“What man in his right mind would kill his kids, Sartain? His boys?”
Chance fired his pistol into the cactus clump. Sartain rose and ran.
Chance fired twice more.
Sartain hunkered down beneath a shelving lip of rock protruding from the bluff, about ten feet below Chance.
The Revenger shouted, “One that’s tired of feeding three young, hungry mouths when he doesn’t have a pot to piss in. Maybe tired of the responsibility of fending for a family including his decrepit old man. Very easy for that man to kill them—even enjoy killing them and taunting his wife with their deaths—and blame it on a demon. Oh, it wasn’t good ole Everett Chance who did it. It was the laughing demon inside him!”
Sartain gave a sardonic laugh. “Horseapples! I’ve seen enough of human doin’s, Everett. I know it don’t take no Apache demon to turn even so-called good men into demons of their very own making!”
“You go to hell, Mr. Revenger, sir!” Chance fired three more rounds at Sartain. Two bullets screeched into the rock shelf. Another flew over it to plunk into the ground just downslope from the Cajun.
That was six shots. If he only had one pistol and one rifle, both guns were empty.
Sartain leaped out from beneath the rock shelf and dashed up the slope, grinding his boot heels into the chalky earth and gravel. Chance no longer showed himself atop the bluff. As Sartain gained the crest, breathing hard, sweat trickling down the sides of his face and burning in his eyes, he looked around.
Chance was gone.
There were only his empty cartridge casings littering the bullet-shaped crest of the butte. A few lay a few feet down the other side, amongst tufts of sage, Spanish bayonet, and cedars. The slope dropped gradually away toward a sharp drop-off. Beneath the drop-off ran a twisting dry watercourse paved with sun-bleached gravel.
Holding his Henry straight out in front of him, heart thudding heavily, Sartain looked around for Chance.
As he turned to his right, he spied movement from the corner of his left eye. He wheeled but didn’t get turned full around before Chance, having bounded up from behind a flat-topped boulder, leaped up onto the rock. He launched himself off the rock with an enraged scream and, with a Bowie knife in his right fist, dove toward Sartain, driving the blade of the knife at the Cajun’s neck.
Sartain dropped the Henry and reached up to grab the killer’s wrist and to stop the knife’s plunge toward his jugular. Chance’s considerable weight drove the Cajun backward. He was punched back hard against the ground, the air hammered from his lungs in a bellowing grunt.
Chance dropped the knife. His face was a foot from Sartain’s; for all the fury showing in the eyes, in the bulging veins and crimson cheeks, it was a man’s face. Not the face of some spectral beast.
Chance hammered the Revenger’s jaw with his fist. Sartain returned the gesture with a stiff right jab to the man’s own lower jaw.
Chance jumped off of Sartain and rolled several yards down the hill, quickly gaining his feet in a thick cloud of wafting dust. Before he could get his feet set beneath him, Sartain dived from the upslope. He slammed his head and shoulders into the big, fleshy man, violently bulling him over backward.
Chance screamed as he hit the ground, Sartain on top of him.
The Cajun hammered the man’s face with his right fist. He was about to ram the fist once more against the man’s heavy jaw, when Chance arched his back, gave a bellowing roar, and, gritting his teeth, slammed his forehead against Sartain’s mouth.
The Revenger hadn’t been prepared for the move or the fierceness with which Chance pushed him off of him. Brains momentarily scrambled, Sartain felt warm blood trickling from the gash in his lower lip.
The Cajun rolled down the steep hill, piling up within a few feet of the drop-off. He set his feet and raised his fists. He had his LeMat, but the fury in him wouldn’t settle for merely punching a .44 round or a twelve-gauge wad of buckshot through the man’s heart.
He’d hammer him into submission with his fists, then toss him into the cell his tortured wife currently occupied.
Chance gave another, lion-like roar, lowered his head, opened his arms, and threw himself at Sartain.
The Cajun stepped aside and flung a haymaker up from his heels. It connected so soundly against Chance’s mouth, with a sharp smacking sound, that Sartain could feel the jarring ache of the blow up into his shoulder. He felt the warm blood from the man’s exploding lips as the shards of Chance’s broken teeth tore into his knuckles.
Chance stopped dead in his tracks, his head whipping up. His eyes acquired a startled, dazed expression. Blood oozed from his ruined mouth and dribbled down his chin and his stout neck. He lowered his arms as he staggered around, turning, and fell backward over the edge of the drop-off behind Sartain.
The Revenger turned to watch the man fall. Chance waved his arms and kicked his legs as though he were trying to fly. His round eyes stared up at Sartain in desperation. His thick body grew smaller.
“H-help meeeee!”
The cry dwindled as the man fell farther and farther away from Sartain before the ground appeared to rise up to stop his descent with a solid, crunching thud.
Chance lay on the dry watercourse, on a bed of sun-bleached gravel, arms spread out away from his shoulders, one leg curled precariously beneath him.
“See there, Chance?” Sartain yelled, staring over the drop-off. “You might have thought you were an Apache spirit, but you died just like a man!”
Chapter 20
Sartain whistled for Boss and tracked down Chance’s stolen horse. He led both horses into the dry wash in which Chance lay staring at the sky as though aghast at what had become of him.
Twin streams of blood had trickled from his nose to dry on his lips.
The Revenger hoisted his dead quarry over the man’s saddle and tied him with rope from Chance’s saddlebags. He swung up onto Boss’s back and, trailing the pinto, retraced his and Chance’s route from town, reaching the ragged outskirts late in the afternoon—around four, four thirty, judging by the shadows.
It had been a long day. The Revenger was hungry and dry. First, a couple shots of bourbon or whatever passed for bourbon in Gold Dust, and then a meal.
He halted his horse where the town proper began, staring down the broad main street limned in smoky, dark-green shadows. There was no one, nothing, on the street. Not a horse or a dog. There hadn’t been much movement in Gold Dust since Sartain had first ridden into the town on the heels of Scrum Wallace. Now, not even the tumbleweeds were tumbling.
An ominous stillness and deathly quiet hunkered down over the gaudy, sun-faded false facades on both sides of the street.
The Revenger lifted his right leg over the saddle horn and dropped straight down to the dirt. A cottonwood stood to the right of the trail, off the corner of a dilapidated stable. Sartain tied the pinto to the tree. He swung back up onto Boss’s back and rode on down the street, holding the barrel of his Henry on his right shoulder. The rifle was cocked and ready to go.
He stared at the Occidental. There was no more movement there than anywhere else. He looked beyond and to the opposite side of the street at the jailhouse, which was around a slight bend and sitting slightly back from the buildings on either side of it. Jerking Boss to a sudden halt, the Cajun lowered the rifle from his shoulder, taking the long gun in both his gloved hands.
A man sat in the chair on the jailhouse’s front stoop. He wore pants and a very white shirt, his suspenders hanging down off his arms. He was bareheaded.
No, he wasn’t wearing a shirt, after all. Those were white bandages crisscrossed on his chest.
Leach.
Boots thumped inside the Occidental. A man’s tan, unshaven face beneath a dark-brown hat appeared over the batwings and turned toward Sartain. He set both hands atop the doors. He smiled at the Revenger astride Boss in the street, about a half a block away from the Occidental. The man pushed through the doors and sauntered across the gallery and down
into the street.
More boots clomped behind him as several other men tramped out of the Occidental, each one catching the doors on their backswing and pushing through them. They followed the first man into the street to form a line in front of Sartain, facing him, each one holding a carbine.
There were seven of them. The same seven who had been in the Occidental earlier that morning when the Cajun had issued his ultimatum. Most were attired in the colorful garb of the country—bright shirts, billowy neckerchiefs, and Sonora-style hats.
They all smiled.
Sartain gave a deep, inward sigh. He had a feeling his drink, and his meal were going to have to wait a bit.
Despite the sourness of his mood, he returned the smiles of the unshaven, armed men facing him and said, “You fellas look like you’ve come to a decision.”
Movement in the corner of Sartain’s left eye. He jerked his head in that direction, but it was only Clara La Corte moving slowly down the outside stairs of her office. She was ghostly pale and stiff as she descended the stairs, taking one step at a time, sliding her anxious gaze from Sartain to the men confronting him and back again.
High-pitched laughter rose from behind the Occidental’s batwings. More boots clomped. Another figure pushed out through the doors, and Sartain’s heart skipped a beat as it burned like molten lava in his chest.
Scrum Wallace.
The last living killer of Sartain’s beloved Jewel was clad in only threadbare balbriggans and his scruffy slouch hat. He wore his pistols in holsters around his waist. He was gaunt and unshaven, but his eyes flashed merrily.
He used a crooked ironwood stick for a cane. He leaned into it hard as he sat in a Windsor chair on the saloon’s gallery and, leaning forward against the stick, stared at Sartain and snickered.
“They done thought about it, all right, Sartain,” Wallace said. “Oh, yes, sir, they done thought about it real good.”
Beyond the men lined up before Sartain, he could see the white line of Leach’s teeth as the former Gold Dust town marshal also laughed his delight at the situation.
The Revenger had just started to wonder about Maggie Chance when the batwings were flung open once more. The barman tramped out onto the gallery, holding Maggie before him, a knife to her throat. The fat man was nuzzling the woman’s neck and grinning at Sartain. As he did, he placed his left, pudgy hand over Maggie’s left breast, drawing her taut against him.
“Lookee here, Sartain. Look what we boys found over at the jail of the new town marshal! A Gold Dust woman—a real pretty one locked up with Leach over there. We decided to take our chances and hope she wasn’t nearly as bloody crazy as what everyone’s been sayin’.” The Irish barman sniffed her left ear and mashed his hand against her breast. “Sure smells nice!”
He laughed.
Maggie groaned and struggled against the fat barman, glancing from the knife held to her throat to Sartain.
“You know what I’d do if I was you?” asked the man standing farthest right of Sartain, ten feet away. He was the one with the badly faded, Union-blue hat trimmed with the insignia of Berdan’s Sharpshooters. “If you don’t want that purty woman pestered and killed, you’d best throw your guns down here in the street.”
“She’s got no part in this,” Sartain said, his calm voice belying his anxiety.
“Well, now,” said the ex-sharpshooter, “any damn fool can see that she does.”
The barman yelled, “Drop the weapons, Sartain, or I’ll cut her throat! You just watch—in five seconds this gallery’s gonna be painted blood-red!”
Sartain looked at Maggie leaning back against the barman, his hand squeezing her breast. He looked at the men sneering or chuckling before him. He looked at Clara, who stood staring at him in silent horror. It almost appeared as though she were trying to communicate with him.
Sartain glanced once more at Maggie, who said tightly, “Don’t... do it... Mike!”
“Do it, and she’ll live!” the barman shouted. “Don’t do it, and my gallery’s gonna get a fresh coat of badly needed paint!”
Sartain looked at the leader of the seven men before him. “You’ll turn her loose.”
“You have my word as a gentleman,” the ex-sharpshooter said.
Sartain scowled. “You’d better do it.”
The former soldier smiled. “I’ll do it.”
“Mike... don’t...!” Maggie said.
Sartain glanced once more at Clara. She continued to stare at him as though she were silently conferring with him.
The Revenger licked his lips, spat to one side. “All right.” He uncocked his rifle and tossed it into the dust at the bluebelly’s feet.
“Now, the big popper,” the man ordered.
“Now, the big popper,” Sartain drawled.
He wasn’t a religious man, but he’d held out hope that when he gave up the ghost and crossed over to the Big Bayou in the sky, he’d run into Jewel again. He didn’t give a damn about seeing anyone else. Just Jewel. He had a feeling he was less than a minute from finding out if he’d hoped in vain...
He unsnapped the keeper thong from over the LeMat’s hammer and slowly lifted it from the holster with two fingers. He looked at the pretty, pearl-gripped, silver-framed popper and regretfully tossed it into the dirt beside his Henry.
“Whoever gets those guns—you keep ’em clean, or I’ll drop down out of the golden clouds and skewer you up the ass with ’em,” he raked out.
Several men chuckled.
“Don’t you talk tough?” said the man to Sartain’s far left, wrinkling his nose. “For an unarmed man?”
Maggie squealed. The barman dropped his knife on the gallery floor and, laughing loudly, grabbed Maggie’s blouse in both hands and gave it a savage tear, ripping it from her body. Savagely, he pulled the woman back through the batwings and into the saloon.
The bluebelly scoundrel glanced toward the Occidental and laughed.
“Let her go, goddammit!” Sartain barked, leaning forward in his saddle, fury nearly causing his heart to explode. “Let her go now!”
The men laughed at him.
From the Occidental came the sound of a bottle breaking.
A mewling scream vaulted over the batwings.
Sartain jerked his head in that direction, frowning, puzzled. The scream hadn’t been Maggie’s voice. That had been a man’s voice.
The scream came again, shriller this time. “Ohhh, gawd! Ohhhhhh, GAWD! Hel—... help me... help me, boys! Oh, GAWDDD—look what she done to me! Why... why... she cut if offfff!”
“What the hell?” said one of the men before Sartain. They were all staring at the saloon.
Clara said in a loud whisper, “Mike!”
Sartain turned to her. She tossed a revolver toward him. It turned end over end in the air. Sartain grabbed it, clicked the hammer back, and swung it toward the men standing before him.
The former sharpshooter had seen the toss and jerked to life, raising his Winchester.
Sartain palmed the ivory-gripped Smith & Wesson .44, extended it over Boss’s head, and fired. The sharpshooter screamed and fired his Winchester wide as he staggered backwards, glancing down at the hole pumping blood from the center of his chest.
Holding Boss’s reins taut in his left hand, Sartain emptied the rest of the Smithy’s wheel into the men standing before him, curveting Boss as he fired the sixth round and then hurling himself out of the saddle. He hit the street with a grunt, aggravating the sundry other aches and pains he’d incurred over the past couple of days.
Men were screaming and writhing while some were shooting, the bullets pluming dust around Sartain, who reached for his LeMat, palming it as a bullet fired by the last man standing in the street creased his right thigh, just above the kneecap. The man, whom Sartain had heard called “Critter,” ran toward Sartain, screaming and shooting. Another bullet sliced a cold line across the side of Sartain’s neck.
The Cajun rolled, avoiding one more bullet before rolling up on a should
er, raising the LeMat. He held fire.
Critter staggered forward, lowering his old New Model Remington conversion revolver while raising a hand as though to stop the blood from spurting from the hole in his chest, about three inches below his throat. Behind him, Scrum Wallace stood on the porch, staggering forward on his cane and triggering one of his pistols into the street toward Sartain.
Critter had obviously blocked a shot.
Wallace squealed, “No! No! No!” as he fired yet another wild round into Critter, blowing Critter’s hat and the top of his head off.
Sartain slid the LeMat away from Critter, lined up the sites on Wallace, clicked the twelve gauge wad into play, and flung the nasty, fist-sized swarm of lead pellets into the dead center of Scrum Wallace’s dirty underwear shirt. They ripped little holes in the shirt and in the pale, exposed flesh revealed by the unbuttoned V in the neck.
The rat-faced killer gave a yowl and flew backwards against the Occidental’s front wall. As he did, he flung his own pistol up beneath his chin and inadvertently fired it, turning the tips of both his chin and his nose to red jelly. Bone chips and blood sprayed toward the gallery’s rafters, painting the clay olla pot hanging from the ceiling.
He opened his mouth, but a full five seconds elapsed before he screamed.
Sartain pulled the LeMat down and looked around. Critter was the only one writhing before him now, lying belly down in the street and rolling his shoulders from side to side as though he were trying to carve out a grave for himself. The other six lay like brightly colored birds that had dropped out of the sky.
The late, saffron light caressed them almost tenderly as the sun dropped behind the man who had punched their tickets. A couple of neckerchief ends lifted in the slight breeze.
Sartain climbed heavily, creakily to his feet and stared at the marshal’s office. Leach was on his feet, holding onto a roof support post, staring toward Sartain. He was too far away to be seen clearly, but Sartain thought he could make out a look of extreme frustration on the former town marshal’s hound-dog-ugly face.
The Revenger Page 48
