Six-Gun Gallows (25 page)

The boys were fairly bursting with pride at such praise. Lorena hugged each of them, her eyes filming with tears of joy at their safe return.

“Say . . . where's Cindy?” Dub asked, adding hastily: “And Krissy?”

“They walked the five miles to the Westphal place. Boys, I've been thinking—Skye is right. We're too far west too early. The Westphals are giving up and heading back to the States. They've invited me, Krissy, and Cindy to go with them. I sent the girls over to tell them we will. It's just not safe for women out here. I can't tell you boys—you young men—what to do. But I pray God the family will stay together.”

Dub and Nate exchanged a long, uncertain glance.

“Do you mean to tell me,” Fargo said to them sternly, “that two experienced plainsmen like you are going to let your mother and two young ladies cross the Great American Desert without your protection? The two of you alone are worth a squad of cavalry.”

“'Course we ain't,” Dub said. “Look what happened to Cindy.”

“Then it's settled,” Lorena said, beaming. “Now ride over to the Westphal place and bring Krissy and Cindy home. Neither of those girls has decent shoes.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Fargo!” Nate called as the brothers rode out. “Good luck up north!”

“Stay frosty!” Dub added, and Fargo grinned.

“So you're on your way, Skye?” Lorena said.

“Reckon so. I owe the army some work.”

“Well, at least come in for a glass of applejack before you go.”

“I wouldn't mind cutting the dust,” Fargo agreed, following the shapely widow into the barn. One corner served as a kitchen, with an oilcloth-covered table, a hand pump, and crossed-stick shelves. Fargo took a seat on a keg while she poured the applejack from a crockery jug, her unrestrained russet hair brushing his hand.

“You know,” she said with a mischievous smile, “after you and Krissy went out to the bathing pool? That girl walked around in a daze for almost a week.”

Fargo choked on his applejack.

“Oh, I'm not angry,” she hastened to add. “Just envious of these young girls. I know this is bold and forward talk, Skye, but you're leaving and—and it's been five years since I've felt a man against my bare skin. I've missed that feeling. But surely men like you don't look twice at worn-out dish rags like me. Why would you?”

“I've looked more than twice at you, Lorena. And I don't see any dishrag. Just fine linen cloth.”

“You mean . . . you'd be willing?”

“Willing, able—” He stood up. “And as you can see, ready.”

She stared at the impressive tent in his trousers. “My, are you ready! No wonder Krissy daydreams for hours.”

Fargo took her hand and led her toward the beds. “Nothing against these lovely twenty-year-olds,” he told her. “But there's nothing quite like a
woman
.”

 

 

 

“More trouble already,” Skye Fargo muttered to his horse, “and we haven't even got there yet. Bad omen.”

The lean, tall, hard-knit man clad in fringed buckskins sat his stallion at the summit of South Pass, brass field glasses trained on a crude camp in the center of narrow Sweetwater Valley below him. Hills surrounded the valley on all sides with magnificent white mountain peaks like spires ranging in a curtain-fold pattern behind them.

For the moment, however, Fargo ignored the natural beauty of western Wyoming, the Indian name he preferred for this remote corner of the vast Nebraska Territory. Instead, his lips a grim, determined slit visible in a close-cropped brown beard, he watched the sadistic scene unfolding below at the edge of the camp.

Four or five bully-boy types—wearing their guns below their hips in the style of stone-cold killers—were tying an elderly man to a tree. The victim was scrawny and his unhealthy skin looked like yellowed ivory.

Fargo gave a long, fluming sigh. “There goes our big plan for riding in unnoticed,” he told his black-and-white pinto. “Good chance they plan to kill that old boy if we don't stop it. Gee up!”

Fargo cursed the luck. He had been paid generously to solve a mystery for a man who was literally dying of grief—a man he respected greatly. He had hoped to join the community below and blend in. That seemed unlikely now.

He headed for a crude trail, just ahead, that led down into the valley. He was at the southern end of the Wind River Range where it opened on to South Pass, the crucial gateway discovered by Jim Bridger that opened up the Far West to the Oregon Trail.

Here at the summit, the pass was an almost level saddle about four miles wide from north to south. Beyond the pass, to the north, tiers of rock ledges, stretches of pine, and pockets of gray sage led to the foothills and the snow-peaked mountains beyond. To the south, Fargo spotted large boulders where migrating pilgrims had chiseled their names. But it was well into September now, too late to clear the mountains before the snowfall, and there was no sign of the canvas-covered bone-shakers making the transmontane journey.

“Step easy, old campaigner,” Fargo advised his Ovaro as he tugged rein and they started down the only trail into the valley. He knew from experience it was just a sandy and rocky trace with washouts that had to be detoured. At one point it turned into an unstable landslide slope, but the Ovaro, sure-footed as a mule, got them across safely.

Soon Fargo didn't need his spy glasses to see what was going on. The camp, while sprawling, was still far from being a town. Tents, log huts, and several flimsy structures of rough-milled lumber were scattered along a wide, wagon-rutted street. Good building material was scarce thanks to a lack of sawmills, and roofing was as simple as old vegetable cans flattened into shingles.

However, one new house of obviously imported milled lumber stood above the camp on a grassy bench.

There's where the king coyote lives,
Fargo told himself.
There's one heap big chief in every roach pit.

“I said talk out, goddamn it!” shouted a thickset bull of a man with a face hard as granite. “Talk out or I'll peel your back like an onion.”

The granite-faced man snapped a long blacksnake whip, opening a bloody crease in the prisoner's back. He loosed a yawp of pain.

“I don't know what you're talking about!” the elderly man protested.

“Like hob you don't, you milk-kneed school man. Tell us about the box.”

Fargo gigged the Ovaro forward. The granite-faced man with the whip wore a bright red sash around his waist. Two ivory-handled .36 caliber Colt 1851 Navy revolvers were tucked in, butts forward. One of the four men watching also wore two guns in cutaway holsters, a pair of .38 Colt revolvers. A man out west, Fargo knew, could wear one gun or none. But two were the mark of either a grandstander or a killer.

“Hold on,” Fargo called out as red sash raised the whip.

Hard-bitten eyes watched Fargo as he hauled back on the reins.

“Well, look-a-here, boys,” red sash said, his tone mocking.

“A true-blue, blown-in-the-bottle frontiersman! Jasper shits in the woods, hanh? They call you Boone or Crockett, stranger?”

“Wearin' buckskins with bloody fringes,” said a man with a string-bean build. “Must be Joe Shit the Ragman, can't even afford white man's duds. Betcha he's gone to the blanket, got his-self a squaw.”

Fargo ignored the others, watching the apparent leader of this pack of curs. “This man's too old to go under the lash.”

“Brash as a government mule, ain't he?” the man with the whip said to this companions. “Stranger, it's no say-so of yours what we do with this white-livered pus bag. You one of them mushy-headed do-gooders?”

“No. But once, at Cherry Creek mining camp, an old gent who looks just like him cut a Cheyenne arrow point out of my back.”

String bean: “Well, this old soak ain't him, squaw man.”

“It's true that I imbibe infrequent potations from a bottle,” protested the scrawny prisoner, “but I'm certainly no drunk.”

“Shut your piehole,” red sash snapped. “You don't just drink—you're a pipe through the floor.”

He looked at Fargo. “Who asked you to shoot off your chin, stranger?”

“I'm just trying to help the old gent out, that's all.”

“Yeah? Well who are you, and what the hell you doing here? Men don't just end up in Sweetwater Valley by happenchance.”

“I got a brother missing,” Fargo lied. “He's a trapper like me. We were s'posed to meet at Sitwell's Creek east of here, but he never showed. He was running traps along the Sweetwater River, so I decided to give the area a squint.”

“Trapper, huh? Beaver's been trapped out for twenty years.”

Fargo nodded. “We go for red and silver fox. The pelts sell high back in Saint Louis.”

The leader moved a few paces to get a better look under the wide brim of Fargo's black plainsman's hat. “Say . . . your map is familiar. You ever been to Silver City in New Mexico Territory?”

The question jogged Fargo's memory too—the speaker was the notorious Jack Slade. But Fargo continued to lie with a poker face. He shook his head. “Did some trapping near Taos, is all.”

String bean pointed at Fargo's Arkansas toothpick. “That pig sticker in your boot ain't worth a Chinese whisker around here. You're among gun hands now, squaw man.”

Fargo turned his head and looked at the man from calm, fathomless eyes. “I've been keeping accounts on you, old son. Your tongue swings way too loose.”

“I didn't catch you name,” Slade pressed.

“John Doe.”

“You're hanging by a thread, stranger. Before you start rocking the boat, you better take the temperature of the water. Clay!”

“Yo!”

A surly-mouthed young man whose jet-black hair was slicked back with axle grease stepped closer. He was the one, Fargo noticed, wearing the pair of .38 Colt revolvers.

“John Doe, meet Clay Munro,” Slade said. “He was raised from birth to eat six-shooters. Clay, give Mr. Doe here a little preview of what's in store for him if he don't light a shuck outta this valley.”

Two bullet-riddled oyster cans sat in the rutted street about seventy yards away. Munro slapped leather with both hands and opened fire, one gun trained on each can as he emptied the wheels. Both cans rolled and bounced, not one bullet missing its target.

“Can you tie that, John Doe?” Slade demanded.

“What's the difference?” Fargo replied. “Oyster cans don't shoot back.”

“You're a hard customer, eh?”

“I don't talk about what I am. I just do what I have to.”

By now several of the thugs were shuffling their feet in a way Fargo recognized—they were nerving up to kill him. All his plans to slip into the valley quietly were smoke behind him. Now he had to take the bull by the horns, and quick.

“His tough horseshit talk don't fool me none,” String bean said, his mouth curling into a sneer. “Squaw boy here is just whistling past the graveyard. I'm gonna bore him through right now. And I get first dibs on that Henry rifle in his saddle boot.”

“Dibs on the stallion,” Clay Munro said.

Fargo's lake blue eyes watched String bean, unblinking. “Let's clarify this point. Are you threatening to kill me?”

“Goddamn straight I am, buckskin boy. You're about to buck out.”

“Jesse,” the red-sashed leader cut in, “ease off. I got a hunch I know who this gazabo is.”

“Don't matter to me if he's the Queen of England. I'm sending this bastard across the mountains.”

“Well, we can't have that now, can we?” Fargo said almost cheerfully.

Quicker than thought, Fargo filled his hand with blue steel and felt the Colt jump. His bullet opened a neat hole in Jesse's forehead, and the corpse flopped hard to the ground like a sack of mail.

“Well, for sweet Jesus!” exclaimed the prisoner tied to the tree.

“Clay!” the leader shouted when the young target shooter's hands started for his guns. “I know who this jasper is. His name's Skye Fargo—better known as the Trailsman.”

All four men stared in slack-jawed idiocy at the lifeless heap, blood still pooling in the dirt.

Fargo had already thumb-cocked the single-action Colt. Wisps of powder smoke still curled from the muzzle. “Anybody else want the balance of these pills? If you do, clear leather.”

Evidently no one did.

“I ain't never heard of no Fargo,” Clay said. “And anyhow, that was cold-blooded murder!”

“You best study up on territorial law, junior,” Fargo advised.

“It's called ‘no duty to retreat.' Any man receiving a direct threat to his life is in immediate danger and can kill in self-defense.”

The kid looked at Slade. “Is that the straight?”

Slade nodded. “ 'Fraid so.”

“Hell, mister, men make threats like that all the time.”

Fargo's lips eased back off his teeth. “Not to me they don't.”

“I pegged you all wrong, Fargo,” Slade admitted. “You're a hard twist, all right.”

“Only when I'm forced to it.”