Six-Gun Vendetta 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

  HEADS UP

  Fargo thought of something and lit down again. He returned to the thicket and selected a long, thin branch, using the Arkansas toothpick in his boot sheath to saw it loose. He sharpened both ends, then turned to the corpse.

  “Turn your head, Wade, if you’re squeamish,” he warned.

  “What are you doing?”

  “There’s a good chance those other three yellow curs are up there watching us with spyglasses. I figure turnabout is fair play.”

  Fargo carried a captured Cheyenne war hatchet in his saddlebag. He dug it out and made short work of severing Steele’s head from his neck. He crammed one end of the sharpened stake into the neck stump, then anchored the grisly mess in the trail with the pain-contorted face staring up toward the rimrock.

  “There,” Fargo said as he mounted again. “I’m not one to mutilate the dead, but I want this bunch to see what happens once a man loses his head.”

  SIGNET

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

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, August 2011

  The first chapter of this book previously appeared in Stagecoach Sidewinders, the three hundred fifty-seventh volume in this series.

  Copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2011

  All rights reserved

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  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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  ISBN : 978-1-101-51753-6

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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.

  Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory, 1860—where four murdering curs learn the hard way what the word “friend” means to Skye Fargo.

  1

  “C’mon out, old-timer!” shouted a thickset man hiding behind a mesquite tree. “We ain’t desperadoes, just prospectors down on our luck! All we ask is a spot of grub.”

  “Prospectors! That’s a hoot,” retorted a tired and gravelly voice from inside the weather-beaten shack. “Ain’t no color nowheres near here. And I’ve seed enough skunk-bit coyotes in my day. You aim to murder me, so let’s get thrashing.”

  “Aww, hell, old roadster,” Baylis Ulrick tried again. “This ain’t Christian of you. My throat is parched and my backbone is scraping against my ribs.”

  “Happens you was just hungry men down on their luck,” the old man shouted back, “you’d a just walked up and give me the hail. But I seen the four of you sneaking up on the place like warpath Comanches, clubs to hand. You’ve busted loose from a hoosegow someplace, and you mean to rob and kill me.”

  Ulrick was a big, heavy-jowled, flint-eyed man in homespun shirt and trousers and a rawhide vest. Like his companions hidden nearby in an erosion ditch, he was filthy and unshaven, his clothing sorely used. He gave the high sign to a hatchet-profiled man in the ditch. The man nodded and felt the sandy ground for a good rock.

  “All right, we was locked up in Chimayo,” Ulrick said, eyeing the shack’s leather-hinged door. “We locked horns with some Mexers and got jugged for disturbing the peace.”

  “That’s a neat trick seeing’s how there ain’t no sheriff nor jail in Chimayo. Not too many Mexers neither—’bout what you might expect in an Indian village.”

  The hatchet-profiled man had found a couple of rocks and was trotting down the ditch, trying to get wide of the view from the shack’s only window. The other two men twigged the game and headed in the opposite direction. The old salt was well armed and a good shot.

  “Listen, Pop, nobody out west tells the truth. That don’t make everybody killers. My hand to God, all we ask is a sup of water. We’re all dry as a year-old cow chip. I give you my word we won’t try a fox play.”

  “Your word don’t mean spit. Now move on from here or my next shot won’t be a warning.”

  Ulrick had a hair-trigger temper and it suddenly laid a red film over his vision. His breathing quickened until it whistled in his nostrils.

  “If we’re such hard cases,” he shouted in a new tone of impatience, “how’s come we ain’t boosted that fine horseflesh in your corral? Ain’t no window in the back of your shack. We coulda just rode out with ’em.”

  “Oh, you figger to do that, all right. But you need guns and food, too, and that means killing me. So let’s just open the ball.”

  “Make you a deal, you old pus-gut. If you light out right now, we’ll let you live. Otherwise, you’ll die hard and I guarandamntee it.”

  “I got a better idea,” the old man shot back. “Why’n’cha stick your dick in your ear and make a jug handle out of it?”

  Immediately after this suggestion, his rifle spoke its piece. Baylis flinched hard when the slug raised a yellow plume of dust close to his exposed left foot. His eyes turned smoky with rage. Neither he nor the three men with him had a sulfur match between them, or they could have just burned the old rooster out.

  Baylis glanced to his right and saw that Jed was in place. On his left, Hiram and Ray were almost set.

  “All right, old man,” he muttered, his tone heavy with menace. “It’s time to fish or cut bait.”

  Despite his tough talk, Corey Webster tasted the corroded-pennies taste of fear.

  Over his long life he had survived his share of scrapes. A man couldn’t trap beaver with the likes of Caleb Greenwood and Jim Bridger in the heyday of the Shining Times without sleeping on his weapons and shooting plumb every time. Corey had fought savages in the Stony Mountains before the U.S. Army even knew how to get there. And long before Skye Fargo became the famous Trailsman, Corey had helped to scrape the green off the kid’s antlers.

  But this today was dangerously different. In his mountain-man days the skirmishes were usually in the open, where a man could see around him and duck for cover. Now he was trapped in a clapboard box, and despite a bevy of good firearms he had foolishly run low on black powder and cartridges.

  All these thoughts skittered around inside his head like frenzied rodents, but the old trapper was steady and determined, even fierce-eyed. Even his wooden leg had not banked h
is fires over the years.

  He knew he was trapped between the sap and the bark. He could never manage to get horsed before this pack of mad dogs would bring him to ground. But without ammo, neither could he continue to hold them off from inside the shack.

  Keeping his head sideways, Corey glanced out the window into the glaring sunshine. The big mouthpiece in the rawhide vest was still holed up behind the mesquite tree—he could see part of his left leg. But Corey knew he could no longer afford potshots. He was determined to plug at least one of these jackals before they sent him to glory.

  His hands clutched a .44-caliber North & Savage rifle. He had traded some red fox furs for it in Santa Fe, realizing it would be a superb repeating weapon for scrapes just like this one. But Montezuma’s revenge had given him a bad case of the trots and laid him up before he could stock up on loads.

  He clicked the cylinder around—one shot left.

  “Place is a goldang armory,” he upbraided himself, “and all worthless. How many times did I tell Fargo a weapon without loads is like water without the wet?”

  Corey had pulled a battered deal table in front of the door and piled his weapons on it. An old Kentucky over-and-under, a good gun, lay useless for lack of primer caps. Likewise with his four-barrel shotgun—each barrel had its own frizzen and pan, but he had no powder to pour into them.

  “Where’s them other three sonsabitches?” Corey wondered aloud. He could no longer spot them peeking at the shack. Flanking the place, most likely, he realized.

  “My offer is still good, old man,” the mouthpiece shouted. “Light a shuck out of there now and you’ll be gumming your supper tonight.”

  “Gum a cat’s tail, you murderin’ graveyard rat!”

  A piece of foolscap on the table caught Corey’s eye. He picked it up and read it.

  Corey, I hope the courier delivers this before I arrive in New Mexico Territory. The army is paying me rich man’s wages to lead a mapmaking detail into the Sangre de Cristo Range. But if you’re still alive, you tough old grizz, I plan to visit you first. The army can wait.

  Skye

  “If I’m still alive,” Corey repeated. “All hell’s a-poppin’, Skye. Ride in now, boy, and give this shit-eating trash a lead bath.”

  They were the last words ever spoken by Corey Webster. He glimpsed sudden movement to the left of the window and swung his rifle in that direction. An eyeblink later a tall, skinny man jumped in from the right, a classic diversion. His right arm was already cocked and released a fist-size rock at Corey almost point-blank. Force like a mule kick made the old man stagger back as an orange starburst exploded inside his skull.

  He folded like an empty sack, the rifle dropping to the rammed-earth floor beside him. A cheer erupted from without.

  “Nice work, Jed,” Baylis Ulrick called out as he ran toward the shack. “You brained the old bastard good.”

  The four men struggled for a moment to open the blocked door, then crowded into the one-room shack. Hiram Steele, a small, hard-knit man with furtive eyes and a pockmarked face, knelt beside the old-timer.

  “Christ on a crutch!” he exclaimed. “Half his forehead is crushed in like an eggshell, but the old goat is still breathing!”

  Ulrick’s eyes flicked toward the bowie knife on the table. “Not for long he ain’t, chappies.”

  Hearing this, the other three men exchanged silent glances. Ulrick, with his hard-hitting fists and take-charge manner, was a natural-born leader of desperate men. But before he took to the owlhoot trail he had been trained as a butcher in Chicago. As they had recently learned, he had not completely left his old trade behind.

  “Wood ticks in my Johnny!” exclaimed a man with green-rimmed teeth and gums the color of raw liver. Ray Nearhood pointed to a shelf made of crossed sticks. It held modest but welcome provisions: a cheesecloth sack filled with jerked beef, cans of coffee and sugar, a sack of cornmeal.

  “And glom the weapons the old cheese dick had,” Jed Longstreet marveled, picking up the heavy but dangerous-looking flintlock shotgun. “This thing’s a relic but, by hell, it’s got four barrels! You rotate ’em by hand.”

  He did so, and all four men were impressed at the sharp, precise clicks as each barrel snapped into place. The vintage weapon was in mint condition.

  “I seen them hand cannons in the Mexican War,” Baylis explained. “A man could toss a biscuit farther than that piece shoots. But close up, one shot will strip the clothes off three men standing shoulder to shoulder. It’s heavy, but we’ll pack it along. Might come in handy.”

  Hiram Steele picked up the North & Savage. “Thissen’s old, too, but it’s a repeater. The trigger guard is combined with the lever, see? When you move it you revolve the cylinder and cock the hammer.”

  “It’s big-bore so we’ll take it,” Ulrick decided. “Piss on that Kentucky rifle. We’ll get more guns someplace. See any ammo?”

  As the men looked around, Longstreet spotted the letter under the table. He swooped down to pick it up. “Any of you boys know how to read?”

  Ulrick snatched it from his hand and read it aloud.

  “Katy Christ!” Nearhood erupted when Baylis read the signature. “This old fartsack was chums with the Trailsman?”

  “Who’s this Trailsman?” demanded Hiram, busy tossing the provisions into a gunnysack.

  “Where you been grazing?” Nearhood replied. “They say he’s the toughest hombre ever born of woman.”

  “The Trailsman,” Longstreet chimed in. “Well, carry me out. Carry me out with tongs! They claim he can track an ant across rocks.”

  “That’s bad news,” Ulrick sneered, “for ants.”

  “Ray ain’t birding,” Longstreet assured him. “I hear Fargo is six sorts of trouble. And if he’s coming to visit this old geezer, they must be chummy. Baylis, maybe you oughtn’t to . . . you know, carve him up like you done them guards in the Manzanos.”

  Ulrick’s big, bluff features twisted into a mask of contempt. “Shit, listen to the ladies’ sewing circle! You boys believe too much barroom josh. Anyhow, you know how it is with travel time out here. Fargo could be a month off still. Ain’t no witnesses saw us, so how will the big bad Trailsman even know who to trail?”

  “That rings right,” Nearhood agreed. “’Sides, Apaches, Kiowa, and Comanches raid in these parts. The way Baylis sets to work, it looks like wild Indians done it.”

  Ulrick nodded. “That’s the gait. You boys round up whatever tack you can and get them horses ready to raise dust.”

  He picked up the bowie knife from the table and tested its edge with a finger. “Not bad. I wish I had me a boning knife and a cleaver, too, but this is all right for rough-gutting.”

  “I don’t like it,” Longstreet objected again. “It’s bad enough that Fargo will find his old pal cold as a wagon wheel. Why poke fire with a sword by butchering him out?”

  Baylis squatted, stiff kneecaps popping. “Finding his chum with a crushed skull will surely raise Fargo’s ire. But finding him with his entrails stacked on his chest just might scare the fight out of him.”

  “Maybe,” Longstreet said as he went out the door. “But that ain’t what I hear.”

  2

  The lazy clip-clop of shod hooves barely disturbed the peaceful, sun-shot day. The two riders, one clad in fringed buckskins, the other in military blue, held their mounts to a long trot. A yellow cloud of dust boiled up behind the riders, powdering the scant growth along both sides of the Old Pueblo Trail.

  “Mr. Fargo,” said Second Lieutenant Wade McKenna, his voice breaking the lazy stillness, “you aren’t too keen on us Academy graduates, are you?”

  Fargo lifted one hand from the reins to shove his broad-brimmed plainsman’s hat higher on his brow. “Mr. McKenna, that’s a libel on me. But seeing as how you’re still frying size, I’ll forgive it.”

  His head swiveled right to study the young officer from piercing, lake blue eyes. He saw a rangy, clean-cut towhead, a young sprout of twenty or so. He was fresh off the benches at West Point with his head full of “field tactics” from the days of Napoleon and set-piece battles on open fields. But since riding out from Medicine Lodge Creek back in the Indian Territory, Fargo had grown to like him.