Sartain pinched his hat brim to Kansas Charlie. “Because of what you did to her and her husband, your fate is in her hands now.”
Maggie Ferris gave another rare smile, turned away from Kansas Charlie, and started walking to her cabin. Sartain began leading the horses around the windmill toward the barn.
“Sartain, you’re crazy! You got no right to do this!”
Without looking back at his naked prisoner, Sartain said mildly, “Maybe no legal right, but I’m doing it, Charlie. And remember—you had no right to do what you did out here the other night, neither.”
“Sartain, you crazy Cajun devil!”
The Revenger chuckled at that as he led the horses around the adobe shack to the barn. When he’d finished graining the mounts, he rubbed each down carefully and thoroughly with a scrap of burlap, curried them, checked their hooves for stones and thorns, and then turned them into the corral with Maggie’s single horse and mule.
Boss ran around the pole corral, whickering and kicking up dust, staking out his territory, as the stallion was wont to do. Out in the yard beyond the shack, Kansas Charlie was still bellowing, but his voice was getting hoarse. Sartain knew, from having witnessed it many times in the past, that when a man yelled that long and loudly, his voice would soon die. Sartain and Maggie Ferris could enjoy some peace and quiet while they . . . and Charlie, of course . . . anticipated the final execution.
Sartain slapped his hat against his denims as he made his way out of the corral, where he left the horses munching hay, and headed around to the front of the shack. Charlie was still kicking, but not with nearly as much vigor as before, arching his back and grunting and groaning as he tried to pull the stake out of the ground.
Sartain stepped onto the shack’s narrow, sagging front porch, dippered some water from the olla, took a long drink from the hanging clay pot, and then stepped through the plank door Maggie had propped open with a stone. She sat at the table just inside the door, on the table’s far side. A pot of beans was bubbling on the small range behind her.
She sat sideways in her chair, a tin cup and a stone jug in front of her. She stared through the door and into the yard with the same vague, flat expression as before.
Sartain glanced into the yard at Charlie.
“The bitterness,” she said. “Does it ever go away?”
Sartain doffed his hat and hung it on a wooden peg by the door. He kicked a chair out and slacked into it with a sigh. “No. It never goes entirely away. But doin’ what you’re doin’ helps.”
Maggie nudged the crock jug toward Sartain. “Help yourself. My husband’s own corn whiskey. Twice distilled behind the barn. He was from Alabama, and his pa taught him how to make it. The recipe’s an old one, been in the Ferris family for years.”
“Obliged.” Sartain splashed some of the clear liquor into the tin cup she’d set on his side of the table.
“You say it helps, and I think you’re right,” Maggie said. “I’m feelin’ better already . . . with that dog chained naked in my yard, the sun burnin’ down on him. Look at him kickin’ out there. Squirmin’ an’ groanin’.”
She lifted her brightening eyes to Sartain. A flush had risen into the nubs of her tan cheeks, making her even prettier. “You know it from experience—don’t you, Mike? That it helps. You don’t just do this for others, do you?”
“Runnin’ down men . . . sometimes women . . . who’ve done bad things to others? No, I don’t do it just for other folks who’ve been wronged and can’t exact justice on their own without help. I do it because I know the kind of bitterness you feel, Maggie. I still have it deep inside me, but it helps knowin’ that the men . . . the soldiers who killed my girl . . . are dead. They died hard. Maybe not as hard as what they done to Jewel, but . . .”
Sartain swallowed, stared down at the table, the pain like a lance in his belly again. But that was all right. He needed to feel it now and then, to remember what had happened so that he could sympathize with others who had endured . . . were enduring . . . had yet to endure . . . the same kind of horror.
“Maybe them soldiers didn’t die as hard as they should have, but they died hard just the same. Screamin’ an’ bellowin’ like Kansas Charlie out there now.” Sartain raised his cup and looked over the rim at Maggie. “And, yeah, it helps. It don’t take away the pain and the bitterness altogether, but it’s a hell of a lot better than havin’ ’em out there, runnin’ free as mustangs and stompin’ with their tails up.”
He sipped the whiskey. It was like liquid fire. He could feel the burn in his cheeks and in his eyes, but it tapered off quickly and left a soothing glow, instantly filing the afternoon’s sharpest edges. He stared down into the clear liquid.
“Good stuff.”
Maggie sipped her own drink and then reached across the table to place her left hand on the Cajun’s. “I’m sorry about Jewel, Mike.”
Sartain’s eyes glazed, as they usually did when he thought of his young wife, all the broken promises, and he threw another drink back to cover the swelling in his throat. “Thanks, Maggie.” He set the cup down and placed his right hand over hers. “And thank you for letting me help you.”
“It helps you, too, don’t it?”
“It does indeed.”
Outside, Kansas Charlie gave a particularly loud bellowing cry.
Maggie smiled. “You hungry?”
“I’m so hungry my belly’s thinkin’ my throat’s been cut.”
“I’m going to feed you, and then I’m going to make love to you, Mike.”
Sartain arched his bushy, black brows. “Maggie . . .”
“Oh, it’s not for no payment for what you done,” Maggie said. “I know you don’t accept payment. It’s because my husband’s dead, and he won’t be comin’ back to me ever again.” She brushed a tear from the corner of her left eye. “And because I’m a woman with a woman’s needs, and you’re a kind, handsome man, and there won’t be too many more of those around here, most like.”
She pulled her hand out from between Sartain’s, rose, and stared out the open door behind him. “Besides, this whole revenge business is plum gettin’ me all worked up!”
She laughed and turned to the range.
Chapter 4
Sartain and Maggie Ferris ate beans in which she’d stewed chicken meat, and some crusty corn bread. They washed the simple but tasty meal down with whiskey and water.
Halfway through the meal, the breeze through the door chilled considerably. Thunder rumbled. The yard beyond the stoop darkened, and Sartain could smell rain on the wind.
“Sartain!” Kansas Charlie bellowed, but not nearly as loudly as before. “You best bring me inside, Sartain! Gettin’ cold out here. Startin’ to rain!”
“We could do with a rain,” Maggie said, setting her fork down and sipping her whiskey. She rose, said, “I’m going to put the chickens in. Sometimes they scatter during a storm, and it takes me forever to find ’em. No, you sit and finish your meal, Mike. It’ll just take me a minute.”
Sartain settled back into his chair as Maggie walked out of the cabin. He could hear her bare feet tapping against the hard-packed yard as she broke into a run. A few minutes later, the rain started coming down hard, rattling on the roof. It felt good against Sartain’s back as he sat at the table, loading the last of his beans and chicken onto his fork with a swatch of cornbread.
When it started to come down harder, he rose from his chair and donned his hat, intending to go out and help Maggie with her chickens. But he stopped on the stoop when he saw her striding toward him through the white javelins of slashing rain.
The quarter-sized raindrops splashed in the puddles around her bare, muddy feet. She was soaked, and the rain basted her dress against her so that it looked like a second skin, through which Sartain could see nearly every part of her.
As she strode past Kansas Charlie, the naked outlaw said just loudly enough for Sartain to hear above the storm’s low roar, “I think you liked it, Mrs. Ferris.” Charlie
laughed. “Yeah, I think you liked it real good!”
He raised and lowered his heels, howling with laughter as the rain came down, turning the ground around him to mud.
Maggie stopped in her tracks. She stood staring at Sartain, who started down the steps to move toward her. He stopped when she shook her head and raised both hands to her chest, palms out. She continued walking forward, climbed the porch’s three steps, brushing past Sartain, and disappeared into the cabin.
When she came out, she was holding an old cap and ball revolver. The gun was an old Confederate-model, iron-framed Griswold & Gunnison. Maggie held it in both hands, staring down at it. “This is what he used to shoot Gunther. He took it away from him when Gunther pulled it to protect me, and he shot Gunther in the stomach with it.”
Sartain pulled her toward him and planted a tender kiss on her forehead.
She dropped down the steps into the yard. Holding the old Confederate cavalry pistol straight down by her side, she walked out to where Kansas Charlie lay naked in the mud, staring toward her, laughing.
“Sure enough, you liked it!” he bellowed, kicking his small, soft, white, bare feet. “You want some more of it, Mrs. Ferris, now that I got your husband out of the way?”
She stopped near his feet and stared down at him.
Kansas Charlie kicked and laughed, straining against the cuffs holding his hands above his head. She aimed the heavy revolver straight out in both hands and slanted it down at the fat man’s head.
“Right between the eyes, Maggie—there ya go!”
Maggie shook her head. She wasn’t ready for his misery to end. Not yet. She lowered the barrel, aiming at his crotch.
“No!” Kansas Charlie shouted, jerking at his cuffs.
The old gun belched flames and fire. Sartain had been worried it would misfire on account of the rain—his own similar revolver had often misfired during the war—but Maggie’s didn’t.
Kansas Charlie threw his head as far back as he could and screamed like an owl with one wing caught in a trap. He rolled the lower half of his body to one side, drawing his knees up to his belly.
“Oh, you bitch!” he cried. “Oh, you bitch! You bitch! You bitch!”
She lowered the weapon and took long strides back to the porch. She stopped at the bottom of the steps and stood to let the rainwater sluicing off the porch roof tumble over her, until her dress became transparent. For all intents and purposes, she was standing before Sartain naked.
Kansas Charlie’s bellows lowered to agonized mewls and sobs as he kept his knees drawn to his chest.
Sartain’s heart thudded as he stared down at Maggie. Maggie tipped her head back, swiping her wet hair behind her head and opening her mouth to drink the rain. She looked at Sartain. Then she looked down at herself. She walked slowly up the steps and stood before him, staring up at him, passion smoldering in her eyes.
Sartain glanced at the rise behind her, at the red flower and her husband’s fresh grave. “You sure?”
She reached down, grabbed her dress, and lifted it up and over her head. She tossed it onto the porch floor, took Sartain’s hand, and led him into the cabin.
Leaving the door open to the fresh damp breeze, hearing the rain pattering on the roof, Sartain followed the naked woman around the table to a bed at the back of the room, abutting the far left wall. There was a small parlor area with a rocking chair, a rope rug, and a small, mud-brick hearth to the right of it.
She stopped beside the bed and stood staring at him, her full breasts rising and falling heavily. They were lightly freckled.
Sartain moved heavily toward her. She rose up on her tiptoes and kissed him.
“This time it’s my idea,” she said just loudly enough that he could hear her above the rain.
* * *
Lightning flashed. Thunder rumbled. The rain wasn’t hammering as hard as before but making a more peaceful rhythm on the roof and against the walls and windows. Beneath it, Sartain could hear Kansas Charlie crying while he clamped his viscera between his thighs.
He rolled off of Maggie Ferris, sweating, breathing hard.
She climbed out of bed and tromped naked out onto the porch. He followed her out there. She drank from the olla. She dipped up some more water and offered it to him, holding it up to his mouth. He drank it all, and when she dippered some more, he drank that, too.
There was an old wicker chair on the porch. He sat in it, and she sat on his lap. They sat there together, gently kissing and caressing and listening to Kansas Charlie’s dwindling wails beneath the even rush of the rain that turned the yard to gauzy silver, the intermittent lightning flashes reflected in the puddles.
Maggie went in and poured fresh whiskey into a single cup, and they sat together in the wicker chair, snuggling and sipping the whiskey. The rain dwindled slightly but continued to come down. Kansas Charlie was a vague shape in the dark, silvery mud, curled on his side, his back to the cabin.
Maggie took another sip of the whiskey, ran her tongue across her upper lip, and looked up at Sartain. “Tell me how you came to do what you do, Mike. Tell me about Jewel.”
“Yeah, she’s a part of it,” Sartain said, staring out into the rain-washed yard. “It was a long time ago. But sometimes it seems like only yesterday. I came home from the war, became a galvanized Yankee—”
“What’s that?” Maggie asked, looking up at him from beneath her brows.
“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 knew really only one thing—fightin’—so I decided the cavalry would be the best place for me. Fightin’ in the Indian Wars out west. 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 sharp-edged memories. Maggie’s 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 . . .
“My patrol was ambushed one afternoon by a Chiricahua war party. The entire patrol was wiped out . . . save myself. 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, nursed me back to health.”
“Jewel,” Maggie said, nuzzling his neck. “Pretty name.”
“She was a pretty girl,” Sartain said, wincing at the pain of the memories. “Pretty as a jewel, she was . . .”
“Was she your girl?”
“Yeah. She came to be my girl. Became . . . well, she got in the family way.”
“Oh,” Maggie said, sadness in her tone.
“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 Cajun tried to swallow down 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.
“And then what happened, Mike?” Maggie asked.
“And then I hunted them all down—all five—and killed them bloody,” the Revenger said tightly. “And now I do the same thing for others who can’t do it for themselves.”
Maggie wrapped her arms around his neck an
d pressed her lips to his cheek. “Thank you, Mike. Thank you . . . for . . . bringin’ Kansas Charlie to me . . . so he could pay for his sins. It don’t bring my dear Gunther back, but . . .” She shrugged a shoulder.
Sartain ran a hand gently up and down her smooth thigh. “Revenge is a dish better served cold,” he said, winking. “But it tastes right sweet, don’t it?”
Chapter 5
Kansas Charlie must have rolled onto his back just before he died.
He lay on his back now, bloody and muddy, his wide, glassy eyes staring at the soft, dawn sky. His lips were stretched back from his yellow teeth in a death snarl.
A magpie had been sitting on his forehead when Sartain had ridden up, but it had flown as the Revenger had approached. There was a spot of blood in the corner of Kansas Charlie’s right eye, where the bird had pecked him.
Kansas Charlie was nothing more than food for the carrion eaters.
“Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”
Sartain removed his lariat from his saddle as he swung down from Boss’s back and wrapped an end of the rope around Charlie’s waist, slip-knotting it. He pulled the railroad spike out of the ground, removed Charlie’s handcuffs, and returned both the spike and the cuffs to his saddlebags.
He climbed back into the saddle, dallied the lariat around the horn, and booted Boss toward the ranch’s wooden portal and the main stage trail.
Kansas Charlie’s pale, lumpy, muddy, bloody body was jerked around by the rope and pulled head first behind the horse, splashing through puddles and gouging a wide furrow in the muddy yard. As Boss plodded along toward the trail, Sartain glanced over his shoulder at the cabin cloaked in early morning shadows, rain from another pre-dawn shower dripping from its eaves.
He’d left Maggie slumbering, exhausted from their night of lovemaking while the storm had swirled over the ranch yard, and Kansas Charlie’s howls gradually dwindled to silence. Sartain pinched his hat brim in somber farewell at the sleeping woman and felt a pang of loneliness, as he often did when parting ways with a woman whose bed he’d shared.
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