The Border Jumpers (A Fargo Western Book 16)

by John Benteen

  Sterling said, voice shaky: “You hold the bag. I’ll catch the rest.”

  “Kid—”

  Sterling’s eyes met his. “I’ve seen how it’s done. I want to try it.”

  Fargo stared at him a moment, then took the bag. “Go ahead.”

  There were half a dozen sidewinders in the bag, four more crawling in the sand, probably more somewhere around the rocks. Sterling went after them with the forked stick, watching every step he took to make sure no unseen rattler hit him while he was pursuing another. He raised the forked stick, jabbed it down. He bent, then straightened up, holding a two-foot long snake that coiled and writhed around his arm. “Bag,” he said tersely, and Fargo shook it hard, then held it open. Quickly Sterling dropped the snake inside. He looked at Fargo. “I thought they’d be slimy. They’re smooth and dry. It’s not so bad.”

  “Don’t get overconfident,” Fargo said.

  “No,” said Sterling, and he went after another snake.

  “That’s enough,” Fargo said twenty minutes later. There were ten sidewinders captive in the bag, all it would safely hold, its canvas sides billowing. Once or twice a white fang hooked through the fabric, oozed a drop of venom, then was wrenched loose. Fargo tied the bag tightly with its draw-string. Then, carrying it well out from his body, he went to the narrow part of the keyhole shaped arroyo. He set down the bag in the shade of a rock placing it on a saddle-blanket. The sun was an hour high. He scanned the rugged panorama of hillsides and draws below. Nothing moved.

  “What do we do now?” Sterling asked.

  “Get your rocks,” Fargo said. “And bring me those two reatas off the saddle. Then we wait. Maybe an hour, maybe a day. Maybe they won’t come at all and we’re up the creek.”

  Sterling turned away. Fargo’s voice halted him. “Sterling.”

  The young man turned. “Yeah?”

  “A man that’s handled four live sidewinders don’t ever have to worry about whether or not he’s a coward.”

  Sterling looked at him, grinned, and wordlessly turned to carry out Fargo’s orders.

  ~*~

  Time droned by—literally, as the contents of the sack kept up a constant buzzing whir. Fargo and Sterling lay well-shielded by boulders at the arroyo’s edge. Fargo yearned for a cigar, but they were all gone. He did not let the craving make him nervous or impatient. He was pretty sure they’d come.

  Now the morning sun was high, brutal. Fargo gave Sterling his hat, lay with his own head in shadow. “Why don’t they come?” Sterling rasped. “This damned filthy country. These damned greasers.”

  Fargo said, “This is a good country, a damned fine one. A man’s country. And the people in it are fine people, too. But they’re in a war, Sterling, they’re fighting for the future of this country, for their wives and kids. They’ve had a pretty lousy time for the past fifty, sixty years with Porfirio Diaz, the Church, and the United States all with its feet on their necks, milkin’ ’em dry. They’re tired of that—which makes us the enemy, understand? But they ain’t dirty greasers, they’re first-class fightin’ men, and the minute you forget that, you’re in bad trouble.”

  “You seem to like ’em, yet you’ve killed a lot of ’em ... ”

  Fargo said, “A man comes at me with a gun, I don’t discuss his politics. Besides, they’ll be better off without Lopez Belmonte. He’s the kind of bastard that caused the Revolution in the first place. He keeps up what he’s doin’, he’ll have us at war with Mexico yet, and then the fat’ll be in the fire ... But I’ve made a lot of money down here, got a lot of friends down here, and—” He broke off, raised his head. “They’re coming,” he said.

  He had known they’d have to. Morales, as soon as the confusion of the stampede had ebbed would have given the orders—check and block all waterholes. Instead of wasting time trailing, tracking, he’d send bands of riders out on a sweep, cover every source of water. Sooner or later, men posted like that would find and take the weaponless fugitives.

  And that they were weaponless, Morales would know, too. He would have had every gun inventoried, and all ammunition belts; eyewitnesses quizzed. One rifle, one pistol, no cartridge belts or bandoleros missing, and all that shooting. These men coming now to check the waterhole had probably cut their trail. Still, they came on confidently and unwarily, certain that the fugitives had nothing to fight with. Probably they had been promised mucho dinero if they took Fargo and Sterling—dead or alive. Instead of keeping their heads up, they were already spending the reward in their minds.

  Now they were closer, emerging from the cloud of dust they made. “Five of ’em,” Fargo said. “A

  rich haul if we play it right.”

  “God, Fargo, the thought of what we’re gonna do makes cold chills go down my spine.”

  “Kid, in this game, you do what you have to. Now, get ready. Just remember this, it’s them or us. And don’t you move until I’ve moved first. You got it?”

  “Got it.”

  They waited, hunkered behind their rocks. The snakes in the bag had quieted down. The riders drew near the entrance to the arroyo, reined in, argued for a while. One, apparently, wanted to scout first. The leader talked him down, spat disgustedly in the dirt. Rifles up, sun glinting from the barrels, they came on, full of courage, greed, machismo. They entered the wide flare of the keyhole’s lower end. Then, in single file, gear jingling, horses’ hooves clopping, they entered the narrow slot. They were so close now, Fargo could see the sweat beaded on brown faces, count the cartridges in their bandoliers, if he chose to. The one in the lead had a face like a hawk, beaked nose and high cheekbones. His head turned restlessly from side to side.

  Fargo untied the lashings that held the bag shut. The rattlesnakes, disturbed, began to writhe and burr their warnings. He shook the bag violently. His shirt was soaked with sweat. All five men were in the slot now, eyes raking the rims above. Fargo shot a glance at Sterling. Stretched flat, the kid lay like something carved from rock. Fargo folded the thick saddle blanket around the bag of snakes. “Now!” he snapped, and he was on his feet, dumping the bag, heaving its contents out with all his strength.

  For one frozen instant, the men looking upward stared at the incredible sight of a rain of rattlesnakes falling on them. Then the first man was suddenly draped with sidewinders. He screamed as one bit him in the neck, slid down his shirt front. His horse screamed too, reared, catching the musky watermelon odor of the serpents. Simultaneously, the other horses bucked and turned. One man, reaching upward, instinctively caught a sidewinder about to fall on his head. It writhed and bit him in the wrist. Another draped around his horse’s neck; the mount exploded, sunfished and its rider went flying. Fargo glimpsed another snake draped around a saddle horn, head lashing toward a rider’s crotch. Then, even as the narrow slot of the arroyo turned into a confused maelstrom of screaming, pawing men and frightened horses, Fargo went into action with the reatas. He’d built a loop in each rawhide rope taken from the saddles of their stolen horses. Now one sailed out, settled around a rider’s head. Fargo jerked, hard, and the man came out of the saddle, hit the ground kicking, then lay still, head twisted strangely on the neck. Fargo let go the rope, seized the other, threw it, made another catch. The hawk faced man, still flailing at a snake, came out of leather. Fargo dragged hard, and the man’s head slammed against the wall of the arroyo as the loop tightened around his throat. Fargo held the rope tight.

  Beside him, Sterling was also on his feet. Baseball-sized stones, carefully selected, hurtled down into the slot. The first one missed, the second smashed into a gunman’s head and the man fell limply from the saddle. Another, pawing at a snake on his horse’s neck, stared up toward the rim, mouth open, eyes wide with horror. A hurled rock caught him just above the nose, and he dropped. That left one man, the last in line. The snakes had missed him, and he fought his mount around, cocked his heels to spur and run. Sterling wound up slowly, carefully, and threw. The rock caught the fleeing man just under his hat brim, at his
skull’s base. He dropped from the saddle, bounced once or twice before his foot slid free of stirrup, then was still.

  Horses stampeded up and down the arroyo, trampling bodies. There was another scream, a groan, a cacophony of whinnies. Then the animals had cleared the notch, snakes still draped on some, and were galloping off across the desert. Five bodies, only three showing any sign of life, lay inertly on the floor of the arroyo. Then everything was still, save for an angry incessant buzzing down there in the slot.

  Fargo let out a long, rasping breath. “All right, kid,” he said. “Let’s go down. Mind the sidewinders.”

  Cautiously, after sliding down the bank, they approached the figures sprawled there. Sterling had a rock in each hand. Fargo scuttled to the hawk faced man, scooped up a Winchester as a sidewinder slithered away. He sighed with relief and satisfaction at again having a loaded gun in his grasp. Then he pulled a bone-handled knife, a Bowie with a ten-inch blade, from the sash of the unconscious body. “Fargo—” Sterling squawked, but he’d already raised the knife high, plunged it down between the shoulder blades. The body arched, collapsed, lay still, no longer breathing.

  Sterling’s hand clamped Fargo’s shoulder, pulled him around. Sterling’s eyes blazed. “Good God, man, you’re murdering them in cold blood!”

  Fargo straightened up. “No. Putting them out of their misery. Sterling, you ever seen a man die of snakebite?”

  “No.” Sterling’s hand dropped away.

  “Well, it takes a while and it ain’t pretty. Every man still alive here has got two or three snakebites, mostly in places where you can’t cut and put on a tourniquet. Now, dammit, you start taking their guns and goods and watch out you don’t get bit yourself.” He moved on to the next body. Behind him, he heard a strange, strangled sound. Glancing over his shoulder, Fargo saw Sterling vomiting dryly, painfully, as he leaned against the arroyo wall. Fargo’s mouth twisted slightly. Then, coldly, efficiently, he went on with what he had to do.

  ~*~

  Fargo had made the fire of dry ocotillo canes, and it was nearly smokeless. What smoke there was drifted inward along the roof of the cave in the remote fastnesses of these Chihuahua hills. The canes burned with a bright, clean flame, quickly cooking the venison steaks on the improvised grill of green juniper twigs. “No salt,” Fargo said, “But gunpowder will do, instead,” and he sprinkled some from an opened cartridge on the meat. He could afford the expenditure of that cartridge—the bandoliers, gun belts and weapons of the five men killed in the arroyo were stored in the cave. Even better, Fargo had recovered his Batangas knife, found on one of the bodies. He could replace the Colt .38 but the Batangas knife and the Fox were irreplaceable. Morales himself, Fargo guessed, would have the shotgun—and he intended to get it back in due time.

  “Chow,” he said. “Come and get it.” He handed Sterling a slab of meat, grinning as his eyes raked over the young man. He and the soldier both were clad in leather brush clothes and high-crowned sombreros taken from the dead vaqueros, and Sterling, in that swaggering gear, was transformed. He seemed older, heavier, his movements less awkward, graceful in an almost catlike way, his blue eyes steady, clear. Five days in Mexico had done a lot for Sterling, Fargo thought. There was a lot the boy still had to learn, but he had already acquired the basic knowledge every man worth his salt had to have—the knowledge that he could face death head-on and keep his nerve. If Sterling had worries, they were no longer over his own courage.

  He had been tested time and time again in these last four days since the thing with the snakes at the arroyo. As soon as they had stripped the bodies of weapons, ammunition, everything usable, they had mounted and ridden, boring their way deeper into the Chihuahua badlands. Fargo picked routes that, so far as possible, would hide their trail. No one could hide his passing completely from a half-Indio tracker, but there were ways of making things hard for anyone reading sign and slowing down pursuit, and Neal Fargo knew them all.

  Still, for two days the hills had swarmed with men, and it had been touch and go. Fargo and Sterling had lived like hunted wolves, never staying one place long, pausing on the high ground to reconnoiter, yet keeping off the skyline. Little water and less food had been their portion for that forty-eight hours. Presently they had found this cave, a natural fortress dominating the land around it. Inside, a trickle of water ran down a wall, enough to sustain them in a siege. With guns and ammunition sufficient to stand off an army, Fargo had decided to make his stand here.

  It had not, though, come to that. Suddenly they were alone in the badlands, no longer hunted; it seemed that Morales had withdrawn his men.

  After a day, Fargo was satisfied, risked a shot at a deer. The sound of the rifle had drawn no lightning down on them. Now they had time to breathe, rest, build up strength.

  Fargo, his belly full of venison, leaned back against the cave wall, picked his teeth with the Batangas knife’s point. As if reading his mind, Sterling asked: “Why do you think they’ve stopped hunting for us?”

  Fargo spat out a fleck of meat. “There could be a lot of reasons. We’ve cost Morales over a dozen men, and he knows we’re well-armed now. Maybe he decided not to risk any more. Maybe, after they saw those snakebit corpses, his men lost their appetite for looking for us. There are lots of men that’ll face a gun or even a knife that panic at the thought of gettin’ snakebit. My guess though is that it’s none of those. I think something big is up.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Fargo shifted lazily, but his eyes watched the slope below the cave’s mouth. “No way of knowing. But one thing might be that Villa—or Obregon or somebody—has made a demand on Lopez Belmonte for a hell of a lot of beef. More than he can furnish right off. He’s got to hit Texas again and hit it hard. That’ll take all his men and he can’t afford to waste any, short-handed as we’ve left him, huntin’ for us. It’s probably orders from headquarters—get some beef and get it fast.” He lit a strong, dark Mexican cigarette taken from one of the bodies, inhaled. “It might even be something important enough to have brought the old he-coon himself up here—Lopez Belmonte.” Smoke dribbled from his nostrils. “Me, I aim to find out. Come sundown, I’m riding out, to scout San Joaquin and Palo Blanco both and see what’s going on. And—you know what a spoiling attack is?”

  “Sort of. Something to break up an enemy operation before it can get under way.”

  “That’s it. Me, I’m gonna do my best to spoil hell out of anything Morales has got going. If Lopez Belmonte ain’t already up here, I’m gonna give him good reason to come—so I can get him in my sights.”

  “I,” Sterling said. “You keep saying ‘I’.”

  “Well, kid, nobody’s paying you thirty thousand dollars to play games with these people. In fact, now’s your chance to get back across the Rio. They’re all tied up on something, and you’ve got those Mex clothes for a disguise. You can go back to your outfit, take your medicine—and chances are, even if they find against you, when it gets up to old Black Jack Pershing, he’ll just reprimand you and send you back to duty. He’s a combat man, and he’ll understand. Besides, you’ve picked up a lot of damned good intelligence you can report.”

  “You go to hell,” Sterling said. “I ride with you.”

  He stood up. “I can’t count how many times you’ve saved my life these past few days. But, damn it, Fargo, you’ve saved more than that. You’ve given me self-respect, put some fire in my belly, like you say, and iron in my spine. I hired out to be a soldier and didn’t know the first thing about it, and that was my trouble all along. You’ve taught me a lot—more than I could have got in a year of training. I’m not about to quit you now, just when I can really learn how it’s done.”

  Fargo took the cigarette from his mouth. “How it’s done ain’t pretty, Tom.”

  “I’ve seen that. I still want to learn. And I don’t know where I’d find a better teacher.”

  “Okay,” Fargo said. “That’s the way you feel, I can sure as hell use you.” He st
ood up. “But it’s time for some practice now. Let’s go outside.” He drew his Colt, stuck it in his sash, and for it substituted a carefully-checked, completely empty revolver. Sterling did the same.

  Outside the cave, Fargo faced Sterling from a distance of thirty feet. His eyes raked up and down the young man. “You’re wearin’ your holster a mite too high,” he said. “Drop it down an inch.” Sterling adjusted the gun belt. Fargo waited patiently.

  “There’s no way you can learn a fast draw,” Fargo went on, “except through practice. Practice day in, day out. It’s got to be completely automatic. You got to know your gun, exactly where it is on your leg, practice until your hand knows that, too. When you grab it, you don’t bring it up and then cock it. It’s bein’ cocked the minute it comes out of leather, and you got to watch so it don’t go off premature. In practice, you can blow your foot off. In combat, somebody will shoot you through the heart. And remember, you curl your thumb around the hammer, don’t keep it straight. The curled thumb don’t slip and it gives you leverage. The straight thumb’s no good at all. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Sterling said.

  “The fast draw’s important,” Fargo said. “But it ain’t the most important thing in gunfightin’. There’s lots of real fast men that died mighty young. What they forgot is that it ain’t the first shot that’s fired that counts. It’s the first shot that hits! So along with drawin’ fast, you got to aim straight. That takes just a nick more time than drawin’ and firin’ blind. Now, the thing about a good revolver is that it ought to be balanced so it shoots where you point it, like pointin’ your finger. These Colts are good for that, but they ain’t quite as reliable, these old Peacemakers, as my newer .38, which hasn’t got as good a balance. It’s a trade-off. And I’ll tell you this, too, while we’re on the subject. You know, with a double-action gun, you can just pull the trigger and it’ll shoot, or you can cock it and then pull the trigger. Always use a double-action gun single-action in combat—cock and fire. The trigger pull shootin’ double-action without cockin’ throws your aim off. Single-action ain’t a fraction of a second slower if you know your business and it’s far more accurate. Got that, too?”