Chapter 4
Prophet shouted, “Louisa!” as he crossed the stoop and ran through the roadhouse’s rear door.
He stopped ten feet inside the place and looked around. The two windows to his right were broken out, and a chill breeze blew through them, sawing against the few shards of glass remaining in the frames. A fire popped and snapped in the big stone hearth between the windows, lending welcoming warmth and tempering the rotten-egg smell of burnt powder with the perfume of pine.
A man lay on the stairs, limbs akimbo, blood oozing out of the twin holes in his chest and another in his forehead, pooling on the steps beneath him. A Spencer repeating rifle lay on the saloon floor at the base of the stairs.
No sign of Louisa.
Again, Prophet called her name, heard his own voice echo around the shadowy, cavernlike room. He also heard a girl’s sobbing coming from somewhere behind the crude pine bar to his left. He moved slowly into the room, quickly emptying his Colt, spinning the wheel and letting the spent cartridges clatter onto the worn puncheons beneath his boots. He winced when he saw a girl with distinctly Indian features lying across a table before him, eyes staring upward in death.
Her face was badly bruised. Beaten. Blood oozed from a broad gash across her neck.
As Prophet slid fresh ammo from his cartridge belt and thumbed them into the Peacemaker’s chambers, through the open loading gate, he turned his head to his left and saw Louisa standing on a second-floor balcony.
The Vengeance Queen held a sobbing girl in her arms—a young redhead several inches shorter than Louisa and clad in only a thin shift, pantaloons, and a necklace of some kind. Colored feathers hung askew in the tangle of her thick, mussed hair. Rocking the girl gently, holding the girl’s head against her chest, Louisa turned to gaze down over the balcony rail at Prophet.
Lou stopped, loosed a relieved sigh at seeing his partner still standing.
The girl in her arms slowly lifted her head to gaze up at Louisa. Through her sobs, she said, “Why are men so mean? Cruel? Why . . . why . . . do they have to be so . . . poison mean?”
“They don’t have to be,” Louisa said, tonelessly. “Some just choose to be. Maybe even most. There are a few”—she turned to stare over the balcony rail again at Prophet—“who don’t. But even they have their faults.”
Prophet turned his mouth corners down.
Louisa blinked as she turned back to the girl. “There’s no point in not facing facts.” She pulled away from the girl, glanced over the rail again, her eyes finding the dead Indian girl sprawled across the table near Prophet. Turning back to the redhead, she said, “You’d best go back to your room for a while. We’ll try to get it cleaned up a little down there.”
The redhead turned to gaze down into the saloon. She looked at the dead Indian girl, her eyes glazing with fresh tears. She turned to Prophet, and the skin above the bridge of her nose wrinkled with a vague incredulity, maybe even revulsion. Prophet thought he saw it, understandably, in her eyes.
She turned away and retreated through an open door, clicking the door closed behind her.
Louisa turned to Prophet.
“You all right?” Prophet asked her.
Louisa dug a lilac-colored hanky from her coat pocket, brushed it across the side of her neck, under her long hair, and looked at it. She winced.
“Bad?”
She looked at him. “No.”
Prophet chuckled. It never ceased to amuse him that while Louisa had drained out maybe a hundred gallons of blood from well-deserving men throughout the West, the sight of her own blood made her queasy. Once upon a time, it had made her pass out. Over the years, she’d gotten more used to seeing it. Now it made her only pale up for a time, like a cloudy day.
She stuffed the hanky back into her coat pocket and began reloading her Colts.
Prophet twirled his own walnut-gripped Colt on his finger, dropped the pistol into its holster, beneath his coat. He secured the keeper thong over the hammer then walked around behind the bar. Two more men lay dead back there. The first one, sitting on the floor and leaning against the back bar, was an older, scrawny gent with long, grizzled gray hair.
His chin was tipped to one shoulder. Prophet might have thought him merely sleeping if it hadn’t been for the bullet hole in the man’s forehead. He wore a green apron, which marked him as the man—or one of the men—who likely ran the place. He’d apparently gotten crossways with the killers, most likely when the gang had first ridden up to the place last night. The apron-clad man was cold and pale and he was already stiff. The bullet wound in his forehead was crusted with dried blood.
He’d been dead nearly a full day.
Maybe he’d balked at pouring the gang free drinks, offering his doxies up for free, or at how the gang was treating the girls. Whatever the reason, he was dead. It never took much of a reason for Gritch Hatchley’s men to kill. Judging by the amount of killing they’d done in the past, they enjoyed it.
The second dead man—a tall, fat, bearded man in a checked shirt and beaded, fringed elk hide vest—had been killed recently. Louisa must have killed him. He lay slumped to one side amidst the shards of broken bottles and spilled whiskey, blood oozing from the many glass cuts pocking his big, fleshy body.
Prophet crouched over him, pulled the man’s head up by his hair. He recognized the round, crudely featured face from a wanted circular Prophet had out in his saddlebags. Brett Chaney, a killer from Utah who’d busted out of the Utah Territorial Pen some years ago and had somehow eluded being dragged back. His joining up with Gritch Hatchley and Hatchley’s second cousin, Weed Brougham, who formed the leadership of the bunch, had made Chaney and the rest of the gang hard to run down.
Hatchley’s bunch was a nasty pack of bloodthirsty wolves. They’d been running off their collective leash for a good three years, since they’d all thrown in together to rob banks, trains, and stagecoaches and generally rape, pillage, and plunder to the content of their black hearts, bouncing from one territory to the next, mostly northern territories, staying two steps ahead of the law, evading capture.
Until today, Prophet thought, letting Chaney’s head flop back down against the floor littered with broken glass. He pulled an unbroken bottle of rye whiskey off a shelf beneath the bar, set it on the scarred oak, and grabbed a shot glass off a near pyramid.
“Drinks are on the house, I reckon,” he said, casting a dubious glance at the dead, apron-clad gent. “Likely forever more.”
The bounty hunter pried the cork out of the bottle with his teeth, spat it onto the floor, and splashed whiskey into the glass. He held the glass up in salute to the dead man and threw back the entire shot.
He smacked his lips then turned sadly to the dead apron. “Sorry, partner. Truly I am. You’ll never again know the joy of a stiff shot of rotgut whiskey. Even cheap rye is bracing on a cold day that’s gonna get even colder.” He shook his head then glanced at the two broken-out windows flanking the big hearth in which the fire was dying. “It don’t help we lost two windows.” He turned to his partner, who was dropping slowly down the stairs, running one bare hand along the banister, staring at the dead Indian girl. “Hey, Vengeance Queen, was you born in a barn?”
Chuckling to himself, Prophet refilled his shot glass. He left it on the bar without drinking it. A vague apprehension touched him. He wasn’t sure of its source.
Frowning, pensive, he walked out from behind the bar and tramped over to the hearth. Beside the fireplace was an ancient wooden feed bin filled with old newspapers, dry branches, and split pine and post oak. He fed several of the smaller branches to the fire, building it up gradually.
When the flames were dancing again, exhaling more pine tang into the room, he added a couple of split pine logs and then an oak knot that, if tended well, should burn half the night, holding at bay some of the chill pouring in on the breeze raking through the broken windows.
When he had the knot arranged to his satisfaction atop the grate, he swung away from the fire, eyes widening and lower jaw sagging as he realized what had been troubling him.
He turned to Louisa, who was striding slowly out from the bottom of the stairs. “Hey—we’re a few owlhoots short!”
Louisa gave him one of her incredulous, impatient looks from inside the tangle of honey-blond hair framing her cameo-perfect face with bee-stung lips. She wasn’t wearing her hat, and her cream muffler hung from her shoulders. “What are you caterwauling about?”
Prophet counted silently on his fingers.
“We’re a few wolves short of a pack,” he said, looking around, frowning, fists on his hips. “More than a few. Several.”
Lou walked over to the stairs climbing his side of the saloon hall and inspected the long-haired dead man there whom Louisa had drilled a third eye. Swinging toward where Louisa stood by the overturned table, near the dead Indian girl, brushing her gloved hands down her carbine’s stock, Prophet said, “This is Joe Horton. So far I haven’t seen Hatchley. Or the woman in the bunch—what’s her name . . . ?”
“Sweets DuPree,” Louisa said. “As deadly as Hatchley, but she’s the half-breed’s woman—Pima Quarrels.”
“Where’s Hatchley?” Prophet asked her. “I didn’t see him outside.”
“Are you sure?”
“No. I’ll check again, but I’d recognize that varmint from a mile away. Probably smell him from that distance, too. He’s almost as tall as I am. Nasty-lookin’ devil with a big, thick head and a curly beard, and he wears a stinky buffalo coat. He’s got a gold stud through his left ear. Resembles a mossy-horned bull buff, and he’s got a temper to match.”
“I haven’t seen any ill-tempered bull buffaloes in here, Lou.”
“I didn’t see any out back. No woman, neither, save the dead girl. In here?”
“Only the redhead.” Louisa jerked her chin toward the second-story balcony behind her and set her Stetson on her head, letting the horsehair chin thong dangle against her coat.
Prophet turned to stare up the stairs rising behind and above him, beyond the dead Joe Horton. “Anybody up there?”
“I haven’t made it that far,” Louisa said. “Pretty quiet, though. If Hatchley was up there, I think we might have heard from him by now.”
“Just the same . . .”
Prophet palmed his Colt, clicked the hammer back, leaped up and over the dead man, and quickly but thoroughly checked out the second story. He found nothing but overfilled slop buckets, unmade beds, and the owlhoots’ strewn gear.
“Nothing,” Prophet said, dropping back down the steps, leaping the dead man again, and sliding the Peacemaker back into its holster.
Louisa had been waiting at the bottom of the stairs, holding her carbine in both hands at port arms across her chest, ready in case anyone besides Prophet came back down the stairs. Now as Prophet dropped into the saloon, Louisa turned to follow him as he walked along beside the bar and out through the rear door he’d left open.
He walked across the stoop and into the yard, stopping and looking around. Only one of the five men out here was moving. That was Wind River Bob. He was down on one knee, trying to rise onto the other knee but the leg that had been pinned under his horse wasn’t having it. He was grunting and groaning and looking around—probably for a gun. Blood dribbled from the cut on his left temple, courtesy Prophet’s gun barrel.
“Which one is that?” Louisa asked Prophet.
“Wind River Bob.”
“Albright?”
“One an’ the same.”
“Are any of the others Hatchley?”
“Nope.”
Prophet stepped over Kooch Ringo to inspect the other men he’d shot from a distance and hadn’t gotten a good look at yet. He rattled off their names then turned to Louisa. “Hatchley an’ the woman ain’t here. Who’re the fellas you hurled out the windows?”
“Let’s have a look.”
Prophet swung around and walked up the side of the roadhouse toward the front. Louisa, too, had a good eye for the men they were after. After all, they’d been on their trail for the past two weeks; she and Prophet had had plenty of time to study their likenesses and descriptions on wanted circulars, usually by the light of their nightly campfires and while coyotes yammered in the distance.
Louisa named both men she’d blown out the windows on either side of the fireplace as Charlie Seltzer and Billy “Hoe-Down” Scroggs.
She turned to Prophet, fists on her hips. “There’s one more on the other side. N. B. Stone.”
“No Hatchley,” Prophet said, scraping a thumb along his jaw and looking around as though he thought the gang leader might appear out of the chill wind. “No Weed Brougham, either.”
“And no Sweets DuPree nor Pima Quarrels.”
Behind them, Wind River Bob groaned loudly as he sagged onto his butt, his injured leg protruding straight out in front of him. “I need help here! Say there—I need help! I’m afraid my leg is broken!”
Prophet and Louisa shared a glance.
The bounty hunters moseyed over to where Wind River Bob lay writhing and groaning. They stood over Bob, staring distastefully down at the vile brigand.
“Not feelin’ too good this afternoon, Bob?” Prophet asked.
Bob looked up at him through pain-racked, dung-brown eyes. “I need a doctor. I think my hip is broke. Hurts god-awful bad!”
“Let me see.”
Prophet dropped to a knee before Bob. He grabbed the man’s right ankle with one hand and laid his other hand over the man’s knee.
“What are you, doin’, Prophet?” Bob looked confused, fearful. He tried to scuttle back away from the bounty hunter. “Don’t touch me, damnit. I need a sawbo . . . ohhhh ! Jesus Christ! What are you doin’?”
“I’m just tryin’ to see if your leg’s broke.” Prophet pressed his left hand down hard against Bob’s knee. “How’s that feel?”
“Owwww!” Bob howled, tipping his head back and trying to inch away again. “It hurts like hell. Leave me alone. I can tell it’s broke. I don’t need you to . . . ohhh ! Owwww! What the hell are you doin’, you fork-tailed devil?”
“We’re missing a few folks, Bob,” Louisa said, standing over Prophet, staring down at Bob.
“Wha . . . wha . . . what?”
“We’re a few wolves short of a whole pack,” Prophet said.
“You really like that one—don’t you, Lou?” Louisa said.
“Get your hands off me—damnit, Prophet! I’m an injured man!”
Prophet shoved down hard again on the man’s knee. “Where’d they go, Bob?”
Wind River Bob threw his head back and howled like a gut-shot coyote. “St . . . st . . . stawwwppp!”
“Where’s Hatchley, Bob?” Louisa asked the outlaw. “Where’s his sidekick cousin, Brougham?”
“And where’s the girl, Sweets Dupree?” Prophet added. “Oh, and the half-breed, Pima Quarrels. Where’s Quarrels, Bob?”
“I don’t know,” Bob said, panting and staring at Prophet in horror. Even though the temperature was dropping fast now as dusky shadows filled the yard and more snow stitched the breeze, sweat beads dribbled down Bob’s cheeks and into his beard. “How would I know where they are?”
“Bob,” Prophet said, “let me check your hip.”
“Nooooo!”
Prophet tugged on the man’s right ankle.
Bob threw his head back and screamed. “Dam . . . dam . . . damnit!” he said, panting, when Prophet had eased up on the tension on Bob’s wounded leg. “I think . . . I think it’s separated.”
“No,” Prophet said. “It’s your knee that’s separated. It’s swelling up on ya real bad. I think your hip is plum broken. Lordy, you’re injured bad, Bob!”
The bounty hunter grinned devilishly and gave the man’s right ankle another savage tug.