The Graves at Seven Devils

by Peter Brandvold

  “Y’all beat a pan when the grub’s on the table,” ordered Emmitt Sanderson, lolling in the current not far from Whipple, only his head and toes showing above the water. He was smoking a stogie. “Me and the boys just fogged a long, hard trail, and we’re gonna soak awhile.”

  “You just do that, Emmitt,” Prophet muttered, keeping his head low, one hand on his rifle. “You just keep soakin’ right there . . . let them girls get on up to the cabin and the hell out of my way. . . .” He chuckled at himself, more afraid of the unarmed women than he was of the armed outlaws.

  The bounty hunter watched the girls drift up through the knee-high bromegrass and wheatgrass toward the cabin capping the hill’s shoulder a hundred yards away. Spread out in a shaggy line, they chattered and laughed. The blond and the redhead had left their tops off, exposing their breasts to the sun. The blond continued clapping her hands, as though still playing patty-cake with Sanderson’s stepson, while the German girl conversed with Whipple’s lummox about soon needing more meat for their larder.

  When they’d all drifted into the cabin, Prophet crawled backward down the rise, keeping his head low. He would tramp upstream, staying clear of the water, then circle back down to the shore to get the drop on Whipple and Sanderson.

  He started to gain his knees. The sickening sound of a cocking gun hammer rose behind him. Something hard jabbed against the back of his neck, just up from his collar.

  He froze, his throat drying suddenly like desert hardpan.

  A nasal, raspy voice said bluntly, “One more move and you might as well go ahead and tell me what name you want scratched on your tombstone, ya big son of a bitch of a squint-eyed polecat!”

  2

  “COLDER’N A GRAVE digger’s ass out there after that rainstorm,” said Marie Antoinette Fletcher.

  The pretty, blond former prostitute didn’t so much step through the timber-frame jailhouse door as she blew in on a chill wind gust rife with the fresh smell of a recent desert gully washer. Holding a wicker basket only partly covered with oil-cloth in one hand, she kicked the door closed behind her.

  Marie Antoinette’s husband, Sheriff Tobias Fletcher, glanced up from some paperwork strewn about his cluttered desk. “Uh, Marie . . . honey . . .” He jerked his head back toward the woman’s twelve-year-old son, Colter, hammering the legs back on a chair that a recent drunk prisoner had smashed against the wall.

  The pretty blond, her disheveled hair tumbling about her shoulders, turned toward her husband, frowning. “What?”

  “The boy.”

  Marie Antoinette wasn’t her real name, but she’d seen no reason to change it back to Marlene Karlaufsky when she gave up the world’s oldest profession to marry Fletcher. She cast her brown-eyed gaze into the shadows at the back of the small room where the boy continued to hammer the leg back onto the chair, several nails dangling from between his lips.

  “What about him?” Marie Antoinette blinked. “You don’t think he’s heard ‘grave digger’s ass’ before?”

  “No doubt he has,” said Fletcher, wincing slightly at his wife’s salty tongue. “But perhaps using such . . . uh . . . terminology in front of him isn’t setting the proper example . . .”

  “Pshaw!”

  Marie Antoinette set the lunch basket atop the desk, then dropped into Fletcher’s lap, making his swivel chair squawk, and wrapped her arms around his neck. “I told Colter when he first started talkin’ what was right and proper. Didn’t I, Colter? And that, while I didn’t always say and do what was right and proper myself, he sure as hell better!” She glanced around her husband at Colter Fletcher. The sheriff had legally adopted the boy a year ago, just after he and Marie Antoinette had married. “Isn’t that so, my darlin’ child?”

  “That’s right, Ma,” the boy said, customarily deadpan, between hammer blows. He stopped suddenly and squinted an eye at the sheriff. “That’s an advantage I have over the other fellas, Pa. I know from example what I can’t do and say, while the others can only guess at it. Most of the time they guess wrong and end up with a switch across their backsides!”

  “There you have it, Sheriff.” As Colter continued working on the chair, Marie Antoinette planted a kiss on Fletcher’s mouth and squirmed around on his lap. “My salty tongue and evil ways are my boy’s advantage over the others. Hell, soon he’ll be so well behaved he’ll be able to skirt the seminary and head right to the pulpit!”

  Fletcher chuckled as he wrapped his arms around his head-strong wife, drew her to him, and kissed her. “I don’t know about that, but I reckon I see your point. Sort of, anyway. . . .”

  In spite of her tongue, Fletcher had never loved a woman more than he loved Marie Antoinette. He was no saint himself, having ridden on the wrong side of the law several times when he was younger. He was pushing thirty-five now, and he couldn’t argue that so far Marie Antoinette hadn’t done a first-rate job raising Colter to be a respectful, hardworking young man—one whom Fletcher was proud to call his son.

  He kissed her cheek and squeezed her shoulder. “So, what’d you bring us boys for lunch, Mrs. Fletcher? We’d best eat. I gotta ride out to the Double Diamond this afternoon.”

  “Rustlers again?” Marie Antoinette wriggled off Fletcher’s lap.

  “ ’Fraid so. Prob’ly Injuns off the rez. If so, I might have to pay a visit to Fort Dixon.”

  “Dixon?” Marie Antoinette scowled as she slid the towel from the basket and began setting out plates and silverware. “That means you’ll be gone overnight.”

  “ ’Fraid so.” Fletcher plucked a bread ’n’ butter pickle off a glass dish and bit into it, glancing at Colter, who was putting his tools back into his toolbox. “But you got him. He’ll protect you. Only twelve years old, but he’ll be tall as me in another year.”

  “I hate it when you have to leave town.”

  “Don’t like it much myself, honey,” Fletcher said as Marie laid a thick sandwich of last night’s antelope roast on a blue tin plate and set it before him, nudging aside a can of cheap cigars. “But it’s the way sheriffin’ works, and I can’t complain. I drove cattle long enough. Dug wells, strung fence. Even mustanged down south of the border for a while.”

  The sheriff bit into his sandwich atop which Marie Antoinette had piled a good helping of raw green onion from the kitchen garden she tended out back of their rented frame house at the west edge of Seven Devils, Arizona Territory. She and Colter had even dug an irrigation ditch down from the creek.

  “This is good, steady work. And around here about the worst you have to contend with is long-loopers and drunk soldiers from Dixon. Your occasional bandito on the run from rurales.”

  “And Mrs. Berg’s hired man,” said Colter as the lanky boy with a thick mop of auburn hair and brown eyes drew a chair up to the right side of Fletcher’s desk.

  Amos Adler was the drunk who’d busted the chair the boy had been fixing. During the week the big German was quiet as a church mouse as he worked around the big house and grounds of the widow of Seven Devils’s founding father. But every Saturday night, Adler’s wolf got loose, as they say, and Fletcher had to arrest the man for breaking up saloons or harassing the soiled doves over at Miss Kate’s sporting parlor.

  “And Amos Adler, correct,” Fletcher said, playfully nudging Colter’s shoulder.

  “Well, you be careful, Toby,” Marie Antoinette admonished as she sat down on the other side of his desk. “If anything happened to you . . .” She bit into her sandwich and regarded her husband angrily, her big, brown eyes grave. “I’d just be really bad piss-burned, that’s all. . . .”

  Fletcher and Colter shared a glance. They chuckled around the food in their mouths, and Marie Antoinette gave a snort and followed suit.

  As they ate the sandwiches and garden vegetables, they chatted about work that needed doing around their place—the house needed a new porch, the chicken coop needed a new roof, and the stable door was off its hinges again. To help makes ends meet, Marie Antoinette sold eggs and bread aro
und town, and she was having trouble keeping up with her growing clientele.

  “It’s going to be a big help to have my cousin here,” she said, biting into a radish. Chewing, she glanced pensively at the remaining radish between the thumb and index finger of her right hand. “Dear Louisa . . . haven’t seen her in years. Not since she was just a little tyke running about her family’s place in Nebraska. . . .”

  “What’s her last name again, Ma?” Colter asked. He’d finished a sandwich and held his half-empty glass of milk to his lips.

  “Bonaventure. Louisa Bonaventure,” Marie Antoinette said. “She’s a good five, six years younger than me. Not yet twenty, I don’t think. My ma and her pa were brother and sister. We all lived in the same county up in Nebraska until Pa went crazy from drink, and Ma took us out to Colorado. That was long before renegades burned the Bonaventure farm, killing everyone in Louisa’s family except Louisa herself.”

  “That’s a terrible thing,” Fletcher said, brushing crumbs from his vest and leaning back in his chair, hands on his thighs. “How’d she get away?”

  “Don’t know,” Marie said. “All I know is she’s been on the drift ever since. Not sure doin’ what—but a young woman alone”—her eyes grew dark as she reflected on her own experience after her mother passed away from a fever—“I can imagine. Judging by her letter, she’s looking forward to finally settling down.” She leaned forward on her elbows and gratefully smiled at her husband across the desk. “I know how she feels.”

  Fletcher stood, sucking meat from between two teeth. “I’m glad you’ll have family here, honey. This winter, and funds permitting, I’ll see about adding a new room onto the house. In the meantime, I best shade the trail for—”

  “Hey, Pa.” Colter had moved to the open jailhouse door for a breath of air still fresh from the recent downpour. He was looking westward up the broad main drag. “Best come have a look at this.”

  “What is it, son?” Brushing crumbs from his soup-strainer mustache, the tall, lean sheriff, his longish brown hair beginning to gray at the temples, crossed to the front door. He sidled up to the boy, whose head came up to his shoulder, and followed Colter’s gaze westward along the soggy, deserted main street.

  The Arizona town of Seven Devils claimed a population of a little over two hundred, but since gold had grown scarce in the surrounding mountains, that figure was now stretching it. The jailhouse sat in the middle of Main Street, on the north side, but the west edge of town was only about sixty yards away. That’s where the last sandstone and adobe-brick business buildings abruptly stopped and the desert took over—red rocks, creosote shrubs, mesquite, sage, and saguaros, all hemmed in by towering, craggy ridges now partly concealed by gauzy, fast-moving clouds.

  The desert floor wasn’t concealed, however. Fletcher’s eyes had no trouble picking out the handful of riders moving down a gentle slope toward the town—about seventy yards from the town’s edge and closing quickly, horses loping as they meandered around rocks and boulders and cactus snags.

  A wan light filtered through the low clouds, but there was light enough to reflect off the silver trimming the horses’ tack and the high-crowned hat of one of the three lead riders. It reflected also off the bandoliers crossing the chests of two of the riders, and off the silver-plated pistols holstered and thonged on the thighs of the rider farthest back.

  All six were distinctive, but the last one rode a high-stepping, white Arab with a fancy black bridle and a bloodred saddle blanket peeking out from beneath the gold-trimmed saddle.

  Colter glanced up at Fletcher, a sharpened matchstick protruding from the boy’s lips. He squinted one eye, incredulous. “Those boys sure ain’t from around here.”

  Fletcher shook his head as he continued staring at the approaching group, fascinated not only by their distinctive attire but by the number of revolvers, rifles, shotguns, and knives each somehow managed to cram onto himself and his horse. A man in blue army trousers and wearing a faded blue cavalry hat, with bandoliers crisscrossing his chest, even had a sword dangling off his right leg.

  The hoof thuds rose as the group entered town, splashing through mud puddles and flooded wheel ruts. Their saddles squawked, bridle chains and spurs jangling.

  Fletcher could now see that only five of the gang were men. The one bringing up the rear, well back from the others and riding the sleek white Arab, was a woman—a big-boned but attractive girl with copper-red hair streaming down from her funnel-brimmed straw hat. Her hair appeared highlighted with lime-green streaks, and green paint outlined her green eyes.

  In front of her, in the group’s middle, rode the man with the cavalry hat and the sword. Beside him rode a beefy black man with a black, gold-buttoned clawhammer coat, white shirt, gold vest, and a red sash around his waist. Two Buntline Specials were wedged behind the sash while bandoliers filled with shotgun shells crisscrossed his broad chest and a sawed-off shotgun dangled down before his bulging belly by a wide, brown lanyard.

  Footsteps sounded behind Fletcher, but he didn’t turn away from the street as Marie Antoinette moved onto the boardwalk to his left, saying, “What’s goin’ on out here, fellas?”

  The three front riders drew even with the jailhouse as they continued east down the wide street, probably heading for a saloon or whorehouse. Fletcher’s skeptical eyes slid back and forth across them, and he almost snorted with bemused disbelief.

  The three men—tall, gangly, pale, and with long, black hair dancing about their shoulders—wore physical features so identical that, if they’d been attired in the same clothes, they would have been impossible to tell apart. They were hawk-faced and, aside from beak-like noses, almost delicate-featured, with pale skin and thin beards and narrow necks rising from bony shoulders.

  They all wore checked suits of similar cuts. One wore a brown suit, the second a green suit, and the third a salmon-colored suit. They all wore collarless, pin-striped shirts beneath their shabby coats. Two wore straw sombreros while the man in the salmon-checked suit wore a black opera hat and rose-colored glasses like those favored by gamblers. They all wore high-topped, mule-eared boots adorned with a thick coating of clay-colored dust and large, Spanish-style spurs. Continuing on past the jailhouse, the look-alike in the opera hat turned a toothy grin to Fletcher and gave a courtly bow.

  “Afternoon, Sheriff,” he said in a thick Southern accent. Tennessee, Fletcher thought. The man’s small, brown eyes slid to Marie Antoinette, giving the sheriff’s wife a cool up and down as he added, “Wet one today . . .”

  Then he and the two others were past the jailhouse and beginning to angle toward Carstairs’s Saloon on the other side of the street, near the east edge of town.

  As the black man and the man with the cavalry hat and the sword rode past the jailhouse, dismissing Fletcher with belligerent sneers, the redheaded girl behind them stopped her white Arab abruptly to cast her gaze toward Fletcher’s side of the street and several buildings west.

  “Hi there, little girl!”

  A woman in a bonnet and shawl and a little girl with yellow sausage curls flopping to her shoulders had stopped in the street to let the riders pass. Both stood a few feet into the street, the little girl clinging to the woman’s hand and regarding the female rider cautiously.

  The girl atop the Arab reached up and picked a flower from behind her ear and held it out over the side of her saddle. “Come get a flower!”

  The little girl with the sausage curls glanced up at her mother, then suddenly jerked her hand free and dashed into the street.

  “Kayleen!” admonished the woman.

  Kayleen ran to the Arab and stopped suddenly, gaining a timid air and holding both hands straight down by her sides. She shyly regarded the well-set up redhead leaning out from her saddle and gently offering the white flower between thumb and index finger.

  “I just picked it out yonder,” she said. “It’s new and fresh as you are. Go ahead. Tuck it behind your ear. It’ll bring a shine to the whole rest of your day
!”

  3

  STANDING WITH HIS wife and stepson on the plank stoop fronting the jailhouse, Sheriff Tobias Fletcher watched the little girl—whom he recognized as Kayleen Finnegan—pluck the desert wildflower from the hand of the strange young woman with green-streaked red hair sitting atop the spry white Arabian.

  Fletcher’s heart was beating in his throat. Something about this group—more than just their bizarre appearance—had pricked the hair on the back of his neck, but he couldn’t pinpoint what it was. Not wanting to frighten the girl needlessly, he restrained himself from stepping down off the stoop and ordering Kayleen’s mother, Constance, wife of the town harness maker, to grab her daughter and skedaddle.

  Instead, he stood tensely between Marie Antoinette and Colter, his right hand draped over the worn walnut grips of his old Remington .44, watching.

  “Mama, look what that nice lady gave me!” Holding the white flower up to her nose, sausage curls dancing on her shoulders, Kayleen ran back toward her mother waiting a few feet from the boardwalk fronting the drug shop.

  The redhead chuckled and gigged the Arab forward, making tracks after the five men in her group. Fletcher unconsciously slid his hand from the .44’s grips and felt a slight cessation of pressure in his throat. As the girl and the Arab drew even with the jailhouse, the girl, who’d spied Fletcher, Marie Antoinette, and Colter before she’d given Kayleen the flower, grinned and waved as though she were passing on a train.

  “Hi there, Sheriff!” She had a strangely pitched, little girl’s voice coupled with a bodacious, tomboyish air that Fletcher found at once alluring and off-putting. Around her waist she wore two bone-gripped .36 Remingtons in oiled, brown-leather holsters trimmed with silver stars. Adjusting her funnel-brimmed straw hat, she slid her green-eyed gaze to Colter and then back to Fletcher and Marie Antoinette. “Strappin’ young lad ya got there. By this time next year, he’ll be sproutin’ up tall as a fir tree. He’ll do ya proud, that one. Well, see ya!”