The Graves at Seven Devils

Table of Contents

 

 

SITTING DUCK

Prophet turned to stare northwest over the rubble heaps. He'd heard what sounded like a blackfly sort of buzzing and whistling. The buzzing and whistling grew louder.

Mean and Ugly jerked his head up. At the same time, Prophet felt a sudden, searing pain in his upper right arm.

Before he knew what was happening, thunder clapped sharply in the northeast, and Mean and Ugly bucked suddenly with an indignant whinny.

Prophet cried as, losing his reins as well as his rifle, his entire right arm on fire, he twisted around and flew straight back off the pitching dun's right hip . . .

PRAISE FOR PETER BRANDVOLD:

“Takes off like a shot, never giving the reader a chance to set the book down.”—Douglas Hirt

HELL ON WHEELS

ONCE LATE WITH A .38

ONCE UPON A DEAD MAN

ONCE A RENEGADE

ONCE HELL FREEZES OVER

ONCE A LAWMAN

ONCE MORE WITH A .44

ONCE A MARSHAL

 

BULLETS OVER BEDLAM

COLD CORPSE, HOT TRAIL

DEADLY PREY

ROGUE LAWMAN

 

.45-CALIBER DEATHTRAP

.45-CALIBER MANHUNT

.45-CALIBER FURY

.45-CALIBER REVENGE

 

THE GRAVES AT SEVEN DEVILS

THE DEVIL'S LAIR

STARING DOWN THE DEVIL

THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE

RIDING WITH THE DEVIL'S MISTRESS

DEALT THE DEVIL'S HAND

THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET

 

BLOOD MOUNTAIN

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

THE GRAVES AT SEVEN DEVILS

 

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

 

PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley edition / January 2009

Copyright © 2009 by Peter Brandvold.

 

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eISBN : 978-1-440-66001-6

 

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LOU PROPHET TIED his hammer-headed line-back dun, appropriately named Mean and Ugly, to a scrub willow along a narrow creek somewhere in the devil's maze of looming peaks and plunging valleys of western Colorado.

“While I'm away, Mean,” the bounty hunter said, ducking his head to peer through the willows, “don't go runnin' off with any mustang fillies, hear? Pretty and frisky they might be, but they'll chew you up and spit you out like spoiled oats. I know that from exp—”

In the corner of his right eye, Prophet had seen the horse swing his head toward him too late. Mean and Ugly sunk his long, flat-edged front teeth into Prophet's right shoulder, dropping a bright red veil of pain down over the big man's eyes.

“Son of a bitch!” Prophet swung around and smashed an elbow against the dun's blaze-faced snout. “How many times I gotta tell you not to
do
that, you black-hearted cuss?”

Unfazed by the blow, Mean and Ugly bobbed his head, snorting. His white-ringed eyes blazed with mischievous satisfaction.

Sucking air through his teeth, his broad, broken-nosed face flushed with pain and exasperation, Prophet canted his head to inspect his shoulder. The horse had torn the oft-repaired tunic seam once again. A small tear, but a tear nonetheless. No blood shone, but the tall, lean, hard-bodied man in dusty, sweaty buckskins felt as though his shoulder had been laid bare to the bone.

What a horse's teeth lacked in sharpness they made up for in hardness—and Mean and Ugly's choppers were hardest of all. The horse had always had a penchant for biting, and long, hard rides ghosting outlaws tended to bore him, making him frisky and contentious and especially prone to sinking his teeth into human flesh.

Or horse flesh, for that matter. But no other horses were near. The nearest were those of the stage robbers Prophet had been following for the past two weeks and that, when he'd glassed the area from a hill a few minutes ago, he'd spotted by the cabin a good two hundred yards away. So Prophet's shoulder, carelessly offered, had proven too enticing for the dun to pass up.

Cursing again with disgust and keeping an eye on the horse, who had now dropped his head to crop bromegrass with infuriating indifference, Prophet leaned down to remove his spurs. “Don't know why I've put up with you all these years, Mean and Ugly. I must be touched. To think of all the
good
horses I've passed up!”

Truth was, Mean and Ugly was the best horse Prophet had owned. Maybe not the handsomest, but the best, toughest stayer a bounty hunter could ask for. And while he'd never admit it out loud, Prophet felt a close kinship with the hammer-headed dun. They were cut from the same cloth. Both were big, ornery, green-broke loners who lived to stomp with their tails up.

He dropped the small-roweled spurs into his saddlebags, then hung four sets of manacles from his cartridge belt, with enough space between each so they wouldn't jostle one another and give him away. Shucking his Winchester '73 from its saddle boot, the bounty hunter racked a fresh shell into the breech. He glanced at Mean and Ugly once more, adding under his breath as he began tramping off through the willows, “A horse like that is an abomination against God and all that's holy. Can't sell him, though. Wouldn't sic that cursed cayuse on my worst enemy. And he ain't
worth
a bullet!”

He spat to one side and, rubbing his still-barking shoulder, continued through the willows to the shore of the shallow, slow-moving creek rippling over rocks and around sandbars. Halting at the edge of the stream, partly concealed by branches, he squeezed his rifle and looked around.

A few crows and mountain jays milled amongst the cottonwoods on both sides of the creek. Otherwise, nothing moved. No sounds but the gurgling stream, rasping weeds, ruffling leaves, an occasional bird cry. It appeared that Emmitt Sanderson, the leader of the outlaws whom Prophet had tracked north from Alamosa, threading the broad San Luis Valley before veering west into the high country, had appointed no picket to watch the gang's back trail.

Resting the Winchester on his right shoulder but raking his cautious gaze from right to left and back again, Prophet stepped into the stream, keeping to the shallow ford as he made for the other side, the water refreshingly cool as it slid over his boots.

When he gained the other shore, he had another look around, then began climbing the slope beyond, working his way right and holding the Winchester in both hands across his chest. His wet boots slipped in the brittle, sun-cured grass.

His breath rasped, and his sweaty buckskin tunic clung to his back. He kept his shrewd bounty hunter's eyes narrowed as he swept the terrain around him.

He'd hiked a hundred yards, uphill and down, when he spied the outlaw cabin perched on the shoulder of a low bluff among sparse pines and boulders. It was a small, worn-gray log affair with a rusty tin roof. A thin ribbon of smoke issued from the chimney pipe, rising nearly straight up to the faultless vault of cerulean sky.

An old fur trapper's track.

A corral and lean-to stable lay on the cabin's near side, and inside the corral five horses milled lazily, clumped head to tail for shade and to keep the flies out of one another's faces. They were the horses Prophet had been tracking, including the stocky steeldust the outlaws had used for packing the stage loot they'd appropriated from the trails around Durango.

The gang had killed nine drivers and stage passengers in the past six months, including a young girl who'd caught a ricochet. They were as deadly a bunch of long-coulee riders to stalk the San Luis Valley. Prophet wouldn't begrudge himself the bounty money he'd pocket as the four were led off to the gallows. In fact, he'd toast their hangman and beseech Ole Scratch to turn up the heat in their honor.

Another hunt was almost over. The bounties on this bunch would set him up through the fall and part of the winter—if he didn't drink and carouse it all away in one wild weekend, as he was prone to do. As his sometime-partner Louisa Bonaventure often reminded him, he had to keep himself on a short leash, show some horse sense. He wasn't getting any younger, and he'd like to retire with a nest egg someday.

Prophet jogged a beeline toward the cabin, crouching and threading a narrow crease between hills. He'd just worked his way through a brushy hollow showing the packed-down weeds where deer or elk had slept, when he stopped suddenly, dropped to a knee behind a stunt cedar, and lifted his head, listening.