The Revenger Page 41

  Feeling about as awkward as he thought it was possible to feel, Sartain glanced at Maggie, who was sweeping the floor and keeping her attention on the broom. Then he grabbed the sotol and three glasses and walked over to the door they’d left propped open to the fresh night breeze touched with autumn’s chill.

  “Join us?” he said.

  Maggie continued to sweep. She glanced up from her work with a strained smile and said, “I’ll be out in a minute... Mr. Sartain...”

  The formal way she’d addressed him spoke loads about the way she now felt about him.

  The Revenger was going to be glad to ride away from the Chance place...

  For the moment, however, he sat on the deacon’s bench on the porch. As Everett packed his pipe, lit it, and then tuned his fiddle, Sartain splashed sotol into three glasses. He set one down beside Everett, who sat on the porch rail, and set the other two—one for him, one for Maggie—beside himself on the bench.

  Chance started playing. Sartain sat back and enjoyed the strains of “My Old Kentucky Home.” Sooner than expected, Maggie came out and sat down on the far end of the bench from him. Everett looked over his bow at Sartain and gave the Revenger a conspiratorial wink, pleased that his wife had joined them. Maggie had wrapped a knitted shawl about her shoulders, against the evening’s damp chill. She sipped the sotol and sat back against the wall of the cabin, crossing her long left leg over the right one, closing her eyes.

  Everett played a couple more bittersweet ballads, and then he tried picking up the mood with “Little Brown Jug” and “Sweet Betsy From Pike.”

  “Why don’t you two shuffle around a bit?” Everett said as he played.

  “What’s that?” Sartain said.

  Everett jerked his head toward his wife. “Dance! Go on—the two of you!” He was tapping his foot and swaying from side to side as he played.

  Sartain felt even more uncomfortable than before. “Oh, I don’t think...”

  Maggie scowled at her husband. “You buried your father this afternoon, Everett, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “Ah, hell, you remember how Howard was. Before he went senile, he loved to dance and laugh. Hell, he used to paint the entire town of Gold Dust red of a Saturday night! He’d think it only fittin’ we held our own private baile in honor of his saddlin’ a cloud and sailing off to meet his maker! Come on, Maggie, get up and dance with the man! Howard’s gone to his reward. We oughta celebrate!”

  Sartain looked at Maggie. She looked back at him. Slowly, her features softened. A faint smile lifted her mouth corners. She slid her hand over to his on the edge of the bench. He’d hoped she’d refuse, but since she hadn’t, he didn’t see how he could.

  He took her hand and rose and then clasped her other hand in his own other hand, and they shuffled around the gallery to the rollicking strains of her husband’s fiddle. Maggie was a good dancer, better than Sartain, though the soiled doves had once taught him back in the Quarter. That was a long time ago, however. Maggie laughed when his boots brushed her feet. Sartain chuckled, his own mood lightening along with hers.

  He liked the pliant warmth of her hands in his. He liked the smell of her on the damp breeze pushing in under the gallery’s brush roof.

  He looked at her pretty face, her pale ears, and long, fine neck against which the thick locks of her strawberry hair bounced.

  He had a brief, remembered vision of her struggling beneath him the previous night on the lumpy bed of the cantina in Fort Sumner.

  Desire warmed him.

  He looked into her eyes. She was staring back at him, a knowing look in her gaze. Her cheeks were flushed, and he thought he could see the glisten of perspiration on her brow.

  Chapter 7

  “EEEEEEE-yi-howwwww!” Everett howled as he grated out the last notes of “Grandpap’s Strawberry Wine.” “Say, you two dance good together! If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you been sneaking off together to practice them five-steppers!”

  Everett laughed.

  Maggie flushed. Sartain’s ears warmed.

  Maggie drew a deep breath and looked demurely up at the Revenger. “Thank you, Mr. Sartain. That was a much-needed distraction. Now, if you will forgive me, gentlemen, I believe I’ll turn in.”

  She walked to the door, stopped, and looked at their guest. “Will Howard’s room be all right, Mr. Sartain? You’re not superstitious, are you?”

  “I’m no more superstitious than your average Orleans Cajun, Mrs. Chance,” Sartain said, drawing out his petal-soft accent so that “Orleans” came out “Oo-lenzz.” “But the barn will be just fine. Boss and I are used to sharin’ a pile of straw.”

  “No guest of ours will stay in the barn, Mr. Sartain.”

  She held him with a brief, commanding look, dipping her chin slightly, and then moved on into the cabin. Sartain heard her soft tread on the stairs.

  “I think I’ll turn in myself,” Everett said, stretching and yawning. “Been a long day.” He glanced toward where he’d buried old Howard. “Good night, Pop.”

  He nodded at Sartain and headed inside.

  The Revenger sat on the gallery and sipped another drink before retrieving his saddlebags from the barn and checking on Boss, who was sprawled on his side in a pile of straw, half asleep. Sartain returned to the cabin, closing the front door and barring it, then heading off to old Howard’s small bedroom at the back of the cabin.

  He threw the shutter back from the room’s lone window, letting in the cool night air, and crawled under a single, coarse cotton sheet. He lay there thinking for a long time, deeply troubled by the plight of both Maggie Chance and her husband.

  From the ceiling above, voices rose softly. Everett was saying something, his deep voice making a low rumbling, the words obscure. Maggie said something in response, her voice softer, even more obscure, and then Everett said something else, and the ceiling creaked slightly.

  Sartain frowned as he stared up at the ceiling beam from which an unlit lantern hung. The lantern began quivering, squawking faintly on the wire it hung from. A man grunted. The ceiling creaked. Maggie groaned and made what could only be a vaguely complaining sound.

  Everett grunted again, louder, and the ceiling creaked louder, more regularly. Occasionally the legs of the Chances’ bed leaped, hammered the floor.

  Sartain felt a pang of jealousy.

  Cursing under his breath, he rolled onto his belly and drew his pillow over his head, shutting out the sounds of the coupling.

  * * *

  When he opened his eyes, gray light was washing through the room’s open window. He lay with his cheek pressed to the mattress. Sometime during the night, he’d shed the pillow. It lay on the floor. From downstairs came the sounds of footsteps, the squeak of a heavy iron stove door being opened, the thud of wood being shoved into the firebox, the squeak again of the door closing, and the faint clang of it being latched.

  Sartain sat up and dropped his bare feet to the floor. He looked out the window. The large, orange-yellow sun was on the rise, the humidity from last night’s rain ringing it with what looked like smoke. Sartain got up and checked his old Waterbury, which he carried in a vest pocket opposite the one that housed his derringer.

  Almost six thirty. He’d slept longer than he’d intended.

  Quickly, he dressed, washed at the basin resting on a wooden stand, ran his wet fingers through his thick, curly hair, and grabbed his hat, saddlebags, and rifle. He went downstairs to find Maggie scraping a flapjack from an iron skillet on the range onto a plate on the table. Beside that plate was another plate crowded with three sunny-side-up eggs, a steak, and a mound of fried potatoes. There were four more plates on the table, all containing the leavings of the Chances’ breakfast.

  “Holy smokes,” Sartain said. “I slept in like a city-bred gentleman of leisure. You should have fired a shotgun outside my window.”

  “You were tired after all the work you and Everett did yesterday,” Maggie said, filling the stone mug beside the plates
that were obviously meant for Sartain. “Sit down and enjoy.” She returned the coffee pot to the warming rack. “I understand you’re leaving us today.”

  “This looks pure-dee wonderful,” Sartain said, glancing at Maggie’s buxom figure and trying not to remember the sounds of lovemaking he’d heard the night before. “I’m much obliged, but you shouldn’t have.” Sartain tossed his hat onto a peg by the door and sat down at the table. “And to answer your question—yes, I believe I’ll be movin’ on.”

  He looked at her. Standing with her back to the range, she crossed her arms on her chest, gave a strained smile, pursed her lips, and nodded. She looked down at the floor. “Of course.”

  Sartain didn’t know what else to say, so he didn’t say anything. He slid his chair forward, took up his fork and knife, and set to work on the good food steaming before him. As he ate, Maggie refilled her own mug and sat at the end of the table to his right, opposite where Everett had apparently been sitting earlier.

  “Everett went out early,” she said. “That mountain lion has been up to her usual tricks. This time she struck our neighbor, Morgan Bentley. Killed one of his horses. Morgan came to fetch Everett, and they’ve gone out to track the critter before it gets any more of our livestock.”

  “That’s too bad,” Sartain said around a mouthful of food.

  “I suppose if you’d been up, you would have joined them.”

  Sartain shrugged. “If I’d been invited.”

  “I’m sure you’d have been invited,” Maggie said, smiling strangely over the smoking rim of her coffee cup. “Everett seems to have enjoyed your company yesterday.”

  There was an undeniable bite to her words, though she continued to smile at him over her coffee cup. Sartain felt guilty, though he knew he had no reason to. The way he saw it, he was caught in the middle between two ends at odds with each other, though really only one end was at odds.

  What was he supposed to do—kill Everett Chance because his wife had gone off her rocker and now saw him as some sort of demon?

  Sartain just didn’t see it that way.

  He finished his meal, slid his plates away, and wiped his mouth with his napkin. He looked at her still sitting at the end of the table to his right, staring at him now but not smiling. It was as though she were waiting for him to speak.

  So, finally, he spoke.

  “Maggie,” he said, “everything’s going to be all right.”

  “Is it?”

  “It is. You just need to give it a little more time. Your wounds... they’ll heal.”

  When she just continued to stare at him as though he’d been speaking in some foreign tongue, he continued with, “Everett... he’s as broke up about your boys as you are. Just in a different way. Your believing he’s some... I don’t know... like he’s some hoodoo conjure like we have down in the Bayou country... is just not right. I know that’s what you believe, but you gotta see around it, somehow. Or maybe you gotta take a good, hard look and see through it.”

  Sartain slid his chair back from the table and rose.

  He said, “You two are all each other has. You’d best hold onto each other.”

  He donned his hat and walked over to her. She was staring at the table now, dull-eyed, expressionless He squeezed her arm. It was a feeble attempt at reassuring the woman. He turned and walked to the door, opened it, and started out.

  “He knows,” Maggie said behind him.

  Sartain turned back to her.

  She looked up at him. “He knows why I brought you here.”

  “He does?”

  Maggie nodded. “Oh, he didn’t say as much. But I could tell by the way he stared down at me last night when he... when he was taking me. Those flat, cold eyes and that mocking grin... He knows.” She paused, swallowed, a faint look of concern entering her brown eyes. “I’m sorry, Mike. I was a fool to bring you here. He’s no ordinary man. I think he’s going to be after you now. You watch your back and ride as far away from here as you can.”

  * * *

  Sartain let Boss pick his way around the shoulder of a chalky bluff on which only prickly pear and a few tufts of Spanish bayonet grew.

  He was following a horse trail he’d picked up just after riding out of the Chance ranch yard to the east and which, since it seemed to be heading both east and north, he assumed would meet up with the main trail, the old stage road, and take him into Gold Dust.

  When Boss had followed the trail around to the far side of the bluff, Sartain checked him down. He stared out over the badlands through which the trail snaked, disappearing at times in dry washes and in the deep, narrow creases between bluffs and mesas, in small thickets of cedars and mesquites. Near Sartain lay the half-rotted carcass of a cow, some of the hide still attached to the flat rib bones.

  Flies buzzed around the empty eye sockets and clung to the skeletal jaws. The stench was sour. It was made even more cloying by the burned-hair smell of sun-scorched needle grass.

  It was a hard country the Cajun was riding through. Though the sun was high and bright and reflecting even brighter off the chalky terrain, death hung like a dark cloud over this stark, vast land burnished now with the hues of autumn.

  Sartain glanced over his right shoulder and around the northeast shoulder of the bluff behind him. He was too far away from the Chance place to make out the buildings, but his attention was drawn in that direction, just the same. The last words Maggie Chance had said to him still echoed in his mind. The fear in her eyes had been so resolute; he’d felt a chill hand reach up beneath his sternum and clench his heart.

  That fist still had a good hold on him.

  Was Maggie even more insane than he’d sensed?

  Or was her husband the crafty killer she’d tried to convince Sartain he was? A deeply evil man. If so, he was the most diabolical character the Revenger had yet crossed paths with.

  Sartain ran his shirtsleeve across his forehead, jerked his hat brim low against the sun glare, and touched spurs to the buckskin’s ribs. As the horse continued along the trail pocked with the marks of cloven hooves, cow pies, and deer droppings, he told himself that, against Maggie’s warning, he’d remain here in this country. He’d hunt Scrum down and kill him and toss his carcass where the wildcats would have easy pickings, and then he’d ride back out here and check on the Chances again soon.

  Maggie’s parting words to him had been that strong. That gut-chillingly portentous.

  A half hour later, Sartain and Boss were making their way through a deep canyon between steep, rocky slopes when Boss shied suddenly.

  Sartain frowned down at the horse. “What the hell’s the matter, old fel—”

  Then he heard the rattle. The snake lay about six feet ahead, tightly coiled, button tail raised and quivering. Sartain jerked Boss to a hard stop and had just started reaching for his LeMat when something pinged into the slope on Sartain’s left, pluming pale dust.

  The flat crack of a rifle sounded from upslope on his right.

  “Hyahh, boy!” the Cajun cried as he grabbed his Henry repeater with his right hand and threw himself hard left.

  The horse whinnied and lunged forward. As Sartain dropped down his left stirrup fender, he watched in dread as the rattlesnake struck at Boss’s scissoring legs. Because of the rising dust, he couldn’t tell if the snake hit its mark to pump its poison into the Revenger’s prize stallion.

  Sartain hit the ground with a curse and rolled as another bullet ricocheted shrilly off a near boulder, the rifle’s belching crack rolling out over the canyon a half a wink later. Sartain rolled behind the same boulder and racked a cartridge into his Henry’s action. He glanced slightly ahead along the trail.

  The snake lay smashed and bloody in Boss’s still-sifting dust, the horse having pummeled it with his iron-shod hooves.

  “Serves you right,” Sartain growled, keeping his head down, jerking it even lower when another bullet screeched from the southeastern slope to hammer the incline behind him.

  As the rifle�
��s crack reached Sartain’s ears once more, he jerked his head and Henry up. His trained eyes quickly picked out a plume of smoke from a nest of boulders capping the southeastern ridge.

  Aiming just as quickly, he squeezed the Henry’s trigger and felt the satisfying punch of the stock against his shoulder as the rifle’s roar filled the chasm, and the peppery powder smoke wafted back against the Revenger’s face. He racked and fired, racked and fired until five brass cartridge casings lay on the ground behind him.

  Holding fire, he heard the echoes of his thundering reports chasing themselves around between the ridges. Beneath the dwindling cacophony, he thought he heard a man cry out. A strangled cry, if a cry was what it was.

  Sartain assumed it was.

  He grabbed his hat and took off running toward the shooter’s boulder nest.

  Chapter 8

  Sartain held his rifle in both hands in front of him as he lunged up the steep slope. He kept his eyes on the boulder nest in case the ambusher was still in business.

  It was a steep, seventy-yard climb. He slowed about three-quarters of the way up, and, breathing hard and keeping his gaze on the rocks at the ridge crest, he walked the rest of the way.

  He stepped around a boulder and aimed his Henry into the gap behind it. All that was in the stone-floored gap behind a half-circle of boulders were a half-dozen brass cartridge casings. An old-model Remington pistol lay farther back behind the rocks, near where the backside of the slope dropped.

  A couple of the cartridge casings were splashed with blood.

  Sartain looked down the backside of the slope. It was a sharp drop for about fifty feet. A man lay at the bottom of the drop. He was moving a little; lips stretched back from his teeth. He groaned faintly. Sartain had halfways been expecting to see Everett Chance down there. Possibly Scrum.