Ahead, he saw the fire and the blanket-draped men sitting around it. There were several fires, in fact. Four, Abner counted. Roughly ten men lounged around each, drinking coffee and passing bottles.
Abner could hear them talking beneath the soughing of the wind and the ratcheting of the bending weeds, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. He glanced over his left shoulder, making sure none had spied him and circled around behind him.
He saw only the ragged gray line of the trees stretching north and curving to the east, in the direction of the town that was a gray smudge on the prairie, through the snow-stitched air. He knew he shouldn’t be out here. He was likely only going to get himself killed before he could kill anyone or start a war before the town was ready for war.
But when he’d made his rounds of the town, ushering what few able-bodied, surviving men he could find back to the saloon, he’d circled the town again, making sure none of the gang had yet ridden back. That’s when he’d seen the swale that led out from the north edge of the town to the trees that sheathed the creek. He knew the gang was likely holed up somewhere in the trees. And he couldn’t resist the urge to find them though he’d had no idea what he would do once he had.
But he’d moved slowly through the swale anyway, the low ground offering him cover to the creek. When he reached the trees, he moved furtively through them, following the creek to the southwest.
Now he turned his head and looked at the smoke rising from the fires. In the smoke, he glimpsed the remembered image of his beloved Ellen lying pale and stiff in her coffin. Fury flared behind his eyes. Abner gritted his teeth.
Ellen...
God, how he’d loved her! They’d been going to spend their lives together, to raise a family together in the old Martin shack that Abner was saving money to buy from the town council. Those dreams had been so light and happy. They’d made the world seem a perfect place.
Now there was only an aching, burning void in the young man’s belly, and the unrelenting burn of rage in his heart, in his throat, and behind his eyes.
He had to kill one of those bastards. At least one of them. The urge was akin to the urge to eat or to make love.
Undeniable.
He crawled forward like a mountain lion using the tall grass for cover as it stalked its prey. He used the trees between him and the scattered gang for cover, as well. He was not surprised that none appeared to be standing watch. They wouldn’t suspect that anyone from town would actually stock them. They were the stalkers, not the prey.
Abner curled his upper lip at their arrogance.
“Goddamnit,” one of the killers cursed. “Boss is in town where it’s warm, and we’re out here freezin’ our asses off! I say we go in and kill that big sonofabitch, free Ramon, and curl up with the women by a hot fire!”
“Shut up, Chaney,” said another man. “We’ll be back in town soon. Give it time. We can’t go in like a bull through a chute, or we’ll get him killed!”
“No, but at least we’ll be warm!”
“Shut up, Chaney!” yelled another man. “If it wasn’t for the boss, none of us would be who he is today.” Abner heard the grin in the man’s voice. “Part of the meanest, kill-happiest, most successful bunch of renegades to ever run wild across the west!”
He gave a low whoop.
“I got a feelin’ you boys’ll be changin’ your mind as soon as the snow starts pilin’ up.” Chaney lifted a bottle to his lips, lowered it, and sighed. He whipped off the blanket draped over his shoulders and rose from the log he’d been sitting on.
He was tall and beefy, with a gut bulging out his buckskin coat. He wore a blue neckerchief under his hat, covering his ears and tied beneath his chin.
“I gotta take a piss,” he said, carefully setting the bottle on the ground.
Abner’s heart thudded. Chaney was headed toward him!
Abner started to raise his pistol. He was about to die. That was okay. He’d meet Ellen in Heaven. But first, he’d take Chaney and maybe one or two other gang members with him.
He slowly clicked the pistol’s hammer back and started to raise the gun higher above the weeds, aiming at the large bulge in the big man’s coat. But then Chaney stepped around two trees and changed course, heading toward a thick stand of chokecherry shrubs.
Abner’s heart thudded again. This time not anxiously but hopefully.
He watched the big man swagger off in his rolling-shouldered way and disappear in the shrubs. He was now a good forty, fifty yards from the camp. Shy bladder.
Abner crawled back the way he’d come, quickly, risking the thrashing weeds giving away his position. When he’d crawled behind a large box elder, he rose then stole into the shrubs. He stopped. Chaney’s broad back was facing him. The man was hunched forward slightly. He was flexing his knees and sighing.
Abner could smell the liquor and animal stench of the man as well as the sour odor of his urine steaming in the cold grass.
“Gettin’ so cold out here my pecker’s like to freeze plum offffff!”
That last came out of him in a surprised gasp as Abner closed his hand over the man’s mouth and jerked him back at the waist. At the same time, Abner stuck his knife in the man’s back, low on his right side. The man struggled but stiffened when Abner rammed the knife in deeper.
The man moaned behind Abner’s hand.
The man’s eyes were wide and glassy with shock.
Into his ear, which bristled with short, wiry hairs, Abner said quietly, “You know that pretty girl you raped out by Shallow Ford and saw fit to leave naked in the trail?”
The man only grunted, rolling his eyes toward Abner and furling his brows in agony.
“That was the girl I was gonna marry.” He twisted the knife in the man’s back, feeling the blood flowing warm over his gloved hand. “I loved that girl more than life. You wouldn’t understand that, but you took it all away from both Ellen and me back in Shallow Ford. Now you know why this knife is in your back, turning your kidney to hamburger, you son of a bitch!”
The man grunted again. Beneath Abner’s hand, his lips contorted.
The tension gradually left his body. His eyelids grew slack.
Abner pulled the knife out of the man’s back and stepped away, dropping him. Chaney lay with his bearded face twisted horrifically, dead.
Abner cleaned his knife on the man’s pants, sheathed it, and then stole away through the brush and trees. His heart was racing. The exhilaration of exacting revenge for Ellen made him lightheaded. Too lightheaded. As he strode back along the creek, glancing behind him to make sure he wasn’t being followed, his knees buckled.
He dropped to the ground and fell forward.
Darkness like the sudden onset of night swept over him. He shook his head, forced himself back onto his knees. He removed his right glove and reached inside his coat. He winced as he felt the warm oily wetness of fresh blood soaking his shirt over the wound in his right side.
“No,” he said, shaking his head in an attempt to clear it. “No...don’t let me die yet. I haven’t...I haven’t made enough of ‘em pay yet!”
A distance-muffled voice rose behind him, tossed around by the wind, “Hey, Chaney, what the hell’re you doin’ over there, anyway?”
“He’s probably playin’ with himself again!” another killer cackled.
Abner gave a groaning cry as he forced himself back to his feet. His boots were made of lead. He glanced behind him. He couldn’t see the fires but only the smoke rising from them, shredding in the wind above the shrubs in which Chaney lay.
The marauders would find him soon. And then they follow Abner’s tracks.
He shouldn’t have taken the chance, but he had to admit it was a good feeling to have killed one of the men who’d abused Ellen so horribly. But it might have gotten him killed and started the gang’s war with the town before Mike and Mercy were ready.
Crap...
Abner shambled away along the creek, weaving through the brush and tree
s, trying to keep as much cover as he could between himself and the outlaws’ camp.
It was late in the afternoon, but Abner knew it wasn’t as late as it appeared to him. Dark shadows danced around him, but it was merely unconsciousness reaching for him, trying to suck him down into it. His eyelids were heavy. His tongue was cold and tasted like copper.
“No,” he groaned, keeping his feet moving. “No...no...no...”
Suddenly, a dark shape stepped out from behind a tree, blocking his path. He couldn’t stop in time. He ran into the large, unyielding figure. And then his knees buckled, and he slid down the front of the man’s body until he was on the ground again, and night’s black wind closed over him.
* * *
“Hell, Abner,” Sartain said, pressing two fingers to the young man’s neck. “What in the hell have you done to yourself?”
There was a pulse. A faint one, but a pulse just the same.
Sartain pulled the young man’s slack body up by the arms and folded him over his shoulder. The Cajun stared through the trees in the direction of the outlaws’ camp. He’d smelled the smoke, so he knew the camp was back there. The kid knew it, too. The Revenger wondered how much sign the kid had left. Something told him he’d left plenty and that he didn’t have much time to get young Fieldhouse back to town before all hell broke loose.
He had to admit he was amazed by the kid’s pluck. Sick as a wounded dog, but he was determined to right things for his girl. You had to hand it to him for that.
Holding his Winchester in one hand, the young deputy over his left shoulder, Cajun tramped back through the trees, following the slight bend in the creek running darkly through its stony bed to his left.
He strode as quickly as he dared without jostling every ounce of blood out of the kid, tossing frequent cautious glances over his left shoulder. When he’d been out gathering wood for the saloon’s stove, he’d seen the young deputy moving stealthily through the swale that ran out to the creek. He’d tried to catch up to him and pull him back before he got himself killed, but he’d moved fast for a fellow so full of lead.
The leaden sky was turning darker and darker. A fine snow was still falling, clinging to the weeds like dandruff. Sartain could hear the creek chuckling, and distant crows cawing. The town lay ahead and to the right of the tree line—a shaggy gray gathering of crude log or wood-frame buildings standing exposed on the prairie.
It was only about a hundred yards away as the crow flew, but if he left the trees now, he’d be traversing open ground. He had to stay in the woods until he reached the swale. The swale would offer a modicum of cover until he reached a big barn at the eastern edge of the town.
He followed the woods as they and the creek made a turn along the east side of the town. His shoulder was getting sore, but he kept walking. He could see the swale now, just ahead on his right, a shallow gray dip in the ground about three or feet lower than the terrain around it.
A throaty voice called behind him, “Hold it right there, you son of a bitch!”
Sartain swerved around a tree and quickened his pace.
Whatever sign young Abner had left, the killers had found it.
A rifle barked behind Sartain, maybe fifty yards away. The bullet screeched through the air to thump into a birch to the Cajun’s right. Sartain ran faster. More rifles barked as men shouted beneath the rushing of the breeze in the autumn-naked trees.
Bullets slashed the ground around the Cajun’s boots, tearing up grass.
Abner groaned and writhed on The Revenger’s shoulder.
Breathless, Sartain said, “Hold tight, boy. Hold tight!”
Sartain ran out of the trees and into the swale. It didn’t give him much protection, but he’d take what he could get. As he ran, he saw three men run out of the trees off his right shoulder and fifty yards behind. Holding rifles, they were running across the higher ground above the swale, trying to cut him off before he reached the barn looming straight ahead.
As they ran, they fired. Sartain crouched as he ran, gritting his teeth as the bullets buzzed through the air to either side of his head. One of the men stopped as the other two kept running, gaining on him now as they took the shorter angle to the barn.
“You sonso’bitches,” the Cajun wheezed as he ran. “You sonso’bitches. You’re gonna get me, aren’t you... Ah, hell!”
The man who’d stopped to take careful aim flung a shot at him, the rifle jerking in the man’s arms. Sartain gritted his teeth as the bullet tore across the front of his right knee—a wicked little nip for being only a graze. Beneath the tear in his trousers and long-handles, he could feel the blood ooze out of the cut. The burn weakened that leg, caused him to limp and suck air through his teeth.
He couldn’t stop. The barn was only forty feet away, a large, jostling blur before him. If he could only reach it...
The other two men were within thirty yards of him now, to his right. Both stopped at the same time and raised their rifles to their shoulders, one slightly back of the other, snow dusting their hats and blurring their images.
The one in front shouted through a victorious laugh, “You’re a dead man, you sonofabitch!”
That man’s rifle leaped and roared, a bellow like the devils’ hounds demanding a meal.
Well, it looked like they’d get it...
Chapter 15
Sartain stumbled forward as the bullet ripped into his right ear and out the other ear.
He dropped poor Abner and slid several feet straight ahead on his belly. His hat tumbled away on the wind. He opened his eyes, stared down at the wiry grass and scattered gravel. He gritted his teeth, awaiting the end.
But what a minute.
He was staring down at the wiry grass and the gravel. He could still hear shooting. He couldn’t be seeing or hearing anything if he’d just had his brains blown out. He lifted his head and peered over the lip of the swale. The shooter who’d fired that “killing” shot at him was down and writhing around on his back.
The second man lay on his side, as though he were taking a nap, head resting on his arm. He wasn’t moving.
The third man was running back toward the line of trees.
Rifles were cracking hollowly beneath the wind. The shooting was coming from the tall grass at the back of the barn. Three men were down on their knees, pumping lead toward the fleeing killer. Two were black men. The smallest of the black men gave a whoop and pumped his fist in the air.
Sartain turned toward where the killer had been running. He wasn’t running anymore. He was belly-down in the grass.
Now he rose heavily to his hands and knees and started crawling toward the trees. One of the other shooters by the barn triggered another shot, and the third killer’s hatless head snapped violently forward.
The shooter with the finishing shot gave a victorious whoop and pumped her fist in the air. It was Mercy. She gained her feet and looked toward Sartain and Abner, who was groaning where he lay on his back, gritting his teeth in misery.
Sartain crawled over to the young deputy. “Ah, crap. I’m sorry, kid.”
He felt like a tinhorn. When he’d seen that rifle aimed at him for a killing shot, he must have imagined the bullet. It had felt like a hard punch to his right ear and caused him to lose his footing.
“Mike!” Misery stopped on the lip of the swale, her repeater smoking in her gloved hands. “I thought you’d been shot!”
“Yeah, me, too,” the Cajun said with chagrin.
She came down to kneel beside Abner. “Oh, God, what happened? He doesn’t look good at all.”
“No, he don’t, and I didn’t help things, neither.”
Sartain pulled the boy up as gently as he could and settled him over his left shoulder again. He looked at the two black men in worn blanket coats and coveralls walking toward him uncertainly, both wielding old-model Springfield carbines.
One was older, his black mustache sprinkled with gray. The other was a boy of maybe sixteen. He hung back a little behind and to on
e side of the older man.
“Who’re your friends?” Sartain asked Mercy, grunting as the young deputy’s weight settled on his shoulder.
“I don’t know. They were just rolling up to the saloon in a wagon when I heard the shooting out here and came running.”
Sartain looked at the trees and back along the swale. No more of the marauders appeared to be coming. They were hanging back, probably looking out from the woods and biding their time, maybe waiting for nightfall to pay another visit to the town.
They’d come now for sure. They were going to come before, but now they’d probably come sooner.
But, then, it didn’t really matter when they came. They’d have to be dealt with sooner or later. Threatening to kill their leader had only bought Sartain and the town some time.
The two black men walked along beside Sartain and Mercy as they all headed back toward the saloon. “Name’s Cable Dundee,” said the older man, who was maybe in his mid-forties and walked with a slight limp. “This is my boy, Jonathon. We come to town for supplies for our farm today, and imagine our shock when we saw the whole town shot up! I was rollin’ on toward the saloon when I saw this young lady runnin’ out of it. Heard the shootin’ down there in them trees. She said the town was under siege, so I thought I’d lend a hand.”
Dundee shot Sartain a wide-eyed look of exasperation. “Under siege?”
“The Ramon Lazaro Bunch,” Sartain said. “They shot up the town. Lazaro's inside. We’re holdin’ him hostage, trying to stave off the rest of his gang, but that was them chasin’ me back there.”
“I don’t understand none of this. None but Lazaro, that is. That sure is a name I could go without hearin’ for a long time.”
“Come on inside,” Sartain said, mounting the saloon’s porch steps. “I’ll introduce you to him.” He stopped and turned to the two Dundees. “Looks like you both can shoot. We can use all the shooters we can get. There’s about eight townsmen in there with pistols or rifles, but for the most part, they’re a squirrely, reluctant group. The rest of the men decided to stay home and hole up tight with their families.”
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