The Graves at Seven Devils Read Free

long, hard trail, and we’re gonna soak awhile.”
    â€œYou 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!”

2
    â€œCOLDER’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?”
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œWhat about him?” Marie Antoinette blinked. “You don’t think he’s heard ‘grave digger’s ass’ before?”
    â€œNo 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 . . .”
    â€œPshaw!”
    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?”
    â€œThat’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