The Trailsman #281

For Springer, as for the rest of the grateful New Mexico Territory, several nights passed with no further fiery nightmares spawned by Blaze Weston.

With the damning testimony of Cynthia Robinson, Bobbie Jean and Jimmy Davis, and Esteban Robles, Skye Fargo’s name wasn’t just cleared—he was declared in newsprint as “the iron backbone of America” and loudly proclaimed a hero. Or as Moonshine Jones aptly put it: “The same damn fools itching to kill you are now lining up to buy your whiskey.”

EVER-VIGILANT TRAILSMAN SENDS FEARED ARSONIST PACKING!!! shouted a confident headline in the Springer newspaper.

But Skye Fargo wasn’t buying any of this ink-slinger’s claptrap. That’s why he delayed even longer in reporting to Fort Union to begin his new scouting duties.

It wasn’t Fargo’s way to leave a job unfinished. Especially a job this important.

Blaze Weston’s trail had led straight to Springer, and Fargo had found fresh signs of the man all around the area. But he’d found no trail proving Weston had ever left the region for good.

He’s biding his time, Fargo speculated. Because of that “master plan” of his.

“Glad to be back in buckskins again, Fargo?” Moonshine asked him as he topped off Fargo’s glass.

It was top-shelf bourbon he poured now, not the cheap Indian-burner he’d served Fargo before. This was the fourth night now since the famous “siege at river flats” as the news hawks had dubbed Fargo’s gutsy show-down west of Springer.

“Glad? It’s like having my real skin back,” Fargo assured him. “I wouldn’t wrap garbage in them machine-made duds.”

“See you’ve stopped shaving, too. Gonna let that peach fuzz on your face grow into a beard again?”

“Mister, if that bear’s big enough,” Moonshine assured him, “he can shit any damn place he pleases.”

Moonshine’s harmless joke again put Blaze Weston on Fargo’s mind. Seemed like everything did, these days. The hero-hungry press may have buried Blaze Weston for good. But, for Fargo, the New Mexico nightmare wouldn’t be over until he saw the arsonist’s lifeless body.

It was just past sundown, and the Queen of Sheba was starting to come to life. Fargo had spent the past few pleasure-filled nights bunking with Bobbie Jean, who would soon be moving into a new home with her brother Jimmy. Once the public learned how the Robinsons had tried to frame him, lumber orders had begun pouring in, including some lucrative government contracts.

“New sheriff arrives tomorrow,” Moonshine remarked, looking glum. “That means I’ll likely have to kick him a percentage. It’s technically illegal to run whores in the territory. Old Sam, he didn’t care and never took a bribe. I oughta know—I tried to slip him one once. Son of a pup socked me one.”

Fargo grinned. “Yeah, I got one of those ‘reminder’ punches myself. It was the straight-and-narrow path with Sam.”

Fargo had been proud to be one of the pallbearers at Sheriff Rafferty’s funeral yesterday. The territorial governor himself had shown up, along with an honor guard from Fort Union.

“Cynthia Robinson’s headed back East,” Moonshine told him. “Told the newspapers she ain’t ever even gonna face west again much less come back out here.”

Fargo nodded, not really paying much attention. Bobbie Jean would be waiting upstairs, ready to ride him to the roundup all night. But even that pleasant prospect wasn’t foremost on his mind as he glanced past the batwings at the gathering darkness of the night.

“ ’S’matter?” Moonshine asked as he wiped the dust out of a jolt glass with the tail of his shirt. “Something on your mind besides your hat?”

“Aw, hell, Skye! He lit a shuck outta here long ago—no pun. With Nate dead, and the whole thing exposed . . . ’sides, that massacre of Butch and his thugs would put the fear of God in any man.”

Any man, maybe, Fargo thought. But he had no proof whatsoever that Blaze Weston even belonged to the human species.

As he had several times a night since returning to Springer, Fargo stepped outside and made a slow, observant tour of the town. In and out of each side alley, circling all the large wooden structures.

Again, nothing. No hobnailed boot prints, no prints left by a chipped rear horseshoe.

Could be Moonshine was right—maybe Blaze had finally shown the white feather.

She flumped the sheet back, showing him she was buck naked. Alabaster skin smooth as lotion, with the exciting, dark contrasts of her pointy nipples.

“I been this way two hours waiting on you, getting so randy. . . . Listen! You make me go without it much longer, long-tall, and I’ll have to join Moonshine’s stable of whores just to scratch this itch you started.”

“Never let it be said,” Fargo replied, tossing his hat onto a chair and unbuckling his gun belt, “that Skye Fargo ever drove a gal to desperate measures.”

The night was his time, and this night Blaze waited until even later than he usually struck.

The wind seemed enraged. Around midnight it had begun to pick up with a fury, howling in off the Texas plains in gusts that whipped the landscape into swirling dust storms.

That wind told Blaze his purpose was right, just. Once he fired his kerosene-soaked tinder, that wind would gust like a giant bellows. The whorehouse would catch fire like a hoop skirt, and everyone inside would be cleansed in hellfire.

It was the time of night sailors called the dog watch—those last, lonely hours before dawn. Blaze had entered town on foot, gliding like a shadow. He knew Fargo was on the prowl lately, but he also knew that even the Trailsman had to sleep.

Fargo had just completed his latest rounds, while Blaze watched from inside an empty hogshead in front of the mercantile, peeking out from under the lid. Fargo would likely turn in now.

As he slipped into the alley beside the Queen of Sheba, Blaze lovingly embraced his folded-up mackinaw. It held the sacred tools of his trade, including the stolen can of kerosene with its cork stopper.

He reached the apron of shadow surrounding the Queen of Sheba, bent almost double by the wind.

Outside his warm bed and far from the naked woman curled against him, Skye Fargo heard the wind rise to a warning shriek that startled him awake.

His own voice in the silent room. Signboards flapped crazily outside in the gusts, and he could hear grit slapping against the window panes of Bobbie Jean’s room.

Bobbie Jean muttered in her sleep, smiling, as Fargo stirred beside her, sitting up to dress and pull on his boots.

Fargo strapped on his gun belt and rolled the cylinder to check his loads. Then he left the room as he had his first time here—he dangled from the window sill and simply dropped.

He landed on his feet in the alley and filled his hand. But a quick check showed this side was clear.

Fargo sneaked around the corner, the sand-laden wind forcing his eyes to slits. All looked clear back here, too.

But when the wind momentarily died down, Fargo breathed through his nostrils, then felt his skin crawl: the strong, pungent stench of kerosene!

Blaze had started with the long side of the building, away from the alley. Carefully, yet quickly and expertly, he placed his piles of tinder along the base of the dry wooden structure, then soaked them and the surrounding wood with kerosene. One quick pass with a burning rope to ignite each pile, and with this wind, the building would be consumed before anyone even realized it was burning.

He had just worked his way around the corner, beginning on the front of the saloon, when a voice boomed out of the darkness.

No time for fancy work now, Blaze realized. He stood up, and swung the can of kerosene toward the building to splash it good. He cursed when most of the kerosene bounced off and soaked his buckskin shirt.

Closer now, and Blaze began to tremble as his hands fumbled to open the piece of oilskin containing his lucifers. No time for the rope, he’d have to just light it and run.

Blaze saw a tall form step around the corner, he struck his match on a dry section of board, and a fragment of the burning sulfur broke off and landed on his kerosene-soaked shirt.

Fargo had just curled his finger around the trigger when Blaze literally became one with his name—he erupted in flames.

Within seconds, in that raging wind, his entire body was aflame, even his wild hair looking like the biblical burning bush.

Fargo, horrified at the sight and smell of a human being incinerated—even this one—nonetheless could not tear his eyes away. It was, after all, the old style of justice: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.

But then, ice forming in his limbs, Fargo realized: Weston was long past the point where he should have collapsed, writhing in agony.

Instead, he was stalking straight toward Fargo, arms extended for a fiery death hug!

Fargo’s shocked brain sent a command to his trigger finger, and he planted two quick rounds in the flaming specter’s chest.

“Fargo!” cried that ghastly, ruined voice. “Fargo, I’ll take you to hell with me!”

Fargo snapped off the remaining four rounds, two of them to Weston’s charred brain.

And still the burning monster was on his feet, charging! In seconds he would be on Fargo.

Bobbie Jean emptied both barrels of her sawed-off scattergun, literally shattering the inhuman demon into flaming bits.

“Woke up and saw both you and your gun belt gone,” she told him, her voice quaking at what she still couldn’t believe she’d just seen. “Then I heard you out here yelling.”

She followed Fargo as he went around the building, pulling out all the volatile tinder and smearing it into the dirt.

“Skye?” she asked. “How could he keep coming at you like that? He was burning alive, and I saw you put six slugs in him!”

Fargo shook his head. “Ain’t got the words to explain it, honey, nor the mentality. And I doubt anybody has.”

However, he noticed how the wind had died down completely, and how a pre-dawn peacefulness was settling over the town. La Llorona, the Weeping Woman in the wind, would forever raise her plaintive cry across this ancient land of the thunderbird.

But as Skye Fargo stared at the charred, unholy remains before him, he realized: This night, a terrible demon had been destroyed forever. Bobbie Jean, Moonshine, and every living soul in this building would go on living—as would all the souls Blaze Weston would never, ever be able to harm again.

“Guess you’ll be headed to Fort Union soon, huh?” Bobbie Jean asked him as they headed back upstairs. “Do that scouting job?”

Fargo nodded. But, in truth, he wasn’t heading right for Fort Union, though Bobbie Jean didn’t need to know that. There was a yellow Western Union flimsy stuffed into his pocket, delivered earlier that day. It was from Rosalinda in Chimayo. Just five simple words that meant he’d definitely be returning soon to his pretty rose.