Utah Deadly Double (9781101558867)

by Sharpe, Jon

  Nonetheless, Fargo still had a man’s animal nature, and this woman was still young enough to feel mighty good through her thin calico dress. He realized she was absolutely buck naked under it, her pliant nipples prodding into his chest as she sobbed. His right hand cupped her hip and he felt the deep-sweeping curve. It had been a while for Fargo, and he was forced to discreetly shift his position on the floor to accommodate his arousal.

  Finally she pulled away and stared into Fargo’s lake blue eyes.

  “It wasn’t you,” she said, sniffing. “It couldn’t have been. As impossible as it seems, it wasn’t you.”

  “I’m glad you’ve come round to the truth,” Fargo told her. “But if it wasn’t for Old Billy, I’d be deader than a Paiute grave. And you might have killed Lonny Brubaker, too.”

  “Hell, that’s his fault,” Old Billy put in. “Damn fool acting like Lancelot.”

  Fargo helped the still-shaking woman to her feet. She looked at Doc Atkins. “Are you going to turn me over to the Mormon constable?”

  “Why bother? You won’t find any place in the West that will jug a woman for anything. You just settle your nerves, Dot. You’ve had a lot heaped on you.”

  “Hell,” said Billy, who had the anti-Mormon complex, “just send her to Old Brigham in Salt Lake City. That randy old goat has filled two houses with his wives. Might as well add one that ain’t ugly as a mud fence.”

  Atkins narrowed his eyes. “That kind of talk on Mormon soil will get you a taste of the cowhide.”

  He shifted his gaze to Dorothy. “What about Ginny’s wounds? Were they treated?”

  She swiped at her eyes and nodded. “I took care of them. I was a nurse back in Arkansas.”

  Sy Munro pushed to his feet. “Dot, I think we need to talk with Ginny, don’t you? Fargo didn’t commit this outrage, so we need to find out who did.”

  The woman nodded. “But do all of you need to come? After what she’s been through, she doesn’t need a passel of men staring at her.”

  “Makes sense,” Sy agreed. “How ’bout just Fargo and Doc Atkins? Fargo should go so she can get a close-up look at him.”

  “Send Lancelot, too,” Old Billy tossed in, inclining his head toward Lonny Brubaker. “Maybe he can heal her with a kiss.”

  The three of them headed outside into the hot glare of early-afternoon sunshine. Fort Bridger, located in the extreme northeastern corner of the Utah Territory, was an outpost of Salt Lake City, a stage-relay station, and an important rescue station for Mormons and gentiles alike. Despite its pike-log fence and guard towers, it was not a military fort except for a small detachment of soldiers from the battle-tested Mormon Battalion, first formed in 1846 as volunteers for the bloody war with Mexico.

  “My tent is over behind the feed stables,” Dot told the men. “It ain’t much to look at.”

  Not much around here was, Fargo thought, even as a harsh gust of wind blew in from the surrounding alkali plain and brought stinging sand with it. The Mormon side of the compound looked a bit more settled, with some plank dwellings and livestock. But the area reserved for gentiles looked more transitory: a motley sprawl of tents, clapboard shebangs, and crude lean-tos made from wagon canvas. A group of men were pitching horseshoes, arm-wrestling, placing small bets on footraces—anything to alleviate the boredom of a desolate way station.

  Dot watched Fargo take all of it in as they walked, leaning forward against the wind. “It’s a mite dreary, ain’t it?”

  “Matter of perspective, ma’am. I could show you a buffalo camp called Hog’s Breath, back in central Kansas, that makes this place look like St. Louis.”

  “I do admire the mountains,” she added. “They rise up forever.”

  She meant the rugged Wasatch Range that ran north and south of Fort Bridger. Fargo admired them, too, despite their steep, sterile slopes. Their granite spires wore wispy capes of cloud.

  Dot stopped in front of a worn tent that had been patched with leather flaps and sinew. “I best go in first,” she told the two men. “Ginny’s liable to throw a conniption fit if I just barge in there with Mr. Fargo.”

  She stepped inside and the Doc looked at Fargo. “Hell of a thing, Skye. I’ll have to report this, you know. Too many women and girls here.”

  Fargo nodded. “No way around it.”

  “But I’d rather not do it while you’re still here. A lot of the Mormons don’t know you, and you know how it is when a woman’s been outraged—even a gentile. Weren’t you and Billy planning on riding out toward Echo Springs in the morning?”

  Again Fargo nodded.

  “Pathfinding for the Pony?” Atkins used the popular name for the highly sensationalized Pony Express, the latest publicity gimmick of the cash-starved freighting empire of Russell, Majors & Waddell.

  Fargo heard a young woman’s voice rising in protest from within the darkness of the tent.

  “Not actual pathfinding,” he told Doc Atkins. “The route has already been laid out. Me and Billy are scouting out locations for the line stations they’ll need all along the route. They’ll soon have to be built and peopled up if this overlandmail route is to kick off next year.”

  Atkins shook his head. “Five dollars a letter—hell and damnation! Nobody has that kind of money but prospectors. Anyway, any chance you and Billy might dust your hocks out of here before tomorrow?”

  “Good chance,” Fargo said, seeing which way the wind set. “First I want to talk with this girl. Something ain’t quite jake here.”

  “It’s a poser, all right.”

  “Gentlemen,” came Dot’s voice, “come on in.”

  Fargo had to pause just inside the fly of the tent to let his eyes adjust from the harsh glare outside. Dot lighted a coal-oil lantern and hung it from a hook on the center pole. The tent was crowded with bundles and carpetbags and overflowing crates. Fargo’s gaze landed on a striking young woman lying on a blanket roll, staring at him fearfully. Her honey blond hair was fanned out around her head on the blankets.

  “Hello, Ginny,” Doc Atkins said in a kind voice. “How are you feeling?”

  She didn’t answer, still staring at Fargo.

  “Honey, this is Mr. Skye Fargo,” her mother said.

  “I know who he is,” Ginny replied in a sullen voice. “I . . . met him earlier today.”

  “Ginny,” Fargo assured her, “I’ve never seen you in my life.”

  “Ain’t you a bald-faced liar! Look what you done to me.”

  Fargo did look. Her pretty face was stained by two grapecolored bruises, one eye nearly swollen shut. Dot pulled her skirt up to show neat swathes of bandages on her thighs.

  “No need to pull my skirt up for him,” the girl spat out. “He’s already done that.”

  “Ginny,” Doc Atkins said, “that’s impossible. Fargo has been playing cards with me and three other men for the past four hours. Before that, I saw him shoeing his horse.”

  “Then he’s got a twin brother, Doc,” Ginny insisted. “One who wears the same buckskins with old blood on the fringes. And the same hat and beard—and wears a walnut-handle gun and carries a big knife in his boot. You ever seen twins like that?”

  Fargo took his hat off and flipped it aside, placing his hands on his knees and leaning closer to the girl. She pulled back.

  “Ginny,” he said, “I know you’re upset, and who could blame you? But take a good look at me—for a full minute just study my face.”

  Clearly she didn’t want to, but neither could she tear her eyes from this handsome man with the calm, compelling manner. Silently, seriously, she scrutinized him.

  “The hair,” he finally said. “Is it exactly like your attacker’s?”

  She looked uncertain. “Well . . . his did seem to have a bit more curl in it. And just maybe it was a little darker.”

  “The eyes?”

  She squinted. “They was blue but . . . more like a slate blue. Yours look the color of lake water.”

  “The mouth and beard?”

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p; “The beard was just the same, short and brown and real thick. But the mouth . . . it was meaner somehow, I think.”

  “What about his build, hon?” Dot coaxed.

  “Well . . .” She ran her gaze up and down his length. “He was just as tall, I ’spose. But this man’s shoulders look a little wider.”

  “Are you still sure,” Doc Atkins said, “that this is the man who attacked you?”

  “I . . . when I take a fast look, yes. But when I go part by part, I can’t swear to it.”

  She sent Fargo a tentative smile. “This man is decent. You can see it in him. The other is the lowest trash though he knows how to hide it.”

  “Did you hear his voice?” Fargo asked.

  She nodded. “It was nice, like yours. Until he got mean.”

  Fargo retrieved his hat and straightened up. “One last favor, Ginny. In a bit I’ll be riding out with my partner. We’ll need to know exactly where this attack took place. And may we stop back here so you can take a good look at my horse? I want to know how the two size up.”

  “Yes. You’re going after him, aren’tcha, Mr. Fargo?”

  Fargo nodded once. “That I am. I’ve got a job to do, but I’ve got a hunch his trail will cross mine.”

  She looked satisfied. “I’ve read stuff about you. Kill the son of a bitch.”

  Fargo’s lips twitched into a grin. “He made the call, Ginny. Now it’s root hog or die.”

  With a huge yellow sun starting to wester, Fargo and Old Billy tacked their horses for the trail. Fargo cast an uneasy eye at the knot of men starting to gather around the big livery barn.

  “Word’s got out about Ginny,” Fargo muttered as he tossed on saddle and pad. “Doc Atkins must be taking our side or they’d have collared us by now.”

  “Doc Atkins, my sweet aunt,” Old Billy shot back as he fastened his golden Appaloosa’s bridle latch. “These clabber-lipped pilgrims know me and you are death to the devil. Let the milk-kneed boardwalkers try to arrest me—there’ll be new widows and orphans aplenty.”

  Fargo’s strong white teeth flashed through his beard as he cinched the girth. “Billy, you smell like a whorehouse at low tide and there’s nothing but rough sides to your tongue. But I’d rather have you siding me than a whole troop of cavalry.”

  “This from a man who needed to be saved from a woman. Christ, Fargo, do children bully you, too?”

  Fargo swung up onto the hurricane deck and wheeled the Ovaro around. Some of the faces were growing uglier as a few drunk gentiles worked them into a white-hot fever.

  Fargo jerked the Henry from his saddle boot and jacked a round into the chamber. “If any of you boys are feeling froggy,” he invited, “go ahead and jump.”

  Billy followed suit, pulling out his Greener 12-gauge express gun. “My name is Old Billy Williams,” he announced in his rasping voice, “I’m strong as horseradish and I like to kill—goddamn if I don’t. I double hog-tie dare any of you to make a play. Ain’t one of you spineless sons of bitches fit to wipe my ass, and I can send twenty of you across the mountains quick as a hungry man can eat a biscuit.”

  Fargo knew that wasn’t an empty boast. Like most Indian fighters who worked alone, Old Billy was a walking arsenal. Besides the Greener for close-in work, he toted around a seven-shot Spencer carbine. For more personal encounters he wore a fancy repeater made by Brasher of London with ivory grips and a folding knife under the barrel. When it was do or die, he resorted to the double-bladed Cherokee hatchet in his legging sash.

  “Williams, the hell you doing takin’ the part of a rapist?” demanded a surly, anonymous voice.

  “Rape?” Fargo laughed. “There’s Mormon soldiers here. You think they’d let me ride out if I raped a woman? Sell your ass, you damn fool.”

  A few of the men nodded at this logic and drifted off. Fargo and Billy gigged their horses in the direction of the gentile camp.

  “Fargo, this hombre that looks like you is trouble,” Old Billy opined. “We need to find the bastard and irrigate his guts.”

  “God’s truth, old son. But we also signed a contract with a tight deadline. There’s a good piece of country ahead of us yet before we reach Sacramento—the hardest piece, too.”

  “Uh-huh. You think this Pony Express will ever show color?”

  Fargo snorted, making the Ovaro prick up his ears. “It was never meant to. I talked to William Russell and Alexander Majors myself back in St. Louis. They admitted the whole thing will sink in less than a year.”

  “Christ! Then why take it out of the gate?”

  “You know how it is out West. The competition for freighting contracts is fierce. At one time Russell, Majors, and Waddell had the whole range to themselves. Now Overland, Creighton, and other haulers are cutting off much of the grass. The Pony is creating plenty of hoopla, and they’re hoping to be the big men on the totem pole once more.”

  Billy shook his head in disgust. “It’s like wasting water to make it rain. Well, long as we get our shiners.”

  By now they’d trotted their mounts to the front of the Kreeger tent.

  “Mrs. Kreeger,” Fargo called as he swung down, holding the reins. “Is Ginny up to coming outside?”

  “We’re on our way, Mr. Fargo.”

  “That Dot Kreeger is a fine specimen of woman flesh,” Billy muttered from the saddle. “You gonna trim her, Fargo?”

  “Pleasant as that might be,” Fargo replied, “all I want right now is to show this place my dust.”

  The two women emerged, blinking in the bright sunlight.

  “Lord,” Old Billy whispered, “yoke the two of ’em and we’ll work as a team.”

  “I have good ears, sir,” Dorothy Kreeger said.

  “Beg pardon, ma’am,” Old Billy said. “I’ll launder my talk.”

  “Better yet,” Fargo told him, “don’t talk at all, you chucklehead.”

  He turned to Ginny, who was leaning on her mother. “Is this the same horse you saw earlier? Take your time and look close.”

  She did, hobbling around the Ovaro for a complete study.

  “Well, they sure do look powerful similar,” she finally said. “The color is just right, and so is the saddle. The markings . . . you know how it is with a paint. I can’t swear those are alike.”

  “How ’bout size and shape?” Fargo pressed.

  Ginny looked some more. “The two seem as tall. But this horse seems to have more muscle in its . . .”

  She pointed.

  “Haunches?” Fargo supplied.

  “Yes. And this one seems deeper in its chest.”

  Fargo nodded. “Now, where’s the exact spot where you were attacked, Ginny?”

  She pointed. “I went out the south gate. There’s irrigated fields out there for about a mile. The last two are hayfields divided by the only trail. I was at the edge of the left field when he rode up.”

  “Was he coming from camp or toward it?”

  “Toward it.”

  Fargo thanked both women and forked leather. As the two men headed for the gate, he realized he had jumped over a snake this time: He had a bulletproof alibi in the form of that poker game.

  Next time, Fargo realized, he wouldn’t likely be so lucky. And “justice,” in the lawless Far West, was usually more swift than certain.

  3

  Fargo and Old Billy rode the narrow lane side by side through the irrigated fields, Mormon field hands watching them from lidded gazes.

  “Word got out fast,” Billy remarked. “Looks like you’re totin’ the no-good label, Fargo.”

  The Trailsman was relaxed in the saddle but vigilant, his sun-slitted gaze missing nothing.

  “Looks that way,” he agreed cheerfully. “But if I’m the King Rat, what’s that make you for siding me?”

  “What I’ve always been. A low-down, whiskey-suckin’, mother-lovin’ son of the sagebrush.”

  “You only suck whiskey when somebody else planks their cash. What do you do with your money, save it for your trousseau?”


  “Fargo, give over with all these questions about my money. You best put your brain toward this hombre that’s raping and cutting women in your name. Word’s bound to spread, you know. We could both end up with our tits in the wringer. I want to finish this job—the wages is damn good.”

  Fargo conceded all this with a grim nod. “Yeah, that’s the deal, all right. It’s a mite curious, huh?”

  Old Billy popped a horehound candy into his mouth. “Curious ? Fargo, a two-headed cow is curious. This here is downright baffling.”

  Fargo nodded again but said nothing. He held the Ovaro to an easy trot in the wagon-rutted lane. Fort Bridger had been built here to take advantage of a natural plateau suited for cropland. But not far beyond the southern edge of the fields, the rugged Utah landscape took over. Hills, some threatening to become small mountains, were interspersed with wind-scrubbed knolls and lofty mesas. Purple sage formed a moving carpet with waves rolling through it when the wind gusted. The hills dotted with bluebonnets and daisies, the green expanses of buffalo grass, were well behind them now.

  “This looks like the spot,” he said, drawing rein. “See where the hay was beat down? That’s where our mystery man raped Ginny.”

  “She says she was raped,” Billy gainsaid, lighting down and tossing his reins forward. “Wouldn’t be the first gal that gave some fellow the go sign and then got in over her head.”

  “Could be,” Fargo agreed. “But she sure as hell didn’t give him the go sign to slice her up like a Sunday ham. Besides, I ain’t worried so much about that. If she’s telling the straight about this jasper’s appearance and horse, I’m the one’s in a world of shit.”

  “Could be she ain’t telling the straight,” Old Billy suggested as Fargo went down on his haunches to study the edge of the trail. “Hell, you’re famous, Fargo, you old pussy hound. And life around this hole is about as exciting as a bucket of sheep dip. Could be that gal flopped in the hay with some trail tramp who cut her up and made tracks out of here. So she turned him into Skye Fargo to get some attention.”