PROPHET CROUCHED AS he drew his pistol, holding out his left hand so his fiddle-footed horse wouldn’t trample him. Tossing his gaze across the street, he saw smoke dispersing in the air over a feed trough.
Prophet fired twice at the trough, then, releasing Mean’s reins, he pivoted to his right, ran back onto the boardwalk, and crouched behind a barrel someone had cut in half and filled with petunias.
The pistol across the street cracked again, the slugs plunking into the barrel. Certain that members of the Red River Gang had tracked him from Wahpeton, Prophet stretched his arm around the right side of the barrel but held his fire when he saw the gunman dart up from behind the trough and disappear around the corner of the millinery shop.
Only one man?
Prophet hesitated, knowing it could be a trap. If he followed the gunman, he might run straight into the rest of the gang waiting for him in an alley. But his legs had already taken him halfway across the street before his mind decided to go ahead and chase the son of a bitch.
He pressed his back to the front of the millinery store, and slid a cautious gaze around the corner. One man, a stout hombre in a floppy hat and suspenders, was mounting a dust-gray horse waiting for him in the alley. Vaguely surprised to not see more men with drawn weapons, Prophet bolted around the corner as the man gigged the agitated mount southward, and fired off three ineffectual shots at the retreating figure.
Prophet paused to stare at the dwindling horseman befuddledly. Something about the man’s homespun clothes, crude gear, and heavy-footed horse told the bounty hunter he was not a member of the Red River Gang. But if he was not, then who was he, and why in the hell was he trying to kill Prophet?
Prophet ran back for his horse, but Ugly was not where he’d left him. He cursed again, ran down the side street, and found the dun standing by a trash heap in the alley, his bridle reins hanging, an owly look in his eyes.
‘Easy, Mean—damnit,’ Prophet groused, walking slowly up to the perturbed mount in spite of his need to hurry. ‘Don’t act like you never heard gunshots before, you old crank.’
When he got close, the horse sidled away, but Prophet lunged for the reins, grabbing them, and jumped into the leather. A moment later he was following the gunman’s path south, tracing a meandering trail around shanties and log cabins. He stopped at the school, where children paused in their play to regard him curiously.
‘A man just gallop through here?’ he asked, suddenly unsure of the gunman’s trail.
A boy in highwater coveralls lifted his arm and pointed southeast. ‘He crossed the river through there! Wolf chased him!’
‘Much obliged!’
Prophet had no idea who Wolf was, but he found out a minute later, when a big, black sheepdog loped toward him from the south, tongue hanging. The dog paused and hunkered low in a patch of high grass, watching Prophet gallop toward him. As Prophet passed, the dog leapt at Mean and Ugly’s hocks, snarling, but was too tuckered to give chase.
Prophet crossed the shallow river and climbed the sparsely wooded rise on the other side. Raking his gaze around, he saw a rider cresting a hill in the middle distance, heading southeast at a lumbering gallop.
Prophet heeled Ugly after him, and when he’d ridden a good mile, he topped a high hill on the other side of a brushy creek. Looking eastward, he saw dust lingering in the still morning air, but he did not see the rider. Apparently, the man had ridden over the next rise east. If he held true to his speed and course, about now he should be climbing the next, higher hill beyond.
But he wasn’t.
Prophet turned Mean and Ugly back down to the creek bottom and tied the horse to a tree. Looping the shotgun around his neck and holding it out before him, he followed the base of the hill southward. When he came to a cleft in the hill, he followed it east.
On the other side of the hill, he paused, looking around. Several trees and boulders provided good cover. A horse blew somewhere nearby, and Prophet crouched, quickening his gaze. Seeing nothing, he moved farther east, staying low in the brush and looking northward up the ravine.
He stopped when he saw the gray horse tied to a tree about fifty yards before him.
Prophet sucked his teeth, wary. Was there really only one man, or was that how it was supposed to look? Was he supposed to creep up on a man placed as a decoy while others crept up on Prophet from behind?
Chewing his cheek, Prophet gazed around with cautious eyes, and peeled the Richards’s hammers back, ready to start blasting at the first sign of trouble. Stepping eastward, he came upon a thin game trail hugging the east side of the ravine, and followed its meandering path north through shrubs and bramble.
Birds cried and gophers chattered in the grass.
When he came to a cottonwood, Prophet stopped suddenly.
About forty feet before him, the gunman crouched behind a mossy boulder, keeping his eyes and rifle trained on the western ridge of the hill looming up before him. He was waiting for Prophet to come galloping down that hill and into his rifle fire—lights out, that’s all she wrote. Fiddler, start the music.
Crouching, holding the shotgun chest-high, Prophet started toward the man. His foot cracked a branch, and the man swung toward him, eyes widening, face coloring up like a sunset.
‘Stop!’ Prophet warned.
When the man didn’t check the arc of the rifle, Prophet tripped his right trigger, and the Richards jumped with the explosion of spewing buckshot. The gunman fired once, the slug smacking into the tree behind Prophet. As the buckshot took him through his middle, he flew back against the rock and dropped his rifle. He stood there a moment and lowered his chin to stare down at his open belly, losing his hat in the process. He looked at Prophet, stumbled forward snarling, then fell to his knees, breathing hard and making high-pitched sobbing sounds.
‘Goddamnit!’ Prophet groused. ‘I told you to stop!’
‘Y-you blasted me ... ye ... snake.’
‘You’re the one layin’ for me in the grass,’ Prophet reminded the man as he stepped forward, lowering the Richards, and glancing around to make sure they were alone.
‘Who the hell are you?’ Prophet asked, crouching down and removing the six-shooter from the man’s holster. He had wavy brown hair and a broad, pitted nose. Half his left ear was gone, leaving an ugly mess of scar tissue—the result of a knife fight, no doubt.
‘I’m Carlton Mack,’ the man groaned, turning onto his shoulder, his face bunched with pain. ‘You shot my brother, Benny, and brung him here for the bounty, you no-good’—the man cried out in pain—’bounty hunter!’
Prophet stared down at the man wearily, lining up his thoughts. Then he remembered that Benny Mack was one of the two men he’d killed in the Johnson Lake Road-house, prior to traveling to Luther Falls. The corners of his eyes creased with surprise.
‘You’re Benny Mack’s brother?’
‘C-came t-ta ... kill you ... you son ... of a bitch!’
With that, the man expired, his head dropping, his mask of pain flattening out and relaxing, tongue drooping. His eyes remained open, sightlessly studying the ants that were already moving in to investigate the gift of carnage fallen here as if from the sky.
‘You goddamn fool,’ Prophet snarled.
On one hand, he was relieved that the man had no connection to the Red River Gang. On the other, he felt chagrined by the fact that a family member of one of his quarry had come gunning for him. Not that it hadn’t happened before, and not that it wouldn’t happen again.
He just didn’t like it. There were too many ways to get killed at this job.
He didn’t bother burying the man. The brush wolves and the bears in these parts would only dig him up in a few hours, anyway. Besides, he didn’t have time. He had the Red River Gang to hunt.
Moodily, he took the man’s guns and walked over to his horse tethered to the oak. He slid the rifle into the saddle boot and dropped the six-shooter in a saddlebag, then led the horse over to Mean and Ugly.
A minute later, he was heading back for Luther Falls, trailing the dust-gray for delivery to the school. No doubt one of those young ’uns on the playground could use a good saddle horse.
An hour earlier, Tom Taber and Billy Silver were sitting before the lumberyard across from the livery barn, smoking and trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, given this was a good Lutheran town and the two gang members not only had sidewinder written all over them, but one was Indian and the other white.
And, of course, there was the little matter of their raid a few days back.
Neither man worried about any of that, however. The town was without its sheriff, and thus these pious folks of Luther Falls were babes in the woods, without threat and defenseless—except for the man who’d taken the girl out of the Wahpeton saloon, that was. That’s who Taber and Silver were watching for now, believing he’d sooner or later show himself around the livery barn. They’d recognize him easy enough. A rough-hewn character like that, clad in trail garb, would stand out in a porridge-and-raisin village like this one.
Taber was talking in a desultory way to Silver about the pony drip his brother had died of last month. ‘Went plumb wild, and even shot a whore, though she wasn’t the one who gave it to him—’ Taber stopped, noticing that Silver was staring eastward down the street, where three men were walking along the boardwalk, headed this way on the other side of Main.
‘Well, well,’ Taber said under his breath. ‘Now who in the hell you s’pose they are?’
‘One, he’s got a badge,’ Silver said in his guttural Indian-English.
‘Badge?’ Taber squinted his eyes to see better. Sure enough, when the trio stepped out from under an awning, something pinned to one of the men’s vests winked in the sun. ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’
The three men marched like proud soldiers home on leave, tipping their hats to the ladies, their jaws straight, the brims of their hats pulled low over their eyes. Their black boots shone like obsidian, and the guns tied on their hips appeared well-chosen and -tended.
As they approached the livery barn, Taber said, ‘Greenhorns with badges is what they are.’ He waited for Silver to say something, but the tight-lipped Sioux just stared, his muddy eyes glinting with kill lust. He got that look every time he saw a badge or soldier blue.
‘You s’pose one of them nabbed the girl?’ Taber said, not expecting a reply. Around Silver, you did a lot of talking to yourself.
He was surprised when the Indian offered a slight shrug. Even more surprised to hear, ‘We know why they’re here,’ in that flat, low, menacing tone of Silver’s.
Taber spat, snorted, and poked his cloth cap up on his pale, bald head. He chuckled at Silver’s laconicism, contrasting it with the war whoops the Indian had given last night when, half smashed on rye, he’d gone upstairs in the saloon.
‘We sure do,’ Taber said. ‘Well now, I reckon we see what direction they’re headed ... and follow ‘em.’ He looked at Silver, who’d stood and was moving toward the lumberyard’s main building behind them. ‘Hey, where you goin’?’
‘Gonna use a grindstone ... sharpen my knife.’
Silver was returning from the lumberyard and inspecting his freshly sharpened knife blade when the three lawmen descended the livery barn’s ramp, two leading duns, the third, a tall black stallion.
‘Here we go,’ Taber said.
Silver stood beside Taber and watched the three men trot their horses out of town.
Taber and Silver walked to their own mounts tied to the hitch rack around the corner, and climbed into the leather. They moved deliberately, not in any hurry. They didn’t want the lawmen to know they were being trailed.
An hour later, when they were about eight miles northwest of Luther Falls, Taber glanced at Silver, forming a gap-toothed grin. ‘What do you say, Billy? Circle around ‘em, set up an ambush?’
The Indian didn’t say anything. He just gigged his horse to the right of the oxcart trail they were following and spurred him into a gallop.
‘Well, goddamnit... wait for me, ye crazy Injun!’