Another bullet came screeching in from the opposite ridge, followed a quarter-second later by the Sharps’s menacing thunder.
A rocky clattering rose from the slope flanking Prophet. He looked up to see several stones rolling down the ridge, bouncing and clacking. Then he saw Louisa moving down the slope, keeping to the shade of the large boulders on her left, which, angled as they were, shielded her from Chivington’s view.
She moved lithely through the wedge-shaped shadows angling out from the boulders, hop-skipping from one rock to another, steadily descending.
Slowing her pace, she crouched and looked across the canyon as she drew within several yards of her partner, then took two bounding leaps and dropped to her haunches beside him.
Her suntanned cheeks were flushed beneath the shading brim of her Stetson. She held her Winchester in one hand.
“I thought I told you to stay with Josephina,” Prophet scolded.
“The Mexican girl’s with Josephina. You’re gonna need help going up against that Big Fifty again, you fool.”
“I thought you were finally starting to defer to my considerably more experience.”
She wrinkled a nostril at him. “Really, Lou—how long did you think that was going to last?”
Again, the Big Fifty roared as another heavy chunk of lead plowed into the side of the ridge near Prophet and his partner.
Prophet donned his hat, curling the brim to his liking. He liked being able to see around the brim. “Well, as long as you’re here, you might as well make yourself useful.”
“All right,” she said, giving an ironic quirk to her mouth corners. “How do you want to handle this?”
Prophet grinned. “Damn, I like the sound of that! Could you say it one more time, girl?”
She scowled at him.
“All right, all right,” he said, edging a fleeting look around the rock toward Chivington’s ridge. “You distract him while I work on across the slope. I’m gonna try and get across the canyon without him boring a train-sized tunnel through my brisket with that cannon of his, and then I’m gonna try and climb his slope and work around behind him. I want that head back, goddamnit. We’ve come too far, and it just ain’t right. The man’s got no honor!”
“Stop preaching to the choir, Lou.”
“But be careful. You keep your pretty head down.”
“Thanks for the compliment, but how am I supposed to keep my pretty head down and distract him at the same time?”
“You’ll think of somethin’.” Prophet ran the back of his hand through the long, blond hair trailing down over her left arm. “I sure would hate to see them pretty locks mussed.”
“Will you get going?”
“All right, all right. We’ll wait till he throws down on us again, and then you toss some lead at him, and I’ll skin out.”
They didn’t have to wait long for Chivington’s next shot.
When the dust from the bullet was still pluming, Louisa snaked her carbine around the right side of the stone finger, and cut loose. Prophet bolted out away from the left side of the covering stone, sprinting along the side of the slope, moving parallel with the canyon floor.
He ran hard, wincing, remembering the size of the hole that the Big Fifty had left in Chaz Savidge’s back. The burn in his cheek and the ache in his left thigh were also reminders of the damage the buffalo gun could inflict.
Louisa kept working her Winchester—steady, even shots that, for the moment, were silencing Chivington’s cannon. Prophet knew that as soon as Louisa had popped all nine of her caps, the Big Fifty would likely go back to work in earnest.
He counted the Vengeance Queen’s shots as he ran, weaving around tufts of brush, cactus, and sandstone boulders. A rattlesnake gave a shrill, menacing rattle somewhere to his left.
“Shit!”
Prophet leaped high when out the corner of his eye he saw the granite-gray viper strike from a slice of shade by a small, square rock. The snake’s flat head bounced off the heel of his left boot with a nerve-rattling nudge and a faint thump.
“Close one!” the bounty hunter wheezed out as, hearing Louisa’s Winchester go quiet, he rammed his left shoulder up against a boulder roughly the size of a small farm wagon.
Across the canyon, the Big Fifty roared, its echoes rocketing around the chasm, dwindling quickly to eerie silence. Prophet didn’t hear the bullets strike. He wondered if Chivington knew he was on the run, or did the poacher think Prophet was the one who’d been throwing .44 caliber bullets at him?
He hoped so. He’d like to give the limey, bounty-poaching, head-thieving bastard the surprise of his life.
When Louisa went back to work with her Winchester, Prophet ran out from behind the rock, running generally downslope now toward the canyon floor.
He traced a serpentine path of least resistance around barrel cacti and saguaros and wicked-looking patches of prickly pear. He holed up again when Louisa’s Winchester fell silent and was curious when he did not hear the Big Fifty roar in reply to the Vengeance Queen’s fusillade.
He would have liked to hear the blast, because then he’d have a better idea, judging by where the .50-90 bullet was placed, if Chivington knew Prophet was trying to work around him. Prophet wanted to be the one to surprise Chivington. Not the other way around.
When Louisa’s Winchester began speaking again from behind and above him now and a good ways off to his left, he sprinted across the canyon floor and up the opposite slope. He angled back in the direction of where he figured Chivington was still holed up in his nest of rocks.
Anxiety was a heavy weight in his lower belly. His left thigh was mostly healed, but it burned now as he ran.
Louisa had only so many rounds to feed Chivington. This batch she was triggering now was likely close to the last of what she’d had in her Winchester to begin with and what she’d been toting on her cartridge belt.
Should’ve given her a few of mine, Prophet thought as he climbed, his feet burning and swelling inside his boots as he trudged heavily up the incline. Boots were made for riding not running, just as Prophet himself had been.
When he was halfway up the slope and among slab-sided boulders larger than most prospectors’ cabins, Louisa’s shots quit.
The last one’s echo spiraled quickly skyward. The echo hadn’t died when the Big Fifty’s roar assaulted Prophet’s ears. He glimpsed the large frame of the shooter standing sixty feet up the slope from him now, aiming the cannon straight out from his right shoulder.
Prophet threw himself hard left as the slug scalded the air off his right ear and plunked into the ragged arm of a saguaro behind him.
“Another close one!” the bounty hunter told himself, pressing his back up against the side of a boulder facing the downslope.
Sweat bathed his face and his back. His shirt clung to him. His mouth was dry. He tried to spit dirt from his lips but he had no saliva.
Chivington called from upslope, from the other end of the boulder, “Your partner joined you, I see, Prophet. Always nice to have a partner. Especially one so beautiful.”
“Chivington, have we met?”
“We’ve run into each other, a time or two. Here and there. Your reputation precedes you, Prophet, so I knew who you were but since my reputation is still chasing its own shadow, you didn’t know who I was.”
“Keep poachin’ the bounties of honest, hard-working hunters, and you’ll gain a reputation, all right.”
“Come out of there, and let’s introduce ourselves to each other right and proper. I think your partner has come to the end of her ammunition.”
“I’m going to introduce myself to you with a forty-four round, you son of a bitch!”
“The head’s mine, Lou,” Chivington said. “Times change. People change. Professions change. It’s a dog-eat-dog world.”
“This dog bites back.”
Prophet was making his way around the left side of the boulder, climbing the slope nearly straight up toward the top. Chivington was somewhere in the rocks around the boulder’s far end, keeping to the high ground.
“Where are you, Lou?” the Englishman asked. “Are you on the move, prolonging the inevitable?”
Prophet didn’t answer.
Setting each boot down carefully, he moved upslope along the side of the boulder. He held the Winchester out from his right side, dragging that shoulder lightly along the side of the rock. Occasionally, he glanced behind him to see if the poacher was circling.
Chivington had also fallen silent, not wanting to give away his position.
Prophet’s heart beat slowly but harshly in his ears.
His throat was so dry he wanted to cough but resisted the urge.
That Big Fifty could do a lot of damage. From close up, especially . . .
He doffed his hat, and, holding it down by his left thigh, edged a look around the backside of the boulder.
Nothing. Only the slab sides and severe angles of more boulders—a geometric patchwork of copper-colored sunlight and purple shadows. The breeze whispered softly against the sides of the rocks. It whistled mournfully through the narrow gaps between them.
Those were the only sounds.
Prophet kept anticipating another thundering report of the Big Fifty blowing the silence to pieces.
Blowing him to pieces . . .
He looked behind. All clear.
He stepped around the front corner of the boulder and made his slow, silent way to the far side. When he came to the far corner, he stopped and cast another slow, cautious look along the downslope side.
Something clattered to his left. He swung the Winchester toward it.
It was only a flat rock just then coming to rest among other stones. Someone had tossed it from the opposite direction. A shadow moved in the corner of Prophet’s right eye. He whipped his head back in that direction to see a tall man in fringed buckskins and long, yellow hair streaked with brown and gray whipping down around his shoulders and thick, tangled beard in the breeze. The Englishman wore a broad-brimmed leather hat.
Chivington was aiming the Sharps straight out from his right shoulder at Prophet, narrowing one eye as he gazed down the barrel. The Big Fifty’s octagonal maw yawned wide. Prophet’s heart thudded for what he was sure would be the last time as he brought his own rifle to bear too late.
The thrown rock had distracted him for a quarter of a second too long.
The Sharps’s heavy hammer dropped . . . but with a clang instead of a burst of smoke and fire. There was a muffled crack and a hiss.
Chivington stared down in horror at the Sharps’s heavy hammer shaped like a curled thumb against the firing pin. At the same time, Prophet finished his motion of aiming and firing the Winchester, which barked loudly in the narrow gap between the boulders.
Chivington grunted as he jerked his head up. The Sharps sagged in his arms. He took two shambling steps straight backward, dragging his heels and his spurs.
“Oh,” he said, making a face. “Oh . . . bloody hell!”
Prophet moved forward, pumping another round into the Winchester’s breech. “That’s the thing about them buffalo guns,” he said in his slow, southern drawl. “When they get too hot, they’ll jam on ya. That’s why I’ve always celebrated the day ole Winchester brought out the ’73. I can take down bounty poachers from dawn till dusk, slick as shit on a hot metal roof!”
He smiled and pumped another round into the Englishman’s tall frame.
Chivington stumbled backward again, this time kicking a blood-stained croaker sack with the heel of his left, mule-eared boot. Something tumbled out of the mouth of the sack and rolled down the slope. As Chivington fell, dropping the Big Fifty, he twisted around and shouted, “Noo!”
He flung an arm out toward the head of Chaz Savidge rolling down the slope behind him.
The man’s anguished plea echoed.
The head came to rest against the right ankle of Louisa Bonaventure, who stood about twenty yards down the slope below the writhing Chivington. Holding her carbine across her chest, Louisa looked down at the head, bald on top, with mild interest, and nudged it with her boot toe.
Prophet walked over to stare down at Chivington, who ground his back against the rocks and gravel, groaning. The man lay still as his eyes found Prophet. Fear glazed them.
Prophet lowered his rifle toward the man’s head. “Maybe you can find an honest occupation in hell,” the bounty hunter said.
The poacher screamed and lifted his hands to cover his face, but not before Prophet’s Winchester finished him.
Chivington farted as his body relaxed against the ground.
Louisa looked up the slope at Prophet. “Lose something?” she asked, and glanced down at Savidge’s head, the man’s face snarling up at her.
“Nah,” Prophet said, picking up the empty croaker sack.
He walked down to Louisa, picked up Chaz Savidge’s head by the long, tangled hair dangling over the ears, and stuffed it into the sack. He shook the sack to settle the head and then tied a loose knot in the neck. “Savidge did.”
He narrowed an eye at his partner. “How ’bout if we go back yonder and give this ole head to Miss Josephina? I think she’s the one person in this whole, ugly frontier who could use it even more than we could . . . hungry as I am.”
Louisa arched a brow. “How ’bout the doxies? You never know when you’re gonna have two dimes to rub together again.”
Prophet shrugged. “I can wait for them. The question is, can they wait for me?”
As he started down the slope toward the canyon floor, he set his rifle on his right shoulder and slung the head of Savidge over his left shoulder. “Let’s take the head of Chaz Savidge to Miss Josephina,” he said. “And watch the girl’s eyes flash in delight!”
He began singing an old Confederate military song.
Louisa fell into step behind him, shouldering her own rifle. “You’re a romantic cuss, Lou Prophet,” she said, giving her head a slow wag, smiling. “I’ll give you that.”