For a quarter second he wasn’t sure if he’d hit the man at all. But then, as the other men jerked their heads toward Prophet, Santee gave a little shiver and stepped back, impulsively triggering his Colt into the ground beside him, blowing up dust and rocks. Dropping his chin, he looked down at his chest where a patch of something dark and wet shone, though it was hard to see against the cutthroat’s brown wool vest and in the wedge of barn shadow the man had stepped into.
There was a moment of crystal silence.
Prophet ejected the spent brass from his Winchester’s breech, and the empty casing clinked to the ground behind him as he levered a fresh round in the chamber. Dusty Willis and the other two cutthroats stared fierce-eyed toward Prophet, but, taken aback by the sudden, unexpected rifle bark, they held as still as stone statues.
A scream broke the silence, and Prophet wasn’t sure where it was coming from until Blanco Metalious jerked his head up, hang-jawed, and staggered bare-assed away from Louisa while thrusting a hand at his crotch.
Dusty Willis and the other two glanced at Metalious and then, as though their heads were all tied to the same string, whipped their gazes back to Prophet. Willis brought his Henry repeater up, bellowing, “Fuckin’ bounty hunters!”
But before he could get the barrel of the sixteen-shooter leveled, Prophet drilled him in his upper left chest, and then, shooting from his right hip, punched both the other two hard cases back against the raised saloon porch. While Metalious continued to bellow like a poleaxed bull, Dusty Willis brought his Henry up once more while clutching his bloody chest, and managed to trigger a round three feet to Prophet’s right.
Several of the horses whinnied and lurched toward the corral’s far end.
Prophet’s Winchester roared. Willis grunted and staggered straight back, dropping his Henry in the dust, then setting his boots and buckling his knees. He grabbed his belly from which thick red blood oozed and hit the street with a curse, stretching his lips back from his teeth, lifting his chin, and yelling a raspy curse at the sky.
Prophet heard gunfire to his right and more bellows from Metalious. He kept his eyes ahead, as the other two cutthroats behind Willis were still alive and trying to get their own weapons raised.
Stepping out away from the corral’s corner, Prophet raised his Winchester and dispatched first the man on the right and then the man on the left, shooting quickly but purposefully and feeling the Winchester buck against his shoulder.
He shot the first man through his right ear while he tried to push himself up against the porch. He drilled the other man through the chest and, as the man reached for a big Dragoon jutting from behind the buckle of his cartridge belt, screaming and spitting blood from his lips, Prophet drilled him through the dead center of his forehead.
The man’s head whipped back so hard that his black derby hat, which already bore what appeared to be a bullet hole in its crown, turned a somersault in the air before hitting the dirt at his quivering feet.
At the same time, a pistol barked to Prophet’s right.
Levering the Winchester but finding it empty, he swung around in time to see the top of Santee’s head burst like a ripe tomato. Somehow, the man had managed to scramble over to the front wall of the livery barn. Louisa was ten yards away from him, lying twisted in the middle of the street, one leg curled beneath the other.
“Son of a bitch!” the girl bellowed as she dropped her hand and smoking Colt down by her bloody right thigh.
Prophet ran over and dropped to a knee beside her. “How bad?”
She hardly ever cursed—cursing lacked nobility, she’d explained time and again—so it must be bad.
“It’s nothing,” she said, gritting her teeth and glaring at Santee, who’d taken a good three or four shots to the torso and his own left thigh before Louisa’s head shot had finally blown his wick.
He slumped slowly sideways, leaving a long arc of red on the gray barn door behind him.
Louisa pitched her voice with exasperation—another rarity for her, who was usually as composed as a Lutheran preacher bright and early on Easter Sunday. “I couldn’t get the bastard to die!”
“Where’s Metalious?”
“Back there—running like the yellow-livered devil he is.”
Louisa canted her head to indicate the saloon along the side of which the outlaw leader ran, shuffling awkwardly while trying to pull his pants up. He had his cartridge belt thrown over one shoulder, a gun in his hand.
Prophet set his empty rifle down beside Louisa and shucked his walnut-gripped Colt from the holster thonged low on his right thigh. “Wait here.”
“Don’t do him any favors. Let the mangy dog bleed to death, Lou!”
Prophet was already striding around the front of the saloon. Metalious had left a scuffed, bloody path behind him. Louisa must have stuck him good with one of her hideout knives, two of which she kept hidden on her lovely person. Never one to walk around armed for anything but bear—that was Louisa.
And she’d always taken a risky satisfaction in luring men under her skirts for just such punishment as she’d given Blanco Metalious. One of these days, it was going to get her killed—and it almost had a year ago in Mexico, before they’d taken on a town called Helldorado up in Wyoming. You’d think she’d learn.
Metalious had just gotten his pants up around his waist with a grunt and a jerk, and disappeared around behind the saloon, when Prophet broke into a run.
“Hold up, Blanco,” he ordered. “From as much blood as you’re paintin’ the gravel with, you ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
He ran around the back of the saloon and stopped suddenly. Blanco Metalious was down on his butt, sort of twisted around at his waist, anguish pinching his beady yellow-gray eyes. Sweat streaked his fleshy, freckled face and patchy, colorless goat beard.
“Help me, Prophet. For chrissakes, that crazy bitch damn near cut my balls off!”
He’d barely gotten that last out before his eyelids drooped, and his head began to sag backward. Prophet hadn’t seen the nasty gash in his temple. Apparently, Louisa had drilled him in the head as well as cut into his nether regions.
Metalious groaned. Then the back of his head hit the ground, and he was out.
To Prophet’s left, something thrashed around in a snag of cedar and chokecherry shrubs. There was the flash of what appeared to be a gun between the branches and the click of a hammer. Prophet wheeled and, crouching, squeezed off two rounds with his .45.
A high-pitched groan. A thud. The clatter of a gun striking gravel.
Prophet glanced at Metalious, whose eyelids were fluttering. Otherwise, he lay still.
The bounty hunter went over and relieved the unconscious cutthroat of two pistols, a double-barreled derringer in an ankle sheath, and two knives. Then he stole over to the shrubs and, moving slowly, began parting branches to peer inside the snag. Holstering his Peacemaker, he lifted his shotgun up over his shoulder and, clutching the gut shredder in both hands, thumbing the rabbit-ear hammers back to full cock, stepped farther into the snag.
The dusky salmon light glistened off an old revolver that lay at the base of a mossy boulder. A hand lay beside the gun, palm up, fingers curled, unmoving. A delicate hand.
A female hand.
Prophet moved forward, holding the shotgun out from his right side, and soon found himself standing over the body of a brown-haired girl, blood leaking from the back of her head. Blood also spotted the boulder. Prophet saw no other wounds on her. He placed two fingers on her neck, found a steady pulse. He gently shook her shoulder.
“Miss?”
He scowled down at her. Imagine a skinny little waif out here at the backside of Nugget Town. A white girl, too—suntanned face lightly freckled, with a little girl’s nose and close-set eyes. A small brown mole off the right corner of her nose. A beauty mark, some would call it. A comely face. Comely body, too—a calico blouse drawn taut against the ripe bosom of a well-developing seventeen-, eighteen-year-old. She wore fring
ed deerskin leggings, stockmen’s boots, and a leather brush jacket. There was a gold locket around her neck, looking about as out of place with the rest of her attire as Prophet would look behind a preacher’s pulpit.
She also wore an old holster on a plain leather belt, both the holster and belt the color of butterscotch. The gun was an old cap-and-ball .44. A Civil War model Colt Army.
He scrubbed a hand across his jaw. She must belong to one of the men in the gang. Funny, though—there were only the tracks of six horses. She was either riding double with one of the men, or waiting here, with a horse maybe stabled elsewhere or picketed off in the brush.
“Hey, miss.”
Prophet slid his right hand beneath her head and gently lifted it a couple inches above the ground. Her dark, wavy hair was blood matted in one spot no larger than a silver cartwheel. She must have fallen against the boulder when Prophet had fired into the brush, hit her head on a pointed knob protruding from the rock, and knocked herself cold.
She was alive, though with a head clubbing like that, there was no telling for how long.
Louisa called his name from the other side of the saloon.
“I’m on my way,” he yelled back at her.
He shoved his ten-gauge back behind his shoulder, wedged the girl’s old horse pistol behind his cartridge belt, then gently lifted her up in his arms and bulled back through the branches, screening her head with his own. When he surfaced from the bushes, he glanced once more at Metalious, who was slowly shaking his head, coming around.
Prophet carried the girl up along the saloon and stopped when he saw Louisa standing with one leg propped atop a stock tank in front of the barn. She’d slid her skirt and fringe-hemmed petticoat up tight against her waist, revealing all of her bullet-creased right leg above her dusty boot. She was wringing out her red neckerchief when she looked up and saw Prophet standing there at the corner of the saloon with the girl in his arms.
“What do you have there?” she said, wincing as she pressed the wadded, wet neckerchief to the bloody tear across the outside of her well-turned thigh.
“Found her in the brush behind the saloon. Don’t ask me what she was doin’ there, but I got a feelin’ she was fixin’ to shoot me. Smacked her head on a rock.”
Louisa frowned as she straightened a little at the waist, holding the wet neckerchief against her thigh. “Do you think she rides with these killers? Or ... rode.”
Prophet shrugged. “I’m gonna take her inside, get her warm.” He glanced at his partner’s leg. “How bad you hit?”
“It’s nothing, I said.”
Prophet grinned. “Don’t want no nasty bullet wounds marring them purty legs of yours.”
“A gentleman would avert his gaze.”
“You see any gentlemen around here?”
“I certainly do not.”
He carried the unconscious girl up the porch steps. At the top, he turned back to Louisa. “When you’re done there, go back and keep an eye on Metalious. I think he’s comin’ around. That trough you carved across his head laid him out nearly as cold as this little miss.”
Louisa lifted her gaze from her leg. “I didn’t carve any trough across his head. I was too busy trying to kill Santee after that missed heart shot of yours.”
Prophet stared back at her, brows furrowed. “Well, someone gave him a nice tattoo.” He glanced down at the girl in his arms.
But she’d had only the big horse pistol, which was only good at close range—say no more than ten feet. Prophet knew that from experience, as he’d fired such unwieldy, hard-to-load, inaccurate beasts during the War of Northern Aggression.
“Musta been a ricochet.”
Swinging around, he pushed through the batwings into the big, cavernous saloon that had already filled with night shadows. The fire was merely a mound of glowing coals in the hearth in the southeast wall, flanked by a horsehair couch on one side, a green velvet settee on the other. Both pieces of furniture were dusty and shabby, and the settee had two nickel-sized holes through its back inside a dark bloodstain as big around as Prophet’s head.
Prophet walked around a table cluttered with playing cards and shot glasses. A cigar stub sent smoke curling into the air. The stolen money hung over a nearby chair back—two swollen saddlebag pouches bleeding green-backs. Most of the money had come from the bank, the rest from a stage the gang had robbed a few hours before riding into Corazon.
Prophet kicked another chair out of his way and eased the girl onto the couch. He smoothed tendrils of dark hair back from her face and took another hard look at her.
She was too young and pretty to have been riding with this bunch of curly wolves. The rough trail garb said she was from the high and rocky—maybe a prospector’s daughter like the one Louisa had been pretending to be. She might have been from a ranch around here. On the other hand, Prophet had been on the frontier long enough to know that how people looked and how they really were could be flip sides of the same coin.
It was important to know who and what she was. He wouldn’t turn his back on her until he did. And if she’d had some part in the robbery and killings in Corazon, she’d have some explaining to do before a circuit judge. If she lived.
Prophet went over to the messy stack of wood and torn catalogues near the hearth and chunked some logs onto the grate. Someone was grumbling outside. He turned as Louisa, limping only slightly, rifle-butted Blanco Metalious into the saloon through the shuttering batwings.
Metalious cursed and ground his teeth. He’d lost his hat. He was crouched slightly forward, holding a bloody bandanna to the right side of his crotch, where the blood from the pigsticker Louisa had poked him with was spreading a nasty, dark red stain.
“You two don’t understand,” he said, after roundly and nastily cursing Louisa. “I pretty much do as I please around here. You know Sam ‘Man-Killin’ ’ Metalious? Well, that’s my old man.”
“The sheriff in town done told me that. Told me your old man has a price on his head, same as you. If we can get him, too, that just about makes this trip out here worth it.”
“He didn’t have no part in this job.”
“How come?”
Blanco just stared at Prophet, one nostril curled.
“Well, he still has a price on his head.” Prophet jerked his head. “Come on over here, Blanco. Take a look at this girl.”
“What girl? Who?”
Louisa rammed the butt of her carbine against the cutthroat’s back. He stumbled forward, spurs ringing raucously, almost dropping to his knees before setting his boots once again. He whipped around toward the blond bounty hunter. “Goddamnit—you hit me with that thing again, so help me I’ll take it away from you and do things with it to you ...!”
Metalious had let his voice trail off. He just stood facing Louisa, so Prophet couldn’t tell what had made him think twice about threatening the comely, deadly lass known far and wide as the Vengeance Queen. But he knew what Louisa could do with her eyes. Especially after what she’d done with that pigsticker.
Grumbling, Metalious turned back around and strode daintily, setting his right foot down easily and far wide of the other, over to Prophet near the fire and stared down at the girl. He looked like he’d just chugged a gallon of bad milk, but his eyes acquired a leering cast.
“Nice. She one of yours, too? How many you got, Prophet?”
Louisa, standing beside him, buried the butt of her carbine in the outlaw’s belly. Metalious crumpled, took mincing feet straight back, then looked from Louisa to Prophet, stricken.
Prophet shook his head. “She don’t like you, Blanco. That’s how Louisa is about ugly sons o’ bitches like yourself that try to rape her atop woodpiles thinkin’ she’s the innocent schoolgirl type and is just so ripe for the pickin’s.”
Louisa gritted her teeth. “She ride with you?”
“Hell, no,” Metalious groaned, still crouched so low that he was almost to the floor, knees bent toward each other, boots out. “Never seen her
before in my life.” He gasped, tried to straighten, then decided his current position was the best one for the time being. “Where’d you find her?”
“You sure she didn’t ride with you?” Prophet urged.
“Hell, I’m sure! Wouldn’t I know if some purty little filly was ridin’ with me? It ain’t like I had that many folks on the roll that I’d forget about a girl.” Metalious jerked his fearful eyes at Louisa. “Don’t do nothin’ else to me now! I just called her a purty filly. It was a fuckin’ compliment!”
4
WHILE LOUISA STAYED with Blanco Metalious and the unknown girl, Prophet went out to fetch his and Louisa’s horses from the ravine they’d tied them in. When he left the saloon, the light was sand colored. When he returned, leading both horses, it was purple. The abandoned, eerily silent town was slowly being swallowed by the night tumbling down the high southern ridge.
He unsaddled both horses and gave them each a good rubdown while they fed from feedbags and drew water from a stock trough. When he’d turned them into the holding corral off the side of the barn, hoping Mean and Ugly didn’t start any fights with the others, as he was likely to do to prove his dominance over all, the weary bounty hunter dragged the dead men out of the street by their heels. He rolled them into a ravine at the far end of town, hearing the coyotes yammering from the ridges.
He knew they were eagerly watching and awaiting a rib-sticking meal.
When Dusty Willis had rolled down the bank with the others, Prophet walked, dragging his boot toes, over to a rock, and sagged down on it. He dug his cigarette makings out of a shirt pocket and slowly, pensively built himself a smoke. He smoked the quirley, habitually shielding the glowing coal with his palm, and watching the stars, wondering about the unknown girl and Metalious’s old man.
Prophet did indeed know Sam “Man-Killin’” Metalious’s reputation. Every bit the outlaw he’d raised his son to be, Sam Metalious ranched—if you could call an outlaw hideout with a few cows nibbling the range around it a ranch—about fifty miles from Corazon. There’d be trouble with the elder Metalious unless Prophet and Louisa could get Blanco the hell out of town pronto and on the road to see the circuit court judge in Albuquerque.
The Devil's Winchester Page 3