The Graves at Seven Devils (6 page)

Prophet couldn't tell if the creature was human, let alone male or female. As far as species, it could be one of those part-man, part-beast concoctions glimpsed by settlers or mountain men now and then. As far as sex, this creature's wizened, stooped body in baggy denims, red flannel shirt, and knee-high deerskin moccasins owned features one could, in a pinch, call both male
and
female—namely, two large lumps pushing out the shirt in front and a distinctly mannish face complete with thin, scraggly goat beard and mustache. Long, coarse gray hair fell to its shoulders from a threadbare coonskin cap. The hips were womanishly broad, but the hands wrapped around the shotgun were thick and gnarled as overcooked sausages.

Cursing his stupidity—he knew better than to ignore his backside; he must have been distracted by the naked women—Prophet set his rifle down and turned slowly around, raising his hands shoulder high. “Who the hell are you?”

“Who am
I
?” the beast said, voice so raspy that it must have had a pound of phlegm in its throat. “Who are
you
? I'm guessin' bounty hunter since you ain't wearin' no badge and you look like you been rode hard and put up wet more times than any lawdog could hope for, women generally not favorin' your average badge toter!”

The beast laughed loudly, throwing its head back on its broad, stooped shoulders. Prophet thought that, while the beast was laughing, its colorless eyes slitted, he might have a chance at wrenching the shotgun out of its grip. But he'd taken only half a step forward when the beast snapped the shotgun barrel down suddenly, cutting off its laugh.

The shotgun exploded with a report like a cannon blast, the double-aught buck blowing a crater the size of a well cover in the weeds and gravel just left of Prophet's left boot. The blast's echo hadn't died before the beast, narrowing an eye at Prophet, lifted its chin to yell over the butte top: “Emmitt, get your horny ass up here, son!”

“What is it, Ma?” came a shout from behind and below.

“Quit askin' questions and get up here, godblastit!”

Prophet heard splashing from the river, as of men scrambling toward shore. He spit grit, which the blast had blown into his face, and eyed the creature incredulously. “You're Emmitt's
ma
?”

“That's right. Maybelle Springford Sanderson. I got more names than that, but I whittled 'em down for smoother conversation. Emmitt's pa was three, four men ago, but Emmitt and me, we stayed close.” Mrs. Sanderson cast her head toward the cabin. “That's my cabin, but as long as my boy's around, my cabin is his cabin—his and his bride's.”

“Especially when sonny boy comes callin' with his saddlebags bulging with stolen loot, no doubt.”

“Shut up.” The old woman raked a lusty gaze across Prophet's broad chest. “Big son of a bitch, ain't ya? Thought you could bring down my boy and his gang all on your lonesome, eh? I found only the one horse back yonder. Figurin' to live high on the hog when you raked up all that reward money. Ha!” The old woman threw her head back once more, wheezing a spine-raking laugh, but Prophet knew better than to try for the shotgun again. “Wasn't countin' on Emmitt's
ma
takin' ya down,
was
ya? Ha!”

“No, I sure as hell wasn't,” Prophet had to admit, still holding his hands up, hearing grunts and boot thuds coming from behind the butte shoulder to his left.

He cursed his carelessness once more as Mrs. Sanderson continued squinting down her gut shredder's double barrels at him. Who'd have thought Emmitt Sanderson would have a mother—much less one that had some facility with a sawed-off shotgun? Of course, anyone could have been skulking around out here, and Prophet should have kept the eyes in back of his head skinned. He had only himself to blame for the sudden fix he found himself in.

The footsteps grew as the outlaws led by Emmitt Sanderson appeared around the hill's shoulder, wet hair squashed down under shabby hats—all except for big Horton Whipple, that was, whose enormous, egg-shaped head was bald as a hunk of hard candy under his frayed brown derby.

As the men drew near, they eyed Prophet with skeptical interest. Sanderson—a scrawny little hard case with a ferrety face and jittery black eyes, a perpetual sneer on his thick lips puffy from a recent brawl—stopped beside his ma.

“Who the hell's this?” the outlaw leader asked his mother.

The other men stood spread out to his right, Horton Whipple towering over them. The big man hadn't donned a shirt, and there was nary an inch of skin on his muscular arms and torso that hadn't been tattooed with images of bucking horses and fire-breathing dragons and of men and women engaged in every position of fornication Prophet had even imagined and a good many he hadn't.

“We ain't got
real
good acquainted jus' yet,” Mrs. Sanderson said, holding the barn blaster on Prophet though her son and the other men were all aiming six-shooters at him. “But I found his horse while I was out grubbin' fer roots—ugliest, owliest thing you ever did see, couldn't git near it—and then I tracked this ranny here, spyin' at you fellas and them worthless squaws of yours while ya tussled in the river like savage Injuns raised without religion.”

“Pervert,” said Emmitt's son, Rodney Hayes, who, aside from his size and shifty, sneering eyes, didn't favor his father much in appearance. He had thin, sandy hair, a scrawny neck, pale blue eyes, and a beard growing in rough patches across his pale, pimpled cheeks. “Who the hell are you and what do you want, pervert?”

“Lou Prophet.” It was Sanderson who'd spoke. He had moseyed up to stand five feet in front of the bounty hunter. He was a good six inches shorter than Prophet, and standing downslope from him, the top of his battered Stetson barely reached Prophet's Adam's apple. The outlaw leader tipped his head sideways and squeezed an eye half closed as he studied Prophet's face shaded by Prophet's own dusty, funnel-brimmed Stetson. “Sure enough, this here's Lou Prophet!”

“Well, hell, Emmitt,” Prophet said. “I don't remember ever havin' the pleasure of a formal introduction.”

Sanderson held his cocked Schofield straight out toward Prophet's belly. With the other hand, and holding Prophet's gaze with his own, he slipped Prophet's bowie knife from the broad sheath on his left hip and tossed it into the brush. Then he removed the Colt .45 from the holster thonged low on the bounty hunter's denim-clad right thigh.

“Your reputation shadows you like the fetor of a gold-camp Chinatown.” Sanderson glanced back at the other men flanking his mother. “Boys, we're in for a real treat here. This here's Lou Prophet, bounty tracker from Georgia. Not too many men slip out of his net.” Sanderson laughed a jeering laugh, showing all his teeth. “But Ma done caught him clean—how do ya like that?”

“I like it,” Horton Whipple said, glaring at Prophet as he polished his right fist against his left hand. “I like it real good.”

“I was just passin' through, fellas,” Prophet said, desperately fishing for any way to free himself from this bear trap. “I was thinkin' about havin' me a little soak in the river my own self.” He chuckled. “Good thing I scouted it out first. We coulda had us an embarrassin' situation. Now, then, if you'll just let me collect my weapons, I'll—”

“A little soak, my ass,” said the fourth man, whose name was Wally “Cisco” Wood, from Milestown in the Montana Territory. He was a dumb-looking, straight-nosed, straight-necked stringbean who didn't look like he'd started shaving yet, though according to the paper on him he'd killed a school-teacher and three children on a playground near Pine Bluff, Utah, when the teacher had refused him a drink of water. He stood barefoot, holding his boots and socks in one hand, his ivory-handled Smith & Wesson in the other. “Why, he's been trailin' us, boys! He knows about the bounty on our heads, and he's been trailin' us!”

“Damn, Cisco,” sneered Rodney Hayes. “Nothin' gits past you, does it?”

Emmitt stood grinning up at Prophet. His two front teeth were yellow and square, with a thick layer of coffee-colored grime caked between teeth and gum. “Lou Prophet. Damn, it sure is gonna be a pleasure to kill you. Yessir!” He turned as if to step away, but then he jerked back, swinging Prophet's own Colt around, grip forward, and rammed the butt into the dead center of Prophet's belly.

The breath left Prophet's lungs in a loud
“Uhfff!”
He stumbled back up the hill, getting his boots tangled beneath him and falling hard on his butt. His hat tumbled off his shoulder. Sucking air and holding one arm across his gut, he rolled onto his right elbow and straightened his legs slightly, trying to unknot his midsection to get some air back into his lungs. Sanderson was a scrawny little bastard, but he packed a hell of a gut-stoving, rib-splintering punch.

Emmitt's mother threw her head back on her shoulders and laughed as though at the funniest joke she'd ever seen. “Good one, boy! The bigger they are the harder they fall!”

Emmitt shuffled around like a rooster, crowing along with his mother. He stepped up to Prophet once more, grabbed a handful of Prophet's sandy hair. “If you think
that
was somethin', Ma, watch thi—”

“Hold on,” Horton Whipple said, grabbing Sanderson's arm as the outlaw leader was about to ram his knee against Prophet's forehead.

Emmitt frowned up at the big man, red-faced. Whipple must have stood just a few inches under seven feet. He had a big, bushy red mustache and blue eyes with what appeared to be flecks of gold steel in them.

Emmitt snarled, “Goddamnit, Whipple. I told you
never
touch me!”

Whipple stared down at Prophet. The big man looked like a bizarrely mottled mountain wall standing there, with his lewd tattoos and egg-shaped head and flat blue eyes. “He killed an old pard of mine in Missouri a few years back. I wanna shot at this four-flushin', bounty-huntin' son of a bitch.” He scowled challengingly down at the pint-sized Sanderson, opening and closing his hands. “And I aim to git it.”

Frowning angrily, Sanderson opened his mouth to object, then closed his mouth suddenly. The wrinkles above the bridge of his nose planed out as he shuttled his gaze between Prophet and Whipple and back again, a slow, cunning smile building on his lips.

“Why not?” Chuckling, he backed away and glanced at the other men standing in a semicircle behind him. “We might even take bets on it, eh, boys?”

His mother was grinning delightedly, three or four crooked teeth showing in her rotten gums. She'd hiked a hip on a rock and was resting the sawed-off across her denim-clad thighs. A lumpy tow sack rested on the rock behind her.

Prophet caught his breath and gained his knees as Sanderson, Hayes, and Cisco bet on the fight's outcome, including how long it would take one man to beat the other senseless, then to kill him. Scuffling around and arguing and elbowing, they handed their money to the grinning and chuckling Maybelle Sanderson, who bet five dollars just to balance things out that Prophet would knock Whipple flat on his back in five minutes.

Again she raked her lusty animal gaze across Prophet's chest and shoulders, and the bounty hunter had to suppress a shiver of revulsion. Then, when wads of greenbacks protruded from his mother's jeans pockets, Sanderson herded Prophet and Whipple down the slope about forty yards to a level area, where only wheatgrass and a few clumps of sagebrush grew, and told them to go at it.

“Hold on,” Prophet said, unbuttoning his shirt cuffs. “I gotta roll my sleeves up.” He took his time, darting his glance around at Whipple shadowboxing before him, grunting and snarling like a wounded grizzly, and the three other men and Mrs. Sanderson forming a rough circle around them.

How in the hell was he going to get out of this one? Even if he somehow managed to clean Whipple's clock, the others would gun him, for they each held a pistol while Mrs. Sanderson continued caressing that sawed-off like a newborn babe in her arms.

He had a fleeting notion of somehow getting Whipple into a headlock and threatening to break his neck if the others didn't give him a gun. But hell, they'd only laugh at him. Whipple meant nothing to them. His dying would only mean more stage loot for the rest of them.

Besides, Whipple had a good four inches and about thirty pounds—most of it muscle—on Prophet. The prospect of Prophet getting the giant into a headlock was as far-fetched as the hope that a gun-toting angel would ride down from Heaven to smite down the Sanderson gang in a hail of righteous lead.

Prophet rolled his right sleeve up to his biceps.

Whipple stepped toward him, holding fists up in front of his chin, eyes pinched, broad face pink with fury. “Ready for your whuppin' now, bounty man?”

Prophet raised his fists and shuffled sideways. “Tell me, Whipple, who was this fella you say I killed over Missouri way?”

The big man lunged toward Prophet, throwing a left jab. Prophet jerked his head away, and Whipple's fist only scraped the side of his chin.

“Frank Dawson.”

“Dawson?” Prophet bunched his brows as he dodged another jab. “Ah, hell”—he lurched forward, feigning a blow with his right fist and landing a left jab to Whipple's hard, muscle-strapped belly, evoking a grunt from the man—“
I
didn't kill him. I was
chasin'
him and he ran out in front of a stage-coach. The team trampled him, dragged him for a good two blocks, and then the coach itself hammered him into little more than a grease splotch!”

Whipple lurched forward with surprising speed, and landed an ear-ringing roundhouse against Prophet's left cheek. The world pitched for a couple of seconds as Prophet skipped back, blinking, trying to clear his vision.