Prophet tramped over to a table near the barman’s, kicked a chair out, and doffed his hat. Giving a quick, furtive study of the others in the room—one gringo looked vaguely familiar—he ran his elbow around inside his hat, soaking up the sweat from the band with his sleeve.
As the Mexican came out with a jug and a filmy shot glass, Prophet tossed his hat onto the table, hooked the Richards over the table’s near right corner, within easy reach, and slacked into his chair. By his own design, the batwings were not directly behind him but sort of off his left shoulder, seven feet away.
He faced all of the other customers in the cantina. The barman’s table was six feet away on his right.
The cat still studied Prophet but it was no longer curling its tail. More even than the others, the cat was making Prophet feel self-conscious.
The Mexican set the shot glass on the table. His quirley drooped between his lips, and he blinked against the smoke wandering up into his eyes as he filled the glass with unfiltered mescal. The aroma of the astringent liquor itself was intoxicating, as it wafted up against Prophet’s nose.
The Mexican glanced at the Richards, then twisted the cork into the jug’s lip as he turned toward the bar.
“Leave it,” Prophet said. “I’m a might thirsty.”
“Come far, senor? Not that it’s any of my business, but . . .”
“We all got a curious streak,” Prophet said. “Yeah, you could say I’ve come far. Boy, it was cold up in Dakota. I’d hate to get stuck up there all winter!”
He chuckled and glanced around the room, but no one else seemed to find the comment in the least bit amusing. Maybe they’d never spent a winter in Dakota Territory. Or maybe their thoughts were elsewhere.
The gringo he thought he’d recognized sat about ten feet ahead and right, near the bar. Long, dark-red hair hung to his shoulders. He had a thin, scraggly beard and long mustaches damp from the forty-rod he was drinking. The top of his bulbous head was nearly bald, but Prophet judged he was only twenty-six, twenty-seven.
He was damned familiar, all right. Most likely, Prophet had seen that ugly visage on a wanted dodger or two . . .
He faced Prophet and kept casting owlish glances over the left shoulder of the man he shared his table with, whose back faced the bounty hunter.
The Mexican set the jug down on the table, on the Richards’s wide leather lanyard. He blinked sleepily down at Prophet once more, then removed the quirley from between his lips, blew smoke out his mouth and nostrils, and strode back over to his own table, where the cat was now washing itself.
Prophet nudged the jug off the lanyard. He picked up the shot glass and studied the cloudy liquid through the filmy glass, then tossed back half the shot, stretching his lips back from his teeth and raking out a heavy sigh as the mescal stoked a frenzied fire inside him.
His eyes watered.
Whenever he drank mescal down here in the southwestern territories, he felt like a kid partaking for the first time of his old man’s skull pop.
It usually took him a shot or two to get used to the vigor of the tangle-leg all over again.
He looked up quickly and caught the gringo glaring at him again over his friend’s left shoulder. The gringo averted his gaze quickly, and his mouth moved as he said something to the man across from him. The Mexicans gathered around the table to the gringo’s left, against the left wall, weren’t saying anything. They were busily keeping their eyes off of Prophet.
Occasionally, they cut their eyes over to the fidgety gringo.
They were a surly bunch—the whole lot of them. There was no denying it. They likely never did much singing and dancing, but was there some particular reason they were looking so sullen just now?
Did they know something about Savidge, or did they know who Prophet was and were taking umbrage about his possible past transgressions against them or against those they knew? Prophet had done plenty of work down here in the past, so he wouldn’t doubt that his reputation preceded him.
The Richards marked him as a bounty hunter, of course. And the nasty gash on his rough-hewn cheek likely told them he wasn’t a deacon in the Lutheran church. Maybe they just didn’t like bounty hunters. Maybe they all had prices on their heads and they were just naturally skittish about sharing a cantina with a man who made his living running their kind to ground.
In that case, their demeanors would be entirely reasonable and understandable.
Prophet threw back the rest of the mescal in his glass, and splashed out more from the jug. Damned good stuff. Really took the edge off a hard ride and a less than friendly situation. He knew from experience to go easy, though, for mescal would start going down like water after the third or four shot.
Over the next half a bottle you’d swear you were stone-cold sober, and could even win a few rounds of stud or ’jack, or take a girl to bed and enjoy yourself. But then it would slap you as hard as a deeply offended puta when you least expected, and send you crawling toward the nearest slop bucket with your eyes swimming and your guts on fire.
Prophet took only a small sip of the second shot, and then dug out his makings sack and began building a quirley.
He’d fired the quirley and was sitting back in his chair, smoking and conservatively sipping the mescal, enjoying himself for a short while before he’d hit the trail again, when the man sitting across from the familiar-looking gringo slid his chair back from their table, stood, stretched, and said with a laugh, “Time to shake the dew from my lily.”
He did not turn toward Prophet but merely gave him his profile as he moved out away from the table before turning to tramp into the shadows at the back of the cantina—a broad-shouldered hombre in a sheepskin vest over a dark calico shirt. He also wore a necklace of what appeared dyed grizzly teeth—something he’d likely taken in trade from an Indian.
He had two cartridge belts crisscrossed on his waist, with one hogleg in a beaded holster thonged on his right thigh. When he’d gained his feet and turned away from his table, Prophet had glimpsed another pistol riding in a belly holster. Walking with an ever-so-slight limp, he pushed through the plank-board door at the back of the room, slipped out into the brassy sunlight, and closed the door behind him.
Before the door had closed, Prophet had glimpsed a privy leaning back there behind the cantina.
Now there was no one to obscure the nervous gringo facing Prophet. The man glanced up at Prophet briefly, furtively, then casually puffed his cheeks out and began rolling a quirley of his own. He and his friend had been playing red dog, and two decks of cards and a few coins were scattered on the table before him, around an earthen jug like Prophet’s.
The mescal had oiled the bounty hunter’s brain enough that the man’s name slipped out like fresh plop from under a cow’s arched tail:
Buck Stinson.
A small-fry criminal wanted in several territories for mostly petty crimes including saloon robberies and stock and hay thievery. He may or may not have been involved in a range war up in Nevada, but he was wanted for questioning by the marshals up there. Prophet thought the price on his head wasn’t worth trifling over.
Stinson licked his quirley closed and glanced fleetingly at Prophet once more.
Prophet raised his shot glass to him. “Hidy, Buck.”
Stinson stared at him, hairy-eyed.
Prophet shook his head. “Pull your horns in. I ain’t here for you.” He glanced at the Mexicans. “Or any of these other hombres. I’m lookin’ for another fellow, Chaz Savidge. Nasty bastard. Makes you look like an aged nun, Buck. Just now, however, I’m enjoyin’ this here—”
He stopped talking suddenly.
The hair at the back of his neck was flicking around like an entire field of wheat in a prairie wind.
A shadow slid across the floor off his right shoulder. He dropped his shot glass onto the table, spilling mescal, and grabbed the Richards as he threw himself hard right from his chair. Just before he hit the floor, a pistol barked and there was a loud, shrill scream of breaking glass.
The pistol kept barking and the glass kept shattering.
Prophet hit the floor on his right shoulder, rolled twice, then twisted back onto his butt, spun, and looked behind him and through a window to see a man firing two pistols from out front of the cantina. Stinson’s red dog partner was firing through a large patch of jagged-edged window he’d broken out with his first few shots.
Glass flew in all directions. Powder smoke wafted in the sunshine. Stinson’s partner was bellowing and laughing as he fired each pistol in turn through the window.
The Mexicans were screaming as they dove for cover, and so was Buck Stinson, cursing loudly. “Hold it, Powell, you crazy bastard—you’re killin’ everybody but Prophet!”
Prophet raised the Richards up off the floor, clicked the left rabbit ear hammer back, and squeezed the corresponding trigger.
A much larger patch of glass was blown out of the window, the shattering noises drowned by the ten-gauge’s booming thunder. Powell screamed as he disappeared in the rain of flying glass.
Behind Prophet, Stinson bellowed incoherently. Boots thumped loudly. Prophet swung around in time to see the small-fry owlhoot staggering toward him, blood oozing from his right, shredded ear.
Stinson’s eyes were bright with fury as he raised both of his own Schofield revolvers. He got one shot off before Prophet tripped the Richards’s second trigger and watched Stinson get blown straight back as though by a sudden cyclone ripping through the saloon.
Stinson landed on a table and rolled heels-over-jaw down the other side and out of sight, landing with a raucous thump.
One of the Mexicans had been hit in the mescal-inspired barrage by Powell, and the others were stumbling around, yelling in Spanish and pulling six-shooters. Since there was no one else in the room to shoot at, they began swinging their hoglegs toward Prophet, who tossed away the smoking Richards and palmed his .45.
Bang! Bang! Bang-Bang-Bang!
Only two of the Mexicans managed to squeeze off shots in Prophet’s general direction, the bullets plunking into the floor wide of him, before the bounty hunter’s bullets sent them pirouetting into the wall and over tables and chairs, screaming as they died. One hit the floor and tried raising his pearl-gripped Bisley, bellowing a less than polite insult against Prophet’s mother.
The bounty hunter aimed carefully, knowing he had only one more round left in the Peacemaker, and drilled a blue, puckered hole in the raging Mex’s forehead, just above the bridge of his nose.
Movement to Prophet’s right.
He swung in that direction to see the barman aiming an ancient, double-barreled shotgun at him from over the bar.
“Oh, shit!” Prophet muttered to himself, automatically swinging his empty Colt at the snarling barkeep.
Seeing the big Colt aimed in his direction, the Mexican dropped the shotgun atop the bar, screaming, “No, por favor— you’re too much killer for me, amigo!”
He swung around and, holding his arms over his head, ran through a door behind the bar, leaving the door open behind him. He obviously hadn’t counted Prophet’s shots. The cat, which must have taken cover under the barkeep’s table, gave an indignant meow from somewhere behind the bar.
A few seconds later, Prophet saw the cat running tail-up after its master beyond the open door, both man and cat running toward a fringe of dusty willows and palo verdes some distance away.
Prophet rose, blinking against the wafting powder smoke. He looked around quickly, then, shaking the spent cartridges out of his Colt and replacing them with fresh from his cartridge belt, walked to the broken window.
Powell lay outside on his back. He looked as though his head and upper torso had been doused with red paint from which bits of window glass protruded. His eyes were gone.
Prophet strode back through the saloon.
None of the Mexicans were moving. He turned to Stinson, whose chest was rising and falling shallowly where he lay on his back, on the other side of the table he’d tumbled over. The buckshot had taken him in the upper chest, but somehow he was still breathing. Buckshot peppered his lower face and his neck, as well. Blood dribbled from the small wounds.
He stared straight up at the ceiling, blinking.
Prophet crouched over the outlaw. “Now, what the hell was that all about? I told you I wasn’t after you.”
“Wish you woulda told Powell,” Stinson said, and chuckled briefly. Then he stretched his lips back from his teeth as pain lanced him. “We . . . thought you was gonna take . . . the girl. We was . . . havin’ fun . . . with her.”
Prophet frowned. “What girl?”
Stinson swallowed. He was sucking air now like a landed fish, his eyes growing wider as he clung more desperately to the life that was fast leaving him. “The . . . one . . . upstairs. Savidge—he’s pimpin’ her out up there . . . buildin’ a stake.”
Outside, hoof thuds rose.
“Hy-ahhh!” a man shouted as the thudding grew louder.
Prophet turned to a dust-streaked window in time to see a rider galloping away from a small adobe stable on the other side of the yard. Chaz Savidge whipped his rein ends across his dappled gray’s right wither and shouted, “Hy-ahhh, you cayuse. Hy-ahhhh!”
Horse and rider galloped across the yard, passing from Prophet’s left to his right, and then swinging around the ocotillo corral and heading west.
“Shit!”
Prophet ran to the front of the saloon and out the batwing doors. He shucked his Winchester from his saddle boot, racked a shell into the chamber, and planted a bead on Savidge’s jostling back as horse and rider galloped straight out away from the cantina.
Prophet fired three quick rounds. He cursed again as his bullets plumed dust to either side of the fleeing killer. He aimed once more, carefully, but held fire when the outlaw gave a wild, victorious whoop and dashed around a bend in the trail, the bristling desert swallowing him.
“Goddamnit!” Prophet shouted.
He was tempted to mount Mean and Ugly and give chase. But Savidge would keep. His trail was fresh.
The girl . . .