The Trailsman #396

Fargo hated to risk the damage, but he trusted Sam Colt's sturdy workmanship as he heaved his ­six-­gun with all his might down the slope. It landed short of Jude but skidded almost to his feet.

By the time Jude leaped forward to pick it up, Butler had gained the trail and the big bay was picking up thundering speed. Jude had a clear shot but hesitated, worried about hitting Karen.

“Jude!” Fargo bellowed. “You
have
to take the chance! He's riding ­double—­once he's clear of here, Butler will have to kill her to make a faster escape.”

Fargo could see everything clearly from up on the slope. By now the range was long for a short gun, and Jude had a difficult moving target. Nonetheless the kid screwed up his courage, and Fargo's Colt jumped in his hand. Fargo had the infinite satisfaction of watching Jude's shot punch into the back of Butler's skull just above the neck, a pebbly gout of blood exploding from his brain. . . .

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First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

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The first chapter of this book previously appeared in
Black Hills Deathblow
, the three hundred ­ninety-­fifth volume in this series.

Copyright © Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

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REGISTERED TRADEMAR
K—MARCA REGISTRADA

ISBN 978-0-698-15338-7

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the ­product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is ­stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

Beginnings . . . they bend the tree and they mark the man. Skye Fargo was born when he was eighteen. Terror was his midwife, vengeance his first cry. Killing spawned Skye Fargo, ruthless, ­cold-­blooded murder. Out of the acrid smoke of gunpowder still hanging in the air, he rose, cried out a promise never forgotten.

The Trailsman they began to call him all across the West: searcher, scout, hunter, the man who could see where others only looked, his skills for hire but not his soul, the man who lived each day to the fullest, yet trailed each tomorrow. Skye Fargo, the Trailsman, the seeker who could take the wildness of a land and the wanting of a woman and make them his own.

Mojave Desert, California, 1858—where it's open season on Skye Fargo in a hellish landscape littered with bleached bones.

“It's the work of the Scorpion,” Fargo announced with grim confidence, unfolding to his full six feet and slapping the sand and grit from the knees of his buckskin trousers. “That throat cut, exactly like a surgeon's work from one earlobe to the other, is his trademark. I hear it's how he announces his presence to his victims.”

A Mexican stock tender Fargo knew only as Lupe lay sprawled on his back in a dry creek wash where scores of boulders were heaped, his tongue swollen so thick it protruded like a leather bladder. Red ants in a feeding frenzy had already eaten the eyeballs down to the bone sockets.

“God dawg! Who's the Scorpion?” asked an army private so young he looked like a mascot.

“Pablo Alvarez,” replied the second man with Fargo, Stanton “Grizz Bear” Ormsby. “Quicksand would spit that son of a buck back up. This here is all we lacked. Thank you, Jesus.”

Fargo sent a careful glance all around them, then focused his ­sun-­slitted, lake blue eyes to the middle distances and expanded his search, ­sweep-­scanning the harsh landscape. His scalp had prickled the moment he recognized the bloody calling card of the Scorpion.

Unrelenting sun and dry wind had cracked his lips. The almost unbreathable air felt brittle with warmth that seemed to radiate from a giant furnace. All around them, as far as the eye dared to look, the arid brown folds of the Mojave Desert stretched on unbroken, ending in a shimmering heat haze on the far horizon. Barely visible in the rippling blur due west was a line of dead black ­mountains—­a reminder of the daunting conditions awaiting any fools who challenged Zeb Pike's Great AmericanDesert.

Only ten minutes after sunrise the morning mist had burned off the nearby Colorado River. When Lupe didn't turn up for breakfast, Fargo, Grizz Bear and Private Jude ­Hollander—­proud, ­razor-­nicked members of the U.S. Army Camel Corps' ­fifteen-­man security ­detail—­rode out to look for him. The circling buzzards were like an aerial fingerboard pointing to his nearly decapitated corpse.

“Shit, piss and corruption!” Grizz Bear exploded. “Ain't enough of a holiday, is it, how we spent the last three weeks huggin' with them Skeleton Canyon Apaches? Now we got warpath Mojaves out front of us and this murderin' greaser Alvarez deals himself into the game. Hell, who
wouldn't
work for the army?”

“You bawl too damn much,” Fargo admonished the veteran frontiersman. He nodded toward Private Hollander. “You never hear soldier blue pissing and moaning like a weak sister.”

“Soldier?
This
pee doodle?” Grizz Bear snorted, dry sand popping out of his nostrils. “Hell's fire! He's a ­fuzz-­faced brat in ready-to-wear boots. You know, Fargo? This tad woulda give the apple
back
to Eve.”

“Who's Pablo Alvarez?” Jude Hollander asked again, well used to Grizz Bear's roweling. “He got one of them road gangs like that bunch we chased off a few days back?”

Fargo was slow to answer, still focusing his attention on the surrounding terrain, habitually thinking like potential enemies and deciding where he'd hole up for an ambush attempt. The dead stock tender might also be a lure for distracted fools. . . .

Fargo's ­hair-­trigger alertness had been challenged, but not dulled, by weeks of grueling and dangerous travel across West Texas and the New Mexico Territory, fighting Comanches and Kiowas, Apaches, two roving ­gangs—­and some of the foulest, most difficult, heartiest and most bizarre beasts of burden the U.S. Army ever sent on a supply mission.

“You can chuck that ­road-­gang talk,” Fargo finally advised the ­green-­antlered recruit. “I have it on good authority that Alvarez doesn't run a bunch of ragtag freebooters or some ­greasy-­sack outfit that can't shoot straight.”

“That reckless bastard fouled a fine nest down in Hermosillo,” Grizz Bear took over. “Had him a gunrunning setup until the federals run him across the border for welshing on his
bribes. Lately he's been ruling the roost in the Mojave, robbing prospectors and paymasters and such.”

“I take your drift,” young Jude said. “He knows dang well his fortunes depend on keeping the desert military outposts weak and low on supplies.”

“Now you're whistling,” Fargo said. “I've never locked horns with Alvarez before. But I've talked to reliable soldiers and lawmen who have. They all claim he's got a private army, well organized, well armed, and numbering up in the scores when he calls them all in.”

And it seemed only logical to Fargo that a man like Pablo Alvarez would know exactly what this strange U.S. Army experiment, which included the gringo
famoso
Skye Fargo, meant if it succeeded: like the kid just said, it was the end of the Scorpion's criminal bonanza.

Fargo had fought men like the Scorpion before. Some, like their bloodthirsty leader, had learned brutal, casual killing in the charnel house of the ­1846–­47 war. Others hailed from around the Scorpion's hometown of La Cuesta. These competent killers were loyal to a ruthless savage who murdered the innocent as casually as he swatted at flies.

Grizz Bear shifted his attention to the dead Mexican. “You s'pose the beaners will want to bury him?”

“We'll all bury him,” Jude spoke up, offended. “He's part of the expedition.”

“He never bought
me
a beer,” Grizz Bear noted. “So fuck him.”

The wind suddenly whipped up, sand and grit assaulting Fargo's face like buckshot. He tugged the brim of his hat lower and pulled his red bandanna up over his nose and mouth.

That body,
Fargo reminded himself.
It could be a lure. . . .

“Rider coming from camp,” Jude said. “Looks like Juan Salazar.”

Not even ten in the morning,
Fargo thought, and the desert heat was already so thick it had weight on his shoulders and the back of his neck. Ragged parcels of cloud drifted slowly across a deep blue dome of sky. Again he studied the terrain they were about to cross. There was very little, beyond the river growth, but the occasional twisted yucca tree or tall, narrow cactus the local Indians called Spanish bayonets.

“Yeah, take a good gander, Trailsman,” Grizz Bear cut into
his thoughts. “You know 'er, boy, and so do I. That Mojave is hell turned inside out, and it just . . . don't . . .
stop
.”

The old salt glanced at Jude. “That's gospel truth, sprout. And
dry
? Why, there's stretches ahead of us so damn dry they got ­three-­year-­old fish that ain't learned to swim yet. This ain't like that ­ninety-­mile stretch back in New Mex. Get set for a ­hell-­buster. The consarn army will rue the day it sent ­soft-­handed children and desk soldiers to stand in for men.”

The kid puffed himself up and slapped the stock of his Sharps. Like the rest of the soldiers on this expedition he wore a mixture of civilian and military clothes.

“It's been rough country since we left San Antonio and it ain't whipped me,” Jude boasted. “This desert coming up ain't nothing but more of the same. If them ugly camels can take it, so can I.”

“Pup, them ships of the desert will shit on
all
our bones.”

“Quit trying to scare the kid,” Fargo cut in impatiently. “Jude, if a man learns the desert he needn't fear it. Besides, a man's got to die someplace. I'm not particular about the terrain.”

Fargo paused to watch Juan Salazar trot closer on an army mule. The Mexican ranch hand had hired on back in San Antone. He was taciturn but civil, a good worker who kept to himself most of the time. But his habit of deliberately avoiding eye contact with others gave the constant impression he was a sneak thief.

Grizz Bear poked the corpse indifferently with the toe of his boot. “If it's Alvarez done this, you kallate he'll have the main gather with him?”

Fargo shook his head. “I don't know the man's tactics firsthand. But I'd guess he'll hold off at ­first—­dust puffs give away big groups in the desert. I'd say he'll try to ­cold-­deck us with just a few of his best ­killers—­more stuff like with Lupe. But mainly I'm worried they'll try to kill the camels. There's no replacements, and it was a helluva deal to buy them and get them here.”

He expelled a long sigh. “This is why I wanted to fight shy of the ­sand-­dune country west of Fort Yuma. That's a ­bog-­down stretch and we'd be fish in a barrel if ­well-­hidden ­dry-­gulchers opened up. Looks like they just followed ­us—”

Fargo's next word snagged in his throat when a rifle spoke its deadly piece from the nearby river bluff, shattering the hot stillness.

That first bullet snapped past Fargo's face and impacted only inches from his stallion, raising a gravel plume near the big horse's front hooves. The Ovaro reared up, nickering more in irritation than fright. Fargo let it go when the stallion began ­crow-­hopping—­the mount was ­bullet-­trained and the shooter would have to earn his target.

“Hell, kid, you bolted down?” he snapped at Jude. “Quit gawking and kiss the deck!”

The other men had already covered down. Again, again, the repeating rifle cracked with a shattering clarity in the transparent desert air. The bullets, ricocheting from boulder to boulder all around them, sent off a screaming whine that especially agitated the horses and mules.

Had the hidden marksman blued his barrel Fargo would not likely have taken his next gamble. But exposed metal caught just enough sun to glint from a steep, ­rock-­strewn sandbank rising up above the river.

Fargo's ­trouble-­honed reflexes didn't wait for further confirmation. Using that glint as his fixed reference, Fargo rose to a ­kneeling-­offhand position, worked the lever of the Henry repeater, and threw the rifle butt into his shoulder. The brass frame was hot from the sun when he laid his cheek against it and notched his bead, deadly lead still snapping past him so close it was personal.

“Let 'er rip!” Grizz Bear bellowed as Fargo methodically and rapidly set to work with his ­sixteen-­shot Henry, holding a tight pattern with that momentary glint at its core.

Fargo was as surprised as everyone else when, all of a moment, a man came plunging down the steep, rocky slope of the sandbank.

He was only wounded and still alive at ­first—­Fargo could hear him screaming as he slammed from rock to rock, plummeting downward toward the ­slack-­jawed men. His rifle clattered along behind him like a faithful pet trying to catch up.

The four men advanced cautiously to examine the ambusher. Though his only gunshot wound was to the left knee, the battering tumble had killed the man before he quit rolling.

“Hell, I figured you to drill him right through the brainpan,” Grizz Bear remarked, staring at the bruised and battered face and misshapen skull. “I ain't never seen this chili pep before.
A-course, his face is messed up considerable so's a body can't be sure.”

Fargo moved forward and brought the rifle back, an old Collier ­seven-­shot revolving carbine that had been converted from touchhole to percussion. The sight had broken off in the tumble, but the weapon appeared serviceable. He bent over and removed a bandolier of bullets and percussion caps from the body. The man wore no sidearm.

Juan Salazar craned his neck to look past Grizz Bear. Fargo watched him stare at the corpse, much of the color draining from his copper skin. He looked like a man who had just been ­mule-­kicked but not quite dropped.

“Santissima Maria,”
he whispered hoarsely, making the sign of the cross.

“You know him?” Fargo demanded.

Salazar turned in Fargo's direction but averted his eyes. He was a young man in his twenties and wore the leather
chivarra
pants of a Mexican cowboy.

“Yes, I know him,” he replied. “His name is Roberto de Torreon de Salazar. The man you have just killed is my brother.”