Badlands Bloodsport

16

The Blackford party pressed onward against a raw northwest wind that, at times, blurred the air with driving snow. Occasionally the primitive trail would hit open spots where pinnacles, buttes, and mesas did not obstruct the view, and Fargo could see the Great Plains rolling to the horizon like a dark, treeless carpet. He estimated that before sundown they should make their egress from the Dakota Badlands.

Which would hardly, he reminded himself, be a milestone worth celebrating. Yes, they’d be closer to Fort Laramie. But close didn’t matter a hill of beans when overcast skies prevented him from even sending mirror signals to the fort to alert a civilian-rescue detail. Those Cheyenne braves, blood-lusting and hungry for glory, would swoop down on the Blackford party like all wrath, and no man in this ill-fated expedition had more than a pocketful of ammunition with which to fight back.

“We have to survive one more shooting battle,” he told Slappy, speaking in a low voice so those in the coach couldn’t hear. “We’ve thinned them out considerable, but we need to plug a few more. The second attack on the plains will be the last we can survive, but only if we can thin them down in the first.”

Slappy cussed at the team, which was fighting the traces. He was discovering that a four-in-hand conveyance was far more trouble than a simple buckboard.

“I done like you said,” Slappy replied. “I got them fancy foreign rifles from Aldritch and His Percyship and tucked ’em in the fodder wagon with Skeets’s Big Fifty and sidearm. You know, Jessica told me all three of them gals got little muff guns. You want I should take them, too?”

Fargo shook his head. “Rebecca just told me today they all realize what they might have to use them for, and these English gals have got starch in their corsets—they’ll do what they have to if it comes to that.”

“You think it will come to that? Straight-arrow now.”

“Distinct possibility,” Fargo admitted. “But this ain’t no time and place for calamity howlers. It’s no sunny outlook, Slappy, but you’re straight-grain clear through and you got a set on you would shame a stallion. Let’s lay the cards out in the open: Aldritch and Blackford are poncy men and they’ll be as useless as tits on a boar hog. The women all got sand, all right, but they’d be poor shakes with a rifle, and we can’t waste the bullets. Ain’t no way we can wangle out of it: It’s gonna be me and you on those fire sticks.”

Slappy noticed that Fargo was keeping a wary eye on Derek the Terrible.

“What about the hangman?” Slappy asked. “I tried to get his Big Fifty and that fancy pearl-grip Remington, but he told me to ‘bugger off,’ whatever the hell that means.”

“Oh, Derek has been watching for his opportunity,” Fargo replied, his lips forming a grim, determined slit. “But I’m gonna put the kibosh on that right now. I’ve had my stomach full of that conniving, murdering bastard.”

Fargo nudged the Ovaro forward until he was riding alongside the japanned coach. Without a word he reached up and snatched the Sharps rifle from the seat beside Derek.

“You fuggin’ whelp!” Derek snarled, dropping the reins to shuck out his Remington. But Fargo was quicker. He tossed the rifle into his left hand and, quicker than eyesight, filled his right hand with blue steel.

“First I want the rifle reloads from your pocket,” Fargo ordered in a dangerous tone. “Then I want you to hand over that gun belt and the hideout gun.”

“In a pig’s ass, you sodding bastard!”

The Colt leaped in Fargo’s fist and Derek let out a hideous screech when the slug tore off half of his left ear.

“Unless you want that right head handle to make a perfect match,” Fargo said, “do what I told you. You try one fox play, I’ll drill you between the eyes.”

With scarlet globules of blood dripping off his injured ear, Derek complied.

“Fargo, I swear by all things holy that I will kill you,” he promised, breathing hard in his rage and pain.

“Yeah, that was your plan. To murder all the men, rape the women, and escape on my horse before the Cheyennes attack.”

Derek started at these words and averted his smoldering gaze. “That’s rubbish.”

“Is it, old bean? Skeets is proof it ain’t. But you just might prove useful yet—very useful.”

Fargo rode back and tucked the weapons into the diminishing pile of fodder. He smiled at Jessica, who shivered inside a knit shawl—none of the women had brought heavy coats.

“A mite frosty to be driving, isn’t it?” he greeted her.

“It is, quite. But thoughts of our little . . . biological adventure in the sand hills warm me up rather nicely. If we survive this, any chance for a return engagement?”

Fargo’s strong white teeth flashed through his beard. “Hell yes—we’ll need to celebrate, won’t we?”

She smiled back. But the corners of her mouth turned down in a frown when she asked, “Why didn’t you kill Derek?”

“Too merciful. If things work out right, he’ll be going to a new kind of hell that’ll make him beg for Satan.”

The swirling snow had abated for the nonce, and Fargo doffed his hat at her, riding forward again. His eyes closed to slits as he scoured the terrain on both sides, searching for sign of any Cheyenne outriders sent in to harass them. After examining an area head-on, Fargo quartered the Ovaro around and searched the same terrain from the corner of his eye. Sometimes peripheral vision showed shapes and motions frontal vision did not.

Another half hour passed, Fargo and the Ovaro squirting ahead and quickly returning to join the others. By now he knew trouble was coming: He had cut fresh sign on two unshod ponies about fifty yards back from the trail. But the riders had stuck to solid rock as much as possible, and the trail was too broken to pick up.

“There’s an ambush coming,” Fargo warned the occupants of the coach. “Keep your heads out of the windows.”

Sylvester Aldritch, whose contempt for Fargo had turned to raw hatred since the latter “walked out” with Rebecca, craned his neck to stare at Fargo through the window.

“Fargo, you aren’t half a show-off, are you? There are no newspaper writers here to impress. We all know you are ten inches taller than God, so why don’t you go sing to your horse and leave your betters in peace? There’s a good chap.”

“Shut your mouth and duck your head inside,” Fargo snapped.

“Blast it to hell, I’m sick of your cheeky arrogance!”

“Sylvester,” Lord Blackford advised, “I rather think Fargo means it. Do as he says.”

Cold air always transmitted sounds better, and just then Fargo’s frontier-honed ears heard two familiar sounds that sent his pulse exploding like hoofbeats in his ears. The first was the powerful fwip of a huge bowstring, followed instantly by the hard slap of that string against the leather band protecting the brave’s wrist.

Fargo was looking right at Aldritch’s face, twisted with insolence, when the arrow skewered him in the right eye so hard that it sank six inches into the brain. Blood shot out in a thick rope, spurting two feet beyond the window. Aldritch flopped sideways onto the passengers.

One of the women screamed. Fargo heard Blackford’s voice, reedy with fright. “Someone help him!”

Fargo had already whipped his Henry out of its scabbard. “Never mind, he’s past help! The rest of you get the hell down!”

Fargo heel-thumped the Ovaro around to the far side of the coach, his eyes carefully scanning. Another arrow thwacked into the coach, and Derek suddenly deserted the box, climbing to safety. Slappy and Jessica, too, had halted their conveyances and taken cover.

“Shoot the bloody bastards!” Derek shouted at him. His ear was tied up with a red handkerchief.

A third arrow streaked at them, passing through the windows of the coach and missing Fargo by mere inches.

By now Fargo had a good fix on the two braves. They were well protected in a clutch of boulders atop a low ridge. He could not possibly score a direct hit unless they showed themselves, and even if they did Fargo refused to waste the lead. But one well-placed shot, against a rock pinnacle a few feet to their left, might set up a dangerous ricochet path and rout them.

He aimed carefully, slowly squeezed the trigger, and felt the Henry buck hard into his shoulder. He knew his calculations had been sound when he heard the prolonged, high-pitched whine as the bullet caromed from boulder to boulder. To the braves hidden there, it must have sounded like a hail of lead opening up on them. A few moments later he heard the sound of two mustangs escaping down the back of the ridge.

“Jolly well done, Fargo!” Blackford called out as he escaped from the corpse inside, showing no gallantry to the ladies.

Rebecca and Ericka came out more slowly, their faces white as gypsum. The front of Ericka’s velvet traveling dress was sopping with blood.

“Poor Aldritch,” Blackford said. “But you warned him, Fargo.”

“Aye, he warned him,” Derek spat out with contempt. “P’r’aps two heartbeats before that arrow doused his wick. Hell, an alley mutt might have barked sooner.”

“I didn’t hear you bark,” Jessica countered. “Nor shout. You were up on the high seat.”

“You’ll all bark—in hell—before I do one blasted thing for any of you,” Derek declared. “His whore would take his side, now, wouldn’t she?”

“Mr. Fargo didn’t start this battle with the Indians,” Ericka declared, “and he’s the only one among us who knows what he’s doing. If the rest of us are to survive, we will follow his orders—Sylvester proves that.”

“Hear, hear,” Blackford said.

Fargo raised one hand to stop the bickering. “Save it for your memoirs, folks. I just got one question: Can we skip the grave this time? Time is pushing, and we’re down to scant rations—we don’t need the exertion. I say we just toss the body out and get moving. The world belongs to the living.”

Not even Derek opposed this idea. Sylvester Aldritch, Dover merchant, social climber, and enticer of young girls, was stripped of his valuables and unceremoniously pitched to the side of the trail, where he would soon lie frozen until the spring thaw and the arrival of hungry buzzards.

* * *

Fargo estimated they still had one hour before leaving the Badlands and emerging onto the open plains. The slate-colored sky began to clear, showing streaks of purple-blue, but the westering sun was still not bright enough to make mirror signals.

He dropped back to ride alongside the mud wagon, the butt-plate of his Henry resting along the top of his thigh.

“See anything?” Slappy asked him.

Fargo shook his head. “With the lead we had on them, there’s a good chance we won’t be jumped the moment we hit the plains. Even so, the attack will come soon. I just hope they don’t reach us before sundown. We can push all night while they huddle in camp—they’ll lose more time catching up to us again.”

“A’course, but these horses is dang near played out, Fargo. They ain’t tanked up on water in days, and these dribs and drabs from our hats is poor fixin’s. Hell, even your stallion is stutter-steppin’.”

Fargo’s face set itself like granite. “Tough shit. They’re just horses, even mine. If we have to kill ’em, so be it. A horse is a tool like any other, and we got a job to do, old roadster.”

Slappy nodded. “Uh-huh, that’s the way of it. It makes me ireful, Skye, to think how two stupid, green-antlered galoots put us in this sling by killing that Cheyenne herd spy. They stepped in it, and now the rest of us got to wipe it off.”

Fargo only nodded absently, for he took a longer view of it. He had learned long ago that life out West meant being a soldier—disciplined, courageous, at times even reckless and crazy-brave. Fools like Skeets and Derek were as common as cheatgrass and would always be around to muck things up. By Fargo’s view of it, any man who demands to live free must also expect to fight for the right to do so, and not just once but over and over, for the enemies of freedom were legion.

“And you take Baldritch and His Percyship,” Slappy grumbled on. “Matter fact, take all four of them tea-sippin’ men—not oncet did I ever see any of them sons a’ bitches takin’ a moment to glom the sights, not even the New Mexico Rockies. They just wanted to kill a couple buff so’s they could brag back in England what big hunters they was. Yessir, it makes me ireful.”

“Yeah, but they got the excuse that they’re foreigners. There’s a million men worse back in the States. All the West is to them is a profit ledger. They’re already taking off the timber, destroying the Sierra with their giant dictator hoses, and claiming railroad right-of-way across open land. Fences and factories, mines and sawmills, that’s their plan for the West. Even the damn squatters claim every raccoon that craps on their back forty. The shining times are damn near over, Slappy.”

“Uh-huh. But I have to admit, Fargo—right about now I wish all that cussed syphillization was here in the Badlands. Then none of us would be in danger of no Indian haircut.”

A brief seam of smile cracked Fargo’s tired, grimy face. “I’ll have to give you that. One steam whistle would send those Cheyenne braves packing with their tails twixt their legs.”

“By God! And if we had enough ammo, they’d never lift our danders. Say, didja notice, in that last attack that killed Montoya, how the balls from them feather-head trade guns was just bouncing off the coach without penetratin’?”

Fargo chuckled. “Lucky for us most of the tribes still think that black powder is magic. They charge their pieces light so it’ll last longer. I once saw a Sioux shoot an antelope, and the ball hit it and then just dropped in the grass. But our problem ain’t their guns—it’s those damn osage bows. Chum, they don’t charge those light.”

“No, sir, and don’t matter how many of their arrows we pick up and snap in two, they can draw for plenty more. Say! Look at Derek.”

Fargo had been doing just that for some time. Despite tying off his mutilated ear, the Tyburn hangman had dried, crusted blood all over his left cheek. The cold and murderous eyes he turned toward Fargo made no mystery of his intentions.

“That bastard plans to piss on your grave,” Slappy remarked. “Can I shoot him?”

“Best hold off on that a mite. They say it’s a poor dog indeed that ain’t worth a bone.”

“Fargo!” Derek shouted over. “It’s not over, you hear me? You stole my best weapons, but not my fists! And my fists, you bloody wanker, are my most dangerous weapons!”

“The hell’s a wanker?” Slappy asked Fargo.

“I don’t know for sure, but I think it means what we call skinning the cat and flogging the hog.”

“Them yahoos sure does talk funny. You—”

“Derek!” Fargo suddenly shouted. “Look out!”

Busy staring down Fargo, Derek hadn’t noticed that the coach had drifted into the path of a jagged boulder. It suddenly lurched hard, rose like a clumsy beast, and then with a splintering crash sagged down in front, its axle snapped like a dry stick.