He did so, smearing a long path of the blood down between the girl’s breasts, feeling like a superstitious fool but too frightened and full of dread to care. At this point he’d have danced a jig on his hands around the old bitch’s smelly cave, if it had a chance of bringing Louisa back to health.
He looked at the crone. “What now?”
“Shh!”
She stared down at Louisa, hands on her thighs. Prophet thought she might be praying, but her eyes were open. Finally, the old woman slid the bobcat hide up to Louisa’s neck and sighed. She turned to Prophet, lifted the necklace over his head, snaked it over Louisa’s, letting the coyote skull rest on her chest with the hide pouch, and said, “Now, we see.”
Prophet spent a miserable day waiting around the cave door, which the crone kept covered with the grass mat. He paced, smoked, walked around the ridge and the village, accepted another plate from Chela but only picked at the corn tortillas and beans fried with spicy chicken.
His stomach was too knotted up for food.
He curried Mean and Ugly several times, trimming and tending all four hooves, adjusting the horse’s iron shoes, just to keep busy. When the sun fell behind the toothy western ridges again, and he’d heard nothing from the cave, he threw back several shots of tequila and rolled up in his blankets, forcing himself to sleep.
Early the next morning, he woke with a start, jerking his head up and poking his hat back off his forehead. He looked around wildly, his cocked Colt in his hand.
He’d heard something. What?
It came again, rising from inside the cave—a female voice so familiar in its insouciant demand and inherent priggishness that he felt as though the long, fine fingers of angels were caressing the strain from his heart.
“Lou!”
6
SIX WEEKS LATER, Prophet reined Mean and Ugly to a halt at the top of a low bench between craggy ridges in southern Wyoming Territory, a stone’s throw from the Colorado line. He shuttled his glance from a signpost standing bold and straight and backed by a flat-topped boulder along the trail’s right side, to the town sprawled in the shallow valley beyond.
“There it is,” the bounty hunter said, rising high in his stirrups, then easing his 230 muscular pounds back against the cantle. “Juniper. Damn fine-lookin’ place, sittin’ down there along that little stream.”
He glanced at Louisa, who reined her brown-and-white pinto up beside him and stared sullenly down at the saddle through the strands of her blond, wind-tussled hair. “I said—damn fine-lookin’ village in one right purty settin’—wouldn’t you say, Miss Persnickety Bitch?”
They’d argued three-quarters of the trail up from Mexico, over everything from Prophet’s snoring keeping Louisa awake at night to her intolerance of his poor dishwashing abilities. Thus his new pet name for her, which she’d been ignoring to get his goat. As irksome as she was, and intolerant of his unheeled ways, he was as happy as a front-tit calf that she’d regained her health during the two months she’d spent recuperating in Rocas Altas, with the singular Sor Magdalena acting as her own private nursemaid.
“Kind of hard to tell from here,” she said, lifting her canteen from around her saddle horn and plucking the cork from its mouth with her gloved left hand, always leaving the right one free in case she needed to reach for one of her pearl-gripped Colts in a hurry. “You know how you are, Lou. You get something in your mind in a certain way, it’d take the Devil’s own hounds to wrestle it out of your craw.”
Prophet popped the cork on his own canteen and arched a sandy, sun-bleached brow at her. “Huh?”
She hiked a shoulder as she drank from the canteen as gracefully, Prophet absently mused, as a sixty-year-old schoolmarm would drink from a teacup that had been in the family for over a century. Only, the schoolmarm likely couldn’t shoot the eye out of a galloping border bandit at a hundred and fifty yards.
Louisa lowered the canteen, sucking the excess moisture from her rich, lower lip, brushing a gloved hand across her chin, and favoring Prophet with a cool, hazel stare. “If you suddenly got it into that big mule’s head of yours that the Sonora desert at high summer was about to see a boom in the ice trade, it would take your drowning in a melted ocean of it to convince you otherwise.”
“That ain’t true!” Prophet took a quick sip then pulled his canteen down sharply, indignantly. “I just like to look on the bright side of things, and I don’t see nothin’ wrong in doin’ so. You’re too negative—you know that? In fact, if a golden waterfall suddenly appeared right before your persnickety eyes, Miss Bonnyventure, why, you’d . . .”
Prophet let his voice trail off.
He stared at the girl regarding him with cool haughtiness, and the anger leached from his eyes. A more beautiful, albeit snooty, face he had never seen. It was heart-shaped, with a perfect, pug nose and the rich bee-stung mouth of a high-priced china doll . . . and no less pretty for having been abused so badly by Major Montoya back in that infernal Mexican hoosegow.
And seeing the few lingering remnants of the merciless beating Louisa had taken—a little graying around her eyes, a pale white scar on her right cheek, a not-quite-healed scab on her lower lip—Prophet realized that no one had more reason to look at life through shit-colored glasses than his beautiful, young partner, who had endured more than her share of misery in her twenty short years.
A rose of tenderness blossomed just behind his forehead and between his eyes. He sidled Mean and Ugly up as close as he dared to the girl’s pinto, wrapped a big arm around her shoulders, drew her to him, tipped her head back, and closed his mouth over hers, kissing her tenderly.
“Lou, dangit!” she cried when the kiss had continued for nearly a minute, pulling away from him, gasping and clamping a hand over the crown of her tan felt hat before Prophet, in his overzealous affection, knocked it off her head. “Did you save me from the Rurales only to finish me off by sucking all the air out of my lungs, you ape?”
Prophet donned his hat. “I’m just damn glad to have you back, girl. And I’m pleased as the queen’s own punch you agreed to make a fresh start with this old saddle tramp.”
“You’re not a saddle tramp. You’re a bounty hunter.” She reached over to brush a dried seed from the three-day growth of sandy beard on his broad, hard-lined face—a face that some would say was far too big, weathered, and scarred to be called handsome. “As am I,” she added.
“Not anymore. You, Miss Bonnyventure, are about to join the ranks of the good, respectable citizens of Juniper, a town every bit as well-heeled as its name.”
“Juniper, huh?”
Louisa stepped down from her pinto, tossed Prophet her reins, and strode into the rocks and brush beside the trail, her brown wool riding skirt buffeting about her long, well-turned legs and the tops of her undershot leather boots adorned with silver spurs. She scrounged around behind the town sign and the boulder flanking it and held up a gray-weathered plank announcing HELLDORADO in badly faded letters that might have been green at one time.
Louisa smiled cockily. “It appears to me that the good town of Juniper was once known by another name entirely. One bespeaking nothing so much as a hotbed of frivolous behavior and corruption of the lowest kind. Painted women and murderous rogues. Just the kind of town you once favored, Lou. You and your friend the Devil, or Ole Scratch, as you call him.”
She grabbed the reins back from him and swung up into her saddle.
“You’re gonna like it here, damnit,” Prophet stubbornly assured the girl as they set off down the bench, each taking a track of the two-track wagon trail. “Helldorado was what the place was called—right appropriately—back before it was cleaned up by an old buddy of mine, the mossy-horned town tamer, Hiram Severin. Or ‘Hell-Bringin’ Hiram,’ as he’s been called in the illustrated newspapers.”
Prophet chuckled. “I picked Juniper for you an’ me special, ’cause Hell-Bringin’ Hiram assured me it’s as tame as any in the Rockies—tamer than most—and it ain’t likely we’
ll be lured back to our crazy, sharp-horned ways here.”
“We’ve tried this before, Lou.”
“Tried what before?”
“Living lives with pianos in them, and picket fences, and a red stable behind a white frame house.”
“No,” Prophet said. “You tried it. Back in Seven Devils. And that was one bad piece of luck, Louisa. As bad a piece as I’ve seen—or had seen till I pulled you out of that Rurale perdition. But I haven’t tried it. You see—that’s the difference. Maybe if we both walk the straight and narrow road, we won’t so easily veer off into the tall and uncut.”
He glanced at the girl riding off his right stirrup. She held her head forward, saying nothing. She hadn’t said anything about what had happened to her back in Montoya’s private quarters, and Prophet hadn’t asked. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but if she ever needed to tell him, she would.
One thing he did know—it had been hell. Otherwise, Louisa wouldn’t have let him talk her into giving settling down another try. She hadn’t jumped into the idea with both feet, but she hadn’t slammed the door on it, either.
When Prophet had mentioned it late one night outside Sor Magdalena’s cave and mapped out his plan about heading for Wyoming—about as far from Mexico and all the horrible stuff that had occurred there as one could get and not find himself hip-deep in a Canadian winter—she’d merely hiked a shoulder, nodded, lain back against her saddle, and rolled up in her blankets.
It had been hell, all right. And Prophet had held her every night while she’d screeched and squealed and sobbed it all out in her dreams.
Maybe here in Juniper, he thought as the first corrals and stock pens and a clattering windmill pushed up along the trail, she’d find relief from those nightmares and could finally put all of her sharp-edged memories to rest.
The town was good-sized and sprawling, though obviously not planned out very well. The main street sort of zigzagged, and new buildings were going up amidst the rubble of the old. There were still tent shacks here and there and log buildings that were part canvas and that bespoke the days when Helldorado was a hell-stomping hiders’ and miners’ camp. Whores’ cribs flanked the tent saloons, and miners’ shacks stood along the stream that angled along the town’s north edge.
But everywhere Prophet looked as he and Louisa clomped along the street, weaving around parked or moving wagons and pausing as two muddy drovers chased a runaway bull from one side of the street to another while a shaggy collie dog nipped at the bellowing beast’s kicking rear hooves, there were big two- and three-story wood frame buildings with false fronts announcing hotels and saloons and sandwich shops and breweries and laundries and ladies’ hat shops and general stores and even toy stores and entire stores given over to books! Most were so new that the resin in the wood made the town smell like a pine forest—albeit a pine forest near a stockyard.
In the midst of it, and planted right smack in the middle of the street, with an old saloon tent on one side and Machiavelli’s Mining Supplies on the other, stood a tall, narrow, richly ornate building of red brick and sandstone, and which large letters formed of black brick across the second story identified as the Juniper Opera House.
Prophet stopped Mean and Ugly in front of the place, which was barricaded off from the street by boards and sandbags, likely to keep runaway cows from breaking out the windows, and poked his hat off his forehead, whistling his awe.
“What’s the matter—you’ve never seen an opera house before?” Louisa said in her condescending way.
“Why, sure I have. Even seen a gent up in Leadville last winter—fella named Oscar Wilde—give a talk on some dead Italian fella in the Tabor Opera House. Sissiest damn fool I ever did see, but he could talk the corn off a cob. But I sure as hell never expected to find an opry place as fancy as this one here this far off the beaten Wyoming path.” Prophet chuckled and narrowed a hopeful eye at Louisa. “I reckon this place is even more civilized than I thought it was.”
A man screamed behind them, and Prophet and Louisa turned to see that the bull had run up onto the boardwalk fronting a men’s clothing shop, pinning a tall gent in a long, clawhammer coat and beaver opera hat against the building while the two drovers yelled and waved their hats and the dog barked and danced.
“I’d say it’s still got some Helldorado in it,” Louisa said with a chuckle.
Prophet gigged Mean and Ugly around the opera house, continuing up the main drag. “Well, it ain’t New York City.”
“So what do you have in mind for us here, Lou? I can’t sing, so that sort of precludes the opera house. And you can’t, either, in spite of your best efforts while bathing. Thank god that only comes around once a year!”
“Very funny, Miss Bonnyventure.”
“I’ve told you—it’s Bonaventure, you lout.”
“Look around,” Prophet said, swinging his gaze from one side of the street to the other. “There’s every kind of shop you can think of. And look there, on the door of that haberdashery place. ‘Help Wanted. Query Within.’”
“I can’t see you selling buttons to old ladies in picture hats, Lou.”
Prophet glanced to his left, and a well-dressed gent waved to him from the covered boardwalk in front of the Federated Bank and Trust of Southern Wyoming Territory. Prophet flushed and turned away sharply but checked Mean and Ugly down.
“You got my funny bone, Miss Bonnyventure.” He pointed toward a boxlike, nondescript building ahead and on the street’s right side. “There’s a bathhouse. Why don’t you go on over and scrub some trail dust off your purty little hide without starting a riot amongst the men folk. I’ll be along in a minute.”
“Where’re you going?”
Prophet hesitated. “I’m gonna look for a livery barn.” “We passed three.”
“Will you quit?” He jerked his chin at the bathhouse. “Go on and get yourself cleaned up now, and I’ll see if I can scrounge up enough pocket jingle to buy you a steak and one o’ them sarsaparillas you love so much.”
“You’re broke.”
“Then you’ll buy me a steak and a beer.”
With a haughty chuff, Louisa booted the pinto up the street. As she pulled up to one of the three hitchracks fronting the bathhouse, Prophet reined Mean over to the bank, where the well-dressed gent who’d waved and who also wore the five-pointed star of a county sheriff on the lapel of his black frock coat stood with a man even better dressed though slighter in build and puffing a long, black cheroot.
“Well, look what the damn cat dragged in,” growled Hell-Bringin’ Hiram Severin, standing beside the gent with the cigar while holding the flaps of his coat back from the two ivory-gripped Colts positioned for the cross draw on his lean hips. Beneath the brim of his black derby, he had a face like a crumbling old barn, and his knife-slash mouth was capped with a silver, soup-strainer mustache through which a gold front tooth flashed in the afternoon sunshine.
“What cat?” said the man next to him, puffing his cheroot as his black eyes strayed across the street to where Prophet had parted with Louisa. “It looked like a blond dragged him into town, and a pretty one at that.” Not quite as old as the sheriff, who was in his early sixties, this man was hatless, with elegant silver-streaked hair combed straight back from a prominent widow’s peak, and a heavy Spanish accent.
“Nah, she didn’t drag me.” Prophet reined up in front of the boardwalk. “I had to drag her, though fortunately she didn’t kick and scream too damn loud. It’ll be the gents in the washhouse who’ll be kickin’ and screamin’ when she starts takin’ her clothes off.”
Chuckling, the big, trail-worn bounty hunter stepped down from his saddle and, lifting his double-barreled shotgun up over his head and hanging it from his saddle horn by its wide leather lanyard, extended his hand to his old pal, Hiram Severin. “How’n the hell you been, you old chicken thief?”
“Better’n you look, ya damn brush wolf!” Severin pumped Prophet’s hand with exuberance, and turned to the well-attired
Mexican. “Don Jose Encina, bank president and mayor of Juniper, please meet your new gold guard, Lou Prophet.”
7
PROPHET REMEMBERED ENCINA’S name from the telegram he’d received from Severin in response to his inquiry about employment in the sheriff’s fair town. “Don, pleased to make your acquaintance. Sorry for the trail dust and foul odor, but I aim to fix that situation over to the bathhouse in two jangles of a whore’s bell.”
“The pleasure is mine, Senor Prophet,” Encinca said, tapping ashes from his smoldering cheroot. “I have heard much about you from Sheriff Severin. Your inquiry for employment came at a most opportune time for us both, as I’d no sooner heard you were looking for work here in Juniper than I lost my head rider to an unfortunate horse accident, and the sheriff strolled into my office with your telegram under his hat.”
“Well, then, I reckon we’re both dancin’ in high cotton!” Prophet chuckled. “When do I start?”
“Would be tomorrow be too early? I need a short run from . . .”
The bank president’s eyes drifted past Prophet and into the street behind him. Hiram’s Severin’s gaze had wandered in the same direction, so Prophet swung around to see what they were looking at so intensely and felt his belly tighten.
“Ah, shit,” he muttered.
Louisa was riding over from the direction of the bathhouse, within twenty yards and closing and cocking her head to one side, a suspicious look sitting hard on her pretty, heart-shaped, hazel-eyed face.
Prophet set a gloved fist on his hip. “Louisa, damnit, I told you to go on over to the bathhouse.”
Louisa blinked and curled her upper lip at him. “You’re not my boss, you two-timing son of a muskrat. What are you up to?”
“None of your damn business.”
Helldorado Page 5