by Sharpe, Jon
She blushed prettily. “Why, how gallant! My name is Trixie Belle. Well, actually, it’s Priscilla Urbanski when I’m back home in Cleveland. But that name won’t do for a thirst-parlor singer. I’m hoping to get on in Santa Fe, you see. Will you be riding the coach with us, Mr. Fargo?”
“In a manner of speaking, Trixie. I’ll be riding shotgun.”
The other three passengers—all men—had looked startled when Trixie pronounced Fargo’s name. Now a long-faced, narrow-shouldered man dressed in clergy black and a battered homburg, clutching a big clasp Bible, spoke up.
“Mr. Fargo, Pastor Brandenburg here. I, too, have heard something of your . . . violent exploits. Isn’t this rather menial work for a man of your reputation?”
Fargo’s lake blue eyes, direct as searchlights, quickly took the clergyman’s measure. He was whipcord thin and gifted with a sonorous baritone voice that should have compelled respect. But his ridiculously long, hanging sideburns—known back East as Picadilly Weepers—made him a ludicrous figure in Fargo’s eyes.
“I was headed to Santa Fe anyway,” Fargo lied, “so I figured I might’s well profit from the trip.”
“Now, now, Mr. Fargo,” broke in an unkempt, plump man of indeterminate middle age sitting next to the preacher. He wore gray homespun and battered brogans. “I can tell, from the ectoplasmic aura surrounding you, that you are prevaricating with us.”
Fargo grinned. “Now, that was a string of thirty-five cent words. You must be Malachi Feldman, astrological doctor.”
“I am indeed, sir. Doctor Malachi Feldman, possessor of the Third Eye that sees hidden truth. I merely said—and I intend no offense—that you are not being truthful. Probably, however, for noble reasons. By nature you are an honest man.”
“And you figured that out from my ecto-whosis?”
“Your ectoplasmic aura, sir. Every human being is surrounded by a thin radiance visible to us who possess the Third Eye. Yours was a normal blue radiance until you answered the pastor’s question—then it suddenly shaded over into red as you told your fib.”
“I take plenty of guff from my friends, but usually I won’t tolerate a stranger calling me a liar. But since you called me a noble liar, I reckon I’ll overlook it.”
Fargo retained his amused mask, but inwardly he was taken aback. He had indeed been lying, of course, but how could this blather-spouting jasper have known?
A harsh bark of laughter from the fourth passenger on the bench diverted Fargo’s attention.
“I’d call that a genuine bug of the genus ‘hum,’” proclaimed the big, hard-knit man who must be Lansford Ashton. He had a bluff, weather-seamed face, shrewd eyes, and a thin line of mustache with a pointed Vandyke beard. He wore an immaculate white linen suit with a silver concho belt. He spoke in the dusty drawl of the West Texas chaparral country.
“Don’t let this fat little grifter honey-fuggle you, Fargo,” he added. “You might say he’s less than meets the eye. Look at those fancy trunks piled up by the door. Moroccan leather with gold studs. Obviously someone of immense wealth, and likely immense importance, will be riding to Santa Fe with us. Add to the mix a gent of your caliber as lowly shotgun rider and the conclusion is as obvious as clown makeup: you’ve secretly been hired as a bodyguard. ‘Third Eye’ my sweet aunt.”
“The secret would’ve come out soon enough,” Fargo said amiably while Malachi Feldman shot Ashton a poisonous glance. “But I commend your powers of observation, friend.”
“Lansford Ashton, Mr. Fargo, businessman’s agent by profession. You might say that I specialize in clearing potential profit paths of all that encumbers them—legally, when possible, artfully when not. I’ve recently been engaged by a consortium of Santa Fe silver miners who are far more ambitious than clever.”
“Based on my first impression of you, Mr. Ashton, I predict they’ll soon be thriving. You don’t strike me as a man who does things by halves.”
Ashton opened his mouth to reply, but just then the depot exploded with boom-claps of thunder in the form of spoken words. “Skye goldang Fargo, you horny son of trouble! Come give Booger a kiss!”
As he turned slowly around Fargo experienced an involuntary shudder and took in a deep breath, for he knew only too well what was coming next.
The moonfaced man beaming at Fargo was a virtual man-mountain who canceled the daylight behind him as he stepped into the depot doorway. Standing six foot five inches tall and weighing two hundred and eighty-five pounds, Bill “Booger” McTeague crossed the large distance in a few lumbering strides, opening his arms wide and bearing down on Fargo like the Apocalypse.
Fargo felt the air crushed from his lungs when Booger swept him up like a sack of feathers, giving him a bear hug that would have killed a Quaker.
“Skye Fargo, you sheep-humping, chicken-plucking bastard of the sage, many is the night I’ve prayed you into the ground! Ain’t seen you since Christ was a corporal! Why, lad, it’s been five long years since we stood back to back and created Comanche widows and orphans at Antelope Wells!”
The shaggy giant finally set Fargo down just before the Trailsman blacked out from lack of oxygen. Booger was thick in the chest and waist, his arms bigger around the wrist than most brawny men were in the forearms. He wore a floppy hat and butternut-dyed shirt and trousers with knee-length elk-skin moccasins.
“Faugh! The sun has peeped up and no liquor on your breath? You and your barley pop—‘beer and draw it nappy.’ By God, you son of a motherless goat, you’ll learn to drink tiger spit like a man when you side old Booger!”
The impressive reinsman forced a glass flask into Fargo’s hands. Fargo knew he had no choice in the matter and knocked back a slug. It was the savage brew known as Taos Lightning, and immediately filmed his eyes.
“Why, you titty baby!” Booger mocked him in his backwater twang. “I—” Booger suddenly caught sight of Trixie Belle, who was gaping as if he were a talking elephant. His eyes widened at the sight of her generous bosoms.
“Crikes, what gorgeous jahoobies!” he exclaimed. “Fargo, have you showed her your trouser snake yet? It’s a square deal started by Eve: one angry serpent for those two juicy apples.”
“Why, God bless me, sir!” protested the preacher, his sallow face now pale. “You carry a pang to my heart with such barbarous blasphemy. Please launder your vulgar speech in front of ladies and a man of God.”
Booger squinted at his horrified passenger. “No Choctaw here, catfish. So I’ve panged you, have I? A man of God, eh? Well, I’m the favorite son of Satan, and soon there’ll be a hot pitchfork in your ass if you don’t put a stopper on your gob, holy man. I’ve no use for the drizzling shits nor witch doctors. Me and Fargo ain’t been Bible-raised, so chuck the mealymouthed sermons or sing your death song.”
“Ahem!” Addison Steele cleared his throat nervously and cast an I-told-you-so look at Fargo. Trixie and the astrological doctor were frozen in shock. Lansford Ashton, however, Fargo noticed, seemed to be enjoying this farce immensely.
“Bill,” Steele suggested, “perhaps we should start boarding the passengers now. And there are trunks to strap down on the roof of the coach. Also, Fargo will want to go outside with you and fill you in on some details.”
“We seem to be one passenger short,” Ashton remarked. “Certainly we cannot leave without our important personage?”
Fargo eyed the coolly confident man speculatively. But as if Ashton were a herald, Ambrose Jenkins stepped into the depot with a stunningly beautiful woman on his arm—one so stunning that the depot went as silent as a classroom after a hard question. Even Booger McTeague was struck speechless, a rare event.
It was Ashton who broke the silence. “As I live and breathe—that fairest flower of all the fields, ladies and gentlemen, is Kathleen Barton, America’s Sweetheart.”
* * *
About
one hundred yards north of the Overland Stage line’s El Paso depot, Cleo Hastings knelt before a fourth-story window in the Frontier Hotel. The notch sight of his Sharps carbine was centered on Skye Fargo’s back.
“God-damn it, Russ! I’m telling you, man, I can pop Fargo over right now! Now, buddy, before he even climbs up onto that box. That’s our job, ain’t it? Just one twitch, Russ, and he’s bucked out.”
Russ Alcott and Spider Winslowe sat at a table cutting cards for a dime a go. Alcott glanced toward the window and shook his head in disgust.
“Cleo, you dumb cockchafer, you ain’t got the brains God gave a pissant. Pull that smoke pole in before somebody spots it.”
“But why, damn it!” Cleo looked back over his right shoulder, his face imploring. He was a thickset man with a huge soup-strainer mustache and a pockmarked face. “You think I can’t make the shot, hanh?”
Alcott kept his voice level only with an effort. “Now see, this here is why I’m the wheel and you’re just a pip-squeak cog. Sure, my damn grandmother could make that shot. But I told you to pull that rifle back inside, and I don’t chew my cabbage twice.”
“Like hell I will! We kill him now and it’s did. Lomax pays us the rest of our money, and we ain’t gotta lock horns with Fargo up the trail. I’m popping that son of a bitch over now.”
Cleo was still curling his finger around the trigger when two menacing, metallic clicks behind him raised the fine hairs on his nape. He looked around and stared into the unblinking eyes of Russ’ and Spider’s six-guns.
“Go ahead and pull that trigger,” Alcott said in a voice dry as husks scraping in an old cornfield. “Pull it, and you’ll buck out a second after Fargo.”
Cleo, looking as if he’d been drained by leeches, slowly pulled his carbine inside and laid it on the plank floor.
“Cleo,” Russ said as if talking to a child, “a man don’t wade into the water until he knows how deep it is. Now you tell me—what happens as soon as you kill Fargo in that wagon yard? What happens to the bitch before you can get another cap on that nib and get back on bead?”
“She . . . why, I reckon they’d hustle her back inside, huh?”
“Atta boy, now you’re whistling. And after she sees Fargo’s guts fly out all over her pretty dress, you think she’ll hop on that coach and just head north, pretty as you please?”
Hastings thought about it, then shook his head. “Nah. She might never go to Santa Fe at all. And then Lomax don’t pay us.”
“That ain’t all, jughead,” Spider cut in. He had thinning red hair and a crooked nose broken in two places. “You see that wooden barracks just past the feed store? Texas Ranger headquarters. You got any idea how them old boys feel about Skye Fargo?”
“And the New Mexico Territory,” Alcott added, flipping over an ace of spades, “allows hot pursuit for crimes committed in Texas. No matter which way we run, they’ll be pouring hot lead up our bung holes.”
By now Cleo was thoroughly chastised. “Yeah. I didn’t think about none a that shit.”
“You don’t need to think, Cleo,” Alcott assured him, quickly building a smoke and expertly curling the ends. “You got enough guts to fill a smokehouse, and you can shoot the eyes out of a crow at two hundred yards. You’re a damn good man to take along, and that’s why you’re here. As for Skye Fargo and Lomax’s silky-satin bitch”—Alcott’s cruelly handsome face set itself hard—“I got a real nice plan worked out for them. Fargo ain’t never seen me, so I’ll be waiting for them at the Vado station. I want to get a good size-up of this galoot and see if I can puzzle out which passenger is on Lomax’s payroll.”
“I don’t like that shit,” Cleo declared. “I mean, Lomax not telling us who he hired.”
“It don’t set good with me, neither. But this deal has got to be done right—from what I hear about Fargo, one mistake can be our epitaph.”
“My pap was a coffin maker,” Spider put in. “Every time I cut a board for him, he told me to measure it twice and cut it once.”
Alcott tossed his head back and blew three perfect smoke rings toward the ceiling. Then he trained his pale-ice eyes on Spider and nodded.
“Your pap was a smart man, and that’s how we’re gonna work this deal. Just remember this: If we want the top money, we got to kill Fargo and not let it fall to whoever Lomax has hired to ride the stage. His main job is to keep the actress on the coach until Lomax douses her glims farther north. But we have to do for Fargo first or that ain’t never gonna happen.”
4
Fargo, Booger and the mozo made short work of securing Kathleen Barton’s trunks to the flat top of the Concord. Fargo was just tying the last hitch knot when Addison Steele led the boarding party out into the yard.
“Ha-ho, ha-ho,” Booger said, eyeing the actress. “There’s one petticoat you won’t get under, Tumbledown Dick. You seen that look she give you when Steele innerduced you to her? Christmas crackers! Like you ain’t good ’nuff to lick her silk boots.”
“I’m generally better at unlacing than lacing,” Fargo assured the shaggy giant.
“Pah! That one pisses icicles. You can’t jump a four-rail fence, Trailsman.”
“The cat sits patiently by the gopher hole,” Fargo said as he began clambering down.
Fargo had heard and read about Kathleen Barton’s famed beauty but had never seen a likeness of her. Watching her approach now, proudly holding separate from the rest of the chattering passengers, he understood the widespread claim that she was the most beautiful woman in America. Her wing-shaped, amber-brown eyes and regal, arching eyebrows set off a beautifully symmetrical face. The thick, coffee-colored hair was swept back tight under a jewel-encrusted tiara. Her complexion was like creamy lotion, and the delicate, disdainful lips matched her icy hauteur.
But Fargo realized the “wide-eyed vivacity” theater critics claimed she projected on stage was nowhere evident now—just a cool disdain for all the lesser mortals around her. But great jumping Judas, he told himself, that woman makes Venus look like a dishrag.
Her melodic but stern voice slapped him out of his reverie. “You do realize, Mr. Fargo, that men can also grope with their eyes?”
Booger sniggered and whispered, “Looks like gopher hole is all you’ll get, chappie.”
Fargo touched his hat. “It was more in the way of admiring a great painting, Miss Barton, not groping. You’re mighty easy on the eyes, and you can’t hang a man for his thoughts.”
She ignored that. “No offense to your manly pride, Mr. Fargo, but I consider your presence on this journey superfluous.”
“Now, now, Kathleen,” Ambrose Jenkins tried to soothe his client, “you yourself showed me the anonymous letter. You also told me you believe it was sent by Zack Lomax, whom you believe is still alive.”
“All that is true and the man’s very name is gall and wormwood to me. But you see”—here she turned to Fargo again—“I believe strongly in Fate. Whatever may happen, Mr. Fargo, is out of your no-doubt roughly callused hands.”
“I believe in Fate, too,” Fargo said. “Fate is the hand you are dealt, the cards you can’t choose yourself. But Fate also allows for discards and the skill of the player.”
For a moment she looked surprised, even perhaps a bit impressed. “My stars, a buckskin-clad philosopher? What’s next—the sun rising in the west?”
“I agree with Fargo, Miss Barton,” Lansford Ashton put in politely. “And all due respect, but I would never judge a man of his capabilities superfluous. As the Latin phrase goes, vestis virum reddit—‘the clothes make the man.’ And buckskin is very tough indeed.”
Hearing his perfect Latin, she glanced at Ashton with some interest. But Malachi Feldman now spoke up eagerly. “You are certainly correct, Miss Barton—our fate is predetermined and in the stars and planets, not the hands of Fargo. If you will kindly tell me wh
ich astrological sign you were born under, I—”
“Pitch it to hell, pip-squeak,” Booger cut in impatiently. “It’s time to cut dirt, not listen to your swamp gas. All aboard!”
Steele and Jenkins handed the ladies in. Booger stared eagerly at the ivory swell of Trixie Belle’s boldly exposed bosoms.
“Her Nibs and Her Nips,” he whispered in the Trailsman’s ear. “Fargo, lad, our cornucopia runneth over. Both them little bits of frippet put a pup tent in my britches. And I know exactly where and how we are going to view both them gals buck naked.”
Fargo started to ask for details, but Booger waved him off. “You will see, lad. Old Booger has his little tricks.”
The come-hither glance Trixie sent Fargo, as she stepped into the coach, convinced him he’d be seeing at least this woman naked—assuming a load of blue whistlers didn’t cancel his plans.
The sturdy coach listed to one side as Booger heaved himself up on the box. He slid on the buckskin gauntlets that no true knight of the ribbons would be caught without. Then he pulled a six-horse whip from its socket: the buckskin lash was twenty feet long and able to reach the leaders of a three-team rig. Fargo ducked behind the coach to check on the Ovaro. The stallion’s lazy tail was swishing at flies, and he had evidently accepted the close proximity of the gentle bays.
“Fargo!” Booger hollered. “Sling your hook or you’ll be eating dust! I’ve no patience with a malt worm who puts water after his whiskey.”
Fargo, the double-ten in one hand, barely had his foot on the steel rung before Booger cracked his blacksnake and the coach lurched into motion with a jangle of trace chains.
“Gerlong there, boys! G’long! Whoop!”
Something in the tail of his eye made Fargo glance toward the five-story hotel on his right. A man’s face stared out a fourth-floor window at him but quickly ducked out of sight.
