She turned his head from side to side for emphasis, a sharp, beseeching tone in her voice. “You come back to me—do you hear? I know what I said before, but the fact is I’m smitten and I don’t care if you know it”—she quirked the corners of her mouth, and her eyes glistened in the gray shafts from the windows—“or take advantage of me.”
He smoothed the rich red locks away from her cheeks. “I’ll give it my best shot.”
She kissed him, began to rise. “I told Mrs. Hildebrand I was just stepping out for some air. I’d better get back before Father sends out a search party.”
She winked and tossed her hair back from her shoulders. Crouching, bending those fine, creamy legs, she retrieved her dress from the stable floor, then turned to the horse staring at her with brazen interest. Chuckling and clutching the dress to her breasts, she placed a tender kiss on the Ovaro’s nose.
The horse snorted and brushed a hoof against the stall partition.
Valeria laughed. “You and your horse are cut from the same cloth, Mr. Fargo.”
Valeria turned away from both Fargo and the horse, shook out the dress, and dropped it over her head. When she lowered her chin to begin buttoning up, Fargo pulled his pants up, climbed to his feet, snaked his arms under hers, and took her tender orbs in his hands once more, nuzzling her neck.
She pressed her hands over his and relaxed against him, tipping her head to one side.
In the distance, a man yelled and a rifle report rent the quiet night.
Valeria gasped. The Trailsman lifted his head, pricking his ears.
More shots and shouts followed by an Indian war whoop.
Valeria whipped around toward Fargo, covering her breasts with her hands. “Oh, my God—they’re attacking the fort!”
“Stay here!”
As the Ovaro nickered and jerked its head up and down, Fargo grabbed his cartridge belt, wrapped it around his waist, donned his hat, and bolted out the stall door.
“Skye, don’t leave me!”
Fargo turned back to her. Valeria faced him, hands cupping her breasts. Outside, rifles and pistols popped and boomed and the shouting and whooping rose to a cacophony.
Fargo grabbed his pistol from its holster, spun the cylinder. He wished he had the Henry that he’d left in the sutler’s storeroom. “Stay down and don’t come out till I tell you it’s clear!”
He wheeled and ran to the near end of the barn, pushed through the double doors. An arrow whistled past his right ear and twanged into the door behind him.
Fargo flinched, raised his revolver toward the dark, painted brave standing fifteen feet in front of him who was reaching behind his back for another arrow. Fargo’s .44 roared, and the Indian flew back against the wall of another stock barn.
Fargo turned right, shot two more braves running toward him from the north, laying them both out with single rounds through their chests, and peered toward the fort’s north stockade wall—or the short stretch he could see from between the stock barns.
Three soldiers stood on the shooting ledge, yelling and firing their rifles over the wall’s sharpened log ends. One had just turned away to reload his rifle when his head snapped toward his right shoulder, a bloody arrow point jutting from the side of his head.
As the soldier fell from the shooting ledge, the Trailsman broke into a hard sprint for the wall. Ahead, another soldier screamed as an arrow thumped into his neck, driving him back off the ledge to hit the ground on his back, writhing.
The dark head of an Indian appeared above the wall, between two red hands grabbing log points, one hand also holding a war hatchet. As the brave leaped over the wall, shrieking demonically, another bolted over the wall beside him to smash a tomahawk into the head of a sergeant who’d dropped to one knee to reload his Springfield. The hatchet nearly cleaved the soldier’s hatted head in two, killing him instantly.
Fargo stopped and, cursing, shot the brave who’d killed the sergeant, his round plunking through the Indian’s right ear to splash another wall-leaping brave with blood and brains. Fargo turned to shoot another brave, ducked to avoid a war hatchet somersaulting toward him, then blew the brave back off the wall with two hastily fired .44 rounds.
Fargo looked left and up.
A screaming brave leaped toward him, the feathered spear in the Indian’s right hand angled toward the Trailsman’s chest. Fargo snapped off the Colt’s last shot, drilling a small, dark hole in the brave’s upper middle chest. Dropping the empty revolver, he threw up both hands, grabbing the dying brave’s left arm and spear hand, thrusting the spear to one side as the painted, grease-coated body bulled him off his feet and into the ground on his back.
Fargo rolled the brave’s writhing, grunting body off his chest, glancing right and left along the stockade wall. Small clumps of soldiers fought the Indians leaping the wall from the backs of their galloping mounts, arrows whistling while rifles and pistols popped and flashed in the twilight.
Amidst the yells to his right, Fargo heard the rumbling curses of Prairie Dog Charley between angry pistol barks and above the shouted Irish-accented commands of a sergeant encouraging his men against the storming hoard of shrieking natives.
Spying a brave aiming a nocked arrow at him from the shooting ledge, Fargo grabbed a war hatchet embedded in the ground near his right shoulder, and heaved it. At the same time the hatchet buried its head into the brave’s chest, his arrow twanging into the ground beside Fargo’s right knee, a high-pitched scream rose above the cacophony.
A woman’s scream.
9
Rising to a knee, Fargo looked to his right, in the direction from which Valeria had screamed.
“Skye!” she cried again.
About thirty yards away, a howling brave broke out from between the hay stables, sprinting toward a ladder leaning against the stockade wall, carrying Valeria across his right shoulder.
“The major’s daughter!” a soldier shouted beyond the running Indian, his voice nearly drowned by the gunfire and yowling savages.
Fargo slipped his Arkansas toothpick from his boot and sprinted after the girl. Above and left, a brave leaped over the wall and dropped onto the shooting platform. The brave loosed an arrow at Fargo. He ducked as the arrow shrieked over his head and plunked into a stable wall. Another brave leaped off the shooting wall and into Fargo’s path. Fargo stopped, pulled his hips back as the Indian slashed at him with a bone-handled knife, then drove the toothpick into the brave’s bare belly.
The Indian howled like a gut-shot coyote.
Shoving the brave back against the stockade wall, Fargo pulled his toothpick free of the man’s entrails, and continued sprinting. The Indian carrying Valeria was halfway up the wall when Fargo reached the ladder. Pounding her fists against the Indian’s bare, glistening back, Valeria’s gaze met Fargo’s, her green eyes alight with bone- rending terror.
Fargo leaped up the ladder, slashing at the Indian’s calves with the toothpick but missing, catching the toothpick’s sharp blade into the hide attaching the rungs to the two cottonwood poles. Around him, men were shooting and shouting. Out of nowhere, an Indian grabbed Fargo from behind and pulled him down the ladder, battering the Trailsman’s head and shoulders with his bare fists.
At the base of the ladder, Fargo whipped around and drove his right boot into the Indian’s jaw. As the brave stumbled straight back, groaning and clutching his face, Fargo lunged up the ladder’s squawking rungs, using his arms as much as his feet.
