The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  Chapter 8

  The hand-painted sign leaning against the front wall of the undertaker’s adobe-brick shack read:

  FELLOW CHILDREN OF GOD, WILL YOU PLEESE CONTRIBUTE TO THE PLANTING OF THESE POOR FORESAKEN SOULS? IF NOT THERE GONNA STAY HERE AND ROT!

  Walking home at noon for lunch and to check on her injured father, Sarah Mangham had stopped to stare at the bodies in the plain pine caskets leaning up against the undertaker’s shack like so many had before. The sign was the same one that Wilbur Sanchez had used to beg money for the tending and burial of other men—and sometimes women—who had no families to provide for them in their final hour of need.

  The undertaker’s shop was on Sarah’s way home, so she often found herself studying the dead men who’d found themselves propped here. She did not think there was anything wrong with ogling dead men...and sometimes dead women. We were all of dust, after all, and who could not be both horrified and fascinated by examples of how we will all end up?

  She’d always rather enjoyed Wilbur Sanchez’s sign as well. It was a half-genuine request for money, half-threat. In the past, dogs had been known to tear off limbs from bodies that had lain there too long and deposit them in the yards or on the doorsteps of their horrified owners or their owners’ equally horrified neighbors.

  The stench from bodies that had putrefied in the summer sunshine could water the eyes of Silver City citizens from blocks away. From a half a mile away when the wind was right.

  A battered Stetson that had belonged to one of the dead men had been nailed crown-down on the deacon’s bench near the sign flanking the caskets. Already in the hat were several coins and one silver certificate.

  Sarah smiled.

  Not at the money in the hat, but at the three dead men displayed here side by side.

  The one in the worst shape was the man who’d forced himself on her first the other day in the storage room behind the mercantile. He’d been badly beaten, and there were several holes in his naked chest. The blood had been washed away, clearly revealing puckered blue wounds the size of nickels. There was another wound beneath his chin.

  His head was canted slightly to one side and down. It looked very light, as though everything inside it had been blown away. His gold tooth shone between his slightly parted lips.

  His eyes were a dull eggshell white behind half-closed lids.

  Sarah felt her burning anger relieved by a hard edge of satisfaction. Her jaw hardened as she clenched her fists at her sides and sneered, “I hope I was worth it, you sorry scudder.”

  She glanced at the other two men, both sightlessly staring into the distance beyond her. One had a look of horror on his stiff, twisted features. Sarah felt her mouth corners quirk with appreciation. She found herself looking around as though for the man responsible for her dead ravagers.

  She’d heard no official word on who’d killed them.

  But she knew.

  She playfully kicked a small rubber ball that some boy had left here on the boardwalk. Boys playing hooky from school especially appreciated Mr. Sanchez’s grisly displays. Sarah sauntered on up the street, feeling light and fresh and...what?

  Avenged.

  The feeling was no less poignant for all the years she’d been told by church ministers to turn the other cheek.

  Let them turn the other cheek after they’d been gang-raped.

  Sarah continued home and upstairs to her father’s room. She tapped lightly on the door. There was a raking sigh, and then Brian Mangham grumbled in a weary, impatient tone, “Come in.”

  “How are you feeling, Poppa?” Sarah frowned and looked around. “Where’s Mrs. Lonetree? She was supposed to be looking after you today.”

  Edna Lonetree was the Mangham’s nearest neighbor. She’d been married to a Ute who’d run away with the family’s cache of gold dust several years ago, leaving Edna alone to raise her goats and two half-breed children in a shack in a little aspen copse about a hundred yards south of the Mangham place.

  The half-breed children were gone. One had been shot robbing a Las Cruces bank. The other was in prison in Arizona. Edna lived alone. Some believed her a witch, for she rarely bathed and wore her grizzled hair clear down past her wide hips that were clad in dyed dresses sewn from animal hides and sackcloth. She often wove small animal bones into her hair.

  She was repeatedly seen dancing alone in her yard around large bonfires.

  “I sent her home.” Mangham peered over the book he was reading. He was propped up by his pillows. “I grew tired of her infernal belching, and that pipe was about to asphyxiate me.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Like I have three broken ribs.”

  “That’s not surprising,” Sarah said, walking over and placing a hand on her father’s forehead to check for fever. “The doctor said you have three broken ribs.”

  “And that’s how I feel. Loads and loads of work to do, on the verge of bankruptcy, and I’m sitting here, helpless...with three broken ribs.”

  “How’s the book?”

  Mangham slammed the heavy tome. “Too much description of whaling implements. If I wanted to know how to whale, I’d find a manual. I thought I was reading an adventure story!”

  “You’re just foul because you’re hungry. I will remedy that situation straightaway!” Sarah said, heading for the door.

  “Sarah, honey?”

  She stopped at the door, half-turned back toward her father. “Yes, Poppa?”

  “Your mood...it’s changed. Yesterday, you seemed distracted. Depressed. Today you seem light and full of joy...despite what happened to your dear old pa,” Mangham added dryly, regarding his daughter curiously over his sagging spectacles.

  Sarah smiled. “The men who so badly abused you are taking some sun out in front of Sanchez’s shop, Poppa.” She shrugged and frowned. “And...I don’t know. I just feel...optimistic about the future. Don’t ask me why exactly, but I do.”

  She cast her father another smile, blew him a kiss, and went downstairs to prepare a lunch of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. She delivered it along with his pain medication and waited while he ate. When he finished, she fluffed his pillows, poured him a brandy to help him sleep, and then took his tray downstairs.

  She was about to pump water into the sink and wash the dirty dishes when she glanced out the window and saw the arroyo that curved back behind the Mangham house. It was an inviting place to walk alone and woolgather or merely let her mind empty. The dry watercourse was especially nice this time of the year, with the aspen leaves falling and the tang of piñon smoke on the wind.

  She’d already decided that, since she didn’t want to leave their father alone here, Scott would have to look after the mercantile himself today. She’d send a boy with a note explaining that she was staying home, so she had time for a short, refreshing walk.

  Sarah grabbed her shawl, pinned up her hair, and stepped out the back door.

  Yesterday she had felt so heavy and tormented, not to mention in pain. While she still felt the physical pain, her light feeling had tempered it. Like she’d told her father, she was feeling optimistic about things now, though she couldn’t really put her finger on why.

  The three men who’d raped her and beaten her father were dead, but her family and family business were still under a definite threat.

  Sarah walked along the arroyo between pine-stippled banks. Strands of her hair blew in the wind. The shawl flapped about her shoulders. She pulled it tight across her chest. She drew deep draughts of the tangy, cool air and continued walking, feeling as though she could walk a long ways today.

  She thought about the man who’d saved her father and dispatched the men who’d savaged her. Thinking about him made her feel warm and secure inside. He was a man like any other, of course. Still, he wasn’t.

  She sensed that he was not a man like other men. She sensed that he was a man who could help them. After all, her father must have thought so, or he wouldn’t have brought the man h
ere in the first place though apparently, their first meeting hadn’t been altogether favorable...

  Sarah stopped walking. She stared straight ahead along the curving floor of the arroyo.

  She’d heard something. She heard it again now—the dull thuds of a walking horse. The thuds grew louder, and then she saw the very man she’d been thinking about riding a large buckskin stallion around a near bend, heading toward her. She recognized the sand-colored hat with its snakeskin band.

  She saw the ruddy-skinned man with the thick, dark-brown hair curling down from the hat to frame his broad, ruddy, handsome face with its deep-set cobalt eyes. His pinto vest stretched taut across his broad chest over a blue chambray shirt, and the large, handsome revolver bristled from the holster thonged on his right thigh.

  When he and the horse had cleared the bend in the arroyo, he reined up and sat studying her without expression. The wind chewed at his hair, rustled the red bandanna knotted around his neck.

  An automatic apprehension plucked at Sarah as her mind flicked back to the three strangers striding threateningly into the mercantile the previous morning. But then she also remembered how they’d appeared earlier, laid out against the front wall of Sanchez’s undertaking shack.

  She smiled and stepped forward. “Why, Mr. Sartain.”

  “Hello, Miss Mangham.”

  “Please, call me Sarah.”

  Sartain smiled as he rode toward her. Her own smile, the glow that fairly radiated from deep within her, warmed him. He hadn’t realized it, but he’d been worried about her—this young lady he hardly knew. This young lady who’d been so badly treated by Jurgens and the others, who’d appeared so low and burdened only a few short hours before.

  It warmed his heart to do what he’d done for her. Folks like her were why he was fogging the vengeance trail, after all.

  Sarah asked, “Did the beauty of the arroyo attract you, as well, or do you have other reasons for being out here this afternoon?”

  “I decided to take a ride and burn some of the stable green off of old Boss here,” the Cajun said, patting the neck of his fine, bright-eyed buckskin stallion. “And make my slow way to your house,” he added with a slightly sheepish air, narrowing one eye.

  “Did you want to see Poppa? I could take you to him, but he might be asleep by now. Just before I left the house, I gave him a pill for his pain and poured him a brandy.”

  “I reckon I could talk to you, Miss Mangham...if you’re not too afraid of me.”

  She looked away into a copse of half-naked aspens and then gazed up at him directly, frankly. “I’m not afraid of you, Mr. Sartain. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’m grateful to you.”

  Sartain swung down from the saddle. “Shall we keep walking?”

  “I’d love to.”

  Sartain threw Boss’s reins over a cedar shrub and then, as the horse lowered his head to crop broom grass, he and Sarah Mangham began strolling up the curving arroyo.

  “Poppa brought you here, didn’t he, Mr. Sartain?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Can I ask you why?”

  “To...uh...dispatch a man, as your pa would likely prefer to put it.”

  “Uh-huh,” Sarah said, nodding as she strolled. “And who is this man he wanted you to dispatch?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me.”

  Sarah glanced at him skeptically.

  “He wouldn’t tell me because I turned down the job. I don’t work for money, Miss Mangham. I work for free. As long as the job is a justified one and the person I’m sent to kill deserves to die. I thought your pa was well off. I don’t work for people who can afford to pay for their revenge.”

  “Hmmm” was all she said, staring straight ahead.

  “But he is no longer well off, is he?”

  Sarah suddenly stopped walking and turned to Sartain. “My father is a poor man, Mr. Sartain. He’s very proud and often refuses to admit that fact to himself. He’s not only cash-poor, but he’s badly in debt. If he sold the store and our stage company, we’d have just enough to get ourselves out of debt, but then there’s the matter of back taxes. After everything was sold, I’m afraid that Poppa, my brother, and I would be indigent. We’d likely have to move into one of the abandoned mine shacks that pepper the creeks around here. How we’d survive out there, I have no idea.”

  Sartain opened his mouth to ask her a question but closed it when she continued speaking, staring off in the direction they’d been walking, her smooth, pale cheeks flushed now with emotion.

  “He’s been brought to his knees by a Socorro businessman named Lucius Creed. Creed owns several mines in the Piños Altos. He acquired the money to buy those mines through very shady business practices, not to mention outright outlawry, and his so-called success has gone to his head. He’s had it in for my father ever since he moved into these mountains. Creed’s outlaws preyed on our stage line for years, keeping us on the verge of ruin. We’ve lost most of our shipping contracts, not to mention private passengers. Most have gone over to Creed’s line. Only a few weeks ago, in fact, two stage-station managers and one driver were killed from a bushwhack.

  “The mercantile suffers because we had to siphon income from that business to prop up our stage line, which we realize now was a mistake. When Creed had acquired enough plunder to buy several mines, he started his own Piños Altos Stage Line. It parallels ours, and he vowed to ruin my father’s business and run us out of these mountains unless...”

  Sarah let her voice trail off. Holding her skirts up against her ankles, she pensively kicked a stone with a side-button black shoe. She’d tightened her jaws, and her soft hazel eyes were as hard as stones.

  Sartain waited.

  Sarah glanced at him, sliding a stray lock of her dark-blonde hair behind her ear. “Shall we continue walking, Mr. Sartain?”

  “Sure.” The Revenger didn’t press the girl. He knew she’d get around to finishing that sentence.

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  After three strides, she kicked another stone and said, “Unless I agree to become Mrs. Lucius Creed.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Miss Mangham, do you mind if I cuss in your presence?”

  Sarah chuckled. “Go right ahead. I might look as pure as fresh-cut parlor roses, but I indulge in a blue-tongued diatribe now and then myself.”

  “Holy crap!”

  “Feel better?”

  “This Creed fella is demanding you marry him?”

  “I think he’s given up on that idea,” Sarah said. “Thus the unspeakable visit from those three men who are now resting in those crude wooden caskets out in front of Sanchez’s undertaking parlor.”

  “Thus the straight-out assault on your pa, too, I reckon.”

  Sarah stopped again, secured the vagrant lock of hair once more, and gazed up at Sartain. “I have no doubt that if you hadn’t been there to stop them last evening, Mr. Sartain, they would have killed Poppa. Eventually, they’d have killed me and my brother Scott too, and likely burned our mercantile to the ground. Probably our stage line barns and relay stations as well. What’s left of them.”

  “And they still will.”

  “Oh, yes, they still will unless Creed is stopped.” Sarah looked incredulously down at the ground, rocking back and forth on her heels. “Unless he is...”

  “Dispatched, as your pa would prefer to call it.”

  Sarah’s gaze climbed the big man’s frame to his eyes. Her gaze was beseeching. “Will you kill him, Mr. Sartain?”

  “Consider him dead, Miss Mangham.”

  “Sarah, please.”

  “And I’m Mike.”

  “Thank you, Mike.”

  “Shall we head back to my horse, Sarah? I believe I have a job to do.”

  “Certainly.”

  She took his arm as they retraced their steps along the arroyo.

  Chapter 9

  As the Concord stagecoach, badly in need of repairs, squawked and rocked
around him, and dust broiled in through the open windows, Sartain scratched a match to life on his cartridge belt and touched the flame to the long-nine jutting from between his pursed lips.

  “Good Lord, don’t tell me you’re going to add tobacco smoke to all this dust,” intoned the jowly old lady in a gaudy ostrich-plumed picture hat sitting catty-corner across from Sartain. “Tell me you’re not! Why, you’ll suffocate us all, including my darling child!”

  The old woman added this last while wrapping her large, protective arms around the pretty young brunette sitting beside her, directly across from Sartain. While the girl, whom the old woman had called Edina, was young and most definitely “darling,” she was no child.

  At least, Sartain had never seen a “child” with a dark-purple shirtwaist as well-filled as Miss Edina’s. And he’d never been cast by any “child” the furtive, brashly insinuating looks that young Edina had been intermittently shooting him ever since they’d rolled out of the Mangham Company’s Silver City Stagecoach Station either.

  No “child” had ever pressed her knees against his as young Edina had done several times during their hour-long trip so far, and then, dimpling her cheeks, glanced coyly out the window while her old aunt snored like a gandy dancer after a three-day bender.

  Young Edina looked at Sartain now from over her aunt’s thick arms, her lilac-blue eyes sparkling with humor. Sausage curls danced along the girl’s flawless suntanned cheeks. She had a little straw hat trimmed with fake berries pinned to her hair.

  Waifish, she had a pug nose and a dimpled chin. Here lilac eyes were long and almond-shaped, and so coquettishly alluring that Sartain had found himself lighting the cigar automatically without thinking about the prospective discomfort of his fellow travelers. They included a scrawny old bib-bearded man in raggedy prospector’s garb leaning back in the coach’s corner to Sartain’s right, by turns snoozing and ogling the comely lass now being fairly suffocated by the middle-aged woman’s ham-like arms and pillowy bosom.

  Sartain had heard the girl address the matronly lady as “Aunty Flo.”