4

LOU PROPHET’S WINCHESTER leaped and roared in his hands.

The Rurale running toward him through the brush dropped his rifle and reached for his knee as he stumbled sideways and tumbled into a cactus snag, screaming shrilly. Dust lifted around him, and Prophet saw a wash of red painting the cactus though he could no longer see the Rurale.

Resting his rifle atop the ledge above the spring, the bounty hunter ejected the spent cartridge casing to send it careening over his shoulder and clanking onto the rocks behind him. He waited, staring through the scrub south of the springs.

Nothing moved now, not even the Rurale who lay belly down in the cactus snag, giving a soft, keening cry.

The dying man was likely a scout rider for Campa. As far as Prophet could tell, the scout was alone. Wary of being trapped here around the spring, and possibly surrounded, Prophet wheeled, slid his rifle into its boot, grabbed Mean’s reins, and swung into the saddle.

He put the horse back down to the faint horse trail he’d been following, looked around carefully, spying only a thin mare’s tail of dust rising in the southwest—a column of cream-clad riders on brown horses angling toward him. They’d heard the rifle fire and were headed in the bounty hunter’s direction.

Giving the east, south, and west a thorough measure, he saw no other signs of movement. The main column of at least ten men—no doubt every Rurale Campa had stationed at San Simon, minus the two Prophet had killed the previous night—was a good mile or so away, and their horses were probably as blown as Mean was.

If he didn’t linger, Prophet had a good chance of making it to the Rio Grande ahead of them.

Twenty minutes later, he followed a switchback deer trail down into the broad, deep canyon. Since he and Mean had watered at the spring, he didn’t waste much time at the canyon bottom, where the muddy waters of the Rio Grande rippled over gravelly sandbars between the twisting canyon walls. He’d have liked to enjoy a bath with his clothes on, thereby scrubbing himself as well as his trail-sour, dust-caked duds, but he’d taken a whore’s bath back in Ramonna’s room, before putting the so-called wood to the comely senorita. That would have to tide him. Besides, he had no one to offend besides himself and his horse, and Mean didn’t seem to mind.

When he and Mean were halfway up the north ridge wall, rifles began cracking behind him. He glanced back to see Campa’s men lined up on the opposite rim, aiming their rifles at an angle, triggering lead at him.

Campa stood off to the right of the line of Rurales, wearing his customary wagon-wheel sombrero with the eagle insignia pinned to the steepled crown. The colonel was shaking his fist at Prophet and shouting. Prophet couldn’t make out what he was saying beneath the crackling of the Trapdoor Springfields, but he had a pretty good idea he wasn’t being complemented on his good breeding.

Prophet hummed, whistled contentedly. He and Campa both knew he was too far away for those old Springfields to be any danger. The bullets dropped harmlessly in the sand and rocks at the base of the ridge. The Rurales kept firing, however, and Prophet kept whistling as he and Mean continued on up the game trail snaking up the face of the cliff. At the top, on Texas soil, he swung down from the leather, stepped up to the edge of the canyon, turned his back to it, dropped his buckskin trousers and longhandles to his knees, and bent forward, giving Campa’s men a round, pale target to aim for.

There was a momentary increase in the firing and in the volume of Campa’s tirade.

Prophet grinned.

He pulled his pants back up, mounted his horse, and rode off to the north, hearing the crackling of the Springfields continuing only sporadically now while Campa continued to pump his fist and berate him shrilly.

“Well, it ain’t Georgia,” the big bounty hunter said, swaying easily now in his saddle, gazing around at the vast, forbidding country around him, which looked like an endless rug of irregularly ridged corduroy stretching away for as far as the eye could see, spiked with mean and nasty-looking cacti of all shapes and sizes. “But at least it’s America, by damn, and Campa won’t cross the Rio Bravo less’n he wants to get crossways with the U.S. Army.”

He glanced over his shoulder once more. Campa’s men had finally now lowered their rifles and were walking off to retrieve their horses. Prophet chuckled.

And then, to keep his mind off his ruined canteen out here in this merciless desert where no man wanted to be long without water, he started to sing: “In Dixie’s land where I was born, Early on one frosty mornin’, Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land!”

He didn’t sing for long, though. The parched air soon turned his throat to leather.

He thought he could feel his tongue swelling, though it hadn’t been long enough since he’d had a drink for that to happen. It was just his imagination, his anxiety over the lack of water, and the sun burning down through his weathered, funnel-brimmed hat and reflecting off the adobe-colored ground all around him.

He probably should have stayed closer to the river, but a canteen wasn’t going to just rise up out of the rocks. Sooner or later, he had to head north. Chisos Springs was somewhere out here, between the Rio Grande and the Chisos Mountains, but he hadn’t been through the settlement in several years, and he couldn’t recall its exact location.

He remembered only the humble saloon run by the colorful old desert rat Chisos La Grange, and the man’s well that teemed with cool, dark spring water that issued from cracks in the underlying Texas strata, deep underground.

La Grange’s well was the only water for a long two-days’ ride in any direction, under a pulsing sun raining liquid fire. Just the thought of a drink from it now made Prophet’s throat all the drier, his tongue feel like a dead, swollen snake in his mouth.

An hour later, when the sun was about an hour past its zenith, he rode up a low rise and looked around to the north and west through his ancient, Confederate-issue field glasses. He spied what looked like a trail running from north to south a little west of his position. The trail was east of the gentle foothills rising gradually toward the craggy, copper ramparts of the Chisos Mountains shouldering dramatically against the western horizon.

And in the north, along the trail, there was a dark brown clump of what appeared more regularly shaped objects than boulders would be.

They were buildings.

Returning the glasses to his saddlebags, his heart quickening at the thought that he’d just located Chisos La Grange’s settlement of Chisos Springs . . . and that he and Mean and Ugly might not die of thirst out here, after all . . . he rode on down the rise and deadheaded for the place in the godforsaken desert where he’d spied the brown blur.

When he’d ridden nearly another hour, and he was beginning to sag wearily in the saddle, and Mean’s legs were beginning to splay and give him a jerking gait from the merciless sun and fatigue, Prophet reined up suddenly.

Straight out in front of him, not ten feet away, lay a dead man.

Prophet had seen enough dead men to know right away the man had given up the ghost. He lay belly down but twisted back on one shoulder, left cheek facing the sky. The other cheek rested on his outstretched arm. He wasn’t moving even a little; he could have been a lump of man-shaped clay, just lying there, his upper lip and thick, brown mustache stretched back slightly from his upper teeth.

Prophet slid his Winchester from the saddle boot, and with a sudden spark of caution, he swung his right boot over his saddle horn and dropped smoothly to the ground, cocking the rifle and holding it straight out from his right hip.

“Kiowa” was a soft, menacing whisper all around him, emanating from the land itself, from a nearby mesquite and the far, red, shadowy Chisos range rising in the northwest. It set miniature snakes of apprehension slithering around beneath the skin of his lower back. He looked around carefully before deeming himself alone—at least within a couple of hundred feet or so—and then dropped to a knee beside the dead man.

The man was tall and relatively well dressed. His hat was nowhere in sight. His brown hair was thick and wavy though badly mussed and threaded with sand and dust. His long, tan duster was twisted around his legs and the tops of his worn, black boots trimmed with Texas-style spurs.

Prophet rolled the man onto his back. A five-pointed star flashed in the sunlight, the flash sparking off the bounty hunter’s retinas for a moment, blinding him. Just when his vision had cleared and he found himself staring down at a badly bloodied Texas Ranger, a rifle report sucked back its own echo.

The slug plumed sand a few feet away.

A man’s voice shouted, “Hold it right there, you Ranger-killin’ son of a bitch!”