The Trailsman #396
Page 19
“It is we,” Fontaine was still pontificating, “who are the keepers of the gate. We form the pillars of society, not a man who sleeps belowdecks with his horse and carries a vicious knife in his boot like a common Smoky Row thug.”
Fargo, still watching out across the countless swirls and eddies of the river, spoke up in a bored tone.
“Hey, Fontaine?”
“What?” he snapped as if Fargo were his misbehaving houseboy.
“Did you hear about the two maggots that were making love in dead Ernest?”
Despite being the supposed pillars of Southern society, almost every man in the room burst out laughing at the crude barracks-room joke. Fontaine, however, affected a dignified shock.
“My God you are a primitive, depraved—”
“That’s all gas work. You know why I despise a poncy-man like you? It’s not your jelly belly or your perfumed hair or that whorehouse rouge on your cheeks. It’s the way you hot-jaw me like you’ve got a real set on you, knowing that if I hit you I’ll be called a woman beater.”
Fontaine’s face discovered a new shade of purple as laughter rippled through the cabin. However, the dealer, Caleb Dupree, also deeply resented Fargo. He frowned and snapped, “This is a card game, not a cockfight.”
There . . . Fargo squinted as if gnats were in his eyes, then raised the binoculars again. There was the black plume. Suddenly the rider reached a momentary break in the riverbank growth. For perhaps one second Fargo spotted the horse, a big cream with a black mane and tail. But he barely glimpsed the rider.
It was nothing to fret. Less than spider leavings. But when Fargo spotted a metallic glint, a tight bubble swelled fast in his stomach and his back broke out in cool sweat.
“Hit the deck!” he bellowed. “Everybody hit the deck now!”
Even as he raised the warning, however, the sound of the hidden marksman’s weapon must have been absorbed by the river commotion and the paddlewheels’ thrashing. But there was no mistaking the liquid, bursting sound before the barber dropped like a stone.
“Suffering Moses!”
The serving woman’s tray crashed to the floor and she stared in wordless horror at the pebbly clots of bloody brain matter splattering the fancy fleur-de-lis wallpaper.