You’d think a man like the Revenger would have a stone-cold heart, but that wasn’t true for Sartain. He loved hard and he hated hard, and losing the love of his life a handful of years ago to renegade soldiers kept him riding hard along the vengeance trail, as though with each killer he killed, he was still avenging the killers of Jewel and his unborn child . . .
He felt lonely for Maggie, as well as for himself. She’d likely stay out here and tend the ranch and the relay station for the rest of the time allotted to her, tending her beloved husband’s grave simply because she had nowhere else to go, and that was the kind of woman she was.
The world was a hard, unforgiving place.
Sartain dragged Kansas Charlie’s worthless carcass several hundred yards from the Ferris ranch and rolled it into a deep ravine. A man like Kansas Charlie didn’t deserve a decent burial, nor did he deserve any words said over him. Sartain merely rolled him into the ravine, coiled his lariat, and stepped back into the saddle.
He continued on, taking the southern trail, which he hoped would eventually lead him to Mexico. From having perused a map in a Wells Fargo office up in the Panhandle, he knew that the town of Carmen was to the north and the larger settlement of Bittersweet was to the south, between the Davis Mountains and the Del Carmen Range just across the border in Mexico.
He’d ride through Bittersweet in a few hours, he judged. He usually tried to steer clear of smaller towns where he might be recognized from the “Wanted” dodgers bearing his likeness that had circulated through the West, announcing the two-thousand-dollar government bounty on his head for killing the soldiers. But Bittersweet would be the last town before the vast wastes of Old Mexico. He needed to lay in trail provisions for the long ride.
He’d ridden along on the muddy trail for a good hour when a clattering rose behind him. Instantly, his hand went to the big LeMat holstered on his right thigh, and he turned to stare back along the trail. There was no dust because of the mud, but he thought he could make out a fast-moving wagon coming around a bend maybe a quarter mile back and obscured by scrub oaks and sotol cactus.
The wagon was moving at a fast clip, clattering to beat the band. Now he could hear someone hoorawing whatever poor animal was pulling the contraption.
Sartain turned Boss off the trail and rode around behind a large, cabin-sized boulder and stopped on the far side of the boulder from the oncoming wagon. He waited, his hand on the LeMat.
The clattering of the wagon grew steadily louder as did the loud hoorawing of the driver and the thuds of the galloping puller. The wagon dashed past the boulder in a tan and red blur, divots of mud flying up from the horse’s hooves and the wheels. Sartain saw through the creosote scrub between him and the trail that a girl was driving, standing in the driver’s boot, feet spread wide. She was whipping the reins over the skewbald paint horse pulling a battered, dull-orange farm wagon.
It wasn’t her clothes that had given her sex away, for she wore the felt Stetson, hickory shirt, brown belt, and denims of a man. It was her slender figure with the feminine curves, and the high-pitched voice trying to coax more speed out of the galloping paint that told Sartain she was a girl. Many men wore their hair long, but hers, which was as black as night, hung down to the small of her back, and it owned a feminine shine.
The girl wasn’t what interested the Revenger most about the fast-moving wagon, however. As she’d dashed past him, he’d caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a body covered by a brown and yellow Indian blanket. At least, the figure beneath the blanket was shaped like a body, and he thought he saw the top of a head and one arm flopping out to one side.
A body, all right. Most likely a dead one. Any injured man would have been killed by the girl’s violent driving along the chuck-hole stippled stage road curving through the west Texas desert.
Curious, and because the girl was obviously in distress, Sartain pulled Boss out onto the trail and put the buckskin into a rocking canter, keeping about seventy yards between him and the girl as they continued along the trail, heading nearly due south. The Del Carmens rose dark and mysterious in Old Mexico, straight ahead of the trail and above the bristling chaparral brushed with occasional cloud shadows.
As hard as the girl was pushing her horse, Sartain expected the paint to blow out both lungs at any moment, or for one of its hooves to plunder a gopher hole. If that happened, the girl would be a goner, crushed beneath a toppled wagon.
He suppressed the urge to catch up to her and slow her down. Though it rankled him to see a horse abused the way she was abusing the paint, her business was her own. Besides, he thought they were probably within a mile or so of Bittersweet.
A few minutes later, he saw the mud adobe dwellings of the ranch- and mine-supply settlement crawl into view between two steep ridges. He wouldn’t have recognized it as a town if he didn’t know a town was out here. From this distance of a third of a mile, it was a few scattered brown shapes amongst boulders and cactus and scrub oaks and piñons climbing the lower slopes rolling up toward the base of the steep, sandstone cliffs. The cliffs towered a good two thousand feet over the town.
Only a town this small could be a county seat in the vastness of the Great Bend.
Sartain followed the wagon around a long bend in the trail, until he could see the tall, false-fronted business buildings lining the trail, which became Bittersweet’s main street.
Flanking the mud-brick and shabby gray business buildings, the small, pale adobes remaining from the town’s Mexican origins rolled up in the brushy, rocky hills, where the Revenger could hear lambs and goats bleating, a few cows lowing, and dogs barking. There was the smell of privies and trash heaps, as well as animal dung moldering in the harsh sun and ubiquitous heat.
There were also the rich, spicy smells of Mexican cook fires, and they started Sartain’s stomach rumbling. He hadn’t had breakfast at Maggie Ferris’s place, though she’d offered to cook for him the night before. She’d been sleeping so deeply that morning, he hadn’t wanted to awaken her.
Likely her slow, satisfying execution of Kansas Charlie had been a load off her shoulders, and she’d finally been able to get a good night’s sleep, though her and Sartain’s riotous coupling probably had something to do with that, as well.
The Revenger smiled, remembering it fondly.
Ahead of him, the wagon lurched and jounced into the town. As it did, the tailgate jerked open to lie flat, one broken chain dangling toward the trail. The wagon swung toward the right side of the street and stopped. Sartain halted Boss at the edge of the town, near a blacksmith’s hut from which rose the clangs of a hammer striking an anvil.
The Revenger poked his hat brim back off his forehead as he frowned curiously, watching the girl with long, black hair jerk the wagon’s brake forward, engaging the blocks against the wheel, and then climb down out of the driver’s boot, on the wagon’s right side. She yelled something that Sartain couldn’t hear, and then she shouted louder as she mounted the boardwalk fronting a large adobe brick building whose sign jutting into the street announced BROWN COUNTY COURT HOUSE.
A sign beneath that sign read simply: COUNTY SHERIFF.
“You bastard!” the girl’s cry echoed. She’d stopped to shout into a window to the right of the courthouse’s front door. “You killed him, you bastard, and I brought him here so you could take a good look at him!”
The front door opened, and an older man in a black, three-piece suit and spectacles stepped out, holding a fat stogie in his hand.
“Carleen!” the older man said, Sartain able to hear better now as he put Boss ahead along the street.
There’d been a dozen or more people milling about the shops, and they all turned their attention to the courthouse. Shop doors were opening, and men as well as women were stepping out to investigate the commotion.
Several dogs had come running out of alleys to sniff and mewl and wag their tails around the wagon. A building similar in bland, bulky style to the courthouse stood to Sartain’s le
ft. One of its several signs boasted “free blowjobs between 5 and 7 every Friday night with the purchase of a whiskey,” so it likely had little to do with officious government grindings—except when the county officials were not taking advantage of the specials.
A large sign stretched across the upper story balcony read simply: NORA’S.
Doves in their fluttering finery were bleeding out onto the rickety-looking balcony to peer over the ironwood rail toward the source of the commotion.
The black-haired girl hammered on the window to the right of the courthouse door, yelling, “Sheriff Chaney—you in there? You murdered him, you bastard! I know you did! I brought him here for you to look at!” She hammered on the window again, until Sartain winced, fearing she’d break the glass and shred her fist.
The old man in the three-piece suit, looking chagrined and befuddled, moved up to her as though to grab her arms, exclaiming, “Now, Carleen, pipe down before you cause a scandal, dear child!”
“Me cause a scandal?” Carleen shrieked so loudly that one of the dogs near the wagon put its tail down and dashed under the wagon bed.
To Sartain’s left, a man shouted, “What in tarnation is goin’ on over there? Who’s yellin’ so’s to wake the dead? Carleen, is that you caterwaulin’ over there?”
A tall, black-haired man had just walked out the front door of Nora’s place, knotting a string tie around his neck.
He yelled, “Goddammit, girl—you pipe down, or I’ll pull your pants down and blister your naked ass!”
Chapter 6
The tall man stepped into the street, the doves looking down at him from the balcony above. He was dressed in the black suit and slouch hat of a card sharp, complete with gold watch chain drooping from a pocket of his paisley vest. A stylish brown slouch hat shaded his soft but handsome face.
His white linen shirttails drooped over his wide, black cartridge belt glittering with brass-cased rounds for the big Peacemaker sitting high and for the cross-draw on his left hip. The thongs on his holster dangled toward his high-heeled, undershot black boots.
A five-pointed sheriff’s star glittered on his vest.
The girl had swung around to face the man. She glowered at him from the boardwalk fronting the courthouse. “Ha! I should’ve expected you’d be whore-mongering, you guttersnipe! Get your cowardly ass over here and say good-bye to your brother, Warren! He’s dead, and don’t try to tell me it wasn’t you who shot him in the back, neither!”
“What’re you talkin’ about, girl?” the sheriff said, finished tying his necktie and striding slowly forward. The street had suddenly gone so quiet that Sartain could hear one of the horses tied to a hitchrack fronting Nora’s place plop apples into the street.
“Get over here and say good-bye to your brother, Warren!” The girl thrust her arm out toward the blanket-covered dead man in the back of the wagon.
Her voice had been quavering with emotion, and now her knees buckled, and she collapsed in the street, her long hair dancing down her arms. She clamped her hands to her face and sobbed. “You killed him! You finally killed him just like you been wantin’ to do ever since he came back to Bittersweet!”
She sobbed into her hands, shoulders jerking, her hat falling off her head and tumbling into the street.
Everyone watched, including Sartain, as the tall, slender sheriff with hair nearly as dark as the girl’s strode over to the wagon. He stared down at young Carleen, and then he turned to the bundle in the wagon box. With one hand, he tugged the blanket down to reveal the man’s face. Then he froze before squaring his shoulders and staring into the wagon for a full minute.
No one said anything. The only sounds were the occasional snorts of a horse and the girl sobbing into her hands as she knelt in the finely churned dust of the street.
The older gent in the three-piece suit had come down off the boardwalk to tentatively peer into the wagon. He winced again and shook his head. “It’s Waylon, all right. Sure enough. May god have mercy on his soul.” He turned to Carleen and clucked. “Oh, you poor girl!”
“He did it!” Carleen lifted her head and pointed at the sheriff. “He might not have pulled the trigger, but he saw to it that his brother was killed, sure enough!” She rose and lunged for the tall man before her. “You killed your own brother, an’ you’ll burn in hell!”
She tried to punch him, but he grabbed her arms. He was far bigger and stronger than she, and she was no match for him. A short Mexican in buckskins had slowly stepped up to the wagon. He’d come from the direction of the blacksmith shop behind Sartain, and he moved slowly but deliberately up behind the girl now and took her in his brawny arms.
“There, there, Carleen,” the burly Mexican said sadly, enfolding the crying girl in his arms and pulling her back away from the sheriff. “There, there . . . come away from there, now.”
“Let me go, Vicente!” Carleen yelled, struggling in the burly man’s grip, kicking out at the sheriff, who stood sullenly before her. “I’m going to kill that bastard! He killed his own brother! His own twin brother! He killed my father, and I won’t rest until he’s dead, too!”
“Come now, Carleen. I take you home. Vicente will take you home.”
“I don’t wanna go home. There’s nothin’ there for me anymore . . . with Pa dead, murdered by his own brother!”
Suddenly Carleen managed to wriggle out of the stocky Mexican’s arms. Sobbing, tears rolling down her cheeks, she stumbled into the middle of the street. “I, Carleen Chaney, daughter of Waylon Chaney, who was murdered by his twin brother, Warren Chaney—Sheriff Warren Chaney—am, as of right now, offering five hundred dollars to the man or men who kills this killer standing before me now!”
The sheriff whipped his head around, his right hand automatically driving across his belly to close around the grips of his Peacemaker. He spun as though to make sure no one was taking the girl up on her offer, and then he spun back to her, thrusting an arm and castigating finger at her. “I declare, Carleen—you simple witch!”
With that, he struck the back of his right hand across her face with a resolute smack. The girl screamed, spun, and fell in a heap.
Red-faced with fury, the sheriff bounded toward the girl, his eyes fairly bulging out of their sockets. Sartain knew unbridled rage when he saw it.
“Come on, Boss!” He booted the buckskin ahead, shucking his LeMat from its holster.
As the sheriff jerked his right boot back, apparently intending to drive it into the girl’s belly, Sartain let a bullet fly. The .44-caliber slug plumed dirt and horse apples about six inches to the left of the sheriff’s left boot. The Revenger turned Boss full around and halted him, dust billowing around horse and rider.
Sheriff Warren Chaney had lunged back, tripped over his own boots, and fallen in the street with an indignant yelp. His enraged eyes blazed up at Sartain, and again his hand went to the Peacemaker.
Sartain drove another .44 round into the dirt near the man’s hat, which tumbled off his head and, cocking the big popper once more, narrowed an eye as he aimed down the barrel at the bridge of the dark-haired, blue-eyed man’s nose. “The next one’s gonna earn me that five hundred dollars right quick!”
Chaney froze, his Peacemaker half out of its holster. He stared up at Sartain with bald fury, the nostrils of his peeling, sun-blistered nose expanding and contracting. His sharply chiseled, clean-shaven face was mottled red.
The crowd had moved a little closer to see over and around the wagon. A shocked rumble rose. At the first roar of Sartain’s LeMat, the three dogs had high-tailed it into alleys, but a shaggy, burr-laden black and white collie peered from over a pile of lumber, grinning as though this were the most interesting thing to happen in Bittersweet in a month of Sundays.
The girl stared up at Sartain from the dirt. Her mouth hung open—a pretty, full-lipped mouth it was, too—and her eyes were wide. Her man’s flannel shirt had torn open, revealing the top of the deep, alluring valley between her breasts.
The stoc
ky Mexican stood staring with much the same expression as the girl, his coffee-brown eyes flicking back and forth between Sartain’s smoking, pearl-gripped, silver-chased LeMat and his eyes. A woman’s voice yelled, “Warren!”
She came running out of the crowd—another black-haired beauty, only this one was better appointed, in a burgundy gown with a wasp waist and pleated skirt, a little straw hat trimmed with fake berries and leaves on her classically beautiful head. She was shielding that beautiful head from the sun with a parasol that matched the gown.
As she ran toward the wagon, her corset jostled becomingly. She was still a good twenty feet from Sartain when he could tell that she was blood related not only to the sheriff, but to the girl, as well. In fact, Carleen appeared merely a slightly younger version of the woman, who was maybe twenty-five or twenty-six, only a few years younger than the sheriff.
“I heard the yelling, and . . . Carleen, it is you!” She stopped near the wagon and looked around at Chaney and Carleen and then at Sartain, who had lowered the LeMat slightly while keeping it cocked and trained on the sheriff.
Now the woman turned to peer into the wagon. “Oh!” she said, clapping a hand to her cleavage visible at the top of her stylishly low-cut gown. She took a halting step backwards. Her fine lower jaw hung, and her ruby lips parted in shock. “Oh, god! Waylon?” She moved forward slowly, dropped the parasol, and closed both her white-gloved hands over the top of the wagon’s side panel.
“Go on home, Celeste.” Keeping a close eye on Sartain’s LeMat, Chaney gained his feet. “Go on home. I’ll tend to him.”
“Who did this?” Celeste asked, her cheeks pale. Otherwise, she looked more angry than sad. There were no tears in her eyes, and her fine jaw was firm. She was staring at Chaney. “Who did this, Warren?”
“He did!” Carleen exclaimed, gaining her feet, her hair in her eyes. “His own twin brother murdered my father. I found him dead in Cobalt Canyon. Back-shot!”
The Revenger Page 28
