Fargo 18

by John Benteen

  Then they were left behind. The airplane banked again, and Fargo almost bit the cigar in two. Suddenly, as if a great, unseen hand had smashed it, the Jenny shot straight up, with a flap and groan of stressed wings, a keening of wires and struts. Its whole body shook, and then, with a suddenness equally heart jarring, it dropped straight downward, as if about to pancake into the earth. Fargo’s stomach came into his throat.

  But the airplane’s fall was arrested, and it sped onward. Ahead loomed sawtoothed peaks. Gaston put the plane between a pair of them, banked again, started to lose altitude. He tapped on the windshield of Fargo’s cockpit, pointed with a gloved hand. Looking down, Fargo saw it below.

  The broad bench jutted out from the mountainside like an enormous shelf. The faint scar of road leading up to it was washed away in some places, obliterated under tons of rubble in others. No wonder it could no longer be traveled by car.

  On the back of the bench were a few scattered buildings—superintendent’s house, stables and warehouse, bunkhouses. The dry air had preserved them all intact for years. Above them, on the mountain’s flank, a black hole yawned, the scaffolding of tipple and windlass near it, a slide of tailings nearby. And somewhere in that complex, Fargo thought, with a surge of excitement, was a half million dollars in big bills! Fair game for anyone who could take it.

  Now the airplane was nosing lower. The bench rushed up at what seemed to Fargo dismaying speed. He could see ruts and washes crossing it, cactus, clumps of brush, piles of rock. None of that seemed to dismay Bill Gaston. He never hesitated. Briefly, Fargo closed his eyes. There was, anyhow, nothing he could do. Then, with a jolting bump, the airplane touched down.

  It raced along the bench, bouncing and lurching. Deftly, Gaston steered it among the obstacles, clearing all of them. After seconds that seemed years, it finally halted, motor purring. Gaston cut the engine, and the silence after its roar and the rush of wind seemed deafening. He and Fargo unlatched their seatbelts and climbed out. The first thing Fargo did when his feet touched solid ground was to strip off the leather helmet and goggles and hand them to Gaston and clamp the battered Rough Riders hat firmly on his head.

  “Well, you’re here,” Gaston said.

  “Yeah, and much obliged.”

  “Easy trip. Only one rough updraft over those mountains. I guess you saw the riders.”

  “I saw them,” Fargo said.

  Gaston’s face was serious. “Neal. You want me to stick around? I don’t know what your fuss is with these people, but I can use a gun.”

  Fargo pointed to the plane. “You get that thing out of here. I don’t want ’em to see it when they come up. And remember our deal. You come back tomorrow at four in the afternoon. If I’m in view, signaling, you land and pick me up. If I’m not, you fly on and—”

  “And—?” Gaston asked.

  “And I’ll be dead,” Fargo said. “Thanks for the ride, Bill. Now get the hell out of here.”

  He waited impatiently while Gaston refueled with a can of gasoline that had ridden with him in the pilot’s compartment, tinkered with the engine. Then he swung the propeller again and it caught immediately. The airplane blew a sandstorm of dust as it lifted off the bench, banked, circled, and then dwindled to a dot over the mountains, like a distant hawk.

  Fargo let out a long breath. Now he was alone at the deserted mine. And he had time to look around, size up the terrain—and plot his ambush.

  Like some great desert wolf, he loped along the edge of the bench, and soon he was satisfied. There was only one place they could come up—the scrape that was all that remained of the old road. It would have been an easy matter to have lain up in the rocks above it and to blow all three men from their saddles as they came over the bench’s rim. But there were two things wrong with that. Any miss or miscalculation would give them time to use Lola as a shield or kill her—and Lola was all-important … the only, one who could tell him where the money was. The second thing was that he did not want to shoot Rex Harrod from ambush. He had a very personal score to settle with that hulking bastard, and—

  Again he felt the itching in his big fists. So what he had to plan was a way to take out Flash Murphy and the knife-man and keep Lola safe and leave Harrod to meet him face to face, hand to hand. Now that, he thought, was not entirely professional, with so much money riding on the outcome of all this, but—sometimes a man had to bend his principles a little.

  It was still early morning. He figured he had several hours until they got here; surely they would not arrive before three in the afternoon. In the intervening time, he was busy.

  First, with a brush broom, he erased all sign of the airplane’s landing. Then he made a circuit, a search, of every building. It was not likely anyone else was here, but you never could tell. The country swarmed with desert-rats and prospectors, wandering aimlessly, always looking for the big strike that would make them rich for life. Sure enough, behind the superintendent’s house he found the droppings of a burro and a fire had been built not too long before in the still usable fireplace. An empty coffee can with the label peeled off was the only other sign of visitation, but there was no doubt that, several weeks before, some rock rat had worked his way up here, nosed around, departed. Otherwise, save for coyote tracks, there was no sign of other visitors.

  Fargo ate dried beef, beans, buried the can, drank tepid water, checked his weapons. He wondered where Lola had hidden the cash—in the shaft or somewhere else? Wherever, it would have been well hidden: she was fox-shrewd and she would take no chances with a half million. Fargo’s mouth quirked. The desert rat had probably been closer to a fortune than he ever would be again, and he would never know it.

  After inspecting the whole layout, his plans came clear in his mind. There were no corrals here, but there were stables for the mine mules, and they were still intact. One of the stalls, with half a board gone, would make a fine hiding place. The gap afforded him a view of the road leading up over the bench’s rim, but, more than that, here he would have a chance to put either Flash or the knife-man out of action, silently.

  Coolly, professionally, he gambled on his ability to anticipate the actions of the enemy. Flash had moaned about the prospect of the long ride; he and Jimmy-the-Blade were obviously city men. Whatever Harrod was, he’d been in prison, away from a saddle, for a long time. They would all arrive beat out and stiff.

  And no matter how greedy they were for treasure, they would have to put up the horses first. The horses were their salvation, the only way to get out of here. Harrod would not do it himself: either Flash or Jimmy would be assigned to that.

  Fargo fingered the Batangas knife in its sheath.

  Whoever brought the horses in to this dim, rickety barn, which still smelled of the fragrance of dried hay, would never leave alive, nor have a chance to make an outcry. And with one down, the odds were cut by a third.

  In the stall he waited, smoked, limbered up with the knife. He was sore and slow from all he’d been through, and his left arm was nearly wooden once again. But he had surprise on his side, and that fierce, liquor-strong hatred bubbling in his veins. That should be enough.

  It was hot here and grew hotter as the blazing sun spilled westward down the sky. His railroad watch was waterproof and still ran after immersion in the well: when it had ticked off three-thirty, Fargo put out the last cigar, took station at the gap in the stable wall and waited. During the half hour that passed after that, he could have been something carved from wood, for all his immobile patience. Meanwhile, his mind was busy, building a kind of fantasy.

  A half million dollars. Add that to the nearly hundred thousand already in the bank, and it was a fortune. Enough to realize a dream he’d always had.

  There was, in Central America, a small republic waiting like a ripe fruit to be picked by some enterprising filibuster. Fargo’s eyes had been on it for a long time. Its so-called Presidente was nothing but a dictator, and he had a palace full of treasure stolen from the poor. There were rich silver m
ines and lush plantations—rubber and banana. The Army was a joke, the populace alienated from the government, and poor and ignorant. With more than a half million dollars, a man like Fargo could hire his own army, infiltrate, and then pull a coup, take over. He could make the country his, become its presidente, have free access to its treasure vaults, its women—the idea amused him. President Fargo. And yet with that kind of money, it was easily achievable. And, by God, they would be better off under him than under their present ruler. Not that he would stay long. But it would be something new and ...

  He tensed. Sound carried a long way in the hush at these heights. And now he heard it, the clop of hoofbeats, the murmur of voices. Fargo’s thumb ran over the edge of the open Batangas knife in his palm. They were coming.

  Crouched there, concealed, he saw them crest the bench’s rim, Lola in the lead. She looked exhausted, but less so than the three men behind her. Unused to riding, they swayed in their saddles, stood in their stirrups to ease the strain on tender thighs and rumps. Then they were, all four of them, over the bench. Reining in, they all dismounted, wearily, stiffly, and Fargo heard their voices clearly.

  “This is it?” Harrod asked.

  “This is it,” Lola said tonelessly.

  “Where’s the money?”

  “It’s in the shaft, off in a stope, hidden in a certain place ...”

  “How do we get there?”

  “We climb up there—” She pointed to the shaft opening above. “And keep on climbing for a while and then go down. It’s a hard trip. I picked a place to hide the money where nobody just passing through would ever find it. Prospectors and rock rats are always nosing around deserted mines.”

  “Climb,” Jimmy-the-Blade groaned. “Hell, I can hardly walk.”

  “All right,” Harrod said. “We’ll rest a few minutes. But not long. I want my hands on that money. Flash—you search these buildings. Jimmy, you put up the horses. That looks like the stable yonder. Unsaddle ’em and let their backs dry. We’ll need ’em when we ride out.”

  “Dammit, I ain’t no stable-boy.”

  Harrod turned on him. “You do what I say,” he said quietly,

  Jimmy-the-Blade’s lips peeled back from his teeth. For a moment he and Harrod stared at one another. But it was Jimmy who yielded. “Yeah,” he grunted, and took the reins of two horses in either hand and led them gimpily toward the stable.

  Fargo’s grin was like a wolf’s snarl as he seated the locked split hafts of the Batangas knife in his hard palm. He shrank back behind a stall partition.

  Jimmy-the-Blade led the horses inside and one by one tied them so he could unsaddle them before putting them in the stalls. “Damn,” he muttered aloud. “Sometimes I get so blasted mad ... Got half a mind to ... put six inches of steel in his gut. Flash, too. Then a whole half million. Ahhhh ...” He let out a gusty sigh. “Stand still, you blasted jughead!”

  Saddles dropped. “A half million,” Jimmy went on muttering. “And that slut, too. That’s a piece of stuff, she is. I’d—” He unstrapped the latigo on the fourth saddle, yanked it off, let the forty-pound weight fall to the ground. His back, now, was to Fargo. And Fargo stepped, soundlessly as a cat, from the stall, and he said, in a whisper:

  “Jimmy.”

  Jimmy-the-Blade whipped his tall, gangling form around. His eyes bulged, his long jaw dropped as he stared at the big, grinning man there a yard away with the ten inches of cold steel thrust forward. “You—” he husked.

  “Me,” Fargo said and came forward with sleek, fluid grace.

  That motion triggered something in the knife-fighter. Astonishment forgotten, Jimmy’s hand whipped to the back of his neck. It was a blur as it brought out a Bowie from a sheath hung there by a string around his neck, and his long arm was already out, parrying, as Fargo lunged in.

  Their blades clanged together. Jimmy laughed. “I don’t know where you come from, but, man, you’re a fool. Now you’ll die a second time.”

  Fargo didn’t answer. Their blades broke apart. Jimmy took the offensive, moved in, lithe and quick and altogether the best knife-fighter Fargo had ever faced, and suddenly he was the one parrying, as steel rang on steel. He backed and backed again and realized how stiff he was, how sore, and that he might have bitten off more than he could chew. Jimmy was his equal in every way. And Jimmy had pulled another knife now, from his boot, had one in either hand, came hard after Fargo. The second one, in his left hand, was a dagger, its eight-inch blade slim and deadly.

  “... cut you to ribbons,” Jimmy panted, and Fargo backed and fetched up against the end wall of the long barn and Jimmy came in, blade parrying to catch Fargo’s, the dagger ready for the killing thrust as soon as Fargo’s knife was locked.

  It seemed to Fargo that it took forever. His left hand and arm were so slow, so weak. Yet, in only half a second, the Batangas knife was transferred from right hand to left hand, and the left hand was moving out. There was a fraction of a second when Jimmy-the-Blade was caught off guard, astonished, and his eyes widened. His Bowie sliced the air where Fargo’s knife should have been, and then, recovering, he tried to parry with the slender poniard. The Batangas knife’s greater weight knocked it easily aside, and Fargo drove in and upward.

  Jimmy’s Bowie sliced his shirt as his own blade went home in Jimmy’s chest. Jimmy lurched forward, pinning himself on it, and raised his Bowie for another slash. Fargo dared not let him get in that reflexive cut; he turned the blade of the Batangas knife. It was deep in Jimmy’s heart and cut it in quarters as it revolved, and Jimmy died before his own knife found Fargo’s flesh. His hands dropped, his dead weight fell forward, and with all his strength Fargo pushed back and Jimmy came off the knife and landed motionless in the dirt of the aisle of the stables. Sniffing blood, the horses snorted.

  Panting, Fargo leaned against the wall, wiping his knife on a tattered bale of half-eaten hay that had been there for years. It had been close. With that hampered left arm, his ambidextrousness, double-handedness, had almost not been enough. But a miss was as good as a mile; and the edge that had saved his life before had worked again. And, Fargo thought, one away. But he had better quit grandstanding, not put too much reliance in that left. But Jimmy had died silently, without giving alarm. And that was what a knife was for.

  That left Flash Murphy, who was supposed to be a gunman, and Rex Harrod, who possibly could or could not use a gun or knife, but whose favorite weapons were his fists. Murphy must be the next to go, Fargo thought.

  But for the moment he must wait. Lola had to be in the clear before he made his next assault.

  He edged to the stable door. The knife was sheathed now, the shotgun slung. It was a risky weapon for what lay ahead: he did not want Lola to catch a buckshot slug. His hand hovered near the holstered .38.

  It had been standard cavalry issue until the Filipino Insurrection. But down on the huge southern island of Mindanao in the Philippines, the Moros, Mohammedans crazed with hate for the infidel and stoked up on drugs, had run amok, gone juramentado, as they said. And the .38 with standard ammunition would not stop them. You could put a whole cylinder into a crazed Moro and he would still chop you up with his parang. So the Army had gone to the .45 automatic, which packed more shock and stopping power. But the automatic was poorly balanced, inaccurate compared to the revolver, and prone to jam. Fargo had stuck with the .38, and the hollow points he used gave it the stopping power of any .45 and more.

  Five minutes passed, ten, fifteen. Still Fargo did not leave the stable. His mouth twisted. Harrod must be wondering now. What was Jimmy up to? Had he decided he wanted the woman and the whole half million for himself? Was he stalking them, circling them, ready to betray and kill them? There was no honor among thieves, and Fargo counted on that.

  Then, as he had known it must, a figure emerged from the Superintendent’s house. Short and stocky, it came toward the stables, and Fargo saw the sun glinting off the Colt in its hand. Harrod, impatient, had sent. Flash to see what was keeping Jimmy-the-
Blade.

  Fargo drew the Colt. Flash Murphy did not come straight for the stable. With instinctive caution, distrusting Jimmy, he circled. In a moment more, he would edge around the side of the building.

  Fargo let him do that. When Flash had disappeared around the stable’s flank, concealing him from view from the super’s house, Fargo stepped out, edged forward, turned the corner. Flash, stiffly after the long ride, was stalking down to look in through a crack at the stable’s other end.

  “Murphy,” Fargo said quietly.

  The man’s turn was incredibly fast and he was already raising the gun and lining it as he spun. Fargo pulled the trigger.

  Murphy’s gun never fired. The hollow-point caught him squarely in the chest, just to the left of the breastbone. It drove deep inside him and spread and blew, and Murphy never knew what hit him. He landed on his back in the dust, open eyes staring sightlessly at the hard blue sky above.

  Fargo pressed back against the stable wall. Harrod would have heard that. Not knowing that anybody else could be up here, he would assume that Murphy and Jimmy had fought it out. The gun, of course, would always win over the knife. And now, for all he knew, Flash Murphy would be coming to contend with him over possession of Lola, the key to the half million. Anyhow, he would take no chances. Harrod would know that he could not shoot it out gun to gun with Murphy. Something had to happen now, but Fargo was not sure what. He pressed back against the stable wall. What happened next depended on how much Harrod trusted Murphy.

  The call rang out, deep-voiced, across the bench. “Flash? What the hell? What’s going on out there?”

  Only silence answered.

  “Murphy, dammit—?”

  Fargo went into action, then. He bent low, scuttled from the stable toward a vacant bunkhouse, fetched up behind its wall.

  “Flash!” Harrod roared. He appeared from the doorway of the super’s house, and he had a gun in his hand and Lola pressed against him as a shield. “Murphy?”