by Sharpe, Jon
Emmett Badger was the first on his feet. A small man, he had a reputation for being as hard as iron. His buckskins were plain, and he favored Apache-style knee-high moccasins instead of boots. He was the only scout Fargo knew who never wore a hat. Instead, Badger let his mane of dark hair fall past his shoulders. His face was bronzed, his eyes twin flints. He didn’t smile or greet them; he simply nodded.
The other two scouts Fargo had never met before.
Jed Crow knew the Rockies as good as anyone. Crow wasn’t his real name. He’d been born Jedidiah Mortimer Flavenbush in New York City, of all places. He’d come west and ended up taking a Crow gal for a wife. When her people adopted him, he adopted their name as his own to show how honored he was.
The last scout, Tennessee, was named after the state he was from. He never gave his real handle. Lanky to the point of being skin and bones, Tennessee wore green buckskins and a coonskin cap. He favored an old Kentucky rifle that had been in his family for generations.
Fargo and Bear River Tom shook hands with each of them and joined them at the fire.
“Ain’t this something,” California Jim declared. “The cream of the scouts, all in one place at one time.”
“There are supposed to be seven of us,” Fargo remembered the sentry and the colonel saying. “Who isn’t here?”
“That would be me,” said a voice in the woods, and the next moment a buckskin-clad form sashayed into the clearing.
“I’ll be damned,” Bear River Tom said. “A scout with tits.”
“Gentlemen,” California Jim said, “I don’t believe either of you have made the lady’s acquaintance. This here is Sagebrush Sadie.”
Fargo had heard of her. Everyone had. The only female scout on the frontier. The sole survivor of the Beckwirth Massacre, Sadie had been taken in by a kindly couple down to Fort Laramie. They’d tried to teach her ladylike ways, or so the story went, but she’d taken to shooting and riding and doing all the things men could do, only better. And somehow or other she became a bona fide scout.
Gossip had it she was a looker. But the gossip got it only half right. She was stunning. Even clad in buckskins and wearing boots and a hat with a curled brim and a feather, she was one of the prettiest females Fargo ever set eyes on.
Her face was oval, with high cheekbones and full red lips and eyes as green as emeralds. Her buckskins fit her so tight, they might as well be her skin. Her full breasts and the shapely curve to her thighs were enough to bring a lump to any man’s throat. On top of all that, she moved with an unconscious sway of her hips that set Fargo to stirring below his belt.
“Heard of you, gal,” Bear River Tom said, rising and introducing himself. “And goodness, aren’t you a sight?”
His eyes were fixed on her chest.
Sagebrush Sadie had a Spencer rifle in her left hand and a Remington revolver on her left hip. In addition, the hilt of a bowie jutted from the top of her left boot. Smiling, she walked up to Tom and he extended his huge hand to shake. Still smiling, Sadie suddenly jammed the Spencer’s muzzle into his groin.
“What the hell?”
“Keep staring at me like that,” Sadie said sweetly, “and I will put one in your pecker.”
Bear River Tom looked down. “Here now. I don’t look at you any different than I do any other woman.”
“I’ve heard about you,” Sagebrush Sadie said. “About how fond you are of these.” To Fargo’s amazement, she cupped one of her breasts, her fingers splayed wide.
“Good Gawd,” Tennessee blurted in a thick Southern accent.
Bear River Tom’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “I think I’m in love.”
The click of the Spencer’s hammer froze all of them.
“I reckon I’m not making myself clear,” Sadie said. “I won’t be treated like a saloon tramp. I won’t be ogled, by you or any other man. The next time you look at me that way, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“A fella can’t help it when a gal is as good-looking as you.”
Sagebrush Sadie’s smile widened. “You better help it, you horny bastard, or you’ll be carrying your balls around in a pickle jar.”
California Jim cackled.
Sadie stepped back and cradled her Spencer and came around the fire. She stopped in front of Fargo and raked him from hat to spurs. “You have to be the famous Skye Fargo.”
“I do?”
“As many times as I’ve heard you described,” Sadie said. “Handsome as hell, they say. And for once they got it right.”
“Here we go,” California Jim said.
“Hush, old man,” Sadie said. “Do you ride every horse you admire?”
“What?” California Jim said in confusion. “Why no, of course I don’t.”
“Neither do I.” Sadie hadn’t taken her sparkling green eyes off of Fargo. “So don’t you ‘Here we go’ me, you hear?”
Several of the scouts grinned, but not Emmett Badger.
“Enough of this foolishness,” he growled. “We didn’t come up here to talk about your love life. Make cow eyes at him some other time.”
Sagebrush Sadie faced around. “Are you telling me what to do?”
“Uh-oh,” Tennessee said.
Badger’s hard features became harder. “You don’t want to rile me.”
“Oh, don’t I?” Sagebrush Sadie said archly, placing her free hand on her hip. “In case you ain’t heard, no one tells me how to behave. Not ever.”
Badger wasn’t intimidated in the least. “I’m telling you to quit your flirting so we can hunker and work out this mystery.”
Fargo had heard that Sagebrush Sadie was a regular hellcat. That she’d fight anyone at the drop of a feather, and drop the feather herself. He was mildly surprised, then, when she abruptly backed down.
“You have a point, I reckon. We need to find out what this is about.” Sadie settled herself and Fargo and California and Tom did the same. “I reckon the place to start is with the letters,” she began. “I got one from Tennessee, which he says he never sent.”
“I honest to God did not,” the Southerner said. “Hell, I can barely write a lick.” He added sheepishly, “I never had much schoolin’. Pa needed help around the farm.”
“I got a letter from Sadie,” Jed Crow said. “Which she didn’t send.”
Each of them spoke up. Each of them had received a letter that the sender claimed never to have mailed.
“It’s the damnedest thing I ever heard of,” California Jim remarked.
Fargo reached into his pocket and produced the letter he’d received. Unfolding it, he laid it out flat. “Who here still has theirs?”
It turned out that California, Bear River Tom, and Sadie did. Badger had thrown his away. Tennessee didn’t know what had happened to his.
“Let me have them,” Fargo directed, and when they handed the letters over, he spread the others out next to his.
“Will you look at that,” California Jim said.
“Even I can tell the handwritin’ is the same,” Tennessee said.
The note on each was to the point: Need to see you at Fort Carlson by the end of the month. Important you be there. But each was signed with a different name.
Sagebrush Sadie squatted next to Fargo, her leg brushing his. “The same person sent all of these.”
Badger leaned over Fargo’s shoulder to say, “It looks the same as the writing that was on mine. Only mine said that I should expect some friends to show up by the end of the month, and for me to stick around. Not that I was going anywhere.”
“Someone wants all of us together,” Bear River Tom stated the obvious.
“But why?” California wondered.
“If’n it’s one of you playin’ a joke,” Tennessee said, “I ain’t amused.”
“Me either,” Je
d Crow said. “I left my wife and kids and came all this way to find out I wasn’t really sent for? I find out who did this, I’ll plant my boot up their ass.”
“Boot, hell,” Sagebrush Sadie said, and patted the hilt of her bowie. “I’ll shove this so far up, he can use it to shave with.”
Fargo had been listening with half an ear while studying the handwriting. The letters were large and uneven, done in a rushed scrawl. “A man wrote this,” he deduced.
“Or a gal pretending to be a man,” Sagebrush Sadie said.
“It weren’t me,” Tennessee said. “I write so slow, it’d take me a month of Sundays to just write one letter.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Badger said.
“Are you accusin’ me?” Tennessee responded.
“If I was,” Badger said, “you’d be lying on the ground spitting blood.” He straightened and glared at all of them. “This is my post. I don’t need nor want any of you here.”
“Friendly cuss,” California Jim said.
“I don’t pretend to be something I’m not.”
“I don’t know why you’re mad at us,” Tennessee said, sounding hurt. “We’re not to blame.”
“If not one of you, then who?” Badger said.
Fargo collected the letters and stood. “I have an idea how we can find out if it was one of us.”
“We’re listening, pard,” California Jim said.
“We go to the fort,” Fargo proposed. “Find some paper and a pencil. Each of us writes the same thing as in the letters.”
Tennessee snapped his fingers. “I get it. Whoever wrote them will have the same handwritin’.”
“And whoever the hell it is,” Badger said grimly, “will wish to hell they hadn’t.”
Bear River Tom chuckled. “Aren’t we a friendly bunch? We get some silly letters and we’re ready to kill the writer.”
“We already know it wasn’t you,” Fargo said, and cracked a grin.
“How so?” Bear River Tom asked.
“There’s no mention of tits.”
5
The day was sunny and bright, the forest rich with wildlife. Birds sang and squirrels scampered and an incautious rabbit panicked and bounded away in high leaps.
Badger rode ahead of everyone else. After him came Jed Crow, Sagebrush Sadie, and Tennessee. Fargo was at the rear with California Jim and Bear River Tom.
“I still say this is a damn silly business,” the latter now remarked. “Bringing all of us here for no reason.”
California Jim nodded. “As practical jokes go, it’s pointless.”
“Maybe one of us did it to make Badger mad,” Bear River Tom said. “Did you see that look on his face? Why does he hate us being here so much?”
“Like he said, Fort Carlson is his post,” California Jim reminded him.
“Even so, it’s plumb childish. But then Badger has always been too high-strung. He’s always on edge. What he needs is to relax.” Bear River Tom grinned lecherously. “A night with a nice pair of tits would do him wonders.”
“I knew you’d squeeze tits in there somewhere,” California Jim said, and turned to Fargo. “You’re awful quiet, pard. No thoughts on this nonsense?”
“Only that it’s not.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nonsense,” Fargo said. “Someone went to a lot of trouble. Writing those letters. Mailing them off. They wouldn’t do it on a lark.”
Bear River Tom scrunched his craggy features. “The thing I’ve been wondering about,” he said, “is how they knew where to send the things.”
Fargo hadn’t thought of that. The six of them had been scattered all over creation. Jed Crow would be easiest to reach; everyone knew he lived with the Crows. Tennessee had been working as a scout out of Fort Laramie. California and Tom had been at other forts. Sagebrush Sadie had been spending time enjoying the sights in Denver. And he’d just come back from the Mount Shasta country of northern California.
“It could have been done through the army,” California Jim said. “If someone knew how to go through channels.”
“Whoever it is must have planned it out in advance,” Bear River Tom said.
“Planned what out?” California said.
They were the last to emerge from the forest. Badger had gone on ahead toward the fort but Tennessee, Sagebrush Sadie, and Jed Crow had stopped to wait for them.
“We’ve been talkin’ it over,” the Southerner said, “and we’d like to head to Salt Creek later.”
“Don’t you mean the Salt River?” Bear River Tom said, and nodded at the ribbon of water visible beyond Fort Carlson.
“Guess you ain’t heard,” Tennessee said. “A settlement has sprung up south of here. They call it Salt Creek on account of a creek that flows into the river.”
“There’s too much Salt in these parts,” Bear River Tom said.
“Not another damn settlement?” California said. “I swear, ten more years and we’ll have as many people west of the Mississippi River as there are east of it.”
“I don’t like it either,” Sagebrush Sadie said. “I hope I don’t live to see the West become civilized.”
Fargo shared her sentiment. He loved the wild places, loved to roam the mountains and the prairies and the deserts. But bit by bit, year by year, they were losing a little of their wildness. Prairie grass was churned under the plow. Woodland was chopped down to build with.
Settlements and towns and even a few cities had become hubs for more.
“What I’d like to know—” Jed Crow started, and he suddenly grunted and wrenched sideways in his saddle.
For a few seconds the rest of them were riveted in place by the sight of an arrow that had thudded into Crow’s chest.
Fargo recovered first. He reined around and drew his Colt as another feathered shaft streaked out of the undergrowth. It missed Tennessee’s coonskin cap by inches, and only because the Southerner had chosen that moment to hunch low over his saddle.
“Injuns!” Tennessee bawled.
Fargo fired at the spot the arrow came from, and jabbed his spurs. He reined right and then left to make himself harder to hit. Flying in among the pines, he spied a figure racing away. A figure with long black hair and a buckskin shirt and leggings and moccasins.
A young face painted for war glanced back at him, and the warrior ran faster.
A second warrior broke cover, joining the first in flight.
Fargo was so intent on catching them that he almost took an arrow, when a third silhouette rose from concealment, a shaft notched to a sinew string.
Shifting, Fargo fired at the center of the darkling shape. He scored, too; the shape staggered and the bow fell.
Then Fargo was past and turning to shoot at the others but someone beat him to it.
Emmett Badger had been farthest away but now he was close behind the Ovaro. His mare was so swift, he’d outraced the others. And it was Badger, a Colt in his hand, who fired two shots as quick as anything.
The second warrior folded in on himself and collapsed into a tumble.
The first warrior, the one who had put an arrow into Jed Crow, plunged into a thicket.
Fargo rode around to the other side but didn’t see him. He went another twenty yards, then hauled on the reins and rose in the stirrups.
The thick undergrowth could hide fifty warriors.
Another heartbeat, and Emmett Badger brought his mare to a sliding stop next to the Ovaro. “Where?”
Fargo, still searching, shook his head.
“We hunt him,” Badger said, and reined to the right.
Fargo reined left. He must have covered an acre when hooves drummed and California Jim and Bear River Tom galloped up on either side.
“Any sig
n?” California asked.
Fargo’s scowl was his answer.
“Damned redskins,” Bear River Tom said. “We should go see about Crow.”
“Not yet,” Fargo said, and went on searching. Only when he was convinced the war party was gone did he turn back.
The others promptly followed suit.
“A hell of a note,” California Jim said. “We should have been on our guard. The colonel warned us about the renegades.”
“I didn’t think they’d strike this close to the fort,” Bear River Tom justified their lapse.
“We were too caught up in those damn letters,” California Jim said.
The brush crackled, and all three of them brought guns to bear.
Out of it came Emmett Badger. “Nothing,” he said before they could ask. “The sons of bitches got clean away.”
“We’ll find them,” California Jim said. “Sooner or later.”
“Hell, we’re the best scouts alive,” Bear River Tom threw in. “If we can’t, no one can.”
Jed Crow was on his back on the ground, Sagebrush Sadie on her knees beside him, holding his hand in both of hers.
She looked up as they came to a stop. “Tennessee went to the fort for the sawbones.”
“How is he?” California asked.
Sadie gave a barely perceptible shake of her head.
“Why haven’t you taken the arrow out?” Bear River Tom asked.
Fargo could see why from where he sat. The shaft was too close to Crow’s heart. Dismounting, he walked over and dipped to a knee.
Jed Crow was conscious. Drops of blood flecked his lips, and a wet stain covered half his shirt. “Stupid way to die,” he said, and coughed. It brought more blood, in rivulets.
“You might want to lie still,” Fargo advised.
“Do me a favor,” Crow said. “Get word to my missus. Her name is Bright Star.”