Hell's Angel Read Free

and fog the sage. I’d appreciate it if you’d never heard of me, if anyone asks—especially the men of Arturo Campa.”
    â€œOh, you.” The old man, whose name Prophet remembered was Santiago Sandoval, materialized like a lumpy ghost in the murky shadows, carrying his own, spy-flecked lantern by its handle. “The bell tolls for thee?” He rolled his dark eyes toward the front of the barn, to indicate the continued tolling of the bells at the Rurale headquarters.
    â€œThey toll for all of us, sooner or later,” Prophet said, stepping into his horse’s stall, the mean, hammer-headed roan twitching his ears devilishly.
    â€œI should have known it was you.”
    â€œWhat do I owe you?” Prophet asked, throwing his saddle blanket over Mean’s back.
    â€œSix pesos. And an extra one for the patience required to house and feed such a wretched, contrary beast. He tore the seam in my serape earlier, when I was only trying to comb him.”
    â€œI’ll make it seven,” Prophet said, understanding.
    A woman’s voice said from a lean-to partition in which the old man and his wife lived: “Come back to bed, Santiago. My feet are cold.”
    The old man gave a wan smile and shrugged. “Leave it on the water barrel.”
    He and his lantern slipped back into the shadows, and Prophet quickly rigged up the dun in the darkness.
    Mean stomped and snorted, playful and excited despite the lateness of the hour to hit the trail again. Mean and Ugly didn’t care to be housed in livery barns unless there were a frisky mare or two for him to touch noses with, stomp with, and to generally try to impress despite the fact he’d lost his balls to the gelding knife many years before. Prophet had just turned his back on the horse to grab his saddlebags off the stall partition when out the corner of his eye he saw the dun lower his long snout toward the bounty hunter’s shoulder and peel his leathery lips away from his teeth.
    â€œGoddamn your cussed hide!” Prophet hissed, jerking around and smashing his left elbow against the side of the horse’s stout jaw just in time to keep the shoulder of his tunic from being ripped out.
    The horse lurched back, blowing, snorting, shaking his head, twitching his ears, and showing his teeth. If there were ever a horse who could laugh in ribald mockery at its rider, that horse was Mean and Ugly.
    â€œWhy the hell do you do that?” Prophet asked the wicked beast, tossing his saddlebags over the horse’s back, behind his saddle. “As if I got all night to dance around in here with you, sportin’ for a fight. We got them Rurales on our asses again, no thanks to Senorita Ramonna—if you can’t trust a whore,
who can you trust
?—and I got no damn time for your nonsense. You know, if I had a lick of sense, I would have listened to everyone who’s so willingly given their opinion on the subject and ridden you off to the damn glue factory years ago!”
    He led the horse to the front of the barn, blew out the lantern, tossed some coins onto the rain barrel’s wooden cover, and then slipped out between the doors, closing them quietly behind him.
    He cocked his head to listen. The bells had stopped tolling. The silence was even more menacing than the tolling had been. Campa’s Rurales were after him, but where were they searching?
    Oh, well,
he thought as he stepped into the leather
—at least they don’t know where I am, either.
He slid his shotgun over his shoulder, letting it dangle down his back, and booted the horse around the side of the livery barn, wanting to light a shuck out of San Simon as quickly as possible but also get as far away as he could from the Rurale outpost on the south edge of town.
    He steered the snorting horse between unlit shacks, stock pens, and corrals.
    The flat roofs around him were limned in starlight. Low hills humped darkly in the north, and a