The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  Dalton glanced at Alma once more. She hardened her jaws as though knowing there was nothing she could do to stop her husband now, and she turned her attention to the potatoes, giving her back to Sartain.

  Dalton hooked his crooked thumbs in the pockets of the denim trousers that sagged on his wide, bony hips. “It’s a beast, all right. A man-beast is what it is.” He spoke slowly, softly, to the floor, owning the air of a schoolboy sent to the headmaster’s office for punishment. “Hans Rasmussen.”

  “Rasmussen?” Sartain scowled in disbelief. He had a feeling that everything he was about to hear was going to be hard to believe. He braced himself for more. “Dorian’s...”

  “Brother.”

  “So it’s human, this beast.”

  “Part.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Dalton walked over to the range. He grabbed two stone mugs from a wooden cupboard and then used a leather mitten to remove an enamel coffee pot from the stove’s warming rack. He brought both cups over to the table, filled them with the thick, black, smoking brew, and returned the pot to the range. “I reckon he was born human, but he’s become more beast than man.”

  Harken slacked down in a chair, facing Sartain, and lifted the cup to his lips, blowing on it tentatively. His emaciated features were tight, his eyes dark.

  “Six years ago, buyers for the railroad came through, making offers for land. Small farms an’ such. Cash on the barrelhead. Mine and Alma’s was one of them farms they wanted to buy. There were several more farms along the path where the railroad wanted to lay its rails. One of ‘em was the Rasmussen farm on the north side of Rasmussen Slough.

  “Because of the slough and the boggy land to the west, the railroad had to have the Rasmussen land. It was the only place around here they could lay the tracks unless they moved the rails ten miles east or thirty miles west. But old Horace Rasmussen didn’t want to sell. He was odd that way. He thought the railroad was too big for its britches. He thought they were just pushin’ him around. He refused to sell unless they doubled their offer.

  “The railroad refused. Horace was stubborn, but the railroad was even more stubborn than he was. The buyers came around here and held a meeting with us other farmers who’d agreed to sell. They told us that if we couldn’t convince Rasmussen to sell to them, they couldn’t buy from us. They’d have to move the rails either east or west, bypassing this whole area.”

  Sartain sat stiffly in his chair, one hand around his coffee mug. He hadn’t taken a sip yet. He was too enmeshed in the old man’s story.

  “Go on,” he said after Dalton had taken another sip from his cup and set it carefully back down on the table.

  Dalton swallowed audibly, grimaced as though from the burn of the hot brew going down his throat, and licked his lower lip. “We other farmers had us a meetin’ and invited Horace Rasmussen. We pleaded with Rasmussen to sell his land to the railroad. Horace flat-out refused, and even refused to talk to any of us any more about it. By god, he was a stubborn son of Satan! An odd one, too. Fought in the war, and it made him...”

  Dalton twirled a finger in the air beside his right ear.

  “But them kids of his were odd too. So was his wife, though I don’t believe I ever seen her except from a far distance. She never went anywhere, but holed up in that old shack of theirs, along with that crazy girl an’ crazy boy, that Hans. Prairie people, born and bred. Crazy people!”

  “What happened, Dalton?” Sartain prodded the man, sensing the Sundance Proprietor was filling time, reluctant to get to the crux of his confession.

  Dalton sighed and turned to Alma. She looked back at him as she sliced cured ham into another pan on the range. She shook her head slowly, with a deeply bitter, reproving look, and turned back to her chores.

  “We all were fit to be tied,” Dalton said, staring down at the table now as he talked. “The railroad offered us each twenty thousand dollars for our land, twice what it was worth. Horace Rasmussen wanted forty! Well, he wasn’t gonna get forty, and that meant none of us was gonna get our twenty.”

  “So...what happened, Dalton?” Sartain leaned toward the little man sitting hangdog in his chair, pressing him. “Get on with it. There’s a girl out there in the snow somewhere, and I want to know if there’s a chance she’s still alive!”

  But it was no longer the girl he’d first been worried about...

  Dalton jerked with a start at the Cajun’s rising, angry tone. He said, “We all got liquored up one night, armed ourselves, and rode out to the Rasmussen place.”

  He looked at Sartain, wide-eyed now with exasperation. “There was a big argument, as you can imagine. Horace went for a gun and shot one of the farmers, a fella named Paul Christie. Someone else shot Horace. Then the kids come at us—the crazy girl, Dorian, though she was all of fourteen. And that giant of a brother. There was somethin’ wrong with him—bad wrong. Stood nearly six feet tall when he was only eight years old. When he was twelve, the age he was when we went out there, he stood nearly seven feet. Couldn’t talk but only grunted. Had a big, pumpkin head—badly misshaped. Big feet and hands. I never seen hands and feet so big!”

  Dalton used his hands to try and convey the large, odd shape of the boy’s head.

  “Odd how the girl could be so pretty, and the boy so damn ugly!”

  Sartain felt the tightness of revulsion at the way Dalton had emphasized “pretty.”

  “Dalton, you’re not gonna tell me that—”

  “Yeah, things got out of hand in a bad way that night. I had no part in that, but I was too fired up and liquored up to stop it. Three of the six of us who went out there beat the boy with their rifles, and then they...managed to run the girl down—she was a wildcat, that one—and take her into the cabin.”

  Sartain glanced at Alma. Dalton’s woman stood with her back taut, facing the range as she worked, making short, jerky movements. The Cajun sensed that she was squeezing her eyes closed and trying not to listen to the rest of the story she’d obviously heard in the past.

  A story she knew only too well.

  “They...they had their way with her, those drunken fools,” Dalton said slowly, ominously. “I might as well have, too, because I didn’t do nothin’ to stop it.”

  Sartain thought that those had been Alma’s castigating words, and Dalton had absorbed them out of guilt and shame. He wore them like a prisoner wore his striped pajamas. “And then, somehow, the cabin caught fire. A lamp must’ve got broke. The three men who’d taken the girl dragged her out but left the boy inside. We all mounted up and galloped off in our separate ways, never to speak of that night again.”

  Again, Sartain leaned forward in his chair, desperate for the whole story. “But the boy, Hans—he survived the fire. Didn’t he, Dalton?”

  Chapter 18

  “Yeah. Somehow. He survived it.” Dalton ran a hand across his mouth and glanced over at his wife again.

  She said nothing but only flipped the sizzling slices of ham and scraped the potatoes around, one stern hand on her beefy hip.

  “But I didn’t know he survived it until the railroad went through, and I built this store in town, and we started to prosper. I thought the girl had left on her own, but then they started showin’ up here in town. The boy had a badly scarred face, though. He wasn’t much to look at, to begin with.”

  “Was that what made him a killer?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He probably always had the killer in him. But folks started disappearin’. One here and there, mostly train passengers. They seemed to feel the need to prey on the railroad.”

  “You mean, all this time they’ve been killing the passengers here in Sundance?” Sartain raised his voice in exasperation. “At this very saloon, Dalton?”

  “Shhhh! Keep your voice down, will ya?” Glancing at the curtained doorway, Dalton waved for the Cajun to pipe down. “They spread the killin’ around, up and down the line. Every once in a while, one of my customers will disappear. Very rarely, you hear? Oh, sometime
s there’d be an investigation, but nothin’ would be found of the poor soul. The local sheriff from over in Jasper usually chalks it up to the still-violent ways of the frontier. After all, it is still a wild place, as much as I’d like to think it ain’t.”

  “Why do they kill? Just mad at the railroad? Why haven’t they killed you?”

  Dalton stared at his coffee mug. Finally, he lifted it with hands that Sartain noticed were trembling slightly. He lowered his head, sipped the still-hot brew, and glanced over his shoulder again at his wife. She must have sensed it, because she glanced back over her shoulder at him, darkly.

  “I reckon on account of I run the hotel, me an’ Alma.”

  “Which lures in their prey,” Sartain finished for the man, nodding slowly.

  Dalton set the coffee cup down, cleared his throat.

  “The boy, Hans? He has him a peculiar appetite.”

  Sartain scowled. “Huh?”

  “He has him an...an unnatural appetite. He eats folks. Humans.” Dalton paused, shook his head, and exhaled loudly. “I’ve heard of it before. Cannibalism. Mostly, though, it’s done when there’s no other food around. You know, like the Donner Party out in California.”

  The old man shook his head again in disbelief. “But I’ve heard of others who somehow have acquired the taste of human flesh. There’s an animal quality about ‘em. They’re born with it. And this boy has it, by God. I know because I seen what was left of one of his victims, the bones all spread around a cave not far from here. I tracked him one fall, right after I figured out that it was Hans doin’ the killin’s hereabouts, that crazy sister of his sort of assistin’, you might say. I think she lures men into traps, and if you’ve seen her, you know how easily that could be done.”

  “Oh, I know,” Sartain’s voice was pitched low with his own brand of disbelief now. He’d heard some wild stories on the frontier, but this one took the cake.

  Vaguely, beneath a lingering fog of incomprehension of such a tale, he wondered why Dorian hadn’t thrown him to her brother, the beast. Had Hans had his fill with Scanlon?

  But, why had he taken Hec Wallace the following night?

  He posed the question to Dalton.

  The proprietor exhaled again loudly, and said, “They been steppin’ up the killins of late. I’m not sure why. Maybe because the winter’s comin’ on again—the long winter—and he gets a little crazy this time of year. Like wolves, like bears. Hell, I don’t know. How am supposed to understand what goes on in the mind of a boy who feeds on his own and a sister who helps him?”

  “Why haven’t you gone to the sheriff, Dalton?”

  Dalton bunched his lips and closed his hands around his cup again but seemed to decide not to lift it to his lips. He took his hands away, let them fall to his sides. “Because...because I thought we sorta had an agreement that, because of what I done—and maybe the railroad helped cause that—that I’d let ‘em take one now and then. A human being. That way, they’d be satisfied, and they’d leave me and Alma alone, and the story wouldn’t get out about what went on here. The killin’ of old Horace, the fire, the boy...the girl...And then the killin’ they started doin’ a few years back, to get even, I reckon, as much as to feed the boy’s cravings.”

  He looked pleadingly at Sartain. “If that story ever got out, you think anyone’d want to stay here at my place? My big red place here on the plain where folks are sometimes murdered and eaten by a monster? Why I’d have to shut down within days! The railroad would probably relocate the depot station!”

  Dalton stared hard at Sartain, then shook his head. “No. No, no one would get off here for the stage, or buy a ticket here for the train. And all we built would be gone, and Alma and me would be back livin’ on ten acres and tryin’ to scratch a livin’ out of this godforsaken prairie. At our ages!”

  Dalton lowered his head and wept, tears rolling down both sides of his long, slender nose.

  Weeping, he said, “I should have gone to the sheriff when I first caught on, but I didn’t, hopin’ that maybe it wouldn’t happen again. But then it did, and I didn’t go to the sheriff because I hadn’t before, and then I worried about the story gettin’ out and folks realizin’ how awful this country still was!”

  Sartain rose a little unsteadily from his chair. He hadn’t touched his coffee. “So Gala is likely dead.”

  “That’d be odd,” Dalton said in a thin, almost inaudible voice. “He never took no women before. I figure...I figure maybe he’s comin’ on to needin’ more than just flesh to eat...”

  Sartain’s heart thudded with both hope and revulsion. “Do you know where they hole up?”

  “One of the places. They move around a lot. When they’re huntin’ around here, I think, though I’m not sure, they stay in an old trapper’s shack on Eagle Creek, about six miles from here.”

  “Draw me a map. I’ll be back for it after I fetch my rifle.”

  Dalton looked vaguely around for paper and pencil then scowled curiously at Sartain. “What I can’t figure is why Hans didn’t take you.”

  Sartain knew why. Because Dorian had tumbled for him. That’s why she’d laid Sartain out on the cot last night and had even built a fire in Wallace’s stove so he wouldn’t freeze to death.

  The girl’s urge to leave here with the Cajun had been real. He was convinced of that. She’d thought she’d fallen in love with him, and while his refusal had hurt her, she must have thought she loved him enough to not allow her brother to kill him.

  To kill and eat him.

  Sartain didn’t convey any of those thoughts to Dalton, however. There was no time. Besides, he was still trying to wrap his mind around the entire grisly situation, and his tongue was as thick as shoe leather in his mouth.

  He had to see about saving Gala from Dorian and her brother, the man-beast.

  He swung around and pushed through the curtain, stopped in his tracks when he saw Stanley Harken and the two bodyguards standing before him, just beyond the doorway. Rand was leaning back against the bar. They all wore stricken disbelieving looks on their faces.

  “Good God!” Harken said, shuddering.

  “You heard, I take it.”

  “Christ, what kind of a hellhole is this?”

  Sartain pushed past the three men and walked out from behind the bar. “If you’re comin’ with me, you’d best pick out and saddle your horses. That buckskin’s mine. I wouldn’t go near him if I were you, unless you want an ear torn off.”

  The Cajun ran upstairs to fetch his rifle and saddlebags.

  * * *

  The snow was knee deep in places. In other places, deeper. But the wind had done a good job of sweeping it into frothy drifts, and between many of these drifts, the land was nearly bare.

  Sartain led the way around these impediments, and by doing so, he was often able to hold Boss to a full trot, sometimes even a ground-eating lope. It was at the bottom of ravines and coulees that he and the other three riders had their work cut out for them, for the snow had piled up in these low-lying areas like white frosting that had dripped down the sides of a rich wedding cake.

  Often, brush and fallen trees, hidden by the deep snow at the bottoms of the cuts, further impeded their way. Several times, they had to dismount and lead their mounts through these buried reefs of tangled brush and branches, a painstaking process that ate up precious time.

  Sartain had no idea how long Dorian and Hans would keep Gala alive. Or if the governor’s daughter was even alive now. Having sated Hans’s sexual hunger, she could very well be satisfying his other, even more, dangerous hunger.

  “Cannibalism,” Sartain quietly mused. “Christ!”

  At least, the weather was holding. It was cold in the wake of the storm. Cold and impossibly sunny, the sun flashing wickedly off the snow. At least no more was coming down.

  Chickadees peeped in the scattered copses. That with the horses’ dull clomps, strained breaths, the constant sigh of the wind, and the sifting of the snow blowing along the ground w
ere the only sounds.

  It was a bright, stark, empty, frigid desert they were traversing, generally traveling southeast in a roundabout way, negotiating routes around or through long drifts capping ridge tops and forming the shapes of frozen ocean waves.

  Occasionally, Sartain hauled out the map that Dalton had penciled on lined notepaper, consulting it briefly, matching its lines and circles with land formations around him, making sure he was still headed in the right direction. Then he stuffed the wind-battered leaf back into his coat pocket and kept going.

  Harken followed close behind him on Charlie Scanlon’s horse. Rand and Temple, riding abreast, followed Harken from about twenty yards back.

  At midday, they dropped into the ravine that the map told Sartain held Eagle Creek and the old trapper’s cabin in which Dorian and Hans holed up from time to time, while they hunted the area around the Sundance. When The Revenger and the others reached the snowy bottom of the cut, Sartain reined Boss in and dismounted.

  “Let’s hold up here,” he said, looping his reins over a gray branch jutting from a deadfall. “According to Dalton’s map, we’re close.”

  “Where is it?” Harken said, his voice betraying his eagerness to retrieve his kidnapped charge. “Where the trapper’s shack?”

  Sartain turned to stare east along the ravine, which broadened out a ways ahead, to the right of where the frozen creek curved away to the north. The ground was relatively flat and stippled with sparse, winter-gray trees—box elders, aspens, and cottonwoods.

  “That way,” said the Cajun, sliding his Henry from its saddle sheath.

  “Christ,” Rand said. “How in the hell did those two find their way out here in last night’s storm?”

  “They must know the country well,” Sartain said, racking a cartridge into his rifle’s breach. “And have one hell of a good sense of direction. Not all that unusual for folks who live in the wild and have grown accustomed to getting around in it in all kinds of weather.”