The Devil and Lou Prophet

Issuing classic fiction
Yesterday and Today!

Call him man-hunter, tracker, or bounty
hunter. As long as the cash was cold and the trail was hot, Lou
Prophet would run his quarry into the ground before giving up the
chase. He loved his work – it kept him in wine and women, and was
never, ever dull. And his newest job sounds particularly
attractive…
Her name is Lola Diamond. She’s a showgirl, a chanteuse, and a
prime witness in a murder trial that’s going on without her.
Prophet is supposed to find her and “escort” her to the courthouse,
whether she likes it or not. But even as Prophet and his lovely
charge battle each other, some very dangerous men are moving to
make sure the pair never reach the courthouse alive. And Lou
Prophet is about to find out that even the best hunter can become
someone else’s prey…

THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET

By Peter Brandvold

First Published by Berkley Books in
2002

Copyright © 2002 by Peter
Brandvold

Published by Piccadilly
Publishing at Smashwords:
December 2012

Names, characters and incidents in this
book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales,
organizations, or persons living or dead is purely
coincidental.

This ebook is licensed for your
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If you’re reading the book and did not purchase it, or it was not
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and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work
of this author.

Published by Arrangement with the
Author.

Cover image © 2012 by Westworld
Designs

For my
brother-in-law,

Terry “Bubba T.” Cline of
Dalton, GA.

The South will rise
again!

I am one, my
liege,

Whom the vile blows and buffets
of the world
Have so incens’d that I am reckless what I do to spite the
world.

—
Shakespeare,
Macbeth,
Act
III, Sc. I

The man-hunter lost the tracks
of his quarry forty miles west of Three Forks. He cursed a good
note, as was his way—cursed himself, his horse, the day, the
approaching dusk—then got back on his ugly, hammer-headed dun and
rode hard for anothe
r mile and a half. Between a low, rocky hill and a spring,
he picked up the tracks again in the mud the spring made as it
trickled across the trail.

“
Ha-ha!” Prophet
congratulated himself. “There you are, you sons o’ bull-legged
bitches!”

He kicked the horse into a canter,
leaning out from his saddle as he followed the tracks through a
valley that deepened into a gorge, and then rose into mountains,
firs climbing around him on rocky slopes, the clean, fresh smell of
pine in his nose. Lion scat lay on a small, saucer-shaped rock
sitting shoulder-high along the trail. There were deer tracks
galore.

Prophet figured he was a good two
miles beyond the spring when the smell of pinesap was tinged with
the smell of cook smoke. He immediately halted the mountain-bred
hammerhead, the meanest—and best—horse he’d ever owned, and lifted
his nose.

“
Yep, that’s pine smoke,
Mean and Ugly,” he told the horse. “Where in the hell’s it coming
from?”

The horse was sniffing,
too.

Not wanting to ride into a camp of the
men he was hunting, Prophet slid out of the saddle with a catlike
grace remarkable for a man his size—six-three, two hundred and ten
pounds, none of it lard—and tethered the white-socked dun to a
lightning-split cedar. Peering cautiously from beneath the funneled
brim of his sweat-stained half-gallon Stetson, he shucked his
Winchester ‘73 from the saddle boot and quietly followed the shod
prints of the four horses, stepping lightly so as not to kick rocks
and give himself away.

The game trail he and the others had
been following emerged from the pines and snaked down a ledge,
twisting around granite boulders tufted with moss and split
occasionally by gnarled fir roots. It planed out in a grassy meadow
where a sod-and-log cabin sat about fifty yards from a barn and a
corral. Four horses milled in the corral. Outside the cabin, a man
was splitting wood in hide britches, red flannels, and suspenders,
a blue bandanna flopping around his neck in the chill spring
breeze.

It looked to Prophet like a buffalo
camp or a horse outfit. By the shabby state of the buildings and
corral, Prophet figured it hadn’t been much of anything except a
hideout for roving outlaw bands for a good five, ten years. Outlaws
weren’t much for keeping up appearances.

Prophet went back to his horse for his
field glasses. While there, he grabbed the spare six-shooter from
his saddlebags, snagging it behind his cartridge belt, and returned
the Winchester to its boot. He had a feeling this was going to be a
job primarily for the sawed-off double-barreled shotgun hanging
from his saddle horn by a worn leather strap.

Gripping the Richards coach gun before
him, he returned to the ledge overlooking the meadow. Squatting
down behind a boulder, he lowered the shotgun to his side and
trained the glasses on the cabin. The man chopping wood had his
back to Prophet. None of the other men appeared to be out and
about. They’d had a long ride from Three Forks, where they’d robbed
an express office and where Prophet had picked up their trail. The
other three were probably sacked out like March lambs.

Prophet lowered the glasses and stared out
across the meadow, his gray-green eyes catching the light of the
west-angling sun. A grin broke across his rugged, sun-seared face
with the thrice-broken nose. “Perfect. You just sleep tight,
pards.”

Prophet returned the glasses to his
saddlebags, and then made his way down toward the meadow, clutching
the barn blaster out before him and weaving around boulders. He
stopped several times to cast a gander at the cabin and to check on
the man splitting the wood. The outlaw kept his back to Prophet,
until at last he disappeared inside the cabin with an armload of
wood.

By that time, Prophet was halfway down
the trail. He paused behind a boulder through which a fir had
grown, and scanned the meadow once again. The man who’d been
splitting wood had obviously stoked the cabin’s stove, for the tin
chimney was belching smoke like a steam locomotive on a sharp
upgrade.

“
Easy, hosses, easy,” Prophet
told himself. “What the hell you going to do—do-is-do in the front
door and ask what’s cookin’?”

He crouched, turning his back to the
rock, and ran a thoughtful hand along his jaw. How in the hell was
he going to take all four of the men in the cabin without getting
himself killed? It didn’t matter what happened to his quarry, for
the wanted dodgers read “Dead or alive,” but Prophet needed to stay
above ground in order to collect the two-hundred-dollar reward per
head and have one hell of a good time spending it.

He slid another look around the
boulder and saw the smoke puffing from the chimney, thick white
pillows of it tearing on the wind. The smell of pine was sharp in
the clean, chill air. Far away, a hunting hawk screeched, and for a
moment Prophet envied the bird its defenseless prey—a burrowing
critter or a magpie’s nest rife with eggs.

“
I’ll get ’em, goddamnit, I’ll
get ’em,” he whispered reassuringly, staring at the smoke-belching
chimney. A soft light entered his gaze and the corners of his mouth
lifted slightly. “And I know just how I’m gonna do it,
too.”

He grinned and looked around for a
rock a little bigger than the chimney. Finding one, he picked it
up, hefted it, and stole another look at the cabin. The windows
were silhouetted, so he couldn’t see if anyone was looking out, hut
the lack of activity told him that if they weren’t sleeping they
were no doubt seated or reclining on cots. They had no reason to
think they’d been followed. Prophet had been a good half-day behind
them.

He stole around the back, where
stove-length logs were stacked to the low-slung roof. Pressing his
ear to the log wall, he listened. The wall was so thick he could
hear little but an intermittent hum of desultory conversation, as
though the outlaws were playing a casual game of cards. Satisfied
no one inside was savvy to his presence, he carefully climbed atop
the wood pile. From there he flung himself ever-so-daintily onto
the roof, which was sod framed with wood, sliding his shotgun ahead
through the grass.

Hefting the rock, he sat on his butt
and pushed himself along carefully, one slow movement at a time,
until he reached the chimney. Squelching a snicker but allowing
himself a self-congratulatory grin, he set the stone over the
chimney pipe. Only a few wisps of smoke escaped around the sides of
the uneven rock. He sat there for several seconds, grinning and
listening, the wind kneading his hat.

Finally, an exclamation erupted
through the sod beneath his ass, followed by the muffled sound of
chair legs scraping the puncheon floor. Prophet turned to crawl to
the front of the cabin, where he intended to order the men to
surrender as they ran out the front door to escape the smoke. He
hadn’t moved more than a foot, however, when the sod and wood
planking sank beneath him. There were two sudden, shallow drops and
the dismaying sound of splintering wood.

Prophet froze, eyes
widening.

“
Oh, shit.”

The roof sank still further. Then it
opened with a terrific crack, and Prophet went through the hole
like a man falling down a well.

“
Sheeee-iiiiitttt!”

Losing his shotgun, he smashed through
a table covered with cards, tin cups, and whiskey bottles, and hit
the floor with a crash. Men were yelling and smoke was billowing.
Stunned and aching and trying to regain the wind the table had
knocked out of him, Prophet turned on his side, throwing off
rubble. He looked around the room, but the smoke was too thick to
see anything but intermittent, moving figures staggering away from
the table, arms flung over their burning eyes.

“
What-in-the-hell?” one man
yelled.

“
Law!” another
bellowed.