Now the doors stood partway open.
“Would you care to join me in my office, Miss Rosen? It ain’t much, but I have a fire and a pot of Arbuckles on the stove.”
Ignoring his proffered hand, she stepped down from the saddle.
Chapter 3
Most of the saloon’s furnishings had been scavenged.
There was one table, three chairs, most of them in poor repair, which was likely why they’d been left, and a goodly bit of dirt, grime, mouse crap, and spider webs.
Still, there was a potbelly stove that didn’t smoke overmuch and a small albeit moldering pile of burnable wood out back of the place. While the saloon had some broken-out windows, which made it drafty, the main drinking hall was relatively warm just now, for the Cajun had stoked the stove within the last hour or so.
He held the door open for his unexpected visitor, then closed it and followed her in.
While Miss Rosen looked around, arching a skeptical brow, Sartain walked over to where the potbelly stove ticked in the middle of the room, and his coffee pot steamed and gurgled. He withdrew an extra tin coffee cup from his saddlebags, which were draped across a chair back near the stove. He laid his Winchester rifle across the table positioned close to the stove and filled two cups with the hot black mud.
“Have a seat,” Sartain said. “Might want to brush your chair off first. Critters have had the run of the place for quite some time. I had to chase a coyote out of here before I moved in.”
Miss Rosen ran her mittened hand across the seat of a chair, and sat cautiously down in it as though she wasn’t sure the chair could take her weight, though the Cajun doubted she had any spare pounds on her. Despite her heavy, shapeless wool coat, he could tell that she was ample-breasted, but she was otherwise spare-framed though strong, durable.
She was also pretty in a subtle way. Maybe the subtlety came from the fact that she seemed dispirited, humorless. Sad. Downright depressed, her features gaunt and pale.
“Do you often house yourself in such...offices...Mister Sartain?” she asked, glancing around again at the humble furnishings.
“I holed up in a hotel in until the local lawdogs started sniffin’ around. I reckon my trail has grown hot enough that I’ll be holin’ up in such ‘offices’ as this for quite some time. Till my wick is snuffed, most likely.”
“You seem as though you don’t dread it.”
The Cajun shrugged. “What’s to dread?” He glanced out a dirty front window. “Any chance you might have been followed out from town, Miss Rosen? I assume you rode here from Rio Rosa since that’s where Mister Kimball came from. You followed him, I assume. It can’t be a coincidence that you’re both showing up here at the same time.”
Miss Rosen removed her scarf and snatched her hat from her head. She set the hat down on the table, set the scarf inside the hat, and shook out her straw-blonde hair so that it jostled prettily though untidily across her shoulders. “Yes.”
“How did you know where he was headed?”
“I work in the mercantile, Mister Sartain. The post office and the mercantile—”
“Are connected, I know,” Sartain remarked, setting a cup of the steaming coffee down before her. “You mean to tell me you overheard our conversation, Kimball’s and mine, when I hired him to bring my mail?”
“Yes.”
Sartain made a mental note to be more careful in such a situation next time. He never knew who might recognize him from the wanted dodgers or who might be listening in on his conversations. He turned his chair sideways to the table and slackened into it.
Resting one elbow on the table, he studied the young woman across from him.
She looked sheepish as she wrapped both her small, pretty, pink hands around her coffee cup on the table.
“Please, don’t be angry, Mister Sartain. I am desperate for your help, and...and just by chance, I recognized you when you dismounted in front of the mercantile last week. I’ve seen the reward circulars the marshal hung around town, and...when I saw you in person, I just knew it was fate.
“Yes, I eavesdropped on yours and Mister Kimball’s conversation from the spring hat racks next door. Yes, I followed Mister Kimball. Please, don’t be angry with him. I was quite desperate, and I must say, cunning. He took great care not to be followed, so I took even greater care in following him.”
Again, Sartain felt the pang of chagrin. Apprehension was a cold hand laid across the back of his neck. If this young woman, however desperate to find him, had followed the postmaster out here from town, someone else even more determined than she could have followed them both.
Sartain rose from his chair, walked to a broken side window near the table, and peered into the windblown, dusty street. “Did anyone know you were riding out here today, Miss Rosen?”
Her voice was crisply indignant. “Of course not. I’m not a fool, Mister Sartain. I know the gravity of your situation. I know how much money the government has placed on your head.” His notoriety had been recounted in most of the Western newspapers, and even in some of the Eastern ones, he’d been told. “I rode out here for your help, not to lead the law to you. You couldn’t very well help me from behind bars, now, could you?”
Sartain swept the area around the saloon with his gaze then turned to her, leaned against the wall, and crossed his arms on his chest. “All right. Why were you so desperate to see me, Miss Rosen?” He glanced at the mailbag he’d set on the table, near the bottle that Kimball had brought him. “You could have just written, you know?”
“I could have, but I’m not much good with paper and pen. I didn’t want to be just another note in a mail pouch. I felt the need to plead my case in person.”
“Which is?”
Miss Rosen lifted her cup to her lips with both hands. They appeared to tremble slightly. When she’d taken a sip and set the cup back down on the table, she touched her tongue to her upper lip and turned to Sartain. Her eyes were grave. “I want you to stalk and kill the gang of train robbers who murdered my son, Mister Sartain.”
“Your son?”
“His name was Edgar Rosen. He was five years old.”
“Five?”
“Yes.” Miss Rosen reached into her coat pocket and placed a small, wooden picture box on the table. She opened it, slid it across the table toward Sartain. “This is a picture of him...us...the week before we lit out on the train for California.”
Sartain moved to the table and stared down at the small ambrotype photograph of Miss Rosen and a little boy sitting on an ornate velvet sofa likely in some photographer’s shop outfitted with the accouterments of a middle-class parlor room. Miss Rosen wore a dark, pleated wool dress with white lace along the collar and sleeves, and a prim hat trimmed with fake flowers. Earrings dangled along her neck. The boy wore a suit and knickers with white stockings stretching to his knees, and small, side-buckle, black-patent shoes.
They both looked soberly at the camera, but there was a precocious glint in the little boy’s eyes. Sartain thought he saw pride in the eyes of the boy’s mother, her face turned ever so slightly toward him, as though to direct attention to the child. Her right arm was draped around little Edgar’s shoulders.
Edgar Rosen had had a pixyish face, with close-set eyes, snub nose, and a cleft in his chin. Sartain smiled. Something told him the boy had been a handful, and that to his mother he’d been worth every bit of the trouble. His right leg was slightly blurred, as though in his impatience he’d started to swing it at the same time the shot had been triggered.
Sartain picked up the bottle Kimball had brought him, popped the cork, and held it over Miss Rosen’s coffee cup. She waved it off. Sartain splashed some of the whiskey into his own coffee, set the bottle down, hiked his boot onto his chair, and leaned forward against his knee. “How did he die?”
“I fell asleep on the train. When I awoke, Edgar had gone. He was running about the train playing ‘lawman.’ When I found him, he was in the car ahead of the one to which we had been assi
gned. He was in the same car that three members of the Lute Lawton Gang happened to be riding in. He’d run into them just before they’d planned to rob the train. He’d recognized them from a wanted circular he’d probably pulled down from a Wells Fargo bulletin board...and tried to arrest them with his toy Peacemaker revolver.”
“Arrest?”
“Quite the imagination Eddie had,” Miss Rosen said, quirking a proud half-smile. A little sheepishly, she added, “Edgar, not unlike his mother, I suppose, was fascinated by reward circulars. There was a lawman there in Lawton’s car, as well. He heard the commotion and came to investigate.”
Miss Rosen sighed, shook her head. “It gets cloudy after that. There was a confrontation between the lawman, a deputy U.S. marshal, I believe he was, and Lawton’s men. Then there was an explosion outside. I guess the rest of the gang had blown the tracks. Then...gunfire. The lawman fell, and Lawton kept shooting him while outside the rest of the gang also fired guns...to put the fear of God into all the passengers...and...”
The woman’s voice trailed off. She stared at the table, her jaws hard, trying desperately to maintain her composure. Sartain thought he saw a faint sheen of emotion in her eyes, but when she blinked it was gone, and she gave him a hard, pointed look, clearing her throat.
“...and then I found myself in the horrific position of holding my dead boy, Mister Sartain. One of the bullets Lawton had fired at the lawman must have ricocheted. It tore through Edgar’s heart.” She paused, swallowed again, her cheeks even whiter than before. “Edgar looked up at me as though with a question and then I felt his little body tremble in my arms, and then his eyes rolled up in his head...and I felt the life leave him.”
She looked down at the table. Her shoulders convulsed once. Just once. She pursed her lips and closed her eyes, obviously fighting hard against the emotions welling up inside her.
Sartain reached across the table and placed his left hand on hers. She pulled it away and dropped it into her lap.
“It’s all right to cry, Miss Rosen.”
She looked at Sartain again with sharp determination. “No, you’re wrong about that, Mister Sartain. It is not all right for me to cry anymore. I’ve cried all the tears I’m going to cry for Edgar. Now my sole focus must be on getting justice for my son. Sadness only clouds that focus. Now, I will allow myself only anger. Fury. But even that must be restrained...funneled into the seeking of justice for my boy. Funneled into making sure that Lute Lawton and every other man in his murderous group are killed...and that they know why they are being killed. They must know that they are being killed to avenge me and the boy they took from me...the boy who was all I had in this world...and who now is gone.”
Her eyes hardened. A muscle in her cheek twitched with pent up grief. “The boy I now will not be able to watch grow up and become a man, who I will not watch raise a family of his own and make a name for himself in this world. Who is now in a tiny little box six feet under this earth, marked with a little stone marker hardly larger than my shoe, because it was all I could afford.”
Sartain said, “Towns, you know... Towns will often help out with—”
“Not when the mother bore her child out of wedlock, Mister Sartain. Not when the child she buried is considered a bastard.” Miss Rosen’s right nostril flared as she added, “A blight. The product of carnal sin.”
“I see.” Sartain sipped his whiskey-laced coffee. He needed a good belt, having heard what he’d heard. He’d been through a lot—lost a love of his own, a child of his own albeit an unborn one—but he had yet to become inured to human suffering. “Not that it’s any of my business, but the boy’s father...”
“Wanted nothing to do with him. Wanted nothing more to do with me, in fact, when he learned I was carrying his child. He was married. Is married, I should say. Edgar has only me to avenge him, Mister Sartain.”
Of course, the killing of her child was enough to cause the almost unbearable grief and outrage that was hers, but Sartain sensed that there was even more to her story.
He stared down into his steaming cup for a few seconds, then, finding the words, said, “What happened next, Miss Rosen? After your boy was killed? To you, I mean...”
Chapter 4
Mort Kimball was puffing his pipe, enjoying the ride back to Rio Rosa—or savoring his time away from Rio Rosa, rather, and enjoying his time out of the shadowy confines of the post office—when something moved on the curving two-track trail ahead of him.
Kimball stared out over the twitching ears of the winter-shaggy claybank in the traces, glowering.
Five riders had just walked their horses out from a small, ragged copse of cottonwoods sheathing a rocky spring. They turned the mounts onto the trail and rode toward Kimball. Feeling cold tendrils of unease rake the base of his spine, the postmaster pulled his pipe from his mouth and set it on the seat beside him. He started to reach for his old cap-and-ball Colt revolver wrapped in an oily cloth and tucked beneath the seat but stayed the movement when he saw something flash against one of the riders.
A badge.
Dread raked Kimball, who hauled back on the reins. “Hooahh, there, Sam’l...”
Now he saw the glint of badges on all five of the riders heading toward him.
As the wagon creaked to a halt, the fiver riders stopped their horses just ahead and stared at Kimball, who grimaced as he stared back and said, “Ah, crap.”
“What’s the matter, Mort?” asked the county sheriff, Jack Epps. “Ain’t you happy to see us?”
He’d said it sharply, angrily, and glanced at the man riding beside him—Wayne Tatum, city marshal of Rio Rosa. Epps and Tatum were the oldest of the five. Two of the other three riders were Al Stanley and Riley Scudder, Tatum’s and Epps’s deputies, respectively. Scudder’s horse was fidgeting around, wide-eyed, and Scudder was grinding his teeth and cursing under his breath as he drew back on the reins.
The horse seemed nervous, probably picking up on the nerves of its rider. Horses would do that.
Kimball was nervous now, too. He gave a nervous smile and said, “I was...I was just ridin’ out to deliver a package special to Mrs. Dempsey at the Three-Bar Over D,” the postmaster added. “I didn’t mind. Mrs. Dempsey don’t get to town very often no more, and it’s a nice day fer a ride. Kinda nice to get out of the office. It was a damn long winter. Sure was. Why I’ve lived in this country nearly twenty years, and I don’t remember a winter as cold as this last one. Chills a soul deep!”
The fifth rider was a Pinkerton detective. He wasn’t from around here, and Kimball didn’t like him. Since arriving in Rio Rosa a week or so ago, he tended to stride around town scowling with his chest puffed up, as if he owned the whole damn town and all the rocks around and beneath it. He had curly black hair and he wore black gloves and a black hat and a black string tie, and he just seemed so full of himself.
His name was Bradley Decker. He’d thrown his name around town, in all the saloons, gambling dens, and the hog pens, brothels, out by the wash. No, Kimball didn’t like Decker one bit. He’d been in the post office several times, getting in Kimball’s way, asking questions and making veiled threats.
“We know where you rode to, Kimball,” Decker said now, his long, pale nose red from the cold. His blue eyes were watery. He was maybe thirty, but he seemed younger in some ways, older in other ways. “We also know you’ve been squirreling mail away for Sartain though you told me otherwise.”
Kimball cupped a hand to his ear. “I’ve been squirrelin’ mail away for who?”
“Knock it off, Mort.” Sheriff Epps reached into the denim jacket he was wearing and withdrew a small envelope. “You dropped this in the livery barn when you rented the wagon. It’s addressed to ‘The Revenger, General Delivery.’ The hostler found it, turned it into Tatum’s office. Said you’d hitched a wagon and rode out of town to the south.”
“Dammit it,” Kimball cussed, raking a hand across the back of his neck. “That damn Harrison kid could have just minded his
own business.”
“Could have,” said the Pinkerton, Decker, “but I alerted him to the possibility that you might be doing just what you did—renting a wagon to deliver a mail pouch somewhere out in the country. That letter you dropped proves who the mail belonged to.”
Decker had ridden his horse up beside Kimball, his cheeks flushed with anger. Now he raised his mount’s bridle reins high then brought them down savagely, slashing them across the old postmaster’s face. Kimball didn’t get his hands up in time to shield himself, and the reins lashed his left cheek and forehead painfully.
He screamed and leaned back and sideways, raising his arms as the reins lashed him again, the Pinkerton barking, “Dammit it, I hate a liar! You told me Sartain wasn’t getting mail from you, Kimball!” The reins came down again and again. “But he was, goddamnit! You were squirreling it away for him. I tell you I hate a goddam liar!”
“Jesus Christ, Decker,” Tatum stressed, holding the reins of his now-jittery mount taut in his gloved fist. “Take it easy on the old bastard, will you?”
“I hate a liar!” Decker said, turning his horse in a full circle but keeping his enraged eyes on the cowering postmaster.
“So you said, Decker,” Epps said, glaring at the Pinkerton. “But if you hit him again, I’ll blast you out of your gall-dang saddle, box you up, and ship you in pieces back to Allan Pinkerton himself!”
When Decker got his mount settled, he sat facing the wagon, flaring his nostrils at Kimball. His horse twitched its ears and blew.
Epps turned to Kimball. “Mort, if you weren’t so damned old, I’d see that you were fired for this. Not only fired but jailed.”
Kimball winced as he probed the several painful lashes on his face with his fingers. He didn’t say anything, just averted his gaze and assessed the extent of the Pinkerton’s damage to his face.
“Where is he?” Epps asked. “Where did you deliver that mail?”
The Revenger Page 116
