The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  “Or maybe they’re not out here at all,” opined the surly Temple. “Maybe old Dalton’s full of crap. Maybe he just led us off on a wild goose chase hoping we’ll get lost and never find our way back. The wind’s fillin’ our tracks in right quick. Or maybe he’s just feedin’ us to that thing, leadin’ us into a trap!”

  “Why would he do that?” Harken asked the bodyguard.

  “So, we won’t live to tell the tale of what’s been goin’ on out here, around his hotel. You heard him. It took him this long to tell anybody. Bad for business!”

  Harken pondered that, “He could tell the other passengers we all went off chasing Gala, who got lost in the storm and simply never came back. None of the others know what’s going on.” He gave the Cajun an incriminating look. “All they know is Sartain and Ed got into it over the girl.”

  “Like I said, we’re bad for business!” Temple repeated, snarling it. Then he jerked back abruptly, eyes widening in sudden shock, as though some invisible fist had punched him in the chest.

  As the crack of a rifle flatted out over the floor of the ravine, Sartain saw blood bubble up from a hole in Temple’s fur coat, just below the third button down from his throat.

  Temple dropped straight back, like a felled aspen.

  “Down!” Sartain shouted.

  Chapter 19

  Sartain hit the snow and crabbed on chest and belly toward a deadfall bowing up out of the fresh powder. Behind him, the horses whinnied and shied at the shot and the smell of fresh blood.

  Another bullet screeched through the diamond-clear air and sliced into the snow near where Harken had fallen after jerking with a start and getting his feet entangled.

  “Jesus!” the older man intoned at the menacing blue crease in the snow near his right arm.

  The shot crackled, clear as a bell, the echo dwindling quickly.

  Sartain lifted his head over the deadfall in time to see a slender figure run out from behind a tree roughly sixty yards away from him, to the right of where the creek made a sharp curve to the north. The sun was so bright, the snow reflecting off it so unforgivingly, that he couldn’t see the figure clearly, but he thought he could make out Dorian’s rabbit fur cap, jostling now as the girl ran through the trees.

  Sartain cursed, not wanting to kill the girl. Still, he raised the Henry and fired three quick rounds at her, hoping only to wing her. As he snapped off the third shot, the sun reflected bayonet-sharp off the snow, momentarily blinding Sartain just as he heard the girl scream and drop to a knee. He blinked, squinting against the pink and gold bayonet blade of flame-like light, and saw the girl’s silhouette push up out of the snow and continue running.

  “I’ll stop the polecat!” Rand bellowed.

  He fired his carbine.

  He pumped another round into the chamber and fired again.

  “Did you get her?” Sartain asked, large, black dots flashing in front of his eyes, his forehead burning from the harsh light’s assault on his retinas.

  “Not sure,” Rand said, pumping another round into the chamber but holding fire. “The damn light...”

  Sartain rose from behind the deadfall, all three horses continuing to shy and nicker, pulling at the tied reins. He lifted an arm to shade his eyes and saw a slender shadow retreat into the denser copse straight beyond him, maybe nine yards away from him now and retreating.

  “There she is,” Sartain grunted half to himself.

  He climbed over the deadfall, tripped on a buried branch, and ran, unable to raise his boots very high in the snow but mostly sliding both feet forward, as though he were skiing.

  What he wouldn’t give for a pair of snowshoes...

  “We have to get her,” Harken said, breathless, running behind Sartain, trying to keep up. “We have to get her...find Gala. Good Lord, what’s the Governor going to say about all this?”

  “He won’t say much as long as we get her back,” Rand said, hopping through the snow to Sartain’s far left, throwing his left arm out for balance, holding his rifle low in his right hand.

  He was nearly parallel with Sartain as they ran into thicker trees east of the creek, but Harken was lagging a good thirty feet behind, working hard, his breaths coming in ragged gasps. He held his own carbine against his chest, swinging it as though he was rowing with it.

  Sartain continued to move into the trees, following the girl’s tracks. He saw no blood in the snow, which meant that neither he nor Rand had hit her. Ahead, the trees grew thicker, and there was more undergrowth for him to stumble over.

  He slowed his pace, looking around carefully. She could be anywhere in these trees, holing up behind cover, waiting for him and his companions to walk into her rifle sights.

  He glanced to his left. Rand was just then swinging a leg over a deadfall.

  “Best slow down,” Sartain yelled.

  Rand stopped, turned his one-eyed face toward the Cajun. “Why? You think she has?”

  The crack of a rifle was a good enough response.

  Rand’s head jerked violently back, then wobbled. His body sagged back against the tree he’d just stepped over, and his carbine tumbled from his hands. As the man dropped to his knees as though bowing for communion, Sartain pulled his head back behind an aspen just in time to avoid another bullet slicing the air where he’d been standing half a wink before.

  The bullet thunked into a frozen tree behind him. The rifle’s shrill echo wailed through the woods.

  Sartain glanced over his right shoulder. Harken was just then dropping behind a dense pocket of chokecherry brush about thirty yards behind him. In the quiet air following the shot, Sartain heard the man curse shrilly.

  “Stay where you are,” the Cajun told him, not having to raise his voice to be heard in the still, dense tense silence.

  “Is he dead?” Harken asked, his voice quavering fearfully. “Is Rand dead?”

  Sartain glanced over to where Rand’s back humped up out of the snow, the man’s head and legs buried. “I’d say it’s a safe bet.”

  “Oh, dear Lord.”

  Sartain knew that the man was reflecting on the irony of the three bodyguards’ having taken out the train robbers with aplomb, only to be dispatched, one by one, first by a lone Cajun and then by a girl.

  Dorian’s voice sliced cleanly through the chill air. “Go away, Mike. I don’t want to have to kill you.”

  Sartain glanced around from behind the aspen. He couldn’t see her for the tangle of shrubs and the leaning pillars of trees silhouetted against the sunlight. But she’d sounded only a handful of yards away, though sounds could be deceptive in air this dense.

  “You don’t have to kill anybody, Dorian,” the Cajun said, again not having to raise his voice much. “I’m here for your brother.”

  “You got no call!” the girl cried. “What’s any of this to you?”

  “You took an innocent girl,” Sartain said. “A governor’s daughter. That man’s going to be wanting her back.”

  Dorian’s voice was shrill with jealousy. “I suppose you want her back!”

  “Yeah, I want her back.”

  “She’s pretty, isn’t she, Mike?”

  Sartain cursed under his breath. He didn’t need this added complication to an already dire situation. On the other hand, it was good to hear Dorian refer to Gala in the present tense, which meant she must still be alive. “That has nothing to do with it, Dorian. Your brother can’t have her.”

  “He’s already got her,” Dorian said, sneering. “He’s going to keep her. He needs someone. Just like I need someone,” she added more sharply and again with accusing.

  “Dorian, be reasonable,” Sartain said. “It’s over. This whole grisly game of yours and your brother’s is over.”

  “I would have run away with you, Mike,” Dorian snapped. “But you wouldn’t have me. I was ready to leave Hans. I was ready to leave this life. I’ve had enough of it...tending Hans and his...hungers...and desires.”

  “You can still leave it.”
<
br />   “And do what?” Dorian asked. “Go where? With who?”

  Sartain didn’t know how to answer that, so he let the question hang in the air.

  Dorian said, “I got nowhere else to go. My life is here with Hans.”

  “Feeding his cravings?” Sartain gave a caustic laugh. “Dorian, his cravings are unnatural. I can understand your anger...your need for revenge. Believe me, if anyone can understand the need for revenge, it’s me. But you and Hans...you’re feeding on innocent people, preying on innocent train passengers like wolves on newborn calves. Dorian, for chrissakes, you’re sane. I know you are. It’s time to stop this.”

  The girl’s response was another bullet plunking into the tree Sartain was using for cover. Bark sprayed. The shot rang out over the forest.

  “Christ,” Harken said behind Sartain.

  The Cajun knew he had no other options now. Dorian wouldn’t give up, and neither would her sick, crazy brother. Gritting his teeth in frustration, he stepped out around the left side of his covering aspen and triggered the Henry in the direction from which her voice had come.

  There was a shrill cry and the crackling of thin branches.

  Sartain saw a shadow move. He bounded toward it through the snow, lifting his knees high. He wove through the trees and bulled through the brush, stopping and staring at the scuffed snow where the girl had fallen.

  The pink slush of fresh blood shone around the deep scuff marks.

  Hard to his right, snow crunched faintly.

  Sartain steeled himself, waiting for the bullet.

  There was only the ping of a hammer dropping benignly against a firing pin.

  The Cajun wheeled in time to hear the girl scream, throw her empty rifle away, and hurl herself toward him from a V between two trees, her face a red mask of insane rage and desperation. She slashed the barrel of her rifle down toward him.

  He’d hesitated in raising the Henry, still reluctant to kill her. Before he could bring the long gun up, she rammed the butt of her own empty rifle down against it, knocking it out of his hands.

  The barrel of her Winchester glanced off his right temple and shoulder.

  And then Dorian slammed into his chest, bulling him off his heels into the snow, screeching like a wildcat. He rolled her off him more easily than he’d anticipated. She lay back in the snow, writhing.

  “Oh, damn you,” the girl cried, closing her eyes and pressing her head to the snowy ground, grinding her heels into the snow as well.

  Red slush shone at her right side.

  “Dorian,” Sartain said, rising to his knees and looking at her. “Oh, Dorian...”

  One of his bullets had hit home. Suddenly, he felt wretched.

  Dorian sobbed, “Leave him be. He can’t help what he is.”

  Sartain brushed the bloody snow away from her side, revealing the small hole from which dark-red blood issued, steaming in the cold air. He reached under his coat and removed his neckerchief.

  He pressed the wadded cloth against the hole.

  “Hold that there,” he told the girl. “Hold it down tight.”

  When the girl only lay back in the snow, sobbing, he grabbed her right mittened hand and placed and it atop the cloth over the hole. “Hold it down tight, or you’ll bleed out.”

  The crunch of footsteps and the rasps of heavy breathing rose, and Sartain saw Harken trudging toward him. The man’s face was mottled red from cold and exertion. He held his rifle not very tightly under his right arm. It wagged and flopped.

  “Keep an eye on her,” Sartain ordered Gala’s chaperone. “And make sure she keeps that neckerchief pressed down tight against the wound.”

  The exhausted Harken looked from Dorian to Sartain. “You going after Gala?”

  “Yep.”

  Sartain scooped his Henry out of the snow and brushed the snow from its stock. Quickly, he removed the loading tube from under the barrel and filled it with fresh cartridges from his belt. When he’d snugged the tube back under the barrel, and locked it, he racked a fresh round into the Henry’s breach, off-cocked the hammer, and looked down at Dorian.

  She’d risen onto her elbows, and she was staring angrily up at him.

  “Go ahead and fetch the pretty governor’s daughter,” Dorian snarled, flaring a nostril. “Kill my brother and leave me with nothing!”

  “I hope to leave you with a new life, Dorian.”

  He turned and looked around. He couldn’t see the cabin, but he sensed it was dead ahead, for that was the direction that Dorian had been heading.

  He glanced once more at the girl and Harken, who sagged wearily onto a snow-mantled tree stump.

  “Keep a close eye on her, Harken,” Sartain ordered the older man again. “Don’t let her out of your sight. Not even for a second. And if she tries to call out a warning to Hans, shoot her.”

  “All right,” Harken said, nodding resolutely. “I will. Shouldn’t be too hard...under the circumstances.”

  He aimed his carbine at Dorian, who held her hateful glare on Sartain, her jaws hard.

  The Revenger swung around and jogged off through the snow.

  Chapter 20

  It wasn’t hard to find the cabin. Sartain quickly picked up Dorian’s tracks and followed them back through the snow and brush to the squat, gray-log shack hunched at the base of a steep slope.

  The place was well hidden. From a distance, it looked a little higher than the snow-covered undergrowth around it. Cottonwoods and aspens towered over it. Hans and Dorian had chosen it well. No one could have found it unless they knew exactly where to look for it.

  A stone hearth jutted up along the left wall. Gray smoke issued from the chimney, flattening out over the cabin’s roof, which was mantled in a good three feet of fresh snow that gleamed like expensive crystal.

  Sartain studied the place from a tangle of thick brush twenty yards away from the northeast front corner. It was banded with sunlight and shadow, smoke from the chimney hovering over it. No sounds issued, lending an additional air of foreboding.

  The only sounds at all were the peeping of chickadees and nuthatches, gay music in stark contrast to the air of hushed menace surrounding the grim place.

  Holding the Henry in both hands, barrel up, the Cajun moved out from his cover, heading slowly toward the cabin. He kept a close eye on the shuttered windows, which bore rifle slits that had probably been used by its original dweller for warding off Indian attacks. The slits formed black crosses. So far, no shadows had moved behind them.

  Sartain stepped onto the rickety stoop, wincing against the squawk of loose, rotting floorboards beneath his boots. He expected the door to be barred from within, but it wasn’t. The metal latch handle dropped in its steel rack, the door shuddered and squawked as it fell open.

  A sour smell permeated the air pushing out through the dark opening at Sartain. Holding the rifle straight out from his right side, he drew the hammer back and stepped inside the cabin, looking around, his eyes slow to adjust to the murky, brown light.

  He wrinkled his nose. His eyes burned.

  The stench was like that of a bear den. Sartain wondered how Dorian stood it. Orange flames danced in the hearth to his far left. The cabin was only one room, neatly kept. There was a table, a cot, some wooden cabinets, a dry sink mounted on branches fastened together with rawhide, and not much else.

  Tack was piled in a corner near the fire. A washbasin filled with water sat on the table, and a strip of flannel likely used as a towel hung over a near chair.

  The Revenger’s eyes swept the room. There was no one here. If Hans was as large as Dalton had said he was, there would be no room for him to hide in here.

  Sartain studied a bobcat skin stretched over the cabin’s rear wall. In fact, it was two skins crudely stitched together. It hung from two nails, like a curtain...

  Frowning curiously, the Cajun moved to the hide and poked his rifle barrel around the left side of it and shoved the barrel forward. It met no resistance.

  Sartain s
tepped back, heart thudding.

  Then he used his right hand to quickly lift the hides, revealing an opening in the cabin wall. Beyond the opening appeared to be a cave. The mouth of the cave was like the mouth of a giant with the worst breath imaginable. The mouth exhaled that sickly sweet stench, which wrapped around Sartain and sucked his own breath from his lungs.

  His eyes watered.

  He was about to reach for his neckerchief, forgetting that he’d given it to Dorian when a giant figure stepped casually into the opening before him. Sartain gave a grunt and stepped back in shock. Just as he began to draw his index finger back against the Henry’s trigger, the giant stepped to one side, gave a loud grunt of its own, and yanked the rifle out of Sartain’s surprise-weakened grip.

  The rifle belched loudly, the echoes hammering in the close confines.

  Sartain’s hand ached from the violent jerk of the gun from his fingers. As he bounded back into the cabin, he saw the beast duck out of the cave entrance and straighten before him—a good seven feet of giant with round cobalt-blue eyes bulging out of a dome-like head only half-covered with stringy yellow hair and a hideously deformed face.

  The mouth almost appeared to be two half-mouths set crudely side by side. The beast’s two connected mouths opened, giving its bear-like bellow. It raised its right arm, a hatchet arcing up in its right hand. Vaguely, Sartain reflected that the hatchet was how it had so quickly freed Charlie Scanlon from his ties, so quickly killed him, and chopped off the half-breed’s head.

  Hans was coming after Sartain now with the same hatchet.

  The hatchet came down in a gray-brown blur toward the Cajun, its razor-edged blade crusted with old blood and tufts of hair.

  Sartain stumbled to one side. The beast gave another, louder bellowing wail as the hatchet thudded loudly into the table. Sartain clawed at his holster for the LeMat, but the beast was too quick. It yanked the hatchet out of the table, bellowing, showing its worn, grimy teeth and squinting its eyes, and slashed the hatchet from right to left.