The Trailsman #396

by Jon Sharpe

  “I fret the Scorpion more than either of them,” Fargo replied. “I can’t figure out why he hasn’t made his next play yet.”

  “I’d wager he’s a-comin’ with a bone in his teeth. But don’t miscalculate ­Robinson—­he’s one of them broodin’ sons-a-bitches that explode on you. When the hell is Beale s’pose to join back up with us?”

  Fargo shrugged. “What’s after what’s next? I wish to hell he’d get here and rein in ­Robin—”

  He was interrupted by a booming thunderclap when the big Hawken gun opened up.

  A Greek camel driver, just then towing his ship of the desert into the camel corral, cried out. His legs collapsed as if deboned, and Fargo saw blood bubbling from his lips and pumping like a bellows from his ­torn-­open chest.

  “God’s garters!” Grizz Bear exclaimed.

  “Cover down!” Fargo bellowed.

  Fargo, who hadn’t yet stripped the Ovaro, reacted with the quick reflexes of a jungle cat. He speared the Henry from its boot and then ducked behind a fodder wagon as he rapidly scanned the terrain for powder smoke.

  The big Hawken barked again and a ­fist-­sized chunk of the wagon blew off right beside Fargo’s head, splinters and chips flying. Fargo spotted the ­gray-­white billow spreading above a clutch of large black cinder boulders about four hundred yards out.

  Grizz Bear had spotted it, too.

  “That ­skunk-­bit coyote has got him a scope, Fargo!” he called out. “He couldn’t recognize you that far out.”

  Fargo agreed and now he realized: that camel driver had stepped directly in front of him as the ambusher fired, taking a bullet intended for Fargo.

  Robinson was shouting out orders to his troops, but right now they were milling in confusion, and Fargo had no intention of letting the lethal rifle keep hammering out slugs.

  But he couldn’t stop it from here.

  Fargo vaulted onto the Ovaro and slapped its rump hard, launching the stallion into action as if ­spring-­loaded.

  A direct charge would give the shooter an easy bead. Fargo figured he had to approach obliquely to get visual targets behind the boulders. He quartered the wind, swinging off to the left, and hoped the Ovaro’s impressive speed would thwart the shooter and make his target hard to lead.

  A third time the Hawken spoke its piece, the lead ball whizzing past Fargo’s ear with a sharp snap. But he had finally spotted at least one man behind the boulders.

  The Ovaro’s ears flattened back as Fargo took the reins in his teeth and poured on the blistering fire, levering and firing so rapidly that only a couple of heartbeats passed between shots. But fate revealed an ugly surprise: the shooter wasn’t alone. At least three handguns opened up like a string of firecrackers as they sent a withering cloud of lead at him.

  Fargo could see their muzzles spitting puffs of smoke. He was still too far out and their bullets struck short or wide, kicking up geysers of sand. But these veteran killers used their misses to improve their aim.

  He got another round off, then cursed when a spent cartridge jammed in the ejector port. The sun was already hot, and he had fired so rapidly the gun had ­heat-­warmed the brass casing. There was no way Fargo could clear it while riding this fast. Knowing he was about to be shot to wolf bait, he veered off sharply, rounds slicing the air all around him.

  By now the soldiers had taken up firing positions and were keeping up steady fire on the ambushers with their ­breech-­loading Sharps rifles. Fargo, fleeing northwest, glanced back over his shoulder and spotted four riders emerging from a hidden barranca and escaping to the east.

  Pursuing four men in open terrain with nothing but a ­six-­shooter in his fist was flirting with suicide.

  “Son of a bitch,” Fargo cursed aloud but calmly.

  Every time those crud weevils struck and then escaped clean only upped the odds that they would succeed in dousing Fargo’s glims with the next ­attack—­and clearly it was the Trailsman they were after first. Survival on the harsh frontier was always a game of diminishing odds, and Fargo had beat the house dealer too damn many times already.

  ­Dog-­tired, disgusted, eyes burning from grit and lack of sleep, he reined the Ovaro back around toward the camp and wondered if he might really be happier as a ­soft-­handed storekeeper.

  • • •

  “Fargo,” Sergeant Woodrow Robinson said accusingly, “who gave you authority to reposition the picket guards after I posted them?”

  Breakfast was over and Fargo was sitting with Grizz Bear and Deke Ritter in the shade cast by a ­high-­walled fodder wagon.

  Fargo glanced indifferently at the big, blustering soldier. “They weren’t efficiently dispersed, is all. It had nothing to do with your authority.”

  “In a pig’s ass! You’ve been deliberately undermining my authority and stirring the troops to rebellion against me.”

  Fargo’s eyes, hard blue gems in a strong, ­weather-­bronzed face, matched Robinson’s stare until the latter was forced to look elsewhere.

  “If you’re wondering why your men don’t respect you,” Fargo said, “don’t stare at ­me—­go look in a mirror. I notice you been cracking that whip of yours a lot more lately and threatening to use it on your troops. ’Case you haven’t noticed, they’re in the same army you are.”

  “Corporal punishment is legal in the army and you know it. Are you threatening to interfere if I punish troops?”

  “Nope. I’m just telling you that what’s legal at a fort ain’t exactly what’s wise in the field.”

  Robinson’s fleshy lips compressed in sudden anger.

  “When we reach Fort Tejon I’m bringing charges against you!”

  “Free country,” Fargo said. “And remember: that’s Skye with an ‘e.’”

  Robinson spat in contempt. “Yeah, you swagger it up big, Fargo. And the fawning, no-dick magpies in the penny press get rich egging it on. But it don’t impress me.”

  “Christ,” Fargo said, “my dreams are shattered. I was hoping for a quick wedding.”

  This was too much for Grizz Bear, who rolled on the ground slapping his leg and howling. Deke shook with silent laughter. Robinson flushed purple. His hand twitched under his long duster but didn’t move.

  Fargo pushed wearily to his feet. “Well,” he said amiably, “you’re a big, strong boy. Why’n’t you try taking that whip to me? You know you want to. I’m bushed, but kicking your ass might help me sleep.”

  “Sure, so your friend there can shoot me in the back the first time I flatten you?”

  “I ain’t his fuckin’ friend,” Grizz Bear protested. “Matter fact, I don’t even like him that ­much—­he hogs all the poon and washes his teeth. If you can kill him, I’ll split his money with you.”

  Robinson looked trapped and Fargo, who wasn’t spoiling for this fight anyway, knew that trapped men did stupid things. This expedition had enough troubles already.

  He decided to pour oil on the waters.

  “Sergeant,” he said, “I’d prefer to call off this pissing contest. I’m worn down to the hubs, and the desert is no place for a man to waste his fettle in a brawl. You’re wrong on one ­point—­I’m not deliberately stirring your men to a damn thing against you.” Fargo shrugged like a man with little choice in the matter. “Beale told me my duties as scout include a say on security decisions. Just come down off your hind legs. You leave me alone, and I’ll stay out of your way.”

  Robinson seized the opportunity to save face without fighting. Without a word he turned to leave. But he paused and turned back toward Fargo again.

  “Just remember: it was your decision, over my objections, to go into the Old Woman Mountains. That’s a suspected Mojave stronghold these days.”

  “Pull up your skirts, Nancy,” Grizz Bear waded in. “The River People live in the Colorado River valley. Might be they are holed up in them mountains
right now, waiting to jump ­us—­so damn what? You ain’t gonna turn them ­tit-­suckin’, ­fuzz-­faced babies of yours into by-god men withouten a bloody fight.”

  “Keep your nose outta the pie, Ormsby!” Robinson snarled. “You were hired to translate Injin lingo, not dictate tactics to a career soldier.”

  “Bottle it, Grizz,” Fargo said when the old salt opened his mouth to retort.

  “That fat bastard is a smallpox blanket,” Grizz Bear said after Robinson left.

  Fargo, however, wasn’t listening. Rosalinda was approaching the wagon from the tent shared by the three women, and the Mexican beauty was a welcome tonic for his bleary eyes. She wore a simple, thin cotton dress and was forced by the heat to wear nothing under it. Supple nipples pressed into the fabric and drew a man’s eyes.

  Ever since their erotic conversation a few days ago, he and Bobbie Lou and been trying, without success, to meet somewhere and scratch each other’s itch. But Fargo noticed that Rosalinda, too, looked frisky. Hell, the order didn’t matter. . . .

  Again wearily, Fargo pushed to his feet and touched his hat. “Morning, pretty lady.”

  She flashed him a ­come-­hither smile and Fargo felt an instant stirring in his trousers.

  “We were all relieved to see you return from that terrible gun battle,” she greeted him.

  Fargo grinned. “Yeah, you know I was, too? I hate being shot at before breakfast.”

  “Again with your gallows humor. Men like you are very exciting, Skye Fargo. But most end up in nameless graves.”

  “A grave’s a grave, I expect. I hope I won’t be too particular after I’m dead.”

  Those flashing dark eyes sent him a reminder of her invitation. “Yes. And a man like you knows he must . . . taste life to the fullest while blood still courses in his veins.”

  Right now it was coursing someplace else, too, and Fargo saw her notice it approvingly.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “I like to taste.”

  “There’s a gleam in your voice, Mr. Fargo.”

  “And in your eyes, Senorita Gonzales.”

  “Christ, you two,” Grizz Bear cut in. “Why’n’t you rent a room?”

  Rosalinda laughed gaily and returned to her tent, her thin dress tracing a pert behind split high like a Georgia peach.

  “‘I like to taste,’” Grizz Bear repeated, snorting. “What? Are you a Frenchman now, Fargo, yodeling in the canyon? Say . . . tell me straight: have you pricked her vent yet?”

  “Let’s just say I’m always hopeful.”

  “Well, you know what they say: familiarity breeds attempt. I kallate you’ll prong her and Bobbie Lou. I ain’t sayin’ about ­Karen—­she’s more highfalutin. ’Course, even gals who wear them long white gloves get the urge, too, hanh?”

  “That would be my guess,” Fargo said innocently.

  Grizz Bear’s eyes focused behind Fargo. “I told you, ­long-­tall . . . he’s lettin’ you know he means to kill you. Priddy soon you’ll find two ­black-­painted eggs in your ­bedroll—­that’s how a Mexer tells you he’s comin’ after your nuts.”

  Fargo turned to look. Juan ­Salazar—­his sad, serious eyes aimed at ­Fargo—­squatted on his rowels about twenty feet away, eating a plate of beans and tortillas. As always when anyone met his gaze, he looked quickly away.

  “He’s a sneaky, cunning Mexer, Fargo,” Grizz Bear said in a low voice. “You killed his brother right in front of him. He won’t abide that. Don’t underrate him, chappie, or he’ll put a ­frog-­sticker in you and give it the Spanish twist.”

  Fargo yawned so hard his lower jaw trembled visibly.

  “Trust everybody, Grizz Bear,” he replied, “but always cut the cards.”

  7

  Fargo decided to take one last squint around before he turned in for a few hours of fitful rest.

  Leaving the Ovaro in the separate corral for horses and mules, always kept as far away as possible from the camels, he walked out about a hundred yards to a ­wind-­scrubbed knoll. Well aware he could be a target, he traversed the endless, desolate terrain in all directions with his binoculars. Several times he was forced to quickly turn his face away from the ­grit-­laden wind that tore into it.

  Here and there the branches of ­wind-­warped Joshua trees were like outstretched arms beseeching heaven for rain. On the west the Old Woman Mountains rose stark and lifeless, their ­ash-­colored slopes scarred by deep crevices that could swallow men and beasts forever.

  The desert’s remarkably clear air allowed a man the best use of his eyes just as the vast emptiness stimulated his best thinking. Fargo spotted no signs of trouble except the most obvious: this dry terrain itself and the danger of it.

  He frowned, liking it less and less as they penetrated deeper into the Mojave. Fargo had scouted open country enough to know that no ground anywhere was ever truly level. A man suddenly ambushed could almost always find hollows and sinks, hummocks and folds, for some kind of cover. But this stretch of desert leading up to the mountains seemed to have been shaken out smooth like a tablecloth.

  He turned around and looked at the camel corral, bringing the binoculars up again for a close study. He focused in on a ­two-­humped Bactrian, smaller than a dromedary but capable of hauling twice the ­load—­in fact, a load equal to what five army mules could haul.

  Strip that camel of the load, put a soldier on it trained for the odd gait, and that animal could charge at speeds reaching bursts of ­forty-­five miles an hour. Fargo never would have swallowed that claim if he hadn’t been part of Lieutenant Beale’s testing back in San Antone before the camel caravan headed farther west.

  Pablo Alvarez, Fargo reminded himself, rightly feared those camels because he also feared a stronger U.S. Army and stronger American settlements. Gangs and small armies like his flourished because of the huge distances between military outposts and California lawmen. News traveled slow and desert conditions meant that posses were rarely formed.

  As for the Mojave Indians who might be waiting to jump them in those mountains: they, too, were smart enough to see how this expedition was one more foreign threat to their beloved river country and the deserts beyond, deserts they had mastered before the Spaniards and Americans came and claimed California.

  Fargo saw how it was: the red man believed he belonged to the land, the white man believed the land belonged to him. Fargo took no side in it and concentrated on surviving, but he knew the white man was winning and nothing would stop the wealthiest among them from one day slicing the American frontier up like a giant pie.

  But right now Fargo faced more pressing problems than rich man’s greed, one of them being the fate of six marooned and nearly abandoned soldiers.

  • • •

  Fargo returned to camp and found Grizz Bear roweling Jude as usual.

  “Don’t hand me that hogwash ’bout how you’re a battle veteran! A feather ­fly-­swisher could knock you over, tadpole. And you already done admitted you ain’t never fired that Colt the army give you.”

  “He’s fired the Sharps, including earlier today,” Fargo reminded the old campaigner.

  “Ahuh, and what did he hit?”

  “Same thing I did,” Fargo said.

  “I ain’t no great shakes with a rifle,” Jude admitted. “Mostly at home I used Pap’s shotgun to kill pheasants and such. It’s the handgun I’m fair to middling with.”

  Fargo couldn’t resist glancing at Grizz Bear and both men grinned. Jude read lurid Western magazines and ­dog-­eared copies of Police Gazette with their accounts of Western ­outlaws—­and he looked barely old enough to have graduated from the eighth grade.

  “Sure, kid,” Fargo dismissed the claim, ready to turn in.

  “You’re allowed to tell stretchers out west, ­pip-­squeak,” Grizz Bear said. “Everybody lies all the time. Hell, Fargo’s lies get printed. But don’t be
settin’ yourself up as a gunny. It could get back to a man who is, and you’ll be doing the hurt dance when he calls you out.”

  “It ain’t a stretcher. I ain’t saying I’m a gunslinger. I just meant I’m a dead shot.” The kid, flustered at being challenged, glanced toward the chuck wagon. “Hey, Deke! Wouldja toss me a tin plate?”

  The cook sailed one over and it skidded into the sand at Jude’s feet. When Fargo saw the young soldier unsnap the flap on his holster, he started to protest. But quicker than a finger snap Jude had flipped the pan high into the air and unlimbered his Colt.

  The shots came so rapidly that Fargo could barely count them. The plate took on a crazy trajectory as bullets pummeled it in contradictory directions, doing a ­herky-­jerky dance across the sky. Fargo and Grizz Bear both heard the decisive click as the hammer announced the gun was empty even before the ­bullet-­riddled plate plunked into the ground.

  Jude, having closely observed Fargo, immediately thumbed cartridges from his belt and reloaded before doing anything else.

  “Ho-ly Hannah!” Grizz Bear exclaimed even as ­puffy-­eyed soldiers began boiling out of their tents.

  “It’s all right, boys!” Fargo bellowed. “Pass the word, it was just firearm instruction!”

  Grizz Bear pushed eagerly to his feet and ran to fetch the plate. He walked back slowly toward the other two, counting the holes over and over.

  “I ain’t never seen the like, kid! Well, you missed wunst, anyhow. There’s only five holes.”

  “Look closer,” Fargo said. “That plate jumped six times.”

  Grizz Bear examined the holes again until he realized one was slightly bigger than the others because two bullets had made it. He loosed a long whistle. “Kid, you ain’t just fair to middlin’. You’re a dead shot, all right.”

  “I’m glad you finally let us know that, Jude,” Fargo said sarcastically. “But couldn’t you pick a better time of day? These folks are still jumpy from this ­morning—­look how many you woke up just by showing off.”