Death Devil (9781101559666)

by Sharpe, Jon

  The breathtaking view out ahead of them was familiar to Fargo, but he always gazed upon it as if seeing it for the first time. Many back in the States still believed the Rocky Mountains were a single wall rather than a series of parallel ranges. He could see them clearly now like ascending curtain folds, with the cloud-nestled spires of the imposing Bitterroot Range forming the final great barrier to human exploration.

  “Think we’ll ever tame ’em?” Dundee called out behind him. “These mountains, I mean.”

  Fargo mulled that one. Two decades earlier Hudson’s Bay Company men had swarmed this region until driven out by Nathaniel Wyeth’s Rocky Mountain Fur Company. But the London dandies no longer craved beaver hats, and now the region was mostly populated by Indians, silver and gold miners, soldiers, and a few hearty independent trappers. Fargo considered this land bordering the rugged Canadian Rockies one of the most pristine and spectacular places in the West—but also in grave danger of being overrun by “cussed syphillization.”

  “Tame them, no,” he finally replied. “Leastways I hope not. But unless the New York land hunters and the rest of them nickel-chasing fools back east are reined in, these mountains will be blasted into slag heaps by the miners and railroad barons.”

  “Spoken like a true bunch-quitter,” Dundee said.

  Something glinted from the slope above the pass.

  “See that?” Dundee called forward.

  Fargo nodded. “That wasn’t quartz or mica, not this far up. Hell, our horses are blowing hard even at a walk. Knock your riding thong off, Jasp, and break out your carbine—we might have a set-to coming.”

  “Suits me right down to the ground. I’d admire to ventilate Dub Kreeger’s skull. I knew that crooked bastard back at Fort Robinson. Just another scheming snowbird—joined the army in fall to get out of the cold, then lit out at the first spring thaw. Only, he liberated three hundred dollars from the Widows and Orphans Fund before he and his greasy bootlicks left.”

  “I heard he got himself arrested in the Black Hills?”

  “That’s the straight,” Dundee confirmed. “All four of ’em were in the stockade. They shoulda danced on air long ago. But they killed two guards and pulled a bust out. Made off with two cases of ammo, too. Lately they’ve taken to this high country and raiding on the new Overland route between South Pass and the Oregon Territory.”

  Dundee paused to survey the slopes around them. “Damn fool idea, Fargo, this new Overland route.”

  “Sure it is. But it was also a damn fool idea for the army to build the road that made it possible. All it did was stir up the feather-heads.”

  “That’s exactly what I told Colonel Halfpenny. There’s no civilian law up here and damn few soldiers. Now there’s three way-station men murdered, two Overland teamsters missing, a payroll missing, and God knows what happened to the three widows. And to cap the climax, Flathead Indian attacks have closed off the route and marooned Robert’s Station.”

  “Oh, there’s law up here,” Fargo gainsaid. “Gun law. But I’m with you on all the rest. And sending one soldier into these mountains is dicey enough, if you take my drift.”

  Dundee took it, all right. He and Fargo had been sent out of Fort Seeley to investigate the apparent heist of an army payroll as well as the fate of missing civilians. Seeley was a small garrison meant to protect prospectors in the Bitterroot Range. But a troop movement this high into the mountains could ignite a full-blown Indian war, especially with the Flathead tribe whose clan circles dotted this region.

  Fargo’s Ovaro flicked his ears several times. Since there were no flies at this altitude, Fargo read it as a warning the stallion was picking up sounds—sounds that didn’t naturally belong to the area.

  “Trouble’s on the spit,” he told Dundee. “But since they’re up above us, there’s no point in holing up. We’d be fish in a barrel. Our smartest play is to keep them back out of range until we hit the new federal road, then outrun ’em. Break out your spyglasses and glom that slope good.”

  “If it’s the Kreeger bunch,” Dundee opined as he pulled out his brass field glasses, “they’ll likely have their stolen army Spencers. It’s a good weapon at the short and middle distances, but that short barrel makes it unreliable over three hundred yards.”

  Several minutes passed in silence, the only sounds the hoof clops of their mounts and the occasional moaning of wind funneling through the pass. But Fargo felt the presence of imminent danger, as real as the man beside him.

  “You know anything about these three widows?” Fargo asked.

  Dundee chuckled. “I wondered when you’d get around to them, Lothario. No, I don’t know much. But all three are sisters, and my hand to God, they were married to three brothers.”

  “Ever meet these brothers?”

  “Nope. According to our records, they were named Stanton—Cort, Lemuel, and Addison Stanton. Hardworking and honest according to Overland.”

  “How do you know for sure they were killed?”

  “An express rider found the bodies, all shot in the head. Sounds like the payroll coach showed up at the station minus the driver and messenger guard. These three fellows went out to see if they could find the missing men.”

  Fargo nodded. “Well, last I heard the Flathead tribe has very few barking irons. Besides, they like to take prisoners alive and bring them back to the village for torture. If a prisoner acts tough and stands up to it good, they’ll generally let him go.”

  “Mighty white of ’em,” Dundee said sarcastically.

  “More than you’ll get from an Apache or Comanche, soldier blue. So what about the strongbox?”

  “Yeah, what about it? I agree with you that white men likely killed those teamsters, and that almost surely means Dub Kreeger and his two-legged roaches. I s’pose they got it.”

  “I don’t,” Fargo said flatly. “Not if that’s the Kreeger gang watching us right now.”

  Dundee, still watching through his glasses, let that remark sink in for a minute. “Yeah, all right, you’ve got a good point and I’m caught upon it. If that pack of yellow curs laid their paws on twenty-eight thousand dollars, why in blue blazes would they still be in this area, right? Sure as cats fighting they’d be on their way to San Francisco or Santa Fe.”

  Fargo nodded. “So either they didn’t get it or that’s not them getting set to perforate our livers.”

  “Fargo, you’ve got a poetical way of speaking,” Dundee said sarcastically.

  Again the Ovaro pricked his ears, but this time Fargo wasn’t so sure it was a danger sign—his own frontier-honed ears picked up faint sounds from the right side of the trail. Sounds remarkably like feminine laughter.

  “Jasp,” he called out, “light down and hobble your mount. Bring your spyglasses, too.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Most likely—sounds like females.”

  Both men swung down, tied their horses foreleg to rear with rawhide strips, then wormed their way through the boulders massed along the trail. A minute later they emerged onto a large traprock shelf overlooking a small valley with a white-water stream churning through it.

  Dundee stared, jaw slacked in astonishment, then brought his field glasses up for a better look. Fargo followed suit.

  “Son of a splayfooted bitch,” Dundee said in a reverent whisper. “Are you seeing the same thing I am, Fargo?”

  “Yeah. We can’t both be dreaming.”

  Below, in the center of the verdant valley, the noisy stream crashed over a rock lip, forming a small waterfall and a natural pool. Three young women, shapely, pretty, and naked as jaybirds, frolicked in the pool.

  Fargo said, “There’s our three widows, I’d wager. Don’t appear to be mourning, either.”

  “Well, keep up the strut! Two gorgeous brunettes and a blonde who looks like the youngest,” Dundee said. “The only place I’ve seen tits like that is on those French playing cards.”

  “These ain’t psalm singers neither,” Fargo said, glancing at the fo
rmidable cache of weapons at the edge of the pool. “These three nymphs are loaded for bear.”

  “A woman should be well-heeled up in these mountains, Trailsman.”

  “Actually, a woman shouldn’t be up here at all.”

  However, Fargo’s words lacked all conviction as he watched one of the brunettes bend over to scrub her legs.

  “Look at that, won’tcha?” Dundee said in a voice gone raspy with lust. “That sweet, firm ass baying at the moon. And look! The blonde is sudsing her tits! Jesus, Fargo, maybe we’ll roll a seven, huh? They got no men now.”

  “We’re ordered to bring them down out of the mountains, Jasp, not to bed them.”

  Still staring through his glasses, Captain Dundee made a farting noise with his lips. “You sanctimonious hypocrite! Christ, every morning you have to comb the pussy hair out of your teeth. You telling me you don’t plan to tap into that stuff?”

  Fargo grinned. “I’m a man likes a challenge, so I aim to hop on all three of ’em. Then I’ll trim each one separately.”

  Dundee laughed. “I’m ugly and going bald, so I’ll settle for just one. Maybe—”

  Dundee never got his next word out. Fargo heard a sickening sound like a hammer hitting a watermelon followed a fractional second later by the reverberating crack of a cavalry carbine. The back of Dundee’s head exploded in a scarlet blossom, and the officer folded to the ground like an empty sack.