The Graves at Seven Devils
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
EPILOGUE
SITTING DUCK
Prophet turned to stare northwest over the rubble heaps. He’d heard what sounded like a blackfly sort of buzzing and whistling. The buzzing and whistling grew louder.
Mean and Ugly jerked his head up. At the same time, Prophet felt a sudden, searing pain in his upper right arm.
Before he knew what was happening, thunder clapped sharply in the northeast, and Mean and Ugly bucked suddenly with an indignant whinny.
Prophet cried as, losing his reins as well as his rifle, his entire right arm on fire, he twisted around and flew straight back off the pitching dun’s right hip . . .
PRAISE FOR PETER BRANDVOLD:
“Takes off like a shot, never giving the reader a chance to set the book down.”—Douglas Hirt
Berkley titles by Peter Brandvold
The Sheriff Ben Stillman Series
HELL ON WHEELS
ONCE LATE WITH A .38
ONCE UPON A DEAD MAN
ONCE A RENEGADE
ONCE HELL FREEZES OVER
ONCE A LAWMAN
ONCE MORE WITH A .44
ONCE A MARSHAL
The Rogue Lawman Series
BULLETS OVER BEDLAM
COLD CORPSE, HOT TRAIL
DEADLY PREY
ROGUE LAWMAN
The .45-Caliber Series
.45-CALIBER DEATHTRAP
.45-CALIBER MANHUNT
.45-CALIBER FURY
.45-CALIBER REVENGE
The Bounty Hunter Lou Prophet Series
THE GRAVES AT SEVEN DEVILS
THE DEVIL’S LAIR
STARING DOWN THE DEVIL
THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE
RIDING WITH THE DEVIL’S MISTRESS
DEALT THE DEVIL’S HAND
THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET
Other titles
BLOOD MOUNTAIN
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
THE GRAVES AT SEVEN DEVILS
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley edition / January 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Peter Brandvold.
All rights reserved.
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eISBN : 978-1-440-66001-6
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For K.G. and Frank
with much affection and a ton
of appreciation
1
LOU PROPHET TIED his hammer-headed line-back dun, appropriately named Mean and Ugly, to a scrub willow along a narrow creek somewhere in the devil’s maze of looming peaks and plunging valleys of western Colorado.
“While I’m away, Mean,” the bounty hunter said, ducking his head to peer through the willows, “don’t go runnin’ off with any mustang fillies, hear? Pretty and frisky they might be, but they’ll chew you up and spit you out like spoiled oats. I know that from exp—”
In the corner of his right eye, Prophet had seen the horse swing his head toward him too late. Mean and Ugly sunk his long, flat-edged front teeth into Prophet’s right shoulder, dropping a bright red veil of pain down over the big man’s eyes.
“Son of a bitch!” Prophet swung around and smashed an elbow against the dun’s blaze-faced snout. “How many times I gotta tell you not to do that, you black-hearted cuss?”
Unfazed by the blow, Mean and Ugly bobbed his head, snorting. His white-ringed eyes blazed with mischievous satisfaction.
Sucking air through his teeth, his broad, broken-nosed face flushed with pain and exasperation, Prophet canted his head to inspect his shoulder. The horse had torn the oft-repaired tunic seam once again. A small tear, but a tear nonetheless. No blood shone, but the tall, lean, hard-bodied man in dusty, sweaty buckskins felt as though his shoulder had been laid bare to the bone.
What a horse’s teeth lacked in sharpness they made up for in hardness—and Mean and Ugly’s choppers were hardest of all. The horse had always had a penchant for biting, and long, hard rides ghosting outlaws tended to bore him, making him frisky and contentious and especially prone to sinking his teeth into human flesh.
Or horse flesh, for that matter. But no other horses were near. The nearest were those of the stage robbers Prophet had been following for the past two weeks and that, when he’d glassed the area from a hill a few minutes ago, he’d spotted by the cabin a good two hundred yards away. So Prophet’s shoulder, carelessly offered, had proven too enticing for the dun to pass up.
Cursing again with disgust and keeping an eye on the horse, who had now dropped his head to crop bromegrass with infuriating indifference, Prophet leaned down to remove his spurs. “Don’t know why I’ve put up with you all these years, Mean and Ugly. I must be touched. To think of all the good horses I’ve passed up!”
Truth was, Mean and Ugly w
as the best horse Prophet had owned. Maybe not the handsomest, but the best, toughest stayer a bounty hunter could ask for. And while he’d never admit it out loud, Prophet felt a close kinship with the hammer-headed dun. They were cut from the same cloth. Both were big, ornery, green-broke loners who lived to stomp with their tails up.
He dropped the small-roweled spurs into his saddlebags, then hung four sets of manacles from his cartridge belt, with enough space between each so they wouldn’t jostle one another and give him away. Shucking his Winchester ’73 from its saddle boot, the bounty hunter racked a fresh shell into the breech. He glanced at Mean and Ugly once more, adding under his breath as he began tramping off through the willows, “A horse like that is an abomination against God and all that’s holy. Can’t sell him, though. Wouldn’t sic that cursed cayuse on my worst enemy. And he ain’t worth a bullet!”
He spat to one side and, rubbing his still-barking shoulder, continued through the willows to the shore of the shallow, slow-moving creek rippling over rocks and around sandbars. Halting at the edge of the stream, partly concealed by branches, he squeezed his rifle and looked around.
A few crows and mountain jays milled amongst the cottonwoods on both sides of the creek. Otherwise, nothing moved. No sounds but the gurgling stream, rasping weeds, ruffling leaves, an occasional bird cry. It appeared that Emmitt Sanderson, the leader of the outlaws whom Prophet had tracked north from Alamosa, threading the broad San Luis Valley before veering west into the high country, had appointed no picket to watch the gang’s back trail.
Resting the Winchester on his right shoulder but raking his cautious gaze from right to left and back again, Prophet stepped into the stream, keeping to the shallow ford as he made for the other side, the water refreshingly cool as it slid over his boots.
When he gained the other shore, he had another look around, then began climbing the slope beyond, working his way right and holding the Winchester in both hands across his chest. His wet boots slipped in the brittle, sun-cured grass.
His breath rasped, and his sweaty buckskin tunic clung to his back. He kept his shrewd bounty hunter’s eyes narrowed as he swept the terrain around him.
He’d hiked a hundred yards, uphill and down, when he spied the outlaw cabin perched on the shoulder of a low bluff among sparse pines and boulders. It was a small, worn-gray log affair with a rusty tin roof. A thin ribbon of smoke issued from the chimney pipe, rising nearly straight up to the faultless vault of cerulean sky.
An old fur trapper’s track.
A corral and lean-to stable lay on the cabin’s near side, and inside the corral five horses milled lazily, clumped head to tail for shade and to keep the flies out of one another’s faces. They were the horses Prophet had been tracking, including the stocky steeldust the outlaws had used for packing the stage loot they’d appropriated from the trails around Durango.
The gang had killed nine drivers and stage passengers in the past six months, including a young girl who’d caught a ricochet. They were as deadly a bunch of long-coulee riders to stalk the San Luis Valley. Prophet wouldn’t begrudge himself the bounty money he’d pocket as the four were led off to the gallows. In fact, he’d toast their hangman and beseech Ole Scratch to turn up the heat in their honor.
Another hunt was almost over. The bounties on this bunch would set him up through the fall and part of the winter—if he didn’t drink and carouse it all away in one wild weekend, as he was prone to do. As his sometime-partner Louisa Bonaventure often reminded him, he had to keep himself on a short leash, show some horse sense. He wasn’t getting any younger, and he’d like to retire with a nest egg someday.
Prophet jogged a beeline toward the cabin, crouching and threading a narrow crease between hills. He’d just worked his way through a brushy hollow showing the packed-down weeds where deer or elk had slept, when he stopped suddenly, dropped to a knee behind a stunt cedar, and lifted his head, listening.
Beyond the camelback to his left, voices sounded, muffled and tempered by splashing water. A woman squealed shrilly. “Ouch, ya big ape! That hurt!”
Prophet squinted up the ridge. Women? Then he remembered that Sanderson’s boys had all gotten hitched a while back, including old Emmitt himself for the fourth or fifth time. Apparently they’d needed some female flesh to cook and sweep out their hideout cabin and warm their mattress sacks.
Prophet chewed his cheek, troubled. Women and dogs were the bane of the bounty hunting profession. Dogs would bark and give you away while women often defended their men as they did their children—viciously and unpredictably. And for some reason, it was harder to shoot a woman than a man. Many a bounty hunter—and lawman, for that matter—had been turned toe down after hesitating with an armed female in his pistol sights.
Prophet scrutinized the cabin once more, tapping his Winchester’s stock with his gloved right thumb. Spying no one milling about the cabin, he turned and, keeping low in case someone was staring out a window, tramped back the way he’d come. Following the voices and splashing water, he approached the crest of a steep southern ridge, the voices rising from down the other side.
Breathing hard from the tough climb, Prophet doffed his hat. He got down on hands and knees and crabbed to the brow of the ridge, snuggling up between two boulders and casting a glance into the valley below.
Lying flat, he pressed his chin to the gravelly ground as his eyes swept the broad, shallow stream angling along the base of the ridge. There were no trees between Prophet and the stream, so it wasn’t hard to see that all four of the Sanderson bunch were frolicking with four women in the stream’s shallow, sun-speckled water—all as naked as the day they were born.
The men’s clothes were strewn with the women’s along the rocky shore. Prophet spied a few rifles, revolvers, and knives with the clothes, but one of the men—a big, bald, mustached hombre whom he recognized as Horton Whipple—wore a revolver on a rawhide loop around his broad, tattooed neck. Another man, who looked like Emmitt Sanderson himself, lolled farthest left with a redheaded girl on his lap, a brace of holstered revolvers within easy reach on a nearby rock.
Even skinny-dipping, the sons of bitches kept themselves armed. But it took that kind of savvy to stay ahead of the law for five, going on six years, as this bunch had. They’d left two sheriffs and three U.S. marshals moldering in graves behind them.
Prophet considered the situation. He had two owlhoots lolling in the water on the near side of the stream, their backs facing him. Another—who appeared to be the youngest of the bunch and Emmitt’s stepson, Rodney Hayes—was splashing around and playing patty-cake with a pretty, big-breasted blond out in the stream’s shallow middle. The fourth man was on the far side of the creek, perched atop a half-submerged tree in the shade of a sprawling sycamore. A brunette faced him, head tipped up toward his, her arms draped over his knees. He lazily kicked the water on either side of the girl, who occasionally lowered her head to the man’s crotch.
The bounty hunter pulled his head back behind his cover and backed a couple of feet down the hill, out of sight from the stream. He thumbed grit from his dimpled chin, a scowl etched across his broad, suntanned forehead.
The outlaws were too spread out for an easy takedown. If Louisa Bonaventure were here, he could bring her in from the other side of the river. Working together, they’d corral the whole group in no time. That would take the outlaws’ women out of the equation, as well, for Louisa brooked no grief from other women, and she wasn’t influenced by their looks, be they clothed or naked.
Since Prophet was on his own, he might have to wait until the women were out of the way and the men were grouped tighter before showing his hand. Even if it meant skulking around out here for several hours—maybe even until tomorrow. In a similar situation, he’d once had to bide his time for three days.
Like soldiering and lawdogging, bounty tracking was often a waiting game, boredom being as much a nuisance as dogs, women, and flying lead.
He hunkered down and waited, tippin
g his funnel-brimmed hat to shade his face. Below and behind him, the conversations continued and the water splashed. Rodney Hayes and the busty blond continued playing patty-cake, laughing and teasing each other with nauseating sweetness. After a time, one of the women took umbrage with something one of the men nearest the base of Prophet’s bluff said, and a slap cracked sharply.
“Ouch,” Prophet said beneath his low-canted hat brim. “That musta hurt.”
A brief, indecipherable argument followed and then the man—for some reason Prophet figured it was the bald-headed Horton Whipple—begged forgiveness, insisting he’d only been joshing and that the woman had known what a prankster he was when she’d thrown in with him. The couple quieted for a few minutes, and apparently the woman softened under Whipple’s charms.
After a time, her voice rose from the stream’s steady rush to say, “I reckon me and the girls better get some dinner goin’. You boys must be starved!”
Prophet quickly poked his hat brim back off his forehead and turned to peer through the gap between the rocks. “At least they got their womenfolk trained.” He watched the naked females head toward their clothes strewn about the near shore.
Not a bad-looking bunch, all in all, though the one who’d been frolicking and fighting with Whipple appeared to outweigh the big, bald outlaw by a good twenty pounds. Built like an apple barrel, she carried most of her weight in her hips and breasts. Prophet thought he recognized the redhead from a whorehouse up in Montana, but it was hard to tell from this distance.
The blond was a saucy-looking number with large, nicely shaped breasts and porcelain-pale skin, her face painted garishly, her hair drawn up in a loose bun. The brunette was round-faced, hippy, and small-breasted. She seemed to be speaking in a thick German accent while she and the others stumbled around the shoreline a hundred feet below Prophet, pulling on their silk stockings, pantaloons, and corsets, and shaking sand from their high-heeled shoes.