BEFORE DAWN, SUNSHINE got up and began building a fire. Hearing the soft snaps of the kindling, Prophet awoke and opened his eyes.
Silently, he watched the naked girl build the fire in the lodge’s tawny shadows. When she’d coaxed a flame into being, she waited until it had grown, cracking and snapping, then set two small pieces of Cottonwood atop it. Crawling on her hands and knees, her black hair swinging from side to side, she slid back under the bearskin.
Seeing that Prophet was awake, she nibbled his ear and giggled. Prophet smiled but shook his head. “You best leave before your father finds you here.”
She fondled him. Despite his anxiety that Three Buffaloes would discover them together, he grew quickly aroused, his protests dying on his lips.
A moment later, she crawled on top of him, and he placed his hands on the silky skin of her thighs, caressing with his thumbs, then placed his hands on the russet orbs of her small, firm breasts swaying above him as she moved, sighing and murmuring ... sighing and murmuring.
The passion built to a crescendo, until she stiffened and threw back her head, and Prophet, climbing out of his own hot bliss, reached up and clapped a hand over her mouth, stifling her scream.
They fell sideways together, rolling and snorting with muffled laughter. A few minutes later, the girl rose and dressed as Prophet watched. He grew aroused all over again as the lithe cinnamon nymph collected her hide dress and pulled it up her legs and belly, covering the lovely breasts with their still-jutting nipples.
Without so much as a good-bye or even glancing at him, she tossed her hair out from her neck and ducked through the flap, gone.
Prophet fell back, his guilt no longer tempered by the delight of the girl writhing beneath him. He’d frolicked with a girl whose father had only a few hours ago become his friend, while Louisa Bonaventure lay fighting for her life in a tepee only a few yards away.
“Law, law, Prophet,” he sighed to himself, using his mother’s old expression of pained exasperation. “You’re lower than a backwater crawdad.”
When he was dressed, he went out and looked sheepishly around for Three but saw only one of the wives fanning the cook fire to life with her apron. Relieved, he went into Louisa’s lodge. The crone was sitting beside her, legs crossed, singing softly with her head thrown back, eyes closed.
Ignoring the woman, Prophet dropped to a knee and studied Louisa, who was sweating like she’d been running across a hot desert. Her heartbeat was still strong, however.
Having taken more than his own share of bullets, Prophet knew it could be days before the fever broke.
He went out, fed and watered his horses, and returned to the encampment where Three was enjoying a morning cup of coffee near the breakfast fire, around which all the women had now gathered. The old Indian hailed Lou heartily and insisted he join him for coffee while the women prepared their meal. Avoiding the old man’s gaze, and more than a little worried about how the old man might react if he found out Prophet had diddled his daughter—even if it had been Sunshine’s idea—the bounty hunter manufactured a cheerful grin and extended his hand for the cup.
“How did you sleep?” Three asked when Prophet had taken a seat.
Prophet’s body heated from the center of his back to the top of his head. “Very well,” he choked. “Very well... thanks very much.” He couldn’t look at the man; only at the fire over which bread was frying and more of the buck was cooking.
“And the girl... did she treat you well?”
Prophet jerked a look at the old man staring at him. Three’s eyes were utterly without malice, waiting. Then Prophet saw the girl standing behind her father, her hands gently kneading the old man’s shoulders and eyeing the uncomfortable Prophet smokily.
The bounty hunter’s tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, and his throat was sandy. He knew his face was brick red.
“It is the Indian way,” Three explained with a smile, “to offer our women to our guests. Sunshine has welcomed many of our visitors with special, man-pleasing methods taught her by my wives.”
Prophet had heard of the Indian custom, but still his voice was locked deep in his throat.
“If you wish visits from any of the others,” Three said, extending his hand at the women chattering around the breakfast fire, “please remember, Prophet—my women are yours.”
Prophet glanced at the others. One of them turned to him and cackled, opening her toothless mouth and jiggling her enormous, sagging bosom, igniting the others, as well as the old man and Sunshine, to uproarious laughter.
‘Thanks, Three,” Prophet said, his ears still scalding but finding his voice at last, though he doubted it was audible above the convulsions. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
But the only one he kept in mind was Sunshine, who visited his lodge again that night, the next night, and the next, and who after sweating and grunting with him for several hours each visit, left without so much as a parting word or nod in the morning.
And she never so much as looked at him during the day.
Prophet became so enraptured by the nightly visits that he had to admit he was in no real hurry to leave the encampment. Rarely had he ever experienced such bewitching, otherworldly charms without the usual complications the next day.
It was enough to turn him into an Indian.
But then Louisa’s fever broke, and she regained consciousness. She healed for another week, moving around the camp to rebuild her strength, and resolutely declared herself fit to resume tracking Handsome Dave Duvall.
“Who?” Prophet said. He and Louisa had just returned to the camp after taking their horses out for a light run. Her left arm was in a rawhide sling.
Louisa stared at him, aghast. “Who!”
Prophet jerked in his saddle, startled out of his reverie of last night’s blissful coupling with Sunshine. “Oh, Duvall. Right. Handsome Dave. Sorry, I was just thinking I better help Three grease those wagon hubs.”
“I know whose hubs you were thinking about greasing, Lou Prophet,” Louisa scolded, turning and gigging the Morgan away. “And you’ve only got one more night left with your lovely Indian princess, so you better enjoy it!”
Prophet stared after her, his sandy brows hooding his eyes. How in the hell had she found out?
Embarrassed and indignant, he yelled after her, “It’s not my fault you went and got yourself ambushed, you silly greenhorn! I should’ve left you to the wolves!”
The next morning they said good-bye to the Indians—to all except Sunshine, that was, to whom Prophet had bid his own special farewell the night before, half hoping Louisa heard the screams—and pointed their horses toward Bismarck. Duvall was no doubt long gone from the territory by now, but Bismarck would be the best place for sniffing out his trail, however cold.
Prophet knew he should have left Louisa with the Indians and tracked Duvall while his trail was still fresh, but he’d been reluctant to leave the girl with strangers, however benign they’d turned out to be. Besides that, he knew how badly Louisa wanted to be involved in Handsome Dave’s capture. If he’d taken the outlaw down alone, he doubted she’d ever forgive him.
Sunshine had had no part in Prophet’s decision to stay with Louisa. At least, not a very big part.
They’d ridden half the day when Prophet realized Louisa hadn’t said more than three words to him since their conversation about Sunshine the day before.
“How come you’re so quiet?” he asked her over a small coffee fire at high noon.
She looked at him testily, wrinkling her pert nose. “Who’s saying I’m quiet?”
“You ain’t said more’n three words all day.”
“Maybe I don’t have anything to say to you.”
“You’re jealous of Sunshine. That’s why you’ve been so damn quiet.” He smiled, bemused.
She looked at him dully and tossed her grounds on the fire. She stood, walked to her horse, stowed her cup in her saddlebags, and mounted up. She reined the Morgan around and headed off at a lope.
When Prophet caught up to her, heeling Mean and Ugly abreast of the cantering Morgan, he said, “If that isn’t it, what is it?”
“You disgust me,” she said, looking straight ahead, her hat shading her stern face and her chin thong bouncing on her poncho. “Spending every night with that girl. You hardly knew her.”
“Three Buffaloes was just trying to make me feel at home, that’s all. And so what if I didn’t know her? I thought I told you—”
“Yeah, you told me all about how you sold your soul to the devil, and take your pleasure whenever and wherever you can. That’s disgusting, too. All of it. You act like nothing means anything. Like there’s no use in ever acting right because it’s all wrong, anyway, and there’s no God that cares about us.” Her voice was taut with anger.
“I’m sorry, Louisa,” he grumbled. “That’s just the way I see it.”
Later, he shot a couple of quail near a prairie pothole and roasted them over a fire that night. When it got dark, he checked on the horses, then came back and fished some gray cloth and a whiskey bottle from his saddlebags.
“I best change your bandage,” he told Louisa, who sat cross-legged by the fire, holding her coffee cup to her breast.
“It doesn’t need changing yet.”
“The old woman said to change it every night for the first five days, then every three days after that.”
He squatted next to her, but she only continued to stare wanly into the fire, as if she hadn’t heard him.
“Come on,” he urged.
Finally, she scowled and shrugged her poncho and dress off her shoulder, grabbing her hair away. While Prophet removed the old bandage and began swabbing the wound clean with the whiskey and cloth, Louisa said grimly, “He’s long gone by now, isn’t he?”
“Handsome Dave?”
“Of course I mean Handsome Dave,” she snapped, still angry at Prophet for his bad moral fiber in general and for sleeping with Sunshine in particular.
“I reckon he’s a ways ahead of us, all right, but we’ll find him. Someone in Bismarck will have seen him—someone in a saloon or a livery barn or a hotel, say. I’ll check around while you relax in a feather bed and get your strength back.”
“I’ve had all the idleness I need, and my strength is back.” She winced as the whiskey burned her wound, which was healing nicely. The old lady had stitched her up as well as any sawbones from a big Eastern college. “I’m just worried that snake has slithered away for good.”
Prophet splashed more whiskey on the cloth. “He may have slithered away, but a man like Dave Duvall can’t hide. He likes attention and commotion. Even if we don’t hear from him in the next few weeks, you can bet we will before winter. He’ll find another gang and rob a train or shoot a lawman or slash a sporting girl, and the word will get out, and we’ll be on him again.”
“What if a lawman gets him first? I don’t want some badge-toting imbecile to get him. I want to get him. Me.” She poked herself in the chest and stared into the flickering fire angrily, gray eyes flashing, hair bouncing on her shoulders.
“You will get him, Louisa,” Prophet assured her, a smile brightening his gaze. Angry or not, it was good to have her back to her old, determined self. Even while he was being distracted by Sunshine, he’d missed her.
There was a lull in the conversation while Prophet bandaged her shoulder. When he was done, he replaced her arm in the leather sling and began to move away. She stopped him with a look.
“What are you going to do after Duvall is dead?” Prophet grinned again, this time without mirth. “Once Duvall has been taken down and, if at all possible, turned over to the authorities, I’m going to do what I always do at the end of one job: go on a bender, then start looking for another.”
“You’re going to hell when you die, Lou Prophet.” “I told you ol’ Scratch is already waitin’ for me.” She shook her head. “Such foolish talk from a grown man.”
“If chasing Dave Duvall ain’t like chasin’ the devil all the way to hell, I don’t know what is.” Prophet stared pensively off. He sighed and turned to Louisa. “What are you going to do?”
She shrugged and sank back against her saddle. She removed her revolver from the holster beneath the poncho, hefting it in her hand and pondering it. “I haven’t given much thought to that.”
Prophet poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and sank back against his own saddle. “I suspect you’ll go back to where you came from,” he said. “You’ll settle in with a good family and marry one of them neighbor boys that was sparkin’ you before. You’ll have a passel of kids and raise some chickens and go to church picnics in the summer. Eventually, you’ll forget about all this, and you’ll have the kind of life a girl like you was meant to have.”
Prophet had been staring into the shadows across the fire. When Louisa did not respond, he turned to where she sat to his right. As if she hadn’t heard him, she continued methodically taking her revolver apart and cleaning each part with a white cloth soaked in oil. Her nostrils flared prettily, and her lip curled, but she said nothing.
He sighed and sipped his coffee. A more baffling girl he’d never seen.
“Good night,” Prophet said finally, rolling up in his blankets.
“Lou?”
He turned to her. She was running the oily rag down the barrel of her Winchester.
“What?”
“How come T.. how come you’ve never tried anything with me like you were doing with Sunshine? You know, to satisfy your man’s lustful desires.” She set the rifle aside and looked at him.
Prophet’s brows furrowed, and he felt the heat rise in his neck. “Well,” he said haltingly. “Well, ‘cause I figured you wouldn’t have it.”
“Well, I wouldn’t, but I was just wondering. You think I’m pretty, don’t you?”
Prophet grinned. Squinting one eye, he said, “Louisa Bonny-venture, I hesitate to tell you this out of fear of it going to your head, but I reckon you’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever laid eyes on, and that’s a fact.”
She stared at him, expressionless. Then she smiled shyly and ground a furrow in the dirt with her boot heel.
“But I figured you’d shoot me if I tried anything.”
“Well, I reckon I would at that,” Louisa speculated. “So you better mind yourself.” She paused, working her heel in the furrow. “But if you got real desperate, at the end of your obviously short tether, you might ask me politely, and I might think about it. Somewhere down the road, that is ...”
“Somewhere down the road,” Prophet said.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe.”
“That’s right.”
“Thanks, Louisa. That’s mighty generous of you.”
“That’s all right. Thanks for changing my dressing.”
“De nada. Good night.”
Prophet rolled over and closed his eyes, grinning.
He’d almost drifted off when her voice rose again. “I mean, I’ve never done it before. But I suppose I should know the experience sometime before I die, and I don’t know any man better than I know you … ”
Her voice trailed off, and the night sounds lifted.
“You will, Louisa,” Prophet assured her, suddenly feeling sad for the girl. “Someday you will.”