The Devil and Lou Prophet by Peter Brandvold

by how things were panning out.
With Big Dan cutting the trail dust in Dave’s, it shouldn’t be too
difficult to nab the girl. Thinking it over and liking the idea
better and better, the bounty hunter reached into his coat pocket
for the deputy sheriff’s star and pinned it to his wool vest,
making sure it was hid by the left lapel of his new coat. He didn’t
want to reveal it until he had to. Enough people around town knew
his true identity to box things up good and plumb if they spied the
badge.
    He turned back to the wagons. Three of
the girls had gathered around the back of the last wagon. The
fourth was inside, handing down carpetbags to the
others.
    “ Ladies, let me help you
with those,” Prophet said as he approached the group.
    “ Thanks, mister,” one of
them said.
    “ Yeah, thanks,” said
another.
    “ No problem at all,”
Prophet said, taking a bag from the girl inside the
wagon.
    He looked at her and almost recoiled
from her beauty—the oval-shaped, elegant face with a narrow,
decisive nose and widely spaced blue eyes. She was in her early
twenties, a stunning beauty whose green dress clung to her kindly,
accentuating the fullness of her breasts and the slenderness of her
waist. What really caught Prophet’s attention was her hair, which
was the deep umber of hot coals as a raging fire burned down to
cinders. It brushed her slender neck in curly waves.
    “ Much obliged,” she said
with an understated smile, lifting her eyes to regard him guardedly
from under the brim of her floppy straw hat. The hat gave her the
air of a tomboy. A tomboy, that was, with full, pursed lips and
skin as smooth as water.
    “ Uh ... no problem at all,”
he said, his heart thumping as he recognized Lola Diamond. The
sheriff’s description of her had not done her justice, and Prophet
was glad he’d had the good sense to buy new duds. She indeed
appeared to be a woman who’d judge a man by his attire. “You must
be Miss Diamond.”
    “ That’s right,” she said,
frowning curiously, stepping onto the wagon’s end gate. He took her
slender arm and helped her down as she asked, “And you are ...
?”
    “ Louis B. Prophet at your
service, ma’am,” Prophet announced with his best Southern
gentleman’s smile. “I’m in the whiskey trade.”
    “ Whiskey
drummer?”
    “ Oh, don’t worry—I’m not here to
sell you whiskey, ma’am. I’m a big fan of yours, and when I saw
your wagons pass by the saloon yonder ... well ... I just thought
I’d see if I could help you ladies with your bags.”
    He exaggerated his Georgia accent,
which he’d found to have a soothing effect on women. He smiled
disarmingly, lifted the crisp bowler, then set it gently down on
his head and glanced behind him to make sure Sheriff Fitzsimmons
wasn’t within hearing range. The inimical sheriff would no doubt
have gotten quite a laugh from Prophet’s performance, and probably
have foiled the whole thing.
    “ Thanks anyway,” the girl
said with a polite smile, “but we’ll carry our own bags.” A
cautious one, she. One so lovely would have to be.
    “ Oh, come on, Lola,” one of
the other girls dissented. “I say if the kind man wants to carry
our bags, we let him.”
    “ Me, too, Lola,” another
chimed in. “My backs hurts.”
    “ Hey, thanks, mister!” the
third girl said before Lola could object.
    “ No trouble at all, no
trouble at all,” Prophet sang, hefting all four carpetbags under
his arms. “Show me the way, ladies!”
    Hauling the carpetbags, Prophet
followed the tired, trail-weary women into the hotel, and then
waited while they registered. When Lola and one of the others had
gotten their room keys, Prophet followed them up the stairs,
admiring the way the green dress clung to the redhead’s legs,
tracing the contours of her shapely thighs as she walked. In spite
of the pain that hefting the bags inspired in his shoulder, he was
growing more and more fond of his job.
    “ Much obliged,” Lola said
dully as