THE NEXT MORNING, Prophet woke to the sounds of someone shuffling about the room. He turned his head on the pillow and opened his eyes.
Pale dawn light seeped around the edges of the curtains. In the smoky dusk of the room, Cordelia held her silk wrapper out before her, tossing it around to find the front. Her breasts jiggled as she did so, and Prophet groaned with desire.
‘Where . . . where you going?’ he asked her.
‘Well, good morning,’ she said cheerfully.
She drew the wrapper on and sat on the edge of the bed, leaning down and kissing Prophet’s lips, running a rough hand through his hair. Her wrapper yawned open, exposing her breasts, and Prophet took them in his calloused palms, fondling them gently and kissing each nipple in turn.
‘It’s early,’ he said, his voice muffled by her bosom.
‘I have to go down and help Annabelle with breakfast,’ she said, making soft sounds of delight as he buried his nose in her cleavage.
‘Come back to bed,’ he urged.
‘I can’t,’ she laughed, drawing her wrapper closed and pulling away. ‘But I’ll be back again tonight—you can bet your boots on that!’
Prophet grinned and smacked his lips at the prospect, watching her lithe form fairly float to the door, her long black hair rippling down her slender back.
‘Oh, Lou?’ she said, turning around.
‘Yes, my pet?’
‘What are your plans for the day?’
‘Don’t have any,’ Prophet said, stretching luxuriously.
‘Then would you mind—? Oh, I hate to ask this.’
He lifted his head from the pillow. ‘Ask what?’
She thought for a moment, then shook her head. ‘No, I can’t.’ She started twisting the doorknob.
Prophet pushed up on an elbow. ‘What is it, Cordelia?’
She stopped again and turned to face him. ‘Well... I was just wondering... You see, the man I had taking caring of chores around here is laid up with a kidney ailment, and ...’
‘And you need something done. What?’
‘Oh, Lou, what will you think of me, asking a favor after we’ve . . . ?’ She let the sentence trail off and drew her shoulders together, bunching her breasts.
‘Ask away,’ he said absently, swallowing as he stared at the flesh exposed by the open wrapper.
‘The door to the privy won’t shut all the way. I think the boards are warped.’ She had a pained look on her face. ‘Would you mind taking a look at it? I mean, since you don’t have any other plans for the day and all?’
Prophet ran his eyes up and down her scrumptious figure once more. ‘I would be more than happy to fix anything you got ailing, Mrs. Cordelia Ryan.’
‘Oh, Lou!’ she said, running back to the bed and kissing his cheek. ‘You’re a dear!’ She went back to the door, began opening it, then closed it again gently, half-whispering, ‘Until this evening, my stallion ,..’
She blew him a kiss and left.
Thoroughly bewitched, Prophet rolled back on the pillow with a big grin on his face.
As soon as he’d polished off a big plate of ham and eggs and fried potatoes, and washed it down with hot, black coffee, he got started on the privy door, which was so badly warped by moisture that he had to remove it, take it apart in the maintenance shed in the backyard, and replace two boards and a handful of screws before putting it back together and remounting the knob, which he also took apart and oiled.
Before he put the door back on its hinges, he gave it a fresh coat of paint. That done, something didn’t look right. The problem was the fresh white paint on the door no longer matched the dull, gray paint of the rest of the privy. It bothered him to the point that he went ahead and painted the whole privy.
‘Now, if that ain’t the best lookin’ two-holer in town, I’m not the middle son of Homer and Minnie,’ Prophet said, stepping back to admire his handiwork.
‘Oh, Lou?’
He turned. It was Cordelia standing on the house’s back porch. ‘Annabelle was cleaning a room upstairs and found a cracked window.’ She thrust her lower lip out, pouting.
Prophet sighed and offered a wry smile. ‘Be right there.’
By the time Prophet had replaced the window, repaired several pickets in the fence surrounding the boarding house, plastered several cracks in the parlor’s ceiling, cleaned the kitchen chimney, and hauled a load of food staples back from the mercantile, stacking it all in the basement storage room, he was ready to saddle Mean and Ugly and head back out on the owlhoot trail for a little rest and relaxation.
But he was rewarded that evening by the finest meal—young chickens roasted in white wine and butter and a dessert of peach cobbler and ice cream—he’d ever eaten in his life. And the coffee Annabelle brought him on the porch afterward, where he sat smoking with the two older, chess-playing gents from the evening before, was liberally laced with a sweet liquor—a clandestine gift, he knew, from Cordelia.
The gift she gave him later was just as clandestine but not nearly as subtle. Slipping into his room after everyone else in the house was long asleep, the old gents’ snores resounding in the walls, she snickered into her hand, ripped off her wrapper, threw herself atop him, and hissed, ‘Come, my stallion—throw the blocks to your sweet Cordelia!’
He did, and paid for it again the next day, so that by the time he’d finished repairing the house buggy’s left front wheel and greasing both axles, his back was squawking like an old goose. Rather than head back into the boarding house, where surely Cordelia or Annabelle would have another chore for him, he washed at the outside pump, donned his hat, unrolled his shirtsleeves, and walked south toward the business district. He thought he’d have a beer and the free lunch in the town’s only saloon, maybe even indulge in a game of five-card stud—if such impious dalliance was allowed in Luther Falls.
On the way to the Sawmill Saloon, he saw Sheriff Beckett sitting in the sun outside the jailhouse.
‘Mr. Prophet,’ the sheriff greeted him. ‘Haven’t seen much of you lately. Thought maybe the widow had done run you out of town.’ Beckett laughed.
‘No ... not yet,’ Prophet said with a baleful sigh, shoving his hands in his pockets. ‘She’s workin’ on it, though.’
Bathing his face in the warm midday sun, the sheriff glanced up at the bounty hunter. ‘Yeah, she can be mighty tough. It’s either her way or no way. Think that might be why she hasn’t remarried. Tends to scare men off with all her rules and regulations. Why, you so much as clear your throat wrong over at the big house, and she’ll read you from the book till you’re blue in the face.’
‘That she will, Sheriff. That she will.’
‘Been toeing the line over there?’
‘I guess you could say that.’
‘Must be doin’ all right,’ Beckett mused, looking Prophet over humorously. ‘Otherwise, she and ole Annabelle would have sent you out on a long, greased pole.’ He laughed again and shook his head.
‘Yeah, I guess I’m doin’ somethin’ right, Sheriff,’ Prophet grumbled with an unreadable irony. ‘Say, how long do you think it’ll take for my money to travel from Dodge?’
‘Well, it’s a fair piece, and this time of the year the roads can be a little muddy. I’d say a week at the earliest.’
‘A week, eh?’ Prophet mused with an air of disheartenment. He’d figured it would take that long but was hoping he was wrong. He wanted to exit these parts before Cordelia decided she needed a new roof. He didn’t think that even at his relatively youthful age he could roof her house and grease her wheels at the same time. ‘I reckon if it rains, or if there’s some official holdup, which there usually is, it could be two or even three weeks before I can start looking for my reward money.’
‘I’d say that’s about right.’
Prophet sighed. ‘Thanks, Sheriff.’ Favoring his back, he started toward the saloon.
‘What’s your hurry?’ Beckett called after him. ‘The widow’s treating you all right over there, isn’t she?’
Prophet gave the man a dismissive wave and continued across the street to the Sawmill, where he enjoyed the free sandwiches, pickled eggs, nickel beers, and several three-for-a-nickel cheroots. There were no gamers, however. Just two regulars—retired sawyers by their ratty clothes and missing fingers—playing backgammon beside the woodstove. The bartender fold Prophet the gamblers were still out chopping trees and wouldn’t be in until after six or so.
‘That’s all right,’ Prophet said, shoving his chair out, extending his legs, crossing his ankles, and lacing his fingers over his belly. He smiled at his third beer sitting before him, beside his empty plate. ‘I’ll wait for ‘em right here.’
He was halfway into his fourth beer when he heard a commotion down the street. A man yelled, a woman screamed, and then two pistol shots sounded.
Prophet looked at the bartender, who was sitting beside the chess players, reading the paper. The man had looked up and was staring out the window with a curious frown.
‘What was that?’ Prophet said. In ranch country, it could’ve been cowboys hoorawing the town, but since this was mainly a honyonker and woodcutting area, and since the weekend was still three days away ...
‘I don’t know.’
Two more pistol shots split the midweek somnolence, and Prophet got to his feet and walked to the door, followed by the bartender in his sleeve garters and the two old backgammon players. Across the street, the dentist stepped out of his establishment to gaze around curiously, as did the blacksmith and the barber and the little gray-haired lady who ran the fabric shop.
They, like Prophet and the others from the Sawmill, turned their gazes eastward down the town’s main drag, where at least twenty men on horseback were milling around on agitated horses before the mercantile. Two more men were on the broad loading dock fronting the place. The two appeared to be fighting with a longhaired girl, who screamed.
One of the men yelled something and smacked the girl across the face. When the girl went limp in his arms, he carried her down the steps to the street, where the other men were heeling their mounts back and forth before the place, six-shooters drawn and raised above their heads.
Several squeezed off shots skyward, just making noise.
‘Now what in the hell is that all about?’ the bartender said as he scratched his noggin.
‘Looks like a damn holdup, if you’re askin’ me,’ Prophet said, all his senses suddenly coming alive but not quite believing what he was seeing.
‘In Luther Falls?’
‘I admit things look a whole lot more like Dodge City suddenly, but...’ He was already walking down the street, instinctively heading toward the fracas, his gaze on the men milling before the mercantile.
‘What are you doing with the girl, Day?’ one of the horse backers yelled.
‘What do you think I’m doing with her?’ another man returned as he climbed into his saddle, hefting the girl in his arms like a feed sack and throwing her over the horn.
‘No!’ the girl cried. ‘No!’
An older woman ran out of the mercantile, screaming, ‘You can’t take my baby! Please, no! Nor
The man with the girl calmly drew his revolver from his hip, raised it to his shoulder, aimed, and fired. The gun clapped, smoke puffing. The woman who had run halfway down the steps of the loading dock stopped suddenly as though she’d forgotten something. She sat down and rolled to the side.
The girl screamed.
That’s when Prophet realized beyond a shadow of a doubt that these men were highwaymen and that they were not only robbing the mercantile, they were kidnapping the girl. Here—in Luther Falls!
He’d run half a block, his heart pounding, when he saw the sheriff turn the corner on his left. Not wearing his suit coat or hat, Beckett was carrying his shotgun. He’d probably been eating lunch at home when he’d heard the gunfire.
‘Good shootin’, Day!’ one of the horse backers shouted.
Day laughed and holstered his gun. ‘Come on, Dave, we got the money,’ he yelled at the store. ‘Leave the candy alone!’ He laughed and shook his head.
‘Yeah, come on, Dave. Let’s skedaddle!’ another man yelled at the store while several others shot their six-guns in the air.
Walking down the side of the main drag opposite Beckett and a half block behind him, Prophet reached for his revolver but grabbed only denim. His heart skipped a beat when he realized the Peacemaker wasn’t there. He’d hung it in his room at the boarding house, having decided it would only get in his way while he toiled for Cordelia.
Besides, who needed a gun in this idyllic little berg?
The blunder mocked him now as he made his way quickly toward the dozen gun-toting firebrands itching for war.
He’d pulled up at an awning post a block from the mercantile when another man walked out of the store, grinning and holding two big paper sacks in his arms.
‘Hit the mother lode, boys!’ he whooped, holding the bags aloft.
‘Come on, Dave. We ain’t got all day.’
‘What’s the hurry?’ Dave said as he took his reins from one of the men riding horseback. ‘I say we see if there’s a gun shop in town. I could use a new Smith & Wesson.’
Standing by the awning post as other shopkeepers gathered on the boardwalks, mumbling, frightened, and confused, Prophet gritted his teeth. These firebrands seemed to think they could ride into town and do as they pleased. What was here was theirs for the taking. They showed no fear whatsoever, and very little urgency. If they knew there was a sheriff in town, they certainly paid no heed to the fact. Their guns were drawn, but mostly for show and to make some noise.
The disregard these men showed for law and order in Luther Falls could not have been lost on Sheriff Beckett, whom Prophet watched creep to the side of a buckboard wagon parked before the butcher shop, about a half block away from the mercantile. Old Beckett laid the barrel of his barn blaster over the side of the wagon box, taking aim.
‘Don’t do it, Beckett,’ Prophet thought, warning bells tolling in his head. ‘There’s a dozen of them, and you’ve only got the two loads in that farm gun.’
Prophet looked around for a gun, but no one was wearing one.
More whooping and gunfire erupted from the men before the mercantile, drawing Prophet’s frantic gaze. They were all mounted now, and starting down the street, heading his way. They fired at windows and shingles as they rode, whooping and hollering like mad spirits released from hell, the hooves of their horses pounding the hard-packed street.
Prophet shot a glance at Beckett, taking aim across the side of the wagon. ‘Don’t do it, Sheriff!’ Prophet shouted.
It was too late.
He heard, ‘Stop! Sheriff!’ and then the roar of the shotgun. It brought the firebrands to a skidding halt. Turning their horses toward the wagon, they opened fire, smoke puffing in huge clouds above their heads, the sound of their mocking laughter mixing with the racketing of their six-shooters and the confused whinnies of their horses.
‘Well, that does it,’ Prophet thought, the skin on his neck pricking in earnest, lead filling his boots. ‘The crazy old coot’s finished.’
As the laughing men resumed their course down the street, Prophet turned to the four shopkeepers cowering a few feet away, behind water troughs and shipping barrels. ‘Doesn’t anyone have a goddamn gun?’
A little man with a big, waxed mustache regarded him fearfully behind a stack of crates. ‘I got one inside.’
‘Get it, goddamnit! Move!’ Prophet shouted.
The man ran into his millinery and was gone for what seemed like a long time as the firebrands trotted their horses parade like down the street, shooting every window they spotted and even killing several horses tied to hitch racks.
‘Hurry up!’ Prophet shouted as the group passed.
He turned around just as the hat maker reappeared, stooped and cowering, his face white, handing an oily, lumpy rag to Prophet. Crouching behind a water trough, Prophet opened the rag to find a Navy Conversion .36 with cracked grips and a rusty barrel. He hefted the gun in his right hand, not sure if the old cannon would blow his hand off but at the moment not caring. He bounced up from behind the trough and ran into the street as the procession made its way westward.
‘Take one from me, you goddamn scurvy swine!’ he shouted, thumbing back the hammer, squeezing the trigger and feeling the old hog nearly buck his hand off, springing his wrist.
In spite of the pain, he loosed two more shots before all the riders were out of range. So much black powder hung before him that he couldn’t see if he’d hit anything. One of the riders at the end of the bunch turned in his saddle to return fire at Prophet, but apparently thinking he wasn’t worth the effort, he turned back around and followed the others out of town.
Silence fell as the thunder of the horses receded in the distance. It was just as quickly shattered again as a woman commenced screaming.
‘Arnie! Oh, Arnie!’
Prophet turned to his right and saw a woman standing beside the wagon the sheriff had used for a shield. She wore a gray gingham housedress, an apron, and a lace-edged bonnet she must have thrown on in a hurry, for it was untied.
‘No! Oh, Arnie!’
Prophet headed that way, hoping there was something he could do for the sheriff. It didn’t take long to see there wasn’t.
Beckett sat behind the left rear wheel of the wagon, his back to an awning post. He could have been napping, his chin on his chest, but for the four holes in his face, another in his throat, and at last three more in his chest. He was a bloody mess, and the wagon had been honeycombed with lead, the two horses killed and lying in the traces, in pools of their own viscera.
Prophet grabbed the woman’s arm and led her up on the boardwalk—Mrs. Arnie Beckett, widowed in an eye blink.
‘Take her home and call the undertaker,’ Prophet told one of the men who’d gathered at the wagon, looking as jittery as raw recruits in the aftermath of their first battle.
Unsteadily, the man led the crying woman off.
Prophet walked around the dead horses toward the mercantile. When he got there, he stopped before the woman lying slumped on the steps and checked her pulse. It was an instinctive move running contrary to logic, for the small, neat hole dripping blood between her eyes told him she was dead.
He mounted the steps and went inside to see who else had been the victims of the gang’s violence. Inside the door, he stopped and looked around at the aisles of clothes and other dry goods, at the upended barrels of flour and nails and scattered displays of soaps and smoking pipes and chewing tobaccos. Nearly all the candy barrels and bins had been upended as well, the rock candy and licorice and jawbreakers scattered about the floor.
A guttural groan lifted from the back of the store, toward the counter, and Prophet moved toward it. Down the aisle he saw a man in a bloody apron sitting with his back to the counter. A tall, lanky man with short, black hair pomaded to his scalp and parted in the middle, he held his hands across his belly. Prophet winced when he saw that the man was literally holding his guts in his hands.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Prophet sputtered, kneeling before the man. Hearing someone mounting the steps, he turned and yelled through the door, ‘Someone get a sawbones— quick!’
He turned back to the wounded mercantile proprietor, who was shaking his head. His eyes were vacant and glassy. Blood bubbled from his mouth.
‘No ... use,’ he rasped. ‘I’m a ... goner.’
‘Hold on, buddy,’ Prophet said, squeezing the man’s shoulder. But he knew the man was right. Back during the Little Misunderstanding, he’d seen similar wounds. They were as deadly as they were painful, and this man didn’t have a chance.
‘My wife?’ the man said. His chin was dipped to his chest.
Prophet hesitated. ‘Fit as a fiddle.’
The man gave a halfhearted chuff, reading the lie. That’s . .. that’s . .. what I... f-figured.’
The man paused as if to conserve his strength. He took a rattling breath and said, ‘D-daughter?’
The daughter was apparently the blond girl the lead rider had ridden away with, thrown callously over his saddle and screaming for her life.
‘I’m gonna get her back for you,’ Prophet said. His jaw was set hard as he stared down at the dying man, his heart breaking for all the hell that had happened here ... for what? There couldn’t have been more than fifty or sixty dollars in the cash drawer.
Now the decent old sheriff was dead, along with most of a family. Who knew how many those human blowflies had left dead or injured up the street, before they’d finished their raid.
The dying man moved his hand to Prophet’s and squeezed his wrist. It wasn’t much of a squeeze, but Prophet could tell the man had something important on his mind. ‘Get... get her back ... for me. P-please.’
Prophet squeezed back. ‘I will. You can count on that.’
Then the man’s hand slid away from Prophet’s wrist, and slowly, as though he were drifting to sleep, he slumped sideways to the floor and lay still.
Prophet stood and turned toward the front of the store, where several townsmen had gathered in the aisle, looking shocked and wary.
‘Ole Hank,’ one of them said slowly. ‘He dead?’
‘He’s dead,’ Prophet said, brushing past the townsmen and heading for the door. When he got there, he pushed through the screen, descended the steps past the dead woman, and headed for the boarding house, moving quickly.
He’d get his guns and his possibles and be on the trail in a half hour. Then he’d hunt those renegades and turn them toe down hard—with not a scrap of mercy and no concern for monetary reward—if he had to ride all the way to hell and thrash the devil with a stick to do it.