Stagecoach to Purgatory Read online

  “No, no, Dorothy—not him !” the other woman scolded her companion, nudging Dorothy’s arm with her own.

  Regarding Prophet with a look of sour distaste, she muttered into Dorothy’s left ear, and then both women turned to the portly gent wearing a three-piece suit and beaver hat and smoking a stogie by the door. They asked him to keep an eye on their luggage. When he assured them he wouldn’t let it out of his sight, he opened the screen for them, and they flounced into the Inter-Ocean’s shadowy interior.

  Prophet returned his gaze to the Indian girl, who stood in the shade of the porch roof, staring sullenly out at the street, hands crossed on her belly. A beaded reticule dangled from her slender right wrist. She must have felt his eyes on her, because she turned her head ever so slightly, glancing at him out of the corner of her right, chocolate-colored eye.

  When her gaze met his, he quickly turned away, sheepish. He was just another ogler. Castigating himself, he took the last drag from his quirley, flipped the cigarette over the porch rail and into the street, then sagged back against the hotel’s front wall. He tugged the funneled brim of his battered Stetson down over his eyes. He’d try to snatch a few winks before the stage rolled in.

  Shortly, he was awakened by a woman’s loud voice carrying out to him from inside the hotel: “You don’t mean we’ll be riding in the same coach as that savage!”

  A voice Prophet recognized as belonging to the ticket agent Ralph Fenton said something in placating tones too low for Prophet to hear. The woman returned with: “Oh no, she won’t! Surely the stage line has rules about giving passage to Indians. I don’t care how she’s dressed—she’s still one of them! And I simply cannot and will not share a coach with those people!”

  “Certainly not,” said another woman’s voice. There was a sharp stomping sound. “I put my foot down, as well. Dorothy and I had nearly our entire family wiped out by those animals back in ’71. You cannot ask us to share a stagecoach with someone capable of something so depraved!”

  “Besides, they’re heathens!” intoned Dorothy. “They don’t belong in a Christian carriage . . . among good Christian people!”

  “Now, ladies, please,” said Fenton in a whining, anguished tone. “I can’t just—”

  Another woman’s voice—this one belonging to the old woman with Mary—cut him off with, “Mary is not a heathen! She has spent the last two years at a Christian boarding school in Denver. They taught her to wash and bathe and eat and dress in appropriate clothes—just like civilized people. True, she was born a savage, but she was orphaned early and my brother adopted her. Vance has always been a bleeding heart, taking in all manner of injured or orphaned critter. However, let me assure you ladies that Mary grew up in a Christian house, on a Christian ranch up in Dakota, and, like I said, she’s been taught by the good teachers at Mrs. Esther Devine’s Christian Academy for Wayward Girls. Why, last night I watched Mary say her prayers down on her knees by her bed, and she bathed in good, clean, hot water before we boarded the train in Denver. I guarantee you that she does not smell any different than you or I!”

  “There is no taking the savage out of a savage!” Dorothy returned.

  The argument continued, but Prophet didn’t bother listening to it anymore. He knew how it would go. He watched Mary. If she heard—and she must have heard because she was standing nearly directly in front of the door—she didn’t let on but continued to stare stonily into the sunlit street.

  Prophet’s heart swelled for the girl as he imagined how she felt, standing there and listening to such haughty blather. Hearing such talk about yourself, how could you not feel that you were any better than a mongrel, scrap-chewing dog? Well, the girl—Indian or not—was better than a dog, by God. She was probably far better than the two old, pinch-faced fools laying down judgment on her.

  Feeling the burn of rage ameliorate the sympathetic ache in his heart, Prophet reached down to where his own traveling gear was piled to his right. He shucked his Winchester repeater from its leather sheath, stood, rested the long gun on his shoulder, and strode toward the screen doors.

  The well-dressed gent, still puffing his stogie inside a thick cloud of aromatic smoke, looked him up and down, a wary cast entering the man’s gaze. He took two steps to the right, scuttling aside from the big bounty hunter, as Prophet opened the screen door and walked into the lobby’s cool shadows.

  Chapter 6

  The stage line’s ticket cage was to the right of the hotel counter.

  Ralph Fenton had come out from behind the counter to arbitrate the argument, which was continuing, the two rat-faced women standing to Prophet’s left, Mary’s traveling companion facing them on his right. Fenton sort of stood between the two factions, holding up his hands, demanding a silence he had not yet managed to obtain.

  The three biddies were going at one another like crows fighting over the same dead, sun-seasoned squirrel.

  Prophet gave his best imitation of a heavy-footed, wobbly-kneed drunk as he shambled into the lobby before stopping about fifteen feet from the trio, and shouting, “Fenton, what in the hell kind of raggedy-heeled operation you runnin’ here, anyways?”

  That commanded the silence that the bespectacled, mustached Fenton had failed to obtain in a less dramatic manner. The old biddies’ lips stopped flapping and their picture-hatted heads swung around as though their necks were all attached to the same marionette string.

  The ticket agent’s glasses glinted in the light pushing through the screen doors flanking the bounty hunter.

  Prophet shifted his weight from one boot to the other, bringing his Winchester down off his shoulder and setting the rear stock against his hip, angling the barrel toward the ceiling and curling his right index finger through the trigger guard.

  “I asked you a question, Fenton. What in the hell kind of backwoods confidence game you got here, fer doin’ your bizness in the nuns’ privy? The stage was due in fifteen minutes ago, and I’m gettin’ a mite tired of waitin’ on it. Don’t you people know how to keep a schedule?”

  Fenton suddenly looked constipated. His lower jaw sagged as he thumbed his spectacles up his nose and grimaced. “Lou . . . what in the hell’s gotten into . . . you know there ain’t no stagecoach west of the Mississippi that’s ever on time. Fifteen minutes ain’t late!”

  Prophet pretended to notice the two rat-faced biddies for the first time, and shaped a lusty grin. “On second thought, who cares if the stage is late?”

  He stumbled toward the two rat-faced women. They stared at him warily, eyes growing wider with every toe-dragging step he took closer to their position fronting the ticket cage.

  “Looks like I got me somethin’ purty to look at now, anyways! Say, you two ladies look so much alike, you must be twins. Sisters, anyways—ain’t that right?” He used the barrel of his Winchester to shove his Stetson up off his forehead. He continued to slur his words as he said, “I love me a pair o’ twins—I purely do! Say, how about you two an’ me go on across the street to the Parson’s Blush an’ have us a coupla drinks?”

  Prophet winked and arched his brows with unbridled, albeit 100 percent feigned, lust.

  Fenton, apparently having caught on to Prophet’s ploy, choked back a laugh and brushed his fist across his nose to cover it.

  Both women backed away from the tall man in the sweat-stained, dust-caked buckskin tunic leering down at them. Mary’s traveling companion had edged wide around the big bounty hunter, as well, eyeing him dubiously.

  Dorothy looked at Fenton and said, “My God, who is this beast? Don’t tell me he’ll be on the stage, as well!”

  “Say, you two takin’ the stage?” Prophet made his face light up like that of a child on Christmas morning. “Well, don’t that beat all! We’ll have us a good long time to get to know each other, then, won’t we?”

  He lifted his head and loosed an ear-assaulting rebel yell at the high, arched ceiling.

  Dorothy’s sister turned to the ticket agent, grabbed the lapel of the man
’s wool coat, and gave it such a hard tug that Prophet thought she was going to rip the coat plumb off the poor man’s back. “Mr. Fenton, we’ll be making other arrangements for our trip to Mandan. Good Lord—the people you allow to travel on your coaches!”

  “Indeed!” exclaimed Dorothy, raking her horrified gaze across the grinning Prophet once more. “Savages and brigands! And here we heard the frontier was becoming civilized!”

  “Civilized, my foot!” intoned her sister.

  Arm in arm they hustled off to the hotel’s front counter, waving at the clerk and pleading for a room and a porter to fetch their bags.

  Prophet glanced at Mary’s traveling companion, who stood watching him warily by the door. He regarded the two biddies standing at the hotel desk, chirping like angry grackles, and shook his head. “Don’t that beat all? I’ve never been so insulted in all my days!”

  He shot a wink at Fenton, who smirked then wandered back behind his ticket cage, chuckling to himself and shaking his head.

  Resting his Winchester on his shoulder again, Prophet walked to the doors and held one screen open for Mary’s traveling companion, giving a courtly bow. “Age before beauty, ma’am.”

  The woman pursed her lips and eyed him dubiously again as she stepped out onto the porch.

  Prophet followed her out. The well-dressed gent with the stogie gave him a knowing smile inside a wreath of billowing cigar smoke. Prophet slacked back onto his bench with a weary sigh and glanced at Mary standing where she’d been standing before.

  She swung her head around to regard the tall man, her expression vaguely quizzical, then, dismissing him with a slow blink of her chocolate eyes, turned her dark, regal head back to stare sullenly into the busy street.

  * * *

  The flashy and relatively new stagecoach, manufactured by the Abbot-Downing Company of Concord, New Hampshire, pitched and rattled into town only thirty-five minutes late. The jehu made a show of the impressive contraption as well as his matched six-horse team, proudly standing in his driver’s boot and bellowing loudly while popping a blacksnake over the team’s lathered backs.

  Pedestrians as well as horseback riders and ranch supply wagons made haste to get out of the lumbering team’s way, and the grizzled jehu grinned with pride. His name was Mort Seymour. Prophet had brushed elbows with Seymour as well as the shotgun messenger, J. W. Plumb, in the past.

  Adding to the hubbub surrounding the red and yellow Concord’s arrival, several dogs ran out from alleys in which they’d no doubt been dining on discarded café scraps or dead chickens, and nipped and barked at the wagon’s large, churning, iron-shod wheels. One old-timer who’d been snatching thirty winks on a loafer’s bench fronting the mercantile was so aroused by the impressive contrivance’s dramatic arrival that he rose from his seat, shucked an old Remington revolver from the holster on his hip, and snapped off three shots, bellowing, “Stage is here! Stage is here! Stage is here!” with each shot.

  Young boys seemingly materialized out of the dirt to chase after the rolling carriage and then mill around as the dusty passengers destaged, brushing two or three layers of talcumlike dust from their clothes and hats. Most were soldiers from Camp Collins in the foothills of the Front Range mountains, likely on their way to another post. When the team had been switched to another matching six-hitch of frisky, glass-eyed, tail-arched thoroughbreds, Prophet helped the old woman traveling with Mary into the carriage, and then Mary herself.

  The only other passenger was the portly gent in the three-piece suit, who dropped the one-inch stub of his stogie into the dust and held out his hand to Prophet, saying, “I’m Max Beermeister. Figured we might as well get to know each other since we’ll be smelling each other’s sweat for a while.”

  “Lou Prophet. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Max. I can tell we’re gonna get along just fine.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Your name. I’m partial to anything having anything to do with beer!”

  Prophet winked at the man and then gestured for Beermeister to climb in first. When Prophet had said how-de-do to both Seymour and Plumb, he stowed his gear in the rear luggage boot and climbed into the coach, which rocked like a small fishing boat on its leather thoroughbraces. He took the rear seat, facing forward as well as toward the pretty, exotic visage of the enigmatic Mary, who quickly slid her own gaze out the window beside her.

  The old woman sat to Mary’s right, facing Beermeister, who sat across from her, to Prophet’s left.

  When the jehu and shotgun messenger had climbed back into the driver’s boot atop the coach, Mort Seymour did his best imitation of a train conductor, shouting, “All abooo-ard ! First stop the Rawhide Buttes, folks!”

  He released the brake with a sudden jerk and began haranguing the team in earnest, popping his blacksnake over their backs. Prophet knew the team needed no encouragement. A fresh hitch was always ready to air out its lungs and tear up some trail. The hoorawing was all part of Seymour’s show.

  Prophet smiled at that, sharing the smile with Mary, who gave him a brief, vacant stare, as though looking right through him, before shifting her gaze once more to the window and the main street of Cheyenne quickly dancing past beyond it.

  In less than a minute, they’d left the last shacks and outlying stables of Cheyenne behind and were heading straight north across pancake-flat sagebrush country broken here and there by haystack buttes and shelving mesas the color of wet adobe. Gradually the terrain began rising and more and more chalky, eroded buttes appeared along both sides of the trail.

  The coach’s first stop for a new team was the Rawhide Buttes Relay Station, nothing more than a chinked-log shack, unchinked-log barn, windmill, stone water tank, and unpeeled-pole corral. Prophet and Beermeister got out to stretch their legs while the two women remained in the coach, quiet as dusty moths on a windowsill.

  When the fresh team had been hitched up, the coach pulled out once more, heading north. This time Seymour forwent his raucous bellowing, for the only ones to hear out here were the grim-faced station manager, his two hostlers—both tongue-tied bashful from too much isolation—and a yellow mongrel dining on a dead rattler in the barn shade.

  There were several more stops—Bear Springs, Wheatland, Chugwater, Chug Springs, and Eagle’s Nest—before the coach stopped for the night at the appropriately named Rustic Hotel at Fort Laramie, a hundred miles northeast of Cheyenne. Here Prophet and the other passengers dined on antelope stew. The two women, neither of whom had said more than two words to anyone since the stage had left Cheyenne—and those two words had been offered only by Mary’s traveling companion—drifted upstairs to bed around sunset.

  Prophet, Beermeister, Seymour, Plumb, and the hotel manager, a man named Hodges who had had one eye burned out by the Sioux and also wore the scar of a near-hanging when he’d been mistaken for a stock thief some years ago in Montana, sat out on the front porch, playing stud poker for nickels.

  When the mournful wails of “Taps” drifted in from the fort’s parade ground, the men, including Prophet, called it a night and headed upstairs to their flea-infested, sour-smelling beds scratchy with corn husks protruding from the mattress ticking.

  Though the country traversed by the Cheyenne-to-Deadwood stage was notoriously perilous, Prophet had seen no signs of trouble so far. For that he was grateful. He wanted no delays in reaching the fondly remembered Lola Diamond and helping her out of whatever entanglement she’d found herself in.

  Trouble, however, reared its ugly head the next day.

  Chapter 7

  Heads, rather.

  There was more than one ugly head that showed up the next day, not long after the coach had pulled out of the Robber’s Roost Station, where it had stopped for the noon meal.

  Prophet, habitually on the scout for trouble, had spied the silhouettes of at least four riders keeping pace with the stage from about three hundred yards off the trail’s southeast side. He soon lost them behind an outcropping of rock and pines but pi
cked them up again twenty minutes later. Only now there were clearly five riders riding in the same general direction as the coach, and they were on the northeast side of the trail.

  They were also less than a hundred yards away now, apparently not much caring if they were seen or not. Prophet couldn’t see them clearly, for they were still a ways off and the coach was rocking and pitching through a jog of pine-clad, rocky badlands, steep ridges occasionally closing on either or both sides of the trail. But he could see the frequent glint of sun flashing off guns. Something about the way the riders were staying close to the trail without following it themselves, told him they were something other than benign range riders looking for bogged beeves.

  He soon lost them again. He had a feeling he’d pick them up again when they wanted to be picked up again.

  Automatically, he unsnapped the keeper thong from over the hammer of his .45 and slipped the revolver from its holster. He hadn’t meant to rile the others, but of course all three had spied the movement and turned to see him open the Colt’s loading gate to check the loads.

  The old woman traveling with Mary was Aunt Grace. Prophet had learned her name on the rare occasion he’d overheard Mary addressing the woman. Aunt Grace acquired an anxious look, as though she thought, as she’d probably suspected in the first place, that Prophet was a road agent. Now, showing his true colors, he was about to rob the stage and probably rape both her and Mary!

  Mary, however, looked at the bounty hunter with the customarily sullen, skeptical expression he’d come to know too well over the course of the one and a half days he’d traveled facing her from three feet away.

  “Trouble?” asked Beermeister sitting to Prophet’s left, arching a brow as he watched Prophet slip a fresh brass cartridge from his shell belt and push it into the chamber he normally kept empty beneath the hammer.

  “Probably nothin’.” Prophet gave Aunt Grace a reassuring smile. “Probably nothin’ at all.”