by Jon Sharpe
“Not a damn thing. I was just admiring your fine pinto.”
“Admire a cat’s tail, you lying bastard. Tell me, is your boss a border ruffian, or does he just pay them to do his dirt work?”
“Mister, you’re fishing in the wrong pond. I got no boss.”
Fargo’s face hardened until it looked chiseled in granite. “Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining. Now talk out.”
“Look, I’ll tell you the straight—I was tryin’ to get into your saddlebag. I just wanted food, is all.”
“You look well fed to me.”
“Mister, my hand hurts to beat hell. Let me go or kill me.”
Fargo didn’t like the attention they were getting from inside, nor their vulnerable position in the street.
“Let him up, boys. We’ll get to the bottom of this. Dub, that’s a Colt Navy he’s toting. Empty the wheel—you can use the bullets.”
“Katy Christ, Mr. Fargo,” Dub said after the man hurried off. “How’s come you got so many enemies around here?”
“Damned if I know,” Fargo admitted. “Why am I so handsome? I can tell you this much: I’ve yet to meet one man in Sublette I’d trust to hold my horse.”
Fargo and the McCallister boys rode to the big log trading post, the only structure in the settlement with a tie rail and water trough out front. Fargo loosened the Ovaro’s girth and dropped the bridle so the stallion could drink.
“Those big horses of yours,” he told the brothers, “will be perfect for hauling the goods back to your farm. Make sure you get gunnysacks you can tie off.”
The interior of the building was a strange combination of smells: new leather, harsh tobacco, male sweat, and the salt tang of cured meat. A space had been cleared just inside the door for a faro game now in progress. At least a dozen men sat on nail kegs and vegetable cans, eyes glued to the female case tender.
Fargo did a double take himself. The lovely Mexican-Indian girl had copper-tinted skin and high, pronounced cheekbones. Her white peasant blouse bared both slim shoulders and a generous glimpse of full breasts like rising loaves.
Nate spoke up too loudly, and every head turned in their direction. “Is that poker they’re playing, Mr. Fargo?”
The room erupted in contemptuous laughter.
“No, mooncalf,” barbed a man in filthy fringed buckskins. “It’s tiddlywinks.”
“The kid’s fresh off the tit,” joined in someone else. “Don’t even know gee from haw.”
Nate blushed crimson to his earlobes. “The hell’d I say?” he muttered to Fargo.
Fargo was on the verge of slapping the kid. It was hard to inspire fear in your enemies, he realized, when you were sided by ignorant shave-tails.
“Just keep your lips sewed shut in places like this,” he muttered back. “That’s a faro game, not poker. No man ignorant of cards need bother going west. It’s as bad as not being able to handle a horse.”
“Will you teach us cards?” Dub asked.
“Yeah, if you rubes don’t get me killed first. Christ, you two stick out like a Kansas City fire engine.”
“Ain’t our fault we’re young,” Dub said.
Fargo grinned. “A good point, and I’m caught upon it.”
Fargo noticed something odd. The men were staring daggers at him just like the men in the saloon had. But the fetching girl couldn’t make it much more obvious that she approved of the new arrival. Never taking her smoldering dark eyes off him, she pulled one side of her blouse down an inch or so lower, revealing a chocolate-colored glimpse of the ring around her nipple.
“Say . . . look at the cat heads on her,” Dub whispered. “It ain’t me and Nate she’s looking at. I think she likes you, Mr. Fargo.”
“I wonder,” Fargo said absently. He was used to instant attention from women, but not usually anything quite this brazen in front of a crowd.
“Hey, Skye! The hell you doin’ in these diggings?”
Fargo spotted a burly, full-bearded man in a long gray duster turning away from the front counter. He held two boxes of factory-pressed cartridges.
“Old Jules!” Fargo greeted his friend and one-time scouting partner. “Still above the horizon, I see.”
“Shit, an act of God can’t kill this old hoss! I can drink more rotgut, screw more women, and kill more grizzlies with my bare hands than any swingin’ dick on the continent!”
Old Jules shifted his glance to the boys. “The hell’s on the spit? You corruptin’ children now?”
Fargo definitely didn’t like all the hostile stares. “Boys,” he muttered to the brothers, “go stock up with the money your ma gave you. Meet me outside.”
Fargo sent a high sign to Old Jules, who followed him outside.
“The hell you doin’ this far south?” Old Jules demanded. “I heard tell you was up in the Nebraska Panhandle.”
“You might say I was delayed.”
Old Jules avoided his eyes after this remark, digging at a tick in his beard. “Uh-huh. That’s what I hear.”
“The hell’s that s’pose to mean?”
“Ahh . . .” The old scout drew out a flask from underneath his duster. “Cut the dust?”
“Nix on that. I want to know what you’ve heard.”
Old Jules swallowed a jolt and grimaced. “Damn! That panther piss could raise blood blisters on new leather.”
“Give, Jules.”
“Let’s just say I don’t believe a word I’ve heard. Matter fact, if I did, I’d a shot you on sight like a mad dog. But ’pears like everybody around here is banking yaller boys—and they’ll do any damn thing to earn ’em ’cept honest work.”
“All right, you’re creeping closer. Now if you wander near a point, feel free to make it.”
“Here’s the long and short of it, Skye. They’s a rumor around here ’bout how you dressed in butternut and led some jayhawkers or pukes—which bunch ain’t clear—in an attack on some Quakers. Then, or so they say, you changed back into your reg’lar duds and pretended to help the Quakers so’s you’d look innocent. It’s all horseshit, but that’s the story.”
“So that’s the way of it,” Fargo said quietly. “Who started peddling this rumor?”
Old Jules shrugged his massive shoulders. “Hell, what comes after what’s next? I just rode in this mornin’ to stock up on ammo, hoss. I signed a contract with Overland to guide a caravan down the Santa Fe Trail. I’m headin’ out right now to meet them at Raton Pass.”
“Tell me,” Fargo said, “have you ever heard of border ruffians this far west?”
“Don’t make no sense. Their dicker is a border skirmish twixt the pro-slavers in Missouri and the abolitionists in the Kansas Territory. ’Course, that’s mostly just lip deep—both bunches ain’t nothin’ but graveyard rats and don’t care a jackstraw ’bout the coloreds. Still, this is a far piece west to ride when there ain’t hardly anybody to rob.”
“Yeah, well, that’s another stumper,” Fargo said. “Jules, I watched that attack on the Quakers, and the border riders hardly even bothered to steal anything. You ever heard of them passing up loot?”
“Yeah, in a pig’s ass. Them butternuts would steal a dead fly from a blind spider.”
Fargo nodded. “So what was the point? I’d say they were paid to mount that raid. But why?”
Old Jules removed a plug of chewing tobacco from his pocket and sliced off a chaw with a small clasp knife. When he had it cheeked and juicing good, he spat an amber stream into the grass.
“It’s too far north for me, Skye,” he finally replied. “But I got more bad news. When you was at Fort Leavenworth, do you ’member hearin’ ’bout General Hoffman and that blowhard senator?”
Fargo nodded. Brigadier General Daniel Hoffman, and an escort of twelve crack soldiers, were to accompany Missouri Senator James Drummond on a fact-finding mission for the Kansas-Pacific Railroad’s proposed transcontinental route. Drummond was a notorious “katydid booster,” adept at gaining federal money for projects out W
est.
“Well, the same jaspers spreadin’ the lies about you claim the entire party has dropped off the earth,” Jules explained. “No mirror signals for a week now.”
“Let me guess,” Fargo put in. “I led an attack on them.”
Jules nodded. “Ain’t it the drizzlin’ shits? That’s what some around here are sayin’.”
Fargo began to feel the first glimmers of enlightenment. “Why didn’t I grab hold of that sooner? Jules, that proposed K-P route is just north of here.”
Old Jules nodded. “You got a better think piece than me, Skye. I still can’t read the sign—can’t even find it.”
“Me either, but I’ll work this trail out. Jules, I see some of the butternuts around Sublette. I suspect some others are wearing regular clothes to disguise their motives. Are they camped near here?”
“Hell, they must me, but I can’t tell you where. I steer wide of them sons of bitches.”
Just then Dub and Nate staggered out of the trading post loaded down with gunnysacks filled with supplies.
“Boys,” Fargo said, “haul that stuff back to your ma and Krissy.”
“You ain’t coming?” Dub asked.
Fargo shook his head. “I got work to do around here, and I best do it quick. Besides, why should you two get the crappy end of the stick? I’m the one they’re after. You boys should be safe riding home, but keep your guns to hand, and remember everything I taught you on the trail.”
“Hell, we was hoping to side you,” Nate said. “We like the crappy end of the stick.”
“You still feel that way after everything you’ve seen here?”
“More than ever,” Dub said. “Pa taught us it’s better to die for a just cause than to live for nothing.”
Old Jules chuckled. “Hell, these tads is game, Skye. Swear ’em in.”
“And we proved to you that we can shoot,” Nate added.
“For a fact you can, and I admit I’ll need help—I see that now. Come on back, but don’t ride into the settlement. Pitch a cold camp along the creek east of Sublette. I’ll find you.”
Dub flashed his gap-toothed grin. “Maybe ‘work’ ain’t all you got to do around here.” He handed Fargo a folded sheet of foolscap. “That pretty gal with the nice thing-a-ma-bobs asked me to give you this.”
Fargo unfolded it and frowned at the rough spelling. Haltingly, he read it out loud, “ ‘Meet me just after dark at the cottonwood grove north of the trading post.’ ” It was signed, “Rosario.”
“Fargo, you always was one to be combin’ pussy hair out of your teeth,” Old Jules roweled him. “Good-lookin’ wimmin flock to you like flies to syrup, you fortune-kissed son of a bitch.”
But Fargo’s frown deepened until there was a crease between his eyebrows. “All that glitters is not gold, Jules. This gal Rosario has got something on her mind besides a quick poke.”
6
Old Jules rode out of Sublette soon after the McCallister boys, and Fargo found himself alone in a rough and dangerous settlement—a place crawling with scurvy-ridden toughs eager to kill him.
Nonetheless, he had no plans to lie low. He had learned, from hard experience, to take trouble by the horns. If a man cringed in the shadows his enemies were emboldened. So he moved about the place freely and openly, letting no man stare him down.
Not everyone, he soon noticed, seemed hostile toward him. Several men greeted him cheerfully, and Fargo supposed they had either not heard the rumors about him or didn’t know who he was. Or, perhaps even better, they set no store by the lies because they mistrusted the source. Who that mysterious source was had become the hard nub of Fargo’s problem, but getting information out of the locals was proving harder than finding ducks in the desert.
At the east end of the rough settlement Fargo spotted an open-fronted shed with a shingle advertising haircuts, tooth extraction, and hot baths. Hobbling the Ovaro right out front in plain sight, he started inside.
“Need a tooth pulled, mister?” said a high-voiced man who was all of five feet tall. He was busy shooing off flies with a feather swisher. “Only two dollars, and I use laudanum.”
“Just a hot bath,” Fargo said, removing his hat and whipping the dust off it.
“Yessir. Cost you four bits, soap and towel included.”
While the diminutive man poured hot water into a wooden tub, Fargo pulled off his shirt.
“Land love us!” the proprietor exclaimed, staring at Fargo’s muscle-ridged torso. “Those are bullet holes and knife scars, ain’t they?”
“Mostly. That pretty purple one in the middle was made by a Cheyenne lance point.”
“I’ve given quite a few men scars myself,” the man boasted. “That’s why I had to scratch ‘shaves’ off my sign.”
Fargo laughed, eyes cutting out front to check on his horse.
“Say,” the man said in his near-feminine voice. “I know you! You’re Mr. Skye Fargo. The hombre they call the Trailsman. I’m Dusty Jones.”
Fargo unbuckled his shell belt and draped it over the edge of the tub. “Pleased to meetcha, Dusty. I take it you’ve heard about my ‘massacre,’ too?”
“That’s a load of whale snot. Mr. Fargo, when you talk like a girl and stand knee-high to a burro, like I do, you ain’t welcome among men. And when you ain’t welcome, you think for yourself. No, I first heard of you five, six years ago. In a story in the New York Herald by a Miss—Miss—”
“McKenna,” Fargo supplied, his lips twitching into a smile as he remembered her. “Beautiful woman.”
“Sure, that’s her name. This lady wrote a sockdologer of a story about how you saved her and a bunch of orphans out in the Dakota land. That lady called you a ‘knight in buckskins.’ ”
Fargo looked embarrassed. “Yeah, well, she can really slather it on.”
“Maybe so, but a knight in buckskins don’t attack defenseless people.”
Fargo finished stripping and eased into the hot water. “ ’Preciate that, Dusty. But tell me—who do you think got that massacre story started?”
“Likely one of the border ruffians, to put the blame off them. Except they like to be called ‘Butternut Guerrillas.’ ”
“Yeah, and I prefer John the Baptist.” Fargo sudsed his hair and beard with strong lye soap. “Any idea who leads this local bunch?”
“Mr. Fargo, that gang is one pile of turds I try not to step into. There’s one fellow with an eye patch, seems to swagger it around and give orders. Don’t know his name. And there’s some big bastard with long hair tied off in a knot—he seems to be some kind of topkick.”
The Ovaro snorted, and Fargo swiped soap from his eyes, drawing his Colt. But it was only a curious old hound, sniffing at the pinto.
“Any idea where they camp?” Fargo asked.
“No, sir, I’d sooner know the entrance to hell. But they stay somewhere close because they come and go freely.”
Fargo finished his bath, dried off with a scrap of rough towel, and dressed. The little man gave him a quick brushing with a whisk broom.
“Thanks, Dusty,” Fargo said, slipping him a silver dollar. “Keep the change.”
“Thanks, Mr. Fargo. I won’t part with this one—you touched it, so it must be lucky.”
“Lucky? If I was you,” Fargo advised as he headed out the front of the shed, “I’d spend the damn thing mighty quick.”
The afternoon sun was throwing long shadows, and Fargo had an unpleasant duty before keeping his tryst with the pretty mixed-breed Rosario—first came a visit to the Quaker camp.
He trotted the stallion next to the creek, making sure his Henry was loosened in its saddle scabbard. An ambush could come at any moment, and in his present mood he welcomed the possibility. He considered the border ruffians among the lowest trash on the frontier, and anytime they chose to open the ball, he was ready to waltz.
The Quaker women and children had camped at an elbow bend in the creek. As Fargo rode up, their mistrustful, fearful glances stabbed at his guts. Obviou
sly they, too, had heard from Dame Rumor.
He found Esther Emmerick stirring a three-legged cooking pot over a campfire. The unwelcome glance she gave him persuaded Fargo to remain in the saddle.
“Mrs. Emmerick.” He touched the brim of his hat. “How you folks getting on?”
“We’re surviving, Lord willing.”
“Have you made any plans yet?”
“If we have, Mr. Fargo, we certainly won’t disclose them to thee.”
“I see. So your religion allows you to hate a man on the basis of a fake rumor?”
“I did not say I hate thee.”
“Mrs. Emmerick, look at me.”
Reluctantly, she did so.
“Do you honest-to-God believe that I led that raid?”
“The Friends do not take oaths on the Lord’s name.”
“All right,” Fargo said, “do you really believe it?”
Esther studied him closely. “I see a gun on thy hip, another in thy saddle, and a knife in thy boot. Thou are a man who consorts with violence constantly.”
“Yes, ma’am, all true. But you’re taking the long way around the barn. Do you believe I led that raid?”
This time her tired, suffering eyes studied only his face.
“No,” she finally replied, her face softening. “Thou are a tough, sometimes even hard, man who has surely killed many souls. But thou are no murderer—I see the decency and kindness in thine eyes.”
“Well, you’re right that I’m no murderer. I’ll settle for that. I know you folks set no store by vengeance, but I mean to get to the bottom of this.”
“As thou said, Mr. Fargo, the Friends are not vindictive. We will turn the other cheek.”
“Fine, but I won’t. If murderers go unchecked, no one will be safe. There’s no law out here yet, and soldiers are stretched way too thin.”
She shook her head. “Vigilantes are not the answer.”
“They are when there’s no one else. You know, last I heard, the Old Testament was still part of the Bible. ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ Anyhow, let’s not butt heads over it. Do you feel safe here?”