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

by Peter Brandvold

  Prophet turned to his right and saw the barman heading toward the saloon with two men in bib-front coveralls. ‘Sorry for the trouble,’ Prophet said to the barman as he untied Mean and Ugly’s reins from the rack.

  ‘Wait a minute, Mister,’ the barman called. ‘You best wait for the county sheriff. You got some explainin’ to do.’

  ‘You saw it,’ Prophet said, mounting up. ‘You explain it.’

  He reined the dun around and kicked him into a trot. At the edge of town he reined Mean and Ugly northward and kicked him into a ground-eating gallop. He’d ridden nearly half a mile before the girl came into sight. She’d slowed her horse into a canter, which made it easier for Prophet to catch up to her.

  When he was about fifty yards behind her, she heard him and turned around, reaching through a slit in her skirt—for the gun, no doubt. She halted the action when she recognized Prophet, and turned back in her saddle to scowl over the Morgan’s ears.

  ‘What do you want?’ she groused as he drew abreast of her.

  ‘Same thing you do,’ Prophet said. ‘The Red River Gang.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘ ‘Cause I was in Luther Falls when they rode in and shot up the town. They kidnapped a girl, the daughter of the couple who ran the mercantile. They not only shot the girl’s parents in cold blood, but they shot the sheriff, too. A nice old fart named Arnie Beckett.’

  ‘You live there?’

  ‘No, I was just passin’ through. But I seen it happen. And since there ain’t no more law to go after those men, I’m doing it myself. I’m sort of in the profession, you might say.’

  The girl sighed. ‘Well, I’m sure there’s plenty of bounty on their heads. They’ve cut a wide swath, that bunch.’

  ‘I’m not after the bounties,’ Prophet said.

  The girl looked at him pointedly. ‘Neither am I.’

  ‘You know, I had a feeling you weren’t,’ Prophet said with an ironic wince. ‘Well, I told you my story. What’s yours?’

  The girl rode along in silence for a minute, obviously pondering her response. Finally, she said, ‘They killed my family.’ That’s all she said, and she didn’t turn to look at him, but kept her gaze straight ahead at the rutted wagon trail they were following.

  ‘Where? When?’

  She sighed heavily. ‘Last year. Nebraska.’

  Prophet looked at her, waiting for more. No more came. Finally, he said, ‘Well, what in the hell made you think you could run them down? You’re just a girl, for chrissakes. I bet you aren’t seventeen.’

  ‘I am seventeen. And being ‘just a girl’ has come in mighty handy a time or two.’

  ‘A time or two?’

  ‘Actually, three times so far.’

  Prophet tipped his hat back from his forehead impatiently and scowled at her. ‘What are you saying?’

  Louisa shrugged. ‘I’ve already done away with three of ‘em. Just waited for the group to split up and went after ‘em one at a time. One I stabbed in a privy outside Julesburg, Colorado. Another one I caught with a whore in Deadwood Gulch. And the third one, Jimmy McPhee was his name, was trying to get into my bloomers when he stopped to help me with my horse I told him had come up lame. That was in southern Dakota, outside Sioux Falls. Ever been there?’

  ‘Once or twice,’ Prophet grumbled, staring at the girl, mystified.

  ‘Nasty place, ain’t it? I think some Saturday night the sheriff should lock all the owlhoots in the saloons and burn the whole kit ‘n’ caboodle to the ground. The whole damn town.’

  ‘You’re a real charmer, Miss Louisa.’

  She favored him with a cockeyed smile. ‘Thank you, Mr. Prophet.’

  ‘What’s your last name?’

  ‘I guess it ain’t no big secret. Bonaventure.’

  ‘Louisa Bonaventure?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘From Nebraska?’

  ‘My folks farmed out there, near the Platte River, before the Red River Gang rode through. Of course, they weren’t called the Red River Gang back then. That’s just been since they moved north to get away from the federal marshals down Kansas and Missouri way.’

  ‘They killed your pa and ma?’

  ‘And my two sisters and my brother, James.’ She squeezed her eyes tightly closed and grimaced, sucking air through her teeth, as though the images in her head were far too much for her to bear. ‘Let’s talk about something else now!’

  ‘Okay, Louisa,’ Prophet said quickly, seeing the pain she was suddenly in. ‘I’m sorry.’ They rode in silence for a while, Prophet reflecting what a tragedy it was that this pretty young girl, who should be churning butter on a porch somewhere and daydreaming about the neighbor boy who sparked her on Saturday nights was instead riding the vengeance trail, her eyes flat and cunning, her innocence lost without a trace.

  He waited awhile before asking her if she’d been alone since she’d started hunting the Red River Gang.

  ‘Except for nights with farm folk here and there,’ she said, the color returning to her cheeks. ‘I try to stay away from people. Men, especially.’

  Prophet glanced at her sheepishly. ‘Well, not all men are bad, Louisa,’ he said, casting her a reassuring smile. ‘How ‘bout ridin’ with me awhile?’

  She jerked a suspicious look at him. ‘Wouldn’t you just like that?’ She looked him up and down, mostly down. ‘Why, you got rascal written all over you!’

  Prophet flushed, offended. ‘I do not!’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘Listen, Missy, I’ve never once in my life laid a hand on a woman who didn’t want me to. Never needed to!’

  She looked him over again, but this time she didn’t say anything and her eyes were hard to figure.

  His anger waning—the girl was right to be suspicious of strangers—Prophet shrugged. ‘I just meant, why not throw in together for a while? We’re both alone, and we share the same objective. And hell, considerin’ how we cleaned up those four back in Campbell, I’d say we make a pretty good team.’ He really just didn’t like the thought of such a pretty young girl being all alone out here. It gave him a lonely, haunted feeling.

  She didn’t reply for nearly a minute. ‘I’d have to think on it. I can’t go gettin’ mixed up with some stranger.’

  ‘You think about it, then,’ Prophet said. ‘In the meantime, we might as well ride to Wahpeton together. That’s where the gang’s headed.’

  Louisa shrugged noncommittally. ‘I reckon it couldn’t hurt to ride together that far.’

  ‘I have a stop by the river, though. I caught one of ‘em this mornin’, and I left him tied to a tree.’

  ‘You did!’

  Prophet grinned proudly. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Didn’t tell me his name.’

  ‘Well, what are we waitin’ for?’ she said impatiently, spurring the Morgan into a gallop.

  They rode hard for fifteen minutes, and then the river came into view over a hill. At first, Prophet couldn’t remember where he’d left his prisoner, but then he recognized a landmark and headed toward a clump of trees in a southward curve in the Ottertail.

  Riding up to the copse, he dismounted, and Louisa Bonaventure did the same. They tied their horses to low branches, then Prophet followed the trail of bent grass into the trees, Louisa following closely behind.

  The prisoner was asleep but woke with a start when Prophet kicked the man’s foot. ‘You still alive?’ Prophet asked the man.

  The man’s voice was raspy and he was breathing hard. ‘Kiss my ass,’ he growled. His arm was bleeding badly, the entire sleeve soggy scarlet. His eyes found Louisa, who’d stopped beside Prophet to gaze grimly down at the man.

  ‘Wayne MacDonald,’ she said.

  The man frowned at Prophet. His voice was thin. ‘Who in the hell is she, and how in the hell does she know my name?’

  ‘I studied the wanted dodgers on all you boys,’ the girl replied in a tone of withering malevolence. ‘I coul
d pick each one of you out of a crowded train station. Prepare to meet your maker, you murdering savage.’

  The girl yanked her silver-plated revolver from a fold in her skirt and aimed it in both hands.

  ‘Hey, wait a minute,’ Prophet objected, reaching out and shoving the gun down. ‘What in the hell do you think you’re doin’, girl?’

  ‘She’s crazy!’ MacDonald cried. ‘She’s plumb crazy!’

  ‘Get your hand off my gun,’ she warned Prophet. ‘This animal raped my mother and sisters.’

  MacDonald gazed at her with wide-eyed fear and incredulity. ‘Huh? What are you talkin’ about?’

  ‘You know what I’m talkin’ about, you dog. Back in Nebraska. Last year. I saw it all—or enough of it, anyway,’ she added darkly. ‘And you’re gonna die for your part in it, just like all the others are gonna die.’

  MacDonald looked beseechingly at Prophet, who still had a grip on the girl’s gun. ‘I don’t know what she’s talkin’ about.’

  Prophet gazed at the man, remembering the raid in Luther Falls, his own anger returning like kerosene dribbled on a guttering fire. ‘You don’t, eh?’ he grumbled skeptically.

  ‘Release my gun,’ the girl ordered Prophet.

  Prophet turned to her. Sympathetically, he said, ‘I’m sorry about what happened to your family, but I can’t let you shoot this man in cold blood. I know he deserves to die, but you can’t do it.’

  Louisa’s eyes flared angrily. ‘Just see if I can’t! He murdered my family!’

  ‘You can’t judge him, Louisa. As tempting as it is, it ain’t your place.’

  ‘What about the two men you killed with that scatter-gun back in Campbell?’

  ‘That was different. They drew on me. I was ready and willing to take them alive and haul ‘em before a judge, but it came down to either them or me.’ Prophet shook his head. ‘You can’t kill a defenseless man, Louisa. It ain’t right. I won’t let you do it.’

  With a sudden tug, he jerked the gun from her hand. She gave an angry grunt and cursed him, watching as he tucked the revolver behind his own cartridge belts. ‘I’ll return this to you when you’ve calmed down.’

  She stared at him, fuming, then stomped off through the trees toward her horse. Prophet waited until he was fairly certain she hadn’t gone to get the rifle he’d noticed in her saddle boot, then said to MacDonald, ‘You worthless pile of dog shit!’

  The last thing in the world he’d wanted to do was to be in the position of defending a man such as this. As much as he knew MacDonald deserved to die, his letting Louisa drop the hammer on him would have been the same thing as Prophet doing so himself. And one thing he’d never let himself do, for as long as he’d been collecting bounties on wanted men, was allow himself to play the tempting roles of judge, jury, and executioner. Because once he got a taste for it, he knew, there would be no stopping himself, and before he knew it he’d become no better than the men he hunted.

  MacDonald looked up at him and grinned, reading his mind. It was too much for Prophet, and, without thinking, he drew his hand back and smacked the outlaw hard across his jaw, whipping the man’s head sideways against the tree.

  ‘Ow!’ the man cried. ‘That hurt!’

  ‘Yeah, well, there’s more where that one came from,’ Prophet groused, cutting the man’s tethers and jerking him to his feet. ‘Move! I wanna hit Wahpeton before sundown.’

  MacDonald laughed as Prophet pushed him toward his horse. ‘Then you wanna be dead before sundown.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘‘Cause the whole gang’s gonna be there,’ MacDonald said through a grin. ‘The whole damn bunch!’

  Chapter Nine

  WHEN PROPHET CAME to the edge of the woods leading MacDonald’s horse, Louisa was waiting there astride her Morgan. ‘Shit,’ Prophet said. ‘I was hopin’ you’d ridden on. I don’t have time for craziness, girl.’

  ‘I don’t go anywhere without my revolver, Mr. Prophet.’ She extended her hand for the gun.

  ‘So you can shoot my prisoner here?’ Prophet said, grabbing his saddle horn and pulling himself atop his hammerheaded dun. ‘No, ma’am.’

  With her customary bald impudence, the girl said, ‘If I still wanted to kill him, I could plug him with my Winchester. Could’ve already done it, as a matter of fact— just as you were coming out of the trees.’

  Prophet looked at her tiredly. ‘Where did you learn all this stuff, anyway—shootin’ and ambushin’ and cuttin’ men’s balls off? You’re only seventeen.’

  ‘It’s a tough world out here, Mr. Prophet.’

  Slouched in his saddle, favoring his wounded arm that was giving him tremendous pain, MacDonald looked wary. ‘Whose balls did she cut off?’

  ‘Man name of Barry,’ Prophet told him.

  ‘Barry?’

  ‘I think that was his name.’

  MacDonald blinked with horror. ‘That little girl cut Barry Little’s balls off?’

  ‘He was appropriately named,’ the girl quipped, flashing another of her icy smiles, then gigging her horse beside Prophet, who had begun heading west.

  They rode for an hour in relative silence, the only sounds the chirping of birds in the trees along the river and the painful sighs and groans issuing from MacDonald, who rode behind Prophet and the girl on a lead rope tied to the tail of Prophet’s horse.

  The day was warm and bright, and they stopped to water their horses in the river. When they were heading out again, Prophet turned to Louisa Bonaventure with a question that had been on his mind since he’d found out who she was and what she was after.

  ‘So Louisa, you’ve been on the vengeance trail for a year now, and you’ve killed five of the men you’re after. What makes you think you can get them all?’

  ‘ ‘Cause I’ve given myself over to it,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘And because I don’t have anywhere else to go or anything else to do. And because I know the souls of my folks won’t rest until I’ve accomplished this task.’

  ‘Why don’t you just turn it over to the authorities?’

  She laughed caustically, swinging her head and tossing her hair out from her slender neck. ‘The authorities, eh? The authorities haven’t been able to stop these men in the five years they’ve been raiding. Not even the marshals out of Fort Smith—Judge Parker’s boys—were able to do it. The ones that chase them either end up dead or out of their jurisdictions, and, lost and afraid, they head home with their tails between their legs.

  ‘Besides, that,’ she continued before Prophet could ask his next question, ‘I’m better equipped than the ‘authorities’ are. That gang can smell the ‘authorities’ from a hundred miles away. None of ‘em has any inkling I’ve been on their trail—sometimes only a half mile behind! Even if they did, they wouldn’t know who I was or what I was up to. I’m just a girl, see? That’s why it’s easy for me to sneak up on them and put a bullet in ‘em or stick a knife in their necks.’ She sighed. ‘It takes time, though,’ she added. ‘I swear, I have to have the patience of Job sometimes.’

  ‘To wait for ‘em to split up, you mean?’

  ‘Then to catch up with the rest again,’ she said with a nod, dramatically blowing air through her lips. ‘They can be a trial, that bunch.’

  Prophet was regarding her uncomprehendingly as they rode, stirrup to stirrup, along the trail to Wahpeton. At last, he whistled and shook his head. ‘Miss Louisa, you’re the crowned queen of vengeance, if I ever knew one.’

  ‘Yessir, I am,’ she said, extending her open hand to him. ‘Now, how ‘bout returning my Colt?’

  ‘So you can play God with ole MacDonald back there?’ Prophet shook his head. ‘Not on my watch, queenie.’

  ‘I don’t have to play God with ole MacDonald anymore,’ the girl pertly replied. ‘The devil came and got him about fifteen minutes ago.’

  Startled, Prophet whipped around in his saddle, placing his left hand on the cantle and darting his gaze at the outlaw. MacDonald was slumped forward on the
speckle-gray, his face buried in the horse’s mane. He didn’t appear to be breathing, and the speckle-gray was tossing its head, its white-ringed eyes filled with an instinctive aversion to death.

  Prophet clucked and sucked his teeth. Then he threw Louisa her gun and dismounted to dispose of the dead outlaw.

  An hour after Prophet had finished burying MacDonald, a job Miss Bonaventure proclaimed the biggest waste of time since the invention of alcohol, they paid a wizened little man in a black stocking cap fifty cents to ferry them and their horses across the Red River, still swollen with snow melt. As they crossed, Prophet found out from the man that he’d ferried eight men and a girl across the river about three hours before.

  ‘They were all looking for a good time in Wahpeton tonight, sure enough!’ the man cackled, shaking his head.

  ‘There much in the way of fun to be had in Wahpeton ?’ Prophet asked with a skeptical air.

  Glancing sheepishly at Louisa, the little man sidled up to Prophet and whispered in his ear that there was one tavern and two whores—both German girls—but that the lack of amenities had never stopped the farmers from having a good time when their wives would let them out of their potato fields. He wheezed, cackling, his one tobacco-colored tooth glinting like a raisin in the sun.

  ‘The town have a sheriff?’ Prophet asked.

  ‘Sure it does,’ the man said, offended. ‘It’s the county seat!’

  ‘Much obliged,’ Prophet said as the ferry scraped the river’s west shore, nearly knocking them all, including the horses, off their feet.

  When the ferryman had dropped the ramp, Prophet and Louisa led their horses across it and onto the grassy bank near several flooded ash and cottonwood trees and a few old, gray cabins where woodcutters for the riverboats probably lived when the Red lay within its banks.

  They splashed through a slough and into the little town of Wahpeton, not much more than a wide, muddy main street lined with hangdog-looking stores before which supply wagons sat. Men in farmers’ garb crossed the street between stores, and several glum-looking blanket Indians stood out front of a blacksmith shop, apparently getting the wheel of their dilapidated wagon repaired.