The Trailsman #395

Book 395: Trailsman

by Jon Sharpe

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

All it takes is one shot…

When Skye Fargo receives a desperate request for help from his old friend Colonel Durant, he knows something must be very wrong. But when the Trailsman learns that the Lakota and Cheyenne nations are being stirred to bloody war against the whites, he must race against time—and a conniving, deadly foe—to stop a slaughter.

Release date: September 2, 2014

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 176

Sample

ALMOST DEAD DRUNK

SIGNET

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.

Black Hills, Dakota Territory, 1860—where Fargo faces enemies on all sides, and the greatest threat of all may be his allies.

1

If the situation wasn’t so desperate, Skye, I wouldn’t have dispatched a courier to track you down. And if you have one ounce of good sense, you’ll tell me to go to blazes. This isn’t just another routine contract job: it’s a forlorn hope.

Colonel Stanley Durant’s ominous note had plagued Fargo like a toothache since riding out of Chamberlain and following the Missouri River northwest toward Fort Pierre. But one ounce of good sense hadn’t nearly the buying power of one ounce of gold, and right now Fargo was light in both pockets.

It was late afternoon by the time he rode into Fort Pierre, the clear fall air starting to bite and the light of day taking on that mellow richness just before sunset.

It’s a forlorn hope. The description didn’t help Fargo’s mood. He felt weary from his hair to his heels, his ass saddle sore, his belly pinched from hunger. And his mouth was so dry his tongue felt like a dead leaf stuck to the roof of it.

Fort Pierre, he was sorry to note, hadn’t changed much since last time he rode through. A fur-trading post on the Missouri, about one hundred fifty miles east of the Black Hills, it had been purchased a few years back by the U.S. Army. The army had built a dismal garrison above the river, a bonanza for soiled doves, and left the crude frontier trading center intact.

The current trading post was a low, sprawling, one-story structure of cottonwood logs chinked with mud and loopholed for rifles. Fox skins were drying on stretchers outside the door. The westernmost third of the building was a thriving grog-and-flesh shop, and it was here that the Trailsman reined in the Ovaro, swung slowly down and stretched out the trail kinks before he looped the reins around a bark-covered snorting post.

The tall, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped frontiersman was clad in fringed buckskins, some of the fringes dark with old blood. His weather-bronzed face and short-cropped beard were half in shadow under the brim of a dusty white hat with a bullet hole in the crown. He wore a walnut-gripped, single-action Colt revolver holstered to his shell belt and a long, very consequential Arkansas toothpick in a boot sheath.

When he removed his hat to slap the dust from it, the westering sun ignited alert eyes the deep, bottomless blue of a high-mountain lake.

A water casket squatted at one corner of the building. Fargo lifted the top off and let it dangle by its rope tether while he dipped out a few double handfuls to splash his face. He didn’t trust it enough to drink it.

“Maybe some oats tomorrow, old campaigner,” he remarked to his stallion as he loosened the cinch and pulled a brass-framed Henry repeating rifle from its saddle scabbard. He looked around for perhaps fifteen seconds before heading into the grog shop.

Fargo paused inside the doorway, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, smoke-choked, foul-smelling interior. It was the only sit-down watering hole between Chamberlain and the Belle Fourche River and crowded with the usual run of hidebound roustabouts and ruffians.

So far nobody had noticed him standing quietly near the door, the Henry dangling muzzle-down from his left hand. But he knew that would likely change before long. Unfortunately for the Trailsman, he had a dangerous and unwanted affliction known as a “reputation,” and it wouldn’t be long before some drunk-as-a-skunk yahoo decided to measure his dick against that reputation.

When he could make out the room better, Fargo made his way toward the long plank bar.

“Hey-up, Smedley!” he greeted the barkeep.

“Skye Fargo! It’s been a coon’s age,” replied a man so heavy that his face creased under its own weight. “What’s yours?”

“Whiskey with a beer posse.”

“The beer’s got plenty of bubbles left, but it’s warm—the icehouse is empty until the first winter harvest comes in.”

“Warm beer’s all right—that’ll draw nappy.”

From the corner of his right eye Fargo saw that a burly, belligerent-looking drunk wrapped in moth-eaten pelts was watching him with unblinking, trouble-seeking eyes.

Fargo chose to ignore him, casting his gaze around the flyblown doggery. It was a typical frontier establishment: shoddy-board walls nailed to the logs to help hold the stove heat in, and an uneven floor with several tin spittoons, all but one tipped over. The bullet-holed roof was made of flattened-out cans that had once served for shipping oysters.

The place had the stale, rancid stench of unwashed bodies and cheap popskull. Yet, in Fargo’s experience, it was as permanent and elegant as anything else the sprawling and dangerous Dakota Territory had to offer.

Smedley plunked down a shot glass and a chipped beer mug sporting a billowy head. The pelt-clad drunk standing to Fargo’s right poked his elbow into a companion’s ribs and said something Fargo didn’t hear above the raucous din. Both men snickered.

“On the house, damn you,” Smedley said when he saw Fargo counting out the last of his five-cent shinplasters. “You go through that routine every time you’re broke. You know nobody wants that damn paper money, and that’s why you carry it.”

Fargo, guilty as charged, couldn’t suppress a grin. “’Preciate it, old son.”

Fargo picked up the shot glass between thumb and forefinger and peered into it. It was said that safe liquor always reflected a man’s eye back. This stuff was like staring into river-bottom mud.

“There’s no such thing as ugly women or bad whiskey.” Fargo rallied himself before he tossed back the shot and shuddered violently.

“Son of a bitch,” he told Smedley. “Ain’t you got white man’s whiskey?”

“That corpse reviver will make a man outta you, Skye. Whatever don’t kill you can only make you stronger, anh?”

Fargo quickly chased the potent concoction with half of the beer. The burly hard case to his right moved in a little closer to Fargo. Fargo didn’t spot a firearm in all that tattered fur, but a fifteen-inch, nickel-plated bowie knife protruded from his red sash like an angry serpent.

“My pard here tells me you’re Skye Fargo, the jasper some call the Trailsman,” he remarked in a hoarse voice laced with scorn. “Might that be the truth?”

“It just might be,” Fargo replied amiably. He was starting to feel that pleasant floating sensation as the strong liquor kicked in fast on an empty belly.

“Well, I’m a Dutchman! I ain’t never met no storybook hero. They say you’ve cut a wide swath, yes, they do!”

The drunk had raised his voice to attract an audience. Fargo sipped his beer and said nothing. There was no shortage of assholes on the frontier. . . .

“Yessir!” Fur boy charged on. “You’re a mighty talked-about hombre. But a feller has to wunner ’bout a . . . man with such pretty teeth. ’Specially one that needs to put barley bubbles behind his liquor. Mayhap he belongs back in Vermont running one a them whatchamacallits—one a them dancing schools for young ladies.”

“Now, let’s you and me clarify this matter,” Fargo suggested. “You’re drunk, so think careful now: was that remark an insult or just some cracker-barrel wit?”

“You can’t figure it out, buckskins?”

“I just did,” Fargo replied as he set his heels hard and side-hammered the man viciously with his right fist. Smedley’s nose broke with an audible snap that made him wince.

Fur boy staggered back and dropped to his knees, blood and snot smearing his upper lip. For a moment his hand twitched in the direction of his knife, then stopped when he saw the less fancy but no less lethal toothpick gripped in Fargo’s fist.

“Bother anybody you want to,” Fargo said, “except me. If you weren’t so corned you’d be dead right now. You’ve had your one break. If you even get close to me again, I’ll gut you.”

There was no bravado in Fargo’s voice, just a blunt warning. The unwashed, stinking troublemaker stared at Fargo for a few seconds to save face, then rose and staggered into the middle of the room. He had just been publicly gelded and now, by God, he sought to vent his drunken rage on an easier target.

Fargo watched the humiliated blowhard push his way toward a solitary figure leaning in a dark corner.

“You, red speckles! Didn’t I tell you to stay clear of this place? Ain’t you got no better place to cough yourself to death?”

Fargo watched the accosted man move out of the shadows. “The ass waggeth his ears.”

He was dulcet-voiced and confident in the way of a cultured card cheat. Fargo took in a small, thin man who had the preternatural gleam in his eye of a consumptive. There was a morbid, ashen pallor to his skin. Obviously of spare frame even when healthier, he had clearly lost so much weight that his cheekbones protruded, lending a ghoulish cast to his aspect. His dirty corduroy coat seemed to engulf him.

His obvious deterioration, however, didn’t distract Fargo’s attention from the Colt Navy in a hand-tooled, cutaway leather holster tied low on the man’s right thigh—and showing clearly below the coat.

“Listen to this shit!” the drunken bully played to the crowd. “Oh, he’s savage as a meat ax, ain’t he? Too weak to even fuck a woman, but he’s the big he-bull now, hey?”

He yanked the bowie knife out of his sash and showed off the blade. “You know, a couple exter holes in them lungs should help him breathe easier, hey, boys?”

The consumptive’s unsteady hand held a pony glass of whiskey. He raised it in a toast. “Here’s looking at you—which is why I need this drink, shit-heel.”

Fur boy’s nose hurt like hell by now, and most of the other men were mocking him. His voice yielded to brute anger.

“Swallow back that insult, you worthless cheese dick! Swallow it back!”

“As Mr. Fargo just tutored you, you should never step in something you can’t wipe off. Why don’t you stumble along now before I decide to kill you?”

Had Fargo blinked he would have missed it. Fur boy took one step closer, and faster than spit through a trumpet the Colt filled the consumptive’s hand and spat red-orange fire.

A neat, small hole appeared in the bully’s forehead, a thin worm of blood spurting out of it while a pig’s-knuckle-size clot of brain matter blew out the exit hole. Fur boy immediately folded dead to the floor, smacking into it like a bale of newspapers.

“God’s trousers!” somebody exclaimed. “He’s feeling hot pitchforks!”

A few men cheered the entertainment—boredom could be worse than Indian attacks. For Fargo it was just one more unremarkable death among many he had either caused or witnessed: just a second or two of nerve-twitching as the body tried to deny the final, certain fact of its own demise.

The consumptive’s gaze caught Fargo’s eye and quickly moved on, looking instead at the body.

“Break out the quicklime, Smedley! ‘He has gone to seek the Great Perhaps!’”

This little burst of animation inspired laughter but also sent the consumptive into a racking spasm of coughing. When he recovered, his eyes again met Fargo’s before he looked away and flipped two dollars in silver—dragging-out money—onto the corpse. He edged outside as more coughs shook his frame.

I don’t like this, Fargo thought. He was looking at me for a reason, and nothing good could come of it. Fargo had seen the diseased man’s face when those brains went flying, and it had all the bliss of a man taking a woman. He was the kill-crazy type, and in Fargo’s experience that was the most dangerous kind. They killed on impulse.

“Welcome to Fort Pierre,” Fargo told himself. “Now just keep riding.”

2

A salmon-pink seam of sunlight showed in the east when Fargo woke up the next morning. He had made a cold camp the night before in a hawthorn thicket along the bank of the Missouri about a mile downriver from Fort Pierre.

Before he rolled out of his blanket, he simply lay still and listened closely. He heard nothing that didn’t belong to the place: the unbroken flow of the river, the scolding of jays and the whistle of bobwhites. He rose and buckled on his gun belt, taking a good squint around in every direction.

He had put the Ovaro on a long tether in good graze next to a backwater. Fargo scrounged up enough driftwood and branches for a fire and boiled a can of coffee, sweetening it with the last of his brown sugar.

Watching carefully for weevils in his food, he sat with his back to a tree and gnawed listlessly on a hunk of stale saleratus bread, dunking it in his coffee to soften it up. The wide Missouri, slate-colored in the first light, quickly changed into its famous emerald green as the sun caught it. Its flow was so massive the current made a noise like nonstop wind gust.

Fargo knew that ramrod-straight Colonel Stanley Durant would already be hard at work. He whistled in the Ovaro and dried the dew off him with an old gunny sack. He checked the stallion for galls or hoof cracks, then tacked him and gigged him northwest even before the mist had burned off the river.

When the bluffs overlooking the military post hove into view, Fargo reined in, arrested by the sight of a man astride a horse atop the bluffs, both of them still as statues.

Fargo tossed the reins forward and dug the army binoculars out of his left saddle pocket. He focused them on the man above.

The horse was a strong, coal black “barb,” an Arabian with a thick, rich mane and tail. The man slumped in the saddle, dwarfed by his big horse and the endless sky, was the consumptive Fargo had seen yesterday in Smedley’s grog shop.

He remained absolutely still in the saddle except when Fargo saw him suddenly bring a big cloth to his mouth and shake with coughing fits. He gazed down on the military post and seemed deep in thought or perhaps distant remembrance.

Fargo rode on toward the main gate. Unlike many frontier posts in less dangerous sectors, Fort Pierre was now walled with squared-off cottonwood logs and there were manned guard towers at all four corners. More and more tribes in this region were heating the war kettles, and the need for constant garrison protection had cut down on army patrols.

Fargo was recognized at the main gate and rode through unchallenged. The fort, like most he had seen in the West, was a drab affair strung out in a rectangle around a huge, gravel-pocked parade and drill field.

Fargo headed straight for the line of low stables. The stable sergeant, an established admirer of the Ovaro, scooped out a bucket of oats for him.

“The old man’s steaming and fretting something fierce,” confided the sergeant, who was once with Fargo on a mapping expedition into the Bitterroot Range. “Lately, he can’t decide whether he wants to piss or go blind.”

“I’m surprised to hear it,” Fargo said, tossing his saddle onto a wooden rack. “Colonel Durant always strikes me as the strong-willed, straight-ahead-and-keep-up-the-strut type.”

“Them days is gone, Fargo. He’s forgetting to eat, keeps missing inspections to brood in his office. Why, my hand to God, this morning a recruit walked right past him without saluting, and Old Fuss and Feathers—I mean, Colonel Durant—didn’t even ream him out! That ain’t his natural gait.”

“No,” Fargo agreed, hanging his bridle on a can nailed to the wall.

“You got any idea how’s come he sent for you?”

“Nah. Nobody tells me anything until I’ve accepted the job and inked the contract. But he sure’s hell didn’t invite me to help decorate for the officers’ ball.”

“I’ll tell the world! If at first you don’t succeed, try, try a gun. If he sent for Skye Fargo, it’s no feather-bed job. It’s dirty, dangerous, low-down work no sane man would take. Good chance your scalp will end up dangling from some featherhead’s coup stick.”

Fargo met all that cynical barracks wit with a stoic grin. “You sure are a sunny son of a bitch. Thanks for the oats, Ernie.”

“Hey!” the sergeant called out behind him. “What’s it cost to fall off a horse?”

“Just one buck,” Fargo called back. “And it was no funnier last time you asked.”

•   •   •

“So you decided to come?” Stanley Durant greeted Fargo, waving him into a chair in front of the colonel’s neat-as-a-pin desk.

Fargo folded into the chair and balanced his hat on one knee. “Yeah, I guess a bad penny always turns up.”

Fargo noticed that Durant was gazing out a window toward the river bluffs—and toward the lone, dying man keeping his solitary vigil.

“Who is that?” Fargo demanded.

“A killer. One of the most active. He’s commonly called the Missouri Mad Dog.”

“Logan Robinson?” Fargo whistled and his face came alive with interest. “Never met him, but I’ve sure’s hell heard of him plenty. Allan Pinkerton told me once it’s confirmed that he’s killed at least forty men.”

“Yes, mostly murders, as I understand it. He’s not a gunslinger although he can certainly sling one—he’s mostly just a killer, one too smart for the law to convict.”

“All right, but what’s he doing playing silent sentry on the bluffs? Is he planning to kill somebody here—you, maybe?”

“I rode up there last week and asked him directly about that. He replied, quite cordially, that such a person would already be dead if that were his plan. We had an interesting discussion, but he volunteered nothing else about his motive.”

“Yeah? Maybe it’s just his good sense giving out—looks to me like he’s ready to keel over.”

“Did he seem so feeble last night when he blew that buffalo hider to blazes right in front of you?”

“You heard about that, huh? It wasn’t that spectacular, just a jerk-and-shoot against a man who wasn’t even heeled. Normally I’d call it murder, but the dead man was flashing a knife and Robinson being sick and all, it was justified.”

Fargo suddenly grasped a thread of thought. “Yeah, that was right in front of me, wasn’t it? And I had this feeling he was putting on the dog for somebody besides the drunks in the saloon. . . .”

Fargo narrowed his eyes slightly and looked at Durant. “An ‘interesting discussion’ . . . All right, what’s the grift, Colonel?”

“Grift is close,” Durant replied, “but graft is the legal term for it. And toss murder and extortion into the mix, too. Skye, I’m going to need you to help me buck the chain of command. And I mean buck it hard.”

Colonel Stanley Durant was the West Point model of moral rectitude. He didn’t cuss, he didn’t drink spirits, he never missed church and was ever faithful to his devoted wife. He was battle-tested and every inch the professional soldier. Fargo knew he honored orders from higher-ups as he did the Ten Commandments.

So if he had decided to disobey an order, Fargo had faith it was an order that needed disobeying. He gave the colonel an ironic grin.

“Bucking the chain of command,” he replied, “is what makes working for the army fun. It’s right up my alley—you know that—and we both know that’s why you sent for me.”

Durant pushed to his feet a bit slowly and crossed to a huge wall map of the military Department of Dakota. Fargo watched worry suddenly mold his face.

“Skye, what would happen if all the branches of the Lakota Nation suddenly went to war against whites in the Black Hills?”

“You know that answer. It would be a mighty short war, and the Sioux would be doing their scalp dances for a week. They’re the best light cavalry on the northern plains and pitiless once they paint.”

Durant gave a curt nod, his way of recognizing an unpleasant truth. “And you know the Cheyennes will grease for war if their Lakota cousins do.”

Fargo made an impatient gesture with his free hand. “Colonel, we’re both experienced Indian fighters; you don’t need to sell me a bill of goods about how dangerous they are. You saying there’s a war kettle on?”

“Let’s just say it’s being heated but hopefully isn’t quite boiling yet.”

Fargo leaned forward in the uncomfortable chair. “All due respect, Colonel, but you didn’t use to mealy-mouth like a politician.”

Durant took the jab without reaction. “Skye, I take it you’ve heard of the Indian Ring?”

Fargo nodded. “A tribe of back-scratching cousins in Washington City who raise their own private herd of cash cows.”

Despite the colonel’s troubled face he laughed. “You do know how to cut right down to the bone. They know that huge amounts of money are handled by the War Department and the Indian Bureau, money for reservation allotments and salaries, for Indian schools and such. That means plenty of lucrative contracts, and they make sure they bribe the right people—including enlisted men and officers if necessary—to get most of those contracts.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen their handiwork a few times. You know, how they put big, flat stones between the slabs of allotment bacon and count the weight as meat, that type of deal. I’m no Indian lover, but when it comes to whiteskin government, the tribes got their side of it, too.”

Again Durant nodded curtly. “Granted, and no officer who claims to believe in God should sanction this. But it’s more dangerous this time, Skye, because a new faction within the Ring is gaining power: the military suppliers.”

“Sure,” Fargo said, trying not to sound bored. “The bunch that keeps stirring up Indian Fever.”

“Precisely. There’s plenty of profit in outfitting civilians and the army to fight Indian threats. And we can both describe plenty of genuine Indian threats. But now and then they slow down, which means the Ring likes to hire experts to stir up those threats—and where threats already exist, such as in the Black Hills, the goal is to stir up all-out war.”

“Yeah, I spun a few waltzes with one of those experts myself down in the Nations. He was doing his damnedest to stir up a war between Cherokees and some other tribes on the rez.”

“Right, and you stopped him.”

“Killing a man definitely stops him,” Fargo agreed.

“That’s why I searched my conscience for days and then sent for you. Skye, are you familiar with the name Stuart Brennan?”

Fargo rolled the name around in his memory. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“No, and that’s by his clever design. I wouldn’t know the name, either, if I didn’t have a loyal nephew working in the War Department. It cannot be proven, of course, that right now Brennan is working directly for a major military-supply baron in Saint Louis.”

“I take your drift,” Fargo said. “Free guns and free flammable liquor for renegades are his main stock-in-trade. It’s old hat for both of us. Look, let’s lay out all our cards, Colonel.”

Durant nodded. “You first.”

“We both know it’s the U.S. Army’s job, under law, to chase all whites out of the Black Hills. The army has done a piss-poor job of it, partly because they resent such rich land being given to savages, and I can see that side of it, too. But anyhow, the frontier army has mostly failed, and now all you top commanders in the Dakota sector are backing and filling, right? Trying to head off a disaster that could reduce all of you to latrine officers?”

Durant flushed with a mixture of anger and embarrassment. “There’s that, yes. But, Skye, you’re wrong about the cabal of commanders theory. I’m alone in this, strong in my faith but fearful in my mortal mind.”

The urgency in Durant’s voice rekindled Fargo’s full attention.

“New orders have come down, Skye, from the Secretary of War himself: all patrols into or near the Black Hills are suspended until further notice.”

“They give any reason?”

“The usual twaddle-and-bunkum: the stand-down is normal policy intended as a goodwill gesture to the red aboriginals, intended to pacify them—you’ve heard it before.”

Fargo mulled all this. “Everybody knows it’s gold that’s lured whites into the Black Hills. But except for some fools a while back who actually tried to dig a mine, it’s just tin-pan prospectors, not miners.”

“The whole area is a tinderbox now,” Durant put in. “That’s sacred territory to the Sioux—apparently they believe there’s a small hole there where First Man came up onto Earth or some primitive nonsense. So far, though, they’ve mostly just stuck to small vengeance raids and demands for tribute. But the younger braves have been pushing the clan elders for full-out war against white intruders into the area.”

“And if there’re some white men in cahoots who want a massacre of palefaces . . .” Fargo trailed off as the possible outcome impressed him.

“If Brennan can drive this deal to war whoops,” he continued, “it could blow up into something bigger than Sioux and Cheyennes. There’re other tribes like the Arapahoe and Crow in these Dakota ranges and in good fighting fettle. True, some of them war with one another all the time. But they could make common cause, get all danced and tranced up, and kill every man, woman and child in or even near the Black Hills.”

“And keep on doing it for years,” the colonel added glumly. “Do you think it really could get that bad?”

Fargo shrugged. “Where do lost years go? Sir, you know how notional the red man is. Even the peaceful Pueblos in New Mexico finally got their bellies full and massacred the Spanish. And the Sioux aren’t exactly peace-loving by nature.”

It had turned into a damp, chilly morning under an overcast sky the color of dirty bathwater. Colonel Durant’s mood seemed to match the weather, a common tendency Fargo had noticed on the Great Plains.

“When I told you this situation was a forlorn hope,” he told Fargo, “I secretly still had some hope. Now I see it’s a fool’s errand.”

Fargo blew his cheeks out and gave a long, resigned sigh.

“All right, Colonel, you can nix the pity-me pitch—it’s a fool’s errand, all right, and you’ve gut-hooked your fool. I didn’t expect this to be a cider party. Tell me about Brennan.”

Durant quickly suppressed a victory grin. “A hard man and a realist. Brutal and capable and without one shred of human conscience, religious or otherwise. He’s almost certainly in the Black Hills now.”

“Almost certainly?” Fargo repeated dubiously.

“I kno