“You won’t need your calves, just your guts. Look, my plan calls for two men. Who else can I choose? Montoya is dead and Aldritch and Blackford ain’t got the courage of a rabbit.”
“What about Skeets? He was in the army and he’s showed real backbone.”
“He’s all right,” Fargo agreed. “But he’s a city fellow from England, where they got no rattlesnakes.”
“No rattle—?” Slappy cocked his head and gazed asquint at Fargo. “The hell has rattlesnakes got to do with the price of cheese?”
Again Fargo’s wicked grin. “Nothing, chum. But rattlesnakes are one thing you’ll find aplenty in this God-forgotten hellhole, and after dark I plan to catch one.”
“Bully for you. I can cook anything. But I ain’t never caught a rattlesnake in my life, and I don’t aim to start in the Badlands.”
“You won’t need to catch it—just hold on to it.”
“Fargo, you jo-fired son of Satan! What in the hell cockeyed, harebrained scheme have you cooked up?”
Fargo ignored the question, glancing past Slappy and through the swirling maelstrom of blowing dust. Derek had climbed out of the coach and now stood in his favorite stance, feet wide apart and thumbs hooked into his shell belt.
“You two cow pies wouldn’t be talking about me, now, would you?” he called out above the howling of the wind.
“I don’t spend much time talking about a man,” Fargo replied, unfolding to his feet, “after I decide to kill him.”
Derek hadn’t expected this, and for a few moments he was speechless. Fargo followed up by coiling for the draw. “You’ve got a fancy Remington with mother-of-pearl grips. Go ahead and jerk it back. We’ve been going round and round, and I’ve had my belly full of it. You’re useless as an Indian fighter, and we all know you mean to kill me for dallying with a woman who wouldn’t piss in your ear if your brains were on fire. So I’m calling your hand right now.”
“You aren’t
“Any man who roams the American West wearing a fancy rig like that, especially with a cutaway holster tied to his thigh, is setting himself up as a gunfighter. Now let’s see the fire behind all that smoke.”
“Ballocks! You just want to shoot me because you’re afraid to fight me with your fists. You know I’ll beat you senseless, you bloody poltroon.”
“Oh, I’d rather shoot you,” Fargo agreed cheerfully. “That’s the frontier preference. As to a dustup: I’ve whipped lumberjacks, bull-whackers, and prizefighters. It’s just that you’re not worth busting up my hands. And I druther not mess up this handsome face of mine. You’ve noticed how it pleases the ladies, huh?”
“In a pig’s ass!”
“No need to drag your mother into this, limey,” Slappy put in. “And what the hell is a poltroon?”
But Derek had climbed back into the coach.
“That’s more like it, Fargo,” Slappy approved. “You made him crawl under the porch. But I want to hear more about this business with a rattlesnake.”
“Well, now,” Fargo said, “as to
11
About an hour after sundown, the dust storm blew itself out and the air turned still and chilly, with occasional hard gusts of knife-edge cold. Fargo tacked the Ovaro while Slappy, muttering curses to himself, saddled one of the sorrels with a low-cantled, high-pommeled English saddle stiff as a board.
“This son-of-a-bitch saddle don’t give a man room for his oysters,” he complained after he awkwardly forked leather. “Why, hell, they’re crammed up into my gut bag. And I can’t adjust the mother-lovin’ stirrups.”
Fargo grabbed a fistful of mane and swung up onto the hurricane deck. “Caulk up. The English been making saddles since before America had a plow horse.”
“All right, Sir Fargo, you want to swap for thissen?”
“Hell no.” Fargo reined the Ovaro around to the north. “I ain’t the fool who let his saddle get boosted in Pueblo. Besides, this one is shaped to my ass and my horse’s back.”
Moonlight was generous and assisted by an endless explosion of unclouded stars. The two men held their mounts to a walk, Fargo carefully studying the ground around them. When he found likely spots—loose rock tumbles or openings under low rock shelves—he would dismount and carefully inspect the dry ground.
Finally they hit pay dirt. Fargo had bent low to study the ground around a clutch of rocks with an opening in their base. He discovered fresh, corkscrew tracks made by a rattler.
“How you gonna get the damn thing out?” Slappy whispered. “Shout fire?”
Fargo took a sturdy leather drawstring bag from his saddle horn. Rebecca had been using it for rock samples. “There’s only one way to get it,” he replied, his heart already thumping. “I’ve done it once or twice in starving times. I have to hope it’s cold enough to make it sluggish. Then I reach in quick, hoping I can grab it behind the head, and yank it out.”
“Hell and furies! That’s the only way?”
