13
Before Samson told Fargo anything, Faith poked her head over the edge of the loft and handed Samson a cup of coffee. When he took it, she reached back down and came up with another cup for Fargo.
“Charity thought you might like to have this now, Fargo,” she said.
Samson took the cup from her and handed it to Fargo, who discovered that he did indeed want it. As he sipped the hot liquid, he imagined his head was clearing a little. His stomach rumbled.
“Bring Fargo some corn bread,” Samson said. “That’s all we have,” he added. “Corn bread and molasses.”
It sounded good to Fargo. He had to be getting better, he told himself. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be hungry.
Faith brought up the corn bread and molasses on a tin plate. There was no fork, but Fargo set his coffee cup on the floor and managed to eat just fine with the flat-bladed knife that was on the plate.
After he finished, he set the plate on the floor and picked up the cup. He drank the rest of his coffee, which was a lot better than he’d had on the trail to Fort Bridger. Then he looked at Samson.
“Well?” he said. “Didn’t you have something you wanted to tell me?”
“I was gonna tell you how you’re about to be a stagecoach robber. It’s easy enough, and you don’t have to do a thing. We’ll do it for you. Charity’ll be goin’ to the fort today, and she’ll have a talk with Colonel Alexander. She’ll tell him that you and your gang rode by here and tried to rob us but that we holed up in the house and ran you off.”
“The colonel won’t believe a story like that,” Fargo said, knowing better.
“You’d be surprised what a man will believe when one of my girls tells him. They can be mighty persuasive.”
There wasn’t any doubt about that, Fargo thought.
“ ’Course that leaves me with a little problem,” Samson continued.
Fargo had a feeling he knew what the problem was, but he didn’t want to ask, and he didn’t have to. Samson was happy to tell him.
“The problem’s you,” Samson said. “What I think I ought to do is open you up, fill you with rocks, and sink you in the river.” He paused, looking regretful. “But I don’t hold with killin’. The good book tells us it’s wrong, and I go by that even if it would solve my problem.”
“I think the good book has something to say about robbery, too,” Fargo said.
Samson brushed that criticism aside. “Says an eye for an eye. I believe in that.”
“You can’t get every eye there is.”
“What chapter of the good book is that from?”
“That’s the book of Fargo, chapter two.”
“Don’t believe I’ve read that one. Don’t matter, though. I’ll take whatever revenge I can get.”
“Why?” Fargo said. “Why put your daughters in danger? They’re not getting enough to help you much, and sooner or later they’ll be caught.”
“Gonna be later, now that ever’body’s lookin’ for you as the ringleader of that treacherous gang of robbers that’s been plaguing the stage line,” Samson said with satisfaction. “As to why they’re doing it, that’s a long story.”
Fargo kicked his leg to one side, rattling the chain.
“I have plenty of time,” he said, “if you’re not going to kill me.”
“I’m not. Not right now, anyway. Just don’t know yet what I’ll do.”
“Well, if you’re not going to kill me, you can at least tell me what the hell’s going on.”
Samson got up and retrieved Fargo’s plate and knife. He called down, and Faith climbed up the ladder to get them. When she was gone, Samson sat back down.
“In the first place, my daughters are doin’ the robberies instead of me because I’m too hard to hide, even with my face covered.”
Fargo nodded. Samson’s size was enough to make him instantly recognizable, no matter how he tried to conceal his identity.
“And in the second place,” Samson said, “it’s their revenge as much as it is mine, and maybe more.”
The ache in Fargo’s head increased but his understanding didn’t.
“Ferriday did something to them, did he?”
“Did it to me, to them, to my wife.” Samson lowered his head. “The son of a bitch.”
Samson sat with his head bowed for several minutes. While Fargo didn’t think he was praying, he said nothing, waiting for Samson to continue.
Finally Samson looked up, but he wasn’t looking at Fargo. He wasn’t looking at anything in the loft or even in the cabin. He had the appearance of a man staring beyond the walls, across miles, across years.
“It was down around Albuquerque,” he said after a while. “I was a young man then, in the strength of my youth. Had me a mighty fine wife, four little girls, and a good life workin’ a little mail run. Then Ferriday came along. He wanted the mail run, and offered to buy me out.” He paused. “Well, I wasn’t selling, and it turned out it didn’t matter to Ferriday what he had to do to get it. If it meant getting rid of me then that’s what he’d do. And he did.”
Samson’s voice trailed off. He sat quietly, shaking his head slowly.
“How did he get rid of you?” Fargo said.
“Had me put in jail. Said I stole from him, which I never did. He paid off the sheriff and the judge, not that it cost him much, and the next thing I knew, I was in the calaboose. Look to the left and see a wall, same on the right, and all around. Nothing but walls. But that wasn’t the worst of it, no, sir. There was a copper mine down there, and the prisoners had to work the mines all day, down in that hellhole with so little light it might as well have been nighttime, and hard to breathe besides. Go down before daylight and come out after dark to march to the jail. Years went by, and I never saw a blue sky.”
Fargo had heard about the jail Samson was talking about. What the big man was saying was all true.
“That jail was hot in the summer and cold in the winter,” Samson said. “Vermin of all kinds covered me up. We never got to take a bath, not even once while I was there. I got used to the smell, bad as it was. Hardly noticed it after a while. I never got used to the filth and the dirt, though, nor the rats and the bugs. That’s why we wash up every day here. I don’t ever want to be filthy again.”
“I don’t like being dirty, either,” Fargo said, sensing an opening. “Maybe I could have a wash down there in that tub of water.”
Samson almost smiled. “I don’t think so, Fargo, not today. I got to decide what to do with you first.”
“You don’t want to treat me the way you were treated.”
“No, nobody oughta be treated that way. It was like bein’ in hell, Fargo, and that’s God’s own truth. I never heard a word about my wife and babies while I was in that place, not till I’d been there four years, and what I heard then like to have killed me.”
He stopped talking again, as if the memory of what had happened to him and his family affected him now almost as much as the real event had.
“What I heard,” he said, “was that my wife had died of a fever and that my girls were all alone. Word was that they were tryin’ to raise themselves, but I knew that sooner or later someone would take ’em to raise, and let ’em forget all about me and Sarah. That was my wife’s name, Sarah. Well, I couldn’t have that, but I didn’t see what I could do about it till one day a guard got careless when we were leavin’ the mine. They put leg irons on us when we came out, one by one, two guards on one man, one with a gun and one to put on the irons. But the guard with the gun looked away before the other one got the irons on me. I kicked that one in the head and grabbed the gun from the other one. He took off at a run, and so did I, just in the other direction. I don’t know how many prisoners they lost that night, but I was one of ’em.”
“They must have come after you,” Fargo said.
“If they did, I never knew it. There was too many of us runnin’ loose for one man to worry ’em much. I went straight to my place, or what used to be my place. My girls were there; the littlest, that’s Prue, not even five years old. Her sisters were tryin’ their best, but the house was nearly as bad as the jail. Charity, she’s the eldest, was just goin’ on twelve. It would’ve been better if someone had taken ’em in, but I had ’em then, and we got out of there that very night, headed north. We’ve lived here and there ever since, with me waitin’ for my chance to get that eye for an eye.”
Fargo thought about the story and Ferriday. Ferriday was a man who’d come up a long way in life, and Fargo knew he’d gotten his start down in New Mexico. He knew that the mail run Ferriday had now wasn’t the first one he’d owned and that Ferriday didn’t plan for it to be the last.
What Fargo didn’t know was how Ferriday had gotten his start and what kind of man that proved him to be. If Samson was telling the truth, Fargo regretted having taken on the job from Ferriday.
At the same time, the Trailsman knew that Samson was going down the wrong trail. He was endangering his daughters, and he wasn’t accomplishing what he’d set out to do.
“You’re not hurting Ferriday,” Fargo said. “You’re just a pest that he wants to get rid of.”
“If that’s what I am, that’s fine. I’m gettin’ my revenge on him slow. My girls are gettin’ theirs, too.”
“You’re going to get them killed or hurt. Dammit, Samson, you can’t let them keep on with this. It’s not right, and you know it.”
Fargo didn’t think he’d put his argument very forcefully, and he blamed his head. He had a feeling, however, that even if he’d been thinking more clearly, he still couldn’t have talked any sense into Samson.
“You can’t tell me how to live my life, Fargo. Can’t anybody do that.”
“What about Kate Follett? Does she know what you and your daughters are up to?”
“Now you look here, Fargo, don’t you go bringin’ Kate into this. She don’t have a thing to do with it.”
“I heard you were soft on her.”
Samson stood up, almost bumping his head on the rafter above him.
“Where’d you hear that? Even if it’s so, and I ain’t sayin’ it is, it’s no business of yours. You better not mention her again, you hear me?”
“If you think you’re going to marry her, you’ve got another think coming,” Fargo said as if he hadn’t heard. “She’s not about to marry anybody involved with robbing stagecoaches.”
Samson seemed to swell and expand to about twice his already impressive size. He leaned forward, reaching toward Fargo with his immense hands, and the Trailsman thought for a second that he might have gone a step or two too far.
And maybe he had. Samson looked as if he’d forgotten what the good book said about killing. But Fargo was saved from having Samson snatch his head off and throw it out the window by a call from below.
“Father! I’m ready to leave. Are you going with me?”
Fargo recognized Charity’s voice, and the call was enough to get Samson’s attention. He stood still for a moment, his hands dangling at his sides, breathing heavily and noisily through his nose.
“You better get a hold on that temper of yours,” Fargo told him. “It’s going to get you in trouble one of these days.”
“More like it’s gonna get you in trouble if you don’t watch what you say.” Samson paused to draw in some deep breaths, getting control of himself. “I’ll be going to the fort with Charity. You can sit here and think about things. Don’t try to get away. I still haven’t decided what to do with you, and I might decide that the good book don’t forbid me to kill you after all.”
Fargo said he didn’t think he could just sit there all day. It wasn’t natural.
“You don’t have a choice,” Samson said. “But I’ll see if I can find you something to do. We have a book somewhere. You can read that.”
“What book?”
“Something about a pathfinder. That ought to be just the thing.”
Fargo wasn’t so sure.