“I am quite the charmer, aren’t I?” Melissa boasted. “You should have seen the look on that farmer last night when I told him I would never marry someone so dull and dumb.” She scanned the emigrants. “Where is he, anyway?”
“Who?” Granny said.
“Jared Fox. The jackass who proposed to me.” Melissa pointed at Cathy. “There’s his sister but I don’t see any sign of him.”
“One of them is missing?” Granny spun toward the Paiutes. “Did you hear that, Lame Bear? What are you waiting for? Find him, and find him quick!”
Lame Bear addressed the other warriors in their own tongue and they loped to the prairie schooners and began going from wagon to wagon.
Granny hustled onto the porch. Removing Cathy’s gag, she demanded, “Where’s your brother, missy?”
“I don’t know. He never came back last night.”
Gripping her arm, Granny twisted until Cathy cried out. “The truth, damn you, or by God I’ll cut out your tongue!”
“I’m telling you the truth!” Cathy cried. “I stayed up late waiting for him but I fell asleep. The next thing I knew, your grandsons were hauling me from our wagon and tying me up.”
Granny muttered and turned to her granddaughter. “The devil take you and your carnal urges! You broke that boy’s heart so he wandered off to mope.” She scanned the canyon. “He’s probably out there somewhere right this second, watching us.”
“Don’t fret, Grandma,” Dixon said. “The savages will find him.”
“We can’t rely on them,” Granny said. “Not if the army is on its way.” She pondered a few moments. “Tie Fargo and put him on the porch with the rest. Melissa and I will stand guard while you boys go help Lame Bear.”
“All of us?” Thorn said.
“What’s the matter? Did you break your legs?” Granny was growing mad. “Yes, by heaven, all of you! Check behind every boulder, every bush. In every tree, every crevice. Move it!”
Shorty pushed Fargo over onto the porch and shoved him to his knees, then covered him while Dixon retied his wrists and bound his ankles. When Dix was done they ran to aid the rest.
Granny moved her rocking chair to the edge of the porch so she could watch the search unfold. “This is what comes of not listening to me,” she said to her granddaughter. “I told you that your shenanigans would cause trouble one day.”
“I’m not in the mood for another of your lectures.” Melissa opened the door. “After I eat I’ll come out and spell you.”
“Don’t bother.”
“What about the girl?” Fargo asked. Mandy was still lying out in the dirt. She had stopped crying and was gazing longingly at her mother.
“What about her?” Granny snapped. “She can bake under the sun for all I care!” Swiveling, she leveled the Walker. “As for you, I don’t much like being made a fool of. It makes me look bad in front of my grandchildren. After we find Jared Fox, I’m going to make an example of you. I’m going to give you to the Paiutes to torture right here in front of everyone. It will be fun to watch.”
17
Fargo lay with his back propped against the roughhewn logs of the trading post wall and his legs bent slightly to one side. He watched the Paiutes leap from the last wagon and dart into the woods like starved wolves eager for the scent of prey. Several of the Barnes brothers had already gone off down the canyon. The rest had gone up it. With Melissa banging pots and pans inside, only Granny was left to guard them and she had her back to him and was slowly rocking in her chair. The Walker Colt was in her lap and she had resumed her knitting.
By shifting his broad shoulders, Fargo was able to touch his spurs. They were sharp enough to eventually saw through the rope but he did not have the luxury of time. Instead, he stretched his arms further and slid his fingers under his right boot. He could reach the hilt of the Arkansas Toothpick but he couldn’t draw it from its sheath. The rope around his ankles was too tight.
Peter Sloane saw what he was doing and suddenly crawled toward the rocking chair. “Granny, a word with you, if you please.”
For a harrowing few seconds Fargo thought Sloane intended to tell her, perhaps in exchange for his own life.
“What do you want?” Granny harshly demanded.
Sloane glanced at Fargo and smiled and bobbed his chin, then wriggled still closer to the chair. “To reason with you.”
Belatedly, Fargo realized Sloane was distracting her for his benefit. He pried at the knots with his fingernails.
“Save your breath,” Granny said. “There’s nothing you can say that will make me change my mind. I’ve heard it all before.”
Sloane pleaded with her anyway, going on and on about an army patrol the wagon train encountered soon after leaving Fort Bridger, and how the captain of the patrol would wonder what had happened to them.
Fargo barely listened. He was tugging and tearing at the knots and the rope in a desperate bid to loosen them. His fingers hurt like hell but he stuck with it. The lives of everyone depended on him and him alone, and he would not let them down.
Sarah and Cathy and some of the others were staring expectantly, and Fargo wished they wouldn’t. Granny might notice and come over to find out what he was up to, dashing any hope they had.
Sloane switched to a different appeal. “What kind of woman are you that you can kill children and infants? You’ve had children of your own. You’re a grandmother. It flies in the face of human nature.”
“What do you know?” Granny hissed. “It’s not as if I put a gun to their heads. Starvation kills them. I’m not even there when they breathe their last.”
“I see. So long as you don’t witness their deaths, you can live with yourself?” Peter Sloane said, his loathing transparent.
“Shut up, farmer. You’re so ignorant, it’s pitiful. You don’t know me. You only think you do.”
Sloane glanced at Fargo, saw he was still striving to loosen the rope, and crawled nearer yet to the rocking chair. “The lives of my wife and my children mean too much to me. Please. I beseech you. Call off this madness. Surely you have a shred of decency left somewhere inside you?”
“You couldn’t be more wrong if you tried,” Granny said, and was out of the rocking chair and on him in two swift steps. In her right hand was a knitting needle which she plunged into Sloane’s right eye. He made a gurgling noise and jerked back but she grabbed the back of his head with her other hand and shoved the needle in deeper.
Muffled cries and screams came from Sloane’s wife and son and daughter as Sloane broke into convulsions and flopped wildly about. Gradually his movements ceased and his body went limp, red rivulets seeping from his ruined eye.
Breathing heavily, Granny coldly regarded her handiwork. “I warned him,” she said to none of them in particular. “I told him to shut up but he wouldn’t listen.”
Fargo had frozen when the rest did but not for the same reason. He tensed when Granny glanced in his direction but she did not notice his hands. She kicked Sloane in the face, then sat in the rocking chair. As soon as her back was to him once again, he renewed his assault on the stubborn knots. Two of the three were slowly loosening. But it was taking much too long. At any moment some of Granny’s brood or the Paiutes might return, and that would be that.
Sloane’s wife and children were crying their hearts out, the daughter sobbing in great heaves. Granny kept looking at them and finally shook her other knitting needle at Sloane’s wife.
“Quit your blubbering, damn it! Quiet your brats or I’ll do it for you.”
Unable to speak or use her hands, Mrs. Sloane nudged her daughter with her head but the girl could not stop bawling.
One of the knots came undone. Fargo tried to draw the Toothpick but the rope still wasn’t loose enough. He resumed prying at the second knot, prying so hard he nearly tore a fingernail off.
Cathy Fox was the only other emigrant who wasn’t gagged, and she attempted to help Mrs. Sloane by urging, “Susan! Tommy! Stop crying! Hold it in for now.�
��
They couldn’t. Not with their father lying there with a knitting needle jutting from his ruptured eye. It was asking the impossible. Susan cried all the louder while Tommy started to wriggle toward the body.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Granny said. Rising, she turned to the children. “Which one should I do first? Daughter or son?”
“In heaven’s name, no!” Cathy begged.
Fargo undid the second knot. Wedging his fingers under the rope, he worked them back and forth.
Granny moved toward Susan. Gone was the smiling, kindly face that greeted them upon their arrival. In its place was a twisted mask of hatred and bloodlust. Seizing Susan Sloane by the hair, she jerked the girl’s head back, exposing her throat. “What fine white skin you have, little one.”
Suddenly the Arkansas Toothpick was in Fargo’s hand. Reversing his grip, he sliced at the rope around his wrists. All he needed was another twenty to thirty seconds but he had run out of time.
Granny was poised for a fatal thrust. “Give my regards to your father, child. You’ll find him in the part of hell they reserve for really stupid people.” She bent the girl’s neck a trifle more.
“Noooooo!” Cathy wailed. “You can’t! You mustn’t! No one can be so cruel!”
“I can, dearie,” Granny said.
The rope around Fargo’s wrists parted. Heaving onto his knees, he threw the double-edged Toothpick with all the skill and all the strength he possessed.
A gleaming streak of steel lightning struck Grandma Barnes in the throat and jolted her backward. It made her miss her stroke, the needle digging a furrow in Susan’s shoulder instead of impaling her through the neck. Letting go of it, Granny clutched at the Arkansas Toothpick, then did the last thing she should do—she yanked the blade out. Blood gushed in a scarlet torrent.
Granny gaped at Fargo. Her mouth moved but no words came out, only inarticulate sounds. She took a step toward the door but that was as far as she got; her legs gave way.
Fargo quickly finished removing the rope around his ankles. He rose just as the trading post door opened.
“Grandma, what’s all the commo—” Melissa began, and recoiled, dropping a cup of coffee she held.
Anxious to reach her before she brought the others down on their heads, Fargo lunged. He clamped a hand onto her wrist but she twisted free before he could get a good grip. Whirling, she darted inside, and he went after her. She headed for the counter, reaching it a few steps ahead of him. Her hand ducked underneath and reappeared holding a Remington revolver.
Fargo had to stop her from firing. The shot would bring her brothers and the Paiutes. He grabbed at the pistol as she curled back the hammer. Before he could wrest the gun from her grasp, she squeezed the trigger. The hammer came down on his finger instead of the firing pin, and the next instant he landed a looping right cross that folded her senseless.
Tucking the Remington under his belt, Fargo ran to a display of various knives and laid claim to half a dozen. He ran back out, cut the ropes that bound Cathy and Sarah, and gave the knives to them. “Free others and pass these out.” There was no need to stress the urgency.
Sarah flew off the porch to Mandy and in a moment the girl was hugging her in relieved delight.
Fargo walked over to Grandma Barnes. A bright red pool had formed under her. He retrieved the Arkansas Toothpick and wiped it clean on the hem of her dress, then slid it into his ankle sheath and hurried back inside to a gun rack.
Shorty still had the Henry and the Colt, so far as Fargo knew. He needed a rifle for himself and guns for the rest of the men. Selecting a Sharps and three other rifles, he opened a drawer underneath. It brimmed with ammunition.
To lend the impression her trading post was legitimate, Granny had stocked items trading posts normally carried. With a little luck, that would help to be her clan’s undoing.
Fargo hurried back out. Half the emigrants had been cut free. Parents were hugging children, husbands were hugging wives.
“This isn’t over yet,” Fargo said to get their attention, and shoved the rifles at Jurgensen. “Keep one for yourself and pass the rest out. There are more inside.”
“Are you proposing that we fight these cutthroats?” a man named Ledbetter asked.
“Unless you want to breathe dirt,” Fargo said. “They’re not about to let any of us leave this canyon alive.”
“Surely now that we’re armed, they won’t dare attack,” Ledbetter said. “Especially with the army on its way. They’ll flee as fast as they can.”
“That’s just it. The army isn’t coming,” Fargo enlightened him. “We’re on our own.” He ran from under the overhang and gazed up and down the canyon. No one was in sight but it was only a matter of time.
Ledbetter still wasn’t satisfied. “You’re suggesting we kill them?”
Everyone heard. Faces filled with fear and hope looked to Fargo for guidance. “Or they will kill you, yes.”
“There must be a better way,” Brickman insisted.
“Tell that to all the people they’ve fed to the vultures,” Fargo said curtly. He was losing his temper.
Mrs. Nickelby bit her lip. “You’re asking too much, Mr. Flint or Mr. Fargo or whatever your name is. None of us have ever killed another human being before.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” Fargo said. “Or would you rather they wipe out your family and friends? Because that’s exactly what they’ll do.” He saw indecision on a few faces. They still didn’t appreciate that it could happen to them, even after witnessing Peter Sloane’s death. He raised his voice. “You will all die. Every man. Every woman. Every child. They can’t leave witnesses.”
“What chance do we have?” Nickelby asked. “There are only seven of us, what with Pete dead and Jared missing. We’re outnumbered, and they have those heathens on their side.”
“You’re forgetting the women and children,” Fargo said.
“Surely you don’t expect them to take up arms too?” Jurgensen asked.
“The kids, no,” Fargo answered. “But your wives can help.” He dashed indoors and brought out an armful of rifles and revolvers which were hastily distributed. Soon every adult, male and female, had one.
“We just stand here and wait for them?” Brickman asked. “Is that it?”
“I want all of you to lie back down.” Fargo had an idea, a loco idea, but it might reduce the odds. “Exactly where you were when you were cut loose.”
“What good will that do?” Ledbetter demanded. “We’ll be right out in the open and they can pick us off.”
“They won’t shoot if they think we’re still there bound and gagged,” Fargo explained. “We’ll let them walk right up to us, and at my signal, open fire.” He glanced up the canyon but still did not see anyone. Lady Luck had been kind to them so far, but no one’s luck held forever.
The emigrants were nervously looking at one another. No one had done as he told them. Then Cathy moved to where she had been lying when he cut her free and curled up in the exact same position. Sarah and Mandy imitated her example, which galvanized most of the others.
“Hurry, damn it!” Fargo growled at the few who still hesitated. He thought he had heard voices at the rear of the trading post.
Jurgensen was sinking onto the porch. “Do as he says everyone! He’s our only hope of making it through this nightmare alive.”
Within seconds the trap was set. They covered their rifles and revolvers with their arms and legs or hid them in their shirts or in the folds of their dresses. A casual scrutiny would not reveal anything amiss. All was as it had been except for one important detail.
Dashing to the rocking chair, Fargo carried it to where Granny usually sat. He was careful not to get any of her blood on him when he dragged her over and placed her in the chair with her head slumped to her chest as if she were sleeping. There was nothing he could do about the glistening red smear on her dress except hope it went unnoticed in the shadow of the overhang.
> The voices were growing louder.
There was nothing Fargo could do about the pool of blood. He did not have the time to clean it up. So he did the next best thing. He lay so he hid the blood with his body as best he could.
“They’re coming!” Ledbetter whispered.
“Quiet!” Fargo commanded, and cocked the Sharps. “No one shoots until I do. Aim for the center of their chests. That way even if you miss their heart you should hit something.”
“I’m scared,” Mrs. Nickelby whispered.
Someone’s teeth were chattering.
Fargo was worried one of them would bolt and give it away. Then he caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and around the corner came Zeke and Caleb Barnes.
18
As Skye Fargo slid his right hand to the Remington, he swore he heard a sharp intake of breath from several of the emigrants. Zeke and Caleb didn’t seem to hear it, though, and came around to the steps.
“No sign of the dirt farmer yet, Grandma,” Zeke said to the figure in the chair. “The others are still searching.”
“It looks like she’s taking a nap,” Caleb commented. His gaze drifted to Fargo, and he stiffened. “What’s he doing over here? And what’s that red stuff next to him?” Comprehension dawned, and Caleb snapped up his rifle, bawling, “He’s loose, Zeke! He’s loose!”
At a range of six feet Fargo sent a slug boring through the center of Caleb’s sweaty forehead and the back of Caleb’s head exploded in a shower of blood, gore, bone, and hair. Fargo fired again a fraction of a second before the muzzle of Zeke’s rifle came level with his chest. He aimed for the forehead but Zeke moved and the slug cored Zeke’s left eye.
Both shots echoed off up the canyon. Now the rest of the bloodthirsty pack would know something was wrong, and come on the run.
“Inside!” Fargo yelled. Rising, he sprang from the porch and gathered up Caleb’s and Zeke’s guns.
“Look out!” Sarah shouted.
Out of nowhere an arrow thudded into a post. Fargo spun and beheld Lame Bear and the other four Paiutes bounding toward the trading post. He snapped off a shot and brought one crashing down.
Nevada Nemesis Page 13
