Blood at Sundown

Book 2: Lou Prophet, Bounty Hunter

by Peter Brandvold

Genres: Westerns

Synopsis

In Lou Prophet's lawless West, justice comes from the barrel of a gun-his gun. Peter Brandvold's acclaimed two-fisted Westerns tell of the bloody days (and thrilling nights) of the bounty hunter called Prophet, and the dangerous woman he dared to love. . . . BLOOD AT SUNDOWN Lou Prophet and the deadly Louisa Bonaventure have torn a bloody swath across Dakota territory in search of the Griff Hatchley gang. When they finally catch up to them, an epic blizzard threatens to turn the Dakota prairie into a frozen hell. To bag their prey before the storm hits, Prophet and Louisa split up-and take separate paths towards damnation. DEATH IN THE SNOW Prophet's course takes him into a town packed to the gills with the deadliest outlaws that roamed the frontier, while Louisa gets caught in Sundown, a one-horse town where a hatchet-wielding maniac threatens to paint Main Street red. When spring's thaw comes, they'll find a city of corpses beneath the snow. And nobody gives a damn about the law . . .

Release date: December 18, 2018

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 416

Sample

Lou Prophet quietly pumped a fresh cartridge into the action of his Winchester ’73, off-cocked the hammer, and turned to his partner. “How you wanna play this one?”

Louisa Bonaventure lay belly down on the face of the bluff beside him. She turned to him, one pretty hazel eye arched. “Are you all right, Lou?”

“No, I ain’t all right. I’m in Dakota Territory. It’s winter. It’s colder’n a gravedigger’s behind. There are sundry parts of myself I haven’t felt since we left Deadwood early last week. In fact, I’m not sure everything’s still where it’s supposed to be and hasn’t frozen off. I fear when I finally pull off my moccasins, my toes are going to come rollin’ out of my socks like dice off a craps table. I need a hot toddy worse than I ever needed one before, worse than I ever hope to again. That said, why do you ask?”

“You asked me how I wanted to play this one. You usually like to call it yourself since no one—especially a woman—is as smart as you are.”

“Oh, that. Well . . .” Prophet shrugged then, chuckling, turned his attention to the rambling, wood-frame roadhouse nestled in the snowy hollow down the bluff’s far side. A skein of gray smoke curled from the building’s large, stone chimney poking up from the pitched roof, behind the broad front veranda. “You called it right the last coupla times. You seem to have an eye for strategy . . . when your neck ain’t in such a hump you can’t see straight.”

Prophet scowled over at her. “You don’t got your neck in too big a hump to see straight, do you? I can usually tell—not by an actual hump but usually by how quiet you’ve been on the trail. Like a whiskey still about to blow from an overheated firebox. You can’t hear nothin’ until all of a sudden all hell breaks loose and your britches have caught fire an’ your ears are ringin’ to whistle ‘Dixie’! I can also tell by the color in your cheeks. Usually, when your blood’s in a boil and you’re primed to go off half-cocked, to start shootin’ at folks left an’ right with those pretty Colts of yours, your cheeks are as red as the yams ole Ma Prophet used to grow in her garden patch.”

Louisa gazed stone-faced down over the barrel of her Winchester carbine at the roadhouse below.

The trail of the thieving killers had led her and Prophet here, several days north of Bismarck. Judging by the tracks they’d been following along the old stage and army road north of Devil’s Lake, all six killers were likely warming themselves with whiskey, women, and the fire popping in the stone hearth down yonder, while Prophet and his comely blond partner, Louisa Bonaventure—the infamous, notorious Vengeance Queen herself—lay belly flat against the frozen slab of this haystack butte lightly dusted with a recent Dakota snow.

The bones of Lou Prophet, born and bred in the warm and humid climes of north Georgia, were rattling from the cold. He couldn’t feel his toes inside his high-topped, fur-lined moccasins. True, the Georgia mountain winters could be cold, but not like this. He thought he could feel the temperature plummeting like a bucket down an empty well. His breath frosted in the air before his face, freezing in the bristles of his nearly two weeks’ worth of sandy beard.

Louisa turned to him slowly. Slowly, she blinked her long, catlike hazel eyes. “Two things we know for sure haven’t frozen off of you, Lou.”

“Oh? What two things are that, pray tell?” Prophet gave her a lusty smile. “Keep it clean, Miss Bonnyventure. This ain’t the time nor the place for your farm talk.”

“Your vocal cords.”

Prophet shrugged with chagrin. “Well, shit, you know . . . I just know how you get when the devils we find ourselves on the trails of have killed women or children. And, you know, when these devils robbed that bank over Wyoming way, they . . . they . . . well, let’s just not talk about it. I’m sorry I even brought it up, consarn my big mouth, anyway!”

“They kidnapped two young female tellers and held on to them, using them for their pleasure until they tired of them and tossed them away along the trail like used-up airtight tins but not without cutting their throats first.”

Prophet ground his molars. “Damn my big mouth, anyway!”

“You go around back,” Louisa said. “There must be a back door since there’s a privy back there. I’ll wait here until I see you’re in position. Then I’ll head on down the butte and go in the front.”

“Like a proper lady.”

Louisa sighed tolerantly as she continued staring down her carbine’s barrel.

“That sounds all right to me, but don’t you start thinkin’ I’m a back-door sort of fella.” Prophet grinned at her.

Louisa cast him a dull stare. He used to get that look from the schoolmarm back home, on the rare occasion he’d attended classes, that was. He was usually admonished with such a look after he’d slipped a snake into the girls’ privy or had brought an old, dangerous blunderbuss to school to shoot squirrels during recess, or sundry other misdeeds his pa would later haul him out to the woodshed for.

Only, the schoolmarm hadn’t been half or even a quarter as easy on the eyes as Louisa was, and she hadn’t cut as fine a figure as Louisa did, either—though Prophet had to admit he’d never seen Mrs. Darryhemple in a snug pair of Levi’s or a skintight pair of boy’s-sized longhandles like the ones Louisa tended to wear in cooler climes, under her Levi’s and tight wool shirts. Not that he would have wanted to see Mrs. Darryhemple in those clothes. Louisa, on the other hand, he could stare at all day . . . and all night . . . especially when she wasn’t wearing anything at all.

Now he returned her flat, incriminating stare, trying not to imagine how she might look later standing before that popping hearth down there, the fire silhouetting her willowy, high-busted, round-hipped body, and shrugged.

“All right, I can see you’re losing patience with this old rebel, Miss Starchy Bloomers,” Prophet said, “so I won’t tarry any longer.”

“Good.”

Prophet leaned forward and planted a kiss on her peach-colored right cheek, enjoying the warmth, the smoothness, and the softness of her skin. “You just be careful, understand, Miss Starchy Bloomers? Without you, this old Confederate would be a drunkard and a fool, totally unmoored.”

“We wouldn’t want that to happen,” Louisa said, rolling her eyes.

Prophet crabbed backward down the hill. When he was nearly to where Louisa’s pinto and his own horse, the appropriately named Mean and Ugly, stood tied inside a fringe of bur oaks and cedars at the base of the butte, Louisa said just loudly enough for Prophet to hear:

“Lou?”

Prophet stopped crawling and looked up at her, brows raised.

Looking back at him over her left shoulder, Louisa held his gaze with a stern one of her own. “You be careful, too.”

He gave her a wink then turned toward Mean and Ugly. He plucked his sawed-off, double-barreled, twelve-gauge Richards coach gun from his saddle, broke open the nasty-looking gut-shredder to make sure both tubes were wadded, then snapped it closed and slung its leather lanyard over his head and right shoulder, letting the shotgun hang down his back.

The gut-shredder cleaned up well at close range in tight quarters. He’d save it for inside the roadhouse, if he needed it.

He picked up his Winchester and felt hot breath on his neck. He jerked his head away from his horse just in time to avoid a nasty nip to his earlobe, which protruded slightly from the muffler securing his hat to his head.

“Doggone it, Mean—you cussed cayuse!” Prophet wheezed, slamming his left, mittened fist against the horse’s stout jaw. “You’re plumb evil, you know that!”

The horse turned its head away, laying its ears back against its head, grinning and whickering softly in satisfaction with itself.

“Wicked hayburner,” Prophet muttered, adjusting the muffler so that it covered his ear, then moved into the trees beyond both mounts. “The glue factory is too good for you. Oughta just put a bullet through your plug-ugly head!”

But then, he’d been saying that for years . . .

He jogged through the woods that encircled the hollow, keeping an eye on the rambling roadhouse through the tangled branches.

The building was flanked by a barn with a hole in its roof, a corral, a privy, a springhouse, and an old Hal-laday Standard windmill that sat askew on one broken leg. The roadhouse had fallen on hard times since a spur railroad line, completed only last year, now spoked north out of Bismarck for a hundred miles just east of here, rendering obsolete the mule and ox teams that had once pulled big Murphy freight wagons along the old stage and army road on which the roadhouse sat. Those teamsters had once stopped here overnight to indulge themselves in a hot meal, a glass or two of stiff busthead, and a warm bed.

Now, of course, the iron horse hauled the freight the stout-wheeled, high-sided Murphys had once carried, leaving the roadhouse sitting high and dry, so to speak, likely patronized by only the occasional cowpuncher off area ranches, woodcutters, and market hunters, maybe the rare cavalry patrol out of Fort Totten near Devil’s Lake. Now and then a begging Indian—a Sisseton, Wahpeton, or Cut-Head Sioux—too proud or restless to be confined to the agency, probably hoofed it by here on a broom-tailed cayuse with painted rings around its eyes, pausing for a free cup of whiskey and a plate of beans.

Breathing hard from the jog, Prophet pulled up behind a stout oak and turned to the roadhouse. He was parallel now with the western rear corner. He could see a back door from his vantage atop a low rise, roughly sixty yards from the building itself. A half a dozen horses milled in the corral off the slumped log barn, munching hay from a crib, their collective breath rising like fog in the air that was darkening now as the winter sunlight, filtering through high steel-colored clouds, waned.

Prophet dropped to a knee, drawing the raw, cold air into his lungs. Holding his rifle in his right hand, clad in a deerskin mitten over a thin wool glove, he clenched his left hand into a tight fist, trying to work some blood into his numb fingertips, cursing the chill air at these northern prairie climes, berating his bad luck at having been lured this far north this late in the year, on the trail of lucrative bounties carried by a notorious gang of thieves, rapists, and cold-blooded killers, when he should be a good five hundred or so miles south of here, heading even farther south, toward Mexico, where he’d planned to winter along the sandy shores of the Sea of Cortez, sunning himself with a couple of supple señoritas.

He’d just taken his Winchester into his left hand and was working blood into his right-hand fingers when a woman’s shrill scream exploded inside the roadhouse. It was like a coyote’s bereaved wail. Fast footsteps sounded on the heels of the cry—feet pounding raw wooden floorboards.

Prophet swung his gaze back toward the roadhouse in time to see the rear door fly open. A woman shot out of the door like a shell from a Napoleon cannon. Clad in a long buffalo robe and moccasins, she leaped off the small rear wooden stoop and into the backyard, running fast, loosing another shrill, horrified cry, and bolted straight back in the direction of the barn.

She was young and slender, with long brown hair, which flew back behind her in the wind as she tripped on something, nearly fell, then, regaining her balance, continued running straight out toward the barn. She looked profoundly delicate and nearly marble-white against the drab winter colors of the barnyard, even inside the bulky robe she wore.

“Oh no, oh no,” Prophet said, his heart quickening.

Boots thundered inside the lodge behind the fleeing girl. A man burst out the door and onto the stoop, raising a rifle to his shoulder, bellowing, “Come back here, you little hussy!”

“No!” Prophet heard himself yell as he ran out from behind the tree.

The rifle of the man on the roadhouse stoop cracked twice, smoke and orange flames lapping from the barrel. The girl screamed and continued running toward a front corner of the barn.

The shooter ran off the stoop and into the yard, pumping another round into his rifle’s action.

Running down the slope toward the roadhouse, Prophet shouted, “Stop!”

The man fired twice more. The girl jerked with both shots, bending forward as she continued running. Her knees buckled just as she gained the barn’s front corner. She hit the ground and rolled wildly.

“Son of a buck!” Prophet dropped to a knee.

He thought he was within range now of accurate shooting. He chewed off his right-hand mitten, let it drop to the ground, then pumped a round into the Winchester and raised the rifle to his shoulder. As he did, the shooter swung toward him.

Prophet fired, the Winchester ’73 kicking back against his shoulder. He was breathing too hard and his fingers were too cold for accurate shooting. That bullet and the next one he sent hurling toward the girl’s shooter plumed snow-dusted dirt in the yard beyond the man.

Prophet quickly stuffed his mitten into his coat pocket, heaved himself to his cold feet, and resumed running down the slope. There was little cover between him and the yard—only a couple of widely scattered, small boulders and brush clumps.

“Hell!” the shooter cried as two more men came running out of the roadhouse to his right. “That’s Lou Prophet!” he bellowed. “I knew I seen that ole rebel devil on our back trail! Ringo, saddle our hosses! I’ll try to hold him off!”

The third man running out of the roadhouse glanced over his shoulder to yell through the open door, “It’s Lou Prophet! Cut an’ run, fellas! Cut an’ run!”

The first man ran to the edge of the barnyard and dropped to a knee behind a boulder little bigger than a rain barrel. He poked his rifle over the top of the boulder and fired two quick rounds. The first bullet sliced a hot line across the outside of Prophet’s right cheek while the second bullet nipped the sole of his left moccasin.

The bounty hunter cursed as he dropped and rolled up against a small, thick clump of shadbush growing up around a rock about the size and shape of a wheat shock.

From inside the roadhouse came the horrified cry of another young woman.

“Damnation!” Prophet spat out through gritted teeth. “They’re gonna kill the girls, the blackhearted sons o’ witches!”

Rising onto his right knee, he glanced over the shadbush thicket, toward the hill on which he’d left Louisa. His stomach fell.

Louisa was running down the hill toward the roadhouse. She was halfway between where Prophet had left her and the front of the roadhouse, running hard, her hat, secured to her neck by its horsehair thong, flapping behind her on the wind, her honey-blond hair bouncing on her shoulders, clad in a green and brown wool coat that dropped to halfway down her shapely thighs. The cuffs of her Levi’s were stuffed down inside her high-topped, rabbit fur boots.

She clutched her Winchester carbine in her black-gloved right hand. She’d stuffed her heavy fur mitten into a pocket of her coat. Even from this distance, Prophet could see the gravely determined expression on her face, the menacing chill in her hazel eyes.

She’d turned her wolf loose, and the devil take the hindmost!

“Louisa, hold on!” Prophet said. “Now ain’t the right time to go in there, damnit!”

He pulled his head down as rifles thundered from straight ahead of him. Bullets plunked into the face of his covering rock.

They snapped branches off the shadbush thicket and threw them up over his head. Two tumbled onto his hat, which he’d tied to his head with his spruce-green muffler, covering his ears so they wouldn’t freeze, turn black, and fall off.

Edging a look around the rock, he now saw five men—three in various states of dress. Four were spread out near the first man, triggering their rifles toward Prophet while another man, with long, bushy muttonchop whiskers and wearing a fawn-colored rabbit hat with earflaps, just then threw a saddle, saddlebags, and a rifle over the top corral slat, into the corral, then climbed in after them. His woolly chaps flapped around his legs.

Prophet snaked his rifle over the top of the rock and began returning fire, first planting a bead on the man who’d shot the girl, and squeezing the trigger, feeling a lurch of satisfaction as the girl-killer’s right eye was turned to jelly as the .44 slug punched through his head.

Lou drew his head and rifle back down behind the rock as the other three men, on knees and spaced about ten feet apart outside the corral, threw lead at him. As they did, he heard glass breaking and peered around the rock’s right side to see two more men busting out two of the roadhouse’s side windows and poking their rifles through the sashed frames.

Those rifles, too, began barking, stitching the air around him with screaming lead.

Again, Prophet peered around the right side of his covering rock and the thicket. He briefly glimpsed Louisa running toward the roadhouse. Then she was gone from view. She was mounting the front veranda steps, heading for the front door.

“Damnit, Louisa!” Prophet grated out through gritted teeth as more bullets screamed off his covering rock and flipped broken thicket branches every which way.

He gave another bellowing curse and then heaved himself to his feet, racking another round into his Winchester’s breech and slamming the butt against his shoulder. He aimed quickly at the three men firing at him from between the rear of the roadhouse and the corral.

He laid out one with his first shot. As the other one triggered a round toward Prophet, Prophet returned fire, his bullet sailing wide as the man flinched and lost his balance, throwing his left arm onto the ground to balance himself.

Prophet jogged toward him, grinding his teeth at the lead punching into the ground around him, curling the air around his ears.

“Prophet, what the hell you doin’ this far north, you Southern rebel sonofabuck?” shouted the man he was targeting just before the hammer of the man’s rifle pinged benignly onto its firing pin.

The man heaved himself to his feet, pulled the two pistols jutting from the holsters thonged low on his thighs, and, raising them, clicked the hammers back.

Prophet strode toward him, yelling, “I come to kill you, you blackhearted Yankee devil!” Calmly aiming down the Winchester’s barrel, he squeezed the trigger, and the rifle bucked against his shoulder.

He fired two more rounds, and then the two-gun pistoleer was rolling backward in the snow-speckled dust, throwing his six-guns high over his head.

Prophet’s determined walk, resolutely flinging lead while seemingly mindless of the lead caroming around him, had so startled the other two rifle-wielding men that they’d taken off running toward the corral in which the other outlaw was saddling a horse. They fired as they ran, sort of half twisted around and bellowing curses.

Prophet dropped to a knee and emptied his nine-shot Winchester and whooped in satisfaction as the two went down, screaming and rolling up against the base of the corral.

The bounty hunter dropped the rifle and palmed his Colt Peacemaker, turning toward the two windows from which the other thieving killers had been slinging lead at him.

He’d just clicked the hammer back when another rifle began blasting away inside the roadhouse, evoking screams—this time not from women but from men. One of the window shooters came hurling backward out his window in a rain of glass. He dropped his rifle and hit the ground outside the roadhouse and lay still as the man in the other window, left of the first one, shouted, “Oh no—it’s that damn Vengeance Queen!”

He flew forward out the window, a long, tall hombre in nothing more than a union suit and pistol belt and with long, stringy hair. He dropped the pistol he’d been firing, turned a forward somersault in midair, and hit the ground on his back as the rifle continued blasting away inside the roadhouse, evoking more shrill curses and terrified screams from the remaining outlaws inside the place.

The long-haired drink of water outside the roadhouse lifted his head, shouted a string of blue epithets that would have set a nun’s habit on fire, then rolled onto his hands and knees. He looked up to see Prophet walking toward him. The outlaw grabbed his pistol out of the dirt.

He looked up at Prophet again, his two silver front teeth winking in the wintry wan light.

“Kooch Ringo,” Prophet snarled, and shot the man through his forehead. “Pleasure to put you down like the rabid dog you are!”

Ringo lay facedown in the dirt, quivering as though he’d been struck by lightning, blood from the hole in his forehead quickly pooling around him.

“Hi-yahhhh!” a man bellowed behind Prophet.

He turned as the man inside the corral, now astride a big Appaloosa, came bounding up from inside the corral to hurdle the fence facing Prophet. The Appy’s eyes were wide and white-ringed, its ears laid back against its head. The rider’s eyes, beneath the brim of his rabbit fur hat, were pinched and dark with rage, the hat’s untied flaps bouncing around his red cheeks bristling with several days’ worth of dark beard stubble.

“Prophet, you’re done for, you fork-tailed devil!” shouted the outlaw whom Prophet, owning a keen memory for men with money on their heads, recognized as Wind River Bob Albright—a stonehearted gunfighter who’d once served in the frontier cavalry stationed at Fort Laramie until he’d been dishonorably discharged for running a prostitution ring involving young, orphaned Hunkpapa Sioux girls.

The Appy touched down ten feet beyond the fence, and Bob Albright, crouched low in the saddle, sort of hiding behind the Appy’s head, batted his heels against its flanks, directing the galloping mount toward Prophet. The man’s woolly chaps flapped about his legs and high-topped fur boots.

The bounty hunter raised his Peacemaker, aimed quickly, and fired twice.

Both slugs flew wide of Albright’s head.

Prophet could have shot the horse. He should have, in fact. The trouble was, he liked horses better than he liked most men, so he always had to think twice or three times before performing what he considered a low-down dirty deed of last resort.

This time he’d waited a wink too late. The Appy was on him before he could get his Peacemaker cocked again, the horse bulling into him hard at almost a full run.

Prophet grunted as the horse punched the air from his lungs. The big bounty hunter flew a good ten feet straight back before hitting the ground hard, losing his hat as the knot in his muffler loosened beneath his chin. He lay dazed and grunting and cursing for three or four seconds before he rolled up onto his left shoulder and hip.

He’d dropped the Peacemaker. He just then realized that he’d lost the Richards twelve-gauge, as well. Both weapons lay too far away for a quick grab, especially in the bounty hunter’s bruised and battered condition, his ribs barking like wild dogs.

Wind River Bob was swinging back toward Prophet from fifteen feet away, bringing his gun around, as well.

Bob aimed and fired, but the horse was moving, fouling Bob’s aim. The shot spanged off a rock over Prophet’s right shoulder. The cutthroat aimed his horse as well as his pistol at Prophet once more and, galloping forward, fired again.

Prophet threw himself to his left, avoiding another bullet.

Wind River Bob and the Appaloosa barreled on past Prophet once more, dust wafting in the chill air.

Shaking away the cobwebs from behind his eyes, Prophet hauled himself to his feet. The hip and shoulder that had taken the brunt of the Appy’s weight were sore as hell, as were his ribs. As Wind River Bob checked the Appy down, turned it, and began galloping back in Prophet’s direction, the bounty hunter sucked back his misery and dove for his Peacemaker.

Bob’s next round plunked into the dirt just behind Prophet’s right boot.

The bounty hunter hit the ground again, groaning against the agony in his cold, battered bones, and scooped the .45 off the ground. He hauled himself back to his feet and stepped sideways as Bob and the Appy thundered toward him. Prophet reached out with his left hand, grabbing the horse’s bridle and jerking its head toward him.

The Appy gave a shrill, indignant whinny as its rear hooves plowed dirt beneath its belly, its barrel curveting sharply. As Prophet drew the horse’s head toward him, he rammed his right shoulder hard against the horse’s left side and against Wind River Bob’s left leg. Bob aimed his cocked Schofield down toward Prophet, but the horse was falling sideways as Prophet continued ramming his shoulder against it, gritting his teeth.

Bob and the Appy fell over hard, and Bob’s bullet sailed skyward.

“Oh . . . ahhhh!” Bob howled where he lay with his right leg pinned beneath the horse’s writhing bulk. He lifted his now-hatless head, which was bald save for a band of brown hair above his ears, and hardened his jaws. “Off! Oh, get off me, you miserable cayuse!”

Prophet threw himself back off the horse and onto his butt, away from the horrified horse’s flailing hooves. The Appaloosa gained its feet with effort, awkwardly, its saddle loose, bridle hanging askew from its head.

Bob gave another squeal as the weight left his crushed right leg. The Appy trotted off, shaking its head as though it had had its fill of such shenanigans. Bob lay inside the cloud of dust the horse had kicked up, writhing on his back while also stretching his left hand out toward the Schofield, which lay about three feet away from his outstretched fingers.

He stared toward Prophet, his eyes dark with pain and exasperation. He jerked his body back and forth against the ground, inching his left hand toward the pistol while holding his right hand against his right thigh.

Prophet heaved himself to his feet once more, wincing and spitting grit from his lips, a wing of his sandy, close-cropped hair hanging over his eyes. He held his left arm against his battered ribs. As Bob laid his hand on his Schofield, Prophet clamped his right boot down over Bob’s hand as well as on the gun. He shifted all his weight—two hundred–plus pounds—to that foot, feeling the bones in Bob’s hand grind against the unforgiving steel of the Schofield.

“Ayeeeeeee!” Bob cried, squeezing his eyes closed and tipping his head far back, so that the cords in his neck stood out like ropes in a ship’s rigging. “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ohhhhh—get off me, damn youuuuuuu!”

Prophet grinned down at the man. Slowly, he removed his foot from the man’s hand.

“There you go—feel better?” Prophet crouched down. Bob stared up at him, eyes growing bright in horror when he saw what was about to happen.

Prophet smashed the barrel of his Colt against Bob’s left temple, laying him out cold.

Prophet swept his mussed hair back from his eye. He picked up his hat and scarf. He retrieved the Richards sawed-off and slung it behind his back and turned toward the roadhouse. He was breathing hard, sucking air through his teeth, gritted against his sundry aches and pains, and the cold wind nibbling his ears.

The roadhouse had suddenly fallen eerily silent. As silent as a church, the back door standing wide open, its inner depths as black as a mine. A fine, granular snow angled down. A chill breeze pelted the snow against the roadhouse’s clapboard siding badly in need of fresh paint.

“Louisa . . . ?”

Prophet shoved his muffler into a coat pocket, pulled his hat down low on his head, and began stumbling toward the open back door.

He stopped suddenly when there sounded the shriek of breaking glass. Almost simultaneously came a young woman’s agonized scream.

A man laughed raucously somewhere up in the roadhouse’s second story.

“Louisa!” Prophet shouted, and lurched into a sprint.

A little over five minutes before Prophet trimmed Wind River Bob’s wick with his .45’s barrel, Louisa kicked in the roadhouse’s front door and stepped quickly to the door’s right side, where the outdoor light, as fading as it was, wouldn’t outline her.

As her eyes quickly adjusted to the dingy light inside the roadhouse’s broad drinking hall, she saw a girl with a bruised, Indian-featured face lying across a table to Louisa’s right, her molasses-dark eyes wide . . .