The Graves at Seven Devils (7 page)

He'd thought he could rile the man into swinging wild punches, but that one had landed right where Whipple had intended. If he landed many more, Mrs. Sanderson was going to be out five singles and Prophet would soon be feeding the carp in the yonder stream.

“Yessir,” Prophet said, never one to easily give up on a plan, “the undertaker's sons were scooping ole Frank outta the dust with shovels and soup ladles, and what they couldn't get the dogs finished off.”

“Don't listen to him, Whip!” Emmitt shouted as the others clapped and yelled on either side of him. “He's just tryin' to get your goat!”

Whipple bunched his lips and puffed his cheeks as he stormed forward, bringing his right ham-sized fist up from his heels. Prophet ducked. The fist whistled through the air over Prophet's head. As Whipple continued wheeling sideways with the swing's momentum, Prophet bolted up and forward and slammed his own right against the man's left ear.

“Uhhn-ah!” Whipple gritted his teeth with fury and brushed at the two-inch gash angling down from the top of his ear and from which thick red blood issued. It glistened in the midday light as it dribbled down over the lobe.

“Told ya!” Mrs. Sanderson crowed, packing her pipe. “Never fight a doomed man!”

“Mercy,” Prophet said, sidling around the cursing Whipple. “I bet that hurts like hell!”

Just as Prophet had hoped, the man came at him, swinging from his heart instead of his brain, and within two seconds he'd swung twice, one fist again cleaving the air over Prophet's head while the other merely grazed the bounty hunter's chin.

Prophet got inside and landed one punch to the man's right-side ribs and another to his left.

Whipple staggered backward, trying to get away. Prophet followed, keeping his own rage on a short leash, funneling all his strength to his fists, and laid a right uppercut to the big man's jaw.

Whipple hit the ground on his back.

“Come on, Whip!” Cisco cried. “I got a gold cartwheel ridin' on ya, bud!”

Prophet didn't want the man to get up again. As Whipple began pushing himself up off his back, Prophet dove on top of him, snaked his hands around the man's bull neck, and began pressing his thumbs against his rock-hard Adam's apple.

Whipple gritted his teeth and made gurgling sounds, spit bubbling out from between his lips, snot blowing from his nose. The big man wrapped his hands around Prophet's wrists, tried to pry the bounty hunter's hands from his neck. The others whooped and yelled, and Mrs. Sanderson cackled like a crazed hen, thoroughly enjoying the show. Prophet levered himself forward off his knees, tightening his grip on Whipple's neck and grinding the back of the big man's head into the ground.

“Gosh, Whip,” Prophet said, stretching his lips back from his teeth, the cords standing out in his neck, “I hope the loot ole Frank was carryin' wasn't part yours. That was one helluva lot of dinero!”

Whipple managed to pry Prophet's grip loose enough to rasp, “We planned . . . that job . . . for four months . . . you son of a bitch!”

“Doesn't that piss-burn ya?” Prophet inwardly cursed as the big man continued to pry the bounty hunter's death grip loose. “Hell, you coulda lived in Mexico for
years
on all that gold!”

Whipple took a deep breath, pinched his eyes, and arched his back as he heaved straight up against Prophet's weight. “Kill . . . you . . . b-b-bastard!”

As Prophet's hands began rising from the big man's sweat-slick neck, he realized the folly of his ways. That his plan had backfired was literally hammered home when Whipple slammed his right knee into the bounty hunter's groin.

Prophet groaned. His hands slipped off the big man's neck and a half second later he found himself on his back, his balls burning and throbbing, his gut churning with nausea. He tried to lift his own right fist, but Whipple, straddling Prophet now, rammed two vision-dulling right jabs against Prophet's left cheek.

Prophet fell slack as his lights went out briefly. When his lids fluttered open again, he saw Whipple, still on top of him, reaching down toward his right boot. The hand came up again, and a savage smile took shape on Whipple's chapped lips as he held a wide-bladed, horn-handled bowie knife out for Prophet's inspection, as though it were a weapon the bounty hunter might want to buy or trade for.

The others were shouting and whooping and dancing in circles around Whipple and Prophet, kicking up dust and flinging pebbles and grit at Prophet's face.

“Kill him, Whip!” Rodney Hayes shouted. “Kill him dead!”

“Go ahead and send him to Jesus, Whip,” Emmitt Sanderson said. “The girls prob'ly done got our lunch ready, and I'm starvin'!”

“Damn.” Mrs. Sanderson shook her head as she puffed her pipe. “That's five greenbacks I'll never see again.”

Whipple's eyes slightly crossed as he stared down at Prophet. “See that?” he growled, turning the knife this way and that, letting the sun catch it. “That blade's so sharp it'll trim the hair on a frog's cock.”

The man suddenly drew the knife back, bunching his lips and slanting the blade toward Prophet. “Won't be no job o' work to cut your
throat
!”

Prophet kicked his legs and tried to lift his arms, but it was no use. The big man had him pinned to the ground. He could only watch in horror as Whipple loosed a bearlike roar and slashed the blade toward Prophet's neck.

LOU PROPHET WAS about to shake hands with the Devil himself—Ole Scratch, as he was called—with whom Prophet had a special bond. The two would meet at last and, as per the agreement they had made when Prophet had survived the War of Northern Aggression and wanted only to live, drink, and carouse to his heart's content for the remainder of his days, the bounty hunter would begin his long, eternal stint shoveling coal in Hell.

Damn. He'd thought he'd have another few years on this side of the sod to stomp with his tail up.

Regretting the pact he'd made, the bounty hunter squeezed his eyes closed and gritted his teeth. He no longer felt the throbbing ache in his groin as he awaited the slash of Whipple's knife that would no doubt cleave his head from his shoulders.

Something wet sprayed across his cheek.

Prophet opened his eyes as a rifle cracked somewhere off in the hills to his right. Whipple straddled him, holding both his knife hand and his free hand chest high. The hands were quivering, the knife flashing in the sunlight. Whipple's head was tipped against his right shoulder, and oddly twisted.

There was a round hole on the left side of his head, just above his ear—a hole about the size of a sewing thimble. Blood dribbled from the hole to form a small river down the side of the big man's bald head. The other side of his skull had opened like a smashed melon, and blood and brains and large chunks of bone ran down his right shoulder and arm to puddle on the ground beside Prophet's hip.

The big man's chest heaved once and his eyes rolled back in his head. His lower jaw dropped. He groaned as he dropped the knife and began to sag toward the ground.

Prophet was trying to figure out who'd fired the shot, as were the other men standing around him and staring down at Whipple with looks of incredulity and horror. Mrs. Sanderson was the first to recover from the shock. She bolted up from the rock she'd been sitting on, glanced around quickly, then lurched toward Prophet, bringing up her double-bore sawed-off.

“He's got a partner!”
she bellowed like a chicken snagged in an eagle's claws.

She jerked as though with a start as a hole opened in the front of her man's flannel shirt, spitting a thick gob of blood across Prophet. The bullet that had torn into her back and out her chest careened between her son and the stringbean called Cisco to spang off a rock behind them. The rifle report followed a half second later, flatting out from the scattered pines on the low northern slope. Mrs. Sanderson's arms fell to her sides as she dropped the barn blaster, staggered forward, twisted around, and tumbled onto her back across Prophet's lower legs, dead.

“Ma!” Emmitt Sanderson cried, leaping toward his mother.

He didn't make it. A bullet took him through the high center of his chest. He flew backward, arms flailing straight out from his shoulders, as the other two men screamed and leaped around, raising their revolvers and trying to get a bead on the shooter.

There were four more rifle shots, booming reports spaced split seconds apart and echoing around the valley like thunderclaps. Prophet, on his back as before with Horton Whipple still straddling him, stared up in disbelief as Cisco and Rodney Hayes danced bizarre death jigs above and around him, screaming as bullets plunked through their chests and bellies, tearing out chunks of flesh, blood, and viscera and splashing the weeds and rocks around them with several shades of red.

Finally, both men were down, Cisco lying off to Prophet's left while Rodney lay straight out from his boots, belly down, one arm curled beneath him. He shook, farted, sighed, and lay still.

Prophet looked up the long, gentle slope on his right. A man with a rifle stepped out from behind a lone boulder and swung into the saddle of a brown-and-white pinto pony. All Prophet could think was that another outlaw—possibly one double-crossed by these four and their mother—had come to even the score. How the bushwhacker knew Prophet wasn't a member of the gang, Prophet couldn't say.

He was just glad to not be shaking hands with El Diablo.

As the rider trotted the pinto down the hill, weaving around cedars and junipers, Prophet heaved aside Whipple's heavy carcass. Mrs. Sanderson lay sprawled across his shins, staring toward him with a fist-sized hole in her forehead and her tobacco-stained tongue lolling out the side of her mouth.

Prophet lifted his back, pulled his right leg out from beneath the dead woman, planted his boot against her face, and gave her an unceremonious shove. She rolled off his other boot to tumble facedown in the weeds with a postmortem gurgle.

Prophet grimaced as he rolled onto his right elbow. His crotch resumed burning and his balls felt as though they'd swollen up twice their normal size. He turned to watch the rider approach on his pinto.

Her
pinto.

The young woman's long, straw-colored hair bounced across her shoulders and down the striped serape that couldn't quite conceal the two matronly lumps beneath.

As she came closer, her face grew gradually clearer. Prophet would have recognized the heart-shaped bone structure, bee-stung lips, pug nose, and wide-set, crystalline hazel eyes anywhere—all shaded by a man's flat-brimmed black hat trimmed with a snakeskin band. It was a face so teeming with peaches-and-cream sweetness and persnickety schoolgirl charm that no one but Prophet would have believed the girl behind it was capable of playing hooky from school, much less gunning down a passel of pistol-packing varmints from a hundred yards uphill without one wasted bullet.

“Louisa, don't you beat all?” Prophet gave an angry chuff and slapped the ground as the girl drew the pinto up before him. “Just when I was about to get the upper hand on that lummox, you start shootin' away like Billy the Kid. If you think you're gettin' any of the bounty money, you got another
think
comin'.”

Prophet gained his feet, moving gingerly, his balls still throbbing, and looked up at Louisa, not yet twenty years old but sitting her saddle with customary self-assuredness, the breeze playing with her hair. “Besides, they were all wanted
alive
. They ain't any good to me
dead
!”

“I think,” the girl said, leaning forward on her saddle horn, the barrel of her Sharps still smoking faintly, “that you should be kissing my boots instead of berating me. That oaf was about to cut your head clean off your shoulders. They would have thrown your uncouth, mangy, smelly carcass in the nearest ravine and neither I nor anyone else would have known what happened to you.”

Prophet leaned down to scoop his hat from a weed tuft. He dusted it off and set it on his head, glancing around at the dead men and Mrs. Sanderson already attracting flies. Horton Whipple's bowie knife glistened in the sun near his left shoulder, beneath which blood from his ruined head was puddling and congealing.

“I had a chance.” Absently rubbing his neck, Prophet turned back to Louisa. His chagrin pained him worse than the groining he'd taken from Horton Whipple. Not only had he let an old woman sneak up on him from behind, but a young one—one who'd been bounty hunting fewer years than Prophet had been wearing the same longhandles—had had to save his ass. “Where in the hell did you come from, anyway? I thought you were up north.”

They'd met a couple of years ago, when Louisa, only seventeen at the time, had taken off after the bunch that had burned her Nebraska farmstead and murdered her family. She and Prophet had hunted the kill-crazy renegades led by Handsome Dave Duvall from Minnesota to northern Dakota Territory, and together they'd sent each man to the spirits in a haze of gun smoke and dust.

Prophet had figured that Duvall's demise would mark the end of Louisa's vengeance trail. But long after Duvall and his gang were moldering in their graves, she, in the grip of some curious obsession for righting the world's wrongs and evening up the odds for those who couldn't do it themselves, had continued ghosting the outlaw trail, collecting bounties not so much for the money but to finance her continued tracking.

Louisa specialized in stalking men who killed or injured women or children, but she didn't discriminate. Any outlaw was fair game, and she wasn't on any man's trail long before the poor bastard was soiling his trousers and begging for mercy.