MEAN AND UGLY snorted.
Prophet, who’d been dozing against the side of a boulder, jerked his head and rifle up.
The rifle was already cocked. He saw the hatchet turning end over end toward his head, and he twisted sideways, hearing the hatchet whistle past his right ear and slam into the boulder behind him. The hatchet tumbled onto his shoulder as Prophet squeezed the Winchester’s trigger.
The Indian standing crouched and wide-eyed a few feet up a rocky grade before him flew straight up and backward as Prophet’s .44 round blew his throat out the back of his neck before leaving him thrashing on the uneven ground, bleeding over both hands clamped to his neck.
Prophet grabbed Mean’s reins as the horse curveted and whinnied his disdain for the Indian’s sudden appearance. Hearing guns begin popping in the distance, Prophet heaved himself to his feet, his denims mercilessly raking him, and swung into the leather. He did not wait to see if any other Mojaves were stalking him, but crouched forward over Mean’s neck and rammed his spurs against the gelding’s flanks.
Horse and rider leaped the still-spasming Mojave and headed on down a meandering wild-horse trail and up a grade toward a low saddle. He spied movement on his right, saw a brave with a carbine scrambling amongst the rocks. The brave was caught off guard by the galloping rider and managed to snap off only one wild round before Mean gained the saddle and lunged down the other side.
The sun was not yet up, and the terrain was mostly shadows, but Prophet could see smoke rising from amongst the rocks and brush a hundred yards beyond. He could see the shooters scrambling around on the lip of a rise, shooting away from Prophet and into a depression beyond, in which other shooters scrambled around, returning fire.
Beyond both sets of shooters the mountain tapered down toward open desert stretching off toward the Sea of Cortez unseen in the south.
Prophet sawed back on Mean’s reins and looked around quickly. An escarpment jutted from a sandy, aproned hill on his right. He reined Mean around, booted him up the rise and around to the backside of the scarp, dismounted, and tied Mean to a spindly mesquite.
Shucking the Indian rifle from his saddle boot, he cocked it one-handed and ran into a notch in the scarp, suppressing the pain in his sunburned hide as he climbed up the notch. He found a niche amongst the rocks near the top of the scarp and found a comfortable perch.
“Four rounds,” he told himself.
From his vantage, he could see several Mojaves shooting into the broad, shallow gully beyond. He couldn’t see much of them because of the brush and jumbled rocks, but he could see enough to place a couple of well-aimed shots. He didn’t think that any of the Mojaves before him had seen him, and he hoped they wouldn’t until he could get his hands on more ammo.
Smoke puffed from the brush and rocks about sixty yards in front of him. It also puffed from about a hundred yards beyond the Indians, the crackle of reports rising and flatting hollowly around the mountain. Bullets fired by the desperadoes blew up dust and gravel and rock shards around the Mojaves, who were not shooting from stationary positions but scrambling around the rocks, moving in on their prey.
Prophet took aim, fired.
The Indian had moved as he’d pulled the trigger, and the bounty hunter’s bullet blew a branch off a pipe-stem cactus to the right of the brave.
The brave whipped around, wide eyed with anger and surprise, and Prophet’s second shot made the brave jerk back against a boulder. The brave dropped his rifle as he fell to his knees and, clutching his belly with both hands, fell forward on his face.
Prophet ducked down behind the rocks, waited a few seconds, then edged another look toward the Mojaves, shuttling his gaze from left to right along their flank. None, it appeared, had realized the shot that had killed the brave had come from behind them. The Indian closest to the dead brave was fifteen yards away and flinging arrows at the outlaws as he darted amongst the rocks.
“Two shots,” Prophet muttered, pulling his head back down. “Not bad. Not half bad at all.”
He climbed tenderly down the scarp the way he’d climbed it, stole around from behind the rocky thumb, and ran crouching in the direction of the dead brave, weaving amongst the dry shrubs and boulders. He’d just run out from behind one such boulder when an arrow snicked nap from his right pant leg.
Wheeling, he saw that he hadn’t been as covert as he’d thought he’d been. A brave was running toward him, wildly leaping rocks while he nocked another arrow. Prophet threw himself to his left as the Indian sent another shaft missiling toward him.
Prophet fired from his backside too quickly. The brave yowled as Prophet’s bullet drilled his left knee.
Cursing at the wasted bullet, Prophet fired again, aiming more carefully and punching a slug through the middle of the brave’s calico shirt. The brave flew back over a rock, one leg hanging up on the rock, his foot bobbing as he died.
Like several of the other braves, including the first one he’d shot, this brave was wearing a single bandolier on his chest. Prophet looked around—no other Indians, or desperadoes for that matter, were bearing down on him—then ran over and pulled the bandolier from the brave’s chest and slung it over his own head and shoulder. He stepped behind a barrel cactus and slipped .44 rounds from the belt and thumbed them into the Winchester’s breech.
With the gun loaded, he walked out from behind the boulder, rested a shoulder against it as he surveyed the field of battle before him.
He could see several dead Indians, including the two he’d killed, and two dead desperadoes farther down the draw. The shooting continued, an angry fusillade accompanied by the Indians’ war whoops and the desperadoes’ angry shouts. He squinted his eyes against the brassy sun but could not see Louisa amidst the rocks and cactus and occasional humps of clay-colored earth.
The Indians were moving away from Prophet, running and leaping as they triggered lead or flung arrows toward the desperadoes. They had the desperadoes on the run now, and Johnson, Knight, and the others were shouting and running away, swinging around now and then to fling lead behind them.
Prophet dropped to a knee and ran his wrist across his chin. Where was Louisa? She might already be dead. In that case, he was wasting his time. Let the Indians and the desperadoes kill each other. He’d be left with the gold and stolen Nogales bank money to head north with.
But he had to know of Louisa’s fate. He had to know if she was here of her own free will, or if they’d forced her to come. He had to know if she was dead or alive.
He rose and ran crouching forward, tracing a circuitous route, pausing occasionally to fire at the Indians.
It wasn’t long before most of the Mojaves were aware that they’d been flanked. He dispatched three. Surprised, the others scrambled up a long, rocky jog of hills on his left and out of the field of fire. Not many remained. He counted only five or so. His own bullets and those of the desperadoes had dispatched most of El Lightning’s band of devoted warriors.
Prophet turned left to walk around a boulder and tripped over a dead man. Kiljoy. The outlaw had two Mojave arrows in his chest, about two inches apart and straight through his heart. He stared up at Prophet, and he seemed to be smiling.
Prophet ran crouching forward, toward where the gunfire was dwindling. The desperadoes had turned on each other now. As he watched, Thelma Knight shouted angrily and triggered a rifle from her shoulder. Her shot blew up dust behind a string of horses galloping about fifty yards beyond her—a pinto, a black, and a pack mule. Louisa stopped her brown-and-white pinto and turned, lifting a carbine to her shoulder.
Knight fired again. The second rider, Sugar Delphi, jerked sideways and almost fell from her saddle.
Prophet stopped beside a cactus and stared as Louisa fired her own carbine. The black woman took the bullet as she ran. The shot jerked her to one side, and she dove awkwardly into a patch of cactus on her left and lay unmoving.
Louisa, leading the beefy pack mule and being followed by the blind redhead, who sagged over her saddle horn, kicked her pinto into a gallop through the rocks and cactus and spindly brown shrubs, dust lifting behind hers and the other mounts. They were heading for the open desert to the south, Louisa glancing back at the wounded Sugar.
Prophet stared, lower jaw hanging. His mouth was dry. His guts were knotted.
Movement ahead jerked him out of his trance. A Mojave was running through the brush. He gave a yowl as he leaped a boulder and disappeared behind a large, flat-topped boulder twenty yards ahead of Prophet.
El Lightning was holding a rifle—Prophet’s own Winchester ’73—in one hand, a bloody war hatchet in the other. Prophet heard the rifle crack. A man screamed. There were two more blasting reports on the heels of El Lightning’s victorious yowls.
Prophet ran forward, leaped atop the boulder, and stopped, crouching and raising his rifle to his shoulder. El Lightning stood over Hawk Johnson’s bloody body. Johnson was on his back, hands raised to his shoulders, palms out, shaking. His mouth formed a horrific O as he stared up at the big Indian straddling him.
El Lightning casually lowered the Winchester’s barrel and blew a slug through Johnson’s face. The outlaw’s body relaxed, and his head turned to one side.
The Indian lifted his head slightly, widening his eyes. He did not look at Prophet, but he smiled.
“I left you to the buzzards, Lou.”
“And you left one man alive in San Gezo.”
El Lightning winced and shook his head at his own folly. “I should have tortured you slow and killed you. It would have given me great pleasure . . . to hear such a big gringo begging for his life.”
“I’d make you beg for yours,” Prophet said, “but—”
Just then El Lightning whipped around and turned Prophet’s own rifle on him. Prophet’s Indian carbine roared twice, blowing the Mojave war chief up off his feet and into the rocks beyond, blood spurting from the two holes in his chest.
“—I don’t have time,” Prophet finished.
He ejected the last spent cartridge, heard it clatter onto the boulder, and seated a fresh round in the chamber. Guardedly, he leaped off the boulder and retrieved his Winchester, also confiscating the war chief’s two crisscrossed bandoliers, so that he now had three draped over his neck and shoulders.
El Lightning lay with his body twisted, head turned to one side, the blue and ochre lines across his nose and the savage lightning bolt glistening in the harsh desert sunlight.
Holding the rifle barrel out from his hip, Prophet looked around. No one else was moving out here. No one except a few buzzards tracing lazy circles about a hundred yards over the charnel ground.
Prophet walked forward. Strewn amongst the rocks, he found the bloody, dusty, battered bodies of Tulsa St. James and Dad Conway lying ten yards apart. He found Doc Shackleford piled up at the base of an organ pipe cactus, dead, his bloody guts in his hands. A buzzard was perched proudly atop his head, giving Prophet the evil eye.
Prophet looked south. Louisa and Sugar were just now reaching the base of the mountains and heading off into the desert, their shadows short in the late morning light, copper dust rising. Sugar sagged lower in her saddle.
Prophet turned and tramped back toward where he’d left his horse behind the scarp. Halfway there, he stopped and frowned down at one of the dead Indians. Stooping, he picked his Colt .45 out of the dust, wiped it clean on his shirt, holstered it, clicked the keeper thong over the hammer, and continued to where Mean and Ugly stood waiting anxiously behind the scarp.
A half hour later, he was galloping across the desert, following Louisa’s faint sign.
He rose up and over a low rise and reined up suddenly, curveting his horse. Fifty yards away, Louisa knelt on the ground with Sugar sagging faceup in her arms. The mule hauling the strongbox stood between Louisa’s pinto and Sugar’s black, all three cropping idly at weed tufts.
Louisa stared down at the blind woman. Sugar was not moving. She didn’t seem to be breathing.
After a long time, the Vengeance Queen lifted her blond head and stared at Prophet. Her hazel eyes were at first stony beneath her tan hat. Then they acquired a shocked, stricken cast. Her face crumpled, and she lowered her head again, shoulders shaking.
Prophet heard her sobbing. Or was it the Devil laughing?
He sat his horse, staring at her. After a long time, he clucked to Mean and rode toward her.