Fargo 13

by John Benteen

  CONTENTS

  About SHOTGUN MAN

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Copyright

  More on John Benteen

  The Colorado was the wildest, toughest river in America. Just staying alive on the rapids took a lot of nerve and a lot of luck. And then there were the men who lined it. Teddy Roosevelt called them wolves—old-time gunfighters and desperados who hid out in the surrounding wilderness. They were desperate sonsofbitches who hated the modern world that had exiled them, and they were constantly ready to strike out and kill any passing stranger for his boat, or his gun.

  Fargo’s job was to go down the Colorado with Roosevelt’s government explorers. And if anyone could keep them afloat and keep them alive, it was him.

  Chapter One

  His name was Fargo. When he wrote it large in the register of the hotel in Green River, Wyoming, he was aware of the curious, slightly apprehensive eyes of the clerk ranging over him. The old days were gone; this end of southwestern Wyoming was, now, in 1915, pretty well tamed down. It was not often, anymore, that such a man appeared here—one whose trade, unmistakably, was combat.

  Even the white shirt, corduroy jacket and matching pants, the kind of garb that might have been worn by a prosperous cattleman or oil-lease shark, could not disguise that. He was too big, carried himself too lightly and alertly, and his ugly face was too hard and sun browned and scarred. The battered old Rough Rider hat perched cockily on close-cropped hair gone prematurely silver-white was another tip-off. Its angle seemed to tell the world to go to hell. So did the cool gray eyes, the nose broken more than once, the cauliflower ear. What with his more than six feet of height, wide shoulders, deep chest, narrow waist, and horseman’s legs, even a hotel clerk could tell that this man was not to be taken lightly or trifled with, and his manner was respectful. He himself helped Fargo carry the big trunk to the room on the second floor. “Heavy,” he panted when they set it down.

  “Mining samples,” Fargo lied. Actually the trunk was full of weapons and ammunition. He tipped the clerk a silver dollar, locked the door behind the man when he had gone. Then he went to the window and from this height appraised the little town to which the train had brought him a half hour before.

  It was bustling, the gateway to the Grand Tetons in the north, to the Colorado River in the south, and shipping point for ranches not only in Wyoming, but in Utah and Colorado. Fargo did not know why he had been summoned here, but it was good to be back in the northwest. He had made a lot of money out of the Mexican Revolution in the past few years, running guns, occasionally hiring out to use them, but for the time being, he had enough of the Coahuila and Sonoran deserts, of rebel factions fighting one another harder than they fought the government they rebelled against, and of dark-skinned women and tequila. He liked the Mexicans, liked dark-skinned women, liked tequila, too. But he was ready to speak English for a change, drink some bourbon and some rye, and he had already stopped over in Cheyenne for a rendezvous with a girl he knew there whose skin was white as milk and hair as blonde as wheat; and it had been a pleasant change.

  He was not, of course, tired of danger. He assumed there was danger in what he had been summoned here to do; the Colonel never called on him for any ordinary job. And that was all right, too. Combat was not only his trade, but his pleasure. In the shadow of death, he felt life surging with superb vitality. Some men were drunkards; his real intoxication came from risk.

  Now he shrugged out of the coat, beneath which a .38 Officer’s Model Colt revolver rode in a shoulder holster under his left arm. He fished keys from his pocket, opened the trunk, threw back the lid. The first thing he took from it was a fresh bottle of good whiskey. With a hard blow of his palm against its bottom, he started the cork, drew it the rest of the way with strong, white teeth. He drank long and deeply, and then he lit a thin black cigar and savored its smoke. While he unpacked the trunk, he wondered where he would use its contents next.

  His earliest memories were of violence. His parents had been brutally murdered by Apaches on their small New Mexican ranch, and it was sheer luck that the Indians, the last Chiricahuas under Geronimo, had overlooked the four-year-old huddled in the barn.

  He was taken in by a couple on a neighboring ranch. Not, as it proved, out of charity, but because it was a way to get an extra hired hand for almost nothing. By the time he was twelve, he was working like a slave at jobs that would have taxed a full-grown man and getting only kicks and curses in return. So he left, one night—and never looked back.

  His education from then on came in a hard school. He’d punched cows, rough necked in oil fields, cut big timber in the Northwest, picked up that cauliflower ear as a professional boxer, and once had even served a stint as bouncer in a Louisiana whorehouse when down on his luck. But his true calling was that of soldier and fighting man. He’d realized that in the Spanish-American War, when, as Sergeant of Troop A, First Volunteer American Cavalry, better known as the Rough Riders, he had played his part in building the legend that had helped vault the Regiment’s lieutenant-colonel to the Presidency of the United States.

  After San Juan Hill, Kettle Hill, El Caney and all the rest, the taste of soldiering lingered in his mouth. A long hitch, then, with the Cavalry in the Philippines during the Insurrection, and then he was ready to go in business for himself.

  Even in the first decade of the Twentieth Century, with the West settling down, there was plenty of work for an expert fighting man. One as good as Fargo came high. His motto was, Go first class or don’t go at all. Nobody in such a trade lived to a ripe old age; for all he knew, the bullet with his name on it rode even now in someone else’s cartridge belt. So, liking women, whiskey, games of chance and weapons, he made a lot and spent a lot.

  But it was not money that brought him here. He had plenty of that in the trunk to keep him for a spell. It was the urgent summons from the only man he really gave a damn about, the only one who could command his loyalty or give him orders which he would accept without question or inquiry. That man should be along soon, and meanwhile, he told himself, he’d better check his gear. Another drink and he went back to the trunk and began to unload it.

  In Fargo’s business, there was one cardinal rule, the law of the combat man: Stop him before he stops you. Whether you killed an opponent or not was immaterial so long as you put him out of action before he could do you damage. And that was what the shotgun was for.

  He lifted it from the trunk, removed it from its special case of chamois skin, and when its cold, blue steel was in his hands, he stroked it as another man might have caressed a woman’s flesh, and his eyes held something of the look another man might have cast at a much-loved woman. He was expert with many weapons, but when you came down to it, this was his pet: he was a shotgun man.

  A Fox Sterlingworth, twelve-gauge, beautifully ornamented and engraved, it had once been a fowling piece. Fargo had sawed off the extra length of barrels, and now it was a stubby, lethal riot gun with open bores that could each spray nine buckshot in a wide, deadly pattern. A single pellet was enough to kill a deer—or man. All eighteen, from both barrels at once, were like a blast of canister from a cannon’s mouth. At close range, nothing could stand up against it. It was, in fact, the nearest thing to a cannon or a machine gun in its effect that one man could transport easily, on foot or horseback, and Fargo had carried it from Canada to South America, from the Philippines to the Mississippi. It had served him well for years, the foremost tool of his trade and his most prized possession. Shotguns could be bought anywhere, but this one was irreplace
able. What made it so was the inscription worked into the elaborate engraving on the breech which his hand now traced: To Neal Fargo gratefully from T. Roosevelt.

  Fargo’s thin lips curled in a grin. Only two people in the world knew what he had done to earn this weapon, which had been presented to him years before in the White House in Washington; and the other one would be along most any time now...

  Meanwhile he checked the weapon’s leather sling, slipped it on his right shoulder so that the gun hung stock up, muzzles down, behind his back. It seemed an awkward way for it to ride, but—Fargo hooked his right hand’s thumb beneath the sling, twitched it hard. With amazing speed, the sawed-off pivoted, stubby barrels coming up beneath his arm, pointed forward. In the same instant his left hand shot across his body, and there were two dry simultaneous clicks as it tripped both triggers. In that position the gun was upside down, but the beauty of the sawed-off was that position made no difference. Either way, it required no aiming at close range, all you had to do was point and shoot, and you had your man.

  Repeating the maneuver twice, Fargo then transferred the gun to his left shoulder, went through the routine thrice more, just as quickly, just as smoothly. He had been born ambidextrous, and that gift of being able to use either hand with equal ease almost doubled his efficiency and more than once had saved his life. This was not idle play, now, but the deadly serious business of limbering up after a train ride, for practice to a gunman was as important as to a violinist or any other kind of artist...

  The limbering-up done with, Fargo unslung the gun, ran his hand lovingly down its barrels once more, and laid it on the bed. Then he unbuckled the shoulder harness and took a cartridge belt and hip holster from the trunk. Each bullet loop glittered with a fat brass cartridge, and the slug in each was of a special kind—a hollow-point.

  Until the Filipino Insurrection, the kind of .38 Fargo transferred from the shoulder holster to the gunbelt had been Army standard issue. But the Moros of Mindanao were like nothing the Army had ever come up against. Mohammedans, ferocious fighters, filled themselves with drugs, bound their loins up with excruciating tightness, and, drunk on religious fervor, went juramentado—they ran amok, blindly killing any living thing that crossed their paths. A .38 slug wouldn’t stop them; Fargo had seen six poured into a juramentado Moro and the man had still killed two of his opponents before he fell.

  So the Army had adopted the heavier .45 Colt automatic, which fired more rounds faster and slammed home a heavier slug. It stopped the Moros, but Fargo found it badly balanced and prone to jam. He clung to the old .38, but beefed up its shock-power with hollow-point ammunition. Such a dumdum slug would virtually explode in flesh, ripping a dreadful wound, with shocking power that would stop a grizzly in its tracks. No matter where it struck a man, it tore him up, laid him down, and drained the fight from him. Brutal as such bullets were, they gave Fargo an edge, and such advantages were important.

  There was a Winchester rifle, too, in the trunk, a .30-30. An indispensable part of his arsenal, it was an interchangeable one as well. He could not do without a rifle, but he’d owned many Winchesters, and this was just another good and useful tool, with no sentimental value. He checked its action, laid it aside. Then his hand went to his hip pocket. What it brought out was a knife of strange design.

  Six inch handles, split and hinged, of water-buffalo horn polished to a high sheen and ridged for better grip, folded down across a ten-inch blade, razor sharp, leaving four inches of point protruding. Called a Batangas knife, it had been made by the incomparable artisans of southern Luzon, specially hardened and tempered so that its point could be driven through a silver dollar with a single blow, without dulling or breaking.

  Fargo flipped his hand; a latch came loose, the split-grips fell back into his palm, unsheathing the full length of deadly blade. He dropped into the cold-steel fighter’s crouch, made a few passes with his right hand, a few with his left. Then he closed the weapon, slid it in his special sheath, which in turn rode in his hip pocket. He turned again to the trunk and took out the bandoliers.

  Heavy leather belts designed to crisscross his torso, they glinted with ammunition. One held cartridges for the Winchester; the other was stuffed with fat twelve-gauge shells for the sawed-off Fox. They were heavy, but he was accustomed to their weight when they were slung across his body, and they were vital. To run out of ammunition in a fight was to die.

  Along with clothes and other gear, there was more ammunition in the trunk. Fargo was fussy about what he fed his weapons, about bullet-weight and powder charges, proper primers, and the like. When possible, he hand-loaded his own and carried a reserve supply.

  In addition to the weapons, there was also about fifteen thousand dollars in currency and gold deep inside the trunk, collected in El Paso from the agent of his best customer, Pancho Villa. Under ordinary circumstances, Fargo would not have worked again until it was gone, blasted in a three-month binge or less of high-rolling: gambling, good whiskey, better women. But these were not ordinary circumstances. If the Colonel wanted him to work, the binge could wait. Fargo restored his weapons to the trunk, save for the Colt and knife, locked its big padlock with its special key. Then he stripped the shirt from his big, bronzed torso, rippling with muscle, puckered and streaked with the scars of many wounds, badges of his trade. He washed off travel dirt, brushed his teeth—he always took good care of them; nothing laid a man lower quicker in a far place than a bad tooth—and, squinting at his face in a ripply mirror, decided he’d shave later.

  It was an ugly face, astonishingly so, but he’d long since grown used to it. Nor was it a handicap: its rough-hewn masculinity drew the eyes of women automatically; and it warned men to walk wide around him unless they had urgent business. He put on a fresh shirt, lit another cigar, had another drink, and waited for the Colonel.

  He did not have to wait long. Ten minutes, the cigar burned halfway to ash, and someone knocked on the door. Fargo went to it, hand on holstered gun. “Who is it?” he asked, his caution instinctive.

  “Sergeant Fargo?”

  He recognized the voice, grinned, unlocked the door and opened it; and the Colonel came into the room. Fargo quickly closed and locked the door again and stepped back and looked at the only man he had ever met who was both tougher and smarter than he himself claimed to be.

  Chapter Two

  He had been rancher in the Dakotas, Under-Secretary of the Navy; Vice President and President of the United States. He had led men in combat, forced the construction of the Panama Canal, captained expeditions of exploration through wild and unknown country; and somehow he’d found time, as well, to write a shelf of books and father a lively brood of children. He was a gentleman and fighting man, scholar and cowpuncher, politician and dead shot; and it seemed incredible that so many talents and so much energy and courage could be packed into such a small and dumpy figure. But he moved with an outdoorsman’s walk, and his round face with gray mustache, buck teeth, thick glasses, and a ready smile concealed a keen and sometimes ruthless intelligence. He was, in short, all man; in his own way as much man as Neal Fargo and maybe more; and their respect for one another, as well as their admiration, was complete. “Sergeant.” The Colonel shook Fargo’s hand vigorously. “It’s bully to see you again. I was afraid you wouldn’t make it.”

  “I almost didn’t. Your letter chased me across hell and half of Mexico before I got it. Colonel, how you doing?”

  “Fair, for an old man who’s lost a big election.” He had been defeated in a third-party bid for another term as President last year. “And probably better, if you can spare a little of that bourbon.”

  “You shall have it.” Fargo used the one cloudy glass the hotel supplied for his guest and drank from the bottle himself as the Colonel, grinning, said: “Cheers.”

  Then the older man’s smile went away. He indicated the outfit he wore: canvas shooting jacket over flannel shirt; riding pants; high boots. “Sergeant, I’ve got to pull out for the Tetons t
omorrow on what’s supposed to be an assignment to write an article for a magazine. That’s a blind. I needed an excuse to come west and meet you. Everything I do is watched nowadays, reporters following me all over the place. So I’ll get directly to the point. I’ve got a job for you. It’s dangerous as sin, maybe the most dangerous thing I’ve ever asked you to undertake. But—if you survive it—the pay will be good. Interested?”

  Fargo drank again, lowered the bottle, grinning. “You make it sound real attractive.”

  The Colonel’s laugh was harsh, scratchy. “I thought you would be.” Once more, he sobered. Reaching in his pocket, he took out a thick, folded document which Fargo saw immediately was a map. “Do you know the Colorado River?”

  Fargo felt a prickle of excitement. “Nobody really knows the Colorado.”

  “True. Which is precisely what this is all about.” Going to a table, the Colonel spread out the map. “This chart was prepared under the personal supervision, nearly fifty years ago, of Major John Wesley Powell. It’s still the most up to date map of the course of the Colorado River that we have. Do you know who Powell was?”

  “The first man to explore the Colorado, wasn’t he?”

  “Right. He was a Union Army veteran, only had one arm, but one of those men nobody could stop. Not long after the Civil War, he led an expedition down the Green to the Colorado and thence through the Grand Canyon of Arizona to the river’s mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. Later, Powell founded the U. S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Ethnology, as well as the Bureau of Reclamation, which has undertaken the responsibility to improve Western farmlands by irrigation and conservation practices.”

  “Quite a man.”

  “Indeed. The point is, however, Fargo, that as good as Powell’s explorations and measurements were, they were made fifty years ago, with instruments we’d consider primitive. And nobody has really done an up-to-date exploration of the Colorado since.”