Sartain ducked, heard the whistle of the blade through the air where his head had just been. Again, he clawed at his holster, but he was stumbling backward, trying to keep his eyes on Hans’s hatchet, and he was having trouble releasing the keeper thong from over the hammer.
And then the wretched beast hammered its three-hundred-and-fifty-pound body straight forward, slamming his massive head and shoulders into the Cajun, lifting him off his feet and driving him to the floor.
Sartain’s head rang from its brutal meeting with the hard-packed dirt. For a moment there were two man-beasts straddling him, opening the horror of his mouth, unleashing that rancid breath fetid with what could only be the stench of human flesh, and lifted the hatchet high above his head.
The hatchet came down, but now Sartain had the LeMat in his right hand.
The pistol exploded, flames lapping from the barrel.
The bullet tore into Hans’s right shoulder at the joint. The beast’s hand opened, and the hatchet slammed into the ground about six inches from the Cajun’s left cheek, so close that he could smell the coppery-sweet smell of the blood- and flesh-encrusted blade.
Hans sagged backward, snarling wildly and shaking his pumpkin-sized head as he clamped his massive left hand to his anvil-sized, bullet-torn shoulder.
Sartain gave a beast-like roar of his own as he hardened his jaws and slammed his forehead into Hans’s chest, shoving the giant backward. The Cajun was able to slide his right leg out from beneath Hans’s rear-end and slam the heel of his boot against the beast’s chest.
Hans roared again and fell backward. As he did, Sartain kicked him again and aimed the LeMat at his head. As he squeezed the trigger, Hans slung his left arm backward, connecting solidly with the LeMat’s brass frame.
The revolver roared, the bullet screeching off the cook stove. The gun itself flew out of Sartain’s hand, spun through the air, and slammed into the front wall.
Hans reached with his left hand for the Cajun’s throat. Sartain elbowed the giant’s massive hand away then grabbed the hatchet, loosing a bellowing curse as he kicked out with his legs and drove the blade into the same shoulder he’d plundered with the bullet.
Hans screamed a scream that was nothing like Sartain had ever heard—part bird, part grizzly bear, part bugling elk cry, and part something that could only be about one-quarter human. The bellow filled the cabin, swirling through the air like something palpable and deadly, causing Sartain to grit his teeth against the rattling of his eardrums.
As the man-beast loosed another such scream of anger, frustration, and pain, Sartain yanked his left leg out from under him. He scrambled to his feet but hit the floor again on his knees as Hans somehow managed to lunge toward him and grab his left ankle.
Sartain could smell the breath of the beast scrambling toward him. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that Hans had pulled the hatchet out of his shoulder and, on hands and knees, crawling furiously toward Sartain, raging, raised the blood-dripping weapon once more.
The Cajun saw the LeMat lying at the base of the front wall and lunged for it. He wrapped his hand around the pearl grips, raised the weapon, twisting around, and saw Hans raising the hatchet high in the air above his head, open mouth looking like a large, black saucer.
That horrible, sour air blew against the Cajun once more, stifling him. Still, he managed to raise the LeMat, engage the shotgun shell, aim, and fire just as the beast started driving the hatchet down.
Hans’s bellowing wail turned into a squeal as the hatchet left his hand once more to tumble to the floor beside Sartain’s head. The man-beast sagged backward and then fell forward. The Cajun rolled to the right a quarter-second before Hans would have fallen on top of him, likely suffocating him with his bulk.
Sartain gained his feet and stared down at Hans. The beast lay sprawled partly on its bloody right shoulder, jerking and gurgling as it died. The massive head bobbed as Hans convulsed with death spasms.
“Mike!” Came a young woman’s cry.
Sartain looked toward the skins covering the cave entrance. “Gala!”
He ran through the door and stopped, looking around horrifically. The cave was lit by several lamps guttering on what appeared old dynamite crates. The cave had been a mine. Sartain could see the marks of picks and shovels in the walls and the high, vaulted ceiling. What caught the brunt of his attention, however, was the grisly litter of human bones. Many of the bones, obviously arms and legs, a few ribs, still had bloody meat clinging to them.
A whimper and a creaking sound drew Sartain’s attention to the large reinforced bed lying against the cave’s left wall, under a stout ceiling beam to which cobwebs clung. The bed was a massive pile of buffalo hides.
“Mike!” It took Sartain a moment to pick Gala’s oval face out of the hides.
She was trying to sit up despite the ropes tying her wrists to the bed’s stout posts, which had been constructed out of what appeared old ceiling beams. They were probably the only supports that could have held Hans’s massive frame.
“Mike!” Gala cried again, turning her head toward him. A neckerchief trailed across her chin. It had likely been used as a gag, which she’d spit out to call for him.
“Jesus,” Sartain muttered, unsheathing his Bowie knife. “Jesus Christ,” he said, freeing the girl’s wrists and ankles while his eyes swept the horror of the bone-littered floor.
“Oh, Mike,” Gala said, staring wide-eyed at him. She wasn’t crying. Her jade eyes were merely glazed with shock.
She didn’t seem to know what else to say. That about said it all, the Cajun thought, as he wrapped the girl in the robes and picked her up in his arms.
Gala clung to him, staring up at him.
“It’s all right,” The Revenger said. “It’s going to be all right.”
But he wasn’t sure, after seeing what they’d both seen here today, that anything would ever be all right again.
He swept the skins away from the cave entrance and ducked back into the cabin. He jerked back against the skins when he saw Hans standing before him, wailing again as he raised the hatchet above his head.
A rifle roared.
Hans squealed and drove the blade of the hatchet into the log wall above Sartain’s head. Hans’s massive frame wobbled, and then he stumbled away and fell to the floor. Sartain could feel the reverberation of the giant’s fall through his boots.
Dorian stood in the cabin’s open doorway, smoke curling from the barrel of her carbine.
“No!” a man’s voice shouted outside the cabin.
Sartain yelled, “Hold on, Harken!”
Drowning the yell, another rifle belched, this one outside the cabin.
Dorian screamed and stumbled forward as the bullet tore through her back and out her chest, spraying blood onto the floor in front of her. She staggered forward, her blue eyes meeting Sartain’s briefly, obliquely, before she crumpled and lay in a quivering heap at the Cajun’s boots, not far from her brother.
“Ah, crap,” said Sartain as Dorian started to raise a hand toward him as though seeking his help.
Then the light left her eyes, and her head and hand dropped to the floor.
The sound of running footsteps and strained breaths sounded outside the cabin. There was a thud on the wooden stoop, and Harken poked his head and the barrel of his smoking carbine through the door.
He looked at Sartain and Gala, then frowned as he shifted his gaze from the unmoving Hans to his dead sister.
“Oh, hell,” Harken said.
“Yeah,” replied the Cajun.
“She jumped me, grabbed her rifle, and headed for the cabin. I thought...I thought she was going to shoot you or Gala...”
Sartain stepped over Dorian as he moved toward the door. “You probably did her a favor,” The Revenger said. “She gave her life for her brother. There wasn’t much left.”
Still, his heart felt heavy and sick. Dorian hadn’t asked for the life she’d been stricken with, being caretaker of a brother
who’d either been crazy since birth or driven that way by circumstances beyond his control.
Sartain carried Gala out of the cabin.
As he headed back in the direction of the horses, she asked, “Mike, what...what happened? My mind can’t quite grasp it.”
Her voice was pitched with shock and wonder.
“Don’t ask me,” the Cajun said, tramping off through the deep snow. “Let’s just chalk it up to one wild night at the Sundance Saloon.”
The End
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FATAL WOMAN
Chapter 1
Edgar Rosen thrust his Peacemaker revolver at the three hard-eyed men slouching on the green plush train seats before him, and said commandingly, “Claw air or chew dirt, ya rotten rannies! I’m Deputy U.S. Marshal Edgar Vincent Rosen, and I’m takin’ you into the federal lockup. You can go in head up or toe down. It’s your decision. Don’t make no never mind to me!”
The biggest man of the three, who had a bullet-shaped head as bald as a wheel hub, and a tattoo of a naked woman on his neck, wrinkled his broad nostrils at the tow-headed five-year-old and said, “Beat it, junior, or I’ll cut your tongue out an’ chop off your—!”
The man beside him elbowed him sharply and smiled down at the nicker-clad boy, who was still pointing his “Peacemaker” at them. It was a wooden gun that little Edgar had carved from a chunk of cottonwood, but in the boy’s mind, it was a brass-chased, ivory-gripped beauty with his initials carved into the handles, which boasted a half-dozen carefully carved notches.
The man who’d elbowed the big man had long, stringy, light-brown hair and a silver spike through his left nostril. He threw his hands up, and said in mock fear, “He’s got us now, boys! He’s got us now! Lordy, I’ve been soooo worried that nasty ole Marshal Edgar Vincent Rosen was gonna run us to ground that I ain’t been able to catch a good night’s sleep in years! Oh, I reckon it’s just as well. Give yourselves up, fellers! Old Rosen has got us dead to rights, he has!”
He pretend-sobbed. “Have mercy on us, Marshal! Oh, please, do have mercy on us, Marshal Rosen! We don’t wanna die!”
“Marshal” Rosen gritted his teeth, extended his left, slightly sticky hand palm up, and wagged his wooden pistol. “Turn over them hoglegs nice an’ slow. One quick move and you’re gonna be snugglin’ with the diamondbacks! I got paper on ya—snagged it from the depot in Denver—so I know who ya are. You’re the Lute Lawton Bunch, and I’ve done run ya to ground!”
The three men’s sharp-featured bearded faces flushed the deep red of an Arizona sunset.
The long-haired man with the nose spike slowly lowered his hands. He glanced around self-consciously and then chuckled edgily. “We’re the Lute Lawton Bunch, eh, sonny? No, I think you done made a mistake.” He chuckled again, edgily. “Run along now, little boy. Your momma’s probably worried about ya.”
“Beat it, kid,” said the man sitting against the window. He was middle-aged, with a gray mustache and chin whiskers, and he wore round-rimmed spectacles and a bowler hat. A scar slanted across his left cheek. There was a long, wide bulge under his black wool coat. “Scram! Can’t you see you’re pesterin’ your elders?”
“Oh, don’t be so hard on the kid,” said the longhaired man. “He’s just playin’ make-believe.” He chuckled again and glanced around the narrow-gauge passenger car as the wheels clacked and clattered over rail seams.
The car was about three-quarters full. Stony ridges passed beyond the sooty, sunlit windows. Nearly every other passenger within ten feet in every direction of the car was frowning curiously over at the longhaired gent and his two partners.
The longhaired gent looked around again and lifted his voice to say, “Little shaver here’s a real law-dog. Why he’s got us dead-to-rights!” He laughed. “Little boys. Ain’t they somethin’ special, though? Oh, to be that age again when everything’s a fancy!” He turned back to young Edgar and said softly but with a tense smile, “Run along, now, sport. Time to take your make-believe game to another car, all right?”
“I got the dodger on ya!” young Edgar exclaimed, pulling a long, flattened leaf of paper out of the back pocket of his gray wool knickers.
He held the paper up and shook it, gritting his small, white teeth, several of which he was missing. “This here tells how there’s a thousand-dollar bounty on each of yas, and Marshal Rosen is here to collect. Now, go on and reach for the ceilin’ before I fill ya full o’ lead and take you into the hoosegow feet-first!”
“I said vamoose, you little peckerwood!” the big man intoned, lurching forward with menace and crinkling up his face. “Vamoose before I cut your ears off!”
Edgar screamed as he lurched back in the aisle, dropping his wooden gun.
The train car pitched and rocked, causing the child to get his feet tangled. He dropped to his butt with a started look, as though he’d been slapped. His cheeks turned pale, and tears filled his eyes as he started to cry. The door opened behind the boy, at the front of the car, and a pretty blonde woman in a conservative, pearl-colored traveling gown with matching waistcoat and picture hat with a beaded reticule hanging from her wrist, pushed into the car.
Her eyes widened in shock at the boy crying on the aisle floor, and she gasped. “Edgar, there you are! What happened, child?”
“Oh, he was just playin’ a little game and got himself riled,” said the longhaired man with the nose spike.
“Say there,” said another man, moving forward along the car’s narrow aisle, “what’s all this about?” He was a tall man in a three-piece suit with a dark-blue vest to which a deputy U.S. marshal’s badge was pinned and peeking around from behind his coat lapel. A black leather gun rig was cinched around his waist. “Are you hurt, boy?”
Edgar was now sobbing into his mother’s arms. “That hardtail tripped me and knocked my gun out of my hand!” he intoned, his voice muffled by his mother’s shoulder. “I want my Peacemaker!”
“Here’s your Peacemaker, boy.” The lawman crouched over the boy. The man was small and compact, his craggy features adorned with a salt-and-pepper mustache and sideburns.
Edgar looked up, his cheeks tear-streaked, and accepted the wooden gun from the man.
“What do you say, Eddie?” said the boy’s mother.
“Thank you, sir,” the boy said and scowled over at the three men sitting sheepishly in their plush-covered seats, five rows down from the front of the car. “Doggone owlhoots!”
“Owlhoots, eh?” the lawman said, glancing at the three obvious tough nuts who did not look at him but kept their stony gazes straight ahead. “What you got in your hand there, boy? No, I don’t mean the gun. I mean what’s that paper you got in your other hand?”
The boy’s mother said, “Show the man what you have in your hand, Edgar. I think he’s a lawman. See the shiny badge on his shirt?”
Edgar squirmed around in her arms so he could get a better look at the lawman. The boy’s blue eyes found the badge, and he said with awe, “Are you really a lawman?”
“Sure am, son.” The lawman gave the boy’s mother a wink. “Can I see that paper you have?”
“This one?” the boy said, holding out the badly crinkled, age-yellowed paper. “I saw it in a Wells Fargo office. I didn’t mean to take it. I was just lookin’ at it, and it fell off the wall. So, I picked it up and got busy with somethin’, and forgot to stick it back on the wall.”
“Sure, sure.” Giving Edgar’s mother another wink, the lawman took the paper and unfolded it.
His gray-blue eyes skimmed the wanted circular, and then, his craggy face blanching slightly, he turned to the three hard cases sitting nearby and staring straight ahead, stony-faced.
Deputy U.S. Marshal Melvin Sickles stared at the men for nearly half a minute, a muscle in his cheek twitching, his heart picking up its beat. The long-haired hard case turned his head slowly toward the lawm
an. He returned the lawman’s stony stare, and then he smiled.
It was more of a smirk.
The lawman lowered the paper to his side. He hung his right hand down over the black leather holster poking down beneath the hem of his coat. “The boy’s right, ain’t he? You’re Lute Lawton.” His voice was pitched so low that he himself could hardly hear it above the noise of the train.
Wood smoke intermittently slipped in through the half-open windows to dance in the air around him.
“You got it, Chief,” said the longhaired man with the nose spike, whose sole likeness had been sketched on the wanted dodger, which the marshal let flutter to the floor at his boots. Only Lawton’s image had been sketched on the dodger, but the circular offered a one-thousand-dollar bounty on each head of the eight-man Lawton Gang save for Lute Lawton himself.
Lute Lawton had four thousand riding on his ugly visage.
Marshal Sickles, who’d been on his way to the little mining town of Grizzly Gap in Colorado’s Sawatch Mountains to discuss none other than the Lute Lawton bunch themselves, quickly lifted the hem of his coat and shucked his walnut-gripped, Frontier-Model .44, aiming the pistol at Lawton and raking back the hammer.
Out of the left corner of his mouth, he said softly but menacingly, “Ma’am, you’d best take the boy and move on outta here now.”
He could see the woman and the boy, both still kneeling on the floor, staring up at him wide-eyed. They both seemed to be in shock. They were as still as statues. Sickles didn’t have time to repeat the warning nor to take his eyes off the three hard cases he was confronting, for fear they’d draw on him.
To a man, the Lute Lawton Bunch was some of the fastest killers on the frontier.
Marshal Sickles’s heart was thumping violently against his breastbone.
“Where’s the rest of you?” he asked, turning away from the three briefly to rake his gaze across the car. All the other passengers—nearly two-dozen men and women and a few children including a small baby being held by its mother—were now staring toward Sickles and the three members of the Lute Lawton Gang.
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