New Mexico Madman (9781101612644) (8 page)

8

Fargo's merriment, however, faded quickly as the coach rolled inevitably closer to the prime ambush region of the bosque.

“There's one more swing station before Los Pinos?” he asked Booger.

“Aye, but it's at Luna Bluff, Trailsman. And that means we hafta clear the hull damn Bosque Grande first—with a stale team that's already wore down to the nubs.”

Fargo nodded, catching his drift. If trouble struck, they couldn't count on outrunning it.

“Addison Steele ordered me to stick with the coach at all times,” Fargo said, thinking out loud. “But either we bend with the breeze or we break.”

“Spell that out plain. I'm a simple son of a bitch and no boy for riddles.”

“Lomax's hired guns need to kill me first. That blast last night at San Marcial was meant for me—they could easy have planted the charge at the back of the station if they just wanted to kill Kathleen. And that anonymous letter she got sounds to me like Lomax means to kill her himself on June nineteenth.”

“Why, you glory-grabbing piker! They need to kill old Booger, too, happens they want to harm his passengers.”

Fargo grinned. “Believe me, old son, I count on that. That's why I told your boss I would accept no driver but you. But see, it ain't likely that Lomax's dirt workers know that I've got a one-man army whipping this stage. To them, you're just a big bastard who blocks out the sun—an easy target they can't miss when they decide to shoot you. Assuming even a buffalo gun could drop you, which I doubt.”

Fargo paused when the stage topped a low rise and he spotted the vast bosque, spread out like a dark painting before them, the Rio Grande looping through it. He had once contracted as a fast-messenger rider for the army in these parts and knew it was a bushwhacker's paradise.

“So let's
give
them me,” Fargo resumed. “I'm gonna ride on ahead and let them have at it.”

Booger mulled this, then nodded. “Needs must when the devil drives, eh? And the devil
is
driving this rig. Old Booger will make them dry-gulchers the sorriest sons of bitches in seventeen states if they come at this rig.”

“I'll leave the double-ten,” Fargo said, “so you'll have plenty of firepower. If I trusted that damn Ashton, I'd put him up here on the box with you—he looks like he could handle himself in a frolic.”

Booger spat tobacco on the rump of the offside wheel horse. “Let's not and say we did. I'd sooner have a smallpox blanket wrapped around me. I'll wager a dollar to a doughnut hole that oily-tongue sharper is on Lomax's payroll.”

“I wonder,” Fargo said, leaving it there. “See you in hell, pard.”

He grabbed his Henry and tossed down his saddle and bridle. Then he swung off the box while the stage was still rolling at an easy pace. Fargo easily kept up as he untied the Ovaro.

“Where are you going?” Kathleen Barton challenged, poking her head outside.

“Crazy,” Fargo called back. “Wanna come?”

“But you're supposed to be my bodyguard!”

“It's a body well worth guarding,” he assured her as the coach rolled ahead of him.

She flushed with indignation and Fargo laughed, tossing her a two-finger salute.

* * *

“Say, chummies, this spot is perfect,” Russ Alcott announced. “Damn fine cover and far enough off the stage road that we can make it to our horses if Cleo misses and Fargo comes after us.”

The three outlaws had reached a tangled deadfall in the dense bosque. Gnarled cottonwoods, usually found only in isolated patches along western rivers, had grown in profusion along this stretch of the Rio Grande. Over the decades, America's heartiest tree—the pine—had filled in the open spaces between the cottonwoods' spreading branches.

“I ain't gonna miss,” Cleo declared with the conviction of a love-struck groom saying “I do.” He pointed east toward the narrow stage road. “Hell, that ain't but a hunnert yards or so, with a nice opening so's I can lay my bead. Old Patsy Plumb here”—he patted the hardwood stock of his carbine—“is gonna sink a big air shaft right through Fargo's skull.”

The trio had left their horses hobbled along the river bank behind them.

“Even if Cleo misses,” Spider Winslowe said, “Fargo ain't likely stupid enough to come at us, Russ, and just let us shoot him to rag tatters. Even afoot it's rough slogging to move through these trees. And he can't spot us anyhow.”

“After the way that lanky fucker foxed us with the powder cask,” Alcott said, “I ain't puttin' a
damn
thing past him. Don't get cocky, boys—this is a war, not a battle. I rate Fargo aces high as a survivor, and we ain't the first swinging dicks that figured to snuff his wick.”

Spider thought about that and nodded. “You've packed heaven with plenty of fresh souls, Russ. If you rate Fargo that high, then I do, too.”

“Smart man. Now you two wait here. I'm going out to the trail and watch for the coach. There ain't no way they can skirt the bosque, so they
will
be coming soon.”

* * *

After swinging past the coach, barely ducking in time when Booger loosed a streamer at him, Fargo still had over a mile of open trail. The Ovaro was champing at the bit to stretch out the kinks, so Fargo gave the stallion his head and let him rip.

Fargo, too, welcomed the hard run and the familiar feel of a curved saddle under him. All too soon, however, the bosque loomed just before him, and Fargo was forced to rein his reluctant Ovaro back to a trot. A faster pace would put the Concord too far behind him and defeat his purpose of serving as a tempting target in place of the stagecoach.

The killers would be expecting him on the coach, and since the shotgun rode to the left of the driver, that meant any ambush would come from west of the trail. As Fargo entered the dense woods, immediately feeling relief from the broiling afternoon sun, he reined in for several minutes to let his eyes adjust to the dimmer lighting.

While he sat his saddle, waiting, he put his years of scouting experience to work. He sent his hearing out beyond the near distance, listening for the scolding of angry birds disturbed at human intrusion, or the warning calls of animals. Most of all, however, he kept close watch on the Ovaro's sensitive nostrils and ears—his most reliable sentries when hidden danger lurked nearby.

Fargo slid his Henry from its boot and jacked a round into the chamber, setting the gun's butt plate on his right thigh, muzzle pointing at the sky.

“All right, old warhorse,” he said softly, squeezing the Ovaro with his knees, “once more into the breach.”

* * *

Spider and Cleo watched their leader quickly wend his way back through the trees to their position.

“Fargo's coming,” he announced. “But he's horsed.”

“Shit,” Spider said. “That means Cleo has
got
to score with his first shot. That stallion of his runs like his pa's name is Going and his ma's name is Fast. What's his pace?”

“Just a slow trot. He's deliberately making himself a target. That tells me he
don't
plan on skedaddling. Spider's right, Cleo—you
got
to pop Fargo over with your first shot.”

“Why'n't we just kill his horse with the first shot?” Spider tossed in. “Bigger target.”

“Nix on that. Fargo
will
come at us then, with blood in his eyes—you can take that to the bank. He wasn't born in the woods to be scairt by an owl. He don't sleep in rented rooms, boys—we're on
his
terrain now. Cleo, quit scratching your ass and snap in! He'll be showing in that little clearing in about two minutes. You'll have maybe ten seconds to get on bead and squeeze one off. Don't bollix it, boy.”

Cleo dropped into a kneeling offhand position and swung the butt of his Sharps securely into his shoulder socket. Soon all three men heard it—the faint, muted thud of shod hooves moving slow over dirt.

Moments later Cleo spotted horse and rider. He drew his hammer from half cock to full with a faint, metallic click. He slipped his finger inside the trigger guard and inhaled a long breath. He expelled it slowly while he relaxed his muscles.

Squeeze
, he reminded himself as he dropped the bead just under the brim of Fargo's white hat—only a head shot could guarantee a one-bullet kill.

Just
squeeze
 . . . the slightest bucking of the trigger would throw off his aim.

His trigger finger took up the slack in one long, continuous pull.

* * *

Sweat beaded and trickled out from Fargo's hair, tickling his forehead. As he rode deeper into the
bosque
he could feel his enemy's eyes on him. It was useless, in this dense growth, to hope he could actually spot them. Nor could he even make a smart guess as to which stretch of the trail made for a good ambush spot. He felt like a bedbug on a clean sheet—easy to see and nowhere to hide.

The Ovaro, too, was nervous in this dim tunnel and constantly snuffed the ground. Fargo didn't pull his head up, knowing that smelling the ground settled a horse in unfamiliar surroundings.

Fargo had already sheathed his Henry. Only fifty yards into the trees he had realized the long-barreled gun would be useless here. He knew that—assuming he wasn't blasted out of the saddle—it would not be enough to simply toss some lead and hope the killers fled.

He had to make it hot for them—so hot they got scared and cleared out. That meant “Booger's Law” again—attack the attackers, and a long-barreled gun would only hinder him in these close-packed trees.

You never hear the shot that kills you.

Fargo willed himself calm and attentive, trying to hear above the pounding of his heart in his ears.

The readiness is all. . . .

The moment was coming, he sensed that, believed in it the way a Baptist believed in Jesus. It would be brief, crucial to his existence—that one little clue that most men missed or couldn't read. A change in the insect hum, perhaps, or that sixth-sense sudden warning in the air, when it felt charged like it sometimes did before a massive crack of lightning.

Or when the Ovaro's ears suddenly pricked forward as they had just now.

Here was the fandango, and Fargo did not pause to think—with the instincts honed from long survival in a harsh land, he simply reacted from reflex, slumping hard to the right side only an eyeblink before a slug thwacked into the tree right beside him. Almost simultaneously he heard the precision crack of a rifle.

Fargo still held the reins and tugged the Ovaro into the cover of the trees as a withering hail of bullets chunked in around them. He quickly wrapped the reins around a weak branch—if he were killed, the Ovaro could easily break free and avoid the fate of becoming an outlaw horse, for no sane man would kill such a mount.

Fargo had six beans in the wheel of his Colt, six more in the spare cylinder in his possibles bag. Hooking left to get out of the line of fire, he sprinted across the trail, letting his experienced ears give him a good idea where the shooters were. Moving quickly and with instinctive dexterity, he leapfrogged from tree to tree, firing as he moved, run and gun.

The enemy fire abated and he heard a man shout, “Pull foot, boys!” Fargo homed in on that voice, pressing forward and changing cylinders as he moved. Firing a round every five seconds or so, he heard the frantic rustle of branches as his attackers panicked.

Even when his twelfth shot was fired Fargo didn't give up. He paused only long enough to thumb reloads into his Colt, then resumed his run-and-gun pursuit. He had to frazzle their nerves enough that they would lack the fighting fettle for another ambush attempt in the bosque.

Then, just before he reached the Rio Grande, he heard hooves pounding toward the north in the three-beat drumming of a gallop. They were escaping along the grassy bank of the river, and more foot pursuit was folly.

Fargo heaved a sigh and leaned against a cottonwood for a moment, his legs trembling now that it was over—at least for now. The shootout and the pursuit were piddling and he had faced no grave danger. But the suspense leading up to that first shot, and the narrow miss, had taken its delayed toll on his nerves.

“Fargo,” he muttered as he recruited his strength for the return to his horse, “maybe you
could
stand a little of that punkin-butter monotony.”

* * *

The El Paso to Santa Fe stagecoach cleared Bosque Grande without further incident. The valley opened up again and Fargo breathed easier. By late afternoon they reached the swing station at Luna Bluff and acquired a fresh relay team.

“All them gunshots back in them trees,” Trixie remarked to Fargo as the passengers stretched their legs at the swing station. “Didja kill anybody, Skye?”

“Pah!” Booger interceded, ogling her pulchritude. “The man admits he spent damn near eighteen cartridges and shot nothing but trees. Up in Dakota he once tried to take a scalp and it made him puke. And can he drink Indian burner like a man?”

The preacher overheard this. He stared at Booger, the corners of his mouth turning down in a frown. “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?”

“Ahh, go blow your horn, Gabriel. I'll credit no man who claims a virgin can have a baby. And I s'pose oysters can walk up stairs?”

Pastor Brandenburg clutched his Bible like a drowning man clinging to a log. “Satan, get behind me!”

“Aye, you'd like that, eh? Buggered by Beelzebub.
That
would leave you slouching toward Bethlehem.”

“Whack the cork,” Fargo snapped. “He's a preacher and you're a blasphemer. How do you expect him to act?”

“Blasphemy, is it? Old Booger knows shit from apple butter,” Booger groused as he walked away to help the swingman with the traces.

“Mr. Fargo,” Kathleen said, “do you expect those men to attack again?”