PROPHET MADE NO sudden movements as he studied the three men at the back of the saloon. They wore pistols and shell belts, and they’d armed themselves with rifles. One he recognized as the townsman called LaBeouf—a burly gent with a wandering eye. The three stood near a door in the middle of the rear wall and to the left of a stairs that angled toward the second story.
Louisa had followed Prophet’s gaze to the three, craning her neck to look behind her. The only other person in the saloon to have noticed the newcomers was, oddly, Sugar Delphi, who had turned slightly away from holding Lazzaro down to cock an ear at the room’s rear.
“Got it!” the doctor roared, pulling his bloody forceps out of the hole in Lazzaro’s side.
Lazzaro screamed, bucking up off the table, then promptly passed out, the leather swatch falling out of his mouth.
“I didn’t think that stupid gringo was ever going to shut up!” exclaimed Sergeant Frieri, sitting with Chacin and the other Rurales around a single tequila bottle.
Red Snake turned his head sharply toward the Rurale and opened his mouth but before he could retort, one of the saloon’s two front doors opened, rattling the rusty bell. The town marshal walked in on a gust of wind-blown grit, scrubbed his boots on the hemp rug, and closed the door behind him.
Prophet kept one eye on the three men at the back of the room and one on the newcomer—a medium-tall, small-boned, potbellied man with curly, dark brown hair puffing out around his tan Stetson. His black frock coat was dusty, and his string tie had been blown back over his shoulder.
He had dark brown eyes, and they both seemed to twitch as he studied the room, grimacing, shoulders slightly slumped, all in all appearing vexed or negotiating a chronic, generalized pain. Prophet judged him to be in his late thirties, early forties.
“Well, well, well,” the marshal said in a high-pitched, gravelly voice, and none too happily. “Ain’t this a party?”
“Come on over and take a load off, Marshal,” Prophet said, raising his shot glass and grinning. “I’ll buy you a drink.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Lou Prophet. You are . . . ?”
The lawman swept the room with his twitching, disapproving gaze—his eyes seemed to be blinking out of sync with each other—and raised his gravelly voice. “Bill Hawkins is my name. Town marshal of San Gezo. And I reckon you fellas ain’t got the word, but here it is: strangers are not allowed in San Gezo. Especially obvious outlaws.” He extended his left arm and pointed his index finger at Chacin, narrowing one of his forever-twitching eyes and shouting, “And that goes for you, too, Captain. Anyone can wear the uniform of a Mexican Rurale. Besides, all of us here are citizens of the United States of America, and we do not recognize the government of Mexico.”
“You don’t think so, uh?” Chacin’s face reddened and he curled his upper lip as he twisted the right upswept end of his mustache. The other Rurales stiffened as they glowered back at Marshal Hawkins.
Hawkins looked meaningfully at the three men at the back of the room, who slowly spread out to form a semicircle at the room’s rear, hefting their rifles. Two were relatively young but hard-eyed, and they wore their guns and wielded their rifles as though they knew how to use them. LaBeouf scowled at the Rurale captain as though filled with an old hatred. Appearing in his early fifties, his pale skin was pink behind his cinnamon beard. Several warts bristled on his double chins and on his small, blunt nose. He cocked his Winchester loudly and worked the gob of chew in his mouth.
The marshal set the butt of his shotgun on his shell belt, aiming the double barrels at the ceiling. “Those three men you might have noticed at the back of the room feel right at home here in Mojaveria. They’re well armed and well schooled in the implementation of said firearms. They are shop owners here in San Gezo and my sworn deputies.
“They’ve been ordered to defend themselves and the good citizens of this town at all costs, for we are the last inhabitants of San Gezo, and we will not be pushed around by Indians or border bandits.” He slid his owly gaze to Captain Chacin. “Or anyone wearing a gray monkey suit and callin’ themselves a Rurale.”
Chacin glowered back at the man, grinding his jaws.
Hawkins looked at the table before him. “Miss Ivy, Miss Tulsa, Dad . . . you all walk back behind the bar and get ready to lower your heads if the situation gets ugly, which it very possibly might. Doc, you, too.”
The two women quickly climbed to their feet. Huffing and puffing and looking deeply dismayed, the hefty, redheaded whore shuffled toward the bar. The black woman took Dad’s arm and moved less quickly, leading the old man, who continued to glare at Prophet, around behind the bar. The whore popped the cork on a bottle and, her pudgy, pale hand shaking, splashed whiskey into a tumbler.
Prophet sighed and slacked back in his chair, hooking his thumbs behind his cartridge belt. “Look, Hawkins, you can talk loud as you want since you’re holdin’ that barn burner an’ all. But know you can’t legally kick us out of your town. We ain’t broken any of your laws, and your town is in Mexico, of which I doubt you ain’t even a citizen. Now, why don’t you come on over here and let me buy you a drink, you ole hornswoggler, before this gets a whole lot nastier than it should.”
The marshal looked at Prophet, one eye wide, the other twitching wildly. He appeared to be puffing up and on the verge of exploding.
Prophet saw something out the corner of his left eye. At the same time, Ivy, standing behind the bar, gasped, “Oh, my god!”
Prophet turned his head to see the tall, dark hombre who’d been manning the Gatling gun fall out of the open loft door on the other side of the street. He turned one somersault and hit the ground in front of the barn with a thud. He bounced slightly and lay still on his belly, dust puffing around him.
An arrow protruded from his back. Prophet lifted his shocked gaze to the open loft door to see the maw of the Gatling gun swinging around slightly and becoming level with the saloon. A dark face beneath a red bandanna smiled wickedly, green eyes flashing in the afternoon light as El Lightning’s fist began turning the gun’s wood-handled crank.
Prophet shouted, “Everyone down!”
He threw himself back in his chair, and he and the chair hit the floor with a resounding boom that was almost instantly drowned by the savage hiccups of the blazing Gatling gun and the screams of everyone else in the room.
Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!
The moaning wind only partly covered the gun’s savage cacophony. It did not at all cover the screeching of breaking glass as the bullets hammered the front of the saloon and blasted out the window to send the bullets screaming through the saloon and into tables and chairs and support posts and the bar and the back-bar mirror and shelved bottles and glasses. The bullets shredded the dull red carpet on the stairs at the room’s right rear and blasted the newel from its post.
Prophet had turned onto his right shoulder and cast a quick look around the room to see everyone on the floor amidst the flying splinters. When the Gatling gun died, its cartridge belt apparently having run out of bullets, Prophet grabbed his rifle off the table, where he’d left it. He pumped a shell into the chamber, rose to his knees, swiping his hat from his head, and edged a look up above the sill of the front window nearest him.
He could no longer see El Lightning in the barn loft. Only the Gatling gun sat there, its smoking canister tilted upward. Howls and the thuds of galloping horses rose, and Prophet saw Mojaves galloping toward the saloon from both sides of the street while several others appeared in the breaks on either side of the livery barn. One bolted out from the barn’s right side and dove behind a stock trough, a carbine in his hands.
Prophet rested his Winchester’s barrel on the sill of the blown-out window and triggered two shots at the stock trough, blasting the carbine out of the Indian’s hand with the first shot and drilling the Mojave’s neck with the second. Both his spent cartridges rattled onto the wooden floor behind him as he pumped a fresh shell into the rifle’s breech.
Two shots for one Injun, he thought with an inward grimace, knowing he had to make every shot count.
Around him, the other men and women were shouting and shifting themselves into position to cut loose on the Indians now triggering rifles and arrows from horseback as they galloped in both directions past the saloon. The Mojaves were howling angrily but moving too quickly for an accurate shot. As two arrows whistled past his head and a bullet drilled the sill, spitting prickly slivers against his face, Prophet lowered his head and put his shoulder to the wall beneath the window.
He ran a sleeve across his face and cast a quick glance behind him. Lazzaro was on the floor, and Sugar was crouched over him, her sightless eyes showing gray in the light from the saloon’s front windows. Louisa was on one knee, triggering both her pistols through the front door that had been blown open by the Gatling’s blast.
Marshal Bill Hawkins was down on his shoulder behind Louisa, holding one arm while sliding himself toward the front window on the far side of the door, holding his big Greener in one gloved hand. His hat was off and his dark curly hair glistened with broken window glass.
Chacin and the other Rurales and Red Snake and Kiljoy were firing pistols and rifles through the larger front window on the right side of the door. One of the three townsmen who’d entered through the rear door was down and unmoving in a pool of blood while the others, including red-bearded LeBeouf, were hunkered behind overturned tables, looking fearfully toward the front of the room.
Prophet broke open his barn blaster, made sure he had a wad in each barrel, then, growling through gritted teeth, said, “I’m getting awful tired of these damn redskins!”
He triggered the left barrel through the window, blowing one Mojave off his horse and causing another behind him to yelp and grab his face. While the first Mojave was still airborne and howling, Prophet triggered the coach gun’s second barrel.
A Mojave had worked his way over to the saloon and was just bounding up the veranda steps when Prophet’s blast shredded the Indian’s calico blouse, peppered his neck and face, and threw him back down the steps and into the street with a clipped cry.
There was a window in the side wall off the end of the bar, behind Prophet. While the others continued to throw bullets at the Indians, Prophet reloaded the double-barrel gut shredder and hurled himself through the window. He landed in the alley between the saloon and another adobe-brick building, with a great “Uhfff!” of air ejected from his lungs.
He rolled over, wincing at the glass pricking under him, and triggered his shotgun at the first Indian he saw, blowing the howling brave off his horse. Heaving himself to his feet, Prophet ran up to the mouth of the alley and blew another Mojave off his horse, as well.
He started to crouch behind a rain barrel to reload but then he heard only a few rifles popping from the front of the saloon to his right. Looking around, he saw the Indians galloping off in both directions along the street before him, leaving a half-dozen dead in their wake.
“Hold your fire!” Prophet shouted, squinting against the windblown dust. Beyond him, the broad main street was a dirty, washed-out yellow amidst the curtains of blowing grit and tumbleweeds.
He whipped around, thinking he’d seen something moving at the other end of the alley. Quickly breeching the shotgun, plucking out the spent loads and thumbing fresh ones in the barrels, he ran down the alley, then sidled up to the rear of the saloon. Thumbing the barn blaster’s rabbit-eared hammers back, he moved slowly around the corner. Two Indians were standing in front of the back door, one nocking an arrow, the other shoving cartridges into the loading tube of his Spencer carbine.
They saw Prophet at the same time and gave a startled yowl. Prophet raised the coach gun, turned sideways, and—Boom! Boom!—blew both braves up off their feet and sent them flying down the alley in clouds of blood that the wind blew against the saloon’s rear wall.
The rear door creaked open. Prophet swung toward it, dropping his empty shotgun and bringing up his Colt. Louisa stepped into the open doorway, both her silver-chased Peacemakers in her fists. She raised both barrels and depressed the hammers as Prophet lowered his own weapon.
She poked her head out to inspect the two dead Indians. Then she looked at Prophet. She pursed her lips and arched a brow. “I hear your Devil friend laughing at us, Lou.”
“Ah, hell,” the bounty hunter said. “We been in tighter places before this.” He picked up his shotgun, breeched it. Uncertainly, he added, “Or . . . just as tight, anyway.”