The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  She sat back against the porch rail, resting an elbow on a raised knee, giving him a smoky smile, and smacking her lips.

  “Damn,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, sighing and taking another pull from the bottle.

  * * *

  Later, she fried venison steaks and potatoes from her irrigated garden, and then they slept with the door propped open to the cool breeze that was both fragrant and fresh on the lee side of the rain.

  Sartain didn’t let himself fall into a deep sleep, waking about an hour after Carleen had drifted off, exhausted. By the moonlight angling through her bedroom window in the cabin’s half-story loft, where she had a small bed and a chest of drawers, he checked his Waterbury.

  One forty-five a.m.

  Carefully so as not to wake Carleen, he rose, gathered his clothes, and crept down the creaky stairs, gritting his teeth against the complaints of the rotting planks. He dressed in the kitchen, wrapped his shell belt and LeMat around his waist, donned his hat.

  He walked out to the barn to retrieve one of the shovels she and Vicente had used to dig her father’s grave. He climbed the rise with the shovel on one shoulder, the Henry on the other. A half-moon angled a gauzy light over the wet ground. He tried to stick to the shadows so Carleen wouldn’t see him if she happened to wake and look out a window.

  At the top of the rise, he leaned his Henry against a mesquite. He looked around carefully, listening, to make sure he was alone out here. There were only the wan stars and the moon and the distant yammering of a coyote. Occasionally, an owl hooted from somewhere nearby. The air was cool and still damp from the rain, though the ground was barely soggy.

  Sartain set to work removing the rocks from Waylon Chaney’s grave. He was going to feel like a fool if his suspicions were wrong, but he felt compelled to investigate.

  When he’d removed all the rocks covering the grave, he set to work with the spade. Fortunately, Carleen and Vicente hadn’t buried the body very deep. Only about fifteen minutes after he’d started shoveling, Sartain’s shovel thumped on a wooden casket lid. Apparently, Carleen had boxed up her father before leaving Bittersweet.

  That fact made the Revenger begin to doubt his suspicions.

  Still, he cleared the dirt, dry at this level, away from the wooden lid so green that he could still smell the pine resin wafting up along with the metallic smell of the desert clay and sand. He stabbed the spade into the dirt, dropped to his knees, and slid his fingers around the sides of the lid, feeling for a hold.

  When he had one, he pried the lid up off the box, and his eyes watered from the sour smell of rot. He recoiled slightly when the moonlight reflected off the two eyes glaring up at him. He hadn’t gotten a good look at Waylon Chaney when he’d been lying in the back of Carleen’s wagon, but now, despite the swollen face and lips stretching back from yellow teeth, he saw the similarity to Sheriff Chaney.

  Carleen hadn’t dressed the man for his funeral. He wore a brown wool vest over a calico shirt, a ratty red cloth knotted around his unshaven neck. She hadn’t even combed the man’s hair, for it was sticking up in tufts all around his head.

  Nor were his eyelids sewn shut, as was often the practice when a body was being prepared for formal burial. The coppery stench of blood mingled with the cloying sweetness of death as Waylon Chaney continued to glare, sneering angrily, at Sartain.

  The Revenger wrestled the body over onto its belly in the casket. He lifted Chaney’s thick, black hair up above the collarless shirt and yanked the neckerchief down, exposing the man’s pale neck. And there it was—red as a fresh sunburn against the otherwise pale skin.

  A birthmark in the shape of a feather.

  Celeste had said that when the boys were younger, the only way that even their mother could tell them apart was by the birthmark on Warren’s neck.

  “Well, well, well,” Sartain said, slowly shaking his head. “I do believe I been hornswoggled, Mr. Chaney. Sheriff Warren Chaney, that is.” He stared down at the eyes that looked more anguished and befuddled now in his recognition of the man’s true identity. “Your bad brother do this to you, Sheriff?”

  He looked down toward the cabin, wondering if Carleen knew. She certainly hadn’t made love like a bereaved daughter.

  Behind him rose the crunching sound of a foot stepping down on gravel. A shadow flicked over the dirt mound in front of and just left of Sartain. A girl grunted.

  As Sartain jerked his head around, he glimpsed the blade of the shovel hurtling toward him a sixteenth of a second before it smashed across his temple and sent him sprawling back against Sheriff Warren Chaney lying dead in his casket, and a vague voice whispered into the Revenger’s ringing ears, “Yep, she knew, all right . . .”

  Chapter 15

  The girl’s foot had slipped slightly as she’d brought the shovel down, and the back of the steel blade had caught Sartain’s right temple a glancing blow.

  It hurt like hell, and it dimmed his lights momentarily, but he regained his faculties quickly. As Carleen lunged toward him, raising the shovel once more, Sartain saw that she was naked, the moonlight shifting shadows around beneath her jostling breasts. Her hair swung wildly out behind her shoulders.

  As she started to bring the shovel down once more toward Sartain’s head, he scissored his right leg, sweeping her feet out from under her. She screamed and dropped the shovel as her legs came up and her ass hit the ground.

  “Ahh, damn!” she intoned.

  Sartain realized that he’d been hearing the low drumming of galloping horses. The drumming was growing louder, and he started to hear the clank of bits and bridle chains.

  “Carleen—that you?” a man’s voice shouted.

  As Sartain heaved himself up off the dead, bloated corpse of Warren Chaney, Carleen sat up and twisted around to stare down the rise in the direction of the cabin.

  “Sheriff!” she screamed. Then she looked at Sartain, and in the moonlight, he could see her grin delightedly. “Sheriff, it’s Sartain!” She thrust her finger and arm out, pointing wickedly. “It was him all along! He killed my father and tonight he raped me! Oh, Uncle Warren, it’s terrible! Please stop him!”

  Sartain stood, crouching. The lunging silhouettes of a good half dozen—maybe closer to a dozen—horseback riders were galloping up from the yard, tack squawking and flashing in the moonlight. They were spread out in a shaggy line.

  “He killed Amos, too!” a man shouted. “Sent him back to Bittersweet tied belly down across his saddle!”

  “He’s pure crazy!” exclaimed another one of the posse. At least, Sartain assumed it was a posse that “Warren” Chaney had sent out after him, likely knowing that sooner or later the Revenger would figure out the trick the imposter and his daughter were playing on the town.

  Warren Chaney as well as Amos McCluskey probably had enough tough-nut friends in town they could call on for help. Sartain could sense the blood lust in these men, who appeared to have taken personally the death of the big deputy.

  “He raped me, Uncle Warren!” Carleen ripped out on a phony grieved wail. “Oh, god—you should have seen the things he made me do!”

  “Get down, girl!” shouted a man whom Sartain took to be Waylon Chaney in the guise of his twin brother.

  As Carleen threw herself belly down on the ground beside the open grave, Sartain ran down the backside of the rise. Knowing he was badly outnumbered, he’d already picked up his Henry and was hightailing it. Good thing he had. Behind him, pistols crackled like hot grease on a giant skillet.

  Bullets screeched through the air above his head, a couple spanging off rocks beyond him.

  Sartain ran hard, pumping his arms and legs. He couldn’t see much out here on the backside of the rise, but that meant his pursuers wouldn’t, either.

  He kept running, trying to avoid the gauzy moonlight, zigzagging around rocks and cacti slanting shadows across the gravelly turf. Behind him, the posse riders were yelling and hoorawing. They were probably drunk, and that would
account for the speed at which they kept coming regardless of the danger to themselves and their mounts.

  They were topping the rise now and heading down the backside toward their quarry, pistols flashing and belching.

  As the drumming grew louder and bullets landed closer to Sartain, he whipped around and lowered the Henry. Firing from his right hip, he cut loose with four quick shots, pumping and triggering the sixteen-shooter, flames stabbing from the barrel.

  Immediately he heard the screams of men and horses. As he ejected the fourth cartridge casing, he pumped another live round into the action and triggered off four more shots.

  More screaming. He heard the thuds of horses and men falling, tumbling, rolling.

  “Goddammit!” a man shouted shrilly.

  Others kept coming, but he could tell they weren’t coming as quickly as before. Having slowed them at least a little, he turned and continued running, heading across a rocky flat toward the black shapes of what he took to be buttes humping up in front of him.

  He came to the first butte and climbed, pulling at small, wiry shrubs and lunging off the balls of his feet. The riders were galloping behind him but keeping their distance. The shooting had stopped. At least, it had paused, which meant that for now the posse had lost its prey.

  “There!” a man shouted.

  Sartain cursed as he gained the crest of the bluff. Someone must have seen moonlight flash off the Henry’s barrel, perhaps off one of his spurs. He hunkered down behind the ridge crest and pumped another cartridge into the Henry’s chamber.

  “Where is he?” another man yelled.

  “On top o’ that bluff!” shouted another. They were riding side by side—two shadows growing larger in the darkness, flanked by the other jostling shadows of the posse riders.

  Sartain had no desire to kill innocent townsmen who’d been hornswoggled by Waylon Chaney. But they weren’t about to hold fire while he explained the situation. They knew he’d killed Amos McCluskey and probably thought he’d done so in cold blood. They were also under the false impression that he’d raped Carleen Chaney.

  They didn’t realize that the man leading them was an imposter.

  Sartain aimed at the left lead rider, hoping it was Chaney. He fired. The shadow leaned back and to one side, and the horse’s eyes flashed in the moonlight as it leaned to the same side as its rider. The horse nearly tumbled on its side before the rider fell free of the saddle and rolled, grunting. Then the still-galloping horse swung hard right and away, trailing its bridle reins.

  “Now that bastard’s killed Tiegen!” shouted the other man. “Surround that bluff, boys! If we get him surrounded, he’s ours!”

  Hell, Sartain thought. That was the same voice he’d heard earlier and which he’d attributed to the bastard, Chaney.

  He aimed the Henry and fired at Chaney, but Chaney had swung his own horse hard left and was riding wide of the bluff. Sartain couldn’t tell for sure, but he didn’t think any of the lead he flung until the Henry’s hammer pinged empty hit its target.

  Pulling the LeMat from the holster on his right thigh, he fired twice to try and hold the others at bay, then rose with the LeMat in hand, the empty Henry in the other, and ran down the backside of the bluff. Members of the posse were trying to work around behind him, and if they accomplished the maneuver, Chaney would have the last say.

  And it was the wrong Chaney.

  Sartain scrambled to the bottom of the bluff as two shadows moved toward him from his right and his left.

  “There he is!” the man on the left shouted.

  Sartain stopped and triggered the LeMat.

  “Dammit!” the rider cried as Sartain saw the rider’s shadow separate from the shadow of the galloping mount. There was a dull thud, a rattle of flying gravel, and the chink of spurs as the rider hit the ground and rolled.

  The horse stopped, reared, and whinnied shrilly.

  Sartain holstered his pistol, ran toward the beast, and reached for the reins, missing the sashaying ribbons as the horse wheeled and galloped away. “Mangy cayuse!” he raked out and ran up the bluff opposite the one he’d just descended.

  Several guns barked behind him. Bullets kicked up dirt and gravel around him, spanged off rocks on the bluff above him. Wheeling, Sartain palmed his LeMat and squeezed off a shot. A horseback rider in the crease in the bluff below squealed and grabbed his shoulder.

  Sartain turned and continued running. He bounded over the top of the bluff and hunkered behind a boulder. Breathing hard, he quickly reloaded the Henry, raked a round into the action, and lowered the hammer to half cock. The shooting had dwindled to occasional pops and barks, the bullets flying wide.

  The posse seemed to have lost him.

  He stared around the bluffs humping darkly around him. He saw a few jostling shadows and heard a few distant hoof thuds, heard a few men shouting, but most of the riders were now well below him. He must have climbed into a series of connected buttes up which none of the posse wanted to dare try climbing on horseback.

  He looked behind him.

  Ridges bulked against the dim stars, and the sky washed in the periwinkle blue of moonlight. A trail angled up the next ridge. He reloaded the LeMat, holstered it, snapped the keeper thong over the hammer, took the Henry in his right hand, and began following the trail through the jutting escarpments peppered with cedars and occasional mesquites and Spanish bayonet.

  He continued to hear men shouting angrily behind him, the occasional drumming of hooves, but then the sounds of the posse faded below and behind him.

  As he continued moving through this devil’s playground comprised of crumbling bluffs, steep-walled mesas, and blocks and fingers of jutting basalt likely carved by some ancient, winding river, silence closed around him.

  Occasionally, however, sounds intruded upon the silence. He couldn’t quite make them out, but he suspected that Waylon Chaney’s recruits were trying to move around him in the darkness.

  At one point he heard the rake of a spur and a clipped curse. Both sounds were sharp and clear, but Sartain didn’t think the man was close. At least, he wasn’t within more than sixty or seventy yards. The silence of the night and the still air cleansed by the earlier storm gave all sounds an almost eerie crispness.

  The Cajun kept moving, weaving amongst the formations, meandering around and through them and several times over them, hunching low so that his silhouette wouldn’t be outlined against the stars and the moon-streaked sky.

  Exhausted, he found a niche amongst the rocks, with sheer ridges towering around him, and leaned back against the stone wall behind him. He sank to his butt, rested the Henry across his knees, and closed his eyes. He intended to take only a catnap, but when he opened his eyes the sun was nearly up.

  The rocky world around him was the copper of a newly minted penny.

  A noise. Close by.

  He’d only been half awake, but now he was fully awake and slowly climbing to his feet, raising the Henry and pressing his thumb against the hammer. Ahead were two boulders and a crooked passage between them. He moved into it, stopped.

  The noise again. Someone was moving ahead of him, on the other end of the passage between the boulders.

  He continued walking, stopped again when he heard a footstep, saw the front end of a hat brim and a boot move at the passage’s far end. He darted to his right, pressing his shoulder into a niche in the boulder on the side of the natural corridor. He heard the soft scuffs of boot heels.

  Then silence.

  He could hear the man breathing at the far end of the passage.

  He was peering into the chasm, in Sartain’s direction.

  Sartain held still. He could raise the Henry and shoot, but he didn’t know how many other posse members were near. When the footsteps sounded again, moving away, Sartain hurried to the far side of the passage. The man stood eight feet ahead of him, on a ledge overlooking a boulder- and brush-choked canyon that was about fifty feet deep.

  The man wore town cloth
es—a shirt, wool vest, bowler hat, and scuffed black half-boots. Sartain could see the bows of spectacles hooked over the man’s ears.

  The man had just dipped a hand into his right vest pocket and was pulling out a tobacco sack when Sartain moved soundlessly up behind him and pressed the barrel of his LeMat against the back of the man’s right ear.

  The man froze.

  “One sound,” Sartain warned, “and you’re deader’n last year’s Christmas goose. Understand? Don’t say anything, just dip your chin.”

  The man slowly dipped his chin.

  He was holding a Winchester carbine in his left hand. Sartain took it and tossed it into the canyon. Then he slipped the man’s Remington revolver holstered high on the man’s right hip and tossed that into the canyon, as well.

  “What’s your name? Say it nice and quiet. You call out, you’ll die.”

  Sartain could hear the man swallow. Sweat trickled down the back of his clean-shaven neck beneath his close-cropped, sandy blond hair.

  “Boyd.” The man’s voice trembled. “Raymond Boyd. I’m . . . I’m the mayor of Bittersweet.”

  “No kiddin’? The mayor. Well, I’d best watch my language, then. I’m in the presence of royalty.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m gonna tell you somethin’ else that’s funny.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The man you followed out here ain’t Sheriff Chaney. It’s his brother, Waylon.”

  The man turned his head to the right, frowning. “Wha—? Can’t be. Waylon’s dead. You killed him, just like you killed McCluskey and sent him back to town belly down over his horse. He was my brother-in-law.”

  Sartain snorted at that bit of information. “Think about it, Mr. Mayor. What would possibly compel me to shoot Waylon Chaney? I didn’t even know the man. Hell, I just rode into this country three days ago.”

  “Some old grievance, no doubt.”

  Sartain sighed. “All right. Try this on for size. If you go back to the Chaney ranch and look at Waylon’s body, you’ll see a birthmark on the back of his neck. Accordin’ to his sister, Celeste, Warren’s the one with the birthmark.”