The Graves at Seven Devils
Page 17
Out like a blown lamp.
Prophet cursed as he grabbed the kid’s stout right arm. Rising, he set his boots beneath him, and drew a deep breath. He grunted fiercely as he pulled the kid up and, crouching, drew the boy’s two-hundred-plus pounds over his right shoulder. Turning awkwardly, face creased and red from the strain, he hauled the kid over to the claybank, sucking air through his teeth, his boots making sucking sounds in the muddy clay.
It took a good bit of heavy lifting, pushing, and pulling to get the kid into his saddle, and his good wrist tied to the horn. Big Hans didn’t awaken once but only grumbled and groaned and called incoherently for someone named Nancy.
When Prophet had tied the boy’s mule-eared boots to his stirrups and wrapped rope around his stout waist and the saddle horn, making sure he wouldn’t fall off and discombobulate that broken arm, the bounty hunter mounted Mean and Ugly, who’d been watching him with customary skepticism and downright distrust. He looked around once more for Louisa, his heart thudding heavily. Then, clucking with frustration, he put the horses up the trail. He hoped to find an old cabin or a cave in which he could build a fire and get the boy dried out and comfortable.
Then he’d ride back toward the monastery, scouring the trail for Louisa.
He’d ridden for twenty minutes, the sky clearing but the sun falling westward, when a low, adobe-brick shack appeared ahead and left of the trail, sitting at the base of a low, rocky rise stippled with creosote, greasewood, and saguaros.
Prophet stopped Mean in the trail. He rested his hand on the butt of his .45 as he stared at the cabin—a long, low, flat-roofed affair that was no doubt used as a stopover for fiddle-footing outlaw gangs. Firewood was stacked under a lean-to off the hovel’s right-side wall.
Smoke wafted from the brick chimney on the shack’s right side, rife with the smell of burning pinyon pine and seasoned frijoles. The windows were lit against the gathering darkness. Voices emanated from inside—the low rumble of bawdy male conversation.
Prophet cursed, glanced at Big Hans sagging sideways in his saddle, the kid’s face gaunt and colorless. Prophet had seen men die from shock. The big younker desperately needed a bed and a warm fire.
No time to look for another, vacant cabin.
This one would have to do.
Prophet led the horses behind a knoll, dismounted, and tethered both to an ironwood shrub. Shucking his Winchester, he racked a fresh shell and started around the knoll, heading toward the cabin, spurs ringing crisply in the dense, post-storm silence.
“Sit tight, Junior,” he growled, pausing to remove his spurs, setting them on a rock. “I’ll be right back.”
19
THE PINTO HAD heard the falling rock, loosed by a lightning bolt shaped like a razor-edged scythe, before Louisa had. The horse whinnied shrilly, rising off its front hooves and clawing the air. Louisa was nearly thrown straight back off the mount’s butt before she got a hand on the apple.
Glancing up, she saw the black mass of boulders tumbling toward her as though thrown from heaven—bouncing off the steep, scree-covered slope right of the trail. Several broke into smaller pieces on impact with the slope, and continued careening straight toward her.
Louisa leaned forward and rammed her spurs into the pinto’s flanks. “Go!”
The horse whinnied and, heart hammering beneath the saddle, lurched into a perilous gallop on the uncertain terrain. Louisa had dropped the reins when she’d reached for the saddle horn and now all she could do was cling to the horn, hunkered low, and hope against hope that the horse didn’t slip and fall before it decided to stop.
Not a minute ago, she’d realized that she and the pinto, disoriented by the hammering storm, had gotten off the trail that Hans had been following. It was when she’d halted the pinto and begun turning around that the scythe-shaped lightning bolt had plowed into the ridge above her, loosing the rock and giving her no choice but to continue forward through the narrow, winding chasm that she and the pinto were careening through at the moment.
Behind her, the boulders loosed from above rumbled into the chasm with what sounded like two planets colliding. The rock walls to both sides appeared to shake with the violent, reverberating impact, as did the uneven floor beneath the pinto’s pounding hooves, the vibrations reaching up through the saddle and into Louisa’s thighs.
Thunder crashed and lightning flashed and the rain slanted down like slender spears with hammer-sized heads. The pinto’s hooves splashed through puddles, slipping and sliding in the mud and slick, orange gravel.
Thunder roared like a cymbal crashing just off Louisa’s right ear, and the pinto whinnied once more and veered left. Louisa gritted her teeth and flinched, expecting to be rammed against the ridge wall on that side of the trail. But as she swayed right against the horse’s abrupt turn, she was surprised and relieved to find that she and the horse had not run into the wall but the horse had found another gap.
Louisa looked around through slitted lids beneath the flat brim of her man’s hat. Brush and boulders swept past on both sides in a blur, and she caught a glimpse of dark gray sky intermittently lit with lightning flashes between towering mountain walls.
Holding the saddle horn with one hand, she reached toward the pinto’s bridle with the other, hoping to catch a rein so she could haul the horse to a stop. She had the hand out beside the horse’s head when the pinto lurched again suddenly, taking a left fork in the canyon, and Louisa was thrown right, her left foot slipping free of the stirrup.
It took her a good half minute to right herself, after several times believing she’d fall beneath the horse’s pounding hooves. When she sat upright once more she hunkered down over the horn, holding the apple tight with both hands, content to relinquish her will to that of the horrified pinto.
Hazed by the storm up one canyon and down another and over a high, windy rise, lashed by rain and assaulted by thunder, then through a broad canyon once more, the pinto galloped, tireless as the storm itself. Louisa could feel its muscles expanding and contracting beneath the saddle. She could feel its heart beating like a war drum, hear its breath blowing like the wind over a cave mouth.
Suddenly, the horse lurched out from beneath her. The pinto whinnied. Louisa’s arms went up as her legs plunged down with the lurching saddle below.
She gasped as cold water flew up to envelop her body with a wicked, knife-edged chill. She flung her hands toward the pinto’s neck, but then her head slipped beneath the roiling, tea-colored surface of the stream. Icy, muddy water trickled down her throat and into her lungs. When her head came up, water sluicing off her face, she drew a gasping, choking breath.
Through slitted lids she saw the pinto’s head with white-ringed eyes a good twenty yards downstream from her, shifting this way and that in the pounding, swirling current.
To both sides the high, willow-and-mesquite-sheathed banks rushed past. Her stomach fell as she flailed with her hands and kicked with her legs, trying to keep her head above the brutal current tugging her this way and that. She and the pinto had plunged—or had the muddy bank slipped out from beneath the horse’s pounding hooves?—into a flooded arroyo churning and roaring with muddy, leaf-and-branch-strewn water from higher up in the mountains.
A branch protruding from the left bank careened toward her. Louisa twisted her body around and threw her left hand toward the branch. She grunted as she clawed at the tip of the branch, but when she got her fingers wrapped around it she was downstream from it, and the dead leaves crumpled in her hand. The branch broke with a nearly inaudible snap.
She continued twisting and turning downstream, the horse now a vague brown shadow thirty or forty yards ahead of her, between the arroyo’s rising and falling banks. Several more branches swept toward her, and she tried to reach for them, but the powerful current swept her too quickly down the arroyo.
She didn’t know how long she’d been in the water, fighting to keep her head above the surface and to keep from ramming boulders and half-subm
erged logs, when the current seemed to relent slightly. As the water followed a long bend to the right, it slowed, the banks falling away to either side.
Choking and gasping for breath, feeling mud like sandpaper in her throat, Louisa was vaguely aware that the rain and thunder had stopped and that lightning only flashed in the far distance beyond several dark peaks. But she was aware that she no longer had to try so hard to keep her head above water and that the current was no longer spinning her like a child’s top.
Her right boot hit a rock on the arroyo’s floor. The other scuffed sand.
The water level continued to drop until she felt both boots skidding along and snagging the bottom. When the water had dropped to the middle of her white blouse, she scrambled over to the left shore, stumbling, several times falling to her knees, her legs feeling both heavy and numb. Along the shoreline, manzanita grass grew amongst the rocks, and tall cottonwoods stood back a ways from the water, still dripping from the recent rain.
Above the cottonwoods, the sky had cleared. It had turned the light green of early evening.
The air was storm-scoured fresh and cool. Birds chirped, wings flashing silver as they wheeled over the brush.
Coughing up water and flecks of mud, Louisa stumbled onto the shore, waterlogged boots squawking beneath her. They felt like lead weights on her feet. She dropped to her knees before a large cottonwood log and, stretching both hands out onto the log, she lowered her head and vomited water, gagging and choking as she sucked air into her aching, battered lungs.
“Hey, somethin’ over here!”
Louisa lifted her head. The shout had come from the darkening trees about thirty yards away. Boots thumped and spurs chinged—heavy footsteps moving toward her.
Louisa tried to quell her coughing, but her lungs refused to stop purging themselves of water. Coughing, holding the cottonwood trunk with one hand, she snatched a slippery .45 from its holster with the other and thumbed back the hammer.
The waterlogged pistol made a muffled, feeble sound, and she could feel that the action was soggy. The wet cartridges probably wouldn’t detonate.
Still, her chest spasming as more water and mud burst from her throat, she raised the revolver over the log. A shadow slid in front of her—a boot arcing up from ahead and right, slamming into the underside of her wrist. She grunted as the gun flew up out of her hand, thumping into the brush and rocks to her left.
“Goddamnit, girl—don’t you ever draw a pistol on me!” The man leaped over the log and, crouching, wrapped a hand around Louisa’s throat, driving her back against the sand and grass. “You hear me?”
The man shook her by the neck, staring down at her, stretching his thin, red-mustached lips away from his teeth, deep-set eyes flashing angrily. He wore a blue, threadbare cavalry jacket with tarnished silver captain’s bars on each shoulder, two revolvers positioned for the cross-draw on his thighs. Another shoulder holster poked out from behind the jacket, and a tarnished steel saber hung down his right leg. He smelled like sweat and whiskey.
Louisa’s misery was enhanced by the man’s powerful hand wrapped around her throat, preventing her from either drawing air or expelling more water. Rage seared her, and she wrapped her hands around the man’s wrist, trying to wrench his hand free.
As she fought to free herself, more footsteps sounded from the trees. In the corner of her eye, she saw shadows move against the tree trunks.
And she heard a woman’s high, authoritative voice. “What is it, Sykes?”
The man stared down at Louisa, chuckling as she struggled against his grip. “Why, it’s a girl. Purty one, too!”
Louisa wrenched the man’s right thumb back across his hand.
“Ouch!” Sykes bunched his lips as he drew his hand away, eyes pinched with fury. “Little bitch!”
As the man drew his right hand back behind his left shoulder, preparing to loose a savage slap, Louisa palmed her other Colt.
“Hold it, Captain!” the woman ordered as she and several men approached, crunching gravel and brush beneath their boots.
Sykes did as ordered, his enraged gaze still riveted on Louisa. Louisa left her revolver in the cross-draw holster on her right hip, as she let her own gaze wander across the woman—a tall, big-boned girl with muscular legs and broad shoulders. She didn’t appear much older than Louisa. Her long, copper-red hair was relieved by thin green streaks all around her head—streaks the same green as her flashing eyes. Three of the tall, long-haired men with hawkish features, each dressed like deranged actors from the stage of some gaudy burlesque show, were near-identical copies of each other.
Triplets.
Louisa’s pulse hammered in both temples as she realized, remembering how Big Hans had described the gang that had murdered her cousin, that the flooded arroyo had swallowed her up only to spit her out . . . right smack-dab in the middle of the Three of a Kind Gang.
“Well, whadoya know. . . .” muttered the triplet wearing rose-colored glasses and a shabby black opera hat. He curled a corner of his black-mustached mouth and cut his slitted eyes at the crazy-eyed redhead. “A girl.”
“A pretty, young girl,” said the look-alike in a green-checked suit and straw sombrero, and puffing a fat cigar. He held a Colt Navy in his free hand, down near a savage-looking Arkansas toothpick jutting from a beaded sheath trimmed in gold. He, too, cut his eyes insinuatingly at the redhead.
“An armed girl,” Sykes growled, reaching down and nudging Louisa’s hand away from her holster. She looked down at the man’s hand as he grabbed her Colt’s pearl grips. Quickly, she tried to decide whether she should let him take the gun.
But even if all the cartridges had remained dry in the flooded arroyo, she wouldn’t be able to trim the wick of more than two of these butchers before they turned her into a human sieve. There was no way they could know she was after them. To them, she was just a girl spit out by the arroyo.
She’d bide her time, concoct a plan for how she—all alone, with Prophet and Big Hans probably several miles behind her, on the other side of a blocked canyon—was going to send this kill-crazy crew howling off into eternity.
Sykes slid her Colt from her holster, hefted it in his hand. It was the redhead who asked with a faintly skeptical but soothing tone as she hunkered down on her heels and frowned at Louisa, “Who are you, miss? What the hell you doin’ out here, anyways?”
She removed her glove and reached slowly forward to slide a lock of Louisa’s wet hair away from her left eye. “How’d you end up almost drownin’ to death in that arroyo? Can you tell Cora? Can you?”
Louisa dropped her head to cough, her chest and belly spasming. When she was able to suck a full breath without choking, she looked at Cora—a pretty, oval-faced redhead with the craziest green eyes Louisa had ever seen—and manufactured the most vulnerable expression she could.
“I was tryin’ to get back to Uncle Lou’s diggin’s,” she said, making her voice thin and quaking and peaches-and-cream backwoods-wholesome. “But before we could get there, the pinto got scared of the lightning and then, all of a sudden, the ground just sort of disappeared, and me and him were swimmin’ for our lives!”
20
PROPHET DUCKED BEHIND a boulder and, doffing his hat and curving his finger through his Winchester’s trigger guard, he peered around the edge of the rock.
The adobe-brick cabin squatted at the base of the rocky ridge, about fifty yards away. Smoke from its chimney curled against the twilit sky clean-scoured by the recent thunder-storm. The mass of purple clouds flashed intermittently in the far northeastern distance.
Shadows moved in the lantern-lit windows. Men’s voices rose. A woman’s voice sounded, too—angry, indignant. There was a light, muffled slapping sound. The woman cursed tightly.
Her voice rose slightly louder. “You are pig!”
A man chuckled. “If I’m pig, what are you, senorita? You were the one makin’ eyes at me in Nogales!”
“I thought you were gentleman!”
“Sure do hate to break up a party.” Prophet sighed as he moved out from behind the boulder. He jogged across the open space fronting it, meandering around mud puddles. “Especially when everybody seems to be having so much fun!”
He shouldered up to the shack, between the left front window and the weathered plank door that sagged on rusty hinges, lantern light showing through the cracks. He reached back for the double-barreled, ten-gauge sawed-off hanging down his back, then decided to stay with the Winchester. With the woman in there, he’d use the barn blaster only as a backup.
He stepped up in front of the door, hearing the voices from inside, the clink of a bottle against a tin cup, the intermittent slaps, and the woman’s angry curses. Backing up, Prophet lifted his right leg and thrust his foot forward, slamming the boot flat against the door, just right of the leather latch.
The door burst open, the latch and slivers from the frame flying into the room. As the door smashed against the wall, Prophet bounded inside and stopped the door’s recoil with his left boot, raising the Winchester to his right shoulder and scowling down the barrel.
There were five men in the low-ceilinged room in which a couple of dusty lanterns shunted deep shadows to and fro. The place had several bunks and cots. At the back was a table around which three of the men sat, playing cards and drinking whiskey from tin cups.
They were a hard-eyed, shaggy, unshaven lot, each with a pistol or rifle near. When the door had burst open, they jumped as one, reaching for weapons but turning still as stone when Prophet bellowed, “Hold it right there, you mangy sons o’ bitches, or I’ll blow you outta your spurs. The name’s Prophet. Bounty hunter! Any one of you so much as twitches, I’ll buck you out in a hail of hot lead! Turn ya deader’n a goddamn fence post!”
Truth was, Prophet had no intention of wasting his time on these gents. He had bigger fish to fry. But Prophet was no cold-blooded killer, so he’d let this hard-eyed lot of fetid, human blowflies make the first move.