The Graves at Seven Devils (3 page)

Fletcher and Colter shared a glance. They chuckled around the food in their mouths, and Marie Antoinette gave a snort and followed suit.

As they ate the sandwiches and garden vegetables, they chatted about work that needed doing around their place—the house needed a new porch, the chicken coop needed a new roof, and the stable door was off its hinges again. To help makes ends meet, Marie Antoinette sold eggs and bread around town, and she was having trouble keeping up with her growing clientele.

“It's going to be a big help to have my cousin here,” she said, biting into a radish. Chewing, she glanced pensively at the remaining radish between the thumb and index finger of her right hand. “Dear Louisa . . . haven't seen her in years. Not since she was just a little tyke running about her family's place in Nebraska. . . .”

“What's her last name again, Ma?” Colter asked. He'd finished a sandwich and held his half-empty glass of milk to his lips.

“Bonaventure. Louisa Bonaventure,” Marie Antoinette said. “She's a good five, six years younger than me. Not yet twenty, I don't think. My ma and her pa were brother and sister. We all lived in the same county up in Nebraska until Pa went crazy from drink, and Ma took us out to Colorado. That was long before renegades burned the Bonaventure farm, killing everyone in Louisa's family except Louisa herself.”

“That's a terrible thing,” Fletcher said, brushing crumbs from his vest and leaning back in his chair, hands on his thighs. “How'd she get away?”

“Don't know,” Marie said. “All I know is she's been on the drift ever since. Not sure doin' what—but a young woman alone”—her eyes grew dark as she reflected on her own experience after her mother passed away from a fever—“I can imagine. Judging by her letter, she's looking forward to finally settling down.” She leaned forward on her elbows and gratefully smiled at her husband across the desk. “I know how she feels.”

Fletcher stood, sucking meat from between two teeth. “I'm glad you'll have family here, honey. This winter, and funds permitting, I'll see about adding a new room onto the house. In the meantime, I best shade the trail for—”

“Hey, Pa.” Colter had moved to the open jailhouse door for a breath of air still fresh from the recent downpour. He was looking westward up the broad main drag. “Best come have a look at this.”

“What is it, son?” Brushing crumbs from his soup-strainer mustache, the tall, lean sheriff, his longish brown hair beginning to gray at the temples, crossed to the front door. He sidled up to the boy, whose head came up to his shoulder, and followed Colter's gaze westward along the soggy, deserted main street.

The Arizona town of Seven Devils claimed a population of a little over two hundred, but since gold had grown scarce in the surrounding mountains, that figure was now stretching it. The jailhouse sat in the middle of Main Street, on the north side, but the west edge of town was only about sixty yards away. That's where the last sandstone and adobe-brick business buildings abruptly stopped and the desert took over—red rocks, creosote shrubs, mesquite, sage, and saguaros, all hemmed in by towering, craggy ridges now partly concealed by gauzy, fast-moving clouds.

The desert floor wasn't concealed, however. Fletcher's eyes had no trouble picking out the handful of riders moving down a gentle slope toward the town—about seventy yards from the town's edge and closing quickly, horses loping as they meandered around rocks and boulders and cactus snags.

A wan light filtered through the low clouds, but there was light enough to reflect off the silver trimming the horses' tack and the high-crowned hat of one of the three lead riders. It reflected also off the bandoliers crossing the chests of two of the riders, and off the silver-plated pistols holstered and thonged on the thighs of the rider farthest back.

All six were distinctive, but the last one rode a high-stepping, white Arab with a fancy black bridle and a bloodred saddle blanket peeking out from beneath the gold-trimmed saddle.

Colter glanced up at Fletcher, a sharpened matchstick protruding from the boy's lips. He squinted one eye, incredulous. “Those boys sure ain't from around here.”

Fletcher shook his head as he continued staring at the approaching group, fascinated not only by their distinctive attire but by the number of revolvers, rifles, shotguns, and knives each somehow managed to cram onto himself and his horse. A man in blue army trousers and wearing a faded blue cavalry hat, with bandoliers crisscrossing his chest, even had a sword dangling off his right leg.

The hoof thuds rose as the group entered town, splashing through mud puddles and flooded wheel ruts. Their saddles squawked, bridle chains and spurs jangling.

Fletcher could now see that only five of the gang were men. The one bringing up the rear, well back from the others and riding the sleek white Arab, was a woman—a big-boned but attractive girl with copper-red hair streaming down from her funnel-brimmed straw hat. Her hair appeared highlighted with lime-green streaks, and green paint outlined her green eyes.

In front of her, in the group's middle, rode the man with the cavalry hat and the sword. Beside him rode a beefy black man with a black, gold-buttoned clawhammer coat, white shirt, gold vest, and a red sash around his waist. Two Buntline Specials were wedged behind the sash while bandoliers filled with shotgun shells crisscrossed his broad chest and a sawed-off shotgun dangled down before his bulging belly by a wide, brown lanyard.

Footsteps sounded behind Fletcher, but he didn't turn away from the street as Marie Antoinette moved onto the boardwalk to his left, saying, “What's goin' on out here, fellas?”

The three front riders drew even with the jailhouse as they continued east down the wide street, probably heading for a saloon or whorehouse. Fletcher's skeptical eyes slid back and forth across them, and he almost snorted with bemused disbelief.

The three men—tall, gangly, pale, and with long, black hair dancing about their shoulders—wore physical features so identical that, if they'd been attired in the same clothes, they would have been impossible to tell apart. They were hawk-faced and, aside from beak-like noses, almost delicate-featured, with pale skin and thin beards and narrow necks rising from bony shoulders.

They all wore checked suits of similar cuts. One wore a brown suit, the second a green suit, and the third a salmon-colored suit. They all wore collarless, pin-striped shirts beneath their shabby coats. Two wore straw sombreros while the man in the salmon-checked suit wore a black opera hat and rose-colored glasses like those favored by gamblers. They all wore high-topped, mule-eared boots adorned with a thick coating of clay-colored dust and large, Spanish-style spurs. Continuing on past the jailhouse, the look-alike in the opera hat turned a toothy grin to Fletcher and gave a courtly bow.

“Afternoon, Sheriff,” he said in a thick Southern accent. Tennessee, Fletcher thought. The man's small, brown eyes slid to Marie Antoinette, giving the sheriff's wife a cool up and down as he added, “Wet one today . . .”

Then he and the two others were past the jailhouse and beginning to angle toward Carstairs's Saloon on the other side of the street, near the east edge of town.

As the black man and the man with the cavalry hat and the sword rode past the jailhouse, dismissing Fletcher with belligerent sneers, the redheaded girl behind them stopped her white Arab abruptly to cast her gaze toward Fletcher's side of the street and several buildings west.

“Hi there, little girl!”

A woman in a bonnet and shawl and a little girl with yellow sausage curls flopping to her shoulders had stopped in the street to let the riders pass. Both stood a few feet into the street, the little girl clinging to the woman's hand and regarding the female rider cautiously.

The girl atop the Arab reached up and picked a flower from behind her ear and held it out over the side of her saddle. “Come get a flower!”

The little girl with the sausage curls glanced up at her mother, then suddenly jerked her hand free and dashed into the street.

“Kayleen!” admonished the woman.

Kayleen ran to the Arab and stopped suddenly, gaining a timid air and holding both hands straight down by her sides. She shyly regarded the well-set up redhead leaning out from her saddle and gently offering the white flower between thumb and index finger.

“I just picked it out yonder,” she said. “It's new and fresh as you are. Go ahead. Tuck it behind your ear. It'll bring a shine to the whole rest of your day!”

STANDING WITH HIS wife and stepson on the plank stoop fronting the jailhouse, Sheriff Tobias Fletcher watched the little girl—whom he recognized as Kayleen Finnegan—pluck the desert wildflower from the hand of the strange young woman with green-streaked red hair sitting atop the spry white Arabian.

Fletcher's heart was beating in his throat. Something about this group—more than just their bizarre appearance—had pricked the hair on the back of his neck, but he couldn't pinpoint what it was. Not wanting to frighten the girl needlessly, he restrained himself from stepping down off the stoop and ordering Kayleen's mother, Constance, wife of the town harness maker, to grab her daughter and skedaddle.

Instead, he stood tensely between Marie Antoinette and Colter, his right hand draped over the worn walnut grips of his old Remington .44, watching.

“Mama, look what that nice lady gave me!” Holding the white flower up to her nose, sausage curls dancing on her shoulders, Kayleen ran back toward her mother waiting a few feet from the boardwalk fronting the drug shop.

The redhead chuckled and gigged the Arab forward, making tracks after the five men in her group. Fletcher unconsciously slid his hand from the .44's grips and felt a slight cessation of pressure in his throat. As the girl and the Arab drew even with the jailhouse, the girl, who'd spied Fletcher, Marie Antoinette, and Colter before she'd given Kayleen the flower, grinned and waved as though she were passing on a train.

“Hi there, Sheriff!” She had a strangely pitched, little girl's voice coupled with a bodacious, tomboyish air that Fletcher found at once alluring and off-putting. Around her waist she wore two bone-gripped .36 Remingtons in oiled, brown-leather holsters trimmed with silver stars. Adjusting her funnel-brimmed straw hat, she slid her green-eyed gaze to Colter and then back to Fletcher and Marie Antoinette. “Strappin' young lad ya got there. By this time next year, he'll be sproutin' up tall as a fir tree. He'll do ya proud, that one. Well, see ya!”

With that, she heeled the Arab into a lope, passing the jailhouse and angling over to Norman Carstairs's two-story, adobe-brick saloon with a brush-roofed front gallery and gray smoke billowing out the chimney. The rest of the group's horses were tied to the hitchrail, swishing their tails and drawing water from the stock tank.

“That's about the looniest-looking crew of hard cases I've ever seen,” Marie Antoinette said softly, staring toward the saloon and giving a jerk as though from a sudden chill.

Kitty-corner across the street, the redhead glanced back toward the jailhouse, smiling brightly as she tied the Arab to the hitchrail. She ducked under the rail and skipped up the gallery's three front steps, her spurred boots chinging softly in the heavy, post-rain silence.

“You can say that again,” Fletcher said, watching the girl sashay through the saloon's batwing doors as though she owned the place. “If they weren't so well armed, I'd say they were part of some traveling burlesque show. But I never seen actors arm themselves like bandits.”

Colter looked up at him, eyes bright. “You think they're here to rob the bank, Pa?”

“Don't know,” Fletcher mused, nibbling his mustache as he stared toward Carstairs's place.

He'd been sheriff for a little over a year, and he'd had a relatively easy time in spite of all the outlaws reportedly holed up in the Seven Devils Range only fifty miles south of town. He'd had to turn the key on only harmless drunk prospectors and Mrs. Berg's hired man. Aside from a couple of half-breed, low-at-heel rustlers, he'd had to pull his gun on no one. He'd never shot anything with less than four legs in his life and was only fair to middling at drawing quickly.

Most of the time, while practicing his fast draw out back of the chicken coop after Marie Antoinette and Colter had gone to bed, he got the gun's fore sight hung up in his holster. He feared that if he ever had to draw down on someone, there was a good chance he'd shoot himself in the thigh or blow off his foot.

Now he swallowed down a small, dry knot in his throat as he stared across the street at the saloon and said pensively, “They could be one o' them groups from the range, but there ain't much for 'em
here
. No . . . I just don't know. . . .”

Colter was still looking up at him with that excited, boyish gleam in his eyes. “You gonna check it out, Pa? Maybe give'em the boot, if ya have to?”

“Colter!” Marie Antoinette wrapped her hand around Fletcher's forearm. “You best steer clear of them, honey. You see how many guns they were carrying? I saw at least three on each man. Even the girl was sportin'—”

“I saw.” Fletcher felt suddenly annoyed that his wife and stepson were here to witness his apprehension. He put some steel in his words as he said, “I reckon I'll check it out if I have to. But first I'm gonna look through that fresh batch of wanted dodgers I got in last week. See if any of their faces match—”

He'd just turned toward the jailhouse's open door when a man's scream rose suddenly. It was a shrill cry, filled with excruciating pain and terror.

Fletcher turned toward Carstairs's Saloon as the scream came again, even louder than before as it shot out from behind the saloon's batwing doors to careen around the street, echoing off buildings. A woman shouted something that Fletcher couldn't make out, and then there rose the muffled scuffs and thuds of boots and the raw scrapes of chairs being kicked around a wooden floor. Men grunted and yelled.