The Graves at Seven Devils

by Peter Brandvold

  Raking her gaze from left to right across the cinder-dusted street, Louisa said, “Apaches?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  She glanced at him, frowning.

  “No bodies—Injun or white,” Prophet said, keeping his Winchester’s butt pressed to his right thigh, his index finger curled against the trigger. “No arrows. No dead women or babies. Not even a dead horse in the street. Hell, I don’t even see a dead dog.”

  “What, then?”

  “Wildfire, maybe, but it doesn’t look like it came in from the country.” Prophet jerked with a start as a chunk of wood dropped from a burned-out sagging porch and landed in the street with a crunching thud. “Whatever it was, it didn’t come as no surprise. Don’t smell no bodies. They musta all got out.”

  Louisa didn’t appear overly comforted by Prophet’s comment. As she and Prophet walked their horses down the middle of the street, approaching the town’s center, she continued looking around fearfully, wondering what had become of her cousin in the midst of this destruction—a whole town burned to the ground.

  They were fifty yards from the west end of town when Louisa drifted back behind Prophet, then turned the pinto toward the street’s left side. She drew up before a charred log hovel with chunks of only two walls standing, the sod roof lying in a heap beyond the fallen, half-burned timber door. As Prophet turned Mean toward Louisa, he saw the blackened strap-iron bars of three jail cells standing at the back of what apparently had been the jailhouse.

  Prophet followed Louisa’s gaze down to a charred shingle protruding from beneath the jailhouse’s fallen porch roof. It was a red plank, about three feet long. A tumbleweed had blown onto it, suspended by rubble from the roof.

  Louisa swung out of her saddle and stooped to pull the shingle out from beneath the tumbleweed and rubble. She scrubbed ashes from the front of the shingle, then held it up for Prophet to read what remained of COUNTY SHERIFF.

  “Marlene’s husband was sheriff,” she said grimly, glancing again at the burned hulk of the jailhouse.

  “No reason to think he’s in there,” Prophet said, sheathing his rifle. “He and your cousin might’ve pulled out with the rest of the folks. Might be holed up outside town somewhere, waiting for a cavalry patrol. We’ll find ’em.”

  Frowning suddenly, 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.

  “Shit!” 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.

  10

  THE GROUND SHOT up to slam against Prophet’s back, snapping his jaws together with an audible clack and ramming the breath from his lungs with an enormous “Ufff!” of expelled air.

  “Lou!” Louisa yelled beneath the rifle’s echoing crack as well as Mean and Ugly’s angry screams and hoof thuds as the hot-blooded beast tore westward down the burned-out town’s main street, his reins bouncing along behind him.

  Prophet groaned and tried to suck air into his battered lungs with little success. Another large-caliber slug blasted dirt, ashes, and dried horse dung into his face from the street beside him. He blinked grit from his eyes and tried another breath, managing half a lungful.

  Running footsteps sounded, and he looked up to see Louisa sprint into the street and drop to a knee beside him. “Lou, dangit, get your lazy ass up!”

  She squeezed off two thundering shots with the .45 leaping in her right hand, aiming in the general direction from which the sniper had fired. Tugging on his left arm, she yelled again, “Get up! Get up!”

  “I’m tryin’, for chrissakes!” Clutching his upper right arm and wincing against the grit the bullet had blown into his eyes, Prophet glanced after both horses now galloping into the western distance, Prophet’s Winchester ’73 snugged down in Mean and Ugly’s saddle boot.

  Prophet cursed—he really could have used the rifle about now—and climbed to his feet as Louisa triggered two more shots toward the sniper. Still clutching his arm, feeling the slick blood ooze from the wound beneath his palm, he ran with Louisa back to the front of the burned-out jailhouse. They dropped to knees behind the ruined front wall, edging looks over the fire-blackened logs toward a hill rising northwest of town.

  “You see him?” Prophet grunted as another shot thundered, the slug thumping into the hard ground just off the end of the boardwalk fronting the jailhouse.

  “Saw the smoke puff on the hill. Appears to be a cemetery up there.”

  “Sniper shootin’ from a cemetery,” Prophet grouched, wrapping his red neckerchief around the bloody path the bullet had carved along the back of his arm. “Seems downright disrespectful if you ask me.”

  “No one’s asking you.” Louisa squeezed off another shot. “How’s your arm?”

  “Just a scratch.”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  “Still kickin’, ain’t I?”

  The heavy-caliber rifle hammered another shot into the side of the jailhouse with a thundering crack, splinters flying. It made the entire ruined hulk shudder.

  Palming his Colt .45 and thumbing the hammer back, Prophet looked up the hill. Sure enough, crude crosses and gravestones sprouted from the hill’s sage-and-rock-mottled shoulder, near a single, gnarled cottonwood tree. A small work wagon, the mule hitched to it looking around nervously, was parked in the middle of the graveyard, near a spindly Mexican pinyon.

  Smoke puffed from around the back of the wagon. Prophet thought he could see the crown of a hat poking above the wagon’s far rear wheel.

  “You work your way to the bottom of the rise he’s on,” Prophet said, staring over the ruins of the jailhouse and the burned-out building next door. “Keep feeding him lead. I’m gonna try workin’ my way around behind him.”

  “You tend your arm. I’ll go.”

  “The fall from my consarned horse hurts worse than my arm.” Prophet scrambled west along the front of the jailhouse wall. “Keep him busy, but keep your head down, girl!”

  Louisa snapped off another shot over the jailhouse, squinting down the barrel of her .45. “Any more orders?”

  “Yeah—keep an eye skinned for more shooters. Could be more than one of those bushwhackin’ sons o’ bitches!”

  As the rifle cracked once more, the heavy slug barking into the jailhouse, Prophet bolted out from the jailhouse’s front wall and across a ten-foot gap to the front of the next burned-out hulk west.

  Colt in his hand, gritting his teeth against the ache in his arm as well as his ribs and battered back, he made his way about fifty yards west along the street, then tramped north between a near-leveled livery barn and a brick derelict with a sign announcing FRAUGENFURST BUTCHER’S still attached to the wall above the door. At the side of the building was another shingle telling anyone interested that Doc Murphy’s office was at the top of the outside stairs, though what remained of the stairs wouldn’t have held a rat.

  Prophet paused at the back of the butcher shop and doctor’s office, and stared into the trash-littered alley beyond. Louisa’s .45s popped intermittently while the big-caliber rifle belched about every five or six seconds.

  Whoever the shooter was, he knew how to handle a long gun. Prophet knew of no Apaches who’d bother with a single-shot Big Fifty or anything similar. They’d sell their children plus a couple of squaws for a repeating Winchester or Henry .44-40.

  As Louisa squeezed off a couple of angry rounds, Prophet bolted out from behind the jailhouse and, swerving left and keeping his head down, plunged into the brush and boulders beyond the alley. He turned around a partly burned chicken coop and cut into a narrow, windin
g ravine littered with rusted tin cans and yellowed newspapers. He followed the ravine into the slope, leaping rocks and sage shrubs and ducking under mesquite branches.

  To his right and above, the bushwhacker continued slinging fifty-caliber slugs toward Louisa—one round about every ten seconds now—while Louisa baited the man with her .45s. As Prophet climbed out of the ravine, heading straight up the hill’s steep west slope, he kept an eye out for more gunmen, and he hoped Louisa was doing the same. The burning of the town—if it wasn’t an accident—had been the work of more than one man.

  The bounty hunter nearly stepped on a rattlesnake shading itself in the lee of a chair-sized boulder. Hearing the rattle and feeling the tap of the head striking his right spur with a soft ching, he sucked a breath through his teeth and felt a chill in his loins as he continued climbing the rocky hill.

  Gaining the crest, now flanking the rifleman, he worked his way back toward the thundering cracks, downslope through widely scattered cedars, cottonwoods, and pinyons. Soon, crouching, he gained the cemetery—a couple of dozen crudely chiseled stones and wood crosses fronting rock-mounded graves. There must have been a rattlesnake nest nearby, because he spied several more of the bloodcurdling serpents shading themselves in the shade angling out from the graves and shrubs.

  Prophet wended his way through the dry, sun-blasted bone-yard. The barks of the heavy rifle now sounded like blasts of a single Napoleon cannon down the hill before him, the echo of each shot screeching off across the valley, answered by Louisa’s angry, slightly higher-pitched Colts.

  Prophet paused between a cracked boulder and a large, fragrant juniper. He dropped to a knee and peered down the slope, over a dozen rocky graves.

  The wagon sat down the slope, thirty yards away. The shooter—a big man in baggy, torn coveralls and a straw sombrero—was hunkered behind the wagon’s rear wheel, his back to the upslope. The big, gray mule in the traces flinched at each blast of the rifle in the man’s thick arms and also at each pill Louisa drilled into the rocks downslope of the wagon.

  Prophet straightened, waved his rifle. Louisa should be able to see him from this angle. When her return fire had ceased, he started down the slope, crouching and working his way around the graves. He kept his cocked Colt aimed at the beefy shooter pressing his rifle’s stock to his shoulder and expertly ejecting and feeding shells into the chamber.

  He was a purposeful shooter but gave little heed to his backside. Prophet moved right up behind him. When he was twenty feet from the wagon, the shooter cursed and pulled his head away from the Sharps, glaring down at it and jerking up and down on the trigger guard cocking mechanism.

  Prophet leaned forward and pressed his Colt’s barrel against the back of the man’s thick, sunburned neck beneath a line of wiry, straw-colored hair. The man jerked with a start, then froze as Prophet said, “That’s the problem with the Big Fifty, I hear. You shoot too many rounds at one time, the breechblock tends to gum up on ya . . . you fork-tailed son of a bitch!”

  Instantly, the man threw his left hand up and thrust the big rifle out to his right. “Don’t shoot!” His voice cracked slightly as he repeated, “Please don’t shoot me, mister! Please don’t! Ah, Jesus!”

  Prophet switched his Colt to his left hand and grabbed the Sharps Big Fifty with his right. He stepped straight back. “Turn the hell around. You so much as flinch at a blowfly, I’ll blow your bushwhackin’ brains out your eyeballs.”

  “Please don’t shoot!”

  The man rose, turning slowly toward Prophet. The bounty hunter scowled, flabbergasted to see a young man standing before him—a big corn-fed younker, around nineteen, with a fleshy, round, clean-shaven face with farm-boy-wholesome eyes and sloping, yoke-like shoulders. There were weepy burns on the kid’s broad cheeks, and a deep gash on his chin.

  His light blue eyes were genuinely horrified, and he stretched both his meaty paws, which were also marked with deep burns and scrapes, high above his sombrero-capped head. Sweat streaked the dirt on his face. The skin above his nose furrowed slightly, and his lips stretched away from his big, white, gapped teeth as he studied Prophet, eyes quickly sweeping the big bounty hunter’s six-foot-three-inch frame sheathed in a buckskin tunic and faded denims.

  “Well, damn,” the kid said uncertainly. “You’re . . . you’re not one o’ them . . .”

  “One o’ who?”

  “One o’ the fork-tailed devils who burned the town.” The kid glanced at the fire-blackened town spread out below the hill as though there might be some question about which town he was talking about. “I seen the girl . . . the blond girl . . . and figured you was . . .”

  Prophet lowered his .45 slightly. “We’ve done got that far. I’d appreciate it if you would finish your thought, son. My bullet-burned arm and my barking ribs have got me feelin’ none too friendly or patient.”

  The kid licked his thick lips, which couldn’t quite cover his big teeth, and continued staring at Prophet as though the big bounty hunter were a particularly puzzling math problem. “The Three of a Kind Gang.”

  “Who the hell’s the Three of a Kind Gang?” Prophet said, impatience hardening his jaws.

  The kid’s eyes widened at the anger in Prophet’s tone, and he shuffled his square-toed boots nervously and glanced at the cocked Colt’s maw. “Them’re the ones that burned the town. I thought . . . I thought you and the girl were two of the gang—you know—come back to raise more hell. I see now how I was wrong . . . shoulda known you wasn’t one, but, shit, I reckon I’m jumpy seein’ as how I lived here an’ all!”

  He glanced backward down the slope, toward where Louisa had been keeping him busy with his buffalo rifle. She was moving upslope toward him and Prophet now, both guns aimed from her belly. “They gotta redhead ridin’ with ’em. From a distance, that one there looks like the one ridin’ with the Three of a Kind Gang, when the sun shines in her hair . . . and when I reckon the one doin’ the lookin’s a damn jackass.”

  The kid turned to Prophet once more. “I mean, you see, them hard cases burned my uncle Alphonse up in his livery barn. I was just trying to set things right, I reckon.”

  Louisa glanced at Prophet while keeping her Colts aimed at the kid. She wore a skeptical expression. “This the bushwhacker?”

  “We ain’t been properly introduced.” Prophet depressed his Colt’s hammer and lowered the gun to his side. “How ’bout it, kid? You got a name?”

  The kid started to lower his hands but stopped when he saw that Louisa still had her Colts aimed at a faded red patch in the blue coveralls stretched across his bulging belly. “I’m Hans. Kleinsasser. Big Hans, they call me.” He licked his lips again nervously and continued. “I’m from over near Fredericksburg way, in Texas. We was farmers before Uncle Alphonse decided to try his hand at buffalo huntin’, but we ended up fightin’ as many Comanche as skinnin’ buffalo up on the Panhandle, and . . .” His tongue flicked across his lips again as he glanced miserably at Louisa. “Miss, you sure are makin’ me nervous holdin’ them Colts on me like that.”

  He grinned, sliding his blue eyes between Prophet and Louisa and running a hammy hand across his paunch. “I know it’s a pretty big target an’ all, but jeepers, I sure would hate to have a hole in it. That’s where I pack away my burritos of an evenin’!”

  He chuckled huskily.

  Prophet looked at Louisa. “Pull your horns in, Miss Oakley. I reckon Hans here made an honest mistake.” Prophet held the Big Fifty out to the kid, butt first. “You learn to shoot that on the Pandhandle?”

  “Yessir,” Hans said, flushing as he took the octagonal-barreled long gun in his big hands, scrubbing dust from the fore stock. “Uncle Alphonse taught me.”

  “He taught you pretty damn well.”

  The kid glanced at Prophet’s arm around which a red neckerchief was knotted tight. “I sure hope I didn’t hurt you too bad, mister . . .”

  “Prophet. That’s Louisa. I’ll live.” Prophet glanced at the town. “Why’d this Three of a
Kind Gang burn Seven Devils, Hans?”

  “Pure devilishness, I reckon.” Hans sagged back on the wagon’s open tailgate and shook his head, glancing once more at the town with pained disbelief in his eyes. “They rode in near on a week ago. I was workin’ in the backroom of Carstairs’s Saloon, arranging barrels and doin’ some general cleanin’ for Mr. Carstairs, when they came in and took a driftin’ cow waddie named Dewey Granger upstairs and killed him slow. Lord Jesus, did poor Dewey scream! I mean, I reckon he had it comin’ cause he killed the girl’s brother over to Lordsburg, but jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, they sure didn’t do it quick!”

  “They burned the whole town because some drifter killed a man?”

  “No, I reckon they burned the town cause after they killed the sheriff and the sheriff’s boy, they got drunk and crazy-wild and just went pure rabid-dog-ass mean and crazy!”

  Louisa stared at him. “They killed the sheriff?”

  “Yes, ma’am. And his boy. And then they killed his wife after . . .”

  The kid let his voice trail off as Louisa jerked back suddenly, as though she’d been drilled through the heart with the kid’s Big Fifty, her lower jaw sagging, eyes snapping wide. As her knees buckled, Prophet lunged for her and wrapped his arms around her shoulders, easing her down to the ground. “Easy, girl.”

  Louisa dipped her chin and shook her head. Prophet felt her body convulse, but she took a deep breath and gathered herself. Dry-eyed but stricken, she looked up at Big Hans. “Are you sure they killed the sheriff’s wife?”

  Big Hans looked as though he’d been dealt a glancing blow by an executioner’s ax. He’d doffed his hat as if in respect to the girl’s sudden grief and stood looking down at her, red-faced and hang-jawed. He nodded dully and glanced at Prophet.

  “Mrs. Fletcher was Louisa’s cousin,” Prophet said, on one knee beside Louisa. “Louisa was on her way here to live with the family.”