by Sharpe, Jon
A foot scraped in the sand behind him and Fargo whirled, jacking a round into the Henry’s chamber.
“Do not shoot me,” a soft, heavily accented female voice called from the darkness. “There is something much nicer we both want, verdad?”
Socorro stopped in front of him, her eyes sheening in the moonlight. “I am shameless, I know. But I have no man, and always the fire burns inside me. Life here, Fargo—it is, how you say, boring. Men like you come to me only in dreams. The priest, he says that good girls always sleep with their hands outside the blankets. But I am bad—I dream of men like you and touch myself down below. Tonight I want to feel a real man inside me.”
“You’re going to, girl,” Fargo promised. “Feel what your talk has done to me.”
He guided her slim hand to the hard furrow along his left thigh.
“Cristo! Like a rock it is, and so big. Now you feel.”
She guided his free hand under her blouse. Fargo was astounded—her breasts felt soft and hard at the same time, like trim muscles wrapped in smooth French wool. Instantly her nipples stiffened, poking hard into his palm. She moaned at his touch and began stroking the hard furrow until both of them were panting like overheated dogs.
Fargo grounded his Henry and opened his fly, freeing his straining, hungry manhood. He dropped his gun belt while she hitched her skirt high. Fargo knelt, gripped her hourglass hips, and pulled her down onto his lap. She gasped with eager pleasure as his curved saber parted the slick, pliant walls of her love nest.
“Hard and fast, Fargo!” she urged him. “Raul will soon miss me—oh! Yes, like that!”
Holding her firm ass tight, Fargo bucked hard, deep and fast, enjoying the mazy waltz after a dry spell of several weeks. Neither one showed the other mercy, driving each other to a frenzy of lust.
“Fargo, it goes so deep!” she panted in a hoarse whisper. “So deep, so deep!”
The angle was perfect for maximum stimulation of her magic button, and soon she was so galvanized with pleasure that each breath ended on a groan. Fargo felt the pin-prickling in his groin swell to a massive, explosive release just as she climaxed in a series of hard, uncontrollable shudders.
The two of them, weak and dazed, collapsed sideways to the ground while their ragged breathing slowly returned to normal. After uncounted moments Raul’s voice called out: “Socorro! Donde estas?”
With an effort she found her voice. “Ya vengo, hermano!”
“He knows why I came outside,” she told Fargo as they untangled from each other. “And he will not be angry. But he does not want the others to know. Thank you, Fargo. I will always remember the stallion who took me under the stars. And it will be very much time before my hands are again outside the blankets.”
“Thank you, too, lady. This night’s been a reg’lar tonic for me.”
She kissed his lips and hurried toward the station. Fargo rose to his knees again, closed his fly, and buckled on his shell belt. A moment later he flinched hard when a voice bellowed from the house: “Ha-ho, ha-ho! Fargo, you double-poxed hound! You’ll smell like fish all night!”
* * *
Fargo debated sleeping outside. But Booger slept like a dead man, and Fargo’s deepening suspicion of Lansford Ashton made him reluctant to leave the house—he was, after all, Kathleen Barton’s bodyguard. So he compromised by sleeping right next to the raw plank door.
Despite his torrid session out back with Socorro, sleep eluded Fargo long past the time the other three men nodded out—Booger snoring like a leaky bellows. He listened to the night sounds outside the door: the gentle soughing of the wind in the valley, the mournful howl of prowling coyotes, the monotonous rise and fall of insects. All of it eventually reassured him and gradually he floated down a deep tunnel into sleep.
Dream images danced across his sleeping mind, half formed, jumbled: Kathleen Barton’s beautiful face, transforming into a mask of terror; pale-ice eyes promising hard death; a silver concho belt turning and twisting like a writhing snake and growing bloody fangs; a Concord swift wagon hurtling out of control into a black maw of hellish death.
And dream sounds, echoing a warning: the whinny of an agitated horse, then the almost comforting sound like meat sizzling in hot grease.
Meat sizzling louder and louder (this is no dream, Fargo!), but not meat, something else, something deadly, something he knew all too well (the readiness is all, Fargo!) . . .
Fargo’s eyes blinked open and some inner urgency, the vital force to live, chased the cobwebs of sleep from his mind. Now he heard the Ovaro, nickering insistently to warn him, and realized: the insect noise was gone.
And that “meat sizzling”—there was a half-inch gap under the door, and Fargo saw faint, flickering orange flashes of light, and he felt the cold sweat of dread break out in his armpits when he realized exactly how Death had come calling for him.
For a frozen moment his muscles seemed severed from his will, but it passed in a blink as a frontiersman’s well-honed instinct to survive took over. Fargo catapulted to his feet, clawed at the latchstring, flung open the plank door. Clouds had mottled the bright yellow moon, and he squinted to see better in the stingy light.
There! Perhaps fifteen feet in front of the doorway—a dark shape spitting sparks!
Expecting his next breath to be his last, Fargo bound forward in several long strides. He could not risk trying to snuff the fuse, and instinct warned him the object was too heavy to kick safely away from the house.
Leaning far forward while still on the run, he scooped it up in both hands—a keg of blasting powder, he realized—and took three more giant strides while he brought it to his chest, then heaved with all the considerable strength of his arms, chest and shoulders.
As soon as he released it, Fargo dropped to the ground face-first like a dead weight. Even before he landed, hell turned itself inside out.
A crack-boom like the last ding-dong of doom threatened to shatter his eardrums. A blinding flash of white light was followed by a searing wall of heat. A giant, violent, invisible hand flung him back toward the house, which he slammed into before slumping to the ground.
The last thing Fargo was aware of was dirt and grass and stones slapping down hard all around him and a woman’s bansheelike scream of terror from inside the station.
And his last thought: the Great Thing at last. . . .
* * *
“Is he dead?” Trixie said anxiously.
“I think he is breathing,” Socorro said, holding a lantern over the unconscious Trailsman.
“He has a terrible bruise swelling on his forehead,” Kathleen chimed in.
“Perhaps this will help him,” Raul suggested, splashing a pail of water on Fargo’s face.
“I fear he has departed this world,” the preacher said. “May his soul—”
“One world at a time, witch doctor!” Booger snapped. “A conk on the cabeza will not kill Skye goldang Fargo. Don’t get your bowels in an uproar, ladies—he’ll come sassy.”
The acrid stench of spent black powder hung heavy around the station house, and patches of wiry palomilla grass still snapped and sparked in the yard. Kathleen rushed into the house and returned with her silk reticule, extracting a small vial of sal volatile.
“Smelling salts should revive him,” she said, uncapping the vial and passing it under his nostrils.
Fargo lay as inert as a stone slab.
“He is dead,” Malachi Feldman asserted, his pudgy hands fluttering like nervous birds. “The Eighth House has claimed him.”
“Pah!” Booger exclaimed. “You feckless ass. Only one thing can bring Fargo back from death’s door: the scent of a woman’s perfume. Give him your best toilet water, muffin.”
Kathleen bristled like a feist. “Stop calling me muffin, you uncouth mudsill!”
“B
eg pardon, cupcake. Give him a whiff of your finest aromatic—the stuff that gives men bedroom notions.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped, but she did extract a small bottle labeled Eau de Ciel and pull off the silver stopper. She held the bottle under his nose. “This couldn’t possibly—”
A smile eased Fargo’s lips apart as his eyes snapped open. For a moment he wondered if there was, after all, a heaven to which he had mistakenly been sent. Three pretty female faces hovered over his and—miracle to behold—Kathleen Barton’s actually deigned to show some concern.
But this was not paradise—his head felt as if he’d been mule-kicked.
“Don’t move yet,” Ashton advised when Fargo groaned trying to sit up. “You may have a serious injury.”
“Buncha damn mollycoddlers,” Booger muttered. “Fargo, quitcher damn malingering.”
He reached a brawny arm down and tugged Fargo roughly to his feet. “Come inside if you’re feeling puny—a ration of who-shot-John will brace you.”
Doctor Booger was right—a pony glass of whiskey did indeed perk up Fargo although his head still throbbed like a war drum. He sat at the trestle table, the rest crowding around him.
“Why, his eyebrows are singed!” Trixie said. “What happened out there, Skye?”
Fargo related what little he could about the powder cask.
“Perhaps a chunk of the wood did that to your head,” Ashton surmised. “It was good work, Fargo. You saved the rest of us.”
“No,” Fargo corrected him, his eyes cutting to the actress. “I saved the men sleeping in the hallway at the front of the house. That powder charge was deliberately placed to spare anyone at the rear of the house—such as you, Miss Barton.”
“I do not take your meaning, Mr. Fargo.”
“Then I’ll chew it a little finer—it was meant to kill me, your bodyguard, but keep you alive—until June nineteenth.”
Fargo let silence underscore his point. Now she did take his meaning and the strength deserted her legs. She fell into one of the chairs.
Ashton watched her closely. “Notice how the lily chases the rose from the cheeks of our proud beauty.”
She glanced at him sharply. “That’s one of my lines from the romantic play Fair Is the Rose. I’ve noticed you are a cultured man, Mr. Ashton, but I wouldn’t take you for an enthusiast of ladies’ romances.”
He bowed slightly. “Like the bee, I sample many flowers.”
Interesting, Fargo thought. For a moment he recalled an image from his dream: a silver concho belt that turned into a snake with bloody fangs.
Kathleen aimed her bewitching eyes at the Trailsman again. “You mean, of course, Zack Lomax?”
“The very man, wouldn’t you agree?”
After a few heartbeats she nodded. “My agent was right after all. And I dismissed that letter as hollow melodrama.”
“We were both dunderheads, lass,” Booger said in a rare admission of guilt. “I called long-shanks here a nervous old woman for fretting constantly about danger. Now I see he is right, and this run will be no trip to Santa’s lap.”
“I understand your point about Fate,” Kathleen said contritely. “Fate placed that powder keg outside the door—the cards you were dealt. But you ‘played your hand’ skillfully and saved many lives.”
“Not Fate, Miss Barton,” the preacher cut in, clutching his Bible in both hands and raising it for emphasis. “That is merely a roll of the dice. It is God’s will that determines each man’s destiny.”
“Pious piffle,” the astrological doctor protested. “Our destiny is determined by the alignment of stars and planets.”
Booger brought one fist down on the table so hard that the whiskey bottle leaped two inches into the air. “Faugh! Both you chowderheads can chuck the gasworks and loop your buttons! It’s almost sunrise and that swift wagon rolls with or without you weak sisters.”
“But, Booger,” Trixie protested. “Skye needs to rest. He—”
“He needs my boot up his hinder, is all. I promised to get him killed, and by the Lord Harry I will! He’s damn lucky he wasn’t bucked out while he was doing the deed outside with this hot little senyoreeter.”
Socorro flushed and hurried out of the room. Raul threw his hands up toward the ceiling. “Ay, dios!” Booger watched Kathleen Barton stare at Fargo and grinned with pure malice.
“Well, that didn’t take you long, did it?” she said snidely. “My noble bodyguard.”
She returned to her room. Fargo stared at Booger. Abruptly, the two men burst out laughing like schoolboys.
“Scandalous,” the horse-faced preacher said.
“If you say so, Rev,” Ashton remarked. “As for me, I admire and envy Fargo for the conquest.”
“Of course you do, slyboots,” Booger said, narrowing his eyes. “You admire Fargo to death, eh?”
Trixie brought her lips close to Fargo’s ear. When she whispered, her animal warm breath was a tickling caress.
“Skye? I sneaked outside and spied on you when you done that Mexican girl. Laws! My naughty parts been tingling ever since. The size on you—it took my breath clean away. I hope I’m next.”
By the time the new team was hitched, the dark sky directly overhead was turning grainy with the promise of a new day. Only a few minutes later the newborn sun painted salmon-pink streaks over the eastern horizon. By the time the passengers were all aboard, the newly risen sun had begun to burn off the mist hovering over the nearby Rio Grande.
And now all could see the huge crater in the yard—as big as the Concord itself.
“This ain’t the usual greasy-sack outfit we’re up against,” Fargo said grimly. “These boys are loaded for bear. And it’s only June thirteenth.”
Booger stared at the crater a few more moments and then cracked his blacksnake, the stagecoach jerking into motion with a rattle of tug chains.
“Bad medicine,” he muttered to Fargo. “Powerful bad medicine.”
* * *
Russ Alcott lowered his spyglass and cursed. “I ain’t even believing this shit, boys! That motherlovin’ station ain’t been touched! And there’s a big ol’ hole way out in the yard.”
“You sure you put the powder close enough to the house?” Spider asked. “I mean, it was dark and all.”
“Does your mother know you’re out? Christ, there was a full moon, and I paced off the distance from the door—fifteen feet. That crater is at least three times that distance from the house.”
“Maybe it rolled,” Cleo suggested.
Alcott aimed a withering stare at him. “Yeah, and maybe every Jack shall have his Jill, too. That ground is level as a billiard table. ’Sides, I dug a little wallow for it.”
“Then Fargo got to it,” Spider declared. “And the cockchafer musta done it just in the nick of time.”
The three men were hidden behind a juniper brake near the river and had already watched the stagecoach leave.
“Lomax ain’t gonna like this,” Cleo fretted. “If Fargo ain’t killed by—”
“It’s too dead to skin now,” Alcott cut him off. “The nearest mirror-relay man is up ahead at Bosque Grande. At ten o’clock sharp I’ll send the signal that Fargo is still alive. Lomax won’t like it, but he knows damn good and well it’d be easier to tie down a bobcat with a piece of string than to kill Fargo. We still got plenty of time—losing a battle won’t keep us from winning the war.”
Alcott was quiet for several minutes, pondering options. Suddenly he made up his mind.
“Boys, that bosque just north of us is at least a ten-mile stretch of cottonwoods and pine that ain’t been cleared for crops. Cleo, you may be a few bricks short of a load, but ain’t nobody can shoot as plumb as you with a long gun. You’re gonna get your chance to drop a bead on Fargo.”
7
By late morning a glaring yellow sun was stuck high in the sky as if pegged there. Even the thoroughbraces couldn’t spare Fargo’s bruised head from constant jolts of pain when the Concord rattled over stretches of washboard trail or plunged into sudden dips.
“Booger, you spiteful son of a bitch,” he complained at one point. “You’re deliberately driving over the worst spots to deal me misery.”
Booger loosed a guilty giggle like a boy caught playing with himself. “For a surety. If I cannot kill you all entire, it will be the death of a thousand ruts. You sneaked out last night for pussy, eh? And left old Booger to his blue balls.”
Fargo shook his head in disgust. “What, I’m a pimp now? If you weren’t so damn mean and ornery to women, you might get a little bit now and then. Cutting farts at the dinner table doesn’t impress them.”
“Pah! You hog it, Fargo! Next you’ll prong Trixie—she’s itching for you. But I guarandamntee, Fargo—you’ll never play push-push with Her Nibs.”
“That leaves me a broken man.”
Booger jabbered on as if Fargo had not spoken. “No sir, Trailsman, you’ll not point her heels to the sky. See, she’s use to them yapping lapdogs in top hats and swallowtails. She needs to be took on the ground like an animal, is all.”
“Get your mind off tail,” Fargo snapped. “We got killers to waltz with. And a bosque coming up soon.”
Again Booger ignored him, cracking his six-horse whip over the leaders in his irritation. “That high-toned bitch grates on a man’s nerves, she does.”
Fargo waved all this aside, pivoting around and climbing onto the top of the coach. He gazed past the strapped-down trunks to check their backtrail. Roiling clouds of dust from the coach obscured the view, but with his field glasses he thought he could make out dust puffs far behind them.
He climbed back onto the box. By now Booger, who had never found any virtue in silence, had changed the subject. “Look at yourself, Fargo—you’re poor as a hind-tit calf, just like me. Roving all over Robin Hood’s barn, and for what? Mince pie, that’s what! Why, a smart, handsome son of a bitch like you could’ve got hitched to a rich skirt and, as they say, managed her money for her.”
