The Graves at Seven Devils

“THERE’S MY HORSE!” Louisa said, still down on her butt behind the log with the bizarre Three of a Kind Gang standing in a half circle around her in the quickly fading light. The men regarded her suspiciously, hands on their gun butts while the young woman, Cora, was a little more fawning than Louisa felt comfortable with.

Louisa stretched her gaze around the group while a burly black man with a red sash led the pinto through the trees. The man’s skin was as black as his frock coat, four-in-hand tie, black hat, and canvas breeches. At times only his white shirt and red sash could be seen against the ink-black cottonwood trunks that he and the horse were passing through.

The pinto snorted and coughed as the man led him by his reins and bridle bit, the horse’s saddle and Louisa’s bedroll hanging down its left side, so that her two rifle sheaths flapped around up near the horse’s back. Both sheaths were empty. Her saddlebags were gone.

As the black man approached, she saw that he was carrying her Winchester in the same hand as the one in which he held the reins. No sign of her Sharps.

“Oh, joy—you found him!” Louisa exclaimed, keeping up her routine of lost little babe in the desert, and hoping that the men would pull their horns in, thus making it easier for her in due time to blow their hearts out their spines in a vapor of blood and bone.

“Well, well, well,” the black man said, stopping the horse on the other side of the log and staring down at what the arroyo had washed in. “What in the pure-devil, ever-lovin’ hell we got here?”

Her lungs still feeling boggy, Louisa began to scramble to her feet, then did her best playacting as she dropped to her knees suddenly and convulsed in more lung spasms that were not so much feigned as exaggerated. “Thank you, sir,” she croaked between coughs, lifting her head toward the black man called Heinz, twisting her face with feigned misery. “Without my horse . . . I’d truly . . . be lost out here.”

Cora dropped down beside her and placed a hand on her lurching back. “Actually, I was the one who found your horse, Miss . . .”

“I was the one who found your horse, Miss Louisa. But don’t tell me you’re thinking of getting back on him tonight!”

“Will you quit, Rosco?” Cora scowled up at the big black man. “She’s been through a terrible ordeal. Why, she nearly drowned in the arroyo while trying to make her way back to her uncle’s mine diggin’s.”

This from the look-alike in the Lincoln-style top hat. He, like the others, had a singsong Southern accent even more pronounced than Prophet’s. Louisa had never visited the South, but even to her ears his accent called up mossy oaks sprawled across rolling, emerald-green hills and pillared mansions adorned with Southern belles and straight-backed gentleman in impeccable beards and black, clawhammer coats.

The look-alike in the Abe Lincoln hat rolled his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “Who the hell’s diggin’ out here? The whole damn range is taken over by outlaws and’Paches!”

“Shit, I ain’t seen a prospector—at least not a live one—in a month of Sundays,” said the look-alike in the green-checked suit. He stood out against the gathering darkness like a green spring meadow.

“You haven’t seen my Uncle Lou,” Louisa sniffed. “Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .” She gained her knees and swooned. While she wasn’t in love with the idea of taking the gang on herself, now that she was here she saw no reason to leave. But looking like she wanted to stay would make the gang suspicious. “I reckon I’ll be back . . . on my . . . way. . . .”

“Oh, no, you won’t, dearie,” Cora said, letting Louisa fall against her and wrapping her arm around Louisa’s waist. “You’re not going anywhere—not in your condition. Rafe, carry her up to my shack.”

“I’ll do it,” the man called Sykes said, stepping forward and stretching out his hands toward Louisa.

Cora turned to Rafe standing with his hawk-faced, long-haired brothers—the three standing around like actors all garbed up with no lines to perform. She smiled mockingly and said with a sneer, “Because the Flute boys ain’t so willing.”

The Flute in the top hat tossed his cigar onto the ground and bolted forward angrily, spitting out in his petal-soft, anger-edged accent, “Now, lookee here, Cora. My brothers and I are the leaders of the troupe, and we’re goddamn tired of putting up with your insults against our manhood.”

Rafe said, “And don’t forget who’s ramroddin’ this group, girl! We’re the ones who threw it together, and we’re damn certain sure the ones who . . .”

“The ones who’d have gotten us all thrown into Yuma pen six months ago if I hadn’t joined up and taught you boys the proper way to rob a bank and take down a payroll shipment!”

Cora straightened and placed a hand on the grips of one of her revolvers, leaning forward at the waist. Sagging against the young woman’s thigh, as if only half conscious, Louisa stared at the men through slitted lids, feeling Cora’s mad, defiant fury flutter up from deep down in her heels.

“Without me, you goddamn tinhorned sons of the Rebel South would be wobblin’ and reelin’ around like schoolboys drunk on their first warm beer. And you’d best take your hand away from your pistol there, Billy Earl, ’less you want a lead swap, though I doubt there’d be much of a swap!”

Cora lowered her voice with menace, twisting and turning her out-thrust face as she continued her tirade, her green-streaked red hair dancing about her shoulders. “You boys fancy yourselves fast, but you know as well as I do that there ain’t one of ya faster . . . or more willin’ . . . than good ole Cora. Now, get your hand away from that .45, ya damn peckerwood, or fill it, and fill it now. This is the last damn argument I’m ever gonna have with you.”

Billy Earl stood, hand still draped over the butt of his .45, staring through the semidarkness at Cora. It was too dark to see his face clearly, but Louisa saw that his eyes were as white-ringed as those of an enraged bronc, and his long, slender legs were quivering. His skinny chest rose and fell heavily beneath the ruffled white shirt he wore under a burgundy vest trimmed with silver piping. His cavernous cheeks dimpled, and Louisa thought she could even hear his molars grinding.

Cora’s leg against Louisa’s cheek did not shake or flutter in the least. Her blood ran calmly through her veins as she waited for Billy Earl to make the first move. This girl, Louisa thought with a vague apprehensive air while waiting for lead to fly, might even be nervier than she, Louisa, was.

“Oh, for Christ’s sakes,” muttered the look-alike in the brown-checked suit, bulling up between Billy Earl and Sykes. “Lower your tails, both of you. I’ll give the damn girl a tow.”

He chuffed as he leaned down toward Louisa. She let herself go limp as the man snaked his arms beneath her, straightened, and started to carry her through the group still standing around the log, toward the rustling cottonwoods. Fires glowed ahead through the trees, and Louisa could see several ancient stone huts huddled amongst rocks and cactus along the base of a steep slope rising into shadows toward a ridge over which stars were kindling.

Behind her, the others followed, spurs trilling and heels grinding gravel. The pinto clomped, shod hooves ringing off stones. A couple of the men—it sounded like Sykes and the black man, Heinz—spoke in hushed tones, chuckling.

Louisa, flopping like a dead fish in Custer’s arms, let her eyes roll to the right. Three men slowly materialized from the shadows, two leading three horses while the third, striding ahead of the others, batwing chaps fluttering about his denim-clad legs, moved toward her and Rafe.

One of the men flanking the man approaching appeared nearly as large and hairy as a grizzly bear. He wore Mexican-cut clothes and a steeple-crowned sombrero. It was from this man, moving up behind the leader, that a sickly sweet smell seemed to emanate, making Louisa’s nose constrict.

“Caught us a fish in the creek, we did,” Custer said, letting his words roll with an accented flourish over his velvet tongue. “A little blond fish, purty as a speckled pup, and half drowned.”

“Cora wants to tend her her own self,” said Sykes, coming up behind Custer with the others, his own voice teeming with a sneer, “in her own shack . . . of course. . . .”

Cora told Sykes to diddle himself as she walked up beside Rafe and Louisa. The newcomer approached from the left—a tall, slender gent in a crisp black Stetson and black vest over a ruffled white shirt. He wore two guns in holsters, and had another pistol wedged over his belly, behind his cartridge belt.

The flickering firelight showed a rakishly handsome face, tanned by the sun, with a clean jawline and straight nose above a trimmed, cherry-blond mustache. Blond hair of the same hue curled down over his ears. On his feet he wore beaded Indian boot moccasins.

Custer stopped and turned to the man. He jostled Louisa in his arms. Louisa fluttered her eyes and groaned a little, wagging her head from side to side as if to clear it. “Sure enough,” Custer said. “Ain’t she purty as a rose petal, Squires? You’d prob’ly rather I took her to your shack, but you’ll have to take that up with Miss Cora.”

The man called Squires slitted his blue eyes, which flashed in the crimson fires’ glow, as he ran his gaze back and forth along Louisa’s body sprawled across Rafe’s arms. He whistled and poked his hat back from his broad, tan forehead. “Damn. You’re tellin’ me the arroyo just up and spit that out?”

The big, bearlike Mexican pushed his round, scarred face over Squires’s left shoulder, his broad nostrils expanding and contracting, letting his black-eyed gaze roam across Louisa. He grunted and sniffed. Louisa’s eyes burned from his stench—the fetor of several dead men staked out in the sun—but the others didn’t seem to notice.

“Hold on.” Squires pulled Custer back by his arm and stared down at Louisa once more. He chuckled, shook his head, and slid a conspiratorial glance at the big Mexican. “Don’t know as I’ve ever seen a girl like that out here—aside from Miss Cora her own self, of course.” His tone grew skeptical, suspicious, and he canted his head to one side, squinting an eye at the pretty blond in Custer’s arms. “Who is she and where’d she come from? Anyone with her?”

“If they is,” said the top-hatted Billy Earl, smoking a cigar off Custer’s left flank, “they done washed up farther down the arroyo.”

Squires held his gaze on Louisa, who gave a little cough. He growled, “Someone cut her tongue out?”

“She damn near drowned in the flood,” Cora said. “I’m puttin’ her to bed. You can make all your inquiries tomorrow, Jay.”

Cora jerked her head forward, and Custer continued walking ahead, toward a gap between two of the ancient stone shacks that looked little more than window- and doorless shells, a couple with half-collapsed brush roofs, all surrounded by boulders and grown up with chaparral.

“I’ll toss a rock, all right, you fork-tongued son of a bitch!” Cora grunted and continued striding along with Custer and Louisa, back into the shadows away from the fires. “I’d rather you sent that big, stinking bean eater of yours.”

“Don’t go gettin’ overly distracted now, Cora,” Sykes called, angling off in another direction. “Remember—we got us a little job day after tomorrow.”

As Custer walked back into the brush, Cora strode ahead, heading for a shack set back from the others. The windows were lit with lantern light.

The place had a brush roof and a narrow porch that appeared to have been recently repaired with new boards. There was a timbered door. Cora strode onto the porch, threw the door open, and stepped aside as Custer carried Louisa over the threshold, sidestepping through the narrow opening.

Cora pointed toward a bed in a far, dark corner that the light shed by a single lamp hanging from a ceiling beam did not reach. “Put her there and vamoose.”

Custer chuckled as he set Louisa on the bed covered with a bobcat hide. As he turned back toward the tall redhead standing by the open door, he gave a lavish bow. He strode toward her and stopped a foot away from her, then slid his face to within six inches of hers.

“Don’t talk to us like that again, Cora. Not Rafe, Billy Earl, or me. You might be faster an’ more willin’ than my brothers, but you and I both know you ain’t faster nor more willin’ than me.”

Custer glanced back at Louisa, who lay on the bed, hands on her belly as she continued pretending that her swim in the river had taken a higher toll than it had. As the sombrero-hatted outlaw turned back to Cora, he said, “And your tastes ain’t no purer than ours, neither. So save your venom for Jay an’ his boys . . . once we get our hands on that gold.”

Custer kissed his index finger, pressed the finger to Cora’s forehead, and strode out the door and into the night.

Running the sleeve of her flowered blouse across her forehead and bunching her lips with revulsion, she strode over to the bed and stared down at Louisa.

“You’re pretty.” She ran the back of her hand across Louisa’s mud-streaked cheek. “Damn purty.”

She hunkered low, shoved her face to within inches of Louisa’s, and smiled. The smile did not extend to her green, catlike eyes. Saliva crackled as she stretched her lips back from her teeth.