Northwoods Nightmare Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  THIRD TIME’S THE CHARM

  Locked together, they strained with all their strength, Strath to use his knives, Fargo to prevent him.

  Fargo bucked in an effort to heave Strath off but the killer clung on. Hissing, Strath threw all his weight into forcing the tips of his knives into Fargo’s neck.

  Water lapped at Fargo’s ears. He drove his knee into Strath, once, twice, three times. At the third blow Strath let out a howl, wrenched loose, and jumped up and back.

  Fargo kicked him in the groin. . . .

  SIGNET

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, May 2009

  The first chapter of this book previously appeared in Tucson Temptress, the three hundred thirtieth volume in this series.

  Copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2009

  All rights reserved

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  The Trailsman

  Beginnings . . . they bend the tree and they mark the man. Skye Fargo was born when he was eighteen. Terror was his midwife, vengeance his first cry. Killing spawned Skye Fargo, ruthless, cold-blooded murder. Out of the acrid smoke of gunpowder still hanging in the air, he rose, cried out a promise never forgotten.

  The Trailsman they began to call him all across the West: searcher, scout, hunter, the man who could see where others only looked, his skills for hire but not his soul, the man who lived each day to the fullest, yet trailed each tomorrow. Skye Fargo, the Trailsman, the seeker who could take the wildness of a land and the wanting of a woman and make them his own.

  The spectacular wilds of British Columbia, 1861—where the trails were few but the ways to die were many.

  1

  Skye Fargo saw the black bear before it saw him.

  A big man, broad of shoulder and narrow at the hips, he sat tall in the saddle. He spotted the bear when it came out of the thick woods onto the trail and stopped.

  Fargo quickly drew rein. He wasn’t too concerned. He had a Colt strapped around his waist, over his buckskins. In a sheath in his boot nestled a razor-edged Arkansas toothpick. The splash of white and black under him was an Ovaro. Fargo had been riding the stallion for years now and would go on riding it until it died or he did. He’d never had a horse so dependable.

  Fargo waited for the bear to move on. That it was a black bear and not a griz was in his favor. Black bears rarely attacked people. This one was big, though, as big as any he ever came across. But then, the bears were like everything else in the colony of British Columbia.

  Fargo didn’t know what it was—the land, the water, the soil, the fact there were so few people—but the wildlife and the plant life all seemed to be bigger north of the border.

  An old-timer once told Fargo that was the way it had been in the States back in the old days. Where humans were few, the animals grew and grew. Then waves of emigrants, pushing west, killed off the big ones, and the game that came along after that never got the chance to grow as big as those before. They were killed off to fill supper pots and so their pelts could be made into clothes and rugs.

  Fargo liked that part about few humans. He was fond of the quiet places, the lonely places, the places hardly any whites ever saw. It was why folks called him the Trailsman. It was why the army relied on him so often as a scout. It was why others hired him as a guide.

  That was what Fargo was doing at the moment: guiding. A quarter of a mile back down the trail came his party. He’d gone on ahead to check the trail and keep an eye out for game, and now this black bear had come along and brought him to a stop.

  It was late afternoon and Fargo had spent all day in the saddle. He could use a cup of coffee and a hot meal. Stretching, he idly gazed at pillowy clouds floating through the blue British Columbia sky. Then he glanced up the trail and gave a start.

  The black bear was coming toward him.

  Fargo dropped his hand to his Colt. He’d rather avoid the bear than shoot it. Bears took a lot more butchering than deer, and some people weren’t as fond of bear meat as they were of venison. Personally, he liked bear meat just fine, but some of those in the party he was guiding struck him as finicky.

  The bear was still coming.

  Fargo rose in the stirrups and hollered, “Skedaddle, you idiot.” Black bears were skittish. They often ran at the sound of a human voice. But not this one. It raised its nose and sniffed a few times and then kept on lumbering toward him.

  “Hell.” Fargo reined around and tapped his spurs. He would go back down the trail. The bear would realize he wasn’t a threat and go its merry way. He went around a bend and glanced back.

  The bear came trotting after him.

  “Son of a bitch.” Fargo scowled. The bear
was moving fast—not a full-out lope, but fast. Clearly, it had decided that he or the Ovaro was worth catching. And what a bear could catch, it ate.

  Fargo used his spurs again, bringing the stallion to a trot. He trotted around the next bend and went fifty more yards besides, and again drew rein. Surely, he told himself, the black bear had given up.

  Here it came, lumbering after him.

  “Damn contrary critter.” Fargo was mad. He was trying his best to spare the thing and it wanted him for its dinner. Once more he wheeled and this time he rode a good distance at a full gallop, enough to show the bear it had no chance of catching him. Bears were as fast as horses over short spurts, but a horse with a big enough lead usually left a bear eating its dust.

  Fargo came to a stop and reined broadside to the trail. He figured that was the end of it. He figured the bear had given up and gone off into the forest in search of easier prey. He waited to be proven right—and was proven wrong.

  Once more the black bear appeared, and when it saw him, it ran faster.

  Enough was enough. The day Fargo couldn’t outsmart a bear was the day he hung up his Colt, found himself a rocking chair somewhere, and put himself out to pasture. He galloped to the next turn and on around. Once out of the bear’s sight, he reined into the trees. The undergrowth was so thick, it only took him a few moments to find cover where he could see the trail without being seen.

  The seconds went by and Fargo began to think that this time the bear had gotten it through its thick head that it couldn’t catch him, when there it was, its heavy paws thudding on the ground. Breathing like a bellows, it ran past his hiding place and soon was out of sight around the next bend.

  Chuckling, Fargo gigged the Ovaro and turned up the trail to continue on his way. With the bear behind him he had nothing to worry about. But then it hit him. The bear was now between him and those he was guiding—and heading right toward them.

  Fargo wheeled the Ovaro. The odds of the bear attacking a party as large as his was small, but this bear wasn’t acting as a bear should. He spurred to a trot, confident he would soon catch up.

  Minutes went by, and there was no sign of the bear. Fargo grew more and more sure the bear had given up and gone off into the forest. He was congratulating himself on outsmarting it when the first shot cracked, and then another. There was a roar, and someone screamed.

  The bear was attacking them.

  Blistering the air with fiery oaths, Fargo sped to their aid. From the shrieks and the cries, at least one person was down and there might be more. Most were city dwellers and prone to panic at a time like this, and too often panic led to dead.

  Fargo reached down and shucked his Henry rifle from the saddle scabbard. The brass receiver gleamed as he levered a round into the chamber. The bear was as good as dead. It just didn’t know it yet.

  Another scream knifed the air. The bear must be wreaking havoc. Then a rifle boomed like a cannon.

  McKern’s Sharps, Fargo reckoned, and he smiled. A heavy-caliber Sharps could drop most anything in its tracks. No doubt the bear was dead.

  A roar proved him wrong.

  That might mean McKern was down, too. Fargo hoped not. The old man was the one of two people in that bunch he counted on.

  Fargo swept around a bend and then around another and came on a scene straight from every guide’s worst nightmare.

  The bear must have torn into them before they realized it was there. Three horses were down, whinnying and thrashing and kicking, one with blood spurting from a clawed throat. Their riders were down, too, and two weren’t moving. The third was McKern. The old man was pinned under his animal and struggling to pull his leg free.

  Fury flooded through Fargo. He wished now he had shot the damn bear the moment he saw it. There it was, in a wild melee of men and horses, tearing into the rest of the party like a wolverine gone berserk. He snapped the Henry’s stock to his shoulder, but a plunging horse filled his sights and he jerked the rifle down again.

  A woman wailed in terror.

  Angeline Havard was desperately trying to rein her mare out of the bear’s path but the petrified mare was slow to respond and paid a fearful cost for its fright.

  Roaring in bestial bloodlust, the black bear raked the mare from shoulder to belly, its claws shredding hide and flesh and ripping wide. The mare whinnied and frantically sought to escape.

  In a bound the bear had its jaws clamped on the mare’s neck.

  Angeline screamed. She pushed against her saddle to throw herself clear but the mare stumbled and went down. Her yellow hair flying, Angeline pitched hard to the ground. But she was up on her hands and knees in a twinkling.

  The black bear saw her. It let go of the mare’s throat and started to clamber over the mare to get at Angeline.

  Fargo flew past McKern. The old man hollered something about “blowing out that damn varmint’s wick.” Fargo didn’t catch all of it. He raised the Henry and took aim as best he could with the Ovaro moving under him. He fixed a bead on the back of the black bear’s head. Not an ideal shot, given how thick bear skulls were, but he must divert its attention from Angeline.

  The bear’s maw gaped wide and it went to leap on the helpless girl.

  Fargo fired, worked the lever, fired again.

  With a roar of pain, the bear spun and hurtled toward him.

  Fargo hauled on the reins and brought the stallion to a slewing stop. He fired a third and a fourth time.

  The bear didn’t slow.

  Quickly, Fargo took better aim. He had a front-on shot. He might be able to hit a lung or the heart but the slug had to go through a lot of muscle and fat. He fired at its eyes, instead.

  The Henry held fifteen rounds. He had already squeezed off six; now he squeezed off two more.

  The bear became an ursine blur of fangs, claws, and hair.

  Fargo banged off another shot.

  Slowing, the bear shook its head, as a man might at the stings of a bee. Suddenly it reared onto its hind legs and kept coming.

  Which suited Fargo just fine; he had the heart and lung shots he wanted. He fired, fired, fired, the Henry kicking with every blast.

  Behind him McKern’s Sharps thundered.

  The Ovaro, superbly trained, stayed perfectly still. Its eyes were wide and its nostrils were flaring but it didn’t bolt.

  Fargo had lost count of his shots but he knew he only had one or two left. Another moment, and the bear would be on him. Its eyes were dark pits of animal hate.

  That was when Rohan ran up. Rohan, filthy as sin, filthy clothes and filthy skin, with the fancy English shotgun he told everyone he won in a poker game. Rohan, the man in charge of the packhorses. He pointed his shotgun at the black bear’s head and blew the top of the bear’s skull off.

  For a few seconds the bear stayed erect. That was how long it took the body to react to the fact it no longer had a brain. The bear keeled over, hitting the ground with a thud, gore oozing from the cavity in its cranium.

  Rohan puffed on the wisps of smoke rising from the muzzle of his shotgun, and chortled. “Did you see that? This baby of mine would drop an elephant.”

  “Seen a lot of elephants, have you?” Fargo had seen one once, with a traveling circus. The thing nearly killed him.

  “No. But I ain’t ignorant. I know what elephants are.”

  Fargo had forgotten how prickly the man could be. “Don’t get your dander up. You did just fine.”

  “I’d have been here sooner but some of the packhorses tried to run off, and I figured saving our food and our bullets was more important than saving any of you.”

  “Don’t let the man who hired us hear you say that.”

  “Hear him say what?” Theodore Havard demanded, striding up with his spare frame rigid and his shoulders thrown back, as was his habit. He had the air of a man who owned the world. In reality, he owned most of San Francisco.

  “We were talking about that,” Fargo said with a nod at the dead black bear. “Where were you in all
the commotion?”

  “My horse threw me and ran off. It’s fortunate I wasn’t trampled or didn’t break a bone.”

  “Two of the men were mauled.”

  “They are? I didn’t notice.”

  The rest were gathering. There was Edith Havard, Theodore’s shrewish wife. There was Allen, twenty-five and unmarried. Shapely Angeline, younger by four years, brushing grass from her dress.

  As for the hirelings, besides Fargo and McKern and Rohan, there were eight others. Or six, if the two prone figures and the spreading pools of blood under them were any indication.

  McKern came up, reloading his Sharps. “I have half a mind to shoot this damn critter again. It killed my horse, and I had that animal going on six years now.”

  “That a shame,” Rohan said. “A good horse is special. Hell, any horse is better than people.”

  “Better how?” McKern responded.

  “I’d rather sleep with a horse than a person any day.”

  McKern took a step back. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re a mite weird?”

  Of all of them, Allen Havard was the least flustered. He sat his expensive saddle, immaculate in a riding outfit that cost more than most men earned in a year, and sniffed in distaste. “Are you two buffoons done?”

  “Sorry, Mr. Havard,” McKern said.

  Allen smirked at his father. “I knew it would come to this. I just knew it. I told you, didn’t I, before we ever left home.”

  “Don’t start, boy,” Theodore said sternly.

  “I’m a man, Father, and I’ll thank you to treat me like one.”

  “Must we bicker like this in public?” Edith asked.

  Rohan drew a hunting knife and hunkered next to the black bear. He pried its mouth open and began to dig at the gums.

  “My word!” Edith exclaimed. “What in heaven’s name do you think you’re doing?”