Riding With the Devil's Mistress (Lou Prophet Western #3) by Peter Brandvold Page A

bleeding
badly, the entire sleeve soggy scarlet. His eyes found Louisa,
who’d stopped beside Prophet to gaze grimly down at the
man.
    ‘ Wayne
MacDonald,’ she said.
    The man frowned at Prophet. His
voice was thin. ‘Who in the hell is she, and how in the hell does she know
my name?’
    ‘ I
studied the wanted dodgers on all you boys,’ the girl replied in a
tone of withering malevolence. ‘I could pick each one of you out of
a crowded train station. Prepare to meet your maker, you murdering
savage.’
    The girl yanked her silver-plated revolver
from a fold in her skirt and aimed it in both hands.
    ‘ Hey,
wait a minute,’ Prophet objected, reaching out and shoving the gun
down. ‘What in the hell do you think you’re doin’,
girl?’
    ‘ She’s
crazy!’ MacDonald cried. ‘She’s plumb crazy!’
    ‘ Get
your hand off my gun,’ she warned Prophet. ‘This animal raped my
mother and sisters.’
    MacDonald gazed at her with
wide-eyed fear and incredulity. ‘Huh? What are you talkin’
about?’
    ‘ You
know what I’m talkin’ about, you dog. Back in Nebraska. Last year.
I saw it all—or enough of it, anyway,’ she added darkly. ‘And
you’re gonna die for your part in it, just like all the others are
gonna die.’
    MacDonald looked beseechingly
at Prophet, who still had a grip on the girl ’s gun. ‘I don’t know what
she’s talkin’ about.’
    Prophet gazed at the man,
remembering the raid in Luther Falls, his own anger returning like
kerosene dribbled on a guttering fire. ‘You don’t, eh?’ he grumbled
skeptically.
    ‘ Release my gun,’ the girl ordered Prophet.
    Prophet turned to her.
Sympathetically, he said, ‘I’m sorry about what happened to your family, but
I can’t let you shoot this man in cold blood. I know he deserves to
die, but you can’t do it.’
    Louisa ’s eyes flared angrily. ‘Just see if
I can’t! He murdered my family!’
    ‘ You
can’t judge him, Louisa. As tempting as it is, it ain’t your
place.’
    ‘ What
about the two men you killed with that scatter-gun back in
Campbell?’
    ‘ That
was different. They drew on me. I was ready and willing to take
them alive and haul ‘em before a judge, but it came down to either
them or me.’ Prophet shook his head. ‘You can’t kill a defenseless
man, Louisa. It ain’t right. I won’t let you do it.’
    With a sudden tug, he jerked
the gun from her hand. She gave an angry grunt and cursed him,
watching as he tucked the revolver behind his own cartridge
belts. ‘I’ll
return this to you when you’ve calmed down.’
    She stared at him, fuming, then
stomped off through the trees toward her horse. Prophet waited
until he was fairly certain she hadn ’t gone to get the rifle he’d noticed in
her saddle boot, then said to MacDonald, ‘You worthless pile of dog
shit!’
    The last thing in the world
he ’d wanted
to do was to be in the position of defending a man such as this. As
much as he knew MacDonald deserved to die, his letting Louisa drop
the hammer on him would have been the same thing as Prophet doing
so himself. And one thing he’d never let himself do, for as long as
he’d been collecting bounties on wanted men, was allow himself to
play the tempting roles of judge, jury, and executioner. Because
once he got a taste for it, he knew, there would be no stopping
himself, and before he knew it he’d become no better than the men
he hunted.
    MacDonald looked up at him and
grinned, reading his mind. It was too much for Prophet, and,
without thinking, he drew his hand back and smacked the outlaw hard
across his jaw, whipping the man ’s head sideways against the
tree.
    ‘ Ow!’
the man cried. ‘That hurt!’
    ‘ Yeah,
well, there’s more where that one came from,’ Prophet groused,
cutting the man’s tethers and jerking him to his feet. ‘Move! I
wanna hit Wahpeton before sundown.’
    MacDonald laughed as Prophet
pushed him toward his horse. ‘Then you wanna be dead before
sundown.’
    ‘