The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6) (25 page)

“
Shhh. Doc’s on the
way.”

“
Thanks ... for the other
night.”

He beat away a bitter frown with a smile.
“My pleasure.”

“
I didn’t deserve such
sweetness.”

She smiled balefully and winced. Her eyes
rolled up, and the light left them. The lids drooped. Her head
canted against his shoulder.

Tenderly, Prophet smoothed the hair back
from her cheek. Someone moved up on his left, and he turned to see
Ralph Carmody approaching, his features drawn, his hat in his
hands. The others from the saloon stood at the edge of the yard,
not knowing what to do.

“
What happened?”

“
Polk,” Prophet said.

Carmody shook his head, befuddled. “You
seen him?”

“
No, but Mary must’ve seen it
all. Miss Whitman told me she offered her food and the bed in her
back room from time to time.”

Prophet slipped out from beneath Fianna
and walked over to Mary. He crouched, grasped the withered woman’s
shoulders in his hands, and shook her gently.

“
Polk,” Prophet said. “Which way
did he go?”

Mary sobbed, lifted her head as if to
scream, then closed her mouth and extended her right arm west.

Prophet released her, straightened, and
tramped through the scattered crowd toward Main Street.

“
Proph, can I ride with you?” It
was Ronnie Williams running up beside him.

The kid knew this country better than
Prophet did.

“
Get your horse.”

It wasn’t hard
to cut the
relatively fresh sign of Wallace Polk’s galloping horse from the
wheel ruts along the mining and mail road leading west from Bitter
Creek.

As Prophet and Ronnie alternately loped
and walked their horses through the sage-tufted hogbacks and sandy
rimrocks, Prophet hoped to gain sight of Polk before dark, about
four hours distant, and let the druggist lead Prophet to Crumb and
Crumb’s new “lawman”—all of whom he hoped to throw in the Bitter
Creek jailhouse.

But he’d not hesitate to kill if it came
to that. Crumb and Polk were two of the most cowardly killers he’d
ever known.

It was a good plan, and it should have
worked.

Only, Prophet didn’t count on Polk being
able to stay ahead of him until dark. The druggist, probably
knowing Prophet would be trailing him, and taking the livery’s
fastest horse, had done just that.

The sun was a bright, bloody blossom
behind the dark western peaks when Prophet and Ronnie stood on a
low butte, their horses’ reins in their hands, a sage-spiced breeze
wafting against their faces. Prophet stared dully southwest,
knowing he could ride no farther without risking losing Polk’s
trail in the darkness.

He and Ronnie would have to bivouac for
the night and begin following Polk’s sign again in the
morning.

They made a cold camp, saying little.
Lying in his blanket roll, Prophet watched in his mind’s eye as
Fianna Whitman walked out of her house again, hand across her
stomach, and slouched down to her porch steps. He thought of
Frieda. He’d had to leave town without telling her the reason; when
she didn’t see him tonight, she’d wonder.

He and Ronnie were in the saddle again as
soon as the dawn showed them Polk’s hoofprints traversing an old
trapper’s trail known as the Medicine Bow cutoff.

“
Crumb must’ve met his lawman
fella somewhere around Broken Lance,” Ronnie said as they trotted
their horses through a pine forest, chickadees chirping in the
branches. “Must’ve come up from western Colorado.”

“
I wonder if it’s Grant
Schaeffer,” Prophet said.

“
Who’s he?”

“
Lawman and hired gun. Shirttail
relative of Wes Hardin. They call him the Eagle ’cause he’s got the
glassiest pale blue eyes, and they say he can shoot a spider off a
fence post from a hundred yards. He wore a badge in Deadwood and
Leadville, then got caught rigging faro games and selling hooch to
Injuns. Last I heard he was in Utah. He’s the only man of his ilk I
can think of who Crumb might’ve found out this way. Bitter Creek
would be a fine remote place for the Eagle to hide out a few years
... and make some money in the process.”

Prophet turned to Ronnie, who flinched under
his dark gaze.

“
If it’s him, you stay clear.
Been enough folks killed in Bitter Creek without the ole Eagle
addin’ you to the bone-yard.”

Late that afternoon, they found a cold
fire pit in a narrow mountain valley, where Polk had met up with
two riders who’d ridden in from the southwest, Crumb on his way
back from wherever he’d picked up the new marshal of Bitter
Creek.

“
Why didn’t we meet ’em on the
trail?” Ronnie asked, looking around the fire ring at the cropped
grass where three horses had been picketed last night.

Prophet was walking west through the brush,
eyes on the ground.

He walked several yards away from the fire
ring, lifted his head, and peered straight west. Finally, he threw
out an arm and said without turning, “Looks like they headed
through that gap in those hills yonder.”

“
Trying to get around
us?”

Prophet slowly shook his head. Scowling,
he tramped back to the fire ring, grabbed Mean’s reins, and climbed
into the saddle. “We’ll see. Keep your eyes peeled. Polk’s told ’em
the whole story by now, and they might try to bushwhack
us.”

They followed the gap through the sunburnt
hills, and rode for a good hour through rolling sagebrush and high,
craggy rimrocks. The trail of Polk and the other two men followed a
creek, which Ronnie told Prophet was the Jackrabbit, feeding the
Sweetwater up near the Buffalo Buttes. They spotted a few rangy
cows on the hillsides and occasional dry pies littered the stream
bank.

“
It’s been a while since I rode
out this far from town, but I’m pretty sure we’re on Jackrabbit
range,” Ronnie said, eyeing one such cluster of cow
pies.

“
What’s that mean?”

“
It means we’re in trouble,”
Ronnie said, cutting his eyes around. “The Jackrabbit’s run by
Jedediah Spillane. He’s business partners with Crumb; Spillane’s
half owner of both Bitter Creek saloons and both
brothels.”

“
So Crumb’s headin’ for the
Jackrabbit for help.” He paused, thinking it over. Polk had found
Crumb and the gunman, told them how Prophet had wiped out the
Lovell bunch, so they’d headed for the Spillane spread to recruit a
few of the rancher’s best shooters.

“
How many men does this Spillane
have on his roll, Ronnie?”

The kid shrugged. “It ain’t a real big
spread, and I heard since Spillane’s old, he ain’t been adding to
it. I’d guess no more than ten. But most of ’em are fightin’
men.”

“
This far off the beaten path,
and in Ute and Cheyenne country, they probably have to
be.”

Prophet looked around, made sure his pistol
and shotgun were loaded, then snugged his hat down and kneed Mean
into a trot.

Late afternoon found them dismounted and
lying prone behind the lip of a high ridge, their horses
ground-hitched at the base of the butte behind them. Keeping his
head low to the grassy lip, Prophet stared through his field
glasses at the ranch headquarters nestled in the brushy hollow
below.

The compound consisted of a weathered,
L-shaped cabin, two hay barns, several corrals, a windmill, and a
simple log bunkhouse beside a blacksmith shop. Horses milled in the
corrals, and several men were working the rough-string broncs near
a snubbing post.

The mustachioed Mexican blacksmith hammered
the hub of a big Murphy hay wagon while two collie dogs sat behind
him, staring at the black-and-white cat cowering at the edge of the
shop roof, tail curled over its back. The dogs wagged their own
tails and eagerly shifted their front paws.

Prophet focused on the main house, before
which three horses were tethered to a hitch rack. Two drank water
from a stock trough. The third lowered its head and shook itself,
making the stirrups of its saddle flap like wings. The coats of all
three horses shone with sweat.

Prophet lowered the glasses and turned to
Ronnie. “That’s what they’ve done, all right. They’ve gone for
help.”

Ronnie squeezed his rifle tensely. “What
now?”

Prophet scanned the ranch again. Finally,
he lowered the glasses and turned to Ronnie. “Is there a direct
trail between here and Bitter Creek?”

“
The Mud Creek Trail is about as
direct as it gets out here.”

“
Would they take it?”

“
I don’t see why not.”

Prophet spit. “We head up trail a ways,
hunker down, and wait for Crumb, Polk, and whoever else to head for
Bitter Creek.”

He and young Ronnie crawled backward down
the hill then, well below the ridgeline, stood, and jogged down the
grade to the horses.

They mounted and rode through rough
country cut by draws and dry creek beds, seeing more cattle but
twice as many black-tail deer and one rare black coyote with a
white-tipped tail. Some Indian tribes regarded a brush with such a
beast as bad luck; others had determined it good. Riding out here
in Indian country, with a gunfight with white badmen imminent and
only one man to back his play, Prophet silently prayed the coyote
meant Crumb and Polk’s asses would both belong to him by this time
tomorrow, and not the other way around.

Prophet wanted to intercept Crumb and Polk
far enough away from the ranch that their gunfire could not be
heard at the Jackrabbit headquarters. Near dark and after another
hour’s ride, he and Ronnie hunkered on a slope strewn with rocks
and boulders and stippled with wind-twisted pines. The trail cut
through the narrow pass fifty feet below, a pale ribbon between
steep, jagged walls.

Taking positions on either side of the
trail, they waited through the long, starry night, watching and
listening. They waited through the morning and early afternoon.
Prophet was beginning to think Crumb had chosen a different route
back to Bitter Creek when he spied movement south and west along
the Mud Creek Trail, a half mile before the pass.

He raised his glasses, brought the seven
riders into focus.

Henry Crumb, in his gray suit and bowler
hat, rode at the head of the pack, beside a man dressed in a
tailored dark suit with a high-crowned tan hat with a Texas crease.
The man was as slightly built as Crumb, but square-shouldered, and
his face looked slapped together from plaster, with a dark,
buckhorn mustache waxed and curled high at the ends.

He rode stiff-backed and forward, butt
lightly slapping the saddle. Holding his reins high and close to
his chest, he stared intently over his black’s bobbing
head—resembling for all the world a human hound scenting
blood.

Prophet chewed his lower lip and chuffed.
Grant “The Eagle” Schaeffer. The new marshal of Bitter
Creek.

He glassed the others in the pack, saw
four men dressed in drovers’ garb, six-shooters on their hips,
rifles in their saddle scabbards. Deciding the four Jackrabbit
riders were nothing special, just fair-to-middling firepower whose
purpose was merely to back the Eagle’s play, he raised the glasses
a notch.

Polk rode at the tail end of the pack, not
looking quite so mild-faced today.

Anxiety creased his eyes as he slouched in
the saddle, elbows rising high with his mount’s every lunge, his
dusty dress coat flapping out behind him, the brim of his derby
pasted against his high forehead. Several times he shook his head
as if to clear it, and lowered his head to brush his nose against
his right arm, once nearly losing his hat in the
process.

“
You and Crumb are at the end of
your run, Wallace,” Prophet snarled as he glassed the man, who
suddenly grabbed his saddle horn to keep from falling. Prophet
snorted. “In spite o’ your nose candy, you know it.”

Prophet lowered the glasses, turned to where
Ronnie hid in the rocks on the other side of the narrow defile, and
raised his right arm. The kid waved. Grasping his Sharps in both
hands, he doffed his hat and hunkered low between two boulders.

Prophet waited until the riders were within
fifty yards, then scurried out from his rocky niche, leaping onto a
flat-topped boulder below. He stood there, boots spread, his rifle
held low across his thighs.

Absently, he chewed the quirley in the right
corner of his mouth, staring, waiting.

Only a few seconds passed before Schaeffer
spotted him, the gunman’s chin raising, his body tensing. The man
held up a gloved hand; with the other he reined his horse to a
halt.

The others checked their own mounts down and
turned to the gunman curiously, several murmuring questions.
Schaeffer replied by extending his right arm toward Prophet.

The others tensed, holding their reins tight
in their gloved hands. Several shucked rifles from their saddle
boots or revolvers from their cartridge belts. Crumb grabbed his
own six-shooter and held the barrel in the air while staring toward
Prophet, his horse prancing nervously beneath him.

Prophet glowered at the group through the
rising dust, working the quirley from one corner of his mouth to
the other. The riders were about thirty yards away and tightly
bunched, well within rifle range.