by Jon Sharpe
Fargo twisted around in the saddle and touched the brim of his hat. “We were just discussing what it is that makes Spanish women so beautiful.”
“As for myself, Mr. Fargo, I am half American. In fact, much to Father’s chagrin, I can barely speak Spanish. Of course,” she added in a meaningful tone, “Katrina is a full-blooded Spaniard—and quite attractive. Don’t you agree?”
“I do, indeed, Miss Quintana. We are fortunate to have two beautiful women along. An embarrassment of riches.”
Quintana’s silver head poked out. “You needn’t flatter her, Senor Fargo. She is already vain enough. And just for the record, I am an American, too. I was granted dual citizenship by the governor of Louisiana.”
“Sounds like you been hedging your bets,” Booger tossed in. “Anyhow, some of your men don’t seem to realize what country this is. They act like Coronado and that bunch are still the honchos.”
“Nonsense, Mr. McTeague. They’re just prideful.”
“There’s a good patch of graze coming up,” Fargo said. “Might be a good spot to make a nooning.”
“A good suggestion. Deke Lafferty is no New Orleans chef, but he is an excellent trail cook.”
Forty minutes later Fargo was tying in to a plate of palatable stew made from canned beef, fresh potatoes, and desiccated vegetables. As usual, most of Quintana’s men had taken their food off and formed a circle about a hundred feet away from Hernando Quintana and the ladies, who ate with Fargo and his companions.
Salazar, however, elected to eat with the Quintanas instead of his two uniformed minions. Booger and Fargo exchanged a knowing smirk, realizing that the pompous ass was seething with jealousy. He made a gallant show of forgoing his meal to hold Miranda’s pongee parasol over her while she ate.
“You see, Mr. Fargo,” she explained in a teasing lilt, “Diego has been steeped in the courtly love tradition of the Middle Ages—the true knight sacrifices his own comfort for that of his lady—or the woman he thinks is his lady.”
Salazar’s wire-tight lips shaped a frown at her remark.
“Nothing wrong with being attentive to a lady,” Fargo said.
“No,” she replied, sending him a sly smile, “there isn’t, is there? Right, Katrina?”
Katrina’s eyes met Fargo’s, eyes filled with lustful promises.
“I have observed that American men,” Salazar said with stiff formality, “treat their women like livestock.”
“Actually, Captain,” Bitch Creek McDade interjected in a polite tone, “we treat our livestock better than our women. A man’s life doesn’t generally depend on a woman.”
“You can’t butcher a decent steak off ’em, neither,” Deke tossed in, and Booger laughed so hard that food exploded from his mouth.
“Oh, crikes! ’Scuze me, Captain,” he said to Salazar with false contrition. “Did I soil your courtly pants?”
Deke pretended to cough to cover his laughter while Fargo, unable to suppress a grin himself, dug a warning elbow into Booger’s ribs.
Just then a sudden, hard gust of wind sprang up, seemingly from nowhere. Fargo glanced up from his plate to watch one of the men in the circle, cheered on by his companions, dash out into the brush. He was pursuing his woven-straw hat, which was now hopping and sailing in the wind.
Fargo recognized the deep, angry bellowing the moment it began.
In a hollow drumbeat of charging hooves, an enraged wild longhorn materialized out of the brush, head lowered, at least six feet separating its two deadly horns.
The man never even had a chance to dodge. Both women screamed in horror when one of the horns punched clean through his stomach, shoving bloody, convoluted entrails out his back and swooping him off the ground.
The man’s high-pitched cry of inexpressible pain raised the fine hairs on the back of Fargo’s neck. The wild longhorn gave a mighty shake of his head, dislodging the annoying weight from his horn. It took the young Spaniard’s nervous system a few seconds to register the final fact of death. And during that brief time the dying man’s heels scratched at the dirt like frantic claws.
This was over in a few heartbeats, everyone so shocked by the unexpected death that no one moved except Fargo—not even when the enraged man killer thundered straight for the group nearest the chuck wagon, perhaps incited by Miranda’s scarlet shawl.
Fargo’s Henry lay grounded at his feet. He tossed his plate and snatched up the rifle, dropping into a kneeling-offhand position. Fargo worked the lever and pressed the stock to his shoulder, his cheek to the brass. Only a head shot would drop a man killer riled up like this one, so he made sure of his bead before squeezing off a round.
The Henry kicked hard into his shoulder and a curly rope of blood erupted from the longhorn’s head before it crashed to the ground, momentum making it skid a few yards more.
Gray-white smoke was still curling from the Henry’s muzzle when the real threat was unleashed.
“Madre de Dios!” Quintana exclaimed when at least half a dozen more ladinos charged from the brush.
The men in the farther circle had already scattered in panic, only a few of them having enough presence of mind to shoot at the beasts, with little effect. And now the ladinos hurtled toward the smaller group near the chuck wagon like inexorable juggernauts of death.
“Booger!” Fargo shouted. “Up and on the line!”
Deadly accuracy and rapid fire were their only hope now. Again, again, yet again the Henry bucked in Fargo’s hands, joined by the sharp cracks of Booger’s North & Savage. The last man-killing longhorn came within twenty feet of goring Fargo before he shot it dead.
Salazar, who had been utterly useless during the harrowing attack, now did one useful thing: he caught Miranda when she suddenly went pale and passed out.
Quintana removed a handkerchief tucked into his sleeve and patted his perspiring brow.
“Senor Fargo, you have earned every dollar I paid you by your quick actions just now. You also, Senor McTeague.”
He gave Salazar a reproving glance. “And you, Diego—a graduate of the Colegio Militario, onetime comandante of the Royal Barracks, and you merely stood there like a pillar of salt?”
Fargo tried to pour oil on troubled waters. “You can’t expect him to carry his rifle at all times in camp, don Hernando, and his sidearm would’ve been useless.”
“Perhaps that is true. And certainly Diego is no coward. But you were right all along about these wild cattle, and now we will have to bury poor Antonio in a forsaken grave. Do you see now, Diego, why I hired this man? You mocked him when he warned us. Your military training is second to none, but you and your men are not frontiersmen.”
Salazar shot Fargo a spiteful glance. “There were many frontiersmen at the Alamo battle, don Hernando, but Antonio Santa Anna, a military man, defeated them.”
“And what good,” Quintana countered, “did the Alamo victory do for Mexico? Not too many years later she lost almost half her country to the Americans.”
This petty quarreling was wasted on Fargo, but one impression struck him full force: when Hernando Quintana made that last comment about losing country to the Americans, his tone had suddenly spiked with anger and resentment. What had begun as a dressing-down of Captain Salazar ended up as a bitter complaint against a nation.
Interesting, Fargo thought.
Mighty damn interesting. . . .
• • •
“Fargo, you damn piker!” Booger exclaimed. “It’s damn near time to turn in and you’ve put on your clean buckskins. And you’re scrubbing your teeth. You’re gonna get some poon, ain’tcher?”
“At least pretend you’ve got more brains than a rabbit,” Fargo scoffed, still working his teeth with a hog-bristle brush.
“You are, you sneaky son of a bitch. You’re grinnin’ like a possum eatin’ a yellow jacket. That’s your Fargo’s-gonna-get-some
grin. Which one will you prong tonight, Miranda or Katrina?”
“Neither one,” Fargo lied. “I am going to visit the ladies, sure, but only to ask them some questions, maybe see if I can find out—”
“Serve it on toast! Fargo, when it comes to pretty lasses, you’re a one-eyed dog in a meat factory. You’re shaggin’ one a’ them gals.”
“Where?” Fargo demanded. “The entire camp is lit up like a widow’s front parlor. There’s eyes and ears everywhere.”
“Why, in that fancy circus tent, that’s where. The viceroy just left with Salazar.”
“Uh-huh, in the tent. Do you really believe I’m gonna bull one of the women while the other watches? Or do you figure I’m gonna poke both of them turnabout?”
The sun had set an hour earlier and a vast Texas sky was peppered silver with glimmering stars. Booger, already stretched out on his blankets, mulled that question over.
“Nah, that don’t seem likely even for you. I screwed a whore one time in Cheyenne while another one watched, but she was holding a gun on me case I got rough. Miranda and Katrina is what you call the Quality.”
“You just listen close while I’m gone. Cherokee Bob will give you the wolf howl if the Indians spot anything.”
Fargo did the best he could to avoid the flickering torchlight as he crossed to the center of camp, keeping his eyes to all sides. Deke and Bitch Creek McDade had already turned in, and the Spaniards were either on night guard or gathered around a distant fire.
What, Fargo wondered, did they talk about when the Americans weren’t around to hear them?
He ducked through the fly of the tent and immediately smelled the pleasant odor of femininity—a tantalizing concoction of cologne, fancy perfumed soaps, and the faint, damp-earth smell of their sex.
The inside of the huge tent was softly lighted by several lanterns. Screened panels divided the tent roughly in two, one side now filled by two wooden bathtubs, still steaming. Fargo saw women’s clothing heaped near the tubs, but no sign of the women themselves.
“Evening, ladies,” he called out in a low voice. “All right if I come in?”
“We’re over here, Skye,” answered a silvery-smooth, musical lilt he recognized as Miranda’s voice.
Fargo ducked around to the left side of the panel, then forgot to take his next breath. He was gazing upon a powerfully erotic scene right out of the myth of the Isle of Lesbos.
“Well, hell-o,” he greeted the two nymphs, instantly so hard that a pup tent sprang up in the front of his trousers.
Each woman lay, bare-butt naked, on a low, backless couch covered with crisp white linen sheets, their heads resting on fancy satin pillows, their hair unrestrained and fanned out like rich manes.
“Which one of us do you like best?” Miranda demanded. “Take a good look.”
Fargo did. Miranda’s hair was chestnut with blond streaks, Katrina’s the rich, shiny black of a raven’s wings; Miranda’s sleepy-lidded, languid eyes were purple-black like the juice of dark berries, Katrina’s intense and the color of dark mahogany; Miranda’s lips were heart-shaped and pouting, Katrina’s full and sultry; Miranda’s tits were smaller but hard, with pointy nipples ending in strawberry tips, Katrina’s tits heavier and pendant, the nipples like cocoa.
Miranda still showed the coltish figure of a young woman of perhaps nineteen or twenty, slim-hipped and leggy, her stomach flat. Katrina, perhaps ten years older, had the voluptuous figure of a woman in her prime, with flaring hips and a gently rounded stomach. Miranda’s mons bush was silkier and sparse, Katrina’s like a mat of dark wool.
Fargo swallowed audibly as he unbuckled his gun belt.
“Which one do I like best? Ladies, all I see are two art masterpieces.”
“That bulge in your pants is breathtaking,” Miranda marveled. “Did you stick a pair of socks down there to impress us? Let’s see what you’ve really got.”
Fargo dropped his trousers and both women goggled at the blue-veined beast now unleashed. It had been too long for Fargo, and each pounding beat of his excited heart made his swollen manhood leap like a jittery divining rod.
“My stars!” Miranda gasped. “Katrina, have you ever seen size like that on a man? Look at his sac! Those aren’t nuts—they’re apples!”
“Oh, he will fill me up like no man has,” Katrina said, her voice husky with the hunger of lust.
“Kneel between her legs, Skye,” Miranda said, one slim hand sliding between her own legs. “But do everything I tell you, all right? Don’t touch me, but I want you to look at me a lot while you do her, understand?”
“Lady’s choice,” Fargo assured her. Katrina opened her legs wide and Fargo knelt between them.
“Kiss her valentine,” Miranda directed.
Fargo lowered his face into the steamy grotto of Katrina’s sex, teasing her clitty out of its sheath with a probing tongue.
“Eso, sí!” Katrina groaned, her hips shimmying. “Just like that!”
A minute of this treatment had Katrina hotter than a branding iron and panting like a dog in August.
“Now stick your thingie between her tits,” Miranda ordered.
Fargo obligingly moved higher as Katrina grabbed her breasts and parted them for him. Fargo parked his curved saber in the warm, velvet-smooth valley. Katrina began rolling him between her tits, faster and faster, sending pulses of hot, tickling pleasure back to Fargo’s groin.
“Look at me, Skye!” Miranda commanded, her voice rising an octave in her excitement and sense of total control. “See what I’m doing?”
Her thighs were parted wide and she was using two fingers to tease her sensitive pearl. Fargo could see “the little man in the boat” was already swollen with her passion.
“Stick it in her now, Skye!” Miranda half ordered, half begged. “Do her fast and hard!”
Fargo had never been one for taking orders, but these commands were pure pleasure. He moved back down and placed his hands under Katrina’s firm, full ass, lifting her and sliding his staff in deep. The pliant, slick walls of her sex opened for him, tight and accommodating at the same time.
“Aye Dios!” Katrina gasped, pumping on his length. “Miranda, his tool is perfect! Oh, Skye, eso, sí . . .!”
Fargo pounded the saddle harder and faster, forcing Katrina to smother her uncontrollable cries into a pillow.
“Look at me!” Miranda ordered again, her fingers moving in a blur of speed now, her face deeply flushed.
A few moments later it was a three-ring extravaganza: Miranda doubled up, gasping hard, as a string of climaxes racked her body; Katrina screamed into the pillow as Fargo took her over the final pinnacle; and a few seconds later he exploded hard inside her, needing seven or eight conclusive thrusts to spend himself.
All three lay in dazed lassitude for uncounted minutes, their heart rates and breathing only slowly returning to normal. It was Miranda who broke the silence.
“There’s still plenty of time, Skye,” she said, “before Father returns. Do you think you could go again?”
“Go again?” Katrina repeated. “Look! He never got soft after the first one!”
“Wonderful! Now, Skye, I want you to watch me as you stick it in Katrina’s mouth. . . .”
9
Two days after Fargo’s unforgettable interlude in the tent, El Lobo Flaco gathered his men around him in the shelter of a draw between two low hills.
A healthy respect for the danger represented by this gringo Skye Fargo, who was known to toss a wide loop when he scouted, had kept the Skinny Wolf well to the south of the Quintana party. But thanks to their informant’s mirror signals and occasional written messages, they knew the party’s rate of progress, disposition of sentries, camp procedures—and Fargo’s daily patterns.
“We cannot, as I had hoped, win over the viceroy’s people,” El Lobo reported. “Not at the pre
sent. Miguel assured me this pretty soldier, Salazar, is a dog loyal to his master. So are the rest. These idealistic Spanish loyalists believe in Quintana’s wild scheme. And true believers can be dangerous, indeed—they place their precious cause above fear of death.”
“Is it truly a wild scheme, jefe?” spoke up Ramon Velasquez, the Skinny Wolf’s segundo or second in charge.
El Lobo’s skullish face looked sinister in the brassy early-morning light.
“You keep asking me this as if it matters to us. De veras, Ramon, it is perhaps well thought out and well timed. The gringos have a nasty civil war on their hands. If enough of the Spanish devils in Californio join them, pues quien sabe—then who knows?”
“With so many silver bars, enough will join them, jefe,” said the blade expert named Paco.
The Skinny Wolf thought about that and nodded. “Yes. And if all else fails, we could pretend to offer our guns to their cause. This viejo, this old man Quintana could use good killers like us, huh? But this can never happen while the Trailsman is above the earth.”
“Then why is he?” spoke up Pedro Montoya, one of the men who had hauled the dismembered corpse of the Papago Indian girl and left it along the Southwest Trail. “We should have sent him to his ancestors by now.”
“Oye, necio—listen, you fool. The road to hell is paved with the bones of men who underrated Fargo. You do not grasp this because you were not with us at the Pecos River when he killed three of my men and nearly killed me.”
“I was there, Pedro,” Velasquez put in. “He is cunning, resourceful, and has the courage of a she-grizz protecting her cubs.”
“Trying to kill him in open country like this,” the Skinny Wolf said, “is a fool’s errand now that we have failed once. He is alerted. But they will reach Victoria by this evening, and that is where we will kill him. Fargo, it is true, likes to seek out the emptiest corner of the canyon. But he also likes saloons. He likes his beer, his poker games, and because he will not likely chinga the viceroy’s daughter or her shapely duenna, he will want a woman. Victoria is known for its fine and willing whores.”
