The Devil's Winchester

by Peter Brandvold

  “I doubt anyone has seen her since I have. Roy and the little boy came in about nine months ago for dry goods and to report some cattle rustlin’ out their way. The dry goods has switched hands since then. But the doc might have been out to the Tawlins’ in the past few months or so. He’ll likely be over at the jail in a few minutes, tendin’ Blanco.”

  Utter’s mind switched gears, and he glanced from Louisa to Prophet. “Blanco the only one you brought back?”

  “The rest are some bobcat’s easy lunch,” Prophet said as Louisa gestured for the girl who might have been Rose Tawlin to follow her on over to the jailhouse at the other end of Corazon.

  When they were a good distance away, Prophet looked at Utter and chewed his lip before saying, “Blanco was probably just greasing our gears, but his story about that little gal is she was runnin’ with him. Could she have been holding their horses while the men robbed the bank?”

  “If so, I didn’t see her.”

  “Who would have?”

  Utter glanced up the street on Prophet’s left, toward a small wooden building whose tall false front identified it as LUNDQUIST’S DRUG EMPORIUM. “Knut Lundquist’s the one who popped off several shots at the gang before they galloped outta town. I reckon he had the most to lose. His store don’t look like much, but you can’t believe what he’s made sellin’ headache powders and red-striped candy. Probably the biggest stockholder in the county.”

  “He got a good look at ’em, did he?”

  “I’d say so. It was pretty early in the mornin’ when they hit the bank. Most folks were still havin’ breakfast.”

  “Let’s ride over an’ chat him up,” Prophet said, reining Mean around.

  Utter nodded, then turned to where the overall-clad man and boy were hefting the dead Devlin onto a wheelbarrow. “Lester—them boys have poker winnin’s on ’em, and I want every cent of it in my office, you hear? I’ll pay you out of the town fund for buryin’ them jackals. Understand?”

  The undertaker and the boy shared a sullen glance before the man threw up his hands in supplication, then continued lifting Devlin onto the wheelbarrow.

  Prophet was dismounting Mean and Ugly in front of the drug emporium as Utter wheeled himself up to the building’s front steps, then spun himself on his back wheels so that his back faced the covered porch.

  “Help me, here, will you, Prophet?”

  The bounty hunter tossed his reins over the hitchrack, then grabbed the porcelain-knobbed handles jutting from the back of the marshal’s wheelchair and hauled the heavy man up the three porch steps. Clumsily negotiating the door, he pushed the portly lawman into the shop rife with the discordant though not unpleasing smells of camphor, chocolate, and licorice. A girl with short, jet-black hair was sweeping the floor to the room’s right, near a display of Burmeyer’s Scented Lye Soap and a barrel of red rock candy.

  “Yellow Feather, is Mr. Lundquist in?”

  She’d had her back to the front door as she tidied up the edges of a pile of dust, candy wrappers, and mouse droppings with a broom. Now she turned. Her sullen brown eyes, high-tapering cheekbones, and cherry-tan complexion bespoke Comanche. She rolled her eyes toward the back of the store. “Behind the curtain. They’ve been having trouble with the little one.”

  Her low-cut bodice billowed as she glanced at Utter and gave a little, oblique smile. She continued sweeping, and her deep bosom jostled, the dark valley of cleavage opening and closing alluringly. Prophet glanced at Utter, who was staring admiringly at the girl.

  “What can I help you fellas with?” came a man’s voice.

  Prophet jerked with a start, as did Utter. Both men turned away from the girl sheepishly to see a thin, bald-headed man with watery blue eyes standing behind the plank-board counter at the back of the room.

  “There’s our druggist now!” intoned Utter, his ruddy, craggy cheeks flushed with embarrassment.

  Prophet followed the marshal down a broad aisle to where the druggist waited, bony fists on his counter. He appeared fifty or so, his eyes red-rimmed, gaunt cheeks sprinkled with gray beard stubble. Through the curtained doorway behind him emanated the fussing of a small baby and the nervous cooing of a sleep-deprived mother.

  There was also the vinegary stench of urine and scorched milk.

  “Little Emma’s got the colic. Kept both me an’ Evelyn up all night. What can I do for you fellas? Unless, uh ...” Lundquist shifted a wily glance toward where the Indian girl was sweeping unseen near the front of the store. “... You came to see my hired girl?”

  “Came to see you, Knut,” said Utter, jerking a thumb at the big man flanking him. “This here’s Lou Prophet.”

  “I know,” the druggist said with mild distaste. “Bounty hunter. That him shootin’ up the town a few minutes ago and wakin’ up little Emma soon as we finally got her bedded down?”

  “No, no, that was me. And I do apologize. However, it should please you that Devlin and Reeves are both about to be kicked out with Lester Hedges’s shovel.”

  “That does please me. Since them two been in town, the good folks of Corazon been reluctant to walk the streets. And when they don’t walk the streets in fear their womenfolk’ll be ogled or far worse, they don’t walk through my door and buy my merchandise.”

  Prophet heard the snicks of the broom grow louder behind him. He glanced over his shoulder to see the Comanche girl sweeping about ten feet away, slowly making her way toward him and Utter. The sheriff looked at her, too. She cast the local lawman a sidelong glance, then turned to let her hair slide down and cover her face as she continued sweeping, her movements making her rich bosom jiggle.

  The druggist sighed, and Prophet turned back to him as he said with a frustrated headshake, “You know, ever since I hired that girl to sweep and stock my shelves, I’ve been getting all kinds of traffic through here. Mostly men. And do you think men buy anything in a drugstore? Nope. They just come in to moon around like schoolboys!”

  Prophet glanced reprovingly at Utter. “I do apologize, Mr. Lundquist,” the bounty hunter said, though it was the sheriff who seemed especially taken with the girl. “If it’ll make you feel any better, I’ll buy some of that red rock candy over yonder.”

  “Don’t do me any favors, bounty hunter!”

  “All right, all right,” Utter said, holding up his pudgy, hairy-backed hands. “We didn’t come here to argue over Yellow Feather. We came to ask you, Lundquist, if you happened to see a dark-haired girl in town the day the bank was robbed across the street. It’s been mentioned, albeit by an unreliable source, that she might have been holding the Metalious gang’s horses between your place here and Randall’s harness shop next door.”

  “Dark-haired, you say?”

  “Dark-haired,” Prophet said. “Dressed in range garb—calico blouse, fringed buckskin slacks. Had a cap-and-ball pistol when I found her. Pretty little gal.” He glanced once more at Yellow Feather, who’d stopped sweeping to listen in on the conversation.

  “White girl,” he added, turning back to the owly druggist.

  “Ah, hell,” Lundquist said. “It all happened so fast. I think there was someone milling around with horses between my store and Randall’s, but I was busy mixing some powders for Emma’s colic. I didn’t look out the window till the shootin’ started.”

  “Did you see a girl with the gang?” Utter asked.

  Lundquist dropped his gaze and narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “I reckon one of ’em mighta been a girl. Yeah ... now that I study on it, one of ’em did look sort of slight.” He looked at Prophet. “I think I remember that calico shirt, too.”

  Utter and Prophet shared an uncertain look.

  “Who is she?” Lundquist asked. “You bring her in?”

  “Prophet brought a girl in with Blanco. Not sure who the girl is, though.”

  “Or if she was with the gang,” the bounty hunter added, feeling less than satisfied by what he and the marshal had learned so far.

  Lundquist gave each man across
the counter from him a wry, mocking look. “Did you think of asking her who she is?”

  “Did that.” Prophet hooked his thumbs behind his cartridge belt as he stared absently out the window to his left, off the end of the counter. “She don’t remember.”

  “Likely story,” the druggist chuffed.

  “Smacked her head,” said Utter. “Don’t seem to be fakin’ the aneesha.”

  “Amnesia.”

  Prophet and Utter swung around to the Indian girl, who stood holding her broom behind them, regarding them with one arched brow.

  “Memory loss,” Yellow Feather said. “The medical term is amnesia.” Her chocolate brown eyes danced between the surprised bounty hunter and town marshal of Corazon. “I went to a mission school in Las Cruces ... before I was adopted by a doctor.”

  She glanced at Utter once more, her mouth corners rising coquettishly before she crouched to sweep some dust out from behind a wooden tub of flavored soda water. The sheriff’s face reddened, and he swiped a fist across his nose in embarrassment.

  “I don’t care who you was raised by, girl, you just keep sweepin’. That’s what you’re good for—sweepin’.” To Prophet and Utter, the druggist said, “If you got that girl to town, someone’ll surely recognize her.”

  “Looks to me like the Tawlin girl,” Utter said. “I couldn’t say for sure, though, as I haven’t seen her since the last blue moon.”

  “Me, neither.” Lundquist winced as the baby in the backroom began yowling in earnest. He raised his voice to be heard above it. “Last time the family came to town, she wasn’t with ’em. Don’t think I seen the boy, neither. If she’s from around here, someone’ll surely know her. It just goes to reason.”

  He glanced regretfully at the curtain behind him. “If you two don’t want nothin’ else, I’d better get back and see if Evelyn needs some help. I swear, if this colic keeps up, she’s liable to throw that little one down the privy hole.”

  Utter waved him off. “Luck to you, Lundquist.”

  When the man had disappeared through the curtain, the marshal glanced at Prophet, who grabbed his wheelchair and turned him toward the door. “I told him not to marry that Evelyn Snyder. Bad family. Germans by way of Dakota. The whole family was likely born with the colic and died from it though not before they reached a good eighty years and gave the pure sanctified hell to them they married!”

  The marshal laughed as Prophet pushed him toward the door, which Yellow Feather held open for them. On the way out, Prophet pinched his hat brim to the girl. “Sorry if we caused you any trouble, miss.”

  Prophet headed on out the door, easing the marshal down the steps to the street.

  Yellow Feather came out behind them, closing the shop door, still holding her broom.

  “If that is Rose Tawlin,” she said, “keep a close eye on her. I’ve never met her myself, but I worked for a farmer out near where her family has their claim. I heard she got wild over the past couple years. You know—” She hiked a shoulder. “After she filled out and got the tomcats prowlin’ around the Tawlin place. Tomcats of the bad stripe.”

  Prophet and Utter gazed at the girl standing atop the porch steps. She took her broom in one hand, raised the other one to an awning support post, and threw her shoulders back, pushing out her breasts.

  The top of her cleavage was dark and inviting. Her eyes and round hips to which the skirt of her dress clung tightly said she’d spoken of prowling tomcats from personal experience. Neither Prophet nor Utter doubted that experience a bit.

  “Much obliged, Yellow Feather,” Utter said thickly, giving his hat brim a pinch.

  She narrowed her eyes slightly. Apparently, she enjoyed staying on the good side of the local law. “Anytime, Sheriff.”

  9

  “FIND ANOTHER ONE to charm out of her bloomers, Mr. Prophet?”

  Louisa was walking toward the jailhouse at an angle from the other side of the street and glancing toward the drugstore, where the Indian girl was sweeping the porch steps.

  Prophet sat atop Mean and Ugly. The marshal sat his wheelchair in front of the jailhouse, a dilapidated wooden building with a porch whose roof was missing most of its shingles. The green paint on the vertical, whipsawed siding boards had all but weathered away, and what was left hung in sausage curls.

  Prophet hipped around to look behind him. The Indian girl dropped her head abruptly, but he thought he could see a smile tweak her mouth corners behind the dark screen of her dancing hair.

  Prophet looked at Louisa, who planted her right boot on the porch steps, to take some weight off her wounded leg, and cast him a smart look. They had an agreement that, despite their occasional bedroll tussles—it got damn lonely out on the stalking trail of a night—neither of them was now or ever would be short-roped to the other. That didn’t keep Louisa from riding him for his easy ways, however.

  “Nope,” the bounty hunter said. “That one there’s the sheriff’s girl.”

  Utter chuffed with embarrassment. “Ah, hell—Yellow Feather’ll flirt with any man with a steady paycheck. Even a crippled, old lawdog!”

  A wooden ramp ran up and down the jailhouse porch steps. Over the ramp, a stout rope hung from a hook. The end of the rope was latched to a nail in a post at the bottom of the steps. Marshal Utter grabbed the rope and used it to haul himself up the ramp, grunting, red-faced, then he wheeled himself around to look toward the drugstore.

  “Watch out for her, Lou. She ain’t been in town long, but already she’s got a good half dozen men in trouble with their wives.”

  “Don’t doubt it a bit,” Prophet said with a wry chuckle as he swung down from Mean and Ugly’s back. To Louisa, he said, “Doc inside with Blanco?”

  The blond bounty hunter nodded. “He said if we put Blanco in the saddle again before that wound heals, he’ll bleed out inside of six miles.”

  “He’s gotta ride,” Prophet said. “If he bleeds out, he bleeds out.”

  Louisa doffed her hat and ran a hand through her thick blond hair. “It won’t do much good to trail him out of here if he’s gonna die on us.”

  Utter looked indignant. “Where the hell you plannin’ on takin’ him? I’ll pay the reward on him right here. The stock association that hung the bounty around his neck is known for speedy reimbursements.”

  “You know we won’t be able to hold him here, Utter,” Prophet said. “His pa bein’ ‘Man-Killin” Sam Metalious an’ all. Why, he probably has twenty seasoned hard cases on his roll, and they’ll all ride into town in a big, hump-necked group as soon as they learn we got Blanco.”

  Utter’s face was still red from his ride up the ramp. It turned even redder now, and he bunched his lips at Prophet. “He stays right here. Right here is where he done held up the bank and killed four citizens of Corazon. This town has every right to see him hang, which he for certain-sure will about ten minutes after the circuit judge rides into town next week.”

  Louisa cast a quick look at Prophet, then, setting her hand carefully on her head, turned to Utter. “When’s the judge due?”

  “Middle of next week.”

  “Even if we can keep Blanco in the lockup that long,” Prophet said, “Metalious won’t let him get here. His gang’ll dry-gulch him along the trail.”

  “The judge comes escorted once a month through this valley by an army patrol out of Fort Stockton. Has ever since a couple rustlers backshot the son of a bitch and left him for dead.”

  Utter chuckled and dug a fat cigar out from a shirt pocket beneath his dusty frock coat. “Turned out he was only fakin’ it though he did end up losin’ a shredded kidney. Damn good actor. That had to hurt like the devil’s toothache, layin’ there in that wash. The soldiers ran those boys down and turned ’em into bobcat vittles pronto.”

  The marshal bit the end off the cigar and stuck it in his mouth. “The long and short of it is he comes with a patrol nowadays. A good nine, ten soldiers with a sergeant and a lieutenant—all gun-handy men. The works.”

 
Prophet unbuckled Mean’s latigo strap in frustration, letting the two ends dangle toward the dust. “We gonna be able to hold Blanco till next week?” He tossed a doubtful look at the falling-down jailhouse. Even one of the shutters over the lone front window had come loose and was hanging by one rusty nail. “In there?”

  “You’re just a bounty hunter, Prophet!” Utter stopped lighting the stogie to glare furiously at both Prophet and Louisa. “I’m the law around here. You merely brought Blanco in. I’m the one holdin’ him until the circuit judge arrives next week. Do I make myself clear?”

  “All right, Marshal.” Prophet threw up his hands. “Have it your own damn way.”

  “Maybe you two oughta clear out right now,” Utter said. “I’m startin’ to get a little tired of your uppity company.”

  Prophet had started leading the horse over to the livery barn sitting kitty-corner across the broad street, where Louisa had apparently boarded her own pinto with Blanco’s and the girl’s.

  Now Prophet looked back at Utter. He was beginning to get a little hot under the collar himself. The marshal was right—he and Louisa had done their jobs. Now it was up to Utter and his deputy, Rubriz. By rights, Prophet should leave the dirty, most dangerous part of the job to the ungrateful old, wheelchair-bound cuss before him.

  “Maybe we should light a shuck on out of here,” he told Louisa, who now stood leaning against a corner of the porch, her arms folded, looking troubled, uncertain. “We’ll take our damn money from this ornery old cuss and head for Albuquerque. I could use a good bottle of whiskey for a change, any damn way! You sure as shit can’t find such an animal around here!”

  “You do that!” yelled Utter.

  “We just will, then!” Prophet yelled back, starting once again for the livery barn that sat alone on a big, unkempt lot, with several near-empty peeled log corrals angling off both sides and the rear. Behind it ran the stream between low, grassy banks lined with cottonwoods.

  “Lou, hold on,” Louisa said, remaining where she was.