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

by Peter Brandvold

  The Indian group was composed of three men, two women, and four children. The children were running around in the mud alongside the shop, chasing chickens. The men were smoking and staring at Prophet and Louisa as the strangers passed before them. The women stared, too, their faces as expressionless as the men’s.

  Prophet pulled up beside the blacksmith working on the wheel.

  ‘Where can I find the sheriff?’ he asked the stout, balding man, who did not turn to look but momentarily ceased hammering the wheel onto the axle.

  ‘One block west, turn right. It’s the log cabin beside the bathhouse.’

  He jerked his head up sharply when a chicken squawked, then turned to the Indian men lounging in the shop’s open doors. ‘I told you to keep your damn kids away from my livestock!’ the blacksmith complained.

  One of the women turned to the mud-splashed kids and said something in Sioux, only slightly raising her voice, and all four kids stopped suddenly and looked at her.

  ‘Much obliged,’ Prophet said to the blacksmith, who did not reply but only started hammering again on the wheel.

  As Prophet and Louisa walked their horses along the street, glancing from side to side for signs of the men they were after, Louisa said, ‘What do you want the sheriff for?’

  ‘It’s his town,’ Prophet said. ‘He should know if there’s badmen about, shouldn’t he?’

  ‘What’s he gonna do about it?’

  ‘I reckon that’s up to him,’ Prophet said, adding, ‘If there’s one thing I learned in my years as a bounty hunter, it’s to never step on a lawman’s toes. Most of ‘em hate bounty hunters the way it is. But you get between one and his quarry without consultin’ with him first. . .’

  Prophet let it go at that, giving his head a resolute wag.

  ‘I don’t think you have to worry about that around here,’ Louisa said. ‘The Red River Gang has a way of sendin’ local lawman into the hills lookin’ for their mommas.’

  Prophet brought his horse to a halt when they came to a cross street. Looking left, he saw what appeared to be a saloon about a block away. The hitch racks before the place were crowded with horses—more than a dozen of them, all craning their heads around to watch the loud freight wagon passing behind them into the vast, flat prairie beyond town.

  ‘Speaking of which,’ he said to Louisa, ‘you think that cavvy belongs to our boys?’

  Louisa studied them coolly, then turned to Prophet, arching one of her eyebrows. ‘Who else?’

  Prophet nodded and looked right, and pointed. ‘That must be the jail over there.’ He gigged his horse toward the sheriff’s office, but stopped when he saw that the girl wasn’t following him.

  When he hipped around in his saddle, she said, ‘You go ahead. I’m gonna go in that general store over there and scrounge up some foodstuffs.’ She reined her horse left, heading south down the street toward the general store, which sat kitty-corner to the saloon.

  ‘You be careful,’ Prophet yelled.

  She didn’t so much as turn, just kept riding. Prophet chuffed ruefully at the girl’s independence, then continued toward the sheriff’s office—a long, low cabin with the words richland county sheriff in gold-leaf lettering on the hovel’s only window. There was a heavyset young man sitting on the gallery, to the right of the window. Shaggy blond hair tumbled out of his shabby bowler hat, and a shiny silver star hung from his ratty wool vest over an even rattier white dress shirt. He leaned forward on his bench, elbows on his knees, rolling the barrel of a Spencer carbine between his hands like a pool stick.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, casting his weary, blunt-faced glance at Prophet reining up at the hitch rail.

  ‘Name’s Prophet, and you and me got trouble, if you’re the sheriff.’

  ‘I ain’t the sheriff, I’m just the deputy,’ the young man was quick to respond, casting another cautious glance to his right, toward the saloon at the other end of the street. ‘You aren’t part o’ that bunch down the street, are ye?’

  Prophet said he wasn’t. ‘Where’s the sheriff?’

  The young man—about nineteen or twenty, Prophet guessed—measured him from the doughy gopher holes of his eye sockets, then jerked his head to his right. ‘Out back. He’s plantin’ his garden.’

  ‘Kind of early for gardenin’ in these parts, ain’t it?’ Prophet said, crawling out of his saddle.

  ‘That’s what I told him,’ the young man grunted.

  As he tossed his reins over the hitch rack, Prophet considered the lad nervously rolling the carbine between his hands, then, with a knowing smile, headed around the building to the back. He found a tall, middle-aged man in suspenders and a wash worn undershirt raking a patch of freshly turned earth. The man’s gray hair was thin on top, and he wore a beard, Prophet saw as the man turned to him.

  ‘What the hell do you want?’ the sheriff asked, narrowing his eyes with the same wary expression his deputy had offered. Obviously, both men knew what kind of snakes had ridden into town, and were more than a little jumpy.

  ‘Don’t worry, Sheriff,’ Prophet said, raising his hands in a gesture of acquiescence. ‘I ain’t part of that crew down the street. I’m after them, as a matter of fact. Yesterday, they raided Luther Falls. Shot a couple and kidnapped a girl of about fourteen or fifteen years old.’

  The sheriff’s eyes dropped, scouring Prophet’s chest for a badge. ‘You a federal?’

  ‘No, I’m a bounty hunter.’

  The sheriff stared at him, holding his rake across his chest. His eyes were gray and old, and his chin jutted like a sharp rock. ‘You alone?’ he asked finally.

  ‘Well... not exactly, but close enough.’

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  Prophet studied the man from across the black, wet garden that smelled of worms and fresh earth and which a pair of robins eyed from the eaves of the jailhouse. Prophet could see the man wanted no part of the Red River Gang, and the bounty hunter didn’t blame him. He’d probably farmed most of his life, and when the sheriff’s job had opened, he’d probably figured why not take it? Beats following mules around a potato patch. It was a pretty typical state of affairs, Prophet had found, and one that contradicted the newspapers and dime novels that had the easterners believing every town was Dodge City and every lawman was Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson.

  Prophet waved and, turning, said, ‘Never mind, Sheriff.’ He should have listened to Miss Louisa, but he always figured that giving the local lawmen a courtesy call would save him trouble in the long run.

  ‘They send me federals, I’d go in there after those bastards,’ the sheriff said.

  ‘It’s all right, Sheriff,’ Prophet said over his shoulder.

  ‘Hell, I have a wife and a daughter, and my deputy just had a baby!’

  ‘I hear ye, Sheriff.’

  ‘If I wired Bismarck today, they wouldn’t have federals here till next Wednesday!’

  Prophet threw up a hand, waving, and walked back to the front of the jail, startling the deputy as he approached the veranda.

  ‘Jeepers, you scared me!’ the lad said.

  Prophet untied his reins from the hitch rack. ‘Sorry, kid.’

  ‘What’d the sheriff say?’

  ‘He told me you just had a baby.’

  The lad grinned. ‘Sure did.’

  Prophet crawled into the leather. ‘Boy or girl?’

  ‘Girl. Named her Sony a after my mother, God rest her soul.’

  ‘Greet her and her mother for me, lad,’ Prophet said. ‘And stay away from that saloon tonight.’

  Chapter Ten

  FROM THE SHERIFF’S office, Prophet gigged his horse southward, toward the mercantile, keeping a wary eye on the saloon.

  He stopped his horse suddenly when he heard the general store’s door open and saw two women walk out. One was Louisa carrying a small burlap bag. The other was a silver-haired lady in a brown dress and a crisp white apron. Louisa and the woman were chatting amiably, though Prophet couldn’t qui
te hear what they were saying until they both stopped at the edge of the boardwalk, before Louisa’s Morgan.

  ‘Now, you go back down the street one block, and hang a left and then another left,’ the lady said, one hand on Louisa’s shoulder and the other pointing east. ‘My house is the big white one with the red barn behind it. You can’t miss it because it’s the only place out there!’ The woman laughed as though at the funniest joke she’d heard in years.

  ‘Oh, thank you, Mrs. McBride!’ Louisa exclaimed, gazing into the woman’s eyes with all the ingratiation the girl could muster. ‘I can’t tell you how pleased Poppa and Momma will be when they hear how well I was taken care of on my journey back homeward.’

  ‘An innocent child like yourself should not be allowed to journey so far from home!’

  ‘Oh, believe me, Mrs. McBride, it was a truly hard decision for Poppa and Momma to make. But with all their infirmities, they simply were unable to make the trek themselves. And I really wanted to go.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry your grandmother has passed, child.’

  ‘Yes, but, you know what, Mrs. McBride? I think her passing was made more comfortable by having her only granddaughter at her side.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it was, I’m sure it was,’ the old woman cooed, drawing Louisa to her great bosom, hugging her and patting her back. Brushing a stray tear from her cheek, she said, ‘Well, I think you’ll find mine and Mr. McBride’s home quite comfortable, child. Run along now. It’s the second-story room to the left of the stairs. The hired boy will probably have a fire going in the hearth, so you can heat water for a bath. Have the boy stable your horse in the barn with plenty of hay and oats.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs. McBride. As meager as my means, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to repay you.’

  ‘Your gratitude is thanks enough, child.’ The old woman gave Louisa a gentle shove toward her horse, adding, ‘Hurry along now, dear. You look positively exhausted.’

  ‘Yes,’ Louisa said, lacing her voice with a weary trill as she untied the Morgan’s reins from the hitching post, ‘I do feel a bit worse for the wear.’

  The girl mounted up and, waving to the old woman, turned the Morgan into the street. When she saw Prophet sitting atop Mean and Ugly and staring at her with a look of amazed disbelief on his unshaven face, she stuck her tongue out at him and gigged the Morgan into a trot.

  Prophet turned his head to watch Miss Bonaventure disappear around the corner, a grim smile on his face. A survivor, that girl. Turning back to the old woman, who remained on the boardwalk before the general store, staring at him with her gnarled fists on her hips and a scowl on her face, Prophet gigged his horse toward her and reined up.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he said with a tug on his hat brim, ‘you have any idea where a poor, weary traveler might find a soft bed for the night?’

  Brusquely she said, ‘Down by the river there’s plenty of soft grass, young man.’ She wheeled around on her stout, black shoes and disappeared into the store.

  ‘Much obliged, ma’am,’ Prophet grumbled at the door slamming closed.

  He turned to the saloon sitting on the corner of the next block. The horses remained at the hitch rack, and, knowing what he knew about the gang inside, the poor animals would probably remain there all night, saddled and bridled. From the sound of the whoops and muffled laughter from inside the place, he suspected the gang was having one hell of a time. The girl they’d kidnapped was probably in one of the upstairs rooms, no doubt going through a hell administered by each of the drunken gang members in turn.

  The thought set Prophet’s blood to boiling, but there was nothing he could do to help her at the moment. If he walked in there now, he’d be dead in two minutes.

  Prophet rubbed his bristly jaw. Shit.

  He thought it over and decided the first thing he had to do was free the girl, and the best time to attempt that was after dark, at least three hours away. The gang would be fairly drunk by then, and his chances of stealing into the place unseen would be fair to good. His chances of getting her out without being seen were probably only poor to fair, but he had to try it, and he didn’t have much time.

  The girl was living on borrowed hours. The gang would no doubt head out of here in the morning, and Prophet doubted they’d take her along. They’d get all they could from her tonight, then probably slit her throat and leave her in one of those upstairs cribs to bleed to death.

  First thing he had to do was get Mean and Ugly stabled, fed, and rested, so he’d be able to ride later. To that end, he reined the horse back along the way he had come. Seeing a barn and paddock down a side street, he headed that way and paid a lad to bed the horse down with fresh hay and oats. He gave the boy an extra dollar to tie the horse before the general store in three hours. Taking only his shotgun and leaving his rifle and the rest of his tack with the boy, he headed back down the street toward the saloon.

  Halfway there, he caught a whiff of something cooking, and followed the smell to a small, tar-paper shack sitting on a weedy lot behind the general store, flanked by stacked wood and a smokehouse. On a crude sign tacked beside the door the word food had been painted in white letters. The place was propped by logs about a foot off the ground, and out from under it came a dog to bark at Prophet and sniff his clothes.

  Tripping over the dog, he made his way to the door, pushed inside, and looked around at the three hand-hewn tables and benches surrounding a smoky woodstove. In one corner, an old man and an old woman worked on a plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes with gravy, not saying a word and glancing up only briefly at the stranger. Noting the shotgun, they quickly returned their eyes to their tin plates, muttering in a foreign language.

  The meal Prophet was served turned out to be as humble as the setting it was served in, and he left the place fighting down the frothy acid bubbles rising in his chest. Unsteadily, he made his way back to the main street and stopped on the corner just east of the general store.

  The sun was nearly down, and there was very little activity on the street. The only horses were those of the Red River Gang, still tied to the hitch rack before the saloon. The animals’ heads hung sleepily.

  Glancing to his right, Prophet saw that there was no light on in the sheriff’s office, and he was grateful for that. He hoped the sheriff and his deputy had gone home for the evening. He didn’t want them getting in his way or fouling up his plan to remove the girl from the rooms above the saloon. From the fear he’d seen in their faces earlier, he didn’t think he had anything to worry about.

  Now, little Miss Bonaventure was another problem altogether. Not having seen her since she’d headed for the room she’d wrangled from the woman who ran the general store, he had no idea what she was up to. But sure as rabbits hopped, you could bet she was up to something. He just hoped she realized what a pit of perdition that saloon was tonight, and stayed away from it. If she did not, she could tie Prophet’s plan in one hell of a knot and probably get herself killed to boot.

  The bounty hunter scanned the area around him for several minutes, trying to spot a good location from which to keep an eye on the saloon and to wait for a couple more hours to pass. Finally, he headed for the alley paralleling the main street, hung a right, and came up behind the general store.

  Seeing that the roof over the store’s rear was fairly low, he used a couple of shipping barrels to help hoist himself on it. Adjusting the shotgun hanging down his back, he made his way toward the front, hoisting himself onto the store’s second story, and hunkered down behind the false front, which jutted up a good six feet and offered perfect cover from the saloon as well as the quickening spring breeze.

  Standing, Prophet could peer over the top of the facade at the saloon, from which tinny piano music prattled above the Red River Gang’s raucous revelry. Bright lantern light spilled onto the boardwalk and the heads of the horses stationed there. Shadows flickered in the windows and occasionally the sounds of breaking glass rose.

  One of the second-story ro
oms, whose windows he could see from this angle, was lit, and he fairly shuddered as he imagined what could be happening to the Luther Falls girl in there.

  As the minutes passed, the laughter in the saloon grew louder, the yells and shouts more and more boisterous. Someone tried playing a banjo for a while, and gave up amidst a barrage of wild complaints and several gunshots. At one point, a girl screamed, and Prophet, who was sitting with his back to the facade and smoking a quirley, jumped. But then the girl laughed harshly, and he realized it was one of the whores.

  The minutes passed slowly. To stretch his legs and stomp the chill from his bones, Prophet rose occasionally and walked around the general store’s roof. Then he sat down again and rolled another quirley.

  About two hours after he’d begun his vigil, he heard the slow thud of hooves and the tinny clatter of a bridle bit. Standing, he saw the boy from the livery barn leading Mean and Ugly this way down the main drag. The boy tied the horse to the hitch rack directly below Prophet, then, tossing a wary glance at the saloon, slipped slowly off in the darkness.

  The sounds in the saloon had grown into a constant, muffled roar, the piano not so much being played anymore as pounded, its discordant notes punctuating the din of the yelling, drunken men. It was time. The noise would cover any made by Prophet, and the senses of the men would be sufficiently dulled that even if they did happen to see or hear him, they’d be less effective at doing anything about it.

  He made his way carefully off the roof, trying not to make any noise and wake any dogs on this side of the main street. The night was black as pitch, for clouds had moved in to cover the stars. He had to be extra methodical in finding the barrels he’d used to hoist himself onto the roof. He got only one foot on one of them, and went down hard on his side, the barrel falling on his right leg.

  Fortunately, the barrel was empty and didn’t do any damage, but Prophet still cursed his clumsiness as he adjusted the shotgun, made sure his revolver was still on his right hip, the bowie on his left, and headed down the alley. When he came to the main drag, he paused beside the general store, making sure none of the gang was outside, then headed for the saloon.