Chaney turned up the lamp’s wick, spreading a warm glow across the sparsely furnished room, which smelled of Amos McCluskey’s sour sweat, whiskey, and gun oil.
“Christ, this is gonna leave a damn scar,” Chaney said, still dabbing at the cut on his cheek and jerking open a desk drawer. He not only dressed like a Fancy Dan, but he had that air about him. “You like to have killed me.”
“Well, then, I reckon I’d be five hundred dollars richer.” Sartain sank into a Windsor chair against the wall to the right of the office’s closed door, near a gun rack with a chain drawn through the trigger guards of all the rifles and two Schofield revolvers.
“I reckon you would.” Chaney pulled a glass out of the same drawer from which he’d drawn a half-empty bottle. He hauled another glass down from a stack of “Wanted” dodgers on top of what appeared to be bound county tax ledgers and splashed whiskey in both glasses, half filling each. “You want any water.”
“I done had a bath.”
Chaney slid the glass across the desk. Sartain rose, sat with a hip on the front edge of the desk, and lifted the glass. He sniffed, able to tell by the fragrance it was of the top-shelf variety.
“You drink well way out here,” he said, sipping.
Chaney threw half his own drink back and set the glass on the desk. As he dabbed an end of the handkerchief into the glass, he said, “What were you doing out on the street this time of the night?”
Sartain figured that Chaney hadn’t been up to his father’s house. Otherwise, he would have known his sister had been late for supper, and he probably would have suspected she’d been out with Sartain. Sartain didn’t care what the man thought about him, but that wouldn’t have been in Celeste’s best interest. He didn’t want to get the young woman into trouble.
“I was looking for a hot meal and a soft bed. If I’d been gunning for you, you’d be dead.”
“Why are you still here?”
“Because a lot of men died to make this a free country.”
“You’re curious, ain’t ya? Curious about my brother.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m the curious sort.” Sartain drew a fresh cigar from the breast pocket of his shirt, bit off the end, spat the end on the floor, and touched the tip of the stogie to the chimney of the Rochester’s lamp, lighting it. “I hear you and your brother were like night and day.” He rolled the cigar tip against the chimney, lighting the edges and puffing smoke. “Him bein’ night and you bein’ day.”
Chaney scowled as he dabbed at the cut with his whiskey-dampened handkerchief. “Who told you that?”
“Some old coot in a saloon this afternoon. Didn’t catch his name.”
“Yeah? So? We didn’t get along. That doesn’t mean I killed him, and who are you to be asking me these questions, anyway?”
“Why did you give him a job?”
“Because he was my brother and he needed one.”
“Some think you killed him because you thought he was getting too big for his britches, that he was a tougher lawdog than you, and he was showing you up.”
“Hogwash. He was a tough son of a buck—that’s true. But I wouldn’t kill my twin brother; I couldn’t do that.” Chaney chuckled ruefully. “He could have done that. Waylon could have done that to me. But I couldn’t have killed my own brother. Shot him the back? Hell, no!”
“Who do you think did it, then?”
“I don’t know. He was out looking for claim jumpers around Cobalt Canyon. Them claim jumpers could have ganged up on him. But, hell, there’s owlhoots of every stripe around here. Throw a rock and you’ll hit a likely candidate.”
Sartain puffed the stogie, sipped his drink. “Have you been investigatin’?”
Chaney threw the handkerchief down on his desk and sipped his own drink. “No, but I’ll head out there tomorrow, have a look around.”
“You don’t sound too urgent about it.”
Chaney cursed loudly. “I give you a belt of my good whiskey, and you just sit there blowin’ smoke at me and accusin’ me of killin’ my own brother. If I ride out there now, someone’ll likely follow me an’ bushwhack me for that damned bounty my lovely niece put on me head! Now I’m tired of explainin’ things to a man with a two-thousand-dollar federal bounty on his head, so, if you’ll forgive me, I’d like to call it an evening!”
“I understand.” Sartain threw back the last of his drink and donned his hat. “Thanks for the whiskey. Went down smooth.”
“You’re welcome. Now, are you gonna leave town tomorrow?”
Sartain sauntered to the door, picked up his rifle, and rested it on his shoulder. “No. Can you recommend a good restaurant? I’d prefer a quiet place that knows how to properly cook a steak.”
“Yeah, there’s a place like that down in Juarez. Pablo’s. It’s on the main drag. A little pink adobe. You can’t miss it. If you leave tonight you’ll be there in three days!”
Sartain pinched his hat brim to the angry lawman. “All right, then. Good night, Sheriff. Be seein’ you around.”
“Jump yourself, Sartain!” the Revenger heard the man bellow as he left the courthouse and stepped into the street.
* * *
He did find an eatery that served a satisfying steak and beans even at this late hour. It was on a side street near the Mexican brothel from which loud voices emanated, including the jeering laughter of women.
A couple of gunshots sounded, but Sartain didn’t doubt that they, too, came from the brothel. There was a three-piece band playing over there, as well, and it only wavered a little at the gunfire.
The middleaged gent with a handlebar mustache who ran the eatery even served Sartain a nice ale to wash the steak and beans down with. The proprietor stooped to peer out the front window at the brothel and rolled a stove match from one side of his mouth to the other, shaking his head. “Now that Waylon Chaney’s dead, them greasers think they can get away with whatever they want.”
He cursed and straightened.
“Oh? They’re not afraid of Warren and Amos?” Sartain said between mouthfuls of steak and beans.
“Hell, no. Waylon, now, he was keepin’ a cork on the Mexican side of town. He never cared much for Mescins and he didn’t mind the Mescins knowin’ it, neither. Ah, hell—why worry about it? Nothin’ I can do. I just hope Warren can hire another deputy half as good as his brother was.”
The proprietor started to walk back to his kitchen behind a louvered door but stopped when Sartain swallowed a mouthful and said, “You think Warren killed his brother like his niece thinks?”
The man thought about that, chewing the stove match. “Nah. Warren doesn’t have the balls. He might have sent Amos, though. Ah, hell—I’m not gonna worry about it. All I can do is get up every morning an’ put my shoes on an’ fetch firewood to start the range. I can’t worry about things that are out of my control!” He pushed a shoulder against the kitchen door, stopped, and glanced back over his shoulder at Sartain. “And hope I don’t get shot by a stray bullet fired from over in that greaser brothel!”
He canted his head to indicate a bullet hole in the wall to his left.
“That one missed by a snake’s whisker.”
He disappeared into the kitchen, and Sartain could hear him knocking pans around and cursing.
After the meal, tired and weary, Sartain went over to the Federate Livery & Feed Barn, which was closed at this late hour but not locked. He opened a big front door and slipped inside, climbed up into the hayloft with his Henry and his bedroll, and slept like the proverbial dead dog, occasionally half waking when he heard gunfire from the Mexican side of town.
Chapter 12
In Cobalt Canyon the next day, Sartain saw the sun flash in the corner of his right eye, and, having seen similar flashes before and knowing what nine out of ten of them meant, he kicked free of his stirrups and hurled himself over Boss’s right wither.
He hit the ground hard on his right shoulder with an an
guished grunt. At the same time, a bullet screeched through the air over Boss’s saddle and hammered a boulder with a wicked-sounding spang!
As the rifle’s flat report reached his ears, Sartain heaved himself to his feet, jerked his Henry out of his saddle scabbard, and yelled, “High-tail it, Boss!”
The buckskin didn’t need to be told twice. As Sartain racked a round into the Henry’s action and dove behind a boulder, the horse reared, whinnied shrilly, and bolted off down the trail in the direction from which he and Sartain had come. Another bullet blasted against the side of the boulder the Revenger had just dived behind, the ambusher’s echoing report following a half second later.
Sartain gained his knees and picked up his hat. He ran out from behind the boulder to another one and then immediately began climbing the side of a low, boulder-strewn escarpment that formed a wall of the narrow chasm. The ambusher fired two more rounds, but both bullets flew well short of the man’s quarry, which meant the son of Satan had lost track of Sartain amongst the cabin-sized boulders comprising the slopes of Cobalt Canyon.
The chasm was appropriately named, the Revenger had seen when he and Boss had first ridden into it, following the directions of the liveryman, Pap Chisolm, back in Bittersweet. The chasm itself was all dull yellows and burnt oranges of wind- and sun-blasted basalt sculpted as if by a mad god entertaining himself. But the sky hanging over the fissure high in the Davis Mountains was a velvety, flawless, cobalt blue.
The sky appeared close enough that a man could rip some of the blue out of it by just reaching up with his hand, and deep enough that it made him feel giddy, as though it were trying to suck him out of his boots and send him reeling into the cosmos beyond it. It was like staring into an ocean above his head.
The sun and heat pulsated off the rocks around Sartain, who was hunkered now in a niche on the shoulder of the scarp, overlooking the canyon floor, a winding ribbon of flood-scalloped sand littered with the glowing, white bones of recent cattle and deer and, most likely, ancient dinosaurs, whose bones were forever being carved from the rock by spring storms.
On the opposite ridge, which was as rocky as the one Sartain occupied, and tufted with short, wiry brush and stunt oaks and creosote shrubs, a man moved out from behind a wagon-sized, flat-topped boulder and scurried behind another one. The Revenger raised his rifle but jerked it back down to avoid the same sort of sun flash that had given his attacker away.
The man was out of sight.
With the fleeting glimpse and the sun glare, it had been hard to tell much about him. He appeared to be wearing a brown hat and a checked shirt, which told Sartain next to nothing about him.
The Revenger snaked his rifle around the right side of his covering boulder. Squinting through the sun glare, he made out a rifle barrel bristling from the top of the boulder the sharpshooter had ducked behind. Sartain fired three quick shots, watching his first bullet blast rock dust from the front of the boulder, just beneath the son of Satan’s rifle barrel.
The rifle barrel was pulled back out of sight, and Sartain’s second and third shots blew more rock dust from the face of the boulder. Sartain bounded out from behind his own boulder, ran through a narrow channel curving up the escarpment, and then ran down the other side.
He was in the open here as he made his way toward the canyon floor, and his assailant soon found him.
Lead hammered behind him. One clipped his left spur and nudged his heel. Sartain went to ground behind a low hump of sand and gravel from which a sotol jutted like a quieting finger, and the shooting stopped.
He looked at his left spur. It was missing a point from its rowel.
Sartain whistled. Three inches closer and he’d be sporting a hole through his ankle. Whoever was out to get him—a bounty hunter, possibly a lawman who’d picked up his trail in Bittersweet, or maybe Warren Chaney himself—was a damned good shot. Sartain would have to tread carefully.
He removed both spurs and stuck them in his back pocket, where they wouldn’t jangle.
He racked a fresh round into the Henry’s breech. He picked up a rock a little larger than his fist and lobbed it down the slope. As the bushwhacker fired at the movement, Sartain whipped his Henry up over the top of the gravelly mound, picked out the dark rifle barrel and the pale oval face beneath the brown hat, and cut loose with three more quick shots, the Henry belching, the empty cartridge casings winging out over his right shoulder and pinging onto the rocks behind him.
Amidst his own thundering shots, he heard a man yell. The rifle, the face, and the hat disappeared behind a boulder about halfway up the opposite ridge shrouded by the throbbing glare of the sun.
Sartain wasted no time in hightailing it out from behind the gravelly mound. He sprinted downhill, following a winding course between boulders and brush snags. Near the bottom of the canyon, he stopped behind a block-like boulder and glanced up the slope toward where he’d last seen the shooter.
There was a high, eerie sounding whisper.
The bullet hammered into the boulder with an angry, snarling crash, blowing sharp rock slivers and dust every which way. Sartain cursed and ducked his head, squeezing his right eye closed against dust that had slipped behind his eyelid. That eye burned, watered. The shards peppered his hat and his pinto vest.
“You son of a buck,” he raked out, blinking his burning eye.
The ambusher’s rifle spoke twice more. The bullets hammered the face of Sartain’s covering boulder. The Revenger snaked his own rifle over the top of the boulder, fired twice, then ran straight to his left.
He slipped behind another boulder and then ran from behind that boulder and into the flood-scalloped sand at the canyon bottom. Sensing a bead being drawn on him, he stopped suddenly and was instantly glad he did.
A slug screeched through air where he would now be standing if he hadn’t stopped and blew a branch off the madrone tree to his left and behind him. He jerked the Henry up and fired at the puff of gray smoke still dancing in the sunshine. He pulled the rifle back down and ran up the ridge, meandering in the general direction of the ambusher.
He took his time now, moving slowly, twisting his way through the large rocks and humps of sand and spidery shrubs and cacti. No shots rang out from above. That made him wonder if he hadn’t wounded the man too badly for him to continue the fusillade, or even killed him.
He’d prefer the former. He wanted to know why the coward was after him.
There was also the possibility the man was waiting for him in silence.
Sartain moved even more slowly.
He stopped beneath a slanted ceiling of basaltic rock and peered out from beneath the overhang, stretching his glance up the broken slope. He saw what he thought was the boulder the shooter had last used as cover.
There was no movement. The only sounds around him were the monotonously whining cicadas. Occasionally a hot, dry breath of breeze scratched dry brush together or there was the soft padding of a kangaroo rat.
The air was as hot as a cookshack at noon.
Sartain dropped to a knee. He leaned his rifle against that knee, doffed his hat, and ran a hand through his thick, sweat-damp hair. His heart beat slowly but heavily.
Was the ambusher waiting for him up there? Or maybe the man, having a better vantage from the high ground, had slipped down around him.
Maybe he was moving up behind him.
Sartain glanced over his right shoulder. His heartbeat quickened when a round, white-faced Montezuma quail slipped out from behind a rock and disappeared behind a clump of Spanish bayonet. Sartain drew a deep breath, calming himself.
Then he quietly slipped the Henry’s loading rod from the tube beneath the barrel and filled the rod from his cartridge belt. When he’d snapped the rod back into place and locked it, he moved from beneath the slanting roof of rock and continued slowly up the narrow channel between boulders and humps of sand and gravel and the occasional twisted gray oak with its dusty leaves buffeting lightly in the hot breeze.
The large, teardrop shaped boulder from which the shooter had last fired at him grew slowly ahead and above him. A sotol fingered up at its left side.
Even more slowly, Sartain approached the boulder, expecting to see a rifle jut toward him from either side. His own rifle was aimed straight out from his right shoulder, and he slid the barrel from left to right and back again.
His muscles were coiled like a snake’s. He was ready to aim and squeeze the trigger.
He moved up the slope and around the boulder’s left side. Crouching, he jerked the barrel toward the backside of the boulder.
The shooter wasn’t there.
Sartain looked around carefully. He looked up slope and down and to both sides, his muscles still drawn taut and ready to spring. When he saw no imminent danger, he walked into the niche between the teardrop boulder and the slope rising steeply behind it. On the ground were several fresh scuff marks and four empty cartridge casings. A small patch of blood stained the sand near one of the casings. The casing had a couple of crimson spots on it, as well.
A shadow slid over the casing.
Sartain’s muscles uncoiled instantly. Crouching low, he aimed the Henry high and fired. The man standing atop a boulder thirty feet above him flinched. The rifle the man was aiming from his thick right shoulder jerked slightly to Sartain’s right. Smoke and flames stabbed from the barrel, just ahead of the crashing report.
The bullet slammed into the teardrop boulder two feet to Sartain’s right, spraying rock shards and dust.
The man grunted and stumbled backward nearly out of Sartain’s field of vision. Then the man stumbled back into it and dropped to his knees. The rifle fell from his hands, clattered onto the steep slope, and fishtailed toward Sartain.
Clutching his chest, the shooter leaned forward. He rolled over the edge of the boulder he knelt on. He turned one complete somersault in the air and was just starting another one when he struck the incline with a grunt, pluming dust. He rolled wildly. His head and shoulders struck a boulder, and then he was sliding feet-first down the slope.
The Revenger Page 32
