Belle laughed again, and then she sobbed some more and grunted from the pain.
“And Jasper?”
“Oh, I couldn’t kill my own pa, as much as I hated him. I promised him some of the gold if he shot Pa on the way down from the Painted Lady. Told him how me an’ Mary would be extra nice to him . . . if you get my drift, Mike.”
“Yeah, I get it. Why’d you shoot him?”
“I was fixin’ to wait till he’d shot you, but I got a nervous trigger finger. He wasn’t no use to us anymore—Mary an’ me. We were tired of entertainin’ him.”
Belle laughed briefly, insanely, scrunching her eyes. She grabbed Sartain’s wrist. “It wouldn’t have been easy watchin’ you die, Mike. After the other night. But, you see, we just had to do it. There was no other way. We loved each other, Mary an’ me, though I know that sounds strange—us both bein’ girls an’ such. But we loved each other just the same, though we both enjoyed you. Now, there was a time!”
The girl paused, tears glittering in her eyes. Her breathing was growing more strained. “I really hope you’re gonna be okay, Mike. I’m awful sorry about that bullet in your leg. Mary fired that one, I think. Just the same, it could have been me, and I’m not a very good shot, I’m afraid.”
“Aw, Belle,” Sartain said, frustration and sadness welling in him. “Belle, Belle, Belle!” He smoothed a lock of hair back from her tear- and sweat-damp cheek. “Look what you done to yourself, girl. To both you and Mary.” He sat down beside her and drew her tautly, warmly against him.
“Maybe it’s better this way,” she said and pressed her lips to his neck.
They sat there together for several minutes, neither saying anything more. Finally, Belle jerked once convulsively. She quivered, gurgled, and sighed. She died there against his side.
Sartain ran his hand through her hair, fighting back tears of his own.
Outside, the clattering of wooden wheels rose. He looked out through the open door to see a chaise jouncing toward him along the creek. The driver was a woman. There was no mistaking the curves or the rich dark-brown hair bouncing on her shoulders beneath the broad brim of her brown felt hat.
Mathilda Maragon wore a black leather jacket over a white blouse, and her black-gloved hands deftly handled the reins of the palomino stallion hitched to the chaise. She pulled up in front of the shack, set the brake, looked around, stared through the open door, then climbed down from the buggy.
She strode beautifully up to the door and stared inside.
Her red lips parted but she didn’t say anything for a time. Then she walked slowly inside and stood staring down at Sartain and Belle, whose head was still resting against his side.
“Oh, Mike,” Mathilda said. “I saw Crazy Mary at the Painted Lady earlier with a young man who was obviously trying to conceal his features. They appeared to be following you. I was worried, so I finally hitched up the chaise and . . .”
Slowly, his voice heavy and sad, he told her all about it.
Mathilda said she’d send some men from the Painted Lady settlement to bury the bodies and retrieve the gold.
Then she helped the heavy-hearted Sartain out to the chaise, bandaged his leg with a cutting from a blanket, and gave him a couple shots of brandy to dull the pain. They rode back along the creek, Boss following, his bridle reins tied around the saddle horn.
“It’s not your fault, Mike,” she said as he leaned far back in the quilted-leather seat.
“No, it’s not, but I still feel like hell.”
“You won’t feel like hell for long.” Mathilda reached over and patted his knee. “Soon we’ll have you all fixed up. Of course, you’ll have to stay with me while you recover. My nursing skills are not half-bad.”
She turned to give him a smoldering look, her cheeks dimpling, dark eyes briefly blazing beneath the brim of her hat.
Sartain gave a slow smile.
THE BITTERSWEET WAR
Chapter 1
One of the five men around the campfire in the Davis Mountains of west Texas froze as he was about to pour coffee into the tin cup he held in his gloved right hand.
He stared suspiciously into the heavy darkness around the pulsating light of the dancing flames. “Hey—what was that?”
“What was what?” asked the man to his right—Dean Harvey Dade. Dade blew on his own steaming cup of belly wash. “I ain’t heard nothin’. Besides, Killigrew’s out there with that big seventy-caliber of his.”
“If he woulda heard anything,” said Richard Green, a rangy outlaw from Oklahoma whose face had been badly scarred from a run-in with a mountain lion when he was only thirteen years old, “we woulda heard that Sharps, and there’d be no mistakin’ the sound, neither.”
Green snorted and chuckled through his broken teeth, lifting a bottle of whiskey to his scarred lips.
The first man who had spoken, Kansas Charlie Sale, said grudgingly, “ ’Spose you boys is right. I reckon I’m a mite on the fidgety side. Especially since that jehu in Dobbs said the Revenger’s been seen in the Bend of late.”
“Yeah, Dwight—we oughta head straight down to Mexico, forget about your plan of holin’ up here for two weeks amongst all these rocks and cactus to let our trail cool. Let’s just cross the border and be done with it.”
This came from Rock Arnold, a former Confederate soldier from Georgia, who’d lost a hand at Cold Harbor and now sported a nasty-looking steel claw in place of it. He’d been speaking to Dwight Mills, who considered himself the leader of the West Texas Hellions, the name he himself had dreamed up for his mixed bag of stagecoach and train robbers.
Mills was reclining against his saddle, under the stone lip of the escarpment in whose midst they’d bivouacked. Mills’s Stetson was pulled down over his close-set eyes. “I done told you why we was here, boys. Since we killed them marshals in Abilene, posses are likely scourin’ the country, cuttin’ off all trails leadin’ to Mexico. We gotta stay up here till the excitement has died down. Then we can head to Mexico, dig up the gold we buried on the other side of the border, and we can all diddle as many senoritas as we want before we’re screamin’ from the Cupid’s itch. Now, kindly shut up. I’m tired. It takes a lot of thinkin’ to do all the thinkin’ for six corked-head fools on a daily basis.”
“Goddammit, there it was again!” Kansas Charlie Sale dropped his cup in the fire, causing steam to wash up from the spilled, sputtering coffee, and gained his feet. Backing away from the fire’s glow, he slipped his Frontier Colt .44 from the holster lying flat against the front of his right thigh and clicked the hammer back. “Goddammit—I know I heard it that time. Somethin’s movin’ around out there, boys!”
Mills poked his hat brim up off his forehead, sat up with a sigh, and stared down the rocky, night-cloaked hill sloping away beyond the fire, opposite the barren stone scarp that flanked the camp. The others stared in the same direction, everybody quiet, listening.
“Pshaw,” said Dean Harvey Dade, grinning. “Kansas Charlie’s just got the fantods on account of he raped that purty young wife of the Red Mesa relay station manager . . . after he gut-shot the woman’s husband so’s the poor man could roll around screamin’ . . . an’ watchin’.”
“What do you think, Charlie?” Mills asked, reclining once more against his saddle. “You think the man’s ghost is gonna come gunnin’ fer ya?” He grinned as he tipped his hat back down over his forehead and laced his hands on his belly.
“You know I don’t believe in no ghosts.” Kansas Charlie Sale stood back against the jutting stone escarpment, at the edge of the pulsating firelight, holding his cocked Colt straight out in front of him, probing the heavy darkness with his eyes. “I just know I heard somethin’—that’s all.” He raised his voice and called into the dark: “Hey, Killigrew—that you out there?”
Green laughed mockingly, rubbing the lip of his bottle against his grimy shirt. “Ah, he’s got the Revenger on his mind. He done believed what that old coach driver told him about Mike Sartain bein’ in
the Bend, an’ he—”
His voice was choked off suddenly, replaced by a dull thud and a splattering sound.
“What the . . . ?” said Rock Arnold, sitting on a rock to Green’s right and back a ways, making a face as he spread his arms and looked down at his shirt. It was splattered with something dark and warm, and the dark and warm substance was speckled with what looked like porridge.
But of course it was not porridge, but bone shards that had come from Richard Green’s blown-apart head, and Rock Arnold realized that very fact at the same time the heavy thunder of a big-caliber rifle resounded like the report of a mountain howitzer over and around the boulder-strewn slope.
Green’s head—or what was left of it—was still bobbling around, nearly hollow at this point—on the Oklahoman’s shoulders when Dean Harvey Dade’s startled yell was rendered stillborn by another large, fast-traveling, 500-grain chunk of lead shattering his front teeth and grinding through his mouth and skull before exiting the back of his head and plunking into the right thigh of Kansas Charlie Sale, who still stood with his back to the escarpment.
Kansas Charlie yowled at the fist-like punch and scalding burn of the bullet, inadvertently firing his pistol into the ground halfway between himself and the fire, and dropping to both knees. He yowled again as he rolled onto his left hip and, tossing away the Colt, clutched his bloody thigh with his right hand.
“I told ya, you stupid bastards!” he screamed against the ripping echo of the heavy rifle’s cannon-like blast.
Somehow, Rock Arnold got it into his head that Killigrew was firing the shots with his formidable Sharps rifle, which he’d used during his time as a sharpshooter during the War Between the States. Arnold stood with his bloody shirt basted against his chest, shouting, “Killigrew, what the hell do you think you’re doin’, you crazy idiot?”
Mills scrambled up from his saddle, yelling, “Get away from the fire!”
Another bullet sang out of the darkness to miss Mills by a cat’s whisker and slam into the coffee pot, sending coffee hissing onto the coals and steam rising like that from a locomotive’s pressure-release valves. Yet another bullet screeched from the black night to blow Rock Arnold’s head apart as the claw-handed outlaw scrabbled for the pistol stuck behind the waistband of his pants.
At the same time, the outlaw leader, Mills, ran into the shadows to the right of the fire.
Lying on his side at the base of the escarpment, Kansas Charlie saw Mills’s silhouette crouch and extend his pistol. Orange flames stabbed from the barrel of Mills’s Schofield as the outlaw leader sent three quick bullets hurtling down the slope, though Kansas Charlie had no idea who or what his target was.
Kansas Charlie himself had seen nothing of the shooter, not even the flashes of the big-caliber rifle the bastard was using to take the gang down most wickedly and efficiently.
Mills turned and ran off along the shoulder of the slope. The darkness had just swallowed him from Kansas Charlie’s view when a fierce-sounding ka-thunk! rose from the outlaw leader’s direction.
Mills gave a high-pitched, ripping scream. Kansas Charlie heard the man fall as again the big gun’s pounding echo rolled out over the boulder-strewn slope and likely had the coyotes heading for their dens with their tails between their legs.
“Ohhhh!” Mills wailed. “You baaastard!” He sobbed, choked another sob back down his throat. “Whoever you are—you’re gonna diiie, you bastard! You’re gonna die slowww!”
A bullet screamed through the darkness, landing somewhere with a resolute plunk!
Mills wailed again. He sobbed girlishly and shouted, “Ohhhhh, you’re gonna die slow, amigooooo!”
Kansas Charlie could hear Mills’s spurs chink and his boots rake the ground as he rolled in agony.
Kansas Charlie’s heart was turning somersaults in his chest, and his mouth was dry as the Sonoran desert. He’d been fear-frozen in place, clamping his hand over the hole in his leg, but now he looked around. He had to take cover. But first, he needed his pistol.
He saw it lying in the sand and gravel a few feet away, and he lunged for it. As he wrapped his hand around the walnut grips, he heard the clipped screech of another large-caliber bullet and stared down in hang-jawed shock at the quarter-sized hole the bullet had punched through the dead center of his right hand over the handle of his Colt.
The heavy round had sort of flattened his hand out against the ground. As blood began to well up out of the ragged hole, looking like oil in the flickering shadows of the firelight, Charlie threw his head back and howled.
He was vaguely frustrated and disappointed that those were the only words he had at his disposal for expressing his consternation, fury, disbelief, and keen, heart-shriveling horror at what had happened here in what was probably less than two minutes’ time.
He pulled his hand from the gun and clutched it like an injured bird to his chest, bawling, cursing. His voice trilling with sobs, his injured hand shaking as though with the palsy, he continued his anguished tirade.
He looked around. All his brethren were down. The coffee still sizzled on the fire, though not as intensely as before. The flames were dancing, shunting shadows this way and that. Aside from the crackling of the fire and the nervous whickering of the horses picketed in some brush near a spring to Kansas Charlie’s left, an eerie silence had fallen over the bivouac.
Kansas Charlie wanted to run, but he was hurting too badly to gain his feet. It was a paralyzing kind of agony. He could tell his leg was only grazed—the bullet appeared to have clipped the outside of his thigh—but it hurt like hell, and his hand hurt even worse. Each beat of his heart felt as though someone were probing the wound just behind his knuckles with a rusty railroad spike.
On the downslope beyond the flickering, crackling fire, spurs chinked faintly.
The chinking grew louder until Kansas Charlie, staring hang-jawed over the flames, saw a moving silhouette gradually shape itself, growing taller and taller, into a broad-shouldered hombre with a broad-brimmed, tan Stetson. He wore a pinto vest over a blue shirt stretched taut across his chest and shoulders, and denim trousers clung to his muscular thighs. Tufts of dark-brown hair curled out from between the bone buttons of his shirt.
A big, pearl-gripped pistol was snugged down in an open-toed, brown leather holster thonged to his right thigh. The man was casually holding Killigrew’s big Sharps rifle on his right shoulder. In his left what appeared to be a Henry rifle dangled low against his left leg. The barrel of the Sharps on his shoulder still smoked.
The big man was puffing the cigar sticking out one side of his mouth. He took a puff, rolled the stogie to the other side of his mouth, puffed again, and rolled it back to the other side of his mouth.
The man meandered around several black boulders and stopped at the far edge of the firelight. The light shone like copper in his wide-set eyes beneath the brim of his hat, which, Kansas Charlie could see now, was banded with snakeskin and silver conchos.
Kansas Charlie panted and groaned. “Oh . . . oh, hell. Now . . . now, you see, dammit—I just knew it was you!”
He hated the weakness he heard in his own voice.
The big man looked down and turned his head this way and that, apparently admiring his handiwork. Kansas Charlie hadn’t heard a peep out of Mills for a while, but the outlaw leader now let it be known he was still kicking.
“Oh, oh, Christ,” Mills said seemingly to no one in particular. “I’m gonna kill the devil . . . that done this to me. Gonna kill him hard!”
Casually, the big man on the other side of the fire dropped the Sharps in the dirt, palmed his big pistol with his right hand, turned, clicked the pistol’s hammer back, and aimed straight out from his shoulder.
Mills said, panting, “I’m gonna kill him ha—”
But the pistol’s loud report cut off his last word.
There was a shrill grunt and then the sound of a body hitting the ground. Spurs chinked for a time, as though Mills’s legs were quivering, and t
hen the chinking faded to silence.
The pistol was a big pearl-gripped, silver-chased LeMat. It appeared the size of a wheel hub in the man’s big hand as, holding the popper straight down against his leg, he walked around the fire to Kansas Charlie.
He stopped and stared grimly down at Charlie, the salmon light of the fire sliding across the clean lines and hard, flat planes of his handsome face that wore a two- or three-day growth of beard shadow. His black hair was thick and curly as it folded over his ears beneath his light-tan Stetson. An ivory diamondback was carved into the rear stock of the handsome Henry rifle resting on his shoulder.
Sure enough. It was him, all right. The LeMat. The Henry rifle. The pinto vest and the snakeskin-banded Stetson. Charlie dribbled down his leg.
“You’re him—ain’t ya?” he said, the words coming of their own accord as he stared up at the tall, dark, menacing hombre. “You’re Mike Sartain—the Revenger?”
Sartain rolled his cigar from the left side of his mouth to the right, blowing smoke out his nostrils. He nodded slowly, once.
“You got it right, Charlie.”
He swung his right boot back and up, and it connected soundly with the soft underside of Charlie’s chin, shattering his teeth and laying him out cold as winter mountain granite.
Chapter 2
Mike Sartain, the Revenger, stared ahead along the meandering trail he was following toward a shelving red mesa hunched beneath a blue sky tufted with low, puffy clouds.
A hundred yards ahead, at the mesa’s base, sat a small ranch whose roughhewn humility was part and parcel of this vast, parched Great Bend area of western Texas. The ranch was of the “shotgun” variety, and it was comprised of an adobe brick shack, a slightly larger mud barn flanking it, two rail corrals, and a round stone breaking corral near the barn. A windmill fronted the cabin. A narrow, brush-roofed stoop sagged off the cabin’s front wall.
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