The Graves at Seven Devils

by Peter Brandvold

  “Ouch! My head hurts.”

  “Where’d the snake bite you?”

  “Shoulder. Another bit me in the leg.”

  Prophet looked at her sharply, brows beetled with concern. He’d never seen anyone recover from two rattlesnake bites. In fact, they’d both died long, painful deaths, begging him and the other men present to drill slugs through their heads.

  Louisa stared at him, tightening her grip about his thick neck. “Don’t fret, Lou.”

  Prophet glanced at her as, hauling his blond partner out from beneath the low ceiling, he straightened in the light falling from the circle of blue sky overhead. The light found Louisa’s half-open hazel eyes and sparkled. “How’s that? You just done told me you been snakebit twice. Do you know what that means, you crazy polecat?”

  “I’m immune to rattlesnake venom.”

  Prophet froze, staring at her. The bland way she frequently reported important information always took him aback, and he was never sure she wasn’t joking. The two hazel orbs staring at him now were totally lacking in irony, however.

  Prophet laughed with newfound relief and genuine humor as he set her feet on the stony ground before him, propped her against him, and reached for the rope. “You know that doesn’t surprise me?” He laughed again, louder, the laughter echoing around them. “No, sir, that doesn’t surprise me one damn bit!”

  That she herself believed she was immune didn’t mean that he believed it, for he’d never heard of anyone being immune from rattlesnake venom. But just the possibility that he might not lose her made him feel better. She certainly didn’t seem to have one foot in the grave.

  With her wrapped in his arms before him, the rope’s loop encircling them both, he chuckled again and clucked to the pinto at the top of the hole.

  The rope grew taut, pinching Prophet’s sides, holding Louisa firmly against him, and the loop began lifting them up the hole’s steep wall, the shotgun swinging back and forth across his back. Prophet ground his boots into the wall as they rose, walking up the steep incline while holding the rope firm in his gloved hands.

  He chuckled again. “Nope. Doesn’t surprise me one damn bit. In fact, I’m beginnin’ to feel sorry for the snake that bit ya!”

  “Ha-ha.”

  Prophet stared at the blue opening growing before him, listening for voices or boot scuffs—anything to indicate the gang was closing on the mine pit. There was only a thin mare’s tail of sun-bright dust blowing on the dry breeze.

  The rope creaked to a stop. Prophet and Louisa stopped moving. The bounty hunter looked at the rope bending down over the hole, creaking slightly from the strain as it ground into the dirt and rock.

  “Damn horse.” Prophet grabbed a chunk of shale protruding from the side of the hole and threw it up out of the hole, aiming for where he figured the horse was probably standing.

  “Get a move on, boy!”

  The last word hadn’t died on his lips before a hawkish face with rose-colored spectacles slid out from the hole’s right side, staring down. The man held a revolver in his right hand. He snapped his eyes wide, jerking the glasses down his nose, as the stone sailed past his cheek, barely missing it and ticking against the brim of his opera hat.

  The hawk-faced hombre bunched his lips with anger and cocked the pistol. “Hey, ole son,” he raged in a Southern accent even thick to Prophet’s Georgian ears, “you damn neah knawcked my block off!”

  Prophet winced as the man angled the revolver’s barrel over the lip of the hole. Throwing his head over Louisa slumped before him, Prophet gritted his teeth and sucked a sharp breath as he awaited the bullet that would no doubt splatter his brains all around the mine pit’s floor below.

  No bullet came. Instead, another, more distant gun barked.

  Prophet looked up. The bespectacled, hawk-faced hombre who’d been about to shoot Prophet was gone. Along the edge of the sphere of skylight, other hatted heads and mustached faces bobbed and jerked while men shouted and screamed.

  Louisa said thinly, barely audible beneath the din from above, “What’s going on?”

  A horse whinnied.

  The loop around Prophet and Louisa drew torturously taut, both grunting as it pinched the air from their lungs. With a violent jerk they were propelled up the side of the hole, the ascension so quick and unexpected that Prophet’s boots slipped off the stone ridge, and he and Louisa slammed the jagged rock wall so hard that Prophet felt as though his shoulders had been fused together. Twisting around, he put his back to the jagged stone incline, his back and shotgun taking the brunt of the scrapes and bruises from the pick-and-shovel-carved sides of the hole.

  Louisa groaned, bunching her cheeks and slitting her eyes as she stared straight up at the opening growing wider and wider above.

  Prophet gritted his teeth as, gripping the taut rope in both his gloved hands, daylight and the acrid smell of powder smoke washed over them and the hole shot back behind them.

  Louisa gave an anguished cry as she and Prophet blew up out of the pit like sudden-struck oil and slammed back to the shale-littered ground. With the girl’s back snugged against Prophet’s chest and belly, they were dragged forward together as if drawn by a team of runaway horses along the rocky ground away from the hole, the ground searing and cutting into Prophet’s left shoulder. Rocks flew to either side as he and Louisa, lashed together like Siamese twins, fishtailed through the gap in the tailing pile.

  Gritting his teeth against the ground hammering and raking him, Prophet caught a quick, blurred glimpse of men around him falling or crouching or shooting up toward the devil-capped southern ridge, powder smoke wafting as flames stabbed from gun barrels.

  Ahead, the pinto was running and buck-kicking at an angle across the slope, dust spitting up from its hooves. The horse jerked sharply right, loose shale flying up around it. The horse went down and rolled in a thick dust cloud, wrenching Prophet and Louisa sharply sideways.

  As the horse screamed and lifted its head, hooves scissoring as it tried to regain its feet, the rope slackened, and Prophet and Louisa, propelled by their previous momentum, skidded down a rocky, brushy bench, dust flying up around them. They piled up together against a low knoll, Louisa squirming and groaning on top of Prophet, her dust-caked hair in his face.

  Prophet felt the rope jerking at his waist and turned to see the pinto starting to draw its feet under it. Holding Louisa’s shoulders with one arm, he reached back behind his head with his other hand and slipped his bowie knife from the thong between his shoulder blades.

  Quickly, as the rope began jerking him and Louisa ahead once more, he flung his arm out, slashing the razor-edged blade through the quivering hemp. He and his partner bounded back from the suddenly released tension, one of the cut ends recoiling like a viper striking him while the other bounced and leaped behind the pinto, which was once again screaming and galloping off across the slope, away from the guns still cracking and popping in the rocks and cedars behind it.

  Prophet wrapped his arms around Louisa and lay his head back in the sand. He sucked a long breath, vaguely taking reconnaissance of his battered body, trying to ascertain if anything was broken. Gently, he rolled Louisa to one side and brushed her hair away from her face with his forearm. Her cheeks were scraped and dusty. Her eyelids fluttered.

  Prophet’s gut was in a knot. He couldn’t believe she’d survived the two snakebites as well as the pummeling they’d both just taken. “Hey . . . you still kickin’?”

  She rolled back onto her elbows, looking around like a drunk just waking up in an alley. “What happened? Who’s shooting?”

  Prophet chuffed at the girl’s sand once more. He groaned as he pulled a boot beneath him and began pushing himself to his feet. Once standing, dizzy and battered but still operable, he reached for his .45, relieved to find the revolver still secured to his holster by the hammer thong. “I don’t know.” He thumbed open the loading gate, plucked out the one spent shell, and replaced it with a fresh shell from his dust-caked
cartridge belt. “Reckon I’d better go find out. You stay here.”

  He’d taken only one step forward, toward the din rising upslope and left, when a gun barked closer than the others. The slug whistled over Prophet’s right shoulder and screeched off a boulder behind him.

  Prophet dropped to a knee, every bone in his big frame squawking in protest of the sudden movement, and raised the .45.

  He hammered three quick rounds at the figure peering at him through cedar branches, snapping branches, tearing bark, and puffing dust from the man’s chest.

  The bushwhacker screamed and jerked back. He stumbled out from the other side of the tree, dropped to a knee—a scrawny gent in a funnel-brimmed Stetson and with bandoliers crossed on a deer-hide vest—and Prophet fanned two more shots.

  Both slugs took the man through his forehead, blood and bone spraying as he flew straight back, hit the ground, and lay spread-eagle, as though dropped from the moon.

  Quickly, looking around for more shooters moving in on him, Prophet opened the smoking .45’s loading gate and began plucking out the spent casings. The gunfire around the snake pit had grown sporadic, and several men were shouting angrily. Beside Prophet, Louisa leaned back against the knoll and shook her hair from her eyes.

  “Give me your pistol, Lou.”

  Prophet thumbed a shell into an empty chamber and narrowed an incredulous eye at the dusty, rumpled, snakebit girl.

  She jerked her hand toward him, furrowed her brows impatiently. “Give me your pistol. You still have your barn blaster. We’ll circle those fork-tailed demons and send them to their rewards in a hail of hot lead.”

  Prophet snorted. “You oughta write them pulp yarns with yellow-backed covers.”

  He flicked the revolver’s loading gate closed and looked around once more. “Forget it. Stay here.”

  He started forward, stopped, and turned back to where she flung pitchforks at him with her sparkling hazel gaze between breeze-buffeting wings of dusty blond hair. “And for once in your ornery, pea-pickin’ life, sit tight!”

  27

  PROPHET HELD HIS barn blaster in his left hand, the Colt in his right, and crept forward slowly, heading away from Louisa, making his way around the boulders, and swinging his hatless head from left to right.

  The sporadic shots now rose from ahead and to his right, from upslope, and they all seemed to be aimed toward the ridge from which purple shade was slowly bleeding into the canyon.

  He moved around a boulder and stopped. A long-haired gent in a green-checked suit coat and brown trousers lay facedown, blood staining the orange caliche around his head. Prophet kicked him over. From Big Hans’s description, the hawk-faced corpse glaring up at him, lips stretched with shock and horror, was one of the triplets the gang had been named for. A big-caliber bullet had smashed a silver cartwheel-sized hole through one side of his head and had left a fist-sized, gaping cavern in the other side upon its exit.

  Squeezing the barn blaster in one hand, his Colt .45 in the other, Prophet continued forward until the snake pit sheathed in mine tailings appeared just ahead. The redhead, Cora, was no longer here, but her blood marked where she’d lain.

  Three more bodies lay around the pit, blood like red paint splashed from a bucket. Another triplet lay beside the hole—this one dressed in a brown-checked coat and fawn vest, the pistol with which he’d been about to clean Prophet’s clock lying a few yards from his pale, long-fingered, outstretched hand.

  A big black man lay draped belly up over a small boulder, a hole the size of a wheel hub gushing blood from his chest.

  A few yards farther up the slope sprawled a tall gent with long, sandy hair and a handlebar mustache. He held two Buntline Specials in his fists, one cocked and splashed with blood from the hole in his throat. His eyes stared glassily at the rocks beneath him, one cheek and a black boot twitching in death spasms.

  Men’s voices drifted from upslope. A boot clipped a rock. Prophet glanced around more, then, sleeving sweat and dust from his eyelids and hefting his Colt and his barn blaster, began striding upslope, moving quickly but quietly.

  He tramped between the rocks and dwarf pines, keying on the voices continuing to drift down from the rocks just ahead. He couldn’t hear what the men were saying, as they were forty or fifty yards away, facing the ridge, but he could tell from their conspiratorial tones they were setting up an ambush.

  As he moved, Prophet glanced at a large, flat-topped boulder leaning slightly to one side and snugged up to the ridge wall behind it. Several smaller boulders and pinyons lay around it. The boulder seemed to be the point the two killers—he could tell there were two by their tracks and voices—were heading for.

  When the boulder was about thirty yards away, the crown of a black opera hat appeared, shifting around behind rocks and brush ahead of him. Prophet hurried forward, sidled up to a boulder shaped like a cracked eyetooth, and edged a look around it. A man with a black braid falling down the back of his salmon-checked suit coat knelt, facing the ridge from behind a wagon-sized chunk of black granite.

  Breathing hard from the climb, Prophet sucked a deep breath and stole slowly out from behind the boulder. He’d set his left boot down softly in the dry gravel, when his quarry swung his head around sharply, black eyes snapping wide and lifting two saddle-ring Schofields in his black-gloved fists.

  Prophet froze and, with an implacable expression on his scraped, dusty, sunburned face, tripped his ten-gauge’s left trigger. At the same time, he fired the .45 in his right hand.

  The .45’s crack was drowned by the short-barreled barn blaster’s cannon-like explosion, which made the ground shudder beneath the bounty hunter’s boots.

  If he’d hit the man with the .45, he’d hit him in the same place that the double-aught buck punched a pumpkin-sized hole through his lower chest, lifting him violently off his feet and throwing him straight back over several rocks to finally disappear in a deadly patch of spiked catclaw and ocotillo, dust rising in his wake.

  One of the Schofields, which he’d thrown into the air unfired, dropped to the gravelly caliche only a few feet from the man’s boot and spur prints, the soft, baleful plunk of iron against earth fittingly punctuating a wasted life.

  Prophet holstered his .45 and, jogging forward, knowing the other killer would be headed in his direction, dropped down behind another boulder in the shade of the mammoth stone devil capping the looming southern ridge. He breeched the ten-gauge, plucked the spent wad from the left barrel, and replaced it with a fresh shell from his cartridge belt.

  He dug a boot heel into the gravel and started to push himself up. Smelling a sweet, cloying odor—the stench of an overfilled privy doused with hog slop—he froze. Staring straight ahead, keeping his ears pricked but hearing nothing, he sat with his back to the boulder. The stench grew more intense, stinging his eyes like the devil’s own supper.

  Behind the boulder lifted the rasp of an indrawn breath. Prophet winced against the pain in his aching bones as he heaved himself quietly to his feet and, crouching and holding the barn blaster straight out from his waist, cat-footed around the side of the rock and edged a look behind it.

  A huge figure—a good four inches taller than Prophet—clad in a short charro jacket and bull-hide chaps over bell-bottomed deerskin slacks—was turning around the boulder’s other end, his back facing the bounty hunter. The stench emanating from the man was now so thick that tears squeezed out from Prophet’s eyes to dribble through the dust down his cheeks.

  The bounty hunter began raising the shotgun. Behind him a squeal rose sharply, freezing the blood in his veins and jerking him around suddenly, eyes popping wide, his right index finger drawn taut against the ten-gauge’s curved triggers.

  Something dog-sized and dark moved in the brush, snorting and grunting. The javelina pulled its pink snout back, wheeled, squealed loudly, and burrowed off through the scrub. At the same time, the smell of the man Prophet had been stalking became so strong it was like an actual dead thing in his n
ose.

  A spur trilled softly. Sensing a target drawn on his back, Prophet twisted around, grinding his heels into the gravel and diving back the way he’d come.

  Behind him, a rifle barked—two quick shots flatting out over the canyon followed by the mad, frenzied yowl of the shooter.

  As Prophet hit the ground on his belly, his barn blaster tumbled out ahead of him. Spurs rang and boots thumped behind him. He turned to look over his right shoulder as his heart rattled in his chest and blood rushed to his cheeks.

  The big Mexican, with a suety face shadowed by four-day stubble and a thick mustache, grinned with delight and, stalking toward Prophet lying helpless on his side, raised his Winchester to his shoulder.

  He narrowed one eye as he drew a bead on Prophet’s chest with the other. His mouth was a near-toothless cavern crusted with long-seasoned chaw.

  Prophet’s legs turned to putty as the man bore down on him. He didn’t have a hope in hell of reaching either his .45 or the shotgun before the big, stinking demon looming in front of him sent him to Ole Scratch in a smoking, smelly cloud of glowing lead. He mused vaguely that at least he’d come to an appropriate place, a hot canyon ringed with massive red devils, to receive his send-off to El Diablo.

  The Mexican slammed the cocking mechanism home with an angry, metallic rasp. Unexpectedly, he lowered the rifle to glare down at the silver-chased breech. As though the long gun had just insulted him, his grin dissolved, replaced by a face-crumpling, exasperated frown.

  Prophet’s chest fairly imploded.

  The Mex’s rifle was empty!

  The bounty hunter threw his right arm out in front of his head, curled his fingers around the barn blaster’s stock, and brought it back toward him. At the same time, the Mexican threw his empty Winchester down as though it had suddenly turned hot.

  Knowing it was now himself who didn’t have time to reach for one of his holstered six-shooters or knives, he bolted forward and sprang off the heels of his high-topped, mule-eared boots, bellowing as he dived toward Prophet, arms stretched out in front of him, hands spread wide, thumbs forward.