To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Peter Brandvold

“You know, girl, I stopped trying to gauge the intelligence of other men a long time ago. Doing so’ll get you planted under a low mound of rocks with no other marker to speak of. I just try to play the trail as smart as I can, and assume everyone else on the frontier is up to no damn good.”

  “You’re a wise one, Lou Prophet.” Her words were touched with irony.

  Prophet shrugged as he ripped another chunk of meat off the venison steak.

  Louisa studied the distant, faintly flickering fire ensconced in a dark hollow. “How you wanna play this?”

  Prophet stopped chewing and looked at her. She arched a brow at him. Prophet gave a snort, then swallowed his last mouthful of the food and wiped his gloves in the grass.

  “I’m gonna give it another hour, then I’m gonna go over and have a look. You stay here with Savidge and the girl, in case they sneak around me. That fire could very well be a diversion, and Burrow could be sneaking around us right now.”

  “I’d best douse the fire, then.”

  Prophet nodded.

  Louisa reached for his plate, then left it where it was. She moved closer to Prophet, and wrapped her arms around his neck. She kissed him. The warm, wet knife of her tongue stabbed between his greasy lips. Then she pulled her head away from his, and gave him a commanding look.

  “Be careful.”

  “What—you don’t think you can spend that whole three thousand by yourself?”

  “Sure, but you’d have such a much better time than I would, you whore-mongering fool.”

  With that, she rose, picked up his plate and fork, and strode back down the hill toward the fire. Prophet watched her go. He enjoyed watching Louisa coming and going. It never failed to give him a boyish thrill, and he never knew when another look at the Vengeance Queen would be his last.

  So he took the time to appreciate this one.

  He remembered their recent night together. His back still ached sweetly from the clawing she’d given him. He remembered her pale hips thrusting hungrily up against his.

  Chuckling and cursing, he shook the remembered pleasure from his mind, and turned back to the fire.

  Behind him, he could hear Louisa talking to Savidge and Josephina. Savidge said something in an objecting tone. Prophet heard the scuffing sounds as Louisa kicked out their fire.

  “Gonna be a cold night,” Savidge groused, his voice low but clear in the chill air.

  “Could be colder,” Louisa told him.

  After that, there was nothing but silence in the hollow in the hills below Prophet. He held his position there on the crest of the rise, watching the fire flickering half a mile away, under a sky awash with twinkling stars. The fire diminished, then burned brighter again.

  Someone was tending it.

  When the stars’ slow glide across the heavens told him an hour had passed since Louisa had left him, Prophet picked up his rifle, rose, adjusted the Richards coach gun’s position behind his back, touched the Peacemaker to make sure it was still thonged on his thigh, and started down the hill’s north slope.

  He hurried down from the brow of the hill, so the stars wouldn’t outline him. Halfway down, he slowed his pace. He took his time as he tramped well south of the fire, following a meandering, dry creek bed generally west.

  Stones and bleached cow skulls glowed pale along the narrow watercourse. In the far distance to the west, coyotes yammered insanely before quieting suddenly, like scolded children.

  A wolf kicked up its long, mournful howls in the opposite direction. Nearer, an owl hooted. There was the constant scratching of mice and other burrowing creatures in the grass and occasional woods around Prophet.

  The night was alive.

  The creek dropped between steep cutbanks lined with brambles and willows. Prophet couldn’t see the fire until the creek bed rose once more, and then the pinprick of wavering light shone again, a half-hearted beacon in the darkness.

  Prophet followed the creek’s northward curve and then left the stream and followed a shallow crease between barren hills. Several times, he again lost track of the fire. Disoriented for some time, he climbed to higher ground and loosed a relieved sigh when he saw its flickering glow again, farther to his right than he would have thought and slightly obscured by trees or bumps of higher ground, maybe picketed horses.

  Fifteen or twenty minutes later, he was crabbing on all fours through a sprinkling of woods tufting this bowl between low, pale hills. The fire lay directly ahead of him. Someone had built it up again recently, for it glowed vibrantly beyond the tangled, black webbing of brush and branches.

  Prophet wondered how long he’d been out here. At least an hour. Maybe closer to ninety minutes. In that case, it was likely around nine o’clock. Most travelers would be settling in by now.

  Wary of an ambush, Prophet slowed his pace as he drew nearer the fire. He could smell the smoke from time to time as the breeze jostled it toward him. Slower and slower he crawled, setting the Winchester softly down beside him with each crawling stride.

  He breathed though his mouth, wincing at every soft crackle of grass beneath his big, lumbering frame.

  Louisa should have come, he thought. She was quieter. But she was also less dependable and predictable, because she was more emotional. She’d never admit it, of course, but she’d made mistakes because emotion had clouded her judgment.

  Eventually, her hot-headedness would get her killed. But not tonight.

  Prophet hoped not tonight . . .

  He crawled up to a deadfall log at the very edge of the firelight. The light spread a dull, umber glow across the top of the log. The fire was lower now, the sphere of light it spread, weaker. But Prophet could see two men lying around it—one on the left side, one on the other side of the flickering flames.

  He couldn’t see the men themselves, but he could see the man-shaped lumps they made in their coats and blankets.

  He looked around. He’d passed two picketed horses about twenty yards back. He couldn’t see them now. They’d made soft whickering sounds as he’d passed, and one had stomped but not loudly enough for anyone around the fire to hear, thank God.

  So there were two men now.

  Where was the third? Dead?

  Prophet studied the camp before him. Neither man moved. He thought he could see the chest of the man on the left rising and falling as he breathed, but that could have been a trick of the firelight. He was wary of the old trick to arrange blankets to look as though men were slumbering under them.

  These blankets looked genuinely filled with men, however.

  Prophet looked behind him and then to each side and beyond the flames, which were dancing lower and lower. He saw no sign of a third man. Just these two.

  Prophet’s heart quickened as, gripping the Winchester, he rose slowly and stepped over the log. Still looking around and pricking his ears almost painfully, listening to the woods surrounding the fire, he moved over to the man on the fire’s left side.

  He pressed his boot toe to the man’s side. “Hey.”

  The man didn’t move. Prophet looked around. Nothing moved in the darkness surrounding him. The only sounds were the occasional scratching of small critters and branches.

  “Hey, wake up,” Prophet said, poking his boot toe deeper into the man’s side.

  Still, nothing.

  Cold sweat trickled down Prophet’s back. The short hairs under his collar were dancing a nervous jig.

  “Wake up, there,” Prophet said, louder, and opened the man’s blankets.

  A red-haired man, Burrow, lay staring up at him. His mouth was twisted in horror. A long, wide gash shown across his throat. The man’s chest was covered with a thick blood pudding.

  “Holy Christ,” Prophet raked out, stepping over the dead man to the other man on the other side of the fire.

  That man lay on his side. Prophet kicked him over, and he lay staring up at Prophet with much the same expression as Burrow. His throat, too, had been cut from ear to ear and he was still trying to scream a
scream that, even when new, likely hadn’t made it past his vocal chords.

  Cold sweat bathed Prophet as he stared down in wonder.

  Who . . . ?

  Then the word snapped like a small-caliber pistol in his brain:

  Trap!

  Before he even realized what he was doing, he was launching himself off the heels of his boots and into the darkness beyond the fire. At the same time, he heard a low screech, like the beginning of a scream issued by a very old woman.

  The screech grew until it merged with the thumping roar of a high-powered rifle, and slammed loudly into a tree inches from where Prophet had been standing, spraying bark and large wood chunks in all directions.

  Prophet hit the ground and rolled, wincing as the Richards dug into his back and then hammered the back of his head as he rolled farther away from the firelight. As he rolled, he realized with a sickening feeling that he’d lost his rifle.

  There was another loud thud as a second large-caliber slug plowed up dirt and dead leaves just off his right hip. The furrow the slug made was like that gouged by a man’s fist.

  The rifle’s hiccupping roar rolled like thunder.

  Prophet scrambled wildly behind a broad tree bole, slamming his back up against it, as he heard the clink of a shell being pulled out of the rifle’s breech and another one being slid into the chamber.

  The shooter was close. Maybe only fifty, sixty yards away. He had to be up high, too. Maybe in a tree. And he must’ve had a scope on that cannon . . .

  Prophet edged a look around the side of the tree.

  There was the tooth-gnashing screech of another bullet shredding the cool night air. Before Prophet could pull his head back, the bullet carved a scalding line across his right cheek before hammering the ground with a heavy thud like that of a stamping horse’s hoof.

  Prophet groaned against the pain in his cheek and threw himself forward, away from the tree. He rolled once, twice, three more times, trying desperately to get out of the shooter’s range. But he knew that a Big Fifty Sharps had a wickedly long range—especially when an expert shooter, probably an ex-sharpshooter or buffalo hunter, was wielding it.

  Yeah, a Big Fifty. He knew what they sounded like. He’d heard a few during the war, many more when he’d tried his hand at buffalo hunting before the waste of that massacre had disgusted him and he turned to hunting men instead.

  As the big gun thundered twice more, the shots spaced about five seconds apart—the shooter was a seasoned son of a bitch, all right—Prophet found himself rolling down a slight hill. That was good. He needed to get lower. And he needed to get into heavier cover.

  As he crabbed to his left, his left leg barked at him, burning. He looked at it. Blood shone across the outside of his thigh, through a gash in his denims and balbriggans. It glistened in the starlight.

  Another bullet whooshed over his head, trailing the hammering blast by half a second.

  Ka-funk! went the bullet blasting into the side of another tree. Bark rained. The tree quivered from the concussion of the blow, barren branches scraping against each other.

  Prophet wanted to return fire, but he only had the shotgun and his Peacemaker. Besides, the shooter wasn’t giving him time. And every time he moved, the shooter seemed to see it. Or he saw the brush moving around him, and that’s what he was keying on.

  Another bullet came hurling toward Prophet to plume dust and leaves a foot to his left. Prophet sucked back the pain in his cheek and leg, and hurled himself farther down the slope and into heavier brush. Yet another bullet came snapping through the brush just over his head. It caromed shrilly off a large rock just beyond him.

  He crawled forward quickly. The shooter must have seen the brush move.

  Another bullet screamed and split a sapling in half just ahead of him, throwing the upper part of the tree on top of him.

  Christ almighty, the bounty hunter silently told himself, lying flat against the ground, deciding he might be better off holding still for a time. You’re out-positioned and overpowered. You might have just come to the end of your trail, old son.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Louisa threw back the last of her cold coffee, and huddled down inside the blanket she’d drawn over her shoulders. She wore her wool blanket coat over a heavy serape, but it was a cold night. The chill penetrated her every fiber.

  She set her cup down and glanced to her right.

  Savidge was curled on his side, inside his blanket roll, head on his saddle. He snored softly, occasionally stopping to smack his lips. How comfortable he looked down there, under his blankets. Louisa felt the burn of deep rage, remembering that nearly naked, bloody girl hanging in the barn with her murdered family.

  All hanged.

  Louisa’s right hand trembled faintly with the nearly irresistible urge to pull her pistols and shoot the rapist and killer through the head that everyone seemed to want so badly. She heeled the impulse. She’d feel good for a time, knowing that Savidge was dead, the girl and her family avenged, but then Lou would be angry with her, and she would no longer have the anticipation of watching the man stretch hemp at a public hanging.

  That would be a joy, indeed.

  As long as she and Lou were able to get the man to Denver. So far, the trip hadn’t been a picnic, and it wasn’t anywhere near finished. They still had to get to the rail line and hope they hadn’t missed the twice-weekly train, though they likely had. If so, they’d have to wait for the next one. When they did get Savidge on the train, it would be a three-or four-day pull down to Denver.

  Josephina murmured to Louisa’s left, where she lay curled in her own blankets on that side of the fire. The girl was shivering in her sleep, moaning softly, turning her head from side to side. She was cold and she was having a nightmare. There was only one part of that that Louisa could help.

  The Vengeance Queen rose from her log, retrieved her own bedroll, and arranged it over the slumbering girl. Josephina lifted her head with a startled gasp.

  “Shhh,” Louisa said, placing two fingers to her lips. “I covered you with my bedroll, that’s all.”

  “What are you going to use?”

  “I don’t think I’ll be going to sleep anytime soon. Lou’s not back yet.”

  The girl sat up, and looked around. “What time is it?”

  “Around nine.”

  “Cold,” Josephina said, shivering inside her mound of blankets.

  “Do you wish you would have stayed home?”

  The girl shook her head and glanced into the cold darkness beyond the camp. “I’d rather freeze to death out here.”

  A distant, rumbling blast caused the girl to gasp again with a start.

  Louisa jerked her head up, frowning toward the north.

  Savidge stopped snoring and lifted his head from his saddle.

  “What was that?” he said thickly.

  There was another thunder-like, rolling blast.

  “Lou,” Louisa said, tonelessly.

  Wheeling, she grabbed her rifle and turned to Josephina. “Stay here,” she ordered, and canted her head toward Savidge. “And stay away from him.”

  She racked a round into her Winchester’s breech and ran up the northern rise.

  Josephina stared after Louisa, a slender shadow that moved up and over the crest of the rise. She quickly dropped down the other side, fading from view.

  Josephina suddenly felt very alone. Cold and alone.

  “They ain’t gonna make it,” Savidge said. He was a man-shaped shadow leaning back against the birch.

  “Please, be quiet,” Josephina said.

  “I’m just sayin’ they ain’t gonna make it.”

  “And I asked you to be quiet, Mr. Savidge.”

  “It’s somethin’ we gotta think about.” Savidge stared at her darkly through the darkness. “If they don’t come back, what’re you gonna do? What am I gonna do?”

  Josephina clutched her arms and shivered as, knees drawn to her chest, she stared off in the direction in
which Louisa Bonaventure had disappeared.

  There was another echoing blast. It sounded like a cannon, though Josephina didn’t remember ever hearing a cannon before. Maybe once, during a Fourth of July celebration in town . . .

  “You hear that heavy report?” Savidge said, his voice pitched low with menace. “That’s a Big Fifty. Buffalo Rifle. Fires a bullet bigger’n your nose. And as fast as it’s being fired out there, I’d say the shooter knows his way around it pretty damn good. That’s about one shot every five seconds. Yeah, he was likely a hide hunter, all right. You see, the Big Fifty is a single-action weapon. You gotta remove the spent shell and replace it with a fresh one after every shot.”

  Savidge shook his head darkly. “Nah, Prophet walked into a trap. And that hot-headed girl is gonna follow him into it. Prophet’s likely pinned, soon dead, and—”

  “Please, shut up, Mr. Savidge!”

  “—and Miss Bonaventure’s gonna be dead here in a few minutes, when she—”

  “Please!” Josephina fairly screamed, clamping her hands over her ears.

  “—walks into the same trap. I’m sorry, but we gotta face facts, Miss Josephina.”

  The heavy reports kept echoing in the north. Josephina jerked with each report, as though the bullets were being hurled at her heart. She turned to Savidge and slowly lowered her hands from her ears, her blood racing in her veins, her stomach aching with fear.

  “I ain’t all that bad,” Savidge said, stretching his lips back in an oily grin. “Not half as bad as they want you to believe. They’ve exaggerated my transgressions to make themselves feel better about turnin’ me in to hang. My gang—now, they were a bad bunch, I’ll confess that much.” He shook his head. “But I never went in for what they did—to women an’ such. And I never killed a man who didn’t have a gun aimed my way.”

  “Really?” Josephina said.

  “My word’s bond.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  Savidge frowned. “What’s that?”

  Josephina shook her head. “You’re a rapist and a killer, Mr. Savidge. That’s why you’re here. That’s why so many bounty hunters are after you.”

  “No, you see, that’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you. I ain’t half as bad as they all would have you believe. I’m good to women. Hell, I was raised with three sisters, and I still write to my ma twice a year.”