The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  “Mary?”

  The brush snapped softly behind him. Something round was pressed against the small of his back. Sartain jerked with a start. He glanced over his right shoulder to see Mary standing behind him, naked, dripping wet, and pressing the barrel of her old Spencer carbine against him. Her hair hung wet around her shoulders, tendrils licking up around the pale globes of her cherry-topped breasts.

  She teased with a cunning grin, “I thought you learned your lesson about spyin’ on girls while they’re bathin’?”

  Sartain raised his hand's shoulder high and declared, “Some men never learn.”

  “You heard me callin’, didn’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It was my siren call.”

  “It surely was.”

  Mary lowered the rifle and leaned it against a pine bole. “Join me?”

  As he turned to face her, she stepped toward him, smiling beguilingly up at him, her gaze flicking around his chest and down his arms to his waist and up again.

  Sartain cleared the phlegmy knot in his throat. His urge was to begin undressing, but despite the hammering in his loins, he resisted it. The girl was touched. No decent man would take advantage of that.

  “No.” He shook his head. “I heard you down here and just wondered . . . thought maybe you were in trouble. Needed help. That’s all.” He smiled and winked. “I’ll head back to camp. I’m buildin’ a fire. You’re gonna need one, once you’re . . . hey, now,” he said. “What’re you doin’ down there?”

  She slowly lowered herself to her knees and was unbuttoning the fly of his denims.

  She looked up at him from beneath her brows. “Shhh.”

  * * *

  Somehow, they ended up in the water together.

  Sartain rolled over to lie in the slow current beside her, his broad chest rising and falling sharply from the exertion. “Mary, that wasn’t your first time, was it?”

  “No.” She turned to him, wrapped her arms around his chest, and tucked her face hard against his neck. “There was only two others, and I don’t think you could even really call it an honest roll in the hay, if’n you know what I mean. I mean, the poor boy was just too excited. This was a long time ago, you understand. Several years back, before my family died and it was just my ma. Both o’ them suitors, if you could call ’em that—hah!—were miners’ sons, moonin’ around our shack of a night.”

  She ran her hand across the hard slabs of his chest and then down across his flat belly, lolling now as they were both lazing in the chill water of the pool. “I was just curious, so I let ’em. It wasn’t nothin’ like it was here, now . . . with you. I’d sort of let myself stop thinkin’ about it since those first two times didn’t amount to much. Now, though, I got a feelin’ I’ll be thinkin’ about it all the time!”

  She laughed huskily, lustily, and pressed her lips to his cheek.

  “You’re right nice for a big man,” she said, snuggling against him. “I like you, Mike.”

  “I like you too, Mary.”

  Chapter 11

  It was full dusk, with only a little fuzzy orange light angling through the forest, when they finally dressed and made their way together, hand in hand, back to their encampment atop the scarp.

  Sartain built a fire while Mary went off to check the rabbit snares she’d set earlier, returning only five minutes later with two large jackrabbits. She dressed and skinned the two beasts, carefully saving the fur, with which she intended to line her winter boots, and threw together a wonderful stew. After the meal, they sat languidly by the fire, sipping coffee laced with Sartain’s favored Sam Clay bourbon.

  “Where you headed next, Mike?” she asked after they’d sat in silence together for nearly a half hour, staring at the dwindling flames.

  “Up to the Painted Lady, I reckon. Figured I’d talk to the owner or the superintendent or somebody, see if they had any leads about who might have attacked Higgins and Jasper Garvey. Sometimes a disgruntled former employee will do such things to get back at their former employers . . . and to line their pockets while doing so. I’d think it was as simple as just another holdup or the lawmen themselves running off with the loot . . .”

  Sartain let his voice trail off as he thought about the bushwhacker in Silverthorne. The man with the horse. Most likely the same man who’d laid him out here and left him for dead.

  Who was he? How was he tied to the robbery? In one way or another, he had to be tied to it. And he must be wanting to snuff The Revenger’s wick before Sartain ran him and/or the gold down.

  Whoever he was.

  Something told Sartain he might find the man up at the Painted Lady, although he wasn’t quite sure why he thought so. But the man was obviously hanging around the country near Silverthorne. He’d either followed Sartain into the mountains or he’d been waiting for him, anticipating his coming.

  For some reason, he very badly wanted The Revenger scoured from the gold’s trail, and no doubt learning this man’s motives would bring Sartain one step closer to that strongbox, and to learning the fate of Sheriff Stephen Higgins and his deputy, Garvey.

  “You be careful up at the Painted Lady, Mike.”

  Sartain looked down at her, snuggling against his chest. “Why’s that, Mary?”

  “Dangerous folks up there. Not only the people who work for the mine, but there’s a whorehouse up there that attracts all sorts of bad men and bad doins. Brings in the men from the mines all across this side of the Sangre de Cristos, and it’s well known that a good many of the men who step foot in the Painted Lady Saloon and Dance Hall end up leavin’ boots-first. Drunkards and evil fornicators, the lot of ’em. That’s how my ma described ’em, and she forbade me to ever go near the place.”

  “Drunkards and fornicators,” Sartain said, raising his coffee cup and sniffing the whiskey-laced steam. “Ahhh.”

  Mary giggled.

  “Mike?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Can we do it just once more before we turn in?”

  Sartain groaned.

  * * *

  When he woke the next morning, Mary was gone.

  He sat up, blinking in the mid-morning sunshine, feeling like a cork-headed fool. Not only had he slept way past dawn, which was when he’d wanted to get up and start traveling, he hadn’t even heard the girl rise, gather her gear, and leave the camp.

  Sure enough, when he’d tossed away his blankets and walked down to where they’d picketed both Boss and Aunt Sarah close to camp, only Boss was there, staring at Sartain as though wondering if they were going to pull their picket pins sometime today, or was his rider going to waste another day lollygagging and trifling with that hussy?

  Sartain doubted he’d ever slept as soundly as he had the past couple nights. He hoped it was only due to having his scalp creased and his ashes hauled so thoroughly by Miss Mary down by the creek and elsewhere, not that he was getting trail soft. When a man who hunted other men for a living—and was hunted in turn—started getting trail soft, his time on Earth would soon come to a hard, bloody end.

  Then again, Mary had no doubt figured Sartain needed all the rest he could get, with his wound and all. She’d probably taken extra care to move around quietly as she’d packed up. She’d built no fire. As at home in these mountains and forests as any stalking mountain lion, Crazy Mary could move quietly indeed.

  Sartain had found that out yesterday when she’d rammed her Spencer against his back.

  Still fatigued from the head wound as well as his torrid coupling with Mary, Sartain took time to build a fire, make coffee, and eat a few morsels of jerky while Boss ground oats from the feed sack his rider had hung from his ears. After Sartain had finished his second cup of coffee, he felt ready to ride. He kicked dirt on his fire, gathered his gear, saddled Boss, and mounted up.

  The ambush had cost him a couple of days, but he admonished himself to continue to take his time scouring the Weaver’s Meadow Trail up to the Painted Lady. Those two days wouldn’
t amount to much in the scheme of things. Two months had already passed since the holdup. The culprits’ sign couldn’t get much fainter than it already was. If he didn’t study the trail thoroughly, patiently, he’d likely miss something important.

  But he found nothing all that day. By the time he started hearing the metronomic slamming of the mine’s stamping mill and started smelling the rancid odor of the smelting plant, the sun’s belly was getting poked in earnest by a high, northern pinnacle of twisted rock that was not hard to identify as Bayonet Ridge. He’d been told the mine lay in the shadow of that landmark, and there was no mistaking the sound or the smell.

  He and Boss climbed on through the forest, which was growing cooler and darker by the minute. He checked the buckskin atop a ridge and stared into the broad valley below—a scoured-out chunk of forest along a rocky creek snaking along the base of the ridge Sartain was on. Situated on this maybe two-city-block-long stretch of flat, cleared ground was a large gaudy hotel whose sign The Revenger could read even from this distance of a hundred and fifty or so yards as the crow flies: THE PAINTED LADY SALOON AND DANCE HALL.

  He had to squint to make out the letters below the main sign stretched across the building’s second story: “Richard H. Maragon, Mine Proprietor and Superintendent.”

  Just the man Sartain wanted to see.

  Sartain touched his spurs to the buckskin’s ribs, and they followed the trail down from the ridge and into the outskirts of the little settlement. One the one hand, it was as colorful as any painted lady. On the other, it appeared as roughhewn and seamy as any other mining camp Sartain had ever ridden into—and he’d ridden into a few.

  On the roughhewn side were three long, L-shaped buildings, probably bunkhouses for the miners, flanked by two barns and several corrals, the ground around the corrals cluttered with large ore drays used for hauling the raw ore from the mines to the stamping mill and then to the smelter. The commotion of that industry could probably be heard from one end of the valley to the other.

  The mine sat about two thousand feet above the town, and on the trail leading down the ridge toward the town, large ore wagons clattered behind braying mules. There was also the relentless stamp of the mill. Loud piano music clattered away inside the Painted Lady Saloon and Dance Hall.

  The saloon was the main splash of color in the otherwise humble little settlement. But now, as Sartain rode along the trail that had become the settlement’s main drag, he saw another bird of striking plumage in the white, pink, and spruce-green Victorian house sitting nearly directly across the street from the saloon. The house was three stories high, liberally adorned with gingerbread trim, and had a broad porch abutting two sides and. The main street-facing gable was open. As Sartain stopped Boss to scrutinize the impressive place, which he’d bet the seed bull belonged to the mine owner, Maragon, a figure moved in the open gable.

  The figure was a woman in a fancy fawn-colored waistcoat over a ruffled blouse secured at the woman’s ivory neck with a brooch of some kind. She’d been sitting in a chair against the front wall, reading, but she’d set her book aside and risen. She was walking to the front of the gable, where she stopped to stare down through the open air into the street at the newcomer.

  Sartain’s heartbeat quickened. The woman was as well put together as the house. She was strikingly attired, but she was just as strikingly naturally attired. Her hair, a rich dark-brown, was pulled back into a loose chignon and trimmed with red ribbons. Her face was pale and classically sculpted, her mouth wide and as red as the last crimson splash of a Colorado sunset. The bosoms pushing out the white silk blouse and tweed waistcoat were, by all indications, as firm and full and proud as deacons’ wives, but also jeering.

  “You can look,” such a bosom said. “And you can dream all you want about touching. But that dream is all the closer you’ll ever get.”

  Everything about this woman screamed money and upbringing.

  As she stared heavy-lidded down from her gable perch, a haughty queen glowering down from a pedimented castle wall at her soiled, toiling subjects, Sartain smiled and pinched his hat brim to her.

  She blinked slowly with the automatic, cool disdain of her ilk when in the presence of an obvious inferior and asked tonelessly, “Who are you?”

  “Who am I?” Sartain said, brashly taking her in. “Who are you?”

  A certain bellicosity always surfaced when he found himself being looked down a snooty nose at, even though this gal probably had every reason to feel superior.

  Abruptly, she turned away, sat back down in her wicker chair, and took up the book she’d been reading when the latest plebian had ridden into her domain.

  “Just tryin’ to make conversation,” Sartain grumbled and turned Boss over to the saloon from which the piano music was still clattering.

  He tied the buckskin to one of the three hitchrails fronting the place, shouldering him in between two docile-looking geldings, and loosened his latigo and slipped his bit. There was relatively fresh-appearing water in the zinc-lined stock tank fronting the rail, and Boss took no time dipping his snout—after he’d glanced at both geldings, making sure they knew who was the new boss of the rail, that was.

  Both geldings snorted and shifted slightly away from the stallion. They’d received the message.

  Sartain slipped his Henry from his scabbard. Mine settlements were notoriously aswarm with thieves. “Drunkards and evil fornicators, the lot of ’em,” as Crazy Mary’s late mother had described them. Well, she could add thieves to the list.

  As Sartain mounted the porch steps, a gun exploded.

  Instantly, he had the Henry in both hands and a round levered into the action.

  Chapter 12

  A man bellowed from inside the Painted Lady.

  The piano chimed to a crashing halt, as though the player had slammed both hands on the keys.

  A man bellowed again, like a cow that had stepped into a gopher hole. Otherwise, an eerie silence drifted out over the tops of the heavy, ornate oak batwing doors. Sartain crossed the wide front porch and cast a cautious look over the doors.

  Inside, the two dozen or so customers sitting at tables or standing along the well-appointed bar and mirrored back bar running along the far wall were all turned toward a large round table in the middle of the room, about fifteen feet from Sartain and slightly to his right.

  One man at the table was standing, his hand extended over the table toward another seated man. Charcoal-colored smoke billowed over the table. The seated man threw his head back and opened his mouth, loosing another bellow that echoed loudly around the drinking hall.

  “Bastard!” he screamed, his eyes flashing angrily beneath the narrow brim of his opera hat.

  A long-faced middle-aged gent, he was dressed in a flashy black and burgundy three-piece suit. He slid his chair back, rose stiffly like a gentleman in a snit, and began walking toward Sartain. He tripped over a chair leg and nearly fell, but then he got his feet set and continued walking, loose-hipped and knock-kneed as though drunk.

  All eyes followed him, as did those of the man who’d been standing with his hand extended over the table.

  The man walking toward Sartain said, “Let it be known that Norman W. Teagarden the Third was murdered in cold blood by the snake Wendell Green in the Painted Lady Saloon!”

  The man standing by the table raised his hand again, showing the two round maws of the silver-chased derringer in his fist. He wobbled drunkenly and slurred his words as he yelled, “Turn around and have another one at no extra charge, Teagarden!”

  Sartain stepped around Teagarden, who was only four feet away from him, and raised the Henry to his shoulder, aiming quickly. The sixteen-shooter roared like a cannon.

  The snake Wendell Green wheeled as though caught by a throw rope, triggering his little popper through a window just to the right of Sartain. Green fell over his chair, howling, throwing the derringer away to clap his right hand to his bloody left shoulder.

  “He shot me!
” the wounded man screamed, flopping around on the floor, his lower legs draped over his overturned chair. He was short and burly and dressed in the hickory shirt, canvas trousers, and high-topped hobnail boots of your typical miner. “He shot me! You seen him. He shot me!”

  Half the sitting men had gained their feet. Several had reached for sidearms, but quickly let their hands drop away from their holsters when Sartain loudly rammed another shell into his Henry’s chamber, the spent cartridge clanking to the wooden floor behind him, and slid the barrel from left to right, covering the room.

  A door opened on the balcony over the bar and a dark-haired, mustached, craggy-faced man stumbled out onto the balcony, yelling, “What the bloody hell is goin’ on down there now? If you men insist on killing each other, kindly do it outside so I can get some sleep!”

  “Mr. Maragon!” the wounded man shouted, still on his ass and clutching his bloody shoulder. “That bastard with the Henry shot me for no good reason!”

  Maragon switched his bleary-eyed gaze to Sartain. His craggy face was as pale as flour, and he appeared to be blue around the eyes. He had a thick British accent. “You there,” Maragon said, pointing a beringed finger at the stranger. “Kindly lower that weapon.”

  Sartain obliged the man, but he only lowered it to his right hip. He kept it cocked and aimed at the room.

  Maragon said, “Mister Green says you shot him for no good reason.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Sartain replied, his voice even, his gaze cautiously roaming the room. “I’d say a drunk man waving a loaded and cocked pistol in my direction is a good enough reason. Besides”—he glanced at Teagarden, who lay belly-down at Sartain’s boots—“a bullet to ole Teagarden’s back would have been overkill.”

  A large blood pool was growing on the floor beneath Teagarden.

  “Teagarden done tucked another ace into the deck we was playin’ with, Mister Maragon!” Wendell Green was furious, spittle flecking his lips. “I had every right to shoot him!” He glanced at a sign tacked to a ceiling support post about ten feet away from Sartain. It read “POKER CHEATS AND CARD SHARPS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED HERE!—THE MANAGEMENT”