The Devil and Lou Prophet by Peter Brandvold

Author:Peter Brandvold
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: western, american west, american frontier, peter brandvold, the old west, piccadilly publishing, the wild west
Publisher: Piccadilly Publishing

Chapter Thirteen

Owen McCreedy was sitting at his desk in the jailhouse in Johnson City, smoking a thin cigar and going over his court docket. He’d just turned a page of the big book when he heard a yell from the cell block.

The sheriff set his cigar in the ashtray, stood, and walked to the door leading into the cell block. He opened the door and yelled, “I’m not getting you any more tobacco, Brown. You’ve smoked a whole bag since yesterday.”

“Look at the goddamn clock,” came the shout from the cell. “It’s supper time!”

“So it is,” McCreedy said without interest.

“I want my supper, goddamnit! I got rights!”

“I’ll fetch your supper when I’m goddamn ready to fetch it.”

Billy Brown’s voice came low and tight with emotion. “Why don’t you come back here, McCreedy? Why don’t you open up this door, so you and I can go at it the way we really want? Huh? Why don’t you do that?”

Knees quaking with rage, McCreedy walked down the short hall between the four cells, stopping at the last cell on the left. Billy Brown stood with his hands gripping the iron bars, his bristly cheeks spread wide with a grin. His blue eyes flashed demonically. “There you go. Now just open the door and step in here, and you and me, we’ll settle this thing once and for all.”

He was about two inches shorter than McCreedy, but the sheriff figured Brown outweighed him by at least twenty pounds.

“If I stepped in there, you’d never walk out. Ever.”

Brown chuckled. “You think so? Why don’t you try it? Come on, open the door.”

McCreedy stared at the man between the bars. His face was impassive, but he hated the stout, ham-fisted Irishman more than he’d ever hated anyone. Brown was a blight on the town—McCreedy’s town. As long as Brown was in business, Johnson City would not flourish the way it should ... peaceably, drawing civilized, honest citizens and their families. As long as Billy Brown was in business, McCreedy would continue to be the laughing-stock Brown thumbed his nose at, and Johnson City would be a hotbed of vice and underhanded business dealings, driving the honest folks out and replacing them with more no-accounts like Brown himself.

At the moment, however, what bothered McCreedy more was knowing that if he opened Brown’s cell door and took Brown’s bait, Brown would beat him senseless. Brown had been a street fighter who’d made his way with his fists. McCreedy had been a farm boy from Nebraska, who’d come to Montana when he was seventeen, to punch cows. He’d been in his share of fistfights but nothing like those that had forged Billy Brown.

McCreedy hated himself for it, but he was afraid of Brown. And what really burned him was that Brown knew it. Brown knew he wouldn’t open the cell door and accept the challenge. Brown knew he was afraid, and the challenge was just more of the criminal’s attempts at intimidation, which he’d honed on the town’s other saloon owners, whose earnings he regularly skimmed.

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