Free The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6) by Peter Brandvold

What’s the point in that?” asked
the portly, pie-headed banker, Ralph Carmody, his face red as his
black Morgan negotiated the grade, throwing the banker forward in
his saddle so that he had to push off the horn to keep from
crushing the family jewels. Turning in his own saddle to look
behind, Prophet noted the gray, curly-headed man, pushing sixty,
had sweated up a good, gray derby.
    “ You hunt birds, Mr.
Carmody?”
    “ Waterfowl,” the banker said in a
pinched voice with a nod.
    “ Well, look at the coffee fire
like a bunch of decoys you lay out on a slew of an autumn morn ...
just at the edge of the cattails.”
    “ I see,” Milt Emory said,
sounding none too happy. “We’re gonna sort of call them in ... to
us.”
    “ Now we’re talkin’ the same
lingo,” Prophet said as he brought his horse to a halt in the
crease between two hills, at the edge of a shallow, narrow gully
filled with briars.
    As he tied the buckskin to a
wild plum bush, he told the others his plan. “Gather some wood and build a
fire. Not too big, not too small. Throw some green leaves on it, so
it smokes up nice... but not too nice. Too much smoke might make
those killers suspicious. Just a little, so they’ll write us off as
tinhorns who don’t know any better than to send up smoke
signals.”
    “ I’d know better than to do
that,” Carmody muttered indignantly, picking cockleburs from the
deerskin leggings he wore over his fawn trousers.
    “ When you’ve got the fire going,”
Prophet ordered the group, “climb to just below the brow of that
hill.” He pointed west, to the low, rounded ridge. “Belly down and
take your hats off, and for God’s sake, don’t show your faces over
the ridge top. Keep your rifles out of sight too.”
    “ What are you gonna do, Mr.
Prophet?” Polk asked, shucking his shiny Winchester from his saddle
boot. His mild blue eyes glittered excitedly, like sun-shot
marbles.
    Prophet dug in his saddlebags
until he found his moccasins—a ratty but comfortable old pair for
which he ’d
traded an old Ute war chief a deck of cards showing naked saloon
girls. He sat on a grassy hummock, tossed the moccasins down beside
him, and began kicking off his boots.
    “ It’s what we’re gonna do—you, me, and Ronnie,” the
bounty hunter said. “We’re gonna sneak around the north side of
this hill, hunker down on that shelf yonder, and see if our decoy
attracts any game. If so, the boys here will have them in their
rifle sights from the east, and we’ll have them from higher ground
in the north.”
    “ You ready?” Prophet asked Polk
and the young man named Ronnie Williams—a sullen but earnest young
man, banker Carmody’s grandson—who did odd jobs around town,
including stringing chicken wire and digging privy
holes.
    He had longish, strawberry-blond hair under
a brown derby hat, a spade-shaped beard, scraggly mustache, and
thin lips that rarely smiled. His old Spencer rifle had seen better
days, the cracked stock held together with wire and twine, but the
others said Ronnie was the best deer and pronghorn hunter in town.
Prophet figured a sharpshooter would come in handy atop the ledge
he was heading for.
    The kid nodded solemnly, eyes wide.
    Polk licked his lips and
squeezed his well-oiled Winchester. “Lead the way.”
    “ Don’t make any moves until I
do,” Prophet told the others. “Any questions?”
    “ Just one thing,” Sorley Kitchen
said—a wiry man, pushing fifty, dressed in faded denims and a
blue-checked shirt, who walked with a pronounced limp.
    A former camp cook
who ’d fallen
from his own wagon during a stampede, Kitchen repaired pots and
pans and painted houses on occasion, when someone in town could
afford paint.
    “ Could we actually brew coffee
over the fire? I sure could go for a cup of joe!” He smacked his
lips.
    Prophet chuffed. “Sure—why not?” he
muttered as he turned and headed north along the base of the
western hill.
    Somewhere above, in the
faultless