The Graves at Seven Devils (22 page)

“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 Louisa, 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.

Out like a blown lamp.

Prophet cursed as he grabbed the kid's stout right arm. Rising, he set his boots beneath him, and drew a deep breath. He grunted fiercely as he pulled the kid up and, crouching, drew the boy's two-hundred-plus pounds over his right shoulder. Turning awkwardly, face creased and red from the strain, he hauled the kid over to the claybank, sucking air through his teeth, his boots making sucking sounds in the muddy clay.

It took a good bit of heavy lifting, pushing, and pulling to get the kid into his saddle, and his good wrist tied to the horn. Big Hans didn't awaken once but only grumbled and groaned and called incoherently for someone named Nancy.

When Prophet had tied the boy's mule-eared boots to his stirrups and wrapped rope around his stout waist and the saddle horn, making sure he wouldn't fall off and discombobulate that broken arm, the bounty hunter mounted Mean and Ugly, who'd been watching him with customary skepticism and downright distrust. He looked around once more for Louisa, his heart thudding heavily. Then, clucking with frustration, he put the horses up the trail. He hoped to find an old cabin or a cave in which he could build a fire and get the boy dried out and comfortable.

Then he'd ride back toward the monastery, scouring the trail for Louisa.

He'd ridden for twenty minutes, the sky clearing but the sun falling westward, when a low, adobe-brick shack appeared ahead and left of the trail, sitting at the base of a low, rocky rise stippled with creosote, greasewood, and saguaros.

Prophet stopped Mean in the trail. He rested his hand on the butt of his .45 as he stared at the cabin—a long, low, flat-roofed affair that was no doubt used as a stopover for fiddle-footing outlaw gangs. Firewood was stacked under a lean-to off the hovel's right-side wall.

Smoke wafted from the brick chimney on the shack's right side, rife with the smell of burning pinyon pine and seasoned frijoles. The windows were lit against the gathering darkness. Voices emanated from inside—the low rumble of bawdy male conversation.

Prophet cursed, glanced at Big Hans sagging sideways in his saddle, the kid's face gaunt and colorless. Prophet had seen men die from shock. The big younker desperately needed a bed and a warm fire.

No time to look for another, vacant cabin.

This one would have to do.

Prophet led the horses behind a knoll, dismounted, and tethered both to an ironwood shrub. Shucking his Winchester, he racked a fresh shell and started around the knoll, heading toward the cabin, spurs ringing crisply in the dense, post-storm silence.

“Sit tight, Junior,” he growled, pausing to remove his spurs, setting them on a rock. “I'll be right back.”

THE PINTO HAD heard the falling rock, loosed by a lightning bolt shaped like a razor-edged scythe, before Louisa had. The horse whinnied shrilly, rising off its front hooves and clawing the air. Louisa was nearly thrown straight back off the mount's butt before she got a hand on the apple.

Glancing up, she saw the black mass of boulders tumbling toward her as though thrown from heaven—bouncing off the steep, scree-covered slope right of the trail. Several broke into smaller pieces on impact with the slope, and continued careening straight toward her.

Louisa leaned forward and rammed her spurs into the pinto's flanks.
“Go!”

The horse whinnied and, heart hammering beneath the saddle, lurched into a perilous gallop on the uncertain terrain. Louisa had dropped the reins when she'd reached for the saddle horn and now all she could do was cling to the horn, hunkered low, and hope against hope that the horse didn't slip and fall before it decided to stop.

Not a minute ago, she'd realized that she and the pinto, disoriented by the hammering storm, had gotten off the trail that Hans had been following. It was when she'd halted the pinto and begun turning around that the scythe-shaped lightning bolt had plowed into the ridge above her, loosing the rock and giving her no choice but to continue forward through the narrow, winding chasm that she and the pinto were careening through at the moment.

Behind her, the boulders loosed from above rumbled into the chasm with what sounded like two planets colliding. The rock walls to both sides appeared to shake with the violent, reverberating impact, as did the uneven floor beneath the pinto's pounding hooves, the vibrations reaching up through the saddle and into Louisa's thighs.

Thunder crashed and lightning flashed and the rain slanted down like slender spears with hammer-sized heads. The pinto's hooves splashed through puddles, slipping and sliding in the mud and slick, orange gravel.

Thunder roared like a cymbal crashing just off Louisa's right ear, and the pinto whinnied once more and veered left. Louisa gritted her teeth and flinched, expecting to be rammed against the ridge wall on that side of the trail. But as she swayed right against the horse's abrupt turn, she was surprised and relieved to find that she and the horse had not run into the wall but the horse had found another gap.

Louisa looked around through slitted lids beneath the flat brim of her man's hat. Brush and boulders swept past on both sides in a blur, and she caught a glimpse of dark gray sky intermittently lit with lightning flashes between towering mountain walls.

Holding the saddle horn with one hand, she reached toward the pinto's bridle with the other, hoping to catch a rein so she could haul the horse to a stop. She had the hand out beside the horse's head when the pinto lurched again suddenly, taking a left fork in the canyon, and Louisa was thrown right, her left foot slipping free of the stirrup.

It took her a good half minute to right herself, after several times believing she'd fall beneath the horse's pounding hooves. When she sat upright once more she hunkered down over the horn, holding the apple tight with both hands, content to relinquish her will to that of the horrified pinto.

Hazed by the storm up one canyon and down another and over a high, windy rise, lashed by rain and assaulted by thunder, then through a broad canyon once more, the pinto galloped, tireless as the storm itself. Louisa could feel its muscles expanding and contracting beneath the saddle. She could feel its heart beating like a war drum, hear its breath blowing like the wind over a cave mouth.

Suddenly, the horse lurched out from beneath her. The pinto whinnied. Louisa's arms went up as her legs plunged down with the lurching saddle below.

She gasped as cold water flew up to envelop her body with a wicked, knife-edged chill. She flung her hands toward the pinto's neck, but then her head slipped beneath the roiling, tea-colored surface of the stream. Icy, muddy water trickled down her throat and into her lungs. When her head came up, water sluicing off her face, she drew a gasping, choking breath.

Through slitted lids she saw the pinto's head with white-ringed eyes a good twenty yards downstream from her, shifting this way and that in the pounding, swirling current.

To both sides the high, willow-and-mesquite-sheathed banks rushed past. Her stomach fell as she flailed with her hands and kicked with her legs, trying to keep her head above the brutal current tugging her this way and that. She and the pinto had plunged—or had the muddy bank slipped out from beneath the horse's pounding hooves?—into a flooded arroyo churning and roaring with muddy, leaf-and-branch-strewn water from higher up in the mountains.

A branch protruding from the left bank careened toward her. Louisa twisted her body around and threw her left hand toward the branch. She grunted as she clawed at the tip of the branch, but when she got her fingers wrapped around it she was downstream from it, and the dead leaves crumpled in her hand. The branch broke with a nearly inaudible snap.

She continued twisting and turning downstream, the horse now a vague brown shadow thirty or forty yards ahead of her, between the arroyo's rising and falling banks. Several more branches swept toward her, and she tried to reach for them, but the powerful current swept her too quickly down the arroyo.

She didn't know how long she'd been in the water, fighting to keep her head above the surface and to keep from ramming boulders and half-submerged logs, when the current seemed to relent slightly. As the water followed a long bend to the right, it slowed, the banks falling away to either side.

Choking and gasping for breath, feeling mud like sandpaper in her throat, Louisa was vaguely aware that the rain and thunder had stopped and that lightning only flashed in the far distance beyond several dark peaks. But she was aware that she no longer had to try so hard to keep her head above water and that the current was no longer spinning her like a child's top.

Her right boot hit a rock on the arroyo's floor. The other scuffed sand.

The water level continued to drop until she felt both boots skidding along and snagging the bottom. When the water had dropped to the middle of her white blouse, she scrambled over to the left shore, stumbling, several times falling to her knees, her legs feeling both heavy and numb. Along the shoreline, manzanita grass grew amongst the rocks, and tall cottonwoods stood back a ways from the water, still dripping from the recent rain.

Above the cottonwoods, the sky had cleared. It had turned the light green of early evening.

The air was storm-scoured fresh and cool. Birds chirped, wings flashing silver as they wheeled over the brush.

Coughing up water and flecks of mud, Louisa stumbled onto the shore, waterlogged boots squawking beneath her. They felt like lead weights on her feet. She dropped to her knees before a large cottonwood log and, stretching both hands out onto the log, she lowered her head and vomited water, gagging and choking as she sucked air into her aching, battered lungs.