The Border Jumpers (A Fargo Western Book 16) Read online

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  Cattle rustlers were hitting the spreads of the biggest Texas ranchers. They were striking the most vulnerable ranches, those along the Rio, and running the cattle into Mexico. Even the cavalry couldn’t stop them.

  The Texas and Southwestern Stock Raiser’s Association hired Fargo to put a stop to the rustling once and for all. They offered him $30,000 to go into Mexico and bust off the ring of thieves. Fargo took on the job for the money but something else entered the picture—the beautiful widow whose husband had been killed.

  FARGO 16: THE BORDER JUMPERS

  By John Benteen

  First published by Belmont Tower in 1976

  Copyright © 1976, 2016 by Benjamin L. Haas

  First Smashwords Edition: December 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.

  Prologue

  THE BIG DIPPER had wheeled a fourth of the way around the North Star high up in the clear velvet of the Texas sky. The moon was only a lustrous silver slit, its uncertain light barely relieving the darkness, turning the terrain into a trap for fools and the unwary, with shadows shrouding the edges of cutbanks and arroyos and transforming boulders, yucca, clumps of nopal, into nightmarish, monstrous silhouettes. Or so it seemed to Sterling.

  In the shadow of a rock outcrop, he reined in his cavalry gelding, signaling the five troopers behind him to halt. His palms sweated; his belly was clenched into a knot. Damn it, when he’d joined the Philadelphia Light Horse two years ago, he hadn’t counted on this. Then the National Guard, especially that silk-stocking reserve regiment, had just been a pleasant social activity, a chance to play some polo and wear a uniform to dances. Now, here he was so close to the Rio Grande he could almost hear its gurgling, two thousand miles from home, in country the Devil himself must have designed while in a sour mood. The darkness was full of danger. The rustling of dried ocotillo canes became a pistolero’s gun clearing leather. The clicking of some kind of beetle nearby had sounded at first like the spinning cylinder of a revolver.

  He licked dry lips. Damn it, where was Atkins? He depended on the man, even if Atkins was a private. He might be rough, profane, vulgar, everything that disgusted Thomas Sterling, but he was the only real soldier on this detail, the only man who’d ever actually fought in a kill-or-be-killed battle.

  Sterling thumbed out his watch. He was twenty-two, his lanky form not yet quite filled out to full manhood, the skin of his long, handsome face still blistered by unaccustomed desert sun. The watch was gold, with his name engraved on it, a present from his father, chairman of the board of a big steel company. Its gold content and engraving did not help him read its face in darkness. Judging that it was close to three, he shoved it back in his pocket. “All right,” he whispered in a voice he hoped was steady. “We’ll wait here.” Then, loudly, his horse snorted and pricked its ears. Sterling fumbled at the holstered Colt automatic on his hip.

  “Easy,” a voice whispered from darkness. “It’s Atkins. I’m comin’ in.”

  Then he was there, shape taking form in the tricky light, a short, blocky man leading his horse. As he crossed a patch of moonlight, Sterling glimpsed his face—burnt and wrinkled like old, rain wet rawhide. Atkins had twenty years’ service behind him, had worn first sergeant’s stripes more than once. But garrison duty was not to his taste: he was a fighting man. Penned up, he drank, wenched, fought with his barracks-mates too much. Now he was a private again—but, as Lieutenant Tom Sterling well knew, he was the real leader of this patrol.

  Atkins halted, swung up in the saddle, put his horse close to Sterling’s. Taking out cigarettes, he lit one, snugged the match between calloused thumb and forefinger. “Well, they’re out yonder, Sterling,” he said.

  “Lieutenant Sterling, private,” Sterling said automatically. He knew Atkins’ contempt for him, fresh, untried as he was.

  “Oh, excuse me, sir.” The soldier’s voice was biting. “In that case, begging the lieutenant’s pardon, sir, by your leave, they’re out yonder, sir.” In the darkness he was grinning. “Six, eight of ’em, anyway. And if we work it right, we can take ’em. By God, we might all git promotions!”

  “Get to the point,” Sterling said, hating the tremble in his voice. “What have you got to report?”

  A drag on the cigarette lit a hard, wryly amused face. “Why, sir, border jumpers. The mean ole people we been sent out to handle.” His voice needled Sterling. “Real malo hombres with real guns that shoot. Maybe Villa’s men, maybe Carranza’s or Obregon’s, or maybe just plain old bandits and cow thieves in business for themselves.” He gestured. “There’s a revolution goin’ on down there below the Rio, two or three different armies fightin’ each other. Armies eat up a lot of beef. They’ve et Chihuahua clean and now they’re stealin’ gringo beef and pushin’ it south to feed their troops. Well, this bunch is drivin’ fifty head. And if I recollect, our orders are to intercept any cattle we find bein’ drove across the Rio, no matter by who.”

  Sterling swallowed hard. It was a fair summary of the troop’s orders and that of his patrol. It had sounded matter-of-factly easy when he’d received those orders in hard bright daylight. It did not sound so simple now. He said, “We have the strength to do so.”

  “Strength? We’re seven to their eight.” Atkins was businesslike now. “We’ve got no choice. We avoid this action, let those cattle get into Mexico, the captain’ll rip those golden bars right off your shirt. What the hell you think we’re out here for?”

  “All right,” Sterling snapped. “Command is my responsibility, though, and I’ve got to think, be sure ...” He bit his lip. “What is the tactical situation?”

  “In our favor, we move fast,” Atkins said crisply. “But we got to hurry. They’re pushin’ those cattle fast, headed for the Nopal crossin’. We got to get there first. There’s cover in the brush along the Rio by the crossin’. We hole up, wait, and when the herd comes in sight, we charge, hell-a-mile, some of us straight on, some from the flanks. Spook those cattle, turn ’em and pile ’em up. Then it’s just a plain old firefight in the darkness and may the best man win. Likely, the minute we start shootin’, they’ll cut and run. They’ll have no idea how many of us there are, a whole troop for all they know. And those fifty head aren’t worth gittin’ killed over. They’ll turn loose of the cattle, make for the river where they know we can’t follow into Mexico. Then what the hell, they can come back another night for the beef. Still, if we’re lucky, they’ll leave behind one or two of their compadres in shape to talk.”

  Sterling considered. Firefight in darkness ... The night was hot, but the sweat on his torso was cold. It would be a hell of a way to die, wouldn’t it—killed by some Mexican in a border skirmish over a few head of cattle. And, the knowledge struck him with sudden force, he could die—or lose an arm, a leg, his eyes, his ... his balls! This was no exercise; no drill; Atkins was talking about men who’d shoot to kill.

  It seemed incredible, all a dream. Yet, he heard himself say, “You know the country?
Can you get us to the crossing in time?”

  “I’ll get you there,” Atkins said. “If we move out now.”

  Somebody else’s voice, it seemed to Sterling, then said, “Very well. Forward, men. Guide on me. Atkins, take the point.”

  ~*~

  An hour later, Sterling stood by his horse’s head in the concealment of Spanish cane and willow brush along the Rio Grande, grasping the animal’s muzzle to keep it quiet. Only a few hundred yards of softly murmuring water separated him from a foreign country. Somewhere out there in the darkness, northward, due to appear at any minute, were the strange inhabitants of that country, trespassing in his own—hard-bitten dangerous men who would kill him if they could. It all seemed incredible, senseless, yet true. Excited and afraid, he looked at Atkins, holding his own mount a few paces distant in the brush, and marveled. How could Atkins be so cool?

  He hated, yet admired Atkins for his bravery and efficiency. It was Atkins who had made the dispositions, put two men out on each flank to charge northward, had posted himself with Sterling and Private Landrum here directly at the crossing. Atkins was, private or not, really in command. And, of course, Atkins would survive. He was old, experienced, probably bulletproof. He would know what to do. It mattered not a damn whether Thomas Sterling died in this fight Atkins lusted for, had dragged all of them into. Yes, he thought he hated Atkins. He—

  Then the horse trembled, jerked up its head. Sterling stared into the darkness that swathed the sand flat before the crossing. Then he heard cattle bawling; there was motion out there in the night. “Arrifea!” somebody called softly.

  “All right,” Atkins whispered. “Mount!”

  Sterling’s mouth was dry. He swung into the McClellan saddle, drew the .45 Automatic. Watching Atkins, he kept the horse tight-reined. Atkins had unslung his 24-inch-barrel ’03 rifle; so had Landrum. Atkins’ teeth gleamed whitely in the darkness.

  Now the herd was only a couple of hundred yards away. Sterling could see the white faces of the lead cattle, the silhouettes of big-hatted riders. He tried to count how many there were, as the group drew closer, but they were driving cattle hard and fast; he could not keep track of their number as they swirled and bobbed around in the dark.

  “Now!” Atkins yelled, spurred his horse, screamed like a lost soul in hell, and rocketed from the brush, firing as he went. Farnum’s mount broke cover, and Farnum’s Springfield blazed. Sterling still held his horse tight-reined, dazed, almost paralyzed. Then the paralysis broke. He spurred, went pounding after the other two.

  He heard himself yelling, shrieking. He sought a target in the darkness and thought he found one. The Colt bucked in his palm. Now he was almost stirrup-to-stirrup with Farnum and Atkins. Gun flashes split the night. The Mexicans were firing back. Cattle bawled, men cursed. The herd jammed, swerved, milled. The other men were coming in from the flanks. And for the first time in his life, Thomas Sterling heard the sound of lead fired at him in anger.

  He had always thought bullets sang or whined. They did not. They made a strange, flat slapping sound, almost like a whip’s pop, when they went by your head. He was scared all right, he realized, but he would make it. He would—

  Then a strange thing happened. Something like a handful of wet mush hit him in the face, blinding him for a second. Instinctively, he reached up, clawed it away, wondering what it could be. Then he saw Landrum, almost at his stirrup, falling from the saddle, with half his head shot away.

  Thomas Sterling screamed as he realized that what had hit him in the face was Landrum’s brains. He screamed and kept on screaming, not even seeing Atkins’ horse go down. He did not hear, either, Atkins’ frantic yell: “Sterling! Sterling! Goddamn you, stirrup!”

  Nor did he hear the gunfire or the bawling of the cattle. He dropped his Colt, clawed at his face with both hands. From somewhere a long way off, he heard a voice shouting: “Run! Retreat! Save yourselves! Run, run—” It trailed off into a hysterical howl. It was his own voice. The sobbing was his own crying. He was smearing himself, his saddle, his horse with the ghastly mess as he fought desperately to get it off his face, off his hands ... “Sterling, god damn you!” somebody yelled, but it was someone far away. His horse pounded flat out across the desert; it was unguided for he had dropped his reins.

  The next thing he knew, he was huddled in a nest of boulders, crying, the winded horse panting nearby. Then he knew nothing else for a long, long time. Not until the rising sun’s remorseless light pierced his closed eyes did he come back to any sort of sanity. And, of course, by then the shooting had long since stopped ...

  One

  THE CONDUCTOR MADE ALLOWANCE for the sway of the train and unerringly spat a brown glob into the spittoon. “Alamo Wells,” he called. “Train’ll be here ten minutes if any of you folks want to get out and stretch.”

  Fargo rolled the thin black cigar to the other side of his mouth and took a final puff. Lithely unfolding a frame well over six feet tall from the coach seat, he dropped the cheroot stub into the spittoon and worked his way down the aisle toward the door. He waited until the train had come to a dead stop before swinging down the steps to the cinders. Take no unnecessary risks was his motto—a philosophy that had helped keep him alive for thirty-seven years so far. Along, of course, with his guns.

  Towering, wide in the shoulders, narrow in the hips, he had a hard, scarred face so ugly and yet so masculine that it drew secret second glances from most women and generated automatic respect and instinctive caution in men who knew danger when they saw it. His eyes, like bits of gray ice in the tanned flesh, were alert, restless; his hair, close-cropped, was prematurely snow white. He wore a battered old cavalry campaign hat, a corduroy jacket especially cut to hide a .38 Officer’s Model Colt in a shoulder holster under his left arm. Long, slightly bowed horseman’s legs were encased in whipcord pants and brown leather cavalry boots. He was a soldier of fortune, and his trade was violence.

  “Careful with that,” he told the men unloading the big, padlocked trunk from the baggage car. He watched them closely as they set it on the station platform: it contained his workman’s tools. As soon as it was unloaded, he checked it meticulously to make sure nobody had tampered with it. Satisfied, he signaled to a hack parked near the station platform. The trunk was so heavy, he had to help the driver load it. “The best hotel in town,” he said and climbed up on the seat beside the man.

  As the hack rolled along, Fargo took stock of Alamo Wells. It had rained not an hour before, but the streets were already dusty again. The rain was unusual for this part of Texas, the dust was not. Neither was the fact that the town was small and ugly. A few board buildings, some adobe ones, some stores, a bank, a livery, a hotel, a two-story frame town hall, a cafe or two, and two or three bars. All in all, no different from a hundred, maybe a thousand other Southwestern cow towns—except for the neat rows of Army tents and the lines of cavalry horses on the flat a half mile away. Fargo felt a twinge of nostalgia, ex-horse soldier that he was. On the other hand, he had made a lot of money running guns to Pancho Villa, in the past few years. The arrival of the cavalry along the Rio Grande in strength had put a stop to that. So while he felt a kinship with the horse soldiers, he wished they’d go away. He much preferred gunrunning on his own to hiring out to someone else. But these days, a man in his line of work couldn’t afford to be too choosy.

  The hotel wasn’t too bad, thick adobe, stuccoed, cool after the noonday heat outside. Wicker furniture in the lobby, Navajo rugs on the floor, the mounted head of big javelina boar, snarling to reveal sharp tusks, above the desk. The clerk was a bored-looking boy in his teens. But when he read Fargo’s name on the register, he came alert. “Oh, you’re Mr. Fargo.”

  “Neal Fargo, that’s right.”

  “Mr. Varnell with the Stockgrowers Association left a message for you. The officers will be meeting at town hall at three. Upstairs.”

  “Much obliged,” Fargo said, and he gave the Mexican porter a hand with the trunk.

&
nbsp; The room was on the ground floor, well back. Fargo tossed the porter a silver dollar, closed and locked the door behind him. The place was no pleasure palace, but it was clean. God knows, he’d stayed in worse. He tossed the old, stained hat, bullet-nipped, on the bed, loosened his tie, shrugged out of the coat. Then he unlocked the trunk.

  The first thing he removed was a bottle of bourbon. A hard jolt with the flat of his hand on the bottom started the cork. He yanked it out with teeth that were white and perfect. He took good care of his teeth. An abscess was as debilitating as a wound when a man was miles from civilization and maybe being shot at.

  He drank long and deeply from the bottle, sighed, recorked it, stripped to the waist and washed off travel dust with water from the pitcher provided by the management. His torso rippled with long, symmetrical muscles and was almost a museum of scars. Soldiers of fortune carried their wound stripes on their flesh. When he was clean, he went back to the trunk, inspecting its contents.

  First he took out a Winchester Model 94 .30-30 carbine, in a leather saddle scabbard. Removing it from the sheath, he inspected it carefully for signs of corrosion or rust. Opening a cleaning kit, he touched it up with oil, worked its action a few times and found it silken. Satisfied, he slid it back into leather and laid it aside.

  Next came a shorter gun case of soft chamois. Fargo’s hard face lit with a sort of glow as he opened this, removing from it the components of a double-barreled Fox Sterlingworth ten-gauge shotgun. He snapped the pieces together. Originally the Fox had been a fowling piece, duck and goose gun. Fargo had sawed its extra-length barrels off short; and what he now held was one of the deadliest side arms known to man: a riot gun. His hand stroked the fancy engraving on the breech, traced out the inscription worked into the pattern: To Neal Fargo, gratefully, from T.R. His faint smile was slightly crooked. Only two men in the world knew what he had done to earn the presentation of this piece; one was himself, the other the man who had given it to him—the man who had been his commander in the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, and who had later become President of the United States.