The Cajun had found himself admiring that about her. She was beautiful and tough, not unlike many of the doves who’d raised him.
Still, she was too beautiful, her skin too perfect, to have ridden as far as they’d ridden together over several consecutive days under a merciless Mexican sun and with damned little water. He’d let her sleep another hour before rousing her.
He’d practiced the art of moving silently during the war, when he’d often led skirmishes behind enemy lines. If you made a sound then, sometimes even the most muffled sound imaginable, you died. It had often been as simple as that.
Now, in silence, he dressed and gathered his gear. Rifle on his shoulder, wincing against the steely morning chill, he drifted away from the camp. He intended to scout around a bit, making sure he and the lady Pinkerton were alone out here.
Despite his embarrassment, the nightmare lingered. Also, he’d actually seen a faint upsweep of dust yesterday afternoon when he’d scanned their back trail from a ridge, not unlike the one in the dream. He’d passed it off as a mere dust devil because that was probably what it had been.
But the dream had suggested the dust might have been something else, and several of the more superstitious doves who’d raised him had taught him to heed his dreams. Sometimes the visions were trying to tell you something—about certain choices to make in life, say.
Sometimes they were warnings.
When he was a good distance from the camp, Sartain lowered the Henry from his shoulder, quietly pumped a cartridge into the chamber, off-cocked the hammer, and continued tramping off over gravelly desert knolls spiked with sage and cacti. He moved as quietly as during his war days, scrutinizing the shadowy features around him.
Dawn and dusk were the most challenging times of day for scouting, for the thin shadows seemed to move with the gradually fading or intensifying light. So, he used his ears as much as his eyes. Picking up unnatural sounds wasn’t so easy either, for as the wash of silvery light grew in the west and the shadows lightened, more and more desert birds began piping and chittering in the branches of the mesquites and flitting among the rocks and cactus plants, scrounging for seeds and beetles.
He circled the camp without finding any sign that he and Jasmine were being stalked. Still, he wasn’t satisfied. He had an uneasy feeling. It was like the sensation you felt after drinking slightly sour milk. Some sense beyond the usual was trying to tell him something.
On the way back to the camp, he stopped and tended their horses, which he and the Pinkerton had tied in the arroyo just south of the bivouac where they wouldn’t be easily spotted, but from where they could give warning of possible interlopers.
Sartain’s buckskin, Boss, was frisky, tossing his head and switching his tail. When the Cajun checked the horse’s hooves, making sure the shoes were still properly seated, the stallion pressed his cold nose to the back of its rider’s neck, and snorted loudly. Sartain laughed despite the added chill rippling along his spine. The mount had been on the trail for five days after his unceremonious train ride to the wilds of New Mexico with his rider, but the horse was still chomping at the bit to get moving.
The thoroughbred too pawed the ground and sharply switched its tail, snorting.
Finished checking both horses’ shoes, Sartain draped feed sacks over their ears.
“All right, boy,” the Cajun said, running a hand down the stallion’s fine neck. “I’ll go clatter some pans around Pinkerton’s princess.”
He looked around. The sun was on the rise behind distant mountains. It was splashing pink and salmon into the sky and against the bellies of high, ragged clouds. There was enough light to start riding even through rugged, unfamiliar terrain.
Sartain figured they still had at least another three days’ ride to get to the general region, a vast, remote sierra where the governor believed his daughter was being held by his stepson Maximilian. The stepson’s lair lay in or near an old church in a forbidding mountain range known as Las Montañas de Sombra, the Shadow Mountains.
Sartain climbed up out of the arroyo and started weaving through rocks and boulders, approaching the camp. He smelled smoke, which told him the princess was up. As he stepped between the last two boulders ringing their camp, he saw the small leaping yellow flames as well as the coffee pot.
“Now, that’s about the best smell a man can—oh, hell...I do apologize!”
He hadn’t seen the woman standing on the far side of the fire, her slender bare back to him, until she’d swung toward him and gasped. She was holding a sponge in her left hand, her canteen in her right hand, giving herself a sponge bath.
She turned away quickly, giving her back to him again. As she did, he caught a profile view of her and again he felt that stiletto poking him in several sensitive areas.
“Do you mind, Mr. Sartain?” she said haughtily.
“Nope, not a bit,” he said through a chuckle, leaning his rifle against a rock and moving toward the fire.
“Could you make a little noise?” she said, pulling her camisole down and reaching for her blouse, which lay on a nearby log.
“You make noise in this country, you’re liable to end up slow-roasting over an Apache cook fire. Hell, just snapping a finger during the War of Northern Aggression would cost a man—”
“I just mean when you’re approaching the camp,” she said, swinging toward him and buttoning her blouse. Her eyes flashed angrily. “So I know you’re coming. How about a couple of quiet whistles? Surely, you can whistle!”
Sartain laid a couple of small piñon branches on the flames and stared at her. “Good lord, you’re a beautiful woman. What in the hell ever made you throw in with Pinkerton, anyway?”
She glared at him as she continued buttoning the blouse. “I would appreciate it if you would scour that image from your mind, Mr. Sartain. You and I are colleagues. In order to maintain a professional working relationship, we are both going to have to conduct ourselves in a professional manner!”
“Well, that’s gonna be hard to do. I’m sorry.” Sartain placed his hand on the coffee pot to see how far along the water was. “Especially now. Good lord...”
“Mr. Sartain!”
“I do apologize, Miss Gallant,” he said, sitting on a rock near the fire. “If you’re so damn worried about your privacy, next time you might wander a little farther away from camp to tend to your ablutions.”
“It’s chilly. The fire was warm.”
“Again, I’m sorry,” he said, reaching into a croaker sack for a canvas pouch of Arbuckle’s. “But that’s what you get when you come down here.” He looked at her pointedly. “To make almighty sure a man kills another one.”
She laughed as she reached back to throw her hair out from under her collar. “Aren’t you the voice of moral authority!”
* * *
After a quick breakfast of coffee, fatback, and the baking powder biscuits she’d cooked the night before, they rode on down the arroyo, which generally angled south. The watercourse climbed into more rugged country than before. The mesquites and briars grew thick along the sides of the wash. Red stone outcroppings loomed.
Hawks gave their ratcheting hunting cries as the hot late-summer sun beat down.
Sartain wasn’t accustomed to partnering with anyone, so he wasn’t accustomed to talking much on the trail—aside from talking to his horse, that was. Now he glanced back at Miss Gallant, who was leaning out to sniff a flowering shrub as she passed it.
“Tell me about yourself, Miss Gallant. Or would you mind if I called you Jasmine? We have been on the trail for nearly a week, and”—he grinned devilishly as he turned forward in the saddle—“I do know quite a bit about you.”
He chuckled.
“A gentleman wouldn’t keep bringing that up, Mr. Sartain.”
“Well, obviously—”
“You’re not a gentleman. I gathered that.”
“Answer my question.”
“Do you think we should be yammering out here, Mr. Sartain?” Out
of the corner of his eye, he saw her looking warily around. “We are in Apache country, aren’t we? Don’t bands of Chiricahuas still roam this area? Not to mention bandidos?”
“Yeah, it’s a country fit only for rattlesnakes and Gila monsters.” Sartain narrowed an eye at a column of striated rock rising steeply on his left. “But if there are any Apaches around—or bandidos, for that matter—they already know we’re here. Besides, I’m not accustomed to enjoying a lady’s company when I’m on a job. I’d like to take advantage of it. Most likely won’t happen again.” He frowned at her curiously. “Why are you so reluctant to talk about yourself, Miss Gallant?”
She gave him a bold, defiant look. “I have my reasons. Now, if you don’t mind, I was enjoying the peace and quiet.”
She clucked to her horse and touched her spurs to its flanks, trotting around Sartain and continuing on up the wash. Brambles rustled loudly on the wash’s right side. The Cajun turned to see a big man in a short charro jacket and deerskin leggings leap from the arroyo’s bank and into the wash, howling like a war-crazed Apache.
“Hey!” Sartain shouted, clawing his LeMat from its holster.
The big man grabbed the bit of Jasmine’s horse, raised his pistol, and fired two shots at Sartain.
As the Cajun got his LeMat leveled, Boss rose off his front hooves, loosing a shrill whinny. Sartain hadn’t been prepared for the sudden pitch. He slapped his left hand down toward the saddle horn but missed it.
“Ah, hell!” he cried, kicking free of his stirrups so he wouldn’t break his ankles.
He was leaving the saddle no matter what.
As he slid back off Boss’s rump, what sounded like a dozen or so pistols and rifles opened on him from both sides of the wash.
Chapter 10
Somehow, Sartain managed to hold onto the LeMat.
When he landed on the sandy bottom of the wash, the relative yielding of which prevented his brains from being overly scrambled, he rolled onto his belly and commenced triggering lead into the briars on both sides of the arroyo.
Lead plunked and screeched around him. Some of it tore straight across the wash and into the shrubs and thorny vines on the other side, evoking screams, apparently from the shooters’ compadres.
The damned fools were shooting across the wash at each other!
With more lead spanging off the rocks around him, Sartain got up and ran at a slant back down the arroyo, then threw himself behind an escarpment bulging into the wash like a giant beer belly. Amidst the crackling of the gunfire, he could hear Boss’s indignant whinnies as the horse galloped straight up the wash away from the lead storm.
Under the circumstances, that was fine with the Cajun. He wanted the stallion out of harm’s way. Without a horse out here, he was a dead man. Of course, if the bushwhackers got their way, he’d likely be dead anyway, but there was no point in getting ahead of himself.
He clicked the twelve-gauge shotgun shell into action and flung the buckshot into the briars on the other side of the wash. He’d seen part of a mustached face and a knotted red bandanna there.
Now the face jerked back while the man’s pistol lapped smoke and flames into the air. There was a crunching thud as the shooter hit the ground.
At the same time, another pistol popped near where the wounded shooter had been standing. The slug slammed into a large boulder to Sartain’s right. It must have ricocheted off the rock because the Cajun felt a hot fist of stabbing pain hammer his left temple.
He crouched and shook his head as though to ward off an attacking horsefly. He felt the warmth of fresh blood oozing from the wound, trickling down the side of his head.
He cursed, swinging around and staggering away from the wash.
The pain felt like a bayonet rammed into that temple and probing around in his brain plate. He felt sick to his stomach and weak-kneed. He walked, dragging his boot toes, for several yards, not sure where he was heading, just knowing he had to get away from the wash. He pushed through some brambles, kicked a rock, tripped, and fell forward.
He didn’t hit the ground as quickly as he’d thought.
Then he saw why.
He’d landed on an incline that dropped away into a canyon. He tried to keep from rolling down the slope by releasing the LeMat and reaching for a handhold, but there were none to be found. At least, no stable holds.
“Ah, shiiiittttt!” he heard himself cry as gravity, like the massive hand of an angry god, rolled him down a slope that seemed to drop forever before he finally landed on the canyon floor some hundred feet beyond.
By that time, he wasn’t aware of anything but a vague, gnawing pain in his throbbing temple and elsewhere.
For a minute or two, he thought the canyon was flooded with warm water. Then he rolled onto his back, digging his fingers into the arroyo’s dry sand. No, not flooded. It had just seemed that way as he’d teetered on the edge of consciousness.
He lifted his aching head, blinking against the sunlight stabbing down on him like a thousand razor-edged bayonet blades.
A whimpering sound rose on his right. A coyote was studying him from between a creosote shrub and a paloverde.
The coyote’s gray-brown eyes narrowed. The black nostrils opened and closed. A deep growl rose from the beast’s throat. Sartain’s right hand dropped automatically to his holster.
Empty.
It took him a few seconds to remember dropping the gun during his descent from the ridge.
Keeping his eyes on the coyote, whose hackles were raised and whose lips were lifting above the black gums and white canines, the Cajun touched his vest. He felt the hard lump of the derringer. He reached inside and pulled the wicked but pretty little popper from its pocket, the gold-washed chain trailing it from the old Waterbury watch stowed in the opposing pocket.
Sartain gritted his teeth and clicked both hammers back, aiming the pearl-gripped piece at the coyote.
“No, I ain’t dead,” he raked out, his throat feeling as dry as parched leather. “But thanks for asking. Move along now, friend. I’m sure you’ll find something dead to eat soon.”
The coyote lowered its head, sniffing.
It growled again even deeper in its chest then, the very picture of disappointment, slowly backed away through the spidery branches before wheeling and soundlessly disappearing. As though to take its place, a small shadow flitted across the arroyo. A hawk’s ratcheting cry followed.
Sartain sat up, wincing against sundry aches and pains, some sharper than others. He shaded his eyes with his forearm as he looked skyward. “You, too, hawk. Sorry to disappoint. I ain’t dead. Not yet, anyways...”
His voice was deep and raspy. He needed water. He hadn’t been in the arroyo more than twenty minutes or so, judging by the light, but he was all dried out. His canteen was with Boss, however.
Boss...
If the horse was badly injured, Sartain was a goner.
He chuckled dryly to himself. Obviously, he was more worried about his horse than Jasmine Gallant. He was so accustomed to traveling alone, he’d nearly forgotten about Pinkerton’s princess. Now as he gained his feet and brushed himself off, he had a very clear image of the big Mexican in the deerskin leggings bounding into the wash and grabbing the bit of the woman’s horse.
Sartain stuffed the derringer back into his vest pocket, ran his fingers along the chain stretching from pocket to pocket, and then looked around for his hat. No, it wasn’t down here, he remembered as he mentally swatted at the cobwebs clouding his battered brain. He’d lost it back up near the arroyo.
He blinked against the trickle of blood running into his left eye. Then he remembered why that temple was thundering so damned hard. He used his neckerchief to give the wound, little more than a crease in his scalp but a bloody, painful one, a cursory cleaning. The blood had turned to half-dried jelly caked with dirt and sand. When he deemed it clean enough until he could get his hands-on Jasmine’s whiskey, he wiped the cloth around his head.
As the cobwebs co
ntinued to clear, he grew concerned about the lady Pinkerton. The bandidos had obviously been tracking them for some time. They were what had been tolling the warning bells in The Revenger’s ears, but having a partner—a comely partner, at that—had been novel to him, and thus, distracting. He made a mental note never to travel with a woman again, especially a beautiful one, and limped over to the base of the ridge down which the angry god had thrown him.
Water...
He started up the ridge, weaving around tufts of brush and rocks. He found his LeMat about halfway to the top, brushed it off, and slipped it back into its holster. He took a deep breath and continued climbing until he’d gained the ridge crest, breathing hard, head pounding. He unholstered the LeMat in case any more attackers lingered in the area and moved through the brush and boulders until he stood at the edge of the arroyo.
Nothing moved except for small birds flitting about the branches overhanging the sandy bed. As he carefully raked his gaze up and down the dry watercourse, Sartain saw what appeared to be a man hanging out from the far bank about forty yards up the draw from him. The Cajun looked around once more, listening carefully, then stepped into the arroyo, the LeMat cocked in his fist.
He stopped near what was indeed a man lying with his head and shoulders on the arroyo floor, his legs hung up in the brush of the bank. A dead Mexican with a round face and a star-shaped scar on his temple. His lower jaw sagged, giving his face a slack, stupid look, brown eyes staring at nothing. He had two bullets in him—one in his left elbow, the other in his upper left chest.
A lung shot. The frothy blood on his lips said he’d died hard, probably shot by one of his own men from the opposite bank. Sartain doubted any of his own hasty shots had hit their mark.
He wrinkled his nostrils against the smell of blood mixed with the sour stench of alcohol. The man was—or had been—drunk. They all probably had been.
Fools, all. Probably a wandering band of raggedy-heeled bandidos who mostly robbed prospectors and remote-traveling stagecoaches for their meager living. They’d likely spied Sartain traveling with the beautiful Pinkerton and allowed their goatish compulsions to lead them here.
The Revenger Page 55