by Jon Sharpe
Fargo rolled out at sunrise and watered the Ovaro from a goatskin bag tied to his saddle horn. Then he carefully inspected the stallion’s hooves, removing a few thorns and small stones with a hoof-pick. By then it was light enough for a careful inspection of his surroundings through his binoculars.
Wary of that unholy trio, Fargo scanned the arid country in every direction, searching for movement or reflections more than shapes. All he spotted, however, was a lumbering armadillo and a few scavenging coyotes.
Feeling safe for the moment, Fargo gathered up enough dead mesquite wood to build a cooking fire. He made coffee and fried up the last of his bacon to ease the gnawing in his belly. Then he rode out onto the desert hardpan and pointed his bridle toward Tierra Seca. Already the heat was rising and forming blurry, dancing snakes on the distant horizon.
For a few moments Fargo wondered where those three menacing attackers were holing up. Most hired dirt workers were town men by choice, their trailcraft weak. These three, however, seemed adept at using terrain to their advantage, and he feared they would prove more proficient than the usual greasy-sack outfit at movement and concealment.
They were obviously of a higher caliber, and that meant that whoever was the head of this snake was, too. Mining interests were behind that brazen rerouting of the Rio, and that meant deep pockets. But what the hell, Fargo wondered again, was Santiago Valdez’s mix in this deal?
As Fargo trotted his stallion closer to Tierra Seca, he idly observed that the Mexican side of the river rose into low ridges exactly like the area near the blast site. But an impressive sight distracted his thoughts: members of the Phalanx already working the fields. Despite their foolish notions and laughable costumes, these agricultural utopians were certainly industrious.
As he had hoped, Carrie spotted him riding in and walked out to meet him.
“Glad you stuck around,” she greeted him. “I hope I had something to do with that. You’ve sure been on my mind.”
Fargo swung down from the saddle. “Same here. There’s something we need to take care of, don’t you think?”
“Why not right now, long-tall?”
Fargo grinned. “You mean right here?”
She slugged him playfully on the arm. “We don’t share that much around here.” She nodded toward a nearby cornfield. “Notice how the corn is tasseled—it’s real high now. Would you like me to show you that field?”
“There’s a little farmer in all of us,” Fargo assured her. “But I need to get my horse away from the road.”
They headed down a row of the bean field, Fargo leading the Ovaro, who kept trying to chomp at the plants.
“Just curious,” Fargo said. “Won’t Rip—uh, I mean Justice—interfere again when he sees you’re not working?”
“Oh, he’s still in bed. He sleeps late.”
“I thought you all shared equally in the work.”
“Well, see, Ripley doesn’t really work. He sorta . . . guides the rest of us.”
Fargo thought he detected resentment in her tone. “In other words he’s privileged? A little more equal than everyone else?”
She shrugged her slim shoulders. “He does seem a little bossy. Danny Dexter wasn’t like that. He was our last spiritual leader. His rebirth name was Harmony and he always worked alongside the rest of us. But one day he just up and disappeared without so much as a fare-thee-well. We were fortunate that Justice came along.”
“Disappeared, you say? How long after that did Ripley Parker join the group?”
She cast those wing-shaped, Prussian blue eyes at Fargo, searching his face. “Why, a day or so later, I suppose. Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” Fargo lied. “I guess it’s just a coincidence. How long ago was that when Parker arrived here?”
“Justice,” she corrected him. “Only about a week ago. But we all saw right away that he’s a highly spiritual man.”
Spiritual . . . was that the scar tissue around his eyes, Fargo wondered, or the twice-broken nose?
They approached a wispy, green-eyed blonde who was busy pulling weeds.
“Hi, Peace Child,” she said, ogling the tall, buckskin-clad stranger. “Who’s your new friend?”
“Skye Fargo, this is Abigail Bartlett. Her rebirth name is Hope.”
“You two headed for the cornfield?” Abigail teased. “Re-member, Peace Child—it’s share and share alike.”
“I’m not hogging him. But I met him first. You’ll have to wait your turn.”
“Well, can I come along and just watch you two?”
Fargo’s face brightened. “Say, that sounds—”
“No, you can’t,” Carrie told her friend. “I’m too bashful for that.”
“Well, now,” Fargo said, suddenly feeling like a dog in a butcher shop, “this is definitely a fertile field.”
They reached the edge of the corn. Fargo led the Ovaro a few yards into the field and tied hobbles on him. The stallion, who had once gnawed tar paper off a shack during starving times in a winter storm up on the northern plains, began contentedly cropping at a corn stalk.
Carrie tugged Fargo a little deeper into the field. Her voice grew husky with the force of suddenly released lust.
“I’ve been wanting to feel your pizzle inside me ever since I saw how hard it got yesterday,” she told him, stroking the swollen furrow bulging his trousers. “Mercy! It’s so big and I can feel it throbbing so hard! I’m gonna work it nice, Skye.”
She lifted her arms to pull the burlap sheath off, and with one quick whisk she stood completely naked before him. Fargo drank in the erotic sight: the luxuriant waves of reddish-brown hair; the pouting, ripe cherry lips; the firm tits with pink, slightly upturned nipples; the alabaster skin like a creamy lotion, gently rounded stomach, and flaring hips with a silken “V” of mons hair centered between them.
Even more hot blood surged into Fargo’s iron-hard manhood as Carrie spread her sheath on the ground and lay on her back, spreading the ivory thighs wide apart to goad him on with the sight of her most intimate parts. One eager hand began to cosset her chamois-enfolded pearl, swelling it out into clear view.
“Hurry, Skye!” she begged him. “Put it in me and stroke me fast and hard! Oh, I’m gonna work it so nice for you!”
Fargo, hotter than a branding iron himself, dropped his gun belt, then his trousers, and fitted himself into his favorite saddle, letting her grab his man-gland and guide it inside of her hot, slippery, tight sex. They both gasped at the galvanic charge of pleasure when Fargo flexed his buttocks hard and drove into the deepest center of her womanhood.
She hadn’t lied to Fargo when she promised him she’d work it nice for him. Her love muscle was strong and greedy, and she rapidly squeezed and released, squeezed and released, charging Fargo up to a furious frenzy as he pounded the saddle ever faster and harder. Carrie, charged right up with him, began writhing like a whirling dervish as a nearly unbroken string of climaxes washed over her in tidal waves.
Fargo went into the strong finish, cupping his hands under her firm, satin-smooth ass and lifting her off the ground as he made his conclusive thrusts, explosively spending himself.
Their mutual release left both of them limp rag dolls for several minutes.
“My stars and garters,” she finally managed to gasp. “You must have taken lessons.”
“You’ve been to school yourself,” Fargo replied, sitting up and closing his fly.
“Skye?”
“Hmm?”
“How come you asked me about Rip—I mean, Justice?”
“Because I don’t much like him,” Fargo said frankly. “I got the impression he’s sailing under false colors.”
“What do you mean?” she pressed him.
“Like I said—it’s just an impression.”
She averted her eyes. “He bothers me, too. He’s pus
hing the rest of us around too much, but everybody’s afraid to speak up.”
“I’m gonna be watching him,” Fargo assured her. “Now can I ask you a question? What do you know about Rosario Velasquez?”
Carrie stood up in a huff and wiggled into her sheath.
“Oh, I see how it is. You waited until after you screwed me to ask about her. Were you thinking about her while we did it?”
Fargo struggled to keep a straight face. “Hold on here, cupcake. Whatever happened to all this share and share alike and ‘we abolished jealousy’ business?”
“Oh, pouf! All that’s fine when I know I’m the prettiest girl. Rosario is a real beauty. All the men want her.”
“I’m not looking to poke her,” Fargo lied, adding truthfully, “but she’s up to something. There’s something dangerous about that woman.”
“I don’t know how dangerous she is, but I know she likes bad men—brutal, violent men. There’s one who comes to see her now and then. . . . I was working in the field a few days ago when he dragged a Mexican out of the cantina and beat him up so bad it was hours before the poor man could even stand up.”
“This brutal man—is he a Mexican himself?”
She shook her head. “He’s an American. I only saw him at a distance that one time.”
“Does he ride into Tierra Seca with two companions?”
Again she shook her head. “I don’t know. But Rosario watched the beating and egged him on. Then she took him back to her house, and they were laughing about it.”
“Interesting,” Fargo said.
“Skye, why are you asking all these questions? Are you a lawman?”
“Not hardly. I’m just the curious sort. Tell me, Car—Peace Child. Have you folks here at the farm heard anything about the Rio Grande lately?”
“No. Should we have?”
Fargo ignored the question. He was afraid to tell her about that explosion rechanneling the river for fear she’d say something to the wrong person. And right now it was impossible to know who the wrong person might be.
He buckled on his gun belt while she watched him thoughtfully. Her eyes slid down to look at the Arkansas toothpick in his boot. “That’s a scary-looking knife.”
“It’s common on the frontier. Mighty handy. It’ll soften up bed ground, serve as a hammer and cut branches for firewood.”
“And kill people too, right?”
“It’ll definitely do that.”
“I suspect that you’re a violent man, too,” she finally said. “And at times I’ll bet you’re even brutal.”
“I’m a lovable cuss when I can be,” Fargo assured her. “With me it’s live and let live. But at times I do what needs to be done.”
“Even killing, right?”
Fargo nodded. “Even killing.”
• • •
Fargo spent the rest of his third day in the borderland holed up in a clump of juniper trees on the American side of the Rio Grande. It was a good vantage point near Tierra Seca that allowed him to observe anyone riding in or out of the border hovel.
He had nothing but hunches to go on, but based on Carrie’s remarks and Rosario Velasquez’s odd behavior he suspected that Rosario was linked somehow to the three men trying to kill him. Fargo had decided not to contact Colonel Evans until he could supply more information. After all, the Rio often shifted its course on its own, and unless Fargo could also provide some specific evidence he might be brushed aside.
But the day’s long vigil proved fruitless when the trio failed to materialize. At sundown Fargo gave it up as a bad job and returned to the sandy draw where he had spent the previous night. He ate a spartan meal of dried fruit and a handful of parched corn, resolving to ride into El Paso in the morning to stock up on ammo and supplies. At least, for a change, he was flush with cash—three months of generous wages for his services down in Old Mexico along the Camino Real, or King’s Highway.
He rode out well before dawn and reached the adobe-pocked hilltops of El Paso just as the sun was rising on the sleepy Southwestern town. Milk and ice wagons rattled along the dusty streets, and Fargo’s first stop was the Early Bird Café on Alameda Street. He stoked his hunger-pinched belly with a big plate of eggs and spicy chorizo sausage, cautiously eyeing everyone who entered.
Fargo had felt a scalp-tingling “truth goose” since riding into the city. It was the only real town in this stretch of la frontera, and logic told him it was the most likely hub for the imported thugs behind the brazen Mexican land grab. And since he had no real idea what any of them looked like, he was essentially a roving target anywhere in this city.
The readiness is all, he reminded himself as he finished his second cup of coffee sweetened with brown sugar.
A lawman had entered right behind Fargo and silently eaten his breakfast, paying little attention to the Trailsman. But just as Fargo scootched his chair back to leave, the badge-toter spoke up.
“You a drifter, buckskins?”
“More or less,” Fargo replied.
“Well, which is it—more or less?”
Fargo gave the deputy marshal a closer size-up. He was a brawny and big-bellied man with the bitter, indrawn look of men who felt that life had somehow given them the go-by—a look Fargo noticed often on the frontier.
The Trailsman knew he had to tread carefully here. El Paso had a reputation for brutal lawmen who tolerated no criminal element in the “better” parts of town, and right now Fargo realized he himself was not exactly the picture of straight-and-narrow rectitude. He was a long way from his last bath, his clothing was dirty and scorched and he was the only man in the café toting a rifle.
“More,” Fargo admitted. “You might say I’ve got jackrabbits in my socks. I just spent three months riding guard for a merchant caravan into Old Mexico.”
The deputy pivoted his chair for a better view of Fargo, revealing his massive sidearm in its canvas holster: a Colt Walker .44, made famous by the Texas Rangers. It was the largest handgun on the frontier, known as the “rifle gun,” a percussion-cap weapon with a huge powder load.
“You look like a hard case to me,” the starman said coldly. “We got vagrancy laws in El Paso. Can you prove you got any visible means of support?”
“I’ve got three months’ wages on me.”
“Yeah, you say it’s wages. But maybe that only runs lip deep. Maybe it’s swag.”
Fargo tended to rile cool. This tin star was clearly pushing for a pissing contest that Fargo couldn’t afford to enter.
“Tell me,” Fargo said, “is Addison Steele still the manager at the Overland depot here in town?”
“What of it?”
“The depot is just around the corner. Why’n’t we head over there? Steele can vouch for me. A while back he hired me as a bodyguard for the actress Kathleen Barton.”
“Are you telling me your name is Fargo?”
“That would be me.”
The lawman studied him. “Yeah. You do look like the sketch I seen in the newspaper. All right, sorry I leaned on you so hard—there’s no shadow on your name that I know of. But lookit here, Fargo . . . everybody knows you tend to draw trouble everywhere you go. Mind your pints and quarts while you’re in El Paso.”
“I’ll do my level best,” Fargo assured him, heading for the door.
“And visit a bathhouse,” the starman called out behind him. “That punk blowing off you could puke a buzzard off a gut wagon.”
Keeping his eyes to all sides Fargo rode two streets over to a gun shop he had frequented before. He bought several boxes of shells for both of his weapons and a tin of wiping patches. Then he stopped at a grocery a half block down the street. He stocked up on bacon, jerky, salt, sugar, coffee, airtights of peaches and tomatoes and sacks of cornmeal and flour.
Next he located a barber who also sold hot baths. Fargo scrubbed up and
then had his beard artfully trimmed to remove the singed parts. He had just emerged when he was arrested by the sight of a man leaving a saloon across the street.
He was big, barrel-chested, beard-smudged with a mean slash of mouth. Two Army Colts were tied low on his muscular thighs, the heavy model with a metal back-strap. That model had been exported in large numbers to Russia for their military officers.
Fargo couldn’t exactly say he recognized the man, but his scalp prickled again—he looked somehow similar to the middle rider in the attack on Fargo yesterday morning, the rider whose horse Fargo had shot out from under him.
Fargo was still sizing up the man when the batwings flew open again and two more men emerged behind him. One carried a bow and wore a fox-skin quiver bristling with arrows. Fargo’s face drained cold.
At precisely the same moment that Fargo recognized his enemies, Mean Mouth glanced across the street and spotted him. Fargo was astounded at the blur of speed with which he jerked back both Colts and opened fire.
Fargo’s catlike reflexes sent him diving behind a pyramid of melons stacked up on the boardwalk. The hammering racket of gunfire increased as the rifleman, too, began unlimbering. The archer pitched in only moments later, and Fargo found himself once again under a deadly, nerve-racking siege.
Fargo heard a rapid series of dull, hollow chug sounds as bullets and arrows pummeled the melons. Pieces of slimy fruit sprayed Fargo as the pyramid began to rapidly crumble under the onslaught. Fargo knew he had only seconds to somehow save his life before he was fully exposed to these ungodly talented and determined killers.
Cursing as pieces of melon clotted his eyes Fargo shucked out his barking iron and risked a peek around the melons. An arrow skewered one of them and stopped with the point only an inch from his left eye. Fargo returned fire, pressed so flat to the boardwalk that he couldn’t aim, only point and shoot.
But this was not his place and time to die—Fargo’s third slug caught the archer in the hollow just under his left shoulder and sent him into a half spin, howling. His companions grabbed him by each arm and shunted him into a nearby alley.