LAYLA, WHO HAD been studying the buttes on the other side of the trail, quickly turned to the right and saw the reflection. Adrenaline shot through her veins. She’d started to rein her horse off the trail when she saw the rider wave.
“Layla!” he called, his voice echoing off the buttes. It was a boy’s voice and one that Layla recognized. She expelled a sigh of relief.
“It’s okay,” she said, turning to Prophet. “It’s my brother.”
Layla sat the wagon seat, reins loose in her hands, and watched her twelve-year-old brother, Keith, descend the spur and traverse a narrow seep, splashing mud, his buckskin’s hooves making sucking sounds in the muck.
“Layla!” the boy yelled again, his suntanned face creased with concern. “I been lookin’ all over for you.” Keith Carr was a towhead, with bleached blond eyebrows. He wore a wide-brimmed, bullet-crowned hat, white shirt, baggy overalls, and worn, lace-up boots.
“Ran into a little trouble,” Layla said as the boy reined the buckskin up. She glanced behind her to indicate Prophet in the wagon box.
“Who’s that?”
“Lou Prophet’s the name, boy,” Prophet said, squinting his eyes, smiling with pain, his curly, damp hair blowing across his forehead in the breeze.
The boy turned his puzzled face to his sister.
“One of Loomis’s men shot him,” she said.
“How come?”
“Because I shot his son,” Prophet growled. “Do you two think we might continue this conversation some other time? Not to be a stickler for details, but Loomis’s men are probably still out here, scouring the country for me.”
“I just seen two over yonder,” Keith said, twisting around in his saddle and pointing northeast. “At least, I think they was Loomis riders. They were riding away from me.”
“Did they see you?” Layla asked.
The boy shook his head. “Don’t think so.”
Prophet cleared his throat. “Like I said, you think—?”
“Yeah, yeah, we’re goin’,” Layla said, shaking the reins against the dun’s back. “Come on, Keith.”
After they’d ridden a couple hundred yards along the trail, Keith riding up beside his sister and Layla filling him in on the details of her adventure, the boy screwed up his courage and fell back even with the wagon box. Peering inside, he saw Prophet riding half sitting up, head lolling, hair blowing in the breeze. The man’s eyes were closed, but Keith didn’t think he was sleeping.
“So you killed Little Stu?”
Prophet opened one eye at the lad, then the other. Then he closed both. He was trying to shut the pain out of his mind.
“That’s right.”
The boy’s full lips—he had his sister’s lips, Prophet had already noticed—widened with a wicked grin. He snickered. “How come ye done that!”
Prophet opened his right eye and looked at the boy askance. “’Cause he was askin’ a lot of fool questions.”
The boy’s smile faded, and his face paled. Hurriedly, he jogged his horse ahead to his sister. Behind him, Prophet shaped half a grin.
In spite of the wagon’s rock and clatter, he had managed to fall asleep by the time they rolled through the poor man’s gate into the compound of the Carr ranch headquarters on the north bank of Pretty Butte Creek. When Layla slowed to a stop, he woke and glanced around at the unchinked log barn, several corrals, a pigsty, a chicken coop, and a small gray cabin built into a bluff. Gnarled weeds grew from the cabin’s sod roof.
On its sagging stoop, from which several boards were missing and weeds had grown up through the holes, a mottled black and brown dog slept. Waking at the wagon’s clatter, it came running, wagging its tail and making happy, groaning sounds.
Layla greeted the dog as she climbed down from the wagon seat. The dog followed her around the box and put its feet up to look inside. It fixed its copper eyes on Prophet, working its nose and growling deep in its chest.
“Only one leg at a time, dog,” Prophet said.
“It’s okay, Herman,” Layla told the dog, pushing it down. “He’s friendly enough.”
“Speaking of which,” Prophet said, squinting an eye at her. “Did you kiss me last night?”
Layla looked at him aghast, her face flushing. “I should say I did not!”
Prophet looked skeptical. “You sure?”
Layla was about to utter another response when a horseman came galloping around the corral, spooking the several horses gathered there and scattering the chickens in the yard.
“Layla!” the rider called.
“It’s okay—just another brother,” she told Prophet when he touched his gun butt again, tensing.
“Where you been?” the young man cried as he slipped off the saddleless horse.
He was a good six or seven years older than Keith, Prophet speculated. A year or two older than Layla. But Prophet could tell by the folly in his eyes that something wasn’t right about him mentally.
He lumbered over to his sister and stopped several feet away when he saw Prophet in the wagon box. His eyes grew wide and his big, blunt face flushed. His mouth opened several times, but no words came out. Wearing soot-blackened coveralls with no shirt, he stood about five feet ten and was lean and long-muscled. On his head he wore a shapeless brown hat with a crow feather protruding from the snakeskin band.
“It’s okay, Charlie,” Layla said. “This is Mr. Prophet. He’s gonna stay with us for a while.”
“Wha ... what?”
“I’ll explain later; help me here.”
Charlie remained where he was, his horse’s reins in his hands, pondering the stranger cautiously. When Prophet stood, grunting and favoring his side, Charlie said through a mouth swollen with chew, “What happened to him?”
“One of Loomis’s riders shot him.”
“That ain’t so good.”
“Tell me about it, son,” Prophet said, smiling to set the youth at ease.
“Layla kissed him last night,” Keith said.
“I did not!” Layla cried, whipping her head at her youngest sibling. Prophet’s left arm was around her, as she was helping him toward the cabin. He grinned.
“How come ye did that, Layla?” Charlie asked, incredulous, giving Prophet the twice-over. “You sweet on him?”
Slouched under Prophet’s heavy arm, Lay la looked at Charlie. “I am not sweet on him!”
‘Then how come you kissed him?” Keith asked innocently.
“Will you two please shut up? And Charlie, will you get your ass over here and help? He weighs a ton, I swear.”
Charlie came over and slung Prophet’s other arm over his shoulder and helped head him toward the house. The dog circled, sniffing the stranger. Lay la’s face was still crimson.
“I told you, you were going to live to regret saving my hide, Miss Carr.”
“And weren’t you right, Mr. Prophet!”
Layla and Charlie guided him up the stoop and into the small, cluttered cabin and through a plank door in the back. Behind the door was a bedroom with an unmade bed, and chunks of sod had pushed through the rafters.
There was a bureau, all its open drawers spilling clothes. The room appeared a depository for odds and ends, from tack and clothes irons to steamer kettles and boxes of canning jars. All manner of objects—animal hides, tanning tools, even an old Indian spear—poked out from under the bed.
“Sorry about the mess,” Layla said as they eased Prophet onto the straw tick mattress sack, “but I wasn’t expecting company.”
“Looks like the maid took the day off,” Prophet quipped.
“Better get out of them clothes. I’ll wash ’em when I get the time.” She headed for the door. “Yell if you need anything. I have work to do.” She went out and closed the door behind her.
Prophet struggled out of his boots, grunting and cursing, feeling as though the stitches in his side would pop loose. When he had the boots off, he struggled out of his caked, sweat-damp breeches and what remained of his shirt. In only his union suit, he slipped under the blankets and pulled up the sheets and single Joseph quilt.
He rested his head on the flat pillow with a sigh, and slept.
Luther McConnell was riding alone along the Little Mo when he saw the wagon tracks. It looked as though the wagon had started up out of the river valley, then the driver changed his mind, swung around, and headed back the way he’d come.
Frowning, McConnell spurred his horse down the crease, following the tracks. At the river he reined up. The wagon appeared to have stopped here. Footprints pocked the gumbo.
With his eyes, McConnell followed the footprints to the base of a butte. Seeing something curious, McConnell heeled his horse over to the butte, gazing down and working the chew in his cheek thoughtfully, his heart increasing its speed.
That was blood staining the sand and sparse grass there, sure enough.
He followed two sets of boot prints back to where the wagon had sat, then followed the tracks back along the river. When they disappeared into the thick brown water, he turned into the river and crossed it, coming out at the same place the wagon had.
The sign was confusing here. As on the other side of the river, there appeared to be two sets of wagon tracks, each going the opposite way. What McConnell figured out, however, was that the wagon had gone up the spur draw before him, and come back out, turning south along the river.
He started to follow the tracks south but reconsidered. Something told him he might find something interesting up the draw. The tracks leading south could wait.
His heart thumping in earnest, and his palms growing sweaty, Luther McConnell followed the wagon tracks into the spur canyon until they dead-ended in heavy brush and bullberry shrubs.
Dismounting and tying his horse to a willow, it didn’t take McConnell long to figure out that all the brush and cut branches had been used to cover the wagon for a time—probably overnight—and that whoever had been driving the wagon and whoever had left the blood on the other side of the river had spent the night in that cave yonder.
Inspecting the cave and finding the boot prints, the still-warm ashes in the fire ring, and the bloody slug, he stepped onto the ledge outside the cave and stood there, looking thoughtfully around the ravine. He spat a stream of chew on a rock and drifted his gaze to his left.
Was that a boot poking out from under that brush pile?
He walked over, grabbed the boot, gave it a hard yank, and pulled out the body of Luke Jordan.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” the Crosshatch foreman mused, allowing himself a grin through his beard.
He rummaged around in the brush and pulled out the blood-smeared corpse of Jordan’s partner, Matthew Hack.
“Shit!”
He did not feel any particular sorrow over the demise of his fellow riders. Better them than him. What he did feel, however, was an urgent need to share his discovery, with his boss, Gerard Loomis, and sic their riders after those wagon tracks.
He knew that following the tracks would lead them to the man they were hunting ... and to whoever had made the mistake of helping the son of a bitch.