The Graves at Seven Devils

by Peter Brandvold

  “Hey!” Jay cried.

  The outlaw had only started raising his hands toward his head when Prophet smashed the rifle’s stout, scarred butt against the side of Jay’s handsome head with a resounding, bone-cracking smack.

  25

  JAY PILED UP at the base of the canyon wall like a long slab of venison thrown down from the bed of a market hunter’s rolling wagon. Lying belly down, nose buried in mud from the springs, the man gave a gurgling sigh and fell silent.

  Prophet snapped the Winchester to his shoulder again, and stayed the girl’s hands, which, taking advantage of his momentary distraction, had dropped over the handles of her holstered six-guns. Seeing the Winchester’s maw yawning at her once more, however, she raised her hands shoulder high, palms out.

  “Keep ’em there,” Prophet growled. He hated dealing with women. But the way he saw it, bare-breasted as she was, this was no woman but a cold-blooded killer. He’d have no more trouble killing her than he’d had trimming her wrestling partner’s wick.

  At least, he didn’t think he would.

  Aiming the Winchester at the crazy-looking redhead’s parted lips, he sidled over to the unconscious, barefoot outlaw, whose chest rose and fell ever so slightly. He held the Winchester in one hand as he crouched, ripped Jay’s revolvers from their holsters, and tossed them up and over the canyon wall above his head. They hit the brush with barely audible thuds.

  Jay’s slow, shallow breath gurgled softly in the mud. He groaned.

  Straightening, continuing to aim the Winchester one-handed at the redhead’s wide mouth, Prophet strode over to Cora quickly, pressed the rifle barrel against her dimpled chin, and ripped her revolvers from their holsters. She flinched with each violent thrust of Prophet’s hands, her breasts and the makings sack bouncing slightly.

  Blood trickled down from the long bullet burn across her cheek and from the painful-looking notch in her ear. When he’d tossed both guns up onto the canyon’s lip with Jay’s, he pressed the Winchester harder against her dimpled chin.

  Fear had flashed in her eyes as Prophet had strode over to her. It flashed again now—stronger, darker. Prophet could tell from her expression that she wasn’t accustomed to feeling such an emotion, and her fear mixed with indignation and downright murderous rage. He could feel her passion rippling up through his rifle.

  “You give me a bullshit answer, you’re gonna end up like your sweetheart over there.” Prophet stared at her hard, his own broad chest rising and falling behind his sweat-soaked tunic. “Where’s Louisa?”

  Cora dropped her eyes to the rifle pressed against her chin. “An old mine diggin’ upslope a ways.” She swallowed and lifted her eyes to Prophet’s. “If you’ll let me put my blouse on, I’ll show you.”

  Prophet rolled his eyes around. When he saw the woman’s blouse, he backed away, keeping his rifle aimed at her face, and scooped it up off a cedar sapling.

  He tossed it against her, then grabbed her bare arm and jerked her forward. She groaned indignantly as she stumbled forward, holding the blouse to her chest, Prophet shoving up to where the pinto stood, regarding him and the girl wonderingly in the corner of its right eye.

  Prophet cleared his throat as dread buckled his insides, but his voice was even as he asked, “She alive?”

  “She was. Couldn’t tell you about now. There’s snakes in that pit.”

  Prodding with the Winchester’s barrel, Prophet backed her up against the canyon wall, just up canyon from the pinto. “Stay there. Any sudden moves, I’ll drill you.”

  Her voice was low and faintly sneering as she continued holding her blouse against her chest. “Do you know how many men are less than a hundred yards away? Men, I might add, who are well armed and always ready and willing to kill.”

  “Just shy of a dozen, I’d say.” Keeping an eye on the girl, Prophet set the rifle against the canyon’s opposite wall, then grabbed the pinto’s saddle blanket off the juniper upon which it and the rest of the horse’s tack had been tossed.

  He tossed the blanket onto the pinto, glancing every now and then at the lip of the ridge behind the girl, faintly hearing the voices of the rest of the gang.

  Cora shook the blouse out in front of her. “Who’re you? I mean, besides being a dead man.”

  “Name’s Prophet. Bounty hunter.”

  The girl froze with one arm in the blouse, seemingly completely uncaring that both her breasts were exposed, and blinked at him in shock. “You came in here aimin’ to collect the bounties on us?”

  Prophet had thrown the saddle over the pinto’s back and moved over to the horse’s left side to buckle the latigo. He glanced over his right shoulder at the girl, who continued donning the blouse. “Nope. Came here to kill ya.” He gritted his teeth as he punched the pinto’s side, trying to get the horse to let its breath out. “Every last stinkin’ one of you kill-crazy sons o’ bitches.”

  The girl stared at him, wrinkling the skin above her nose, her eyes regaining that wary cast she’d acquired after Prophet had all but decapitated Jay. “That’s a mighty tall order. You’re a big, ornery-lookin’ son of a bitch, but there’s nigh on a dozen of us, like you said.”

  She buttoned the shirt’s last bone button and looked down her chest. As if in afterthought, she freed one of the top buttons, exposing a good bit of her deep cleavage, and sauntered forward, stuffing her hands in her back pockets and throwing her shoulders back, breasts out.

  “Why don’t you quit this foolishness and throw in with us? Me and the fellas—even the queers, or, I should say, especially the queers—would be pleased as punch to sign up the gent who cleaned Jay Squires’s clock.”

  “Squires, huh?” Prophet chuckled dryly as he stooped to pluck the bit and bridle off the juniper. “Thought he looked familiar. Seen paper on him up in Wyoming, a few months back. Thousand dollars, dead or alive.”

  She sidled up against Prophet as he draped the bridle over the pinto’s twitching ears and slipped the bit through its teeth.

  “Have you cleaned the dust out of your ears lately? Did you hear what I said? Me an’ the boys are fixin’ to ride out for a job that would set us up—you and me up, if’n you like bigtitted redheads with every man-pleasin’ skill you can think of and several you can’t!—for a good ten years in Mexico. Hell, we could buy our own island!” She rubbed a firm, pointed breast against Prophet’s shoulder. “Come on—let’s ride on over and say hello.”

  With the pinto saddled, bridled, and ready to go, Prophet moved around behind the girl. “Sounds right enticin’. Let me mull it over.” She gave a startled gasp as he wrapped his big hands around her waist and threw her up onto the pinto’s back.

  He grabbed the Winchester and led the pinto out from the wall. He was about to mount up behind Cora when a grunt sounded from down canyon.

  Jay Squires was bringing a .32-caliber hideout gun up from an ankle sheath. His handsome, pain-racked face was lifted toward Prophet, the side of his head bloody and swollen, his lower jaw hanging askew. Lips bunched, eyes bright with malice, Squires thumbed the .32’s hammer back and began raising the gun from the mud.

  Prophet dropped the Winchester. His .45 was in his hand almost instantly. He cursed as the gun’s roar filled the canyon, echoing like one of last evening’s thunderclaps and no doubt clearly heard by the rest of the gang.

  The bullet careened through Squires’s forehead, snapping his chin up sharply. Squires’s mouth formed a small, round O as his chin dropped into the mud. The back of his shirt and vest shone with a red blood spray stippled with bone slivers that had been blown out the back of his head.

  “Damn,” Cora exclaimed when the Colt’s roar had finally ceased reverberating about the narrow canyon, “I’ve been wantin’ to do that for years!”

  Prophet growled another curse, then holstered the .45, grabbed his Winchester, and swung up behind Cora.

  “Only problem is,” the girl said with a smug, jubilant air, “the other fellas done heard it, and they’ll be here in three s
hakes of a mule’s tail. I don’t see how you got any choice but to throw in with us now . . . or get your fool hide tossed to the same snakes as that cute little blond.”

  Holding the reins in his left hand, Prophet reached forward to slide the Winchester into the saddle boot. He palmed his .45, snugged the barrel against Cora’s back, and gigged the horse up canyon, hoping to find a trail up one of the ridges.

  “You’re gonna lead me to that cute little blond, and you’re gonna do it fast,” Prophet snarled, his voice quaking as the pinto trotted up the crooked canyon, his heart pounding in hard, even thumps, “or you’re gonna be the one snugglin’ snakes—comprende?”

  “I don’t know,” Cora said, shaking her head as she and Prophet continued up the boulder-and-brush-littered cut, “I don’t take you for a man who’d kill a woman. Leastways, not one who’d shoot a girl in the back!”

  Prophet spied a narrow trough in the canyon wall, twisting up into shale and cedars, and swung the pinto into it, prodding the horse hard with his spurs. “There was a time I would have agreed,” Prophet said. As the horse lunged up the trough, snorting, hooves clomping loudly, he rammed the gun hard into the girl’s right kidney. “But, girl, if you don’t lead me to that snake pit without further bullshit, I’m gonna show you just how wrong you are!”

  “Ouch! Christ!” Cora recoiled against the gun stabbing into her. “Damnit, you’re hurting me!”

  When the horse had lunged up out of the trough and stood amidst giant rock slivers and cracked boulders shaded by pines, Prophet stopped the horse and peered behind and right. Voices sounded down the rocky shoulder of the slope, growing louder as the girl’s compadres moved toward the cut to see about the gunshot. Prophet couldn’t see them from this angle, which meant they couldn’t see him either.

  He kept his voice down as he turned to the girl, still writhing, groaning, and cursing against the .45’s barrel buried in her kidney. “Which way?”

  “Up the slope!”

  “Straight?” Prophet said, grinding his spurs into the pinto’s flanks and grabbing the horn in front of the girl to keep from being thrown back over the horse’s lunging hindquarters.

  “I think so! I don’t remember exactly! I’ll have to see once we’re farther up the mountain!” She glanced over her shoulder, her eyes pain-racked and indignant. “That gun in my back ain’t helpin’ my memory none, you big, mean bastard!”

  Prophet put the pinto straight up the slope, looking around and spying several mine tailings and pits either dug straight into the rocky soil or angled back under massive boulders—none of which the squealing redhead claimed was the right pit.

  “Left,” the girl groaned.

  “How far?”

  “I don’t know—I’m lookin’ around for it, damn you!”

  Prophet reined the pinto left across the slope, meandering around pines, cedars, talus slides, and boulders of every shape and size while two of the monolithic devils stared down from the steep southern ridge. The westward-sliding sun hit the tops of the devil heads and appeared to stretch toothy grins across their stony, red faces.

  Prophet looked down the slope, catching glimpses of men moving along the base of the slope, between several ruined hovels and the brush-sheathed arroyo, toward the canyon in which they’d soon find Squires with a bullet through his bashed-in head. Prophet glanced farther back behind him, at the thick, clay-colored dust rising from beneath the pinto’s scissoring hooves.

  Too much dirt. One of the Three of a Kind Gang needed only to glance up the slope, and they’d see the dust if not Prophet himself weaving amongst the rocks and trees.

  He turned his head forward, anxiety surging through him. “Where is she, damnit? If you’re jerkin’ my picket pin, I’m gonna—”

  Prophet cut himself off as something flashed in the brush straight ahead.

  The girl groaned and leaned forward. “We’re close, damnit. You got me so rattled—!”

  “Shut up.” Prophet put the pinto slightly upslope toward the reflection continuing to flash through the branches of a squat, dusty cedar.

  He reined the horse to a halt over a man in cavalry blues sprawled dead in the dirt. He had a red beard and mustache, and his small, deep-set eyes stared straight up at the sky. Blood dribbled from a hole over his right ear, the nearby ground splattered with blood and brain tissue. The sun glanced off the gold-chased pocket watch lying in the dirt near the man’s coat pocket.

  “I drilled Captain Sykes not far from the pit.” The girl pointed upslope. “We’re close!”

  Hearing voices rising from the direction of the arroyo, Prophet put the horse up the slope until a slag pile appeared, sheathed in cedars. Prophet jerked back on the pinto’s reins and slid back off the horse’s rump, hitting the ground on both feet. He lunged toward the black hole yawning on the other side of the slag pile, stopped suddenly, and turned back toward the pinto.

  Cora was sliding the Winchester from the boot on the pinto’s right side. Prophet reached for it. Cora squealed and racked a shell. Prophet wrapped his hand around the barrel, and as he started to jerk the gun from the girl’s grip, she pulled the trigger.

  The ripping crack flatted out over the canyon, the slug flying skyward.

  Prophet pulled the rifle forward. Cora screamed again, her finger caught in the trigger guard, and tumbled down the horse’s left wither and hit the rocky ground headfirst at Prophet’s feet. Groaning, she lifted her head feebly, pushing off her hands. Blood dribbled onto the rocks beneath her. She groaned again, her muscles went slack, and she fell flat against the ground, unconscious.

  Prophet swung around and jogged up and over the slag heap, dropping down on his hands and knees beside the hole. Below he saw little but a few feet of steep, gravelly slope dropping into blackness. The air smelled of rock and soil and trapped air.

  “Louisa?”

  His voice echoed, then an eerie, grave-like silence.

  “Louisa, you down there?”

  26

  SILENCE ROSE UP from the musty hole, and Prophet’s pulse throbbed in his temples as a strange voice from deep in his heart screamed the girl’s name while he stared, blank-faced, into the yawning darkness.

  He licked his taut lips and was about to call again when, from below, he heard a muffled grunt and the scrape of a boot heel. Louisa’s voice rose up from the dark pit like a soothing balm to a deep burn. “Lou? . . . Where’ve you been?”

  Prophet choked back a relieved sob and chuckled. “I take it you’re down there.”

  “Very funny.” Her voice sounded a little pinched.

  “You all right?”

  “Not exactly. A viper chomped into my shoulder and I took a pretty good rap to my head.”

  Prophet felt apprehension nip him once more. Just because he’d found her didn’t mean everything was roses. “I’ll be down.”

  He leaned the rifle in the rocks, scrambled up and over the tailing pile once more, and jogged back to where the pinto stood where he’d left it, beside Cora, who still lay facedown in the gravel, unmoving. Down the slope he could hear voices, but he didn’t have time to worry about the killers now. He had to get Louisa out of the snake pit.

  He led the pinto up near a gap in the tailing pile, grabbed Louisa’s rope coil from the saddle horn, and tied one end to the horn itself before turning the horse away from the hole.

  “You stay here till I tell you, boy,” Prophet said, slapping the pinto’s shoulder and, breathing hard with anxiety and the need to hurry, he uncoiled the rope through the gap in the tailing pile.

  Prophet glanced into the hole once more. “Louisa, you still with me?”

  “No, I’ve gone to the Larimer Hotel in Denver for sarsaparilla and ginger snaps.”

  Prophet adjusted the position of the ten-gauge hanging down his back, wrapped the rope around his waist, slipknotted it, turned his back to the hole, and, keeping the rope taut between himself and the pinto, dropped over the edge, starting down.

  The pit’s walls were st
eep though not sheer, and he descended quickly, the daylight drifting up over his head and his breath beginning to echo in the stony, cavernous silence. His boots scuffed along the wall, loosing occasional shards of orange shale. He winced as he heard them clatter to the pit’s floor maybe thirty feet below, possibly hitting his partner crouched in the shadows.

  Semi-level ground rose beneath him, and a wall pushed up from behind to scrape against the double-barreled gut shredder. He set his boots, released the rope, and looked around in the dark gray light.

  Louisa’s voice trilled under the low wall behind him, like water in a sepulcher. “Under here. Watch out for the snakes.”

  Prophet ducked under the low-angling ceiling and peered farther back into the cave. Louisa’s booted feet and riding denims stretched toward him, her upper body, obscured by the cave’s inner dark, resting against a four-foot-high wall. As if to give credence to Louisa’s warning, a snake rasped to her left. Along the base of the wall, left of the girl, a slender shadow moved. The penny-colored, pellet-sized eyes shone in the dimness.

  “Shit!” Prophet slipped his .45 from its holster, thumbed back the hammer, and fired. The rocketing blast felt like two cupped palms slapped hard over Prophet’s ears. Louisa gave an irritated grunt.

  The rattling died abruptly, and the two cold eyes winked out like distant railroad lanterns. The slender, coiled shadow continued to jerk and quiver.

  Keeping his revolver unholstered, Prophet scuttled under the low-angled ceiling, looking all around for more vipers, and knelt beside Louisa. “How in the hell did you end up in here?”

  “Don’t ask stupid questions. Is the gang dead?”

  Prophet laughed dryly as he snaked his arms beneath Louisa’s back and legs. “Talk about stupid questions—no, they sure as hell ain’t!”

  “Good. I’d like to handle that job myself.”

  Kneeling and sort of sidestepping while remaining crouched beneath the ceiling, Prophet slid the girl out from the wall. “I don’t doubt it, Miss Bonnyventure. I don’t doubt that one damn bit.”