“I bet they do.”
Sartain backed away to the south, Edina staying close beside him, swinging her head from left to right and back again. As they made their slow way into the woods carpeting the slope of the next ridge, Sartain could hear the wolves prowling around them, growling and snapping their jaws, the older ones occasionally nipping at the younger ones, evoking injured yelps.
They all wanted to be the first to bring down their two-legged feasts.
When Sartain and Edina were weaving their way through the firs and pines halfway up the next ridge, a wolf made a run for them, darting through a hawthorn shrub and keeping its cream-colored head close to the ground.
Its hackles formed a broad halo and the hard blue eyes glistened in the sunlight. The ivory-pale teeth shone beneath pulled-back lips.
Sartain whipped around, aimed quickly, and drilled a round through the beast’s head. It bounded up, twisted full around in the air, and landed with a heavy thump about ten feet short of the man and the girl. It panted twice, as loud as a bellows, then made a gurgling sound and heaved a last sigh.
“Mike!”
Sartain pumped another round into the Henry’s action as he whipped around and fired once more, clipping the leg of another beast making a run at them. It leaped a deadfall, then, yipping miserably, ran limping away.
Sartain looked around, holding the Henry straight up and down before him, index finger drawn back against the trigger. The woods appeared eerily empty, mottled with sunshine glistening on the fallen leaves. He couldn’t see the wolves, but he could hear them mewling and slavering just out of sight.
Occasionally, a shadow would dart through the trees and scrub, but by the time the Cajun got his Henry aimed, the beast was gone.
He and Edina gained the bald crest of the ridge. From here, they had a good view of the surrounding country—a vast lumpy blue-green carpet of mountain forest. In the northern distance, the jewel-like blue of a small lake shone. A pretty view, but a menacing one. Sartain could see nothing but more forest rolling away in all directions around him.
Far to the east was the broad Rio Grande valley in which he knew Socorro lay, a good thirty miles or more away. They’d never make it with the wolves dogging their heels.
Hell, they likely wouldn’t make another mile. The Revenger figured he had about six more shells left in the Henry. He had six and a shotgun round in the LeMat and two more in the derringer, but the derringer would be useless against the pack. He had nearly a full cartridge belt, but would the cocksure carnivores give him time to reload?
He sensed from the growing din and dancing shadows in the woods around him that they were getting ready to swarm him and the girl. If they did that, he and Edina would be nothing more than clean-licked bones before the next sun poked its head above the eastern mountains.
He needed high, defensible ground. He needed an outcropping from which he could pick off the wolves as they came after him until he discouraged the pack and they slunk off in search of more succulent quarry—an elk or a moose. He had a feeling those animals might be relatively rare, however. It being autumn, the prospectors in the area might have filled their keeper sheds with meat, thus thinning the herds for the wolves.
Meanwhile, the beasts were snarling and scampering through the woods along Sartain’s backtrail—savage ghosts of the mountain forest.
“Mike, I made a big mistake about the Jernigan cabin.” Edina was staring into the next valley with her hand on her head. Her lilac eyes were wide and round. “I got turned around!”
Sartain’s heart sank. “You mean we’re farther away than you thought we were?”
“No, we’re closer!” She thrust her arm out, pointing. “It should be right down there...somewhere! That’s Haystack Peak yonder. The Jernigan cabin sits at the bottom of Haystack peak just inside a feeder canyon.”
She started running down the slope. “Come on!”
“Hold on, girl!” Sartain glanced behind him once more to where the snapping of jaws could still be heard, then wheeled and followed Edina down the slope and into the forest that began about halfway down.
She was running hard, desperate to reach the safety of the cabin.
Sartain spied movement in the periphery of each eye. Wolves were dashing down the slope on a parallel course with the Cajun and the girl, bounding into the woods on either side of them. They were staying about fifty yards wide, but they’d no doubt close the gap once they reached the trees, which the first two beasts were doing now.
“Edina, hold up!”
She screamed and darted to her left. A beast was a blue and gray blur dashing toward her, snarling. Sartain stopped, raised the Henry, and fired.
The beast yipped as it twisted in mid-air before slamming hard into Edina, knocking her flat. Sprawled on top of her so that she was barely visible, the wolf quivered like it had been struck by lightning. It kicked its legs as though trying to run. As Sartain ran up to it, the beast fell still, staring sightlessly.
Edina groaned and shook her head slowly, squeezing her eyes closed.
Hearing more beasts running toward them, Sartain wheeled as he fired the Henry in a circle around him, holding the others at bay. Then he reached down, heaved the heavy, furry, stinky animal off Edina, grabbed her arm, and pulled her up and over his left shoulder.
He took the Henry in his other hand and started walking quickly down the slope. He thought he had two or three bullets left in the Henry. No time to reload. Once those were gone, he’d have to rely on the LeMat, though the forty-four wouldn’t do much good from long range. It might hold the wolves off for a short while, though.
The beasts quartering around him, Sartain hastened his pace through the forest. He could see a stream at the bottom of the valley and hear the glassy churning of the water along its stony bed. He looked around for the Jernigan cabin but saw nothing but a moss-pocked granite wall rising on the far side of the stream and more trees.
His heart was hammering. Chicken flesh had risen across his shoulders. He held his jaws taut in desperation, hearing the wolves closing on him to both sides.
Where in the hell was the Jernigan cabin?
Edina was out cold, a dead weight on his left shoulder.
Desperately, he looked around, breathing hard. Edina said the cabin was along a feeder canyon. In which direction? He flipped a coin in his head and started downstream.
The wolves were padding around him, snarling and yipping. One started howling, the eerie voice echoing around the canyon. A couple of wolves drew close, eyes aglow in the shadows of the forest.
Sartain raised the Henry and fired from his hip. With one hand, he couldn’t place his shots, and all three went wide but at least sent the wolves loping off into the forest. Another approached from the other side of the stream. Sartain squeezed the Henry’s trigger and chewed out a curse when the hammer pinged benignly on the firing pin.
Empty.
The wolf bolted forward and started across the stream, snapping its jaws.
Sartain dropped the Henry, hauled out his LeMat, and blew the beast into the water, where it flopped in a circle, continuing to snap its jaws and paint the rocks around it red.
The Cajun saw an opening in the craggy wall abutting the stream. He hurried toward it and followed a moldering wooden bridge across the stream and into an intersecting canyon rife with the smell of pine resin and mushrooms.
The wolves were behind him now, fanned out and loping. The beasts seemed to sense that without the Henry, their quarry’s firing range was drastically reduced.
Sartain swung around. He fired at one of the wolves, missing by a hair’s breadth, but he slowed the others down. He could see six or seven, with maybe one or two behind them splashing across the stream.
He turned and quickened his pace. Ahead, a cabin came into view, nestled in a clearing amongst scattered pines and half-naked aspens. It was a low-slung affair with moss furring its warped shake roof, its windows shuttered and the yard overgrown with weeds. A
small barn and stable flanked it, as did a pole barn housing an old ore wagon and longtoms and other mining paraphernalia.
Sartain could see the rubble of a mine high on the rocky, pine-peppered slope above the cabin. A rickety gray tipple stood at the edge of the spoil bank.
Sartain ran toward the cabin, wincing when he heard the menacing thuds of padded feet growing louder behind him. He stopped, wheeled, and emptied the LeMat’s forty-four shells as well as the twelve-gauge shotgun shell, killing one wolf and wounding another, which yowled sharply, and then continued running toward the cabin.
“Crap!” he rasped out, running, hearing the raking breaths of the beasts closing on him. “So damn close, but we ain’t gonna make...”
He let his voice trail off when one of the cabin’s shutters opened. A rifle was thrust out and it barked, blossoming flames. The rifle spoke twice more, evoking more yips and yowls behind Sartain, who’d paused when the shutter had flown open.
A man beckoned from the window. “Come on, I’ll cover you!”
The man levered his Winchester and continued hurling lead into the pack behind Sartain, who took off running again. When he was ten feet from the cabin, the door was thrown open from the inside and a second a man in a red-and-white checked shirt stepped out, beckoning with his rifle.
The first man continued firing from the window.
“Got an injured girl here!” said the Cajun as he ducked through the door.
He paused in the shadows, blinked against the heavy cigarette smoke. It was a small one-room shack broken up into vaguely separate areas. A gamey smell laced the tobacco smoke. A bed lay to the right behind a partly open blanket curtain. Sartain pushed through the curtain and gentled Edina onto the bed covered by a mountain lion skin.
The girl groaned. She’d been knocked cold, but she was coming around.
Footsteps sounded behind Sartain. He smoothed Edina’s hair back from her cheek and straightened.
“Sure am glad you fellas were here,” he said, turning. “We’d have been wolf bait. The girl could use—”
He stopped. The man standing before him was Dangerous Dan Tucker, who grinned. Then the Silver City lawman snapped up his Winchester and rammed the butt against Sartain’s right cheek.
A half-second before the world went black, Sartain heard the loud thud of his body hitting the floor.
Chapter 13
Cold water hammered his face, plucking him instantly from the warm darkness. He lifted his head, gasping, blinking the water, so cold it had to be straight from a cold stream, from his eyes.
“Haul him up!” ordered Dangerous Dan, who sat on the cot beside Edina, sort of jumping up and down, grinning, his lazy eye cast devilishly. “Haul him up and beat the holy hell out of the son of a bitch, but don’t kill him. I want Mr. Creed to have the opportunity should he so choose. That’d only be fittin’ and proper!”
There were three others. Two grabbed Sartain by his arms from behind and lifted him to a standing position though he was having trouble getting his knees to lock.
“You just can’t get enough of kissin’ ole Creed’s ass, can you, Dan?” asked one of the men—a bearded gent in a brown bowler hat and green neckerchief—who’d hauled Sartain to his feet.
“Shut up, Yager!” Dangerous Dan shouted, pointing. “If I want any crap out of you, I’ll knock you down and stomp on your head!”
Yager scowled at the Silver City lawman. The other two men laughed. Dangerous Dan laughed then too.
One of the three others stepped in front of Sartain. He had a long, jagged scar under his gray right eye. He winked at Sartain, then pursed his lips and drove his right fist into Sartain’s belly.
The Revenger, still dazed by the gun butt Dangerous Dan had rammed into his right cheek, wasn’t prepared for the onslaught.
The man’s fist drove so deep that Sartain, jackknifing as the air gushed out of him in a loud, anguished grunt, felt that the man’s fist had driven his gut back against his spine. He dropped to his knees, futilely trying to suck air into his lungs. He heard his own miserable groans as he tried to gulp air that just would not come.
Dangerous Dan laughed and clapped his hands.
As the other two men hauled Sartain back to his feet, the Cajun was vaguely aware of Edina making noises on the cot. Then the gray-eyed, scar-faced gent slammed his bony right fist into Sartain’s left jaw.
The other two released the big Cajun and he stumbled back and sideways. He fell onto the cabin’s eating table, breaking it and following it down to the floor.
“Crap, he ain’t so much!” yelled Dangerous Dan from the cot. “He ain’t so much, is he, boys?”
The Revenger felt himself being dragged up out of the rubble of the table. He was held upright while one of the others, a little red-haired gent with a spade-like chin from which tufts of red goat whiskers straggled, went to work on him with his hard little fists. He had a pinky ring, and Sartain felt it painfully gouge his jaw, causing blood to ooze.
The little man chuckled through his teeth as Sartain dropped once more.
Then they dragged him to his feet again. Sartain wasn’t sure which one went to work on him this time. The cabin swirled around him and his ears rang. His head felt as though he’d been worked over by a beefy, angry blacksmith wielding an awfully large hammer.
As the three toughs continued to beat him, letting him fall, hauling him to his feet again and then hammering him some more, he was vaguely aware of Dangerous Dan bouncing up and down on the cot.
No, not just on the cot.
He was bouncing his ass up and down on Edina, who was crying and groaning and trying to get away from the demented lawman. But she was pinned by the lawman on one side and the wall on the other side, so she had nowhere to go.
Sartain lived in an excruciatingly violent world of misery for a time, and then he found himself on the floor, blinking up at the ceiling. Dangerous Dan said, “I told you fellas not to kill him. You didn’t kill him, didja?”
Dan’s mustached face with his mean little brown eyes set beneath the brim of his cream Stetson stared down at Sartain. “Dammit, I told you not to...oh, he ain’t dead.” Dan prodded Sartain’s ribs with his boot toe. “You ain’t dead, are ya, Mr. Revenger?”
That lazy eye wandered toward the outside of its socket like a brown marble suspended in fluid.
Dan laughed. “Nah, he ain’t dead.”
“Should we continue?” asked the little red-haired man with the nasty pinky ring.
“Hell, no, you shouldn’t continue! I told you not to kill him. If you continue, you’re gonna kill him. Tie him to the post there.”
Dan turned and walked away from Sartain. “Hey, little girl where you think you’re goin’?” the lawman bellowed in a mocking tone.
Sartain couldn’t see the man any longer, but he heard the sounds of a violent struggle.
“Let me go!” Edina cried.
“You just lay back down there,” Dan said. “I aim to dip my wick in you, little girl. See what them boys from Crow Mountain have been crowin’ about!”
He laughed in delight at that.
Sartain struggled against the men dragging him across the floor, but to no avail. He was only half-conscious. There were two cabins and two sets of owlhoots revolving around him, nearly disappearing in shadows as unconsciousness swept up to brush at the Cajun’s tender, throbbing brain.
A thicker shadow of unconsciousness descended on him, then lifted.
Suddenly, he was sitting with his back to a ceiling support post, near the broken table. His hands were tied behind him around the post. He was facing the cot where three of the outlaws, including Dangerous Dan, were hovering over the struggling girl. The fourth man, Yager, stood back a ways, smoking a cigarette and staring coolly down at the struggle.
“Get her frillies off, boys!” Dangerous Dan said, straddling the girl’s legs.
“Leave me be, you cowardly bastards!” Edina screamed.
Her scream was like a bracing sla
p to the Cajun. He hardened his jaws and pulled against the support post. Nothing doing. He was trussed up tight, and the post was stout.
“Let her go!” Sartain raked out. He kicked out with his boots, but he was too far away to hit anyone. “Let her go, dammit, or I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” asked Dangerous Dan, laughing. “You ain’t in no position to do nothin’ but watch!”
He laughed again as the other two men ripped Edina’s underwear off.
The redhead stepped back from the cot and wadded up her panties. “Look here, I think I can get these little frillies tucked inside one cheek!”
He stuck the frillies in his mouth. No one else seemed to be paying attention to him, however, so he spat them out. Sartain saw Edina’s bare legs kicking.
“Hold her arms,” Dangerous Dan said, opening his pants.
There was another brief struggle, then Edina seemed to relax against the cot and said, “No reason to hold my arms. Come on, fellas—I was just makin’ it more fun, that’s all. You all know how much I like it. You heard the stories.”
Dangerous Dan stared down at her skeptically. The other men turned to him, frowning.
“All right,” the lawman said. “Let her go.” He chuckled as he wrestled his pants down to his knees and mounted her. “You try anything, you little viper, I’ll slap you so hard you’ll never get your head back straight on your shoulders, understand?”
“I understand,” Edina said with a coquettish air. “Now, you gonna get on with it or keep a girl waiting? Besides, these other fellas are gonna want their shot when they see how much fun you’re gonna have, Marshal.”
She was a good actress. At least, Sartain thought she was acting.
She had to be...didn’t she?
The other three stepped back but stayed close, watching, their faces flushed with eager anticipation.
“Damn, that’s a fine-lookin’ filly there,” Yager said, smoking to Sartain’s right. “I get her next.”
“I do,” said the gray-eyed man. “I done already told Dan.”
Yager cursed then returned his eyes to Dangerous Dan, who lowered himself into the naked girl’s outstretched arms. Edina spread her legs wide and lifted her bare feet. “You’re better lookin’ up close,” she told the marshal, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him. “Even with that funny eye.”
The Revenger Page 83