The Graves at Seven Devils

by Peter Brandvold

  Curtis scratched and sniffed about the cabin, adding a few cackling chitters to a chorus or two.

  Prophet began sharing the bottle with the man after he’d effected his last stitch and started cleaning the blood from the man’s ear with hot water and whiskey. When he’d finished, Louisa had thrown a meal together—beans and antelope steaks from the carcass she’d found hanging in the lean-to stable and which the Apaches had left alone, distracted by the prospector’s hooch and preferring mule meat anyway.

  The three of them dug in, eating at the crude plank table, Prophet and Buster Davis washing the food down with whiskey while Louisa, who’d killed nearly fifty men in her short career but disapproved of spirituous liquids, drank coffee. When Big Hans returned, tired and sweaty from hauling away the dead Apaches and hazing away their horses, she filled him a bowl, and he sat up to table with the rest.

  Outside, good dark fell. The little cabin, which had a loft and two cots and was cluttered with tack and every mining implement imaginable, became filled with inky shadows jostling and shifting when a freshening breeze pushed through the open door to nudge the room’s single hurricane lantern hanging from a ceiling beam.

  When Louisa finished her meal, she slid her plate and cup toward Prophet. “I cooked. You can clean.”

  She hauled her pistols out of her holsters, set them on the table, and reached into the saddlebags draped over her chair for a cloth and a tin of Hambly’s gun oil. Prophet curled his lip at her. Setting his half-rolled quirley down on the table before him, he slid his chair back, stood, and began stacking bowls and cups.

  Buster Davis chuckled as he fed Curtis, who’d crawled onto his lap midway through the meal, some bits of crusty bread. “Reckon a girl who can shoot like that could have a man dancin’ quite a jig around her.”

  “She thinks so,” Prophet growled.

  Big Hans shoveled his last bite of beans and meat into his mouth and dropped his spoon in his bowl. Rising, doffing his hat, and heading for the door, he said, “I got me a fast mustang in the corral. I’m gonna tend his hooves and grain him, get him ready for tomorrow.”

  Balancing dishes in both hands as he headed for a washtub, Prophet glanced at the kid. “Hold on there, Junior. You might be good with that buffalo gun, but it ain’t buffalo we’ll be goin’ after.”

  Big Hans wheeled at the open door, a grieved look on his big, fleshy, sunburned face, his blue eyes flashing fervently beneath his shading hat brim. “Look here, Mr. Prophet, I know them mountains like the back o’ my hand. There ain’t no way in hell you’re gonna find that bunch of killers without my help. Besides . . .” He frowned and looked around as though searching for words. “Besides, I want a shot at ’em. The one I didn’t take when they were burnin’ up the town. . . .”

  He lifted his injured, defiant gaze to Prophet.

  Prophet held the kid’s eyes and glanced at Davis. The prospector stared over his shoulder at Big Hans for a good five seconds before he turned to Prophet with an arched brow.

  Prophet looked at Louisa. She was letting the bullets fall from the wheel of one of her Colts. They clinked to the table and wobbled in half circles.

  “Well, Miss Pistolera,” Prophet grunted at the self-absorbed girl. “Don’t you got an opinion?”

  Louisa hiked a shoulder as she slipped the cylinder free of the Colt’s barrel and set it on the table with the still-dancing cartridges. “It’s his neck. And I don’t care to go fishing without knowing where the fish are feeding.”

  Still balancing the dishes in his hands, Prophet thought it over. Finally he looked back at the kid staring at him expectantly from the door, the starlit desert yawning behind him, a coyote yipping somewhere in the buttes south of the cabin.

  Standing on Buster Davis’s right thigh, Curtis sniffed the table edge and growled deep in his throat.

  “Tend your horse, kid,” Prophet growled and dropped the dishes in the washtub with a tinny clatter.

  When Prophet had finished the dishes, and while Louisa continued to quietly clean her Colt and her rifle at the kitchen table, the bounty hunter sat on the stoop with Buster Davis and Big Hans. They chatted quietly, keeping their ears peeled for threat.

  It was doubtful that more Chiricahuas would show up tonight, as Apaches didn’t like to travel after dark, much less fight, but you never let your guard down in Apache country unless you wanted to risk being slow-roasted over a hot fire or buried chin deep in a honey-slathered anthill.

  “I reckon I’ll find a place to bed down out here,” Prophet said, rising from his porch chair and tossing the last of his coffee over the rail.

  Big Hans stretched. “We gonna take turns keepin’ watch, Mr. Prophet?”

  “Y’all get a good night’s sleep. I’ll stay out here. I’ve never been able to sleep through an entire night in ’Pache country anyways.”

  Prophet set his cup on the porch rail, stuck his lit quirley between his teeth, grabbed his saddle, bedroll, and rifle from where they’d been leaning against the cabin wall, and headed into the silent, night-cloaked yard. Not a breath of breeze. Hearing the others take their ablutions and retreat to their cots—Louisa would bed down inside—Prophet moseyed around the yard, looking and listening, all his years of bounty tracking having given him catlike vision and hearing.

  There was still plenty of blood around from the Apaches he and Louisa had beefed. But no one skulking about.

  Prophet climbed a flat-topped hill south of the cabin, with a good view of the surrounding terrain. He found a clear place amongst the brush and rocks and spread his saddle and bedroll. Leaning back against his saddle, he crossed his arms and ankles, took a deep breath and a long gander around the knoll and the cabin below. As he did, the cabin lamp sputtered out, and the night seemed to settle even deeper, the stars brightening, the intermittent coyote and distant bobcat screams growing crisper.

  It was so quiet he could hear a pebble roll down the slide rock littering the side of the steep, velvet-black, wave-shaped monolith looming in the north. Doubtless, gravity had dislodged the rock, for not even an Apache would try to descend the monolith’s steep wall.

  Prophet yawned and closed his eyes.

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d dozed when there was the sound of a boot heel clipping a stone. He lifted his head and set his hand on the walnut grip of his .45, heartbeat quickening. He let the hand settle there when Louisa said softly but clearly in the cool, quiet desert air, “Don’t start throwing lead, Lou. It’s me.”

  Prophet slid his hand off the gun butt. Damn. He’d hoped she’d get a good night’s sleep. But she hardly ever slept well, the screams of her butchered family haunting her dreams. Now she was probably nettled by those of her long-lost cousin, murdered by the Three of a Kind Gang.

  He turned his head to watch her silhouette take shape in the inky darkness as she meandered up the slope around the spindly branches of the creosote, yucca, and dwarf pinyons. As she gained the crest of the butte, she stopped and turned her head, looking around.

  Prophet said, “Here.”

  Holding a blanket across her shoulders, she moved toward him, her boots crunching gravel and the short, brown grass growing between the shrubs and rocks.

  “How’d you know I was here?”

  “I was watching you from the porch.” She stood beside him, looking down. Her hair hung down, framing her round, pale face. Between her boot tops and the blanket, her legs were bare. “I wanted to know where you were.”

  Prophet reached up and squeezed her hand, gently pulling her down to him. When she knelt to his left, holding the blanket closed at her throat, he smoothed her hair back from her face. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “Dreams.”

  Prophet wrapped his arms around her and drew her to him tightly. She pressed her cheek to his chest and slid her hands up his back, dug her fingers into his shoulder blades. Prophet could feel her hot breasts swelling against him. He pushed her away and looked down. The blanket hung open. She wore nothing beneath it.
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  Other than her boots, not a stitch.

  Suddenly, she flung the blanket away, pulled him toward her once more, and kissed him hungrily, moaning softly, running her hands up the back of his head. She nudged his hat off and ran her fingers through his close-cropped hair.

  He felt the heat of her body in his arms. Her grasping, clutching, desperate need. She pushed against him harder, groaning almost savagely, and Prophet’s loins reacted—full, heavy, and prickling with unfettered desire.

  Again, he pushed her away. “Hold on.”

  Quickly, he shucked out of his shirt as she knelt naked before him, starlight dancing in her eyes, shadows limning her breasts, which stood up proudly on her chest, the nipples pebbled and erect. He could hear her breath rasping hotly, expectantly beneath his own.

  When he’d removed his shirt, she flung it away from him, and then he stood to kick out of his boots, jeans, and balbriggans, stumbling around and nearly falling until his clothes lay strewn about him, and he stood naked before her, the cool air pushing against him, increasing his desire and the almost painful drumming in his loins.

  “Make them stop, Lou,” she whispered, leaning toward him and wrapping her arms around his legs. “Make it all go away!”

  She closed her mouth over his jutting member.

  Prophet gritted his teeth and ground his feet into the earth as her head rose and fell quickly.

  Finally, she pulled back. Twisting around, she sank onto his bedroll. Looking up at him stonily, her breasts rising and falling sharply, her flat belly pale in the starlight, she lifted her arms and reached toward him.

  Prophet knelt between her spread knees. As he dropped forward, propping himself on his outstretched arms, elbows locked, she lifted her head to close her mouth over his. Sucking at his lips, probing with her tongue, she wrapped her legs around his back and dug her fingers into his shoulders.

  Prophet thrust against her.

  She threw her head back and groaned throatily. From far away, the exclamation could have been mistaken for the mating call of a mad, lonely panther.

  “Uhh-ah . . . Louuu!”

  14

  THE GIRL KNOWN as Cora swept a lock of her green-streaked red hair from her eye and scanned the barren yard in front of her.

  She rode her cream Arabian at the head of the Three of a Kind Gang, which was named after the identical triplet brothers who’d started it—Rafe, Billy Earl, and Custer Flute—because she’d gotten tired of eating the others’ dust and of listening to Captain Sykes endlessly passing wind. The ex-cavalry officer, who’d taken one Sioux tomahawk blow to his head too many, was rather infamous for his troublesome digestion, especially when he was trying to digest beans, though one would think an ex-cavalry man would have gotten used to beans a long time ago.

  Cora drew back on the Arab’s reins and, holding her windblown hair back from her eyes with a gloved hand, frowned incredulously at the porch of the old mission-style building sitting like a couple of sun-faded adobe salt boxes wedged together amidst the sage and creosote. A pedestal rock loomed behind and above, making the nondescript old house appear even smaller, even more insignificant here on the cactus-studded, sun-blasted canyon deep in the Seven Devils Range.

  But it wasn’t the adobe house itself or the formations behind it that interested Cora. Her narrowed, disbelieving gaze held steady on the man sitting under the house’s brush arbor—a strawberry-blond, mustached gent with a black, flat-brimmed hat and with a bare-breasted girl on his knee.

  “Well, I’ll be ding-dong-damned,” said Rafe Flute, poking his low-crowned sombrero off his head, his long black hair blowing around his face in the dusty breeze. He rode up beside Cora and cut his eyes at her, grinning mockingly. “Is that who I think it is?”

  Cora clucked the stallion ahead, her heart thudding in her chest as she drew close enough to see that the blond man was the very man she’d feared he was, with his ruddy, handsome face from which two piercing blue eyes stared out like blue fire from beneath the brim of his dusty, black Stetson.

  “Hello, darlin’!” greeted Jay Squires, resting both his hands on the thighs of the young, bare-breasted Apache girl straddling his left thigh. He bounced the knee up and down, and the girl’s brown, pointed breasts jiggled. Squires laughed his characteristic rakish laugh. “Fancy us meetin’ up out here in the middle of this devil’s wide-open asshole!”

  Before Cora could say anything, Billy Earl Flute rode up, his shabby black opera hat denting in the desert wind, and placed his right hand on the butt of one of his several pistols. “Cora, you want me to drill this squirrel right here and now, you give me the word, girl!”

  Jay Squires laughed. “Billy Earl, how many times do I gotta tell you—that hat and them rose-colored glasses don’t so much make you look mysterious as downright tin-horned stupid.”

  “Listen, you son of a—”

  “Hold on, Billy Earl,” Cora said, holding out her hand and keeping her befuddled gaze on the handsome man she’d once been so in love with that just hearing his name had tied—still tied!—her innards in knots. “I wanna hear what he has to say.”

  No, she didn’t. Not really. She wanted to swing her horse and head for the high rocks, holding her ears closed lest she should hear the siren cry of his masculine, intoxicating voice. But she couldn’t kill him. Not yet. She wanted to feast her eyes on the rake’s handsome countenance for just a little while . . . as long as he was here, sitting suddenly before her like some heart-shredding specter out of a past she’d tried so hard to forget.

  “You always was a bighearted gal,” Squires told her, his tan, handsome cheeks dimpling with a grin, white teeth flashing beneath his strawberry-blond mustache.

  Cora hardened her jaws and narrowed her eyes. “What the hell are you doin’ here, Jay? I told you when I left you in Oregon that if I ever saw you again, I’d unleash the wolf inside me, and you’d suffer for it bad!”

  “Hold on, hold on!” Squires chuckled again as he held his hands up, palms out, on either side of the half-naked Apache girl, who regarded the strangers as though they were nothing more than a small dust devil that had swirled out of the desert. “You’re the one who did the shootin’ back there, if you remember.”

  “I shot that bitch because I told her to keep her hands off you.” Cora leaned forward in her saddle, jutting her dimpled chin like a weapon. “People just have to understand that if they don’t mind what I say, I’m going to get angry, and the devil take the hindmost!”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Squires said, that infuriating, toothy grin in place, complete with dimples deep enough to hide thimbles in. “You cheated on me first! Remember the little mulatto bath-house girl?”

  “You said it excited you!”

  “It excited me when I was there to watch. Not when I just walked in and there you two were, goin’ at it like two she-wolves in a mud puddle!”

  Behind Cora, Sykes laughed and farted.

  “Shut up!” Cora said, turning a shriveling look on the man. Beside Sykes, Rosco Heinz saw the look the girl gave Sykes, and the black man let his own amused grin fade.

  Cora turned back toward Squires and spoke with barely controlled fury. “You know she meant nothing to me. It was late and I was drunk and she’d been makin’ eyes at me all evenin’, said she felt we was bonded an’ such.” She shook her head suddenly, annoyed at herself for letting him lure her into an argument. “I asked you what the hell you’re doin’ here. Don’t try to tell me it’s just a coincidence that I find you trampin’ around down here in my very own territory.”

  “Your territory,” Squires grunted. “Christ! You’re as goddamn self-centered crazy as you ever were.” His eyes brushed the men beside and behind him. “At least you found the right gang!”

  “Well, that’ll be enough of that,” Rafe said, dragging a Colt Navy from a shoulder holster and thumbing back the hammer.

  A rifle boomed behind him, and Cora and the other men all jerked with a start as a bullet clanged and sparked o
ff a copper bell hanging beneath the brush arbor, just ahead and right of Custer. The Apache girl whimpered and ducked, slapping her hands to her ears. The clang set Cora’s ears to ringing. As the echo flatted out toward the bald, surrounding ridges, she looked over her right shoulder.

  A tall, broad-shouldered Mexican in a short, brush-scarred, fancily stitched charro jacket stood inside an otherwise empty corral grown up with weeds. Aiming a rifle across the corral’s top slat of bleached ironwood, he ejected the spent shell with a menacing jerk, then rammed a fresh cartridge into the breech.

  The bearlike man wore a straw sombrero that shaded his face though Cora could just make out the whites of his eyes as he leaned over his rifle, which was aimed at the middle of her group.

  “That there is Chulo Alameda,” said Jayco Squires. “He’s big, mean, and stupid . . . and he can blow the eye out of an eagle at four hundred yards.” He winked. “Rafe, I’d holster that hogleg, ’cause losin’ your head wouldn’t do that silly getup of yours any good at all.”

  Custer turned back toward Jay, grinning at him winningly, and depressed the revolver’s hammer as he raised the barrel.

  “What’s your game, Jay?” Cora narrowed an eye and leaned forward on her saddle horn. “If you came to get me back, you can forget it. I’m so far away from you that it took me near on a minute to recollect your name.”

  Squires chuckled again and canted his head toward the adobe’s two stout wooden doors standing open to his left. The half-naked girl stared with the eyes of a frightened doe toward Chulo Alameda aiming his rifle from the corral. “Why don’t you and your boys come on in and have a drink on me? I got a proposition for you.”

  Cora arched a brow skeptically. “Proposition?”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I ain’t gonna try to get into your drawers. Little Alvina here’s been treatin’ me just fine the past few days.” Squires hugged the girl to him and kissed the back of her bare shoulder. “Ain’t you, Alvina?”

  The girl said nothing as she stared, wrinkling her forehead, at the big man aiming the rifle from the corral.