Prophet cantered Mean and Ugly up to the doctor’s side door and swung down from the saddle. He’d just dropped Mean’s reins when the door opened and Whitfield dropped down a step and stopped suddenly, frowning in surprise at his visitor. He had a gun belt and two holsters in his hands.
Prophet recognized Louisa’s fancy rig.
“Ah, there you are,” Whitfield said, quietly closing the door and dropping down one more step.
Prophet’s heart thudded. He didn’t like the expression on the doctor’s face. He seemed pensive, troubled. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing.” Whitfield held up Louisa’s gun rig. “I was about to store this out in my stable for your partner. Don’t like guns in the house where Titus can get at them.”
“Oh.” Prophet felt relief wash through him. “She’s alive, then.”
“Yes. In fact, she was conscious just a few minutes ago. She fell out of bed, crawled across the floor, and got her hands on one of these. I thought she was going to shoot me.” Whitfield gave a wry snort.
“That’s Louisa.”
“I assured her she had no need for these on my premises.”
“Are you sure about that, Doc?”
“People in this town respect the wishes of their only doctor, Mr. Prophet. Call it an unfair advantage or whatever you like, but my withholding services can prove costly.”
He held the guns out, and Prophet took them and stowed them in his saddlebags. He turned to Whitfield. “Can I see her?”
“No.” Whitfield shook his head. “She just fell back asleep, and sleep is the best thing for her now.”
Prophet sighed and looked away. “Well, I’m glad to hear she’s still kickin’. Did she hurt herself fallin’ out of bed?”
“It doesn’t look like it. She’s a tough girl. A spirited girl.”
“That she is. Well . . .” Prophet gathered up Mean’s reins.
“Why don’t you come in for a drink, Mr. Prophet?”
Prophet had turned a stirrup out. Now he glanced in surprise at the doctor. “What’s that?”
Whitfield jerked his chin at the house. “Come in and have a drink. I have a bottle of Spanish brandy in my liquor cabinet. I don’t drink much, so it’s just been gathering dust. I mean”—he shrugged, offering a rare, sheepish half-smile—“if you’ve a mind. If you’ve nowhere else you need to be.”
“No, no,” Prophet said. “It’s just that—well, I’m a little surprised by the invitation, Doc.”
“I’m afraid I’ve been a trifle impolite,” the doctor said. “A little quick to judge, perhaps.”
“Well, hell,” Prophet said. “It’s bad luck to turn down a free drink.”
Prophet started forward. Whitfield cleared his throat meaningfully, glancing at the double bores of the shotgun hanging up above Prophet’s right shoulder.
“Oh, right,” Prophet said, and slung the Richards’s lanyard over his saddle horn.
He followed Whitfield through a kitchen and parlor and into the doctor’s office separated by French doors from the rest of the house. It was a small room, book-lined, and with a neat desk outfitted with a green-shaded Tiffany lamp. The room that flanked it, through a half-open door, appeared to be an examination room. In the main office, the smell of medicines mingled with the aroma of pipe tobacco.
Whitfield produced a cut-glass decanter from a plain walnut cabinet with glass doors. He filled two goblets and handed one to Prophet. “Have a seat.”
Prophet sank into a short, horsehair sofa flanking one wall while Whitfield sat in a wingback armchair beneath an oval-framed daguerreotype of himself when younger and a beautiful woman with her hair neatly lifted, rolled, and secured with an ornate tortoiseshell comb. She wore a ruffled white dress and held a bouquet of wildflowers.
Whitfield glanced up at the picture. “My wife.” He sipped his brandy and studied the image for a time, then turned back to Prophet. “She’s dead. Buggy accident. Same accident that gave me this bit of additional grief.”
Prophet set his hat down beside him on the sofa. “I’m sorry to hear that, Doc.”
“Your partner asked about Diana. She seemed quite moved by the story.”
Prophet sipped the brandy. He could tell it was good stuff, but he’d have preferred a couple belts of Tennessee Mountain. Brandy tasted bitter to his unrefined palate. Like wine. Give him a beer and a bourbon any day of the week. “Does that surprise you?”
“I guess it did, yes.”
“Louisa’s not your typical bounty hunter. She comes packing a whole steamer trunk of heartbreak.”
“Oh?”
“Her family was killed a few years back by an outlaw gang led by the bull demon of all demons, Handsome Dave Duvall.”
“Duvall?” Whitfield looked surprised.
“Yeah. Know the name?”
Whitfield shook his head. “No. I mean . . . I knew some Duvalls back where I came from, in Ohio, but I’m sure it’s not the same family.”
“Doubtful. I think Duvall hailed from Alabama, but as a fellow Confederate, I recognize no kinship with that rabid coyote. Dead now, anyways, thank god.”
Whitfield looked down at the drink he held in both hands. “I see.”
“Duvall was a child killer. A rapist and a murderer of women. That, you see, Doc, is sort of Louisa’s specialty. Hunting down men who do harm to women and children. It’s her calling and she practices it with a religious fervor I ain’t seen since I left the healin’ preachers and snake charmers in the north Georgia mountains.”
Whitfield remained pensive. Something did indeed seem to be pestering the man, even more so now than when Prophet had just ridden up to the house.
“You all right, Doc?” Prophet asked.
Whitfield glanced up at him and quirked a phony smile. “Yes, I’m fine. Just a little tired, I guess.”
“I’m sure Louisa’s been a burden, having to check on her every hour.”
“She’ll be less so now. She still has a slight fever but it will gradually diminish. Now we just have to make sure there’s no infection. I’d like to keep her here for at least the next week. Then she should be able to move over to the hotel. She should fully recover before she returns to the saddle.”
“What’re the charges, Doc?” Prophet reached into a front jeans pocket. “Between us we got . . .”
Whitfield waved his hand. “No need for that yet. We’ll settle up when she leaves here. I sense that despite the lowliness of your occupation, you are an honorable man, Mr. Prophet. She certainly seems like an honorable woman, anyway.”
“Oh, I’m honorable. Don’t bathe much and tell stupid jokes, but you can trust me farther than you could throw me uphill.”
Whitfield chuckled. “Yes, she told me about your jokes.”
“She asked about me, did she?”
“Of course. I sense that you’re close.”
“Sometimes more than other times. I reckon we’re cut too much alike to not get along like gators of the same swamp.”
“You sound like brother and sister.”
“That’s pretty much what we are, Doc.”
Whitfield took another sip of his brandy. He didn’t seem to be enjoying it all that much. “Tell me what’s going on in town, Mr. Prophet. Between you and the men you think ambushed you.”
“Oh, I know they ambushed me, Doc. I heard it from their own lips, though I’ll admit I was a might deceptive. I listened to ’em talkin’ in the billiard room after Wayne’s funeral. Now I got the who of it answered. So’s I just need to know the why. If they confess their sins to your local lawdog, and if he’ll lock ’em up and call for the circuit judge, all will be well between me and Box Elder Ford.”
“That’s a tall order, I’d imagine.”
“I would, too, but when they ambushed me an’ Louisa that night, they were fillin’ a tall one themselves. And they fucked it up. Pardon my French, but I’m mad as an old wet hen.”
“So you have poor Roscoe Deets in the middle.”
“There’s no need for him to be in the middle. He wears a badge. This is his town. He should act like it.”
“We had a man like that before Deets showed up. That’s why Deets is in there now.”
Prophet laughed without mirth and shook his head. “Well, I reckon you get what you pay for. But if there’s gonna be any justice . . . and peace . . . in Box Elder Ford, Deets is gonna have to live up to that badge on his coat.”
“And what if neither your ambushers nor Deets complies with your demands, Prophet?”
“Then I reckon I’ll be taking matters into my own hands.”
“And the town be damned.”
“Doesn’t have to be that way.”
Whitfield took another, larger swallow of his brandy, set the glass on his right thigh, and stared at Prophet dubiously through his glasses. “To use a stockman’s expression, don’t you think you’re stomping a little high, Mr. Prophet?”
Prophet felt his cheeks warm with anger. He leaned forward on his knees. “They ambushed that girl in there. Could have killed her. Could have killed me. And I don’t even know why.”
“I’m not saying you don’t have the right to be angry. I’m just wondering if you’re not stomping a little high, placing this entire town in a whipsaw.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Prophet said, “if Roscoe Deets would grow up and be the lawman he calls himself.”
Prophet drained his glass.
“Mr. Prophet?”
He looked at Whitfield. “I know how you feel about her, but don’t take it out on the whole town. It’s just eight men who ambushed you. There are two hundred innocent bystanders here in Box Elder Ford.”
Prophet sank back against the couch, holding his empty glass on his leg. “What would you like me to do?”
“Sometimes things happen and there’s really no one to see about them. Sometimes you just have to cut your losses.” Whitfield stared pensively down at his own glass, then drained it. “Those men . . . they might have been desperate. You don’t know what compelled them. I’d imagine it was something very . . . powerful, maybe beyond their ability to control. They felt that they had no option. I know those men, and none of them is a cold-blooded killer. Desperation compels men to do the oddest, most foolish things. Things that they might not otherwise do.”
“What was it?”
“Huh?”
“What compelled them?” Deep lines cut across the bounty hunter’s leathery forehead as he narrowed his eyes at the doctor. “Come on, Whitfield. You know, don’t you? What was it?”
Whitfield rose from his chair. “I was speaking in general terms, Mr. Prophet. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I need to call my son and start preparing supper.” He held his hand out for Prophet’s glass.
The bounty hunter stood, glowering in frustration. “All right. Thanks for the drink, Doc.” He donned his hat. “But if you decide to tell me, I’m all ears.” He strode out of the room. “I’ll see myself out.”
Prophet had stabled Mean and Ugly in the Federated Livery and Feed Barn and was heading down Hazelton to look for a room and a meal, when he stopped suddenly. He poked his hat brim back off his forehead.
Doc Whitfield was just then crossing the street a half a block ahead. The doctor was riding his horse, and he didn’t have his medical kit hanging from his saddle horn. He wore a corduroy jacket and a bowler hat. He crossed Hazelton and continued westward one block before swinging down a cross street and heading north.
Prophet poked his hat up from behind and scratched the back of his head.
He continued tramping forward and on into the lobby of the Grand View Hotel. A pretty but weary-looking blond woman in her early thirties was manning the front desk, doing bookwork. She glanced up as Prophet strode to the desk and her cheeks colored a little.
She looked Prophet up and down, critically.
“Can . . . I . . . help you?”
“I’d like a room.”
She gazed at him, nodded once, an odd, amused light entering her brown-eyed gaze. “You’re the one who has all the men of Box Elder Ford looking as though the bogeyman were after them—my husband included.”
“Oh, he is,” Prophet said, smiling grimly. “Indeed, he is. But that’s just between them and me, Mrs. Hunter. I see no reason why you and me can’t be friendly.”
“Well, then.” The woman chuckled and turned the register book toward Prophet. “How long will you be staying?”
“As long as it takes, Mrs. Hunter,” Prophet said, scribbling his name. “As long as it takes.”
He pinched his hat brim to her, hefted his saddlebags on his shoulder, scooped his Winchester off the desk, and climbed the stairs.
In his room, he dropped his gear on the bed and glanced out the west-facing window, trying to cast a look up the hill to the north, the direction in which Whitfield had headed.
Why was it that everything in Box Elder Ford seemed to begin and end on the north end of town?