Beyond Squaw Creek

4

Glancing at the knife embedded in the bar planks, Fargo again turned to face the room. The French Canadian mule skinner, Bardot, strolled toward him, big boots clomping along the roadhouse’s puncheons. His sombrero shaded his face, but as he approached the bar, a lamp found the tiny, steely eyes set deep in the man’s doughy, red-bearded face.

He grinned, showing a wide gap where his two front teeth should have been. He spoke slowly, loudly, each word spat out in the freighter’s French accent. “I said take it or leave it, friend.”

Fargo smiled amiably and poked his soaked hat off his forehead. “She’s not for sale, friend.”

“No, no, no,” the big freighter said, shaking his head and frowning. “She is for sale, and you can either take the money or leave it. Either way, the girl is mine tonight, and she goes with me and my partner tomorrow.”

He grinned, but his tiny eyes were hard.

Fargo maintained his affable smile. “You’re just not gonna take no for an answer, are you, friend?”

The freighter continued grinning at him.

Keeping his eyes on the big man before him, Fargo reached back, plucked the coin pouch off the bar, and thrust it against the man’s chest, the coins clinking around inside.

The freighter dropped his gaze to the pouch, returned it to Fargo.

The Trailsman held the man’s hard glare.

The freighter lurched forward, red-faced, swinging his ham-sized right fist toward Fargo’s face.

The Trailsman, anticipating the punch, grabbed the man’s wrist and, pivoting, bulled the man’s back against the bar and thrust the man’s hand out across the planks. Pressing his own back against the man’s chest, wedging him against the bar, Fargo reached out with his free hand, plucked the knife from the bar top, and slammed it through the freighter’s open palm and into the wood.

“Uhhhh!” the man bellowed like a bull in an abattoir, turning his head toward his hand from which his own knife protruded, pinned to the rough-hewn planks.

Bright red blood welled up around the rusty blade.

Fargo heard a chair rake across the room’s puncheons and saw the Norwegian bound up out of his seat, reaching for one of his two holstered six-shooters positioned for the cross draw. The Trailsman palmed his own Colt .44, clicked the hammer back, aiming from his belly.

The big Norski froze. Around him, the other four men had fallen silent, still seated at their tables, sliding their cautious gazes between the big Norwegian, the Frenchman who was still pinned to the bar with his own knife, and Fargo.

The Norski freighter stumbled back drunkenly, then, letting his hand fall away from his holster, sagged down in his chair.

Fargo glanced at the Frenchman. The man had drawn his other hand cautiously up to the bar. Now he wrapped it around the knife handle and, stretching his lips back from his empty, tobacco-dark gums, gave a hoarse grunt as he pulled the knife out of the bar.

Clutching the bloody appendage to his chest, he dropped to the floor, wincing and cursing and glaring up at Fargo.

The Trailsman holstered his Colt, turned to the bar, and threw back his second whiskey shot. Setting the glass back onto the bar, he glanced at Smiley, who was scrubbing at the bloody planks with a damp cloth, as though blood were spilled there all the time.

“I’m gonna see to my horse,” Fargo said above another thunderclap, pulling his hat brim down over his eyes. “Make sure no one goes upstairs, will you?”

“That includin’ me? I hear the water boilin’ for the lady’s bath.”

“You can go. Take her some food, too,” Fargo said, reaching for the door handle. He glanced back at the old barkeep, curling his lip wryly. “But keep it in your pants.”

With that he glanced once more at the redheaded Frenchman sitting with his back against a beer keg holding up the bar planks, still grunting and cursing and glaring at Fargo as he wrapped a blue bandanna around his shaking, bloody hand.

Fargo tipped his hat to the man, opened the door, went out, and closed the door behind him. He stepped to the edge of the porch.

The rain was only dribbling off the porch roof now. The thunder rumbled off in the distance. A forked lightning bolt flashed over a distant knoll to the north, but another mass of purple clouds was moving in from the east.

The bad weather wasn’t over yet. That was all right with Fargo. He didn’t doubt the Indians valued Smiley’s hooch too much to attack the outpost, but he favored the reassurance of the storm.

A bunch of braves mixing from two separate tribes, broiling with fury and sharpening their horns for the white-eyes, tended to cut a broad swath.

Fargo stepped off the porch and slogged through the mud and lightly pelting rain to the stable. When he’d unleathered the Ovaro, stabled him, rubbed him down with dry burlap, and fed and watered him, he headed back outside, his rifle in his right hand, saddlebags and bedroll draped over his right shoulder.

The sun had gone down and the eastern storm chugged and flashed over the southeastern hills, but there was a lull in the rain. The air was fragrant with the smell of damp earth, sage, and brimstone.

After a cursory inspection of the grounds around the trading post and finding no sign of prowling redskins, the Trailsman walked back around to the front of the roadhouse and, resting one hand on his pistol grips, pushed through the door.

Inside the lodge, he’d half expected to see a knife thrown toward him, or a pistol aimed his way. Instead, as he blinked through the smoky shadows as though through layers of dirty gauze, he found two men—drovers, judging by their batwing chaps and sun-seared faces—dancing hand in hand and grinning from ear to ear.

One of the others sang softly of Dakota sunsets, of ancient Indians hunting buffalo, and of walking arm in arm along a creek with a girl named Rose.

The big Norwegian sat passed out in his chair, head on the table before him. The redheaded freighter, Bardot, sat with his back against the wall beside the snapping hearth, cradling his wounded appendage in his lap like a pet. In his other hand, he held an uncorked bottle. The light was too dim for Fargo to be sure, but the man’s eyes appeared open, his face expressionless.

Good and soused. Too soused to make trouble, Fargo hoped.

He removed his hand from his pistol grips, closed the door, and stepped into the room. He’d taken two steps before a French-accented voice rumbled softly from across the room, “This ain’t over, Fargo.” The Frenchman held up his injured hand, and winced. “Ain’t over by a long shot!”

Boots thumped on the stairs, and Fargo turned to see Smiley descending from the second-story shadows, swinging an empty bucket in each hand. “Filled the lady’s tub,” the oldster said, grinning lasciviously. “Most fun I had in a month of Sundays!”

“You need to get out more, Smiley,” Fargo said, pouring a fresh drink from the bottle on the bar.

Smiley set the buckets down and grabbed a wooden bowl heaped with steaming kidney stew off the bar’s far end. “I’ll bring her some of my good griz kidney to eat with her bath!”

As the old man wheeled toward the stairs, Fargo tossed the empty glass on the bar, and grabbed the bottle by its neck. “You’ve done enough, Smiley.” He strolled down the bar and took the bowl from the oldster’s hands. “Let me give you a hand.”

“Ah, have a heart, Skye!” the old man complained as Fargo climbed the stairs.

Fargo strode down the hall to the Chicago room, boots clomping, spurs chinking. Rain tattooed the roof and lightning flashed between the logs at the end of the hall where the chinking had crumbled.

He tripped the lever latch and pushed the pine-plank door open with one hand. Standing in the steaming copper tub and running the soap across her breasts, the girl turned toward him and gasped. She allowed him a lingering peek at her sudsy, pale breasts before she raised an arm, feigning outrage.

“Can’t you knock?”

Fargo stepped into the room and kicked the door closed, running his eyes across the girl’s incredible figure— long-limbed, pale, full-busted, and round-hipped. She’d pinned her damp hair atop her head, and several wisps curled down around her sculpted cheeks.

“You heard me comin’,” Fargo said knowingly, keeping his eyes on her as he set the bottle and the bowl on