Someone told her to shut up. She glowered at him.
Buffalo’s eyes widened, boring into Sartain’s. “You son of a bitch!”
Lines spoked around Sartain’s eyes as he balled one cheek with a lopsided grin. He canted his head, bent Buffalo’s fist over to his left. Buffalo’s head sagged sharply as Sartain drove the bearded man’s knuckles into the table.
The room erupted with applause, cheers, and groans.
Men clapped Sartain on both shoulders, popped the cork on a bottle of Royal Oak bourbon, and assured him that drinks were on them for the rest of the night. Others converged on the redhead, Arliss, who hiked herself onto the bar, crossed her legs importantly, grabbed the kitty, and began flipping through her notepad.
Buffalo, his right cheek resting on the tabletop, glared up at Sartain and made his voice only loud enough for his partner to hear. “It was your turn to lose, ya son of a bitch!”
Sartain smiled woodenly as one of the well-dressed gents pumped his hand. He said out of the side of his mouth, “Shut up, you horse’s ass, and maybe I’ll buy ya a drink.”
* * *
Several hours later, when the last of the other customers had left the bar, Sartain leaned back in his chair. He dug his winnings out of his shirt pocket and flipped half onto the table amidst the dozen or so empty shot glasses and beer schooners.
“There’s your cut, pard. Twenty-five dollars. Not bad for a slow Tuesday night.”
Buffalo stuck his quirley stub between his lips and counted the small wad of bills, glowering across the table at Sartain. “It was your turn to lose, damn ya, Mike.”
“Who cares who wins or loses as long as we make a little extra drinking money?”
“ ’Cause I don’t like lookin’ weak. And that’s how you made me look.” The burly man leaned over the table toward Sartain, casting a furtive glance at the redheaded whore wiggling her fanny as she sponged off the bar top. “Weak!”
Sartain chuckled and stuck his half of the winnings back in his shirt pocket. “All right, all right. I was just gettin’ you back for that water bucket trick you pulled on me back at the bunkhouse. Tell you what. You can win the next two times. I don’t mind losin’. Some girls feel sorry for losers.”
He canted his head toward the redhead. “Ain’t that right, Marliss?”
“That’s right, honey. But it’s ‘Arliss,’ and I set even more store by winners.” She turned to give him a flirtatious grin. “You spendin’ the night, Mike?”
Sartain grinned back at her. “With you, sweetheart. All night long. And, uh, thanks fer helpin’ us out. I know it wasn’t much of a take for ya, but me an’ ole Buffalo find our little hornswogglin’ routine cuts the boredom.”
“When you spend six years in the cavalry, you’ll do anything to cut the boredom,” said Buffalo, throwing back his last whiskey shot.
“You two in the service together?” Arliss asked.
“Opposin’ sides during the Fight Against Southern Rebellion,” said Buffalo. “Me a blue-coat, him a mangy Reb. Then scouts at Fort Beckett over New Mexico way, off an’ on.”
“So what brought you to cattle wranglin’?”
“Boredom . . . for me, at least. Change o’ pace for ole Mike.” Buffalo sauntered toward the stairs at the back of the room. “I’ll take leave o’ you two lovebirds. See ya in the morn . . .”
Boots thumped on the boardwalk outside the saloon. The silhouette of a hatted head appeared over the batwings. A young man’s voice said, “Would there be a Mister Sartain hereabouts?”
Arliss glanced at the Cajun, still leaning back in his chair. He looked at Buffalo, then brought the front legs of his chair back down to the floor, edged his hand toward the big, pearl-gripped, silver-plated LeMat revolver thonged on his right thigh.
“Who wants to know?”
The batwings squawked. Boots raked the puncheons and spurs chinged as the short, slender figure entered the saloon, dragging his pant cuffs.
A kid with long, stringy hair. A bracket lamp shone on a charcoal smudge of a mustache mantling his upper lip. He wore a ratty shirt, a vest, and a plainsman hat.
Mud spotted his baggy duck breeches. A Russian .44, positioned for the cross-draw, graced the worn holster on his left hip. Sartain had spent enough time around ranch hands the past half-year to know right off that this kid had mucked around in cow shit aplenty.
“Name’s Marty Calloway, Mr. Sartain. I just come from Black Bird Gulch Roadhouse. There’s a man there. Says he needs to see you real bad.” The kid hesitated. His voice quivered slightly. “If’n . . . if’n you’re the one they call The Revenger, that is.”
Chapter Two
Arliss gasped at the moniker mentioned by the kid.
The redhead looked in surprise at Sartain. “That you, Mike? You The Revenger?”
Sartain didn’t go around announcing himself. He placed ads in newspapers when he felt inclined to hire out his guns as well as his razor-edged sense of right versus wrong, but he didn’t use a trumpet to announce his comings and goings. He was wanted by the law for his vigilante ways, so he tried to keep as low a profile as possible for a man of his size and passionate blue-eyed gaze.
“The Revenger—that’d be him,” Buffalo said with a dry chuckle, standing at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the newel post and casting his gaze toward the lanky kid at the front of the room. “Just hope you ain’t a bounty hunter, sonny, or you’ll be ruing this night!”
Arliss stood with her back to the bar, staring in awe at the tall, dark Sartain.
“Who is this hombre that wants to see me so late?” Sartain asked, still slouched in his chair, his right hand resting on the pearl grip of his fine LeMat.
Distant thunder clapped again, the storm unable to make up its mind where exactly it wanted to unleash its fury.
“Said his name was Ubek, er . . . somethin’ like that. Said he needed to see you real bad. Said it was somethin’ about someone named . . . umm . . .” The kid snapped his fingers to jog his memory. “Phoenix.”
“Phoenix?”
“Who’s Phoenix?” Buffalo asked.
Sartain kept his eyes on the kid. “Describe this pilgrim for me.”
The kid flushed slightly and looked around as if searching for a picture of the man on a wall. “Uh . . . under six foot, I’d say. Very skinny. Dresses kinda dandified. Wears a thin beard, one o’ them . . . whaddya call ’em . . . ”
“Van Dykes?”
“Yeah, a Van Dyke beard. And small, round specs, sorta like a schoolmaster. Two guns.” The kid glanced at the ceiling, squinting his eyes with concentration. “One with walnut grips, the other with pearl.” He offered a wan, sheepish smile. “Purty poppers.”
“Sounds like Ubek, all right. Why in the hell didn’t he come to me?”
The kid hesitated, flushed. “Said he couldn’t be seen in town,” he explained, his eyes crinkling a little as he added wryly, “Law trouble.”
“Law trouble? Jeff?” The description had sounded like Jeff. The law trouble did not. Sartain kicked his chair back, stood, and crossed the room to the boy. He towered over the lad, his shadow falling across the kid’s skinny features. “How long’s he gonna be there?”
“The rest of the night. Said he had to leave before sunup.”
“He pay you?”
The kid smiled, showing several half-rotten teeth and tobacco-blackened gums. “He said you’d probably throw somethin’ in fer the information. Maybe?”
Sartain fished in his pocket and flipped the kid a gold piece. “Run on back to your spread, boy. You should’ve been in the sack hours ago.”
The kid pinched his hat brim. “Thanks, Mr. Sartain.”
He turned and pushed through the doors. His spurs chinged. Tack squawked as the kid climbed onto a horse. Hoof thuds sounded, dwindling off in the damp night, distant lightning flickering above the silhouetted hill on the other side of Navajo Creek.
Sartain stared over the batwings at the black, starless sky.
“I reckon I best go check it out first, partner.” Sartain hadn’t heard the burly oldster lumber up beside him.
Buffalo stared at him gravely. “You’ve made quite a few enemies over the years. Could be a trap.”
“Not too many people know about Ubek . . . and Phoenix.”
“Can’t say as I’ve heard you mention them names. Just the same, wouldn’t hurt for me to scout the roadhouse. Black Bird Gulch is known for its owlhoots and drygulchers.” Buffalo patted Sartain’s shoulder. “I’ll ride in, have me a drink, ride out. Meet you on the trail. Give me a fifteen-minute head start.”
He gave Sartain another pat, then pushed through the doors and crossed the wide dirt road toward the dark livery barn fronting the creek, abutted on both sides by corrals and parked wagons in various states of disrepair. Navajo Wells had been a boomtown at one time. No longer.
Only a handful of people remained—those who’d come to support the boom but were still too poor to head elsewhere.
Or didn’t have anywhere else to go.
After Buffalo had led his saddled sorrel out of the livery barn, mounted up, and galloped south along the road, Sartain pushed out onto the saloon’s rotten stoop and rolled a cigarette. He’d fired it with a lucifer, taking the first deep drag, when the batwings squawked behind him. Light footsteps sounded, and the smell of ripe cherries rose to his nostrils.
Sartain glanced left. Arliss appeared, wrapping a cloak about her slender shoulders. She stood beside him, her head rising only to his shoulder, and took the quirley from his fingers. She placed it between her lips, drew a shallow puff, then returned the cigarette to Sartain.
“Helluva night to be out.” She shivered, holding the cloak taut about her shoulders. “A night like this, a man needs to curl up with a warm woman.” She rubbed a shoulder against his. “A woman needs a warm man.”
“I’d like nothin’ better.”
“Won’t this keep till tomorrow? Black Bird Gulch is a dangerous place in the daylight. Night . . .” Arliss shuddered again.
“Don’t look that way.”
Arliss looked up at him, her brown eyes reflecting the saloon’s wan lamplight pushing over the batwings. “That shavetail saddle tramp was spoutin’ names from the past, wasn’t he? A painful past.”
Sartain glanced at her, offered the cigarette. “You a witch?”
“Don’t take a witch to read a man’s eyes.” Arliss took the quirley, held it before her lips, and studied it for a time. “Nothin’ like names from the past to call up dark haunts.” She took another shallow drag off the cigarette and coughed. “Phoenix. Pretty name.” She looked up at him, arching one brow. “Pretty woman?”
“How’d you know it’s a woman?”
Arliss smiled bemusedly. “A man named Phoenix couldn’t get you out on a night like this.” Her smile broadened. “Not when you got me here, ready and willin’.”
Sartain snorted.
“You really The Revenger, Mike? The one we hear so much about—rightin’ wrongs for folks who can’t right ’em themselves?”
“One an’ the same.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“You just never know about folks.” Sartain gave her a quick, affectionate squeeze and kissed her cheek, genuinely wishing he could stay with her this rainy night.
But those two names from his past had him on edge and feeling anxious.
“I’ll be headin’ out,” he said as he dropped down the porch steps.
“Want the quirley?” Arliss asked behind him.
Sartain was striding toward the livery barn. “Nah, you finish it.”
Thunder rumbled and lightning flashed. Rain began falling, lightly pelting the rutted, hard-packed street. In the hills, several coyotes yammered maniacally, as if to be heard above the storm.
Arliss huddled within herself and, letting the gusting wind rip the cigarette smoke from her lips as she turned back through the batwings, yelled, “You be careful, Mike!”
Sartain threw out an arm, then drew one of the barn’s front doors open and stepped inside, where Buffalo had left a lamp burning on a stanchion post. The tall, dark-haired man took his time, saddling his lean, muscular buckskin stallion named Boss. His bushy brows were ridged with thought and, as Arliss had guessed correctly, dark hauntings from his past.
When he’d unwrapped his yellow slicker from his bedroll, he donned it and crawled into the hurricane deck. He gigged Boss toward the front of the barn, leaned over to blow out the lamp, ducked through the door, and spurred the stallion into the rain-splattered street, hooves making sucking sounds in the manure-laced mire.
He put the big stallion into a trot, sitting stiff-backed in the saddle, reins held high. When the ruined shacks of Navajo Wells receded behind him and he’d climbed the first rocky hill to the south, lightning flashed in earnest and thunder echoed around the high, rocky ridges to the east and west.
“He-yah!”
Lowering his head against the rain, Sartain gigged Boss into a ground-eating lope. Horse and rider couldn’t move fast for long, however, as the rain fell in sheets, sluicing off Sartain’s hat and the horse’s head and cutting gullies across the narrow, rocky wagon trace.
The rider cursed a blue streak when he found the trail cut off by a flooded arroyo, the muddy waters running too fast and deep between willow banks to risk traversing even atop a sure-footed stallion like Boss. It took him a good twenty minutes to find a shallow place to cross and another fifteen to get back to the main trail, which was as much a creek now as a passable wagon trace.
Thunder rumbled like the Navajo gods beating on giant war drums, and sharp witches’ fingers of lightning cut the velvet sky silvered by the rain coming down like javelins.
Lightning flashed off the high, craggy peaks surrounding Black Bird Gulch, telling Sartain he’d reached his destination. Water roared in the creek beyond the cottonwoods and willows to his right.
As he steered the jittery stallion around a trail bend, a blur of orange light shone about fifty yards ahead. Cottonwoods, willows, and boulders fallen from the surrounding ridges made the trail a vague black corridor.
Good place for an ambush.
As Sartain lifted a corner of his oil slicker above his holster, he touched his LeMat’s pearl grip and wondered why Buffalo hadn’t met him.
The horse slogged through the mud. Sartain swung his head from left to right, using the intermittent lightning flashes to scour the nooks and crannies for drygulchers. As the trail began opening ahead like a tunnel mouth, something obscured the lighted windows of the roadhouse—a branch hanging from a cottonwood. Probably broken off by a lightning strike or the wind.
As Sartain drew closer, it became more and more apparent that what hung from the cottonwood looming blackly on the right side of the trail was no broken branch. An icy knife stabbed his bowels.
He reined the horse up before the tree, stared up at the object. Lightning flashed, and thunder cracked like simultaneous Howitzer blasts. The sudden, brief illumination showed Buffalo McCluskey hanging from an arching branch of the cottonwood, boots turning slowly three feet above the muddy trail.
Buffalo’s face and beard were a wet, bloody mask, his hair curling straight down the sides of his head. The big man’s eyes were open, staring down, his tongue protruding from the right corner of his mouth.
The hemp noose shone like a corded muffler around his neck.
The lightning had no sooner flashed than Sartain, shucking his Henry rifle from his saddle sheath, swung his right leg over the stallion’s head and dropped straight down to the ground. His boots splashed mud around his shins. He flicked the back of his right hand against the horse’s shoulder, turning the mount and sending him splashing back the way they had come.
Levering a fresh shell into the rifle’s breech, Sartain bolted off the trail’s left side, bulling through shrubs and stumbling over rocks. Whoever had shot Buffalo had hung him there for a reason. It’d be a good w
ay to freeze a rider—to see his dead friend hanging from a branch like that, Buffalo’s face obliterated by several well-placed rifle shots.
While Sartain’s heart leap-frogged around inside his chest and his gut burned with the bile of rage, he’d been an army scout and tracker too many years to freeze up at the sight of a dead friend—even as good a friend as Buffalo. He wouldn’t make himself an easy target.
He’d search out a target of his own . . .
Sartain hunkered down beside a boulder, glanced back toward the trail, where Buffalo’s bulky silhouette slid this way and that, turning in the wind. He bunched his lips, fought back a curse, and flicked rain from his cheeks. He turned back to the roadhouse, crept to the edge of the yard, hunkered down beside another cottonwood, and rested the Henry across his thighs.
Before the low-slung, adobe-and-brick roadhouse, only one horse stood tethered to the hitch rack, hanging its head against the rain streaming off the porch’s shake roof. Odd that the owner hadn’t put the animal in the barn out of the weather.
Unless the horse was Buffalo’s sorrel. The mounts of the killer or killers could be in the corral on the other side of the yard. On the other hand, after killing Buffalo, they might have lit a shuck.
Only one way to find out.
Blinking water from his lashes, Sartain took another cautious glance around the yard, then sprinted out of the trees, tracing a zigzag course in case someone was laying for him with a rifle. Ahead stood the rock ruins of an old Spanish trading post.
Sartain hunkered down behind a three-foot-high rock wall, took another glance around the yard, scrutinizing both the front and back corners of the roadhouse, then leapt the crumbling stones. He ran to the near wall of the roadhouse and pressed his back against the bricks just left of a lighted window.
The perfume of burning mesquite, ripped and torn by the wet wind, touched his nostrils.
Sartain edged a glance through the nearest window. Inside, four men in various styles of rough trail garb played cards around a table, their faces hidden by shadows. None looked even remotely like the saloon-owning businessman, Jeff Ubek.
The Revenger Page 2
