Six-Gun Gallows 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

  Teaser chapter

  MOVE OR DIE!

  “All right, folks, I know it’s hard for you, but we have to get a wiggle on. If you rehitch some of the teams, there should be at least one ox for every wagon.”

  Nobody moved, not wanting to leave the grave. Most stood still as stone lions, staring at the new mound of dirt. Fargo hated to get rough with them, but there was no other way to save them.

  “Damn it, people, stir your stumps!” he snapped. “What’s done is done. Do you want the children to die, too?”

  That finally goaded them into action. Feeling like a brutal mine foreman, Fargo began helping the women with their teams. But he vowed to move heaven and earth—if that was what it took—to punish every murdering son of a bitch who had attacked these helpless innocents.

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, June 2010

  The first chapter of this book previously appeared in Texas Hellions, the three hundred forty-third volume in this series.

  Copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2010

  All rights reserved

  eISBN : 978-1-101-19791-2

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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.

  Southwest Kansas Territory, 1860—

  where “Bleeding Kansas” earns its name in spades

  when Skye Fargo cleans out an outlaw hellhole.

  1

  The Ovaro suddenly gave his trouble whicker, and Skye Fargo, naked as a newborn, shook water from his eyes as he hustled out of the chuckling creek and onto the grassy bank.

  His gun belt hung from the limb of a scrub oak, and he filled his hand with blue steel. He clapped his hat on, not wanting to die totally naked. Then he knocked the rawhide riding thong off the hammer and thumb-cocked his single-action Colt.

  “Steady, old warhorse,” he soothed the nervous pinto stallion. “Let’s have a squint—might be just a stray buffalo spooking you.”

  Staying behind the stunted tree, Fargo used his left hand to clear his vision of leaves. His face was tanned hickory nut brown above the darker brown of his close-cropped beard. Eyes the bottomless blue of a mountain lake peered out from the shadow of his broad white plainsman’s hat.

  Fargo’s first glimpse was the infinite vista of the western Kansas Territory plains, so vast and boundless that many men lost their confidence for feeling so dwarfed in it.

  A heartbeat later, however, his blood iced when he saw that trouble was boiling to a head.

  About a quarter mile north of his well-hidden position at the creek, a small group of pilgrims—perhaps seven families—were traveling west. Fargo recognized their sturdy wagons as the type made famous in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. And the men’s clergy-black suits, the women’s crisp white starched bonnets, told him they were Quakers.

  Pacifists, out here of all places. Fargo mocked no man for his heartfelt religious convictions and tended to like the hardworking, charitable Quakers. But this was the wrong place to turn the other cheek.

  And most definitely the wrong time, he thought, watching a boiling yellow-brown dust cloud approaching from the Cimarron River to the north—a large group of riders, and only iron-shod horses would kick up that much dust. Large groups of riders, anywhere in the Kansas Territory, meant hell would be coming with them. This wasn’t called Bleeding Kansas for nothing.

  “You damn, thick-skulled fools,” Fargo said in frustration as he pulled on his buckskin shirt and trousers, then his triple-soled moccasin boots. “This ain’t Fiddler’s Green out here.”

  Fargo knew there had been settlement going on for some time in the eastern half of the territory, but lately he had seen more pilgrims like these pushing way too far west—well beyond the U.S. Army’s protection line. Just some stubborn and isolated homesteaders trying to prove up government land, without permission, in rain-scarce country better suited for grazing.

  The Quakers, having spotted the approaching riders, had reined in their teams of oxen. But since defending themselves was not an option, they took no further action—merely waited patiently for whatever fate befell them.r />
  By now Fargo’s stomach had fisted into a knot. The riders were close enough that he recognized their butternut-dyed homespun clothing. Border ruffians . . . organized gangs of supposed anti-slavers who clashed with the “pukes,” similar gangs from Missouri who used pro-slavery rhetoric as a thin excuse to terrorize settlers.

  Fargo had waltzed with both factions before: kill-crazy marauders of no-church conscience.

  But usually, he reminded himself, they were found well east of here, where the settlers and towns were. This was a long distance from their usual range—a fact that piqued Fargo’s curiosity.

  “Something ain’t jake here, old campaigner,” he told the Ovaro, his voice calming the nervous stallion.

  First Fargo heard the warbling cries as the attackers moved in, then the sickening sound of a hammering racket of gunfire. Men frantically pushed their women and children into the wagon beds as bullets dropped some of the oxen in their traces.

  At least thirty riders, Fargo estimated, all well-heeled and liquored up. And he knew damn well these mange pots could take a human life as casually as shooing off a fly. Many had developed a taste for killing during that slaughterfest known as the Mexican War.

  After killing a number of the oxen, they took aim at the butcher beef and milk cows tied to the tailgates of the wagons. Fargo’s face etched itself in stone when they next killed every adult male, then pulled some of the screaming girls from the wagons and gang-raped them—innocent girls who had never experienced violence in their lives.

  But Fargo stayed hidden despite the anger roiling his guts. It was one of the ugliest scenes he had ever witnessed, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it—not now.

  He had learned long ago never to push if a thing wouldn’t move. He would gladly risk his life to help any man—and especially a woman or child—if there was even the slimmest chance of success. Revealing himself now, however, would simply make him part of the slaughter. Fargo preferred to survive so he could avenge it.

  And he vowed that he would. He had been on his way to the sand-hill country of the northern Nebraska Panhandle country, hired by the U.S. Army to be a fast-messenger rider between military outposts there. But the army could wait—no man worth the name could turn his back on this.

  The grisly nightmare was over in about fifteen minutes. At least the marauders hadn’t killed any women or children. When the attackers had cleared out, after only quickly looting the wagons, Fargo untied the Ovaro’s rawhide hobbles and vaulted into the saddle.

  “Jesus, I could use a drink,” he informed the landscape as he cleared the scrub oaks and cantered the Ovaro toward the scene of devastation.

  The sights—and especially the god-awful sounds—forced Fargo to all his reserves of strength. The survivors had gathered around dead and dying men, their cries piteous. Girls who had been brutally raped lay in wide-eyed shock, young children bawled like bay steers, frightened out of their wits. Despite his best effort, Fargo misted up.

  An elderly woman spotted him riding in and screamed. “Please, God, no more!” she begged the heavens. “Thou must please make him leave us alone!”

  Fargo realized she had confused his fawn-colored buckskins with butternut.

  “I’m a friend, ma’am,” he assured her. “I’m not part of that bunch that just left.”

  “Friend?” she repeated in a tone implying she no longer trusted the word. Then she turned away and folded to the ground, overcome with grief.

  A man lay slumped on the box of his wagon, screaming in agony. Fargo hauled back on the Ovaro’s reins and threw a leg over the cantle, dismounting. He threw the reins forward to hold his pinto, and then checked on the man. He’d been gut-shot twice and was past all help. All that lay in store for him was hours of indescribable agony while he bled out.

  His face set hard as a steel trap, Fargo moved out of the man’s line of sight, shucked out his Colt, and sent the man to glory with a clean head shot. He expected howls of protest, but this bunch was in such shock no one took notice.

  “Listen, folks!” Fargo shouted. “We’ll have to bury your dead and get you out of here. Even if that gang of white men is done with you, the Indian Territory is only forty miles south of here, and some of the hotheads like to jump the rez. There’s dozens of tribes there, and warpath braves could be anywhere in this area.”

  No one seemed to be listening. Fargo grabbed a shovel from a wagon and began digging a mass grave. Soon a few women and older boys had joined him. The elderly woman Fargo had first spoken to had recovered from the worst of her shock and spoke a prayer after the bodies had been covered with dirt.

  “We thank thee, young man,” she said to Fargo. “We came out from western Pennsylvania. We never expected anything like this. No one warned us. We’re just farmers.”

  Fargo felt a welling of hopelessness. How many times had he heard those fateful words on the lips of green-antlered settlers burying their dead?

  “What brought you folks this far out, ma’am?”

  “Well, all the talk of railroads. We hoped to prosper.”

  Fargo had all he could do not to curse. There were still no railroads west of the Missouri River, but plenty of misguided folks were riding west on rumor waves. In 1854 the Committee on Territories proposed building three transcontinental lines, two of them slicing through the entire width of Kansas. Squatters immediately began pouring into the area. Some were the usual profiteers who hoped to cash in by being first on the scene. Others, like these folks, were hapless farmers expecting new markets for their crops—and finding only a nameless grave like this one.

  But Fargo looked at this tired old woman, her eyes water-galled from weeping, and dropped the matter.

  “Ma’am, obviously you folks are in no shape to push on. Fifteen miles east of the Cimarron River there’s a trading post called Sublette. There’s clean water, plenty of room to camp, and plenty of protection if you join with other settlers. There’s also experienced guides for hire if you decide to go home.”

  The woman nodded. “My name is Esther Emmerick. Who were those men who . . . who attacked us?”

  Again that question niggled at Fargo. “Well, they sure looked like Kansas border ruffians. But this is mighty far west for them.”

  “I’ve heard of them—supposedly they are looters. These men hardly touched our possessions.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Fargo said. “It’s a mite curious, isn’t it?”

  The old matriarch steeled her resolve with a mighty sigh. “We’re in God’s hands for good or ill. Will thou take us to this trading post, Mr. . . .”

  “Fargo. You better believe I will. I’m on a mission for the U.S. Army, but it can wait.”

  “Army? Thou are a solider?”

  “No, ma’am. I do contract work for them now and then. Scouting, hunting, messenger, in that line.”

  “I see. One moment, please, Mr. Fargo.”

  The woman went to a nearby wagon, rummaged in the back, and returned with a doeskin pouch. It was sewn shut with thick gut string.

  “Two nights ago,” she explained, “a badly wounded soldier, barely able to walk, met up with our group. The poor man died, but before he did he gave this to my—my husband—”

  Her eyes cut to the new grave, but then she forged on. “He could barely speak, but he said it was imperative that this pouch be delivered to a military officer—any officer. He said it must not be opened before such delivery. Thou, Mr. Fargo, are more likely to see an officer before I do. May I trust it to thee?”

  Fargo took it, noticing dried blood all over it. “It feels empty,” he remarked.

  “Yes, but that poor soldier was adamant that it be delivered.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Fargo promised.

  He glanced around. A westering sun threw long, flat shadows to the east.

  “All right, folks, I know it’s hard for you, but we have to get a wiggle on. If you rehitch some of the teams, there should be at least one ox for every
wagon.”

  Nobody moved, not wanting to leave the grave. Most stood still as stone lions, staring at the new mound of dirt. Fargo hated to get rough with them, but there was no other way to save them.

  “Damn it, people, stir your stumps!” he snapped. “What’s done is done. Do you want the children to die, too?”

  That finally goaded them into action. Feeling like a brutal mine foreman, Fargo began helping the women with their teams. But he vowed to move heaven and earth—if that was what it took—to punish every murdering son of a bitch who had attacked these helpless innocents.

  2

  Rafe Belloch, hidden in an erosion gully north of the attack site, studied everything through a pair of German-made field glasses.

  “Christ on a crutch,” he muttered softly. “That’s all I needed.”

  “What’s wrong, boss?” Shanghai Webb asked.

  “Plenty,” Belloch replied, still peering through the glasses. He was tall and whipcord thin, with a high pompadour, a thin line of mustache, and a pointed Vandyke beard.

  Belloch took in the magnificent black-and-white pinto, the tall man’s buckskin clothing, and the brass-framed Henry rifle protruding from the man’s saddle scabbard.

  “I could be wrong,” he said, “but I think that jasper helping those Quakers is Skye Fargo.”

  “So what? Whoever that is, he’s just one man.” Shanghai was a barrel-chested, rawboned man with long, greasy black hair tied in a knot between his shoulder blades. Unlike his boss, whose only visible weapon was a thin Spanish boot dagger, he wore a brace of pistols and a bowie knife.

  “No,” Belloch corrected him. “If we’re not careful, he’s the rock we’ll all split on. That son of a bitch is death to the devil. But we’ll bide our time and soon Fargo will be worm fodder.”