Ryder chuckled. “Temptin’, ain’t it, Miss Bonaventure? Wouldn’t have to feed him or listen to his bullshit. Wouldn’t have to tie him up every night, tie him to his saddle every morning. I assume you’re takin’ him back to Denver. That’s a fair piece!”
“We’ll manage it,” Prophet said.
Ryder looked at him. The fat man blinked slowly. He was moving to his right, sort of toeing the ground, trying to look casual as he traced a semicircle around Prophet, moving up on the bounty hunter’s left side, exposing him to the creek side of the camp.
Prophet also “casually” kicked a stone and moved to stay on the east side of Ryder. As he did, he saw the others spreading out around him and Louisa, their hands hanging down over the handles of their guns. Louisa had noticed the movement. She turned her head slowly back and forth, rolling her gaze around, keeping the men in the periphery of her vision.
As she did, she backed up, not wanting them to get directly behind her where she couldn’t see them.
Prophet moved up to stand in front of Ryder, keeping the fat bounty hunter between himself and the creek.
“Say, Ben, I been wonderin’,” Prophet said, scratching the back of his head and scowling with feigned pensiveness, “where’s your old pal, Spider Dotson?”
Ben stopped his slow stroll, and smiled, crossing his arms on his broad chest. “Spider? Oh, well . . .” He scowled suddenly, sadly. “Spider’s dead, Lou. Took a bullet down in Wichita. We was takin’ in an owlhoot named Harley Mason, and Mason got the drop on us, I’m afraid. He was sittin’ in a privy and fired through the half-moon in the door!”
“What a way to go,” said Coyote Perry, shaking his head sadly, though he had a tense look on his pale face as he slowly moved his hands down toward the grips of the two pistols on his hips. “Shot by a drunk owlhoot through a privy door!”
“That’s funny,” Prophet said.
“Nothin’ funny about it, Lou,” Ryder said, offended.
“I could swear I just seen ole Spider moving in them trees back there along the creek.”
He’d just gotten “creek” out when he whipped his Winchester down off his shoulder, aimed, and fired not six inches to the left of Ben Ryder’s left ear.
The blast evoked a shrill yelp from the woods along the creek. At the same time, Ryder himself screamed and, stumbling back away from Prophet, clamped a hand over his ringing left ear while fumbling a long-barreled Smith & Wesson from the holster on his right thigh.
Prophet pumped another round into the Winchester’s breech and popped a pill into the fat’s man’s belly. As he cocked the long gun again, he saw and heard Louisa go to work with her two fancy Colts, sending Kinch Duggan and Coyote Perry dancing off into the trees, triggering their own pistols into the air or the ground, bellowing.
Ghost had just unholstered his own six-shooter and was aiming at Louisa, when Prophet raked out a sharp curse and flung a round into the side of the giant’s head, just above his left ear.
Ghost’s own shot sailed wild as he staggered sideways.
Louisa wheeled and triggered both her Colts into the big man’s chest.
Ghost pinwheeled and stumbled off into the woods before falling with a loud, crackling thump and lay kicking.
Kinch lay unmoving on his side, but Coyote was trying to heave himself up onto his hands and knees. As he reached for his dropped revolver, Louisa calmly walked up to him and finished him with one round to the crown of his skull.
Prophet walked over to where Ben Ryder lay on his back, clamping both hands to his bulging belly, which was oozing blood through the ragged hole in his buffalo coat. His red face was pain-wracked. He threw his head back and howled.
“Why, you wily Rebel sonofabitch!” he yelled, sobbing, casting his pain-bright gaze to Prophet.
“Tryin’ to poach a bounty, eh, Ben?” Prophet said. “We took Savidge down fair an’ square. He’s ours.”
“Ah, shit,” Ryder said, grunting, “We been trackin’ that bastard for weeks. We couldn’t believe it when we seen you two ahead of us. We . . . we just couldn’t let him go. Goddamn you, Lou, you deafened me.” He brushed a hand toward his left ear. “I can only hear church bells tolling in that ear! Otherwise, nothin’!”
“They ain’t tollin’ for you, Ben.”
Ryder glared up at the big bounty hunter standing over him. “Look what you done—you went and killed your old pal, Ben Ryder, you ornery sonofabitch!”
“About one pull of a whore’s bell before you would have killed me, Ben.” Prophet glanced at Chaz Savidge looking on in grave distress. “And sawed ole Savidge’s ugly head off.”
Savidge made a sour expression. “Savage!” the outlaw wailed at Ryder. “Damn savages—fixin’ to hack a man’s head off for profit!”
“Ah, hell,” Ryder said, breathing heavily now, his face turning pale and sweat-bathed as he looked over at Savidge, “you’re just a child rapist and murderer.”
He gave a ragged sigh, and his body fell slack. His chest and belly stopped rising and falling. His hands fell to the ground. He turned his head to one side and half-closed his eyes.
Louisa had walked over to stand beside Prophet, staring down at Ryder.
She glanced at her partner. “You knew?”
“As soon as I saw them,” Prophet said. “None of those tinhorns has taken down their own bounty in years. When he made the mistake of sayin’ there were five in his group, I started looking around for Spider. He’s the best shot of the bunch, which ain’t sayin’ much.”
“Good on ya, Proph!” Savidge said, delighted, an enervated shine lingering in his gaze. “I knew you could do it. Two against five, and you took ’em all down quicker than a whore can blow a—”
Prophet cut him off with, “Don’t get any ideas.”
He’d spoken to Louisa, who was staring dubiously down at their prisoner.
“Yeah, don’t get any ideas!” Savidge echoed the bounty hunter.
“I’m not gonna cart a bloody ole head back to Denver. I’ve had to do that before, and it wasn’t purty or sweet-smellin’!”
Louisa narrowed a speculative eye at the sky. “It’s cool enough.” She looked at Savidge again. “He wouldn’t get to smelling too awful bad. Leastways, not any worse than he smells now.”
Savidge made a face, and shuddered.
Late that afternoon, Josephina Hawkins adjusted the powder-blue print dress she’d donned after her hot bath, and walked to her kitchen window.
Since she’d bathed in the kitchen, whose windows faced the bunkhouse on the other side of the yard, she’d pulled the flour sack curtains closed. When she and George Hawkins had first been married ten months ago, and Josephina had moved off her parents’ small farm and into Hawkins’s log cabin, she’d sewn little felt roses into the curtains, to lend them color.
Now, the little blood-red roses danced against the window fringed with frost and dusted with the snow that had been falling all day, foretelling another long—no, endless—Great Plains winter.
As Josephina stared out the window at the bunkhouse, which was a boxlike, one-room log cabin with a brush roof and a single ladder-back chair sitting against the wall just left of its plank-board door, the door itself opened. Josephina felt a flush rise in her cheeks as the hired man, Henry Otherday, stepped outside, smoothing his thick, coal-black hair back with one hand and then donning his Stetson hat with the other.
Josephina took two steps back away from the window, which was finely scraped waxed paper stretched between brittle sashes. The paper made annoying popping and wheezing sounds when the breeze blew it, which it was doing now.
Mr. Otherday stood looking around for a time, as though judging the weather. He wore blue denims and a corduroy jacket over a cream wool shirt and black neckerchief. His dark hair hung down over his ears. He held out one of his large, brown hands, as though to catch the downy flakes that were falling, and then brought his palm to his mouth, and licked it.
“Oh,” Josephina laughed. “Oh, my gosh. He’s eating snow!”
She wasn’t sure why that thrilled her, but it did. She couldn’t imagine her husband, Mr. Hawkins, ever doing such a thing. But then, Hawkins was eighteen years Josephina’s senior, and Mr. Otherday was probably right around Josephina’s age of nineteen.
He’d been working for Mr. Hawkins since just before the roundup. Mr. Hawkins wanted to carry the young half-breed over the winter, because his rheumatism was making it hard to keep up with even his less taxing winter chores, and then he’d have ready help in the spring for calving and branding.
At least, that’s what Mr. Hawkins had told Josephina. Josephina secretly opined that the real reason her husband wanted to keep a hired man on the place was so that he could spend more time at the woodcutters’ camp down on Mulberry Creek. There was a small saloon there, which employed three girls of various ages.
Josephina wasn’t sure why, but her ears did not burn at the notion of her husband as a whoremonger. Rumors about his infidelities to his first wife had circulated throughout the county, so Josephina had known what she’d been getting into when she’d accepted the man’s marriage proposal.
She hadn’t married him out of love, anyway. She’d married him because her parents couldn’t afford to support five daughters and two sons on their little dirt farm five miles from here, and she’d needed a place to live. Otherwise, she herself might have ended up working for room and board down at the woodcutters’ camp and enduring all manner of indignity just to feed herself.
Now she gave a little gasp of excitement as Henry Otherday began walking toward the cabin. Her heart lurched in her chest. At the same time, shame caused her ears to burn. She was a married woman. She had no right to feel so light in the head at the prospect of enjoying a meal and maybe part of an evening with her husband’s hired man.
The two of them—Josephina and Henry Otherday—alone in her husband’s cabin!
Mr. Hawkins’s own transgressions gave her no right to transgress in a similar way. But then, she was only cooking supper for the hired man, she reminded herself. She had no intention of letting things go any further than that. In fact, the thought increased the burning in her ears, and added a shrill, admonishing hum.
It caused her heart to flutter and her breath to grow short.
She’d been raised a good Christian girl. In fact, her mother had read to Josephina and her sisters and two brothers from the Good Book right up until the very night before Josephina married George Hawkins. If Josephina’s family knew that she was entertaining a man alone in her husband’s cabin tonight, they’d likely disown her.
Outside, the sound of footsteps grew. There was a thump as the hired man stepped up onto the small boardwalk fronting the Hawkins’s shanty.
A light knock sounded against the door.
Josephina gave another gasp, stepping back.
Oh, dear Lord—what had she done!