Death Valley Vengeance

by James Reasoner

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Teaser chapter

  A FINE HOW-DO-YOU-DO

  “Did you say your name was Skye Fargo? The one they call the Trailsman?”

  He started to turn, about to acknowledge the name that had been hung on him, when he saw the smoky light from the lanterns hung around the tent glinting on the blade of a knife coming at his throat.

  Fargo’s instincts took over, throwing him to the side so that the knife passed harmlessly by his shoulder. The miss threw the man wielding it off-balance. As he struggled to catch himself and bring the blade around in a backhand slash, Fargo drove an elbow into the side of his head. The man went down as people yelled and got out of his way.

  The heel of one of Fargo’s high-topped boots came down on the wrist of the man’s knife hand, pinning it to the hard-packed dirt floor. Fargo bent over and plucked the knife from the man’s fingers.

  Straightening, Fargo palmed out his Colt and covered the man on the ground. “That was a mighty unfriendly thing to do,” he said.

  SIGNET

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

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  First Printing, January 2005

  Copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2005

  All rights reserved

  The first chapter of this volume originally appeared in Mountain Manhunt, the two hundred seventy-eighth volume in this series.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  The Trailsman

  Beginnings . . . they bend the tree and they mark the man. Skye Fargo was born when he was eighteen. Terror was his midwife, vengeance his first cry. Killing spawned Skye Fargo, ruthless, cold-blooded murder. Out of the acrid smoke of gunpowder still hanging in the air, he rose, cried out a promise never forgotten.

  The Trailsman they began to call him all across the West: searcher, scout, hunter, the man who could see where others only looked, his skills for hire but not his soul, the man who lived each day to the fullest, yet trailed each tomorrow. Skye Fargo, the Trailsman, the seeker who could take the wildness of a land and the wanting of a woman and make them his own.

  Death Valley, 1860—

  a landscape halfway to hell,

  where some are as wicked as the devil

  1

  The big man in buckskins rode down the single street of the mining camp. His lake-blue eyes were alert for trouble. These boom camps were known for sudden outbreaks of violence, and Skye Fargo didn’t figure this one would be any exception.

  He reined the magnificent black-and-white Ovaro stallion to a halt in front of a sprawling tent saloon. It was early evening, with the red glow of the recently departed sun still in the sky above the Panamint Mountains to the west, but the saloon was already doing a bustling business.

  Fargo swung down out of the saddle and with an outstretched hand stopped one of the prospectors hurrying toward the saloon.

  “Pardon me, friend,” Fargo said. “Does this settlement have a name?”

  The man paused but licked his lips impatiently as he glanced toward the tent saloon. “Blackwater, they call it,” he replied. “After Blackwater Wash.”

  Fargo nodded and said, “Obliged.” He let the prospector hurry on into the saloon to get on with his drinking.

  Instead of going inside himself, Fargo led the stallion on down the street toward a corral made of pine poles cut from the trees that grew higher up on the slopes of the mountains. A much smaller tent sat in front of the corral, and a man perched in front of the tent on a three-legged stool, sipping from a cup of coffee. He nodded pleasantly as Fargo walked up.

  “Evenin’, mister. Somethin’ I can do for you?”

  Fargo patted the Ovaro’s shoulder. “I’d like to put my horse up for the night.”

  The man looked at the stallion and let out a low whistle of admiration. “That’s one fine piece of horseflesh, mister,” he said. “It’d be an honor to have him in my corral. Cost you four bits, though, honor or not.”

  “That include a rubdown and some grain and water?”

  “Sure.” The man stood up and moved closer.

  “Careful,” Fargo advised. “Let him get used to you while I’m still here. Otherwise he’s a mite touchy.”

  “One-man horse, eh?” The corral owner reached out, let the Ovaro smell his hand, and then rubbed the horse’s nose. “Seems to take to me all right.”

  “He can usually tell when somebody’s friendly.” Fargo handed over the reins. “I reckon you stay close by all night?”

  “Right there in that tent. If you’re worried about horse thieves, mister, there ain’t no need. Most of the men around here are a lot more interested in gold and silver than they are in horses. This is probably the finest animal I’ve ever seen in Blackwater, but I’ll bet not half a dozen fellas even noticed that when you rode into town.”

  Fargo nodded. “That’s all right with me.” He wasn’t looking to attract any attention.

  He had come to Blackwater on business, though, and now he was ready to get on with it. He gave the corral man a couple of coins, then walked back down the street to the saloon.

  The only sign in front of the place consisted of a couple of boards nailed together in
a cross shape and hammered into the ground. The word whiskey was hand-lettered on the crosspiece. Paint had run down from the letters and dried.

  Fargo pushed back the canvas flap over the entrance and stepped inside. The saloon was crowded and noisy, the air blue-hazed with smoke. Rough planks laid across barrels formed the bar. Men lined up in front of it for drinks. Poker games went on at a few crudely made tables.

  Fargo had seen similar places dozens of times in his travels across the West. In the little more than ten years since the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, mining camps had sprung up all over California and in other states and territories, too. Fargo had visited many of them.

  Not because he was a prospector, however. He had done some mining in his time, but that wasn’t what drove him. He was more of a drifter, a man who had a talent for finding and following trails that was unsurpassed on the frontier. He had scouted for the army, guided wagon trains, and taken other jobs that involved following or blazing trails.

  Now he had come to Blackwater because someone had gotten word to him through an army colonel he knew, asking Fargo to meet him here and promising a payment of three hundred dollars just to listen to a proposition. Fargo was willing to invest the time it had taken to get here. He hadn’t had anything better to do at the moment.

  Even though he enjoyed a good game of poker, he wasn’t interested in cards right now. Whiskey was a different story. He could use something to cut the dust after the long, dry ride. He headed toward the bar, threading his way through the crowd.

  It was late spring, and already the temperatures on the broad salt flat east of the Panamints known as Death Valley were approaching one hundred degrees during the days. At night, though, the air cooled off rapidly and could be downright cold. At the moment it wasn’t too bad, dry but not unpleasant. The wind was from the west, carrying the stink of the salt flats away from the settlement.

  When Fargo finally edged up to the bar, he found himself facing a burly, red-faced bartender with sweeping mustaches. “What can I do you for, friend?” the man wanted to know.

  “Whiskey,” Fargo said, and remembering that bar-tenders were usually the best source of information in a town, he added, “I’m looking for a gent named Slauson. Know him?”

  “Can’t say as I do,” the bartender replied as he splashed liquor from a bottle into a smudged glass. He shoved the glass across the plank bar. “That’ll be a dollar.”

  Fargo thought the price was a mite high but didn’t complain. Prices were always high in mining camps. That was just part of the boom. He handed over a coin and tossed back the drink. The whiskey was rotgut, but it cut the dust.

  “No idea where I can find the man I’m looking for?”

  The bartender shook his head. “Another?”

  “No, thanks.” The letter Fargo had gotten had specified a meeting here, but that didn’t mean the mysterious J. N. Slauson had informed any of the locals about it. Slauson might have Fargo’s description and be planning on approaching him, given time. The letter had said to be here if possible sometime during the last two weeks of May, and today’s date was May 20.

  Fargo turned away from the bar, intending to drift around the room and let himself be seen if anybody was looking for him. It occurred to him that the whole thing might be a trap—there were people who would like nothing better than to see him dead—but he was willing to risk it.

  He had taken only a few steps when someone ran into him heavily from the side. “Hey!” a rough voice exclaimed. “Watch where you’re goin’, damn it!”

  “You ran into me,” Fargo pointed out as he faced a tall, brawny man in a battered old hat. The man’s dark beard was liberally laced with gray.

  “The hell I did!” the man said angrily. He lifted knobby-knuckled fists.

  Trap, a small voice said again in the back of Fargo’s head. And he had walked right into it.

  Before the angry prospector could swing at Fargo, though, another voice said sharply, “Gyp, what are you doing?”

  The man looked around with a frown and said, “This fella ran into me!”

  “Are you sure about that?” A much smaller man stepped up beside him and continued in a reasonable voice. “You know you have a habit of not watching where you’re going. Is it possible you ran into him?”

  The big man snatched his hat off and scratched at the thatch of graying dark hair on his head. “Well, yeah, I reckon it’s possible,” he said reluctantly.

  “Then you shouldn’t try to hit him,” the smaller man said. “In fact, you should probably apologize.”

  “Do I gotta?”

  The smaller man sighed. “It would be the polite thing to do.”

  “Well . . . all right.” The big man turned back to Fargo and stuck out a grimy paw. “I’m sorry, mister. I didn’t mean to start no trouble.”

  “That’s all right,” Fargo told him as he shook hands. He looked at the smaller man, who was also dressed like a prospector in well-worn but neat overalls, a flannel shirt, and a bowler hat that was pushed back to reveal thinning sandy hair.

  “My friend here is Gypsum Dailey,” the man introduced himself. “My name is Frank Jordan.”

  Fargo shook hands with him as well. “Skye Fargo.”

  The big man laughed and said, “Frank says I should have been a confidence man, ’cause I got the right name for it. Gyp Some Daily—you get it?”

  Fargo smiled and nodded. Clearly, this was an accidental encounter after all, and not a trap as he had suspected for a moment.

  “They just call me that, though, on account of I used to work in a gypsum mine.”

  “Makes sense,” Fargo said with a nod. He got the impression that Gypsum Dailey was a little slow in the head. Maybe that was why Frank Jordan had partnered up with him, to sort of look out for him. And as big as Gypsum was, he would be a good worker to have around a mining claim, too.

  Jordan said, “Can we buy you a drink, Mr. Fargo, to maybe make up for that little unpleasantness?”

  Fargo shook his head. “No need for that. Your friend didn’t cause any harm.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Fargo nodded. “I appreciate the offer, anyway.”

  “All right, then.” Jordan put a hand on Gypsum’s arm. “Come on, we need to head back to the claim before it gets too much later.”

  “Sure.” Gypsum lifted a hamlike hand in farewell.

  “Be seein’ you, mister,” he said to Fargo.

  Fargo gave the men a friendly nod and watched as they made their way to the saloon’s entrance and stepped outside. He was about to move over and watch a few hands in one of the poker games when a voice said behind him, “Did you say your name was Skye Fargo? The one they call the Trailsman?”

  He started to turn, about to acknowledge the name that had been hung on him, when he saw the smoky light from the lanterns hung around the tent glinting on the blade of a knife coming at his throat.

  Fargo’s instincts took over, throwing him to the side so that the knife passed harmlessly by his shoulder. The miss threw the man wielding it off-balance. As he struggled to catch himself and bring the blade around in a backhand slash, Fargo drove an elbow into the side of his head. The man went down as people yelled and got out of his way.

  The heel of one of Fargo’s high-topped boots came down on the wrist of the man’s knife hand, pinning it to the hard-packed dirt floor. Fargo bent over and plucked the knife from the man’s fingers.

  Straightening, Fargo palmed out his Colt and covered the man on the ground. “That was a mighty unfriendly thing to do,” he said.

  The man was a stranger to Fargo. Young, rat-faced, and dirty, he looked like a typical hardcase. He stared wide-eyed at the muzzle of the revolver in Fargo’s hand, then swallowed and said, “Go ahead, shoot me. Kill me just like you killed my brother, you son of a bitch.”

  Fargo shook his head. “I don’t know you. Who was your brother?”

  “Arnie Tyler. You shot him in Santa Fe last year.”


  “Sorry, I don’t recollect who you’re talking about. If I shot your brother, though, I reckon he must’ve tried to shoot me first.”

  The young man sneered. “Yeah, that’d be your story, all right. Big hero. But you’re really nothin’ but a murderin’ bastard.”

  Fargo was getting a little weary of this youngster’s abuse. He said, “If I was a murderer, I wouldn’t think twice about blowing your head off right now, would I?”

  He looked around at the saloon’s other customers. They had fallen silent and were watching to see how this drama was going to play out.

  “Any law in this settlement?” Fargo asked.

  “None to speak of, mister,” the bartender called over from behind the planks. “Deputy from the county seat gets by here maybe once a month.”

  Another man spoke up, saying, “Nobody would think much of it if you were to go ahead and shoot this young scoundrel, mister. We all saw him take that knife after you.”

  The young man’s eyes widened a little more. Clearly he expected Fargo to fire at any moment.

  Instead, Fargo stepped back and holstered the Colt. He said, “Stand up and get out of here. I’ll leave your knife with the bartender. You can come back and get it later, when I’m not here.”

  “You . . . you’re not gonna shoot me?”

  “Nope. Not unless you’re an idiot and want to push this farther. I’m sorry your brother’s dead, but I don’t make a habit of shooting people unless they leave me no other choice.”

  The youngster rolled over, pushed himself up on hands and knees, and then came to his feet. He cast a furtive glare at Fargo and shuffled toward the entrance, muttering under his breath as he went. He slapped the canvas aside and disappeared into the night.

  Fargo hoped he hadn’t made a mistake by letting him go. He would have to watch his back while he was here in Blackwater.

  But then, he did that all the time anyway, since he was sort of fond of staying alive.

  Shaking his head, he started toward the bar. He had decided that another drink didn’t sound like such a bad idea after all. The noise level in the saloon went back up, now that it was obvious there wasn’t going to be any gunplay, at least not right away.