The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  Tumbleweeds, dust, sand, and old trash littered the place.

  Not seeing an easy way in the front door, and figuring he’d probably end up taking the kid to the stable after all, he dropped down off the gallery and walked around to the saloon’s rear.

  There was a small door back there, atop a few stone steps. He gave the metal and leather latch a half-hearted nudge and was surprised to hear it click.

  The hinges groaned as the door gave a shudder and swung inward.

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  Sartain moved into the earthen-floored room before him. It must have been a storeroom. There was enough light pushing through a dusty, cobwebbed window to his right to show him the way to another door on the other side of the room.

  This one opened, as well. Now he found himself at the rear of what appeared the main saloon, with stairs angling up over his left shoulder.

  He walked haltingly down the short, narrow hall abutted by the stairs on one side and a wall on his right from which a moose head stared dubiously down at him through the misty shadows. He stopped near the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and stared into the room before him.

  From what he could see in the dusky light, the saloon was still outfitted with a fancy bar, back bar, and a half-dozen or so tables onto which chairs were still overturned. So far, so good, The Revenger thought, starting up the stairs with the groaning kid in his arms. If the downstairs was still reasonably intact, there was a good chance the upstairs would be as well.

  It was.

  At least, as far as the Cajun could tell. He stopped at the first door he came to, turned the knob, and nudged the door with his boot toe. It groaned open. Sartain saw the outline of a bed before him. He gentled the kid onto it and then stepped back, looking around the room.

  Surprisingly well appointed for a ghost town, he thought.

  He dug a match out of his shirt pocket, scraped it to life on his thumbnail, and held it high. The watery light revealed a bracket lamp near the door. He lit the lamp and looked around again. He’d be damned if the room didn’t look lived in. There was a dresser, a green-painted armoire, a room divider, and a washstand complete with a porcelain bowl and water pitcher. A towel even hung from a rail, and there was a good-sized mirror above the towel.

  He turned to the bed. It looked not only well-kempt but freshly made.

  Either the ghosts in this town were damned neat and tidy and preferred all the comforts of home or someone living and breathing was haunting Hard Winter.

  On the bed, the kid groaned.

  Sartain turned to him. The kid writhed from side to side, moaning.

  “Kid, you hang tough,” the Cajun said. “I’m gonna go out and fetch my bottle. I’ll be right back.”

  “Mister?” the kid said as Sartain started for the door.

  The Revenger turned back to him.

  “You ain’t gonna go off and leave me to die here alone, are ya?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “I’m awful scared. I’m hurtin’ bad, and I’m just plain scared. I don’t wanna die!”

  “Don’t blame you a bit, son,” Sartain said. “I’ll be right back.”

  He started again toward the room’s open door but stopped when Boss lifted a long, warning whinny from the street fronting the place.

  “Ah, hell,” Sartain groused. “Now what?”

  Chapter 3

  Sartain went back downstairs, the LeMat again in his hand.

  Strange sounds were coming from the front of the saloon. Thudding and squawking sounds. As he walked through the saloon, the bar on his left, the tables on his right, he could tell someone was on the front gallery. They were removing the planks from over the front door—which was two doors with beveled and colored glass still in their top panels.

  The squawking and thudding continued. The Cajun stood near the doors, waiting, the LeMat in his hand, an incredulous scowl on his face. He could feel the reverberations of the toil of the man or men through the floorboards.

  Finally, the last board was removed from over the door and tossed onto the gallery floor.

  “Ouch!” said a voice.

  The Revenger’s scowl deepened. Had that been a young woman’s voice?

  “Damn!” she said as though to herself. She must have injured herself on a nail.

  Sartain could see her silhouette through the colored glass, the top glass squares showing the single word Saloon from the back. One of the doors opened halfway, and the girl’s shadow moved toward Sartain. She wore a hat and a coat, and he could see long hair hanging down past her shoulders. She half-turned as she closed the door.

  As she started to turn toward the drinking hall, Sartain scratched another match to life on his thumbnail and held it high.

  The girl screamed and stumbled back against the doors, stretching her arms out to both sides, then fell to her rump on the floor.

  Sartain stepped forward, the match sputtering between his thumb and index finger.

  The young woman’s battered Stetson tumbled off her left shoulder to reveal a rich, messy spill of chocolate-colored curls framing a clean-lined face with a straight nose and resolute jaw.

  “Who’re you?” Sartain asked.

  “Who’m I?” she said, dark eyes sparking in the match light. “Who’re you, you son of a buck?”

  “Sartain.”

  Just then, the match burned down to his fingers. He dropped it. Darkness closed over him and the girl once more. He heard her give an angry grunt. There was the scuffing of boots and then she was on him in two-fisted fury, bulling into him while smashing her fists against his face.

  “Hold on!” he said, dropping the LeMat to get hold of her.

  Before he could grab her flailing arms, which he could barely make out in the darkness before him, she’d shoved him back onto a table. Her supple body pressed against his. Her coat fell open, and he could feel the yielding curves of her body loosely restrained behind a blouse.

  Sartain got hold of her right hand and was surprised to feel the cold, hard, irregular bulk of a pistol in it.

  “No!” she cried through gritted teeth.

  Sartain jerked the pistol free of the girl’s surprisingly strong grip. As he did, he fell back and sideways, rolled off the table, and hit the floor with a bang! The girl came with him, landing on top of him, getting to her knees, straddling him, and going back to work on his face with her fists.

  Sartain tossed her gun away and heard it hit the floor and slide.

  “I wasn’t open, you son of a buck!” she railed. “No one comes in here when I’m not open! I saw the horses, but I didn’t think whoever belonged to ’em would be ill-mannered enough to break into my place!”

  Sartain cursed when one of her fists split his upper lip and the coppery taste of blood touched his tongue. Her silky hair raked him as her fists battered him. None of the punches did any real damage. She was a small girl, as tough and as resolute as her jawline. His biggest problem was trying to restrain her without hurting her.

  If this place belonged to her, he was the interloper here, after all.

  Finally, he managed to grab both her wrists again, instantly stopping the onslaught. He pushed up to a half-sitting position and rolled the girl onto her back. He straddled her, holding her wrists taut against the floor above her head.

  “Now, hold on!” He grunted, pressing her down hard. “I’m not your enemy, miss. I just needed a bed for a younker who rode into your fair town with a bullet in his shoulder. He’s upstairs. He needs tendin’ by someone who knows what they’re doin’, which I don’t. My name is Mike Sartain, and I was just passin’ through.”

  When he felt her go somewhat slack beneath him, he climbed off her and lit a lamp bracketed to a ceiling support post. Turning up the wick and spreading a dull, yellow glow around the room, he glanced at her. She’d pushed up onto her elbows. Her hair was in her face. She shook it back.

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  The Cajun chuckled.
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br />   She started climbing to her feet. He went over and gave her his hand, which she accepted. “How did you get in here?” she said when she was standing before him, looking him up and down critically as though seeing him for the first time.

  “Back door.”

  She turned her mouth-corners down. “Yeah, it doesn’t lock. Last time I left for the week, I must’ve forgot to slide the sideboard in front of it. I only open up on weekends.”

  “I’m glad you forgot about the sideboard. Like I said Miss...”

  “McKee. Dixie McKee.”

  “Like I said, Miss McKee, I got a young man upstairs with a bullet in his shoulder.”

  She tucked her hair behind one ear and narrowed a suspicious eye at him. “He ride with you?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because you got trouble written all over you.”

  “You’re not the first to tell me that.”

  “Are you?”

  Sartain poked his hat up off his forehead. “Not tonight. Not here. Unless somebody tries to bushwhack me again.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind.” Sartain shook his head. “Is there a sawbones around, Miss McKee?”

  “Does this place look like it still has a sawbones, Mr. Sartain?” She had a salty, frank air about her. It mixed well with her feminine attractiveness.

  “Well, it doesn’t look from outside like it still has a saloon and a hotel. You do a damn good job of disguising that fact.”

  “Best way to keep scavengers out.”

  Dixie McKee wrinkled her nose at him snidely. It had a few small freckles on it that stood out against her tan in the lamplight.

  “Let me get a pan of water and some cloths and some whiskey,” she said. “I’ll go up and take a look at him. I was raised with two brothers twelve miles from here. There weren’t any sawbones close around. Leastways, no good ones, so Ma and I did all the doctoring in the family. I keep a kit up in my room.”

  She followed The Revenger’s gaze and then turned away, pulling the top of her blue blouse closed and reprimanding him with a stern look.

  “You said you weren’t trouble,” she said as she headed for the bar.

  “I said I wasn’t trouble here tonight, Miss McKee, I didn’t say I wasn’t a man.” The Cajun smiled, giving her a wink.

  She gave him another critical up-and-down, as though she were appraising a dangerous animal. “Yes, I know what men are all about.” She’d said it like she knew, all right, and didn’t like it.

  She walked around behind the bar, reached down, and then set a rusty porcelain pan atop the varnished oak. “How about if you go out back and fill this pan with water from the rain barrel? I’m going to need plenty of water to clean that wound. You can bring in some wood, too, and get that potbelly stove fired up good and hot. Gonna be a cold night, and I’m gonna need some hot water.”

  Sartain grabbed the pan off the bar. “You got it.”

  “Then you can get those chairs down off those tables and light my lamps down here. I have a handful of regular weekend customers. More on Saturdays than Fridays, but there’ll be a few in tonight, most likely. There’s a few prospectors and ten-cow cattlemen around here, and they like to come in and have a few drinks on the weekends. Mine is the only place around.”

  “Whatever I can do to help out.”

  “That’s good enough for starters,” Dixie said, heading upstairs with a bottle and a couple of rags. “Now, let’s go see how bad off your friend is.”

  Sartain didn’t see the point in reminding her that the wounded younker was not his friend. Dixie McKee was a headstrong girl. Once she got something in her head, you’d need a crowbar to lever it back out again.

  And that might not even work.

  * * *

  Sartain fetched water from the well and brought a pan up to Dixie, who was busily tending the boy. The kid was out of his head now with shock, warning someone named Roamer that lightning struck in high places, “and they best get these beeves to lower ground or get lit up like firecrackers!”

  “Why, he’s just a boy. Nothing but a child,” Dixie scolded as she mopped up the blood around the young man’s wound.

  The implication was that Sartain had corrupted him, somehow caused him to take that bullet.

  “I know that, Miss McKee, but like I said...” He let his voice trail off. She wasn’t listening, and he didn’t have a crowbar near big enough. “Never mind.”

  He went back downstairs, brought in several washtubs full of split aspen and pine, and started a roaring fire in the potbelly stove, which sat in the dead center of the saloon’s main drinking hall. He filled a couple of iron kettles from the rain barrel and set them on the stove. When he’d pulled all the chairs down off the tables, he went around the room to make sure all the lamps were lit.

  Because the stove was heating the place up like a washhouse in mid-July, he opened the front door.

  That was when he saw Boss, the kid’s paint, and the dead bushwhacker’s sorrel. All three horses were limned by the lamplight spilling out of the saloon behind him. They stood in the street, still saddled and in need of tending.

  Sartain led the trio over to the stable in which he’d found the bushwhacker’s mount. What he took to be the girl’s mount was there, a handsome cream touched with dun speckles across its hindquarters. He saw no black on this horse either, which made it unlikely that Dixie McKee had been the fleeing rider he’d seen earlier.

  He also found a bin filled with oats and another rain barrel.

  He rubbed all three horses down carefully, then fed and watered them and shut them up in the stable. When he got back to the saloon, the water in both pots was boiling, and two men were sitting at one of the tables, regarding the big Cajun incredulously.

  “Who’re you?” one of them asked—a tall, hawk-nosed, horse-faced man in dusty trail garb. He wore a bowler hat. A red bandanna was knotted around his scrawny neck. Apparently, he couldn’t find pants long enough to fit him, so he’d sewn otter skin to the cuffs.

  “Sartain.”

  “Where’s Dixie, Sartain?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “What the hell’s she doing upstairs?” asked the other man, a beefy, red-faced, middle-aged gent in dusty trail garb similar to the string bean’s. He had silver hair beneath his sweat-stained Stetson, and he wore a red and white checked shirt under a brown leather vest.

  He grinned lasciviously. “She tryin’ to earn a few more pesos on her back up there, is she?”

  He slapped his thigh.

  The string bean clouded up, rose tensely from his chair, and turned his fiery eyes on the beefy gent. “Don’t you talk about Dixie like that, Slater! You hear me?” He slammed his fist on the table. “Or you’ll have me to answer to!”

  Just then, the wounded younker screamed in the room above Sartain’s head, “Don’t kill me! Oh, God—please don’t kill me!” The plea was followed by a strangled, “Noooooooooooo!”

  Chapter 4

  “Holy Christ—what’s happenin’ up there?” Slater asked as Sartain wheeled and ran to the stairs at the back of the room.

  He took the steps three at a time. As he gained the second floor, he pulled the LeMat, cocked it, and thrust the kid’s door open.

  He stopped in the doorway, peering into the room lit by two lamps—one on the wall, another on a small table near the kid’s bed. The kid lay back on his pillow, eyes shut, mouth half-open. Dixie McKee was crouched over him, half-sitting on a chair beside the bed, probing the kid’s wound with long, bone-handled tweezers.

  She glanced at Sartain, lowering her eyes to the LeMat in his hand. “Holster that hogleg and give me a hand here.” She made a face as she continued probing the wound. “I’ve almost got it.”

  As he moved slowly into the room, the Cajun said, “I thought...heard him cry out...”

  “He’s out of his head. He woke up to find me about to probe around in his shoulder and he went loco on me. He’s out now.” She glanced testily at The R
evenger again, and he holstered the revolver as he approached the bed. “Hurry—I need you to hold the wound open while I reach inside. I just about had the bullet, but it slipped away.”

  Sartain crouched over the bed and took the handle of the tweezers in his right hand.

  “Hold it tight. Good and tight, maybe use both hands. Pull down on the wound to give me some room to get my finger in there.”

  “What the hell’s goin’ on in here?” the thick man, Slater, asked over Sartain’s right shoulder. The Revenger had been vaguely aware of Slater and the string bean following him up the stairs. Now they were both in the room, gazing inquisitively at the doings.

  “Shut up,” Dixie said. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  “Yeah, shut up, Slater, or I’ll clean your clock, you cork-headed fool,” admonished the tall string bean. “Can’t you see Dixie’s busy?”

  Sartain did as the girl told him. She poked an already bloody finger into the wound, leaning far forward and turning her head to stare at the big Cajun with grave concentration, wincing and chewing her rich bottom lip.

  She toiled, moving her finger around in the wound for nearly a half a minute before, keeping that finger about halfway in the wound, she took the tweezers back from Sartain and used it to help her finger guide the bullet to the opening.

  “Got it!” she said, holding the bloody chunk of lead up between her thumb and index finger. “Told you I could doctor a wound.”

  Sartain sighed with relief. “That you did, miss.”

  She grabbed an uncorked bottle off the table by the lamp and splashed whiskey over the wound. The kid gave a long, ragged sigh, his eyelids fluttering as the busthead turned the wound to fire.

  “That’s about all I can do.” Dixie turned to the string bean. “Lonnie, run downstairs and stick the stove’s poker into the flames. Get it good and hot. Glowing. Then fetch it back here pronto.”