The brave on the other side of the fire grabbed a carbine from across a rock. As he wheeled and leaped the staked-out white man, raising the repeater to his shoulder, Prophet drew a bead on his chest.
Crack!
The bullet took the brave high around his left shoulder. Triggering his own long gun skyward, he screamed and flew straight back across the white man, who stared toward Prophet, his gritted teeth forming a white line through his thick, red beard.
“Kill the rock-worshippin’ heathen mule fuckers!”
Prophet had only vaguely heard the man’s shrill demand beneath the screams of the two other Apaches closing on him and Louisa. As he seated another round in his Winchester’s breech one-handed, Mean screamed, bucked, and wheeled sideways.
At the same time, one of the two approaching Apaches, knife flashing in his right fist, eyes sparking like agates at the bottom of a sunlit stream, catapulted himself off his moccasined heels and flew up toward Prophet like a russet-colored, black-capped missile launched by a Stone Age catapult.
Prophet swung his rifle toward the flying brave. The brave’s left arm flung the barrel aside, and then the man’s head and shoulder rammed into Prophet’s belly, jarring the wind from the bounty hunter’s lungs. Releasing Mean’s reins and reaching for but missing the saddle horn, Prophet flew down the dun’s left side with the brave wrapped around him like a knife-wielding boa constrictor.
The brave’s raucous shrieks were muffled by Prophet’s buckskin-clad belly as the bounty hunter hit the ground on his back with another “Uhfff!” of displaced air. His already battered back screamed in torment. Looking up, he found the round-faced, crooked-nosed brave’s head a foot from his, glaring down at him, lips bunched. Prophet’s left hand was wrapped around the brave’s right wrist, the point of the knife jutting from the brave’s hand pricking Prophet’s throat like the lingering nip of a bumblebee.
“Yeeeeee-eyyyyyyyyy!” the brave shrieked, slitting his fierce eyes and rising up on his moccasined toes for leverage, driving the knife downward.
At six-three, 210 pounds, the bounty hunter had a good seven inches and nearly fifty pounds on the war-painted demon, so he managed to lift the kid’s clenched fist up and away from his jaw with relative ease until the blood-speckled knife tip rose into his line of vision.
Then, gritting his teeth and driving his right heel into the ground, he bulled the brave onto his back. The brave kicked and thrashed, howling so loud that Prophet thought his ear-drums would burst. The younker’s eyes widened as Prophet grabbed the kid’s knife wrist in both his big, gloved hands and, lunging down, swept the knife tip across the brave’s throat twice. He drew two straight lines across the cinnamon, tendon-ribbed neck, and dark red blood gushed as though it had been looking for a way out for days.
Two muffled pistol shots sounded nearby, and someone grunted.
The hand of the brave beneath Prophet opened, and Prophet, rising onto his knees, snatched the knife away, then glanced to his left.
Louisa was on her side, half lying, half sitting, legs curled beneath her. The other brave who’d been running toward them was on his knees before her, a strange, ironic look in his eyes, which had snapped as wide as two dollops of fresh cow plop. The brave’s hands were wrapped around both of Louisa’s slender wrists. Her own hands were filled with her silver-plated .45s, the barrels of which were rammed up against the brave’s bloody chest.
Thick, black smoke, fetid with the smell of burned cordite and fresh blood, wafted from the brave’s ruined chest. Keeping his hands wrapped around Louisa’s, the brave convulsed once, eyelids fluttering as he glanced down at the smoking pistols.
Louisa gritted her teeth. “Let go of my guns, you black-hearted cur!”
She jerked the Colts back from the brave’s loosening grip. Then, with another snarl, she smashed the right Colt across the side of the Indian’s head, and he flopped onto his back with a groan.
“Nice shootin’,” Prophet grunted as he gained his feet, wincing at the stiffness in his back and the saber pokes of sharp pains in his ribs.
This had been one tough day on his body.
Standing and thumbing her bloody Colts’ hammers back, Louise sniffed, “Even you could have made those shots, Lou.”
“Don’t get sassy.”
He turned toward the staked-out white man whom he assumed was Buster Davis. The prospector lifted his head to stare at the Apache whom Prophet had shot in the upper left chest, and who was now pushing up off the white man’s belly as he gained his knees, grunting and groaning, blood splashing down to the prospector’s ragged duck shirt.
“Ah, ya red demon,” Davis snarled, flexing his knees as if to shed himself of vermin. “Get off me, you damn coyote!”
At the same time, the sixth brave—taller than the others and with a long, jagged scar running from his left temple across his nose to his right jaw—was reeling drunkenly, tripping over rocks and sagebrush, trying to get his feet beneath him. He was laughing as though at the funniest joke he’d ever heard while fumbling with the Sharps carbine in his hands, working the trigger guard cocking mechanism as though his fingers were smeared with butter.
The carbine’s rear stock had been carved with the letters U.S. CAV.
Gaining her feet and holding her pistols straight down by her sides, Louisa stalked the scar-faced brave, her shoulders straight, brows mantled, jaws jutting. Prophet angled toward the wounded brave, who was staggering off in the direction of a two-story, brush-roofed shack, lean-to stable, and corral that looked little larger than a shoe box beneath the vast, red, wave-shaped monolith looming above it.
“Filthy goddamn lobo heathen!” Buster Davis yowled.
Prophet jogged toward the wounded Indian heading now toward a cleft in the stone monolith behind the shack. When he’d narrowed the gap between him and the brave to twenty feet, Prophet stopped, snapped his rifle to his shoulder, and yelled, “Don’t make me shoot you in the back, you son of a bitch!”
He couldn’t let the wounded brave flee and possibly summon more of his ilk. He’d shoot him in the back if he had to.
Unexpectedly, the brave wheeled, flashing a horrified look over his shoulder while fumbling a knife from a beaded scabbard on his hip. Prophet drilled him through the center of his chest, and he flew back, pinwheeling and falling over a boulder with a scream and a thud.
Prophet ejected the spent shell. “Thanks, amigo.”
To his right, a revolver barked. Prophet turned to see the drunk brave, down on his knees in front of Louisa, jerk his head straight back on his shoulders. A neat, round hole had been tattooed through his forehead. Four feet away, smoke wafted around Louisa’s extended right-hand Colt, another tendril dribbling from its barrel.
As the brave sagged back on his heels, Louisa raised her left-hand Colt and squinted steely-eyed along the barrel. The Colt leaped in Louisa’s clenched fist, belching smoke and flames.
The brave’s head jerked a second time as another hole appeared three inches left of the first.
As the brave continued sagging straight back on his heels, Louisa drilled a round through his breastbone, then lowered the right Colt to bring up the left one again smoothly, automatically, and as emotionlessly as any cold-steel artist Prophet had ever seen.
She ratcheted the hammer back, aimed again, and fired.
His brows arched skeptically, Prophet watched her. She wasn’t shooting the Apache over and over again. In her mind, she was drilling a round through each face of the Three of a Kind Gang, maybe hearing them beg for their lives and scream, then watching them fall—bloody, dusty, and dead.
When the brave lay in the sage before her, she holstered one Colt, then quickly raking her eyes around the clearing to make sure all the attackers were disposed of, flipped open the Colt’s loading gate. She shook out the spent brass, which thumped and pinged to the ground around her boots, and began replacing them with cartridges from the leather loops on her shell belt.
The prospector’s head was
turned toward her, eyes wide with awe, furred lips parted. Prophet moved toward the man, lowering his Winchester and sliding his bowie from the sheath behind his left hip.
As Prophet sawed through the leather tying the man’s left wrist to a buried stake, he looked him over. He was cut and bruised, his duck shirt and baggy denims torn. His left ear had been slashed, and there was a long knife cut above his right eye. But he looked as though he’d live. “You all right, friend?”
The man turned his head slowly from Louisa, his shaggy, red-gray brows furrowed, a wary light in his eyes. “My, my, my,” Davis said as a wagon clattered and a mule hee-hawed in the distance, the sounds growing louder as Big Hans approached from the west. “Where’d ya find her?”
Prophet cut through the leather binding the man’s right wrist, then reached toward the man’s right ankle. “Nebraska.”
The burly prospector sat up, rubbing his wrists and turning his head to regard Louisa, who stood grimly reloading her second Colt once more. “I coulda used her ’bout an hour ago when those heathens jumped my diggin’s. They was about to hack off my eyelids and sundry other parts when you two rode in. . . .”
“Buster!” Hans drew the wagon up beside Prophet and Davis.
As the wagon lurched and creaked and the mule hee-hawed at the smell of blood, the big blond leaped heavily from the driver’s seat, the springs giving a raucous squawk of released tension. He bolted over to where Davis was sitting up and drawing his untied ankles in. “What the hell happened, Buster? I thought you made peace with ole Three-Toe!”
“I reckon that was last month’s agreement,” the prospector said, fishing a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbing at his bloody ear from which, Prophet now saw, the lobe had been hacked away.
Davis swept his green-eyed gaze from Louisa to Prophet and back again. “Who’s these Injun killers and”—the paunchy, middle-aged gent wheezed a laugh as he continued dabbing at what was left of his ear—“do ya work for free?”
“This is Lou Prophet and Louisa Bonaventure,” Big Hans said. He spread his lips back from his big teeth, grinning. “We’re goin’ after the Three of a Kind Gang, and we’re gonna clean their clocks just like these Chiricowies here!”
13
“PLEASED TO MAKE your acquaintance, Davis.” Prophet shook the burly prospector’s big, skinned-up hand and glanced at Big Hans still grinning at him. “But I don’t know’s we made any plans—the boy and me and Louisa—to ride together after the Three of a Kind Gang.”
As Louisa walked off, apparently in search of her and Prophet’s horses, both of whom had vamoosed when the Apaches had charged, Big Hans said, “We was just gettin’ to that when Buster yelled.”
Holding the handkerchief to his ear, Davis looked at the kid skeptically. “I thought you didn’t wanna have nuthin’ to do with them mountains again, Hans.”
“That was before that gang burned the town, Buster. Criminy-craw, they killed Uncle Alphonse, and I stood around like a dog cowerin’ under a boardwalk!”
“Wait a minute,” Prophet said, on one knee beside the big blond. “I know how you feel about your uncle an’ all, but, son, you said yourself them mountains are crawlin’ with fork-tailed demons. You ain’t got no business—”
“Sure I do! They killed my uncle, burned my town. And I know them mountains better’n anyone around. Better’n Buster here even.” Big Hans glanced around at the dead Apaches lying as though they’d fallen from the sky. “Just as good as these Chiricowies here, matter of bonded fact!”
“How?”
“That’s a bonded fact.” Buster Davis began pushing himself up off the ground, and the kid rose and grabbed his shoulder to help him. “For nigh on two years, him and ole Alphonse chased about every vein in the Seven Devils. The north slopes of the Seven Devils anyway.”
“A good chunk of the Mexican side, too,” Big Hans put in.
Prophet draped Davis’s right arm around his neck. “I reckon this conversation can wait till later. That ear of yours needs tendin’.”
Prophet and Big Hans helped the prospector, who was still fairly weak on his legs after the beating the Apaches had given him, over to the gray-weathered shack. Davis grunted and groaned and winced, stepping lightly on his right foot. “That scar-faced demon—drunk on my hooch!—whacked my knee good with the blunt end of a war hatchet. I’m just glad you and that girl of yours blew their wicks for me, Prophet. Wish I coulda kicked one off my own self. I’d go to my grave grinnin’ about it—I’ll tell you that!”
Mounting the shack’s gallery, the posts trimmed with elk and deer horns, and several bobcat pelts nailed to the cabin’s front wall, Prophet kicked the half-open door wide. Something moved in the musty shadows before him, and as his eyes picked the black-and-white varmint out of the cabin’s gloom, he lurched back and sucked a startled breath.
“Kee-rist, Davis—you gotta skunk in here!”
As if in response, the critter glared through the doweled back of the chair it was standing on and gave a raucous chitter, reaching between the dowels to slash a little, black-clawed paw at Prophet.
“Oh, now you show your mangy carcass, eh, Curtis?” Davis growled. “When them Apaches was ransacking my digs, lookin’ for my notorious hooch, I bet you was cowerin’ under the stove. Weren’t you? Ha!”
Prophet glanced at Davis as he and Hans continued guiding the man into the cabin, most of the crude furnishings of which had been either smashed or scattered as if by a heavy wind. “I take it you know each other?”
“Yeah, Curtis adopted me when I first moved in.” Davis grunted as Prophet and Big Hans deposited the prospector into a chair near the overturned kitchen table beside a sheet-iron woodstove. “Come and goes as he pleases, but he usually pleases around supper time!”
The skunk scolded the newcomers, then dropped down and, chittering and holding its tail up, scuttled off under a plank-board cabinet against the far wall.
“Mind your manners, Curtis,” Davis groused as Prophet tipped the man’s head to one side, inspecting his bloody ear. “Sorry, there, Mr. Prophet. Aside from your occasional Chiricowy and bobcat, we don’t get many visitors.”
The lobe was hanging by what looked like a bloody thread, blood dribbling darkly from the ragged cut.
Grimacing at the prospector’s ear over Prophet’s shoulder, Big Hans said, “You got any doctorin’ skills, Mr. Prophet?”
“No, but I reckon I can sew a lobe back onto an ear. Won’t guarantee it won’t fall off in a day or two, but I’ll do my best with needle and catgut.”
Outside, slow hoof clomps rose, and Prophet glanced out the open door to see Louisa leading both horses into the yard, Mean eyeing the pinto owlishly.
“Louisa, bring in my saddlebags!” The bounty hunter glanced at Big Hans. “Kid, start a fire and boil some water. Then you best head out, load them Apaches into your wagon, and haul ’em a good ways away. Throw some dirt and rocks on’em, just enough to keep the smell down. I heard tell Apaches could smell their own dead from five miles away.”
“You’ve done some traveling in these parts, Prophet,” Davis said. “I’ve heard that my own self.”
“I’ve traveled in most parts. Been welcome in damn few.”
“They’re bounty trackers, Buster.” Big Hans had opened the stove door and was rummaging around in the wood box built from several Magic black-powder crates for kindling—old newspapers and pinecones. “Both him and Miss Louisa.”
Just then, Louisa stepped through the door, Prophet’s saddlebags draped over her shoulder. Davis turned to her, his earlobe dangling like a grisly ornament. Whistling with appreciation, he gave the girl the thrice-over.
“Bounty tracker—you don’t say! Well, I could tell by the way she dispatched them ’Paches she wasn’t no Sunday-school teacher.”
With characteristic indifference to flattery, Louisa picked the table up off the floor with one hand, then dropped the saddlebags onto it, puffing dust. Kicking a tin coffee cup across the earthen floor, s
he moved over beside Prophet, who was easing the lobe back into place beneath the ear.
“How bad?”
“He’ll live. Dig out my whiskey bottle.”
“Ah, Christ,” Davis said. “I’d just as soon you hacked the damn thing off.”
Prophet chuckled dryly. “I’d still have to sterilize it, less’n you want your whole head to turn black.”
When Louisa had pulled the bottle out of the saddlebags, as well as Prophet’s small canvas pouch of needle and thread, the bounty hunter popped the cork with his teeth and, keeping Davis’s earlobe in position with the thumb and index finger of his right hand, offered the bottle to the prospector with the other.
“There you go, Davis. Have you a good pull. You’re gonna need it.”
Bunching his cheeks, carving deep dimples inside his shaggy, sweat-damp beard, Davis tipped the bottle back a couple of times, making the bubble in the bottle rise and fall with a loud chug. Finally, sighing and smacking his lips, his green eyes watering, he returned the bottle to Prophet.
Prophet said, “Ready?”
Davis growled, then tipped his head to one side, his torn, bloody ear facing the low rafters. “No.”
Prophet tipped the bottle over the man’s ear.
“Yeee-owwww!” Davis bellowed, his face blanching and his shoulders quivering as the whiskey hit his ear.
Curtis poked his black, white-striped head out from beneath the cupboard and chittered like a rabid squirrel.
By the time Prophet had finished sewing Buster Davis’s ear back together, albeit raggedly, the prospector was feeling little pain and had even taken to humming several parts of several saloon songs including “Little Brown Jug,” “Clap-Carryin’ Kate,” and “Whiskey Jack and Old Leonard.” Occasionally, he’d slap the table and howl, keeping time.
The Graves at Seven Devils Page 11