The Graves at Seven Devils (11 page)

Prophet had known male bounty trackers and even lawmen who could have learned by watching Louisa.

Of course, Louisa had her rare, off-putting beauty and girlish sensuality going for her. It wasn't easy for a man—even the most depraved border bandit—to drop the hammer on such a harmless-looking creature. And it was that reluctance that often caused would-be killers to give up their ghosts in a mind-numbing storm of lead.

Louisa registered no gray areas when taking the measure of a man. And she never, ever hesitated. Once those lustrous, seemingly innocent hazel eyes began to narrow, lines forming above the bridge of her small, perfect nose, her prey was wolf bait.

They didn't even have time to piss their pants.

Louisa studied the deer, its head down about fifty yards ahead of her, and she cast a peeved glance toward Prophet. She knew he'd seen the deer and had been waiting for her reaction to the startled quail.

Prophet grinned, reached into his shirt pocket for a tobacco braid, and bit off a hunk. Ahead and right of him, Louisa gigged the pinto forward, and Prophet sat chewing, resting Mean and Ugly, and feeling his grin fade.

He was going to miss that girl. He'd wanted her to quit the trail and settle down for a long time, but he was going to miss her just the same. Leaving her in Seven Devils was going to be hard, and he didn't look forward to it. Jealousy gnawed at him. Like he'd told her, she'd no doubt be married inside of a year.

She'd choose a good man, but that man would not be Prophet—he'd made that clear to her as well as to himself; it just wasn't in the cards for either of them—and he'd have to ride without her from here on in, knowing their trails would likely never cross again . . . knowing she'd settled down with another man.

Probably have kids with that man. Raise a family.

They'd had a good trip down from western Colorado—riding through some of the most spectacularly lonely, beautiful country Prophet had ever trod. They'd camped, talked, argued some, swum in ravines after desert gully washers, and made love in the moonlight. Last night they'd even frolicked in a waterfall, the saguaros around them casting bizarre shadows amongst the rocks and the velvet ridges trimmed with starlight.

But now, two weeks south of Alamosa, they were near the end of their trail. According to a map an old prospector had drawn for them in Tucson, Seven Devils should lie just over the next saddleback ridge to the west, about a hundred miles north of the Mexican border.

Prophet spat a tobacco quid on a rock and heeled Mean forward. He caught up to Louisa ten minutes later, where the trail narrowed as it angled through cabin-sized boulders, climbing the ridge toward the faultless, cobalt eastern sky.

“Louisa, I wanna tell you something,” he said as their horses moved side by side. “As long as you've been roughshoddin' it, it's gonna be hard for you to settle down at first. But I want you to give it some time. . . .”

He let his voice trail off. Mean and Ugly's ears had suddenly perked. The horse lifted his snout now, too, working his nostrils. Louisa's pinto continued ahead as usual, plodding along, but Mean had been hoofing around with a manhunter on his back for nearly ten years, and the horse's senses were as keen as those of any Apache mustang.

Louisa had seen Mean's reaction. She kept her voice low as she turned her head from right to left and back again. “What is it?”

Prophet slipped his Winchester from the scabbard beneath his left knee and cocked it one-handed, holding the reins high in his left. “Smells somethin'.”

He looked at the rocky ridges on either side of the trail, and at those ahead and behind, watching for Apache smoke signals. The Indian reserves in this part of Arizona Territory were merely way stations for rampaging Apache. The braves would head to the agency for free government beef before riding out in search of another white ranch to burn or a village to ransack. There was little the badly undermanned cavalry could do about it.

Prophet and Louisa had come upon a doomed cavalry patrol only a half day back. Chiricahua arrows had protruded from the hacked, scattered remains of the soldiers and horses, with only a few patches of blue uniform showing amidst the red.

As Prophet and Louisa neared the crest of the saddleback ridge, the girl's pinto gave a sudden whinny, then shook its head, rattling its bridle chains. Whatever Mean had sensed, the pinto picked it up now, too. Prophet held up his hand and dropped out of his saddle. Ground-tying the horse, he hefted his Winchester and moved slowly up the rutted wagon trail, lifting his head to steal a look over the rise.

Louisa came up beside him as he stopped ten feet from the crest of the ridge to stare down the other side. Beyond another, lower hill lay a broad valley studded with saguaros and chaparral. In the middle of the valley, three-quarters of a mile away, stretched what looked like a vast, oblong cloud shadow.

Prophet glanced at the sky. There were no clouds. And there were no near ridges to cast shadows down the middle of the valley. The nearest ridge lay a good thirty miles to the south—a hulking blue-and-copper formation, capped by the seven devil-shaped spires, which had lent the town its name.

“What is it?” Louisa said, shading her eyes with a gloved hand.

Prophet turned and started back down the hill. “Gonna fetch my glasses.”

When he'd grabbed his field glasses from his saddlebags, he returned to where Louisa was standing about ten feet from the hillcrest. He lifted the glasses and adjusted the focus until the vast dark shape swam into focus beyond the second hill.

The dark oblong, cleaved by the trail, was pocked with mounds of burned debris. The burn extended a good hundred yards around the mounds of what, Prophet realized as he stared through the glasses, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end, was all that remained of a town.

Prophet lowered the glasses and turned to Louisa. She regarded him skeptically, anxiety growing in her eyes as she read the dread in his own features. She began to reach for the glasses, then, dropping her hand, looked down at the oblong of scorched earth again, moving her eyes slowly from left to right and back again, desperately scrutinizing the black mass.

Finally, she wheeled and began striding back down the ridge toward the horses.

“Hold up.”

Prophet grabbed her arm, but she pulled it free and continued on down to the pinto, grabbing the ground-tied reins in one hand, the apple with the other. As she swung into the leather, Prophet strode toward her. Keeping his voice down—whoever burned the town, Indians most likely, might still be around—he rasped, “You ain't goin' down there till we've scouted it out.”

“Giddup,” she ordered the horse, grinding her heels into the pinto's flanks and barreling up the rise.

As she approached, Prophet lunged for the pinto's bridle, but Louisa, sensing it coming, swerved sharply off the trail. She shot past Prophet like a cannonball, the horse blowing, hooves clomping loudly on the hard-packed trail.

Prophet swung toward her, scowling, as she crested the rise and dropped out of sight down the other side.

“Louisa!” he barked louder than he intended, taking back all his earlier judgments about the girl. The fool filly was likely to ride straight into a Chiricahua war party—probably the same ones who'd butchered the cavalry patrol they'd stumbled on earlier.

Cursing, Prophet ran down the ridge to where Mean stood eyeing him warily. “Remember what I said about fillies, Mean. Don't forget it!”

He dropped the field glasses back into his saddlebags, swung into the saddle, and spurred the reluctant, nickering dun up and over the rise, squinting against Louisa's sifting dust while eyeing the chaparral for Chiricahua pickets. He held his Winchester in one hand as the hammer-headed dun ate up the trail. Mean snorted and shook his head. Prophet wasn't sure if the horse was reacting to the acrid smell of the charred timber wafting on the hot, dry breeze or to the smell of Apaches—or both.

Mean didn't discriminate when it came to Indians. He hated them all.

He and the horse rounded a short curve and galloped between two brush-sheathed boulders standing on either side of the trail. Prophet pulled back on the reins. Just ahead, at the edge of the brick-and-wood rubble rising beyond the scorched chaparral, Louisa sat her stopped pinto, staring at a small wooden sign on the trail's right side.

SEVEN DEVILS, ARIZONA TERRITORY had been painted on the post-and-plank sign, which angled slightly back and off trail. Five bullets had been drilled through the painted letters, nearly cleaving the plank in two.

Prophet shifted his gaze from the plank to Louisa. “Hold your damn horses, girl. We're gonna ride in there slow.”

Louisa cut her angry eyes at him and opened her mouth to give a tart reply. Closing her mouth, she let it go, pressed her heels to the pinto's flanks, and continued forward at a slow walk.

Prophet gigged Mean and Ugly along beside her, the owl-eyed dun snorting and tossing his head.

A few yards beyond the post, on the right side of the trail, hunched a pile of charred logs, a scorched tin roof angling down across what remained of a porch rail, a brick chimney lying broken on the near side. Stretched out along the other side of the street, to Prophet's left, humped the demolished remains of a good half dozen business buildings, a couple of shingles—one announcing a hotel, another a harness shop—still partly legible.

A couple of buildings, forlorn and skull-like, remained standing. Most had been reduced to coal-black ash and splintered logs the texture of charcoal. Here and there, wisps of gray smoke lifted.

Raking her gaze from left to right across the cinder-dusted street, Louisa said, “Apaches?”

“Don't think so.”

She glanced at him, frowning.

“No bodies—Injun or white,” Prophet said, keeping his Winchester's butt pressed to his right thigh, his index finger curled against the trigger. “No arrows. No dead women or babies. Not even a dead horse in the street. Hell, I don't even see a dead dog.”

“What, then?”

“Wildfire, maybe, but it doesn't look like it came in from the country.” Prophet jerked with a start as a chunk of wood dropped from a burned-out sagging porch and landed in the street with a crunching thud. “Whatever it was, it didn't come as no surprise. Don't smell no bodies. They musta all got out.”

Louisa didn't appear overly comforted by Prophet's comment. As she and Prophet walked their horses down the middle of the street, approaching the town's center, she continued looking around fearfully, wondering what had become of her cousin in the midst of this destruction—a whole town burned to the ground.

They were fifty yards from the west end of town when Louisa drifted back behind Prophet, then turned the pinto toward the street's left side. She drew up before a charred log hovel with chunks of only two walls standing, the sod roof lying in a heap beyond the fallen, half-burned timber door. As Prophet turned Mean toward Louisa, he saw the blackened strap-iron bars of three jail cells standing at the back of what apparently had been the jailhouse.

Prophet followed Louisa's gaze down to a charred shingle protruding from beneath the jailhouse's fallen porch roof. It was a red plank, about three feet long. A tumbleweed had blown onto it, suspended by rubble from the roof.

Louisa swung out of her saddle and stooped to pull the shingle out from beneath the tumbleweed and rubble. She scrubbed ashes from the front of the shingle, then held it up for Prophet to read what remained of COUNTY SHERIFF.

“Marlene's husband was sheriff,” she said grimly, glancing again at the burned hulk of the jailhouse.

“No reason to think he's in there,” Prophet said, sheathing his rifle. “He and your cousin might've pulled out with the rest of the folks. Might be holed up outside town somewhere, waiting for a cavalry patrol. We'll find 'em.”

Frowning suddenly, Prophet turned to stare northwest over the rubble heaps. He'd heard what sounded like a blackfly sort of buzzing and whistling. The buzzing and whistling grew louder.

Mean and Ugly jerked his head up. At the same time, Prophet felt a sudden, searing pain in his upper right arm.

Before he knew what was happening, thunder clapped sharply in the northeast, and Mean and Ugly bucked suddenly with an indignant whinny.

“Shit!”
Prophet cried as, losing his reins as well as his rifle, his entire right arm on fire, he twisted around and flew straight back off the pitching dun's right hip.

THE GROUND SHOT up to slam against Prophet's back, snapping his jaws together with an audible clack and ramming the breath from his lungs with an enormous
“Ufff!”
of expelled air.

“Lou!” Louisa yelled beneath the rifle's echoing crack as well as Mean and Ugly's angry screams and hoof thuds as the hot-blooded beast tore westward down the burned-out town's main street, his reins bouncing along behind him.

Prophet groaned and tried to suck air into his battered lungs with little success. Another large-caliber slug blasted dirt, ashes, and dried horse dung into his face from the street beside him. He blinked grit from his eyes and tried another breath, managing half a lungful.

Running footsteps sounded, and he looked up to see Louisa sprint into the street and drop to a knee beside him. “Lou, dangit, get your lazy ass
up
!”

She squeezed off two thundering shots with the .45 leaping in her right hand, aiming in the general direction from which the sniper had fired. Tugging on his left arm, she yelled again, “Get up! Get up!”

“I'm tryin', for chrissakes!” Clutching his upper right arm and wincing against the grit the bullet had blown into his eyes, Prophet glanced after both horses now galloping into the western distance, Prophet's Winchester '73 snugged down in Mean and Ugly's saddle boot.