“You hold on. I’m gonna stall my horse, get him rested up for ridin’ out of here tomorrow.” Prophet stopped and looked over his shoulder at his partner. “Say, where’s the girl? Inside with the doc?”
Louisa shook her head. “The doc already tended her head. He didn’t recognize her. Said he hadn’t seen the Tawlin family in over a year, and it had been longer than that since he’d seen Rose. She’s walking out yonder, along the creek.”
Prophet followed Louisa’s gaze to the cottonwoods behind the livery barn. “You let her go out there untended?” he said, incredulous.
“I stabled her horse. How far’s she gonna get on foot?”
“How do we know? We don’t know nothin’ about her.”
“You didn’t learn anything from the druggist?” Louisa smirked. “Except that he has a pretty swamper?”
Marshal Utter studied the gray coal on his stogie. “Learned she could be Rose, could have held the horses for Blanco’s bunch, and she could be a mite on the wild side.”
“Ah, hell.” Again, Prophet continued his tramp toward the livery barn. “She ain’t none of our problem, anyways. We’re just bounty hunters.”
“That’s right!” Utter intoned behind him, still as mad as a bobcat tied to a plank. “She ain’t, and you are!”
The bearded gent in the livery barn was sleeping off what, judging by the stench of whiskey in the place as well as whiskey sweat, was one hell of a hangover. So Prophet tended Mean and Ugly himself, rubbing the horse down thoroughly, graining and watering the contrary beast who twice tried to put a new tear in Prophet’s multi-patched tunic, and turned him into the corral with the other horses.
Mean and Ugly gave a snort, then ran around the corral to announce himself. When, after pawing the dirt and shaking his head friskily, none of the five livery mounts nor Louisa’s and Blanco’s horses wanted to fight, he promptly rolled in the dirt, raising whinnies like a demented hyena.
“There you go, you son of a bitch,” Prophet said, settling a shoulder against the frame of the door to the holding corral and reaching into his tunic pocket for his makings sack.
“Mr. Prophet?”
The girl’s voice made him jerk slightly with a start. He turned.
The girl whom he’d decided to think of as Rose Tawlin until he’d learned of another handle for her was walking toward him from the barn’s open double doors. She had a clean, white bandage wrapped around the top of her head. Her tanned elfin face looked almost Indian-dark in contrast.
Prophet troughed a rolling paper between his right index and forefingers as the girl hiked a hip on a nearby oat bin and loosely entwined her hands on her lap.
“You take a walk, did ya?” Prophet asked her as he dribbled tobacco onto the paper.
“Yeah, but I don’t remember anything. Nothing around here looks familiar.”
“It’ll come back,” he said with shallow optimism. “Sooner or later.”
“Do me a favor?”
“What’s that?”
“Take me out to the Tawlin place?”
Deftly folding the paper closed, he looked at the girl from under his brows, scowling. “What—now?”
“The sheriff said the Tawlin claim is twenty miles away. On fresh horses, we could make it before sundown.”
“How ’bout if we ride out there tomorrow? I don’t much care for riding an unfamiliar horse, and ole Means needs him a good, long—”
“Please?”
Prophet lowered the half-made quirley and looked at her.
“Do you know what it’s like to not know who you are or how you got where you’re now standing?” she asked, her voice again brittle. “To not know if you’re good or bad, if you come from a home that wants you back or one that doesn’t?”
She slid off the bin and walked toward him, holding his gaze with her own, her eyes at once fearful and desperate. “To not know if you belong behind bars or at the end of a hang rope?”
Prophet’s own gaze wavered, and he dropped his eyes to the cigarette in his hands.
“If I rode with Blanco’s bunch,” she said, her voice low and almost menacing, “I’m just as guilty as Blanco for the killing of the people here in Corazon. Including that little boy.”
“Back home ... if it is your home ... who’s to say you’ll find out if you rode with Metalious’s bunch? They may not know. You mighta been gone a long—”
“I’ll find out more than what I’ve learned here. I’ll know if I am who that Blanco creature says I am or if I am really Rose Tawlin. If I’m Rose, then maybe I’ll learn from my family about what I was doing in Nugget Town. Maybe I was with my father or my brother.”
Her eyes were growing more and more passionate, her voice louder. She grabbed Prophet’s right wrist with both her hands, and squeezed. “Maybe we were out hunting or looking for a new claim. Why was I alone when you found me? Maybe they’re up there in those hills, injured, and I’d wandered into the town looking for help.”
“All right, all right,” Prophet said, closing his left hand over hers as if to comfort the girl.
She was damn near hysterical and he supposed she had every right to be. She wouldn’t rest until she found out who and what she was. If he didn’t take her out to the Tawlin place, she’d likely sneak off alone.
“Let’s give ole Mean an hour’s rest. Me, too. I could use a drink and a sandwich. Then I’ll saddle him and a fresh mount for you, and I’ll meet you on the street.”
“I’ll help. Something tells me I know how to saddle a horse. I’d like to find out for sure. It’s not much, but ... it’s something.”
Prophet nodded. “All right. Meet me here in an hour.”
An hour later, after Prophet had enjoyed the free lunch that had come with the nickel beers at the Mecca Saloon, they found out that Rose had been right. She knew how to bridle and saddle a horse right down to punching the air out of the stubborn beast’s lungs so she could tighten the latigo strap. As she’d said, it wasn’t much, but it was something she knew about herself that she hadn’t known a few minutes ago. She didn’t say anything, but she seemed satisfied.
As the liveryman was still asleep with two empty whiskey bottles standing on the earthen floor beneath his cot, Prophet decided he’d pay the man later. He and Rose led their mounts—hers, a claybank that appeared to have some barb in it—through the corral gate and into the street.
As they rode westward along Brush Street, few people were out, but Louisa wandered out of the mercantile shop near the end of town and on the street’s right side. She held a bottle of sarsaparilla in her hand. Her hat hung down her back from the horsehair thong around her neck. Her Winchester was leaning outside the door.
She frowned, puzzled, as she stopped at the top of the loading dock’s wide steps.
“We’re gonna head on out to the Tawlin place, see what’s what and”—Prophet glanced at the girl he hoped was Rose—“who’s who.”
Louisa glanced west. “It’ll be sundown in a few hours.”
“We’ll just make it,” Prophet said. “Wanna come? I see no point in hangin’ around a town where bounty hunters are treated like they was trash-mongerin’ coyotes.”
“I’ll take my chances.” Louisa slid the top of the brown bottle between her bee-stung lips, glanced skeptically between Rose and Prophet, and took a sip.
She smacked her lips together softly, ran her tongue along the upper one. “Just so you know, I’m not going anywhere till I’ve watched Blanco hang or at least heard his neck snap. He killed a youngun and, well, you know how I am about that.”
“We might just be forkin’ trails here, then.”
Louisa slid a cool, cryptic glance at Rose waiting behind Prophet. “We’ve forked them before.”
Prophet nodded and gigged the dun forward. Rose booted her own horse up beside him.
“Watch yourselves,” Louisa cautioned behind them. “This is wolf country.”
10
SITTING ON THE steps of the mercantile’s loading dock, nursing he
r cherry sarsaparilla, Louisa watched the bouncing backs of Lou and the amnesiac girl until they’d dwindled to dots in the brassy sunlight and the sage and junipers closed behind them. She briefly spied Lou’s soiled hat, worn to a faded yellow, and the girl’s white bandage glowing in the afternoon sun, before the horses and riders disappeared down the other side of a distant rise and were gone.
Louisa lifted the bottle to her lips once more and drank.
She mentally waved off an annoying twinge of insecurity at Prophet’s absence and the touch of jealousy that clung to its heels. She would posses nor be possessed by no one. It was the same for him.
She threw back the last swallow of the sugary liquid that sputtered and popped sweetly in her throat. Drinking the syrupy soda water always reminded her of home, of riding into Sand Creek, Nebraska Territory, once a month with the rest of her family on a supply run—Pa, Ma, the other two girls, and their brother—and of drinking sarsaparilla on the steps of the Sand Creek Mercantile’s loading dock while Pa and their older brother hauled the dry goods from the store to their wagon box. Ma would be inside, looking over the yard goods and sewing thread, maybe perusing a Sears & Roebuck catalogue with stars in her eyes.
Louisa and the girls would drink their sodas and keep an eye out for any boys they knew, or talk about the kind of houses they’d have if they lived in town.
Owen. Junie. Opal.
All dead now. Owen had been three years older than Louisa when Handsome Dave Duvall’s Red River Gang had ridden hell-for-leather onto their farmstead, hackles raised, guns popping, hooves tearing up Ma’s kitchen garden and setting their dog to howling.
Owen had been only half a head shorter than Pa, who’d been just over six feet but who, to Louisa at seventeen, had been a giant of a man. Owen would be a full-grown man now, had he lived. He’d likely have a farm near Pa and Ma’s place.
Junie would still be at home, most likely, but Opal would have married Brian Davisson, whom she’d had eyes for since they’d all started school together. They might have even had a child or two by now. Louisa herself had liked the country, but she’d also had aspirations toward a more civilized life, of playing the piano and hosting tea parties in a warm parlor, of maybe having a couple of fine horses in her stable.
No kids of hers would run around barefoot of a summer for lack of rain to make the wheat and corn grow....
Louisa waved that train of thought away, as well.
Thoughts were suddenly like flies buzzing around her head. Or horseflies sure to bite this late in the year, when the cold nights started making them surly and realizing their time was almost up.
She went back into the mercantile, returned the bottle for which she was given back her penny deposit. The mercantile owner ran his gray eyes across her chest and told her to come back real soon. As she turned away from him and walked toward the door she felt his eyes wandering down her narrow back to her hips flaring to her bottom, dreaming of what he could do with a piece of young, supple female flesh like hers if his wife hadn’t tied her apron strings so tight around his neck, and he wasn’t quite so long in the damn tooth.
She stepped back out onto the dock, letting the screen door squawk shut behind her, blocking the mercantiler’s view and running a hand through her gold blond hair before setting her hat on her head. She scooped up her gear—rifle, saddlebags, and war bag—from where she’d left it piled on the floor, and, settling her rifle on her shoulder, looked up and down the street.
Not many people out, just a few milling here and there, a wagon leaving the competing mercantile on the other side of town and heading southeast. There were three saloons on this end of town, beyond the squalid red-light district known as Bayonet Wash, but horses stood bunched to only two of these.
There were two hotels—the French Hotel and Cora’s Rooms. Louisa had walked past both, and she not only liked the sound of the French Hotel but had liked the look of the building. Big and solid, with large fancy letters adorning the high false façade.
Cora’s Rooms was little more than a narrow, unpainted shack with split cordwood abutting both sides and frilly women’s underclothes flopping on the line behind it near a path beaten into the barren ground to a falling-down privy. There was a chicken coop back there, too, and roosters would wake her up too early. And she had nothing to wake up early for now that she was between jobs and was only awaiting the execution of Blanco Metalious.
The killer was all that held her here.
If Utter objected to her staying and waiting for the circuit judge, he could go to the devil. She hadn’t run the killer down just so the man’s outlaw father and outlaw ranch hands could ride in and spring him so he could go on killing women and young children.
Blanco. Finally a thought that made her feel better.
One that swept away all the heavy, cloying dark thoughts that seemed to haunt her, day and night, even when she didn’t realize it. Blanco’s drop through the trapdoor, his boots coming to an abrupt halt two feet from the ground, his neck snapping so loudly that crows would light from the false fronts around the gallows.
The boy he’d killed would smile in heaven, where he was surrounded by all the others taken too soon, including Louisa’s own sisters and brother, and poor, murdered Ma and Pa, as well.
“One room,” Louisa told the man who stood behind the desk in the lobby of the French Hotel—a portly gent sporting a longhorn mustache with waxed and twisted ends and a freshly brushed brown bowler slanted on his head. His fleshy cheeks were florid, his eyes brown and devilish, as they quickly dropped to his open ledger book when Louisa had walked in.
“It’s a dollar a night,” he grunted. He wore a vest that didn’t cover his paunch, and an open shirt fold revealed his deep, dark belly button from which several long brown hairs curled. “Do you have any idea how long you’ll be staying, Miss Bonaventure?”
Louisa looked at him. He kept his eyes down. A shy one, but she could read the nasty thoughts in his head. By now, everyone in the county knew that she and Prophet were in town. The bounty tracker on whom the devil held a hefty note, and his blond partner known as the Vengeance Queen. Dangerous, having that knowledge spread so wide. She’d have to keep her guns cleaned and loaded with six full rounds in each cylinder.
“I’ll pay through Monday, then one day at a time after that.” Louisa tossed a silver cartwheel onto the ledger book, which the man did not request she sign, and glanced out the clean front windows flanking two tall, potted palms. “Where do they usually build the gallows here in Corazon?”
For the first time, he raised his eyes, creased with surprise, to Louisa’s face. Haltingly, he said, “Uh ... right out in the middle of Brush Street.”
“I’d like a room with a good view of the street, then.”
The man turned and snagged a key from a ring behind him.
“I’d also like a bath brought up to my room. Not by you. By a female, if you have any around here.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Bonaventure,” the hotelier said nervously, only able to let his gaze scuttle back and forth across Louisa without focusing. “You’ll have to visit Talbot’s for a bath. He don’t rent rooms, and I don’t rent baths.”
Louisa considered this primly, scowling at the beady-eyed man with mild disgust. “Well, you and Mr. Talbot have a nice little racket going, don’t you?”
The man smiled wanly and kept his eyes somewhere low on Louisa’s waist. “He’ll launder your clothes for only a nickel extra, and I’ll vouch for his workmanship.”
“I’m sure you would. Who is he—brother?”
The man’s plump, rosy right cheek twitched, and he gave his shoulders a brief hike. “Brother-in-law.”
Louisa snorted. “All right. I guess you just made a sale for your brother-in-law.”
She snatched her room key off the open register book and reached down for her gear, which she’d dropped against the base of the man’s desk when she’d entered.
“I’d be happy to carry those up to your roo
m, Miss Bonaventure.”
“No, thank you.”
Adjusting the gear on her shoulders—she’d grown accustomed to hefting a good half of her own weight around for long stretches while scouring strange towns for hotels or eateries—she climbed the faded red-carpeted stairs at the back of the lobby. Turning at the first landing, she glanced down the stairs behind her, caught a brief glimpse of the hotelier flushing with chagrin as he jerked his head back behind his desk and out of sight.
“Men ...” Louisa muttered distastefully.
Her room was in the middle of the hotel’s south side, facing the street. When she’d deemed it adequate—really, it was rather well appointed for being this far out in the brushy hills—she gathered up her saddlebags, leaving her rifle and war bag on the bed, and headed back down the stairs.
From the hotelier, she learned where Talbot’s bathhouse was located and headed off to the south side of town and a simple brown shack with thick tufts of white wood smoke unfurling from its large, brick chimney.
Talbot was a tall, bearded man with a hawk nose and eyes not unlike those of his brother-in-law. He gave Louisa a towel and ordered his son Junior, a shorter, beardless version of Talbot himself, to fill her tub—his only copper tub, he pointed out—in one of his three rough-hewn bathing rooms that consisted of only the tub itself, a night vase, a wooden bench, a backless chair shoved into a corner as though to get it out of the way, and two railroad spikes driven into a wall for hooks.
There were only three narrow, slotted windows up where the walls met the pitched roof and, unlike many bathhouses she’d visited, the boards of the walls were rammed up close together, with no cracks between them. Surprising. She’d become convinced that most bathhouses were so loosely knocked together as to make it easier for peepers.
Louisa sat on the bench, knees spread, elbows on her thighs, while Junior made several trips with water buckets to fill the tub. When he’d poured the last bucket of hot water into the battered tub that had a little seat built halfway up its narrowing back, Louisa stood.
“Hold on, Junior.”
The Devil's Winchester Page 8