Sartain and Olivia Rosen stopped at the head of the stairs, facing the beleaguered and outraged Mrs. Thompson. The old woman was a full head and a half shorter than Sartain. She had to tip her head far back to stare up into his face.
“Two out of three ain’t all that bad for this backwater,” The Revenger said. He glanced at Olivia, gave a wry curl of his upper lip. “So far.”
Olivia quirked a rare, faint smile of her own.
“You must leave here,” Mrs. Thompson said, her voice quavering with outrage. “Straightaway!”
Sartain shook his head slowly. “We’ll be stayin’ the night.”
Mrs. Thompson stared up at him, her lower jaw hanging.
“Tell me, Mrs. Thompson, where can a fella and a lady find a hot bath in this town?”
It took the incredulous woman nearly a full minute to get the words out.
“Fine, then,” Sartain said. “Where, once they’ve soaked in a hot bath, can that same fella and lady find a good steak?”
After Mrs. Thompson had finally bit out the words “Johnson’s Place by the Creek,” Sartain thanked her cordially and then led Olivia Rosen down the stairs and outside in search of the Parliamentary Tonsorial Parlor and Bathhouse.
* * *
When Sartain and Olivia returned to the hotel, Mrs. Thompson was still at her place behind the lobby desk. She must have been too much of a skinflint to hire help outside of her idiot son, Henry.
She did not speak as Sartain and Olivia passed her on their way to the stairs. The old woman merely stared coldly, her lips compressed into a taut, straight line, her knitting needles clacking together to form a sweater.
Henry was on his hands and knees on the second-floor hall, scrubbing up the blood that remained from Olivia’s execution of the four Lawton riders.
Outside the door to room two, Olivia turned to Sartain. “Come in for a drink? You left your bottle behind earlier.”
Sartain shrugged. “Why not?”
He followed her into the room and doffed his hat. She closed and locked the door and then turned up a bracket lamp. While Sartain hooked his hat on a wall peg, Olivia poured them each a drink from the bottle of Sam Clay on the dresser.
She gave one glass to Sartain then went over and sat on the edge of the bed.
The long, hot bath and the steak seemed to have brought color to her cheeks and a luster to her hair.
Sartain sat in a chair by the door and sipped his bourbon. Neither of them spoke for a time. They hadn’t spoken much all night. It was around nine o’clock, and the sun was down. From outside came only the sounds of a single barking dog and the occasional hoots of an owl.
Sartain hadn’t seen many people out on the street or in either of the business establishments that he and Olivia had visited. He supposed that word of the killings...and the killers...had made its way around town, and most folks thought it better to stick close to home.
Olivia sipped her bourbon and broke the silence. “We know where to find Lute Lawton...if the deputy sheriff was telling the truth. I sense that he was. What about the others? The rest of the gang may not be as guilty as Lawton himself, but they are guilty. I want them dead.”
Sartain felt his lips shape a wistful half-smile as he turned his glass in his hand.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
The Revenger hiked a shoulder. “I thought maybe you’d had enough. After...earlier.” He took another sip from his glass.
“How could you think such a thing? We’ve only just begun.”
Sartain looked at her. Her eyes glistened like he’d never seen them glisten before, and he didn’t think it was merely a trick of the lamp burning on the wall over her shoulder, either.
“All right,” he said. “Okay.” He tapped his thumbnail on the rim of his glass. “I don’t think we need to worry about the others. I got a feelin’, after what happened here today, they’ll be lookin’ for us. Maybe before we get to Alkali, maybe after. But we’ll run into them.”
“Good,” she said, looking satisfied. “That’s very good indeed.”
Sartain threw back the last of his whiskey and set the glass on the dresser. “Well, I’ll be turnin’ in.”
“No.” She frowned at him from the bed. “Stay.”
“I don’t need any payment tonight. Hell, you did most of the heavy lifting earlier.”
She rose from the bed and set her glass on the dresser. She turned to him, her expression grave. Firmly, she said, “I want you to stay, Mister Sartain.”
She began to unbutton her blouse.
Chapter 13
Sartain became aware of someone hammering on the door.
“Stop! Stop! Oh, you’re animals!” Mrs. Thompson shouted from out in the hall.
Sartain rolled away from Olivia, both of them laughing.
Mrs. Thompson stomped off down the hall, yelling, “First the killing...the blood...and now this! Oh, my God!” Her shoes thudded on the stairs. “What kind of people are you?”
Sartain gave a last shudder and relaxed against Olivia’s heaving bosom. He stared into her moist eyes, thumbed a bead of sweat from her cheek.
He laughed. Olivia squeezed her eyes closed, stretched her lips back from her white teeth, and laughed, as well.
Sartain rose from the bed and splashed whiskey into their glasses. He handed one to Olivia and crawled in beside her. They rested back against the headboard, propped on their pillows. She slumped against him, sipped her whiskey.
“That, Mister Sartain, was as good as I’ve felt in a long time,” she said through a long sigh.
“After that, Miss Rosen,” Sartain said, “you might as well call me Mike.”
She lifted her head to stare up at him gravely, her hair bewitchingly tangled. “I can’t,” she said, shaking her head slowly. She gazed even deeper into his eyes. “I can’t.”
Sartain stared back at her. Then he kissed her moist forehead. “I know.”
* * *
Agent Carl Warner walked his horse into Willoughby the next morning around ten and looked around the humble village.
He saw the sign jutting into the street announcing COUNTY SHERIFF & RANSOM COUNTY COURTHOUSE and rode up to the humble building. It had been constructed of stone on the first story, with a second story of vertical pine boards painted a sun-faded and blistered green, the windows trimmed in white.
The ramshackle hovel was humble indeed considering that it was a county courthouse, trials likely held in the wooden second story. Then, again, Warner thought, while the county might have been as large as some eastern states, there probably weren’t more than a few hundred people in it. In fact, the people here were likely outnumbered a hundred to one by cattle, many of which he’d seen grazing along the trail out from Colorado, nibbling the green shoots of spring grass jutting between wildflowers and sage.
The Pinkerton had also seen lots of human bones. Likely the bones of Indians and settlers killed in raids. In places, predators had strewn them like jackstraws.
What a savage place, the frontier!
Seeing a pasteboard sign hanging from a nail in the sheriff’s closed front door, the words BAK IN 1 OUR scribbled in heavy pencil across the placard in what was obviously a clumsy and illiterate hand, Warner glanced around.
There were only a few people on the main street. One was a pretty, young brunette in a dark-calico, white-collared frock crossing the street nearby, a bowl of straw-cushioned eggs in one hand and a small brown parcel in her other hand.
She wore a large, floppy-brimmed white hat. The hat, a bit old and shabby, had a ribbon wrapped around its brim, the end trailing a little, blowing in the breeze. The girl was maybe Aggie Noble’s age, sixteen, long-limbed and slender in the long-sleeved cambric frock.
“Good day to you, pretty miss,” Warner said, fashioning his best smile while holding his hat down over his chest.
“G’day,” the girl said blandly, giving the stranger a cold glance as she continued walking, apparently heading toward a small,
unpainted, wood-frame cabin set back off the street’s north side. A wooden barn and corral flanked the house in a grove of cottonwood trees.
“Could you spare me a minute for a lonely wanderer?”
The girl glanced at him again, frowning. She continued walking slowly and then stopped, canting her head to one side, studying him skeptically.
She didn’t appear sure of what to make of the handsome, well-dressed man before her. Women in these backwaters rarely did at first, before he could charm them with his sophistication, wit, and phony adoration.
Most had likely never seen anything like Agent Carl Warner—handsome, impeccably attired, and articulate. Most of the men around them from day-to-day were too fat or otherwise misshapen, nearly toothless, badly unkempt, often drunk, and almost always foul-mouthed.
“I’m wondering where I might find the county sheriff,” Warner said.
The girl kept her eyes on him but tucked her parcel under her left arm and raised her right arm to point toward the south. She did so with a desultory air, feet set shoulder-width apart, her face pinched into an impatient frown, leaving Warner a little breathless and lightheaded with lust. While her hazel eyes didn’t give a good coyote about Warner or anyone else, her ripe mouth was calling out to be plundered by his tongue.
Ah, the young ladies from the provinces. While not fit to marry, there was something about their uncouthness that he found deeply provocative.
The Pinkerton found her so stimulating, in fact, that he was slow to rake his gaze from her to where she was indicating with her slightly dirty finger. He did so only when she crossed her eyes, chewed her lower lip, and tapped her left foot clad in a scuffed brown half-boot better suited to a boy. Clearing his throat, Warner reluctantly swiveled his head toward where a cemetery rose just south of the town, atop a broad knoll capped with one lone tree pale green with young spring leaves.
There were maybe a dozen mostly crude monuments sprawled over the top of the butte, spilling down its rocky sides.
Warner squinted. A man was working atop the knoll. Digging with a pick. Chopping at the soil. The dull clangs of the pick against rock reached the Pinkerton’s ears nearly a full second after the pick had been thrust downward.
A second man sat near the digger, under the lone tree. He appeared to be sitting on a coffin, one boot hiked on a knee. Something about the set of his shoulders marked him as old.
“One of those men is the sheriff, I take it?” Warner said.
The girl lowered her arm. She gave a sly sneer, showing the ends of her little teeth, and said, “He don’t have a deputy no more.”
Poor grammar, too!
“He don’t?” Warner said. The girl didn’t seem to realize he was mocking her poor schooling.
“Nope.”
“What happened?”
“Let him tell you. I don’t have all day to stand out on the street talking to some natty stranger.”
How wonderfully rude!
Again, her hazel eyes flicked him up and down. She tried hard to be coy, but there was a vague glint of interest in her otherwise impatient gaze.
“Tell me, angel,” Warner said, adjusting his position in his saddle, “do you live around here?”
“I live over there.” The girl canted her head toward the wood-frame shack. “With my mother and grandmother.” Deep lines of disdain cut into the skin above the bridge of her nose. “Not that it’s any of a stranger’s business.”
“What’s your name?”
She studied him. “Why?”
Warner smiled winningly. “Because you’re beautiful. Surely there is no better reason to relinquish your name, Miss...”
“Daggart. Marlene Daggart.”
“Will you be busy later, Miss Daggart?”
“I’m always busy,” she said, backing away, parcel in one hand, egg bowl in the other. “But you can check the barn after dark,” she added, her tone invitingly uninviting. “I might be out there.” She hiked a slender shoulder. “Might not.”
She turned and ran toward the house. She glanced over her shoulder, and she was smiling, tongue pressed to her upper lip. She turned her head forward and skipped, throwing out her arms.
“See you after dark, Marlene,” Warner said to himself, staring after her, feeling the old, dark pull in his loins.
Humming to himself, he reined the roan through a break between false-fronted buildings and headed up the cemetery hill.
Chapter 14
As Carl Warner made his way up the hill, letting his mount pick its way around graves with crude stone or wooden markers, he saw that the old man was indeed sitting on a coffin.
There were three other coffins gathered around him, near the end of the wagon parked nearby. The beefy sorrel hitched to the wagon nibbled shoots of spring grass growing around a leaning wooden cross.
The young man digging a grave about twenty feet to the left of the old man heard Warner’s horse whicker. The boy turned toward Warner, turned away, and then jerked his gaze back toward the Pinkerton again, scowling his incredulity at the handsome red-haired stranger in the tailored suit and blood-red tie. The boy drew his thick chapped lips back from his crooked teeth, squinting his pale, opaque blue eyes—the eyes of a retard, for sure.
A corkhead, Warner thought. The frontier was full of them.
The old man removed the briar pipe from his mouth, smoke billowing around his gray, wizened head in the breeze, and frowned at the newcomer. The man had a long, tangled gray beard. He was dressed in rags, but a shiny silver county sheriff’s star was pinned to his ragged, thigh-length denim coat lined with red flannel.
Warner stopped the roan and pinched his hat brim. He raked his gaze across the coffins, including the one the old man was sitting on, and asked, “Typhus, influenza, or lead poisoning?”
The old man gave his pipe a few more tentative puffs as he studied the newcomer skeptically. “Lead poisonin’,” he said. “Who’s askin’?”
“Carl Warner.” He slid his lapel back from the copper shield pinned to his purple vest. “Pinkerton Detective.”
Warner was a little disgruntled to see that neither the old man or the kid, now leaning on his shovel and regarding the Pinkerton as though he were a pink elephant who’d appeared out of nowhere, were impressed. The old man continued to take small puffs from his pipe, letting smoke dribble away on the breeze.
“You’re the sheriff?” Warner asked.
“That’s why I wear the badge.”
The kid snickered at that, rolling his eyes around in their sockets.
The old man looked at him. “Get back to work, Henry. We got four to plant and you ain’t even finished with the second one yet.”
“Looks like he could use some help,” Warner said.
“He’s got all the help he’s gonna get,” the sheriff said. “Less’n you want to volunteer.” He grinned, white lines spoking up around his leather eye sockets. “But you wouldn’t want to get them purty duds dirty, I’d bet the bank.”
Warner decided not to get angry. He was accustomed to the petty jealousies of the little folk, which so defined them. He merely smiled his winning smile and nodded as he swept his gaze across the coffins again. “What happened?”
“You guessed it,” the sheriff said. “Lead poisonin’.”
“Would the man who poisoned them be a big man in a pinto vest named Mike Sartain, otherwise known as The Revenger?”
The sheriff glowered with interest. “That’s who it was, all right. Never heard of him myself, but he matched up to the face on the wanted dodger ole”—he slapped the top of the coffin he was sitting on—“Hy had on him. Big, shaggy-headed character wearin’ a purty LeMat pistol. Has a nice price on his head, too.”
“He does, at that.”
“That why the Pinkertons are after him?”
“We’ve been contracted by the federal government.” Warner looked at the coffin the sheriff was sitting on. “Who is...er, was...ole Hy?”
“My deputy.”
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p; “Ah.”
The sheriff sighed as he knocked the dottle from his pipe against the side of Hy Miller’s wooden overcoat. “I’d like to say that ole Hy didn’t have a bullet comin’, but I reckon he did. He ran with a bad bunch. Them other three, too.”
“Lute Lawton?”
“That’s right.”
“Why’d you keep him on as deputy?”
“Me an’ his pa, Wendell Miller, was friends back in the buffalo days. Fought the Comanch’ together. Hy knew how to shoot and, crap, help ain’t easy to come by.”
“I see.”
The sheriff looked back at the kid who had resumed digging with occasional, vaguely puzzled looks at the Pinkerton. “I might have to pin a badge on Henry’s vest, now.”
Henry looked at him in pleasant surprise.
“Ah, crap, I’m just joshin’. You’re an idjit, Henry. You’re doin’ about all you’re qualified to do, and by God, you best get to it before I take the quirt to you! I ain’t payin’ you ten cents a grave to stand there lettin’ spittle dribble down your consarned chin!”
Henry gave a squeal and started chopping anxiously at the flinty soil.
The sheriff turned to Warner. “So...you’re on the trail of this Sartain fella. This Revenger.”
“That’s right.”
“And the woman runnin’ with him?”
“I reckon if the woman’s still runnin’ with him, I’m after her, too.”
“Well, don’t catch ‘em too quick.”
“What’re you talking about, Sheriff?”
The sheriff was packing his pipe from a green canvas pouch. “I mean, if I was you, I’d let them kick as much of that gang out with a cold shovel as they can. They seem to partner-up right well together. That girl’s got a mighty big chip on her shoulder, for good reason, if Lawton killed her boy like she said he done. There’s quite a few o’ the Lawton Bunch scattered around. A dozen plus, I hear, though they tend to come and go. A bastard son of Satan, every one. One o’ them will probably do your job for you. Sartain can’t take ‘em all down, even with the woman sidin’ him. They’re veteran killers, Lute’s boys.”
The Revenger Page 123
