The Revenger Page 50

  Sartain closed his eyes. “You got me there, Miss June. I can, indeed.” He groaned. “But no man is immune to getting backshot from a dark alley.”

  June whispered, “Not to worry. Most folks won’t be sorry to see Clancy’s corpse planted on Boot Hill. He’d gotten too big for his britches, and over the past several months, he’d made far more enemies than he had friends. This town—hell, the whole damn county—had outgrown him, but Clancy would have been the last to realize that.”

  “How’d you fall in with him, June?” Sartain asked, keeping his eyes closed.

  Her hands were soft.

  “He gave me little choice. You see, I once owned half of this place with a local businessman, Burt Donleavy. Burt got drunk one night and gambled his share of the Oriental away to none other than Clancy, who, it turned out, saw me as not only his business partner but his...”

  “Bed partner, as well.”

  “You got it,” June said. “He was very convincing, that brigand. Not to mention threatening. I had little choice in the matter. The varmint even thought he was going to marry me. And, believe me, he made no bones about the fact that when we were married, my half of the Oriental would just naturally go to him. To Clancy’s way of viewing the world, no woman—”

  “Should own property,” Sartain said in a slow, heavy voice. “I see, I see.”

  “Are you sure you see, Mike?” June whispered in his ear. “Or...maybe you’re only feeling at this point in the conversation...”

  As she turned to press her lips to his cheek, more voices rose in the hall.

  She pressed two fingers to his lips and whispered, “Don’t worry, Mike. Most of the men in this town are probably far more grateful for your killing Clancy than they are worried about my honor.” She dropped her head back onto her pillow. “Oh, you horrible man!” she sobbed, bucking up against him. “First you kill my beloved, and now you ravage me like some heathen Apache! You’re a barbarian!”

  Sartain cursed. Despite the woman’s reassurances, he half-expected a gun to blast him through the door.

  * * *

  Sartain woke the next morning to a mule braying in the street below the large bedroom’s two windows. A freighting outfit must have been heading out for the gold camps higher in the San Juan Range. He rose quietly so as not to disturb June, who slept beside him in the bed. Her head was turned to one side, her hair a lovely mess across her pillow.

  The Cajun admired her body, as fine as he’d seen since laying his life’s one true love, his dear Jewel, to rest in a rocky grave beside her grandfather. He’d buried Jewel with their child, which she’d miscarried when drunken renegade federal soldiers had savaged her out on her grandfather’s diggings south of Benson in the Arizona Territory.

  Sartain raked a hand down his face, pressing away those bitter memories, and turned once more to June. He leaned down, lightly kissed her left cheek, and drew the twisted sheet up from the foot of the bed, covering the pretty woman against the morning’s chill. As the freight outfit began clomping and clattering north out of Low Range, Sartain closed the window, took a sponge bath from a basin of tepid water, and quietly dressed.

  After he’d buckled his holstered LeMat and sheathed Bowie knife around his lean waist, shouldered his Henry rifle, and donned his hat, he glanced once more at June. He could hear her breathing deeply, regularly in the room’s misty shadows, exhausted from their night of lovemaking.

  The Cajun pinched his hat brim to the woman, grinning at the memory of the previous night, and opened the door. As he stepped out into the hall, a shadowy figure stopped abruptly to his left, gasping and falling back against the wall on the corridor’s opposite side.

  It was a dove with sleep-mussed brown hair wearing a man’s wool shirt that hung halfway down her thighs. She dropped the bottle and two glasses she’d been carrying and regarded The Revenger with wide-eyed terror. Her eyes flicked to the big LeMat, the Bowie knife on his left hip, and the Henry repeating rifle on his shoulder.

  “Oh, Lord!” she exclaimed.

  Sartain pressed two fingers to his lips and canted his head toward the door he’d just closed.

  The girl pressed a hand to her chest and swallowed. “You...you didn’t hurt her too bad, did you?”

  “Miss June?” The Revenger said. “Nah. She’ll be back on her feet in a week or two, good as new.”

  He winked.

  The dove frowned curiously, then slowly lowered her hand. She glanced around cautiously and then said just loudly enough for the Cajun to hear, “Most folks around, me included, ain’t sore at all about you shootin’ Clancy Coles, though I’d appreciate it if you kept that between you an’ me, Mr. Sartain.”

  “You got yourself a deal.” The Revenger scooped up the bottle and the two glasses and handed them to the girl.

  As she stared at him through her thin screen of mussed hair, vaguely befuddled, he nodded his head cordially and then drifted on down the hall to the rear of the second story. There he found an outside door and descended the stairs to the alley flanking the place. He’d killed a man last night, and though most folks might not have given a hoot, or were even relieved to have ole Clancy Coles strumming a harp with the angels, there might be one or two of his gang around who felt otherwise.

  They might be waiting for Sartain to step out the Oriental’s front door.

  The Revenger had not lived as long as he had, riding the vigilante trail for those who couldn’t ride it themselves, by being careless.

  Digging a cheroot from his shirt pocket, he strode west down the alley, paralleling the main street past two buildings before swinging back south through a break between a harness shop and a feed store. He paused at the mouth of the break, looking out onto the main street the early morning light had painted smoky gray.

  The sun was nearly over the eastern ridges, the sky over there growing brighter by the second. All of the stars had faded except one very faint one in the west, to Sartain’s right.

  The street jogged crookedly off to the east and the west, with a cottonwood rattling its leaves here and there in the morning breeze, the ponderosa standing by the Arkansas River Hotel dropping the occasional pine cone on the hotel’s porch roof. The fresh, deep, overlaid furrows of the recently departed freight trains shone silver, brighter than the gray of the older wheel tracks.

  Somewhere on the far side of town, a blacksmith was hammering an anvil—steady, regular, clanging beats.

  That was the only sound.

  Sartain cupped a flame to his cheroot. Lighting up and puffing smoke, he flicked the match into the dust and began crossing the main street, heading for the stable down the cross street ahead of him. He hadn’t gained the center of the main street before the muffled drumming of hammering hooves rose in the west.

  He turned to see what appeared to be an Army ambulance bearing down on him. The high-sided wagon was covered with a cream canvas tarpaulin stretched flat across its box. A soldier in cavalry blues and leather-billed forage cap was driving two shaggy horses, popping a whip over their backs. The horses and the wagon bouncing and clattering behind them seemed to turn slightly toward Sartain, who began moving back toward the side of the street he’d just come from.

  Obviously, the Army man was in a hurry. He also didn’t have a firm rein on his team. Bad combination.

  Sartain was about to yell out to the man, who wore a sergeant’s chevrons on the sleeves of his dark-blue Army tunic, but then when the team was maybe twenty yards away from The Revenger, the driver turned the team full around in the middle of the street, the rear wheels sliding and kicking up dust, and stopped.

  Dust wafted, painted pink and salmon by the early sunlight.

  The back of the canvas-colored wagon was now facing Sartain. The sergeant yelled to his team, holding the reins neck-high and turning to glance over his left shoulder. He was broad-shouldered and red-bearded.

  The team smartly backed the wagon several yards toward Sartain and stopped. The Revenger pensively puffed his cheroo
t and studied the wagon cautiously, raking his thumb across the hammer of the Henry still resting on his shoulder.

  The driver quickly set the wagon brake, grabbed the end of a rope, and jerked it. The cream canvas rolled along the high sides of the wagon toward the front, exposing two more soldiers, one crouched over the large, brass-canistered maw of a Gatling gun mounted on a wooden tripod. His hand was on the Gatling gun’s wooden handle.

  The other soldier was on one knee beside the first soldier, aiming a Henry repeater at Sartain’s head.

  Chapter 3

  Sartain still studied the soldiers casually, slowly puffing the cigar, knowing he had a fair amount of trouble facing him but befuddled by its origin.

  The Gatling gun was aimed directly at him. The soldier manning it had thrust a long brass cartridge tube into its action. The soldier smiled along the brass maw at Sartain, eagerly tapping his thumb on the machine gun’s wooden handle.

  The Revenger had just started considering possible cover options, wondering if he could get the Henry off his shoulder before the grinning soldier cut him to shreds, when boots thudded on a porch across the street. Sartain slid his gaze slightly left to see a man in a crisp blue Hardee hat with the right-side brim pinned up and a blue wool cape step out of the narrow gap between two mud-brick buildings, still dark and silent at this early hour.

  He was armed with a pistol in a black leather flap holster on his right hip and had a long, brass-hilted Solingen saber dangling down his left leg in a steel scabbard. The shoulders of his tunic bore the brass bars of a captain. His neatly trimmed upswept mustache was pewter gray.

  “Mr. Sartain.” He did not have to yell in the early morning stillness, which seemed even more still and silent now after the thundering of the wagon had stopped. “Kindly throw down your weapons—even the double-barreled derringer you keep in your vest pocket—and lie belly-down in the street for me, please. Do so slowly. If you make any sudden moves, I assure you that you will be carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey, not only by that hiccupping cannon you see facing you, but by the twenty-five rifles aimed at you from nearly every direction!”

  Sartain cut his eyes around, studying the street through the cigar smoke billowing around his head.

  A shutter opened in the second story of a drugstore just left of the captain. A soldier in a blue forage cap thrust a Spencer repeating carbine through the window, slanting it down toward Sartain. As The Revenger continued to slide his gaze around the street, he saw more rifles bristling toward him from second-story windows and behind water barrels on street-level boardwalks and from alley mouths. Two were aimed at him from the far side of a wagon that had been parked for the night in front of the mercantile hard to Sartain’s left a half a block away.

  Sartain sighed.

  Funny, he’d always wondered how it would feel when the soldiers finally ran him down, as he supposed they would eventually. He’d always figured to go down fighting, but he didn’t see much point in fighting here with all these rifles aimed at him. He didn’t have a chance. The only reason he didn’t go ahead and end it all right here, right now, by pulling the Henry off his shoulder and commencing to fire as many shots as he could was because he didn’t want to make it that easy for the federal bastards.

  They’d have to try to hang him.

  Meanwhile, he’d look for a way to escape and maybe take a few more federals with him. He’d killed all the bluebellies who’d ravaged and killed Jewel and her grandfather—even shot their mule—but he didn’t mind killing a few more who meant to punish him for what he considered justified revenge.

  Dying was the price you paid for piss-burning The Revenger.

  “Your wish is my command, Captain.”

  Sartain slowly lowered the Henry, then laid it gently in the dirt. Just as slowly, he slid the big LeMat from its holster with two fingers, held it up to show the captain that its barrel was pointed down, and set it beside the Henry. Finally, he reached into his pinto vest and slid out the brass-framed, pearl-gripped double-barreled derringer and set it in the street, as well.

  The captain glanced toward the two men crouched behind the wagon to Sartain’s left. They ran out from behind the wagon, holding their carbines at port arms—two young lieutenants with thin mustaches mantling their pink upper lips. One was also trying to grow a goatee without much success, his pale chin was mostly sporting red pimples.

  Both soldiers’ eyes were wide and glassy with anxiety.

  “Hold it right there!” Pimples shouted, though he’d stopped only six feet away from Sartain. “Get those hands raised!”

  Sartain glowered at the youth, who was likely fresh from West Point—he couldn’t have been much over twenty-one, if that—and slowly raised his hands, rolling his cheroot from one corner of his mouth to the other. As he did, the second young lieutenant crouched as he closed on Sartain and, watching the big Revenger apprehensively, gathered up the Cajun’s weapons, pocketing the derringer.

  “Careful with that little popper there, sonny,” the Cajun said in his slow Louisiana drawl. “Both barrels are loaded, and it’s liable to blow your pecker off, you don’t handle it right.”

  “Shut up!” yelled Pimples, jutting his Spencer toward Sartain. “Flat on the ground! Now! Don’t make me tell you again!”

  “Hold your water, soldier,” Sartain drawled, taking his time getting to his knees.

  “Cuff him, Lieutenant Grodin,” said the captain, who was moving out into the street, coolly keeping his hand away from his sidearm.

  Lieutenant Grodin moved behind Sartain and slammed the flat of his boot against The Revenger’s back, pushing him unceremoniously to the ground.

  “I’m going to remember that one.” Sartain grunted as Grodin jerked his arms behind his back and pulled a set of steel handcuffs from a leather pouch on his shell belt.

  Sartain winced as the young lieutenant clicked one bracelet closed, then the other. They were so tight they pinched, making the Cajun’s hands swell and tingle.

  He cursed.

  He cursed once more when he saw one of the soldiers from the ambulance hauling a set of heavy leg irons over from the wagon. Both irons were open, with about a foot and a half of heavy log chain drooping between them. The soldier from the wagon was also carrying a long-handled clamp, the head of which looked similar to a buzzard’s beak.

  When he had one manacle closed over Sartain’s left ankle, he applied the clamp to it, his face turning red as he closed the jaws as well as the manacle. When the manacle was taut, the soldier applied the same treatment to The Revenger’s other ankle.

  The captain chuckled. “I’ve heard you’re slippery. Well, you’re not slipping out of those.” He looked around at the soldiers still aiming carbines from here and there around the street and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Fetch your horses, men. Time to ride!”

  He looked at the nearer men, still breathing hard and flushed with anxiety as though they’d chained a particularly menacing mountain lion after a long, harrowing chase. “Sergeant Case, fetch the man’s horse from the livery barn.”

  “Here.” It was a woman’s voice.

  Sartain looked up, incredulous, to see a comely dark-haired woman riding toward him from the direction of the livery barn. She rode a fine black thoroughbred gelding, and she was trailing Boss by the buckskin’s bridle reins. “I fetched him to save time, Captain.”

  Even in his compromised, utterly frustrating predicament, Sartain took the time to admire the filly atop the thoroughbred. She was probably twenty-five, with straight chocolate hair tumbling down her back, secured in what appeared a loose braid. She wore a soft doeskin jacket over a white silk blouse and form-fitting, dark-green denim trousers stuffed into high black, recently-shined riding boots.

  On her head was a man’s broad-brimmed cream Stetson with a beaded Indian band.

  On her hips, two silver-plated small-caliber pistols were behind a wide brown belt that accentuated the narrowness of her waist and the fullness of her bos
om. In her saddle scabbard was a Winchester. As she rode slowly over to where the captain and several other soldiers were now gathered around Sartain, The Revenger saw that her eyes were nearly the same pearl color as the grip of his derringer.

  Her creamy cheeks were lightly tanned to a dark peach by the sun. Her face overall was flawless, carefully crafted by an adoring god who knew his way around a bone mallet and chisel. Her eyes were cool as she stared negligently at The Revenger, who was trussed up like a calf for branding.

  “Is this him, Miss Gallant?” the captain asked her.

  She studied Sartain a long moment, the corners of her wide, officious mouth lifting in a self-satisfied half-smile. “Oh, yes.” She blinked slowly. “Oh, yes. It’s him, all right.”

  She tossed Boss’s reins to the sergeant who’d been driving the ambulance. He wasn’t ready for them. They hit the sergeant in the head, nearly knocking his hat off.

  The man grunted his displeasure as he scowled at the woman. Ignoring the soldier, she cast one more cool glance at Sartain, slightly curling her upper lip in victory, then booted her fine horse into a canter eastward along the street into which the other soldiers were now riding on their Army bays.

  “Now, who in the hell is that?” asked The Revenger, staring after her.

  “None of your damn business.” The captain scowled down at him. He turned to the sergeant. “Throw him into the wagon. Tie his horse behind. We’ll be pulling out as soon as we’ve formed a column. I want your wagon in the middle.”

  “Where we goin’?” Sartain wanted to know.

  The two lieutenants hauled the Cajun to his feet. He stood nearly a full head taller than either of the lieutenants and the captain, who looked him up and down critically and then said, “I told you to hobble your mouth, mister. You’ll know where you’re going when we get there.”

  The two began leading Sartain, who tripped every time the chain between his ironclad ankles drew taut, over to the wagon. “Not even a hint?”