“Ah, Hell!” Leach shouted, punching the support post.
“Hell!” he said again as he swung around and walked into the jailhouse. A few seconds later, Sartain heard the clang of a cell door closing as Leach locked himself inside.
Sartain turned to see Clara rising from behind a stack of crates, where she’d crouched on the periphery of the lead storm. Now she stood where she’d been standing before, on the boardwalk at the base of the stairs rising to her office. She looked shocked as she slid her gaze from Sartain to the dead men, to the howling Scrum Wallace atop the Occidental’s gallery.
She returned her stricken eyes to Sartain. “Are you all right?”
Sartain nodded. “You?”
She nodded, slid a lock of hair back from her cheek and turned back to the howling Wallace.
Sartain remembered Maggie and started jogging around dead men toward the Occidental. He stopped when Maggie moved out through the batwings.
She looked as though she were sleep-walking. Her blouse hung in tatters. Her camisole barely covered her. She was spattered with blood. There was more blood on her right hand, which hung low against her skirt. She was holding a broken bottle in her fist, also blood-covered.
Blood strung down from the broken shards.
Maggie glanced at Scrum Wallace lying to her left. She looked at Sartain, the men lying dead around him. She dropped the bottle and walked down the gallery steps and into the street.
Sartain noted that the bar tender’s agonized screams were no longer careening out from behind the batwings.
The Cajun wrapped his arms around Maggie, drew her tightly toward him, rocked her gently. She wrapped her arms around him but said nothing until she lifted her chin and asked, “Everett...?”
“Dead.” Sartain glanced back to where he’d left Chance’s body tied over the man’s stolen pinto. “I’d best fetch him.”
He glanced at Clara, who was already walking toward Maggie. The young medico nodded. As Sartain moved away from the two women, he heard Clara say, “Come on, Mrs. Chance. Let’s get you up to my office and clean you up.”
“You have any tequila up there?” Maggie asked in a quiet, raspy voice.
“Tequila? Oh, si.”
“Might as well call me Maggie, then, I reckon.”
As the two women climbed the stairs, Sartain swung up onto Boss’s back. He galloped westward, to where he’d left Chance. He hadn’t galloped far before he slowed Boss to a walk, then to a halt. He stared at the cottonwood to which he’d tied the pinto.
The horse and Everett Chance were no longer there.
There were no tracks leaving the tree. Only the shod hoof prints the horse had stamped into the finely churned dirt when it had been standing there.
Sartain stared dubiously at the trail.
No tracks..?
The Cajun poked his hat brim off his forehead and looked around, tendrils of dark foreboding wrapping around him as the light continued to fade, and a chill breeze rose.
SAVAGE BARRANCA
Chapter 1
Mike Sartain, The Revenger, rode into the little mining-supply camp of Low Range, Colorado Territory, just before midnight on a hopping Friday night in the late summer.
He found a feed barn on a side street just off the main drag and gave the Irish proprietor, who was half-soused and bending a saucy señorita over a saddle tree when The Revenger first encountered him, two dollars for water, feed, and a clean stable.
Leaving his prized buckskin stallion, Boss, in the Irishman’s dubious care, the tall, broad-shouldered Cajun, his cobalt eyes staring hungrily out from beneath the broad brim of his sand-colored Stetson, and wearing a big, silver-plated LeMat revolver thonged on his right thigh, slipped his Henry repeating rifle from his saddle sheath and headed for the Oriental Saloon & Gambling Parlor.
He strode purposefully through the crowd of rollicking miners, muleskinners, cattlemen, pleasure girls, and even a few blue-clad soldiers on furlough from a nearby cavalry outpost. Young Mexican boys were selling tamales wrapped in corn husks from handcarts. Horses whinnied, mules brayed, and a couple of oxen harnessed to a stout ore wagon were locking horns, as though infected by the raucous atmosphere.
Dogs ran, grinning and barking, down the main street, which was identified as Arkansas Avenue by a crude wooden sign.
Several scantily clad girls stood on the balcony of a hurdy-gurdy house calling to the men in the street. One of them lifted her skimpy red wrap to show Sartain her wares. The Revenger, who enjoyed the women as much as any man—in fact, even more than most, having been well-schooled in the intimate arts by the most talented sporting girls in the country while growing up in the French Quarter of New Orleans—merely gave the girl a cool nod in passing.
Later, the Cajun would find a girl, maybe this girl, to spend time with. At the moment, he had more pressing concerns.
The indignant whore scowled as she lowered the wrap and cursed him angrily while several onlookers laughed.
Sartain made his way to a mud-brick building identified by a wooden sign stretching into the street atop a crooked cottonwood pole as the establishment he was looking for. He mounted the broad front gallery, pushed through the batwings, and squinted against the heavy wood and tobacco smoke swirling in the sprawling room. The room was filled with men and painted ladies and the frenetic pattering of a piano, and lit by a dozen smoky gas lamps.
Beneath the din, Sartain could hear the clattering of a roulette wheel and the clicking of craps dice. Men were clumped at various gambling layouts here and there about the room. Others were tramping arm in arm with colorful, albeit skimpily attired, nymphs du pavé up the carpeted stairs at the back of the room.
Sartain, taller than most of the other fifty or sixty men in the room, surveyed the crowd carefully until he found the man he was looking for. Shouldering the Henry once more, he made his way through the crowded room. He skirted a group of men standing around a faro layout and then pushed up to a large, round, baize-covered table, around which seven or eight men were playing what appeared to be five-card stud.
A beautiful blonde attired in a frilly purple gown and smoking a slender cigarillo in a long black wooden holder moved slowly through the crowd gathered on the far side of the table from Sartain.
She was young, despite the implacable coolness of her gaze and the matronly swells of her body. Her limbs were long. Her shoulders were bare. Her ivory skin was flawless, nearly translucent. Her eyes were a hard light-blue. They were the faintly jeering eyes of a stone-hearted siren.
Her full blood-red lips glistened in the light from a nearby lamp.
Her hair was piled in creamy swirls atop her head and held in place with a jewel-encrusted comb. A jewel-encrusted black choker encircled her long, slender neck. The jewels in the comb and the choker sparkled like glitter on a Christmas tree.
The blue-eyed beauty stopped near the man Sartain was scrutinizing with his shrewd cobalt gaze. The impeccably dressed man would have been handsome but for his dark, narrow-set, mean little eyes.
He was maybe thirty, and he was having the time of his life, calling and raising and flinging his cards down with aplomb, pausing now and then to jeer at one of his opponents. He was drinking beer and shots of whiskey, swilling the stuff and slamming the glasses down on the table.
He had longish dark-brown hair combed straight back off his forehead and curling onto the shoulders of his cream silk shirt, which was adorned with a celluloid collar and a brown four-in-hand tie. A thick brown mustache mantled his thin-lipped mouth. He wore two shoulder holsters containing gold-plated derringers.
When the blue-eyed beauty in the purple gown drew near him, he grabbed her arm, pulled her brusquely down to him, and kissed her lips. She didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she wrapped her arm around the man’s neck and returned his kiss with passion while the men sitting or standing around the table cheered.
She straightened, winked winningly, puffed her cigarillo, blowing the smoke toward the ceiling, an
d continued making her queenly way through the crowd. As she moved, all male eyes flicked to her darkly, lustfully.
Sartain pushed his way toward the table. When he was six feet away from it, he stared hard at the man with the derringers. The man seemed to sense his gaze and returned it, frowning incredulously, a long, slender cigar smoldering in the corner of his mouth.
Sartain raised his voice, “Clancy Coles?”
The men around the table fell silent as they turned their skeptical gazes to the big, dark-haired Cajun in the pinto vest, the handsome Henry repeater resting on his shoulder, and the pretty LeMat jutting from his holster.
The little eyes of the man across the table nearly crossed as, flaring his nostrils, he said, “Who, by God, wants to know?”
“Mike Sartain.”
The low roar still emanating from the room beyond the table grew noticeably quieter. A few men hushed the others.
“Come again?” said the man across the table from Sartain.
“You heard me,” The Revenger stated.
Now the entire saloon was nearly as quiet as a barn at night.
Apprehension flickered in Coles’ gaze.
“You killed innocent men, Coles. That’s why you are a dead man,” Sartain said, reaching down with his right hand to free the keeper thong from over his LeMat’s hammer. “You gonna just sit there and take one through your brisket, or do you want to stand up and take your chances with those derringers?”
There rose a rumbling like a cyclone sweeping through town as all the men at the table abandoned their cards, scrip, and specie and hustled away, cursing and tripping over each other and their chairs. The table was nudged. Coins clattered. Several chairs tumbled over. One man fell and grabbed his knee, and two others pulled him to his feet and dragged him out of the line of fire.
The blonde in the purple dress swept up to the table near Coles and stomped her foot on the carpeted floor. “What is the meaning of this? I am the proprietor of the Oriental, sir. You have no right to come in here and threaten my clients!”
“I’m not threatening one damn thing,” retorted The Revenger, keeping his eyes on Coles. “I’m making a promise.” Several beefy men in three-piece suits had started toward Sartain from several different points around the room. He glanced at the woman. “Call off the apes unless you want ’em bloodyin’ up your floor.”
She jerked around, throwing up her pale hands.
The apes stopped dead in their tracks.
While studying Coles, Sartain was pricking his ears at the rest of the crowd, listening for the telltale snick of a pistol being unsheathed and possibly leveled at his back. The back-bar mirror flanked Coles, and the Cajun occasionally flicked his gaze that way as well, unable to discern any other immediate threat beyond Coles himself.
“So, I’ve warranted me a visit from the Angel of Death himself, is it?” He smiled proudly at that. The smile slipped away quickly as he lowered his chin angrily and said, “Who sent you?”
“What does it matter? In less than a minute, you’re gonna be too dead to do anything about it.”
“Please,” the blonde said, taking one more step toward Sartain. “Can’t this be resolved in some other way?”
“Nope.”
Coles chuckled. “Well, then.” He set his cigar in an ashtray, slid his chair back, and slowly gained his feet. He hooked his thumbs in the black belt looped around his slightly bulging waist. “I reckon I’ll take my chances with these purty ladies right here!”
With that last, he snarled and reached for the derringers.
Sartain palmed the big LeMat and sent Clancy Coles dancing backward. The gambler tripped over a chair, firing both his derringers into the floor and then leaning back against the long, ornately scrolled mahogany bar.
The blonde sandwiched her face with her hands, which had now turned peach with shock. “Oh my God—Clancy!”
Coles winced, blinked, and stared at Sartain through the wafting powder-smoke. He wobbled on his hips. As he gave a savage cry, he raised both his derringers once more, and Sartain finished him with two more shots that punched through his chest—one about two inches to the right of the first.
Coles jerked back, then stumbled forward, dropped to his knees, and raised his chin to the ceiling. “Go to hell,” he ground out through a ragged sigh. “You killed me!”
He dropped the derringers, fell forward, and smashed his head against the seat of a chair, where it stayed as his arms dangled to the floor and his shoulders shook.
Sartain wheeled, clicking the LeMat’s hammer back once more and cocking the Henry one-handed. He looked around the room. Several men had started reaching toward holsters, but they stayed the movement when they saw The Revenger’s two guns aimed at them, smoke curling from the LeMat’s maw. Their faces acquired sheepish expressions.
When Sartain thought he had the crowd cowed to the point he wasn’t assured a bullet in his back within the next few minutes, he holstered the LeMat. He off-cocked the Henry’s hammer, plucked Coles’ cheroot from the ashtray, and puffed it as he walked around the table to the blonde glaring up at him.
She was a piece of work, all right. Her heavy, pale bosoms rose and fell sharply as she breathed. She backed up against the bar, staring up at the Cajun fearfully.
“You his woman?” Sartain asked, canting his head toward the body of Clancy Coles, which had fallen still now that his life had fled. His head remained on the chair.
“So what if I am?” the woman asked.
Sartain grinned around the cheroot in his teeth. “Spoils of war, honey.”
He leaned down and threw her over his shoulder.
“No!” she wailed, punching his back as he straightened, carrying the woman like a fifty-pound sack of feed corn. “Put me...put me down this instant!”
Sartain spun and leveled the Henry straight out from his hip, clicking the hammer back to full cock, again stopping the woman’s bouncers in their tracks. One had drawn a pistol. He dropped it like a hot potato.
Sartain pivoted around and made his way through the crowd as the woman continued to curse him and punch his back with her fists.
“Damn you!” she cried as he climbed the stairs. “Damn you to hell!”
Several half-dressed men and pleasure girls had congregated on the stairs to observe the festivities in the main drinking hall. They made way for Sartain and the woman, who berated him all the way down the second-story hall to a room at the far end. The Revenger flung it open, stepped inside, and threw the woman on the bed.
“Damn me to hell?” said the Cajun, incredulous. He slammed the door, then turned the key in the lock. “That was a little strong, don’t you think, June?”
She laughed as she sat up, peeled her dress down to her waist, and began unlacing her whalebone corset. “Shut up, you cad. Get over here and let me reward you for a hand well played!”
Chapter 2
“Oh, my dear Lord,” June said in a Southern accent that Sartain had not detected before they’d come to the room, at which point it became as pronounced as his own, “I thought you were going to kill me as dead as Clancy!”
The Revenger curled an arm behind his head on one of June’s pink silk pillows. “Same here, dear June. Same here.”
“I realize it’s too late now,” Sartain continued, “but I was remiss in informing you, dear June, that I never require payment for my services.”
She blinked, staring at him with feigned shock in her lustrous, catlike blue eyes. “Well, what a convenient time to inform me. It’s a little late in the game, Mr. Revenger, sir.”
Footsteps thudded in the hall as chattering doxies and their Jakes sauntered past June’s room.
June gasped. “Oh, you wretched beast!” she intoned, rolling around on the bed to make the springs cry out again. “Oh, the horrible things you’re making me do. You’re absolutely...incorrigible, Mr. Sartain!”
Sartain glanced at the door, chuckling.
When the doxies and their customers had drift
ed away, June pulled on the Cajun’s ears and pecked his lips. “I knew you didn’t require payment, dear Mike. Payment of any kind. I investigated you quite thoroughly before I sent for you...and hired you, so to speak.”
“In your case, the satisfaction of killing that snake, Coles was all the payment I could ever want or need.” The Revenger had heard of Coles and his outlaw operation that, until this evening, had gripped this part of the Colorado Rockies in a stranglehold of corruption. Coles, who’d started out as a small-time stage robber, had built up influence that had even spread into local politics. He’d not only become rich off thievery, but he’d become powerful as well, with the local law eating out of his hands, so to speak.
But until Sartain had been summoned by the lovely June McCarthy, proprietor of the Oriental Saloon & Gambling Parlor here in Low Range, which was also the best hurdy-gurdy house in this neck of the Rockies, he hadn’t had good reason to kill the man.
He killed only for those who had a good reason for wanting someone dead and couldn’t do the deed themselves.
“Oh, my God! You want me to do what?” June cried out as voices and footsteps came down the hall again. “After you killed the love of my life?” She flopped around, making the bedsprings groan and sigh. “Oh, what a devil!”
Sartain glanced at the door once more. When the voices and footsteps had dwindled to silence and a nearby door had closed, The Revenger turned to June. “Miss June, I declare, you’re gonna get me shot down in the street tomorrow like a hydrophobic cur!”
June snickered. “I have a reputation to uphold,” she said, smoothing his hair back from his handsome, ruddy face. “You’ll be leaving tomorrow, but I have to stay here and run my business. If anyone should get any idea—any idea at all—that I directed you to kill Clancy Coles, my life would be in very grave danger.”
“And what about my life?”
“After what I saw downstairs earlier, Mr. Revenger, sir, you can take very good care of yourself. If not, you wouldn’t be here.”
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