The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6)

by Peter Brandvold

  Prophet figured she was barely over twenty, though her manner was that of an older woman, one who’d been saddled with too much responsibility at a young age. Something told Prophet she had no mother.

  Gently, a thin woman in wash-worn homespuns, who’d come over from one of the nearby cabins and shanties, said in a slight British accent, “Come on now, Miss Fianna. These men can’t ride after Scanlon, face his gun wolves. Why, they’d be killed! We’d all be widows!”

  “Everyone who crosses Scanlon ends up dead,” agreed a short, portly man in coveralls and a duck coat, a wad of chew bulging his fat red cheek as he stared somberly down at the bodies.

  “Sure would like to see an end to Scanlon’s hell-raising, Miss Fianna,” another man said. “But, well, you know—”

  Prophet’s face and ears had been warming for the past several minutes. “Oh, for chrissakes,” he finally blurted out, amazed by the townsmen’s lack of spine.

  He figured he didn’t need to introduce himself; in a town this size, everyone knew who he was by now.

  He shot a look around the crowd. “Your lawmen have been murdered. Murdered and hung. No citizen with half a teaspoon of sand would stand around while the killers rode free.” He stopped and stared at the men, who avoided his passionate gaze. “I’ll track the men who did this, but I won’t go alone. I’ll need at least eight of you to even up the odds.”

  He paused to study the crestfallen faces around him. “Who’s in?”

  He looked around the crowd. It took nearly a minute for one hand to raise. It started a slow, short ripple through the crowd, at the end of which Prophet counted eight raised hands.

  “All right,” the bounty hunter said with a nod. “You meet me out in front of the jailhouse in an hour, with saddled horses and at least two days worth of provisions.”

  The men who’d raised their hands slinked away from the crowd, looking regretful, the others watching as though the volunteers’ names had been called by the Grim Reaper. A couple of women clung to them, sobbing.

  The girl knelt over her father, the dead man’s hand clasped in both of hers. She gazed up at Prophet through two brown tear puddles, her upper lip quivering.

  “Thank you, Mr. Prophet.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Prophet,” the girl had said. The phrase echoed in Prophet’s brain as he rode at the head of the eight-man column curling into the foothills of the Laramie Mountains, south of Bitter Creek.

  “Thank you, Mr. Prophet,” he mimicked now, tipping his hat brim down to keep the sun from his face, glancing back to make sure the faint-hearted townsfolk were still on his trail. “Thank you, hell. Thank you for gettin’ yourself killed dusting outlaws you never even heard of, for folks you don’t owe a damn thing. And hell, there ain’t even any reward involved!”

  “What’s that, Mr. Prophet?” the man named Wallace Polk said, riding directly behind the horse Prophet had borrowed from the owner of the Bitter Creek Federated Livery Barn and Wagon Rental rent-free, since he was riding on the town’s business.

  “Uh, I was just sayin’ the trail must head into the Laramies.”

  “I’m not a tracker, but that’s how it looks, I reckon.”

  “Scanlon have a ranch out here?”

  “That’s what people say, but I’ve never known anyone who knows where it is. Lawmen have tried to track him before, to no avail.”

  “To no avail, eh?”

  This asshole Scanlon seemed to have everyone in Bitter Creek buffaloed like captive white girls at a Kiowa powwow.

  Poor Whitman. Poor Fianna.

  “I would have to be around when it happened, though, wouldn’t I? Goddamn my luck!”

  “What’s that again, Mr. Prophet?”

  “Uh...” The trouble with riding alone so much was that talking to yourself became such a habit that you often didn’t even know you were doing it. “I was just sayin’ we best stop at the spring yonder, give the horses a blow and a drink.”

  They stopped for fifteen minutes, climbed back into their saddles, and rode until the sun set behind the western mountains, cloaking the killers’ trail. As they rode, Prophet learned from several others that Scanlon did indeed have a ranch somewhere in the Laramie Mountains. No one knew exactly where.

  The outlaw leader had once ridden the owlhoot trail in Texas before he and his son, Rick, drove a small herd into Wyoming and made a halfhearted attempt to earn an honest living. It didn’t take the Scanlons long to learn they just weren’t cut out for the backbreaking labor a profitable stock business required. Before their second Wyoming winter, they’d formed their own owlhoot gang of misfits from Texas and Missouri and started preying on stagecoaches, freight trains, and isolated banks like that in Bitter Creek.

  When they weren’t breaking the law in obvious ways, they made general nuisances of themselves in Bitter Creek, where Marshal Whitman had been growing too old and weary to do much about it. After every big job they pulled, they hightailed back to their ranch in the godforsaken Laramies, the compound of which no lawman had ever been able to find.

  Dry camping in a hollow, the posse nibbled jerky for supper and washed it down with tepid spring water.

  Prophet wanted no fires, in case the killers were watching their back trail. To his surprise, the other members of the posse did not complain. In fact, though they’d ridden hard all day and most of the men were Main Street businessmen, unaccustomed to long days in the saddle, there had been little grumbling at all.

  Maybe they’d only needed a leader to help them rise to the challenge of running down a gang of cold-blooded killers.

  Each posse member took turns keeping watch throughout the night. At the first flush of dawn in the eastern sky, they all rose, ate more jerky with water, tacked up their horses, and continued riding south. They rode silently, with grim determination, with a fearful but purposeful air.

  At two o’clock in the afternoon, with a brassy Wyoming sun beating down on the rocky knolls and sandstone buttes, they traced a circuitous route through a long valley, wending through the rabbit brush and wild mahogany. At the head of the column, Prophet halted his sweat-soaked mount abruptly and raised his right hand for the others to do likewise.

  “What is it, Mr. Prophet?” asked the mild-faced Polk, who ran the tiny drugstore he called the Health Tonic and Drug Emporium beside the jailhouse. “Time for another break? I sure could use one. My saddle galls are acquiring saddle galls.”

  “I agree,” said Milt Emory, riding beside the druggist. He was a lean man with a high forehead, deep-set eyes, and wearing a threadbare white shirt, suit slacks, and brogans. Long, sweat-soaked hair hung down from his floppy-brimmed black hat. Owner of the Bitter Creek Valley Lumber Company, Emory had put his dull twin sons in charge while he was away, and the worry of it shone in his dark, heavy-browed eyes. “I think my—”

  “Shh.” Prophet squinted into the distance, across the brows of two hills, onto a bench furry with dusty green scrub. The flash came again, like the reflection off glass or metal, amidst the scrub at the bench’s peak.

  His heart increased its rhythm, but he kept his voice low and calm as he half-turned in his saddle to regard the others with gravity. “Boys, real nice and easy now, we’re headin’ into that ravine yonder—ahead and right. Real casual ... like we’re all just headin’ for a shady place to smoke.”

  He gigged his buckskin ahead and quartered the horse right, following a meandering game trail off the rise. The others followed, murmuring curiously.

  “Mr. Prophet, what is it?” Polk asked, riding off the tail of the bounty hunter’s buckskin.

  “I think we’re bein’ set up nice and sweet for a drygulchin’.” As Prophet told Polk about the reflection he’d seen on the bench about two hundred yards ahead, he slipped his Colt from its holster and inserted a fresh shell in the chamber beneath the hammer, which he usually kept empty for safety reasons.

  He had a feeling it wouldn’t be long before he’d need all six rounds and more.

  Chapter
Seven

  Wallace Polk looked around, frowning, swinging his incredulous, blue-eyed gaze from left to right. “You mean, you think the Scanlon Gang’s nearby?”

  “I’d love to think it was some circuit-ridin’ sky pilot readin’ the Book of Common Prayer around a coffee fire with a tin pot makin’ those reflections, but we best assume it’s the Scanlon boys linin’ us up in their rifle sights. If it really is some harmless drifter, I’ll be the first to apologize with my hat in my hands, but for the time bein’, I want you boys to start a coffee fire of your own, at the bottom of this here ravine.”

  “What’s the point in that?” asked the portly, pie-headed banker, Ralph Carmody, his face red as his black Morgan negotiated the grade, throwing the banker forward in his saddle so that he had to push off the horn to keep from crushing the family jewels. Turning in his own saddle to look behind, Prophet noted the gray, curly-headed man, pushing sixty, had sweated up a good, gray derby.

  “You hunt birds, Mr. Carmody?”

  “Waterfowl,” the banker said in a pinched voice with a nod.

  “Well, look at the coffee fire like a bunch of decoys you lay out on a slew of an autumn morn ... just at the edge of the cattails.”

  “I see,” Milt Emory said, sounding none too happy. “We’re gonna sort of call them in ... to us.”

  “Now we’re talkin’ the same lingo,” Prophet said as he brought his horse to a halt in the crease between two hills, at the edge of a shallow, narrow gully filled with briars.

  As he tied the buckskin to a wild plum bush, he told the others his plan. “Gather some wood and build a fire. Not too big, not too small. Throw some green leaves on it, so it smokes up nice... but not too nice. Too much smoke might make those killers suspicious. Just a little, so they’ll write us off as tinhorns who don’t know any better than to send up smoke signals.”

  “I’d know better than to do that,” Carmody muttered indignantly, picking cockleburs from the deerskin leggings he wore over his fawn trousers.

  “When you’ve got the fire going,” Prophet ordered the group, “climb to just below the brow of that hill.” He pointed west, to the low, rounded ridge. “Belly down and take your hats off, and for God’s sake, don’t show your faces over the ridge top. Keep your rifles out of sight too.”

  “What are you gonna do, Mr. Prophet?” Polk asked, shucking his shiny Winchester from his saddle boot. His mild blue eyes glittered excitedly, like sun-shot marbles.

  Prophet dug in his saddlebags until he found his moccasins—a ratty but comfortable old pair for which he’d traded an old Ute war chief a deck of cards showing naked saloon girls. He sat on a grassy hummock, tossed the moccasins down beside him, and began kicking off his boots.

  “It’s what we’re gonna do—you, me, and Ronnie,” the bounty hunter said. “We’re gonna sneak around the north side of this hill, hunker down on that shelf yonder, and see if our decoy attracts any game. If so, the boys here will have them in their rifle sights from the east, and we’ll have them from higher ground in the north.”

  “You ready?” Prophet asked Polk and the young man named Ronnie Williams—a sullen but earnest young man, banker Carmody’s grandson—who did odd jobs around town, including stringing chicken wire and digging privy holes.

  He had longish, strawberry-blond hair under a brown derby hat, a spade-shaped beard, scraggly mustache, and thin lips that rarely smiled. His old Spencer rifle had seen better days, the cracked stock held together with wire and twine, but the others said Ronnie was the best deer and pronghorn hunter in town. Prophet figured a sharpshooter would come in handy atop the ledge he was heading for.

  The kid nodded solemnly, eyes wide.

  Polk licked his lips and squeezed his well-oiled Winchester. “Lead the way.”

  “Don’t make any moves until I do,” Prophet told the others. “Any questions?”

  “Just one thing,” Sorley Kitchen said—a wiry man, pushing fifty, dressed in faded denims and a blue-checked shirt, who walked with a pronounced limp.

  A former camp cook who’d fallen from his own wagon during a stampede, Kitchen repaired pots and pans and painted houses on occasion, when someone in town could afford paint.

  “Could we actually brew coffee over the fire? I sure could go for a cup of joe!” He smacked his lips.

  Prophet chuffed. “Sure—why not?” he muttered as he turned and headed north along the base of the western hill.

  Somewhere above, in the faultless blue sky, a hawk shrieked. He hoped it wasn’t a bad omen. He wanted to nail the killers, but he also wanted to get these tinhorns back to Bitter Creek alive. And himself.

  Prophet led Polk and Ronnie Williams about fifty yards north of the other posse members then west another fifty yards and up a steep rise. It was a moderately hard climb, with the layered, chalky shale giving way beneath their boots so that several times each man slipped and had to grab junipers and sage shrubs for purchase.

  Once, young Ronnie grabbed a dwarf chokecherry under which a diamondback was napping. The snake woke and struck, nipping the kid’s shirtsleeve before Ronnie jerked his hand back. He slid several feet back down the slope on his butt. But the excitement gave him an adrenaline burst, and ten seconds later he was sitting on the shelf’s crest beside Prophet and Polk.

  He was breathing hard and he looked flushed, but when Polk asked him if he was all right, he just grinned and gave a nervous chuckle, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the shirt sleeve in which two tiny round holes showed, a half inch from the cuff’s bone button.

  The three crawled to the southern lip of the shelf and hunkered behind boulders shaped like squashed mushrooms. Prophet peered through a notch in the rock, casting his gaze out and down at the flat, scrub-tufted ground between the hill behind which the rest of the posse lay hidden, and the flat-topped butte where he’d seen the sun flashes.

  From behind the low hill to his left, a shaggy mare’s tail of smoke rose. Just about the right size, Prophet thought. The kind of fire the members of a tinhorn posse might start if they got a little sloppy about the wood they used for a cook fire.

  Prophet looked at the flat directly beneath the shelf.

  If there were indeed men on the butte—and he was going to feel like a fool if there weren’t—they’d have to traverse that stretch of sage and rabbit brush to investigate the smoke wafting from the posse’s coffee fire.

  If there were indeed men on the butte ...

  After fifteen minutes, he was wondering if the reflections he’d seen had only been that of the afternoon sun off mica shards or water from a spring. If so, he was wasting precious time while the killers hightailed deep into the Laramies.

  Gazing through the notch, Prophet was about to spit a curse through pinched lips when he ducked suddenly and felt adrenaline spurt in his veins. On the flat, he’d spied movement behind a frowzy cottonwood stand and a tangled patch of wild plums.

  To his right, Polk had seen his reaction. “What is it?” the druggist asked.

  Prophet didn’t say anything. Casting another careful glance through the notch, he again saw movement—a shoulder and part of a hat moving through the rabbit brush on the other side of the trees.

  “Gentlemen, I think we have a barn dance,” Prophet whispered to Polk and Ronnie, who were lying tensely on their elbows, holding their rifles with iron grips. “In about a minute, we should know for sure.”

  He peered through the notch again, saw three... four ... five men moving through the brush along the base of the shelf. The men walked abreast, about ten to fifteen feet apart. They held rifles across their chests as they traced serpentine courses through the high desert foliage, staring straight ahead at the ridge before them and at the shaggy white smoke billowing and tearing against the sky.

  Prophet bit the inside of his cheek and felt the blood coursing slowly but purposefully through his veins. Too impatient to wait where they’d been, the owlhoots had taken the bait.

  He turned to Polk and Ronnie. “You bo
ys stay here. When I start shootin’, pick a man out of the group and shoot from the top of these rocks. I’m gonna go down and storm ’em, try to take ’em by surprise.”

  He looked at the two men sidelong and added wryly, “Just don’t shoot me in the back.”

  Polk gulped and adjusted his derby. “You got it, Mr. Prophet.”

  Prophet had grabbed his Winchester and risen to his feet. He turned back to Polk. “Folks who call me ‘mister’ make me nervous.”

  With that he jumped onto the mushroom-shaped rocks at the edge of the shelf. Quickly scouting the slope below, he scrambled from one rock to another, swiftly making his way down the shelf’s gently sloping, rock-strewn wall, keeping his eyes on the men below.

  He’d get in as close as he could before cutting loose with the Winchester…

  He’d just leapt a low shrub, landing on a flat boulder about halfway down the slope, when one of the men turned and saw him. He was the third man out from the slope, wearing black jeans, black vest, and a wide-brimmed black hat.

  “Hey!” he called to the others. Wheeling, he dropped to a knee and raised his rifle to his shoulder.

  Before the man could fire, Prophet snapped his own rifle to his shoulder and squeezed the trigger. The whip crack of the rifle echoed off the buttes and hills. The killer’s rifle popped as he flew backward off his feet, the slug sailing skyward.

  The others had turned to Prophet now. They all fired at once as he leapt onto another rock to his right, crouched, and fired again. The man closest to him whipped his head back with the force of the .44 blow to his temple, did several dancelike pirouettes before tripping over a log.

  One of the others cursed loudly and ran back for the cover of the cottonwoods. The others dropped where they’d been when they’d first spotted Prophet and began kicking up a furious fusillade. Their faces bunched with frustration as Prophet avoided their bullets by hopping like an Indian from rock to rock, zigzagging down the mountain, pausing on rocks only to raise the Winchester to his shoulder and trigger shots before leaping onward.