by Jon Sharpe
Cherokee Bob caught his eyes. “You know, Fargo, I wonder.”
“Wonder what?”
Bob nodded toward the dead man. “If All Behind Him would be interested in eating that son of a bitch. He likes Spanish food.”
20
Fargo slapped alum powder on his wounds and wrapped them with linen strips. The first unpleasant task, after the battle in Diablo Canyon, was tossing finishing shots into the wounded Spanish soldiers and horses. This was standard practice for Fargo ever since a possum player had nearly killed him in Arkansas.
“You two,” Fargo told Deke Lafferty and Bitch Creek McDade, “are both a credit to your dams. For tenderfoots, you hung in there like hairs in a biscuit. Without the help of that devil dust, we’d all be cold as a basement floor.”
Deke puffed his scrawny chest out like the cock of the dung heap. “No need to coddle me. I wasn’t a-scairt.”
Booger made a farting noise with his lips. “Hell, your part in it was small bore. You boys wanna see a sight that’ll tear your hearts out?”
He turned around to reveal a bullet hole in the seat of his pants. “Ricochet got me right in the ass. I’m leaving the slug in as a souvenir.”
Cherokee Bob and All Behind Him ignored the others, busy robbing the corpses. McDade glanced around nervously at the dead bodies.
“This is an Indian funeral ground. What happens when they find all these dead Spaniards littering their sacred ground?”
“Let’s just say we don’t want to be here when they do,” Fargo replied.
He pointed to a gutta-percha water bag tied to the saddle horn of a dead horse. “There’s a few more of those. Let’s make sure we fill them before we ride out.”
“I wunner where the viceroy and the two women are waiting,” Booger said.
“Yeah. We’ve got a little problem there—Quintana. He’s the head of the snake, but how are we gonna prove it?”
“You ask me,” Deke said, “he needs to have a little accident.”
“Given his plan,” Fargo agreed, “that just might have to happen. I hate to play it that way, though. Don’t forget there’re others in on this shindig. I’d prefer to have proof.”
The second unpleasant task was using ropes and elbow grease to haul out several dead horses clogging the trail. Booger’s prodigious strength helped immensely. The horses that had not been killed escaped into the surrounding desert as soon as the entrance was cleared.
They had just begun the seventy-mile ride back to Las Cruces when Fargo reined in. About a quarter mile ahead, a gray gelding, saddled and hobbled, was standing with its head down in the oppressive heat.
“There’s a man lying near that horse,” Fargo said. “And judging from that fancy frock coat, I’d say our problem with Hernando Quintana has been solved.”
They gigged their mounts forward and confirmed the body was indeed Quintana’s—a silver-inlaid, ivory-gripped “muff gun” lay near his outstretched right hand.
“Why, he closed his own account!” Booger exclaimed. “Shot an air shaft through his head.”
“Looks like maybe he rode in with the rest,” Fargo speculated, “and waited here for the good news. But he must’ve recognized Salazar’s death cry, and when none of his men rode out he figured out what happened.”
Fargo squatted on his heels and searched the old man. He found a thick sheaf of papers in the inside breast pocket and quickly perused them. “Boys, we’ve struck a lode. Here’s all the battle plans and a bunch of letters about it from somebody in Sacramento named Augustine Sandoval. Bob, they’re in Spanish. I’ll sound them out and you help translate.”
According to the letters, Quintana was hauling a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in silver bars to pay and equip a military force. Their plan was to seize the arsenal at Benicia and then the capital in Sacramento.
Booger whistled. “A hunnert and fifty thousand! Boys, that’ll make a nice split for us—we sure’s hell earned it.”
“Nix on that,” Fargo said. “The moment you smell mustard you start crying roast beef. Unless that money was stolen, it belongs to his only heir—Miranda.”
“Well, he’s sure got a fine watch,” Cherokee Bob said, unfastening it from Quintana’s vest.
Booger shot him a murderous look. “Who you gonna say this one belonged to—Ben Franklin?”
“Don’t let his daughter see any of that loot,” Fargo admonished, knowing he’d never get it back from the Shawnee without killing him.
“We just leaving the body here?” McDade said when Fargo crammed the papers into a saddle pocket and forked leather.
“That’s my policy,” Fargo replied. “I’ll bury anybody except a man who tried to kill me. Let the buzzards feast. One of you boys tie a lead line to the gray before All Behind Him butchers it out.”
• • •
With plenty of water and the cooler night air, the riders made good time. Exhaustion finally settled in around midnight and they slept beside the trail for four hours, riding into Las Cruces about an hour after sunrise.
They left their mounts at the livery and discovered the Quintana party conveyances still parked behind the big livery barn. Fargo washed up at the stone trough and changed into his spare buckskins. Then the six famished men visited the La Paloma Café and devoured a huge breakfast of eggs and the spiced sausage called chorizo.
Fargo inquired at the front desk of the Montezuma House and learned that Miranda and Katrina had been allowed to keep their room. He next faced the unwelcome task of telling Miranda her father was dead by his own hand. He produced the sheaf of papers and Katrina translated them for Miranda while Fargo improved on the crease in his hat.
“Skye,” Miranda said, looking up at him where he stood gazing out a window, “was my father buried?”
“He was,” Fargo lied shamelessly. He added a postscript: “We buried all of his possessions with him. It was a lonely grave in the desert, and we figured you’d want him to have them.”
“Yes. He especially cherished his watch.”
Fargo looked solemn. “I noticed it was a nice one,” he said, figuring Cherokee Bob was probably already trying to sell it.
“Katrina and I knew he was up to something,” she said. “But this—why, it’s treason! He was an American citizen. And this one letter from Sandoval—it makes it clear that my father intended to give me to Diego Salazar as payment if Diego led a successful military action. My own father!”
“The world isn’t likely to grow honest anytime soon,” Fargo said awkwardly. He wasn’t much good at consolation.
“Well, he was my father, and of course I love him. But for that very reason I also despise him. Suicide was at least an honorable choice.”
Katrina seemed less sympathetic. “He knew he would be executed anyway, Miranda. The government takes a very dim view of treason.”
Katrina looked at Fargo. “You killed all of the men?”
“We had no choice. They were fanatics loyal to Spain and this plot, and it was us or them. They couldn’t let any of us live.”
“This silver,” Miranda said. “It is my father’s entire fortune. I knew it was hidden in the coach, but I had no idea what he intended to use it for. Will the government confiscate it?”
“They won’t because they aren’t going to know about it. Only one letter mentions it, and you’re going to lose that one. But we have to make sure this Augustine Sandoval is jugged and the plot broken up. I know the army judge advocate up at Fort Union. I’m sending him a telegram today and asking him to send a courier down to pick up these papers.”
A smile ousted Miranda’s frown. “Katrina and I can’t tell you how grateful we are.”
Fargo felt a stirring in his loins. Few things were more pleasant than a grateful woman—or two.
“Just one question, ladies—do we finish this journey to California?”
/>
“Neither one of us ever wanted to go,” Miranda assured him. “We don’t know one soul in California. Our entire lives are centered on New Orleans, or at least mime is. I was born there, all my friends are there, and Katrina has lived there for ten years. We wish we could go back.”
“All right, then, you will. But we’ll need Booger, Deke, McDade, even those two lazy, conniving Indians to get it done. Are we all hired?”
“Of course. No one ever fired you. Skye?”
Her voice had grown husky in a way Fargo recognized. “Yeah?”
“Do you realize there will be no one preventing you from . . . visiting us in the tent on the way back?”
“The thought has crossed my mind more than once,” he admitted.
Katrina spoke up, giving him a sultry up-and-under look. “Do we have to wait until we leave? Why don’t you lock the door for a while?”
Fargo felt a grin tugging at his lips and sudden pressure in his hip pocket.
“Yeah,” he agreed, crossing toward the door. “Why don’t I?”
LOOKING FORWARD!
The following is the opening
section of the next novel in the exciting
Trailsman series from Signet:
TRAILSMAN #385
THUNDERHEAD TRAIL
1861, in what will one day be Montana—where a bounty is being offered for a killer with horns.
Skye Fargo wasn’t surprised to find a town where there hadn’t been one two years ago. New towns sprang up all the time. This one had a single dusty street and barely twenty buildings, but one of them was a saloon.
A crudely scrawled sign Fargo had passed not a hundred yards back said the town was called Trap Door. It seemed a strange choice, but when it came to naming towns, people could be downright peculiar. There was a town he’d stumbled on once called Sludge. The name he liked the most was one he heard about from back east. It was called Intercourse.
He figured naming a town Trap Door was someone’s notion of a joke.
He didn’t know what to think of the naked woman standing in the middle of the street.
Fargo drew rein to study what he was seeing. Fargo, a big man, broad of shoulder and hard with muscle, wore buckskins and a white hat so dusty, it was brown. A Colt was on his hip, and unknown to anyone else, an Arkansas toothpick was strapped to his leg inside his left boot. Women rated him handsome. Men rated him dangerous.
The woman in the street was in her twenties or so.
Long brown hair fell past her bare shoulders. Her head was down and Fargo couldn’t see her face. He did see that she was quaking as if with fear. Her arms were across her breasts and she stood with her legs half-crossed.
Fargo looked up the main street and then down it and was further surprised to find there wasn’t another living soul in sight.
Just the naked woman and no one else.
Fargo gigged the Ovaro, and when the stallion was next to her, he drew rein again and leaned on his saddle horn. He was tempted to say, “Nice tits,” but he decided to be polite and said, “How do you do, ma’am?”
She didn’t look up. All she did was go on quaking.
Leaning on his saddle horn, Fargo said, “Folks don’t wear clothes in these parts?”
Her hair was over her face, and when she raised her head just a little, a single green eye peered out at him.
“You shouldn’t,” she said.
“How’s that, ma’am?” Fargo said while admiring the rest of her.
“You shouldn’t talk to me,” she said, her voice trembling like she was. “It’s not safe.”
“Safe for who?”
“You, mister. He won’t like it. He’ll hurt you or worse. Or his brothers will.”
Fargo looked around again. Horses were at hitch rails and a cat was licking itself but they were the only signs of life. “Where is everybody?”
“Hiding.”
“From who?”
“Mister, please,” she said, practically pleading. “Ride on before it’s too late.”
“I was thinking of wetting my whistle.” Fargo hadn’t had a drink in a week and a whiskey would go down smooth.
“God, no. You don’t want to. Light a shuck before one of them looks out and sees us.”
Just then there was a loud crash from the saloon and a burst of gruff laughter.
The woman nearly jumped out of her skin. She quaked harder and balled her hands, her fingernails biting into her palms.
“You have a name?”
“Just go. Please.”
Fargo bent down and carefully parted her hair with a finger. She didn’t try to stop him. He spread it wide so he could see her face, and a ripple of fury passed through him.
Her left eye was fine but the right eye was swollen half-shut. Her right cheek was swollen to twice its size and was turning black and blue, and blood had trickled from the corner of her mouth and dried on her chin. Someone had clouted her, clouted her good.
“Well, now,” Fargo said.
“Please,” she said again.
“How long have you been standing here?”
“I don’t rightly know. An hour, I suppose. Ever since they rode in and he got mad at me for not wanting to sit on his lap.”
“I need a handle,” Fargo said.
“Folks call him Grizz on account of that’s what he looks like. Him and his two brothers show up from time to time to have a frolic, as they call it.”
“How about your own?”
“It’s Candice.” She glanced over her shoulder at the saloon. “God, you’re taking an awful chance. For the last time, please skedaddle or they’re liable to do you harm.”
“Where did your clothes get to?”
Candice looked down at herself and closed her good eye and a tear trickled from it. “Grizz ripped them off me after he hit me and I was lying on the floor. He said how he’d teach me to mind him and told me to come out here and stand until he hollered for me to come back.”
“Well, now,” Fargo said again. “I reckon I’ll have that drink.” He raised his reins but she clutched at his leg.
“I’m begging you. Go before it’s too late. I don’t want you stomped or killed on my account.”
“You say he has two brothers with him?”
Candice nodded. “Rance and Kyler. They’re almost as snake-mean as Grizz. Rance carries a Sharps everywhere and Kyler is partial to a big knife. You don’t want to rile either of them. Both will kill a man as soon as look at him.”
“You don’t say.”
She removed her hand. “Now that you know, fan the breeze.”
Fargo clucked to the Ovaro and made for the hitch rail.
“Wait,” Candice said. “Where are you going?”
“To do some riling,” Fargo said.