Helldorado Read Online Free PDF Page A

many wild, dangerous animals including the puma, it was forty miles by way of several connected barrancas east of here.
    “I’m gonna stay with the wagons,” Prophet told Big Tio, looking around to make sure no Rurales had been left alive. He hadn’t needed to. The old revolutionario leader’s men had made fast, savage work of the corrupt rural policemen, leaving several of the worst offenders with bloody gashes where their privates had been.
    Before Prophet could nudge Mean and Ugly’s flanks with his heels, Big Tio said, “I see you got your girl back, eh, Padre?”
    “So far.”
    “How does she look? Not so good?”
    Prophet gritted his teeth as another burn of raw fury seared him, and he glanced toward the massive prison building from the open windows of which the smoke of set fires curled like fog. “Not so good. But she’ll make it.”
    He wished like hell he could believe it.
    As the bounty hunter gigged Mean into the sifting dust of the wagons rattling off across the bench fronting the courtyard, Big Tio yelled behind him, “I’ll stop and say a prayer for her at the shrine of Guadalupe. The saint will look after your girl, Lou. You may want to stop there yourself.”
    “I reckon I better not,” Prophet grunted to himself.
    Yeah, you’d better not, he thought. Your praying days ended the day you sold your soul to the Devil, you big dumb son of a bitch. Now what’re you gonna do? Louisa needs help, and you don’t even have a god to pray to for her.
    He tipped the straw sombrero low and put Mean and Ugly into a gallop, chewing up the sand and sage and looking around warily for returning Rurale patrols. He almost wished he’d see one. The day was still young, and there were still a good twenty, thirty Rurales from here whom he’d like to kick out with a shovel.
    He didn’t know which ones had sprung the trap on Louisa and the peasant girls—the senoritas had all been washing clothes at a stream when they’d been captured, with several older women killed outright—but as far as Prophet was concerned, there wasn’t an innocent Rurale in all of northern Mexico.
    The next one he saw would die hard.

4
    PROPHET TOOK A swig from his canteen as he rode, wishing he’d given Louisa some water. That might have brought her around. She probably wouldn’t have drunk it, but he should have tried. Soon, he’d have Chela stop the wagon—by Pozos de Cobre, maybe, or Copper Wells—and he’d make sure she got water. He doubted that she or any of the other girls had been given much to drink or eat since they’d been carted off to the prison.
    Prophet ground the cork into the canteen’s mouth with the heel of his hand and cursed himself. He shouldn’t have let Louisa part ways with him back in the Seven Devils Range on the Arizona-Mexico border.
    He’d last seen her after they’d run to ground the Three of a Kind Gang, who’d killed her cousin and her cousin’s family and burned the entire village of Seven Devils to the rocky ground. Prophet, Louisa, and the young man from Seven Devils, Big Hans, who’d guided them into the mountains after the butchers, had killed the gang bloody, leaving their carcasses, including that of their demonic, beautiful female leader, to the diamondbacks and buzzards in a sunblasted canyon where their gnawed bones were likely now strewn like matchsticks.
    Louisa had pointed her pinto northwest, with no destination in that stubborn, independent mind of hers. Just an urge to be alone and to ride. That had been two months ago.
    Prophet and Mean and Ugly had headed down to Monterrey, and they’d both stomped with their tails up for a good week, Prophet spending most of his time playing poker and getting to know a big-breasted half-breed puta named Riget right down to the leaf-shaped birthmark on the back of her right thigh, just below the lovely globe of her smooth, tan butt cheek.
    Mean and Ugly had torn a stable apart while expressing his affection for a buckskin named Linda.