MOUNT UP AND RIDE
THE WILD TRAILS WITH THE MOST COLORFUL PAIR OF BOUNTY HUNTERS...AND LOVERS...THE
FRONTIER HAS EVER SEEN
After a hot night
in Spanish Gulch, Lou Prophet and Louisa Bonaventure, aka the Vengeance Queen,
split up to follow a gang of kill-crazy cutthroats who have also split up as
they journey through the Spanish Mountains of southern Arizona, heading toward
Mexico. While Prophet shares the trail with one of the captured killers, Jack
Flood and his daughter Nancy, as well as a wet-behind-the-ears cavalry
lieutenant, Louisa finds herself on foot and without a gun, having become the
killers' prey.
Prophet’s trail
isn’t so easy, either. The ex-Confederate bounty man finds himself stalked by a
notorious border bandito who doesn’t care one bit for the gringo bounty hunter--especially
after Prophet cheated him at cards and killed his partner in a Juarez brothel.
Enrique Granados wants Prophet’s valuable prisoner and the prisoner’s lovely
daughter as sweet justice, and Prophet’s head on a stick for his own
satisfaction!
First few paragraphs:
“Hey, Prophet—you know what’s even uglier
than you are?” bellowed the outlaw, Kinch Broadwell, from a stony escarpment
high above the bounty hunter, Lou Prophet, who was hunting him.
“No,” Prophet shouted, standing at the
base of the scarp, staring up toward where Broadwell hid in the rocks. “What’s
that, Kinch? Pray tell!”
“This here!”
Something streaked down past Prophet’s shoulder
and landed with a heavy thump about six feet out from where the bounty hunter
stood with his back to the scarp, squeezing his Winchester ’73 in both his
gloved hands.
Dust wafted.
A sour stench filled the air as well as
Prophet’s nostrils. He blinked against the dust and then looked down in disgust
at what appeared to be a dead javelina.
Half
of a dead javelina, make
that.
Something had consumed the beast’s
hindquarters and part of its trunk, leaving a ragged, bloody, fly-encrusted bit
of jagged spine trailing out from behind its front legs, like a tail of some
horrible sort. The ugly head tufted with coarse black bristles, jaws studded
with razor-edged tusks resembling a raptor’s oversized talons, grimaced up at
the bounty hunter, its dark eyes leering and somehow menacing. Prophet was
suddenly having trouble keeping his breakfast down, though it had been a sparse
one of three-day-old baking powder biscuits and coffee reheated from the night
before.
He sidestepped away from the beast,
turning his head and drawing in deep draughts of the dry, Arizona breeze still
lightly perfumed from an earlier morning rain.
Above him, Kinch Broadwell
howled with laughter.
