by Jon Sharpe
Fargo didn’t look; he scrambled toward the table. An arrow with a discolored bone tip thunked into the floorboards inches from his arm.
Letting go of the Sharps, Fargo rolled, palming the Colt as he turned. The Mad Indian was at the window, nocking another arrow. Flat on his back, Fargo fanned off two swift shots and was rewarded with a yelp. The Mad Indian disappeared.
Across the room, the razorback had wheeled to come at him again but its hooves were finding slick purchase on the smooth boards.
Fargo fanned two shots so quickly they sounded as one. Then he was under the table and the boar was pounding past but as it went by it hooked the table with a tusk and upended it. Fargo felt a pain across his shoulders. The table had landed on top of him. Shoving it off, he gained his knees. The axe was only a few feet away. He grabbed it up, and stood.
The razorback came at him yet again, squealing, its beady eyes ablaze. Its tusks swept up and in.
Fargo sidestepped. He put all he had into swinging the axe and the edge bit deep into the razorback’s neck. He tried to jerk it free but the handle was torn from his grasp.
Once more the boar wheeled. It paused, wheezing, blood misting from the new wound.
At Fargo’s feet lay the meat cleaver and one of the logs he had sharpened. He scooped them up.
The razorback stood there, glaring. In the confines of the cabin it seemed enormous beyond belief.
The boar tensed to spring forward.
And that was when the bedroom door opened. Namo Heuse, caked in sweat, blanket over his shoulders, blinked and said in dazed confusion, “Fargo? I thought I heard a noise.”
The razorback spun.
And Fargo flew, taking the gamble of his life. He stabbed the stake into the razorback’s eye. Out of instinct the razorback jerked away, and collided with the wall. It stumbled, then righted itself just as Fargo brought the meat cleaver down. Again and again and again Fargo swung. His life was in the balance.
The terror of the Atchafalaya squealed. With the axe sticking from its neck and the stake jutting from its eyes, it took a step toward him—and died. The crash of its great body rattled dishes in the cupboard.
“You did it!” Namo marveled.
Fargo dashed to the Sharps. Reloading on the fly, he raced out the front door and around the corner. But he needn’t have worried.
The stick figure in the mud was as still as death could make it, the eyes, even in oblivion, twin mirrors of madness.
Namo appeared at the window. “Is he—?”
“He is.”
“Then it’s over? It’s really and truly over?”
“Except for getting you to the healer in the settlement.” Suddenly so weary he could barely stand, Fargo leaned against the cabin.
“There’s no rush, my friend. The meal and the rest did wonders. I think my fever broke. We can wait until daylight.”
Fargo smiled for the first time in days. “I can use some rest myself. And something more to eat.”
Namo Heuse glanced over his shoulder. “How would you like roast boar?”
LOOKING FORWARD!
The following is the opening
section from the next novel in the exciting
Trailsman series from Signet:
THE TRAILSMAN #330
TUCSON TYRANT
Tucson, Arizona Territory, 1860—
where “stranglers” rule supreme and a
beautiful woman’s embrace is the dance
of death.
The sound of gunfire ripped through the furnace-hot desert air, but the lone, crop-bearded rider astride a black-and-white pinto stallion ignored it. One or two shots, the rider mused idly, usually meant celebration fire, just drunks hurrahing the town. Three or more often meant somebody was six feet closer to hell.
“Time to tank up, old campaigner,” Skye Fargo told the stallion, reining in at a small spring just outside the siesta-prone, but dangerous, settlement of Tucson in south-central Arizona Territory.
Fargo had been feeling a case of the nervous fan-tods for the past twenty miles or so. With the bluecoat pony soldiers being pulled from nearby Camp Grant for the rumored war brewing back east, three dangerous tribes—Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache—were making life hell for everyone else out here.
Fargo dipped his dusty head into the cool spring water, then cupped handfuls and drank them. Next he dropped the Ovaro’s bridle and let him drink. More gunfire erupted from town, and Fargo thumbed back the rawhide riding thong from the hammer of his single-action Colt.
“Don’t go looking for your own grave,” he muttered, advice from a Ute warrior, up in the Mormon country, just before the Ute almost killed him. But when had the Trailsman, as some called Fargo, ever done the safe thing?
Fargo studied Tucson and the surrounding terrain from slitted eyes. He was a tall, rangy, sinew-tough man wearing buckskins and a wide-brimmed plainsman’s hat. His face was tanned hickory nut brown above the darker brown of his beard. Eyes the pure blue of a mountain lake stayed in constant motion.
Fargo didn’t like what he was seeing—and not seeing. In places sagebrush grew tall enough to hide a man, and as Fargo had ridden across the dreaded desert of southern Arizona Territory in the past few days, he had spotted rock mounds where victims of Indian attack had been buried—killed by Apaches, most likely.
But the view within the town limits was just as ominous. At first glance, all Fargo could see through blurry heat waves was the steeple of a massive San Antonio church at the head of the central plaza. A green expanse of barley land ringed the town, cultivation meeting the desert like a knife edge. Strips of cottonwood lined the little Santa Cruz River, which divided the narrow and fertile valley where the mining-supply center of Tucson was located.
None of that, however, impressed Fargo as much as the slumping body hanging from a cottonwood limb near the river. He couldn’t read the sign pinned to it, so he retrieved his brass binoculars from a saddle pocket.
“ ‘Jerked to Jesus,’ ” he read aloud, shaking his head in disgust.
There were no Rangers out here as had recently been formed in Texas, and not enough marshals to fill an outhouse. Fargo had been warned, before he left Fort Yuma, about Tucson’s notorious Committee for Public Safety. Furthermore, he vastly preferred the Arizona Territory as it looked farther north, a mostly unpopulated landscape of pine trees, granite cliffs, and air that didn’t cling in your lungs like molten glass.
But Fargo was a victim of events. He had recently lost a high-stakes match against a pretty redhead who ran a faro wheel, and a sorely needed job as a fast-messenger rider awaited him here.
Fargo snugged the bridle again, the Ovaro taking the bit easily, and swung up into leather. He took a moment to slide his sixteen-shot Henry rifle from its saddle scabbard and check the vulnerable tube magazine for dents. Then he spurred the Ovaro forward, aiming for the central plaza at the heart of town.
Not much had changed, Fargo quickly realized, since last time he’d ridden these unpaved, sun-drenched streets. Lumber was scarce in the region, and most of the buildings were of Indian-style puddled adobe with brush ramadas shading the doors. Not one hotel or store, but plenty of twenty-four-hour gambling houses. Fargo heard lilting Spanish everywhere. The place was still overrun with dogs, whose constant yapping made the Ovaro stutter-step nervously.
When Fargo’s eyes flicked to the rammed-earth sidewalks, the two-legged curs watching him from hooded glances bothered him even more. The local vigilantes were as obvious as bedbugs on a clean sheet, for they all carried double-ten scatterguns, barrels sawed off to ten inches.
“Mr. Fargo? Mr. Skye Fargo?”
At the sound of a musical female voice, Fargo tugged rein and slued around in the saddle. A young woman stood in the doorway of a two-story adobe house that fronted on the plaza. The room visible behind her seemed almost bare, but clean, darned curtains hung in the windows. Seeing him rein in, she began running toward him—and she jiggled impressively, Fargo noticed.
“Mr. Fargo?” she asked again.
Fargo opened his mouth to reply, but as he got a better look at her, he was struck dumb by this sensuous vision. The Trailsman was no novice when it came to rating woman flesh, and he figured this one was at the top of the heap—far as her looks, anyway. Horn combs held her long, russet hair neatly in place, and her figure showed to curving perfection in a pinch-waisted gown of emerald green silk and lace.
“Mr. Skye Fargo?” she repeated, stopping beside the Ovaro and shading her eyes with one hand to look up at him.
In the seductive style of Santa Fe women, kohl had been artfully applied to lengthen her eyebrows, shade the lids, and extend the outer corners of the eyes. Fargo felt sudden loin warmth and was forced to discreetly shift in the saddle. He was rarely woman starved, but he often got plenty hungry.
“Excuse my bad parlor manners, miss,” Fargo hastened to say, tipping his hat. “Yes, I’m Skye Fargo. May I ask how you know me?”
“Mr. Fargo, you’re too modest. Any Western school child can tell you about the fearless Trailsman.”
Fargo grinned, strong white teeth flashing through his beard. “School child? Well, if that includes you, maybe I’ll get an education, Miss . . . ?”
“Oh, forgive me. I’m Amy Hanchon. My father, he . . .”
She faltered and Fargo waited patiently. The bell of San Antonio sounded the hour, three p.m. Wagon teams constantly brought in loads of merchant stock, and now a dozen or so wagons were parked in the plaza as the teamsters slept. Fargo spotted at least one vigilante in the shadow of the east plaza, watching him with eyes fatal as a snake.
“My father,” she soldiered on bravely, knuckling away a sudden tear, “is Daniel Hanchon. Reverend Daniel Hanchon. He is . . . was also a silver miner with political aspirations. But now I’m getting ahead of myself. Mr. Fargo, would you consider working for me?”
Fargo reluctantly pried his eyes away from the creamy white swells of her bosoms, thrust high by tight stays.
“First of all, Amy, I’m curious. Even if you have heard some backcountry lore about me, how could you recognize me riding past your house? I don’t pose for portraits.”
“Because of the Tucson Intelligencer, our newspaper. You see, I tried to place a notice for the services of hired guns. The editor was sympathetic, but he was afraid to do it.”
Her pretty face tightened with bitterness. “He’s afraid of Henry Lutz and that despicable goon of his, Crawley Lake. Every ‘man’ in this region spits when Lutz says to hawk.”
Fargo slanted a glance toward the vigilante in the shadows. He was looking north toward the huge church. Fargo felt a warning tingle in his scalp. Very soon he would regret not heeding it.
“Henry Lutz,” he repeated. “Would that be Bearcat Lutz?”
“Yes! You know him?”
Fargo shook his head. “Know of him, is all. I hear he’s the self-appointed head of the Tucson Committee for Public Safety. Anyhow, you were saying the newspaper editor was scared?”
“Yes, because I’m daring to defy Lutz. But the editor heard you were headed to Tucson to take a job with the Butterfield Overland. He said every newspaperman west of the Mississippi has heard of you.”
“Yeah, I’ve been blessed all to hell,” Fargo said from a deadpan. “But you’re taking the long way around the barn, Amy. What’s your dicker with Lutz?”
“He’s my father’s chief business rival. They are also bitter political rivals, each with a faction supporting them for Territorial Governor. Lutz is a cold-blooded murderer, but my father is the local Methodist minister, and even Lutz is afraid to openly murder a man of God. So he used his ‘authority’ as head of the vigilantes and arrested my father on a trumped-up charge of rape. He even paid a young Mexican girl, his own whore—I mean, mistress—to testify at the so-called miners’ court.”
“You’re sure there’s no truth to the charge?”
Red spots of anger leaped into her cheeks. “It’s pure buncombe!”
“It’s rough business, falling into the hands of stranglers,” Fargo allowed, using the common southwest word for vigilantes. “But you need law, not me.”
She placed her hands lightly on her hips. “What law? I doubt you know the half about Henry Lutz. Don’t think my father is sitting in jail, Mr. Fargo. Lutz and his lick-spittles are arresting almost any man who drifts into Tucson, accusing them of peddling whiskey to the Apaches.”
“That’s an easy pitch right now,” Fargo said. “Apaches have wiped out every white settlement except this one.”
“Exactly. The prisoners spend their nights in Lutz’s private prison, but from dawn until late night they work in his silver mine.”
She pointed to a blue-gray line of foothills about two miles north of town. “The prison is conveniently close to the mine. So long as a man can do the donkey work, he stays alive. When he finally breaks, he’s sentenced and executed. Locals are starting to call Tucson ‘Hangtown.’ My father is a strong man, but he’s no longer young.”
“I take it you want me to break him out?”
“Oh, yes! If he can be taken east where there’s law, Lutz can’t touch him. Will you do it, Mr. Fargo? Please . . . Skye?”
Fargo cursed silently. He’d rather buy ready-to-wear boots than lock horns with a criminal army. Besides, there was a contract with his name on it waiting at the Butterfield Overland office, a job that would mostly keep him away from the rattle and hullabaloo of cities.
“Lady,” he finally said, “looks to me like Bearcat has the whip hand while you’re trying to kick the dirt out from under your own feet. There’s still soldiers at Camp Grant.”
“Yes, but many are being called back east. And my father swears the commander is on Lutz’s payroll.”
“Even so, the plan you’re backing just gives stranglers all the ammo they need to make more arrests. These hemp-committee types are gutter filth, and they will hang a woman—after they’ve had their use of her.”
“That will surely happen,” she warned, “if you just ride away like it’s none of your business. You’re the Trailsman, a supposedly brave man who takes on lost causes and wins. They say you can sniff out a rat in a pile of garbage.”
“Well, ‘they’ make me out all wrong. I’m not the law, and I don’t go sniffing for rats—I prefer to avoid them. This Lutz sounds like a hard twist, all right, but you’ll need a badge toter to help you. Right now I plan to exercise my liver.”
Fargo tipped his hat and took up the slack in the reins. But before he could thump the Ovaro forward, Amy laughed bitterly.
“Oh, I see. Another sawdust Casanova,” she dismissed him. “It’s all lies about your courage. Devilment is all you men seek.”
Fargo grinned wide. “And I s’pose you’re purer than Caesar’s wife?”
“You’ve probably had her, too.” Amy stamped her foot in anger. “Perverse, arrogant, and uncouth,” she summed him up. A moment later, watching him, she added, “If your stupid grin grows any wider, you’ll rip your cheeks.”
“Tell you the straight, that acid tongue doesn’t help your disposition any,” Fargo retorted. “Why don’t we—”
Just then the Ovaro nickered, sidestepping nervously. Fargo swallowed his sentence without finishing it, remembering the vigilante across the plaza. Fargo spotted him just as a rifle somewhere above the plaza spoke its piece, the sound whip-cracking through the lazy air.
He felt the wind-rip when a lethally close bullet snapped past his face and chewed into the baked mud of the plaza, only inches from a shocked Amy. Fargo saw her leap like a butt-shot dog, then foolishly freeze in place instead of seeking cover.
The shooter opened up in earnest, a hammering racket of gunfire. Fargo hated to do it, but rounds were peppering them nineteen-to-the-dozen, and his experienced eye told him it was Amy the shooter was after, not him—yet, fear froze her in place like a pillar of salt. So Fargo, hunched low in the saddle, planted his left boot on her chest and gave a mighty shove.
The thrust catapulted her backwards and out of immediate danger, but now the hidden shooter opened up with a vengeance on Fargo. A round whacked into his saddle, another tugged his hat off. By now, however, Fargo had followed the bullets back to their source—the bell tower of San Antonio church.
It was a job best suited for the Henry, but fractional seconds counted now, and Fargo knew his belt gun would be faster. Quicker than eyesight, he filled his hand with blue steel. Just then, up in the bell tower, he spotted the familiar glint of sunlight on skin. The Colt leaped three times in his hand. His last shot made the bell ring.
At first, when all fell silent, Fargo figured the would-be murderer had fled. Abruptly, a straw-haired man with a chiseled face and shoulders broad as a yoke appeared in the opening of the tower for a moment. Fargo thumb-cocked his Colt, ready to put sunlight through him. Before he could fire, the man suddenly plummeted to the plaza like a sack of dirt, impaling himself on the iron spikes of the church fence.
“Gone to hunt the white buffalo,” Fargo muttered, leathering his six-gun. A second later a woman’s shrill, piercing scream startled the yapping dogs silent.
FB2 document info
Document ID: 3a418d8f-0d77-4502-a3ce-cc80e091d6f9
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 16.5.2012
Created using: calibre 0.8.50, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6.6 software
Document authors :
Jon Sharpe
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