Blood at Sundown

The countess Tatiana Miranova placed her hand on Prophet’s cheek and turned his head toward hers, giving his nose a tender peck. “You are better than Cossack!”

Prophet snuggled down in the surprisingly soft bed in his room in the Indian Butte Saloon & Hotel, and nuzzled the girl’s neck, chuckling. “Well, I reckon I don’t know how a—”

“I think I will take you home with me, Lou. Back to Russia!” Tatiana wrapped her arms tightly around his neck, drew him taut against her, entwining her legs with his.

“Not that I even know where your home country is.” Prophet chuckled. “But I doubt your old man the count would go in for haulin’ my raggedy behind back to your castle or palace or whatever it is you folks live in, Miss Tatiana.”

She frowned at him, curious. “I don’t understand. What is . . . ‘raggedy behind’?”

Prophet thumbed his chest and laughed. “Me!” He laughed again. “What I mean is I don’t think your pa would go for that.”

“No. Probably not.” The countess sighed. She snuggled against him, burying her nose in his armpit and sniffing, savoring his manly smell. “But I think I will spend the night right here in your arms. I never want to leave your bed, Lou Prophet!”

“That may not be such a good—”

Prophet stopped. He pricked his ears, listening. The music downstairs had fallen silent and now there was a low rumbling of footsteps and concerned male voices.

Prophet’s heart quickened. Uh-oh.

Before he had time to voice his concern at the sudden change in the atmosphere of the sprawling hotel, a deep, heavily accented male voice shouted from somewhere below: “Tatiana! Tatiana! Where are you, my daughter?”

“Ach!” The countess jerked her head up and stared wide-eyed at the door. She exclaimed in what could only have been Russian, adding for Prophet’s benefit, “My aunt, Sonya Drubatskoya, must have checked my room and found my bed empty!”

Prophet sat straight up in bed, his heart thudding. “Who the hell is Sonya Drub . . . whatever-you-called-her?”

“Drubatskoya. She was the big woman playing the gusli downstairs! My mother’s sister! She is my chaperone on this trip to America!”

Just then a woman’s chortling, angry, exasperated voice shot up the stairwell at the end of the second-floor hall: “TAT-I-ANAHHHHHHH!”

“Ah, shit!” The big, severe-looking woman who’d been playing the flat, boardlike stringed instrument downstairs had cut a rather imposing figure. She had not looked like a woman who would take lightly the compromising of her niece’s honor. Especially not by a hard-tailed western bounty hunter!

In a flash, Prophet saw himself being held down by a half-dozen big Russian Cossacks while Aunt Sonya beat him silly with her gusli . . . or whatever Tatiana had called it.

Several pairs of boots pounded the stairs, growing louder as what sounded like the countess’s entire party—a whole posse of Cossacks—was thundering toward Prophet’s room in which he’d just despoiled their young charge, the countess.

I’ll be damned, Prophet silently reflected, staring at the door shuddering in its frame from the resonations of the thundering herd rushing toward it, toward him. I survived the War of Northern Aggression and a dozen years bounty hunting across the wild and woolly western frontier to be killed in Indian Butte by Russians for despoiling a countess.

“Them two Cossack friends of yours must’ve told your old man where they last seen you!” Prophet said, dropping his feet to the floor and reaching for the sawed-off Richards hanging from the near bedpost.

“I don’t think so.” Tatiana was on her knees on the bed, sitting back on her heels, staring anxiously at the door. “They would have been too embarrassed to tell my father what happened. They are likely cowering like dogs in their rooms!”

“Still . . .” Prophet rose from the bed, the sawed-off in his right hand. “He’ll turn this place inside out. He’ll find you sooner or later. I might have to shoot my way out of here. Don’t worry—I’ve done it before!”

“No, no!” Tatiana leaped off the bed and began climbing into her pantaloons. “I will crawl out a window, make my way to the ground. I will enter through the back door. I will tell Papa that I stepped out for some fresh air and got turned around. Don’t worry, Lou—if I told Papa I flew away to have a few quiet moments on the moon, he would believe me!”

She chuckled throatily as she grabbed her gown and the rest of her undergarments and shoes and padded toward the room’s single window.

“You can’t go out there, Tatiana!” Prophet glanced from the door to the girl then back again, the voices and the footsteps growing louder in the hall. He could feel the reverberations through the floorboards beneath his bare feet. “You know how cold it is out there! You’ll freeze your pretty little . . . not to mention your feet!”

“Cold? Hah! You have never been to Russia in the winter, Lou.”

“No, I haven’t. And if this cold is to scoff at, I reckon I never will, neither!”

The footsteps fell silent outside Prophet’s room.

A fist thundered on the bounty hunter’s door. “Prophet! Lou Prophet, are you in there, you scalawag?” It wasn’t a voice Prophet had heard before.

The countess drew a sharp breath through gritted teeth and cast her bright, anxious gaze at the door. To Prophet, she said just loudly enough for the bounty hunter to hear, “That’s the senator. Maybe you were right, Lou—Papa must have gotten Ivan and Dmitri to tell him where they last saw me!”

“Either that or that damnable Rawdney had his suspicions!”

The pounding came on the door again—three loud thuds, making the door leap in its frame. “Prophet?”

Wearing only her white cotton pantaloons, holding her shoes and gown in a large ball before her, the countess ran back to Prophet, rose up onto the tips of her toes, and kissed his cheek. “All will be well, Lou. Don’t you worry. I am as strong as a bear and lithe as a monkey!”

She kissed him again, giggled, apparently delighting in the excitement, then ran back to the window, which she’d already opened. Windblown snow slithered through the gap.

Three more hard whacks on the door. “Mr. Prophet, open this door or I will have it broken down!”

“Don’t break down my door, Senator!” the barman begged from farther off down the hall. “Doors don’t grow on trees around here. Hell, hardly any trees grow around here!”

The countess, perched on the sloping roof outside Prophet’s window, grinned through the window at him. She blew him a kiss then quietly closed the pane.

“Prophet!” came the voice of the senator’s nancy boy son, Rawdney. “We know you’re in there, Prophet. The barman told us. If you have the countess in there, you’d better not have harmed a hair on her head!”

The Russians were anxiously conferring in their own tongue around the senator and Rawdney Fairweather.

“Let her go, Prophet!” bellowed the senator. “Her father is right here, and if you’ve harmed that girl, I am going to leave you to the count’s men to do with as they see fit! It will not go well for you!”

“Oh, for chrissakes!” Prophet pulled on his longhandles and socks. As the senator and Rawdney and the Russians continued milling around outside his room, pounding on his door and threatening him, he buckled his Colt and cartridge belt around his waist and set his hat on his head. Somehow, the hat seemed to make up for his lack of pants, which he didn’t want to take the time to put on.

Besides, he wanted it to look as though they’d awakened him from a dead sleep.

“Hold on!” he bellowed, feigning a loud yawn. “Don’t get your bloomers in a twist, Senator. I’m comin’. You keep poundin’ on the door like that, you’re gonna turn it into toothpicks!”

He turned the key in the lock and slid the bolt free of the frame.

He opened the door just as the senator threw his fist at it once more, and the man stumbled forward into the room, bulling into Prophet. Prophet was an unmoving mountain. The senator, a foot shorter, bounced off him and stepped back into the hall, scowling up at the brawny bounty hunter clad in only longhandles, gun belt, socks, and hat.

Fair weather’s son flanked him on his right, drawing his father back by one arm.

The stocky, bearded old count stood to his left, glaring up at Prophet through a monocle.

Rawdney’s assistant, Leo, and a half-dozen big, bearded Russians in their crisp red uniform tunics and deerskin trousers stood behind the count, the senator, and Rawdney, looking like wild grizzlies fixing to bust out of an inadequate zoo cage.

“Let her go, you animal!” yelled the senator.

“You heard my father,” Rawdney intoned, holding a small, silver-plated, pearl-gripped over-and-under derringer in his beringed right fist, aimed at Prophet’s heart. “Let her go right now!” He bolted forward, poking his head into the room. “If you’ve hurt that girl, so help me!”

“Hold on, hold on!” Prophet said, holding up his hands, palm out. “Will someone please tell me what in the hell is goin’ on here? You woke me out of a dead sleep, and I got a big day tomorrow!”

Count Miranova stepped forward, monocle dangling by a thread from his left lapel, and cut loose with a tirade of gibberish the likes of which Prophet hadn’t heard since traveling through a mining town populated by Prussians in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado. This particular spiel was directed at him, along with a good deal of spit.

Prophet held up his hands again and shook his head. He cut the old Russian off with: “Friend, I don’t understand a word you’re sayin’, so you might as well save your gas!”

Again, Rawdney poked his head into Prophet’s room, sniffing like a dog. “What’s that I smell?” He sniffed again. “Why . . . why, that’s the countess’s smell, you mangy Southern dog! I’d recognize her fragrance anywhere!” The dandy stepped back and aimed the derringer up at Prophet’s head, hardening his jaws and brightening his eyes. “What have you done with her, you Confederate scalawag?”

“Did someone say my name?” It was the voice of the countess herself, rising from somewhere behind the knot of mostly large, uniformed, bearded men gathered before Prophet’s open door.

All heads turned as though on a swivel.

The old count exclaimed in his own language and pushed through the small crowd of big Cossacks, hurrying over to where the countess was just then padding along the hall, wearing her gown, arms crossed on her splendid bodice, shivering. Prophet was relieved to see that she’d put on her shoes. Russian or no Russian, even the countess’s toes would turn to stone after only a few minutes exposed to the frigid winds of Dakota Territory.

“Countess!” Rawdney yelled, and rushed over to stand with the pretty young woman and the count, who had just then taken his long-lost daughter into his arms, hugging her tightly and speaking in his guttural tongue that was all gibberish to the bounty hunter’s ears.

The senator and all the others rushed over to hover around the countess, also. After conversing with her father in their own harsh, nonsensical language, she turned to the senator and his dandified son to explain in broken English and in a pinched, frightened little girl’s voice, “I stepped out to get some air—I was so hot from dancing—and . . . and I must’ve gotten turned around.”

Tatiana’s gaze drifted fleetingly toward Prophet, who could have sworn a devilish little grin tugged at her mouth corners and flashed in her eyes.

Continuing, she said, “As I stepped out, there was a great gust of snow, and suddenly I found myself by the barn. The snow was so thick that I couldn’t find my way back, until . . . until . . . well, I don’t know how I managed it. I guess the snow cleared, and I saw the lights in the windows, and—”

“Oh, thank heavens, Countess!” exclaimed the senator, placing a relieved hand on the girl’s arm. “However you managed to make it back, we’re all soooo glad you did. The snow can get quite thick up here at times.”

The count turned his wizened head to yell down the hall. Presently, the stout woman whom Prophet had seen downstairs bounded out of a room at the hall’s far end. The count yelled again in Russian, and Aunt Sonya, the countess’s rain barrel–shaped chaperone, returned to her room before bounding back out a few seconds later, this time with a thick quilt in her arms. She’d obviously been crying; her fat cheeks were red and swollen.

She’d thought the countess had been gobbled up by the big bounty hunter and spat to the wolves.

Cooing and clucking and pattering in Russian, breathless, the big woman rushed over to where the countess stood shivering with her father, the senator, and Rawdney. Meanwhile, Leo and the Cossacks, who saw that their assistance was no longer required, drifted off down the stairs to the saloon’s main drinking hall, muttering and chuckling among themselves.

Prophet had seen by the brightness of the men’s eyes that they were all, to a man, pie-eyed. Headed as they were back to the saloon, they were apparently in no hurry to sober up despite the lateness of the hour.

They were on vacation, after all . . .

The gently cajoling aunt Sonya wrapped the countess in the quilt, picked the girl up in her stout arms, ordered the men out of her way, and hustled down the hall toward Tatiana’s room. As they passed Prophet, the countess turned toward the big bounty hunter still standing in his open doorway. She gave him a furtive wink and pooched her rosebud lips out in a fleeting kiss before she was hustled away in her aunt’s suety arms.

When the pair had disappeared into a room next door to Aunt Sonya’s, the senator patted the count’s back in relieved congratulations and, conversing jauntily, chuckling and wagging their heads, the older men drifted back down the stairs and likely to a couple of hot toddies.

Rawdney Fairweather, however, remained.

The priggish little mucky-muck turned toward Prophet, looked the bigger man up and down, critically, disdainfully, then sauntered toward him, swaggering a little on the heels of his black, high-topped, fur-lined riding boots. Again, he poked his head into Prophet’s room, sniffed.

He turned to Prophet, who stared dubiously down at him.

“Don’t think I don’t know what went on here, Mr. Prophet.” Fair weather jabbed two fingers against the bounty hunter’s chest. “And don’t think your taking advantage of the countess, an innocent and romantic young woman in a foreign land, will go unpunished.” He jabbed Prophet again, wrinkling his nose and narrowing his priggish little eyes.

Prophet sighed.

“Rawdney,” he said, “let me share some words of rarefied wisdom once expressed by none other than my dear old mother, Ma Prophet, her ownself, may her wise and lovely soul rest in peace.”

“Oh, please, do share your mother’s words of wisdom, Mr. Prophet!” Rawdney said, snickering.

“‘Never dance in a graveyard,’” Prophet recited. “‘And never mess with a Prophet!’”

With that, he rammed the first two fingers of his right hand against Rawdney’s chest, sending the little dandy stumbling backward with a startled grunt. Lou slammed his door, locked it, skinned out of his hat, gun, boots, and socks, and went to bed.