Fargo 12

by John Benteen

  Somehow, even before he reached the wagon, he knew what he would find.

  As he neared it, the howling ceased. The dog had heard the drum of hoofbeats. It was an Australian collie, black and white and somewhat bigger than its breed’s usual run. Fargo pulled up the horse as the dog planted itself between him and the canvas-topped vehicle, its neck hair bristling, white fangs showing in a snarl.

  Not wanting to have to shoot it, he began to talk to it in a low, soothing voice. “Easy, boy, easy … Easy there …” He spoke to it for a long time, watching its tail. The fur around its neck lay down, its naked fangs were sheathed, and at last the tail wagged faintly. Still talking softly, Fargo swung down, tied the dun and the mule to the wagon wheel.

  The dog watched him intently. Then it trotted around the wagon. Fargo followed it.

  The dead man lay sprawled on his back, sightless eyes staring at the sky, flies walking over them and making a black cluster on the crusted scarlet-brown of his shirt front. Fargo recognized immediately the effects of a charge from a double-barreled shotgun and his lips thinned.

  The collie planted itself between him and the corpse, threw back its head, and howled again. As Fargo tried to come nearer, it turned on him, rumbling a deep, warning growl, showing its teeth again and crouching to spring.

  He backed away. The dead herder had been a Basque. From the look of him, at least twenty-four hours had elapsed since the killing; the body was badly bloated.

  As he put distance between himself and the corpse, the dog relaxed a little. Fargo climbed up into the wagon.

  It should have been full of supplies and the herder’s gear and bedroll. But it was empty, stripped clean of everything that could be carried off.

  He grunted a curse, visualizing what had happened. The Frosts with Sandy in tow riding in, the herder greeting them without suspicion. Clint tilting the shotgun, pulling the trigger without warning. Murdering, Fargo thought, for a lousy sheep-herder’s outfit, with thirty thousand dollars in gold already in their saddlebags.

  But that, he knew by now, was the way they were. They would kill a man for anything. If there was something to steal, something that could be taken with them, they could not help themselves; they had to steal it. He spat over the wagon’s tailgate in disgust, then jumped down. They would probably have loaded their gear on the horse that had pulled the herder’s wagon, taken that with them, too. Likely, as well, they had shot at the dog, missed, and it had taken cover until they left. It must have hurt them, he thought, to leave the sheep behind, but even they must have had sense enough to know they couldn’t drive a flock of woolies across the Mojave desert to San Bernardino.

  Fargo stood there thoughtfully for a moment in the blazing sun, looking at the dog hunkered by its master. Then he shrugged. No use to try to bury the corpse; he would have to kill the dog before he could lay a hand on it. He knew such animals well enough to know he could not persuade it to come with him, either; it would die before it would leave its master’s body and the flock that was in its charge.

  It looked up at him, whimpered as if imploring him to stay as he swung into the saddle. He rode wide around it, eyes searching the ground. The herder had built a fireplace of rocks; around it were signs where a sheep had been butchered and cooked. What meat was left, they had apparently taken with them.

  There would be water somewhere in the valley, but there was nothing here for the dog to eat. It would have to guard not only the flock but its master’s body from wolves, coyotes, eagles and buzzards until somebody came. It might be weeks. Because it was a professional, it would do its best, and it would starve before it killed one of the animals entrusted to it.

  Fargo unlatched the rope from his saddle, shook out a loop. He rode up close to the flock that, blatting, cringed away. His lip curled; he hated sheep with the deep, profound hatred of a man who had seen too often how they could turn good range into desert with their deep-cropping bite and their sharp, ground-packing hooves. He selected a fat wether, dabbed his loop around its neck. Then he shot it with the pistol.

  He dragged the carcass back to the wagon, close to the body, shook the rope off, coiled it up. The dog would not kill one of its flock, but it could eat the animal he had killed with a dear conscience and no violation of its code. That was all he could do for it, or for its dead master.

  He circled the valley. At its western outlet he found their trail—three ridden horses, a pack horse, and a loaded mule, probably the herder’s. They had not ridden out in any particular hurry. That was good; they felt secure, certain that no one was behind them.

  Fargo spurred the horse, jerked the lead rope of his own pack mule. If he rode hard and fast, he might overtake them before they got to San Bernardino.

  Again it came to him that he should have taken Chelsea’s Winchester or bought rifle and shotgun in Las Vegas. It was insanity to go up against two men like the Frosts armed only with a Colt when they had long guns. He laughed, a short, sharp scratchy sound. But, what the hell. He was crazy and so were they.

  ~*~

  Toward evening he was on the edge of the Mojave Desert.

  He had crossed a lot of deserts in his time. Some were rock and lava, some pure sand, some alkali and salt flats, some merely endless stretches of waterless hardpan overgrown with creosote and cactus. The Mojave combined them all.

  For a hundred miles, it sprawled away before him, as tough a stretch to cross as existed anywhere in the United States. To the north, it gave birth to the low, heat-blasted hell of Death Valley; to the south, it extended nearly to Mexico. Westward, the direction in which he was headed, it tapered off at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains. It was not something to dare without plenty of water, and he did not have enough. Neither did he know where the good waterholes were. But Chad had said his brothers knew the desert. So he could make it, too. All he had to do was be sure not to lose their trail.

  Well, it lay plain before him, winding on into that sun-blasted, windswept hell. He had to stick to it like grim death.

  That turned out to be easier said than done.

  As if the Frosts had had second thoughts, they began to hide their tracks. They had been raised in desert country, knew everything about it, could calculate how long it would be before the wind erased the marks of their passage in loose sand, how to circle over rock, take advantage of the flats of hardpan. As he moved farther into a terrain that seemed to have been put together by a creator with limitless supplies of sand, flint, lava and cactus, the track grew dimmer, harder to trace. Fargo had to slow. What made it worse was the fact that wild burros ran loose here; sometimes the passage of a herd of them would erase the sign. Then he would have to circle, pick it up again.

  It was a slow, hard process; and it got slower, harder. It was fortunate for Fargo that he had learned desert tracking from the Yaquis of Mexico, the greatest masters of the art in the world. His eye was tuned for the little things: a dot in the sand, as if a raindrop had fallen there, actually a splash of sweat from a lathered horse; the scratch of iron shod hooves on a vast expanse of boulders; an occasional pile of droppings over which someone had scooped sand; a broader, watered place where a horse had urinated.

  Once their trail disappeared entirely, but he found where a coyote had fled in one direction, a jackrabbit in another. He took a bearing on the gap between their tracks, picked up the Frosts’ spoor further on, by a pair of yucca leaves hooked behind others in the bunch where a horse had brushed them, confirmed it by an overturned rock. Undisturbed for centuries, the tops of desert rocks were worn smooth by wind and sand; their bottoms were still rough. When he found one with rough side up, he knew that it had been kicked by a horse’s hoof.

  He found where they had stopped to rest: a few grains of oats, probably covered when they had moved out after feeding their horses, then uncovered again by the restless wind. Otherwise, they had erased all marks of passage.

  It was slow, excruciatingly slow, and made worse by the knowledge that they could move muc
h faster than he now. For every mile he made, they were making two. And the faint trail could not be followed at night at all. They would, after all, be at San Bernardino long before him, maybe even headed for Mexico before he got there.

  But he was in too deep to get out now, too far from the railroad to be able to make it on the scanty supply of ever-diminishing water in the goatskin. The desert sun and furnace wind baked a lot of moisture out of man and animals alike, and it had to be replaced if they were to keep going.

  He had to follow the Frosts to find the water-holes.

  Because he could not track in the dark, he had to lie up the whole night, sleeping fitfully. The rest, though, did the animals good. When he set out at sunrise the next morning, he was in deep desert with the knowledge that time was his enemy. The farther they got ahead of him, the more thoroughly the wind would wipe out even the faint traces they had left, the colder their trail would get.

  Now he was in sand up to his horse’s pasterns. It deepened as he went on, its endless expanse broken only by an occasional low hill of piled gravel, the nightmare pattern of a Joshua tree. The wind was like the breath from a blast furnace, searing whatever it touched. The horse and mule had to be watered far too often. Lather streamed down their flanks, left traces of precious liquid in the sand.

  Still, he managed to find the trail. But it took a long time. Sometimes he had to back off, circle, and get a different slant of light on the ground before the faint indentation of their passage showed. Sometimes he had to check and check again until he uncovered another grain of oats in the sand, or find a pile of horse droppings that would guide him.

  On either side of him the Mojave stretched away like the bottom of an enormous frying pan. Salt flats glimmered in the sun, mirages danced and shimmered ahead; sometimes Joshuas turned into monstrous, contorted figures. The wind was brutal, merciless, and increasing in intensity, whipping his face with cutting particles. His mouth was dry, his tongue swollen, but he could not drink, needing to nurse every drop of water.

  Then disaster struck.

  It came out of the north, in a sudden keening, howling lash of wind. Aware of that sound, he turned in the saddle, saw the dark cloud boiling toward him. He cursed. A sandstorm, and a vicious one, bearing down on him like a stampede. Even as he jumped out of the saddle, turned horse and mule with rumps toward the blast, it hit him.

  Then the world was blotted out in a swirl of sand and dust. He crouched, reins and lead rope tightly clutched, hat pulled down over eyes and face, for he had no neckerchief. The sand whipped and whirled around him, and he had to cup his palm over his nose and mouth to fend it off so he could breathe Above him, horse and mule alike snorted and coughed and shivered with the blast of abrasive grains against their flesh.

  The storm lasted for four hours. They were the longest four Fargo had ever spent. It was not that he doubted his ability to survive it; he had been through such storms before, and longer ones. What racked and galled him with impatience was that it was wiping out the trail ahead. After this, there would be no chance of picking up the track of the Frosts.

  He suffered through it; there was nothing else to do. Three hours before sundown, the wind died; the brown cloud faded. The sun once more struck him like a mallet.

  Fargo arose from inside a dune that had been drifted around him by the relentless wind. Every wrinkle, fold and opening of his clothes was filled with sand. He undressed, shook it out as best he could, and dressed again. He unsaddled the animals, got as much sand off their sweaty backs as possible. Then he began to clean the sixgun.

  It was clogged with sand, too. He had to strip it down, remove the cylinder, pour precious water through it to wash the sand out of its mechanism. But the gun had to be clean; above all else, that was necessary. Later on, if he made it across the Mojave, he could oil it.

  Now, though, there was a very definite chance that he would not make it across the desert. The wind had dehydrated both himself and the animals. The goatskin was nearly empty when he had drunk and watered them. And the Frosts’ trail was gone; he would have to find water on his own if he were to get to San Bernardino.

  He knew now that he might not. He still had more than sixty miles to go, and water enough for only ten, fifteen, of that.

  He made a sound in his throat, a kind of crazy snarl. Somehow that did not matter, either. He had unfinished business with the Frosts. One way or another, he was going to stay alive until he’d wound it up.

  In the last hours of daylight, he set off again across the vast bottom of that devil’s frying pan.

  At nightfall, he made camp. The only reason for the mule had been to pack his goatskin and his food. He had so little water left in the goatskin that he could not afford to waste it. He watered the horse, turned the mule loose, drank a couple of swallows to assuage his own thirst. Then the skin was empty and he rolled it up. The mule roamed around camp, all night, braying pleadingly, thirstily; when he awakened the next morning, it was gone. Maybe it would survive, maybe not. He thought it would; mules were smart and hard to kill.

  His mouth felt stuffed with cotton. He knew that by day’s end he must find water. He had that much leeway, ten hours. After that, neither he nor the horse would have much strength left.

  Ahead, the desert glimmered in the sun blindingly. The wind was high and hot; and Fargo understood wind. In cold countries, every knot of wind lowered the temperature a few degrees; in the desert, the more it rose, the hotter it got, the faster your body baked dry. This wind was cutting his chances of survival; it would dehydrate him and the horse two hours earlier than if the day had been calm.

  He went on, keeping the horse at a walk, dismounting and walking himself from time to time; It was hard going in deep sand, blasted by the wind and the cutting grains it carried. By noon he was light-headed, dizzy, a little irrational. Yet, some part of him clung to its purpose. He would not catch up with the Frosts out here, not now; but somehow he would get to San Bernardino. “Somehow, dammit,” he heard himself rasp aloud.

  By mid-afternoon, under the merciless dazzle of a sun seemingly fixed forever high in the cloudless blue arch of sky, baked from beneath by the shimmering heat of sand and alkali, he was not so sure; both he and the horse had begun to lurch and stumble. Not even a pebble under his tongue summoned any moisture in his mouth. Yet, the sweat, the life-giving wetness, oozed from him in massive quantities relentlessly. And there was no sign anywhere of water.

  At about four, he fell down. One moment he was walking, the next, his strength simply vanished, and he found himself lying face down in the sand. He heard somebody sobbing; then he realized that it was himself. Meanwhile, above him, the horse stood with lowered head, panting, dripping lather.

  Fargo lay there in the broiling heat for a long time. It would have been so easy to keep on lying there. Dying in the desert was like freezing; when your strength gave out, you got sleepy. A great lassitude gripped you and you lacked strength or impulse to stand up again. You just drifted off, sleeping, and then you were dead.

  He almost did that. Then, dreaming, he remembered Clint Frost kicking him. He seemed to feel, over and over, the impact of that boot toe.

  Hatred surged up in him; and hatred was almost like water, something to keep a man going for a little while longer anyhow.

  Fargo got to hands and knees. His eyes stung with sweat, were blinded by sun-dazzle. His face was charred and blistered from the heat. He remained motionless for a few minutes, head drooping. He savored the hatred.

  Then he lurched to his feet, gathered up his horse’s reins.

  He staggered on. The dun came behind him, unsteadily. It was weakening faster than he; it had no hatred, no purpose, to sustain it.

  An hour later, he knew he could go no farther. Cresting a sand-drifted ridge of talus, overgrown with cactus, he dropped gasping to his knees, looked at what lay ahead of him.

  Endless, baking, shimmering flats. Miles of them. More miles than he could cover.

  He remained t
here, kneeling, for a long time. His panting was loud in his own ears; behind him, the horse made a moaning sound.

  Fargo knew that it was finished, too. Slowly, with almost the last of his strength, he drew his Colt. No need to let it suffer...

  It took a tremendous effort even to turn, earing back the trigger. Then, his body twisted, he froze, blinked.

  He rubbed his eyes, clearing them of sweat and sun-glare and sand.

  Maybe it was a mirage...

  He stared at it for a long time, that faint, curling wisp of gray smoke swirling upward against the scalding blue of the sky.

  Smoke: that meant people; that meant water.

  Again he knuckled at his eyes. Maybe the Frosts! Maybe, sure now after the sandstorm that their trail was obliterated, they dared build a fire!

  Fargo lurched to his feet, sucking in great breaths of superheated air. The smoke arose from behind a low, humping, sandy finger of rock. He tried to estimate the distance. In this clear atmosphere it could be one mile or ten, twenty, to the west.

  That did not matter. Not if it had been made by the Frosts. He would get to it somehow.

  He seized the horse’s reins. “Come on,” he croaked.

  With the leathers in one hand, his gun in the other, he staggered on, into the teeth of the sun.

  ~*~

  Blessedly, by the time he reached the ridge two hours later, the sun was sinking. It took all his strength, all his willpower, to scramble up the boulder-dotted slope, through the treacherous sand. There was no need to tie the horse; it had lain down behind him.

  Fargo reached the crest, collapsed, panting. He rubbed salt water from his eyes again, shaded them with his hand. Then he shook his head slowly, unbelievingly. It had to be a mirage, that clump of green below, a full mile off. It was either a mirage or an oasis. Beside it there was a kind of dark blot from which faint wisps of smoke still curled.

  Mirage or not, it was his only chance.

  He staggered back down the hill, seized the horse’s reins. Somehow he made it get to its feet, move on. They lurched across the ridge, down its treacherous forward slope.