by Jon Sharpe
“To hire you. He says he is willing to pay you a thousand dollars to do him a favor.”
Fargo whistled. “It must be some favor.” He waited for the cowboy to tell him what it was but Stoddard just sat there. “Is it a secret or am I supposed to guess?”
“I would say if I knew. The boss wants to tell you himself. He did say that he’d give you a hundred dollars just to come hear him out.”
“He’s awful generous with his money.”
“He can afford to be.” Stoddard wagged his arms. “Can I put these down? My shoulders are commencing to hurt.” He started to do it anyway and stiffened when Fargo sighted down the Henry’s barrel. “Hold on. I just explained everything. You have no call to shoot me.”
“People don’t always tell the truth.” Holding the Henry steady, Fargo moved to a lower branch. “Shed the hardware. Use two fingers.”
“Damn, you are one suspicious son of a bitch,” Stoddard complained, but he slowly plucked the revolver from its holster and bent and let it drop to the grass. “Happy now?”
“Open the vest.”
“All I’ve got under it is my shirt.”
“Open it anyway.”
Frowning, the cowboy parted the vest wide. “There. I’m not carrying a hideout. I’m no assassin. I punch cows for a living.”
Still keeping the Henry on him, Fargo slipped to the lowest branch, perched for a moment with his legs dangling, and dropped. He landed in a crouch on the balls of his feet. Unfurling, he sidled around and picked up the Starr. “I’ll hold on to this until I think I can trust you.”
“I don’t much like you taking my six-shooter. I feel half naked without it.”
Fargo sympathized. He would feel the same. “Your boss should have told you what he wants me for. He must have plenty of cowhands working for him—”
“Pretty near thirty.”
“Yet he needs me to do him a favor? Why not have one of you do it?”
“I honest to God don’t know. The big sugar doesn’t confide in me like he does Griff Jackson.”
“Who?”
“The foreman. As tough an hombre who ever lived. If Mr. Bell had sent Jackson instead of me, he’d take your rifle and beat you half to death with it.”
Fargo moved a few yards behind the cowboy’s sorrel. “Ride ahead until we get to my horse. No tricks, hear?”
“Mister, I ain’t feather-headed. I get forty a month, and found. That’s hardly enough to die for.”
Fargo was beginning to like him. “Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself?”
“What the hell for?”
“To pass the time.”
Stoddard muttered something, then declared, “If this don’t beat all. Are all of you Daniel Boone’s so nosy?”
“The ones who are fond of breathing.”
“There’s not much to tell. I was raised on a farm in Indiana. I got an itch and drifted west when I was sixteen and did some cow work and liked it. Been at it ever since. Drifted to Denver a while back and Mr. Bell was hiring and I signed on.”
“He came all the way up here to start a ranch?” Fargo had heard of a few but there wasn’t a town to be had for hundreds of miles and no railhead, either.
“Mr. Bell ain’t like you and me. He’s always looking to the future. He says as how the country is growing and people are multiplying like rabbits and all of them will need beef to eat.”
“He’s not worried about Indians? The Bannocks or the Cheyenne or the Arapaho?” All of whom, Fargo knew, had clashed with whites in recent years. The situation was bound to get worse now that the Indians realized the white man intended to claim their land.
“Mr. Bell says it will be a cold day in hell before he’ll let redskins or anyone else run him—” Stoddard stopped and straightened and reined up. “Say, is that your animal?”
Fargo looked, and his blood chilled. They were almost to the spruce. The Ovaro was no longer tied to it. Three men were about to lead it away. Two were on horseback. The third had dismounted to untie the reins and had them in his hand. Fargo stalked toward them. He tossed the Starr to the cowpoke as he went by and snapped, “That’s my horse you’re stealing.”
The three were cut from the same coarse cloth. They weren’t white and they weren’t red. They were a mix. Their clothes were grubby and they were grubby but their rifles and revolvers looked to be well oiled and their eyes glittered like the eyes of hungry wolves.
The man holding the stallion’s reins had a Sharps at his side and bushy eyebrows as big as wooly caterpillars. “It was here by itself,” he said. “We reckoned maybe someone left it.”
Fargo almost called him a liar to his dirty face. Instead he held out his left hand. “I’ll take those.”
“Sure, mister.” The breed held out the reins. “We don’t want trouble. If you say it’s yours, it’s yours.” He turned to climb on his mount.
“Hold on.” Fargo was wondering how it was that they happened to be there at the same time as Jim Stoddard. He glanced at the cowboy and saw that Stoddard had holstered the revolver. “You didn’t think to holler and see if anyone was around?”
The breed shrugged. “We figured anyone who would leave a fine animal like this must be dead. It’s not as if we were following you to steal it.”
“That’s exactly what they were doing,” Jim Stoddard remarked.
Both Fargo and the half-breed looked at him and said, “What?”
“I spotted them yesterday, south of you a ways,” the puncher explained. “They were shadowing you and keeping well hid. It’s why I rode hard to catch up today. I figured you’d want to know.”
“Well, now.” Fargo shifted so he could watch all three and said to the man who’d had the reins, “You’re a liar as well as a horse thief.”
“You’re taking his word over mine? Why? Because he’s a white and I’m not?”
“No. I’m taking his word because you were fixing to steal my horse, you goddamn idiot.”
The man with the caterpillar eyebrows scowled. “I don’t take kindly to insults,” he said, and dropped his hand to his six-gun.
