Wyoming Winterkill

by Jon Sharpe

  “The longer you hold out, the longer you’ll take to die,” Blackjack threatened.

  Fargo saw movement in the trees and a patch of dark color. He fixed a bead and stroked the trigger.

  An outlaw staggered into view, but it wasn’t Tar. He reeled as if drunk, and collapsed.

  A torrent of lead rained on the lead-to.

  Flattening, Fargo was about to crab backward when a Sharps boomed loud and clear. From up high.

  A figure was silhouetted on a bluff above the beehives. The figure whooped and raised an arm and waved, then dropped from sight before the outlaws could send a volley his way.

  Jules Vallee, Fargo realized, and smiled. The old buzzard was still alive, and if he’d survived the avalanche, it could be that Josephine and Hortense had, too.

  Private Benton began shooting and several outlaws responded in kind.

  Fargo intended to work his way around the lean-to and hunt other cover. Skulking forms changed his mind. Three outlaws were over at the bluff, moving toward the beehive; in the lead was Jacob Coarse.

  Fargo had a hunch what they were up to. Tar had sent them to bring captives to the trees. Tar would then threaten to kill the emigrants unless Fargo, and the troopers surrendered.

  Like hell, Fargo thought, and moved to intercept them. The snow helped. On this side of the lean-to it was deep enough that if he stayed in a crouch, only part of his hat showed.

  Coarse and the other two didn’t spot him. They reached the first of the pockmarks and looked in. Coarse shook his head and they moved to the next. At a gesture from him, the pair entered and reappeared moments later with a woman. She had been tied and gagged but she could kick and buck and was doing her best to thwart them.

  Coarse struck her with the butt of his rifle, a brutal blow to the temple that caused her to sag.

  By then Fargo was close enough. He set the Spencer down and filled each hand with a Colt. As the pair was about to bear the woman off, he rose and simultaneously shot each man in the head.

  Jacob Coarse turned and brought up his rifle.

  Fargo shot him in the chest, both Colts at once. Coarse was slammed back but stayed on his feet. Fargo shot him again, in the gut, both Colts at once.

  Coarse folded and clutched himself. “No!” he bleated.

  “Yes,” Fargo said, and triggered both Colts into his face.

  Hurrying to the woman, Fargo scooped her into his arms and carried her into the pockmark. Four others were bound and gagged. Setting her down, he placed the Colts within easy reach, hiked his pant leg, and palmed the Arkansas toothpick. A few slashes and her arms and legs were free. He removed her gag, cradled her head, and lightly slapped first one cheek and then the other.

  On the fourth slap she opened her eyes and looked wildly around. “Where? What?”

  “You’re safe,” Fargo said. “I shot the men who were taking you.” He quickly sat her up. “Listen. I don’t have a lot of time.” Reversing his grip on the toothpick, he pressed it to her hand. “Take this. Free as many as you can. Tell them to stay hid.”

  Blinking in confusion, the woman stammered, “Who are you? What’s going on?”

  “No time,” Fargo said. “Do as I told you.” Grabbing both Colts, Fargo reloaded and darted out. Shots blasted and hornets buzzed his ear.

  Up on the cliff, Jules cut loose with his Sharps.

  A man screamed.

  By Fargo’s reckoning ten or more of the outlaws were dead. There couldn’t be more than half a dozen left, if that. Girding himself, he sprinted along the bluff. He weaved when a rifle muzzle was thrust out of the trees and spanged, and fired at the smoke.

  Bending low, Fargo charged in. An outlaw—Buck—heaved upright. Fargo shot him. Another figure reared and Fargo spun and put slugs from both Colts into the figure’s chest without realizing who it was.

  Margaret Tar looked down at herself in disbelief, and collapsed.

  Fargo took a few more bounds and a two-legged bear roared and hurtled at him. They fired at the same instant. Fargo felt a sting in his shoulder. He thumbed the hammers and stroked the triggers, thumbed and stroked, thumbed and stroked.

  Blackjack Tar let out another roar. He rose onto the tips of his toes, his eyelids fluttering, then crashed to the snow with a thud, and convulsed.

  Fargo went up, pressed both Colts to Tar’s head, and fired a final time.

  How long he stood there, he couldn’t say. His ears were ringing and his shoulder was bleeding, but he was alive.

  Suddenly so tired he could hardly stand, he walked out of the trees.

  Sergeant Petrie and Private Benton had come out of the cabins. Petrie had been creased and Benton was limping.

  “We did it, by God,” Sergeant Petrie said.

  Up on the cliff, Jules and Josephine and Hortense yelled and windmilled their arms.

  “I need to find a bandage,” Petrie said.

  “I need a drink,” Benton said.

  Fargo knew what he needed. A week in Denver with a willing filly.

  LOOKING FORWARD!

  The following is the opening

  section of the next novel in the exciting

  Trailsman series from Signet:

  TRAILSMAN #379

  HANGTOWN HELLCAT

  Wyoming (Nebraska Territory), 1861—where a

  dangerously beautiful woman entices Fargo into an

  outlaw hellhole where honest men dance on air.

  “We’re in some deep soup, Fargo,” said “Big Ed” Creighton, surveying the latest damage to his life’s dream. “Back in the rolling grass country we were making up to twelve miles a day. Between twenty-two and twenty-five poles per mile, slick as snot on a saddle horn. But I didn’t take the buffalo into account.”

  Creighton cursed under his breath and knocked the dottle from his pipe on the heel of his boot.

  “I’ll have to send men back to set the poles again,” he said bitterly. “They were inferior wood to begin with, but all we had. Most have been snapped—turned into scratch poles for the blasted bison!”

  The tall, lean, wide-shouldered man dressed in buckskins said nothing to this tirade, merely removed his hat to shoo flies away with it. His calm, fathomless lake blue eyes stayed in constant motion, studying the surrounding slopes dotted with stands of juniper and scrub pine. From long habit as a scout, Skye Fargo watched for movement or reflection, not shapes.

  “Two days before Independence Day,” Creighton mused aloud, his tone almost wistful, “me and Charlie dug the first posthole in Julesburg, Colorado. Even with the nation plunging into war, President Lincoln himself took time to wish us luck. Think of it, Fargo! For the first time telegraphic dispatches will be sent from ocean to ocean.”

  Fargo did think about it and felt guilt lance into him deep. He glanced up into a storybook-perfect Western sky: ragged white parcels of cloud slid across a sky the pure blue color of a gas flame. The flat, endless horizon of eastern Wyoming was behind them, and now the magnificent, ermine-capped peaks of the Rockies—still called the Great Stony Mountains by the old trappers—surrounded them in majestic profusion.

  And here’s the fiddle-footed Trailsman, Fargo told himself, helping to blight it with a transcontinental telegraph that will only draw in settlements like flies to syrup. But at the time Creighton offered him fifty dollars a month to work as a scout and hunter, Fargo was light in the pockets and out of work.

  All that was bad enough. But as Fargo read the obvious signs that Big Ed had missed, the words pile on the agony snapped in his mind like burning twigs.

  “Buffalo!” Creighton spat out the word like a bad taste. “Fargo, we’re already on a mighty tight schedule. My contract allows me a hundred and twenty days to link up with Jim Gamble’s crew in Utah. If this keeps up, and we get trapped in a Wyoming winter . . .”

  Creighton trailed off, for b
oth men knew damn well what that would mean. Fargo had seen snow pile up so deep, and so long, in these parts that rabbits suffocated in their burrows. He recalled being caught in a blizzard just north of here that forced him to shelter inside a hollowed-out log for three days.

  Stringing this line in late summer was travail enough, too. Mosquitoes all night, flies all day. Sometimes they drove men and beasts into frenzied fits. Trees to provide telegraph poles often had to be freighted great distances, as did the supplies needed to keep a virtual army of workers fed, clothed, and equipped.

  And most vexing of all was the serious lack of drinking water. Fargo had spent more time locating water than he had hunting or scouting.

  Now came this new trouble—Fargo studied the ground around the downed poles and felt a familiar foreboding. Instinct told him that, soon, lead would fly.

  “Well,” Creighton said, kicking at one of the broken poles, “wha’d’ya think? I could use the pocket relay and telegraph back to Fort Laramie. Maybe Colonel Langford could send enough soldiers to scatter the herds away from these parts.”

  Fargo shook his head. “The Laramie garrison has always been undermanned. And now half the troops have been ordered back east. That leaves just enough for force protection at the fort.”

  Creighton expelled a long, fluming sigh, nodding at the truth of Fargo’s words. “Speak the truth and shame the devil. You got any suggestions?”

  Fargo glanced at his employer. Big Ed Creighton, the son of penniless Irish immigrants, was a ruddy-complexioned, barrel-chested man in early middle age with a frank, weather-seamed face. He wore a broad-brimmed plainsman’s hat, sturdy linsey trousers, and calfskin boots. He was the rainmaker for this ambitious project and a damn good man for the job, in Fargo’s estimation. He rode every mile of this route before he mapped it out, and now he was working right alongside his men, eating the same food and taking the same risks.

  One thing he was not, however, was a good reader of sign.

  “Ed,” Fargo said, “it’s true that great shaggy brought down some poles back in the grassland. And we are sticking mostly to bottomland and valleys lately where you’ll sometimes spot herds. But does the ground around us look like it’s been torn up by sharp hooves?”

  “Why . . .” Creighton surveyed the area around them. “Why, no. In fact, the grass isn’t even flattened, is it?”

  Fargo watched a skinny yellow coyote slink off through a nearby erosion gully. Clearly the boss did not like the turn this trail was taking.

  “Then it must be Indians,” Creighton said.

  Fargo snorted. “I’d call that idea a bug of the genus hum. Sure, there’s been Lakota and Cheyennes watching us like cats on a rat. They don’t like what they see, and I don’t blame them. But they don’t understand what we’re up to, and when the red man doesn’t understand something he tends to wade in slow. Everything connected to the white man is likely to be bad medicine—they aren’t touching those poles. Not yet, anyhow.”

  Creighton looked like a man who had woken up in the wrong year. The weather grooves in his face deepened when he frowned. “You yourself are always pointing out how the Indians are notional and unpredictable. Back in western Missouri, the Fox tribe learned how to use stolen crowbars to rip up railroad tracks.”

  Fargo sighed patiently. “Indian scares” were common because they stirred up settlers. Stirred-up settlers meant more soldiers and thus, more lucrative contracts to the Eastern opportunists supplying them.

  “Ed, if it was Indians who tore down these poles, then their horses have iron-shod hooves.”

  These words struck Creighton like a bolt out of the blue. He hung fire for a few seconds, not understanding. “You’re saying white men did this?”

  “’Pears so.”

  “But . . . Fargo, there’s nary a settlement anywhere near here. What white men?”

  “That’s got me treed,” Fargo admitted. “But there were three of them, and they rode out headed due south. Buckshot left at sunup going after game. He should be back anytime now. We’ll pick up that trail and see where it takes us.”

  “White men,” Creighton repeated as the men headed toward the two mounts calmly taking off the grass nearby. “Why would white men go to such trouble to sabotage a telegraph line?”

  Fargo forked leather and reined his Ovaro around to the west, pressuring him to a trot with his knees.

  “Because,” he suggested, “the telegraph is even faster than a posse. There’s been strikes against bull trains and mail carriers in this neck of the woods. Even a few kidnappings of stagecoach passengers on the Overland route. Good chance the owlhoot gang behind those crimes don’t want that telegraph going through. Back east, the talking wires have put the kibosh on plenty of road agents.”

  “All that rings right enough,” Creighton agreed reluctantly, gigging his blaze-faced sorrel up beside Fargo’s black-and-white stallion.

  “It does and it doesn’t,” Fargo hedged, keeping a weather eye out and loosening his sixteen-shot Henry repeater in its saddle scabbard. “Most outlaws are a lazy tribe with damn poor trailcraft. They like good meals, saloons, and beds with a whore in them. You’ll most often find them in towns, not running all over Robin Hood’s barn. Like you said, there’s no settlements around here.”

  “Right now,” Creighton said, “Jim Gamble and his Pacific crew are racing to beat us to Fort Bridger. Working in those God-forgotten deserts of Nevada and Utah. Black cinder mountains, alkali dust, and warpath Paiutes—until now, I figured we had the easy part.”

  “You might be building a pimple into a peak,” Fargo reminded him despite his own growing sense of unease. “If it’s just three outlaws, me and Buckshot will salt their tails. That sort of work is right down our alley.”

  “You two are just the boys to do it,” Creighton agreed. “It’s water I’m really fretting about. I’ll tell you who will soon get rich out west—well diggers and men who build windmills to drive the water. You won’t find one in a nickel novel, but one man with a steam drill is worth a shithouse full of gunslingers.”

  “I respect honest labor, Ed, but to hell with wells and windmills.”

  Creighton flashed a grin through the dusty patina on his face. “To hell with this magnetic telegraph too, huh?”

  Fargo grinned back. “I’m straddling the fence on that one,” he admitted. “Couriers and express riders are murdered every day, including some good friends of mine. It’s an ill Chinook that doesn’t blow somebody some good, I reckon.”

  By now the two men had ridden into sight of the main work crew. Under the watchful eye of Taffy Blackford, the Welsh foreman, workers were busy digging postholes, setting and shaping poles, and stringing wire. Other men had scattered out to scavenge wood for poles. A carpenter was at work repairing the broken tongue of a wagon.

  “Here comes Buckshot now,” Fargo remarked, spotting a rider approaching them on a grulla, an Indian-broke bluish gray mustang also known as a smoky. “Something must be on the spit. He rode out without eating and he’s always hungry as a field hand when he gets back. He’d ought to be feeding his face right about now.”

  Buckshot Brady had been hired at Fargo’s insistence. He was an ace Indian tracker and experienced frontiersman who had learned his lore at the side of Kit Carson and Uncle Dick Wootton during the shining times at Taos. He earned his name from carrying a sawed-off double ten in a special-rigged swivel sling on his right hip.

  Buckshot loped closer and Fargo saw that his face was grim as an undertaker’s.

  “Trouble, old son?” Fargo greeted him.

  “Skye,” Buckshot replied quietly, drawing rein, “I got me a God-fear.”

  The hair on Fargo’s nape instantly stiffened. Buckshot’s famous “God-fears” were as reliable as the equinox.

  “Ed,” Fargo snapped, tugging his brass-framed Henry from its boot, “whistle the men to cover.” />
  “What’s—?”

  “Now!” Fargo ordered and Creighton reached for the silver whistle on its chain beneath his collar.

  Just then, however, a hammering racket of gunfire erupted from the boulder-strewn slope on their left. Fargo watched, his blood icing, as a rope of blood spurted from one side of the carpenter’s head and he folded to the ground like an empty gunnysack.

  “God-in-whirlwinds!” a shocked Ed Creighton exclaimed.

  An eyeblink later, the withering volley of lead shifted to the three men, and Creighton, too, crashed to the ground, trapped under his dying horse.