to his shoulders, his chest bare except for a thin, deerhide vest.
Fargo’s pistol belt and Colt .44 were wrapped around the man’s waist and loincloth. His moccasined foot was so close that Fargo could have swatted it with his rifle barrel.
If the Trailsman had been alone, he would have shot the mad lieutenant out of his saddle, but there were at least a half dozen braves sitting horses in the shadows behind Duke. Killing the self-proclaimed shaman would get not only Fargo’s wick trimmed, but Valeria’s and Prairie Dog’s, as well.
Duke suddenly threw his head back and howled like a moon-crazed coyote. Fargo started, slamming the back of his head against the rock wall. The high yammer, so loud that it raked the Trailsman’s eardrums, chased its own echo around the defile and set a couple of actual coyotes yammering in the northern distance.
The Indians behind the lieutenant grunted and muttered, amused. Duke’s horse turned suddenly toward Fargo. The steel dust’s eyes, meeting Fargo’s, widened suddenly, showing the whites. Fargo began swinging the rifle barrel down and tightening his finger around the trigger.
One of the Indians behind Duke spoke loudly and fast, something about hearing movement on the opposite ridge.
Duke drew back on the horse’s reins, clipping the horse’s startled whinny, turning the animal away from Fargo and around toward the warriors. Duke and the Indians spoke too quickly for Fargo to follow, and then hooves clomped, tapering off back down the ravine.
Fargo sighed, the painfully taut muscles in the back of his neck relaxing. He took a couple of deep breaths, then tramped back along the defile to where Valeria knelt beside Prairie Dog, who lay belly down, one of the girl’s blankets draped across his back. The man breathed steadily, deeply, moonlight reflected off his grizzled, bald pate and the single human tooth hanging from his right ear.
“Did they leave?” Valeria whispered.
Fargo nodded, staring down at Prairie Dog. “He’s out?”
“Passed out right after you left.”
Fargo turned to Prairie Dog’s blue roan and unbuckled the latigo strap under the horse’s belly. When he’d set the saddle, blanket, the scout’s saddlebags, and rifle scabbard in the brush, he turned to Valeria. “Sit tight. Try to keep him comfortable. Build a small fire only if it turns cold and he gets overly chilled.”
Holding the ends of the blanket across her chest, Valeria stared up the Trailsman, frowning. “What’re you going to do?”
“I’m going after Duke, and I’m going to kill the crazy son of a bitch if I can get a shot at him.”
A thought dawning on him, he reached down and pulled the old scout’s target rifle out of its scabbard. The Schuetzen was a better long-range shooter than Fargo’s Henry repeater, and a long shot might be the only shot the Trailsman would get.
Holding the fine German rifle in one hand, he pulled the Henry from his own scabbard with the other, leaned it against a rock. “I’ll leave that for Prairie Dog, though I hope like hell he doesn’t have to use it.”
He slid the Schuetzen into his own saddle boot, and glanced at Valeria. She was still staring up at him, her green eyes bright in the moonlight, her full lips parted slightly. Her breasts pushed against the trade blanket. Fargo moved to her, grabbed her brusquely, and kissed her.
“I’ll be back.”
“Be careful.”
He swung onto the pinto and turned the horse down the dark, narrow cavity, heading for the main ravine.
Fargo picked up the Indians’ trail on the northeast side of the gully. He also found the sign of a bobcat—a fresh track and warm scat—which was no doubt what the braves had heard and what had drawn them out of the ravine.
The Indians had continued northeast along the swelling prairie. Fargo followed slowly, keeping a close eye on their trail, which wasn’t easy to follow in the dark and on the relatively hard, grassy ground.
Strips of terrain overgrazed by bison helped to show the tracks of the eight unshod ponies, as did a recent prairie burn. But when daylight streaked the eastern horizon and burnished several long, low clouds, he still hadn’t overtaken the group but counted himself lucky not to have ridden into an ambush.
Lieutenant Duke and the braves obviously figured Fargo, Prairie Dog, and the girl were headed back toward Fort Clark and were hoping to cut them off. Rage at the invasion of their camp and at the killing of Iron Shirt must be driving them, because they sure as hell were tearing up the sod.
The sun had just separated from the eastern prairie and Fargo was climbing the long, low swell of a shale- capped dike, when the clap of gunfire broke the morning quiet. A prairie falcon, its wings coppered by the rising sun, swooped over Fargo’s head and continued north, shrieking.
Several more quick, angry shots rose from straight ahead—a good mile or more away—and Fargo swung out of the saddle, wincing when his charred soles touched the prickly earth. Ground-hitching the pinto, he jogged to the lip of the dike, which faced east, and dropped to his knees behind a lone hawthorn shrub.
His keen eyes scanned the murky morning shadows beyond him, but he didn’t spy movement until several more shots rang out, followed closely by a bizarre, victorious yowl—the crazed yammer of a madman.
Just beyond the next rise, similar to the one upon which Fargo lay, several shadows milled amongst the brush. A horse galloped straight south along the valley, buck-kicking and trailing its reins, its saddle hanging down over its ribs. Its terrified whinny rose shrilly, quickly absorbed by the vast, pale green sky.
Unable to see much from here, Fargo jogged back down the rise, mounted the Ovaro, and rode north, paralleling the crest of the long bluff before dropping over the bluff’s north shoulder and into the valley below.
The distant gunfire ceased, replaced by the beseeching screams of a man in deep physical pain.
A narrow ravine twisted through the valley, angling along the base of another bluff standing between Fargo and Duke and his howling victim.
Leaving the Ovaro ground-tied in a cottonwood swale, Fargo grabbed Prairie Dog’s Schuetzen from the saddle boot, wedged a second spare revolver—a .36 Colt—behind his cartridge belt, then dropped into the ravine. Keeping his head below the ravine’s steep but shallow rim, he followed the dry watercourse’s gravelly floor toward the rising screams punctuated by Duke’s demonic yelps and howls.
When the screams seemed to be coming from his right, Fargo stopped and edged a look over the ravine’s lip. Fifty yards away through the gray sage and bunchgrass tufts, several horseback braves milled, riding in broad circles around Lieutenant Duke who stood menacingly over a blue-clad man sprawled on the ground before him. Waving a bloody knife in the air, Duke howled. He bent down, his blond hair and the Trailsman’s own hat dropping below Fargo’s field of vision.
A man screamed shrilly—a long, hopeless cry of excruciating agony.
The Trailsman leaned the Schuetzen against the side of the gully, the barrel extending far enough that Fargo could locate the gun easily if he needed it. Snakelike, he slithered up over the lip of the gully and crawled through the sage and bunchgrass, gritting his teeth, cocked .44 in his right hand.
“It’s too bad you don’t remember, you feeble white-eyes!” Lieutenant Duke shouted. “It is too bad you— nothing more than prairie vermin crawling out from your civilized white society—had the unfortunate gall to kill the bravest war chief who ever walked the plains and stalked the buffalo!”
A blade whispered through flesh. The soldier howled shrilly. “I didn’t kill him, damn your hide. And you’re as white as I am, you crazy bastard!”
Lifting his head from a clump of bunchgrass, Fargo glanced around at the horseback riders milling around him—seven painted braves on snorting mounts. Their attention was on the man staked out on the ground before Lieutenant Duke, whose back faced Fargo from twenty feet away.
Fargo stretched the cocked Colt straight out before him through the coarse blond grass, squinting one eye as he stared down the barrel. He planted his sites on Duke’s back as the crazy lieutenant leaned down to swipe his blade once more across his staked, howling captive.
Suddenly, hooves thundered to Fargo’s right. He turned quickly. A brave was bearing down on him atop a brown and white pinto. The brave shrieked, wide brown eyes glistening in the sunlight as he leaned over his horse’s right shoulder, drawing a bow string taut, the nocked arrow aimed at Fargo.
Fargo jerked right, stumbling as he gained his feet. The arrow clattered off a rock to his left. He triggered the
