Prophet had been through Box Elder Ford before.
It had grown up some since the last time Prophet was through here, but it still didn’t amount to much—only about four blocks of shabby wood-frame and mud-brick buildings, with log cabins and adobe huts dotting the surrounding hills, which were lush down here near the Arkansas.
The river, wide and brown and sheathed in cottonwoods, box elders, and willows, twisted between buttes to the south. The river was too shallow this time of the year for hauling gold down from and freight up to the mountain mining camps via flatboats, but Prophet knew it was rollicking in the springtime.
Now in August, the river meandered between broad, sandy banks and around sandbars, glittering in the harsh summer light. A couple of boys in overalls were fishing with long cane poles from one of the sandbars as Prophet rode down into the town, looking around the broad main street lined with gaudy false fronts.
The town was mostly quiet on this hot early afternoon, but as Prophet rode along the street, looking desperately for a sawbone’s shingle, a couple of men in bowler hats stepped out of a saloon on the street’s right side. They stared at Prophet dully, one with spectacles glinting in the sunlight.
Prophet rode with his jaws set hard, both apprehension and barely bridled rage burning along his spine. The tracks of the seven bushwhackers had disappeared in the well-churned dust of the street, indistinguishable from the other traffic.
“Sawbones!” Prophet yelled at the bowler-hatted gents—local shopkeepers, likely.
As the batwings swung back into place behind them, they both stopped with starts, scrutinizing Prophet and the girl lying slack against him. They glanced at each other quickly, quickly turned away, and began striding down the boardwalk, back in the direction from which Prophet had come.
“You yellow-livered sonso’bitches,” Prophet raked out as they hurried away.
He rode on. The local marshal’s office was a block-like stone building with a high front porch sitting above barred windows on the lower story, and with a brush-roofed gallery. A young, blond-headed young man stood atop the steps in a black suit with a boiled white shirt and billowy red neckerchief. A five-pointed star was pinned to the lapel of his suit coat. He was a tall kid, but his clothes hung on his long-boned, sparely tallowed frame.
As Prophet rode up to the stone building, the young marshal tried to look appropriately steely-eyed, thumbs hooked behind his cartridge belt, which glistened with polished brass. He wore a walnut-gripped Remington in a cracked leather holster on his right thigh.
He poked his broad-brimmed slouch hat back off his forehead as he said in a tone that was intended to match the hardness of his eyes, “What you got there, stranger?”
“I got a wounded young lady here, as you can likely see, sonny, so if you’d direct me to a sawbones, I’ll be on my way. Pronto!” To Prophet, everyone in town was his enemy, and they would be until he’d singled out those devil’s seven.
A softness in the young man’s mortar shone when he frowned as though indignant—maybe his feelings were a little hurt at the stranger’s obvious lack of respect for the badge on the kid’s lapel. He canted his head over his left shoulder and said, “Doc Whitfield’s down one block and east, by the river. I don’t care for your tone, though. Hey, mister!” the kid scolded as Prophet rode off, the pinto following dutifully from about fifteen feet behind Mean and Ugly.
Prophet looked around as he turned the corner and started toward the river. He wondered where the seven were who’d bushwhacked Louisa. Were they still in town or had they ridden on? Eldon Wayne had said “Box Elder Ford” as though Prophet would be able to find them there, but could he take the word of a bushwhacker—one who’d been dying from possibly his, Prophet’s, own bullet?
Prophet saw a neat, wood-frame house along the right side of the street that was little more than a two-track trail out here between the town and the river. There was a lot of green grass and sage around the house. The house, painted lime green with dark-red trim, was set back in a spare grove of cottonwoods and box elders, with what appeared a few fruit trees out back.
There was a chicken coop, a hog pen, and a stable and small corral back there, as well. Prophet saw a man in shirt and suspenders tossing food to a small flock of cream-colored chickens that converged on it loudly, fighting amongst themselves and squawking. As Prophet rode into the yard, the man swung toward him—a man much younger than Prophet was expecting. Most of the pill-rollers he’d known were old and gray and given to wry witticisms and gallows humor due to the innate darkness of their trade.
The young man’s round spectacles glinted in the sun.
As Prophet rode toward him, the young man set the bucket down and began walking toward Prophet. Limping, rather. He was half-dragging his right foot. Prophet hadn’t seen a boy until the young man crouched through the rails of the hog pen, where he’d obviously been working. He couldn’t have been much over ten, if that. He was dressed in a white shirt, vest, and knickers, with a ragged straw sombrero on his straw-blond head. His face was round and tanned by the sun. The sombrero’s chin thong bounced against his chest.
Tentatively, he walked beside the limping man, shading his eyes with a gloved hand as he stared toward Prophet.
“What happened?” the man asked as Prophet approached on Mean and Ugly.
“You Whitfield?”
“That’s right.”
“Doctor Whitfield?”
“Yes.”
While holding Louisa on the saddle with one hand, Prophet swung down from Mean’s back. He eased the girl into his arms, and turned to the young doctor and the boy. “She took two bullets, Doc. She needs help bad.”
Whitfield turned to the boy. Apparently, he didn’t need to say anything. As though he knew the drill, the boy grunted and ran for the house, clamping his sombrero down tight on his head with one hand.
“Follow me,” said the doctor as the screen door on the side of the house slapped closed behind the boy.
Whitfield limped to the door and winced as he climbed the three, mortared stone steps and entered the house. Prophet followed him into a mudroom where coats and jackets hung from pegs.
Whitfield canted his head to Prophet’s right. “In there. I have two beds for patients back there.”
Prophet carried Louisa through a low, curtained doorway and into what appeared a lean-to addition of the house. There were two beds—one to the left of the door, one to the right. Both were outfitted with white sheets and pillows with crisp, white covers. The walls were papered in red and black velvet with gilt flower trimmings, and there was a large, gold-framed daguerreotype of a woman, her hair in a neat bun atop her head, on the far wall over a bureau and between two red-curtained windows.
Prophet gentled Louisa into the cot left of the door. She didn’t groan or sigh or grunt or even squirm around. She was as still and quiet as death. Her eyelids were like thin paper, the blueness of veins showing faintly through the skin. The doctor’s limping shuffle sounded behind Prophet, and then Whitfield came in carrying several towels over one arm, and wearing a stethoscope around his neck.
Without looking at Prophet, he set the towels on a table near Louisa’s bed and said with businesslike crispness, “You’ll need to leave the room. I’ll tend to her and let you know how she’s doing as soon as I know.”
Prophet detected a faint note of disdain in the man’s voice. He probably tended quite a few gunshot wounds out here and had built up a reasonable disgust for the folks who get involved in such shenanigans.
“Listen,” Prophet said. “You gotta know—this girl means everything to me, Doc.”
Whitfield glanced at the holstered Peacemaker thonged on Prophet’s thigh. “Are you threatening me?”
Prophet didn’t know what to say to that. He supposed he was, in a way.
“Every moment you stand here, sir, with that big gun in your holster, is a moment I could be working to save her life.”
“You got it.”
Prophet glanced at Louisa as he backed toward the door. Worry hammered at him, making his ears ring. Reluctantly, he pushed through the door and stopped. The boy was heading toward him with a smoking iron pan filled with utensils, including a scissors and scalpel, in his two small hands.
“Excuse me,” the boy said.
Prophet held the curtain open for him, and the boy slipped through into the hospital room.
Prophet pushed through the screen door and out into the sunlit yard. The chickens clucked as they fed. A breeze had come up and was kicking dust around. Mean and the pinto stood side by side, regarding Prophet as though sensing his worry. The pinto whickered and turned to Mean as though to confer.
Mean turned his head away, a dark, customarily surly light entering the horse’s gaze.
Prophet walked over and stripped the tack off both horses, leaving it in the yard where it fell. There was a well between the house and the chicken coop and hog pen, with a pitched, shake-shingled roof over it. Prophet winched up a bucket of water and set it down beside the well, for the horses who’d followed him over. The pinto dipped its head to drink but Mean, in typical bullying fashion, nudged the pinto aside and dipped his own snout into the bucket.
The pinto shook its head and loosed an angry whinny, which Mean ignored as the dun loudly slurped water.
“Don’t worry—you’ll get your turn, Peaches,” Prophet said, smiling despite his worry about Louisa. He wondered what she’d say if she knew he’d dubbed her otherwise nameless horse with such a sissy name. Likely, she’d merely roll her eyes and call him a fool to name a horse anything but “Horse.”
It wasn’t that she was cold-hearted, Prophet knew, though she tended to act that way. The reason she hadn’t named the horse was because her heart was so large she didn’t want it getting broken if she should lose the mount.
“Ah, shit!” Prophet cuffed his hat off his head, letting it drop to the dirt at his boots. His knees buckled, and he knelt there near Mean and Ugly, grabbing fistfuls of his hair and tugging, trying to distract himself from his own heart, which had a large, rusty bowie knife of grief sticking straight out of it.
He’d been wrong to threaten the doctor. But that’s how desperate he was for Louisa to survive. He’d have given his own life to see the surly, beautiful, blond-haired, hazel-eyed Vengeance Queen come walking out of that house right now, fit as a fiddle. He’d run to her and squeeze her and throw her high in the air and catch her, and grind his lips against hers.
He’d paw her up and sniff her all over, savoring the feel and smell of her.
Oh, Christ—why had he left her alone?
If he’d been there with his Richards, he could have saved her.
“You’re a goddamn fool, Prophet!” he castigated himself, raking his knuckles across his scalp. “You’re a goddamn, cork-headed fool. Now you’ve gone and killed her, and what’re you gonna do without that girl runnin’ drag on your raggedy ass?”
Louisa Bonaventure was the only grace note in his otherwise coarse and crude existence.
He fisted tears from his cheeks. Mean had lowered his head toward him, sniffing him as though trying to figure out what the trouble was. The pinto eyed Prophet from a little farther back, warily.
“Ah, shit—don’t worry, Mean, Peaches. I ain’t totally loco. Not yet.”
Prophet heaved himself to his feet and sat on the edge of the well, letting the peaked roof shade him. He dug in his shirt pocket for his makings sack and started building a smoke. He hated the rawness he felt in his chest. He’d been wounded several times over the years—back during the War of Northern Aggression and several times on the frontier. He’d had the shit nearly literally kicked out of both ends.
And he’d just as soon have to endure that torture all over again than be dealt the kind of agony he’d been dealt here now. It made him want to cut out his own heart and chuck it into the well with a plop.
Mean turned his head, and whickered warily.
Prophet followed the horse’s gaze toward the main trail. A rider was just then swinging off the trail and into the doctor’s yard. Prophet recognized the shabby suit, billowy red neckerchief, and tan slouch hat of the young marshal.
“Hell,” he said.
He was in no mood to deal with the law.
The young man rode up to him, his chestnut kicking up dust and giving it to the breeze. The pinto whinnied. Mean whickered. The lawman’s horse whinnied in return. His badge glinted in the brassy afternoon light. He halted his horse near the well and studied the bounty hunter blandly for a time, pensively.
Then he looked off, looked back at Prophet, and said, “How’s she doin’?”
“Don’t know yet. Doc’s with her.”
The young man nodded. He was leaning forward against his saddle horn. “Got a name?”
Prophet scowled at him. He didn’t feel like telling the man his name. For all he knew, he was one of those from this town who’d shot Louisa. He didn’t trust lawmen any more than he trusted any other man. But there was no point in making trouble until he knew for sure he was making it with the right folks.
“Prophet. I’m a bounty hunter. So’s Louisa.” Prophet set a boot on a knee, and blew smoke into the breeze. Sweat trickled down his cheeks. “There were eight of ’em that bushwhacked us.”
“Why’d they bushwhack you?”
“That’s what I was hopin’ you could tell me. They’re from here. At least, they rode back this way last night. Left one of their pards lyin’ wounded up near Ramsay Creek. Said his name was Wayne. Eldon Wayne.”
“Eldon Wayne,” said the lawman as though he knew the name. “Was he alive when you left him?”
“Nope. I drilled a round through the bastard’s head.” Prophet touched his index finger to his forehead. “Right here.”
The young lawman stared at him.
Prophet stared back at him—angry and defiant.
“He was one of those who bushwhacked my partner. I take that right personal.”
“I understand.” The young lawman flicked some windblown grit from his lips. “I’ll send someone out for him.”
“He live here?”
The young lawman stared at Prophet until his stare became a glare. “Mr. Prophet, you’re not the one askin’ the questions. I’m the one askin’ the questions. I’m the law in this here town.” He touched the star on his coat. “I am town marshal Roscoe Deets, and I’ll ask the questions. Is that clear?”
Prophet rose, rage burning hot in his cheeks. He rolled the quirley to one corner of his mouth and lowered his hands to his sides, raking a thumb against the holster on his right thigh.
“Look, sonny, I don’t give a good goddamn about that peach tin on your coat lapel. Eight men from your town, or from hereabouts, ambushed my partner and me last night. There’s seven o’ them cowardly devils on the lurk somewhere around here. Before I blew Wayne’s wick, he told me they were all from your fine little dung heap of a town. When I find ’em, I’m gonna kill every last one of the gutless sonso’bitches. If you think you’re gonna stop me, you got another think comin’. And you’d best go home right now and tell your purty young wife to iron your burial suit.” Prophet had seen the gold band on Deets’s finger.
Prophet drew air into his lungs and let it out his nose.
Young Roscoe Deets glared down at him. Deets’s cheeks were bright red, his eyes small and round in the shade beneath his hat brim. Finally, unexpectedly, the young marshal jerked his horse around and spurred him into a gallop toward the main trail. When he hit the trail, he turned the chestnut hard again, and galloped back into town.
Prophet stared after him in surprise. He rolled the quirley from one side of his mouth to the other.
“Now, what have we here?” he muttered.