A hand shook him awake. He came up on the bed reaching instinctively for the gun beneath the pillow. “Easy, Neal,” a man’s voice snapped. “It’s only me—Bill Gaston.”
Fargo blinked. Then his vision cleared and he relaxed a little, swinging out of bed. “What time is it?”
“Six in the morning. You’ve had twelve hours sleep. There’s coffee hot and bacon and flapjacks. And I’ve got the map you asked for and I’ve looked it over. Hell, yes. We can do it.”
Fargo said, “Let me see the map.” He knuckled sleep from his eyes, stood up.
Gaston’s house, on the outskirts of El Paso, was little more than a shack. Gaston was single: the way he lived, the risks he took, a woman would have been a fool to marry him. A lanky man, originally from South Carolina, he was cold-nerved, intelligent, and wholly without fear. “Don’t you want some coffee first?” he asked.
“The hell with coffee. Lemme see the map.”
Gaston spread it on the rickety table in the middle of his one-room shack. “I got it from the Land Office. It’s fairly accurate: a Geological Survey team did it.” He laid a thick finger on a certain point. “Here’s the mine, the J & D. Way to hell and gone back in the Sierra Diablos. I know that country: it’s rough as a cob. Forty years ago it used to be a hangout for Victorio and his Apaches. The Army should have let ’em have it. But anyhow, you can read the contour lines. The mine’s way back up on this peak. They’ll have hell’s own time reaching it on horseback, and she was right: the roads are all washed out. But ... see? Right here in front of the mine. This big bench ...”
“Yeah,” Fargo said, and as the terrain leaped alive in his brain, he drew in a breath of satisfaction. “It’s big enough?”
“And to spare. I remember it anyhow. In my business, you have to know places like that in case you ever need ’em.”
“Yeah,” Fargo said. “How long will it take?”
“Hell, it’s only forty miles or so. Two hours at the most. Plenty of time for breakfast, and I can have you there before noon.”
Neal Fargo straightened up. “Let’s eat,” he said.
Like most men who cook for themselves, Bill Gaston was good: the bacon was crisp, the pancakes light. Fargo stuffed himself, not knowing when he might eat again. Then, while Gaston went out to attend to matters only he could take care of, Fargo washed, shaved, and checked his weapons. They were all in good shape, and he was thumbing fresh ammunition Gaston had bought for him into his bandoliers when the man returned.
“Neal,” Gaston said, “I’m ready when you are.”
Fargo stood up, slung the bandoliers, the canteen, the musette bag with some canned food in it. He adjusted the Colt in its holster, tucked the Fox sawed-off and his Winchester under his arm. “I’m ready,” he said.
They went out into the fresh-washed morning. Gaston’s shanty sat on the edge of an enormous, absolutely level field. Sunlight shone on the taut-stretched canvas of the airplane parked at one end of that and tied down by ropes. Fargo halted. “That’s not the old crate you used when you flew for Villa.”
Gaston laughed softly. “Nope. This is something brand-new and I used the money Pancho paid me to buy it from Glen Curtiss. Ain’t she a beauty? It’s called a JN-4, officially, but everybody calls her a Jenny. It’s one of the first he’s produced. He hopes to sell ’em in Canada and England. Anyhow, it’s got a ninety-horsepower engine, and it’ll take you up and set you down in the Sierra Diablo. I’ll tell you, Fargo, this Jenny is a big jump forward from the old scrap iron and baling wire and used-rag planes I flew for Pancho down in Mexico three years ago. As different as a Tin Lizzy from a horse.”
Fargo spat into the grass. “Me, I’m a cavalryman. Given a choice, I’d rather have a horse. Goddam cars, airplanes, they’re changing everything. But I can’t be choosy now. The main thing’s to get to the J & D mine before Harrod does.” But to himself he admitted that there was something sleek and satisfying about the airplane’s lines, like the conformation of a fine horse. It had a real fuselage, not just a contraption of struts and wires with a seat in the middle of it, and two strong-looking wings, and it had real wheels instead of skids.
“Okay, so you’re a cavalryman. But you’re gonna have to take that hat off and tuck it inside your shirt. Wear this.” Gaston handed him a leather cap and a pair of goggles. Fargo put away his treasured hat, slipped that gear on. Then Gaston gave him further instructions, and five minutes later he found himself standing in front of the propeller, holding it, awaiting the high-sign from the pilot.
It came, and Fargo leaned into the prop and spun it. It coughed, stopped. He tried again, whirling it with all his strength, jumping back, and this time it caught and the engine roared and the wooden blade was a shining whirl and the dawn was full of engine-thunder. Carrying his weapons, he climbed into the rear cockpit of the shuddering airplane. Carefully, following Gaston’s previous instructions, he strapped himself in with the safety belt. Gaston turned, looked, nodded, gave a sign and dropped back in his own seat. Then he gunned the engine, taxied the aircraft into position for take-off.
Fargo chewed an unlit cigar. He had ridden with Gaston twice before, on orders of Pancho Villa, in this action or another he’d been caught up in, deep in Mexico. Skimming over the chaparral, they’d reconnoitered, dropped crude bombs on the Federales. Each flight had been an ordeal for Neal Fargo, but he’d had full confidence in Bill Gaston. Like himself, Gaston was a thorough professional.
And when, strength coming back to him at the ruined Dane Ranch, he had tried to figure out what to do, how to overtake Harrod or beat him to the mine, Gaston’s name had popped into his brain unbidden. It would have taken a bird to reach the mine in time—and Gaston was an eagle. Fargo had pushed the old mare hard to El Paso, where, he knew, Gaston, no longer flying for Villa, had a shack, a hangar, as he called it, and an airfield. Gaston was trying to negotiate a contract with the Army at Fort Bliss to reconnoiter for them along the Rio, but so far having no success and living off of thin soup and hope. Fargo’s offer of three hundred dollars to be taken to the mine by air had been a godsend, and Gaston had leaped at it. While Fargo slept, he’d obtained the necessary maps and bought the gasoline and naphtha and castor oil this thing ran on, and now, for the time being, the rest was up to him.
The plane shuddered, then sped down the field. Wind rushed around Fargo’s exposed head as it lifted smoothly from the close-cropped grass, was airborne. The earth fell away, and Fargo looked down, queasy, yet fascinated. In a few moments, El Paso was a clutter of child’s toys spread out on the Rio, with desert above it, the Organ Mountains nearby, and the rich fertile strip of the Rio Grande valley a streak of green against the dun-colored bleakness. Beyond was the tan expanse of Chihuahua. Fargo saw troops drilling on the outskirts of Juarez—toy soldiers.
The Jenny banked, turned southeast. Fargo chewed harder on the cigar. Now there was nothing to do but sit back and wait.
Wild, broken country, like a relief map, unfolded beneath them, studded with sparse, occasional ranch buildings. Fargo, leaning out, surveyed it closely. In almost no time at all, he saw ahead the bleak folds of the Sierra Diablo, the high peak of the nearby Sierra Blanca. Apache country, he thought. No wonder Victorio’s Warm Springs braves had been able to hide out for so long, foiling the General for whom Van Horn was named.
Then he stiffened. Through drifting, wispy clouds, he could see antlike figures below, moving up through the lower slopes of the Sierra Diablo. Four of them, on horseback, tiny, lost, in the massive, hostile terrain. His mouth twisted. Lola, Harrod, and the others. For riders, they had made good time.
Then they were left behind. The airplane banked again, and Fargo almost bit the cigar in two. Suddenly, as if a great, unseen hand had smashed it, the Jenny shot straight up, with a flap and groan of stressed wings, a keening of wires and struts. Its whole body shook, and then, with a suddenness equally heart jarring, it dropped straight downward, as if about to pancake into the earth. Fargo’s stomach came into his throat.
But the airplane’s fall was arrested, and it sped onward. Ahead loomed sawtoothed peaks. Gaston put the plane between a pair of them, banked again, started to lose altitude. He tapped on the windshield of Fargo’s cockpit, pointed with a gloved hand. Looking down, Fargo saw it below.
The broad bench jutted out from the mountainside like an enormous shelf. The faint scar of road leading up to it was washed away in some places, obliterated under tons of rubble in others. No wonder it could no longer be traveled by car.
On the back of the bench were a few scattered buildings—superintendent’s house, stables and warehouse, bunkhouses. The dry air had preserved them all intact for years. Above them, on the mountain’s flank, a black hole yawned, the scaffolding of tipple and windlass near it, a slide of tailings nearby. And somewhere in that complex, Fargo thought, with a surge of excitement, was a half million dollars in big bills! Fair game for anyone who could take it.
Now the airplane was nosing lower. The bench rushed up at what seemed to Fargo dismaying speed. He could see ruts and washes crossing it, cactus, clumps of brush, piles of rock. None of that seemed to dismay Bill Gaston. He never hesitated. Briefly, Fargo closed his eyes. There was, anyhow, nothing he could do. Then, with a jolting bump, the airplane touched down.
It raced along the bench, bouncing and lurching. Deftly, Gaston steered it among the obstacles, clearing all of them. After seconds that seemed years, it finally halted, motor purring. Gaston cut the engine, and the silence after its roar and the rush of wind seemed deafening. He and Fargo unlatched their seatbelts and climbed out. The first thing Fargo did when his feet touched solid ground was to strip off the leather helmet and goggles and hand them to Gaston and clamp the battered Rough Riders hat firmly on his head.
“Well, you’re here,” Gaston said.
“Yeah, and much obliged.”
“Easy trip. Only one rough updraft over those mountains. I guess you saw the riders.”
“I saw them,” Fargo said.
Gaston’s face was serious. “Neal. You want me to stick around? I don’t know what your fuss is with these people, but I can use a gun.”
Fargo pointed to the plane. “You get that thing out of here. I don’t want ’em to see it when they come up. And remember our deal. You come back tomorrow at four in the afternoon. If I’m in view, signaling, you land and pick me up. If I’m not, you fly on and—”
“And—?” Gaston asked.
“And I’ll be dead,” Fargo said. “Thanks for the ride, Bill. Now get the hell out of here.”
He waited impatiently while Gaston refueled with a can of gasoline that had ridden with him in the pilot’s compartment, tinkered with the engine. Then he swung the propeller again and it caught immediately. The airplane blew a sandstorm of dust as it lifted off the bench, banked, circled, and then dwindled to a dot over the mountains, like a distant hawk.
Fargo let out a long breath. Now he was alone at the deserted mine. And he had time to look around, size up the terrain—and plot his ambush.
Like some great desert wolf, he loped along the edge of the bench, and soon he was satisfied. There was only one place they could come up—the scrape that was all that remained of the old road. It would have been an easy matter to have lain up in the rocks above it and to blow all three men from their saddles as they came over the bench’s rim. But there were two things wrong with that. Any miss or miscalculation would give them time to use Lola as a shield or kill her—and Lola was all-important … the only, one who could tell him where the money was. The second thing was that he did not want to shoot Rex Harrod from ambush. He had a very personal score to settle with that hulking bastard, and—
Again he felt the itching in his big fists. So what he had to plan was a way to take out Flash Murphy and the knife-man and keep Lola safe and leave Harrod to meet him face to face, hand to hand. Now that, he thought, was not entirely professional, with so much money riding on the outcome of all this, but—sometimes a man had to bend his principles a little.
It was still early morning. He figured he had several hours until they got here; surely they would not arrive before three in the afternoon. In the intervening time, he was busy.
First, with a brush broom, he erased all sign of the airplane’s landing. Then he made a circuit, a search, of every building. It was not likely anyone else was here, but you never could tell. The country swarmed with desert-rats and prospectors, wandering aimlessly, always looking for the big strike that would make them rich for life. Sure enough, behind the superintendent’s house he found the droppings of a burro and a fire had been built not too long before in the still usable fireplace. An empty coffee can with the label peeled off was the only other sign of visitation, but there was no doubt that, several weeks before, some rock rat had worked his way up here, nosed around, departed. Otherwise, save for coyote tracks, there was no sign of other visitors.
Fargo ate dried beef, beans, buried the can, drank tepid water, checked his weapons. He wondered where Lola had hidden the cash—in the shaft or somewhere else? Wherever, it would have been well hidden: she was fox-shrewd and she would take no chances with a half million. Fargo’s mouth quirked. The desert rat had probably been closer to a fortune than he ever would be again, and he would never know it.
After inspecting the whole layout, his plans came clear in his mind. There were no corrals here, but there were stables for the mine mules, and they were still intact. One of the stalls, with half a board gone, would make a fine hiding place. The gap afforded him a view of the road leading up over the bench’s rim, but, more than that, here he would have a chance to put either Flash or the knife-man out of action, silently.
Coolly, professionally, he gambled on his ability to anticipate the actions of the enemy. Flash had moaned about the prospect of the long ride; he and Jimmy-the-Blade were obviously city men. Whatever Harrod was, he’d been in prison, away from a saddle, for a long time. They would all arrive beat out and stiff.
And no matter how greedy they were for treasure, they would have to put up the horses first. The horses were their salvation, the only way to get out of here. Harrod would not do it himself: either Flash or Jimmy would be assigned to that.
Fargo fingered the Batangas knife in its sheath.
Whoever brought the horses in to this dim, rickety barn, which still smelled of the fragrance of dried hay, would never leave alive, nor have a chance to make an outcry. And with one down, the odds were cut by a third.
In the stall he waited, smoked, limbered up with the knife. He was sore and slow from all he’d been through, and his left arm was nearly wooden once again. But he had surprise on his side, and that fierce, liquor-strong hatred bubbling in his veins. That should be enough.
It was hot here and grew hotter as the blazing sun spilled westward down the sky. His railroad watch was waterproof and still ran after immersion in the well: when it had ticked off three-thirty, Fargo put out the last cigar, took station at the gap in the stable wall and waited. During the half hour that passed after that, he could have been something carved from wood, for all his immobile patience. Meanwhile, his mind was busy, building a kind of fantasy.
A half million dollars. Add that to the nearly hundred thousand already in the bank, and it was a fortune. Enough to realize a dream he’d always had.
There was, in Central America, a small republic waiting like a ripe fruit to be picked by some enterprising filibuster. Fargo’s eyes had been on it for a long time. Its so-called Presidente was nothing but a dictator, and he had a palace full of treasure stolen from the poor. There were rich silver mines and lush plantations—rubber and banana. The Army was a joke, the populace alienated from the government, and poor and ignorant. With more than a half million dollars, a man like Fargo could hire his own army, infiltrate, and then pull a coup, take over. He could make the country his, become its presidente, have free access to its treasure vaults, its women—the idea amused him. President Fargo. And yet with that kind of money, it was easily achievable. And, by God, they would be better off under him than under their present ruler. Not that he would stay long. But it would be something new and ...
He tensed. Sound carried a long way in the hush at these heights. And now he heard it, the clop of hoofbeats, the murmur of voices. Fargo’s thumb ran over the edge of the open Batangas knife in his palm. They were coming.
Crouched there, concealed, he saw them crest the bench’s rim, Lola in the lead. She looked exhausted, but less so than the three men behind her. Unused to riding, they swayed in their saddles, stood in their stirrups to ease the strain on tender thighs and rumps. Then they were, all four of them, over the bench. Reining in, they all dismounted, wearily, stiffly, and Fargo heard their voices clearly.
“This is it?” Harrod asked.
“This is it,” Lola said tonelessly.
“Where’s the money?”
“It’s in the shaft, off in a stope, hidden in a certain place ...”
“How do we get there?”
“We climb up there—” She pointed to the shaft opening above. “And keep on climbing for a while and then go down. It’s a hard trip. I picked a place to hide the money where nobody just passing through would ever find it. Prospectors and rock rats are always nosing around deserted mines.”
“Climb,” Jimmy-the-Blade groaned. “Hell, I can hardly walk.”
“All right,” Harrod said. “We’ll rest a few minutes. But not long. I want my hands on that money. Flash—you search these buildings. Jimmy, you put up the horses. That looks like the stable yonder. Unsaddle ’em and let their backs dry. We’ll need ’em when we ride out.”
“Dammit, I ain’t no stable-boy.”
Harrod turned on him. “You do what I say,” he said quietly,
Jimmy-the-Blade’s lips peeled back from his teeth. For a moment he and Harrod stared at one another. But it was Jimmy who yielded. “Yeah,” he grunted, and took the reins of two horses in either hand and led them gimpily toward the stable.
Fargo’s grin was like a wolf’s snarl as he seated the locked split hafts of the Batangas knife in his hard palm. He shrank back behind a stall partition.
Jimmy-the-Blade led the horses inside and one by one tied them so he could unsaddle them before putting them in the stalls. “Damn,” he muttered aloud. “Sometimes I get so blasted mad ... Got half a mind to ... put six inches of steel in his gut. Flash, too. Then a whole half million. Ahhhh ...” He let out a gusty sigh. “Stand still, you blasted jughead!”
Saddles dropped. “A half million,” Jimmy went on muttering. “And that slut, too. That’s a piece of stuff, she is. I’d—” He unstrapped the latigo on the fourth saddle, yanked it off, let the forty-pound weight fall to the ground. His back, now, was to Fargo. And Fargo stepped, soundlessly as a cat, from the stall, and he said, in a whisper:
“Jimmy.”
Jimmy-the-Blade whipped his tall, gangling form around. His eyes bulged, his long jaw dropped as he stared at the big, grinning man there a yard away with the ten inches of cold steel thrust forward. “You—” he husked.
“Me,” Fargo said and came forward with sleek, fluid grace.
That motion triggered something in the knife-fighter. Astonishment forgotten, Jimmy’s hand whipped to the back of his neck. It was a blur as it brought out a Bowie from a sheath hung there by a string around his neck, and his long arm was already out, parrying, as Fargo lunged in.
Their blades clanged together. Jimmy laughed. “I don’t know where you come from, but, man, you’re a fool. Now you’ll die a second time.”
Fargo didn’t answer. Their blades broke apart. Jimmy took the offensive, moved in, lithe and quick and altogether the best knife-fighter Fargo had ever faced, and suddenly he was the one parrying, as steel rang on steel. He backed and backed again and realized how stiff he was, how sore, and that he might have bitten off more than he could chew. Jimmy was his equal in every way. And Jimmy had pulled another knife now, from his boot, had one in either hand, came hard after Fargo. The second one, in his left hand, was a dagger, its eight-inch blade slim and deadly.
“... cut you to ribbons,” Jimmy panted, and Fargo backed and fetched up against the end wall of the long barn and Jimmy came in, blade parrying to catch Fargo’s, the dagger ready for the killing thrust as soon as Fargo’s knife was locked.
It seemed to Fargo that it took forever. His left hand and arm were so slow, so weak. Yet, in only half a second, the Batangas knife was transferred from right hand to left hand, and the left hand was moving out. There was a fraction of a second when Jimmy-the-Blade was caught off guard, astonished, and his eyes widened. His Bowie sliced the air where Fargo’s knife should have been, and then, recovering, he tried to parry with the slender poniard. The Batangas knife’s greater weight knocked it easily aside, and Fargo drove in and upward.
Jimmy’s Bowie sliced his shirt as his own blade went home in Jimmy’s chest. Jimmy lurched forward, pinning himself on it, and raised his Bowie for another slash. Fargo dared not let him get in that reflexive cut; he turned the blade of the Batangas knife. It was deep in Jimmy’s heart and cut it in quarters as it revolved, and Jimmy died before his own knife found Fargo’s flesh. His hands dropped, his dead weight fell forward, and with all his strength Fargo pushed back and Jimmy came off the knife and landed motionless in the dirt of the aisle of the stables. Sniffing blood, the horses snorted.
Panting, Fargo leaned against the wall, wiping his knife on a tattered bale of half-eaten hay that had been there for years. It had been close. With that hampered left arm, his ambidextrousness, double-handedness, had almost not been enough. But a miss was as good as a mile; and the edge that had saved his life before had worked again. And, Fargo thought, one away. But he had better quit grandstanding, not put too much reliance in that left. But Jimmy had died silently, without giving alarm. And that was what a knife was for.
That left Flash Murphy, who was supposed to be a gunman, and Rex Harrod, who possibly could or could not use a gun or knife, but whose favorite weapons were his fists. Murphy must be the next to go, Fargo thought.
But for the moment he must wait. Lola had to be in the clear before he made his next assault.
He edged to the stable door. The knife was sheathed now, the shotgun slung. It was a risky weapon for what lay ahead: he did not want Lola to catch a buckshot slug. His hand hovered near the holstered .38.
It had been standard cavalry issue until the Filipino Insurrection. But down on the huge southern island of Mindanao in the Philippines, the Moros, Mohammedans crazed with hate for the infidel and stoked up on drugs, had run amok, gone juramentado, as they said. And the .38 with standard ammunition would not stop them. You could put a whole cylinder into a crazed Moro and he would still chop you up with his parang. So the Army had gone to the .45 automatic, which packed more shock and stopping power. But the automatic was poorly balanced, inaccurate compared to the revolver, and prone to jam. Fargo had stuck with the .38, and the hollow points he used gave it the stopping power of any .45 and more.
Five minutes passed, ten, fifteen. Still Fargo did not leave the stable. His mouth twisted. Harrod must be wondering now. What was Jimmy up to? Had he decided he wanted the woman and the whole half million for himself? Was he stalking them, circling them, ready to betray and kill them? There was no honor among thieves, and Fargo counted on that.
Then, as he had known it must, a figure emerged from the Superintendent’s house. Short and stocky, it came toward the stables, and Fargo saw the sun glinting off the Colt in its hand. Harrod, impatient, had sent. Flash to see what was keeping Jimmy-the-Blade.
Fargo drew the Colt. Flash Murphy did not come straight for the stable. With instinctive caution, distrusting Jimmy, he circled. In a moment more, he would edge around the side of the building.
Fargo let him do that. When Flash had disappeared around the stable’s flank, concealing him from view from the super’s house, Fargo stepped out, edged forward, turned the corner. Flash, stiffly after the long ride, was stalking down to look in through a crack at the stable’s other end.
“Murphy,” Fargo said quietly.
The man’s turn was incredibly fast and he was already raising the gun and lining it as he spun. Fargo pulled the trigger.
Murphy’s gun never fired. The hollow-point caught him squarely in the chest, just to the left of the breastbone. It drove deep inside him and spread and blew, and Murphy never knew what hit him. He landed on his back in the dust, open eyes staring sightlessly at the hard blue sky above.
Fargo pressed back against the stable wall. Harrod would have heard that. Not knowing that anybody else could be up here, he would assume that Murphy and Jimmy had fought it out. The gun, of course, would always win over the knife. And now, for all he knew, Flash Murphy would be coming to contend with him over possession of Lola, the key to the half million. Anyhow, he would take no chances. Harrod would know that he could not shoot it out gun to gun with Murphy. Something had to happen now, but Fargo was not sure what. He pressed back against the stable wall. What happened next depended on how much Harrod trusted Murphy.
The call rang out, deep-voiced, across the bench. “Flash? What the hell? What’s going on out there?”
Only silence answered.
“Murphy, dammit—?”
Fargo went into action, then. He bent low, scuttled from the stable toward a vacant bunkhouse, fetched up behind its wall.
“Flash!” Harrod roared. He appeared from the doorway of the super’s house, and he had a gun in his hand and Lola pressed against him as a shield. “Murphy?”
Fargo ran up the slope, stiffly, toward the huge pile of cinnabar tailings, rusty red, near the tipple. Harrod, shoving Lola ahead of him toward the stable, did not see him. He gained the pile of tailings, clambered up again, and then fell behind a rusted ore cart parked near the mouth of the abandoned mine. There he waited, grinning. From here, he could not see what was happening, but he knew that sooner or later Harrod would find Murphy and Jimmy-the-Blade, both dead. And then he would know there was an enemy on the bench. He could not know that it was Neal Fargo. Neal Fargo was dead, and even if he weren’t, he couldn’t possibly have gotten here ahead of Harrod.
So, alone now, Harrod would waste no time. He’d shove Lola up to the mine, fast as possible. He wanted to get his hands on that money, get out of here. Menaced by an unseen enemy, without his killer friends to side him, unless he were superhuman, he should be feeling panic.
He was. Below, Fargo heard rocks rattle. He peered around the ore cart. They were coming now, Lola struggling up the slope, Harrod right behind her. But the terrain was so steep, so rough, that Harrod could not hold the girl. He only had a gun trained on her, and Fargo heard him growl, “Faster, damn you. We’ve got to get under cover!”
Lola was panting, white-faced, a parody of the lovely woman she once had been. “Rex, please—” she gasped.
“Move!” Harrod rasped. His head swiveled as he searched the bench below. His face, too, was pale. Fargo grinned. Colt in hand, he waited.
Gasping, Lola struggled past, fell to her knees at the mine’s mouth. Ten yards behind, Harrod came up strongly. Then Fargo stepped from behind the ore cart, gun lined.
“Rex,” he said. “Drop it.”
Harrod stared at him and at the Colt lined on his chest, and it was more the shock of recognition than the gun that froze him. “You,” he whispered after a long second. “It can’t be.”
“But it is,” Fargo said, grinning wolfishly. “Drop that gun.”
Harrod bit his lip. But slowly his hand unclenched and the pistol, a Webley, fell into the rocks. “Fargo,” he said. “Fargo, listen ...”
“Neal—” Lola blurted behind him. “Neal, is it really you?”
“Me,” Fargo said. “You stay right where you are.” He came forward. “Down the hill, Rex.”
Harrod stared at the gun. “What are you gonna do with me?”
“Kill you,” Fargo said.
“Listen—”
“Down the hill.”
Harrod obeyed. His knees were weak and his gait awkward as he went down the slope.
“Neal!” Lola called from behind him. But he paid her no attention.
They reached the level. Fargo marched Harrod out in front of the Super’s house. “Stop right there,” he said when Harrod stood on an absolutely level patch of ground.
Harrod turned. “Fargo, for God’s sake—” Then his eyes widened as Fargo threw the .38 aside, into the brush. The shotgun, handled more gently, was unslung and followed it. Then the Batangas knife. “I said I’d kill you,” Fargo grated. “But I aim to do it with my hands.”