The bodies still lay where he had shot them, but as the light filled the sky, the men were starting to move around in the compound a little.
“Fargo, I’m impressed,” Jim said, staring through the eyepiece. “You really cut their numbers down. So, what do you think their next play is?” He handed Fargo the spyglass.
A number of men were now starting to pull the bodies around behind the stable and toward the small mine cemetery.
“We’ve cut off his plan on taking over the mine through his mine,” Fargo said. “And he doesn’t have enough men to stage a direct attack anymore. So he needs to hire more, which is what I think he will do.”
“And we’re not going to allow him to go do that, are we?” Jim asked, laughing.
“No, we’re not,” Fargo said.
Below, he saw the familiar figure of Kip moving around the yard, barking orders. That kid was going to die and die ugly. Fargo was going to make sure of that. No one tricked him like Kip had done and got away with it.
Fargo handed Jim the spyglass and said, “Look who showed his ugly face.”
Jim stared for a moment, then shook his head and handed the glass back to Fargo. “The kid had us all fooled.”
Fargo said nothing. His impulse was to ride into the compound and kill Brant and Kip. But it was better to keep his rage under control.
A few minutes later, Brant came out on the porch of the big house followed by his daughter. He had a bandage on one side of his forehead that made Fargo smile. He hadn’t killed the man in the window last night, but he had clearly got him with the glass.
Sarah Brant looked like she was back to normal. She seemed to have no intention of leaving anytime soon. She was talking to her father and watching the activity in the courtyard.
Fargo watched as Kip moved over to them and said something, and both Brant and his daughter laughed.
After twenty minutes, Brant and his daughter turned and went back into the house arm in arm. Kip kept the men working, cleaning up the area, posting new guards, moving the bodies.
No one made a motion to leave, and no one new came up the road.
After two hours of watching as the sun warmed the air around them, Fargo sat up from his position flat on a rock surface and shook his head. “They’re waiting for something.”
“That’s my sense as well,” Jim said. “But for what?”
“I don’t know,” Fargo said. And that bothered him something awful. Again, Brant seemed to be a step ahead of him.
What were they waiting for?
Henry Brant was ruthless and only after the ore. He didn’t care about people or who died for him or against him. Only the gold mattered. And now he needed more men to get to the gold.
So somehow, he already had more men coming.
But he also needed something to take care of Fargo, to take him out of the picture in one fashion or another.
The beautiful image of Anne lying there naked in that bathtub snapped into his mind and his stomach twisted into a tight knot. Suddenly, he had an urgent need to know if Anne was all right.
He jumped to his feet. “Keep as many eyes as possible on that compound and the road leading into it,” he said to Jim. “Don’t start a fight unless you have to until I get back.”
Jim stood. “What’s happening? Where are you going?”
Fargo stared one last time down at the Brant compound. “I think I know what they’re waiting for and I need to make sure both things don’t get here.”
With that, he turned and headed off down the hill at a steady run, trying to keep his fear in check, trying to push the image of Anne tied up and beaten from his mind. After what he had done to Sarah Brant, he couldn’t imagine what those two would do with Anne if they got her inside that building down there.
“When will you be back?” Jim shouted after him.
“As soon as I can,” Fargo shouted back.
As soon as he made sure Anne was safe. But his gut told him that he was already too late.
He rode the Ovaro hard and fast down the Placerville road, keeping his head low as he slashed past wagons and other riders.
In record time, he reached the telegraph office in Sacramento and had them wire an urgent message to Anne at her hotel in San Francisco. He paid extra to have the message run to her and a response brought back as quickly as possible.
While he waited, he headed for Marshal Davis’s office. He usually liked to go it alone and didn’t often feel he needed help, but right now he did. If Anne had been taken, he didn’t care how many people helped him get her back. All that was important was that she was safe.
“Fargo,” Marshal Davis said, smiling as Fargo entered the office. “Glad to see you’re still alive and kicking.”
“I do my best,” Fargo said.
“I hear it’s a real hornet’s nest up there right now. Even the Placerville sheriff is staying out of the way.”
“It might get worse before it gets better if I can’t get something stopped here real quick.”
He explained to the marshal everything that had happened so far, then told him the two reasons why he was in town.
“You think they’ll go after her?” Marshal Davis asked.
“I’m getting to know how Henry Brant thinks. He needs me out of the way to get the Sharon’s Dream gold. And people around Placerville have seen me with Anne, so he knows she means something to me. He’ll go after that leverage on me. That’s why I had her leave town in the first place, but my guess is he had her followed, or had someone track her down.”
“Makes sense,” the marshal said, grabbing his hat and heading for the door. “Let’s go see if you have a telegram back yet.”
As they entered the office, the telegram came in, and it was exactly what Fargo had feared the most. Anne had checked out suddenly this morning.
Fargo stared at the telegram, trying to control the twisting dread in his stomach, then handed the slip of paper to the marshal.
“She wouldn’t do that,” Fargo said.
The marshal nodded, then glanced at the clock on the wall. “First train in from San Francisco is in twenty minutes. That would be the quickest way to bring her in. Otherwise it would take a good day of riding around the bay. Let me round up some deputies and we’ll meet it. They won’t suspect we’re coming.”
Fargo nodded his thanks. “You might want to have as many men as you can get. Brant has reinforcements coming in as well. Gunhands. My guess is many of them are wanted men. They all might be coming in together.”
“Meet you at the train station,” Marshal Davis said and headed out the door at a fast trot.
Fargo stared for a moment longer at the telegram, then flipped it back on the counter.
Cain dead, his son dead, now Anne taken. How much worse could this get?
He decided he didn’t want an answer to that question.
11
He found a place against the stone wall of the train station, right in the middle, his back to a door into a luggage area. The door had a window in it head-high for people to see in or out as they went through.
The train was starting to pull in as the marshal arrived, spreading out his men along the platform. There were enough other people on the platform that the marshal’s men blended in pretty well.
Fargo stepped back inside the door to the luggage area. No point in taking a chance that someone on the train would recognize him before they got off. His only chance against professional gunhands with this many people around was to catch them by surprise.
That was also the only way to make sure Anne got away safely.
Steam from the locomotive flooded the platform as it passed, its wheels grinding as it braked slowly to a stop.