“It’s not that. It sounds to me like you believe you’re telling the truth. But if I didn’t look into the matter more closely, I’d be a fool—now, wouldn’t I, Maggie?”
She gave a wan smile. “I reckon you would, Mike.”
“And I should have told you this before. It was wrong of me not to, but I plum forgot after I saw you down there in the storm.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t take payment for what I do. If someone needs someone killed badly enough, for the right reasons, I kill them. No payment necessary.”
Maggie frowned. “How do you earn a living then, Mike?”
“I take on jobs now and then when I need a stake. Sometimes I’ll hire on to a ranch for a roundup season. I’ve deputy sheriffed under made-up names, ridden shotgun for stage lines. A ridden guard on gold shipments...”
“That’s all right.”
“What is?”
“My prepayment.” Maggie reached up and smoothed his thick, curly, dark-brown hair behind his ear. “I didn’t make love with you for any reason other than you’re a handsome, desirable man, a good man doing good for folks, and... because I wanted to so badly, I could feel the need for you all the way to my toes.”
She placed her hand on his thigh.
“I’m feeling it again, Mike.”
She shrugged out of her blouse and tossed it on the floor.
Chapter 4
Sartain woke up the next morning to find himself spooned against Maggie Chance. Fairly glued to her, in fact, by their mingled sweat and sundry other fluids. He was cupping her bosom in his hand.
Slowly, so as not to wake her—she might as well sleep while he rigged their horses—he opened his hand and pulled away from her. Her pale bosom, soft in her slumber, sloped down toward the other one buried in the sheets. He leaned down to inspect the bandage on her side. It didn’t look like she’d bled anymore, despite the strenuousness of their couplings.
Maggie had made love with a desperation he’d rarely encountered. It was almost what the dime novels or Mr. Fennimore Cooper might call “ribald abandon,” if the gentleman author had ever been given to write about such matters—or known about them. There had been a need in her that had not been sated for a very long time, and it had built to a torrid crescendo that had for a time caused Sartain to worry he might be paying the landlord for a new bed, though he was almost desperately low on greenbacks and coins.
As he quietly dressed, he scoffed at his chagrin.
While he did not make a habit of sleeping with married women, he’d done so last night, at least the second time, with full knowledge of what he was doing. Too late to feel guilty. His only defense was that she’d seemed so desperate for it, he hadn’t had the heart to turn her down. Obviously, her own man hadn’t been satisfying her needs, as natural to a woman as to a man.
He went out to the stable and rigged up Boss and Maggie’s grullo. As he did, he wondered about this new job he’d been asked to take. Killing the woman’s husband. He wanted to believe that Maggie was sane because he didn’t want to think he’d been lowdown enough to bed a vulnerable woman possibly suffering from some mental instability.
On the other hand, he found it hard to believe any man could be evil enough to kill his children without any motivation beyond the evilness itself.
Was anyone except Satan himself that malicious?
It was a cruel world. The frontier was one of the cruelest worlds on earth. Children died. Sartain had known entire families wiped out by typhoid or milk fevers. Drowning was one of the most common causes of death in the West, as was fire and getting kicked by horses, mules, or even calves during branding.
The possibility took firm root in the Revenger’s mind that grief might have caused Maggie to stray from the path of sanity; that she now blamed her husband for what had happened to their children because she needed to hold someone responsible, and blaming Fate offered little satisfaction or consolation.
That scenario seemed the likeliest possibility. A sad one, but no more tragic than a man killing his kids because he was “evil.”
Anyway, Sartain would take the woman home and see about her husband, Everett. Most likely he’d be back on Scrum’s trail again soon...
Sartain led the fed, watered, and rested horses across the yard to the cantina. Boss was stepping high and switching his tail sharply, eager to hit the trail. The buckskin’s mood seemed to infect Maggie’s grullo gelding, who also danced a little and rippled its withers so that it took some effort to get both mounts tied to the hitch rack.
The sun was just then poking above the eastern horizon, stretching long shadows as lemon light spread across the low, sandy hills tufted with prickly pear and bunch grass.
Sartain walked back into the cantina. Rodriguez was scrubbing one of the bloodstains near the bar. He gave Sartain a dubious look and then continued the chore as the Revenger climbed the stairs. He paused outside his second-floor room and raised his hand to tap on the door. He stopped, frowning, and tipped his head to the wood.
On the other side of the door, Maggie was crying. The sobs were muffled, likely by a pillow, but the pillow could not muffle the heartbreak inherent in the uncontrolled crying. The keen anguish was like a knife to the Revenger’s heart. It awakened his own pain for his beloved Jewel.
He waited until the sobbing had dwindled to near silence, and then he tipped his head to the door panel and said softly, “The horses are ready. Take your time. I’ll be downstairs.”
He turned away from the door and walked back down the stairs.
The short Mexican was tossing a bucket of soapy, red water out into the yard as Sartain walked around behind the bar, helped himself to a bottle and a shot glass, and tossed a couple of his precious few remaining coins onto the counter. He took the bottle to a table, kicked out a chair, and slacked into it.
He poured out a shot of tequila and tossed it back.
Jewel...
He was glad Scrum had gotten away. The need to track the wounded man helped distract him from his heartbreak, which often, like now, felt as keen as it had when he’d first discovered the bodies of his lover, her grandfather, and the miscarried child.
He was sipping his second shot of tequila when he heard boots clomping on the stairs. He turned to see Maggie descending the staircase. She wore her hat and coat. She walked into the drinking hall and crossed to Sartain’s table.
“I’m ready.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“All right.” Sartain slid his shot glass toward her. “For the road?”
“Why not?”
She threw back the rest of the tequila, wiped her mouth with her hand, and set the glass back down on the table.
* * *
Sartain and Maggie Chance followed an ungraded stage road straight south of Fort Sumner, in the direction of Gold Dust.
As they left the sleepy village of Sumner, following a nearly dry tributary of the Pecos River, they passed the shabby fort of a dozen or so tumbledown, adobe-brick hovels fronted by brush galleries and flanked by a few brush huts and patches of torn up desert that had once been corn fields. The slouching huts were all that remained of the Bosque Redondo Reservation, where about ten years ago the army tried unsuccessfully to turn thousands of Mescalero Apaches and Navajos, traditional enemies of each other, into farmers. The fort itself had been abandoned in the late 1860s, and Sartain had heard the land had been bought by a local cattle baron whose son was a friend of young William Bonney.
The sheriff in these parts was an old acquaintance of Sartain’s, Pat Garrett, whom Sartain had met in Texas gambling dens in the years after the war and felt an affinity with. They were of similar temperaments, at once sentimental, soft-spoken, and hotheaded. Also, they’d both grown up in Louisiana, though Garrett had come from a prosperous, land-owning family from Alabama while Sartain had been a whore’s homeless orphan, growing up by his wits in the French Quarter of New Orleans and taught to appreciate t
he finer things in life, including sex, by the nymphs du pave along Royal Street.
Sartain wasn’t worried about Garrett. Of course, the sheriff of Lincoln County was aware of the federal paper on Sartain’s head, but they’d run into each other before and had bucked the tiger and drunk tequila together in Los Alamos and Mesilla without either of them uttering one word about Sartain’s bloody past in southern Arizona.
In fact, Sartain hoped he’d run into his old drinking buddy. Since Maggie’s husband was a deputy sheriff of Lincoln County, he likely answered to Juan Largo, or Big Casino, as Pat was often known. Pat might be able to help Sartain clear up the matter of Everett Chance’s culpability in the deaths of his and Maggie’s three young boys.
As Sartain rode along beside Maggie, he scanned the relatively fresh tracks of a horse that had galloped up the trail ahead of them. Those had to be Scrum’s tracks. He wanted to go after Jewel’s killer in the worst way, but it seemed two assignments had overlapped. He’d give Maggie’s problem priority and savor meeting up with Scrum again afterwards.
He hoped he didn’t find the killer dead out on the desert somewhere, but, then again, dying slow and alone under the New Mexico sun might be just the sendoff Scrum deserved.
The Revenger and Maggie followed the stage road for about an hour through harsh, nearly treeless, sandy country pocked with buttes and crumbling escarpments, the cobalt sky arching broadly over them. After they’d crossed a dry wash white with alkali dust, they turned onto a barely marked trail that was merely a gap between mesquites and followed the old horse trail up a steep hill stippled with cedars and gnarled juniper.
Now they rode into even more forbidding terrain—badland country of steep hills creased by dry arroyos. It was a vast, harsh land. Sartain often wondered while traveling through such remote country what had possessed people to settle here.
He asked as much of Maggie.
“Everett’s father, Howard, grew up in a small village in northern England. I guess once he got out here with his brother, looking for western gold, he thought it all seemed so inhospitable that one place looked as good as another. His brother died from a rattlesnake bite their second summer. That’s when Howard decided to turn one of his mining claims into a homesteading claim. That’s where Everett and I and old Howard live now.”
“How did you and Everett meet, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“My father and his own brother came out here from Tennessee to open a saloon in Gold Dust. The town was on a major stage road at the time, though travel has slacked off over the years. Both my father and uncle were killed during one of the many Apache uprisings in these parts, back when I was only fifteen. Everett’s father was a friend of my father’s, and he took me in. And that is how Everett and I became man and wife.”
“I see,” Sartain said, nodding as he turned to her, swinging easily with the sway of his sure-footed horse. “Tell me, something, Maggie—and please tell me if I’m prying too deep—did you ever love Everett?”
“No.” She turned her frank, copper-brown gaze to Sartain once more. “But I never disliked him. I admired him. He was a hard worker, and when we couldn’t make a living on the ranch, Sheriff Garrett made him a deputy, because the sheriff knew Everett to be an honest, upstanding man. And his easygoing, friendly nature made him good at collecting taxes. But he’s also good with a carbine, and he can be uncompromising. We need good, uncompromising lawmen out here, where thieves and sometimes marauding Indians still run amok.”
“That uncompromising personality probably kept him from being the ideal husband.”
“Yes.” Again, Maggie’s gaze was frank. “Yes, it did.”
That’s all she said on the matter before adding nearly a minute later, “But that’s not why he needs killing, Mike.” Her grullo faltered as they climbed another steep hill. She took a firm, commanding hand on the reins, gritted her teeth slightly, and booted the mount on up to the crest of the rise.
Her raised voice quavered with the horse’s pitch as she rode. “He needs killing because, as I’ve said, he’s evil.”
Sartain stopped as they rode around the shoulder of a steep bluff and looked into a slight clearing among prickly pear and scrub cedars and rocks. A rattlesnake slithered across the clearing and disappeared behind a human skeleton clad in tattered, dusty, sun-faded army blues. The skeleton leaned up against a gray boulder, slumped slightly to one side. Across his ankles—he still had his boots on—lay another skeleton. This one was clad in what remained of a red calico shirt and deerskin leggings. A few threads of a red bandanna clung to his skull that sported a hole a few inches up from and between the empty eye sockets.
The hole had probably been placed there by the rusty army revolver that lay near the dead cavalry soldier’s skeletal left hand, to which strips of a gauntleted, leather glove still clung. An Apache war lance protruded from the skeleton soldier’s chest. It had little to support it anymore, however, so its end drooped in the dirt.
“Warrior Gulch,” Maggie said. “Those two have been right there, like that, for many years. The Mexicans who live around here think the gulch is cursed, so no one has bothered with the remains. Not even after twenty years. There are more, many more, dead men up the draw a ways. Dead men as well as dead horses. Everett once scouted the entire canyon and said that, while some of the bones had been strewn by scavengers, many bodies had been left untouched, as though the carrion eaters, too, were frightened by the souls lingering here.”
“A superstitious country, eh?”
“I guess you could call it that. Some say it’s a haunted country.”
Sartain lifted his canteen and pried the cork from the lip. “Is that what you think?”
“Yes,” Maggie said flatly, booting her horse down the bluff, following the winding trail. “You have no idea how haunted, Mike.”
Chapter 5
Maggie drew her grullo to a halt and sucked a sharp breath through her teeth.
Sartain drew rein beside her and followed her gaze down the slope and into the humble ranch yard along the northern bank of the Pecos. Like most, if not all, of the other ten-cow operations he had seen in this rough country, it wasn’t much. Just a one-and-a-half-story, mud-brick cabin with a second half-story constructed of vertical, badly warped and weathered boards. It had a shake roof and a brush-roofed gallery, which was part and parcel of this hot, dry country. Stone pylons formed the gallery’s front support posts, and the cabin’s front wall was also partly stone.
To the left of the house lay the barn and three corrals and several other, smaller, outbuildings of stone and adobe. A well-worn path led into the yard from the Pecos, which was about ten feet wide as it curved through its low banks between mesquites.
Maggie wasn’t staring into the yard but at a flat-topped slope on the other side of it, where a man was digging a hole in a fringe of scattered junipers. Several buzzards winged slow circles high above the slope as the man shoveled dirt from the knee-deep hole he stood in, near a trio of crude wooden crosses that probably marked the graves of the Chance boys.
Maggie glanced at Sartain. Horror flashed in her gaze.
She whipped the reins against her grullo’s flanks, yelled, “Hyahh, boy!” and galloped down the slope and across the yard and up the slope on the far side.
Sartain followed from several feet back. As he approached the crest, where Maggie was just then reining the grullo to a halt, Sartain saw the body lying in the back of the wagon parked near where the man was digging the hole. The body was covered with a black and yellow Navajo blanket. Mule-eared boots protruded out the near end of the blanket, and a fringe of thin, pewter gray hair showed where the blanket did not quite cover the man’s head.
The man digging the hole had turned when he’d heard the horses galloping toward him. As was likely long-established habit in this country, he reached for a Spencer carbine leaning against a nearby mesquite but abandoned the movement when he saw that the rider approaching was his wife.
�
�Maggie!” he said. “Good Lord, woman—where have you been?”
Maggie swung down from her grullo’s back and walked over to the back of the wagon. She stared down at the figure lumped beneath the blanket. She did not say anything. Her back was to Sartain as the Cajun rode up behind her and stopped Boss several yards away from her and the grave.
The beefy gent still standing in the grave cut his incredulous gaze to Sartain before turning back to Maggie. He stabbed his shovel down into the bottom of the grave.
“He’s gone, Maggie,” the man said, climbing out of the hole with effort. He stood beside the grave, opening and closing his gloved hands and shuttling his curious, wary gaze between his silent wife and the newcomer.
Finally, his gaze held on Sartain. “Who’re you?”
“Mike Sartain. Mr. Chance, I take it?”
Chance turned back to Maggie. Slowly, he walked toward her. She turned to him, and her voice was crisp but quavering slightly as she asked, “How?”
Everett Chance rested an elbow on the side of the wagon. “Found him this morning. Down by the river. He went out first thing for water like he usually does. Must have just started back with two buckets full and collapsed. His heart, most like.”
Maggie turned and stared up at her husband. Her face was white. She glanced behind him at Sartain, who remained in his saddle, not knowing what to think, though he had to admit that the old man’s death while Maggie was away certainly lent more credence to her story.
“I’m sorry, honey,” Chance said. “But he was old. And, hell, most of the time he didn’t even recognize us anymore. Where were you, anyway?” He turned to stare accusingly at Sartain. “You were gone all night. I was worried sick.”
“Mrs. Chance went for a ride,” Sartain said. “Storm came up, spooked her horse. Bought a graze from a stray bullet likely fired by a hunter. Fortunately, our paths crossed. I sewed her up. She’ll be fine in no time.”
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