The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  “You see, Mr. Sartain, the job I have for you concerns my beloved father, and I really needed to know if you were the right man for the job . . . despite what them yarn-spinners are always spewin’ ink about. I only have so much money, and I need to know I’m spendin’ it on the right man.”

  Sartain glanced at the dead men sprawled around them. “And you didn’t think any of those was the right man?”

  Before the girl could respond, Sartain heard sniffing sounds and the scratching of toenails around the batwings. Both he and the girl turned to see a brown and yellow mutt peering under the doors, mewling and looking sheepishly in toward where the fresh meat was starting to molder.

  The girl scolded, “You go on home, Titus. That ain’t food for you. Them varmints’ll make you sick. Go, now!”

  The dog gave a frustrated yip, turned, tucked its tail between its legs, and bounded reluctantly down the porch steps and out of sight.

  The wind continued to blow dust and grit through the broken window and under the batwings. Sartain could smell the tang of an approaching storm.

  “That’s one hell of a way to land a job, Miss Belle,” he said, helping himself to another glass of whiskey and giving a wry chuckle. He supposed the shooting had been half his own fault. The girl obviously didn’t know better, and he should have checked the situation out more thoroughly. He’d take it as a lesson learned.

  Besides, the world without the six bounty hunters was a better place. In fact, now he wished there’d been a few more here today . . .

  “To answer your question, Mr. Sartain, I think it’s rather obvious that none of those fellas there”—she jerked her head toward the human beef aging on the floor—“was the right man.”

  She held him with a smugly serious expression.

  “Touché.” He chuckled and took another sip of the whiskey. “All right, Miss Belle, tell me about your pa. Tell me about the sheriff.”

  She was staring straight at him, a pensive cast to her large brown eyes and a flush on her cheeks. “If you’ll forgive me for sayin’ so, Mr. Sartain, you sure are one good-lookin’ man. The newspapers—they were within shoutin’ distance of that, at least.”

  It was The Revenger’s turn to blush.

  “Oh, sorry.” Belle looked away, sheepish. “It’s just I was born and raised out here in this canker on the devil’s ass, and most of the men through here are . . . well . . . like them on the floor. Anyway, the sheriff.”

  “Yes, the sheriff.”

  Topping off Sartain’s glass and refilling her own, Belle said, “He went missin’ last month, Pa did. It was when he and his chief deputy, Jasper Garvey, was haulin’ a strongbox of gold bars down from the Painted Lady mine up in the Sangre de Cristos. He and Jasper hauled the gold down once every two months for the Painted Lady Minin’ Company run by an Englishman, Mr. Maragon. Last month they was due to have the gold down to the Wells Fargo office at noon on a Monday, which is when the weekly stage to Albakurk pulls through, and they never showed. Ain’t been seen since, neither hide nor hair.”

  “What do you think happened, Miss Belle?”

  Belle hardened her jaws and leaned forward, pressing her bosom against the edge of the table until both those sweet, pale orbs bulged up like two mounds of freshly churned butter, showing all but her nipples. “Here’s what I think happened.”

  She scrunched her eyes and an angry flush replaced the previous one of embarrassment. “I think Jasper Garvey done hooked up with his outlaw brother’s gang, and”—a sheen of tears brightened in her eyes, and she had to swallow and shake her head before continuing—“most likely killed my pa, Sheriff Stephen Hendricks, and run off to Mexico with the gold!”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because Jasper Garvey, who my father made chief deputy out of the goodness of his heart and because he wanted to give Jasper, who once let his wolf run with his no-good firebrand of a brother, a second chance. Pa wanted to give Jasper the opportunity to prove he could be a good man, and I think Jasper tried for the two years he wore his badge, but then . . . but then I seen a change come over Jasper. He’d stop by here for drinks on his nights off. He was startin’ to drink more than usual, and he was gettin’ ornerier and ornerier. Him and me used to kid around—you know, he’d sort of jokingly ask me to marry him an’ such, though there was no way in hell I’d ever marry a man like Jasper Garvey, but—”

  “Why not?”

  “Why, because his pa was Harvey Garvey, a known outlaw in these parts since before the War Between the States. I’d never let a man like that sow his foul seed in my womb . . . and . . . and suckle the result of such an unsavory union. Gosh, no! Me, I’m gonna marry an upright man someday, and he’s going to have that blue blood in his veins. My boys will be doctors and lawyers, too, and my girls . . . well, the wives of doctors and lawyers and . . . and . . . scholars, like the ones they have back East. That’s where my ma was from, and though I do dearly love my pa, he comes from a poor strain of farmers from the Dakota Territory, while Ma was the daughter of an attorney in Council Bluffs, Iowa.”

  Sartain didn’t bother to ask the girl where she thought she’d run into a blue-blooded man out here on the backside of nowhere.

  “Anyway,” Belle continued, “Jasper and I used to joke around like that, but once he got mad and he grabbed my arm until it hurt, and he said somethin’ like, ‘I’ve had enough of your teasin’, Miss Belle. How ’bout if we go upstairs and get serious?’”

  The girl’s mouth and eyes widened in shock and exasperation. “As if I ever would do such a thing! With the ilk of Jasper Garvey!” She sipped her whiskey and made another face. “He was quick to make a joke out of it when he saw I was not one bit compliant with his goatish urges, and I was too embarrassed to tell Pa. But that’s when I started to realize that Jasper’s true character was startin’ to surface again.”

  “All right, so much for you and Jasper Garvey livin’ happily ever after,” Sartain said. “Do you have any other reason to believe Jasper turned on your father? Don’t you think common owlhoots, like the ones the bounty hunters were after, could have attacked the gold shipment?”

  She hiked a shoulder and ran the tip of her index finger around the rim of her glass. “Of course that’s a possibility. But I think otherwise.” She raised her eyes to Sartain’s. “That’s what I would like you to find out for me, Mr. Sartain. And if I’m proven right and Jasper Garvey did indeed kill my father and make off with the gold with his brother and his brother’s no-account ruffians, I’d like you to run ’em all down and kill ’em!”

  Suddenly, her lips trembled, and her eyes filled with tears.

  Sobbing, she said, “I only have a little bit of money, which I’ve been savin’ from tips, but I’ll give you anything you want if you’ll help me learn the fate of my father and deal your brand of justice to anyone who might have brought him to harm!”

  She reached across the table and squeezed The Revenger’s wrist.

  “To hell with my honor, Mr. Sartain. I offer you anything at all—myself included!”

  Chapter 4

  “If you know anything about me—anything at all, Miss Belle—then you know I don’t require payment of any kind.”

  She sniffed, wiped tears from her cheeks with her hands, and looked mildly confused and disappointed. “You . . . don’t?”

  “Nope. If I think a person has a legitimate reason to seek revenge for some misdeed and cannot otherwise exact that revenge for him- or herself, I’ll set to it. No payment necessary. Even . . . uh . . . of the kind you’ve so generously offered.”

  “Oh, well . . . Please don’t think me a charlatan, Mr. Sartain.”

  “Mike.”

  “Mike it is.” She sniffed again and smiled, still collecting herself. “I don’t make a habit of offering such a thing. I just . . . well, I just really want to know what happened to my father. I want justice served, and I thought, well, if that’s the only way I can get it . . .”

  “It’s not.�
��

  “Well, at least let me offer you a room. I rent half a dozen rooms upstairs, but yours, of course, will be free. And I’d like to cover the charge for quartering your horse as well.”

  “That’s not necessary,” Sartain said, finishing his whiskey, setting his empty glass down on the table, and rising from his chair. He jerked his shoulders at what sounded like a shotgun blast that rocked the saloon and rattled the glass pyramid atop the bar. “I’ll stable him myself and, judging by how close that thunder was, I’d best get him under a roof pronto. The room will be fine. I’ll get started on your father’s trail first thing in the morning.”

  He pinched his hat brim to the girl and started to turn away, but turned back when she said, “I’ll have Northcutt cook you a steak with all the trimmings. He does all the cooking here at the Belle of the Ball, and while I can’t say he’s any good, no one I know has so far died from his concoctions. He makes a darn good peach pie. I can vouch for that myself, and the cream’s fresh from Mr. Burlinson’s cow in the pasture just behind the Belle.”

  “Makes me hungry just thinkin’ about it.” Sartain pinched his hat again and started to turn toward the batwings once more, but turned back when she added, “The beds are right comfortable. I’ll give you the room next to mine. That’s the best bed in the whole place!”

  “Much obliged, Miss Belle.”

  “Oh—how do you like your steak?”

  “Still kickin’.”

  “Still kickin’. That’s just how I like mine!”

  He was about to push through the batwings when she called once again, “Can I fix you a nice hot bath, Mike? I got the stove stoked in the kitchen in preparation for supper, so it’d be no trouble at all to fix you a hot bath. I laid in a store of Dr. Mulligan’s Fine Soap and salts straight from the Great Salt Lake on my last run to Albakurk!”

  She ran her hands down her arms, squirming around in her chair. “They make a body feel fine all over . . .”

  “That’d be delightful,” Sartain said, “as long as I’m not putting you to any trouble, Miss Belle.”

  “Please, skip the Miss and just call me Belle. And it’s no trouble at all, Mike.” She smiled charmingly as she rose from her chair, adjusting her corset and causing a warm stiletto of desire to tear through him. “The Occidental’s up one block and north one more. It’s the only building in town that’s been painted in the last five years. You can’t miss it. I’ll have your bath ready by the time you get back . . . Mike.”

  Sartain pinched his hat brim once more, swung around, and headed for his horse.

  * * *

  Hours later, after tending his horse, soaking in a hot bath, and enjoying that steak “with all the trimmings,” Sartain found himself alone in his room with Belle Higgins.

  “You like that?” he asked the girl in his slow, Cajun drawl beneath the intermittent rumbles of thunder from a fragrant summer storm that was pelting against the window and gurgling down the roof and off the overhang onto the street below, where it was forming large puddles.

  Belle groaned, “God, where . . . where on earth . . . did . . . you . . . ever learn to . . . do such things to a girl?”

  “I grew up an orphan in New Orleans’ . . . the French Quarter.”

  “Oh,” she said, though he doubted she understood the implications. She just wanted him to keep doing what he’d been doing to her for the past half hour, ever since she’d knocked on his door with the pretense of offering him an extra quilt.

  He’d taken the quilt because the night was deliciously cool, but she’d been flirting with him all night long while he’d played poker with a couple of cowhands holing up from the storm, who were now snugged into their beds just down the hall.

  A man could take only so much toying from a girl like that. Just after he’d finally got himself to sleep, an hour after she’d closed up shop for the night and Northcutt had slunk off to his cabin near the livery barn, Belle had knocked on his door holding the quilt. In fact, the quilt had been all she’d been wearing.

  In fact, she hadn’t been wearing a stitch, which he fully realized after he’d taken the quilt.

  Suffice it to say, a man can take only so much. Sartain took the quilt and the girl along with it.

  “What are you . . . why are you stopping?” Belle asked now, breathless.

  “Gonna leave it right there for now.” He stepped off the end of the bed, stomped over to the dresser for his hide makings sack, and sat down in an upholstered armchair near the half-open window. The cool, damp air felt soothing against his sweat-damp skin. “Sometimes, the best part of love-makin’, dear Belle, is patience. Anticipation.”

  She sighed, stretching her legs out full on the bed and grinding her head in frustration against her pillow. “Oh, Lordy!”

  He lifted a whiskey bottle from a small table on his right and took a drink, swishing the whiskey around in his mouth, savoring the taste of the good bourbon. He swallowed, sighed, and set the bottle back down on the table.

  “Patience,” he said, troughing a wheat paper between the first and second fingers of his left hand and deftly dribbling chopped tobacco into the crease.

  Slowly, enjoying the relaxed feeling lovemaking always gave him, having learned to enjoy and savor it from the whores back in the French Quarter—the tender, lovely, salty doxies of varied races who’d been his mothers as well as his first lovers—he leisurely built the smoke, lit it, and slacked back in the chair, crossed his ankles, and just as leisurely smoked it.

  Outside, the rain eased, made a peaceful sound as it ticked against the window and gurgled off the overhang. The thunder was drifting away, the rumbling growing fainter, more and more peaceful.

  Occasionally, out the window over his left shoulder, Sartain could see the lightning flashing in the southwestern distance beyond the silhouetted facades on the opposite side of the street. The diminishing rumbles of thunder were the only sounds for several minutes, until the girl stirred on the bed, lifting her head from her pillow and rising to a sitting position, her hair tumbling in a beautiful dark mess around her head.

  Her breasts were rich, round, and full, shaded by the flickering umber lamplight. They jostled as she crawled down to the bottom of the bed, slipped to the floor, and knelt before him.

  “What a wonderful evening . . . with the rain and all,” she whispered.

  Sartain blew out the smoke he’d just taken into his lungs.

  She raised her head and placed her hand on his knees. “Tell me, Mike, how did you come to do what you do?”

  For a long time, he didn’t respond. He just sat with his head resting against the back of the deep chair, staring at nothing across the room.

  “That’s all right if you don’t want to tell me,” Belle said, kissing his thigh tenderly.

  “It was years ago, now,” Sartain said. “Five . . . six . . . I came home from the War, became a galvanized Yankee—”

  “What’s a galvanized Yankee?”

  “Since I’d been a Grayback, fought on the side of the Confederacy during the War of Northern Aggression, I had to swear allegiance to the Federal army . . . in order to join the frontier cavalry, you understand. It’s called becomin’ ‘galvanized’ to the federal ways.”

  He shrugged a shoulder. “I had nowhere to go after the war, and really only knew one thing—fightin’—so I decided the cavalry would be the best place for me. Besides, I’d never been any farther west than New Orleans. So I swore allegiance, got stationed at Fort Huachuca in the Arizona Territory . . .”

  His gut tightened with the dread of those cloying memories. An odd sensation to feel the agony of his past while a girl entertained him. Belle’s tongue, her sweet lips, and gentle hands took some of the teeth out of the horror that, despite the pain, was good to remember from time to time. Good to remind himself why he was here, doing what he was doing . . .

  He swallowed, licked his lips, and ground his heels into the floor as Belle slid her head forward.

  “My patrol was a
mbushed one afternoon. Chiricahuas. They—”

  Belle looked up at him again. “What’s ‘Chiricahuas’?”

  “Apaches. A nasty bunch, though who could blame them? We were—are—interlopers in their ancestral territory. Anyway, the entire patrol was ambushed, wiped out . . . save me. I was badly wounded. Somehow, when the squaws were sent in to finish off the wounded soldiers, they didn’t find me lying in the brush and rocks. I must have been shaded or somethin’ . . . I don’t know. An old prospector and his granddaughter Jewel found me and nursed me back to health.”

  “Jewel,” Belle said.

  “Yeah,” Sartain sighed, wincing at the pain of the memories as well as Belle’s sweet manipulations. “Jewel . . .”

  “Was she your girl?”

  “Yeah. She came to be my girl. Became . . . well, she got in the family way.”

  “Oh,” Belle said, her tone growing ominous, as though sensing the dark way that the tale would turn.

  “I’d gone out hunting one afternoon. On the way back, I spied five bluebellies—federal soldiers—riding fast. Viewed ’em through my spyglass. They were whoopin’ and hollerin’ like Apaches on the warpath. Later, when I got back to the camp, I discovered why those five renegade bluecoats had been stompin’ with their tails up. They’d plundered the old prospector’s cache of gold. Killed the old man. Killed Jewel. . . after they’d raped her. Each one of ’em, most like.”

  The Revenger tried to swallow the hard knot in his throat, felt the warm wetness of tears rolling down his cheeks. “One after another . . .”

  Sartain squeezed his eyes closed against the bloody images, tried to concentrate instead on Belle’s sweet and gentle manipulations. She seemed to sense the comfort he needed. The girl had a deft touch. She was a natural at giving a man pleasure. Some women were born with such skills. Despite the darkness of Sartain’s thoughts, his blood rose to a crescendo.

  Belle grunted.

  “And then I hunted them all down—all five—and killed them bloody,” The Revenger said tightly, clenching his fists against the memories as well as the lovemaking.