by Jon Sharpe
Again the rifle banged but the rifleman rushed his shot and the slug clipped the stallion’s flying mane.
Fargo glanced over his shoulder. A puff of gun smoke let him know the rifleman was hidden in the high grass. Drawing his Colt, he fired three times. He didn’t expect to draw blood. He wanted the man to hug dirt long enough for the Ovaro to reach safety.
It worked.
Swinging down, Fargo shucked the Henry. He darted from trunk to trunk until he was at the last one. Cautiously, he peered around, and nearly lost the top of his head to a shot that left a deep furrow in the tree and peppered him with slivers of bark.
“Almost got you that time, didn’t I?” Owen shouted, and cackled.
Fargo took his hat off and set it on the ground. “Where did the senator get to?” He had a notion Keever left Owen there to keep him busy while Keever went after the white buffalo.
“He’s up ahead a ways,” Owen replied. “To get to him you have to get past me.”
“Is he paying you extra for this?” Fargo kept him talking while peeking out again.
“As a matter of fact, he is. Two hundred to keep you from interfering. Five hundred if I blow out your wick.”
“A lot of gents have tried.”
Owen laughed again. “Haven’t you heard? There’s a first time for everything.”
Fargo saw grass move sixty yards out. Owen was changing position. He took a bead low to the ground, and fired. A startled oath greeted the shot.
“Damn you! That pretty near got me in the hip.”
“I’ll try harder next time.” Fargo worked the lever, feeding another cartridge into the chamber. The Henry held fifteen in the tubular magazine under the barrel. As folks liked to say, you could load a Henry on Sunday and shoot it all week.
The grass was moving again.
“You could make this easy on both of us,” Owen hollered. “You could get on that fine animal of yours and light a shuck. No one will ever know.”
“Except me.” Fargo wedged the stock to his shoulder. All he needed was a gap in the grass.
“Damn it. Be reasonable. What’s the white buff to you?”
“To the Indians it means a lot.”
“Why are you so bothered about a bunch of savages? And so what if they get upset? It’s just a buffalo, for God’s sake. Another white one will come along in ten or twenty years and they can make a fuss over it.”
“Lichen is dead, you know.”
The grass stopped moving. “I figured as much. You told me that to make me mad, didn’t you? Hoping I’d jump up like an idiot and start spraying lead. But I’m not that stupid.”
“Stupid enough.” Fargo had discerned a vague shape that might or might not be Owen. He thumbed back the hammer, took precise aim, and lightly stroked the trigger.
At the crack there was a roar of pain. Owen’s rifle spanged, four, five, six times. He was a good shot. The trunk was struck again and again.
Fargo chuckled. He worked the Henry’s lever and leaned his shoulder against the tree. “Almost got you that time, didn’t I?” he mimicked Owen’s earlier taunt.
“You did get me, you son of a bitch! Nicked my leg. It hurts like hell.”
“Show yourself and I’ll try to do better.” Fargo scanned the nearest trees and spied a spruce that suited his need.
“Funny man. But this isn’t doing you any good. You might as well leave while you still can. By now Keever has the herd in sight. It shouldn’t take him long to pick out the white buff. Any minute now we’ll hear the shot.”
Flattening, Fargo crawled toward the spruce. Now if only Owen didn’t spot him.
“What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue? You’ve gone to all this trouble, and for what?”
Fargo crawled faster. He went around the tree and rose into a crouch. The lowest limb was within easy reach. He pulled himself up, branch after branch, until he had climbed twenty feet.
“Answer me, damn you.”
Fargo parted two limbs. And there was Owen, on his belly in the grass. Snail-slow, Fargo slid the Henry’s barrel between the limbs and rested it on the lowest. He lined up the rear sight with the front sight and both sights with Lem Owen.
“What are you up to in there? Are you trying to flank me?” Owen turned his head right and left.
Fargo waited for him to stop.
Owen cast a puzzled look at the trees, then cupped a hand to his mouth. “Are you still there?”
Fargo fired. He jacked the lever and went to take aim again but Owen was prone, both arms flung out. Quickly, Fargo descended. He couldn’t see Owen. If he’d only wounded him, Owen might be waiting for him to show himself. But he couldn’t afford more delay. He sprinted out into the grass.
Lem Owen was still there, still facedown. There was no need to roll him over to confirm he was dead. Much of the top of his head was gone, and his brains were oozing out.
Fargo ran to the Ovaro. He mounted and rode past the body. Fifty yards on was a hollow and in it was Owen’s horse. Now all Fargo had to do was backtrack to where Owen had parted company with Keever.
The grass was dotted with droppings. There were scores of wallows. A lot of buffalo had been this way.
Fargo worried that he had miles to go and would be too late. Then he remembered. Owen said something about being able to hear the shot. Keever couldn’t be that far.
A low rise rose like a serrated saw. Fargo goaded the Ovaro up it but stopped short of the rim. Sliding down, he crept to the crest. He smelled them and heard them before he saw them: hundreds of shaggy brutes, most grazing. A few bulls pawed the ground. Calves gamboled playfully about.
Nowhere was there sign of a white one.
Fargo turned to the right and the left. The rise went for hundred of yards in both directions. He saw no one and was about to stand and walk to the Ovaro when a head popped up two hundred yards away. A head with white hair.
Stooping so low his nose practically brushed the ground, Fargo glided toward it.
It was Keever, all right, and his attention was fixed on the herd.
Fargo glanced in the same direction, and tensed. There it was—the white buffalo. If Fargo had to judge, he would say it wasn’t much over six months old. It was said that buffalo nursed until seven or eight months, and that was what this one was doing. It made a perfect target.
Fargo threw caution to the breeze, and ran. Keever would hear him but he didn’t give a damn.
Oblivious to its danger, the white buffalo continued to nurse.
The senator had his eye to the tube above the barrel. Any moment now and he would shoot.
Fargo took a few more bounds and stopped in his tracks. What the hell was he doing? he asked himself. There was an easy way to foil the bastard. Grinning at his inspiration, he pointed the Henry at the sky and banged off eight shots while whooping like a Comanche on the warpath.
Shaggy heads rose in alarm. Bulls bellowed and cows snorted, and the next thing, the entire herd was in motion. Every last buff wheeled to the south and joined the stampede, the white buffalo and its mother among them.
“Nooooo!”
Senator Keever was on his feet, staring after the fleeing buffs in consternation. He jerked his rifle up but he didn’t have a shot. So he ran after them, yelling at the top of his lungs. A crazy stunt, since he had no hope of catching them. He was almost to the bottom of the rise when a giant brown shape rose up out of a wallow.
“Keever!” Fargo shouted, but the senator couldn’t hear him over the din. Fargo snapped the Henry up but before he could shoot the bull was on its intended victim.
At the last second Keever must have heard it. He spun, directly into the bull’s path. A curved horn caught him full in the chest and he was swept off his feet as if he were weightless. A toss of that great head, and the senator went flying. He tumbled shoulders over heels and flopped to a stop. The bull didn’t slow. It ran to join its fellows, one horn black, the other horn glistening red.
Fargo went to see. There w
as nothing he could do. The hole was big enough to shove his fist through. Keever’s eyes were wide in terror and would stay that way this side of eternity.
The drum of hooves brought Fargo around in a crouch. This time it wasn’t a buffalo; it was Gerty, quirting her horse, her young face twisted in fury. She rode right at him, screaming, “I’ll kill you! Kill you! Kill you! Kill you!”
Fargo dodged, grabbed a leg as she swept by, and upended her. He felt no sympathy when she bounced a few times. She was unhurt and swearing like a river rat as he forked her under his arm and carried her to the Ovaro.
“Let go of me, you wretch! Where are you taking me?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
It took three nights of searching. The woman with the withered face was half a mile from the village, flitting among the trees. She gave a start when Fargo rode up and dumped the bundle at her feet.
“You!” she exclaimed. “I remember you.”
“I bring you a gift.”
She stared at the blanket. It was tied at both ends and bulged and moved as if alive. “What is this?”
“The girl you have been searching for.”
The woman titled her head. “She does not sound like Morning Dew.”
“Keep her anyway.” Fargo touched his hat brim and used his spurs. He didn’t look back.
LOOKING FORWARD!
The following is the opening
section of the next novel in the exciting
Trailsman series from Signet:
THE TRAILSMAN #334
COLORADO CLASH
Colorado, 1861—three men dead, a town filled
with ugly secrets and Fargo trying to stay alive long enough
to learn the truth.
Skye Fargo might not have found the body if he hadn’t decided to stop by the creek and fill his canteen.
Late September in Colorado was a melancholy time with the thinness of the afternoon sunlight and the snow-peaked mountains looking cold and aloof.
Ground-tying his big Ovaro stallion, Fargo grabbed his canteen from his saddle and walked through buffalo grass until he came to the narrow, winding creek. The water was clean. He hunched down next to it, opening his canteen. A jay cried. Fargo looked over to see what the hell was wrong with the damn bird.
And that was when he saw, sticking out from behind a ponderosa pine to his right, a pair of boots. Easy to assume that attached to those boots was a body.
He finished filling his canteen before getting up and walking through the smoky air to stand over the remains of what appeared to be a teenager of maybe sixteen, seventeen years. From the denim shirt and Levi’s and chaps, Fargo figured that the kid had been a drover. Cattle were getting to be a big business around here.
The birds had already been at him pretty good. The cheeks reminded Fargo of a leper he’d once seen. One of the eyes had been pecked in half. Dried blood spread over the front of the kid’s shirt. Hard to tell how long the kid had been here. Fargo figured a long day at least. The three bullets had done their job.
He found papers in the kid’s back pocket identifying him as Clete Byrnes, an employee of the Bar DD and a member of the Cawthorne, Colorado, Lutheran church. Cawthorne was a good-sized town a mile north of here. That was where Fargo had been headed.
He stood up, his knees cracking, and rolled himself a smoke. He’d seen his share of death over the years, and by now he was able to see it without letting it shake him. The West was a dangerous place, and if bullets weren’t killing people, then diseases were. But the young ones got to him sometimes. All their lives ahead of them, cut down so soon.
The cigarette tasted good, the aroma killing some of the stench of the kid’s body.
Not far away was a soddie. He walked toward it and called out. Then he went to the door, but there was no answer.
He went back to his Ovaro then, untying his blanket and carrying it back to the corpse. He spread the blanket out on the grass and then started the process of rolling the body on it. Something sparkled in the grass. He leaned over and picked it up. A small silver button with a heart stamped on it. Something from a woman’s coat. He dropped it into his pocket.
When the blanket was wrapped tight, he hefted the body up on his shoulder and carried it over to the stallion. He slung it across the animal’s back and then grabbed the rope. A few minutes later the kid was cinched tight and Fargo was swinging up in the saddle.
Two minutes later he was on his way to Cawthorne.
Karen Byrnes had no more than opened the door and stepped inside when she saw the frown on Sheriff Tom Cain’s face. She knew she was a nuisance and she really didn’t give a damn.
A regional newspaper had once called Sheriff Cain “the handsomest lawman in the region.” Much as she disliked the man, she had to give him his bearing and looks. Sitting now behind his desk in his usual black suit, white shirt, and black string tie, the gray-haired man had the noble appearance of a Roman senator. It was said that he’d always looked this age, fifty or so, even when he was only thirty. It was also said that many gunfighters had mistaken the man’s premature gray for a slowing of his abilities. He’d killed well over two dozen men in his time.
The office was orderly: a desk, gun racks on the east wall, wanted posters on the right. The windows were clean, the brass spittoon gleamed and the wood stacked next to the potbellied stove fit precisely into the wooden box. Tom Cain was famous for keeping things neat. People kidded him about it all the time.
The hard blue eyes assessed Karen now. She tried to dismiss their effect on her. Somehow even a glance from Cain made her feel like a stupid child who was wasting his time.
“There’s no news, Karen.”
“Been two days, Tom.”
“I realize it’s been two days, Karen.”
“They found the other two right away.”
“Pure luck. That’s how things work out sometimes.”
She had planned to let her anger go this time. She would confront him with the fact that if her brother Clete was dead that would make three young men who had been murdered in Cawthorne within the past month. And the legendary town tamer Tom Cain hadn’t been able to do a damn thing about it. The father of one of the victims had stood up at a town council meeting and accused Cain of not being up to the task of finding the killer. He had immediately been dragged out of the meeting. In Cawthorne nobody insulted Tom Cain. When he’d come here four years ago, nobody had been safe. Two warring gangs of outlaws held the town for ransom. Many of the citizens had started to pack up their things and leave. To the shock and pleasure of everybody, Cain had needed only five months to set the gangs to running. Eleven of them were buried in the local cemetery. It was downright sacrilegious to insult Tom Cain.
“My mother’s dying, Tom. You know that. Her heart’s bad enough—if we don’t find Clete—”
He stood up, straightened his suit coat and came around the desk. Just as he reached her, she began to cry—something she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do. He gathered her up and took her to him, her pretty face reaching well below his neck. He let her cry and she resented it and appreciated it at the same time.
“We’re all just so scared, Tom. Especially my mother.”
His massive hand cupped the back of the small blond head and pressed it to him.
“I’m going to find him, Karen. I promise you that. And I’m going to find out who killed the other ones, too. I haven’t had any luck yet but I think that’s going to change.”
She leaned away from him, looked up into the handsome face. “Did you find out something?”
“I don’t want to say anything just yet, Karen. I don’t want to have bad luck by talking about it.”
Despite the situation, she smiled. That was another thing they always said about Tom Cain. Him and his damn superstitions.
“Excuse me,” said the slim older deputy Pete Rule, coming through the door that separated the four cells in back from the front office. Rule wore a faded work shirt. A
star was pinned to one of the pockets. There was a melancholy about Rule that Karen had always wondered about. Cain’s other deputies were basically gunslingers. She wondered why somebody as quiet and often gentle as Rule would have signed on. “Afternoon, Karen.”
“Hello, Pete,” she said, slipping from Cain’s arms. She’d liked Rule ever since she’d seen him jump into a rushing river and pluck out a two-year-old girl who’d wandered into it.
“We’ll find him, Karen,” Rule said. “That’s a promise.”
Karen nodded, a bit embarrassed now that she’d been so angry.
“You tell your mother she’s in my prayers,” Cain said.
“Thanks for helping us. If you weren’t here—” She felt tears dampen her eyes again.
“You better go get yourself one of those pieces of apple pie that Mrs. Gunderson’s serving over to the café for dinner tonight,” Cain said. “She snuck me a slice, and I’ll tell you, I felt better about things right away. And I suspect she’d let you take a piece home for your mother, too.”
At the door, she said, “If you hear anything—”
“We’ll be at your door ten seconds after we get any kind of word at all.”
She nodded to each of them and then left.
“I know one thing,” Rule said. “He ain’t alive. He’s just like them other two.”
“Yeah,” Cain said, almost bitterly. “And when we find him, I’ll be the one who has to tell her.”
A little girl in a dress made of feed sacks was the first resident of Cawthorne to see the body of Clete Byrnes. She had just finished shooing her little brother inside for supper when she turned at the sound of a horse and there, passing right by her tiny front yard, was a big man on a stallion just now entering the town limits. She knew that there was a man in the blanket tied across the horse because she could see his boots. She wondered if this was Clete Byrnes. Her dad knew Byrnes from the days when he’d worked out at the Bar DD. Byrnes was all her dad talked about at the supper table the past two nights. He said he figured Byrnes was dead but then her mother got mad and shushed him for saying that in front of the four children.