The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  The ambusher was neither man. Sartain couldn’t see much of him from this distance, but he could tell who he wasn’t.

  Sartain looked around, saw a possible way to navigate the steep slope, and started the descent, holding onto rocks and a few cedar branches to break his pace. When he reached the bottom of the small canyon, he dropped to a knee beside the bushwhacker.

  He was a middle-aged gent, small-boned, potbellied, and leathery, with a thin, gray beard and thin, gray hair edging his otherwise bald head. He wore old, worn buckskins, suspenders, and a shell belt with an empty holster. His rifle, an early-model Winchester, lay about seven feet away, near a canteen.

  Sartain’s bullets had taken him through his belly and his left shoulder. He lay on his back with one leg twisted oddly back at the knee so that the heel of that boot was even with that hip. The man’s face was mottled red. He squeezed his eyes shut and groaned softly, turning his head this way and that, writhing in deep pain.

  “Well, it looks like I hurt you pretty bad,” Sartain said, feeling no sympathy, looking around for more possible ambushers. “Who are you, and why were you shooting at me?”

  Sartain couldn’t tell if the man had heard him. He lay writhing and groaning, eyes squeezed shut, unable to lower his turned-under leg. Hoof thuds sounded. Sartain turned to see a horseback rider galloping toward him through a crease on his left. It was Everett Chance holding his old Spencer carbine across the pommel of his saddle.

  He wore a funnel-brimmed Stetson, and a brown leather vest flapped as he urged the horse up the incline crease between bluffs.

  Sartain stepped back, frowning suspiciously at the newcomer.

  “What the hell happened?” Chance said. “I heard shooting!”

  He stopped his piebald gelding and swung down from the saddle.

  “This old fool took some shots at me from the ridge up yonder,” the Revenger said. “Who is he?”

  “Oh, no,” Chance said, glowering as he dropped to a knee beside the wounded man. He touched the man’s shoulder. His hand came away bloody. “Ah, Hell, Morgan.” He glanced up at Sartain. “This is the man I was huntin’ that wildcat with. Morgan Bentley.”

  “Why in the hell was he shooting at me?”

  Chance slapped his hat against his thigh in frustration. “Ah, Hell, I don’t know. I doubt he even saw you. We’d seen that wildcat back a ways, and we split up to hunt her. Morgan was as nearsighted as a black-tailed deer without his glasses, which he broke pret’ near two months ago. He must’ve spied movement along the trail and just started shootin’. That wildcat got two of his best horses last night—a mare and her foal.”

  Sartain studied Chance, suspicion still dragging cold fingers across the back of his neck. “What fool would shoot at something he can’t see?”

  “Apparently, that fool is Morgan Bentley,” Chance said. “He was pretty broke up about his hosses. He lives alone out there on his little ranch, and all he’s got is his hosses.” He placed a hand on his friend’s chest. “Morgan, can you hear me? Can you hear me, Morgan?”

  Bentley only groaned lips stretched back from his teeth. He looked about half unconscious.

  “Ah, Hell,” Sartain said, dropping to a knee across from Chance. He inspected the wounds. “How far away is Gold Dust?”

  “We’re close. Only a mile or two. The wildcat was stickin’ close to town for a time. Since spring, in fact. Folks been losin’ chickens and pigs an’ such. Apparently, it’s widened its territory to include mine and Morgan’s ranches.”

  “There a sawbones in Gold Dust?”

  “Yeah, a good one. Help me here, Mike. I think we best get his leg straightened out.”

  They lifted the right side of Bentley’s body and gently slid his boot down. As they did, Bentley stiffened in misery. He gave a clipped scream and raised his head, eyes opening wide.

  “Easy, Morgan, easy!” Chance said.

  As they continued to straighten the leg, Bentley fainted, his head falling back against the ground, his eyes fluttering closed.

  “Hip must be dislocated,” Sartain said, suddenly feeling more guilty than angry, though he had no reason to. Whether he’d intended to or not, the old rancher had nearly killed him. It had been the snake that had saved Sartain. He just hoped Boss hadn’t been bit.

  “Poor old, stupid devil,” Chance complained. “Damnit, anyway, Morgan. I told you to leave the shooting to me!” Chance stood and looked around. “Let me see if I can find his horse, and we’ll haul him out of here.” He walked away, and Sartain heard him mutter, “Simple fool!”

  Sartain dragged the man into the shade of an escarpment. He removed his neckerchief, tore it in two, and stuffed both wadded up pieces into the man’s wounds to stem the blood flow.

  “Come on, you old varmint,” Sartain urged the unconscious graybeard. “Hold on.”

  He climbed up and over the ridge Bentley had fired from. He descended the ridge, feeling owly and befuddled. He was also worried about Boss. When he found the horse grazing a couple hundred yards up the trail from where they’d been fired on, he inspected the horse closely and was relieved to see no sign of snakebite.

  Sartain straightened his saddle, tightened the latigo, and then rode back down the trail.

  He was met by Everett Chance leading a dappled sorrel mustang. Bentley rode in the saddle, slumped forward, hands tied to his saddle horn. The sorrel was a handsome mount as well as a healthy, well-tended one. As Chance had said, Old Bentley obviously enjoyed his horses. Seeing the man’s fine horse made the Cajun feel even lousier about having shot the man.

  “I’d rig a travois for him,” Chance said as he rode up to Sartain, “but we don’t have far to go. I think it’s best we get him to the doc as soon as possible. If anyone can save him, she can.”

  “She?”

  “Yeah, Gold Dust got ’em a woman doc.” Chance jerked the sorrel on up the trail. “A pretty one, too.” He glanced back at his friend. “Hold on, Morgan. We’ll have you in good hands soon.”

  Sartain fell in behind Chance, flanking him and Bentley to make sure the wounded man didn’t slide out of his saddle. He thought they should rig a travois, but it was Chance’s call. They rode slowly out of regard for the wounded rancher’s condition, having to stop twice briefly so that Sartain could reposition Bentley on the saddle. Twenty minutes after they’d left the site of the ambush, Gold Dust began rising out of the rolling dun hills and spreading out before them.

  As they neared the town, Sartain saw it was a humble little settlement sprawled across the hills and around a broad main street typically stretched between business buildings outfitted with garish false facades.

  Sartain didn’t think there were more than a dozen such business buildings, most comprised of gray adobe bricks and either front galleries or covered boardwalks. There were only a few horses on the brightly sunlit street. A couple of dogs were horsing around in the street between Johnson’s Tonsorial Parlor and a large furniture store, growling and kicking up dust as they played.

  One dog was old, the other young. The old one spied the newcomers first and stared with tail and ears raised. The young dog wanted to keep playing, which annoyed the older dog, so he gave the younger one an admonishing nip. The young dog leaped back with an indignant yowl, then followed the older dog’s gaze. It raised its hackles and barked, glanced at its older friend conspiratorially, and then both dogs came running and barking.

  “Scram, you cussed curs!” said Chance, gritting his teeth and jutting his chin at the pair, as though it were a club.

  He’d admonished the dogs with a venom that Sartain found striking. So far, he hadn’t heard the man utter a harsh word to anyone. The look on his face was dark and savagely, mindlessly malevolent.

  Both dogs wheeled and ran around behind the furniture store.

  Chance glanced back at Sartain, who was studying him skeptically. Chance grinned. “I was just funnin’ with ’em.” He laughed. “Did you see ’em run?”

  Chance reined up
in front of the furniture store. There was a sign on the side of the building announcing Clara La Corte Medical Services, with an arrow pointing toward a door atop the stairs that ran up the building’s side. As Sartain put Boss up to the hitchrack and swung down from the saddle, the door at the top of the stairs opened, and a young woman came out. She was slender and pretty in a pale-yellow blouse with puffy sleeves and a dark-blue skirt with a wide, black, patent-leather belt strapped around her narrow waist.

  She was a striking creature with curly, dark-brown hair spilling across her shoulders and serious, dark eyes set in a well-chiseled face that bespoke good Spanish breeding.

  “Chance?” she called, shading her eyes from the sun. “What is it?”

  “Bullet wound, Miss La Corte. Couple of ’em. It’s old Morgan Bentley.”

  “Bring him up, bring him up!” The young woman, who’d spoken with a slight formal Spanish accent, strode back through the door.

  Sartain and Chance eased Bentley down from his saddle, which was smeared from the blood that had leaked through Sartain’s makeshift compresses.

  They each took an arm and helped the man up the wooden staircase, Bentley groaning, his head wobbling heavily around on his shoulders. His eyes were still closed. Sartain thought he was unconscious but only calling out in his miserable sleep.

  The woman was waiting for them inside what appeared to be a small waiting area of her office. There were four brocade-upholstered, straight-back chairs and a clock on one of the walls, which were tastefully papered in purple with butterflies printed in gold.

  “Right in there, gentlemen,” she said with what Sartain thought was a vague, faintly admonishing disdain. She probably saw a lot of gunshot wounds and the unsavory characters who inflicted them.

  Sartain and Chance guided Bentley through an open door and into a bedroom-sized room with a leather examination table mounted upon a dais. Instrument-laden glass and wood cabinets lined the room, which was filled with the smell of camphor and other medicines. A large, clear-glass coal oil lamp hung over the dais on a pulley that raised and lowered it.

  The curtains over the room’s two windows were closed. The woman opened them, filling the room with sunlight as she said, “What happened? Who did this?”

  “Took the words right out of my mouth,” said a man’s voice behind them.

  Sartain turned to see a man with a hound-dog face standing behind them in the doorway thumbs hooked behind his cartridge belt. He was probably about thirty, with a brown, soup-strainer mustache. He wore a badge on his pinstriped pullover shirt; a pair of gloves was hooked inside one suspender, just above the belt.

  “I did,” Sartain said. “I shot him.”

  The newcomer canted his head to see past Sartain and Chance. “Who is that there? Bentley?”

  “That’s right, Lyle,” Chance said. “Sartain here shot him, but he didn’t have no choice. It was an accident. Bentley’s blind as a bat without his glasses, but we was huntin’ that damn she-cat, and he got his neck in a hump and started shootin’ at what he couldn’t see for sure. Which happened to be Sartain here.”

  He looked at the Revenger, tossing his head toward the hound-dog-faced newcomer. “This here’s the Gold Dust town marshal, Lyle Leach.”

  “Sartain?” said the local lawman.

  “That’s right,” the Cajun said.

  Leach studied him closely, brushing his hand over the hammer of the Colt resting in the holster on his right hip.

  Chance said, “Lyle, let’s go outside. I can vouch for Mike here. Purely, I can. It was an accident.”

  “Sartain,” Leach said, keeping his gaze on the Revenger. “That’s a name I know.”

  “How well do you know it, Leach?”

  Leach brushed his thumb across the Colt once more. “Oh, I know it well enough.”

  Chapter 9

  “Come on, Lyle,” Chance said, taking the man by a shoulder. “Let’s go outside.”

  “Why don’t all you gentlemen go outside,” Miss La Corte suggested, pointedly looking at Sartain. “I need room to work.”

  As Chance got Marshal Leach turned around and headed through the outer office, Sartain doffed his hat and said to the pretty Mexican medico, “I’d like to stay and assist if you need it. I’ve sewn up plenty of wounds—mostly, my own, but I know how to do it.”

  She was crouched over Bentley, cutting off his shirt with shears. “If you knew how to do it, Mr. Sartain, then why did you bring your handiwork to me?”

  Her look was boldly reproving. There was no denying her disdain for him.

  “I understand,” he said. “I’ll be across the street. I’d appreciate it if you sent word about his condition.”

  She merely shook her head in disgust as she continued cutting the old man’s bloody shirt off his wounded shoulder. Sartain moved through the outer office and down the stairs.

  When he hit the street, he saw Chance talking with Leach in front of the barbershop beside the furniture store. Chance was gesturing with his arms. Leach glanced at Sartain and started backing up the street, away from Sartain, saying snidely, “I know who you are, Sartain. I know who you are!”

  Sartain just stared at him. Leach turned around and started angling toward the Occidental Saloon.

  Chance walked over to Sartain. “Don’t worry about him. Wearin’ the badge makes him feel like the bull of the barn. In all honesty, no one else wanted to be the town marshal of Gold Dust. The town don’t look like much now, but at night things change around here. Punchers and no-accounts of every stripe in the county pour into the three saloons here. Lawmen have a tendency to die ugly. Lyle’s had the job for nigh on a year now, and he ain’t dead, so that’s a big plus in his column.”

  “I hope he can stay upright,” Sartain said, casting his slit-eyed gaze toward where Leach stood glaring at him from over an open batwing of the Occidental. Leach went inside and let the door swing shut behind him.

  “Don’t kill him, Mike. Please. If Gold Dust don’t have a lawman, ole Pat makes me throw down a picket pin here till it gets another one.” Chance shook his head as he untied his reins from the hitch rack fronting the furniture store. “Believe me—I don’t want that job. Last time, they beat me so’s I couldn’t open my eyes for near on two weeks, and I still got some tender ribs.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Sartain said. “Where are you going?”

  Chance had untied his piebald as well as Bentley’s sorrel. He turned out a stirrup. “I’m gettin’ back after that cat. Then I’m gonna go out to Morgan’s place and feed and water his stock. I’ll take his sorrel. I got a feelin’ he won’t be needin’ it any time soon. I’ll be back tomorrow to check on him.” He swung into the leather. “I sure hope the old boy makes it.”

  “So do I,” Sartain said, feeling miserable. He’d killed a lot of men, but most had deserved killing. Old Bentley did not. He’d made an old man’s mistake. The Revenger didn’t want to be the one who made him pay the ultimate price for it.

  “See ya later, Mike.” Chance reined his piebald away from the hitchrack and spurred it west.

  * * *

  Sartain stood staring after Everett Chance. The man’s dust sifted in the air over the broad main drag of Gold Dust, tinted orange by the sun.

  The Revenger’s scalp was beginning to crawl. He had a feeling it had more to do with Chance than his—Sartain’s—shooting of old Bentley. There was something about Maggie’s husband now that he didn’t like. Or didn’t trust. Wasn’t sure of.

  He wasn’t sure why his perspective about the man had changed. It had something to do with Morgan Bentley.

  Sartain turned his attention to the saloon on the opposite side of the street. The Whiskey Jim, built of adobe brick, was small and dark with a small boardwalk fronting it, behind a broad arbor stretching shade into the street. Sartain led Boss into the shade and tied him to one of the two hitchracks fronting the Whiskey Jim. One horse stood at the other rack—a tall, rangy, white-socked black with a speckled white snout.


  Two old Mexicans sat on a deacon’s bench under the brush arbor. One was asleep; head bowed over his folded arms. The other sat puffing a corncob pipe with one boot hiked on a patched, canvas-clad knee. Sartain unbuckled the latigo, slipped the horse’s bit so he could drink from the stock trough behind the hitchrack, and headed on into the watering hole’s cool shadows.

  There were two men in the place. One was a long, tall hombre crouched over a beer and a whiskey shot at the bar, his back to Sartain. He wore a high-crowned tan Stetson shoved back off his forehead. He was so thin that his clothes sagged on him. He wore two cartridge belts. Sartain could see only one pistol, holstered high on his right hip.

  A stocky, bald Mexican with a black handlebar mustache stood behind the bar, reading a newspaper and smoking a brown paper cigarette. A girl sat at a table near Sartain. Her occupation was obvious by her scanty attire—a pink and black corset and bustier—and the pink feathers in her hair. Her long legs were bare. She was resting her chin on the heel of her hand and absently curling a lock of hair around a finger.

  She glanced sidelong at Sartain and grinned, showing a missing bottom tooth. She had a faint scar on her upper lip. Both flaws added a touch of child-like vulnerability to her woman’s beauty.

  Sartain pinched his hat brim to her and bellied up to the bar about four feet from the stringbean, who was just then taking a long, leisurely drag from his own brown paper quirley.

  “Senor?” said the barman, blowing out a long plume of smoke.

  “Give me a beer and a shot of tequila.”

  The stringbean turned his long, saturnine face toward the Cajun. “Well, I’ll be damned. Look what the coon dogs just dragged out of the bayou.”

  “One of each for my friend here, too, will you, Apron?”

  “Tryin’ to get me drunk, Mike?” asked Pat Garrett, smiling beneath his brown, dragoon-style mustache. His steely-gray eyes were rheumy from drink.