Fargo’s belly. But Fargo was ready. Shifting, he plunged the toothpick to the hilt in the base of Perkins’ throat, then leaped back.
Blood spurted from the wound and gushed from Perkins’ mouth. He staggered, tripped, and crashed down. A few convulsions and it was all over.
The thunderous discharge of a shotgun reminded Fargo of the battle being waged all around him. Harvey was dead, drilled through the forehead. A woman had been shot through the heart. One of Rinson’s men flopped madly about with part of his face missing.
Fargo scooped up his Colt. As he spun, lead blistered his ear. Rinson was still in the saddle, and took deliberate aim. Fargo was quicker. His hands a blur, he fired from the hip, fanning the hammer. Holes appeared in Rinson’s face, in his neck, in his chest.
A blow to the shoulder jarred Fargo to his marrow. He swiveled to find Slag holding a rifle by the barrel, about to swing again. Fargo brought up the Colt, or tried to. His arm wouldn’t rise as it should. He was much too slow, and about to have his brains bashed out.
It was then that Martha Winston materialized out of the swirl of gun smoke, a double-barreled shotgun in her hands. She let Slag have both barrels full in the face.
Silence abruptly fell. Fargo’s ears rang as he slowly surveyed the slaughter. There was no other word for it.
Blasted, bleeding bodies were everywhere. Victor Gore was dead. All the killers had fallen; Rinson, Perkins, Slag, Larson, Stern, all dead, dead, dead, dead. There wasn’t a farmer left standing, either. Lester, Harvey, every last one of them, and the women who had helped them, all blown to hell. Only Martha was left, Martha, and the women and children at the other side of the circle.
“I tried to warn you,” Fargo said to the still form of her husband.
A sob escaped Martha. “Dear Lord, no,” she said, and shuffled over to Rachel. “Not her, too.”
“She saved my life,” Fargo said, but he doubted that Martha heard him. Tears trickling down her cheeks, she uttered a loud sob and sank to her knees.
“Not my girl. Please, not my girl.”
Fargo’s Henry lay partially under Stern, the brass receiver spattered with red drops. Fargo tugged it loose.
Martha stared at him, her eyes pits of horror. “It’s not as I thought, is it? All my life, and it’s not as I thought.”
“It never is,” Fargo said.
There wasn’t much more.
Fargo offered to take the survivors to Fort Bridger. Martha wanted to bury the dead, but Fargo was anxious to get everyone out of there before the Nez Perce found them. He looked back only once—the sky was thick with buzzards.
Fargo told himself he wasn’t going to, but he did. From Fort Bridger he headed straight back to the canyon. He intended to help himself to some of the gold and then treat himself to wild nights of whiskey, women and cards. But the sacks were gone. Every last one. Either the Nez Perce had found them, or Gore and Rinson hid them before heading for the valley and their date with death.
As for the O’Flynns, the family Fargo was searching for when the whole ordeal started, it turned out they had made it to Oregon, after all. The father paid Fargo for finding them, and Fargo promptly sought out the nearest watering hole.
He had a lot of forgetting to do.
LOOKING FORWARD!
The following is the opening
section from the next novel in the exciting
THE TRAILSMAN #328 TEXAS TRIGGERS
The sun was killing him.
It hung at its zenith, a blazing yellow furnace. For weeks now, west Texas had been scorched by relentless heat. The land baked, the vegetation withered, the wild-life suffered. It was the worst summer anyone could remember in the desert country west of the Pecos River.
That included Skye Fargo. He had been through Texas before, plenty of times, and he had never experienced heat like this. Heat so hot, his skin felt as if it were on fire. With each breath, he inhaled flame into his lungs. Squinting up at the cause, Fargo summed up his sentiments with a single, bitter “Damn.”
His horse was suffering, too. The Ovaro was as good a mount as a man could ask for. It had stamina to spare, but the merciless heat had boiled its strength away to where the stallion plodded along with its head hung low, so weary and worn that Fargo had commenced to worry. Which was why he was walking and leading the stallion by the reins.
Any man stranded afoot in that country had one foot in the grave. Any man except an Apache.
The Mescaleros had roamed that region since anyone could remember. Tempered by the forge of adversity, they prowled in search of prey. The heat didn’t affect their iron constitutions. And, too, they knew all the secret water holes and tanks. They thrived where most whites would perish.
Most, but not all. The harsh land of cactus, mesquite and limestone rock was home to scattered settlers. Isolated valleys amid the maze of canyons and plateaus where pockets of green against the backdrop of brown. But not this summer. Now most of those green valleys were as brown as everything else.
It was just Fargo’s luck to be passing through after delivering a dispatch to Fort Davis. He was on his own, and headed for cooler climes. The sun, though, was doing its best to roast him and the Ovaro alive, and it was close to succeeding.
Fargo stopped and gazed out over the bleak, blistered landscape. He licked his cracked lips. Or tried to. His mouth was as dry as the rest of him, and he had no spit to spare. He glanced back at the Ovaro. “Hold on, boy. I’ll find us water if it’s the last thing I do.”
It might well be.
Broad of shoulder and narrow of waist, Skye Fargo was all muscle and whipcord. He wore buckskins and boots and a white hat made brown by dust. Around his neck was a splash of color: a red bandanna. At his hip hung a Colt. In an ankle sheath inside his boot was an Arkansas toothpick. From the saddle jutted the stock of a Henry rifle.
At first glance, Fargo looked no different from most frontiersmen. But he had more experience in the wild than any ten of them put together. In his travels he had been most everywhere, seen most everything. He’d lived with Indians and knew their ways. In short, if any white could make it through that country, Fargo could.
Or so he thought when he started out. Now he wasn’t so sure.
Fargo tried to swallow, and couldn’t. He ran a hand across his hot brow and was surprised at how little sweat there was. He had little moisture left in him. His body was a cloth wrung dry, and unless he found water, and found it soon, his bleached bones would join the many skeletons that already littered the desert.
Fargo had to force his legs to move. A bad sign, that. His body was giving out. The steely sinews that had served him in such good stead had turned traitor and would not do as he wanted unless he lashed them with the whip of his will.
The Ovaro went a short way and abruptly stopped.
Fargo tugged on the reins to keep the pinto moving but it didn’t respond. He turned, and saw that it had its
