Hangtown Hellcat Read Online Free Page B

Mexer freebooters out of Taos. Scattered ’em like ninepins. Them pepper guts ran like a river when the snow melts.”
    “Way I heard it,” Fargo said, “you were drunk as a fiddler’s bitch and wallowing with a whore during that battle.”
    Buckshot sent him a dirty look and then expelled a sigh. “You’re a hard man to bullshit, Skye. Well, I’ll take a hoor over a shooting scrape every time.”
    Both men, realizing their increased danger with the trip split up, scoured their surroundings with an eye to likely snipers’ nests. Fargo’s earlier prediction came true when a sudden thunderstorm boiled up. Gray sheets of wind-driven rain pelted them, destroying visibility and forcing them to shelter under a traprock shelf. The rain lasted nearly an hour and left patches of mud as thick and sloppy as gumbo, slowing them down. But both men were among the best trackers in the West and they held the trail.
    However, it was a rough piece of work. Splitting up was only the beginning of their enemy’s precautions. The rider they were following also rode for several hundred yards through a small creek, making it difficult for his trackers topick up the spot where he emerged. And once he even rode into a chewed up buffalo run, obscuring his tracks.
    “I’m thinking maybe you were right yesterday, Buckshot,” Fargo speculated out loud. “This jasper went to a lot of trouble to hide his trail. That tells me these three ain’t just on the prod—they’ve got themselves a hideout and they’re bound and determined to keep anybody from finding it.”
    The two men doggedly persisted, leaning low from the saddle and often forced to dismount to study the bend of the grass or an overturned stone. The afternoon heated up and biting flies plagued men and horses mercilessly.
    “Shit-oh-dear,” Fargo breathed softly when he and Buckshot rounded a long rock abutment. “Stay frosty, old son. Straight ahead and keep up the strut. Looks like we got company, and they don’t appear too happy to see us.”
    Strung out in a line just ahead of them, impassive faces blank as gray slate, sat six Northern Cheyenne braves astride their mustangs, weapons pointed at the paleface intruders.
    *   *   *
    Fargo had expected an eventual encounter with one of the tribes, but had not envisioned riding cold into a trap like this. In his experience the Northern Cheyenne were not cold-blooded murderers, even of white men. Deeply religious in their fashion, the taking of a human life was not a casual act.
    Then again, braves who had painted and danced, propitiating Maiyun the Great Supernatural, had a freer hand to take an enemy’s life.
    And every one of these braves wore his red, yellow, and black war paint.
    “Katy Christ,” Buckshot muttered, “I thought your stallion was trained to hate the Indian smell.”
    Buckshot meant the smell of the bear grease that Cheyenne braves smeared liberally into their long black hair.
    “He is,” Fargo replied quietly as they walked their mounts closer. “But we’re upwind, you knothead.”
    “These red sons are painted, Fargo. How’s ’bout I swing Patsy Plumb up and jerk both triggers? This smoke wagon can blow three of those bucks off their ponies. You’re quickerthan eyesight with that thumb-buster of yours—you can send the other three under faster than a finger snap.”
    “At least pre
tend
you got more brains than a rabbit. We leave six Cheyenne braves murdered and we’ll touch off a vengeance war that’ll guarandamntee Indian haircuts for Big Ed and his crew.
Don’t
pull down on them unless we can’t wangle out of this.”
    Fargo raised one hand high in sign talk for peace. Both men drew rein about ten feet in front of the line of grim-faced braves. The two men kept any feelings from showing in their faces—a white man’s habit despised by most Plains warriors as unmanly.
    The brave who first spoke had the most eagle-tail feathers dangling from his coup stick, making him the natural