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  The lake blue eyes that women found so intriguing now went hard and cold, as did the rest of Fargo’s face.

  “Take it easy, muchachos, all three of you,” Fargo said in a low, toneless voice. “With me it’s live and let live until it’s kill or be killed. I will not abide a threat.”

  Fargo flexed his right hand, which lay against his holster. Salazar tried to stare him down but was the first to avert his eyes.

  “You are confusing advice with a threat,” he said. “Vamanos, amigos,” he added, and the three men turned and walked away.

  “Criminey, Fargo,” McDade said, backhanding sweat from his freckled brow, “I thought certain sure we were about to have a cartridge session.”

  Booger cursed and swiped a hand across his lips, showing Fargo fresh blood. “See that, long-shanks? See what comes of putting a muzzle on old Booger? Why, I damn near bit clear through my lip. ‘Persuasion I don’t mind.’ Why—”

  “Bottle it.” Fargo cut him off. “A wise man puts no foot down until there’s a solid place to bear it.”

  “Pee doodles! These—”

  Fargo raised a hand to silence him. “I said turn off the tap. We’ll be huggin’ with those soldier boys soon enough, I expect, but we’re up against a cold deck here until we size this deal up and see which way the wind sets. Right now I’m gonna say howdy to Helzer, and then me and you are gonna have that bath we’ve been advised to have. We are a mite whiffy, old son.”

  • • •

  “No, I didn’t build that fine coach, Skye,” Jerome Helzer, the outfitter from Powder-horn, answered Fargo’s query. “Innit a little honey, though? He sent it by steamer from New Orleans to Steamboat Springs. Finest conveyance I’ve ever seen.”

  “Aye,” Booger agreed, “and I’ve seen some of the finest. The queen of England herself would be proud to ride in that rig.”

  “Those wheels,” Helzer added, tapping one with the toe of his boot, “are made from Osage orange wood, the same wood Kiowas use to fashion their bows. They will shrink very little and seldom require repairing. And they’ve been kiln dried to stand up to desert air.”

  Booger whistled. “Crikes! Look at the running gearing—the ends of all the bolts have been riveted.”

  “Is that good?” Fargo asked.

  “Damn smart,” Helzer replied. “Most carriage accidents happen when nuts fall off the bolts. This viceroy may dress in silks and pinch snuff, but he’s had some top-notch advice about conveyances.”

  Booger grabbed the hoist bar and heaved himself onto the box. “Well, I’m a Dutchman! This is a lazy-back spring seat of cushioned leather!” he exclaimed. “My piles will feel neglected.”

  “That’s nothing,” Helzer said. “There’s a big oaken water tank built in under that seat.”

  Booger stood and lifted the seat. “Christmas crackers! Why, if it was filled with whiskey—”

  “That’s the queer part of it,” Helzer said. “When I offered to fill it with water, the old Spaniard nixed it. Said he could not afford the extra weight. But, Skye, it’s only going to be him and two women riding, and he’s hitching eight mules to that rig.”

  “Eight?” Fargo repeated. “For three passengers? Granted, Booger is a big grizz. But a mule is a strong puller—most of the range is flat, and six would be more than plenty.”

  “Sure, that’s what I told him. But since he bought the mules from me, I didn’t argue the point. I’m not the kind to shoot a hole in my own canoe.”

  “Eight mules,” Fargo mused aloud, “and he won’t fill the water tank, huh? Say, Booger, hop on down a minute.”

  “Hop a cat’s tail. Old Booger likes this seat. I think I’ll sleep on it. Hell, I might even marry it and sire a tribe of little baby stools.”

  “Hop down, you demented circus monkey,” Fargo insisted. “I want to check on something.”

  Cursing, Booger climbed down. Fargo tucked at the knees to study the nearside wheels closer. “Huh. Booger, you’re the expert here. I know this coach is resting on thick grass, but should it be cutting in that deep when it’s standing empty?”

  Booger and Helzer studied the wheels.

  “Ha-ho, ha-ho!” Booger finally said. “Fargo, you may have the pretty teeth of a gal-boy, but also a keen eye. This is a sturdy rig, right enough, but it’s cutting too deep.”

  “False bottom?” Helzer asked. “Maybe guns?”

  “Guns don’t seem likely,” Fargo gainsaid. “They can be hauled openly with a two-dollar transit permit so long as they’re not sold to the tribes.”

  “Quintana doesn’t strike me as a contrabandista,” Helzer said. “He—”

  Booger interrupted in a low voice. “Lookit that pepper-gut scuttling toward us, boys—he looks as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs. He’s been glomming us close.”

  “Senors,” called out one of the young men Bitch Creek McDade suspected was a soldier in mufti. “His Excellency prefers that his personal conveyance not be disturbed.”

  “Dis-goddamn-sturbed? Just an ever-lovin’ minute here, Sancho,” Booger protested. “I’m the jasper who’ll be whipping that coach.”

  The Spaniard wore the rope sandals and white cotton shirt and trousers of a bracero or common worker. But enough daylight remained for Fargo to notice a hard, contemptuous glint to his eyes. However, like most men with an ounce of sense, he was intimidated by the scowling, moon-faced giant looming over him like Judgment Day.

  “Como no,” he said politely. “Of course, but His Excel—”

  “Pah!” Booger spat into the grass. “Give over with this ‘His Excellency’ shit! I’m—”

  “Chuck the flap jaw,” Fargo snapped.

  Fargo straightened to his full six feet. “Never mind this big gasbag,” he told the young man. “We were just admiring the craftsmanship of your boss’s rig. By the way, soldier, what’s your rank?”

  “I am . . . that is, I have no rank, senor. I have never been a soldier. I was a worker on don Hernando’s sugarcane plantation.”

  “My mistake. Let’s go have a hot bath, Booger, then stoke our bellies. I’m so hungry my backbone is rubbing against my rib cage.”

  “That garlic is a damn liar, Skye,” Booger muttered as they walked off. “He’s a soldier, right enough. And I’ll eat my flap hat if that fine coach ain’t got a false bottom.”

  “The way you say,” Fargo agreed. “But so what? We ain’t star packers. The pay is good, and we have no proof anybody is breaking any laws. Besides, neither one of us is a scrubbed angel. We’ve broke our share of laws, too. Whatever’s in that coach is none of our picnic—leastways, not yet.”

  “Why, that’s so, ain’t it?” Booger agreed. “But old Booger still thinks we will have to put some men below the horizon before this trip is behind us.”

  “Lead will fly,” Fargo agreed. And again the ominous words occurred to him unbidden: Wait for what will come.

  4

  As night drew her sable curtain over the east Texas saw grass country, Fargo and Booger enjoyed a long, hot soak in tubs made from whiskey barrels sawn in half. Booger eventually got stuck and Fargo nearly herniated himself prying him loose. Then they searched out the trail cook, Deke Lafferty, who obligingly warmed up beef and biscuits for the two new arrivals. Bitch Creek McDade, the affable wrangler, joined them for coffee.

  “Fargo,” McDade said, “I gave your stallion a good rubdown and took the currycomb to him before I grained him good. I checked his feet, too. I used a hoof pick to pry a few small stones loose, and all his shoes are tight. Booger, Ambrose got plenty of fodder.”

  “’Preciate it,” Fargo said.

  “Deke, them eats was tolerable good,” Booger told the cook, picking his teeth with a horseshoe nail. “But this coffee . . . faugh! It is a vile concoction—too thin to chew and too thick to swallow.”

  “You’re t
he only one bitching about it,” Deke shot back. “This is whatcha call an all-purpose libation. It loosens up the bowels, cures hangovers, and makes a good horse liniment. And so long as you keep it away from an open flame, it’s safe.”

  Lafferty was a thin, sallow man with a soup-strainer mustache and a mouthful of teeth like crooked yellow gravestones. He was around thirty with one of the oddest builds Fargo had ever seen: a strong torso on bandy legs so that he looked like a cabinet mounted on two poles.

  “Never mind this big ugly flea hive, Deke,” Fargo said. “He’d stand in a bread line and demand toast.”

  Deke took in Booger’s impressive size. “Well, he’d get toast from me. ’At sumbitch is a big grizz, ain’t he? He ain’t a man—he’s a county.”

  Jerome Helzer, the outfitter, had returned to Powder-horn. Fargo marveled at the stores and provisions Hernando Quintana had laid by for the journey. Bacon had been packed in strong sacks of a hundred pounds each; likewise flour had been packed in stout double canvas sacks. Sugar was well secured in gutta-percha. Desiccated, or dried, vegetables, almost equal when boiled to the taste of fresh, were stacked in compact tins. Men of the U.S. Army called them “desecrated vegetables” and “bailed hay,” but Fargo was partial to them.

  Pemmican, which kept fresh for months at a time, filled several large bags made from animal hides. Several dozen bushels of parched corn would feed men and horses over a long haul. There were also plentiful supplies of coffee, salt, and saleratus for making bread.

  “You boys meet the viceroy yet?” McDade inquired as he blew on his coffee. The three men sat cross-legged around Deke’s cooking fire.

  “We’ll look him up soon as we eat,” Fargo replied. “I notice this bunch keeps picket guards outside the camp. You boys noticed any trouble?”

  “Me and Bitch just got here yestiddy,” Deke replied. “Ain’t been no lead chucking nor nothin’, but Diego Salazar and them two soldier sidekicks of his seem a mite nerve-jangled—wound up tighter than an eight-day clock. Like mebbe they’re expectin’ a set-to.”

  “What’s your size-up of those three, Bitch?” Fargo pressed McDade.

  “I’m no frontiersman like you, Fargo,” McDade replied. “But I got enough sense not to drink downstream from the herd. All these Spanish gazabos strike me as a queer lot who belong in cities.”

  Fargo rose, rinsed his tin fork and plate in a wreck pan set up on two sawhorses, then wiped his hands on his buckskin trousers.

  “All right, old son,” he said to Booger, “let’s go palaver with our employer. I haven’t even seen him yet.”

  “See him? Pah! I would like to see more of his daughter. Deke, where do the women bathe?”

  “Don’t answer that, Deke,” Fargo spoke up quickly. “Damn you, Booger, I told you not to start that shit with this bunch.”

  “Ah? You had no objections, pearly teeth, that night when old Booger showed you a peephole so’s you could spy on that actress Kathleen Barton.”

  “Yeah, until you got all het up and crashed through the wall and knocked her outta the tub.”

  Both men laughed at the memory.

  Deke looked flabbergasted. “You two seen Kathleen Barton, America’s Sweetheart, nekked?”

  “Oh, that was nothing, Catfish,” Booger said, warming to his theme. “We seen her diddling herself while she cried out Fargo’s name—”

  “Your mouth runs like a whoopewill’s ass,” Fargo cut in, his tone laced with disgust. “C’mon. And keep a tether on your tongue.”

  Both men headed toward the huge tent at the center of camp. Torches had been lit all around the camp, and their sawing flames threw grotesque shape-changing shadows. Too damn many torches, in Fargo’s opinion. The entire area was lit up almost as bright as day—a fact he didn’t appreciate after that near miss with the pitfall earlier.

  Hard upon that thought, Fargo felt tingling needle points on the back of his neck. It seemed as if the loud and bustling camp had suddenly grown quiet—too quiet.

  “Booger, I’m thinking—”

  For the second time that day Fargo never finished his sentence. A hammering racket of gunfire suddenly broke the stillness, and Fargo heard bullets snapping past his ears—a few so dangerously close he felt the wind rip from them.

  “Kiss the ground!” he shouted, diving forward.

  Unfortunately for Fargo, he and Booger dived for the exact same spot, and Fargo landed first. The air exploded from his lungs when nearly three hundred pounds landed on top of him like an anvil.

  Bullets continued to thicken the air all around them, but suddenly Fargo was more worried about being crushed to death than shot.

  “Off!” he managed to rasp out. “Get . . . off!”

  “The hell you crying about?” Booger riposted. “No bullet can touch you now.”

  Fargo was on the verge of blacking out from oxygen deprivation. Suddenly, as abruptly as a door slamming shut, the firing ceased. Booger rolled off Fargo just before the Trailsman would have passed out.

  Fargo, gasping like a fish in the bottom of a boat, heard distant shouts in Spanish—the perimeter guard, he guessed. A moment later Booger jerked him onto unsteady legs.

  “That was no random volley, Catfish,” Booger said, shaking Fargo back to his senses. “Them lead whistlers was aimed right at us!”

  Fargo, still fighting for a full breath, only nodded.

  “Either of you hit?” Bitch Creek McDade demanded, hurrying toward the two men.

  “This little schoolgirl is breathless with fright,” Booger scoffed. “P’r’aps she has even pissed her petticoats.”

  Deke Lafferty joined them. “Boys, I cal’late they was at least thirty shots fired.”

  He lowered his voice and added, “Christ only knows who done the lead chucking. Plenty of sons of Coronado out there.”

  Nobody saw Captain Diego Salazar until he spoke up. “You will remove that slander of the Spanish Crown, cocinero, or I will remove your tongue.”

  “Get off your high horse, Salazar,” Fargo said, finding his voice with an effort. “You’re on American soil now. Deke doesn’t have to crawfish to you.”

  Salazar, his disapproving mouth wire-tight now, turned his attention to Fargo. “I advised don Hernando not to hire you. Trouble, it is said, follows you like an afternoon shadow. You have brought this trouble to our camp, Fargo. And I advise all of you norteamericanos to stop insulting us with your baseless accusations.”

  “Nobody accused you of anything. Deke only pointed out the obvious, that you’ve got plenty of armed ‘plantation workers’ out there. I’m warning you right now, and I don’t chew my cabbage twice: If I find out you’re behind these sneak attacks, I’m gonna cut you open from neck to nuts.”

  • • •

  “It is indeed a pleasure to finally meet you, Senor Fargo,” Hernando Quintana, former viceroy of Monterrey, Mexico, said in his cultured baritone. “One reads about the Trailsman in many newspapers and magazines. ‘A promptitude of action’ is how one writer explains your survival.”

  “Those ink slingers,” Fargo said, “are more interested in selling bunkum for profit than in sticking to the facts.”

  Quintana smiled. “A man must admire a hero who does not sound his own trumpet. Still, I certainly wish your reception had been much less violent.”

  Quintana was a distinguished, silver-haired man in his sixties. The corners of his eyes crinkled like old shoe leather when he smiled. Despite his obvious politeness and dignified bearing, he could barely keep from staring at Fargo’s huge and rustic companion, who seemed to fill at least half of the tent.

  Fargo said, “This ugly mange pot is your driver, William ‘Booger’ McTeague. In seven years with Overland, he’s never rolled a coach or lost a passenger. I’m not sure if it’s his skill or his weight.”

  “As for weight,” Booger chimed in, “your fine
rig out there has plenty.”

  Quintana tugged at his goatee, watching the big reinsman closely. “How do you mean, sir?”

  Fargo caught Booger’s eye and sent him a warning.

  “Why, I meant only that is a solid conveyance, to be sure. Heavy osage wood and iron castings . . .”

  Quintana was not alone inside the commodious, comfortable tent. Miranda Quintana, seated in a canvas camp chair, had been watching Fargo with a quiet intensity.

  “Gentlemen,” Quintana said, “certainly you have noticed my daughter. Miranda’s mother—en paz descanza, may she rest in peace—was an American actriz, much younger than I. Thus, you see, she combines the traits of the American and Spanish bloodlines to superlative effect.”

  “Oh, she caps the climax, all right,” Booger ventured, and Miranda, still watching Fargo from languid dark berry eyes, smiled demurely.

  “This other beauty,” Quintana added gallantly, “is Katrina Robles, her duenna.”

  This news surprised Fargo. A duenna was supposed to be a much older woman who chaperoned a younger woman. But Katrina was still on the friendly side of thirty. The black lace mantilla she wore over her head could not disguise her pretty face and full, sultry lips.

  “Senor Fargo,” Quintana said, “this long journey ahead is terra incognita for me and the ladies. But I am told that no man in the United States or the American territories knows it better than you do. We are fortunate to have you as our guide.”

  “To be honest, sir,” Fargo admitted, “I’m a mite curious as to why you folks didn’t take the northern trail from St. Joe. It’s rougher terrain, but there’s greater safety in numbers.”

  “For one thing, I was informed, by an experienced wagon conductor, that grass is more plentiful along the southwestern route.”

  Fargo nodded. “Grass is generally plentiful after early May, but it’ll start to thin out in west Texas.”

  “And there is the matter of terrain. My informant insists there are no major difficulties with mountain ranges. Doesn’t that make this route faster?”

  Fargo bit back his first reply. He knew all about these helpful “informants.” Often they owned business interests along the routes they enthusiastically recommended.