The Graves at Seven Devils

PROPHET DUCKED BEHIND a boulder and, doffing his hat and curving his finger through his Winchester’s trigger guard, he peered around the edge of the rock.

The adobe-brick cabin squatted at the base of the rocky ridge, about fifty yards away. Smoke from its chimney curled against the twilit sky clean-scoured by the recent thunder-storm. The mass of purple clouds flashed intermittently in the far northeastern distance.

Shadows moved in the lantern-lit windows. Men’s voices rose. A woman’s voice sounded, too—angry, indignant. There was a light, muffled slapping sound. The woman cursed tightly.

A man chuckled. “If I’m pig, what are you, senorita? You were the one makin’ eyes at me in Nogales!”

Several guffaws rose, and the light slaps continued, with the woman cursing tightly, her speech slurred from drink.

“Sure do hate to break up a party.” Prophet sighed as he moved out from behind the boulder. He jogged across the open space fronting it, meandering around mud puddles. “Especially when everybody seems to be having so much fun!”

He shouldered up to the shack, between the left front window and the weathered plank door that sagged on rusty hinges, lantern light showing through the cracks. He reached back for the double-barreled, ten-gauge sawed-off hanging down his back, then decided to stay with the Winchester. With the woman in there, he’d use the barn blaster only as a backup.

He stepped up in front of the door, hearing the voices from inside, the clink of a bottle against a tin cup, the intermittent slaps, and the woman’s angry curses. Backing up, Prophet lifted his right leg and thrust his foot forward, slamming the boot flat against the door, just right of the leather latch.

The door burst open, the latch and slivers from the frame flying into the room. As the door smashed against the wall, Prophet bounded inside and stopped the door’s recoil with his left boot, raising the Winchester to his right shoulder and scowling down the barrel.

There were five men in the low-ceilinged room in which a couple of dusty lanterns shunted deep shadows to and fro. The place had several bunks and cots. At the back was a table around which three of the men sat, playing cards and drinking whiskey from tin cups.

They were a hard-eyed, shaggy, unshaven lot, each with a pistol or rifle near. When the door had burst open, they jumped as one, reaching for weapons but turning still as stone when Prophet bellowed, “Hold it right there, you mangy sons o’ bitches, or I’ll blow you outta your spurs. The name’s Prophet. Bounty hunter! Any one of you so much as twitches, I’ll buck you out in a hail of hot lead! Turn ya deader’n a goddamn fence post!”

Truth was, Prophet had no intention of wasting his time on these gents. He had bigger fish to fry. But Prophet was no cold-blooded killer, so he’d let this hard-eyed lot of fetid, human blowflies make the first move.

Frozen in various positions, all five men regarded him with red-rimmed eyes hard as marbles—three from the table at the back of the room, one crouched in front of the woodstove and clad only in longhandles, the other on a cot against the right wall, about ten feet from Prophet.

The gent on the cot—a half-breed with one eye—lay atop a black-haired, round-faced woman. The man wore only a grimy undershirt while the woman was as naked as the day she was born, naked knees spread wide.

The half-breed’s brown ass dimpled as he glared at Prophet, molasses-colored eyes flashing furiously. A Remington revolver jutted from a black leather holster coiled with a shell belt on the floor, within easy reach of the man’s left hand.

“Lou Prophet,” one of the men growled, making a face like he’d just bitten into a lemon. He was bald, clean-shaven, and even-featured. He would have been handsome if the tip of his nose wasn’t missing, giving him a piggish look.

He wore a sheepskin vest over a blue denim shirt. In one hand he held playing cards; the other hand, trimmed with a giant ruby ring, lay over the silver-plated Schofield on the table before him, near a black cheroot sending pale smoke ribboning into the cloud already filling the cabin.

“Mark Diamond,” Prophet growled back. “I shoulda known if Lyle Hawk was around, you wouldn’t be far. There’s a mangy cur ghostin’ every gut wagon.”

Diamond lifted a mouth corner. “You don’t really think you’re gonna bring us all in, do ya?”

Prophet had taken down enough owlhoots to know which of a group would move first. That’s why he was ready, after having read the eyes of each of these five, for the man in the longhandles by the snapping sheet-iron stove to drop the wood he had in his left hand and to grab the Henry repeater standing against a wood box with his right.

Prophet shot him before he’d lifted the Henry a foot above the floor, the Winchester’s explosion filling the entire room and causing the whore to scream, “Maria madre de la Jesus!”

As the man in the longhandles screamed, flying back against the woodstove, then screaming even louder, Mark Diamond snapped up his silver-plated Schofield and leaped to his feet, throwing his chair straight out behind him.

Racking a fresh shell into the Winchester breech, Prophet drew a bead on Diamond’s chest, squeezed the trigger, and watched through the wafting gun smoke as the bullet drilled a quarter-sized hole through Diamond’s blue denim shirt, rocking the man back on his heels and sending his triggered slug into the ceiling above the table.

Two more quick shots dispatched the other two men at the table. Aware of the man on the cot to his right, Prophet had no sooner fired his fourth round before he dove forward into the room.

The man on the cot had reached down and grabbed his Remy from its holster. The Remy roared. The slug sliced across Prophet’s back and into the adobe wall to his left as he rolled off a shoulder.

Rising onto his knees, the bounty hunter snapped the rifle to his shoulder once more and drilled two quick shots through the half-breed’s chest and one more through his left cheek.

The man screamed and slammed against the wall behind him, triggering a slug into the ceiling, eyes snapping wide with pain and horror. Flopping around on the cot beneath him, the woman screamed and covered her head with her arms.

Prophet racked another round and swung toward the rear of the room, his cartridge casings clattering onto the earthen floor behind him. Squinting through the powder, wood, and tobacco smoke, Prophet saw that all four men at the rear of the room were down and still.

Spying movement to his right, he jerked around toward the cot. The half-breed dropped down from the wall against which Prophet’s slugs had pinned him and collapsed like an oversized puppet, his hairy, naked legs slapping together, his shaggy head lolling to one side, blood welling up in a corner of his thin-lipped mouth.

His black eyes rolled toward Prophet and widened slightly just before they glazed over in death.

“Mierda!” the woman screamed, cowering against the wall, drawing her naked legs toward her chest. Her huge, brownnippled breasts swayed as she raised her arms to her head as though to shield herself, and she turned her hands toward Prophet, palms out. “Por favor! Please, mister, don’t shoot!”

“Pipe down.” Prophet lowered the Winchester and kicked the half-breed’s Remy under the cot. “I’ve never shot a woman without damn good cause.”

Keeping his Winchester aimed from his hip, he stomped back into the cabin’s shadows, and inspected each of the bodies. Deeming them dead, including the child killer and notorious Utah bank robber Mark Diamond, he grabbed the log that the man in the longhandles had dropped on the floor and chunked it into the stove.

He strode back to where the whore sat on the cot, one leg dangling over the edge, the other knee raised. She held her hands to her neck, half hiding her amazing, pointed breasts between her elbows, and gave Prophet a brash up-and-down, swishing a light brown foot against the floor.

Prophet looked at her. She wasn’t bad-looking for a whore in this neck of the woods, but she’d known some tough years. They were written in the deep lines around her mouth and eyes, one of which was lightly bruised. She had a small, glistening cut on her chin. Her cinnamon hair curled, thick and rich, to her shoulders, giving a glimpse of two silver hoop rings dangling from her ears.

She looked down at the half-breed bleeding onto the floor and wrinkled her nose. “They took me out of Nogales. Said I would entertain them out here, while they planned their next job.” She spat a wad of spit onto the half-breed’s ruddy cheek, then plucked a brown bottle off a nearby shelf and threw back a drink. “I’m glad you killed them. Now I can go back to Nogales and feed my dogs.”

She jerked her head toward the back of the cabin. “Stable out back in the brush. If you are taking their horses, leave me one.” She rolled her brown eyes up to give him a lascivious look. “ ’Less you want take me with you, uh?”

He ducked out of the cabin and retraced his steps back to where Big Hans sat on his claybank near Mean and Ugly. The kid was groaning and sort of whimpering in his sleep, his head thrown back on his shoulders. If not for the rope securing him to the saddle, he’d have rolled straight back off the clay’s ass.

Prophet led both horses back to the cabin and tethered them to the hitchrack out front. He gently maneuvered the kid out of the saddle, but couldn’t help, because of the younker’s two-hundred-plus bulky pounds, a semi-rough landing. Big Hans sagged toward the clay and lifted his head, groaning.

“Easy, kid,” Prophet said, snaking Hans’s good arm around his neck and leading him toward the open door. “Have you bedded down in no time.”

Prophet let his voice trail off. He and Hans had stopped just in front of the hovel’s open door. The woman was on one naked knee at the back of the room, a blanket draped so carelessly about her shoulders that it hardly covered a thing.

She had Mark Diamond’s left hand draped over her thigh and was cursing softly in Spanish as she tugged on the dead man’s large ruby ring, her voluminous breasts slanting out from her chest and pillowing out over the dead, pale fingers.

Sensing Prophet’s stare from across the room, the woman looked up. Her thick brows wrinkled, and her eyes grew peeved. “They paid me for only one night in Nogales. For none of the half dozen nights they have held me here like a rabid bitch in this maggot patch of a vermin-infested casa!”

Prophet continued guiding Big Hans toward the cot where the woman and the half-breed had been frolicking. “Reckon it ain’t stealin’ if you’re stealin’ from a thief . . . and a dead one, far as that goes.”

He chuckled as he ruminated absently on the breed of humanity he’d discovered so far in the Seven Devils Range. He sobered quickly, however, when he considered that his estimation of humanity, based fairly or unfairly on what he’d discovered here, was only bound to worsen.

When he’d gotten Hans lying down on the cot, the kid still grumbling and holding tight to the wrist of his broken arm, Prophet reached down and started dragging the half-breed out the cabin door by his ankles.

When he’d gotten the half-breed outside and about forty yards north along a narrowing, winding canyon and partially concealed in rocks, he went back for the others.

Ten minutes later, he returned to the cabin, breathing hard from his labors, to find the whore sitting on the edge of the cot beside Hans. She was sponging the boy’s broad, sweaty forehead with a damp cloth. A basin of water rested on her near-naked thighs, and a corked canteen lay at her bare feet, beside the brown bottle from which she’d been drinking.

“Boulder rolled down a ridge, damn near took his head off.” Prophet stood gazing down at the whore. Tiring of having his gaze attracted to her amazing bosoms, he drew the blanket across her chest with a sigh. “Can you tend him for an hour or two? I done lost another friend in the storm. I’m gonna ride back a ways, see if I can track her.”

Prophet hunkered beside the kid, placed his hand on the boy’s heavy shoulder. “Hans, if you can hear me, I’m gonna leave for a while. This nice lady’s gonna stay with you.” Prophet glanced at the woman. “What’s your name?”

The kid’s eyes fluttered, and he turned his head from side to side, the very picture of misery. His skin was pasty, his blond hair sweat-matted and mud-flecked. Perspiration beaded his forehead and streamed down his cheeks. “I . . . I reckon I’ll be here, Lou.”

Prophet stopped when the woman, who had just twisted around to stare wide-eyed toward the door, screamed, “Mierda! Look out!”

The bounty hunter wheeled around, swinging the sawed-off ten-gauge out from behind his back. In the doorway, the half-breed stood, stooped and pale and bloody, regarding Prophet with bloodshot, heavy-lidded eyes as he raised a .36-caliber Remington that he must have produced from a boot well. As Prophet threw his back against the cot, he raised the ten-gauge one-handed, thumbing back both rabbit-eared hammers.

The resurrected half-breed was blown straight back out the door in a spray of blood and viscera, as though he’d been pulled out from behind by a log chain attached to a six-mule hitch with their tails on fire.