by John Benteen
~*~
His journey next day, roughly paralleling the river and yet well back from it, took him through country ever more desolate and barren, seemingly devoid of all life save a few scrubby stray cows and an occasional wild burro. Nevertheless, his caution, if anything, doubled. Anybody he did meet in this brutal land of arroyos and wind-carved hills and buttes would not likely be here on honest business. And there was always the possibility of members of the Wild Bunch from the vastnesses downstream drifting up toward settled country to lift some horses or some cattle.
He covered a lot of ground in that day’s ride, and the lowering sun was setting the country aflame with orange, red and purple when he decided to call a halt. He had perhaps an hour until darkness, but when you found a water hole out here, you didn’t pass it up if it was close to time to camp.
This one was a tiny spring welling into a basin not much bigger than the crown of a Texas hat, but the water was clear and fresh, and its overflow had fostered a pitiful patch of greenery around it. Fargo spotted that green smudge from a distance; immediately, he reined in. In the deep Big Bend of Texas, he would have scouted such a place before riding up, because where there was very little water you were bound to meet whoever traveled in the desert. Such a move here would be every bit as wise. He tied the horse, unslung the shotgun, and went ahead on foot. No coyote could have moved more silently or blended better with the desert, for his khakis had been chosen for that purpose.
It took a little extra time, of course, but a man in Fargo’s trade learned patience. What was time when measured against your life? He had no wish to live forever, and no desire to grow old and go out with his boots off. His way of living was to make every minute count and let the threat of death season all sensations—women, drink, food, sleep, and risk—with a tang that nothing else could give. In due time, he knew, he would take his bullet, the one with his name on it—maybe tomorrow, maybe next week or next month or maybe right now. That was all right. But it was a matter of pride not to make things easy for the man who fired it.
He scouted the high ground first, and only when satisfied everything was clear did he go to the water. At the spring, he found only tracks of deer and burros. He drank, splashed face and hair, filled his canteen, brought the horse down and let it drink. After that, he spent some time erasing what sign he and the animal had left in the immediate vicinity of the waterhole. He camped that night on high ground, himself, on the backside of a ridge above the spring. You never camped beside the water, but always well away and above, where you could see who came to it before they saw you.
His caution paid off. About an hour after midnight by the moon and stars, he came awake, sitting straight up in his blankets with the shotgun ready before he even knew what had brought him out of sleep. Then he heard the riders coming.
Soundlessly, he hurried to his own hobbled horse, clamped his hand over its muzzle, held his breath and listened. Three, four men, anyhow, coming to the waterhole. He heard them halt there, drinking, watering their mounts. In the stillness, their voices, even though they kept them low, could be heard clearly.
“All right,” one said, after they had used the water. “Mount up and let’s move on.”
“Damn it, Jim, let’s rest a while. We been pushin’ hard.”
“Can’t help it, we got to push harder. It’s a long way from here to the Wind River Mountains. We want those horses, we got to be in position two nights from now, and there’s no time to waste.”
“You ask me,” somebody grumbled, “this whole thing’s damn foolishness. Too risky. And them Shoshone horses ain’t all that good.”
The first man said, half in anger, but with patience, as if speaking to a child, “Hell, yes, it’s risky. But we got to have some horses, and the Shoshone Reservation’s the safest place to lift ’em. We’ll have fair cover all the way back.”
“Me, I think we ought to tell Dogan to go to hell,” the grumbler said.
“You tell Dogan to go to hell. I aim to live a while longer. He wants his pay and we got to make a score to pay him, or else he throws us out. Anyhow, maybe we can rake in enough this time to help with that stake for Argentina.”
“You’re kiddin’ yourself. We’ll never git a stake for Argentina, not this way. Dogan won’t let us. He’ll do like he did last time, cheat us, and we’ll wind up right back where we started from.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Anyhow, we’ll at least have a place to lay low. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather put up with Dogan than stretch hemp. Now, either you’re in it with us or you ain’t.”
There was silence. Then the grumbler said, “Awright. I reckon I got no choice. All the same, he’s makin’ slaves out of us. We take all the risks, he gits all the money, and no matter how big a score we make, we end up with nothin’ and still in debt to him.”
“We’ll worry about that later. Right now, we got to get some horses. Move out—and keep your guns up. We’re gittin’ close to settled country.”
No more argument: only the squeak and jingle as they mounted, the sound of hoofbeats drumming, fading into the night. Fargo waited until they could be heard no longer, then released the horse’s muzzle. At once, it whinnied; but there was no one but himself now to hear the sound.
Thoughtfully he walked back to his blankets, sat down cross-legged with the shotgun across his knees, and rolled a cigarette. One thing was plain: Roosevelt had been right. There were owlhoot men still holed up in the breaks along the Green and Colorado, and, more than that, the Old Outlaw Trail was still being ridden. A few nights from now, the Shoshones on their reservation in the Wind River Mountains would lose some horses—and the stolen animals would be brought back down along the Outlaw Trail … which, for good reason, had also been known as the Horsethief Trail in the old days. Fargo accepted that without surprise; but his mind chewed hard on something else, a name: Dogan.
But that was impossible, he thought. It simply could not be. The man known as Double-Barrel Dogan was dead and had been a good ten years.
Double-Barrel Dogan ... Fargo’s hand caressed the Fox shotgun. A name that once had ranked with those of Sam Bass and Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the other great train robbers of the West. But Bass and Cassidy had been honest cowboys gone wrong, and train-robbing had been as much high-spirited sport as business with them. Dogan, Sam Dogan, had been another case entirely. Robbery was his business; killing was his sport.
They said that in the stagecoach days Dogan had been a shotgun guard for Wells-Fargo. He’d blasted more than one bandit gang with the sawed-off ten gauge Greener issued to him, and people had learned to let the stages guarded by Double-Barrel Dogan strictly alone. But Wells-Fargo had been miserly with its rewards to him, and Dogan had turned rogue, gone into business for himself. First coaches, then trains, and his technique was brutal and efficient. Dynamite and shotguns were the weapons he used, and he did not care who died as long as he got what the express car carried.
It was all so simple when your disregard for human life was absolute. Pick a deserted stretch of track, wait for the train. Work your timing to a hair, send a rider down, roll a bundle of dynamite, fused and burning, on the track almost beneath the oncoming locomotive, and blow the engine straight up, a technique Fargo had often seen put to use by both the rebel and Federal armies in Mexico. Then your men swarmed over the wrecked train, using shotguns to blast anything that moved, dynamited the express car and the safe, gathered up the loot, and rode like hell, after cutting all telegraph wires. Total destruction of the train and telegraph gave you a head start of hours, and you had vanished like a wisp of fog long before news of the robbery was in, much less pursuit mounted. You even had time enough to do a good job of wiping out your tracks, so not even the best trailers could follow you.
Fargo ground out the cigarette, lit another.
About six or eight such robberies, though, and Dogan’s tactics had backfired. He had become the most wanted man in the West, and his crimes had turned the stomachs of
even ordinary owlhooters—women and children had died in the wrecks and under Dogan’s shotgun blasts. He was giving train robbers a bad name, so to speak, and the owlhoot had a code of its own. Somebody squealed on Dogan, betrayed him. A special train, loaded with Wyoming State Guardsmen equipped with machine guns, and a volunteer railroad crew, had met Dogan on his final attempt. What happened next had made headlines in every paper in the country in the summer of 1903.
Dogan’s man had ridden down and thrown the dynamite, all right, and the engine had been over the explosive and was blown sky-high. But the train crew had already uncoupled it and jumped, and only the locomotive went as the brakemen stopped the cars. Then, as Dogan’s men charged out, shotguns blasting, they were met by a hail of machine gun fire that killed every one of them, their leader included. Fargo himself remembered seeing pictures of Dogan’s bullet-riddled body laid out, almost cut to pieces, but with the head intact enough to make identification positive.
So, he thought, finishing the second cigarette. It could not be that Dogan, not Double-Barrel Dogan, the men at the spring had cursed. It had to be another one, with the same name. Which, in a way, Fargo mused, was a shame. His hand tightened on the shotgun.
What he felt then was something he often despised, but could not help. It was a kind of sick lust that grew in most men who made their living from their guns, the need to try themselves out, measure themselves, against the best. It was childish, foolish, and yet...
Whatever his trade, a real professional always wanted to be the best. That was why rodeos had lately become so popular: if a man could ride or rope, he had the need to measure his skill against others who were good, find out if he were fair, better than fair, or tops. The same urge had drawn all kinds of fighting men to death: it was the plague of the pistolero with a reputation. Fargo had suffered from it himself, as his own reputation had grown: would-be and better than would-be gunmen would ride for miles to test themselves against you, if you had a rep. Kill the big man and you became the big man ... Fargo had been on the other end of the stick for a long time, defending his reputation and on occasion killing men he had never seen before and against whom he’d had no grudge simply because they felt the need to kill him and step into his boots. Colt and knife, he had been up against the best there was.
And yet... He looked down at the shotgun.
He knew what he could do with it, needed no reassurance.
But he could not help a brief, sick craving. If, by some miracle, a shotgun man like Dogan, Double-Barrel Dogan, were still alive ... a real expert, who knew the weapon as well as Fargo...
He spat. Damned foolishness. And besides, Dogan was long dead. It was another Dogan and maybe their trails would never cross and maybe ...
Still, when he rolled back into his blankets, he was restless.
It was a long time before he got to sleep.
~*~
Four days later, he worked his way down out of the Uintah Range, through lonesome, broken country wooded with juniper and bull pine, toward the watercourse called Sheep Creek. He had traveled hard and stayed watchful day and night, which resulted in his encountering no one at all. He had skirted the spectacular Flaming Gorge of the Green, with its nearly thousand-foot walls, and Horseshoe Canyon which lay just below. Now, putting his mount through thick brush along the clear, swift creek, he felt himself being swallowed up by heights towering over him, and presently, at the end of a narrow, massive canyon, he heard a deeper sound than the rippling of the creek: the powerful, masculine rumbling of the fierce current of the Green.
Despite himself, Fargo felt a certain awe as he was dwarfed by the very magnitude of the cliffs that reared above him. He had been in such country before, and yet this hell of cliffs and sheer canyon walls and swirling water had a special quality that was nearly overpowering. But he responded to it, too, in another way, its very size and wildness striking a chord within him. In a way, this was the kind of land in which he felt most at home.
Then he reached a kind of open delta, augmented by sandbars fanning into the stream. First, he saw it through the brush, then he saw movement out there in the open, and he was pretty sure it was the party he was supposed to meet. Nevertheless, when he broke from a willow thicket and into coverless open, the shotgun was unslung and tilted forward across his saddle pommel.
Then he reined in, deftly slinging the Fox across his shoulder. These were the people, all right, with whom he had to ride the river.
They saw him coming, the big man on the sorrel, sunlight glinting on his bandoliers and on the white hair beneath the cocky cavalry hat. Like ants, they swarmed around three beached boats, but they looked up, left their labors. As Fargo heeled the sorrel into a trot, one of the men, clad in military khaki, strode forward to meet him. Fargo saw the silver captain’s bars glinting on his shirt. Vane, he thought, Charles Vane, leader of the expedition. As Vane came to meet him, Fargo sized him up warily.
Captain Vane was short, barrel-chested, very muscular, with thick arms and legs and a square, sun burnt face beneath a shock of black hair slightly shot with gray at the temples. His eyes were black, too, hard, direct, even a little challenging. The nose below them was straight and short above a black mustache, neatly trimmed, the mouth thin and short over a craggy chin. Vane’s spine was ramrod straight, his carriage every inch that of the professional officer, his stride neatly measured. He carried a holstered Colt automatic on his hip, dangling from a web belt.
Fargo reined in. Vane halted a few yards from the horse, raking his gaze over all the artillery and the man who bore it. His own hand was close to the flap of the Colt’s holster.
“You’re Captain Vane,” Fargo said.
“I am. You’d be Sergeant Fargo.”
Vane’s voice was brisk, dry, harsh, with an arrogance in it Fargo did not like.
“I’m Neal Fargo,” he answered softly. “I’ve been a civilian a long time. Most people just call me Fargo.”
“My understanding was—”
Fargo swung down. “Well, Captain, I don’t know what your understanding was or is. But I’m here to join your party, with orders from the Colonel … you know who I mean.” He looked around the camp on the delta, the drawn-up boats, three tents, a fire sending a cloud of dark smoke straight up. “I thought this jumping off,” he said, “was supposed to be a secret.”
“It is, of course,” Vane snapped, frowning.
“Well, about the only thing you lack’s a brass band. You’re camped out in the open, you’re smoking like a forest fire, and you didn’t have a single guard out. Well, I reckon that’s my business, to handle that end of it. After all, you’re an engineer.”
Vane’s mouth twisted at one corner. “Sergeant Fargo, are you criticizing me?”
“Like I said, I’m a civilian. And, no. I’m not criticizing. Just taking inventory so to speak.” He put out his hand and Vane took it briefly. “Now, let’s get that fire out, strike those tents and move ’em back into the brush, and do the same with those boats if they’ve got to be worked on.”
Vane’s eyes narrowed. Other men were coming up behind him then. Vane said, “I beg your pardon, Sergeant. I think you’re confused. I give the orders here.”
Fargo felt a kind of weariness. Well, he had dealt with officers like this before. They were, God knows, all too common in the Army. But he found it hard to understand how Roosevelt could have picked a man to lead this expedition who seemed more concerned with those railroad tracks on his shirt than common sense. He fished a travel-stained envelope from his pocket.
“Well, you’ll give some of ’em, Captain. But I give some of ’em, too. Maybe you’d better read these orders from the Colonel before we go any farther.”
Vane, eyes fixed on Fargo, took the envelope. Opening it, he unfolded and read the Colonel’s letter. Fargo saw the flush mounting beneath his tanned cheeks. Vane evidently read the letter twice, and his hands trembled slightly as he put it back into the envelope. “This is not exactly according to my under
standing. I think my orders supersede these. However, I’ll analyze them and—” He started to tuck the orders into his pocket.
Fargo said, softly, “Captain, I’d like that back, if you please.”
Something flashed in Vane’s eyes. “Sergeant, these orders form part of the records of this expedition and are in my keeping.”
Fargo sighed. “Captain, those orders are mine and I’m to be directed by them. And I’ll say it one more time, don’t call me Sergeant. There’s one man calls me that when I’m a civilian, no other. My name is Fargo. Neal Fargo. You can use either end, as you please. But if we go down this river together, it’s as equals, not a captain and a sergeant.”
“Now, you listen,” Vane began. “I will not have an enlisted man, former or present—” His eyes met Fargo’s and he broke off.
“My orders,” Fargo said quietly.
Vane rubbed his mustache. Then, slowly, he handed them back. “I want a copy of them, copied by yourself, at your earliest convenience.”
“Glad to oblige, when I get the chance,” Fargo said.
Vane’s face was almost crimson beneath the tan. “You’ll make the chance damned soon.”
“I’ll make it when I get around to it,” Fargo said. “Right now, there’s other work to do, and to make sure it gets done, I’m going to read part of these orders aloud to your outfit. I’d appreciate it if you’d get ’em all up here. You can introduce me, and then I want them to know who I am and how much water I draw. We’ll get this shebang under cover and discuss the fine points later.”