by Sharpe, Jon
Fargo rolled hard and fast as Red Sash threw his knife, grabbing the express gun and cocking both hammers. Sprawled on his back, Fargo fired both barrels almost point-blank. The twin load of buckshot lifted the Apache off the coach in a bloody spray. Seeing their battle leader land in an ungainly heap behind the swift wagon shocked the rest and broke the back of their attack. They scattered to the east like dogs with their tails on fire.
When the smoke cleared, the stink of saltpeter and death was thick in the broiling heat. Fargo, his face blackened with powder, sat up and thumbed reloads into his Colt as he watched the Apaches retreat. The sudden calm, after a pitched battle, always seemed eerie to him.
“You hit, Booger?”
“Not so’s you’d notice. Think them red Arabs will mount a vengeance raid?”
“No. This bunch are after loot, not coup feathers. But I’ll still feel better when we clear out of here. They’ll be back to get their dead—or at least their weapons.”
Fargo raised his voice. “You folks all right down there?”
“Malachi got nicked in his ribs, Skye,” Trixie answered, a tremble in her voice. “But it’s piddlin’. Laws! I thought sure we was all goners!”
“Stay put,” Fargo said. “We got to switch out a dead horse, then we’re pulling foot.”
“Fargo,” Booger said just before both men climbed down, “have I thanked you yet for naming old Booger as your driver on this run? My only regret is that I will not leave a widow for you to fuck after you get me killed.”
“That is a shame,” Fargo agreed. “You got any sisters?”
11
Russ Alcott lowered his spyglass and loosed a sharp whistle. “Boys, that’s what you call painting the landscape with blood. Them was Apaches they just routed, and them red sons ain’t no cracker-and-molasses Injins. Two of ’em whipped a force that was ten to one against ’em.”
Alcott, Cleo Hastings and Spider Winslowe were well hidden in a river thicket beside the Rio Grande. Alcott, picking his teeth with a twig, was silent for a full minute, thinking hard.
“Well, that flat out does it,” he finally announced. “It’s open country ahead and we ain’t got a snowball’s chance to kill Fargo and snatch that woman anytime before they hit Albuquerque.”
“Why don’t we give Fargo the go-by and just grab the woman?” Spider suggested.
“You been grazin’ locoweed? Fargo’s a jobber and his job right now is to protect that pert skirt. Even if we could do it, it’s no use taking her withouten we kill Fargo. They say he can hold a trail in windstorms that blow even insect tracks away. We’d never shake him.”
Thus reined in by logic, Spider tried another tack. “What about the station at Peralta just south of Albuquerque? Maybe we could—”
Alcott waved this off. “Nah, we’d just be barkin’ at a knot. We bollixed it up back at San Marcial and now Fargo will be on guard at the stations. Good ambush country starts just past Rio Rancho. I use to ride with Jack Dancy’s gang up that way; I know the country good.”
“Yeah, Russ, but hell,” Spider protested. “This is already the fifteenth of June. By the time they hit Rio Rancho, it’ll be the seventeenth before we can make another play. That gives us only three days—ain’t that paring the cheese might close to the rind?”
“What cheese?” Cleo put in, confused, but the other two ignored him.
“Too damn close,” Alcott agreed. “But, see, we got us another problem in the mix—that goddamn driver.”
“Yeah. ’At sumbitch is a big grizz, ain’t he?”
“Size ain’t nothing to the matter, Spider. That bastard is crazy-brave, and that’s the worst kind. Just now—bullets was humming in nineteen to the dozen, and did you see him laughing while them Apaches attacked? Hell, he enjoyed it. We ain’t never gonna whip the pair of ’em together.”
“You mean we’re just gonna give up?” Cleo demanded.
Alcott gave him a pitying look. “Here’s a man knows gee from haw,” he replied scornfully. “When you ever seen Russ Alcott get icy boots? I’m just telling you, lunkhead, we got to kill the big grizz first if we want even odds at Fargo.”
“Sure,” Spider said, “but how we gonna play a deal like that?”
“I ain’t got a foggy notion in hell,” Alcott admitted. “Unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
“Unless,” Alcott said, thinking out loud more than speaking, “we can maybe rub him out in Albuquerque. That’s an Overland stagecoach hub and more in the way of a saloon than a station house. Spider, are you still in thick with that pretty Mex’can whore, what’s-her-name?”
“Conchita? Sure, I trimmed her just before we took this job. She’s the one helped me kill Billy Hanchon. That hot little twat will do anything for a gold double eagle.”
“She still got her that crib right along the river behind Albuquerque station?”
Spider nodded. A sudden spark of hope animated Alcott’s pale-ice eyes.
“Now we’re cookin’, boys! That big son of a bitch siding Fargo is bad trouble, all right, but he ain’t got the think-piece Fargo’s got. And he drinks whiskey like he’s a pipe through the floor—I seen him at San Marcial. The main mile is to get him away from Fargo long enough to kill him. We’re gonna ride hard and talk to this little Mexer. That coach will pull into Albuquerque sometime late tomorrow, and we’re gonna make damn sure it pulls out with a different driver.”
* * *
On June sixteenth, two hours before sunset, Fargo watched the adobe and red-tile buildings of Albuquerque heave into view ahead of them.
Nestled between the Rio Grande and the Sandia Mountains, the dusty frontier outpost had, in the era of New Spain, served merely as a layover for caravans traveling the long trade route known as El Camino Real—the King’s Highway—linking Santa Fe with Chihuahua, Durango, Aguascalientes and other interior cities of Mexico. Recently, however, it had become a transportation center for people and goods throughout the American Southwest.
The sight seemed to stir Booger from a hibernation state brought on by exhaustion. “My favorite station, Fargo! Good eats, cheap tarantula juice, and the best-lookin’ sparkling doxies in Zeb Pike’s wasteland. Old Booger will finally get himself a spot of the old in-out, hey?”
“Don’t go treating the place like Fiddler’s Green,” Fargo warned. “We shook the Apaches off our tails, but we’ve still got Zack Lomax’s curly wolves looking to put us with our ancestors. Go easy on the whiskey, and keep your eyes to all sides.”
“Faugh! Them jackleg gunmen will catch a weasel asleep before they surprise this child.”
A half hour later the Concord pulled in at Overland’s big wagon yard. Unlike the sleep station at Peralta, the place was a hive of activity. The big depot wasn’t very impressive from the outside, even drowning in burnished-gold sunlight as it was now. Departing from the rest of the town’s architecture, it was a low, split-slab building with a shake roof and a long tie-rail out front still covered with bark. Nearly transparent hides had been stretched over the windows to keep out the grit-laden winds that plagued Albuquerque.
The inside, however, was bright and cheery, the plastered walls turned into painted murals depicting red rock canyons and pristine mountain ranges. The building was divided into a cluster of small sleeping rooms for children and female passengers and a bustling cantina that, like the relaxed public standards in Santa Fe, was open to both sexes.
“Where is the ladies’ bathhouse?” Kathleen demanded the moment the travelers from El Paso entered the depot.
Fargo bit his lower lip to keep from grinning. “Sorry, lady, but water scarcity plagues this town. Spring runoff from the mountains was low this year, and they’ll barely have enough for the horses.”
“Drat!” She stamped her foot in frustration. “Half the dust from the trail seems to have
settled on me.”
Trixie caught Fargo’s eye. “You should have bathed in that creek where we camped, Miss Barton. It was real nice.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to have ruined your fun—or Mr. Fargo’s.”
Trixie shrugged. “Don’t bother me if people watch. They might learn something.”
“Disgraceful,” Pastor Brandenburg muttered. “Modesty is a virtue, Miss Belle, as is purity.”
“What about hypocrisy?” Ashton asked the preacher. “You’d give anything to have been in Fargo’s place. An honest pagan is better than a bad Catholic.”
“Now, now, Your Loftiness,” Booger soothed Kathleen, who was still petulant. “No need to fret. Old Booger gives you his word you will have a fine, hot bath when we reach San Felipe.”
“Oh? Another water trough, I suppose?”
Booger glanced at Fargo and winked. “No cruel jokes this time. A fine bathhouse just for the ladies. Plenty of privacy.”
“I’m famished,” Malachi Feldman complained. “Let’s get some hot food.”
Despite the number of female passengers in the cantina, the place had the grim, masculine smell of any other frontier saloon: sweat, unwashed bodies, tobacco and pungent liquor. Fargo stepped through the archway ahead of the others and took a careful look around. Then he waved the rest in.
A big Navajo wearing a red plume in his low-crowned leather hat was tending bar, and Fargo noticed several dark-skinned Mexicans with flashing white teeth and dark, dangerous eyes—eyes that fastened appreciatively on the two women as they entered.
Trixie wrinkled her nose at the stench of heavy Mexican tobacco, stronger even than cigar smoke. “These Spaniards look like some rough fellows,” she remarked nervously.
“Pah!” Booger scoffed. “Ol’ Sancho likes to flash a knife, but it’s like they say about the Espanish navy: ‘A frog likes his cognac, a limey his rum, but the dago sticks to port.’”
Kathleen noticed how Fargo stayed close to her side and did not relax his vigilance.
“I certainly feel well protected,” she remarked, a note of sarcasm seeping into her tone. “I suppose next you will insist on sleeping in my room?”
“I hate to disappoint you,” Fargo replied, “but Booger and me have already agreed to take turns sitting in a chair outside your door.”
They settled at an empty table and Booger gathered up the meal chits, taking them back to the kitchen. Kathleen had been watching a number of young women—smoke-eyed women who flirted from behind palmetto fans—enticing male travelers.
“Well, Mr. Fargo,” she taunted, “they all certainly notice you. Perhaps you’ll make that third conquest after all?”
“It’s not really a conquest,” Fargo explained, “if a man pays for it.”
“Oh? Something you never resort to, I’m sure.”
“Why would I when there’s plenty of volunteers?”
“Yes, you are a ruggedly handsome fellow, I suppose. But, of course, men who wear bloody buckskins and carry knives in their boots are perforce limited to women of easy virtue—women who make little distinction between a bed and a berry patch.”
Ashton snickered, Trixie frowned, the preacher clutched his Bible tighter. Feldman, busy untying a chamois pouch, seemed not to have heard. Fargo held the actress’s gaze and replied amiably, “Generally they forget real quick where they are. And I’ve found that a woman who’s good in bed is usually even better on the floor.”
Kathleen flushed just as Booger returned with a bottle of red-eye and a tray of pony glasses. “Grub pile in just a few minutes. No beans this time, Miss Barton.”
She flushed even deeper. But by now Booger had shifted his attention to Feldman. “H’ar now, you little pop-eyed freak. What’s that in your pouch?”
“The world-famous traveling moon pebbles, Mr. McTeague.”
“No Choctaw here, catfish.”
“It’s not Choctaw, it’s plain English. I assume you are aware that millions of birds migrate to the moon every winter?”
“Teach your grandmaw to suck eggs.”
“It’s scientific fact,” Feldman insisted. “Surely, at night, you’ve seen geese flying into the face of the moon. It is only a few hundred miles from Earth and easily reached by most birds.”
Booger looked a question at Fargo. The Trailsman, by a supreme effort, kept a straight face. “I have heard,” he replied truthfully, “that birds can fly to the moon.”
“Indeed they can,” Feldman said, warming to his theme. “And some of them bring back moon pebbles in their beaks. Pebbles like these.”
He shook out six round, gray objects the size of marbles and formed a circle with them on the table. Booger finished his whiskey and wiped his mouth on his sleeve, staring at them. “Pah! Them could be kidney stones passed by a bull moose for aught I know.”
“No, sir. These moon pebbles are distinct, for unlike any pebbles found on Earth they are animate—they can travel on their own.”
He reached into the pouch again and produced a “pebble” twice the size of the others. “All they require is a leader stone. The moment they sense the presence of a leader, they immediately travel to it—safety in numbers and all that.”
He placed the largest pebble in the center of the circle. Booger started, his eyes widening, when the six smaller pebbles instantly rolled inward until tightly clustered around the large one.
“Carry me out!” he exclaimed. “Carry me out with tongs! Them sons-a-bitches scuttled like bugs! Fargo, you seen that too?”
“Sure did,” Fargo replied.
“Well, old Booger is clemmed! I’ll allow I never seen the like in all my born days! Say, little fellow, what will you take for them?”
Trixie, unable to hold off any longer, sputtered with laughter but disguised it as a cough. Even Kathleen, Fargo noticed, was actually smiling.
“McTeague,” Lansford Ashton said, “have you never heard of magnets?”
He suddenly brought a fist down hard on one of the pebbles. It disintegrated to a white powder, revealing a small piece of metal within. “These ‘pebbles’ are merely plaster of paris painted gray. The biggest one has a magnet inside.”
“Ignore this skeptic, Mr. McTeague,” Feldman spoke up quickly. “I might be persuaded to part with these rare objects for—”
Booger cut him off with a growl, his face bloated with anger. “Walk your chalk, you filthy bedlamite, or I’ll pump a bullet into your bagpipes. You think old Booger don’t know sic ’em about magnates? Why, I spotted your grift all along.”
“Magnets,” Fargo corrected him. “Not magnates.”
“Hey, Booger,” Trixie cut in, “I got some pieces of wood that can square-dance. Wanna buy ’em?”
Booger scowled and poured more whiskey while everyone except Kathleen and the dour-faced preacher laughed. Fargo, however, closely watched a pretty Mexican soiled dove who had not taken her attention off Booger since he arrived, her eyes watching him through the black lace mantilla over her head.
Kathleen saw Fargo watching the girl and mistook his interest. “Surely, Mr. Fargo, she’s a mercenary. Or perhaps you think even a pretty adventuress will dally with you gratis?”
“Take a closer look. It’s not me she’s eyeballing.”
Kathleen did look. “Yes . . . yes, I see what you mean. Well, I suppose Mr. McTeague is an easy sale. He’s already drunk.”
“Could be,” Fargo said. “But there’s plenty of other men in here I’d pick first if I was a sporting girl.”
Kathleen suddenly caught his drift. “You don’t mean . . . ?”
“Lomax’s men? Why not? Booger is obnoxious, foulmouthed, and generally acts like a fool. But he’s hell on two sticks when the war whoop sounds. They must know that by now, and maybe they figure they’ll never get to me—and you—until they p
ut him under.”
Fargo quickly turned the problem over with the fingers of his mind the way a jeweler might study facets of a stone. The more he looked, the worse it smelled.
The Mexican girl made her move, stopping by Booger’s chair and whispering something in his ear. She headed for the door and Booger rose to follow her. Fargo caught up with him halfway to the door.
“Let it go, Booger. That gal’s been paid to lure you out.”
Booger, his moon face flush with drink, narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “H’ar now! You have your ration of free cunny, eh? But old Booger may not even pay for it? Fargo, like I warned you: I’m a volcano fixin’ to explode. Gangway or I’ll dust your doublet!”
“Let it go, hoss. All that’s waiting for you is a lead bath.”
“Pah! Acknowledge the corn, Fargo—you’re jealous because she prefers a big brute like me over you. Say! One love bite hides another, hey? Let’s go tandem on her and then flip to see who pays.”
“Booger, c’mon back inside. I give you my word: when we get to Santa Fe you can have all the frippet you want and I’ll post the pony.”
“Clean your ears or cut your hair, catfish. Never come twixt a dog and his meat.”
Booger swept Fargo aside with one brawny arm, almost knocking him ass-over-applecart. Fargo cursed, knowing he couldn’t stop the horny giant without shooting him. He turned and glanced quickly around the cantina. A man wearing the five-pointed star of a deputy sheriff stood hip-cocked at the bar, conversing with another man. Fargo quickly crossed the cantina.
“Ask you a favor, deputy?” Fargo greeted him.
The lawman’s suspicious eyes traveled the stranger’s length. “And just what might that be, Mr. . . . ?”
“Fargo. Skye Fargo. You see that beautiful woman waiting for her supper at the table in the center of the room?”
“See her? I ain’t looked at much else since you folks come in. Skye Fargo, you say? Aren’t you—”
