The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6) (13 page)

Leaving his shotgun on the
depot
’s
boardwalk, Prophet grabbed his fallen rifle, sprinted across the
street, and ran along the east side of the bank. He bolted around
the bank’s rear corner and dropped to a knee, snapping his rifle to
his shoulder and gazing into the alley over the rifle’s front
sight.

Shipping crates lay scattered
along the building
’s rear wall. Hearing hoofbeats to his left, Prophet jerked
his gaze that way in time to see the blur of a horse and rider
galloping around a log shack, heading south.

Prophet straightened and looked around
quickly.

Down the alley behind him, a saddled gray
mare was tethered to an iron wagon wheel. Prophet ran to the horse,
quickly untied it, leapt into the saddle, and spurred it hard down
the alley, turning south around a stable, angling around the shack,
and looking around. His heart thudded with rage as he urged the
horse southwest.

Fifty yards ahead, the gunman dropped below
a ridge. Prophet took the ridge at a gallop. At the crest, he
peered down the other side to see the man galloping into a draw
sheathed in scattered cottonwoods, heading southwest.

Prophet spurred the horse and
bent low over the gelding
’s neck, urging the horse down the ridge, then
reining it into the draw. The horse was heavy and old, not made for
speed, and Prophet cursed as he caught brief glimpses of the
fleeing gunman through the trees and brush littering the shallow
cut.

The man was steadily outdistancing him.

Prophet gritted his teeth as he
stared around the lumbering gray
’s lowered head. “Get back here, you
cowardly son of a bitch!”

Nothing he hated worse than a
bushwhacker.

His adopted horse
didn
’t have
much speed, but it did have bottom, he discovered. Slowly but
resolutely, he and the gray followed the gunman’s trail into a low
jog of hills about three miles southwest of Bitter Creek. Prophet
knew the odds of catching the man were against him, but there was a
slim chance the man’s horse was built more for speed than distance.
That meant, if Prophet kept after him, he might eventually catch up
to him.

He had little doubt about what
he
’d do then.
First, he’d find out why the man had tried to perforate his hide,
then he’d kill him. On the frontier, bushwhackers were never
allowed to bushwhack again.

That thought was foremost in his mind as he
followed a coulee along the base of a high, grassy bench. When he
saw where the bushwhacker had suddenly left the coulee and climbed
the bench, Prophet ducked and reined the horse sharply left. It was
an instinctive dodge in case the man, having climbed to higher
ground, had stopped to place Prophet in his sights again.

He had.

The sound of the shot rang out
just after the bullet had sizzled over Prophet
’s right shoulder, where his
neck had been only a half second before.

The old horse whinnied and
lunged forward. Prophet rolled out of the saddle, hit the ground on
his shoulder, and rolled back right along the base of the rise.
Startled by the first shot and then by a second bullet tearing up
sod to Prophet
’s left, the horse lunged forward, nickering and loping
away.

Taking his Winchester in both
hands, Prophet jacked a shell in the chamber and slid a look up the
grassy, sage-tufted rise. A granite spine rose from the
bench
’s peak.
To the left of the spine, smoke puffed.

Prophet jerked his head down as the slug
tore into the slope a foot above, blowing up a sage tuft and
rolling it across his shoulders.

“
Bastard,” Prophet raked
out.

He jerked upright, extended the
rifle, and fired. His bullet ricocheted off the rocks at the
bench
’s peak
with a shrill whine. He rolled back off his left hip and crawled
back along the base of the slope. When he’d crawled ten yards, he
rose again and squeezed off two more rounds at the spot from which
the shooter had fired.

His chances of hitting the gunman were slim,
but he thought he could possibly pin him down behind the rocks,
then sneak around the base of the slope, possibly flanking the son
of a bitch.

Ducking low, Prophet waited for return fire.
Nothing.

High above the
hill
’s crest,
a hawk screeched. Along the slope a gopher chittered
angrily.

Keeping his head low, Prophet
crawled back along the slope
’s base for about fifty yards, rocks and shrubs
clawing at his shirt cuffs and denims. Turning left, he ran up the
slope, crouching behind rocks and shrubs to glance at the rocky
spine looming over him. The slope was steep and his lungs were raw,
his thighs screaming by the time he crested out and walked slowly
toward the spot from which the gunman had shot at him.

The man was gone, leaving boot
prints in the thin layer of sand and gravel around the rocks and a
wind-twisted cedar. Prophet hunkered down to inspect the oval print
where the man had knelt on one knee, no doubt propping his
rifle
’s
barrel on the rocks before him.

Prophet looked around, seeing no
sign of the gunman along the slope tapering in the northwest to a
deep draw thick with brambles. Beyond were more hills and brushy
draws. Prophet scowled and cursed. Impossible to track the man
through that. Even if he could, he
’d have to find his own horse first, and
by then the shooter would be miles away.

Who was the bastard? Why had he been so
determined to bed Prophet down with snakes?

A half hour later, Prophet was wandering the
prairie on the south side of the bench, looking for the gray horse.
On a knoll to his right, a horse whinnied.

He wheeled and raised the Winchester toward
the rifle-wielding rider silhouetted against the western sky.

“
Proph, that
you?”

The voice belonged to Ronnie
Williams. Prophet lowered the rifle slightly. The kid gigged his
horse down the hill. When the hill instead of the sky was behind
him, Prophet saw the kid
’s shabby hat, his pale face with the anemic
beard, long hair blowing out behind him in the wind.

Ronnie held a rifle across
his
saddlebows. The chest and withers of his chestnut gelding
were lather-foamed, as though the horse had been ridden
hard.

“
What’s all the shootin’ about?”
Ronnie asked.

Prophet regarded the kid suspiciously. The
kid was known to be a good marksman, and several of those slugs had
come close to hitting their target.

“
How long you been out here,
boy?”

The kid
’s blue eyes flickered. He shrugged.
“I reckon I got out here about dawn. I’m huntin’ deer for Miss
Frieda over to the cafe. Her special tomorrow is deer stew.” He
glanced around. “Where’s your horse?”

Prophet
’s glance fell on the .56-caliber
Sharps set across the bows of Ronnie’s saddle while he kept his own
Winchester raised, held in both hands across his chest. Ronnie
lacked a killer’s rough edges and cunning eyes. In fact, he was the
last person in Bitter Creek whom Prophet would suspect of
cold-blooded murder.

Hadn
’t the kid saved Prophet’s life a
couple days ago?

Still, Prophet had been targeted by someone
wielding a large-caliber rifle, and here the kid sat with his
Sharps ... on a sweat-soaked horse.

“
You fired that rifle recently?”
Prophet asked. He strode to the chestnut, grabbed the rifle from
the kid’s gloved hands, and sniffed the barrel.

“
Why, sure I have,” Ronnie said
with mild indignation as Prophet’s nose detected the bitter smell
of burnt powder. “I just shot at a deer back over that
ridge.”

Prophet sent a glance behind the
cantle of the kid
’s saddle, where a deer would have been draped if there’d
been one. There wasn’t. He had a feeling Ronnie didn’t miss many
shots.

“
Where’s the deer?”

“
I gut-shot a buck. A wind gust
took my bullet. Last I seen, he was headed that way.” Ronnie nodded
and flicked a finger to indicate a hillock rising in the southeast,
just beyond a thin line of cottonwoods. “I was trackin’ him when I
heard the shootin’.”

Prophet gave Ronnie back his
rifle. Taking his own Winchester in his right hand, he grabbed the
kid
’s
deer-hide vest for purchase and swung up onto the chestnut’s
rump.

“
Let’s go find him,” Prophet
growled, his voice betraying his skepticism. “Maybe we’ll find my
horse in the process.”

Ronnie spurred the chestnut into
a swale and around the knoll
’s base. A half mile beyond the knoll, they came
upon a six-point buck lying dead, one hind leg extended, amongst
dock and cattails spiking a seep. The mule deer’s snout and chest
were blood-flecked. A large-caliber slug had torn a hole through
its charcoal-colored belly.

“
There he is,” Ronnie said,
reining the horse to a halt. “I was afraid I’d lose him in the
river bed yonder.”

Prophet nibbled his cheek. He
doubted Ronnie could have shot at him
and
downed a deer in the space of a half hour.
As Ronnie deftly and quickly dressed the buck, Prophet looked
around at the rolling prairie dotted with wind-jostled sage and
rabbit brush.

The shooter was probably long
gone, but Prophet couldn
’t be sure he wouldn’t return to try and finish
the job. When the bounty hunter turned south and peered along the
base of a low bench, he saw the gray mare casually cropping grass,
about a hundred yards away.

Prophet jogged out to retrieve the horse.
Twenty minutes later, he and Ronnie walked their mounts back toward
Bitter Creek, riding abreast. Prophet told the kid about the
shooting.

“
You s’pose someone don’t want
you becomin’ marshal of Bitter Creek?” the boy asked.

Prophet
’s neck tightened. “You know about
that?”

“
Mr. Kitchen told me this
mornin’, when I was buyin’ eggs at the mercantile. Heck, everybody
knows.”

Prophet snorted.
“Whole town probably
knew before I did.”

“
Huh?”

“
Never mind.” Prophet saw no
reason to go into the particulars of last night’s debauch. Truth
was, he deserved what he’d gotten. He was probably damn lucky he’d
only been tagged with a badge. In Prophet’s business, getting
soused was a good way to get yourself greased by someone holding a
grudge.

As he rode, he went over the
faces he
’d
come to know in Bitter Creek—wondering which one wanted him dead.
Anger tensed his jaw. He was trapped here now, tricked into taking
a job he didn’t want, shot at by someone who wouldn’t show his
face.

When he and the kid got back to
Bitter Creek, Ronnie
headed to the cafe with his deer. Prophet watered the gray
horse at a stock tank, then returned the mount to the alley behind
the bank.

When he
’d tied the horse to the iron wagon
wheel, he took a gander around the alley, peering amidst the trash
for any clue as to the gunman’s identity. Seeing nothing the man
might have dropped when he’d leapt from the roof to the shipping
crates, Prophet decided to check out the roof itself.

When he
’d piled the crates, climbed them,
and hoisted himself onto the roof, he crept along the shakes,
sliding his glance this way and that. Just behind the false facade
jutting six feet above the roof, he crouched to get a better look
at the shakes, hoping the man might have left a shell casing in the
cracks between the shingles—anything offering some clue as to the
bastard’s identity.

Nothing.

He
’d started to rise when something caught
his eye. A rusty nail jutted from the side of the wooden facade.
Wrapped around the nail head were several blue threads streaming
out in the breeze.

Prophet removed the threads from
the nail and inspected them between thumb and index finger.
They
’d been
torn from faded blue cloth. They hadn’t been wrapped very tightly
around the nail, which meant they hadn’t clung to the nail for more
than a couple of hours, else the wind would have blown them
away.

He
’d have bet silver cartwheels against a
carpetbagger’s honor that the gunman had torn his shirt on the nail
when he was levering shots at Prophet.

Pocketing the strands, the bounty hunter
straightened and walked carefully back toward the rear of the bank,
lowered himself to the crates, and leapt to the ground.

A woman
’s voice shot at him from his left.
“Cousin Sarah!
There
you are!”

Prophet turned to see a
diminutive old lady clad in
faded gingham approaching the gray mare. She
turned her prune face, seared by at least seventy years of outdoor
labor, to Prophet. “I was visiting Emma, and when I came out,
Cousin Sarah was
gone!
I’ve been looking
all over!”

“
There she is,” Prophet said,
sheepish.