The Devil and Lou Prophet (2 page)

Above the cursing, coughing, and
chinging spurs, Prophet heard the unmistakable sounds of gun
hammers clicking back. The sound sent adrenaline jetting through
his veins. Knowing he’d be dead in seconds if he didn’t react fast,
he gained his feet, hunkered down on his heels, drew one of his two
Colt .45s, and fanned the hammer, jerking in a complete circle as
he fired. When the first gun was empty, he drew the second,
pivoting this way and that and letting go a cacophony of gunfire
that had his ears ringing so loudly he could barely hear the shouts
and cries of the men he was ventilating.

By the time the second gun was empty,
the room was so full of smoke that Prophet couldn’t breathe, and
his nose, eyes, and lungs were on fire. The cabin was deathly
silent. He searched for the door, hitting solid wall several times
before he found it, and ran out choking and wheezing, clutching his
throat with one hand, his empty gun with the other.

A gun barked behind him. A slug tore
into the ground a foot to his left. Turning, squinting his searing,
running eyes back at the smoke-filled cabin door. Prophet saw a
tall man, with a savage face and a thin beard, staggering and
taking awkward aim with a six-shooter. The man’s shirt was covered
in red, and blood dripped down his left cheek.

He fired again as Prophet dropped to a
knee, thumbed back the hammer of his Colt, and squeezed the
trigger, the hammer hitting the firing pin with a sickeningly
benign ping.

Prophet’s pulse pounded as he
remembered the gun was empty. Both guns were empty!

The man kept coming, staggering,
choking, and squinting his eyes. He thumbed back his gun hammer and
fired, the slug tearing into a corral slat behind Prophet, who
dropped his empty Colt and reached for the Arkansas toothpick on
his belt. He flung the knife at the approaching gunman. Because of
the ringing in his ears and burning eyes, his aim was off; the
blade sailed over the man’s left shoulder and clattered against the
house.

“
Hah, hah!” the man roared.
“Now what are you gonna do, you son of a bitch!”

The gun came up and barked as Prophet
ducked, shoulder-rolled to his right, and came up making a bee-line
for a water trough.

“
You’re a dead man ...
whoever you are!” the bandit raged, staggering after Prophet like a
half-blind madman, gun raised and ready. The gun barked again, the
bullet thunking into the wood in front of Prophet, who cowered
behind the trough.

Prophet’s heart was racing and his
ears were ringing. Hands shaking, he stuck out his right leg,
jerked up his faded denims to just above his boot, and pulled the
double-barreled derringer he kept in a small, homemade sheath
strapped to his calf.

“
I’m gonna fill you so full
o’ lead you’ll jingle when they drop ye in the hole!” the gunman
raged as he approached the trough. He fired his Colt, and Prophet
felt the burn of the bullet notching his ear.

Wincing against the pain. Prophet
brought up the hideout gun, forcing his burning eyes open, knowing
this was his last shot, and fired just as the bandit brought his
own revolver up and was stretching a scraggly grin. Prophet’s slug
took the man through the throat, making a penny-sized hole. The man
froze, his eyes widening. Automatically, he dropped his gun,
bringing his hands to his throat. He was as good as dead, but to
finish him, Prophet fired another round through the man’s
forehead.

The man staggered sideways, took one
step back, and fell on his face, sighing as he expired.

Prophet stared at the man through his
burning eyes, then at the cabin. Smoke billowed through the open
door. Strings of it trailed out of the new hole in the roof. His
shotgun was in there, but he’d wait for the smoke to clear before
he retrieved it.

Prophet sighed and looked around like
a full-grown man newly born, trying to gather his wits. The past
few minutes had passed so quickly and intensely that now, with it
all over and finding himself still alive, he wasn’t quite sure what
to do with himself. His ears still rang but the pain in his eyes
was abating.

Never a man to go long with unloaded
guns, he sat on the edge of the water trough and thumbed brass into
the chambers of his two Colts. As he worked, his swirling thoughts
slowed steadily into backwaters, and he became aware of a numbing
pain high in his back. Flexing his shoulder daintily, he realized
he must have separated the damn thing when he’d fallen through the
roof.

“
Goddamnit,” he cursed,
twirling the cylinder of his second Colt. He’d found through
considerable experience that a rope and a strong horse worked
rather well at popping bones back in place.

Prophet shook his head and started for the
barn. The big man sighed.

“
Helluva day.”

The next morning, turned on his sore
shoulder, and groaned with pain. He felt like someone had hammered
a dull rail spike deep in the joint.

Opening his eyes, he stared around the
cabin, half-hoping he’d find himself in the Waddy’s Cottage in
Henry’s Crossing, clean sheets beneath him and the smell of
breakfast emanating from the kitchen downstairs.

No such luck. He was lying on a
spindly cot in the ancient cabin, the morning sun glaring through
the four-by-four-foot hole in the roof, beyond which occasional
birds fluttered. As his vision cleared, he saw the blood splattered
on the walls and smeared on the floor, making several gruesome
trails to the door and outside.

He’d dragged the bodies out last
night, after he’d jerked his shoulder back into its socket and the
smoke had cleared. He’d decided not to head for Henry’s Crossing
until morning, as his arm had been too sore to lift the cadavers
onto the horses. Also, the trail was dangerous at night, haunted as
it was by roving outlaw bands and renegade Indians.

He’d boiled coffee over an outdoor
fire, eaten some jerky and stale biscuits he found in his
saddlebags, and used a few tips of his whiskey bottle to relieve
the pain in his shoulder enough to conjure sleep. He’d slept rather
well, too, in spite of the shoulder, the ceaseless yammering of
coyotes and wolves, and the coppery smell of blood in the
cabin.

Throwing his blanket aside, he swung
his legs to the floor, stomped into his boots, donned his hat, and
headed outside, working the kinks out of his neck. Gazing across
the shabby yard, which the morning sun had discovered and painted a
soft gold, lightly brushed with a fuzzy breeze, he inspected the
bodies laid out side-by-side before the corral. The outlaws’ horses
stared at Prophet across the prone, blanket-covered figures of
their former owners, as if to say, So what now, hotshot?

Prophet’s shoulder barked at the mere
thought of wrestling those bodies onto their mounts, but that’s
exactly what he had to do. He couldn’t wait around here another
day. His grub was low, for one thing, and this was outlaw country,
for another. Bounty hunters and outlaws rarely mixed without
fireworks.

He approached the bodies, squatted
down, and threw the blankets back from the pale faces,
belligerent-looking even in death. He recognized McTeague and
Clawson, having cowboyed with both down on the Staked Plain one
summer. The other two—a burly, middle-aged hombre with a long gray
beard, and a tall, stringbean fellow with receding blond hair and
hand-tooled Texas boots— he didn’t know.

Hoping he hadn’t made a mistake, he
reached into his shirt pocket for the descriptions, and let out a
sigh of relief. Since he’d turned to bounty hunting six years
ago—after having tried everything from soldiering and scouting to
bartending, cowboying, riding shotgun for a stage line, and even
wearing a deputy sheriff’s badge for a year—he’d had nightmares of
drawing down on the wrong man, one of the many hazards of the job.
Witness descriptions were not always accurate, and neither were the
pen sketches on wanted posters. And Prophet would have been the
first one to admit, if only to himself, that he got a bit careless
at times, having been raised by a Georgia cotton farmer who
believed the best way to approach any obstacle was head first. You
could reflect once the dust settled.

In bounty hunting, however, the
slightest mistake could put you on the wrong side of the law in a
heartbeat, make you a target of your own breed. Odd how that made
the job both nasty and compelling, Prophet thought now, stuffing
the papers in his pocket. He knew it was not to his credit that he
liked doing what he did, and he could understand the revulsion of
others. But there was just something dangerous enough about it to
make every other job look dull.

And like his old man had
said—foul-mouthed drunk that Silas Prophet was—you’re dead one hell
of a long lime.

“
Well, there’s no time like
the present,” the bounty man said as he headed for the barn, where
the outlaws had put up their tack.

He dreaded the nasty job of lifting the
bodies onto the horses but was eager for its completion. When he
got to Henry’s Crossing, he’d stay there awhile and pay a whore to
coddle him with whiskey and lovin’. Maybe he’d go down to Mexico,
spend a few months by the ocean. He’d heard the senoritas were
something special, cheap as snake-water but sweet as sugar. Hell,
maybe he’d even find another line of work—in Texas, say, where the
winters weren’t so harsh. Something less revolting but equally
interesting. Maybe he’d even find a woman to settle down with.
Hell, stranger things had happened ...

Saddling the horses was a big job in
itself, straining Prophet’s shoulder. Several times he considered
leaving the tack, but couldn’t do it. He knew that if the dead
men’s kin didn’t claim them, which they probably wouldn’t, he could
sell them to a livery barn, upping his take-down by as much as a
hundred dollars. Prophet was many things, even a spendthrift at
limes, but he’d been barefoot-poor enough lo never turn his back on
an extra cent.

Saddling the horses was a job, but
getting the dead men onto the horses, even with the help of his
horse and lariat, about made him faint. That railroad nail he’d
woken up with had doubled in both size and number, and they were
tearing around in his bruised shoulder, probing for nerves. The
morning was cool, but he sweated like a butcher, and by the time he
was through, his face was as pale as the cadavers lashed to their
horses.

He boiled coffee and took his time
sipping it and eating the last of his jerky and biscuits, waiting
for the hammer in his shoulder to ease its pounding. It did so
after about twenty minutes, and Prophet kicked sand on the fire,
returned his coffee pot to his saddlebags, and mounted the ugly
dun, heading out, leading the four horses, tied tail-to-tail, by a
rope.

The day warmed quickly, and as he
headed east, the sun was warm on Prophet’s stiff, aching shoulder,
which he couldn’t wait to soak in a hot tub and hire a pleasure
girl to knead gently with her fingers, caress with her naked
breasts. Mile after mile, he thought about those fingers, those
breasts, a tall glass of pilsner, fresh tobacco, and a bottle of
Tennessee whiskey. To pass the time, he hummed and occasionally
even sang a few bars of songs from his Confederate past: “Jeff
Davis built a wagon and on it put a name, and Beauregard was driver
and Secession was the name ...”

He made it to the outskirts of Henry’s
Crossing at midday, halting the string of horses on a chalky clay
butte overlooking the town, a collection of primitive buildings
scattered about the little yellow shack that did duty as the ferry
office. Like many Western towns, Henry’s Crossing had been spawned
by river traffic and the intersection of several freight
roads.

At the moment, Gil LaBlanc’s ferry was
leaving the town side of the Missouri with a big Murphy freight
wagon and four mules, the ferry bucking the waves and taking on
water like a half-submerged tree. In town, a terrier tied outside
the mercantile was barking at two kids teasing it with
slicks.

Prophet hiked a leg around his saddle
horn and rolled a cigarette, giving the horses a breather after the
long climb up the butte. He studied the big painted letters—
WADDY’S COTTAGE—on the side of Henry’s Crossing’s only hotel—a
thirty-room affair with a veranda on both the lower and second
floor, and the best cook this side of the Rockies. The woman who
owned the joint, Ma Thurman, was the most persnickety bitch you’d
find north of the Pecos, but she ran a tight ship, nearly bedbug
free.

Thinking of those beds, and the
whiskey and women over at the Queen Bee, Prophet heeled the roan,
jerked on the lead rope, and started down the trail into town,
sucking on the quirley until it was no longer than a thimble, then
tossing it in the well-churned, clay-colored dust of the
trail.

“
... and Beauregard was
driver and Secession was the name ...”

He rode past the boys now sitting on the
boardwalk chewing candy, past the tin-ware store and butcher shop
and a half-dozen drays parked before the sawmill which filled the
air with pine. He crossed the board bridge over Mud Creek and
pulled up before the little mud-brick shack with a weather-beaten
shingle announcing simply “SHERIFF”. He climbed tiredly down from
the roan, clamping his jaws as another lightning bolt shot through
his shoulder.