Scott said, “I learned that Creed is dying of cancer, so instead of throwing in with him, I became him. It was me who’s been having your men killed and your stations burned.”
Brian Mangham moved his mouth, but no audible sounds came out. His leathery neck, cheeks, and ears were bright red.
Scott laughed. “I knew Creed would be blamed. Naturally, he’d be blamed, since he’d started the process of driving you out, not to mention demanded Sarah’s hand in marriage. But then the old owlhoot learned he was full of bone cancer.
“I learned this from his sawbones when I went down to consult with Creed a few months ago. Ran into Doc Munich in a Socorro whorehouse, drunk and chatty as usual. That was when I came up with my plan. Only, you went and made the desperate move of bringing in Sartain to kill Creed. The Cajun probably knows by now that it wasn’t Creed coming after you lately, but it’s doubtful he’ll ever know it was me. Because you see...”
“Scott, Scott...for god sakes, what’re you doing?”
“We’re taking a little side path, Poppa.”
“Scott, Scott, please, I can’t...”
Young Mangham had taken his father’s arm and was leading him out of the arroyo by a narrow game path. The old man dropped his cane. He was stumbling now, throwing his free arm out for balance but nearly falling. He was wheezing, gasping, cheeks and ears crimson.
“Scott, no—please! You’ve gone mad. Mad!”
Scott dragged the old man to the edge of a steep hill.
“The old man went for a walk. Never should have gone out alone in his battered, frail state, but he must have gotten disoriented.”
Scott drew the old man closer to the edge of the hill. It was a good hundred feet of nearly sheer drop punctuated by rocks and spindly cedars. A kid might survive the fall. Not an old man.
“This could have been finished the other night if Sartain hadn’t shown up!”
“Oh, my God. It was you who sicced those men on me?”
Scott laughed giddily. “I told ‘em to scare Sarah, not ravage her, but that’s what they did, all right.” He laughed again. “Prim bitch deserved what she got. I wouldn’t doubt she enjoyed it. Prob’ly her first time!”
“Sarah—ravaged?” Old Mangham raked it out through a low scream. “My God, what kind of an animal did I raise?” He struggled desperately, digging the toes of his brogans into the dirt and gravel, flailing at his son with his black-gloved fists. “Scott!”
“Goodbye, Poppa. Out with the old and in with the new!”
Scott swung around and hurled the old man over the lip of the ridge.
Old Mangham screamed as he fell.
Chapter 18
Sartain almost felt sorry for leaving the lonely old dying outlaw in Socorro.
Creed had obviously been desperate for a new friend. Unfortunately, his only new friends would likely be the worms he was destined to visit soon, six feet underground.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your perspective on a known killer.
Sartain rode as hard as he dared push his already tired horse. He camped that night in the mountains, sleeping restlessly, going through everything he knew about Mangham’s situation in his head. He kept remembering that familiar voice he’d heard after Dangerous Dan’s men had ambushed Edina’s Aunty Flo, the stage driver, and the old prospector who’d been on his way back to Australia.
Familiar, but hard to identify.
He rode into Silver City mid-morning of the next day. Several things had become clear to him during his long, hard ride up from Socorro, but he needed straight answers.
To that end, he hurried over to Aunt Irma’s place, sitting catty-corner to Mangham’s mercantile. As he swung down from his tired horse, he saw Sarah Mangham standing on the mercantile’s front porch staring off to the east. What she saw there, Sartain couldn’t see. He couldn’t see the girl’s face from his vantage either, but the set of her shoulders told him she was troubled.
He almost headed over to her, but then he saw Emmanuelle standing on the balcony outside her room, staring in the same direction. Sartain knocked on the whorehouse door but didn’t wait for a response. He threw the door open and marched into the foyer.
He could hear Aunt Irma talking with several girls in another part of the house, so he headed quickly upstairs. He knocked once on Emmanuelle’s door and went in.
The pretty French doxie was standing in the balcony doorway, facing Sartain but staring down at the floor. The room was shadowy and smoky. A cigarillo smoldered between the first two fingers of the girl’s right hand. She didn’t seem aware of Sartain’s entrance until he said, “Emmanuelle?”
Jerked from her spell, she snapped her eyes to his. “Mike!”
He moved forward. “You said things are complicated here.”
She came toward him, stopped before him, and stared worriedly up at him. “A good whore doesn’t speak of a town’s secrets without risk of being tarred and feathered, mon cher. But in this case, Scott Mangham...he’s...”
She turned her head slowly toward the balcony.
“Scott!” Sartain said. “That’s whose voice I heard the other night. Where is he?” Mangham had been part of the ambush but then he’d likely headed back to town, confident that Dangerous Dan and the other three men would finish the Cajun off.
“I think he’s heading to their house...the Mangham house. He isn’t well, Mike. I think he’s...”
“All right!” Sartain ran out of the room and down the stairs.
Outside, he swung up into the saddle. As he pulled the horse away from the hitch rack, Sarah Mangham came out of the mercantile, frowning at him. Sartain rode over to her.
“Mike, you’re back.” She still looked worried, hugging herself. The morning breeze rustled her hair and pushed against her long tan gingham skirt.
“Sarah, did you talk to Scott a few minutes ago?”
“Yes, I did. And he has me worried.”
Sartain drove his horse up close to the porch and said, “Climb on. I think your pa might be in trouble!”
Sarah didn’t hesitate or ask any questions. She strode to the edge of the porch, accepted The Revenger’s offered hand, and dropped down onto the saddle behind him.
Sartain drove spurs against the horse’s flanks. As tired as it was, the beast bounded into a hard gallop, weaving around wagons and foot traffic along the street, heading east and then south. The Cajun put the horse up the circular driveway, reined to a halt in front of the house, and started to swing his right foot over the pole of his horse.
A man’s rattling scream sounded.
Sarah gasped. Sartain dropped his right foot back into the stirrup and looked around. The scream rose again. It seemed to originate behind the house.
“The arroyo!” Sarah yelped.
Sartain neck-reined the horse and galloped around the house and into the arroyo behind it.
“Scott!” He heard Mangham scream. “Scott, you’re mad!”
Sarah dug her fingers anxiously into The Revenger’s waist. “Oh, God, what’s happening? What is he doing?”
Sartain followed the fresh tracks along the arroyo’s soft sand and gravel. He could make out the indentations of a cane. Suddenly, the tracks veered hard to the right, and there was the cane, lying in the shrubs of the bank near a narrow game path leading up out of the arroyo.
“Good-bye, Poppa!” Scott Mangham shouted in a voice pitched high with insanity. “Out with the old and in with the new!”
“Christ,” Sartain said as he galloped straight out away from the arroyo.
The ground slanted down. He and Sarah galloped between two tall pines and there was Scott Mangham, crouched at the edge of a steep hill falling away to another creek bottom through which a slender brown stream curved.
Scott was leaning out over the side of the hill, arms thrown wide for balance. He was stomping his right foot down hard.
“Good-bye, Poppa! With the money I skimmed off your dying business, I’ll be able to buy...”
Scott must have heard the hooves of Sartain’s galloping horse. He turned his flushed face toward the Cajun and his sister riding behind him.
“Consarn it!” Scott cried, reaching into a coat pocket.
Sartain checked the horse quickly, dust wafting around him, the horse blowing hard.
“Hold it, Scott!”
The Revenger clawed the big LeMat from its holster.
“Scott!” Sarah screamed.
Scott extended what appeared a pearl-gripped, silver-chased pocket pistol.
Sartain extended the LeMat and fired. Scott Mangham jerked violently and fired his little pistol into the air. The report was little louder than a branch snapping. He looked down at the bloody hole in his chest, his eyes wide and sharp with terror.
“No!” he cried, stumbling backward over the brow of the hill.
He spread his arms and dug his half-boots into the ground as though to maintain his balance. His eyes grew wider and sharper with even more terror, and then he fell straight back out of sight.
Sartain swung his right boot over his saddlehorn, dropped to the ground, and ran to the edge of the hill.
Scott was rolling down the hill, bouncing, his brown frock coat flapping and a string tie whipping around his neck. Rocks, gravel, and dirt tumbled in his wake. His bowler hat followed his descent until it hung up against a scrub cedar.
Scott kept rolling, jouncing hard and kicking up dust until he landed with a muffled thud at the bottom of the canyon, belly-down, arms stretched across the little stream.
Sartain had been only half-aware of Scott’s fall. His attention had slid to Brian Mangham lying against the side of the hill, about six feet down from the lip. He was clinging to a small scrub cedar with one red hand. The tree was bending sharply.
The bark was cracking, and the roots were starting to bubble up out of the ground.
The old man stared up in horror at Sartain. Fresh cuts oozed blood from his cheeks and lips.
Footsteps sounded behind the Cajun. “Poppa!” Sarah screamed.
“Hold on, Mangham!”
Sartain crabbed sideways down the steep slope, ramming the sides of his boots into the dirt. Rocks and gravel slid out from beneath his feet. He slipped and slid down the hill for several feet but managed to dig his right hand and boot into the ground and gain purchase, albeit a precarious one.
He wrapped his left arm around Mangham’s right arm and shoulder.
“Let go.” He grunted. “I got you!”
At least, he hoped he did.
Mangham shook his head fatefully and released the cedar just as the roots came up out of the ground. The cedar tumbled down the hill while Sartain dug his boots into the dirt and gravel. With a loud groaning grunt, he heaved himself and Mangham up the slope.
Mangham was a dead, heavy weight on his left arm, which felt as though it were about to spring from its socket. Sartain raised his head, opened his mouth, and bellowed savagely as he hoisted himself and the old man up and over the brow of the hill, where Sarah waited on her hands and knees.
“Oh, Christ!” Mangham bellowed when Sartain released him. He lay on his stomach, blowing like a calf rescued from quicksand.
“Daddy!” Sarah cried, crouching over her father while Sartain rolled onto his back and drew deep drafts of air into his lungs. “Oh, Poppa. Are you all right?”
Mangham rolled onto his side. His battered face was swollen and red, his eyes rheumy. He’d lost his glasses, but he stared down into the canyon and with a stricken air, he said, “No. No, I’m not all right. That’s my son down there!”
Sarah threw her arms around the old man and bawled into his shoulder.
* * *
“You know, Emmanuelle, this would have gone a whole lot easier for everybody if you’d told me what Scott Mangham was up to during our first night together,” The Revenger told the lovely French parlor girl that night in her dim, perfumed boudoir warmed by a cozily crackling fire.
He lay upon the bed.
She lay beside him, angled toward him, sipping a glass of brandy.
“I would have, Mike, if I’d put it all together. He visited me from time to time and bragged about his...business endeavors, as he called them, but it was mostly innuendo. I knew he was up to something bad, and I sensed it concerned his father and sister, but it was only today I realized how bad it really was.”
She shook her head sadly. “I’m so sorry about what happened to Sarah and her father.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
“They are better off now, though. No?”
“Yeah, I reckon.”
She smiled. “And you are better off now too. No?”
Emmanuelle smiled.
It made Sartain’s whole body smile back.
“Oh...yeahhh.”
She frowned as she looked up at him again. “Why, Mike? What could have caused him to do something so bad?”
“What causes anyone to do bad things? Greed. Plum meanness. And I reckon for some reason, he felt like a third wheel on the Mangham wagon. Maybe he was closer to his mother, and she’s dead. Sometimes that’s what it all comes down to. Who we lose, what we end up with.”
Emmanuelle sipped her brandy, then swallowed. The firelight played in her thick chocolate curls. “What did he hope to gain?”
“Creed’s business, I guess. Figured it would go for pennies and horse water after ole Creed kicked off.” Sartain shook his head. “Imagine using the money he stole from his father and sister to buy his father’s worst enemy’s business.”
“Plum mean, I guess, eh, mon cher?”
“Plum mean. Plum broken, too, I reckon. I reckon there’s part of me that feels sorry for him.”
“Where will you go now, Mike?”
“Wherever I’m needed. But let’s not worry about that, eh, Emmanuelle? We still got tonight, and you know the old Creole expression: ‘A minute can be as sweet as an hour in the right place at the right time...with the right person’?”
“Mhmmm.” She smiled. “But that is a French expression.” She smiled more broadly. “Do you mean me?”
Sartain smiled back at her and caressed her cheek with the back of his hand. “Right now, I’m just gonna enjoy this time right here...before I have to figure out how I’m going to pay Aunt Irma for these hours. She’ll likely be putting me to work come morning. I’ll be greasing every hinge and repairing every broken window shutter on the premises. Probably digging a new privy pit or two.”
Emmanuelle touched her nose to Sartain’s. “A minute can be as sweet as an hour, Mike.” CSW
NO MERCY
Chapter 1
“Hell’s bells on the Sabbath. Sounds like the world’s comin’ apart at the seams!” exclaimed Abner Fieldhouse, lifting his head from a nicely rounded pair of pale, tender breasts. “Sounds like the mother of all summer storms, but there ain’t a cloud in the sky!”
The young man, who’d turned nineteen two days ago, stared through the timber of the hill that he and Miss Ellen Hobbs had been frolicking upon, far from the prying eyes of Ellen’s father, the Reverend Abraham Hobbs, and the rest of the persnickety town of Shallow Ford, Nebraska Territory.
Ellen gasped. She snapped the skirt of her dress over her legs. She grabbed her corset and pulled her frilly camisole and the pale blue top of her dress over her chafed bosom. “Oh, my God! It’s Father!”
“Not unless your father is sendin’ a whole posse after us,” Abner said, rolling off the pretty young brunette, tucking himself back into his pants and buttoning his fly.
The ground reverberated with the thunder of many galloping horses. The din was growing louder as the riders approached from the east, likely hammering along the trail that ran the brow of the hill, roughly a hundred feet above where Abner and his betrothed lay in the aspens and cottonwoods, still panting from desire, although their anxiousness about the riders was starting to claim the effect.
“It’s Father. I know it!” Ellen said, sitting up and hastily buttoning her dr
ess. “He’s sent the sheriff and a whole posse after us!”
“It can’t be the sheriff, honey,” Abner said, scrambling to his feet and running down the hill to where his and Ellen’s horses were tied along a little stream. “That’s why I’m wearin’ the star today. The sheriff’s out of town collecting taxes. Besides, Bill Mitchell ain’t gonna come after us with a whole posse, Ellen.”
“If Father sicced him on us, he would!”
Abner grabbed his old Spencer .45/70 carbine from where he’d leaned it against a tree and ran back up the hill. He paused to peck his girl on the cheek and to squeeze her arm reassuringly.
“Nobody sicced no one on us, Ellen. No one knows where we are much less what we been doin’. Besides, I don’t think what we’re doin’ is worth a whole posse, now, do you? We’re fixin’ to be married in two months anyways!”
He gave an ironic but reassuring chuckle.
Ellen’s round brown eyes were glassy with fear. She hadn’t bothered with the corset but was hastily trying to button her dress over the fullness of her bosom. “Father certainly would think what we’re doing is worth a posse, Abner. We’ve been doing just terrible things for months now!” Her expression softened a little. “Admittedly fun things, but terrible things just the same!”
The young man chuckled again. “You just relax and stay down while I go and see who them riders are. They’re probably drovers cut loose with a month’s worth of wages burning holes in their pockets and heading for Shallow Ford. If that’s the case, I’d best get back and keep an eye on ‘em.”
Abner started climbing the steep hill, crouching, holding the Spencer in one hand. Behind and below, his horse, Wichita, lifted a screeching whinny. Abner stopped and wheeled. He waved angrily. The horse stared up the hill at its rider, anxiously switching its tail.
Ellen’s cream switched its tail edgily but held its tongue.
The roar of the approaching riders was growing louder.
Abner continued climbing the hill. When he was twenty feet from the trail running along the hill’s crest, he saw the silhouettes of the riders through the trees on his right. They were coming hard and fast, passing just beyond the woods, their shadows flickering.
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