Both men laughed. The standing man sat back down in his chair and poured liquid from a bottle into the black man’s glass and then into his own glass.
Only one man sat alone. He was an older man with a large, gray-brown mustache and round spectacles perched on his nose. He sat near the brick fireplace, the fire’s red flames reflecting off his glasses as he read the large paper he held open in his hands.
The little man who was always here straightened from the hearth and the beast pulled its head back from the window with a start. When it slid its eye back across the frame and peered into the room once more, the little man was limping away, heading toward the bar on the room’s far side.
Just beyond where the little man had been standing, a young woman sat leaning back and sideways on a sofa. The old man had blocked the beast’s view of the young female. Now it had a clear view of the lovely creature before him.
The beast’s heart fluttered.
The young female’s legs were stretched out before her. They were long legs whose shape he could see through the dark-green dress she wore. The dress was trimmed with fur. It was the same green as the girl’s eyes. It was cut low. The bosoms were like the tops of hills, the lower reaches of the hills concealed by the maddening fringe of fox fur.
The girl had thick, long, black hair. She was curling a long lock of the hair around a finger as she stared thoughtfully into the fire’s flames, to the right of the beast peering in. Her lips were slightly parted. Sometimes the plump lips parted a little more, showing more of the white glow of the girl’s teeth.
As she stared into the fire, she was thinking about something that pleased her.
The beast felt his blood warm, his belly stir.
He gave a deep grunt and ground his back teeth.
He pressed his face closer to the window, pressed his nose against the frosted glass. The girl turned her head toward the window. The beast gave an alarmed grunt and lowered its head, gritting its teeth.
Had the young female seen it?
The beast waited for a short time and then slid his eye across the frame once more and across a thick fringe of frost. The girl had returned her gaze to the fire. She continued to curl her hair around her finger and give that pensive half-smile, showing the white gleam of her teeth behind her plump lips.
The beast’s chest lightened with relief.
It pulled its head back away from the window. It pressed its back against the saloon wall. It groaned, almost howled but caught itself just in time. The beast pressed its back harder against the wall, shuddering, the image of the young female’s half-hidden mounds floating around before its eyes.
The thick hair, the white teeth, the long legs...
The spasming stopped.
The beast sighed, spat to one side, felt the wretchedness following release. It stepped out away from the saloon and slogged heavily back through the snow to the barn. Heaving the barn doors open with a grunt, the beast moved inside and closed the doors behind it.
Horses nickered nervously, one kicking a stall partition, as the beast moved through the darkness and into the room in the lean-to addition, where the man it had just fed on had lived. The man had been fetching wood outside the barn when the beast had attacked. The beast could smell the man now in the warm darkness. The smell was much as the man had tasted—the parts the beast had eaten, that was.
The rest it had saved for later.
A lit lamp, the wick turned low, sat on the round table against the far wall, left of the still-warm potbelly stove. A coffee pot sat on the warming rack. Smelling the coffee, the beast took a cup off a shelf above the stove and poured coffee into it.
A sound rose from behind him.
The beast grunted with a start, coffee sloshing down the side of the cup to dampen his thick, hide mitten. He wheeled. Something or someone was on the bed. The beast’s heart thudded fearfully. He set the coffee on the table and quickly turned up the lamp. Even as he saw the blond hair spilling across the pillow, he drew into his lungs the familiar smell of her, and his heart slowed.
He moved to the cot, shuffling his large feet in the large fur boots that rose to his knees. He dropped to a knee beside the cot, placed a mittened hand in the thick hair fanned out across the pillow.
Dorian gasped and turned toward the beast, her eyes snapping wide, mouth opening in shock. She blinked. “Hans?” She cleared her sleep-thick throat. “Oh, Hans!”
The beast grunted, sheepish.
Dorian sat up, her wide eyes reflecting the light of the guttering lamp. “Hans, where have you been? I was waiting for you back at the cabin! When you didn’t come, I came back here to look for you, and for a while, I was lost in the storm. I might have frozen to death!”
She studied the beast. It lowered its eyes with chagrin.
“Why did you come back here, Hans? It’s storming, and you’ve already fed. Wasn’t the half-breed enough for you?” Dorian smiled at him. “You are a growing boy, but you know we can’t get greedy. And, in case you hadn’t noticed, Hans, it is storming out there. While your senses are as keen as a mountain lion’s, you, too, have been known to get turned in a storm, naughty boy!”
The beast cowered, lowered its head still further in shame. It whimpered softly.
“You are incorrigible. You know that, don’t you?”
The beast, chin dipped nearly to its broad chest, bobbed its head.
“Now, why don’t you tell me what you thought was worth the risk of coming back here?”
The beast looked away.
“Hans, don’t you pull that with me,” the girl admonished. “You answer my question and be honest! Were you being greedy?”
The beast shook its head.
“What, then?” Dorian asked.
The beast’s cheeks burned with chagrin.
“Hans, what is it?” the girl prodded him.
The beast shoved its mittened hand toward her. He placed it on one of the two, fine, large mounds in her partly open coat.
“Hans, no!” Dorian cried, slapping the large, paw-like hand away. “No, Hans! No! Nooo! Very bad, Hans!”
The beast lurched back in terror and shame. It dropped to its butt, scuttling back away from the girl and pressing its back against the outer wall, raising its knees and burying its head between them.
“Very, very bad, Hans!” the girl continued to castigate the beast, rising from the cot and moving menacingly toward it. “I told you that you must never, ever place your hand on me in that way again! Bad, Hans! So very, very bad! It’s not natural! What would Papa say?”
The beast threw its head back and howled and then, squeezing its eyes shut, shook its head from side to side.
Dorian frowned. She crouched over the beast and placed a hand on its knee. “Hans, you were just trying to tell me something, weren’t you?”
The beast lifted its head, and stared back at the girl, widening its eyes. It nodded.
“What could you have possibly been trying...”
The girl let her voice trail off and then turned to stare in the direction of the saloon. Her red lips stretched a slow, faintly devilish smile. “Oh. I think I understand you, now, Hans.”
She turned back to the beast, the grin still spreading her lips. “You were trying to tell me you found something...or someone... you desire. Is that it, Hans? Is that what you were trying to tell me?”
The beast nodded quickly, grunting and sort of groaning, bringing the sounds up from far down in its belly.
Yes, yes, yes. That was it exactly!
“I see,” Dorian said.
The girl lowered her head and tucked her bottom lip beneath her upper teeth. She turned toward the saloon once more, and stared in that direction for a time, grimly thoughtful. The beast sensed a deep sadness in the girl. A hopeless longing.
The beast knew such feelings. Such yearnings. Regularly, they flogged him nearly senseless so that all he could do was wander off alone, drop to his knees, and howl.
But his heart began to
beat hopefully now as he studied the girl.
She said nothing for a long while, and then she placed her hand on the beast’s knee again, and said, “All right, Hans. All right.” She nodded slowly. “Let’s just see what we can do about that, shall we?”
The beast’s thick, crooked lips shaped an eager smile.
Chapter 15
Sartain ran a rag down the stock of his prized Henry repeater, giving the walnut stock and the brass chasing a good polish. He noticed a couple more, small scrapes in the stock due to some recent rough handling.
Each nick pained him, but they couldn’t be helped. The kind of life he lived was hard on guns. Hell, it was hard on him, but riding the vengeance trail was the only life he knew. He’d ridden other trails, mostly soldiering trails, until Jewel and her grandfather were murdered.
Now, the trail of revenge was his life, the only life he’d know from here on in.
Clad in only his skin-tight balbriggans and socks, he sat in a chair near where his bathtub had been until Dalton had drained it and hauled it away. Tufts of dark hair curled out from between the buttons in his long-handle top. He tilted the rifle to the light of the lamp on the dresser behind him. He turned the gun this way and that, gave a satisfied grunt, and set the rifle on the bed.
From downstairs, the strains of Dalton’s raucous fiddle music nearly drowned out the howls of the storm still battering the big saloon. The Sundance’s proprietor was entertaining his overnight guests, singing as well as fiddling and stamping his boots to the beat.
One or two of the clientele were also stomping their boots and giving an occasional, festive, inebriated howl. Sartain could feel the reverberations of the din through the floor beneath his feet.
He wasn’t tempted to join the others. He was a loner by nature, and, besides, he wasn’t in a festive mood. His mind was on Dorian and the so-called bear that had taken Scanlon and killed Hector Wallace.
If it really was a bear.
Sartain had his doubts.
When the storm gave ground, he’d find out for sure.
He took a drag from the quirley that smoldered between his lips and then pulled his LeMat revolver from the holster he’d hung from a near bedpost. He inspected the heavy piece, from its pearl grips to the short, stout, twelve-gauge shotgun tube residing beneath the main, .44-caliber barrel. The gun was in good shape, the pearl of the grips and the brass of the scrolled barrel glistening beautifully in the lamplight.
He gave the gun a cursory rubdown and leaned forward to return the piece to its holster.
Light footsteps sounded outside his door. They were nearly inaudible beneath Dalton’s raucous fiddling, but the Cajun’s hearing was keen. He kept the LeMat in his hand and automatically ratcheted back the hammer as he turned to the door.
Underneath it, a shadow moved.
There was a light tap. A girl’s tap.
Sartain ignored it. He’d locked the door for the night and had no intention of opening it. The governor’s daughter was right fetching, but he was no longer in the mood for company this evening. The bath and a plate of food and half a bottle of Sam Clay had filed the edge off his desires.
Besides, Dorian had satisfied his male urges several hours ago, before she’d disappeared.
Now all he wanted was another cigarette, another drink, to climb under the bedcovers, and let the wind lull him to sleep. Then he’d go out after Dalton’s so-called bear...
Another tap sounded on the door. The knob twisted again.
The girl was persistent. Sartain would give her that.
He turned away from the door but turned back again when another set of footsteps sounded in the hall. These were louder. These, too, stopped outside Sartain’s door.
A man said something in a tone that sounded angry, but Dalton’s fiddling and the howling storm obscured the words. The LeMat in his hand, Sartain rose from his chair and walked over to the door, tipping his head to hear Gala say in a hushed, angry voice, “...none of your business what I do, or whose door I go to!”
A man’s thickly inebriated voice said, “You harlot. How ‘bout if I tell your old man what you do when you’re not around where he can personally keep an eye on you?”
“Go to hell, Ed,” the girl returned sharply. “How ‘bout if I fire you right here and now?”
“You don’t have the authority. Now, how ‘bout if you stop standin’ out here makin’ a fool of yourself, and come over to my room? I got this bottle right here, and I got two glasses—”
The tallest of the girl’s three bodyguards cut himself abruptly off when Sartain pulled the door open. The man was holding a bottle and looking heavy-lidded and uncertain on his feet. He and Gala snapped surprised looks at the big Cajun whose broad frame nearly filled the doorway.
Sartain grabbed the girl’s arm, pulled her into the room, and informed, “Two’s company, Ed. Three’s a crowd.”
He slammed the door in Ed’s hang-jawed face.
Gala snickered. She looked Sartain’s long-handle-clad frame up and down, eyes lingering on his bulging chest and shoulders, and then rose onto her tiptoes and wrapped her arms around his neck. “My savior!”
Her breath smelled of alcohol.
Sartain removed the girl’s hands from behind his neck. “You’re trouble!”
“Trouble comes in pretty packages sometimes. Doesn’t it, Mr. Sartain?”
“Oh, it does at that, Miss Morrissey. But that doesn’t mean I’m gonna unwrap it.”
“You wouldn’t have to unwrap much,” she said, screwing her right index finger into his chest. Lowering her voice a notch, she explained, “I’m not wearing much.”
He turned away from the girl and sat on the edge of the bed. “I don’t care. I didn’t invite you in here to...to do what you came here for.”
Gala placed an indignant fist on her cocked hip. “Then what did you invite me in here for?”
“I didn’t like Ed’s tone. The doves who raised me back in the Quarter always said my contrary nature was gonna get me back-shot by some fool over a girl. Just never did take a liking to folks ordering other folks around. Especially men ordering women around because they think the woman is theirs...although I do suspect you might have done a little to get ole Ed believing you were his. Maybe led him on a fair amount?”
Sartain narrowed an eye at the pretty, chocolate-haired, green-eyed waif standing haughtily before him. “Maybe even a tad more than a fair amount?”
“So I slept with him once. Days and days ago. There was no one else around at the time, and a girl gets lonely in eastern Dakota Territory. Have you ever been there? Our train was stalled in a little jerkwater town because a band of renegade Indians had damaged a trestle.”
Suddenly coquettish again, she moved toward the Cajun, swaying her hips. “So...you were raised by nymphs du pave in New Orleans, eh? What did they teach you?”
Sartain chuckled in spite of himself. “More like what didn’t they teach me.”
“Could you show me a little of it?”
“No, but I will offer you a drink, though it appears you might have had enough.” Sartain held up his bottle of Sam Clay. “Then, again, I reckon I have, too.”
“Mr. Dalton served punch,” Gala said, snickering. “There was rum in it. Stanley is dead asleep in front of the fire downstairs.”
Sartain wasn’t sure how anyone could sleep through the din still rising through the floor, although Dalton had moved onto a somewhat less raucous tune than the one previous. The sounds of shuffling feet told him, however, that the men were dancing together, a spectacle that Sartain hadn’t seen since his days on remote outposts in the frontier army, where women had been damned few and far between.
Some were singing along with Dalton. They sounded as off-key as coyotes celebrating a fresh kill.
Gala took the Sam Clay. She popped the cork, sipped, swallowed, and lowered the bottle quickly. A deep flush rose into her cheeks. Her eyes looked as though they would pop out of her head. She convulsed, coughing.
“Jesus,” the girl said through another raspy cough, “I think I’ll stick with Dalton’s rum punch!”
Sartain chuckled and reached for the bottle. The girl pulled it back away from him and crawled onto the bed. She had an insouciant look on her beautiful face. Staring alluringly at the Cajun, she leaned back against the headboard and drew her skirt up her long, creamy legs.
She hadn’t been lying about the absence of underwear. At least, she wasn’t wearing pantaloons or a petticoat. Only pink silk stockings. She made her expression even more alluring as she continued to draw the heavy skirt up past her thighs. She tucked each foot beneath an opposite knee, sitting Indian style, the billowy folds of the dress drawn around her belly.
The Cajun’s throat grew thick as he watched her.
“See?” she said in a soft, husky voice. “I wasn’t lying about not wearing underwear.”
“You sure weren’t.”
“Some might call me brazen, or even a harlot.” Gala smiled. “But never a liar.”
“I reckon not.”
It was a cold and stormy night, and there was nothing he could do about Dorian or the beast that had likely killed her. He might as well enjoy this beautiful girl.
At first, the sound he heard outside the door of his room was a mere annoyance, a slight distraction from the night’s festivities.
But then he looked up to see through the crack beneath the door a shadow move in the hall.
Chapter 16
There was another faint squawk of a floorboard under an ominously stealthy tread.
Cursing under his breath, Sartain thrust his left arm out toward the bed’s front post from which hung his cartridge belt and holstered LeMat.
Using his thumb to flick the keeper thong free from over the big popper’s hammer, he slid the gun from the holster. His voice muffled by the door, a man shouted, “Two-timin’ vixen!”
There was the sudden slamming sound of a gunshot. A blond, ragged-edged crater appeared in the top door panel as the bullet curled the air over Sartain’s head and thudded into the wall behind him.
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