Free Buchanan's Revenge by Jonas Ward Page B

cloudless sky before the grave was ready. Buchanan laid Rig Bogan into it with a tarpaulin for a shroud. He picked up a shovelful of dirt.
    "Fred Perrott," he said aloud and poured the dirt back into the grave. "Jules Perrott," he said with the second shovelful. "And Sam Gill," he said with the third, passing judgment equally on all three. It was spoken tonelessly, matter-of-factly, and had anyone heard the deep voice they would have known there was no appeal from the sen tence.
    Buchanan finished his work quickly, as if anxious to be gone, and walked away from the grave without a backward glance. But as he was starting to cl i mb the gorge again he glanced up to find a mounted figure watching him from the trail. It was the girl, Cristy, and how long she had been there Buchanan neither wondered nor cared. When he reached the top again he noted that she was dressed in levis and a shirt, that the blue blanket from her bed was now rolled behind her saddle. He went to his own horse, threw a leg up.
    "Was that your partner down there?" Cristy asked him.
    "The big winner," Buchanan said. She studied him, marked the cold detachment of his voice and manner.
    "It wasn't —an accident?" she asked.
    Buchanan shook his head curtly. "They didn't give him a chance," he said, and started off.
    "Wait!" she called out, impulsively.
    He looked around. "I did my waiting back in San An tone," he said.
    "But where are you going now? What are you going to do?"
    His smile was bleak and cheerless. "Going to collect some damages," he said.
    "Do you know where they went?"
    "I'm betting they continued south."
    She had ridden up to him. Now her eyes were full on his face. "Can I go along," she asked, "as far as Browns ville?”
    Buchanan frowned, then shrugged. "Why not?" he re plied.
    "Thank you," she said and that reminded him.
    "Thank you for the use o f your bed last night," he told her. "And the clean shirt."
    She colored slightly, smiled at him. "I was —surprised to find you gone," she said, choosing that word at the last moment.
    "Yeh," Buchanan said, cutting off any further conver sation. "Well, let's ride." He took off abruptly, at a restless trot, and she was some seconds in following. This, Cristy thought, is a different man than the warm and easygoing one she had felt so comfortable with last night. She could remember how he looked when she'd come back to the room and found him so peacefully sleeping, how she'd sat in the chair and been content to observe him in repose for the better part of an hour. Gaze at him and know that for all the strong and proud and fiercely independent men who came in off the trail this one here was what the Mexicans meant by un hombre todo. All man —and, for now, within the four walls of her small room, all hers. Other women who had thought the same? Oh, yes. The battered nose and the crescent scar on his cheekbone had come from men. But the gentle curve at the end of his lips, the smile in his eyes, the caressing tone of his voice —those had been gifts from beautiful women.
    She could remember the sharp sense of loss to awake this morning and find him gone. The impulse that had seized her to follow after him, to go wherever he went...
    But he was changed now. He was hard and withdrawn, cold and aloof on the outside but consumed by a fire that raged in his mind and his heart. His partner had been killed and robbed. He was going to avenge that even at the cost of his own life. And there was no place in those grim plans for a woman and her feminine ways. She knew that and rode on behind him, keeping silent.
    Six
    T he wildest of the wild towns on the border of the Rio Grande was Brownsville. There were five thousand people living there, mostly Mexican, but it was the Amer icans and French who raised all the hell. Escaped crim inals headed for Brownsville —thieves, murderers, rapists —as if it were second nature. So did the deserters from the army, and discredited gamblers, and swindlers, and scores of