“Pa!” Mercy screamed again when she’d rolled her father over and saw the blood oozing from the hole in the middle of his chest. She placed her hands over it, as though to stop it, and screamed once more, “Paaaaa!”
But then a strong hand grabbed her arm and jerked her to her feet. She glanced over her shoulder to see a mustached man in a bullet-crowned Stetson sitting a roan horse behind her. He gave her arm another tug. She tried to wrench it from his grip, but there was no doing. He was far stronger than she was.
He bunched his lips beneath his mustache, tugged on her arm again, and sent her sailing up onto his horse behind his saddle.
“No!” Mercy screamed and threw herself off the other side of the horse, the trail slamming a lightning bolt of pain through her right shoulder.
She scrambled to her feet and ran, stumbling. She’d hurt her knee in the fall, so she couldn’t run as she normally did, which was fast.
“Damn you!” shouted her attacker.
Hooves drummed behind her. She glanced back and screamed when she saw him bearing down on her, his coiled lariat in his hand.
He whipped the rope at her. She threw up her arm, but the blow was still enough to throw her off her feet. She hit the ground hard again, groaning, trying to regain her feet once more. The rope had caught her across the right jaw, causing a burning welt. She could feel blood oozing from it.
“Goddamn you, son of Satan!” Mercy screamed.
“Goddamn me?” shouted the dark-eyed outlaw, swinging down from his saddle. “Goddamn, you!”
As he strode toward her, the lariat still in his hand, Mercy regained her feet and started to run again.
“Leave me alone, you bastard!”
The man laughed as he caught up to her and pushed her forward.
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere!”
Mercy ran wildly, trying to keep her feet beneath her, but she lost her balance, fell and rolled. As she sat up, the man was still coming toward her, throwing the coiled lariat away, doffing his hat, and moving his hand to the fly of his wool trousers.
Mercy cursed him again as he knelt before her.
“Shut up!” He smacked her across the face. “You crazy little bitch. You’re needin’ a good tamin’. That’s what you need, and I’m just the son of a bitch to give it to you!”
Mercy lunged at him, smashed her fist against his jaw.
That enraged him even more. He slapped her again, harder, and she fell back and slammed the back of her head against the ground. That dazed her. For a moment, he saw two men kneeling between her legs, two men fishing their already erect staphs out of their flies. Grinning lustily, breathing hard, the cold-eyed man crouched over her, grabbed her shirt, and ripped it open.
Then he ripped the chemise open, as well, laying her bare.
“Nice!” He laughed and began unbuttoning her denims. “Very nice!”
When the two-man images had merged into just one again, Mercy saw that he had her denims and panties pulled down to her knees.
“No!” Mercy yelled, trying to sit up so she could punch him, but he was holding her down with one hand mashed hard against her right breast.
As he leaned down farther, mounting her, Mercy saw the walnut-gripped revolver jutting from the holster still belted around his waist. The handle of the gun was angled toward Mercy. The man’s attention was on other things, however. Mercy’s heart hammered desperately as she sat up slightly, closed her hand over the revolver’s grip, released the leather keeper thong from over the hammer, and ripped the gun from its holster.
The man turned his head slightly to see what she was doing.
“Hey!” He removed his left hand from her breast to grab for the gun.
Mercy ratcheted the hammer back. Just as the man got his hand wrapped around the top of the revolver, she squeezed the trigger.
The gun roared.
She’d fired so close to the man’s chest that the powder set his shirt on fire. He screamed and jerked back, gray smoke billowing around the blood gushing out of the hole in his chest.
“Oh!” he cried, sagging backward and sideways, looking suddenly pathetic and silly with his shirt on fire, blooding oozing out of him.
Mercy fired the pistol again. She laughed as she fired again, again, and again, until the man lay crumpled beside her, his chest and belly a mass of red. His entire body jerked. His cold eyes stared at the sky, unblinking.
Mercy pulled her trousers up and scrambled to her feet. She grinned devilishly as she half-closed one eye, aimed the cocked revolver carefully down at the outlaw’s crotch, and fired the last shot.
“You won’t be ravaging no girls wherever you are now, you son of a buck,” she grated out through clenched teeth. She tossed away the empty pistol and brushed her fist across her nose.
Her heart lurched as she sensed a presence behind her.
Mercy wheeled and found herself staring at the leg of a man astraddle a horse.
Chapter 7
“Mercy!”
Sartain swung down from Boss’s back.
“Oh, Mike!” Mercy wept, throwing her arms around him and pressing her cheek to his chest. “Oh, Mike...he...they...killed my pa!”
Sartain hugged her tightly, rocked her gently from side to side. “Oh, Mercy,” he said, as she bawled in his arms, her tears soaking his shirt. “Oh, Mercy...”
He held her like that for a long time. Finally, she pulled her head away, sniffing, tears rolling down her face. “Are you all right?” he asked her.
Mercy glared down through tear-glazed eyes at the bloody dead man staring glassily at the sky. “I fixed this son of a bitch,” she said through gritted teeth. She turned to gaze at The Revenger. “The others...they rode away. There was fifty of ‘em, at least.”
“There was a bunch,” Sartain said. “I saw ‘em, too, south a ways. At first, I thought they were just cowpunchers on their way to town. But after I rode a ways, I realized somethin’ was layin’ right about them rannies. And I knew you’d be in their trail.” Holding her head in his hands, he brushed her tears away with his thumbs. “I’m sorry I didn’t figure it out, sooner, sweetheart.”
“It’s all right,” Mercy said, wrapping her hands around his wrists and sobbing again. “There wouldn’t be much you could have done, Mike. There may not have been fifty, but there was a lot of ‘em!”
She turned away, crossing her arms over her exposed breasts, and walked over to where her father lay on the far side of the trail. “I have to see to Poppa.”
Sartain looked down at the dead man. He gave a caustic snort, seeing what she’d done to him. He gave the carcass a fierce kick in the side.
“You rot in hell, you bastard!” he raked out, and then followed Mercy into the brush beyond the trail.
Mercy knelt beside her father, head bowed, crying uncontrollably while holding old Van der Deutsch’s left hand.
“Oh, Poppa!” she cried. “Oh, Poppa, Poppa, Poppa!”
Sartain stepped away. The girl needed privacy. He looked around. The wood wagon sat near a cottonwood copse a couple of hundred yards away to the south, well off the trail. Sartain swung up onto Boss’s back and rode out along the trail before swinging off its left side. The two horses in the wagon’s hitch looked at him warily, flicking their ears.
“It’s all right, fellas. Easy, now,” he said softly, holding up his hand palm out.
He stopped Boss when it looked like the two duns were going to bolt, the wagon wheels turning. One of the horses whickered and shook its head, rattling the bit in its teeth.
Sartain swung down from the saddle, walked slowly up to the team, moving around to the front and gently patting their snouts, calming them. As he did, he glanced back to where Mercy lay near her father.
Sartain felt as though a knife had been rammed through his breastbone and into his heart. He remembered finding his beloved Jewel in the aftermath of the soldiers’ attack on her and her grandfather’s shack. Jewel and their child, that was—the one she’d miscarried d
uring the rape that was resting beside the bloody, naked, blonde young woman Sartain had considered his wife although they’d hadn’t yet officially married.
Jewel’s grandfather, a kind, odd old desert rat, lay several yards away. He’d been gut-shot and left to die. He’d probably witnessed the gang rape before he’d died.
Sartain knew how Mercy felt. It wasn’t a feeling that wouldn’t go away anytime soon, either. It was a wound you tended. What had helped him was running down each of the soldiers who had raped and murdered Jewel and the old man. He’d tracked them all down and killed them in a bitter, fire-breathing fury.
Most of them had begged for mercy. He hadn’t given it. Sartain didn’t believe in mercy. Not that kind, anyway, he thought, gazing at the poor girl sobbing over her dead father.
Sartain walked around to the side of the wagon and engaged the brake. He tied Boss to the tailgate and then climbed onto the wagon seat, disengaged the brake, and clucked to the two-horse team. Both horses shook their heads. One gave a skeptical whinny. Then they turned, and the wagon began rolling back toward the scene of Van der Deutsch’s murder and Mercy’s near-rape.
As he rode slowly back to the trail, he considered the gang of roughnecks. That they were outlaws, there was little doubt. The Revenger hadn’t heard of a gang that size operating in this stretch of Nebraska, but such a group usually traveled far and wide, hitting banks or mining camps and running hard and far to evade the law.
Most gangs that size enjoyed the terror they evoked, as well. They reveled in it. Terror was like a drug for them. That’s most likely why they’d attacked the Van der Deutsches. To instill more terror and wreak havoc as well as to sate their unbridled male lust. A gang that size could not be seen as a group of men. It was a single, savage beast with one brain, one leader. It was a pack of wolves running off their leashes.
It needed to be hunted down and exterminated with the utmost prejudice.
Sartain stopped the wagon near where Mercy still knelt by her father. He set the brake, climbed down, and walked over to place his hands on her shoulders.
“I’ll help you get him back home, girl.”
She sniffed and looked at him, tears swimming in her eyes and still rolling down her cheeks. “Thanks, Mike.”
She stood and stepped off to the side, drawing her torn shirt closed over her breasts. Sartain crouched to pick up the old man in his arms. Old Van der Deutsch was a big man, almost as large as Sartain himself. The Cajun grunted as he straightened with the dead weight in his arms.
He carried the body over to the wagon, lifted the dead man over the tailgate, and set him gently atop the split wood. He arranged the wood around Van der Deutsch, so the body wouldn’t roll, and then stepped back. Mercy stared over the tailgate at her father, and her lips quivered with fury.
“Bastards! They had no reason to kill my pa. No reason at all, Mike.” She turned to him, her upper lip curled. “It was like they...at least their leader...enjoyed killing.”
Sartain nodded. “That’s how it is with men like that. But they’re not men. They’re animals. Don’t you worry, girl. I’ll find ‘em. They’ll pay for what they did here.”
The girl glanced at him skeptically, then looked around, frowning. “My horse...”
“I’ll find him. You climb up in the wagon and get started. I’ll be close behind you.”
Sartain had seen the horse in the trees far east of where he’d found the wagon. He retrieved the animal after a short game of cat and mouse and led it on up the trail by its reins. He caught up to the wagon and rode up beside Mercy, who stared straight ahead.
She was no longer crying. Her cheeks were pale and tear-streaked, but she now had a hard light in her eyes, a cold, defiant set to her mouth.
That was good, thought the Cajun. Turn that sorrow into something you can actually use. That’s what he’d done.
He was still doing it. That’s what he used to help others now.
An hour later, the trail dipped down over a low, dun-brown hill and into a shallow bowl between low buttes. A fringe of trees followed the curve of the creek that ran along the bowl’s far side, at the base of the far buttes. The trees were mostly bare, but there were still a few splashes of gold and yellow.
In front of the trees hunched a long, low-slung log cabin with a front porch badly leaning to the right. Smoke unspooled from the brick chimney running up the cabin’s right wall. There were several log outbuildings, a corral, a windmill, and stock tank, and what Sartain assumed was a keeper shed for storing meat, near the creek.
Several colorful rugs were hanging from the porch rail. A slender woman with long, black hair and wearing a bright, blueprint dress and an apron was beating them with a stick. As Sartain followed Mercy and the wagon into the yard, the woman turned toward the wagon and raised a hand to shield her eyes from the sun.
She stared out from beneath her hand as the wagon crossed the yard. She didn’t move. She just stood there with one hand raised, the other hand holding the stick. Sartain’s belly tightened. He didn’t want to be here now. These two women should be left alone with their grief. But they’d need help with the body.
The woman whom Sartain assumed was Mercy’s mother didn’t say anything until the wagon had chirped and squawked to a stop before her. She seemed to be sensing that all was not right. She was a handsome, middle-aged Indian woman with coffee-brown features. Her hair was long and coarse. There was no gray in it, but it had a grizzled quality. The skin was pulled taut across her high, tapering cheekbones.
“Mercy,” she said in a throaty voice, without expression. She looked at Sartain and then back at her daughter. “Where...where is...your...”
She stopped as Mercy set the brake and climbed wearily down from the wagon. As her daughter approached, the old woman’s eyes dropped to the girl’s torn blouse and chemise. The old woman’s lips parted as though with a silent gasp.
“Mercy,” she said, frowning at the girl walking toward her.
Mercy didn’t say anything. She stopped in front of her mother, who was roughly Mercy’s height and then wrapped her arms around her mother’s shoulder, drawing her close. Though Mercy had her back to Sartain, he could tell that she was speaking into her mother’s right ear. He could see the girl’s jaw moving.
The old woman’s face, her chin resting on Mercy’s left shoulder, slowly crumpled. She didn’t sob or cry out or say anything at all. Her face just turned crumpled. And then she wrapped her arms around her daughter and closed her eyes, pressing her chin against Mercy’s shoulder.
After a time, Mercy took her mother’s hand and led her slowly over to the back of the wagon. The old woman appeared reluctant to look in the box. She stopped several feet away from it, staring at Mercy. But then she walked forward. When she did look in the box and saw her husband laying on the mounded wood near the tailgate, her knees buckled.
“Mama!” Mercy exclaimed, grabbing her mother to keep her from falling.
Sartain swung down from the saddle, ran over to Mercy, and picked her mother up in his arms.
“I got her,” he told Mercy. “Lead the way.”
Mercy strode ahead of him, climbed the porch steps, and threw open the front door. Sartain took the unconscious woman inside and lay her in her bed, on a quilt trimmed with Indian designs. Then he came back outside to retrieve Mercy’s father. Mercy stayed inside with her mother.
Sartain was carrying the dead man up the porch steps when a great wail vaulted out the cabin’s open door. He paused for a few seconds, then carried old Van der Deutsch through the open door and inside.
He came out a few minutes later, drawing the door closed behind him.
He sighed. His heart felt as heavy as an anvil. Inside, the old woman was still crying. Mercy had directed The Revenger to lay her father out on the table. That’s where the women would prepare him for burial.
Sartain looked around the yard, and then he turned his attention to the trail climbing the hill to the east. Nothing moved there yet
. But he had to assume that the gang, or at least part of the gang, would double back to find its missing rider.
They’d find him, all right. They’d find him burned and bloody and his pecker shot off.
Sartain’s and Mercy’s tracks would lead them here.
First things first.
He walked out to tend the horses and the wagon. As he did, he kept his rifle near and a close eye on the eastern hill. When he had the horses tended and stabled in the barn, he unloaded the wood from the wagon, stacking it neatly at the back of the house, where several cords had already been stacked. The Van der Deutsches would need plenty of wood to get them through a cold western Nebraska winter.
It was a cool, crisp fall day, but the work had him sweating like a butcher. He took off his coat and pinto vest, set them over the side panel of the wagon, and rolled his shirtsleeves and went back to work. He kept his Henry rifle leaning against a wheel of the wagon, within quick reach. Often, he stepped out from a corner of the house to inspect the trail leading down from the eastern hill.
When he was nearly finished unloading the wagon, it was mid-afternoon. Mercy came out from the house carrying a bottle of whiskey. She looked pale and worn out. She wore a fresh plaid work shirt, and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail.
She looked at the nearly empty wagon. “You made fast work of that job.”
“On a nice cool day, the working’s easy. How’s your mother?”
“Resting now. We prepared Pa’s body for burial. Dressed him in his best suit though we discovered the moths had gotten to it. It’ll do, though. Pa hasn’t worn that suit since his wedding day. Thank God he was nearly as big then as he is now!”
She laughed, but tears welled in her eyes and dribbled down her cheeks. She closed her hand over her mouth and convulsed with grief. Sartain wrapped his arms around her, holding her taut against him.
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