“The rest of us?” Lawton said, still smirking up at the lawman. Then he frowned and looked around. “Well, I don’t know. They should be around here some—”
He cut himself off as a cannon-like blast sounded in the distance ahead of the train. The train slowed suddenly, lurching violently back and forth, brakes screeching and iron wheels clawing the steel rails. The floor was ripped out from beneath Sickles’ feet, and he went briefly airborne, watching the three gang members lurching forward with the car’s sudden slowing.
Sickles hit the floor on his left hip and shoulder, wincing against the piercing pain of the fall but keeping his gaze on the Lawton Bunch.
Each of the three was now smiling and whooping and hollering in delight while clawing six-shooters out of their holsters.
“There’s the rest of the boys now, Marshal!” Lawton howled, raising two big, long-barreled Smith & Wesson pistols as he continued to lean over the seat before him. “They done blowed the tracks! Give ‘em a second, and I’ll introduce you!”
The car’s wheels continued to screech shrilly as the train continued to slow, gravity like a strong wind trying to blow Sickles along the aisle toward the front. The boy and his mother had fallen against the car’s front door, the woman screaming and the boy yelling, “What’s happening, Mama?”
A pistol roared.
A bullet hammered the floor six inches to Sickles’s right. The lawman jerked his gaze back to see Lute Lawton, whose right-hand pistol was smoking. Lawton raised his left-hand pistol and, laughing maniacally, dropped the hammer.
The bullet slammed into Sickles’s left shoulder like a blow from a hot branding iron. The lawman bellowed a curse as he kicked his legs, lifting his back from the floor and raising his Colt.
Just then the train came to a dead stop with another violent lurch, throwing Lawton and the three other gang members back into their seats. Sickles’s bullet flew past the outlaw leader and plunked through the window behind him.
The shouts and screams of men and women and the wailing of the baby and young children filled the car.
Sickles looked at Lawton again, and his belly churned with dread.
Lawton was whooping and hollering and extending both his pistols at the federal lawman, and firing. Sickles felt as though he’d been run over by a locomotive. As both bullets slammed into his chest, he was smashed flat against the floor.
Everything went dark for a time though he could hear the din of men shouting and women and children screaming as though from far away. Nearer, he thought he heard a woman screaming, “Eddie!” over and over again.
Then the din faded slightly, and Sickles found himself flotsam in a rollicking dark sea of pain.
When the lawman opened his eyes again, he looked up to see Lute Lawton strolling toward him along the aisle. The man had one long-barreled Smithy in his hand. The other Smithy jutted from the holster positioned for the cross-draw on his left hip.
The other two other gang members were just then running out the train’s rear car behind the outlaw leader, both carrying grub sacks likely containing loot they’d stolen from the passengers. Out the car’s dusty windows, Sickles saw men milling on horseback, whooping and hollering and triggering pistols into the air.
The rest of the gang had likely been waiting at some predetermined position along the rails to blow the tracks and storm the train. They were doubtless looting the express car for the gold the train had been carrying from the mine at Grizzly Gap.
Sickles returned his gaze to Lawton, who stopped two feet away from the lawman. Sickles felt the heavy, cold wetness of his own blood bathing his chest. He felt around for his pistol. His hand closed over it. As he tried to lift it, Lawton set his left boot on top of it.
Sickles winced as the man ground his hand and the gun into the floor.
“Uh-uh,” Lawton said, shaking his head. “You done popped all the caps you’re ever gonna pop, Chief.”
The long-haired outlaw glanced beyond Sickles. The lawman followed the man’s gaze, and his stomach convulsed in horror. The blonde woman in the pearl dress was down on both knees near the front door, cradling her son, young Edgar, in her arms.
The boy’s limbs hung slack. Blood shone on the child’s white shirt, just down from his bow tie.
Horror of horrors, the child had taken a bullet!
His mother sobbed as she hugged and rocked the dead child in her arms.
Sickles gritted his teeth in fury as he glared up at Lawton, who kept his eyes on the woman. “Sorry about that, ma’am,” the outlaw leader said, lifting his boot from Sickles’ hand and then kicking the lawman’s gun away. “He musta caught a stray one. Had it comin’, though, if you ask me. Nosy little barn rat!”
Lawton walked over to the woman and grabbed her arm. “Come on, Momma,” the outlaw leader said, jerking the woman to her feet. “I’ll take your mind off your grief!”
The woman screamed and fought until Lawton slammed his pistol across her left temple, knocking her cold. She sagged. Lawton grabbed her around the waist and heaved her over his left shoulder.
Laughing, he looked at Sickles.
“You...son...of...a...buck!” the lawman raked out, gritting his teeth until he could hear them cracking.
“You got that right, Chief!” Lawton whooped, raising the Smithy once more.
Lawton saw the brief stab of flames from the gun barrel half a wink before the bullet hurled him into eternity.
Chapter 2
Mike Sartain, The Revenger, flicked a match to life on his cartridge belt and touched the flame to the end of a freshly rolled quirley.
An object appeared beyond the flickering orange flame, beyond the gray smoke now billowing around Sartain’s head in the cool breeze scuttling along the sage-carpeted floor of this high mountain valley.
Sartain dropped the match in the dirt at his boots, and the old, backless chair groaned against his shifting weight as he toed out the flame.
He cast his gaze out beyond the tiny ghost town, a ragged collection of under a dozen log or wood-frame buildings lining a two-track wagon trail. He frowned beneath the brim of his snakeskin-banded, sand-colored Stetson to study the wagon that had crested a low, rocky ridge to the north. The wagon swayed and pitched down the ridge’s near side, weaving around crusty, dirty snow patches left over from the hard-mountain winter, heading toward the little ghost town and the big, shaggy-headed Cajun sitting in the backless chair out front of Pete Stanley’s derelict saloon, smoking the quirley.
The wagon was a small, black one-seater with red-spoked wheels. The horse pulling the wagon was a big, lumbering gray. The man driving the wagon, whipping the reins across the gray’s back, appeared from this distance to be a small man wearing a clay-colored vest and a billed forage cap. Gray hair hung down behind the cap, blowing around the old gent’s ears in the wind.
As the wagon approached the bottom of the ridge, Sartain could hear the driver’s raspy voice urging the horse ahead along the trail it was following, a trail that intersected the town’s main street at the edge of the now-defunct mining town, a block or so away on the Cajun’s left.
“Come on, now, Sam’l,” the wagon driver urged testily. “We don’t got all day. Forget about that damn rattlesnake, will you, you shifty, old broomtail!”
The horse shook its head as if in response to its driver’s tirade and swung around a severely leaning, log livery barn and onto the main trail, loping toward Pete Stanley’s Saloon and The Revenger perched on the sun-blistered boardwalk fronting the partly boarded-up place. As the clomping of hooves and the rattle of wagon wheels grew louder, The Revenger shifted his gaze back toward the rocky northern ridge down which the wagon had come.
So far, there was no other movement back in that direction.
Maybe the old man hadn’t been followed out from town.
Still, Sartain automatically adjusted the big, pearl-gripped LeMat thonged low on his right thigh. The LeMat was outfitted with a twelve-gauge shotgun barrel under the mai
n, .44-caliber maw. A simple flick of a steel lever switched the gun from .44 to .12-gauge—for one shot, anyway. That’s usually all it took. He glanced at the Henry repeater leaning against the saloon wall flanking him, within an easy reach if needed.
It had been needed before. It would be needed again.
That was the life of a man who lived for Revenge...
The old man yelled, “Whooahhhh now, Sam’l!” as he jerked the ribbons, leaning back on the wooden seat padded with a red-and-yellow striped horse blanket. The old man’s dark-blue, leather-billed cap and matching wool trousers were part of his postmaster’s uniform. He wore garters on the sleeves of his pinstriped shirt.
The torn, quilted vest lined with wool was not part of the uniform, but it was needed on a chilly spring day in the Rockies.
A small, wooden tomato crate rested on the seat to the postmaster’s right. Blinking against the dust catching up to him, the old man threw the wagon brake and reached into the box padded with straw and from which he produced a half-filled, corked bottle. He grinned shrewdly at Sartain as he popped the cork and lifted the bottle in salute.
“Good day to you, sir!” the man greeted, slurring his words slightly and throwing back a sizeable swallow of the amber liquid. The blue eyes behind his round, silver-framed spectacles were red-veined and watery.
He was making the most of his time away from the office.
“Did you have a nice ride out from Stony Butte, Mr. Kimball?”
“As nice as could be expected,” Kimball said, smacking his lips as he rammed the cork back into the bottle with the heel of his gloved hand. “Rough trail, chill wind, and old Samuel here started at a rattlesnake about three miles back. Damn near upended the rig and sent me to my Maker. If you break a bone at my age—even a little one—you’re as good as dead.”
He smirked and tossed the bottle toward Sartain, the bottle flashing in the washed-out sunlight. “Leastways, that’s what my wife keeps warnin’ me, but only because she’d kill me for sure before she’d empty my bedpan!”
Sartain caught the bottle.
Kimball laughed an old man’s wheezing laugh.
Samuel shook his head and blew, rattling his harness. Horse apples plopped onto the ground behind him.
Sartain took a pull from the bottle and made a face as he lowered it. “That’s awful stuff, Mr. Kimball.”
“Yes, it is,” Kimball said, grinning, leaning forward with his arms on his bony knees. He glanced around, narrowing an eye against the sun. “You alone out here, Mr. Sartain?”
Sartain had gained his feet and was walking over to the wagon.
“As far as I know. Been out here for nigh on a week, and I haven’t seen much more than a coyote or two.”
He handed the bottle back to the postmaster and then reached into the wagon box behind the seat.
“Must be a lonely way to live,” the postman said, studying Sartain with a suddenly sad, speculative air. “Holin’ up in ghost towns, waitin’ on your mail.”
“Life is what you make it.” The Revenger held up the small canvas sack into which his mail was stuffed. “Much obliged for the special delivery, Mr. Kimball.”
“That’s what they forwarded from Albukirk. It’s all right there.”
“That’s likely all you’ll get. Two weeks’ worth is all I had my hotel forward to you.”
“You pullin’ out, are you, Mr. Sartain?”
Sartain hefted the bag in his hand. “It’s a good bit of mail. I reckon I’ll find somethin’ intriguin’ in here.”
“Another job?”
“What I do ain’t work, Mr. Kimball.” The big, shaggy-headed Cajun winked at the old man. “So, I can’t call it a job.”
Kimball said, “I know folks—most folks, anyway—appreciate your, uh, service, Mr. Sartain. But like I said, it must be a lonely way to live. Especially when you’re wanted by the law and can’t show your head in most places without gettin’ shot at.”
Sartain’s being wanted by the law was the reason he’d had his mail forwarded from his hotel in Rio Rosa to the little Colorado mountain town of Stony Butte. Sartain had gotten word from a desk clerk sympathetic to The Revenger’s cause that federal lawmen were staking out the hotel, hoping to catch The Revenger in a whipsaw.
So, he’d moved out to this little ghost town to wait on a reason to leave it. He hoped he’d find that reason in the bag he was holding now, someone with a valid grudge that needed a remedy only a man with The Revenger’s specialized skill could provide.
“Like I said, life is what you make it.” Sartain reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a ten-dollar gold piece, which he’d taken off the last man he’d killed.
“No, no.” Kimball threw up his hands, palms out, and shook his head. “You done paid me one of them eagles in Stony Butte. That’s all we agreed to.”
“I was going to give you ten more.” The Revenger smiled and glanced at the bottle, which Kimball had returned to the box on the seat beside him. “So, you could get yourself some better busthead.”
“That skull pop that Mort Latimer brews in the old barn behind his saloon has right grown on me,” Kimball assured and smacked his lips. “I guess I’m just naturally partial to the taste of strychnine and diamondback venom. Besides, there’s no point acquiring expensive tastes at this stage of life.”
The postmaster took up the gray’s ribbons and disengaged the brake. “You keep an eye on your backtrail, Mr. Sartain.” He winked. “And one finger on the trigger. I know you don’t need to be told that, bein’ in the line of work you’re in, but I for one hope you live a good, long life. If you ask me, the frontier needs more like you; men who help others who can’t help themselves. Justice is laid down pretty thin out there. Sometimes the cards just don’t land in the little fellow’s favor, and the odds get stacked too high. Thank God there’s a man like you out here who can even the playin’ field a little.”
“If only a little,” Sartain said, pocketing the eagle.
To his left, there was the clomp of a horse’s hoof and the faint rattle of a bridle chain.
Instantly, The Revenger wheeled, the big LeMat in his hand before he even realized he’d pulled it. Crouching, feet spread, he aimed the cocked revolver outfitted with a twelve-gauge shotgun shell beneath the main, .44-caliber barrel straight out from his right shoulder.
A black horse with three white socks had just come around the front of the barn at the west edge of town, and now, facing Sartain, the rider pulled back on the reins, stopping the black abruptly.
The horse stomped, shook its head, and blew.
“Looks like you were followed, Mr. Kimball,” Sartain said, keeping his voice pitched low.
Kimball hitched around in the wagon seat, craning his neck to see behind him. “Well, I’ll be doggoned,” the postmaster said. “I done thought I took every precaution. Rode in two circles around town before finally swingin’ south. And I kept a sharp eye out, I swear, Mr. Sartain!”
Sartain lowered the LeMat slowly, scowling incredulously toward the newcomer—a woman in a thick wool coat with the collar pulled up to her cheeks. A thick, dark-blue scarf was wrapped vertically, tightly around her head, the ends tucked into the coat. Mittens of the same color were on her hands. Strands of long, blonde hair had freed themselves of the snug headgear and were blowing around in the breeze.
“Well, I’ll be hanged,” Kimball said. “If that isn’t Olivia Rosen!” Kimball raised his voice. “Miss Rosen, what in tarnation are you doin’...” He let his voice trail off as a though something had just then occurred to him. “Well, I’ll be...” he finished.
The woman was young, in her early to mid-twenties. The pale oval face framed so tightly by the scarf appeared fair and relatively wrinkle-free. The nubs of her cheeks had been rouged by the cold air. She touched heels to her horse’s flanks and came on ahead.
Her horse tramped through a small, crusty finger of dirty snow jutting into the street fronting the dilapidated livery barn and clomped toward
Sartain and Kimball. As the horse and rider continued toward him, Sartain looked around cautiously, always wary of an ambush. Federal lawmen, as well as bounty hunters of every stripe, were after the three-thousand-dollar bounty that Uncle Sam was offering for the Revenger’s head, dead or alive. Sartain had earned the bounty for having hunted down and killed the cavalry soldiers, men from his own fort, who’d murdered Sartain’s pregnant fiancée and Jewel’s old desert rat of a harmless, defenseless grandfather in Arizona Territory.
Now he did for others what he’d had to do for himself—exact vengeance where vengeance was due.
“Well, I’ll be hanged,” Kimball said again, as the young woman drew the black up before Sartain. “Well, I reckon I’ll be runnin’ along. Gonna be night soon.”
Kimball shook the ribbons over the gray’s back, turned the horse, and yelled, “Hi-yahhh! Get along there, Samuel. Gonna be night soon, an’ we don’t wanna be stuck out here after dark! Spooks’ll get us, certain-sure!”
The wagon turned around the barn, the hoof thuds and the rattling of the wheels fading into the distance.
Sartain looked at the girl.
She stared down at him through her inscrutable, gray-blue eyes. Her eyes were hard, matter-of-fact. The eyes and her rather tough upper lip and upturned nose lent the rest of her a steely, moody significance.
“Mr. Sartain, I take it?” she said finally. Her voice was deep and even.
“I reckon you knew that,” The Revenger said, “or you wouldn’t be here.”
He glanced around once more.
“I’m alone,” she said. “No one knows I’m here.”
“All right, then,” the Cajun said and shoved the LeMat into its holster.
He snapped the keeper thong into place over the hammer and glanced at the saloon. Most of the windows were boarded up, but he’d removed the planks over the doors when he’d moved into the place a week ago. He didn’t figure you could trespass in a place that had been abandoned.
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