Savage Vengeance

1

JOHN SAVAGE SAT ON THE PORCH OF HIS EMPTY CABIN. HE SIPPED his coffee, the aroma of Arbuckles cinnamon stick long gone. He could almost taste the tin in the battered cup that had once been his father’s favorite when he was alive and they had worked the creek, panning for gold. The steam rose up over the rim as he tipped the cup to his lips. He felt the warm mist seep into his eyes like tears from another time, another place.

He stared up at the stars in the paling sky. It seemed to him that they had all moved at once, leaving silver streaks across his retinas, and the vapor made them blur into melted diamonds until, putting the cup down, his eyes cleared. He set his cup next to the chair Emmalene had left behind because she knew he liked to sit in it of an evening when they would talk and watch the sunset turn the high clouds to ash as it sank behind the snowcapped peaks. The mist didn’t go away, and he realized that his eyes had filled unexpectedly with tears. Just to think of Emma gone, though it had only been about three days, made him sentimental and sad. He had grown fond of the woman and her daughter, Evangeline. They had become squatters on his land, unwittingly, when Argus Blanchett had brought them there—Emma’s husband, Eva’s father. And John had killed Argus down in Cherry Creek, without knowing who he was, only that he was a bad man who had tried to kill him.

Emma—he had begun calling her that as he had come to know her better—was still mourning the death of her son, Whit. Bad like his pa, Whit had taken his own life. Eva had taken Whit’s death even harder than her mother. Yet the young woman was nothing like her brother. Nothing like her father, either, he thought. But he granted that this place held worrisome memories for both Emma and Eva. Whit was buried on a little knoll in the pines, just a few yards off from his grazing land, away from the cattle, deep in the ground where the wolves and the coyotes could not get at him.

He had become fond of Emma, and he thought they might have been able to get past the sadness, the grief, and that cloud of death that hung between them like some nameless phantasm. She was a comely woman, with her auburn hair, her alabaster skin, her dimpled chin. Then, below his and Ben’s claim, another party of men had found color in their pans and the hard-rock miners had come in and found veins of gold in the bluffs above the creek.

Other men had come, and they had built a small town just a few miles from John’s claim, hauling in lumber and building log cabins, putting in stores and a little bank, a church, even a weekly newspaper that boasted the progress of the town and the miners who hauled ore down to Denver, built arrastres, and brought in mules. They made whiskey and beer and opened a tavern at one end of town and then another at the other end. One day, a man rode up and offered both Emma and Eva jobs at his mercantile store. Emma washed clothes and Eva ironed them, and they had moved away to a new house in the town they were calling Butterfly Creek because, when the first prospectors came to pan gold, hundreds of yellow-winged butterflies hatched from their brown cocoons, and the men took it as a sign that there was gold in the water and in the limestone bluffs that shone golden in the morning sun.

The good part of it was that the restaurant owners bought his beef and drove the cattle to the slaughterhouse at no expense to him. Otherwise, it was an unwelcome settlement in a wilderness he had come to love. The settlers had brought all the sins of civilization with them and taken away Emmalene and Evangeline to wash their filthy clothes and sell dry goods at exorbitant prices.

He heard the gentle lowing of the cattle as they stirred in their Stygian pools of shadows, sounding like lost souls moaning in some nocturnal Hades. The smell of them and their offal drifted to his nostrils, mingling with the scent of columbines and the faint musk of morning glories, their petals still folded in green cocoons, flowers Emma had planted in beds bordering his porch. And the agony of those aromas made his innards twist into rippling knots as if her hands were twisting his muscles into three-ply ropes slick with his own coursing blood.

He had never spoken to her of his feelings for her. He had never told her that when she came near or touched him, his heart raced and pounded like an Arapaho tom-tom. Nor did she know what her smile did to him, melting some hard, bitter something inside him until his vocal chords seized up with the hot wax of desire. And when she touched him, his loins burned from the glow of her hand and his manhood fattened in the white cradle of his underwear.

He felt the surge of unbidden tears and snatched his pistol from its holster. The pistol his daddy had left him, a beautiful Colt .45 that he had modified to suit a boy who would become a man. He gripped it hard and squeezed the tears with his eyelids, his throat turning raw and sore and dry as withered corn husks. He looked down at the faint gleam of the legend his father had engraved on the blued barrel, the words illegible in the darkness but seared into his brain with its quicksilver scroll.

No me saques sin razón,

Ni me guardes sin honor.

The liquid Spanish translated to: Do not draw me without reason, nor keep me without honor.

It’s the damned gun, he thought. That’s what drove Emma away from me.

The savage gun. The same gun that had killed Emma’s husband. And so many others, bad men all.

But he who lives by the gun shall die by the gun crawled across the velvet escarpment of his mind, like some warning serpent flushed from an ebony garden.

The damned gun. The cursed gun.

He brought the pistol up, turning his hand so that he could peer at its steel snout and think about the deaths it had issued from its metal throat, the men it had killed and the men it might yet kill. He thought of the woman it may have driven away under the hypnotic spell of its deadly curse.

Damned gun, he cried out and toyed with the thought of cocking it and slipping his finger inside the guard and squeezing that hair trigger just once, just enough to blot out all pain and erase all memory in a single explosive roar that would echo up the valleys of the mountains and make the cattle jump and run like rabbits through the high grasses of spring.

He heard the crunch of boots and dropped the gun to his side.

A figure loomed out of the darkness and approached the porch.

You got a problem with your gun, Johnny?

Ben, you got more mouth than brains, John said.

I smelt coffee. You got any to spare?

Ben Russell came up on the porch, his bearded face in shadow, his bulk making the boards creak and whine under his boots.

I used the last of it, but there’s another cup or two in the pot.

Out of coffee and everything else, I reckon.

Carlos brought all that stuff up last night, didn’t he?

That’s just it, John. Ain’t seen hide ner hair of Carlos. Wagon ain’t in the shed. Let me get some coffee in this growlin’ belly and we’ll talk.

Ben went into the cabin. John holstered his pistol and watched the sky pale to the east. A thin line of cream defined the horizon. A pale blue sky washed the stars away as dawn crept up the firmament pushing the black away with the soft color of a robin’s egg. He heard Ben banging the cups in the cupboard, the clank of the coffeepot as he set it back on the woodstove, his heavy footsteps as he walked back toward the front porch.

Carlos Montoya had hauled the last of Emma’s furniture down into town. He was supposed to buy coffee, flour, beans, bacon, sugar, and such and haul them back to the ranch. He should have arrived shortly after nightfall.

Ben sat down on a rough-hewn bench next to the wall.

I looked for Carlos, waited up for him, Ben said, blowing on his coffee. Finally went to bed.

I wasn’t even thinking about him, John said.

You ain’t slept a dadgummed wink, have you, Johnny?

I catnapped some. Wasn’t listening for that wagon, I guess.

Ben drank a sip of coffee and rolled it around in his mouth before he swallowed the liquid. John could hear it swish in his mouth.

Reckon Carlos got tied up in one of them cantinas? Ben said.

Not Carlos. He doesn’t drink and he doesn’t dance.

Maybe he run into a Mex friend.

John finished his coffee and stood up. He could see the cattle now, and his gaze swept the expanse of grassland, the blades still in shadow, the sun still buried in the east but gilding the far clouds and stitching the gray cotton with orange and rosy sprays, a slight tinge of silver that shimmered along the lower edges.

Who’s riding night herd? John asked.

Ah, lemme see. Juanito took over at dusk. On till midnight. Should be . . . nope, Gasparo took that shift. Juanito is ridin’ herd till sunup. Should be headin’ back to the bunkhouse by now.

Ben looked off to his right at the cluster of buildings, empty hitchrails, the barn.

John glanced that way, too.

Nope. Ain’t back yet.

There’s nobody watching the herd, Ben, John said, and his voice was leaden, weighted with the worry that was a hand pressing hard on the back of his neck.

He felt the silence rush up to him as the blazing orange rim of the sun scoured the cream rent in the sky and pierced the clouds with its rays expanding like a giant Japanese fan.

Something’s wrong, John said, his voice barely above a whisper. Something’s damned wrong.

Hell, ain’t no need— Ben Russell started to say. His thought and his voice were shut off by the piercing scream that shot across the pasture from the fringe of the pines bordering the grassy sward.

Both men stiffened. Ben set his cup down on the bench and stood up.

The second scream was filled with blood and terror. It was much louder than before. It was full of agony and desperation.

And it made the hackles on the back of John’s neck stiffen and crawl with icy lice that streamed down his back with tiny racing claws.

Ben cursed.

John missed all the steps and hit the ground running. Ben clambered off the porch right behind him, his shirttail slipping out of his trousers and flapping against his butt like a tattered battle flag whipped by the winds of exploding cannons.

2

THERE WAS ONE MORE SCREAM.

This one ripped through John’s eardrums and screeched in his brain like human flesh being torn apart by some savage beast. It was a scream that embedded itself in his brain as if a hot coal had been plunged into his lungs and gut. It burned a permanent memory deep in the recesses of his mind.

And midway through the long ribbon of the man’s scream, it was cut short, as if someone had sliced the ribbon of sound in two with a terrible swift sword.

There were no dying notes in the scream. It just shut off, leaving a silence that was like a hundred kettle drums pounding in John’s ears.

As he ran, it seemed the world had become a vacuum, that something had sucked all the air out of his lungs and the meadow and the caverns of his ears. It was as if some part of him had gone deaf while another throbbed at his temples like a gandy dancer’s ten-pound maul.

A pair of heifers bolted away from John as he ran toward them. He dodged a steer as he headed for the timber, running through the wet grass that made a swishing sound against his trouser legs. His boots thudded on the earth, his heels barely touching as he dashed forward on the balls of his feet. Light seeped onto the meadow with the pale fingers of dawn pushing the shadows toward the snowcapped mountains, the dark ranch buildings standing silent at the far end of the pasture.

He was vaguely aware of Ben running behind him, thrashing through the grass with a swish-swish sound and the rhythmic thumping of his boots ticking like a grandfather clock in John’s eardrums.

He entered the timber at an angle where the darkness lingered in the pines and visibility was challenged. He stopped suddenly and hunched down, listening. He slid his pistol from its holster but did not cock it. He froze there, peering ahead of him and sweeping his gaze in a wide arc, looking for the slightest movement, any shape that should not be there, any sign of life or death.

Veils of pale golden light streamed through the gaps between the trunks of trees, gilding the fallen pine needles, shimmering with a silent electricity that John could almost feel against his eyes. Ben came up behind him, and John sensed that Russell was going to ask him a question. He turned and, with his left hand, put a finger to his lips. Ben nodded and drew his own pistol. The sound from the holster was like the soft slithering of a snake, and it was the only sound for a long moment when all creatures freeze into motionless statues and even the trees seem to hold their breaths.

Then there was a scurrying sound off to John’s left and he saw the flash of a chipmunk, the nervous flicker of its tail, the rattle of tiny claws on vagrant stones scattered like a child’s marbles among the fallen pinecones that looked like grenades left behind from a forgotten war.

More silence surrounded the two men as they turned their heads to listen for any slight sound.

They waited.

Waited for the unknown, for the great mystery of the scream to be revealed. Waited for the cough of a cougar, the grunt of a feeding lion.

They heard it then. Heard something. The crack of a dry branch, the muffled shuffle of a horse’s hooves in the distance. It was a ghostly sound, a disembodied sound that made no sense to either man. It was too far away and might have been the noise of Juanito’s horse running away, running away from its dead master. Or it might have been the retreating sound of a man riding away from the cutoff scream, the man who had caused the pain and the agonized shrieks and sliced them off with a long sharp blade.

What do you make of it? Ben whispered, leaning down so that his mouth was close to John’s ear.

John shook his head.

The sound of the galloping horse faded away, faded into that deep hush of the forest at dawning until it was as if there had never been a sound at all, only imagination in the minds of Ben and John as they waited and listened for some sign of revelation, a clue to a terrible discovery just beyond earshot and the piercing gazes of their eyes.

John stood up and tiptoed over the brown rungs of pine needles, heading for that place where he figured the screams had rent the dawn