by Jon Sharpe
“Leastways they ain’t killed us yet,” Grizz Bear said. “But this old hoss can’t take too much more standing in that damn sun.”
Twenty minutes later five Mojave warriors—not one of them under six feet tall—emerged like wavering heat mirages over the front line of dunes. Four of them carried their mesquite hardwood skull-crackers. Tasenko, the chief wearing yellow-piped cavalry trousers and a red headband, was unarmed.
They stopped ten feet in front of the two white men. Tasenko, appearing to be riled at Grizz Bear, addressed him loudly in the Mojave tongue. Grizz Bear, speaking haltingly and occasionally resorting to sign language, conversed with him for a minute.
“He says he recognized me just as they were nigh to killing us,” Grizz Bear translated.
“Why’s he so pissed at you?” Fargo asked.
“Ahh . . . he’s got him some half-ass notion I spied on Mojave girls whilst they was bathing.”
Fargo shook his head in disgust. “Yeah, now I see why you don’t stand in thick with him. If that gets us killed . . .”
“He asked who you are. That’s how’s come they’re all glomming you . . . they know all about the Trailsman, the paleface asshole with the pretty teeth.”
Tasenko, his face harsh as his tone, fired off something else, gesturing toward the dunes behind him.
“He says his warriors are spoiling for a fight. Tasenko says me’n you can leave and take the women with us. But he means to slaughter the camels and the pony soldiers and take all the supplies.”
“That’s mighty white of him to let us go. Have you asked him if there might be some other way to arrange this besides a battle?”
Grizz Bear spoke and Tasenko replied in a scornful tone.
“He wants to know what other way could possibly be better for him.”
Fargo whipped the poker deck out of his pocket, then turned to point toward a huge pile of supplies Robinson had ordered the soldiers to stack at the edge of camp. A camp table and two chairs sat next to the pile under a canvas tarp to block the sun.
Tasenko’s eyes widened and brightened at sight of the deck. Fargo pulled the pasteboards out and riffled them loudly.
“Tell him,” Fargo said, “one hand wins it all. This is better than a victory by his warriors. If he wins, the skill is his and his alone. Tell him that for generations to come Mojaves and other tribes will sing of his great victory over the whiteskins at their own big-medicine game. No other red man between where the sun rises and sets can make this boast.”
Grizz Bear chuckled. “Fargo, you do know Injins.”
He did his best to translate Fargo’s words. Tasenko’s bronze face registered nothing, but Fargo thought he detected a spark of interest in the chief’s eyes. He’s death on poker, Grizz Bear had claimed and Fargo hoped like hell that was true.
Tasenko said something and Grizz Bear translated. “He wants your terms.”
“If he wins, all the piled-up supplies and the glory are his, but the caravan gets safe passage. If I win, we get safe passage and we keep the supplies.”
“He don’t like it none,” Grizz Bear said after translating for the chief. “If he wins you still get something. If you win he gets squat.”
“Lower your voice when you tell him,” Fargo told Grizz Bear, “that I’m not likely to win. And remind him that even if he wins a fighting battle, he must face many wailing widows and orphans.”
Tasenko mulled this then spoke briefly with his companions. He turned to Fargo. “Play,” he said in English.
Each man spit on his right palm and shook hands. Twenty minutes later Fargo and the Chief of the River People had squared off against each other over the folding canvas table. Tasenko had brought up forty warriors to stand nearby, with nearly that many again in reserve twenty yards behind them.
Fargo started to deal but Tasenko protested.
“He wants to cut the cards,” Grizz Bear explained.
Fargo set the deck in front of him. Tasenko picked it up, sorted through it, and selected the jack of diamonds. He placed it in front of him and gave the deck back to Fargo, who glanced curiously at Grizz Bear.
“I told you he don’t savvy the damn rules,” the old salt explained. “He always takes that jack out like that. He don’t put it in play—it’s his totem or some such.”
Fargo dealt out five cards apiece facedown. Tasenko immediately flipped his own cards faceup in plain view as if proud of them. Never batting an eye, Fargo casually announced, “Follow suit,” and did the same—as if it were the rule and didn’t everybody know that?
Fargo carefully studied Tasenko’s hand then his own.
“Damn!” Fargo finally swore reluctantly. “This heap big chief just whipped my ass. He’s got three red cards and two black. That’s the top hand in poker.”
Grizz Bear translated this. To Fargo’s surprise the two men began arguing hotly.
“What’s the hitch?” Fargo said.
“Fargo, you just shoved our tits in the wringer. He claims I taught him that four black and one red card is the top hand—and that makes you the winner.”
“Did you tell him that?”
“Hell, likely I did. I just made it up as I went along.”
Tasenko, already steamed over his poker loss, grew suspicious of all this talk he couldn’t follow. He lifted a hand over his head and the twenty archers nearby nocked their deadly barbed arrows.
Robinson and the troops had been staying discreetly back as Fargo had requested, weapons hidden. Now the sergeant’s bullhorn voice roared out, “At the ready!” Both sides were one quick command away from a bloodletting.
Fargo abruptly laughed. “Hell, Grizz, just explain the rule—you know, how the top hand changes with the phases of the moon?”
Grizz Bear grinned. “Yeah, that’s so, ain’t it? I plumb forgot.”
The unarmed Trailsman crossed mental fingers while Grizz Bear sold this hokum to the chief. Tasenko mulled this for a few moments and then nodded, well satisfied with this quite sensible rule. After all, did not the moon affect men’s behavior and even dictate success in battle?
Besides, the crafty leader reasoned, he was now the winner—an Indian hero who had beat the paleface hero at poker. The word would spread even to the northern tribes.
Tasenko lifted one hand again and the warriors lowered their bows. Then he glanced at the generous pile of food, clothing and other supplies. Perhaps, after all, he knew this white man had let him win. But Tasenko had saved face with his people and lost only one man.
For a moment his eyes met Fargo’s and a glimmer of understanding passed between them.
“Damn that Indian,” Fargo fumed, still feigning anger. “He slickered us good.”
• • •
Several weeks after the fateful “poker showdown” in the Mojave the U.S. Army Camel Corps made a triumphal arrival parade through cheering throngs in the dusty pueblo of Los Angeles. Soon afterward they were encamped in the new camel outpost in the nearby San Fernando Valley.
With the Scorpion dead and the Indian threat neatly sidestepped, the caravan had gone on to successfully resupply several more remote outposts and settlements. They had taken on water again at Weeping Woman Springs near Joshua Tree, the last destination before they wound their way through the San Bernardino Pass and down onto the coastal plain of California.
For Fargo it was a tonic to once again hear the first birds celebrating dawn, to feel the cool ocean winds and see bright green slopes with dazzling white flashes of Queen Anne’s lace. Karen safely rejoined her brother in Los Angeles, and Fargo himself escorted Rosalinda to her family’s rancho in nearby Placerita Canyon. Bobbie Lou had been turned over to the U.S. marshal in Los Angeles awaiting federal indictment.
Word came down that Lieutenant Ed Beale would soon be joining the Camel Corps again after
successfully petitioning the War Department to finance the venture for one more year. But Fargo didn’t plan to be around when his old friend arrived. First he intended to enjoy a well-earned loafing spell until he went broke and had to scrounge up more work.
Grizz Bear, swearing he’d rather stick his face in a Digger Indian’s ass than ever work for the consarn army again, rode out at dawn on the first morning after the Corps went into quarters in San Fernando.
“You heading out too, Deke?” Fargo asked the hash-slinger as he tacked the Ovaro in front of a low stable.
“Me? Hell, Skye, I’m as poor and common as your Uncle Bill and crippled into the deal. If I don’t work I don’t live. I plan to keep scraping the gravy skillet—signed on for another six months. Robinson is acting like a damn human being now, and with Beale back it won’t be so bad.”
Juan Salazar was also rigging his mule, planning to return to ranch work in northern Mexico. He crossed the corral toward Fargo and shook his hand.
“Fargo, I left a good job in Nogales with the foolish idea I could somehow get revenge against the Scorpion. But I lack the skills and could never have done so.”
He paused, mustered a weak smile and then actually met Fargo square in the eyes for a moment. “But I thank God a better man was along. Now I know Alvarez is dead and no angels are weeping for him.”
Fifteen minutes later Salazar and a few other Mexican hands rode out together.
“Skye,” Deke said, “are them silly damn camels ever gonna catch on in this country?”
Fargo thought about that one as he gazed at the imperturbable animals milling in their corral. The expedition had blazed a new supply route and the army had learned the considerable advantages of camels over mules and horses—as well as the dangerous drawbacks due to the animals’ unpredictable, rebellious nature.
Newspapers were already ballyhooing the exotic animals and their amazing qualities. But they always glossed over or ignored the Mojave Desert itself—the vast, windswept void that had become the final resting place for some on this journey, including three young soldiers just doing their duty.
“Deke,” he finally replied as he swung up and over, “I don’t much give a damn either way. My horse can’t go ten days without water, but at least when he bites me on the ass his teeth are dull.”
“What’s your plans now? More army work?”
“I been thinking on that,” Fargo replied solemnly. “I’ve decided I’m gonna open up a barbershop, whorehouse, saloon and undertaker’s parlor all on one stick. That way a man can get groomed, screwed, snockered and buried under one roof.”
Deke shook with silent laughter. Fargo grinned, tossed him a two-fingered salute and gigged the Ovaro into the golden explosion of the morning sun.
LOOKING FORWARD!
The following is the opening
section of the next novel in the exciting
Trailsman series from Signet:
TRAILSMAN #397
RIVERBOAT RECKONING
Aboard the Creole Queen, Louisiana, 1860—where Skye Fargo has only days to avert massive slaughter in the region that’s “half horse, half alligator.”
“Women are morbid damn creatures,” opined Justin Breaux, a gentleman gambler from Lake Charles, Louisiana. “Tell them your best friend has committed suicide and they’ll never ask why, only how, for they instinctively wonder how messy it was and who in the world had to clean it up.”
“I’d call that being practical,” spoke up the dealer, “not morbid. Women are an uneven cocktail of useful practicality and silly sentimentality. What say you, Fargo? You’re a knockabout single man with an impressive history of conquests.”
“Topping venereal-tainted squaws on the side of a hill,” cut in Abbot Fontaine, an acid-tongued, heavy-jowled man with foppish side whiskers, “is hardly a conquest.”
In the momentary lull following Fontaine’s snide remark, Fargo listened to the Creole Queen’s two huge side-paddles, forty feet in diameter and the most powerful on the river, churn the mighty and muddy Mississippi into froth. The sound of the blades slicing into the water reminded him of a big hall clock ominously ticking off the seconds.
“Abbot,” Breaux said good-naturedly, “this line of attack will ill behoove you. Squaws? Skye Fargo has bedded beautiful women who can buy and sell both of us.”
“Oh, I’ve taken squaws in the grass, too,” Fargo chipped in over his shoulder from the opposite side of the Gentleman’s Cabin. “You’ve not seen beauty until you’ve glommed a Crow or Cheyenne woman naked.”
Fargo spoke these words absently, paying little attention to the poker game behind him or the foolish conversation meant to distract from all the cheating going on at the table.
The crop-bearded frontiersman looked as out of place as a duck in the desert. His fringed buckskins, knot-and-dip red bandanna and white plainsman’s hat seemed to glare among the fancy frock coats and ruffled silk shirts. And the deep, nut-brown tan clashed markedly with these pale-skinned men of privilege. For them, tanned skin was a mark of social and financial failure.
The shutters of a large breezeway had been thrown open on the starboard side of the riverboat to provide a wide view of the storied river that formed the eastern boundary of the frontier. It was late morning and the Queen was thirty miles upriver of New Orleans.
Fargo carefully scanned the floating traffic. The river was chockablock with steamboats, barges, keelboats, flatboats, skiffs, rafts and the dugout canoes called pirogues. Pure white egrets dotted the swampy backwaters of the west bank like randomly tossed cotton bolls. Fargo occasionally glimpsed mud-daubed dwellings with thatched roofs, many raised on rickety stilts.
One slip, he reminded himself, one wrong guess, one missed clue and he could find himself on the wrong side of the grass—permanently. And hundreds more, now debauching in blissful ignorance all around him, might be joining him.
“Plague take it!” cursed one of the gamblers. “A straight open at both ends and I can’t fill it. Gentlemen, I yield the field,” he added, folding.
Following the request of his new employer, Fargo had boarded the Creole Queen at her northernmost dock in Louisiana. She was currently the prime example of the luxurious floating palaces now plying the river daily. Such riverboats were seldom used as practical transportation. Some were discreet, convenient, floating dens of elegant iniquity for the very upper crust of society.
The decks were interlaced with teak and mahogany, many of the lavishly furnished saloons and cabins carpeted with velvet pile. An elderly black woman in a mobcap and crisp white apron circulated around the spacious cabin carrying a serving tray filled with all sorts of delicacies and several boxes of fine Havana cigars.
Overhead, cane-inlaid ceiling fans twirled, ingeniously powered by a system of gears driven by the paddlewheels. The steamboat’s barber, a free man of color named Levi Mosby, was on call to shave any passenger anywhere on board. At present he was sculpting the pointed Vandyke beard of a portly customer in a chair near the cabin entrance.
For Fargo, however, even amid such opulence and elegance, it was his job once again to stir up the sewage. The Creole Queen and the river formed one more dangerous environment that needed to be scouted more thoroughly than he had time to do.
Abbot Fontaine, drunk and getting drunker, watched Fargo raise binoculars to study the riverbank.
“There he stands in all his buckskin glory, gentlemen,” he announced, “as big and bold as Billy-be-damned! Ensconced among the paying passengers and bulling his way into our Inner Sanctum.”
“I rather think there’s a good and official reason why Mr. Fargo is here,” Breaux gainsaid. “Although he’s certainly keeping it quiet.”
“Yes, and no doubt a violent reason. I detest violence.”
“It can be overdone,” Fargo agreed a
bsently, eyes scouring the thickly tangled growth beyond the riverbank. “But I tend to enjoy it. Adds a little savor to life.”
Fargo liked goading Fontaine, and now the offended man—widely known as King Cotton—emptied his brandy snifter too quickly.
“Yes, of course. You are the hale and hearty Western man who would sit in an uncomfortable chair for hours and never once cross your legs—that might cast doubt on your manhood.”
Fargo quickly fine-focused the spyglasses. Something had caught his eye among a clump of blackberry brambles.
There . . . there it was again . . . a black plume bobbing in and out of view. . . .
“Abbot,” Justin Breaux objected, “your constant harping on Fargo is childish and tiresome. Frankly, he deserves more respect.”
It’s a black-plumed hat, Fargo finally realized. And it was bobbing up and down, most likely, because whoever wore it was riding a horse.
“Childish and tiresome, is it?” Fontaine retorted, his dignity offended. “Well, Justin, a hungry dog must eat dirty pudding. His kind does not belong here.”
“‘His kind’ is more unique than our kind. We are merely the idle rich and our kind is the same everywhere. That certainly isn’t true for Fargo.”
Nothing at all unusual about a man in a black-plumed hat riding along a riverbank, Fargo thought. Not a damn thing wrong with it. But it began to canker at him—why did the rider seem to be keeping perfect pace with the Queen?
“I do not deny Fargo’s much-ballyhooed manly prowess,” Fontaine huffed as he tossed a discard into the deadwood pile, “although we have no proof it is anything but newspaper hokum. But I repeat: he does not belong here. The law of social subordination is clear and long established. And Southern gentlemen who violate that law are no more refined than darkies or mudsill whites or savage Indians.”
“We are all erring sons of erring men,” Justin Breaux said, trying to smooth the irate kingpin’s ruffled feathers.
Fargo lost sight of the plume when the late-morning sun ducked behind a scud of clouds, turning the surface of the river into a flat sheet the color of wet slate. He chided himself for feeling the jimjams over such a mundane thing as a man riding a horse.
