Warner glanced at her bosom. “Surely not!”
Now her entire face and neck mottled red.
“Well, you surely look older than your years, Miss...”
“Noble. Agnes Noble. Folks call me Aggie.”
“Aggie...” Warner extended his hand to her. “Special Agent Carl Warner of the Pinkerton Agency.”
“Oh, my gosh, really?” Aggie Noble shook his hand, staring at him in awe. “The Pinkerton Agency. I’ve heard of them.”
“I’m here on business.”
“Oh, my gosh...”
“Yes, well, nothing I can go into in any kind of detail. Suffice it to say, however, it was a long train ride to Belen and then a rather rough and cold horseback ride down here from there. I would have taken a stagecoach, but I’d forgotten how hard it was to find anything but knock-kneed, ewe-necked hammerheads out here. I hope I’m not being too crass by confessing my backside is a might on the sore side, and I have a chill down deep in my bones.”
“What you need is a hot bath, Mister Warner.”
“Please, call me, Carl.”
“All right, then. Carl, it is. I tell you what. I will set you up in Room Seventeen and have the Injun swamper, Old Joe, bring up a tub and plenty of hot water. You don’t mind Injuns in your room, do you? Old Joe is harmless enough, and I don’t think he’s even full. Room seventeen is near the stairs to the kitchen, so it shouldn’t take too long at all to get you soaking in a steaming copper tub, Mister, um, I mean, Carl!”
Warner glanced around the lobby. Fortunately, no one else was in earshot. He could hear someone moving around in the dining room that opened off the lobby, but it was probably still too early for most travelers to be securing rooms.
He turned back to Miss Noble, who was watching him with eager interest. She’d no doubt never been lavished with such attention from a man of Warner’s polished ilk. And a Pinkerton detective, no less! He wanted very much to nibble her cherry lips, ever so slightly parted and only twelve inches from his own.
He would soon. He had no doubt about it...
“I have a proposition for you, Miss Noble.”
“What’s that?” the girl asked, a little breathless. She was staring at his dark-red mustache.
“My evening only gets started at ten o’clock. Why don’t you join me for a drink once you’re finished with your labors?”
Her lower jaw dropped, her eyes popped, and she slapped a hand to her swollen shirtwaist. “Oh, my gosh, I couldn’t visit a gentleman in his room! If anyone saw, I’d be fired on the spot! And if Pa found out, well...”
Warner straightened. “Of course, of course...I understand. Oh, well, then. It was worth a shot. I have tried and been deterred. A man must accept defeat at some point. A lonely night it will be.” He picked up a pen with which to sign the guest register. “Which room was it again, dear, and how much do I owe?”
Stitching her thin, blonde brows together, panicked, Aggie Noble said too quickly, “Oh, but I suppose...I suppose there is another way for us to...have a drink together...though I’ve never touched anything stronger than sarsaparilla...if you desire it so much...”
She gave a nervous laugh, glancing around again.
“What’s that? Pray tell, you lovely vixen!”
She whispered very softly. “Since Pa won’t be home till Monday, I guess...I guess you could come calling at our house...if you’re real quiet and don’t let yourself be seen. I guess that should be easy enough for a detective of the Pinkerton Agency.” She snickered into her palm. “Besides, we live on a quiet street, and there are no near houses since the old Turner place burned down last summer.”
Warner leaned toward the girl once more, so that he could again bask in her soft breath caressing his cheek. “Why that sounds a little devilish...and just perfect!” He smiled and watched as her cheeks turned brick red. “Where might I find this house of yours, Miss Noble?”
Chapter 7
Warner soaked in the steaming tub until he felt like a scalded chicken with its neck wrung.
Then he dressed in fresh silk balbriggans and wool socks, but the same outer duds he’d worn down from Denver since his war bag had room for only a single change of clothes. He hoped to find a laundry soon. Certainly, even a village as humble as Rio Rosa had a Chinaman with a boiler, it being the county seat and all.
Warner had some time to kill before his tryst with Agnes Noble, so he walked back over to the courthouse to see if Decker and the local lawmen had returned. It was nearly dark now, the main street and plaza nearly deserted except for puffs of wood smoke wafting from chimneys. As he tossed the butt of yet another cigar into the street and mounted the courthouse’s granite steps, he heard frantic hoof thuds from somewhere up the street.
Warner stopped to stare into the gloaming.
The hoof thuds grew louder.
Finally, a horse and rider galloped around a corner about seventy yards away. The horse made the turn so fast that it nearly slipped in the mud that was beginning to freeze now with the dropping temperature. Its rider gave a sharp cry of fear. Regaining its footing, the horse lunged ahead, the rider on its back leaning forward and whipping his rein ends against the horse’s flanks.
As the pair approached Warner, the Pinkerton could see that the rider was either a small man, maybe only five feet tall, or a boy. The horse ran with a shambling gait, blowing hard. Foam basted its snout, glistening in the torchlight emanating from a near cantina.
As the horse angled toward the courthouse, Warner watched its rider—a boy in an overlarge coat and floppy-brimmed canvas hat—leap out of the saddle even before the horse was stopped. The boy’s feet sunk in the thick mud. Lunging forward, he dropped to his knees with another shrill cry. As he clambered to his feet and bulled forward, he ran smack into Warner standing on the boardwalk.
“Whoa, there, boy,” Warner said, grabbing the boy’s shoulders and holding him still before him. “What’s the hurry? Do you realize you’ve all but killed that horse?”
The boy was gasping for breath, staring with horror-shiny eyes up at the Pinkerton towering over him. “I-I-I...saw something awful, señor! I need to see Deputy Spanish.”
“Spanish is busy at the moment,” Warner said. “Why don’t you tell me what the problem is, and I’ll tell Spanish as soon as he’s available.”
The boy squinted his eyes slightly, skeptically up at Warner. The Pinkerton pulled the right side of his coat back far enough to reveal the Pinkerton badge pinned to the lapel of his frock coat beneath it. “You can tell me, boy. I’m a lawman.”
The boy's eyes glistened brightly as a sheen of tears dropped over them. He opened his mouth to speak, but all he seemed able to get out was, “I-I-I...”
“Well, I can’t make heads or tails out of that,” Warner said. “Come on up here and sit down.” He pulled the boy up onto the boardwalk and then shoved him gently down to a sitting position on one of the granite steps. “Sit down there and take three deep breaths. Calm yourself. And then, when you think you can do it without swallowing your tongue, tell me what happened.”
The boy nodded obediently. Placing his gloved hands on his spread knees, he lowered his head and lifted it slightly as he drew in three deep breaths.
After the third one, he lifted his head and drew a fourth breath then swallowed, licked his lips, and turned to Warner. His chocolate eyes were alive with a near-savage excitement.
“Señor, Sheriff Epps and Marshal Tatum have been killed!”
“Killed?”
“Bang, bang, bang, bang! And they all are dead! The deputies, too. The Revenger killed most of them, but...a lady...a lady killed Marshal Tatum, señor!”
“A lady?”
“A lady, señor!”
“Did you recognize this lady, boy?”
“Si.” The boy nodded. His eyes were as wide as silver dollars. “It was the lady from the train whose little boy was killed by Lute Lawton!” The boy looked around and then added with a whisper from behind his raise
d hand, “Señora Rosen.”
“Señora Rosen...”
“Sí, señor. She shot Marshal Tatum down like a dog in the street, Señor. My eyes have never seen anything—”
“Easy, son,” Warner said, patting the boy’s back. “Get ahold of yourself now.”
The boy caught his breath, swallowed. He stared up at Warner. “They all are dead, señor. Much shooting and killing. Bang, bang, bang! I watched the whole thing from behind a stack of crates!” Now the boy didn’t seem to know whether to cry from the savage thrill of what he’d witnessed or to cry at the horror.
“When you say they all are dead,” Warner queried, “do you mean that the Pinkerton detective, who wore a badge like mine, is dead, as well?”
“Sí, sí, señor. They all are dead. The Revenger killed them all! Except for the lady killing Marshal Tatum, I mean. Mike Sartain! He is as deadly as everyone says! Oh, it was awful, señor. So much blood and screaming!” The boy clamped his hands over his ears as though to quell the screaming inside his head.
Warner reached over and pulled the boy's hands from his ears. Sternly, he asked, “What were you doing out there, boy?”
The boy looked up at Warner with a constipated look on his face. His lips moved, but he didn’t say anything. That was all the response the Pinkerton needed. The boy had followed the five lawmen out of a boy’s prurient curiosity. He’d had that curiosity satisfied and gotten himself scared stiff in the bargain.
“I am sorry, señor. My mother told me not to, but...”
“That’s all right, kid,” Warner said, smiling gently down at the sobbing lad. “Not to worry. Your secret is good with me...as long as you can tell me, in sufficient detail, just where all this killing happened. All right? Do you think you can do that? And not tell anyone else? Not a soul...”
“Sí, sí, señor,” the boy said, nodding his head. “I can do that.”
* * *
Sartain pierced the writhing angleworm onto the hook from his little fishing kit, doubled the worm, and pierced it again. The worm writhed wildly against the bright red bead that had worked several times over the years to lure fish to The Revenger’s bait.
Sartain dropped the hook over the side of the beaver dam he was squatting on and took his makeshift fishing pole—a long, slender green aspen branch—in both hands. He jostled the pole a little, making the worm and the lure dance along the base of the dam, deep down in the inky black water that was swirling slightly, gurgling faintly, and turning even blacker now as the sun dropped behind the western peaks.
Sartain glanced at the two red-throated trout lying with open gills and staring, gold-ringed eyes in the bed of grass to his right. Two were enough for supper, but three would be better. The killing in the ghost town had made him hungry, as killing usually did.
And now he had the woman to feed as well.
Besides, he’d caught the first two fish too quickly. He wasn’t ready to head back to camp yet, despite the gathering dark and intensifying chill. He needed time to think about what he was going to do about Olivia Rosen.
On the other hand, what was there to think about?
The kid had seen her shoot the town marshal of Santa Rosa. Soon, that news would likely be all over town and then the county. Since it was linked to news of The Revenger himself, it might even get into the eastern newspapers.
Nothing Sartain could do about that. He couldn’t very well have run down and killed the boy. He didn’t kill innocents, especially innocent children. He had to take the woman with him and keep an eye out for a place to hide her until he accomplished the task, she’d set for him.
He looked over toward where the fire he’d built blazed in a grove of pines.
Miss Rosen sat near the fire, her back to a tree, legs extended straight out in front of her and crossed at the ankles. Sartain’s coffee pot hung from a metal tripod over the fire. Their gear was piled around her. Their two horses were tied to picket pins about ten yards behind.
Miss Rosen held a cup of coffee on her lap. Sartain couldn’t see her well from this distance of fifty or so yards, but she appeared to be staring stonily into the flames.
Odd woman. On the other hand, no odder than the Cajun himself had been in the days that had followed the murder of Jewel and their unborn child in Arizona. A stony determination had set into Olivia Rosen as it had set into Sartain. A determination to hunt justice. A determination that could not be compromised by emotion. So, she was fighting down her horror and grief and concentrating, or at least trying very desperately to concentrate, on her rage.
On killing...
Rage was better than grief. Grief could drive you mad.
Rage kept you going.
There was a tug on the fishing pole. Sartain landed the trout, added it to the others, and headed back to the camp. It was solid dark now, and the fire was dying. Miss Rosen didn’t seem to have noticed. She sat as before, staring into the dwindling flames.
Sartain gazed down at her. He showed her the fish. “Supper.”
She glanced at the fish dangling from the string, their scales glinting in the firelight. “I’m not hungry.”
Sartain leaned his rifle against a tree, set the fish down, and added a couple of blowdown branches to the fire. The flames crackled, rose, danced.
He unsheathed his bowie knife and went to work cleaning the trout, emptying the guts out onto a large, flat piece of bark.
“I can understand the lack of appetite. I bet you never killed a man before today.”
She slid her eyes to him but didn’t say anything. It was almost as though he’d spoken to her in a foreign tongue.
“I guess I should thank you for saving my hide, but you shouldn’t have done that.”
“I didn’t do it for you, Mister Sartain. I did it for me.”
“Yeah. I know. It’s still hard.”
“Shooting Tatum is not why I’m not hungry. I haven’t been hungry since...” She pressed her lips together, returned her gaze to the fire, and shook her head. Her expression remained flat, stony.
Sartain was unsettled by the woman. Her grief was so deep and thick and hard that it reminded him of his own, and he didn’t need anyone else to remind him of Jewel and the baby. His mind, his memories, reminded him enough on their own...
Sartain tossed the fish guts into the river and then fried the trout in a cast iron pan, in butter with salt and pepper. He fried up some cornbread and sowbelly in another pan from his possibles sack, then portioned out the meal on two tin plates. He offered one to Miss Rosen, who shook her head.
“I told you, Mister Sartain, I’m not hungry.”
“Look, you have to eat something. Even if you’re not hungry, you have to force it down. Take it from me. I know.”
That seemed to convince her. She took the plate albeit reluctantly, picked up the fork, and began to pick at the steaming food, occasionally taking a small bite. Sartain removed the coffee pot from the tripod over the fire and refilled both of their cups.
Sartain ate hungrily, aware of the woman forcing herself to eat her food on the other side of the fire.
When he finished, he went over and cleaned his plate and the cook pans in the river, scouring the pans with sand. She walked out from the camp and cleaned her plate, which she’d emptied, he’d noticed.
Sartain set his scoured dishes down on a tuft of grass and turned to her. “I don’t know anything about the Lute Lawton Bunch. I have no idea where to find them. Of course, I can find out, but it’ll take time.”
“I was with them for three days. I listened very intently to their conversations, learning all I could.”
“So, even then, you knew...”
“Yes, even then I knew I would one day see them dead. When Lawton had his way with me on those nights, I would look up at his strained face and smile. I think it confused him a little. I don’t know, maybe he thought I was enjoying it. But I wasn’t. I was imagining his death. I was imagining him howling as he was killed...very slowly...knowing why he was
dying...picturing his killing of my boy in his slowly dimming mind.”
She set her plate aside, sat back on her rump, and turned to Sartain. Her breath frosted in the chill mountain air around her hatted head. “The gang is from Kansas. That’s all I know about most of them. When I was with them, they were heading southwest, trying to convince the posse that they were heading for Mexico. But they were really going to circle back to the east and head back to their home country.”
“Well, Kansas is a big state.”
“Four of Lawton’s men were heading back to Willoughby. It’s a little town on Comanche Creek. They’re in some kind of business there. I gathered that at least two of the four owned a saloon. One is a deputy sheriff.”
She gave an ironic chuff at that bit of information. Sartain, on the other hand, wasn’t surprised at all. He knew from his own experience that most frontier lawmen often rode both sides of the law at one time or another.
“What about Lute?”
Miss Rosen shook her head. “I didn’t learn much about him. Just that he holes up in Kansas between western train-robbing raids. Someone chided him about a girl. Her name is Sadie...or something like that. When he was pulling me away from the camp to rape me—I believe it was the second night—someone asked him what Sadie would think. He only laughed. But that’s all I know about him.”
“All right, then,” Sartain said, gathering his plates and pans, and rising. “I reckon we’ll head for Willoughby...wherever that is.”
They returned to the camp.
Sartain had another cup of coffee. He spiked it with a splash of his favorite bourbon, Sam Clay, brewed in Kentucky near his home territory of New Orleans. He’d grown up an orphan in the French Quarter, raised by doxies who’d taught him the ways of the world, including the ways of love...
Sartain loved bourbon nearly as much as he loved women. The taste reminded him of the mossy oaks and the bayous, the spring air perfumed with burgeoning rose blossoms, the humidity rising from the slow-moving streams and rolling jade hills. It reminded him of a more innocent time...before the War of Northern Aggression...before coming west to fight in the frontier army.
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