Lola laughed.
Prophet helped her onto her horse, and they galloped toward Jubilee.
DEVIL BY THE TAIL
From The Life and Times of Lou Prophet, Bounty Hunter by HEYWOOD WILDEN SCOTT
The old roarer and I became fast friends.
One session in his smoky room, sipping whiskey and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes while he recounted the tales of his life from the mountains of north Georgia to the western frontier and beyond, led to another night . . . another . . . and yet another, until we’d gotten a few weeks in and I’d filled up several notebooks, dulled a few nibs, and emptied several ink pots.
We stayed up too late on some nights and endured the remonstrations of the henlike harpy who oversaw the night-shift attendants. Yet, we soldiered on, keeping our voices down . . . our old-man coughing and guffawing (some of the tales were quite wonderfully bawdy and humorous) as furtive as possible . . . while Lou palavered on in his petal-soft, gentling rolling accent fairly dripping with a soft, Southern spring rain and rife with the perfume of dogwood blossoms.
As I said, his room was sparsely furnished.
There was the cursory small bed with a lumpy mattress and a single pillow of striped ticking. There was a small wooden table, two straight-back chairs, an electric lamp, and a small shelf trimmed with a single photograph. It was the only photograph displayed anywhere in the room. In fact, it was the only decoration of any kind in his dusky, smoke-hazy quarters.
It was an old ambrotype photo in a velvet-lined, hinged case with a clasp. The gilt-washed case was open and sitting upright, displaying the photograph of a beautiful young blond woman in a calico blouse, long hair twisted into sausage curls tumbling to her shoulders, rich lips set in a firm line, a fiery, warriorlike defiance in her eyes.
The young woman sat in an ornately scrolled and upholstered armchair, probably on a photographer’s set in Dodge City or Abilene or some such, and she held a Winchester repeating rifle across her skirted lap. Her right finger, clad in what appeared to be a kid glove, was curled through the rifle’s trigger guard, as though she were ready and raring at a moment’s notice—at the first scream of a defenseless child, say, or a horrified mother’s wail issuing from a near street—to snap up the long gun and commence firing.
Chapter 1
“Mean and Ugly, I got a question for you,” Lou Prophet said as he and his appropriately named horse made their way along a dusty, meandering West Texas trail. “Did that jasper up there in them rocks see me just now? And, if he saw me, is he about to snuff my wick and plant my ass?”
Mean and Ugly gave an ambiguous snort, rippled a wither, and kept walking.
“You’re a lot of help, old son,” Prophet grunted, keeping his gaze straight ahead along the trail, not wanting the possible bushwhacker to know he’d glimpsed his shadow.
The short hairs were prickling along the back of the bounty hunter’s neck. Having seen the shadow move in the rocks atop the spur he was just now riding around the base of, his impulse was to throw himself from his saddle and spare himself a lead-heavy heart.
Something, however, made him keep his seat.
Quickly, drawing a deep, calming breath, he pulled a quarter from a pocket of his skintight, wash-worn denim trousers, and flipped it.
“Heads, he’s about to feed me a pill I can’t digest. Tails, he’s gonna wait till I get around this rock where the sun won’t be facing him, and he’ll have a clearer shot at my back.”
Prophet caught the coin in his right hand and placed it atop his left hand. He moved his right hand away from it.
“Heads,” he said.
Still, Prophet kept his boots in the stirrups. They felt as heavy as lead. His back felt as though leeches were crawling around on it, under his sweat-soaked buckskin tunic.
He held his breath, wincing, waiting for the bullet to shatter his breastbone while praying it wouldn’t. He wasn’t ready to shake hands with the devil just yet and make good on his end of the deal they’d made about shoveling coal for all eternity in exchange for a few more years of stomping with his tail up on this side of the sod.
He wasn’t ready for the coal shovel or the stench of forever-burning coal oil or whatever Ole Scratch filled his burning oceans with. Besides, Prophet might have been born and raised in the Deep South, but he couldn’t take the heat, even a dry heat.
The bounty hunter’s heart thudded.
Mean and Ugly kept walking along the trail that curved more sharply around the base of the spur now.
Birds sang. A dry breeze rose, lifted a handful of dust, and dropped it. Mean’s hoofs thudded softly in the well-churned, powdery dust of the sun-blasted trail.
As the horse kept moving, the face of the spur slid around behind Prophet, covering him from the man in the rocks. He heaved a relieved sigh. The shadow of the tall outcropping slid over him, cool and dark and as safe as a baby’s cradle.
In about fifteen more of Mean’s strides, however, horse and rider would be in the open again. Prophet’s back would be exposed to the man no doubt tracking him with his Winchester, ready to plant his sights between the big bounty hunter’s shoulder blades.
Quickly, Lou wrapped his reins around his saddle horn from which his double-barreled, sawed-off twelve-gauge Richards coach gun dangled by its leather lanyard. He’d leave the gut-shredder right where it was. This was likely a job for a long gun.
He shucked his Winchester ’73 from the saddle boot jutting up over his right stirrup, said, “Good luck, Mean. I hope he don’t shoot you before he realizes I ain’t on your back, but it wouldn’t be any more or less than what you deserve, you cussed broomtail!”
He chuckled whimsically as he swung his right boot over the horn and dropped smoothly to the ground, lunging off the side of the trail and putting his back up against the escarpment’s uneven rock face. The horse gave a start at the sudden and unexpected disappearance of its rider and trotted ahead for a few steps, glancing incredulously back over its left wither at the bounty hunter.
Despite his earlier comment, Prophet hoped the son of a bitch atop the scarp didn’t shoot his horse. Mean and Ugly might have been appropriately named by Prophet himself, but they had a lot in common. And while Mean wasn’t much to look at, and he could be as colicky as all get-out, which were two more things he had in common with his rider, he’d been a damned good horse who’d carried the big bounty hunter many a mile along many an owlhoot trail on the wild and woolly western frontier.
Prophet ran ten yards back along the trail then turned and stepped into a gravelly notch carved into the escarpment’s stone face. The notch curved steeply up. Prophet hoped it let out somewhere near the top . . . somewhere near the son of a bitch with the long gun.
The bounty hunter was a big man who didn’t cotton to walking much less climbing, so he silently cussed his predicament. But he could move fast and relatively gracefully when he needed to. He covered the twenty or so feet of gravelly, twisting ground relatively quickly. As he poked his head above the crest of the escarpment, a rifle cracked near enough and loudly enough to rattle his eardrums.
He blinked with a start and saw a man squatting not ten feet away from him, aiming a smoking Henry repeating rifle over the escarpment’s opposite side. At the same time, dust plumed just beyond where Mean and Ugly was walking along the trail, heading away from the escarpment.
Mean gave a shrill, indignant whinny, buck-kicked, and ran.
Prophet took his rifle in his left hand and shucked his Colt Peacemaker .45 from the holster thonged low on his right thigh, clicked the hammer back, and said, “You’re lucky you didn’t shoot my hoss, you lamebrained son of a bitch!”
The man who’d shot only the air above Mean’s saddle, still expecting the bounty hunter to be in the hurricane deck, yelled in sudden shock. He twisted around, ejecting a smoking brass cartridge from his long gun’s breech and pumping a fresh one into the chamber.
“Or I’d have gut-shot you and left you up here, howlin’ for your m
omma!” Prophet bellowed, punching two quick rounds side by side through the man’s chest.
The slugs killed him instantly.
Convulsing violently, he dropped the Henry, stumbled backward, got a spur stuck on an upthrust thumb of crumbling rock, and fell silently down the scarp’s far side.
Silence.
A muffled thump as the carcass hit the ground.
Prophet leaped up onto the rise and walked to the edge of the scarp. He looked down to see the man’s body lying on the trail, belly up, arms and limbs akimbo. His battered hat and rifle lay beside him. His mouth was wide open in a silent wail of shock. Blood puddled on his chest and frothed on his lips.
“You can thank me for killin’ you quick. More than you deserve, ya chicken-livered bushwhacker!”
Prophet looked around for any more chicken-livered bushwhackers. He could see a good distance in all directions, as this was the West Texas desert, near the New Mexico line, and there wasn’t much cover except for a few rocks and low, cactus-studded hills. Blue mountains rose in the far distance to the north and west. South and east there was only flat, pale desert and brassy sky in which the sun rode like a giant ball of molten gold.
Nothing but rock grew atop the bald scarp that Prophet stood on. He walked around, peering around rocks, aiming his Winchester straight out from his right hip.
Nothing. No one.
There was, however, a lone horse standing down the backside of the rise—a rangy, saddled claybank that had been tied to a picket pin. The horse peered up at Prophet from a gap between two stone shelves, and gave a curious whicker.
The son of a bitch had been alone out here, all right. Just him and his horse.
Prophet looked toward the south for his own horse. Mean and Ugly stood roughly a hundred yards away, off the winding trail’s right side, pulling at a patch of wiry brown grass growing up from the base of a clay-colored boulder. Prophet stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled.
Mean looked up at him, chewing with casual insolence.
“You heard me, you stubborn cuss,” Prophet raked out. “Get your ass over here!” He whistled again.
The horse continued to stare at him, in no hurry to comply with the command. Then, as though it had weighed through its options carefully, it began to mosey back toward where its rider stood atop the escarpment. It stepped slowly, ploddingly, taking its time.
“Collicky cuss,” Prophet said, then started back down the rise the same way he’d come up.
He stepped on a couple of fist-sized rocks, which rolled forward. Prophet cursed as his left boot slipped out from beneath him and he dropped to his ass. Cursing, he regained his feet, rubbed his sore butt then continued down the decline but taking it slower this time and being more careful about where he set his feet.
When he was back on level ground, he swung left and strode along the trail, curving around the base of the escarpment. He found the dead man lying on the trail about ten yards beyond where Prophet had dismounted his horse and left Mean and Ugly to his own devices.
Prophet stood over the man, realizing that by killing him he’d lost his chance of knowing why the lowlife had ambushed him. At least, the man himself wasn’t going to say. He was about six feet tall, and he wore the gear of your average cowpuncher. His red hair was coarse and wavy. His eyes were blue. Prophet judged him to be in his late twenties, early thirties.
There was a two-or-three-day growth of red beard stubble on his sallow cheeks that did not take the sun well. The skin over the nubs of his cheeks was pink and peeling. Same with that on his blunt nose.
Prophet pulled the pistol from the holster on the man’s right hip. A Starr .38 with a worn walnut grip. Nothing special about the piece. The Henry, on the other hand . . .
Prophet picked up the rifle, gave it a good looking over. It was a well-cared-for Henry sixteen-shot repeater. Despite the dust and sand it had accumulated in the fall from the scarp, it shone with a recent oiling. The stock showed the wear and tear of much use.
The Henry had belonged to a man who’d used it often. Depended on it regularly. Perhaps even made his living by using it . . .
Prophet went through the man’s pockets, finding nothing except a cheap pocket watch, a hide makings sack filled with chopped tobacco and rolling papers, a small wooden box containing three Lucifer matches, a chewed pencil stub, and a small leather-covered notebook.
Prophet opened the notebook and frowned down at his own named scrawled in thick pencil on the notebook’s first, lined page.
LOU PROPHET.
The handwriting was large and childlike.
“Well, at least you spelled my name right,” the bounty hunter muttered to the dead man. “But why were you out to perforate my hide?”
He’d been a fool not to try to take him alive. But, then, taking alive a man who was bearing down on you with a Henry repeater was easier said than done. The dead man had likely had a grudge against the bounty hunter, as so many did. You weren’t a man hunter for as long as Prophet had been without making some enemies.
This man had probably seen Prophet somewhere back along the trail down from Lubbock. He’d probably shadowed Prophet for a time then swung around ahead of him to affect his ambush. Prophet didn’t recognize him, but he’d seen a lot of faces on the frontier in the years since the War of Northern Aggression. He didn’t remember them all. Also, this man might have been a friend or family of someone Prophet had caused to serve time or swing from a gallows.
Maybe, if the dead man were from around here, Jonas Ford would know who he was. Ford was the town marshal Prophet was on his way to see, at Ford’s own request, which had been wired to Prophet when Prophet had been turning in two stagecoach robbers to the law in Lubbock. Prophet wasn’t certain why Ford needed his services, but he’d find out soon, as Ford’s town, Carson’s Wash, was just a few more miles east along the trail.
A snorting sound rose behind Prophet. He glanced over his shoulder to see Mean and Ugly standing about six feet behind him, regarding him owlishly. The horse shook its head and whickered.
“What—you’re piss-burned ’cause I used you as a decoy?” Prophet chuckled. “Believe me, pal, you’d have done the same thing to me if you’d been in my position. Which you weren’t and never will be. I’m a man. You’re a beast. Time you accepted that fact.”
Mean gave his head another acrimonious shake, almost freeing himself of his bridle and bit.
“Some fresh hay and oats once we get to Carson’s Wash will make you forget all about that bushwhacker’s bullet. In the meantime, stay here.” Prophet strode around toward the backside of the escarpment, muttering mostly to himself, “I got another hay burner to fetch so we can take him on to Carson’s Wash and, hopefully, find out who he is and why he tried to drop a coin in my bucket.”
Chapter 2
Prophet rode into Carson’s Wash one hour after he’d tossed the jasper who’d tried to air him out over the back of the dead man’s horse.
The bounty hunter had ridden through the remote West Texas ranching supply town only seven months ago when Prophet and his sometime partner, sometime lover Louisa Bonaventure—who’d been dubbed the Vengeance Queen by some ink-stained, raggedy-heeled Eastern newspaper scribbler—had turned in a couple of prisoners to Jonas Ford in return for the Wells Fargo bounty on their heads. Prophet and Louisa had spent a few days in the town, waiting for the paperwork to go through and the money to be wired to the local bank, so they’d gotten to know Ford passably well.
What Prophet had seen of Ford, he’d liked. Ford hadn’t shown the prejudice against the bounty hunting profession that many badge-toters did. Many didn’t see bounty hunting as a profession at all, but a mere sport practiced by cutthroats, which was true in some cases. But Ford seemed to think that Lou and Louisa were doing him and other lawmen a service by bringing in killers they were too shorthanded and too strapped by jurisdictional boundaries to go after themselves.
Prophet did, however, wish that in his telegram Ford ha
d at least hinted at why he’d summoned the bounty hunter back to Carson’s Wash. At least he had wished he’d known. Now he was about to find out, for he was swinging Mean and the dead man’s horse up to the small, squat, mud-brick, brush-roofed building that was identified as CARSON’S WASH TOWN MARSHAL by the wooden shingle tacked to gnarled mesquite posts jutting into the street.
Prophet glanced at the horse already tied to the hitchrack fronting the hovel, glanced away, then swung his gaze quickly back to the mount—a brown and white pinto with a hand-tooled, brown leather saddle and a Winchester carbine jutting from the boot. The horse’s braided leather bridle was studded with brightly colored Indian beads.
Prophet would have recognized that horse anywhere.
As it was, he recognized it here as the fine, unnamed mount of his infamous and notorious partner, Louisa Bonaventure, her own persnickety self. She’d purchased the bridle only last year when she’d traveled through Navajo country. The girl might have been a stone-hearted killer of men who deserved killing, but her tastes leaned toward the fancy.
Or gaudy, as some would say . . .
Consider her matching, pearl-gripped, nickel-washed pistols and their hand-tooled leather holsters she wore thonged low on her shapely thighs.
Ah, her shapely thighs . . .
Recalling in his mind’s eye her sumptuous body, burnished by the umber light of some backcountry fire, the bounty hunter knew a moment’s tug of desire. No woman stirred him like the hazel-eyed Vengeance Queen.
“Well, well, well,” Prophet said, keeping his incredulous gaze on the pinto. Had Ford called Louisa in, too? Prophet hadn’t known she’d been in the area. He hadn’t seen her for nigh on a half a year now. While they often rode together and shared each other’s bedrolls at night, they didn’t get along well enough outside of those bedrolls at night to work together for more than a few weeks at a time during the day.
Prophet swung down from Mean’s back and tied the two sets of reins to the hitchrack. As he tramped up the veranda’s three steps, he heard voices issuing from inside the marshal’s office.
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