When Prophet finished scouring the southern buttes, he headed back to the post headquarters. Halfway across what had once been the parade ground, he whistled for Mean and Ugly. The horse came galloping, dragging its reins.
As the horse pranced up to the well, having smelled the water, Prophet saw Louisa walk into the canyon through a crease between the rocky bluffs to the north. She was trailing her brown-and-white pinto, which she called simply “Horse.”
That was Louisa’s way. Like many cowboys, she saw no reason to get close enough to her mount to give it a name. To her and many drovers, a horse was a means of getting around—nothing more, nothing less.
Secretly, Prophet called the pinto “Peaches,” chuckling to himself when he did. It was just the kind of name the unsentimental Vengeance Queen wouldn’t have named it had she been inclined to name it anything at all.
The well was nothing more than mortared stone coping over a hole in the ground. It had a stout wooden cover, one whose boards had been replaced by some unknown handyman over the years. The well was obviously valued by everyone traveling the Old Arkansas River Trail between Sullyville, in western Kansas, to Pueblo, which sat at the foot of the Front Range to the west. There were many relatively fresh tracks leading into the old parade ground and marking the area around the well, including the week-old tracks of what Prophet assumed was a stagecoach.
Prophet removed the cover, dropped the bucket, which was attached to a rope, into the well, heard it splash and gurgle, and then heaved it up. He set the bucket down on the ground, doffed his hat, slurped water cupped in his hands, and then splashed himself with the refreshing goodness. Finally, he dunked his head up to his neck, and blew.
He pulled his head out of the bucket, water streaming down his face, and shook his head. The eager Mean and Ugly whinnied, nudged Prophet aside with his long snout, and sank his lips in the bucket.
“Damn, that feels good!” Prophet intoned, letting the water drip down his chest and back, cooling and refreshing him. “Bone-chillin’ cold, too—just like I remember it. Them soldier boys dug ’em a deep well.”
Louisa slipped her pinto’s bit. “Don’t let your guard down over some cold water. Someone called us out here for a reason. I’m assuming you didn’t come across anyone to the south. I saw no one to the north, but there’s a reason why we’re here, Lou, and I have a feeling we’re going to find out what that reason is soon.”
“Ah, shit, I’m just enjoying some water, Louisa. Do you mind if I enjoy myself for two minutes?”
“Two minutes—hah! You live to enjoy yourself, Lou.”
“You got a point there.” Prophet looked around as the water already began to dry on his face. “Nothin’ wrong with a man enjoyin’ himself. That’s why we’re put here, after all. But don’t worry, Miss Bonnyventure, I know we ain’t here to pay our respects to no belle of the ball. That don’t mean we’re necessarily on death’s doorstep, though.”
“No? Then how do you account for the lie we were both told?”
Louisa had pulled the water bucket away from Mean and Ugly and dropped it into the well. Now she was grunting and flushing prettily beneath her hat brim as she fetched it up out of the cool darkness below.
“I can’t,” Prophet said, scooping his hat off the ground and running an elbow around the inside of the brim, soaking up the sweat from the band. “But I got a feelin’ that if whoever called us out here wanted us dead, he’d have tipped his hand by now. He . . . or they . . . would have been waitin’ here to bushwhack us.”
“Possibly.” Louisa looked around, concern showing in her pretty, refined features with her clear hazel eyes, straight, fine nose, and delicate, dimpled chin. Her skin was tanned a dark olive, with a light peppering of freckles across her cheeks, but it was still smooth despite all the traveling she’d done, hunting down bad men beneath a harsh, frontier sun. The tan made the hazel in her eyes stand out.
Her religious-like zeal for hunting men—especially those who harmed women and children, like those who’d wiped out her family, leaving her alone alive to hunt the killers and kill them one by one, hard and bloody—often shone in those pretty hazel orbs, lending them an off-putting sharpness that contrasted bizarrely with her otherwise sweet schoolgirl face.
“Possibly,” she said again, quietly, as the dry breeze blew her sun-bleached blond hair around her shoulders.
Prophet slipped Mean’s saddle and blanket from the horse’s back, and set them on the ground by the well.
“What are you doing?” Louisa asked him.
“Figure we’re gonna be here a while.”
“Don’t need to be.” Louisa ran a toe of her boot along the ground in front of her. “We could just ride out of here.”
Prophet removed a hackamore from a saddlebag pouch. “You really wanna do that?”
She shrugged and looked off. “No point in us sticking around when we know we were lured here by a lie. For what will most likely turn out to be nefarious reasons.”
“What kind of reasons?”
Louisa rolled her eyes. “Never mind.”
“Wasn’t really a lie,” Prophet said as he slid the hackamore over Mean’s ears. “The notes just said someone wanted to talk to us about the other.” He grinned. “I for one would like to hear what they have to say about you.”
“It’s hogwash and you know it.”
“Yeah, I know it.” Prophet sighed and stared to the south from over Mean’s back. “But, yeah—okay, what the hell. Let’s pull our picket pins. I was havin’ a fine ole time in the Springs.”
“I’ll bet you were.”
Prophet looked at her. Louisa was leading the watered pinto back toward the post commander’s headquarters. “What’re you doin’?”
“Gonna picket my horse out of sight. No use leavin’ him out here where someone could shoot him and leave me afoot.”
“I thought you wanted to go back to Denver and continue enjoyin’ them opera shows.”
Louisa gave him a droll glance over her shoulder.
Prophet chuckled and led Mean after Louisa and the pinto.
“Yeah, I’m right curious, my ownself.”
Prophet pulled the quirley down and blew smoke at the headquarters’ low ceiling, watching the blue smoke flatten out against the herringbone-pattern rafters that were coated in dirt and cobwebs in which dead flies and leaves hung suspended.
“So that’s the story of how my pal Jeff Diddle stole the old planter’s prized Thoroughbred and got himself hitched to that sweet little Belle Pinkett, who didn’t turn out so sweet, after all, seein’ as how she got poor ole Jeff thrown in the Dalton hoosegow.” Prophet chuckled as he stared at the burning end of his loosely rolled cigarette. “My Lord—that was a time ago. Why, that was before the damn Yankees—”
“Lou, his name was not really ‘Diddle,’ ” Louisa interrupted him in disgust.
Prophet looked at the woman sitting on her saddle near the front window right of the door. Prophet himself lay back against the eastern wall, leaning against his own saddle, legs stretched before him on the grimy floor, boots crossed. The ten-gauge Richards lay across his thighs, freshly cleaned and oiled, both bores loaded and ready to go. “His name sure as hell was Diddle. Jeffrey Diddle.”
“You made that up to try and shock me, though nothing you could say or do could ever again shock me.”
“Louisa, I swear on a whole stack of family Bibles.”
“What would you have to lose? You already sold your soul to . . .” Louisa let her voice trail off as she turned to look out the window over her right shoulder.
She turned full around and then grabbed her own carbine and pressed her shoulder against the wall, to the right of the window. “Someone’s coming.”
Prophet blew out another drag, mashed the quirley on the floor, set the Richards aside, and grabbed his Winchester. He crabbed over to the window on his side of the door, and, doffing his hat, edged a look around the frame. He saw the movement about the same time he heard the clattering of what could only be a wagon.
A mule was just coming into view along the main trail snaking through the crease between the buttes. Now the wagon the mule was pulling came into view, as well. It was a small wagon with an old, gray-bearded man sitting in the driver’s box, mule-eared boots propped against the dash.
A yellow dog sat on the blanket-covered seat beside the old man. As the mule headed for the well, Prophet saw that the wagon was full of lumpy sacks and mining paraphernalia, including pans, picks, shovels, and sluice boxes. The wagon had been painted orange at one time, but the orange had faded to a dull copper. One of the wheels was relatively new, and it sported red spokes.
The old man drew up to the well and punched the brake home. While he clambered down from the driver’s boot, the dog leaped down and immediately began sniffing the yard around the well. The mongrel had obviously picked up the scent of Prophet, Louisa, and their horses.
“Shit,” Prophet muttered. The dog would find them. The old man was probably harmless, but someone could have put him on the scout for a few pinches of gold dust.
“What the hell you smell, Skeeter?” the old man asked the dog, who was running zigzags in the yard between the well and the post headquarters. The old man studied Prophet and Louisa’s hideout suspiciously, his eyes small and dark in his craggy, leathery face beneath the brim of his low-crowned straw sombrero. He was dark enough to have some Indian blood, but something told Prophet he was just an old desert rat wizened by the sun.
The dog continued to follow its nose toward the cabin.
Prophet looked over at Louisa, and shrugged. What could they do?
But then the dog turned on a dime and went running off into the brush to the west. Shortly, a cat hissed loudly. The dog yipped and ran back to the wagon, snorting and shaking its head as though it had gotten its snout scratched. Pouring out water for the dog and the mule, the old man laughed.
“Someday, Skeeter, you’ll learn to leave them cats alone.”
When the old man had watered his animals and himself, and filled a couple of canteens and canvas water sacks, he gazed once more toward the post commander’s headquarters, shading his eyes against the glare as the sun dropped in the west. He lifted his hat, sleeved sweat from his forehead, muttered something that Prophet couldn’t hear from this distance, and then climbed back into the wagon.
As the mule swung the wagon around and headed back out to the trail between the buttes, the old man glanced once more over his shoulder. And then he and the mule and dog were gone.
Prophet and Louisa shared a glance and a shrug.
As they continued to sit in the headquarters shack, waiting, the sun dropped lower in the west. Now Prophet felt like pulling his picket pin. The idea of getting caught here at the outpost after dark held little appeal. His memory of the two cavalry ghosts was still fresh in his mind. He was about to suggest to Louisa that they pull foot, but then a horse whinnied out toward the main trail.
Hooves thudded. Two riders were approaching.
Prophet looked at Louisa. She returned the look but said nothing as she turned to edge a look out the window, caressing her carbine’s hammer with her thumb.
The visitors turned out to be two saddle tramps who paid no attention to the post headquarters building, and didn’t even look around the outpost overmuch. That didn’t mean they weren’t on the scout, but Prophet doubted it. The two tramps chuckled as they jeered each other the way bored saddle tramps do; then they mounted up and road off with nary a look behind them.
“Shit,” Prophet said when they’d drifted out of sight.
“What?”
“Night’s comin’ on.”
“Yeah, we’ll likely get some action soon.”
That wasn’t what he meant. Suddenly, he was more concerned about the ghosts that haunted this place than he was about the person or persons who’d lured them here.
He shouldn’t have been.