Hell's Angel (20 page)

27

PROPHET CRAWLED TO
within three feet of the ridge crest, and doffed his hat. Louisa did the same. At the same time, they crawled up just far enough that they could see down the bluff's opposite side.

In the open area near the base of the bluff, a large fire danced. It was more of a bonfire than a simple cook fire though a wrought-iron spit had been erected over it, likely to roast some large animal.

A dozen men milled around the fire, some sitting on rocks or logs, eating with plates on their knees, tin cups on the ground near their feet. The tin cups reflected the umber light from the dancing fire. The flames sent cinders high in the air where they winked out against the stars.

The light also reflected off the stripes and silver or gold bars on their dark-blue cavalry tunics, and off the stripes crawling down the legs of their light blue slacks, the cuffs of which were stuffed down into stovepipe cavalry boots.

Flat-heeled, round-toed boots, like the boot whose print Prophet had spied near the escarpment near the hacienda.

Louisa whispered very softly, “Soldiers?”

Prophet kept raking his gaze around the encampment. At the far perimeter of the bivouac were two covered wagons. Animals milled in what appeared a rope corral to the right of the canvas-covered Skinner freight wagons.

“That's how it looks,” Prophet said.

“Fortune has smiled on us, then.” Louisa's face brightened as she stared down the slope toward the men milling around the fire. “They'll help us run Moon's men and the slave traders to ground!”

She started to rise, but Prophet grabbed her wrist and pulled her back down. “Hold on!” he hissed.

“What is it?”

Prophet stared into the encampment. The men were extremely animated, some appearing drunk. They were mostly older hombres—late twenties, early thirties, with beards or mustaches on their sun-seared, shrewd-eyed faces. What's more—a man with a captain's bars decorating his shoulders was laughing and joking around with several privates and a sergeant.

Prophet glanced at Louisa, jerked his chin, and then crawled backward about five feet down the hill. Louisa followed suit and said, “You don't think they're soldiers.”

“The frontier cavalry is a young man's army. Some barely twenty, most younger. The man or men leadin' 'em are usually only a few years older. All those men down there are older, and there's somethin' else about 'em I don't like.”

“What?”

“Hell, I don't know.” Prophet's eyes widened. “Oh, yeah—soldiers on routine patrol or any other kind of patrol ain't normally allowed to drink. At least, not drink till they're drunk. That's why I just couldn't wait to get out and didn't think once about enlistin' and gettin' all reconstructed and becomin' a
galvanized Yankee.
”

Louisa scowled at him. “How you do go on! Who do you think they are if not cavalry?”

“I don't know—bandits, maybe dressed up like soldiers to haul loot more free-like across the Rio Grande.” Prophet picked up his rifle. “There's only one way to find out.” He rose and started long-striding down the bluff. “Come on!”

Halfway down the slope, he swung to his right and walked parallel to the ridge crest, following a faint game trail. Earlier, he'd seen that the bluff was somewhat horseshoe-shaped, with the bivouac and wagons nestled inside the horseshoe. The east end of the horseshoe was lower than where he and Louisa had surveyed the camp, and that end was farther away from the fire.

When he and Louisa came to it, they climbed to the crest of the ridge once more. He'd been right. This end of the bluff was much lower than the other end, and the fire was about a hundred yards away, on his and Louisa's right. The “soldiers'” silhouettes jostled between Prophet and the fire.

The wagons were nearer Prophet now than the soldiers. He could see the vague, canvas-topped shapes about fifty yards nearly straight out from the base of the bluff. He couldn't see the rope corral but knew it was beyond the wagons.

Prophet glanced at Louisa. “Stay here. If the soldiers or whoever them boys are see me and start actin' all impolite, as federal soldiers tend to do, cover me. I'll be hightailin' it back this way.”

“All right,” she said, quietly pumping a cartridge into her Winchester's breech. “But don't do anything stupid.”

“Me?”

Prophet clambered up over the ridge and dropped, crouching, holding his Winchester low in both hands, down the other side. He weaved between modest-sized boulders. When he was about a hundred feet from the first of the two wagons, he dropped flat and quickly clawed his hat off his head.

Gritting his teeth, he pressed his chin to the dirt. He'd heard something. Animal-like sounds emanating from somewhere up near the wagons.

Prophet lifted his head slowly until he could see the nearest wagon. He could hear the sounds more clearly now—grunting and groaning. Guttural sighing. Savage sounds.

A wounded animal? Maybe a horse?

Possibly a wounded man?

A man chuckled. There was a sharp smack, like a sudden, violent slap. A girl sobbed. The man chuckled again. A buckle clanked.

Prophet stared straight ahead toward the wagon. The sounds were either issuing from inside or close around the wagon, possibly from the other side.

No, from
underneath
the wagon. A shadow slithered up out of the darkness between the front and rear wheels facing Prophet. A hatted man with stripes on his sleeves straightened. On the outsides of his slacks ran the same yellow stripes as those Prophet had seen before, nearer the fire. The soldier, or whoever he was, was breathing hard, as though he'd run a long ways. He turned back to the wagon and crouched down. “Come out of there now,” he ordered.

A girl sobbed.

The man said more gruffly, “Come on, now, by God, or I'll whip ya!”

He reached down and pulled the girl out from beneath the wagon. From what Prophet could see from this distance and in the darkness tempered by starlight and thin javelins of firelight, she was small and dark-skinned. Long, black hair hung down past her shoulders. She wore a long skirt. Her shoulders were bare. She held something, probably a blouse, against her breasts.

Tugging brusquely on the girl's arm, the man led her back to the rear of the wagon. He grabbed her around the waist and tossed her easily through the rear pucker. Then he reached up and drew the flaps of the pucker closed and tied them shut.

He turned toward Prophet, who sucked a sharp, nervous breath. The man stared toward Prophet. Prophet ground his jaws together and squeezed the neck of his Winchester, caressing the hammer with his gloved right thumb.

The man bent his knees, adjusted his crotch, chuckled, and then swung around and started sauntering back in the direction of the fire.

Prophet rose slowly, looking around cautiously.

His heart thudded heavily.

He swallowed, took his rifle in both hands, and approached the wagon slowly, pricking his ears, listening. The wagon creaked and groaned a little as someone moved around inside. There was a faint sobbing—probably the cries of the girl who'd just been raped beneath the wagon. Another girl was cooing to her.

Prophet moved up alongside the wagon, crouching low, staying within the wagon's shadow. He looked around again carefully, and then he straightened and unhooked a strap fixing the canvas to the box. He lifted the side of the tarpaulin about three inches above the top of the box, and peered into the wagon.

It was too dark to see much, but he thought he could see six or seven cowering shadows in there in all that pent-up air smelling like sweat, urine, musty burlap, and roasted meat. The girls had probably been fed what the so-called soldiers had roasted over the fire—wild pig, judging by the smell—and the smell of the charred meat lingered in a cloying potpourri.

Prophet wanted to call out to the girls, to ease their misery, their fear, but he knew that doing so might only startle them instead. One or all might scream or call out, alerting their captors to his presence.

Chewing his lower lip, he reluctantly pulled the tarp down over the side of the box and hooked the strap once more. He wanted to try to get them all out of there now, but where would he take them? They were all on foot, and he and Louisa as well as the Indian girls would very easily be run down by the slave traders.

“Wait,” he told himself softly. “Just chew the apple one bite at a time, hoss.”

Cursing under his breath, Prophet made his way back in the direction of the slope atop which Louisa waited for him. He was nearly to the bluff's base when something flashed in the corner of his left eye. A bullet screamed through the air behind his head. It barked off a rock at the same time the rifle's flat crack reached Prophet's ears.

A man shouted.

The bounty hunter stopped and swung toward the man who'd fired at him but before he could raise his Winchester, Louisa's rifle flashed and thundered atop the ridge straight ahead of him. The man-shaped shadow standing about forty yards from Prophet, between him and the fire, yelped and flew back to hit the ground with a thump and a clatter of his rifle.

As more men from around the fire started shouting and running, Prophet hightailed it up the ridge, weaving around boulders, pumping his arms and knees, raking air in and out of his lungs, and cursing his smoking habit. Rifles popped to his left. Louisa's rifle barked above him. He ran hard, wincing as bullets screamed around him and thumped into the slope around his boots or spanged loudly off rocks.

Louisa was pumping and firing her Winchester handily as Prophet gained the ridge, threw himself down atop it, and rolled several feet down the other side.

“I thought I told you not to do anything stupid!”

“I didn't do nothin' stupider than I always done!”

Louisa snapped as she fired twice more. The second time her hammer pinged on an empty chamber, and she scrambled down beside Prophet, her Winchester smoking. “What happened?”

Rifles continued barking on the far side of the slope, men yelling. The horses in the rope corral were whinnying.

“I'll tell you later,” Prophet said, climbing to his feet. “For now, we'd best pull our picket pins. There's far too many o' them fellas to try swapping lead with 'em!”

He ran down the slope, Louisa on his heels. He ran all the way to the bottom of the bluff and straight out away from it. When he and his blond partner had dropped into a shallow wash sheathed in stunted willows, he stopped and dropped to a knee behind the cut bank.

He stared back the way he'd come. The bluff stood dark against the starry sky. Prophet pricked his ears, listening hard to pick out sounds above the hammering of his heart, the drumming of blood in his ears. His breathing slowed.

He thought he could see several jostling shadows atop the bluff, vaguely outlined against the shimmering stars. Faintly, he heard men conversing. There was no more shooting. None of the so-called soldiers appeared to be coming after him and Louisa.

“Well, maybe that's that,” Prophet said, sucking a deep breath.

Louisa knelt beside him. “What was in those wagons, Lou?” Her eyes were as bright as the nearest stars in the darkness of the arroyo.

“Rifles.” The lie had been impulsive, only half-consciously considered. But he knew he'd made the right decision. If he told Louisa that there were slave girls in those wagons, she'd no doubt walk right back up that ridge and stir up a showdown with those dozen phony soldiers. She wouldn't do one thing toward getting those girls freed but only get herself killed in the bargain.

That's how impulsive and headstrong—even, yes,
crazy
—she was. Prophet would tell her the truth later, when he'd ironed out his own plan for rescuing those Indian slave girls.

Louisa looked at him suspiciously, as though she'd been reading his mind. “Rifles?”

“That's what I said.”

“Where would they be heading with rifles out here?”

“Hell, how do I know?” Prophet was nervous. He'd never been the greatest liar. His eyes always sold him out. That's why he wasn't looking at Louisa but continued to stare up the side of the black bluff. “Maybe Campa's buying 'em down in Mexico. You know Campa, don't you?”

“Heard of him. Outlaw Rurale colonel. You think he's buying those rifles?”

Prophet started to feel some relief in the taut muscles between his shoulder blades. “Most likely. He's probably got the most use for 'em, looting villages and the like down in Mexico.”

“And running slave whores.” Louisa stared at Prophet as though she were trying to read him. He felt her eyes boring into his right cheek.

“Yeah, he's probably using 'em to help out with his slave running. Lots of competition between bandito bands down in Mexico.” Prophet rose, let his gaze slide quickly across Louisa's eyes, which were riveted on him, like the eyes of a young brush wolf about to pounce on a kangaroo rat. “Come on—let's head on back to the hacienda. I've had enough fun for . . . hey, where in the hell you
goin'
?”

She'd climbed the wash's shallow bank and was marching toward the bluff.

“Ah, bless me,” Prophet complained.

He caught up to her, grabbed her arm. Louisa jerked her arm out of his grip and started running toward the bluff. Prophet chased her, threw his big body into her legs, and knocked her off her feet.

She cursed like a drunken Irish poet, twisting around and hammering his hatted head with her fists. “Damn, you let me go,” she hissed through gritted teeth. “I'm going to—”

“You ain't gonna do no such thing,” Prophet said, grabbing her wrists in his fists and pinning her to the ground in much the same way he'd done before they'd seen the fire glow. “You're as dazed as a goose with a nail in its head, and I ain't gonna let you kill yourself. Now, forget it, hear? We'll see to them girls later.”