Backwoods Bloodbath (19 page)

Fargo wore fringed buckskins, some of the strings stiff with old blood. His crop-bearded face was tanned hickory-nut brown, and the startling, lake blue eyes had seen several lifetimes of danger and adventure. He cast a wide glance around the once-thriving town of Plum Creek.

“Boom to bust,” he muttered, amazed by the rapid change.

The last time the Trailsman, as some called Fargo, rode through Plum Creek, the place was fast and wide open. Seemed like everybody had money to throw at the birds. But he had watched plenty of boomtowns turn into ghost towns practically overnight, and clearly this berg would soon make the list. Last night a rough bunch of buffalo skinners had made enough ruckus to wake snakes. The hiders were gone now, and the sleepy little crossroads settlement seemed on the verge of blowing away like a tumbleweed.

There was still this hotel, though, Fargo reminded himself, even if it was the size of a packing crate. And even more surprising, a bank straight across the street. That was especially hard to believe—Fargo had played draw poker the night before with a few locals, and all but one had used hard-times tokens as markers, private coins issued by area merchants to combat the critical shortage of specie.

Again Fargo’s gaze cut to the livery, but the Ovaro was peacefully drinking from a water trough in the paddock. Fargo watched sparrow hawks circling in the empty sky. The only traffic in the wide, rutted main street was a despondent-looking farmer driving a manure wagon.

Until, that is, a fancy-fringed surrey came spinning around a corner near the bank.

Fargo whistled appreciatively when he’d gotten a good look at the driver. “Well, ain’t
she
silky satin?” he asked the four walls of his cramped room.

The surrey pulled up in front of the bank in a boil of yellow dust. The Trailsman forgot about the two Cheyennes, dumbfounded at this vision of loveliness. The young woman on the spring seat was somewhere in her early twenties with lush, dark-blond hair pulled straight back under a silver tiara and caught up under a silk net on her nape. Hers was a face of angelic beauty except for full, sensuous lips.

Fargo had an excellent view, and with his window open he heard everything that transpired.

“Yoo-hoo, young man!” she called out in a voice like waltzing violins. “Yes, I mean you. Come here, please.”

A slight, puzzled frown wrinkled Fargo’s brow. Her accent, he guessed, was supposed to sound French and might fly in these parts. He’d heard better imitations, though.

A boy of about twelve years of age, a hornbook tucked under his arm, was just then passing along the raw-lumber boardwalk. At the woman’s musical hail, he turned to look at her and his jaw dropped open in astonishment. Like Fargo, he seemed mesmerized by the gay ostrich-feather boa draped loosely around slim white shoulders, and the way her tight stays thrust her breasts up provocatively.

“Yes, you,” she said again, laughing at his stupefaction. “I don’t bite!”

“Hell, a little biting might be tolerable,” Fargo muttered.

“Please run inside the bank,” she told the awed lad, taking a coin from her beaded reticule, “and tell them an invalid lady requires help outside.”

“Yes, muh-muh-ma’am!” the kid managed, staring at the coin she placed in his hand.

Invalid? Fargo’s eyes raked over her evidently healthy form. It was early September—dog days on the High Plains—and the still air felt hot as molten glass. Yet, the mysterious woman’s legs were wrapped in velvet traveling rugs.

Fargo’s vague suspicion of the beauty instantly deepened. He was familiar with the ways of grifters, and it didn’t take him long to twig the game. No traffic outside, the bad French accent—and her noontime arrival when only one teller, probably the bank manager, would likely be on duty. Suddenly he recalled one of Allan Pinkerton’s detectives telling him about how the “beautiful invalid” scam worked with surprising ease at small-town banks. Gallant managers were eager to run outside and cash small bonds or redeem stock coupons, leaving the bank briefly unoccupied.

Sure enough, one dashed out now, resplendent in pomaded hair, a new wool suit, and glossy ankle boots.

“Your servant, Madame,” he greeted her, even tossing in a clumsy bow.

“
Now
I see which way the wind sets,” Fargo muttered, a grin touching his lips.

The sheep was about to be fleeced, but the Trailsman had no intention of stepping in just yet. This was going to be a good show and Fargo, mind-numbed by his long ride across the plains, needed the diversion. However, he resolved to recover and return the money later—the citizens of Plum Creek were poor as Job’s turkey and could ill afford a loss. Besides, that course of action allowed him to see the woman up close. In this territory, females like her were only seen in barroom paintings of Greek and Roman nymphs.

“Sir, you are
so
kind!” the striking young woman effused. “I have been in your wonderful country for only six months, and I am—how you say?—puzzled about bonds. May I ask a few no-doubt silly questions?”

“Madame,
nothing
you ask could be silly,” the bank officer assured her.

Fargo shook with mirth while the deceitful shill, as he assumed her to be, removed some papers from a wallet. As the two conferred, heads intimately close together, Fargo watched behind them for the woman’s partner. Yet, even knowing what was coming, Fargo’s eyes were almost deceived.

The sneak thief was impressively adept at swift, silent movement. Like a fast shadow he glided out of an alley and onto the boardwalk, soundless in the cork-soled shoes of his trade. He slipped inside the bank so quickly that eagle-eyed Fargo hardly gained an impression—only that the small, dapper man’s hair was silver at the temples and his fox-sharp face slightly puffed and lined.

“And what is this,” the woman’s lilting voice inquired, “about ac-cum-u-la-tive interest?
Ciel!
Such a difficult word!”

Fargo laughed outright, admiring the little sharper in spite of her criminality. Right now, while the bedazzled bank manager stood in a stupor, the sneak thief inside would spend less than two minutes rifling the open vault. If the vault was closed, or yielded little, he would leap to the cash drawers. Then he would unlock the rear door and make his escape.

The moment the woman reined her two-horse team around and headed back out of town, Fargo went into action.

He buckled on his heavy leather gun belt and palmed the cylinder of his single-action Colt to check the workings before he snatched up his Henry. He trotted down to the livery, tacked the Ovaro, and swung up and over, reining in the direction of the surrey’s dust trail.

Not surprisingly, the conveyance was making jig time as the couple tried to avoid capture. For the Ovaro, however, it was swift work to carry Fargo alongside. The “invalid” was no longer driving, that job falling to her male partner. Keeping his eyes on both, Fargo leaned out and grabbed the reins from the man, drawing back to halt the team.

The beauty’s nostrils flared in anger. “Sir! I protest! My father and I are in an urgent hurry!”

Fargo, grinning like a butcher’s dog, let his eyes sweep over her. “Well, pardon me all to hell. Sweet-heart, you really need to polish that phony accent. Sounds like you got a bad head cold.”

“Phony?” she protested. “It is the way we speak in Par-ee, but,
mais oui,
of course a benighted savage like
you
would not know this.”

Fargo took in wide emerald green eyes with thick lashes that could flutter most men into total submission. She had flawless skin like creamy lotion, a figure that would tempt a saint to impure thoughts—and Fargo was no saint.

However, the Trailsman was forced to shift his attention to her companion, whose right hand was inching toward his vest. The man was compact and well-groomed, in his forties, with distinguished silver streaks in his hair, a neat line of silver mustache, and shrewd, intelligent eyes that missed nothing.

His hand moved another inch and Fargo said mildly, “Don’t miscalculate yourself, mister. Just because I’m smiling politely don’t mean I won’t kill you if you skin that hideout gun. Real slow, toss it down.”

“Now see here!” he protested in a suave baritone, his accent as phony as the woman’s. “I am merely checking the time. See?”

Under Fargo’s close scrutiny he slid a watch from the fob pocket of his silk vest and thumbed back the cover. “
Mon Dieu!
We are indeed tardy for our appointment, Arlette. Sir, my daughter and I have a crucial engagement and must resume our journey.”

Fargo laughed. “Damn straight you must. The sheriff of Plum Creek is hard as sacked salt. Maybe you’ve heard of the Kansas troubles? This whole region is known for hemp socials, and ‘trials’ take place a few minutes before the hanging. Even for genteel bank robbers like you. True, even here they won’t hang a woman, but
you
will decorate a cottonwood.”

“Bank robbers! How preposterous! We employ neither masks nor guns, the tools of that nefarious trade.”

“If it chops wood,” Fargo assured him, “you can call it an ax. You talk like a book, mister, and I don’t trust flowery men. Now shuck out that hideout gun, nice and easy.”

The girl calling herself Arlette tossed back her pretty head and laughed, showing Fargo even little teeth white as pearls. “
You,
sir, are in my bad books,” she coquetted.

Fargo knew it was just a desperate bid to distract him so her companion could get the drop on him. Fargo’s Colt leaped into his fist. The loud click, when he thumb-cocked it, made both grifters go a shade paler.

“Cottontail, you can play that bank manager like a piano, but I know women like he knows ledgers. Now, mister, hand it over, and don’t try a fox play or I’ll let daylight through you. That’s something I’d surely hate to do, by the way.”

The man’s veneer of cool composure now cracked completely. Scowling, he handed Fargo a two-shot derringer with a folding knife under the barrels.

“Now,” Fargo added, “hand over that buckskin pouch that’s on the seat between you.”

“Sir,” the man protested, his face going red with anger, “yours is the manner of a man who holds the high ground and all the escape trails.
If
we stole this money, as you boldly assert, how are you any different from us? Clearly you intend to steal it for yourself.”

“The hell you jabbering about?” Fargo said, growing impatient—he thought he spotted dust puffs from the direction of town. “You’re lucky I’m letting you two ride on instead of turning you over to the law. Now hand over that swag and get going before I change my mind.”

“You hairy brute!” Arlette flung at him. “Neanderthal! Picking on gentlemen and ladies must be your specialty!”

Fargo laughed again, glancing inside the pouch before tucking it into a saddle pannier. He tapped both bullets out of the derringer and tossed it into the surrey.

“No need to get on your high horse, missy,” he said. “All I steal are kisses. By the way—both of you seem to be losing your
French
accents.”

Arlette blushed to her very earlobes as the man, suddenly cursing out Fargo like a dockworker, removed the whip from the surrey’s socket and lashed the team into motion.

Fargo headed back toward Plum Creek and quickly realized his mistake—the bank robbery had been discovered almost immediately because that was definitely a posse thundering right at him. He had figured to return the stolen money before the alarm was raised. Banks never reported a robbery if they could recover the money without publicity.

Possibly, a witness had seen him leave town in a hurry. The Plum Creek sheriff, Hinton Davis, had kept a wary eye on Fargo last night, and Fargo saw him pocketing payoffs from the town’s few remaining sporting gals. He didn’t strike the Trailsman as a by-the-books lawman. And the “good citizens” with him right now, Fargo realized with a sinking heart, looked more like a hemp committee than a posse. He recognized several scurvy-ridden toughs who had been in the saloon last night.

“Well, old campaigner,” Fargo said to the Ovaro, “looks like I put our bacon in the fire again.”

The moment he fell silent, still trying to decide what to do, the whipcrack of a rifle sent ice into Fargo’s veins. That first shot hissed wide, but within seconds more bullets hummed like blowflies past his ears, some so close he felt the tickle of wind-rip.

The moment of stunned immobility passed in a blink, and the will to live instinctively asserted itself. He still had a full magazine in his sixteen-shot Henry, and six beans in the wheel of his walnut-gripped Colt. This was no time, however, to make a stand. That jackleg posse was coming at him like the devil beating bark, and clearly they had no plans to arrest him. Nor was Fargo willing to kill any of them—after all, it was his legal duty to report, or stop, the bank theft, not let it play out for his amusement.

“Fargo, you damned knucklehead,” he cursed himself as he clawed the buckskin pouch from his pannier, “I hope you enjoyed your little diversion.”

However, he didn’t toss down the pouch as he’d intended. Fargo knew that Davis and his minions would give up the chase quickly once they had the money. The initial excitement would be over, and they were townies. However, Fargo also believed this bunch would split the swag, not return it to the bank. He would send it back to Plum Creek by express rider first chance he got.

Fargo reined the Ovaro around, kicked him up to a gallop, and lowered his profile in the saddle. Fearing for the two grifters, he veered off the road and led the vengeful pursuers toward more rugged terrain, bullets thumping the ground all around him.