Chapter 19
“I’m gonna ask you one more time,” Prophet told the young hardtail lying at the base of the window through which the cold wind blew. “Where’s Hatchley?”
He pressed the Peacemaker’s barrel more firmly against the young hardcase’s right cheek. The hardcase flopped on his back on the deep, sour-smelling Oriental rug, kicking his legs defiantly. Blood oozed from the ragged hole on the other side of his face.
“I don’t know, you son of the devil!” he screamed.
Another scream sounded somewhere in the bowels of the remote whorehouse/saloon, beneath the wind moaning through the broken windows. This scream, a girl’s, had been muffled.
“You go to hell!” the one-eyed hardtail bellowed.
Prophet pulled the Peacemaker away from the young man’s cheek. Slowly, staring up at the balcony, he rose and started striding toward the stairs. The scream had come from the second story.
When Prophet was halfway across the room, he heard soft scuffling and grunting sounds behind him. He wheeled.
The kid was just then pulling a hideout pistol from the well of his right boot. Prophet whipped up the Peacemaker, cocking it, and squeezed the trigger. The kid was knocked straight back against the floor, where he lay flopping, dying fast.
“Fool.”
Clicking the Peacemaker’s hammer back again and holding the big .45 barrel-up in his right hand, Prophet continued across the room and mounted the stairs angling up the back wall, running parallel to it and the balcony. It was a steep staircase with a rail made of woven aspen saplings.
Prophet moved slowly up the stairs, as quietly as possible then walked just as slowly along the balcony, listening behind each door as he passed. When he was three-quarters down the balcony, in deep shadows that wavered with watery light reaching weakly up from the first story, something sounded behind a door off his right shoulder.
Prophet stopped, wincing as a floorboard squawked faintly beneath his left boot.
From behind the door came a clipped, muffled cry and then the sound of someone saying, “Shhh” very faintly. A click followed the admonition.
Prophet took a quick step forward. Before he’d even set his boot down again, a loud explosion assaulted his ears, making the balcony leap beneath his boots. A hole the size of a squash was blown through the door from the other side, the buckshot blasting the wood slivers out over the balcony and into the saloon below.
Another concussive explosion sounded close on the heels of the first, plugging one of Prophet’s ears and doubling the size of the hole in the door.
Prophet stepped back in front of the door and slammed the flat of his right boot against it, near the latch. The door with the gaping hole burst open, and before it could slam back against him, Lou stepped into the small room and caught the door with his boot as he extended his cocked Colt straight out from his right shoulder.
The man standing before him—six feet, broad, long haired, pale skinned, and clad in only wash-worn balbriggans—had just lowered his smoking, sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun and was smiling as he aimed a Bisley .44 straight out from his own right shoulder, lining up his sights on Prophet’s forehead.
Prophet was about to cut loose with his Colt but then the face of the man before him crumpled in sudden horror, chocolate eyes turning wide as silver dollars, his mouth opening to nearly the size of the hole he’d blown in the door. There was a girl on the bed to his right. She appeared to be a small, plump Mexican, and she had long, dark brown hair. She pulled a stiletto out from between Hatchley’s legs, from behind him.
She must have stuck him in his backside. She appeared very satisfied with her work, too, for she slid her plump lips back from her gritted teeth and shrieked, “¡No sabes cómo tratar a las chicas, loco!”
Prophet, who knew just enough Spanish to get himself into deep trouble south of the border, roughly translated the puta’s exclamation as: “That’s no way to treat a girl, you crazy fiend!”
Hatchley had dropped to his hands and knees, bellowing. He dropped the Bisley and reached down to cup his hand over the gash whose placement Prophet still hadn’t pinpointed.
The girl vaulted her small, dark, plump body off the bed and onto Hatchley’s back and went to work, screaming and punching his head, slamming her fists against his ears, the back of his neck and the crown of his skull, making his dark brown hair, which was nearly as long as the girl’s hair, fly like a muddy tumbleweed in the wind.
Hatchley glared up at Prophet and yelled, “Get her off me!”
Prophet lowered his Colt as he stepped farther into the room.
“All right, señorita,” he said. “I’ll take over from here.”
She continued to punch and slap the wounded hardcase, screaming Spanish epithets, for a good half a minute. She likely would have continued the assault if she hadn’t gotten winded and if she hadn’t looked up and seen the big man in the buckskin coat holding the .45 low in his right hand, his funnel-brimmed Stetson tied to his head with a ratty green muffler.
She didn’t know if Prophet were friend or foe. For all she knew, he was just as bad as Hatchley. Breathing hard, muttering curses under her breath and sobbing now, as well, she climbed down off the hardcase’s back and brushed past Prophet as she ran out of the room. She gave a scream in the hall, and Prophet turned to see that she’d run into Marshal Sheldon Coffer, who’d just stepped into the room’s doorway.
She bounced off Coffer and then ran down the balcony to her right, the padding of her bare feet dwindling behind her. Another door opened and slammed shut, and she was gone.
Coffer held his old Remington barrel-up, and looked first at the howling Gritch Hatchley and then at Prophet. Coffer’s face was red from the cold outside, and his nose was running. “You clean up right well, Lou.” He nodded at the cursing hardcase, who now sat on his butt against the washstand abutting the room’s back wall, to the right of the bed. “Who’s your friend here?”
“This here’s Gritch Hatchley,” Prophet said. “Damn near thought I wasn’t gonna be able to take him alive. If that little girl had had her way, I wouldn’t have. She really worked him over.” He raised his voice. “How you doin’, Gritch? Feelin’ all right, you old bank robber?”
Hatchley’s face was as broad as an Indian’s. In fact, he looked Indian though Prophet had heard he hailed from French coal-mining stock up in Canada. He wore long, black mare’s tail mustaches down past his chin, long sideburns, and a silver stud shaped like a cross in his right ear. His left earlobe was missing. Only a grisly white knot remained. His face looked as though it had been hammered crudely out of dark granite though the rest of his body was as white as salt.
“That loco señorita cut me good!” The outlaw spat through large, square, gritted teeth. “I’m bleedin’ bad!”
“She cut off anything important?”
Hatchley glared at Prophet, dark eyes shiny from both drink and exasperation. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Prophet?”
The bounty hunter had never met the man before though he’d heard plenty about him. Hatchley had probably heard plenty about Prophet, in turn.
“No, I wouldn’t,” Prophet said, shaking his head. “Because that’d mean you’re likely gonna bleed to death here in a few minutes, and that would cost me five hundred dollars. Me? I’m a thrifty son of the old rebel South. I’d just as soon tote your livin’, cussin’ corpse into Bismarck for the full two thousand.”
The bounty hunter canted his head, trying to get a look at how bad his prisoner’s wound was, but all he could see was way more than he wanted to see and not the wound itself. Plenty of blood was oozing onto the floor between the man’s pale legs, however. He had his right hand cupped under his upper left thigh.
“She missed the important stuff,” Hatchley hissed, “but she come close! I’m bleedin’ bad! Fetch me a sawbones before I bleed dry!”
Prophet dragged a pair of girl’s pantaloons off a chair back. He tossed them to Hatchley. “Wrap it up and get dressed. We’re ridin’ back to Indian Butte.”
“In this weather? It’s stormin’ outside, fool!”
Coffer stepped forward. “Storm or no storm, we’d best light a shuck, Lou. Several men skinned out the back when you went in the front. They probably lit out for the woodcutters’ camp, which means they’ll likely bring more men back here soon. They prob’ly think we’re federal”—he raised his brows significantly—“and after their whiskey.”
He shook his head. “They won’t want to part with their whiskey.”
“I’ve had about enough lead swappin’ for one night, anyways. I’m plum tuckered out.” Prophet turned to Hatchley. “Don’t make me tell you again, Gritch, or I’ll sic that little Mex on you again. Wrap it up and get dressed. We’re burnin’ starlight!”
* * *
It was a chilly ride back to Indian Butte.
In the barn flanking the whorehouse Prophet had saddled a horse for Gritch Hatchley and tied the man’s handcuffed wrists to his saddle horn. Not that Hatchley would have strayed far without the cuffs and the ties. It was a cold, snowy, windy night, and he’d missed being gelded by the width of a cat’s whisker.
The plump señorita had, however, buried her stiletto deep in the killer’s left inner thigh. At least, judging from the amount of blood Hatchley had left on the girl’s floor, she must have buried it deep. Due to the location of the injury, Prophet felt no compunction to scrutinize it overly closely. If the outlaw died, he died. The hell with him and the extra five hundred. Prophet had lost that much money in a half hour at a poker table.
Still, he summoned a sawbones once he, Hatchley, and Sheldon Coffer reached Indian Butte, after the horses had been turned over to the livery barn’s slightly pie-eyed hostler, Pop Schofield. Horses first, Hatchley second.
Indian Butte’s venerable surgeon, an older gent named Karl Hassler, who’d been the medico at the nearby Fort Totten Agency and who, like the liveryman, had been keeping the stormy chill out of his bones with a goodly portion of who-hit-John, continued to sip from a small, flat brown bottle while he sutured Hatchley’s leg in one of the three cells forming a line along the rear stone wall of Coffer’s jailhouse two blocks east of the Indian Butte Hotel.
“You’re one lucky feller, I’ll give you that,” the mossy-horned medico announced from time to time, pinching up the groaning killer’s skin and running his curved needle through the torn flesh.
Each time he drew the catgut taut, he took a drink, extending one beringed, age-gnarled pinky then smacking his lips as he returned the bottle to the floor. “If your girl had slid that blade a hair to the right, she would have perforated the circumflex fibular branch of the anterior tibial artery, and your goose would have been cooked.”
“That sow,” Hatchley grunted, panting and swilling whiskey against the pain as he lay belly down against the padded iron cot. “That crazy little sow! I’m gonna cut her tongue out, cut her ears off, cut her nose off . . .”
And on and on he went while Prophet, yawning, sat in a chair in the cell’s open doorway, keeping his Richards gut-shredder trained on the miserable killer’s head.
It had been one hell of a long day. It was damn near midnight, and Prophet wanted nothing so much as to head over to the Indian Butte Saloon & Hotel, rent a room with the softest, least louse-ridden bed in the place, order up a steak, a bottle, and a hot bath. After soaking himself into near unconsciousness, he’d throw himself into the bed and plummet deep into a restful if all too brief slumber.
As soon as the sawbones had finished sewing up the growling, snarling killer, Prophet closed the cell door on him, twisted the key in the lock, turned the key over to Coffer, who looked as weary as Prophet felt, then slogged through the several inches of fresh snow to the sprawling flophouse, which sat at the opposite end of the main street from the marshal’s humble little jail.
Not much snow was falling, but the wind was a blue, howling devil. The cold bit Prophet deep. It seemed to bite him even deeper than before, coming again so violently after he’d so recently thawed himself out in Coffer’s jailhouse, heated by a roaring potbelly stove. He slipped and slid in the fresh white stuff that lay like a two-inch-deep bed of feathers on the boardwalk fronting the hotel.
He climbed the steps, grumbling, hunkered down inside his coat, hearing music resonating from inside the place—strange music to his ears, but damned lively music, as well.
He stomped snow from his moccasins then pushed through the heavy storm doors inside of which the batwings, used in warmer months, were tied back against the wall to either side. He closed the storm doors but not before a cold breath laden with large snowflakes had swept in around him, causing several people in the saloon beyond to give him the woolly eyebrow.
Prophet shrugged guiltily as he turned to face the room, untying the muffler knotted beneath his chin and removing his hat. He stood several feet above the room, which was sunken five steps down from the door, so he had a good view of the layout.
Broad and deep, the room was lit with several well-placed bracket lamps. It was heated by two large, black, bullet-shaped Windsor stoves. There were a good twenty men in the room, occupying two long tables running along the room’s far-right wall and several scattered tables nearer to Prophet and the front of the room. The men were smoking and drinking but what they were mainly doing was watching the dark-eyed little countess dancing about ten feet from the stove to Prophet’s right, to the right of the bar that ran along the rear wall.
Prophet had never seen such a dance. And he’d never seen a young lady—or any woman of any age—decked out in such billowing, brightly colored finery as was the dancing countess.
Her dress was snow-white with a pleated skirt, and it was trimmed in gold and red velvet, and there was even some spruce green in it. It looked almost like a fancy Spanish ball gown, for it was low cut, leaving the pretty, olive-skinned little damsel’s shoulders bare, its brocade bodice jostling as she moved, hopping and skipping and turning lithe pirouettes that caused her long, thick, dark brown hair to fly out wildly around her head.
Just watching such a scrumptious, sensuous female move in such an exotically enticing fashion made the bounty hunter’s heart twist.
“If that don’t beat a pig a-flyin’!” he heard himself mutter beneath the jubilant strains of the happy, raucous music to which the dark-eyed countess kicked and hopped, flinging her arms about and even, at one point, crossing them straight out in front of her chest while she kicked her knees up nearly to her chin.
“Holy moly,” the bounty hunter said, pensively scratching his chin.