Wallace Polk looked around, frowning, swinging his incredulous, blue-eyed gaze from left to right. “You mean, you think the Scanlon Gang’s nearby?”
“I’d love to think it was some circuit-ridin’ sky pilot readin’ the Book of Common Prayer around a coffee fire with a tin pot makin’ those reflections, but we best assume it’s the Scanlon boys linin’ us up in their rifle sights. If it really is some harmless drifter, I’ll be the first to apologize with my hat in my hands, but for the time bein’, I want you boys to start a coffee fire of your own, at the bottom of this here ravine.”
“What’s the point in that?” asked the portly, pie-headed banker, Ralph Carmody, his face red as his black Morgan negotiated the grade, throwing the banker forward in his saddle so that he had to push off the horn to keep from crushing the family jewels. Turning in his own saddle to look behind, Prophet noted the gray, curly-headed man, pushing sixty, had sweated up a good, gray derby.
“You hunt birds, Mr. Carmody?”
“Waterfowl,” the banker said in a pinched voice with a nod.
“Well, look at the coffee fire like a bunch of decoys you lay out on a slew of an autumn morn ... just at the edge of the cattails.”
“I see,” Milt Emory said, sounding none too happy. “We’re gonna sort of call them in ... to us.”
“Now we’re talkin’ the same lingo,” Prophet said as he brought his horse to a halt in the crease between two hills, at the edge of a shallow, narrow gully filled with briars.
As he tied the buckskin to a wild plum bush, he told the others his plan. “Gather some wood and build a fire. Not too big, not too small. Throw some green leaves on it, so it smokes up nice... but not too nice. Too much smoke might make those killers suspicious. Just a little, so they’ll write us off as tinhorns who don’t know any better than to send up smoke signals.”
“I’d know better than to do that,” Carmody muttered indignantly, picking cockleburs from the deerskin leggings he wore over his fawn trousers.
“When you’ve got the fire going,” Prophet ordered the group, “climb to just below the brow of that hill.” He pointed west, to the low, rounded ridge. “Belly down and take your hats off, and for God’s sake, don’t show your faces over the ridge top. Keep your rifles out of sight too.”
“What are you gonna do, Mr. Prophet?” Polk asked, shucking his shiny Winchester from his saddle boot. His mild blue eyes glittered excitedly, like sun-shot marbles.
Prophet dug in his saddlebags until he found his moccasins—a ratty but comfortable old pair for which he’d traded an old Ute war chief a deck of cards showing naked saloon girls. He sat on a grassy hummock, tossed the moccasins down beside him, and began kicking off his boots.
“It’s what we’re gonna do—you, me, and Ronnie,” the bounty hunter said. “We’re gonna sneak around the north side of this hill, hunker down on that shelf yonder, and see if our decoy attracts any game. If so, the boys here will have them in their rifle sights from the east, and we’ll have them from higher ground in the north.”
“You ready?” Prophet asked Polk and the young man named Ronnie Williams—a sullen but earnest young man, banker Carmody’s grandson—who did odd jobs around town, including stringing chicken wire and digging privy holes.
He had longish, strawberry-blond hair under a brown derby hat, a spade-shaped beard, scraggly mustache, and thin lips that rarely smiled. His old Spencer rifle had seen better days, the cracked stock held together with wire and twine, but the others said Ronnie was the best deer and pronghorn hunter in town. Prophet figured a sharpshooter would come in handy atop the ledge he was heading for.
The kid nodded solemnly, eyes wide.
Polk licked his lips and squeezed his well-oiled Winchester. “Lead the way.”
“Don’t make any moves until I do,” Prophet told the others. “Any questions?”
“Just one thing,” Sorley Kitchen said—a wiry man, pushing fifty, dressed in faded denims and a blue-checked shirt, who walked with a pronounced limp.
A former camp cook who’d fallen from his own wagon during a stampede, Kitchen repaired pots and pans and painted houses on occasion, when someone in town could afford paint.
“Could we actually brew coffee over the fire? I sure could go for a cup of joe!” He smacked his lips.
Prophet chuffed. “Sure—why not?” he muttered as he turned and headed north along the base of the western hill.
Somewhere above, in the faultless blue sky, a hawk shrieked. He hoped it wasn’t a bad omen. He wanted to nail the killers, but he also wanted to get these tinhorns back to Bitter Creek alive. And himself.
Prophet led Polk and Ronnie Williams about fifty yards north of the other posse members then west another fifty yards and up a steep rise. It was a moderately hard climb, with the layered, chalky shale giving way beneath their boots so that several times each man slipped and had to grab junipers and sage shrubs for purchase.
Once, young Ronnie grabbed a dwarf chokecherry under which a diamondback was napping. The snake woke and struck, nipping the kid’s shirtsleeve before Ronnie jerked his hand back. He slid several feet back down the slope on his butt. But the excitement gave him an adrenaline burst, and ten seconds later he was sitting on the shelf’s crest beside Prophet and Polk.
He was breathing hard and he looked flushed, but when Polk asked him if he was all right, he just grinned and gave a nervous chuckle, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the shirt sleeve in which two tiny round holes showed, a half inch from the cuff’s bone button.
The three crawled to the southern lip of the shelf and hunkered behind boulders shaped like squashed mushrooms. Prophet peered through a notch in the rock, casting his gaze out and down at the flat, scrub-tufted ground between the hill behind which the rest of the posse lay hidden, and the flat-topped butte where he’d seen the sun flashes.
From behind the low hill to his left, a shaggy mare’s tail of smoke rose. Just about the right size, Prophet thought. The kind of fire the members of a tinhorn posse might start if they got a little sloppy about the wood they used for a cook fire.
Prophet looked at the flat directly beneath the shelf.
If there were indeed men on the butte—and he was going to feel like a fool if there weren’t—they’d have to traverse that stretch of sage and rabbit brush to investigate the smoke wafting from the posse’s coffee fire.
If there were indeed men on the butte ...
After fifteen minutes, he was wondering if the reflections he’d seen had only been that of the afternoon sun off mica shards or water from a spring. If so, he was wasting precious time while the killers hightailed deep into the Laramies.
Gazing through the notch, Prophet was about to spit a curse through pinched lips when he ducked suddenly and felt adrenaline spurt in his veins. On the flat, he’d spied movement behind a frowzy cottonwood stand and a tangled patch of wild plums.
To his right, Polk had seen his reaction. “What is it?” the druggist asked.
Prophet didn’t say anything. Casting another careful glance through the notch, he again saw movement—a shoulder and part of a hat moving through the rabbit brush on the other side of the trees.
“Gentlemen, I think we have a barn dance,” Prophet whispered to Polk and Ronnie, who were lying tensely on their elbows, holding their rifles with iron grips. “In about a minute, we should know for sure.”
He peered through the notch again, saw three... four ... five men moving through the brush along the base of the shelf. The men walked abreast, about ten to fifteen feet apart. They held rifles across their chests as they traced serpentine courses through the high desert foliage, staring straight ahead at the ridge before them and at the shaggy white smoke billowing and tearing against the sky.
Prophet bit the inside of his cheek and felt the blood coursing slowly but purposefully through his veins. Too impatient to wait where they’d been, the owlhoots had taken the bait.
He turned to Polk and Ronnie. “You boys stay here. When I start shootin’, pick a man out of the group and shoot from the top of these rocks. I’m gonna go down and storm ’em, try to take ’em by surprise.”
He looked at the two men sidelong and added wryly, “Just don’t shoot me in the back.”
Polk gulped and adjusted his derby. “You got it, Mr. Prophet.”
Prophet had grabbed his Winchester and risen to his feet. He turned back to Polk. “Folks who call me ‘mister’ make me nervous.”
With that he jumped onto the mushroom-shaped rocks at the edge of the shelf. Quickly scouting the slope below, he scrambled from one rock to another, swiftly making his way down the shelf’s gently sloping, rock-strewn wall, keeping his eyes on the men below.
He’d get in as close as he could before cutting loose with the Winchester…
He’d just leapt a low shrub, landing on a flat boulder about halfway down the slope, when one of the men turned and saw him. He was the third man out from the slope, wearing black jeans, black vest, and a wide-brimmed black hat.
“Hey!” he called to the others. Wheeling, he dropped to a knee and raised his rifle to his shoulder.
Before the man could fire, Prophet snapped his own rifle to his shoulder and squeezed the trigger. The whip crack of the rifle echoed off the buttes and hills. The killer’s rifle popped as he flew backward off his feet, the slug sailing skyward.
The others had turned to Prophet now. They all fired at once as he leapt onto another rock to his right, crouched, and fired again. The man closest to him whipped his head back with the force of the .44 blow to his temple, did several dancelike pirouettes before tripping over a log.
One of the others cursed loudly and ran back for the cover of the cottonwoods. The others dropped where they’d been when they’d first spotted Prophet and began kicking up a furious fusillade. Their faces bunched with frustration as Prophet avoided their bullets by hopping like an Indian from rock to rock, zigzagging down the mountain, pausing on rocks only to raise the Winchester to his shoulder and trigger shots before leaping onward.
The killers’ bullets plunked into the rocks and shrubs around him, twanging and clanging with the ricochets.
Meanwhile, as Prophet hopped and fired, hopped and fired, his fellow posse members from the ridge to his left began triggering their own rifles, as did Polk and Ronnie on the ridge behind and above him. From what he could tell as he skipped around the buzzing bullets and took hasty aim from his shoulder, only Ronnie actually hit any of the outlaws. He put one bullet through a man’s right eye, dropping him like a tin can from a fence post.
As the man fell into the arroyo at the base of the cottonwoods, Ronnie gave a victorious whoop, his jubilant cries echoing above the intermittent cracks of the rifle fire.
“Don’t get cocky, kid,” Prophet muttered as he hurdled a shrub at the base of the slope. He ran twenty yards, leapt over one of the dead killers, saw another owlhoot dart out from behind a stunt pine and run toward a boulder.
Prophet stopped and fired two quick shots from the hip. The killer, a man with red hair hanging to his shoulders and clad in a tattered deer-hide vest and battered hat, dropped to a knee, clutching his left side.
He tried bringing up his big Yellowboy repeater. Guessing he’d fired all the rounds in his Winchester, Prophet took the rifle in his left hand, grabbed his Colt .45, and shot the man through the forehead.
He went over with a groan, dropping the Yellowboy and flopping around on his back for ten seconds before he wound down like a child’s toy and died.
Crouching, pistol extended before him, Prophet made several slow circles, looking around for the next onslaught.
No more men ran toward him shooting, however. Several lay dead and bleeding, one hanging over a hawthorn shrub, blood pouring from the bullet wound in his chest and from the many small puncture wounds made by the shrub’s stiletto-like thorns.
Someone was groaning and cursing just south of him. He walked that way, threading around the shrubs and cedars, until he saw the man. He was dark-haired, with an unshaven, handsome face, tall and lean, wearing black denims and a white pinstriped shirt and suspenders. He wore two holsters on his hips, positioned for the cross-draw, but only one still held a gun—a pearl-gripped Remington.
Rolling on his back, he clutched his wounded right knee and turned his dimpled chin to Prophet, screaming, “My knee! Oh, Christ, my knee! Jesus, it hurts!”
“I reckon it would,” Prophet said, glancing around to see if any more killers lurked nearby.
The brush was quiet. The bounty hunter walked over to the wounded youngster and stared down without mercy. He leaned down, grabbed the Remington from the kid’s holster, used its barrel to poke his hat back on his head, and clucked his tongue. “Yeah, I bet that hurts like hell.”
Hearing footsteps from both the west and the north, he swept his gaze that way. His fellow posse men were jogging this way, holding their rifles up defensively, gazing around at the killers lying twisted and dead over rocks and shrubs, attracting flies.
“Well, well, well,” the banker, Carmody, exclaimed as he approached, glaring down at the knee-shot youngster. “Young Rick sure don’t look very dangerous now, does he?”
“I’ll say he don’t!” the lumberman, Milt Emory, said with a nervous chuckle. “None o’ these boys do!”
“Goddamnit!” Rick Scanlon exclaimed through gritted teeth, clutching his bloody knee. “For the love o’ Christ— help me!”
“Yeah, we’ll help you, all right,” Carmody said. “We’ll help you the same way you and your old man helped Marshal Whitman and young Eddie last night.” He looked at the other men. “Someone get a rope!”
“No ,” Prophet said. “There ain’t gonna be no hangin’.”
Carmody and the others looked incredulous.
“What on earth are you talking about?” the banker exclaimed. “There’s absolutely no doubt him and these others played cat’s cradle with Whitman and young Eddie’s necks! I don’t much care about Whitman, but Eddie—”
One of the other posse members coughed loudly, cutting the banker off. Curious, Prophet frowned and turned to the man, who averted his gaze and feigned a yawn. Prophet wondered what Carmody hadn’t liked about Whitman, but there was no time to pursue the matter.
Prophet returned his gaze to the banker and shook his head. “No Judge Lynch. That ain’t the way I work.”
He might have skirted around the edges of the law at times, but there were certain lines he did not cross. In his line of work, the area between good and evil was just too gray. If you didn’t want to become as bad as the men you hunted, you had to follow a strict set of rules—including the one that said you never killed except in self-defense. Even when an outlaw was wanted dead or alive, or was as vile as Rick Scanlon.
Carmody chuffed and shook his head while Rick Scanlon begged for help.
“You’ll get help when we get back to Bitter Creek,” Prophet told the outlaw. “If you don’t bleed dry by then.”
He knelt down and was about to remove his neckerchief to use as a tourniquet when young Ronnie walked in from the north. “Hey, Mister... I mean, Proph—I looked over all these dead men, and I don’t see old Sam nowhere.”
“Me neither,” Polk said, stepping between two cedars as he approached from the east. He was breathing hard, enervated from the gunplay, as were the others. “You said there were nine sets of horse tracks, right? Well, there’s eight men here, Mr. Prophet, and none of ’em is old Sam.”
Prophet straightened and looked around, one hand on the butt of his .45, silently chastising himself. He should have counted the dead men, made sure all nine riders had been accounted for. Such sloppiness was a good way to get yourself greased.