Hell on Wheels (A Fargo Western #15) Read online

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  He was a soldier of fortune, for sale to the highest bidder—he was Fargo.

  Broke and on foot after his horse breaks a leg and has to be put down, Fargo jumps aboard a train in Idaho. He's almost instantly attacked by a hulk working for the rail line. The Continental-Western allows no riders, even paying ones. Junction Flats is owned by the C-W and Hawk Morrison. After Fargo has to take out the local railroad detective, Morrison attempts to hire him. Though broke, Fargo has already taken a dislike to the man and his methods. If this man wants to hire him, then someone else is on another side. He gets caught up in the C-W's attempts to take over a small rail line running silver ore twice a day from a mine. They get a cut of the profits to the tune of $3,000 a day. Music to Fargo's ears.

  FARGO 15: HELL ON WHEELS

  By John Benteen

  First published by Belmont Tower in 1976

  Copyright © 1976, 2016 by Benjamin L. Haas

  First Smashword Edition: October 2016

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover image © 2016 by Edward Martin

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges * Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.

  Chapter One

  Thundering out of the night, drivers pounding, headlight gleaming yellow, smokestack pluming sparks, the big Baldwin locomotive whistled, the sound keening off across the prairie like the cry of a lost soul trying to find its way back from Hell. Fargo, crouched low beside an outside curve of track, a horseshoe bend, waited. Slinging around the curve, the freight train slowed. Its boxcars and cattle cars were a roaring shaking wall above Fargo’s head. The iron wheels seemed to devour the rails. His mouth was dry, every muscle tense. He knew what would happen to him if he missed his grip. Then he thought: Now! He leaped up, out of the darkness beside the roadbed, strong and smooth as a panther’s spring.

  Even so, in the night and at that speed, he almost missed. His right hand seized a grab-iron, one of the lines of rungs mounting up the boxcar’s flank, but his scrabbling foot missed its hold; so did his left hand. The momentum of the rushing freight snapped him out like a whiplash, threw him against the boxcar’s flank. Only the steel grip of his right hand on the grab-iron saved him. Without it, he’d have been sucked beneath those relentless wheels as he fell and chopped to rags.

  Like a pendulum, his body swung back, the arm feeling as if it were pulled loose from its socket. His left hand clawed, found a grip; so did the scrabbling toe of his booted foot. Panting, he clung to the side of the car a moment; then he began to climb.

  Presently he reached the roof, managed to pull himself up and over, and then he lay flat on the boxcar’s catwalk, breathing hard, flexing his cramped fingers, stiff from maintaining that life-or-death grip on the irons.

  He was a big man, better than six feet tall, wide in the shoulders, his narrow hips and long legs those of a horseman born and bred. His hair, close-cropped, was snow-white, prematurely so, for he was only in his middle thirties. His face was battered, scarred, weathered and so remarkably ugly that it was nearly handsome—a face that drew helplessly admiring second looks from women and cautious, wary ones from men who recognized danger when they saw it. He was by trade a fighting man, a soldier of fortune, guns and skill for hire to the highest bidder, and danger was, after all, his business.

  He lay there on the catwalk a moment longer: hard gray eyes squinted against the black smoke rolling back from the engine as the train once more straightened out. He touched the holster on his hip to make sure the .38 Colt was still in place; then his hand sought the sheathed knife behind it. It was there, too, in its strange scabbard. All right. Fargo got to his knees, then to his feet, catching the rhythm of the train, feet wide-braced. The wind plastered khaki shirt and dusty canvas pants to his powerful body as he moved gracefully, yet cautiously, along the catwalk of the swaying car.

  When he reached its end, he made a long, accurate jump to the roof of the car behind it, landing bent-legged. Then, crouching slightly, he ran as far as he could go along that car. Beyond it, there was nothing: yawning space and darkness. He was on the caboose, the last car on the freight.

  He checked the gun again to make sure it was tightly seated in its holster, dropped to his knees and found the grab-irons. Like a monkey, he went down, swung his lean frame easily onto the rear platform. Through the door of the caboose he could see the freight conductor at a table, leafing through bills of lading. A brakeman was pouring coffee from a pot on the stove, his back to Fargo.

  Fargo’s hand swung near to his Colt. He shoved open the door of the caboose and entered. “Evening, gentlemen,” he said, deep voiced. “You got room for a passenger?”

  The brakeman whirled, coffee sloshing from his cup, his eyes wide. The conductor scraped back his chair, turned, and his hand went instinctively toward his back pocket. But he froze at the sight of Fargo’s fingers spread near the butt of the .38, the cartridges in Fargo’s gunbelt glittering in the yellow lantern light. A hard-faced man in his fifties, the conductor knew a gunman when he saw one. “There’s no express car on this train,” he said.

  “Suits me all right,” Fargo said. “All I want’s a ride to Junction Flats, and I aim to pay my way.” His left hand dug in his pocket, brought out a twenty-dollar gold-piece ... his last. “I was comin’ down from the high country and my horse stumbled, popped its cannon bone. Had to shoot it, and I’ve put in about twenty miles on foot across the desert before I struck this line. Knew you wouldn’t stop if I flagged you, so I just grabbed a boxcar and swung aboard. Figured I’d better introduce myself slow and easy, so you didn’t take me for a hold-up man or a bum and do me a meanness. Now, what’ll you charge for here to Junction Flats?”

  The conductor licked his lips. “Mister, you can’t ride this train to Junction Flats.”

  Fargo’s eyes narrowed. “The hell you say.”

  “That’s the size of it. Company rules say no passengers on a freight, no deadheads, no bums. Nobody rides a Continental-Western string but the crew.”

  Fargo grinned, but it was more like the snarl of a hungry wolf. “Do tell. So I’m supposed to walk thirty miles across Idaho to Junction Flats?”

  “How you git there ain’t my problem. My problem is to see you don’t git there on this train.”

  “No,” the man named Fargo said. “Your problem is how to put me off without somebody gittin’ hurt. And if somebody does, it won’t be me.” His voice was soft, even. “I just said I’m not a bum or a hobo. I’ve showed you my money. You can take it or not, as you please. But I figure to stay on this train ’til I get where I’m going.”

  “All right,” the conductor said. “But you’ll sure as hell do time in stony lonesome when you get there. You’ll—” The blast of the whistle almost drowned his words. At the same instant, his eyes raised, shifted, lit slightly, and the brakeman with the coffee cup turned his head, mouth opening. Fargo reacted instinctively. He pivoted, stepped aside, turned, and the gun was in his hand. As he wheeled something sliced through the space where, half a second before, he had stood. Fargo lashed out with the pistol and felt the impact run up his arm as it smashed hard against bone. Then the giant of a man in rail
road overalls who had come in the caboose behind him and had been about to brain him with the short, steel pinch bar was cursing furiously, holding his right wrist, and the deadly hunk of steel with its hooked end had clattered to the floor.

  “God damn you,” Fargo said furiously, “I hope I broke it.” The gun barrel moved like the head of a snake about to strike, covering all three of them in turn. “All right, that’s it with the three of you. First one breaks bad, now, I’m gonna punch a bullet in ’im. And you better know this gun’s loaded with hollow-points. I don’t have to kill you to ruin you for life. No matter where they hit, these things’ll blow a hole in you that you could drive this engine through.” He jerked his head at the conductor. “Take that bulldog outa your hip pocket, slow and easy. Then hand it over grip first, and not a trick, unless you want this company to build a monument to you.”

  Reluctantly, the man obeyed. When Fargo had the pistol, he turned his attention to the brakemen. The man with the coffee cup was skinny, slope-chinned; Fargo judged him fairly harmless. It was the other man, the one who’d tried to crush his skull from behind with steel, who he raked carefully with his eyes and covered with the muzzle of his gun.

  ~*~

  If, Neal Fargo thought, you had picked a grizzly bear out of the Idaho Mountains, dressed him in bib overalls and a railroader’s cap, he might have been the twin of the man who stood there with his back against the wall of the swaying caboose, still rubbing one thick wrist.

  At about six and a half feet, he stood at least two inches taller than Neal Fargo, was twice as wide across the shoulders and half again as thick through the chest. His eyes were little reddish buttons beneath bushy black brows. His face was like a slab of granite with a nose, his mouth short, almost lipless with yellow teeth, one front one rotted clean away. Fargo could feel the hatred radiating from this greasy, overalled giant like warmth from a depot stove in winter. “You,” Fargo rasped. “What’s your name?”

  The giant started not to answer, met Fargo’s cold gray eyes, thought better of it. “Bly,” he said. “Landslide Bly, they call me.” Fargo’s mouth quirked. “Landslide? Why?”

  “Time comes, maybe you’ll find out.”

  “Maybe,” Fargo said. “Right now, shake yourself down. Pockets inside out, everything clean. Do it easy.”

  Bly hesitated, eyes narrowing. Fargo said, “You just tried to kill me, Bly. No questions asked, no why, if, or by your leave. Murder me from behind, bash my head in with that crowbar. We got thirty miles to roll, maybe an hour together in the caboose. I don’t aim to have you try it again. Now, do what I say or I’ll use one hollow-point in your shoulder. If it don’t take your arm clean off, you’ll still never use it again and one-armed brakemen ain’t, I’d guess, in big demand. So move!”

  Bly bit his lip, but slowly, carefully, he complied. Fargo snorted as the contents of his pockets fell to the floor—coins, dirty rags ... and a switchblade knife and a pair of brass knuckles with spikes on each outside curve. “You’re a bad man, ain’t you, Landslide?” His voice was biting. “How many bums and hobos you chalked up with that stuff and your crowbar? All right, kick it over here.”

  Bly did. Carefully, Fargo scooped up the weapons, opened the door of the cast-iron stove that heated the caboose. He threw the knife and brass knuckles on the glowing coals. “Now,” he said. “You’ll have to be tougher than I think you are to use ’em for a spell.” His eyes shuttled to the other brakeman. “You?”

  “I’m clean.” When he emptied his pockets he was.

  Fargo let out a breath. He dropped the conductor’s bulldog in his pocket, then, deftly, with his left hand, poured himself a cup of coffee. Seeing the conductor’s eyes follow his motions, he grinned. “That’s right. I’m what they call ambidextrous. Can use the left hand as good as I can the right. Remember that, in case you get any notions.” Then, satisfied with the situation, he dropped onto the bench along one side of the caboose, stretched out legs shod in dusty cavalry boots and gulped the coffee greedily. When the cup was empty he set it aside. No one in the caboose had moved as the train roared on through the night.

  Fargo fumbled with the buttons of his shirt, reached inside, drew out a wadded something that proved, when punched into shape, to be a wide-brimmed, peak-crowned cavalry hat, old, battered, nipped with holes that could only have been made by bullets. He perched it jauntily on his white brush of hair. “Now,” he said. “Me, I’m curious. I’ve seen plenty of railroads that are hard on bums and hobos, free riders. But I never seen one before wouldn’t sell a passage to a man stranded in the desert when he had the money in his hand. How come that?”

  “I told you,” the conductor said. “Company rules.”

  “But why?”

  “Mister, I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Hawk Morrison. He’s the brass hat that runs this division. It’s his say-so, not mine. All I know is, we got orders. Anybody unauthorized gets on, payin’ or not, we pitch him off. Either that, or it’s our butts ... and our jobs.”

  “Pitch him off,” Fargo said. “At what, forty, fifty miles an hour?”

  “That’s his tough luck,” Bly growled. “You don’t stop a hotshot freight for nothin’!”

  Fargo let out a breath. “Well, it’s a hell of a way to run a railroad. Me, it sort of gets my short hairs up. I wasn’t feeling too good about things anyhow. Not after I lost a good horse, had to cache my gear, leg it a whole day on the damn desert. I’ll tell you what. Your Mr. Hawk Morrison gives you any noise, you send him to me. The name’s Neal Fargo and I’ll be in Junction Flats for a while.”

  The conductor sat up straight. “Fargo? Neal Fargo?” He turned to Bly. “Jesus, Landslide, you got off lucky!”

  When Bly only grunted, the man went on. “Before I come with Continental-Western, I used to be a hogger down in Mexico, pushin’ one of those old cold-water Brooks hogs from Presidio to Chihuahua.”

  Fargo looked at him keenly. “You were an engineer on that line?”

  “Was until the Revolution down there got so bad I had to hightail it—Pancho Villa against Carranza and Obregon and all the rest, everybody shootin’ everybody. And Neal Fargo right in the middle of it, Villa’s right hand man, runnin’ guns and ammo across the border, commandin’ Pancho’s machine gun detachment, doin’ God knows what all, as long as there was money in it ... You stole a goddamn train I was drivin’!”

  Fargo grinned at him. “Did I now?”

  “Slick as a whistle, full of guns and ammo for the Federal troops! We stopped for water at a place called Las Piedras, and your outfit hit the government guard on the train.” His eyes were awed. “I saw you in action with a damn sawed-off shotgun. Like a one-man army: anything in the way of that buckshot, it was finished. Then your men were in the cab, had me covered, and you were hightailin’ it off on horseback on down the line.” He paused. “They used to say that riot gun was your favorite weapon. But you ain’t carryin’ it now.”

  “I’ve still got it,” Fargo said. “It’s cached. Didn’t want to risk banging it up when I hopped this rattler. Don’t worry, I’ll get it back.”

  The conductor nodded. “And now here you are in Idaho. What happened? Revolution get too hot for you, too?”

  “No,” Fargo said. “It petered out on me. The money got scarce and the number of people itchin’ to ’dobe-wall me multiplied. I figured Mexico could do without me for a while.” Fishing in his pocket with his left hand, he brought out a thin, black cigar, clamped it between good white teeth, snapped a match into flame and lit it. “How long to Junction Flats?”

  The conductor cautiously hauled out his watch. “Twenty-eight minutes more. We’ll hit it on the nail.”

  “All right,” said Fargo. “Make yourself comfortable.” He gestured to the bench on the other wall. “Time comes when you got work to do, you go right ahead. Meanwhile, you stay put. Any more people on this string besides the engineer and fireman?”

  “This is all,” the conductor said. “Me, the two shacks—that’s bra
kemen—and the hogger and the fireman, that’s the crew.”

  Fargo nodded, tossed the twenty-dollar gold piece at the conductor, who caught it deftly. “You’ll give me a receipt for that. Nobody tags me for a bum when I get off at Junction Flats.”

  “It’ll git me fired,” the conductor said. “Hawk Morrison won’t stand for it.”

  “You give me the receipt,” Fargo said. Reluctantly the conductor scribbled out a slip, gave it to him. Fargo glanced briefly at it, without ever quite taking his eyes off of Landslide Bly, who had settled, glowering, still rubbing his wrist, on the bench opposite.

  “Good enough,” he said. “Now, let’s all have another cup of coffee and wait it out ’til Junction Flats.”

  The freight train roared on through the night, its whistle howling from time to time. Fargo sat outwardly relaxed, yet totally alert, and sipped his third cup of coffee. The conductor and the chinless brakeman no longer worried him; Landslide Bly did. The giant, Fargo guessed, lacked in brains what he made up in muscle, and he did not need a crowbar or brass knucks to kill a man. Those enormous scarred fists of his could do the job alone, powered by that huge body. He might be fool enough to take a chance against the gun.

  The gun. Fargo was disgusted and enraged that it had even come to this. The senseless policy of the railroad was, for him, the last straw, after a time in which nothing had gone right.

  As he’d told the trainman, the Mexican Revolution had dwindled out on him. Villa was whipped, pursued by American soldiers under the leadership of General Pershing. Fargo would sell him no more guns, lead no more of Villa’s troops into battle for high pay. Neither were there any other small wars going on just now. Of course, the biggest one of all was booming along in Europe, but now, in 1916, the United States was still clear of that. Fargo had a hunch that it would not be for long. But meanwhile, he’d stay clear of the fighting overseas.

  Anyhow, he was having trouble finding the kind of jobs that paid the sort of money he had to have—big money, ten, fifteen, twenty thousand at a whack: the kind of work no ordinary gunman could do, the kind that paid off in percentages. The West was strangely quiet and tame just now. Maybe, at last, it was getting civilized. Maybe the border troubles had been the last sputter of the old brutal West in which he’d grown up. Maybe, it had occurred to Fargo, he was obsolete. There was so damned much law and order everywhere right now it was about to bankrupt him.