Arizona Renegades (21 page)

The drummer appealed to the others. “Honestly, none of you believe these wild allegations, do you?” Their cold stares showed they did. Tucker nervously licked his lips. Then his hand moved, and in it materialized a derringer. “Damn you, Fargo! Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone? Now I can’t let any of you live.”

Gwen Pearson asked the question on all their minds. “In heaven’s name, Virgil, what did you hope to gain?”

Tucker pulled a leather wallet from an inner pocket. “Half a million dollars worth of negotiable certificates! Is that reason enough for you?” He cackled at his good fortune. “Elias Hackman wasn’t an ordinary stockbroker. He was a courier, taking these stocks to a client in San Francisco. I found out by accident at one of the way stations, when he was writing a letter to his firm and I peeked over his shoulder. Now they’re mine!”

Melissa took a step and he pivoted toward her. “Would you really murder all of us, Virgil? I thought we were your friends.”

“Lady, for half a million dollars I’d kill my own mother! No more endless days on the go! No more bouncing around in cramped stages! No more sleeping in hovels! From now on, it’s only the best for Virgil W. Tucker.”

Fargo saw one of the others draw a pistol. He moved, and the drummer swung toward him. Tucker’s astonishment when a shot shattered the dawn was etched in his face as he pitched to the earth.

Buck Dawson blew wisps of gunsmoke from the barrel of his revolver. “I never have liked pushy salesmen much.”

To the north, on the road, hooves drummed, accoutrements rattled, and a commanding voice bellowed for a patrol to halt.

“Is that what I think it is?” Gwen eagerly asked.

Fargo wearily nodded. Against all odds, and the treachery of one of their own, they had survived. The nightmare was over. Now he could finally get on with his life. Or could he?

Melissa Starr and Gwen Pearson were advancing, hands on their hips and wrath crackling on their brows. “We have a bone to pick with you, mister,” the redhead declared.

Fargo hoped the cavalry would hurry.

“Coming events cast their shadows before them.”

The big man with the lake blue eyes uttered the phrase as he guided the magnificent Ovaro between two towering Ponderosa pines, his voice colored with wry amusement. Written by a man named Joseph Campbell, the phrase had stayed with Skye Fargo ever since he’d first read it. It had proven itself to be true all too often but always when hindsight had given the shadows form and meaning, and everyone knew that hindsight was always too late to be of practical help. Shadows, Fargo reflected, were hard to interpret, even for a trailsman.

His lake blue eyes narrowed as they swept the rugged terrain. Certainly the high-mountain country of north Montana held plenty of its own shadows. Named Land of the Mountains by the Spanish conquistadors, it was a land that offered pleasure and hardship, beauty and danger, in equal measure. As he rode from the north, the Sapphire Mountains in front of him, the Bitterroot Range rising in the distance on his right, he wondered if Abbey had been one of those events that cast their shadows. It had to be a good shadow she cast, benign and filled with pleasure memories. Her eager passion, unrestricted ecstasy and ample breasts could cast nothing else. He had made the long detour into the north Montana high country, hoping she still ran the small sheep ranch with her brother. He discovered that she did and together they turned the clock back to old pleasures with new urgency.

It had been almost a week he’d spent with Abbey and he smiled as he rode, a parade of intimacies and memories surrounding him. He’d been surprised at how little things he’d thought forgotten leaped up at once as though they’d simply been waiting for a time to wake. Abbey’s nipples were two of those memories, always so very small on her ample breasts, as though they really ought to belong to a very young, very small girl. But their tiny mounds were fountains of sensitivity, rising at once, reaching upward to give and be given. It had always been that way with Abbey and time hadn’t changed that at all. The week that followed had been all he could have hoped for, the feeling mutual, she acknowledged when the week drew to an end. “You have to go,” she said as she lay exhausted beside him, her slightly chunky body quivering with spent passion. “I’m not getting any of my work done. All my chores are piling up. Or stay with me always,” she added. “And I know you won’t do that.”

He didn’t answer and they both knew he had. She’d clung to him before he left after breakfast, leaving the only regret they shared. Abbey rode with him, a welcome companion if only in his thoughts. Shadows. He grunted. If they were being cast by coming events they could only be good ones.

Shaking off idle thoughts, he steered the Ovaro down a deer trail as he scanned the land. He always felt small riding this land. The tremendous Douglas firs, Engelman spruce, ponderosa pines, the giant sequoias and the red cedar were giants to make anything and anyone feel small. This was logging country, evidence almost anywhere he looked, the stumps of fallen trees, the broken pieces of a bucking saw, the long hafts of a splintered falling ax and the ubiquitous hooked oilcans left lying on the forest floor.

But mostly, the land was imprinted by the thousands of logs that floated down every river, tributary, lake, and waterway. Still other logs were seen stored in big ponds behind splash dams, built for the purpose, waiting for the moment when the spill gate of the dam was pulled away and the cascade of logs sent hurtling down to the river or lake. Riding through logging country always gave him a mixed feeling, Fargo acknowledged. There was a violation here, the power and beauty of nature being destroyed by man’s uncaring greed. Someday a better way of using the timber would be found than the unchecked logging practiced now, he told himself. There had to be if the treasure of the great forests were to be renewed for others. But now there was a headlong selfishness, a dark spirit of destruction that had to affect the destroyers as well as the destroyed. These loggers were a breed unto themselves, he knew, personally brave and foolhardy, the lumberjacks simply crude and unthinking, their bosses adding greed and contempt to their legacy.

Fargo turned the Ovaro along the edge of a narrow river, into the open sun that made the horse’s jet black fore- and hindquarters glisten, its pure white midsection gleam. Fallen logs all but filled the narrow river, moving faster than they seemed to move from a distance, no room between them as one pushed against the other. Suddenly his eyes rested on a figure almost in the center of the logs. The man lay face-down, his legs hanging into the water, caught between logs, the one he clung to and the one that held him pinned against it. Fargo sent the pinto into a canter, down a steep bank that deposited him at the water’s edge. He peered across the carpet of logs that moved down the river. Though still traveling slowly, they were gathering speed as they moved into the center of the river, jostling each other with increasing force.

Fargo pulled the pinto to a halt and swung from the saddle, leaping onto the nearest logs that drifted past him. Landing on both feet simultaneously, he felt the logs instantly move under his weight. Though the movement was slight, it was enough to send some of the logs immediately climbing over others. Though he didn’t wear the cleated, caulked logger’s boots, he began to make his way across the logs, leaping lightly from one to the other. But the logs moved, unexpectedly, some sinking down, others shifting away, and he found each step becoming a tricky little dance with the creak and scrape of logs the only rhythm. But his eyes went to the still figure as he became more convinced the man would be crushed as soon as the logs that held him began to gather speed when they reached midriver.

Leaping forward more recklessly, Fargo neared the figure, finally halting on the log that trapped the man’s legs. Dropping down, Fargo used both feet and all the strength of his powerful leg muscles to push against the next log. It moved, even with the pressure of other logs against it, opening up enough for him to reach out and swing the man’s legs out of the water and onto the log on which he lay. Straightening up, Fargo stepped onto the log where the man lay. He knelt down on one knee to turn the man onto his back. He felt the frown dig into his brow as the figure wouldn’t turn. Leaning closer, he tried again, then saw the two big ten-penny nails that had been driven into the log. Ropes ran from the nails around the man’s wrists.

The frown digging deeper, Fargo stared at the figure. The man hadn’t fallen and been trapped by the crush of adjoining logs. He’d been nailed to the log and sent out into the river with the mass of other logs. The terrible truth speared into Fargo. The man had been nailed to the log to be crushed to death when the logs gathered speed and climbed over each other. But death hadn’t waited to claim him, perhaps mercifully so, Fargo saw. The logs that had trapped his legs had also taken life from him, probably by sheer loss of blood. Sitting back on his haunches, his eyes riveted on the lifeless figure, thoughts whirled inside him. If the man had been crushed by other logs, the wrists ropes would have been torn away. Had it been a clever way to hide a killing? Or had he been put there not to hide anything but to be an example?

Did it much matter? He asked himself. It was a cold-blooded killing. The reasons wouldn’t change that. They’d only put a face on it, nothing more. He’d let others struggle with that, in their own way, in their own time. He was but passing by. The bitter taste stayed in his mouth as he rose to his feet and began to hop his way across the logs, a treacherous, shifting floor. Suddenly a huge redwood rose up and drove itself forward over another log and straight at him with thunderous speed. He spun, half leaped, half dived, and landed on a nearby log, then jumped onto another and continued to find his way over the logs. Finally, with a long jump, his feet hit the soft earth of the shoreline and he heard his own breath escape him.

Turning, he watched the logs gathering speed as they went by and he slowly walked back to where the Ovaro waited. The questions clung to him as he pulled himself onto the horse and rode up the embankment and away from the waterway. He rode south again, refusing to dwell on what he’d seen, though other logs in other waterways refused to let him forget. He was passing through, he reminded himself again, and he’d let it stay that way. Moving through the thick forests of red cedar and lodgepole pine, he heard the distant sounds of logging operations, the crash of the huge trees that reverberated for miles, the sounds of big, double-handled bucksaws, and the sharp crack of broadaxes. The sounds faded away as he rode deeper into untouched, virgin timber-land, and as dusk began to slide into the day, he slowed to a halt.

He listened, his head inclined to one side, and his eyes scanning the forest from beneath the frown that had again come to his forehead. He sat very still, his wild-creature hearing picking up the sounds. They had intruded on him since he’d entered the virgin forest. This time it was the whir of wings taking flight, an entire charm of goldfinches with their black foreheads and black wings filling the sky. Before that it had been a herd of black-tailed deer, all fleeing through the forest at once, startled and fearful of an alien presence. Before that there had been the tremendous racket of a murder of crows, the kind only set off when they were unexpectedly disturbed. Crows, being what they are, didn’t just fly away as most birds would. They stayed, swooped in huge groups, and angrily cawed and protested, aggressively showing their displeasure. Finally they had calmed down. But before that there had been the unmistakable rustling sound of grouse taking wing almost straight up.

It had all been a good distance behind him yet it had persisted, one sound after the other, each a message to those who could understand. He had ridden casually and made no effort to cover his tracks, but he was becoming convinced that either someone was following and searching out trail-marks, or happened to be riding along the same paths. Fargo grunted at the last thought. He never dismissed coincidence. He just didn’t put much store in them. As night supplanted dusk, he swung from the Ovaro and led the horse into a dense thicket of hackberry with plenty of wild geranium to soften the land and welcome a bedroll. He ate cold beef jerky, certain that darkness had put a stop to anyone tracking him. Then he lay down and listened to the night sounds, the clatter of scarab beetles, the buzz of insects, the soft swoosh of bats, and the chatter of kit foxes, until finally he slept.

When morning came he found a stream, washed, and rode on until the trees thinned out enough to leave patches of open land. He stopped, dismounted, and used his boots to scrape marks on the ground, then pressed a circle in the grass. He used his canteen to damp down the grass inside the circle he’d scraped. He finished, added a few more meaningless marks, and smiled. Even he wouldn’t know what to make of them. Taking the Ovaro behind a cluster of cottonwoods, he sat down against the furrowed, pale bark and waited. The sun had reached the noon sky when he heard the horse approaching in clustered, hesitant steps, the rider pausing often to search the ground.

Fargo was on his feet behind the tree trunk when the horse pushed into sight, a dark brown gelding, the rider on it no more than eighteen years old, he guessed, as he took in the young man’s smooth cheeks and full, unruly black hair. The youth halted, dismounted, and knelt down beside the markings on the ground. Fargo watched the frown of consternation gather on his forehead as he studied the markings. “Real confusing, isn’t it, junior?” Fargo said as he stepped from behind the tree. “What do you make of it?” Startled, the young man straightened up and spun, one hand moving toward the gun at his hip. “I wouldn’t do that, junior,” Fargo said quietly. The youth’s hand dropped to his side and his eyes went to the marks on the ground.