Chapter 30
It’s hard not to feel the blood pool in your knees when a rifle is aimed at you—especially a fancy sporting rifle that appeared more than a little accurate and outfitted with a sliding rear sight and mounted on a tripod.
Especially when a half-pint devil with a jealous grudge is grinning down the barrel at you . . .
The barrel of Rawdney Fair weather’s Scheutzen, poking out of the small clump of men gathered under the cottonwoods along the trail to the Indian Butte train station, sixty yards from where Prophet stood crouched, heart thudding, appeared to be aimed directly at the big bounty hunter’s ticker, sure enough.
Lou stared back along the Scheutzen’s barrel at the fop aiming through the little, vertical, rectangular sight standing up just behind the breech. Rawdney was showing a sly little grin as he adjusted the rifle slightly on the tripod, apparently placing the bead at the barrel’s end where he wanted it.
Prophet curled his upper lip in an enraged snarl touched with more than a little bare-assed trepidation.
Devil’s gonna shoot me and leave me here along the trail like a sack of potatoes spilled off a cart!
With an angry, bellowing wail he hurled himself off the left side of the trail just as the Scheutzen thundered, the little viper tongue of flames lapping toward Prophet. As the big bounty hunter hit the snowy grass, he heard the hiss of the bullet stitching the air if not where he’d been standing a moment before, then within a cat’s whisker, no doubt, before it hammered into the ground with a hair-raising ping.
Prophet rolled onto his belly and fired a look of keen hatred at the dandy laughing with the big, bearded Russians and his natty assistant, Leo, gathered around the rifle under the cottonwoods. Leo was rocked back on the heels of his fur boots, pointing at Prophet, laughing and tipping his flask to his mouth once more.
“You son of a buck, Fair weather!” Prophet yelled, his jaws set so hard he thought they’d crack. “I’ll get you for that—mark my words!”
Fair weather held up a prissy, gloved finger to the others, then crouched over his rifle once more.
“Goddamnit!” Prophet shouted.
He rose to his heels and then ran crouching toward the only cover out here—a rock humping up out of the ground ten yards to his left. Just before he reached the rock, Fair weather’s bullet hammered the face of it with a snarling bang followed closely by the rifle’s echoing report.
Prophet hit the ground and rolled up behind the rock, hearing the men laughing beneath the cottonwoods.
Prophet glanced to the west. Mean and Ugly was a small brown speck maybe a hundred yards away under the low gray sky, calmly grazing now in the wake of the horse’s having fled Fair weather’s first assault. Nearer Prophet, maybe thirty yards from the trail, Gritch Hatchley lay in the snowy brown grass, grunting and cursing.
“If only I’d grabbed my Winchester,” Lou fumed to himself, glancing toward Mean and Ugly again and seeing the butt of his rifle poking up from the saddle scabbard. He looked back at Fair weather and Leo and the Russians. “I’d blow that little nancy right out of his tailor-made outfit, and I’d finish with those goddamn Russians!”
But he didn’t have his rifle. He had only his .45 and his bowie knife. Each would be of equal value from this distance. So when another bullet came screeching toward him, Prophet could only pull his head back down behind the rock and grit his teeth and curse as the heavy-caliber round slammed into it, making the rock shudder against the bounty hunter’s shoulders.
“Go ahead and have your fun, you prissy coward,” Prophet raked out, pressing his back taut against the rock. “When you’re done, I’m gonna fetch my ’73 and shove it so far up your behind, you’ll . . .”
He let the words die on his tongue.
The clatter of a wagon rose. He turned to see a nice two-seat leather chaise with yellow-spoked wheels rolling along the trail out from Indian Butte. Ahead and moving toward him on his left, the chaise was pulled by a handsome dun, and the man sitting in the front seat holding the reins was Pop Schofield. Prophet could tell by the long, tangled gray beard and the long, blue-gray hair spilling from the ratty bear fur hat to dangle down over the old man’s spindly shoulders clad in a molting bear fur coat. Beside the liveryman on the quilted leather seat was Rawdney’s father, Senator Wilfred Fairweather.
On the second seat, behind the first, sat Count Miranova. Beside him, on Prophet’s near side, was the lovely countess Tatiana. The men were decked out in dark fur coats and tall fur hats, but the countess wore a thick rabbit fur coat with a high collar made of fox fur, the fox’s head complete with open eyes and black-tipped snout dangling down across her left shoulder. On her lovely, dark-eyed, fair-skinned head was a hat also of long, breeze-rippled rabbit fur. Her hands were stuffed into a rabbit fur warming muff.
Prophet turned his head to edge a look around his covering rock.
Rawdney was no longer aiming the Scheutzen at him. The sporting rifle had been taken down off its tripod. Rawdney, Leo, and the Russians were walking leisurely along the trail, heading for the train depot, talking and laughing and casting glances back over their shoulders toward Prophet. One of the big Russians was holding the rifle in a fur scabbard over his shoulder while another big Russian was carrying the tripod.
Prophet turned back to the chaise rolling toward him, within thirty yards now and closing. All eyes, including those of the countess, had found the bounty hunter hunkering down here behind the boulder, like a schoolboy playing hide and seek.
Prophet’s cheeks burned with embarrassment.
He winced, cursed to himself, spat to one side, and heaved himself to his feet, brushing snow from his denim britches and from the arms of his buckskin mackinaw.
Schofield smiled and shook his head, puffing a corncob pipe wedged in one side of his mouth. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a man who attracts more lead than you do, Prophet.” He chuckled and shook his head once more as the chaise slowly rolled past along the trail. “No, I purely don’t!”
The senator turned and leaned over the seat to say something in a jeering tone to the count. Both men laughed loudly. As the buggy continued rolling on down the trail, now between Prophet and the cottonwoods from which he’d been so reprehensibly assaulted. . . not to mention humiliated . . . the countess turned her head to keep her eyes on the man she’d cavorted with in the blissful postdawn hours of the previous evening.
She was smiling at him, but the skin above the bridge of her nose bore more than a few skeptical wrinkles.
Prophet’s ears blazed even hotter behind the muffler knotted around his head. “You’d be cowerin’ like a dog, too, Countess,” he grunted out sheepishly, “if you had that . . . that . . . that big cannon bearin’ down on your purty pink behind!” He spat again as he strode heavy footed across the trail, heading for where Mean and Ugly stood nonchalantly pulling at the dead grass poking above the snow. “Just wait till I see that fancy snot again—the Dan probably wears pink lace frillies—I’m gonna pistol-whip him till there ain’t a bit of skin left on his purty face, and then I’m gonna—”
“Prophet, I’m in a bad way here—a real bad way!”
Lou stopped. Hatchley lay in the snowy brush, on his back but half sitting up, his right hand snaked under him to hold the back of his right leg.
“Yeah?” Prophet gave an angry chuff and continued stomping toward his horse. “Join the party,Gritch!”
* * *
Mean and Ugly was second to no one, not even the Vengeance Queen, at reading his rider’s mind.
The hammerheaded dun always knew when Prophet was feeling a mite off his feed, and he wasn’t at all above exploiting the situation to deepen his rider’s misery. He performed such calculated follies merely for fun. A typically mean kind of fun, but fun, just the same.
Today, on the heels of Rawdney Fair weather having hoorawed Prophet with the sporting rifle, the horse made himself hard to catch, edging away from Lou just when the bounty hunter, having tramped the hundred and twenty yards or so through the cold and snow, was about to grab his reins.
When Prophet had finally stepped on the reins and gotten them into his fist, the horse took the opportunity to give Lou’s right earlobe, poking out from beneath the mouse-chewed muffler, a painful nip. A person who has never had a cold ear nibbled on by a horse should endure such an injury once in his life, because it makes such frivolous injuries as, say, cracking a funny bone against a blacksmith’s anvil or stubbing a bare toe on a stone hearth some cold, dark night when you’re looking for the thunder bucket, seem as insignificant as a brief tickle by an annoying brother.
Suffice it to say, it was a pallid-faced, weary-eyed Lou Prophet who finally led Mean and Ugly, with Gritch Hatchley in the hurricane deck and cuffed to the saddle horn once more, up to the cottonwood hitch rail running along the side of the wooden depot building nearly a half hour later. As he tied Mean to the rail, he looked around the front of the depot to see Rawdney and his fur-clad cohorts smoking cigars near the vestibule of one of the hunting party’s fancy railcars, talking and laughing.
None of the hunting party appeared to have seen Prophet. They’d long since forgotten about the butt of their joke, no doubt. Well, he hadn’t forgotten about them.
Lou stuffed his right-hand mitten into his coat pocket and shucked his Winchester from his saddle boot. He’d calmed down some since Rawdney had used him for target practice. Not much, but enough that he’d managed to talk himself out of marching up and shooting the dandy through his black heart at point-blank range, but only because he didn’t want to face the hangman in Bismarck alongside his old friend Hatchley.
But as long as Rawdney Fair weather was within, say, a hundred square miles, Prophet wasn’t going anywhere without his Winchester in his hand or on his shoulder. Let the dandy pull that sissy-looking long gun on him again, and Prophet would give him a pill he couldn’t digest. Anyone who didn’t want to call it self-defense would take the second round out of the barrel and follow Rawdney straight to wolf bait.
Lou snarled at the cussed fop as he stepped up to the front of the depot, leaving Hatchley grunting curses on Mean’s back, and pushed through the front door. Inside was all bleak shadows and the smell of wood varnish and cat piss. It was so warm that Prophet thought he’d faint before he made it to the ticket cage behind which a little, gray spider of a blue-haired old woman slouched on a low stool, smoking a loosely rolled quirley and stroking the liver-spotted puss on her spindly shoulder.
She blinked her brown eyes through the ticket cage at the tall man standing slumped before her, and croaked out, exhaling smoke through wizened nostrils, “You look like you been rode hard an’ put up wet, you handsome devil.”
The cat turned to Prophet and meowed as though in agreement with the spidery woman’s assessment.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
The woman smiled. At least, the lines in the lower half of her face deepened and widened slightly in what appeared to be a smile. “Wanna light and sit a spell, tell me about it? I could dig us out a bottle, and we could get to know each other.”
She gave a slow, lewd blink of her eyes, the lids like moth wings.
Prophet chuffed a laugh despite his sour mood . . . or maybe because it suddenly wasn’t so sour anymore. “Now, what makes you think I’m that kind of boy?”
She looked him up and down, her dark eyes twinkling with devilish insinuation. “You’re a tall son of a buck. My husband was tall.” She stuck the quirley between her lips, if the thin pink lines running parallel to her chin were indeed lips, and sucked on the quirley, making the end turn dark orange.
She sucked a long draw of the smoke deep into her lungs, held it, and said, “He’s long since dead, an’ I haven’t had my toes curled by a tall son of a buck like either of ya in you-wouldn’t-believe-how-long.”
Prophet would probably believe it but he didn’t say so as he didn’t want to seem impolite, and he wanted to purchase a ticket each for himself and his prisoner. He took the spidery little woman as someone who could hold a grudge. Discreetly parrying the spidery woman’s advances though his mood was buoyed by the bleak humor of the old woman’s brashness, he managed to purchase the tickets—three dollars and seventy-five cents apiece and an extra fifty cents for a stall for Mean and Ugly in the stock car.
While the transaction was being made, the chatty little spider informed Prophet that there was only one coach car, as the rest of the combination was taken up by “that damned charlatan Fair weather and his fay son along with them funny-talkin’ furriners they got up here huntin’ all the game off this prairie so the rest of us can live off gopher an’ blackbird pie for the rest of the winter.
“So far, you an’ your friend and your hoss will be the only payin’ passengers. Don’t expect a conductor or, for heaven sakes, a porter, cause there ain’t no such thing on this line, sweetie. You’re lucky to have bench seats and a woodstove. You’ll tend the stove and your hoss yourself. For that purpose, there’s a stock car between your car and the first of the senator’s fancy-dancy coaches. That’s on purpose. The stock car is to keep you raggedy-heeled, unwashed heathens back where you belong—in the passenger coach with its hard seats and damn little else. You’re not to mingle with the hunting party. They’re way above your lowly station, hear? Or so I hear tell . . .
“There’s a piss pot in the passenger coach, near the stove. Empty it yourself. I done punched your ticket and, less’n you’ve changed your mind about that bottle an’ a little slap ’n’ tickle—I got a new pad in back I just this past fall stuffed with new corn shuckin’s—you and your friend and your hoss have a nice trip to Bismark an’ come back an’ visit me soon when you can stay a little longer, now, you hear, handsome?”
Prophet assured her he would do just that, then, pocketing the tickets and resting the Winchester on his shoulder again, headed for the door. He stopped when, through a front window, he saw three horseback riders ride from around the building’s left side and onto the platform between the station and the train waiting on the tracks.
They were the three Cut-Head Sioux Prophet had seen before—the old man, Leaps High, the hand-shaker, Little Fawn, and the other, sober-faced young brave riding a sleek brown and black pinto.
The old man and the sober-faced brave rode ahead of Little Fawn.
Just as the three Indians started walking their horses across the brick platform, between the depot station and the sitting train, the countess stepped down from the car ahead of the stock car, which fronted the shabby passenger coach, which would have been the last coach in the combination if not for the little red caboose. The stylish, gleaming fittings of the countess’s sleek, black coach with red velvet curtains adorning the windows made the passenger car look like a derelict old fishing boat by comparison.
Seeing the girl, Little Fawn jumped down off his horse and ran over to the countess, extending his hand and bowing unctuously, wanting to shake. Prophet pushed through the door and out onto the platform.
“It’s all right, Countess,” he said when he saw the startled, apprehensive look on the black-eyed beauty’s face. “He just wants to shake your hand, is all.”
The countess looked at Prophet and then, turning to the Indian boy who stood only an inch or two taller than she, pulled her right hand out of the rabbit fur muff sewn onto her coat and gave it to Little Fawn, who shook it, laughing again with a combination of embarrassment and delight at the ridiculous custom. His laughter infected the countess, who, too, broke into laughter just before the boy released her hand and went jogging off down the platform, laughing.
He ran toward where Rawdney Fair weather and Leo stood together with only one of the Russians now, the others having apparently boarded the stylish cars of the senator’s private combination.
Prophet chuckled as he strode forward, heading toward the countess. He paused when he heard a voice raised in anger several cars up the train. He turned to see Rawdney Fair weather slap the young Indian boy, Little Fawn, hard across the young Indian’s face with the open palm of his right hand.
Little Fawn jerked back, startled. Looking at the dandy who’d slapped him in round-eyed, wide-mouthed shock, the young brave stumbled back toward where his horse had followed him along the platform and was also sidling away from the red-faced dandy in apprehension.
The other two Indians, Leaps High and the sober-faced brave, had their backs to the young Indian and Fair weather, but they both turned to peer back over their shoulders as the priggish dandy shouted at Little Fawn, “How dare you approach me, you filthy savage! Why would I want to shake your hand, you snickering red devil! Get the hell out of here before I fetch my rifle and shoot you through your savage heart!”