Fort Death (9781101607916)

by Sharpe, Jon

  California pointed at Fargo’s ear. “And you might want to get that stitched or you’ll have a scar.”

  Fargo reached up. To say his ear was mangled was being charitable. “Well, damn.”

  “I hope you two are satisfied with your antics,” Sagebrush Sadie said. “Making a spectacle of yourselves like that.”

  The bartender coughed. “It was the best fight we ever had in here. No one broke anything.”

  “Did anyone ask you?” Sadie snapped.

  “No ma’am.”

  “Then keep your two bits to yourself or you and me will go at it.”

  “Go at it how, ma’am? With pillows or fists?”

  “Say pillows again and I will by-God shoot you.”

  “Scouts,” the bartender said. “Prickly as cactus.”

  That struck Fargo as funny. He started to laugh, and Badger started to laugh, and in another moment the two of them were cackling.

  “You two whale the tar out of each other,” Bear River Tom said, “and then act like it’s no different than squeezing a pair of ”—he caught himself and finished with—“cow’s teats.”

  “You’re lucky you said cow,” Sagebrush Sadie said.

  “What do cows have to do with this?” the bartender wanted to know.

  “God, this is ridiculous,” Badger said.

  “I’ll drink to that,” Fargo said.

  Sadie was glaring at the barkeep. “Who asked you to keep butting in?”

  “Why are you biting my head off?” the bartender whined. “I’m not your husband.”

  “Oh, good one,” Bear River Tom said.

  “Is it me,” Tennessee said, “or are all of you half loco?”

  “Probably more than half,” California Jim said.

  “I feel like I’m in an asylum,” the bartender said.

  “And to think,” California Jim said, “none of us are drunk yet.”

  Fargo gulped Monongahela and held out the bottle to Badger.

  “Obliged,” the other scout said, and fastened his mouth to it.

  “Save some for me,” California Jim requested.

  “Fighters first,” Fargo said.

  Sadie snorted. “If men ever make sense, the world will come to an end.”

  “It already has for Jed Crow,” Tennessee reminded them.

  That killed the good mood.

  California paid for a second bottle and they passed it back and forth.

  “Once we’re so drunk we can’t pee in a pot without help,” Bear River Tom brought up, along about his fourth swig, “what then?”

  “I’m headin’ for Fort Laramie,” Tennessee said.

  “It’s Denver for me once this is done,” Sadie said. “I have business to attend to.”

  “Man business?” Bear River Tom said, and leered and winked.

  “How about I blow your peter off?” Sadie said.

  Tom cocked his head. “What’s with you, woman? You’re always talking about shooting a man in his Rocky Mountain oysters.”

  “I didn’t say your oysters,” Sadie replied. “I said pecker and I meant pecker.”

  “Spoken like a true lady,” Bear River Tom said. “Next you’ll be wearing a dress and joining a sewing circle.”

  “Uh-oh,” Tennessee said.

  Bear River Tom was smirking at his jest and likely didn’t see Sadie let fly or he’d have avoided the fist that caught him on the jaw. He bleated and took a couple of steps back and she went after him. She could fight, too. She held her fists as a boxer would and jabbed and flicked solid rights and lefts.

  “At it again,” the bartender said. “I should charge folks to watch.”

  “Tom will make mincemeat of her,” California Jim said. “He’s five times her size.”

  But Tom wasn’t trying to hit her, only to stop her from hitting him.

  Tennessee cupped a hand to his mouth and hollered, “That’s it, Sadie gal. You can lick him.”

  “Anytime she wants,” Bear River Tom managed to say while ducking and twisting. “I like tongue almost as much as I like tits.”

  Sadie hopped into the air and kicked at his privates. Her aim was off and she buried her foot in his belly.

  “That hurt,” Tom said.

  It was then that a man covered with blood lurched through the batwings.

  8

  The man took a few staggering steps, cried out, “Massacre!” and pitched to the floor.

  Fargo and Badger were the first to reach him. Fargo sank to a knee and together they carefully rolled him over.

  “Butchers,” Badger said.

  It looked like someone had used the man for chopping practice; his body, his arms, his legs, bore dozens of slash marks. Some were shallow. Some were deep. His clothes were soaked red.

  “I know that fella,” one of the locals declared. “His name is Johnson. He has a place about half a mile up the creek.”

  “Farmer?” Bear River Tom said.

  “Hunter,” the local answered. “He’s got a cabin off in the backwoods. Him and his family.”

  “Family,” Sadie said, and blanched.

  The backwoodsman’s eyes fluttered open. He had to try twice to croak, “Got hold of her . . .”

  “Who got hold of who, mister?” California Jim asked when the man didn’t go on.

  “My girl,” the backwoodsman said. “She . . . she’s only ten.”

  “Was it the Bannocks?” Tennessee asked.

  “Think so,” the man gasped.

  “Who else would it be?” California said. “This is Bannock country.”

  “My boys. Little Sophie,” the man said. “My wife . . .” He looked at the ceiling, arched his back, and keened, “Why, God? What did we do? Tell me why?” His eyes closed, he shuddered, and folded in on himself and was still.

  “Maybe he’ll get his answer on the other side,” California Jim said.

  “Or maybe he’s just dead,” Bear River Tom said.

  “The Bible says different,” Tennessee said.

  Sadie looked at them as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Didn’t you hear him about his girl? Why are we still here?”

  Fargo was up and outside before any of them and reached the horses a couple of strides ahead of Badger.

  Word was already spreading, and the settlement’s inhabitants were hurrying from their homes and businesses to converge on the saloon.

  “I told the barkeep to get word to the fort,” California Jim said.

  “It’ll be a couple of hours before any soldiers get here, I reckon,” Tennessee said. “Bluebellies are turtles.”

  “We’re not,” Fargo said. He reined down the street and over to the creek and headed up it.

  Badger quickly caught up. “Damn stupid settlers,” he said.

  Fargo agreed. The dead man was a fool to take his family off so deep into the woods. Back East it would be fine. Back East most hostile tribes had been exterminated or forced onto reservations. But this was the West, where many tribes hated the whites for trying to do to them as the whites had done to those others.

  Truth told, Fargo’s sympathies were with the Indians. His own kind were locusts, taking over everything in their path. That he was helping the locusts pricked at his conscience now and again. But he liked scouting more than any other work and aimed to keep at it until the day he died.

  The others soon were right behind them, the drum of their horses’ hooves rumbling like thunder.

  Fargo remembered the ambush near the fort, and stayed alert. When they had gone about four miles, he slowed.

  “What are you’re doing?” Sadie demanded.

  “Think, gal,” Tennessee said. “It could be the war party is still there.” />
  “But the little girl . . .” Sadie said.

  Fargo felt the same urgency. But it wouldn’t do to ride into a hail of arrows, and he said so.

  “I know,” Sadie said. “I just hate it when it’s kids, is all.”

  “Same here, gal,” California Jim said. “Them as will hurt children, red or white, are scum.”

  Bear River Tom remarked, “They’ll probably take her back to their village and raise her as one of their own and in ten years she’ll be married to some buck and be raising a pack of half-breeds.”

  Sadie gave him a withering glance.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Tom asked.

  “Hush up,” Fargo said. He’d be damned if he’d listen to another petty argument.

  “My God, you people are touchy,” Bear River Tom muttered loud enough that everyone heard.

  “I thought you don’t believe in Him?” California said.

  “When I say hush,” Fargo broke in, “I really mean shut your damn mouths.”

  The family had worn a track in their comings and goings from the settlement. It led around the next bend to a wide clearing.

  Fargo drew rein.

  “Oh, hell,” Tennessee said.

  The cabin door was open and most every article the family owned had been brought out and smashed and torn and scattered willy-nilly. Amid the debris lay bodies: a woman and a small boy, mother and son, her arm protectively over him, both mutilated. An older boy lay off toward the outhouse, his shirt ripped open, his flesh peeled to the spine. A dog, the head attached by a sliver of skin and fur, was near him. Even the chickens had been killed, their heads chopped off.

  “You’d think they’d take the birds to eat,” Bear River Tom said.

  Fargo alighted and palmed his Colt. The stillness suggested the war party was gone but they could just as well be lying in ambush. He went to the woman and the small boy. There was no need to bend down and examine them. “Hell,” he said.

  “Same with this one,” California Jim said from over by the outhouse.

  “Find the sign,” Badger said.

  They spread out. It wasn’t a minute later that Tennessee, who had drifted to the northeast, hunkered and hollered, “They skedaddled this-a-way.”

  Everyone joined him.

  The tracks were plain, and the horses weren’t shod.

  “I reckon ten or more,” Tennessee said. “Likely headin’ back to their village.”

  “We’re wasting time,” Sadie said.

  Fargo and Badger assumed the lead. For over a mile the depth and spacing of the tracks showed that the war party had fled at a gallop. Eventually the warriors had slowed, convinced no one was after them.

  “I hope we take them by surprise,” Bear River Tom observed, “and take a few alive so we can do to them like they did to those settlers.”

  “We kill as many as we can, as quick as we can,” Badger said.

  “Why can’t we have some fun while we’re at it?” Bear River Tom rejoined.

  “I wonder if any have guns,” Tennessee said. “I’d rather go against bows.”

  “Bows they learned to use as soon as they learned to walk,” California Jim said. “Don’t ever underestimate an Injun with a bow.”

  “We should have an edge with our rifles,” Tennessee insisted.

  “Tell that to Jed Crow,” was California Jim’s rebuttal.

  “Biddy hens,” Fargo said, and clucked to the Ovaro. He’d never realized it before, but put a bunch of scouts together and they acted like a ladies’ sewing circle.

  Once again Badger stayed alongside him. “Doesn’t this strike you as a mite too easy?”

  “They’re on horseback,” Fargo said.

  “Even so,” Badger said, “they’re not making any effort to throw us off.”

  “If you’re right,” Fargo said, “they’ll pick the best spot they can.” He motioned at the peaks and slopes that stretched to the horizon. “You’ve been at the post a spell. Know this area?”

  “I’ve been through it,” Badger said. “The Bannocks know it a lot better.”

  “Remind the others to keep their eyes skinned.”

  “You think they don’t know that?”

  “Remind them anyway.”

  Badger went to rein around, and paused. “I’m the official scout here. I should be giving the orders.”

  “You are.”

  Badger went back down the line.

  Fargo shucked the Henry from the saddle scabbard and held it across his saddle, ready for quick use. When the attack came they’d be lucky to have a split-second’s warning.

  Another mile, and another horse was beside the Ovaro.

  “I hate this,” Sagebrush Sadie said. “I hate it when a family is involved.”

  “You see anyone jumping for joy?”

  “I have a soft spot for children. Always have. I suppose because I’ve never had any of my own.”

  “What’s stopping you?” Fargo said. “You have the equipment for it.”

  A pink blush crept into Sadie’s cheeks. “I’d expect that from Tom but not from you. And how the hell could I raise a kid, traipsing all over creation like I do?”

  “If you ever find the right man, odds are you’ll settle down.”

  “Listen to you,” Sadie said. “I don’t see you hitched.”

  “And you never will.”

  “With my luck,” Sadie said, “the man who claims my heart won’t want a family. All he’ll be interested in is killing and whatnot.”

  “Why in hell would someone want to do that?” Fargo asked.

  Sadie shrugged. “My problem is the same as yours and most of these others.”

  “Oh?”

  “We’re alike, us scouts,” Sadie said. “Wanderlust is in our blood. We go where the wind blows us.”

  “You have me pegged,” Fargo said.

  “Of course I do. Just because I’m female doesn’t mean I must have some peculiar female reason for being a scout. I do it because I love it.” Sadie paused. “When I can.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s harder for me than it is for you and the rest of them.”

  “Because you have to squat when you pee?”

  “Damn it, I’m serious,” Sadie said, but she chuckled. “No, it’s harder because there are a lot of officers who won’t have anything to do with a female scout. They think because I’m female I can’t be as good as a male.”

  Fargo was about to say that based on what he’d heard, she was as good as any scout alive, when Bear River Tom called out a warning.

  “The Bannocks!”

  9

  Fargo drew rein and whipped the Henry to his shoulder but not so much as a single war whoop shattered the serenity of the forest and no arrows sought his hide.

  “Up there,” Bear River Tom said, pointing.

  Half a mile higher reared a ridge partly in timber and partly open. Strung out in single file, a line of riders was just about to cross over to the other side.

  “Consarn you, Tom, you lunkhead,” Tennessee said. “I thought we were about to be attacked.”

  “So did I,” California Jim said. “Good thing we’re too far away for them to hear you.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Badger said. “They know we’re here. They wanted us to see them.”

  “Luring us in, huh?” Tennessee said.

  Fargo kept going, his eyes on the ridge. He forgot about Sadie until she gave a slight cough.

  “As I was saying, it’s a lot harder for me than it is for the rest of you.”

  Fargo hardly thought this was the time or place to talk about their profession. There might be warriors lying in wait on the way up, arrows nocked to pick them
off.

  “It’s hard for women all over,” Sadie rambled on. “There aren’t as many jobs for us as there are for you, and those there are bore me to hell. Work as a seamstress? Sit in a chair all day sewing? I’d rather slit my wrists than live so dull a life.”

  Fargo grunted to pretend he gave a damn.

  “A lot of women are cooks. But who wants to sweat at a hot stove eight to ten hours a day? I sure as hell don’t.”

  Fargo grunted again. A man could say a lot with a grunt.

  “There’s cleaning, and being a maid, and such,” Sadie said. “But it’ll be a cold day in hell before I scrub someone else’s floors. And could you see me prancing around in a maid outfit?”

  Fargo imagined the shapely body under her buckskins. “That would be something. You’re easy on the eyes.”

  “Why, thank you, kind sir,” Sadie said, and blushed. “But no. Being a maid calls for a lot of kowtowing, and ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, ma’am.’ I don’t lick boots. Never have, never will.”

  “Is there a point to all this?”

  “It’s the same point as before,” Sadie said. “The only kind of work I like is scouting. I was a tomboy when I was young, and I reckon spending my days in the woods hunting and fishing and exploring got into my bones.”

  Fargo would like to get into her pants but didn’t say so.

  “So it’s scouting or nothing. The problem is, not enough take me serious.”

  “I do,” Fargo said. He’d always held that women could do most any job a man could. Female muleskinners and stage drivers and a lady doc he’d met confirmed his belief.

  “Why, thank you,” Sadie said, and blushed anew. “I wish more army officers were like you. And those who hire pilots for the wagon trains to Oregon country and wherever.”

  “You have to try harder than men,” Fargo said, thinking that if he showed her he understood, she’d shut the hell up.

  “You don’t know the half of it. Half the time I have to practically beg to get work. Why, down to New Mexico, they needed a scout to lead a patrol into Apache country. I happened to be there and volunteered. But would they let me? No. A major looked me right in the eye and told me it was no work for a female.” Sadie swore. “I could have shot him.”