The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  “I suppose that goes with the line of work you’re in.” Chance studied Sartain with a wry half smile, then cocked his head slightly to one side. “Unless you was a little unnerved about... well, about somethin’ else. Like what Maggie might have told you over at the marshal’s office?”

  Sartain shrugged and kicked a dirt clod. “I don’t know... I suppose that might have been part of it.”

  “That’s all right, Mike.” Everett patted the Cajun’s shoulder. “She does make it all sound so reasonable. Credible. I suppose she told you about her theory that I been cursed by that spirit she and the Mexicans believe is roaming around Warrior Gulch...”

  Sartain hitched his gun belt higher on his hips as he stared back at the marshal’s office. “She did, yes.” Hearing it put that succinctly made Maggie’s assertion sound all the more ridiculous. Again, the Revenger’s ear tips warmed. “It’s just so damned hard to believe she’s mad, Everett. Insane.”

  “Don’t I know,” Chance said with a ragged sigh, running a hand across the back of his neck. “Don’t I know...” He wagged his head. “Me? I’m gonna go over and get me a drink at the Whiskey Jim. You want one? I’ll buy.”

  “No, thanks, Everett.” Sartain glanced east along the main street toward the Occidental, where five or six of Wallace’s cronies were milling, staring at him. “I reckon I’d better go check on my prisoners.”

  “What’re you gonna do about Leach?”

  “That’s up to him.” Sartain started walking back toward the jailhouse.

  “I’ll see you later, Mike,” Everett said. “Tell Maggie I’ll be over in a bit to check on her. I’ve asked Miss Clara to look in on her, too; maybe help us figure out what we can do for her.”

  “That sounds about right,” Sartain said, graveled by the problem. What did you do about a woman who thought her husband was haunted by a demented ghost and tried to stick a knife in his back? It wasn’t really his problem.

  Yes, it was.

  He’d spent a beguiling night with the pretty woman, and he felt a deep tenderness for her. He didn’t want to see her locked up in a prison or an insane asylum. He kicked another dirt clod in frustration and looked back at the Occidental once more, at the men gathered there, staring at him with menace.

  “I thought I told you tinhorns to get back inside!” the Revenger shouted.

  They cursed him, laughing.

  He muttered a few oaths of his own and pushed into the jailhouse to see about his prisoners.

  Chapter 18

  An hour later, Sartain was kicked back in a chair on the jailhouse’s front stoop, his Henry across his thighs. He was staring at the Occidental. A half-dozen sat on the gallery over there, returning the Revenger’s gaze. They all held carbines across their thighs. A couple, like Sartain, had their boots crossed on the rail before them.

  One man was busily cleaning his pistols, dribbling oil over the parts and rubbing them down with a white cloth. The men talked amongst themselves, occasionally chuckling. At one point, they all broke out in raucous laughter as they cast their sneering gazes toward Sartain.

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see who laughs last,” the Cajun muttered to himself.

  The latch clicked behind him. The door opened. He turned to see Clara walk out of the jailhouse. She was carrying her brown medical bag. She’d come over nearly an hour ago to take a look at Leach’s wounds and to talk to Maggie.

  Now she closed the door and stood atop the porch steps, staring at the Occidental.

  “Well, what do you think?” the Cajun asked her.

  “She seems sane to me. At least, as sane as you or I.” Clara looked at Sartain, frowning. “But I don’t know any more about the mind than you do, Mike. My father taught me nearly everything he knew about healing the body.” She shook her head. “We never talked once about doctoring minds.”

  Sartain sighed and recrossed his boots atop the rail. “Yeah, that’s sort of what I thought.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I got no idea.”

  She still stared at the Occidental. “You have your hands full.”

  “Yup.”

  “What’re you going to do about them?” She meant the men on the Occidental’s gallery.

  “That’s up to them.”

  “What about Leach?”

  “He’s up to them, too. How’s he feeling?”

  “Sore.” Clara glanced at him with a dry smile. “And angry.”

  “I bet he...”

  Sartain let his voice trail off. There was movement down at the Whiskey Jim, across the street from the furniture store and Clara’s office. The bald, stocky Mexican who ran the little cantina stumbled out of the shade of the brush arbor fronting the place. Sartain’s heart skipped a beat. The man carried a body in his arms.

  A woman’s naked body lay slack across his forearms. The woman’s—or girl’s—head hung slack, as did her arms and her bare legs. Her long hair hung to the ground.

  “Good lord,” said Clara through a breath.

  “What the hell...?” Sartain dropped his boots to the porch floor and followed Clara into the street, both angling toward where the Mexican barman was moving toward them.

  “Senorita!” he called, his voice hoarse with emotion, stretching his lips back from his teeth. He was running awkwardly with the girl in his arms. “Senorita La Corte! It is Magdalena! Can you help?”

  Clara ran to meet the man. He was breathing hard, sweat dribbling through his several days’ worth of brown beard stubble and his handlebar mustache. When he moved to ease the girl to the ground, his legs buckled. He fell to his knees with a groan, and the girl tumbled into the street.

  “Oh, my god!” Clara cried.

  Sartain saw the blood then, too, which had been obscured by her hair. It was issuing from a long, thick gash across the girl’s throat, stretching from the lobe of one ear to the other. The dark-red blood glistened in the afternoon sunshine.

  “She’s had her throat cut!” Clara exclaimed.

  “Si!” the barman cried. “I know. I heard her cry out, and then... and then there was a gurgling sound! Is there anything, senorita? Is there anything you can do to help her?”

  Clara smoothed the girl’s hair away from her bloody throat, and shook her head. “No. There’s nothing I can do, Hector. She’s gone.”

  She looked at Sartain, who said, “Who in the hell did this?”

  Somehow, he knew the answer to the question even before Miguel, staring at him in exasperation and disbelief, said, “Senor Chance! He was with her... in her room! When I heard her cry out, I ran upstairs. Senor Chance was running down the hall, heading for the back door!”

  Clara jerked a startled look at Sartain.

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know, senor,” Miguel said. “He ran out the back. That is all I know! I wanted”—he lowered his sad eyes to the dead whore—“I wanted to try and help Magdalena...!”

  Sartain took his Henry in both hands and ran down the street and behind the Whiskey Jim. Hooves thudded loudly from behind a stand of scraggly, dusty mesquites. As Sartain turned toward the trees, a horse and rider exploded out of the brush.

  It was a wild-eyed Everett Chance astride an equally wild-eyed brown-and-white pinto. Sartain started to bring the Henry up, but he was too late. Chance turned the pinto toward him, and the last thing Sartain saw before he was hammered to the ground was the pinto’s bright, fear-glazed eyes.

  When he finished rolling, aching in his hips and shoulders, a sleeve of his shirt hanging torn and frayed, he saw Chance galloping off through another stand of mesquites.

  “My horse!” someone cried in Spanish. “My horse! My horse! That bastardo stole my horse!”

  The boy came running through the brush—a tall, skinny Mexican lad with short, dark brown hair. He was clad in Mexican pajamas and rope-soled sandals. A straw sombrero dangled down his back, held by its horsehair thong.

  The boy ran past Sartain and screamed, “Come back he
re, you common thief! Come back!”

  He swung toward Sartain. “He came out of nowhere, pulled me off my horse, and—”

  “I’ll get him, son,” Sartain said in his rudimentary Spanish, limping off to the livery barn. “Don’t worry. I’ll get him...”

  Chapter 19

  Sartain limped back to the Lincoln County Inn and clomped wearily up the stairs. His joints ached. He especially ached in his right hip and shoulder, both of which had taken the brunt of the pinto’s hammering charge. The other shoulder and hip ached, as well, for he’d landed on those, too, but it was his right side that was causing him to see red and wonder if he could ride.

  “What the hell happened to you?” asked Pops Pepper, walking through the front door as Sartain continued to climb the stairs. “You look like you been hung on a line and beaten with a broom.”

  The old man’s old dog barked once as though to punctuate his owner’s comment.

  Sartain stopped. “Saddle my stallion, will you, Pops? I gotta go see about killin’ a demon.”

  “A demon? Why you’re drunk!”

  “Wish I was,” Sartain grunted as he reached the hotel’s second floor.

  Fifteen minutes later, he rode Boss out of town to the south and then circled west, so the men in the Occidental wouldn’t see him leave. He didn’t want them trying to bust Leach out of jail, though they probably would anyway when they didn’t see Sartain around for a while.

  Likely, they’d leave Maggie alone. They had no reason to hurt her.

  If they busted Leach out, Sartain would see to them sooner than expected, that’s all...

  He picked up Chance’s fresh tracks at the west edge of Gold Dust and followed them along the main trail. The man was galloping hell for leather—it was obvious by the length of his stolen horse’s stride. Sartain held Boss to a canter, avoiding an all-out run and possibly riding into a bushwhack. He rode with his Henry resting on his saddle pommel, raking his gaze carefully across the country around him—all rolling, sage- and creosote-stippled hills and buttes with crumbling orange dykes cropping up here and there.

  A couple of miles out of town, Chance had swung off the main trail and headed cross-country to the north.

  Where in hell was he going?

  Sartain followed the man’s spotty trail with a perplexed feeling weighing heavily on his shoulders. Was he really tracking a demon—some ancient, black-spirited Apache god?

  He’d never been a religious man. Or rarely given much consideration to anything he couldn’t understand through his senses. He couldn’t wrap his mind around Maggie’s story.

  The country started chopping up into washes and shallow canyons. Chalky buttes rose to either side of the faint horse trail Sartain was following. About twenty minutes after he’d left the main trail, he found himself in a badlands of sorts—a deep canyon whose floor had been carved up by an ancient river. Giant haystack bluffs rose all around these dry watercourses that were white with alkali and showed the serpentine tracks of rattlesnakes and the prints of coyotes and wildcats. They were edged with rocks and patches of prickly pear and Spanish bayonet.

  Sartain came upon several cow skulls and even a skull that appeared human—probably the bone of some ancient settler, maybe an old prospector—that had been washed up by recent rains.

  The sun hammered out of a clear, brassy sky.

  Sweat trickled down Sartain’s back, tickling him. It rolled down his forehead and stung his eyes. Several times he dabbed at his eye corners with the ends of his neckerchief.

  As he rode, closely following the recent horse tracks, his perplexity over the state of the man he was tracking gave way to a sense of menace that gradually ratcheted his nerves, until he could feel an almost painful tension in his back. The feeling told him Chance was trying to lead him into an ambush.

  It made sense. For what other reason would the man have ridden into this devil’s playground?

  Sartain checked Boss down and was about to swing from his saddle when he spied movement ahead of him. The blurred shape of a man was running up the shelving slope of a high bluff. Chance had his rifle in one hand, and he dropped forward, grappling with brush and rocks as he climbed the butte, dust rising behind his hammering feet. He was moving quickly, casting quick glances toward his back trail, obviously trying to stay out of sight.

  Sartain swung down from Boss’s back and led the horse into a ragged patch of shade.

  “You stay, boy,” he said, patting the buckskin’s neck.

  Boss rippled his withers and shook his head uneasily, rattling the bit in his teeth. He’d been in enough tight spots with the Cajun to know they were in another one here.

  Sartain moved to the east, following a gravelly wash between high banks tufted with wiry brush and prickly pear. There were several intersecting washes. He took one to the north, which is where he’d seen Chance running up the side of the bluff. He moved slowly, cautiously, blocks of water-scored earth rising and falling around him.

  Something hammered the shoulder of a butte in front of him and to his left.

  He pulled his head down as the rifle’s crack flatted out over the canyon.

  Hearing the distant but clear rasp of another cartridge being racked into the rifle’s breech, Sartain took off running straight ahead along the wash.

  Another bullet plumed dirt and gravel to his left, and it was followed a quarter-second later by the rifle’s echoing report.

  Sartain threw his left shoulder against the side of the bluff, pulling his head low as yet another bullet clipped the bluff just above him, spraying his hat with small rocks and dirt clods.

  “I got you, Mike!” Chance shouted. “You shouldn’t have followed me in here!”

  Sartain doffed his hat and edged a look over the brow of the bluff. He saw Chance sprawled atop a bluff about a hundred yards away. Smoke puffed from the man’s rifle barrel. Sartain pulled his head down as the bullet slammed savagely into the butte about a foot above his head.

  “Your game is over, Chance!” the Cajun shouted. “You’ve exposed yourself to the whole town!”

  “Nah, I don’t think so, Mike.” Chance spaced his shouted words a half second apart, so they were nearly obscured by the echoes. The amphitheater of the canyon, as well as the dry air, brought them cleanly to Sartain’s ears. “I’m a great liar, Mike! This county trusts me! Hector saw me running away! All I need to do is grin and smile and tell everybody I was chasing the real killer, and they’ll be back thinkin’ I’m the ace of hearts!”

  “You and I know better, though—don’t we, Chance?”

  “That’s right, Mike! You and I know better!” Chance laughed raucously, demonically.

  Sartain bounded off his heels and scrambled up and over the shoulder of the bluff. He threw himself down the other side as another bullet tore into the bluff just behind his boots. He hit the ground on the other side of the bluff, for the moment out of Chance’s line of fire.

  The last report echoed shrilly, dwindling gradually.

  Sartain ran along the base of a low, shelving butte, stopped suddenly, raised his Henry, and fired three quick rounds toward where Chance was sprawled over his Winchester. The Cajun’s bullets blew up dirt in front of the killer, causing him to crab back behind the lip of the ridge he lay on.

  Chance laughed raucously, crazily.

  Sartain bounded up and over the shelving ridge. He saw Chance lift his head and rifle. The Cajun dove behind a boulder as two more bullets sliced the air around him, spanging loudly off rocks.

  “No one suspects a thing, Mike!” the shooter bellowed. “No one but Maggie. All these years!”

  “No one suspects what, Chance? That you’re infected by some Apache demon?”

  “That’s right! Maggie knows! You know! I know! No one else.” Chance fired two more rounds. “As soon as you’re dead, I’m gonna go to work on Gold Dust in earnest!”

  “Why didn’t you kill Maggie?” Sartain wanted to know. “You just wanted to toy with her all those years
?”

  Chance laughed maniacally. “Sure—why not? It amused me, Mike!”

  He fired another round. It blew up dust from the small shelf of sandstone Sartain crouched behind.

  The Cajun shouted, “You know what I think, Chance?”

  Then he fired three rounds at his quarry, though Chance had seen them coming and drew his head down. Sartain began running up the slope atop which Chance hunkered. The Cajun traced a circuitous path between boulders and scrub pines. When he saw the killer’s rifle aimed at him once more, tracking him, he dove behind a boulder.

  A bullet crashed into the rock with a thundering concussion, spraying shards in all directions.

  “What’s that, Mike?”

  Sartain ran out from behind the boulder and dove behind another one just beyond it as Chance’s next shot sliced across the side of his left boot. “I don’t think you have any demon in you at all!” the Cajun shouted as the shot’s echo dwindled. “I think you just think you do. By thinking you do, you woke up some very human evil that was sleeping inside you!”

  He fired up the hill. When Chance pulled his head back down behind the lip of the ridge, Sartain ran hard. He dove behind a clump of cactus as Chance fired again, the bullet blowing up the ears of a prickly pear and flinging them onto the Cajun’s back.

  “That’s a nice theory, Sartain! Too bad it’s not true. The demon’s in me, all right. He’s sittin’ right here on my shoulder!”

  He fired two more shots.

  “Know how I got old Morgan to fire on you?” Chance laughed again, loudly. “I told him you was an owlhoot with a big reward on your head. I told him I was gonna move around and catch you in a crossfire! I told Morgan to shoot at the first thing he sees moving in that canyon, and I’d back him up from the other side!”

  More wild laughter.

  Sartain cursed as he ran. He dove, pressing his face against the desert as two more slugs hammered the ground around him.

  “That’s right convenient, Everett—blamin’ your wickedness on some Apache medicine man!” Sartain edged a look around the stout cactus clump to see Chance toss his empty Winchester aside and raise his pistol. “I don’t believe it.”