The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6) (7 page)

Seeing the smoke of the burning
house, hearing the screams and the gunfire, she
’d run toward the buildings
through the trees and brush along the creek. Seeing the horde of
laughing, savage-faced men on horseback, she stopped suddenly.
Terror-stricken, she dropped to her knees and hid in the
brush.

From there, frozen with shock, she watched
as her father and brother were shot down in the yard, her mother
and two sisters dragged screaming into the brush west of the house,
where they were beaten, raped, and shot before the gang got back on
its horses and thundered away.

When Louisa had recovered from
the initial shock of the raid, she
’d taught herself to shoot and to track,
and she’d tracked the Red River Gang into the northern territories,
killing it slowly, one man at a time as the opportunities revealed
themselves, even appropriating one of its horses, the black Morgan
she still rode now. She’d killed a half dozen of the gang when
she’d met Prophet in Minnesota, and together they’d stalked and
killed the rest.

The gang was dead now, including
their leader, Handsome Dave Duvall. Yet for Louisa Bonaventure,
whose
family
was gone, her life ruined, the war against all the other Dave
Duvalls and Red River Gangs continued.

Prophet turned to her now,
breathing quietly against his shoulder—sweet and lovely, with the
innocence of a young Nebraska farm girl. Only, her war continued.
It would continue, he realized, until she
’d either rid the frontier of evil
men or died trying. And Prophet’s attempting to stop her was like
trying to plug a summer rain in Georgia with a whiskey
cork.

Prophet woke early the next
morning with achy feet and his chest chafed raw from the cornhusk
tits he
’d
worn in yesterday’s summer heat.

He yawned, shoved up on his
elbows, and looked to his right. Louisa wasn
’t there. The wrinkled covers on that
side of the bed were pulled up to the pillow, which still bore the
mark of her head.

Looking around the tiny room lit
wanly by pearl light penetrating the single, drawn shade, he saw
that her carpetbag and rifle were gone as well, which meant
she
’d
probably left town.

Disappointment nipped him.

He
’d been hoping she’d stay around long
enough for them to have breakfast together, but he wasn’t surprised
that she hadn’t stayed till morning. It wasn’t Louisa’s way. She
knew she’d get her share of the reward money when she and Prophet
ran into each other again, and she cottoned to good-byes no more
than paperwork.

It had always upset him a little
that she could slip away without waking him, for a bounty
hunter
’s
longevity correlated directly to the keenness of his senses. Maybe
he was just more relaxed when Louisa was around. At least, he hoped
that was the case.

He blinked and smacked his lips,
swimming up from his slumber. He pushed up on his elbows and
glanced around the sparsely furnished room, half-consciously
looking for
some sign of her amidst the hard-backed chair by the
window, the shabby bureau with its tin washbasin and stone pitcher,
and his clothes and weapons hanging from hooks along the wall near
the door.

Nothing—only her faint smell of
talcum and cherries tinged with the scent of pine from too many
lonely
campfires.

He swung his feet to the floor,
planted his elbows on his knees, and lowered his head to his hands.
Damn, he thought with a sigh. Why don
’t I just marry the girl?

But he knew the answer to that.
She had far too many demons to whip before settling down with
anyone, and maybe he did too. She had to get the faces of her
butchered family out of her brain, and he had to travel and drink
and fornicate until he quit seeing the faces of his friends and
cousins lying beaten and bloody on smoky Southern
battlefields
…

Those first few hours after he
and Louisa had parted were damn lonely, though, he noted as he
poured water for a whore
’s bath in the cracked porcelain bowl.

Damn lonely.

When he
’d dressed in his faded denims,
buckskin shirt with leather ties, funnel-brimmed Stetson, and blue
neckerchief, he stepped into the hall, which smelled of sour
runners and stale beer, and turned the key in the lock. He’d leave
his possibles, including his shotgun and rifle, in his room until
after the stage company had wired his reward money.

He might be here a day or two, waiting for
the stage line to cough up the bounty. Prophet was always amazed
and frustrated by how quickly express companies offered rewards on
owlhoots impeding their business, and how slow they were to pay up
when said owlhoots were in custody or wolf bait.

On his way down the stairs, he
rolled a cigarette. Passing the spidery gent mopping the lobby
floor, he nodded and dug in his denim
’s pocket for a lucifer.

“
Is it true what they said?” the
old man asked, eagerly looking up from his work. He was wearing a
grimy duck jacket against the morning’s high-country chill. The
potbelly stove near the desk roared and cracked, smoke seeping
around the door. “Did you and your sister stop the Thorson-Mahoney
Gang’s clock?”

“
I reckon you could call it
that,” Prophet allowed, touching the match flame to the quirley.
The story must’ve made the rounds a few times by now. He hoped his
money arrived shortly. There was nothing worse than staying on in a
town where everyone knew your occupation. For every five men in awe
of your abilities, five others saw you as nothing but trouble, and
one or two wanted to cut you down by way of earning reputations of
their own.

“
That musta been some shootin’.”
The old man shook his head and snapped his dentures. “You a
gunslick?”

“
Nope, just a lowly bounty man,”
Prophet said lazily, his mind’s eye on a plate of flapjacks and
salt pork.

He was on his way out the door
when the geezer said,
“I don’t normally let bounty hunters stay in my
abode. Takes too long to get the death stench from the
sheets.”

He cackled as Prophet turned to look at him
over his shoulder.

“
In your case, though, I’ll make
an exception. Pike Thorson—he sure was a thorn in everyone’s side
around here. Damn near drove us all out of business more than
once!”

Prophet stepped outside and regarded the
morning. The toothy ridges showed pink in the north, while the
rimrocks in the east were a dusty green before the swollen, salmon
orb of the rising sun. Closer to town, the prairie grass rippled
over the swells. A couple roosters crowed competitively, and the
squawk of a well pump filled the air.

Along the meandering main drag lined with
old log shacks and newer, whipsawed stores that still smelled of
pine resin, proprietors were sweeping the boardwalks or washing
windows or shaking out carpet runners.

One man in a green apron was
shoveling horse dung from the street before a small, whitewashed
grocery store. He tossed each load into the empty space between his
store and the unlabeled shanty beside it—probably a whorehouse. The
half-dozen pens flanking the house of ill repute were probably
cribs. Weeds had grown up around the place, the chinking between
the logs of the main cabin was crumbling, and the windows
hadn
’t been
washed in several dust storms. It all looked like a bad case of the
pony drip to Prophet.

Exhaling smoke, he turned toward the
cafe.

He
’d taken only three steps when a shrill
scream cut the quiet morning air.

A half second later, he was
bolting across the main drag, his six-shooter in hand, heading in
the direction from which the sound had come. As he ran around the
west side of the jailhouse, he wondered vaguely why the marshal
didn
’t come
out of his office. The scream had been loud enough to be heard a
good mile into the countryside.

Prophet was halfway down the
weedy gap between the jailhouse and a drugstore when the scream
sounded again, even more shrill this time. It was a little
girl
’s
scream, and it made Prophet’s heart thud.

He was thinking some pervert was trying to
drag the little girl into the brush along Bitter Creek, when he
turned the corner around the jailhouse and froze dead in his
tracks, hot blood rushing to his face as he looked into the
branches of a sprawling cottonwood.

Two men hung in the tree, their boots about
five feet off the ground—Marshal Whitman and a younger,
carrot-topped man. Their necks had been stretched a good six inches
beyond their normal lengths, and their tongues protruded from their
mouths, purple and swollen to the size of small sunfish.

The sounds of retching rose on
Prophet
’s
right.

He turned to see two young girls dressed for
school. One of the girls, a wiry blonde about ten years old, was on
her hands and knees facing the jailhouse, a couple schoolbooks
strewn to her right. Her arms were crossed over her stomach. Her
head bobbed as her breakfast leapt from her wide-drawn mouth and
into the straggly sage clump before her.

The other girl—apparently the
one who
’d
screamed— stood behind the blonde, facing the opposite direction.
She was a year or two younger than the blonde. Clutching two thin
schoolbooks and a black slate to her chest, she wore a purple poke
bonnet trimmed with white lace. Her thick, brown hair fell to her
shoulders, which jerked as she cried, casting her tearful,
mesmerized, horrified gaze into the cottonwood towering above the
alley.

Prophet walked to the girl, pressed her face
against his side, and returned his own beleaguered gaze to the
tree.

The tin stars on the dead
men
’s chests
glistened dully in the morning sun.

The two dead
lawmen hung from the tree, their
glassy, half-open eyes staring dumbly at the scuffed, gouged ground
beneath their boots. Their hair fluttered in the breeze.

The deputy had obviously been
shot before he was hung; blood the color of ripe chokecherries
stained the shoulder of his light-blue shirt. Both
men
’s boots
turned slowly, this way and that, the ropes squeaking like leather.
Whitman’s right boot hung half off his foot, showing how hard he’d
kicked before he died.

Running footsteps sounded from east and west
along the alley and from the spaces between the buildings. The
footsteps grew in volume as more townsfolk, having heard the
screams, approached.

A woman running around the rear
of the drugstore stopped suddenly and clutched her chest.
“Oh, my God! Look
what they done!”

“
For the love of God ...” a man
moaned on Prophet’s right. Wretching sounds followed, and Prophet
turned to see the portly, balding man bent over,
vomiting.

The crowd grew until three fourths of the
town was standing around the tree, gazing up at the grisly
spectacle. Prophet glanced around at the ground, tufted and
furrowed where the lawmen had been dragged to the tree.

Prints of shod hooves made
overlapping pocks. It was hard to tell with all the people here
now, but he
’d
say there had been anywhere from five to ten riders in this alley
last night.

Finally, when he saw that the
gathered, muttering townsfolk were in too much shock to do much but
stand, gawk, and shake their heads, Prophet retrieved a barrel
standing in the alley behind the drugstore. He stood it on end
beneath the tree and climbed on top of it. With his folding
pocketknife, he cut
through the ropes. When they saw what he was doing, three men moved
forward to help. He lowered the stiffening bodies, one at a time,
into their hands, and they grimly gentled the dead lawmen onto the
ground.

Prophet jumped down from the
barrel and collapsed his
pocketknife as he gazed at the crowd. “Anyone have
any idea who’s responsible for this?”

The crowd fell silent, the
people glancing around at each other, their brows ridged with
befuddlement. Finally, a lean man with a sharp nose and two-day
growth of beard stubble lifted his chin at the back of the crowd,
near the jailhouse
’s rear wall. His eyes were tentative as he swung his wary
gaze from Prophet to his fellow townsmen.

“
Rick Scanlon’s gone from his
cell. I just checked.”

A collective murmur rose again, louder.

One man barked angrily,
“Sam
Scanlon!”

Prophet had just turned to the
man when an urgent, female voice rose behind him.
“Let me through, let
me through!”

Prophet turned to see the crowd
parting for a rather plain-faced young woman in a dark blue gingham
dress. She was thin and pale and wore her chestnut hair in a severe
bun behind her head. She had the look of a schoolteacher, and
Prophet would have bet several silver cartwheels
that
’s
exactly what she was.

“
Dad? Eddie?” she muttered, her
eyes drawn wide, her cheeks ashen. Her lips quivered as she bolted
past Prophet and dropped to her knees.
“Oh, my God!”
She knelt staring from one body to
the other, her hands making nervous gestures over Whitman’s
chest.