The Graves at Seven Devils

PROPHET’S PRIDE BURNING as hot as his groin, he rode silently behind Louisa. He winced against the horse’s jostling movements as they headed back to where he’d tied Mean and Ugly in the willows near the small branch stream. Louisa said nothing either, and Prophet was too absorbed in his own shame to notice her pensive silence.

As they approached Mean and Ugly, who shook his head and nickered an insult at Louisa’s clean-lined pinto, Prophet slid off the pinto’s rear and, holding his rifle in one hand and grabbing the outlaws’ saddlebags with the other, said, “I’m gonna find a place to hole up for the rest of the day. I’m wore out, hungry, and in bad need of a drink.” He slid the rifle into his saddle boot and glanced at Louisa, who sat the pinto, staring off pensively. “You might as well camp with me.”

“I’m settling down, Lou. I’m giving up bounty hunting to live with family. Raise chickens and sew dresses and such.”

“You’re welcome to visit as long as you bathe first.” She heeled the horse into a trot through the brush and splashed into the stream, and Prophet stood listening as she crossed the stream and thumped up the low rise beyond, heading south.

Prophet continued to stand, feeling a strange tightness in his throat. “Well, hell, I guess I won’t be visiting, then.”

He turned to Mean and Ugly staring at him skeptically. “Imagine that? Her telling me when to bathe when we’re not even married. Christ! Who needs women anyways?” He tightened Mean’s saddle cinch and swung into the leather. “That’s the beauty of pleasure girls, Mean. They don’t boss you around, and if they do, you leave and find another the next night!”

Prophet swung the horse around and, glancing after Louisa, who was cresting a ridge on the far side of the creek, chuffed again angrily and gigged the dun downstream. Soon, following the meandering creek, he found a secluded canyon flanked by a sandstone ridge, with the shallow stream nearby and a scattering of cottonwoods and junipers to screen his smoke.

He swung down from Mean and Ugly, unsaddled the horse, rubbed him down, and hobbled him near the creek to graze and draw water at his leisure.

It didn’t take Prophet long to set up camp. He was an old hand at it. Having left home at fourteen to fight for the Confederacy in the War for Southern Independence, he’d slept out in the open for nearly half his life, and aside from the occasional whorehouse, he preferred it that way.

He gathered wood for a fire, though he wouldn’t start the fire until later, when the sun was setting and the mountain air was cooling. He set out his bedroll and his saddlebags, hiding the outlaws’ loot in a notch at the base of the sandstone ridge, then arranged his cooking gear. After indulging in a couple shots of good Kentucky bourbon from his half-empty bottle, he stripped down to his longhandles and socks. He scrubbed the blood from his buckskin tunic and his faded blue denims in the creek as, wary of another shoulder nip, he kept an eye on Mean and Ugly grazing nearby.

When the clothes were as clean as they were going to get, he returned to his camp and draped the tunic and jeans over rocks to dry. Hanging, the buckskin would no doubt dry hard as adobe, but he didn’t feel like wearing it wet.

After another shot from his bottle, he heard Louisa’s voice again in his head. He wasn’t sure if it was because of what she’d said, or because he was tired of his own trail smell, but he fished around in his saddlebags for a soap sliver.

Tramping out to the creek, he found a hole a couple of feet deep under the far bank. He shucked out of his longhandles, sank gingerly into the water—the swelling in his oysters had gone down, but they were still tender—and soaked himself in the cool, refreshing stream murmuring between the low banks, magpies and squirrels chittering in the branches around him. Then he stood and ran the soap over every inch of his scarred, rugged, slab-chested frame.

He flopped down again to rinse off the soap. When he’d scrubbed out his longhandles, he tramped naked back to camp, chilled by the cooling afternoon breeze but feeling pounds lighter having shed the sweat, grime, trail dust, and blood smell. And the cool water had soothed his battered crotch.

Feeling better all around, he built a fire, hung the longhandles over a rock near the fledgling flames, then lay back in a patch of wan sunlight flickering through a towering aspen, and sighed and closed his eyes.

It had been a long, hard ride after the Sanderson bunch, and he’d found no picnic at the end of the trail. If it hadn’t been for Louisa . . .

Sleep drew him down. He slept deeply, soothed by the canyon’s gradually thickening shadows and by the freshening breeze rustling the leaves over his head.

He didn’t know how much time had passed before Mean’s warning whinny jerked his head up. He grabbed his Colt from the holster propped beside him, thumbing the hammer back and aiming straight out before him. At the same time, he pulled his saddlebags across his waist, partly covering himself. His pulse quickened.

Had someone spied the extra pair of saddlebags he’d been carrying and followed him? Or were Utes on the prowl, looking for white men’s scalps to show off to their squaws around the fire tonight?

The shadows had thickened between dwindling light shafts angling through the trees and between the canyon’s high walls. From his left, along the stream, the slow clomps of a single horse sounded, crunching old leaves and dry grass. A figure appeared, moving through the trees and behind a thin brush wall.

To Prophet’s right, Mean and Ugly whinnied again shrilly, as he always did at the approach of strangers. But the rider approaching now was no stranger, Prophet saw, as the rich blond curls jostled across Louisa’s shoulders, under the brim of her black hat. Her face was a pale, heart-shaped smudge in the tree shadows.

Swaying easily with the pinto’s movement, she turned the horse from the creek and headed straight for Prophet sitting naked beside the fire that had burned itself out while he’d slept. He depressed the Colt’s hammer and raised the barrel.

Louisa drew rein before him, letting her gaze sweep his scarred, deep-chested, saddle-worn body lounging there in the brown grass, wearing only a pair of saddlebags and with a few pennies of sunlight glowing across his sun-cured, fresh-scrubbed skin.

Prophet curled his upper lip at her. “That was one fast ride to Arizona and back. That pinto got wings I can’t see?”

She didn’t say anything, just swung down from the pinto and silently led the horse off into the brush away from the dead fire. Prophet sat staring after her. Then he heard the squawk of tack in the brush and knew she was unsaddling her mount. He threw aside the saddlebags—he was as comfortable naked around Louisa as he was alone—then lay back in the splotchy, fading sunlight, smiling contentedly.

Only a few minutes later, he heard her footsteps but didn’t open his eyes until she was standing over him. “You had a bath.”

Prophet opened his eyes to see her lifting her serape over her head, blond curls rising and then flopping back down to her shoulders as she dropped the woolen poncho in the grass and began unbuttoning her plaid shirt. Her face was flushed, a cool, lusty cast to her eyes. Her chest rose and fell sharply.

Prophet feigned a yawn, crossed his ankles, and hooked his arms behind his head. No point in looking overly eager after she’d insulted him. “I started counting the days since Christmas and figured I was a day or two overdue.”

He stared up at her as she removed the shirt, then reached down, crossing her arms, and lifted her camisole up and over her head to drop it in the grass with the poncho and shirt. Her deep breasts—pale and upturned, with tender rosebud nipples—jostled as she moved, kicking out of her boots, then unbuttoning and dropping her wool riding skirt. She stared back at Prophet, who could no longer feign disinterest. He could hear her sharp, desperate breaths as she removed her riding socks and pantaloons and stood before him naked, legs spread, cupping her breasts in her hands with tooth-gnashing allure.

Prophet tried to speak, but his throat had pinched closed. He cleared it, ran his eyes down her small but willowy frame—she wasn’t much over five feet two—somehow unblemished and unscarred despite how many badmen she’d ridden down and kicked out with her twin Colts and a shovel. With her clear eyes and waiflike charm, she could have been a city girl—the daughter of a successful grocer or mercantile proprietor with enough money to keep her in tight corsets and piano lessons, with occasional strolls arm in arm with her well-bred beau through the park at sundown.

She knelt before him and threw her arms around his neck. He wrapped his own arms around her waist, pulled her taut against him, and kissed her hungrily, relishing the feel of the girl once more, the smell of her, the taste of her tongue, the silky feel of her ripe, full lips under his.

Her breasts pushed flat against his chest, the nipples pebbling. She sighed and shuddered as she ran her hands brusquely through his hair and returned his penetrating kiss.

Prophet held her for a long time, kissing her, running his right hand down her arm, across the swell of her hip to the long curve of her thigh, sculpted and tightened by all the miles she’d stretched out behind her. Then he gentled her onto the ground, and she spread her legs, sighing deeply as he positioned himself between her knees and, mindful of his injured groin, eased himself down.

They made love desperately, hungrily, and then again more slowly, with Louisa on top, rising and falling on her haunches, full breasts sloping out from her chest as she rocked. They shuddered together in a fury of spent love, and Louisa leaned forward to squeeze the hard slabs of his chest. She sandwiched his face between her hands and nibbled his right ear.

At length, she lifted her head and peered into his eyes, her own hazel eyes slightly crossing as the skin above the bridge of her nose wrinkled with beseeching. “Come with me to Arizona, Lou. Let’s start a new life together.”

“Don’t get your shorts in a twist.” Louisa stretched her body out atop his, like a cat stretching on a window ledge. She hooked her feet around his shins and rubbed her cheek against his chest. “I’m not proposing we get married and raise kids and join a church, and all that other stuff you’re so afraid of. I just think you should give some thought to settling down. We could do it together.”

“I have thought about it,” Prophet said, slowly running his hands down her slender, naked back. “Decided against it. Now, that don’t mean you shouldn’t. I been tellin’ you since I first met you that bounty hunting is no job for a girl. You need to settle down, get hitched to a nice boy, raise some kids, and join a church. But me?” He chuckled as he stared at the slowly fading sky. “Hell, this is all I know.”

“Oh, I know about your blasphemous contract with ‘Ole Scratch.’” Louisa rested her chin on his breastbone and absently caressed his arms, which he’d crossed behind his head. “That demon doesn’t need you shoveling coal throughout eternity any more than you need to spend the rest of your life bounty hunting just so you can drink and carouse to your heart’s content. You’re not getting any younger. And that incident with the old lady—”

“Nobody asked you. Forget it. I got a contract with Scratch, and I aim to keep it. But like I said, I’m glad you’re settling down. What family you got down there?”

“A cousin. I heard about Marlene through another cousin I ran into up in Dakota last fall. Marlene Karlaufsky was her name. I think her married name’s Fletcher or some such. She and I were close as girls back in Nebraska, before her father pulled up stakes and moved the family to Denver. I wrote her a letter down in Arizona, just trying to reestablish contact with her, trying to find out how she was. She wrote back inviting me to go live with her and her husband and her boy.”

Louisa gently twisted one of Prophet’s chest hairs, keeping her chin planted on his breastbone, and nibbled her lower lip. “At first, I didn’t cotton to the idea. But then I got to thinking, why not? I’ve been tracking badmen for nearly three years now, and it hasn’t brought my folks back. And it hasn’t done anything to silence their voices I hear in my head every night before I go to sleep. Maybe it never will.”

“Raises chickens and takes in sewing. She said I could work for her a year or two, earn some money. Then maybe I’ll open a shop of some kind.”

“Hell,” Prophet said, chuckling, suppressing a sudden pang of jealousy and lonesomeness. “You go down there and settle down, Louisa girl, you’ll be married inside of a year.”

“I wore a badge once . . . for the last time.” It had been an awful mistake, and Prophet wasn’t sure how he’d come to represent the law in that little Wyoming town, but he’d woken up one morning with a thunderous hangover in bed with a pretty, painted harpy to find a badge pinned to his shirt and the whole town congratulating him on his new employ. “Them badges might be only a half ounce of cheap tin, but they weigh a ton.”

“Well, hell, I’m sure I could shovel shit off the street, too.” Prophet eased Louisa off his shoulder and grabbed his longhandles, which the high mountain air had nearly dried. “But I think I’ll keep doin’ what I know best, thank you very much, Miss Bonaventure.”

Prophet had stuffed one leg into his longhandles. He glanced at her and froze, an ice pick of raw desire tickling his loins.

She lay belly down in the short, wiry grass, kicking her feet up over her round, firm bottom. Her tender pink nipples caressed the ground, and her fingers tore absently at the grass. Her hair caressed her pale, delicate shoulders. “At least ride down to Seven Devils with me, won’t you? I’ve been lonely and—I’ll admit it—hungry for your attentions.”

She met his stare and lifted her mouth corners slightly, eyes slitting devilishly, her bee-stung lips seeming to swell. She crossed her ankles and curled her toes. “We’ll have a good time, Lou. I promise.”