The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  “Hey, now,” complained the tallest of the three gunmen.

  Ignoring him, Gala tilted her head to study the big Cajun more closely, up and down. “You, Mr. Sartain, look like a man who might be good at both. If so, would you like a job? I’ll have Stanley fire these three and hire you instead.”

  “Hey, you can’t do that!” said the one-eyed, broad-chested bodyguard. He was holding a bloody handkerchief to the back of his head, and he was snarling like a dog with a leg caught in a trap.

  Sartain wasn’t sure what to make of the girl. He suddenly felt as though he’d fallen out of the frying pan and into the fire, at least as far as unhinged women were concerned.

  Women...

  Dorian.

  Thinking of her nudged his thoughts back to Hector Lee Wallace’s head, as well.

  He looked at Harken, the only other one here who seemed rational. “There’s something out there. It got the swamper.”

  “Wallace?”

  “Yep.”

  “What do you mean it got him?” asked One-Eye, still wincing at the cut in the back of his head.

  Sartain glanced at the girl and decided it might be best not to be too graphic in his description. “It got him. As in he’s dead. I found him out in the ravine yonder when I was looking for Dorian.”

  “Dorian, Dorian, who is this Dorian?” Gala wanted to know, a deep frown betraying her jealousy.

  Ignoring the girl, Harken stepped forward, glowering incredulously up at Sartain, who was a full head taller than he. “You mean the half-breed is dead?”

  “That’s right. That thing, whatever it is, got him.”

  “What thing?” asked the gunman with the gold front teeth.

  Sartain glanced at the girl again, who was frowning at him now as though she thought he was the one who was unhinged.

  “Never mind.” Sartain turned to the men who’d jumped him. “Have you three had enough or should I drill you and be finished with you?”

  Harken spread his fingers. “You can holster your weapon, Mr. Sartain.” He glanced at the three bodyguards. “No more nonsense, understand?”

  “We thought he was one o’ them robbers,” snarled One-Eye. “Thought maybe one of ‘em ran off when we beefed the others and came here to get out of the weather.”

  “Go on back to the saloon,” ordered Harken, jerking his head toward the opening between the doors.

  The three disgruntled gunmen glanced at each other, then glanced at Sartain with meaning. All three were piss-burned. They’d been humiliated in front of the girl. Sartain knew he’d have to watch his back, as they’d have to make another try at him if only to restore their pride.

  Hitching their gun belts up on their waists, they trudged through the doors like injured schoolboys. Their boots crunched off through the snow, quickly being drowned by the wind and the sand-like sound of the snow being driven against the barn’s creaking walls.

  “You go on, too, Stanley,” Gala said. “I...er, we...will be along in a minute.”

  Harken gave a rueful snort. “I am not leaving you alone out here with...with him!”

  “Stanley,” she said, arching a brow as though to convey the futility of her chaperone’s position.

  It was a succinctly efficient gesture. Stanley got it right away. Obviously, this wasn’t his first rodeo with the governor’s green-eyed daughter, and he was exhausted by the futility of his efforts.

  He sighed, slapped his hands against his sides, gave Sartain a look of feeble warning, and then followed the others back in the direction of the saloon.

  “You might as well go back, too,” Sartain told Gala. He walked over and picked up his rifle, brushed the dust and straw off it, closely inspected the stock for scrapes and abrasions. “I have to go back out there. I have to find Dorian.”

  “Dorian,” Gala said. “What a pretty name.” She glanced at the open door to what had been Hector Lee Wallace’s room, where a dim light still danced from the fire in the potbelly stove. “What were you two doing together out here?”

  She turned back to Sartain, her wide eyes betraying lurid fascination.

  “We were, uh, warming ourselves. Now, if you’ll excuse—”

  Gala placed her hand on the barrel of the rifle in his hands. “You can’t go back out there. You’re half-frozen. If Dorian’s out there, I’ll guarantee you she probably doesn’t need your help anymore. Even if she’s still alive, you’d never find her.”

  “I have to try.”

  “Futile!” the girl fairly yelled, widening her eyes at him commandingly.

  He had to admit that this girl was made of formidable material. That look almost convinced him.

  “Come,” she said, sliding her mittened hand slowly along the Henry’s barrel then giving it a slight tug. “Let’s get you inside. I’ll have Mrs. Dalton heat water for a bath. I was about to do the same for myself when the others thought they saw someone out here.”

  Sartain glanced at the girl’s hand on his rifle. “What’re you doing out here?”

  “I was curious.” Gala smiled. “I’m a bored, curious, precocious girl, Mr. Sartain. And I don’t mind a little...danger...now and then.” She removed her hand from the rifle. “Come. A hot bath is waiting.”

  Those eyes met his once more, levelly, commandingly.

  Seductively.

  She was right. If Dorian was out in the storm, he didn’t have much chance of finding her. Especially now that he was already half-frozen.

  As Gala Morrissey swung saucily away from him and stepped out between the barn’s open doors, Sartain glanced around the barn once more. He walked over to the open door of Hector Lee Wallace’s room—a room the half-breed would no longer be occupying—and peered inside.

  Just in case Dorian was lurking around in there.

  She wasn’t.

  “Damn fool girl,” the Cajun muttered as he moved inside the room.

  He grabbed his bottle of Henry Clay off the table and stuffed it inside his coat pocket. He slung his saddlebags over his shoulder.

  He walked out of the barn’s main doors and into the storm.

  There was only a little light left in the sky, and it was bleeding out fast. He followed the girl’s tracks, overlaying the men’s fast-fading tracks, to the rear of the saloon.

  Gala waited there for him, by the back door, hunched inside her fancy fur coat. She waited until he’d stopped near her and the door, then she lunged toward him, wrapped her arms around his neck, and rose up on her tiptoes to press her warm, moist mouth against his.

  From the lamplight leeching out the sashed window to his left, he saw her white-toothed smile when she pulled away from him.

  She chuckled throatily then swung around, opened the door, and stomped her boots as she hurried inside.

  Sartain was a little taken aback by the girl’s brashness. Two brash girls in one day...

  What potion had leeched into the water here in western Nebraska, anyway?

  Chapter 12

  Sartain looked around once more, as though maybe Dorian had suddenly materialized behind him. But there was only the snow roiling through the howling, fast-descending darkness.

  He followed Gala past the mouth of the saloon’s rear stairs and down a short hall adorned with a badly faded oil painting of George Washington in full dress regalia. There was a bullet hole in one of George’s brass buttons.

  Sartain’s boots felt as heavy as lead. All he could feel of his feet inside them was a pinching pain where he thought his toes probably were, but he wasn’t sure. He half-wondered if, after he’d pulled off his boots, they’d tumble out one by one, hard as stones.

  He winced at the notion.

  He and the girl pushed through a wine-red curtain and into the main saloon. While Gala hurried over to the large, ornate mahogany bar that the Sundance’s proprietor, Lick Dalton, had ordered from San Francisco, Sartain stopped to get the lay of the land.

  The large, dimly lit, low-ceilinged saloon was threaded with smoke from the massi
ve stone hearth in the wall to the Cajun’s right, and from the cigarette or cigar smoke sent into the air by the men smoking in various places about the room.

  There were four long, halved-log tables running from the front to the back of the place. Three were occupied by a dozen or so men and one woman.

  Six of these men sat together at the end of the second table from the room’s front. They were a mixed bunch, including a gent in cavalry blues, with a cavalry great coat hanging off the back of his chair. Among them was also a black man in pinstriped overalls and with a wool-lined leather coat and a fur hat with earflaps hanging off the back of his chair. Sartain thought he worked for the railroad.

  Two of the other four at that table were middle-aged and wearing what appeared badly rumpled business suits while the other two wore the worn gear of common trail riders. All but one of the six was smoking so that a heavy, gray cloud swirled over their table, its belly dully lit by a hurricane lamp near the pile of cards, coins, shot glasses, and greenbacks.

  At the next table nearer Sartain sat the three bruisers who’d jumped him. They had a bottle and glasses on the table before them, and they all had their eyes on Sartain. Stanley Harken sat in a leather-upholstered armchair angled near the fire. He’d been reading a newspaper, but now his bespectacled gaze was also on the Cajun.

  At the far-left side of the table nearest, The Revenger sat a man and a woman, one on either side of the table, the woman’s back to Sartain. They were a young couple. Sartain couldn’t tell for sure, but the woman looked pregnant. Both were heavily dressed in worn wool garb against the weather. They had large coffee mugs on the table before them, and plates with food leavings.

  The young man, who sported a blue-eyed Germanic face and close-cropped yellow-blond hair, had his vaguely curious, apprehensive eyes on the newcomer. Following the young man’s gaze, the young woman, hunched low over the table, both hands wrapped around her stone coffee mug, turned to glance over her right shoulder at the object of the young man’s scrutiny. Thick brows accentuated her decidedly plain, pale features.

  She didn’t seem to like what she saw in the big man standing before the wine-red curtain. Drawing her head down a little, like a cowering dog, she turned back forward. Sartain saw the side of her face move as she muttered something to the young man who was probably her husband.

  He said something back to her and placed his hand on one of hers as though to reassure her.

  They’d obviously been on the ill-fated train, and between the robbers and the weather, they’d had enough trouble for one day.

  “Sartain!” This from the little, wiry man with a prominent Adam’s apple and upswept gray mustaches standing behind the bar, staring past Gala at the burly newcomer. “Sartain!” Lick Dalton bellowed, then, ambling out from behind the bar and limping toward Sartain, he wiped his hands on his apron and looked around the room sheepishly, clicking his dentures worriedly.

  He wore a threadbare long-handle shirt under baggy denims held upon his spindly shoulders with snakeskin galluses. A black cloth watch cap was perched on his bony head.

  He hurried up to the Cajun, getting a little too close for The Revenger’s comfort—so close that Sartain could smell the malty ale on the man’s breath, and his rancid body odor—and said with a conspiratorial air, “What’s this about the breed?”

  “He lost his head.”

  “What?” Dalton had said it too loudly, and looked around cautiously. Lowering his volume and moderating his tone, he said, “If this is some kind of joke, I got customers here, don’t ya know. And I don’t need no one gettin’ scared off by—”

  “Crap, Dalton,” Sartain chuckled, “where they gonna go?”

  “I mean, I don’t need no dark tales gettin’ spread around. The railroad’s been good to Sundance. We’re a growin’ town though it might not look like it just yet, but we been gettin’ more and more trains through here, and—”

  “I’m sorry if Wallace’s death is bad for business,” said Sartain, “but come spring, you’ll find his head at the bottom of the hill beyond the barn. If the coyotes don’t drag it off.”

  “Shhh!” Dalton said, looking around again then grabbing The Revenger’s arm and leading him over to the wall near the hearth, out of hearing range of everyone except possibly Harken and Gala, who was inching closer to the pair with an uncertain expression on her radiant, jade-eyed features.

  “I say, Miss, beggin’ your pardon an’ all,” Dalton said, giving the girl an uneasy glance, “I know you’re a governor’s daughter, but we got us a private conversation here.”

  Gala arched her brows in mild shock at the harsh tone the saloon owner had taken with her and sagged into a shabby upholstered armchair near Stanley Harken and the fire. But she kept her curious gaze on Sartain and the Sundance’s scrawny, mustachioed proprietor, who gave her his back.

  Dalton might have held guard over Sundance’s reputation, but, like most westerners, he had little patience for the uppity elite, one of which this girl obviously was.

  “Are you sure the half-breed’s dead?” Dalton whispered, getting so close to Sartain now that The Revenger felt compelled to hold his breath.

  Sartain kept his voice low mainly to keep the Sundance proprietor’s shorts from getting into more of a bunch than they already were. Dalton seemed very much undone about the dark turn of events, and The Revenger had a feeling there was more to it than the man’s feelings of personal loss.

  “Unless a man can survive without his head, he’s dead.”

  Dalton glanced away, his brows ridging over darkly pensive eyes.

  “What is it?” Sartain probed the man.

  Dalton was suddenly staring off into space.

  “What is it?” Sartain said, louder.

  Dalton jerked as though out of his reverie, sliding his indignant gaze back up at the tall man hovering over him. “Keep it down, will ya? I got a business to run here.”

  The man limped away, glancing over his shoulder to say, “Alma will have your bath ready in a few minutes. Why don’t you go upstairs and make yourself comfortable? Room 6 is clean...so to speak.”

  Alma was Dalton’s sullen, portly wife.

  “If you need someone to wash your back, I’m sure you can find someone around here somewhere!” Dalton said as he glanced at Gala then winked at Sartain, giving a devilish grin.

  “Good God!” Harken complained, shooting a reprimanding look at Gala, who merely sucked in her cheeks.

  Dalton walked around behind the bar, raising his voice to bellow to the room, “Gonna be a long night, folks! A long, stormy night, yessir, but there’s nothin’ to worry about. Me an’ my sweet Alma got plenty of grub and plenty of busthead and plenty of wood to keep the fires stoked!”

  “Yeah, but what’re we gonna do without the half-breed to fetch it from the shed for us?” said one of Gala’s bodyguards, the tallest of the three, with a mocking air.

  The others in the room cast suspicious glances between him and Dalton, who gave a brittle laugh and said, “Oh, never mind him, folks. Why the breed’s just takin’ a little badly needed break out in his room off the barn, that’s all!”

  He laughed again, even more woodenly than before, and disappeared through a curtained doorway flanking the bar. Sartain studied the curtain jostling back into place over the doorway.

  The Sundance proprietor had more on his mind than just the knowledge he was out one half-breed swamper.

  What was that, exactly?

  Did Dalton have an idea of who...or what...had separated Hector Lee Wallace from his head?

  Sartain dragged his numb feet over to a chair on the other side of the fire from the girl and Harken. They both sat facing him, a stout log table between them. On the table sat a one-quarter-full brandy snifter and a cigar resting in an ashtray. Sartain pulled his bottle from his coat pocket, popped the cork, took a couple of healthy swallows, and set the bottle on the floor beside him.

  He winced as he tried to scrape his left boot off with the r
ight one. When Gala saw that he was having trouble, she said, “Let me help you with that.”

  She removed her fur hat and shook her head. Sartain felt himself become a little breathless when he saw the thick, coal-black hair cascade around her head and shoulders. Gala slid out of her chair and dropped to her knees before the Cajun.

  “Gala, for heaven’s sake!” admonished Stanley, glancing around the room to see who was watching.

  Plenty of eyes had been flicking to the girl, Sartain had noticed. Nearly every man in the room was fascinated by the beautiful young woman though word had no doubt gotten around that she was the daughter of the governor and, thus, off limits.

  The tallest of the three bodyguards glared over his cards at Sartain. He seemed to be the one most interested in her actions. His eyes owned a proprietary air whenever they landed on her. The other two snorted ruefully and shook their heads, One-Eye taking a long drag off his quirley.

  “Oh, hush, Stanley,” Gala said. “I’m lending assistance to a brother in need.”

  “He’s not your brother.”

  “Just as well,” the girl said, looking up ironically from beneath her brows at the man she was assisting.

  Harken glanced around once more, his nose turning crimson, and then sighed and distracted himself with his newspaper.

  “Obliged,” Sartain said as she pulled his left boot off with a grunt, and stood it on the edge of the hemp rug near the popping flames in the hearth.

  Sartain was glad to see that all of his toes were intact. He couldn’t feel them, but they were still attached to his foot, at least.

  “One down, one to go.”

  The girl bunched her lips as she took the second boot in both hands, propping the heel between her thighs, and pulled. She grunted, making a face, and nearly fell backward against her chair when the boot finally slipped free of the Cajun’s foot.

  The sock had come off with the boot.

  Sartain scowled at his foot, all the toes of which were purple.

  “Oh,” the girl said. “See? I told you you were half-frozen!”