Fargo 18

by John Benteen

  The Home of Great Western Fiction!

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About John Benteen

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Copyright

  The Fargo Series

  About Piccadilly Publishing

  Fargo was running Springfield rifles across the border to Pancho Villa. That meant he had to dodge the U.S. Army, the Texas Rangers, and the Mexican regulars. But for the kind of money he was getting, it was worth it. Then he got mixed up with two American sisters—Rose and Lola. Rose was a nice girl, Lola was wild and mean—and you can guess which one Fargo liked better. Especially when she was holding half a million dollars in stolen money!

  FARGO 18: KILLER’S MOON

  By John Benteen

  First published by Belmont Tower in 1976

  Copyright © 1976, 2017 by Benjamin L. Haas

  First SMASHWORDS Edition: June 2017

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover image © 2017 by Edward Martin

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.

  One

  The five hundred rifles had been shipped by rail to Marathon, Texas, marked “Farming Implements.” A tough, grizzled old man named Ferrebee who actually dealt in farming implements had picked them up there, and, for a fee of a thousand dollars had hauled them south in Ford trucks to a ranch just north of the Santiago Mountains, above the Big Bend of the Rio Grande in Texas. Fargo had paid the rancher another five hundred for receiving the guns and had bought twenty big, strong, and desert-wise mules from him at a premium price. By the time the pack train, with Fargo scouting ahead and a couple of Mexican muleteers handling the animals, headed south for Mexico, he had a total investment of nearly nineteen thousand dollars in the half-a-thousand Springfield rifles and the pack animals. That, in 1915, was a lot of money by any standards.

  Now all he had to do was get the pack string and the rifles past the American Army, which was thinly strung out along the border, patrolling against possible raids across the Rio by the various forces of the Mexican Revolution and the bandits who operated in its wake like vultures, past the Texas Rangers who cooperated with the Army, and on into Mexico. After that, it was merely a matter of dodging the forces of Carranza, his ally Obregon, the two of them in effect now the government of Mexico, at least as far as the United States was concerned, and making it into deep Coahuila, where he was to make contact with Angelita.

  If the Army caught him, they would send him to jail for a long, long time. Likewise if the Rangers intercepted him. If the Carranza forces caught him with those guns, they would kill him, and probably not quickly. But if he could get them through to Angelita, she would pay him forty thousand dollars in hard Chihuahua silver and see that the rifles were distributed to Pancho Villa. So, if he could make it through with the guns, he could sell them and the mules as well for a profit of better than a hundred per cent. For the big man who now lay on the rim of Juniper Canyon, deep in the heart of the heat-blasted hell of the Big Bend country, that was incentive enough to risk his life.

  Now, though, Fargo had a problem. Carefully, in El Paso, Marfa and Marathon, he’d scouted on the disposition of the Army. As a former cavalryman, and one with good connections, he’d been on a drinking-buddy basis with most of the regular non-coms and some of the officers, and the information he’d received was sound. But somewhere along the line, someone had crossed him up. He had not counted on a platoon of horse soldiers blocking Juniper Canyon; they must have been moved out since Ferrebee had left Marathon. He had no idea who had given the orders, but whoever he was, it was somebody with brains and the ability to read a map. Now his access to the San Vincente crossing of the Rio was thoroughly blocked. With two-dozen American cavalrymen down there, he had not a chance in hell of sneaking twenty heavily laden mules down through the canyon and the draw beyond.

  Sliding back a little from the rim, Fargo cased his binoculars, clamped a thin black cigar between his teeth and lit it, savoring the smoke while he considered. In his mind, a map of the Big Bend country unreeled. It was not comforting. Somebody had once said that if he owned Texas and Hell, he would rent out Texas and live in Hell. In which case, all he would have to do would be to move down from the windswept high plains to this devil’s brew of badlands. It was not only the roughest country in Texas, it was maybe the roughest country in the whole Southwest. Which was why, usually, it was deserted, and a fine jumping off place for a man running guns to the forces of the great revolutionary, Pancho Villa, the Lion of the North, who held most of the country south of the Rio Bravo.

  But, Fargo thought, nobody ever paid you for doing anything easy. Chewing the cigar, he made his plans. He didn’t want to go back up the canyon and down the western slopes of the Chisos Mountains. The patrols were even more numerous and intensive in that direction. He pulled the battered old cavalry campaign hat—he’d worn it ever since he’d served in the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War—down over his eyes to shade them from the westering sun. His thoughtful frown made his battered, ugly face even harder. As a professional fighting man, he liked to minimize his risks, maximize his profits. But when the cigar was smoked halfway down, he grinned, coldly, wolfishly, and worked his way back down the slope to the big bay he had tethered in a wash.

  Despite his size, his movements were light, easy, soundless. In his cavalry boots, he stood inches better than six feet, a man with the long legs and almost non-existent hips of a horseman born and bred, spreading out to a thick chest and wide shoulders above. He wore plain khaki shirt and pants, which blended perfectly with the background; beneath the Rough Riders’ hat his hair was close-cropped and snow-white, though prematurely so, for he was only in his middle thirties. And though he was careful to still any clicking or clacking of his gear, he was a one-man arsenal, his body draped with weapons and ammunition.

  A Colt .38 revolver, Officers’ Model, rode in a holster on his hip, hung on a cartridge belt stuffed with fat rounds for its cylinders—and each bullet had a hollow point, designed to explode on impact with flesh, capable of making a terrible wound and stopping the man who took the slug in his tracks through sheer shock, an edge he liked.

  In addition, he carried a Winchester .30-30 rifle in his right hand. A bandolier full of cartridges for it was slung across his torso. And that was crisscrossed by another bandolier—this one full of shotgun shells. Each loaded with nine double-zero buckshot, they were fodder for the wicked, sawed-off weapon slung over his left shoulder.

  That was a ten-gauge Fox Sterlingworth double-barreled shotgun, hammerless, with an ornately engraved breach. Originally a fowling-piece with thirty-inch barrels designed to reach out for flying geese, it had been altered by Fargo, all the extra barrel length cut off short, to produce the deadliest short-range, close combat weapon a man could carry—an open-snouted riot gun capable of spraying eighteen lethal slugs in a wide pattern that no one standing close before it could escape. It gave him
, at ten, fifteen, twenty yards the murderous capability of a dozen men with six-guns or rifles, and it was the core around which all his combat tactics had grown. It and its fifty rounds of shells made a heavy burden, but Fargo had the muscle to accommodate that load, and he had carried it so long he would have felt naked without it. He did not notice its extra weight as he cat-footed back to where he had left the tall bay horse securely tethered. Mounting, he put it at a walk back up the wash, heading for the narrow side-canyon that fed into the main one he had meant to travel, where he had left the mules.

  He did not hurry, and he kept his eyes open every minute. He was that rare breed, the perfectionist. Discipline, patience, concentration, continual alertness: these were the qualities his life depended on. Those and ruthless toughness when it was required. He had learned his trade in a hard school, had been studying it ever since he could remember.

  When he was still a small child, Apaches, the last flare of Geronimo’s rebellion, had killed his parents in a raid on their New Mexico homestead; they had missed the little boy hidden under blankets. Foster parents had taken him in—but that was no rescue. They had wanted a peon, not a son, and at twelve he had known that he would always be doing their dirty work for no return but kicks and curses if he stayed. So he’d cut out, had been on his own ever since. From horse jingler, he’d risen, almost before he had to shave, to top hand on a succession of cattle ranches.

  He’d learned to drink, top rough horses, handle a Colt, hold his own in any company. Then the war with Spain had come, and like a lot of other hardbitten Southwestern punchers, he’d joined the cavalry. But, in his case, not just any horse outfit: he’d volunteered for a regiment organized by a New Yorker named Teddy Roosevelt who had been a rancher in the Dakotas and knew the west and could imagine what all those wild riders and gunmen could do to the Spaniards. Even though they hadn’t taken their horses to Cuba, they came to be known as the Rough Riders, and it was in malarial swamps and sniper-infested jungles and the final charge at Kettle and San Juan Hills that Fargo had learned his trade as a fighting man. And when the war was won, he’d stayed in the cavalry, now fighting native insurrections in the Philippines: the Tagalogs on Luzon and the fierce, proud Moros on Mindanao. By the time he’d returned to the States, he was a wholly professional fighting man with a chestful of medals; and so far he had not met one who was better.

  By nature he was solitary, akin to the wolf; and there is always something of the outlaw in the wolf. He hired out his skills in Mexico, Central America, Alaska, the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma, anywhere there was a need for guns and a man who knew how to use them. Between jobs, with the rise and fall of his fortunes, he’d been a professional prizefighter, a gambler, and once, when he’d hit bottom, bouncer in a Louisiana whorehouse. He’d made a lot of money and he’d spent a lot. A smart man would have saved for his old age; in Fargo’s business, there was no such thing as growing old. Right this minute, someone might be carrying in a Colt’s cylinder, a Winchester’s tube, or a loop in a cartridge belt, the lead slug that meant his finish: an American cavalryman, a Mexican soldier, or some bandit or guerilla whose existence he did not even now imagine. Anyhow, he had no desire to grow old. He knew some of the old gunslingers who had survived into the closing of the frontier and the coming of law and settlers and the automobile. Like Bat Masterson in New York they were human fossils, living in the past, pestering strangers and little boys to listen to their tales of former glory, riddled by sickness and gimping through their days like crippled dogs. Neal Fargo had no intention of going out that way. He lived for the present, never turning down a bottle, a hand of showdown, or a woman. He loved the action. When he got too old to keep up with it and enjoy it, he was ready to cash in.

  They were waiting for him in the canyon, Fernando and Jesus. They had worked for him before and they were damned good men; he would have hired no other kind. Fargo told them what he had found.

  Fernando, the oldest, sighed. “Then we cannot go the way we planned. And that increases the danger, because if we must spend extra time back-tracking, circling—”

  Fargo grinned. “We won’t back-track and we won’t circle. Now, listen, Fernando. Because it’s gonna be up to you and Jesus ...”

  He told them what he meant to do. Fernando, with a face like a piece of rawhide left in the rain, listened closely, and when Fargo was through, he grinned. “Ay, Chihuahua! If you do your part, we can do ours! We’ll have these hammerheads through the canyon and down the draw before the soldiers can spit! And you will meet us at the crossing!”

  “I will meet you at the crossing,” Fargo said.

  “Then you do your part,” said Fernando, “and leave the rest to us.”

  “Right,” said Fargo. “Now, let’s get some sleep.”

  He awakened after two hours. When he rode out, it was with an extra weapon across his saddlebow: one of the Springfield rifles; and a bag of ammo clips was lashed over his saddlehorn.

  Having made it his business to learn every foot of the Big Bend, he had no trouble working his way across the upper reaches of Juniper Canyon in a sunset that turned the badlands to pure glory. Rock strata and gravel hills flamed with color evoked by dying rays; across the river, the Del Carmen escarpment would be blazing with it. Something lifted in Neal Fargo; he had met people who roamed galleries trying to capture such beauty from the paintings of others: here he was immersed in the raw grandeur that artists tried to catch on canvas and city-dwellers came to soak up second-hand. And the poor bastards, he thought, could spend a million and never see anything like this ...

  Violet-tinged darkness had settled by the time he was on the far rim, working his way into position. He had to be as far as possible from that horse-soldier camp that blocked the canyon, yet close enough for them to hear everything he did.

  As a strange violet-tinged darkness settled, he found the place he wanted, in a nest of boulders near a juniper thicket on a hillside. He settled down, waiting, laying out the tools of his trade, the Winchester, the Springfield, the shotgun, and his Colt revolver, and arranging rounds for each on a rock shelf before him. Then he capped the three sticks of dynamite he had brought along in a saddlebag and fused them. Satisfied that everything was in order, he had nothing to do but wait.

  The moon came up, started to wheel down. It transformed the badlands with its own brand of radiance. Fargo took out a fat, thick gold watch of the type used by railroad men, accurate to the second. He examined it, saw it was almost midnight. Close enough. He shoved the watch back in his pocket, lit a cigar. When it was glowing well, he picked up a stick of dynamite.

  The fuse was cut to a five-minute length. Fargo took the cigar from his mouth, held it against the fuse’s tip. When the powder-charged cotton glowed and sizzled, he leaned back, waiting, watching the fuse burn down while he held the dynamite in his hand. When three minutes of fuse were burned away, he stood up, threw the stick of dynamite with the practiced lob of a grenadier. Shedding sparks, it turned over and over and fell deep into a ravine. Fargo dropped back behind the rocks, worked the bolt on the Springfield, waited.

  With a flash of orange that lit the night and a roar like thunder the dynamite went off. Fargo waited until its echoes died and the rain of gravel it had hurled spattered back to earth, and then he seized the Springfield, fired three shots. He laid that rifle aside, worked the lever of the thirty-thirty, sluiced off a dozen rounds straight up. Laying that gun aside, he drew his Colt, fired four rounds from that with his right hand and with his left picked up the Springfield again, and fired the rest of its six-shot clip. Immediately he laid the Springfield aside, raised the shotgun and triggered off its twin barrels, not together, but one after the other. Then he lit another stick of dynamite. This time he threw the stick without waiting, and even as it arced through the air, he crammed new rounds into the shotgun and fired it twice. The dynamite exploded, echoing, and by then Fargo had the Colt reloaded and triggered off six rounds in succession, after which he picked up the Sp
ringfield, loaded a clip and shot it straight up into the sky. He reloaded the Winchester with three rounds, unloosed them, and for a moment there was silence until he could get two more bullets into the Colt and fire them. He reloaded the Springfield, fired it and picked up the other stick of dynamite in his left hand and touched its fuse to his cigar and hurled it. While it arced through the air, he reloaded the Colt, the shotgun, and the Winchester. He did not bother with the Springfield, only slung it on his shoulder.

  The last stick of dynamite he hurled up the hillside, where its orange flash could be seen from a long way off. Then, clanking with weapons, the hills echoing with the dying sound of thunder, he raced to the tethered bay, snorting with fear at the unexpected violence of the gunfire and explosions. He hit saddle without touching stirrup, spurred the big horse. It raced along the rim of Juniper Canyon. Fargo kept it to easy ground, sandy washes, and good concealment, careful to stay off the skyline. Presently he reined in, head cocked and listening. Then, his grin like a wolf’s snarl, his teeth showed in his leathery face.

  Well, he didn’t blame them. It had been a pretty damned good counterfeit of an unexpected fire-fight. Several different kinds of weapons going off at once had added texture, not to mention the exploding dynamite. Anyhow, it must have seemed to the platoon in the canyon that all hell had broken out up the way, and sure enough he could hear the drum of hoofbeats down below.

  If they had been regulars, they would have left a patrol on station to block the canyon. But their guidon had showed them to be a National Guard outfit. Likely the whole bunch of them was riding hard to the sound of the guns—especially since one of those guns had been the Springfield, making it seem as if an American soldier had been cornered. Fargo spurred the bay, rode on hard, bound for the San Vicente Crossing.