11
Fargo regained consciousness less than a minute later, although he didn’t know at the moment that such a short period of time had passed. He heard shooting and shouting. Hoofbeats hammered on the ground somewhere close by. He forced himself to roll onto his hands and knees, and groped for his Colt as he struggled to stand up.
A strong hand gripped his arm and helped him to his feet. ‘‘You all right, Mr. Fargo?’’ Jimmy asked. ‘‘I hope so, ’cause here they come again!’’
Fargo looked up and saw that the gunmen were once again charging toward them, just as Jimmy had said.
‘‘It’s gonna be a real battle,’’ the young man went on. ‘‘Just like when Joaquin and Three-Fingered Jack shot it out with the rangers!’’
‘‘I’d just as soon not wind up with my head in a jar,’’ Fargo said as he lifted his Colt. ‘‘Let ’em have it!’’
Standing shoulder to shoulder in the road, he and Jimmy opened fire as bullets kicked up dust around their feet. Jimmy had to be scared, but he didn’t show it. He seemed cool and collected as he squeezed off shot after shot from his old pistol. Fargo took his time, too, aiming before he pulled the trigger each time. Clouds of powder smoke rolled over them, stinging their noses and half blinding them.
But Fargo was able to hear the angry yell from one of the bushwhackers. ‘‘Damn it, let’s get out of here! The bastards are shootin’ us to ribbons!’’
‘‘Split up!’’ Fargo told Jimmy. ‘‘Head for the trees and reload, in case they come back!’’
With his head pounding, he picked up his hat, ran into the shelter of the trees to his right, and began reloading the Colt, which he had emptied at the attackers. He had to pause to wipe blood out of his right eye, where it had dripped from the cut on the side of his head while he was unconscious. The bullet that had struck him barely grazed him, a mere kiss, but that had been enough to knock him out of the saddle and make him lose consciousness for a moment. Fargo was confident that it hadn’t done any permanent damage, though.
He closed the Colt’s cylinder and peered along the trail. The bushwhackers had fled. He saw no sign of them. But that didn’t mean they weren’t lurking somewhere close by, waiting for another chance to try to kill him and his companions.
‘‘Mr. Fargo, are you all right?’’ Jimmy called from the other side of the trail. ‘‘I know you were hit by one of those shots.’’
‘‘Just a scratch, Jimmy,’’ Fargo assured him. ‘‘I may have a headache tomorrow, but it takes more than that to dent this thick skull of mine.’’ Fargo looked the other way along the trail. The stagecoach and the spare horses were out of sight, too. ‘‘You shouldn’t have come back to help me. I was counting on you to stay with the coach.’’
‘‘Shoot, when I saw you fall, I couldn’t just leave you. And them fellas might’ve trampled you if I hadn’t come back.’’
Fargo gave a grim chuckle. ‘‘They might have, at that. I’m much obliged to you, Jimmy.’’
‘‘My pleasure. Now I can say I fought side by side with the famous Trailsman.’’
Fargo wasn’t sure just how great an honor that really was, but he let it pass. He said, ‘‘You didn’t just let the spare horses go, did you?’’
‘‘Nope, I managed to throw the lead rope to Angie, and she hung out the window and tied it to the rail on top of the coach. She’s a mighty brave girl, as well as bein’ mighty pretty.’’
Fargo couldn’t argue with either of those things. ‘‘Where’s your saddle horse?’’
‘‘He ran off into the woods. I reckon he was scared, what with all the shootin’ goin’ on. Your stallion went with him.’’
Fargo nodded, not surprised by what the young man had just told him. He whistled, and a moment later the Ovaro emerged from the trees, driving the other horse in front of him with an occasional nip at the animal’s rump. Fargo figured that the stallion had gotten out of the line of fire. Now that the shooting was over, the Ovaro came back and brought Jimmy’s horse with him.
The men stepped out into the trail, grabbed the reins, and swung up into their saddles. ‘‘Let’s go see if we can find that stagecoach,’’ Fargo said.
Sandy had done like Fargo told him and taken the trail that led to the settlement of Monterey and San Carlos Borroméo, sometimes known as Mission Carmel. The trail twisted through the pine-covered mountains that ran almost all the way to the ocean before dropping off in a series of spectacular cliffs. The rugged terrain slowed the stagecoach enough so that Fargo and Jimmy were able to catch up to it before it reached the seaside settlement of Monterey.
‘‘Jimmy!’’ Angie called from the window of the coach as she looked back along the trail and saw them coming. She stuck an arm out and gave them an enthusiastic wave that Jimmy returned with equal enthusiasm.
Sandy slowed the coach to a stop and let Fargo and Jimmy ride up alongside it. Belinda saw the dried blood on the side of Fargo’s face and exclaimed, ‘‘Skye, you’re hurt!’’
‘‘Just a scratch,’’ the Trailsman assured her, ‘‘nothing to worry about.’’
‘‘Those were Stoddard’s men who ambushed us, weren’t they?’’ Grayson said.
Fargo nodded. ‘‘I’m pretty sure I saw that hombre Elam, who was working for Stoddard down in Los Angeles. The others were probably gunmen he picked up on the way up here. There are plenty of men in California who are handy with a Colt and willing to use it for the right price.’’
‘‘What are we going to do now? We can’t go back the way we had planned, can we?’’
‘‘No, they’ll be laying for us that way,’’ Fargo said with a shake of his head. ‘‘But that’s not the only trail to San Francisco. We’ll go on to Monterey and stick close to the coast.’’
Grayson’s forehead furrowed in a worried frown. ‘‘That’s going to be an awfully rough trail. It’s not the way I’d normally take a stagecoach.’’
‘‘It’s not the way I’d go, either,’’ Fargo agreed, ‘‘but Stoddard’s bushwhackers sort of changed the rules of this game. I know we were supposed to follow the best route, but now it’s a matter of just getting to San Francisco alive, so you can prove that a stagecoach can make it through. Once you’ve done that, you can change the route later if you want to.’’
Grayson nodded in acceptance of Fargo’s reasoning. ‘‘You’re right, of course. The important thing is making it through alive. So it’s on to Monterey?’’
‘‘On to Monterey,’’ Fargo said.
They reached the settlement just as the sun was dipping below the surface of the ocean to the west, painting the clouds and the sky in an awe-inspiring display of colors. The picturesque houses of Monterey, with their mixture of Spanish and American architecture, the darkly looming, pine-covered hills, the vast ocean and the endlessly crashing waves . . . it all combined to make as pretty a scene as Fargo had witnessed in quite some time.
They stopped at a hotel with a red-tiled roof, built around a central plaza with a fountain. Fargo reckoned the place had been there ever since Spanish explorers had settled the area many years earlier.
The stagecoach’s arrival was unexpected, but the travelers received a hearty welcome anyway. The hotel owner wanted to know if the coach would be making a regular run through Monterey in the future. Grayson hedged on answering that. The main line wouldn’t run through here, Fargo thought . . . but Grayson might want to consider setting up a feeder line to give people more access to the coast.
While the others were tending to the horses and getting settled in the hotel, Fargo went in search of a doctor. He was pretty sure his head was all right, but it wouldn’t hurt anything to have a medico take a look at the wound.
The sawbones he found was an elderly Mexican named Zapata. The man fussed at Fargo as he cleaned the wound. ‘‘You should not go around getting shot at,’’ Zapata complained. ‘‘Young men are too reckless.’’
‘‘It wasn’t my idea to have to duck some flying lead,’’ Fargo told him. ‘‘Anyway,’’ he added with a smile, ‘‘I’ll bet in your day you did a few reckless things.’’
Zapata gave a dignified sniff and said, ‘‘I prefer not to think about such things.’’ Memory overtook him, though, and he grinned. ‘‘Perhaps you are right, senor.’’
Once the dried blood had been cleaned away and Zapata had examined the wound, he announced that it would not require stitches.
‘‘I will bandage the wound to keep it clean, but other than that, everything should be fine.’’ The old man leaned closer to Fargo. ‘‘Let me see your eyes.’’
Fargo met the doctor’s gaze. Zapata studied his eyes for a few moments and then gave a satisfied grunt.
‘‘They look fine. No injury to your brain, in my opinion. You are a lucky man, Senor Fargo. An inch or two to the side, as they say . . .’’ The doctor’s shoulders rose and fell in an expressive shrug.
‘‘Yeah, but an inch or two the other way and it would have missed me,’’ Fargo pointed out with a smile.
‘‘One could look at it like that,’’ Zapata admitted as he finished wrapping a bandage around Fargo’s head so that the bullet crease was covered. ‘‘The bill for my services will be one dollar, American.’’
Fargo paid Zapata and then put his hat on, being careful how he did it. The hat covered the bandage for the most part and didn’t hurt his head too much. Fargo left the doctor’s office and headed back to the hotel.
It was a gracious place, and despite his slight headache,he enjoyed the supper that the group had in the dining room. As they ate, Arthur Grayson asked, ‘‘Will we still make San Francisco tomorrow?’’
‘‘Hard to say,’’ Fargo replied. ‘‘If we follow the coastline around Monterey Bay, we can hit the Old Mission Trail again at Santa Cruz. From there it’ll be a pretty straight shot on up the peninsula to San Francisco. Whether or not we make it tomorrow depends on how rough the trail is between here and Santa Cruz . . . and whether we run into any more trouble along the way.’’
‘‘Oh, we’ll run into trouble,’’ Grayson said. ‘‘Hiram Stoddard’s not going to give up at this point. He’ll do whatever it takes to stop me from beating him.’’
Fargo thought that was pretty likely, too.
Jimmy and Angie were still making eyes at each other. Angie thought it was very brave of Jimmy to have gone back to help Fargo like that. Fargo pointed out that Jimmy might well have saved his life. The young man blushed and muttered and acted embarrassed, but it was clear that he enjoyed the attention.
Maybe when the time came for Jimmy to return to Los Angeles, Angie would go with him, Fargo thought. That might just be the best solution all the way around.
The night watch was split into four shifts, with Fargo, Grayson, Sandy, and Jimmy each taking a turn. Fargo had the first watch tonight, so he took his Sharps and walked down the street to the wagon yard where the stagecoach had been parked. The teams were in the stable next door.
Nothing happened during Fargo’s shift. Grayson showed up on schedule, and Fargo told him that all was quiet.
‘‘It won’t stay that way,’’ Grayson said with a pessimistic scowl. He took a cigar from his vest pocket and clamped it between his teeth, leaving it there unlit.
Fargo returned to the hotel. When he reached his room upstairs, he was surprised to find one of the servants there pouring hot water from a bucket into a large tub that was already mostly full.
‘‘I didn’t order a bath,’’ Fargo said with a frown.
The servant, a stout Mexican woman, just shrugged and said, ‘‘I was told to prepare it, senor. Perhaps it was a mistake and was supposed to be in some other room. But the tub is here and full of hot water. Perhaps you should enjoy the blessings of good fortune.’’
Fargo couldn’t argue with that. He gave the woman a coin and sent her on her way, then started stripping off his dusty buckskins.
When he was naked, he stepped into the tub, wincing a little at the feel of the hot water. He grimaced even more as he lowered himself into it. His body was still sore and covered with bruises from the fracas with Jarlberg back at Los Olivos. Those bruises all twinged as the hot water hit them.
But then, as the heat washed through Fargo, the aches and pains began to ease. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. A delicious feeling of languor enveloped him. After a few minutes like that, he didn’t hurt at all, not even his wounded head.
Fargo knew that some people considered regular baths to be unhealthful. At the same time, hot springs like the ones down at Paso Robles were always popular. This tub wasn’t full of minerals like hot springs were, but the heat soothed away Fargo’s worries anyway.
Under the circumstances, he could have been forgiven if he hadn’t noticed the door of his room opening. But he did notice, and his eyes were open and the Colt he had placed on a chair beside the tub was ready in his hand by the time the door swung open.
‘‘Skye, I thought you’d be glad to see me,’’ Belinda said with a pout.
‘‘Oh, I am,’’ Fargo told her as he smiled and placed the gun back on the chair. Understanding dawned on him. ‘‘You’re the one who ordered this tub for me, aren’t you?’’
She wore the thin silk robe that clung to her enticing curves. Fargo hadn’t been able to tell what color it was before, because of the darkness in the farmer’s hut. Now, in the light of the lamp that was trimmed low on the bedside table, he saw that the garment was a deep forest green. It looked beautiful on her, and she definitely looked beautiful in it.
But she looked even more beautiful when she untied the belt, shrugged out of the robe, let it fall around her feet, and stood nude before him.
‘‘Is there room in there for me?’’ she murmured.
‘‘I don’t know,’’ Fargo told her. ‘‘Why don’t you find out?’’
She came over to him and stepped daintily into the tub. ‘‘It’s hot,’’ she said as her foot touched the water.
From where he was sitting, looking up at her with one leg raised to step into the tub, he could only agree with her. Hot, indeed.
She eased down into the water, saying, ‘‘Ooohhh,’’ as she sank into the heat. It was pretty cramped in the tub with both of them in it, but neither of them minded being pressed together. Belinda moved her legs so that they were around Fargo’s hips. She sat on his thighs. His manhood jutted up between them, stiff as a bar of iron.