The Graves at Seven Devils

by Peter Brandvold

  The short-barreled ten-gauge would be a handier weapon in a close-quarter shoot-out, and that’s what any attack amongst these narrow, rocky defiles and twisting, snake-infested arroyos would be. The bowie knife sheathed between his shoulder blades might prove necessary if an Indian leaped off a near wall, intending to trim his wick with a tomahawk.

  That night they camped in a dry arroyo sheathed by cracked, cabin-sized boulders and sparse ironwood shrubs. Prophet had seen fresh horse tracks overlaying the older trail they’d been following, maybe a day or two old. Knowing they weren’t alone out here, they cold-camped, washing down jerky and wild berries with only water, and kept their conversation to a minimum.

  After dark, Prophet didn’t even roll his customary quirley for fear the smoke would carry and give away their position.

  Out here, if the Apaches weren’t a danger, banditos were. Crazy damn country. Prophet would rather fight the Sioux up north than the Indians and the black-souled breed of white man that haunted this border country.

  The next afternoon, he let Mean pick his own way along the trail curving up a rocky mountain shoulder as Prophet watched a golden eagle soar high above a clump of distant pinyon pines and junipers. The eagle suddenly turned away, and a cold wind blew against Prophet’s sweaty back. He looked just west of the eagle and saw that a large, low mass of swollen purple clouds was bearing down on him fast.

  Thunder rumbled and the wind swirled, whistling through the crags behind him. Big Hans’s clay whinnied shrilly.

  “Shit!” Prophet reined Mean down to inspect the storm.

  Louisa came up behind him, hipped around in the saddle, her long hair blowing in the sudden wind. “That doesn’t look good!” she said, her words nearly swallowed by a gust that lifted the pinto’s mane straight up and down.

  “Monsoon season,” Prophet said. “We’re about to get hammered!”

  He dropped his gaze from the angry skies to Big Hans hauling back on his reins with one hand while clinging to his saddle horn with the other. His mustang whinnied and bucked, and the kid stretched his lips back from his teeth as thunder rumbled once more, like the crash of boulders down a near slope.

  “Hold on, Junior!”

  Prophet looked around. Nothing more than a few large boulders offered cover within a good fifty yards. Upslope a hundred yards, the mountain appeared to level out, forming a bench stretching back to a sheer sandstone wall.

  As Prophet watched, the wall went from being bathed in full golden sunshine to turning the dark purple of a ripe plumb. The storm was moving in like a Kansas cyclone, icy raindrops pelting the bounty hunter’s back, lifting gooseflesh.

  Mean and Ugly nickered and shook his head.

  Prophet looked back at Louisa and Big Hans, who was keeping his big mustang in relative check though the beast’s eyes were white-ringed, its nostrils expanding to the size of jawbreakers. The bounty hunter held his hat brim low so the wind wouldn’t take it as he yelled, “Let’s vamoose before this little squall turns us into firecrackers!”

  Thunder rocked the earth and sky. Lightning flashed like flames licking from the maws of God’s double-barreled shotgun.

  Prophet turned Mean off the switchbacking trail they’d been following and gigged him straight up the slope. The dun gave a whinny and dug his front hooves into the gravelly ground, lunging off his back legs.

  Behind, Prophet heard Louisa urging the pinto and Big Hans yelling in frustration at the half-wild clay, which seemed determined to turn and head back into the storm rather than away from it.

  Rain poured from the heavens. Nickel-sized drops fell like javelin spears, instantly soaking Prophet’s buckskin tunic and denims and sluicing off his funneled hat brim.

  To his right, a witch’s finger of lightning flashed, followed a half second later by an ear-numbing boom. Sparks flew as a sprawling cedar about fifty yards away lost its crown with a loud crunch and then a long, rattling snap of breaking limbs. Mean leaped forward with a start, and Prophet had to grab his saddle horn to keep from being thrown off the horse’s ass.

  Mean lunged again when the crown hit the ground with another, louder crash.

  As Prophet approached the bench he glanced behind, glad to see Louisa and Big Hans in close pursuit, albeit with the clay buck-kicking, shaking its head wildly. Another lightning bolt struck close by, topping a three-armed saguaro, and a second later another blasted a large, diamond-shaped boulder, the smell of brimstone thick in Prophet’s nostrils, even the hair on his arms standing on end.

  It was with keen relief that he gained the bench and glanced back to see both Louisa and Big Hans moving up from behind him and swinging out to his right side, unharmed.

  Her head tipped low against the rain, Louisa pointed straight ahead. “Look!”

  Prophet peered over Mean’s head to see a building hulking up before them, about fifty yards away. At least, it looked like a building. With the rain coming down so hard, the image was blurred.

  He urged the horse forward through cedars, pinyons, and boulders and entered a clearing cleaved by a trail angling into it from Prophet’s right and left. As he continued forward across the clearing pocked with rain-splashed puddles, the structure clarified slightly behind the billowing moisture curtains, the lightning reflecting off its stout adobe facade to show large cracks and fissures and wind-jostled vines.

  It was a three-story barrack-like building with what appeared to be bell towers over the doors—one at each end. Crumbling stone steps rose to each entrance. The hammering rain sluiced off the roof. As Prophet inspected the roofline, a lightning flash revealed a human-shaped figure standing atop the roof, near the bell tower over the door at the building’s left end.

  In that split-second flash, Prophet saw a man wearing a hooded brown robe and throwing one arm out toward the yard, making a beckoning motion. The bounty hunter could see nothing more of the face inside the hood than a dark-colored beard.

  “Welcome, amigos!” the man shouted, barely audible above the thunder and pounding rain. “Welcome! Come in out of the storm!”

  Prophet had slid his rifle into its sheath when he’d started up the hill. Now he wished he had it in his hands. Apprehension raking him, he glanced at Louisa, who returned the look, then, squinting skeptically, canted her head toward the barrack.

  “What the hell is it?” Louisa was obviously anxious; she hardly ever cursed.

  “Monastery!” Big Hans shouted above the wind. “Last time me and Uncle Alphonse was through here, no one was here ’ceptin’ a family of mangy coyotes!”

  “Amigos!” the man on the roof called once more, throwing an arm forward to beckon wildly. “Hurry! Before the lightning fries you to cinders!”

  Another lightning bolt lit up the building, silhouetting the figure on the roof. The light flashed off a steel object separating from the man’s robe.

  Prophet palmed his revolver.

  “Trap!” His shout was swallowed by a wind gust. “Let’s get the hell outta here!”

  18

  PROPHET STEADIED HIS Colt against the wind and squeezed the trigger. The revolver belched and leaped in his hand. The man on the massive adobe’s shake-shingled roof pitched back and out of sight with a scream that was drowned by the storm.

  “Look!” Big Hans shouted, pointing at the building’s left door.

  Prophet had heard the door scrape open as he’d been looking around wildly for an escape route. Now, holding Mean’s reins taut against his chest with one hand, his Colt in the other, he saw a man bolt out through the door and onto the crumbling steps, raising a rifle. Two more followed, one aiming a carbine while the other palmed a revolver.

  Prophet fired two quick shots, watching one man throw his head back, wincing, while the second slug plunked into the steps with a chirp.

  “You two vamoose!” Prophet shouted, thumbing the Colt’s hammer back once more. “I ain’t gonna tell ya again!”

  He aimed and fired another round, pitching another bushwhacker back inside t
he monastery.

  Louisa held one of her Colts in one hand, her skitter-hopping pinto’s reins in the other as she looked around wildly. “Which way?”

  Prophet ducked as a slug whined past his left ear and barked into a boulder behind him. “Does it matter?”

  “Come on!” Hans shouted, hoorawing the screaming clay past both Louisa and Prophet and galloping wide around the monastery’s left front corner, the clay’s hooves splashing water up around its hocks.

  Spying movement to the right, Prophet swung his head that way. Two more men—one in a shabby, steeple-crowned sombrero, the other hatless and wearing a red leather vest over which bandoliers were crossed—stumbled out the right-side door. The man in the vest was thumbing wads into a shotgun while the other man shouted what to Prophet’s cow-pen comprehension of Spanish sounded like—“Come on in out of the rain, amigos! Bring the girl! We have a special gift for her!”

  Prophet jerked his gaze toward Louisa, who was triggering a shot toward the left door. “Follow the kid, girl! Looks like we stumbled onto some lonesome banditos!”

  Louisa galloped after Hans, triggering a couple more shots at the monastery as several pistols and rifles barked back at her.

  The reports sounded little louder than snapping twigs amongst the thunder and lightning, the flames stabbing through the slashing javelins of bullet-sized raindrops. More guns flashed from the broken-out windows, men shouting and whooping, and Prophet emptied his Colt as he gigged Mean into a lunging gallop after Louisa and Hans.

  Bullets sizzled through the rain-slashed air around his head as he made a wide turn around the corner of the monastery. Mean flinched as a bullet creased his right hip. Prophet quickly holstered his empty revolver, grabbed his sawed-off shotgun from behind him, and hipped around in his saddle.

  Several men were running after him, stumbling drunkenly and shouting in Spanish while triggering lead.

  Prophet sent a thundering blast of double-aught buck through the group’s center.

  One man screamed and dropped while another twisted around, triggering his pistol into the ground as he grabbed his upper left arm. The third cried “Mierda!” and stopped to hop around on one leg, clutching a knee.

  Prophet faced forward as Mean galloped through what appeared to be an orchard of some kind. There was an eight-foot-high wall on his right, stretching into the blackness behind the monastery. Ahead, Louisa was a vague, jostling silhouette in the stormy gloom, ducking low-hanging branches.

  A rifle stabbed flames from atop the wall, the flash limning a sombrero-topped, silver-trimmed figure crouching there. Louisa’s horse screamed, dropped, and rolled—a vague tumbling shape in the darkness. Prophet used his second barrel to blow the man off the roof, the shotgun sounding little louder than a pistol amidst the booming thunder, and raced ahead toward Louisa.

  The horse and the girl were already regaining their feet. Limping slightly, Louisa jogged forward and grabbed the horse’s muddy reins.

  “You all right?” Prophet yelled.

  Louisa swung with characteristic ease onto the hurricane deck of the skitter-hopping pinto, which was looking around crazily, eyes bright with terror. “I’ll feel better when I’ve dried out.” She slammed her heels against the pinto’s ribs, and the horse lunged forward after Hans.

  As lightning forked across the sky and the rain continued hammering, Prophet glanced around him and, spying no more gun flashes or figures dashing toward him, he booted Mean after Louisa.

  The girl’s jostling figure swept in and out of his vision as he cut through the orchard and into the rocky bluffs beyond, rising and falling with the old cart trail he appeared to be on. Mean cut through a broad, rocky valley between thousand-foot cliffs, lightning intermittently revealing the rugged terrain spiked here and there with small tufts of brush and cactus.

  As Prophet and Mean galloped up a low rise, a lightning bolt rocketed into the cliff towering on their left. Mean leaped with a start, screaming, as a cabin-sized portion of the cliff lit up like a Mexican Christmas tree, blue-green sparks dancing across the rock. Brimstone peppered the air. There was the low rumble of falling rock.

  Prophet and the prancing, snorting dun topped the rise at the same time a horse screamed down the other side. Below, about forty yards beyond the base of the rise, a horse tumbled right of the trail, legs thrashing, whipping its head about furiously. The boulder that the lightning had hurled into the valley was rolling off toward a dry streambed snaking against the base of the opposite cliff.

  “Louisa!” Prophet shouted, grinding his spurs into Mean’s flanks.

  Anxiety pinched down the corners of Prophet’s mouth, and he stared unblinking through the downpour. The bouncing boulder must have swept her out of her saddle, no doubt crushed her into pudding.

  Mean and Ugly whinnied as he galloped down the rise. A silent prayer tumbled through Prophet’s head. Please don’t let her be dead! Ahead Louisa’s pinto rose, shaking its head as if to clear it, reins dangling, stirrups flapping like wings.

  No, not Louisa’s pinto. As he drew near, he saw that the horse picking itself up out of the mud before him was Big Hans’s claybank.

  Prophet reined Mean and Ugly to a skidding stop and leaped out of the saddle, hitting the muddy caliche at a dead run and scrambling into the rocks right of the trail. The big kid was on his back, both legs drawn up, head thrown back on his thick shoulders. He cradled his left arm across his belly, rocking to and fro and groaning as he stretched his lips, teeth flashing white in the continuing lightning bursts.

  “Hans!” Prophet dropped down beside him, wincing as another lightning bolt hammered the ridge a little lower down than before.

  The kid groaned through gritted teeth, his entire body quivering. “Damn rock flew a foot over my head! Scared the shit outta ole Demon! Scared the shit outta me!”

  Prophet leaned down to inspect the kid’s arm, immediately seeing what the trouble was. The kid had landed on a branch, which had ground into the underside of his arm, just before his elbow.

  Prophet laid one hand on the kid’s arm. With the other he grabbed the end of the branch. “Hold on, Junior. I’m gonna pull it out!”

  “Pull what out?”

  Prophet blinked, frowning. He dropped his head lower, squinting his eyes. Wrong again. It wasn’t a branch sticking out of Big Hans’s big arm. It was the kid’s bone sticking out of his arm! Blood welled out around the splintered end of the bone and the torn, ragged flesh, thinning out in the rain.

  “Ah, shit!”

  Big Hans gripped his wrist, drawing the broken arm even tighter to his belly. “Look bad?”

  “Junior,” Prophet said, pushing off his knee and gaining his feet. “You’re gonna wanna kill me for this, but there ain’t no other way.”

  Big Hans stared up at him through narrowed, pain-racked eyes. “No other way than what?”

  Prophet grabbed the kid’s right wrist and forearm with both hands, and planted his right boot against the kid’s chest. Quickly, before the kid had time to object, he drew the wrist sharply toward him while holding Hans’s chest back with his boot.

  There was a sickening crack. The kid screamed shrilly and loudly enough that, for an instant, he drowned out the storm. The scream ended abruptly. Sagging straight back, the kid’s face went white as new linen. His eyelids fluttered down over his eyes. He hit the ground with a soft thud, and his head turned sideways, his chin dipping toward his shoulder.

  His chest rose and fell slowly.

  Prophet dropped to a knee again and lowered his head to inspect the kid’s bloody arm. The bone had gone back in. Jerking his neckerchief off, he wound it lengthwise into a two-inch strip, then wrapped it around the kid’s upper forearm and knotted it, hoping to keep the bone from sliding back out.

  With a heavy sigh, he rose and, leaving the kid in the sopping brush, walked back out onto the trail. Both Mean and the claybank were gone, having high-tailed it uptrail.

  Prophet looked both uptrail and down for L
ouisa, then to both sides, his eyes scouring the rain-lashed terrain. No sign of her. He was certain she’d been ahead of him. If she’d overtaken Big Hans, surely she would have returned by now, looking for the kid and Prophet.

  If she was able.

  Shoving his concern for the girl aside for now, he glanced at Big Hans. The kid was in shock. Prophet had to get him dry. But first he had to find the horses. Without them, they were both goners.

  He moved back off the trail and pulled the unconscious kid into the relative shelter between two boulders. Then, holding his head low against the rain, which was slowing gradually, the lightning bolts growing less frequent, he stretched his legs into a jog uptrail, mud splashing up around his boots and trouser cuffs, spurs ringing softly.

  He’d crested two rises when, from the second rise, he saw both horses standing hang-headed on the lee side of a black-granite dinosaur spine humping up out of the boulders to his left. The surly mounts stood side by side as if seeking shelter from each other, too scared to fight.

  As Prophet approached, Mean stood where he was but the claybank whinnied angrily and sidestepped into a cleft behind it. The cleft offered him no escape, so when Prophet had mounted his hammer-headed dun, he simply rode over, swiped up the clay’s reins, and put Mean and Ugly down-trail, jerking the jittery claybank along behind him.

  “Come on, Junior,” he said when he’d ridden back to where Big Hans lay between the boulders.

  The rain had stopped but the sky was still a purple mass of low, swirling clouds. Lightning flashed in the distance. The thunder had dwindled. The surplus moisture dripped from rocks and shrubs and eddied in shallow gullies. It continued dripping from Prophet’s hat.

  “Hans,” he said, squatting beside the kid, whose chest rose and fell slowly, head tipped to one side.