“Oh, yes, I remember the sign in front of the coffin.” At the mention of the coffin, Frederica and Ava suddenly remembered that Suzie was dead, and both of them made the sign of the cross very quickly.
“Thank you, ladies, you have both been very helpful,” Falcon said.
After learning that Fargo Ford had been in town recently, Falcon spent the rest of the day talking to everyone who knew him in order to get as good a picture as he could get of the man’s habits. By nightfall, he had gathered enough information to give him an educated guess on the best way to track him down.
Falcon took a room in the hotel, spending the night in bed, his first night in bed in several nights.
It was still dark when Falcon left town the next morning. When the sun came up and the undertaker came up front to close the caskets of the two bodies, he noticed that Ponci Elliot was wearing a hat. That seemed strange. He hadn’t put a hat on Ponci’s head. He wondered where the hat came from.
Removing the hat, he gasped.
Ponci had been scalped.
CHAPTER 21
“It stinks in here,” Dagen complained as he, Monroe, Casey, and Fargo looked through the cave where Ponci had done his self-amputation to see if they could find the money.
“You can put up with a little stink,” Fargo said.
“A little stink? We could be up to our bottom lip in shit and it wouldn’t stink anymore,” Dagen said.
The others laughed.
“What the hell are we lookin’ for?” Monroe asked.
“What are we looking for? We’re looking for the money,” Fargo replied.
“Yeah, I know that. But is it in a bag or what?”
“It could be,” Fargo said. “But like as not it’s ...” He stopped in mid-sentence, then leaned over and started tossing a few rocks aside.
“Have you found something?” Casey asked.
Fargo pulled out a set of saddlebags, then opened the flap and looked inside. A broad smile spread across his face.
“Here it is, boys.”
“Is the money there?” Dagen asked.
“It’s here.”
“Let’s divide it up,” Dagen said.
“Not here.”
Dagen looked at the other two men and, sensing that they were behind him, he looked back at Fargo. Fargo was holding the saddlebags and looking down inside. He didn’t notice that Dagen had pulled his gun.
“Yeah, let’s do it here,” Dagen said.
“I’m in charge here,” Fargo said. “And I’ll decide when and where we divide the money.”
Dagen pulled the trigger and the gun flashed and boomed loudly inside the cave. A little puff of dust flew up from the front of Fargo’s shirt and his eyes opened wide in pain and surprise. He dropped the saddlebags and put his hand over the wound.
“You son of a bitch,” he said. “You killed me.”
“Yeah,” Dagen said easily. He pulled the trigger a second time, and Fargo went down.
Monroe and Casey looked on with shock.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Casey asked.
“Because I don’t believe the son of a bitch had any intention of dividing up that money,” Dagen said. “I think he was planning on just stringin’ us along for a while, then, first chance he got, he was going to run out on us.”
“When do you plan on dividing the money?” Monroe asked.
“Right now,” Dagen said. He smiled. “That is, as soon as we get out of this stink.”
Leaving Fargo dead inside the cave, the three bandits walked outside into the bright sunlight. Dagen took a deep breath.
“Damn, it feels good to be able to breathe again,” he said.
“Yeah,” Monroe said. “I don’t know how much longer I could’ve stayed in there.”
“Ha,” Casey said. “If you think it stinks in there now, what’s it goin’ to be like when ole Fargo gets ripe?”
“Ain’t goin’ to be that much worse,” Dagen said. “Fargo always did have a stink about him anyhow.”
The others laughed, even though they knew that they probably smelled just as bad.
Dagen dumped the money out onto the ground; then the three men squatted down around it and began counting it out. It totaled fourteen thousand, two hundred dollars.
“Looks to me like it’s a couple hundred dollars short,” Monroe said.
