The Graves at Seven Devils

by Peter Brandvold

  The boy was sweeping up glass shards near the dead man’s head. Hatless before, the kid now wore a stained, cream Stetson that was a couple of sizes too large for his head, a hawk feather protruding from the braided-rawhide band.

  Regarding the newcomers with dark, animal-like caution, he adjusted the angle of his new hat, then swept the liquor-soaked glass and a cork into a neat pile, firming up the edges.

  “Any survivors?” Prophet asked the Mexican, who stood chopping up a couple of big jackrabbits on the long bar running along the room’s right wall.

  The Mexican dropped a bloody leg into an iron pot. “Survivors are few and far between in these parts, amigo.” He shrugged a shoulder. “It’s a hell of a mess, but I don’t argue with the extra dinero.”

  He chuckled, showing his silver-capped upper teeth. When his eyes had finished appreciating Louisa, they slid to Big Hans, still standing near the door, and widened.

  “Hansy?” The Mexican stared, frowning. “Is that little Hansy Kleinsasser?”

  Big Hans slid his gaze from the dead man on the floor to the Mexican behind the bar. His lips spread in a grin. “How ya doin’, Rudolpho?”

  Wiping his hands on a damp towel, the barman ducked under the bar planks, wincing against the strain in his back. He tossed the towel onto the bar behind him and ambled up to Hans, his eyes wide, lower jaw hanging. “What you do back here?” He glanced at Prophet and Louisa once more, then rose up on his toes to peer over the big younker’s broad left shoulder. “Where’s your uncle? He’s tending the horses?”

  Big Hans shook his head and pursed his lips. “Alphonse is dead, Rudolpho. That’s what brings me here with my new friends—Lou Prophet and Louisa Bonaventure.”

  He glanced at his companions and nodded to indicate the barman. “This here’s Rudolpho Salinas. He staked me and Uncle Alphonse when our bellies were kissing our backbones. Anyway, Rudolpho, there’s a gang out here, the Three of a Kind Gang. They burned Seven Devils, the town, and Alphonse burned up in the barn. I couldn’t get him out. We’re trackin’ them vipers. These two are bounty hunters.”

  At the mention of the Three of a Kind Gang, a cloud had passed over Salinas’s broad, dark face with its slightly off-center left eye. “Sí, sí,” he said quickly, looking around as if the gang were lurking nearby. “I know of this gang. Five men and a girl—if you can call her that.”

  The barman shook his head, frowning at Hans. “No, no, Hans. You must go back to Seven Devils!”

  “There’s nothing left in Seven Devils but ashes.”

  Salinas shook his head again. “Then go to Tucson. Or Lordsburg. Christos—I will give you a job here tending my horses. I have accumulated so many I could start my own ranch! But do not, I beg of you, go any farther into the mountains. Many bad men. More even than before—the Three of a Kind Gang the worst of all of them. . . .”

  Big Hans just stared at the shorter man, his blue eyes bleak. Salinas sighed, shook his head again, then turned and gestured toward one of the tables.

  “You sit, huh? It’s been a long ride, no? I bring drinks, and I have rooms in the back.” He grinned at Louisa, his eyes lustily taking the high-busted, well-armed girl’s measure. “I even have the old fountain working back there. It makes a pleasant sound in the evening.”

  Louisa ignored the old man’s lusty gaze. “You know where the Three of a Kind bunch is holed up, do you, Mr. Salinas?”

  Salinas held a finger to his lips as he looked around once more. “Sh-sh! It is not good to speak of the outlaws.”

  As the newcomers sat at a table against the back wall, near an old, faded painting of a plumed-helmeted conquistador on a high-stepping white stallion, Salinas pitched his voice low. “If word got around that I spoke of them . . .”

  He made a slashing motion across his throat as he looked directly at Prophet. “Besides, I do not know where any of the hideouts are. It is not something that is spread around. But I will tell you this—many lawmen and bounty hunters have passed through here over the years.” Salinas shook his head sadly. “Maybe one in thirty I ever see again. Now, please, what would you like to drink?”

  “Do you have sarsaparilla?” Louisa asked, tossing her hat on the table and biting her gloves off her fingers.

  Salinas looked at her as though she’d spoken some alien tongue. He shook his head slowly, frowning. Prophet looked at her, too, scowling.

  The girl shrugged. “Glass of cold water.”

  “Goat milk for me,” Big Hans said.

  “Sí, sí,” said Salinas, ruffling the boy’s short, wheat-colored hair. “You always loved your goat milk! And your uncle, his pulque!”

  “Water and goat milk,” Prophet growled. “You two sure know how to turn your wolves loose. Make mine tequila. And bring the bottle.”

  As Salinas limped off, Prophet glanced at his two companions, chuffed, and dropped his hat on the table. Outside, hoofbeats rose, growing louder as riders approached the cantina. Tack squawked and men talked in what sounded like English.

  Shortly, boots clomped onto the gallery and the batwings chirped. Prophet glanced toward the bar where Salinas was dribbling milk into a stone mug from a bladder flask.

  Raking his eyes across the newcomers, Prophet’s stomach fell and filled with bile.

  Under his breath, he said, “Shit.”

  Frowning, Louisa glanced at the three men sauntering up to the bar, dusty chaps flapping about their denim-clad legs—three rough-garbed, unshaven hombres in battered Stetsons and with holstered six-shooters thonged low on their thighs.

  Prophet kept his voice low, pitched with dry whimsy. “Just had a feelin’ I might run into somebody I knew out here. . . .”

  17

  WHEN RUDOLPHO SALINAS had delivered their drinks and limped back to the bar, where the three newcomers milled, talking and chuckling in the languid tones of weary riders, brushing dust from their sleeves and swiping hats against chaps, Louisa sipped her water and licked her lips, regarding Prophet casually.

  “Which one?”

  “Tall one. With the turquoise-studded ear ring.”

  Prophet sipped his tequila. A veteran bounty hunter riding into an outlaw lair like the Seven Devils was like a jackrabbit hopping into a rattlesnake dance. He was bound to run into badmen he’d had run-ins with or put away or relatives or friends of such men now moldering behind bars.

  “I ain’t certain sure he made me, but keep in mind he’s left-handed and lightning fast.”

  Big Hans sat across the table from Prophet, his back to the bar. The kid, who wore a thin goat-milk mustache, glanced over his shoulder. He leaned toward Prophet and said a little louder than Prophet would have liked. “You know them fellers, Lou?”

  Rudolpho Salinas finished pouring out shots of tequila for the three men at the bar. Sweeping up his shot glass, the tall hombre turned around abruptly, his turquoise earring flashing in the last saffron light angling through the window to his left. He poked his hat brim back off his forehead, leaned back on his elbows, and grinned.

  “Well, if it ain’t Lou Fuckin’ Prophet.” The outlaw laughed huskily. “What are you doin’ out here, amigo—tryin’ to make a pile all at once so you can retire, buy one o’ them big, fancy houses in Denver?”

  Prophet shaped a nervous grin as he stared over Big Hans’s left shoulder. The kid’s back was to the bar, between Prophet and Hawk and the other two outlaws. If the hard cases flung lead, the kid was sure to catch a pill or two.

  Prophet wagged his head slowly and turned his shot glass around on the table. “Lyle Hawk—didn’t the judge give you life?”

  Hawk lifted his chin, laughing, and let his hands dangle down toward his two .36 revolvers positioned for the cross-draw in matching black leather holsters. A short-barreled third revolver was wedged in front of his belly. His shirt was open, revealing the greasy thong from which a sheathed Arkansas toothpick hung. “Them fancy federal sweat houses were made for breakin’ out of, amigo.”

  Hawk turned his head to
one side, sweeping his greasy, gray-blond hair back to reveal the grisly knots where his right ear had been. A long knife scar angled down from the knotted mess toward his shoulder. “Got this in there,” he chuckled dryly, letting his hair fall back into place and turning his head forward, his eyes and jaws hardening. “A little memento of the place . . . and the man who put me there.”

  Prophet glanced at Big Hans, who had turned his head to regard the three outlaws over his shoulder. The kid’s broad bulk fairly covered Prophet completely. Somehow, he had to get the kid out of the line of fire, or get Hawk and his cohorts to pull their horns in.

  Prophet clucked and shook his head. “That had to hurt somethin’ fierce, Lyle. Sure am sorry to see that—I purely am.”

  He lifted his head toward Salinas, who stood grimly behind the bar planks. “Senor Salinas, would you please pour my friends a drink on me? It’s the least I can do, seein’ as how they cut the poor bastard’s ear off an’ all.”

  The stony looks of the three outlaws didn’t crack.

  Prophet’s smile faded as Hawk glanced at the other two men on his left, then pushed off the bar. He hooked his thumbs behind his cartridge belt as he sauntered toward Prophet’s table, keeping Big Hans between him and the bounty hunter.

  His boots clacked on the cracked flagstones, his ostentatious Texas spurs trilling softly. The wan evening light from the west-facing windows glinted redly off the silver discs trimming his chaps. Stopping three feet behind Big Hans, he shuttled his mild gaze from the kid to Louisa and then to Prophet.

  His dark eyes acquired a sardonic gleam. “Traveling with children now, eh, Proph?” He stretched his chapped lips in a hard smile and rolled his eyes back to Louisa. “That’s all right. Me an’ the boys—we’ll take good care of ’em both when you’re gone!”

  He hadn’t uttered that last before his hands crossed in front of his belly and came up ratcheting the hammers of both pistols back. Before he could level the barrels, Big Hans’s right hand shot up and over his head. A half a glass of goat’s milk splashed into Hawk’s fury-reddened face.

  The outlaw grunted, snapping his eyes closed and stumbling backward as he triggered both pistols at the same time. The guns roared, stabbing smoke and flames over Big Hans. The bullets whistled over Prophet’s head, each parting his hair, before one tore through a window and plunked into a wall behind him.

  The outlaw screamed again, cursing shrilly, as Big Hans rolled out of his chair onto the floor. Bounding forward and kicking his chair back behind him, Prophet jerked up his cocked .45. Hawk squinted through the goat’s milk dribbling off his eyelashes and jerked his guns toward Prophet once more, ratcheting back the hammers.

  Prophet’s Colt roared twice, leaping in his hands, two slugs plunking through Hawk’s neck and chest. They punched the outlaw straight back. Falling, he triggered two shots into the ceiling over Big Hans, who lay belly down on the floor, arms crossed on his head.

  “Christ!” Hawk cried a half second before he hit the stone floor with a thump and a raucous rake of his spurs, guns clattering onto the flags around him.

  Behind him, the other two outlaws were palming their own pistols and lurching forward, spreading their feet and stretching their lips back from their teeth.

  Having bolted up and left of the table, one of her matched Colts in her hands, Louisa fired a quarter second before Prophet did. The bounty hunter fanned three shots through his and Hawk’s powder smoke. Together, his and Louisa’s leaping and popping pistols sounded like the cannonade of a French firing squad as they echoed off the cantina’s thick adobe walls.

  Only one of the other two outlaws got a shot off, the bullet hammering into a chair back, as Prophet’s and Louisa’s slugs flipped him up and back onto the bar, screaming and cursing and writhing like a bug on a pin.

  “Sons o’ bitches!” the other man cried as three slugs tore through his chest, belly, and neck at nearly the same time, whipping him around in a complete circle.

  Dropping his revolver and clutching the blood-spurting hole in his neck, he pushed off the wall, staggered two steps toward the door, and dropped to his knees.

  “Sons o’ bitches!” he cried once more, but softer this time, blood frothing from his lips.

  Then he fell facedown, grunting and sighing and jerking, making a feeble attempt to push himself along the floor to the door. He didn’t get more than six inches before he went slack and died with a fart.

  Quickly thumbing fresh shells into his revolver’s loading gate, Prophet raked his gaze across each of the fallen outlaws in turn, squinting against the sting of the powder smoke. The one on the bar, legs dangling toward the floor, lay unmoving, as did the one by the door. Lyle Hawk’s chest was still rising and falling, blood welling from his wounds with every breath.

  Prophet moved around the table, stepped over Big Hans, who still lay belly down as though he, too, were dead, and stood over the dying outlaw. Hawk stared up at him, eyes wide with shock and rage. He opened and closed his mouth, but only blood frothed across his lips.

  Prophet flicked his loading gate closed, thumbed back the hammer, and aimed the Colt at Hawk’s head. “Tell Ole Scratch Lou Prophet says hey.” The Colt barked, and a nickel-sized hole appeared in the middle of Hawk’s forehead. The man’s eyes rolled up as if to inspect the hole, and his lower jaw sagged, the tip of his tongue poking out like a hairless pink mouse from its hole.

  Prophet let the revolver hang slack as he turned to Louisa, who was so calmly reloading her own Colt that she might have been only target shooting to hone her aim. As he dropped his gaze to Big Hans, Prophet’s heart fluttered. The boy still hadn’t moved.

  “Hey, kid!” Prophet nudged the boy’s ribs with his boot toe.

  Hans lifted his head suddenly, looking around and blinking against the smoke. When he’d seen the three dead outlaws, he twisted a glance up at Prophet and ran his tongue through the milk on his upper lip. “What’d you think o’ that, Lou? He sure wasn’t expectin’ no kid to throw milk in his face, was he?”

  “I reckon you surprised him, all right. Take any lead?”

  “Not that I can tell.”

  Prophet glanced at Louisa. “You all right?”

  “Sure.” The girl twirled her Colt and dropped it into its holster. “No thanks to you and that reputation of yours.”

  Someone groaned. “San Pedro . . . are they all dead?” Salinas poked his head above the bar and glanced at the dead man draped over the planks to his left.

  “I reckon you just acquired three more horses.” Prophet sagged back in his chair, picked up his shot glass, and threw back the tequila.

  Leaving Salinas’s cantina, Prophet, Louisa, and Big Hans continued pushing westward, traversing the narrow chasm known as the Devil’s Tail, and camped in a box canyon a thousand feet above the desert floor.

  After a quick supper of a goat quarter, frijoles, and tortillas, which they’d purchased from Salinas, Prophet climbed to a peninsular ridge to keep the first watch of the night.

  The desert stretched away on three sides like a molten ocean, the liquid-orange ball of the sun sinking off to Prophet’s left. Distant bluffs and mesas were vague shadows in that vast, misty emptiness, with far-off barrancas shouldering against the horizon like the fading lines of an ancient painting. Since he’d entered this wild, rugged range, he felt as though he’d been enveloped by the giant, toothy mouth of a territory-sized dinosaur.

  Above Prophet, a fresh breeze jostled the limbs of a sprawling, lightning-topped cedar.

  A coyote yammered—several high-pitched yips followed by a mournful howl. Others answered.

  Prophet turned to look up the slope behind him. Rocks, pinyon pines, and creosote rose gradually toward a ridge he couldn’t see from here. Rock turrets and broken walls leaned out of the slope, and from the top of one such ruined-castle-like formation an owl hooted three times in quick succession.

  The hair on the back of Prophet’s neck pricked.

  He’d heard Indians—Cheye
nne as well as Apache—make the same sound when signaling others in their band.

  He caressed his Winchester’s trigger and ran his gaze slowly along the spindly, sun-parched brush and stone outcrops. The last light died quickly, and soon the darkness closed down around him like a burial shroud. Stars like bits of glowing steel did little to alleviate the blackness. Louisa and Hans’s small fire flickered in the hollow behind him and left—the size of a match flame from this distance.

  He looked around again, squinting into the darkness. Was it the cool night air or the owl that made him shiver?

  Later, hunkered down in the rocks, he watched a far thunderstorm move slowly from right to left, lightning flashing like cannons, the thunder sounding little louder than distant train cars coupling.

  Louisa relieved him and then Hans relieved Louisa. By dawn they were on the trail again, ghosting an ancient horse trail in which he’d spied the faint sign of recent riders. The terrain was too rough to make out how many riders had passed—at least six, he figured.

  To Prophet’s relief, Louisa let him ride point without argument for most of the next day. The girl knew that her partner, having traversed Apache country before, had a better chance of detecting an ambush or Indian smoke signals, which, to the chagrin and horror of many soldiers and prospectors, were often mistaken for dust devils out here.

  Louisa rode her pinto about twenty yards behind Prophet while Hans brought up the rear astride his clay. The boy, who was also accustomed to Indian country, spoke little now as he rode, and he was quick to lean forward and clamp a hand over the clay’s nostrils whenever Prophet, spying dust or a suspicious noise, threw up a warning hand.

  They pushed deeper and deeper into the Seven Devils, with massive, bald ramparts of windblown rock rising on both sides of the trail. Prophet remembered the owl he’d heard last night. Had it been a winged raptor, or Apaches organizing an ambush?

  He held his Winchester across his saddlebow, and he dug his double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun out of his saddlebags. He ran his hand across the gut shredder’s oiled stock, then let it hang from its leather lanyard, attached to the walnut stock by metal swivels, down his back.