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

by Peter Brandvold

  ‘Your boys tore up my house, Dave. They like to burned the place to the ground, and ... and then there ... there was what you did to Vivian....’

  Flowers looked at Duvall, wrinkling his bushy brows. ‘Vivian? Who in the hell’s Vivian?’

  It was Duvall’s turn to shrug.

  ‘She’s the one whose toe you bit off!’ Cora fairly yelled, angry now as she remembered the poor girl screaming and bleeding as she stumbled down the stairs. Vivian had long ago limped off with a horse buyer from Glendive, Montana, but the memory of that night would haunt Cora forever.

  Chuckles rose from the motley group sweating behind Duvall and Flowers. Like a sheepish child, Dave shrugged and grinned and shook his head.

  Finally, he said over his shoulder, ‘Boys, take your horses to the corral. Miss Ames here just needs her feathers smoothed a little is all. Her and me’ll confer privately, and I’m sure we’ll have this little misunderstandin’ straightened out in no time.’

  As the others headed, snickering, for the dilapidated corral near the buggy shed, Duvall climbed out of his saddle and tossed his reins to Flowers. Then he turned to Cora, smiled, and removed his hat. Still grinning, he slapped the hat against his thigh, billowing dust, and shook his head as though at a joke that tickled him no end.

  ‘Yeah, that was some night,’ Duvall said through a chuckle. ‘But if memory serves, I apologized for that, Miss Cora.’

  ‘You can’t apologize for biting a girl’s toe off, Dave! Go away and take your crew with you. You’re not wanted here.’

  Dave looked at the short, squat woman, her brown hair piled and fastened with barrettes atop her head. The smile faded from his lips. ‘If memory serves, I gave her twenty dollars and a watch. A gold watch with a picture of Mary Lincoln inside!’

  ‘The watch wasn’t no toe, Dave. And the twenty dollars ain’t the goin’ rate for toes, neither.’

  ‘You don’t have the right spirit, Cora. Forgive and forget—that’s the Christian spirit.’

  ‘What would you know about anything Christian, Dave?’

  Duvall grinned again sheepishly. ‘You got me there, Cora.’ Slowly, he climbed the steps.

  Cora shook her head. ‘No, Dave. This is my place. I order you off the premises.’

  He kept coming. She took two shuffling steps backward, her chubby face mottled with anger.

  ‘Let’s go inside and talk about it, Cora.’

  ‘No! I—’

  Duvall opened the door, grabbed Cora’s arm, and shoved her inside. She grabbed the coat tree, nearly upending it, to keep from falling.

  Her voice was small and tight, and her lips trembled. ‘Dave ... please ... I can’t have you eatin’ limbs off my girls!’

  Dave smiled again, as affable as a boy at a church picnic. Then, before Cora could comprehend what was happening, he balled his right fist and punched her in the stomach—hard.

  Cora bent over with a deep ‘Uggh!’ as her breath exploded from her lungs. She dropped to her knees, wheezing as she fought for air.

  ‘Ah, Cora, now look what you made me do!’ Duvall exclaimed, dropping to a knee and lowering his head to peer into her face.

  She rasped, grunted, and coughed.

  Smoothing a lock of hair from her face, Duvall said with mock tenderness, ‘Now, I wouldn’t have had to do that, Cora, if you’d have shown me some proper respect. I mean, I don’t see no cause to speak to me in front of my men like you just did. No sir, not after all the money and gifts I’ve bestowed upon you and your girls.’

  Duvall paused, gave his head a grieved shake. ‘Now, I’m sorry if I injured little Vivian, but like I said, I done apologized for that. Why, I even gave the girl a gold watch with a picture of Mary Lincoln on the lid!’

  He caressed Cora’s face gently with the back of his hand. ‘Now, don’t you think I should be forgiven one teeny-weeny little indiscretion that happened when I was drunk on your booze pret’ near a year ago?’

  Trembling and regaining her wind, Cora lifted her head and stared at him coldly.

  ‘Don’t you think so, Cora?’ Dave asked her again in an innocent little boy’s voice.

  Cora swallowed and panted, holding her aching stomach. Sweat streaked her forehead and cheeks, and her face was as pale as death. She swallowed again, ran her tongue across her lower lip, and said something inaudible.

  Turning his ear, Duvall said, ‘What’s that, Cora? I couldn’t hear you.’

  Giving a shallow sigh, Cora said weakly, ‘I said... p-please ... don’t do nothin’ ... nothin’ crazy, D-Dave....’

  ‘Cora, Cora, Cora,’ Dave said, as if deeply chagrined. ‘I would never.’ He grinned and gently helped her to her feet. ‘And just to show you how good I can be, I’m gonna let you be the first one to escort me upstairs.’

  He turned her around, slapped her ample rump, and shoved her down the foyer. ‘What do you say to that, Cora, old girl!’

  Chapter Eighteen

  AN HOUR AND a half later, Louisa rode along the wagon trail the Red River Gang had followed north of Wahpeton, on the west side of the north-flowing Red River. She reined up when, about an hour before sundown, she came to the point where the gang had turned westward onto a shaggy two-track showing the recent semi-circular gouts made by shod hooves.

  Now, why would they head west when Fargo was another three or four miles north?

  Then she saw the crude sign someone had kicked into the grass where the two trails intersected. Riding over and gazing down at the pink lettering on an arrow-shaped board, she read: cora’s place—1 mile.

  Louisa pursed her lips and nodded knowingly. A brothel. Figures. She had a mind to camp nearby, see if she couldn’t carve a few more cadavers out of the gang later tonight.

  She turned it over in her head and decided not to push her luck. After hers and Prophet’s raid on their party last night, they might be perked for trouble. She’d continue on to Fargo and try to pinpoint the havoc they’d planned for the next river hamlet north on the north-flowing Red.

  She’d learned from a conversation she’d overheard between two gang members draining their bladders outside the saloon in Wahpeton that the gang had been planning a job in Fargo for the past several weeks. From the way the men had talked, it sounded like a big takedown, involving ‘enough loot to set ‘em up for several years down in old Mexico with two or three senoritas apiece.’

  Gigging her horse northward along the trail, Louisa thought it over. What kind of job could be that big in Fargo? A bank? An assay office? An express terminal? A hotel?

  She’d heard Fargo was a growing river port. Maybe it had something to do with riverboats and gambling and such....

  Whatever it was, she smelled the town a good while before she actually saw it, for a stiff north breeze commenced blowing before sunset, sending southward the pungent smell of privies and charred trash heaps. It was a familiar smell and one reason why Louisa avoided most population centers, especially boomtowns. They smelled bad, they looked bad, and most of the people populating them were the very epitome of bad—pimps, painted ladies, confidence men, gamblers, and gunmen.

  As she neared the town, farms with sod houses and fenced pastures gave way to sod-and-log shanties, tarpaper hovels, and makeshift canvas affairs clustered along the shiny new railroad line on its high, black bed. A wide, muddy street called Broadway appeared to be the town’s hub, and Louisa halted her horse between the railroad tracks and a loading dock, watching in amazement as men of all shapes, sizes, colors, and creeds mucked through the ankle-deep mud-and-dung between the milled lumber establishments fronting Broadway.

  She’d never seen such a concoction of white men, red, black, and yellow, or heard so many different languages yelled, laughed, and spoken in low tones over cigars on the nearby mercantile stoop.

  A gun barked, and Louisa jumped, instinctively grabbing for the Colt beneath her skirt. She stopped when, turning toward the report, she saw three men coaxing two mules pulling a wagon heaped with barbed-wire spools
and seed sacks out of the mud behind a post-and-wire shop. One of the men—a tall, burly fellow in coveralls and smoking a pipe—held a Civil War-model pistol in the air. He yelled something and fired the big iron again, and the mules jerked the heavy wagon out of the mire, the men around the wagon shouting and laughing with unrestrained exuberance.

  Two of the men clapped each other on the back and walked into a nearby saloon. The big man with the gun tossed the revolver under the wagon seat, then climbed aboard. He grabbed the reins off the brake and hee-hawed the mules into the street, pulling to a halt before Louisa. Only then did she realize she must have been staring with eyes large as ‘dobe dollars, amazed at such a place, half frightened out of her wits. She felt as though she’d landed on a foreign continent.

  ‘Help you, Little Miss?’ the big man called through a chip-toothed grin. The accent was either Dutch or Scotch—Louisa wasn’t sure which.

  She was shocked into fearful silence before thinking of a question. ‘Uh ... is there a feed barn hereabouts?’

  The big man jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

  ‘The Associated’s down that way, and McMurphy’s place is down t’other.’ He looked her up and down as he sucked on his pipe. ‘You all alone, Little Miss?’

  Louisa hesitated, startled momentarily by several Sons of Han crossing the street before her in black pajamas and tassled hats. ‘Uh,’ she hemmed, ‘uh ... no, sir. I’m waiting for my brother—my brother and my father. They’re bringing a wagon to town.’

  The big man nodded. ‘I see, then. Sure. Might want to wait for them over by the notions shop, Miss. The sun’s going down, and ole Broadway, she gets a little rough come nightfall.’ He gave her a wink and a nod and slapped the reins against the broad backs of the mules, who jerked their heads up and lumbered westward along the rails glistening silver and mauve as the sun slipped bleeding into the sod.

  Keeping one hand close to the revolver beneath her skirt, Louisa neck-reined the Morgan toward the river, soon wishing she’d gone the other way. Just about every building down here sported a sign announcing a saloon or tavern. Painted ladies leaned against awning posts in their frilly, low-cut dresses, net stockings, and feathered hats. Some wore boas and smoked cheroots. All watched Louisa pass on her Morgan with wistful slants of their heavily made-up eyes.

  Louisa glanced away from one such marvel of chintzy exhibitionism only to see another between two buildings, bent over a wood pile with her skirts pulled up, laughing while a grunting man banged away at her from behind. In the past year, Louisa had been to a lot of places throughout the West, but she’d never seen anyplace like this, and she felt a mute, black dread swath her very soul.

  This was the last town she’d ever visit—at least in Dakota. She might even set a match to it on her way out; it was going to burn sometime, one way or another.

  ‘What are you staring at, Missy—you want him next?’

  Louisa stiffened when she realized not only that she’d stopped the Morgan to stare at the copulating couple in awe, but that the whore was speaking to her, in Irish-accented English.

  ‘No thank you,’ she said primly, kicking the Morgan down the street as the whore’s cackle echoed behind her and her face heated like a skillet.

  The livery barn sat dangerously close to the Red River, which had flooded a half-dozen establishments along its banks. She negotiated with the dark, wiry little man who ran the place for the stabling and feeding of the Morgan, then asked if she could stay there, too.

  ‘What, with your horse?’ the man asked, blinking.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He looked her up and down in much the way the big man with the wagon had done. ‘You don’t want to stay here, Miss.’ He looked around, scowling. ‘This is a barn.’

  ‘I know it’s a barn, sir. But I’d like to stay with my horse, if you please. I’ll share his stall and keep to myself. I don’t drink or use tobacco.’

  The little man regarded her again, skeptically. ‘Are you all alone, Miss?’

  She sighed, tired of all the questions she had to contend with everywhere she went. Tiring of all the lies and excuses she’d had to concoct to detract attention from herself, a young woman alone, she said with an air of great impatience, ‘Yes—is that a crime?’

  ‘No, it’s not a crime, Miss, but... it might not be safe here for a girl. I go home at eight-thirty. I have a half-breed who mans the office, but. .. there’s strange men about, Miss.’

  ‘I know that, sir, but I assure you I can take care of myself. I won’t be any trouble. You won’t hear a peep out of me, and I’ll tend my horse myself.’

  The man shrugged and looked at her sadly, piteously. The look annoyed her. Louisa Bonaventure could take being yelled at and cussed and even threatened bodily, but pity was something with which she could not, would not, contend. Wishing she’d gone ahead and told the lie about meeting her father and brother here, she said, ‘How much more do you need to house me along with my horse, sir?’

  ‘Nothin’,’ the man said after brief pause. ‘You can stay with your horse for nothin’ extra.’ Shrugging, he appraised her and the Morgan one more time, then turned away, grabbed a pitchfork, and headed out the double doors to the paddock.

  Louisa wheeled to the Morgan and, annoyed without fully realizing why, stripped the tack from the horse, groomed him, and filled his trough with fresh oats. When she’d lugged in a pail of water from the well and filled the Morgan’s water trough, she froze suddenly and dropped her head. Her heart wrenched and tears spilled out from her tightly shut eyes.

  Silently, she sobbed, though she didn’t know why. She suspected it was the piteous looks the man with the wagon had given her, which was then equaled in sympathy by the dusky-skinned stableman. In their eyes, she saw the reflection of how she was: alone and pitiable.

  She, Louisa Bonaventure, daughter of Kyle and Marie Bonaventure, sister to James, Elsie, and Donna, was alone.

  She was an orphan, with no home whatsoever. With no friends or family or prospects for happiness. All she had in this cruel, barren world were the clothes on her back and her horse and her quest for the gundogs who’d murdered her family. That’s all that kept her eating and sleeping and breathing and going....

  For nearly a year now, she’d tried to keep her mind clear of everything but the Red River Gang. For the most part, and aside from occasional nightmares that plucked her, sweaty but chilled, from deep sleep, she’d accomplished the feat. But now, suddenly, in this dank barn in this sleazy town amidst lost souls rutting like pigs in alleys, she thought of her house and her family and her sisters’ taunts and grins and their two-mile rides to school on the old spotted pony their father had received in trade from transient Indians.

  She thought of the kitchen where she’d worked each day, helping her mother prepare meals. She thought of the old, chipped percolator she’d never given much thought to when she was still on the farm. She thought of the lilacs that grew thick by the cellar their father had dug, and how they’d perfumed the whole barnyard for one wonderful week every June.

  She thought of their windmill and corral and the place by the spring where Elsie had seen the snake. She thought of the hills and the river and the deer that came out at twilight to forage the creek banks for bluestem and grama. How soft and ethereal they’d looked, with the rosy sun on their coats and on the tawny weeds around them.

  She thought of her bed and heirlooms she’d brought from their old place in Vermont, and of the way Donna would grin big whenever she talked about the neighbor boys, the Thompsons, over on Buffalo Head Creek, not far from town.

  She thought of the chickens and the pigs and the two milch cows and her father’s old work wagon that kept falling apart and of how in the summer his big arms were always nearly black from the sun but above his sleeves they were powder white, and so was the line above his forehead covered by his hat.

  Her father. . . Kyle Bonaventure. She’d loved him. She’d loved her mother. She’d loved her sisters, though th
ey’d often made her so angry she’d screamed. She’d loved her brother in spite of his teasing her about Buck Thompson, and she’d always secretly wished she’d been a boy like James—a boy all the girls liked and followed around at church picnics by the creek.

  Rushing in like a haze over all the memories was the smoke from the fire the Red River Gang had set, and the sounds of the screams, her father yelling, ‘No! No! No!’ while the gang members laughed and chased her mother and her sisters ... like it was all just a game ... a playground game ... and all the while James lay dead in the yard, his head scarlet with blood... clubbed down and trampled and shot like a dog in his own yard....

  And then Donna was carried kicking and screaming ... No! ... into the weeds where they’d played when they were smaller... down by the creek ... where two days later, when Louisa had come out from hiding, she’d found her...

  ‘No! No! No!’

  Louisa lifted her head and looked around the stable, half expecting to find herself in the weeds behind the house, where she’d hidden when, returning from selling eggs at the Miller farm, she’d seen the riders attacking her family, burning the house and barn and shooting their livestock.

  She looked around now, realizing she’d been lying on her side in the stable, her knees to her chest, arms over her head, tears washing over her face as she’d fought the memories like Indians screaming down a hill. The Morgan watched her, frightened and pricking his ears. He kicked the partition, jarring Louisa to her senses.

  Her muscles relaxed, and she crawled to her knees, feeling foolish, washed-out and weak.

  She hadn’t cried since it had happened. She’d felt little emotion whatever, only a deep, muted anger, like a coal vein smoldering deep within the earth.

  And a quiet resolve for vengeance.

  But never outright sadness. The emotion frightened her, for it was the one thing that could sap her strength and derail her plans. She had to be as tough and as fearless as Handsome Dave Duvall. Only then could she have the strength to hunt him to the very ends of the earth if she had to.