The Graves at Seven Devils

by Peter Brandvold

Marie Antoinette groaned and continued running down the alley as the pistol popped three times, chewing up sand and gravel behind her bare feet. One slug barked into the rear corner of the livery barn as she darted back behind it.

  At the far side of the barn she paused to peer left, over the livery barn’s corral toward the street. No saddled horses anywhere. Only a couple of unsaddled mounts stood in the corral, shading each other and regarding her with mild, dark-eyed interest as they ground hay between their jaws.

  “Shit! Goddamnit!” Marie Antoinette hadn’t realized she’d screamed as loudly as she had. Her voice echoed shrilly. She cursed again, more softly, and peered behind her, catching a glimpse of men running down the whorehouse’s outside staircase, hearing the thunder of boot heels and the ching of spurs.

  “Oh, Christ,” she sobbed as she wheeled right and began running as fast as she could into the rocks and chaparral north of town. There were few cabins in this direction, only a couple of abandoned mine shafts, and a chicken coop or two. Few places to hide. She’d continue running into the desert and hope that the outlaws were too drunk to pursue her.

  “Which way’d she go?” the redheaded girl’s voice sounded behind her.

  “Behind the barn!” a man returned, his voice thick from drink.

  There was a clattering sound, as though someone fell down the stairs.

  “Bitch damn near blew my head off!”

  Marie Antoinette sucked air in and out of her lungs as she ran, weaving around junipers and mesquite shrubs and cracked boulders. The blood mixed with sweat in her eyes, and burned. She sleeved it away quickly and, only barely registering the sharp slashes of the thorns and gravel beneath her bare feet, continued running, pulling away from the edge of town and entering the open desert.

  If she stumbled onto a good place to hide, she could hole up there until the outlaws tired of drinking and tearing up the whorehouse and assaulting the girls and rode on back to where they’d come from. The slight optimism she felt dropped suddenly out of her, like a rock tossed down a deep, dark well, when in her mind’s eye she saw her son being blown back from the saloon doors and out into the street, the several bullet holes in Colter’s chest sprouting rich red blood.

  As Marie Antoinette had run to the boy and dropped to her knees, he had time only to roll his eyes up to hers, as though he were about to ask her a question, before he gave a ragged, final sigh, and his chest fell still.

  The memory stopped Marie Antoinette cold, and her knees buckled. She dropped to the sand and gravel and sobbed into her hands.

  Colter.

  Toby.

  Foot thuds and spur chings rose behind her. It was like a cold slap to the face. She whipped her head around.

  Without realizing, she’d climbed a considerable rise stippled with rocks, saguaros, and mesquite shrubs. The men and the girl were moving up the slope behind her, spread out in a ragged parallel line. All except the girl were in various states of semi-dress and running heavy-footed and weaving slightly. Sykes seemed to be the drunkest; he was bringing up the rear—hatless, a bloody gash on his forehead and a hole torn in his trouser knee. He’d no doubt been the one who’d tumbled down the whorehouse’s outside steps.

  “There she is!” shouted the crazy redhead with bizarre cheer.

  Marie Antoinette scrambled to her feet and continued running up the rise. There were more rocks and shrubs. She could hear herself sobbing as she ran, her left knee weakening. Glancing down, she saw a large patch of sand-crusted blood on her dress over the knee. She’d done more damage than she’d thought when she’d fallen down those outside steps herself, and now she could feel the bone-deep, aching burn.

  She sobbed louder as the knee barked and she heard the footsteps growing louder behind her. The rise steepened. A gun cracked. The slug spanged off a rock just right of Marie Antoinette’s bare right foot.

  “Hold your fire, Rosco!” one of the men admonished.

  “Hold this, Rafe! That bitch done tried to perforate my hide!”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time a girl tried to turn you under, Rosco,” said the redhead. “Doubt it’ll be the last, neither.”

  A couple of the others chuckled, but Marie Antoinette didn’t hear. She found herself at the top of the rise, peering down the other side. She’d never wandered this far north of town and didn’t know the terrain. But what she found herself staring down at was not a slope like the one she’d just climbed, but a deep, rocky ravine choked with cactus and wiry brush poking out from cracks between the red, brick-like rock lining both sides of the canyon.

  The bottom of the cut was a good two hundred feet straight down, with a narrow, glassy blue stream snaking along the bottom. A scrawny, gray coyote had been drinking from the stream. Now it stood staring up at Marie Antoinette warily, lapping water from its jaws.

  Behind Marie Antoinette, Sykes laughed thickly, and the coyote wheeled and loped away upstream, disappearing behind a thumb in the canyon’s jagged wall. “What’s the matter, girl? Come to the end of the line?”

  Marie Antoinette’s back crawled and her stomach dropped. Her eyes searched for a route into the canyon. Finding none, she glanced behind her once more. All six of the gang members were within twenty yards and closing, all grinning except Sykes, who held his cocked revolver straight out before him. His lips were bunched with fury.

  The redhead glanced at Sykes. “Sykes, put that hogleg away. Look at her. She’s injured.” The redhead had turned back to Marie Antoinette and frowned as she moved slowly straight up the rise, holding out her hand.

  “Come on, precious. Let’s get you cleaned up.” The big-boned girl’s green eyes roamed with keen interest across Marie Antoinette’s body, which was only partly concealed by the torn dress. She smiled. “Come on now. I won’t hurt you. I won’t let these animals hurt you no more, neither.”

  Marie Antoinette stood atop a flat rock at the very lip of the ravine, facing the killers. She backed closer to the edge as she stared at the men and the girl moving toward her, the girl’s eyes raking her body with the same lust as that in the drunk-bleary eyes of the men.

  One of the three look-alikes puffed a fat cigar and blinked his deep-set dark eyes. “Sure ’nough. Now that we’re done with her, Cora, she’s all yours.” He grinned around the cigar. His chest was bare—pale and thin with a scrap of black hair along his breastbone. “She’ll clean up right purty.”

  “Shut up, Billy Earl!” Cora waggled her fingers at Marie Antoinette. “Come on, honey. Let’s go back to the whorehouse and get you in a hot tub.” She smiled broadly, showing all her large, white teeth, her cheeks dimpling with schoolgirl charm. “What do you say?”

  A chill of revulsion and horror rippled through Marie Antoinette. She glanced over her shoulder at the canyon yawning below. She turned back to the girl and the men who’d stopped ten feet away from her and set her jaw defiantly.

  “I hope all you crazy bastards burn in hell.”

  Then she turned, stepped out into the air over the canyon, and dropped like a stone.

  9

  LOU PROPHET STARED at his comely partner.

  Statue-still, Louisa sat her pinto pony forty yards ahead and right of him on the far side of the narrow, high-walled canyon painted ochre by the west-angling sun. A moment ago, a covey of quail had exploded out of a mesquite snag about a hundred yards straight ahead of her. She’d reined the pony to an instant stop, raising her carbine in one hand from her saddlebow. She sat straight-backed now, tensely looking around and listening.

  What had spooked the quail? It might have been her presence they’d detected. But it might have been Apaches, too, or banditos, white marauders, possibly a bobcat. All brand of danger stalked this wild, remote, devil’s playground of deep-cut canyons, pedestal rocks, and tabletop mesas, which loomed lemon-colored in the brassy distance.

  Prophet had a better angle, so he knew that it was only a small Sonoran deer that had spooked the quail where they’d no doubt been foraging mesquite beans. As t
he doe stepped out from the shade of the canyon to drink at a runout spring, Prophet continued staring at Louisa.

  He was amazed at how keen her senses were, how trail savvy she’d become in only the three short years she’d been riding roughshod across the frontier, stalking outlaws. He’d taught her a few things, but most she’d learned herself, instinctively knowing that in order to hunt without becoming the hunted she needed to keep her eyes and ears open always, to question every sound and movement, and to read the sign around her. It required patience, concentration, single-mindedness, and the constant willingness to kill if necessary. Such traits were rare, and few bounty hunters lived to become journeymen.

  Prophet had known male bounty trackers and even lawmen who could have learned by watching Louisa.

  Of course, Louisa had her rare, off-putting beauty and girlish sensuality going for her. It wasn’t easy for a man—even the most depraved border bandit—to drop the hammer on such a harmless-looking creature. And it was that reluctance that often caused would-be killers to give up their ghosts in a mind-numbing storm of lead.

  Louisa registered no gray areas when taking the measure of a man. And she never, ever hesitated. Once those lustrous, seemingly innocent hazel eyes began to narrow, lines forming above the bridge of her small, perfect nose, her prey was wolf bait.

  They didn’t even have time to piss their pants.

  Louisa studied the deer, its head down about fifty yards ahead of her, and she cast a peeved glance toward Prophet. She knew he’d seen the deer and had been waiting for her reaction to the startled quail.

  Prophet grinned, reached into his shirt pocket for a tobacco braid, and bit off a hunk. Ahead and right of him, Louisa gigged the pinto forward, and Prophet sat chewing, resting Mean and Ugly, and feeling his grin fade.

  He was going to miss that girl. He’d wanted her to quit the trail and settle down for a long time, but he was going to miss her just the same. Leaving her in Seven Devils was going to be hard, and he didn’t look forward to it. Jealousy gnawed at him. Like he’d told her, she’d no doubt be married inside of a year.

  She’d choose a good man, but that man would not be Prophet—he’d made that clear to her as well as to himself; it just wasn’t in the cards for either of them—and he’d have to ride without her from here on in, knowing their trails would likely never cross again . . . knowing she’d settled down with another man.

  Probably have kids with that man. Raise a family.

  They’d had a good trip down from western Colorado—riding through some of the most spectacularly lonely, beautiful country Prophet had ever trod. They’d camped, talked, argued some, swum in ravines after desert gully washers, and made love in the moonlight. Last night they’d even frolicked in a waterfall, the saguaros around them casting bizarre shadows amongst the rocks and the velvet ridges trimmed with starlight.

  But now, two weeks south of Alamosa, they were near the end of their trail. According to a map an old prospector had drawn for them in Tucson, Seven Devils should lie just over the next saddleback ridge to the west, about a hundred miles north of the Mexican border.

  Prophet spat a tobacco quid on a rock and heeled Mean forward. He caught up to Louisa ten minutes later, where the trail narrowed as it angled through cabin-sized boulders, climbing the ridge toward the faultless, cobalt eastern sky.

  “Louisa, I wanna tell you something,” he said as their horses moved side by side. “As long as you’ve been roughshoddin’ it, it’s gonna be hard for you to settle down at first. But I want you to give it some time. . . .”

  He let his voice trail off. Mean and Ugly’s ears had suddenly perked. The horse lifted his snout now, too, working his nostrils. Louisa’s pinto continued ahead as usual, plodding along, but Mean had been hoofing around with a manhunter on his back for nearly ten years, and the horse’s senses were as keen as those of any Apache mustang.

  Louisa had seen Mean’s reaction. She kept her voice low as she turned her head from right to left and back again. “What is it?”

  Prophet slipped his Winchester from the scabbard beneath his left knee and cocked it one-handed, holding the reins high in his left. “Smells somethin’.”

  He looked at the rocky ridges on either side of the trail, and at those ahead and behind, watching for Apache smoke signals. The Indian reserves in this part of Arizona Territory were merely way stations for rampaging Apache. The braves would head to the agency for free government beef before riding out in search of another white ranch to burn or a village to ransack. There was little the badly undermanned cavalry could do about it.

  Prophet and Louisa had come upon a doomed cavalry patrol only a half day back. Chiricahua arrows had protruded from the hacked, scattered remains of the soldiers and horses, with only a few patches of blue uniform showing amidst the red.

  As Prophet and Louisa neared the crest of the saddleback ridge, the girl’s pinto gave a sudden whinny, then shook its head, rattling its bridle chains. Whatever Mean had sensed, the pinto picked it up now, too. Prophet held up his hand and dropped out of his saddle. Ground-tying the horse, he hefted his Winchester and moved slowly up the rutted wagon trail, lifting his head to steal a look over the rise.

  Louisa came up beside him as he stopped ten feet from the crest of the ridge to stare down the other side. Beyond another, lower hill lay a broad valley studded with saguaros and chaparral. In the middle of the valley, three-quarters of a mile away, stretched what looked like a vast, oblong cloud shadow.

  Prophet glanced at the sky. There were no clouds. And there were no near ridges to cast shadows down the middle of the valley. The nearest ridge lay a good thirty miles to the south—a hulking blue-and-copper formation, capped by the seven devil-shaped spires, which had lent the town its name.

  “What is it?” Louisa said, shading her eyes with a gloved hand.

  Prophet turned and started back down the hill. “Gonna fetch my glasses.”

  When he’d grabbed his field glasses from his saddlebags, he returned to where Louisa was standing about ten feet from the hillcrest. He lifted the glasses and adjusted the focus until the vast dark shape swam into focus beyond the second hill.

  The dark oblong, cleaved by the trail, was pocked with mounds of burned debris. The burn extended a good hundred yards around the mounds of what, Prophet realized as he stared through the glasses, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end, was all that remained of a town.

  Prophet lowered the glasses and turned to Louisa. She regarded him skeptically, anxiety growing in her eyes as she read the dread in his own features. She began to reach for the glasses, then, dropping her hand, looked down at the oblong of scorched earth again, moving her eyes slowly from left to right and back again, desperately scrutinizing the black mass.

  Finally, she wheeled and began striding back down the ridge toward the horses.

  “Hold up.”

  Prophet grabbed her arm, but she pulled it free and continued on down to the pinto, grabbing the ground-tied reins in one hand, the apple with the other. As she swung into the leather, Prophet strode toward her. Keeping his voice down—whoever burned the town, Indians most likely, might still be around—he rasped, “You ain’t goin’ down there till we’ve scouted it out.”

  “Giddup,” she ordered the horse, grinding her heels into the pinto’s flanks and barreling up the rise.

  As she approached, Prophet lunged for the pinto’s bridle, but Louisa, sensing it coming, swerved sharply off the trail. She shot past Prophet like a cannonball, the horse blowing, hooves clomping loudly on the hard-packed trail.

  Prophet swung toward her, scowling, as she crested the rise and dropped out of sight down the other side.

  “Louisa!” he barked louder than he intended, taking back all his earlier judgments about the girl. The fool filly was likely to ride straight into a Chiricahua war party—probably the same ones who’d butchered the cavalry patrol they’d stumbled on earlier.

  Cursing, Prophet ran down the ridge to where M
ean stood eyeing him warily. “Remember what I said about fillies, Mean. Don’t forget it!”

  He dropped the field glasses back into his saddlebags, swung into the saddle, and spurred the reluctant, nickering dun up and over the rise, squinting against Louisa’s sifting dust while eyeing the chaparral for Chiricahua pickets. He held his Winchester in one hand as the hammer-headed dun ate up the trail. Mean snorted and shook his head. Prophet wasn’t sure if the horse was reacting to the acrid smell of the charred timber wafting on the hot, dry breeze or to the smell of Apaches—or both.

  Mean didn’t discriminate when it came to Indians. He hated them all.

  He and the horse rounded a short curve and galloped between two brush-sheathed boulders standing on either side of the trail. Prophet pulled back on the reins. Just ahead, at the edge of the brick-and-wood rubble rising beyond the scorched chaparral, Louisa sat her stopped pinto, staring at a small wooden sign on the trail’s right side.

  SEVEN DEVILS, ARIZONA TERRITORY had been painted on the post-and-plank sign, which angled slightly back and off trail. Five bullets had been drilled through the painted letters, nearly cleaving the plank in two.

  Prophet shifted his gaze from the plank to Louisa. “Hold your damn horses, girl. We’re gonna ride in there slow.”

  Louisa cut her angry eyes at him and opened her mouth to give a tart reply. Closing her mouth, she let it go, pressed her heels to the pinto’s flanks, and continued forward at a slow walk.

  Prophet gigged Mean and Ugly along beside her, the owl-eyed dun snorting and tossing his head.

  A few yards beyond the post, on the right side of the trail, hunched a pile of charred logs, a scorched tin roof angling down across what remained of a porch rail, a brick chimney lying broken on the near side. Stretched out along the other side of the street, to Prophet’s left, humped the demolished remains of a good half dozen business buildings, a couple of shingles—one announcing a hotel, another a harness shop—still partly legible.

  A couple of buildings, forlorn and skull-like, remained standing. Most had been reduced to coal-black ash and splintered logs the texture of charcoal. Here and there, wisps of gray smoke lifted.