Riding With the Devil's Mistress (Lou Prophet Western #3)

by Peter Brandvold

  Issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!

  Most of bounty hunter Lou Prophet’s man-hunting jobs have been purely business transactions that he’s carried out with cool professionalism. He’s seldom seen the depravations his quarries have committed to earn a price on their heads. But when the Red River Gang raids the town of Luther Falls, Prophet witnesses it in person—and can’t do a thing to stop it.

  It’ll be days before anyone can organize a posse—and a small girl has been kidnapped by the cold-blooded outlaws. Prophet will have to go it alone. But then he meets up with a young woman who’s lost her entire family—and thinks that justice and vengeance are one and the same.

  RIDING WITH THE DEVIL’S MISTRESS

  LOU PROPHET 3:

  First published by Berkley Books in 2003

  Copyright © 2003, 2013 by Peter Brandvold

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: June 2013

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading the book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Cover image © 2013 by Westworld Designs

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  For Routh and Lawrence Cline, with love from their Yankee son-in-law

  Also Available in the series:

  THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET

  DEALT THE DEVIL’S HAND

  All available from Piccadilly Publishing

  They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in.

  —Psalms 107:4

  Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

  —William Congreve

  Chapter One

  LOU PROPHET REINED his horse off the trail and up a hill carpeted in deep, tawny grass. At the hill’s crest, he halted the line-back dun beneath a tall, scraggly oak tree with swollen buds. Several crows took flight from the tree, complaining like Satan on Sunday.

  ‘Sorry, crows,’ Prophet said, reaching for the spyglass bound to his saddle with rawhide. ‘Some of us don’t have all day to sit and quarrel in oak trees. Some of us have jobs to do—ain’t that right, Mean and Ugly?’

  The horse twitched its ears, one of which had been frayed in a fight with an uppity thoroughbred a few weeks back. Prophet fished the glass from its case, rubbed the lens on his greasy shirt, and brought the piece to his right eye, slowly adjusting the focus.

  ‘There we go,’ Prophet mumbled as the backside of the roadhouse swam into view. It was a weathered-gray two-story structure fronting a frothy, green lake. The shore of the lake was littered with ice chunks swept off the water by a recent spring thaw. Seagulls dipped over the chunks and over the heads of the three men gathering the ice in a blue box wagon.

  Behind the roadhouse sat a privy, several wood stacks, and two dilapidated storage sheds surrounded by barrels and crates of all shapes and sizes, as well as two rusted wagon chassis. There was a chicken coop with several pullets running around, and a pigpen which stunk like the devil’s supper.

  ‘Whew! Never could see raisin’ pigs.’

  Prophet lowered the spyglass, returned it to its case, and sat leaning over the saddle horn, critically studying the roadhouse.

  When he’d decided that there was no time like the present, he grabbed the shotgun hanging by a leather lanyard down his back and breeched it, making sure both barrels shone with ten-gauge buckshot. The shotgun, a Richards coach gun, was sawed off only an inch above the walnut forearm, and Prophet had found that the barn blaster, backed up by the Colt Peacemaker on his right thigh, was often the best friend a bounty hunter could ask for—at least in close-range situations.

  When he was dealing with a little more distance, he called his Winchester ‘73 into action. He shucked the rifle from the saddle sheath now, making sure it, too, was fully loaded, then returned it to the boot. He might need it later. Gripping the short-barreled barn blaster in his right hand, the big, lean, broad-shouldered bounty man in rough, sun-faded trail garb kneed Mean and Ugly down the hill toward the roadhouse.

  As he neared the hulking structure, Prophet began to hear a tinny piano clattering inside. The raucous notes rose above the wind as it ushered the waves against the lake shore, and above the sound of the pullets scratching for seeds around the coop. Behind the hog pen, Prophet tied his horse to an iron-rimmed wagon wheel lying in the weeds, then started for the roadhouse along the path cut to the privy.

  The back door to the place opened onto a storeroom on the left, a makeshift sleeping area, probably for a swamper or stable boy, on the right. Prophet opened another door to the main room, stepping inside and pulling the door closed behind him. Above him rose a staircase. Before him, eight or nine men dressed in wool sweaters and cloth caps sat around the dozen or so tables, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and cheroots and clenching soapy beer mugs in their gnarled fists.

  A young lady in a low-cut red dress and with a matching red ribbon in her cinnamon hair banged away on the piano. To her left was a long mahogany bar behind which stood the apron, who froze when he saw Prophet, a dirty towel shoved inside the glass he was drying. Prophet grinned to put the man at ease, and stepped up to the bar, glad there was a mirror in which he could keep an eye on the room.

  The others had, one by one, taken notice of him now. This being a stage stop as well as a watering hole for woodcutters who worked at the sawmill on the east side of the lake, they were used to comers and goers. Most of the men turned back to their cards or their beers or their conversations.

  Two did not. Prophet wasn’t sure if these two, who sat at a table not far from the piano-playing brunette, were the same two depicted on the wanted dodgers in his saddlebags—wanted-poster renderings were infamously shoddy—but he had a feeling he’d know soon enough.

  ‘What’ll you have?’ the barman asked him. He was tall and dull-looking, with a waxed mustache, carefully combed black hair, and pale, sunken cheeks.

  ‘Give me a shot of your best whiskey and a bottle of your best beer,’ Prophet said jovially, tipping his hat back with a grin but keeping one eye on the two faces peering at him in the mirror.

  One had a boyish, oval face with a wispy mustache and glassy blue eyes. The other had a long narrow face with a full mustache and chin whiskers. Neither wore the cowl-necked sweaters or high, lace-up boots of the woodcutters. They appeared more like the two Kansas drovers-turned-bank-and-stage-robbers Prophet had been chasing since Dodge City, where his friend, Wyatt Earp, had put him on their scent.

  ‘Boilermaker it is,’ the barman said as he dumped whiskey into a shot glass and popped the top off a stout beer bottle.

  ‘Good and cold,’ Prophet said when he’d sipped the frothy beer.

  ‘Keep it in the cellar,’ the barman said, going back to his glass drying.

  ‘That your boys cuttin’ ice yonder?’

  The man nodded. ‘They’ll dust it down, toss it in the cellar, and I’ll be settin’ up frosty brews for these boys’— he gestured at the woodcutters—‘on the Fourth of July.’

&nbs
p; ‘Nothin’ like a cold beer on the Fourth,’ Prophet said conversationally.

  He kept an eye on the mirror as he and the barman rambled on about the weather and the farming in the country, and about the fishing on the lake. Prophet stopped abruptly when he saw the two cowboys gain their feet behind him, shoving back their chairs. He turned around and put his back to the bar, bringing up the shotgun across his belly and fidgeting his thumbs across the hammers.

  Over the heads of the raucous woodcutters, the two drovers locked eyes with him. The one with the chin whiskers turned, grabbed the girl’s left arm, and said something Prophet couldn’t hear. She looked at him, scowling, then stood reluctantly as the whiskered man pushed her toward the stairs. The younger man with the glassy blue eyes followed them, eyeing Prophet with one hand on the walnut grips of the pearl-handled Colt tied low on his thigh.

  When the piano had fallen silent, the woodcutters did too, and looked to see what was happening. They followed the cinnamon-haired girl and the two men with their eyes, frowning curiously.

  ‘Hey, she was just startin’ to carry a tune,’ one of them quipped as the threesome mounted the stairs.

  That broke the tension, and the others laughed.

  ‘Carryin’ a tune is not her only job,’ another one said in a Norwegian accent heavy enough to sink a clipper ship.

  More laughter.

  Prophet fingered his shotgun, wondering how to play this so the girl wouldn’t get hurt. The younger man stopped halfway up the stairs, crouching as he clawed his six-shooter from its holster, and aimed it over the railing, the barrel forming a black hole directed at Prophet’s face.

  Prophet crouched as the revolver spat flames and smoke, barking and shattering the mirror behind the bar.

  The bounty man straightened, brought the bam blaster to his shoulder while thumbing back the rabbit-eared hammers, and squeezed the right trigger. The shotgun thundered and jumped, ripping a hole the size of a Mexican sombrero through the younger man’s chest, throwing him back against the blood-splattered wainscoting and rolling him down the stairs.

  The girl halted on the landing, screaming and dropping to her knees. The man with the chin whiskers grabbed at her arm, but seeing Prophet turn the shotgun on him, let her go, cursing her loudly. He turned and ran to the second story.

  Prophet followed him, hurdling the dead man at the bottom of the stairs and passing the frightened girl on the landing. When he came to the second story, he slowed, creeping between the two rows of closed doors in the hall, the floorboards squeaking under his boots.

  There were three doors on each side. One stood ajar, the crack bleeding light from a window within the room.

  Prophet extended the Richards’s short barrel, nudging the door wide. Before him stood the man with the chin whiskers. He held a naked red-haired girl with nubbin breasts and freckles. He stood behind her, clutching her left arm tightly with his left hand and snugging the barrel of his Smith & Wesson to her head with the other.

  In the room’s small bed lay another man, his head and shoulders pressed to the wall, clutching a wool blanket to his neck. He lay frozen, expressionless, and pale. His wide eyes shuttled between the outlaw and the bounty hunter.

  The girl was crying and begging the outlaw to let her go—

  ‘It’s all right, Miss,’ Prophet said, staring into the cold, sneering eyes of the man behind her. ‘He’ll be gone in a minute.’

  ‘She’s the one’s gonna be gone,’ the man spat through gritted teeth, ‘if’n you don’t drop that gut-chewer.’

  Sweat rolled down Prophet’s cheeks as he stared at the revolver snugged up to the girl’s jaw, its hammer locked back, the man’s dirty finger crooked over the trigger. Prophet had little doubt that if he didn’t set the shotgun down, the man would kill the girl.

  Of course, giving up his shotgun would mean giving up his ghost as well—the man would shoot him outright— but what else could he do? He didn’t want to be the cause of this innocent whore’s demise.

  As the bounty hunter prayed for a miracle, his heart pounded, and the sweat glistened on his dusty forehead.

  ‘All right,’ he said finally, with a distraught sigh. He depressed the right trigger, thinking, ‘Okay. This is it. It’s been a nice run ...’

  As he crouched, lowering the shotgun to the floor, images of his Georgia childhood reeled through his brain. The outlaw grinned widely, showing small, hard, yellow teeth. The man extended his revolver toward Prophet. The bounty hunter stared wearily down the bore, wincing at the imminent, life-ending bullet.

  The outlaw laughed. He squeezed the trigger.

  At the precise moment the gun barked, the whore screamed.

  Prophet couldn’t tell for sure what had happened, because he’d closed his eyes. But he figured the whore must have nudged the outlaw’s arm, for instead of pinking the bounty hunter’s forehead, the bullet had seared a shallow trough along his cheek and notched his earlobe before thunking into the door behind him.

  Prophet stumbled back and opened his eyes.

  ‘You goddamn whore!’ the outlaw raged, punching the naked girl and sending her sprawling across the bed with another scream.

  Prophet reached for the shotgun. The gunman wheeled and fired as the bounty hunter raised the two-bore; the slug slammed into the Windsor chair Prophet was crouched behind. Seeing that the fight was going to involve the shotgun once again, the outlaw turned and dove through the room’s single window, landing on the porch roof in a rain of glass. He scrambled to his feet, cursing, and ran to the edge of the roof.

  Prophet bolted to the window, thumbing back the shotgun’s right hammer. Standing at the roof edge, shuttling his worried gaze between Prophet and the ground below, the outlaw squeezed off a wild round at the bounty hunter. Prophet poked the shotgun through the window and fired as the man threw himself over the edge.

  Scrambling through the window, Prophet made it to the edge of the roof as the outlaw, clutching his buckshot-peppered shoulder, gained his feet and started limping across the yard toward the corral, where several saddled horses ran in circles, shaking their manes at the gunfire.

  Prophet raked his Peacemaker from his holster. ‘Stop or prepare to meet your maker, you bucket o’ bat shit!’

  His yell was followed by the sound of screaming horses. Prophet glanced right, frowning.

  Two startled Percherons and the blue ice wagon were barreling across the yard, on an interception course with the outlaw. There was no driver, and the heavy geldings were pulling away from a small gray shed as though the hounds of hell were nipping at their hocks.

  Not quite believing what he was seeing, Prophet stared in awe as the gunman, hearing the horses, stopped in the middle of the yard and turned to his right. The marauding team closed on him like a shaggy, blue-tailed comet.

  The man opened his mouth but didn’t have time to scream before the horses ran him down. Crumpling beneath their hooves, he was pummeled and snatched up by the hitch, dragged a hundred feet east of the roadhouse, and spat turdlike from under the box.

  The rolling, mangled heap came to a dusty rest under a Cottonwood as the wagon continued over the hill and out of sight.

  Dust sifted down in the yard. All was quiet but for the breeze, a few spring songbirds, and the muffled sobs of the whore.

  Prophet heard the tentative shuffling of boots on the porch beneath him, where the woodcutters had gathered to watch the festivities. At length, someone whistled. Someone else cleared his throat guiltily.

  ‘Guess I shoulda set the wagon brake.’

  Chapter Two

  IT WAS FULL dark when Prophet dropped down off a low hill, trailing the horses of the two dead outlaws, the outlaws themselves hanging belly-down over their saddles, hands tied to their feet. He walked Mean and Ugly across a log bridge over a narrow stream and passed the first of several tarpaper shanties of the town of Luther Falls.

  The bartender back at the roadhouse had told Prophet that Luther Falls was a mellow little vill
age where he’d find the only sheriff within a two-hour ride. So Prophet had loaded up his cargo and headed northwest.

  Luther Falls did, indeed, look mellow enough, with its tight little houses spewing piney chimney smoke, the windows lit with the warmth of familial associations. It was an hour past supper, but the smells of roasted meat and coffee still clung to the cool night air.

  Cows bellowed in corrals, occasional dogs barked, and chickens clucked in coops not far from backyard privies. In one window that Prophet passed, well-dressed ladies sang hymns around a piano, open songbooks in their hands. The sight warmed his heart after what he’d been through back at the roadhouse, and he was glad he hadn’t ridden into this God-fearing little town, his ghastly cargo in tow, in broad daylight.

  Prophet followed the meandering road, no more than two pale wagon tracks under a sky filled with small, hard stars, to the business district. He pulled up before a clapboard hovel with a peaked roof and a shingle over the boardwalk announcing sheriff. He was happy to see a dim lantern glow in the window.

  ‘How can I help you, stranger?’ a man’s voice called behind him.

  Dismounting, Prophet turned to see a stout gentleman in a suit, a long deerskin coat, and a fur hat angling across the street toward the jailhouse. He was carrying saddlebags over his shoulder and a full-length shotgun in his hand. A briar pipe jutted from his mouth, puffing a rich, aromatic smoke.

  ‘I’m looking for the sheriff,’ Prophet said.

  The man had stopped to look over the two bodies draped over the horses on Prophet’s lead line. ‘You found him. And I’d say you have a little explaining to do, Mr....’

  ‘The name’s Prophet, Sheriff. I’m a bounty man. These two men are wanted for robbery and murder in Kansas and Missouri. I’ve been following them since leaving Dodge City three weeks ago. My friend, Wyatt Earp, put me on their trail. He and Bat Masterson were too busy to go after them themselves.’