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

blue sky, a hawk shrieked. He hoped it
wasn ’t a bad
omen. He wanted to nail the killers, but he also wanted to get
these tinhorns back to Bitter Creek alive. And himself.
    Prophet led Polk and Ronnie Williams about
fifty yards north of the other posse members then west another
fifty yards and up a steep rise. It was a moderately hard climb,
with the layered, chalky shale giving way beneath their boots so
that several times each man slipped and had to grab junipers and
sage shrubs for purchase.
    Once, young Ronnie grabbed a
dwarf chokecherry under which a diamondback was napping. The snake
woke and struck, nipping the kid ’s shirtsleeve before Ronnie jerked his
hand back. He slid several feet back down the slope on his butt.
But the excitement gave him an adrenaline burst, and ten seconds
later he was sitting on the shelf’s crest beside Prophet and
Polk.
    He was breathing hard and he
looked flushed, but when Polk asked him if he was all right, he
just grinned and gave a nervous chuckle, wiping the sweat from his
forehead with the shirt sleeve in which two tiny round holes
showed, a half inch from the cuff ’s bone button.
    The three crawled to the
southern lip of the shelf and hunkered behind boulders shaped like
squashed mushrooms. Prophet peered through a notch in the rock,
casting his gaze out and down at the flat, scrub-tufted ground
between the hill behind which the rest of the posse lay hidden, and
the flat-topped butte where he ’d seen the sun flashes.
    From behind the low hill to his
left, a shaggy mare ’s tail of smoke rose. Just about the right size, Prophet
thought. The kind of fire the members of a tinhorn posse might
start if they got a little sloppy about the wood they used for a
cook fire.
    Prophet looked at the flat directly beneath
the shelf.
    If there were indeed men on the
butte—and he was going to feel like a fool if there
weren ’t—they’d have to traverse that stretch of sage and rabbit
brush to investigate the smoke wafting from the posse’s coffee
fire.
    If there were indeed men on the butte
...
    After fifteen minutes, he was
wondering if the reflections he ’d seen had only been that of the afternoon sun
off mica shards or water from a spring. If so, he was wasting
precious time while the killers hightailed deep into the
Laramies.
    Gazing through the notch,
Prophet was about to spit a curse through pinched lips when he
ducked suddenly and felt adrenaline spurt in his veins. On the
flat, he ’d
spied movement behind a frowzy cottonwood stand and a tangled patch
of wild plums.
    To his right, Polk had seen his
reaction. “What is it?” the druggist asked.
    Prophet didn ’t say anything. Casting another
careful glance through the notch, he again saw movement—a shoulder
and part of a hat moving through the rabbit brush on the other side
of the trees.
    “ Gentlemen, I think we have a
barn dance,” Prophet whispered to Polk and Ronnie, who were lying
tensely on their elbows, holding their rifles with iron grips. “In
about a minute, we should know for sure.”
    He peered through the notch again, saw
three... four ... five men moving through the brush along the base
of the shelf. The men walked abreast, about ten to fifteen feet
apart. They held rifles across their chests as they traced
serpentine courses through the high desert foliage, staring
straight ahead at the ridge before them and at the shaggy white
smoke billowing and tearing against the sky.
    Prophet bit the inside of his
cheek and felt the blood coursing slowly but purposefully through
his veins. Too impatient to wait where they ’d been, the owlhoots had taken the
bait.
    He turned to Polk and
Ronnie. “You
boys stay here. When I start shootin’, pick a man out of the group
and shoot from the top of these rocks. I’m gonna go down and storm
’em, try to take ’em by surprise.”
    He looked at the two men
sidelong and added wryly, “Just don’t shoot me in the back.”
    Polk gulped and adjusted his
derby.