37

“WELL IF I was dyin’, which I ain’t, I don’t think it’d be right for you to curse me so,” Prophet said.

He grinned at Ruth, trying to calm her down. She gave a reluctant smile, kissed him, and then knelt beside him to inspect the wound.

“Is the bullet still in there?” she asked, looking around his side at his lower back for a possible exit wound.

“I do believe so,” Prophet said with a grunt.

“Water.” Ruth rose and began jogging away. “I’m gonna fetch our horses. The canteens. I need water to clean that out and get the bleeding stopped.”

“Shit,” Prophet said, pressing a gloved hand to the wound and leaning forward against the hot pain flooding his side, making him queasy. “Sure could do with a shot of busthead.”

For some reason, his desire for a shot of whiskey made him think of Louisa. He glanced toward the crest of the hill on which he and Ruth had effected their ambush and over which Louisa and Colter had ridden.

He wondered where they’d gone and how they’d faired against the six riders who’d been trying to cut them off. As if by magic, two riders came up over the top of the ridge and started down—Louisa herself, and the redheaded younker, Colter Farrow.

Right away, Louisa must have sensed something wrong. She ground her heels into her pinto’s flanks and galloped down the hill toward Prophet. “What happened?” she said, jerking back on her reins and leaping down from her saddle, chaps buffeting about her long, slender legs.

Colter drew rein behind her and glanced toward where Ruth was returning with hers and Prophet’s mounts.

“Bee bit me,” Prophet said. “You wouldn’t happen to have a snort of tanglefoot, would you?”

“You drank the last of it.” Louisa crouched over him, placed a hand above the fist-sized patch of blood on his side. “Shit, Lou.”

Prophet glanced at Colter, who was just now dismounting the coyote dun he called Northwest. “The women in this region are decidedly privy-mouthed.”

“Is the bullet still in you?”

“I’ll worry about it later. Where’re them six that were tryin’ to cut you off?”

“We laid for ’em but they stopped suddenly, as though they were spooked, maybe sensing a trap, and swung east.”

“Toward town?”

“Well, Moon’s We . . . I mean, Chisos Springs . . . is east, so, yes, I guess they headed toward town.”

“Well, we’ve cleaned up right good,” Prophet said. “They probably think we’re more than we are. Don’t call me Geronimo just yet, though . . .”

He started to rise. Louisa placed her hands on his shoulders and pushed him back down.

“You just sit there, Lou—you’re bleeding bad!”

Ruth was approaching on the grullo they’d appropriated for her, trailing Mean and Ugly. “There’s my ride,” Prophet said. “We’re headin’ to town, girl. Gonna finish this, turn them slave girls loose.”

“Not in your condition.” Louisa stared up at him worriedly and hardened her jaws. “Lou, don’t you die on me, you son of a bitch!”

“Never seen such bossy, foul-mouthed women!”

Ruth was walking toward him, holding a canteen by its braided hemp lanyard. “Water, Lou.” She shouldered Louisa aside, handed him the canteen, and knelt before him.

“Obliged.” Prophet glanced at Louisa, who sidled away reluctantly, looking vaguely miffed at Ruth. Prophet popped the canteen’s cork. He took a drink, splashed some water down his side, and handed the canteen back to Ruth.

He rose from the rock, shouldering both women aside, and strode heavy-booted toward his horse.

“Lou!” both women admonished simultaneously.

“Ah, hush up, both of you. Son, hold my horse, will you?”

As Colter held Mean by his bridle, Prophet reached up and grabbed the saddle horn. He heaved himself heavily into the saddle, groaning at the tearing pain in his side and clamping his right hand over the wound, which oozed more blood as he settled into the leather.

He looked at the women glaring at him, both standing side by side, feet spread, fists on their hips. “Christalmighty,” Prophet snorted, looking at Colter, who held his reins up to him. “Been ridin’ solo all these years, and now a coupla females think they can boss me like we was married.”

“Lou, you think you oughta do this?” Colter said. “Maybe you oughta stay here, rest up. We’ll go to town—the three of us—and settle things, and be back by sundown.” The kid narrowed his eyes resolutely. “That’s bond, Lou.”

Prophet scowled as he sort of crouched in the saddle, holding his neckerchief against the wound. “Ah, Junior,” he complained. “Not you, too!”

He reined Mean around, touched spurs to the dun’s flanks, and galloped up and over the rise.

* * *

As Prophet’s group approached from the south an hour later, Chisos Springs stood dusty, sunbathed, and silent in the still, searing afternoon air. Shadows were stretching out from the southeast sides of the buildings scattered around the low rocky hills stippled with Spanish bayonet and the upright poles of sotol cactus.

Moon’s House of a Thousand Delights, standing at the center of the settlement, near the roofed well, looked especially garish in the unforgiving light, like a whore painted way too early in the day. A thick, purple shadow was bleeding out from the front gallery, edging toward the well.

As Prophet’s group clomped slowly into the southern edge of the town, approaching the Rose Hotel and Saloon on the broad trail’s right side, a dust devil rose beyond the well. It swirled, picked up a newspaper, and swirled it with a couple of handfuls of dust, before the mini-tornado and the dust and paper all piled up against the far side of the steps of the dwarf’s front gallery.

As Prophet approached the south front corner of the Roses’ hotel, he said softly, “Whoa,” and pulled back on Mean’s reins, bringing the horse to an easy stop.

The others stopped around him, Louisa on his left, Ruth and Colter Farrow on his right. He’d been looking around cautiously, sensing gunmen waiting for him, but now the brunt of his attention was on the gallery of Moon’s House of a Thousand Delights. Several shadowy figures milled there, some sitting on the rail, others in chairs against the House’s front wall. Smoke wafted around a couple of the men.

Suddenly, a quirley stub sailed out of the shadows and turned copper white in the sunlight before it landed in the street near one of several long hitchracks. The shadows on the gallery shuffled lazily and then one came down the gallery steps, nonchalantly cocking a carbine one-handed. Four more men filed down the steps behind him. They walked in a line out into the street, heading toward the well.

Prophet continued to turn his head slightly from left to right and back again, scanning all the shadows around stoops and boardwalks, all the windows and rooflines. His gaze held on a second-floor window of Moon’s House. A face peered out at him—the round, gray, old-man’s face he’d seen when he’d first ridden into town nearly two weeks ago.

The haunting, haunted visage of Mordecai Moon.

Unlike before, no girl stood beside him. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but the dwarf’s face looked grayer, more haggard than it had that day when Prophet had first ridden up to the well, wanting only water.

He couldn’t see the expression, if any, on Moon’s face now, but he detected a simmering rage in the little eyes.

Prophet looked at the five men who had now stopped in the street, standing about four feet apart, between Prophet’s group and the well. There were four Anglos and one Mexican.

Prophet looked at Ruth. “Don’t argue with me now. You go inside your hotel and keep your head down.”

She slid her eyes from the five gunmen to Prophet. There was no defiance in the expression. She knew this was no place for her now. A shoot-out in the street was for seasoned shooters. She’d only get in the way if she didn’t get herself killed first.

Ruth drew a breath, nodded slightly, swung down from her saddle, glanced up at him, wishing him luck with her eyes, and then turned, patted Colter’s thigh, and then walked around behind the young redhead’s horse and over to the hotel.

She climbed the porch steps and then stopped and turned, one hand on the rail post, staring apprehensively at the five men lined up in front of the well.

Prophet swung down from his saddle. He tied his reins to his saddle horn, turned Mean around, slapped his rump, and watched the horse gladly head back along the trail. Mean had been Prophet’s horse long enough to know when lead was about to fly.

Louisa and Colter dismounted, hazed away their own horses, and turned toward the men and the well.

Prophet gave a grunt. He’d stuffed Ruth’s bandanna into the bullet hole and that had seemed to quell the flow of blood though he knew he must have lost a pint by now. Still, the wound was a raw agony in his side.

Louisa glanced at the bounty hunter. “How are you doing, Lou?”

“Fine as frog hair. Mind your own business.”

Staring at the men glowering back at him, all of them holding rifles across their chests, he said, “There were six sons o’ bitches before, only five here.” He started walking forward, and Louisa and Colter matched his stride. “Keep your eyes skinned for the other son of a bitch.”

A thunderous blast sounded on Prophet’s right. At the same time, a man came hurling out a shop door in a hail of breaking glass and wood. The man was thrown over the short boardwalk fronting the door and out into the street, his rifle piling up beside him about ten feet to Colter’s right.

“Never mind,” Prophet said.

The would-be shooter lay belly down. The back of his doeskin vest was shredded, and blood oozed through the pellet holes in the vest as well as those in the back of his head that was a mess of long, tangled, greasy brown hair.

Boots clomped in the shop behind the dead man. Prophet watched Lee Mortimer walk through the door and stop on the boardwalk, holding a double-barreled shotgun in both hands across his chest. Mortimer glanced at the dwarf’s men and then turned to Prophet. He lifted his left hand slowly, pinched his hat brim, and offered a grim smile.

His eyes were as shiny as polished, dark blue marbles.

One of the five men near the well pointed at Mortimer. “You’re gonna pay for that, Sheriff!”

Mortimer grinned and leaned against the door frame.

The man who’d pointed turned his attention to the two men and one woman standing before him. The two groups were about fifty feet apart. Prophet raked his gaze across each of the rugged faces partly shaded by their hat brims.

He smiled. That caused a couple of his opponents to frown. A smile in such a situation usually caused a moment’s confusion and peevish anger in Prophet’s opponents, and that’s why he did it. Anger could translate to a slightly shaky aim in some. A man, especially a wounded, outgunned man, needed any edge he could find.

Silence hung over the street. It was so heavy that Prophet could hear Louisa breathing to his left, Colter on his right. In the corner of his left eye, Prophet could see the dwarf staring into the street.

“Sorry I got you into this, kid,” Prophet told Colter.

The redhead drew a deep breath. “Me, too.”

Prophet felt his lips stretch a wry grin.

The man second to Prophet’s left in the opposing group said, “How you wanna do this?”

One of his own men, the man on the far right, didn’t wait for Prophet to respond.

“How about thisaway!” he shouted, snapping his rifle to his shoulder.