Beyond Squaw Creek (4 page)

They started off slowly, in and out, in and out, the bed creaking gently, the girl's spread legs bouncing, knees bending. After a couple of minutes, Fargo rose up on his arms and began increasing the beat, enjoying the sweet misery, the torture of holding himself back while the blood surged and raged in his loins.

He'd worked himself into a steady rhythm, when his keen ears detected a noise from the stairs.

He slowed the pace, lifted his head.

“No,” she protested, placing her hands on his face and nibbling his lips hungrily. “Don't slow down…oh,
please
!…Don't slow down!”

Another sound rose from the stairs—the squawk of a loose step. Fargo continued thrusting. Valeria Howard groaned and shook her head like a mounted mare as the Trailsman regained his former rhythm, bucking against her wildly.

The girl sobbed and clawed at his shoulders, and the bed pitched like a rowboat on a storm-tossed sea.

Lightning flashed in the window. Rain tapped on the roof.

In the hall, a man laughed cunningly beneath the roar of a near thunderclap, and the thud of approaching boots grew and quickened—the stout, heavy-heeled boots of a mule skinner.

“Oh, Skye, oh, Skye!” Valeria Howard shrieked, digging her fingers into his shoulders and throwing her head back on the pillow.

Fargo gritted his teeth and dug his fingers into the corn-shuck mattress as he drove his ripe cock in and out of the girl's hot, sopping core. Beyond the door, the thunder of running boots stopped suddenly. A man's guffaw echoed around the hall.

“Skye, don't
stop
!” the girl shrieked.

Fargo continued thrusting and the girl continued groaning.

Thunder clapped and lightning flashed.

Supporting himself on his right arm, Fargo thrust his left hand at the bedpost, grabbed his Colt from his holster, and clicked the hammer back.

There was a huge explosion, as though the storm was suddenly inside the room. The door burst open to slam against the wall, slivers from the casing flying in all directions.

The French mule skinner's big frame filled the doorway, eyes glinting in the lamplight, frizzy red hair spilling down around his shoulders. Laughing wildly and shuttling his head from right to left, looking around the room, he swung his big six-shooter toward Fargo.

Fargo gave one final thrust between Valeria Howard's legs, and aimed the Colt at the doorway.

The forty-four roared and bucked in his hand.
Boom! Boom! Boom!

Valeria Howard drove the back of her head into the pillow, arched her back, and howled as seed jettisoned from the Trailsman's heaving loins.

At the same time, the French freighter yowled like a lightning-struck bull and flew back out of the room and into the hall, triggering a bullet into the ceiling. He bounced off a wall and hit the floor, the report of his own impact and another thunderclap rocking the entire building.

“Oh, my God!” Valeria Howard bellowed, locking her ankles behind the Trailsman's back.
“Oh, my Gawwwwwwd!”

When the smoke had cleared, Fargo shouted down the stairs for Smiley to cart the French trash out of the hall and to keep better tabs on his guests. Grumbling angrily, he rose naked from the bed, slammed the door, wedged a chair against it, and replaced the Colt's three spent shells with fresh ones.

Valeria Howard rose up on the bed, her hair in her eyes, looking shaken and disoriented. Feebly, she clutched a blanket to her breasts and stared at the door.

“What…?”

“Nothing to worry about,” the Trailsman said. “I think the frog eater was just inquiring the time.”

Before she could form another question, Fargo climbed back onto the bed, gently pushed her down, turned her over, shoved her hair aside, and peppered her neck, back, and buttocks with kisses.

After the commotion in the hall had faded, the body hauled away, he quelled further questions by mounting her from behind—slow, easy, time-consuming strokes. If she remembered anything about the shooting, she mentioned nothing more about it for the rest of the storm and love-tossed evening before she and Fargo collapsed in each other's arms, her head on his chest, her hand proprietarily cupping his balls.

Fargo woke at the first wash of dawn and dressed quietly, letting Valeria sleep for a few more minutes, and went outside and scouted around before saddling the Ovaro and leading it back to the roadhouse. He woke the girl, and, sitting at a table downstairs, they enjoyed Smiley's breakfast of venison sausage and biscuits washed down with hot, black coffee.

All the men from the night before remained at the roadhouse—all except for the dead Frenchman, obviously, and his partner, Hallbing, who before dawn had headed out for Fort Clark with his wagonload of army supplies.

“Too bad Hallbing started out so early,” Smiley said as Fargo scraped his chair back and tossed several coins on the table. “You three coulda ridden together. The Injuns leave that old Norski alone on account of he's married to a Sioux woman from over by Devils Lake and gives 'em free trade beads.”

“I figured he might have been a little piss-burned over his partner,” Fargo said, donning his hat as he ushered Valeria toward the door.

“Hallbing?”

Smiley laughed and followed Fargo and Valeria outside, where the air was cool and fresh after the storm, the yard pocked with mud puddles from which several sparrows and magpies bathed and drank. Meadowlarks piped on the dawn-washed prairie around the roadhouse.

“Hell, he's been wantin' to kill Bardot for a month of Sundays, on account of Bardot got one of Hallbing's daughters in the family way, if you'll pardon the expression, Miss Howard.” The bearded oldster laughed again. “He just never had the guts to drop the hammer on him, I reckon. Besides, freightin' partners ain't all that easy to come by in these parts. If you see him,” Smiley continued as Fargo swung up onto the Ovaro's back, “tell him he didn't leave enough lucre on the bar this mornin' to cover his bill. If he don't cough it up, his next time here he'll be drinkin' the snake venom I usually serve to the soldiers!”

Fargo reached down, took the girl's hand, and swung her up behind him. “How would he know the difference?” With that, he pinched his hat brim to Smiley, neck-reined the pinto around, and booted it into a trot across the muddy yard, heading southwest. Valeria sat behind him, her arms wrapped around his waist.

“Very funny, Fargo!” the roadhouse proprietor called, raising his voice as he added, “I reckon I'll dust off a bottle o' that coffin varnish for you, too!”

Fargo threw up an arm and put the Ovaro into a jog-trot, looking around carefully as the sun climbed toward the eastern horizon. Gray-purple shadows swelled out from buttes and hillocks and occasional cottonwood stands. The roadhouse was a good nine miles from Fort Clark—nine miles that at first gander appeared as open as a sea but were in fact scored with countless hidden coulees, ravines, and creek beds in which Indians might lie in ambush. The marauding redskins would most likely be holed up because of the rain, but leave it to an Indian to do the unexpected.

Fargo stayed clear of the wagon road connecting the roadhouse with Fort Clark, as the Indians were probably watching it. Traveling cross-country, he kept his eyes open, probing every rise and depression and every clump of bunchgrass and weed-choked boulder, ready to reach for his saddle gun.

Three miles from the roadhouse, and following a well-worn but ancient Indian path, he drew rein in a ravine choked with wild rose and chokecherry shrubs. The ravine was probably dry most of the year, but last night's rain had sent water churning through it like whipped tea.

Keeping his eyes on the grassy rise south of the stream, Fargo slipped out of the saddle and looped his reins over a stunted oak. When he was sure he and Valeria were alone, he pulled her off the Ovaro's back and set her down gently. Before he could turn away, she grabbed his arm and stared up at him sheepishly.

“I just wanted to make sure you understood, Mr. Fargo. About last night…”

Fargo looked down at her, a gleam in his eye. “You're not that type of girl?”

She frowned, and a fire blazed in her green eyes. She hadn't bothered to put her red hair up; it cascaded richly across her shoulders. “Indeed, I'm
not
. It was the Indians and the storm…the strange surroundings. You could have just”—she dropped her eyes and crossed her arms on her breasts—“
reassured
me that I was safe. You needn't have…”

Fargo slipped his Henry repeater from the saddle sheath. “You got it, Miss Howard. Next time, instead of letting you maul me like a she-griz with the springtime craze, I'll
reassure
you that you're not about to lose your pretty hair. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna cross the stream and look around from that rise yonder, see if there's any Indians between us and the fort.”

He turned to push through the cattails lining the creek, jacking a fresh round in the Henry's chamber.

“Fargo?”

He turned around. She stood beside the grazing pinto, the sun fairly glowing in those angry, agate eyes. Her bosom rose and fell like that of an angry schoolmarm.

“I know how men like to brag about their conquests. With that in mind, I would hope that you might restrain your man's shameful impulses, and save me the indignity of spreading what happened last night around Fort Clark. I mean, even if I could bear the embarrassment, Father would—”

“This might come as a shock to you, Miss Howard,” Fargo said, “but you weren't my first
conquest
, and, unless the Blackfeet and Assiniboine have something more to say on the subject, you won't be my last. Rest assured, your secret's safe with me. Now, why don't you tend nature or have a drink of water or something, and let me scout around a bit?”

He left her standing on the bank as he followed a deer path through the willows and cattails and pushed out toward the edge of the narrow, churning stream. He took the Henry in one hand, set his feet, and spread his arms.

Just as he was about to spring to the creek's other side, a scream rose from his left flank, Valeria Howard's piercing cry of sheer terror echoing around the shallow canyon.

Fargo wheeled and sprinted back the way he'd come, stumbling in the weedy turf. He ran around the pinto, which was prancing nervously and craning its neck to stare over its left hip, and plunged into the tall wheatgrass, heading upstream. Bounding over a low rise, he stopped suddenly, stared into the depression before him.

Valeria stood facing him, her face in her hands. Another fifteen feet beyond her, a man lay in the crinkled, bloodstained grass, several arrows sprouting from his chest, belly, and legs.

Beyond the body, a freight wagon sat at the edge of the brush lining the creek, two mules lying dead before the drooping wagon tongue, their bloody carcasses half concealed by young cottonwoods and willows. The tarp had come loose from the box, revealing overturned barrels and broken crates. Several more barrels and burlap bags lay scattered behind the wagon, dislodged when the freighter had tried to make a run for the creek, Indians nipping at his heels.

Fargo moved around Valeria and stood over the stout body clad in a blood-soaked wool coat, stovepipe boots, and duck trousers. He'd thought the man's head had been concealed by the brush, but he saw now that the head was gone—chopped off with a hatchet—leaving a grisly, ragged hole atop the man's broad shoulders.

Wrinkling his nose at the cloying, copper stench of fresh blood, Fargo looked around. A large cottonwood stood left of the wagon. Something had been attached to the trunk with a feathered arrow. Fargo moved down the knoll and circled the wagon, squinting at the tree trunk until the object attached to it became the head of the Frenchman's freighting partner, Jan Hallbing.

The arrow had been drilled through the man's forehead. The eyelids, brushed by wisps of wheat blond hair, drooped as though with extreme fatigue. The tongue protruded from the mouth, angled slightly as though to lick blood from the swollen lower lip. Blood dribbled from the ragged flaps of torn skin at the neck, streaking the cottonwood's trunk below.

So much for Hallbing's truce with the Assiniboine.

Fargo wheeled suddenly and peered back in the direction of the roadhouse. His heart thudded as a slender column of gray-black smoke rose in the far distance, nearly too thin to see from this vantage point—a good three miles—unless you were looking for it.

The roadhouse was on fire, which probably meant that Smiley's relations with the local aborigines had chilled along with Hallbing's. Dropping his gaze and shading his eyes from the sun's glare, Fargo could make out the jostling brown blurs of distant riders moving toward him across the rolling prairie.

Galloping
toward him.

“Mount up!” the Trailsman shouted as he ran back toward the pinto.

Kneeling where he'd left her, holding her arms across her stomach, Valeria turned toward him, her gaze both questioning and fearful.

“More company!”

Fargo paused to lift the girl brusquely to her feet then half dragged, half carried her over the rise to where the Ovaro waited, craning its neck to stare back toward the roadhouse. The horse had obviously scented the Indians; it twitched its ears and nickered anxiously, prancing in place.

Fargo threw the girl up behind the saddle, then grabbed the reins and swung into the leather. He didn't have to spur the horse into motion; almost before he'd gotten seated, the pinto bulled forward into the cattails and willows, leaped over the rushing creek, and bounded up the opposite side of the cut.

As the horse gained the crest of the ridge, snorting and blowing, hooves thumping, Fargo turned back to see the jostling brown blurs moving toward him. The Indians were a mile away but moving fast and spread out in a loose group, with several holding war lances or rifles.

Behind them, the smoke from Smiley's roadhouse ribboned skyward.

“What's got into those crazy savages?” Fargo muttered. He gave the pinto its head and tipped his hat brim low. The horse galloped up and down the gentle prairie knolls and hogbacks, swerving wide of the occasional alder or cottonwood copse.

With the pinto's blazing speed, it wasn't long before Fort Clark rose up out of the prairie ahead, at the confluence of two streams—Little Porcupine Creek and the Mouse River. A low jog of steep buttes rose a quarter mile from the fort's right wall, and a hat-shaped bluff towered over a cottonwood forest on the left.

Clark was a stockade-surrounded fortress hewn, adzed, and back-and-bellied from trees felled in the breaks of the Missouri River. From this distance, and even with its blockhouses and guard towers looming over its four corners, the fort appeared little more significant than a small schooner on a large sea of gray-green grass and scattered oak, cottonwood, and ash. But Fargo had never been as happy to see one of these far-flung military outposts in his life.

The happiness was short-lived.

Valeria tapped his shoulder and said in a frightened voice shaken by the horse's pounding strides, “Fargo…over there!”

He looked west. A half dozen painted warriors bounded over a low, rocky rise, maniacally heeling their mustangs into turf-chewing gallops, angling southeast on an interception course.

Swirling war paint glistened on their cherry red faces. Their hair—braided, feathered, greased, and trimmed with rawhide strips and bone amulets—blew out behind them. The knife slashes of their mouths spread with glory whoops and battle cries. Several braves raised their ash bows or plucked arrows from quivers flopping down their backs.

“Keep your head down!” Fargo ordered, clawing his .44 from its holster.

The pinto jerked a glance toward the Indians thundering toward them on the right, bounding over the prairie swells, their horses stretched out in long, leaping strides. The pinto gave an anxious snort and lowered its head, stretching its own legs, driving ahead even faster.

Before Fargo, the fort rose up out of the bunchgrass and wild timothy. To his right, the Indians drew within fifty yards. Several loosed arrows. They whirred like bats around the Trailsman's head, one cutting close enough that he could hear the shriek of the feathered shaft before it broke on a lone boulder to his left.