‘HE BUTCHERED THE kid. Jesus! You saw him, Fargo. He looked like raw meat.’
Fargo nodded and lifted the whiskey bottle. Passed it to Jude.
The red-head filled his glass to the brim and swallowed half in a single gulp.
‘What we gonna do?’
‘Kill him,’ said Fargo. ‘We’re gonna meet him an’ kill him.’
‘You crazy?’ Jude emptied the rest of his drink. Topped himself. ‘I say we run. I don’t reckon on facin’ no crazy half-breed.’
Fargo’s dark eyes bored into the stocky red-head’s face. He had downed the better part of a bottle since the ruckus in the whorehouse had brought them running down the street with half of Mattock’s population along for the fun, and whiskey always made him mean. Meaner.
‘Where you gonna run, Jude? Our money’s in Valverde, an’ them cows are beyond. We want to sell ’em in Grantsville, we hafta go through Valverde. You gonna give all that up?’
‘Christ!’ Jude shuddered. ‘He’ll be waitin’ for us. Luke’s dead. He killed Taggart. Now he’s killed Cotton. It’s just like you said … he’s out for revenge. An’ we’re on the list.’
‘So am I.’ Fargo’s hooded eyes narrowed down to slits. ‘I ain’t partial to bein’ run outta nowhere. I ain’t gonna let no goddam half-breed spook me.’
Jude thought about it while he drank more whiskey. He didn’t want to quit Mattock on his own; not with the half-breed lurking around, maybe ready to pick him off. Nor did he want to give up his share in the rustled cows. But by God! the ’breed had him frightened.
He tried to find a compromise.
‘Maybe we could skirt round him,’ he said, conscious of his voice slurring. Whether from whiskey or fear, he didn’t know; or care. ‘Go ’cross the Box M range an’ come up on Valverde from the south?’
‘He’d come after us,’ said Fargo. The whiskey didn’t seem to affect him, except to make him colder and more dangerous than usual. ‘He’s proved that already. Sensible man wouldn’t have come back to Mattock in the first place, but the half-breed did. Ain’t many would risk lynchin’ a sheriff, nor risk comin’ in to carve Cotton like that. You don’t understand him, Jude. He’s Cherry Cow, an’ he’s made hisself a promise to kill us. He’ll do that, unless we stop him.’
Jude stared into his glass, then shrugged.
‘So what we do?’
He wasn’t very good at thinking, Jude Stoddard. Mostly he was muscle and a fast gun: a useful combination when there was someone to point him in the right direction and tell him what to do. Left to his own devices he tended to mess things up. He was thirty-five years old, six of them spent in the penitentiary after he’d attempted an unsuccessful raid on a bank in Torres Blanco. He’d been with Fargo for close on seven years and got into the habit letting the thin man do his thinking for him. He’d never had so much money as was waiting for them in Valverde – more than he’d expected, now that Luke Masters and Cotton were dead – and he didn’t feel like leaving it behind.
Fargo clarified his thoughts.
‘We got exactly nine hundred and forty-seven dollars in the Valverde deposit,’ he said. ‘The cows hafta be worth at least eighty dollars. That makes one thousand an’ twenty-seven. Split two ways, we get five hundred an’ thirteen apiece.’
‘Shit!’ said Jude, cheering up. ‘I never had that much money before.’
‘An’ there’s two of us,’ added Fargo. ‘An’ we don’t hafta follow the trail. We can go wide. Come in on him from two sides.’
Jude nodded, then frowned: ‘How we know he’ll be where he told Cotton?’
‘He kept his promises so far,’ grunted Fargo. ‘Didn’t he? Besides, that’s flat country out there. We got as good a chance of spottin’ him as he’s got of seein’ us.’
‘Yeah,’ said Jude. ‘That’s right.’
‘Fine,’ said Fargo. ‘We’ll move out tomorrow. We’ll kill the bastard an’ go celebrate in Valverde.’
The day Cotton Frederick Rockwell got buried was very hot. The sky shone like polished silver plate, the sun burnishing the azure so that no color showed except the yellow-white orb that fed heat to the land. There were no mourners, just the undertaker and the two Mexican gravediggers; and they didn’t stay any longer than it took to drop the rough box into the hole and shovel the dry earth on top. One of them hammered a wooden marker into the ground. It was little more than a plank, with some words scratched over the surface. The words just said: Cotton. Killed in bed.
Maybellene had put up the money, from what she found in Cotton’s saddlebags. In addition to what he had already paid her, she held back sixty dollars for the fund she was depositing in the bank. She already had almost enough to finance a journey to New Orleans and get a room of her own. That was her ambition, but she put it off for a while because she was suddenly very popular: the local clientele wanted to sleep with the whore who had been there when Breed killed Cotton. Her price went up from ten dollars a night to fifteen.
Fargo and Jude ate a good breakfast. Then they bought supplies for the journey to Valverde and killed a bottle in the Lucky Lady. They rode out of Mattock with Winchester carbines canted over their saddles and their eyes scanning the trail ahead. Fargo had bought a spyglass from Caleb Black, and every so often he reined in and extended the telescope, checking the terrain in front.
Jude had never seen him so nervous.
Breed made camp exactly where he had told Cotton. For the first night. After that, just before dawn, he found another place where an arroyo made a cut across the prairie. He fashioned a makeshift shade for the gray stallion and scattered a pile of oats on the ground. He scooped out a pit in the dry sand and lined it with a section of tarpaulin held down by rocks. He filled the hollow with water and left the horse on a long tether. Then he went back to the original campsite and spread his blanket on the ground. He left his saddle there, and his hat. Around his mane of sun-bleached hair, he wound the leather war-band.
Then he took up station behind a slight rise to the south. He carried his Winchester and a canteen. He settled down to watch the Valverde trail.
From ground level, the rise was no more than a slight hummock that drifted on a north-to-south line across the trail. It dipped where the road went through the center. Over the flatlands, it gave an excellent view of the western approaches.
‘All right.’ Fargo reined in. ‘We split up here. You move south. Circle round an’ then come in from the east. I’ll go in from the north.’
‘Suppose somethin’ happens?’ queried Jude. ‘What then?’
‘It ain’t gonna take more’n a day to find him,’ snarled Fargo. ‘If we ain’t killed him by then, we ride for Valverde. Meet up there.’
The If hung heavy on Jude’s mind, but he didn’t say anything. Just nodded and steered his pony off the hardpacked dirt of the trail onto the softer ground to the south.
For a little while, he thought about riding out, straight to Valverde. Then he decided it was best to do what Fargo said. Best to kill the half-breed and take him off their tails. Besides, he wasn’t sure he could get the money out of the bank on his own. It might need a signature for that, and he couldn’t write.
And there was another consideration: if he let Fargo down and the hook-nosed man lived, then Fargo would come looking for him. And he wanted that even less than having the half breed trailing him.
He rode southwards through a parched landscape of saguaro and cholla and mesquite, circling slowly so that he was sure of passing the place where they had found the half-breed camped. After that, he moved north and east, coming back onto the Valverde trail before turning the pony’s head west again.
He stopped once to eat. And three times to swig from his canteen. Each time he stopped, he drank some more from the whiskey bottle he had stuffed into his saddlebags.
He wished Fargo hadn’t suggested that trip to Valverde.
Wished he hadn’t gone along.
Wished they’d never found the half-breed.
But now it was too late.
Some hours into the afternoon the whiskey bottle shone empty when he canted it to his mouth. He threw it away, wishing he had another. He climbed down from his horse and opened his pants, splashing liquid over the trunk of a cactus. He wasn’t, he calculated, more than a quarter mile from the campsite, maybe a bit less. He nodded to himself, whiskey-wise, and climbed back on the horse.
By now Fargo should have moved in from the north: the half-breed would be trapped in a crossfire.
If he was there.
And there was only one way to find that out.
Jude thumbed the hammer of the Winchester back and heeled the pony to a fast canter.
A straight charge, that was the thing. He remembered Fargo telling him how the Texas Rangers handled Comanches: how the Rangers had surprised the Indians by using their own tactics against them. By charging straight in, relying on surprise and fire power.
He forgot that Breed was half-Apache.
Breed calculated the time by the sun. He had never owned a watch, nor ever paid much attention to clocks. The sun was time-keeper enough, and the feel of the land, of the sky.
Round about now, he guessed, the two men should be reaching his position. They were too careful – too canny, his father would have said – to come straight in, so the chances were that they would circle to move in from either side. He thought they would try that because he thought he had frightened them enough to lure them out: to try to take him off their tails.
So he was ready for the sound of Jude’s horse as it pounded across the arid prairie. He touched his fingers to the blade of the Bowie knife, feeling a faint vibration stir the metal where it was dug into the ground. He tugged the blade loose and sheathed it on his hip.
One horse, coming fast.
He wondered where the other might be as he folded against the sand, his body hidden under the overhang of a gigantic saguarro.
Jude spotted an arroyo that he guessed would take him up behind the camp site. It was deep enough to hide his approach and when he got to where he thought he was more or less level with the site, he dismounted and began to move in on foot.
He slid his hat back off his hair, leaving it hanging by the leather chin strap. He inched his way up to the rim of the arroyo and saw a flat space in front, lifting up thirty yards distant in a low rise that was dotted along the upper edge with cactus. He checked the flat, then ran across, throwing himself down on the side of the ridge. Then, slowly, working inch-by-inch, he eased up to the rim and peered over.
He saw the saguaro-ringed clearing where they had found the half-breed. There was a fire smoldering at the center. A bedroll spread from a saddle, bulky as a man’s body might make it. A hat at the top.
He grinned and went back to his horse.
The half-breed was playing possum. That was obvious. He was waiting with a rifle under his blanket for the attack. But when Jude came charging in, he’d be taken by surprise. Fargo would hear him yelling and come in from the north. Most likely charging the way he’d told Jude. They’d catch the half-breed between them and kill him. Get it done, so they could ride free to spend their money.
Yeah, Jude shook his head, that was how it would be. Real easy: like Fargo had said. The only thing missing was another swig of whiskey; but that would come in Valverde. Plenty of it.
Jude got up on his pony and urged the animal over the wall of the arroyo. He’d never favored spurs, but he wished he had them now: they might have added an extra turn of speed to the charge.
He slammed his heels against the animal’s flanks and went down onto the flat with his mouth open in an ear-splitting yell.
He topped the ridge and went down the far side, Winchester pumping .44-40 caliber slugs into the bedroll.
The blanket danced under the impact. Tufts of cloth flew clear. The low-crowned stetson rolled away.
And Jude swung up the far side of the depression with the awful realization that it was all a decoy.
Then his horse faltered.
He felt the reins tug loose from his left hand and something warm and wet hit his face. He grunted and began to tug the reins back. They wouldn’t come. Hie pony’s head wouldn’t move. Instead, it began to drop as the front legs folded.
Jude realized that the wetness on his face was blood from the animal’s skull, and shouted: ‘Fargo!’
The horse went down. In a weird instant of clarity, Jude saw that a bullet had shattered the animal’s head neatly between the eyes and the ears. He kicked out of the stirrups, powering clear of the tumbling body so that he rolled back towards the fire.
The horse snorted, long streamers of bloody foam spuming from its nostrils as the muzzle hit sand and the legs doubled. Its eyes were blank and dead. It shuddered, folding forwards into the ground, then kicked once and began to roll back.
Jude shouted, ‘Fargo! Where the hell are you?’
Then, unthinking, he began to lever the Winchester carbine, spraying bullets in a semi-circle around the clearing.
Sand plumed high into the air. Chunks of cholla and saguaro flew loose from the branches. Smoke filled the depression.
The Winchester clicked empty.
Jude tossed the carbine aside and drew his Colt.
He opened his mouth to yell, ‘Fargo!’
But the shout got cut off by the bullet that shattered his left knee. And Fargo didn’t answer.
There was no sign of Fargo.
There was only pain and loneliness and heat.
Jude looked at his leg. His foot stuck out at a curious angle, and there was blood staining his pants. More on the sand below him. He rolled onto his right side and began to pump his way towards the nearest big cactus.
He was halfway there when a slug struck his right wrist.
He screamed as the impact burst his fingers open, spinning the Colt two feet from his body. It had broken his wrist where the arm joined the hand. There was blood pulsing from the underside. Where the artery was severed, and the hand flapped loose, like a limp red flag, there were pieces of bone sticking out.
He rolled over onto his back and tried to reach the fallen pistol as Breed came down into the hollow. There was smoke curling from the barrel of his rifle, and the hammer was full back, his forefinger tight on the trigger.
‘Fargo!’ shouted Jude. ‘For Chrissakes!’
‘I think he’s gone,’ said Breed; slow and quiet. ‘I think he left you.’
Jude didn’t hear him. All the strength – all the purpose – left in his body was concentrated on reaching the pistol. There was a haze over his eyes. A red haze that washed and flickered through his being like the surging of the ocean he had once seen in Galveston. Something irrefutable, relentless.
He reached for the Colt. It was familiar, an old friend: he knew from the chipped butt and the dented strap.
There was the trigger just beyond the butt. Then the cylinder and the barrel. All he needed do was get his good hand on it.
Fasten his fingers around the butt.
Thumb the hammer back.
Settle his forefinger over the trigger.
Lift the pistol so that it pointed at the half-breed.
Squeeze the trigger.
He had done it before. Why not now?
Why was his old friend so far away?
He never even felt the pain of the bullet that spread his left hand like a bloody spider over the ground. He just stared at it and laughed, watching the splayed fingers drip crimson onto the sand as they crumpled and folded under while he went on reaching for the gun.
When they got there, they couldn’t hold the pistol. Instead, they struck the familiar grip and sent waves of pain flooding up his arm. He screamed.
‘Where’s Fargo?’ Breed asked. ‘Tell me.’
Jude laughed; a high, hysterical giggle.
‘Valverde’s the place. We meet there. Me an’ Fargo. No one to share with. Not now.’
‘Thanks,’ said Breed.
And triggered the Winchester into Jude’s face.
The .44-40 slug smashed through the bone structure as the flash scorched away the eyebrows and seared the eyeballs to milky red pulp. It crashed the bridge of the nose inwards so that both eyes got tugged into the hole at the front of the man’s skull. Impact bounced the head upwards as the slug imbedded through the rear of the brain into the ground beneath. One eye burst from the socket, dangling on crimson cords over the cheek. The other was lost inside the massive fountain of blood from the rear of the skull.
Pieces of bone and brain matter gusted in a wide circle from under Jude’s head, and what was left of his face stared up at a sky he could no longer see.
Flies settled on the body, oblivious of the blond-haired man who stood for a moment, watching them.
When he was gone, they settled in thicker. Until the buzzards came down and began to peck at the corpse.
By morning most of it was gone. What the buzzards left, the coyotes took. After that, there wasn’t much left, except for the ants and the beetles.
After a while, Jude Stoddard was just one more pile of bones fertilizing the Texas plain with no one to remember him and no marker to state his name.
Fargo watched it happen through his newly bought telescope.
He saw Jude die and grinned as he folded the spyglass back in the case.
It had all gone exactly as he wanted: the only snag was that Jude hadn’t killed the half-breed. That would have made it perfect. He’d thought that maybe Jude had a chance – the red-haired idiot was stupid enough to charge in and take the ’breed by surprise.
So: all right. Jude was dead, but the ’breed was still delayed.
Fargo mounted up and rode hard for Valverde.
With everyone gone, there was upwards of nine hundred dollars waiting, just for him, in the Valverde bank. The cows he’d forget about: it was easier to take money than to try herding steers alone.
He folded the telescope back inside its case and stuffed it down into his saddlebag. There was no one on his trail, just a long column of buzzards circling down towards the body of Jude’s horse and the scantier pickings of his deceased partner’s corpse.
Fargo laughed and slammed his heels against the flanks of the big black horse he was riding. It would be dark soon, and anyone who didn’t know the trail would find trouble.
Good old Jude, he thought, you really did me a favor.
Breed went back to the gray stallion when he was sure there would be no second attack.
He saddled up and checked the ground. And after a while, found where a man had watched the killing of Jude Stoddard. He knew the watcher had to be Fargo, so he followed the spoor the man left.
It headed out through the dry country in the direction of Valverde. When the tracks met the road, they got lost inside the slurring of wheel ruts and cattle herds, but the direction stayed obvious.
Breed rode eastwards, confident of catching up with the thin man in the town.
He rode slow, not wanting to spook Fargo. Wanting to let the man believe he was clear. Wanting to let him feel safe, so that the final confrontation would be that much more terrifying.
He camped out one night, knowing that Fargo would be running harder, confident of his own abilities as he remembered something old Sees-The-Fox had told him.
A running man is frightened, the old hunter had said. He has two paths to watch, after all. One is in front of him, the other behind. He must look for a way of escape from the one who follows him, and watch behind at the same time. That is difficult: no one has eyes both sides of their head. For the hunter, it is easier: he can see where his quarry is going, though he has two choices, as well. Easier choices, though the outcome depends on his judgement: to drive the game before him, or to move in front and take it there.
If he is a good hunter, the choice depends on him.
Breed chose the latter path as he closed on Valverde; to get in first and wait over for his quarry.
Fargo wore out his pony midway between Mattock and Valverde.
The horse faltered, spluttering blood-flecked spume as its head drooped and its forequarters folded up. Fargo slid clear of the saddle, landing on his side as the tilt of the animal threw him clear.
He stood up and began to lash the reins about the pony’s head. After a while, the animal climbed to its feet again. Fargo swung into the saddle and felt it go down. The horse snuffled froth, and he was thrown over again.
He shot the horse, more from anger than compassion, and left it on the trail. He took his saddlebags onto his shoulder and carried his Winchester in his left hand as he began to walk down the Valverde road.
The sky was getting dark. Over to the west, the sun was fading down behind the horizon. It shone red out of the western hills, temporarily filling the flatlands with burning red-gold light. Box M cattle lowed a sad, belling lament to the dying brilliance.
And a circuit rider stopped his pony on the trail and stared at the pilgrim wandering down with his bags on his shoulder and a sad look on his face. He watched the man come out of the shadows before he recognized Fargo.
His name was Travis Mather, and he was nineteen years old. He was surprised to see Fargo walking.
‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘You lose yore horse?’
Fargo nodded and said, ‘Give me yours.’
Travis Mather shook his head and said, ‘Sorry, Mr. Fargo, but Jonas gave orders about you.’
‘What orders?’ Fargo asked; knowing the answer already.
‘Said you didn’t work for the Box M no more,’ said Travis Mather. ‘Said you was posted clear of Mattock an’ the ranch. Said we wasn’t to give you anything.’
‘Jesus!’ grunted Fargo. ‘Not even to a man afoot?’
‘Well,’ said Travis Mather, ‘I guess he didn’t think of you losin’ yore pony. I guess he wouldn’t argue about me givin’ you a ride back to Mattock, not seein’ as how you are afoot.’
‘I’d appreciate it, boy.’ Fargo extended his hand so that Travis could haul him up. ‘That would be a real favor.’
Travis Mather reached down to take the hand.
Then he saw the last thing in his life, which was the muzzle of Fargo’s carbine. It flamed yellow as Fargo dragged the cowhand down from the saddle as the Winchester shattered his face.
The muzzle was pressed up close. It burned Travis Mather’s hair as his skull fragmented into tiny pieces under the pressure of the .44-40 caliber slug. Blood and brain matter flowed in a column over the cow pony’s hindquarters. Fargo held onto the reins until the bucking stopped and the corpse slid loose. Then he mounted and calmed the pony.
Travis Mather slid clear into the sand of the trail. Ants began to crawl into his opened skull.
Fargo looked at him for a moment before turning the pony.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I wish all the cowhands were as brainless as you.’