Prophet lifted his back, pulled his right leg out from beneath the dead woman, planted his boot against her face, and gave her an unceremonious shove. She rolled off his other boot to tumble facedown in the weeds with a postmortem gurgle.
Prophet grimaced as he rolled onto his right elbow. His crotch resumed burning and his balls felt as though they’d swollen up twice their normal size. He turned to watch the rider approach on his pinto.
Her pinto.
The young woman’s long, straw-colored hair bounced across her shoulders and down the striped serape that couldn’t quite conceal the two matronly lumps beneath.
As she came closer, her face grew gradually clearer. Prophet would have recognized the heart-shaped bone structure, bee-stung lips, pug nose, and wide-set, crystalline hazel eyes anywhere—all shaded by a man’s flat-brimmed black hat trimmed with a snakeskin band. It was a face so teeming with peaches-and-cream sweetness and persnickety schoolgirl charm that no one but Prophet would have believed the girl behind it was capable of playing hooky from school, much less gunning down a passel of pistol-packing varmints from a hundred yards uphill without one wasted bullet.
“Louisa, don’t you beat all?” Prophet gave an angry chuff and slapped the ground as the girl drew the pinto up before him. “Just when I was about to get the upper hand on that lummox, you start shootin’ away like Billy the Kid. If you think you’re gettin’ any of the bounty money, you got another think comin’.”
Prophet gained his feet, moving gingerly, his balls still throbbing, and looked up at Louisa, not yet twenty years old but sitting her saddle with customary self-assuredness, the breeze playing with her hair. “Besides, they were all wanted alive. They ain’t any good to me dead!”
“I think,” the girl said, leaning forward on her saddle horn, the barrel of her Sharps still smoking faintly, “that you should be kissing my boots instead of berating me. That oaf was about to cut your head clean off your shoulders. They would have thrown your uncouth, mangy, smelly carcass in the nearest ravine and neither I nor anyone else would have known what happened to you.”
Prophet leaned down to scoop his hat from a weed tuft. He dusted it off and set it on his head, glancing around at the dead men and Mrs. Sanderson already attracting flies. Horton Whipple’s bowie knife glistened in the sun near his left shoulder, beneath which blood from his ruined head was puddling and congealing.
“I had a chance.” Absently rubbing his neck, Prophet turned back to Louisa. His chagrin pained him worse than the groining he’d taken from Horton Whipple. Not only had he let an old woman sneak up on him from behind, but a young one—one who’d been bounty hunting fewer years than Prophet had been wearing the same longhandles—had had to save his ass. “Where in the hell did you come from, anyway? I thought you were up north.”
They’d met a couple of years ago, when Louisa, only seventeen at the time, had taken off after the bunch that had burned her Nebraska farmstead and murdered her family. She and Prophet had hunted the kill-crazy renegades led by Handsome Dave Duvall from Minnesota to northern Dakota Territory, and together they’d sent each man to the spirits in a haze of gun smoke and dust.
Prophet had figured that Duvall’s demise would mark the end of Louisa’s vengeance trail. But long after Duvall and his gang were moldering in their graves, she, in the grip of some curious obsession for righting the world’s wrongs and evening up the odds for those who couldn’t do it themselves, had continued ghosting the outlaw trail, collecting bounties not so much for the money but to finance her continued tracking.
Louisa specialized in stalking men who killed or injured women or children, but she didn’t discriminate. Any outlaw was fair game, and she wasn’t on any man’s trail long before the poor bastard was soiling his trousers and begging for mercy.
But when it came to killers and renegades, Louisa showed no mercy.
She and Prophet worked together only occasionally. But being too stubborn to stand each other for long, they spent more time apart than together. Otherwise, they’d have spent more time arguing than bounty tracking.
Besides—though neither had made a formal declaration—they were in love with each other, and love had no place in the bounty hunting business.
“You carve a wide swath, Lou,” Louisa said, sliding the Sharps into her saddle boot. “I accidentally cut your trail in Denver where I ran into your old pal Hooch Mullaney, who said that when you’d finally gotten out of the local lockup for busting up the Drovers Saloon and Pleasure Parlor during a typical inebriated brawl, you headed south for the winter. In Pueblo I learned from a deputy sheriff that you’d gotten word a gang of stage robbers was running sharp-horned and high-tailed through the country north of Durango, and you intended to collect the bounty to fuel your winter—a winter that you no doubt intend to spend in the arms of some dark-skinned harlot in some rank perdition south of the border.”
Prophet grinned up at her. “Why, you been followin’ me. Needin’ a real man to curl your toes, are ya?”
Louisa blinked coolly, but her smooth-skinned cheeks flushed ever so slightly. “Hardly. And I’d rather follow a bobcat into a rattlesnake den. It just so happens our trails crossed several times below Denver—I, too, am headed south—and I had a premonition you were about to get yourself into hotter water than even you were accustomed to.” She raked her haughty, self-satisfied gaze around the bodies of the dead Sanderson bunch, as if to prove the validity of her portent. “I cut Mean and Ugly’s trail yesterday. Who woundn’t recognize that scrub horse’s shabble-footed, knock-kneed gait?”
“Jesus Christ, now she’s insultin’ my horse.”
As Prophet turned to gather his weapons, Louisa said behind him, “Your entourage?”
He stopped and swung back around. “What?”
Prophet followed Louisa’s gaze westward, where the outlaw cabin sat on the hill shoulder, smoke billowing from its chimney pipe. The four women—vague, long-haired, colorfully clad figures from this distance—stood in the dooryard, staring toward their dead husbands and Mrs. Sanderson. They all seemed to be holding pots or pans while Horton Whipple’s hefty gal was shoving a ramrod down the barrel of an old Kentucky rifle, awkwardly holding the barrel between her fat, bare knees.
“Shit.”
“What?”
“The women.”
Louisa snickered. “You think they’ll whip you to death with their garter belts?”
Prophet swung around to regard the unlikely bounty hunter and sharpshooter once more and jerked his arm toward the hill. “The loot the gang stole from their last holdup around Durango is probably in that damn cabin. To get it, I’m gonna have to run that petticoat gauntlet.”
Louisa stared at him skeptically, as if she weren’t sure she’d heard him correctly, then rolled her eyes. “Lord!” Gigging the pinto westward, she called behind her, “Stay here and pull yourself together, for heaven’s sakes. My God, this is embarrassing!”
Louisa made short work of the women.
As soon as she’d galloped within range of the hefty gal’s old blunderbuss, Louisa cut loose with the twin, silver-plated Colt revolvers she kept holstered beneath her serape. The fat gal didn’t have time to snap off a shot before Louisa’s slugs tore into the dust and brush at the women’s feet, and all four scattered like chickens from a rampaging fox.
The fat gal bellowed raucously, threw the blunderbuss away as though it were a Mojave green rattler, and ran for cover at the cabin’s rear. Louisa pulled the pinto up in front of the cabin, leaped down from the saddle, and strode through the open front door.
She wasn’t inside for over a minute before she reappeared, a pair of saddlebags draped over her shoulder. Swinging lithely atop the pinto, she reined the horse around and headed him back downhill to where Prophet waited, feeling even more foolish than before.
He’d returned his bowie and his Colt to their sheaths, and held his Winchester over his shoulder.
Louisa glanced at the saddlebags draped over her ow
n bags behind her saddle and bedroll. “Are those what you’re looking for?”
Prophet unfastened the flap over the right bag and peered inside where eight or nine stout wads of greenbacks resided. He sighed.
“Now, I suppose you’d like a ride back to your cayuse?”
Prophet’s face warmed. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”
7
PROPHET’S PRIDE BURNING as hot as his groin, he rode silently behind Louisa. He winced against the horse’s jostling movements as they headed back to where he’d tied Mean and Ugly in the willows near the small branch stream. Louisa said nothing either, and Prophet was too absorbed in his own shame to notice her pensive silence.
As they approached Mean and Ugly, who shook his head and nickered an insult at Louisa’s clean-lined pinto, Prophet slid off the pinto’s rear and, holding his rifle in one hand and grabbing the outlaws’ saddlebags with the other, said, “I’m gonna find a place to hole up for the rest of the day. I’m wore out, hungry, and in bad need of a drink.” He slid the rifle into his saddle boot and glanced at Louisa, who sat the pinto, staring off pensively. “You might as well camp with me.”
She gave him one of her wrinkle-nosed looks. “So you can curl my toes for me?”
“It’s plain you’re needin’ it.”
“Ha!” She reined the pinto around. “I’ll cook my own steak and boil my own coffee, thank you.”
He grabbed Mean and Ugly’s reins off the scrub willow and stared after her, frowning. “Where you headed?”
Louisa stopped the horse and glanced at Prophet over her shoulder. “Seven Devils in the Arizona Territory. Know it?”
“Nope.”
“I’m settling down, Lou. I’m giving up bounty hunting to live with family. Raise chickens and sew dresses and such.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.”
“You’re welcome to visit as long as you bathe first.” She heeled the horse into a trot through the brush and splashed into the stream, and Prophet stood listening as she crossed the stream and thumped up the low rise beyond, heading south.
Prophet continued to stand, feeling a strange tightness in his throat. “Well, hell, I guess I won’t be visiting, then.”
He turned to Mean and Ugly staring at him skeptically. “Imagine that? Her telling me when to bathe when we’re not even married. Christ! Who needs women anyways?” He tightened Mean’s saddle cinch and swung into the leather. “That’s the beauty of pleasure girls, Mean. They don’t boss you around, and if they do, you leave and find another the next night!”
Prophet swung the horse around and, glancing after Louisa, who was cresting a ridge on the far side of the creek, chuffed again angrily and gigged the dun downstream. Soon, following the meandering creek, he found a secluded canyon flanked by a sandstone ridge, with the shallow stream nearby and a scattering of cottonwoods and junipers to screen his smoke.
He swung down from Mean and Ugly, unsaddled the horse, rubbed him down, and hobbled him near the creek to graze and draw water at his leisure.
It didn’t take Prophet long to set up camp. He was an old hand at it. Having left home at fourteen to fight for the Confederacy in the War for Southern Independence, he’d slept out in the open for nearly half his life, and aside from the occasional whorehouse, he preferred it that way.
He gathered wood for a fire, though he wouldn’t start the fire until later, when the sun was setting and the mountain air was cooling. He set out his bedroll and his saddlebags, hiding the outlaws’ loot in a notch at the base of the sandstone ridge, then arranged his cooking gear. After indulging in a couple shots of good Kentucky bourbon from his half-empty bottle, he stripped down to his longhandles and socks. He scrubbed the blood from his buckskin tunic and his faded blue denims in the creek as, wary of another shoulder nip, he kept an eye on Mean and Ugly grazing nearby.
When the clothes were as clean as they were going to get, he returned to his camp and draped the tunic and jeans over rocks to dry. Hanging, the buckskin would no doubt dry hard as adobe, but he didn’t feel like wearing it wet.
After another shot from his bottle, he heard Louisa’s voice again in his head. He wasn’t sure if it was because of what she’d said, or because he was tired of his own trail smell, but he fished around in his saddlebags for a soap sliver.
Tramping out to the creek, he found a hole a couple of feet deep under the far bank. He shucked out of his longhandles, sank gingerly into the water—the swelling in his oysters had gone down, but they were still tender—and soaked himself in the cool, refreshing stream murmuring between the low banks, magpies and squirrels chittering in the branches around him. Then he stood and ran the soap over every inch of his scarred, rugged, slab-chested frame.
He flopped down again to rinse off the soap. When he’d scrubbed out his longhandles, he tramped naked back to camp, chilled by the cooling afternoon breeze but feeling pounds lighter having shed the sweat, grime, trail dust, and blood smell. And the cool water had soothed his battered crotch.
Feeling better all around, he built a fire, hung the longhandles over a rock near the fledgling flames, then lay back in a patch of wan sunlight flickering through a towering aspen, and sighed and closed his eyes.
It had been a long, hard ride after the Sanderson bunch, and he’d found no picnic at the end of the trail. If it hadn’t been for Louisa . . .
Louisa. Damn her hide.
Sleep drew him down. He slept deeply, soothed by the canyon’s gradually thickening shadows and by the freshening breeze rustling the leaves over his head.
He didn’t know how much time had passed before Mean’s warning whinny jerked his head up. He grabbed his Colt from the holster propped beside him, thumbing the hammer back and aiming straight out before him. At the same time, he pulled his saddlebags across his waist, partly covering himself. His pulse quickened.
Had someone spied the extra pair of saddlebags he’d been carrying and followed him? Or were Utes on the prowl, looking for white men’s scalps to show off to their squaws around the fire tonight?
The shadows had thickened between dwindling light shafts angling through the trees and between the canyon’s high walls. From his left, along the stream, the slow clomps of a single horse sounded, crunching old leaves and dry grass. A figure appeared, moving through the trees and behind a thin brush wall.
To Prophet’s right, Mean and Ugly whinnied again shrilly, as he always did at the approach of strangers. But the rider approaching now was no stranger, Prophet saw, as the rich blond curls jostled across Louisa’s shoulders, under the brim of her black hat. Her face was a pale, heart-shaped smudge in the tree shadows.
Swaying easily with the pinto’s movement, she turned the horse from the creek and headed straight for Prophet sitting naked beside the fire that had burned itself out while he’d slept. He depressed the Colt’s hammer and raised the barrel.
Louisa drew rein before him, letting her gaze sweep his scarred, deep-chested, saddle-worn body lounging there in the brown grass, wearing only a pair of saddlebags and with a few pennies of sunlight glowing across his sun-cured, fresh-scrubbed skin.
Prophet curled his upper lip at her. “That was one fast ride to Arizona and back. That pinto got wings I can’t see?”
She didn’t say anything, just swung down from the pinto and silently led the horse off into the brush away from the dead fire. Prophet sat staring after her. Then he heard the squawk of tack in the brush and knew she was unsaddling her mount. He threw aside the saddlebags—he was as comfortable naked around Louisa as he was alone—then lay back in the splotchy, fading sunlight, smiling contentedly.
Only a few minutes later, he heard her footsteps but didn’t open his eyes until she was standing over him. “You had a bath.”
Prophet opened his eyes to see her lifting her serape over her head, blond curls rising and then flopping back down to her shoulders as she dropped the woolen poncho in the grass and began unbuttoning her plaid shirt. Her face was flushed, a
cool, lusty cast to her eyes. Her chest rose and fell sharply.
Prophet feigned a yawn, crossed his ankles, and hooked his arms behind his head. No point in looking overly eager after she’d insulted him. “I started counting the days since Christmas and figured I was a day or two overdue.”
He stared up at her as she removed the shirt, then reached down, crossing her arms, and lifted her camisole up and over her head to drop it in the grass with the poncho and shirt. Her deep breasts—pale and upturned, with tender rosebud nipples—jostled as she moved, kicking out of her boots, then unbuttoning and dropping her wool riding skirt. She stared back at Prophet, who could no longer feign disinterest. He could hear her sharp, desperate breaths as she removed her riding socks and pantaloons and stood before him naked, legs spread, cupping her breasts in her hands with tooth-gnashing allure.
“I’m sorry I insulted your bathing habits, Lou.”
Prophet tried to speak, but his throat had pinched closed. He cleared it, ran his eyes down her small but willowy frame—she wasn’t much over five feet two—somehow unblemished and unscarred despite how many badmen she’d ridden down and kicked out with her twin Colts and a shovel. With her clear eyes and waiflike charm, she could have been a city girl—the daughter of a successful grocer or mercantile proprietor with enough money to keep her in tight corsets and piano lessons, with occasional strolls arm in arm with her well-bred beau through the park at sundown.
“I reckon I can overlook it if you get down here real quick.”
She knelt before him and threw her arms around his neck. He wrapped his own arms around her waist, pulled her taut against him, and kissed her hungrily, relishing the feel of the girl once more, the smell of her, the taste of her tongue, the silky feel of her ripe, full lips under his.
Her breasts pushed flat against his chest, the nipples pebbling. She sighed and shuddered as she ran her hands brusquely through his hair and returned his penetrating kiss.
Prophet held her for a long time, kissing her, running his right hand down her arm, across the swell of her hip to the long curve of her thigh, sculpted and tightened by all the miles she’d stretched out behind her. Then he gentled her onto the ground, and she spread her legs, sighing deeply as he positioned himself between her knees and, mindful of his injured groin, eased himself down.
The Graves at Seven Devils Page 6
