He didn’t come upon any obvious sign of a holdup or an ambush, either.
That night, he camped in a high-mountain park near a stream at the edge of a fir and spruce forest. There was plenty of elk and moose scat along the creek, and seeing a couple of bear prints reminded him to keep his Henry close at all times. He had no hankering to become some bruin’s slow supper.
He fished for trout in the stream, catching a couple of pan-sized brook trout, which he fried in lard with some mountain sage sprigs and wild onion in his iron skillet. He fried corn cakes in the same pan. Sitting Indian-fashion near the short, leaping flames that snapped and crackled and perfumed the air around him, he washed the sweet, tender meat and thin, crusty cakes down with coffee brewed on his iron tripod.
In typical high-mountain fashion, the night was clear, cold, and as black as the inside of a glove despite the seeming nearness of the stars glittering above the pine tops. Before retiring, he had a few sips of the Sam Clay bourbon he always carried in a hide flask to cut the chill. He added a few small branches to his fire against the knife-edged cold and set a few more broken branches nearby, which he could feed to the flames from time to time during the night.
He slept in his heavy wool coat, wrapped in his blankets, his Henry close beside him.
The frigid night with its smells of stone and the cold creek and frosty grass closed over him.
He slept so soundly that he didn’t even dream, though the intermittent cries of coyotes and wolves from the crags looming over him were dreamlike in their smoky comings and goings.
The next day, just after noon, he had his first real sign that he wasn’t alone in the mountains. A rifle spoke from an escarpment above and to his right, and the bullet blew him from his saddle.
Chapter 8
Sartain flew headlong into the brush on the left side of the trail, the ambusher’s shot still echoing. That side of the trail dropped into a wooded canyon, and when The Revenger hit the ground, he rolled several times down the hill before fetching up against a tamarack bole, the branches of the tree several feet above his head.
Cursing and slapping his right hand over the bullet burn across the front of his left arm, he twisted around and stared back up the trail. The shooter’s rifle barked twice more and then a third time, the bullets thumping and cracking into the brush just above him. Up on the trail threading the canyon and beside a large black escarpment jutting from the trail’s opposite side, Boss was pitching wildly and buck-kicking.
The rifle cracked again. A bullet plumed dust near one of the buckskin’s pounding hooves.
“Boss, high-tail it, ya damn fool!” Sartain yelled, gritting his teeth and waving his good arm angrily.
As though in compliance with his rider’s wishes, Boss dropped onto his front hooves and wheeled, knocking the saddle down his side and giving Sartain a good look at the Henry still in its scabbard. At the moment, The Revenger would have given his eyeteeth to have the sixteen-shooter in his hands. Loosing another enraged whinny, Boss kicked his rear legs straight out behind him once more and galloped back down the trail in the direction from which he and Sartain had come.
Ignoring the blood oozing from the rip in his right shirtsleeve—the wound was merely a burn, although it smarted like twenty bee stings—Sartain palmed his LeMat, which he was happy to find hadn’t slipped out of its holster in his tumble down the slope.
Staying low, he looked up through the evergreen brush to see the ambusher maneuvering around on top of the dark crag. The shooter wore a tan Stetson, a yellow neckerchief, a white-and-red checked shirt, and a rifle from Sartain’s vantage point. The hat appeared to be the same shape as the one his ambusher of the previous night had been wearing.
Likely the same man.
Now as the shooter hunkered low and extended his rifle once more, Sartain pivoted to his left and ran along the side of the slope.
The bushwhacker’s rifle screeched, bullets tearing up dirt and pine needles just upslope from Sartain. Another slug hammered a pine tree. Yet another clipped a branch and sent it hurtling toward The Revenger, who kept running until he launched from the balls of his boots, dove forward, and hit the ground behind a large deadfall tamarack lying parallel to the trail and the escarpment looming above it.
The rifleman atop the escarpment triggered several more rounds, but all were well wide of their target. Apparently, the man had lost track of his quarry. There was something green about this shooter, another thing that told Sartain he was the same shooter as before.
Sartain lifted a careful look over the top of the deadfall. He couldn’t see the shooter now; there was nothing but clear sky above the bulging, cracked face of the escarpment, which loomed about a hundred feet above the trail. Straight above Sartain was a vestibule of sorts in the formation’s facing side. It was a cleft in the rock that appeared to run from top to bottom, and it was about wide enough to conceal a man The Revenger’s size.
Quickly, before the rifleman could adjust his position, Sartain heaved himself to his feet, leaped the deadfall, and scrambled up the bank. As he crossed the trail, he cast a quick look up toward the top of the escarpment. He didn’t see his bushwhacker, but a couple of stones buzzed through the air to his right, thumping into the brush at the base of the scarp.
Sartain gritted his teeth, expecting another shot. None came, and he gained the cliff wall with a deep sigh of relief, panting from the run and removing his neckerchief to tie it around the bullet burn. The rocks had no doubt come from the shooter shifting position, but there was no indication he’d spotted his quarry.
Staring straight up at the bulging wall of rock that loomed over him as though a massive, fat finger was pointing at the high, thin swirls of cloud in the cerulean sky, he stepped back into the niche he’d spotted from the slope. It leaned back into the formation, likely a softer spot in the rock that had eroded more quickly over time than the granite.
It was strewn with rocks of all shapes and sizes and showed the effects of rainwater tumbling through its middle, sweeping the rocks and debris this way and that. A few gnarled shrubs were trying to grow up out of the thin, stony soil.
Both sides of the cliff sort of swelled out around it, concealing it, offering cover to a man wanting to climb up there and shake hands with the son of a bitch trying to perforate his hide. Sartain knew it was risky. If the shooter anticipated the move, he could simply wait near the top of the makeshift rocky chute and drill Sartain a third eye when he poked his head up out of the hole.
But there was a good chance the man wasn’t aware of the chute. From up top, he’d have an entirely different view of Sartain’s position, and the shooter would probably be expecting him to remain below, waiting for him to show, which the man might eventually do. Or he might wait until dark and simply slip away to come at The Revenger again in a similar cowardly fashion.
Sartain quietly spat dust and pine needles from his lips. He’d eaten a good amount of both in his rumble town the slope. Looking up the steep cleft in the scarp, he thought it was best to end this chapter in his visit to the mountains right here. The shooter was likely the same man who’d ambushed him in Silverthorne, which meant he was a persistent if hapless cuss.
Besides, Sartain was not only piss-burned the way any man would be, getting shot out of his saddle, but he was damned curious, too.
He holstered his LeMat, snapped the keeper thong over the hammer, grabbed a finger of rock sticking out of the side of the chute up near his right shoulder, placed his left boot on a shelf of sorts, and hoisted himself up into the chute. Now he was five feet above the ground and a little winded. Sweat cut through the grime on his cheeks.
He was on the first leg of his journey.
That first step was the hardest. After that, it was mostly a matter of finding secure holds and the occasional shrubs to use as steps and handrails. He had to move around bellies of rock bulging out of the greater rock wall to his right and, doing this, he left himself exposed for a few seconds each time to poss
ible fire from the top end of the gap.
He kept an eye on that gap as he continued climbing, trying hard not to make any noise. A few times he caused slight rockslides, but nothing too prolonged or loud, and each time he did, he pulled his LeMat and aimed it toward the patch of cloud-scalloped blue above, ready to shoot the bushwhacker if he showed his head.
He continued climbing. The window on the sky grew wider and brighter above him.
He was six feet from the top. A step from one rock to a cleft in the bulging wall on his right, and he edged his head up out of the chute. He looked around, aiming the cocked LeMat straight out in front of him. The top of the escarpment was all bulging, cracked rock from which a couple of scraggly cedars grew from fissures.
The air was fresh, almost cool, the sun like honey warmed on a stove.
The only movement was the breeze brushing over the various humps and piles of ancient volcanic rock, jostling the cedars. Holstering the LeMat, he used both hands to hoist himself up out of the chute.
Standing atop the escarpment in a crease between low hills of solid lava, he unholstered the LeMat once more and started moving slowly to his right, sliding his gaze from left to right and back again, stopping occasionally to swing full around. He moved into a deep corridor between two ten-foot-high mushrooms of solid stone. Ahead, a shadow moved across the stone floor, sliding from his right to his left.
He saw the shadow of the front of a hat, and he stopped, tightening his grip on the pistol, raising it.
Behind him, something screeched so loudly that it seemed to come from inside his own head. He heard the windy rustle of wings and spun in time to see a large crow sweep down toward him from a higher mound of stone, the bird’s beady eyes bright with anger, beak opening and closing as it loosed its ratcheting screams.
The bird just started to pull up and away from Sartain when he started to spin back around.
Too late.
Something both icy and hot slammed into his right temple like a pugilist’s resolute fist, laying him out cold.
His brain became an exposed, sputtering nerve that some faceless demon was probing with a dull, rusty nail in a room as black as the inside of a coffin. The demon was chuckling while poking that nail against the frayed, dancing nerve, and while Sartain cursed and groaned and tried to pull his head away, he couldn’t quite manage it. Something was holding him down on a marble slab while that demon continued its diabolical torture, chuckling all the while.
By increments, the pain lessened. Inexplicably, he was aware of the taste of whiskey on his tongue and its burn spreading throughout his belly.
The pain continued to abate, and when he started to smell the smoke of a fire and the aroma of cooked beans and boiling coffee, he opened his eyes. A young blonde woman sat across a fire from him. She held his shirt in her hands, and she was poking a needle through the left sleeve. A thick wing of honey-gold hair hung down over her right eye, obscuring her face, but when she lifted her head slightly, glancing over at him, she dropped the shirt and needle on her lap and picked up his LeMat.
Leaning back away from him, she extended the heavy revolver in both hands and ratcheted the hammer back.
“You just stay right there,” she said testily. “Or I’ll drill you with your own gun!”
Sartain studied her. She was the young woman who’d been bathing in the creek. The one who’d taken issue with his indiscretion and pumped a bunch of rounds from an old Spencer rifle at him. Now she sat just across the fire, the sky awash with the pastels of dusk showing through the tall, columnar pines behind her, from beyond a pinnacle of black rock jutting from a near ridge.
He glanced at his arm. A bandage of feminine material, maybe part of a chemise, was wrapped tightly around it. There was no bloodstain. He was aware of a bandage of similar material wrapped around his forehead, although he was too weak to lift his arms to investigate further.
He cleared his throat, ran his dry tongue across his dry lips, and said, “I’d pay ya a pretty penny.” Wincing and groaning, he found the strength to press three fingers to his hammering skull, trying to quell the demon’s prodding. “Go ahead—shoot.”
She studied him over the slightly quivering barrel of the heavy weapon in her hands. Her eyes were hazel, and her nose long and fine. Her face was round, she had a cleft in her chin, and her smooth cheeks were tanned the color of varnished walnut. Her honey-blonde hair was bleached from many hours in the sun, giving her an earthy, slightly wild air. Her eyes, too, added to this feral quality about her. Those two wide-set orbs were like a doe’s eyes—a doe with a fawn to protect.
Threatened, wary, ready to take action if necessary.
When she didn’t say anything but just continued to study him like a doe sniffing the wind, he said, “Oh, put it down. I ain’t in no condition to go anywhere, much less make a play for you. And if you were so damn suspicious, why all the fuss?”
“What’re you talkin’ about?” she asked. Her voice was raspy and a little husky—too raspy for such a cherubic face, although it complemented her earthiness.
“You know—the bandages. The fire.” He looked at the sewing in her lap. “My shirt.”
Faintly sheepish, she lowered the LeMat. Handily, she depressed the hammer and rested the pistol barrel-down in the V her two bare feet formed, tucked beneath her. They were poking out from beneath the skirt tented across her lap and bent knees.
Like her face and hands, her feet were tanned. She obviously went without shoes a lot. Her stubby toes were dirty. Pine needles clung to the pink pads.
Sartain remembered her pale cherry-tipped breasts swinging to and fro as she washed them and felt a very faint electrical charge sweep through him.
“Just passin’ the time,” she said, picking up his shirt, needle, and thread. “Waitin’ to see if you was gonna live or not. If you were gonna die, I figured it only proper to bury ya.”
“Right nice of you to do that for a man you caught spying on you.”
Her cheeks flushed as she went back to work sewing a patch over the hole in his shirtsleeve. “Yes, it is.”
Chapter 9
“What the hell happened?” Sartain asked the girl.
“What do you mean?”
“Who shot me? How’d you find me? How come that fella with the rifle didn’t finish me off? He put enough work into it.”
His mind was sluggish. He was exerting a lot of energy fighting the pain of the bullet crease. At least, he figured it was a crease. It must have carved a nice trough across his temple, maybe nicked the bone. He’d been grazed similarly before. It was painful, but he’d live, although he might not want to for a few more hours.
The girl hiked a shoulder while she poked the needle through Sartain’s shirtsleeve. “Never seen him. He must’ve figured you was dead and left you to the carrion eaters.”
“How’d you find me?”
“Heard the shootin’. I was up on the ridge yonder.” She jerked her sewing needle back over her left shoulder. “Rode down here, found you, found your horse, and hobbled him with mine.”
Sartain had heard the faint munching of horses cropping grass. He looked beyond the girl, saw that the backside of the escarpment blended almost perfectly with the slope angling down from the evergreen-carpeted ridge five hundred feet above. That explained how the rifleman had gotten up here—a hell of a lot more easily than Sartain had.
She glanced over her work and the fire’s leaping flames at The Revenger. “You hungry?”
He shook his head. All he felt was pain and nausea. He wanted to sleep, but wondered if he could with the hammering in his head.
“How ’bout a cup of coffee?” She canted her head toward a brown bottle near the base of the rise of rock to her left and arched a brow. “I have whiskey.”
“I’d take the whiskey.”
She reached for the bottle, tossed it to him over the fire. He had to make a quick grab for it and she seemed to enjoy that, spreading her mouth in a slightly devilish grin before
lowering her gaze again to her work. Sartain sucked a sharp breath through his teeth against that faceless ogre hammering away at his brain plate.
He popped the cork, took a couple of soothing swallows. He’d hardly got the cork back into the bottle before the dark spirit of sleep, however painful, reached up and pulled him back down into its fold.
When he woke again, it was morning, and she was dropping a load of deadfall branches down beside the flames dancing in the fire ring. As she did, her shirt billowed away from her chest, as did the undershirt beneath it, and he caught a glimpse of her tender breasts.
“Hey!” she scolded him schoolmarmishly.
“Oh, shit.” Sartain groaned. “That time wasn’t my fault. I just opened my eyes and you were—”
“Here.” She lifted both shirts to her neck. “Have you a good long look so you can stop skulkin’ around, thinkin’ about ’em.”
“I wasn’t skulkin’ around . . .” Sartain let his voice trail off. What was the point of lying? “They are truly spectacular. Thank you.”
She let her shirts fall back down to her belly. “I have a feelin’ you’re a fella who’s seen quite a few of ’em, ain’t ya?”
This was not the conversation he wanted to be having first thing in the morning after another cold, restless night’s sleep. “At the risk of incriminating myself to someone who has me at a great disadvantage here, me bein’ unarmed and in the foggy-headed state I’m in, I’d just as soon withhold responding to the query until I’m capable of taking quick evasive action. In case you go for your Spencer again.”
He caught her smiling before she turned away, walking off down the sloping, lumpy stone floor of the escarpment and disappearing from view.
Meanwhile, the fire danced beside him, flicking its welcome warmth against him. His own coffee pot hung from a tripod over it, the water whooshing as it heated. Gray ash fluttered around it, caught in the steam puffing up from the spout. He could tell by the cold dampness of his blankets that it had frozen last night and the frost had just recently burned off. The sun was warm as it rose over his right shoulder, just now edging its buttery light into the camp.
The Revenger Page 18
