The Graves at Seven Devils

by Peter Brandvold

“You’re sure?” Louisa asked the kid, more forcefully.

  “I seen her run out the back of Miss Kate’s place,” Big Hans said as though confessing a grave sin. “I’d been sort of stayin’ out of sight and keepin’ an eye on the gang, tryin’ to get a handle on what they might do. Uncle Alphonse’s nerves been shot since a Coyotero raid up around Apache Pass took his scalp and one eye, and he was holed up in the hayloft of our livery barn with a bottle. Most of the townsfolk done locked themselves in their shacks.”

  Louisa’s voice was deep and slightly quivering, teeming with barely restrained emotion. “What was Miss Kate’s place?”

  Big Hans colored. He glanced from Prophet to Louisa and back to Prophet again as he said, “H-house of ill repute, I’m sorry to say, miss. They’d taken her over there after they shot the sheriff and the boy.”

  Big Hans kept his eyes on Prophet and shook his head as though the memories were darts being fired into the back of his stout neck. “There was some awful screamin’ comin’ from over there. Then, like I said, Mrs. Fletcher went runnin’ out the back with the whole gang on her heels like a pack o’ hungry wolves. I never did ever see such a thing. Damn near peed my pants, if you’ll forgive the expression, miss.”

  Louisa said, “Did you see them kill her?”

  “No, ma’am. I was holed up in the saloon over yonder. I seen ’em run out after Mrs. Fletcher, but”—Big Hans shook his head grimly—“it was only the gang that came back later.”

  Big Hans glanced at Prophet guiltily. “I found her later at the bottom of Crow Gulch.” He turned his head toward the cottonwood standing upslope and east, its sun-silvered leaves rustling in the hot breeze, its lightning-scarred trunk making soft splintering sounds. “I buried her over there . . . with the sheriff and her boy.”

  11

  LOUISA TURNED TOWARD the three graves shaded by the cottonwood. Slowly, resisting Prophet’s help, she gained her feet and began walking up the slope toward the tree.

  Prophet watched her for a time, his heart gripped by a tight fist. The girl had come here to settle down with family. But there was no more family.

  No more here.

  How much did she have to endure?

  Prophet doffed his hat, sleeved sweat from his forehead, and walked a few feet down the slope, propped a boot on a rock, and stared out over the burned town. Inky shadows bled out from the ruined hulks as the sun angled down in the west, turning the country around the town the color of a newly minted penny. Several hawks circled lazily, on the scout for carrion amongst the charred ruins.

  He hooked his thumbs behind his cartridge-studded shell belt and glanced over his shoulder at Big Hans standing behind him. “The rest of the townsfolk make it out alive?”

  Big Hans nodded as he thumbed an iron tie ring on the side of the wagon box. “About half the town packed up the night the gang was raisin’ holy hob over to Miss Kate’s. The others pulled out the next mornin’, when the gang plundered both mercantiles for kerosene, and started runnin’ and riding around, dousin’ all the buildings.”

  The kid paused for nearly a minute, breath rattling up from his throat. He continued as Prophet stared out over the town. “I was so busy trying to get the horses out of the barn that I forgot about Uncle Alphonse until flames pret’ near engulfed the place. I climbed into the loft but I couldn’t get to him. The smoke was too thick.”

  The kid shook his head and heaved a ragged sigh.

  Prophet turned to face him. “Don’t flog yourself, boy. Few men could keep their heads in a dustup like that one.”

  “I let him die,” the big younker said, scraping at the ground with a square-toed boot. He canted his head toward a fresh grave a few yards downslope of the wagon. A rusty-bladed pick lay over the grave. “That’s him over there. I came up here to pile more rocks on him. Heard coyotes up here last night, diggin’ away and mewlin’ like devils.”

  “Where’d the rest of the townsfolk go?”

  “Some headed east to Wagon Tongue. Others headed west to Fort McCarthy. They were gonna send a cavalry patrol out after the gang, but I ain’t seen hide nor hair of ’em yet.”

  Prophet remembered the massacred patrol he and Louisa had stumbled upon, and shucked his Colt .45 from its low-slung, thonged-down holster. “The patrol didn’t make it.”

  Behind him, Big Hans said, “Chiricahuas?”

  Prophet nodded as he shook the spent brass from the Colt’s wheel.

  “They been burnin’ ranches off in the boonies,” Hans said.

  “When I first saw the burn, I figured it was the work of Injuns.”

  Big Hans said, “You wouldn’t figure on white folks to do such a thing to other white folks—would you, Mr. Prophet?”

  “I would.” Louisa was striding over from the direction of the three graves lined up beneath the cottonwood. “I’ve witnessed such deviltry before. I’ll no doubt witness more again before my time’s up on this wretched vale of bloody tears.”

  “Shit,” Prophet muttered as he thumbed fresh brass into the Colt’s cylinder.

  He’d heard this tone before from the high-blooded queen of holy vengeance, and it filled him with his own dark dread. Not for the men she hunted, but for Louisa herself. One of her few weaknesses as a bounty tracker was lighting out half-cocked, letting emotion cloud her judgment.

  Louisa stopped in front of Hans, her eyes like flint, blond curls blowing back from her shoulders. Her cheeks were ashen. “Which direction did the butchers head?”

  Big Hans opened his mouth to speak, but Prophet cut him off. “We’re not heading after ’em today, Louisa.”

  Jerking her head around, she turned those flinty hazel orbs on him, and he felt his oysters tighten. “Maybe we aren’t, but I am.”

  Prophet snapped another curse through gritted teeth, twirled his loaded Colt on his finger, and dropped it into its holster with a resolute snick of oiled steel against oiled leather. He stepped in front of his high-blooded partner and clamped his hands on her shoulders.

  “Louisa, damnit, I’m sorry as hell about your cousin. But our horses are beat. If we headed out now, our mounts’d drop within two miles, and we’d be the main entertainment in some Chiricahua camp by sundown.” He shook his head and parried her fiery gaze with his own. “We’ll rest the horses tonight and head out after the gang first thing in the mornin’.”

  Louisa narrowed her eyes and opened her mouth, but she uttered only one syllable before her eyes softened slightly, her resolve weakening, and she turned back to the cottonwood tree. She studied the tree for a time, as if searching for something hidden there.

  Just above a whisper, she said, nodding, “All right. First thing in the morning, Lou.”

  She strode down the slope toward the town, head down, shoulders slumped. Her slitted riding skirt buffeted about her legs, her twin, pearl-gripped Colts jutting from the cross-draw holsters riding high on her hips, only partly concealed by her striped brown poncho. The ache and fury was like a red aura around her.

  She was a walking, low-rumbling volcano.

  As Prophet stared after Louisa, feeling sick enough to vomit, Big Hans cleared his throat behind him. “You two really ridin’ after that bunch, Mr. Prophet?”

  “Sure as shit in a Texas dust storm, Hans.”

  The kid let a pensive moment stretch. “You have experience trackin’ kill-hungry desperadoes, do ya?”

  “Bounty huntin’s our profession—mine and Louisa’s,” Prophet said.

  Hans pitched his voice with surprise as he stared after the girl dropping gradually out of sight down the sage-and-pinyon-stippled slope. “Hers, too?”

  “Especially hers.”

  “You don’t say. . . .”

  The horses were as trail beat as a couple of Texas plugs after a long drive to Montana, so it didn’t take Prophet and Louisa long to run them down. When they’d adjusted their saddles and bridles, tightening the latigos, they mounted up.

  The clatter of a wagon rose on the trail to the east, and P
rophet swung his head around to see Big Hans heading toward him, sitting slope-shouldered and splay-kneed on the lurching wagon’s driver’s seat, reins in his hands, elbows on his thighs. Picks and shovels bristled from the box behind him as the old, beefy mule gave a contentious hee-haw and shook its dark brown mane.

  As the wagon approached Prophet and Louisa sitting their mounts on either side of the trail, the big blond younker pulled back on the reins and spat to one side. “I’m bunkin’ with a friend of Uncle Alphonse’s,” the kid said, glancing skeptically at Louisa once more, as if still trying to reconcile the bounty hunting profession to such a pretty, innocent, fragile-looking girl. “He’s got a cabin about a mile from here. He’s a good cook, and he loves company.”

  Prophet glanced at Louisa. “I could do with a meal and a roof over my head.”

  “I gotta warn you, though,” Hans said. “Buster—that’s his name, Buster Davis—he favors odd critters, has a foul mouth, and imbibes to his own detriment.” The kid’s eyes brightened, and he wagged his head and patted his bulging belly. “But he more than makes up for his faults with his cookin’. The man can throw together an antelope stew even better than my aunt Agnes could, God rest her soul.”

  “That seals it for me,” Prophet said, putting his horse up to the wagon box.

  “It won’t take us out of the way of the killers’ trail, will it?” Louisa asked Hans.

  “No, ma’am. In fact, it’ll practically put ya right on it!”

  Without further ado, Louisa gigged her horse up to the wagon. Prophet wrapped his own reins around his saddle horn, stepped off Mean and Ugly and into the cluttered wagon box. He extended his hand to Louisa, who wrapped her own reins around her apple. The horses would follow of their volition. Taking Prophet’s hand, she dropped easily into the box beside him.

  “There’s room up here,” Hans said over his shoulder, sliding his butt to the wooden seat’s left side.

  “No, thanks.” Prophet rearranged the picks and shovels and sagged down against the box’s right side panel. “I’ll stretch out back here.”

  “Me, too,” Louisa said, kicking a crowbar out of the way and sitting down against the left side of the box, removing her hat and shaking her hair across her shoulders.

  Hans glanced over his shoulder again. “Ready?”

  “Ready to get shed of that smell of burned town,” Prophet said. “I reckon!”

  Hans shook the reins across the mule’s broad back. The beast gave a typically mulish hee-haw and began moving forward, jerking the wagon along the uneven terrain. With Mean and Ugly and Louisa’s pinto following close behind, they headed straight west, back the way Prophet and Louisa had come to this country only a couple of hours earlier but what, after all that happened, seemed like days.

  Prophet watched her sitting on the other side of the wagon box, leaning back against the side panel, her arms crossed on her chest. She’d stretched her legs out beside his and stared down at the wagon’s splintered floor with a dark, pensive expression.

  A few hours ago she’d been about to settle down, Prophet thought. Now she was back on the outlaw trail.

  On the trail of what might very well prove to be the toughest, wiliest killers she and Prophet had ever shadowed.

  She might not come back from it.

  Prophet glanced at Big Hans’s broad, slumped back. “You know which direction those owlhoots headed, do you, kid?”

  Big Hans lifted his chin as he turned the wagon off the road and headed south along a faint wagon trace. It was a rough ride, and the wagon clattered like dice in a well-shaken cup. Prophet stretched his arms out across the top of the side panel, holding himself as steady as possible.

  “See them devils up yonder?” Hans yelled over his shoulder, his voice quaking with the wagon’s pitch and jounce.

  Prophet stretched his neck for a look above the mesquites, Mexican pinyons, and boulders at the seven statue-like formations rising from the hazy range before him, a good fifty or sixty miles south. “The Seven Devils?”

  “Yessir.” Big Hans winced as the wagon’s left front wheel bounced off a rock with a crash, making the hub squawk. “I heard one of ’em say when they was leavin’, with the town burnin’ behind ’em and all us folks scramblin’ around like headless chickens, that they was gonna have to stay up in the Seven Devils a good, long time after what they just done.”

  Louisa stared at the hazy formations with grim interest. “They border Mexico, don’t they—the Seven Devils?”

  “Yes, ma’am. And they’re haunted by half the border toughs in Arizona Territory and northern Mexico. The Arizona Rangers call it a snake-infested devils’ lair. Over the past coupla years, most lawmen and bounty hunters been givin’ it a wide berth. Several U.S. marshals and even a coupla cavalry patrols went in and never came out again. Hell, all that showed up of one partic’lar marshal was his head. Whoever killed him sent it to his wife up Tucson way—in a box delivered by the U.S. mail!”

  Wincing, Prophet looked at Louisa. “I bet that’s one gift she won’t never forget.”

  Louisa recrossed her ankles and said with customary wry-ness, “It’s probably on her mantel.”

  Big Hans coaxed the mule around a thick mesquite and catclaw snag, cursing under his breath. When he had the wagon going relatively smoothly again, he said, “No, sir—I don’t think I’d venture into that snake pit, if I was you—there only bein’ two of ya, an’ all.”

  Louisa turned to Prophet. “Two might have better luck than a whole patrol. Not so much noise and dust.”

  “But there’s so many banditos out there, and so much ground to cover,” Big Hans said darkly, “that it’s gonna be nigh on impossible to track the group you’re after.” He glanced over his shoulder again, his right blue eye momentarily locking on Prophet. “Without someone who knows the country, that is. Without a guide.”

  Prophet was about to ask the kid if he knew of such a person but stopped when an agonized yell rose in the southern distance, straight out from the wagon now threading a rocky, sycamore-sheathed arroyo.

  Hans drew back on the reins. “Whoa!” He stared out over the sycamores and saguaros, lemon-colored dust billowing up around the wagon box. “What the hell was that?”

  The scream rose again, shriller this time.

  “Someone ain’t too happy about somethin’,” Prophet said, keeping his voice low, head up, as he stared through the brush.

  A man’s muffled voice rose, small with distance but crisp and clear on the dry, desert air. “Ah, ya mangy yalla heathens—leave me be, ya sons o’ fuckin’ bitches!”

  Big Hans’s entire bulky body tensed and he rose half out of his seat. “Buster!”

  As if in response to the kid’s exclamation, a shrill Indian-like whoop rose, followed by another more muffled one.

  “Dawg-eatin’ carrion snipe!” the man screamed, the last words dwindling as his voice pinched with sobbing grief.

  Big Hans lurched to his feet. “The Chiricowies’re after Buster!”

  Prophet swung himself up and over the wagon’s tailgate and into the saddle of Mean and Ugly, the horse shaking its head and rippling its withers warily. Louisa leaped onto her pinto. Shucking his Winchester from his saddle boot, Prophet gigged Mean past the wagon, heading up the arroyo.

  “Doesn’t sound like they’re after him!” Ahead of the mule, and with Louisa following close behind, Prophet put Mean into a ground-eating lope. “Sounds like they done got him!”

  12

  PROPHET AND MEAN and Ugly flew up the winding arroyo, Prophet ducking cottonwood and post oak branches leaning out from both sides of the cut. He could hear the drum of Louisa’s hooves behind him, the snorts of the pinto, and the continuing cries and curse-laced harangue of Buster Davis.

  That the man was being tormented by Apaches was verified by the tensing of Mean and Ugly’s muscles beneath Prophet’s saddle, and the horse’s terror-filled snorts and knickers and the whites of his rolled-back eyes. Following the shouts, yells,
and occasional spine-tingling yowls, Prophet put Mean up a game trail, and he and the horse shot up the bank, barreling through berry thickets and catclaw with a crackling rustle of trampled brush, and then leveled out on a rocky slope.

  Prophet checked Mean down to a skidding halt as Louisa bolted out of the draw behind him and stopped the pinto off his right stirrup. Both horses whinnied sharply and Prophet held Mean’s reins taut in his left hand as he raised his Winchester in his right.

  Forty yards away at the base of a low, sage-stippled knoll, a half dozen Apaches—clad in smoked deer-hide breech cloths, moccasins, traditional red bandannas, and colored armbands— were doing some bizarre torture dance around a bulky, red-haired, red-bearded gent they’d staked out spread-eagle on the ground, not far from a smoldering cook fire.

  Several stone jugs were strewn about the rocks and catclaw. One Apache, standing on the white man’s far side, was tipping back a brown bottle while throwing his free arm behind him in quivering ecstasy. As the others, jerking their heads toward Prophet and Louisa, bellowed surprised, guttural war cries, the drinking brave jerked his bottle down, his own black eyes flashing wickedly in the late day’s saffron light.

  As though they’d all been connected by the same invisible rope, four of the six braves lunged into instant sprints toward the interlopers, howling and screaming, coarse black hair jouncing across their shoulders, plucking knives or war hatchets from the buffeting sashes around their waists.

  Prophet planted his Winchester’s barrel on his left forearm and lined up his sights, shouting, “Ah, shit—aim true, girl!”

  “I always aim true!” Louisa retorted as Prophet drew a bead on the screaming brave breaking toward him, a step ahead of the others and swinging a hide-wrapped hatchet behind his left shoulder.

  Prophet’s Winchester leaped and belched. The slug took the brave through his throat, just below his chin, snapping his head back on his shoulders and instantly cutting off his tooth-gnashing scream.

  As the three others continued sprinting toward Prophet and Louisa, undeterred despite their comrade’s death crumple, Louisa leveled a silver-plated Colt straight out from her right shoulder. As she drilled one of the three braves lunging toward her, within ten yards and closing, Prophet levered a fresh round into his Winchester’s breech.