The Graves at Seven Devils

by Peter Brandvold

  With that, she heeled the Arab into a lope, passing the jailhouse and angling over to Norman Carstairs’s two-story, adobe-brick saloon with a brush-roofed front gallery and gray smoke billowing out the chimney. The rest of the group’s horses were tied to the hitchrail, swishing their tails and drawing water from the stock tank.

  “That’s about the looniest-looking crew of hard cases I’ve ever seen,” Marie Antoinette said softly, staring toward the saloon and giving a jerk as though from a sudden chill.

  Kitty-corner across the street, the redhead glanced back toward the jailhouse, smiling brightly as she tied the Arab to the hitchrail. She ducked under the rail and skipped up the gallery’s three front steps, her spurred boots chinging softly in the heavy, post-rain silence.

  “You can say that again,” Fletcher said, watching the girl sashay through the saloon’s batwing doors as though she owned the place. “If they weren’t so well armed, I’d say they were part of some traveling burlesque show. But I never seen actors arm themselves like bandits.”

  Colter looked up at him, eyes bright. “You think they’re here to rob the bank, Pa?”

  “Don’t know,” Fletcher mused, nibbling his mustache as he stared toward Carstairs’s place.

  He’d been sheriff for a little over a year, and he’d had a relatively easy time in spite of all the outlaws reportedly holed up in the Seven Devils Range only fifty miles south of town. He’d had to turn the key on only harmless drunk prospectors and Mrs. Berg’s hired man. Aside from a couple of half-breed, low-at-heel rustlers, he’d had to pull his gun on no one. He’d never shot anything with less than four legs in his life and was only fair to middling at drawing quickly.

  Most of the time, while practicing his fast draw out back of the chicken coop after Marie Antoinette and Colter had gone to bed, he got the gun’s fore sight hung up in his holster. He feared that if he ever had to draw down on someone, there was a good chance he’d shoot himself in the thigh or blow off his foot.

  Now he swallowed down a small, dry knot in his throat as he stared across the street at the saloon and said pensively, “They could be one o’ them groups from the range, but there ain’t much for ’em here. No . . . I just don’t know. . . .”

  Colter was still looking up at him with that excited, boyish gleam in his eyes. “You gonna check it out, Pa? Maybe give’em the boot, if ya have to?”

  “Colter!” Marie Antoinette wrapped her hand around Fletcher’s forearm. “You best steer clear of them, honey. You see how many guns they were carrying? I saw at least three on each man. Even the girl was sportin’—”

  “I saw.” Fletcher felt suddenly annoyed that his wife and stepson were here to witness his apprehension. He put some steel in his words as he said, “I reckon I’ll check it out if I have to. But first I’m gonna look through that fresh batch of wanted dodgers I got in last week. See if any of their faces match—”

  He’d just turned toward the jailhouse’s open door when a man’s scream rose suddenly. It was a shrill cry, filled with excruciating pain and terror.

  Fletcher turned toward Carstairs’s Saloon as the scream came again, even louder than before as it shot out from behind the saloon’s batwing doors to careen around the street, echoing off buildings. A woman shouted something that Fletcher couldn’t make out, and then there rose the muffled scuffs and thuds of boots and the raw scrapes of chairs being kicked around a wooden floor. Men grunted and yelled.

  The woman’s voice sounded again, shriller and clearer this time, and Fletcher recognized the squeaky, girlish voice of the redhead with the straw hat and green streaks in her hair. Only now that high voice rumbled with fury. “Goddamnit, Jack, grab his feet and pull him upstairs!”

  “Christ . . .” Marie Antoinette rasped darkly as she stared across the street, one hand to her chest.

  “Holy moly,” Colter said. “What do you suppose they’re doin’?”

  A couple of storekeepers stepped out of the shops up and down the street, casting their cautious, befuddled gazes toward Carstairs’s place before shuttling expectant looks toward Fletcher.

  “I don’t know,” the sheriff said, swallowing, draping his right hand over his pistol’s grips, and then starting off the porch, “but I reckon I’d best find out.”

  Marie Antoinette grabbed his arm. “Toby, wait.”

  He swung around. The fear in his wife’s eyes mirrored his own, made his throat even tighter. “This is my job, honey. You and the boy go on home. I’ll be along shortly to pack ’fore I head out to the Double Diamond.”

  Marie Antoinette’s chest fell as she released Fletcher’s arm. He turned away, stepped off the stoop, and, keeping his sweaty hand draped over the .44, angled across the street toward the saloon growing larger and larger before him, its roof and smoke-spewing chimney raked with low, cottony clouds the color of lightly soiled rags.

  Another muffled cry rose from the saloon’s second story as Fletcher tramped up between two trail-dusty horses tied to hitchracks and mounted the gallery. The girl yelled something indecipherable from somewhere back in the building’s second floor, and there was more shuffling and stomping. Fletcher swallowed again and closed his hand around his Remington’s grips, as much to stop the hand from shaking as to prepare for battle.

  He topped out on the porch and stopped to peer over the batwings, squinting against the murky, smoky shadows within. Finally, taking a breath, he pushed through the doors and angled toward the mahogany bar running along the wall to his right. To his left and about halfway down the room, three of the strangers sat smoking and playing cards—the three identical men who’d led the gang into town.

  The redheaded girl, the black man, and the man in cavalry blues were nowhere to be seen, though Fletcher could hear the girl’s odd voice squealing angry orders from somewhere upstairs.

  Meanwhile, amidst the girl’s screams and the occasional boot scuff, a man begged and sobbed so softly now as to be nearly inaudible.

  The three identical men didn’t turn toward Fletcher, but only glanced at one another conspiratorially. One grinned and laughed around the fat stogie between his thin lips and shook his long hair back from his shoulder—a strangely feminine gesture.

  Fletcher moved up to the bar. The owner of the place, Norman Carstairs, stood with both hands spread out atop the mahogany, a grim cast to his eyes, a dark set to his lips beneath his neatly trimmed and waxed mustache. He was a big, paunchy, balding man, with a face so seamed and gouged that it resembled a map of southern Arizona.

  While the three identical riders conversed casually as they flipped cards and coins onto the table, Fletcher looked at the bartender, an unspoken question in his eyes.

  Carstairs said quietly, his face implacable as he canted his head toward the narrow stairs at the rear of the room, “Three of that gang nabbed Dewey Granger away from the bar. Dragged him upstairs. That’s him squealin’. His partners, Trace and Dawson, lit out the back like the devil’s hounds were nippin’ at their heels.”

  “What’s it all about?” Fletcher asked.

  The sheriff had kept his voice low, but apparently one of the men behind him had heard. “None o’ your concern, Sheriff. Just know it’s just. An eye for an eye, a tooth fer a tooth.”

  Fletcher turned toward the hard cases’ table. They continued to play, the one on the left side of the table casually dealing a round of blackjack. A bottle and three shot glasses were on the table, as was an ashtray in which a couple of cigarettes smoldered.

  Fletcher narrowed an eye. “What’s that?”

  The one with his back to the bar was the one wearing the salmon-checked suit and opera hat, his spectacles shoved back on his head. He half turned toward Fletcher, removing the fat stogie from his mouth and blowing a thick cloud of blue smoke at the rafters. “The dull-witted drover, Mr. Granger, had the misfortune of getting drunk one wild Saturday night over to Lord’s Station and killing Miss Cora’s brother, Cecil.”

  “Avril,” corrected the man in the brown-
checked suit, leaning back in his chair to leisurely study his cards. His sombrero hung down his back by a horsehair thong.

  The man in the green-checked suit clucked impatiently. “Whichever brother it was, he’s dead as a hammer, and Miss Cora is extracting her satisfaction from the man who killed him.”

  Fletcher squared his shoulders at the table and took a slow, deep breath to steady himself. “You best call Cora down here. If Mr. Granger killed someone, it’ll be up to the law to decide his punishment.”

  Just then a long wail rose above the rafters. There was a clattering thud, as if a chair had been knocked over. The wail died abruptly, and the girl laughed.

  The man in the stovepipe hat threw back his shot glass and said with a liquid sigh, his back to the sheriff, “I reckon it’s too late for that.” He and the others chuckled.

  Fletcher had turned toward the stairs, his heart beating faster, his face hot. A man was dying upstairs while he, the sheriff, stood down here palavering with a couple of the queerest-looking cutthroats he’d ever laid eyes on.

  He glanced at Carstairs, who looked as though he’d seen a ghost.

  “Christ!” Fletcher moved toward the stairs.

  On his right flank, there was the raking squawk of a chair turning on the rough wood puncheons. A man bellowed, “Uh-uh!”

  Fletcher stopped abruptly and turned toward the queer-looking hard cases. The one with the opera hat, his chair turned toward Fletcher and his rose-colored spectacles now sitting low on his nose, held two long-barreled Smith & Wesson pistols straight out from his belly, arms just above his spread thighs. The gun hammers were cocked.

  “No, suhh,” he said in his molasses-thick Southern accent. “For Cora, vengeance is a religious experience, and I won’t have you stompin’ up there and interruptin’ her moment of glory. Besides, there ain’t nothin’ you can do for that murderin’ scalawag anyways. He done paid for his ticket.”

  Fletcher stared at the twin bores yawning at him. Rage and fear broiled within him. Sweat dribbled down his cheeks, soaking his mustache. He looked at the three long, hard, bearded faces peering at him through the room’s smoky shadows. They were leering, challenging, daring him to reach for his .44.

  They wanted him to. He could tell by their eyes that they would no more hesitate to kill a lawman than they would a rattlesnake along the trail. In fact, they’d enjoy it.

  Angry and humiliated, his chest rising and falling sharply, his hands bunched at his sides, Fletcher glanced at Carstairs. The saloon owner peered at him skeptically over the bar.

  “Tobias . . .” Carstairs swallowed and shifted his eyes toward the hard cases. “You maybe best just . . .”

  Fletcher cursed and began stomping back along the bar toward the door. To his right, one of the queer-looking hard cases chuckled. As Fletcher pushed through the batwings and stepped out onto the gallery, he heard coins clink as one of the hard cases said, “Kinda thought he’d see it our way.”

  Rage nearly blinding him and causing the street to rise and fall around him and muffling all sound, Fletcher angled toward the jailhouse. He walked stiffly but quickly, jaws taut, eyes pinched, hands squeezed into fists. Colter and Marie Antoinette were blurred shapes standing on the jailhouse stoop before him.

  “Honey, what’s going on over there?” Marie Antoinette said, standing beside Colter, one arm around the boy’s waist.

  “I told you two to go on home!”

  Fletcher brushed past them as he moved through the open jailhouse door and stomped across the hard-packed earthen floor to the gun rack on the wall opposite his cluttered desk. He fished a small key ring from his pocket and removed the padlock from the chain securing the three rifles and a rusty shotgun to the rack. He let the chain and padlock drop as he grabbed the old Greener, his clammy hands shaking as much from rage as fear.

  “Toby, what’re you going to do?” Marie Antoinette called from the doorway.

  “My job, honey.” Fletcher breeched the shotgun, moved to the desk, and opened a drawer. He set a box of shotgun shells on the desk, fumbled the box open, and grabbed one of the wads. “You and Colter go on home like I said.”

  “Don’t go over there, Toby. I saw how well those men . . . and that girl . . . were armed.” She paused as Fletcher thumbed the first wad into the shotgun barrel, then plucked another from the box and punched it into the shotgun’s second tube. “At least find someone to help you.”

  “Carstairs is over there,” Fletcher said, snapping the gun closed with a click and heading for the door. “He has a sawed-off under the bar.”

  He stopped before his wife. She looked up at him, eyes wide with fear. Her hair, mussed by the wind, hung beautifully disheveled about her slender shoulders. Her hair . . . He’d like nothing better than to take her home and run his hands through her hair.

  He fought the temptation. He had a duty to perform. If he turned tail, he’d never be able to look Marie Antoinette and their son in the eye again. Nor anyone else in town, for that matter.

  Odd, though, how enticing the idea was. To just go home and bury his head in a pillow and call the killing of Dewey Granger, an average ranch hand with a checkered past, justified.

  Fletcher wrapped his hand around Marie Antoinette’s and squeezed. “It’ll be all right. Please go home so I don’t have to worry about you two.”

  His feet were suddenly heavy as lead, but he managed to walk around her and out the door and past Colter standing on the porch, watching him. The boy no longer looked as excited at the prospect of a shooting as he had before. He looked worried.

  “Pa . . .”

  Fletcher hurried off the stoop and made a beeline for the saloon. “Take your ma home, Colter. I’ll be along later. Go on, now. Don’t make me tell you again.”

  4

  FLETCHER MOVED WITHIN twenty yards of Carstairs’s Saloon, then turned abruptly right. Holding the shotgun in both hands across his chest, his right thumb caressing each rabbit-eared hammer in turn, he turned down the gap between the saloon and Fairchild’s Tonsorial Parlor, noting a couple of faces peering out the parlor’s front windows at him.

  He continued through the trash-strewn gap to the saloon’s rear.

  A rickety, unpainted staircase rose along the back wall to a door on the second story. Fletcher took the steps two at a time and slowly, quietly opened the door, relieved to find it unlocked. He looked both ways down the dim, papered hall and pricked his ears, listening.

  The only noise came from the first story. The screams had ceased. The girl had stopped yelling. The second story was utterly quiet. It smelled like kerosene lanterns and musty carpet runners.

  Fletcher closed the door, so it wouldn’t silhouette him against the outside light. Thumbing both hammers back, he stole quietly down the hall to his left, squeezing the shotgun in both hands.

  When the town had been booming, Carstairs had kept a couple of soiled doves, who’d plied their trade in the six rooms on both sides of the hall. Now the only doves in town were over at Miss Kate’s place. Fletcher didn’t know what Carstairs did with the rooms now, but one of the doors on the hall’s right side was open.

  As Fletcher approached the open room, the hair on the back of his neck pricking, he detected the coppery smell of fresh blood. The smell thickened, tightening his gut, as he sidled up to the door frame. His heart thudded, his pulse beating in his neck.

  He held his breath, trying to listen above the beating of his own heart. Only the sickening blood stench and silence issued from the open door.

  Fletcher bolted out from behind the wall and swung his shotgun barrel into the room, squaring his shoulders and spreading his feet. The stench hit him like a fist, and then he saw the body lying about six feet back from the door, between a dresser on the right and a bed on the left.

  Dewey Granger lay on his back, arms thrust straight out from his shoulders. His denims and underwear had been pulled down around his boots. There was so much blood that Fletcher couldn’t tell exactly what they’d done
to him, but it looked as though he’d been carved up like a field-dressed deer.

  Blood was still running out from the broad, grisly wound in his midsection and crotch and puddling on the floor around his body. Something protruded from his mouth, but Fletcher turned away before he could identify it, his guts clenching and throat contracting as though a stick dipped in fresh cow shit had been shoved down past his tonsils.

  He dropped to a knee in the hall, swallowing quickly to keep from vomiting. When his stomach settled, he ran a sleeve across his sweat-soaked mustache and peered toward the stairs.

  Fletcher had grown up on the frontier and had visited nearly every state and territory, even witnessed some Indian atrocities. But only once or twice, in Comanche country, had he seen a man treated the way the girl and her two cohorts had treated Dewey Granger.

  Fletcher curled his upper lip. “Murderin’ goddamn savages.” That they’d been so bold as to do their butchering practically in his face galled him keenly, kindling a hot fire at the base of his skull.

  He rose slowly, again gripping the shotgun in both hands. Taking a deep breath, quickly brushing sweat from his face, he began moving toward the end of the hall, where the stairs dropped to the saloon’s main room from which voices rose, including the screechy, contentious voice of the girl.

  He stopped well back from the top of the stairs, so he wouldn’t be seen from below, and peered down into the main saloon hall. No one on the stairs. He could see shadows moving ahead and left, sensed the tension of Norman Carstairs, who was probably still behind the bar, wondering if Fletcher had lit out for good like a donkey with its tail on fire.

  Fletcher took another deep breath and, holding the shotgun low and angled about forty-five degrees away from his body, started down the stairs.

  “Hey, Captain Sykes, why didn’t you tell me you had the jack?” the girl yelled, her shrill voice echoing around the room’s adobe-brick, mud-chinked walls. “Damn you anyways!”