The Graves at Seven Devils (2 page)

Beyond the camelback to his left, voices sounded, muffled and tempered by splashing water. A woman squealed shrilly. “Ouch, ya big ape! That
hurt
!”

Prophet squinted up the ridge. Women? Then he remembered that Sanderson's boys had all gotten hitched a while back, including old Emmitt himself for the fourth or fifth time. Apparently they'd needed some female flesh to cook and sweep out their hideout cabin and warm their mattress sacks.

Prophet chewed his cheek, troubled. Women and dogs were the bane of the bounty hunting profession. Dogs would bark and give you away while women often defended their men as they did their children—viciously and unpredictably. And for some reason, it was harder to shoot a woman than a man. Many a bounty hunter—and lawman, for that matter—had been turned toe down after hesitating with an armed female in his pistol sights.

Prophet scrutinized the cabin once more, tapping his Winchester's stock with his gloved right thumb. Spying no one milling about the cabin, he turned and, keeping low in case someone was staring out a window, tramped back the way he'd come. Following the voices and splashing water, he approached the crest of a steep southern ridge, the voices rising from down the other side.

Breathing hard from the tough climb, Prophet doffed his hat. He got down on hands and knees and crabbed to the brow of the ridge, snuggling up between two boulders and casting a glance into the valley below.

Lying flat, he pressed his chin to the gravelly ground as his eyes swept the broad, shallow stream angling along the base of the ridge. There were no trees between Prophet and the stream, so it wasn't hard to see that all four of the Sanderson bunch were frolicking with four women in the stream's shallow, sun-speckled water—all as naked as the day they were born.

The men's clothes were strewn with the women's along the rocky shore. Prophet spied a few rifles, revolvers, and knives with the clothes, but one of the men—a big, bald, mustached hombre whom he recognized as Horton Whipple—wore a revolver on a rawhide loop around his broad, tattooed neck. Another man, who looked like Emmitt Sanderson himself, lolled farthest left with a redheaded girl on his lap, a brace of holstered revolvers within easy reach on a nearby rock.

Even skinny-dipping, the sons of bitches kept themselves armed. But it took that kind of savvy to stay ahead of the law for five, going on six years, as this bunch had. They'd left two sheriffs and three U.S. marshals moldering in graves behind them.

Prophet considered the situation. He had two owlhoots lolling in the water on the near side of the stream, their backs facing him. Another—who appeared to be the youngest of the bunch and Emmitt's stepson, Rodney Hayes—was splashing around and playing patty-cake with a pretty, big-breasted blond out in the stream's shallow middle. The fourth man was on the far side of the creek, perched atop a half-submerged tree in the shade of a sprawling sycamore. A brunette faced him, head tipped up toward his, her arms draped over his knees. He lazily kicked the water on either side of the girl, who occasionally lowered her head to the man's crotch.

The bounty hunter pulled his head back behind his cover and backed a couple of feet down the hill, out of sight from the stream. He thumbed grit from his dimpled chin, a scowl etched across his broad, suntanned forehead.

The outlaws were too spread out for an easy takedown. If Louisa Bonaventure were here, he could bring her in from the other side of the river. Working together, they'd corral the whole group in no time. That would take the outlaws' women out of the equation, as well, for Louisa brooked no grief from other women, and she wasn't influenced by their looks, be they clothed or naked.

Since Prophet was on his own, he might have to wait until the women were out of the way and the men were grouped tighter before showing his hand. Even if it meant skulking around out here for several hours—maybe even until tomorrow. In a similar situation, he'd once had to bide his time for three days.

Like soldiering and lawdogging, bounty tracking was often a waiting game, boredom being as much a nuisance as dogs, women, and flying lead.

He hunkered down and waited, tipping his funnel-brimmed hat to shade his face. Below and behind him, the conversations continued and the water splashed. Rodney Hayes and the busty blond continued playing patty-cake, laughing and teasing each other with nauseating sweetness. After a time, one of the women took umbrage with something one of the men nearest the base of Prophet's bluff said, and a slap cracked sharply.

“Ouch,” Prophet said beneath his low-canted hat brim. “That musta hurt.”

A brief, indecipherable argument followed and then the man—for some reason Prophet figured it was the bald-headed Horton Whipple—begged forgiveness, insisting he'd only been joshing and that the woman had known what a prankster he was when she'd thrown in with him. The couple quieted for a few minutes, and apparently the woman softened under Whipple's charms.

After a time, her voice rose from the stream's steady rush to say, “I reckon me and the girls better get some dinner goin'. You boys must be starved!”

Prophet quickly poked his hat brim back off his forehead and turned to peer through the gap between the rocks. “At least they got their womenfolk trained.” He watched the naked females head toward their clothes strewn about the near shore.

Not a bad-looking bunch, all in all, though the one who'd been frolicking and fighting with Whipple appeared to outweigh the big, bald outlaw by a good twenty pounds. Built like an apple barrel, she carried most of her weight in her hips and breasts. Prophet thought he recognized the redhead from a whorehouse up in Montana, but it was hard to tell from this distance.

The blond was a saucy-looking number with large, nicely shaped breasts and porcelain-pale skin, her face painted garishly, her hair drawn up in a loose bun. The brunette was round-faced, hippy, and small-breasted. She seemed to be speaking in a thick German accent while she and the others stumbled around the shoreline a hundred feet below Prophet, pulling on their silk stockings, pantaloons, and corsets, and shaking sand from their high-heeled shoes.

“Y'all beat a pan when the grub's on the table,” ordered Emmitt Sanderson, lolling in the current not far from Whipple, only his head and toes showing above the water. He was smoking a stogie. “Me and the boys just fogged a long, hard trail, and we're gonna soak awhile.”

“You just do that, Emmitt,” Prophet muttered, keeping his head low, one hand on his rifle. “You just keep soakin' right there . . . let them girls get on up to the cabin and the hell out of my way. . . .” He chuckled at himself, more afraid of the unarmed women than he was of the armed outlaws.

The bounty hunter watched the girls drift up through the knee-high bromegrass and wheatgrass toward the cabin capping the hill's shoulder a hundred yards away. Spread out in a shaggy line, they chattered and laughed. The blond and the redhead had left their tops off, exposing their breasts to the sun. The blond continued clapping her hands, as though still playing patty-cake with Sanderson's stepson, while the German girl conversed with Whipple's lummox about soon needing more meat for their larder.

When they'd all drifted into the cabin, Prophet crawled backward down the rise, keeping his head low. He would tramp upstream, staying clear of the water, then circle back down to the shore to get the drop on Whipple and Sanderson.

He started to gain his knees. The sickening sound of a cocking gun hammer rose behind him. Something hard jabbed against the back of his neck, just up from his collar.

He froze, his throat drying suddenly like desert hardpan.

A nasal, raspy voice said bluntly, “One more move and you might as well go ahead and tell me what name you want scratched on your tombstone, ya big son of a bitch of a squint-eyed polecat!”

“COLDER'N A GRAVE digger's ass out there after that rainstorm,” said Marie Antoinette Fletcher.

The pretty, blond former prostitute didn't so much step through the timber-frame jailhouse door as she blew in on a chill wind gust rife with the fresh smell of a recent desert gully washer. Holding a wicker basket only partly covered with oil-cloth in one hand, she kicked the door closed behind her.

Marie Antoinette's husband, Sheriff Tobias Fletcher, glanced up from some paperwork strewn about his cluttered desk. “Uh, Marie . . . honey . . .” He jerked his head back toward the woman's twelve-year-old son, Colter, hammering the legs back on a chair that a recent drunk prisoner had smashed against the wall.

The pretty blond, her disheveled hair tumbling about her shoulders, turned toward her husband, frowning. “What?”

“The boy.”

Marie Antoinette wasn't her real name, but she'd seen no reason to change it back to Marlene Karlaufsky when she gave up the world's oldest profession to marry Fletcher. She cast her brown-eyed gaze into the shadows at the back of the small room where the boy continued to hammer the leg back onto the chair, several nails dangling from between his lips.

“What about him?” Marie Antoinette blinked. “You don't think he's heard ‘grave digger's ass' before?”

“No doubt he has,” said Fletcher, wincing slightly at his wife's salty tongue. “But perhaps using such . . . uh . . .
terminology
in front of him isn't setting the proper example . . .”

“Pshaw!”

Marie Antoinette set the lunch basket atop the desk, then dropped into Fletcher's lap, making his swivel chair squawk, and wrapped her arms around his neck. “I told Colter when he first started talkin' what was right and proper. Didn't I, Colter? And that, while I didn't always say and do what was right and proper myself, he sure as hell better!” She glanced around her husband at Colter Fletcher. The sheriff had legally adopted the boy a year ago, just after he and Marie Antoinette had married. “Isn't that so, my darlin' child?”

“That's right, Ma,” the boy said, customarily deadpan, between hammer blows. He stopped suddenly and squinted an eye at the sheriff. “That's an advantage I have over the other fellas, Pa.
I
know from
example
what I can't do and say, while the others can only guess at it. Most of the time they guess wrong and end up with a switch across their backsides!”

“There you have it, Sheriff.” As Colter continued working on the chair, Marie Antoinette planted a kiss on Fletcher's mouth and squirmed around on his lap. “My salty tongue and evil ways are my boy's advantage over the others. Hell, soon he'll be so well behaved he'll be able to skirt the seminary and head right to the pulpit!”

Fletcher chuckled as he wrapped his arms around his head-strong wife, drew her to him, and kissed her. “I don't know about that, but I reckon I see your point. Sort of, anyway. . . .”

In spite of her tongue, Fletcher had never loved a woman more than he loved Marie Antoinette. He was no saint himself, having ridden on the wrong side of the law several times when he was younger. He was pushing thirty-five now, and he couldn't argue that so far Marie Antoinette hadn't done a first-rate job raising Colter to be a respectful, hardworking young man—one whom Fletcher was proud to call his son.

He kissed her cheek and squeezed her shoulder. “So, what'd you bring us boys for lunch, Mrs. Fletcher? We'd best eat. I gotta ride out to the Double Diamond this afternoon.”

“Rustlers again?” Marie Antoinette wriggled off Fletcher's lap.

“ 'Fraid so. Prob'ly Injuns off the rez. If so, I might have to pay a visit to Fort Dixon.”

“Dixon?” Marie Antoinette scowled as she slid the towel from the basket and began setting out plates and silverware. “That means you'll be gone overnight.”

“ 'Fraid so.” Fletcher plucked a bread 'n' butter pickle off a glass dish and bit into it, glancing at Colter, who was putting his tools back into his toolbox. “But you got him. He'll protect you. Only twelve years old, but he'll be tall as me in another year.”

“I hate it when you have to leave town.”

“Don't like it much myself, honey,” Fletcher said as Marie laid a thick sandwich of last night's antelope roast on a blue tin plate and set it before him, nudging aside a can of cheap cigars. “But it's the way sheriffin' works, and I can't complain. I drove cattle long enough. Dug wells, strung fence. Even mustanged down south of the border for a while.”

The sheriff bit into his sandwich atop which Marie Antoinette had piled a good helping of raw green onion from the kitchen garden she tended out back of their rented frame house at the west edge of Seven Devils, Arizona Territory. She and Colter had even dug an irrigation ditch down from the creek.

“This is good, steady work. And around here about the worst you have to contend with is long-loopers and drunk soldiers from Dixon. Your occasional bandito on the run from
rurales
.”

“And Mrs. Berg's hired man,” said Colter as the lanky boy with a thick mop of auburn hair and brown eyes drew a chair up to the right side of Fletcher's desk.

Amos Adler was the drunk who'd busted the chair the boy had been fixing. During the week the big German was quiet as a church mouse as he worked around the big house and grounds of the widow of Seven Devils's founding father. But every Saturday night, Adler's wolf got loose, as they say, and Fletcher had to arrest the man for breaking up saloons or harassing the soiled doves over at Miss Kate's sporting parlor.

“And Amos Adler, correct,” Fletcher said, playfully nudging Colter's shoulder.

“Well, you be careful, Toby,” Marie Antoinette admonished as she sat down on the other side of his desk. “If anything happened to you . . .” She bit into her sandwich and regarded her husband angrily, her big, brown eyes grave. “I'd just be really bad piss-burned, that's all. . . .”