The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  As The Revenger closed on the woman and their prisoner, he saw she had a question in her eyes. He knew what she was wondering.

  What in hell were they going to do?

  He looked ahead and right, where the ridge on that side of the barranca, now a good hundred yards away, had lowered appreciably. It looked downright surmountable in one place that was maybe fifty yards wide—an inclining stretch of boulders and open ground between two steeper monoliths of solid sandstone. It probably rose a hundred and fifty yards to its crest, leaning away from the broad canyon.

  Sartain pointed to the gap in the ridge wall. “There! Go there!”

  Jasmine swung her horse to the right, angling toward the sloping belly of the ridge, tugging Uncle Hector’s mount along behind her.

  The yowling of the Apaches grew louder behind Sartain. So did the cracks of their carbines. He could hear the thudding of their horses’ hoofs now as well. They sounded like an earth tremor. Several bullets landed close, whining shrilly off rocks to each side of the Cajun, who steered his own mount toward the ridge.

  Ahead of him, Jasmine gained the base of the ridge and put her mount up the slope, which was partly shaded by the steeper ridge to the right of it. Shade also bled out from the large and small boulders peppering it. Jasmine’s thoroughbred zigzagged around the rocks, the woman glancing back at Tejada’s horse, tugging its bridle reins.

  The Mexican slumped miserably in his saddle, the arrow protruding from his left calf.

  Sartain got to the base of the ridge and began climbing. The horse’s breathing grew harsher, deeper, the bit rattling in its teeth. As Boss turned sharply left to steer around a cabin-sized boulder throwing out a trapezoid of purple shade around its base, Sartain glanced behind. The Apaches were less than fifty yards from the base of the slope and galloping hard, like a herd of wildcats smelling blood.

  Sartain slipped his Henry from its sheath and swung down from Boss’s back. He slapped the horse’s rump, shouting, “Go on, boy!” He wanted the horse to continue up the slope. If the mount caught a bullet or an arrow, the Cajun’s goose would be cooked, not to mention he was rather fond of the surly buckskin.

  As he stepped behind the huge boulder, Sartain pumped a cartridge into the rifle’s action and glanced upslope. Jasmine had reached a talus slide and was swinging down from her mount to lead him as well as the Mexican’s skewbald across the loose patch of sharp-edged gravel. Her right boot slipped and she dropped to a knee, but quickly gained both feet again and resumed tramping on up the slope, pulling on the reins of both horses.

  A bullet slammed against the side of the boulder near Sartain, flecking his cheeks with rock shards and dust. He glanced out from behind the boulder to see the Apaches now approaching the base of the slope, not slowing their mounts a bit.

  Sartain stepped out from behind the boulder and commenced firing the Henry from his hip. He unseated one rider with his first shot. He thought he winged another with the second. After he’d fired two more rounds, he’d accomplished his task of slowing the braves’ pursuit. Several dismounted and started up the slope on foot with either a rifle or a bow and arrow in their hands. Some had steel-bladed war hatchets wedged behind red sashes.

  As one brave ran out from behind a flat boulder near the base of the slope, Sartain raised his Henry, carefully drew a bead on the brave’s chest, and squeezed the trigger. The Indian jerked back, screaming. The Cajun stepped back behind the boulder and then started running up the slope directly behind it, using the large obelisk for cover.

  His shots had been like beating a hornet’s nest with a broom. They had really piss-burned the Apaches. Their yips and howls rose to a cacophony. The rifle fire picked up, and several arrows whistled through the air around Sartain, one glancing off a rock as he dashed up the slope. A bullet blew up the talus just as he hit the slide-rock. Breathing hard, pumping his arms and legs, he increased his pace, silently chastising himself for overindulging in cheroots.

  He was low on wind, his lungs straining.

  Another bullet sizzled across the right side of his neck. It was like being raked by the frigid tip of a witch’s finger. He winced and kept running as more bullets and arrows ricocheted off the rocks around him.

  As he ran, he allowed himself another backward glance.

  Most of the Apaches were on foot now, running up the slope behind him, weaving around boulders and scattered cedars and piñons. One of the braves jerked back and sideways, wincing and slapping a hand to his bloody left shoulder. He sagged back against the flat boulder from which Sartain had flung lead.

  Upslope, a rifle cracked.

  A bullet blew a dark hole in the Apache’s forehead just above his right eye. The Indian’s head whipped back, bouncing off the boulder. Blood bubbled up out of the hole as the Apache dropped to his knees, twisting around and rolling back down the slope, another brave leaping over him and then howling and clutching his left knee a half-second after the rifle cracked again on the upslope.

  Hunkered down in a gap between two rocks at the crest of the ridge, Jasmine pumped another cartridge into the action of her Winchester and pressed her cheek against the neck of the stock.

  “What’s taking you?” she yelled a half-second before smoke and flames lapped from the Winchester’s barrel.

  Sartain bounded up the last several yards and hunkered down behind a rock to her left.

  He took a few seconds to catch his breath, then, still raking deep draughts of air into his burning lungs, he said, “Didn’t know you were handy with a long gun.”

  “There are a lot of things you don’t know about me, Mr. Sartain.” Jasmine triggered another shot, then levered another round into the Winchester’s chamber.

  “Yes, there are, Miss...” Sartain let his voice trail off as he racked a round into the Henry’s action and rested the barrel of the rifle on the lip of the ridge before him. “...Gallant,” he continued, picking out a weaving long-haired target and taking the shot.

  The Apache he’d hit dropped his bow and arrow, grabbed his belly, and howled. He flopped backward and rolled.

  “Gallant,” Sartain said, picking out another target and firing. “It just now occurred to me that I’ve heard that name before.” Again, he racked a fresh round into the Henry’s breech. He glanced toward where he couldn’t see Jasmine but only the smoke and flames stabbing from her Winchester’s barrel.

  “Have you?” Thumbing fresh cartridges from Tejada’s belt into the Winchester.

  “I’m sure I have.” Sartain ducked when a bullet blew up dust and gravel about three feet in front of him. “But I’ll be damned if I can remember where.”

  He picked out another target and fired, evoking a muffled grunt and sending another Apache rolling down the rocky decline.

  He cursed and was forced to focus all his attention on the Apaches when it became clear they were going to keep coming despite the half-dozen or so he and Jasmine had sent to the Happy Hunting Ground. When he’d snapped off all sixteen of the Henry’s rounds, he slid the loading tube out from beneath the main barrel and refilled it with fresh brass from his cartridge belt.

  In ten minutes, he’d spent all that ammo as well, with little to show for it.

  The Indians were still coming but more cautiously now, holing up behind covering rocks and clumps of brush before bounding, fleet as wildcats, to another rock or brush clump. They howled and hooted, jeering at Sartain’s and Jasmine’s missed shots.

  “Crap,” Jasmine yelled from the other side of her covering rock. “This isn’t looking so good.”

  Sartain didn’t say anything, but his throat was dry. That meant he was thinking the same thing she was. They were badly outnumbered, and they were low on ammunition.

  “Help me!” Uncle Hector said from a fringe of mesquites down the slope behind Sartain. Jasmine had cut him free of his saddle, allowing him to dismount. He lay folded up on the ground, clutching his bloody calf. “I need some assistance here, amigos. I’m bleeding quite profusely!”
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  “Shut up,” Sartain raked out, planting his LeMat’s sights on the dark-brown blur of a dashing Apache and squeezing the trigger. He couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought it was another miss.

  Again, he cursed.

  Then the LeMat’s hammer clicked on an empty chamber.

  He swore again and reached for the Henry, forgetting in the direness of the situation that it was empty. He set it down and pulled the loading tube from beneath the barrel. To his right he heard one of Jasmine’s own guns, probably one of her pistols, clapping benignly down its firing pin.

  “I’m out!” she yelled. “All three guns!”

  “Dammit!” Sartain grumbled. “Don’t tell ’em that!”

  He hadn’t gotten the admonishment entirely out when a wiry young Apache came storming up the ten-foot gap between Sartain and the boulder the brave had been hunkered behind. Another was close on his heels, both holding only war hatchets. They were whooping wildly, grinning, their sense of honor and challenge making them resort to the oldest tools of their trade. They must have known enough of the white man’s tongue to understand the Pinkerton’s pronouncement.

  The first brave bounded toward Jasmine while the second one came running up the slope toward Sartain, who set his Henry aside and rose from behind his rock, sliding his Bowie knife from its belt sheath. He crouched as the Apache approached, whooping and hollering so loudly, Sartain’s eardrums rattled.

  The brave swung the war hatchet down at an arc toward The Revenger’s head. Sartain jerked his head back. As he heard Jasmine scream, he gritted his teeth and sliced the blade of the Bowie across the Apache’s belly, opening him up like a field-dressed deer.

  The brave screamed shrilly, digging his hands into the blood pudding spilling from his belly and dropping to his knees. Jasmine groaned. Sartain turned to see the other Apache holding her taut against him on the other side of her rock. The grinning brave started to swing the war hatchet toward her head.

  Sartain sent the Bowie careening through the air end over end until its wickedly hooked tip crunched into the brave’s left eye. The war hatchet dealt Jasmine’s left shoulder a glancing blow as she twisted around and away from the brave, who staggered backward, howling and swatting both hands at the knife handle as though it were a pesky fly.

  His arms dropped, and he fell straight back without trying to break his fall. He lay silently jerking as though the ground were bounding around beneath him, the hide-wrapped handle of the Bowie quivering as well.

  Jasmine dropped to a knee, clamping her right hand to her left shoulder.

  She gasped and widened her eyes as two more braves came charging up the slope, howling and slicing the air with war hatchets and knives.

  Chapter 17

  Sartain bolted off his heels, slamming his head and shoulders into the chest of the first Apache. He bulled the howling brave over onto his back so hard that the brave’s eyes rolled back in his head. The Cajun jerked the war hatchet from the Apache’s slack hand, smashing it across the brave’s head.

  There was the sound of cracking bone, and one of the brave’s eyes popped out of its socket to hang by a ragged thread.

  The other brave kicked Sartain in the ribs, throwing The Revenger onto his back. His side screamed in misery. He felt as though he’d been impaled with a dull sword. Gasping for air, he looked up and saw the brave diving toward him, clenching the Bowie in his right fist, the curved tip of the rusty brown blade arcing down toward the Cajun’s throat.

  Sartain reached up and grabbed the brave’s wrist, stopping the blade six inches from his jugular and slowly driving the squirming brave, whose sweat and raw-meat stench almost made The Revenger’s eyes water, onto his back. When Sartain had gained a knee over the brave, he smashed his left fist hard against the Indian’s right cheek.

  The brave stiffened, brown eyes glazing. The Bowie clattered onto the rocks.

  Sartain delivered three more punishing blows and the brave’s body fell slack. He looked downslope. The bottom dropped out of his belly as he saw more braves lunging up the incline toward him, howling, all dropping carbines and bows and arrows and unsheathing knives and hatchets to cut the Cajun to bloody ribbons.

  Sartain glanced at Jasmine. She knelt ten feet to his right, holding the Bowie down low by her right thigh, blood dripping from the blade onto the rocks beneath her.

  She stared in slack-jawed shock at the Indians storming up the slope, the first three within thirty yards and closing fast, eyes bright with the promise of a satisfying kill. They were racing, shoving each other as they ran, laughing.

  Back when he was soldiering in Arizona, Sartain had come to learn how Apache warriors thought. These young men had seen him kill three of their own virtually bare-handed, so each was eager to win the honor of having killed such a formidable warrior.

  Not only would such a feat garner them esteem from their compadres but also the veneration of the prettiest girls in the band, who would vie to be the one or ones to bear his children.

  “Run!” he shouted to Jasmine, throwing an arm out to indicate the backside of the ridge. “Get your horse and ride the hell out of here! I’ll distract them for as long as I can!”

  He squared his shoulders and balled his fists, ready to challenge the Indians’ assault. He had enough ammo on his cartridge belt to reload the Henry and he had two more boxes of shells in his saddlebags, but not enough time to put any of it to use.

  He glanced again at Jasmine. She just knelt there as if frozen, staring in shock at the braves charging toward her.

  “I said run, dammit!” he bellowed.

  That caused the young Pinkerton to jerk with a start. She’d just begun to straighten when what sounded like a cannon blast rose somewhere above and to Sartain’s left. The echo of the heavy explosion danced around the slope, dwindling.

  Sartain blinked, his mind slow to comprehend what his eyes had just told him.

  The head of one of the charging braves had exploded. White bone and brain and red blood and black hair sprayed in all directions. The braves looked around, shocked. Another head exploded, and the Indians wheeled and scattered across the slope, diving for cover.

  Again, the heavy gun’s explosion-like report vaulted across the ridge.

  Sartain didn’t see where this slug landed.

  “Take cover!” he roared at Jasmine.

  He grabbed his Henry and dropped down on the other side of the ridge crest, pulling out the loading tube to begin reloading.

  Soon there was another rocketing blast. Again, The Revenger didn’t see where the bullet had gone.

  The Indians had fallen eerily silent.

  When Sartain had reloaded the Henry, he rested it on the gravelly crest of the ridge and gazed down the slope toward where the Indians had been dashing toward him only a minute before. Now he saw only swatches of black hair and the occasional glimpse of a dark-brown face as the Indians sheltered behind boulders, brush clumps, and low hummocks of rock and cactus, looking around, trying to discern the shooter’s location.

  Sartain looked up hard on his left. Smoke puffed from a niche of high rocks maybe fifty yards away. As the dark smoke ribboned on the breeze, another heavy blast flatted off across the slope. There was the crashing whunk of the large-caliber bullet smashing rock.

  Sartain scowled up at the shooter. He had no idea who the man was. He was wielding what sounded like a Sharps “Big Fifty,” as the .50-caliber buffalo-hunting rifle was known, and he no longer seemed to be shooting at the Apaches. He was shooting at the higher ridge on the slope’s north side, where there appeared an outcropping of loose rock.

  Sure enough, on the heels of the next blast, rock dust puffed from near the top of the outcropping.

  After the shot’s last echo, silence.

  A low rumbling started, building.

  Sartain frowned, staring up at the outcropping. Then he grinned as the large thumb of rock set against the north ridge wall began shaking. He grinned wider when the highest rocks, roughly th
e size of small farm wagons, began tilting toward the slope across which the Indians were hunkered.

  They tilted farther and farther. Several began to fall. They appeared to spend a long time in the air, turning slowly end over end. When they landed, Sartain felt the ground lurch beneath him.

  Then more rocks fell.

  More and more, cracking together as they plunged to explode on the slope like the rounds of mountain howitzers, the ground now moving beneath The Revenger as the rocks hammered the slope as though to crush it into submission. The rocks and boulders bounced, dancing across the slope. Now the Indians were lighting out down the incline, back in the direction from which they’d come.

  They resembled black-tailed deer, leaping rocks and cacti and weaving around boulders, the rocks from the outcropping giving chase with a vengeance. One Apache screamed and disappeared as a large, pale boulder crushed him. Two more screamed and fell.

  Then there were so many rocks and so much dust that Sartain’s view of the declivity was nearly totally blocked. Beneath the explosions of the rocks on the slope, he occasionally made out the muted screams of another soon-to-be-crushed Apache.

  After several minutes, the rocks stopped falling. A couple shifted position and tumbled a few times, but the brunt of the slide was finished. Dust roiled up from the slope like smoke from a hard-fought battle.

  The Cajun coughed, blinking dust from his eyes, “There, that’ll teach ya.”

  He could hear Jasmine coughing too. Then she rose from the far side of her boulder, blinking and batting her hat against her thigh.

  “What...was...that...” she asked, turning her incredulous gaze to Sartain.

  The Revenger had straightened, as well, coughing and running his shirt sleeve over his eyes. “Your guess is as good as mine, my dear.”

  He gazed up the southern ridge from which the shots had been fired, seeing nothing. Then he heard the crunch of gravel and saw an old Mexican man, skin as dark or darker than any Apache’s, step around a pinnacle of rock about three-quarters of the way down from where the big rifle’s smoke had been puffing a few moments earlier.