by Jon Sharpe
As Fargo eased closer, the man turned and whispered loudly into the night. “Hey, Ray, how much time do we have left?”
At that moment, two men appeared from a bunkhouse below and the man said, “Never mind. Put your watch back in your pocket. I see them coming.”
Fargo took one quick step toward the man and hit him full force. The man groaned and slipped, unconscious, to the ground.
Fargo, with the same movement, grabbed the man’s carbine so it didn’t go clattering into the rocks.
He eased the man down and then watched as the two men started up the hill toward the guard positions.
It was doubtful he could take them both out silently. It looked like it was time for a change of plans. A more direct approach worked better for him anyway.
He took his Henry from over his shoulder and made sure a cartridge was in the chamber. He needed two shots in quick succession to make this work.
The two guards were now climbing up on a narrow trail toward him. He killed the one in front first, then killed the second guard before the gunhand even had time to go for his gun or duck behind a rock.
Taking the first guard’s ammunition belt, Fargo headed back up and into the rocks, moving quickly now, the sounds covered by all the commotion in the yard caused by his shots.
He found a large boulder for cover and locked new cartridges into the chambers of the Henry. There was no guard between him and the ridgeline back to Sharon’s Dream if he needed to make a hasty retreat. The Brant guards that he knew about were all below and beside him. This was as good a location as any to get a little target practice.
Below, a number of men were moving around in the light, shouting orders. Fargo ignored the men who looked like miners and worked to spot the professionals.
Picking one who seemed to be in charge, he shot him through the chest. Fargo’s gun cracked loudly in the night air, and he knew it spit just enough fire to let someone who was watching pinpoint his location.
The man he had shot slammed into the side of a bunkhouse, fired one shot into the air, and then went down hard, clutching his chest. No one went to help him and after a moment he stopped moving.
Fargo stayed perfectly still as the men below all took cover and tried to figure out exactly where the shot had come from.
The miners, not used to a fight, ran for the bunkhouses and the mine tunnel. It was the professionals who stayed, rifles in hand, taking any cover they could, waiting for Fargo to make the next move.
Fargo figured he could outwait them. They didn’t know exactly where he was on the pitch-dark hillside and he could more or less see all of them in the lights from his high position in the rocks.
He silently put another shell into his carbine, then lay against the rock, holding his fire and watching.
Finally, one man moved, running low toward the trail that led up into the rocks. The idiot figured he would outflank Fargo by climbing directly up the rocks at him.
The man paid for his stupid thinking as Fargo caught him in midstride and he tumbled like those people you see in a circus act. Except this one didn’t come up onto his feet and never would again.
Again, there was silence over the compound.
Fargo moved silently over to another rock on the left about twenty paces away and reloaded. Then he went back to watching the scene below.
Through the window of the big house, Fargo caught a glimpse of a man’s shadow.
Fargo sent a shot through the window, exploding glass inward like a kid had hit it with a rock. He doubted he had hit Brant, unless he’d gotten lucky. But if that had been Brant standing there, he’d at least been cut by the flying glass.
From the yard below, a man shouted up at him. “Fargo, is that you? We have no fight with you.”
“You do as long as you work for Henry Brant,” Fargo replied, turning his head toward the right and shouting back at the mountain to let the echoes confuse them as to his exact location. “Go to the stable and mount up and ride right now and I’ll let you live.” Fargo again shouted at the mountain to his right.
His voice echoed over the compound and then silence filled the dark night again.
Suddenly, one man near a horse trough started firing at the lanterns hanging around the compound, hitting one, missing another, trying to put the compound into darkness.
Fargo ducked down and moved to yet another large rock, putting another shell in the carbine as he went.
“Offer still stands!” he shouted, this time at the rocks and steep hillside to his left.
A good two dozen miners poured out of the mine entrance and headed down the trail at a fast run. More poured out of the bunkhouse.
“Stop!” one of the men in the courtyard shouted at them and raised his gun. The idiot was ready to fire on his own men. Fargo shook his head at the stupidity of it.
Fargo put a bullet through the edge of the wall the man was hiding against and into the man’s gut before he had a chance to shoot at any of the fleeing miners.
The shot made the miners run faster and within twenty seconds, they had all poured into the stable and out of sight.
Fargo again moved to a different firing position as he pushed another shell into the chamber, staying silent and low in the dark. No one below wanted to risk a blind shot up into the rocks for fear of drawing his fire. He had them pinned down and scared and without a leader. Still, the men down there were professionals, and Fargo decided that being safe and continuing to move was the best plan.
A few minutes of silence in the standoff before suddenly the farside stable doors burst open and the fleeing miners headed down the road, most of them in a large wagon, a few on horseback riding ahead and carrying lanterns.
It seemed that Brant had lost a large part of his fighting force. But Fargo figured there were still a good twenty to thirty professional guns left down there, some pinned down in the courtyard, some in the buildings. If he had to go through all of them to get to Henry Brant, he would.
He turned and shouted into the rocks next to him.
“Time’s up on the offer.”
Two of the guards still holding stations in the rocks above the compound opened up on his position, bouncing lead off the rocks around him.
Fargo slid back into cover. Crouching, he ran along the rocks, moving silently to yet another area of cover, this one farther up on the hill so that he had a better angle on the guards in the rocks.
He didn’t dare end up trapped on this hillside in the light, not with so many professional guns facing him. So he was forced to move back up and over the ridge while it was still dark enough for cover.
As the sun finally showed a little light in the sky, a signal that the day would be clear and again hot, Fargo walked between two of the miners guarding Sharon’s Dream and down toward the big white building where Jim and Walt and Hank were waiting on the porch holding carbines on their laps.
All three stood as he approached.
“Sounds like you were busy,” Jim said, smiling.
Hank said, “And our guards above the entrance to Brant’s mine told us that a large group of miners, in fact most of them who worked for Brant, beat a hasty retreat headed for Sacramento about one in the morning.”
“There’s still a lot of professional guns over there,” Fargo said, stepping up onto the porch. “I need to get back up on the hill and watch what’s going on, but I thought I’d come first for a little breakfast before it got too light.”
“We figured you might,” Walt said. “Got the cooks up early, as if any of us could sleep with the gunfire going on.”
Fargo nodded. “At least for the moment, they’re not coming this way. Now I have to stop them from ever coming this way.”
“And how do you plan on doing that?” Hank asked as they all went inside.
“By cutting off the head of the snake,” Fargo said. He smiled at Hank. “Haven’t you been listening?”
10
By the time the sun was just starting to light up the tallest p
eaks of the mountains, Fargo, with Jim at his side, was back high on the ridgeline with the spyglass, watching the Brant compound. The food and the morning light had cleared some of the tiredness that had started to set in his bones during the last few hours of his attack on the compound. He knew he could go a couple of days without sleep. He had done so in the past, but he didn’t like it, and he worried about what no sleep did to his judgment and speed. He wanted to get this finished today. One way or another.
The bodies still lay where he had shot them, but as the light filled the sky, the men were starting to move around in the compound a little.
“Fargo, I’m impressed,” Jim said, staring through the eyepiece. “You really cut their numbers down. So, what do you think their next play is?” He handed Fargo the spyglass.
A number of men were now starting to pull the bodies around behind the stable and toward the small mine cemetery.
“We’ve cut off his plan on taking over the mine through his mine,” Fargo said. “And he doesn’t have enough men to stage a direct attack anymore. So he needs to hire more, which is what I think he will do.”
“And we’re not going to allow him to go do that, are we?” Jim asked, laughing.
“No, we’re not,” Fargo said.
Below, he saw the familiar figure of Kip moving around the yard, barking orders. That kid was going to die and die ugly. Fargo was going to make sure of that. No one tricked him like Kip had done and got away with it.
Fargo handed Jim the spyglass and said, “Look who showed his ugly face.”
Jim stared for a moment, then shook his head and handed the glass back to Fargo. “The kid had us all fooled.”
Fargo said nothing. His impulse was to ride into the compound and kill Brant and Kip. But it was better to keep his rage under control.
A few minutes later, Brant came out on the porch of the big house followed by his daughter. He had a bandage on one side of his forehead that made Fargo smile. He hadn’t killed the man in the window last night, but he had clearly got him with the glass.
Sarah Brant looked like she was back to normal. She seemed to have no intention of leaving anytime soon. She was talking to her father and watching the activity in the courtyard.
Fargo watched as Kip moved over to them and said something, and both Brant and his daughter laughed.
After twenty minutes, Brant and his daughter turned and went back into the house arm in arm. Kip kept the men working, cleaning up the area, posting new guards, moving the bodies.
No one made a motion to leave, and no one new came up the road.
After two hours of watching as the sun warmed the air around them, Fargo sat up from his position flat on a rock surface and shook his head. “They’re waiting for something.”
“That’s my sense as well,” Jim said. “But for what?”
“I don’t know,” Fargo said. And that bothered him something awful. Again, Brant seemed to be a step ahead of him.
What were they waiting for?
Henry Brant was ruthless and only after the ore. He didn’t care about people or who died for him or against him. Only the gold mattered. And now he needed more men to get to the gold.
So somehow, he already had more men coming.
But he also needed something to take care of Fargo, to take him out of the picture in one fashion or another.
The beautiful image of Anne lying there naked in that bathtub snapped into his mind and his stomach twisted into a tight knot. Suddenly, he had an urgent need to know if Anne was all right.
He jumped to his feet. “Keep as many eyes as possible on that compound and the road leading into it,” he said to Jim. “Don’t start a fight unless you have to until I get back.”
Jim stood. “What’s happening? Where are you going?”
Fargo stared one last time down at the Brant compound. “I think I know what they’re waiting for and I need to make sure both things don’t get here.”
With that, he turned and headed off down the hill at a steady run, trying to keep his fear in check, trying to push the image of Anne tied up and beaten from his mind. After what he had done to Sarah Brant, he couldn’t imagine what those two would do with Anne if they got her inside that building down there.
“When will you be back?” Jim shouted after him.
“As soon as I can,” Fargo shouted back.
As soon as he made sure Anne was safe. But his gut told him that he was already too late.
He rode the Ovaro hard and fast down the Placerville road, keeping his head low as he slashed past wagons and other riders.
In record time, he reached the telegraph office in Sacramento and had them wire an urgent message to Anne at her hotel in San Francisco. He paid extra to have the message run to her and a response brought back as quickly as possible.
While he waited, he headed for Marshal Davis’s office. He usually liked to go it alone and didn’t often feel he needed help, but right now he did. If Anne had been taken, he didn’t care how many people helped him get her back. All that was important was that she was safe.
“Fargo,” Marshal Davis said, smiling as Fargo entered the office. “Glad to see you’re still alive and kicking.”
“I do my best,” Fargo said.
“I hear it’s a real hornet’s nest up there right now. Even the Placerville sheriff is staying out of the way.”
“It might get worse before it gets better if I can’t get something stopped here real quick.”
He explained to the marshal everything that had happened so far, then told him the two reasons why he was in town.
“You think they’ll go after her?” Marshal Davis asked.
“I’m getting to know how Henry Brant thinks. He needs me out of the way to get the Sharon’s Dream gold. And people around Placerville have seen me with Anne, so he knows she means something to me. He’ll go after that leverage on me. That’s why I had her leave town in the first place, but my guess is he had her followed, or had someone track her down.”
“Makes sense,” the marshal said, grabbing his hat and heading for the door. “Let’s go see if you have a telegram back yet.”
As they entered the office, the telegram came in, and it was exactly what Fargo had feared the most. Anne had checked out suddenly this morning.
Fargo stared at the telegram, trying to control the twisting dread in his stomach, then handed the slip of paper to the marshal.
“She wouldn’t do that,” Fargo said.
The marshal nodded, then glanced at the clock on the wall. “First train in from San Francisco is in twenty minutes. That would be the quickest way to bring her in. Otherwise it would take a good day of riding around the bay. Let me round up some deputies and we’ll meet it. They won’t suspect we’re coming.”
Fargo nodded his thanks. “You might want to have as many men as you can get. Brant has reinforcements coming in as well. Gunhands. My guess is many of them are wanted men. They all might be coming in together.”
“Meet you at the train station,” Marshal Davis said and headed out the door at a fast trot.
Fargo stared for a moment longer at the telegram, then flipped it back on the counter.
Cain dead, his son dead, now Anne taken. How much worse could this get?
He decided he didn’t want an answer to that question.
11
He found a place against the stone wall of the train station, right in the middle, his back to a door into a luggage area. The door had a window in it head-high for people to see in or out as they went through.
The train was starting to pull in as the marshal arrived, spreading out his men along the platform. There were enough other people on the platform that the marshal’s men blended in pretty well.
Fargo stepped back inside the door to the luggage area. No point in taking a chance that someone on the train would recognize him before they got off. His only chance against professional gunhands with this many people around was to catch them by surprise.
Th
at was also the only way to make sure Anne got away safely.
Steam from the locomotive flooded the platform as it passed, its wheels grinding as it braked slowly to a stop.
Fargo noticed that the marshal also had men moving along the tracks to the area where the baggage and animal cars would stop, moving casually as if nothing was wrong. Fargo was impressed. In a very short time he had talked to his deputies and had them trained for the situation. The marshal was even more competent than Fargo had thought.
Fargo stared through the tiny door window at the windows of the first passenger car as it eased slowly past him.
No Anne. More than likely she would be in one of the cars surrounded by five or six men.
The five passenger cars slowly ground to a very noisy halt in front of Fargo, the middle one not more than twenty paces from him through the growing crowd.
So far, he hadn’t seen Anne in any of the first three cars.
He stepped from the door as the people inside the cars stood and started to get off. He kept his hat pulled down and his shoulders hunched to avoid being recognized.
It was from the fourth car that a man carrying a leather rifle pouch got off and looked around, scanning the crowd before stepping to the platform.
Mick Rule.
Fargo knew that face very well. He had hoped to never have a run-in with the man. He was fast and deadly with a gun, almost as deadly as Fargo was.
Rule was also wanted in three states. He had robbed banks, killed guards and lawmen, and was known to work with a dozen other men. It was no wonder Henry Brant had been waiting. It was no wonder Sarah Brant hadn’t left as Fargo had told her to do. With Rule and his men headed their way, they could control not only Sharon’s Dream, but more than likely a lot of Placerville.
Two more men got off behind Rule, followed by Anne. Fargo’s jaw clenched as he saw how she was being shoved around.
The marshal and his men had seen Rule as well, but were still holding their positions, hoping to let some of the crowd thin.
Fargo didn’t much care about the crowd.