“You’ve killed before, Mr. Sartain—for people who’ve been unable to accomplish the task themselves. That’s all I’m asking you to do for me. Ride down into Chihuahua. I’ll give you detailed maps of the general area where I believe Maximilian is hiding. Find where Maximilian is hiding my daughter, kill him and old Hector, if need be, and return my dear Priscilla to me.”
Sartain flipped his own spoon in the air, caught it, and cast Miss Gallant a victorious look. She regarded him blandly, unimpressed.
The Revenger turned to the Governor, who eyed him speculatively as though wondering what his answer would be. “My freedom and fifty thousand dollars.”
The lieutenant governor and the captain grunted as though they’d been kicked in the gut.
“Half now,” Sartain added, “and half when Maximilian and his cohorts are snuggling with diamondbacks.”
“Jesus Christ!” The captain laughed.
The governor waved him off.
He studied Sartain with what appeared to be admiration and approval. “You have a deal.” He glanced at the lady Pinkerton. “Miss Gallant rides with you.”
Sartain gave a caustic chuff. “Why in the hell would I need a woman to—”
“To make sure you perform the duties prescribed without running off with half of the fifty thousand,” McDougal finished for him. “Miss Gallant will also verify that you’ve accomplished the task, and that you have earned the second half of your pay.”
Sartain shook his head vigorously. “No. No way.”
The comely Pinkerton merely stared at him with that same bland look as before.
“She’s quite a good tracker...obviously,” the governor said.
The lieutenant governor snorted a laugh and thumbed his glasses up his nose.
“No,” Sartain repeated. “Do you have any idea how hard it would be to travel in Mexico unharassed with a woman who looks like that?” He shook his head again. “No. Absolutely not, Governor. Pure suicide for both of us. If she goes, I stay. The deal is off. That’s all I have to say on the subject. Call the guards and cart me off to my court-martial!”
Chapter 8
Sartain turned the wheel of his field glasses slowly with his gloved right finger, squinting into the eyepieces.
There wasn’t much out in the sun-blasted badlands he’d just traversed, but a few minutes ago, before he’d hauled out his army-grade binoculars, he’d seen—or thought he’d seen—a telltale curl of dust along his back trail. This part of Chihuahua was haunted by desperadoes of every stripe, and there were still packs of bronco Apaches on the hunt for white blood as well.
That dust could have belonged to anyone. Whoever it belonged to, the Cajun would have bet gold nuggets to horse apples that their intentions were not benign. There were few benign intentions in Mexico.
Cursing under his breath, Sartain gained his feet, returned his binoculars to their baize-lined leather case, and picked up his Henry repeater with the ivory diamondback inlaid into the rear walnut stock. He set the rifle on his shoulder and walked back toward the nest of rocks in which he’d set up camp for the night.
“Well, we got company,” he groused, kicking a stone in frustration. “Bandidos most likely. Bandidos with a taste for...”
Sartain stopped walking abruptly, letting his voice trail off slowly with, “pretty female flesh...”
Before him stood a husky Mexican with a scar over and below his milky-white left eye. He wore buckskins and coarse cotton, and he had cartridge bandoliers strapped across his chest. He smelled bad. Real bad—like deer piss. If he smelled bad to Sartain from ten feet away, then he must have really reeked to Jasmine Gallant, because she was about as close to the man as she could be without copulating with him, though that seemed to be what the beefy bandido had in mind.
He was standing behind her, holding her against him. He’d ripped the lady Pinkerton’s blouse open, and he was holding her bare left breast in his thick brown left hand, pinching the nipple. In his other hand, he held a rusty Bowie knife close to Miss Gallant’s creamy neck.
The knife looked especially barbaric against the woman’s fine, delicate skin and the torn silk of her blouse.
If she was appalled by the bandido’s rancid smell, she didn’t let on. She seemed more concerned with the big Bowie knife whose savagely upturned tip was pressing ever so gently against her jugular vein. She shuttled her fear-bright gaze from the knife to Sartain and back again. She was moaning. Tears of terror and pain rolled down her cheeks.
Two other bandidos stood to the right of the big man and Jasmine around the small fire the woman had obviously been building and erecting an iron tripod over when she’d been set upon by these trail wolves. Those two each had a pistol drawn. The pistols were cocked and aimed at Sartain.
“Amigo,” said the big Mex holding Jasmine, giving her breast another squeeze and causing her to cry out in pain, “how much for the woman, huh? We’ll give you a good price for her”—he glanced at the two laughing men on his left—“won’t we, mis compadres?”
“Hold on,” Sartain said, slowly lowering his Henry from his shoulder, wincing when he saw the big Mex push the tip of his Bowie knife a little harder against the woman’s neck. “Ease up a little there, pards. You’re hurting the lady.”
“How much you want, amigo?” the Mex said, stretching his lips back from his cracked, crooked teeth. “How much you want for us to take her out into the bushes and have our ways with her? Huh? Name your price.”
“She ain’t for sale,” Sartain said, glancing at the other two and wondering how much of a chance he had. Could he snap off a shot with his Henry before those two turned him into a human sieve?
“Oh, she is most definitely for sale, amigo,” intoned the Mex who held Jasmine. “Every woman has a price. But it is just out of politeness I offer to buy her from you when as you can see, I could very easily just take her!” He laughed raucously, squeezing the woman’s breast and causing her to scrunch her face in pain. “On the other hand, I don’t think you are the reasonable sort, amigo, so you know what I think I’m gonna do? Huh? Do you know what I have decided to do?”
He actually seemed to be awaiting an answer. The other two grinned and chuckled and kept their revolvers aimed at The Revenger.
“What’s that?” Sartain asked, knowing he wasn’t going to like the answer.
“I think I am just going to have my compadres kill you and be done with you, and then we will be free to have a very lovely afternoon and evening with your woman!”
He threw his head back, laughing loudly.
“Amigos!” he yelled at the other two. “Kindly give us some privacy!”
“No, wait!” Sartain shouted. “Let her go!”
The two pistols began bucking and blasting in the Mexicans’ hands.
The men laughed as they fired.
“Let her go!” Sartain shouted as the bullets punched through him.
But then she was far closer to him than she’d been only a second ago. Only a few inches away, in fact.
“Mr. Sartain!” she said, staring down at him, shaking his shoulder. “Mr. Sartain! Wake up! You’re dreaming!”
“Let her go!” he heard himself shout again before he’d fully come to his senses.
He’d heaved himself up onto his elbows. His heart was racing and his feet were still moving, like a dog trying to run in its sleep.
Now he stared at her. Embarrassment washed over him like a cold ocean wave. He let his legs relax. He ran a hand down his sweaty face, blinked, and looked around. There were only himself and Miss Gallant here in this isolated desert camp at the edge of a dry arroyo. It must have been after midnight. The sky was black velvet awash with floury swirls of glittering starlight.
The cold, dry night air chilled the sweat on his face and under his collar. Miss Gallant was on one knee beside him. She removed her hand from his shoulder, letting it fall to her thigh.
He shivered.
“Oh, hell,” he said as the dream finally cl
eared out, though he thought he could still hear the bandidos’ dwindling laughter beneath the roaring of their pistols.
“Let who go?” the lady Pinkerton asked him. She had a blanket over her shoulders. Her hair was a pretty, tangled mess as it hung down around her shoulders. He couldn’t help noticing that a couple more buttons than usual were undone on her blouse, exposing an alluring glimpse of flesh.
“Let who go?” she repeated.
“Just a dream.”
“About what?”
Annoyed, he frowned at her. “Just a dream. What, you never dream?”
She studied him. It was hard to see her eyes in the darkness. The starlight glinted in her left one as it shone through a lock of her hair. She placed a hand on his forehead. “My God, you’re sweating on this cold night.”
His chagrin was not diminishing. “Like I said...” He lay back down, resting his head against the wool underside of his saddle, and drew his blankets up to his chin. “Just a dream. Good night, Miss Gallant.” They’d been on the trail for five days and they still were not on a first-name basis. She was as chilly as they came, as though she didn’t much care for men in general.
Or was it him in particular?
In those five days, they’d probably not spoken more than twenty sentences.
She rose and, still holding the blanket around her shoulders, walked over to where her gear lay on the far side of the cold fire over which they’d roasted a good-sized jackrabbit he’d snared just after they’d set up camp for the night, and pulled a bottle out of her war bag. She grabbed a couple of tin cups and walked back over to him, sinking to her butt on the ground.
“Drink?”
Sartain looked at the bottle. It had a label on it. Frowning, he scrutinized it more closely. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, genuinely surprised. “That’s ole Sam Clay. Ole Sam’s my fav...” He let his voice trail off, narrowing a suspicious eye at her. “You knew that, didn’t you?”
“Of course. I’ve learned a lot of things about you, Mr. Sartain. It’s my job to learn things about my quarry.”
“Quarry.” He grunted, not liking the sound of the word when applied to himself.
“Yes, quarry.”
She poured a couple of fingers into one of the cups. He liked the tinny sound of the top-shelf firewater striking the bottom of the cup. The sound alone helped take the sharp edge off his humiliation about having been discovered in a nightmare.
As she handed him the cup, he couldn’t help glancing at her bosom again, remembering her exposed breast in the dream. Would it look the same as the dream breast had? Fleeting speculation, no less provocative for being childish.
She followed his glance to her blouse, gave him a vaguely reproving look, and then splashed bourbon into her own cup. She sighed. “Yes, you’re every bit the man my investigation indicated you were.”
Sartain sipped the bourbon. It felt wonderful sliding over his tongue and tingling down his throat to spread a gauzy warmth through his chest and belly. “And that is?”
“A lusty whoremonger.”
“Hey, I was raised by whores. Let’s not get personal, shall we, Miss Gallant?”
“Yes, of course. Your appraising my bosom wasn’t at all personal. Or lusty.”
Sartain leaned back on an elbow, swirling the whiskey in his cup. “I’m just a man, Miss Gallant. You can’t blame me for wondering...you know, about...”
He didn’t need to finish that. Even in the darkness, he could see that her cheeks turned darker.
“If you were so bothered by my character, why were you so persistent about followin’ me down here? I gave you every opportunity to bow out. The governor would have let you back out of the deal. No man in his right mind would send a pretty woman, Pinkerton or not, down here with a known killer to kill a man illegally.”
“You’re the one who’ll be doing the killing, Mr. Sartain.”
“Come, now, Miss Gallant. Let’s not sift the dirt too fine. You’re down here to make sure I kill a man.”
Ignoring that, she sipped her bourbon and shook her hair back. “What you said about a man in his ‘right mind.’ Are you suggesting the governor is not in his right mind, Mr. Sartain?”
“Hell, yes.” Sartain laughed. “Isn’t that obvious? He’s a territorial governor. His job is to see that I, a wanted man with several federal bounties on his head, am tried and hanged, not sent down to Mexico to kill his own stepson and the stepson’s uncle. Let me see, how many laws is he breaking?”
The Revenger laughed again. The ludicrousness, not to mention the hypocrisy, of the assignment actually tickled him. That was why he’d not been overly bothered to accept the chore. It confirmed what he already knew—he was no worse than most of the men who were after him, including some of the most powerful men in the government. He’d long heard that McDougal’s prospects of winning the presidency were fair to good, and it was a target he had his sights on.
Sartain hadn’t taken the job for money. He’d had no choice. Still, it wasn’t all that bad. It amused him, and he wasn’t about to turn the money down. He didn’t normally charge for his services, but then, he usually worked for people who couldn’t have afforded him. McDougal could afford the name fee and more.
And fifty thousand dollars would take him many miles, and for a good, long time, it would prevent him from having to take on odd jobs when his larder needed restocking.
“I guess it doesn’t matter to me,” Miss Gallant said. “Any of that stuff about being right or wrong. All I know is that the governor hired the Pinkerton Agency to track you down. Mr. Pinkerton sent me.” She shrugged.
“You’re feeling pretty good, aren’t you?”
She shrugged again, then tried to hide a grin by chomping down on her bottom lip.
“Why’d they send a woman?” Sartain asked her once he’d taken another sip of his drink.
“Think about it, Mr. Sartain.”
The Cajun pooched out his lips. “All right, I’m thinking...” He frowned ironically, as though studying hard on a difficult subject, which it was.
“Don’t strain yourself. Women are invisible to men like you. Even beautiful women.”
She didn’t appear at all chagrined to have complimented herself so frankly.
“Maybe especially beautiful women,” Miss Gallant said. “When you see a woman, beautiful or otherwise, you think about one thing. Don’t worry, you’re not unlike most men. At least most handsome men who’ve traditionally had an easy time working your way into a woman’s boudoir.
“You saw me several times during the time I was tracking you—once in Coffeyville, again in Denver. There was another time in a small supply camp on the trail into the mountains. I wasn’t worried. I knew you wouldn’t entertain the notion that I might be doing exactly what I was doing—stalking you, learning your habits in preparation for setting a trap. Because I’m a woman. A beautiful woman. If you’d given me any consideration at all, it would have been how you’d go about trying to bed me.”
Sartain studied her from beneath his rumpled brows. “Jesus, I did see you!”
“See?”
“Yeah, now I remember. You were pretty far away, but in the back of my mind, I thought you were awful pretty to be alone on a horse on the rough and tumble frontier. I reckon I thought—if I gave any consideration to you at all beyond wondering what you’d look like in your birthday suit, or what pitch your voice would climb to during a tussle—you must have had a man around somewhere.”
“It’s not going to work, Mr. Sartain.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re not going to embarrass me.” She set her cup down and crawled slowly toward him, smiling beguilingly.
Her long, wavy hair danced about her shoulders. Her plump lips were parted.
He couldn’t have been more surprised when she slid her head up close and kissed him. Her lips had the texture of ripe plums.
“And you are not, under any circumstances,” she added, then kissed him once
more, intentionally getting his blood up, “ever, in your entire, miserable life going to see me naked.”
She kissed him once more with agonizing tenderness, pulled her head away, and winked.
She scooped up her cup, rose, and walked over to her bedroll.
Sartain stared after her, hang-jawed. He felt as though he’d been poked with a stiletto in all the places it would hurt most.
“Oh, and Mr. Sartain?” she said as she laid down and started drawing her blankets up.
He could see only her silhouette in the starlight.
“Yes, Miss Fancy Britches?”
“You won’t be needing to shout for anyone to let me go. I’m perfectly capable of protecting myself.”
“Miss Gallant?” the Cajun called, ironically.
“Yes, Mr. Sartain?”
“I got twenty dollars says I can seduce you by the time we fork paths.”
Jasmine Gallant chuckled dryly. “You’re on.”
“Good night.”
“Good night, Mr. Sartain.”
Chapter 9
Sartain woke relatively refreshed at dawn’s first blush.
Sitting up, blinking and stretching, he saw that Pinkerton’s princess, as he amused himself by silently referring to her, was still deeply slumbering. He could hear her soft, rattling snores as she lay curled on her side, her left cheek flat against the underside of her saddle. Two blankets and her striped blanket coat covered her.
Sartain rose quietly and started dressing. There was no point in waking her just yet.
He doubted the young woman was accustomed to riding as far as they’d ridden over the past five days without more than a few hours’ break. She hadn’t complained, of course. That wasn’t her way. She’d have walked ten miles with a snake-bit ankle swollen to the size of a wheel hub before she’d have asked for a ride in a buckboard wagon.
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