The Graves at Seven Devils (14 page)

Louisa turned to Prophet. “Two might have better luck than a whole patrol. Not so much noise and dust.”

“But there's so many banditos out there, and so much ground to cover,” Big Hans said darkly, “that it's gonna be nigh on impossible to track the group you're after.” He glanced over his shoulder again, his right blue eye momentarily locking on Prophet. “Without someone who knows the country, that is. Without a
guide
.”

Prophet was about to ask the kid if he knew of such a person but stopped when an agonized yell rose in the southern distance, straight out from the wagon now threading a rocky, sycamore-sheathed arroyo.

Hans drew back on the reins. “Whoa!” He stared out over the sycamores and saguaros, lemon-colored dust billowing up around the wagon box. “What the hell was
that
?”

The scream rose again, shriller this time.

“Someone ain't too happy about somethin',” Prophet said, keeping his voice low, head up, as he stared through the brush.

A man's muffled voice rose, small with distance but crisp and clear on the dry, desert air. “Ah, ya mangy yalla heathens—leave me be, ya sons o' fuckin' bitches!”

Big Hans's entire bulky body tensed and he rose half out of his seat.
“Buster!”

As if in response to the kid's exclamation, a shrill Indian-like whoop rose, followed by another more muffled one.

“Dawg-eatin' carrion snipe!”
the man screamed, the last words dwindling as his voice pinched with sobbing grief.

Big Hans lurched to his feet. “The Chiricowies're after Buster!”

Prophet swung himself up and over the wagon's tailgate and into the saddle of Mean and Ugly, the horse shaking its head and rippling its withers warily. Louisa leaped onto her pinto. Shucking his Winchester from his saddle boot, Prophet gigged Mean past the wagon, heading up the arroyo.

“Doesn't sound like they're after him!” Ahead of the mule, and with Louisa following close behind, Prophet put Mean into a ground-eating lope. “Sounds like they done got him!”

PROPHET AND MEAN and Ugly flew up the winding arroyo, Prophet ducking cottonwood and post oak branches leaning out from both sides of the cut. He could hear the drum of Louisa's hooves behind him, the snorts of the pinto, and the continuing cries and curse-laced harangue of Buster Davis.

That the man was being tormented by Apaches was verified by the tensing of Mean and Ugly's muscles beneath Prophet's saddle, and the horse's terror-filled snorts and knickers and the whites of his rolled-back eyes. Following the shouts, yells, and occasional spine-tingling yowls, Prophet put Mean up a game trail, and he and the horse shot up the bank, barreling through berry thickets and catclaw with a crackling rustle of trampled brush, and then leveled out on a rocky slope.

Prophet checked Mean down to a skidding halt as Louisa bolted out of the draw behind him and stopped the pinto off his right stirrup. Both horses whinnied sharply and Prophet held Mean's reins taut in his left hand as he raised his Winchester in his right.

Forty yards away at the base of a low, sage-stippled knoll, a half dozen Apaches—clad in smoked deer-hide breech cloths, moccasins, traditional red bandannas, and colored armbands— were doing some bizarre torture dance around a bulky, red-haired, red-bearded gent they'd staked out spread-eagle on the ground, not far from a smoldering cook fire.

Several stone jugs were strewn about the rocks and catclaw. One Apache, standing on the white man's far side, was tipping back a brown bottle while throwing his free arm behind him in quivering ecstasy. As the others, jerking their heads toward Prophet and Louisa, bellowed surprised, guttural war cries, the drinking brave jerked his bottle down, his own black eyes flashing wickedly in the late day's saffron light.

As though they'd all been connected by the same invisible rope, four of the six braves lunged into instant sprints toward the interlopers, howling and screaming, coarse black hair jouncing across their shoulders, plucking knives or war hatchets from the buffeting sashes around their waists.

Prophet planted his Winchester's barrel on his left forearm and lined up his sights, shouting, “Ah, shit—aim true, girl!”

“I
always
aim true!” Louisa retorted as Prophet drew a bead on the screaming brave breaking toward him, a step ahead of the others and swinging a hide-wrapped hatchet behind his left shoulder.

Prophet's Winchester leaped and belched. The slug took the brave through his throat, just below his chin, snapping his head back on his shoulders and instantly cutting off his tooth-gnashing scream.

As the three others continued sprinting toward Prophet and Louisa, undeterred despite their comrade's death crumple, Louisa leveled a silver-plated Colt straight out from her right shoulder. As she drilled one of the three braves lunging toward her, within ten yards and closing, Prophet levered a fresh round into his Winchester's breech.

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.

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
?”