by Sharpe, Jon
The first shot kicked up a geyser of dirt well out in front of them. Both men ignored it.
“Fargo, you got a point, and I’m caught upon it. That’s ig-zactly the way Utes will play it. You got any big ideas?”
Fargo rested his right cheek on the stock of the Henry and sent a shot between the front feet of Spotted Pony’s mount, slowing him down.
“The well’s dry, partner. You’re the specialist in Indian removal.”
A sly grin came over Old Billy’s face as he squeezed off a round, blowing a brave’s rifle from his hands with the carbine’s big slug. “I am, ain’t I? Fargo, here’s the way of it: Happens we kill enough Johns to drive them off, they’ll be on us like ugly on a buzzard until they plant us. If we don’t kill enough, they’ll turn us into worm castles right here. Now you know what that means, don’tcha?”
Indian trade rifles were cracking loudly, most of the .31 caliber slugs whistling wide. But one thumped the ground near Fargo’s head, throwing dirt into his eye. That brave was getting sassy and probing in close, so Fargo shot him in the foot and turned him.
“Big medicine?” he replied.
“Big medicine,” Old Billy agreed, starting to inch backward toward his saddle. “Best way to drive Injuns off permanent like is to show them a sight they ain’t never glommed before—most especial, a sight that shames their manhood. Keep them savages at bay, Fargo, until I get Richard out.”
“Richard? Who the hell is he?”
“You’re about to meet him. Just keep tossing lead.”
By now Fargo was receiving as much as he tossed. A few of the better marksmen were sending rounds past his ears with a blowfly drone. He was grateful, however, that they had not yet gone into their highly favored circle attack with its ever-tightening noose.
The Henry bucked into his shoulder when he nicked a pony’s pastern, spooking the mount into throwing his rider. When another crazy-brave Ute rushed him, Fargo drilled his right shoulder and spun him onto the ground.
“Let’s get thrashing back there!” he shouted to Old Billy. “These ain’t licorice drops they’re throwing at us, and I can’t keep winging them much longer. They push any closer, I’ll have to kiss the mistress.”
“Keep your pants on,” Old Billy shot back, but when Fargo glanced over his shoulder he saw that the Indian fighter wasn’t following his own advice—he had stripped buck naked and was now applying charcoal to his face—black, the color for celebrating the death of an enemy.
“You goddamn fool!” Fargo snapped. “Has your brain fried in this sun?”
He fired several more rounds, starting to ratchet up from nervous to desperate. When he glanced back Old Billy had risen to his feet—and Fargo was shocked sick and silly, his jaw dropping open. For a full ten seconds, despite the rounds parting his hair, he was speechless. He didn’t know whether to laugh or puke—or both.
“How you like him?” Billy demanded as he strutted forward. “It’s made of that India rubber—had her special-made in St. Louis.”
Fargo had seen sights, during his wide travels, to make kings and queens marvel. He had seen streams in the Black Hills that actually ran uphill; grizzly bears so huge they could knock down a full-grown tree; prairie-dog towns in Texas that covered six hundred square miles; and buffalo herds so massive they took a full day to pass him. But this . . . it had no equal in his experience.
Old Billy’s pale white body now sported a giant cod—huge in diameter, trailing almost to the ground, and quite realistic. It was trussed over his real sex with a flesh-colored band. To get the Utes’ attention, Old Billy gyrated his hips and made the huge organ swing around like a tassel. As one, the braves stopped firing, stunned just like Fargo.
But Old Billy Williams wasn’t content to shock them. He now pranced forward like a drunken madman, screaming Scripture.
“ ‘Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils!’ ” he roared out.
Christ, they’re going to shoot him, Fargo thought. Hell, I might beat them to it.
Old Billy gyrated his hips again, swinging the massive member as he hopped and pranced even closer. “ ‘Ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table and of the table of devils!’ ”
Fargo braced for the volley of shots, but it never came. Instead, Spotted Pony unleashed a shrill cry and the entire group whirled their ponies around, racing toward the north at a two twenty clip.
Old Billy swaggered back toward the sand wallows. “This ain’t no dick,” he declared proudly. “It’s a Richard.”
“Sir Richard,” Fargo allowed, although he averted his eyes in disgust as he pushed to his feet.
“How’s that for wit and wile?” Old Billy taunted him as he pulled Richard off and started dressing.
“It likely saved our lives,” Fargo said, “but, William, you are one strange and sick son of a bitch.”
Old Billy tossed back his head and howled like a wolf. “Hell yes I am! Always been, always be. But can any man say Billy Williams don’t know his redskins?”
“Not around me,” Fargo said. “Not that I ever doubted it.”
Old Billy winked at Fargo. “I heard a couple sporting gals in Santa Fe talking you up, saying how you was ‘well-endowed.’ Don’t looking at Richard make you feel a mite humble?”
Fargo grinned. “He does tend to give a man a puny feeling.”
When he saddled his horse, Fargo sent a slanting glance toward Old Billy as he stuffed his giant rubber cod into a saddlebag.
“Old son,” Fargo said quietly, “I don’t mind if I die now for I have truly seen the elephant.”
10
Deets Gramlich sat stunned in his saddle, still holding his telescope. He had acted in some wildly ribald skits in low theaters and barrelhouses from Manhattan to San Francisco. But what he had just witnessed was unsurpassed in his wide experience. He had been certain that Fargo and his partner were gone-up cases. Until . . . holy Jesus, until . . .
He suddenly burst into paroxysms of laughter that forced him to grip the horn. K.T. Christ! Those Indians had howled like dogs in the hot moons and fled quicker than scat. It wasn’t just Fargo—this Old Billy Williams was savvy and cunning. Deets resolved yet again to exercise extreme caution. Otherwise he’d soon be playing checkers with the devil.
He sat his horse in the only concealed spot in sight, a narrow, shadowed declivity in the base of a mesa. Fargo and Williams were perhaps a mile north of his position, now bearing west toward Salt Lake City. This next attack, he mused, would have to be done with great precision and care. And this time he must toss a loop around Fargo, because Deets wanted nothing to do with the Great Salt Desert. His trail skills were top-notch, especially for a former thespian, but a trek across the Great Salt in search of suitable victims would be like searching for dictionaries in an Indian camp.
He turned the problem of Skye Fargo back and forth for a while. It disturbed his actor’s vanity that Louise Tipton had doubted he was Fargo. By now Deets had come to believe that he was Fargo—believe it and like it. Before he had turned Fargo into a pariah, and it was safe to leave his Fargo disguise on, the power and pleasure had thrummed in his blood.
Beautiful women like Ginny Kreeger had sent him comehither glances; capable frontiersmen jostled to buy him drinks. A man could get to like being Skye Fargo, all right.
Deets thought about that cretin Butch Landry and his two mangy sidekicks. So long as they kept doling out the gold cartwheels, he would do their bidding—Judge Moneybag ruled all his decisions. But their dream of seeing Fargo bouncing along in a tumbleweed wagon, on his way to a Mormon prison, would never pan out if Deets could grab the reins. If not, and Fargo did end up facing the gallows, at least there was the payoff.
Either way, Deets reminded himself as he sank steel into the ribs of his stallion, Skye Fargo was in one world of shit.
“I expected the grain to hold out longer,” Fargo said as he and Old Billy broke camp on the fourth day after riding out from Fort Bridger. “Look at our mou
nts grazing saltbush.”
“Them’s tough horses,” Old Billy reminded him. “Neither one of us coddles our mounts like them green-antlered fools who gives their horses names and feeds ’em sugar from their hands. Sugar—to a goddamn horse! I ain’t had no sugar since Christ was a corporal.”
“You damn piker, you won’t lay out a few Bungtown coppers to buy a sack, that’s all.”
“Set it to music, why don’tcha? The hell you do with your money, bank it? Hell no! You piss it away on whiskey, whores, gambling, them fancy eating-houses where a Longhorn steak costs four bits. That time we run into each other in New Orleans, you had a hunnert dollars in your pocket. When I seen you two days later, you had to let a whore buy your breakfast.”
Fargo grinned, shaking his head. “Old son, you’re a caution to screech owls. You strap on a rubber pecker the size of a sequoia, prance around like a man from Bedlam, then lecture me on my wanton ways.”
Old Billy joined the laughter. “Wa’n that the shits? Them damn Utes won’t have the gumption to top their squaws for at least a moon.”
“Anyhow,” Fargo said, “that was yesterday. I have to plot down a couple more line stations today, and there’s no way we’ll make Salt Lake City before tomorrow. My Ovaro can get by on tree bark, but there’s none to be had.”
“Hell, my Appaloosa will eat tar-paper shingles,” Old Billy boasted. “’Course, ain’t none of them, neither. But, say! You ever heard tell of Kellar’s Station?”
Fargo mulled it. “Well, once I knew a Junebug Kellar back in the Nebraska Territory. Big, pear-shaped fellow bald as a cue ball. He ran a ferry on the Niobrara.”
“Yeah, that’s Kellar. They taxed him outta Nebraska and he started out for the Sierra goldfields. But his back started givin’ him jip, so he opened up a little station on the freight road, mebbe five, six miles from here. You seen his daughter?”
“He spoke of a little girl,” Fargo replied. “I never saw her.”
Old Billy grinned wickedly. “She ain’t no little girl no more. Got a set of catheads on her what could derail a train.”
Both men forked leather and gigged up their mounts.
“That’s all real interesting,” Fargo said, for he had not spent enough time with the tempting Caroline Reed back in Echo Canyon and now he regretted it. “But does Junebug sell grain?”
“His station is poor shakes, f’sure. Just a little clapboard shebang with a plank bar—he even sells liquor to Injuns so they won’t lift his hair. Ain’t no feed stable, but I recollect he sells oats and parched corn.”
Fargo kept his head in constant motion, studying the bleak, parched terrain in the brassy morning sunlight.
“This could be a tricky piece of work,” Fargo pointed out. “There’s usually men lounging around these places, and Junebug knows both of us. And he’s likely heard all the lies about my rape-and-killing spree.”
Old Billy waved this aside. “Junebug won’t credit the lies, not by a jugful. He knows how you saved all them orphans in the Dakota country.”
“Maybe, but if he recognizes me even without my whiskers, he’ll likely greet me by name. And even if he doesn’t recognize me, he’ll greet you by name. By now everybody knows that Old Billy Williams is siding me.”
“You’re a cheerful son of a bitch, Fargo,” Billy said sarcastically. “We oughter get you a plug hat and a hearse.”
“Just trying to wangle out of a bloodbath, old campaigner. I haven’t killed a soul since we took on this leg of the route, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
Old Billy spat, again just missing the Ovaro’s ear. “Why, you goddamn Quaker! Plenty of men require killing, and by God, I’m just the jasper to send ’em under.”
“When you put it that way,” Fargo replied, “I see the light. Hell, let’s just chop wood and let the chips fall where they may.”
“Now you’re whistling! That first note you found called you death’s second self.”
That first note . . . now there, Fargo thought, was one pig’s afterbirth who definitely required killing. But could he be stopped before it was too late? Fargo had confidence in his ability to square off against any man. But how could he cut sign on a man who lived in the shadows—or draw down on a man who was only odjib, a thing of smoke?
Once a man mates with despair, he’s worthless. An old mountain man had told Fargo that many years ago, and the Trailsman had rallied himself many times with those words. But this evil preying on him now was different. A soulless coward was turning Fargo against himself, turning a roughhewn but decent frontiersman into a despicable pariah in the eyes of the world.
“Keep up the strut,” he muttered. “Straight ahead.”
“What’s that?” Old Billy demanded. “Speak out like a man or go braid your pigtails.”
“I said, I think I’ll find out where you hide your money and steal it.”
Even Old Billy’s purple birthmark turned pale. In a flash he drew his fancy Brasher of London six-gun.
“Long Shanks, don’t you even joke about my money. You ever touch it, I’ll kill you deader than last Christmas.”
Five seconds of silence except for the chinging bit rings. Then both men broke into raucous laughter.
“Kellar’s Station dead ahead,” Old Billy said a minute later. “Knock that riding thong off your hammer, Quaker, and let’s commence to killing.”
Across the dust-hazed sage, shimmering like a heat mirage in the metallic sun, Fargo spotted a typical frontier shebang leaning under the weight of shoddy construction and too much wind. Jagged pieces of flock board had been cobbled together to make walls, and a stovepipe chimney rose through a roof of flattened vegetable cans. Fargo counted four horses at the mesquite tie-rail out front.
Old Billy spat a brown streamer, this one so close to the Ovaro’s right ear that the stallion whinnied in warning.
“You’ll regret that reckless spitting,” Fargo assured him. “That pinto is mighty touchy about his ears.”
“The hell! He’s fine horseflesh, but the rider is the master. Consarn you, Fargo, flush out your headpiece. Ain’t no mother-ruttin’ horse lays down the law to Old Billy Williams.”
Fargo bit his lip to keep a straight face. “All right, then. I’ve brought it up twice and I won’t harp on it anymore.”
“Huh. You just watch me—you might have this animal lipping salt from your hand, but by God he’ll dance when I pipe.”
“Four horses tied off ahead,” Fargo remarked. “Let’s reconnoiter soon as we go inside just in case they’re hungry for a frolic. I like to know what kind of artillery might open up on me.”
Old Billy grinned. “Say! Why don’t we just go in a-smokin’ like we done in that cantina in El Paso? Brother, them Mexican slavers didn’t know whether to piss or go blind. Lead was flying ever which-way before you even slapped the batwings.”
Fargo laughed at the memory. “Yeah, and you singing ‘La Paloma’ in Spanish. But this is different—we might kill Junebug or his girl. And from what you said about her tits—”
Fargo stopped in midsentence, watching four heavily armed men who had just emerged into the glaring sun. They stood only twenty yards away, rifles and scatterguns trained on the new arrivals.
“Shit-oh-dear,” Old Billy muttered. “We was so busy flap-jawin’ I forgot to break out Patsy.”
“This won’t be a wit-and-wile situation,” Fargo muttered back. “Look for the main chance, Old Billy, then spark your powder.”
The two men reined in, dust swirling around them in the hot wind.
“Don’t stop there,” said a toothless chawbacon dressed in butternut homespun. “Climb off them hosses and lead ’em in.”
Both men ignored the order. Old Billy hunched forward in the saddle, trying to see better in the blowing dust. “Horten? Zachary Horten, is that you?”
“A-huh,” Horten replied in his High South twang, keeping his close-set eyes narrowed on Fargo. “You’re free to ride on, Old Billy. Ain’t nobody said a word ag
in you. It’s Skye Fargo here what faces a reckonin’.”
“Fargo! Hell, I got shed of him miles back. This here is Frank Scully.”
Horten shook his head. “Best be careful, Billy, or we will have a score to settle with you for sidin’ with a rapist and woman-killer.”
The man beside Horten, a hatchet-faced mestizo in a rawwool serape, spoke up. “Word came from Echo Canyon, Fargo, that you shaved your beard and got new clothes.”
“Yeah, shit-for-brains,” spoke up a third man, gawking at the shirt. “You’d a been less conspicuous in your buckskins than in that nigger-woman blouse.”
“Man ain’t got no taste,” Old Billy muttered to Fargo.
“Light down,” Horten ordered again, wagging the barrel of his New Haven Arms rifle. “First, Fargo, we’re gonna learn you that wimmin is respected in the Utah Territory. After that, you’ll dance on air. Then me and the boys here will draw cards to see who gets that fine horse of yours.”
“That’s all I was waiting to hear,” Fargo said quietly.
“How’s that?”
“I wanted it to be legal,” Fargo explained, “so I waited until you threatened my life.”
Quicker than eyesight, Fargo filled his fist with blue steel. The Colt bucked in his hand and a neat hole opened in the center of Horten’s forehead. Blood blossomed out, splashing into the parched earth with a sound like a horse pissing. Fargo’s reflexive speed, and the sudden fact of death in their midst, froze the other three men like statues of salt.
By the time the other three were able to blink again, Old Billy had his Greener unsheathed and at the ready. “Drop’em, boys,” he ordered in his gravelly voice. “If the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers couldn’t spill my guts, you three bald-headed baboons sure as hell won’t, neither.”
Facing this double threat, all three complied instantly.
Old Billy laughed so hard he was forced to slap his thigh. “Fargo, these needle-dick bug-humpers won’t never learn territorial law. Back in the States they got that ‘duty to retreat’ law if a man’s life is threatened. Out here, a threat ain’t no different than the attempt. This fool ain’t the first to turn his tongue into a shovel and bury hisself with it.”