South Pass Snakepit 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

  Chapter 21

  Teaser chapter

  BIG TALK, SMALL MAN

  “His tough talk don’t fool me none,” the string bean said, his mouth curling into a sneer. “Squaw boy here is just whistling past the graveyard. I’m gonna bore him through right now. And I get first dibs on that Henry rifle in his saddle boot.”

  Fargo’s lake blue eyes watched string bean, unblinking. “Let’s clarify this point. Are you threatening to kill me?”

  “Goddamn straight I am, buckskin boy. You’re about to buck out.”

  “Jesse,” the red-sashed leader cut in, “ease off. I got a hunch I know who this is.”

  “Don’t matter to me if he’s the queen of England. I’m sending this bastard across the mountains.”

  “Well, we can’t have that now, can we?” Fargo said almost cheerfully.

  Quicker than thought, Fargo filled his hand with blue steel and felt the Colt jump. His bullet opened a neat hole in Jesse’s forehead, and the corpse flopped hard to the ground like a sack of mail.

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,

  Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,

  Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632,

  New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, July 2010

  The first chapter of this book previously appeared in Six-Gun Gallows, the three hundred forty-fourth volume in this series.

  Copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2010 All rights reserved

  eISBN : 978-1-101-19806-3

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  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.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  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 gun-powder 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.

  South Pass, Wind River Range, 1859—where a valley of death is littered with the skeletons of children, and Fargo discovers the only god around is Sam Colt.

  1

  “More trouble already,” Skye Fargo muttered to his horse, “and we haven’t even got there yet. Bad omen.”

  The lean, tall, hard-knit man clad in fringed buckskins sat his stallion at the summit of South Pass, brass field glasses trained on a crude camp in the center of narrow Sweet water Valley below him. Hills surrounded the valley on all sides with magnificent white mountain peaks like spires ranging in a curtain-fold pattern behind them.

  For the moment, however, Fargo ignored the natural beauty of western Wyoming, the Indian name he preferred for this remote corner of the vast Nebraska Territory. Instead, his lips a grim, determined slit visible in a close-cropped brown beard, he watched the sadistic scene unfolding below at the edge of the camp.

  Four or five bullyboy types—wearing their guns below their hips in the style of stone-cold killers—were tying an elderly man to a tree. The victim was scrawny and his unhealthy skin looked like yellowed ivory.

  Fargo gave a long, fluming sigh. “There goes our big plan for riding in unnoticed,” he told his black-and-white pinto. “Good chance they plan to kill that old boy if we don’t stop it. Gee up!”

  Fargo cursed the luck. He had been paid generously to solve a mystery for a man who was literally dying of grief—a man he respected greatly. He had hoped to join the community below and blend in. That seemed unlikely now.

  He headed for a crude trail, just ahead, that led down into the valley. He was at the southern end of the Wind River Range, where it opened onto South Pass, the crucial gateway discovered by Jim Bridger that opened up the Far West to the Oregon Trail.

  Here at the summit, the pass was an almost level saddle about four miles wide from north to south. Beyond the pass, to the north, tiers of rock ledges, stretches of pine, and pockets of gray sage led to the foothills and the snow-peaked mountains beyond. To the south, Fargo spotted large boulders where migrating pilgrims had chiseled their names. But it was well into September now, too late to clear the mountains before the snowfall, and there was no sign of the canvas- covered bone-shakers making the transmontane journey.

  “Step easy, old campaigner,” Fargo advised his Ovaro as he tugged rein and they started down the only trail into the valley. He knew from experience it was just a sandy and rocky trace with washouts that had to be detoured. At one point it turned into an unstable landslide slope, but the Ovaro, sure-footed as a mule, got them across safely.

  Soon Fargo didn’t need his spyglasses to see what was going on.
The camp, while sprawling, was still far from being a town. Tents, log huts, and several flimsy structures of rough-milled lumber were scattered along a wide, wagon- rutted street. Good building material was scarce, thanks to a lack of sawmills, and roofing was as simple as old vegetable cans flattened into shingles.

  However, one new house of obviously imported milled lumber stood above the camp on a grassy bench.

  There’s where the king coyote lives, Fargo told himself. There’s one heap big chief in every roach pit.

  “I said talk out, goddamn it!” shouted a thickset bull of a man with a face hard as granite. “Talk out or I’ll peel your back like an onion.”

  The granite-faced man snapped a long blacksnake whip, opening a bloody crease in the prisoner’s back. He loosed a yawp of pain.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” the elderly man protested.

  “Like hob you don’t, you milk-kneed schoolman. Tell us about the box.”

  Fargo gigged the Ovaro forward. The granite- faced man with the whip wore a bright red sash around his waist. Two ivory-handled .36 caliber Colt 1851 Navy revolvers were tucked in butts forward. One of the four men watching also wore two guns in cutaway holsters, a pair of .38 Colt revolvers. A man out west, Fargo knew, could wear one gun or none. But two were the mark of either a grandstander or a killer.

  “Hold on,” Fargo called out as red sash raised the whip.

  Hard-bitten eyes watched Fargo as he hauled back on the reins.

  “Well, look-a-here, boys,” red sash said, his tone mocking. “A true-blue, blown- in-the-bottle frontiersman! This jasper shits in the woods, hanh? They call you Boone or Crockett, stranger?”

  “Wearin’ buckskins with bloody fringes,” said a man with a string-bean build. “Must be Joe Shit the Ragman. Can’t even afford white man’s duds. Betcha he’s gone to the blanket, got hisself a squaw.”

  Fargo ignored the others, watching the apparent leader of this pack of curs. “This man’s too old to go under the lash.”

  “Brash as a government mule, ain’t he?” the man with the whip said to this companions. “Stranger, it’s no say-so of yours what we do with this white-livered pus bag. You one of them mushy-headed do-gooders?”

  “No. But once, at Cherry Creek mining camp, an old gent who looks just like him cut a Cheyenne arrow point out of my back.”

  String bean: “Well this old soak ain’t him, squaw man.”

  “It’s true that I imbibe infrequent potations from a bottle,” protested the scrawny prisoner, “but I’m certainly no drunk.”

  “Shut your piehole,” red sash snapped. “You don’t just drink—you’re a pipe through the floor.” He looked at Fargo. “Who asked you to shoot off your chin, stranger?”

  “I’m just trying to help the old gent out, that’s all.”

  “Yeah? Well who are you, and what the hell you doing here? Men don’t just end up in Sweetwater Valley by happen-chance.”

  “I got a brother missing,” Fargo lied. “He’s a trapper like me. We were s’posed to meet at Sitwell’s Creek east of here, but he never showed. He was running traps along the Sweetwater River, so I decided to give the area a squint.”

  “Trapper, huh? Beaver’s been trapped out for twenty years.”

  Fargo nodded. “We go for red and silver fox. The pelts sell high back in Saint Louis.”

  The leader moved a few paces to get a better look under the wide brim of Fargo’s white plainsman’s hat. “Say . . . your map is familiar. You ever been to Silver City in New Mexico Territory?”

  The question jogged Fargo’s memory too—the speaker was the notorious Jack Slade. But Fargo continued to lie with a poker face. He shook his head. “Did some trapping near Taos, is all.”

  String bean pointed at Fargo’s Arkansas toothpick. “That pig sticker in your boot ain’t worth a Chinese whisker around here. You’re among gun hands now, squaw man.”

  Fargo turned his head and looked at the man from calm, fathomless eyes. “I’ve been keeping accounts on you, old son. Your tongue swings way too loose.”

  “I didn’t catch your name,” Slade pressed.

  “John Doe.”

  “You’re hanging by a thread, stranger. Before you start rocking the boat, John Doe, you better take the temperature of the water. Clay!”

  “Yo!”

  A surly-mouthed young man whose jet-black hair was slicked back with axle grease stepped closer. He was the one, Fargo noticed, wearing the pair of .38 Colt revolvers.

  “John Doe, meet Clay Munro,” Slade said. “He was raised from birth to eat six-shooters. Clay, give Mr. Doe here a little preview of what’s in store for him if he don’t light a shuck outta this valley.”

  Two bullet-riddled oyster cans sat in the rutted street about seventy yards away. Munro slapped leather with both hands and opened fire, one gun trained on each can as he emptied the wheels. Both cans rolled and bounced, not one bullet missing its target.

  “Can you tie that, John Doe?” Slade demanded.

  “What’s the difference?” Fargo replied. “Oyster cans don’t shoot back.”

  “You’re a hard customer, eh?”

  “I don’t talk about what I am. I just do what I have to.”

  By now several of the thugs were shuffling their feet in a way Fargo recognized—they were nerving up to kill him. All his plans to slip into the valley quietly were smoke behind him. Now he had to take the bull by the horns, and quick.

  “His tough-horseshit talk don’t fool me none,” string bean said, his mouth curling into a sneer. “Squaw boy here is just whistling past the graveyard. I’m gonna bore him through right now. And I get first dibs on that Henry rifle in his saddle boot.”

  “Dibs on the stallion,” Clay Munro said.

  Fargo’s lake blue eyes watched string bean, unblinking. “Let’s clarify this point. Are you threatening to kill me?”

  “Goddamn straight I am, buckskin boy. You’re about to buck out.”

  “Jesse,” the red-sashed leader cut in, “ease off. I got a hunch I know who this gazabo is.”

  “Don’t matter to me if he’s the queen of England. I’m sending this bastard across the mountains.”

  “Well, we can’t have that now, can we?” Fargo said almost cheerfully.

  Quicker than thought, Fargo filled his hand with blue steel and felt the Colt jump. His bullet opened a neat hole in Jesse’s forehead, and the corpse flopped hard to the ground like a sack of mail.

  “Well, for sweet Jesus!” exclaimed the prisoner tied to the tree.

  “No, Clay!” the leader shouted when the young target shooter’s hands started for his guns. “I know who this jasper is. His name’s Skye Fargo—better known as the Trailsman.”

  All four men stared in slack-jawed idiocy at the lifeless heap, blood still pooling in the dirt.

  Fargo had already thumb-cocked the single-action Colt. Wisps of powder smoke still curled from the muzzle. “Anybody else want the balance of these pills? If you do, clear leather.”

  Evidently no one did.

  “I ain’t never heard of no Fargo,” Clay said. “And anyhow, that was cold-blooded murder!”

  “You best study up on territorial law, junior,” Fargo advised. “It’s called ‘no duty to retreat.’ Any man receiving a direct threat to his life is in immediate danger and can kill in self-defense.”

  The kid looked at Slade. “Is that the straight?”

  Slade nodded. “ ’Fraid so.”

  “Hell, mister, men make threats like that all the time.”

  Fargo’s lips eased back off his teeth. “Not to me they don’t.”

  “I pegged you all wrong, Fargo,” Slade admitted. “You’re a hard twist, all right.”

  “Only when I’m forced to it.”

  “You’re a nervy cuss,” Clay conceded. “But, mister, we own this valley. You’d be wise to show this camp your dust.”

  “I just did when I rode in,” Fargo said. “You’ll see it again when I choose to leave
. Ain’t no man allowed to own one inch of territorial land—not until the government passes this Homestead Act. Now, all you boys just clear out of my gun-sights, and drag your dead pard with you.”

  “The worm will turn, Fargo,” Clay Munro vowed. “I’m going to—”

  “Clay!” Jack Slade cut him off, pointing at the dead man. “There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.”

  Clay took the point and avoided any threats.

  “Fargo,” Slade said, “I don’t believe for one minute you’re here to find a brother. And you sure don’t set up like no trapper. A man as gun handy and cool nerved as you could be mighty useful to the rainmaker in this valley, an hombre named Philly Denton. Let me know and I’ll set up a meeting.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Fargo said, still holding his Colt.

  2

  When the killers had disappeared, Fargo swung down and threw the reins forward. He slid the Arkansas toothpick from his boot sheath and sliced through the ropes binding the prisoner to the tree.

  “There’s one welt on your back,” he said, “but it didn’t cut too deep. A little bear grease will fix you right up.”

  Fargo took a can from his saddle pocket and smeared the wound.

  “Mr. Fargo, I am eternally indebted to you,” the scrawny little man said with formal, educated enunciation. “That jackal Slade would have cut my back to ribbons if not for your impressive intervention.”

  “Yeah, but why? You seem harmless enough.”

  “ ‘Why’ is a rhetorical question in Sweetwater Valley,” he said dismissively. “By the way, my name is Ignatius P. O’Malley.”

  “Is that your real name or a summer name?”

  “To you I’ll confess it’s a summer name. But it doesn’t matter because I’m better known in these parts as ‘Professor.’ ”

  “Seems like an unlikely place for a professor.”