Nevada Vipers' Nest

by Jon Sharpe

  “Well, college trained or no, he could still be full of sheep dip.”

  “I s’pose. But, Skye, these young mining engineers today are pretty sharp.”

  “That’s true,” Fargo conceded. “I met a couple of them up on the Comstock, and they know their oats. But if he knows about a fortune in silver, why didn’t he mine it?”

  “On account he ran out of money and couldn’t find any backers. But he has—well, had—him a family out in Oregon and had to get home and take care of them. A while back he sent a letter to the Territorial Enterprise, a newspaper up in Virginia City. He swore he could find that silver if somebody would stake him.”

  “So you boys at Rough and Ready pooled your money and sent for him?”

  “That we did. And now somebody has slaughtered him and his family.”

  Fargo mulled all of this for a minute.

  “Duffy,” he said, “can you think of any reason why Mike Scully and his toad-eaters would have wiped out Hightower and his family?”

  “You think he did?”

  “Well, I did think that, yeah. But it doesn’t make sense if Hightower was the key to the mint.”

  “No, it don’t,” Duffy agreed. “But far as asking me if Scully is low enough to do it, hell yes. He’s the main reason I decided to light a shuck to the Sierra. Him and the rest of the sashes has always been pricks. ’Bout a month ago, though, he started swaggerin’ around and actin’ all biggity, like he owned the whole damn camp.”

  “A month ago,” Fargo repeated. “Was that after you fellas wrote to Hightower?”

  “Yep.”

  “Interesting,” Fargo said.

  “Look, Duffy,” Sitch cut in, “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you did for me and Fargo. And you’ve got the right idea—get the hell out of here before Scully and his minions do the hurt dance on you. But, Fargo, you’re just looking for your own grave if you hang around here. Why not just return to your express rider job and leave this thing alone?”

  “Mind your own beeswax,” Fargo snapped. “That fine-looking sorrel you’re riding—you boosted it, didn’t you?”

  “From a livery in Virginia City,” Sitch admitted. “But, Christ, I had four pissed-off gamblers looking to buck me out in smoke.”

  “Not only a card cheat but a damn horse thief. And I should take advice from a scut like you? Besides, you’re forgetting something. Scully and his maggots are going to spread the word far and wide that the two of us murdered women and children. Sure, they ain’t the law and it won’t have any official weight. But this is the frontier, full of hotheads and hair-trigger idiots who thrive on Dame Rumor. Either we clear our names or we live in caves the rest of our born days.”

  Even in the grainy darkness, Fargo saw McDougall’s shoulders slump. He plopped down on a log. “Hell, I didn’t think of that. All right, deal me in, but you’re calling the shots.”

  “I always call the shots,” Fargo assured him, “and I’m damned if I’m dealing you in. You’d be as useful to me as tits on a boar hog.”

  Fargo turned to Duffy again. “Duffy, there’s a woman who escaped the attack. Could Scully have known about her before that family was slaughtered?”

  “He could have, sure, if Hightower mentioned her in his letter.”

  “You didn’t read the letter?”

  “I can’t read, Skye, but it wouldn’t a mattered nohow on account Scully got the letter in Carson City and didn’t read it to nobody. He just told us the Hightower family was on their way out. We had to build a cabin for the bunch of them, so maybe Clement said who was coming.”

  Fargo nodded. At first he’d been damned near convinced Scully and his pack of rabid curs perpetrated that massacre. But based on everything Duffy had told him, it just didn’t make sense.

  “I don’t know who that woman is,” Fargo mused aloud, “but if she’s alive, I have to locate her. She could bust this deal wide open. Well, we best turn in.”

  “Damn straight,” Duffy said. “Tomorrow at first light I’m gonna light out full bore for the Sierra.”

  Fargo took some comfort in the proximity of the rugged Sierra Nevada. In places it rose to an altitude of twelve thousand feet, and Fargo knew that range so well he could elude any pursuers there if need be. But hiding among snowy peaks wouldn’t clear his name or answer the perplexing questions gnawing at him.

  “Where we gonna sleep?” McDougall complained.

  Duffy was astounded. “Where? Ain’t you never slept under the stars before?”

  “Not outside. I had a nice comfortable pallet in the back of Dr. Geary’s medicine wagon.”

  It wasn’t too dark for Duffy and Fargo to exchange a quick glance.

  “Tell you what,” Fargo said, “we’ll make you a Tucson bed.”

  McDougall’s tone grew more hopeful. “Thanks! What’s a Tucson bed?”

  “You lay on your belly,” Duffy explained, “and cover up with your back.”

  Fargo snorted and McDougall cursed. “That’s about as funny as a rubber crutch,” he groused.

  It was definitely one of that day’s lighter moments. But as Fargo softened up bed ground with his knife, he couldn’t shake two images painted on the backs of his eyelids: one was of four slaughtered innocents lying in the dirt, shot full of holes.

  The other was of a beautiful, ashen-faced, blood-spattered woman racing through the boulders, so frightened that she promised to kill herself if he tried to approach her.

  4

  The next morning, with the day’s new sun still a pink blush on the eastern horizon, Fargo dug a fire pit.

  “The tree cover is good,” he told the other two men, “and they won’t spot the smoke. I’m not letting you hit the trail, Duffy, without some hot chuck in your belly.”

  Fortunately the red sashes hadn’t gotten around to emptying his saddlebags. Fargo pulled out his blue enameled coffeepot and filled it with water from a goatskin water bag kept lashed to his saddle horn. He tossed a handful of coffee beans in it to boil. Then he mixed cornmeal with water and formed little balls with it, tossing them onto the hot ashes to bake into corn dodgers.

  “Where you headed to in the Sierra?” he asked Duffy.

  “Place called Hat Creek in Modoc County. Most of the easy color has played out in California, and the hard-rock operations has moved in, running the gravel-pan sourdoughs out. But my cousin Jed says there’s still some good nuggets in the stream beds thereabouts.”

  “You got any money?” Fargo asked him.

  “Only about twelve dollars in Spanish coins, but you’re welcome to it—”

  “I don’t want your money, you dunderhead.” Fargo cut him off. “You’ll need a better stake than that. Scully and his puke pails emptied my pockets, but they didn’t get my secret stash.”

  Fargo dug into the sack of cornmeal and pulled out two double eagle gold shiners.

  “Here’s forty dollars,” he said. “Prices will be high in a gold camp, but this might tide you until you pan some high assay. Sitch, pony up.”

  “Hell, Fargo, they emptied my pockets too, and—”

  “Don’t hand me that shit. I never met a grifter yet who didn’t have money in his boots. Give. This man saved your life.”

  McDougall wore a pair of buffalo-skin boots with the hair inside. With considerable effort he pried one off and produced two half eagles. “Ten dollars is all I got, my hand to God. But you’re welcome to it, Duffy.”

  “Those boots don’t fit you very good,” Fargo remarked. “Did you kill the man you stole them from?”

  “That’s a libel on me.” Sitch bristled. “I’ve never killed a man in my life. I won them in a crap game in Cheyenne.”

  “With loaded dice, anh?”

  Sitch struggled to get the boot back on. “I don’t see no halo on you, Fargo.”

  “Oh, I’ve still g
ot my quota of original sin,” the Trailsman admitted. He looked at Duffy again.

  “There’s a sheriff in Carson City, right? You know anything about him?” Fargo asked.

  “His name is Cyrus Vance, and believe it or not he’s not your usual bribes-or-bullets lawman. He’s middling honest. But he couldn’t solve a one-piece puzzle. He’s gettin’ long in the tooth now, and mainly he just jugs drunks and naps in his own jail cell. The magistrate is crooked as cat shit, though. Any offense can be settled out of court for the right amount. If you don’t pony up the amount he demands, you’re found guilty.”

  “This Sheriff Vance—how’s he feel about Scully and the red sashes?”

  “He wouldn’t piss in their ears if their brains was on fire. They bullyrag him every time they get to town, but Vance ain’t got no deputies so there ain’t squat he can do about it. Matter fact, most folks in town can’t stomach them.”

  “Interesting,” Fargo said, tugging at his short chin whiskers.

  “You’re not thinking about going into Carson City, are you?” Sitch asked. “Hell, you’d be a sitting duck.”

  “Carson City is where I sent the woman to, and she’s the only witness to what happened night before last. And maybe she can answer a few more questions that are biting at me.”

  “It was dark, Fargo. It’s likely she didn’t see much.”

  “Dark with a full moon. Besides, there’s a good chance she heard something.”

  “That rings right,” Duffy agreed, picking his teeth with a twig. “But the sashes will likely try to get the town stirred up agin you by claiming you killed women and kids. Happens that don’t work, they’ll give you a lead bath.”

  “Far as stirring the town up against me, you just said the boardwalkers can’t stomach them. They don’t have a shred of proof, just their say-so. As to killing me, even in the territories it’s a serious business to kill a deputy sheriff.”

  Sitch choked and spat out a mouthful of coffee. Duffy’s shoulders began to shake as he laughed silently. “You, a deputy sheriff? Fargo, you’re planning to stir up the shit agin, ain’tcha?”

  Fargo assumed a look of cherubic innocence. “With me it’s live and let live—until it’s time to kill or be killed. I’m a lovable cuss. And speaking of lovable—Carson City is where the females are. I’m starting to get amorous thoughts when I spot a knothole.”

  “I do wish you luck, Skye,” Duffy said, tossing out the dregs of Fargo’s river-mud coffee. “But I best skedaddle. That bunch back at camp might soon have their horses rounded up. You boys best light a shuck, too—this place ain’t that far from Rough and Ready.”

  “I doubt if those cockroaches could track a buffalo herd through a mud wallow,” Fargo said. “Look, Duffy, after what Scully and his bootlicks did to me yesterday, I got my mind set on either killing them or running them off. Might be you could hang around these parts a bit, join up again with your pards at the camp.”

  Duffy shook his head, looking suddenly embarrassed. “See, Skye, it ain’t just Scully and them that’s put jackrabbits in my socks. There’s . . . things happening in Carson Valley. Things that give me the fantods.”

  Fargo’s brow wrinkled in puzzlement. “The hell you talking about, old son?”

  “You heard about what happened in this valley back in fifty-eight, right? How Paiutes wiped out a preacher and a bunch of church missionaries bound from the Humboldt River to Old Sac?”

  Fargo nodded. “Sure. It started that half-assed legend about how this is now the ‘Valley of Death’ for any white intruders. Some claptrap about how there’s ‘wandering dead’ going around sucking the blood of the living in hopes they can come back to life. But, Duffy, you don’t believe that foolishness?”

  “I didn’t when I come here, Skye. But now . . . I ain’t so sure. I ain’t the first to scat, neither. Plenty of other miners has pulled up stakes. But I ain’t talking no more about it—it’s bad cess.”

  Fargo knew that Duffy was stubborn as a rented mule, and he didn’t try to press the matter. But it piqued his curiosity—clearly the topic had unstrung Duffy’s nerves, and Fargo didn’t know him to be a superstitious man.

  Duffy tacked his horse. “I thank both you gents for the stake. Mayhap we’ll meet down the trail somewheres.”

  “How ’bout a shot of bust-head for the road?” Sitch suggested, pulling a stirrup cup and a flask from a saddle pocket.

  The three men shared a drink, and Duffy pointed his bridle west toward the towering ermine-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada.

  “So he believes this is a haunted valley,” Sitch remarked. “He doesn’t strike me as the type who goes in for spirit knockings and such.”

  “Hard to know about a man when it comes to such things,” Fargo said, his crop-bearded face thoughtful. “A man can have enough guts to fill a smokehouse when it comes to facing real danger, but then shrivel up like fried bacon when he hears about ghosts and such. Well, this is where we part ways, Sitch. Where you headed?”

  “I was hoping you’d change your mind about me siding you for a time.”

  “No soap. It’s nothing personal—you’re a likable enough cuss. But you got nothing but green on your antlers and you’d be a liability to me what with the job I’ve got ahead of me.”

  “I can be more useful than you might think, Fargo. I’m a master pickpocket, and I could sell a double bed to the Pope,” he boasted. “Never underrate a good grifter.”

  “I don’t have too many meetings with the Pope,” Fargo barbed as he tossed the blanket and pad on the Ovaro. “I suggest you quit while you’re behind.”

  “I admit I’m no frontiersman like you, but I’m tougher than you give me credit for. I grew up an orphan in Manhattan’s notorious Five Points area and ran with the gang called the Plug-uglies.”

  “An orphan, huh?” Fargo said as he tossed on his saddle and tightened the girth. “That’s a tough break,” he added, knowing something about that himself. “But I don’t need a grifter. You cheat at cards and you steal horses—those are both killing offenses out west. A man can’t trust your word or your actions.”

  “I admit that neither gospel nor gunpowder will put me on the straight and narrow. I refuse to live as a common wage slave—why, most men bust their humps for twelve hours a day just to earn a measly dollar. But I never rook widows, old folks or the poor—or any man I call my friend. And I call you a friend.”

  “No need to slop over,” Fargo shot back sarcastically.

  “All right—but look here, Fargo,” McDougall hastened to add, opening a saddle pocket. “A man like me who’s often on the dodge has to be mighty resourceful.”

  He pulled out an impressive array of fake beards and mustaches with a bottle of spirit gum to affix them, spectacles with clear glass, even a priest’s collar.

  “I’m a disguise artist, too. In two minutes I can change my appearance so you wouldn’t even recognize me, even with this homely face of mine. Think how handy that could be if you needed a man to do some eavesdropping for you.”

  “Look,” Fargo said impatiently, “I’m not a Pinkerton man. And I got no use for a damn pickpocket or cardsharp or disguise artist. Mostly I’m a one-man outfit. If a man has some skills I might use, maybe he’ll do to take along. What I don’t need is a boardwalker who’d starve and go naked without stores.”

  “Skills, huh?” Sitch repeated, reaching into the other saddle pocket. He pulled out the finest whip Fargo had ever seen. The hickory handle was inlaid with ivory and the buckskin lash dyed gold.

  “That’s an impressive whip,” Fargo said, pulling a thin black Mexican cigar from his shirt pocket.

  “Had it custom made for me in Saint Louis before I joined the traveling medicine show.”

  Fargo, still admiring the whip, pulled a lucifer match from his possibles bag. Before he could scratch it to life with a thumbnail, McDougall’s whip cr
acked and the match burst into flame.

  “Damn,” Fargo said, astonished at such fine-tuned accuracy. “I guess you are a trick-whip expert.”

  But the demonstration wasn’t over yet. The whip cracked again and Fargo’s dusty white hat flew straight up off his head. With rapid, successive cracks, Sitch kept the hat aloft like a hovering hummingbird for at least ten seconds. To Fargo’s utter amazement, Sitch dropped the hat back onto Fargo’s head perfectly.

  “Damn and double damn!” Fargo said in an amazed tone.

  “Not all my tricks are just for show,” Sitch assured him. Again the whip cracked, and Fargo’s Colt was lifted from his holster and dropped on the ground about ten feet away. “Would you call that a useful skill?” he demanded.

  “Sure as little green apples,” Fargo admitted, retrieving his six-gun. “I’ve never seen any man handier with a whip. But I watched you shooting that harmonica pistol last night, and you were bucking that gun like a frightened schoolchild. And you’ve got a round ass in the saddle. You belong back in the land of steady habits working sideshows.”

  “And I suppose you were never green yourself, huh? Nobody ever taught you a thing about frontier survival, right? You just came out of the womb ready to kick ass and take names?”

  McDougall’s tone had turned from wheedling to bitterness. For a moment Fargo thought about the legendary mountain man Corey Webster, who had saved young Fargo’s life in the days when the man who eventually became known as the Trailsman was still too green to survive a bad winter storm in the Rockies.

  “I learned from my betters,” Fargo conceded.

  “Fargo, I’ll tell you the straight truth—I’m scared. I was stupid and I had to flee from Virginia City and the medicine show. Now I’m on my own in godforsaken country, and I don’t even know how to locate the North Star or hunt or read a trail. Hell, yesterday I didn’t even have enough sense to notice that those hoofprints around that burning wagon were made by iron-shod horses. But I’m a damn quick study. If I could just side you for a bit, watch you and learn . . . I’m just trying to stay alive, that’s all.”