Hangtown Hellcat (23 page)

Waldo gripped Butch’s beefy shoulder. “Snap out of it! You’ve been arguing full bore about how we have to settle Fargo’s hash. Now you’re harping on Jenny. Butch, just admit it—Fargo has put ice in your boots.”

Butch snarled and knocked the hand away. His booming voice rose in anger. “Ease off that talk, Waldo, or you’ll be getting your mail delivered by moles. It’s
Fargo
who’s got icy boots. He’s yellow! All I ask is for a call-down with that lanky, woman-stealing bastard, that’s all.”

“All right, Butch,” said a calm, commanding voice from the open fly of the tent. “Let’s get thrashing.”

17

Every man in the Bucket of Blood had riveted his attention on the unfolding argument between Butch McDade and Waldo Tate. No one had noticed the two imposing figures now filling the entrance.

At the sound of Fargo’s voice, McDade froze like a hound on point. Waldo, however, immediately turned away and lost himself among the other men.

Fargo’s Henry was at sling-arms around his left shoulder. Buckshot held Patsy at the ready, watching the assembly with hawk eyes that stayed in constant motion. He remained in the entrance when Fargo took a few steps inside.

“Sounds like you’re a big he-bear on the scrap,” Fargo said amiably. “Me, I’m the kind of hombre likes to accommodate a jasper who’s eager for a frolic. You
are
eager for a frolic, ain’t you, Butchie Boy?”

Butch finally looked at him, his face twisted with insolence. “Fargo, you’re a damn fool. You see how many armed men are in this tent? You just strolled right into the lion’s den.”

“That’s the only way to beard him. So I’m yellow
and
a fool? I’ll give you the fool part—every man has a fool up his sleeve now and again. But by ‘yellow’ do you mean that I have a liver condition?”

Butch averted his eyes. “I think you know what it means.”

“I do, yeah. But I guess it don’t matter how much you insult me now—I came here to kill you, and since a man can only die once, you can have at me all you want. It’s the least I can do for a blowhard, white-livered, murdering son of a bitch who’s seen his last sunrise.”

A few men looked restless and on the verge of some action. Buckshot noticed this and spoke up.

“My name is Buckshot Brady, and this here is my gal Patsy Plumb. I learned my lore from the Taos Trappers, Kit Carson, and Uncle Dick Wootton, and I am a voracious, man-killing son of a bitch! I’ve kilt Utes, Apaches, Sioux, Crows, Cheyennes, Mexers, dagos, frogs, limeys, and that’s just my Sunday list. I’m plumb savagerous and mean when my dander is up, and the first one a you little sissy bitches what goes for her gun”—here Buckshot wagged the barrel of his double-ten—“is gonna get a meat-bag fulla blue whistlers.”

“Don’t let that mouthy ’breed buffalo you, boys,” McDade said in a tight, nervous voice. “Nor Fargo neither. We got the numbers on ’em!”

“Seems to me, Butchie Boy,” Fargo said, “like you’re trying to weasel out of that call-down you wanted so bad. Never mind them—this is
our
waltz.”

“You got no dicker with me, Fargo. I ain’t never done nothing to you.”

“Opinions vary on that. I count at least three times you tried to get my life over. One up north in a cowardly ambush; the second time six days ago when I first rode into these parts; the third time yesterday when your greaser buddy tried to add my ears to his necklace. But it was a fellow named Danny Appling who sent me down here.”

“Hell, I don’t know nobody by that name.”

Fargo nodded, smiling his smile that wasn’t really a smile. “You don’t know his widow or kids, neither, but you killed him just the same. Cut him down in cold blood. That account has to be settled.”

“Christ, man, there was three of us rode up there. How do you know which one of us—”

“It’s all one.” Fargo cut him off. “A fish rots from the top, and that raid was your idea. You sowed the wind, and now you’ll reap the whirlwind.”

While all this went forward, Waldo Tate had discreetly been moving through the crowd of men, angling behind Fargo. Buckshot had seen him, too. The moment Waldo’s hand tickled his canvas holster, Buckshot shouted, “H’ar now! You men standing next to or behind that back-shooter Waldo Tate best make a big hole around him on account I aim to put one
through
him.”

The men cleared away from Tate as if he carried plague.

Waldo went pale as new gypsum. “Now, just hold your horses, Brady! My hand to God, I was only—”

“Chuck the flap-jaw, you egg-sucking groat. I seen what you was up to.”

“You can’t just gun me down, man!”

“Fargo wouldn’t, maybe. He’s a
noble
son of a bitch, and he’d likely give you an even chance. Me, I’m just a stone cold, mother-lovin’ killer.”

“I got gold, Brady, plenty of it! I can make you rich! I—”

Buckshot thumbed one hammer back with a menacing click, and Waldo fell silent abruptly as if he’d been slugged.

“You’re a back-shooting coward,” Buckshot pronounced in his gravelly voice. “Danny was just workin’ hard to feed his family when you scum buckets burned him down. Then you three bushwhackers turned your guns on me and Fargo.”

“He ain’t stupid enough to kill you, Waldo,” Butch scoffed. “He knows his ass is grass if he does.”

“Yeah,” Waldo said, grasping at this straw, “you best think about it because—”

Patsy’s right muzzle spat flame and double-aught buckshot, the blast deafening inside the tent. Tate’s entrails splatted in a greasy spray onto the wall of the tent behind him, his corpse flying head-over-handcart. Before the men could recover from their shock, Buckshot broke open the breach and inserted a shell into the empty chamber.

“Good God-a-gorry!” someone exclaimed.

“That’s two down, Butchie Boy,” Fargo said, his eyes hard as blue gems now. “You’re the last one. Get coiled and throw down.”

“Now, just a goddamn minute here, Fargo,” McDade blustered. “You’re on
my
range now. I don’t hafta—”

“Shut your filthy sewer and keep it shut. I’m making the medicine around here and you’re taking it. You just made your brag how you wanted a draw-shoot with me. So here’s your big chance to make your boys proud—quit mealymouthing and throw down.”

“Nerve up, damn it, alla yous!” Butch shouted to his men.
“The hell you waiting for? We got the numbers on these bastards—smoke them down!”

“Fargo’s right,” spoke up Cliff, the snowbird who had challenged Jenny at the knife fight yesterday. “You got it bass-ackward, Butch. You’re the one’s been spoiling for a cartridge session with Fargo, not us. Well, there he stands.”

“Throw down,” Fargo repeated.

“Holy Hannah!” someone exclaimed. “Butch just pissed himself!”

“Jerk it back,” Fargo ordered. “This is the final reckoning, McDade.”

As if finally realizing cowardice wouldn’t save his bacon, a transformation came over McDade’s brutally handsome face. Determined confidence washed out the craven fear, for after all McDade had every right to trust in his skills as a shootist. That skill had left a trail of graves from Missouri to California, and besides, for all his notoriety, Skye Fargo was not ballyhooed as a gunslinger. All the guts in the world couldn’t trump superior speed in the draw.

“All right, crusader,” he replied, pushing away from the plank bar and coiling, “I been packing heaven full of fresh souls for a long time, but there’s always room for one more.”

A slight movement of McDade’s neck muscles was all the warning Fargo needed.
Here’s the fandango,
he told himself just before McDade made his play and Fargo filled his fist with blue steel.

It was over in a few thundering heartbeats, but for Fargo the critical moments of life-or-death action always had a dreamlike slowness to them as if they were happening underwater. He became both participant and observer simultaneously.

The observer in him realized, heart sinking, that Butch McDade was faster, his walnut-gripped Remington clearing leather an eyeblink before Fargo’s Colt. But the participant in him remained confident and sure of purpose when a nerve-rattled McDade bucked his trigger, the bullet tracking wide and taking a couple of fringes off Fargo’s shirt.

The participant knew, instinctively, that the easy, center-of-mass shot might allow McDade a second chance to score
a kill. Instead, Fargo drilled a slug through McDade’s forehead and into his brain. Unlike in the melodramatic fiction of the Wild West, McDade did not fling his arms wide and stagger a few steps forward. He simply flopped straight down as if his bones had turned to water, toes scratching a few times as his nervous system protested its sudden destruction.

Wisps of smoke still snake-danced from the Colt’s muzzle as Fargo leathered his shooter. The men in the tent stood as still as pillars of salt, staring at their dead leader.

“Boys,” Fargo announced, “I’m one to take the easy way when I can, but I’ll keep up the killing way if that’s what you choose. Face it—it’s all over for Hangtown. That fire last night—I’ll guarandamntee that red aborigines somewhere saw it, and they’ll be riding here soon to see what gives. The paleface can usually travel across their land, but they draw the line at settlements of any kind. And with the ring of brush gone, they
will
spot this place. You hang around here too long and your dander will end up hanging from a coup stick.”

Fargo let that sink in, then added, “I have a message for you from Jenny. Any man who agrees to ride out from this place by noon today gets three hundred dollars in gold and silver. That’s a damn good trail stake.”

“She’s got more than that,” a voice protested.

“She has,” Fargo agreed. “But the rest will be divided up among the prisoners, who lost everything when you boys kidnapped them, and Danny Appling’s widow.”

Cliff hooted. “Say, I know Little Britches—
she
never came up with a plan like that. That woman is tight as Dick’s hatband.”

Fargo grinned. “Let’s just say I helped her come to Jesus.”

“I can’t speak for the rest,” Cliff said, “but it sounds jake to me. A bunch of us was planning on lighting a shuck out of here anyhow. These diggings are used up.”

Many of the others chorused assent.

“All right,” Fargo said. “You’ll be paid off at the corral. But every man hops his own horse and takes only his own tack. Me and Buckshot have killed about ten of you, and the dead men’s horses and leather remain behind.”

“What about their weapons?”

“Take ’em.”

“Hey, Fargo!” one of them called out. “Didja notice that Butch shucked out his six-gun before you did?”

Fargo glanced at the corpse. “I did. Of the two of us, he was the faster draw. But I scored the first hit, and in a gunfight that’s all that really matters.”

18