The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  “There. That oughta do it.”

  Sartain untied the five horses from the hitch rack, pointed them south, and triggered his LeMat into the air over their heads. All five mounts lurched with a start and then lunged into hard gallops, their grisly cargoes jostling on their saddles.

  “How far is de Castillo’s hacienda from here?” Sartain asked Claudia as they stood side by side in the street, watching the horses gallop into the distance, shaking their heads against the smell of the dead men they were carrying.

  “An hour’s ride.”

  Sartain glanced at the sky. “They should be home for supper, then.”

  He turned to the marshal, who was gazing at him darkly. “He killed Buffalo, Claudia.” The Cajun felt his cheeks warm with barely bridled fury. “I’m gonna find out why. And then I’m gonna kill him.”

  Chapter Eleven

  A low ridge stood to the south of the main house at Hacienda de la Francesca. The ridge overlooked a narrow valley, cleaved down its middle by a flashing creek sheathed in oaks, sycamores, cottonwoods, and galleta grass.

  There were tawny patches of corn and hay on both sides of the creek, and just now peasants in their traditional white cotton pajamas were scything the hay, the second cutting of the year, and tossing it into the backs of two mule-drawn wagons.

  The valley was sheltered from the wind, but up here, where the don stood, it rustled the shrubs and bunches of shaggy brown grass growing amongst the rocks and prickly pear.

  The don stared off into the valley. Such a beautiful valley. Long and curving and well-watered, teeming with deer, fox, elk, and even the occasional bear. Red-throated fish thrived in the creek.

  The earthy blues and browns and greens shimmered in the lemony sunlight at this high altitude. Beyond the ridge on the other side of the valley were three more ridges and then the earth dropped to a long, sand-colored stretch of low, open desert with another, dark lump of a mountain range rising far, far beyond. That range seemed to hover in a blue-black cloud far above the ground.

  Such a beautiful place.

  The don’s favorite place since he’d been a boy and his father had been haciendado of Hacienda de la Francesca. Back when life had seemed so simple, and his heart was still a live thing beating in his chest and not a dead thing merely spasming as it slowly—oh, too slowly!—petered away to stillness.

  The don turned to the lone grave capping this beautiful ridge. One stout wooden marker fronting a mounded hill of pink gravel.

  There was no cemetery up here. The cemetery of Hacienda de la Francesca, consisting of over a hundred graves, lay on a hill a quarter mile east of the main casa. That was reserved for family. A sacrosanct place encircled with a low adobe wall, bearing a shrine devoted to the memory of Madre Maria and her beloved Jesus and a stone crypt containing the remains of the great-great-grandfather of Don Castillo.

  It also contained the grave of Castillo’s youngest son, Pedro—the one of the don’s three sons who most resembled the patrón and who, if he had been allowed to live—would have taken over Hacienda de la Francesca upon the don’s passing into eternity. Now, with his only living son banished from the hacienda, there was no one. The don’s death would mean Jacinta would take over. That, in turn, would mean the beginning of the end for Hacienda de la Francesca.

  The woman had no business savvy. She wanted only gold and power.

  A gravely important matter, but not one that was currently on the don’s mind.

  He stepped to the grave, only a couple of months old, and dropped to his knees. He stared down in sadness at the stout wooden cross of the grave that stood out here alone, for the most part, unattended except by the don. No one else cared. Of course, the woman buried here could not have been buried with the family, for she had not yet become family.

  She had been about to become family, but then . . . an indiscretion on her part as well as on the don’s. And now she lay out here alone for all the centuries to come, beside that beautiful valley under that arching Sonora sky.

  “Why?” the don asked. “Oh, why did it have to end like this?”

  Grief washed over him like a large ocean wave, swamping him, and he flung himself upon the cross. He held it to his chest, pressing his cheek to the top of it, grinding his teeth, pressing his fingers into the wood, openly sobbing.

  His shoulders jerked so violently that his hat fell from his head and tumbled onto the ground. The don’s thin hair blew in the wind. Tears dribbled down his cheeks to dampen his trimmed beard.

  And still, he sobbed.

  When finally the sorrow passed—or at least the brunt of it; he knew he would carry the bulk of it around with him for the rest of his days—he pulled out a silk handkerchief and dabbed his cheeks, his eyes. He replaced his hat, stood, sniffed, glanced down at the grave once more, and then turned and began walking down the hill toward the casa that sat like an enormous jewel in the valley to the west, not far below the ridge.

  He took only three steps and stopped.

  He stared straight ahead. His eyes grew as hard with anger as they had been soft with grief only a moment before. He hardened his jaws until his cheeks dimpled, and he flushed the red of a Sonora sunset.

  Suddenly, clawing his right Colt’s pistol from the tooled black leather holster residing on his right thigh, he wheeled back to the grave. He cocked the fine piece, aimed, and fired, screaming, “Puta bitch! Puta bitch! Puta bitch!”

  The gun roared six times before the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. The don stared through the wind-torn powder smoke at the cross. It was riddled by the six round, ragged-edged bullet holes and leaning precariously back and to one side.

  “There you are now,” the don snarled, holstering his pistol and snapping the keeper thong closed across the hammer. “How do you like it, puta bitch?”

  His jaws set, he wheeled and continued on down the slope. But he’d taken only a half-dozen more steps before he stopped again.

  Hooves drummed, and he saw riders galloping down the road beyond the hacienda’s main compound. They were descending the last hill along the pale, curving trail from the north, the wind whipping their dust. A couple of the horses were buck-kicking curiously.

  Don de Castillo lifted a hand to shade his eyes from the coppery sun as he stared toward the horses. They didn’t appear to be carrying riders. From this distance, it was hard to tell, but he thought it looked more like they had packs strapped over their saddles. Long packs hanging down over the flapping stirrups.

  Quickly, one after another, the procession dipped down behind the casa and out of sight.

  Apprehension poked at the back of the don’s neck as he continued on down the ridge. When he was nearly to the bottom, he saw the horses come into the yard. They galloped over to the stable and barn area of the compound, a ways down the grade from the walled, sprawling, tile-roofed casa. A couple of vaqueros jogged from the L-shaped mud-brick bunkhouse toward the horses, and then a stable boy dropped his pitchfork and went running as well.

  By the time the don had made his way through the trees and around the front of the casa, the segundo, Ernesto Cruz, and several other vaqueros were milling amongst the fidgeting, dusty, sweat-silvered horses. The blacksmith’s shaggy old dog was running around the mounts on his creaky hips, barking raspily, his tail in the air. Occasionally, the dog would run up to one of the horses and lift his snout toward the head of one of the men draped belly-down across a saddle to sniff.

  The don had stopped when he’d seen that the saddled horses were carrying men. Likely, dead men. Likely the five men who had been riding the five horses when they’d pulled out of the hacienda earlier that morning after being hand-picked by Ernesto Cruz himself.

  “Oh, shit,” the don said softly to himself.

  A low ringing started in his ears.

  The other men had grabbed the reins of the horses and were holding them still. They’d all inspected the men sprawled across the saddles, and now Cruz stood in front of them, facing the don with a
grim, haggard expression.

  The don continued striding forward. His legs and back felt stiff, as though all his joints had been fouled with mortar. One of the horses bucked suddenly, whinnying, and after a moment the vaquero who’d lost the horse’s reins grabbed them again and settled the Arabian back down.

  De Castillo stared at the head of the man hanging down the near side of the horse that had just bucked, probably not caring too much for the smell of death clinging to its back. Something about the dead man interested the don, who strode stiffly past Cruz and over to the horse.

  Cruz, who had not yet said anything, turned to follow the don. The don lifted the dead man’s head by his thick, curly, dark-brown hair. The man’s bandanna had been tied around his head, knotted tightly beneath his jaw. The man’s cheeks bulged slightly.

  Cruz glanced at the patrón skeptically.

  The don slipped the knot beneath the dead man’s chin. The man’s mouth opened. Something fell out from between his lips. It landed on the ground between the toes of the don’s polished black boots.

  Cruz bent down to pick it up between two fingers. He opened it and tensed.

  “What is it?” asked the don.

  Cruz showed him the note on which two words had been scrawled in pencil:

  Hell’s coming.

  * * *

  In the early evening, after the sun had died and the stars had opened up over Sonora Gate, Salvador de Castillo scratched a match to life atop a scarred wooden table. He touched the flame to one of the Cuban cigars he’d stolen from the old man’s study at Hacienda de la Francesca.

  As the eldest son of Alonzo de Castillo lit the cigar, blowing the aromatic smoke out his mouth and nostrils, he sat back against the adobe wall in the shadowy cantina of Xavier Obregon, which was all that remained of an ancient Spanish settlement lining the dry creek known as Durango Wash. The wash was a quarter-mile or so from the western outskirts of Sonora Gate, whose dull, red lamps and torch lights shone to the north beyond the steepled barrack-like church capping a rocky hill.

  This night in Obregon’s cantina, there were a dozen or so other customers, including the two men who sat at a square table to Castillo’s right. These two were in the deep, silent, softly grunting throws of an arm-wrestling match. The stakes were high, which mildly amused Salvador. The five men sitting in a semi-circle around the two combatants—all Mexicans, as this was the old Mexican side of Sonora Gate—smiled lustily, greedily at the teetering, clenched fists of the two players.

  Many pesos had been bet on the match. A bonus was the grisly fascination of the two scorpions held to the top of the table by rawhide strips strung through a hole on each side of the players’ struggling arms. The end of each length of rawhide was tied to a leg beneath the table, securing each scorpion in place over each small hole.

  The loser’s hand would be smashed down atop one of the two waiting scorpions, both of whom had their dangerous tails raised in anger at their predicament, and would likely be painfully injected with the scorpions’ toxic poison. So, the penalty for losing the match could very well be death or, at the very least, an agonizing few days of painful recovery ahead for the loser.

  Yes, the stakes were high. But then, the stakes were often high on this end of Sonora Gate. That was why Salvador was only mildly amused, despite his having bet two hundred pesos on one of the combatants.

  At the moment, he was more interested in hearing word of the man known as The Revenger, and in the ass of one of Obregon’s cantina girls—a full-hipped, well-endowed, brown-eyed blonde just now passing in front of Salvador’s table, two steaming platters in her hands. Salvador stuck out his boot to hook the girl’s skirt in an attempt to drag her over to him. He managed to hook the fancily embroidered and pleated cotton skirt, but it slipped on over the top of his boot as the girl sashayed away.

  The blonde jerked her head toward Salvador, frowning incredulously, then rolled her impertinent eyes as she continued to a table to the left of de Castillo’s. She set the platters down on the table, whirled, and gave Salvador’s table a wider berth as she passed.

  Behind a counter consisting of three cottonwood planks resting over beer barrels, Señor Obregon was tending several steaming kettles and sputtering fry pans.

  Salvador snorted a laugh as he finished lighting his cigar and tossed the match on the earthen floor. He blew out a long plume of smoke, sipped from his stone mug of pulque—the agave-derived alcohol that Obregon brewed better than any other—and glanced once more at the arm-wrestlers.

  They were facing each other, heads bowed as though in prayer, lips stretched back from their teeth. Their clenched fists were sticking straight up in the air between them. The scorpions turned angry circles on the table, inches from each combatant’s right elbow, flicking their poisonous tails.

  The bettors sat around the grunting fighters, leaning forward, none saying a thing, only anxiously picking their noses or raking their nails across their unshaven jaws.

  All were smoking or working a tobacco cud.

  Save for the bubbling and sputtering of Obregon’s pots and pans, the place was so silent now on the lee side of the windstorm that Salvador could hear a couple of coyotes yammering in the nearby hills.

  He hauled out his gold-chased pocket watch. Six-thirty. He’d sent his partner, Coyon, to look in on his father’s five so-called assassins and the gringo known as The Revenger an hour ago. Salvador’s own face was too well known on that side of town, and he didn’t want to get the female marshal’s panties in a twist. She’d banned him from the gringo part of town, after all.

  Salvador would have put a bullet in her head by now, but he hadn’t yet made love to her, and he very much wanted to do that before he drilled her with a bullet.

  He would show himself to The Revenger sooner or later, but first, he wanted to savor the anticipation of their meeting, savor his father’s anxiety.

  He hooked the skirt once more and lifted his leg, driving the toe of his boot up high against the cloth. The brown-eyed blonde cantina girl gave a shrill yell as Salvador drew his knee up and back and pulled the girl unceremoniously onto his lap.

  He bellowed a laugh as the girl fought him.

  “I have work to do, you cow!” she screeched in Spanish.

  “Rubia linda, I am in love with you!” Salvador bellowed, sticking his cigar between his teeth and cupping the girl’s full breasts in his hands.

  He knew her to be half-Mexican; her father had been a German prospector who’d died when the girl was still an infant. Salvador, who had always had an eye for the young girls, had seen her from time to time, growing up in a little adobe with her mother and grandmother not far from here along the southern bank of Durango Wash.

  Now she was a desert flower in full bloom. He wondered if her flower had ever been fertilized.

  “Por favor, Señor de Castillo. I have work to do!”

  “Xavier and the Indio can handle it,” Salvador said, glancing at the plump Pima girl who also served drinks and food here at Obregon’s cantina. “Can’t you, Xavier?” he yelled at the short Mexican wearing a grubby green bandanna over his head, with a cornhusk cigarette smoldering between his thick, mustached lips.

  Xavier glanced over his shoulder as he stirred some carne asada. “Salvador, por favor, uh? That one’s not a puta. You want a girl? The putas are upstairs.”

  “I’ve had the putas upstairs,” Salvador said, continuing to heft the girl’s breasts through the lacy cotton of her low-cut blouse, holding her taut against him. “I want this little one tonight, I think. She’s ripe, Xavier. Oh, brother, this one’s ripe!”

  “Salvador, her mother forbade me from whoring her. She said if she ever found her upstairs, she’d take her away. Hey, it’s not easy getting good help these days, much less keeping it!”

  “Don’t worry. I will pay you well, mi amigo!” Salvador drew the straps of the girl’s blouse down her arms. He closed his hand over the bare orbs and guffawed.

  The girl screeched. />
  Xavier shook his head and shrugged a shoulder despondently.

  Salvador and the serving girl must have been too much of a distraction for one of the arm wrestlers, because just then there was the thud of a fist against wood and a shrill, agonized scream.

  Chapter Twelve

  When the money had been exchanged, the loser of the wrestling match was escorted mewling from the cantina by three of the winning gamblers to the home of an Apache medicine woman. Salvador had lost the bet, but he didn’t mind.

  He had the blonde on his lap, and he’d subdued her by setting his Bowie knife on the table to his left, near her left thigh, and threatening to use it if she did not become more friendly. His friend and sole confidant, Coyon, sidestepped through the small crowd that had gathered near the front of the cantina in the wake of the wrestling match and shuffled over to where Salvador sat with his back against the wall, the suddenly subdued girl on his lap.

  Coyon was short and broad, with a fat belly and a hump on his back, drawing his head and shoulders down and forward. He was dressed much like Salvador, nearly all in leather except for a grimy red-and-black calico shirt and an even grimier bandanna knotted around his neck. He wore a long beard, and the left eye beneath the brim of his straw sombrero wandered up and outward as if to view something on his temple.

  Coyon slipped into the chair on the other side of the table from Salvador. The hunchback was staring lustily at the girl.

  Salvador scowled at his partner, who once had worked on the hacienda as a stable boy, long before Salvador’s exile from Hacienda de la Francesca. “Don’t you know it is not nice to stare, Coyon? Were you raised by wolves? It took you long enough. What did you see? What did you find out?”

  “Oh, very much, Salvador,” said Coyon, grinning lustily as he pried his gaze off the blonde’s opulent breasts filling his friend’s hands. He chuckled; it sounded like a rooster’s dying wails. “As you guessed, the don’s men have returned to the hacienda.”