Helldorado (24 page)

He heard a shout and turned to his left. Hitt and Brewster were giving Severin the same punishment twenty feet away, between the bank and washhouse. The two outlaws took turns ramming their boots into the sheriff’s dusty, battered body, rolling him gradually toward the bathhouse on the other side of the street.

The other outlaws, Casol and Sawrod on horseback, the others standing, were yelling and hoorawing, a couple firing shots of revelry into the air.

Severin and Encina’s shrieks dwindled to gasps and then groans barely audible above the growing rumble of thunder issuing from the storm clouds piling up over the canyon’s southern ridge.

When he could no longer get even a sigh out of his father, Miguel wheeled toward Hitt and Brewster.

“Hold it!”

The men stopped and looked at Miguel.

“Hell-Bringin’ Hiram ain’t dead, is he?”

Orrie Hitt grinned. “Not yet!”

Miguel turned to one of the horseback riders—Sawrod, a killer and rustler whose acquaintance Gleneanne had made after a performance in Ouray—and waved an arm. “Get over here, Royal. Bring your rope. I do believe it’s time for a Dutch ride through prickly pear!”

Both riders whooped and peeled their throw ropes off their saddles. Sawrod rode over to Miguel, swinging out a head-sized loop and tossing it down on Jose Encina’s bloody, rumpled chest. Miguel crouched to work the loop over his father’s shoulders and arms.

Jose looked up at him through the narrowed lids of his swollen eyes. His voice was a raspy whisper as he said, “You will burn in hell for this. . . .”

“Maybe.” Miguel winked. “Maybe ole St. Pete’s got a special place just waitin’ for me, Pa.”

Miguel stepped back and slapped the rear of Sawrod’s horse. The blaze-faced roan shot forward with a whinny, heading west. When the rope snapped taut behind it, Jose Encina’s ragged body lurched violently forward, more bones snapping audibly.

The elder banker wailed shrilly as he dashed like a human missile westward along the street behind the galloping roan, angling past the opera house and heading toward the open country beyond the town.

Severin wasn’t far behind, fishtailing and bouncing along in the dust of Juventino Casol, who whooped and fired his pistol into the air. As the sheriff shot past Miguel, his arms pinned to his sides by the noose, Severin cast a fleeting, dark gaze toward the young banker.

Former young banker.

Miguel waved. As Hell-Bringin’ Hiram lurched and jerked up the empty street, he cupped his hands around his mouth to shout, “Didn’t much care for that old mine shaft, Sheriff!”

He chuckled and lowered his hands to watch Casol and Severin thunder out of sight as the first of the pellet-sized raindrops began ticking off Miguel’s bowler hat.

“Nope. Didn’t care for that one damn bit. . . .”

He turned to the men behind him and raised both arms high in the air. “It’s a wide-open town, boys. Drinks are on me, but you gotta pay for the whores your own damn selves!”

His dimples cut into his cheeks as he roared.

Then he walked over to where Gleneanne O’Shay was still admiring the gold.

AT THE SAME time, and about six miles as the crow flies from Juniper, Lou Prophet put Mean and Ugly into a side canyon that forked off the main canyon that he and Louisa had been following since nearly being hammered finer than a breakfast serving of Georgia grits by the rock slide loosed by the gold guards.

“Hell, I’m not sure if this is the way back to Juniper or not,” he grouched, off his feed and feeling dumber than a lightning-struck steer for having let himself be hornswoggled like that.

Louisa rode along beside him, feeling no better than he did. “Then why are we taking it?”

“Because the sign in the other one said Copper Gulch, four miles straight ahead, and I know from lookin’ at a map before we rode out here that Copper Gulch is west of Juniper, and there’s a tall ridge between the two towns.”

“What sign?”

“You didn’t see the sign?”

“I saw no goddamn sign.”

“Jesus, you’re startin’ to curse bad as me. We gotta get you back to town quicker than I thought.”

They rode up the canyon a ways, both sitting their saddles sullenly. When they reached a broad open park threaded by a chuckling creek sheathed in wolf willows, Prophet reined Mean in again and looked ahead at several piney ridges, blue-green in the distance, dropping into the same canyon another four or five miles away.

The vista looked like a bunch of green paint on some novice landscape painter’s canvas, mountain ridges obscured by other mountain ridges, but Prophet knew there was another canyon there, angling off in the direction of Juniper, so he kneed the dun ahead once more. The land would sort itself out in due time, and maybe he’d find another sign. The trail they were on had been traveled recently, judging by a couple of sets of overlaid wagon tracks, so maybe they’d run into a camp or at least another sign soon.

As they let their horses drink in the middle of the broad park, whose grass rose to their horses’ knees, Louisa broke the silence. “How do you figure it, Lou?”

“What’s to figure? A couple of the other guards, or all of ’em, maybe, hightailed it with the gold.”

“You think they’re the ones who sicced the bushwhackers on us in Juniper?”

“That’s how the cards look to me. Why they weren’t waiting for a bigger truck of gold, I got no idea. Maybe they’d just made up their minds this was the day they was gonna become outlaws and followed through.”

Louisa leaned forward as the pinto drank from the crystal-clear creek gurgling over polished stones. “I think we oughta run ’em down. Work our way around the canyon they tried to kill us in, and track ’em from there.”

“You know how to get there, you take the lead.”

“Don’t get owly. I’m not the one who double-crossed us.”

Prophet sighed with chagrin, leaned back in his saddle as Mean slurped at the creek, and hooked a leg over his saddle horn. “Since we’re lost, we’d best head back to Juniper, tell the Encinas and Hell-Bringin’ Hiram what happened, then head out from there and pick up the wagon’s trail. Hitt an’ them won’t get far if they stay with the wagon. If they transfer the gold to their horses, they’ll make a little better time, but not much. Unless they’ve got pack mules cached somewhere along their getaway trail.”

“Then they could mosey down any little trail between any two ridges, cover their tracks, and be gone before we even reach town.”

Prophet glanced at her, one eye narrowed. “Got a better idea?”

Louisa sighed wearily and looked around. “Let’s build a camp. Our mounts are blown, and I’m blown, too. We’ll think on it overnight, after a meal and a cup of tea, and start fresh in the morning.”

Prophet dropped his boot back into its stirrup. “Sometimes you make sense, girl.”

“One of us has to.”

“Believe I’ll have coffee and rye whiskey.”

“I figured you would.”

Prophet grunted and put Mean across the creek, through the willows, and angled him toward the southeast corner of the park, where a stone scarp jutted from the side of the pine- and fir-carpeted ridge and appeared to offer adequate cover for a night camp.

There was another creek—a freshet, mostly—that tumbled out from beneath the scarp and along the base of the ridge. Along the trickling watercourse, in the thickening shade of the ridge, they unsaddled their horses then took their time rubbing both sweaty mounts down with scraps of burlap. After they’d fed the horses and tied them to short picket lines where they could forage and drink, they set about wordlessly setting up camp.

As Prophet gathered wood for a fire, something didn’t feel right to him and it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the chill finger poking the back of his neck. He wasn’t sure what caused this additional ill feeling until he’d gotten the fire going and had filled a coffeepot at the spring-fed creek.

As he swung away from the stream, he stopped in his tracks, the tin pot made cold by the icy water fresh from the earth’s stony bowels dripping in his hand.

No, it wasn’t that something didn’t feel right. It was that something did feel right—him and Louisa out here, hunting owlhoots like they’d done before they’d split up in Mexico, him going to Monterrey and her getting herself caught in the Rurales’ trap and ending up in Montoya’s prison.

He watched her kneeling by the fire, setting her tin teacup on a rock in the flames, then, turning away from the fire, and reaching behind her to toss her hair out from under her shirt collar. She began untying the leather thongs securing her blanket roll. Her clothes rustled, and her boots crunched pine needles and fine gravel, her pistols moving in their holsters as she worked, one of her spurs reflecting a stray ray of saffron-colored light angling between pines at the peak of the western ridge.

He could smell the nearby horses, the leather tack, the smoke of burning pine, hear the snapping fire, the horses cropping bunchgrass and ferns along the creek. Louisa’s teacup begin to purr as it heated, the water swirling gently in the cup on which a single white ash floated.

Prophet felt a soothing hand wash over him, knowing suddenly that what bothered him was that nothing was bothering him except the stolen gold. But even that felt right. At the moment all felt perfectly as it should be, and deep inside he wished it could remain this way—him and Louisa together, building a camp, her teacup smoking on the fire and the horses stomping and snorting nearby—forever and always.

Why did things have to change? The notion was no less poignant for being so childishly maudlin.

They ate beans and jerky washed down with tea and coffee, sitting back against their saddles on opposite sides of the fire. They each washed their own plates at the creek, then Louisa made more tea and Prophet brewed another pot of coffee. Setting his smoking cup on a rock beside him, he leaned back against his saddle to watch the stars kindle brightly in the black velvet sky over the silent park before him and slowly, thoughtfully built a quirley from his makings sack.

On the other side of the fire, Louisa sipped her tea, then picked up her rifle, running an oiled cloth along its clean lines.

When she’d finished with the rifle, she did the same to her pistols, unloading them to clean the cylinders with a small brush, then filling the cylinders again—five pills in each wheel, then giving each a spin before replacing both pearl-gripped hoglegs in their oiled holsters, which she wrapped over her saddle horn, both guns close at hand.

“I think you’re right, Lou.”

It was the first either of them had said anything in over an hour; her voice sounded fresh and new to him, and imminently welcome and somehow reassuring.

“When have I not been right, Miss Bonnyventure?” he said with a wan, contented smile as he shaped the quirley in his big, brown fingers.

“We’d best go on back to Juniper, let Miguel and his father know what happened. I bet those scurvy dogs are headin’ for Durango. It’s the easiest route south, and from there they’d have a clear shot at Arizona and then Mexico. With that much gold, they’d have to head for Mexico.”

“I hear you.”

Louisa finished her tea and wandered into the brush to answer the call of nature. When she came back, she said, “I’m going to turn in.”

“I reckon it’s about that time.” Prophet took the last puff off his quirley and flipped it into the fire. On the other side of the dancing flames, Louisa kicked out of her boots, unbuttoned her skirt, and let it fall to the ground. “I wonder how cold it’s going to get up here.”

Prophet shrugged and glanced at the sky before returning his gaze to Louisa, who lifted her poncho up over her head and tossed it onto her skirt.

“I’d reckon pretty chilly, this high up.”

“How high up, do you think?” With customary immodesty—they’d been on the trail together too long, shared each other’s blankets too many times, for modesty—she unbuttoned her blouse and dropped it down with her other garments.

Prophet’s voice thickened as she crossed her arms and lifted her cotton camisole. “Oh . . . nine, ten thousand feet maybe. The air feels a might thin to me.”

The camisole caught on her nipples for a second, jostling her breasts, as she lifted it up and over her head and tossed it away. Her hair fell back across her shoulders and breasts in a disheveled mess that gripped Prophet hard by the loins.

“I haven’t been up this high many times before,” Louisa said, bending over to pull her socks off. Her breasts sloped down, dancing this way and that, just visible behind the rustling screen of her honey-blond hair that the firelight caught and turned several different shades of gold. “I reckon that’s why I’m so sleepy all of a sudden.”

When she’d removed both socks, she reached down again to gather her clothes and lay them in an orderly pile beside her saddle. She shivered as a chill night breeze caught her, and she crossed a slender arm over her lovely breasts as she dropped to her knees, then, sitting sideways to Prophet, opened her saddlebags and rummaged around inside.

“You sleepy, Lou?” She’d found her nightshirt—a heavy flannel man’s work shirt that was several sizes too big for her and that hung almost to her knees—and held it out in front of her as she turned to him. Her hair looked like a tumbleweed, all mussed and spiking about her head and dangling off her shoulders. The firelight glowed in her hazel eyes, caressed her smooth, tanned cheeks.

“I was.”

She made a face, then, turning toward him as if to punish him, held the shirt out for a moment, adjusting it, before swinging it back behind her, thrusting her shoulders back, breasts forward, and shrugging into the shirt and closing it over her chest and buttoning it.

“No need for that,” Prophet grunted. “Come over here, Miss Bonnyventure, and whisper a sweet-nothing in ole Lou’s ear.”

She looked up between the mussed wings of her hair. She’d only buttoned the shirt’s bottom two buttons, and it exposed her alluringly. She left it like that as she stared across the fire at Prophet, then rose and walked around it to him and dropped to her knees. She leaned forward, ran her hands through his hair, pulling it gently, then closed her hands on his ears and kissed his forehead.