“Crap,” Dan said.
She groaned as he began to buck against her.
Edina groaned again, louder, and ran her hands through Dan’s hair as he went to work on her. Dan lifted his head from hers, grunted, and said, “Why, you are a little whore, aren’t ya?”
“Ain’t that what you wanted, Marshal?” Edina said, pulling him back down to her. “But then, you really prefer your momma, don’t you?”
Dan stopped bucking. “What was that?”
“Oh, come on, Marshal. Everyone in the whole county knows what you and your fat old ma do together in that little telegraph shack.”
The others snickered.
“Why, you little witch!” Dan slapped her hard.
Edina arched her back, reached up with both hands, and clawed his face. She dug her fingers into his eye socket. With a feral scream, she ripped out the lazy eye and tossed it onto the floor near Sartain, who wasn’t sure what it was at first until the marshal’s egg-shaped eye was staring up at him, trailing the thick, red, ragged thread of the optic nerve.
It still seemed to be staring off-kilter.
Dan clamped his hand over that eye socket and screamed so shrilly that Sartain first thought it was Edina screaming. But then he saw Dan’s head tipped back and the marshal’s mouth yawning wide and his entire body jerking on top of Edina’s.
“My eye!” he bellowed. “My eye! My eye! That little whore just ripped out my eyyyyye!”
Dan clawed his pistol out of the holster still strapped to his thigh.
“Hold on, Dan. You ain’t gonna kill her!” Yager shouted, ripping his own six-shooter from its holster and clicking the hammer back. “Not till I’ve had my turn!”
Dangerous Dan didn’t seem to hear Yager’s warning. He aimed his Bisley with his quivering right hand and had started to click the hammer back when Yager’s own Schofield bucked and roared.
Dan’s head jerked violently toward the far wall, which was simultaneously splattered with blood and brains issuing from where the bullet exited the town marshal’s right ear.
“Yager, you crazy son of Satan!” shouted the gray-eyed man whose own two pistols were suddenly in his hands.
“Now, hold on, Case!”
Yager raised his free hand in supplication, but Case shot him just the same. Yager stumbled back, cursing, and shot Case twice in the chest.
The redhead had his own pistol out and was waving it around as he bellowed, “Stop it! Stop it, you goddamn fools! All this over a girl?”
He hadn’t gotten that last out before Yager fell to the floor, cursed again, spitting blood, and shot the redhead.
“Oww! Oh, you crazy owlhoot!” the redhead shouted and fired.
His bullet flew far wide of his target and plunked into the ceiling support point so close to Sartain’s head that he felt the wind brush his hair.
Yager shot the redhead again, but his aim was failing as his life left and he merely blew out the redhead’s left kneecap.
That started the redhead bellowing anew as he fell to his butt on the floor, writhing, blood oozing from both his knee and his upper belly. He fired his pistol into the floor, rolled over, cursed loudly, and stopped writhing.
Blood pooled beneath him.
Sartain looked warily at Yager, half-expecting another bullet to be directed his way.
But Yager lay flat on his back. He’d been shot in the upper right chest, likely a lung shot. He continued to spit blood. He convulsed, choking on it. He slammed his boots angrily against the floor and breathed wildly for a time, spitting more blood, before he drowned on the blood in his lungs and suddenly stopped breathing altogether.
He turned his head to one side and lay still.
Silence fell over the cabin.
Sartain blinked against the wafting gun smoke. He wasn’t sure if what he’d witnessed had really happened or if he’d been hit one too many times, but then one of the dead men farted, and for some reason, his doubt was gone.
Edina lay belly-down on the bed, arms crossed over her head.
Now she turned to peer out from under her left arm. She slid her incredulous gaze around the room. She sat up, naked, blinking, coughing against the powder smoke, and looked around once more, dropping her bare feet to the floor and tucking her hair behind her ear.
She looked at Sartain.
The Cajun gave a dry chuckle. “Crazy bastards.”
Edina rose from the cot and walked over to drop to a knee beside Sartain. “Oh, crap, Mike. Look what they did to you.”
“Hell, I’m fine and dandy. How’re you doin’, sweetheart?”
“I’m doing all right.” Edina snickered as she glanced at the bloody eyeball staring up from the floor at her and Sartain.
Sartain chuckled again. “You got the bark on, girl. Remind me to never mess with you.”
“You can mess with me whenever you want, honey.”
Sartain swallowed the blood that had pooled on his tongue from a cut inside his mouth. “Sweetheart?”
She was looking around, shocked and fascinated by all the carnage. “Hmmm?”
“Would you mind untyin’ me?”
“Oh, sure, Mike. Sorry!”
Chapter 14
Edina untied Sartain and helped him onto the cot. He groaned, grunted, and cursed. He kicked Dangerous Dan’s slumped body off the cot, and Dangerous Dan hit the flour with a brief series of smacks and thuds.
The Cajun felt as though he’d been run over by a runaway ore dray moving down a steep slope at a fast clip. Fortunately, the pain was confined to his head and his ribs, though one shoulder was a little sore from being wrenched to his feet as a dead weight a few too many times. One eye was swollen nearly shut. As he ran his fingers across his face, he felt oily blood dribbling from several cuts and abrasions.
His lips had been split at least twice.
“You poor thing,” Edina said, crouching to inspect him. She patted his hand away and lightly probed him. “You need a good tending.”
“Sweetheart?”
“Yes, Mike?”
He’d just heard low growling, which had reminded him of the wolf pack that had been chasing them before they’d been set upon by the human wolves in the shack. “Best shut the door.”
Edina gasped and ran to the half-open door. She peered out, gasped again, and slammed the door.
“Don’t worry, I’ll feed ‘em soon,” the Cajun said, glancing at the dead men as he manipulated his lower jaw with his hand, making sure it wasn’t broken.
Edina put her torn frillies back on, then she went over to the corner of the cabin in which the dead men had piled their tack and possibles. From a warbag, she appropriated a dark green and brown plaid shirt that fit her like a gown. She returned to the cot with a canteen, a bandanna, and a flat hide-wrapped traveling flask. A large one. She shook it close to her ear and liquid sloshed around inside it.
Edina unscrewed the cap and threw back the flask. She sloshed it around in her mouth and swallowed. “Hmmm...not bad,” she said, extending the flask to Sartain. “Snort?”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
He took a long drink. She’d been right. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t his beloved Sam Clay, but it wasn’t bad. The whiskey had probably come from a labeled bottle, at least. It was a shame to waste the stuff on a man’s hide, but that was what Edina used a good bit of it for—soaking the cloth and cleaning the Cajun’s wounds.
While she did, she and Sartain took frequent pulls from the flask. The girl’s eyes grew shiny, and her cheeks turned as red as cherries. The racking pain in The Revenger’s head and body numbed considerably while he noticed a fuzzy glow stealing into the cabin filled with dead men and the coppery stench of blood.
Outside, the wolves howled, and the breeze scraped a branch against a window shutter. The outlaws had started a fire in the cabin’s small stove, but the flames had died. Edina added several feather sticks, reigniting the fire, and then chunked in a few pine and aspen logs.
Soon, the st
ove was ticking, and a dry heat stole around the little cabin.
Half-drunk, Sartain lay back on the cornhusk pillow at the head of the cot. Edina lay down beside him, curled against him, rested her head on his shoulder, and ran her hand down his chest and belly to his crotch. She snickered when she felt him come to life, then pulled him out and gave him a long, slow suckling that only added an improbable dose of magic to this day that had started off so terribly.
They slept entangled in each other’s arms.
When Sartain woke, soft green light was angling through the cracks in the shutters. The fire had nearly gone out again. He rose and chunked the last few logs onto it from the small box beside it. Edina curled into a tighter ball on the cot, groaning luxuriously as she slept with her hands pressed together beneath her cheek.
Sartain kissed her bare right foot and she tittered in her half-slumber. The Cajun reloaded his weapons from the outlaws’ stores and slipped quietly outside onto the rotting wooden walk fronting the door. He quietly racked a round into the Henry’s chamber and stepped out a ways from the shack.
The wolf howls had dwindled gradually while he and the girl had been making love and sleeping. Now as he looked around, pricking his ears, he saw no sign of them.
Gone?
He hoped so.
Cautiously, he stole around behind the cabin and found a stout stable that had obviously been built against possible wolf attacks. The outlaws’ four horses were inside. They’d heard and smelled the wolves, of course. They were stamping around owlishly, but they settled down considerably when The Revenger strapped feed sacks of parched corn to their snouts.
He made sure they had water and then he left, barring the log door behind him. At least two of the horses would prove handy tomorrow when Sartain and Edina continued their trek to Socorro, although he reflected that it might be best if the girl returned to her diggings instead.
He had a job to do in Socorro, and he didn’t want her to get any more deeply involved in his trouble than she already was.
Rifle held at the ready, Sartain looked around the cabin once more. Satisfied there were no wolves near—at least not within a half-mile or so—he returned to the shack and dragged the dead men out into the woods a good distance from the cabin one at a time with one hand, the other hand wrapped firmly around the Henry.
By the time that nasty job was done, the sun was down and the canyon was cloaked in deep shadow. Smoke issued from the shack’s brick chimney. Edina had obviously built up the fire again from the small woodpile abutting the shack’s rear wall.
Sartain went back inside to find the cabin warm and alive with the smell of a simple stew that the girl was cooking from a venison haunch, a potato, and an onion she’d found in the dead men’s possibles. The meal was as good as it smelled.
“What are you going to do now, Mike?” the girl asked after they’d eaten and had slacked back onto the cot. It was only about eight o’clock, but Sartain’s sundry aches and pains had lured him to bed early, and Edina was worn out too.
“Next?” the Cajun said, rolling a smoke from his makings sack. “Forward, my dear. On to Socorro.”
He scratched a match to life on his cartridge belt. The wolves had returned. Sartain could hear them out in the woods, snarling, growling, and yowling like banshees as they fought over the fresh carrion.
“You’re in no condition,” Edina told him.
“You’re a good sawbones, and I’m a fast healer.” Sartain lifted the flask to his lips and took a drink. “I feel better. I’ll feel even better come morning.”
He offered the flask to the girl, who waved it off.
“You need it more than I do. Especially if you’re still gonna take on Lucius Creed.”
“It’s the straw I drew, sweetheart.” Sartain took another sparing sip of the busthead. “How many does he have sidin’ with him anyway?”
“Oh, I don’t know. At least a dozen, I’ve heard. Maybe more.”
“And what’s the name of his saloon in Socorro again?”
“Lucius Creed’s Rio Grande Saloon, Whorehouse, and Gambling Parlor.”
“Humble little place, eh?”
Edina gave a dry snort. She turned to Sartain, beetling her brows. “Don’t go, Mike. You’re badly outnumbered. You’re a big, capable hombre, but you’re still only one man.”
“You want me to just give up and ride away? Let Creed continue to have his way with Sarah Mangham? Let him kill old man Mangham and his son? Because that’s what he’ll do if he’s not stopped.”
“It’s not your fight, Mike.”
“Yes, it is.”
Edina just stared at him as if trying to read a note written in some foreign tongue. “I just don’t get you. This revenge stuff—it’s like a religion with you, isn’t it?”
Sartain drew deep on the quirley and blew the smoke at the ceiling. “It is at that, honey child.”
She kissed his lips, placed her hand on his lower belly. “Isn’t there some way I can convince you to let Creed go...and you can come back to my diggings with me? I still own the shack and the mineral rights. It’s hard work, but we could make a nice life of it, you and me. You an’ me...a couple kids...”
She smiled enticingly.
Her hand was slowly massaging him, working his blood up.
Sartain leaned down and kissed her. “I got me a feelin’ we wouldn’t get much diggin’ done, Miss Edina.”
Smiling, she sat up, unbuttoned her shirt, and tossed it on the floor. “I got a feelin’ you might be right.”
An hour later, they lay naked together under the mountain lion skin, listening to the wolves and the scratching night breeze.
“Oh, Mike,” she said, wrapping her arms around his neck. “I miss you already!”
* * *
Just after noon the next day, Sartain swung the stout steel dust he’d appropriated from one of the dead men into the outskirts of Socorro—a bedraggled, ancient Mexican settlement scattered through the scrub brush and aspens along the Rio Grande just north of the inhospitable Jornada del Muerto.
The cool blue Magdalena Mountains humped in the western distance.
Sartain had traversed the southernmost shoulders of those mountains a couple of hours ago. His heart had felt heavy as he’d ridden away from the Jernigan cabin, for he’d said goodbye to Edina earlier that morning. He’d always felt forlorn saying goodbye and hitting the trail again, an affliction he attributed to never really having had a family or a home.
He supposed various people had been his home, but he’d never been able to hold onto any of them long either.
Now he rode past the barracks-like Catholic church of age-stained adobe ringed by peon’s shacks and capped by a vast, arching cerulean sky that made the walls of the church look all the more soiled. He scattered a flock of chickens as he swung off the main trail and pinched his hat brim to a couple of young Mexican boys playing in the yard of a small straw-roofed adobe hut shaded by a tall mesquite. He approached the town’s main street, which ran from north to south, from the west.
Soon, he reined up near a stable and windmill whose wooden blades creaked in the warm breeze. The Cajun swung down from the steel dust’s back and shucked his Henry repeater from the saddle scabbard. He smelled the spicy aroma of red pepper on the breeze and saw several chili ristras drying on a low adobe wall that ringed another small hut.
He ground-reined the steel dust, slipped its bit, and loosened its latigo. While the horse dipped its muzzle into the stock tank, drawing water, Sartain made his way toward the settlement’s business center. Ten minutes later, he strode through a cool, shaded break between two cracked adobe business buildings and held up near the front of the alley.
He stared out into the broad main street, which formed a slow curve to his left. He saw the building he was looking for to his right on the opposite side of the street: LUCIUS CREED’S RIO GRANDE SALOON, WHOREHOUSE & GAMBLING PARLOR.
It was a large, Spanish-style affair with arched window casement
s and a broad arched doorway boasting two stout batwing doors with two large winter doors drawn open beyond. A broad front gallery ran along the front of the place. As grand as it was, it didn’t appear to be doing much business. Sartain thought that was understandable, it being the middle of a weekday. Still, he’d expected to see a few more men around.
Especially since Creed was likely expecting a visit from the man out to kill him.
Or had the local crime boss had enough confidence in the men he’d sent after Sartain to be enjoying a siesta in one of the second- or third-story rooms, probably with a comely young puta?
Sartain looked around carefully. The entire main street appeared subdued. A businessman in a green apron was sweeping the boardwalk fronting his place, a farm wagon was parked in front of a mercantile, and a few horses switched their tails before a couple of saloons, but that was about the extent of the town’s activity.
Puzzling. Sartain had been half-expecting a welcoming party, if only in the form of arms-bearing men forming a protective ring around Creed’s saloon.
Was the man really that confident that he had nothing to worry about?
Sartain stepped out of the alley, muttering, “If you ain’t careful, Creed, you’re gonna hurt my feelings.”
He slowly racked a round into his Henry’s breach, off-cocked the hammer, and moved slowly along the street, heading for the lair of his quarry.
Chapter 15
Sartain paused behind an empty freight wagon parked in front of a small cantina directly across the street from Creed’s hotel and saloon.
He rested the Henry atop the freight wagon’s side panel, closed his free hand over the panel, and squeezed. He slid his gaze up and down the street, wary of a trap.
It had to be a trap. That was why he saw none of Creed’s men on the street. They were staying out of sight, waiting to take him unawares.
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