The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  As the man standing farthest away stepped out away from the bar to stand just to the left of the table at which the other two sat, the man nearest Sartain sniggered, “Friend, you got a two-thousand-dollar government bounty on your head.”

  He was a duster-clad, stocky gent with a ginger beard and close-set gray eyes, a dusty red neckerchief billowing down his broad, lumpy chest.

  Sartain shot a quick glance at the girl. She smiled so brightly he thought she was going to clap her hands, laugh, and jump up and down, proud of herself for having lured the Revenger into a whipsaw.

  Chapter 2

  Sartain sighed as he looked at the men standing gun-ready before him in a ragged semi-circle across the right half of the room and slowly let his gaze settle on the girl still standing behind the bar. He could see the back of her head and her bare, slender shoulders in the mirror behind her. “Reckon I should have checked out the ole Belle of the Ball before I rode into town. Your note just sounded so . . . desperate.”

  “What do you think, boys?” the girl asked, nervously cutting her eyes around the room. “Do you think you can take him? Remember, there’s two thousand dollars on his head. Y'all can split it six ways, and just give me a hundred for lurin’ him in.” She spoke with a faint Texas accent.

  “That’s not a small bait o’ money.” Sartain put some steel into his voice, though his eyes still crinkled at their corners with a faint affable smile. “You sure you fellas can afford it?”

  He recognized a couple of them. They were likely all bounty hunters.

  The one he knew to be Clayton Demry, the second man from the door, standing now with his back to the bar, said, “Them federal boys gonna be pleased as punch to see your head in a gunnysack . . . finally.”

  “They would be at that, Clay.”

  “Let’s cut the chinnin’, shall we?” This from the man in the brown hat, who’d gained his feet, as had the man he’d been sitting with at the table—a yellow-haired hombre named Lancaster, if Sartain remembered right. Lancaster had been a deputy U.S. marshal himself before he’d turned in his badge to start collecting bounties for a living. Bounty men earned more than lawmen.

  “Yeah,” scolded the stocky gent nearest Sartain. “Let’s stop with the lollygaggin’. Me, I got a drink to finish.” He smiled.

  Sartain let his right hand hang down over his holstered LeMat. His right index finger tingled, as it often did in this situation. It was an anxious twitch that he tried to keep in only the finger while the rest of him remained calm, his face implacable, his heartbeat slow.

  Not that he was overconfident. Six against one was steep odds, and he was not the fastest gun in the West. In fact, he’d never faced six at one time in close quarters. Chances were, he’d kill three of these men within five seconds.

  The fourth would get him.

  Oh, well. It was what he deserved for getting careless. But the girl’s note really had seemed desperate, and Mike Sartain was a sucker for desperate women.

  He glanced at her once more. Her wide eyes were roaming anxiously around the room, her lips slightly parted, her lovely corset rising and falling sharply as she breathed. In the mirror over her right shoulder, the third of the four men standing with their backs to the bar jerked his right elbow up.

  Sartain’s LeMat was in his fist, blasting.

  The third man howled and fired his Peacemaker into the floor. Next, The Revenger shot the man standing to the third man’s right—both shots coming so fast and furious that the second shot sounded like an echo of the first—and then he bounded left, lofted himself into the air as the bounty hunters’ guns thundered. Bullets shredded the batwings and the front wall and window.

  Shattering glass screeched, exposing the room to the moaning wind.

  Sartain fired the LeMat again as he flew through the air, evoking a shrill curse as Lancaster doubled over and staggered backward. The Revenger slammed his left shoulder on the side of a table, upending it to create a wooden shield as Sartain and it dropped together.

  As The Revenger hit the floor, two bullets slammed through the shield, spraying slivers, tearing his shirtsleeve, and carving a hot line across his right shoulder. Wincing against the burn, he bounded to his heels, lifted his head and smoking LeMat above the table. He winced again as a bullet tore the table’s edge, spraying more slivers. He shot Clayton Demry before jerking the big horse pistol slightly left, the last man standing hurtled over the top of the bar and into several shelves of bottles behind it.

  More glass shattered.

  In the corner of his left eye, he saw the man in the brown hat standing about ten feet away, near where he had been lounging in his chair. He was screaming wildly at the tops of his lungs as he flung lead at Sartain. As bullets screeched and thudded around him and blew out more window glass, The Revenger launched himself back to his right and rolled onto his left hip and shoulder in front of the swinging batwings, extending the LeMat toward the brown-hatted gent.

  The hammer of the man’s Russian .44 clinked on an empty chamber.

  He flung the revolver aside and reached for another one holstered over his belly, his wide, white-ringed eyes blazing beneath the wide brim of his hat. He hadn’t wrangled the belly gun even halfway out before Sartain flipped the LeMat’s lever, engaging the shotgun shell, and squeezed the trigger.

  The thunder caused the room to leap as though from an earth tremor. Dust sifted from the ceiling. The heavy piece’s recoil caused The Revenger’s wrist to ache.

  The brown-hatted man’s hat flew off his head as the .12-caliber wad of buckshot shredded his chest, lifted him two feet in the air, and pitched him straight back over a table and into a piano, which gave an indignant, raucous belch as the man bounced off it and piled up at its base. Rising, twirling the LeMat on his finger and dropping it back into its holster, Sartain drew his derringer from inside his vest with his other hand and clicked both hammers back.

  Only one of the six bounty hunters was moving.

  Clayton Demry crawled down along the bar toward the back of the room, groaning, panting, and leaving a smeared blood trail behind him. As he reached a dead man, he stopped, picked up the dead man’s cocked Colt, and twisted around toward Sartain, who raised the derringer and popped a pill dead-center through Demry’s forehead.

  Demry fired the Colt into the ceiling as he rolled onto his back, shaking his head and jerking before gradually growing still.

  Sartain glanced around the room, gauzy with spiderwebbed smoke and rife with the coppery smell of fresh blood.

  Where was the girl?

  As if in response to his silent question, she lifted her eyes above the bar. They were even wider than before. She looked around until her shocked gaze landed on Sartain, then flicked to the cocked derringer he held in his hand, aimed at her.

  “Holy shit,” she said, lifting her head still farther until she was standing up straight, smiling, showing all her fine, white teeth between ruby lips. “You’re really him, ain’t ya? The Revenger.” She leaned forward to peer over the bar at the dead men lying at its base and shook her head in awe. “Yep, you’re him, all right.” She smiled. “Thanks for comin’, Mr. Sartain.”

  Sartain studied her critically. “You got a fine way of makin’ sure a man is who he says he is.”

  “When Northcutt said he seen you in Alamosa—”

  “That’d be me,” a man’s voice said from behind Sartain.

  The Revenger wheeled on a heel, leveling the derringer at the gray-bearded face hovering just above the batwings on the other side.

  The old man drew his head down behind the doors, yowling, “Now, don’t go a-cuttin’ loose with that pocket popper, mister! This wasn’t my idea. I told her it was you I seen in Alamosa, sure enough, but Belle done thinks I’m so damn old I can’t see straight, or leastways, knows what I’m lookin’ at when I’m lookin’ at it!”

  “Get in here!”

  The oldster busted through the doors like a bull through a chute, keeping his head down and h
olding his hands in front of his face as though to shield himself from a bullet. He sidled away from Sartain, crowing, “It’s her fault! It’s Belle’s fault! If’n you’re gonna shoot somebody—I mean, add to the pile of dead you done already piled up—shoot Belle!”

  “Oh, shut up, Northcutt, and put your hands down!” Belle scolded the old man from behind the bar. “Mr. Sartain, this is my swamper and sometime piano player, Raymond Northcutt. He was once a deputy sheriff. My father’s deputy sheriff. Worked for my pa—back when he could see straight, that was, and knew what he was lookin’ at when he was lookin’ at it.”

  She grabbed one of the few intact bottles from a shelf along the back-bar mirror, glanced down at the dead man who’d been blown over the bar and was likely lying at her feet, and wagged her head.

  She sighed, plucked two glasses off a pyramid atop the bar’s near end, and walked out from behind the bar to stand before Sartain in all her half-dressed glory—tall for a girl, and as pretty as a speckled pup. Willowy and full-busted, the Revenger judged her to be all of seventeen. He tried to keep his eyes off her overflowing corset while reminding himself that she’d sicced six-seasoned bounty hunters on him.

  If not for a few fast moves and a good bit of luck, he’d be lying where the six bounty men were, mingling his bodily fluids with the cow dung, tobacco, and sawdust that fairly carpeted the place.

  “Where’s my glass?” Northcutt asked, indignant. His bearded face was as dark and wrinkled as a walnut, and his canvas trousers and calico shirt, over which he wore a ragged deerskin vest, hung on his spindly frame as though from a badly stunted tree. “I fetched him here. Made two trips to Alamosa in the past week, and now you treat me like dirt!”

  “Get your own glass and take it outside,” the girl said, staring brashly up at Sartain, who stood only a few inches taller. “The Revenger and I have business to discuss. Oh, and take Mr. Sartain’s horse over to the Occidental and make sure he’s tended properly—curried and given plenty of hay and oats. Best keep that stallion away from the mares.”

  Her cheeks dimpled as her eyes flicked to Sartain’s broad chest and the dark hair curling out of the open top of his shirt, beneath the collar and knotted red neckerchief. “I saw that stallion when he rode in, and I bet he could do some damage in a barn full of fillies . . . left to his own devices.”

  “Ah, ya ungrateful pup,” the oldster groused, stomping around behind the bar. “I’m gonna tell your pa—if he’s still kickin’—about how you been treatin’ me since he’s been gone, and he’ll bend you over his knee. I’d do it myself if I was a few years younger and could catch ya. Let me see here . . . where’s the Tennessee? Oh, there it is!”

  He cackled, bending stiffly forward to lift a bottle from under the bar, then cradling the bourbon like a beloved infant in one arm and patting the fancy label as though it were the baby’s belly. “Worked me up a powerful thirst with all that ridin’ around the country on old Millicent. Do believe I’m deservin’ of the Belle of the Ball’s best.”

  “Millicent is his mule,” the girl informed Sartain, turning her mouth-corners down.

  Northcutt ambled out from behind the bar and headed for the batwings. “Don’t worry, I won’t dirty up a glass.”

  “Good,” the girl said impatiently. “Could you be gone now?”

  Still standing before the girl, his mind spinning over the killings, he regarded this cool, smiling, scantily-clad seductress who was acting as though it were all just a melodrama performed by some traveling theatrical show. The Revenger said sharply, “Old man, you leave my horse where he is.”

  Northcutt shrugged. “All right, if you say so.” He glanced at the dead men heaped around the room and then looked at the girl. “What about all that fresh beef? You leave these bodies here, they’ll attract coyotes, and those coyotes will soon be after Mrs. Patrick’s cats, and you know who she’ll be complainin’ to. Me, since I’m the last lawman in town!”

  “Some lawman,” the girl said through a low, caustic snort, keeping her bold eyes on Sartain. “Send a couple of the Occidental’s hostlers over later with a wagon. They can load ’em up and take what’s in their pockets for payment. Have ’em bury ’em up in that potter’s field on the backside of Boot Hill.” She wrinkled her nose as she glanced at the dead men sprawled near her pretty red high-heeled shoes. “Worthless trash. Bounty hunters, my ass!”

  “That ass of yours needs a good paddlin’,” the old man grouched, digging the cork out of the bottle with a small pocketknife.

  “Are you still here?”

  “I’m goin’! I’m goin’!” Northcutt stopped between the batwings and glanced peevishly over his shoulder, suspiciously scrutinizing Sartain before sliding his castigating eyes to Belle. “You mind your Ps and Qs now, girl. Your pa done ordered me to see to your honor while he was away!”

  “My honor. Hah!” The girl laughed.

  “And how many times I gotta tell ya—you shouldn’t go around dressed like that, with them titties of yours spillin’ out all over the place. Mr. Sartain’s liable to mistake you for a percentage gal. It ain’t decent to dress like that if’n you’re not a whore.”

  She placed her hands on her hips and pivoted toward the old man, giving him a good look at her wares and coquettishly fluttering her eyelids.

  “Sure, go ahead,” Northcutt intoned, his dark face turning darker as a flush rose high on his craggy cheeks. “Give an old man a heart-stroke!”

  Northcutt indulged in one more sheepish glance at the girl’s bosom and then grumbled and cursed and continued on out through the batwings and into the wind, which was blowing waves of dust and dried leaves and the smell of horse shit through the saloon’s broken front window.

  “Didn’t think he’d ever leave,” Belle said, raising the two shot glasses up close to The Revenger’s chin. “Shall we?”

  He grabbed her wrist and said through gritted teeth, “What the hell is your game, girl? And, if you ain’t a whore, how come you’re dressed like one?”

  “What, this old thing?” She laughed and twisted her hand out of Sartain’s grip. “Can’t blame a girl for wantin’ to look pretty. Besides, wearin’ it instead of my old Mother Hubbard seems to bring in higher tips.” Belle turned, swinging first her shoulders and then her hips, and smiled at The Revenger over her bare left shoulder. She walked around to the far side of a table nearby, kicked out a chair, and sat down. “Now, you stop lookin’ like a mean ole bear. Come on over here and have a drink with me, and I’ll tell you all about my game.”

  Chapter 3

  Sartain had never before met such a brazen, arrogant young hussy.

  He kicked a chair out, but instead of sitting down on it, propped one boot onto it and leaned on his knee, drilling the devilish, long-legged beauty with a seriously castigating scowl. “Do you realize you just got six men killed? Six! And I could have been one of ’em. So you’ll have to forgive me if I seem just a little reluctant to smoke the peace pipe with you, miss.”

  “I ain’t askin’ you to smoke the peace pipe,” she said, pouting. “Just have a little drink’s all.” She smiled again winningly, looking up at him from beneath her auburn brows.

  She popped the cork on the bottle, filled one glass, and slid it across the table. She filled the other and set the bottle aside. “I’ve been wantin’ to meet you for a long, long time, Mr. Sartain,” she said, sitting back in her chair. “Been readin’ about you in the papers for quite a while now. The Revenger!” She lifted her shot glass in salute. “To your fine shootin’ here today!”

  She sipped and then held the glass down by her jaw, turning it slowly between her long, delicate fingers.

  Sartain just stared at the girl, not knowing what to make of her. She stared right back at him, chin lowered with fake demureness, chewing her lower lip, and slowly turning the glass in her hand.

  Finally, despite himself, Sartain gave a dry chuff and sat down in the chair.

  “This is a first,” he said.

  “Th
e first for what?”

  “The first for me sittin’ down and havin’ a drink with someone who damn near got me killed.”

  “I saw the whole thing, and I don’t think it was even close.”

  “It’s always close.” Sartain threw back half the shot.

  “Now I know you’re the man for the job,” she said, throwing back a good half of her own drink, making a face and wiping her lips with the back of her wrist. “Powerful stuff!” She smiled, eyes boring into his. “Just like you, Mr. Sartain.”

  Sartain scowled again, though his judgment of the girl was losing its edge. You couldn’t help admiring a girl this saucy and unflagging in the face of what she’d just seen. In the face of what she’d just caused, even.

  “This was a test of some kind?”

  “You don’t expect me to believe what all the newspapers write about you, do you? My pa, the sheriff, says ten percent of them yarns sits within shoutin’ distance of the truth while the other ninety percent is off on a fishin’ trip.”

  “Smart man, the sheriff. Where is he, anyway? Off on a fishin’ trip?”

  The girl looked down, the cloud of a somber mood passing over her face. “He’s why I summoned you here, Mr. Sartain.”

  “The sheriff is why you called me into this ambush?”

  “Oh, it weren’t nothin’ of the sort! Well . . . maybe it was within shoutin’ distance.” She threw back the last of her whiskey, gave a sheepish snort, almost choking, and wiped her mouth and nose.

  Glancing around, she said, “They was all regulars. I’m gonna miss their business, but they came in last week huntin’ stage robbers that headed south toward Mexico. I told ’em Northcutt said you was in Alamosa and I had an idea about how to get you here, so’s they could collect the bounty and give me somethin’ to see, like what the newspaper scribblers scribble about, and they could give me what they saw fit for the work of sendin’ Northcutt with the note.