A chicken coop sat off to the right, surrounded by woven creosote branches for keeping predators out. The white- and copper-colored objects moving around the yard near the coop and the shack’s front porch were chickens.
A few dusty cottonwoods and one lone oak offered meager shade against the relentless Texas sun. Wildflowers blooming amongst the rocks and sotol and prickly pear cactus offered the only color aside from that vivid sky and the red, brick-like stone wall of the mesa flanking the ranchstead.
The blades of the windmill turned lazily in the hot, dry breeze. As Sartain’s big, rangy buckskin, Boss, clomped closer to the ranch yard, the shaggy-headed Cajun could hear the soft clattering of the windmill’s wood paddles and the quiet splashing of the water into the stone tank at its base.
“Where the hell are we, Sartain?” asked Kansas Charlie Sale, riding a skewbald mare six feet off Boss’s slowly switching, black tail.
Charlie’s hands were cuffed, and the chain linking the manacles was tied to his saddle horn. Still, he managed to hip around a little in the saddle, looking behind and around him, scowling. “We ain’t nowhere near Bittersweet. Hell, there’s Baldy atop Mount Livermore over there . . . Hell, Bittersweet’s to the north. What the hell are we doin’ way out here?”
“I ain’t takin’ you to Bittersweet, Charlie,” Sartain said, staring straight ahead over Boss’s ears. “Never said I was.”
He was watching a young blond woman in a drab brown and cream dress who’d just filled a wooden bucket with water from the tank beneath the windmill. She was carrying the bucket from the windmill to a small rise to the right of the shack. A straw sombrero trimmed with a red feather shielded her face from the glaring summer sun.
Water slopped over the sides of the bucket as she walked up the slight rise toward the large oak standing at its crest. The dress billowed against her long legs as she walked.
Kansas Charlie was confused. “I thought you was takin’ me to Bittersweet to turn me over to Sheriff Chaney and claim the ree-ward.”
“Did I tell you that, Charlie?”
“No, but I just assumed.”
“You know what they say about assumin’, Charlie.”
“Kiss my ass, Sartain. Where the hell are you takin’ me?” Behind the Revenger, Charlie fell silent for several seconds. Then a nervous trill entered his voice as he said, “Hey, wait a minute. Wait just a minute. That’s the Red Mesa relay station up ahead, ain’t it?”
“ ’Bout time you recognized it, Charlie.” Sartain glanced over his shoulder at his weary prisoner, giving a wry, crooked half-smile. “But then, it was night when you were here last, wasn’t it?”
Charlie’s broad, freckled face, framed by bushy red muttonchop whiskers swelled with fear and anger. “What the hell you takin’ me back here for, you Cajun son of Satan? The sheriff’s over to Bittersweet. You gotta take me to Bittersweet and turn me in to the sheriff. There’s a ree-ward on my head, Sartain. Five hundred dollars! Might be higher now since we killed them marshals!”
“I don’t believe in cashin’ in on someone else’s misery.”
“That’s real sportin’ of ya.”
“I believe in lettin’ miserable sons of bitches like you cash in your own chips.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Trailing Kansas Charlie’s mare by a long lead rope, Sartain put Boss under the wooden portal straddling the two-track wagon trail, which also served as a stage road between Fort Davis and the little desert settlement of Bittersweet. The portal’s wooden crossbar announced FERRIS RANCH & RED MESA STAGE RELAY STATION.
Kansas Charlie said in a quavering, skeptical tone, “Sartain, I asked you a question. What’d you mean by that? ‘Lettin’ the miserable cash in their own chips.’ What the hell does that mean?”
“You’ll find out soon enough, Charlie.”
“Damn you, Sartain! You take me to Bittersweet! I wanna see the sheriff in Bittersweet. It won’t be no picnic for me, if that’s what you’re worried about. The town—hell, the whole damn county—is run by Sheriff Chaney and his brother, Waylon. Now, take me there and let them deal with me! I got rights, by god!”
Sartain stopped Boss just inside the ranch yard. He slipped his big LeMat from its holster, clicked the hammer back, and swung around to aim the big popper casually out behind him at Kansas Charlie’s head. Kansas Charlie flinched, turned his face to one side, scowling.
“Hey, now . . . be careful with that big ole hogleg, Sartain.”
“Charlie?”
“What?”
“Another word out of you and I’m going to blow one of your ears off.”
Kansas Charlie flinched again, as though he were imagining the proposed pain. He already had a painful leg and an even more painful hand. Sartain himself had sewn both wounds shut with catgut and bandaged them, though Kansas Charlie thought it odd to be doctored by one as savage as the Revenger was known to be.
When Kansas Charlie had asked Sartain why he was bothering to bandage his wounds, when Sartain was known for killing men, not doctoring them, Sartain had just given one of his infuriatingly oblique, mock-affable smiles, and winked.
That wink had sent chills down Kansas Charlie’s spine. He hadn’t wanted to think about what it meant, but he couldn’t help thinking about it now.
Sartain booted Boss on ahead. As he did, he watched the young blond woman stop at the top of the rise, beneath the sprawling oak, which was about the only living thing large enough to sprawl out here in this desolate valley. A crude wooden cross angled up from the sandy ground beneath the tree.
Fronting the cross was a mound of rocks in the shape of a grave, which was fitting since it was, indeed, a grave, Sartain knew.
It was the grave of the young woman’s husband, young Gunther Ferris, killed by Kansas Charlie Sale. A red flower of some kind had been planted at the base of the cross. The young blonde was watering the flower from the wooden bucket. Apparently hearing the slow clomps of the horses entering her ranch and stage station yard, Maggie Ferris turned to look over her left shoulder.
She straightened abruptly, dropping the bucket, her right hand immediately sliding into a pocket of her dress. She pulled out something small and black and aimed the pocket pistol at Sartain. She shaded her eyes with her free hand. Sartain reined Boss to a halt near the windmill. He smiled and waved across the distance between himself and the woman.
Maggie Ferris must have recognized her visitor. She returned the pistol to her dress pocket, picked up the bucket, poured the rest of the water out on the ground around the oak and the flower with which she’d decorated her murdered husband’s grave, and started walking down the hill, meandering around the clumps of sage and cactus.
The Revenger stepped down from his saddle and slipped Boss’s bit from his teeth so the horse could freely drink.
“What you got in mind here, Sartain?”
Kansas Charlie stared at the young woman walking toward them, the breeze rustling her fine, long, straight, wheat-colored hair. Her dress was worn and plain, but somehow its bedraggled quality accentuated the sumptuousness of her body.
She was barefoot. All of her exposed skin had been deeply tanned by the west Texas sun; its dark tone accented the icy blueness of her eyes and the white-bleached highlights of her hair.
“I don’t have nothin’ in mind, Charlie. I’ve done my duty. The rest is up to the woman you raped and whose husband you gut-shot when you hoorawed this place the other night.” While Boss dipped his muzzle in the stone water tank, Sartain freed the horse’s latigo and then went over and freed Kansas Charlie’s mare of the same trappings, so the mare, too, could drink, which she did, merrily switching her tail.
Her rider wasn’t nearly as happy.
“Hi, Maggie,” Sartain said as the woman approached. She was tall and long-limbed, heavy busted.
She wore no expression at all. Like the shabby dress, the lack of expression seemed to increase her beauty by contrast. She had the face of a stony-souled
Nordic goddess.
“Hi, Mike.”
“Brought you a present.”
Twenty feet away from the windmill, she let the bucket drop straight down to the ground. She continued walking, swishing her hips ever so slightly, curls of dust licking up around her bare feet, and stopped within ten feet of Sartain and Kansas Charlie.
Maggie Ferris stared blandly up at Sartain’s prisoner. “I see.” She had a slight gap between her two front teeth.
“Sartain . . .” Kansas Charlie said, eyeing the woman as though she were a rattlesnake coiled and ready to strike. “What in the hell’d we come here for?”
“Don’t you like it here?” asked Maggie Ferris blandly.
Kansas Charlie scowled back at her. “Come on, Sartain. I get it now. I get the joke. You can take me on over to Bittersweet now.”
“What’s in Bittersweet?” asked Maggie Ferris.
“The county sheriff!” Kansas Charlie barked. “I need to be taken there and locked up and tried legal-like, by a court judge. That’s my right. That’s the right of any man, though I understand how’s you wouldn’t see it that way, Mrs. Ferris.”
“Why wouldn’t I see it that way, Kansas Charlie?”
Charlie scowled down at her, his own sun-bleached brows crawling down over his fleshy eye sockets. For a few seconds, Sartain thought the big, paunchy, red-haired outlaw was going to break down and cry.
Sartain pulled his Barlow knife from the well of his right boot and cut the rope tying Kansas Charlie’s cuffs to his saddle horn. “What’re you doin’, Sartain? I’ll stay right here where I’m at.”
“I don’t think so, Charlie.” Sartain backed away from the mare, slipped his LeMat from its holster, and cocked the weapon. “Climb down, Charlie. Been a long, hard ride. We’re gonna stay here a spell, give the horses a blow, let ’em drink and eat and stomp around the yard. Have us a little visit with Mrs. Ferris.”
Kansas Charlie looked at Maggie Ferris. For the first time since Sartain had known her—and he hadn’t known her long; just since a couple of days after the West Texas Hellions had ridden through here, killing and raping, in fact—he saw her smile. It was an icy smile that didn’t quite make it to her eyes, but it was a smile just the same.
It made the Revenger realize how beautiful a real smile would be on such a deftly crafted face, though he doubted he’d ever see a real one on Maggie Ferris.
At least, not for a long time.
“Climb down, Charlie,” Sartain ordered. “Or I’ll shoot you down.”
Charlie sighed. “Aw, hell.” He leaned forward and grimaced painfully as he swung his bandaged right leg over the cantle of his saddle and gently lowered it to the ground. He got his cuffs hung up on the horn, and when he jerked them loose, he stumbled back, tripping over his own heavy boots, and fell on his ass with a thud, dust wafting around him.
“Oh, hell,” he cried. “My leg! And this hand is grievin’ me somethin’ awful, Sartain. You gotta get me to Bittersweet. That’s my right. I wanna go on to Bittersweet, goddammit!”
Maggie Ferris stared down at him. “What’s wrong with my place, Charlie? You and the others seemed to like it well enough the other night. You seemed to enjoy stripping me right out here in the yard and forcing my dear husband to watch while you grunted around on top of me like the fat, ugly goat you are.
“While my poor, dying husband and the others watched, your friends cheering you on. You seemed to get a big kick out of forcing me to do something awful after you raped me. Instead of allowing me to go and lend comfort to my beloved Gunther. By the time I reached Gunther, he was dead.”
Her tone was stony, but a faint sheen had grown over her eyes, which were crinkled at the corners as she spoke, staring down at Kansas Charlie and flaring her nostrils.
“Even the others seemed a little horrified, after all was said and done. You raping and doing . . . that . . . to me in front of my dying husband. Not that they didn’t enjoy watching. I reckon they couldn’t get their blood up much after they saw Gunther was dead, though. I guess the only good thing to come out of that night was that I wasn’t raped by the lot of you . . . and probably murdered, like you murdered Gunther.”
“Look, Miss,” Charlie said, staring up at her.
“It’s Mrs. Ferris, and don’t you forget it.”
“R-right. Mrs. Ferris. I know. I just wanna take this opportunity to apologize for—”
“Shut up,” Maggie said.
She looked at Sartain. “I think it would only be fair if he was stripped naked, Mike. I’ll pay extra if you strip him naked, like he did to me. Strip him naked and leave him to season out here in the sun to pontificate on what’s gonna happen to him next, in a couple of hours, while you and I go inside and eat some beans and drink a glass or two of whiskey.”
“I told you, Maggie,” Sartain said. “I don’t do what I do for money. I do what I do for the satisfaction of havin’ folks like you get justice. Stripping ol’ Kansas Charlie and leavin’ his ugly carcass out here to season in the sun seems about right, to my way of thinkin’.”
Kansas Charlie’s eyes flashed raw horror. “Sartain, you wouldn’t!”
Sartain looked at Maggie and chuckled. Then he walked over to his horse and pulled a railroad spike out of a saddlebag pouch.
Chapter 3
“Sartain, dammit, you take me to Bittersweet!”
Kansas Charlie saw the railroad spike Sartain held and tried to gain his feet and run. The Revenger kicked the man’s boots out from under him, and Kansas Charlie fell hard on his fat gut.
Sartain kicked him over onto his back, lifted his cuffed hands above his head, and impaled a chain link with the railroad spike. He used a rock to hammer the foot-long spike into the hard-packed ground and tested it.
Kansas Charlie wasn’t going anywhere.
Charlie kicked at Sartain and bellowed like a bull in an abattoir. Sartain pulled out his Barlow knife, grabbed the front of Charlie’s grimy shirt, and cut it down the center. He ripped the shirt off Charlie’s back and tossed it away.
“Sartain, goddammit—you can’t do this!” Kansas Charlie railed, jerking on his cuffs and kicking both legs, but mostly just kicking the left one, as he’d opened up the wound in the right one. The white bandage behind his trousers was spotted with blood, and the spot was growing. The wound in his hand, cuffed and held fast to the ground above his head, appeared to have opened up, as well. Blood trickled out from beneath the bandage and down his wrist.
“You can’t do this, Sartain. I got rights. I might be an outlaw, but I still got rights, and the law says you gotta take me to the sheriff in Bittersweet so I can—”
“I know, I know—I done heard you the first time, Charlie,” the Cajun said, rolling out his long, flowing vowels in a way that brought a taste of the bayou to everywhere he traveled. “So you can be tried by a judge an’ jury . . . legal-like.” He pressed a knee down hard on the fat man’s belly, causing the air in Kansas Charlie’s lungs to gush out in a loud, bellowing curse.
As he set to work ripping Charlie’s greasy denim trousers open, he said, “But you know that ain’t my style, Charlie. I don’t work that way.”
With one hard tug, he pulled the outlaw’s trousers down his legs, revealing the grubby, tattered summer underwear reaching down to Charlie’s pale, dimpled knees. He ripped off the man’s trousers and then the underwear, exposing Charlie’s soft, winter-white flesh to the merciless west Texas sun.
Cursing like a gandy dancer, Charlie kicked his bare legs this way and that, trying to get at Sartain, causing his bulging belly to jiggle. His chest and belly were carpeted in thin, sweaty strands of curly red hair.
“Now, Charlie, you killed the poor woman’s husband. You savaged her in front of the dying man, and when I was passin’ through here last week, on the way to Mexico for a leisurely sojourn away from the law and the bounty hunters I got doggin’ my trail, she asked me if there was something I could do about that.”
Staring stonily down at th
e flopping Kansas Charlie, bunching her lips and swelling her nostrils, a single tear rolling down her cheek, Maggie Ferris said, “I knew the law wouldn’t do nothin’. The West Texas Hellions got a way of evadin’ the law, of always slippin’ down into Mexico when a lawman gets close. Or they kill him and send his body back to wherever he came from, tied belly down over his saddle. Besides, there ain’t no telegraph out here.”
She shook her head in frustration.
“So I told Mrs. Ferris that, yeah, I thought I could do somethin’ about her woes.”
“You take me to Bittersweet, Sartain!”
The Revenger looked at Maggie. “How do you want to handle this?”
“I say we let him season out here for a while.” Maggie Ferris glanced at the sky. “Sun’s still high. Got several hours of heat left. We’ll go inside for some beans and whiskey, and I’ll put some thought into how my Gunther should be properly avenged.”
“All right, you go on in and break out the tangleleg. I’ll tend the horses and join you in a few minutes.”
“Sartain!” Kansas Charlie cried from between his elbows, trying to pull the stake out of the ground. It wasn’t budging. The ground was nearly as hard as stone. “Sartain, you take me to the marshal in Bittersweet. I got rights!”
“No, you don’t, Charlie.” Sartain grabbed up the bridle reins of Boss and the mare. “You see, that’s where you’re wrong. When I come into the picture, you cease having any rights right then and there. The only one who has any rights out here is Mrs. Ferris. It is an undisputable fact what you did to her and her husband, so by the power vested in my by myself and with casual disregard for the laws of this country of ours—laws that benefit the criminals far more than they help the criminals’ victims—I deem Maggie Ferris your judge, your jury, and your executioner.”
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