No animal would be out in this. Unless it was a damn hungry one. The beast stalking Sartain couldn’t be hungry. Charlie Scanlon had been a big meal.
Sartain’s cheeks grew raw as he continued walking. The wind batted his hat. He had to pull it down several times to keep it from blowing away. He hadn’t taken the time to don his muffler. He should have. The frigid wind’s razor-edged teeth nipped at his ears. It slithered under his collar and raised chicken flesh between his shoulder blades.
What had appeared a flat, stormy plain at first soon dropped away to a slope. The declivity became more and more pronounced, and gravity was a strong hand shoving Sartain down, down, until he had to turn sideways to negotiate the steep hill, to keep from slipping and falling.
Below, brush and woods lined a crease between hills.
When Sartain gained the bottom of the hill, he found himself in a canyon. The slough at the north side of the town fingered into the crease on his left. He could see the fringe of cattails at the ice’s edge. Straight ahead of him appeared a good fifty or so yards of cottonwoods, box elders, and cedars. The woods stretched out to his right, as well, but he couldn’t see how far.
He couldn’t see much of anything.
It was a gray-white world that he was locked into, his field of vision limited to only a handful of yards in all directions around him.
The howl had seemed to originate from straight off into the woods, so that’s the direction he headed. He hadn’t taken more than two steps before his right boot kicked something that was too soft to be a rock or even a log. Whatever it was rolled a ways off into the snow.
Sartain moved forward and stared down.
Two dark-brown eyes stared at him unblinking from a broad, ruddy face. Sartain gave a startled grunt and lurched backward, getting his boots entangled and falling onto his butt. He nearly dropped the rifle as he plunged his left hand into the snow.
“What the hell?”
He stared straight ahead of him, over the tops of his snowy boots. He gained his knees and crabbed over to stare in scowling dismay at the head of Hector Lee Wallace staring past him at the sky.
Snow glazed Wallace’s eyes and brows. The man’s neck was ragged, bloody skin turned to slush. Wallace’s long, dark-brown hair was flecked with snow as it lay tangled on the ground beneath his head. The skin of his broad face with high, Indian cheekbones was still brown, but it was turning waxy, and the pallor was just rising behind the natural nut-brown color.
He hadn’t been dead long. Maybe an hour or so.
“Holy crap, Hec,” Sartain said, looking around, heart thudding heavily, “where’s the rest of you, old son?”
The wind moaned. The snow sprayed like sand against the trees. It tap-tap-tapped against the Cajun’s hat.
Sartain gained his feet, brushed the snow from his Henry, and stared again at Hector Lee Wallace. Or, at least at the half-breed’s head. Again, as though the head might answer him, Sartain said, “What happened out here, Hec?”
No reply. The half-breed’s brown eyes that were quickly being covered with snow stared dreamily at the skeletal tree branches. The man’s lower jaw hung slack, as though with wonder or maybe confusion.
Sartain looked around again. He was colder than before. Faint tracks led off into the trees. He wanted to follow them, but his boots suddenly felt like lead.
There it was again.
Fear.
Sartain’s toes were numb inside his boots. His ears burned. His fingers were cold, too. He should go back to the barn. The heat of the fire Hector had laid before he’d been so brutally butchered beckoned. But Sartain couldn’t answer that call. He couldn’t give in to his fears. He had to find out what kind of a creature he was dealing with.
He had to kill the son of a buck.
He stepped around Hector Wallace’s head, glancing at it one more time.
A scream rose in the south.
Sartain froze and whipped his head in that direction.
Faintly, Dorian’s voice screamed, “Mi-ike?”
He hesitated. Had that really been Dorian’s voice, or had it merely been a trick of the wind and his own terrorized imagination?
No, he had to assume it was Dorian. But what was she doing out here?
Switching course, he jogged through the snow to the south, down the middle of the crease between the hills and along the edge of the woods. He tripped over a buried log, fell. He climbed to his feet and continued jogging.
“Dorian?” he called. “Dorian, is that you?”
The only reply was the loud sighing of the wind.
It was getting darker, as though a dark rag were being closed over a weak lamp. But he continued running down the crease. Soon, he found himself in deep woods. Beyond, lay a hill. He climbed the hill, quickly growing breathless, pausing once in a while to suck frigid air into his aching lungs and to look around for tracks.
He called the girl’s name again. No response.
He climbed the hill to its crest and called again.
Still, nothing.
A good twenty minutes had passed since he’d left Hector Lee Wallace’s head. He hadn’t heard Dorian’s scream in that time, and she hadn’t responded to his shouts. Maybe he was heading in the wrong direction.
He stared out over the top of the hill. A few scrub pines and cedars poked out of the snow, their branches bowing under the fresh stuff coming down. The sky was a deep purple-gray. It looked like the ocean during a winter storm. It meant more snow would be falling soon.
Lots more.
He was in a for a real Great Plains blizzard.
He had to get back to the barn before full-dark descended on him. After dark closed, he might never find his way back. That wouldn’t do him or Dorian any good. She’d probably gone back to the barn when she’d seen how violent the weather was becoming. He’d likely find her there.
Maybe she’d never been out here. He was no longer convinced that it was the girl’s cry he’d heard but merely a trick of the wind and his own fear, after all.
He followed his own, fast-obliterating tracks back the way he’d come. He had trouble climbing the steep hill, his boots slipping and sliding. It didn’t help that he could no longer feel his feet. He needed a pan of warm, salty water with which to thaw the old dogs out...
At the top of the hill, he could barely make out the barn moving up before him. The snow was coming down at a fast, wicked slant. It felt more like sand than snow. It formed a crust on his face. He was so cold that only a few flakes melted and slid down his cheeks toward his neck.
At least, he thought they did. He couldn’t feel much of anything.
He tripped over what he’d thought before was a hay rake, and fell in the snow, which had totally covered it. Cursing, he gained his feet, clinging to the Henry, and staggered around the side of the barn to the front. He heaved open the doors, lurched inside, the warm air in contrast to the outer cold nearly making him pass out.
As the dark barn pitched and rolled around him, he called out breathlessly, “Dorian?”
“There he is,” a man’s voice replied.
“Grab him!” said another.
Sartain jerked his head up to see a black-gloved fist caroming toward him. He felt only a dull blow as his head was thrown back. His face was too frozen for it to register the pain of the blow beyond a slight pinch.
“I said, grab him!” a man bellowed.
Sartain staggered sideways. He felt a man grab him from behind, pull his arms back. At the same time, a hand wrenched the Henry repeater from his right hand. He was so cold and tired that he barely registered that sensation, either.
He glimpsed man-shaped, fur-clad shadows moving around him.
A fist rammed into The Revenger’s belly, hammering the breath from his lungs. Sartain jackknifed, dropped to his knees, hearing his own wheezing rasp as he tried to suck air into his battered lungs.
His ears rang. The warmth of the barn was beginning to thaw him out, but it was not a pleasant sensati
on. His skin prickled, and his face felt like it had been raked by a hundred sharp claws. The heat was heavy and damp, turning his coat to a warm, moist blanket pushing down on him.
“Who are you?” asked the man standing before him.
Sartain glanced up. A broad-shouldered, shaggy-headed gent in a black fur coat and a black hat was ramming his right black-gloved fist into the palm of his left black-gloved hand. His face was fat and pitted, and a dark-brown mustache mantled his thick upper lip. He wore a fur-lined eyepatch over his left eye socket.
Sartain continued to fight air into his lungs, managing about half a teaspoonful at a time.
“I’ll say again,” One-Eye said, ramming his fist into his hand once more. “Who are you?”
Rage boiled over in Sartain. It was as though all his blood had turned to molten lead as it rushed to his extremities, filling him with ferocious energy. He bounded off his heels and rammed his head and shoulders into the one-eyed man’s chest and slammed his forehead against the point of his chin.
One-Eye screamed as he fell backward with a loud, crackling thud on the hay-strewn floor.
“Grab him!” one of the others yelled.
Sartain turned, swinging his fist toward a shadow on his right.
The fist connected soundly. That man went down with a scream, as well.
“Crap!” said another man, lunging toward Sartain, who hammered the man’s face twice with his right fist, knocking him backward.
He struck the man’s face twice with his left fist. As that man flew backward, cursing and grunting, Sartain reached under his coat and quickly slid the big LeMat from its holster, ratcheting the hammer back.
He swung the gun toward One-Eye, who lay writhing on the floor, clutching his head in both black-gloved hands. Sartain swung the gun toward the second man he’d hammered, and that man, who was trying to pull his own revolver from under his buffalo hide coat, froze.
He glared at Sartain, two gold front teeth winking in the gray light angling in through the partially open barn doors, along with a column of windblown snow.
“Keep going,” Sartain bit out, drawing air through his gritted teeth, just now beginning to draw complete, albeit painful, breaths. “Pull it! I said pull the goddamn thing, so I can blow your damn head off!”
He turned to the third man, who was sitting on the barn floor, staring hang-jawed at the pearl-gripped revolver in the Cajun’s clenched fist. He was the tallest of the three, and fairly lean, and he wore a red mackinaw and a tan hat tied on his head with a red muffler.
“What about you?” asked the man with a challenge.
Crunching footsteps rose from beyond the barn doors. Two people were moving toward the barn, walking, not running.
An older gent with upswept, handlebar mustaches poked his head around the near door, frowning behind snowy, quickly fogging spectacles. His cheeks were two apples holding the round-rimmed glasses on his nose. He was elegantly attired in a long, wool, fur-trimmed coat and store-bought beaver cap.
“What in tar-na-tion?” he inquired, frowning around the barn door and then casting his incredulous gaze at Sartain.
The Cajun’s blood was still up, and, after the assault on his solar plexus, he was itching to shoot somebody. “Who in the holy hell are you, old man?” he fairly roared, breath billowing thickly around his steaming head.
“Hold on, hold on,” the older gent said. He had a pearl-gripped derringer in his gloved right hand, but he held it wide, as though in supplication.
“His name is Harken,” said the young woman who poked her head around him to look at Sartain and then at the pearl-gripped cannon he was clenching in his fist, its hammer eared back. “Stanley Harken,” she added.
The girl let her jade eyes flick around the inside of the barn, taking in the men who were still down and grunting and looking the worse for wear.
“Oh, dear,” she said, wrinkling the skin above the bridge above her fine, pale nose.
Then she glanced once more at the three men who’d jumped Sartain, and, unexpectedly, she choked back a laugh. She covered her mouth with a mitten of silky chocolate marten fur, snorting.
“Gala, this is nothing to laugh at,” said the old gent, Harken, still regarding Sartain dubiously. “Who are you, and what do you want? Are you one of them?”
He stepped sideways to place his short, bulky frame in front of the girl, who tipped her head sideways to see around the gent’s red-cheeked, beaver-hatted head. “Forget it. You can’t have her. You won’t have her, I tell you. You’ll have to shoot me first, and even then, you’ll have the United States Army hounding you from sundown to sunup! You’ll hang if you touch one hair on the governor’s daughter’s precious head!”
Chapter 11
The girl didn’t look all that afraid as she regarded Sartain with those large, jade eyes. Coal-black bangs hung over her forehead. Her brows and lashes were of the same black, in beguiling contrast to the eyes that shone as though small fires kindled behind each frank, green orb.
In the corner of Sartain’s left eye, the gent flanking him made a sudden movement. Sartain wheeled, triggered a bullet into the floor, the blast sounding like a shotgun in the close confines.
The girl expelled a startled, “Oh!”
The bullet blew intentionally wide but relieved One-Eye of his ill-advised intention. As he jerked both hands high, palms out, Sartain looked back at the girl, who was spreading her dark-red lips back from small, fine teeth as though with as much delight as apprehension.
She had a mittened hand pressed to her breast swathed in the same chocolate fur as her hat. Her chest was rising and falling sharply.
“Brigand!” bellowed the walrus-mustached gent, Harken, holding his arms out and back to protect the girl.
“There you have it,” Sartain said. “A brigand whose gonna blow your head off, old man...and the plug-ugly heads off your three partners here, and take the girl into a stable with me”—he grinned evilly, his cheeks now fairly burning from both frostbite and rage—“if you don’t tell me why they jumped me.”
The girl stared at him with those glowing jade eyes, the slight smile of fascination still working on her pretty mouth. His threat hadn’t seemed to frighten her in the least though it did add some color to her cheeks.
“You’re one o’ them, ain’t ya?” said the broad-chested One-Eye behind Sartain. “One o’ the train robbers.”
“Wrong.”
Sartain studied the girl. He was as fascinated by her as she apparently was by him, but he raked his gaze from her to step back behind One-Eye, giving the man a light kick in the side. “Get up and get over there with the others, where I can keep an eye on. You two—up!”
When all three of the tough nuts who’d jumped him were on their feet, glowering at him and straightening their clothes and replacing their hats on their heads, Sartain said, “You’re from the train, I take it.”
“We are,” Harken replied. “Do you know about the train?”
“We rode by, saw the bodies.” Sartain glanced at the others and asked incredulously, “Did these fellas do that?”
The girl snickered.
“Yes, they did,” said Harken, proudly, then added with a sheepish pitch to his voice, “They are apparently better with their guns than their fists.”
The three tough nuts cast the older man glares.
Sartain said, “I was with a girl. A blonde. About her age. She disappeared in the storm, and I was out looking for her before these three jumped me.”
No one said anything. They only stared dubiously at Sartain.
“The only girl here is Gala,” said Harken.
“Who’s Gala?”
The girl stepped resolutely out from behind the older gent, removed a mitten, and extended her fine, long-fingered right hand to Sartain. “Gala Morrissey. I am the daughter of Governor Galen Morrissey of Colorado Territory. Pleased to meet you, Mister...ummm...”
“Sartain.”
He didn’t shake the girl’s hand.
She was a beauty along the lines of Dorian, though without the backwoods feral edge. But he didn’t see any reason to get too friendly with her, since he had a feeling she was tied rather closely to the other men in the barn, whom he didn’t care for, for obvious reasons.
“Who’re these barnyard dogs?” he asked.
“They’re my bodyguards, I guess you could say.” Gala Morrissey looked around at the hangdog men as though giving them a fresh appraisal. “I was rather impressed by the way they...and even Stanley here...took down the men who tried to rob the train I was on. My impression, however, has suddenly turned none too favorable.”
She looked back at Sartain. “Since one man, albeit a rather large and tough-looking hombre, managed to tie them all in knots single-handedly, and while half-frozen. Southern, aren’t you?” She sucked in her cheeks. “I’m rather partial to a Southern accent.”
“Louisiana Cajun.”
Her left brow rose and fell quickly. “Oh, Cajun!” She seemed to like that even more.
“Gala!” Harken admonished the girl. “That’ll be enough. Your father warned me to keep you on a short leash this trip.”
Gala kept her eyes on the big man facing her. She glanced coolly at the fancy, savage-looking pistol still in his hand, aimed at the other three. “Oh, don’t get your shorts in a twist, Stanley,” she said. “A girl can be impressed, can’t she?”
To Sartain, she said, “Stanley, here, is my chaperone. He was once my father’s personal secretary until he got, ahem, rather too taken with drink.”
Harken’s cheeks flushed above his ostentatious mustaches, and he glanced sheepishly at the floor.
“Now his job is to keep me out of trouble,” the girl added.
“I spent the autumn in Minneapolis, where Father wants me to enroll in a private college for girls. He had Stanley following me around like a watchdog, on the attack at the first glance of a passing stranger.”
She stretched her lips wide and gave a slow, arrogant blink of her jade eyes. “I can get quite a few of those. He hired these men as bodyguards for the trip back west. They’re gunfighters. Obviously, as Stanley so aptly pointed out, they’re better with their guns than they are with their fists.”
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