The third day after the Ute ambush on Yellow Grizz Mountain dawned sunny and crisp, with a cloudless sky the pure blue of a gas flame forming an endless dome over the mountaintop by eight a.m. Fargo tied into a heaping plate of eggs and side meat, fully aware that Inez Holman was on the feather edge of an explosion.
“You and Susan seem to have ravenous appetites this morning,” she said pointedly as she poured him more coffee.
“The way you cook, Inez,” he replied, sopping up some gravy with a biscuit, “would make a dead man hungry.”
“Thank you,” she said archly.
“Susan always has a good appetite,” David said, coming to his sister’s defense.
“It must be those walks she takes after dark,” Inez pressed on.
“I always walk around the lake,” Susan said. “I did so long before Skye began to work for the ice business.”
“Who cares, anyhow?” Steve chimed in. “Neither one of ’em is married.”
“Yes, evidently no one cares,” Inez complained, giving up the topic. “And I suppose I shouldn’t care, either, about what’s going on down below? You men are awfully close-lipped about it, that’s certain.”
“Inez is right,” Susan said, catching Fargo’s eye across the plank table. “That attack on the house a few nights ago was just the beginning, wasn’t it?”
Fargo pushed his plate away. “I’ll tell you this much, ladies—whatever’s going on down in Buckskin Joe, we didn’t start it. But now we have to finish it. There’s no third way.”
“There would be a third way back in Dayton, Mr. Far—”
“Bully for Dayton.” Fargo cut her off brusquely. “I’m sure it’s a nice, civilized place full of law-abiding citizens. But you’re in the far West now, Inez, and you need to give over with all this comparing of the states to the territories. I’m not the one stirring up trouble around here, and neither is Dave and the twins. This area is crawling with double-poxed hounds looking to paint the landscape red, and the parlor manners in Dayton won’t replace bullets.”
Fargo admired Inez, admired her a lot, and he hated to confront her so harshly. But Dave didn’t have the heart to do it, and the pretty, college-educated woman had to square with the facts.
Inez surprised all of them by measuring out a long sigh and saying, “You’re right, Mr. Fargo. As much as I hate to admit it, I’m a western wife now. I want all of you men to know that I pray long and hard each time you ride down that infernal mountain. And if any trouble comes up here, Susan and I will stand in for men.”
Fargo, Dave, and Susan all exchanged surprised looks. Predictably, Inez wandered to the crossed-sticks shelf and plucked up her felt-covered box, stroking it.
“It’s all in here,” she said melodramatically. “The hopes and dreams of a young woman.”
“Confound it, honey,” Dave spoke up, seeing that Fargo was about to ask yet again, “what’s in there? Can’t you even show your husband?”
“You wouldn’t care,” she said in a hurt tone. “It’s silly and female.”
“If it’s female,” Steve said slyly, “Mr. Fargo definitely cares.”
“Guilty as charged,” Fargo agreed. “Open it up, Inez.”
“Never. It’s not a bit of curiosa. It’s important only to me.”
Fargo gave up and went outside. He’d left the Ovaro in front of the house, reins forward to hold him while he grazed. He cinched the girth and led the stallion toward the pole corral. There was no ice delivery today and he had advised the Holman brothers to stick close to home while he rode down and made a good scout of Last Stand Gulch. Fargo had a feeling it was going to live up to its name before this boil called Jackson Powell was lanced.
“Mornin’, Trailsman,” Dunk greeted him from the open-fronted shed, where he was busy shoeing one of the team horses. “Still got your topknot, I see.”
“Yeah, but you were right, old son. Somebody’s watching me out there—somebody born in the woods, I’d say, because he’s good at his job.”
“Ah? He ain’t tried to kill you?”
“Not yet. That makes me suspect it’s a Ute—a white man would likely be on Jackson Powell’s payroll and under orders to send me under. One thing picks at me, though. If it’s a Ute, why hasn’t he pilfered my goods?”
Dunk peered up at Fargo from his swooped-over crouch. “Aye, that’s a mite queer. Most especial a Ute would take coffee and sugar—them’s nectar of the gods to a Ute.”
“The way you say, dad. Keep a sharp eye out.”
Fargo grabbed the horn and swung up and over, wheeling his horse around.
“Hell, I’ve had my threescore, Trailsman. You’re still a young man. You keep a sharp eye out, hear? You’re all grit and a yard wide, but that bunch you’re up agin would shame the devil out of hell.”
* * *
Fargo had no plan to show himself in Buckskin Joe and alert Powell’s boys to his presence. At the bottom of the mountain, he continued straight ahead for about a mile, threading his way through scattered thickets and tumbles of scree. When he estimated he was beyond the three creeks, he turned west and found slow-going through heavy pine woods and rocky soil.
Fargo depended on a mind map he had been making of the region to tell him when he should jog south. The Ovaro was bridle-wise and Fargo had only to lay the reins on the side of his neck he wished to go. Last Stand Gulch lay just outside Kellyville, and in less than a half hour he spotted the narrow seam in the ground as the tree cover broke in front of him.
Still sitting his saddle, Fargo fished into a saddle pocket and broke out his field glass. Holding it so the sun couldn’t reflect on the lenses, he carefully studied the gulch. Sentries, most dressed in the butternut homespun of Border Ruffians, dotted both rims, well ensconced in thick brush or rock tumbles. Some of these men were surely veterans of the Mexican War, and Fargo rated them as dangerous fighters.
He couldn’t see into the gulch itself, but he knew Powell’s headquarters would be at the end of the gulch with three walls to protect him. Anyone wanting to attack him directly would thus have to charge through the narrow gulch itself—a fool’s errand.
Absorbed in his study, Fargo missed the telltale slithering sound from the ground below. By the time he heard the high-pitched, buzzing rattle, the damage was done.
The spooked Ovaro suddenly chinned the moon, almost dumping Fargo from the saddle. The stallion bolted forward into a clearing near the gulch, and Fargo desperately hauled back on the reins, trying to gentle him.
“It’s Fargo, boys!” a sentry sang out, and the turkey shoot was on with Fargo as the prize turkey. Rifles opened up with a vengeance, slugs blurring the air around Fargo’s head even as his panicked horse galloped closer and closer. A slug ripped through Fargo’s buckskin shirt; another struck his boot heel and knocked his foot out of the stirrup.
“Well, holy Christ, old campaigner!” Fargo shouted at his desperate mount. “Do you want to become an outlaw’s horse?”
Something in his tone broke the Ovaro’s panic. Fargo tugged rein hard left, wheeling him, and the stallion raced toward the tree cover with the wind-rip from bullets still fanning them.
They made it to cover, but Fargo couldn’t risk a chase and pushed the Ovaro as fast as he dared, tree branches slapping at his face and trying to swipe his hat off. Evidently Powell’s mercenaries had orders not to desert their posts—Fargo soon realized no one was pursuing.
He was bypassing Frenchman’s Creek when he noticed an interesting sight—Chicken Pete and Big Dick McQuady at the center of a ring of prospectors. When this many sourdoughs stopped working their claims in good weather, something was in the wind.
Fargo flicked the reins to bear right and trotted closer. “What’s on the spit, boys?”
“Murder, that’s what,” Chicken Pete spat out. “Look yonder, Fargo.”
Fargo did look. A wreath-bearded prospector lay on a stretcher made from wrapping a blanket around two shovel handles. Both of his legs were heavily splinted.
“That-’ere’s Jeremy Hupenbecker,” Pete went on. “He’ll never walk right agin. Powell’s mange pots only crippled him. But now the cruddy cockroaches has kicked it up a notch—last night they murdered Telly Winslowe. He not only refused to sell out for them worthless paper shares; he cussed Ozark Bill Brassfield out into the deal.”
“It was Utes,” Big Dick insisted forcefully. “Hell, you can see he’s been scalped, and them savages is all over this area.”
“Scalped, huh?” Fargo lit down and threw the reins forward. “Where’s the body?”
The group of sourdoughs led Fargo to a tent beside the creek. The body lay inside on a cot. Fargo stepped inside and examined it good. He suddenly winced when he saw that not just the scalp had been lifted—the man’s entire face was gone.
“All you prospectors carry your gold on you,” he observed. “Did anybody find Telly’s?”
“I found him,” Chicken Pete said. “There was no nuggets on him or anywhere in his tent.”
“This wasn’t Utes,” Fargo said with finality. “It’s meant to look that way, is all. Not all tribes are keen on scalping, and the Utes are one of them that’s not. They only take one as a battle trophy, and this was sure-God no battle. Besides, they got no interest in gold—it’s just yellow rocks to them.”
“What about his face?” a prospector wearing cavalry trousers and a gray pullover demanded. “Why would any white men do somethin’ that savagerous?”
“That’s a poser,” Fargo agreed. “But the only tribes I’ve known to skin off faces are the Comanches and the Karankawas of east Texas. Whoever did this doesn’t know much about Indians. I’d wager it’s a poor dodge in case the cavalry gets called into these parts to investigate.”
“It makes me ireful,” Chicken Pete fumed. “Hell, Powell and his bootlickers are just a whoop and a holler from here! Let’s just rush the skunk-bit bastards now and kill ’em!”
“Huzzah!” shouted Big Dick. “Hell, Fargo killed the one-eye. Now there’s only four of them and a double handful of Border Ruffians lining the top of the gulch. Let’s fix their flint, boys!”
“Nix on that,” Fargo said, raising a hand to quell the bravado. “I know this is your meeting and your battle, but I’ll guarandamntee you’ll just be shot to rag tatters if you go waltzing in there half-cocked. Boys, I did a reconnoiter on that gulch just now.”
“Yeah, we heard the shootin’,” Chicken Pete said. “Sounded like a war commencing.”
“That’s my point. I figured Powell would be bringing in guns later, but they’re already here. That double handful Big Dick mentioned is about thirty men. All of them Pukes, and most of them veterans of a damn hard war with Mexico. It was a bloody slaughter fest down there, boys, and this bunch are frosty killers. And that gulch didn’t earn its name for nothing—one well-armed man could hold off ten attackers.”
“By the twin balls of Christ!” exclaimed the frustrated prospector in the cavalry trousers. “I respect Fargo, all right, but we dursn’t let these murdering Pukes just get away with murder!”
“Hold your whist, old son,” Fargo said patiently. “What’s your front name?”
“Jacob.”
“Were you in the army, Jacob?”
“Just for a year,” he admitted. “I lit out when I heard there was placer gold here.”
“A year is good enough,” Fargo said. “Raw anger ain’t worth a busted trace chain, Jacob. You know where the Aspen Ring is?”
“Sure.”
“Take about ten men at a time and take them there. Those men who can’t shoot worth a damn, teach them army marksmanship and the basic shooting positions. And teach them the basic combat formations for closing in on a target. Teach them how to tuck and roll, that type of deal.”
“By God, I will,” Jacob promised.
Fargo looked at Chicken Pete and Big Dick. “Boys, right now we’re neither up the well nor down. We can’t attack without being cut to ribbons. But it won’t take long at all to whip these men into the Buckskin Joe Brigade.”
* * *
Fargo did not feel the same confidence he exuded around the prospectors. He had counted only about a dozen men gathered around Chicken Pete and Big Dick McQuady. Counting himself and the three Holman brothers, that made a force of perhaps around half of the enemy’s number. Dave had been a soldier under fire, and the twins had acquitted themselves well in the shoot-out outside the Gravel Pan.
But these sourdoughs . . . they had plenty to fight for, all right, but few had any battle experience. And Fargo had seen their weapons: mostly single-shot, cap-and-ball pistols and rifles—he had even spotted one flintlock relic from late in the previous century. The men under Powell had modern repeating weapons and plenty of experience using them.
“Wit and wile,” Fargo reminded himself as he headed back up the north slope of Yellow Grizz Mountain. In a raw clash of arms against these hardened killers, the prospectors would be slaughtered. But the same unconventional tactics employed by Rogers’ Rangers against a superior British force in the Colonial days could pull the Buckskin Joe Brigade’s bacon out of the fire.
For a moment Fargo recalled the image of Telly Winslowe, his face literally skinned off to leave red, glistening meat. This bunch under Powell were not just ruthless—they were without even the slightest human scruple, the very dregs of humanity. They were soulless, pitiless vermin of a type Fargo had met too frequently in his traversing of the American West. And vermin couldn’t be chased off—they had to be exterminated from the face of the earth.
Fargo gave the Ovaro his head on the steep slope, stopping now and then to let him blow. Dust rose swirling, then settled to powder the brush. His eyes, narrowed to slits in the brilliant afternoon sun, rarely left the thick growth to either side of the trace. Despite his vigilance, he couldn’t stop his thoughts from wandering to the sultry and beautiful Rosita Morales.
Her intelligence seemed to match her looks, and for that reason Fargo had decided to believe her. She knew damn well that pond scum like Powell had no plans to let her or her family go free, and thus, that her best chance was to throw in with Fargo. But what if, the thought nagged him, there was no family held hostage? What if she was in fact Powell’s woman and a clever liar? The fair rose could turn out to be a nasty thorn. . . .
“Pile on the agony,” he said aloud, and the Ovaro flicked his ears.
Fargo found a beehive of activity waiting for him atop the mountain. Dunk Langdon was busy fashioning pointed stakes out of new green wood. Dave, Steve, and Jess were busy digging trip holes at various points around the house.
Dave, wiping his forehead on his sleeve, ambled over to meet Fargo.
“Siege defenses, huh?” Fargo greeted him as he swung down and began to loosen the girth.
Dave nodded. “I know we’re not Powell’s main worry—hell, we just sell ice. But me and the twins sided you in that shooting match with his men. And I got to thinking how he’s bound and determined to deal you out of the play. He could up and decide to attack the house again hoping to get Inez and Susan as hostages.”
“I can’t gainsay that he might,” Fargo said. “But I know the women would be killed no matter what I do, so I wouldn’t haul back.”
“Yeah, but he might not know that. Anyhow, the trace widens right before the top and four horses can charge abreast. Dunk is going to plant the stakes at sunset every night, pull them the next morning. They’re sharp enough to impale a running horse. The trip holes are about the size of gopher holes, just right to snap a horse’s leg. We’re covering each one with a flap of sod. I’ll show you right where they are.”
“It’s a good idea,” Fargo said. “I hate punishing a horse for the crimes of its rider, but nothing makes night riders rabbit quicker than the scream of a dying mount. Unstrings the nerves.”
“Did you run into trouble down there?” Dave asked. “We heard gunfire echoing way up here.”
“I got spotted while I was scouting the defenses along Last Stand Gulch. Those butternut bandidos sent up enough lead to knock me into next Sunday.”
Fargo told him about the meeting of the prospectors.
“Think they’re in it to win it?” Dave asked.
“That’s anybody’s guess. I’ve seen some of these ‘citizen posses’ fight like veteran soldiers. Other times they don’t amount to a hill of beans.”
Dunk had overheard all this. Now, pulling up his gallowses, he approached the two men. “I been a sourdough myself, Trailsman, since the Sutter spread was overrun. It’s a hard, mean sorter life, and a prospector is tough as ary grizz. But a prospector is a one-man outfit, a bunch-quitter like you, and he ain’t cut out for soldierin’. Oh, they get all puffed up and put on a war face. But it’ll go bad in a puffin’ hurry if you count on them sourdoughs.”
* * *
Fargo skipped his standing invitation to supper and rode slowly around the lake in the westering sun, looking for sign that didn’t belong there. But whoever was prowling the area and watching him was a careful man.
A search of the area around his camp again turned up nothing suspicious. But Fargo had noticed there were fewer small-game prints in the mud around the lake. Meaning fewer animals were coming to water. Only a large predator or the human smell would keep them away, and no large predators had been near the lake recently.
Fargo led the Ovaro to water, then tethered him in the grass between the lake and Fargo’s camp. He decided to check his trotline for any possible supper. He had made it by stringing a strong line from shore to a stake driven into the lake bottom. Six separate, shorter lines, hooked and baited, dangled into the water.
Fargo waded in, checking the first two lines. Both were empty. By now he was in up to his hips as he reached for the third line.
That’s when Fargo felt it: the “goose tickle” he had occasionally felt on the back of his neck all of his life, warning him that something dangerous or horrifying was about to occur. Dread heavy in his belly, he pulled the line out of the water.
It broke the surface, and Fargo felt his gorge rise. He was staring into the empty eye holes of what could only be Telly Winslowe’s missing face.