“I’d gone out hunting one afternoon. On the way back, I spied five bluebellies—federal soldiers—riding fast. Viewed ‘em through my spyglass. They were whoopin’ and hollerin’ like Apaches on the warpath. Later, when I got back to the camp, I discovered why those five renegade bluecoats had been stompin’ with their tails up. They’d plundered the old prospector’s cache of gold. Killed the old man. Killed Jewel...after they’d raped her. Each one of ‘em, most like.”
The Revenger tried to swallow the hard knot in his throat, felt the wetness of tears rolling down his cheeks. “One after another...”
Sartain squeezed his eyes closed against the bloody images, tried to concentrate instead on Dorian’s hand, which stroked him more vigorously now, as though she sensed the comfort he needed.
Despite the darkness of Sartain’s thoughts, his blood rose to a crescendo.
“It’s okay, honey,” Dorian said. “Just relax. Everything’s going to be all right...”
“And then I hunted them all down—all five—and killed them bloody,” The Revenger said tightly, clenching his fists against the memories and Dorian’s sweet enjoyment of him.
Finally, he lay back against the ground.
Dorian looked at him. “I’m sorry, Mike.”
“That was...wonderful, darlin’.” Sartain wheezed, staring through the breaking clouds at the faint glow of stars.
“No. I mean about…about…Jewel.”
“Yeah,” Sartain said with a sigh. “Me, too.”
She lay her head on his chest, drew the blankets over them both, and they slept.
Chapter 7
Sartain woke with a grunt, sitting up so quickly that Dorian gave a startled cry as he inadvertently hurled her away from him, reaching for the Henry. He pumped a round into the chamber and aimed in the direction from which the sound had penetrated his slumber.
He eased the tension in his trigger finger and lowered the rifle barrel.
He sighed, his heartbeat slowing.
Boss stared at him from the edge of the camp ten feet away.
“What is it?” Dorian queried, blinking her startled eyes as she slid her gaze from Sartain to the big buckskin, who rippled his withers and blew and then nodded his head friskily.
In the gray dawn light, Sartain could make out Charlie Scanlon’s horse standing a ways behind Boss, pawing through the snow for forage.
Dorian turned back to Sartain and arched a brow. “You two know each other, I take it?”
The Revenger chuckled and leaned the rifle back against the log.
“Thank God it’s you, hoss,” he told Boss. “As deep as I slept, if it was that thing that got Scanlon, I’m afraid that I and my new friend here would be in about the same state that ole Charlie is now.”
“Which likely isn’t good,” Dorian said with wry grimness.
“Well, my horse is back,” Sartain said, feeling better about everything now, throwing the covers back. “I reckon it’s time...oh, damn it’s cold!” he exclaimed as the fierce morning chill wrapped itself around him, squeezing, feeling as though his heart would turn to ice in his chest.
Snow had fallen on the blankets, and it slithered down from the covers and onto Sartain and his blonde lover.
“Get back down here!” Dorian urged, laughing, wrapping her invitingly warm arms around his neck and pulling him down against her, beneath the heavy, mounded blankets. “It’s too cold to get up just yet.”
“I’d best build up the fire.”
“Let’s just stoke each other’s stoves, Mike,” Dorian cooed, nibbling his left earlobe. “That’ll be better than any old campfire!”
“Smart woman!” the Cajun agreed, laughing.
* * *
Warm from yet another bout of unbridled passion, they braved the elements to build up the fire and brew a pot of coffee. They warmed the beans and rabbit meat from the night before and ate a hearty meal washed down with coffee to which Sartain added a liberal portion of his favorite bourbon, Sam Clay.
It was a cold, breezy morning, but the clouds had broken and washed out sunlight filtered through the treetops.
Fortified, Sartain and Dorian broke camp, saddled their horses, and rode west, in the direction of the rails that would eventually take them to Denver, and, in the case of Dorian, points south. Sartain found himself with the unenviable prospect of continuing west to Central City, in the Rocky Mountains, where he’d inform Elaine Rafferty that her husband’s killer was prematurely dead and that she wouldn’t have the satisfaction of watching Scanlon dance from a branch over Jim’s grave.
Sartain and Dorian rode up and down the rolling prairie hills, meandering between low, crusty snowdrifts. The wind blew the snow this way and that, and the crispy flakes glistened like diamonds in the wan sunlight. Scanlon’s coyote dun followed, for horses were highly social animals, and this one had nowhere else to go.
It wanted to go where Boss went.
When they’d ridden for nearly three hours and it was nearly noon, Sartain reined Boss to a halt at the crest of a hill spotted with burr oaks. He stared straight ahead, frowning over Boss’s twitching ears.
“What on earth?” Dorian said, bringing her cream to a halt beside Sartain.
Ahead were the twin rails, nearly hidden by drifted snow, from which about two inches of yellow grass poked. The rails curved in around a wooded gulch to the right. A train was stalled nearly straight out away from Sartain and Dorian and slightly left, the engine and tender car sitting near the arrow-shaped tip of a copse of winter-gray woods.
The train was made up of six or seven blandly colored cars, including what appeared two passengers cars and possibly a parlor car behind them, fronting a windowless stock car, a car marked WELLS FARGO EXPRESS CO, and the caboose.
There was a gray smudge about fifty feet out ahead of the engine with its black, diamond-shaped stack that was not spewing smoke and cinders. No steam puffed from around the giant iron wheels. There was no movement around the train. It just sat there on the rails as though it had been abandoned out here on the vast prairie, the blue sky banded with high, gray pancake clouds arching over it.
“Yeah, what on earth?” The Revenger asked, touching his spurs to Boss’s flanks and galloping down the hill.
Dorian followed suit, and they crossed the quarter-mile distance in a hurry. Scanlon’s horse galloped along behind them, snorting and shaking its head. Sartain checked Boss near the second of the two passenger cars and stared down at the ground to his left.
A man was sprawled belly-down about ten feet out from the rails. Blood reddened the scuffed snow around him. He wore a blue blanket coat, a wool muffler around his neck, and pinstriped wool trousers. A hat lay nearby. Long, dark brown hair hung past his coat collar while the crown of his skull was nearly bald. He held a cocked six-shooter in his right hand, the barreled angled into the snow.
A ragged hole shone in the middle of his back, around a large patch of frozen blood.
Sartain swung down from Boss’s back and looked around.
“There!” Dorian said, gigging her pinto along the train toward the engine.
She halted near the rear vestibule of the next passenger car. Sartain followed her on foot to see a man in a dark-blue uniform lying sprawled belly down over the vestibule steps, arms dangling toward the cinder-paved rail bed. A leather-billed, dark-blue hat lay several feet away, caught in a patch of bromegrass poking out of the snow.
A pearl-gripped, long-barreled Remington revolver lay on the ground nearly directly beneath the man’s stiff, dangling hands.
“The conductor,” Sartain said, half to himself. He glanced again at the first dead man lying behind him now, and the picture began to grow clearer in his mind.
“A holdup, you think?” Dorian asked.
“Sure, looks that way,” Sartain said, grabbing the brass rail of the vestibule and pulling himself onto the steps, moving gingerly around the dead conductor as though not to wake him. Blood shone on the first step, from a wound in t
he man’s neck.
The Revenger turned to Dorian. “You’d best wait here.”
Drawing his LeMat, he clicked the hammer back and peered through a window in the door of the second passenger car. He opened the door and stepped inside, raising the brass-framed popper.
The car was empty save for two men, both obviously dead. The first was a tall man sitting in a plush-covered seat four rows down on the car’s right side. The man, who looked a little like Abe Lincoln and was dressed in a black suit under a heavy wool coat, was slumped against the wall, his bowler hat wedged between his head and a bracket lamp with a busted chimney.
A quarter-sized hole shone in his right cheek, just beneath his eye. Blood had dribbled down from the hole toward his jaw. Something told the Cajun that the man had likely taken a ricochet during the obvious lead swap inside the car.
The second man was folded forward over a seat back on the car’s opposite side, about two-thirds of the way down toward the rear door. Sartain started toward him. He looked at the tall man as he passed the man’s seat, saw what appeared a drummer’s leather-upholstered sample case on the seat beside him, beneath a folded Bismarck Tribune.
Sartain stopped beside the second dead man, grabbed the man’s coat collar, and pulled him off the seat back with a grunt. The man, who had a big, bulging belly, slumped into the seat behind him and fell sideways against the opposite wall.
There was a hole in his rat hair coat, just over his heart. The coat was soaked with dried and half-frozen blood. The man himself wore long mare’s tail mustaches. His face was long and angular, the open eyes brown and fierce even in death.
The man’s death stare also owned a glassy cast of shock, as though he’d been surprised and angered by his sudden end.
Sartain moved back through the car, across the outer vestibule, and into the next car forward, raising the LeMat then lowering it when he saw only two more dead men, both lying in the central aisle. The nearest man lay on his side, legs scissored, near a sawed-off shotgun with a lanyard, and an empty gunnysack. The other dead man lay near the rear of the car, on his back and staring at the ceiling, his ankles crossed as though in leisure.
Two pistols lay on the floor beside him. There was also a burlap sack that he’d likely been trying to fill with the passengers’ loot before the holdup attempt had been stymied.
Sartain walked out through the car’s front door. The tender car lay beyond, its store of wood running low. He leaped off the vestibule to the ground and walked to the locomotive and stopped.
Another dead man lay slumped across the large, greasy iron coupling between the tender car and the locomotive. This man wore a buckskin coat, a greasy fur hat with earflaps, a thick muffler around his neck, baggy pinstriped overalls, and knee-high, lace-up boots with thick soles and high heels. He’d been shot twice—once in the left thigh, once in the upper chest. His lips were stretched back from large, tobacco-encrusted teeth.
As charred as his coat was, he’d probably been the fireman, Sartain decided.
Climbing into the locomotive, he found the engineer in much the same condition as the fireman. He sat on the narrow steel floor, knees raised to his chest, his back to the door of the firebox.
He’d been shot twice in his bearded, wind-burned face, and once in the belly. A long-barreled shotgun lay on the steel floor near his right hip. He still had a gloved hand on the neck of the barn-blaster.
Sartain leaped off the locomotive. Dorian had ridden ahead to where trees and branches had been piled high across the tracks. They were now mounded with snow. The engineer had stopped the train about halfway through the roadblock, and the front wheels of the locomotive had been nudged slightly off the tracks, bending several of the iron rails. The holdup must have happened so fast and unexpectedly that he hadn’t had time to both stop the train and defend himself. Likely, the snow had obscured his vision of the roadblock.
As soon as he’d raised the shotgun, the robbers had likely shot him from their positions along the rail bed.
Dorian rode back to Sartain, who was kicking around in the grass and snow, where several sets of horse tracks were overlaid with human footprints.
The girl was breathless as she stopped her horse and curveted him. “Anyone on the train, Mike?”
“Yeah,” Sartain said, running a gloved hand thoughtfully along his unshaven cheek. “A few. But they’re all dead. And I think all but four are the jakes who decided to run roughshod over this combination here and got their medicine poured down their throats straight from the bottle.”
“Say again?”
“The only ones on the train are dead men. And some of ‘em are the men who robbed the train. Some tough-nut passengers weren’t about to let themselves be robbed, I reckon.”
Dorian scowled incredulously at him, then looked slowly around at the train sitting on the rails like a cold, stone dinosaur that had been waiting out here on the plains for the last several eons. “Where are all the passengers?”
“I don’t know.” Sartain moved around, studying the tracks in the patchwork quilt of fresh snow and the tufts of snowy grass and brush along the rail bed. “Looks like footprints lead that way along the rails, which would make sense since that’s the direction Sundance lies.”
Dorian said, “Well, I reckon we’ll find out what happened when we get to Sundance.”
“Yeah,” Sartain said, lifting his coat flap and shoving his LeMat down inside its holster. “I reckon we will.” He sighed as he pondered the stalled train and the bent rails. “So much for a fast trip to Denver. The Sundance station agent is going to have to get a fresh crew in here, as well as a work crew to repair and clear the rails.”
“I think the sooner we get moving, the better, Mike.”
Sartain glanced at Dorian, who gestured at the northern sky. Sartain turned to see a vast expanse of low, gray clouds sliding toward them. The bellies of those clouds were a forbidding dark blue.
“Storm on the way,” Dorian said. “A big one.”
“Horse apples.”
Sartain hurried back along the trail to where he’d left Boss. The storm promised by those clouds would likely make the last one look like a few harmless flurries on Easter morning.
Chapter 8
The first snowflakes were starting to stitch the chill breeze when the settlement of Sundance appeared ahead and to the east of the north-south-rails, which were buried in places by yesterday’s storm. As Sartain rode, Dorian cantering just off his left stirrup, he saw the dozen or so clapboard shacks take shape on a low, flat-topped hill beyond a frozen slough ringed with cattails, a half-mile away and closing.
The settlement wasn’t much. It appeared even less in contrast to Lick Dalton’s Sundance Hotel and Saloon, a vast sprawling affair that Dalton, a former farmer, had built in the heart of Sundance and which capped the dull-colored, snow-patched hill like a woman’s gaudy red picture hat.
Painted blood red with a gaudy false facade, the Sundance dwarfed the other business buildings and private houses that surrounded it in typically disorderly frontier fashion. Sartain, having visited the settlement a couple of times previously, knew that there was no main thoroughfare running through town but merely a few old cow and horse trails and the stage and army trail that jogged into town from the southeast, hooking a southwest corner as though it had no desire to linger in the shabby hamlet, but made a hasty curve around a wood-frame and adobe stagecoach station before stretching off to the west in as straight and efficient a two-track line as possible.
Sartain glanced at the footprints marking the snow along the rails beneath Boss’s cantering hooves.
He’d counted only ten or so sets of footprints, which meant the train hadn’t been carrying many passengers. That wasn’t odd. He’d rarely ridden a passenger-laden spur line this far off the beaten path. As he and Dorian continued to follow the scuffed blue tracks, many of which had been partially obscured by drifted snow and were growing more indistinct with each frequent gust, he wondered which on
es belonged to the man or men who’d dispatched the would-be train robbers.
Whoever he was or they were, he or they had to be quite the handy cold-steel artists, for the gimlet-eyed owlhoots lying dead around or inside the passenger coaches hadn’t appeared tinhorns to The Revenger’s trained eye, nor, being as well armed as they’d been, had they appeared new to the outlaw profession.
He couldn’t help wondering if they were lawmen. If so, they might recognize him from the sketched likenesses adorning the wanted circulars cast here and there about the frontier. Of course, the portraits had him appearing as craven-eyed, hawk-faced, and mean-jawed as did most such representations of cold-blooded killers, but trained lawmen had a way of making up for such deficiencies and seeing the real man behind the caricature.
If they did recognize him, they’d be sorry, for Sartain wasn’t one given to leniency on anyone who sought to kill him, badge-toters or otherwise. He’d killed plenty of lawmen who’d come gunning for him. He held the law in no higher esteem than he did the whiskey-besotted federal soldiers who’d murdered his lover and her harmless grandfather.
He hoped there would be no trouble here, but he wouldn’t shy from it.
As he and Dorian followed the rails as well as the scuffed tracks up the rise toward the railroad depot lying dead ahead of them, on the far western edge of the town and abutting the cold steel rails, he leaned forward to nudge the butt of his Henry rifle jutting from beneath his right thigh. He was conscious of the weight of the LeMat thonged on his thigh, the toe of the holster peeking out from beneath the hem of his coat.
Both were automatic, semi-conscious gestures to reassure himself that his weapons were handy in the event he needed them. And in towns—even towns as small as Sundance—there was always a good chance he’d need them.
The past had taught him well...
Sartain reined Boss to a halt at the edge of the wooden platform on which the small, clapboard depot station hunched, the wooden shingle beneath its broad front eve announcing SUNDANCE, NEB. TERR. The shingle was getting a good workout by the increasing wind now howling and moaning like a northern witch in the worst kind of heat.
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