Nevada Vipers' Nest (3 page)

“So you're Skye Fargo?” Sitch McDougall said when the two tightly trussed men were alone. “The hombre the ink slingers call the savage angel?”

“Looks like I'm soon to be the
late
Skye Fargo. I wouldn't mind it so much if I'd had me a woman recently. I hate like hell to die horny.”

“
Damn
these ants!” Sitch complained. “Say, speaking of women—why did that greasy-haired bastard Scully ask you about one earlier?”

“That's got me treed,” Fargo said. “But he wasn't just shooting at rovers—I did see a woman, a real looker, too, though I only caught a glance of her. Spotted her just about a couple hundred yards from the massacre site, hiding in the boulders. Her dress was covered with blood, so I'm figuring she must have escaped in the dark.”

“Hunh. Didja talk to her?”

“You might say that. But the conversation was cut short when she took a shot at me.”

“I thought I heard a shot, but I was still numb from what I was seeing.”

“She took off running, and I'm hoping she followed my advice and went to Carson City. Otherwise, she won't have a snowball's chance of surviving.”

Sitch cursed the ants again. “Fargo, I've come across my share of cutthroat bastards since I joined Dr. Geary's medicine show in Saint Louis and headed west. But this bunch under Scully could scare the devil out of hell.”

“Yeah, they're a sweet outfit, all right. Did you notice that ferret face wears a human ear as a watch charm?”

“I wondered what that wrinkled piece of leather was.”

It was autumn and a sudden moaning gust of cold wind added to Fargo's misery. A raft of clouds sent dark moon shadows sliding across Carson Valley. For several minutes both men were alone with their gloomy thoughts. Then:

“Fargo?”

“Yeah?”

“With our final reckoning coming in the morning, you think we should . . . you know, pray or something? I got plenty of sins on my head.”

“If you were Bible-raised, go right ahead. I'm just a heathen.”

“Think they'll at least bury us?”

Fargo grunted. “Sure, when the world grows honest. Face it, Sitch—unless we somehow escape, Scully is right. We'll end up as buzzard shit.”

“Thanks for gilding the lily,” Sitch replied sarcastically.

“Don't ask the question if you can't stomach the answer. I'm no sunshine peddler.”

“It's prob'ly for the best anyhow. Burying me would likely just put me six feet closer to hell.”

A few more minutes passed in gloomy silence. Fargo's ropes were so tight that he could barely even flex his muscles, and the ants were playing hell with him, their bites like fiery pinpoints. At least the late-night chill dulled the painful bites somewhat.

“
Can
we somehow escape?” Sitch asked in a tone laced with desperation.

“I'm cogitating on that, old son. So far I've come up with nothing but the sniffles.”

“I read a nickel novel once called
Skye Fargo, Indian Slayer
. In that one, you escaped the jaws of death over and over. You even escaped from a tipi surrounded by dozens of armed Apaches—you tunneled out with your bare hands. Did that really happen?”

Fargo shook his head in disgust. “Hell, Sitch, you won't find Apaches living in a tipi—they sleep in wickiups or jacals or mostly in caves or behind stone windbreaks because they're usually on the run. That oughta tell you how much these word merchants know.”

Fargo fell silent, noticing a shadow moving slowly toward the two prisoners. Perhaps Scully was returning to play a little more thump-thump while he still had the chance.

The shadow took on human form as the clouds blew away from the full moon, and Fargo recognized Duffy Beckman with Fargo's Arkansas toothpick in his left hand. His right hand held the Henry, and Fargo's gun belt was draped over his shoulder. McDougall's harmonica pistol was tucked into his belt.

Maybe there
are
miracles, Fargo thought, hope surging within him.

Without saying a word, Duffy grounded all the weapons except the razor-honed toothpick. He made short work of cutting both men free. They briskly rubbed their arms and legs to restore normal circulation. Then Fargo buckled on his gun belt, tucked the Arkansas toothpick into its boot sheath and picked up the Henry—he welcomed its reassuring weight in his hand.

“Your horses are over in the rope corral,” Duffy whispered. “I've already tacked them.”

“Duffy,” Fargo whispered back as all three men headed toward the corral on cat feet, “I ain't got the words. But you can't hang around here after this. You spoke up for me, and they'll put the crusher on you.”

“I
ain't
hanging around,” he replied. “My horse is tacked, too.”

The Ovaro whiffled softly, greeting Fargo by pushing his nose into his chest. Fargo booted his long gun and stuck his foot into the stirrup. He was about to step up and over when disaster struck: one of the other horses, spooked by the sudden proximity of men whose smell it didn't recognize, rose up on its hind legs, neighing loudly.

This set the rest of the horses off, and within seconds the unholy racket had raised a shout of alarm in the camp.

Fargo cursed but reacted swiftly. He snatched his knife back out and slashed through the rope holding the horses in.

“Hi-
ya
!” he shouted, unlimbering his Colt and firing several shots into the air. “Hi-ya, hii-
ya
!”

The rataplan of hooves reverberated through the night as the mounts scattered in every direction. But by the time the men had mounted and calmed their own nervous horses, a withering fusillade of gunfire erupted from the camp as the miners hurried toward the corral.

“Make it hot for 'em!” Fargo shouted as bullets snapped past his ears with a blowfly drone.

He tugged his Henry from its saddle scabbard, tossed the butt plate into his shoulder socket, and started working the lever rapidly, aiming toward the approaching muzzle flashes. Sitch fired his cumbersome harmonica pistol as rapidly as he could, and Duffy made his long Jennings rifle sing. First one, then a second miner cried out in anguish as they were struck, and the advance halted as the miners sought cover.

Fargo led the desperate escape, heading west toward the forested foothills of the Sierra Nevada. A chance bullet caught his hat and spun it off his head, but Fargo caught it in midair. The three riders disappeared into the moonlit night, and despite being a heathen, Fargo felt the indescribable relief of a damned soul escaping from hell.

•   •   •

Fargo always tried to avoid riding after dark, especially at a good clip. Horses were most vulnerable in their long, slender legs, and rocks that were easily avoided in daylight could permanently cripple a horse at night. Knowing the red sashes wouldn't likely retrieve their mounts until well after daylight, he reined in at a tree-sheltered hollow only about four miles west of Rough and Ready.

“Hell,” Sitch McDougall protested, “we just made a hot bustout with the odds against us a million to one. Why'n't we just keep on going while our horses are fresh? If we stay in these parts, we'll just be sticking our heads in a noose.”

“Who died and made you boss?” Fargo retorted as he dismounted and began to pull his saddle.

“But—”

“But me no buts, card cheat. Do as you please. We ain't joined at the hip. I'm aiming to settle some scores and get some questions answered. You think I'm gonna let some blowhard son of a bitch beat the dog shit out of me, railroad me to a hanging and then just walk away from it?”

“Seems to me a sane man would be grateful just to be alive.”

“Or a coward,” Fargo said in a pointed tone. He turned to Duffy, faintly visible in the silver-white moonlight.

“Duffy, you saved our bacon, and I for one am beholden. I won't forget this.”

“Skye, you saved plenty of us back at Buckskin Joe when that scum bucket Ike Perry turned his rented thugs on us. 'Sides, you two actually done me a favor by prodding me into action. For months now I been meaning to light a shuck for the gold camps still showing color up in the Sierra.”

“Slim pickings at Rough and Ready?”

Duffy was busy ground-tethering his coyote dun gelding. “Well, there's that. All of us are just barely making enough to keep the wolf from the door—not that we
got
a door.”

“It's not usual,” Fargo said, “for miners to stick so long where there's no profits.”

“Well, see, we had what you might call an enticement. There's been this rumor, for a long time now, that there's a rich vein of silver somewheres around Rough and Ready.”

“Yeah, I've heard that, too. Hell, Duffy, you know you can't set stock in mining-camp rumors,” Fargo said as he began rubbing the Ovaro down with an old feed sack. “Look how Coronado and the rest of those dons listened to some scuttlebutt from Indians and wasted their lives searching for El Dorado.”

“This ain't just the usual bubbling hearsay, Skye. That fellow you and McDougall found slaughtered—Clement Hightower. He's a college-trained mining engineer. He swears there's a fortune in that vein.”

“Well, college trained or no, he could still be full of sheep dip.”

“I s'pose. But, Skye, these young mining engineers today are pretty sharp.”

“That's true,” Fargo conceded. “I met a couple of them up on the Comstock, and they know their oats. But if he knows about a fortune in silver, why didn't he mine it?”

“On account he ran out of money and couldn't find any backers. But he has—well,
had
—him a family out in Oregon and had to get home and take care of them. A while back he sent a letter to the
Territorial Enterprise
, a newspaper up in Virginia City. He swore he could find that silver if somebody would stake him.”

“So you boys at Rough and Ready pooled your money and sent for him?”

“That we did. And now somebody has slaughtered him and his family.”

Fargo mulled all of this for a minute.

“Duffy,” he said, “can you think of any reason why Mike Scully and his toad-eaters would have wiped out Hightower and his family?”

“You think he did?”

“Well, I did think that, yeah. But it doesn't make sense if Hightower was the key to the mint.”

“No, it don't,” Duffy agreed. “But far as asking me if Scully is low enough to do it, hell yes. He's the main reason I decided to light a shuck to the Sierra. Him and the rest of the sashes has always been pricks. 'Bout a month ago, though, he started swaggerin' around and actin' all biggity, like he owned the whole damn camp.”

“A month ago,” Fargo repeated. “Was that after you fellas wrote to Hightower?”

“Yep.”

“Interesting,” Fargo said.

“Look, Duffy,” Sitch cut in, “I can't tell you how much I appreciate what you did for me and Fargo. And you've got the right idea—get the hell out of here before Scully and his minions do the hurt dance on you. But, Fargo, you're just looking for your own grave if you hang around here. Why not just return to your express rider job and leave this thing alone?”

“Mind your own beeswax,” Fargo snapped. “That fine-looking sorrel you're riding—you boosted it, didn't you?”

“From a livery in Virginia City,” Sitch admitted. “But, Christ, I had four pissed-off gamblers looking to buck me out in smoke.”

“Not only a card cheat but a damn horse thief. And I should take advice from a scut like you? Besides, you're forgetting something. Scully and his maggots are going to spread the word far and wide that the two of us murdered women and children. Sure, they ain't the law and it won't have any official weight. But this is the frontier, full of hotheads and hair-trigger idiots who thrive on Dame Rumor. Either we clear our names or we live in caves the rest of our born days.”

Even in the grainy darkness, Fargo saw McDougall's shoulders slump. He plopped down on a log. “Hell, I didn't think of that. All right, deal me in, but you're calling the shots.”

“I always call the shots,” Fargo assured him, “and I'm damned if I'm dealing you in. You'd be as useful to me as tits on a boar hog.”

Fargo turned to Duffy again. “Duffy, there's a woman who escaped the attack. Could Scully have known about her before that family was slaughtered?”

“He could have, sure, if Hightower mentioned her in his letter.”

“You didn't read the letter?”

“I can't read, Skye, but it wouldn't a mattered nohow on account Scully got the letter in Carson City and didn't read it to nobody. He just told us the Hightower family was on their way out. We had to build a cabin for the bunch of them, so maybe Clement said who was coming.”

Fargo nodded. At first he'd been damned near convinced Scully and his pack of rabid curs perpetrated that massacre. But based on everything Duffy had told him, it just didn't make sense.

“I don't know who that woman is,” Fargo mused aloud, “but if she's alive, I have to locate her. She could bust this deal wide open. Well, we best turn in.”

“Damn straight,” Duffy said. “Tomorrow at first light I'm gonna light out full bore for the Sierra.”

Fargo took some comfort in the proximity of the rugged Sierra Nevada. In places it rose to an altitude of twelve thousand feet, and Fargo knew that range so well he could elude any pursuers there if need be. But hiding among snowy peaks wouldn't clear his name or answer the perplexing questions gnawing at him.

“Where we gonna sleep?” McDougall complained.

Duffy was astounded. “Where? Ain't you never slept under the stars before?”

“Not outside. I had a nice comfortable pallet in the back of Dr. Geary's medicine wagon.”

It wasn't too dark for Duffy and Fargo to exchange a quick glance.