The Trailsman #388

by Jon Sharpe

  Fargo was hot, parched with thirst and sticky from the salty residue of so much evaporated sweat coating him like grease. He headed for a clump of cottonwoods beside the river and reined in, hobbling his still-nervous mount.

  The spot seemed safe. Birds chattered, cicadas gave off their monotonous drone, and the lazy Rio Grande chuckled softly. A full moon glowed, spider-webbed by the tree branches overhead. Fargo took a careful look around and then began digging a seep hole a few feet back from the river.

  He paused often to watch and listen. Fargo had learned that impending danger often lent a certain texture to the air, and suddenly he felt it now: a galvanic tickle of charged air particles as if a huge bolt of lightning were about to fork down from the heavens.

  He knocked the riding thong off the hammer of his Colt and loosened the weapon in its holster, every sense acutely alert. If it was coming, let it come.

  He suddenly started when a nearby coyote began its long, mournful howl. In the same moment a dark, massive figure lunged from behind a nearby cottonwood and Fargo’s right hand streaked toward his holster.

  21

  The lightning-swift attacker beat Fargo’s gun hand by a fractional second.

  The air was thumped from his chest when the huge assailant bowled into him, knocking the Colt from his hand. It was all too quick to comprehend. Fargo was driven backward by the attacker’s weight and felt a sudden, jarring slam against his back as he crashed hard into the ground.

  The double impact, front and back, was like being caught in the cross kick of two powerful mules. Fargo saw a bright orange pinwheel explode inside his skull. But by sheer dint of will to survive he fought off the dark oblivion of unconsciousness, teetering on the brink of awareness.

  He felt two huge, powerful hands encircle his neck.

  Fargo had been choked before, but this was terrifyingly different. The flow of blood and air were both stopped immediately, and the viselike power of the grip defied belief. He saw the Apache’s stone-carved face in the moonlight, those dead black-button eyes never once blinking as they bored into him. Still throttling him the Apache rose and effortlessly picked him up off the ground.

  Fargo, badly stunned, could not muster the strength to fight this bear, though every instinct in his body urged him to struggle even without breath. So he did although his efforts were useless. Death was coming for him on incredibly swift wings; his world was closing down to darkness and raw pain.

  Tell Fargo he must die before he is dead.

  And then Fargo understood.

  There were still a few more heartbeats of struggle and awareness left in him. But instead he pretended to die. He suddenly slumped heavily and went slack, perfectly feigning death while actually on the threshold.

  Mankiller was disappointed, even in his elation. He had expected more of a fight from this formidable-appearing, blue-eyed frontiersman. Instead, he turned out to be nearly as fragile as a woman. His heart was not worth eating.

  Mankiller threw the dead man down in disgust. And Old Maria had called him “a worthy foe.”

  A few eyeblinks later, cold, hard steel slid between his fourth and fifth ribs and pierced deep into his heart as the supposedly dead Fargo rose to his knees and drove the Arkansas toothpick hard with his last reserve of strength. The Apache sucked in a final breath, staggered, collapsed onto the ground.

  Fargo lay still for several minutes gasping for air. When he finally sat up and gingerly touched his neck, shock jolted through him. His neck was so swollen that he could barely differentiate it from his chin.

  He glanced at the dead Apache in the eerie, blue-white moonlight. He was sprawled on his back and something protruded from the folds of his shirt. Fargo pulled it out and recognized the carved kachina doll, its evil face now glistening with the Apache’s blood.

  “Thanks for the warning, Santiago,” Fargo muttered hoarsely. “I died before I was dead and now I’m alive.”

  • • •

  “Good God, Fargo!” fumed Colonel Josiah Evans. “I said you were on per diem, not a drunken spree!”

  He stared in disbelief at the bill a desk clerk at the Balderas Inn had just handed him. “Sixteen dollars for your room, eight dollars for meals . . . a liquor tab for twelve dollars! Are you trying to bankrupt the U.S. Treasury?”

  “I earned it,” Fargo assured him. “Besides, this river deal cost me a lot of my own money. I had to pay for—”

  Evans raised a hand to silence him. “Spare me the sob story. I’ll authorize payment. It pains me to say it, but you certainly did earn it. You may be an irreverent reprobate, but I must admit that you have rendered a great service to your nation.”

  The two men sat, smoking Evans’s cigars, on a sofa in the small but comfortable lobby. As Fargo had predicted, it had taken U.S. Army engineers less than one hour to confirm Fargo’s report: The Rio Grande had indeed been blasted out of its natural channel and routed into an older one. A strategically placed countercharge had returned to Mexico the silver-bearing ridges stolen by Stanley Winslowe.

  Fargo let the colonel’s remark pass without comment. But the Trailsman’s concept of “nation” was vastly different from the colonel’s. For Fargo it was the land itself, the mountains and deserts and rivers and plains, the wide-open spaces and remote canyons—the pristine frontier that greedy money grubbers like Winslowe treated as their personal cash cows. If Fargo had saved innocent life during his recent ordeal, all well and good. But thwarting a wealthy criminal like Wins-lowe was the real prize.

  “Tell me the truth, Colonel,” Fargo said. “Is there even a snowball’s chance Winslowe will face a trial?”

  Evans expelled a long, frustrated sigh. “Don’t hold your breath. I’ll file a report, of course. But I failed completely, a couple years back, to get an indictment against his man Harlan Perry for attempted bribery. United States attorneys are handmaidens to the politicos, and if I can’t hobble the subchief, I’ll certainly not hobble the chief.”

  “Well,” Fargo said, tossing back his head and blowing a perfect smoke ring, “at least you won’t have to worry about Perry anymore.”

  Evans sent him a sharp glance. “Yes, I read all about that in the local newspaper. Some local legend named Santiago Valdez and a vengeance killing . . . evidently the man has become quite a folk hero since that bloody incident, even on this side of the border. And I noticed your name was linked to his, although vaguely.”

  “Oh, you might say we were nodding acquaintances,” Fargo said dismissively.

  “I’m sure you were,” Evans said sarcastically. “According to the newspaper accounts, El Paso lawmen suspect it was more than nodding.”

  “Yeah, they looked me up and did some blustering. But none of the bullets in those dead bodies matched the caliber of my weapons and they lost interest.”

  Evans said, “There were no bullets in Valdez. Those sensational descriptions of his dead body—were they true?”

  “Every word,” Fargo admitted.

  “So you were mixed up in that fray. I wondered about those marks on your neck. But who on God’s green earth could have done that to him?”

  “He’s no longer on God’s green earth,” Fargo replied. “Unless you count skeletons. Desert buzzards work fast.”

  Evans frowned. “I see that, as usual, you’ve left plenty out of your report.”

  “Nothing that mattered to the army,” Fargo assured him.

  “Well, I must admit that your penchant for, ah, discretion in one point is commendable: Not one newspaper mentioned the situation with the Rio Grande.”

  “That’s prob’ly luck more than discretion. I did have to tell some people about it.”

  “At any rate, getting back to Winslowe: While he will likely buy his way out of any legal repercussions, we have put the kibosh on his ambitions for stealing Mexican territory. I’m putting him on notice that a report is be
ing filed with the War Department and that the U.S. Army will be monitoring his activities closely. He has too much to lose if he tries another international land grab. Even a rich man can go once too often to the well.”

  “His ilk always prospers somehow,” Fargo remarked. “If they can’t raise the bridge, they just lower the river—so to speak.”

  “No question about it. But, Fargo, I was a young lieutenant of artillery in the Mexican War. I witnessed firsthand the slaughter in battles like Cerro Gordo and Chapultepec. Mexican resentment naturally runs high, and I believe your persistence in exposing Winslowe’s actions may well have headed off another vicious conflict. You’ll never be a model citizen or even a true-blue patriot, and we have our differences, but you can always count on me for future contract work.”

  “I ’preciate that, Colonel. I’m generally light in the pockets.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Evans added, “I could use a good chief of scouts for an expedition Headquarters is getting up—an extended patrol across the Continental Divide into Jicarilla Apache country. I and my team are leaving El Paso today and returning to the fort. Why don’t you ride back with us?”

  “Sounds good,” Fargo agreed, suddenly entertaining a vision of a copper-skinned Mexican beauty with a beguiling smile. “But I’ll catch up with you on the trail. I have a little . . . matter to take care of in Tierra Seca.”

  Evans, who was well known among his soldiers as a prude, shook his head in resigned disapproval. “You and your infernal womanizing. You won’t die in the saddle, Fargo—you’ll be shot in some married woman’s bed.”

  Fargo didn’t see that as such a bad fate, but he assumed the face of an innocent cherub. “You got it all wrong, sir. I’m just riding down to Tierra Seca to sample a flower.”

  LOOKING FORWARD!

  The following is the opening

  section of the next novel in the exciting

  Trailsman series from Signet:

  TRAILSMAN #389

  OUTLAW TRACKDOWN

  Wyoming, 1861—where a young killer has gone on a spree and has Fargo in his gun sights.

  It isn’t every day a man starts a brawl.

  Skye Fargo had no intention of starting one when he stopped at the saloon in a sleepy little town called Horse Creek. He had a full poke after being paid for a scouting hitch with the army and figured to treat himself to a bottle of Monongahela, a card game, and a willing dove, not necessarily in that order.

  So when he ambled into a whiskey mill called the Tumbleweed, he wasn’t looking for trouble. He was looking for a good time.

  Fargo strode to the bar and smacked it for service. Not that he need have bothered. Other than an old-timer sucking down bug juice like it was the elixir of life, the only other patrons were three townsmen playing cards.

  The bartender waddled over and asked, “What’ll it be, mister?”

  Fargo told him and fished a coin from his poke and plunked it down. “Quiet little town you have here.”

  The bartender had turned to a shelf, and grunted.

  “What do you do for excitement? Watch the grass grow?”

  “Haven’t heard that one before,” the bartender said.

  “Had much Indian trouble hereabouts?” Fargo wondered. The Cheyenne had been acting up recently. They’d had their fill of the white invasion and were raiding homesteads and attacking stagecoaches.

  “Doesn’t everybody?” was the barman’s response.

  “I’m not asking everybody,” Fargo said. “I’m asking you.”

  The bartender selected a glass from a pile next to a dirty cloth and picked up the dirty cloth and wiped it. “Our problem ain’t Injuns. It’s outlaws. They’ve hit three farms in the past couple of months and struck the Overland stage and got away with the money box.” He set the glass on the bar and turned and chose a bottle.

  Fargo picked up the glass. “You call this clean?” He wasn’t fussy but there was . . . something . . . crusted a quarter-inch thick on the bottom, and a few brown smudges besides.

  “I just wiped it. You saw me.”

  “It would be cleaner if I wiped it with my ass.”

  “Here now,” the barkeep said indignantly. “You’re not funny.”

  “Do you see me laughing?”

  The man looked at Fargo and opened his mouth to say something but seemed to think better of it and held out his hand. “Give it to me. I’ll wash it.”

  Fargo watched him dip it in a bucket of dirty water and then dry it with the dirty cloth. “You’re something,” he said.

  “How’s that again?”

  “Forget the glass. I’ll buy a bottle. One that hasn’t been opened.”

  “First you want a clean glass and now you want a bottle,” the bartender grumbled. “I wish you’d make up your mind.”

  “I just did.”

  Fargo’s tone caused the barman to stiffen. “I don’t want no trouble. I’m just doing my job.”

  “A goat could do it better.”

  Turning to a shelf lined with bottles, the barkeep muttered, “You have no call to insult me.”

  “The bottle,” Fargo said. “This year.”

  “Damn, you are prickly.”

  Fargo snatched the bottle and opened it himself and tilted it to his mouth. The burning sensation brought a welcome warmth and he could feel himself relax.

  “Happy now?”

  Just then the batwings creaked and in came half a dozen cowboys. Smiling and joshing one another, they strolled to the bar.

  One of them bumped Fargo with his shoulder and went on talking to his pard. About to take a swallow, Fargo felt his arm jostled a second time and whiskey spilled onto his chin.

  “. . . heard that calf when we branded it,” the cow nurse was saying. “It screamed just like a female, I swear.”

  “Peckerwood,” Fargo said, and jabbed the puncher with his elbow so hard, it rocked the cowboy onto his bootheels.

  “What the hell was that for?” the cowboy demanded, growing red in the face.

  “You know damn well.” Fargo sleeved his chin with his buckskins. “Bump me again and I’ll lay you out.”

  “I’d like to see you try.”

  Fargo should have let it go. That’s what anyone with a lick of common sense would do. But the cowpoke’s smug smirk was like a slap to the face. Then there was the unwritten law that you never, ever jostled a man taking a drink. “I believe I will,” he said, and swung.