Belle rose and moved to the washbasin. When she’d returned with a damp cloth, she said, “I’m sorry, Mike.”
“You were wonderful,” Sartain wheezed, easing back into the chair.
“No. I mean about . . . about . . . Jewel.”
As she dropped to her knees and extended the damp cloth toward him, he spied movement out the window over his left shoulder. He turned, blinking against the darkness and the ambient light flashing silver in the puddles pocking the street. A horse stood in the middle of the street.
As the short hairs bristled along the back of his neck, Sartain blinked again, trying to focus.
A hatted figure in a rain slicker stood on the other side of the horse, near the horse’s off rear hip. The man was extending something over the top of the saddle toward the Belle of the Ball.
Sartain’s heart hiccupped. He’d just turned toward Belle and yelled, “Get down!” when he glimpsed the rifle’s orange flash. He heaved himself up out of the chair, shoving Belle to the floor and landing on top of her, hearing the soft tinkle of breaking glass followed closely by the rifle’s roar.
Chapter 5
“Good Lord, what’s happening?” Belle cried from beneath Sartain, her voice muffled by his chest.
“You stay right there, Belle!”
Outside, a horse whinnied shrilly. He could hear someone cursing.
Sartain crawled over to where his Henry repeater was leaning against the wall. He grabbed the sixteen-shooter and, crouching, ran back over to the window. He edged a look around the frame.
The shooter was no longer aiming the rifle toward the Belle of the Ball but was trying to check his horse. The animal had apparently started bucking at the rifle’s report. Sartain could see only the horse and the shooter’s silhouette, but he could see them just the same—the man’s shadow sidestepping this way and that in the street while jerking on the horse’s reins.
The horse’s dark eyes flashed with fear.
Sartain pumped a round into the chamber and extended the Henry toward the street. He pressed his cheek to the rifle’s rear stock and aimed low, intending to only wing the son of a bitch. He couldn’t slap the hell out of a dead man, nor find out why he’d drilled a pill through Belle’s window. Just as Sartain squeezed the Henry’s trigger, the man cursed again and was nearly jerked off his feet by his angry, scared, buck-kicking mount.
Sartain’s bullet plumed dust as it hammered into the street where the bushwhacker had been a half-second before. Then the horse half-dragged the gent into the deep black shadows on the opposite side of the street.
Sartain cursed. Belle looked up at him from where she lay belly-down and naked on the floor, squirming like a landed fish. Her eyes were wide and round with fear. “Who is it, Mike? Who fired a shot in here?”
“I don’t know, darlin’, but I’m going to find out!” He tossed his rifle onto the bed and began pulling on his summer underwear. “You just stay down there, in case he starts hurling lead again!”
She looked so frightened and vulnerable down there that he took her in his arms, squeezed her reassuringly, and pressed his lips to her temple.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get him!”
He grabbed his rifle and ran to the door while she cried behind him, “Do be careful, Mike!”
Sartain was a careful man. He’d already scouted the place thoroughly and knew there was a rear door to the outside from the second story. He ran to it, raking one hand against the wall as a guide down the dark hall, and then threw the door’s locking bolt, ran out onto the landing, and quickly descended the steps to the shadowy backyard that dripped now after the rain.
He made for the saloon’s rear corner and stopped, pressing a shoulder against the building’s back wall, and threw a look toward the main street.
He couldn’t see anything but ambient lilac-blue light, heavy shadows, and starlight beyond a clearing sky reflecting silvery on the wet rooftops, but he could hear a voice raised in anger. It was coming from down a cross street somewhere on the other side of the town’s main drag.
Sartain pushed away from the building and bolted around the corner, sprinting toward the front. The saloon was on his left. A smaller adobe-brick structure—a furniture store, if he remembered—was on his right. He kicked a couple of tin cans and other sundry trash, and then he dashed out into the street just as a horse-and-rider-shaped shadow hurled itself out of the heavy shadows of the cross street, swung hard left, and galloped away down the main drag, heading for the settlement’s ragged outskirts.
“Hold it there or take it in the back, you son of a bitch!” Sartain shouted.
The silhouetted rider merely crouched lower in his saddle and whipped his rein ends against his mount’s right hip.
The Henry leaped and roared three times in Sartain’s hands. He sprinted forty or fifty yards forward and loosed another barrage, the rifle’s reports echoing over the dark town, the heavy, humid air somewhat muffling them.
A dog started barking somewhere in the distant darkness.
Sartain stared through the wafting powder-smoke, the tang of cordite in his nostrils. Horse and ambusher had been swallowed by the night. He could hear the distant clomps of the horse’s galloping hooves. They dwindled quickly into the distance until there was nothing but the dripping silence.
Somewhere, a man said angrily as though to someone else, “Listen to all that shootin’ out there! This town is goin’ to hell in a damned handbasket!” And then there was the thud of a window being slammed shut.
Sartain cursed and lowered the smoking repeater to his side. He gave a sigh, scrubbed moisture from his forehead with his forearm, then drew his hat down taut on his head, turned, and tromped back down the soggy street, his boots making splashing, sucking sounds as they ground into the mud.
As he approached the Belle of the Ball, he saw movement on the second story. His window had been raised higher, and Belle poked her head out.
“Mike?” the girl said softly but loudly enough to be heard in the heavy quiet that had descended after the shooting.
“Yeah?”
“Them two fellas you was playin’ poker with earlier?”
“Yeah?”
“They pulled out of their room just after you left.” Belle turned her head this way and that, looking around suspiciously. “They must be out there somewhere.”
There was an orange flash at the saloon’s left front corner. Sartain flinched as the bullet screeched passed his head so close that he felt the warm curl of air just off his right ear.
Crouching and pivoting while raising the Henry, Sartain fired two quick shocks, evoking a groan. There was another orange flash from the saloon’s opposite corner, but Sartain had instinctively thrown himself forward, landing on his shoulder and rolling. That shot too missed its mark, to thud into a building on the street’s opposite side.
Sartain rolled up on his right hip and shoulder, lifted the Henry from the mud, and fired two more rounds, and then a third when he saw the bushwhacker’s staggering shadow separate from the saloon wall. The man threw up his arms and collapsed just after Sartain had heard the shooter’s rifle drop in the mud.
The man lay on his back, kicking. Quickly, the kicking ceased and the shooter lay still.
Sartain aimed his rifle from his hip at the first man he’d shot, who also lay still, and walked over to the second man—a tall hombre with a thick black mustache. Earlier, when they’d been playing five-card stud, he’d said his name was Clements. Now he was merely Clements’s bloody ghost.
Sartain walked over to the second man, whose chest was rising and falling behind his checked vest and white shirt. Unlike Sartain, and just like Clements, he was fully dressed, his empty holster tied down on his right thigh clad in brown wool trousers with hide-patched knees.
He’d said his name was Brown. Billy Brown. A young man with a blond fringe of mustache mantling his pink upper lip that had a small, corded notch scar, as though he’d been poked with a blade. A short-barreled fi
ve-shot Smith and Wesson “Baby Russian” revolver, .38 caliber, lay in a tuft of wet bunch grass just off his right shoulder.
An old-model Remington .44 conversion revolver lay near his left hand. He was sliding his hand toward it, inch by painful inch, until Sartain stepped on the hand.
Billy Brown groaned and arched his back, grinding the back of his head and the heels of his boots into the wet ground.
“Oh, you’re hurting me, you nasty devil! You’re hurting me!”
“Devil, huh?” Sartain said, keeping his boot pressed down on the kid’s palm. “You bushwhacked me, remember?”
“Oh, you nasty devil. I’m dyin’ here! You blew my guts out!” With his free hand, he was trying to keep his intestines from slithering out through the gaping hole in his belly.
“Why’d you do it, dumbass?”
“Go to hell, you! I’m—!”
“Yeah, I know—you’re dyin’ here.” Sartain hunkered down and stared into the kid’s pain-pinched eyes, glassy with fast-approaching death. “Why are you dying, kid?”
“That . . . that little bitch upstairs!” the kid grunted out, still grinding his heels painfully into the soggy ground. “She knows . . . she knows where the loot’s at . . . from the mine. Don’t let her kid ya!”
Sartain frowned. He kept his voice low as he said, “You think Belle knows where the gold is?”
“Sure as shit. Her and Jasper Garvey . . . they done . . . slipped an extra . . . jack . . . into the deck!” He winced, squeezed his eyes closed. “Oh, Lord, you killed me!” The kid sobbed, convulsed. “I’m comin’ Momma!”
“Hold on,” Sartain said, pinching the kid’s chin and shaking his head. “Who was that bastard with the horse?”
The kid fell slack against the ground. His head rolled to one side, and he gazed up at Sartain, glassy-eyed. He gave a soft fart, made a gurgling sound in his throat, and that was it. He was dancing with his mother, if his mother was dancing the devil’s two-step amongst the butane vapors, that was.
“He dead?”
Sartain jerked at Belle’s voice. She was standing a few feet away, just off the corner of the saloon. She had a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. That appeared to be all she was wearing. Her feet were bare, and her hair tumbled messily across her shoulders.
Billy Brown’s disembodied voice said, “‘She knows where the loot’s at from the mine. Don’t let her kid ya!’”
“He dead, Mike?” she repeated, coming up and prodding the kid’s shoulder with one bare toe.
“Yeah,” Sartain said.
“The other one?”
“Dead, too.”
Sartain straightened, looking down at the slack, staring form of Billy Brown, and then shuttling his gaze to Belle Higgins. She returned his look and hiked a shoulder beneath the blanket. “Any idea why they was gunnin’ for you too, Mike?”
Sartain shook his head. He wondered if she’d heard what Billy had said. If not, he wasn’t going to tell her. “No. None at all.”
He swung around to stare off into the murky western distance, where the rider had disappeared into the night. “He must’ve been in with these two. More bounty hunters, maybe.” But they didn’t need to be bona fide manhunters. More than a few times, men who’d merely crossed trails by happenstance with The Revenger had tried to kill him for the bounty on his head.
Maybe that’s who these men were. And they’d brought in a third man—the man on the horse—to back their play.
Still, Billy Brown’s dying words kept bouncing around inside Sartain’s head: “Her and Jasper Garvey slipped an extra jack into the deck!”
“We’d best go in, Mike. Come on. I’ll have Northcutt tend to these two in the mornin’.” Belle tugged on his arm and stretched her lips in a lusty smile. “Look at you—you’re covered in mud. I think we’d best get you back soakin’ in a nice hot bathtub!”
“Yeah,” Sartain said. “Yeah, I suppose I’d best have me another bath.”
Pensively, chill fingers of apprehension dancing along his spine, he let her lead him back around the side of the saloon toward the rear.
“Her and Jasper Garvey done slipped an extra jack into the deck!”
Chapter 6
Sartain woke feeling as though he’d only had an hour of sleep. Which he supposed was about right.
After a bath, which he’d taken in lukewarm water because he hadn’t wanted Belle to waste the stove wood to heat it, nor had he wanted to wait for it, he’d slept lightly and fitfully.
The Revenger’s mind was foggy and troubled by the intriguing words Billy Brown had uttered on his deathbed, so to speak. But by the time he’d finally drifted off into a short slumber, he’d pretty much dismissed the whole notion that Belle could be in cahoots with Jasper Garvey.
If so, why would she send The Revenger after the deputy sheriff? It made no sense for her to sic a killer on her accomplice. Billy Brown might have believed what he’d said—possibly only because Belle and Garvey were known to horse around in the Belle of the Ball together—and he and his friends might have decided to try to catch the two together with the strongbox of gold bars from the mine.
But Billy Brown hadn’t looked like the sharpest tool in the shed. Nor had he acted like it. He’d most likely been dead wrong about the Belle-and-Garvey conspiracy.
In the wash of dull, gray light pushing through the room’s sole window, Sartain glanced at Belle. She lay on her belly, head turned away from him, the sheet and quilt exposing her left buttock and the pale downward curve of her left breast beneath her arm. He leaned down, pressed his lips to the small of her back, then drew the sheet and quilt over her. The air was damp and cool.
The girl groaned, moved her legs, and drifted back to sleep once more. Exhausted.
The Revenger gave a wry chuckle. He moved to the window and looked out. The sun didn’t appear to be up yet, but it was hard to tell with the scalloped gunmetal clouds arching in relief across the sky. It was a soggy, moody, post-storm morning. Northcutt was squatting over the body of Billy Brown. The old man looked up toward Sartain’s window, spat to one side, and shook his head.
Sartain shrugged.
On the other side of the street from the old man, at the mouth of a break between the Wells Fargo office and a small laundry, a coyote stood, ears and tail raised as though waiting for the old man to leave him to a breakfast of Billy Brown and Billy’s unlucky cohort.
While Belle snored softly into her pillow, Sartain dressed, stepped into his boots, donned his hat, draped his saddlebags over his left arm, picked up his Henry repeater, and went out. He gently closed and latched the door behind him.
“You wear that girl out?” Northcutt asked him downstairs in the main drinking hall, where the oldster sat over a steaming stone mug of coffee at a table near the bar. Beyond him and the batwings, the sky was turning a lighter shade of gray.
“Looks like it.” Sartain set his gear on a table near the old man and then walked over to the bar, where a large, speckled black coffee pot sat on a thick, leather potholder. Steam rose from its spout to unravel in the misty morning air still soggy from the storm. “Leastways, I could have used another hour or two in the old mattress sack.”
He leaned back on his hips, stretching, and grabbed one of several coffee mugs lined up beside the pot, then dumped some of the smoking mud, black as tar, into it.
“Well, good, I’m glad you wore her out,” the old man groused. “That girl’s been so damn owly of late, I half-feared she was gonna toss a butterfly loop over my head, tie me to the cookin’ range back there, and have her way!” He laughed and lifted his mug to his bearded mouth, blowing ripples on the coffee’s surface.
Sartain brought his coffee back to the old man’s table and sat down across from him.
Northcutt hauled a small canvas tobacco pouch out of his pocket. “Headin’ out?”
“Just as soon as I swill this and saddle my horse.”
Northcutt withdrew rolling papers from the sack, but when he tipped
the sack over the paper troughed in his fingers, only a few grains of chopped tobacco came out. Sartain tossed his own sack down beside the old man’s steaming mug.
“Obliged.” Northcutt set to work building his smoke. “Some handy shootin’ you did last night. You keep shootin’ all our regular customers, Belle’s gonna have to board the place up.”
“There was a third one.”
“Wouldn’t doubt it.”
Sartain sipped his coffee and took back his tobacco pouch. Sitting back in his chair, he started building a quirley of his own. “You know who that third bastard might be?”
“Got no idea.”
“I know one was Billy Brown. Leastways, that’s who he said he was. The other one—”
“The other one was Calvin Clements. The two rode together. Sometimes with a third man named Reeves, sometimes with a fourth one named Iverson. I’ve seen five of ’em ride through here a time or two. Don’t believe I was ever told the fifth one’s name, or if I was, I can’t recall it. Old age ain’t purty, Mr. Sartain.”
He twisted his cigarette closed and rolled it between his lips, sealing it. “They were all cowhands workin’ at various ranches, sometimes only two or three together at the same brand. Sometimes all five. One or two was always drawin’ his time and gettin’ hazed onto the grubline trail—fired for one reason or another—so they wasn’t always all runnin’ in the same pack together or workin’ for the same spread. But they had history in that they was all soldiers together, stationed up at the Tawny Buttes outpost north of here. I think Billy Brown grew up in this country. Clements might have, too.”
The graybeard fired a match to life on his cracked, yellow thumbnail and held it up in front of his quirley. “Any idea why they ambushed you? At least, I’m assumin’ that’s why that coyote out there is lickin’ his chops. They tried gunnin’ you, same as the others. My, you’re fillin’ up the cemetery faster’n the Utes and Southern Cheyenne did back in the day!”
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