Chapter 9
Prophet leaned over his prisoner’s legs to gaze out the coach window. He turned his head to glance out the opposite window, past where Beermeister sat, looking nervous, then he turned to stare out the window by Wells again, blinking against the dust roiling into the carriage.
Nothing out there but trees and bluffs, occasional flat patches of buckbrush and rocks.
He turned to see Wells smiling at him.
“What’s the matter, big man?” Wells said. “Nervous?”
“You’re the one that should be nervous.” Prophet pressed the barrel of his Winchester against Wells’s belly and gave a cagey smile. “If your friends attack the stage, you’re gonna get a .44 bullet to your guts. You ever have to swallow a pill that size?”
“Uff!” said Aunt Grace, shaking her head. “Such vile men. Both of you. Vile!”
Mary turned to her aunt and said, “Mr. Prophet isn’t bad, Aunt Grace. He’s trying to help us.”
Prophet stared at her in surprise. Until now, he hadn’t heard her utter more than a handful of words and maybe two clipped phrases beneath her breath. But now she’d said two entire sentences out loud. Her voice was deep and, while her English was unaccented, it owned the flatly lilting rhythms of the Native people.
She turned to Prophet with her customary expression of nonchalance but he could see a faint glitter in the depths of her chocolate eyes. Then she glanced at Wells, flaring a nostril distastefully, and continued turning her head until she was staring out the window.
Wells looked at Prophet. “You’re a real hero, ain’t ya, big man?”
“Shut up.”
Wells smiled. “You’re just tryin’ to get into the Injun gal’s bloomers.”
“Oh!” Aunt Grace intoned, shaking her head again with exasperation.
Mary glanced at Prophet then returned her stony gaze to the window.
Prophet rammed his Winchester’s barrel deeper into Wells’s belly, until Wells gave a yelp and doubled over. Gritting his teeth, Prophet said, “Keep it up, and you’re gonna ride all the way to the next station with my Winchester kissin’ your liver. You like that idea?”
Grimacing, red-faced, Wells shook his head.
“You gonna be nice?” Prophet asked him.
Wells bobbed his head.
Prophet pulled his Winchester out of the man’s gut. Wells tipped his head back and drew a deep breath, groaning, “Damn . . . that hurt!”
“Next time it’s gonna hurt a whole lot mo . . .” Prophet let his voice trail off. He’d just spied movement out the window beyond Wells. He began to raise his rifle but stayed the motion when he saw a mule deer dashing off through the brush.
He slid the Winchester barrel back down against Wells’s belly. He rode like that, hunched forward slightly in his seat, casting his gaze out both sides of the carriage. Tension was a large hand pressed tight to the back of his neck. The gang could strike at any time. There was plenty of cover along the trail. The Concord’s panels were maybe a half-inch thick.
They wouldn’t stop rifle bullets any better than pasteboard would.
The miles ticked off, however, and nothing happened.
The coach rocked and swayed, lurched and bounced over the occasional chuckhole. Dust roiled through the windows. The heat of the midafternoon hung heavy. The coach slowed as it plodded up inclines and speeded up as the team caromed downhill. They crossed a wash sheathed in berry thickets and started up the opposite bank, slowing to a near standstill as the team negotiated the steep incline.
Prophet’s hands sweated inside his gloves. Here’s where Wells’s bunch would hit them. Here, for sure. Rifles would start belching at any time, and bullets would punch through the coach’s ash housing . . .
Prophet whipped his head from one window to the other.
Sensing his tension or maybe realizing the danger, Aunt Grace gave a sob. Beermeister just sat stiff-backed in his seat, staring out the window on his side of the carriage, his cheeks and heavy jowls mottled red. He kept wiping sweat from his face with a soaked handkerchief. Mary looked out her window and chewed her finger.
But then they were off on another straight swath of open ground, the team leaning into their collars and stretching their strides, and Prophet heaved another sigh of relief, easing his grip on his Winchester’s neck.
Fifteen minutes later, the coach slowed.
Prophet looked out the window by Wells to see weathered log buildings pushing up along the trail’s south side. A sign over the main shack read PORCUPINE RELAY STATION, Diego Bernal, MGR.
Again, Prophet heaved a relieved sigh.
They’d made it to one more station.
The next stop was Jubilee. That’s where Prophet would destage and turn Wells over to Seymour and Plumb, and the stage would continue with a fresh team to Deadwood. He’d learned from direct as well as indirect conversation that Beermeister, who sold roulette wheels and other gambling paraphernalia, was the only passenger continuing to Deadwood. Aunt Grace and Mary’s trip was ending at Jubilee, as well. From there, they’d travel to the ranch where Mary had been raised, in the shadow of the Black Hills.
“Whoaaaa!” Mort Seymour bellowed from the driver’s boot, the stage slowing. “Whoaaaa, there now, you broomtailed cayuses!”
The carriage drew to a stop in front of the log shack with a gullied sod roof and a front porch resting on stone pylons.
Leaning forward, Jimmy Wells started to rise from his seat. Prophet pushed him back. “Hold on. You ain’t goin’ nowhere. Not yet, anyways.”
Wells glared at him. “I need to stretch my legs.”
“I’ll consider it once everyone else is off.”
Prophet rose from his seat and opened the coach’s door. He stepped out into the yard and, holding the door open, looked back into the carriage. Aunt Grace was waving a white-gloved hand at the dust billowing inside the coach, shaking her head and blinking her eyes in disgust.
“This is my last stage,” the woman complained. “My last stage—do you hear? I will never, ever board another coach again.” She glanced at Mary. “If your father thought it so important that someone fetch you from Denver, I for the life of me don’t understand why he didn’t go himself. Instead, he sends a woman ten years his senior and in very poor health!”
She looked at Mary.
“How many times do I have to tell you to stop chewing your finger?” Aunt Grace pulled Mary’s hand down away from her pretty, full-lipped mouth. A little spittle clung to it. “All that money for nothing!”
Seeing that the women were going to take their time destaging, Beermeister pushed past Prophet, doffing his bowler hat and swiping it against his broadcloth-clad thighs. “I’m with the old bat,” he muttered to Prophet. “I hate these goddamned contraptions. Make me feel like a craps dice.”
He chuffed as he headed around to the rear of the coach.
Prophet leaned into the carriage, offering Aunt Grace his hand. “Come on, ma’am. The air’s fresher out here.”
Aunt Grace looked distastefully at the big, gloved hand that had been offered. Reluctantly, she rose from her seat, placed her hand in Prophet’s, and allowed him to help her down out of the coach. She stood near a stock trough, shading her eyes as she looked around.
“Where in the hell is everybody?” yelled Mort Seymour.
Prophet just then realized that he and Plumb had been yelling for a while now, calling for the hostlers. Now both men stood up near the head of the six-horse team, staring toward the barn, stable, and unpeeled-pine corral to the east. The stable doors were open, and a good dozen or so horses milled inside the corral, but there appeared to be no men around.
“Nash? Coates? Quit playin’ with yourselves and get out here and fetch this hitch!” shouted Seymour while Plumb stood beside him, staring toward the stable, gloved fists on his hips.
Plumb turned toward Seymour and chuckled.
A high-pitched whine rose in Prophet’s ears. At first, he thought a bluebottle fly must be on the prod near his head. But then he realized that the sound stemmed from his growing apprehension.
He’d offered his hand to Mary, and she’d taken it and was now rising from her seat. Prophet turned to her and, frowning, said, “Hold on.”
Her head frozen in the coach’s open doorway, she frowned. “What is it?”
Prophet released her hand and turned toward the cabin.
As he did, the cabin door opened with a menacing squawk of dry hinges.
Beermeister was on the porch steps, heading for the front door with a small carpetbag in his right hand. As he gained the top of the porch, a man stepped out of the rectangle of shadow made by the door. Sunlight winked off gunmetal.
A blast from the rifle in the hands of the man in the doorway kicked Beermeister two feet up in the air and then punched him back down the steps to hit the ground behind the stage with a resolute thud.
“Dear Lord!” yelled Aunt Grace.
A quarter second later, more rifles began belching from the direction of the barn. Seymour and Plumb began shouting. There was the nasty metallic rasp of the rifle in the cabin doorway being cocked, and Prophet yelled to Mary, “Get down!”
Aunt Grace howled.
As the man on the porch cut loose with his rifle, Prophet hurled himself straight back into the coach, smashing into Mary. He bulled her over as he fell to the floor between the seats. Bullets sliced into the side of the coach and stitched the air around his head. He could feel Mary squirming around beneath him. The coach jerked ahead, stopped, jerked again.
Beneath the cacophony of rifle fire—there were four, maybe five, shooters, he vaguely surmised—he could hear the left-front wheel grinding against the brake blocks as the frightened team tried to bolt.
Prophet cast a quick look out the door beyond his boots. Aunt Grace faced him, seemed to be shuffling toward him. It was an odd, paganlike dance.
The old woman jerked wildly, like a scarecrow beaten with a club. Bullets smashed into her back and exited her pillowy bosom with little jets of splashed blood and viscera. A couple of large drops splashed the toe of Prophet’s right boot.
Behind and above the old, dying woman, standing atop the porch and out in the sunlight now, where Prophet could see him, a tall, broad-faced man with a mustache and red neckerchief was cutting loose with a Colt’s revolving rifle. He was trying to hit him, Prophet, the bounty hunter could tell, but Aunt Grace stood between them, taking all the bullets.
Meanwhile, the screaming horses were dragging the coach herkily-jerkily across the yard. Prophet’s shotgun lay beneath him—between him and the writhing Mary. He reached beside him for his rifle, which he’d hurled into the coach ahead of him. As he reached for the long gun, a face came into view in the right periphery of his vision.
The face belonged to Jimmy Wells. Wells’s eyes stared at him, blinking rapidly. Blood oozed out of Wells’s open mouth to dribble over the side of the deerskin-upholstered seat and onto Prophet’s rifle lying on the floor beneath Wells’s body. As the coach continued to jerk, turning sideways now as the horses danced and pranced, in frantic need to flee the shooting, the coach wheeled first to one side, then the other.
Three wheels were moving but the left-front one was gripped motionless in the jaws of the surprisingly effective brake blocks.
As the coach was jolted sharply sideways again, Wells rolled off the seat to Prophet’s right. The body landed atop the bounty hunter. The hot, yielding, bloody body jerked as more bullets punched into it. Prophet knew a January chill as he became aware that Wells had, without a moment to spare, just saved the bounty hunter from taking those bullets himself.
And then the coach careened from side to side just before the left wheel dug into the ground. The coach pitched beneath Prophet like a rowboat being thrust up from below by a swell in a storm-tossed lake.
“Jesus!” Prophet heard himself cry out as he watched his boots, framed by the open coach door, rise higher, higher, until his legs and ass and then his back, too, were hurled up off the coach’s floor.
Mary screamed beneath him.
Then their bodies and Wells’s body were entangled, and Prophet felt the raw punch of his own shotgun’s stock against his right jaw as the carriage careened onto its side. Prophet watched his legs climb up over his head until he and Mary and Wells were turning backward somersaults. Prophet grunted and Mary groaned as they landed on what was now the bottom of the carriage but which had been the left side only a second before.
Prophet felt the door handle grinding against his right kidney.
Mary lay against his left side, half on top of him. Wells was beneath him. He could see the man’s right leg beside his own.
The carriage kept sliding along the ground. Dirt poured in through the windows. Prophet could hear the thudding of the horses’ hooves, the team’s shrill whinnying.
Suddenly, the carriage stopped sliding. The hoof thuds died. The whinnies settled to whickers. A man was cooing to the team, as though trying to calm the frightened beasts.
Otherwise, an ominous silence had descended on the now-still coach.
Dust billowed.