Hell on Wheels (A Fargo Western #15)

by John Benteen

  “We didn’t come down here to watch the trains go in and out,” Fargo said.

  Morrison laughed shortly. Then the laugh died. “Maybe you should. Where you’re going, I know some trains that aren’t going in and out much longer.” He shifted weight, and something moved and stirred inside Neal Fargo: one gunman’s response to another. Because, he saw now, that was basically what Hawk Morrison was. Not a penny-ante tinhorn like King Brady, but the pure quill, a fighting man. They didn’t make many like that nowadays. Whether now or later, bucking Hawk Morrison he would earn his money, by laying his life on the line. Despising the man, Fargo could not help feeling a certain admiration for him, even kinship with him.

  Then he thought of the two dead Nez Percé. Hiring Indians as assassins diminished Morrison in his eyes. He said, casually, “Hawk, we want to buy some tickets north. How many Indians have we got to fight to do it?”

  Morrison’s eyes didn’t change. “Likely about two less than you might have a couple of days ago.”

  “What?” Ellen said, not understanding this.

  “Actually,” Morrison said, “when you work for a big company, sometimes you got to hire people to do things you’d rather do yourself.”

  “Yeah,” Fargo said, and Morrison had risen in his estimation again. “I know how it is. Ellen, buy the tickets, will you?”

  “Ellen,” Morrison said.

  Coolly, regally, nearly as tall as he was, she turned toward him. “You’re going to try to stop us, Hawk?”

  “Not from buying tickets, no. The railroad needs all the business it can get. Just from making a mistake.”

  “Didn’t know I’d made one.”

  “Fargo’s bottom price, I hear, is twenty thousand. That’s a lot of money to throw down the drain.”

  Ellen smiled. “Why,” she said, “it’s only seven days running for us. If he can keep us going seven days, we’ve paid his wages and we’re a thousand to the good. It’s worth a try.”

  Morrison looked at her bleakly. “Suit yourself.” Then he turned to the ticket agent. “They’re railroad people, Arnold. Give ’em passes to Felspar. One way. Have a good trip, Ellen, Fargo.” Then he stepped down off the platform. Without looking back, he strode toward the Division Headquarters.

  ~*~

  That was behind them now, here in Felspar. And as Fargo’s trunk was landed on the platform, someone called Ellen’s name.

  The man coming toward them as they turned was well past middle age, his face lined and seamed with weather, squint wrinkles around his gray eyes. Short and muscular, he wore a railroader’s cap and striped overalls, and the gun belted around his waist seemed out of place with that. He halted, looking at Fargo keenly. “Well, Ellen,” he said, “I see you got him. You’d be Neal Fargo. I’m Will Whitmore. Welcome to Felspar.”

  “Will,” Ellen put in quickly, “is everything all right? Has there been any trouble?”

  “Everything’s been quiet. Did you see Morrison in Junction Flats?”

  “Yes, and we’ve had a holiday up here while he tried to deal with Fargo. Now it’s over and he’ll be coming after us, full-throttle.”

  Whitmore’s face darkened. His eyes raked over Fargo. “Well, it looks like you’ll earn your pay,” he said. “Ellen, Sim Phillips is waitin’ over yonder with a buckboard. You take your gear and Fargo’s. I’ll show him around.”

  Ellen nodded. “Go ahead, I’ll see to it.”

  “You watch that trunk real close,” Fargo said. “Don’t let anything happen to it.” And he waited until it was safely loaded in a buckboard driven by another man in railroad clothing. When the vehicle drove away, Whitmore said, “Come on, Fargo. Let’s get off of C & W property, the sooner the quicker. What do you want to see and what do you want to know?”

  “Everything,” Fargo said, as they passed behind the station and followed a street that was cut out of the valley wall. “And as soon as possible. A man’s at a disadvantage when he don’t know the country he may have to fight in. And I don’t like bein’ at a disadvantage.”

  “Right,” Whitmore said. He paused. “Well, yonder’s the smelter. It’s a big old son of a gun, serves four big mines in this area includin’ the Cayuse Mountain. Silver and lead is what it handles, and a lot of it goes out of here, believe me.”

  Fargo nodded, eyes ranging over the vast complex of smoke-stacked buildings, with its web of railroad tracks alongside.

  “The smelter company owns those tracks,” Whitmore said, “so the C & W and us both have equal access. If the C & W owned ’em, I’d never get close to the smelter with my cars.”

  They walked on, and Fargo could see the town laid out below them, wooden shacks clinging to both valley walls, the heart of the place constructed mostly of stone, to resist the acids in the smelter fumes, which had killed nearly everything green growing in the valley. “I didn’t know Felspar was so big.”

  “Big and gittin’ bigger—a boom town, Fargo, and rough as a cob.”

  “That why you wear that gun?”

  “I wear it on account of Hawk Morrison—and because the town’s full of C & W gunmen. The C & W hauls high-grade in here from every mine but Cayuse Mountain, and they guard each ore train. They haul the bullion out, and they guard those trains, too. So they’ll have two dozen fighting men on their payroll up here at any given time.”

  “And you? You’ve been operatin’ without any?”

  “I had a crew of three. I lost two in a wreck we had. Somebody sprung a rail and the whole train went off the track. Killed the train crew and two guards. Some of the C & W hardcases ganged up on the third one, worked him over, and he hightailed it. Since then I’ve armed my brakemen, but they’re not fightin’ men. And I’m replacin’ the dead engineer myself, which is why I’m wearin’ this rig.

  “You’re an engineer?”

  “I’m an everything when it comes to railroadin’. When I was fourteen years old I used to lay in bed at night out there on that farm in Indiana and hear them big old hogs moan on the high iron a couple of miles away, and it tore somethin’ inside of me. Come away, come away, that’s what those ole whistles hollered and I took off and been railroadin’ ever since. And when the day comes that a train whistle hollers cold and low and I don’t move, you’ll know I’m dead … Come on, let’s go down to the main drag.”

  ~*~

  Felspar was booming all right. Miners, smelter workers, railroaders, merchants, speculators, whores and gamblers; they were all in evidence and nearly every other building seemed to be a bar or gambling hall. The mines poured out ore, the railroads hauled it, the smelter refined it, and everybody was making money, so the town ran wide open. Fargo saw more men wearing pistols than he had in a long time; the bulk of them, he guessed, were railroad men—C & W men.

  Will Whitmore jerked a thumb at a big saloon across the street. “The Johnson Bar. That’s the real hangout for the Continental-Western crowd. A Johnson bar, incidentally, is the reverse lever on a locomotive. Anyhow, that’s a good place to stay out of.”

  “Let’s go in and have a drink,” said Fargo promptly.

  Will stared at him. “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “I heard you.” Fargo grinned tightly. “But I want to see the competition—and I want ’em to see me.”

  Whitmore hesitated, then nodded. “All right. You look like you can hold your own with any crowd. If it’s what you want.”

  They crossed the street. “There’s a couple you got to look out for especially,” Whitmore went on. “Rawhide Blaine, he’s Morrison’s boss guard up here, in charge of all the rest, Hawk’s man a hundred per cent. And dead set against me another hundred. I fired his butt off the C & W when I was Division Super. He was a yard bull, then, and we were losin’ a lot of valuable stuff out of sealed boxcars. Rawhide was supposed to stop it, but my idea was, he was mixed up in it. Couldn’t prove it, but I fired him anyhow, and the theft stopped. But Hawk hired him back when he got promoted to my old job. Anyhow, Rawhide’s smart and tough—and my h
unch is, he’s the one that sprung that rail, dynamited that tunnel ... or had it done. On Morrison’s orders, of course.”

  They mounted the steps of The Johnson Bar. “Other one you got to watch is Rawhide’s sidekick, Slasher Gregg. He’s a knife man, and cold steel is somethin’ I can’t stomach. Slasher was a yard detective, too, and he’d drag some poor hobo off a rattler and work him over with that double-edged Arkansas toothpick he carries ... I couldn’t stand it, and I canned him same time as Rawhide. Okay, Fargo. Here we are. Look sharp. We’re goin’ in the wolves’ den.”

  ~*~

  The Johnson Bar was big, clean, and crowded, the bar lined, the tables packed. Most of the men at the bar wore Colts or Smith & Wessons, mark of the railroad guard, and towering over them, halfway down the counter, was one who stood out from the others like a grizzly among a flock of sheep. Tall as Fargo and as husky, he had black hair winged with gray, brows like crayon marks, eyes like chips of volcanic glass in a tanned, craggy face. Grinning crookedly at something he himself had said, he turned slightly from the bar, saw Whitmore and Fargo; he froze and the grin went away.

  “Well,” he said, detaching himself from the crowd. Coatless, he tipped back his derby, hooked his thumbs in his vest pockets. Fargo saw that he wore two guns, ivory-handled Peacemakers, slung low on crisscrossed belts, buscadero holsters thonged to thighs. The old-time gunfighter’s rig, Fargo thought; and he realized this man was as different from the tinhorn Brady with his swivel holster as a cougar from a housecat. “Well, look who’s here. Hello, Will.”

  “Rawhide,” Whitmore said.

  Slowly, but perceptibly, a hush settled over the saloon as eyes raked over Whitmore and the tall, ugly man beside him in the battered cavalry hat, corduroy jacket and pants and cavalry boots. After a second Blaine nodded. “You’d be Neal Fargo.”

  “Yeah,” Fargo said.

  “Heard of you. Bad man, they say. Hell on wheels.”

  “People say most anything,” said Fargo.

  “Heard you’ve gone to work for Will, too. Might be a mistake. The Cayuse Mountain’s a hard luck line. Lot of accidents. Got your life insurance paid up?”

  “Generally,” Fargo said, “I carry it with me.”

  Blaine’s eyes flickered to the gun on Fargo’s hip. “Uh-huh. Me, I carry twice as much as you do.”

  “Who knows?” Fargo said. “Maybe you’ll need twice as much. Will, let’s have a drink.” He started toward the bar. There had been an element of the theatrical in all this, which he had planned deliberately. He was doing two things: serving notice that Whitmore and the Cayuse Mountain Line were no longer unprotected and letting the C & W gunmen size up the quality of the protection. Hardcases like these, Fargo knew, were like yard dogs. If they thought they frightened you, they’d chase you. If they saw you weren’t afraid, most of them would cringe back themselves. He intended to let them know, here and now, that they had no chance of scaring him. There’d be less trouble all around that way.

  Now, as he neared the bar, they made way for him, moving aside carefully, leaving it to Rawhide Blaine to handle this. “Two bourbons,” Fargo said to the bartender, watching Blaine in the mirror. The man stood there a moment, indecisively, then grinned. Taking his own place at the bar again, he said something to a gangling man, thin as a skeleton, dressed in baggy miner’s clothes and high-laced boots. Fargo saw, as the skeletal man grinned back and stroked his chin, that he wore a leather band, a cuff, on his right wrist. Something tingled in Neal Fargo and, instinctively, he touched the sheathed Batangas knife riding in his left hip pocket beneath the jacket.

  Then the gangling man left the bar and came toward them. Whitmore tensed. “Oh-oh,” he whispered. “Slasher Gregg. I knew we shouldn’ta come in here.”

  All right, Fargo thought. Blaine was testing him. Plenty of gunfighters who wouldn’t hesitate to take on long odds with pistols lost their guts when they saw cold steel. “Easy, Will,” he said, stepping away from the bar. “Stand fast. Leave it to me.”

  Now Gregg faced him and Whitmore. Gregg’s eyes were blue and cold, his face skull-like. He laughed, a phlegmy sound. “Hey, Will. You know you lost a button?” Instinctively, Whitmore looked down. “Where?”

  “There,” said Gregg and the knife came from somewhere so fast Fargo did not even see it drawn. Its pointed, double-edged blade ten inches of steel, flicked; the button of one of Whitmore’s overall straps, severed, hit the floor and rolled. Gregg laughed again, turned to Fargo. The knife moved back and forth, two feet from Fargo’s belly, like the head of a snake getting ready for the strike. “And you, Big Ugly—” Gregg began.

  Fargo spread his right hand as if to draw. Gregg’s eyes shuttled to it. Then Fargo’s left was up and out, steel flashed in lamplight; a faint click and the blade of the Batangas knife was long and naked. Even as Gregg’s eyes came back to stare at it, Fargo moved. Gregg, he thought, was a tinhorn, like Brady. In a knife-fight, you never played around; you either used the knife or not.

  He used his, coming in fast under Gregg’s guard, set for a right-handed opponent. It was a tactic that had paid off more than once, since Fargo was ambidextrous and could use either hand with equal ease. It paid off now. Taken by surprise, Gregg squawked as Fargo’s blade raked the inside of his right arm, above the leather cuff. He pivoted, blood already pouring from the slashed bicep, but Fargo had moved away, danced back lightly.

  “Goddam,” Gregg said, and he crouched and backed off, too, and now they faced each other, knives in hand; and the room was absolutely hushed.

  Fargo never took his eyes off Gregg. He waited. Then Gregg said, “I’m gonna write my name on you.” Flinging blood, he moved in, and he was fast, hard, and compensating for Fargo’s left-hand attack. Fargo smiled coldly, shifted the knife from right to left. Gregg’s blade moved through empty air, and Fargo slashed down on the leather cuff covering the wrist.

  It was hard, but not as hard as a silver dollar; and he’d driven the knife through one of those, once. The finely tempered steel cut the leather as if it were chamois, bit into flesh. Gregg grunted, jerked back, bleeding from two wounds now. He stared at Fargo, and his eyes were wide and frightened. Because now he understood. Fargo could take him with either hand.

  Still, he did not lack guts. Grimacing with pain, he came in once more, despite the fear, and this time the knife was flickering shimmering silver in the lamplight and Fargo was not quick enough by just a fraction of a second, and he felt its edge slit corduroy, score skin, but not deeply, along his flank. Then Gregg was off balance and Fargo whirled away and brought the knife down in a long raking cut that opened Gregg’s shirt and slashed his left flank with a quarter-inch-deep cut from just beneath the arm down to the belt. Suddenly Gregg’s torso was bathed in blood.

  Fargo danced back as Gregg, moaning, turned to face him. “I’m not a poor old hobo off a freight train, Gregg,” he rasped. Then he moved in again, and now it was a cat playing with a mouse. Gregg’s knife was never in the right place at the right time, because Fargo changed hands as he chose. Gregg whirled and Fargo was not there, but the Batangas knife blade was; and slowly, methodically, and with measured savagery, Fargo was slashing the clothes off of Gregg’s upper body, scoring Gregg’s hide with every slash.

  Gregg backed away, panting. He yelled something, a bloody parody of a man, then charged at Fargo madly. Fargo braced his feet, and steel rang and chimed as blade met blade. Fargo twisted his wrist and locked Gregg’s blade with his. He pried, and then it happened as he’d guessed it would—its handle slippery now with blood, the Arkansas toothpick flew from Gregg’s hand and arced across the room and landed on the floor and now Gregg was unarmed.

  Fargo grinned, moved forward, blade out.

  Gregg, dripping red, backed, eyes wide, jaw slack. “Fargo, for God’s sake—”

  But Fargo came on inexorably, blade poised for the killing stroke, point aimed at Gregg’s gut. Gregg, backing, collided with a table and could go no farther. Fargo lunged.

&n
bsp; The blade slashed, up, down, up again. Then Fargo stepped back. “You’ve lost more than a button, Gregg,” he said, and he laughed harshly.

  Still not comprehending that he lived, Gregg stared down at a torso stripped of the last of the shirt and at blood dripping from the three shallow slashes on his chest, two horizontal, one vertical, forming a bloody letter “F.” Fargo said, “Next time you pull a knife on me, you better go for the gut right away without all the war-dancin’ first.” His own blade still in his left hand, his right one dangling by the Colt, he turned. Rawhide Blaine stood apart from the crowd, towering, yet relaxed, his hands at his hips, his eyes slitted. And this was a different breed of cat from Slasher Gregg, Fargo thought. “You, Blaine,” he said quietly. “You care to take up where he left off?”

  Blaine said, with no trace of fear, “Not at the moment. Maybe later.”

  “All right,” Fargo said. “Well, now, I will tell you something and you can pass it along to Hawk Morrison. It’s in the C & W’s interest to see that the Cayuse Mountain Line runs without any trouble whatsoever. Because if anything happens to it—people, rack or rollin’ stock—I won’t look any further than the C & W for who’s responsible. And, far as I’m concerned, you and Hawk Morrison are the C & W. You tell Hawk: any trouble the Cayuse Mountain has, the C & W will have four times as much. Anything we lose, you’ll lose four times over. You let us be, life’ll be quiet and happy up here and I’ll buy the drinks. You mess with us and there’ll be more hell than you and Morrison can pay. You think about that and pass it on, huh?”

  “I’ll do that,” Blaine said. “But if I was you, I wouldn’t count on anybody payin’ any attention to it.”

  “As long as we understand each other,” Fargo said.

  “We do,” Blaine answered thinly.

  “Well, wrap up your so-called knife man before, he bleeds to death. He’s plumb ruinin’ the floor. Whitmore and I’ll be goin’ on. Will—?” Crabwise, watching the room, he went out of the door. Whitmore followed.

  On the streets again, Fargo turned down an alley, walked a back street, but once more over to Main well out of sixgun range of The Johnson Bar. Men were standing on the porch, Blaine among them, but when they saw him and Whitmore, they made no attempt to come after them.