When no follow-on attack was forthcoming, Fargo sent Injin Slim to spend the rest of the night at the head of the trace. Then he and the rest of the men stripped the weapons off the corpses and rifled their pockets, turning up an impressive three hundred dollars in gold cartwheels.
“Keep it, Dave,” Fargo said. “That’ll be a payment toward the thousand Powell owes you.”
“Sure, but Dunk deserves fightin’ wages. Here’s forty dollars, old-timer.”
“’Preciate it, Sarge,” Dunk said, pocketing the shiners. “Reckon they can’t spend it in hell, huh? I wouldn’t mind some of their ’baccy, neither.”
Next the men dragged the four bodies well back into the woods and left them to be buried by scavengers.
“What about the horses?” one of the twins asked. “They’ll stink to high heaven once they start rotting.”
“I’ll butcher ’em out,” Dunk volunteered, “give the meat to the Utes. That last batch seemed to settle their ointment.”
Dave and the twins left to get the women and escort them back to the house. Fargo shared a smoke with Dunk before the old roadster returned to his corral shed to grab some shut-eye. Fargo figured it was only a few hours until dawn and rolled up in his blanket against the high-altitude chill.
He felt himself sliding down a long tunnel into sleep when an owl hoot, coming from the north, slapped him awake. Fargo reached for his shell belt beside him and tugged out his Colt. Before long he heard the plodding steps of an unshod horse.
Utes, he thought, fading back farther into the woods. Moments later, however, he saw a mule in the silver-white moonlight, the rider hard to make out.
“Fargo?” called out a hesitant female voice. “Don’t shoot. It is Rosita.”
Fargo expelled a long sigh of relief. He walked toward the lake to join her. “Que haces aqui? What are you doing here?”
“Injin Slim told me where to find you. I have no place else to go. Powell is going to kill me as soon as Bill Brassfield leaves me alone.”
“How do you know that?”
“Tonight, after the men returned from—from—how you say?—la batalla, I heard everything they said. Latimer killed the pig called Perley, who was shot in el estomago. The pig-man Powell has guessed that I told you about tonight. He did not tell Brassfield he means to kill me. But I could hear the—how you say?—rage in his voice. I ran away after all were asleep, and Riley gave me this mula. Do you want me to go?”
Fargo reached up and gripped her tiny, tight waist, swinging her down. “What, and send you to fend for yourself? No man owns a deed on this land, and there’s plenty of room here for you to stay awhile.”
“I worry now for my mother and sister. But the pig-man, he will kill them no matter what I do.”
“Don’t give up hope yet. He’s got bigger fish to fry right now.”
Fargo let the mule tank up from the lake, then found rawhide strips in a saddlebag and hobbled it in the high grass near his stallion, stripping it down to the neck leather.
“Tengo frio,” Rosita complained, chafing her arms against the chill.
“Yeah, it gets cold this high up. I’ve only got one blanket, but you’re welcome to share it with me.”
“This I would like,” she replied, and even in the darkness he saw her white teeth flashing at him in a smile.
The two of them squeezed under Fargo’s blanket, Rosita instantly making Fargo erect when she pressed her tight, curvaceous body against him. She felt his man gland suddenly probe into her and reached down to cup him.
“Ay mamacita! Es como una rama de arbol!”
“Oh, it’s no tree branch,” Fargo assured her, running his hands up the satin-smooth skin under her blouse and squeezing her impressive honeydews.
The Ovaro never bothered to alert when a friend approached. Thus, Fargo was just in the act of hiking up Rosita’s skirt when a female voice interrupted him.
“Skye? Don’t shoot, it’s Susan. I just sneaked out so we can—oh!”
The fetching blond had just caught sight of the couple in the bedroll.
Fargo, failing to keep the grin from his voice, said, “Susan, this is Rosita Morales. She’s on the run from Jackson Powell. He suspects she tipped me off about the raid tonight, so she’s going to be staying here.”
“Yes, it appears that I arrived just as you were in the act of . . . protecting her.”
However, Fargo noticed that Susan’s tone was not a bit jealous—in fact, seemed on the verge of excitement. Her next remark clarified the point.
“Are you a broad-minded man, Skye?”
“I am when the occasion warrants. Are you suggesting you’d like to watch?”
She laughed. “Watch? That might be interesting, but what I have in mind is a test of the Trailsman’s legendary skills as a lover. If Rosita is amenable, why don’t you take both of us on at one time?”
“What is this ‘amenable’?” Rosita asked.
“It means if you like the idea,” Susan explained.
Fargo knew Mexican women to be generally old-fashioned in carnal matters, very passionate but very private. So it surprised him when Rosita giggled and said, “I think there is plenty for both of us, senorita. I am—how you say?—a-meen-a-bul.”
Just damn, Fargo thought. Either one of these hot little firecrackers was enough for even a “legendary” lover. But both at once were a daunting challenge. Fargo had been talked into a tandem act by the infamous madames Tit Bit and Smooth Bore in Virginia City, and they damn near screwed him into an early grave.
Susan moved closer, dropping her shawl. “Skye?” she teased him, seeing him hesitate. “What, are we too much woman for you?”
Fargo’s eyes shifted from her golden-blond tresses to Ro-sita’s ink-black coronet braids. In the luminous moonlight Susan’s alabaster skin glowed like an angel’s halo, while Rosita’s flawless caramel tint made an enticing contrast. His erection notched itself up from wood to steel.
“Let’s get thrashing, ladies,” he invited the pair. “But you’ll have to take charge—I can’t favor one beautiful woman over another. All I ask is that both of you strip buck. This is some blue-ribbon woman flesh about to descend on me, and I want a gander at all of it.”
Despite the chill, both women eagerly complied, Rosita climbing out of the bedroll so she could disrobe next to Susan. Fargo wondered if there might not be a heaven after all as his eyes drank in the moonlit beauties. They knelt on either side of his blanket to show him how the chill had stiffened their nipples. Fargo’s hands played with four succulent tits at once.
Susan threw back the blanket and opened his fly, freeing a curved erection that leaped and bobbed like a ferret with hiccups. “There it is, Rosita,” she said almost reverently. “You ever seen one like it?”
“Por Dios, not on a man.”
“Has he been inside you yet?”
Still staring, mesmerized, she shook her head.
“Then you take the first ride. Straddle his pecker while I straddle his face.”
Fargo grinned like a butcher’s dog. Rosita swung her left leg over him, then grabbed his member and bent it until it was at the perfect angle. He felt his pliant tip nudging through the chamois-soft folds of her nether portal, encountering a hot, tight, slick sheath that gripped him like a velvet glove.
“Ay, caramba!” she cried out, starting to move faster and harder on his length. “It fills me so deep!”
Susan wasn’t just watching. She straddled Fargo’s face and brought her cunny down to his mouth, giving him perfect access to her swollen pearl. Fargo, already writhing in ecstasy from Rosita’s ministrations, didn’t even have to lick—she simply brushed against the bumps of his tongue and began gasping at the galvanic pleasure.
As if knowing what Fargo wanted, the two delirious-with-pleasure women, who were facing each other, leaned forward and ground their tits together for Fargo’s pleasure. He added his greedy hands to the velvety mix, tits grinding both sides of his hands, a brand-new sensation.
Soon Rosita was panting like a bitch in heat. “Ay, Dios!” she cried over and over, “Aye, Dios mio!”
Susan, having already experienced several climaxes herself and going for more, was being wildly infused by Rosita’s passion. She brought her face close to Fargo’s, a curtain of her hair tickling him, and gave vent to dirty talk while she kept riding his face.
“Your big peeder has her pussy in flames, Skye! Drill her hard, you randy stallion! Give it to her! Buck her to the moon! Buck her high, tamp it in deep!”
Fargo rarely heard such things from women, not even soiled doves, and his boilers suddenly heated to full steam and demanded venting. He did indeed buck Rosita high and hard, and if Susan hadn’t been holding her she would have flown off into the trees like an ejected shell casing. All three of them exploded as one, the women collapsing in a naked, panting heap on Fargo.
It was Rosita’s astounded voice that finally broke the long silence. “Es increible! He did not even get soft, Susan! It is your turn to ride. I will lie in the grass beside him and whisper cosas sucias—how you say, dirty things—in his ear.”
Fargo accepted his fate in stoic silence. How else could a lover become legendary?
* * *
Chicken Pete stepped outside the tent and hawked up his morning phlegm. He hitched up his heavy, ore-stained denim trousers and glanced around the camp. A copper sun was just then edging over the foothills to the east, still too cool to burn off the spidery tendrils of mist dancing over the creeks. A few men had fires going to heat coffee but few bothered to cook—it wasted valuable time that could be spent grubbing for color.
“Where is that knot-head Latham?” he muttered to himself. “Prob’ly out digging up night crawlers for breakfast.”
He pulled aside the fly of the tent. “Hey, Big Dick, up and at ’em! I want to try that spoil-bank where the creek bends. Latham gouged out some good nuggets just with a butcher knife. Let’s sift that bottom dirt.”
“Yeah,” Big Dick McQuady’s sleep-rusty voice groaned. “Juzmint.”
Chicken Pete stooped over to lay the kindling when a sudden shout from across camp goose-bumped his skin. “Murder, boys! Murder black and foul!”
A prospector named Corey Webster stood over a crumpled body in front of Webster’s tent. Several men came running to join him, and Chicken Pete headed that way. But a sudden, queasy churning in his guts made him stop and reverse his dust. He had just remembered that Latham often got up early to start filling buckets for the long tom.
He cut through a line of cottonwoods and saw it immediately: Latham Hastings, harmless soft brain, pierced with arrows and folded double over the rickety boards of the long tom.
Chicken Pete spat, hitched up his pants again, and reluctantly moved closer. Latham had been crudely scalped, exposed veins tracing the bumps of his skull. Even as he stared, lips curling off his teeth in disgust, more shouts of alarm went up around the camp.
“This wasn’t no mother-lovin’ Indians,” came Big Dick’s angry voice behind him. He stared, mouth agape, at the grisly sight before him. “I ain’t no big frontiersman like Fargo, but I reckon I know that savages don’t leave their clan circles of a night.”
“Naw. It was Powell’s killers sure as cats fighting. Christ, look. He was throat-slashed first, damn near took his head off. Now, an Injin spends a long damn time making an arrow, and he ain’t about to waste the son of a bitch on a dead man. These was shot into him after he was kilt.”
Soon it was known throughout Buckskin Joe that five sourdoughs had been slaughtered. Chicken Pete looked at his only surviving partner.
“Big Dick, Fargo says we gotta fight our own battles, and by Saint Barbara I’m ready even if I get burned down. But I’m gonna borrow Pete Helzer’s line-back and ride up the mountain. If Fargo won’t side us, he’ll damn sure give us advice. And advice from Skye Fargo is worth ten guns.”