by Jon Sharpe
The horse stared straight down the narrow defile, toward Prairie Dog and Valeria about fifty feet beyond. The dun twitched its ears and lifted its snout, working its nose.
Fargo’s back tightened. Would the horse sense the other two horses, smell the blood that Prairie Dog had lost?
Still pressing his back against the rock wall, Fargo looked up through the branches of the gnarled pinñon. The tall, light-skinned man sitting the saddle was wearing Fargo’s high-crowned, broad-brimmed hat, blond hair falling to his shoulders, his chest bare except for a thin, deerhide vest.
Fargo’s pistol belt and Colt .44 were wrapped around the man’s waist and loincloth. His moccasined foot was so close that Fargo could have swatted it with his rifle barrel.
If the Trailsman had been alone, he would have shot the mad lieutenant out of his saddle, but there were at least a half dozen braves sitting horses in the shadows behind Duke. Killing the self-proclaimed shaman would get not only Fargo’s wick trimmed, but Valeria’s and Prairie Dog’s, as well.
Duke suddenly threw his head back and howled like a moon-crazed coyote. Fargo started, slamming the back of his head against the rock wall. The high yammer, so loud that it raked the Trailsman’s eardrums, chased its own echo around the defile and set a couple of actual coyotes yammering in the northern distance.
The Indians behind the lieutenant grunted and muttered, amused. Duke’s horse turned suddenly toward Fargo. The steel dust’s eyes, meeting Fargo’s, widened suddenly, showing the whites. Fargo began swinging the rifle barrel down and tightening his finger around the trigger.
One of the Indians behind Duke spoke loudly and fast, something about hearing movement on the opposite ridge.
Duke drew back on the horse’s reins, clipping the horse’s startled whinny, turning the animal away from Fargo and around toward the warriors. Duke and the Indians spoke too quickly for Fargo to follow, and then hooves clomped, tapering off back down the ravine.
Fargo sighed, the painfully taut muscles in the back of his neck relaxing. He took a couple of deep breaths, then tramped back along the defile to where Valeria knelt beside Prairie Dog, who lay belly down, one of the girl’s blankets draped across his back. The man breathed steadily, deeply, moonlight reflected off his grizzled, bald pate and the single human tooth hanging from his right ear.
“Did they leave?” Valeria whispered.
Fargo nodded, staring down at Prairie Dog. “He’s out?”
“Passed out right after you left.”
Fargo turned to Prairie Dog’s blue roan and unbuckled the latigo strap under the horse’s belly. When he’d set the saddle, blanket, the scout’s saddlebags, and rifle scabbard in the brush, he turned to Valeria. “Sit tight. Try to keep him comfortable. Build a small fire only if it turns cold and he gets overly chilled.”
Holding the ends of the blanket across her chest, Valeria stared up the Trailsman, frowning. “What’re you going to do?”
“I’m going after Duke, and I’m going to kill the crazy son of a bitch if I can get a shot at him.”
A thought dawning on him, he reached down and pulled the old scout’s target rifle out of its scabbard. The Schuetzen was a better long-range shooter than Fargo’s Henry repeater, and a long shot might be the only shot the Trailsman would get.
Holding the fine German rifle in one hand, he pulled the Henry from his own scabbard with the other, leaned it against a rock. “I’ll leave that for Prairie Dog, though I hope like hell he doesn’t have to use it.”
He slid the Schuetzen into his own saddle boot, and glanced at Valeria. She was still staring up at him, her green eyes bright in the moonlight, her full lips parted slightly. Her breasts pushed against the trade blanket. Fargo moved to her, grabbed her brusquely, and kissed her.
“I’ll be back.”
“Be careful.”
He swung onto the pinto and turned the horse down the dark, narrow cavity, heading for the main ravine.
Fargo picked up the Indians’ trail on the northeast side of the gully. He also found the sign of a bobcat—a fresh track and warm scat—which was no doubt what the braves had heard and what had drawn them out of the ravine.
The Indians had continued northeast along the swelling prairie. Fargo followed slowly, keeping a close eye on their trail, which wasn’t easy to follow in the dark and on the relatively hard, grassy ground.
Strips of terrain overgrazed by bison helped to show the tracks of the eight unshod ponies, as did a recent prairie burn. But when daylight streaked the eastern horizon and burnished several long, low clouds, he still hadn’t overtaken the group but counted himself lucky not to have ridden into an ambush.
Lieutenant Duke and the braves obviously figured Fargo, Prairie Dog, and the girl were headed back toward Fort Clark and were hoping to cut them off. Rage at the invasion of their camp and at the killing of Iron Shirt must be driving them, because they sure as hell were tearing up the sod.
The sun had just separated from the eastern prairie and Fargo was climbing the long, low swell of a shale-capped dike, when the clap of gunfire broke the morning quiet. A prairie falcon, its wings coppered by the rising sun, swooped over Fargo’s head and continued north, shrieking.
Several more quick, angry shots rose from straight ahead—a good mile or more away—and Fargo swung out of the saddle, wincing when his charred soles touched the prickly earth. Ground-hitching the pinto, he jogged to the lip of the dike, which faced east, and dropped to his knees behind a lone hawthorn shrub.
His keen eyes scanned the murky morning shadows beyond him, but he didn’t spy movement until several more shots rang out, followed closely by a bizarre, victorious yowl—the crazed yammer of a madman.
Just beyond the next rise, similar to the one upon which Fargo lay, several shadows milled amongst the brush. A horse galloped straight south along the valley, buck-kicking and trailing its reins, its saddle hanging down over its ribs. Its terrified whinny rose shrilly, quickly absorbed by the vast, pale green sky.
Unable to see much from here, Fargo jogged back down the rise, mounted the Ovaro, and rode north, paralleling the crest of the long bluff before dropping over the bluff’s north shoulder and into the valley below.
The distant gunfire ceased, replaced by the beseeching screams of a man in deep physical pain.
A narrow ravine twisted through the valley, angling along the base of another bluff standing between Fargo and Duke and his howling victim.
Leaving the Ovaro ground-tied in a cottonwood swale, Fargo grabbed Prairie Dog’s Schuetzen from the saddle boot, wedged a second spare revolver—a .36 Colt—behind his cartridge belt, then dropped into the ravine. Keeping his head below the ravine’s steep but shallow rim, he followed the dry watercourse’s gravelly floor toward the rising screams punctuated by Duke’s demonic yelps and howls.
When the screams seemed to be coming from his right, Fargo stopped and edged a look over the ravine’s lip. Fifty yards away through the gray sage and bunchgrass tufts, several horseback braves milled, riding in broad circles around Lieutenant Duke who stood menacingly over a blue-clad man sprawled on the ground before him. Waving a bloody knife in the air, Duke howled. He bent down, his blond hair and the Trailsman’s own hat dropping below Fargo’s field of vision.
A man screamed shrilly—a long, hopeless cry of excruciating agony. “No!” he shouted. His voice cracked, and he sobbed, panting. “I don’t…I don’t know where they went, you crazy son of a bitch!”
The Trailsman leaned the Schuetzen against the side of the gully, the barrel extending far enough that Fargo could locate the gun easily if he needed it. Snakelike, he slithered up over the lip of the gully and crawled through the sage and bunchgrass, gritting his teeth, cocked .44 in his right hand.
“It’s too bad you don’t remember, you feeble white-eyes!” Lieutenant Duke shouted. “It is too bad you—nothing more than prairie vermin crawling out from your civilized white society—had the unfortunate gall to kill the bravest war chief who
ever walked the plains and stalked the buffalo!”
A blade whispered through flesh. The soldier howled shrilly. “I didn’t kill him, damn your hide. And you’re as white as I am, you crazy bastard!”
Lifting his head from a clump of bunchgrass, Fargo glanced around at the horseback riders milling around him—seven painted braves on snorting mounts. Their attention was on the man staked out on the ground before Lieutenant Duke, whose back faced Fargo from twenty feet away.
Fargo stretched the cocked Colt straight out before him through the coarse blond grass, squinting one eye as he stared down the barrel. He planted his sites on Duke’s back as the crazy lieutenant leaned down to swipe his blade once more across his staked, howling captive.
Suddenly, hooves thundered to Fargo’s right. He turned quickly. A brave was bearing down on him atop a brown and white pinto. The brave shrieked, wide brown eyes glistening in the sunlight as he leaned over his horse’s right shoulder, drawing a bow string taut, the nocked arrow aimed at Fargo.
Fargo jerked right, stumbling as he gained his feet. The arrow clattered off a rock to his left. He triggered the Colt then ducked as the horse galloped over him, wincing as a foreleg nipped his thigh.
When he glanced up again the brave was still somersaulting through the air to hit the ground on his head and shoulders, his neck snapping audibly to leave him quivering amidst the grama grass and pokeweed.
Behind the Trailsman rose a coyotelike yammer as the other six braves loosed war whoops and gigged their horses toward Fargo, two bearing down with rifles, two with bows, another with a war lance painted the gray and blue stripes of the Coyote Clan.
Straight ahead of Fargo, Lieutenant Duke cocked his arm and tossed his bloodstained knife. Fargo leaned sideways, and the blade sliced across his upper arm—a long but shallow cut from which blood glistened instantly.
The Trailsman snapped up the .44 and fired at Duke, flinching as the war lance whistled past him. The mad lieutenant howled and clapped a hand to his ear, blood seeping between his fingers. Fargo whipped his gun around and blew the brave who’d just thrown the war lance out of his saddle with two shots through his breastbone.
The brave hadn’t hit the ground before Fargo jerked suddenly, as though he’d been hit in the chest with a sledgehammer. An Indian galloping behind the brave he’d just killed screamed victoriously as his horse whipped on past Fargo, who glanced down to see a fletched shaft protruding from his left shoulder.
The Trailsman whipped around. The brave who’d fired the arrow reined his horse sharply with one hand while reaching into his quiver for another arrow.
Fargo emptied his Colt into the brave’s neck and chest, then ducked several bullets slicing the air around him. He dropped the Colt and grabbed the spare .36 from behind his cartridge belt.
Suppressing the hot, stabbing pain of the arrow in his shoulder, he began pivoting on his hips and heels, picking out the three other targets surrounding him, the .36 belching and smoking in his clenched right fist—pop, pop, pop-pop, pop!—before the last three horses galloped off, riderless, reins bouncing along the ground behind them.
Staggering slightly, squinting through the wafting powder smoke, Fargo looked around.
Four braves lay silent and unmoving. A fifth was crawling feebly after the horses, head and hair hanging, blood painting a swath behind him. A sixth lay on his back, coughing between the somnolent notes of his death song.
The young soldier whom Duke had staked out, spread eagle to the sun, turned his shaggy head left and right and up and down, glancing around, terrified. His blue, yellow-striped uniform pants were threadbare. He wore no tunic, just a torn undershirt and one suspender. Blood glistened from the shallow cuts on his arms, thighs, and belly and from the cuts and bruises on his red-bearded face.
Beyond the young soldier, Duke was running straight west through the brush, toward where a steel dust mustang stood eyeing the man warily. Duke had lost his hat, and his yellow hair swung wildly across his broad, sun-bronzed back.
Fargo jogged around the staked soldier, wincing at the stabbing pain of the arrow in his shoulder, and raised the .36. Aiming quickly as Duke leaped onto the steel dust’s back, he squeezed the trigger.
Dust puffed behind the horse’s swishing tail.
The horse lunged forward, nearly throwing Duke backward. Clutching the rope reins, Duke glanced at Fargo, then grabbed the steel dust’s dancing mane as the horse broke into a ground-eating gallop, heading west.
Fargo drew a bead on the man’s bare back, squeezed the trigger, but the hammer pinged on an empty chamber.
Cursing, Fargo wheeled and ran back toward the ravine.
Behind him, the soldier shouted, “Hey, cut me loose, mister!”
“Hold on, soldier!”
The Trailsman pulled the Schuetzen out of the ravine by its barrel, ran back past the writhing, cursing soldier, making sure the muzzle-loader was ready for firing. He dropped to a knee, snugged the Schuetzen’s deep-curved, silver-fitted butt-plate to his shoulder, raised the rear leaf site, and sighted down the long, polished barrel.
Duke was a good two hundred yards away and dwindling into the distance, horse and rider bounding up a gradual rise.
Fargo adjusted the sites for the distance, snugged his cheek to the stock. Quivering from the pain in his left shoulder, he lowered the rifle, took a deep breath, fought the pain from his consciousness, and raised the rifle once more.
He had time for only one shot. If he missed, Duke would be out of range by the time Fargo could ram another ball down the rifle’s barrel.
The Trailsman lined up the front and rear sights on Duke’s back, barely the size of a moth wing from this distance, and dwindling with each passing second. Holding his breath, relaxing against the lightning searing his shoulder, he held the rifle still, and took up the slack in his trigger finger.
Ka-boom!
The Schuetzen’s butt-plate slammed against his right shoulder, though he felt it more in the one from which the arrow protruded. He lowered the rifle, blinked against the wafting powder smoke.
One, two, three seconds passed.
Duke continued galloping up the rise. He turned his head slightly as the rifle’s blast reached his ears, then threw up his right arm in the Assiniboine victory wave, and turned forward.
Fargo gritted his teeth. “Shit!”
Less than ten feet from the crest of the distant rise, nearly four hundred yards away, Duke’s head jerked suddenly forward, both arms flying straight out from his body. The lieutenant sagged down toward the lunging horse’s right shoulder, then, as the horse crested the rise, buck-kicking fearfully, rolled off the steel dust’s side, hit the ground on his right shoulder, tumbled head over heels, and slammed against a boulder. As the horse crested the rise and disappeared down the other side, Lieutenant Duke fell in a heap at the base of the rock, unmoving.
Hooves thudded to Fargo’s right, and he turned to see a brave gallop straight past him toward the rise. “Yem-seen!” the warrior cried, crouched over his bloody midsection, ramming his moccasined heels against the lunging pinto’s flanks.
Fargo let the heavy Schuetzen sag to the ground, then fell back on his heels, pain and nausea overwhelming him. He kept his eyes on the wounded brave until, having inspected Duke’s body, the brave continued shouting incoherently as he crested the rise and disappeared in the direction of the Indian village.
“You get him?”
Fargo turned. The young bearded soldier regarded him desperately, face etched with pain.
Fargo nodded as he gained his feet, groaning, and plucked a tomahawk from the belt of one of the dead warriors. He’d no sooner chopped the soldier’s limbs free of the buried stakes than he turned, cast one more glance in the direction of the dead lieutenant, and passed out.
17
Fargo had no idea how long he was out before he opened his eyes and found himself staring at a woman’s deep cleavage—the breasts pushing up from a wine red corset edged with white
lace. The deep gap between the pale, lightly freckled breasts rose and fell slowly, moved toward Fargo slightly, and then a woman’s voice said, “How do the stitches look, Doctor?”
From Fargo’s left a man said, “They seem to be holding fine, and no sign of infection yet.”
There was the sound of a cork being popped from a bottle, and then Fargo’s left shoulder was set ablaze. He jerked and lifted his head, sucking air through his teeth.
“Skye,” Valeria said, gently pushing him back down on the bed. “No sudden movements, or you’ll tear the sutures!”
“Do as the young lady says, Mr. Fargo.” The doctor whom Fargo had seen earlier—tall, older, with iron gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, pince-nez glasses perched on his broad, pitted nose—rose from a straight-back chair on Fargo’s left. He dropped a bottle in a leather grip. “That’s a nasty arrow wound, and I had to stitch both sides—a good thirty sutures, all told.”
“Ah, shit,” Fargo rasped, feeling the deep, burning ache in his upper left chest. He glanced around the long room, both walls of which were lined with a dozen or so beds, most of them filled. Fort Clark’s infirmary. “How long before I’m back on my feet?”
“At least a week. The arrow didn’t hit anything vital, but it tore you up pretty good. The soldiers got you here about fifteen minutes before you would have bled to death.” The doctor snapped the grip closed, donned a ratty beaver hat, nodded at Valeria standing on the right side of Fargo’s bed, and began moving down the long alley between the beds, toward the open front door.
Fargo turned to Valeria. Except for a little sunburn and a few small abrasions on her cheeks, she looked as fresh as the day he’d first met her at the steamboat docks in Mandan. “How long I been here?”
“Two days. Don’t you remember riding in with the soldiers? The guards said you looked like a dead man riding through those gates. You no sooner told them where they’d find me and Mr. Charley than you passed out.” Valeria sat down beside him, smoothed his sweat-damp hair back from his forehead, and gazed softly into his eyes. “Can I get you anything?”