He straightened with a grunt and went running wide to the right around the saloon, the flames leaping and licking at him like burning tongues, as though trying to draw him into the furnace. He ran out around what was left of the saloon’s right rear corner.
Beyond, Lazaro stood over Mercy, aiming one of his long-barreled, silver-chased revolvers at her. The girl jutted her chin defiantly at him. “Goddamn you!”
Sartain snapped his rifle to his shoulder, but he knew even as he thumbed the hammer back that he was too late. Lazaro had at least a second on him.
But then a faint pop sounded to The Revenger’s left, beyond a burning beam obscured by burning shingles.
Lazaro jerked, fired his pistol into the ground. He staggered backward, throwing his free arm out for balance. Mercy whipped her head around to peer behind her. Abner Summerfield walked out from the far side of the burning rubble, cocking his old Spencer repeater and calmly bringing the rifle to his shoulder again.
As he continued walking toward Lazaro and Mercy, the rifle belched again. The bullet punched through the killer’s right arm, jerking him back in the other direction, evoking a shrill, exasperated cry.
Abner stopped where Mercy slumped, watching Lazaro stumble around, screaming in rage and terror.
The young deputy extended the rifle to Mercy. She took it, gained her feet, pumped a round into the chamber, aimed the rifle at a sharp downward slant, and blew out Lazaro’s right knee.
Lazaro loosed another shrill, keening cry as he dropped to the ground and rolled onto his side, clutching his bloody knee.
“Please!” the killer cried. “No! Stop!”
She didn’t stop. She blew out his other knee, and then she shot him in the balls.
Lazaro was down, writhing violently, bringing first one ruined knee up toward his belly, then the other, sobbing like a child.
Mercy gave the rifle back to Abner, saying, “You think that’s enough, or should we finish him?”
The young deputy shook his head as he stared grimly down at the dying killer. “Why do him any favors? He never did my Ellen any favors.”
Sartain walked toward the pair. Abner turned around and began walking away from Mercy and Lazaro, but suddenly dropped to his knees.
“Abner!” Sartain lunged forward, grabbing the lad before he fell on his face.
“Abner!” Mercy echoed, running around and dropping to a knee beside the two men.
Abner looked around dully. There was no color in his face whatsoever. The parchment skin was drawn taut across his pronounced cheekbones. Yellow circled his eyes. But when his gaze landed on Mercy kneeling beside him, the boy’s thin, cracked lips stretched a celestial smile.
“Why, Ellen,” the young deputy said. “Oh...oh...Ellen.” He reached out to lay gentle fingers on Mercy’s cheek. “I was hoping...I was so hoping we’d meet again...and here you are...pretty as you ever were!”
Mercy choked back a sob. “Yes, it’s me, Abner.” She choked back another sob and pressed her lips to his forehead. “Here we are together again. I love you, Abner. I’ll love you forever.”
That caused the boy’s lips to spread even wider. Then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he sagged forward against Sartain and Mercy. Sartain could tell from the slackness in the young man’s body that there wasn’t a breath of life left in him.
“Oh, Mike!” Mercy sobbed, bringing her hand to her mouth.
“He did what he needed to do, girl,” he said. “He did what he needed to do, and now he’s with his life’s one true love.”
Sartain eased the deputy onto his back, brushed Abner’s eyelids closed, and heavily gained his feet. Mercy stood beside him. Together, they stood staring down at the slack but content countenance of Deputy Abner Summerfield.
“We should all be so lucky,” The Revenger added.
The End
CSW
WILD NIGHT AT THE SUNDANCE
Chapter 1
The Revenger, Mike Sartain, swung down from Boss’s back and lifted the collar of his quilted elk-hide mackinaw against the howling wind spitting snowflakes the size of silver dollars. He slid his Henry repeater from his saddle sheath, pumped a cartridge into the chamber, and lowered the hammer to half cock.
“Stay, boy,” he said, patting the buckskin’s neck then tossing the reins over the top pole of the corral before him.
Boss whickered quietly, switching his tail.
Sartain blinked against the swirling snow as he studied the small, gray cabin which sat about sixty yards beyond the corral, on the opposite side of this remote ranch yard on the rolling prairie of western Nebraska Territory. Large, winter-naked cottonwoods flanked the cabin, dwarfing it. Another, larger cottonwood stood between the corral and the cabin, offering Sartain and his horse partial concealment from the shack.
The cabin’s windows appeared to be shuttered against the weather, but wan yellow light bled out from between the cracks in the planks, on either side of the front door. In the steely gray light of the early afternoon, Sartain could also see tufts of sooty wood smoke rising from the stout stone chimney that ran up the cabin’s right wall.
A roofed porch ran along the front of it. The stoop was set on low stone pilings. On the porch were a rickety wooden washstand and a wicker rocking chair that rocked intermittently in the wind, occasionally nudged right or left as the wind changed direction. A wooden water bucket swung from a rope tied to a beam of the porch roof, left of the chair.
Sartain looked around him and the buckskin stallion. He saw the tracks of four shod horses quickly being filled in by the wind-driven snow. The tracks led up to the doors of the barn close on his left. The killers had stabled their own mounts in the barn, which meant they’d intended to stay the night here.
Sartain turned back to the cabin and flicked his thumb across the Henry’s hammer. They’d stay the night, all right. But it was going to be a much longer night than they were expecting...
The Revenger remembered Elaine Rafferty’s story about how the four killers had walked up to her and her husband’s table in the Arkansas Hotel in Central City, Colorado, one early Saturday morning a few weeks ago. One of the killers, a notorious stock thief, former town constable, and regulator named Charlie Scanlon, had pointed at Sheriff Jim Rafferty bold as you please and calmly told Rafferty he was going to kill him.
Rafferty had arrested Scanlon several months earlier for the murder of a saloon owner, though the case had been dismissed for lack of evidence by a circuit court judge who was known to be a close associate of Scanlon.
“Yes sir, I’m gonna snuff your wick, Sheriff,” Scanlon had laughed. “What do you think of that?”
Rafferty had gone for his gun, but before he could get the keeper thong released from over the Remington’s hammer, Charlie Scanlon had drilled a bullet through Rafferty’s heart, knocking him backward in his chair, blood geysering from the hole in his chest, dead.
Elaine Rafferty had thrown herself atop her husband, screaming.
Scanlon and his tough-nut cohorts had laughed as they’d walked casually out of the hotel dining room, mounted their horses with a mocking lack of haste, and trotted nonchalantly out of town.
The Revenger, having several warrants on his head, was no friend of most lawmen. But he’d been proud to call himself a friend of Jim Rafferty. He and Jim had fought side-by-side together in the War of Northern Aggression, on the side of the Confederacy, watching each other’s backs and doctoring each other’s wounds. More than once or twice, the men had saved each other’s lives.
Now Jim was dead, leaving a heartbroken widow and a beleaguered twelve-year-old son, Rufus. And there’d been no one around who’d dared go after Scanlon and his three equally cold-blooded partners.
So, Elaine had gotten hold of The Revenger, who’d trailed the four killers to Nebraska Territory. Now he walked around the rear corner of the corral and moved along the corral’s right side, heading toward the cabin, boots faintly crunching the three inches of sugary snow as t
he wind moaned and howled around him. He walked around the front of the corral, moving so that the tree was in front of him, concealing him from the cabin.
Holding the Henry high across his chest, he strode to the tree, paused there to study the cabin, making sure no one was peering out of the front windows, and then moved out from behind the tree. Keeping his hat brim tipped low against the chill wind, he moved with increasing purpose, mounted the porch quietly, and sidled against the window right of the door.
He peered between shutter planks and through the window covered with a lace curtain embroidered with small apples and oranges. Through the filmy curtain, he saw two men sitting at a table before him, playing poker, while another man, Charlie Scanlon himself, was poking wood around in the hearth to the right. Three poker hands lay on the table. There were two bottles, one empty, and three water glasses showing various levels of amber whiskey.
Sartain moved quietly to the door. He caught sight of something to his right, beneath the porch.
Two people were laid out on the ground. Two old, gray-headed people, an old man in pinstriped overalls and an old lay with her silvery hair knotted in a double bun. They lay side-by-side, staring up at the dancing snowflakes, hands on their unmoving bellies.
The old man had a quarter-sized hole in his right cheek, just beneath his eye. Blood had dribbled from the hole to pool on his neck. The old woman had been shot twice in the chest. They both had somber, faintly incredulous expressions on their waxy faces.
Sartain grimaced as he studied the two old dead people—the couple who’d likely built this place up from a pioneer’s claim, maybe raised a family on it, called the place their home.
And now they’d been killed and thrown out like trash.
Sartain rocked the Henry’s hammer back to full cock. He gritted his teeth as he fingered the door latch, hoping against hope the door wasn’t barred. He lifted the latch’s metal plate. It gave a metallic click.
The door fell slack in its frame.
Sartain stepped back then kicked the door wide and bounded inside, planting his right foot wide to catch the door as it bounced off the wall, dislodging a framed picture, which crashed to the floor. All three men—the two at the table, Scanlon still standing at the hearth—jerked their heads toward him in shock. They’d obviously hadn’t figured on being followed out from Grand Island, where Sartain had picked up their trail.
“What the...” Scanlon bellowed. He didn’t appear to be armed, so Sartain focused on the two men at the table, swinging the Henry in that direction.
Billy Kershaw, Scanlon’s cousin, bounded to his feet, knocking his chair back against the wall and reaching for the silver-chased Smith & Wesson on the table to his right, beside an ashtray in which two loosely rolled quirleys smoldered. Sartain lined up the Henry’s sights on the neck of Kershaw, who was the youngest of the three and had no qualms about punching a forty-four round through the young killer’s Adam’s apple.
Kershaw dropped the Smithy back onto the table and made a shocked, horrified expression as he stepped back and raised both hands to the blood spurting from his throat. The other man at the table, “Long Nose” Charlie Halliday, a hired gun from Texas known to have murdered three small-fry ranchers in Dakota Territory the year before, had also gained his feet, clawing a short-barreled Colt Lightning from the cross-draw holster on his left hip while also reaching for the Bisley thonged on his right thigh.
He was bellowing, “Who the hell, who the hell?” Sartain having ejected his first spent cartridge casing and racked a fresh round into the chamber, drilled a bullet through the dead-center of Halliday’s forehead, just above his long, blunt-tipped nose.
Stumbling backward, eyes crossing and rolling back in his head, Halliday inadvertently aimed both his pistols at Kershaw and fired them both at the same time. One bullet plunked through a window while the other one punched through the ailing Kershaw’s belly, just above the square, brass buckle of his cartridge belt.
As Kershaw slid down and sideways against the cabin’s front wall, he knocked a bracket lamp off the table behind him. The lamp shattered. Flames danced along the spilled coal oil spreading across the floor.
Sartain pumped another round into the Henry’s chamber and turned toward the fireplace on his right in time to see only the heels of Charlie Scanlon’s boots disappear through the window the man had just dived through.
There was the clatter of shattering glass and the solid thud of Scanlon’s head punching through the shutters. Another, crunching thud sounded as the killer of Jim Rafferty hit the ground beneath the window.
Sartain triggered a round through the window and then racked another shell into the chamber, ran to the broken window and peered out through the shards of broken glass. Scanlon was climbing to his feet in the fresh snow, cursing, wearing only a fleece-lined leather vest against the cold.
Sartain lined up another shot at the man, but before he could squeeze the rifle’s trigger, the wind blew both shutters back toward him, spoiling his aim.
“Damnit!”
He rammed both shutters wide, poked the Henry’s barrel out the window, and fired three quick shots. But Scanlon was now running through the thick brush around the cottonwoods, and all of The Revenger’s shots merely snapped a few willow branches or barked into the boles of the old cottonwoods.
Sartain racked another round as he wheeled, ran out the open door, and leaped down the porch steps. He wheeled again as he hit the ground, and ran around the cabin’s right front corner, heading toward the rear. He followed Scanlon’s tracks through the snow-covered brush, slowing his pace and holding the Henry straight up and down before him.
He couldn’t see Scanlon himself. He could see only the man’s tracks now, weaving through the cottonwoods where the brush thinned. Scanlon was running down a shallow incline.
Looking from left to right and back again, Sartain continued to follow the man’s tracks as the wind swirled the snow around his boots and pelted his face. The wind sighed through the trees, making the old branches creak.
Sartain moved between two more cottonwoods and stopped. Just ahead, Scanlon’s tracks turned sharply to the right. Sartain swung his head in that direction—too late.
Scanlon stepped out from behind the tree on the Cajun’s right, grimacing as he raised a stout cottonwood branch and drew it back slightly before swinging it forward with a bellowing grunt.
Chapter 2
Sartain got the barrel of the Henry up in front of his face fast enough that the rifle took a good portion of the blow.
But Scanlon was a big, powerful man, as big and possibly as powerful as the Louisiana Cajun himself. The branch cracked as it drove the Henry back hard against Sartain’s head and chest, splitting his lips.
Sartain hadn’t steeled himself for the blow. It sent him flying.
He dropped the Henry as he hit the ground on his back.
Scanlon was a tall, broad hombre with long, tangled black hair framing a savage, red mess of a fleshy face bearing several long, curved scars above his thick beard. Blood oozed from several glass shards protruding from the ruddy skin. His big, brutal face set with deadly determination, Scanlon moved swiftly toward Sartain and stooped for the Henry.
Sartain heaved his torso to the right, swinging both legs to the left. He cut Scanlon’s feet cleanly out from under the big man.
“Hell!” the killer yowled as he hit the ground with a decisive, snow-crunching thud on his ass.
Sartain’s LeMat revolver was under his coat, so he sat up and lunged for the Henry. He’d just gotten his right hand wrapped around the neck of the stock when Scanlon, moving with surprising speed and agility, thrust himself into Sartain, once more knocking the Henry from the Cajun’s grip.
Bellowing raucously, Scanlon smashed his clenched left fist against The Revenger’s cheek. He was as powerful as he was big, and Sartain cursed silently as he sagged backward and saw the world dimming around him. He fought away the clawing tendrils of unconsciousness.
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br /> Shaking his head and trying desperately to clear his vision, he saw Scanlon again reaching for the Henry.
Sartain got his heels centered beneath him and sprang off his boots with a loud roar of vented fury and determination, conjuring in his mind’s eye his friend Jim Rafferty lying dead on that hotel dining room floor, Elaine bawling over him.
Scanlon grunted and dropped the Henry as he flew backward, throwing his arms out to both sides to break his fall. But Sartain was on top of him, driving him hard to the snowy ground.
Sartain gained his knees and smashed his right fist against the man’s left cheek.
Scanlon wailed as the blow hammered a glass shard deeper into his face, and Sartain winced at the jabbing tear of the glass between the middle knuckles of his hand.
“Ahhhckkkk!” Scanlon bellowed, gritting his teeth and thrusting his head sharply off the ground. His forehead connected with The Revenger’s chin, the pain of the blow feeling as though a spike had been rammed through his jaw.
Sartain flew backward off of Scanlon but immediately thrust himself back to his feet. He was about to lunge for the killer again, but then Scanlon himself sprang up, blood oozing from the deep gashes in his face and sending red droplets into the snow. The two men, crouching, fists raised like pugilists in a fight ring, staggered in a tight circle, growling and snarling like rogue grizzly bears in a territorial battle.
“Who the hell are you, anyway?” Scanlon spat out.
“A friend of Jim Rafferty’s.”
Scanlon grinned savagely. “A friend of Rafferty’s, huh? Well, then, let me help you join him!”
He lurched toward the Cajun, thrusting his right fist straight forward, which Sartain managed to dodge enough that the blow caught only the edge of his chin and glanced off his jaw. The man’s other fist, coming in fast from Sartain’s right, connected solidly with The Revenger’s right temple.
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