“Whoopee ti yi yo!” shouted Steve Holman, startling his horse. “Gonna get rich, Dave! Soon that pretty wife of yours will be decked out in fancy feathers. No more hog and hominy on our plates, mister.”
“Hesh down, you fool,” Dave warned his younger brother. “This ain’t Fiddler’s Green.”
About fifty yards out ahead of them on the steep mountain trace, a tall man in fringed buckskins wheeled his black-and-white pinto stallion around and rode back to join them. A broad black plainsman’s hat left half of his crop-bearded face in shadow. He was lanky and his muscle-corded body hard as sacked salt.
Fargo said, “Jess, I’ve—”
“That’s Steve,” Dave corrected him. “Jess stayed with the women.”
Fargo cursed mildly under his breath. Telling the identical Holman twins apart was dealing him misery. “All right, Steve it is, then. By any name, son, you can’t get rich unless you stay alive. And hog-calling in the middle of Mountain Ute country is a good way to get your life over in a puffin’ hurry.”
“Hell, Mr. Fargo, you yourself said they already know we’re up here.”
Fargo cast a patient glance at the young pilgrim. Steve Holman’s face was raw from wind and rough soap, beardless, without even one deep sun crinkle yet. But he had the strong jaw and direct, alert gaze of a man determined to watch and learn. Fargo knew that both the twins were green, piss-proud, and full of sass, but he had liked them instantly.
“Sure as cats fighting they know we’re up here,” he replied. “But I’d appreciate some warning before they attack, and how can we hear anything with you bellowing like a castrated bull?”
Dave Holman nodded agreement even as he carefully guided an Owensboro freight wagon down the steep northern slope of Yellow Grizz Mountain. He and Fargo had rigged the wagon with Mormon brakes, a tree lashed to the back to slow the downhill descent.
“Fargo’s right,” he said. “The Utes know we’re up here. But I think they figure us for soft-brains. What kind of crazy-by-thunder son of a bitch cuts out blocks of ice and stores them, then hauls them off the mountain?”
Fargo grinned, riding beside the wagon. His vigilant, sun-creased eyes left nothing alone. “That’s good if they think we’re crazy. Crazy white men scare them sick and silly, and it’s heap big bad medicine to kill one. But I wouldn’t assume you’re safe, Dave. You were a frontier soldier and you know the red man is notional.”
Two weeks earlier Fargo, finding himself light in the pockets, had hired on as a scout and guard for the Rocky Mountain Ice Company, owned by Holman and his green-antlered twin brothers. They harvested blocks of winter ice from Lake Bridger and stored them, packed in sawdust, in the earthen icehouse they had built. Now that warm weather had set in, they were making a king’s ransom hauling ice in their big, lumbering wagon to the mushrooming mining camps below. In wide-open places like Kellyville, California Gulch, and Buckskin Joe, ice was a luxury almost worth its weight in gold.
As if reading Fargo’s thoughts, Dave said, “Steve and Jess keep harping on how we’re rich. But you spoke God’s truth, Fargo. Nothing’s cheaper than an Indian haircut.”
“We are rich,” Steve insisted. “We’ll haul in two hundred dollars for this one load alone. Riley’s grog shop in Buckskin Joe can fetch two dollars for a glass of iced beer. Mister, this frozen water beats any crop we ever sold back in Ohio.”
Dave waved this off. “Rich? Sell your ass, brother. Right now we’re just a cocklebur outfit. Not only that, we’re squatters up on top this mountain.”
“So is every sourdough down below who filed him a claim. Ain’t nobody driving them off, right, Mr. Fargo?”
“They won’t have to be driven off, Steve. The gold nuggets will play out quicker than scat. I’ve been in gold camps in the Sierra, on the Comstock, in the Snake River country, and all over the Rockies. It’s the same anthem everywhere: cash in and move on. Today iced beer sells at twenty times the going rate back in the States. Tomorrow the diggings and grog shops have pulled up stakes. And there goes your ice trade.”
Steve looked glum at this intelligence. Then his face perked up. “But it could last long enough for us to salt away a small fortune, huh?”
Fargo only nodded absently, busy studying their surroundings. The newborn sun was balanced like a brass coin above the grassy foothills to the east, making them resemble a dark pod of whales. Yellow Grizz Mountain was the highest peak in the Park Range of the Rockies, situated between the South Platte and Arkansas rivers. Its slopes were dotted with bluebonnets and daisies and splashes of bright red Indian paintbrush.
However, Fargo wasn’t swayed by the natural beauty. For, unfortunately, this slope, the only way down to the gold-bearing creeks, was also a dry-gulcher’s paradise. Huge tumbles of boulders flanked the ancient trace, interspersed with thick stands of jack pine and hawthorn bushes.
“Trouble?” Dave asked him.
“I don’t see any,” Fargo replied, not bothering to add but I sure’s hell sense it.
“If Mr. Fargo don’t see it,” Steve blustered, “then it ain’t there. Why, I read in Leslie’s Weekly how he can follow a wood tick on solid rock.”
“Newspaper bunkum,” Fargo said in his mild way. “Now, why the hell would a man want to follow a wood tick?”
It was heel-fly time, and as the party traveled lower the Ovaro began to snort in irritation. That bothered Fargo—he depended on the stallion’s keen senses, and a pesky distraction like flies could weaken them.
“You ask me,” Dave said, “the real trouble is down below, not up here. Especially in Buckskin Joe.”
Even the ebullient Steve, ever one to find the silver lining, nodded at this, scowling. “That shines, brother Dave. That bunch in camp really gripe my ass. They call us fodder forkers and hay slayers and punkin rollers. If we hadn’t hired on Mr. Fargo, we’d be as cold as this ice by now.”
“Now you’re whistling, brother,” Dave agreed, carefully riding the brake with his left foot to help the team. “The crap sheets are right about one thing. Any man past the hundredth meridian is either on the dodge or seeking pay dirt.”
Fargo grunted at this. “Or both. I’d say one in five of those jaspers in Buckskin Joe is a killer. First time I rode in and met you two, I recognized at least ten of them by name.”
“When we first got here,” Dave said, “it was just a few sourdoughs in brush shanties, some of them not even armed. Now there’s a new breed moving in—hard cases with shifty eyes and tied-down guns. You won’t see ’em panning the creeks, neither.”
Fargo nodded. “Mostly Missouri trash. Day before yesterday I spotted Gus Latimer.”
“Who’s he?” Steve demanded.
Dave’s sunburned face creased in a frown. “They say Latimer can draw quicker’n you can spit and holler howdy.”
Steve looked at Fargo. “Is that the straight?”
Fargo nodded. “He’s from Blue Springs, Missouri, the cradle of killers. One of the West’s most feared draw-shoot artists. I’ve spotted him a few times and had no trouble with him, but he’s savage as a meat axe. And he’s not particular about whether the bullets are in the front or back.”
“He’s also a hired jobber,” Dave chimed in. “He didn’t just drift in on his own. He’s generally doing dirt work for the codfish aristocracy.”
Fargo grunted affirmation. “He’s here to help some rich toff acquire claims—one way or another.”
“Well, these easy-money lemmings won’t want our operation,” Steve opined. “We’re way up the mountain, and besides, it’s backbreaking labor to harvest and haul ice.”
Fargo agreed with the kid on that point. But the Ovaro suddenly bridled, whiplashing his head up.
“Steady on, boys,” Fargo warned. “Might be trouble on the spit. Swing your weapons to the ready.”
Steve slid a Greener twelve-gauge from his saddle boot, an excellent piece for close-in defense. Dave left his army-issue Colt revolver in its flap holster and grabbed his Spencer carbine. Fargo tugged the sixteen-shot brass-frame Henry from its saddle scabbard and levered a cartridge into the breech.
“Utes?” Dave said in a low voice.
Fargo said nothing, carefully scanning the terrain on both sides of them. The Ovaro bridled again and he realized it was flies tormenting him. Fargo leaned forward to shoo them off with his hat.
“Nasty hatch this year,” he remarked as he gigged the stallion forward.
“Damn things are giving Inez conniption fits,” Dave said, meaning his pretty, young wife. “That’s one reason she’s been scratchin’ at you lately, Skye.”
“Man alive, she’s a she-grizz when Mr. Fargo comes around,” Steve agreed. “She figures he’s a killer, I reckon. Then again, he is.”
Fargo grinned. He was still digesting a snug breakfast of eggs, slapjacks, and ham-doin’s. “She sets out good grub, boys, so let her scratch. My hide is thick.”
Every man had his obsession, and Dave Holman’s was his wife. “Her mama taught her to hitch her wagon to a star. Looks like she hitched it to an army mule.”
“You’re the world-beatingest man, Dave,” Steve pitched in when Fargo said nothing. “Always talking yourself down on account of that woman. Hell, you’ve built up an icehouse and a vegetable business, all on one stick. You’d ought to feel proud.”
“That ain’t good enough for Inez, little brother, and you know it. It’s trade, and she favors somethin’ more genteel. Somethin’ where I just make the money without handling it.”
“Huh,” was all Steve said, spitting into the wind and getting it all over his shirt. Fargo grinned at the ignorant kid and shook his head.
But it was Fargo’s opinion on women that Dave valued, considering him a worldwide expert on the subject. He waited until he caught the Trailsman’s eye and said, “Oh, I know she acts like an F.F.V. sometimes—you know, the first families of Virginia? But she’s just a pretty Buckeye from Dayton with a schoolteacher daddy and a ma who took in sewing.”
Dave was waiting expectantly, so Fargo reluctantly answered. “You can’t rightly blame a woman out West for putting on airs. It’s a mean, hardscrabble life and chips away at their spirit. They can’t hardly lay hands on a bright bit of cloth, and the only book around is likely a Bible or a gun catalog.”
“Don’t it beat the Dutch?” Dave plowed on as if Fargo hadn’t spoken. “She don’t like me to cut shines, nor smoke tobacco, nor get oiled. No gambling, no cussing, and get this—no foofaraw on Sunday! Hell, that’s the only day I’m rested enough for it.”
“It makes sense that she’d object,” Fargo replied from a deadpan. “After all, seven days makes a hole weak.”
All three men enjoyed a hearty laugh at the bawdy pun.
“Speaking of foofaraw,” Steve put in, “that’s one thing I do miss since we left Iowa—women. Them strumpets down in the camps all got the French pox.”
“Pipe down and ready your weapons,” Fargo said tersely as the Ovaro began to stutter-step nervously toward the right-hand side of the trace. “It ain’t flies this time. Eyes left!”
In a heartbeat things started happening nineteen to the dozen. A hideous, yipping war cry broke out from the jack pines on their left. One moment Steve sat his saddle, pivoting to aim his Greener. An eyeblink later the earth seemed to swallow him up. Fwipping arrows rained in on Fargo, spinning his hat off his head. The sudden shrieking panicked the wagon team, and they tore off down the mountainside at a breakneck pace, bouncing Dave off the board seat and onto the trail.
“Put at ’em!” Fargo roared to Dave, bringing his Henry up into the offhand position. But it was impossible to draw a bead: There wasn’t an Indian in sight.