Wolf's Head (A Neal Fargo Adventure--Book Seven)

by John Benteen

  Duke’s jaw dropped. MacKenzie’s weathered face seemed to turn to stone. “You’re sure?” he said heavily, after Fargo was through.

  “Positive.” Fargo lit a cigarette, “I’d stake anything I got that she’s no more his daughter than you are. She’s a girl he’s living with. So he’s lied about that. The chances are, he’s lied about a lot of other things, too. Like, for instance, being a Ranger at all.”

  MacKenzie frowned. “But the Government was supposed to send in a Ranger. And his papers were in order—”

  “They probably did send a Ranger. Likely one named Mannix. But Rangers can be killed like anybody else and their papers taken. And once out here on Wolf’s Head, who’s to know? If Lasher needed a control out here, somebody to boss the other men he planted in your outfit, who better than this guy? He knows everything that goes on, has freedom to move anywhere he wants to. And that girl with him—she could do things nobody else could. Like slicing Hoskins’ rope. You think he’d let a man play around with something that his life depended on?”

  Duke shook his head. “I still don’t believe it. How’d you get on to her?”

  “Who else would have had the opportunity to cut Hoskins’ rope? Last night I paid a little call on her. She—got pretty friendly in a hurry. She’s got slut written all over her. On top of which, she makes damned good bait. She can toll a man off by himself, away from camp, and then he can be disposed of. That’s what almost happened to me last night.” And he told them about the fight on the dam.

  “Hell,” Duke whispered. “So that’s what happened to Goodis. I might have—”

  MacKenzie cut in decisively. “All right, Fargo. If what you say is true, and I’ve no reason to doubt you, we’ll take Mannix and the girl right away. We can lock them up here and keep them in custody until I can check him out with the Forest Service. Even if he is a real Ranger, we don’t want him on this job.” He turned to Duke. “Get some men together.”

  “No,” said Fargo.

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “Let’s keep the men out of this. We don’t know how many of Lasher’s spies are still among ’em, but once we get our hands on Mannix, we can sure as hell find out. Let’s you and me and Duke take Mannix and the girl; the three of us can do it easy, come the middle of the night when everybody else is asleep. That’ll leave us time to squeeze the identity of any of Lasher’s men out of ’em before daybreak and take those men cold.”

  “Of course. You’re right.” MacKenzie nodded. “Okay, damn them. When I get my hands on them—” His big fists clenched. “But what if Mannix won’t talk?”

  Fargo’s grin was not pleasant. “Leave it to me,” he said. “He’ll talk.”

  Chapter Seven

  By eleven o’clock the camp was sound asleep, its bunkhouses crammed with the new men. Fargo had looked them over more closely, and MacKenzie had chosen well. Seldom had he seen a tougher bunch assembled in one place. If they were loyal, God help any of Lasher’s men who bumped into them!

  He felt a surge of pleasure. He was glad of this development. He’d been prepared to tough it out as a logger and he didn’t mind the work. But fighting was his real business, it was what he lived for, and he would be glad, he thought, to be able to sling the shotgun and wear it openly, work at the trade he loved.

  Meanwhile, he had turned in with the rest of the outfit, lest his absence arouse suspicion. Now, like a great cat, he rolled out of the bunk, stood listening. All around him the chorus of snores was loud and steady. He slipped on his mackinaw, the Colt in place beneath it. Clamping the cavalry hat at its usual hell-for-leather angle, he picked up his boots, went soft-footed out of the bunkhouse. In shadow he donned the boots, laced them tightly; then he headed for the dam.

  He had almost reached it when a tick of sound startled him; he whirled the gun out in a fantastic, reflexive draw. Then MacKenzie’s voice whispered, “Fargo, over here.”

  They waited in the shadow of a clump of saplings. Fargo joined them, holstering the Colt. He stared at Duke. “What the hell’s that for?”

  Hotchkiss raised the double-bitted ax. “I ain’t no gunman, but God help the man gits within range of this!”

  Fargo’s voice was thin. “Listen, we want Mannix and the girl alive and in condition to talk.”

  “Don’t worry, this is jest for self-defense.”

  “Likely Mannix is dead drunk anyway. All right, come on.” He led them across the dam. They reached the other side and struck the path that led to the cabin in the clearing. Fargo went ahead, gun out, totally alert. He didn’t anticipate trouble but he had lived to his present age by not taking anything for granted. Trouble was what you got by assuming you weren’t going to have any.

  Nothing untoward happened, though, and they came to the clearing’s edge and halted. The cabin was dark. Fargo checked the breeze, not wanting the horses in the corral to catch their scent, spook, alarm Mannix and the girl. It was all right. He moved out into the open, crouched low, ran soundlessly to the only door the cabin had. By prearrangement, Duke took the window on one side, MacKenzie the one on the other.

  Fargo had seen the heavy wooded bolt on the door, knew it would be shot. Mannix would not want to take the chance of anyone’s walking in on him while he was making love to the girl supposed to be his daughter. He reversed the pistol hammered on the door with its butt. “Hey, Mannix! Mannix, wake up! Fire! Fire in the woods!”

  For a moment no sound answered him. Then he heard a grunt. “What? What’s that?”

  “Fire! Duke says to come on! We need everybody!”

  “Hell—” Mannix’s voice was thick, slurred. Fargo heard his footsteps; the bolt slid open. Then the door cracked. “What—?” Mannix began again.

  Fargo rammed the Colt through, slammed his weight against the door. Mannix tried to throw it shut when he felt the gun’s cold steel in his belly but Fargo forced it open, pushed Mannix back into the room, followed him.

  “Don’t move,” he whispered. “You do, I’ll blow you wide open!” Then he called softly. “All right, Duke! MacKenzie!”

  Barbara came awake, then let out a muffled cry. “What—?”

  “Hush,” Fargo said. “You make a yip, I’ll kill your lover man. You stay right still, exactly where you are.” Then Hotchkiss and the Scot had come in behind him. “Find a lamp,” Fargo ordered. MacKenzie struck a match; an instant more and a wick caught, flooded the room with yellow light.

  Mannix’s face was beardy, gummy, his eyes bloodshot. He wore only the bottom half of a pair of longjohns. Behind him, in the same bed that he’d just vacated, Barbara cowered wide-eyed, pulling the sheet up over her naked body. “Fargo,” she breathed. Then she stared at MacKenzie and Hotchkiss, and the ax with its blades gleaming in the lamp glow.

  Mannix blinked. “Duke, what the hell is all this about?”

  Before Hotchkiss could answer, MacKenzie said thinly, “You and your daughter always sleep together, Mannix?” Then anger took him. “You damned spy,” he rasped, clubbing a fist. “What the hell’s your real name?”

  For an instant, as the words sank in, Fargo thought Mannix would try to fight. Instead, a kind of shudder rippled over the man and his shoulders slumped. “So you found out, huh?” he muttered. He dropped heavily into a chair by the table, rubbed his eyes.

  “It’s the truth, then? Who are you, anyway?” MacKenzie towered over him.

  The man who called himself Mannix drew in a long breath. “My name’s Roy Morse. She—” He jerked a thumb. “Barbara Daniels.”

  “And you work for Lasher?”

  Morse rubbed his eyes, seemingly trying to gather his wits. “Yeah, I work for Lasher. I useta be his woods boss out in Michigan. He sent me a telegram, told me he had a job for me. I came. He gimme the papers and outfit of a Ranger named Mannix—”

  “Where’s Mannix?” Fargo cut in.

  “Dead, where you think? Lasher told me he killed Mannix, cut him open, stuffed his corpse with rocks, then sank it in the bottom of
Puget Sound. Nobody’ll ever find it … Mannix was supposed to come here, supervise the cuttin’. I came in his place. Picked her up on the way, in a honky-tonk, she was bein’ floated out of Boise, Idaho, by the town law. Brought her here with me and—”

  “Okay,” Fargo said. “How many more men has Lasher got planted here and who are they?”

  Morse blinked “What?”

  Fargo moved the gun closer to his face. “You heard me. I want to know who the spies are Lasher’s planted in our camp.”

  “There ain’t any. Not since Goodis disappeared.” But Fargo read the lie in the way his eyes shifted.

  Fargo laughed softly. “All right, Morse, you want to play your way, I’ll play mine.” He swapped the gun to his left hand; his right blurred and then the Batangas knife was in it, its point between Morse’s eyes. “You’ve got exactly one minute to start givin’ us some straight talk. Otherwise, I’ll show you a few tricks with cold steel I picked up down in Mexico. You know what the Yaqui Injuns do to a man? First they cut off his eyelids—”

  “For Christ’s sake—” Morse’s face paled. “All right, I’ll talk, damn it!” His eyes shuttled to Duke, standing there with poised ax-blade, also threatening him. He pulled his face back from the point of the knife. “I’ll tell you everything—” Then, in a sweeping motion, he knocked the lamp off the table and toppled the chair backwards and the room was in darkness.

  “Hold it!” Fargo bellowed, after him with the knife in that same split second. “I’ll take him!” He heard Morse scrambling to his feet, got his arm. “I’ve got—” But then Morse screamed. It was a short, sharp cry, quickly cut off; and it did not quite smother the curious chunk that was like a butcher cutting meat with a cleaver. Fargo felt the arm in his grasp go limp; Morse’s body fell back before it had arisen.

  “Goddman it,” Fargo said bitterly. “Duke—”

  MacKenzie had already struck a match. When it flared, the girl on the bed cried out at the sight of Morse, lying on his back, wide eyes staring sightless at the roof poles, one blade of the double-bitted ax buried in his chest, splitting his torso wide.

  Fargo whirled on Hotchkiss. “Blast it, I told you I had him! Now—” Disgustedly, he lit another lamp.

  Duke shook his head. “Hell, I’m sorry. It was all so quick. All I know is that when he started to go, I swung at him. It was all so quick.” He turned to MacKenzie.

  The Scot nodded grimly, a gun in his own hand. “I know, Duke, I almost shot him myself when he slugged that lamp; held my fire just in time. Well ... ” He looked down at the body, grimaced. “What’s done is done. We’ve still got her.” He pointed at the girl.

  “I don’t know anything, so help me I don’t!” Her voice trembled. “Except about Goodis and Milligan—”

  Fargo stiffened. “Milligan?”

  She nodded mutely. Her eyes went again to Morse’s body, then she turned her head to the wall, the sheet clutched about her breasts.

  “They were the only two I ever heard him mention,” she said dully. “They were—”

  The crash of glass drowned her words. The panes of a window fell in. Fargo whirled just in time to see the barrel of a .45 Colt Peacemaker rammed through. Then the gun roared. The impact of the slug caught the girl between her naked shoulder blades, threw her against the log wall beside the bed. Before the sound of the gun had died, Fargo punched a shot through the window, then another.

  And knew he’d missed; the man had ducked below the sill. Fargo swept the second lamp off the table with a quick gesture, hurtled through the door. As he crossed the threshold he threw himself sideways against the wall, taking cover in the shadows there.

  That saved his life. From around the corner of the cabin, a long spurt of orange tongued at him; the .45 roared almost in his ear. The bullet cut air where he’d have been if he hadn’t swerved. Fargo fired back but his own bullet chunked into the corner logs behind which the gunman dodged. Fargo eased forward, then he heard the thud of running feet. The killer was making a break across the clearing, heading for the woods.

  Fargo leaped around the cabin’s corner, strained to pierce the darkness. He thought he saw a tatter of movement near the edge of the woods. Then brush crashed. Fargo bellowed, “Milligan!”

  At the same instant, he fell forward.

  As he had hoped, the killer fired once more, at the sound. The slug snarled overhead. Fargo caught the telltale muzzle-flame and fired three times, one directly on it, once to the right, then to the left. And, in the brush beyond the clearing, a man screamed.

  Fargo fired again; the scream died. Then, carefully, he got to his feet. Nothing happened, and he ran forward. He probed in brush, then his booted foot kicked something solid yet yielding. He knew what it was before he bent, groped, and came up with a hand smeared with warm wetness.

  Fargo let out a terse obscenity, found a match and snapped it with his thumb. In its light, the glazed eyes of Jerry Milligan glittered back like a pair of marbles. One of the hollow-points had caught him in the chest, and he would never swing an ax again.

  Or, Fargo thought, betray the man who paid his wages.

  Fargo stood there looking down at the body of the man he’d worked alongside. Of course, Milligan could have spotted him when he’d left the bunkhouse, their beds were next to each other. And Milligan, sensing something wrong, could have trailed him—and then put a bullet into Barbara in a desperate attempt to keep her from giving him away. But, of course, a shade too late … That could have been how it happened, exactly how it happened, maybe it was.

  Only, Fargo did not think so. There was something here he could not yet fit together. He lifted his head, sniffed the air. Milligan … He’d talked of that distant, invisible crown fire, the taint of danger a man could smell. That talk had been, of course, to throw Fargo off the track. And yet Milligan had been right. There was still something in the air, a stink of menace … And it did not entirely come from the knowledge that somewhere out there in the darkness, Lasher’s men were gathering to burn them out.

  Then MacKenzie and Hotchkiss came up behind him, the Scot wielding a carbide lantern he’d found in the cabin. Behind Fargo, Duke cursed. “Jerry Milligan! It was him, like she said!”

  MacKenzie was shaking his head dazedly. “What a bloody night,” he whispered. “What an awful, bloody night!”

  “The girl’s dead,” Duke said. “That one bullet killed her, Fargo.” Then he made a sound of satisfaction. “Well, this’ll give Lasher something to think about. All his people rubbed out in one night, just like that!” He snapped his fingers. “Mannix, Goodis, Milligan—he sure as hell had us well-salted, didn’t he? Maybe now, if Fargo can keep the firebugs off of us, we can get some timber out.”

  “Maybe,” Fargo said. He suddenly felt very tired. “Let’s get back to camp. We can clean this mess up in the morning.”

  “Sure,” said Hotchkiss. “It’s been a good night’s work.” He turned and led the way back past the darkened cabin to the dam. Fargo stayed behind him, all the way to camp.

  ~*~

  Fargo had slept only fitfully but there was work to do and he started early. By sunrise he was back in harness—literally. Now the trunk had been robbed of its contents; as Fargo lined up the gunmen MacKenzie had turned over to him and gave them orders, his torso was crisscrossed with ammunition bandoliers. The fat primers of ten-gauge shells glittered in one; rounds for the Winchester saddle-gun in the other. The sawed-off Fox hung down his back behind his right arm, on its sling. Now he had abandoned the shoulder harness and the Colt was seated in the buscadero holster on a cartridge belt around his waist. He was, in effect, a walking arsenal, but every weapon had its special use and was worth carrying a long time for the one crucial moment when it could do the job better than anything else.

  The two dozen fighting men who he confronted were only slightly less heavier armed than he. Each had at least one pistol and a Winchester or Springfield rifle, and each carried a sheathed knife. They looked at him and listened
to him with the respect of professionals who recognized a master of their trade.

  “Okay,” Fargo said. “I want you in groups of four. You’ve got maps showing the sectors you’re to patrol. Each group of four sets up a base camp, in good cover. Two men ride the line on the day shift, while the other two sleep, then you swap over; a twenty-four-hour watch on every sector. No fires; you eat the canned grub you’ve been issued. If you smoke make damned sure you put out matches and cigarettes completely and totally. We’re here to keep these woods from burning down, not to do the trick ourselves by accident. You run across anybody out there, shoot first and ask questions later. You spot a fire, get three men on it, the fourth signals with three shots, pauses, three more, and rides like hell for camp, here. We’ll all pile in to help you. And—You’re being paid good wages, but MacKenzie’s offerin’ a bonus. Two hundred dollars a head, for every one of Lasher’s men you bring in! Any questions?”

  There were none; this was only the tail end of a thorough briefing. Fargo nodded. “All right. Mount up. And when you’re on patrol, that pack mule goes where you go.”

  They nodded, swung into the saddles of the riding mules MacKenzie had provided from his work stock and from the wagon teams. Each group of four led a pack animal, loaded with axes, long-handled shovels and backpack water sprays: firefighting equipment to be used to halt any blaze before it could get a fair start. Fargo went to his own mule, mounted lithely, checked the seating of his Winchester in its saddle scabbard. He took the lead-rope of his own pack animal. His job was the biggest, most demanding of all—to patrol the whole perimeter, stay in contact and make sure they did their work, kept a sharp lookout. Until the routine was shaken down and he knew how well he could trust them all, how much they could be depended on, there’d be little rest for him.

  But that was why he had hired out.

  MacKenzie and Hotchkiss, at his stirrup, looked up at him. “Good luck, Fargo,” the Scot said. His face was taut, strained from the violence of the night before.