Her heart began to slow when she saw both men sprawled on the carpet in front of the mahogany desk, both hatless, one flat on his back, limbs akimbo, duster flaps open to show the three or four bloody holes in his chest. The other lay curled on his side, one hand pillowing his cheek, as though he’d lain down for a nap. He had long, black hair, and he was dressed all in black except for a white shirt.
At least the shirt had been white. Now it was red, and more red trickled down from the ragged hole in his right cheek.
There was a strange, warbling sound. For a moment, Louisa thought it was coming from one of the men she’d shot, and she was about to drill each once more, to make sure the demons were galloping back to hell. But then she saw the desk clerk standing about ten feet away from her bushwhackers, in front of a potted palm, looking down at them while holding his hands in the air as though beseeching a higher power.
Slowly, he raised his face, crumpled in exasperation, to Louisa who was staring down at him from the second-floor balcony.
His lips moved as he tried to speak, but he could only make incomprehensible sounds that were soon drowned by the thumps of boots on the boardwalk in front of the hotel. When Louisa saw several men with badges, including Sheriff Hiram Severin, bolt into the lobby with their pistols drawn, Louisa remembered she was standing there in nothing but her birthday suit.
“The furnishings are right splendid,” she told the desk clerk, who was still staring up at her in awe. She held the rifle across her soapy breasts. “But the clientele leaves much to be desired.”
With that, she lowered her rifle, walked back into her room, and closed what was left of her door.
10
ALMOST AN HOUR earlier, having bought a room at the Muleskinner’s Inn and hauled his saddlebags including a sliver of lye soap over to the bathhouse, Lou Prophet scowled at the Chinaman in a red wool cap sitting at a dilapidated rolltop desk in the washhouse’s shabby front room. “Eight bits for a bath? You gotta be joshin’, amigo!”
Six kittens were drinking from a pie tin near a cabinet that had been nailed together from tomato crates and was sagging under the weight of many wash-worn cotton towels. The kittens’ mother lounged on a burlap sack against the wall, licking a front paw to clean her face with.
The Chinaman held up eight pudgy fingers and jostled his Fu Manchu mustache as he said, “Eight bits or go! Eight bits or go!”
“Hold your damn horses,” Prophet growled, tossing the silver to the squat bathhouse proprietor, who caught the coins against his shabby gray underwear top. “But, by god, the water better be hot!”
“Eight bits!”
“There’s your eight bits. Now show me a room and bring some hot water. And for eight bits it better be
damn
hot.”
“My water hot,” intoned the Chinaman, dropping the coins into a lockbox. “My water hottest in town. Hey, cowboy,” the man hailed Prophet, who’d drifted through the bead-curtained door in the office’s back wall. “You want whore? I bring you whore. Best whores in town!”
“No, thanks,” Prophet said, his boots pounding the rough, mud- and shit-stained puncheons as he continued down the hall, leaving the Chinaman scuffling around behind him.
He could hear a man and a woman laughing and splashing water behind one of the curtained rooms opening off the dim hall. Bright sunlight shone through cracks in the ceiling and unchinked walls. The air was steamy and rife with the smell of sweat and the horseshit crusted on the floor-boards. He chose an empty ten-by-ten-foot room at the far rear of the place, with a simple bench, one plank shelf, a cracked mirror hanging from a bent nail, and a corrugated tin tub hanging from a square-hewn ceiling joist.
The tub was rusty and dented, and the curved rim was pulling away from the sides.
“Eight bits, my ass,” Prophet grunted, dropping his gear on the bench, then hauling the tub off the post. He dropped it onto the floor with a loud clang that for a moment drowned out the sounds of carnal frolic emanating from up the hall.
He undressed slowly, peeling his grubby, sweaty clothes off his rawboned frame. The Chinaman, who’d obviously pegged Prophet for a troublemaker, came in grumbling with two steaming water buckets. He gave the bounty hunter the evil eye and dumped both buckets into the tub, then left to fetch cold. Showing his teeth like an angry cur, he returned and dumped some of the cold water into the basin then stood around as though awaiting a tip. Prophet threw him his dirty clothes instead.
“Wash those.”
“Wash extra!”
“How much extra?”
“For this kind bad clothes, bad smelly clothes, one dollah!”
“Wash ’em. I’ll be over at the Muleskinner’s.”
He kicked the chuffing, muttering Chinaman out of the room, then eased his bulk slowly into the steaming water, gritting his teeth as the near-boiling liquid inched up his ankles and locked its jaws around his balls.
He could do little more than sit down in the tub, knees raised nearly to his chin. Reflecting on the likely contrast between his bath and Louisa’s, who was no doubt taking a leisurely, sudsy soak in one of those throne-like copper jobs you could virtually stretch out and take a nap in, he chuckled dryly. Grabbing his sliver of pale-yellow lye cake off the short stool that he’d positioned beside the tub, and onto which he’d dropped his hat and rawhide tobacco pouch, he went to work scrubbing the three weeks of grime from his hot, chafed hide.
When he was done scrubbing his body and his sandy hair that was curling over his ears and feathering down over his neck—soon he’d have to splurge for a trim—he called for a rinse. The Chinaman returned, no longer grumbling but grunting and shaking his head, and poured a bucket of warm water over Prophet’s head, shoulders, and knees. Dismissing the fellow once again, Prophet sat back in the tub, grabbed his makings sack from the stool, and took his time building a smoke.
He fired the quirley with a stove match, and took even longer smoking it, sitting there in the tub, hearing faintly the water droplets falling from his body, the two groaners up the hall, and the sounds of the town beyond the squat bathhouse—the rumble of wagon wheels, occasional hoots and hollers, barking dogs, neighing horses.
Listening, he wondered what living in town would be like.
Likely anywhere he found a house to buy, he’d hear similar sounds. All day long, every day, the sounds of other people—their wagons, horses, and dogs. Their squabbling. Their industry. Could he get used to that?
Whenever he’d spent much time in a town before—Denver, Abilene, Dodge City, or Cheyenne—he couldn’t wait to climb onto Mean and Ugly’s back and salt the brush for the tall and uncut, for the silence of mountain and plain. There the only sounds were those of the birds, the river, the sound of the breeze in the cottonwood leaves. The rumble of thunder. The patter of rain off his hat.
Peaceful sounds.
Oh, there was the occasional screech of an angry bobcat, the snarls of hunting wolves or grizzlies, even the thundering train sounds of a distant cyclone. But somehow those sounds evoked less anxiousness in him than did the rattle of a wagon’s trace chains or the sudden eruption of laughter from a nearby saloon.
Oh, give it a chance, for chrissakes,
he silently scolded himself.
With any luck, Louisa’ll fall for that young banker, Encina, and you won’t have to worry about her anymore. He’ll take care of her, likely put her up in a big house, and give her a passel of kids and the life you always wanted for her.
She won’t care if you stay or leave. Hell, she’d probably haze you out of town with a broom and a shotgun to keep from being reminded how far she’d once fallen, sharing the blankets of a beat-up old bounty hunter and former fighter for Jeff Davis’s ill-fated, Confederate dream.
Prophet chuckled. There wasn’t any humor in the laugh, and suddenly a dark, lonely mood was upon him. He drew deep on his half-smoked quirley, as if the pungent tobacco smoke would clear his head. He took the wet, tightly rolled cylinder between thumb and index finger and regarded it thoughtfully.
He liked Miguel Encina. The kid would make a good husband.
Yet, deep down inside the bounty hunter, where his fine-tuned instincts lay tightly coiled, apprehension beat a slight but insistent rhythm. . . .
As he stared at the burning cigarette, he spied movement out of the corner of his left eye, and he turned both eyes to the warped, dusty glass window four feet in front of him. It faced the scruffy yard of the bathhouse, a large stack of split wood, and several wheelbarrows and a long wash line sagging between aspens beyond. There was a shed there, too. Atop the shed’s flat, corrugated tin roof, a man knelt, aiming a rifle at the bathhouse.
More specifically, he was aiming the rifle at Prophet sitting in a tub in the bathhouse’s rear-most room.
Prophet jerked his head down, dropping the quirley, which sizzled out in the bathwater. At nearly the same time, the rifle’s maw smoked and blossomed orange. There was a ping of breaking glass, a thwack in the wall behind Prophet, and a quarter second later, the flat report of the rifle reached the bounty hunter’s ears.
Prophet felt an icy burn and touched his finger to the side of his head, just above his right jaw. He felt the oily blood that the bullet had drawn there before it had continued on over and past him and into the room’s back wall.
His gaze flashed fire, and his face broke with an enraged snarl as he looked through the window again.
The man on the roof was quickly ejecting his spent cartridge casing from his Winchester’s breech and racking fresh. The hammered silver discs of his hatband flashed in the afternoon sunlight.
“Why, you son of a bitch!” Prophet grunted, leaping up and out of the washtub, nearly upsetting the basin and causing a minor flood as he dashed to the wall on his right.
The rifle thundered again on the heels of the
thwack
of another slug slamming through the broken window and into the back wall but not before Prophet had felt the curl of air over his left shoulder.
Snarling a curse, Prophet grabbed his rifle from against the wall and racked a shell into the chamber. As he turned toward the window, another bullet slammed into the wall beside it, showing a round hole of yellow light. Prophet heard the Chinaman shouting angrily at the front of the place as he raised his Winchester to his right shoulder and aimed at the man who was racking a fresh round into his rifle breech atop the shed.
Prophet laid a bead on the man’s chest and fired. Apparently he missed—he didn’t have a good angle, he was barefoot, and he was sopping wet. The man triggered another round himself, drilling another little sphere of yellow light in the wall right of the broken window.
Prophet ejected the spent brass and ran to the window’s left side as the bushwhacker fired again. Then, hearing his own ejected cartridge casing rolling around on the wooden floor at his bare feet, Prophet stepped in front of the window, smashing the remaining shards from the frame, then drawing another quick bead on the shooter.
He fired four times quickly, gritting his teeth and squinting through his own powder smoke.
Two of his shots plunked into the corrugated tin roof on either side of the dry-gulcher. One blew the silver-banded, low-crowned hat from his head, exposing his bald pate around which thick, cinnamon hair hung straight to his shoulders. Another slug made him show his teeth below his straggly brown mustache and above his straggly brown goat beard.
The gunman jerked back slightly, then turned full around and scrambled to the back of the shed. As Prophet fired two more rounds, the man disappeared over the shed’s far edge, seeming to half leap, half fall to the ground behind it.
Prophet snapped off another shot in anger, then leaned the rifle against the wall and rummaged through his saddlebags for a fresh pair of longhandles. The spares had collected some trail dust seeping in around the flap, but they were as clean as Prophet needed.
He struggled into them quickly, grunting and wheezing with exasperation, then stomped into his boots, donned his hat, wrapped his cartridge belt with its single holster and Colt Peacemaker around his waist, and grabbed his shotgun.
Holding the shotgun down by his side one-handed, the lanyard swinging slack, he clomped out the washroom door. The Chinaman stood several feet away, eyes wide and sparkling. He yelled in Chinese while a skinny gent stared at him from a near doorway. The man’s grimy longhandles clung to his pale, wet skin, and a shabby brown bowler sat at a precarious angle on his head. A girl with curly brown hair stood behind him, staring wide-eyed over his shoulder.
“What the hell’s goin’ on, amigo?” the man said in a slow Texas drawl, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing in his leathery throat. He jerked a red thumb at the girl. “One o’ them blue whistlers almost took Loretta’s head off!”
“I do apologize, Loretta.”
Prophet turned away from the trio and pushed out the door at the end of the hall. Just beyond the door, he paused, looking around, taking the shotgun in both hands, and thumbing back the rabbit-eared hammers.
“Where are you, you bushwhackin’ son of a bitch?”
His deep voice echoed off the shed and woodpile. His heart hammering with red fury, he strode quickly across the rocky yard littered with wood shavings and stray logs amongst the rabbit brush and skunk cabbage and stopped at the front of the shed. It was missing both its front doors and the inside of it was cluttered with wagon wheels, rims, felloes, and sundry other junk. Prophet stopped at the far end and edged a cautious look around the corner.
There was nothing beside the shed but more junk, including moldering sluice boxes called Long Toms, dilapidated ore drays, and heavy rusting axles, all swallowed by brush. Prophet swung around the corner and strode straight back along the shed’s west wall, holding the shotgun straight up in one hand, his right hand resting on the worn walnut handle of the his low-slung .45.