by Jon Sharpe
Colorado Clash
( The Trailsman - 334 )
Jon Sharpe
When Skye Fargo comes across a dead man near the town of Cawthorne, he figures he'll bring the body to town for burial. But he learns soon enough that dying has been real easy to do in Cawthorne lately. Someone in town has developed a taste for murder-and the Trailsman might just be the next course...
HANDS OFF
Kenny was faster than Fargo expected. The man’s right hand dropped to his holster, the .45 started gleaming in the light of the Rochester lamps and—
And in a single swift move, Fargo spun back toward the bar, grabbed the whiskey bottle by the neck and hurled it at the other man’s gun hand. The bottle smashed so hard against Kenny’s hand that his shot went wild as he squeezed it off. He stood there looking confused and angry, as if some diabolical magician’s trick had just been played on him.
Then he made a move so dumb Fargo gave up coddling him. Drunk as he was, Kenny dove in the direction of the .45 that had been knocked from his hand and then skidded a few feet away.
Fargo had put two bullets in Kenny’s gun hand before the man was even close enough to his weapon to retrieve it.
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.
Colorado, 1861—three men dead, a town filled
with ugly secrets and Fargo trying to stay alive long enough
to learn the truth.
1
Skye Fargo might not have found the body if he hadn’t decided to stop by the creek and fill his canteen.
Late September in Colorado was a melancholy time with the thinness of the afternoon sunlight and the snow-peaked mountains looking cold and aloof.
Ground-tying his big Ovaro stallion, Fargo grabbed his canteen from his saddle and walked through buffalo grass until he came to the narrow, winding creek. The water was clean. He hunched down next to it, opening his canteen. A jay cried. Fargo looked over to see what the hell was wrong with the damned bird.
And that was when he saw, sticking out from behind a ponderosa pine to his right, a pair of boots. Easy to assume that attached to those boots was a body.
He finished filling his canteen before getting up and walking through the smoky air to stand over the remains of what appeared to be a teenager of maybe sixteen, seventeen years. From the denim shirt and Levi’s and chaps, Fargo figured that the kid had been a drover. Cattle were getting to be a big business around here.
The birds had already been at him pretty good. The cheeks reminded Fargo of a leper he’d once seen. One of the eyes had been pecked in half. Dried blood spread over the front of the kid’s shirt. Hard to tell how long the kid had been here. Fargo figured a long day at least. The three bullets had done their job.
He found papers in the kid’s back pocket identifying him as Clete Byrnes, an employee of the Bar DD and a member of the Cawthorne, Colorado, Lutheran Church. Cawthorne was a good-sized town a mile north of here. That was where Fargo had been headed.
He stood up, his knees cracking, and rolled himself a smoke. He’d seen his share of death over the years and by now he was able to see it without letting it shake him. The West was a dangerous place and if bullets weren’t killing people then diseases were. But the young ones got to him sometimes. All their lives ahead of them, cut down so soon.
The cigarette tasted good, the aroma killing some of the stench of the kid’s body.
Not far away was a soddie. He walked toward it and called out. Then he went to the door but there was no answer.
He went back to his Ovaro, untied his blanket and carried it back to the corpse. He spread the blanket out on the grass and started the process of rolling the body on it. Something sparkled in the grass. He leaned over and picked it up. A small silver button with a heart stamped on it. Something from a woman’s coat. He dropped it into his pocket.
When the blanket was wrapped tight, he hefted the body up on his shoulder and carried it over to the stallion. He slung it across the animal’s back and grabbed the rope. A few minutes later the kid was cinched tight and Fargo was swinging up in the saddle.
Two minutes later he was on his way to Cawthorne.
2
Karen Byrnes had no more than opened the door and stepped inside when she saw the frown on Sheriff Tom Cain’s face. She knew she was a nuisance and she really didn’t give a damn.
A regional newspaper had once called Sheriff Cain “the handsomest lawman in the region.” Much as she disliked the man, she had to give him his bearing and looks. Sitting now behind his desk in his usual black suit, white shirt and black string tie, the gray-haired man had the noble appearance of a Roman senator. It was said that he’d always looked this age, fifty or so, even when he was only thirty. It was also said that many gunfighters had mistaken the man’s premature gray for a slowing of his abilities. He’d killed well over two dozen men in his time.
The office was orderly: a desk, gun racks on the east wall, WANTED posters on the right. The windows were clean, the brass spittoon gleamed and the wood stacked next to the pot-bellied stove fit precisely into the wooden box. Tom Cain was famous for keeping things neat. People kidded him about it all the time.
The hard blue eyes assessed Karen now. She tried to dismiss their effect on her. Somehow even a glance from Cain made her feel like a stupid child who was wasting his time.
“There’s no news, Karen.”
“Been two days, Tom.”
“I realize it’s been two days, Karen.”
“They found the other two right away.”
“Pure luck. That’s how things work out sometimes.”
She had planned to let her anger go this time. She would confront him with the fact that if her brother Clete was dead that would make three young men who had been murdered in Cawthorne within the past month. And the legendary town tamer Tom Cain hadn’t been able to do a damned thing about it. The father of one of the victims had stood up at a town council meeting and accused Cain of not being up to the task of finding the killer. He had immediately been dragged out of the meeting. In Cawthorne nobody insulted Tom Cain. When he’d come here four years ago nobody had been safe. Two warring gangs of outlaws held the town for ransom. Many of the citizens had started to pack up their things and leave. To the shock and pleasure of everybody, Cain had needed only five months to set the gangs to running. Eleven of them were buried in the local cemetery. It was downright sacrilegious to insult Tom Cain.
“My mother’s dying, Tom. You know that. Her heart’s bad enough—if we don’t find Clete—”
He stood up, straightened his suit coat and came around the desk. Just as he reached her she began to cry, something she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do. He gathered her up and took her to him, her pretty face reaching well below his neck. He let her cry and she resented it and appreciated it at the same time.
“We’re all just so scared, Tom. Especially my mother.”
His massive hand cupped the back of the small blond head and pressed it to him.
“I’m going to find him, Karen. I promise you that. And I’m going to find out who killed the other ones, too. I haven’t had
any luck yet but I think that’s going to change.”
She leaned away from him, looked up into the handsome face. “Did you find out something?”
“I don’t want to say anything just yet, Karen. I don’t want to have bad luck by talking about it.”
Despite the situation, she smiled. That was another thing they always said about Tom Cain. Him and his damned superstitions.
“Excuse me,” said the slim older deputy Pete Rule, coming through the door that separated the four cells in back from the front office. Rule wore a faded work shirt. A star was pinned to one of the pockets. There was a melancholy about Rule that Karen had always wondered about. Cain’s other deputies were basically gunslingers. She wondered why somebody as quiet and often gentle as Rule would have signed on. “Afternoon, Karen.”
“Hello, Pete,” she said, slipping from Cain’s arms. She’d liked Rule ever since she’d seen him jump into a rushing river and pluck out a two-year-old girl who’d wandered into it.
“We’ll find him, Karen,” Rule said. “That’s a promise.”
Karen nodded, a bit embarrassed now that she’d been so angry.
“You tell your mother she’s in my prayers,” Cain said.
“Thanks for helping us. If you weren’t here—” She felt tears dampen her eyes again.
“You better go get yourself one of those pieces of apple pie that Mrs. Gunderson’s serving over to the café for dinner tonight,” Cain said. “She snuck me a slice and I’ll tell you I felt better about things right away. And I suspect she’d let you take a piece home for your mother, too.”
At the door, she said, “If you hear anything—”
“We’ll be at your door ten seconds after we get any kind of word at all.”
She nodded to each of them and then left.
“I know one thing,” Rule said. “He ain’t alive. He’s just like them other two.”
“Yeah,” Cain said, almost bitterly. “And when we find him, I’ll be the one who has to tell her.”
A little girl in a dress made of feed sacks was the first resident of Cawthorne to see the body of Clete Byrnes. She had just finished shooing her little brother inside for supper when she turned at the sound of a horse and there, passing right by her tiny front yard was a big man on a stallion just now entering the town limits. She knew that there was a man in the blanket tied across the horse because she could see his boots. She wondered if this was Clete Byrnes. Her dad knew Byrnes from the days when he’d worked out at the Bar DD. Byrnes was all her dad talked about at the supper table the past two nights. He said he figured Byrnes was dead but then her mother got mad and shushed him for saying that in front of the four children.
She waved at the big man on the horse and he waved back. Then she ran inside to share her news.
Cawthorne had once been nothing more than a cattle town but these days it was a commercial hub for ranchers and farmers from all around. Fargo started seeing small, inexpensive houses right after he waved to the little girl. He traveled the main road from there into town. At indigo dusk, the stars already fierce, the mountain chill winterlike, he reached the three-block center of Cawthorne. Most of the false-fronted businesses had closed for the day but two cafés and four saloons were noisy as hell and obviously planned to stay that way.
Every few yards somebody on the plank walk would stop to peer at him. There was a fair share of buggy, wagon and horse traffic but somehow, even before they saw the blanket on the back of the Ovaro, they seemed to know that this was the horse everybody in town had been dreading to see.
They had to wait until Fargo came closer to confirm what they suspected. Then they jerked a bit at the sight of the blanket or cursed under their breath or said a prayer.
Fargo watched for a sign identifying the sheriff’s office. He had to pass by the saloons before reaching it. A couple of whores stood on the porches of their respective saloons. Fargo had known enough of them in his time—and had liked a hell of a lot of them—to know that these two had stepped out just to get away from the cloying stench and grubbing hands of life inside.
The sheriff’s office was at the end of a block that fronted on a riverbank. The building was long, narrow, adobe. As he dismounted and started to tie the reins of his Ovaro to the hitching post, he turned to see shadow-shapes in the gathering darkness. The word was out. Only a few of those in the business district knew about Clete Byrnes as yet but soon most of Cawthorne would. A half-dozen shadow-shapes hurried down the street toward Fargo. The first wave of ghouls.
He walked up to the door and shoved it open. A gaunt man in a faded work shirt and a star came around the desk. “Everything all right?”
Fargo noted that the man’s first instinct wasn’t to go for his gun. A good sign. Too many gun-happy lawmen around.
“I’ve got a body out here. His papers said his name is Clete Byrnes.”
“Oh, damn, that poor family of his. What happened to him?”
“He was shot three times.”
Fargo walked back out on the plank walk. By now twenty people had formed a semicircle around the Ovaro and its lifeless passenger. Men, women, even a pair of towheaded kids who might have been twins. An elderly gentleman with a cane carried a smoky lantern that he held up to the corpse. “Did somebody say it’s Clete? I always knew that boy’d end up like this.”
“Well, that’s a hell of a thing to say,” a woman wrapped in a black shawl snapped. “And I’ll remember it when we bury you too. I’ll have some choice things to say then, myself.”
A few of the people laughed, making the scene even stranger.
The deputy shouted, “Now you get away from here and get on about your business.”
“We got a right to be here, Pete. Same as you do.”
“Is that right, Sam? I guess I can’t see your badge because it’s so dark. But maybe somebody made you a deputy without me knowing it. We need to sort this thing out.”
“Who’s the one who brought him in?”
The deputy offered Fargo his hand. “Pete Rule.”
“Skye Fargo,” the Trailsman said as they shook.
“Hey, I’ve heard of him!” one of the men said.
“Now, c’mon folks. This whole situation is bad enough. Just please go on about your business.”
They left resentfully, calling Rule names as they shuffled away.
Cold moonlight gave Rule enough of a look at the face of the corpse to know who he was seeing. “It’s Clete, all right.” He shook his head. “Third one in a month.”
“Any idea if they’re connected?”
“That’s what the sheriff is trying to figure out. They were friends, hell-raisers but they never got into any serious trouble. That’s what makes this whole thing so damned strange. Who’d want to kill them?”
From down the street came the clatter of a buckboard. All Fargo could see of the man driving it was a top hat. Who the hell would wear a top hat in a town like Cawthorne?
“Here comes Charlie Friese.”
“Who’s Friese?”
“The undertaker.”
“Somebody must’ve told him about the body.”
“He just seems to know. He’s got an instinct for it. A lot of folks around here think he’s supernatural.”
“He wears a top hat?”
“Wait’ll you see his cape,” Rule laughed.
The buckboard pulled up. Silver steam poured from the nostrils of the horses pulling the vehicle. Rule hadn’t been joking about the cape. Fargo still couldn’t get a look at the man’s face as he stepped down from the buckboard.
“Looks like you’ve got some business, Charlie. They found the Byrnes boy.”
Friese stepped into the light cast from inside the sheriff’s office and lifted off his top hat. Shining shoulder-length red hair swung free and a full feminine mouth opened and said, “It’s Sarah, Pete. My dad’s down with the gout again.” Her body was as rich with female promise as her face. Slender but sumptuous at the same time.
; “You wearin’ your dad’s outfit now?”
“People don’t take me seriously if I don’t. They think I’m just some nineteen-year-old who doesn’t know anything. People are used to Dad’s getup. He scares them a little bit. He likes it, too. He’s always laughing about it.” She touched a hand to the Ovaro’s neck. “What a beautiful horse. I’m just sorry he had to bring Clete home. Poor Karen and her mother. They were praying he wouldn’t be dead.” Her emerald eyes settled on Fargo. “Where did you find him?”
Fargo told her.
“Same as the other two. I wish we knew who was doing this.” An ivory hand appeared beneath an edge of the cape. “Sarah Friese.”
“You ever heard of the Trailsman?” Rule said.
“Sure.”
“Well, that’s who you’re shaking hands with.”
She smiled. “Dad’ll be sorry he wasn’t here. Are you just passing through, Mr. Fargo?”
“I hope so.” Fargo nodded to the buckboard. “Now I imagine we need to get the body on the buckboard.”
“I’d appreciate the help.”
With Fargo and Rule working together, Clete Byrnes’ corpse presented no difficulty. Fargo untied him and they carried him to the back of the buckboard and set him inside.
A larger crowd had gathered. This one remained twenty yards away. One of the onlookers carried a torch. A few lanterns blazed in the gloom.
Before climbing up on the seat again, Sarah Friese said, “I hope I see you before you leave, Mr. Fargo.” She wasn’t coy. She was straightforward and Fargo liked that. She was interested in his company and he was certainly interested in hers.
“I’d like that, too.”
When she was seated and the reins gathered in her hands, she glanced down at Rule. “Sheriff Cain is going to catch a whole lot of hell for this, Pete. My dad said that at church the other night the minister said maybe the sheriff just wasn’t up to the job of finding out who killed these boys. That’s not the kind of talk you usually hear from a minister. Not our minister, anyway.”
