The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  “Better not try anything, amigo!” the girl said in a low voice pitched with menace. “You understand? I got the sights right on your heart, and I’ll blow you in two if you try anything!”

  But she didn’t appear to have her sights lined up on the Cajun’s heart. The gun was aimed more at his right knee.

  He remembered that Otero’s daughter was blind.

  “I’m not going to try anything, Miss. I’m Mike Sartain. I’m here to see your father. I was invited.”

  She must have used Sartain’s voice to recalculate the location of his heart because she put her rifle’s sights on it now. Sartain winced slightly. He felt Boss tense his back through the saddle.

  “I’m here to see your father, Miss Otero,” the Cajun repeated. “Is he around? Like I said, he’s expect—”

  She lowered the rifle and, sobbing, pressed a hand to her forehead and yelled, “He’s not here! Somebody came for him earlier today and took him away!”

  Chapter 15

  Sartain swung down from Boss’s back. He quickly tossed the reins over the hitchrack fronting the ranch house and mounted the gallery.

  As he did, the young woman sank into a chair of woven aspen branches. She too hastily leaned the rifle against the shack’s stone front wall, and it slid across the stones and clattered to the floor.

  She kept a hand over her forehead as she bawled.

  Sartain dropped to a knee beside her. “Who took your father, Miss Otero?”

  She shook her head, sniffing and sobbing. “He didn’t say his name. He rode into the rancho this morning. Papa was in the breaking corral working with a colt. I heard them arguing. I ran out to the corral to see what the trouble was about, and Papa told me he had to leave with that man.”

  She hardened her voice, flaring her nostrils and curling her upper lip angrily. “The man said, ‘Don’t worry, sweetie, I’ll send this old chili-chomper back to you just as soon as he gives me what I want.’”

  “You didn’t catch his name? Anything about him that might identify him?”

  “Not his name, but he smelled like blood, and I heard him dragging one foot.”

  Sartain said half to himself, “Beacham. I knew I should have gone back to that cabin and finished that simple bastard.”

  “Who is Beacham?” Celina wanted to know. Reaching tentatively for Sartain, she placed her small brown hand around Sartain’s left wrist and squeezed it tightly. “What does he want with my father? What does he want Papa to give him?”

  Sartain studied the young woman, hesitating. Obviously, Otero had told her nothing about the gold. He probably hadn’t wanted to worry her. She was no child, but a full-grown woman. Still, there was a childlike innocence and vulnerability about her, likely due to the fact she’d been blind since birth.

  The Cajun wasn’t about to keep the old man’s secret. Celina was worried sick about him, and not knowing why Beacham had come for him would only worry her more. Sartain wrapped an arm around the sobbing woman’s shoulders. She felt so slender and delicate as he drew her against him that his heart ached for her.

  Blind and terrified that she would end up alone out here without the father she obviously loved more than anything, not to mention depended on...

  “It’s about loot stolen from a mine. One of the robbers had your father hide it for him. One of the other robbers is Beacham. He came for it.”

  Celina gasped and pulled away from Sartain. “Robbers?” She placed a hand on his face. It was not an intimate gesture, he instantly realized. It was her way of communicating with him more deeply than words because she couldn’t read with her eyes the expression on his face.

  Her hand was small and warm as she slid her fingertips across his cheek as though she were reading an inscription in stone.

  “He’ll be all right, Celina,” Sartain said, taking the girl’s hand in his own, and squeezing it. “Your father will give the man what he wants, and he’ll be fine. Beacham won’t hurt him.”

  He hoped his voice hadn’t betrayed any of the doubt in his mind. Maybe it had. The childlike young woman’s smooth, brown, round face looked even more frightened than before. “Dios mio!” she cried. “Papa!”

  “Where did they go, Celina? Do you have any idea?”

  She held her face in her hands, shoulders quivering as she cried. She shook her head.

  “Do you have any idea where your father would hide something important in these mountains? It’s probably not far away.”

  Celina lifted her head and turned her flat, sightless eyes to Sartain. “There is an old stone sheepherders’ shack in High Canyon. That is the only place I can think of. There are plenty of places to hide among the rocks in that canyon. Papa and I used to play there together when I was just a child, and he still takes me walking up there.”

  “Up there?” Sartain glanced out at the yard. The snow was falling harder, blocking out the forest beyond the ranch portal. Boss wore a furry ermine mantle of the stuff, and the ground was now covered. “How high is High Canyon?”

  “It’s high. Another thousand feet.” She flung an arm out, pointing across the yard. “To the east.”

  Slowly, she lowered her arm. Rising from her chair with a look of dire consternation on her face, she walked out to the edge of the gallery and held her hand out to let the snowflakes flutter into her palm.

  “Consarnit,” she bit out, hardening her jaws and shaking her head. The curse word sounded especially hard, spoken by a woman-child who on first impression had seemed so fragile. “Consarnit it to hell. The gods are against us. There is a wide creek between here and the shack, and it’s been raining all day up there. I’ve heard it and smelled it.”

  She cursed loudly.

  She turned to Sartain. “There will be no way across it until the snow quits.”

  Suddenly, she seemed less fragile but no less frightened.

  “You sure?” Sartain asked her.

  “Sí. I am sure.” She stomped her foot clad in a riding boot. “Mierda de cabra!”

  “Goat dung,” was how Sartain roughly and silently translated the epithet.

  He straightened and walked over to Celina Otero, placing a hand on her slender back. “The snow will likely quit by morning. I’ll ride up there then. They’ll have to stay put, too. Don’t worry, Celina. I’ll find them and make sure Beacham doesn’t lay one hand on your father.”

  “Sí. Gracias. Thank you, Mr. Sartain. You can put your horse up in the barn. There is fresh hay and corn.”

  “I’ll hole up out there myself.”

  “Don’t be silly. It is cold, and will only get colder. You’ll stay inside.”

  “Would that be proper?”

  “Who would know, way out here?” It seemed to be a genuine question. Celina hugged herself tightly, shivering. “I’ll build a fire and make some coffee. It is cold out here. Inside, we will be warm.”

  She didn’t wait for a response, just stooped to retrieve her rifle, then went inside and closed the door.

  * * *

  The Revenger finished tending his horse and stabling him and started back to the Otero cabin. He drew his coat collar up high against the chill breeze and the icy fingers of the snow seeking his bare flesh. It was probably only around four o’clock in the afternoon, but it was nearly dark.

  The snow fell steadily. Half an inch already lay on the ground, covering the leaves that had fallen from the cottonwood just off the lodge’s east wall. Dim light flickered softly in a couple of the first-story windows.

  He tapped on the door.

  “Come.”

  He moved inside, stamping snow from his boots on the hemp rug fronting the door. Celina sat at a table to his right. The range was behind her, and steam ribboned from the spout of the large black coffee pot gurgling softly on a stove lid.

  “Take your coat off, Mr. Sartain. I will get you some coffee. Are you hungry? I can warm some beans. I will make supper soon. Papa shot an elk earlier in the week. It is hanging in the keeper shed out back.”

/>   Sartain shrugged out of his coat and opened the door to shake the snow outside. The cabin was neat and tidy and warmly furnished with hand-hewn furniture, bright rugs, and striped-blanket room dividers. Tintypes and game trophies decorated the walls.

  A fire popped in the fieldstone hearth to Sartain’s left. Above it hung a wooden crucifix and an oil painting of the Virgin Mary.

  “You don’t need to tend me, Celina. I can pour my own coffee.”

  She was already filling a heavy white mug.

  “I am blind, Mr. Sartain. I am not helpless. Papa did not raise me to be helpless. I can do everything everyone else does within reason, except see. I’ve worked with our horses every day since I was six years old, and in the summer, I raise chickens and goats. We butchered two weeks ago. Papa goes to town now and then to make me feel more independent. But also because he likes to drink in a saloon now and then,” she added with a fond smile.

  She set the mug on the halved-log table and glanced out the window behind Sartain. “Winter is on its way.” She wrung her hands together. “And Papa is out in the first storm of the season with a man who might kill him.”

  “He’ll be all right. Beacham just wants the gold.”

  Celina reached behind her to adjust her chair and then sank slowly into it. “He did not tell me about any gold. Why didn’t he tell me?”

  “Didn’t want to worry you, I suppose.”

  Sartain didn’t tell her that the renegade, Rench Hadley, had threatened to cut her throat if her father did not adequately protect the gold, which was likely another good reason her father hadn’t told her about it. He picked up the mug and blew ripples on the coffee. The aroma was intoxicating after the long day he’d had, killing seven men and enduring the start of a mountain snowstorm.

  The cabin felt good and warm after the damp chill of outside.

  They sat as the night slowly closed down just beyond the windows and the snow began piling up on the windowsills. Sartain and Celina Otero sat quietly at the table, drinking coffee and staying warm.

  Celina was nervous. She sat with her head cocked slightly, as though listening intently. For what, the Cajun didn’t know.

  A distant rifle shot?

  Finally, she rose from her chair and said, “How about some brandy, Mr. Sartain?”

  Again, she’d surprised him. First, the cursing and now the tangle-leg. He knew he was foolish to be surprised that a blind woman would have a proclivity for either.

  “Why not?”

  She retrieved a bottle and two cut-glass goblets from a cabinet near a ticking cabinet clock. She set the glasses on the table and stuck a finger into each glass as she filled it as high as her finger. She set the glasses on the table and set the bottle there, as well.

  “I’ll start supper,” she said after she’d taken a sip of her brandy.

  As she prepared the meal, moving with surprising ease about the large, well-appointed kitchen, she asked him to tell her about himself.

  They had some time to kill and she seemed to need to be distracted from the peril her father was in, so he told her about his life, starting with his orphaned childhood roaming New Orleans’ French Quarter. He told her about being raised by whores and mucking out saloons, whorehouses, stables, and jails for pennies and nickels, and then heading off to war on the side of the Confederacy.

  He told her about rising to the rank of lieutenant, as surprised as his fellow Rebel soldiers by his fighting prowess.

  He told her about leading guerrilla raids behind enemy lines, killing Union officers and couriers and sabotaging munitions dumps and railroads. He told it all flatly, without bragging, because he didn’t think it was anything to brag about. It was something he’d been ordered to do so he’d done it, and that was that.

  In fact, he was a little ashamed to have found himself—an orphan without a real home to speak of—so at home in the war and in the shoes of an efficient warrior.

  Finally, while Celina stood rapt at the range, her back to him, making gravy from the elk loin she was roasting, he told her about joining the frontier cavalry after the travesty of Appomattox, about nearly being killed by Apaches, and about being discovered badly wounded and having had the good fortune of getting nursed back to health by an old Arizona desert rat and his beautiful granddaughter, Jewel.

  Then he told her about the drunken soldiers who’d come into the old prospector’s camp when Sartain, well on his way back to health, had been off buying supplies in Benson. The soldiers had been part of a larger contingent who’d been scouring the desert for the missing soldier.

  Instead, these men, who’d gotten drunk earlier in Benson, had found the beautiful Jewel. They’d raped and murdered her after they’d murdered her defenseless old grandfather, then stole his gold cache.

  Sartain left out the part about finding his and Jewel’s miscarried child lying dead beside Jewel’s body. He hadn’t withheld that part because he thought Celina might be too sensitive to hear about it. He’d withheld it because he hadn’t wanted to evoke that image in his head again.

  It evoked itself enough times without his conscious help.

  “And now what do you do, Mr. Sartain?” Celina asked as she set the bowls and platters of food—way too much food for two people—on the table. Like the coffee earlier, the aromas were intoxicating. The steam fogged the windows, which were turning whiter and whiter.

  Sartain hesitated.

  She looked at him almost as though she could see him, though, like most blind people he’d known, she appeared to be staring right through him. Then she chuckled and wiped her hands on her apron.

  “Come on, Mr. Sartain. After all you’ve already told me, do you expect me to be shocked that you didn’t enter the priesthood?”

  Sartain laughed.

  Then he told her that he killed people who needed killing for those who couldn’t kill such folks themselves.

  She stared at him from across the table. It was the first time she’d really seemed to be looking at him instead of through him. Her cheeks were flushed slightly, her lips parted.

  Then she smiled, removed the apron she’d been wearing over her jeans and belt buckle, and hung it on a hook. “Well, then, señor,” she said as she moved carefully around the table and sat in her chair, “I am most fortunate to have a man such as yourself show up at my casa at such an opportune time.”

  She smiled. It was almost a beatific smile.

  She rested her hands in her lap and bowed her head. “Shall I say grace?”

  Chapter 16

  After the delicious and filling supper, Sartain went outside to look around. The snow fell steadily, whipped by a light wind, but it didn’t seem to be getting any heavier. Several inches lay on the ground, but he could make out the moon’s glow through a thin patch of clouds.

  The squall would likely blow on out by morning.

  He checked on Boss, who appeared content, then kicked his way back through the fresh snow to the house.

  “How does it look out there?” Celina asked. She was standing with her back to the fire, staring in his general direction. She’d pinned her hair into a loose chignon behind her head, with several strands fluttering along her cheeks.

  She’d also exchanged her red shirt for a light cotton blouse. She had a round, curvy, alluring figure.

  “I think the storm will be gone by morning. Not much of a storm, really.”

  “At least, not down here. I bet Papa and that outlaw, Beacham, are pinned down pretty good on the other side of High Canyon.” She rubbed her arms and shook her head. “So frustrating. He’s not ten miles away, but he might as well be a hundred. He took his coat and wool hat and gloves, thank God. And he strapped his blanket roll to his saddle before he rode out with...that man.”

  She wrinkled her nose in disgust.

  Sartain hung his coat on a peg by the door. “He’ll be all right. It’s not that cold.” He kicked out of his snowy boots and walked over to her. “I’ll head out after him at first light tomorrow.” />
  “I’m going with you.”

  “No, you’re...” He let his voice trail off. Had he underestimated her again? “How?”

  “Their sign will be wiped out by the snow, but I know the trail. I’ve been on it many times, and Papa has described it to me. You can call out the landmarks, and I’ll point out the direction you need to take. I want to be there when you find them, Mike. Papa might need me.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Celina. I’m going to be worried about you. I know you’re stronger than I first thought you were, but you’re still blind. My concern for you could distract me when the chips are down.”

  She turned down her mouth-corners and nodded. “All right, Mike. I see your point.”

  They’d agreed over supper to start using each other’s first names.

  “Good.” Sartain smiled as he gazed down at her. “Say, you’re a right special gal, Celina.”

  “And you’re a special man, Mike.”

  He yawned. “This warm fire is makin’ me tired. I reckon I’ll turn in. Can I throw down right here on the floor?”

  “Only if I can throw down with you.”

  Sartain studied her skeptically. Had he heard her right?

  She stepped up close to him and placed her hands on his face. She started reading him again with her fingers. “What’s the matter? Does my blindness repel you?”

  Sartain glanced down at her bosom, which was rising and falling slowly beneath the tight blouse.

  “Not at all. It’s just that...”

  “Am I being too forward?” Celina’s hands continued to move on his face, her fingers occasionally pressing deeper as though to more easily read the lines forming his expression.

  She smiled. “You’re blushing, Mike.”