“If they do, he’s well hid. I’m bettin’ there ain’t any. Judging by how this bunch stuck to only one trail, without so much as one little detour to throw a posse off, they’re pretty confident they ain’t been followed.”
“Haven’t been followed. God, your English is awful, Lou.”
“That’s another thing I’ll remind you to teach me one of these days. Good English. Comes in right handy in our line of work.” Prophet looked at her. “You be careful. The only seasoned outlaw of the bunch is Metalious, but Dusty Willis is right handy with a six-shooter, too. The other three are amateurs, but they can be just as dangerous as professionals.”
Louisa looked at him askance. “This ain’t the first bunch of owlhoots I’ve brought down.”
“Don’t let it be your last.”
A faint smile pulled at Louisa’s mouth, and her eyes grew soft. She glanced toward the town. Then, seeing no one outside the saloon, she walked crouching over to Prophet, tipped her hat back off her forehead, tipped his back with the barrel of her carbine, and pressed her warm lips to his.
“Just for that I’m gonna curl up in your blankets tonight. Stark naked by a hot fire.”
“Am I gonna be there?”
She pulled his hat brim back down over his forehead. “I have a feeling.”
Prophet swallowed the dry knot in his throat and raked his eyes from her velvet pink lips and creamy neck toward the ghost town aglow in the waning light at the base of the ridge. Slowly, quietly, he levered a fresh round into his Winchester’s breech.
2
KEEPING THEIR HEADS low, Prophet and Louisa moved with little sound across two dry washes, weaving through brush and around boulders, both keeping their eyes skinned on the terrain around them as well as on the town.
When they gained the base of the water tower, they each hunkered behind a creosote-slathered piling. The saloon was only fifty yards away, and the street before it was bathed in shadow. A shingle chain under the saloon’s porch roof, announcing nickel beers and a fresh lunch plate, squawked faintly in a rising breeze.
Prophet glanced at Louisa, nodding. She rose from behind her piling and began to head toward the saloon’s near side.
“Wait!” Prophet rasped, gritting his teeth.
Louisa dropped behind a piling just beyond the one she’d left, pressing her back against it as she squatted in the gravel, knees to her chest. Her cheeks flushed with apprehension.
Prophet doffed his hat to peer around the piling in front of him. He’d heard voices and a muffled clomp of footsteps, and now he drew a slow, anxious breath as a man walked out of the saloon’s front door onto the porch. A tall man in a long, spruce-green duster and carrying a sixteen-shot Henry repeating rifle from a lanyard around his neck and right shoulder. From the man’s mustached mouth protruded a long, black cigar. He had a spade beard and he walked with a slight hitch in his right leg.
Dusty Willis.
As Prophet peered out from behind his piling and Louisa watched from over her right shoulder, Willis stared straight out across the rugged hills and washes bathed in a golden, late day haze. Willis lifted his head slightly as he drew deep on his cheroot. Then, letting the Henry hang barrel down at his side, he turned away from Prophet and Louisa and blew the cigar smoke into the street.
There was a low rumble from inside the saloon. Willis glanced over his left shoulder and said something that Prophet couldn’t hear. Then Willis turned full around toward Louisa and Prophet, and the bounty hunter jerked his head back behind the piling, hoping the post concealed him, wide shoulders and all.
He stared at the coated wood before him in which someone had carved a heart between the letter L and the letter J. His heart thudded anxiously. The breeze sifted through the pilings, blowing the pungent tang of the creosote.
After a long, slow minute, Prophet leaned slightly left, peering out from behind the post. Dusty Willis had stepped to his own right along the porch and was leaning slightly back at the waist as he sent a piss stream arcing into the street while continuing to puff the cigar in his teeth.
Louisa softly but insistently cleared her throat. Prophet glanced at her. She looked at him with a question in her eyes. She didn’t want to poke her head out from the piling and risk being seen.
“He’s shakin’ the dew from his lily,” Prophet said just loudly enough for Louisa to make out above the breeze and the creaking platform high above.
He cast his gaze toward the saloon once more.
Willis faced him but his head was down as he tucked himself back into his pants, bending his knees and clamping his Henry repeater under his right arm. When the outlaw had strolled back into the saloon and out of sight, Prophet said, “I do believe Dusty is feelin’ better, and so am I. Let’s go.”
While Louisa ran out from the right side of the water tower pilings, Prophet ran left. A glance in her direction as he rounded the rear corner of the badly sun-bleached and splintered livery barn told him that she’d gained the first of the main street structures and was starting to make her way past a boarded-up drugstore on her way to the Gold Nugget Saloon.
She strode quickly, her skirt swishing around the tops of her boots, her rifle held up high across her chest. Even from this distance he could see that her expression betrayed not the least bit of fear.
Only resolution. Eagerness.
The Vengeance Queen, Prophet had dubbed her long ago.
She had nothing personally against these men they were hunting. Only, as they were riding out of Corazon in the wake of their robbery during which they’d killed a teller and the bank president who’d tried being a hero with a double-barreled, gold-chased derringer no longer than a pencil, one of their stray rounds had clipped a sandy-haired boy in faded dungarees and left him sprawling dead in the dirt, blood oozing from both ears.
That had been personal enough for Louisa, who’d watched her own young siblings die bloodily at the hands of Handsome Dave Duvall’s gang a few years back. As Prophet ran along the back wall of the livery barn, he almost felt sorry for Blanco Metalious and Dusty Willis and the three other poor, unsuspecting sons o’ bitches who’d been unfortunate enough to cross paths with Louisa Bonaventure.
Prophet ran out from behind the barn and along the stock corral in which the gang’s six horses milled. A blue roan that had been standing nearest the barn gave a start when it saw the big bounty hunter, and the other horses swung their heads around to inspect the intruder.
“That’s all right—go ahead,” Prophet said quietly, as he dropped to a knee behind a corner post. He kicked a tumbleweed away from the post and growled, “Go ahead—git a fuss up, damnit!”
All six horses regarded him sullenly. The blue roan walked toward him cautiously, slowly lowering its head and twitching its ears.
“Shit! When you want horses to keep their damn traps shut, they summon half the owlhoots south of the Arkansas River. When you want ’em to go ahead and give the alarm, they look at you like you’re some harmless angel that done dropped out of a pink puffy cloud and is here to feed ’em carrots and sugar cubes!”
The roan stopped suddenly, dust lifting from its shod hooves. It stretched its neck out a little more, its black, seed-flecked nostrils working daintily.
Prophet pushed off his heels and strode down the corral’s far side toward the front corner, where he’d have a good view of the Gold Nugget. As he walked, he whistled softly, trying to get one of the horses to sound the alarm.
They only watched him, twitching their ears. A black with one white sock gave a moderately loud blow, rippling its withers, but then turned its head to nip an itch on its side.
“Useless critters.”
Prophet dropped to a knee behind the corral’s front corner post and stared toward the saloon with its broad front gallery on which two old wicker chairs sat in the thickening shade. On one sat a tumbleweed. The saloon’s windows were boarded up, so it was impossible to see inside. He could hear the low rumble of voices emanating from behind t
he saloon’s batwing doors, but the only movement was a small, charcoal cat slinking around in the shadows under the porch that was set on low stone pilings.
Prophet looked at the saloon’s front corner but saw no sign of Louisa. She was likely keeping herself hid until the curly wolves scrambled out of their den. Glancing over his right shoulder, he saw that three of the cutthroats’ horses were standing within ten feet of him, heads down to inspect him with typical dull-witted curiosity while the other three were slowly walking up to join them.
Prophet snorted and grabbed a rock, intending to bounce it off the porch’s ceiling to summon Metalious’s men. He cocked his arm and froze as movement at the saloon’s far front corner drew his eye.
Dropping the rock, he hunkered low behind the corral’s corner post, quickly doffed his hat, and edged a look around the porch. He sucked a sharp breath. His knees turned to putty.
Louisa was walking out from behind the saloon. A rough-garbed rider with a cinnamon beard and a billowy red neckerchief held himself tight against her back, one of his brawny arms hooked around her neck while his other hand held a cocked .45 Colt Army against her left temple.
“Goddamnit, girl,” Prophet heard himself grumble as he continued to hunker low and edge his right eye around the side of it, squeezing his Winchester in both his gloved hands. “What the hell have you gone and got yourself—?”
He stopped as the man behind Louisa said loudly, “Blanco! Hey, Blanco, get out here! Look what I found!”
The man kept his head close to Louisa’s as, gritting his large horse teeth, he slid his cautious gaze along the street fronting the saloon.
Prophet stared, hang-jawed and sharp-eyed. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Louisa had eyes in the back of her head. How could she have let herself get snuck up on? Hell, on his worst, most hungover days with buxom whores still dancing around behind his eyes, he wouldn’t have let ...
The echoing thumps of several pairs of boots echoed inside the saloon, growing louder until a short man in a yellow duster pushed through the batwings and onto the porch. He was flanked by Blanco Metalious, who wore a dusty, flat-brimmed black hat over his stringy, pale blond hair and was holding a Henry repeater in one hand, letting it dangle negligently down along his right leg that was clad in cheap orange-and-brown-checked wool.
Two more men followed the short man, whom Prophet didn’t recognize, and Metalious onto the porch, where they sort of spread out as the bearded hombre shoved Louisa out farther into the street.
Metalious stopped on the porch’s top step, leaned against a post, and grinned, showing his white, even teeth under his white mustache that stood out against the redness of his sunburned face. In town, Prophet had learned the man’s infamous father was a big Greek, though Blanco had been dropped from the womb of an albino whore somewhere in Alabama. Blanco’s yellow-gray eyes narrowed down to the size of steel pellets.
“Well, goddamn, Santee—I thought all the gold was done pinched out of these hills!”
Santee continued to hold Louisa in his firm grip and look around carefully. “I thought the same thing, till I spied this little golden-haired beauty skulkin’ around out here when I was headin’ back from the shitter. You think there’s any more of her ilk out here?”
“What the hell is her ilk?” asked the short man standing to Metalious’s left and fingering the two matched Remingtons positioned for the cross draw on his narrow hips.
He wore a bowler hat and brown wool trousers. A wood-handled bowie knife was sheathed on his chest, dangling from a braided rawhide cord around his neck.
“A whore? Is that what she is?” The short man raised his voice. “Is that what you are, little girl? You come out here to give us each a squeeze off’n your titties for the price of a whiskey shot?”
“She was carryin’ a carbine like she meant business with it,” Santee said. “And she was sneakin’ around real catlike. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she might have meant us harm.” He lowered a hand to Louisa’s striped serape, feeling around. “And she’s got more than two mosquito bites inside this poncho—I’ll tell you that.” He reached down and lifted Louisa’s skirt high, exposing both her pale, supple legs and the brown leather knife sheath strapped inside her right thigh. “And lookee here!”
Louisa did not struggle but only gazed up at the men on the porch blandly as Santee slipped the razor-edged Mexican pigsticker from her hideout sheath. He held the knife up for the others to see, then tossed it into the dirt.
“Why, she’s armed herself for ’Paches,” intoned the stocky man dressed in deerskin slacks behind the short man with the matched Remys.
The men on the porch, including Metalious, had become tense and defensive, raising their weapons and looking around the street. Holding his rifle in one hand, barrel up, Metalious thumbed the hammer back as he strode slowly down the porch steps. The others followed until they were all in the street, looking around, swinging their pistols or rifles this way and that, wary of an ambush.
Metalious walked up in front of Louisa and, staring up the street beyond Prophet and the corral, cupped her chin tightly in his gloved left hand.
“What’s your game, miss? There a posse out here?”
Louisa swiped his hand away from her face. “No game. And there ain’t no posse. I came to find a bottle for Pa. Ma made him give up the firewater on account of him sleepin’ all day instead of diggin’ for gold. But he’s been seein’ snakes for nigh on three days now, and Ma and me is done tired of it. We don’t care how much he sleeps as long as he pipes down about the snakes. So, I come to Nugget Town to see if I could rustle up a bottle. Then I seen your horses and the smoke in the chimney.” She shrugged. “I was just bein’ cautious, that’s all. You never know who’s on the lurk amongst these hills. Besides, ghost towns give me the willies. You fellas have a bottle you could spare for Pa?”
Blanco Metalious narrowed an eye at her. “A bottle for your pa, huh? You sure that’s all you’re doin’ out here?”
Behind the corral post, Prophet caressed his Winchester’s cocked hammer with his thumb and watched Louisa nod her head while feigning an expression of wide-eyed, girlish innocence.
“What else would I be doin’?” she said.
“She’s lyin’, Blanco,” said Santee, continuing to hold his cocked Colt to Louisa’s left temple. He lifted one of her matched Colts from its holster and tossed it into the dust. Reaching for the other one, he said, “This purty little thing is armed for bear.”
“In these hills, one can’t be too careful.” Metalious’s head was turned away from Prophet as the outlaw leader studied Louisa, probably running his eyes up and down and all around her delectable frame. “Especially little girls on their own and away from home.”
The gang leader slid her hair back away from the right side of her face with the back of his free hand. “What you got to buy a bottle with, young lady?”
“Don’t have no money,” Louisa said. “What’d you have in mind?”
Prophet stopped caressing the Winchester’s hammer with his thumb. Tensing, mentally calming himself, he prepared to start shooting.
The three men in the street besides Metalious and Santee were all looking at Louisa now, lusty leers showing on their hard, weathered, belligerent faces. Prophet could take those three easily enough, but Santee still had his Colt pressed against Louisa’s temple. And Metalious was partly blocking his view of the pistol-wielding cutthroat.
“Steady,” Prophet told himself. “All in good time. The fool girl done got herself in a peck of trouble, but she’s obviously got an idea about how to get herself out of it.”
Above the slow thudding of his heart, Prophet heard Metalious ask Louisa her name.
“Louisa,” she said with mock schoolgirl innocence.
Metalious didn’t say anything for a time. He just continued to stare down at Louisa, who looked up at him coolly, her hair ruffling in the cooling breeze.
“Fellas,” he said
finally, turning to the three men between him and Prophet, “take a good long look around. I mean a long look around.”
Suddenly, Metalious grabbed Louisa’s hair and jerked the girl out of Santee’s grip. Louisa gave a startled grunt and went sprawling into the street near the bottom of the saloon’s porch steps. “Me and Miss Louisa here gonna climb up on top of this woodpile here and do us a business transaction!”
Metalious reached down, shoved his hands under Louisa’s shoulders, and tossed her brusquely atop the wood stacked on the right side of the porch steps. He drew her wool skirt and white petticoat up around her waist and, laughing savagely, stepped back to unbuckle his cartridge belt.
3
LOUISA LOOKED DAZED as she sat back against the porch rail, her naked rump propped on the woodpile. Her hat was off, and her mussed hair screened her face. Prophet’s heart hammered as he watched Metalious drop his checked trousers down around the cartridge belt he’d thrown at his feet and step between Louisa’s bare legs, laughing louder.
Santee stood near Metalious, enjoying the show. He still held his cocked Colt in his hand, and the gun was still aimed at Louisa.
The other three were sidestepping along the street toward Prophet. Prophet was waiting for them to get good and clear of Louisa and Metalious before he showed himself, so his own lead wouldn’t take out his partner.
Waiting wasn’t easy. Not with his heart pounding bile through his veins and rage resounding like a smithy’s hammer in his ears.
Just as the last of the three men moving toward him stepped clear of Louisa and Metalious, Prophet jerked his head up, rising to his knees and snugging the butt of his Winchester against his right shoulder. Normally, he gave even the most blackhearted cutthroat a chance to give himself up. But Santee was holding that cocked pistol a little too close to Louisa, who was groaning and grunting against Metalious’s savage thrusting.
Boom!
In his haste, Prophet had punched his Winchester round a hair south of Santee’s heart.
The Devil's Winchester Page 2