Helldorado Read Online Free PDF

Prophet had had to rescue the ugly dun from a stableman’s bullet twice. Still, he’d intended to stay with the sultry Riget for another week—he liked her digs and the sound of her lusty chuckles—and he’d likely still be tumbling with the girl, and drinking her liquor, if he hadn’t gotten wind of a bank robbery just north of there.
    Two young peasant girls had been killed in a hail of gunfire as the banditos had trampled a young pregnant peasant mother and headed north . . . toward the Montanas Olvidadas.
    Prophet didn’t know what it was that had warned him of danger. Maybe his own sixth sense acquired from years of man hunting on the western frontier after barely surviving the War of Northern Aggression. Or possibly a weird lining up of certain stars in his and Louisa’s signs—though it was she who believed in such blather, not him. But a prickling between his heart and his spine told him that Louisa would be on the trail of those child-killing wolves, and that it wasn’t a trail the lovely blond bounty hunter needed to be on alone.
    Not in Mexico or anywhere else. Sure as hell not in the forbidding Olvidadas.
    That’s where he had picked up her trail, after he’d cut that of the banditos—all four of whom she’d taken down in a deep canyon not far from Rocas Altas. Prophet hadn’t learned how she’d handled it. Knowing Louisa, she’d used her charms as well as her guns, maybe even the razor-edged stiletto she kept in her boot. She might have shown up around the bandits’ campfire like a vision straight from a young man’s lusty dream, only to leave all four dancing with El Diablo behind the smoking gates of hell.
    She’d laid over in Rocas Altas—coincidentally the village where Big Tio’s revolutionarios had been holed up as well—and that’s where Montoya had gotten her. Likely caught her off guard while she was enjoying a few days in the remote mountains with the innocent village children, tending her tack and gathering trail supplies while letting her horse rest before moving on. Having had her own childhood cut short by bloody murder, Louisa loved being around children—when she wasn’t hunting those that killed them, that was.
    Prophet kept Mean and Ugly close to the back of Chela’s wagon, not minding that he was eating its dust. Occasionally, Big Tio’s comely daughter turned to look through the covered wagon at him, over the jostling dark heads of the Mexican girls. Louisa’s blond head was all but covered by the hides, but Prophet kept his eyes on the swatch of hair he could see of her, in case she needed him.
    “We stop here,” Chela said an hour after they’d left the prison, the backside of which they could see in the canyon below them, black smoke rising into the brassy sky above.
    Prophet also saw Big Tio’s men galloping toward him and the wagon over the low, cedar- and manzanita-stippled hogbacks, their horses looking bulky with stolen Rurale loot.
    Chela had stopped the wagon by a stream, and while the lovely revolutionaria and the boy with the horse pistol wedged behind his rope belt helped the Mexican girls out of the wagons, Prophet grabbed his canteen, stepped off Mean and Ugly and into the wagon in which Louisa lay unmoving beneath the bobcat hide. He dropped down beside her and tipped her face toward him.
    Beneath the purple bruises, she looked paler than before. Waxy. Prophet’s heart thudded. Had she died on him without so much as a parting word? He doffed his hat, lowered his head to her chest.
    Faintly, her heart thumped.
    He popped the canteen’s cork and, snaking his left arm around behind her head, tipped the flask to her cracked, swollen lips. “How ’bout some water, girl? Huh? How ’bout it? Why don’t you take a drink for ole Lou?”
    Her lips didn’t move. Her swollen eyes remained closed. As swollen as they were, she probably couldn’t get them open if she tried.
    Prophet felt as though a sharp knife were poking around in his guts.