California Crackdown

9

After a quick planning session with Hank, Walt, and Jim, Fargo headed back to the stable with Jim. He opened the door to Sarah Brant’s prison and said clearly and firmly, “Come with me.”

She stood on shaky legs and moved toward the stall door, almost slipping and falling twice before she got into the main stable area.

“Why are you letting me go?” she asked, looking stunned.

“I’m not, really,” Fargo said. “I’m just giving you back to your father to protect for the moment. By tomorrow morning, I expect you to be in Sacramento boarding the first train available going east.”

She stared at him and said nothing, so he went on.

“I want you out of this whole situation. You understand me?”

“Completely,” she said, shivering. “But you still didn’t answer my question.”

He stared into her dark eyes. “Because Daniel and Cain would have wanted me to.”

For a moment she looked confused, then nodded. “You’re right. Thank you. I’ll be on that train and never leave the East Coast again.”

“And you might try to convince your father before you leave that trying to take over the Sharon’s Dream mine is a fool’s mission.”

She quickly mounted the horse and then looked down at Fargo. “My father has never listened to me before. I don’t expect he will now.”

She turned the horse and headed toward her father’s mine, cutting up through the rocks and over the lower part of the ridge instead of going down the road.

“Do you think you bought us some time?” Jim asked from beside Fargo.

“Maybe a little. Depends on if she leaves or not.”

“She’s not leaving,” Jim said.

“She’s not leaving,” Walt agreed.

Fargo watched her disappear over the hill. He wasn’t so sure about that. But it seemed that lately he had been wrong about people a great deal. And that wasn’t like him.

The expected attack from the Brant mine didn’t come that afternoon, so work in the Sharon’s Dream mine went back to normal, with guards doubled on the ridgeline and around the other entrances to the compound.

An hour before sunset, Fargo had gone with Jim high up on the ridge with a spyglass. They had taken turns watching the Brant mine and compound. It seemed like a normal evening down there.

A long time ago, when Cain and Brant still pretended to get along, Jim had visited the Brant mine. He slowly gave Fargo a tour of the compound, where the mine entrance was in relationship to the bunkhouses, how far it was from building to building, approximately how many men were working there. He even had a rough floor plan of the big ranch house that spread along a shallow ridgeline.

From their vantage point high up, Fargo spotted at least a half dozen guards in posts around the compound. But beyond that it looked like normal activity in and out of the mine. There didn’t seem to be any attack being planned at all. And that made no sense. What was he missing?

Fargo studied what he could see of the trail leadingup to the mine entrance on the hillside under them. In fact, the entire mountain they were on was honeycombed with both Sharon’s Dream and Brant’s tunnels.

“How close do you think they are from breaking through into one of our tunnels?” Fargo asked.

“The men haven’t heard anything on any shift,” Jim said. “And trust me, they’re all listening.”

Fargo shook his head. This entire fight, the reason Cain and Daniel were killed, was the gold ore. Brant’s mine was petering out while Sharon’s Dream was still following thick veins. Everything came back to the gold. Brant had to be going after the gold first. He didn’t care about the buildings or the people, only the gold. He would go after the gold first, the miners second.

Fargo turned from the spyglass to look at Jim. “Gold mine tunnels have a lot of false lead tunnels and short side tunnels, am I right?”

“You’re right. A number of them of varied lengths.”

“Have you checked all those dead-end tunnels?”

Jim nodded. “They’re all boarded off.”

“Easy to break through boards,” Fargo said as he watched yet another man carry a large wooden case up toward the mine. It looked like an ammunition case.

Jim said nothing and after a few seconds, Fargo again looked away from the spyglass and at Jim.

“It’s possible they’re coming that way,” Jim said after a moment. “Two of those side tunnels are long and go toward the Brant mine.”

“Can you blow the entrances to those side tunnels closed without bringing down the entire mine?”

Jim nodded. “We can, and we have to do it now.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Fargo said, standing a half beat behind Jim and following him at a near run down the ridge.

One hour later they had the mine empty and a team starting to blow the side tunnels, all of them that could hook up with any Brant tunnel.

Twenty minutes before midnight, Jim came out of the entrance to the mine, his face covered in dark dust. Fargo was standing there with a dozen others, waiting, watching.

“We got them all blown shut. You were right. We heard voices down one tunnel right before we blew it. Now it would take a dozen men a week to open any of them back up, and if they tried, we’d hear them.”

“Good,” Fargo said. “Now to get to the gold, they have to come at us where we can see them. Have everyone standing by for an attack at dawn.”

Fargo turned and headed into the dark.

“Where are you going?” Jim asked.

Without turning around, Fargo said, “I’m going to try to reduce the numbers on the other side a little. No matter what you hear, stay here and be ready for a possible attack at dawn. Brant and his men are coming to take your mine away from you.”

“Not likely,” Fargo heard Jim mutter behind him.

Fargo didn’t want to tell him that it was likely. Very likely. The coming fight was between miners and the professional fighters and gunhands Brant had hired. It wouldn’t be a fair fight at all unless Fargo could change the odds a little. And he had about eight hours of darkness to do just that.

Slowly, silently, Fargo worked his way over and around the rocks toward the guard positions set up by Brant around his compound. Fargo had no real idea how long it took him to get to them, but once he crossed the ridgeline and was on Brant’s side of the hill, he avoided looking into the lights of the Brant mine compound to make sure his night vision stayed as good as it could be. They had the place lit up with at least three dozen lanterns hanging from poles and the sides of buildings.

Fargo found the first guard right where he had spotted him from high on the mountain. He had his carbine across his lap and was sipping on a cup of something that smelled of beef.

Fargo slammed the butt of the Henry into the man’s head with so much force that the guard’s hat flew off and blood began leaking from his ear.

The man’s carbine rattled to the ground on the rocks and Fargo eased him to the dirt.

“What’s the matter, Ray?” a voice said from out of the dark about fifty paces away. “Can’t hold on to your gun while you piss?”

Fargo grunted loudly as if in response to the man’s question.

The man laughed and went silent.

Fargo checked out the man at his feet. He was a professional, and Fargo remembered seeing his face on a wanted poster down south. His name had been Ray Tanner. From what Fargo knew about him, he usually worked with his brother Carl. More than likely, it was Carl who had kidded him.

Fargo moved over toward the second guard, taking his time, making sure that no footstep he took made a sound, pausing between every step, staying low and undercover behind the large rocks where he could.

In the dim light, he could see the guard sitting on a flat rock, his carbine also across his legs.

As Fargo eased closer, the man turned and whispered loudly into the night. “Hey, Ray, how much time do we have left?”

At that moment, two men appeared from a bunkhouse below and the man said, “Never mind. Put your watch back in your pocket. I see them coming.”

Fargo took one quick step toward the man and hit him full force. The man groaned and slipped, unconscious, to the ground.

Fargo, with the same movement, grabbed the man’s carbine so it didn’t go clattering into the rocks.

He eased the man down and then watched as the two men started up the hill toward the guard positions.

It was doubtful he could take them both out silently. It looked like it was time for a change of plans. A more direct approach worked better for him anyway.

He took his Henry from over his shoulder and made sure a cartridge was in the chamber. He needed two shots in quick succession to make this work.

The two guards were now climbing up on a narrow trail toward him. He killed the one in front first, then killed the second guard before the gunhand even had time to go for his gun or duck behind a rock.

Taking the first guard’s ammunition belt, Fargo headed back up and into the rocks, moving quickly now, the sounds covered by all the commotion in the yard caused by his shots.

He found a large boulder for cover and locked new cartridges into the chambers of the Henry. There was no guard between him and the ridgeline back to Sharon’s Dream if he needed to make a hasty retreat. The Brant guards that he knew about were all below and beside him. This was as good a location as any to get a little target practice.

Below, a number of men were moving around in the light, shouting orders. Fargo ignored the men who looked like miners and worked to spot the professionals.

Picking one who seemed to be in charge, he shot him through the chest. Fargo’s gun cracked loudly in the night air, and he knew it spit just enough fire to let someone who was watching pinpoint his location.

The man he had shot slammed into the side of a bunkhouse, fired one shot into the air, and then went down hard, clutching his chest. No one went to help him and after a moment he stopped moving.

Fargo stayed perfectly still as the men below all took cover and tried to figure out exactly where the shot had come from.

The miners, not used to a fight, ran for the bunkhouses and the mine tunnel. It was the professionals who stayed, rifles in hand, taking any cover they could, waiting for Fargo to make the next move.

Fargo figured he could outwait them. They didn’t know exactly where he was on the pitch-dark hillside and he could more or less see all of them in the lights from his high position in the rocks.

He silently put another shell into his carbine, then lay against the rock, holding his fire and watching.

Finally, one man moved, running low toward the trail that led up into the rocks. The idiot figured he would outflank Fargo by climbing directly up the rocks at him.

The man paid for his stupid thinking as Fargo caught him in midstride and he tumbled like those people you see in a circus act. Except this one didn’t come up onto his feet and never would again.

Again, there was silence over the compound.

Fargo moved silently over to another rock on the left about twenty paces away and reloaded. Then he went back to watching the scene below.

Through the window of the big house, Fargo caught a glimpse of a man’s shadow.

Fargo sent a shot through the window, exploding glass inward like a kid had hit it with a rock. He doubted he had hit Brant, unless he’d gotten lucky. But if that had been Brant standing there, he’d at least been cut by the flying glass.

From the yard below, a man shouted up at him. “Fargo, is that you? We have no fight with you.”

“You do as long as you work for Henry Brant,” Fargo replied, turning his head toward the right and shouting back at the mountain to let the echoes confuse them as to his exact location. “Go to the stable and mount up and ride right now and I’ll let you live.” Fargo again shouted at the mountain to his right.

His voice echoed over the compound and then silence filled the dark night again.

Suddenly, one man near a horse trough started firing at the lanterns hanging around the compound, hitting one, missing another, trying to put the compound into darkness.

Fargo ducked down and moved to yet another large rock, putting another shell in the carbine as he went.

“Offer still stands!” he shouted, this time at the rocks and steep hillside to his left.

A good two dozen miners poured out of the mine entrance and headed down the trail at a fast run. More poured out of the bunkhouse.

“Stop!” one of the men in the courtyard shouted at them and raised his gun. The idiot was ready to fire on his own men. Fargo shook his head at the stupidity of it.

Fargo put a bullet through the edge of the wall the man was hiding against and into the man’s gut before he had a chance to shoot at any of the fleeing miners.

The shot made the miners run faster and within twenty seconds, they had all poured into the stable and out of sight.

Fargo again moved to a different firing position as he pushed another shell into the chamber, staying silent and low in the dark. No one below wanted to risk a blind shot up into the rocks for fear of drawing his fire. He had them pinned down and scared and without a leader. Still, the men down there were professionals, and Fargo decided that being safe and continuing to move was the best plan.

A few minutes of silence in the standoff before suddenly the farside stable doors burst open and the fleeing miners headed down the road, most of them in a large wagon, a few on horseback riding ahead and carrying lanterns.

It seemed that Brant had lost a large part of his fighting force. But Fargo figured there were still a good twenty to thirty professional guns left down there, some pinned down in the courtyard, some in the buildings. If he had to go through all of them to get to Henry Brant, he would.

He turned and shouted into the rocks next to him.

“Time’s up on the offer.”

Two of the guards still holding stations in the rocks above the compound opened up on his position, bouncing lead off the rocks around him.

Fargo slid back into cover. Crouching, he ran along the rocks, moving silently to yet another area of cover, this one farther up on the hill so that he had a better angle on the guards in the rocks.

He didn’t dare end up trapped on this hillside in the light, not with so many professional guns facing him. So he was forced to move back up and over the ridge while it was still dark enough for cover.

As the sun finally showed a little light in the sky, a signal that the day would be clear and again hot, Fargo walked between two of the miners guarding Sharon’s Dream and down toward the big white building where Jim and Walt and Hank were waiting on the porch holding carbines on their laps.

All three stood as he approached.

“Sounds like you were busy,” Jim said, smiling.

Hank said, “And our guards above the entrance to Brant’s mine told us that a large group of miners, in fact most of them who worked for Brant, beat a hasty retreat headed for Sacramento about one in the morning.”

“There’s still a lot of professional guns over there,” Fargo said, stepping up onto the porch. “I need to get back up on the hill and watch what’s going on, but I thought I’d come first for a little breakfast before it got too light.”

“We figured you might,” Walt said. “Got the cooks up early, as if any of us could sleep with the gunfire going on.”

Fargo nodded. “At least for the moment, they’re not coming this way. Now I have to stop them from ever coming this way.”

“And how do you plan on doing that?” Hank asked as they all went inside.

“By cutting off the head of the snake,” Fargo said. He smiled at Hank. “Haven’t you been listening?”