California Crackdown (13 page)

The man didn’t like being cowed this way. But he obviously had only two choices. Take the humiliation that would come from backing down or fight Fargo. And he was wise enough to know that however many gunfights he’d survived in the past, his luck was about to run out. All of a sudden humiliation didn’t sound so bad. He pulled his hand away from his gun.

The saloon girl sitting nearby in a soiled red dress obviously liked what she saw. Her ruby lips quirked in an inviting smile. She couldn’t be sure if Fargo saw it.

It seemed everyone in the room knew who he was, and everyone in the room seemed to be on the other side. Ten men, plus the bartender.

He’d made it this far. Now he had to get down to business.

At a poker table in the corner, a silver-haired man looked up from his cards and laughed. He looked powerful and very much in control of the room.

Henry Brant. There could be no doubt. And by the looks of this room, it was clear that Henry Brant paid the wages of every man here. He was far more powerful than his daughter.

“Well, well, it seems we have a famous guest in our presence. Fargo, what task brings you to us this fine afternoon? I heard you had moved in with that bunch at Cain’s old mine.”

Fargo stayed close to the batwings. If more guns cleared leather, his only hope was to dive backward and out the door. But before he did, he’d make sure to put a shot or two into Brant.

“I just wanted to meet the man who ordered the killing of my friend Cain Parker and his son.”

A number of hands around the room edged even closer to their guns, but Brant just laughed, holding his hands up in the air in front of him to calm the men. “I had nothing to do with those unfortunate deaths, I can assure you.”

Fargo said nothing in return. He just let Brant’s laugh die off into silence.

Finally, Brant sat a little more upright in his chair and glanced at the cards in front of him. “Now that we have that cleared up, do you mind? You’re interrupting my afternoon poker game.”

“Not at all,” Fargo said, moving one step closer to the door without turning his back on the room. “I just like to know what a man’s face looks like before I kill him. You’ll never know when I’ll be there, Brant. Cain Parker was a good man. He didn’t deserve to die. But you do. Very soon.”

With that, Fargo stepped backward out of the door and to one side just in case anyone got the bright idea to shoot out the batwings at him.

Fargo walked down the street and around the block. He quickly ducked into a hotel lobby and up the staircase to the second floor. He knew that a window at the end of the upstairs hall looked out over the street in front of the Benson Saloon, and that’s exactly where he wanted to be to see what happened next. He figured he wasn’t going to have long to wait.

He was right. Ten minutes later, Brant came out, surrounded by six men.

The white-haired man looked nervous, glancing constantly up and down the busy street as they moved to their horses tied at the hitching posts in front of the saloon. A moment later, Brant and his men were headed out of town at full gallop. More than likely, there wouldn’t be another poker game in the Benson real soon. And that was just fine by Fargo.

And Fargo had delivered the message to Brant that he had wanted to deliver. A man like him, afraid for his life, often made poor decisions. Fargo was counting on Brant to make more than his share of bad ones. And when he learned his daughter was missing, all hell was going to break loose.

But before that happened, it was time for Fargo to let loose a little hell of his own on Brant and his mine.

And with some luck, chase off anyone who really didn’t want to work and die for the man.

The next morning, after a good night’s rest in the guest room of Cain’s big house, Fargo went to visit Sarah Brant. He carried a loaf of bread and a canteen full of water. He didn’t want her dying in there just yet. But the longer she suffered, the happier he would be. You don’t kill a good friend of the Trailsman and not live to regret it.

Walt and another man Fargo didn’t recognize were on guard duty inside the stable. “Has the door been opened?”

“Nope,” Walt said. “They tell me she stopped shouting sometime around midnight.”

“Open it,” Fargo said, “and keep a rifle trained on her.”

Walt removed the board and pushed open the thick door.

The smell coming from the room flooded out and washed over Fargo, making him smile at how she was suffering. She deserved it, every minute of it.

The light from the stable filled the cell and Fargo could see Sarah Brant sitting in one corner, her legs pulled up against her chest.

She looked up at him and blinked. Then she asked softly, “Why did you do this to me?”

“Why did you kill Cain, those other men, and finally Daniel? You know, don’t you, that your boyfriend, Daniel, died sitting in an outhouse, afraid of you, afraid you were coming after him to kill him? And it seems he was right.”

She looked up at Fargo and blinked. “I didn’t know that. I honestly didn’t.”

Fargo laughed. “All the men I’ve talked to said you hired them, you gave the orders.”

“I hired the men,” she said. “My father said I was good at getting the right type of men to work for him. But I didn’t hire them to kill Daniel.” Her voice sounded more like a little girl’s every moment. “I actually loved him. He was like a big puppy around me, and I adored that about him. I hoped to marry him. Why would I kill him?”

With that she broke down crying.

“So you’re saying your father ordered Daniel’s death?” Fargo asked, doubting that the show of tears was real.

“I don’t know,” she said between sobs. “Maybe. Or maybe Kip. I honestly don’t know.”

“Kip? Your driver?”

“My father’s main foreman,” she said, holding back the sobbing a little. “Kip was in love with me too and he hated Daniel, hated him with a passion, and hated me for loving Daniel. My father made Kip go everywhere with me as my personal bodyguard, and more than once I caught him spying on me and Daniel in a private moment.”

Fargo’s stomach twisted hard. Could she actually be telling the truth? More than likely, she was just playinghim to get back at a man who had betrayed her. He glanced at Walt, who just shrugged.

“Thanks for the information, Miss Brant,” Fargo said as he tossed in the loaf of bread. Then he tossed in the canteen and she caught that.

He motioned for Walt to close the door and bar it again.

The door slammed on her scream, muffling it like someone had put a pillow over her face.

Fargo turned to Walt. “Find Kip and bring him to me in the house.”

Thirty minutes later, Walt came back, shaking his head. “No one has seen him since sunrise.”

Fargo wanted to break something. He sure hoped he hadn’t been taken in by Kip. If he had been, Kip would have told Henry Brant where his daughter was and how she was being held. And he would be getting ready to come after her.

“Get Hank and Jim in here as fast as you can. We’ve got to make some defense plans.”

Walt turned and headed out the door at a run. Fargo dropped into a chair in Cain’s dining room. The war was about to start, and it was going to get deadly very fast.

And he didn’t have any idea how to stop it now.

After a quick planning session with Hank, Walt, and Jim, Fargo headed back to the stable with Jim. He opened the door to Sarah Brant’s prison and said clearly and firmly, “Come with me.”

She stood on shaky legs and moved toward the stall door, almost slipping and falling twice before she got into the main stable area.

“Why are you letting me go?” she asked, looking stunned.

“I’m not, really,” Fargo said. “I’m just giving you back to your father to protect for the moment. By tomorrow morning, I expect you to be in Sacramento boarding the first train available going east.”

She stared at him and said nothing, so he went on.

“I want you out of this whole situation. You understand me?”

“Completely,” she said, shivering. “But you still didn’t answer my question.”

He stared into her dark eyes. “Because Daniel and Cain would have wanted me to.”

For a moment she looked confused, then nodded. “You’re right. Thank you. I’ll be on that train and never leave the East Coast again.”

“And you might try to convince your father before you leave that trying to take over the Sharon’s Dream mine is a fool’s mission.”

She quickly mounted the horse and then looked down at Fargo. “My father has never listened to me before. I don’t expect he will now.”

She turned the horse and headed toward her father’s mine, cutting up through the rocks and over the lower part of the ridge instead of going down the road.

“Do you think you bought us some time?” Jim asked from beside Fargo.

“Maybe a little. Depends on if she leaves or not.”

“She’s not leaving,” Jim said.

“She’s not leaving,” Walt agreed.

Fargo watched her disappear over the hill. He wasn’t so sure about that. But it seemed that lately he had been wrong about people a great deal. And that wasn’t like him.

The expected attack from the Brant mine didn’t come that afternoon, so work in the Sharon’s Dream mine went back to normal, with guards doubled on the ridgeline and around the other entrances to the compound.

An hour before sunset, Fargo had gone with Jim high up on the ridge with a spyglass. They had taken turns watching the Brant mine and compound. It seemed like a normal evening down there.

A long time ago, when Cain and Brant still pretended to get along, Jim had visited the Brant mine. He slowly gave Fargo a tour of the compound, where the mine entrance was in relationship to the bunkhouses, how far it was from building to building, approximately how many men were working there. He even had a rough floor plan of the big ranch house that spread along a shallow ridgeline.

From their vantage point high up, Fargo spotted at least a half dozen guards in posts around the compound. But beyond that it looked like normal activity in and out of the mine. There didn’t seem to be any attack being planned at all. And that made no sense. What was he missing?

Fargo studied what he could see of the trail leadingup to the mine entrance on the hillside under them. In fact, the entire mountain they were on was honeycombed with both Sharon’s Dream and Brant’s tunnels.

“How close do you think they are from breaking through into one of our tunnels?” Fargo asked.

“The men haven’t heard anything on any shift,” Jim said. “And trust me, they’re all listening.”

Fargo shook his head. This entire fight, the reason Cain and Daniel were killed, was the gold ore. Brant’s mine was petering out while Sharon’s Dream was still following thick veins. Everything came back to the gold. Brant had to be going after the gold first. He didn’t care about the buildings or the people, only the gold. He would go after the gold first, the miners second.

Fargo turned from the spyglass to look at Jim. “Gold mine tunnels have a lot of false lead tunnels and short side tunnels, am I right?”

“You’re right. A number of them of varied lengths.”

“Have you checked all those dead-end tunnels?”

Jim nodded. “They’re all boarded off.”

“Easy to break through boards,” Fargo said as he watched yet another man carry a large wooden case up toward the mine. It looked like an ammunition case.

Jim said nothing and after a few seconds, Fargo again looked away from the spyglass and at Jim.

“It’s possible they’re coming that way,” Jim said after a moment. “Two of those side tunnels are long and go toward the Brant mine.”

“Can you blow the entrances to those side tunnels closed without bringing down the entire mine?”

Jim nodded. “We can, and we have to do it
now
.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Fargo said, standing a half beat behind Jim and following him at a near run down the ridge.

One hour later they had the mine empty and a team starting to blow the side tunnels, all of them that could hook up with any Brant tunnel.

Twenty minutes before midnight, Jim came out of the entrance to the mine, his face covered in dark dust. Fargo was standing there with a dozen others, waiting, watching.

“We got them all blown shut. You were right. We heard voices down one tunnel right before we blew it. Now it would take a dozen men a week to open any of them back up, and if they tried, we’d hear them.”

“Good,” Fargo said. “Now to get to the gold, they have to come at us where we can see them. Have everyone standing by for an attack at dawn.”

Fargo turned and headed into the dark.

“Where are you going?” Jim asked.

Without turning around, Fargo said, “I’m going to try to reduce the numbers on the other side a little. No matter what you hear, stay here and be ready for a possible attack at dawn. Brant and his men are coming to take your mine away from you.”

“Not likely,” Fargo heard Jim mutter behind him.

Fargo didn’t want to tell him that it
was
likely. Very likely. The coming fight was between miners and the professional fighters and gunhands Brant had hired. It wouldn’t be a fair fight at all unless Fargo could change the odds a little. And he had about eight hours of darkness to do just that.

Slowly, silently, Fargo worked his way over and around the rocks toward the guard positions set up by Brant around his compound. Fargo had no real idea how long it took him to get to them, but once he crossed the ridgeline and was on Brant’s side of the hill, he avoided looking into the lights of the Brant mine compound to make sure his night vision stayed as good as it could be. They had the place lit up with at least three dozen lanterns hanging from poles and the sides of buildings.

Fargo found the first guard right where he had spotted him from high on the mountain. He had his carbine across his lap and was sipping on a cup of something that smelled of beef.