Hangtown Hellcat Read Online Free Page A

Buckshot had just cussed out was already at work, and Fargo knew it wouldn’t be long until the Great Plains and Intermountain West peopled up, too—hell, the killers were obviously already here. The buffalo, the free-range Indians, and finally the drifters like him and Buckshot would be hemmed in on all sides.
    “Might’s well face it, old son,” he remarked. “Men like me and you will likely end up our lives—if we don’t die of lead colic first—holed up in Death Valley or the Jornada del Muerto. Surviving on rattlesnake and cactus juice.”
    Buckshot loosed a brown streamer into the grass. “Ain’t it the drizzlin’ shits? Soft-handed town bastards driving us out of our own country.”
    The trail of the attackers was still plain, still pointing due south straight as a plumb line. But Fargo briefly jogged west to avoid a level range pockmarked by prairie dog towns. A horse with a snapped ankle was the last thing they needed.
    “Where in Sam Hill are these cockroaches headed?”Buckshot wondered aloud. “Mayhap they got a camp on Bitter Creek. I been down that way tracking Injins—good water, good graze, and you can see anybody coming at you for miles.”
    “I hope not,” Fargo replied. “Unless we sneak in at night, they’d shoot us to doll stuffings before we got across that tableland.”
    “Bad medicine,” Buckshot agreed. He gnawed off a corner of his plug and parked it in his cheek as soon as he had it juicing proper.
    “Chaw?” he asked Fargo, offering the tobacco.
    Fargo waved it off. “Can’t abide the taste.”
    “You damn weak sister. You gotta learn to chew the suption out of it, is all.”
    Buckshot loosed another brown streamer that just missed Fargo’s boot.
    “You get that
suption
on me,” Fargo warned, “and you’ll be wearing your ass for a hat.”
    Buckshot hooted. “Won’tcha listen to pretty teeth? The pup is barkin’ like a full-growed dog.”
    The terrain gradually altered and soon the riders were crossing meadows where sunflowers grew shoulder high and blue-winged teals darted about like spring-drunk butterflies. The horses, never pushed beyond a trot, still had plenty of bottom. Fargo had lashed a goat gut filled with water to the Ovaro, and now the two riders reined in to water the mounts from their hats.
    “Sheep clouds making up,” Fargo remarked as they hit leather and gigged their horses forward again. “Rain’s likely in an hour or two.”
    “I wunner when them Injins will show,” Buckshot said, slewing around in his saddle to study their back trail.
    “If it’s Cheyennes,” Fargo reminded him, “they’ll likely show up on our flanks or out front of us. They don’t track their enemies—they pace ’em and guess where they’re headed.”
    Both men gnawed on buffalo jerky and cold biscuits in the saddle. When he finished eating, Fargo poked a skinny black Mexican cigar into his teeth and scratched a phosphor to life with his thumbnail. He leaned forward into the flame,fighting the wind for a light. The wind won and he cursed mildly, sticking the cigar back into his possibles bag—he was damned if he’d use up another precious match.
    A few more uneventful miles and the terrain changed again, rising slightly as the grass thinned to sandy patches. Scattered rock spines dotted the land, and Fargo realized that was potentially dangerous news.
    “Trouble,” he announced, lake blue eyes slanted toward the ground. “They’ve pulled an Indian trick on us and split off in three directions.”
    Buckshot eyed the nearest rock spine, rubbing his chin. “And in good ambush country, too. One a them shit-heels could be layin’ back to pop us over.”
    “Nothing else for it,” Fargo decided. “I’d wager all three of them are headed to the same place, so it won’t matter which trail we follow. Let’s stick with the middle one.”
    “Hey diddle diddle and up the middle,” Buckshot agreed. “That’s how me, Kit, and Uncle Dick attacked and drove them