Riding With the Devil's Mistress (Lou Prophet Western #3)

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Most of bounty hunter Lou Prophet’s
man-hunting jobs have been purely business transactions that he’s
carried out with cool professionalism. He’s seldom seen the
depravations his quarries have committed to earn a price on their
heads. But when the Red River Gang raids the town of Luther Falls,
Prophet witnesses it in person—and can’t do a thing to stop it.

It’ll be days before anyone can organize a
posse—and a small girl has been kidnapped by the cold-blooded
outlaws. Prophet will have to go it alone. But then he meets up
with a young woman who’s lost her entire family—and thinks that
justice and vengeance are one and the same.

RIDING
WITH THE DEVIL’S MISTRESS

LOU PROPHET 3:

First published by
Berkley Books in 2003

Copyright
©
2003, 2013 by Peter Brandvold

Published by
Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: June 2013

Names,
characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any
resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons
living or dead is purely coincidental.

This ebook is
licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be
re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share
this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy
for each reader. If you’re reading the book and did not purchase
it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return
to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for
respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

Cover image © 2013 by Westworld Designs

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

Published by Arrangement with the
Author
.

For Routh and Lawrence Cline, with love from
their Yankee son-in-law

Also Available in the series:

THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET

DEALT THE DEVIL’S HAND

All available from Piccadilly Publishing

They wandered in the wilderness in a
solitary way; they found no city to dwell in.

—
Psalms
107:4

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred
turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

—
William
Congreve

LOU PROPHET REINED his horse
off the trail and up a hill carpeted in deep, tawny grass. At the
hill
’s
crest, he halted the line-back dun beneath a tall, scraggly oak
tree with swollen buds. Several crows took flight from the tree,
complaining like Satan on Sunday.

‘
Sorry, crows,’ Prophet said, reaching for the spyglass
bound to his saddle with rawhide. ‘Some of us don’t have all day to
sit and quarrel in oak trees. Some of us have jobs to do—ain’t that
right, Mean and Ugly?’

The horse twitched its ears, one of which
had been frayed in a fight with an uppity thoroughbred a few weeks
back. Prophet fished the glass from its case, rubbed the lens on
his greasy shirt, and brought the piece to his right eye, slowly
adjusting the focus.

‘
There
we go,’ Prophet mumbled as the backside of the roadhouse swam into
view. It was a weathered-gray two-story structure fronting a
frothy, green lake. The shore of the lake was littered with ice
chunks swept off the water by a recent spring thaw. Seagulls dipped
over the chunks and over the heads of the three men gathering the
ice in a blue box wagon.

Behind the roadhouse sat a
privy, several wood stacks, and two dilapidated storage sheds
surrounded by barrels and crates of all shapes and sizes, as well
as two rusted wagon chassis. There was a chicken coop with several
pullets running around, and a
pigpen which stunk like the devil’s
supper.

‘
Whew!
Never could see raisin’ pigs.’

Prophet lowered the spyglass, returned it to
its case, and sat leaning over the saddle horn, critically studying
the roadhouse.

When he
’d decided that there was no time
like the present, he grabbed the shotgun hanging by a leather
lanyard down his back and breeched it, making sure both barrels
shone with ten-gauge buckshot. The shotgun, a Richards coach gun,
was sawed off only an inch above the walnut forearm, and Prophet
had found that the barn blaster, backed up by the Colt Peacemaker
on his right thigh, was often the best friend a bounty hunter could
ask for—at least in close-range situations.

When he was dealing with a
little more distance, he called his Winchester
‘73 into action. He shucked the
rifle from the saddle sheath now, making sure it, too, was fully
loaded, then returned it to the boot. He might need it later.
Gripping the short-barreled barn blaster in his right hand, the
big, lean, broad-shouldered bounty man in rough, sun-faded trail
garb kneed Mean and Ugly down the hill toward the
roadhouse.

As he neared the hulking structure, Prophet
began to hear a tinny piano clattering inside. The raucous notes
rose above the wind as it ushered the waves against the lake shore,
and above the sound of the pullets scratching for seeds around the
coop. Behind the hog pen, Prophet tied his horse to an iron-rimmed
wagon wheel lying in the weeds, then started for the roadhouse
along the path cut to the privy.

The back door to the place
opened onto a storeroom on
the left, a makeshift sleeping area, probably for
a swamper or stable boy, on the right. Prophet opened another door
to the main room, stepping inside and pulling the door closed
behind him. Above him rose a staircase. Before him, eight or nine
men dressed in wool sweaters and cloth caps sat around the dozen or
so tables, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and cheroots and
clenching soapy beer mugs in their gnarled fists.

A young lady in a low-cut red dress and with
a matching red ribbon in her cinnamon hair banged away on the
piano. To her left was a long mahogany bar behind which stood the
apron, who froze when he saw Prophet, a dirty towel shoved inside
the glass he was drying. Prophet grinned to put the man at ease,
and stepped up to the bar, glad there was a mirror in which he
could keep an eye on the room.

The others had, one by one, taken notice of
him now. This being a stage stop as well as a watering hole for
woodcutters who worked at the sawmill on the east side of the lake,
they were used to comers and goers. Most of the men turned back to
their cards or their beers or their conversations.

Two did not. Prophet
wasn
’t sure
if these two, who sat at a table not far from the piano-playing
brunette, were the same two depicted on the wanted dodgers in his
saddlebags—wanted-poster renderings were infamously shoddy—but he
had a feeling he’d know soon enough.

‘
What’ll you have?’ the barman asked him. He was tall and
dull-looking, with a waxed mustache, carefully combed black hair,
and pale, sunken cheeks.

‘
Give
me a shot of your best whiskey and a bottle of your best beer,’
Prophet said jovially, tipping his hat back with a grin but keeping
one eye on the two faces peering at him in the mirror.

One had a boyish, oval face
with a wispy mustache and glassy blue eyes. The other had a long
narrow face with
a full mustache and chin whiskers. Neither wore the
cowl-necked sweaters or high, lace-up boots of the woodcutters.
They appeared more like the two Kansas
drovers-turned-bank-and-stage-robbers Prophet had been chasing
since Dodge City, where his friend, Wyatt Earp, had put him on
their scent.

‘
Boilermaker it is,’ the barman said as he dumped whiskey
into a shot glass and popped the top off a stout beer
bottle.

‘
Good
and cold,’ Prophet said when he’d sipped the frothy
beer.

‘
Keep
it in the cellar,’ the barman said, going back to his glass
drying.

‘
That
your boys cuttin’ ice yonder?’

The man nodded.
‘They’ll dust it
down, toss it in the cellar, and I’ll be settin’ up frosty brews
for these boys’— he gestured at the woodcutters—‘on the Fourth of
July.’

‘
Nothin’ like a cold beer on the Fourth,’ Prophet said
conversationally.

He kept an eye on the mirror as he and the
barman rambled on about the weather and the farming in the country,
and about the fishing on the lake. Prophet stopped abruptly when he
saw the two cowboys gain their feet behind him, shoving back their
chairs. He turned around and put his back to the bar, bringing up
the shotgun across his belly and fidgeting his thumbs across the
hammers.

Over the heads of the raucous
woodcutters, the two drovers locked eyes with him. The one with the
chin whiskers turned, grabbed the girl
’s left arm, and said something
Prophet couldn’t hear. She looked at him, scowling, then stood
reluctantly as the whiskered man pushed her toward the stairs. The
younger man with the glassy blue eyes followed them, eyeing Prophet
with one hand on the walnut grips of the pearl-handled Colt tied
low on his thigh.

When the piano had fallen silent, the
woodcutters did too, and looked to see what was happening. They
followed the cinnamon-haired girl and the two men with their eyes,
frowning curiously.

‘
Hey,
she was just startin’ to carry a tune,’ one of them quipped as the
threesome mounted the stairs.

That broke the tension, and the others
laughed.

‘
Carryin’ a tune is not her only job,’ another one said in a
Norwegian accent heavy enough to sink a clipper ship.

More laughter.

Prophet fingered his shotgun,
wondering how to play this so the girl wouldn
’t get hurt. The younger man
stopped halfway up the stairs, crouching as he clawed his
six-shooter from its holster, and aimed it over the railing, the
barrel forming a black hole directed at Prophet’s face.

Prophet crouched as the revolver spat flames
and smoke, barking and shattering the mirror behind the bar.

The bounty man straightened,
brought the bam blaster to his shoulder while thumbing back the
rabbit-eared hammers, and squeezed the right trigger. The shotgun
thundered and jumped, ripping a hole the size of a Mexican sombrero
through the younger man
’s chest, throwing him back against the
blood-splattered wainscoting and rolling him down the
stairs.