out back then. My pa built one beneath our cabin, too.”

  “Where is it?”

  The girl pointed to a throw rug on the puncheons before the kitchen range. Prophet crawled over to it, throwing the rug aside. Sure enough, there was a trapdoor with a pull ring.

  He looked through the chairs beneath the table. Louisa was scowling curiously at him from her position in the cabin’s right front corner.

  “You stay here, partner,” he called beneath the crackling rifle fire. “I’m gonna see if I can work around behind ’em and show ’em the error of their ways!”

  Louisa started crawling toward him. “I’d best go with you, or you’ll get yourself shot!”

  Prophet shook his head adamantly. “I do appreciate your concern for this big, old, ugly hide, sweetheart. But you gotta stay here and hold ’em off in case they try to burn the place.”

  Louisa stopped crawling. Staring at him through the chairs beneath the table, she drew her mouth corners down.

  Prophet grinned at her. Then he swung his gut-shredder behind his back and lifted the trapdoor up and out of the floor. He let it slam back against the floor, on the other side of the hole, which pushed cool, loamy-smelling air up at him rife with the smell of meal and root vegetables.

  He looked at the girl, who was gazing back at him from where she lay before the sofa.

  “Thanks!” he called.

  “I hope it’s not caved in,” she said. “Our tunnel at home caved in after a time, and there was no point digging it out, since we never used it after the Sioux quit, except for a root cellar. That’s we used this one for—Mr. Hawkins and me—so watch your step at the bottom of the ladder.”

  “Got it.”

  Prophet grabbed his Winchester and dropped his legs into the hole. He climbed down the wooden rungs, feeling the air growing cooler around him. The light from above showed him the gunnysacks gathered at the bottom. Garden potatoes and carrots spilled out the necks of two open sacks, the potatoes sending out long, waxy, curling ears.

  Prophet stepped off the ladder, negotiated his way around the foodstuffs, and moved down the tunnel. He had to crawl, as the ceiling was only about four feet high. He didn’t like dark, cramped places. He could feel his muscles tightening up, his heart quickening.

  No, he didn’t like dark, cram
ped places one bit.

  He had to fight off the imagined images of a cave-in—of the ceiling collapsing and dirt tumbling down on top of him, suffocating him. During the war, he’d spent plenty of time in mountain tunnels, and he’d never gotten used to it.

  Soon he got beyond where the light from above penetrated, so he stopped, dug a lucifer out of his shirt pocket, and scraped it to life on his thumbnail. Down here, the rifle fire sounded like muffled belches. The shooting was tapering off, as the shooters were likely growing concerned about popping off all their caps.

  Soon, one or two might make a play on the cabin. They had to be wondering if they’d killed anyone inside and if the odds were now enough in their favor to make a full-out assault.

  Prophet held the match out before him. The flickering, watery light didn’t illuminate much ground, but it showed him the way. Holding the match in one hand, his rifle in the other, he continued crawling awkwardly, slowly, the crown of his hat raking the tunnel’s low ceiling. The tunnel wasn’t shored up with wood, and clumps of dirt and rock had fallen from occasional spots in the ceiling to litter the tunnel floor.

  The cavern didn’t seem to curve but led straight east from the cabin.

  Prophet felt the walls and ceiling closing in on him. A few times, he thought they actually were, but it was just his nerves. It was cool down here, but sweat trickled down the backs of his ears and between his shoulder blades.

  His own raking breaths echoed. They seemed to belong to another desperate man following him.

  He nearly went through his entire store of lucifers before he came to an earthen wall. The match burned his fingers. He cursed, dropped it, and lit another one. He held it up and saw the rotting wood rungs of a ladder built into the tunnel’s right side, leading up into darkness.

  Prophet let his last match burn out and then grabbed the ladder’s first rung. He climbed blindly, hearing his breaths echo off the walls around him. The crown of his hat nudged something solid. Prophet reached up, placed the heel of his hand on what he assumed was the cover over the tunnel—it felt wooden—and pushed.

  The damn thing wouldn’t give!

  Prophet grunted again as he pushed.

  Nothing. No give whatever. The cover, which might have gotten buried under sod or brush, held fast to the ground.

  Shit!

  Had he come all this way to find that the exit cover wouldn’t open?

  The bounty hunter placed his hand against the underside of the cover once more. He gave a deep, groaning grunt as he heaved. The cover gave way so suddenly that Prophet’s momentum jerked him upward with another, shriller grunt.

  He settled back against the rungs of the ladder and stared out of the hole into hazy daylight—where three men in animal skins or fur coats and wielding rifles stood in a semicircle around the hole, staring down at him.

  One was grinning and aiming an old Springfield repeater at his head.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Hidy, fellas,” Prophet said, returning the man’s grin. “Anyone got a light? I’m plumb out of matches.”

  The three bounty poachers leveled their rifles on him. The man who’d been grinning said, “Climb on out of there, you son of a bitch!” He extended his left hand. “Your rifle first, Prophet.”

  Prophet sighed. He tossed the Winchester up out of the hole. The man who’d been grinning but who now merely looked smug caught it one handed and tossed it into the brush behind him. He was tall, and he wore a wolfskin coat and a heavy blond beard. He had a deep scar across the bridge of his nose. Prophet thought he’d seen him before and was vaguely trying to place him.

  “Get up out of there.”

  Climbing wearily out of the hole, Prophet glanced around. He was about a hundred yards straight east of the cabin, in some wild brush and sickly looking oaks at the edge of the yard. The shooting around the cabin had died. The chill breeze jostled the brush and whipped the ends of the bounty poachers’ scarves around their necks, nipping at their hat brims.

  Prophet said, “How’d you fellas know about the . . . ?”

  “There was a red flag on the cover,” the blond-bearded poacher said, glancing at where the cover lay in the grass, near a wooden stick to which had been attached a red bandanna. “I seen it when I was circlin’ the cabin. I grew up in these parts, and I figured it marked an escape tunnel from the wild Sioux days. My own pappy had one like it. When the shootin’ stopped from inside the shack, I had me a feelin’ you was gonna use the tunnel here to work around us.”

  He grinned again, working a wad of chaw around inside his cheek.

  The man’s name gained a foothold on Prophet’s brain.

  “Homer Johnson?” he asked. “Rotten Homer Johnson from Bismarck?”

  “I never cared for the ‘Rotten’ part,” Johnson said.

  “I heard it was fittin’,” Prophet said. “Since you been back-shootin’ your quarry for years now, afraid to look an owlhoot in the eye. Now you’ve turned to poachin’ bounties.” Prophet shook his head and clucked in disgust. “Look how low you’ve become, Homer.”

  Johnson’s cheeks flushed above his tobacco-stained beard. He snapped his rifle around and buried the butt in Prophet’s belly. Prophet jackknifed as the air was hammered from his lungs. He dropped to his knees in misery, fighting to rake a breath into his chest.

  Johnson chuckled as he pulled the bounty hunter’s Peacemaker out of its holster and tossed it away. “There you go, big man. How do you like that?” He pulled the Richards off Prophet, tossed it away, and glanced at the other two men flanking him. “This here’s Lou Prophet, fellas. In case none of you have ever had the pleasure. Look at the big bounty man now—down on his hands and knees, squirmin’ around like a landed fish!”

  “Shoot the son of a bitch,” one of the others said, “and be done with him.”

  “In good time,” Johnson said. “I wanna have some fun with him first. I want him to watch me with his purty partner, the Vengeance Queen herself, when we drag her out of the shack along with Savidge.” He grabbed his crotch and glared down at Prophet. “I got somethin’ special for her. She’s gonna like it just fine, too!”

  Prophet burned with fury, but at the moment all he was able to do was continue trying to work air into his lungs so he didn’t pass out. Johnson pulled the bowie knife out of the sheath on Prophet’s right hip, held it up, and whistled his appreciation at the finely tempered, razor-edged Damascus steel blade.

  “I know just how I’m gonna kill him, too.” Johnson grinned. “After I use his big bowie here to separate Savidge’s head from his shoulders.”

  He glanced at the others. “Teddy, you and J.W. take the tunnel. When you reach the cabin, you shouldn’t have too much trouble. You won’t be expected. Just remember to take Miss Bonaventure alive. I don’t care if you don’t take anyone else alive, but make sure you take her alive—understand?”

  The shortest poacher of the three said, “Why do we have to take the tunnel? Why don’t you take the fuckin’ tunnel!”

  “ ’Cause I said so, and me an’ Burrow’s in charge. That clear enough for you, or do you boys wanna fork trails?”

  “Christ almighty—let’s get on with it,” said the third man, whose hairless face was badly pitted with smallpox scars.

  He climbed down into the black circle of the tunnel entrance, the rungs squawking against his weight. Cursing a blue steak and glaring at Johnson, the little man followed him down into the ground.

  Prophet cursed under his breath. That told him he was getting some air into his lungs, anyway. His belly ached all the way to his spine, but he had to do something fast, before those two poachers made it through the tunnel to the cabin.

  Johnson had been right. Louisa wouldn’t be expecting anyone from that direction.

  Bad luck. Just pure, one-hundred-proof bad luck that Johnson had happened to spy the exit to the tunnel!

  Prophet drew another, deeper breath and looked up at Johnson. The poacher had Prophet’s bowie in his hands. He was
flicking his thumb across the razor-edged blade, frowning down at the weapon devilishly.

  “Sharp,” Johnson said as he stepped slowly toward where Prophet was still down on all fours, raking raspy breaths through gritted teeth, his anxiety over the poachers reaching the cabin now making him as miserable as had the butt of Johnson’s rifle. “I bet you could scalp a man right quick with a knife this sharp.”

  He looked down the blade at Prophet, and smiled. Tobacco juice dribbled out the corner of his mouth and into his beard. Prophet thought of this man taking Louisa, and another volley of fury hammered through him like rounds fired by mountain howitzers.

  “Sure would like to have the scalp of Lou Prophet dangling from my belt,” Johnson said. “Now, that there would be a conversation piece if there ever was one!”

  Johnson crouched over Prophet. The poacher jerked Prophet’s head up by his hair and swept the bowie toward Prophet’s forehead. Prophet gave a bellowing cry and, gritting his teeth and narrowing his eyes, hammered his right fist up against the underside of Johnson’s chin with a killing fury and the resonating crack of shattering bone.

  The bowie fell from Johnson’s hand.

  Johnson grunted and flew straight back off his feet to plop down on his rump with a stupid look in his dung-brown eyes, which were rolling around in their sockets like two coins spun on a table.

  “Oh,” he said as though around a mouthful of beans. “Ohh!”

  Blood spilled out his mouth. The blood was flecked with the small shards of the man’s tobacco-stained teeth.

  As Johnson comprehended what had just happened, his eyes widened in shock as more blood and more bits of his teeth oozed out from between his lips. “Ohh-ohhhh!”

  Prophet grabbed the bowie. He rose and stood over the horrified Johnson.

  “There you go, you rotten son of a bitch,” Prophet said, drawing yet another, deeper breath into his lungs, the fury having returned more of his strength to his brawny frame. “How do you like that?”

  Johnson looked up at him in terror.