“You got it, Miss Dixie,” said Lonnie, wheeling.
He was a good head taller than the doorway, and he didn’t duck enough. He smacked the top of his head hard, grunted, slapped a hand to his forehead, and continued running with a little less vigor than before.
“Who’s he?” asked Slater, nodding at the wounded kid.
Dixie was dabbing up some of the blood around the wound with a whiskey-soaked cloth.
“Said his name’s Dewey Dade from Alamogordo,” Sartain said. “You ever see him in these parts?”
“Can’t say as I have,” Slater said. “Who shot him?”
“That was my next question for you,” Sartain said.
Slater chuffed. “What—you think I shot him?”
“All I know is I was just passin’ through here a few hours ago, and someone bushwhacked me. Damn near hit his target. And then this kid here rode into town with that chunk of lead in his shoulder.”
“Who bushwhacked you?” Dixie McKee wanted to know, looking up at him from her work on the kid.
“I don’t know. But he’ll never bushwhack me or anyone else again.”
“You shoot him?” asked Slater, closing one eye.
“Yes, I did. Dudish sort of gent in trail garb. Didn’t look like your regular cowpuncher. Had a trimmed beard and spectacles. Rode the sorrel I stabled with mine and the kid’s horse out back.”
Slater rubbed his jaw. “Dudish sort, huh? With glasses?” He and the girl shared a fleeting glance.
Sartain frowned. “You think you know him?”
Slater colored slightly. “Nah.”
Sartain looked at Dixie. She turned her head away sharply and resumed mopping blood from around the kid’s wound.
“What about you, Miss McKee?”
“I wouldn’t know your dude from Adam’s off ox, Mr. Sartain,” Dixie said crisply but none too convincingly.
Lonnie returned with the glowing poker, interrupting the conversation. Sartain left the room and headed downstairs, scowling his consternation at the recent turn of events that had made his life a whole lot more complicated than it had been when he’d ridden into Hard Winter a few hours ago, merely wanting a cold drink of water for himself and his horse.
“If you had the sense of a stupid mule,” he told himself, “you’d ride hell for leather out of here right now.” He knew what trouble smelled like and he smelled it here.
But it wouldn’t be wise to ride out in the mountain dark, which was the darkest kind of dark. Besides, he thought he’d heard distant thunder a while ago when he’d been fetching wood for the stove.
He wasn’t sure that he’d have ridden out of here even if there’d been a few hours of good light left and no storm on the way. He smelled trouble, all right. And he was curious about where it was coming from.
Who was the man who’d bushwhacked him and died for his sins? Who’d carted his body away? Who’d bushwhacked the kid, Dewy Dade from Alamogordo?
A new customer had entered Dixie’s place while he’d been upstairs, a small Mexican man with thick, salt-and-pepper hair in elkskin leggings and a short, wool vest over a yellow and green plaid shirt. He’d draped a quilted elkskin mackinaw over his chair back.
Like the other two customers, Slater and Lonnie, the Mexican had served himself. He was sitting alone at a table near the front door, against the far-right wall, facing Sartain but not making eye contact. He sat hunched over a tin cup. A brown paper cigarette smoldered in his right hand, which he lifted now to take a deep drag from the quirley, narrowing his eyes and gazing out the window beside him.
Sartain could do with a drink and a smoke himself.
Again hearing thunder rumbling, but from much closer this time, he went over to the woodstove and gave it a good stoking. Dixie had been right. The night had turned cold. He added several chunks of pine and then fetched more from outside, where it was beginning to rain—large, quarter-sized raindrops falling at an angle. He was good and damp by the time he got back inside.
When he’d filled the wood box near the stove, the little Mexican was helping himself from a bottle on the bar. The Mexican tossed a dime onto the counter, near where several others lay around the bottle, turned to Sartain, grinned broadly, and raised his tin cup in salute.
Wiry and bandy-legged from a life on horseback, he had large, vanilla-colored teeth edged with brown. Limping slightly, as though he had one bad knee—as did most cowpunchers his age—he returned to his chair and began building another cigarette from a small burlap makings sack.
He seemed almost mesmerized by the rote endeavor.
Sartain walked around the bar, hearing the rain hammer the front of the saloon. Through the open window, it looked like a gauzy curtain had been thrown over the front door just beyond the gallery. Thunder pealed, and the floor leaped beneath the Cajun’s boots. Dust sifted from cracks in the ceiling.
As Sartain poured himself a glass of whiskey, he noticed that neither the stout Slater nor the tall, horse-faced Lonnie had returned from the kid’s room upstairs. He could understand why Dixie would still be up there tending the kid but why the other two? They must have had something private to talk about.
Something private regarding the bushwhacker whom Sartain had beefed?
As if reading his thoughts, they appeared on the stairs, Lonnie ahead of Slater. They were both cutting dubious looks toward the Cajun but otherwise doing their best, which wasn’t very good, at looking nonchalant. When they’d retaken their seats at their table, Slater hauled a deck of playing cards from his shirt pocket and started laying out a hand.
The Mexican smoked his new quirley as though it were the best tobacco he’d ever tasted and he wouldn’t likely taste it again.
Sartain took his drink over to a table by the bar. He’d just started building his own quirley, hoping he’d enjoy his as much as the Mexican was enjoying his own, when Dixie came down the stairs, carrying the basin of bloody water. She walked over to the front door and threw the bloody water out into the storm. She stood there, staring out for a time, shoulders tense.
She stepped backward as a man mounted the gallery deliberately, not like a man in a hurry to get out of the rain. He stepped into the saloon, and two more men came in behind him.
Dixie stood before them, eyeing the men skeptically, as the man who’d first entered, a tall man with a handlebar mustache clad in a yellow rain slicker, doffed his gray sombrero and batted it against his thigh.
“I’ll be damned if it don’t pour in these mountains like someone up there’s working up a sweat on the ole pump handle!” he intoned, adding a jovial whoop as though he enjoyed nothing more than a good storm.
The other two were similarly dressed. They were all close to the same height—lean, tall, hard-faced men. They all had considerable hair on their faces. They were each holding a rifle. Sartain could see holsters bulging under their dripping rain slickers. When they unbuttoned the slickers, he could see well-filled cartridge belts cinched around their waists.
“Look at you, ain’t you a sight for sore eyes!” the first man said, grinning at Dixie, who stood regarding him and the others testily. She had her arms crossed over her breasts and one boot cocked forward. She was tapping the toe of that boot on the floor.
“What’re you doing here, Chick?” she asked the man.
He’d moved toward her, spreading one arm out as though to give her a hug. Now he frowned and let the arm drop to his side. “What’re you talking about, honey? What am I doing here? What’re you doing here?”
“I own this place,” Dixie said. “Paid the back taxes on it, so I own it. You might have owned it once with Melvin Pepper, but Pepper’s dead and you let it go under.”
“That’s fine, that’s fine,” Chick said, grinning and spreading his arms out again. “That ain’t what I meant. I just meant that ain’t no way to greet your best pal Chick Beacham, sugar-bunny! Come here and give me a hug! Boy, do I need a hug!”
“Don’t call me that,” Dixie said, swinging
away from the man—who had outlaw written in every line carving the hard planes of his face—and walked toward the bar, setting the pan on top of it as she strode past.
She walked behind the bar, flushed with anger. She took the pan down the bar and tossed it onto the floor with a clang.
Outside, the rain continued hammering. Thunder peeled. Slater and Lonnie held their cards in their hands, but they weren’t playing. They had their eyes on the three rain-soaked newcomers.
The Mexican didn’t seem interested, however. He sat at his table, his eyes glazed with contemplation, staring straight ahead, slowly smoking his quirley and drinking his whiskey. He might have been in a different place altogether.
“Is that any way to treat your best pal?” Chick asked Dixie, who crossed her arms on her chest and did not return his gaze. She stared straight across the room.
“I for one would like a drink,” said one of Chick’s partners, shrugging out of his rain slicker. He tossed the slicker onto the bar and leaned forward. “Set me up—will you, Dix?”
“Tell him to get out of here first,” Dixie said tightly.
“Ah, hell,” said Chick. “Is that how it’s gonna be?”
“Get him out of here, Earl,” Dixie told the man leaning against the bar, “and I’ll set you and Johnny both up. You’ll be drinking on the house tonight, but you have to get him out of my place. I told him I’d never let him set foot in here again after what he did to the Pierson boy and I meant it.”
Chick strode angrily up to the bar and slammed his fist on it. “You shut up about that!” He pointed an angry finger across the bar at Dixie, who backed up a step and crossed her arms over her chest once more. “I told you to never mention it again, or you knew what I’d do to you!”
“Get out of my place, Chick!” Dixie screamed, clamping her hands over her ears and wildly shaking her head.
“Dammit!” Chick turned and began striding past Sartain, heading for the end of the bar with the intention of getting behind it.
Sartain put his left boot out. Chick’s left boot snagged it, and Sartain whipped the man’s foot up high. Chick dropped face-first on the floor with a loud, indignant grunt and a boom!
Chapter 5
Save for the storm outside, the room fell silent.
Chick lay belly-down on the floor. He stared up at Sartain, wide-eyed, his ruddy, scarred face flushed with exasperation. It took him a few seconds to understand what had just happened. He’d probably never been treated so poorly, and he was having trouble comprehending someone interfering in his nefarious affairs.
The other two outlaws, Earl and Johnny, stared at The Revenger with similar expressions. Johnny, slightly shorter than the other two, was still standing near the open door. He laughed once, suddenly, incredulously, girlishly.
Then his eyes widened as he stared down at Chick.
“I’ll be damned!” He glanced at Earl standing by the bar, now facing Sartain. “Did he just do what I think he done?”
Earl didn’t say anything. His lower jaw hung loose.
Chick continued to glare up at Sartain, who gazed mildly back at him. Slowly, his cheeks blazing red with humiliation, Chick gained his feet to stand over the Cajun, his broad chest rising and falling slowly as he breathed through flared nostrils.
“Mister,” he said with mock concern, wrinkling the skin above the bridge of his nose, several veins showing in his leathery forehead, “you just made one terrible mistake.”
Sartain said, “Nope. You did.”
The LeMat was almost instantly in his hand. The others in the room probably only saw him twitch slightly and then a blur of motion before the big popper was in his right hand and leveled at Chick Beacham. He clicked the hammer back.
“You see,” Sartain said, “telling me I made a big mistake was your big mistake. I took it as a threat. Whether or not you aimed to follow up on said threat don’t matter.” He lowered the LeMat’s barrel slightly.
Boom!
The LeMat hurled a .44 caliber bullet into the top of Chick Beacham’s left boot, curling back the shredded leather around the hole. Smoke wafted. The loud report was absorbed by the building’s stout walls, and Beacham’s shrill scream was nearly drowned by the storm.
He rose up off that foot so high that his head hit the ceiling, squashing the crown of his sombrero against the top of his head. He fell back against the bar, lost his footing, and again hit the floor with another loud bang!
“Damn!” yelped Earl.
He automatically reached for one of the two long-barreled pistols holstered on his hips. He didn’t have it even half-raised before the LeMat spoke again.
“Oh!” the outlaw cried, dropping the pistol and looking down at his belly.
Sartain had got to his feet and now he swung the smoking LeMat toward the outlaw standing by the door. Johnny had grabbed the handle of one of his own pistols, but now he released the weapon as though it were too hot to handle and thrust both arms in the air.
“Okay!” he shouted. “Okay, okay...ohh-kayyy!”
He reached so high that his fingers brushed the underside of the ceiling beam above his head.
Dixie stared slack-jawed at Sartain. She moved slowly forward to peer over the bar at Chick Beacham, who lay on one side holding his bullet-torn right foot in both hands. Blood bubbled out of the hole in the boot. Beacham writhed and cursed through gritted teeth, the veins in his forehead now appearing as though they were about to burst.
“You son of a buck,” he said tightly, with menacing softness. He rocked on his right hip. “Oh, you son of a buck!”
Dixie closed her hand over her mouth in shock at what she was seeing. She laughed and lowered her hand. “Careful he don’t take that as a threat, Chick.” She laughed again and looked at Sartain, her eyes bright with astonishment and humor. “Whether you mean to try and follow up on it or not.”
Earl had now dropped to his knees. He was holding both hands over the hole in his belly, from which blood oozed like oil from a fresh well. “Oh, no,” he said in a strained, uncomprehending voice. “Oh, no. I don’t...I don’t think I’m gonna make it, Chick.”
He lowered his head and fell face forward to the floor and lay still.
Sartain stood over Beacham. He held the big, smoking LeMat low by his side. It was about even with Beacham’s head. The outlaw glanced at the impressive, deadly weapon and then glared darkly up at the man holding it.
Sartain asked, “Who are you, Beacham?”
“I don’t know,” Beacham said tightly, through gritted teeth. “Who’re you?”
“I’m a fella who was bushwhacked out by the well earlier. One of your boys wouldn’t have done that, would they?” Sartain didn’t think so. The bushwhacker hadn’t looked like a man who’d ride with a rawhider like Beacham. But Sartain had nothing else to go on.
“My boys don’t need to bushwhack nobody. Here, you got the drop on us, understand? If you’d fight fair, ’stead of trippin’ folks like a girl, then you’d see just how much we don’t need to bushwhack nobody!”
Sartain glanced at Johnny, still holding his hands above his head. “Best fetch your pard here, amigo. Get him on his horse and ride out. Leave your other friend. I’ll tend to him when the storm dies. If I see either one of you ever again in this life, I’m going to do more than shoot Chick here in the foot, though I might go ahead and shoot the other one to amuse myself.” He glared hard at the outlaw writhing before him. “But you won’t feel the pain long, Chick—if you get my drift.”
Chick shook his head. “This ain’t over.”
“You’d better hope it is.”
“Oh, it’s not!” Beacham laughed caustically.
“Come on, Chick,” Johnny said, helping Chick to his one good foot.
As Chick hobbled out with the help of his friend, Chick swung another searing glare over his shoulder at Sartain, “Oh, this is far from over!”
As he hopped, he accidentally rammed his injured foot against a chair. He stopped, stood bal
anced on one foot, and stared straight down at the floor, shoulders taut. His friend looked at him.
“You all right, Chick?”
Beacham drew a breath. His voice was pitched high as he said, “Dammit, will you look where you’re goin’, Johnny?”
“Sorry, Chick.”
Beacham shook his head and then continued hopping until he and Johnny were outside in the rain and Sartain could hear the regular thumps of Chick Beacham hopping across the gallery on one foot. He stared at the open doorway until he saw the silhouettes of both men riding off to the west in the silvery rain.
Sartain looked around the room. The Mexican was gone. He must have slipped out sometime during the dustup. The other two card-players, Slater and Lonnie, just then rose from their chairs. Slater was tucking his pasteboards back into a vest pocket and straightening his hat on his gray head.
“Reckon we’ll be pullin’ foot,” he said.
“You ain’t gonna stay the night?” Dixie asked. “Wet night, Slater. And it’s a long ride back to your sawmill.”
As he and Lonnie made for the door, Slater winked at Dixie and said, “That ride just seemed a whole lot drier and shorter. Much obliged, though, Miss Dixie. And good luck to you.”
He glanced darkly at Sartain and gave his head a quick shake. “Good luck to you too, mister. I sure hope you got someone around who’ll toss some daisies on your grave. Hell, every man deserves that.”
And then he was out the door and crossing the gallery toward wherever he’d stowed his horse.
Lonnie stopped just inside the door and held his hat in his hands, looking sheepish, frustrated. “Good night, Miss Dixie.”
“Good night, Lonnie.”
“Maybe see you next weekend.”
“All right. Thanks for comin’ in.”
Lonnie smiled bashfully, set his hat on his head, and ducked through the doorway, knocking his hat askew as he did.
Sartain turned to Dixie. She was staring at him pensively.
“Sorry about business,” he said.
She frowned, canting her head slightly to one side. “Who are you, Mr. Sartain?”
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