Prophet and Clatsop, who’d run up from the corral when he’d heard the shooting, dragged the bodies behind the barn. The boys, wizened veterans, offered to bury them beside Frank Harvey.
Since they all, including Prophet, had lost their appetites, they forwent breakfast and filed out to the stage. As the old man and the two boys backed the team between the shafts, Prophet pulled the girl aside.
“I think we’d best light out on our own,” he said. “Everyone in the county knows what stage we took.”
“I’ll say they do,” she sniped.
Prophet glanced at the Appaloosa Smith had tethered to the hitch-rack before the house. “You take that horse. I’ll see about rounding up one for myself.”
It wasn’t hard convincing the old man to lend him one of his saddle horses, tack, and a soogan. The old station agent was shaken by the shooting, and it didn’t take a genius to see that the sooner Prophet and the girl were gone, the better off everyone would be.
Mike Clatsop didn’t argue with the decision, either.
“Prophet, I hope you make it,” the jehu said from atop the driver’s box, looping the reins in his arthritic old hands. “But I gotta tell you, if you’re in trouble with ole Billy Brown, you prob’ly won’t.”
“Thanks for the note of encouragement,” Prophet said as he walked a saddled speckle-gray up from the barn.
“If I was you, I’d head north to Canada,” Clatsop continued. “The winters aren’t all that bad... relatively speakin’.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Mike.”
Prophet mounted his horse and held the reins tight as the stage started away from the station, Clatsop yelling and cracking the blacksnake over the horses’ backs, the dog nipping at the dust-dripping wheels.
“Good riddance!” Mrs. Phelps called to Prophet, poking her blunt face out the window.
When the stage was gone, Prophet saw the girl standing beside the Appaloosa. She held her carpetbag in both hands and was regarding him with bald disdain. He didn’t blame her. He wished he would have left her alone. It was too late for that now, however. They were both in too deep—had too many men after them—to back out now.
“Well... we’d better ride,” he said tiredly.
She lowered her gaze to her dress, then looped the handles of her bag over the Appaloosa’s saddle. Bending down, she lifted the hem of her dress and tore a slit up to her thigh. When she was finished, she climbed into the saddle with an ease Prophet found surprising for a showgirl.
She must have noticed his appraisal. “Oh, my father kept horses, and I rode all the time!” she grouched, brows furrowed with disdain. “Which way?”
“This way,” he said, reining the speckle-gray south.
They rode single-file down the stage road for about a hundred yards. Then, by a stand of sun-dappled cottonwoods, Prophet abruptly turned his horse off the trail and headed east.
It was a big country they rode through, following game trails through hogbacks and sandstone buttes, cedar-studded rimrocks rising around them, sudden walls shutting out the horizon. They traced the folds in the hills, one fold after another. The sky was a vast, blue bowl. Hawks hunted the brush and trees lining watercourses, giving their shrill cries. Prairie dogs chortled.
The sun hot on her neck, Lola rode behind Prophet, her anger simmering deep inside her. She was too tired and discouraged to give voice to it now. She’d wanted to find a saddled horse on which she could escape this insane, brutish man ... this Lou Prophet... but none had been available when she could have used it to escape. Besides, she’d been too exhausted to make a run for it, anyway.
So now she found herself having escaped death once again—by a very narrow margin—and following this madman horseback through the vast northwestern wilderness, heading cross-country to Johnson City. She couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t release her. Didn’t he see there was no way Billy Brown would let them live?
Some men were as stubborn as fate, and this Mr. Prophet was definitely one of those. After they’d camped for the night and Prophet was asleep, she’d take one of the horses and get away from the fool once and for all, before he got them both killed. She’d give him the slip if she first had to knock him in the head with a stone.
They’d traveled about forty-five minutes when Prophet reined up suddenly and jerked his gaze southward. Lola halted her horse, as well.
“What is it?”
“Did you hear something?”
She frowned. “No.”
“I thought I heard gun shots.”
“Great! Just great! They’ve followed us!”
“Shh.”
“Don’t shush me—”
His sharp look silenced her. He cast a look south again, squinting his eyes, straining his ears. He heard it again. Muffled gunfire. And that smudge above the butte about two hundred yards away ... was that... ?
Sure enough ... it was smoke.
The hair on the back of Prophet’s neck bristled. It could very well be the stage road over there.
“You wait here,” he ordered the girl, knowing full well she’d probably run. He couldn’t worry about that now. If the smoke and gunfire were what he thought they were, he had a far bigger problem on his hands.
He gigged the horse into a ground-eating gallop, rising and falling over the rolling tablelands. He crested the saddle of a low butte and reined the speckle-gray to a skidding halt. Tossing his gaze to the flower-speckled prairie beneath him, he saw what he’d hoped he wouldn’t:
The stage, fire licking up around the wheels, black smoke billowing into the sky.
Something moved along the stage road, right of the stage. Prophet turned his head to see four horseback riders galloping north, kicking up dust, their dusters flapping open, the sun winking off the hardware on their hips and protruding from their saddle boots.
Prophet clamped his jaws together and drew his lips away from his teeth. “You goddamn sons of bitches!” he breathed, spurring his horse down the saddle, its front hooves digging deep into the sandy, rocky ground. When the terrain leveled once more, the horse sprang off its hind legs and stretched out in a hell-for-leather gallop, blowing hard, lather stringing off its lips.
Prophet approached the stage, dismounting as the horse skidded to a stop. He dropped the reins and hit the ground on the run. He’d run only five or six strides before he stopped suddenly, raising his arms against the heat of the thundering flames consuming the overturned carriage like so much scrap wood heaved on a bonfire. There was hardly a square foot of the red carriage housing not pocked with bullet holes.
The sons of bitches, whoever they were, had filled the stage with lead, no doubt killing everyone inside, then run it down and set it on fire. All the horses were dead— lifeless hairy humps strewn about the traces and shafts, blood leaking from the bullet wounds in their hides.
Prophet turned, looking around for Clatsop. He didn’t see the jehu, however, until he’d walked a hundred yards north along the stage road. Then he found the man face down in a sagebrush, Clatsop’s body riddled with bullets, blood leaking through the holes in his cotton shirt and cowhide vest like a sieve.
Prophet hunkered down on his haunches and turned the man over, put a finger to the leathery neck. There was no pulse. He listened to the heart, but there was nothing there, either. What the hell was he expecting? There was more blood than unsoiled cloth on the man.
He’d just hoped ... what? That he hadn’t gotten everyone aboard the stage killed? His head throbbed and he lowered it, dislodging his hat and rubbing a heavy hand through his hair. Mrs. Phelps ... her boy ... the old miner …
All were dead because he’d insisted on taking the girl to the hearing in Johnson City.
He knelt there, head in his hands, as close to vomiting as he’d come since the war. His chest was heavy, and a lump burned in his throat. Every vein in his body throbbed with outrage and horror.
As he lifted his head to regard the burning stage wavering behind the flames and hot air, the enormity of his dilemma hit him full force. What the hell you going to do now, Prophet?
Finally, he replaced the hat on his head and staggered to his feet, looking down at Clatsop. He licked his lips and shook his head, wincing. “I’d like to give you a proper burial, ole boy, but there’s no time.”
Stiffly, he walked back to his horse, which had shied a good distance from the burning stage and the smell of its dead brethren, and was cropping grass in a hollow. Prophet mounted and rode back where he’d left the girl, surprised to find her there. She studied him worriedly as he rode up.
“What is it?” she asked, standing and holding her horse’s reins. She could tell by the look on his face it wasn’t good.
“The stage,” he said grimly, not looking at her. His face was expressionless. “Mount up. We have to get the hell out of here.”
He knew that whoever had attacked the stage had discovered, too late for the other passengers, that Prophet and Miss Diamond were not aboard. That’s why they were racing northward, hoping to cut Prophet’s trail. Prophet figured they’d do so within the hour.
“They’re ... all... dead?” the girl asked him. She hadn’t run while Prophet was gone, because she, too, had sensed the stage had been attacked and had wanted to know the outcome.
Prophet sighed and nodded, looking off. “Mount up.”
Her face was white, but her eyes were sharp. “You’re quite the piece of work, Prophet.”
“Mount up!” he raged, his head reeling. If only he’d stayed in Henry’s Crossing. But he hadn’t. He’d taken money for a job, and it was a job he was going to finish.
She did as he ordered, and they gigged their horses off at a trot.
They rode hard, stopping only to rest and water their mounts. Prophet found jerky in the saddlebags draped over the back of Lola’s Appaloosa, and they ate while they rode. They did not converse; the troubled silence hanging between them was almost palpable. Prophet could feel the girl’s loathing, but it was nothing compared to the resentment he felt for himself.
He saw nothing of those pursuing them until, toward day’s end, he rode to the top of a low rimrock and trained his spyglass on their back trail. There, just beyond the last divide, he saw the light spray of dust tinted orange by the falling sun. It could have been dust kicked up by drovers, as this was cow country, but something told Prophet it was not.
Reducing the spyglass and returning it to his saddlebags, he caught up with the girl, and they spurred their horses into a canter. They rode through a canyon that let out on a creek bottom. They followed the creek into another, shallower canyon rimmed with junipers. By midday they’d crossed a shelf of low, grassy hills and stopped to rest and water their horses along a spring bubbling among the glacial rubble of boulders.
It was a country so huge and varied it was hard to believe it was all of one territory, under a sky scalloped with high, serried clouds. Wherever they looked they saw deer and antelope. Sign of cougar, fox, and lion were at every turn in their trail. Since Prophet hadn’t eaten breakfast, he was hungry and believed the girl must be as well. But he couldn’t dare a shot at game out here, with the firebrands behind them.
When the horses were watered and Prophet had smoked a cigarette, he and the girl sitting a good ways apart, not saying a word, they mounted again and followed an old buffalo trail over a bench and through a prairie. Blond grass ruffled in the wind. Cloud shadows flickered sunlight.
Toward the end of the day they endured a short rain, hunkered low in their saddles. The purple clouds rolled over them, and the sun came out, even brighter than before.
The sun was nearly down before Prophet stopped for the night in an ancient riverbed. He walked the high points around the camp, scouting their back trail. Seeing no sign of those following, he thought it was safe to shoot a rabbit, so he did so—a big jack that weighed close to ten pounds.
He roasted the jack over the fire and brewed coffee in the pot he found in the girl’s saddlebags. He and the girl ate hungrily, again sharing no words. The girl didn’t even look at him.
When they’d finished eating, it was dark, the sky awash with stars. Prophet checked on the horses he’d staked in a patch of green grass, then returned to the fire. The girl had already rolled up in her blanket and rested her head on her saddle, sound asleep.
Prophet sat up for an hour, looking into the darkness beyond the fire, watching and listening. He smoked several cigarettes as he sipped his coffee. Finally, he took apart his revolver, setting the parts on a bandanna spread out beside him. He cleaned and oiled the parts, snapped them back together, and did the same to his rifle and sawed-off eight-gauge.
He had a feeling he was going to be in dire need of each weapon soon, and he wanted to make sure each functioned properly.
Tired as he was, it took him over an hour to fall asleep, the stage burning behind his eyelids. He’d just sailed off when something woke him. His eyes opened. The girl stood over him holding a large stone above her head. She glared down at him.
He rolled sideways, the rock grazing his right shoulder as it careened out of the girl’s hands. He scissored his legs, kicking the girl’s feet out from under her. She fell with an angry scream.
“Ow! Goddamn, you son of a bitch!”
Prophet stood, grabbed her arm, and dragged her back to her saddle. He retrieved the lariat from his own saddle, tied her wrists together as she squirmed, kicked, and cursed—and tied her wrists to the horn of the saddle she’d been sleeping on.
“There you go,” he said, heading back to his own bed. “Sleep tight.”
Gradually, her cries diminished, and they both slept.