Beyond Squaw Creek

her fist into the brave’s broad back. As the Indian turned to run off with his prize, Fargo steadied the pistol, angling it down from his right shoulder, and squeezed the trigger.

The Colt roared and leaped in his hand. The bullet ripped through the back of the Indian’s head and careened out his forehead with a small geyser of bone, brains, and blood.

Valeria screamed as though she herself had been shot. The Indian ran several more feet toward the gap in the canyon wall, knees bending as the life drained out of him. He fell in a rolling, tumbling heap, the girl rolling through the dust and sage ahead of him, skirts and torn shirtwaist flopping around her hips.

She’d barely stopped rolling when Fargo, having leaped down from the stage and sprinted past the quivering Indian, pulled her brusquely to her feet, her breasts jiggling, red hair falling across her face and dusty, porcelain shoulders.

“Noooo!” she cried, shaking her head wildly and beating her fists against his shoulders.

“Keep your pants on—it’s me!” he yelled as he wrapped his left arm around her waist and half dragged, half carried her toward his Ovaro stallion tied behind the stagecoach.

In the south, the Indians’ whoops and shouts grew louder, hooves thumping, guns popping. Evidently, a couple of soldiers were putting up a fight, but they couldn’t keep it up for long. He’d seen close to twenty braves along the creek, and judging by the sound of approaching horses, they were headed toward the coach.

“Where…what…?” the girl gasped as Fargo holstered his Colt, wrapped his hands around her waist, and tossed her onto the pinto’s back. The horse was skitter-stepping at the gunfire, twitching its ears and snorting.

Fargo ripped the reins from the stage’s luggage boot, then shucked his Henry repeater from the sheath attached to the saddle. “We’re gonna haul ass outta here!” He swung up behind the girl. She halfheartedly crossed her arms over her breasts and looked around, sobbing.

As the Trailsman reined the pinto away from the stage, an arrow whistled through the air behind his head and clattered into the canyon wall to his right. He swung a look left as two painted braves clad only in loincloths, moccasins, and war paint galloped their paint ponies through the notch in the canyon wall, screaming like devils loosed from hell. Their medicine pouches and bone necklaces jostled wildly.

As one jerked his mount to a skidding halt and reached into his quiver for another arrow, the other flung a war hatchet. Fargo reined the pinto toward the two braves as the hatchet careened wickedly past his left cheek to bury its head in the stage’s thin housing.

The Trailsman snapped the Henry to his shoulder and fired two quick shots, firing and cocking and firing again. Hearing the braves scream but not waiting around to watch them fly off their horses, the Trailsman reined the Ovaro out ahead of the stage and gouged the stallion’s flanks with his spurs.

“Keep your head down!” he ordered the girl as several arrows and bullets careened through the air around them, plunking into the dust on both sides of the two track trail.

Fargo took his rifle in his right hand, reins in the left, then snaked that arm around the girl’s waist, drawing her taut against him.

The Ovaro lowered its own head and, snorting, mane buffeting, lunged down the trail in a ground-eating gallop. This wasn’t the stallion’s first encounter with Indians, and the smell of blood and bear grease and the savage, elemental sound of the whoops and yowls and the creaking twang of bows and arrows chilled his blood and rendered his hooves light as feathers.

“What about the soldiers?” the girl cried above the thunder of the pinto’s hooves.

“Finished!” Fargo shouted, turning in his saddle to fire his Henry repeater one-handed behind him at the six or seven braves giving chase, hunkered low over the necks of their lunging ponies.

“What about my luggage?” she cried. “All my belongings are on the stage!”

Two arrows thumped into the ground on both sides of the trail. Several slugs sliced the air over Fargo’s head, one ricocheting loudly off a rock.

“If you want to go back for it, you’re on your own!” Fargo shouted, loosing another shot behind.

“But…but…I have nothing to wear!”

Fargo jerked a look behind and shook the Ovaro’s reins, urging more speed. “If we don’t lose these savages, you won’t need anything!”

As rifles popped behind him, he leaned forward to yell in the horse’s ear. “Come on, boy! Split the trail wide open!”

The girl jerked her head toward the Trailsman accusingly, brows furrowed, lips parted, fire red hair jostling across her eyes. Fargo was about to ask what the look was about, but then he realized his left arm was pushing up beneath her naked breasts.

He gave a sheepish half smile, loosened his grip, then turned to fling another shot behind them.

2

The Ovaro was not only the fastest horse Fargo had ever ridden, but it had plenty of bottom, too. More bottom than the Indians’ mustangs, obviously, because Fargo and Valeria Howard gradually pulled away from their pursuers, until the braves’ gunshots sounded little louder than snapping twigs, and the thunder of their ponies was like the distant passing of a fleeting summer storm.

When they’d ridden a good four miles beyond the scene of the attack, Fargo pulled the horse off the old traders’ trail he’d been following, and into a cut between high, chalky buttes. A light breeze rose, and the Ovaro lifted its head, sniffing and softly nickering. Fargo turned the horse to look behind, tipping his hat against the sun.

About a half mile straight east of the traders’ trail, six or seven Indians were walking their horses along the base of a jog of curving hogbacks, riding slowly away from Fargo and Valeria. Their leader wore a buffalo headdress. They were armed with either bows and arrows or carbines. Hatchets swung from their belts. A couple of the young braves held war lances adorned with tribal feathers.

Judging by the tribal feathers and designs painted on their faces and horses, these braves were Assiniboine, not Blackfeet, like those behind Fargo.

Valeria Howard shivered on the saddle before the Trailsman. “Oh, God…”

Fargo studied the riders until they’d disappeared down the other side of a distant slope. Oh, God was right. They were surrounded by Indians.

Fargo turned the Ovaro and galloped west between the buttes.

“Where are we going?” the girl asked, craning her neck to peer over Fargo’s shoulder.

“The pinto needs water. There’s a spring around here.” Fargo glanced behind, and seeing no redskins on his trail, checked the sweat-lathered Ovaro down to a walk. “About two prairie swells farther west is a trading post and stage station. We’ll stop there for the night.”

Crossing her bare arms over her pale breasts, the girl looked up at him. Her face was dust streaked, and weed seeds clung to her mussed, russet-colored hair. There was a fearful trill in her voice. “But we could make Fort Clark in a couple of hours!”

“If we kept moving as fast as we’ve been moving, we could make the fort about three hours after good dark. But the horse is tired. And we don’t want to be out here after dark.”

Valeria looked around warily, at the eroded butte faces and breeze-ruffled buffalo grass, at the dry, chalky wash meandering through the gray-brown grass tall enough to conceal a crawling Indian. “Father is going to be worried.” She swung her gaze back to Fargo, eyes sharp. “How could you let this happen? You were supposed to be watching for Indians! That’s why Father hired you!”

“You’re alive, aren’t you? Still have your topknot.”

Fargo reined the horse into a hollow at the base of a high butte. Water bubbled up from the butte’s base, around sand and mossy, pitted boulders, and emanated a vague sulfur smell. Cattails grew along the spring’s perimeter, and meadowlarks rode the swaying weed tips, a few lighting as the Ovaro drew up and Fargo slipped off the horse’s back.