Prophet squatted on a butte top, one hand on his Winchester, and smoked a cigarette. The sun was high, almost straight up, and his sweated collar stuck to his unshaven neck.
Below him lay the rocky floor of Miner’s Gulch. Harsh sunlight speckled the unnamed creek snaking through the scattered mix of conifers and deciduous trees. It coursed around the back of the old cabin Prophet remembered from his short stay in the country five years ago.
He watched the long-abandoned hovel—weathered gray, doorless, no window glass, battered chimney pipe— and felt his heart beat rhythmically beneath his sternum. Things would be happening soon now ... very soon. Prophet would at last meet the bottom-feeder who’d sent his firebrands out to kill him and Lola but who’d managed instead to kill a coach load of innocent stage passengers—a boy, two old people, and good ole Mike Clatsop to boot.
Obviously, that was how Billy Brown worked. He gave the word, and whomever he wanted dead was a target—never mind the cost. Sometimes he even did the killing himself, as had been the case with Hoyt Farley, which told Prophet the man didn’t mind getting his own hands dirty now and then. That’s why Prophet believed Billy himself would show today, along with his entire army. Billy wouldn’t want to risk letting Prophet and the girl slip away. They’d no doubt become quite the thorns in his hide.
Prophet smiled at that thought, enjoying what little comfort he could take from the situation. But then, too, there had been Lola last night, naked in his arms.... He couldn’t get his mind off of her this morning, no matter how hard he tried to concentrate on the matter at hand. Maybe he’d slept with whores too long. It had been a long time since he’d made love like that... been made love to like that... with that kind of passion.
It was almost as though they’d both been expecting to die today....
The feel of her writhing beneath him faded reluctantly when a magpie threw up an alarm, bounding out of a pine branch west of the cabin. Prophet cast his gaze that way, hunkering low and fingering the Winchester.
Through the trembling leaves he spied riders, saw only glimpses of horses and men spreading out in the woods before the cabin. Movement behind the cabin attracted Prophet’s eye. More riders appeared there, moving out from the aspens and splashing across the creek, rifles held across their saddles, hats tilted over their foreheads. They wore cream dusters and their faces were brown ovals beneath their hat brims.
When they’d fanned out around the cabin, dismounting and taking cover behind the rocks along the stream, three men rode into the clearing before the cabin. One was squat and wearing a suit beneath his duster, and a derby hat. A gold watch chain winked in the sunlight. The man riding beside him was of medium height and broad-shouldered. The third wore long red hair down his back, and an ostentatious mustache and beard.
The squat man held his rifle butt down on his thigh and gave his gaze to the cabin. “Hello the camp! Prophet, you in there?”
Prophet’s heart picked up its rhythm.
“Prophet, you in there?” the squat man asked again, barking it loudly, angrily. That had to be Billy—ornery little bulldog of a gussied-up thug.
Prophet got to his feet and extended his rifle out before him, aiming. He didn’t want to kill Billy. Not yet. He’d save the crime boss for later, when he was staring him in the eye.
The gun barked.
In the canyon, Billy Brown jerked his head around sharply as a bullet smacked the head of the man riding beside him. A small round hole appeared about two inches before the man’s right ear, in the shade of his hat. The man sat there for a moment, swaying in the saddle, making wet, sighing sounds. He held tightly to his reins. Gradually, the grip loosened, his hands opened, and the man fell sideways out of his saddle.
“What the hell!” Billy cried, jerking his head around.
Prophet extended his rifle above his head and waved it. “Up here, Billy. Come and get me, you son of a bitch!”
He pivoted, jogged down the other side of the butte, and jumped onto his horse tied to a shrub. Holding his rifle in one hand, he reached out to untie the reins with the other, then gigged the horse up a winding trail in the butte behind him, his heart pounding, adrenaline spurting in his veins.
Down in Miner’s Gulch, Billy stared at the butte top which Prophet had just vacated. His eyes were like daggers, his mouth set with exasperation. “Get after that son of a bitch!” he ordered in his high, raspy tenor, which cracked a little on the end note. He stabbed his horse with his spurs, and the animal lunged off its hindquarters.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Boss,” Clive Russo warned behind him. “That’s just what he wants us to do.”
“Ride, you cream puff!”
Russo shook his head as he watched the others fall in behind Billy, whose horse pounded through the clearing, into the woods and up the southern butte. Reluctantly, knowing he had no choice in the matter, the segundo joined them, galloping to catch up with his boss.
When Prophet had crested another ridge, he quickly dismounted and squatted down on his haunches, bringing the Winchester up to his shoulder. He waited, hearing Brown’s men galloping up the escarpment just north of him, the pounding of the hooves and the clinking of rein chains and bits growing louder.
When Prophet saw the first two riders cresting the ridge, he aimed and quickly fired, pausing to watch the one on the right roll backwards off his horse. Prophet shot the other man just as he jerked a look at his fallen pard. The man fell to the right, got his right boot caught in the stirrup, and was dragged to the bottom of the escarpment before being deposited in a juniper shrub.
Billy Brown rode up behind the first fallen man, raising his rifle to fire at the opposite ridge. He scowled, mouth bunching, eyes narrowing, looking around.
No one was there.
He lowered the rifle and waved an arm. “Come on, you sorry bastards! After that son of a bitch!”
Behind him, riding parallel with two other galloping riders, Clive Russo quirted his horse and shook his head. He had one hell of a bad case of the jitters....
As Prophet galloped his mount down the ridge and reined him westward through a narrow gorge, the bounty man thought. Three down, twenty-two to go.
He repeated the refrain over and over as he left the gorge, hung a sharp right, and gigged his horse through a valley, hoping both that Brown’s men hadn’t lost him in that gorge and that they didn’t gain on him too quickly. They had the advantage of riding horses they’d probably ridden for a couple of years and knew better than they knew each other. In contrast, Prophet was riding a horse he’d ridden for only a couple of days. The gelding seemed to have a good set of lungs, and so far he’d been surefooted, but it would only take one misstep on this treacherous terrain to smoke Prophet’s hide for sure.
Crossing a saddle, he reined the horse to the left and saw Silver Canyon open before him, its toothy ridges looming impressively at least a quarter mile over the rock-strewn canyon floor. When he came to the trail that had been carved by deer and mountain goats, he gritted his teeth and reined the horse to the right, spurring it up the mountain, weaving between towering gray boulders and clattering over shale.
“Come on, horse ... gidup!” Prophet rasped, holding the reins loose in his hands, elbows rising and falling like wings. The horse was breathing hard and saliva streaked from its lips, but it was lunging off its hindquarters like a pro, as though it had been bred for these very peaks.
“Come on ... come on ... !”
Three-quarters up the switch backing trail. Prophet brought the horse to a halt and looked down. Brown’s men were just now riding into the canyon, dusters flapping behind them in the wind. When they did not see
Prophet on the trail ahead, and had lost his tracks, they slowed and milled along the canyon floor, looking around. Several men raised their heads and spied Prophet at the same time. They jutted their arms out, pointing.
“There!”
Prophet jerked a look up the ridge above him, to a nest of rocks he recognized. “Okay, Lola, now, now, now!” he shouted.
Before the last word, he heard the booming report of Dick Dunbar’s Big Fifty. It sounded like one of the Howitzers that had thrown grapeshot at him during the War Between the States, and it made the hair stand on the back of his neck. It was not an unwelcome sound, however. With each boom resounding off the canyon walls, he clucked to his horse, and grinned, continuing up the wall toward the peak.
Boom! sounded the gun. Then, after the five seconds it took Lola to reload the single shot beast... boom!
He was only about thirty yards from the ridge when he heard a rumbling, as though from a distant storm. He checked his horse down to a stop, and twisted around in his saddle, giving his gaze to the men behind him. The Big Fifty’s shots had slowed them down, and they were scattered along the mountain below him, looking frantically around, rifle butts on their thighs, their horses slipping in the loose gravel. Hearing the rumbling, several looked behind them, at the opposite canyon wall.
Panting, Prophet grinned as the rumbling grew in volume until it sounded like the thunderhead was careening over the canyon with a vengeance. The ground vibrated, and Prophet felt his own bones resounding like a tuning fork.
He glanced at the opposite wall as several boulders, prompted by the Big Fifty’s probing balls and cannon-like booms, peeled loose from their precarious moorings. As if slowed down somehow, they tumbled downward, smashing others as they went, starting the rockslide Prophet had once been so afraid of and now welcomed like rain after a long drought.
Prophet gave a rebel yell as he crested the ridge.
Hunkered in the nest of rocks, where Prophet had deposited her earlier, the showgirl snugged her cheek up to the gun’s heavy stock once more and squeezed the trigger. The gun flashed and boomed, bucking like a horse, throwing her into the rock behind her and nearly bouncing out of her grasp.
Unfazed by the tumult, she turned her head up at Prophet and grinned.
“That’s some fancy shootin’ for a showgirl!” he whooped, casting his gaze back down the canyon.
The floor was a pillow of billowing gray dust. The roar was deafening and the ground shook as though it were about to crack and heave like a California quake.
Prophet tossed his reins to Lola and dismounted, walking to the lip of the ridge. He stared down, rifle in his hands. The cries of the men and horses, crushed by the falling rock, rose on the resounding roars. Gritting his teeth, fingering his rifle and listening. Prophet waited.
He didn’t have to wait long. Two riders, managing to ride clear of the slide, appeared simultaneously out of the dust. Prophet knelt, took aim, and fired. The man left his saddle with his arms splayed, landing in the jumbled rocks around him. His horse turned and reared, giving a loud, ear-piercing whinny.
Prophet fired at the other man, who crouched at the last second, dodging the slug. Prophet jacked another round into the chamber, but before he could aim again, two more riders appeared out of the billowing dust, teeth gritted, eyes black as kill-crazy grizzlies.
Turning, Prophet said to Lola, “Mount up!” and climbed onto his own sweat-lathered horse.
Turning back toward the charging riders, Prophet lifted the Winchester and fired, covering Lola as she ran several yards down the mountain’s backside and mounted her horse waiting for her under a wind-torn conifer. When she was in the saddle, Prophet gigged his own horse out ahead of her, leading the way down the mountain, through the tall pines peppered with aspens and box elders.
As they rode, the bullets zinging around them and thunking into trees told Prophet that at least a handful of Brown’s men had survived the landslide. They’d crested the ridge, and were now galloping behind them, probably about fifty or sixty yards away—well within Winchester range.
When they reached the bottom of the mountain and had splashed across a shallow creek, Prophet halted his horse and turned to Lola. “Okay, just like we planned now! Keep riding!”
Her horse facing him sideways, Lola stared at him from beneath the brim of her straw hat, wincing as though in physical pain. “You be careful, Lou!”
“I will! Now ride!”
She reined her horse around and heeled him into a gallop along the stream, disappearing into woods about fifty yards away. Prophet turned his horse behind a knoll, dismounted, and ground-staked the reins. Winchester in hand, he crawled to the top of the knoll, jacked a shell in the breech, and fired just as three riders appeared in the clearing at the base of the mountain.
The man on the left leaned back in the saddle, a hole through his forehead, while his horse rode past Prophet and continued downstream at a gallop. The others were sawing back on their reins, aware of the ambush. Prophet squeezed the Winchester’s trigger and unsaddled a rail-thin man with a scraggly beard. The riderless horse followed the first downstream.
Prophet jacked another shell and slid a gaze around the crest of the knoll. All he saw was woods and the vague outline of a horse and one leg of its rider, hidden behind a tree.
“Prophet, goddamnit, you double-crosser!”
Prophet knew the raspy shriek belonged to Billy Brown.
“Rode right into it, too, didn’t you, stupid bastard.” Prophet laughed.
“Where’s the girl?”
“Long gone. Just you and me now, Billy.”
“I still have three men left, Prophet. And we’re gonna fill you so full of holes your own mother won’t recognize you.”
Prophet was about to respond when guns opened up from the woods, smoke puffing from under the pines. At the same time, the man in the bowler hat bounded out from behind a thick-trunked tree, shooting a pistol in Prophet’s direction, and galloped his horse downstream.
Jerking his head back behind the knoll, the bounty hunter wheezed a curse. Brown was going after Lola while these other three men pinned Prophet down.
Prophet jerked his rifle around the knoll and squeeze off two quick shots before the hammer fell benignly against the firing pin. Empty.
Shit!
Wanting to get after Lola as quickly as he could and frantically thumbing shells out of his cartridge belt and into his rifle’s receiver, Prophet heard the gunfire and the slugs tearing into the mound behind him, throwing up chunks of dirt, pebbles, and sod.
“He’s empty,” someone called. “Storm him!”
Prophet’s heart danced and his fingers shook as he thumbed the cartridges through the receiver’s door. One slipped out of his sweaty fingers. Hearing horses pounding around him, he bent to retrieve it, blew the dust off the brass casing, and slipped it into the breech.
The pounding of the hooves was all around him ...
Turning to face the woods and scrambling atop the knoll, he jacked a shell in the chamber of his rifle and clawed his pistol off his hip. Two riders bounded toward him, firing their rifles. Prophet blew one off his horse with the Winchester, and shot the other man twice in the chest with his Colt. Knowing that one more lingered in the trees, Prophet ran that way, between the two riderless horses coming to a harried halt and pivoting to run in opposite directions.
Smoke puffed from the woods. Keying on it, Prophet dropped to a knee and cut loose with his Winchester, levering one shell after another. He’d fired all eight rounds when a dry voice rose.
“All right. All right. I give up. My guns are empty.”
“Step out here, you bastard.”
A man stepped out from behind a pine. Surrendering, he raised his pistol in one hand, rifle in the other. He was the man Prophet had seen earlier, with long red hair and Custer-style mustache. He stared at Prophet dully. Then his impudent mouth lifted a grin. Prophet raised his pistol and blew a hole through the man’s chest, sending him backwards into the woods, blood spurting through his expensive wool vest and black cravat.
“Never shoulda smiled like that,” Prophet grumbled as he wheeled and ran behind the knoll for his horse. Forking leather, he kicked the mount into a gallop, heading upstream toward Billy Brown and Lola, his fear for her safety spreading like a cancer throughout his loins....