“We’ll just take care of each other,” Jordan said with a smile.
Fargo helped Julia onto the wagon seat and then mounted the stallion. With a wave of farewell to the two prospectors, he led the way back out of the canyon.
“What’s wrong with the one called Gypsum?” Julia asked when they were well out of earshot and heading south, with Fargo riding alongside the wagon.
Fargo shook his head. “I don’t know exactly. He was injured in a mine cave-in, and it affected his thinking. He still seems like a pretty good fella, though.”
“Yes, he struck me as being rather sweet,” Julia said with a smile. “Although I imagine he could be pretty fierce if he was angry, considering how big he is.”
“It’d probably be wise not to get him riled up, all right,” Fargo allowed dryly.
They followed the hills on down the western edge of Death Valley, until late in the afternoon when they came to the next main canyon that branched off. During the afternoon they had passed several smaller canyons and washes, but those had run only a few hundred yards back into the hills before petering out. Fargo had explored each of them quickly and found no signs of anyone in them.
This canyon was a different story. Fargo’s keen eyes spotted fairly recent hoofprints near the entrance.
“Somebody’s been here not too long ago,” he told Julia, pointing to the tracks.
“Can you tell who it was?” she asked, then realized the foolishness of that question. “No, of course you can’t. I don’t know what I was thinking. One set of horse tracks looks pretty much like another, doesn’t it?”
Fargo grinned. “Well, not always. Sometimes you can tell quite a bit if the tracks are fresh enough. Every set of horseshoes is a little bit different. Unfortunately, these tracks are several days old, so the wind has blurred them, and even if they weren’t, we don’t know what the prints of your father’s horse look like. We don’t have anything to compare them to.”
“Oh. That makes sense. Was there just one horse?”
“That’s right. And it was a saddle horse, not a packhorse or a pack mule, because you can see there aren’t any human footprints around, just the hoofprints.”
Julia nodded. “What does that mean?”
“That the rider probably wasn’t a prospector, or he would have had a pack animal with him. You saw the mules back there where Frank and Gypsum were camped. Two for riding and two for carrying supplies—and gold, if they’re lucky enough to find any.”
“Then who was it who rode through here?”
“No way of telling,” Fargo said with a shake of his head. “One of Puma Jack’s bunch, maybe.”
Julia frowned. “I hope we don’t run into them again.”
“You and me both.”
The tracks led into the canyon and didn’t come out again. That meant whoever made them was still up there. Fargo thought about that and went on. “Stay here while I take a look.”
“But this is a bigger canyon. It looks like it runs a mile or more up into the hills.”
“I reckon it does.”
“I thought we would explore it together.”
“I just want to scout a little first,” Fargo said. “If you see anybody coming, fire a shot and I’ll hightail it back here.”
She nodded, looking a little nervous as she did so. Fargo didn’t much blame her. With those men who had been after her back in Los Angeles possibly still on her trail, plus a gang of outlaws on the loose here in Death Valley, trouble could crop up at any time, from any direction.
He sent the Ovaro into the canyon at a fast lope, his eyes constantly scanning the rugged landscape around him. The walls of the canyon were rocky and rose at a steep slant, though not perpendicular. A man could probably climb them if he had to, but not a horse.
The mouth of the canyon was a good hundred yards wide, but the walls pinched in as Fargo rode farther into it, until the canyon was barely twenty yards from side to side. It didn’t seem to have any sharp bends, but it weaved back and forth in gentle curves so that he couldn’t see very far either in front of him or behind him. Julia and the wagon were out of sight.
But not out of mind. Fargo listened closely for the sound of a warning shot, hoping that he wouldn’t hear one.
The dominant smell around Death Valley was the briny stench of the salt flats, but up here in the canyon the wind swirled so that it sometimes carried down odors from higher in the hills. Fargo reined in sharply as a stiff breeze blew in his face for a moment, bringing with it an unpleasant but all too familiar smell.
Something was dead up there, somewhere ahead of him in the canyon.
Fargo slid the Henry rifle from the saddle boot and levered a cartridge into the chamber. He wasn’t afraid of whatever was dead, since it could no longer harm anyone. He wasn’t really afraid of whoever or whatever had dealt out that death, either, but he was damn sure going to be prepared for trouble if it came.
He kneed the stallion into motion again and rode forward slowly. The canyon bent through one of its curves. The canyon floor rose slightly. The walls were higher, looming up and blocking some of the sky so that the ground ahead of Fargo was in shadow.
There was still plenty of light, though, for Fargo to be able to see the two shapes lying there in front of him, sprawled motionless in death.
4
Fargo brought the stallion to a halt and grimly studied the bodies of a man and a horse that lay on the floor of the canyon. Evidently they had been there for several days, long enough to bloat in the heat and then be torn open by the scavengers that had been at them.
It wasn’t a pretty sight.
Fargo clucked to the Ovaro and walked the horse closer to the mutilated corpses. The horse had been a bay, probably a big, strong-looking animal. The man was big, too, dressed in black trousers, a white shirt, and a black vest. The shirt had a large brown stain on the front of it. Dried blood from a bullet wound, Fargo guessed.
Not much of the dead man’s face was left. He’d had thick gray hair, indicating that he wasn’t a youngster. He wasn’t armed. There was no gun belt around his waist.
That didn’t mean there hadn’t been one there when he was alive. Whoever killed him could have taken his weapons. Somebody had stripped the saddle off the dead horse.
Fargo stopped the Ovaro again and studied the ground around the bodies. He saw several sets of hoofprints and boot prints. He estimated that three riders had jumped this lone man and killed him and his horse.
Then the killers had turned and ridden on up the canyon toward the Panamints. Fargo lifted his gaze toward the mountains. Maybe there was another trail through there, like the one Frank Jordan had mentioned. The trails might even connect somewhere up there.
Chances were, if Puma Jack and his gang had been using these hills around Death Valley as their hideout for the past half year, they knew most of the trails by now. Fargo wasn’t going to be at all surprised if the three men who had murdered this gray-haired stranger turned out to be members of the gang.
The question that gnawed at his brain now was whether or not Julia Slauson’s father had had gray hair . . .
As soon as Fargo had caught sight of the body, he had wondered if it might belong to Julia’s father. He hated to think that she might have come all this way and risked as much as she had, only to find that the object of her search was already dead.
As grisly as the corpse was, he couldn’t just bring her up here and have her take a look at it. He would find out first whether it was possible that the dead man could be her father.
He swung down from the saddle and walked over to the sprawled body. The man lay on his back with his arms out to the sides. Fargo couldn’t tell if he had fallen that way or had been rolled over onto his back after he fell. It didn’t really matter, of course; he was just as dead either way.
With his jaw clenched tightly, Fargo tried to ignore the smell and knelt beside the corpse. He searched quickly through the dead man’s pockets but didn’t find anything t
o identify him, or anything else, for that matter. The killers had robbed him and taken everything.
With the saddle and saddlebags gone, too, Fargo had no way of knowing who the man had been. He straightened and went back to the stallion.
He dreaded the questions he was going to have to ask Julia when he got back to the wagon.
She was sitting patiently on the seat when he rode out of the canyon.
“Did you see anybody?” Fargo asked as he reined in beside the wagon.
Julia shook her head. “Not a soul. We might as well be all alone out here, Skye.”
“Well, we’re not,” he told her.
“Oh, I know. There are probably a lot of prospectors in the hills and canyons—”
“That’s not what I meant,” Fargo broke in. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I found somebody up the canyon.”
Julia’s face lit up with anticipation. “Really?”
“What color is your father’s hair?” Fargo asked.
She seemed surprised by the question. “Why . . . it’s white. Prematurely so. His hair turned white at a very early age. I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t that color.”
“You don’t mean gray?”
“No, I meant what I said. My father has white hair.” She frowned. “What’s wrong, Skye? That’s an odd question to ask, about my father’s hair.”
“I just wanted to make sure the fella I found wasn’t him.”
“Well, then, why didn’t you just ask hi—” She broke off her question and lifted a hand to her mouth as her eyes widened in understanding. “Oh! You mean he . . . he’s . . .”
“Dead,” Fargo finished for her. He nodded. “I reckon he’s probably the man who left these tracks here at the canyon mouth. Somebody shot him and his horse, killed them both. Looks like it happened several days ago.”
A visible shudder ran through her. “That’s terrible. They must be . . . well . . .”
“They’re not pretty to look at,” Fargo confirmed. “The coyotes and the buzzards and the ravens have been at them.”
“You don’t know who the man . . . was?”
Fargo shook his head. “He didn’t have anything on him to tell me. His pockets had been emptied, and his saddlebags were gone.”
“What a terrible way to die.”
“I don’t know that there are any good ways.”
“Well, what a terrible place, then. And to be left out in the open like that . . .” She shook her head.
“Drive the wagon a short distance up the canyon,” Fargo told her. “You can stop and make camp for the night. I’ll go back and bury the man.”
“I can help you.”
“No need for that,” Fargo assured her.
He had started to turn away when she stopped him by saying, “Skye, you thought that man was my father, didn’t you?”
“I thought he might be,” Fargo answered honestly. “You hadn’t given me a description of your father, so I had no way of knowing.”
“I appreciate your consideration in trying to spare my feelings.”
Fargo nodded and headed back up the canyon toward the spot where he had found the bodies. Digging a grave in the hard, rocky ground wasn’t going to be easy, but he would manage.
He wasn’t sure what he was going to do about that dead horse, though.
He wound up tying his rope to one of its hind legs and using the Ovaro to drag it over next to the canyon wall. That was the best he could do. Eventually, scavengers would finish stripping the bones, and they would be scattered throughout the canyon.
The dead man would be laid to rest properly, though. Fargo used a short shovel from his gear to scrape out a shallow grave in the hard earth. He dragged the dead man into it, covered him up, and then piled rocks on top of the mound of earth. It was difficult work in the late-afternoon heat, and Fargo was soaked in sweat by the time he was finished.
Holding his hat in his hands, Fargo said a short prayer consigning the dead man’s soul to El Señor Dios. Then he mounted up and rode back to the wagon.
When he got there he found that Julia had built a small fire, using bits of dead brush that had blown up into the canyon from the belt of sparse vegetation between the hills and the salt flats. She had coffee on to boil, and the smell made Fargo feel a little better.
“Were you able to . . . ?” she began.
“I took care of it,” he told her. “I couldn’t do anything with the horse except drag it out of the middle of the canyon, but I buried the man.”
“I can’t help but wonder who he was, and why he was killed out here in the middle of nowhere.”
Fargo got a tin cup from his saddlebags, hunkered by the fire, and used a piece of leather to protect his hand as he picked up the coffeepot and filled the cup. A sip or two of the strong black brew made him feel even better. It was amazing, he thought, how good coffee was, even when the weather was hot.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he ran into a few members of Puma Jack’s gang,” he said. “All his gear was gone, even his hat. They probably just shot him out of hand and robbed his corpse.”
“But who was he?”
Her curiosity struck him as a mite strange. “We’ll probably never know,” he said.
“Probably not.” Julia changed the subject by saying, “Do you want me to fix supper? I didn’t think you’d mind if I started the coffee.”
“I don’t mind at all. I appreciate it. As for supper, have at it if you want, or I’ll take care of it if you’d rather. I’m a pretty good trail cook. Have to be since I’m usually fending for myself.”
“Why don’t we work together?” she suggested with a smile.
That sounded like a good idea to Fargo, although he knew that old saying about too many cooks spoiling the broth had some truth to it. They pitched in together, frying bacon and pan bread and putting some beans on to soak. They could cook the beans in the morning and then have them for several meals afterward.
It was a pleasant, almost domestic scene, even though their surroundings were a far cry from homey. As darkness fell, the coyotes that lived in the hills began their nightly serenade.
Julia shivered at the sound and asked, “What’s that? Wolves?”
Fargo shook his head. “Nope. Coyotes. Closer to dogs than wolves, but you still wouldn’t want to tangle with them. Hear that yipping that sounds a little different from the others?”
Julia listened for a moment, then said, “Yes. Is that a coyote?”
“Fox,” Fargo said. “You wouldn’t think to look at it that there would be much wildlife in Death Valley, but it’s here, you just don’t see it very often. There are a lot of mountain goats up in the hills, and coyotes, foxes, and rats down here lower. Not to mention the chuckwallas.”
“What in the world are those?”
“Big lizards. You want to avoid them if you see any. They’re touchy, and they’ve got a nasty bite.”
“I’ll remember that. Stay away from big lizards.”
“And rattlesnakes and scorpions, of course,” he added.
Julia sighed in exasperation. “Is there anything out here that can’t hurt you or kill you?”
Fargo thought about the outlaws and said, “Not really.”
“Why would anyone want to come here, then?”
“Gold,” he said simply. “Everybody wants to get rich.”
“I suppose. I’d settle for finding my father and getting out of here.”
After they had eaten, Fargo let the fire burn down to embers. No point in announcing their presence, even though he didn’t think anybody would be looking for them. There were no hostile Indians in this area. Of course, there were the owlhoots led by Puma Jack, and there was no telling when they might come prowling around.
“I guess I’ll turn in,” Julia announced. “Do you plan to sleep under the wagon?”
Fargo nodded. “That’s right. I’ll lay my rope all the way around it to keep out any crawling varmints.”
“Do we need to take
turns standing guard?”
Fargo gestured at the Ovaro, who was picketed nearby. “There’s the best sentry you’ll find. If anybody comes around, he’ll let me know.”
“All right, then. Good night.”
“Good night,” Fargo said.
Julia climbed into the wagon and pulled the canvas flap closed behind her. Fargo shook out his bedroll under the wagon, placed the rope around the vehicle as he had told her, and then crawled into his blankets. The temperature was already dropping. It would be cold by morning.
Fargo went to sleep quickly and easily, out of long habit falling into a deep, dreamless slumber. He wasn’t sure how long he had been asleep when he came instantly awake, all senses alert.
He opened his eyes and saw the Ovaro standing quietly a few yards away. Since the stallion hadn’t been disturbed, Fargo was reasonably certain there were no predators around, animal or otherwise.
But if that was the case, what had awakened him?
He got the answer a moment later when Julia whispered, “Skye? Are you awake?”
Fargo sat up and said, “I am now. What’s wrong?”
She was at the rear of the wagon. “Could you come up here?”
Fargo slid out of his blankets. Since there didn’t seem to be any trouble, he could think of only one logical reason Julia would ask him to join her in the wagon.
He might be wrong, of course, in which case he could easily embarrass her, so he would proceed with caution until he was sure what she wanted.
He stood up, stepped onto the tailgate, and climbed into the wagon. It was pitch dark inside, but he could hear Julia’s breathing.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I . . . I’m fine. I just thought you might like to . . . collect on part of your fee.”
That was the answer Fargo expected. It was time he set her straight on that.
“Listen, Julia, you don’t have to pay me that way. I know that’s what you suggested back when we first talked about me looking for your father, but it’s not necessary.”
“I’m not sure I have enough money—”
“I’m not worried about that,” Fargo assured her. “I’ll help you the best I can, whether you ever pay me a penny or not.”
Death Valley Vengeance Page 5