The Trailsman #396

Book 396: Trailsman

by Jon Sharpe

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

Killing is for the living.

Skye Fargo has spent weeks with the U.S. Army Camel Corps, trying to create a supply train across the Mojave Desert. But after fighting Indians, bushwhackers, and nature itself, his deadliest foe appears: Pablo “the Scorpion” Alvarez. And that savage killer will let no one, not even the Trailsman, survive his fury.…

Release date: October 7, 2014

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 176

Sample

DEAD-ON

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.

Mojave Desert, California, 1858—where it’s open season on Skye Fargo in a hellish landscape littered with bleached bones.

1

“It’s the work of the Scorpion,” Fargo announced with grim confidence, unfolding to his full six feet and slapping the sand and grit from the knees of his buckskin trousers. “That throat cut, exactly like a surgeon’s work from one earlobe to the other, is his trademark. I hear it’s how he announces his presence to his victims.”

A Mexican stock tender Fargo knew only as Lupe lay sprawled on his back in a dry creek wash where scores of boulders were heaped, his tongue swollen so thick it protruded like a leather bladder. Red ants in a feeding frenzy had already eaten the eyeballs down to the bone sockets.

“God dawg! Who’s the Scorpion?” asked an army private so young he looked like a mascot.

“Pablo Alvarez,” replied the second man with Fargo, Stanton “Grizz Bear” Ormsby. “Quicksand would spit that son of a buck back up. This here is all we lacked. Thank you, Jesus.”

Fargo sent a careful glance all around them, then focused his ­sun-­slitted, lake blue eyes to the middle distances and expanded his search, ­sweep-­scanning the harsh landscape. His scalp had prickled the moment he recognized the bloody calling card of the Scorpion.

Unrelenting sun and dry wind had cracked his lips. The almost unbreathable air felt brittle with warmth that seemed to radiate from a giant furnace. All around them, as far as the eye dared to look, the arid brown folds of the Mojave Desert stretched on unbroken, ending in a shimmering heat haze on the far horizon. Barely visible in the rippling blur due west was a line of dead black ­mountains—­a reminder of the daunting conditions awaiting any fools who challenged Zeb Pike’s Great AmericanDesert.

Only ten minutes after sunrise the morning mist had burned off the nearby Colorado River. When Lupe didn’t turn up for breakfast, Fargo, Grizz Bear and Private Jude ­Hollander—­proud, ­razor-­nicked members of the U.S. Army Camel Corps’ ­fifteen-­man security ­detail—­rode out to look for him. The circling buzzards were like an aerial fingerboard pointing to his nearly decapitated corpse.

“Shit, piss and corruption!” Grizz Bear exploded. “Ain’t enough of a holiday, is it, how we spent the last three weeks huggin’ with them Skeleton Canyon Apaches? Now we got warpath Mojaves out front of us and this murderin’ greaser Alvarez deals himself into the game. Hell, who wouldn’t work for the army?”

“You bawl too damn much,” Fargo admonished the veteran frontiersman. He nodded toward Private Hollander. “You never hear soldier blue pissing and moaning like a weak sister.”

“Soldier? This pee doodle?” Grizz Bear snorted, dry sand popping out of his nostrils. “Hell’s fire! He’s a ­fuzz-­faced brat in ready-to-wear boots. You know, Fargo? This tad woulda give the apple back to Eve.”

“Who’s Pablo Alvarez?” Jude Hollander asked again, well used to Grizz Bear’s roweling. “He got one of them road gangs like that bunch we chased off a few days back?”

Fargo was slow to answer, still focusing his attention on the surrounding terrain, habitually thinking like potential enemies and deciding where he’d hole up for an ambush attempt. The dead stock tender might also be a lure for distracted fools. . . .

Fargo’s ­hair-­trigger alertness had been challenged, but not dulled, by weeks of grueling and dangerous travel across West Texas and the New Mexico Territory, fighting Comanches and Kiowas, Apaches, two roving ­gangs—­and some of the foulest, most difficult, heartiest and most bizarre beasts of burden the U.S. Army ever sent on a supply mission.

“You can chuck that ­road-­gang talk,” Fargo finally advised the ­green-­antlered recruit. “I have it on good authority that Alvarez doesn’t run a bunch of ragtag freebooters or some ­greasy-­sack outfit that can’t shoot straight.”

“That reckless bastard fouled a fine nest down in Hermosillo,” Grizz Bear took over. “Had him a gunrunning setup until the federals run him across the border for welshing on his bribes. Lately he’s been ruling the roost in the Mojave, robbing prospectors and paymasters and such.”

“I take your drift,” young Jude said. “He knows dang well his fortunes depend on keeping the desert military outposts weak and low on supplies.”

“Now you’re whistling,” Fargo said. “I’ve never locked horns with Alvarez before. But I’ve talked to reliable soldiers and lawmen who have. They all claim he’s got a private army, well organized, well armed, and numbering up in the scores when he calls them all in.”

And it seemed only logical to Fargo that a man like Pablo Alvarez would know exactly what this strange U.S. Army experiment, which included the gringo famoso Skye Fargo, meant if it succeeded: like the kid just said, it was the end of the Scorpion’s criminal bonanza.

Fargo had fought men like the Scorpion before. Some, like their bloodthirsty leader, had learned brutal, casual killing in the charnel house of the ­1846–­47 war. Others hailed from around the Scorpion’s hometown of La Cuesta. These competent killers were loyal to a ruthless savage who murdered the innocent as casually as he swatted at flies.

Grizz Bear shifted his attention to the dead Mexican. “You s’pose the beaners will want to bury him?”

“We’ll all bury him,” Jude spoke up, offended. “He’s part of the expedition.”

“He never bought me a beer,” Grizz Bear noted. “So fuck him.”

The wind suddenly whipped up, sand and grit assaulting Fargo’s face like buckshot. He tugged the brim of his hat lower and pulled his red bandanna up over his nose and mouth.

That body, Fargo reminded himself. It could be a lure. . . .

“Rider coming from camp,” Jude said. “Looks like Juan Salazar.”

Not even ten in the morning, Fargo thought, and the desert heat was already so thick it had weight on his shoulders and the back of his neck. Ragged parcels of cloud drifted slowly across a deep blue dome of sky. Again he studied the terrain they were about to cross. There was very little, beyond the river growth, but the occasional twisted yucca tree or tall, narrow cactus the local Indians called Spanish bayonets.

“Yeah, take a good gander, Trailsman,” Grizz Bear cut into his thoughts. “You know ’er, boy, and so do I. That Mojave is hell turned inside out, and it just . . . don’t . . . stop.”

The old salt glanced at Jude. “That’s gospel truth, sprout. And dry? Why, there’s stretches ahead of us so damn dry they got ­three-­year-­old fish that ain’t learned to swim yet. This ain’t like that ­ninety-­mile stretch back in New Mex. Get set for a ­hell-­buster. The consarn army will rue the day it sent ­soft-­handed children and desk soldiers to stand in for men.”

The kid puffed himself up and slapped the stock of his Sharps. Like the rest of the soldiers on this expedition he wore a mixture of civilian and military clothes.

“It’s been rough country since we left San Antonio and it ain’t whipped me,” Jude boasted. “This desert coming up ain’t nothing but more of the same. If them ugly camels can take it, so can I.”

“Pup, them ships of the desert will shit on all our bones.”

“Quit trying to scare the kid,” Fargo cut in impatiently. “Jude, if a man learns the desert he needn’t fear it. Besides, a man’s got to die someplace. I’m not particular about the terrain.”

Fargo paused to watch Juan Salazar trot closer on an army mule. The Mexican ranch hand had hired on back in San Antone. He was taciturn but civil, a good worker who kept to himself most of the time. But his habit of deliberately avoiding eye contact with others gave the constant impression he was a sneak thief.

Grizz Bear poked the corpse indifferently with the toe of his boot. “If it’s Alvarez done this, you kallate he’ll have the main gather with him?”

Fargo shook his head. “I don’t know the man’s tactics firsthand. But I’d guess he’ll hold off at ­first—­dust puffs give away big groups in the desert. I’d say he’ll try to ­cold-­deck us with just a few of his best ­killers—­more stuff like with Lupe. But mainly I’m worried they’ll try to kill the camels. There’s no replacements, and it was a helluva deal to buy them and get them here.”

He expelled a long sigh. “This is why I wanted to fight shy of the ­sand-­dune country west of Fort Yuma. That’s a ­bog-­down stretch and we’d be fish in a barrel if ­well-­hidden ­dry-­gulchers opened up. Looks like they just followed ­us—”

Fargo’s next word snagged in his throat when a rifle spoke its deadly piece from the nearby river bluff, shattering the hot stillness.

That first bullet snapped past Fargo’s face and impacted only inches from his stallion, raising a gravel plume near the big horse’s front hooves. The Ovaro reared up, nickering more in irritation than fright. Fargo let it go when the stallion began ­crow-­hopping—­the mount was ­bullet-­trained and the shooter would have to earn his target.

“Hell, kid, you bolted down?” he snapped at Jude. “Quit gawking and kiss the deck!”

The other men had already covered down. Again, again, the repeating rifle cracked with a shattering clarity in the transparent desert air. The bullets, ricocheting from boulder to boulder all around them, sent off a screaming whine that especially agitated the horses and mules.

Had the hidden marksman blued his barrel Fargo would not likely have taken his next gamble. But exposed metal caught just enough sun to glint from a steep, ­rock-­strewn sandbank rising up above the river.

Fargo’s ­trouble-­honed reflexes didn’t wait for further confirmation. Using that glint as his fixed reference, Fargo rose to a ­kneeling-­offhand position, worked the lever of the Henry repeater, and threw the rifle butt into his shoulder. The brass frame was hot from the sun when he laid his cheek against it and notched his bead, deadly lead still snapping past him so close it was personal.

“Let ’er rip!” Grizz Bear bellowed as Fargo methodically and rapidly set to work with his ­sixteen-­shot Henry, holding a tight pattern with that momentary glint at its core.

Fargo was as surprised as everyone else when, all of a moment, a man came plunging down the steep, rocky slope of the sandbank.

He was only wounded and still alive at ­first—­Fargo could hear him screaming as he slammed from rock to rock, plummeting downward toward the ­slack-­jawed men. His rifle clattered along behind him like a faithful pet trying to catch up.

The four men advanced cautiously to examine the ambusher. Though his only gunshot wound was to the left knee, the battering tumble had killed the man before he quit rolling.

“Hell, I figured you to drill him right through the brainpan,” Grizz Bear remarked, staring at the bruised and battered face and misshapen skull. “I ain’t never seen this chili pep before. A-course, his face is messed up considerable so’s a body can’t be sure.”

Fargo moved forward and brought the rifle back, an old Collier ­seven-­shot revolving carbine that had been converted from touchhole to percussion. The sight had broken off in the tumble, but the weapon appeared serviceable. He bent over and removed a bandolier of bullets and percussion caps from the body. The man wore no sidearm.

Juan Salazar craned his neck to look past Grizz Bear. Fargo watched him stare at the corpse, much of the color draining from his copper skin. He looked like a man who had just been ­mule-­kicked but not quite dropped.

“Santissima Maria,” he whispered hoarsely, making the sign of the cross.

“You know him?” Fargo demanded.

Salazar turned in Fargo’s direction but averted his eyes. He was a young man in his twenties and wore the leather chivarra pants of a Mexican cowboy.

“Yes, I know him,” he replied. “His name is Roberto de Torreon de Salazar. The man you have just killed is my brother.”

2

After Salazar’s emotionless announcement Fargo waited cautiously, his eyes on the old but no doubt highly lethal Colt Walker .44 in Salazar’s crude canvas holster.

Blood vengeance was a big deal to some Mexicans, and Fargo had even seen a few kill on impulse, without a word of warning, when insulted. Salazar, however, seemed already resigned to his brother’s violent demise.

“He forced my hand,” Fargo said. “I got no regrets about killing ­him—­his kind require it.”

Salazar nodded. “He was evil. Back in our town, in La Cuesta, his hero was el Scorpio. Like him, Roberto was no good.”

“Now, ain’t that uncommon coincidental,” Grizz Bear spoke up. “You and your brother both from that sewer rat’s hometown . . . you know, Skye? I recollect hearing how that greaser Alvarez likes to put a man in ’mongst his enemies.”

“And you figure the Scorpion’s man here is going to tell us this is his brother and that he rode for the gang?” Fargo countered. “If you got better proof than that, old son, trot it out. Otherwise, sing soft.”

“Trot out a cat’s tail,” Grizz Bear rumbled back. “You just watch this chili pep, Fargo, and you watch him like a cat on a rat. You done for his brother and there’s a Mexer blood chit on you now.”

Fargo ignored him, glancing at each man in turn. “From all I’ve been told, if the Scorpion has notched on us we damn straight best keep a weather eye out.”

“Here comes Sergeant Robinson,” Jude spoke up, watching a ­seventeen-­hand sorrel horse lope toward them from the encampment in the river valley. “I sure do wish Lieutenant Beale was back in charge.”

“You’re a private,” Fargo reminded him. “You don’t pick your bosses.”

Sergeant Woodrow “Red” Robinson hauled back on the reins and stared at the dead man sprawled at the bottom of the slope.

“He’s a freebooter,” Fargo explained. “Belonged to Pablo Alvarez’s gang.”

Fargo pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “Lupe copped it bad. Looks like the Scorpion’s work.”

“Leaving plenty out, ain’tcher, Fargo?” Grizz Bear put in like a schoolboy tattletale. “Like how this dead bandito is Juan Salazar’s brother? And how both of ’em hail from the Scorpion’s hometown?”

Sergeant Robinson grabbed the horn and swung down. He was a ­big-­bellied man with powerful muscles. The NCO was vain about his appearance and wore a long duster to protect his clothing, a gun belt cinching it.

“If you were fired on, Fargo, you had no choice,” he said pointlessly. “But I’ll need reports from you men on Lupe Vargas. And just a reminder to all of you: the U.S. Army Camel Corps has two missions, and two only. First, to establish a new supply and emigrant trail across the Mojave. And second, to figure out the best way to use the camels and see how they rate against pack mules.”

Robinson stood with his feet planted wide, thumbs tucked behind his shell belt. He nodded toward the badly pulped body. “One thing we are not is jackleg lawmen.”

“Like you said,” Fargo reminded him, “we were fired on. Ain’t like we forced a ­call-­down.”

Fargo was an old acquaintance of the officer in charge of the Camel Corps, Lieutenant Ed Beale, a longtime desert explorer and blazer of several key desert trails. But Beale had been abruptly pulled from the expedition and ordered north to Fort Mojave to meet with an official from the War Department.

Fargo had so far had no major dustups with the burly, redheaded top sergeant Beale left in charge. However, he had the distinct impression that Robinson was inexperienced at top field command and would turn to brutality and stupidity when adversity exposed that inexperience.

Sergeant Robinson shifted his attention to Juan Salazar. “You report to my tent later after we make camp. I want to know more about this dead brother of yours.”

Without warning Robinson whirled on Jude.

“Wipe that stupid, ­shit-­eating grin off your dial, Trooper Hollander, and get back to your duties! Fargo doesn’t rate an orderly.”

“­But—”

“But me no buts, trooper. We’ve got a big river to ford, and those damn fool Arab tribesmen don’t even know if camels can swim. I ain’t chewing my lip, ­Hollander—­any lollygaggers will get a taste of the cowhide.”

Grizz Bear cleared his throat. He had been hired because of his knowledge of desert Indian languages and warfare.

“A-course you mean any soldier lollygaggers, Red,” he said. “Any foolish son of a bitch who tries to cowhide this child will die slow with a burning gut.”

“You like to talk about death, old man,” Robinson retorted after he heaved his considerable bulk into the saddle. “I’ll discipline any man who endangers this mission.”

He reined the sorrel around and sank steel into it, racing back toward the river encampment.

“Not exactly a ­play-­the-­crowd man,” Fargo remarked.

“Didja know Robinson had him a brother who killed a bank teller?” Grizz Bear said.

Fargo shook his head, not much interested.

“It was back someplace in Indiana. You might say he got a suspended ­sentence—­they hung him.”

“Sounds like a latrine rumor,” Fargo said, eyes flicking toward Salazar. The Mexican was trudging back toward his mule.

“It ain’t no rumor, Mr. Fargo,” Jude cut in. “I heard him brag about it at grub pile one night.”

“I don’t cotton to the son of a bitch,” Grizz Bear said. “Always swingin’ his eggs like he’s some. He’s a prick, is what he is.”

“All sergeants are pricks,” Fargo scoffed. “This is the army, you knucklehead, not a freethinkers’ society. Quit teaching the kid to disrespect rank.”

“Fargo, you ­two-­faced groat! You got no respect for rank yourself.”

“I always respect it . . . insofar as I can.”

“I will bring a shovel,” Salazar called over before he clucked to the mule, “and bury both bodies.”

Jude tugged up his picket pin. “Mr. Fargo, what if them camels can’t swim?”

Fargo forked leather, strong white teeth flashing in a grin through his ­close-­cropped beard. “That would be an army logistical problem, Jude. I’m just a contract scout.”

“If them ugly, stinking sons-of-­the-­sand-­dunes drown,” Grizz Bear suggested, “we can pull some ashore and butcher out some hump steaks. I been wondering if it’s as tasty as buff meat.”

Jude stared into Grizz Bear’s tired, ­grit-­galled eyes. But they peered out of the weathered grooves of a face like windswept stone.

“He’s joking, ain’t he?” the young soldier asked Fargo.

The Trailsman grunted to acknowledge the question but gave no reply.

•   •   •

Fargo topped a rise overlooking the Colorado at a site where the river broadened, slowing the current slightly.

Finally, after many weeks of hard travel, the Camel Corps had reached the King of Desert Rivers. The ultimate goal was the dusty pueblo of Los Angeles and here at last was California. But first the burning, vast, ­water-­scarce Mojave Desert must be ­conquered—­and the Colorado forded.

Fargo wasn’t surprised they had gotten this far without discovering whether or not camels could swim. Many creek and stream beds sliced the desert, but only a few held water more than two or three weeks. Rivers tended to flow on its margins, not across it, which made the Colorado River fifteen hundred miles of literal lifeblood as it twisted and turned from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of ­Mexico—­right smack through the heart of the American desert and the jealously protected Mojave Indian homeland.

This new ford, selected by Ed Beale, was about seventy miles north of the usual crossing at Quartzsite. After crossing into California they would blaze a new trail and inspect water sources as they linked remote Mojave outposts like Fort Tejon and scattered American and Mormon settlements on or near the route to Los Angeles.

But the sight that riveted Fargo’s attention at the moment was the barely controlled chaos straight ahead at river’s edge.

How ­twenty-­five camels could raise a ruckus like two hundred was beyond Fargo, but this bunch always did. They were big, clumsy, shaggy, waddling, with bells around their necks to warn of their ­proximity—­they were excellent stalkers and Fargo had so far been bitten on the ass and copiously spat on with a foul and most disgusting “cud broth” that coated like gun oil.

“Lookit!” Grizz Bear said, pointing. “Lookit Topsy chewin’ her ­cud—­lookit them big, floppy lips! Them ­lips—­them—”

Grizz Bear broke up laughing and smacking his thigh. “I ain’t never seen the like in all my born days,” he finally managed. “Lookit them damn lips! A-floppin’ up and down ­like—­say, they’re just like fingers, too. I seen that troublemaker Mad Maggie using her lips to untie a tent line—that’s no shit.”

He lost control again and by now the rest were laughing, too. Fargo had never seen such an ugly, comical species in his life. And the stench blowing off them always forced him to eat upwind of the camels.

It was just last year when Fargo first caught word that Ed ­Beale—­backed by Secretary of War Jefferson ­Davis—­had got up some foolish plan to use camels in the deserts. Like most veteran frontiersmen, Fargo had treated the notion as a lunkheaded lark even when he was hired on.

But observation and experience had since reformed his ­thinking on some points. Fargo had been along when a ­six-­camel caravan had hauled a ton of supplies sixty miles in one ­day—­a record no other pack animal could ever match in the desert.

“The ­one-­humpers are lighter and faster,” Jude said.

Grizz Bear shifted his gun belt, grunted as he threw a leg around the horn, and began to build himself a smoke.

“Them ugly hunchback horses don’t wear no metal shoes,” he praised, “but there ain’t nothin’ they can’t walk across. And after a spell horses and mules will tolerate ’em just so’s they don’t get too close.”

Fargo granted all that. And he had quickly been convinced of the beasts’ astounding ability to withstand heat and go without water. But Ed Beale and his supporters had wildly exaggerated visions of camels hauling the mail and even carrying soldiers into battle.

All that was possible, maybe, except for a form of incurable camel rebellion that Fargo called “the ­walk-­down.” When the mood came over the ­leaders—­even when well fed and ­rested—­they simply began walking slower and slower.

Beating, cajoling, coaxing, prodding, even singing had no effect. The same camels who might give sixty miles in one day often gave only fifteen over easier terrain. Nor were the camel boosters realistic about the preferences of American riders. Fargo had climbed aboard one of the camels for a short ride and quickly became violently seasick. By his lights camels didn’t walk or ­trot—­they pitched and rolled like jolly boats on angry swells.

“There goes Salazar totin’ a shovel,” Grizz Bear said. “He won’t dig your grave, ­Fargo—­just fill it.”

Fargo ignored him, dismounting as he reached the clamorous bottleneck beside the river. The party was made up of soldiers, Mexican ranch hands, veteran frontiersmen and camel drivers imported from the Middle East along with the animals.

Two of the drivers, Hassan and Turkish Tom, were friendly, energetic, ­fresh-­faced lads still in their teens. Fargo found them arguing confusedly with Sergeant Robinson while several more drivers crowded close, gesturing wildly and shaking their fists.

“This ain’t the best damn place to go into a mill,” Fargo told the temporary commander. “The Mojaves had a helluva battle a few months back with white prospectors. Grizz Bear tells me they’re still on the warpath.”

“Tell these crazy bastards all that,” a ­flush-­faced Robinson retorted. “I can’t get a straight answer out of the ­mealymouthed—”

“Hassan,” Fargo said to a lad wearing billowing trousers, a turban and a short jacket dotted with bells, “do these camels know how to swim?”

Hassan nodded thoughtfully, shook his head no, nodded again.

“Does that mean they can swim?” Fargo demanded.

Hassan looked at Turkish Tom, and both camel drivers began rattling away in rapid Arabic. Then they looked at Fargo and shrugged.

“Swim maybe,” Hassan suggested. “Maybe sink? Sometimes hard to say always. I think yes, perhaps no.”

He nodded again and Fargo swore. He knew they understood English, but getting anything straight out of these drivers required a pry bar.

“Look,” he told them, “we have to cross this river now. Tell the drivers to neck the camels in groups of four or five. Then you two push Topsy into the river. If she swims, the rest will follow.”

“As you were, Fargo,” Robinson snapped. “Who died and left you in charge? If those camels drown I’ll be drumheaded from the army. You don’t have to answer for them.”

“If they drown,” Fargo said, “I’ll take responsibility. Anyhow, I am in charge of Indian matters, and right now we’re caught between a sawmill and a ­shoot-­out with those camels clumped in the open.”

“Lieutenant Beale told me the Mojaves aren’t a warring tribe.”

“That was before they decided they had to protect this river country from Americans, and I’ve seen those big, strong braves swing those potato mashers of theirs. They don’t tip their arrows with stone or flint, either. They use a piece of hardwood with barbs that rip the target open wide. They could slaughter that herd in thirty seconds even if we drove the attackers off.”

Fargo pointed his chin toward the bluff where Roberto Salazar had opened fire on him.

“And now it appears the Scorpion means to waltz with us, too. He knows damn good and well what it means for military strength if these camel caravans