Several more quick, angry shots rose from straight ahead—a good mile or more away—and Fargo swung out of the saddle, wincing when his charred soles touched the prickly earth. Ground-hitching the pinto, he jogged to the lip of the dike, which faced east, and dropped to his knees behind a lone hawthorn shrub.
His keen eyes scanned the murky morning shadows beyond him, but he didn’t spy movement until several more shots rang out, followed closely by a bizarre, victorious yowl—the crazed yammer of a madman.
Just beyond the next rise, similar to the one upon which Fargo lay, several shadows milled amongst the brush. A horse galloped straight south along the valley, buck-kicking and trailing its reins, its saddle hanging down over its ribs. Its terrified whinny rose shrilly, quickly absorbed by the vast, pale green sky.
Unable to see much from here, Fargo jogged back down the rise, mounted the Ovaro, and rode north, paralleling the crest of the long bluff before dropping over the bluff’s north shoulder and into the valley below.
The distant gunfire ceased, replaced by the beseeching screams of a man in deep physical pain.
A narrow ravine twisted through the valley, angling along the base of another bluff standing between Fargo and Duke and his howling victim.
Leaving the Ovaro ground-tied in a cottonwood swale, Fargo grabbed Prairie Dog’s Schuetzen from the saddle boot, wedged a second spare revolver—a .36 Colt—behind his cartridge belt, then dropped into the ravine. Keeping his head below the ravine’s steep but shallow rim, he followed the dry watercourse’s gravelly floor toward the rising screams punctuated by Duke’s demonic yelps and howls.
When the screams seemed to be coming from his right, Fargo stopped and edged a look over the ravine’s lip. Fifty yards away through the gray sage and bunchgrass tufts, several horseback braves milled, riding in broad circles around Lieutenant Duke who stood menacingly over a blue-clad man sprawled on the ground before him. Waving a bloody knife in the air, Duke howled. He bent down, his blond hair and the Trailsman’s own hat dropping below Fargo’s field of vision.
A man screamed shrilly—a long, hopeless cry of excruciating agony. “No!” he shouted. His voice cracked, and he sobbed, panting. “I don’t…I don’t know where they went, you crazy son of a bitch!”
The Trailsman leaned the Schuetzen against the side of the gully, the barrel extending far enough that Fargo could locate the gun easily if he needed it. Snakelike, he slithered up over the lip of the gully and crawled through the sage and bunchgrass, gritting his teeth, cocked .44 in his right hand.
“It’s too bad you don’t remember, you feeble white-eyes!” Lieutenant Duke shouted. “It is too bad you—nothing more than prairie vermin crawling out from your civilized white society—had the unfortunate gall to kill the bravest war chief who ever walked the plains and stalked the buffalo!”
A blade whispered through flesh. The soldier howled shrilly. “I didn’t kill him, damn your hide. And you’re as white as I am, you crazy bastard!”
Lifting his head from a clump of bunchgrass, Fargo glanced around at the horseback riders milling around him—seven painted braves on snorting mounts. Their attention was on the man staked out on the ground before Lieutenant Duke, whose back faced Fargo from twenty feet away.
Fargo stretched the cocked Colt straight out before him through the coarse blond grass, squinting one eye as he stared down the barrel. He planted his sites on Duke’s back as the crazy lieutenant leaned down to swipe his blade once more across his staked, howling captive.
Suddenly, hooves thundered to Fargo’s right. He turned quickly. A brave was bearing down on him atop a brown and white pinto. The brave shrieked, wide brown eyes glistening in the sunlight as he leaned over his horse’s right shoulder, drawing a bow string taut, the nocked arrow aimed at Fargo.
Fargo jerked right, stumbling as he gained his feet. The arrow clattered off a rock to his left. He triggered the Colt then ducked as the horse galloped over him, wincing as a foreleg nipped his thigh.
When he glanced up again the brave was still somersaulting through the air to hit the ground on his head and shoulders, his neck snapping audibly to leave him quivering amidst the grama grass and pokeweed.
Behind the Trailsman rose a coyotelike yammer as the other six braves loosed war whoops and gigged their horses toward Fargo, two bearing down with rifles, two with bows, another with a war lance painted the gray and blue stripes of the Coyote Clan.
Straight ahead of Fargo, Lieutenant Duke cocked his arm and tossed his bloodstained knife. Fargo leaned sideways, and the blade sliced across his upper arm—a long but shallow cut from which blood glistened instantly.
The Trailsman snapped up the .44 and fired at Duke, flinching as the war lance whistled past him. The mad lieutenant howled and clapped a hand to his ear, blood seeping between his fingers. Fargo whipped his gun around and blew the brave who’d just thrown the war lance out of his saddle with two shots through his breastbone.
The brave hadn’t hit the ground before Fargo jerked suddenly, as though he’d been hit in the chest with a sledgehammer. An Indian galloping behind the brave he’d just killed screamed victoriously as his horse whipped on past Fargo, who glanced down to see a fletched shaft protruding from his left shoulder.
The Trailsman whipped around. The brave who’d fired the arrow reined his horse sharply with one hand while reaching into his quiver for another arrow.
Fargo emptied his Colt into the brave’s neck and chest, then ducked several bullets slicing the air around him. He dropped the Colt and grabbed the spare .36 from behind his cartridge belt.
Suppressing the hot, stabbing pain of the arrow in his shoulder, he began pivoting on his hips and heels, picking out the three other targets surrounding him, the .36 belching and smoking in his clenched right fist—pop, pop, pop-pop, pop!—before the last three horses galloped off, riderless, reins bouncing along the ground behind them.
Staggering slightly, squinting through the wafting powder smoke, Fargo looked around.
Four braves lay silent and unmoving. A fifth was crawling feebly after the horses, head and hair hanging, blood painting a swath behind him. A sixth lay on his back, coughing between the somnolent notes of his death song.
The young soldier whom Duke had staked out, spread eagle to the sun, turned his shaggy head left and right and up and down, glancing around, terrified. His blue, yellow-striped uniform pants were threadbare. He wore no tunic, just a torn undershirt and one suspender. Blood glistened from the shallow cuts on his arms, thighs, and belly and from the cuts and bruises on his red-bearded face.
Beyond the young soldier, Duke was running straight west through the brush, toward where a steel dust mustang stood eyeing the man warily. Duke had lost his hat, and his yellow hair swung wildly across his broad, sun-bronzed back.
Fargo jogged around the staked soldier, wincing at the stabbing pain of the arrow in his shoulder, and raised the .36. Aiming quickly as Duke leaped onto the steel dust’s back, he squeezed the trigger.
Dust puffed behind the horse’s swishing tail.
The horse lunged forward, nearly throwing Duke backward. Clutching the rope reins, Duke glanced at Fargo, then grabbed the steel dust’s dancing mane as the horse broke into a ground-eating gallop, heading west.
Fargo drew a bead on the man’s bare back, squeezed the trigger, but the hammer pinged on an empty chamber.
Cursing, Fargo wheeled and ran back toward the ravine.