“Fine, fine, Mr. Sartain,” said Van der Deutsch. “I’ll have Mercy build up the fire and fish my bottle out of my war bag.”
“I’m not your slave, Pa,” the girl snapped at her old man.
“Oh, but Mercy, honey, can’t you see my ankle here is swelled up to the size of a small mountain?” Van der Deutch beseeched the girl in a thin, wheedling voice.
“Fish that liquor out your own self,” the girl said as she continued whittling. “I don’t care if you have to crawl for your firewater. Ma wouldn’t, neither. In fact, she’d probably shoot you if she seen you drink it!”
She looked at Sartain, and a flash of savage delight sparked in her eyes behind the dancing strands of her tangled hair.
“Mercy,” mused The Revenger, turning and leading his horse off toward where the Van der Deutch’s mounts were picketed near a chuckling stream. “That’s a right fittin’ name.”
Van der Deutch roared.
The coyote answered him.
* * *
When Sartain had tended and picketed Boss, he returned to the camp hauling his saddle, saddlebags, bedroll, burlap-wrapped venison haunch, and rifle scabbard housing his prized Henry repeating rifle.
It was almost dark now. By the flickering firelight, Ludwig Van der Deutch appraised the Henry from where he sat against his log.
“Say, that’s a fine-lookin’ shootin’ iron, there, Mr. Sartain. Mind if I take a look?”
“Why not?”
The Revenger set his gear down on the far side of the fire from the old man. His daughter watched him warily from where she sat on her stump to the old man’s left. She’d put down the stick she’d been shaping into the form of a blue heron, but the big knife jutted from a sheath thonged to her left thigh.
She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, hands entwined, watching the big Cajun wolfishly, as though daring him to do something untoward with the rifle.
“You can pull your horns in, Miss Mercy,” Sartain apprised as he slid the rifle from the scabbard. “Just gonna hand this over to your pa, that’s all.”
The girl didn’t say anything.
Her father grinned as though in admiration of the girl. “She does sort of make a man nervous, don’t she? After all these years, she even makes me look twice before I head out to the privy at night. Never know when she’s gonna mistake me fer an interloper and blow me to hell an’ back!”
“Don’t doubt it a bit,” Sartain replied.
“Say, that is a fine shootin’ iron,” Van der Deutch said as he accepted the Henry from the Cajun.
He ran his hands down the smooth walnut stock and the scrolled receiver. He lifted the gun high and turned it slightly to inspect by firelight the coiled ivory diamondback carved into the rear stock and whistled. “Say, who did that?”
“I don’t know who did for sure. I won the rifle in a poker game a few years back. One of the few things I’ve ever won playing poker. The guy I won it from was a sore loser. All he told me was that some fancy gunsmith carved it back in some little town around St. Louis.”
Van der Deutsch held the rifle close to his chest and looked at The Revenger cunningly. “What would you take for it?”
Sartain shook his head. “You don’t have enough, Mr. Van der Deutsch. No one does. I’ll likely be taking the long gun to the grave. We’ve been through a lot together.”
Sartain thought of the soldiers he’d taken down with the Henry as well as his LeMat—the five federal soldiers whom he’d once ridden with but who’d murdered his girl, Jewel, and their unborn child, not to mention the girl’s old prospector grandfather, back in the Arizona Territory.
“No, we been through a lot together, that gun an’ me.” The Cajun pulled the burlap-wrapped venison quarter out of his piled gear and handed it to the girl. “How ‘bout if you cut that up and roast it while I tend your old man’s foot?”
The girl accepted the pouch cautiously, like a wolf skeptical of a baited trap, scowling at the big Cajun from under her brows.
“You a doctor, Mr. Sartain?” asked Van der Deutsch, handing the Henry back to its owner.
“Me? Nah. But I’ve set a broken bone or two. Mostly, my own.”
“Have at it, then, I’d be obliged. Hurts like the infernal fires of hell.” He nodded to a tin cup sitting on the ground near the campfire. “Oh, and...uh...I managed to coax Mercy into pourin’ us each a glass of the devil’s blood.”
He lifted his speckled tin cup to his lips with a grin and sipped.
“Just one for you, old man,” Mercy cajoled the old-timer, as she deftly sawed away at the venison haunch with her big knife. “Mr. Sartain’s soul is his own business, but yours is mine.”
She curled her mouth and flared a nostril at that.
But she did not stick to her threat. In fact, every time the old man held his cup out to the girl, she splashed whiskey into it. As she did, she glanced at Sartain and curled her mouth again in that oblique way of hers, her green eyes flashing in the firelight.
Only later, after they’d eaten the roasted venison and old Van der Deutsch had passed out, and Sartain and the girl had turned in for the night, did he realize what she was up to...
Chapter 4
Abner Fieldhouse opened his eyes, expecting to see himself swathed in the gauzy white of a cloud with an angel perched in the air nearby, strumming a golden harp.
He blinked. His vision stayed blurry.
Somewhere inside the cottony cloud, he saw two indistinct shapes. The sound he was hearing didn’t sound like a harp. He’d heard a harp once in an opera house in a Rocky Mountain mining camp, when he was just a kid and tagging along from one camp to another with his prospector father in the years after his mother had passed from scarlet fever back in Dakota Territory, where his family had lived once, in happier years.
As Abner stared at the two gauzy shapes, the shapes began to clarify gradually. The strumming stopped. The two figures moved closer to him until they clarified more and merged into only one, only slightly blurred shape.
They merged into the heart-shaped, fair-skinned face of a pretty brown-eyed girl with long, dark-red hair and a small mole just to the right of her small nose. She had a heavy chin, but the irregularity only added to her prettiness.
Miss Angeline smiled and placed a hand on Abner’s cheek. “You’re alive. Not only alive, but you’re awake.”
Abner looked down to see that the instrument in her hands wasn’t a harp but a mandolin. He lifted his head in surprise to see both the girl and the mandolin instead of an angel and a harp, but a dozen or so rusty railroad spikes of misery ground into his bones and muscles.
He lay back, sucking air through his teeth. “Ah, crap!”
“Hurt, does it?”
“Where am I?” Abner raked out, glancing around the small room in which a single, small stove ticked in a corner and realizing where he was at the same time Miss Angeline said, “You’re fine. You’re at Mamie’s Place. The doc’s dead—shot in the street like a dog by those savages—so I told them to carry you over here, and I’d tend you.” She pressed her tender lips to his cheek. “The least I could do after what you did for me.”
She smiled and gently smoothed the young man’s hair back from his forehead.
“Imagine you worry about a whore at a time like that,” she spoke softly.
“What happened?” Abner queried, not quite remembering.
But even as he asked the question, he remembered the screaming and shooting and the dead townsfolk lying twisted in the street. He remembered Ramon Lazaro walking out of the bank with a pair of bulging saddlebags draped over his shoulder.
He remembered planting the sights of his old Spencer repeater on the head of the man who’d been treating Miss Angeline so terribly.
And then he remembered all the revolvers and rifles aimed at him, blossoming smoke and flames.
He tensed as burning pain washed through him, causing him to grind his molars.
Miss Angeline was telling him about the
Lazaro gang, but he only vaguely heard her as all those images swept through his mind on the tide of the tearing, burning sensations inside him. Ellen’s face floated up from behind all those other images, and it was as if the girl he’d promised to marry had slapped him sharply across the face.
Automatically, groaning at the intensifying pain, he sat up and shouted, “Ellen!” He looked at Miss Angeline, who’d jerked her head back away from his with a shocked look. “Where’s Ellen?”
He’d told her to stay where he’d left her, in the ravine by the stream. But he hadn’t gone back to her.
Was she still there?
“Oh,” Miss Angeline said, shaking her head slowly. “Oh, no, honey. You need to lay back and rest.”
“Miss Angeline,” Abner said, “where’s Ellen? I left her down by the creek, and...”
Abner stopped. He stared at the girl who seemed to be staring right through him.
Her voice grew small and far as she said, “Please, Abner...lay back and go to sleep. I’m going to go downstairs and fetch something from Mamie to help you go back to sleep.”
Abner grabbed the girl’s arm. He sat up straighter, ignoring the tearing and pulling pains inside him.
“Ellen...”
“Honey.” Miss Angeline threw her arms around him, sobbing. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry, but Ellen has passed!”
He knew from Miss Angeline’s sobbing that it was true. Yet, it couldn’t be true. He’d left her in the ravine. He’d told her to wait there until he came back for her.
Sobbing, Miss Angeline said, “Oh, Abner, honey. They must have found her along the road. They rode back to the east when they left town. She must have been riding to town from that direction. I saw you both leave town. I’ve always seen how you left...one before the other, always in different directions, but I knew what…”
The young whore made a face and shook her head, as though to haze her mind back to the topic at hand. “They must have found her...along the road...because that’s where Marshal Mitchel and the rest of the posse found...oh, Abner, you must stay in bed. You were shot seven times!”
Abner had shoved the girl away as he’d dropped both bare feet to the floor.
“Shot,” he rankled in exasperation. “Seven times?”
He swept the bedcovers off him and stared down in horror at the bandage wrapped around his belly. There was another around his left thigh, yet another wrapped at an angle over his left hand, covering his little finger. But then he realized that his little finger wasn’t there. All that was there was one of those fierce burning sensations that all added up to a fully stoked furnace of pain inside him.
“Most of the bullets went right through you, Abner. Most were grazes nipping your sides, but you still have one inside. Neither me nor Mamie or even Miss Dawn, whose pa was a sawbones, could get it out and we thought it best to just leave it there.”
Abner glanced down at the little, pale hand that Miss Angeline had placed low against his right side, about six inches above his hip. A deep fire burned there. Pressing it out of his mind, Abner shoved the young redhead away again, and, using the back of her upholstered chair, heaved himself to his feet.
He didn’t care that, save for the bandages, he was naked. Normally modest to a fault, the young man no longer felt a shred of it.
“Abner, you mustn’t,” Angelina warned. “You’ll open up the sutures and bleed to death!”
“I gotta see...her...” The room pitched around the young man, like a ship on a stormy sea. He fell back onto the bed but rose again with a grunt and began stumbling around, looking for his clothes.
“Abner, honey, she’s dead.”
“Still...still gotta see her.” Not seeing his duds, he turned to Angelina. “Please...where...”
The girl hurried over to a white armoire that had large yellow sunflowers painted on it. She opened the doors, withdrew a stack of folded clothes, and turned to him. “They’re a bloody mess.”
“That’s all right.”
Abner took the clothes from the girl. When she saw that he was having trouble, she shoved him gently back onto the bed and helped him dress. Pulling the clothes onto his battered, wounded body was a long, slow, and excruciating process. Every time he moved his arms or his legs or took too deep a breath, the pain shot through him like poison arrows.
Finally, he stood near the door in his bloody clothes, holstered six-shooter cinched around his waist, and his Stetson on his head.
“I thank you mighty kindly, Miss Angelina.”
The girl stood before him. She was dressed in baggy denims, a pink corset, and a camisole. Her red hair was usually brushed till it shone. Today, it was mussed. She obviously wasn’t entertaining any jakes.
Then Abner remembered why and gave a soft chuff of chagrin.
“Ah, heck...I’m sorry, Miss Angelina. I didn’t even ask you how you was.”
Her fair cheeks colored slightly, and she offered a phony smile. “Those men didn’t do one damn thing to me.” She put some steel in her voice. Her eyes, normally soft and gentle, were suddenly hard.
Abner kissed her cheek. “Thank you again, Miss Angelina.”
“You come back, Abner. You still need tendin’. Those bandages need to be changed daily or infection’ll set in.”
“All right. I will.” Abner nodded as he turned and started down the hall.
* * *
Abner walked stiffly through the eerily silent hurdy-gurdy house. He’d never actually been inside the place before. He’d been too shy and too afraid of sullying his reputation as an upstanding young citizen of Shallow Ford, though he’d chatted with Miss Angelina outside on the front porch several enjoyable times when he’d been making his rounds as Deputy Town Marshal. He liked her, and he sensed that she liked him in a way that went beyond merely a prospective customer, but he’d never entertained any serious ideas about getting to know her better.
She was a whore, after all. A pretty, friendly whore with an innocent, childlike air about her, but a whore, nonetheless. Now, after how well she’d doctored him, and had even given her bed over to him, he felt a little guilty about not having given her more serious consideration.
But he felt only a little guilty about that, in a vague sort of way.
Because several voices were screaming inside his head, “Ellen!” over and over and over again.
His body trembled as he stepped out of Miss Irma’s place and onto the porch, he knew it was not merely because of how badly his body was torn. It was from heartbreak and horror at what he’d just learned about his Ellen.
Using the handrail, he eased himself down into the street and stood looking around. His shock and horror increased when he saw that, to his right, not only was the bank burned nearly to the ground but so were four or five other buildings beyond it. A few shopkeepers were sifting through the burned heaps that were still sending up a few thin wisps of gray smoke, but otherwise, the street was deserted.
Most of the windows that he could see to his right and left were shattered, curtains hung in tatters. None of the shops in the town appeared to be open. There wasn’t so much as a dog in the street sniffing around the still soggy blood pools showing where many of Shallow Ford’s citizens had fallen.
It must have been early afternoon because the sun was bright and birds were chirping, but a heavy dolor hung over the town as over an ancient ruin. From somewhere that Abner couldn’t discern came the muffled wails of a bereaved woman.
He looked around again, getting his bearings.
He had to find Ellen. Most likely, she would be with her parents, the Reverend Abraham and Mrs. Virginia Hobbs...
Abner moved through the hushed town like a ghost. No one was out. The sun beat down through the chill air. The breeze shepherded leaves around his boots. He came to the church near the town’s east edge. The parsonage sat beside it, back a ways from the main street, behind a now-dormant lilac hedge.
It was a neat, white-frame house sitting beside a neat matching buggy shed. A
gravel drive curved in from the street. As Abner walked up the drive, he saw that two leather, red-wheeled buggies were parked beside the parsonage, the horses tied to a wrought iron hitching post.
Sunlight shone in the house’s curtained windows. They were the only windows that Abner had seen that had not been shattered by bullets, Abner regarded them with vague amazement.
Stiffly, he mounted the porch steps, wincing at the sunlight reflected in the glass pane of the polished oak door before him. One of the buggy horses whickered and shook its head, rattling its leather traces.
Abner didn’t bother knocking. In the past, he’d always knocked and stood waiting right here in front of the door with his hat in his hands, his heart beating a little faster than usual, because he’d known that he was about to see his girl, and also because he would once again have to withstand the judgment of her father, the Reverend.
He had always found himself hoping the Reverend wasn’t home.
Abner turned the knob and went inside, stumbling a little as he stepped into the parlor, at the front of which, near a crackling fire, a pine coffin sat atop a long table draped in white lace.
An impossibly pale figure in a white gown lay within.
“Ellen!” he howled, stumbling forward on the toes of his boots. “Oh, Ellleeennnnnnn!”
Chapter 5
Sartain snapped his head up from his saddle and reached for the LeMat jutting from the holster coiled beside him, around the saddle horn.
“Oh, leave it there.”
A barefoot closed over his hand, over the big LeMat’s pearl grips.
Sartain looked up. Mercy Van der Deutsch was beside him. She was wearing her buffalo jacket. That was all she was wearing. It hung open so that in the milky moonlight filtering down through the bare trees, he could see the valley between her bosoms.
“It’s cold,” she said.
Sartain stared at her, his mind fogged from sleep. Her old man was snoring steadily on the other side of the fire. Deep, resonating, even snores, his exhalations making his lips flutter.
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