Fargo 12

by John Benteen

  “And so their claim’s voided?”

  “It’s expired,” Steele said, “and they didn’t take it up again. And I’ve superseded them. Fargo, there are hundreds of thousands of tons of tailings up there, and all the water in the world to wash the gold out of them. The people before us took five million out of here; we’ll take two ourselves.”

  He began to thrust bags at Fargo. “Now we’ve got capital, we can expand. More pumps, more workmen. We’ll be gorged with gold in another year. But first we’ve got to get this out.”

  “Your letter sounded like you were expecting trouble,” Fargo said.

  “I’m not expecting anything. All I know is that when you haul sixty thousand in gold outside, you don’t take any chances. Nobody comes through this hell anymore; Sandy and me ain’t seen another living soul in three months. But a man never knows. That’s where you come in. I know all about mining gold, but I’m no fighting man.”

  “Well,” Fargo said, “I am.”

  “Yeah,” said Steele. “And I’m ready to go outside, now. Come tomorrow, let’s strike out with all this gold. I’ll buy the equipment, hire the help we need—and then we’ll really dig into our first million, Fargo.”

  “That suits me,” Fargo said. “As long as I don’t have to do the digging.”

  ~*~

  It was all that money that made him restless, woke him up in the middle of the night.

  Thirty thousand dollars; that was just enough to edge him up, despite his weariness. When he rolled into his soogans on the floor of the superintendent’s house, with Steele between himself and Sandy, for some reason two amounts kept echoing in his head. Thirty thousand; a million. A million was rather frightening. Thirty thousand he could get rid of in a few months of wild, high living. But a million—to spend that would take some doing. Ownership of a million dollars in gold could make a man fat and slow. He couldn’t spend it fast enough to keep it from having its effect on him. A little afraid, Fargo tried to sleep. But it was no use for a while yet, so he rolled out of his blankets, picked up the shotgun, slipped the pistol in his belt, and padded out to the rickety veranda of the house.

  The raw night wind was cool on his face; overhead, the sky swam with stars above the jagged mountain tops. He took out makings, and leaning against a rickety post, built a cigarette. He lit it, then snapped out the match. From his pocket he shoved a fat, gold watch, the kind used by railroad men, always accurate. It told him that it was nearly two.

  Fargo stepped off the porch, looked up and down the empty street, the Fox cradled in his arms. Nothing moved.

  Then he heard the squeak of a rotten board behind him.

  When he whirled, it was with fantastic speed, and the shotgun was pointed. Then he lowered it.

  “You,” he said.

  “Me,” murmured the girl, Sandy. She came down the rickety steps. “Dad’s sawing wood, but I couldn’t sleep, either. I don’t know why. Maybe because you’re here.”

  “Me?”

  She nodded, her face, washed by moonlight, grave and lovely. “I’m twenty-five years old,” she said. “I’ve spent—how many years?—traipsing through the desert with Dad while he chased his rainbow.” She gestured, in a way that took in the whole wild jumble of terrain, the forlorn, empty, rotting town. “Most of these past few years spent in places like this, lonely places. I’m … not used to men. Especially men like you.”

  Fargo smiled faintly. She was a lot of woman, and he wanted her. But her father was his partner, millions of dollars were at stake, and this kind of thing in a place like Eden did not mix with gold. He said, “Well, Mac’s found his rainbow now. You’ll be rich. No more lonely places for you. You’ll have the big cities, fine clothes, all the men you can handle.”

  She moved closer to him. “Will I? Do you really think so? Maybe I’m not pretty enough—”

  “You’re pretty enough,” Fargo said. “Don’t worry about that.” Then, because it was what she wanted, needed, he bent and kissed her, not hard, briefly, on the lips. Straightening up, he said, seriously, “Now, get back to your bedroll. Come morning, we’ll pull out of here, head for Tonopah. Then, I reckon, to El Paso or Los Angeles. Big towns. When we get there, I’ll show ’em to you.” She took his hand. “That’s a promise?”

  “It’s a promise,” Fargo said and meant it. He liked this girl. And there was a lot he could teach her. But not here, not now... He and Steele had a lot of desert to cross together; and he did not want to make that journey with a man who might have a grudge against him for fooling around with his daughter.

  “I’ll hold you to it,” Sandy whispered. Then she went back into the house.

  When she was gone, Fargo was still restless. Something gnawed at him, a sixth-sense nagging. He had learned not to ignore that. Occasionally it misled him, but it had, in the past, served him well, that kind of warning bell ringing in his head, trying to alarm him to the fact that all was not right.

  Loosening the Colt in its holster, he struck out to take a turn around the town. He walked down the deserted street cautiously, keeping in the shadow. The animals—his horse and mule, Steele’s and Sandy’s mounts and string of burros—were penned in an old corral at the street’s end where the hill’s flank towered high. The first thing was to reassure himself that all was well with them.

  They drowsed in moonlight. Above them was the huge pile of tailings, like a landslide on the slope; at its foot was the complex of sluiceways and rockers Steele had built to placer mine them. Fargo moved past the corral, walked among the boxes marveling at all the work Steele and his daughter had put in. Steele had earned his wealth.

  He turned to go, convinced now that his hunch had been wrong. He circled around the network of sluices and rockers close to the foot of the great pile of tailings. Amidst its sand and mud, rejected from the stamp mill, there were enormous chunks of rocks that had been blasted from the mountainside to open the shaft. As he skirted a tower of this rubble higher than his head, they jumped him.

  He heard a tick of sound above him, whirled, brought up the shotgun just in time to see a body leaping down at him from that rock pile like a hunting panther. An instant more and he would have pulled both triggers, blasted it to nothingness, but he lacked a necessary fraction of a second. Before he could fire, the body struck him hard, its weight knocking him backward. Simultaneously, even as he fell, he saw three more dark shapes boiling from the rock pile.

  Another face was close to his, rank breath in his nostrils. Hands pinned his arms as his head struck the stony soil with a force that dazed him. A boot clamped down on the wrist that held the shotgun; Fargo did pull the triggers then, and the gun spumed flame and shot from both barrels, but its charges whined off into space harmlessly.

  Somebody rasped, as he arched his body with all his strength, “Hit the sonofabitch, Clint! He’s strong as a goddam bull!” Fingers gouged for his eyes; Fargo rolled his face aside, tried to grasp the .38’s butt. Two hands seized his wrist, wrenched. Somebody snarled, “No, you don’t!” The first voice yelled, angrily, as the man sought to keep Fargo pinned, “I said hit him!” Fargo kicked out with a booted foot, felt the heel crush soft tissue and there was a moan. But they were all on him now, and, though he used every ounce of strength, he could not rise. Then something gleamed across his vision, shining in the moonlight: a Colt’s barrel. It chopped down across his skull; the world seemed to explode in a great roar. It was a long while after that before he knew anything else.

  Chapter Three

  Slowly and painfully Fargo eased back to consciousness, aware first of more agony within his skull than it seemed possible it could contain. Slowly, experimentally, he opened his eyes, shut them tightly again as light seared them. He lay like that, awake but drifting, for several minutes.

  He became aware of voices around him. “Steele, it ain’t gonna do you no good to wrassle like that. Them ropes ain’t comin’ off. Hey, Clint. Check the big one. He ought to be wakin’ up about now.”

  Somebo
dy laughed, a gravelly, ugly sound. “Way I laid that Colt barrel up alongside his head, he’ll be lucky if his brains ain’t turned to scrambled eggs.” Then, eyes still closed, Fargo was aware of a presence over him. Suddenly, with terrific force, a hard, pointed boot toe slammed into his ribs. He felt one break.

  The pain made him yell involuntarily, and his eyes flew open. He was staring up into a face beneath a battered gray sombrero, one weather-burned and fringed with scraggly black beard in which yellow snaggles of teeth showed in a mocking grin. The man wore range clothes, and he was built like a gorilla with huge shoulders and a barrel of a chest and arms so long his hands dangled down past his knees. “Figgered that would bring you outa it, soldier.”

  He bent, and one huge, black-furred hand locked in the slack of Fargo’s shirt, jerked him upright. The pain in Fargo’s head and that in his flank fused; he ground his teeth together. He was shoved into a sitting position against the wall and found that his hands were tightly bound behind his back with rawhide thongs, his ankles wrapped together the same way.

  His vision, blurred with tears of pain, cleared slowly. He was in the house Steele used for headquarters, and he saw the miner, bound like himself, sitting propped against the opposite wall. Steele’s face was scabbed with crusted blood, his lips swollen, his jaw a huge blue bruise, one eye puffed shut. He had taken a hell of a beating.

  Sandy—! Fargo turned his head. Then he saw her. She was on her feet, her hands tied behind her, too, her hair tousled, her face pale. Another man stood before her, hipshot, hands in his back pockets. Except for the fact that his black shag of hair and beard were shot with gray, he could have been the twin of the one who’d kicked Fargo. Like the other, he wore a sixgun strapped low on his right hip.

  Fargo looked around cautiously. Near the fireplace in which a coffee pot sat on the embers, there were two more of the same breed. One was younger, lacked the beard; his face was thinner, but he had the same apelike build. His eyes were beads under heavy ridges of bone, and he made animal sounds as he crammed bacon and biscuits into his mouth greedily. The other was in a red shirt. He had no beard, but instead had a heavy black mustache. The clothes of all of them were filthy and coated with alkali; they looked like they had been out in the desert a long time.

  Above Fargo, the one who’d kicked him said, “Sure, soldier, take a good look around. I reckon this is the first time you’ve ever seen the Frost brothers. Likely it’ll be the last time, too.” He turned. “The guy in the soldier hat’s awake, Roy. Which one you want to start on?”

  Roy turned slowly away from Sandy and looked at Fargo. Fargo stared back at him, and there was a long, tense moment as their eyes met. Then, through his beard, Roy spat on the board floor. “That one’s tough,” he said. “He won’t tell us nothin’. We’ll begin on the girl’s daddy.”

  The young one at the fire seized the end of a stick, pulled it out of the blaze. Its end was a red, glowing ember. “Lemme do it, Roy. This’ll have him singin’.”

  Roy snorted. “Put it back, Chad. That kinda thing’s too slow.”

  The one with the mustache pulled a Bowie from his boot, tested it with his thumb. His eyes glittered. “This ain’t. I could make a cigar store Indian sing with this.”

  “Not needed, Dorsey. Not yet, anyhow.” He went to stand above the bound Steele. “Well, feller,” he said, “we know you got it. We been out there in the desert watchin’ you for weeks, now. A lot easier to let you take the dust out than to have to do the work ourselves. But then soldier, here, rode in; and we knowed he had come to take you and the girl and the money out and figgered it was time to make our move. Damned if you didn’t put up a real good fight, almost as good as soldier over yonder.” He spat again. “Anyhow, it’s time to git down to business. Where at you keep the dust?” Steele looked up at him with his one good eye. “You go to hell,” he said.

  “Gonna be tough to deal with, huh? You looked like the breed. That’s why I figger neither fire nor knife’ll work. But—” he grinned, hooking thumbs in the pocket of his stained, black vest, “I know what will.”

  He turned again to Sandy, who stood, chin high, displaying no fear except in the paleness of her face, and the heaving of her breasts beneath her shirt. Roy’s jet eyes dropped to those breasts. “Ain’t she a purty thing, Steele?” Then his hand shot out, seized the shirt. Savagely, he ripped. Buttons popped and cloth tore, and then the shirt was open.

  “Hot damn!” Chad, the young one, exclaimed from by the fire. “Look at them!”

  Steele struggled with his bonds as Roy reached out, touched Sandy’s naked breasts with a big hand. “Damn you, Frost—”

  Roy laughed. “I figgered that would git to you, Steele. But it’s only a beginnin’. Unless you tell us where the gold is.”

  “Dad, don’t tell them anything.” Sandy’s voice was sharp, fearless.

  “Well, listen at Miss Biggity,” Roy said wryly. Again that great hand at the end of a long arm flew out; cloth tore, and now the shirt was shredded and Sandy was naked to the waist. “She do talk big …” He turned toward Steele. “There’s four of us Frost brothers. Me, I’m the oldest, so I go first. Then Clint, Dorsey, Chad … You kinda got to watch out for Chad, though. He plays rough with women. Last one, he damned near got us all throwed in jail up in Ogden. He likes fire, and when he held her down—”

  “Will you let her go if I tell you where the gold is?” Steele asked.

  “Why not? All we want, really, is the dust. We kin buy women with that—ones that ain’t gonna fight us. You treat us right, we’ll treat you right. That’s the way the Frost brothers operate. You ask anybody from here to Mexico, they’ll tell you that.”

  Steele looked up at him despairingly. Realization flared slowly in his single open eye. “I know who you are, now,” he whispered. “You’re the sons of Black Jack Frost.”

  Fargo remained impassive, having already guessed. “Well, you ketch on fast,” Roy said. “That we are. Pore Daddy, they executed him with a firin’ squad in Utah. Claimed he robbed stages, killed the passengers, and I’ll admit he was a great hand for the ladies, he did tumble a few of ’em in the bush before he shut ’em up so they couldn’t give evidence against him—”

  “Raped them,” Steele rasped.

  “If you wanta call it that, yeah.” Roy’s eyes went to Sandy. “Oh, Daddy woulda loved to git hold of somethin’ like that. He’d really have made her squeal. But I allow we can—” He whirled back to Steele. His face was hard, now, savage, all his easy-going manner vanished. “And we will!” he rasped. “And you’ll watch it, what we do to her. And it’ll be plenty! Unless—What about it, Steele! The girl for the gold!”

  Steele looked at Fargo. Fargo, his head clear now said, “Not until they let her go, Steele. Not until they put her on a horse, let her ride off. Once she’s in the clear, has a head start, yes. Then we tell ’em.”

  Clint took a step toward Fargo. “Who asked you to open your mouth, Big Ugly?” Suddenly his boot lashed back, then forward again. Fargo grunted as his body was racked once more with the pain of another cracked rib. His head swam. When the pain had ebbed enough for him to be conscious of what went on again, Steele was saying, “That’s it, Frost. Mount her up, let her ride. Then I’ll tell you where the gold is.”

  “You tell us now,” Frost said harshly.

  “No,” Steele said. “The gold is all I got to bargain with. You let my daughter go, you’ll have it. Right away.”

  Frost rubbed his beard. “Maybe I’ve changed my mind, Steele. Maybe we’d like to have the girl, too. We been out here in the desert for a long time. Maybe we’ve upped the ante. Maybe we want her and the gold.”

  “Then I’ll die before I’ll tell you where it is.”

  “You may yell a lot, but I don’t think you’ll die. Chad, I reckon you’re gonna git to use that firebrand after all. Bring it over.”

  “Sho, Roy.” Chad’s eyes gleamed. He took the ember from the fire: It trailed smoke as he straightened up, came
across the room. His eyes went from Sandy to her father. “Which one you want me to use it on?”

  Steele looked up at him defiantly. “You can burn me alive, God damn you. I won’t tell unless you let my daughter go.”

  “I quit lookin’ for you to talk. She’s the one that’s got to tell us now. Unless she wants to see Chad burn that other eye outa you.”

  Sandy sucked in a shuddering breath. “No!” she cried. “God, no!”

  “Yeah. You got five seconds to talk.”

  Fargo tugged with every ounce of strength at the rawhide that bound him. These men were experts; it gave not a fraction of an inch. “Frost,” he rasped, “you’re buildin’ up a big score...”

  “And you think you’ll settle it?” Roy grinned at him. “Time we leave here, you won’t be in no shape to settle anything.” He turned away. “Go ahead, Chad.”

  Chad laughed—a high, rattling, manic sound—and raised the glowing ember. It moved closer and closer to Steele’s eye socket, then stopped an inch away. Steele closed his lid against the unbearable heat. “Five seconds,” Roy murmured. “One … two...”

  “No!” Sandy’s scream was loud, full of terror. “Don’t, please! I’ll tell you!”

  “Shut up!” her father roared. “Don’t you understand, that’s all we’ve got!”

  “I’m going to tell them! I can’t see them do that—take that thing away from his eyes!”

  Roy turned toward her. “All right. You talk. And fast.”

  “Under the hearth. The four corner bricks. They’ll come up. The gold’s there!”

  Roy let out a breath of triumph. “Ahhh ... Dorsey! Check it!”

  The man with the mustache scrabbled at the bricks. “They’re in tight, seem like they’re mortared down. I tried ’em all before.”

  Sandy’s voice trembled. “Lift out the one on the far right first. Then the others will come.”

  Dorsey struggled with them a moment more. Then he made a sound of satisfaction. “Here we go.” He tossed bricks aside. “It’s here, Roy.”