South Pass Snakepit Read online

  “Not one who is writing a firsthand book on frontier types.”

  “A man can write a book on Satan without going to Hell.”

  O’Malley flashed a woebegone smile. “Touché, Mr. Fargo, touché.”

  The professor had an unruly gray shock of silver- white hair, watery green eyes, and prominent neck muscles like taut cords. He donned a dingy gray shirt and a ratty frock coat while Fargo glanced carefully around the busy camp.

  “Welcome to the ugly duckling of the American West, Mr. Fargo,” he announced, settling a tall plug hat over his unruly coif.

  “I’ve seen uglier—like a place called Sublette in southwest Kansas. That hole is a pimple on nowhere’s ass. At least there’s pretty country here and some real buildings.”

  “Perhaps, but the state of society here is exceedingly loose, and that’s a euphemism. When business is slow, the whores prance naked in the streets to get men interested.”

  Fargo grinned. “That way they won’t buy a poke in a pig.”

  “You’re as clever as you are brave. But believe me, Mr. Fargo. Not only is there a Hell, but we have found it.”

  The two men fell into step toward the center of the camp, Fargo leading the Ovaro. The narrow valley widened at the north end of the camp, and beyond this was a long, rocky gulley with a narrow brook splashing down from the mountains. Past the gully was a green-timbered gorge.

  “What was that box Slade was asking you about?” Fargo asked.

  “Slade is a madman,” O’Malley replied, neatly sidestepping the question. “He and his pack of curs torment me every way they possibly can. They hate me because I respect the English language and don’t go ‘heeled,’ as they call carrying a weapon.”

  “Speaking of that . . . looks like every man in town except you is loaded for bear.”

  “Warpath Indians,” O’Malley said.

  Fargo nodded. “Yeah, that shines. The white man’s pox has wiped out the Rees and Blackfeet. But other tribes consider this valley part of their range.”

  “You heard Slade mention Philly Denton. He has bought a private treaty with some of the hostiles. He gives them liquor and shiny gimcracks, and they generally leave the camp alone.”

  “Let me guess—any man who wanders too far away from it is likely to get a haircut.”

  O’Malley nodded. “There, my friend, is the problem of depending solely on money—it won’t buy goodwill.”

  “There’s a Philly Denton in every lawless settlement out west,” Fargo said. “They use money as a bludgeon. When that fails, one of their dirt workers uses a real bludgeon.”

  “Indeed. Denton likes to keep heaven packed with fresh souls.”

  By now the two men had reached the camp proper. The resin scent of newly cut pine logs and boards stained the air and mingled with the musty stench of canvas tents. Several men watched Fargo from lidded eyes. A saloon straight ahead advertised itself as The Buffalo Palace.

  “Speaking of Denton,” Fargo said. “That jay watching us from in front of the saloon was one of the four men with Slade. Who is he?”

  The Professor snorted. “Ben Thompkins. He talks like the big stallion, but he’s always got a sore hoof when it’s time to saddle up. But he’s dangerous—a notorious back-shooter.”

  “I’ll definitely keep that in mind,” Fargo said. “Matter fact, I need to pump you some more. How ’bout I spot you to a jolt and a feed at the Buffalo Palace, Professor?”

  O’Malley’s watery eyes grew big as quarter eagles. “Has your brain come unhinged, young man? Those killers you just put the shawl on practically live there.”

  Fargo lifted a shoulder. “No skin off my nose.”

  “Well . . .” O’Malley rubbed his hands together briskly. “A bracer would be just the tonic after my harrowing experience just now.”

  Fargo stared at Thompkins with iron resolve as they drew nearer, finally sending him scuttling into the alley beside the Buffalo Palace. Fargo wrapped the Ovaro’s reins around the tie rail and threw the bridle, loosing the girth and placing a stirrup on the saddle to remind him it was loose. He also made sure he pulled his sixteen-shot Henry from its saddle boot. He already had plenty of enemies in this deadly settlement, and a lever-action repeating rifle was a persuasive deterrent.

  There was no boardwalk, but wide wooden steps led up to the batwing doors.

  “Best building in town, and the same milled boards as that house on the bench,” Fargo said as he slapped open the doors. “Philly Denton owns this, right?”

  “Yes, Emperor Denton. He’s good at the Great Commoner Act, but just like Katy—his inamorata—he considers himself ten inches taller than God. They’re a fine pair, all right.”

  “Inamorata?” Fargo repeated.

  “A fancy Italian word for concubine. Denton is a gambler and he’ll be in toward evening. As for Katy, she runs the faro game and usually sets up around this time. You might see her. She has ice in her veins, but she is a vision of loveliness.”

  As he always did when entering a crowded place, Fargo took a quick but thorough look around. The pine-board saloon was like most out west, with a rammed-earth floor, a scattering of tables, and a crude plank bar. The one elegant touch, however, was a fancy beveled mirror in a bronze frame behind the bar.

  “Fine work, eh?” the Professor said, noticing Fargo looking at it. “It was . . . donated by pilgrims who broke down up in the pass. Sometimes they manage to get their wagons down here for repairs—a decision many of them don’t live to regret.”

  “You happen to know the names of any of these victims?”

  “Mr. Fargo, I’m just the camp fool. They’re all pilgrims to me.”

  Fargo noted gratefully that only two men were paying any special attention to him: Jack Slade and Clay Munro, who were matching shots of whiskey from a table in a back corner. The Buffalo Palace also had live entertainment: a handsome young man wearing a velvet-trimmed coat and ruffled shirt was wandering from table to table, performing magic tricks. Fargo watched him lift a man’s hat to expose an egg resting on the man’s pate. Onlookers roared their appreciation.

  “That prestidigitator and sleight-of-hand artist,” O’Malley said, scorn dripping from his words, “is Avram Nash. As ill luck would have it, a severe shortage of lodging in South Pass forces me to share quarters with him.”

  “Seems talented,” Fargo remarked as both men squeezed up to one end of the plank bar. He placed his elbows carefully to avoid the beer slops.

  “Oh, he is that, among other things.”

  A balding barkeep wearing sleeve garters and a string tie moved down to take their order. “Starting early, ain’tcha, Professor?”

  “In order to start, Dakota, one has to stop.”

  “Two shots,” Fargo ordered. “Smells like there’s grub on, too.”

  “All we got left is bean soup and cornbread, stranger. Two bits a meal.”

  “Two servings.” Keeping his eyes on the back-bar mirror, Fargo laid a Spanish silver dollar on the bar. Because of a serious shortage of currency in the West, these were often cut into eight parts or “bits” worth twelve and a half cents.

  “Just a warning, Mr. Fargo,” the Professor said. “The rotgut in this camp would make a rabbit attack a bulldog. Philly has his private stock from Bourbon County, Kentucky. The rest of us usually get potato whiskey. True essence of lockjaw.”

  “You can’t be choosy west of Omaha,” Fargo said philosophically as Dakota filled their glasses, even slopping over the brim for good measure.

  The Professor sighed at the truth of this. “After all, this is just a stepping-off place with no other settlement between here and the Snake River country. Mud in your eye.”

  Both men tossed back their drinks, and for a few moments Fargo felt as if he’d been mule- kicked. Tears filmed his eyes and he felt a coal fire in his belly.

  Slade and Munro were still watching Fargo with the intensity of hounds on point.

  “I know of Jack Slade,” he told O’Malley. �
�Don’t surprise me none that he’s the head gun-thrower hereabouts. I saw him a few times in Silver City, New Mexico territory, but we never locked horns. He ran a string of Mexican whores out of a gambling parlor on Pecos Street. Rumor had it he killed one every now and then to keep the rest honest.”

  “Yes, that’s in character for Slade. But you understand, of course, Slade is just the wheel horse. Philly Denton cracks the whip. But Slade is a malevolent force to be reckoned with.”

  “And the other?”

  “Perhaps the most dangerous of them all because of his constant gun practice. Clay Munro is from Jackson County in western Missouri. He led the massacre of Mormons in Nauvoo that killed forty women and children. He brags about it openly.”

  “All right,” Fargo said. “And we saw Ben Thompkins outside. That leaves one more who was with Slade this morning. Ugly cuss with a goiter on his neck big as a horseshoe ring.”

  “That would be Angel Hanchon, a stupid dolt who rarely talks. But he seems to be a fearless man who’s handy with pistol or rifle. Now, may I ask you something, Fargo?”

  “Seems only fair.”

  “This business about searching for your brother . . . if it’s true then you have my deepest sympathies. But the questions you’re asking don’t seem consistent with a lost brother.”

  “It’s hokum,” Fargo admitted. “Keep this dark, but I’ve been hired by Overland Stage and Freighting to find out what happened to a mine payroll waylaid near South Pass.”

  O’Malley pulled on his chin, considering that. “Yes, that would explain your morbid interest in a ‘box.’ But is that the truth, Mr. Fargo, or your next- best story?”

  “If you’ve got a better theory why I’m here, trot it out.”

  The Professor opened his mouth to reply, then his eyes cut to a door behind the bar. “All this can wait. Right now, get set to feast your eyes. Here’s Katy Miller.”

  The greatest pleasure in Skye Fargo’s often hard and dangerous life had been women. Tall and short, plump and skinny, innocent and wanton, he’d sampled them all the way bees sample flowers. And the woman he gazed on now rated right near the top of the heap.

  Fargo took in a seraph- faced beauty with a full- lipped, rosebud mouth and smoke-colored eyes, her reddish blond hair pulled back in a braided coil around the nape. She wore a rose taffeta gown, and her bare shoulders and pearls were like magnets drawing every male eye in the room.

  “Never mind Avram’s cheap abracadabra tricks,” O’Malley said. “Now she’s something to conjure with, eh?”

  “There’s a frontier type for your book,” Fargo agreed.

  Katy glided to a table in the middle of the room, where the faro rig was already set up and men waiting in line to bet against the bank. Her manner was imperious and aloof, as if all these horny men were just so much unwanted furniture. However, as she turned to take a seat, her glacial stare melted when her eyes took in Fargo.

  “Oh, here’s trouble, Fargo,” O’Malley said under his breath. “I’d say she’s notching her sights on you.”

  “So what if she is?”

  “Are you daft, man? Philly won’t like it.”

  “So what? Is he her husband?”

  “Of course not.”

  Fargo turned back toward her again. “Then he’s nothing to the matter. You can own a horse but not a woman.”

  “My friend, you have much to learn about Philly Denton.”

  “Soup’s on, gents,” the friendly bartender said, plop-ping down two steaming bowls of bean soup and a plate of cornbread.

  “Bless God for a good stomach,” O’Malley said. “Otherwise you’ll die quick around Sweetwater Valley.”

  Fargo had already pitched into his meal. “Hell, this is good grub, old roadster. Once I lived on slippery elm bark and acorns for a week.”

  “More and more men are looking our way,” O’Malley said, his voice climbing an octave higher in nervousness. “They must have noticed Katy’s interest in you.”

  “ ’Pears to me,” Fargo said, dipping a corner of cornbread into his soup, “half of these men are on the dodge. What about the other half?”

  “Some are snowbirds,” O’Malley said, meaning soldiers who deserted in the summer, then enlisted under another name in the winter to have meals and a warm bed. “They’ll thin out soon when the first snow falls. Others are pilgrims who gave up the westward trek at South Pass. They’ll stick for weeks or months and then head back east. Fargo, here comes Jack Slade.”

  “So what?” Fargo said, scraping the bowl. “You gonna finish that soup?”

  “Fargo.”

  The Trailsman turned so he was sideways to the new arrival. “Yeah?”

  “We just buried Jesse.”

  Fargo shrugged indifferently. “Wolves woulda dragged him away, saved you the trouble.”

  “Jesse worked for Philly Denton. Philly wants to talk to you. Tonight, here in the Palace.”

  “I don’t spit when Denton says hawk,” Fargo said. “He wants to see me, he can look me up.”

  “Look here, Fargo, this ain’t no threat, just a fact—most men around here die from colic. Lead colic.”

  “You mean, like Jesse did?”

  Slade’s granite features etched themselves even harder. “Yeah, like him. Trying to buck Philly Denton is a good way to catch the colic.”

  “I’m curious to talk to him,” Fargo admitted. “Maybe I will stop by.”

  “That’s more like it. I’ll tell him.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” O’Malley urged the moment Slade had stalked off. “They want to trap you in here so Clay Munro can kill you.”

  “Could be,” Fargo agreed cheerfully. “It seems like a lot of men want to help me get my life over. C’mon, let’s rustle.”

  Before Fargo could push away from the bar, however, Dakota leaned over with a message. “Miss Miller wants to know if you’re interested in bucking the tiger.”

  O’Malley assumed a lecherous grin and muttered to Fargo, “Tell her you’re interested in something else that rhymes with bucking.”

  “All right, little man,” the barkeep said, “I’ll tell her what you said.”

  O’Malley’s yellow complexion turned alabaster. “God no! Philly will kill me.”

  Dakota laughed. “Relax, Professor. I’m just kidding you along. Well, stranger, what should I tell her?”

  The fact that Fargo admired women didn’t mean he always trusted them. If Katy’s motive was seduction, she could pick a less public place to do it than a crowded saloon. And if her motive wasn’t seduction, Fargo wasn’t interested. Besides, he had learned years ago that spurning a woman’s advances was the fastest way to get her more interested—assuming she didn’t shoot you.

  “Tell her thanks, but faro isn’t my game,” he replied. “Let’s dust, Professor.”

  With the muzzle of his Henry pointing at the floor, Fargo headed for the batwings. Katy coolly ignored him as she turned over cards, but Fargo was more interested in keeping an eye on Clay Munro.

  “Rhymes with bucking,” he admonished O’Malley when they were back on the street. “Has your brain gone soft? That kind of talk will get you tied to a tree again—or worse.”

  “My abject apologies, Mr. Fargo. I am plagued with a self-destructive streak.”

  “Lose it,” Fargo suggested. “Lose it now. ’Pears to me you have enough enemies already—no need to add yourself to the list.”

  3

  Girded with a hot meal and a shot of firewater, Fargo chose to walk down the middle of the wide camp street, leading the Ovaro. While it exposed him to public view, the edges of a street provided more places for a close-in ambusher—and less need to aim.

  “You say lodging is tight around here?” he asked O’Malley.

  “No room at the inn, Mr. Fargo, and no inn. Your best chance might be the boardinghouse where I stay, that ramshackle place on the right at the edge of town. It’s owned by a queer duck named Orville Danford. People come and go frequently. But it’s a
roach pit. You might be more comfortable camping in the valley, near the creek.”

  Fargo could see the creek dead ahead, and how it was wide as a small river in snowmelt season. It was a crinkumcrankum, full of twists and turns as it conformed to the rugged landscape. He had washed in it years before, when this camp didn’t even exist, and knew the mountain water was cold and bracing as well as sweet to the taste.

  Of course Fargo would rather camp under the stars than put a roof over his head. But he had a job to do—a job that had nothing to do with a missing payroll—and needed to be right here where he could see and hear what was going on.

  “I’d prefer not to camp,” he finally told his companion. “Is that a livery next to your boardinghouse?”

  “Yes. The liveryman is Jake Headley, who’s also the camp blacksmith. He’s one of the few honest men around.”

  “Those few honest men include you?”

  O’Malley flinched. “Well, harmless if not quite honest.”

  Fargo heard a sudden racket of barking and vicious snarling.

  “You got curs running wild in this place?”

  “Wild dogs and wolves are shot for target practice,” O’Malley explained, catching his tall hat in the nick of time as a stiff gust blew in off the Wind River Range. “What you hear now is a pack of man- killing dogs that Jack Slade keeps in a pen at the edge of town—right across the street from my room. It’s his favorite hobby to make them mean. The damnable hellhounds sometimes bark half the night.”

  “This place might survive and be a town someday,” Fargo remarked. “I see somebody has ditched the street so rainwater can run off.”

  “We depend on freighters for almost everything,” O’Malley said. “Before those ditches they used to get mired up to the hubs.”

  While this conversation went forward, Fargo had been keeping his eyes to all sides—and behind. Ben Thompkins, the man O’Malley called a notorious back-shooter, was not accounted for, and neither was Angel Hanchon.

  “At least you have fresh meat,” Fargo said, nodding toward a fenced-in plot where about a dozen head of butcher beeves were feeding from a hay trough.