The Devil and Lou Prophet (15 page)

The stage, fire licking up around the
wheels, black smoke billowing into the sky.

Something moved along the stage road,
right of the stage. Prophet turned his head to see four horseback
riders galloping north, kicking up dust, their dusters flapping
open, the sun winking off the hardware on their hips and protruding
from their saddle boots.

Prophet clamped his jaws together and
drew his lips away from his teeth. “You goddamn sons of bitches!”
he breathed, spurring his horse down the saddle, its front hooves
digging deep into the sandy, rocky ground. When the terrain leveled
once more, the horse sprang off its hind legs and stretched out in
a hell-for-leather gallop, blowing hard, lather stringing off its
lips.

Prophet approached the stage,
dismounting as the horse skidded to a stop. He dropped the reins
and hit the ground on the run. He’d run only five or six strides
before he stopped suddenly, raising his arms against the heat of
the thundering flames consuming the overturned carriage like so
much scrap wood heaved on a bonfire. There was hardly a square foot
of the red carriage housing not pocked with bullet
holes.

The sons of bitches, whoever they
were, had filled the stage with lead, no doubt killing everyone
inside, then run it down and set it on fire. All the horses were
dead— lifeless hairy humps strewn about the traces and shafts,
blood leaking from the bullet wounds in their hides.

Prophet turned, looking around for
Clatsop. He didn’t see the jehu, however, until he’d walked a
hundred yards north along the stage road. Then he found the man
face down in a sagebrush, Clatsop’s body riddled with bullets,
blood leaking through the holes in his cotton shirt and cowhide
vest like a sieve.

Prophet hunkered down on his haunches
and turned the man over, put a finger to the leathery neck. There
was no pulse. He listened to the heart, but there was nothing
there, either. What the hell was he expecting? There was more blood
than unsoiled cloth on the man.

He’d just hoped ... what? That he hadn’t
gotten everyone aboard the stage killed? His head throbbed and he
lowered it, dislodging his hat and rubbing a heavy hand through his
hair. Mrs. Phelps ... her boy ... the old miner …

All were dead because he’d insisted on
taking the girl to the hearing in Johnson City.

He knelt there, head in his hands, as
close to vomiting as he’d come since the war. His chest was heavy,
and a lump burned in his throat. Every vein in his body throbbed
with outrage and horror.

As he lifted his head to regard the
burning stage wavering behind the flames and hot air, the enormity
of his dilemma hit him full force. What the hell you going to do
now, Prophet?

Finally, he replaced the hat on his
head and staggered to his feet, looking down at Clatsop. He licked
his lips and shook his head, wincing. “I’d like to give you a
proper burial, ole boy, but there’s no time.”

Stiffly, he walked back to his horse,
which had shied a good distance from the burning stage and the
smell of its dead brethren, and was cropping grass in a hollow.
Prophet mounted and rode back where he’d left the girl, surprised
to find her there. She studied him worriedly as he rode
up.

“
What is it?” she asked,
standing and holding her horse’s reins. She could tell by the look
on his face it wasn’t good.

“
The stage,” he said
grimly, not looking at her. His face was expressionless. “Mount up.
We have to get the hell out of here.”

He knew that whoever had attacked the
stage had discovered, too late for the other passengers, that
Prophet and Miss Diamond were not aboard. That’s why they were
racing northward, hoping to cut Prophet’s trail. Prophet figured
they’d do so within the hour.

“
They’re ... all... dead?”
the girl asked him. She hadn’t run while Prophet was gone, because
she, too, had sensed the stage had been attacked and had wanted to
know the outcome.

Prophet sighed and nodded, looking
off. “Mount up.”

Her face was white, but her eyes were
sharp. “You’re quite the piece of work, Prophet.”

“
Mount up!” he raged, his
head reeling. If only he’d stayed in Henry’s Crossing. But he
hadn’t. He’d taken money for a job, and it was a job he was going
to finish.

She did as he ordered, and they gigged
their horses off at a trot.

They rode hard, stopping only to rest
and water their mounts. Prophet found jerky in the saddlebags
draped over the back of Lola’s Appaloosa, and they ate while they
rode. They did not converse; the troubled silence hanging between
them was almost palpable. Prophet could feel the girl’s loathing,
but it was nothing compared to the resentment he felt for
himself.

He saw nothing of those pursuing them
until, toward day’s end, he rode to the top of a low rimrock and
trained his spyglass on their back trail. There, just beyond the
last divide, he saw the light spray of dust tinted orange by the
falling sun. It could have been dust kicked up by drovers, as this
was cow country, but something told Prophet it was not.

Reducing the spyglass and returning it
to his saddlebags, he caught up with the girl, and they spurred
their horses into a canter. They rode through a canyon that let out
on a creek bottom. They followed the creek into another, shallower
canyon rimmed with junipers. By midday they’d crossed a shelf of
low, grassy hills and stopped to rest and water their horses along
a spring bubbling among the glacial rubble of boulders.

It was a country so huge and varied it
was hard to believe it was all of one territory, under a sky
scalloped with high, serried clouds. Wherever they looked they saw
deer and antelope. Sign of cougar, fox, and lion were at every turn
in their trail. Since Prophet hadn’t eaten breakfast, he was hungry
and believed the girl must be as well. But he couldn’t dare a shot
at game out here, with the firebrands behind them.

When the horses were watered and
Prophet had smoked a cigarette, he and the girl sitting a good ways
apart, not saying a word, they mounted again and followed an old
buffalo trail over a bench and through a prairie. Blond grass
ruffled in the wind. Cloud shadows flickered sunlight.

Toward the end of the day they endured
a short rain, hunkered low in their saddles. The purple clouds
rolled over them, and the sun came out, even brighter than
before.

The sun was nearly down before Prophet
stopped for the night in an ancient riverbed. He walked the high
points around the camp, scouting their back trail. Seeing no sign
of those following, he thought it was safe to shoot a rabbit, so he
did so—a big jack that weighed close to ten pounds.

He roasted the jack over the fire and
brewed coffee in the pot he found in the girl’s saddlebags. He and
the girl ate hungrily, again sharing no words. The girl didn’t even
look at him.

When they’d finished eating, it was
dark, the sky awash with stars. Prophet checked on the horses he’d
staked in a patch of green grass, then returned to the fire. The
girl had already rolled up in her blanket and rested her head on
her saddle, sound asleep.

Prophet sat up for an hour, looking
into the darkness beyond the fire, watching and listening. He
smoked several cigarettes as he sipped his coffee. Finally, he took
apart his revolver, setting the parts on a bandanna spread out
beside him. He cleaned and oiled the parts, snapped them back
together, and did the same to his rifle and sawed-off
eight-gauge.

He had a feeling he was going to be in
dire need of each weapon soon, and he wanted to make sure each
functioned properly.

Tired as he was, it took him over an
hour to fall asleep, the stage burning behind his eyelids. He’d
just sailed off when something woke him. His eyes opened. The girl
stood over him holding a large stone above her head. She glared
down at him.

He rolled sideways, the rock grazing
his right shoulder as it careened out of the girl’s hands. He
scissored his legs, kicking the girl’s feet out from under her. She
fell with an angry scream.

“
Ow! Goddamn, you son of a
bitch!”

Prophet stood, grabbed her arm, and
dragged her back to her saddle. He retrieved the lariat from his
own saddle, tied her wrists together as she squirmed, kicked, and
cursed—and tied her wrists to the horn of the saddle she’d been
sleeping on.

“
There you go,” he said, heading
back to his own bed. “Sleep tight.”

Gradually, her cries diminished, and
they both slept.

Owen McCreedy was sitting at his
desk in the jailhouse in Johnson City, smoking a thin cigar and
going over his court docket.
He’d just turned a page of the big book when he
heard a yell from the cell block.

The sheriff set his cigar in the
ashtray, stood, and walked to the door leading into the cell block.
He opened the door and yelled, “I’m not getting you any more
tobacco, Brown. You’ve smoked a whole bag since
yesterday.”

“
Look at the goddamn
clock,” came the shout from the cell. “It’s supper
time!”

“
So it is,” McCreedy said
without interest.

“
I want my supper,
goddamnit! I got rights!”

“
I’ll fetch your supper
when I’m goddamn ready to fetch it.”

Billy Brown’s voice came low and tight
with emotion. “Why don’t you come back here, McCreedy? Why don’t
you open up this door, so you and I can go at it the way we really
want? Huh? Why don’t you do that?”

Knees quaking with rage, McCreedy
walked down the short hall between the four cells, stopping at the
last cell on the left. Billy Brown stood with his hands gripping
the iron bars, his bristly cheeks spread wide with a grin. His blue
eyes flashed demonically. “There you go. Now just open the door and
step in here, and you and me, we’ll settle this thing once and for
all.”

He was about two inches shorter than
McCreedy, but the sheriff figured Brown outweighed him by at least
twenty pounds.

“
If I stepped in there,
you’d never walk out. Ever.”

Brown chuckled. “You think so? Why
don’t you try it? Come on, open the door.”

McCreedy stared at the man between the
bars. His face was impassive, but he hated the stout, ham-fisted
Irishman more than he’d ever hated anyone. Brown was a blight on
the town—McCreedy’s town. As long as Brown was in business, Johnson
City would not flourish the way it should ... peaceably, drawing
civilized, honest citizens and their families. As long as Billy
Brown was in business, McCreedy would continue to be the
laughing-stock Brown thumbed his nose at, and Johnson City would be
a hotbed of vice and underhanded business dealings, driving the
honest folks out and replacing them with more no-accounts like
Brown himself.

At the moment, however, what bothered
McCreedy more was knowing that if he opened Brown’s cell door and
took Brown’s bait, Brown would beat him senseless. Brown had been a
street fighter who’d made his way with his fists. McCreedy had been
a farm boy from Nebraska, who’d come to Montana when he was
seventeen, to punch cows. He’d been in his share of fistfights but
nothing like those that had forged Billy Brown.

McCreedy hated himself for it, but he
was afraid of Brown. And what really burned him was that Brown knew
it. Brown knew he wouldn’t open the cell door and accept the
challenge. Brown knew he was afraid, and the challenge was just
more of the criminal’s attempts at intimidation, which he’d honed
on the town’s other saloon owners, whose earnings he regularly
skimmed.

“
You think so, do you,
Owen?” Brown taunted, shadowboxing, fading this way and that.
“Well, come on, then—open the door.”

McCreedy stared at him coolly, trying
not to look intimidated, trying not to show his insecurities and
his anger. What he wanted to do more than anything was draw the
Colt on his hip and shoot Billy Brown through his forehead. The
problem was, McCreedy was an honest, law-abiding man, which was why
the majority of Johnson City’s citizens had elected him sheriff two
years ago. If he shot Brown, he’d be no better than Brown. He’d be
letting the honest citizens down.

“
I’d love to tussle with
you, Billy,” McCreedy said casually, “but that isn’t how I do my
job.”

With that he walked slowly back toward
his office, feeling a prickle around his neck.

“
Yeah, I know how you do
your job, you weak-kneed tinhorn!” Brown shouted after him. “You
cower behind your badge! Now bring me my supper,
goddamnit!”

McCreedy walked back to his desk and
sat down in his creaky chair. He picked up his cigar and puffed
away, trying to calm his nerves and distract himself, but it was no
use. He knew he should go over to the Excelsior and get Brown’s
supper. Mrs. Dornan would probably have it dished up and waiting
for McCreedy, and as much as McCreedy wanted to keep Brown waiting,
he couldn’t do that to Eunice Dornan.

“
All right, goddamnit,” he
grouched, stubbing out his cigar in the ashtray.

Standing, he retrieved his hat off the
coat tree, and walked out the door. He headed across the street
through the spare, late-day traffic. At the busy Excelsior, he
found Mrs. Dornan in the kitchen, ladling soup into bowls. Her
husband, Johnny Dornan, was manning the big cast-iron range, on
which several steaks sizzled and potatoes sat in warming racks. A
five-gallon kettle of green beans simmered, sending steam to the
rafters.