The Revenger aimed the LeMat straight out from his left shoulder, flicked the steel lever to engage the twelve-gauge shotgun tube beneath the main barrel, ratcheted back the hammer, and fired.
Gala and the man in the hall screamed in unison. There was a heavy thud as the man in the hall struck the floor.
There was another, clattering thud as his pistol did the same.
Gala sat up, shuddering. Voices rose in the hall.
Sartain went to the door. He peered out through the fist-sized hole in the upper panel, saw Ed lying out in the hall, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, one leg tucked under the other one. The one-eyed bodyguard crouched over him, his Remington in one hand. As he turned toward Sartain’s ragged door, the Cajun opened it and stepped out into the hall.
Dalton was just then climbing the stairs, weaving a little from side to side, his fiddle in one hand, the bow in the other hand. He was breathing hard as he gained the top of the stairs. He cursed under his breath, wagging his head as though this were just the sort of thing, he’d been afraid of, though of course, he’d witnessed plenty of dustups equally bad and worse.
The one-eyed bodyguard straightened, scowling and glancing at the smoking LeMat in The Revenger’s fist.
“You make it a habit of drillin’ men through your door, mister?”
“Only in return for the favor.”
Sartain glanced at the much smaller hole in the door panel, just above his own fist-sized one.
One-Eye frowned, puzzled, as he studied the hole. “Well, why in the hell...”
A jade eye peered out at him through Sartain’s hole. Gala blinked then stepped sheepishly out around the partly open door. She had her head down, and she was sucking in her cheeks. She glanced demurely at the one-eyed man and said, “We were just having a drink, Chance.”
She glanced at Sartain, a devilish gleam in both eyes then looked at the floor again.
“That cuts it, Miss Gala,” said the one-eyed man. “That just cuts it!”
The third bounty hunter had come up the stairs behind Dalton. He was swaying and weaving around on the stairs and clutching a bottle to his chest. There was no sign of the girl’s chaperone, Harken. He was probably still pie-eyed on Dalton’s rum.
When the gold-toothed bounty hunter saw Ed lying dead on the hallway floor, he gave a clipped chuckle and then, as though suddenly realizing the gravity of the situation, brushed a hand across his mouth, as though pushing away the smile, and said, “Holy...crap.”
Then he looked from the Cajun to Gala and back again. “Poor ole Ed.”
The other men from the train were clumped at the bottom of the stairs, muttering among themselves, shaking their heads.
The black man said, “That girl’s trouble. You can just tell by lookin’ at her. Come on, gents. I finally got me a good hand. Let’s get back to it!”
The others turned and, owning the fatalism of most rugged frontiersman, turned and followed him back to their poker game.
That left only Alma and the young man and the pregnant young wife, all three appearing to be the only sober folks in the building, standing at the bottom of the stairs.
Alma sighed and slapped her arms against her sides. “I’ll get a mop!”
She turned and disappeared, as well.
The gold-toothed bodyguard standing behind Dalton touched the pistol holstered on his right thigh. “What we gonna do about this, Rand?”
“Nothin’,” Rand said in disgust. “I reckon ole Ed done it to himself, all right. I never did cotton to a bushwhacker, and Ed didn’t, either. He was just drunk and...” He let his voice trail off as he looked at Gala in her rumpled dress and the big Cajun in his skin-tight long-handles and wool socks.
He stepped close to Sartain and gritted his teeth as he said, “You can haul him on out of here since you’re the one who beefed him.”
He gave Gala a reproving glance and then swung away from the lovers and tramped angrily down the hall to his room.
Dalton groaned as he stared at the dead man and then looked at Sartain. “Doggone it, Sartain! Folks’re gonna think I don’t run a civilized place!” He clicked his dentures and then, using the handrail, went back down the stairs.
Sartain stretched, yawned, and scratched his chest. “Well, I reckon we caused enough damage for one night,” he told Gala, tramping back into his room for his duds.
“I’ll help you, Mike,” she said. “Just let me get my coat and boots!”
“No, no. You just stay in here, young lady,” the Cajun ordered, but he doubted she’d heard him.
Dalton was sawing away on his fiddle again even more loudly than before, and Gala had trotted off down the hall to her room.
Sartain dressed and shrugged into his heavy mackinaw. He wrapped his scarf over his hat and tied it beneath his chin. Pulling gloves on, he walked into the hall. Gala was moving down the hall from the direction of her room, bundled up against the cold, even wearing her sleek fur hat and fur mittens.
“I told you to forget it,” the Cajun told her. “I can handle him myself. Besides, it’s dangerous out there.”
“Don’t be mad, Mike,” the girl pouted, beetling her sexy brows. “I’m not the one who fired that bullet through your door!”
“No, but...” Sartain let his voice trail away as he started to pull Ed off the floor. What was the point of trying to reason with the impetuous girl?
“I’ll take his feet.” Gala crouched over the dead man’s legs. “We’ll both carry him, so you won’t get blood all over your coat.”
“Ah, hell.” But Sartain thought she had a point there, too. The shotgun blast had opened one hell of a bloody hole in Ed’s chest. And, besides, if it weren’t for her having led the man on, Sartain likely wouldn’t have had to kill him.
Someone likely would have killed him eventually. Ed hadn’t been new to trouble. But Sartain wouldn’t have had to kill him.
The Revenger lifted Ed up by his shoulders and Gala lifted him by his ankles. Grunting and stumbling, they back-and-bellied the dead man down the stairs. Dalton was playing his fiddle near the bar, but only two men—the drifters in rough trail garb—were dancing hand-in-hand, drunkenly twirling each other while a couple of the card players yelped and howled at the dancers, occasionally throwing money.
All turned to see Sartain and the girl hauling the body, but none offered to help. They were all too drunk, too distracted, and they knew that Sartain already had dibs on the girl’s pleasure. She might have been a tart, but she wasn’t the kind of tart to entertain more than one man in an evening.
Gala’s chaperone, Stanley, was sound asleep on the settee. He looked dead, for he was laid out on his back, beringed hands entwined on his chest. He wore one of those serene half-smiles that undertakers arranged on cadavers’ faces, to make the dead folks’ families believe their beloved was pleased as punch to be heading off to the Great Beyond.
Sartain could have warned the man about Dalton’s punch, which he’d sampled once before and woke the next morning feeling as though a mule had kicked him three solid times in the head and then rolled on him, besides.
The young man and young pregnant woman were sitting near the hearth, drinking coffee. The young man had an arm around the young woman’s shoulders, and they were both watching Sartain and Gala with a repelled, reproving air.
They looked sleepy, but after all that had happened today, their nerves were probably too jangled to rest. Something told Sartain this was probably their first time traveling any distance from home. Something also told him they were traveling somewhere so that a female relative could help with the last weeks of the young woman’s pregnancy, which, judging by the distant, worried look in the girl’s eyes, might not have been going well.
He and Gala carried Ed down the rear hall and past the oil painting and the rear stairway. Two stout locking bars were in place across the door. Sartain hadn’t noticed those before. He thought it odd to have two bars, one thick chunk of ash or pine could usually be trusted to do
the trick.
He and Gala set the body on the floor and caught their breaths as Sartain removed the locking bars and leaned them against the wall beside the door.
“Shall we?” he asked, grunting as he snaked his forearms beneath Ed’s upper arms.
He and Gala carried the body through the deepening drifts. The wind was swirling the snow so violently that he couldn’t see the barn until he was maybe twenty feet away from it. Again, they lay Ed down, the body sinking deep in a feathery drift. When Sartain had slid the two barn doors five feet open on their frozen, rusty rollers, he and Gala carried the body inside.
Gala dropped Ed’s feet and slowly straightened. Even in the barn’s thick, aromatic shadows, Sartain saw her eyes widen as they fixed on something behind the Cajun. Her mouth opened, and then a shrill scream came ripping out of it.
Sartain started to turn around. Something heavy and solid, like a two-by-four, clubbed him across his left temple.
He flew back across the dead man and hit the barn floor on his back, losing consciousness as fast as the flame died on a blown candle.
Chapter 17
“Sartain!” a man’s voice called to him as though from the bottom of a deep well.
At the same time, rough hands shook him.
“Sartain! Sartain! Where’s Gala?”
The Cajun opened his eyes, immediately slitting them against the harsh morning sunlight streaming through the shed’s east windows. He lay on Hec Wallace’s bed, a buffalo hide beneath him.
Stanley Harken had both his gloved hands on the sleeve of Sartain’s quilted coat, and he jerked him again roughly, shaking him, pulling him farther and farther out of the pit of merciful sleep he’d prefer to remain in, away from the throbbing pain in his left temple. Behind Harken stood the other two bodyguards, both as red-eyed and haggard as Gala’s chaperone.
“Sartain!” Harken intoned once more, aggravating the throbbing in the Cajun’s head. “Where...is...Ga-laahh?”
Gala!
Sartain jerked his head up off the cot and dropped his feet to the floor so abruptly that a fetid wave of dizziness and nausea washed over him, nearly making him faint. He fought it back, wincing against the pain hammering his skull like the blows of a sledgehammer, and fought to stand, clinging to both Harken and the one-eyed Rand. The memory of what had happened after they’d entered the barn last night, her horrified stare and then her scream, the smack of the club against his temple, poked and prodded his memory.
“Where is she?” Harken said, staring up from beneath Sartain’s right shoulder, his own features terrified as well as mystified. “By God, if you did something to that girl...”
As if that were a signal, Rand reached under his fur coat and pulled a pistol, holding the gun at waist level, aimed at Sartain. He gritted his teeth as he clicked the hammer back.
“Christ,” the Cajun said, pushing off both men and staggering toward the open door. That was all he could say: “Christ...Christ...Christ...”
He moved through the doorway into the main barn. The doors were open six feet, the post-storm sunlight blazing down from a clean-scoured sky, forming a glowing trapezoid on the scattered hay and straw. The ground was scuffed where Sartain had fallen and where the girl had no doubt tried to fight off the beast.
The beast.
That’s the only thing that could have taken her.
Only in a vague, stunned way did he wonder why he’d been laid out on Wallace’s cot. Alive! That part was too mystifying for him to consider just now, in his brain-fogged state.
“Where’s Ed?” he asked, glancing at the three men walking through the side-shed door behind him. “Did you move him?”
“No Ed,” said Rand, again aiming his revolver at Sartain. “No Ed, no Gala. Just you, Sartain, sound asleep on the cot.” His voice was hard and brittle with accusing. “Suppose you tell us where both of them are!”
“Did you look all over the barn?”
“Pretty much,” Rand said.
Still, Sartain stumbled off down the barn alley, staggering like a drunkard, peering over the stall doors on both sides. His own horse and Charlie Scanlon’s coyote dun stood in stalls nearest the front.
Boss looked nervous. When he saw his rider staggering toward him, he loosed a relieved whinny. The two other horses, both likely Dalton’s, answered in kind. They too looked edgy as they craned their necks toward the Cajun. The sorrel kicked its stall door.
Sartain ignored the mounts. He felt compelled to check each stall, looking for whatever the beast had left of Gala and Ed. But there was nothing.
Nothing.
Could it have hauled both away like it had done with Charlie Scanlon?
Then he swung toward the stall in which he’d housed Dorian’s horse. The pinto wasn’t there!
It had been there last evening after Dorian had disappeared in the storm. But it wasn’t there now.
He walked slowly, heavily toward the front of the barn. Harken stood glaring at him, red-eyed, his stubby nose also red and swollen from drink. The other two flanked him, Rand aiming his cocked revolver at him.
All three appeared ready to hang him.
“What?” Sartain laughed derisively, brushing his curly hair back from his swollen temple. “You think I gave myself this?” He let the thick hair flop back down on his forehead. “What do you think I did with the bodies? Why would I have done anything with Ed’s body? You knew last night he was dead.”
Harken kept his hard stare on Sartain, wanting to believe the conclusion he’d already come to because it was the easiest thing for him to wrap his mind around. “Who knows how a madman thinks?”
The gold-toothed bodyguard, who Sartain thought he’d heard called Temple, said, “Yeah, a madman. That’s it. You killed the swamper, and then you killed Gala and Ed. Prob’ly been plannin’ the whole thing since you got here. A goddamn crazy son of a buck. You got it written all over you, Cajun!”
“Yeah, I got a good bit of crazy in me, but not that kind of crazy.” Ignoring Rand’s pointed gun, he pushed through the trio and continued to stagger up the alley and out through the doors. He raised his arm to shield his eyes from the sunlight and looked around.
There could have been some tracks leading out away from the barn, to the northeast, but it was hard to tell for sure. There were Harken’s and the two bodyguards’ recent tracks, but the wind had likely blown all night. Any other tracks would have long been erased.
“Where you goin’, Sartain?” Rand barked as the Cajun tramped through the snowdrifts that rose to his knees in places. “Hey, where you goin’?”
Ignoring the men moving toward him, he continued to walk out northeast of the barn. There were no tracks that he could see. There were a few faint dimples that were a little darker blue than the rest of the snow, but they could have been made by the wind.
Sartain stopped and swung around. Temple and Rand stood a ways out from the barn, both holding guns on him now. Harken remained between the barn’s open doors with a befuddled expression on his ragged, hung over features.
Sartain pushed past the two frowning bodyguards as he headed back to the barn. “Now, where you goin’?” Temple called.
“I’m goin’ to fetch my hat.”
Sartain brushed past Harken, picked up his hat where he’d left it on the floor last night, stuffed it onto his head, and then tramped back out through the barn door. He stopped suddenly. Lick Dalton stood staring toward him from the saloon’s rear door. The apron-clad proprietor was holding an armload of wood against his chest. He had a funny, faintly sheepish expression on his long, craggy face.
Seeing Sartain staring back at him suspiciously, Dalton jerked with a start and then pulled the saloon’s rear door open and disappeared inside, awkwardly pulling the door closed behind him.
“Dalton!” the Cajun intoned. “Hey, Dalton! Wait a minute!”
Sartain jogged through the snow as Rand said, “You wait a minute, Sartain! We ain’t finished!”
“Ah, let hi
m go. He didn’t give that goose egg to himself,” Sartain heard Harken say as he jerked open the saloon’s rear door. He bounded inside the saloon. As he entered the main room, in which only a couple of last night’s card players and the young couple sat, drinking coffee, Dalton disappeared through the curtained door behind the bar.
Sartain strode purposefully around the bar. He pushed through the curtained doorway. Dalton was dropping his load of wood into a box beside the large cook range at which Alma was frying potatoes and onions. Three loaves of fresh bread sat on a wire warming rack on a stout log table.
Dalton glanced at Sartain as he grabbed one of the logs and turned to the range. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. No, sir. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.”
He opened one of the range’s small, square side doors and shoved the log inside.
“What wasn’t supposed to happen?” the Cajun wanted to know.
Alma jerked a harsh, commanding look at her husband. “Lick!”
“What wasn’t supposed to happen?” Sartain repeated, louder, ignoring the woman’s cold stare at her husband.
“Nothin’,” Dalton said as he shoved another log into the firebox then closed the door with a squawk, twisting the handle to lock it.
“Come on, Dalton. Be a man.” Sartain moved forward, hot blood rushing to his face. “What’s going on around here? I got a feelin’ you know all about it, don’t you? I got a feelin’ you know what that beast is that’s been doin’ all the killing.”
Dalton glanced at Sartain then turned to Alma. She held her castigating gaze on her husband, bunching her lips as she angrily stirred the potatoes in the cast iron pan.
Sartain said, “Alma, he might as well tell me. Or you might as well. I know there’s something wicked at play here. Wickedly deadly. And I know you two are in on it. I’m gonna get to the bottom of it one way or another.”
Sartain pulled a chair out from the table, sat down, removed his hat, and tossed it onto the table beside the bread. He ran a hand through his hair. “I’m not goin’ anywhere until I hear every word of what’s at play here in this godforsaken devil’s lair!”
The Revenger Page 111