The Revenger dropped to a knee near the dead man and looked around.
Now, where were they? Most likely, they had Miss Gallant, because they’d obviously been too distracted to care for their dead. Distracted by their comely plunder.
Sartain walked up the arroyo a ways and found one more dead man—another who’d probably been killed by one of his own. He had a bullet in one cheek, another in his forehead. He also smelled like raw tequila, a half-filled bottle of which stood on the ground nearby at the base of a paloverde.
An ambush affected by drunkards.
Sartain cursed.
Drunkards who’d taken the woman.
Never under any circumstances travel with a beautiful woman in Mexico, he reminded himself. That should be written somewhere. Sartain had tried to tell the governor and the rest of them that, but they hadn’t listened. Now he had to find her, and most likely he’d be burying what was left of her.
He cursed again and started looking around for his horse. Fifteen minutes later, he heard a low whicker. He followed the sound to a slight clearing on the south side of the arroyo. Boss stood near some Mormon tea, reins hanging, saddle angled down over his right side, staring at Sartain with a faint look of incredulity.
Boss didn’t like gunfire. He never had and, despite how much of it he’d heard over the last several years, he likely never would. That was all right. Sartain didn’t like it much either. But it came with the job, so...
He walked up to the horse, gave him a handful of grain and some water from the canteen still hanging from the saddle horn, and then reset the saddle and tightened the latigo.
Leading Boss by his reins, the Cajun dropped back down into the arroyo, scouring the eroded sand and gravel for tracks. They weren’t hard to find, and it wasn’t hard to see that the gang of bushwhackers had headed on up the cut in the same direction that Sartain and Pinkerton’s princess had been heading.
He mounted and followed the wash. He thought the gang was around an hour ahead of him. He put Boss into a canter, following the wash’s meandering course through the rocky desert but keeping an eye skinned for another possible ambush. His anxiety over the young woman was a hard knot in his belly, but he had to take his time. For once this trip, he had to keep his wits about him. His getting shot out of his saddle wasn’t going to do either of them any good.
As the old saw went, “Fool him once, shame on them. Fool him twice, shame on him.”
Since they hadn’t pursued him after he’d been clipped by the ricochet, they probably thought he was dead. If they were giving him any thought at all, that was, and they weren’t too distracted by their trophy.
He decided the latter was probably the case, for the tracks he was following had been made by seven or eight shod horses moving fast. They were riding so fast that some of the catclaw angling into the wash from the banks glistened with blood and bits of horsehide. The ambushers were in a hurry to get to their destination, wherever that was, and get down to business with the girl.
There was a good chance that their loins were so heavy, they hadn’t ridden far.
Easy, the Cajun warned himself over and over when he felt himself loosening his grip on the reins and half-consciously urging more speed from the stallion.
Easy. They could be anywhere in here...
An hour passed. Then another.
Sartain paused to water himself and his horse. He swabbed the bullet crease again, cleaned the bandanna, and retied it around his head. As he rode, he reached into his saddlebags for a few bits of jerky and chewed the salty beef slowly, working up enough saliva to keep him from thinking too much about the water he was growing short on.
The arroyo broadened gradually until it was a vast river bottom stretching between low banks peppered with the lime colors of desert shrubs, including mesquites, creosote, and paloverde. The ancient barranca, as such winding river courses were called down here, was peppered with boulders and cactus.
It appeared to lead into jagged-crested mountains humping darkly on the distant horizon, straight ahead of the Cajun. Very gradually as he rode, the mountains grew taller and broader. The black color of the massive ramparts turned furry green, which later in the afternoon became streaked with peach.
The green had not been from foliage, but only a trick of the light for an hour or two. The closer the Cajun got to the sierra, the more clearly he saw that there didn’t appear to be any green on them whatever. They looked nothing more than massive, inhospitable humps of bald rock.
A massive clump of forbidding stone ramparts that the barranca, the floor of which rose gradually, appeared to cleave right down their middle.
The Shadow Mountains, most likely. Sartain knew they were the only range out here.
The tracks he followed had spread out across the barranca and, judging by the stride they depicted, the riders had slowed down considerably from the gallop they’d started out in. As he rode, the Cajun noted where they had paused to water their horses, where they’d walked them, and where they’d increased their speed.
They were obviously following the ancient watercourse into the mountains.
Just as obviously, they hadn’t been in the all-fired hurry The Revenger had thought. He continued to ride cautiously, however. He also scoured the terrain for the woman’s clothes, and possibly for her body. Most likely they’d kill her after they’d sated their hunger. Once she’d satisfied a man’s desires, a woman wasn’t much good out here.
The sun sank behind Sartain. The air chilled as the night came down.
Chapter 11
The Revenger followed the barranca as it rose steadily into the mountains, continuing to curve between the steep, dark mountain walls. The wide course narrowed dramatically, and it became littered with driftwood, and, in some cases, entire trees and cracked boulders, probably washed down from the higher reaches during the monsoon rains.
The moon rose, shedding ethereal light into the chasm. If not for the light, the Cajun would have had to stop or risk serious injury to the stallion. But the moon lit his winding way into the sierra.
Finally, he came to a plateau where the mountain wall on his left dropped gradually away to little more than a slope. The ambushers’ trail swerved out of the barranca, which was a narrow wash hugging the base of the right-hand ridge at this point, and rose up through a jog of low, dark hills in the northeast.
Widely scattered pines and stunted aspens thrust their branches toward the lilac sky in which the stars glittered dully.
Ten minutes after he’d ridden up out of the barranca, The Revenger jerked back on the stallion’s reins and slipped the LeMat from its holster. He clicked the hammer back as he scowled into the moon-relieved darkness off the trail’s right side.
A chilly mountain wind had picked up. It was blowing several dark shapes hanging from a large deciduous tree around. Large shapes. Not the sort of thing you’d normally see hanging from a tree.
Man-shaped figures...
Sartain looked around. Spying no movement, he clucked to the stallion and rode toward the tree. The branches creaked in the cold wind. There was the whining sound of stretched and straining hemp as well.
Sartain checked Boss near one of the shapes. The moonlight angling over the canyon’s southern ridge pooled in the eyes staring down at him and he flinched. Sensing his rider’s unease, Boss jerked beneath him.
The boots of the man hung down to the level of The Revenger’s hat crown. They were soft and brown, so worn in one place that Sartain could make out the dead man’s stocking-clad foot.
Sartain appraised the long figure attired in worn Mexican-style trail clothes. He wore a short vest and a red neckerchief. His hair was black, his face long and angular, and he had a black mustache mantling his small mouth. He’d been hanging here awhile, since his clothes had been badly pecked and torn by birds. Part of one eyeball had been chewed out of the socket.
The wind jostled the body, making the branch and the rope creak.
Sartain kept a f
irm hand on Boss’s reins so the stallion, unsettled by the sour stench of death heavy in The Revenger’s own nostrils, wouldn’t bolt as he circled the tree. He counted five dead men hanging from three separate branches. Four appeared Mex. One looked like a sandy-haired gringo, with one eye hanging by a bloody thread down his badly bird-pecked cheek, his swollen tongue poking out a corner of his mouth.
The five bodies pitched and swayed in the wind.
They didn’t call this part of Mexican Las Tierras Baldias for nothing.
The Wastelands...
These men were likely bandidos who’d run afoul of some other band of desperadoes. Or maybe they’d double-crossed their own. For such a breed of men, revenge was swift. Even swifter than it was for Sartain’s breed, which was saying something.
The Revenger looked around and then rode on, following the ambushers’ trail up a gradual rise. As he rode, he smelled wood smoke on the wind. Wood smoke laced with the aroma of roasting meat. It grew stronger as he rode. Ahead, another odd silhouette revealed itself off the trail’s left side this time and up a rocky knoll.
It wasn’t a tree but was more the shape of a cross.
Sartain dismounted, ground-reined Boss, and slipped the LeMat from its holster. Holding the big pistol low by his side, he pushed through short, gnarled cedars and climbed the knoll. A minute later he found himself staring up in awe at the naked body of a man who appeared to have been crucified on a stout cross made of unpeeled pine poles. The moonlight revealed a thick gray beard and tufts of curly gray hair running around the edges of an otherwise bald pate.
In the pearly light, the man’s body was the color of bleached bones. Bleached bones liberally stained with the darkness of dried blood.
His lower jaw hung slack, chin almost resting on his bony chest. Around his neck hung a wooden crucifix—the kind Sartain had seen Catholic priests wear. His eyes were gone, and birds had torn away a good bit of his flesh. Judging by the stench, he’d been there a good four or five days.
Sartain backed away from the crucifixion, giving a shudder and looking around cautiously. Crucifixion was a nasty way to die. Maybe not as creative as Apache methods, but nasty just the same.
Sartain made his way back down to Boss and heaved himself back into the saddle. Apprehension was a handful of caterpillars crawling along his spine as he continued up the rise. As he rode, he watched what appeared to be firelight growing before him. He was nearing the ambushers’ camp. About ten feet from the crest of the rise, he slipped off the trail and tied Boss to a stout cedar.
Shucking his Henry repeater, he climbed to the top of the rise at the right side of the trail, and in a nest of small boulders and shrubs, dropped to a knee.
A broad fold in some pale bluffs lay below. The white objects scattered willy-nilly about the fold like dice on black velvet were most likely the small adobe casas of an ancient pueblito. They were strewn around a bluff rising just ahead of Sartain, maybe a quarter-mile away.
A large building topped the rise. It was so well lit by torches and the two small fires that had been built near it, Sartain could see it was an old adobe church—a simple, crude affair in the shape of a large block, its broad doors thrown wide to reveal flickering umber lamplight within. A two-story adobe casa sat about fifty feet to the left. The casa had a crude stone wall around it and stone pens to the left, some with small woven-ocotillo corrals attached.
No sounds, light, or movement issued from the dark folds between the rolling buttes in which the old pueblito lay. Either the town had been abandoned, or the townsfolk were lying low.
The top of the bluff was a noisy fire- and moon-lit contrast to the darkness surrounding it. A few men were moving around atop the bluff, about the churchyard, silhouetted by the dancing firelight. Between wind gusts, Sartain could hear them talking and laughing.
They sounded drunk. Their horses milled in one of the corrals, though the Cajun could only make out their silhouettes. Some of the men were sitting on the stoop of the casa, others lounged around the two fires fronting it. They were too far away for Sartain to be sure, but they appeared to be passing a bottle.
Sartain raked a thumb through his several-day growth of beard.
Where was the girl?
Only one way to find out.
He retreated several yards back down the hill and then swung to the south. He ran, crouching, over the shoulder of the hill, worried the moonlight might reveal him to the men by the church. He dropped down into the dark fold encompassing the adobes. He could see only the very top of the church from this vantage, which meant the men probably couldn’t see him unless they’d posted a lookout.
He moved carefully through the broad crease between the buttes, weaving around the adobes, which, were likely abandoned. They were old ruins, possibly damaged in an earthquake or one of the many Apache and Yaqui battles that had ravaged this part of northern Mexico, just as they’d been a blight for so many years on the American Southwest. The adobes were cracked and crumbling vestiges of former homes, some with attached stone corrals now grown up with briars, piñons, and cedars.
The wind swept through the crease from the south, sawing and moaning through the hollow caverns, whistling through windows that gaped like the empty sockets of bleached skulls, and caused the brush to dance eerily in the moonlight.
As Sartain moved across the floor of the crease and started up the hill atop which the church loomed, he heard the whine of a cat among the ruins. Judging by the pitch, it was either a small bobcat or a wild domestic cat, nothing to be worried about. As he kept moving, he could hear other beasts running through the brush away from him. They left their wild, sour stench on the moaning wind.
They were coyotes or foxes, most likely, keeping an eye on the churchyard in which the desperadoes were roasting meat. Later, when the men had gone to bed and the fires had died, the carrion eaters would move in to carry off the leavings.
The ruined casas thinned out about halfway up the steep hill. There was little cover here. Sartain crouched low and doffed his hat as he moved slowly, quietly, though the wind would likely cover his approach. When he reached the top of the hill, breathing hard, he crouched behind one of the few boulders at the edge of the yard and peered out around its right side.
The church was about a hundred yards away across the relatively flat top of the hill, the casa to the left. The men were no longer strolling around between the church and the two-story, brush-roofed hovel. They were all gathered around between one of the two fires, some eating and drinking, a couple standing and facing the casa from which firelight or lamplight spilled from deep-set windows.
One of the men facing the church, holding a carbine in one hand, appeared to grab his crotch with his other hand as he said in unaccented English, “Hurry it up in there. Give the rest of us a turn!”
“Sí,” said one of the others, laughing. He continued half in English and half in Spanish with, “I have gone to church and said my prayers, jefe, and the great Jesus has vowed to forgive me for my forthcoming sins!”
One of the men threw something—maybe a bone—at the man who’d last spoken, hissing, “Stop taking the name of Jesus in vain, fool, or he will laugh in your face and send you packing to El Diablo!”
The gringo yelled toward the house, “For Christ’s sake, if you can’t—”
He was cut off by a Spanish-accented voice yelling from somewhere on the second story, “Come in, gentleman! The lady yearns for a party!”
The voice had sounded raspy, stilted, and distant.
The others looked around at each other, stunned. Then one of the Mexicans laughed, whooped, and bolted for the front door.
The gringo grabbed his arm and jerked him back, growling, “Hold on. I’m next in line, dammit. We flipped for it!”
“Diddle yourself, Decker!” said the Mexican, swinging around and bringing up a right-handed roundhouse, slamming his fist into the gringo’s face.
The gringo hit the ground with a shrill curse. The other seven
or so dashed past him and into the house.
Sartain gave a curse of his own as he stepped out from behind the boulder and began making his way toward the casa. The wind lifted dust around him and blew the flames of the two fires, sending cinders showering over the gringo called Decker, who gained his feet heavily and stumbled into the casa.
Sartain could hear the men’s running footsteps, their eager shouts and yowls. The Cajun broke into a run, gritting his teeth and racking a cartridge into the Henry’s breech. Amidst the din inside the casa, a gun barked.
It barked again.
A man screamed.
Sartain stopped, frowning through the casa’s door, which had been propped open with a chair from the back of which a black shirt and bolo tie hung.
The shouting had stopped for about three seconds. Now it resumed louder than before. Above it, the gun barked again...again...and again.
There was the thunder of bodies falling. Through the open door, Sartain saw several men tumbling down a crude stone staircase that rose beyond a small monkey stove and a round wooden eating table. They hit the floor hard at the bottom of the stairs, a couple piling up together while a third one bounced off the two-man pile and rolled toward Sartain, blood gushing from a hole in one man’s red-shirted chest.
The gun’s barking continued, as did the men’s screaming and the thunder of the dead and dying tumbling down the stairs until all seven who’d run into the house lay in a ragged semicircle around the bottom of the stairs.
The gun or guns fell silent.
Two of the desperadoes were still moving, writhing.
As Sartain stared incredulously into the casa, lit by a fire in a beehive hearth and a lamp hanging over the table, the spindly wooden stair rail sagged out away from the stairs. There was a snapping sound, and then the rail fell to the short, dim hall running along the outside of the stairs.
Silence.
The Revenger Page 56