Wolf's Head (A Neal Fargo Adventure--Book Seven)

by John Benteen

  Fargo knew Lasher was behind attempts to wreck the MacKenzie logging operation. Lasher wanted the lush timberland known as the Wolf’s Head Tract for himself, and smashing MacKenzie was the first step in taking it. Teddy Roosevelt, Fargo’s old Rough Riders boss, had an interest in the situation, and wanted Lasher stopped—permanently.

  But Lasher was as tough as they come, and harder to catch than a greased pig. Still, when Fargo took on a job he saw it through to its violent end … or died in the trying.

  WOLF’S HEAD

  FARGO 7

  By John Benteen

  First published by Belmont Tower in 1970

  Copyright © 1970, 2015 by Benjamin L. Haas

  First Smashwords Edition: May 2015

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover image © 2015 by Edward Martin

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.

  Chapter One

  The hotel on Seattle’s Skid Road was about one cut above a flophouse. The room, with an iron bed and scabby linoleum on the floor, stank of its previous habitants: of dirt, sweat, stale smoke, bad whiskey. But Fargo did not intend to stay here long.

  He was a big man, better than six feet, wide in the shoulders, narrow in the hips, his legs the long, lean tough ones of a horseman. His face was weathered, tanned, with high cheekbones and a rock of a jaw, the mouth a thin-lipped slash. Beneath white brows, his eyes were gray, cold, yet always alive, alert. He was still a few years away from forty, but his close-cropped hair was snow-white, prematurely so. He was ugly, no doubt about it, bearing the scars of many battles, but it was the kind of ugliness that made women look at him more than twice and come to him if he wanted them; a hard, thoroughly masculine ugliness.

  Now, as easily as if it were empty, he hoisted the big trunk up on the sagging bed. Fishing a key from the watch-pocket of his canvas pants, he unlocked the heavy padlock and threw back the lid. For a moment, his eyes flared with pleasure as he looked down at its contents. They were the tools of his trade, which was fighting. He was a soldier of fortune, with long years of violent experience behind him.

  The violence had begun on a New Mexican ranch when his parents had been killed by raiding Apaches, who had somehow missed the only child. It had continued through a few years of servitude with foster parents on another ranch. At twelve, he’d had a bellyful of being an unpaid slave, kicked around by the miserly, sadistic foster father. He’d hauled out one night, on foot; never been back. Since then, he’d been on his own.

  Punching cattle, hardrock mining, logging, he’d done it all. Growing into manhood as hard as hickory, he’d found his real profession in Bucky O’Neill’s company of The Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War. He had everything it took to make a soldier, and he’d stayed on in the Cavalry through a hitch in the Philipines during the Insurrection when the fighting had been bitter between the Army and the natives who, freed of Spanish rule, were determined to be independent of America as well. That hard interval had made him a true professional. Since then, he had fought in little wars and revolutions all over the Western hemisphere, freelance. In between, he’d put in a stint as a boxer in the prize ring and once, really down on his luck, as bouncer in a New Orleans whorehouse. That was behind him now; he went where the money was, and he did not work cheap. There was no reason to; the rewards were good for a fighting man who knew his trade and had long since ceased to quibble over right and wrong.

  Now, with respect, he unpacked the articles in the trunk. Weapons, good ones, tailor-made for his own purposes. He took out a Winchester .30-30 carbine in a fine leather saddle scabbard, extracted it, worked its lever once or twice, satisfied himself that it had survived the long train trip up from the border without damage. He laid it aside, fished from the trunk a pistol in a buscadero holster on a cartridge belt. It was an Officer’s Model Colt .38 revolver, of the sort the Army had used before adopting the .45 automatic. The Army had said the .38 packed insufficient stopping power to halt the Moros of the Southern Philippines when they ran amok, full of hashish and fanaticism. Fargo had stopped lots of them with the .38; it was far more accurate and reliable than the .45; and the fact that he used hollow-pointed slugs that would explode on impact, doing terrible things to human flesh, made up for the difference in bullet-weight and powder-load.

  He laid the Colt aside, took out a shoulder harness for it. That he put in another place; shortly, he would slip it on, transfer the pistol from the hip-holster to one that fitted under his left arm. Then, with a faint smile, like that of a man thinking of his lover, he took from the trunk the shotgun, in its chamois-skin case.

  It was disassembled; neatly he locked it together. A Fox Sterlingworth, ten-gauge, it had once been a long-barreled fowling piece. Fargo had cut the barrels off short, transforming it into a riot gun with open bores. He had added, too, the sling. Now he slung the sawed-off shotgun over his right shoulder so that it hung, muzzles-down, behind his back. He hooked his right thumb in the sling. Then he twitched that thumb, almost imperceptibly. With lightning speed the short barrels came up under his right arm, pointed forward, the gun upside down. In the same clock-tick of time, Fargo’s left hand lashed across his chest, hit both triggers at once. If the gun had been cocked and loaded, that incredibly fast motion would have hurled eighteen buckshot in a deadly spray toward his chosen target. At short range, it was the most lethal weapon man had yet devised; that spreading pattern of buckshot would chop up, mow down, anything in its path.

  He was totally expert with it; and now he shifted it to the left shoulder and repeated the process. It was just as miraculously swift and would have been as deadly. He had been born with the ability to use either hand; being ambidextrous had saved his life more than once.

  Fargo unslung the shotgun, but he did not put it aside at once. Instead, he looked down at its ornately chased, engraved, and inlaid receiver, reading the legend almost obscured amidst the fancy work: To Neal Fargo. Gratefully, from T. Roosevelt. His thumb traced the legend absently. It had been The Colonel who had put him on to this job.

  The Colonel, Fargo remembered, had looked old, tired. After years of power—Police Commissioner of New York City, Governor of the State, Vice President and then President—power had been his meat and drink. Even without it, he still had to be on the go, and, naturalist and conservationist and generally feisty adventurer that he was, he had just returned from an exploration of the Amazon and its tributaries that had been full of hardship. That trip had taken its toll; still debilitated from fever, he had looked shrunken and sallow when he and Fargo had conferred secretly in El Paso, far from the robust figure he had cut as Colonel of The Rough Riders, when they had first come to know one another.

  “You’ve worked in the woods,” the Colonel said. “Logging.”

  “Yes.” Fargo rolled the drink of excellent bourbon between his palms. They were in The Colonel’s hotel room, only the two of them, all the aides and understrappers banished.

  “You know it well?”

  “I’m a damned good timber beast,” said Fargo without conceit.

  “Then ...” The Colo
nel hesitated, looking embarrassed. “You’d be ideal for the job. Except I can’t pay you much.”

  Fargo looked back at him. This was the only living man whom he loved and respected. This was as close to a real father as he could remember. Between the two of them it had never been a matter of money; not since Fargo had saved The Colonel’s life under fire in Cuba.

  “If you got something you want me to do,” he said, “I’ll do it.”

  “I have. But it’s hard to explain.”

  “Tell me anyhow.”

  “Yes.” The Colonel had risen, had begun to pace the room with that short, choppy stride of his. It lacked the old-time bounce. “Fargo,” he said, “we’re using up the country too fast.”

  “There’s a lot of it,” Fargo said.

  “Not enough.” The Colonel turned. “It seems like a lot now, yes, in 1916. But someday it won’t be nearly enough. Someday this country will be full of people, big cities everywhere, all across it. Swarming with people.”

  “I hope I don’t live to see that,” said Fargo. “Before it gets like that, I’ll hoist my tail and stampede out.”

  The Colonel looked almost sad. “I know. You and I—we’re too much alike. We like the lonesome places; when we see smoke from other people’s fires, it bothers us. You’re not cut out for civilization and neither am I really. But that doesn’t change things. People go on breeding, immigrants keep on coming, we’re going to fill up. When that happens, if we’re not careful, we’ll rape this country. Gouge out all its minerals, cut down all its trees, turn it into a desert.” His lips thinned beneath his gray mustache. “It’s happened before. Civilizations—mighty ones—have fallen because they laid waste the land. Look at Greece, barren now. Look at North Africa—desert where once there was fertility. You’ve seen it in your time, here in Texas. Overgrazing, the land grown up in cactus and chapparal where once it was horse-high in good grass. The big game killed off. Farmers coming in and plowing up ground that’s going to blow away sooner or later because there’s not enough rainfall to keep it from turning to dust.”

  “I’ve seen that,” Fargo said. “It makes me sick. That’s why I spend more time south of the border these days.”

  “All right,” the Colonel said. “Wood, timber. God knows, we seem to have plenty of it now. But we don’t really. You know, there are two ways of logging—selective cutting and what the loggers call highball, cut-and-get-out. Meaning, chop down everything in sight, turn the land to wasteland, and the hell with anything except profit.”

  “That’s the way most of them operate.”

  “Right. And it’s a crime. Selective cutting is what they ought to be doing. Conservation—” He chopped the air with a hand. “When I was President, I made it one of the keynotes of my administration. We set up national parks and forests, restocked big game, tried to preserve something of this country for generations to follow. But now I’m out of power, and things are different.”

  “How?” asked Fargo.

  The Colonel sat down, picked up his drink. “You ever hear of the Wolf’s Head Tract?”

  “The Wolf’s Head,” Fargo said, after a moment. “Yeah. Virgin timber, Douglas fir, up the Wolf’s Head River. Government owns it all, has, ever since they signed a treaty with the Indians years ago.”

  “Right.” The Colonel’s eyes glittered. “When I was President, we set that aside as a preserve. But the lumbermen want that timber. All right, timber’s necessary; the country needs wood. But there’s a right way to go at it and a wrong one. If it’s cut properly, selective cutting, taking out only the marketable trees and leaving the rest to reseed, raise another crop of fir, the Wolf’s Head will be an invaluable national resource for generations.”

  “I see,” Fargo said.

  “The lumber interests in Congress were finally successful in forcing Interior to put logging rights to the Wolf’s Head out for bids. The specifications were strict: selective logging, in accordance with best practice. Cutting so something will be left for the future. Whoever bid had to agree to that.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Great Northwestern, run by Alec MacKenzie, was the successful bidder. Alec and I have hunted together; he’s a good man, Fargo, an honest one. He stuck his neck out a mile to bid in these timber rights. He’s following the letter of the law, observing the terms of the contract down to every crossed T and dotted I. It’s costing him money, the kind of money the cut-and-get-out logger would never spend. But that’s the way Alec is.”

  The Colonel took a long swallow of his drink. “He stretched himself thin, mighty thin, Fargo, to bid in the Wolf’s Head Tract. He’s got to make a payment to Interior come winter when his drive’s gone down the river and been paid for at the mills. If he doesn’t, he’s in default and the contract, the logging rights, go to Lasher Lumber Company, the next high bidder.”

  Fargo’s eyes narrowed. “Saul Lasher?”

  “You know him?”

  “He’s a sonofabitch,” said Fargo. “He’d cut his own grandmother’s throat for a nickel. They ran him out of northern Michigan on account of the way he operated. When he gets through cutting, there’s nothing left behind him—nothing.”

  “Exactly,” said the Colonel. “If MacKenzie doesn’t meet his payments, Lasher gets the Wolf’s Head Tract by default. And Lasher will turn the whole country into a desert. A hundred years from now, it’ll still be desert.” He stared at Fargo. “I don’t want MacKenzie to default. I don’t want Lasher to get his hands on the Wolf’s Head.”

  “Is that where I come in?”

  “That’s where you come in. Alec MacKenzie’s having a devil of a time. Sabotage … Everything is going wrong. Probably Lasher’s hired men inside MacKenzie’s outfit to screw him up, but Alec can’t put his hand on them. Anyhow, he’s way behind schedule in his cutting. If he doesn’t cut more timber, make his drive successfully down the Wolf’s Head to Puget Sound, he’s finished and Lasher gets the lease. I don’t want to see that happen. The country can’t afford to have that happen.” The Colonel paused. “You’re an expert logger. You also happen to be the finest fighting man I know. Fargo, you’ve got to see that MacKenzie comes through, gets the timber out, makes his drive down the river, is able to pay the Government. It’s not just a matter of dollars and cents for a friend of mine, it’s a matter of the country’s welfare.”

  Fargo stood up, uncoiling his tall length like a lazy snake. “I haven’t been in the woods for a long time. Maybe it’ll be a nice change.”

  “Wait a minute,” the Colonel said. “I told you, I couldn’t pay you much.”

  “The hell with what you can pay,” Fargo said. “How much profit will MacKenzie make if he doesn’t lose this lease?”

  The Colonel frowned. “At least a quarter of a million. Maybe more.”

  Fargo smiled. He took out a long, thin, black cheroot, clamped it between perfect white teeth, and struck a match. Through smoke, he looked at the man across the table.

  “It ought to be worth ten per cent of that to MacKenzie to get his logs out on time,” he said.

  The Colonel stared back, then gave a short, barking laugh. “Yes. Yes, by Jove, I dare say it would be.”

  “So you don’t have to pay me anything,” Fargo said. “I can strike a deal with him.”

  “Yes,” said the Colonel. “Yes, certainly. But, Fargo—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I should warn you. When MacKenzie got in touch with me, he told me that he had already put three undercover agents in his camps to see who was trying to break him. All three died. There are accidents in logging camps. One was killed by a choker cable when it broke and lashed. Another was crushed under a falling tree. A third was found drowned in a creek near one of their cutting areas.”

  Fargo’s lips curled. “Were they professionals?”

  “Loggers? Yes.”

  “I mean fighting men.”

  For a moment the man across from him was silent. Then he said, “Not like you.”


  Fargo’s grin widened. He rolled the cigar across his mouth. “All right,” he said.

  The Colonel smiled. “You’ll try it?”

  “Sure,” said Fargo. “I’ll catch the night train north.”

  ~*~

  Now he reluctantly laid the shotgun aside. Then, from the trunk he took a knife. It was a weapon of strange design with a ten-inch blade in a specially molded sheath. Hinged handles of water buffalo horn folded down over six inches of that shaft of hardened steel which could be driven through a silver dollar with a single blow without blunting or dulling. It came from Southern Luzon, was called a Batangas knife, and Fargo was as much expert with it as with his guns. He hefted it now in his right hand, with the handles closed around the blades; then he flipped the handle catch and his hand jerked and suddenly the whole ten inches of glittering blade was naked and ready for lethal use. He smiled, flicked his hand again, and the blades closed up. Then he sheathed the knife. Later, when he went to the woods, it would ride in his hip pocket.

  Next, from within the trunk, he took out the bandoliers. They were designed to crisscross his chest, one holding fifty rounds of shotgun ammunition, the other studded with rifle cartridges. In the bottom of the trunk was a supply of extra ammunition for all his firearms; he was careful about his cartridges. One bad round could cost his life in this business; and he either loaded them himself or bought them only from people he could trust.

  Beneath the guns and ammo were his clothes. They fit every occasion, from riding hard in Mexico with Villa against the Government, to sledging across Alaska where he had, on occasion, finding mining too tedious, dealt faro and played poker, using his skill as a professional gambler to relieve the suckers, who really worked the creeks, of their accumulated dust. What he chose now, however, were canvas pants—stagged short, their bottoms cut off—and heavy leather boots with sharp steel caulks. Logger’s boots.

  He stripped off his regular trousers, climbed into the stagged pants, threw aside the leather cavalry officer’s boots he usually wore and laced on the logger’s footgear. Then, arising, he slid the Colt into the shoulder harness, buckled it around his torso, and donned a light jacket—Seattle was chilly, even in late summer—to conceal it. He slid the Batangas knife on his belt, sheathed it in his hip pocket. Then he put everything else back into the trunk, locked it, and slid it beneath the bed.