The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  “What in the hell you doin’, you crazy bastard?” Bundy brayed, awkwardly scuttling backward on his ass.

  Sartain set the loop over Bundy’s head, tightened it around the man’s neck.

  “Stop this! Stop this!”

  Sartain tightened the noose. When the man tried to slide his fingers under it to loosen it, Sartain jerked it tighter. Bundy gulped. His eyes almost popped out of his head. He tried to yell but only croaked.

  Sartain mounted Boss, dallied the riata around the horn, swung around, and galloped toward the river. He glanced back only once at Bundy flopping along the ground behind him, head forward, hands drawn to his neck, trying in vain to free himself of the noose.

  Sartain turned forward and narrowed his eyes in satisfaction.

  He’d done something similar to one of the soldiers who’d butchered Jewel and her grandfather, one of the soldiers stationed at the same fort as Sartain—Fort Bowie. His name had been Burleson. Ivan Burleson.

  Sartain had felt a keen satisfaction when he’d stopped riding to find Burleson stripped as naked as Jewel had been. Only, the ground had stripped Burleson. Not marauding federal soldiers. And Burleson had still been alive. Hanging on by a thread.

  Sartain had left him still breathing, albeit feebly, for the coyotes to finish.

  He would have done that to Bundy too, but he wanted Olivia to have the pleasure. It would do her good.

  When Sartain reined Boss up by the river, near where he’d been when the attackers had descended on him, Bundy was moving his legs slightly. Still alive.

  The Revenger looked around. Olivia was nowhere in sight. Her clothes, which she’d left in a neat pile by the stream, were gone.

  Sartain’s heart thudded anxiously. He swung down from Boss’s back, shucked his Henry from the scabbard. He looked around at the men he’d blown out of their saddles. Some he could see lying twisted in the brush. Some he couldn’t see. Had he left one alive?

  Had Olivia been...

  A pistol popped in the distance. Sartain jerked with a start.

  He began to run in the direction of the blast.

  A man screamed, “No! No! No!”

  The pistol popped again.

  Silence.

  Crunching footsteps rose. They grew louder. Sartain saw the woman moving down the slope at a slant, her .41-caliber pistol held low by her side.

  She stopped when she saw Sartain.

  “I brought you one more,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

  Olivia’s eyes glistened with satisfaction.

  Chapter 16

  Lute Lawton bucked hard against the girl, her upraised knees flopping to either side of him like the wings of some ungainly white bird trying desperately to take flight.

  The bed shuddered and creaked, shuddered and creaked, its legs dancing on the puncheon floor.

  “Oh, Lute!” the girl cried.

  “Yeah!” Lawton yelled. “Yeah! Oh, yeah!”

  “Oh, Lute! Oh, Lute! Oh, Lute!”

  “Yeah,” Lawton fairly shouted, his passion reaching its crescendo. “Oh, yeahhh!”

  From outside, a man’s bellowing yell permeated the room. “Lawton, by God, pull your dick out of my daughter and get your mangy carcass out here, you chicken-livered son of a buck!”

  Sadie Hawthorn stared in wide-eyed horror up at Lawton.

  “What in Sam Hill?” Lawton grunted.

  “Lawton!” came the man’s voice from outside once more.

  “Oh, my God!” Sadie gasped. “That’s my father!”

  Lawton pulled out of the girl. He leaped off the bed, grabbed one of his guns, and crouched over the window facing the front yard, sliding the sooty flour sack curtain aside with the gun.

  Six men sat six horses in the yard of the Lawton ranch. They sat in a line, six to eight feet apart, facing the Lawton lodge. It was a rambling, two-and-a-half-story log and adobe structure that had once been home to a family of eight, but which now housed only Lute Lawton himself. His parents had died several years ago, his father having been consumed by the bottle, and his four brothers and two sisters had died, been married off or jailed, or fled to greener pastures.

  Sadie’s father, Edward Hawthorn, sat in the middle of the bunch out in the yard. Hawthorn was a broad-hipped fireplug of a middle-aged man, red-faced and narrowed-eyed, with heavy jowls and grizzled gray muttonchops. He sat atop a fine Appaloosa stallion that deserved a better rider, a long-legged, high-waisted man. Not the gnome that was Edward Hawthorn, whose ranch abutted Lawton land.

  Hawthorn wore a three-piece suit, a string tie, and a crisp beaver hat.

  The rancher held a brass-cased Winchester Yellowboy repeater across the pommel of his saddle. Over his suit, he wore a doeskin duster trimmed at the collar and sleeves with deer hide.

  “Lawton!” shouted the younger man riding beside Hawthorn. “You heard Mister Hawthorn. Get out here and face us like a man, you sniveling cur!”

  “Oh, my God,” Sadie cried, “that’s Dean Broadstreet, the man my father wants me to marry!”

  Broadstreet was in his late twenties, with sandy hair curling down from his bowler hat. His pale face was trimmed with a sandy, upswept mustache, a goat beard, and long sideburns. Broadstreet was the son of a local mercantiler and freighter, Melvin Broadstreet, who’d died two years ago of cancer. He’d left his holdings to his only son, who’d never done a thing to earn a penny of it, though now he rode around the county like some eastern mucky-muck with a broom handle shoved up his skinny ass.

  The other four men sitting their mounts to each side of Hawthorn and Broadstreet were Hawthorn’s riders. Lawton recognized a couple, maybe a third to boot. Your typical thirty-a-month-and-found cow nurses, maybe a little better with six-shooters than some. Hawthorn hired such types to keep his range clear of rustlers, though a branch of Lawton’s gang long-looped beeves from the man almost weekly and sold the cattle in the Indian Territories.

  As Sadie rolled onto her belly, groaning and grinding her body into the soiled sheets, as though trying to burrow her way into the corn shuck mattress, Lawton chuckled. “Hold on!” he yelled. “I’m comin’! I’m comin’! Don’t get your drawers in a twist, there, Mr. Hawthorn!”

  The outlaw turned away from the window. He crouched over the bed and gave Sadie’s right, bare butt cheek a kiss and a playful bite. He raked it with his nose spike.

  “Oh—oww!” Sadie cried, twisting around toward Lawton. “What’re you gonna do, Lute? Papa won’t listen to reason about you an’ me. He’s bound and determined to make me marry Dean!”

  Lawton didn’t bother with long-handles or socks or shoes or any clothing whatsoever. He walked out of the bedroom as naked as the day he was born but a whole lot hairier and uglier, his long uncombed hair dancing around his thin, pale shoulders.

  He pushed through the curtain at the end of the short hall, crossed the parlor and kitchen area that was cluttered with so much gear that did not belong in a house that the house looked more like a large tack room or smithy’s shop. When Sadie was over, she tried to clean up a bit, but Lawton usually kept her otherwise occupied.

  Lawton jerked open the ranch-house door and stepped out onto the front veranda so dilapidated that it looked as though the next stiff breeze would raze it to matchsticks. “Well, good mornin’, Mister Hawthorn! How are you this fine spring day? Purty one, ain’t it?”

  Sadie poked her head out the door behind Lawton, holding a blanket around her shoulders. “Pa, it’s Lute I love. I don’t love Dean. I’m sorry, Dean. Truly I am. But I don’t love you!”

  “Sweet blood of Christ, man!” Hawthorn said, staring aghast at the tall, lean, pale, naked outlaw strutting out into the yard before him and the five other horseback riders. “Do you realize you ain’t wearin’ a shred? Not a shred of attire! Good God!”

  Holding his six-shooter casually in his right hand, Lawton stopped before the group, squaring his hips and shoulders at them, and looked down at his swinging manhood. “I do apologize if
my nakedness offends you, Mister Hawthorn, but Sadie and me prefer to run around natural out here. Makes us feel closer to the earth and life and all of nature. Besides, it makes it a whole lot easier to make love when the mood comes over us, as it so often does.”

  He grinned and winked at Hawthorn then slid his devilish gaze to Sadie’s betrothed, Dean Broadstreet.

  “You uncouth ne’er-do-well,” Broadstreet raked out through gritted teeth. “You’re either drunk or an imbecile. I don’t know which.”

  “He was always slow. All the Lawtons were slow. None of ‘em amounted to a hill of beans. After the folks died, Lawton and his brother Noah let the ranch go to seed.”

  Hawthorn was looking around at the dilapidated barn, at the corral nearly buried in pig’s ear and wild rye, and at the small, log, L-shaped bunkhouse sitting directly across the yard from the house, near the blacksmith shop whose roof had caved in under a mantling of wet snow two winters ago. “Look at this place. What a waste. You’re not a man, Lute Lawton. You’re an animal!”

  He looked at Sadie still poking her head out the front door. “Sadie, you get dressed and get out here this instant. I’m taking you home. You’re marrying Mister Broadstreet whether you want to or not!”

  “Sadie, you stay right there!” Lawton told her. “You ain’t your father’s slave, nor Broadstreet’s, neither.”

  “I suppose she’s your slave. Is that it, Lawton, you filthy pig?” Broadstreet was rising in his stirrups and jutting his enraged face over his horse’s head at Lawton. “I don’t know how you did it, you bottom-feeding scalawag, but somehow you have that poor girl convinced she’s in love with you”—he switched his gaze to Sadie—“which couldn’t be farther from the truth!”

  Sadie lurched out onto the veranda, the blanket only partly concealing her, drawn taut against her chest and reaching only partway down her well-turned thighs. “It is the truth! It’s Lute I love! Lute’s got him a nest egg, and we’re going down to South America together. Lute’s gonna buy a sugar plantation, and we’re gonna have slaves and the works! He promised me so!”

  “Slaves and the works, eh?” Broadstreet sneered. “I thought they outlawed slavery.”

  Lawton said, “Only up here they did. The damn bluebellies and carpetbaggers. That nonsense hasn’t reached South America yet!”

  “What kind of a nest egg are we talking about?” Hawthorn queried. “One that you’ve acquired through aberrant and felonious means? One you’ve acquired, more specifically, by robbing banks out west?”

  “What?” Lawton yowled, crinkling his eyebrows, incredulous.

  “Lute has business interests out west,” Sadie stated, proudly. “You give him no credit, Pa. Lute has business interests, including part ownership in gold and silver mines and he even helped build a big opera house in the Paris of Colorado Territory, Leadville!”

  “An opera house, eh?” Hawthorn retorted, raising his brows with mock surprise. “You’re a more cultivated and learned man than I gave you credit for, Loot!” He raked his gaze across the skinny, long-haired outlaw’s lean frame. “Looks can certainly be deceiving, can’t they?”

  “An opera house.” Broadstreet laughed, slapping his thigh. “My ass. Lute Lawton has never set foot in an opera house. Or if he has, it was only to watch girls dance naked or to swamp it out!” He turned to the girl. “Sadie, your head ain’t right. He’s dazzled you some way or another. You gave your promise to me, and, despite what has been happening here—and I don’t even want to think about that”—he glanced fleetingly at Lawton’s privates—“you are going to be my wife. Your father and I have already made the agreement.”

  “No!” Sadie cried. “It’s Lute I love!”

  Broadstreet pointed at Lawton and shouted, “This man is an imbecile. He is a killer, a thief, a robber, and a rapist of women!”

  Lawton gave a disgusted chuff, raised his pistol, and squeezed the trigger.

  Pop!

  Broadstreet sat back in his saddle, saying, “Oh, my.” His face acquired a confused expression as he looked down at the shattered bone button of his horsehide vest just down from the end of his black foulard tie. Blood spurted from the hole that had replaced the button as though from a pig’s bladder.

  “Oh,” Broadstreet said again, shriller this time, with even more surprise. He lifted a hand to the hole, as though to plug it, and then looked accusingly at Lawton. “You...son...of...a...buck!”

  Lawton waggled his smoking pistol at the man. “I just killed you, Mister Fancy Dan, because you insulted me one too many times.”

  The other riders, including Hawthorn, held the reins of their frightened mounts taut and stared in shock at Dean Broadstreet, who began to list to his left. Broadstreet’s eyes grew heavy. He lowered his hand from his bloody chest and continued to sag to his left until he tumbled from the saddle and hit the ground with a thud.

  His horse backed up, shaking its head and switching its tail fearfully.

  Sadie stared in hang-jawed shock at her murdered beau from the porch.

  Hawthorn turned to Lawton. “You’re every bit the murdering devil I heard you were!”

  The older man pumped a cartridge into his carbine’s breach and snapped the brass buttplate to his shoulder.

  “No, Pa!” Sadie screamed.

  Lawton grinned as he clicked his Colt’s hammer back once more. He calmly raised the weapon, aimed, and fired, punching Hawthorn back in his saddle.

  The rancher fired his rifle into the air, wild. As his Appaloosa lunged forward, Hawthorn gave a bellowing cry and rolled back off the horse’s rump to hit the ground behind Lawton, who went to work on the other riders, all of whom were slapping leather and clawing iron.

  Lawton whooped and yelled as, standing naked in the yard, he shot the one he thought was Cullen Hildebrandt, then H.J. Meade, and finally Hawthorn’s Segundo.

  Meade triggered a shot into the dirt just left of Lawton’s bare right foot as Lawton’s bullet smashed through Meade’s right cheek and left him flopping lifelessly in his saddle as his frightened horse whinnied desperately, crow hopping as though in some rodeo corral on the Fourth of July.

  The other two triggered lead at Lawton. The bullets buzzed wide, for the two men were trying in vain to steady their frightened beasts, keeping one hand on their reins while they capped cartridges with their other one.

  Lawton, standing in place and only pivoting on his hips as he aimed, as though he were merely taking target practice, blew a paunchy, red-headed rider out of his saddle with one bullet to the man’s neck, another to his left cheek. Lawton slid his pistol right as the last saddled rider, a tall man in a buckskin vest, bore down on him with a Schofield .44.

  Lawton squeezed his Colt’s trigger and winced when the hammer pinged benignly onto the firing pin.

  “Crap,” said the outlaw as the Schofield’s maw yawned at him.

  A gun popped. The Schofield blossomed smoke and flames. The bullet screeched over Lawton’s head to break a window of the house behind him. The Schofield dropped from the tall rider’s fist. As the man’s horse wheeled, the rider tumbled down from the saddle to hit the ground near Lawton’s bare feet.

  The horse galloped away, whinnying shrilly and shaking its head.

  The rider lay at Lawton’s feet, cursing under his breath as he reached for a second hogleg holstered for the cross draw on his left hip.

  “Some folks never learn,” came a voice on Lawton’s right.

  He turned to see his partner, Neville Simms, step off the boardwalk fronting the bunkhouse and walk over toward Lawton and the man fumbling his second gun out of its holster. Simms wore only his threadbare long-handles and boots. He kicked the second gun out of the tall man’s hand, placed a boot on the man’s chest, and shot the man through his forehead.

  The tall man bucked up off the ground, arching his back, then slowly relaxed as his eyes rolled back in his head.

  Neville Simms was a big, broad-shouldered hombre with a head as bald as a boiled egg, and a tattoo
of a naked woman on his neck. He wore a gold hoop in his right ear. He brushed a fist across his nose, snorting, and looked around.

  “Pulled me out of a dead sleep,” he said, indignant.

  “Pulled me out of a dead tussle,” Lawton replied, grinning.

  Simms frowned toward the house. Lawton followed his partner’s gaze to Sadie Hawthorn standing on the dilapidated, badly cluttered front porch, the towel half-covering her.

  She had her head half-turned and was regarding Lawton suspiciously, one eye narrowed.

  “Have you been lyin’ to me, Lute?”

  “What’s that, sugar plum?”

  “You have, haven’t you? Dean was right, wasn’t he? You ain’t no businessman. You’re a train robber. The rumors are true!”

  “Oh, now, honey,” Lawton said, walking over toward the girl glowering down at him, tears glazing her eyes. “Don’t you listen to none o’ them. They been tryin’ to break us up for months! You know how this whole damn county has hated every Lawton that ever lived. Why that’s why they locked up two of my brothers and ran my sister Nancy out of here on a greased rail!”

  Sadie’s bottom lip quivered. “Oh, Lute, you swore you’d never lie to me. And here you’ve been lyin’ all along. You never intended on takin’ me down to South America, either, did you? Those were all just words. Just lies so I’d keep lettin’ you into my candy store!”

  “That just ain’t true, Sadie! Now, that ain’t true! I love you, girl!”

  “You don’t what love is, Lute Lawton!” Sadie whipped around and marched into the house.

  “Aw, crap,” Lawton said.

  “Women,” Simms said, yawning and blinking the sleep from his eyes. “Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em. You got some makin’ up to do with that one, Lute.” He glanced around at the dead men. “What do you want to do with them?”

  “I don’t know. I reckon we’d best drag ‘em off a ways so they don’t stink the place up and lure the buzzards and coyotes in. Let me get dressed.”

  Lawton started toward the house.

  “Lute, hold on,” Simms said.