Rule seemed to fold in half told the Trailsman that there would be no gunplay now. Fargo’s harsh words had destroyed Rule almost as effectively as bullets would have. In other circumstances Fargo might have felt sorry for the man. But no, not ever, not this man.
The men Rule had been laughing with moved away from him as if they’d suddenly learned that he was a plague carrier. The bartender stared at him as if he had just seen the boogeyman he’d heard about all his life. A frozen silence lay on the air.
“I need your gun on the bar, Rule. Now.”
Slowly, Rule turned toward him. It was as if he hadn’t heard Fargo’s command. He didn’t make any move toward his gun at all. Even from this distance Fargo could see the tears that streaked the man’s face and the gaze that saw beyond Fargo, saw some other realm that only Pete Rule knew.
“I loved her, Fargo.”
And then he did it. Even in that instant, even as he fired, Fargo realized that he was helping Rule do what Rule didn’t have nerve enough to do alone. As Rule’s right hand dropped to his six-shooter and his fingers closed on the handle, Fargo shot him three times in the chest. The crack of the gun was louder than any piano music could ever be and the stench of gunfire stronger even than the stench of the latrine out back.
There was no dramatic death. Rule was thoroughly dead by the time his head cracked against the floor. There was a brief spasm running down the legs and into the feet. Blood began seeping into Rule’s shirt.
The bartender said, “Well, I guess we have a lot to thank you for, Mr. Fargo. You sure figured this out for us.”
“O’Malley figured it out. Not me.” Fargo holstered his gun and started to turn back to the batwings.
“What the hell’re we going to do for a sheriff now?” the bartender said.
“That’s your problem,” Fargo said. “I was going to wait till dawn to get out of this town but I’m not going to wait any longer.”
He pushed through the batwings and out into the clarity and beauty of the mountain-shadowed night.
Ten minutes later he was saddling up his big Ovaro stallion. And five minutes after that he was passing the WELCOME TO CAWTHORNE sign.
LOOKING FORWARD!
The following is the opening
section of the next novel in the exciting
THE TRAILSMAN #335 RIVERBOAT RAMPAGE
Raucous shouting attracted the attention of the big man in buckskins. He looked toward the docks and saw a large group of people gathered around something, blocking his sight of whatever it was. Skye Fargo gave a mental shrug and pointed the big, black-and-white Ovaro stallion toward his destination, a waterfront tavern called Red Mike’s.
Then somebody in the crowd behind him let out a whoop and yelled, “Kill him, Owen! Bash the dummy’s brains out!”
That prompted a burst of laughter, and somebody else shouted, “He can’t do that! The dummy ain’t got no brains!”
Fargo reined the Ovaro to a halt. His mouth quirked at the irony.
Then he turned the stallion around and headed back toward the commotion at the docks.
With his buckskins, close-cropped dark beard, and broad-brimmed Stetson, Fargo looked like the veteran frontiersman he was. A long-barreled Colt .44 rode in a holster at his hip, and tucked into a sheath strapped to his right calf was a heavy-bladed Arkansas Toothpick. The butt of a Henry repeater stuck up from a saddle boot. Plenty of men out here went armed. With Skye Fargo, it was like the weapons were part of his body.
He reined in again. Now that he was closer, he could see over the heads of the crowd. The shouting men formed a circle around a couple of hombres who were fighting.
Or rather, one of the men was fighting. The other had his thick, muscular arms raised and his head hunched down as far as it would go between his massive shoulders. He just stood there, absorbing the punishment that his opponent dealt out. The look on his face was one of dull confusion, as if he couldn’t understand why the other man was hitting him.
The man doing the punching was big, too, and dressed like one of the dockworkers. He had a thatch of dark hair and a mustache that curled up on the ends. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up over brawny forearms. The hamlike fists at the ends of those arms shot out again and again, thudding into the body of the younger man.
The spectators kept up their whooping and hollering as they made bets on the outcome. Fargo watched and saw that most of the action seemed to be going through a slender young man who stood to one side, a bowler hat pushed back on his curly, light brown hair. Fargo’s lake blue eyes narrowed as his gaze went back and forth between that young man and the one the dockworker was thrashing.
Fargo thought he saw a family resemblance between the two youngsters. Unless he missed his guess, they were brothers.
The massacre—you couldn’t really call it a fight—continued for long minutes. The dockworker’s fists had opened up several cuts around his opponent’s eyes. Blood smeared the young man’s face.
One of the spectators cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Finish him off, Owen! This is gettin’ boring!”
Grinning, Owen cocked his fists and angled in, poised for the knockout.
The youngster in the bowler hat reached up and tugged on the brim.
The young man who’d been getting pounded finally threw a punch, a slow, ponderous roundhouse right. At least, the blow appeared slow and ponderous at first. But somehow it made its way past Owen’s suddenly frantic attempt to block it and exploded on the dockworker’s jaw. A collective “Oh!” of shock came from the crowd as Owen went up in the air, his feet rising several inches off the ground before he came crashing back down on the ground. He twitched a couple of times and then lay still, with his eyes rolled back in their sockets.
Silence reigned over the crowd now.
The youngster in the bowler hat rushed over to his brother. “Are you all right, Denny?” he asked anxiously. “Did he hurt you?”
“Nuh . . . no, I reckon I’m all right, Cord,” Denny said. “Did I hurt that fella? I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just wanted him to stop whalin’ on me.”
Tears began to run from Denny’s eyes and down his moon face.
“I didn’t mean to hurt him!” he wailed.
One of the spectators stepped forward and said, “Uh, that’s all right, young fella. Don’t worry about it. Owen’s kind of a mean son of a bitch anyway. He’s the one who picked a fight with you.”
Denny kept blubbering. Cord reached around his shoulders, or tried to, anyway, and started to lead him away. The crowd parted to let them through.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” Cord murmured to his brother. “Everybody knows you didn’t mean to hurt
