The Graves at Seven Devils (30 page)

“Very funny.” Her voice sounded a little pinched.

“You all right?”

“Not exactly. A viper chomped into my shoulder and I took a pretty good rap to my head.”

Prophet felt apprehension nip him once more. Just because he'd found her didn't mean everything was roses. “I'll be down.”

He leaned the rifle in the rocks, scrambled up and over the tailing pile once more, and jogged back to where the pinto stood where he'd left it, beside Cora, who still lay facedown in the gravel, unmoving. Down the slope he could hear voices, but he didn't have time to worry about the killers now. He had to get Louisa out of the snake pit.

He led the pinto up near a gap in the tailing pile, grabbed Louisa's rope coil from the saddle horn, and tied one end to the horn itself before turning the horse away from the hole.

“You stay here till I tell you, boy,” Prophet said, slapping the pinto's shoulder and, breathing hard with anxiety and the need to hurry, he uncoiled the rope through the gap in the tailing pile.

Prophet glanced into the hole once more. “Louisa, you still with me?”

“No, I've gone to the Larimer Hotel in Denver for sarsaparilla and ginger snaps.”

Prophet adjusted the position of the ten-gauge hanging down his back, wrapped the rope around his waist, slipknotted it, turned his back to the hole, and, keeping the rope taut between himself and the pinto, dropped over the edge, starting down.

The pit's walls were steep though not sheer, and he descended quickly, the daylight drifting up over his head and his breath beginning to echo in the stony, cavernous silence. His boots scuffed along the wall, loosing occasional shards of orange shale. He winced as he heard them clatter to the pit's floor maybe thirty feet below, possibly hitting his partner crouched in the shadows.

Semi-level ground rose beneath him, and a wall pushed up from behind to scrape against the double-barreled gut shredder. He set his boots, released the rope, and looked around in the dark gray light.

Louisa's voice trilled under the low wall behind him, like water in a sepulcher. “Under here. Watch out for the snakes.”

Prophet ducked under the low-angling ceiling and peered farther back into the cave. Louisa's booted feet and riding denims stretched toward him, her upper body, obscured by the cave's inner dark, resting against a four-foot-high wall. As if to give credence to Louisa's warning, a snake rasped to her left. Along the base of the wall, left of the girl, a slender shadow moved. The penny-colored, pellet-sized eyes shone in the dimness.

“Shit!” Prophet slipped his .45 from its holster, thumbed back the hammer, and fired. The rocketing blast felt like two cupped palms slapped hard over Prophet's ears. Louisa gave an irritated grunt.

The rattling died abruptly, and the two cold eyes winked out like distant railroad lanterns. The slender, coiled shadow continued to jerk and quiver.

Keeping his revolver unholstered, Prophet scuttled under the low-angled ceiling, looking all around for more vipers, and knelt beside Louisa. “How in the
hell
did you end up in
here
?”

“Don't ask stupid questions. Is the gang dead?”

Prophet laughed dryly as he snaked his arms beneath Louisa's back and legs. “Talk about stupid questions—no, they sure as hell ain't!”

“Good. I'd like to handle that job myself.”

Kneeling and sort of sidestepping while remaining crouched beneath the ceiling, Prophet slid the girl out from the wall. “I don't doubt it, Miss Bonnyventure. I don't doubt that one damn bit.”

“Ouch! My head hurts.”

“Where'd the snake bite you?”

“Shoulder. Another bit me in the leg.”

Prophet looked at her sharply, brows beetled with concern. He'd never seen anyone recover from two rattlesnake bites. In fact, they'd both died long, painful deaths, begging him and the other men present to drill slugs through their heads.

Louisa stared at him, tightening her grip about his thick neck. “Don't fret, Lou.”

Prophet glanced at her as, hauling his blond partner out from beneath the low ceiling, he straightened in the light falling from the circle of blue sky overhead. The light found Louisa's half-open hazel eyes and sparkled. “How's that? You just done told me you been snakebit twice. Do you know what that means, you crazy polecat?”

“I'm immune to rattlesnake venom.”

Prophet froze, staring at her. The bland way she frequently reported important information always took him aback, and he was never sure she wasn't joking. The two hazel orbs staring at him now were totally lacking in irony, however.

Prophet laughed with newfound relief and genuine humor as he set her feet on the stony ground before him, propped her against him, and reached for the rope. “You know that doesn't surprise me?” He laughed again, louder, the laughter echoing around them. “No, sir, that doesn't surprise me one damn bit!”

That she herself believed she was immune didn't mean that he believed it, for he'd never heard of anyone being immune from rattlesnake venom. But just the possibility that he might not lose her made him feel better. She certainly didn't
seem
to have one foot in the grave.

With her wrapped in his arms before him, the rope's loop encircling them both, he chuckled again and clucked to the pinto at the top of the hole.

The rope grew taut, pinching Prophet's sides, holding Louisa firmly against him, and the loop began lifting them up the hole's steep wall, the shotgun swinging back and forth across his back. Prophet ground his boots into the wall as they rose, walking up the steep incline while holding the rope firm in his gloved hands.

He chuckled again. “Nope. Doesn't surprise me one damn bit. In fact, I'm beginnin' to feel sorry for the snake that bit ya!”

“Ha-ha.”

Prophet stared at the blue opening growing before him, listening for voices or boot scuffs—anything to indicate the gang was closing on the mine pit. There was only a thin mare's tail of sun-bright dust blowing on the dry breeze.

The rope creaked to a stop. Prophet and Louisa stopped moving. The bounty hunter looked at the rope bending down over the hole, creaking slightly from the strain as it ground into the dirt and rock.

“Damn horse.” Prophet grabbed a chunk of shale protruding from the side of the hole and threw it up out of the hole, aiming for where he figured the horse was probably standing.

“Get a move on, boy!”

The last word hadn't died on his lips before a hawkish face with rose-colored spectacles slid out from the hole's right side, staring down. The man held a revolver in his right hand. He snapped his eyes wide, jerking the glasses down his nose, as the stone sailed past his cheek, barely missing it and ticking against the brim of his opera hat.

The hawk-faced hombre bunched his lips with anger and cocked the pistol. “Hey, ole son,” he raged in a Southern accent even thick to Prophet's Georgian ears, “you damn neah knawcked my
block
off!”

Prophet winced as the man angled the revolver's barrel over the lip of the hole. Throwing his head over Louisa slumped before him, Prophet gritted his teeth and sucked a sharp breath as he awaited the bullet that would no doubt splatter his brains all around the mine pit's floor below.

No bullet came. Instead, another, more distant gun barked.

Prophet looked up. The bespectacled, hawk-faced hombre who'd been about to shoot Prophet was gone. Along the edge of the sphere of skylight, other hatted heads and mustached faces bobbed and jerked while men shouted and screamed.

Louisa said thinly, barely audible beneath the din from above, “What's going on?”

A horse whinnied.

The loop around Prophet and Louisa drew torturously taut, both grunting as it pinched the air from their lungs. With a violent jerk they were propelled up the side of the hole, the ascension so quick and unexpected that Prophet's boots slipped off the stone ridge, and he and Louisa slammed the jagged rock wall so hard that Prophet felt as though his shoulders had been fused together. Twisting around, he put his back to the jagged stone incline, his back and shotgun taking the brunt of the scrapes and bruises from the pick-and-shovel-carved sides of the hole.

Louisa groaned, bunching her cheeks and slitting her eyes as she stared straight up at the opening growing wider and wider above.

Prophet gritted his teeth as, gripping the taut rope in both his gloved hands, daylight and the acrid smell of powder smoke washed over them and the hole shot back behind them.

Louisa gave an anguished cry as she and Prophet blew up out of the pit like sudden-struck oil and slammed back to the shale-littered ground. With the girl's back snugged against Prophet's chest and belly, they were dragged forward together as if drawn by a team of runaway horses along the rocky ground away from the hole, the ground searing and cutting into Prophet's left shoulder. Rocks flew to either side as he and Louisa, lashed together like Siamese twins, fishtailed through the gap in the tailing pile.

Gritting his teeth against the ground hammering and raking him, Prophet caught a quick, blurred glimpse of men around him falling or crouching or shooting up toward the devil-capped southern ridge, powder smoke wafting as flames stabbed from gun barrels.

Ahead, the pinto was running and buck-kicking at an angle across the slope, dust spitting up from its hooves. The horse jerked sharply right, loose shale flying up around it. The horse went down and rolled in a thick dust cloud, wrenching Prophet and Louisa sharply sideways.

As the horse screamed and lifted its head, hooves scissoring as it tried to regain its feet, the rope slackened, and Prophet and Louisa, propelled by their previous momentum, skidded down a rocky, brushy bench, dust flying up around them. They piled up together against a low knoll, Louisa squirming and groaning on top of Prophet, her dust-caked hair in his face.

Prophet felt the rope jerking at his waist and turned to see the pinto starting to draw its feet under it. Holding Louisa's shoulders with one arm, he reached back behind his head with his other hand and slipped his bowie knife from the thong between his shoulder blades.

Quickly, as the rope began jerking him and Louisa ahead once more, he flung his arm out, slashing the razor-edged blade through the quivering hemp. He and his partner bounded back from the suddenly released tension, one of the cut ends recoiling like a viper striking him while the other bounced and leaped behind the pinto, which was once again screaming and galloping off across the slope, away from the guns still cracking and popping in the rocks and cedars behind it.

Prophet wrapped his arms around Louisa and lay his head back in the sand. He sucked a long breath, vaguely taking reconnaissance of his battered body, trying to ascertain if anything was broken. Gently, he rolled Louisa to one side and brushed her hair away from her face with his forearm. Her cheeks were scraped and dusty. Her eyelids fluttered.

Prophet's gut was in a knot. He couldn't believe she'd survived the two snakebites as well as the pummeling they'd both just taken. “Hey . . . you still kickin'?”

She rolled back onto her elbows, looking around like a drunk just waking up in an alley. “What happened? Who's shooting?”

Prophet chuffed at the girl's sand once more. He groaned as he pulled a boot beneath him and began pushing himself to his feet. Once standing, dizzy and battered but still operable, he reached for his .45, relieved to find the revolver still secured to his holster by the hammer thong. “I don't know.” He thumbed open the loading gate, plucked out the one spent shell, and replaced it with a fresh shell from his dust-caked cartridge belt. “Reckon I'd better go find out. You stay here.”

He'd taken only one step forward, toward the din rising upslope and left, when a gun barked closer than the others. The slug whistled over Prophet's right shoulder and screeched off a boulder behind him.

Prophet dropped to a knee, every bone in his big frame squawking in protest of the sudden movement, and raised the .45.

He hammered three quick rounds at the figure peering at him through cedar branches, snapping branches, tearing bark, and puffing dust from the man's chest.

The bushwhacker screamed and jerked back. He stumbled out from the other side of the tree, dropped to a knee—a scrawny gent in a funnel-brimmed Stetson and with bandoliers crossed on a deer-hide vest—and Prophet fanned two more shots.

Both slugs took the man through his forehead, blood and bone spraying as he flew straight back, hit the ground, and lay spread-eagle, as though dropped from the moon.

Quickly, looking around for more shooters moving in on him, Prophet opened the smoking .45's loading gate and began plucking out the spent casings. The gunfire around the snake pit had grown sporadic, and several men were shouting angrily. Beside Prophet, Louisa leaned back against the knoll and shook her hair from her eyes.

“Give me your pistol, Lou.”

Prophet thumbed a shell into an empty chamber and narrowed an incredulous eye at the dusty, rumpled, snakebit girl.

She jerked her hand toward him, furrowed her brows impatiently. “Give me your pistol. You still have your barn blaster. We'll circle those fork-tailed demons and send them to their rewards in a hail of hot lead.”

Prophet snorted. “You oughta write them pulp yarns with yellow-backed covers.”

He flicked the revolver's loading gate closed and looked around once more. “Forget it. Stay here.”

He started forward, stopped, and turned back to where she flung pitchforks at him with her sparkling hazel gaze between breeze-buffeting wings of dusty blond hair. “And for once in your ornery, pea-pickin' life, sit tight!”