section from the next novel in the exciting
THE TRAILSMAN #330
TUCSON TYRANT
The sound of gunfire ripped through the furnace-hot desert air, but the lone, crop-bearded rider astride a black-and-white pinto stallion ignored it. One or two shots, the rider mused idly, usually meant celebration fire, just drunks hurrahing the town. Three or more often meant somebody was six feet closer to hell.
“Time to tank up, old campaigner,” Skye Fargo told the stallion, reining in at a small spring just outside the siesta-prone, but dangerous, settlement of Tucson in south-central Arizona Territory.
Fargo had been feeling a case of the nervous fan-tods for the past twenty miles or so. With the bluecoat pony soldiers being pulled from nearby Camp Grant for the rumored war brewing back east, three dangerous tribes— Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache—were making life hell for everyone else out here.
Fargo dipped his dusty head into the cool spring water, then cupped handfuls and drank them. Next he dropped the Ovaro’s bridle and let him drink. More gunfire erupted from town, and Fargo thumbed back the rawhide riding thong from the hammer of his single-action Colt.
“Don’t go looking for your own grave,” he muttered, advice from a Ute warrior, up in the Mormon country, just before the Ute almost killed him. But when had the Trailsman, as some called Fargo, ever done the
Fargo studied Tucson and the surrounding terrain from slitted eyes. He was a tall, rangy, sinew-tough man wearing buckskins and a wide-brimmed plainsman’s hat. His face was tanned hickory nut brown above the darker brown of his beard. Eyes the pure blue of a mountain lake stayed in constant motion.
Fargo didn’t like what he was seeing—and not seeing. In places sagebrush grew tall enough to hide a man, and as Fargo had ridden across the dreaded desert of southern Arizona Territory in the past few days, he had spotted rock mounds where victims of Indian attack had been buried—killed by Apaches, most likely.
But the view within the town limits was just as ominous. At first glance, all Fargo could see through blurry heat waves was the steeple of a massive San Antonio church at the head of the central plaza. A green expanse of barley land ringed the town, cultivation meeting the desert like a knife edge. Strips of cottonwood lined the little Santa Cruz River, which divided the narrow and fertile valley where the mining-supply center of Tucson was located.
None of that, however, impressed Fargo as much as the slumping body hanging from a cottonwood limb near the river. He couldn’t read the sign pinned to it, so he retrieved his brass binoculars from a saddle pocket.
“ ‘Jerked to Jesus,’ ” he read aloud, shaking his head in disgust.
There were no Rangers out here as had recently been formed in Texas, and not enough marshals to fill an outhouse. Fargo had been warned, before he left Fort Yuma, about Tucson’s notorious Committee for Public Safety. Furthermore, he vastly preferred the Arizona Territory as it looked farther north, a mostly unpopulated landscape of pine trees, granite cliffs, and air that didn’t cling in your lungs like molten glass.
But Fargo was a victim of events. He had recently lost a high-stakes match against a pretty redhead who ran a faro wheel, and a sorely needed job as a fast-messenger rider awaited him here.
Fargo snugged the bridle again, the Ovaro taking the bit easily, and swung up into leather. He took a moment to slide his sixteen-shot Henry rifle from its saddle scabbard and check the vulnerable tube magazine for dents. Then he spurred the Ovaro forward, aiming for the central plaza at the heart of town.
Not much had changed, Fargo quickly realized, since last time he’d ridden these unpaved, sun-drenched streets. Lumber was scarce in the region, and most of the buildings were of Indian-style puddled adobe with brush ramadas shading the doors. Not one hotel or store, but plenty of twenty-four-hour gambling houses. Fargo heard lilting Spanish everywhere. The place was still overrun with dogs, whose constant yapping made the Ovaro stutter- step nervously.
When Fargo’s eyes flicked to the rammed-earth sidewalks, the two-legged curs watching him from hooded glances bothered him even more. The local vigilantes were as obvious as bedbugs on a clean sheet, for they all carried double-ten scatterguns, barrels sawed off to ten inches.
“Mr. Fargo? Mr. Skye Fargo?”
At the sound of a musical female voice, Fargo tugged rein and slued around in the saddle. A young woman stood in the doorway of a two-story adobe house that fronted on the plaza. The room visible behind her seemed almost bare, but clean, darned curtains hung in the windows. Seeing him rein in, she began running toward him— and she jiggled impressively, Fargo noticed.
“Mr. Fargo?” she asked again.
Fargo opened his mouth to reply, but as he got a better look at her, he was struck dumb by this sensuous vision. The Trailsman was no novice when it came to rating woman flesh, and he figured this one was at the top of the heap—far as her looks, anyway. Horn combs held her long, russet hair neatly in place, and her figure showed to curving perfection in a pinch-waisted gown of emerald green silk and lace.
“Mr. Skye Fargo?” she repeated, stopping beside the Ovaro and shading her eyes with one hand to look up at him.
In the seductive style of Santa Fe women, kohl had been artfully applied to lengthen her eyebrows, shade the lids, and extend the outer corners of the eyes. Fargo felt sudden loin warmth and was forced to discreetly shift in the saddle. He was rarely woman starved, but he often got plenty hungry.
“Excuse my bad parlor manners, miss,” Fargo hastened to say, tipping his hat. “Yes, I’m Skye Fargo. May I ask how you know me?”
“Mr. Fargo, you’re too modest. Any Western school child can tell you about the fearless Trailsman.”
Fargo grinned, strong white teeth flashing through his beard. “School child? Well, if that includes you, maybe I’ll get an education, Miss . . . ?”
“Oh, forgive me. I’m Amy Hanchon. My father, he . . .”
She faltered and Fargo waited patiently. The bell of San Antonio sounded the hour, three p.m. Wagon teams constantly brought in loads of merchant stock, and now a dozen or so wagons were parked in the plaza as the teamsters slept. Fargo spotted at least one vigilante in the shadow of the east plaza, watching him with eyes fatal as a snake.
“My father,” she soldiered on bravely, knuckling away a sudden tear, “is Daniel Hanchon. Reverend Daniel Hanchon. He is . . . was also a silver miner with political aspirations. But now I’m getting ahead of myself. Mr. Fargo, would you consider working for me?”
Fargo reluctantly pried his eyes away from the creamy white swells of her bosoms, thrust high by tight stays.
“First of all, Amy, I’m curious. Even if you have heard some backcountry lore about me, how could you recognize me riding past your house? I don’t pose for portraits.”
“Because of the
