The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  He’d closed his hand over the walnut grip of the Bisley revolver thonged low on his right thigh.

  “Go ahead,” Sartain told him mildly, closing his own right hand over the pearl grip of his big silver-plated LeMat. He put some steel into his voice as he added, “Pull it. Pull it fast or pull it slow and set it on the bar behind you. Your choice. You have three seconds.”

  The lawman stared at Sartain, lazy eye twitching nervously.

  “Hold on,” he said, then slowly slid the Bisely from its holster and set it on the bar behind him, beside a small tin beer bucket.

  A swarthy bartender stepped back away from the bar, holding his hands wide as though to indicate he wanted no part of any ugliness.

  “’Dangerous Dan,’ huh?” snarled Jurgens. “You chicken-livered son of a bitch!”

  Dangerous Dan flushed as he kept his gaze on Sartain. “He’s got the drop on you, fellas. I suggest you don’t do nothin’ stupid. I’m dangerous in the right situation. This ain’t that situation.”

  The thick man to the right slid his own chair back abruptly, rose, and faced Sartain. One eye was swollen shut, and he had several deep cuts and bruises on his cheeks. “What the hell’s your cut o’ this, Mister? What difference is it to you if we work over that old scudder?”

  “That’s not the only reason I’m here.”

  They all stared at Sartain, their eyes vaguely sheepish and nervous.

  Jurgens glanced at the other man sitting at the table. “Are you in this, Sugar, or you gonna go yellow like Dangerous Dan there?”

  Sugar looked indecisive. His eyes were like little brown rats jerking around in tiny cages.

  “Sugar doesn’t have any choice,” Sartain said. “He’s in this, all right.”

  Dangerous Dan pointed at him angrily. “Now, that’s against the law! You shoot men who don’t draw on you, that’s murder! That’s an execution!”

  Sartain jerked the LeMat out and up, simultaneously flicking the lever that engaged the twelve-gauge shotgun barrel and aiming the big popper toward Dangerous Dan. The town marshal screamed, threw his hands up as though to shield himself, and hurled himself onto the floor beside the bar.

  Sartain blew Dangerous Dan’s beer bucket to smithereens.

  The blast made the entire room jump.

  It also made the third man, Sugar, leap out of his chair.

  Screaming, he clawed both his Smith & Wesson .44s from their holsters. He didn’t get them half-raised before Sartain’s LeMat leaped and roared again, this time flinging .44-caliber lead from the main barrel. The first bullet punched into Sugar’s brisket, throwing him back into both the table and the chair.

  The second shot thumped into Jurgen’s left shoulder. He gave a shrill oath.

  Simultaneous with the shouted epithet, the third bullet plowed through the bull-necked man’s lower left side, causing his own triggered lead to screech wide of Sartain and plunk through a window with the sound of a single note from a wind chime.

  The bull-necked man stumbled backward, unsheathing another popper.

  Sartain’s LeMat spoke again, and the thick man triggered his second pistol through the toe of his own right boot. Shrieking, he fell over a chair, hit the floor, and rolled.

  Jurgens had fallen, but now he bounded to his feet, firing his second pistol from a crouch, barking curses through gritted teeth. The bullets stitched the air around Sartain before The Revenger calmly aimed and fired, punching two fresh holes in Jurgens’s chest and throwing him straight back into the room’s shadows.

  “Dammit!” Jurgens cried, raising a foot and dropping it to the floor with a boom. “Son of thunder!”

  Sartain turned to where Dangerous Dan lay on the floor, arms crossed over his head. The lawman lay face-down, taut as piano wire. He turned his head and opened one eye. When he saw the Cajun’s smoking LeMat aimed at him, he closed his eye and pointed his nose straight down at the floor again.

  “Good boy,” Sartain said.

  Quickly, he reloaded the LeMat, letting the empty shell casings clink to the floor around his boots.

  Moving forward, he looked at the bull-necked man who, mewling loudly, rolled from side to side, holding his wounded right boot in the air. Blood dribbled from the hole in the toe. Sartain casually extended the LeMat and finished the man with a bullet through the underside of his chin, spewing brains out the top of his head.

  Sartain kicked chairs aside as he made his way back into the shadows and stood over Jurgens, who lay staring straight up at him through pain-wracked eyes. His chest was a bloody mess. Blood dribbled down from the right corner of his mouth.

  Wetly, he said, “What’s...what’s your cut o’ this, you crazy scudder?”

  “You raped her.”

  Jurgens just stared at him. “So what?”

  “That’s why you’re dying. Work it through. You’ll get it.”

  “Ah, go diddle yourself.”

  “Who sicced you on her, you worthless cur? Who sicced you on Mangham?”

  “Go diddle yourself.”

  Sartain crouched and poked the LeMat’s barrel into one of the blood-gushing holes in Jurgen’s chest.

  Jurgens jerked as though he’d been struck by lightning, wailing.

  “How hard you wanna die?” Sartain asked him.

  Bawling like a weak child, Jurgens said, “Creed! Luther Creed sent us! Oh, for mercy sakes, pull it out! Pull it out!”

  Sartain pulled the LeMat out of the hole and blew a finishing hole through Jurgen’s forehead.

  “Who’s Creed?” The Revenger asked, turning toward Dangerous Dan.

  But the town marshal was no longer on the floor. The batwings were flapping in his wake.

  Sartain looked around for the swarthy barman. He’d lit a shuck as well.

  Peppery gun smoke hung like cobwebs in the lantern-lit room, torn by a breeze that blew dead leaves in under the batwings.

  Sartain holstered the LeMat.

  Luther Creed.

  Chapter 7

  Dangerous Dan Tucker ran along the dark street, his pistol in his hand.

  At a cross street, he stopped and glanced back over his shoulder. A shadow moved back there along the opposite side of the street maybe fifty or sixty yards away. Light from the rising moon flashed off the big pistol holstered on Sartain’s right thigh.

  At least, Dangerous Dan thought it must have been the moonlight on the pistol. Or maybe his mind was just so fixated on the pistol that he was imagining things.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Christ, Dangerous Dan had never seen a man fire a weapon so coldly, calmly, quickly, and assuredly. The man hadn’t missed a single shot. Drew Jurgens, J.W. Stacy, and Milo “Sugar” McCallister had gone down like ducks on a millpond.

  They’d been no slouches, either. All three were known as hired guns you did not cross.

  Christ.

  Sartain. The man known as The Revenger.

  Dangerous Dan had read about him in the papers. He’d also seen his likeness on several wanted circulars the feds had sent him. Uncle Sam was offering two thousand dollars for the man’s head.

  Two thousand dollars.

  Dangerous Dan had once hauled in that much cash when he was robbing stagecoaches for a living, but it hadn’t lasted long. He’d been young and foolish. Money had slipped through his fingers like rain from a downpour. Now if he made that much cash, he’d hold onto it. Maybe invest in a business of some kind. A saloon or a livery barn, say. Maybe he’d put it into a mine.

  He had to think about his future.

  Two thousand dollars.

  Working as a lowly town marshal, he’d have to toil for years and years to even come close to bringing in that much dinero, and by then he’d probably end up backshot by some drunk staggering out of a whorehouse high on love and opium, or “midnight oil,” as the drug was more widely known.

  No point in thinking about that now. Not yet. Not tonight. The Revenger had blood on his mind. Besides, Dangerous Dan had other things he ne
eded to do tonight...

  He had to think about his future.

  He turned left down the cross street, running hard, the chill night breeze raking his lungs like sandpaper. A low wood-frame shack sat on the street’s right side, framed by two Ponderosa pines. A neat stack of split stove wood stood along the front wall to the right of the door. Dan had split and stacked the wood himself.

  Mercy Blevins always laid in a good supply of wood to get her through the chilly Silver City winter. Smoke rippled from the chimney pipe rising from the bedroom addition off the shack’s rear.

  Dangerous Dan cast another cautious glance back toward the main street. Spying no movement back there, he ran at a crouch toward the shack’s small front stoop. A long sign stretched over the stoop announced WESTERN UNION TELEGRAPH AND U.S. MAIL. Dangerous Dan flipped the steel and leather latch and shoved the door wide, stepping inside, then quickly closing the door behind him.

  Leaves had scuttled in around his boots.

  He winced at the leaves. Mercy kept a neat place. She’d give him hell for that.

  “Mercy?” he called softly into the shack’s darkness, which was rife with the smell of the telegraph woman’s supper—meat and gravy. He could see no light emanating from her personal quarters toward the rear. It was a cold night. Mercy often turned in early on cold nights.

  Dangerous Dan gave a caustic chuff.

  He strode past a cold potbelly stove, an ancient upholstered armchair with a book propped under one leg, and the telegrapher’s cage. He pushed through the curtain to Mercy’s private quarters and was met by a wave of warm, dry, smoky air.

  “Mercy?”

  He saw the umber glow of a lamp turned low. A gun hammer clicked back. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light embedded in shadows, he saw the gun aimed at him from the bed to the left of the lamp propped on an upended fruit crate.

  A woman’s deep voice, taut with anger, said, “It better be damned good, whoever you are. I was deep asleep and havin’ one o’ the best dreams I’ve had in a month of Sundays!”

  “Mercy, for God sakes, it’s Dan. Put the gun down, you crazy bitch!”

  The gun clicked again as the hammer was depressed. The revolver’s rust-mottled barrel rose and slid sideways to reveal a round, pudgy, blunt-nosed face, ever so vaguely feminine below a red knitted night sock. “Danny?”

  “Put the gun down!”

  Mercy set the old Remington conversion on the crate beside the lamp and sat up straighter on the bed, scowling at the man walking toward her down the short low-ceilinged hall. “What’re you doin’ here so late, Danny boy? You know you’re liable to get beefed, skulkin’ around ole Mercy’s quarters after dark on such a cold damn night.”

  The woman’s voice grew shriller, more grieved. “I was havin’ the best dream I’ve had in years, too!” She punched the mattress beside her.

  “Oh, yeah?” Dangerous Dan stopped at the foot of the wood-frame bed and grinned. “What were you dreamin’ about?”

  Mercy Blevins wrinkled her brows. “Just you never mind!” A seedy smile shone through the admonishing glower. “Suffice it to say the scudder wasn’t no Nancy, I’ll give him that!”

  Dan chuckled. Mindful of why he was here, he glanced behind him as though expecting The Revenger to have followed him into the telegrapher’s shack.

  Turning back to Mercy, he gestured urgently. “Come on! Come on! Get up! I got a message you gotta send down to Socorro, Mercy!”

  Mercy had dropped her heavy legs over the edge of her bed. Clad in a long striped flannel nightshirt, the stout middle-aged woman was blinking and yawning and smacking her lips. “Oh, Christ. I ain’t open for business, Dan. I was havin’ the best dream of the past six lonely years!”

  “I know, I know. You done said he wasn’t no Nancy.” Dan grabbed her arm and began pulling her to her feet. “But I got somethin’ important to send down to Socorro. Way more important than your well-hung soldier!”

  “He was a prince! A tall Russian prince! And he was a gentleman!”

  “All right, more important than your tall, well-hung, gentleman-like Russian prince! Come on, Mercy, dammit! I don’t have all night!”

  “Oh, stop tuggin’ on my arm—you’re gonna pull it right out of its socket, damn you, Danny! I gotta grab my robe and slippers. I’m an old person! Oh, dear, it’s awful cold and late to be roused from such a rare and wonderful dream!” the woman whined.

  Dangerous Dan stepped back, fidgeting impatiently and glancing back toward the front of the place. “You can get back to your prince just as soon as you send the telegram.”

  “If he’s still there!”

  Mercy pushed up from her creaky bed, ambled past a small potbelly stove breathing and creaking in a corner, and grabbed a red velvet gown with a rabbit-fur collar off a wall hook. She slid her pudgy feet into a pair of rabbit-skin slippers and, groaning miserably, followed Dan back through the curtain and into the telegrapher’s main office.

  She pushed through the flimsy wooden door into the cage and turned to place a hand on Dangerous Dan’s chest. “No, just me! It’s against Western Union regulations for anyone to be back here but the operator!”

  “Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Mercy. Do you see any Western Union folks lurkin’ around in here this evening?”

  “Rules are rules!”

  Dan threw his hands up in defeat. “All right, all right!”

  When the old woman had gotten a lamp lit, she slid a manila telegraph request pad through the cage with a pencil. “Fill that out as legibly as you can. The harder you make it for me to read, the harder it will be for me to key, thus the longer it will take for me to send.”

  “Oh, Christ, Mercy, can’t I just tell you what I want you to send? It’s real short!”

  “Western Union needs a written record of every transaction. Rules are rules. If you don’t wanna follow ‘em, I’ll be headin’ back to my prince!”

  Dangerous Dan cursed, picked up the pencil, wet the tip on his tongue, and carefully penciled his missive to Luther Creed, New Mexico Territory.

  JURGENS, STACY, MACALLISTER ALL DEAD

  WARNING!!!!

  REVENGER ON THE WAY

  (Signed)

  DANGEROUS DAN TUCKER, MARSHAL, SILVER CITY, NEW MEX. TERR.

  He tore the page from the book and passed it through the cage to the yawning Mercy, who donned a pair of round wire-rimmed spectacles to read it, running her pudgy index finger under each word as she went along.

  Dan impatiently tapped his pencil on the counter. “Just send it, Mercy. Just send the damn thing!”

  Mercy looked at him through the cage. “Who is this Revenger fella?”

  “Trouble, Mercy,” Dan said. “Trouble!”

  “Oh, Dan,” Mercy said, pursing her thin lips at him sympathetically from the other side of the telegrapher’s cage. “I see now why you’re such a nervous Nelly this evening. Someone’s killed your friends! But what does Creed have to do with this? Danny, I told you to stay clear of that man!”

  “Consarn it, Mercy, that man is rich. I gotta think about my future! Now, will you...”

  Dangerous Dan let his voice trail off as the old woman held up a placating hand and turned to her key. Sitting down before it, she went to work, making it clatter. As she did, Dan walked over to a window and parted the curtains.

  The lawman sucked a sharp breath and pulled his head back away from the window. He slid his Bisley from its holster, and, clicking the hammer back, edged another cautious glance around the window frame, and gazed out into the street.

  A figure stood in front of the old assayer’s building. A big man, judging by his silhouette. He was leaning against an awning support post. The white patches of his pinto vest shone in the shadows. The coal of a cigar shone burnt orange as the man who could only be Sartain raised it to his lips and drew on it.

  Dangerous Dan could see the pale smoke billowing around the man’s head in the darkness. A breeze blew leaves around The Revenger’s feet.

 
The key stopped clattering.

  Mercy’s chair barked across the rough wooden floor.

  She looked through her cage and removed her spectacles, frowning. “Dan, what’re you doing over there?”

  “Shh!” Dangerous Dan waved urgently to her. “Step back, Mercy! He’ll see you!”

  “Who’ll see me?” Mercy said, stepping back into the shadows and turning the lamp low.

  Dangerous Dan edged another look out the window. Sartain no longer stood in front of the assayer’s office. The only movement was the leaves blowing this way and that in the chill, chaotic wind.

  “Nobody,” Dangerous Dan said, suddenly feeling smug as he imagined the two-thousand-dollar check he’d soon be cashing. That and likely a sizable reward Luther Creed would bestow upon him as well, along with a great amount of favor. Creed was a powerful man, and Dangerous Dan knew what side his bread was buttered on.

  “Just a man I’m gonna kill. That’s all,” he said.

  He turned to the old woman staring through the cage at him and grinned. “That’s all, Momma.”

  “Oh, son,” Mercy said. “Don’t you go diggin’ a hole you can’t climb out of now, you hear?”

  Dangerous Dan scowled at her. He doffed his hat in frustration and batted it against his thigh. “Do you think that just once you could show just a little confidence in your only child?”

  Mercy clucked and ambled out of the cage.

  She moved over to Dangerous Dan, wrapped her arms around him, and pressed her cheek against his chest. Dan wrapped his arms around Mercy’s thick body and sucked back an anxious sob.

  “You wanna stay here with ole Mercy tonight, Danny?” the woman asked him.

  Dangerous Dan drew a ragged breath. He stared at her pensively. “What about your prince?”

  Mercy looked up at him and smiled. “I got my prince right here.”

  She pinched his cheeks, rose on her tiptoes to peck his lips, then took his hand and led him back through the curtained doorway.