Helldorado (21 page)

“I would have heard.” Louisa pushed off her hands, climbed to her feet, and stared through the brush toward the trail.

As she stepped around one side of the rock, Prophet stepped around the other, holding his quirley down low by his side. They met in the trail, glancing back in the direction from which they’d come.

“Nothin’.” Prophet puffed the quirley absently, sending his glance into the brush off both sides of the trail.

“Maybe they smelled your quirley and chose a different trail.”

“Maybe they smelled you, you burr-tailed filly, and decided they wasn’t up to it.” Prophet strode back off the path, heading for Mean and Ugly. “I reckon we’d best check it out.”

When they’d mounted their horses, they trotted back over the rise, both holding their rifles over their saddle horns and looking around cautiously. They rode a mile back along the twisting trail, with broken, rugged terrain showing on both sides, but no extra sets of tracks overlying their own and the twin furrows that had been ground by the wagon’s steel-shod wheels.

“Damn peculiar,” Prophet said, scouring the ground.

Louisa was looking toward a bluff whose crown had been eroded down to bare rock, spying nothing untoward. “They must have left the trail farther back. They gotta be circling around, Lou, meeting up with others farther ahead.”

“I reckon you’re right, Miss Bonnyventure. We’d best catch up to Hitt and the boys, and we’d best catch up to ’em fast. That witch ain’t only pokin’ me now—she’s snarlin’ in my ear!”

With that, he neck-reined Mean around and touched spurs to the horse’s flanks. He didn’t stop galloping until nearly a half hour later, at the mouth of a narrow canyon, the trail of which rose steeply ahead of him, between craggy gray walls. Pines stood atop the walls, offering good cover. The lips of both ridges were a couple of hundred yards away, but a good rifleman could make the shot.

“What is it?” Louisa was looking around, holding her carbine up high across her chest, her lips parted with a worried look.

“Never liked canyons.” Prophet clucked Mean ahead. “Let’s go easy.”

They rode single file, Prophet in the lead. Their hooves clacked on the canyon’s pitted stone floor.

Ten yards, twenty. Up the canyon floor they climbed, Prophet’s heart beating in his ears.

One good thing was that the cold finger had been removed from the back of his neck. Why that made a difference, he didn’t know, with his heart beating a powwow rhythm. But then, ever since the war, he’d had a fluttery heart. You couldn’t see that many kith and kin killed horribly before your eyes and not come out of that bloody fandango with something fluttering oddly.

Prophet’s eyes raked the ridges around him. On the ridge on his right, a dark shadow moved between two trees.

“Hold it!” Prophet jerked back on Mean’s reins and narrowed his eyes at the shadow.

“What?”

Prophet pointed. “There.”

The shadow crouched down behind a rock, and Prophet expected to see a rifle barrel snake out from behind the same rock. He raised his Winchester, pressing the stock firmly against his shoulder, but before he could thumb the hammer back, the rock suddenly leaned out away from the ridge, exposing the man-shaped figure standing behind it.

Prophet caught a fleeting glimpse of a short, bandy-legged man in a short-crowned straw sombrero—Juventino Casol—before his attention returned to the rock that seemed to float in the air for an instant just beneath the ridge’s lip. Then it slammed into a nest of similar-sized boulders about thirty yards below the ridge, the shotgun-like blast of the concussion reaching Prophet’s ears a second later as the first boulder and several more began rolling and plunging down the side of the ridge.

Each rock loosed several others. In turn, the others loosed several more, and in a matter of seconds Prophet was staring up the ridge at a hundred boulders crashing, leaping, bounding, and rolling toward him, some cracking in half, others in thirds, the dust of the plunging rocks boiling like steam from a teakettle.

“Let’s go!” both Louisa and Prophet shouted at nearly the same time, wheeling their pitching horses in tight circles and spurring them back down the canyon.

Prophet glanced over his shoulder, his loins turning to ice.

The rocks hit the canyon floor fifty yards behind him and plunged toward him brutally, mercilessly—roaring, causing the ground to leap beneath Mean’s plundering hooves. The rocks doubled, tripled in size in Prophet’s eyes, the rising din turning to merging thunderclaps in his ears.

Prophet turned forward in his saddle, and crouched low, whipping Mean’s flanks with his rein ends. He flung a hand up to snatch his hat from the wind.

“Haul ass, you ugly cayuse!” The shout was drowned by the rockslide’s raging fury. He could no longer hear the hammering of the horses’ hooves, either.

Prophet glanced at Louisa. She rode as one with her horse, stirrups up and back, her head nearly hidden behind the pinto’s extended neck and buffeting cream mane. She held her carbine in one hand over the pinto’s left wither.

Prophet jerked his gaze forward, willing the canyon mouth closer. Unlike the rocks plunging toward him with the dumb fury of gravity hazing them on, the daylight-filled gap seemed to be standing still.

The bounty hunter gritted his teeth, feeling the hot, dusty wind of the rocks gaining on him—leaping and lunging and seeming to try to overtake each other as they hammered straight down the pitched canyon floor—snarling, fire-breathing demon hounds hell-bent on overtaking the furiously galloping riders and turning the canyon into a sarcophagus.

Prophet whipped his head from side to side and cursed.

Nope . . . they weren’t going to make it.

PROPHET’S HEART LIGHTENED slightly as though to an unexpected, strangely affecting piano chord. He glanced over his shoulder to see that the rockslide had slowed just enough that he and Louisa were staying ahead of it, with the slide’s front rocks bouncing and tumbling about ten yards behind Mean and the pinto’s hammering hooves.

The gap yawned like the sunlit door to heaven, birds flicking this way and that.

Prophet and Louisa careened through it, each turning their horses off opposite sides of the trail and behind the canyon’s jagged front walls. Pointing Mean toward some spindly aspens, Prophet checked the dun down and curveted to see a few gray rocks spilling from the canyon mouth to settle in the trail just beyond it.

Dust rose. The rumbling inside the canyon sounded like a distant thunderstorm. The rocks shifted as they settled, clattering over one another, a few smaller ones spilling farther out along the trail beyond the canyon.

A silence settled. It was like the silence after a plains twister, heavy and complete. There weren’t even any bird-calls, and the wind had died as though in awe of the recent calamity.

Prophet looked over the pile of smoking rubble to see Louisa riding toward him. They met in the trail in front of the rubble, peering over it toward the canyon mouth. The rocks and boulders, with here and there a cedar or pine branch, had sealed the mouth up tighter than a cork in a whiskey bottle.

Louisa could face five pistoleers and look cool as stone statue. But almost being hammered to pulp and shredded saddle leather under the rockslide had even her rattled. Her eyes were glassy, and strands of blond hair stuck to her sweaty, dusty face.

“How in the hell did that get started?” she asked Prophet.

“You didn’t see?”

“I saw the first rock fall.”

“Casol pushed it off the ridge.”

Louisa looked at him, skeptical lines digging into her tanned forehead. “The Mex?”

“I think I glimpsed Hitt behind him.” Prophet looked around for an alternate route, seeing none. His heart was still hammering and his shirt was sweat-plastered against his back. Mean and Ugly coughed, blew, and rippled his withers as he studied the rocks in front of him, lowering his snout to give the rubble a delicate sniff.

“I do believe, Miss Louisa,” Prophet said with a fateful sigh, shifting around in his saddle, “we done been hornswoggled.” He sleeved sweat from his brow. “Yessir, hornswoggled like a whiskey drummer at a church social where nothin’ stronger than sarsaparilly is a served.”

 

Hell-Bringin’ Hiram Severin stood on the front porch of the sheriff’s office, smoking a cigar and enjoying the quiet commotion of a controlled but industrious day in Juniper, when he heard the clomp of hooves in the street to his right.

He turned to see his chief deputy, Frank Dryden, angle toward him while holding a Henry rifle on his shoulder. Dryden’s eyes, hardened by his years in Yuma pen, and shaded by the brim of his brown bowler, looked official.

“The gold’s on the way, Sheriff,” the deputy said, halting his blue roan at the hitchrack fronting the office, where two more saddled horses stood tied. “Horn gave me the signal from Ute Ridge. Wagon should be pullin’ into town in a half hour or so.”

“All right,” Severin said with a nod, removing the wet cigar from his mouth with a puff of blue smoke and inspecting the gray coal with a bored, quiet air. “Gather the other deputies and take up your positions. I’ll grab my pistol and head on over to the bank.”

Dryden pinched his hat brim to the old town tamer, then nudged the roan ahead with his spurs, heading off to summon the other deputies, Brink Moffett and Giuseppe Antero, who would be patrolling the western side streets this time of the day—two in the afternoon. Severin watched Dryden recede into the slow, midweek traffic, heading toward the main drag, then turned and went into his office.

He liked not wearing a gun most of the time, when he could remember not to put it on. To him, walking around unarmed, wearing only his sheriff’s badge to show he was the law, was a sign of success. Sort of the way a successful businessman wore a potbelly to signify his prosperity. Only a sheriff who had tamed his town could walk around unarmed in it, letting his deputies do whatever minor bits of dirty work needed cleaning up with six-shooters or carbines.

When he’d strapped his old but clean and well-oiled Peacemaker onto his hip, he adjusted his brown bowler at its customary angle on his head and headed out of the office and into the street. The jail office was on a side street southwest of the bank, and Hell-Bringin’ Hiram, knowing he had ample time—it usually took the wagon at least a half hour to arrive at the bank after being spotted from Ute Ridge—took a leisurely stroll.

Severin was a proud, taciturn man, and an entire team of Prussian plow horses couldn’t have dragged it out of the old lawdog that he enjoyed his reputation as a whang-tough law bringer and that he enjoyed a frequent, slow stroll through town, tipping his hat to the ladies, ruffling the hair of the towheaded boys, for the sole purpose of basking in the glow of their admiring eyes.

Usually, he got the opportunity to order a couple of out-of-work saddle tramps, or those lingering too long in town from one of the ranches, to move along or saddle up and to see them nod and quicken their paces, maybe favor the aging sheriff with a glance of wary caution. He did so now outside of the Rawhide Saloon, where a couple of men from the Chain Link were drinking beer and sparking a little, redheaded whore in plain sight of any passing womenfolk or younguns.

“Yessir, Mr. Severin,” the Chain Link foreman, Case Reeve, said, flushing and clearing his throat as he unwrapped his arms from the little redhead and tipped his beer at Severin. “We was just havin’ one and fixin’ to head on back.”

“Finish the one and head back now, Case,” Severin ordered in passing, keeping his voice affable but with that uncompromising steel edge.

He didn’t look back to make sure his orders were being followed. He knew they’d be followed, and looking back would only be a show of weakness. To a lawdog, confidence was almost as handy a weapon as a finely tuned six-shooter or a Winchester rifle that had been used so often the owner’s cheek had worn a pale wedge in the stock.

At the bank, Severin pinched his hat brim to one of the lady tellers, despite his not approving of women working out of the home, and opened the gate in the low, varnished rail that separated the small lobby from the bankers’ offices. He paused when he saw young, impeccably attired Miguel Encina speaking with the loan officer, Herman Mayville, near Mayville’s desk by the solemnly ticking grandfather clock with its big, gold pendulums.

“Your father in, Miguel?” the sheriff asked.

“Pa’s in his office,” Miguel said with his customarily friendly smile. “Anything I can help you with, Sheriff?”

“Gold wagon’s on the way.” The sheriff continued straight back toward the senior Encina’s office, on the opposite side of the large, open, carpeted area from his son’s. “I’m gonna let him know.”

“You could let me know, Sheriff.”

Severin paused to turn back to young Encina, who had turned to face him beside Mayville. The smile on the young banker’s face had become rigid, his brown eyes wide and brash. The dimples in his cheeks looked counterfeit. The loan officer, Mayville, turned toward the sheriff with a vaguely puzzled frown.

“I am the bank president, Sheriff,” young Miguel said, an edge in his voice, the wooden smile frozen in place. “In spite of the sign on my office door. You need only let me know that the gold is on the way. If I think my father needs to know, I’ll inform him.”

Severin held the young banker’s gaze. He knew that beneath the surface affability, Miguel hated his guts. The young man had never really gotten over his four days at the bottom of that mineshaft. Oh, he pretended he had, and he’d straightened out and made a good life for himself in Juniper under his father’s tutelage, but he really hadn’t forgiven the sheriff.

Which had always made Severin wonder if young Miguel had ever really forgiven his father.

“Well, now I reckon you know,” Severin said with a wink. “And I’ll just go make sure your pa knows about it, too . . . seein’ as how you seem busy with Mr. Mayville an’ all.”