by Jon Sharpe
Two of the cactus’s arms flapped like the wings of an ungainly bird as the warrior crouched behind it was flung to the ground.
A command was barked and the rest broke from cover, three from the boulders, two more from the saguaros. Several had guns and they were the ones Fargo dropped first, firing as fast as he could work the Henry. Then the remaining two were on him, one wielding a lance, the other a war club.
The latter was Chipota.
A swing of the lance brought it crashing down on the rifle’s barrel. Fargo held on and spun to shoot but the war club caught him across the right forearm, a grazing blow that numbed him from the elbow to the tips of his fingers. He backpedaled to gain room to move but another sweep of the long lance jarred the Henry from his grasp.
Chipota growled a few words at the other warrior, then came in low while the other one came in high.
Fargo couldn’t draw the Colt because his right hand was next to useless. His fingers tingled madly and wouldn’t clench tight enough to grip the butt. He avoided a lance thrust, a flash of the club. The Apaches were so eager to finish him off that in their rush to get at him, they crowded one another.
Fargo skipped backward, away from the horses, away from the helpless Texan. When the Apache holding the lance glanced at Raidler, Fargo bent, scooped up a handful of dirt, and threw it in the man’s face. It drew the warrior’s attention but also permitted Chipota to connect again, this time with a searing smash to the thigh that nearly dropped Fargo in his tracks.
The tingling in Fargo’s arm was swiftly fading. He could move his fingers but couldn’t make a play for the Colt yet. Another thrust of the lance missed by a whisker. With his left hand he grabbed the shaft. The warrior grunted and pulled but couldn’t wrest it loose.
Suddenly Chipota swiped viciously at Fargo’s hand with his war club. At the last instant Fargo jerked it away and the heavy stone head struck the lance. A resounding crack, and the lance was broken, shorter now by a good two feet.
That didn’t stop the warrior who held it. The metal tip was gone but the end was tapered to a wicked point. Powered by sufficient force, it could be just as deadly. The Apache lunged, pressing Fargo mercilessly, while Chipota slanted to the left to come at him from a new angle. They were working in concert, the one to occupy him while the other finished him off. A flick of the lance drove Fargo toward the war club. He dodged, spun, and had to sidestep another lethal thrust. The pair were unrelenting, never giving him a second to catch his breath.
Fargo took another step back, and another. The feel of a rock under his heel gave him an idea. Deliberately stumbling, he let his momentum carry him onto his back. He flipped onto his side as the lance sought his heart. Then he rolled, but not away from the warrior, toward him, into the Apache’s legs. Whipping his arm around them, Fargo heaved, causing the warrior to totter against Chipota.
It gained Fargo a few precious seconds and he used them to reach across his hip and draw the Colt with his left hand. He was slower than he would normally be but fast enough to level the revolver and thumb back the hammer before the Apaches recovered. The man armed with the lance raised it and sprang, hatred animating his face.
Fargo fired, the slug slamming the warrior partway around. Other men would have crumbled, but the Apache reputation for toughness was well-earned. The warrior braced himself and hiked the lance to throw it. A second shot catapulted him rearward.
That left Chipota boiling with fury. Raining the war club in a fierce deluge, he tried to bash in Fargo’s skull.
Fargo skittered from side to side, like a crab. The club passed so close to his cheek, he felt a gust from its passage. Abruptly, Chipota’s barrel chest blotted out the sky. Fargo fired once but Chipota barely slowed, fired a second time, and the leader faltered, firing a third time as Chipota elevated the club. The scourge of the territory tottered, hissing like a serpent.
One shot was left in the Colt. Fargo had to make it count. Firing from the hip, he cored Chipota’s skull, but the Chiricahua firebrand was as tenacious as a wolverine. Dead on his feet, he somehow took one more step, then folded. Fargo had to scramble to keep from having the body fall on him.
In the silence that ensued, Fargo retrieved the Henry. The feeling in his right arm had almost been restored. He moved to the bay and stood waiting for more Apaches to appear, but none did. Evidently the band had broken up into small parties and fanned out across the wasteland. Purely by chance, Chipota’s bunch had been the one that had spotted him.
Burt Raidler raised partway up. “Pard? Why have we stopped? Are we there yet?”
“No, but we will be by first light.”
And Fargo was true to his word. Long hours of wary winding along inky gulches and around benighted hills, through thick brush and across baked flatlands, brought them within sight of the stand of oaks just as pink tinged the eastern rim of the world. Fargo’s legs were as heavy as iron, every muscle in his body sore. He guided the plodding Ovaro into the trees.
Buck Dawson was awake, tending a small fire. Beaming, he rose stiffly and shuffled over to greet Fargo and help lower the Texan. The commotion awakened Melissa, Gwen, and Virgil Tucker, who sat up rubbing his eyes. The drummer had been using his folded jacket for a pillow. Now he carefully unfolded it and slipped it on.
“You made it!” Gwen exclaimed happily.
“I knew you would!” Melissa said. “The worst is over!”
Dawson was taking a bite of tobacco. “Ain’t you forget-tin’ that Frazier gent? He’s still not accounted for.”
“Yes, he is,” Fargo revealed. “The Apaches got him.”
Gwen sadly sighed. “Another one. But I don’t feel as upset about him as I did about that sweet boy, Tommy, and those other fellers. Frazier got what he deserved for killing Mr. Hackman.”
Fargo turned to the drummer. “Tell them,” he said. Virgil Tucker acted surprised. “Tell them what?”
“That it wasn’t Frazier. It was you.”
“You must have been in the sun too long, friend. I haven’t the foggiest notion what you’re talking about.”
Fargo was in no mood to be played for a fool. “You’re a lying bastard, Tucker. I found where you crossed the road with the team when you went hunting for Hackman.”
Tucker slowly stood. “I told you. They ran off on me.”
“No, they weren’t bunched up as they would have been if they were on their own. They were being led, in single file.” It was why Fargo had been so mad when he found the tracks. He knew the drummer had lied. “You lost the team near where you killed Hackman. Probably the shot spooked them and they ran off. Later, the Apaches found them.”
“This is ridiculous.” Tucker was sweating despite the morning chill. “Why would I do such a thing?”
“For whatever Hackman had in his valise. Whatever was so valuable, he wouldn’t let it out of his sight.”
The drummer appealed to the others. “Honestly, none of you believe these wild allegations, do you?” Their cold stares showed they did. Tucker nervously licked his lips. Then his hand moved, and in it materialized a derringer. “Damn you, Fargo! Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone? Now I can’t let any of you live.”
Gwen Pearson asked the question on all their minds. “In heaven’s name, Virgil, what did you hope to gain?”
Tucker pulled a leather wallet from an inner pocket. “Half a million dollars worth of negotiable certificates! Is that reason enough for you?” He cackled at his good fortune. “Elias Hackman wasn’t an ordinary stockbroker. He was a courier, taking these stocks to a client in San Francisco. I found out by accident at one of the way stations, when he was writing a letter to his firm and I peeked over his shoulder. Now they’re mine!”
Melissa took a step and he pivoted toward her. “Would you really murder all of us, Virgil? I thought we were your friends.”
“Lady, for half a million dollars I’d kill my own mother! No more endless days on the go! No more bouncing around in cramped stages! No more sleeping
in hovels! From now on, it’s only the best for Virgil W. Tucker.”
Fargo saw one of the others draw a pistol. He moved, and the drummer swung toward him. Tucker’s astonishment when a shot shattered the dawn was etched in his face as he pitched to the earth.
Buck Dawson blew wisps of gunsmoke from the barrel of his revolver. “I never have liked pushy salesmen much.”
To the north, on the road, hooves drummed, accoutrements rattled, and a commanding voice bellowed for a patrol to halt.
“Is that what I think it is?” Gwen eagerly asked.
Fargo wearily nodded. Against all odds, and the treachery of one of their own, they had survived. The nightmare was over. Now he could finally get on with his life. Or could he?
Melissa Starr and Gwen Pearson were advancing, hands on their hips and wrath crackling on their brows. “We have a bone to pick with you, mister,” the redhead declared.
Fargo hoped the cavalry would hurry.
LOOKING FORWARD!
The following is the opening
section from the next novel in the exciting
Trailsman series from Signet:
THE TRAILSMAN #209
TIMBER TERROR
Montana, 1861, the logging country just north of the
Sapphire Mountains where trees were not the only thing
cut down and the two-legged timberwolves were worse
than the four-legged kind...
“Coming events cast their shadows before them.”
The big man with the lake blue eyes uttered the phrase as he guided the magnificent Ovaro between two towering Ponderosa pines, his voice colored with wry amusement. Written by a man named Joseph Campbell, the phrase had stayed with Skye Fargo ever since he’d first read it. It had proven itself to be true all too often but always when hindsight had given the shadows form and meaning, and everyone knew that hindsight was always too late to be of practical help. Shadows, Fargo reflected, were hard to interpret, even for a trailsman.
His lake blue eyes narrowed as they swept the rugged terrain. Certainly the high-mountain country of north Montana held plenty of its own shadows. Named Land of the Mountains by the Spanish conquistadors, it was a land that offered pleasure and hardship, beauty and danger, in equal measure. As he rode from the north, the Sapphire Mountains in front of him, the Bitterroot Range rising in the distance on his right, he wondered if Abbey had been one of those events that cast their shadows. It had to be a good shadow she cast, benign and filled with pleasure memories. Her eager passion, unrestricted ecstasy and ample breasts could cast nothing else. He had made the long detour into the north Montana high country, hoping she still ran the small sheep ranch with her brother. He discovered that she did and together they turned the clock back to old pleasures with new urgency.
It had been almost a week he’d spent with Abbey and he smiled as he rode, a parade of intimacies and memories surrounding him. He’d been surprised at how little things he’d thought forgotten leaped up at once as though they’d simply been waiting for a time to wake. Abbey’s nipples were two of those memories, always so very small on her ample breasts, as though they really ought to belong to a very young, very small girl. But their tiny mounds were fountains of sensitivity, rising at once, reaching upward to give and be given. It had always been that way with Abbey and time hadn’t changed that at all. The week that followed had been all he could have hoped for, the feeling mutual, she acknowledged when the week drew to an end. “You have to go,” she said as she lay exhausted beside him, her slightly chunky body quivering with spent passion. “I’m not getting any of my work done. All my chores are piling up. Or stay with me always,” she added. “And I know you won’t do that.”
He didn’t answer and they both knew he had. She’d clung to him before he left after breakfast, leaving the only regret they shared. Abbey rode with him, a welcome companion if only in his thoughts. Shadows. He grunted. If they were being cast by coming events they could only be good ones.
Shaking off idle thoughts, he steered the Ovaro down a deer trail as he scanned the land. He always felt small riding this land. The tremendous Douglas firs, Engelman spruce, ponderosa pines, the giant sequoias and the red cedar were giants to make anything and anyone feel small. This was logging country, evidence almost anywhere he looked, the stumps of fallen trees, the broken pieces of a bucking saw, the long hafts of a splintered falling ax and the ubiquitous hooked oilcans left lying on the forest floor.
But mostly, the land was imprinted by the thousands of logs that floated down every river, tributary, lake, and waterway. Still other logs were seen stored in big ponds behind splash dams, built for the purpose, waiting for the moment when the spill gate of the dam was pulled away and the cascade of logs sent hurtling down to the river or lake. Riding through logging country always gave him a mixed feeling, Fargo acknowledged. There was a violation here, the power and beauty of nature being destroyed by man’s uncaring greed. Someday a better way of using the timber would be found than the unchecked logging practiced now, he told himself. There had to be if the treasure of the great forests were to be renewed for others. But now there was a headlong selfishness, a dark spirit of destruction that had to affect the destroyers as well as the destroyed. These loggers were a breed unto themselves, he knew, personally brave and foolhardy, the lumberjacks simply crude and unthinking, their bosses adding greed and contempt to their legacy.
Fargo turned the Ovaro along the edge of a narrow river, into the open sun that made the horse’s jet black fore- and hindquarters glisten, its pure white midsection gleam. Fallen logs all but filled the narrow river, moving faster than they seemed to move from a distance, no room between them as one pushed against the other. Suddenly his eyes rested on a figure almost in the center of the logs. The man lay face-down, his legs hanging into the water, caught between logs, the one he clung to and the one that held him pinned against it. Fargo sent the pinto into a canter, down a steep bank that deposited him at the water’s edge. He peered across the carpet of logs that moved down the river. Though still traveling slowly, they were gathering speed as they moved into the center of the river, jostling each other with increasing force.
Fargo pulled the pinto to a halt and swung from the saddle, leaping onto the nearest logs that drifted past him. Landing on both feet simultaneously, he felt the logs instantly move under his weight. Though the movement was slight, it was enough to send some of the logs immediately climbing over others. Though he didn’t wear the cleated, caulked logger’s boots, he began to make his way across the logs, leaping lightly from one to the other. But the logs moved, unexpectedly, some sinking down, others shifting away, and he found each step becoming a tricky little dance with the creak and scrape of logs the only rhythm. But his eyes went to the still figure as he became more convinced the man would be crushed as soon as the logs that held him began to gather speed when they reached midriver.
Leaping forward more recklessly, Fargo neared the figure, finally halting on the log that trapped the man’s legs. Dropping down, Fargo used both feet and all the strength of his powerful leg muscles to push against the next log. It moved, even with the pressure of other logs against it, opening up enough for him to reach out and swing the man’s legs out of the water and onto the log on which he lay. Straightening up, Fargo stepped onto the log where the man lay. He knelt down on one knee to turn the man onto his back. He felt the frown dig into his brow as the figure wouldn’t turn. Leaning closer, he tried again, then saw the two big ten-penny nails that had been driven into the log. Ropes ran from the nails around the man’s wrists.
The frown digging deeper, Fargo stared at the figure. The man hadn’t fallen and been trapped by the crush of adjoining logs. He’d been nailed to the log and sent out into the river with the mass of other logs. The terrible truth speared into Fargo. The man had been nailed to the log to be crushed to death when the logs gathered speed and climbed over each other. But death hadn’t waited to claim him, perhaps mercifully so, Fargo saw.
The logs that had trapped his legs had also taken life from him, probably by sheer loss of blood. Sitting back on his haunches, his eyes riveted on the lifeless figure, thoughts whirled inside him. If the man had been crushed by other logs, the wrists ropes would have been torn away. Had it been a clever way to hide a killing? Or had he been put there not to hide anything but to be an example?
Did it much matter? He asked himself. It was a cold-blooded killing. The reasons wouldn’t change that. They’d only put a face on it, nothing more. He’d let others struggle with that, in their own way, in their own time. He was but passing by. The bitter taste stayed in his mouth as he rose to his feet and began to hop his way across the logs, a treacherous, shifting floor. Suddenly a huge redwood rose up and drove itself forward over another log and straight at him with thunderous speed. He spun, half leaped, half dived, and landed on a nearby log, then jumped onto another and continued to find his way over the logs. Finally, with a long jump, his feet hit the soft earth of the shoreline and he heard his own breath escape him.
Turning, he watched the logs gathering speed as they went by and he slowly walked back to where the Ovaro waited. The questions clung to him as he pulled himself onto the horse and rode up the embankment and away from the waterway. He rode south again, refusing to dwell on what he’d seen, though other logs in other waterways refused to let him forget. He was passing through, he reminded himself again, and he’d let it stay that way. Moving through the thick forests of red cedar and lodgepole pine, he heard the distant sounds of logging operations, the crash of the huge trees that reverberated for miles, the sounds of big, double-handled bucksaws, and the sharp crack of broadaxes. The sounds faded away as he rode deeper into untouched, virgin timber-land, and as dusk began to slide into the day, he slowed to a halt.