Helldorado (7 page)

It had been hell, all right. And Prophet had held her every night while she’d screeched and squealed and sobbed it all out in her dreams.

Maybe here in Juniper, he thought as the first corrals and stock pens and a clattering windmill pushed up along the trail, she’d find relief from those nightmares and could finally put all of her sharp-edged memories to rest.

The town was good-sized and sprawling, though obviously not planned out very well. The main street sort of zigzagged, and new buildings were going up amidst the rubble of the old. There were still tent shacks here and there and log buildings that were part canvas and that bespoke the days when Helldorado was a hell-stomping hiders’ and miners’ camp. Whores’ cribs flanked the tent saloons, and miners’ shacks stood along the stream that angled along the town’s north edge.

But everywhere Prophet looked as he and Louisa clomped along the street, weaving around parked or moving wagons and pausing as two muddy drovers chased a runaway bull from one side of the street to another while a shaggy collie dog nipped at the bellowing beast’s kicking rear hooves, there were big two- and three-story wood frame buildings with false fronts announcing hotels and saloons and sandwich shops and breweries and laundries and ladies’ hat shops and general stores and even toy stores and entire stores given over to books! Most were so new that the resin in the wood made the town smell like a pine forest—albeit a pine forest near a stockyard.

In the midst of it, and planted right smack in the middle of the street, with an old saloon tent on one side and Machiavelli’s Mining Supplies on the other, stood a tall, narrow, richly ornate building of red brick and sandstone, and which large letters formed of black brick across the second story identified as the Juniper Opera House.

Prophet stopped Mean and Ugly in front of the place, which was barricaded off from the street by boards and sandbags, likely to keep runaway cows from breaking out the windows, and poked his hat off his forehead, whistling his awe.

“What’s the matter—you’ve never seen an opera house before?” Louisa said in her condescending way.

“Why, sure I have. Even seen a gent up in Leadville last winter—fella named Oscar Wilde—give a talk on some dead Italian fella in the Tabor Opera House. Sissiest damn fool I ever did see, but he could talk the corn off a cob. But I sure as hell never expected to find an opry place as fancy as this one here this far off the beaten Wyoming path.” Prophet chuckled and narrowed a hopeful eye at Louisa. “I reckon this place is even more civilized than I thought it was.”

A man screamed behind them, and Prophet and Louisa turned to see that the bull had run up onto the boardwalk fronting a men’s clothing shop, pinning a tall gent in a long, clawhammer coat and beaver opera hat against the building while the two drovers yelled and waved their hats and the dog barked and danced.

“I’d say it’s still got some Helldorado in it,” Louisa said with a chuckle.

Prophet gigged Mean and Ugly around the opera house, continuing up the main drag. “Well, it ain’t New York City.”

“So what do you have in mind for us here, Lou? I can’t sing, so that sort of precludes the opera house. And you can’t, either, in spite of your best efforts while bathing. Thank god that only comes around once a year!”

“Very funny, Miss Bonnyventure.”

“I’ve told you—it’s Bonaventure, you lout.”

“Look around,” Prophet said, swinging his gaze from one side of the street to the other. “There’s every kind of shop you can think of. And look there, on the door of that haberdashery place. ‘Help Wanted. Query Within.’”

“I can’t see you selling buttons to old ladies in picture hats, Lou.”

Prophet glanced to his left, and a well-dressed gent waved to him from the covered boardwalk in front of the Federated Bank and Trust of Southern Wyoming Territory. Prophet flushed and turned away sharply but checked Mean and Ugly down.

“You got my funny bone, Miss Bonnyventure.” He pointed toward a boxlike, nondescript building ahead and on the street’s right side. “There’s a bathhouse. Why don’t you go on over and scrub some trail dust off your purty little hide without starting a riot amongst the men folk. I’ll be along in a minute.”

“Where’re you going?”

Prophet hesitated. “I’m gonna look for a livery barn.” “We passed three.”

“Will you quit?” He jerked his chin at the bathhouse. “Go on and get yourself cleaned up now, and I’ll see if I can scrounge up enough pocket jingle to buy you a steak and one o’ them sarsaparillas you love so much.”

“You’re broke.”

“Then you’ll buy me a steak and a beer.”

With a haughty chuff, Louisa booted the pinto up the street. As she pulled up to one of the three hitchracks fronting the bathhouse, Prophet reined Mean over to the bank, where the well-dressed gent who’d waved and who also wore the five-pointed star of a county sheriff on the lapel of his black frock coat stood with a man even better dressed though slighter in build and puffing a long, black cheroot.

“Well, look what the damn cat dragged in,” growled Hell-Bringin’ Hiram Severin, standing beside the gent with the cigar while holding the flaps of his coat back from the two ivory-gripped Colts positioned for the cross draw on his lean hips. Beneath the brim of his black derby, he had a face like a crumbling old barn, and his knife-slash mouth was capped with a silver, soup-strainer mustache through which a gold front tooth flashed in the afternoon sunshine.

“What cat?” said the man next to him, puffing his cheroot as his black eyes strayed across the street to where Prophet had parted with Louisa. “It looked like a blond dragged him into town, and a pretty one at that.” Not quite as old as the sheriff, who was in his early sixties, this man was hatless, with elegant silver-streaked hair combed straight back from a prominent widow’s peak, and a heavy Spanish accent.

“Nah, she didn’t drag me.” Prophet reined up in front of the boardwalk. “I had to drag her, though fortunately she didn’t kick and scream too damn loud. It’ll be the gents in the washhouse who’ll be kickin’ and screamin’ when she starts takin’ her clothes off.”

Chuckling, the big, trail-worn bounty hunter stepped down from his saddle and, lifting his double-barreled shotgun up over his head and hanging it from his saddle horn by its wide leather lanyard, extended his hand to his old pal, Hiram Severin. “How’n the hell you been, you old chicken thief?”

“Better’n you look, ya damn brush wolf!” Severin pumped Prophet’s hand with exuberance, and turned to the well-attired Mexican. “Don Jose Encina, bank president and mayor of Juniper, please meet your new gold guard, Lou Prophet.”

PROPHET REMEMBERED ENCINA’S name from the telegram he’d received from Severin in response to his inquiry about employment in the sheriff’s fair town. “Don, pleased to make your acquaintance. Sorry for the trail dust and foul odor, but I aim to fix that situation over to the bathhouse in two jangles of a whore’s bell.”

“The pleasure is mine, Senor Prophet,” Encinca said, tapping ashes from his smoldering cheroot. “I have heard much about you from Sheriff Severin. Your inquiry for employment came at a most opportune time for us both, as I’d no sooner heard you were looking for work here in Juniper than I lost my head rider to an unfortunate horse accident, and the sheriff strolled into my office with your telegram under his hat.”

“Well, then, I reckon we’re both dancin’ in high cotton!” Prophet chuckled. “When do I start?”

“Would be tomorrow be too early? I need a short run from . . .”

The bank president’s eyes drifted past Prophet and into the street behind him. Hiram’s Severin’s gaze had wandered in the same direction, so Prophet swung around to see what they were looking at so intensely and felt his belly tighten.

“Ah, shit,” he muttered.

Louisa was riding over from the direction of the bathhouse, within twenty yards and closing and cocking her head to one side, a suspicious look sitting hard on her pretty, heart-shaped, hazel-eyed face.

Prophet set a gloved fist on his hip. “Louisa, damnit, I told you to go on over to the bathhouse.”

Louisa blinked and curled her upper lip at him. “You’re not my boss, you two-timing son of a muskrat. What are you up to?”

“None of your damn business.”

Jose Encina cleared his throat meaningfully, and Prophet turned to see the man forming one of those smiles that Louisa’s presence always evoked in members of the male sex—sort of an expressive throwback to when said male was eleven years old and he realized he could do more with the prettiest girl in the schoolyard than merely dip her braids in his inkwell.

Or thought he could.

Prophet shifted his gaze to Hiram Severin and saw that the old law bringer wore a similar expression as he quickly doffed his beaver hat to hold it before him, worrying the upturned brim with a couple of fat brown fingers with yellow nails thick as clamshells.

Prophet returned his glower to Louisa. “Don Encina and Sheriff Hiram Severin, this here is my sometime partner and all-the-time thorn in the ass, Miss Louisa Bonnyventure her own self.”

“That’s Bonaventure,” Louisa said through a glassy smile. “There never has been a ‘y’ in it, though this uncouth brute has never managed to get it right and likely never will if he lives to be a thousand years old.”

“Ahhh,” Encina said as though he’d just sipped an unexpectedly fine wine and gave a courtly bow. “How wonderful to meet you, senorita. I have heard a lot about you. The sidekick of Senor Prophet and a formidable bounty hunter in your own right.”

He must have seen the puzzled light in Prophet’s eyes. Taking a short puff off his cigar, the banker shifted his hungry gaze back to the girl on the pinto and let the smoke dribble out with his words, “I have read about the two of you in the
Rocky Mountain News
, whenever I’ve been so fortunate to have had one brought to me by business associates from Denver. Quite the pair, you’ve made, taking down many bad men that somehow managed to elude frontier lawmen and who would, no doubt, still be wreaking their black havoc if you had not brought them to justice.”

“I’ll vouch for that,” Hiram Severin said in his burly wheeze that bespoke a lifetime of strong whiskey and harsh tobacco. “There ain’t enough lawmen out here. Now there’s sometimes too many bad bounty hunters, but if you ask me, we can’t get enough of the like of my old friend Prophet here.”

As Severin shuttled his gaze back to Louisa, he smiled so brightly that Prophet thought the old lawman’s eyes were going to pop out of his skull and his false teeth would crack. “And, of course, his purty sidekick.”

“Lou’s my sidekick,” Louisa growled. “And I thought my sidekick here always told me what was on his mind. Now, however, I’m fearful he’s been dealing from the middle of the deck.”

“That’d be the bottom of the deck,” Prophet corrected her through gritted teeth. “You’d know that if you’d ever played cards.”

“A game for sharpies and saloon frogs.”

“I’ve gotten a lot of tips on badmen and their hideouts over games of stud, Miss Fancy Britches.”

“Suppose we get back to the subject,” Louisa said, jerking her chin toward the bank behind the two older gents, who were admiring her through toothy grins. “You’re working for banks now? Doing what? Sweeping the floors and emptying spittoons, or something more exciting?”

Before Prophet could speak, Encina said, “A bit more exciting than that, but not much more, Miss Bonaventure. Senor Prophet has hired on to lead the gold trains from the mines around Juniper, to my bank here in town. In the old days, before Sheriff Severin came to our fair city and swept it more or less free of crime, such a job guarding the gold was a dangerous one indeed. Now, with the country scoured of badmen, it is little more dangerous than a Sunday afternoon ride along Chokecherry Creek with an hombre’s”—he gave another winning smile as his dark eyes gave Louisa the lusty up and down—“favorite senorita.”

“Lou said he wanted a peaceful town to settle down in,” Severin said, doffing his hat and poking his fingers into his vest. “And a job he was qualified for. Well, I didn’t see a reason to waste old Proph here in a livery stable, mucking out stalls. So I referred him to Jose here. I’m sure, Miss Bonaventure, that if the good banker had another opening on his gold-guarding crew, he wouldn’t think twice of awarding that position to you . . . uh . . . in spite of you obviously being a member of the . . . uh . . . much fairer sex an’ all.”

Severin grinned and let his adobe-brown eyes roam the same bewitching path which the banker’s had taken.

“As a matter of fact,” the banker said, “I could use an extra rider on—”

“Now, hold on!” Prophet interrupted the man but kept his angry gaze pinned to his partner. “That ain’t how I planned this out at all. Not at all.”

“Oh?” Louisa arched her brows. “You intended for me to sell buttons and sewing needles to old ladies while you guarded gold shipments?”

“That’s right, I did.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s time you settled down and started acting like a lady instead of a man with . . . well, uh, with . . . a good-lookin’ stride and bad case of pistolero fever. Time you settled down and settled in with a respectable job for a young lady. And me, hell, what am I qualified for besides bounty huntin’? About the only damn thing I can think of is guardin’ gold shipments.” Louisa opened her mouth to speak, but Prophet held a hand up, cutting her off. “And it ain’t like you’re gonna miss out on any damn rodeo. Like Don Encina done said, the country’s been cleaned up.”

The banker nodded and broke in with: “We haven’t had any trouble with the shipments for over two years, haven’t lost any gold in three.”

“There, you see?” Prophet jerked his head from the banker to Louisa. “It’s no more eventful than a trip to the shithouse. Probably downright boring, in fact—wouldn’t you say, Don?”

The banker raised his brows and shrugged noncommittally, absently puffing his cigar.