The Wildcatters

by John Benteen

  Brasher’s ruddy face went dead pale. He also got to his feet, towering over Russell. “Nobody talks to me like that,” he snapped.

  “I just did,” Russell said. “I’ll repeat it, too. You’re a louse, Brasher. You’re too low to look up at a snake’s belly button. You’re a rotten thing without the guts to fight your own battles.”

  Brasher’s mouth thinned. “You think so, huh?”

  “You travel with your pet gunman,” Russell said coldly, looking up at him.

  “You used some bad words against me. Suppose I told my pet gunman to lay off. You want to put your damn fists where you’ve run your mouth?”

  Russell’s eyes gleamed. “There ain’t nothing I’d like better.”

  Brasher drew in a breath that made his barrel chest swell. “I won’t gunfight you, Russell. But I’ll sure as hell knock the crap out of you.”

  “Oh, will you now?” Curt said, happily,

  “You call off Fargo, I’ll call off Friday. Nobody talks to me like that and gets away with it.”

  Russell stared at the bigger man. Then he nodded. “You think you can take me, Brasher? After all these years, when I’ve itched to get my hands on you?”

  “I know damn well I can take you. But you’ll have to shuck that gun. I’m not armed.”

  “The hell you’re not.”

  Slowly, Brasher peeled the coat away from his bull’s frame. “You see? No gun. Friday’s good enough for both of us.”

  Russell’s eyes glittered. “You want to go it knuckle and skull?”

  “After what you called me, yeah.”

  “Then you got yourself a deal.” Russell unbuckled his gun belt. He handed it to Fargo. “Neal, watch ’em. Watch ’em both.”

  Fargo said, “Curt. Remember this. A good little man can’t whip a good big man.”

  Russell turned a face almost mad with hatred toward Fargo. “You think not? Watch.”

  Fargo shrugged, draped Curt Russell’s gun belt over his shoulder. “Ross,” he said, “no matter which way it falls, we’re out of this.”

  “Suits me,” Friday said, and he came to stand beside Fargo.

  “Nobody’s gonna interfere, then,” Brasher rumbled.

  “Nobody,” said Fargo. “Knuckle and skull. Anything goes.”

  “That’s the way I want it,” said Curt Russell. He and Brasher moved out away from the outbuilding. “Any time, Tull.”

  Friday looked at Fargo. “Ten to one on Tull.”

  “No,” Fargo said. “It’s not a bet I’d take.”

  Ross Friday drew in a long breath. “Neal, what kind of bet would you take?”

  “You and me,” said Fargo. “Dead even. Pistols.”

  “It might come to that,” Friday said.

  “We’ve got room here for another man, if you want to come,” Fargo said, watching Russell and Brasher square off in the dust. Brasher raised fists the size of sledgehammers; Russell hunched into a fighting crouch.

  “No. I’ve done hired out. Once I do that, I don’t sell out any more than you would.”

  “Then maybe it will come to you and me and pistols,” Fargo said.

  “I’ll have to admit,” Friday murmured, “it’s something I’ve always wondered about.”

  “Me, too,” Fargo said. Then he added: “Let’s watch the fight.”

  ~*~

  The two men faced each other across ten feet of dusty ground. Brasher was taller, heavier, but he was also older, a hard drinker. Russell, smaller, was all muscle, no blubber. Nevertheless, Fargo did not think he had a chance. He had read something in Brasher’s face that was absent in Russell’s; Brasher had a killer instinct which Russell lacked.

  They circled each other warily. Then Russell made a sound in his throat, charged in.

  Fargo wanted to yell. Russell went with his head down; that was bad. How bad it was Russell learned when he slammed both fists at Brasher and Brasher wasn’t there. The big man had sidestepped the blind charge, and as Curt swung and missed, Brasher hit him on the side of the head and in the kidneys all at once. Curt stopped short, staggered, whirled. He blinked his eyes and came back again.

  This time more cautiously, but not to any avail. Brasher backed up, squinting appraisingly. Then Brasher charged, but watched what he was doing, where he was going. Curt threw up an arm that fended Brasher s right. But that left him open to a short, chopping left; and that left caught him in the belly and rocked him back, gasping; and Brasher wasted not a second. He bored in as soon as Curt was off balance, and the sound of his fist on Russell’s jaw was thunderous.

  The impact picked up Curt and tossed him backward; he landed on his shoulders in the dirt, But he was tough, resilient, and as Brasher charged he came up, caught the big man around the legs, tossed, heaved. Brasher made a sound and went over backward to thud into the dirt. Then Curt was on him, fists clubbed, hammering at him.

  But Brasher was too old and wise a fighter not to be ready. His right hand flashed up, caught Curt defensively around the throat, closed and pushed as Russell hammered at him. Fargo wanted once more to yell; Brasher had raised Curt too high, had room to get in a knee.

  But it was not his fight. Brasher brought up that knee, hard, sharp, accurately, and Curt Russell screamed with the agony of its impact in his groin. His whole body went limp; he rolled aside, as Brasher bucked, and then he was on the ground with Brasher standing over him.

  Brasher drew back a booted foot, kicked. His toe slammed into Russell’s ribs with sickening impact. Russell gasped, rolled wildly across the ground, doubled up like a worm touched with a hot match-end. Brasher was right after him, kicked again. His boot caromed off of Curt’s hard buttocks, and Russell tried to scramble to his feet, his face like paper.

  But he never made it. Brasher brought up a knee. As Curt was halfway up, that knee caught him under the chin. At the same time, Brasher’s fist crashed into Curt’s temple.

  Russell sighed, fell back supine, eyes closing. He lay immobile in the dust. Brasher grinned wickedly, pulled back a booted foot for a final kick against the side of Curt’s head.

  Fargo tensed; that kick would kill young Russell. Instinctively his hand flashed down. Suddenly he held his Colt .38, backing off to cover both Friday and Brasher. “Tull, hold it!” he snapped.

  Eyes full of killer lust, Brasher whirled, stared at the unsheathed gun. “You swore—” he rasped.

  “You’ve whipped Russell. I won’t let you kill him.”

  “It was knuckle and skull. Anything goes. If I want to kick the hell out of him—”

  “You d better not,” Fargo grated. “I’ll drill you.” He swung the gun to cover Friday. “Nor you, Ross. Don’t draw. Tull’s won his fight, but he don’t kill Curt.”

  Ross Friday’s eyes glittered as he looked at the gun in Fargo’s hand. “Neal,” he said, “you promised. You put that thing up, I’ll brace you fair and square. We’ll see which is faster.”

  “No,” Fargo said. “Later. Right now, it’s saving Russell that counts.”

  Friday drew in a deep breath. “Neal, this is the end of it. The whole end. The next time I see you I’ll kill you on sight.”

  “That’s fair enough,” said Fargo, feeling no sadness, only a kind of pleasure at facing Friday. Ross was his equal with a gun; and it had been a long time since he had met his equal. “We’ll leave it like that. But for now, Curt lives and the two of you clear out.”

  Brasher rubbed his knuckles, his black eyes hard as he stared at Fargo. “I’m warning you,” he said. “You’re wastin’ your time and money. You’ll never get that well down. I’ll see to it that you don’t get that well down.”

  Fargo looked back at him. “Brasher, I’ll make you a promise. As I understand it, you’ve got five producing wells. If anything happens to this rig, you’ll lose five in return. And if we buy another rig after that and anything happens to it, you’ll lose five more. You can try to stop this well if you want to. But every try you make will cost you five wells in return.”
/>   “Big talk,” Brasher said, lip curling.

  “No. Just truth. A promise.” His eyes went back to Friday, read the implacable hatred on the man’s face. Friday had been bested too many times. He would not challenge Fargo now, not with Fargo’s dead drop. But the time would come—Fargo added: “Ross will tell you that I don’t make big talk.”

  ‘We’ll see,” Brasher said. “Come on, Friday.” He turned toward the car, halted. “Sixty thousand dollars, Fargo. Think about it.”

  Fargo grinned coldly. “You’re about nine hundred and forty thousand shy, Tull.”

  He watched them go to the car. Just before Friday got in, he said: “Neal. Don’t come into Golconda. You do, it’ll be me and you, on sight—showdown.”

  “Fair enough,” Fargo said. “So long, Ross.”

  He stood there with gun in hand as the car chugged away. When it had disappeared, he hurried back to where Russell lay, still unconscious in the dust. By that time Lily Erickson had found him, knelt beside him and held his battered head against her lush breasts. Gently Fargo pushed her aside. Then he picked up Curt as easily as if the man had been an infant and carried him into the house.

  Chapter Eight

  Fargo’s experience in the Texas oilfields had mostly been with the older, simpler cable-tool rigs. He was amazed both by the complication and the speed of the rotary rig and studied it carefully, fascinated by anything mechanical, just as he was fascinated by the tools of fighting.

  Its heart was the rotary turntable on the derrick floor, powered by an engine and a gear train. Into a bushing in the center of this fitted the fifty-foot “kelly,” a six-sided pipe that not only turned the drill stem—which was made up of coupled sections of pipe with the bit on the end—but through which the drilling mud necessary to stabilize the well and cool the bit was pumped. As the drill was twisted deeper and deeper into the earth, new sections of drill pipe were coupled on as needed. Meanwhile, mud flowed down into the well under pressure and, returning up the sides of the bore, brought with it samples of the soil and rock through which the drill stem traveled. Uncle John watched these continually, muttering to himself like a soothsayer examining the entrails of a sheep for omens.

  “You know,” he told Fargo, “it was only fourteen years ago that the first one of these rigs was used, down near Beaumont in the Spindletop field. It was A.F. Lucas and the Hamill brothers who used it, and it took ’em seventy-two days to git down to eleven hundred feet. I figure we got maybe four hundred more than that to go, at a minimum, but I was flush when I went down to Mexico, and this rig I bought is the latest kind. Of course, nobody but a damn fool would try to predict what’s gonna happen. I figure that, with this outfit, if we’re gonna bring in oil, we ought to be able to make it in forty, maybe forty-five days; maybe less. That’s if we don’t lose a bit and have to fish for it, or have to whip-stock around it. Only thing I don’t like is, we’re operatin’ so close to the edge. We need more pipe, likely to need more couplin’s. We’ll need more gas for the engines, and I’m short of bits. If we do lose one, we’ll have to git a replacement from Tulsa.”

  Fargo chewed his cigar, watching the roughnecks hook on a thrible—three sections of drill pipe—to the string. “What it all boils down to is this: somebody’ll have to make another trip to Tulsa, bring back what you need.”

  “Which is you,” Uncle John said. “It’ll take a fightin’ man to get that load back here through Brasher’s yahoos.”

  Fargo shook his head. “I can’t be in two places at once. Somebody’s got to guard this well. We ain’t heard the last from Brasher yet, not by a long shot. We’ve got to keep a tight watch every minute.”

  “I’ll take the responsibility for that,” Curt Russell put in. His beating by Brasher had put him out of action for a day, but he had come back strong. Fargo eyed him narrowly; that whipping had changed Russell. He was cooler, more cautious, level-headed.

  Fargo nodded. “If I have to go to Tulsa, you’ll have to. It’ll mean an around-the-clock guard and arming our drillers; when Brasher comes, he’ll bring an army.”

  “Well, let’s wait and see,” said Uncle John. “Maybe if we have good luck, strike before I think we will or don’t lose our tools, nobody’ll have to go.”

  Fargo left the drilling to Morris and Russell after that and kept ceaseless guard, mostly at night, sleeping during the day when attack was least likely. The drillers and roughnecks occupied tents ranked behind the house; far beyond that was an earthen bunker where the nitroglycerin was stored.

  The house was so small that Fargo and Uncle John had set up cots in one of the outbuildings. Another building near it had been cleaned out and made into quarters for Tess Kendall and Maggie. Fargo had to give the two women credit; along with Lily Erickson, they worked like dogs. Since the drilling went on around the clock, meals had to be provided at all hours; hot coffee had to be on tap continually. It kept the women bustling twenty-four hours a day, in turns; their work, in the broiling Oklahoma summer, was not any easier than that of the men.

  Fargo had not forgotten his suspicions of Maggie, but he had to admit that she had behaved herself, given him no reason to suspect her further. It was an explosive situation anyhow: nine randy oilfield workers unable to get into town to vent their lusts and three pretty women in continual contact with them. The least flirtatiousness could have triggered an explosion. It was absolutely necessary that the women be modest and distant where the roughnecks were concerned, and both Maggie and Tess had been scrupulous about that. So far, there had been no trouble, and Fargo only hoped that it would stay that way.

  ~*~

  That was what he thought about at dawn, as he rode the sorrel back to the house after a long sweep around the Erickson property. Lights burned on the rig, the engines throbbed rhythmically, and the drilling went on. Fargo dismounted and turned the sorrel into the corral. He could hear a stream of profanity flowing from Uncle John, already breakfasted and out on the job.

  Putting up the bars on the corral gate, Fargo hitched the shotgun on his shoulder. He was tired, looking forward to sleep. Stiff-legged, burdened with guns, he went to his shack. He stowed the shotgun in its chamois case after carefully oiling it, and laid it beside the bed along with his bandoliers. He did the same with the Winchester, stripped off his Colt and gun belt, removed his shirt. At a washstand, he doused himself with tepid, soapy water. He was drying with a none-too-clean towel when he heard footsteps behind him.

  He whirled; a woman’s form was silhouetted in the door of the shack. “Fargo,” she said; and it was Maggie.

  “Yes.” In the light of the kerosene lamp he could see that she carried a tray.

  “I saw you come in. I was on duty tonight. I thought you might want some coffee and a sandwich.”

  “Thanks.” He watched her set the tray on the foot of the bed, pour the coffee. She wore a dress he had brought back from Tulsa, since neither she nor Tess had had time to bring clothes with them from Golconda. It was a shade too tight for her, clung too closely to her rounded breasts, her flared hips. When she straightened up, turned, corn-silk hair hanging down around her shoulders, he saw that its top buttons were unfastened; the shadowy cleft between her breasts was visible. She was so damned young and so damned lovely, Fargo thought. Suddenly he realized that it was her very innocence that made her seem so sexy. Despite himself, he kept on looking at her and felt a flare of desire.

  He started to check it, then let it burn. It was not because he wanted her, although he did; he always wanted any pretty woman within his reach. He had learned how to let alone any woman who was more trouble than she was worth. All the same, he sensed something in the room, a kind of electricity, and he knew that he was on the verge of learning something important about Maggie.

  She brought the coffee to him, standing very close as she presented the cup. He sniffed; it was not the aroma of coffee that he smelled; she wore perfume, subtle, light, yet arousing.

  There was no real reason for that, and suddenl
y Fargo realized that she had put it on for him.

  Looking down at her, he let his mouth twist into its wolf grin. “Thanks,” he said, taking the cup, staring at her breasts. In that instant, she drew in a deep breath that made them swell and rise above the opened bodice.

  “Everything’s quiet?” She made it a question. “Out there?”

  “Everything’s quiet. No trouble.”

  “Good. Everything’s quiet here, too.” Maggie hesitated. “Tess and Lily are both asleep. I’m not due to wake them until nine.”

  “I see,” Fargo murmured.

  Her eyes ranged over his torso. They widened as they inventoried the scars on its brown, muscular hardness. Then, as Fargo sipped the coffee, she put out a finger, traced a ridge of puckered tissue that ran from his shoulder across his chest.

  “Good heavens,” she said. “Where did you get that?”

  “Knife fight in Sonora. Ugly, ain’t it?”

  “No,” she said. Her finger lingered on it. “No, it’s not ugly.” Now her whole hand was stroking that banded, hairy muscle. “It’s not ugly at all.” Then, before he knew what she was about, she had moved in closer, and suddenly he felt her lips on the scar. “It’s not ugly at all,” she murmured again.

  Fargo put down the cup. “Maggie,” he said hoarsely.

  Suddenly her hands were on his naked flanks, her breasts were pushed against his chest. “Fargo,” she whispered. “Oh, it’s so lonely here on this place. So frightening.” She put her arms around him. “Hold me, Fargo.”

  With all that soft, young woman flesh molded to him, Fargo fought to maintain objectivity. Already he had learned something; and, suddenly, he realized that he was going to learn something else, something important. He drained the tin cup, threw it aside.

  “Look,” he whispered. “If Tess knew—”

  “I told you.” And now her body was moving against him, moving and pushing and rubbing against his thigh. She moved the smoothness of her cheek across his naked shoulder. “I told you Tess was asleep. Fargo ... Fargo ...” Then she had released him, backed away. Her hands went to the buttons of the bodice, deftly opened them. Her breasts sprang into view, rounded, white, crested with sharp, pink nipples. “Fargo, I’ve watched you so long, needed you so much—”