Fargo held his Henry at port and kicked his knees high, sticking close to the water’s edge to avoid crashing into logs and underbrush. The night riders circled the house rapidly, wasting lead on the thick log walls. The shutters inside had been closed, and the only light visible from the house were the long red-orange streaks of muzzle flash.
Dunk was shooting from the corral, but the attackers kept him under withering return fire. Fargo heard both barrels of Steve’s Greener explode like small cannons, and he watched the shadowy outline of a horse crashing hard to the ground. But the rider, no doubt crazy-brave from the strychnine-laced liquor common in gold camps, managed to leap free and was taken up behind another rider.
When several torches flamed to life, Fargo guessed the play. He’d come as close as he was going to if he wanted to save the Holmans. He dropped into a kneeling-offhand position, threw the Henry’s butt-plate into his shoulder socket, and aimed by instinct just left of one of the torches. He squeezed off a round, and the Henry kicked into his shoulder.
But he was literally aiming in the dark, and his first shot took no effect. One of the riders rode in closer to flip his torch onto the roof. Fargo gave up on finesse and resorted to the Henry’s great strength: rapid and sustained fire. He levered and fired with mechanical precision, and suddenly the torch plummeted to the ground as one of his rounds tagged the marauder.
By now the lead bath had alerted the others to his presence. They switched their fire toward him, and rounds peppered his position and sent plumes of water spurting. Despite the moonlight limning him, Fargo stuck to his position and sent the balance of his seventeen shots into the attackers. Dunk was now free to bang away from behind, and this deadly pincers trap broke the back of the attack. Fargo heard the drunken riders escaping back down Yellow Grizz Mountain, still whooping and hollering like by-God bravos.
Fargo sprinted the rest of the way around the lake, passing the icehouse and ducking toward the corral. “Hey, Dunk! You still in one piece?”
“Shit yes, buckskins! A man all swooped over like I am ain’t no easy target.”
“Keep a weather eye out, old roadster, case they double back. I’ll check the house.”
Fargo stopped to one side of the door, knowing they were nerve-frazzled inside and thus hair trigger. “Hallo, the house! It’s Fargo. The riders are well down the mountain.”
A shaft of oily yellow lamplight wedged into the darkness and Dave Holman stepped outside, still clutching his smoking carbine. The twins followed him and then Inez, her face pale and drawn.
“Susan’s missing,” Dave said before Fargo could speak. “Christ, what if they saw her and gunned her down? We need to—”
“It’s no circumstance,” Fargo assured him. “She’s safe.”
“You mean she’s with you?” Inez demanded, her tone implying that no decent woman could be so brazen.
“No, I passed her while she was walking,” Fargo lied. “I sent her back to my camp until the frolic was over.”
“The frolic,” Inez repeated. “I suppose you find that language colorful? I rather suspect you enjoy these ‘frolics.’ Indeed, I have a strong feeling it wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t here.”
“Honey, it was Skye who sent them packing,” Dave admonished his wife.
“Man alive,” said the twin holding the Greener, so Fargo guessed it was Steve. “That long gun of yours won’t take a rest, will it? Just kept poppin’ away.”
“Look,” said Fargo, “you fellows bring a lantern out behind the house. We’ve got a horse down, and I think I drilled one of the night riders, too. But he might just be wounded and playing possum on us.”
Inez aimed a searing stare at Fargo. “Make sure you send Susan back, Mr. Fargo.”
“He will when he’s done having fun with her,” Steve quipped in a low voice, and the twins snickered.
“What’s that?” Inez demanded sharply.
“I just said she shoulda had a gun with her,” Steve ad-libbed.
“Hmmph! It’s a fine kettle of fish when ladies must bear arms. In Dayton, even most men avoid them.”
Inez banged the door shut and Fargo led the three Holman brothers out behind the house. Dunk joined them. The lantern light revealed a coal-black gelding sprawled dead in the grass, one flank left bloody ribbons of flesh by Steve’s shotgun blast.
“Fair to middlin’ horse,” Dunk remarked. “’Specially for an outlaw mount. You can see where it’s been roweled in the shoulders, but it’s been well fed.”
“I didn’t aim for no horse,” Steve said. “It didn’t do nothing wrong.”
“Hard to see in the dark, sprout,” Dunk said. “’Tweren’t your fault.”
“We’ll hitch the team up to it in the morning,” Fargo said, searching for the man he’d shot. “Haul it out into the woods.”
“How’s ’bout we butcher out some steaks first?” Dunk suggested. “What with the icehouse and all, we’ll have fresh meat.”
“Horse meat?” Jess repeated uncertainly.
“Horse meat is good fixens,” Dunk insisted. “Ain’t that right, Fargo?”
“Not bad,” he replied absently, for he had just spotted a crumpled form in the grass. He approached cautiously, Henry at the ready, but the man was dead as last Christmas. Fargo recognized the silver conchos on his holsters—it was Ace, the slim tough with the gunmetal eyes who had accosted them earlier at the Gravel Pan.
“Say!” Steve said. “You done for one a’ the Pukes, Mr. Fargo. Is he a big bug?”
“Nope. He’s just bottom of the heap. I’ll guarandamntee you he’s never met Jackson Powell. Likely, he was hired by Brassfield and Latimer. Well, I’m damned if I’ll bury any man that tried to kill me. We’ll lash him to the dead horse and haul them both into the woods tomorrow.”
“Think they’ll be back tonight?” Dave asked.
“I’d give it long odds. They had to get liquored up to do this, and they’re sober by now. Sober enough to realize this carcass in the grass could be any one of them.”
“Don’t fret, Dave,” Dunk said. “I’ll take my bedroll down the trace a mite and sleep there. It’s the only way up, and iffen they try to ride past me they’ll be the sorriest sons of bitches in seventeen states.”
“Well, Skye, looks like the war is on,” Dave said.
“Sure’s hell is. We didn’t start this, boys, but we have to finish it. Dave was a frontier soldier and he knows what’s ahead, but you twins have got to make yourselves hard as nails. This ain’t a magazine story or a pissing fight back in Iowa. From now on it’s no mercy—it’s kill or be killed.”
* * *
Despite Susan’s tempting plea to “go it again,” Fargo walked her back to the house as soon as he returned to his rustic camp.
“The big bad Trailsman is scared of Inez, are’n’cha?” she accused him after they had set out.
“I hate to admit it, but I am a little,” he replied. “She’s a mighty potent force.”
“I’m scared of her, too,” Susan admitted. “So’s Dave and the twins. She’s the Wrath, all right. But awfully pretty, you think?”
“You’re no slouch,” Fargo assured her. “And don’t play dumb—a pretty girl always knows she’s pretty.”
“Coming from a famous lover like you, I take that as a high compliment.”
“Famous, huh? Like I said—you’re no slouch, lady.”
She laughed. “I’m as good as the man I’m with. Tonight I was very good.”
Fargo checked on the Ovaro before returning to camp, then rolled into his blankets and slept the sleep of the just until a half hour before sunrise. The mist had still not burned off the lake when he returned to the house. Dunk Langdon was just then trudging toward the corral, his bedroll under his arm.
“I feel sore all-overish,” he complained to Fargo. “Shoulda softened up my bed ground.”
“Stay peaceful last night?” Fargo greeted him.
“’Cept for a damn snake that kept circling me. The cockchafer kept me up all night with my knife to hand.”
“Hell, dad, you know there’s no poisonous snakes up this high.”
“There’s timber, ain’t there? You never heard of a timber rattler? Anyhow, don’t matter to me if a snake is pizen or no—I just can’t abide anything that travels with its belly on the ground. Gives me the fantods. ’Sides, we got worser problems than a snake. I seen Injins watchin’ this place soon as the sun come up. Utes.”
Fargo tugged at his neatly cropped beard. “Greased?”
“Nah. They wasn’t on the scrap, just sneakin’ around to watch the corral. Looks like they plan to heist the horses. And they don’t need ’em for riding—they got plenty of good mustangs they captured down along the Arkansas.”
Fargo nodded. “A well-grained white man’s horse makes for good eating.”
“Mebbe we should kill a few of them red johns, put the fear of the rifle in ’em.”
“And bring the whole damn tribe down on us? You’re some pumpkins at killing Indians, Dunk, but you know nothing about wooing them. This situation calls for honey, not vinegar.”
Dunk loosed a brown streamer into the grass. “Fargo, you got the balls of a seed bull, but all you young breed today are too quick to mollycoddle the savages. Ain’t you never heard of manifest destiny?”
“I have and I think it’s a crock. More factories and mines and railroads and sawmills. Hell, what do you think is destroying the West—Indians? I say live and let live. Besides, your idea will just get us all scalped.”
“Ah? So, what’s your plan?”
“We’ll put up a peace pole and leave them a gift to the place. They consider this their range, so we’ll pay a little rent.”
Dunk grunted. “That’s why they got their eye on the horses.”
Fargo nodded. “Sure, but one thing I’ve learned about Indians—they’re lazy when it comes to hard work. If we can give them good horse meat already butchered out, they’ll only have to cook it.”
Dunk’s weather-wrinkled face broke into a grin. “That dead horse we was gonna butcher for ourselves, right?”
“That’s the gait. You take your wheelbarrow back there and get to carving. Cut out the intestines and the lights, too—they like all of it. I’ll pull the worktable out of the shed and put it where they can see it. Pile the meat onto it.”
Dunk mulled over all of this. “Hell, even if it don’t work, it might buy us some time while they feed their faces.”
While Dunk set to work, Fargo selected a sapling near the corral and trimmed it down with his Arkansas toothpick, carving one end to a point. He pulled a bit of white bandage cloth from one of his saddle pockets and tied it to the pole. He wrestled the table out to a point about twenty yards from the corral, then jammed the peace pole into the ground beside it.
By now Dave had come outside, still buttoning his suspenders to his trousers, to see what was afoot. Fargo explained about the horse, and Dave nodded. “Can’t hurt to try. Makes me nervous, what with the women up here and only Dunk with them lots of the time.”
“You got any deliveries today?” Fargo asked.
“Uh-uh. Not till tomorrow.”
“Tell you what—after we eat, you and your brothers cut out and tack your horses. Then we’ll see how Dunk’s coming along with the butchering. We’ll haul the horse carcass and that dead night rider off and then head down the mountain.”
Dave looked at him askance. “You think that’s wise?”
Fargo’s strong white teeth flashed through his beard when he laughed. “Of course not, flatlander. ‘Wisdom’ won’t feed the bulldog in Zeb Pike’s country. This is the land of the harum-scarum and the reckless. Last night those skunk-bit coyotes under Jackson Powell sent in their card. It’s up to us to take the bull by the horns and throw him—hard. Halfway measures won’t get it done.”
“So we go looking for trouble?”
“Damn straight. And if we can’t find it, we’ll make it.”
Dave grinned and speared his fingers through his unruly thatch of red hair. “A brevet or a coffin, huh? What the hell—Inez will make a fetching widow.”
The moment the two men entered the house, Inez tied into Fargo. “I swan, Mr. Fargo! That rose-patterned carpet is one of the few fine things in this house, and you’re always tramping that lake mud all over it!”
“She sets great store by that carpet,” Dave said apologetically.
Fargo stepped back outside and knocked the mud off his boots. When he came back in, Susan met his eye and smiled. She wore a pretty plum-colored dress and her blond hair was twisted in a braid over one shoulder. The twins caught this look and snickered. Fargo pushed his legs under the table, chafing under Inez’s accusing stare.
“Here’s long sweetenin’ for your flapjacks,” Steve said, handing Fargo a jar of molasses. “You look hungry.”
Again the twins snickered, Susan blushed, and Inez seemed on the verge of a conniption fit. Fargo half expected her to pick up her “dream box” and caress it for comfort. Instead, she piled his plate high with eggs and side meat and muttered in a tragic voice, “Such goings-on around here. It’s enough to make a horse blush.”
“Boys,” Dave said casually to the twins, “hurry up and finish. We’ll be riding down to Buckskin Joe today.”
“Why?” Inez demanded. “You have no deliveries today.”
Dave looked helplessly at Fargo, who finished chewing and said, “We have some fellows to look up.”
“Oh, I’m sure of that, Mr. Fargo. It has to do with what happened last night, doesn’t it?”
“Out West,” Fargo said quietly, “the cow doesn’t bellow to the bull.”
Despite his calm exterior, he stood by for the blast. Inez surprised him by merely flouncing into the kitchen.
“Dunk will be here with you ladies,” Fargo told Susan.
The weapons for defense of the house were impressive. The centerpiece was a cumbersome but lethal twelve-shot-magazine rifle made by the Olrick brothers of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. There were also three Ketchum grenades Dave managed to “privately requisition” when he mustered out of the army. Fargo knew they had a spotty record and a small blast radius—upon impact a flint-and-steel fuse struck a spark and ignited the black-powder charge, hurling bits of sharpened iron. It was more smoke and noise than killing power, but they terrified Indians.
“Skye,” Susan said bluntly, “will these vigilantes kill women?”
“They did in Lawrence, Kansas,” he replied just as bluntly. “But they won’t likely attack by day. These aren’t vigilantes, they’re graveyard rats, and rats hole up during the day. These Pukes generally carouse all night and sleep until sundown. One reason we’re riding down is to . . . persuade them it’s not a bright idea to attack up here.”
“Damn, Steve,” Jess said, his voice excited, “we’re gonna side the Trailsman in a shooting affray! Ain’t it the berries?”
“You young fool,” Dave snapped, wiping up his plate with a biscuit, “this ain’t no lark. You two just keep your mouths shut and do what you’re told.”
“Amen,” Fargo said, scraping back his chair. “Let’s see how Dunk is doing out back, then go cinch up. We got a little undertaker work to finish before we dust our hocks.”