High Country Horror

13

They spent the night in the cell. Shortly after seven a.m. Tibbit looked out the window and spied a wagon coming down the street and yelled loud enough to shake the walls. A farmer coming in to deliver eggs to the general store heard him, pulled up, and came in.

“Why, Marshal, what on earth are you doing locked in your own cell?”

“It’s a long story, Phillip. Just get us out. The keys are on the desk.”

Fargo didn’t waste a minute. He went straight to the boardinghouse. Helsa Chatterly was up and in the kitchen fixing breakfast.

“Look at what the cat drug in,” she said in a tone that told him she was miffed. “I kept expecting you to show and when you didn’t I figured you had gone to the saloon and found someone else to spend the night with.”

“I spent it with Tibbit,” Fargo said.

“I beg your pardon?”

Fargo told her, and while she chuckled he went up and washed and retied his bandanna. When he came down the food was on the table. The aroma made his stomach growl. He ate six flapjacks with maple syrup and washed them down with four cups of scalding black coffee. He also had a slice of cantaloupe that he salted until it tasted more of salt than cantaloupe.

Helsa watched him eat. “You sure were famished,” she stated the obvious as he pushed his plate away.

Fargo was also mad as hell at being outwitted by an old prospector who barely had half a wit to boast of, and having to spend the night listening to Tibbit whine and pace and go on and on about ladies’ corsets. He didn’t tell her that.

“I’ll be gone most of the day.”

“You’re off after the Ghoul again?”

“And the old prospector,” Fargo said.

“What do you make of him? It was a shock, him showing up with Myrtle’s bonnet.”

“He knows who took the women and where the man is lying low,” Fargo said, “and he’s going to tell me.”

“You won’t hurt him, will you? He didn’t harm you or Marshal Tibbit.”

“That will be up to him.” Fargo rose and walked around the table and she stood in his way and placed her hands on his shoulders.

“Be careful out in those wilds. It’s not just the Ghoul you have to watch out for.”

Fargo knew that better than anyone.

“If you make it back tonight I’ll treat you to a special meal. Don’t worry about the time.” Helsa paused. “I’m sorry I didn’t come looking for you last night. I assumed, and I shouldn’t have.”

“You’re the only woman in this town I care to bed.”

“Thank you for the compliment,” Helsa said. “At least, I think it was one. Or maybe I need to reexamine my morals.”

“Oh, hell.” Fargo kissed her and left. He went out the front door. The Ovaro was at the hitch rail. He was halfway to the gate when the drum of boots warned him. He whirled, and they were on him—Harvey and Dugan and McNee. Their faces were bruised and swollen and grim with purpose. They hadn’t brought the ax handles this time; they came at him with their fists, all three of them in a rush. He barely got his arms up and they were on him, slamming into him and bearing him to the ground.

Fargo smiled grimly. When he was mad he liked to hit things, and he had plenty to hit. He punched Harvey in the face as he went down and smashed a fist into McNee’s cheek and planted his boot in Dugan’s gut. He absorbed blows without hardly feeling them. He kicked McNee in the leg and McNee yelped and staggered. That left Harvey to try and hold him down alone and Harvey wasn’t strong enough. With a heave Fargo gained his feet, raised his fists, and waded in.

“Get him!” Harvey hollered.

Dugan tried. Fargo blocked a left and countered with an uppercut. McNee had regained his balance and walked into a cross that sent him staggering again. Harvey hissed like a snake and flailed his fists in a windmill of rage. Fargo punched him in the mouth, pivoted, and drove his fist into Harvey’s wind cage. Dugan clipped him on the chin but not hard enough to jolt him and Fargo returned the favor with a lightning jab. He traded blows with the other two and then Dugan leaped back again and it was all three of them. Fargo reveled in the violence.

He was a whirling dervish, unleashing a storm of straight arms, crosses, uppercuts and jabs. In their eagerness to pound him into the ground, Dugan and McNee collided. It caused both to stumble, and Fargo had his opening. He rammed a right from the shoulder with all his weight behind it and Dugan went down face first. McNee frantically tried to ward off jabs and never saw the left that looped down and in and nearly drove his gut through his backbone.

That left Harvey. Bloodied and panting, he glared and spat, “You son of a bitch. We’ll keep doing this until we beat you.”

“Good,” Fargo said. He feinted right and went right and Harvey teetered on his heels, his eyelids fluttering. A solid cross hurt Fargo’s knuckles. It also brought Harvey crashing down.

Fargo’s chest was heaving. He looked up, and Helsa was on the porch, her eyes wide.

“Do you want me to fetch the marshal?”

“No.”

“But they keep attacking you. They should be behind bars.”

“They’d only come after me as soon as they got out.”

“The next time they might pull their guns on you. Did you ever think of that?”

“Yes,” Fargo said.

“I’m going to get Tibbit anyway. If you won’t press charges I’ll at least have them thrown off my property and warned never to set foot on it again.”

“You do what you have to.”

Fargo collected the Ovaro and was on his way out of Haven two hours later than he would have been if Badger hadn’t locked them in the cell.

The morning was bright and blue. Songbirds sang and deer bounded off with their tails up. A red hawk sought prey.

Fargo made a beeline for the canyon and rode along the canyon floor to the north and on into the dense timber. When he came in sight of the cliffs he slowed.

Where the trees ended he drew rein, climbed down, and spent the next half an hour studying the cliffs. He didn’t show himself. The killer might be up there with his rifle. But nothing moved. There were no glints of metal.

Fargo rubbed his sore jaw where Dugan had clipped him and settled down for a long wait. Another quarter of an hour went by, and the clatter of pots and pans brought him to his feet.

Badger was leading Gladys along the base of the cliffs. He was smiling and singing and happy as a bluebird.

Fargo stayed hidden. He saw Badger hike to a point where two cliffs merge and turn to a solid wall of rock. Prospector and burro walked into the rock and out of sight.

“How the hell?” Fargo said. He let a few minutes go by and climbed on the Ovaro. A flick of the reins and he was out of the trees. His skin crawled with the expectation of taking a slug but not a single shot thundered from on high. He trotted to the spot where Badger and Gladys had vanished, and drew rein.

The cliff didn’t merge. There was a narrow gap, wide enough for a rider, leading to who-knew-where. Faint impressions in the dirt hinted that Gladys wasn’t the only animal to go through. Unless Fargo was mistaken, those impressions had been made by horse hooves wrapped in fur.

“Got you,” Fargo said, and grinned. He gigged the Ovaro and ramparts of rock rose on either side, blotting out most of the sunlight. The gap seemed to go on forever. He thought at any moment it would end, but it didn’t. By his reckoning he had gone more than half a mile when the cliffs gave way to a broad expanse of caprock and hard ground. In the far distance a black mesa reared.

Fargo drew rein. He rose in the stirrups but couldn’t spot Badger and Gladys anywhere. The burro’s prints were easy enough to follow—for a few dozen yards. Then the caprock began, and tracking became a tedious exercise of looking for scrapes and chinks, however slight. At first Fargo thought the trail was leading toward the black mesa but it led to the south of it, across miles of hot wasteland. The sun burned like a furnace. A lizard skittered from his path. He glimpsed the tail end of a snake slithering under a large flat rock; the tail had rattles.

The ground was nearly solid rock. Fargo found it increasingly harder to find sign. The minutes crawled into an hour and another hour. He was sweaty and thirsty and would like to rest but there was no cover, only the burning sun and the hot rock and the lizards and snakes.

When next Fargo glanced toward the black mesa he was to the west of it, and a lot closer. Almost as if Badger were taking a roundabout route to get there. Maybe it was the same route the Ghoul took, Fargo reflected. The better to hide his trail. This near, he saw that the mesa was sprinkled with dark pines and split by shadowed arroyos and recesses. Just the sort of place Apaches might use as a sanctuary—or a white man who kidnapped white women.

A flapping sound made Fargo forget the mesa. Turkey vultures were rising into the air directly ahead, their bald heads a vivid red. Their great wings rising and falling, they slowly gained altitude, moving faster as they climbed in ever widening spirals. He had the illusion they were coming out of the ground, but that couldn’t be.

Then the stink washed over him in an invisible wave of loathsome odor.

Fargo almost gagged. Quickly, he adjusted his bandanna so it was over his nose and mouth, sparing him from the worst of the reek. The Ovaro didn’t like it, either, and whinnied and shied. Fargo gigged it on to a basin about twenty yards across. A few straggling carrion eaters sluggishly sought the sky, one passing so close, he could count every feather.

Fargo had come across gruesome sights in his travels: pilgrims in a Conestoga, butchered by the Sioux; Mexican freighters, tortured by Apaches; a backwoodsman, clawed to death by a bear. But this was more gruesome than any of those. This was something different, something unnatural, something vile.

The basin had become a charnel pit. Bodies and pieces of bodies covered the bottom. Some of the remains were animal: deer skulls and hide and legs, the bones of bears, the complete skeleton of a horse, and a host of smaller bones from the likes of rabbits and raccoons. Most, but not all, had been stripped of flesh.

It was the other remains that interested Fargo: the human remains. Only four women had gone missing so it stood to reason there would be four bodies, or parts from four. But there were more, and not all of them were female.

Fargo counted nine human skulls. None of the skeletons was intact from the neck down. Judging by how the bones were scattered, it appeared to him that they had been chopped into chunks and pieces. He remembered Badger saying something about finding a leg, and put two and two together.

A splash of color on the other side prompted Fargo to circle around and dismount. Scarcely breathing for the stench, he descended. At the bottom was a pile of clothes with other garments scattered about—dresses and shirts and pants and boots and shoes. His nose and throat felt raw and when he took a breath his stomach tried to crawl up his throat. Flies rose in swarms. Maggots infested the rotting flesh. Fargo had to force himself to squat and examine the clothing. All the dresses were torn as if they had been ripped from the women who wore them.

All had a musty smell, as of long neglect, and were covered with dust.

Tufts of human hair poked from under the putrid mass of a dead doe. Fargo gripped the deer’s leg and flipped the carcass over. His insides did another flip-flop.

The hair was attached to a human head severed at the neck. A woman’s head, the skin long gone and the eyes long since rotted out or pecked out by the buzzards.

One of the first girls taken, Fargo figured. He lifted some of the clothes but couldn’t find any clue to who owned them. A crumpled dress lay to one side. He lifted it and shook it and a large black scorpion fell out and landed near his foot. Pincers waving, it raised its tail. Fargo jumped back. He went to put his hand down for balance and nearly put it on another scorpion.

The stink, the maggots, the flies—Fargo had to get out of there. He turned and scrambled up the side and reached for the Ovaro’s reins—only someone else had hold of them. “You,” he said.

“Me,” Badger answered, and cackled.

“You’re becoming a thorn in my side.”

“I like to think of myself as a pretty rose.” Badger was pointing his Sharps and the hammer was cocked. Marshal Tibbit’s Remington was tucked under his belt.

Fargo looked but didn’t see the burro. “Where did you come from?” He regretted it each time he opened his mouth; the reek was worse.

“Now you see me, now you don’t.”

“How can you breathe?” Fargo marveled.

“Easy.” Badger sucked a breath deep into his lungs and exhaled, smiling the while. “I’ve been doing it since I was in diapers. Comes natural by now.”

“You are a card.”

“Thought I was a thorn?”

Fargo nodded at the Sharps. “Don’t point that at me.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Badger rejoined, and held out the Ovaro’s reins. “You take these and I’ll take your six-gun.”

“You don’t want to do this.”

“Sure I do. This makes twice I’ve got the better of you.”

“It’s no game,” Fargo said.

“Never thought it was.” The prospector backed off and gestured with the Sharps toward the mesa. “Walk that way. You’ll know when to stop.”

“Lower that rifle and we’ll forget this ever happened.”

“Listen to you. I’m the one can blow you to hell if you so much as move wrong.” Badger’s voice hardened. “Do as I told you and walk.”

A dozen yards, and Fargo came on a another, smaller, basin. It was empty except for Gladys, who stood at the bottom dozing. “So this was where.”

“I knew someone was following me. Caught sight of you when you came out of the cliffs.” Badger made a tsk-tsk sound. “Mighty careless of you, buckskin. How you’ve lasted so long is a mystery.”

“Now what?” Fargo asked.

The prospector raised the Sharps to his shoulder. “Do you really need to ask?”