The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  He worked quietly but with grim, desperate determination. The bindings were tight. As he twisted his wrists against them, he felt the chill wetness of blood. That was all right. If the rawhide got wet, it was more liable to stretch.

  He’d been working on stretching the bindings for a good two hours when he heard the young lovers whispering on the other side of the cold fire from where he and Jasmine lay. He stopped working and lay still, tense.

  Had they seen him?

  There was more low talking. He heard the faint, furtive rustling of blankets. There was the clink of a belt buckle. A muffled girl’s laugh.

  “Shhh!” whispered Maximilian.

  The old men’s snores continued.

  “They can’t hear us, Max,” said Priscilla in a voice just barely audible above the snores and the crickets and the occasional scratching of creosote branches in the breeze. “They’re all asleep. Come on—hurry!”

  Maximilian grunted. More rustling of cloth.

  Silence.

  Priscilla gave a faint groan.

  Facing away from the fire, Sartain slowly lifted his head and turned to gaze over his right shoulder. The two lovers lay together about five feet on the other side of the fire, old Tio about ten feet away on their left, the bandido uncle ten feet on their right, tied to a tree.

  A blanket half-covered Maximilian and Priscilla. They both lay on their sides, spooned against each other. The blanket had fallen to the girl’s waist, exposing her upper body.

  The pale orbs sloped toward the ground, jostling as Maximilian took the girl from behind, thrusting his hips ever so slowly and quietly against her rump.

  Maximilian grunted softly as he worked, holding her right hip with his hand. Priscilla breathed raspily. Her blonde hair quivered as she rocked forward and back.

  “Oh.” Priscilla moaned, placing both hands on the ground and thrusting her rump higher to receive her lover’s mast. “Oh, oh, oh...”

  “Shh!”

  “I am!”

  “Shhh!”

  Priscilla giggled, showing her teeth in the darkness, squeezing her eyes closed as Maximilian continued to thrust against her.

  “Oh.” Priscilla moaned throatily again after a time. She dropped her head forward, hair spilling toward the ground.

  Maximilian levered himself up higher with his left knee, pushing against her more forcefully, his long, dark-brown hair tumbling down his right shoulder. Priscilla turned her head to one side and Maximilian kissed her. They kissed for a long time as the boy continued to thrash against her. Priscilla pulled her lips from his and reached back to place her right hand against his cheek, a celestial smile of carnal pleasure showing on her face in the starlight.

  Then she jerked her head forward and placed both hands on the ground, whispering, “Oh, Lord!”

  Maximilian grunted, thrusting himself against her hard, and held her fast against him by both her hips. He quivered. Priscilla had fallen silent as the boy spent his seed and she quietly enjoyed her pleasure.

  Maximilian sighed throatily. He kissed the girl’s right shoulder and sank down to the ground. Sartain laid his head back down on his saddle, ashamed of himself for having watched and noting a frustrating tightness in his own trousers.

  He glanced at where Jasmine lay five feet away from him, facing him. Her eyes were open. He thought he could see her chest rising and falling sharply as she breathed. As though suddenly realizing he was watching her, she closed her eyes and rolled abruptly away from him.

  Sartain grinned.

  Then he went back to work on the rawhide.

  * * *

  Old Tio sniffed the wind and then lifted his head abruptly from the underside of his saddle. He turned toward Sartain and widened his eyes in shock. Sartain had the morning fire going, smoke skeining into the air over this niche in the rocky hills.

  “Ay, caramba, I’m an old fool!” intoned the Mexican. “No wonder I never found the treasure. My senses are as dull as my prick.”

  Both exhausted lovers, Maximilian and Priscilla, lifted their heads from their saddles. When they saw Sartain sitting on a rock and poking a stick into the fire, Jasmine sitting beside him and pouring water from a canteen into a speckled blue coffee pot, they both cursed—one in Spanish, the other in English.

  Automatically, Maximilian reached for his Winchester ’73.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Sartain warned him through a growl. He raised his hands to reveal the bloody swatches of skin below his sleeve cuffs. “Rope works better.”

  “No!” Priscilla cried, throwing herself into her lover’s arms as though to shield him from a bullet. “If you kill Max, you’ll have to kill me, too!”

  “Don’t be so damned dramatic.” Sartain scoffed, poking the fire again with his stick.

  “He’s not going to shoot Max,” Jasmine insisted. “When we were sent down here, we didn’t realize the situation. Apparently, you hid your love for each other very well from your father.”

  “Oh, he knows,” Priscilla retorted, pulling away from Maximilian. “That’s why we ran away—Max and me. When my father caught us together, he had Max horsewhipped and threatened to kill him if he ever saw us so much as looking at each other. And he told me next time I would get the whip, too...after I was forced to watch my lover die!”

  “Figures,” the Cajun grouched. “I had a real bad feeling about that coot. Now I know why.” He sighed and tossed his stick into the fire. The coffee pot had started whooshing on the glowing coals. “As soon as we’ve had a cup of coffee, maybe a few bites of your javelina, if you don’t mind sharing, we’ll be saying vaya con Dios.”

  “You’re just going to ride out of here?” Maximilian asked with a skeptical frown.

  “That’s right,” said The Revenger.

  “Without fulfilling your job?”

  “It’ll be a first for me, but I’ll get over it.”

  He glanced at Jasmine, who turned her mouth-corners down at him as she continued to clean her rifle.

  “Pssst!” It was the old reprobate, Uncle Hector, sitting up and holding his arms out toward Sartain, as though beseeching the Cajun to cut his ties. He chuckled through his teeth.

  Sartain gave a mirthless chuff. “You’re their problem now, Hector.”

  “Please, señor,” Hector urged, canting his head toward his shoulder. “They’ll kill me.”

  “And that’ll be too good for you,” Jasmine told him, removing the pot from the flames and tossing a couple of handfuls of coffee into the water.

  “Do not worry, you cur,” said old Tio. “We’ll make sure you get a good, long look at the treasure before we kill you. We might even allow you to assist us in hauling a wagonload back to the church.”

  Sartain felt it was time to break the news. He couldn’t very well not tell them that their friend the padre was dead.

  “About the church,” he said, speaking in low, dark tones. “If you head back there, you’re not going to like what you find.”

  Priscilla gasped.

  “What?” Maximilian’s eyes wide and horror-stricken.

  “That’s where we met up with Uncle Hector,” Jasmine declared, scowling at the old killer.

  Slowly, Maximilian, Priscilla, and old Tio turned their heads toward Uncle Hector as well. Hector grimaced, sweat trickling down his cheeks.

  Old Tio bellowed Spanish epithets as he pulled his pistol and pumped three rounds into Uncle Hector’s chest.

  * * *

  After two weeks of hard, hot, dusty riding, Sartain and Jasmine crossed the Rio Grande and rode into the little village of San Rafael, which was shaded by poplars and tamarisks. They checked into the only hotel in town.

  Each ordered a bath sent to their rooms.

  They met down in the hotel’s brush-covered galleria in time to enjoy the cooling night breeze scratching in off the desert.

  They hadn’t spoken much about what had happened down in Mexico, but now Jasmine sipped her tequila and turned to The Revenger. “Where will you g
o now?”

  Sartain sipped his own shot and chuckled, running his hands through his still damp hair. “Good question. Here’s a better one. What’re you going to tell the governor?”

  Jasmine held her shot glass up close to her cheek. Pooching her ripe lips out pensively, she turned the glass slowly in her hand. “The truth.” She turned to Sartain. “That’s best, don’t you think?”

  “Might get you fired.”

  She regarded him strangely, wrinkling the skin above the bridge of her fine nose.

  “You were supposed to kill me down there,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “After I’d killed Maximilian.”

  He waited.

  She continued to gaze at him strangely.

  “Am I right?”

  Jasmine took another sip of the tequila and set the glass on the table. “How did you know?”

  “Why else would he have sent you? Just to confirm that his stepson was dead?” The Cajun shook his head. “Nah. He wouldn’t have sent a beautiful woman for that menial task. He sent a beautiful woman to kill me, knowing I have a powerful weakness for beautiful women. I’d give you my back sooner than I would some dude from McDougal’s office. He sure as hell wouldn’t have sent a soldier. That’s why you’ve been so cold, this entire ride. You knew you were going to have to shoot me.”

  “All right,” she said mildly. “There you have it. I was going to kill you.”

  “But you didn’t. Why not?”

  Her gaze wavered. She looked across the town’s little cobbled square, where an old lady in a black dress and rebozo was filling a clay pot from the stone fountain fronting the obligatory copper-colored adobe church. A brown mongrel pup was rising onto its back legs to sniff the pot.

  A brown-robed priest came out of the church, smiling and gesturing to the old woman to let him help her with such a heavy pot. The pup barked at the man and backed off warily.

  The priest laughed.

  Jasmine smiled at the scene in the square, then she turned her head back quickly to The Revenger, tossing her hair as she did and resting her chin on the heel of her hand. She looked fresh and rosy after her bath. Her thick hair was only slightly damp, so she must have brushed it dry on her room’s small balcony.

  “I don’t do everything a man asks of me, Mr. Sartain.”

  “Even the governor of New Mexico Territory?”

  “Not when it goes against my conscience. The governor overestimated me, I’m afraid. It will all be in my report. If Mr. Pinkerton doesn’t like what he reads, then he and I will fork paths. I’ve been considering going into business for myself anyway.” She narrowed her eyes, causing them to crease at the corners. Both pearl orbs fairly smoldered. “Know this, Mr. Sartain. I didn’t not shoot you because I thought you didn’t deserve a bullet. While I discovered down in Mexico that you are human after all, you’re still a killer.”

  “I didn’t kill your father, Jasmine.”

  She snapped a surprised look at him.

  “Jasmine Gallant. Daughter of Jim Gallant, United States Marshal out of Denver.” Sartain nodded slowly. “I finally remembered where I’d heard the name before. Jim Gallant was shot down coming out of the Denver Federal Building with his young daughter. The man’s wife, the girl’s mother, had died earlier that winter, and he took his daughter out for lunch nearly every day. Three men seeking revenge on the marshal because he’d tracked down one of the men’s brothers—”

  “Cousins,” she corrected.

  “Because he’d tracked down one of the men’s cousins and brought him to trial, after which he was promptly and rightfully hanged.”

  Jasmine sighed as she sat back in her chair. “My, you have a good memory.”

  “Wasn’t all that long ago. It was a big story. Ran in all the papers.” Sartain dug a half-smoked cheroot from his shirt pocket. “I wasn’t one of them, Jasmine.”

  “No,” she whimpered, shaking her head and staring down at the table, tears glazing her eyes. “No, you weren’t one of them. But you are of their sort.”

  Sartain scratched a match to life on the table. Again, he shook his head. “Not even close. You learned that down in Mexico. That’s why you didn’t turn one of your pretty little pistols on me.” He lit the cheroot, blowing smoke and tossing the match out into the courtyard. “And killing me won’t bring him back.”

  “Killing doesn’t bring anyone back, does it, Mike?” Tears rolling down her cheeks. She sniffed, brushed her hand across her face, and gave him a pointed look.

  She sobbed and turned away as though ashamed of the emotion.

  “No.” Taking a long drag on the cheroot, feeling a dull knife of old misery prick his heart. “No, it don’t.”

  She hung her head, weeping. Sartain scraped his chair back, rose, and knelt beside her. He wrapped his arm around her and held her as she cried.

  Later, after a few more drinks and tacos carnitas for supper, they went upstairs. Sartain turned to his door, expecting to see her turn to her own room across the hall. Instead, she sidled up to him and placed her hand in his. Her eyes sparkled in the light from a single candle.

  He felt something cold in the palm of his hand. He opened it.

  A twenty-dollar gold piece glinted up at him.

  SAN JUAN BUSHWHACKERS

  Chapter 1

  Mike Sartain, The Revenger, heard the clipped screech of the bullet half a blink before the shot tore into the roof of the well from which he’d been winching up a bucket of fresh water. It hammered the moldering wood only six inches from his head.

  As the bark of the bushwhacker’s bullet reached his ears and bits of wood from the well’s roof flew in all directions, the big Cajun released the winch handle.

  He threw himself hard right to hit the ground behind the well’s stone coping. The filled bucket hit the water with a hollow thud and a splash. Behind Sartain, his big buckskin stallion, Boss, whinnied his disdain for the rifle’s bark.

  The Revenger knew how he felt.

  The buckskin wheeled and ran, trailing his bridle reins, kicking up dust in the street of this remote and somewhat eerie mountain ghost town somewhere on the southwestern flank of Colorado’s San Juan mountains.

  Another bullet smashed the far side of the well, followed close on its heels by the rifle’s echoing blast.

  Sartain rose to a knee, flicking the keeper thong free from over the hammer of his big LeMat revolver outfitted with a twelve-gauge shotgun shell in a stout barrel beneath the main .44-caliber barrel, and took hasty aim at the first man-shape he saw. He triggered three quick rounds, the heavy pistol leaping and roaring in his hand, smoke billowing over the top of the well to be trapped by the remnants of the pitched roof, peppering the Cajun’s nose.

  Between Sartain’s second and third shots, he’d heard a muffled grunt. As he’d triggered his third shot, he saw the man facing him from a gap between two weathered log buildings. The shooter twisted around and stumbled sideways into the gap. The rifle in the man’s hands sagged and finally dropped as the son of a buck turned full around and stumbled away from the man he’d tried to beef from bushwhack.

  Sartain considered a fourth round, then thought better of it.

  Holding the smoking LeMat in front of him, he straightened and walked out from behind the well. He strode quickly across the street, keeping the big popper aimed at the man who continued stumbling down the ten-foot gap between the two buildings, both of which sagged on their short stone pylons with forlorn abandonment.

  The man was dragging his boot toes. As he stumbled out of the gap, the watery sunlight revealed the bloodstains on the back of his tan leather vest. He took two more halting steps, gave a groan, and dropped to his knees.

  Sartain stepped over the ambusher’s rifle, a .38-40 Winchester, and walked down through the gap littered with bits of ancient trash. He moved around the bushwhacker to face him. The man, still on his knees, stared straight ahead, lower jaw sagging. His black, low-crowned Stetson lay on the ground beside him. A pair of steel-framed s
pectacles with one cracked lens drooped from one ear.

  The man’s eyes were light blue. He had a ginger soup-strainer mustache and thick muttonchops. His thin hair of the same color was carefully trimmed. His skin was soft and on the pale side, though his nose was sunburned. A gold watch chain sagged from a vest pocket. He had something of the dude about him, the Cajun silently opined.

  He might have been thirty-five, maybe forty. He wasn’t going to see fifty.

  “Why?” Sartain asked, keeping the LeMat aimed at the man’s head, though he’d obviously taken the venom out of him.

  The man continued to stare straight ahead, as though he didn’t know Sartain was standing nearly in front of him. Blood issued from the two rounds in his chest, soaking the ends of his string tie and the pinstriped cotton pullover shirt he wore beneath the vest. Two cartridge belts were cinched around his waist, two holsters bristled with Remington revolvers.

  “Why?” Sartain asked again, louder this time, gritting his teeth.

  He felt an odd amalgam of fury at nearly having gotten his head blown off, and sympathy for a dying man. A man who was likely just then sifting through all the meaningful moments in his fast-fading life, taking one more look before the long night closed over him.

  The man turned to Sartain. He gritted his teeth, flared his nostrils, enraged. He had a chipped eyetooth.

  He appeared to try to say something, stretching his lips back, trying to get his vocal cords to work. But then his eyelids fluttered closed. He dropped straight forward, not breaking his fall in the least. He hit the ground with a resolute thud and sighed out his last breath, jerking slightly.

  He lay flat against the ground, arms close against his sides.

  Sartain stared down at him. “Come on, you son of Satan. Why’d you try to grease me?” He kicked the dead man’s side. “Who are you?”

  The man lay inert. His head was turned toward Sartain, his eyes half-open and glassy. A blood pool grew beneath him.

  The Revenger looked around. If there was one bushwhacker, there could be more, though he thought he’d probably know by now if this man had been riding with anyone. Then he had a strange sensation, his spine turning chill, as though someone was watching him, maybe planting a pair of rifle sights on him.