Thunderhead Trail

by Jon Sharpe

  Near the top of the ridge he spotted buzzards wheeling in a cloudless sky of bottomless blue—merchants of death impatient to feast. But the fact that they were still circling told Fargo that someone, human or animal, was likely still alive below.

  Just before he topped the long ridge, he detected motion in the corner of his left eye.

  With the honed reflexes of a civet cat, Fargo threw the reins forward and rolled from the saddle, levering a round into the Henry’s chamber even before he landed on the ground. He peered cautiously past the Ovaro’s shoulder, eyes widening in surprised disbelief.

  In this dreary and woman-scarce country, the woman he now clearly spotted fleeing between boulders stood out like a brass spittoon in a funeral parlor. Evidently Fargo had ridden too close and scared her out of hiding.

  “Hey!” he called out. “No need to skedaddle, lady! Maybe I can help you.”

  She paused for a moment, turning in his direction. Fargo drank in the thick tresses of copper-colored hair, flawless mother-of-pearl skin, a pretty, fine-boned face. But her sprigged-muslin dress was obscenely splotched with blood.

  “What happened?” Fargo called to her, stepping out into the open.

  By way of reply, the woman brought her right hand into view and fired a short iron at Fargo. The bullet came nowhere near him, but the surprised Trailsman leaped back behind his stallion.

  “Christ, lady, lower the hammer! I want to help you. Are you hurt?”

  “No, and I’m not going to be!” she shouted back. “If you even try to get any closer to me, I’m going to use every bullet but one in this gun to try to kill you. And if I miss, I’ll use the last bullet on myself! I swear to God I will!”

  The sheer desperation in her voice told Fargo she had recently suffered some unspeakable horror. He believed she meant every word.

  “All right, lady, it’s your call. But listen to me. If you turn to your right you’ll be headed due south. Carson City is only three miles from here in that direction. If you keep going east like you are now, you’ll die in the desert.”

  She must have heard him because she did turn south, disappearing among a clutch of boulders.

  Fargo turned the stirrup, took up the reins, and stepped up and over. A minute later he topped the ridge and saw the whole bloody chronicle, laid out below like a tableau straight from hell.

  “Shit, oh, dear,” he muttered, fighting to control his sidestepping stallion, who wanted nothing to do with the scene below.

  A sudden squall of anger tightened Fargo’s lips and facial muscles. Despite everything he had seen during his many years yondering on the western frontier, there were some things he had never learned to stomach.

  Especially the brutal murder of women and children.

  A burned-out prairie schooner, still sending up curls of smoke, lay on its side, six dead Cleveland Bays tangled in the traces, all shot through their heads. A man, a woman and two small girls lay scattered about like ninepins, bodies riddled with bullet holes. The woman’s calico dress had been pulled up and her chemise and pantaloons ripped away—clearly she had been raped before she was murdered.

  Fargo also saw why the buzzards were still wheeling instead of swooping in for the feast. A man stood beside a blaze-faced sorrel, his face ashen as he surveyed the grisly scene.

  “Rider coming in!” Fargo called out, bringing his Henry down to the level.

  The man scarcely seemed to hear or notice the new arrival, still staring around him in a state of shock.

  “Mister, you’re either an innocent passerby or one damn fine actor,” Fargo greeted him as he dismounted.

  The man said nothing to this, his unblinking eyes like two glazed marbles. Fargo gave him a quick size-up. He was of medium height and build with a homely, careworn face and an unruly shock of dark hair. With his usual abundance of caution, Fargo kept the Henry leveled on him, but he strongly doubted that the stranger had played a hand in this slaughter.

  Fargo glanced at the unusual firearm tucked behind the man’s canvas belt.

  “I see you play the harmonica,” Fargo said, meaning the harmonica pistol the man carried. “Mind if I take a look at it?”

  Fargo knew damn well that a small-caliber pistol didn’t do the killing here. The dead man’s heart had practically been ripped out of his body by a large-bore weapon. But the Trailsman hadn’t survived so long by coming to quick conclusions.

  “Snap out of your shit!” Fargo barked when the man failed to respond. “I said let me glom that harmonica.”

  Fargo’s take-charge voice did rouse the man from his stupor. He handed the weapon over. It was an early attempt at a multishot pistol. A sliding bar held ten bullets with primer caps, the mechanism roughly resembling a harmonica. Each time the weapon was fired, the bar could be slid to the next round. The harmonica pistol had never caught on, though, because it was awkward and cumbersome.

  “All right, mister,” Fargo said, handing the weapon back. “Give.”

  “Not much to give,” he replied. “I just got here about ten minutes before you did. I didn’t see or hear anything.”

  “What brings you to these parts?”

  “You might say I had to take the geographic cure, and in a puffin’ hurry. I was working as a trick-whip performer for Doctor Geary’s traveling medicine show. We were up north in Virginia City on the Comstock. I got into a poker game, and somehow a fifth ace turned up.”

  “Musta been a faulty deck,” Fargo said sarcastically. “Where you headed?”

  “Just drifting through to Old Sac,” he replied, meaning Sacramento.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mitt McDougall, but I prefer to be called Sitch.”

  “Sitch . . . that’s an unusual handle,” Fargo remarked absently, beginning to study the ground around them for sign.

  “It’s bobtail for troublesome ‘situations,’ which I always find myself in—just like this one. Katy Christ, mister, did Indians do this?”

  “Not unless they’ve taken to riding iron-shod horses and rolling cigarettes. There’s several fresh butts here.”

  “And they call the red men savages. If it was road agents or whatever, why in Sam Hill did they have to slaughter all these folks just to rob them?”

  “That don’t cipher,” Fargo agreed. “I’ve never heard of road agents deliberately killing women and children. Even the hardest of the hard twists shy away from that. Well, we best try to find out who these folks were before we bury them.”

  So far Fargo had avoided looking at the victims, but now he steeled himself for what must be done. He grounded his Henry, knelt beside the dead man, and started searching through his pockets.

  Suddenly, the Ovaro gave his trouble whicker.

  Fargo started to reach for his rifle when a shot split the silence, a geyser of sand spuming up only inches from his feet.

  “Both you murdering sons a bitches freeze!” shouted a gravelly voice that brooked no defiance. “Make one damn move and we’ll shoot you to rag tatters!”