Utah Deadly Double (9781101558867) (22 page)

Old Billy nodded, enjoying one last look. “That rings right.'Sides, it ain't much pleasure staring at women that comely and knowing I can't bull 'em. It's like staring at another man's money knowing I'll never spend it.”

The men nudged their mounts a few feet away. Old Billy shivered. “I gotta haul my freight to a whore first chance I get. I'll think on them two dumplings and then ride that soiled dove until she smokes and throws off sparks. I never seen—”

The sudden, loud thump of a window sash being thrown open interrupted Old Billy. Fargo slewed quickly around in his saddle and felt his face drain cold: A stout Mormon matron in a flannel nightgown and nightcap aimed a scattergun at the two men in the alley.

“I'll teach you heathen outlanders to rape
my
daughters!” she said in a homicidal voice as her finger wrapped the trigger.

Fargo did some quick horseback thinking. They were mere eyeblinks away from disaster, and even the Ovaro couldn't get ahead of buckshot. Nor could he and Old Billy pull down on the woman in time. Even if they could, she was too angry to be deterred, and they could hardly shoot her—they had, after all, been peeping at her girls through the window.

There was only one option, and weak though it was, Fargo chose it.

“Left fender!” he barked at Old Billy. “Pull foot!”

Old Billy had been in enough close-in scrapes to instantly understand. Both men, borrowing a trick from Plains Indian warriors, slumped down the left side of their saddles, putting their horses between the most vital parts of their anatomy and the outraged woman with the scattergun. Simultaneously, they thumped their mounts into motion.

But even as their horses leaped, both barrels of the scattergun exploded behind them. A stinging fire raced up the arm Fargo was holding the saddle horn with as well as the exposed right leg he could not jerk from the stirrup in time. The Ovaro, too, had taken some of the load and shot into the wide street heedless of the freight caravan.

Despite the pain like a hundred snakebites, Fargo silently rejoiced—he had been hind-ended enough to recognize rock salt when he felt it, a painful but nonlethal load. However, the outraged woman wasn't done with these gentile criminals yet.

“Skye Fargo!” she screeched out the open window. “It's Skye Fargo! Him and that purple-faced monkey tried to outrage my girls! Help!”

The teamsters and bullwhackers were outlanders and in no hurry to take up any Mormon cause. They gaped, slack-jawed with astonishment, as the two riders streaked across the street, causing several startled mules to rear in the traces. But enough armed Mormons were in the street and heard the woman's cry.

Rifles and handguns cracked behind them as the fleeing pair broke onto the white-salt desert flat, rating their horses at a full run. Plumes of sand kicked up around them as bullets sought their vitals.

“Fargo!” Billy roared from just behind him. “My ass feels like it's been panther-chewed! Damn you to hell anyway!”

“
You're
the jackass who stared through the window first,” Fargo replied without turning around. “But it's too dead to skin now. We got another problem: Won't be long and there'll be a posse dogging us all the way to Bingham Canyon. It's still cool now, so push that Appaloosa hard, old son. Unless we open out a big lead now, we'll be picking lead out of our livers.”

Captain Saunders Lee called for a ten-minute rest. He lit down from his big, dust-coated cavalry sorrel and held the reins as he surveyed the bleak terrain surrounding the Mormon soldiers. The men had lost their bearings in the last dust storm and he searched for any landmark that might help to orient them.

The brutal afternoon sun coaxed out a thick layer of sweat that mixed with the dust coating his skin, forming an irritating paste under the collar of his tunic. He was filthy, hungry, thirsty, and worn down to the nub—even the wet heat of tropical Mexico had not been as torturous as this bone-dry desert air that evaporated a man's piss before it hit the ground.

The burly form of Sergeant Shoemaker trudged up beside him. “Are we lost, sir, or just ‘momentarily bewildered'?”

Saunders managed a slight grin at that one. “That's enough guff from you, Sergeant. Follow my finger.”

He pointed east. The wind-driven grit made it difficult to open their eyes beyond mere slits.

“See how there seems to be a sheen of light out on the horizon?”

“Yessir. Glows like an angel's halo.”

“That has to be Utah Lake. It's fresh water and fresh water reflects more than salt water.”

Shoemaker nodded. “But Utah Lake sits right on the west flank of the Wasatch. Why can't we see the mountains?”

“We will in an hour or so. But right now there's an optical ruse going on. That's all pure white sand over there with lots of quartz and mica in it. The sun is at a perfect angle to reflect it like a shield—the water glare can be seen but not the solid mountains.”

“Well, sir, so
that's
why officers go to college. Optical ruse, huh?”

“College?” Saunders shot back. “I'd give four years at West Point to sleep on a shuck mattress tonight.”

“The men share your sentiments. Right now they're keen to turn Skye Fargo's guts into tepee ropes. You think he's still around here?”

“Maybe, but it's a damn long chance. Unless he foxed us and stayed in the city somehow. Fargo is the type to head toward the trouble, not away from it. All he can accomplish out here is drying himself to jerky.”

“Well then, Corporal Hudson is poorly, sir. Centipede got into his boot. Was you to declare a medical emergency we'd have to get him back to headquarters on the double.”

Saunders considered this. A centipede sting was hardly fatal, under normal circumstances, but could indeed kill a man in these grueling conditions. Besides, they'd been patrolling the desert for days with no sign of anyone but a few Indians.

“Let me make one last reconnoiter with the glasses,” he finally decided, unbuckling a saddle pocket and removing his binoculars. “Then we'll head back.”

“
That's
the gait, sir. You've got me half convinced that Fargo is innocent, so who wants to slap him in irons?”

Saunders raised his glasses and focused them out past the middle distance. He swept the empty, flat desert to the west, then north toward Great Salt Lake. He aimed them east toward Salt Lake City and then scanned slowly south toward the outlying settlement of Murray and, finally, Bingham Canyon.

“We've struck a lode,” he said abruptly.

Shoemaker tensed like a hound on point. “Fargo, sir?”

“It's two men riding at breakneck speed. One's wearing buckskins and riding a pinto stallion. The other man is astride a golden Appaloosa.”

“Sounds like Fargo and his chum, all right. If so, he's back in his own clothes and riding his own horse.”

Saunders watched a little while longer, adjusting the focus. “Oh, I'd bet a dollar to a doughnut it's Fargo and Old Billy, all right. About two miles behind them there's a town posse.”

Shoemaker said, “Where they headed?”

“Has to be Bingham Canyon. It's all hard mountains after that—mountains bristling with warpath Utes. Fargo knows that canyon well—ten years ago he scouted and mapped it for the City Council.”

Saunders' entire mien changed as he shook off his weariness and looked suddenly alert. “Sergeant,” he said, lowering the glasses, “tell the men to prepare for contact phase. Quickly water the horses and make sure weapons are operating. Then mount up. But remember—
no
weapon is to be fired unless we're fired upon. I want these men taken alive.”

 

“See anything?” Orrin Trapp asked in a voice tight with nervousness.

“Not a damn thing,” Butch Landry replied. “But it's dusty as all git-out. If that cussed wind dies down we'll be able to see better.”

Deets Gramlich, working his teeth with a hog-bristle toothbrush, stood behind both men. He pulled it from his mouth and said, “He's coming, all right. Fargo isn't called the Trailsman for nothing. Wind or no wind, dust or no dust, he'll spot your trail and know where you headed.”

“Why put it on us?” Landry snarled. “Unless you miracled your ass here you musta left a trail.”

“I doubled around and came in from the West Mountains District. This was supposed to be our emergency fallback position, remember? Why didn't the two of you just leave a trail of bread crumbs?”

“We told you how Fargo
found
us and had already killed Harlan,” Trapp replied in a low voice laced with menace. “We had no time for fancy parlor tricks.”

The three men were ensconced in the hollow of a basalt turret known as the Crow's Nest—a rock spire on the righthand side of the only entrance into Bingham Canyon. A series of trap-rock shelves formed a crude stairway up to the hollow. A squat edifice of mud and lumber, with its hind end backed into the side of the turret, had been built within the hollow years earlier for a sniper position against Indians. From here the three men could, weather permitting, see for miles across the glaring desert and command a clear shot at anyone riding into the canyon. The shadowed stone of the canyon walls surrounded them like black curtains.

“This ain't what I wanted,” Landry spat out bitterly. “He was never s'posed to know about me, Harlan, and Orrin being in the mix. Deets was s'posed to get him jugged and then hanged. Now it's all come a cropper and all three of us is holding the crappy end of the stick.”

“It's coming down to a goddamn shootout,” Orrin chimed in. “A shootout with two men who can knock out the eyes of a pheasant at two hundred yards.”

Deets tossed back his head and laughed. He no longer wore any Fargo disguise, but still bore a striking resemblance to the Trailsman.

“Boys, you need to reach down inside your pants and see if you own a set! Fargo is indeed a formidable enemy, but don't go puny and confuse the man with the myth. He bleeds red like all the rest of us.”

Landry craned his neck around to look at the actor. “You wanna chew that a little finer?”

“You can still triumph. It
hasn't
come a cropper. Fargo is still a fugitive, and even if he has linked me to you, he can hardly go to law about it.”

Landry mulled that. “All right, I like the tune. Keep singing.”

“First we kill Old Billy—we have to concentrate on Fargo, but we can't until Billy Williams is out of the mix. That bastard is dangerous as a she-grizz with cubs. Then we
wound
Skye Fargo—wound him bad enough to take the fight out of him. I'm a good trail doctor and I can stem any bleeding. Then you two let me use my skills to alter your appearance a little so you can go back to Salt Lake City. I'll take Fargo in after dying my hair and gluing on a mustache. If we play it right, Fargo will never have to see any of us the way we really look.”

Deets had no intention of carrying out this plan—he had a far better one in mind, and Fargo would indeed have to die for it to succeed. But Old Billy was truly a threat and required killing. And Deets had no illusions about killing Fargo unless he was wounded first—preferably by one of these two fools.

Landry and Trapp exchanged a long glance after the suggestion.

“It
could
work,” Trapp suggested. “Me, I'd favor a simpler plan. But we got nothing better.”

Landry slowly nodded his bulldog head. “Too rich for my belly—too many ‘ifs' and ‘ands.' Still, I reckon it's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”

“
Now
you're whistling!” Deets exclaimed. “I get the rest of my gold shiners, you fellows get your revenge, and Skye Fargo does the hurt dance—on air.”

 

Twisting around in the saddle without slowing the Ovaro's pace, Fargo broke out his spyglasses and studied the glaring white expanse of desert behind them.

“A couple of their horses are foundering,” he announced. “I knew those town nags wouldn't keep pace once the heat rose. We've got a good lead on them.”

“That's just hunky-dory,” Old Billy barbed, “but my horse is lathered and your Ovaro is blowing foam, too.”

Fargo nodded, hauling back on the reins. “Let's lead 'em for a spell to cool 'em out. We'll want these mounts rested when we rush that canyon.”

Old Billy, too, pulled up and lit down, leading his Appaloosa by the bridle reins. “Rush the canyon?”

“Did I stutter? We'll have to, old son, because of the Crow's Nest. It's a fortified sniper's nest above the entrance. They'll have a straight bead on us when we approach across the open desert.”

“Can these bald-face baboons shoot?”

“Whoever cut loose on us at the bathing pool near Mormon Station seemed like a fair hand with the Henry—assuming he's in the canyon. As for Butch Landry and Orrin Trapp, I'd rate each fair-to-middling. They made things lively for me in the Big Bend country. We'll have to hit that canyon at a two twenty clip, zigzagging to throw off their bead, and come in a-smokin' to keep them covered down.”

Old Billy again failed to muster any spit and unleashed a string of curses that would make a horse blush. “Why, Christ! So we make it into the canyon without being shot to ribbons. What then? Them three got the high ground. And then we got this clusterfuck from Salt Lake City on our ampersands—if they don't kill their horses first, they'll be dealing us misery.”

Fargo trudged through the hot sand, eyes closed to slits against the glare. “What then, huh? We climb the staircase ledges and smoke those rats out of their hole, that's what. That Greener of yours should put the fear of God into 'em. And we hope like hell that my twin is up there, too, and that we get some evidence for the posse. Otherwise . . .”