The Trailsman #388 (4 page)

“Well, now,” Fargo greeted her, tipping his hat. “I hope you're the welcoming committee. It's hard to believe a gal can wear burlap and look as good as you do.”

“Burlap chafes a mite,” she replied. “Whenever I can I just go naked.”

She gave him an inviting smile and Fargo felt a tickle of loin heat. The girl was around twenty with Prussian blue eyes, thick, luxuriant, burnt-sienna hair and soft, full lips like cherries ready to be plucked.

“My lands!” she exclaimed after peering closer at him. “It appears that you were recently caught in a fire. Your beard and eyebrows are singed—your hat and clothing, too. I hope you weren't badly hurt.”

“Got drunk and rolled into my campfire,” Fargo lied. “Looks like you folks have some nice fields growing here.”

She beamed proudly. “Yes, thanks to the river. We are con- tinuing the Brook Farm tradition.”

“Brook Farm?” Fargo repeated politely while keeping his eyes on the surroundings. “I never heard of the Brook family.”

“Not the Brook family, silly. It was an agricultural commune named after a nearby brook. It was very famous.”

“I never heard of it,” Fargo admitted. “I don't get around too many newspapers.”

“You've not heard of it? Goodness, you must be a true hermit! It was a wonderful community that started in Massachusetts in 1841. Many famous people joined. Even Nathaniel Hawthorne lived there for a time.”

“Him I've heard of,” Fargo said. “So these folks were farmers, huh?”

Her voice grew excited and took on the reverent tone of true believers. “Oh, it was much more than just farming. It was a self-sustaining community. Everyone shared equally in the work and in the pay. And all members were equal. All property was shared and violence abolished.”

Fargo struggled to keep a straight face. “Seems like you should've gone there instead of this desert that you have to irrigate. Mighty pretty country in Massachusetts. You folks sure don't look like you're from around here.”

“I'm from Hannibal, Missouri. My birth name is Carrie Stanton, but my rebirth name is Peace Child. I couldn't live at Brook Farm, goose, because the main buildings burned down and the community disbanded when I was still a little girl. We call our group here the Phalanx and we make up about half the residents of Tierra Seca.”

“Peace Child,” Fargo repeated. “Now that's a nice name.”

He was lying through his teeth and biting his lip to keep from laughing in her face. He had nothing against farming or peace, but
rebirth
name
? This gal was a bigger fool than God made her, but He was mighty kind to her otherwise. She had the face of an angel, the body of a courtesan, and the seductive smile and eyes of a wanton.

“You share
everything
?” he hinted.

She caught his drift and her eyes fixated with fascination on the pup tent in his trousers.

“Everything,”
she assured him, her voice suddenly throaty. “We do not suppress our desires, and we have abolished jealousy and possessiveness. We view our bodies as vessels of pleasure.”

“Well, in that case—”

“Peace Child!”

Fargo glanced behind the girl, who whirled around as a man, also dressed in the ridiculous commune garb, approached them.

“A rest break hasn't been called,” he told the girl while watching Fargo from suspicious eyes.

“I just stopped to chat for a minute. This gent is—”

She paused, looking a question at Fargo. “Why, I don't know your name.”

“Fargo. Skye Fargo.”

“Well! Skye is a mighty pretty name. Skye, this is Ripley Parker.”

“My rebirth name,” he reminded her, “is Justice. Our old names belong to the venal, violent, greedy world we left behind.”

The man spoke with a soft Virginia drawl, but Fargo suspected there was nothing soft about him or his commanding manner. His obsidian eyes burned with the intensity of men who brooked no defiance, and those lumps of scar tissue around them betokened the violent world he had just claimed to repudiate. So did his nose, which had obviously been broken at least twice.

“The others are working diligently,” he told Carrie. “You should be too.”

“I'm just curious,” Fargo said in his amiable manner. “Peace Child here just told me no one's in charge in this Phalanx doohickey of yours. Seems to me you're being a mite bossy . . . Justice.”

“Justice is our spiritual leader,” Carrie Stanton explained. “We don't believe in the Christian God, but we believe there is spirituality in nature. Anyhow, hope I'll see you around, Skye,” she added in a tone of unmistakable invitation.

The “spiritual leader” turned and followed her back into the field.

“Interesting,” Fargo muttered.

Fargo, drawing plenty of curious and hostile stares, moved carefully around the flyblown settlement until he was certain the outlaw trio were nowhere around. Then he made his way toward the largest adobe building. Several horses and two burros were tied off out front including a well-muscled roan gelding he recognized immediately.

He looped the Ovaro's reins around a crooked snorting post out front and stepped through a doorless arch into a bare-bones cantina that smelled like a bear's cave. He spotted Santiago Valdez eating tortillas and beans at a crude plank counter.

“How's the leg?” Fargo greeted him.

“Hurts like hell. I had trouble with it seeping blood until I took your advice and got some beef tallow from Antonio here. I packed the hole good and it's sealed up tight now.”

Fargo glanced around the smoky, dark interior. About a dozen men, most of them Mexican and mestizo, were seated at crude deal tables. They sized him up from caged eyes. One met Fargo's gaze and then contemptuously spat on the packed-dirt floor.

“Friendly place,” Fargo remarked. His eyes lingered on a dusky, voluptuous Mexican beauty seated at a corner table with an older woman. She gave Fargo a beguiling smile, but her dark, dangerous eyes watched him with something more intense than flirtatiousness.

“Keep your eyes to all sides or they'll shoot you in the back,” Valdez said cheerfully, mopping up the last of his chili beans with a flap of tortilla.

The round-faced proprietor, dressed in dirty white linen and a straw Sonora hat, nodded at Fargo from the other side of the counter.

“Fargo, meet Antonio Two Moons. Besides owning this—how you say?—thriving establishment, he makes and peddles whiskey to Indians. He's also a good barber. Maybe he can trim that burned beard of yours.”

“
Una
copa
, senor?” Two Moons asked Fargo.

Fargo nodded. He knew these dusty borderland watering holes never served beer, always his first choice. But the milky cactus liquor called pulque went down smoothly and gave a man a pleasant jolt.

Fargo also knew the ritual when ordering a first drink, and he drank his wooden cup to the dregs without pause. Now he was free to sip the second cup at his own pace.

Antonio Two Moons watched him expectantly, as did several others. Fargo pressed a fist into his sternum, emitting a loud belch and reducing some of the tension in the room. Not to do so, in a poor establishment like this, was construed as an insult to the host.

“I see you know the customs,” Valdez remarked.

“Yeah, but there's still a helluva lot I don't know about. Why don't you enlighten me?”

Valdez's quick-darting eyes shifted away. His lips twitched in what Fargo guessed was a smile. “
Vaya,
hombre.
What can I tell the famous Trailsman?”

Fargo kept his voice low. “For starters, you can tell me what the hell's going on around here. A couple days ago an explosion damn near puts me on the moon and changes the international border. Not long after, you and me almost get shot to rag tatters. Today the same demented jackals jump me again. Now that hot little senyoreeter in the corner appears to be spying on me—or maybe us. Top of all that, there's a bunch of moon-crazy, peace-preaching utopian mush brains hereabouts led by a man who looks about as peaceful as a scalp dance.”

Valdez nodded. “So, you met Ripley Parker. . . . I see that the two of us size him up about the same.” Valdez added a sly grin. “Did you also . . . ‘meet' Peace Child?”

Fargo grinned back. “You too, huh? She's a mite strange but seems willing. I take it you know her in the Biblical sense?”

“Haven't had the chance. Parker watches her like a dog with a bone.”

“Dogs are easy to kick. Look, I s'pose it's just a coincidence that I tail three killers to this roach pit and find you here, too?”

“
Quien
sabe?
You did a good job in that shoot-out this morning. I had you down for a dead man. Looks like those newspaper sissies aren't just chewing their lips when they talk you up big.”

Fargo stared at him. “You mean you watched it? Thank you all to hell and back for pitching into the game.”

“You didn't need me. Your guts were showing all over the place.”

“Yeah, they damn near were,” Fargo shot back sarcastically.

“I would've helped if you required it,” Valdez assured him. “This one time. I owe you that much for the surgery you did on my leg.”

“All right. If you figure you owe me, then tell me who they are and who hired them.”

“That ship has sailed, Fargo. You can ask me questions until you're blue in the face. I got nothing to say.”

The Mexican girl was still watching Fargo with unrelenting vigilance.

Valdez pushed away from the counter and hitched up his gun belt with its two odd-looking, experimental revolvers Valdez claimed were double action—a claim Fargo had trouble believing. He clapped on his sombrero.

“Actually,” he said, “I
will
tell you something that you've already guessed. I don't give a damn about those three men. And you shouldn't either unless you want to get your life over in a hurry.”

“For a man who doesn't give a damn about them you sure seem to be glomming them mighty close.”

“You've already guessed right about that, too. They're just the bread crumbs that I have to follow. Fargo, you're dancing on a powder keg.”

“And you aren't?”

“I have a good reason. A damn good reason—the best in the world. You've just got a long nose. Point your bridle away from the border while you're still above the horizon.”

He walked out before Fargo could reply. The moment Valdez stepped outside, the pretty Mexican girl with the trouble-seeking eyes got up to join Fargo.

“
Buenas
tardes
, Senor Fargo.”

She looked even better close up. But the haughty beauty's pursed lips were twisted in obvious scorn.

“You have the advantage on me, Senorita . . . ?”

“Velasquez. Rosario Velasquez.”

“Pleased, I guess. You seem to have a great interest in me”

“
Por
qué
no? You are much man.”

“Uh-huh. But your interest in me doesn't seem like the type a much man should welcome.”

She tossed back her head and laughed—a silvery smooth, rippling laugh that moved up and down the bumps of Fargo's spine on tiny, tickling feet.

“Oh, but I am much woman, too,
verdad
?”

“Very true,” Fargo agreed.

“Some say you ride with Santiago Valdez. Is this so?”

“What if it is true?”

“Entonces, eres un muerto.”

Fargo's scratch Spanish was good enough to translate that one: “Then you are a dead man.” Two warnings, back to back, predicting Fargo's imminent death. He was glad he wasn't a squeamish man.

“You're much woman, all right,” Fargo said. “But there are female scorpions, too.”

Again that silvery laugh that sent tingles through Fargo's groin. “Good. I see that we understand each other.”

Fargo snatched his hat off the plank bar. “Lady,” he assured her before he walked out, “there ain't a
damn
thing around here that I understand.”

•   •   •

Only a few hours after Fargo was in Tierra Seca being mysteriously warned by Rosario Velasquez, businessman's agent Harlan Perry conferred with his employer in El Paso's Del Norte Arms hotel.

“The initial steps at my end,” said mining kingpin Stanley Winslowe, “have gone quite well. The governor of Chihuahua was quite happy with the, ah, inducement I gave him.”

“I trust it wasn't a lump sum,” Perry said. “I've dealt with Torres before. He's more or less reliable so long as the carrot is kept dangling in front of his nose. But he burned me once when I was ignorant enough to pay him everything in advance.”

Winslowe chuckled. He was a portly, balding man with a gold-chain monocle and salt-and-pepper muttonchop whiskers. His elegant tailoring disguised a shabby morality.

“Don't worry, Harlan. I've dealt with these greasers before. I made it clear that the initial payment will be repeated every month so long as my operation is pulling ore out of those ridges.”

Perry nodded. “Well played. Given the constant revolutionary fever in Mexico and the extraordinary weakness of their federal government it should be safe enough for you. Chihuahua is essentially Juan Torres's private little fiefdom.”

Winslowe poured himself another glass of scotch and rolled a sip around in his mouth. His luxurious hotel suite featured textured walls and heavy teak furnishings.

“Oh, he'll eventually try to put the crusher on me,” he said. “And the U.S. government might butt in at some point. But my engineer tells me the veins under those ridges are dense and high yielding. It won't take that long to mine plenty of high-grade ore. Even if they eventually haze me out, I'll have millions in the banks back east.”

The smug satisfaction on Winslowe's face gave way to a frown as a possible irritant occurred to him. “But what's this about this drifter Skye Fargo? Do you really believe he could make trouble?”

“Making trouble is his hallmark. At this point, however, I consider him a volatile unknown quantity. He's put himself into the mix, and he'll have to be killed as soon as possible.”

“If he's the fiddle-footed drifter you claim he is, perhaps he'll soon just move on. I hear the man is a bunch quitter.”

“That's my understanding, too,” Perry replied. “But there's a complicating factor, and his moving on may not be enough.”

Winslowe waited expectantly for a few moments and then narrowed his eyes. “Well?” he demanded. “Is there a chicken bone caught in your throat?”

“It's this way, Mr. Winslowe. You may have arranged things with Governor Torres, but the U.S. Army is a horse of a different color. And Fargo has valuable acquaintances in the army.”

“If it comes to that, I happen to know you've paid off several high-ranking officers in the past.”

Perry nodded. “Yes, even many West Point men often prefer the color gold over red, white and blue.”

“Then why the long face?”

“The commander at the nearest fort, Colonel Josiah Evans at Fort Union, is one of these straight-and-narrow types who is pathologically law abiding. I know that from rueful personal experience—he had me indicted once for attempted bribery. Fortunately for me, the judge in the case
was
corruptible.”

Winslowe, not liking the drift of this conversation, pushed out of his overstuffed easy chair and began pacing the spacious room.

“You've got good men on the payroll,” he pointed out. “Look how professionally they handled the blast. Don't you have confidence in them?”

“I'm confident they're very good, yes. But I learned long ago to respect a worthy enemy. Deuce Ulrick and his men have clashed twice with Fargo to no avail. Just today I had to purchase a new horse for Ulrick—Fargo killed his mount this morning.”

Winslowe interrupted his pacing to stare at his subordinate. “I don't like what I'm hearing, Harlan. We need to get moving on this second operation at Tierra Seca. If it's done quickly enough, no one can easily prove that the Rio Grande didn't simply jump its channel naturally at two locations more or less simultaneously. It has done that before.”

“Yes, but Tierra Seca poses a problem the first blast didn't—the settlement there hugs the river and there will be people killed, many of them Americans.”

“People? Stuff! The dregs of humanity, you mean. No one will miss them or give a damn about them. As for any survivors, they will simply move on to some other filthy sewer. But we can't have a loose cannon like Skye Fargo gumming up the works.”

Perry hadn't told his boss about a second loose cannon named Santiago Valdez, nor did he plan to. It was Perry's job to eliminate problems, not create them. And he had definitely created a huge one in Valdez.

“Fargo must be eradicated,” Perry agreed. “And while I believe our own men can do the job, I also believe that the best way to hit the mark is to aim above it. I've sent word up to Taos.”

Winslowe's brow furrowed in puzzlement. “Taos? Why? I don't—”

Winslowe suddenly caught on and an ashen pallor suffused his face. “You don't mean—?”

“No names,” Perry hastened to cut him off. “You'll have nothing to do with it.”

Winslowe was forced to return to his chair. He sat down heavily and removed a handkerchief from his inside coat pocket, mopping his brow.

“Christ, Harlan. I know we face a problem. But you-know-who is a dog off his leash—a
mad
dog. I assume you recall what he did in central Texas?”

Harlan Perry did indeed recall that incident, and who could ever forget it? A Texas prosecutor and former Texas Ranger with a stubborn streak of honesty in him had threatened to shut down several of Winslowe's mines for graft and other charges. Mankiller had removed that thorn, all right—along with his wife and three children, two of them still infants.

“Harlan,” Winslowe added in a voice just above a whisper, “he
ate
their damn hearts!”

Perry nodded, his bespectacled, professorial face grim.

“That's because he has strange ideas derived from some sort of pagan witchcraft,” he explained to his employer.

“Who the hell cares why? The cause is secret, but the effect is known. If he goes off the rails again, he could sink us both—sink us six feet closer to hell.”

“Without question,” Perry conceded. “Remember, he's only our ace in the hole. I spoke at length with his handler—the only man with some influence over him. I emphatically insisted that there cannot be a repeat of that Texas situation. Also remember, Mr. Winslowe, that Deuce and the others are on the job. Only if they fail will I unleash the final option. One thing is certain: The man from Taos has never failed.”