19

A SHRILL SCREAM cut the night wide open.

Louisa’s scream.

He’d recognize her voice anywhere, even pitched with horror and agony. He’d heard it pitched that way many times . . . when she’d been having her nightmares, in her sleep reliving the bloody murder of her family back in Nebraska.

The scream echoed, sounding like a million panes of shattering glass.

Prophet jerked his head up from his saddle. He looked around, blinking. The fire was out. The cave was nearly as black as the inside of a glove. He looked around, blinking, trying to penetrate the darkness.

“Louisa?” His own voice sounded eerie in the dense silence.

No reply.

He called her name again, louder. Still, nothing.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw the fire ring about three feet to his left. He lay with his feet toward the cave opening, saddle behind him. Louisa’s gear was nearby, on the same side of the fire, and he could usually see her blond hair in the darkness, but he did not see it tonight.

Prophet flung his blankets aside, heaved himself to his feet. In the four days he’d been here, he’d healed enough that his head no longer felt like an old, cracked bell tolling incessantly in a bitter wind. He still had plenty of bruises, but they’d heal in time.

It was his ribs that graveled him. He didn’t think they were busted, but they felt like they were not only broken but grinding around and chewing into his lungs. The raw ache made it hard to breathe. The old shirt Louisa had cut up and wrapped around him had helped some. Now he drew a breath and looked around the cave.

No sign of the Vengeance Queen.

“Louisa?”

The silence of the deep, desert night.

He walked to the cave entrance and called for her softly, not loudly enough for anyone nearby to hear. Sound carried on such a night as this. It didn’t carry to her, however, which meant she must be a ways away.

Where?

He stomped into his boots. Dressed in only his hat, boots, and balbriggans, he walked down the rocky slope to where Mean stood, hobbled in a hollow amongst cabin-sized boulders, head and tail drooping as the horse slept on his feet, knees locked. The horse winded Prophet and gave a wary whicker, swatting his tail.

“Easy, hoss,” Prophet said, going over and running a hand down the horse’s neck that owned several rough scars from tussles with other horses and, once, a mountain lion before Prophet had managed to shoot the beast.

That had been up in Montana. How long ago? He couldn’t remember. Sometime before he’d run into Louisa and they’d ridden after the Handsome Dave Duvall gang and she’d acquired her reputation that was now even bigger than his own, her being a beautiful, blond, and especially savage pistolera and all.

Prophet glanced over to where he’d last seen the pinto, hobbled a cautious twenty yards from Mean and Ugly. The horse was gone.

Apprehension raked at Prophet.

He moved back out of the hollow and looked off through a velvety black pass over which stars were sprinkled like Christmas glitter, clear as sequins on a fat whore’s black dress, in the direction of Chisos Springs.

The stars were bright. They showered the nightscape with a soft, lilac light that seemed to pulse up from the ground itself, but all he could see were sand-colored rocks and cactus spikes dropping gradually away from him before rising just as gradually toward the pass, beyond which lay Chisos Springs.

Or, Moon’s Well as the little demon was calling it now.

Louisa had most likely ridden to the town, as he’d suspected she would though he’d tried to convince her to wait until he was able to accompany her, and they’d see about prying Ruth Rose free of the dwarf’s clutches. How long ago had she left? No way to tell. Again, apprehension was a monkey riding his shoulders. He drew another deep breath.

The ribs were better now that he was standing. Louisa’s bandage had helped more than he’d thought. Could he ride?

He’d just have to see. He sure wasn’t going to stand around out here with his thumb up his ass while she called down only God knew what kind of hell on herself in Chisos Springs.

He opened his fly to evacuate his bladder. Then he walked back into the cave, dressed, wrapped his shell belt and Peacemaker around his waist, thronging the holster on his right thigh, and then tenderly hauled his gear out to the hollow where Mean was fidgeting around now, knowing Prophet was up to something.

He saddled the horse, strapped his rifle scabbard to his saddle, and slung his shotgun over his shoulder to let it hang barrel up down his back. Grimacing, he mounted, drew another breath, suppressed the raw ache like a rat chewing his lungs.

“Not bad,” he said, touching spurs to the dun’s flanks, heading out. “Not bad at all. I’ll be plum spiffy as a half-growed calico colt in no time.”

To suppress the pain of his battered ribs and to alleviate his fear of what was transpiring with Louisa, he sang an old song that, with the singing, always made him feel better about whatever situation he was in:

Away from Mississippi’s vale,

With my ol’ hat there for a sail,

I crossed upon a cotton bale

To Rose of Alabamy.

He paused. Mean’s hoofs clomped along the rocky trail, shod hooves ringing off stones. Prophet held him to a moderate pace to lessen the risk of injuring the beast on this dangerous night ride. From somewhere near and sounding sad and all alone in the mountain quiet, a lone coyote wailed, yipped wildly for a time, and then gave another mournful wail.

Prophet increased Mean’s pace a little, and sang:

Oh brown Rosie,

Rose of Alabamy!

A sweet tobacco posey

Is my Rose of Alabamy . . .

He was a hundred yards down the pass and heading toward the broad, arid valley in which the town and the well sat, when he reined the horse up sharply.

He’d heard something. The distant clomps of riders moving toward him.

He kept the reins taut, listening, looking around to make sure he wasn’t outlined against the sky. Reining Mean off the trail a ways, he stopped in front of a tall stack of boulders and pricked his ears again, listening.

The riders were moving toward him. The hoof thuds were growing gradually louder. Occasionally he heard the metallic ring of a shod hoof kicking a rock, the clatter of a bridle bit in a horse’s mouth.

Just one rider. He could pick out each footfall.

He squinted straight ahead along the old Indian trail he’d been following down toward the valley. Movement there. An inky smudge jostled against the powdery tan of the terrain around it. Amidst the ink was a pale splotch that, as the rider drew closer, appeared blond hair bouncing on narrow shoulders.

Prophet’s heart began to lighten, but then he heard more, quieter thuds behind the first rider. He shuttled his gaze farther down the grade and saw more inky shapes moving against the dark tan of the surrounding rocks and sand, climbing toward him.

Prophet eased out of the leather, ground-reined Mean and Ugly, and slid his Winchester from its boot. Quietly, he levered a round into the rifle’s breech and strode down the slope a ways, about twenty yards wide of the trail, and walked out onto a broad oval boulder cropping out of the slope. This vantage offered a good view of the trail rising toward him from downhill and stretching past his left side and over that shoulder.

The first rider came on along the trail, the horse showing its fatigue in its loose-legged, lunging gait as it galloped up the hill. It was blowing raspily. Its rider was indeed a blond. The horse was a brown-and-white pinto. A second rider, dressed in red, rode behind the first.

Prophet dropped to a knee and doffed his hat, afraid it might show against the sky or the upslope behind him. The splay-kneed pinto was near when Prophet yelled, “You make some new friends, Louisa?”

She whipped her head toward him, hair flying, and closed a hand over her right-side Colt. After a second’s scrutiny, and recognizing his voice, she shook her head. “No friends of mine. In fact, I’d admire if you took care of them fellas, Lou.”

“Keep ridin’,” he said, keeping his voice low as he dropped prone against the boulder.

When Louisa had drifted on up the slope and out of sight behind him, he set the rifle down beside him, and swung his shotgun around to the front. He broke the big blaster open, made sure he had a wad in each barrel, snapped it closed, and drew both rabbit-ear hammers back to full cock.

He hunkered lower, pressing his chest down fast against the rock.

The riders kept coming, pushing hard. Their horses were fresher than Louisa’s, but not by much. Their gasps sounded like several blacksmith bellows being pumped hard at once.

The hoof clomps grew louder. Prophet could make out around five jostling shapes on various-colored horses and in various-colored and – styled garb, various-shaped hats. There were a couple of palm-leaf sombreros.

Gun iron winked in the starlight.

When the riders were at the ten o’clock position before Prophet, he said in a softly menacing voice just loudly enough to be heard above the thudding hooves and the squawking of tack, “Go back home, fellas, or get right with your maker. You got about two more strides to make up your pea-pickin’ minds!”

“Whoa!” the lead rider shouted, hauling back on his reins.

He turned his head toward Prophet. The other riders brought their own mounts to skidding halts behind him.

“There!” he yelled and raised a carbine.

Prophet tripped the coach gun’s left barrel.

Ka-booom!

The lead rider blew straight back off his horse with a scream.

The rider nearest him also raised his rifle.

Ka-booom!

Both riderless horses whinnied shrilly, turned sharply, and galloped off into the desert away from Prophet. Their riders lay behind them, motionless along the side of the trail.

“Hold on!” one of the three survivors shouted, throwing both hands up, including the one holding a Winchester.

At the same time, one of the other two triggered a rifle at Prophet. The slug whistled past Prophet’s left ear. The bounty hunter had already raised his cocked rifle, and now he thumbed the hammer back, squeezed the trigger, and emptied a third saddle.

The third rider’s hat danced in the air for a few seconds and then landed atop the back of its prone rider while its horse shot straight up the trail, whinnying and buck-kicking wildly.

The other man still had his arms and carbine raised. The second survivor wisely tossed his own rifle out away from him. It clattered onto the trail and bounced atop one of the dead men.

“Yours, too!” Prophet shouted, “or your saddle’s gonna get empty mighty quick, amigo!”

The man tossed away his rifle and yelled, “We thought we done kilt you!”

Rage burned through Prophet like a wildfire. He was apparently looking at one of the men who’d given him his sore ribs, not to mention his other sundry complaints, and tied him bare-ass naked over Mean and Ugly’s back. Hazed him off in the desert to die painfully slow. He planted a bead on the man’s forehead, just beneath the brim of his broad-brimmed black hat.

“Best vamoose, friend! My trigger finger is real itchy tonight!”

The one-eyed man glanced at his partner, who looked back at him. At the same time, both riders turned their horses and galloped back the way from which they’d come.

Prophet cursed as he climbed heavily to one knee. He stared after the riders dwindling down the slope in the starry night. Gradually, their hoof thuds died.

“You should have killed ’em both, you stupid bastard!” he grumbled to himself. “’Cause now it’s just a chore you’re gonna have to face later!”