“When I last ran you out of here, Salvador, it was for the last time.”
Casually puffing the stogie, Salvador de Castillo grinned and shrugged and said, “I blew out a horse and I was hungry, Papa! Aunt Jacinta was kind enough to cook a nice breakfast for me.” He glanced over his shoulder. Jacinta was standing under the tiled arbor fronting the casa, on the far side of the patio. She was too far away for the don to know for sure, but he thought her ugly mouth was set with her devilish, self-satisfied smile.
She would do anything to taunt him. They’d been rivals since childhood.
“Now, then,” Salvador said. “As I was saying, Papa—why send five men when only one, if he’s good enough, will do?” He broadened his smile, chocolate eyes flashing silver in the sunlight. “And you know as well as anyone I’m good enough, don’t you, Papa?”
Salvador held the don’s gaze for several seconds and then stepped out from the opening in the adobe wall and, puffing the stogie, tapping ashes into the dirt, sauntered in his leisurely way toward the stables.
“You better have that ingot hauled in from the mines, Papa,” Salvador said over his shoulder. “I’ll be back soon with The Revenger’s head, and I know you don’t like me hanging around the place!”
Salvador laughed before disappearing into a horse barn. A few minutes later, he led a big, rangy Morgan out of the barn, stepped into the saddle, quirted the horse savagely, and galloped out of the yard to the north.
Chapter Eight
Mike Sartain stopped his big stallion beside a cottonwood the wind was doing its best to strip and break as though over a giant, invisible knee. The wind had come up an hour earlier, and it was blowing heavy curtains of grit this way and that over the Arizona desert.
Holding his hat down over his eyes, Sartain squinted down over Boss’s left stirrup at the stage road he’d been following. He slid his gaze along the shod hoof tracks he’d been following, as well, until he was looking at a single-track trail angling off the main trail.
“Hold on, Boss,” Sartain said, wincing against the pain in his bullet-grazed thigh as he stepped down from the saddle. He dropped the buckskin’s reins, crossed in front of the horse, and walked over to where the secondary trail angled off to the right of the main one.
The Cajun walked several yards up that secondary path, an old horse trail, possibly an ancient Indian trail now being used by owlhoots and cowpunchers, and dropped to one knee. He traced the outline of a shod hoof.
A familiar shod hoof.
Then he saw the indentations of several more shod hooves and lifted his head to follow the trail with his gaze, squinting against the windblown grit. The trail rose up and over several rocky, cactus-studded hogbacks before disappearing from the Cajun’s view.
Sartain ran a gloved hand across his unshaven right cheek. “Headin’ for Mexico, just like I suspected,” he muttered, his voice nearly drowned by the rushing, moaning wind. “But where in Mexico?”
He rose and stared down the trail in frustration. Behind him, Boss whickered and shook his head, showing his own frustration with the wind and dirt and sand blowing in his eyes.
Sartain cursed and walked back to the buckskin. He removed his canteen from his saddle horn, dampened his neckerchief, and swabbed the stallion’s eyes. Then he corked the canteen and slung it back over the horn. He glanced straight south along the stage trail. About a mile away, he could see the town of Sonora Gate spread out across red, rocky hills.
His quarry had avoided the little border settlement. Instead, he’d headed along this secondary trail that had likely taken him across the border into Old Mexico. He’d been in a damned hurry to get back to where he’d come from, which told Sartain he had a definite destination in mind.
With this wind having kicked up as violently as it had, Sartain had no choice but to abandon the trail for now. He’d pick it up again the next day after the wind died.
He didn’t like the delay. He wanted to catch up to the son of a bitch, find out who he was and why he’d wanted Sartain dead, and who, if anyone else, had put him up to the task.
And then Sartain would kill him.
That wouldn’t bring Buffalo back, of course, but it would make the old reprobate rest a little easier in his grave. And it would make Sartain sleep a little better at night, though probably not by much for a while.
Sartain stared at the town, barely visible through the veils of blowing dirt and sand. He’d visited Sonora Gate a few times in the past. They had a telegraph there, which was good because he had a message to send. His time in the rough-and-tumble border settlement wouldn’t be a total waste.
He could rest his bullet-burned leg for a few hours, eat a steak, and swallow some whiskey. He’d be fit as a fiddle for the last leg of his vengeance trail.
Sartain stepped into the leather and urged the horse ahead. He didn’t have to give Boss much of a nudge. The stallion probably already smelled the oats and fresh hay in the Sonora Gate Federal Livery & Feed Barn, and likely a couple of randy mares. He gave an eager snort and skipped into a jarring trot before settling into a ground-eating lope.
Five minutes later, Sartain slowed Boss back down to a trot and watched the mud-brick shacks and stables of Sonora Gate’s ragged outer edges jostle into view along both sides of the trail. Some of the shacks were only half-visible against the rocky hillsides.
As he continued ahead to where the trail became the settlement’s main street, he saw that the wind was having a detrimental effect on the town’s business here at the heart of a midweek business day. There wasn’t a soul on the street, and no horses were tied in front of the hitch-racks fronting the town’s two main saloons.
In fact, nothing at all moved along the street except Sartain, wind-jostled shingles hanging from chains from gallery eaves, and bouncing tumbleweeds. But then as he and Boss continued to clomp along the street, heading for the feed barn, Sartain saw that he’d been wrong.
The street was not totally deserted. Under the brush-roof of the gallery fronting the Sonora Gate Town Marshal’s Office, a single figure dressed in rough trail gear sat in a rocking chair, slowly rocking. The figure slowly lifted the heels of his boots as he rocked—up and down, up and down.
Her boots, Sartain saw as he drew even with the marshal’s office. Because just then the figure in the chair lifted the brim of her man’s Stetson from her copper eyes, revealing a pretty female face framed in tawny hair that blew out around her shoulders in the wind. The wan light glinted off the five-pointed badge pinned to the young woman’s brown leather vest.
Under the vest and badge, high, proud breasts jutted.
Sartain lifted his eyes from the girl’s bosom to her face. She regarded him obliquely, still holding the brim of her hat up and preventing the wind from catching it. As the Cajun continued to clomp past the marshal’s office on his big buckskin, Sartain quirked the corners of his mouth and pinched the brim of his sand-colored Stetson to the girl.
She gave no reply to the gesture but merely stared at the newcomer dully, maybe with faint curiosity. A red neckerchief blew around her neck in the wind. She held a Winchester carbine across her thighs, clad in brush-scarred leather chaps. She’d stopped rocking when she’d spied Sartain, but now as he drifted on past her, she began shifting her weight again from the heels of her boots to the toes, gently rocking.
Sartain stabled his horse with a middle-aged black man, Hannibal Howe. He gave the man instructions on how to tend the horse while keeping the stallion from inflicting bodily injury on Howe’s person, since Boss could get cranky when horny or when the wind kicked up or for no reason at all. Sartain left Howe currying Boss, who was munching oats from a feed sack and twitching his ears at a couple of mares eyeing him from a nearby stall, and headed across the street to the Wells Fargo office, which had a telegraph.
He filled out a flimsy given him by the old man sitting in the cage eating a crumbly ham sandwich and regarding him suspiciously, head tilted to one side. The Wells Fargo agent was ob
viously trying to remember where he’d seen Sartain’s countenance before. Sartain knew, because his image—or at least a vague likeness—was staring back at him from a Wanted circular hanging from a nail on the wall behind the man, just left of his telegraph key and a window overlooking the main street.
The dodger was one Sartain had seen before, hanging in a similar office. It was offering one thousand dollars for the man known as The Revenger, wanted for a string of vigilante killings-for-hire, including a couple of lawmen, throughout the frontier.
Sartain grinned at the old telegrapher regarding him dubiously through the bars of the cage, as the Cajun penciled a couple of concise sentences on a pink telegraph flimsy:
JEFF ARE YOU ALL RIGHT STOP IS PHOENIX ALL RIGHT STOP REPLY SOON END STOP MIKE
Sartain instructed the telegrapher to hammer the missive off to Jeff Ubek at the Continental Hotel in New Orleans and to deliver any response to the Sonora Sun, where he intended to rent a room. He paid the man for the telegram.
As the oldster palmed the twenty-five cents, he spat crumbs from his mustache and said, “Hey, ain’t you . . .”
Sartain tensed.
“Ain’t you Matt Studebaker? Old Kent Studebaker’s boy?”
Sartain’s cobalt blues glittered at the man through the bars of the shadowy cage. “Yep, that’s just who I am.”
He pinched his hat brim and then went back outside into the gusting wind that blew his longish hair around his ears and threatened to tear his hat off his head. He paused and looked around. The three-story mud-brick shake-shingled Sonora Sun Saloon and Pleasure Parlor sat a half a block away, on the other side of the street. Sartain’s mouth watered at the thought of a few shots of Royal Oaks followed by a thick steak and a woman.
Those thoughts rattling around between his ears, holding his hat down taut on his blowing curls, he stepped down off the boardwalk and angled across the street. Dirt and ground horseshit blew against him, stung his cheeks and eyes. The wind whipped his pinto vest out like bat wings. A tumbleweed bounced off his tweed-clad knee, and then he trudged up the Sonoran Sun’s broad wooden porch steps and looked over the carved oak batwings.
He had to blink several times before he could make out through the dim, dingy light within that the place was deserted. The wind licked in around his legs like invisible tongues, lapping at the dust thickly coating the saloon’s floor puncheons, lifting it and blowing it around the chair legs and tables. The smell of tobacco smoke, old varnish, and liquor lured Sartain through the doors, and as he let them clatter heavily into place behind him, a tall, lean man stepped through a curtained doorway flanking the bar.
“Goddamn, is it windy enough for you, pard?” the man growled, thumbing a suspender over his left shoulder and then shambling behind the bar, automatically twisting the upturned ends of his waxed mustache and sniffing.
“Just windy enough, amigo. Set me up with your best tangle-leg, will ya?” Sartain tossed his hat onto the bar, leaning on his elbows and scrubbing his hands through his thick hair, dislodging a shovelful of dirt, sand, ground horseshit, and plant seeds, all of which ticked onto the bar top.
“Been out in it long, have ya?” the barman said, dubiously glancing at the stranger’s leavings on his counter.
“Long enough to wanna get out of it.”
“How’s this?” The man, whose coal-black hair combed straight back from his high forehead was in stark contrast to the pastiness of his face and watery blue of his eyes, held up a bottle.
“Got any Royal Oaks?”
The man winced and shook his head.
“Sam Clay?”
“Kentucky bourbon?” The man thought about it, blinking. “Might have.” He replaced the bottle he held in his hand with another he had to rummage around for on a bottom shelf. “Here we go! A Sam Clay feller, are ya? Not to pry, but are you from Kentucky?”
Sartain shook his head. “Close, but no cigar. Same green hills, though, with some water between ’em. Lew-zee-anna,” the Cajun said, giving his slow, petal-soft drawl its head and watching eagerly as the barman filled a shot glass.
The barman slid the drink toward Sartain and corked the bottle. “Don’t get many gents in here thirsty for the expensive stuff.”
Sartain held the amber liquid up in front of his face, grinned, wagged his head, and then threw back the entire shot. It burned pleasantly down in his throat and into his chest, spreading a warm glow, soft as the sun setting over the bayous, throughout his being.
“Fill her again and leave the bottle, will you, pard?” Sartain said. “And say, can you tell this poor wanderin’ pilgrim where that trail on the north side of town leads? The one that angles away from that big cottonwood the wind is havin’ its way with just now?”
“The one anglin’ southwest through them rocky, rollin’ hills?”
“That’s the one.”
“Mexico. Crosses the San Pedro about ten miles south of Sonora Gate.”
“Any towns down thataway?”
“A couple villages,” the barman said, playing with a waxed end of his mustache again. “One big hacienda. Big one in the Olvidado Mountains. Forgotten Mountains in English. An old Spanish land grant owned by the de Castillo family.”
Sartain threw back half of his next shot and stared at the low ceiling, pensively scratching his chin. “De Castillo family . . .”
A woman’s voice said loudly, “Hold it right there, Sartain!”
Sartain jerked around to see the young woman he’d seen sitting out in front of the town marshal’s office standing between the open batwings. The dirty gray light from a window to her left winked off her badge and off the cocked Schofield repeater she held in her gloved left hand.
Chapter Nine
“I am holdin’ it, Claudia,” Sartain said, raising his glass to the scowling, mixed-breed beauty standing between the batwings aiming her pistol at him. He tossed the shot back, sighed, and smacked his lips in satisfaction. “And there . . . I drank her down.”
He canted his head toward the bottle. “Can I buy you one?”
“Stow it.” She walked into the saloon, the batwings clattering into place behind her. She kept the barrel of the Schofield aimed at the Cajun’s belly. Claudia Morales swaggered over to him, subtly swinging her hips, chaps flapping against her tapered thighs.
The hot blood of her south-of-the-border sultriness colored the nubs of her perfect cheeks. She raked a spur across the floor as she stopped about six feet away from Sartain and cocked one foot with her customary flourish.
“I really ought to arrest you, Mike.”
Sartain studied her up and down. She was about five-feet-six-inches tall, high-busted, supple-hipped, and long-legged. Her eyes were the copper of newly minted pennies, and her hair was only a shade or so lighter, with slightly darker highlights.
Her breasts thrust toward him from behind her calico shirt and leather vest. The buttons of the shirt were straining, threatening to give.
“I’m up here, pendejo.”
Sartain slid his gaze up from the marshal of Sonora Gate’s deep, olive cleavage past her slender neck and across her rich lips and long, cool nose to her eyes that smoldered out from her smooth, tanned face that could have been carved by a master craftsman out of finest oak, depicting a heartrendingly alluring senorita from the pages of ancient Spanish myths and legends.
A more perfect, intoxicating creature Sartain had rarely seen.
“Claudia, you’re all over,” Sartain said, wagging his head in awe at the beauty before him, feeling a drum beating in his loins.
“As I was saying, I should arrest you.”
“And go and spoil a good time?”
“What good time?”
“The one we could have later”—the Cajun grinned again, showing all his white teeth—” if you played your cards right and promised not to disrespect me in the mornin’.”
The barman cleared his throat and shuffled off down the bar. “I’ll leave you two to work it out.” He glanced ov
er his shoulder as he headed toward the curtained doorway. “Just please don’t bust the place up.” With that, he ducked through the doorway and drew the curtain closed behind him.
“Now, then,” Sartain said, turning back to the girl holding the cocked pistol on him. “Where were we?”
“That price on your head keeps climbing,” Claudia said, taking two more slow steps forward and pressing the barrel of her pistol against Sartain’s belly. She looked down at the gun and then stared into his eyes, her face only a foot away from his now, and added in a deep, sexy rasp, “And I could use a new dress for Cinco de Mayo.”
“How ’bout if I just buy you one?” Sartain closed his hand over the Schofield. She did not resist as he gently pried the pistol free of her grip. He held the hammer back with his thumb, squeezed the trigger, which gave a faint click, and then eased the hammer back down to the firing pin.
He slid the Schofield into the holster thonged low on her right thigh. And then he swept the girl up in his arms, held her against his chest, and brushed his nose across her cheek. “That way, you can save a bullet, and we can find a more creative a way of passin’ this windy afternoon.”
She grabbed the bottle and two shot glasses off the counter as he turned and walked along the bar to the stairs. “What are you doing here, Mike?” she asked as he began climbing, wincing a little at the burn in his thigh. He remembered that she rented a room on the second floor.
“I’m on the hunt, Claudia.”
“When are you not, pendejo?”
“Such talk, after all we’ve meant to each other.”
“You mean after the two times we curled each other’s toes and you slipped away like a ghost in the night?” She lifted her head and pressed her silky lips to his cheek.
Sartain chuckled. “You know I never wanna stay long enough to get boring.”
He turned on the landing and continued up the last stretch of creaky wooden stairs. “Still keepin’ a lid on this town, I see.”
The Revenger Page 6