The Graves at Seven Devils

by Peter Brandvold

  “Hey, Hans,” Louisa said, raising her voice slightly, “can’t you prod a little more speed out of that beast?”

  “Don’t get your drawers in a curl, girl,” Prophet grumbled. “These’re the only horses we got, and we blow ’em out, it’s a long walk to anywhere.”

  Louisa glanced at Prophet, her exquisite upper lip curled, the flat brim of her black hat hanging low over her vivid, hazel eyes. “At this pace, we won’t reach even the Devil’s Tail until it’s time to cut our Christmas tree.” Back straight and chin lifted defiantly, she gigged the pinto ahead with a frustrated chuff, passing Hans and disappearing over a hogback, the clay-colored dust riding behind her.

  “If you get lost out here, you crazy polecat,” Prophet hissed, gigging Mean and Ugly up to Hans’s right stirrup, “I’ll leave you out here for the Apaches to tickle to death!”

  Prophet cursed and shook his head.

  “That’s a strong-willed girl there,” Hans observed. “Kinda reminds me of my sister, Ruth. Why, if it was rainin’, she’d say it was snowin’ just to argue! I remember one time . . .”

  Prophet groaned at the prospect of another big windy blowing up and tipped his hat brim low.

  Louisa didn’t run ahead for long.

  The deeper they rode into the hills and bluffs and arroyos of that great, scarred country flanking the mountains, the more she seemed to realize she needed Big Hans to show her the way. The trail they followed, meandering through the creosote and saguaros, disappeared for long stretches under fallen rocks or eroded shale or arroyos that had flooded in the last hard rain.

  From time to time, when the trail grew doubtful, she let Prophet and Big Hans catch up to her. Prophet sensed her tension, the impatience that made her chuff and nibble her lips and balk every time they stopped to give the horses a blow or to let them drink from the rare rock tank or spring.

  Prophet would let her push her horse only so long as the pinto didn’t show signs of strain. If he had to, for Louisa’s sake as well as the pinto’s, he’d hogtie her, lash her belly down across her saddle, and lead her into the mountains behind Mean and Ugly.

  Late in the day, Prophet and Big Hans crested a low, sandy bluff to find Louisa waiting in the shaded wash below, staring up at a steep jumble of adobe-colored rocks and boulders stippled with saguaros, organ-pipe cactus, and spindly mesquites. On both sides rose the steep, rocky walls of twin mesas.

  Prophet and the kid headed down the bluff toward Louisa holding the pinto’s reins in one hand while shading her eyes with the other. Prophet’s and the kid’s dust rose around them, copper-colored in the late-afternoon light.

  “We best walk the horses over this,” Big Hans said, swinging heavily down from the claybank. “It’s the only way between these mesas. We could go around, but this is a shortcut to the Devil’s Tail. Takes a good half day off the trip. Uncle Alphonse figured an earth tremor probably sealed this gap.” Sweating and breathing hard, the kid grinned at Prophet, showing his big horse teeth. “There’s a cantina on the other side.”

  Prophet chuffed skeptically. He wasn’t sure how much to believe about the kid’s far-fetched tales of his experiences in the Seven Devils country, but surely now he was pulling the bounty hunter’s leg. “Cantina?”

  “An old adobe that a rancher turned into a watering hole. It’s on an east-west smuggling road that ain’t used anymore, but it was still open last time I was here. Mostly used by banditos and prospectors an’ such.” The kid wagged his big, blond head, whistling. “Boy, Uncle Alphonse spent some time there, I tell ya!”

  Prophet heard the ring of shod hooves on stone and turned to see Louisa leading her pinto up the rubble mound. “Louisa, hold on, damnit!” He’d been letting Mean and Ugly draw water from his hat. “Give your horse some water and a rest, you crazy minx.”

  “My pinto is better conditioned than that ugly cayuse of yours,” she called without turning around. The pinto slipped and stumbled on the rocks that had apparently fallen from the ridge of the southern-looming mesa.

  Prophet cursed and snugged his hat back down on his head, letting the last of the water dribble down his hot face streaked with sweat mud. He started leading Mean forward. “Rest your clay,” he grumbled at Big Hans. “Looks like I gotta babysit that wooden-headed wildcat, try to keep her from pulling that pinto out of its shoes.”

  Prophet followed Louisa’s path up the perilous slope, meandering around the steepest snags and brush clumps and around the saguaros stretching their forked shadows. She was moving faster than he was, however, so he was a good forty yards behind her when he spied a shadow moving among the rocks just above her and right.

  He’d just glimpsed the movement out the corner of his eye, and he thought he’d seen a streak of red mixed with the shadow, like the red calico shirts Apaches often wore.

  Not again . . .

  He’d just started reaching toward his rifle scabbard when he saw the Indian leap up onto a flat-topped boulder so close to Louisa that he could have spit on her. Prophet’s heart thumped. It was too late for the rifle.

  He shouted, “Louisa, down!” and jerked his Colt from its holster.

  Crouching and fanning the hammer, he emptied the cylinder in what sounded like one thundering explosion, the sour-smelling smoke rising up around his face. Forty yards uphill was a tough shot for a revolver, and Prophet saw a couple of slugs bark into the rocks, but two hit home with audible plunks. One ground into the Indian’s knee while the other puffed dust from his shirt.

  The Apache screamed as he loosed the arrow toward Louisa. The girl dove forward, and the arrow clattered into the rocks behind her.

  At the same time, the brave dropped his bow and stumbled back against another boulder behind him, grabbing at his chest as if to dislodge a knife, stretching his lips back from his teeth.

  His knees bent and he fell forward off the rock, turning a somersault, limbs akimbo. Hitting the slope, he rolled toward Louisa and the whinnying pinto, and Prophet could hear the thumps and the sharp rattling cracks of his breaking bones.

  Prophet holstered his Colt, grabbed his Winchester, and racked a shell into the chamber as he bolted up the slope, hop-scotching boulders, breathing hard. He swung his gaze from left to right as he ran, expecting arrows to suddenly start raining down from the ridges on both sides of the rubble pile. The pinto ran awkwardly upslope, stumbling on the precarious terrain, whinnying and snorting. Prophet dropped to a knee and, holding the Winchester to his shoulder, cast quick, edgy looks along both ridges.

  No flying arrows. No flitting shadows of braves scurrying about for killing positions.

  Could the dead brave have been alone?

  He lowered the rifle and glanced toward Louisa. Only the brave was there, lying facedown, his bloody back humped slightly.

  Prophet rose and continued upslope, frowning and looking for the girl while flicking cautious looks all around.

  He called softly, “Louisa?”

  In the corner of his right eye, the brave moved. Prophet swung around, angling his Winchester down and pressing his finger against the trigger.

  The brave wobbled from side to side, then turned onto his shoulder to reveal Louisa lying on her back atop a large, slanting boulder. She blinked dazedly, grunting with the effort of trying to heave the Indian’s big body off her. A long red line had been slashed across her right cheek—by the Indian’s arrow, no doubt.

  “Christ!” Prophet reached down and pulled the Indian’s limp carcass off Louisa’s diminutive frame. She rose onto her elbows, her eyes rolling around, blood dribbling from her cut cheek. Blood from the Indian’s chest wound had stained the cream shirt she wore, trimmed with green piping in the shapes of prancing horses.

  Prophet knelt before her, bunching his lips and shaking his head with fury. Normally she would have smelled the Indian before she’d even started up the slope. She’d gone kill-crazy, and that’s how bounty hunters ended up six feet under.

  She glanced at the Indian now lying belly up
beside her, the dead man’s half-open eyes staring at the sky. Sleeving blood from her cheek, she glanced at Prophet with a self-righteous sneer. “Well . . . at least I wasn’t distracted by a gaggle of naked women!”

  16

  LOUISA KNEW SHE’D made a mistake, scrambling carelessly across the rubble pile in hostile country—she was too good a bounty hunter not to know—but she didn’t admit it.

  She’d looked over the pinto thoroughly, though, with a worried expression, as the horse might have been seriously injured when it had thrashed about the rocks to escape the Chiricahua arrow as well as Prophet’s crashing pistol shots.

  Her mistake was no less a mistake because Prophet had made one similar. But she merely watered the frightened horse while the bounty hunter and Big Hans scouted around. She rubbed the blood from the shallow burn across her cheek, then scooped up the pinto’s reins. “Well, we’ve wasted enough time—don’t you think, boys? Let’s get a move on.”

  “You don’t mind if I take the lead this time, do you, Miss Bonnyventure?” Prophet said smartly. He’d finished hiding the dead Apache’s body in the rocks, in case others came looking for him and cut his sign. He grabbed Mean’s reins and shouldered his Winchester.

  Louisa gave her chin another defiant lift and ticked a finger against the flat brim of her black hat. “If it’ll make you feel better.”

  “Much obliged.”

  Prophet led the dun past her and the pinto, and with Louisa leading the pinto behind him and Big Hans—who was suddenly, uncharacteristically quiet in the wake of the shooting—bringing up the rear with his shifty-eyed claybank, the three continued up and over the rocky rise and down the other side. Prophet watched the terrain intently, for Apaches could meld nearly completely with their surroundings.

  But no more braves showed themselves or flung arrows down from the rocks.

  The dead brave must have been on his own, maybe the sole survivor of a run-in with Yaquis, also known to haunt this country, or with cavalry. His face had been painted for war, so he wasn’t just out here communing with nature.

  At the bottom of the rubble pile and on the far side of the gap between the mesas, Prophet, Louisa, and Big Hans mounted up once more and gigged their horses into long, loping strides. The terrain was table-flat, with few rocks and cholla snags, and they wanted to get as far away from the dead Apache as possible.

  The sun was a golden orb falling fast toward the toothy western ridges behind them when they broke out of the chaparral and reined their mounts down at the edge of a hard-packed yard surrounding a low-slung white adobe. A windmill sat in the middle of the yard, towering above a stone stock tank.

  Right of the adobe lay an overgrown corral, and straight east lay a long line of half-ruined mud-brick stables that had probably once served the rancho. The cracked adobe walls were bathed in the coppery light of the falling sun.

  Big Hans grinned at Prophet as he pulled back hard on the mule’s reins; the mule and the horses all smelled the water in the stock tank beneath the windmill. “I told you there was a canteen out here.”

  Prophet was sleeving sweat from his forehead and raking his eyes around the place before him, noting the two saddled horses tied before the brush-roofed gallery. “Boy, I gotta admit, finding a cantina out here is like—”

  A gun exploded from inside the saloon—a hollow, tinny bark that made the two horses in front of the place jerk their heads up and skitter-hop. The report was followed by a shouted curse, a scream, three more shots, and another scream.

  “Double-crossin’ son of a bitch!” a man shouted.

  Two more pops—k-blam! K-blam!

  Both Prophet and Louisa had their revolvers out as they stared toward the adobe house. Prophet thumbed his Colt’s hammer back when a man in a battered hat and bright red shirt stumbled out the door and across the porch to drop to his knees on the far side of the jittery horses.

  Prophet glanced at Louisa, then spurred Mean and Ugly straight into the yard. As he pulled up about twenty feet in front of the thatch-roofed hovel, the red-shirted man pushed up off his knees and stumbled forward. He twisted around and fired two shots into the cantina’s front wall though it appeared he’d been aiming for the door.

  The tied horses whinnied and bucked as shards of adobe ticked around the gallery.

  The red-shirted man yelled, “Bastards!” and squeezed his revolver’s trigger. But the hammer hit the firing pin with a sharp ping—empty. He dropped the gun and, clutching his upper belly with both hands, continued stumbling forward as though he were trying to run through quicksand.

  He looked up, saw the three newcomers sitting their mounts in the yard, and angled toward Big Hans. Falling forward, he grabbed the boy’s saddle horn. The mule nickered indignantly as the man looked up at the boy, his face sweat-soaked and pain-racked, and groaned several times before, knees slowly buckling, he said, “Those . . . double-crossing bastards . . . been wantin’ me dead fer a long fuckin’ time!”

  Big Hans held his frightened horse’s reins taut to his chest as he looked at Prophet and Louisa as if for counsel.

  The red-shirted man looked up at Big Hans and sobbed. “They killed me, didn’t they?”

  Big Hans’s eyes were large as saucers. He swallowed and blinked. His voice was thick and low. “I reckon they did, sir.”

  “Shit!”

  The red-shirted man dropped to his knees and fell facedown in the yard. Big Hans’s horse whinnied horrifically and, giving a halfhearted buck, sidled away from the man whose blood quickly reddened the dust beneath him.

  Boot thumps and spur chings rose from inside the saloon, and Prophet ripped his gaze from the dead man to the front door. Another man appeared, bounding forward as though to break down an invisible door.

  He was broad and unshaven, and he wore no hat on his bullet-shaped, bald head. With one hand he clutched his upper left chest while wielding a smoking Colt Army in the other. Blood gushed from a bullet wound in his right temple.

  “Hold it!” Prophet said as he and Louisa extended their Colts at the man at the same time, Big Hans’s clay nickering and stomping behind them.

  The man dropped to his knees before Prophet’s order had died on his lips. The man groaned and panted and pressed the heel of his hand to the ragged hole in his chest. He held his Colt straight down to the porch floor as he regarded Prophet desperately, his small blue eyes pinched with pain.

  “That bastard dead?”

  Prophet glanced at the red-shirted man lying facedown in the dirt. The man’s right boot twitched as though with a slight electrical charge.

  “Close enough,” Prophet said.

  “Good!” The man on the porch fell forward, his face hitting the porch floor with a resolute smack.

  Prophet glanced at the two dead men once more, then looked at the door, half expecting another man to run out yelling and shooting. Another man did appear, but this one—an old, stoop-shouldered Mexican with thin gray hair and an upswept gray mustache—merely stood in the open doorway, squinting out into the fading sunlight at the dead men.

  He looked at Prophet and Louisa and at Big Hans, who had jumped down from his prancing claybank and stood holding the beast’s reins, a wary look in his eyes. The Mex turned and grunted something in Spanish behind him.

  Presently, a young Mexican boy scuttled out from behind the man. Clad in soiled, torn canvas trousers, a serape, and rope-sole sandals, his black, unevenly cut hair hanging to his shoulders, he dashed off the porch, paused to give the three newcomers a quick, cautious scrutiny, then knelt and began going through the pockets of the dead man on the porch.

  Prophet looked at the Mexican man still standing between the batwings. “You got any more shooters in there?”

  “Not alive!” In Spanish, the old Mex told the boy to make sure he removed the dead men’s boots—he could make some extra pocket jingle off barefoot pilgrims—and to take their horses to the stable. Then he turned and disappeared back inside the saloon.

  Prophet
turned to Louisa, shrugged, holstered his .45, and swung down from the saddle.

  Sitting on her pinto tensely, still holding her cocked Colt in her hand, Louisa stared at his broad, sweat-dark back. “You intend to stop here?”

  “Why not?” Prophet led Mean and Ugly toward the clattering windmill and the stock tank. “They got water. Inside, they probably got whiskey.”

  “No time for spirituous liquids, Lou.”

  Prophet doffed his hat and glanced over his shoulder, grinning. “There’s always time for spirituous liquids, Miss Bonnyventure.” While Mean drew water, swishing his tail luxuriously, Prophet leaned over the stone-walled tank and ducked his head in the cool, refreshing fluid.

  When Prophet, Louisa, and Big Hans had watered their horses, they tied the mounts to the hitchrack fronting the cantina and mounted the gallery in single file, Prophet taking the lead, Big Hans bringing up the rear. The two dead men lay where they’d fallen in the blood-splashed dirt, their pockets inside out, worthless paraphernalia like playing cards and pencil stubs littering the ground around them, their guns, knives, and boots gone, their socks half off.

  Prophet rested his Winchester on his shoulder and ducked through the doorway, instinctively stepping to one side so the door didn’t backlight him, and looked around. Louisa and Hans followed suit on the other side of the door.

  The room was well lit by high, arched windows recessed in the thick adobe walls. The herringbone-patterned ceiling was low, with several dusty ristras hanging from it. Another dead man—a short hombre in blue denims and a black-and-white-checked shirt—lay in the middle of the room near an overturned table and broken glass. He stared unseeing at the ceiling, his hazel eyes reflecting the salmon light angling through the western windows.

  His boots were gone, his pockets pulled out of his pants. A small notebook, a .36 cartridge casing, a bullet-smashed, blood-smeared pocket watch, and a rabbit’s foot—all apparently deemed worthless—lay on his bloody chest.