The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

“Higgins?” Sartain muttered aloud around the stogie, blowing smoke out his nostrils.

  He hurried over and, ignoring the thunder and the cold rain beginning to spit at him, began removing the rocks from the top of the cairn. He’d removed only a few when he stopped and stared down at the badly swollen and misshapen face of a middle-aged man with a thick, gray-brown mustache in the old Dragoon style.

  The stench was like a fist to the jaw. Sartain breathed into his arm. The Dragoon mustache was about the only distinguishing feature he could make out, since the body had been vituperating for a good two months and the birds, worms, and maggots had been working on the bloated carcass. It appeared that the dead man had only a few wisps of thin, sandy-gray hair combed straight back over the top of his lightly freckled head, with straps of fuller hair on the sides.

  He had a bloody hole in his neck just left of his throat, and another in his right shoulder.

  The man’s lips were stretched far back from his long yellow tobacco-edged teeth in a death snarl. Keeping his mouth pressed against his arm, his eyes watering as though against a strong onion, Sartain looked around on the man’s clothes for a badge that should read TOWN SHERIFF OF SILVERTHORNE.

  He found none.

  But judging by this dead man’s age, he had to be Higgins.

  Sartain straightened quickly, strode several yards from the body, and removed the handkerchief from his mouth. Drawing fresh air into his lungs, he stared across the stream and wondered just what he’d found here. What would these two dead men tell him if they could?

  A shadow slid over the rocks and gravel to his right. Something told him it wasn’t a cloud. The rain and wind were cold, but they weren’t what caused the short hairs at the back of Sartain’s neck to rise. A spur chimed faintly.

  The maw of a gun pressed against The Revenger’s spine at the small of his back. Dread pooling like hot mud in his belly, Sartain lifted his hands.

  “Let me guess,” he stated. “Jasper Garvey?”

  Chapter 17

  The man behind Sartain gave a high-pitched laugh. “How in the hell did you know, Sartain?”

  “Can I turn around?”

  The man unsnapped the keeper thong over Sartain’s LeMat and slipped the big popper from its holster. “Slow.”

  Open hands raised to his shoulders, Sartain turned to face a young man about six inches shorter than he was. His face would have been handsome if it wasn’t quite so round and his eyes weren’t set quite so close together. His cheeks owned a three- or four-day growth of sandy beard, and a thin, long goatee drooped from his chin. A skimpy mustache mantled his upper lip. His nose and the nubs of his cheeks were pink and peeling from sun blisters.

  He’d been spending a lot of time outdoors of late.

  He’d backed up and shoved Sartain’s LeMat down behind his twin cartridge belts. His Russian .44 was aimed at Sartain’s belly. He was grinning, showing small crooked yellow teeth. “So you’re The Revenger.”

  “So you’re the appropriately-named Jasper Garvey.”

  “One an’ the same.” Garvey canted his head a little to one side. “How’d you know it was me?”

  “I only found your badge, not your body. Higgins wasn’t wearing any badge. At least, I’m assuming that smelly carcass with the bad neck wound over there is Sheriff Higgins.”

  “That’s him, all right.”

  “You must have pinned your badge to the sheriff’s shirt, thinking that’s all anyone would find after the scavengers had finished with him and strewn his bones around this canyon. They’d think Higgins had killed you, the poor innocent deputy, and made off with the gold. It would be him any investigators would be looking for, and you’d be free to spend all that gold by yourself.”

  Garvey was still grinning. “That’s pretty close to the size of it, all right.” A fine rain fell at a slant, and thunder rumbled loudly, causing the ground to shudder. The rain was pelting him, whipping his longish hair and neckerchief around his cheeks.

  “You didn’t expect a Pinkerton to find him before the scavengers could go to work on him. The nights up here are cold, and the light probably doesn’t last long in this canyon. He didn’t rot and draw the carrion-eaters as fast as you’d expected, so you came back recently and buried him. Or maybe you dogged the Pinkerton out here, shot the detective, and buried Higgins.”

  “You’re right smart. I reckon you earned your reputation. Too bad I gotta kill you now.”

  “What the hell are you hanging around here for, Garvey? Why aren’t you in Mexico by now, spending that gold on tequila and senoritas?”

  “A man has his reasons.” Garvey raised the cocked Russian and narrowed one eye as he aimed at Sartain’s forehead. “You scared? You should be, because you’re gonna die in about two jangles of a whore’s bell.”

  Sartain flicked a glance behind Garvey. “Oh-oh.”

  Garvey started to turn his head, wrinkling the skin at the bridge of his nose. Then, realizing that Sartain was only trying to distract him, he started to smile.

  But the instant’s distraction was enough for Sartain to make his move, since he had nothing to lose. He’d bulled forward and grabbed the Russian just before the former deputy had gotten the revolver leveled at him again, and shoved it straight up.

  It thundered between the two of them, the blast feeling like two open hands had slapped against Sartain’s ears, which instantly started ringing. Distantly, he heard another crack. It might have been the thunder, but then it might not have been, because he found himself staring at Jasper Garvey’s blown-out right temple.

  The kid’s arms went slack in Sartain’s grip, and Garvey stared at him with a vague look of befuddlement as though he wanted to ask, “What just happened?”

  His arms slid out of Sartain’s hands and he crumpled at Sartain’s boots, blood and white brain matter oozing out that fist-sized hole in his temple. As thunder pealed and lightning flashed, Sartain spied a human-shaped silhouette and a familiarly-shaped tan hat on the sloping stone ridge looming behind Garvey. He also spied a rifle barrel being brought to bear on him and leaped to one side too late.

  He hadn’t seen anyone on the ridge when he’d distracted Garvey, but someone really was up there . . .

  Shit.

  The bullet tore hotly into Sartain’s right thigh. He grunted, ground his teeth against the burn—it felt as though a hot railroad spike had been driven into his flesh—and then he wheeled as another gunshot sound amid the storm.

  A bullet spanged off a rock to his right. He grabbed his Henry from where he’d leaned it against the deadfall aspen and dove behind a large, pale boulder that was now being lashed by the wind-blown rain.

  Two bullets hammered the rock’s far side—too close together to have come from the same weapon. There were at least two shooters.

  Sartain’s ears were still ringing from the blast of Garvey’s Russian. That, his pounding right thigh, and the storm served to confuse and disorient him. Quickly, as the rifles atop the ridge continued to blast at his covering rock, he wrapped his neckerchief around the bullet wound in his right thigh and consciously fought to regain all his faculties.

  When he did, he rose to a crouch, trying to ignore the hammering pain in his leg, and edged a glance around the rock’s left side.

  There was a small flash atop the ridge, and Sartain drew his head back behind the rock as a bullet sang past him, the rifle’s report half-drowned by the storm. Sartain snaked his rifle around the rock and fired at where he’d seen the rifle flash, loosing a mini-barrage and watching rock shards fly from the lip of the ridge.

  He thought he heard a woman scream, but then he wasn’t sure because the rushing roar of the rain, wind, and thunder filled the canyon. Fearing he wouldn’t have the strength to keep up the fight much longer and knowing there was a chance he’d pass out from pain and blood loss, Sartain waited for a particularly loud earth-shuddering thunderclap and ran out from behind the rock.

  He hop-skipped, dragging his bad leg, as fast as he
could to a gap in the ridge wall below where he’d seen the rifle flashes.

  Grunting and cursing, the wind and rain lashing him, he climbed the boulders littering the gap, holding his Henry in one hand. The leg burned and throbbed. He could feel the blood leaking out around the neckerchief and mixing like oil with the rain soaking him. He was only halfway up the ridge wall when the thunder and lightning stopped suddenly, and the wind died as though it had been the end of a long, violent exhalation.

  The clouds parted and shafts of washed-out golden light angled down from the sky, bathing the dripping rocks and showing Sartain the top of the ridge nearly straight above him. He stopped, raising the rifle. But then he lowered it.

  He stared at the blonde hanging down from a jutting block of granite. She lay on her back, and she hung over the rock, arms and wet hair dangling straight down below her, toward Sartain. Her hazel eyes were open. Blood stained her forehead where Sartain’s bullet had drilled her. Her Spencer repeater had fallen, to hang up against a rock about ten feet below her.

  She was wearing a red-and-white checked wool shirt and a yellow neckerchief. A man’s brown felt hat lay near the rifle.

  “Mary,” Sartain whispered in the sudden silence, broken only by the soft gurgling of the rain running and dripping down the rocks around him.

  The man who’d creased his temple had been wearing similar attire.

  No, the woman who’d ambushed him.

  Crazy Mary.

  Why?

  From somewhere atop the ridge came a horse’s energetic whinny and a female voice yelling throatily, “Hi-yahhh!”

  Shod hooves clattered on rock and brush crackled beneath the horse’s galloping hooves. The sounds dwindled quickly as horse and rider apparently descended the ridge’s opposite side. And then there was just the dripping rocks and Crazy Mary staring down at him from the lip of the ridge above, her eyes wide and glassy in death.

  “Mary?” Sartain said, shocked and puzzled. He felt as though he’d been sucker-punched in the heart.

  The answer lay with the other rider—whoever she was.

  Mathilda Maragon? Could her husband’s suspicions be true?

  Sartain scrambled as quickly as he could down from the rocks and boulders, falling several times and cursing his aching leg. He hurried back toward Boss, the sky growing lighter and the chill burning off with the intensifying sun, steam rising from the ground around his feet.

  When he got back out to the trail, he called for the buckskin and looked at the trail. The mud shone with fresh tracks heading down the mountain in the direction of Silverthorne. Hooves thudded and brush snapped, and Sartain turned to see Boss moving toward him from where he’d apparently taken shelter in the heavy timber.

  Happy to see his rider and relieved that the short but powerful mountain storm had passed, Boss shook his head and snorted and then lowered his snout to sniff Sartain’s bloody leg.

  “Thanks for alerting me to trouble, pal,” Sartain raked out, sliding his rifle into his scabbard and cursing while trying to gingerly heave himself into the saddle. “Really appreciate that!”

  The horse must have been more preoccupied with the storm, which he’d likely heard building long before Sartain had, than sniffing the wind for danger to his rider.

  As if to announce just that, Boss whickered and shook his soaked head again, rattling the bit in his teeth.

  * * *

  Thanks to the mud, the fleeing rider was easy to track. He or she—or whoever in hell the ambusher was—rode straight down the main trail, twisting and turning with the lay of the mountains.

  About a mile from where Sartain had left Crazy Mary and Jasper Garvey, his quarry had swung off the main trail onto a single-track horse trail that headed off into a forest of firs, aspens, and pines. Soon, a muddy creek bubbling with the recent rain swung into sight from the woods on Sartain’s right to follow the trail. Ahead, a patch of gray appeared.

  It was a stone cabin with an abutting falling-down pole corral.

  Sartain stopped Boss and stared cautiously toward the hovel—likely an old prospector’s cabin. A saddled horse stood in the corral. A shadow moved in the window left of the half-open door.

  His heart lurching, Sartain neck-reined Boss around sharply and dashed into the creek as smoke puffed in the dark window. The rifle’s hollow report echoed as Boss splashed across the creek and lunged up the opposite bank and into the relative sanctuary of thick forest.

  Sartain rained Boss to a halt behind a large moss-patchy boulder and a sprawling spruce, and eased tenderly out of the saddle, trying to put as little weight as possible on his right foot. The rifle cracked two more times, and then a third time, the bullets plunking into the ground and spanging off rocks near the creek.

  Grimacing against the pain bayoneting up and down his right leg, Sartain shucked his Henry from his saddle scabbard and told the buckskin to stay. The horse was wide-eyed and fidgety about the gunfire and he shifted his weight around, but otherwise stayed put. Sartain hobbled away from the rock, heading straight ahead along the stream on a course that, if he kept going, would place him at the cabin’s left end. There was more cover from the large spruces, pines, and boulders in this direction, and more shade.

  He stopped behind a spruce and cast a look toward the cabin.

  Rain-washed, sparkling sunlight angled down through the trees to burnish the gray shake-shingled roof with its thick tufts of wet green moss. The chinking had disappeared from around some of the stones comprising the walls, showing black gaps. Sartain tensed when a rifle barrel slid slowly out the window to the left of the shack’s front door.

  Like a snake’s tongue, it seemed to be probing the air for a target.

  Sartain felt the burn of anger well up from the wound in his leg as well as the annoying, ever-present ache in his temple. Time to find out who Crazy Mary’s accomplice was.

  The Revenger raised the Henry, quietly levered a round into the action, snaked the barrel around the side of the spruce, and cut loose with five shots one after another, the cartridge casings arcing back over his right shoulder to clank against each other behind him. Shards from the stones around the window casing flew in all directions, showing copper in the clean sunshine.

  The rifle disappeared from the window and a scream rose from inside the shack. The scream was a woman’s.

  Another woman’s.

  A familiar voice, muffled by the shack’s walls, cried, “Damn you, Mike!”

  Sartain frowned and stared down the Henry’s smoking barrel toward the window. “Belle?”

  Chapter 18

  The girl sobbed.

  Sartain stepped slowly around the spruce, holding his cocked rifle at port arm and keeping his eyes on the window and door, and dragged his right boot toward the cabin. His mind was swirling like the creek he crossed. Twenty feet from the cabin, he slowed his pace, approaching from the end facing the creek, ready for that rifle to be thrust out the window or the open door.

  He moved a little faster when he heard soft sobs coming from inside.

  He moved to the worn patch of ground in front of the door, aimed the Henry straight out from his right hip, and stepped as quickly as he could through the door. He stepped to the right and pressed his back against the wall, out of the light from the door.

  The cabin was empty, the floor strewn with dirt and dead leaves.

  Empty except for Belle sitting on the floor, her back to the small, stone fireplace that was a little larger than a charcoal brazier. A Winchester carbine and a sand-colored Stetson lay on the floor near her men’s stockmen’s boots. She was dressed in a wool shirt and denims. Trail gear.

  To her right was the strongbox.

  Golden sunlight angling through a window to Sartain’s left painted a trapezoid across the box and the girl’s legs. She was breathing hard, groaning, and holding a hand against her right side.

  “Congratulations, Mister Revenger,” Belle said in a pinched voice. “You did your job right well. Did exactly wha
t I asked you to do.”

  She patted the closed strongbox on her left and smiled grimly.

  Sartain hobbled over and kicked the lid up, let it drop back behind the box. Six gold ingots shone brightly in the sunlight.

  Sartain shook his head, thoroughly befuddled. “I don’t get it, Belle. You, Crazy Mary, and Jasper Garvey . . . ”

  “You didn’t know my old man. He was a devil. When he found me an’ Mary together one night after he’d come back to town after chasin’ bank robbers, he whipped us both. Damn near shredded the skin on our bare asses.”

  Belle grunted and winced, briefly showing her teeth. Blood oozed from the hole in her side, pooling on the floor beneath her. “So we decided to take the gold shipment and head East, buy us some frilly dresses and live high on the hog together. See us some opera shows in New York City an’ the like.”

  Awkwardly, Sartain dropped to his good knee beside her, set his rifle down, and untied her neckerchief. He wadded it up and started to press it against the hole in the girl’s side. She waved his hand away, shook her head.

  “Don’t bother. I’m a goner. Took a ricochet. Tore me up pretty good inside. I ain’t gonna be able to spend an ounce of that gold.” She laughed, but there was no humor in it. “When I sent for you, I was really outsmarting myself, wasn’t I?”

  Sartain just stared at her.

  “I figured no one would suspect I had anything to do with it if I hired you to track down the robbers. That way, when Jasper cleared you from our trail, me an’ Crazy Mary could take off with the gold and we wouldn’t have to worry about anyone followin’ us. I was just heartbroken on account of Pa’s killin’, so I turned the saloon over to Northcutt. Everyone would see how I just needed to go somewhere to lick my wounds. Start a new life.”

  “Why did Mary take that shot at me in town?”

  “She was jealous. Gets that way from time to time. She said she heard us together, saw what we were doin’ through the keyhole in my door. She was gonna ride on back to the mountains, but then turned back and fired that shot through the window. That was just Mary. Crazy Mary. I loved her, though.” Belle sobbed. “Poor, sweet, Crazy Mary. Then, when she saw you on the trail, she decided to take another shot. And then, when she saw you up close, she decided to see what all the fuss was about between you an’ me.”