Helldorado Read Online Free PDF Page B

Frustrated, he sighed and lowered the canteen from Louisa’s lips. As if in response to his sigh, she gave a soft sigh of her own. Her head moved slightly, as though shaking her head. As if to say, not now, Lou. I’ll drink later. At least, that’s what he hoped she meant. That she was conscious enough to refuse the water.
    “Okay,” Prophet said, ramming the cork back into the canteen as hope softened the edge on that knife in his guts. “Maybe later. I’ll let you sleep now.”
    He glanced over at the creek twisting through sycamores and poplars beside which the rescued girls sat with their knees up and staring or leaning forward to drink from the cool, running stream. Chela sat beside one of the girls, smoothing the senorita’s hair back from her forehead with one hand while offering bits of jerky with the other. Another girl was sobbing against the shoulder of yet another, older child.
    Prophet’s heart wrenched. What misery they’d all been through. Yet, they had each other. Soon, they’d be home with their families. Louisa had no one but him. No one waiting for her with a warm fire and a hot meal.
    Just Prophet himself—a down-at-heel, bounty-hunting saddle tramp. And all he had were empty pockets, a few pots and one change of clothes in his saddlebags, guns, ammo, tack, and a hammer-headed lineback dun.
    That’s all he had, and that’s all she had. The last of her known family had been killed in Seven Devils.
    He imagined the anguish being played out behind those swollen-shut eyes, and he groaned. He slumped down beside the comatose girl, wrapped his arm around her shoulders, pressed his lips to her forehead. “Gonna get you well again soon.”
    He stared off at the ridge above the stream. “Good as damn new, and then things are gonna change for us both.”
     
    The horseback revolutionarios, several of whom were passing bottles or stone jugs between them, caught up to the wagons a few minutes after the girls had been loaded up and they were moving again. Prophet hung back with Louisa, keeping an eye on her, as they climbed the zigzagging canyon high into the blue reaches of the Forgotten Mountains.
    The cool air was a welcome relief from the heat of the desert below. As he rode, Prophet remembered he was barefoot. He reached back into his saddlebags for his socks and boots, and then he pulled out his battered, funnel-brimmed Stetson that was stained from salt sweat and the weather of many western lands. While it wasn’t as good protection from the high-country sun as the broad-brimmed sombrero, he was more familiar with it.
    He clamped it down on his head and adjusted the curled brim.
    They crested the last pass just before sundown, and as Prophet followed Chela’s wagon down the rocky two-track trail, he saw the small village spread out across the boulder-strewn bowl ahead of him. Rocas Altas had once been a small, sprawling city nurtured by gold and silver mines, but earthquakes over the past hundred years had nearly obliterated it.
    Ancient adobe and stone ruins hunched in the sage amongst the cracked boulders and cedars, but it was only a dozen or so brush huts, quickly erected so that they could be just as quickly abandoned at the first sign of an Apache, Yaqui, or Rurale attack, that were occupied. On the steep slopes all around the village rode the tawny grass parks on which goats grazed. On the far side of the village, a high, massive stone ridge rose like a giant, dilapidated castle angling away. Its steep slopes were pocked with the tailings of long-abandoned mines.
    Because of the frequent quakes, the place was too dangerous to mine. But it was a good place for Big Tio’s band of revolutionarios to hide out from the Rurale and Federale troops as well as the wealthy landowners they intermittently badgered in revenge for the savage exploitation of the land-less peon.
    As the wagons squawked and rattled into the village, the families ran out from their brush huts or horse stables or chicken