As Abner approached the break, he slowed his pace and pressed his left shoulder against the wall of the barbershop and looked as far right down the street as he could. The bank was over that way, but all that Abner could see at the moment was web-like gun smoke wafting in the sunlight.
The gunfire was nearly deafening, and Abner felt himself clenching with each heavy, echoing blast. As he moved closer to the mouth of the break, he could see farther to the right along the street. After he moved another step, he stopped. A man lay in the middle of the street, on his side, facing toward the young deputy marshal’s side of the trace. He was bald, and he wore a red necktie and pinstriped shirt with sleeve garters.
Jim Hansen.
His eyes were open, but he wasn’t moving. He looked dead.
Now a blond young woman in a pink day dress came running along the street from Abner’s right.
“No!” she screamed. “No! Leave me!”
She cut herself off with another scream as two men overtook her, whooping and hollering. She was Mamie Davis, daughter of the bank president, Melvin Davis. She also helped her father balance his books, and she must have been doing that today when the Lazaro Gang had descended on the town.
The two men swept the girl off the street and dragged her kicking and screaming into the harness shop she’d just reached when the men had grabbed her. When they had Mamie inside the shop, one of the men kicked the door closed with a bang!
Abner could hear Mamie’s screams and her attackers’ ribald laughter beneath the shooting and shouting farther to the young deputy’s right.
Abner moved to the mouth of the break and stepped over to press his right shoulder against the wall of Mrs. Sully’s shop. He stiffened when he saw the carnage out in front of the bank, which sat on the next block to the right and on the opposite side of the street. At least half a dozen townsfolk, men as well as women, lay unmoving around the stomping hooves of the outlaws’ horses. The outlaws were galloping up and down the street, shooting willy-nilly.
Several riderless horses stood before the two saloons and judging by how they were just ground-reined and not running from the gunfire, they likely belonged to the gang.
Some of the gang was likely plundering the saloons and whorehouses while others were robbing the Shallow Ford Bank & Trust. The reins of three riderless horses were being held by one of the gang in front of the bank. Beneath the banging of the gang’s shooting, Abner could hear women screaming from inside the saloons and brothels. Men continued shouting from inside several businesses as well as out in the street.
Abner licked his dry lips and tried to press down the terror raging inside him. His tongue, lips, and mouth were as dry as an arroyo in the dead of summer. He’d never been so afraid. However, remembering how calmly he’d dispatched the man who’d run down Ellen gave him the confidence to attempt…what?
To attempt to get himself killed?
But what else could he do? Tell Bill Mitchell that not only had he been frolicking with his girl when the gang had thundered toward Shallow Ford, but when he’d reached town he just stood in an alley and watched?
He knew now that he’d been vaguely hoping a few of the men in the town would have taken up arms against the Lazaro bunch, and he’d be here to join them, to inform Lazaro in no uncertain terms that Shallow Ford would not take pillaging and plundering lightly.
Nor the savaging of its women, he silently added now, hearing Mamie’s screams issuing from inside the harness shop, beneath the shouting and grunting of the men raping her.
Abner stepped out of the alley and sort of slinked onto the boardwalk fronting the ladies’ apparel shop. Keeping to the shadows at the front of the buildings lining this side of the main street, he moved slowly in the direction of the bank, holding the cocked Spencer high across his chest.
Rage was burning hotter and hotter in him now, as he saw the outlaws laughing and yelling to each other and tipping bottles stolen out of the saloons. Two men came hauling a half-naked dove out of the purple-painted brothel three doors down from the bank. Abner saw the bright red hair of the girl being unceremoniously led into the street.
That would be Miss Angeline from Lincoln, Nebraska, a timid girl who played the piano during the bailes Miss Edna, the madam, often held at her hurdy-gurdy parlor on Saturday nights.
Two riders were thundering down the street in Abner’s direction, triggering their revolvers at the second stories of the buildings around them. Abner ducked down behind a stack of shipping crates out front of Meachum’s Grocery Store. As the two men passed, whooping and hollering, two bullets slammed into the stack of crates, making it quiver.
Abner gritted his teeth.
When the men had passed, he stepped off the boardwalk fronting the grocery store and dropped to a knee at the end of the raised boardwalk fronting the next building, a furniture store. His hands oozed sweat around the forestock and the neck of the Spencer. He hunkered low behind the boardwalk, resting the Spencer across the sun-slivered planks.
He stared at the bank now sitting catty-corner across the street from him. His hands tightened around the rifle when he saw three men walk out of the bank. They were moving as casual as you please, one smoking a long, black cheroot like he was just stepping out for a bit.
Gray smoke was boiling out of the twin open doors of the bank behind him.
He had a pair of saddlebags draped over his right shoulder. In his right hand, he held a long-barreled, silver-chased Russian revolver.
As he talked and laughed with the men around him—some sitting horses, some standing—he broke open the top-break pistol and emptied the spent cartridges into the street. He was a tall, fair-skinned hombre with a ginger beard. He wore a brown square-crowned Stetson and knee-high riding boots. Two cartridge bandoliers crisscrossed his chest, under a long, black leather duster. A bowie knife jutted from the back of each boot.
He wore a white shirt, a businessmen’s red foulard tie, and pinstriped trousers stuffed into the boots.
Abner’s heart quickened and skipped beats.
Ramon Lazaro!
The short man standing beside Lazaro pointed at something on the far side of the street. Then he and Lazaro laughed, and Lazaro called in his thick, Spanish accent, “Now, that’s called bucking the tiger, eh, amigos!”
He laughed louder, throwing his red-bearded head back. Abner turned to see what he and the others were looking at. A fresh wave of rage burned through him.
Two of the gang members had Miss Angeline bent forward across a water barrel directly across the street from the bank. One had mounted her from behind. He’d thrust her white cotton nightgown up so that it was bunched around her waist. He’d lowered his pants to his knees. His ass was as pale as sun-bleached flour as he thrust violently against the girl, whose head the other hombre was holding down with both hands and laughing.
The girl didn’t move. She didn’t make a sound. Her face was turned toward Abner. Now he saw that her eyes had met his. Her pale, oval-shaped face was expressionless as she was forced to submit to the two outlaws’ humiliation and savagery.
Something exploded inside of Abner. Again, he seemed to be watching himself from a short distance away as he rose from where he’d been hunkering behind the boardwalk and leaped onto the raised planks.
“Nooooo!” he bellowed, raising the Spencer and ramming the brass butt plate against his right shoulder.
Calmly but quickly, he planted the beads on the side of the man’s head crouched over the girl from behind.
The Spencer thundered, spatting smoke and flames.
The outlaw raping Miss Angeline had just turned his head toward Abner when the bullet careened through his left eye and blew out the back of his skull behind his right ear.
His head jerked violently. He pulled back away from the girl, staggered, then tripped over his trousers and hit the dusty street in a pile.
Abner quickly cocked the Spencer and whipped around to face the bank, vaguely intending to make the gang leade
r, Lazaro himself, his next target. But before he could get the rifle raised again, nearly every member of the gang on the street fronting the bank was aiming a pistol or rifle at him.
The guns blossomed smoke and flames.
Abner heard himself scream as he was punched back through the plate glass window of the furniture store.
And then all he heard as the chill darkness enveloped him was the strumming of an angel’s harp.
Chapter 3
The Revenger, Mike Sartain, led his big buckskin around a bend in the game trail he’d been following for several miles and spied a small fire flickering in a copse of cottonwoods, not fifty yards ahead. Smoke skeined upward through the branches just now catching the salmons and ochres of the last light.
He cupped a hand to his mouth and called in a voice not so loud as to sound threatening, “Halloo, the camp.”
The response from the camp was the metallic rasp of a rifle being cocked.
The rifle barked. A bullet blew up grass about three feet in front of Sartain. The Revenger’s buckskin, Boss, jerked his reins out of his rider’s hands and gave an indignant whinny, lurching away.
As the rifle was cocked once more, Sartain yelled, “Hold on!”
Despite his plea, he saw the rifle being trained on him from behind a log near the fire. He ran to his right, dove and rolled as the rifle barked again, the bullet slamming into the far side of the log he just now rolled behind. He clawed his big, silver-chased LeMat revolver from its holster thonged low on his right thigh.
As he cocked the LeMat, a man’s voice bellowed from the direction of the fire, “Mercy, put that fire stick down, damn your crazy female hide!”
Sartain lay on his side behind the log, keeping his head down and gritting his teeth. The rifle blasted again. Sartain could feel the slug hammering the log he was leaning back against.
The man’s voice bellowed once more, “Mercy, dammit, will you listen to your old pa?”
There was a shrill scream and the sounds of a scuffle. A girl grunted. A man grunted and cursed.
There was a brief silence before the man’s voice called through the trees, “It’s all right, Mister. I’ve dehorned this polecat. You can come on in...if’n your friendly, that is. If not, I hope you’ve made right with your Maker, because I’ll be givin’ this fire stick back to this trigger-happy female of mine!”
The man laughed deeply, raspily.
Sartain lifted his head above the log. He stared toward the fire. A big, burly, bearded gent stood in front of the dancing flames, cradling a rifle in his arms. He wore a buffalo-hide coat and a buffalo-hide hat, both of which gave him the aspect of a small bear.
A slender girl with long, dark-brown hair stood behind him, looking disheveled. She just now angrily swept her hair back behind her head with one hand and stood staring toward Sartain with one hip cocked.
She looked like a wildcat ready to pounce.
“You sure it’s all right?” The Revenger called cautiously.
The old man laughed again and glanced at the slender girl flanking him. “Yeah, she’ll be all right. I got her firestick. She might have a knife or two on her purty little person, but I’ll make sure she don’t poke ya none!”
“I’m friendly,” Sartain assured the big man.
“All right, then. We’re fine as frog hair. Fetch your horse and come on in for a cup of Arbuckle’s.” The big man beckoned broadly with one arm. “Mercy here just brewed a fresh pot. If I talk to her nice, she might even let me add a couple jiggers of who-hit-John!”
He laughed again with his whole body, throwing his bearded head back.
Sartain continued to rise, keeping his eye on the girl, who appeared defanged for the moment. “All right,” the Cajun said, running a hand through his shaggy, curly hair and then stooping to retrieve his hat. “Who-hit-John is just my style.”
He holstered his LeMat and began walking out to where Boss stood a good seventy yards away, grazing. “I’ll be along in a minute.”
It took him a good five, six minutes to run down his horse. The buckskin was always owly after close gunfire, as though its feelings were hurt. The big stallion was obviously preferring to graze peacefully alone out in the bromegrass and widely scattered cottonwoods, with only a few chickadees and nuthatches for company. But his rider finally ran him down, grabbed his reins, and led him back in the direction of the camp.
He approached slowly when he saw the girl sitting on a stump near the crackling flames, whittling a stick into a bird of some variety. The knife was large. It looked akin to a bowie but was probably homemade. It looked sharp.
In the girl’s obviously adept hands, it made Sartain’s flesh feel a tad sensitive.
The big man lay on the ground, resting back against a deadfall log. He had his right foot propped on a rock. He wore a grimy sock on it. Unless the man had elephant feet, the foot was badly swollen. He appeared sixty or so, a broad bearded face and rosy-cheeked, with large, dark-brown eyes.
The eyes danced with humor. In that way, they were in direct contrast to the girl’s eyes, which owned a sharp, feral, brooding quality. They were amethyst green. They were green wolf’s eyes, but she was darker than her fair-skinned father. She was strikingly pretty despite the rawness of her features and the unkempt quality of her long, tangled, dark-brown hair. She had a small, pale, slightly twisted scar on the nub of her right cheek. It had been a brutal cut.
She too wore a buffalo coat, but it was not as long as her father’s. It dropped just past her slender waist. She wore a loose-fitting buckskin blouse over what appeared red men’s long-handles, faded smoke-stained denim trousers, and men’s brown riding boots. A small hide sack, like an Indian’s medicine sack, dangled down her chest from a rawhide thong around her neck.
As she whittled, she frequently shifted her blazing green wolf’s eyes from the stick, which appeared to be a blue heron in the making, to the man just now stepping up to the edge of her and the old man’s camp.
“Welcome, welcome, my friend!” intoned the old man. “Don’t mind Mercy and the knife. She’s promised to play nice—haven’t you, girl?”
The old man laughed again.
Mercy didn’t say anything. She continued to whittle and glare at the newcomer though her expression showed some mild interest, as well. When she returned her frequent gaze to The Revenger, her eyes seemed to shift around on him, sizing up his tall, broad, rather impressive figure clad in a green plaid mackinaw worn open over a pinto vest, denim trousers, and the big LeMat hanging down his thigh.
The broad brim of his sand-colored Stetson shaded his cobalt eyes and hawk’s nose. A snakeskin band was stretched around the hat’s crown.
Sartain poked his hat brim off his forehead. “Name’s Sartain. I don’t normally interrupt a man’s...and a girl’s...camp, but I glassed you a ways back and it didn’t look like you had any grub to cook, so...”
The girl looked at him. She had a deep raspy voice but, despite the darkness of her features aside from the wolf-green eyes, she spoke uninflected English. “You glassed us?”
“Yeah. You know, trained my field glasses on you...from a ridge a ways back.”
The girl looked at him through those wolf’s eyes, like a wolf sizing up a possible meal.
“Sorry,” The Revenger said. “I didn’t mean to offend. I’m only...uh...cautious. Big, empty country out here, this neck of western Kansas. A feller can’t be too careful about, uh, who he shares a fire with.”
He gave the girl an ironic smile. She only stared dully back at him.
“Ain’t that the truth?” laughed the old man.
“So, I glassed you and saw you didn’t have any food to cook. Well, I got food to cook—a whole quarter of a deer strapped behind my saddle there. I also got a horse that threw its shoe earlier this afternoon. Threw it into a wooded canyon where I couldn’t find it so I could reset it. I was hoping you might be able to direct me to a settlement that might have a blacksmith who’d do the job for me.”
“What’d you do there?”
“I was out huntin’ a deer or the like for supper tonight, and my hoss spooked at a coyote and sent me tumblin’ down a ravine. Used to be I could take a tumble like that and bounce right back up, but somehow I twisted the holy livin’ crap out of my ankle here.”
“What’re you folks doing way out here, if you don’t mind me bein’ nosy?”
“Cuttin’ wood. Winter’s on the way. Been too busy over the summer, trappin’ an’ such, to lay in a good enough firewood supply to see us through. Last winter was colder’n a gravedigger's ass, if you’ll pardon my barn talk, and my old bones say this winter’s gonna be even worse.”
He shuddered at the thought.
“Say, I’m Ludwig Van der Deutch, and that polecat there is my dear daughter, Mercy.”
“Ludwig Van der...”
“Van der Deutch. Named after some Prussian king, I been told, though I always been poor as dirt, even back in Ohio where I hail from. My mother had high expectations, I reckon. I came out here about ten years before the Little Misunderstanding Between the States to make my fortune huntin’, trappin’, and scoopin’ gold right out of the creek bottoms and into my wagon, don’t ya know.”
Van der Deutch made a digging gesture with his arms and laughed his booming laugh again.
He laughed so loudly that a coyote began howling incredulously from a distant ridge. The sun was down now, and a thin, purple light was beginning to fill the shallow, wooded valley. It was late fall, so the day had been cool, but it would get cooler soon. Probably well below freezing.
“Night soon,” The Revenger said. “I’ll picket my horse and we can get this deer roasting,” The Revenger said.
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