The Trailsman #396

by Jon Sharpe

  “No wonder you’re so ‘cocky,’” she said after assessing his endowment in impressed silence. “Rosalinda didn’t exaggerate.”

  “If you like it,” Fargo invited, “give it the works.”

  “Remember you said that. But you’d better hold that hard monster off until I get my first shiver, Skye. I mean it. Too damn many ­good-­looking men like you buck a few times, grunt once, and go soft as a punctured bag. Once that hot little tickle starts building fast inside me and I know I’m coming, I want the job finished!”

  “I aim to please,” Fargo promised meekly.

  She egged him on by lifting and squeezing her tits. She took a wide stance over him and thrust her pelvis forward, pulling back on the skin above her pubic mound to open a good view of the ­chamois-­petaled love nest. Fargo also found a woman’s pussy hair exciting and he admired the dark copper, silken triangle carpeting the mound above her split.

  She straddled him fast and slapped his face a few ­times—­pretty damn hard, Fargo ­thought—­for no reason he could figure. Then her hair draped over him like a silken shroud when she explored his mouth with an eager, probing ­tongue—­one that had gotten wet fast like she said it would.

  None too gently, starting to whimper like a bitch in heat, she grabbed his leaping staff and controlled it like a tiller as she eased her hot sex onto the tip and then plunged down hard on all of it.

  But Fargo found out it wasn’t all talk and that Bobbie Lou had more than plunging up and down on him in mind. She spread her smooth ivory thighs impressively wide, then used her hips like hinges, doing a perfect split on him and tucking more of him inside than a woman had ever managed.

  “Heavens above, Skye!” she moaned, her voice husky with overwhelming pleasure. “It feels like you’re up past my belly button and I still want more!”

  Now and then, as she plunged wantonly on him, Bobbie Lou torqued her body to left or right, spinning simultaneously. For Fargo it felt like the tightest, silkiest, most talented fingers in the world were goading him to massive release.

  “Damn you, Skye. Hold off!” she ordered, feeling him begin to tighten inside her and slapping him hard.

  It felt too damn good to protest about the slaps, and if they were helping her get that shiver Fargo was a charitable man.

  She loosed a series of sharp little barks. “Close, Skye, but not yet! Hold off . . . not quite, not . . . I’m close now, I’m . . . get it, Skye!”

  She wasn’t the loud type, but Christ was she violent! Fargo, bucking hard in his own powerful release, was forced to grip her hard by the hips to keep the wildly thrashing woman from flying off him like an artillery round and knocking the center pole down.

  Their mutual explosion of wordless pleasure was followed by a long, dazed numbness as thought returned only slowly like blood to a sleeping limb. And then Fargo’s mind was rudely jogged back to the present moment when gunfire crackled outside and a woman screamed.

  15

  Once outside, still recovering from his erotic daze, Fargo didn’t know where to look first in all the chaos.

  He had taken only two steps when a panicked camel, bells ringing like a Kansas City fire wagon, nearly plowed over him. The camel corral was a scene of bedlam, animals escaping on all sides. Even as Fargo watched, a camel sank to its front knees braying in pain as an arrow skewered its hindquarters.

  Soldiers, including Jude Hollander, were up and on the line under Robinson’s command. They were concentrating echelon fire in earnest toward a low line of hummocks to the northwest. Fargo was close to the horse corral and his saddle, and he sprinted to retrieve his rifle and binoculars.

  Grizz Bear had been sleeping under a fodder wagon. Cussing like a stable sergeant, he fell in with Fargo and they ran toward the soldiers’ position.

  “Mojaves!” he told Fargo, huffing for breath. “And here I figured Tasenko would never jump us on the flats! Damn but the red man is notional!”

  The two men crowded in with Jude and trooper Rudy Mumford in the ­waist-­high rifle pit.

  “Nobody seen ’em till the first arrows came in,” Jude told Fargo. “They look to be maybe four hundred yards out, but some are closer.”

  A barbed arrow streaked past with its deadly hiss.

  Fargo propped the Henry beside him and focused his binoculars. He hadn’t expected the daunting sight of so many braves.

  “Is that Tasenko wearing the cavalry trousers?” he asked, handing the glasses to Grizz Bear.

  “Ahuh, that’s him. Damn, lookit that war face! When I was lettin’ him clean me out at poker, that savage was mild as ma’s milk.”

  The two soldiers beside them were occupied in returning fire. Grizz Bear lowered his voice.

  “Fargo, there’s a right smart chance of warriors with Tasenko. Big, strong sons of bitches with them skull crushers they like so much.”

  “Yeah, I’d say at least fifty.”

  “Ahuh. And it ain’t like with these ­three-­penny soldiers we got. These Mojaves is all related by blood somehow.”

  “Which means,” Fargo reminded him, jacking a round into the Henry’s chamber, “that Tasenko will likely sound retreat if too many of his people are hit. I’ve seen very few tribes willing to take heavy casualties except when attacked in their camps.”

  “Well, by God, they ain’t bashful about inflictin’ ’em.”

  Fargo rose and opened fire, the Henry bucking into his shoulder with each shot. He “walked the line,” spreading his shots along the Mojaves’ entire string of positions. The added firepower of a good repeating rifle kept the braves in hiding.

  “Let ’er rip!” Grizz Bear bellowed. Fargo had given him the dead Roberto Salazar’s old ­percussion-­converted rifle. The sight had been broken off, but the old salt joined Fargo in peppering the line of barren hummocks.

  “Tasenko’s showing the white feather!” Grizz Bear boasted. “Some has already pulled foot! Looks ­like—”

  He was interrupted by a sudden, loud, wet noise and then a scream so piercing even ­nerve-­hardened Fargo almost dropped his rifle. Rudy Mumford’s knees folded like cloth and he fell into a screaming, convulsive heap, an arrow buried deep in his guts past the point of hope.

  “­God-­damn!” Jude cried out, the first time Fargo had ever heard him curse.

  Those sharp, hooking hardwood barbs had torn savagely into his vitals, and Fargo knew he was dying the hardest death in the ­world—­a ­white-­hot fire in his entrails that would only burn hotter.

  But it wasn’t the almost supernatural screams that made his flesh crawl against his ­shirt—­it was the rapid scuffing noises as the soldier’s bootheels clawed at the sand like a frantic animal digging, caused by his body reflexively jackknifing from the unbearable pain.

  Fargo had his hand on the butt of his Colt when Rudy managed to unsnap his holster flap and get his own sidearm out long enough to shoot himself in the head.

  “They’re in full retreat,” Grizz Bear reported, apparently unfazed by events in the rifle pit.

  “Let’s run ’em to ground!” Jude said, averting his eyes from Rudy’s ghastly corpse. “They ain’t mounted.”

  “Might be smarter to corner a silvertip in his cave,” Grizz Bear said. “Them ­desert-­willow bows they use ain’t as strong as osage or oak. But they make up for it by makin’ ’em ­six-­foot long. You just seen what happened to your ­chum—­you wantin’ to see more of it?”

  “I reckon not.”

  Fargo looked at the dead soldier. He wasn’t much older than ­Jude—­barely of shaving age if once a week counted. He died in a screaming nightmare of pain and now he’d be buried in one of the loneliest spots on earth. A little slip of paper, signed by all of his fellow soldiers, would be tucked into an empty bullet cartridge and pounded into a simple wooden marker.

  Young Jude was right, Fargo thought. Who wouldn’t b
e a soldier?

  But thanks, in part, to Robinson’s quick response, Rudy Mumford was the only death. A camel had been struck, but its leathery hide had limited the damage. The oldest driver in the group, a Turk named Rashid, was also an experienced camel doctor. With a poultice that smelled more foul than the camels, he soon had the ­two-­humped Bactrian again feisty and ­trouble-­seeking.

  “You know,” Grizz Bear remarked, “I soured on Red Robinson real quicklike the first time I seen him. But he done a good job just now. Moved right out in the open directing his troops, too. You was right when you said he ain’t no coward in battle.”

  Fargo watched the man repositioning his pickets for the daytime layover. Robinson had continued to command and inspect his men ­daily—­and he was still a regular army prick in the usual way of a top sergeant. But since his last confrontation with Fargo he was controlling his rage around the civilians.

  “I can’t figure him,” Fargo said.

  “Hell, what’s to figure? Since you settled his hash, that no-­account blowhard is scairt of you. He don’t know you’re really just a ­sweet-­lavender pussy.”

  Fargo narrowed his eyes. “Don’t count on your gray hairs to keep my boot out of your ass. Anyhow, you’d best turn in. This afternoon I’m riding out a couple hours early, and you’re going with me. We got one more possible water hole before Yucca Springs, but it’s well off the trail.”

  “Fargo, you damn undertaker’s tout! Off the trail? You know it’s crawlin’ with Injins out ­there—­not to mention that ­pin-­dick ­bug-­humper Alvarez.”

  A grin creased Fargo’s tired, ­sun-­darkened face. “I know. This is my best chance yet to get you killed.”

  • • •

  Jim Butler fired the word out like a bullet.

  “Fargo! You Mexers have underrated him from the get-go. He ain’t alive because his clover is deep.”

  Pablo Alvarez shook tobacco into a crimped paper. The three men had witnessed the earlier Indian attack. Now they had taken refuge in one of the dozen dugouts the Scorpion’s army had dug throughout the desert basin for caching water, food and their spoils.

  Alvarez said, “Hear how he sings now, Jemez? Hear the famous gringo pistolero change his tune? How fast and easy it was going to be! Caramba! This Fargo was already dead! But now he tells us the Trailsman is ten feet taller than God.”

  Butler’s murky, ­mud-­colored eyes registered the insult for later reference. But right now there was a much bigger problem, and it wore buckskins.

  “Pablo, we need him cold as a wagon tire, and mighty damn quick,” he said urgently. “I’ll tell the world my cousin Ham was slicker’n hot axle grease. You could catch a weasel asleep before you could bust up one of his plays. And you swear up and down that the ­turtle-­mouthed what’s-­his-­name—­Montoya—­was the same way?”

  Alvarez nodded. “That is why I made Pinchito my segundo.”

  “There you go. And yet Fargo killed both of them in that massacre at Doomed Domains. I’m telling you, boys, give him just that much chance”—he snapped his ­fingers—“and that relentless motherfucker will tear us a new one.”

  “Then go kill him,” Jemez said bluntly in his toneless voice. “You who brags how he has faced down the fastest gunmen on the frontier.”

  “He has killed some very fast men, Jemez,” the Scorpion intervened. “And Fargo is not said to be a gunfighter. But with Fargo, it is not just a race to draw first. A man must also defeat his confidence, his goading ­courage—­his ability by his very presence to will a man a coward. He destroys even the fastest man’s belief in his own ability.”

  Butler cleared his throat. “Now that’s stretching the blanket a mite,” he said. “Hell, no man alive could do to me what you just said.”

  Alvarez and Jemez exchanged amused glances. A tense, brooding glint had settled into the Scorpion’s eyes, as if he didn’t know whether to be angry or scared. But as that glint deepened, his outward manner became more polite and reasonable.

  Jim Butler assured himself he feared no man. But judging from the ­half-­breed’s wary, nervous eyes, the Scorpion’s present equanimity was even more dangerous than his rage.

  “It is clear now,” Alvarez said slowly, thinking out loud more than conversing, “that the Mojaves are not merely harassing this camel mission. I think we will wait and see how serious they are. Like us they seem determined to force the army to give up its plans. ­We—”

  “Damn it, Alvarez, you still don’t take my meaning!” Butler cut him off. “Look, I got no dicker with either one of you. But you can’t start this shit about leaving Fargo to the Indians. Either we finish the job of killing him or he carves out our livers.”

  “I said nothing about leaving Fargo to the Indians,” Alvarez said, his eyes in turmoil but his voice oddly serene. “Only that they might save us the labor of forcing the army mission to fail. That leaves us free to do two things: kill Fargo and seize Karen Bradish for ransom. And of course the woman then becomes the bait that will draw Fargo.”

  Butler mulled that. “Yeah, maybe we had it ­bass-­ackwards: thinking we couldn’t nab the bitch until we killed Fargo first. It shoulda been the other way around.”

  Alvarez nodded. “Thanks to her foolish habits, we can get her. But both of you must control your lust and violence. We must take good care of her. And no man touches her until Fargo is dead. Only then will it be safe.”

  “I don’t like that rule,” Jemez objected.

  “We have no choice,” the Scorpion insisted. “I have seen it too many times. The woman hunger gets in a man, burns in his loins. It destroys his common sense. I have seen my own men kill each other fighting over whose turn it was to top an ugly old woman. This gringa is neither old nor ugly. We will share her until she limps, but only after Fargo is dead.”

  “That’s jake by me,” Butler said, “just so the white man taps it first.”

  Again Alvarez and Jemez exchanged amused glances.

  “Do you mean,” Jemez said from a face blank as a granite wall, “the way white man Fargo has surely tapped all three women by now?”

  “Basta!” Alvarez said. “That’s enough, stags. A woman’s twat is like a common drinking ­cup—­no matter how many men drink from it, it holds its shape. We are finally using our wits. You must attack your enemy at his weakest point, and Fargo’s weakest point is women. Only look how desperate they are for ­water—­all because a woman has fooled him.”

  “Yeah, well, speaking of water,” Butler said, “you’re counting on what we done at Yucca Springs to finish them off. What if it don’t? It ain’t like Fargo never faced a tough scrape before. And this deal with counting on the red aboriginals to kill those ­camels—”

  “As for the camels, we will see how the savages perform,” the Scorpion assured him. “And Jemez has a plan for tonight. As for killing Fargo, we will do that, not thirst. He will come for the woman and that will bury him.”

  16

  A sudden flash of bright light, above them on the right, made Grizz Bear start and sit up straighter in the saddle. “See that, Fargo?”

  Fargo eyed the long rock spine. “Yeah. Could be quartz or mica. There’s plenty of reflecting mineral traces in those rocks. That’s the third flash I’ve seen.”

  “Ahuh. It’s just, I been jumpier’n a ­long-­tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs ever since you seen that glint back at the Colorado. That one was a rifle, by the Lord Harry.”

  About one hour of sunlight remained. The two men, guided by Fargo’s far from precise military map, were headed northwest from the expedition’s route. The map showed two wavy ­lines—­the symbol for ­water—­but unfortunately nothing indicated whether it was good or bad water.

  “I’ll allow as how them army mapmakers ain’t no experts ’bout water holes and such,” Grizz Bear groused. “You don’t learn that stuff in them coll
eges. But how’s come the stupid yacks don’t at least tell you if you can drink the damn stuff?”

  Fargo ignored him, sending his hearing out beyond the near distance. He constantly checked the Ovaro’s ears, often his earliest warning of danger. But Grizz Bear was in a stew.

  “Fargo, this shit ain’t none of our funeral! Alvarez or them Mojaves could be notched on us right now. We’re doing the goddamn army’s work.”

  “Yeah, and for better pay. All right, you want Robinson running this deal?”

  Grizz Bear met that with stony silence, chewing nervously on a thumbnail. Five minutes later they crested a low, barren hill.

  “There’s your water hole. Thank you, Jesus,” Grizz Bear said, his voice heavy with disgust.

  The brackish seepage pool, in which floated a badly decomposed desert fox, was crusted with salt at the edges.

  “Worse than that last one,” Fargo remarked. “That’s the whole shooting match, old son. The expedition has to hold out two more days until Yucca Springs. I’ve seen tougher scrapes. Well, we can always use the salt.”

  Fargo swung down and broke off several large chunks, stuffing them into a big fiber sack tied to the mule’s saddle horn. They reversed their dust and made the ride back at a lope, forced to spell the horses after only twenty minutes.

  “Jesus, I’m dried to jerky,” Grizz Bear complained, listening as he shook his canteen. “Fargo, you ­greedy-­gut bastard, you been snitching my water?”

  “I don’t give a damn what happens to you,” Fargo said. “You’re as bad as Jude. The minute you get your day’s ration you drink half of ­it—­and you a man of the desert. But if this stallion drops out from under me . . .”

  The suggestion was too gruesome to finish. They forked leather and, switching off between a trot and a lope, joined the camel caravan just as the sun blazed out in a fast, intense flaring of red and purple.

  Because the more severe water rationing was doubly hard on the pack mules, the camel caravan was now laying over for a ­two-­hour break halfway through the night. Robinson had doubled the usual number of picket posts but only by resorting to ­single-­man posts. Fargo preferred the greater saturation with Indians skulking around, but worried more about the isolated guards.