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

nearest ravine and neither I nor anyone else would have known what happened to you.”
    Prophet leaned down to scoop his hat from a weed tuft. He dusted it off and set it on his head, glancing around at the dead men and Mrs. Sanderson already attracting flies. Horton Whipple’s bowie knife glistened in the sun near his left shoulder, beneath which blood from his ruined head was puddling and congealing.
    â€œI had a chance.” Absently rubbing his neck, Prophet turned back to Louisa. His chagrin pained him worse than the groining he’d taken from Horton Whipple. Not only had he let an old woman sneak up on him from behind, but a young one—one who’d been bounty hunting fewer years than Prophet had been wearing the same longhandles—had had to save his ass. “Where in the hell did you come from, anyway? I thought you were up north.”
    They’d met a couple of years ago, when Louisa, only seventeen at the time, had taken off after the bunch that had burned her Nebraska farmstead and murdered her family. She and Prophet had hunted the kill-crazy renegades led by Handsome Dave Duvall from Minnesota to northern Dakota Territory, and together they’d sent each man to the spirits in a haze of gun smoke and dust.
    Prophet had figured that Duvall’s demise would mark the end of Louisa’s vengeance trail. But long after Duvall and his gang were moldering in their graves, she, in the grip of some curious obsession for righting the world’s wrongs and evening up the odds for those who couldn’t do it themselves, had continued ghosting the outlaw trail, collecting bounties not so much for the money but to finance her continued tracking.
    Louisa specialized in stalking men who killed or injured women or children, but she didn’t discriminate. Any outlaw was fair game, and she wasn’t on any man’s trail long before the poor bastard was soiling his trousers and begging for mercy.
    But when it came to killers and renegades, Louisa showed no mercy.
    She and Prophet worked together only occasionally. But being too stubborn to stand each other for long, they spent more time apart than together. Otherwise, they’d have spent more time arguing than bounty tracking.
    Besides—though neither had made a formal declaration—they were in love with each other, and love had no place in the bounty hunting business.
    â€œYou carve a wide swath, Lou,” Louisa said, sliding the Sharps into her saddle boot. “I accidentally cut your trail in Denver where I ran into your old pal Hooch Mullaney, who said that when you’d finally gotten out of the local lockup for busting up the Drovers Saloon and Pleasure Parlor during a typical inebriated brawl, you headed south for the winter. In Pueblo I learned from a deputy sheriff that you’d gotten word a gang of stage robbers was running sharp-horned and high-tailed through the country north of Durango, and you intended to collect the bounty to fuel your winter—a winter that you no doubt intend to spend in the arms of some dark-skinned harlot in some rank perdition south of the border.”
    Prophet grinned up at her. “Why, you been followin’ me. Needin’ a real man to curl your toes, are ya?”
    Louisa blinked coolly, but her smooth-skinned cheeks flushed ever so slightly. “Hardly. And I’d rather follow a bobcat into a rattlesnake den. It just so happens our trails crossed several times below Denver—I, too, am headed south—and I had a premonition you were about to get yourself into hotter water than even you were accustomed to.” She raked her haughty, self-satisfied gaze around the bodies of the dead Sanderson bunch, as if to prove the validity of her portent. “I cut Mean and Ugly’s trail yesterday. Who woundn’t recognize that scrub horse’s shabble-footed, knock-kneed gait?”
    â€œJesus Christ, now she’s insultin’ my horse.”
    As