“I don’t know what to say, girl.” He pressed his lips to her head. “Show me where you want him buried, and I’ll dig the grave.”
Mercy pointed to a hill behind the house, near a lone cottonwood. “My brother’s buried there. Died from the influenza when he was only two. Let’s put him next to Carl.”
“All right. I’ll have the grave ready in about an hour.”
“Thanks, Mike.” Mercy rose on her tiptoes and kissed his lips. “I’m gonna go back in and sit with Momma.”
“You do that.”
Sartain grabbed his rifle and walked with her back to the front of the house. He continued across the yard to the barn while Mercy mounted the porch steps and went back inside.
He went into the barn, found a spade, and headed back outside, the spade in one hand, the Henry in the other.
He took two steps out away from the barn and froze. He whipped his head to the east. A line of riders was galloping hell for leather down the hill toward the yard. He dropped the shovel, lifted the Henry in both hands, stepped back between the barn’s open doors, and levered a round into the chamber.
His heart thudded. As he stared at the riders galloping on down the hill and into the little valley among the buttes that were shadowing now in the mid-afternoon, he counted eight men. Well, he supposed he should be grateful that the whole gang hadn’t come.
Making sure they hadn’t, he looked toward the west. Nothing. He looked all around, and as the riders thundered into the yard, their horses blowing and lifting dust, there were only the eight.
Only...
Chapter 8
The eight men spread out across the yard, half facing the house, half facing the barn and other outbuildings. Their dust sifted around them, glowing in the afternoon sunlight. The hard cases blinked against the dust, their mustached or bearded faces sharp-eyed with anger.
Sartain stepped out of the barn, holding the Winchester’s butt against his right hip, the barrel in the air.
“Can I help you gents?”
Now they all snapped their heads around to the barn. “Can you help us?” asked a lean, hook-nosed hombre with a red soup-strainer mustache and battered Stetson with one side of the brim pinned to the crown. He spoke in a thick Southern accent. “Well, yeah, I reckon you could help us. Where’s the girl?”
“What girl?”
“You know what girl. The tracks of that wagon lead here, and we know the girl was on it. We found our friend layin’ dead back yonder. Somebody shot his damn pecker off!”
“That’d be me.”
Now they all turned their heads toward the cabin. Mercy lay on the cabin roof, her cheek pressed against her Winchester carbine, which she was aiming at the gang. She slid the barrel around threateningly, as though picking out a target.
“What’d you cut his damn pecker off for?” asked the Southerner, his voice shrill.
“What does it matter?” Mercy said. “He won’t be needin’ it where he is now.”
Sartain couldn’t help smiling at that.
The hard cases shared exasperated glances.
The Southerner pointed at Mercy and shouted, “You put that rifle down, young lady. I will not have a girl aim a rifle at me. Besides, you’re badly outnumbered.”
He swung his horse around to face Sartain. “You, too, big man. Put that Henry down. We got things to talk about.”
“We don’t have anything to talk about,” Sartain said.
“She killed Randall Wade!” yelled one of the others—a short man in a bowler hat and torn yellow duster. “That little bitch is gonna pay for that!”
Sartain shook his head slowly. “I don’t think so. You boys best ride on out of here or the only way you’ll be leaving here is feet first.”
The Southerner studied the Cajun incredulously. “Are you out of your mind. There’s eight of us! Now, throw that rifle down. You, too, you little polecat!”
“Why don’t you come up here and get it?” Mercy spat out as she aimed down the carbine’s barrel.
The hard cases looked around at each other. One of them gave a loud whoop and galloped around the left side of the cabin, heading for the rear. When he turned the cabin’s rear corner and disappeared from Sartain’s sight, Mercy swung her rifle around and fired at a downward slant.
Then the others brought their rifles to bear on Sartain, who blew two out of their saddles before any could get off a shot. He stepped back behind the left sliding door of the barn as two bullets slammed into it loudly. He snaked his rifle around the door and fired two more quick rounds, unseating one more rider before stepping behind the right door, blinking as more bullets hammered it, ripping chunks out of the wood.
The hard cases were firing madly, but they had the disadvantage of being mounted. A couple must have figured this out because they swung down from their saddles. Sartain saw them through the opening between the doors. He could also see Mercy’s rifle blasting away atop the cabin’s roof, smoke and flames blossoming from the barrel, spent cartridges arcing back over the girl’s right shoulder.
Sartain stepped quickly outside, dropped to a knee, and picked out a horseback shooter, and fired. His target jerked back in his saddle, throwing his rifle in the air and screaming as his horse careened, giving an indignant whinny, and threw the rider from its back. The man flew toward Sartain, landing four feet in front of the Cajun and rolling past him, brushing his knee and fouling his next shot.
A bullet curled the air in front of The Revenger’s face. He turned toward the man who’d fired it just as the man was bearing down on him again. The shooter knelt on the ground a few feet in front of the cabin.
Sartain winced. Facing in the wrong direction, he was about to get drilled. But then the man’s head jerked hard to his right, blood and brains splattering across the porch steps.
Another hard case flew out of his saddle to pile up, howling, in a stock trough fronting the cabin. Sartain frowned, wondering where those two bullets had come from. Neither he nor Mercy had fired them.
Now there were more hard cases down than up. Three were still mounted, turning their horses this way and that, flinging lead. Mercy blew one out of his saddle. At the same time, another jerked hard sideways and then slid down the side of his mount, which kicked his head as he hit the ground.
Sartain picked out the last man, who, exasperated by the carnage around him, screamed and kicked his cream horse toward The Revenger, galloping hard and triggering lead over his horses right wither. The bullets hammered the barn door behind and to each side of the Cajun.
Sartain aimed the Henry, lining up his sights on the man’s chest, and squeezed the trigger.
The hammer pinged benignly.
The rider was six feet away. He wasn’t aiming his rifle now but running his horse straight at Sartain, intending to run him against the barn.
Sartain figured he had two seconds.
It took him only one to step to the right, unsheathe the LeMat, engage the shotgun beneath the main barrel, and fire.
The twelve-gauge buckshot tore into the galloping rider’s face. He fell back in the saddle as his horse slammed head-first into the barn door, two feet right of Sartain, who threw himself flat to the ground.
The horse whinnied shrilly as it bounced off the barn door, leaving a long, ragged crack in it. The Cajun winced as the horse kicked him as it hammered over him. The indignant mount whinnied shrilly and buck-kicked wildly as it galloped out of the yard.
“Mike!” Mercy cried from the cabin’s roof.
Sartain lay belly-down. He groaned against the ache in his side and right thigh where the horse had hammered him with its iron shoes. They were deep, pounding bruises. But just bruises, he thought, as he rose to a sitting position.
He didn’t think anything was broken.
He looked around through the heavy cloud of dust and powder smoke. A couple of the outlaws were groaning. One was on his hands and knees, crawling toward where a pistol lay in the dust near a blood-splattered dead man lying
spread-eagle and staring wide-eyed at the sky.
Sartain flicked the LeMat’s lever to engage the main barrel, and, just as the crawling man closed his hand over the pistol, drilled a .44-caliber round into his side. At the same time, another round punched into the back of the man’s head, slamming him straight down against the ground, quivering.
“Who in the hell...” Sartain said as he frowned curiously, looking in the direction from where that second shot had come.
“Mike!” Mercy ran out from behind the cabin, her rifle in hand. She dropped to a knee beside Sartain. “Mike, are you all right?”
The big Cajun flexed his jaw. He hadn’t realized it till now, but the horse had also given his chin a glancing blow. “Fine as frog hair, as they say in the bayou.”
He spied movement in the corner of his right eye. He turned to see a man drop down from the roof of a small, log shack—probably a blacksmith shop. The man landed on his boot heels with a grunt, then fell to hit the ground on his back. He dropped his Colt revolving rifle, as well.
As the man cursed and started to climb heavily to his feet, Mercy cocked a fresh cartridge into her rifle’s breach, aiming at the stranger.
“It’s all right,” Sartain said, also climbing to his feet. “I think.”
The young man plucked his rifle out of the dust. He was maybe twenty, or even younger. Short blond hair hung messily to the collar of his checked shirt to which a five-pointed silver star was pinned. He was fair-skinned, and pink with sunburn. He wore a blue neckerchief and leather suspenders held his faded denim on his skinny hips.
He brushed the dust from his rifle then bent over to pick up his weather-stained gray hat and pulled it down tight on his head.
He walked tenderly, grunting, toward Sartain and Mercy, as though his feet were sore or he had a broken bone or two. Sartain saw a blood stain low on the right side of his shirt.
“You hit?”
“Me?” The young man squinted at Sartain as he continued moving in his shambling, heavy-booted gait. “Yeah, but not just now. A few days ago.”
“Who are you?”
“Fieldhouse. Abner Fieldhouse, Deputy Town Marshal of Shallow Ford.” The young man shifted his pale blue, squint-eyed gaze from the Cajun to Mercy. “Who might you two be?”
“I’m Sartain. This is Mercy. This is her place.” Sartain glanced around. “You’re alone, I take it?”
“Yeah. Marshal Mitchell took out a posse, but I ain’t seen him. That bunch robbed a bank in Shallow Ford. Shot up the town. Burned part of it.” His voice cracked when he added, “Killed a girl.” He looked off. “My girl.”
“I’m sorry,” Sartain said. “They damn near killed Mercy, too.”
“I was followin’ the gang’s tracks when I seen ‘em swing back this way. Followed ‘em here. They struck another town and another bank—Smithville. Burned that one all the way down. Then they must have laid up in the badlands north of here for a couple days. Some folks say they got a hideout in there. I reckon that’s how I caught up to ‘em. I’m wonderin’ if maybe they bushwhacked Marshal Mitchell, and his posse is layin’ dead out here...somewhere...”
“I haven’t seen anything,” Sartain said.
Mercy said, “You don’t look too good, Abner.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“You’d better come on in the cabin and sit down.”
Abner looked at Sartain. “You know where the rest of them killers are, Mr. Sartain?”
“All I know is they were heading north when I saw ‘em and when they attacked Mercy and her pa.”
“Her pa?”
“They killed him.” Mercy said, shaking her hair from her eyes that did not well with tears but remained hard. “For no good reason. He’s inside. Ma and I got him ready for burial.”
She glanced at the cabin, started to turn back, then swung her gaze once more to the cabin. Her mother stood on the porch, squeezing the rail as she inspected the carnage before her.
“We’d better bury him soon.” Sartain glanced at the dead killers strewn around the twisted body of one dead horse. “It’ll be dark soon, and we’d best pull out.”
Mercy frowned at him. “You think the others will come?”
“I know they will...once these fellas don’t rendezvous. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, but they’ll come. We’d best not be here when they do, or this little dustup will look like a Saturday night fandango by comparison. There’s eight dead here, one more on the north trail. That still leaves close to forty.”
Deputy Fieldhouse studied Sartain skeptically. “Who are you, Mr. Sartain? If you don’t mind me askin’.”
The Cajun wrapped an arm around the girl standing beside him. “A friend of Mercy’s.”
Chapter 9
Sitting at the Van der Deutsch kitchen table, his rifle on the table beside him, Sartain sipped from his stone coffee mug.
He was sitting where he had a good view of the trail up the northern hill. So far, no riders. Anxiety was a small mouse nibbling away at his insides, however. Mercy and her mother, whose name was Demina, were on the hill with the old man. Sartain had carried him up there and buried him and then left so that the women could be alone with their husband and father.
The Revenger knew they had to do what they were doing, but he wished they’d hurry. If the gang returned, likely they’d all come, and Sartain and the others at the cabin would have no chance against them. They’d all die. He himself had no fear of death, but he didn’t want the women to die. And he didn’t want to die before he had a chance against them, to avenge old Van der Deutsch.
Abner Fieldhouse already looked half-dead.
Sartain glanced at the young man sitting in a rocking chair in the parlor area of the homey cabin, under an antelope trophy. He even sat as though it pained him. He held a coffee cup in one hand, on his thigh, and he stared straight ahead not appearing to really be looking at anything except the thoughts buzzing around inside his head.
His mouth was tense and slightly twisted, his eyes tortured.
His shirt had gotten bloodier.
Sartain glanced out the window once more, then slid his chair back from the table and gained his feet. “Tell you what, kid, let’s have a look at those wounds.”
Abner turned to him slowly, eyes vacant, as though he hadn’t understood. “What?”
“Let’s have a look at them wounds. Pull your shirt out of your pants and lift it up.”
“I’m all right.”
“I don’t think so. Lift that shirt up and let me have a look. I think you’re in bad need of a bandage change.”
Abner gave an annoyed snort and pulled his shirttails out of his pants. He raised the shirt to his chest. Staring down at the bloody mess, Sartain made a face.
“Holy God, kid, how many times were you shot?”
“Six. Only one’s bad. They couldn’t get the bullet out.” Abner let his shirttails drop. “I’ll be all right.”
As though to end the discussion, he got up heavily from his chair and walked over to the table. He glanced out the window and then pulled a chair out and sank into it, giving his back to the Cajun.
“Look, kid—”
Abner whipped an enraged look at him. “Stop callin’ me ‘kid!’ I ain’t no kid! I’m a deputy town marshal, dammit, and just a few days ago I held my dead girl in my arms. I lifted Ellen out of her coffin and held her in my arms, Mr. Sartain!”
Red-faced with grief and exasperation, he stared at The Revenger as though firing his words with his gaze. “I held her in my arms, and it’s because of me she’s dead. They savaged her. One of the men in town told me so. I figured they had, and I got him to tell me. The marshal, Dick Mitchell, and a posse rode out after the gang and found her and brought her back. Said she’d been stripped naked! They’d used her, hit her with a rock, and dumped her like trash in the trail!”
The young man shook his head, keeping his wide-eyed gaze on the Cajun. “Do you know what that’s like, Mr. Sartain? To hold your dead girl
in your arms. Do you?”
Sartain knew how it felt, but he didn’t say anything.
Abner shook his head again. “No one don’t never get to call me a kid again.”
He continued to stare at the big man before him. Then his eyes filled with tears, his face crumpled into a mask of melting wax. He screamed, turned away, and slammed his head down on the table. He folded his arms on his head and bawled like a baby.
He was still crying when something thumped on the porch. Sartain reached for his rifle but left it there when the door opened and Mercy and her mother stepped in. Both were red-eyed. There’d been a whole lot of crying here today, just as there had been that day Sartain had returned to the camp in the Arizona desert to find the butchery.
Mercy looked at Abner then shuttled her incredulous gaze to Sartain.
The Cajun shook his head. He stepped forward, placed a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Come on, Deputy. If you’re coming with us, we’d best get a move on.”
* * *
They packed food and ammunition and saddled up and rode south of the hollow in which the Van der Deutsch ranchstead sat. They were well beyond the hollow when the sun sank into the western plain, leaving a painter’s palette of bright colors washing across a sea of high, scalloped clouds.
Mercy drove the wagon with her grief-stricken mother on the seat beside her, wrapped in a blanket.
“Mike,” Mercy said, driving the wagon behind Sartain and the Deputy, “I’m gonna fork off here and get Momma over to our neighbors. She should be safe there.”
“Good idea,” Sartain said. “Me and Deputy Summerfield will hold up here and set up camp for the night. Goodbye, Mercy. Goodbye, Mrs. Van der Deutsch. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for your loss...all this trouble.”
The old woman just sat staring straight ahead, as though she’d hadn’t heard what the Cajun had said. Or just wasn’t interested.
“This isn’t goodbye for me, Mike. When I get Momma stowed safely, I’ll be back.”
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