Hannibal Rising

LEGWORK

The man’s teeth flashed white and he thrust his blade up and in.

Fargo’s boot was already rising. He caught the would-be assassin between the legs and the knife stopped inches from his chest as the man gasped and staggered back, his thighs pinched together from the pain.

Suddenly the woman holding him let go and a knife glinted in her hand.

“I will kill you myself.”

She had a slight accent that at the moment Fargo couldn’t afford to give much thought. He barely avoided a stab at his throat. Pivoting, he went for his Colt again, only to have the woman do the most incredible thing: she leaped high into the air and kicked him with her right foot, catching him across the jaw. . . .

The Trailsman

Beginnings . . . they bend the tree and they mark the man. Skye Fargo was born when he was eighteen. Terror was his midwife, vengeance his first cry. Killing spawned Skye Fargo, ruthless, cold-blooded murder. Out of the acrid smoke of gunpowder still hanging in the air, he rose, cried out a promise never forgotten.

The Trailsman they began to call him all across the West: searcher, scout, hunter, the man who could see where others only looked, his skills for hire but not his soul, the man who lived each day to the fullest, yet trailed each tomorrow. Skye Fargo, the Trailsman, the seeker who could take the wildness of a land and the wanting of a woman and make them his own.

Deep in the Missouri backwoods, 1861—where hate and greed pit brother against brother and sister against sister.

1

There were only two things in life Skye Fargo liked as much as a good card game. One was a willing filly and the other was the warm feeling in his gut from good whiskey. At the moment he was enjoying all three. As the locals in Missouri might say, he was in hog heaven.

Fargo was on the steamboat Yancy, a side-wheeler plying its way up the broad Mississippi River toward the small town of Hannibal. He had sat in on a poker game early that afternoon and now it was ten at night and he was on a winning streak that he hoped would continue a good long while. Perched on his lap was a dove called Sweetpea and at his elbow sat a half-empty bottle of the best whiskey the Yancy served.

Fargo took another swallow, smacked his lips in satisfaction, and then lightly smacked Sweetpea on her rounded backside. “Stick with me, gal, and this will be a night you won’t forget.”

“Where have I heard that before?” Sweetpea giggled and fluttered her long eyelashes. She had a full bosom and a slim waist and lips as red and full as ripe strawberries. Her hair was a lustrous burgundy and hung to her shoulders in curls.

Fargo smacked her again, harder. That giggle of hers irritated him. It had a nasal quality, as if she were giggling out her nose instead of her mouth, and made him think of a goose being strangled. She did it a lot. Her voluptuous body more than made up for the annoyance, but if she giggled less he would be happier. And it wasn’t as if she was the only irritation. The other was a man named Baxter, a weasel with a needle-thin mustache and a derby who fancied himself a professional gambler and had been needling the other players the whole day. Fargo was growing tired of being needled.

“Are you going to bet or sit there fondling that cow?” Baxter now demanded.

Sweetpea stiffened. “Here now. There’s no call for insults.”

“Tell that to that slab of muscle you’ve attached yourself to,” the gambler replied. “If everyone put on the same show he does when he goes to bet, poker games would last weeks.”

The three other players shifted uneasily in their chairs. They had grown tired of his carping, too.

Fargo sat perfectly still. He was a big man, broad of shoulder, and he packed more hard muscle on his frame than most. It came from the life he led. His buckskins marked him for what he was—a frontiersman. He also wore a white hat nearly brown with dust, a red bandanna around his throat, and boots that had seen a lot of wear. On his hip was a Colt, in a hidden sheath in his boot an Arkansas toothpick. He kept his beard neatly trimmed and had what a lady once described as “the most piercing lake blue eyes this side of creation.” Now he raised those eyes to meet the gambler’s and the lake blue became glacier cold. “For such a little runt you sure do run off at the mouth.”

Now it was Baxter who stiffened. He wore a frock coat that might conceal all sorts of things and during the game had held his left forearm on the table in a way that suggested to Fargo he had something up his sleeve. A hideout, most likely. “I don’t like that kind of talk.”

“Then you shouldn’t go around insulting folks.” Fargo added chips to the pot. “I raise you, you little peckerwood.”

Baxter grew red in the face. He was short, not much over five feet, and about as wide as a broom handle. “Keep it up.”

Fargo gripped Sweetpea by the arm and pulled her off his lap. She frowned but didn’t object. Standing, he lowered his hand so it brushed his Colt. “I am tired of your guff. Shut up or show you have sand.”

The other players pushed back their chairs.

Baxter glowered. He glanced at Fargo’s Colt and shifted slightly so his left arm was pointed at Fargo. “You don’t want to rile me.”

“I’m plumb scared.”

“I mean it. Ask anyone here. I have a reputation.”

“Makes two of us.”

“Is that so? Just who the hell are you, anyway? I’ve said my name but I don’t recollect you ever saying yours.”

“It’s Skye Fargo.”

The gambler blinked and started to smirk as if he thought it was a jest; then he gave a start and the red in his cheeks drained to a pasty chalk. “I think I’ve heard of you.”

“Could be,” Fargo allowed. The damn newspapers were always writing about him.

Another player said, “I sure have. You’re the one who killed those outlaws a while back. The ones that robbed that stage. I read where you went up against twenty of them armed with just your bowie and your pistols.”

Fargo didn’t own a bowie. He wore one revolver, not two. And there had been four cutthroats, not twenty.

Baxter looked sick. He had broken out in a sweat and his fingers were twitching. “You’re that Fargo?”

Fargo didn’t answer.

The other players were staring at the gambler as they would a man about to step up on a gallows. Baxter’s