The Graves at Seven Devils (19 page)

“You don't mind if I take the lead this time, do you, Miss Bonnyventure?” Prophet said smartly. He'd finished hiding the dead Apache's body in the rocks, in case others came looking for him and cut his sign. He grabbed Mean's reins and shouldered his Winchester.

Louisa gave her chin another defiant lift and ticked a finger against the flat brim of her black hat. “If it'll make you feel better.”

“Much obliged.”

Prophet led the dun past her and the pinto, and with Louisa leading the pinto behind him and Big Hans—who was suddenly, uncharacteristically quiet in the wake of the shooting—bringing up the rear with his shifty-eyed claybank, the three continued up and over the rocky rise and down the other side. Prophet watched the terrain intently, for Apaches could meld nearly completely with their surroundings.

But no more braves showed themselves or flung arrows down from the rocks.

The dead brave must have been on his own, maybe the sole survivor of a run-in with Yaquis, also known to haunt this country, or with cavalry. His face had been painted for war, so he wasn't just out here communing with nature.

At the bottom of the rubble pile and on the far side of the gap between the mesas, Prophet, Louisa, and Big Hans mounted up once more and gigged their horses into long, loping strides. The terrain was table-flat, with few rocks and cholla snags, and they wanted to get as far away from the dead Apache as possible.

The sun was a golden orb falling fast toward the toothy western ridges behind them when they broke out of the chaparral and reined their mounts down at the edge of a hard-packed yard surrounding a low-slung white adobe. A windmill sat in the middle of the yard, towering above a stone stock tank.

Right of the adobe lay an overgrown corral, and straight east lay a long line of half-ruined mud-brick stables that had probably once served the rancho. The cracked adobe walls were bathed in the coppery light of the falling sun.

Big Hans grinned at Prophet as he pulled back hard on the mule's reins; the mule and the horses all smelled the water in the stock tank beneath the windmill. “I told you there was a canteen out here.”

Prophet was sleeving sweat from his forehead and raking his eyes around the place before him, noting the two saddled horses tied before the brush-roofed gallery. “Boy, I gotta admit, finding a cantina out here is like—”

A gun exploded from inside the saloon—a hollow, tinny bark that made the two horses in front of the place jerk their heads up and skitter-hop. The report was followed by a shouted curse, a scream, three more shots, and another scream.

“Double-crossin' son of a bitch!” a man shouted.

Two more pops—
k-blam
!
K-blam!

Both Prophet and Louisa had their revolvers out as they stared toward the adobe house. Prophet thumbed his Colt's hammer back when a man in a battered hat and bright red shirt stumbled out the door and across the porch to drop to his knees on the far side of the jittery horses.

Prophet glanced at Louisa, then spurred Mean and Ugly straight into the yard. As he pulled up about twenty feet in front of the thatch-roofed hovel, the red-shirted man pushed up off his knees and stumbled forward. He twisted around and fired two shots into the cantina's front wall though it appeared he'd been aiming for the door.

The tied horses whinnied and bucked as shards of adobe ticked around the gallery.

The red-shirted man yelled, “Bastards!” and squeezed his revolver's trigger. But the hammer hit the firing pin with a sharp ping—empty. He dropped the gun and, clutching his upper belly with both hands, continued stumbling forward as though he were trying to run through quicksand.

He looked up, saw the three newcomers sitting their mounts in the yard, and angled toward Big Hans. Falling forward, he grabbed the boy's saddle horn. The mule nickered indignantly as the man looked up at the boy, his face sweat-soaked and pain-racked, and groaned several times before, knees slowly buckling, he said, “Those . . . double-crossing bastards . . . been wantin' me
dead
fer a long fuckin' time!”

Big Hans held his frightened horse's reins taut to his chest as he looked at Prophet and Louisa as if for counsel.

The red-shirted man looked up at Big Hans and sobbed. “They killed me, didn't they?”

Big Hans's eyes were large as saucers. He swallowed and blinked. His voice was thick and low. “I reckon they did, sir.”

The red-shirted man dropped to his knees and fell facedown in the yard. Big Hans's horse whinnied horrifically and, giving a halfhearted buck, sidled away from the man whose blood quickly reddened the dust beneath him.

Boot thumps and spur chings rose from inside the saloon, and Prophet ripped his gaze from the dead man to the front door. Another man appeared, bounding forward as though to break down an invisible door.

He was broad and unshaven, and he wore no hat on his bullet-shaped, bald head. With one hand he clutched his upper left chest while wielding a smoking Colt Army in the other. Blood gushed from a bullet wound in his right temple.

“Hold it!” Prophet said as he and Louisa extended their Colts at the man at the same time, Big Hans's clay nickering and stomping behind them.

The man dropped to his knees before Prophet's order had died on his lips. The man groaned and panted and pressed the heel of his hand to the ragged hole in his chest. He held his Colt straight down to the porch floor as he regarded Prophet desperately, his small blue eyes pinched with pain.

“That bastard dead?”

Prophet glanced at the red-shirted man lying facedown in the dirt. The man's right boot twitched as though with a slight electrical charge.

“Close enough,” Prophet said.

“Good!” The man on the porch fell forward, his face hitting the porch floor with a resolute smack.

Prophet glanced at the two dead men once more, then looked at the door, half expecting another man to run out yelling and shooting. Another man did appear, but this one—an old, stoop-shouldered Mexican with thin gray hair and an upswept gray mustache—merely stood in the open doorway, squinting out into the fading sunlight at the dead men.

He looked at Prophet and Louisa and at Big Hans, who had jumped down from his prancing claybank and stood holding the beast's reins, a wary look in his eyes. The Mex turned and grunted something in Spanish behind him.

Presently, a young Mexican boy scuttled out from behind the man. Clad in soiled, torn canvas trousers, a serape, and rope-sole sandals, his black, unevenly cut hair hanging to his shoulders, he dashed off the porch, paused to give the three newcomers a quick, cautious scrutiny, then knelt and began going through the pockets of the dead man on the porch.

Prophet looked at the Mexican man still standing between the batwings. “You got any more shooters in there?”

“Not alive!” In Spanish, the old Mex told the boy to make sure he removed the dead men's boots—he could make some extra pocket jingle off barefoot pilgrims—and to take their horses to the stable. Then he turned and disappeared back inside the saloon.

Prophet turned to Louisa, shrugged, holstered his .45, and swung down from the saddle.

Sitting on her pinto tensely, still holding her cocked Colt in her hand, Louisa stared at his broad, sweat-dark back. “You intend to stop here?”

“Why not?” Prophet led Mean and Ugly toward the clattering windmill and the stock tank. “They got water. Inside, they probably got whiskey.”

“No time for spirituous liquids, Lou.”

Prophet doffed his hat and glanced over his shoulder, grinning. “There's always time for spirituous liquids, Miss Bonnyventure.” While Mean drew water, swishing his tail luxuriously, Prophet leaned over the stone-walled tank and ducked his head in the cool, refreshing fluid.

 

When Prophet, Louisa, and Big Hans had watered their horses, they tied the mounts to the hitchrack fronting the cantina and mounted the gallery in single file, Prophet taking the lead, Big Hans bringing up the rear. The two dead men lay where they'd fallen in the blood-splashed dirt, their pockets inside out, worthless paraphernalia like playing cards and pencil stubs littering the ground around them, their guns, knives, and boots gone, their socks half off.

Prophet rested his Winchester on his shoulder and ducked through the doorway, instinctively stepping to one side so the door didn't backlight him, and looked around. Louisa and Hans followed suit on the other side of the door.

The room was well lit by high, arched windows recessed in the thick adobe walls. The herringbone-patterned ceiling was low, with several dusty ristras hanging from it. Another dead man—a short hombre in blue denims and a black-and-white-checked shirt—lay in the middle of the room near an overturned table and broken glass. He stared unseeing at the ceiling, his hazel eyes reflecting the salmon light angling through the western windows.

His boots were gone, his pockets pulled out of his pants. A small notebook, a .36 cartridge casing, a bullet-smashed, blood-smeared pocket watch, and a rabbit's foot—all apparently deemed worthless—lay on his bloody chest.

The boy was sweeping up glass shards near the dead man's head. Hatless before, the kid now wore a stained, cream Stetson that was a couple of sizes too large for his head, a hawk feather protruding from the braided-rawhide band.

Regarding the newcomers with dark, animal-like caution, he adjusted the angle of his new hat, then swept the liquor-soaked glass and a cork into a neat pile, firming up the edges.

“Any survivors?” Prophet asked the Mexican, who stood chopping up a couple of big jackrabbits on the long bar running along the room's right wall.

The Mexican dropped a bloody leg into an iron pot. “Survivors are few and far between in these parts, amigo.” He shrugged a shoulder. “It's a hell of a mess, but I don't argue with the extra
dinero
.”

He chuckled, showing his silver-capped upper teeth. When his eyes had finished appreciating Louisa, they slid to Big Hans, still standing near the door, and widened.

“Hansy?” The Mexican stared, frowning. “Is that little Hansy Kleinsasser?”

Big Hans slid his gaze from the dead man on the floor to the Mexican behind the bar. His lips spread in a grin. “How ya doin', Rudolpho?”

Wiping his hands on a damp towel, the barman ducked under the bar planks, wincing against the strain in his back. He tossed the towel onto the bar behind him and ambled up to Hans, his eyes wide, lower jaw hanging. “What you do back here?” He glanced at Prophet and Louisa once more, then rose up on his toes to peer over the big younker's broad left shoulder. “Where's your uncle? He's tending the horses?”

Big Hans shook his head and pursed his lips. “Alphonse is dead, Rudolpho. That's what brings me here with my new friends—Lou Prophet and Louisa Bonaventure.”

He glanced at his companions and nodded to indicate the barman. “This here's Rudolpho Salinas. He staked me and Uncle Alphonse when our bellies were kissing our backbones. Anyway, Rudolpho, there's a gang out here, the Three of a Kind Gang. They burned Seven Devils, the town, and Alphonse burned up in the barn. I couldn't get him out. We're trackin' them vipers. These two are bounty hunters.”

At the mention of the Three of a Kind Gang, a cloud had passed over Salinas's broad, dark face with its slightly off-center left eye.
“Sí, sí,”
he said quickly, looking around as if the gang were lurking nearby. “I know of this gang. Five men and a girl—if you can call her that.”

The barman shook his head, frowning at Hans. “No, no, Hans. You must go back to Seven Devils!”

“There's nothing left in Seven Devils but ashes.”

Salinas shook his head again. “Then go to Tucson. Or Lordsburg. Christos—I will give you a job
here
tending my horses. I have accumulated so many I could start my own ranch! But do not, I beg of you, go any farther into the mountains. Many bad men. More even than before—the Three of a Kind Gang the worst of all of them. . . .”

Big Hans just stared at the shorter man, his blue eyes bleak. Salinas sighed, shook his head again, then turned and gestured toward one of the tables.

“You sit, huh? It's been a long ride, no? I bring drinks, and I have rooms in the back.” He grinned at Louisa, his eyes lustily taking the high-busted, well-armed girl's measure. “I even have the old fountain working back there. It makes a pleasant sound in the evening.”

Louisa ignored the old man's lusty gaze. “You know where the Three of a Kind bunch is holed up, do you, Mr. Salinas?”

Salinas held a finger to his lips as he looked around once more. “
Sh-sh!
It is not good to speak of the outlaws.”

As the newcomers sat at a table against the back wall, near an old, faded painting of a plumed-helmeted conquistador on a high-stepping white stallion, Salinas pitched his voice low. “If word got around that I spoke of them . . .”

He made a slashing motion across his throat as he looked directly at Prophet. “Besides, I do not know where any of the hideouts are. It is not something that is spread around. But I will tell you this—many lawmen and bounty hunters have passed through here over the years.” Salinas shook his head sadly. “Maybe one in thirty I ever see again. Now, please, what would you like to drink?”

“Do you have sarsaparilla?” Louisa asked, tossing her hat on the table and biting her gloves off her fingers.

Salinas looked at her as though she'd spoken some alien tongue. He shook his head slowly, frowning. Prophet looked at her, too, scowling.

The girl shrugged. “Glass of cold water.”