Beyond Squaw Creek tt-316 Read online

  Beyond Squaw Creek

  ( The Trailsman - 316 )

  Jon Sharpe

  The trailsman is trapped on the warpath

  Skye Fargo and a cavalry major's daughter have barely survived an Indian attack against their stagecoach when they discover the local Blackfeet tribe is being led by a former army lieutenant- driven insane by the brutal frontier...

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  Keeping his eyes on the big man before him, Fargo reached back, plucked the coin pouch off the bar, and thrust it against the man’s chest, the coins clinking around inside.

  The freighter dropped his gaze to the pouch, returned it to Fargo.

  The Trailsman held the man’s hard glare.

  The freighter lurched forward, red-faced, swinging his ham-sized right fist toward Fargo’s face.

  The Trailsman, anticipating the punch, grabbed the man’s wrist and, pivoting, bulled the man’s back against the bar and thrust the man’s hand out across the planks. Pressing his own back against the man’s chest, wedging him against the bar, Fargo reached out with his free hand, plucked the knife from the bar top, and slammed it through the freighter’s open palm and into the wood….

  THE TRAILSMAN #316

  BEYOND SQUAW CREEK

  by Jon Sharpe

  1

  “I bet you could do a lot of damage with that thing—couldn’t you, Mr. Fargo?” the major’s daughter asked.

  Skye Fargo ran his lake blue eyes across the girl’s willowy frame, the proud breasts pushing up from the shirtwaist of her traveling dress—pale and lightly freckled and sheathing a small jade cameo, the same green of her eyes, hanging by a gold chain. Her shirtwaists had been getting tighter and tighter over the past few days since the party had left Fort Mandan, exposing more and more of her cleavage.

  The stagecoach was parked in a canyon of White-Tail Creek, in western Dakota Territory. Valeria Howard sat in a canvas chair before the stage’s left front wheel, holding a parasol over her regal head of bright red hair. Fargo sat on the ground ten feet away from her, his back to a boulder, sharpening his Arkansas toothpick on the whetstone perched on his thigh.

  The soldiers escorting the stage from Fort Mandan had taken their own mounts and the stage’s four-horse hitch down to the creek for water.

  “Miss Howard, you got no idea,” Fargo said.

  Her nose wrinkled and her jade eyes glinted snootily as she continued staring at the knife on his thigh. “A rather uncouth customer, aren’t you?”

  “Wanna see?”

  “Do I want to see what?”

  “How much damage I can do with this thing.”

  Fargo followed her smoky gaze to his lap then glanced up at her, curling his upper lip. “The knife is the…uh…thing we’re talking about, isn’t it, Miss Howard?”

  Her eyes snapped up, and a flush rose in her cream cheeks. She opened her mouth to speak but only gasped when Fargo snapped up the toothpick suddenly, and sent the six inches of razor-edged, bone-handled steel careening through the air in front of her.

  She recoiled as the knife whistled past her, missing the sleeve of her muslin blouse by a half inch, to cleave the gap between two wheel spokes and bury itself, hilt deep, in one of the two brown eyes staring out from behind the hub. The Indian made a gagging sound as his head snapped back, lower jaw dropping, the remaining eye wide open.

  As the girl fell over in her chair, her feathered, lemon yellow hat tumbling off her shoulder, Fargo bounded onto his knees and clawed his Colt .44 from its holster. He aimed quickly at one of the two Indians bounding onto the stage’s roof from the other side, and fired.

  The bullet plunked through the medicine pouch dangling from the neck of the brave standing near the driver’s box. As the brave screamed and pitched backward off the coach, throwing his bow and arrow over his head, the second brave leaped forward atop a steamer trunk, gave a savage war cry, and loosed an arrow.

  The feathered missile shaved a couple of whiskers from Fargo’s right cheek as it whistled past his ear to clatter against the sandstone scarp behind him.

  Fargo triggered the Colt twice, the slugs hammering into the brave’s neck and breastbone, pinwheeling him off the coach in twin streams of geysering blood.

  “Stay down!” Fargo hurdled Valeria Howard, cowering on the ground beside her overturned chair, and climbed the stage to the driver’s box.

  Holding the cocked Colt in his right hand, he leaped onto the wooden seat, and then from the seat to the sandstone wall on the other side of the stage, his boots finding a narrow ledge while his left hand reached for a gnarled cedar.

  As he looked up and right, a brave peered down at him from behind a thumb of rock, his face streaked with yellow and ocher war designs, eyes wide with rage. The brave raised a feathered war lance but before he could cock his throwing arm, Fargo drilled a round through his forehead, blowing him back off the scarp with a grunt, the lance clattering down the rocks behind him.

  Clinging to the gnarled cedar, the .44 smoking in his right hand, the man known as the Trailsman turned to peer south through a break in the opposite canyon wall.

  Since just after he’d cleaved the first buck’s head with his Arkansas toothpick, he’d heard sporadic gunfire and war whoops from the direction of the creek. Through the cottonwoods lining the stream, he spied smoke puffs, prancing horses, and soldiers scrambling to repel the Indians attacking from the creek’s far side. Several of the savages rode horses and triggered pistols and repeating rifles while others, running afoot, loosed arrows and heaved war lances.

  The soldiers returned fire while trying to hold the reins of their frightened bays.

  As Fargo watched, several soldiers and cavalry mounts went down screaming, and the Indians continued charging, whooping, and shooting. Only nine soldiers had been assigned to the stagecoach carrying not only the beautiful daughter of Major Howard, the commander of Fort Clark, but two army surveyors detailed to Fort Clark to plot the site of a planned sister fort near the mouth of the Wolf Head River.

  Seven soldiers and the two surveyors had gone down to the creek to water the horses while, as per Fargo’s orders, two privates kept watch from the butte tops. It appeared now, as two more soldiers were shot from their mounts and an Indian knelt beside a wounded surveyor, wielding a knife with which he no doubt intended to relieve the man of his hair, that none were coming back.

  A spine-jellying scream rose from below. Fargo looked into the canyon. A brave stood over Valeria Howard, leaning down to smash the back of his right hand across the girl’s face with a resounding smack. He pulled her up brusquely and, using both hands, ripped her shirtwaist down the front then threw his head back to loose a delighted whoop toward the sky.

  Fargo raised the .44, but he couldn’t see clearly over the stage roof.

  He holstered the Colt and scrambled back along the rock wall. Dropping onto the stage, he raked the .44 from its holster. Off the coach’s south side, the Indian had crouched to fling the major’s daughter over his back like a sack of parched corn.

  Naked to her waist, the blouse hanging in tatters around her thighs, the girl kicked, screamed, and pounded her fist into the brave’s broad back. As the Indian turned to run off with his prize, Fargo steadied the pistol, angling it down from his right shoulder, and squeezed the trigger.

  The Colt roared and leaped in his hand. The bullet ripped through the back of the Indian’s head and careened out his forehead with a small geyser of bone, brains, and blood.

  Valeria screamed as though she herself had been shot. The Indian ran several more feet toward the gap in the canyon wall, knees bending as the life drained out of him. He fell in a rolling, tumbling heap, the girl rolling through the dust and sage ahead of him, skirts and
torn shirtwaist flopping around her hips.

  She’d barely stopped rolling when Fargo, having leaped down from the stage and sprinted past the quivering Indian, pulled her brusquely to her feet, her breasts jiggling, red hair falling across her face and dusty, porcelain shoulders.

  “Noooo!” she cried, shaking her head wildly and beating her fists against his shoulders.

  “Keep your pants on—it’s me!” he yelled as he wrapped his left arm around her waist and half dragged, half carried her toward his Ovaro stallion tied behind the stagecoach.

  In the south, the Indians’ whoops and shouts grew louder, hooves thumping, guns popping. Evidently, a couple of soldiers were putting up a fight, but they couldn’t keep it up for long. He’d seen close to twenty braves along the creek, and judging by the sound of approaching horses, they were headed toward the coach.

  “Where…what…?” the girl gasped as Fargo holstered his Colt, wrapped his hands around her waist, and tossed her onto the pinto’s back. The horse was skitter-stepping at the gunfire, twitching its ears and snorting.

  Fargo ripped the reins from the stage’s luggage boot, then shucked his Henry repeater from the sheath attached to the saddle. “We’re gonna haul ass outta here!” He swung up behind the girl. She halfheartedly crossed her arms over her breasts and looked around, sobbing.

  As the Trailsman reined the pinto away from the stage, an arrow whistled through the air behind his head and clattered into the canyon wall to his right. He swung a look left as two painted braves clad only in loincloths, moccasins, and war paint galloped their paint ponies through the notch in the canyon wall, screaming like devils loosed from hell. Their medicine pouches and bone necklaces jostled wildly.

  As one jerked his mount to a skidding halt and reached into his quiver for another arrow, the other flung a war hatchet. Fargo reined the pinto toward the two braves as the hatchet careened wickedly past his left cheek to bury its head in the stage’s thin housing.

  The Trailsman snapped the Henry to his shoulder and fired two quick shots, firing and cocking and firing again. Hearing the braves scream but not waiting around to watch them fly off their horses, the Trailsman reined the Ovaro out ahead of the stage and gouged the stallion’s flanks with his spurs.

  “Keep your head down!” he ordered the girl as several arrows and bullets careened through the air around them, plunking into the dust on both sides of the two track trail.

  Fargo took his rifle in his right hand, reins in the left, then snaked that arm around the girl’s waist, drawing her taut against him.

  The Ovaro lowered its own head and, snorting, mane buffeting, lunged down the trail in a ground-eating gallop. This wasn’t the stallion’s first encounter with Indians, and the smell of blood and bear grease and the savage, elemental sound of the whoops and yowls and the creaking twang of bows and arrows chilled his blood and rendered his hooves light as feathers.

  “What about the soldiers?” the girl cried above the thunder of the pinto’s hooves.

  “Finished!” Fargo shouted, turning in his saddle to fire his Henry repeater one-handed behind him at the six or seven braves giving chase, hunkered low over the necks of their lunging ponies.

  “What about my luggage?” she cried. “All my belongings are on the stage!”

  Two arrows thumped into the ground on both sides of the trail. Several slugs sliced the air over Fargo’s head, one ricocheting loudly off a rock.

  “If you want to go back for it, you’re on your own!” Fargo shouted, loosing another shot behind.

  “But…but…I have nothing to wear!”

  Fargo jerked a look behind and shook the Ovaro’s reins, urging more speed. “If we don’t lose these savages, you won’t need anything!”

  As rifles popped behind him, he leaned forward to yell in the horse’s ear. “Come on, boy! Split the trail wide open!”

  The girl jerked her head toward the Trailsman accusingly, brows furrowed, lips parted, fire red hair jostling across her eyes. Fargo was about to ask what the look was about, but then he realized his left arm was pushing up beneath her naked breasts.

  He gave a sheepish half smile, loosened his grip, then turned to fling another shot behind them.

  2

  The Ovaro was not only the fastest horse Fargo had ever ridden, but it had plenty of bottom, too. More bottom than the Indians’ mustangs, obviously, because Fargo and Valeria Howard gradually pulled away from their pursuers, until the braves’ gunshots sounded little louder than snapping twigs, and the thunder of their ponies was like the distant passing of a fleeting summer storm.

  When they’d ridden a good four miles beyond the scene of the attack, Fargo pulled the horse off the old traders’ trail he’d been following, and into a cut between high, chalky buttes. A light breeze rose, and the Ovaro lifted its head, sniffing and softly nickering. Fargo turned the horse to look behind, tipping his hat against the sun.

  About a half mile straight east of the traders’ trail, six or seven Indians were walking their horses along the base of a jog of curving hogbacks, riding slowly away from Fargo and Valeria. Their leader wore a buffalo headdress. They were armed with either bows and arrows or carbines. Hatchets swung from their belts. A couple of the young braves held war lances adorned with tribal feathers.

  Judging by the tribal feathers and designs painted on their faces and horses, these braves were Assiniboine, not Blackfeet, like those behind Fargo.

  Valeria Howard shivered on the saddle before the Trailsman. “Oh, God…”

  Fargo studied the riders until they’d disappeared down the other side of a distant slope. Oh, God was right. They were surrounded by Indians.

  Fargo turned the Ovaro and galloped west between the buttes.

  “Where are we going?” the girl asked, craning her neck to peer over Fargo’s shoulder.

  “The pinto needs water. There’s a spring around here.” Fargo glanced behind, and seeing no redskins on his trail, checked the sweat-lathered Ovaro down to a walk. “About two prairie swells farther west is a trading post and stage station. We’ll stop there for the night.”

  Crossing her bare arms over her pale breasts, the girl looked up at him. Her face was dust streaked, and weed seeds clung to her mussed, russet-colored hair. There was a fearful trill in her voice. “But we could make Fort Clark in a couple of hours!”

  “If we kept moving as fast as we’ve been moving, we could make the fort about three hours after good dark. But the horse is tired. And we don’t want to be out here after dark.”

  Valeria looked around warily, at the eroded butte faces and breeze-ruffled buffalo grass, at the dry, chalky wash meandering through the gray-brown grass tall enough to conceal a crawling Indian. “Father is going to be worried.” She swung her gaze back to Fargo, eyes sharp. “How could you let this happen? You were supposed to be watching for Indians! That’s why Father hired you!”

  “You’re alive, aren’t you? Still have your topknot.”

  Fargo reined the horse into a hollow at the base of a high butte. Water bubbled up from the butte’s base, around sand and mossy, pitted boulders, and emanated a vague sulfur smell. Cattails grew along the spring’s perimeter, and meadowlarks rode the swaying weed tips, a few lighting as the Ovaro drew up and Fargo slipped off the horse’s back.

  He dropped the pinto’s reins and reached up to help the girl down. She’d forgotten to cover her breasts as she stared into the distance, her face drawn with worry. Fargo couldn’t help letting his gaze linger over the softly rounded, pink-tipped orbs, no less enticing for being rimed with trail dust and belonging to a rather haughty debutante.

  She glanced down at him, saw where his eyes were, and gasped. Quickly, she drew the frayed strips of her torn blouse closed. “Isn’t there something besides staring at my breasts you should be doing, Mr. Fargo? Perhaps making sure we’re not attacked again by those savages!”

  Fargo wrapped his hand around her waist and pulled her roughly out of the saddle, evoking another gasp.r />
  “I reckon,” he said, setting her on the ground, glancing again at the pale orbs peeking out between the insufficient flaps of cloth. She smelled sweet, like talcum and lilacs, in spite of the ordeal. “But it won’t be near as much fun.”

  He opened one of his saddlebags and rummaged around before pulling out a shirt sewn from flannel trade cloth, with badger teeth for buttons. He tossed the shirt to the girl. “Why don’t you put that on so I can concentrate on my job?”

  “Oh, I suppose the Indians surprised you because of me!” she said, turning her back and flapping out the overlarge shirt in front of her.

  Fargo grabbed his spyglass out of his saddlebags and began climbing the slope rising east of the spring.

  The girl called behind him, “You don’t have something a little smaller?”

  Halfway up the slope, Fargo stopped and turned toward her. She remained standing with her naked back to him, holding the shirt up to inspect it.

  “I wasn’t packing for you!” As he continued climbing, he glanced over his shoulder and said quietly, “Get a drink. We’ll be movin’ out in two minutes.”

  “Uncouth bastard,” she grumbled behind him.

  Fargo dropped down against the bluff, doffed his hat, and telescoped the spyglass. He’d no sooner trained the glass on their back trail between the two ridges than his back tensed and his gut filled with bile.

  Shadows of galloping riders undulated across the grassy southern slopes of the shallow canyon. A few beats later, the Indians he’d spied a little while earlier appeared around a bend, the brave in the buffalo headdress riding point, batting his moccasined heels against the ribs of his chuffing, galloping paint.

  Behind Fargo, the Ovaro snorted loudly. Down the canyon galloping hooves rumbled.

  “What’s the matter with—?” The girl stopped as Fargo slammed the end of the spyglass against his palm, reducing it, then grabbed his hat and began scrambling down the slope, leaping rocks and tufts of sage and silverthorn.