Hangtown Hellcat Read Online Free

replied.
    Earlier that day the Ovaro’s sensitive nose had located this underground spring. Fargo and Shoo Fly had cooked upthis scheme back in the Nebraska Panhandle and worked it several times since then. Fargo enjoyed the ruse as much as the rest of the men.
    While some of the men filled water casks, Fargo and Buckshot took a good squint around the outskirts of camp, checking with all the guards.
    “We best knock up some grub for the trail,” Fargo remarked as both men gazed south across the moon-bleached landscape. “I want to ride out before full light.”
    “You seen the notched trees in this area?” Buckshot asked.
    “What, you think I’m as green as Charlie? How could I miss ’em?”
    “I can’t break their code,” Buckshot said. “But it’s Northern Cheyennes sending messages to their Sioux battle cousins. Messages about the paleface invaders crossing their ranges.”
    “They know every damn thing we’re up to,” Fargo agreed. “And they’ll be watching me and you when we ride out.”
    “Paleface killers ahead of us and pissed-off savages on our back trail,” Buckshot said. “
Thank
you, Jesus, for another glorious day siding Skye Fargo!”

3
    The next morning, even before the dull yellow sun edged over the eastern horizon, Fargo and Buckshot tacked their mounts and headed due south, tracking their quarry across the vast stretch of southern Wyoming known as the Great Divide Basin.
    The imposing Wind River Range of the Rockies saw-toothed the sky behind them, and smaller ranges encircled them. Much of the basin was a broad expanse of sage and greasewood bushes—and a bushwhacker’s paradise. In places the sagebrush was tall enough to conceal a standing man.
    Years of scouting dangerous country had taught both men a hair-trigger alertness that was as habitual as breathing. So far, tracking the trio of attackers proved easier than rolling off a log. They had taken no pains to obscure their trail, and the hoof depressions in the lush grass—overlapping often, the sign of a gallop—proved their greatest concern was fast escape, not concealment.
    “As long as we can see all three sets of those tracks,” Fargo remarked about an hour after they rode out from the work camp, “we don’t have to worry about being dry-gulched.”
    “Ahuh,” Buckshot agreed. “Seen any featherheads yet?”
    “Nope. But you know how it is with Bronze John—we’ll see him only when he wants us to. This is their range and they don’t miss a damn thing. They’re out there watching us.”
    The two men rode for several more miles in silence, each man alone with his thoughts. Then Buckshot abruptly spoke up.
    “You know what, Skye? Eastern capital is the goddamn enemy of the westering man. Them sons-a-bitches back inWashington City is powwowing with them railroad barons right now, cuttin’ the West up like it was a pie baked just for them. This telegraph me and you is helping to string through—it ain’t for the common man. It’s just making things easier for the damn railroads when they finally come through.”
    “’Fraid so,” Fargo agreed. “But Big Ed ain’t in their hip pocket. He raised the money for this line himself after Western Union put it up for bid. And I think he
does
mean for it to help the common man.”
    “Nothing cheapjack about him,” Buckshot acknowledged. “Him and Charlie both are straight grain clear through. Some of these big nabobs, why, hell! They want to rise so high that when they shit they don’t miss nobody. Big Ed ain’t like that.”
    Fargo agreed, but the westering fever was far bigger than one good man’s intentions. It took at least five months for a wagon train to get from Missouri to Oregon, with one in ten pilgrims dying along the way. But at the moment, the “Wild West” was of no interest to most of them—it was just Zebulon Pike’s Great American Desert that must be crossed to reach the supposed paradise of California or Oregon.
    But that Western capital