“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.
Another knifed the air just behind Valeria, who gave a miserable cry.
Fargo loosed a couple of errant shots at the Indians. They didn’t so much as hesitate but continued on their driving, slanting course, which in another hundred yards would put them between the fort’s front stockade wall, and Fargo.
But then the pinto began to pull away, and the Indians’ cunning, kill-crazy expressions tensed. All but that of one young warrior on a small blue roan. He kept pace with the pinto.
Drawing to within thirty yards of Fargo’s right stirrup, and taking his braided halter ribbons in his teeth, the glory-drunk brave knocked and cocked an arrow. Fargo extended the .44 in his right hand, aimed as well as he could from his jouncing seat, and fired.
The Colt roared. The brave loosed the arrow, which flew wildly above and behind Fargo and Valeria.
At the same time, the bullet plunked through the Indian’s breastbone and drove him off the right side of his horse. As he got tangled with the roan’s scissoring legs, the horse gave a shrill scream, and then horse and rider both hit the ground and rolled and somersaulted wildly, dust puffing up around their wind-milling limbs and the scattering arrows as though from a cannon ball explosion.