The Trailsman #396 Read Online Free Page B

“So what’s our next play?”
    â€œThey are holing up by day now, so our best chance is to hit them on the move after dark. But where they are camped right now puts them in a good spot for Montoya’s buffalo gun. He is looking at things now. Perhaps he can stay back seven hundred yards and get a clear shot at Fargo through the boulders. It would even help to kill his fine stallion.”
    â€œNever mind his horse,” Jemez warned. “Kill Fargo before anything or anyone else. We have fired on him, and now he is for us. Every thought now must be of killing Fargo before he kills us. And he will move like swift white wings of lightning, so we must move faster.”
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    Deke Ritter, the civilian contract cook, was a salty ­thirty-­five-­year-­old with a grizzled face, a ­gravel-­pan voice and a game leg shot up bad during the Blackfoot wars. He glanced carefully around to make sure none of the women were within ­earshot.
    â€œThere’s this drummer named Jenkins from Ohio,” he said, “and he wants to find out if it’s true what he hears about French gals. So he saves up and goes to Paris and he meets this fine little filly in one of them fancy eating houses with cloths on the tables.
    â€œWell, he don’t savvy a word of frog talk and she don’t know no English. So he draws a picture of a bottle. She smiles and nods and they have ’em some wine. Then he draws a picture of a plate and a chicken. She nods again and they have ’em a fancy dinner with ice cream and all the trimmin’s.
    â€œBy now, see, she’s starting to feel like she owes him for the big time, and she draws a picture of a bed. ‘Son of a bitch!’ Jenkins cries out. ‘How did you know I sell furniture?’”
    Grizz Bear guffawed, Fargo chuckled and Private Jude Hollander looked confused.
    â€œLookit, Little Miss Pink Cheeks,” Grizz Bear roweled the kid. “He don’t get it! Say, tad, ain’tcher never done the old slap and tickle?”
    Jude flushed and looked down at his boots.
    â€œÂ­Push-­push,” Grizz Bear added, and the kid turned from pink to deep scarlet.
    Grizz Bear winked at Deke and Fargo. “Say, kid, don’tcha ever get tired of cleaning your own gun every night?”
    Jude looked puzzled. “A soldier always cleans his own . . .”
    He trailed off in confusion when Grizz Bear and Deke howled with bawdy mirth. Jude caught on and took a deep interest in his boots again.
    â€œYour tongue swings way too loose, Grizz,” Fargo said, sopping up the last of his stew with a hunk of biscuit. “Jude, if the topkick finds you slacking here he’ll rate you hard.”
    The camel caravan had set up camp in a low wash where giant boulders threw some shade for men and beasts. The increasing heat and danger had forced Lieutenant Beale to order nighttime travel only just before he was ordered to Fort Mojave. By now they had fended off warpath Indians, freebooters, gangs of highway bandits, even one drunken, ragtag “army of the people” scared spitless by the camels. Indians, too, were sometimes less of a threat after dark, but Fargo knew the evil night was the Scorpion’s chosen element.
    Still, he favored the decision. Traveling in the daytime heat was becoming an almost literal torture. Besides, desert air was exceptionally clear, and moonlight and starlight reflected generously off the sand. But nobody could sleep more than a few hours in the oppressive daytime heat.
    Fargo tossed his metal plate into a big wreck pan Deke had set up behind the mobile army field kitchen, a clumsier version of a civilian chuck wagon. He scrubbed his hands in the sand and then poked a slim, dark cigarillo between his teeth.
    Grizz Bear, seated nearby on an upended ammo crate and gnawing on his fingernails, watched Fargo survey their surroundings.
    â€œHow’s it