Read Online The Graves at Seven Devils by Peter Brandvold - Free Book Online

the bounty hunter might want to buy or trade for.
    The others were shouting and whooping and dancing in circles around Whipple and Prophet, kicking up dust and flinging pebbles and grit at Prophet’s face.
    â€œKill him, Whip!” Rodney Hayes shouted. “Kill him dead!”
    â€œGo ahead and send him to Jesus, Whip,” Emmitt Sanderson said. “The girls prob’ly done got our lunch ready, and I’m starvin’!”
    â€œDamn.” Mrs. Sanderson shook her head as she puffed her pipe. “That’s five greenbacks I’ll never see again.”
    Whipple’s eyes slightly crossed as he stared down at Prophet. “See that?” he growled, turning the knife this way and that, letting the sun catch it. “That blade’s so sharp it’ll trim the hair on a frog’s cock.”
    The man suddenly drew the knife back, bunching his lips and slanting the blade toward Prophet. “Won’t be no job o’ work to cut your throat !”
    Prophet kicked his legs and tried to lift his arms, but it was no use. The big man had him pinned to the ground. He could only watch in horror as Whipple loosed a bearlike roar and slashed the blade toward Prophet’s neck.

6
    LOU PROPHET WAS about to shake hands with the Devil himself—Ole Scratch, as he was called—with whom Prophet had a special bond. The two would meet at last and, as per the agreement they had made when Prophet had survived the War of Northern Aggression and wanted only to live, drink, and carouse to his heart’s content for the remainder of his days, the bounty hunter would begin his long, eternal stint shoveling coal in Hell.
    Damn. He’d thought he’d have another few years on this side of the sod to stomp with his tail up.
    Regretting the pact he’d made, the bounty hunter squeezed his eyes closed and gritted his teeth. He no longer felt the throbbing ache in his groin as he awaited the slash of Whipple’s knife that would no doubt cleave his head from his shoulders.
    Something wet sprayed across his cheek.
    Prophet opened his eyes as a rifle cracked somewhere off in the hills to his right. Whipple straddled him, holding both his knife hand and his free hand chest high. The hands were quivering, the knife flashing in the sunlight. Whipple’s head was tipped against his right shoulder, and oddly twisted.
    There was a round hole on the left side of his head, just above his ear—a hole about the size of a sewing thimble. Blood dribbled from the hole to form a small river down the side of the big man’s bald head. The other side of his skull had opened like a smashed melon, and blood and brains and large chunks of bone ran down his right shoulder and arm to puddle on the ground beside Prophet’s hip.
    The big man’s chest heaved once and his eyes rolled back in his head. His lower jaw dropped. He groaned as he dropped the knife and began to sag toward the ground.
    Prophet was trying to figure out who’d fired the shot, as were the other men standing around him and staring down at Whipple with looks of incredulity and horror. Mrs. Sanderson was the first to recover from the shock. She bolted up from the rock she’d been sitting on, glanced around quickly, then lurched toward Prophet, bringing up her double-bore sawed-off.
    â€œHe’s got a partner!” she bellowed like a chicken snagged in an eagle’s claws.
    She jerked as though with a start as a hole opened in the front of her man’s flannel shirt, spitting a thick gob of blood across Prophet. The bullet that had torn into her back and out her chest careened between her son and the stringbean called Cisco to spang off a rock behind them. The rifle report followed a half second later, flatting out from the scattered pines on the low northern slope. Mrs. Sanderson’s arms fell to her sides as she dropped the barn blaster, staggered forward, twisted around, and tumbled onto her back across