Ronnie squeezed his rifle tensely. “What now?”
Prophet scanned the ranch again. Finally, he lowered the glasses and turned to Ronnie. “Is there a direct trail between here and Bitter Creek?”
“The Mud Creek Trail is about as direct as it gets out here.”
“Would they take it?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Prophet spit. “We head up trail a ways, hunker down, and wait for Crumb, Polk, and whoever else to head for Bitter Creek.”
He and young Ronnie crawled backward down the hill then, well below the ridgeline, stood, and jogged down the grade to the horses.
They mounted and rode through rough country cut by draws and dry creek beds, seeing more cattle but twice as many black-tail deer and one rare black coyote with a white-tipped tail. Some Indian tribes regarded a brush with such a beast as bad luck; others had determined it good. Riding out here in Indian country, with a gunfight with white badmen imminent and only one man to back his play, Prophet silently prayed the coyote meant Crumb and Polk’s asses would both belong to him by this time tomorrow, and not the other way around.
Prophet wanted to intercept Crumb and Polk far enough away from the ranch that their gunfire could not be heard at the Jackrabbit headquarters. Near dark and after another hour’s ride, he and Ronnie hunkered on a slope strewn with rocks and boulders and stippled with wind-twisted pines. The trail cut through the narrow pass fifty feet below, a pale ribbon between steep, jagged walls.
Taking positions on either side of the trail, they waited through the long, starry night, watching and listening. They waited through the morning and early afternoon. Prophet was beginning to think Crumb had chosen a different route back to Bitter Creek when he spied movement south and west along the Mud Creek Trail, a half mile before the pass.
He raised his glasses, brought the seven riders into focus.
Henry Crumb, in his gray suit and bowler hat, rode at the head of the pack, beside a man dressed in a tailored dark suit with a high-crowned tan hat with a Texas crease. The man was as slightly built as Crumb, but square-shouldered, and his face looked slapped together from plaster, with a dark, buckhorn mustache waxed and curled high at the ends.
He rode stiff-backed and forward, butt lightly slapping the saddle. Holding his reins high and close to his chest, he stared intently over his black’s bobbing head—resembling for all the world a human hound scenting blood.
Prophet chewed his lower lip and chuffed. Grant “The Eagle” Schaeffer. The new marshal of Bitter Creek.
He glassed the others in the pack, saw four men dressed in drovers’ garb, six-shooters on their hips, rifles in their saddle scabbards. Deciding the four Jackrabbit riders were nothing special, just fair-to-middling firepower whose purpose was merely to back the Eagle’s play, he raised the glasses a notch.
Polk rode at the tail end of the pack, not looking quite so mild-faced today.
Anxiety creased his eyes as he slouched in the saddle, elbows rising high with his mount’s every lunge, his dusty dress coat flapping out behind him, the brim of his derby pasted against his high forehead. Several times he shook his head as if to clear it, and lowered his head to brush his nose against his right arm, once nearly losing his hat in the process.
“You and Crumb are at the end of your run, Wallace,” Prophet snarled as he glassed the man, who suddenly grabbed his saddle horn to keep from falling. Prophet snorted. “In spite o’ your nose candy, you know it.”
Prophet lowered the glasses, turned to where Ronnie hid in the rocks on the other side of the narrow defile, and raised his right arm. The kid waved. Grasping his Sharps in both hands, he doffed his hat and hunkered low between two boulders.
Prophet waited until the riders were within fifty yards, then scurried out from his rocky niche, leaping onto a flat-topped boulder below. He stood there, boots spread, his rifle held low across his thighs.
Absently, he chewed the quirley in the right corner of his mouth, staring, waiting.
Only a few seconds passed before Schaeffer spotted him, the gunman’s chin raising, his body tensing. The man held up a gloved hand; with the other he reined his horse to a halt.
The others checked their own mounts down and turned to the gunman curiously, several murmuring questions. Schaeffer replied by extending his right arm toward Prophet.
The others tensed, holding their reins tight in their gloved hands. Several shucked rifles from their saddle boots or revolvers from their cartridge belts. Crumb grabbed his own six-shooter and held the barrel in the air while staring toward Prophet, his horse prancing nervously beneath him.
Prophet glowered at the group through the rising dust, working the quirley from one corner of his mouth to the other. The riders were about thirty yards away and tightly bunched, well within rifle range.
When the group’s collective murmur had died and the horses had settled down, Prophet called, “Crumb, Polk, your trail ends here!”
The group just stared at him. Finally, Crumb glanced at Schaeffer, then slid his gaze back to Prophet. “Ha!”
Schaeffer turned his head to one side, muttered something to the others, then kneed his black stallion ahead, until he was nearly directly below Prophet. He looked up at the bounty hunter.
“Lou Prophet, I take it?” he called amiably.
Prophet rolled the quirley between his lips and smiled.
“Your reputation precedes you.”
Prophet shot a look across the canyon, pleased to see that Ronnie was staying out of sight, keeping his rifle where the sun couldn’t reflect off the steel. “Eagle, you’re ridin’ with the wrong bunch,” Prophet drawled.
Schaeffer smiled. He hadn’t drawn a weapon, but he had one hand on the big Colt jutting from the cross-draw position on his left hip. “Why don’t you go back to what you do best, Prophet? You’ll find no bounties here.”
“You got that wrong, Eagle. There’re two big bounties on Crumb and Polk.”
Crumb rose up in his stirrups and yelled angrily up the jagged canyon wall, “There are no bounties on my head!”
“Oh, yes,” Prophet said with a slow nod. “For what you done to Bitter Creek, enslaving the whole town, intimidating and killing those who bucked you—I got a bounty on your head. And it’s steep.”
Prophet turned to Schaeffer. “Turn both men over to me, and I’ll save you for another time and another place.”
The Eagle smiled. The confidence in the smile and casual way the Eagle sat his horse made Prophet lift his gaze along the canyon wall opposite, just in time to see a shadow move out from between two boulders and level a rifle at Ronnie.
Raising his Winchester, Prophet dropped to a knee. “Kid, above you!”
Chapter Twenty-One
The gunman on the opposite canyon wall took Prophet’s Winchester slug through his shoulder.
He spun around, dropping his rifle and slipping on the boulder he’d lighted on. With a shrill cry, he tumbled off the wall and plummeted like a potato sack to the canyon floor, landing with a crack and a grunt only a few feet before Schaeffer’s horse.
“Proph!” Ronnie yelled.
The kid extended an arm to indicate something above and behind Prophet. The bounty hunter spun on his knee as a man in a bullet-crowned tan hat and blue shirt leapt onto a rock and crouched.
He extended a Spencer rifle with a stock trimmed with brass tacks, and fired.
Prophet had seen it coming and threw himself against the canyon wall. The gunman’s slug sailed over Prophet’s head, spanging off the trail below and setting several horses to whinnying.
Ronnie fired at the sharpshooter, but the slug smacked into an arrow-shaped rock partially shielding the man.
Prophet raised his Winchester and fired two rounds, levering quickly, watching the slugs thump into the gunman’s chest, puffing dust from his shirt and blowing him back and out of sight.
Slugs slamming into the rocks and shrubs around him, Prophet hunkered down behind a boulder and pe
ered at the trail below. The gunfire had startled the horses, throwing the gang into disarray. Several men were being flung about by their shrieking mounts. Others had taken cover behind rocks and shrubs and were firing at Prophet and at Ronnie on the opposite wall.
Schaeffer was yelling orders Prophet couldn’t hear above the gunfire, whinnies, and clattering hooves.
He glanced above and around him, then scoured the opposite canyon wall. Seeing no other flanking riflemen, he glanced at Ronnie, nearly straight across the canyon, and allowed himself a taut smile.
The kid hunkered behind a rock, throwing lead down at the scattering gunmen, apparently unfazed by Schaeffer’s two sharpshooters. His slugs had already pinked two gang members, one of whom was dragging a bloody leg toward a wild mahogany shrub, while another remained on hands and knees in the middle of the trail, head hanging sickly. As Prophet raised his rifle, the man was mowed over by a fleeing pinto and rolled into a yucca patch, limbs akimbo.
Prophet extended his Winchester and fired quickly, catching as many riders as he could still out in the open. Several slugs spanged off the rocks beside him, spraying shards.
He bolted behind the boulder to his left, peered around the other side, and continued shooting, levering the Winchester, taking hasty aim, and eliciting cries and curses from below.
When the Winchester clicked empty, he ducked back behind the rock and thumbed shells from his cartridge belt. Meanwhile, shooting resounded from the trail, and Ronnie was pounding away with his Sharps.
“They’re tucked in too tight!” a man yelled from the trail. “Pull out and—” His sentence was cut off and punctuated by a warbling shriek.
Prophet thumbed the last shell into the Winchester’s breech, winced as a slug slammed into the rock a few inches from his face, then swung out from behind the rock, triggering two quick rounds while reconnoitering the trail.
The shooting had all but died, the bodies of two dead horses and several men littering the canyon floor.
Prophet lowered the Winchester and hunkered down, whipping his head around, looking for movement.
Silence. Smoke wafted around the canyon smelling like rotten eggs. Far off, a horse whinnied. Closer in but up the trail, a man groaned.
Prophet clamped down on what was left of his quirley and squinted at the opposite canyon wall. Ronnie poked his head out between two sharp-edged boulders, the rifle in his hands, his eyes round as saucers. As the kid moved farther out from between the rocks, a man in a checked shirt and tan vest rose from the slope just below him, raising a carbine where Ronnie couldn’t see him.
Prophet snapped his Winchester up and shot the man through the base of the neck, slamming him against the slope. He lost his hat and carbine and rolled onto his back, slid feet-first several yards down slope before a boulder broke his fall, holding him there, straight up and down against the slope, chin resting on his chest.
A rifle popped in the heavy silence.
Hearing the slug whistle past his left ear, Prophet hunkered down and snapped his gaze across the canyon, where Ronnie stood, staring down his Sharps’ smoking barrel.
A grunt sounded to Prophet’s left.
He turned to see a mustachioed man stumble backward several steps, his rifle dropping in his right hand while his left rose to his chest. Blood shone beneath his black-gloved hand as he sat brusquely down on a rock and cursed. Thin lips drew back from his mouth, raising the waxed mustache and showing the small, yellow teeth and the gap where one was missing from the lower jaw.
“Fuck,” Schaeffer said, his pale blue eyes twinkling in the west-angling sun. He didn’t look at Prophet, but stared vacantly across the canyon, pain spoking his eyes. His voice was deep and strangled. “Tell me... tell me that ain’t a kid that just shot me.”
Prophet spit out the bits of paper and tobacco remaining from his quirley. “Well, he’s eighteen. I reckon it depends on how you look at it. When I was eighteen ... well, never mind.”
Schaeffer sat there on the rock, wheezing and sighing and trying to plug the hole in his right center chest with his hand. It wasn’t working. Blood ran down from beneath the glove, soaking his collarless, pin-striped shirt and doeskin vest.
Finally, the man’s face bunched with fury. Cursing, he channeled the last of his remaining energy into his right hand, raising the rifle toward Prophet. He hadn’t expected to get a shot off, however. It was just the way he wanted to go out.
Obliging the man, Prophet raised his own Winchester and drilled a round through Schaeffer’s right temple, knocking his tan hat from his head and draping him back over the rock he’d been sitting on. The rifle fell against the rock, but remained in the Eagle’s clenched fist for several seconds before the fingers slowly released it and it clattered onto the gravel.
Prophet whipped around to regard the canyon.
No more shooting. That didn’t necessarily mean all the shooters were dead. A few could be hunkered down, waiting.
Seeing Ronnie making his way slowly down the opposite slope, a rifle in each hand, Prophet said without raising his voice, “Careful, boy.”
Ronnie didn’t look at him, just threw a hand up as he approached a dead man sprawled facedown over a shrub and kicked the man over with his right boot.
Prophet slowly made his way down the slope, investigating the bodies as he found them. All were dead or as good as dead.
He met Ronnie on the trail and began looking around for Crumb and Polk, finding Polk a hundred yards back up the trail, sprawled on his back with both hands pressed down on his gut. The trail showed scuff marks from where he’d dragged himself.
When Prophet’s shadow fell across Polk’s fair face, dark with two-day beard stubble, the druggist raised his head. He’d lost his hat and his domed forehead shone pale in the afternoon sun. Fear etched his gaze, and he panted.
The man gave a choked cry as Prophet squatted over him, patting him down for weapons. “Don’t worry, Polk.” He glanced at the man’s torn guts, then raised his cold eyes to Polk’s pain-clenched orbs. He stared hard, fighting the urge to finish the man. Better to let him lay here, let the bullet sear him and the vultures finish him off. “I’ll leave you for the devil.”
Prophet stood and began turning away to look for Crumb. Polk gasped. “Please ... you can’t just leave me. Help…”
Ignoring the man, Prophet walked back into the canyon, and met Ronnie approaching from the opposite direction. “Any sign of Crumb?”
The kid threw up his hands. “No sign of him.”
“And he wasn’t on your slope?”
Ronnie shook his head.
His heart increasing its beat, Prophet looked around at the sprawled Jackrabbit riders and the three dead horses. Blood and viscera had been strewn around like spilled paint.
Chest clenching against the death smells, Ronnie voiced Prophet’s own reluctant assessment. “He musta got away somehow …”
He hadn’t finished the sentence before Prophet began scrambling up the canyon’s west wall, heading for the horses tethered on the other side of the ridge.
Henry Crumb clung to the saddle horn of the galloping dun, as though to a buoy in a storm-tossed sea.
The horse thundered across a salt lick, followed a bend in the narrow trail, and dipped into a swale fetid with a rotting deer carcass. Crumb grunted against the horse’s left front shoulder, gritting his teeth as the horse’s lunging gallop thrashed his organs like dice in a cup. The beast bolted up the opposite slope, barely slowing for the grade, and continued across the prairie, dusting the sage in its wake.
The horse continued hell-for-leather for another hundred yards. Then it started to blow and rasp and gradually stopped. Crumb felt the heavy, musky heat rising from its back. It turned quarter-wise with a heavy sigh, and Crumb looked through the gauzy brown dust sifting behind him, eyes spoked with fear.
Twenty minutes earlier, when the shooting had first started, bullets buzzing like angry bees around the canyon, Crumb had frozen in his saddle. He’d l
ooked around in shock as bullets ripped through bodies, cracking bones and spraying blood. His head swam and his limbs turned to lead.
In spite of the iron grip he’d maintained on the town of Bitter Creek, no one had ever taken a shot at him. He’d never been physically assaulted in any way.
He was, at heart, a timid albeit evil man who’d managed to keep his stranglehold on Bitter Creek and to keep making money. But the closest he’d ever come to using force was simply directing others, like Marshal Whitman and Dean Lovell, to do so. He’d never actually had to use his fists or his guns and wouldn’t have known what to do had the need presented itself.
The gunfire had turned him to putty. Automatically, his knees had gripped the saddle of his skitter-hopping mount while his hands sawed back on the reins.
He’d felt the horse beginning to rear beneath him, and he clamped his jaws down hard, steeling himself. Just then a ricocheting slug slammed into a silver saddle ornament a half inch before his left knee. It twanged off the medallion, sparking and setting the horse to screaming.
Before Crumb knew what was happening, the horse was rocketing straight up the canyon trail.
Crumb slackened the reins and funneled all his energy into keeping his head low against the horse’s neck, wrapping both hands around the saddle horn, and holding on. He didn’t notice when his gray felt bowler blew off his head.
Eyes round with shock, he stared at the jagged line of rimrocks rising behind him, from which the breeze brought the pops and cracks of the rifle fire to his ears.
The two men Eagle Schaeffer had sent ahead of the main group, to reconnoiter the canyon and to foil the attack, were dead. Prophet and his cohort had the high ground. Even before Crumb had fled the canyon, the Jackrabbit riders were being ripped to shreds.
Crumb stared at the rimrocks, behind which the sun was slowly sinking, cloaking them in spruce-green shadows. The rifle fire died. Ten seconds later, two more reports sounded, then two more, and another.
Crumb stared toward the bloody canyon, mouth agape, his own blood draining from his face. He sat on the tired dun stony-eyed for several minutes.
The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6) Page 18