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

by Peter Brandvold

‘Help yourself,’ the deputy said, nodding at one of the three vacant chairs at the oil cloth-covered table.

  Prophet sat down and regarded the deputy, who held his pen out before him in both hands as though studying it. He was a broken man, Prophet saw. He felt sorry for the lad. It wasn’t easy being young in the West, even when you weren’t wearing a badge.

  ‘Writin’ up reports to bring back to your boss?’ Prophet asked when a girl had brought him coffee and taken his order.

  ‘To send back to him,’ Mcllroy corrected.

  ‘I see,’ Prophet said with a slow nod, sipping his coffee. ‘You’re sendin’ the bodies back alone.’

  ‘That’s right, Mr. Prophet. I came here to do a job, and I aim to finish it.’

  In spite of his doubt about the young man’s ability to bring the Red River boys to justice, Prophet had to admire Mcllroy’s spleen.

  ‘I can understand the notion,’ he said. ‘You have any help coming?’

  ‘I’ve requested four more deputies. I doubt I’ll get any more than one, two at the most. Most of the men are needed in the Black Hills and in the northwestern part of the Territory, where the Sioux are on the rampage.’

  When Prophet didn’t say anything, Mcllroy said, ‘Have you come up with the reason the gang is headed to Fargo?’

  ‘No,’ Prophet said with a sigh. ‘Not a thing.’ He was looking around for Louisa. Not seeing her and growing concerned, he turned to Mcllroy. ‘What about you? You come up with any ideas?’

  ‘Just this,’ the young man said, slipping a newspaper out from under the report he’d been writing. He dropped the paper before Prophet, who frowned down at the first page, reading the twenty-point headline: royal train to stop in fargo. Below it, in slightly smaller letters: ‘Duke and Duchess of Dunston-Abbey Bound for the Duchess’s Birthday Ranch in Montana.’ Between that and the article there was one more subheading: ‘Many Prominent Britishers on Board Birthday Train!’

  ‘Holy shit,’ Prophet mumbled, scanning the lengthy article. ‘When’s this train gettin’ to town, any—?’ He stopped and stared at the red-haired deputy. ‘This mornin’.’

  ‘You thinking that’s their target?’

  ‘I haven’t seen anything more likely.’ Prophet thought of something. ‘I seen a train pullin’ into town about twenty minutes ago. You don’t s’pose that was the one, do you?’

  ‘I think it says in the article there that it’s due in around eleven.’

  ‘They could’ve been ahead of schedule.’

  ‘A train? Ahead of schedule?’

  Mcllroy hadn’t completed his last sentence before Prophet had bounded out of his chair and headed for the door, weaving around the tables.

  ‘Well, wait for me, damnit!’ the deputy exclaimed as he hurriedly shoveled his papers into a cowhide valise, dropped some coins on the table, and followed Prophet out the door.

  Outside, the bounty hunter turned left and ran toward the railroad tracks paralleling Main Street. When he’d passed a lumber yard, he looked westward down the shiny, new rails, and scowled. A red caboose was diminishing in the distance, dwindling darkly, swallowed by prairie and crowned with coal smoke. The faraway whistle sounded forlorn.

  Prophet cursed and ran across the rails, angling over to the red brick station house. Several people had gathered there and were staring westward down the tracks.

  ‘Please tell me that wasn’t the duke’s train,’ he told a pleasant-faced gentleman in a minister’s collar and floppy black hat.

  ‘Why, sure it was!’ the minister said with a mild grin. ‘Got to see the duke close up, too—at least, as close up as his muscle men would let us get. I wanted to offer a prayer, but don’t you s’pose—?’

  ‘It said in the paper he wasn’t due in till eleven!’ Prophet groused.

  ‘They made better time than they expected comin’ out of Minneapolis,’ said a man dressed in a blue coat and uniform hat staring westward.

  ‘You the station agent?’ Prophet asked the man.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Where’s the train stoppin’ next?’

  ‘Oh, they won’t be stoppin’ again till Jamestown for water.’

  ‘Any way to get a message to them between here and there?’

  The agent beetled his heavy, salt-and-pepper brows at Prophet, peering at him sharply. ‘Only way would be to telegraph the station in Valley City, then signal the train to stop. But—’

  ‘How far is Valley City?’

  ‘Pret’ near seventy miles. Say, who are you, anyway, and why would you wanna—?’

  ‘Never mind,’ Prophet said, staring thoughtfully down the rails. The caboose had diminished to a small, black dot, and then it faded altogether.

  Behind the bounty hunter, Mcllroy approached running, gripping his valise in his right hand, his frock coat winging out behind him. Breathless, he asked, ‘Was that it? Was that the duke’s train?’

  The station agent was eyeing them both suspiciously. ‘Say, why in the hell are you two so damn interested in the duke’s train?’

  ‘It’s about to be robbed,’ Prophet said.

  Mcllroy cleared his throat and judiciously added, ‘Well, at least, it’s a distinct possibility. We don’t know that for sure.’

  ‘Yeah, we do,’ Prophet groused.

  Wheeling and heading south for the livery barn and his horse, he stopped suddenly and turned to his right. Tethered before the station house was Louisa’s black Morgan. Curious, Prophet walked over to the horse, then raked his gaze in a full circle around the station.

  He called her name, but it was a wasted breath. She was nowhere near. She’d been here, though. That was obvious.

  Mcllroy approached, frowning. ‘What’s with the horse?’

  ‘Belongs to a friend of mine.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? Well, where is he?’

  ‘She’s on the train.’ As Prophet said it, he knew it was true. She’d seen the duke’s train pull into town, realized the train was the Red River Gang’s next target, and somehow got her sneaky self aboard.

  Prophet chuckled without humor, shaking his head. Running a big, brown paw across his face, he said, ‘Damn, girl... you’re gonna get yourself killed yet.’

  ‘Your friend aboard the train is a woman?’ Mcllroy was thoroughly befuddled. ‘I don’t understand.’

  Prophet looked at him seriously. ‘All you need to understand, Deputy, is that train is gonna be robbed by the Red River Gang. And they won’t just rob it, either. They’ll probably butcher everyone onboard. You best run and inform the sheriff.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Prophet had untied the Morgan’s reins from the hitch rack and was jogging toward the livery barn, the Morgan following at a canter. ‘Where the hell do you think I’m goin’? I’m gonna get my horse and follow the train!’

  Louisa climbed over the rail at the end of the caboose and stood peering at the town dwindling before her, the flat, virtually treeless prairie rushing in on both sides. Glancing behind her, she saw the door into the caboose. There was a window in the door, and she crouched, backing up to the wall beside the door so she wouldn’t be seen by the man or men inside.

  She dropped to her butt to avoid the wind swirling under the roof’s slight overhang, and bit her lower lip. Okay, she was aboard the train. Now what was she going to do?

  For starters, she decided, she’d try to make her way to the passenger cars and look for the Duke. If she could only get past his brutes and talk to him, she might be able to convince him the train was headed for hell with a capital H. If not, well, she’d tried....

  There wasn’t much the Brit could do to her except have her expelled from the train at the next water stop—if they made it that far, that was. She doubted the man, arrogant as he’d appeared on the station platform in Fargo, was haughty enough to have her removed while the train was still moving.

  The worst that could possibly happen was that the gang would murder her when they murdered the others. But by God, sh
e’d die triggering her trusty six-shooter, and she wouldn’t die alone!

  Now, to get to the passenger cars ...

  Looking up, she saw the metal rungs climbing the caboose’s rear wall. Standing unsteadily as the train rocked and swayed, clattering over the rail seams, she grabbed the lowest rung, and climbed. When she poked her head over the roof, she was pleased to see a catwalk stretching from the caboose all the way to the locomotive, traversing every car.

  But when she’d hoisted herself onto the roof, she realized getting to the duke’s car wasn’t going to be as easy as it had first appeared. There was nothing to hold onto, and when she tried to stand, with the train rushing forward at a good twenty miles per hour and rocking and swaying this way and that, jerking over the seams, she nearly lost her balance and flew over the side.

  Deciding crawling was the safest strategy, she got down on her hands and knees and began putting one hand before each knee. When she came to the front of the caboose, she climbed down the ladder, crossed the vestibule, and began climbing the first of the two stock cars. Crawling into the wind was getting easier now, and before long she was nearing the end of the second stock car, and hearing voices raised in jovial laughter.

  She was approaching the duke’s car.

  ‘What... who the hell is that?’ inquired one of the Brits as Louisa descended the ladder on the stock car’s front wall.

  When she’d stepped onto the vestibule, she turned to the covey of well-dressed gents smoking stogies and standing about the open bay of the duke’s natty car. Several were holding shotguns with richly gleaming stocks. Some were polishing the guns with white cloths while others thumbed wads into the chambers—apparently about to start pot-shooting birds along the right-of-way.

  All froze, however, and turned wide-eyed, astonished looks at the girl who’d just appeared before them dressed in a plain gray skirt and brown poncho, her long hair tussled by the wind, her hat hanging down her back by the cord around her neck. Her face was flushed, her eyes red from windburn.

  The breeze tussling the red locks hanging down from his Texas hat, the duke edged forward, scowling and rolling his half-smoked stogie to the right side of his mouth. ‘Who are you?’ he said, with a slight, emphatic pause between each word.

  Louisa was about to answer but stopped when what sounded like an explosion from somewhere ahead of the train lifted on the wind. It was followed by the high-pitched shriek of the train’s brakes, throwing Louisa and the duke’s party off their feet.

  Louisa was vaguely aware of being tossed like a doll over several overstuffed chairs and into a wall before everything went black.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  PROPHET RODE HARD for several miles before he halted Mean and Ugly, dismounted the exhausted beast, and mounted Louisa’s Morgan, which he’d been leading by its bridle reins. Then he rode hard for another several miles before topping the rise and spying the train halted on the tracks below, puffs of black coal smoke issuing from its funnel-shaped stack.

  He’d heard the dynamite explosion followed by the flat cracks of pistol and rifle fire a good twenty minutes before, and he’d tried to keep from imagining what had been happening aboard that train in the meantime. He knew the dynamite had been used to blow up the tracks and cause the engineer to stop the train. He could guess what the pistol fire was all about.

  Now he produced his field glasses and did a quick scan of the train, which sat a hundred yards west, its engine sighing and panting like a steel dinosaur taking a respite from battle. Several bodies littered the grade amidst well-dressed men running around aimlessly. The Red River Gang, it appeared, had already gotten what they’d been after, and left.

  Leading Mean and Ugly, Prophet gigged the Morgan down the hill. He was about fifty yards from the train when he noticed several of the well-dressed gents, who were no doubt from the duke’s entourage, form a scraggly line and raise shotguns to their shoulders. They stood there, shoulder-to-shoulder, looking like a small, portly, out-of-uniform regiment waiting for Prophet to get within bird gun range.

  Scowling and impatient, Prophet reached into his saddlebags for a white handkerchief. He tied the handkerchief to the barrel of his Winchester, and held the gun high as he rode slowly toward the train, hoping one of the Britishers looking dazed and disheveled didn’t go ahead and shoot him anyway.

  The men kept the butts of their shotguns snugged against their shoulders and watched him critically, but no one fired.

  ‘Easy,’ Prophet said. ‘I’m here to help.’

  The Britishers appeared to believe him. Two of the four shotguns went down, and the other two men relaxed considerably.

  ‘Are you a policeman?’ a man in blood-streaked, snow-white muttonchops inquired.

  ‘Something like that,’ Prophet said, casting his gaze about the train, half appraising the damage, half looking for Louisa. Five men lay dead along the tracks, three of the bodies covered with blankets. Up near the engine, another was being tended by a man and a woman.

  ‘What happened here?’ Prophet asked the Brits.

  One dropped his shotgun to his side, wiped a stream of blood from his lip—they all appeared to have been roughed up some if not pistol-whipped a lot—and said, ‘Bandits attacked us. They stopped the train. They—’

  ‘They took the duchess!’

  ‘Took her?’ Prophet said. ‘Why?’

  ‘They’re holding her for ransom,’ another man carped, patting his mussed hair down.

  ‘They got all our money and valuables, shot the duke’s bodyguards, and took the duchess!’

  Prophet was still glancing around for Louisa. He heard women crying aboard one of the passenger cars, but there was no sign of Louisa.

  ‘Where’s the duke?’ Prophet asked, turning his head back to the men standing before him.

  ‘He went after them,’ the man with the muttonchops said with a shake of his head. ‘He and Senator Dawson. Imagine that. On foot.’

  ‘On foot?’

  ‘Yes. They released our horses from the stock car and scattered them to the four winds. The duke took after the ruffians with only his Wimbley twelve-gauge. Senator Dawson went after him.’

  ‘The duke was addled by the clubbing they gave him,’ another man added.

  ‘Yes, that explains it. Poor man. He and the duchess have only been married a year, don’t you know? Poor man. What a ghastly place, the West. What do you suppose lay in store for the duchess now? So close to her twenty-third birthday . . .’

  Prophet declined to answer that question. They might keep her alive long enough to pick up the ransom money, but she might not want to live that long....

  Thoughts of the duchess’s fate pointed Prophet’s concern back to Louisa. ‘Any of you men see a blond-headed girl aboard? She’d have been wearing a gray skirt and a brown poncho.’

  The man with the muttonchops blinked his eyes at Prophet puzzledly. ‘Well, yes ... yes ... the girl who climbed down from the stock car.’ His voice was breathy with wonder. ‘Who on earth was she?’

  Prophet’s heart picked up its beat. ‘Was?’ he exclaimed, whipping his head around the dead lying along the train. ‘Where the hell is she?’

  ‘They took her, too. Her and Harrington’s poor, sweet niece.’

  ‘Yes, they took the young, pretty ones—poor dears,’ the man called Harrington said, wagging his head and mopping at his sweaty forehead with a silk handkerchief. ‘Oh, my dear sweat Evelyn,’ the man complained, turning his gaze northward though the stalled train impeded his view. ‘Packed off with the duchess ...’

  ‘Shit!’ Prophet swore.

  He couldn’t help feeling more concerned for Louisa than for anyone else out here. He sympathized with the duchess and Harrington’s niece, but they were mostly just spoiled Brits to him—haughty English fops buying up pieces of the West for their sporting forays. He’d seen others like them, attended by vice-presidents or wealthy senators, shooting game from their private Pullman cars while the ladies sipped tea fro
m China.

  Prophet gigged the Morgan up to the engine, where a uniformed man was being tended by an older woman in a torn, dusty gown and a ruddy-skinned, wizened gent with a wide tie pierced with a diamond stick pin. Probably two of the duke and duchess’s attendants, Prophet thought.

  ‘Are you the engineer?’ the bounty hunter asked the uniformed man.

  The man nodded, glancing up from his bullet-pierced arm. ‘You the law?’

  ‘No, but they should be on their way soon. You and your crew sit tight. I’m going after the gang.’

  The man sized up Prophet, then said, ‘Well, they shouldn’t be hard to follow. They headed northwest, and they had three women with ‘em. They kidnapped the duchess for ransom, don’t you know?’ The engineer swore, apologized to the lady wrapping his arm, and returned his gaze to Prophet. ‘They’re also pullin’ a wagon.’

  ‘A wagon?’

  ‘Yeah, they took a wagon off the train to carry all the booty they stole. You know, trinkets and jewels and coins and whatnot....’

  ‘Good,’ Prophet said, meaning he was glad the gang had a wagon to slow them down. With both his horses tired out from the ride from Fargo, he wouldn’t be able to follow them with any speed. In fact, he’d have to give both mounts at least a fifteen-minute breather before pursuing the gang at all.

  With that consideration in mind, he gigged the Morgan around the panting engine, to the other side of the train. Dismounting, he tied the horses to one of the passenger cars, filled his hat from his canteen, and fed the water first to the Morgan, then to Mean and Ugly, who’d been studying the black horse with derision.

  When both horses were watered, Prophet donned his hat and looked around for the Red River Gang’s tracks. They weren’t hard to find, even in the tough prairie sod: A dozen horses and one wagon heading northwest.

  Heading for what? Did they have a hideout that way? If so, and if Prophet could penetrate it, would he be able to rescue Louisa and the two British women?

  One man against a small army?

  Prophet sighed and shook his head, but the urge to get moving made him itch all over. He had to give the horses another few minutes of rest, however. Louisa and the British gals were good as dead if his horses gave out. They probably were, anyway, but Prophet figured if he could follow them to their destination, the women would at least have a chance....