Staring Down the Devil (A Lou Prophet Western #5) (10 page)

She
withdrew the rag and gazed at her handiwork. She pursed her lips,
pleased, then returned her sultry gaze to his. “I believe you do,
at that.”

Prophet’s throat constricted with desire, and to temper it, he
drew deep on the quirley and turned away from both her and the
Cossack, whose eyes Prophet could feel boring into him.

She was wringing
the cloth out in the bowl when Prophet heard a low whine. Suddenly
Sergei leaped from the bench and grabbed the LeMatt from his
holster. Prophet froze, thinking the Russian was going to beef
him.

“Wolf!” the Cossack cried.

Prophet whipped
his head to the door. A dog — or was it a coyote? — stood in the
open doorway, hanging its head and looking in expectantly, wagging
its brushy tail. Its bushy, burr-ridden coat was mottled gray, its
nose long and sleek.

“No,
no!” Fergus shouted. “That’s ole Miguel, my ole coyote-dog. Raised
him from a pup after I found him down by my trash hole one day, all
by his lonesome.”

The
agent whistled. “Come on, Miguel. Get your treat!”

The coyote padded
through the door, its fat gut jouncing. Its toenails clicked on the
wood puncheons as it entered the kitchen, where Riley Fergus bent
over, a scrap of raw meat hanging from his mouth.

The coyote sat
back on its hindquarters, raised its long, pointed snout, and
gently took the meat in its teeth. Eyes bright with bliss, the
coyote packed the meat quickly to the door and outside.

The
station manager guffawed. “He just loves that trick, Miguel
does!”

“What
a hellish place this country is,” the countess whispered, a hand to
her chest. “They let wild animals eat from their
mouths!”

Prophet was just
finishing his cigarette when the sullen station manager brought
three bowls of stew to the table. At least he called it stew. It
looked like a few white disks of meat boiled in water with a
smidgeon of rice. The biscuits were hard and stale.

“What
is this, Mr. Prophet?” the countess asked quietly, so the manager
couldn’t hear.

“Stew,” Prophet replied, just as quietly.

“I
mean, what is the meat?” She poked at it with her spoon.

“Oh,
that . . . that’s rabbit,” Prophet lied. He knew rattlesnake when
he saw it in his bowl. It didn’t bother him; hell, it had been a
fast, easy meal for him many times in the past. He had a feeling
the countess wouldn’t approve, however.

“Oh,
rabbit,” she said. “I love rabbit.” She spooned one of the disks in
her mouth, chewed slowly, and nodded. “It is good.”

Prophet eased a
relieved sigh through his lips.

When
they were through with the main meal, the station manager served
apricot cobbler and coffee. The dessert wasn’t half bad, Prophet
judged, and the countess and Sergei appeared to agree, for they
cleaned their plates. Nothing like traveling to make a man — or
woman — hungry.

They
were just finishing when the two old-timers, Timmy and Jimmy, came
in, sat down at the other long table, rolled cigarettes, and broke
out a deck of cards. They didn’t say a word to each other or anyone
else, giving all their attention to their cards and cigarettes.
Occasionally the station manager wandered over to refill their
cups.

After
a while the coyote wandered in, a half-eaten rabbit in its teeth,
and lay down by the fire in the stone hearth. It plopped one paw
over the rabbit, rested its snout on the paw, and went to sleep
with a weary groan. The cats were lounging here and there; one was
eating a food scrap under the table.

“I
believe I will retire now,” the countess said, raking her dismayed
gaze around the room and rising.

When
she’d retreated to one of the cots and had drawn the blanket,
partitioning herself off from the rest of the room, Prophet asked
the station agent if he knew of an Arizona town called Broken
Knee.

The agent ceased
scrubbing a pan at the range and turned to Prophet, frowning.
Prophet noticed that the twins jerked startled looks at him, as
well.

“Broken Knee?” the manager said.

“That’s where we’re headed.”

“What
in the hell you want to go there for? No thin’ but cutthroats in
that place. Cutthroats and Leamon Gay’s men. One and the same
thing.”

Prophet considered the information and glanced at Sergei, who
arched an eyebrow at him. The Cossack was drinking another cup of
coffee and smoking another of his black cheroots. He’d loosened his
shirt collar, and his chest hair was nearly as thick and black as
his well-groomed goatee and mustache.

“Who
is this, uh, Leamon Gay?” Sergei asked, taking the question right
out of Prophet’s mouth.

“Nothin’ but an owlhoot, through an’ through. Used to hunt
Indian scalps and sell ‘em down in Mexico. Then he’d steal horses
from the ranchos down there and smuggle ‘em into Arizona, sell ‘em
to American ranchers. Used to steal arms from the Army and sell ‘em
to the tribes.”

Prophet asked, “What’s he have to do with Broken
Knee?”

“A few
years ago a man found gold in the Pinaleno Mountains. The
prospector ended up dead — a so-called
accident,
if ye savvy my drift. All
of a sudden Gay moves into the area with a hundred or so wagon
loads of hard-rock miners and whores and builds him a town. Only
it’s his town, run his way, or he chisels ye a
tombstone!”

One of
the twins piped up, growling low, “Many a man, he goes to Broken
Knee” — the twin ran a long, gnarled finger across his throat —
“and is never seen again.”

Prophet winced and glanced at the other twin, who corroborated
the story with a dark nod, drawing deep on his quirley
stub.

“I’ve
heard tell,” Riley Fergus said, “that Gay’s responsible for the
deaths of more than fifty men.”

“Hellkatoot!” Prophet grunted, suddenly wondering what he’d
gotten himself into.

“You
folks don’t want nothin’ to do with him or Broken Knee, and they’re
one and the same thing. He’s the devil, and it’s the devil’s
town.”

“We do
not have a choice,” Sergei said, consternation straining his voice.
“We are looking for the countess’s sister. The last the countess
heard from her, Marya was in Broken Knee.”

Fergus
shielded his mouth with his hand, so the countess couldn’t hear
from her cot behind the blankets. “She a whore?”

Sergei
looked angry but kept his voice down. “She certainly is
not.”

“Then
what’s she doin’ in Broken Knee?”

“We
think she might be lookin’ for gold,” Prophet said. Before Fergus
could ask another question. Prophet asked one of his own. “What’s
the best way to get there?”

“There
ain’t no best way,” Fergus said. “I reckon I’d go south through
Lordsburg, though, and take Pyramid Mountain Pass. Then trail north
along the San Simon River. With that coach you don’t have much
choice. Watch for Apaches, though. Ole Cochise ain’t actin’ up now
like he was a year ago, but I’d still grow eyes in the back o’ my
head and do a lot of my travelin’ at night. Should be a full moon
soon. Apaches won’t attack at night.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Prophet said, inwardly cursing the
Russians again for not taking the train. Apaches rarely attacked
trains. Stretching, he stood. “I reckon I’ll keep first watch on
the porch,” he told Sergei.

“That
sounds good, my friend,” the Cossack said. “I’ll take over in a
couple of hours.”

“You
still expectin’ those highwaymen?” Fergus asked Prophet. The
station manager had gone back to scrubbing his pan.

“Have
to,” the bounty hunter said as he headed for the door. “That way
we’ll be ready if they come.”

“Well,
if they come, they’ll be sorry. They might not look like much, but
Timmy and Jimmy, they’ll back you in a fight any day of the week,
and by god, there’ll be hell to pave and no hot pitch!”

Prophet glanced
at the wizened old pair, over which a cloud of cigarette smoke
hung, thick as twister dust. Nearby, ole Miguel, the fat
coyote-dog, snored with one paw on the rabbit. The cat behind the
door rolled onto its back, kicked its feet in the air, and
yawned.

“That’s right comforting,” Prophet said, sharing a rueful
glance with Sergei.

He
went outside and led Mean and Ugly off to the corral. Back outside,
rifle beside him, he sat on the porch and rolled a smoke. He was
thinking of the long ride he had ahead of him through hostile
territory, wishing he’d never run into the Russians in Denver. But
then he thought of the countess’s bold gaze meeting his, and of her
swelling bosom and flushed cheeks, and he felt a little better . .
.

To
Prophet’s relief, the night passed uneventfully. In the morning he
and the Russians sat down to breakfast feeling relatively
fresh.

It had
been nice not sleeping on the ground for a change, and Prophet
suspected that, while she never would have admitted it, the
countess had enjoyed a night away from the coach’s cramped quarters
and lumpy leather seats. Fergus’s cots hadn’t been bad.

The
same did not go for his breakfast, however. The eggs were too
runny, the biscuits were burned, and the venison sausage tasted
gamy as week-old deer liver, as though the station manager had aged
the carcass too long in the sun. Prophet didn’t say anything,
however, and was happy that the Russians didn’t, either. They
appeared to be acquiring the humbling art of humility, though they
didn’t clean their plates — a transgression which would have made
Prophet’s mama scowl.

Just
after sunrise Timmy and Jimmy harnessed the bays to the coach, and
Prophet and the Russians were off, the fat coyote giving the
coach’s wheels a parting bark and nip. Prophet waved at Riley
Fergus standing on his dilapidated porch, then cantered ahead of
the coach to scout the trail. He figured their attackers of the
night before last had given up on them, but it never paid to let
your guard down.

In the coach
Natasha Roskov rummaged around in several carpetbags until she
found her silver cigarette case. Sitting back in her seat, she
adjusted the pillow cushioning her back, opened the case, and
removed one of the yellow French cigarettes she loved so well.
Sticking the cigarette between her unpainted lips — what good did
it do to wear face paint when dust covered it all, anyway? — she
struck a match.

Before she could
touch the flame to the cigarette, an arm snaked out of the luggage
boot behind her. She gave a start, dropping the match, which died.
Before she could cry out, the hand slapped tightly over her mouth
and jerked her head back brusquely against the seat.

“Do
you want to die, my lovely?” came a man’s low, breathy voice in her
right ear. The hot breath smelled sour. Rolling her eyes around,
heart pounding, neck aching, feeling as though she were
suffocating, the countess saw the grinning visage of a
savage-looking man wearing a black eye patch.

“Do
you?” he asked again, tightening his grip on her mouth and bringing
a wide-bladed, blood-crusted knife to her throat. She squeezed her
eyes closed and ground her teeth together as she felt the
razor-sharp blade slice slowly into her neck.

Prophet was on
his second scouting trip of the morning when he swung left off the
trail, keeping an eye skinned on the terrain around him while
watching for horse tracks and other signs of recent
riders.

It was a stark,
beautiful country they were traversing now, heading south through
New Mexico on their way to Lordsburg. The rolling plain was covered
with buffalo grass with occasional cedars and greasewood thickets
dotting the swales. The benches were spiked with Spanish bayonet,
or yucca. In the west rose the velvety slopes of the Chuska
Mountains, their higher peaks stippled with cedars and
pines.

Prophet had visited this country several times, on quests for
badmen and to escape the northern winters. Still, smelling the
greasewood and tangy sage, and seeing this majestic landscape again
swept with purple cloud shadows, his heart grew light. It was cold,
though, with a bite to the piney breeze, and he raised the collar
of his sheepskin and swung Mean and Ugly back north.

Suddenly he
stopped and stared downward. Fresh hoofprints pocked the sandy,
sage-tufted ground.

Frowning, lifting
his head to scan the distance, then returning his eyes to the
prints, he gigged Mean ahead, following the prints. They led into a
shallow, rocky arroyo — a good place to get drygulched.

Prophet was just releasing the thong over his .45’s hammer
when two horseback riders rode out from behind a boulder. Prophet
reined Mean to a halt and grabbed the butt of his revolver, but
froze when one of the men said, “Unh-unh. Don’t do it,
amigo.
Less you wanna die
quick.”

He was
a big, dark-skinned man with a helmet of tight, curly black hair
lying close to his scalp, under a wide-brimmed, dust-colored hat
pushed back off his forehead. His eyes were green. He was holding a
side-hammered saddlegun in one hand, aimed at Prophet’s
belly.