The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  * * *

  When they were finally finished rocking together and the bed had finally stopped hammering the wall, she sagged against him, kissed his chest, and slid down to lie curled beside him. They were both panting as though they’d sprinted a mile with a horde of Apache warriors close on their heels.

  A soft knock sounded against the door.

  Edna’s firm, even voice. “Mrs. Maragon?”

  “Yes, Edna—what is it?”

  “We’ll be leaving now, Lyle and me. We’re finished here, ma’am. We cannot work in a house of such sinfulness.”

  “Yes, I understand, Edna. Stop back tomorrow, and I’ll give you the time I owe you plus a generous severance.”

  The only sound on the other side of the door was Edna’s footsteps heading down the hall toward the stairs.

  Sartain looked at Mathilda. “Now you’ve done it. Who’s going to shovel out this dump?”

  She laughed.

  “You don’t care?”

  Mathilda rubbed her cheek against Sartain’s hair-matted chest. “Don’t need ’em. Richard hired them when we first came here. I never needed them, but didn’t have the heart to release them when I released Richard. They’ll get along. They’ll probably return to Denver, where they’re from. They never much cared for this crude, remote place.”

  They dozed together for a time, and then they took a long, leisurely bath together in the lukewarm water.

  Half-dressed, they slipped downstairs for coffee, bourbon, and dessert, then returned to Mathilda’s room and slept the sleep of the dead.

  Sartain woke to a noise. Not moving but only opening his eyes, he saw that soft, blue morning light was pushing through the bedroom windows. He also saw Mathilda walking toward him wearing a sheer powder-blue wrap. Her hair was still mussed from sleep. He couldn’t see her face because of her mussed hair and the dim light, but she moved with such a furtive air that he did not react but merely kept his eyes slitted, watching her.

  Before they’d drifted off to sleep, he’d hung his gun from the nearby bed post. Slowly, Mathilda moved toward it, taking one slow step at a time, moving soundlessly save for the slight swishing of the wrap against her bare legs.

  She stopped only a foot away from Sartain. Sliding her hair back from her cheek with her right hand, she extended her left hand toward his brown leather holster. She wrapped her hand around the LeMat’s pearl grip and slowly slid the revolver out of the sheath.

  As she aimed the gun toward Sartain, she touched her thumb to the hammer as though to cock the weapon.

  The hammer hadn’t started to go back when Sartain lashed out with his left hand and wrapped it around hers, turning the barrel away from him.

  Mathilda gave a startled cry. “Mike, you’re hurting me!”

  “I’ll take that.” Sitting up, he wrapped his right hand around the barrel and pulled the LeMat free.

  Mathilda took a stumbling couple of steps away from him, shaking her hair out of her eyes. “Mike, it’s not what you think!”

  “Oh? You weren’t about to blow my brains out?” Sartain dropped his feet to the floor, holding the LeMat on his thigh and scowling angrily at her. “What is it, then? We have an intruder downstairs? Rats?”

  “No, there’s no intruder,” Mathilda stammered. “And, no, there are no rats. I just saw it there and . . . I was curious, is all. I’ve never been around guns. I was raised in London and Boston, and until I got out here, I’d never seen so many guns. Still, I have never held one in my hand. Especially one like that. Beautiful . . . and yet one that has probably killed many men.”

  Sartain studied her. She stared back at him between the mussed wings of her hair, most of which she’d shoved behind her head. He believed her. At least, he thought he did. When it came to women like her—beautiful, well-bred, well-educated women—he had to admit he was not swimming in his usual waters.

  Maybe after last night, he wanted to believe her. He had a penchant for romanticism, which was probably due in no small part to the hot Cajun blood coursing through his veins.

  Besides, what motive would she have for killing him?

  Judging by her screams, he’d done fairly well last night in the ole sack.

  Or, as her husband suspected, was she responsible for stealing the gold?

  “Sorry,” he said, rising and flipping the LeMat in the air, catching it by its barrel. He walked over to her and held the heavy gun out to her, pearl grip first. “Old habits die hard. Here. It’s all yours.”

  She stepped toward him, shoved the gun aside, and reached down for him. “I’ve changed my mind. There’s another gun here I’d really rather play with.”

  Chapter 16

  His male desires sated and his belly full of the oatmeal and eggs Mathilda had cooked for him, Sartain kissed her goodbye and went out to the barn. He grained and saddled Boss and led the horse around the house to the main street, both sides of which were still concealed in purple morning shadows. The sun had not yet risen from behind the eastern peaks.

  The street was nearly deserted, just a few men leaving the mine bunkhouses and drifting over to what Sartain assumed was the cookhouse. Heavy smoke issued from the building’s two chimney pipes, flattening out over the pitched shake-shingled roof. The hammering of the stamping mill sounded all the louder in the otherwise peaceful morning stillness, and the rancid odor emanating from the smelter was all the more cloying.

  Sartain took a minute to check Boss’s bridle then climbed into the saddle. As he turned Boss west along the street, he spied movement on the porch of the Painted Lady Saloon that sat kitty-corner to the Maragon house. Sartain stopped the buckskin as Richard Maragon drifted out of the porch’s heavy shadows and dropped down the steps and into the wan morning light.

  He was wearing his red-velvet robe with the fur collar again. His face was as white as paper, its stark contrast making his dark-brown hair appear almost black. He drew on a half-smoked stogie, blew the smoke out, and called above the reverberation of the stamping mill, “You have a good time last night, Sartain?”

  Sartain merely pinched his hat brim to the man and touched his spurs to Boss’s flanks.

  Maragon said loudly, angrily, behind him, “You find that gold and bring it back here and maybe, just maybe, I won’t sic rabid dogs on you as payback, Revenger!”

  Sartain kept riding but stopped when he saw Mathilda standing out on her open gable again, as she had been when Sartain had first seen her. She stepped up to the rail, facing her husband, and said, “You send any dogs after him, Richard, you worthless sot, I’ll pay those dogs double what you paid them to hang you right here on the street between my house and your brothel. And then I’ll burn your brothel to the ground.”

  “You stay out of this, Mathilda! It doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s between me and him!”

  Mathilda threw her pretty head back, laughing. “Last night had everything to do with me and Mister Sartain, Richard. Don’t tell me you couldn’t hear my love cries.” She placed a mock-reflective finger on her chin. “But then, how would you know they were mine . . . since you’ve never heard them before!”

  Chuckles rose beneath the hammering rumble of the stamping mill. Sartain glanced behind him to see several miners in felt watch caps and canvas coats and trousers standing on the street between the bunkhouses and the cook shack. Some stood on the cook shack’s porch. They were all either smoking or drinking coffee or both, and they were all facing Maragon, elbowing each other and chuckling.

  Maragon swung around to face them, pumping an angry fist in the air. “You men either get to work or draw your time, do you hear? Get the hell out of my town, and don’t ever show your faces around the Painted Lady again!”

  His voice rose so shrilly that it cracked.

  Cowed, the miners hustled into the cook shack.

  Sartain again touched his spurs to Boss’s flanks and headed for the open country beyond the mining settlement. He glanced over his right shoulder. In the open gable, Mathil
da waved and blew him a kiss.

  He pinched his hat brim to her.

  * * *

  Sartain made his slow way along the gradually-descending Old Ute Trail, rising over windy, rocky passes and falling through lush, timbered valleys. He was especially careful now, more thoroughly scouring the trail because he knew that this was the path Higgins and his deputy had taken down the mountains toward Silverthorne.

  The first day, he didn’t see a thing. Because of his slow, thorough progress, he rode only about six or seven miles before the sun fell far enough that shadows obscured the trail, and he camped for the night. The next day, just after he’d stopped around noon to water Boss and to refill his own canteen at a stream, the sun flashed off something bright and shiny.

  He twisted the cap onto his canteen, walked over to where a gnarled cedar jutted near a rock half its size, and dropped to a knee. He plucked the spent brass cartridge casing from the ground beneath the cedar and held it up to inspect it—a relatively short cartridge compared to the Colt .45 or the Schofield, the two most common revolvers on the frontier.

  This cartridge, about the length of Sartain’s index finger from the first joint to the tip, had likely propelled a 210-grain bullet from a Smith & Wesson Model 3 Russian revolver.

  Propelled the bullet into what?

  He looked around. A few yards away, he saw something else.

  A splash of brown across another cedar.

  He pocketed the cartridge, walked over, dropped to a knee again, and ran the brown-stained needles of the cedar between his right thumb and index finger. The brown stain crumbled and dropped away. It owned the texture of ever-so-slightly damp cinnamon.

  It was blood that had been fresh maybe four, possibly five days ago. There was more of it on the ground three feet away.

  As Sartain investigated the blood-stained rocks and sand, he saw that several branches of a shadbark shrub had been snapped. They were sagging to the ground, not quite dead yet, as though something heavy had fallen on them. Around the shadbark, the dirt and sand were scuffed, and grooves had been carved into the ground, showing intermittently amongst the brush and trailing off along the stream.

  Standing by the creek, Sartain looked off toward where the grooves disappeared down a gentle slope between low stone escarpments tufted with juniper and cedar. The stream dropped down the declivity as well, chuckling and flashing darkly in the stark noon light. The Revenger’s heart quickened.

  A body had been dragged down there.

  He glanced back at the sun-washed trail showing beyond the pines and mentally laid out what might have happened. A man or men had left the trail to water their horses at the stream, just as Sartain himself had done, and the man or men had been bushwhacked. One had taken a bullet, and maybe the other one had dragged the wounded man to safety. Or to what he’d hoped had been safety . . .

  Sartain’s breath came faster. His blood was charged. He finally had some sign, a clue.

  He walked over to where Boss stood at the edge of the creek, water trickling from his snout as he studied Sartain dubiously. The buckskin knew his rider’s blood was up. Sartain patted his mount’s neck, slid his rifle from his saddle boot, pumped a round into the action, lowered the hammer to half-cock, and rested the barrel on his shoulder.

  He fished the second of Maragon’s stogies from his shirt pocket, nipped off the end, and fired a match to life on his thumbnail. Sometimes when he was on a hot trail, he smoked a good cigar. Smoking soaked up some of his excess energy and helped him think.

  When he had the cigar drawing to his liking, he tossed the match into the stream, heard the clipped sizzle, and patted Boss’s neck once more. “You stay, boy. Keep an eye skinned, and call out if you see anything.”

  He was thinking about the bushwhacker who’d carved what would probably be a permanent notch in his left temple a few days back.

  Puffing pensively on his stogie, he followed the intermittent trail through the brush along the creek.

  Where there were no furrows from what Sartain figured were a pair of men’s boots, there were scratched rocks and broken sage branches. He followed the trail through mixed cedars, piñons, and scrub down the declivity that dropped more steeply. He soon found himself in a deep, cool canyon walled in by shelving stone mesas.

  Here the water ran faster as it traveled down the steep slope.

  Beneath the low roar of the tumbling creek, a high screech sounded. Anticipating a gunshot, Sartain stopped suddenly and raised the Henry, thumbing the hammer back to full cock.

  But then he saw the large, mottled brown eagle take wing from a mound of rocks about fifty yards away. The bird gave another angry screech as it flapped its heavy wings and slanted skyward over Sartain’s head, the whir-whir-whir of its wings fleetingly audible above the creek’s hollow, gurgling roar.

  Sartain eased the Henry’s hammer back down and dropped deeper into the canyon. He pulled up beside the mound of rocks.

  It was not a natural cairn deposited here by floodwater. The sun-bleached, water-polished rocks, most about the size of a wheel hub, had been hauled up from the wide creek bed and placed here where the creek had once run, and where it still probably ran in the spring, violent and bone-splintering cold with fresh snowmelt.

  No brush had grown up around the rocks, which meant they hadn’t been here long. There were brown patches of blood here and there on the rocks and sage tufts and cedar limbs.

  Sartain drew on the stogie, blew the smoke out, and rolled the cigar between his lips as he looked carefully around the canyon, wondering if his bushwhacker had trailed him here. It had become suddenly darker, though it wasn’t much after noon, and a cool wind rife with the smell of rain scuttled through the cut, chilling the sweat on his back.

  He looked up to see angry-looking storm clouds sliding over the canyon, beginning to block the cerulean blue of the high-altitude sky.

  “Shit,” The Revenger said around his cigar.

  He’d been lucky so far. He’d had to contend with no rainstorms on his journey from Silverthorne, although brief but often violent afternoon squalls were part and parcel in the high country this late in the summer, edging toward August. It looked as though he was in for one now, however.

  Quickly, he leaned his rifle against the cut bank, dropped to his knees, and began lifting the rocks from the cairn, setting them aside. Someone had piled a lot of rocks here, as though they’d wanted to keep whatever they’d been concealing from ever being found by man or beast, though the eagle had obviously been curious.

  In fact, the eagle had been more than curious. Sartain winced as he removed another rock and set it beside the cairn, staring down at the eyeball he’d just uncovered. Its iris was copper-colored, with a bloody spot where the eagle’s beak had plucked it from its socket. It trailed a long, frayed, bloody string of sinew.

  The eagle had poked its head and beak down deep amongst the rocks and found a tasty morsel. Now Sartain made a face as the sickly sweet stench of decay wafted up, filling his nostrils and threatening to pinch off his wind. He swallowed and, continuing to work, breathed through his mouth to muffle the odor.

  He lifted a couple of more rocks and revealed part of a wool vest and a blue shirt, as well as a faded red neckerchief. He lifted another rock and revealed a face. The face was puffy and pale, and its lone eye stared up past Sartain in hushed surprise.

  The nose was long and sharp. Beneath it was a light-brown mustache. A puckered blue hole shone in his forehead. Blood had oozed out of the hole to drip across the man’s forehead in a thin, crusted brown line.

  Sartain removed the rest of the rocks from the body—a man about his size, dead less than a week. He was beginning to bloat and he stank to high heaven, but he was dressed in a store-bought three-piece suit. He wore brown stockmen’s boots and spurs. Pinned to his checked brown vest just above a gold watch chain was a copper shield on which PINKERTON DETECTIVE AGENCY was engraved. To the right of the badge was another bullet wound surrounded by thick, dr
ied blood.

  The smell was so overpowering, Sartain had to step away from the body and draw a couple of deep breaths of the fresh air that smelled even more strongly now of the coming storm. Lightning flashed in the sky to the west, and thunder rumbled above the creek’s roar.

  Cloud shadows danced across the creek bed.

  Cupping a handkerchief to his mouth, Sartain went back to the body and started going through the man’s pockets.

  He found a wallet that contained twenty-three dollars in greenbacks. Obviously, he hadn’t been killed for money. In a front pocket of his broadcloth trousers, Sartain found six bits and half a comb, as well as a brass matchbox on which the letters CM had been engraved. In another pocket, he found a small pasteboard-covered and -backed notebook. There were some penciled scrawls inside—some that looked like a train timetable, and the name “Maragon” followed by “Painted Lady.”

  Otherwise, Sartain saw nothing of significance during his perfunctory flip-through. He’d give the pages a more thorough scrutiny later when he was away from the poor man’s death stench.

  The man wore a shoulder holster, but there was no gun in it. He had a knife sheath sewn into the well of his right boot. It contained a long, slender blade, slightly rusted and with a wooden handle. It didn’t appear to have even seen much use. The man also had a small .41-caliber pocket pistol with a gutta-percha grip in a pocket of his brown tweed coat. In that same pocket was another badge.

  Sartain stared down at it, frowning.

  “Silverthorne Deputy Sheriff,” he muttered, reading the words engraved on the five-pointed star.

  Sartain flipped the badge in his hand, pondering.

  Had the Pinkerton come upon the body of Deputy Jasper Garvey? If so, where was the body of Sheriff Higgins? Unless Higgins had killed Garvey and taken the gold?

  Sartain pocketed the badge. As he relit the stogie, he spied another cairn in a slight depression closer to the creek, partly hidden by a deadfall aspen.