Death Wields a Henry .44 by Frank Leslie

Author:Frank Leslie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

SAN JUAN BUSHWHACKERS

CHAPTER ONE

Mike Sartain, the Revenger, heard the clipped screech of the bullet half a blink before the shot tore into the roof of the well from which he’d been winching up a bucket of fresh water. It hammered the moldering wood only six inches from his head.

As the bark of the bushwhacker’s bullet reached his ears and bits of wood from the well’s roof flew in all directions, the big Cajun released the winch handle.

He threw himself hard right to hit the ground behind the well’s stone coping. The filled bucket hit the water with a hollow thud and a splash. Behind Sartain, his big buckskin stallion, Boss, whinnied his disdain for the rifle’s bark.

The Revenger knew how he felt.

The buckskin wheeled and ran, trailing his bridle reins, kicking up dust in the street of this remote and somewhat eerie mountain ghost town somewhere on the southwestern flank of Colorado’s San Juan Mountains.

Another bullet smashed the far side of the well, followed close on its heels by the rifle’s echoing blast.

Sartain rose to a knee, flicking the keeper thong free from over the hammer of his big LeMat revolver outfitted with a twelve-gauge shotgun shell in a stout barrel beneath the main .44-caliber barrel, and took hasty aim at the first man-shape he saw. He triggered three quick rounds, the heavy pistol leaping and roaring in his hand, smoke billowing over the top of the well to be trapped by the pitched roof, peppering the Cajun’s nose.

Between Sartain’s second and third shots, he’d heard a muffled grunt. As he’d triggered his third shot, he saw the man facing him from a gap between two weathered log buildings. The shooter twisted around and stumbled sideways into the gap. The rifle in the man’s hands sagged and finally dropped as the son of a bitch turned full around and stumbled away from the man he’d tried to beef from bushwhack.

Sartain considered a fourth round, then thought better of it.

Holding the smoking LeMat in front of him, he straightened and walked out from behind the well. He strode quickly across the street, keeping the big popper aimed at the man who continued stumbling down the ten-foot gap between the two buildings, both of which sagged on their short stone pylons with forlorn abandonment.

The man was dragging his boot toes. As he stumbled out of the gap, the watery sunlight revealed the bloodstains on the back of his tan leather vest. He took two more halting steps and then gave a groan and dropped to his knees.

Sartain stepped over the ambusher’s rifle, a .38-40 Winchester, and walked down through the gap littered with bits of ancient trash. He moved around the bushwhacker to face him. The man, still on his knees, stared straight ahead, lower jaw sagging. His black, low-crowned Stetson lay on the ground beside him. A pair of steel-framed spectacles with one cracked lens drooped from one ear.

The man’s eyes were light blue. He had a ginger, soup-strainer mustache and thick muttonchops.

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