Texas Timber War 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

  PUNCH OUT

  Fists smashed into Fargo, sending heavy jolts through his body. But he stayed upright and fought back. He had dropped his gun when the first man tackled him, but he still had his fists.

  He slammed a punch into the middle of a man’s face, then bent to the side and snapped a kick into another man’s midsection. That bought him a little room, but the respite lasted only a split second, just long enough for Fargo to drag in a breath. Then one of the other men landed on his back and looped an arm around his throat. . . .

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

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, November 2007

  The first chapter of this book previously appeared in Shanghaied Six-Guns,

  the three hundred twelfth volume in this series.

  Copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2007

  All rights reserved

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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 piney woods of East Texas, 1860—where danger for the Trailsman lurks in the forest thickets.

  1

  The big man in buckskins raced his horse along the bank of the bayou. The area was thickly wooded, so the magnificent Ovaro stallion had to weave around and through clumps of loblolly pines and cypress trees. Even though the sun was shining overhead, the forest canopy ensured that this part of eastern Texas remained in perpetual shadow.

  Skye Fargo’s lake blue eyes narrowed as he heard the rattle of more gunshots. The shooting had started a couple of minutes earlier as he made his way through the area, and the swift urgency of the reports told Fargo that trouble had erupted somewhere in front of him.

  Some parts of this forest were all but impenetrable, and as Fargo reined his black-and-white mount to a halt and listened to the gunfire, he had considered staying out of it for a change. Whatever was going on, he might not be able to reach the spot in time to help anyone.

  But that thought had been fleeting. Fargo wasn’t the sort of man to ignore someone else’s danger. Moving as fast as possible, he had headed in the direction of the shots.

  By the time he reached the bayou, though, the gunfire had shifted. The shots now came from somewhere upstream. Fargo turned the Ovaro to follow them.

  As he rode, he became aware of another sound—a deep, throaty chug-chug-chug that he recognized as the noise of a steam engine. He reined the Ovaro around a bend and came in sight of a stern-wheeled riverboat churning through the waters of the bayou.

  Men in canoes paddled after the riverboat, and other men who ran along the banks peppered the vessel with rifle fire. A few puffs of powder smoke from the riverboat told Fargo that someone on board was trying to put up a fight, but they weren’t mustering much of one.

  The attackers had to be river pirates, Fargo thought. No one else would have any reason to try to stop the boat by force like that.

  Fargo reached for the Henry rifle that jutted from a sheath strapped to the Ovaro’s saddle. He cranked the repeater’s loading lever as he brought the rifle to his shoulder. Three canoes pursued the riverboat, and Fargo aimed at the waterline of the one closest to the vessel. He sent a couple of bullets smashing through the canoe’s hull just below the surface of the bayou, then shifted his aim to the second canoe.

  The men in the first canoe barely had time to realize what had happened before Fargo drilled the second canoe as well. Both of the little craft began taking on water. With yells of alarm, the pirates abandoned their pursuit of the riverboat and turned to wave their arms and point at Fargo. The men paddling the third canoe dropped their paddles and picked up rifles. They started firing at the big man on the black-and-white horse.

  So did the men on the banks of the bayou. As the riverboat chugged on around another bend, the pirates turned their attention to the man who had interrupted their attack on it. Shots blasted out, further shattering what had been the peaceful stillness of the piney woods, and Fargo heard bullets ripping through the air around his head.

  He had shot holes in the canoes, instead of in the men paddling them, because he didn’t know all the details of what was going on and didn’t want to kill somebody needlessly. Also, shooting somebody who wasn’t even aware of his presence went against the grain for Fargo.

  But now they were tryin
g to kill him, so all restraints were off. Fargo’s Henry cracked swiftly and mercilessly. One of the men in the third canoe toppled out of the little craft, landing in the bayou with a great splash of murky water. A man on the near bank fell as well, also ventilated by a slug from Fargo’s rifle. A third man clutched a bullet-shattered shoulder and howled in pain.

  Even though the pirates outnumbered Fargo by more than twelve to one, his deadly accurate fire must have unnerved them. The men on the far bank bolted for cover, disappearing into the trees. So did the ones on the nearer bank. And the men in the canoes paddled hard for the opposite shore, giving up the fight.

  The two canoes Fargo had holed sank before they got there, with the men inside them floundering into the water and swimming for the bank. The frantic desperation of their thrashing reminded Fargo that alligators lurked in many of these East Texas streams.

  Fargo held his fire and let the men flee. The canoe that was still afloat reached the shore, and the men inside it leaped out and dragged the craft onto the bank. The swimmers clambered out of the bayou and joined them. They all vanished quickly, because they had to take only a few steps before the thicket swallowed them up.

  Fargo reined the Ovaro away from the bank and moved back into the woods himself, not wanting to leave himself exposed to any bushwhackers’ bullets. He brought the stallion to a halt and sat there listening, an intent expression on his ruggedly handsome face with its close-cropped dark beard. The forest was quiet. All the shooting had spooked the birds and small animals and made them fall silent.

  When Fargo was satisfied that the pirates had fled, rather than doubling back to try to jump him, he slid the Henry in the saddle sheath and hitched the Ovaro into motion again.

  A few minutes later he hit the trail he had been following earlier, before leaving it to seek out the source of the gunfire. The trail ran west out of Louisiana toward the settlement of Jefferson, roughly paralleling Big Cypress Bayou. But since the trail twisted and turned due to the varying thickness of the forest, and the bayou followed an equally meandering path, sometimes they were within sight of each other and sometimes they weren’t.

  As the broad, slow-moving stream came into view again, Fargo was surprised to see that the riverboat had pulled in close to the bank and come to a halt. It had to be bound for Jefferson, which was still several miles away, Fargo reckoned. The big paddle wheel at the rear of the boat had stopped turning, but smoke rose from the twin stacks, showing that the engine still had steam up.

  Fargo cut across a field dotted with pine and cypress to reach the bayou. His keen eyes scanned the decks and didn’t see anyone moving around. Crates were stacked on the main deck—goods bound for Jefferson, no doubt.

  The steamboats that plied these waters came up the Mississippi River from New Orleans and veered off into the Red River north of Baton Rouge, then followed the Red to Shreveport, Louisiana. From Shreveport the boats steamed up Big Cypress Bayou to sprawling Caddo Lake, which straddled the border between Louisiana and Texas and, according to local legend, had been formed by the tremendous earthquake that had shaken the whole middle part of the country nearly fifty years earlier.

  Beyond Caddo Lake, Big Cypress Bayou continued to flow westward and took the paddle wheelers all the way to Jefferson. That was as far into Texas as the river traffic could penetrate, but it was far enough to open up all of eastern Texas to the rest of the world.

  As a result, Jefferson wasn’t the backwoods settlement it might have been otherwise, but rather a sophisticated, fast-growing city that rivaled Galveston in importance as Texas’s second-largest port.

  The flow of commerce wasn’t all one way, either. Numerous cotton plantations were located in the area, and in the past decade, logging operations had moved in as well to harvest the riches of the hardwood forests. On the return trips, the riverboats that came to Jefferson were loaded with bales of cotton and stacks of timber. At first the loggers had tried floating the felled trees down the bayou, but the current was so slow that it proved to be impractical. Riverboats had turned out to be the answer.

  Fargo was well aware of all this, his fiddle-footed ways having taken him through the region several times in the past. He knew this riverboat wouldn’t have stopped along here unless something else was wrong, so he swung down from the saddle and looped the reins around the horn. The Ovaro was well trained and would stay put.

  ‘‘Hello the boat!’’ Fargo called in his deep, powerful voice. ‘‘Permission to come aboard?’’

  He gathered his muscles to make the leap from the bank to the deck. Instead he jumped backward as a shot rang out and a bullet smacked into the bank ahead of him.

  ‘‘Permission denied!’’ a man’s voice bellowed.

  The voice and the shot both came from the thicket of crates on the main deck. Fargo’s hand dropped instinctively to the butt of the big Colt revolver holstered on his right hip, but he left the gun where it was since he couldn’t see anybody to shoot at. Anyway, he figured that had been a warning shot, rather than one intended to hit him.

  ‘‘Hold your fire, damn it!’’ he said. ‘‘I don’t mean you any harm.’’ A grim smile tugged at his mouth. ‘‘Fact of the matter is, I’m the hombre who chased off those pirates who were trying to board you, back down the bayou.’’

  A man emerged from behind the pile of cargo, carrying a rifle. ‘‘That so?’’ he asked. The thick wooden peg that replaced his left leg from the knee down made a clumping sound on the deck as he moved. He was tall and scrawny, with a gray spade beard and a battered old river-man’s cap crammed down on a bald head. He went on. ‘‘What the hell business was it of yours, anyway?’’

  ‘‘It looked to me like you folks were in trouble, so I decided to help,’’ Fargo replied. ‘‘Simple as that. Just like I figure something else is wrong now, or you wouldn’t have stopped here. You’d have gone on and made port in Jefferson.’’

  ‘‘Got it all figured out, ain’t you?’’ The man spat into the bayou but kept the rifle trained on Fargo. ‘‘What’s your name, mister?’’

  ‘‘Skye Fargo.’’

  The gaunt old-timer’s eyes widened in recognition. ‘‘I heard of you,’’ he said. ‘‘You’re the fella they call the Trailsman.’’

  ‘‘Sometimes,’’ Fargo admitted.

  ‘‘And you ain’t an outlaw nor a pirate, leastways not that I recollect.’’ Finally, the man lowered the rifle he held in his gnarled but strong-looking hands. ‘‘All right, come aboard, if you’re of a mind to.’’

  Fargo’s powerfully muscled form made the jump from the bank to the deck of the riverboat without any trouble.

  ‘‘I’m Caleb Thorn, the engineer o’ this boat,’’ the old-timer went on. ‘‘We’re obliged to you for your help, mister. If you hadn’t come along when you did, that dad-blasted bunch o’ river rats might’ve boarded us.’’

  ‘‘Where is everybody?’’ Fargo asked. ‘‘You can’t be the only one on board.’’

  ‘‘The passengers, what few there are of ’em, are in their cabins. They all run for cover when the shootin’ started, and I don’t blame ’em. There ain’t no crew ’cept for me and a couple o’ firemen, and one o’ them got shot during the ruckus. The other boy’s tendin’ to him now. And the cap’n’s up in the wheelhouse, along with—’’

  Thorn was interrupted by a voice that called down from the tall wheelhouse perched on top of the riverboat’s two decks. ‘‘Caleb! Whoever that is, if he knows anything about doctoring, send him up here! I think the captain’s about to bleed to death!’’

  The voice belonged to a woman, and as Fargo looked up at the wheelhouse, he saw the sunlight that penetrated along the bayou shining on blond hair. He caught just a glimpse of her face as she leaned out one of the wheelhouse windows for a moment before ducking back inside, but that was enough to tell him that she was lovely.

  ‘‘Damn it!’’ Thorn burst out. ‘‘Cap’n Russell was hit by one of them bastards durin’ the shootin’. Can you give
the gal a hand, Fargo?’’

  ‘‘I’m already on my way,’’ Fargo said as he strode toward one of the steep sets of stairs that led to the upper deck and the wheelhouse.

  It took him only a moment to reach the wheelhouse. When he opened the door and stepped inside, he saw crimson splashed across the chart table. On the other side of the room, which had windows all around for an unimpeded view of the bayou, a man sat on a three-legged stool and leaned against a cabinet. His face was pale and drawn, and his eyes were closed as if he had passed out. The left sleeve of his shirt was soaked with blood.

  The young woman who leaned over him, holding an equally blood-soaked cloth to his upper arm, turned a frantic gaze toward Fargo and said, ‘‘I can’t stop the bleeding.’’

  Fargo didn’t have time to appreciate her beauty. He stepped past her, reached to the wounded man’s midsection, and unbuckled the belt that was cinched around his waist. Fargo pulled the belt free, wrapped it around the man’s arm above the injury, and twisted it as tight as he could. The blood welling out of the bullet hole in the captain’s arm slowed to a trickle.

  ‘‘I’ll hold this,’’ Fargo told the young woman. ‘‘Get me some sort of rod, about the thickness of a gun barrel.’’

  ‘‘Where would I—’’ the woman began.

  The wounded man opened his eyes, demonstrating that he wasn’t unconscious after all. ‘‘There are some . . . spare wheel spokes . . . ,’’ he rasped, ‘‘over there in . . . that cabinet.’’

  He pointed with his right hand, which trembled quite a bit. The woman looked where he was indicating and came back with a wooden spoke that she handed to Fargo.

  He thrust it into a loop he had made with the belt and turned it, tightening the makeshift tourniquet even more. ‘‘Now I need some strips of cloth to tie this in place,’’ he said. ‘‘Your petticoat will do.’’

  She flushed but pulled up the long skirt of her dark blue dress. She tore several strips from the bottom of her petticoat and, following Fargo’s directions, tied them around the captain’s arm so that the spoke couldn’t move and release the pressure on the belt.