Inside, Susan had just taken fresh-baked bread out of the Dutch oven, and the smell made Fargo’s mouth water. The meal Inez laid out was up to her usual standard: eggs, scrapple, biscuits and honey, and hot coffee. At one point during the meal, Susan caught Fargo’s eye and sent him a knowing grin. Inez, ever vigilant, saw this.
“Are you and Mr. Fargo sharing a secret, Susan?” she asked in her prim, schoolmarm tone.
The twins snickered, Susan flushed to the roots of her hair, and Fargo attacked his food with renewed zeal.
“We should have fresh trout for later,” he volunteered, changing the subject. “I’ll check the trotline when I go back to my camp.”
Inez coolly ignored him. She aimed probing eyes at her husband. “David, tomorrow is another ice delivery, am I correct?”
Dave looked up slowly from his plate, warned by his wife’s use of his full name. “Sure is, hon. Every other day. Why?”
“I have a mind to ride down with you men, that’s why.”
“Inez, that’s out of the question. Why would you want to go into Buckskin Joe? It’s no place for a woman.”
“Indeed. But you’ll be taking more vegetables, won’t you?”
“Spun truck? Why, of course.”
Here Inez leveled scathing eyes on Fargo. “There may be more starving orphans in the camp, right, Mr. Fargo?”
Steve and Jess hastily excused themselves and hurried outside. Fargo laid his fork on his plate and assumed his best poker face. “Doesn’t seem likely, Inez. That last bunch was just a chance arrival, you might say.”
Dave had the look of a man lost at sea. Inez smiled cruelly at their hired guard. “Balderdash! A chance arrival? It’s curious, Mr. Fargo. Susan and I took a stroll down the mountain while you men were gone today. And lo and behold! We found the trail strewn with a veritable cornucopia. We saw melons and cucumbers and squash scattered everywhere. I wonder how they got there.”
Fargo felt his scalp sweating. “That’s a poser, all right.”
Dave tried to come to the rescue with a half-truth. “Now, honey, we lost control of the team on that steep slope. The truck flew out, and see, Skye sorter made up that story about the orphans to spare your feelings.”
“Spare my feelings—with an outrageous lie, and hiding behind orphans? Susan and I work hard in that garden. Why didn’t you simply pick up the produce after the team was under control?”
Dave was still floundering. Fargo had had enough. “Inez, we were ambushed by Indians, and we didn’t feel like trading our dander for spun truck.”
“Indians?” Inez looked at her husband. “Why didn’t you just tell me instead of weaving wild tales?”
“I wove the tale,” Fargo reminded her.
“And enjoyed the weaving, didn’t you?”
Fargo confessed with a grin. “No offense intended, Inez, but most Westerners are yarners. It gets mighty boring out here, and now and again a man is tempted to toss in another grizzly.”
“That’s a colorful description of telling a lie. Nonetheless, I’m certainly glad that you three made it home safely yesterday. Now I understand about the produce—of course you had to leave it.”
Fargo thanked Inez for the tasty meal and pushed away from the table.
“Mr. Fargo,” Inez said, casting a disapproving glance at his dirty buckskins, “would you like me to wash your sit-down-upons?”
Fargo looked baffled while Dave stuffed a few knuckles in his mouth to keep from laughing.
“She means your trousers,” Susan explained. “Back in Dayton the word isn’t used in polite circles.”
“Oh. Well, my spare sit-down-upons look just as bad,” Fargo replied. “I’ll bring them in before I ride back to my camp.”
Dunk was currycombing the last horse when Fargo strolled into the corral, looking like an escapee from a torture chamber.
“That copper-haired wench been scratchin’ at you agin?” the oldster greeted him, grinning wickedly. “That’s a fine little piece, but brother, don’t let her catch you suppin’ coffee from your saucer. Damn my eyes iffen she ain’t a pesticatin’ bitch.”
“I wouldn’t rate her a bitch,” Fargo said. “But she’s some piece of work, all right.”
“Women!” Dunk sent an amber streamer into the dirt but missed and hit his boot. “Stand ’em on their heads naked and they all look like sisters.”
Fargo centered his saddle on the Ovaro’s back. “Never mind the cracker-barrel philosophy, old roadster. We’ve got Utes and mail-order killers to worry about. Keep your nose to the wind. I’ll be taking my horse out to the camp with me from now on. Fix me up a sack of crushed barley, wouldja?”
Fargo dropped his spare buckskin shirt and trousers off at the house, then made a slow ride around Lake Bridger in the westering sun. He stuck close to the tree line and reined in often to simply listen. His search for tracks turned up nothing that didn’t belong to the place: old, crumbling prints in the lake mud made by a black bear; newer prints made by fox, muskrat, and rabbits.
When he reached his camp, he sat his saddle and gazed north across the small lake toward the house and icehouse. The high-altitude lake had thawed in early June, but the icehouse was still packed with sawdust-insulated blocks of ice. The thick walls were well chinked, and a canvas tarp warded off the sun. The Holman brothers might not be salty frontier denizens just yet, he knew, but they were ingenious tradesmen.
Still . . . all this business with women washing his clothes and cooking his meals meant nothing. It was true that Fargo had decided to keep the Ovaro in his camp in case of attacks on the house. But he also wanted this excellent four-legged sentry close to hand. All seemed quiet and scenic atop Yellow Grizz Mountain, but several times the Ovaro had laid back his ears and snorted in a way Fargo recognized.
Somebody was out there, likely scouting the house but perhaps even his camp. Whether Indian or white—or both—Fargo couldn’t say just yet. Right now the danger wasn’t imminent, but it would come, and hell was coming with it.
* * *
“The best way to kill a man like Skye Fargo,” Jackson Powell opined, “is to do it quick and from ambush. Perhaps when he’s taking a crap, his pants around his ankles and his rifle laid aside. Boys, I tell you, the road to hell is paved with the bones of men who tried to kill him. No offense to you, Gus, but Fargo has even killed some of the fastest guns on the frontier in walking showdowns—not his usual gait.”
“I ain’t offended, Mr. Powell,” Gus Latimer assured his employer. “Fargo is quicker than most people know—quicker than eyesight. And it’s them eyes of his when he’s on the scrap—they bore right through a man, cut right to the pith of him. I seen him cut down Raleigh Meadows in Santa Fe, and Meadows was a draw-shoot artist, faster than Fargo. But Fargo put the hoodoo on him with that stare of his, and Meadows got chicken guts. Fargo popped him over with one shot before Meadows even cleared leather. That lanky bastard is six sorts of trouble, and only a fool says otherwise.”
Powell nodded. “That’s why I always send for you, Gus—a killer with a ration of common sense.”
“Well, Jesus Christ!” Philander Brace exploded, his voice heavy with contempt. “Are we gonna kill the son of a bitch or elect him to office?”
Brace’s face was dotted with isinglass plaster marking the wounds made by the shotgun pellets earlier. He, Latimer, Ozark Bill Brassfield, and Franklin Perley sat with Powell outside the fly of Powell’s tent in Last Stand Gulch, drinking good liquor in the waning daylight.
Powell laughed tolerantly. “I’d be hopping mad, too, Phil, if my face had just been cratered. But going after Fargo in anger is a fool’s errand. The man is cool and unflappable, and that’s how he must be killed.”
Brace cracked his blacksnake hard but maintained a stony silence. Powell looked at Ozark Bill. “Did you take care of that matter we discussed?”
The big Missourian nodded. “You ever heard of a half-breed named Injin Slim?”
Powell mulled the name, stroking his neat spade beard. “Rings a bell. Is he a local?”
“Yeah, knows every nook and cranny in this region. His dam was a Ute, his pa a Canadian fur trader. The local redskins call him White Man Runs Him on account he picks up scouting jobs and such from the paleface. Only a redskin with Fargo’s tracking and scouting savvy could hope to spy on him without getting his glims doused.”
“He’s up on the mountain now?”
Ozark Bill nodded. “He’s already reported that Fargo ain’t bunking in the house. He’s got his own camp across the lake, and we know where it is.”
“Excellent. Is this Injin Slim also a killer?”
Bill shook his head. “The contrary buck refuses to kill Fargo at any price. Claims he’s big medicine or some shit.”
Perley snorted. His big, lethal hands appeared to be strangling a rock. “Them ignut, gut-eating savages think everything is medicine. Power. These two hands is where the medicine is. I could unscrew Fargo’s head and shit in it.”
“Maybe you’ll get that chance,” Powell said. “Fargo has put the kibosh on my plans more than once, and there’s nothing I’d love better than to see the Strangler here squeeze the life out of him. It helps to have a spy on him.”
He looked at Brassfield again. “How fares it in the camp?”
“So far we’ve come a cropper in Buckskin Joe. You said to try the buyout route first, and that’s how we’re playing it. But gold is thick in these cricks, and these mother-lovin’ gravel sifters ain’t tempted by your fancy-printed shares. They view ’em as no different than wildcat money or greenbacks. They prefer a bird in the hand.”
Powell took a pinch of snuff, deliberating. “Well, I expected resistance, but I felt compelled to give them a chance to at least save their necks. Are you going to the right men—the ones Rosita points out?”
Here Brassfield scowled. “Yeah. These are the ones that got good claims and easygoin’ natures. A couple are stupid as mules, and one—Latham Hastings—is about a half bubble off bead. But the cussed fools won’t give way.”
“Well, a man has to bend with the breeze or he breaks,” Powell said. “Looks like a certain amount of bloodletting is required to persuade these stubborn sourdoughs to sell out and pull up stakes. I will flush them out of here if we have to kill every cannibal on the Congo. But we won’t go the whole hog just yet—we’ll fly the vigilante flag. There’s no organized police in the territories, which lends some legal authority to regulators.”
“I thought you said we should make the killings look like Indians done it,” Brassfield said.
“It may come to that, Billy. But right now there’s a cavalry patrol in the area flushing Arapahos out of the backwaters of the Arkansas. We don’t need them sticking their nose into the pie.”
“There’s another fly in the ointment, Mr. Powell,” Latimer said. “A buzzing, busybody fly that goes by the handle of Otis Scully.”
Powell had been balanced on the back legs of his canvas camp chair. Upon hearing the name, he brought the chair thumping back to the ground. “Scully? You mean that white-livered troublemaker is here in Buckskin Joe?”
“Bold as a big man’s ass. And he’s talkin’ chummy with Fargo.”
Powell was silent for a few moments, brooding. Then he looked at each man in turn in the blue-black twilight.
“Boys, that pin-dick has hounded me since the strike of ’forty-nine. He’s a goddamn agitator. Works behind the scenes to gum up the works for his betters. If he’s talking to Fargo, it portends ill for all of us. Quick as you can, trump up a charge on him and then snuff his wick.”