“I don’t mind the smell of tobacco smoke, Aunty Flo,” the girl said now, blinking dust from her eyelashes as she slid her gaze toward the sweating prospector. “Indeed, it might help cover the nasty stench of liquor sweat that fairly permeates the carriage.”
Aunty Flo laughed nervously as she glanced at the indignantly scowling prospector.
She kissed young Edina’s forehead as she said, “’That fairly permeates the carriage.’ Imagine such a vocabulary from a child born and raised in this savage land, in the rollicking mining camps of the Piños Altos. A voracious reader is my darling child. She taught herself how to read! Books have saved her from the soft-headedness that so infects most who inhabit the farthest reaches of this region. Thank goodness, however, that young Edina, now an orphan, has been rescued by her Aunty Flo. No longer a wild child, she is en route to Philadelphia, where she’ll make a lady at last! And an educated one!”
The old woman flushed. “I didn’t mean, of course, that it’s fortunate Edina has been orphaned—by the typhoid, don’t you know—but merely that since she has now found herself without benefit of family, she has her aunty to save her from this ghastly place and appoint her with all the benefits of wealth and society! Of course, I’m not bragging. Never cared for a braggart. ‘God gives grace to the proud but opposes the humble.’ St. Peter said that.”
“Wise man, Saint Pete,” said Sartain, scratching the lit coal from his long-nine on the window ledge and letting it drop over the door. “Let’s hope we all get to shake his humble hand one day. And I do apologize for the cigar, Aunty Flo.” He gave the woman a disarming wink. “My manners seem to have been compromised by...”
He glanced at young Edina, whose brash eyes were on him again, mouth-corners quirked in an alluring half smile.
“By distraction.”
“You are most certainly forgiven, Mister...uh...”
“Sartain,” the Cajun said, doffing his hat and giving his chin a courtly dip. “Mike Sartain. You and your child here are welcome to call me Mike.”
Edina gave a snort. Aunty Flo, who’d removed her arms from around her niece’s head, glanced at her skeptically. Edina brushed a fist across her nose and covered the snort with a cough against the dust.
The graybeard to Sartain’s right wheezed a laugh. The old woman cowed him with a look. He folded his arms across his chest, snuggled back into his corner, and closed his eyes.
Presently, he was snoring. A minute later, Aunty Flo had her own thick arms crossed on her mountainous breasts and was also snoring.
Edina turned her suddenly frank but not unironic gaze to Sartain and pressed her left knee against his much larger right one. “Are you from around here, Mike?”
“No, I’m not, Miss Edina. I’m from New Orleans.”
“Oh, I’ve read about New Orleans. A most colorful place, populated by races from across the globe!”
“Boy, you have done some reading.”
“Mrs. Heywood, our neighbor in the Piños Altos, was once a teacher, and had laid in a whole store of books that she carried out here from Indiana. I read them all, and then ordered some of my own the few rare times I could convince my folks to pay out a few pinches of dust for ‘em.”
Edina sighed as she squinted out the window. “I’ve read plenty about other places and other experiences. Unfortunately, all those other places are far from here, and all those experiences belonged to others—some real people, some fictional ones. Never mine.”
“Sounds like you’re about to have your fill of real experiences your own self, Miss Edina,” Sartain told her.
She wrinkled her nose at Aunty Flo, loudly sawing away, her snores badly out of sync with those of the old prospector. “I reckon.” Her gaze brashly swept the brawny man sitting across from her. The long, sexy, almond-shaped, lilac eyes fairly poked and prodded him like little fingers, causing a stirring in his primitive masculine depths.
Her eyes snapped wide. “Boy, that is a big gun you got strapped to your leg, Mike!”
“What, this one here?” Sartain said, closing his hand over the holstered LeMat.
But when he glanced at her again, her eyes were elsewhere and she was tucking her bottom lip under her upper front teeth, her soft cheeks coloring. Just then the stage began jerking violently to one side—Sartain’s and the girl’s side.
Edina gasped.
Aunty Flo snapped her eyes open, sat up straight, and said, “Oh Lord, are we doomed? I’ve heard this line has been plagued by highwaymen of late! I knew we should have taken the Creed line, but I just hated to give that villain my hard-earned—”
Sartain cut her off by yelling out the window, “Hold up there, jehu—you got a cracked wheel! Either that or the earth is opening up! Either way, you’d better check your team before this crate rattles plum apart!”
“Whoah, you mangy cayuses!” bellowed the jehu from up in the driver’s boot. “Hold on there, Jasper! Stop pullin’, Geronimo, you stubborn old crow bait. You know what I’m tellin’ you. Don’t let on like you don’t, or I’ll send you to the glue factory myself!”
When the driver finally got the coach stopped, Aunty Flo said, “Lordy, how close did we come to certain death, Mike? Give it to me straight. I may be from the East, but I can take it!”
“Ah, it’s nothin’, Aunty Flo,” Sartain said, offering the old bird another disarming grin. “Judging by feel, I’d say we just cracked a wheel, is all. Maybe lost the rim. Either way, it’s all fixable though we might be delayed a bit.”
He opened the door and offered Edina his hand. “May I assist you down, dear?”
“Mike,” Aunty Flo said haughtily, swatting her niece’s hand away from the Cajun’s, “please keep your hands to yourself. Edina is young and spry and doesn’t need any help from single males with, if I may say so, a devilish glint in his rather overly masculine and inquisitive gaze.”
She extended her pudgy gloved hand to The Revenger. “I, on the other hand, will accept your offer.”
Edina snickered as she pushed out the door and leaped deer-like to the ground.
Sartain said, “Of course, Aunty Flo,” and took the old woman’s hand. He helped her with no little effort out of her seat. It was like hoisting a half-filled rain barrel clad in ten pounds of gingham and billowy lace.
Breathing hard, Sartain stepped out and then took the woman’s hand once more.
By the time he’d gotten Aunt Flo to the ground—there didn’t appear to be a portable step aboard the dilapidated Concord—he felt as though at least three of his lowermost vertebrae were bulging. He straightened with a wince against the ache in his back, then turned to the driver and shotgun messenger, both older, bearded, dust-caked frontiersman who were uncertainly scrutinizing the left rear wheel, shaking their heads and muttering under their breath at the problem.
“Ah, crap, Melvin, we’re gonna have to unhitch old Geronimo and ride back to the Silver Gulch Station fer a new wheel. If’n they have one, that is!” grieved the driver, who appeared at least eighty though he certainly couldn’t have been that old. The sun and wind had worked him over without mercy.
The shotgunner, who was named Melvin Burdette, didn’t look much younger. He merely stood with his fists on his hips, shaking his head.
Sartain sighed and led the women into the shade of some cedars ringing a small open area among clay-colored boulders about ten yards from the trail. The old prospector was kicking around for dry wood for a coffee fire. When Sartain had obeyed Aunty Flo’s orders to fetch a blanket from one of her three steamer trunks in the stagecoach’s boot and had spread it on the ground for the women, he helped the prospector scrounge for deadfall branches.
He also helped the man lower the level on a small, tin traveling flash the codger carried in his canvas coat pocket. “It’s a hard life, mate,” Elmer Hodges told Sartain, “and I don’t intend to spend another moment of it sober.”
“Where you heading, Hodges?” Sartain asked the man as they each carried an armload of wood bac
k to the makeshift bivouac.
“Australia.”
“Kinda far, ain’t it?”
“Goin’ home to die, my boy. Goin’ home to die. I don’t know what I have, but I got me a pain in my chest and a bloody cough. I thought I’d go home a rich man or die here in the American West, but with the eternal firmament starin’ at me every night as I lay me head down on me pillow, I decided to go home and pay me last respects to me mum. Still alive, she is, at one hundred and three. Just got a letter back from her last summer.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“We’re all damned, me boy. Some more than others.” Hodges grinned at the girl, Edina, resting in the shade by her aunt and twirling a small wildflower across her full lips. “But the man who dips his wick into that one there’s liable to forget that fact for at least a few blissful hours.”
He snorted a laugh and dropped his load of wood in the shade of the cedars.
As Hodges built a fire, Sartain walked back out to the trail. The shotgun messenger was just riding off bareback in the direction of the last stage station, which was probably a good ten miles over rugged terrain.
“He won’t get back before dark,” Sartain told the driver.
“No,” said the jehu, digging a bottle out of the jockey box secured to the side of the stage beneath the driver’s boot. “Even if he does, we won’t get the new wheel wrestled back on the axle till daylight. Oh, well, them’s the cards.” He popped the cork on the bottle and tipped it back, then ran the lip across his grimy shirt and offered it to Sartain. “Sup?”
“No thanks,” said the Cajun, looking around. “We’re gonna need something to eat for supper. One of us best get looking.” He glanced back toward where Edina was wrapping a quilt over Aunty Flo’s shoulders, the old woman not looking one bit happy about the sudden crudeness and discomfort of their situation.
Edina glanced at Sartain and smiled.
Sartain retrieved his Henry rifle from the rear luggage boot, racked a round into the chamber, and strode off to look for supper.
Impatience gnawed at him. He wanted to get to Socorro and locate his quarry, Lucius Creed. He’d taken the Mangham stage because he’d wanted to give his stallion a break from the trail and he’d thought it would be the quickest and most efficient way of reaching Socorro.
He also thought that Creed wouldn’t be expecting his hunter by stage. Especially Mangham’s stage. The Revenger had no doubt that Creed knew he was coming. He’d followed the harried Dangerous Dan Tucker to the telegraph office the previous night. Who else would Dangerous Dan have been sending a missive to at that late hour, so soon after Sartain had dispatched Creed’s thugs?
Obviously, Creed was a powerful man with many men working and looking out for him, including the town marshal of Silver City. He might prove a hard target.
Sartain shot two large jackrabbits and a wild turkey inside of an hour. He tied a string around the carcasses and carried them back toward the fire he now saw flickering amongst the cedars. The autumn sun had set, and the night was fast closing over the mountains with a stony chill.
A figure stepped out of the shadows to Sartain’s right. The Revenger stopped and started to lower the Henry from his shoulder, but then kept it where it was.
Edina walked out of the shrubs. She’d removed her hat. Her brown hair was down, spilling prettily across her shoulders. The salmon light of the gloaming was reflected in her eyes.
Chapter 10
Edina pulled her head back from The Revenger’s with a gasp.
The blasts of rifles sounded like a close, violent mountain thunderstorm, cleaving the night wide open and the ground thudded beneath Sartain’s boots. Automatically, he pushed the girl away from him.
“What’s happening?” Edina yelled above the noise.
Men were shouting. Aunty Flo was wailing shrilly. She sounded like a dairy cow caught in a burning barn. Then her wails abruptly halted.
Sartain wrapped his cartridge belt, LeMat, and sheathed Bowie knife around his waist. He turned to where Edina sat looking up at him, her eyes bright with terror in the moonlight.
“You stay here and stay down, I’ll be back for you!” Sartain ordered.
“Aunty Flo,” Edina said. She hadn’t made it a question. It was just a pronouncement without any emotion attached to it.
Sartain didn’t know what to say to that. He merely donned his hat, grabbed his Henry from where it was leaning against the outcropping, racked a round into the chamber, and took off running up the slope.
When he’d run fifteen feet, the shooting dwindled sharply.
Then, after two more shots as though afterthoughts, silence moved down the slope toward him, hot and heavy as an ocean wave with a typhoon behind it. Sartain slowed his pace, moving quietly toward where he could see the soft pink glow of what remained of their cook fire.
Shadows moved around the camp in the cedars.
A man’s voice sounded inordinately loud in the wake of the cacophony, “Crap.” There was the crunch of boots stomping around among the trees. “I don’t see him.” More stomping. “I see those two old bastards and this old woman all dressed up like a peacock. We turned ‘em to blood puddin’. But I don’t see Sartain.”
“You know what he looks like?” asked a voice familiar to Sartain’s ears.
“Hell, Dan, what does it matter what he looks like? You think one of these two old bastards is him? Or maybe you think this old woman is Mike Sartain? Is that what you’re askin’ me, you cow-stupid son of a buck?”
“Dammit, Watkins, don’t you climb my hump!” warned Dangerous Dan Tucker.
“Shut up, both of you,” said another, lower voice.
Sartain dropped behind a deadfall aspen. He stared up the slope toward where the shadows were moving against the pink embers of the nearly dead fire and the moonlit sky above and behind them. He could occasionally see the silhouette of a Stetson or a raised rifle barrel, not much more.
He rested the Henry against the top of the deadfall aspen and quietly clicked the hammer back, pressing his cheek against the neck of the stock. He planted the sights on a shadow near the fire that wore a bowler hat. The Cajun began to draw his finger back against the trigger.
Footfalls sounded behind him. Edina said breathlessly and too loudly, “Mike, where are you?”
Sartain whipped his head around to shush the girl, but one of the men atop the hill yelled, “Sartain, you down there?”
“Get down!” Sartain rasped at the girl.
He bounded off his heels and, holding the Henry in one hand, threw himself into her. Edina screamed. As they hit the ground together, rifles began barking atop the hill. Edina screamed again as a bullet tore up the ground too close for comfort, spitting leaves over her and Sartain, who covered her with his body.
Lead continued to hammer the ground and the log behind which Sartain had crouched a moment ago, spraying bark and splinters over the cowering pair. Beneath Sartain, he could feel the girl’s supple body quivering and writhing. The men atop the hill whooped and hollered like coyotes on a blood scent.
The shooting tapered off.
Sartain rose to his knees. “Let’s go!” He grabbed Edina’s arm, jerked her to her feet, and began running at an angle across the slope. He held the girl’s wrist tightly in his hand, pulling her along behind him.
The men atop the slope shouted and resumed firing, the bullets plunking into the ground behind Sartain and Edina. After The Revenger pulled the girl behind a large boulder, the bullets hammered the rock.
The shooting tapered off again.
Sartain kept running across the slope, the boulder now between him, the girl, and the shooters.
Edina seemed able to keep up with him, so he released her arm. He glanced back to see her running hard, pumping her arms and legs. She was wearing only her camisole and pantaloons. That was all, just her billowy cream-colored underwear. She wore no shoes, or even stockings. Her arms, shoulders, and feet were bare.
“Holy C
hrist!” Sartain spat out. “Where’s your dress?”
“I didn’t bother with it!” Edina said breathlessly behind him.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. You left me alone back there, and I didn’t wanna take the time!” They took several more strides, Sartain wanting to put as much distance between him and the shooters as possible. “Mike, who was doin’ all that shooting?” Edina called to him. “Who were those men?”
Sartain stopped and turned to her. She nearly ran into him before she saw that he’d stopped running. She threw her hair back from her eyes and gazed up at him, her eyes glistening in the moonlight.
Sartain took her shoulders in her hands. “Those men are gunnin’ for me, Edina. I didn’t think they’d shoot innocent stage passengers to get to me, but I reckon that’s what they’ve done.”
“Aunty Flo?”
“Dead, most likely.”
Sartain stretched his gaze out behind the girl. The thuds of running boots and the snapping of brush rose from the moonlit darkness. In the quiet night, Sartain could hear the raking breaths of his pursuers.
“We gotta keep going,” he told the girl, glancing at her feet. “Can you make it?”
“I’ve gone barefoot nearly my whole life, Mike. I’m not used to shoes, especially those clompers Aunty Flo had me wearing!”
“All right, then.” Sartain wheeled. “Let’s go. Stay close to me!”
As he and Edina broke into another run, a man behind them shouted, “There—I hear ‘em!”
It was a vaguely familiar voice, but Sartain couldn’t place it. It wasn’t Dangerous Dan, but a voice belonging to someone else he’d encountered before, probably in Silver City.
Sartain stopped. “Keep going!” he told Edina, giving her a gentle shove.
The Revenger raised his Henry repeater, aiming from his right hip.
He clicked the hammer back and started firing, the big rifle roaring loudly, flames lapping from the barrel. Behind him, a man yowled.
Sartain held his fire and dropped to a knee, pricking his ears to listen.
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