Buchanan's Revenge

by Jonas Ward

  The cool hand was withdrawn. The audience with the queen of Aura was concluded. But Buchanan, apparently, hadn't been dazzled in the fashion to which she was accustomed for she paused for an extra moment.

  "Is there something wrong?" she asked.

  "I want to have a talk with you," he said. Her eyelids went down, like a shade, and when they opened again the eyes were ten degrees colder.

  "About Rig," Buchanan said.

  "Who?"

  "Rig Bogan." He gave her a sudden, violent shove away from him, one brief instant before the gun aimed at them above the doors blazed its vicious fury. Shoved the girl and ducked low himself as the assassin outside kept firing.

  Buchanan cleared the Colt, aimed guessingly at the top of the door and threw out a reply. A second and a third. Then the hammer clicked once on the empty casing that had blown the bottle out of Wynt's fist, again on the one that had taken Prado to eternity.

  But the three live slugs had driven the sniper's gun to cover and the silence now was golden. Buchanan's eye fell on the discarded shotgun nearby. He cradled it in his hands and moved swiftly toward the doors, shouldered one of them open and stepped into the street. Fifty yards to the south a single rider was running away, a man whose body tilted curiously in the saddle. Wynt, Buchanan guessed, who had to favor that busted collarbone. The shotgun might carry to him, but what the hell?

  He turned, instead, and re-entered the saloon, laid the shotgun atop the bar and made his way to where the girl was seated after being helped from her rude fall.

  "You all right?"

  She nodded her head, managed a smile. "You move quickly when you have to," she said.

  "Didn't mean to shove that hard. What's the matter?"

  One moment she was staring at his middle and the next she had sprung to her feet. "You're wounded," she told him. "You're bleeding!"

  He looked down at the wet stain just above his gunbelt. "Well I'll be damned/' he said, smiling ruefully, as if he had committed something rather foolish. She had him by the arm and was turning him around.

  "Come upstairs," she said.

  "What for?"

  "So you can get off your feet. Mr. Price, would you ride out to Doc's house right away?"

  "You betcha!"

  "Come on," she said to Buchanan. "Up these stairs."

  He held back, remembering. "This isn't anything," he assured her.

  "How do you know?" she said with the kind of anger you use for a child.

  "After a while," Buchanan explained, "you get to tell between a little scratch and a hole. This is a scratch."

  "We'll let Doc Vincent decide that," she told him firmly. "Until then you're going to lie down."

  "Might as well do what Cristy says," said her bartender brother. "She'll save your life if she has to hound you to death."

  "That's very funny, Steve," she replied, pulling Buchanan insistently toward the staircase.

  "How about the other gent?" he asked in an undertone.

  "What other gent?"

  "Isn't there somebody up there?"

  Her eyebrows shot skyward. "Up there?" she said. "In my room? What would a man be doing in my room?"

  Buchanan winced. "I just thought ... I mean, I ..."

  "Well, you can just think again!"

  "Miss, I'm sorry," Buchanan apologized. "I really am."

  "Let's stop talking and get you quiet until the doc gets here," she said with finality, urging him up the steps. He went along now, not daring to protest after making such a jackass of himself.

  Not that he didn't have a few questions about Rig Bog-an, though. The only difference was, he wouldn't put them to her quite so bluntly now. He had been only briefly singed by her anger a moment ago and he was sure he didn't want the full treatment. She opened the door, stood aside for him to pass on through. It was a small room with a single window, big enough to accommodate only an armchair and a table in addition to the washstand and the single bed. The empty single bed with the crisp white sheet and pillowcase, the light blue blanket.

  "Well, at least my gent made the bed before he sneaked out through the window," she commented.

  "I said I was sorry, ma'am."

  "Sorry because you were wrong? Take your shirt off and lie down."

  "Just sorry," he said. "And I'm not going to mess that bed."

  "You can be stubborn, can't you?"

  "Only when I'm pushed," he said and that made her pause, give his rugged face a close study.

  "Yes," she said, less brusquely. "And you've been pushed." She reached up, began unbuttoning the shirt herself.

  "I can do that."

  "You take the gunbelt off."

  Buchanan did the one, she the other. After she peeled the shirt from his shoulders he went and laid the gun rig across the back of the chair.

  "Horrible," he heard her say and turned his head.

  "Me?"

  "The gun. All guns."

  He smiled at her. "It started with fists," he said. "Then clubs and spears. Now we got guns."

  "And men who get paid to use them . . ." Her voice broke off. "I imagine that includes you," she said and Buchanan laughed.

  "Earned me a drink and dinner tonight," he said.

  She smiled back. "And that little scratch the whole length of your side," she said, coming toward him with a towel in her hand. She laid the towel over the gash, pressed gently. "Another inch," she said, "and there'd be a bullet

  in your body."

  "It's a life of inches."

  "It's a life of ... You'd better lie down," she said. "Hold the towel close and maybe the bleeding will stop a little."

  Buchanan did as he was told. He stretched out and his legs extended the bed by six inches.

  "Lordy," she laughed, "how tall are you, anyhow?"

  "Too damn, sometimes." He turned his shaggy head sideways and sniffed suspiciously.

  "What's the matter?"

  "Perfume in the pillow," he said. "That's a new one on me."

  "Not where I come from."

  "Carolina," Buchanan said. "Or Tennessee."

  "South Carolina. But how did you know?"

  "My favorite pastime. Placing people by their voices."

  "Is this the patient?" an old man asked from the doorway and came inside the little room. "Good gravy," Doc Vincent said, his lively eyes traveling the length of Buchanan. "Ought to charge you by the square foot."

  "Better keep the bill under three dollars, Doc," Buchanan said.

  "That's been taken care of," he said, leaning down and pulling the towel away. He spent the next five minutes cleaning the wound and bandaging it. "Better stay off your feet for a couple of days. Give it a chance to scab."

  "You bet, Doc. Much obliged."

  "Glad I could help. 'Night, mister. 'Night, Cristine." He went out, and as soon as the door closed Buchanan was swinging his legs to the floor.

  "What do you think you're doing?" she demanded.

  He stood up, reached out for his shirt. Her hand got to it first, snatched it behind her back.

  "You," she said, "are going to lie down, and I'm going to wash this shirt. And take that stubborn look off your face."

  Buchanan looked down at her for a long moment.

  "Let's have that talk about Rig Bogan," he said.

  "You mentioned him before," she said. "Is he the fellow who drove the red wagon through town last week?"

  "That all you know about him?"

  "Yes," she said. "That's all I know about any fellow who comes through." -

  "He told the liveryman this was his lucky town. He thinks he means on account of you're here."

  She began to shake her head puzzledly. Then her face brightened. "He means the game that night he was here," she said. "And I'll say he was lucky. He broke the bank and everyone else playing." She smiled. "Sat there grinning and turning up blackjack three times out of every five."

  "How much did he win?"

  "Well, there was a hundred in the bank. That's my limit and he
won it all. And he must have taken those three toughs for another hundred apiece."

  "What toughs?"

  "Three just like the ones that came in tonight. Two of them were brothers."

  "And Rig busted them?"

  She nodded. "Then he left. That was when they started drinking and turned surly. Poor Sheriff Rivercomb tried to quiet them and they beat him with their guns."

  "They bother you?"

  "I got out and drove to my brother's house. Why all these questions?"

  "I'm looking for Rig Bogan," Buchanan said. "We're partners in that red wagon he was driving."

  "So you're the famous partner," she said. "Every time he'd win a pot he'd say, 'Boy, if only old Buchanan could see me now!' I thought he'd drive me crazy."

  "I wish old Buchanan could see him now."

  "Is something wrong?"

  He told her what was wrong. Even told her about his suspicions concerning Bogan and herself.

  "You came in here tonight with a lot of ideas about me," she said.

  "All of them wrong."

  "But intriguing, though," she said with a sad smile. "More intriguing than this existence."

  "You don't like what you're doing?"

  "Like it? I hate every minute of it."

  “How'd you come to leave Carolina?" 59

  She took a deep breath, walked over to the window. "My husband was killed in a duel," she said very quietly. "It was all very gallant."

  "What was the duel about?"

  "It seems that another gentleman made a remark about me, about my—virtue—before David married me. David challenged him to a duel and this other man put a bullet in his heart." She swung around. "That's why all guns are horrible," she said.

  "A man," Buchanan said, "sees it different from a woman. Me, I don't know what else your husband could have done."

  "David's mother says I could have stopped him."

  "How?"

  She looked across the dimly lit room steadily. Beneath the bodice of the dress her breasts rose and fell emotionally-

  "David's mother said I should have told him that what the man had said about me was the truth," she said slowly. "She pointed out that we'd only been married a month, that we really hadn't formed any deep attachment. I should have sacrificed our marriage, his mother said, to save his life."

  "That lady was wrong," Buchanan said.

  The blonde girl's head came up in surprise. "You think so? You really think she was wrong?"

  "She'd have been wrong if you were my wife," Buchanan answered her. "I'd have looked up this jasper regardless."

  The smile that came to her lips seemed grateful. "For some reason you make me feel better," she told him. "As if I couldn't have changed anything that happened. Thank you." She came away from the window, still holding his shirt. "I'm going to take this down to the kitchen and wash it out," she said. "At least lie down for that little time."

  "All right."

  She went past him and out of the room. Buchanan looked down at the bed thoughtfully, unable for the moment not to think of the little story he had just been told.

  A marriage that had lasted one brief month. He had a picture in his mind of a beautiful young bride riding in an open carriage with a handsome, smiling young fellow who cut a dashing figure in a long jacket and rakish beaver hat. Then some drunk at a bar has to open his dirty mouth. Buchanan could even imagine him as a beau who had lost out. She must have had beaux like a flame has moths. And the sonofabitch was probably a dead shot with one of those tricky dueling pistols. It would be one of those strictly formal affairs, at-dawn, with everybody being so goddamn polite to each other. "Take six paces, gentlemen, then turn and fire." A wedding and a funeral in one short month.

  And this lonely bed in this little room.

  Buchanan lay down on it again, smelling the perfume in the pillow, staring at the crack in the ceiling just as she must stare at it one long night after another.

  Bogan. Think about Rig. Stop looking at the ceiling. Bogan, he told himself again. Bogan winning money from what she called "those three toughs." What was the name in the ledger—Perrott? Two brothers named Fred and Jules Perrott. And a third man named Sam Gill. They'd lost their money and turned surly, taken it out on some old sheriff. And topped off their stay by running out on a lousy one-dollar feed bill.

  What was he trying to remember now? A conversation. The codger at the table downstairs had wondered at the steady parade of noisy guns through town. Some recruiting going on around here? Somebody stirring the pot?

  Lost a hundred dollars apiece, she'd said. Lost it to a grinning freighter who probably wasn't even packing a pm. Had the brothers and their friend ridden south that morning, the same direction as Rig?

  Buchanan closed his eyes. His great hands folded slowly into fists, unfolded again and lay still beside him. He would be on the trail himself. Right now. He smothered a yawn. Tomorrow he'd be riding, all day, south to Brownsville and Matamoros. Buchanan closed his eyes, and when he opened them again there was a faint gray light coming into the room beneath the drawn shade. It was coming on dawn am he had slept the hours away in her bed. But then he called her mentioning her brother's house and he felt little better. Until he turned his head and found her curled up in the chair, and then he felt terrible.

  And worse when he realized that the blanket had been thrown over him, that his boots had been removed. Him; the ranny that slept with one eye open and both ears cocked, that could hear a rattler sigh at three hundred feet.

  His shirt, washed and ironed, hung-above the door. Oh, Buchanan, you horse's ass! he growled at himself. What a performance! He came out of the bed scowling, let go with a self-disgusted sigh, then walked softly in his stockinged feet to where she slept, looking somehow both cramped and comfortable with her knees drawn up against, her chest, her head pillowed on her forearm.

  Easy, now, he cautioned, bending over the chair, lifted her effortlessly in his arms and settling her into the bed. Now he returned the favor, covered her to the chin with the blanket, went and got the fresh-smelling shirt and put it on. He picked up the boots from the floor, carried them out of the room and on down the stairs. Buchanan left the saloon via the kitchen door, walked back down Mat Street to the stable.

  This, he reflected, would have been about the time that Rig would have departed Aura seven mornings ago the other three would have slept off their drunk till mid-morning, ridden out of town at a defiant, hung over gallop.

  Five

  THE COUNTRY south of Aura was stark and rugged, sparsely settled, and Buchanan traveled through it at a pace that was deceptively casual. He was trying to put himself in Rig Bogan's place a week ago, to think the other man's thoughts as he hit the trail again after a pleasant night of leisure and winning at cards. I'd be feeling pretty good about now, Buchanan mused. That money I won would have a comforting feel inside my shirt and I'd be telling those mules that it took some talent to break the bank at blackjack.