Chapter 29
Louisa pulled on her gloves and shoved her mittens into the pockets of her wool coat. She wrapped her muffler around her ears, shoved the tails down inside her coat, and set her Stetson on her head.
She picked up her rifle and, as Mose and Nasty Ralph hefted Vink up by his arms and ankles, strode back along the bar. Louisa did not glance at Yardley standing at the bar with his shot glass and bottle, one high-topped, black cavalry boot perched on the brass rail running along the bar’s base. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him glance at her in the back bar mirror as he once again lifted his glass to his mustached mouth.
Louisa stepped over Tutwiler then walked around the stairs to the back door. She threw the bolt, nudged the door open. The wind caught it and slammed it back against the saloon’s rear wall with a loud bang that made both Mose and Nasty Ralph jerk with starts behind her.
“Jesus,” Mose said, anxiously shaking his head.
Holding her Winchester straight out from her right hip, Louisa stepped outside. She looked around and, deeming the area relatively safe though she couldn’t see much farther than about fifteen feet out before her, glanced at the two men standing in the doorway behind her, and nodded.
Mose and Nasty Ralph carried Vink out the door. They followed Louisa, leading with her rifle aimed before her, around the privy and out to the woodshed.
She set her rifle down and lit a match. Cupping it carefully in the palm of her left hand, she used the wan glow to inspect the shed, which was a small pole structure with a sloping roof, open on one side. It was filled with cut logs. Atop one five-foot-high woodpile lay Rainy, on his belly, ankles crossed. On another pile sprawled Pima Quarrels and Sweets DuPree, both with their arms and legs spread, heads tipped to one side, eyes wide and staring.
The wind snuffed the match but not before Louisa saw that no hatchet-wielding killer was lurking in the woodshed.
She nodded to the market hunters and stepped aside to let Mose and Nasty Ralph pass with Vink, whom they swung back and forth a few times between them. On “four,” they sailed him up onto the pile beside Del Rainy. Vink rolled off the pile, dislodging several logs before he hit the ground with a slapping thud.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Mose complained.
They picked Vink up again and sent him sailing up onto the woodpile beside Rainy. The tall blond stayed that time though he dislodged one more log, which fell onto Mose’s right foot, evoking a curse.
“Now, Tutwiler,” Louisa said, jerking her chin in the direction of the saloon.
“Oh Christ!” Nasty Ralph intoned. “We’re not undertakers!”
“Now, Tutwiler,” Louisa repeated, more firmly, flexing her hand around the neck of her Winchester.
When Mose and Nasty Ralph had hauled the big barman out from the saloon and deposited him in the woodshed with the other cadavers, Mose turned to Louisa and said, “Happy now?”
He and Nasty Ralph stomped back toward the saloon.
Louisa remained outside the woodshed, holding her rifle on her shoulder, looking around through the blowing tendrils of her blond hair. She did not follow the men back to the hotel. Instead, she stared at a footprint in the snow near the front of the woodshed, at the base of a crooked cottonwood pole supporting the roof.
The print wasn’t hers and it was neither Nasty Ralph’s nor Mose’s. She knew because she’d spied the print before they’d entered the woodshed. The wind was slow to fill it in because of its placement there on the lee side of the building. Now she looked around and found another print on the leeward side of a shrub straight out from the shed, maybe fifteen feet to the south. The wind was gradually filling it in.
Louisa walked slowly eastward, holding her rifle with both hands across her chest, her jaws taut against the cold wind battering her. Whoever had made those footprints had made them less than a half hour ago. And he was heading south, away from the saloon at the rear of which Tutwiler had been impaled with the hatchet.
Who else could those prints belong to but the killer, Ramsay Willis?
Louisa’s heart quickened as she walked slowly east in the snowy darkness, her gaze darting this way and that, frequently returning to the ground before her that was mostly dead brown grass and buck brush partly covered with snow.
Bushes cropped up to both sides of her as she moved slowly beyond the ragged outskirts of Sundown. She crossed the new railroad tracks mounted on their recently graded, cinder-paved bed nearly swept clear by the blowing snow, and continued heading east.
She almost stopped and turned back, the icy hands of the wind grinding her bones to jelly, but then she found another recent print and knew she was heading in the right direction and that she was likely close on the heels of Ramsay Willis.
Louisa’s heartbeat quickened again, her blood flowing warmly despite the chill engulfing her like a giant witch’s hand.
A dark, broken wall of trees moved up on both sides of her—winter-naked and creaking and moaning as the wind ripped at them. They were cottonwoods, she believed. Maybe some ash and box elder. A small copse out here on the open prairie at the very edge of Sundown.
As she moved into them, setting one high-topped fur boot down at a time, following a meandering break through the woods, she spied another footprint. It sat askance some low shrubbery matted with fresh snow. He was here, just ahead of her, probably. He was on the run from the saloon.
Did he know Louisa was behind him, stalking him?
Louisa swallowed. She breathed slowly, taking one cold breath at a time, wincing when a gust of wind sucked it back out of her lungs and sent a chill wave spasming through her.
She stepped over a deadfall tree blocking her path, noting where snow had been brushed off it recently by her quarry, when he, too, had hiked a leg over the fallen cottonwood, likely putting a hand down to support himself like Louisa did now, removing her right hand for a moment from her Winchester’s neck.
A riflelike crack sounded beneath the wind.
Louisa set her left boot down with a start on the opposite side of the deadfall, quickly returning her right hand to her Winchester. She clenched as she waited for a bullet, but then she saw a branch tumbling downward in the darkness just ahead of her and to her right.
She swallowed, drew a slow breath.
Only a branch, broken by the wind, falling from a wind-battered tree. It crashed with a muffled thud in the brush.
Louisa continued forward, sliding her gaze across the dark woods around her, keeping one eye skinned on the ground, looking for more prints left by her quarry.
A stab of flames flashed red-orange ahead and on her left. She felt the heat of the bullet’s passing just off her right cheek. At the same time, the hiccupping report of the rifle reached her ears. She gasped and threw herself to the ground laced with layers of bent, snowy brush, and rolled to her left, toward the cover of another blowdown angling before her.
Icy snow slithered down beneath her coat collar, and she gritted her teeth against it.
Another stab of orange flames in the murky darkness ahead of her, maybe twenty feet away. The wind muffled the thud of the bullet slamming into the blowdown. Snow and wood slivers sprayed.
Louisa rose to a knee and rammed the Winchester against her right shoulder.
The rifle bucked as she squeezed the trigger, aiming toward where she’d seen the flash of her quarry’s rifle. The Winchester belched again, briefly relieving the darkness with its red-orange flash.
She fired two more rounds, one after the other, then, ejecting the last smoking cartridge and pumping a fresh one into the action, she rolled quickly to her left, knowing that if she’d missed her target, the shooter would track her by her own gun flashes.
She couldn’t roll far. A nest of shrubs growing up around a stout trunk blocked her way. She lay on her left side, staying as low as possible, holding her Winchester in both hands up close against her, trying to make a small target.
Breathing hard from both exertion and anxiousness, wincing against the cold of the snow pressing against her and the million little sharp points of brush prodding her, she waited, staring in the shooter’s direction.
She lay there for nearly two full minutes, seeing only murky, snow-laced darkness before her, hearing only the wind’s relentless moaning and groaning and the agonized creaking of the battered brush and tree limbs.
She’d remained in such a position before, for several hours, waiting for the coming dawn to help her with the task of revealing her quarry. She couldn’t remain here all night, however. She probably couldn’t stay out here another hour, or she’d freeze to death.
She drew her legs up beneath her and, using the butt of her rifle pressed against the brushy ground, slowly pushed and hoisted herself to a standing position. She suppressed the urge to shiver against the cold snow clinging to her, the stuff that had slithered down her back melting with the contact of her bare skin, causing frigid rivulets to roll down along her spine and into the waistband of her flannel-lined denims, finding the crack between her butt cheeks.
She gave a raspy curse.
Slowly, she moved ahead through the thick woods, meandering around trees and shrubs, stepping over fallen branches. When she finally made it to where she believed the shooter had fired from, she stopped and looked around.
She’d been right. The shooter had been here. She could see his dark markings in the snow, by the light of a dull blue ambience radiating out of the snow itself. Louisa looked at the scuff marks, trying to pick out a trail. She stepped quietly straight south of the tree behind which the killer had fired, her eyes scanning the uneven, snowy ground.
Several split logs lay in a loose pile before her.
She toed one of the logs, frowning down at it. Firewood?
A faint shadow slid across the snow to her right.
A breath that was part grunt sounded behind her.
Louisa whipped around, glimpsing a man-shaped shadow before her and seeing something that might have been a swinging ax angling toward her from what was now her left. She fired the Winchester, the rifle bucking and flashing and belching a wink before the thing swinging toward her plowed into her left temple.
“Oh!” Louisa dropped the Winchester, twisted around, and fell, her landing padded by the heavy brush and the snow.
Her ears rang. Stars burst behind her retinas.
“Goddamnit!” she heard herself cry—a rare oath for her. She hadn’t been raised to talk like that, but her language had gotten considerably saltier since she’d started riding with a certain blue-tongued ex-Confederate.
Gritting her teeth against the gnawing pain in her head, she rolled onto her back and pushed up onto her butt in time to see the man who’d wielded the club stumbling backward, both hands pressed to his chest, over his heart. He grunted as he continued stumbling backward, then, getting his boots caught in a tangle of barely covered brush, he fell on his butt.
He sat there, grunting, writhing, and kicking his legs.
Louisa looked around for her rifle. Not seeing it immediately, she jerked up the right flap of her coat and shucked her right-hand Colt from its holster.
Aiming the big popper straight out in front of her, she clicked the hammer back.
The man before her was winding down like a top, his grunts growing more and more strangled.
He kicked a few more times, each kick more feeble than the last, then collapsed to lay back down in the brush, hands falling to his sides. His legs quivered a little and then fell still.
Louisa tried to heave herself to her feet but fell back to her butt, clamping her left hand to her temple from which she could feel blood trickling. The blow had dazed her, made her dizzy and a little sick to her stomach. She drew a breath, pushed up onto her knees, and cupped snow to her face, bracing herself.
She drew a sharp breath through her teeth. The icy snow cleared the cobwebs. At least, it kept her from passing out.
Feeling stronger but still a little dizzy, she heaved herself to her feet and, still clutching the Colt in her right hand, moved unsteadily toward the man on the ground roughly fifteen feet away. Blood from the gash on her temple slid down her cheek, becoming sluggish as it froze. She dropped to a knee beside the man she’d shot, and, keeping an eye on his hands, placed her left hand on his shoulder, shaking him.
His head bobbed. His eyes appeared closed.
Louisa saw the dark shine of blood on the front of his homemade fur coat. A heart shot, most likely. He was dead.
Louisa pulled the man’s wool hat with earflaps from his head, to get a better look at him. His face was blunt, with a short, broad nose. There was nothing striking about his features, nothing that set him apart from a million other men. Several days’ worth of sandy stubble spiked his cheeks. There were maybe a few streaks of gray in his straight brown hair, which hung down a short ways over his ears. He appeared to be in his middle to late thirties, maybe early forties.
Ramsay Willis?
A voice called out of the windy darkness: “Louisa?”
She recognized Yardley’s voice. He’d come looking for her, likely followed her trail.
She would have been annoyed if she hadn’t suddenly, grudgingly found herself needing help.
She rose and turned to face in the direction of Sundown.
“Here!” she called, trying to lift her voice above the wind. “I’m over here, Captain!” She waved her arm so he could see her better in the dark.
An orange light flashed straight out before her, from maybe thirty yards away.
She heard the bullet whoosh through the air to her right. It was followed by a revolver’s crackling report.
Two more flashes.
One bullet thumped into a tree just ahead of the exasperated Vengeance Queen. She threw herself to the ground once more and, snarling more curses taken from Prophet’s repertoire, lifted her Colt to return fire.