Badlands Bloodsport

Fargo nodded, watching Ericka work quickly. “When we find a safer place to hunt buffalo, I’ll pitch in to the game.”

Derek made a growling noise in his throat. “Fargo, have you never heard of subordination—the proper ordering of mankind? You’re naught but a hireling, yet you constantly lay down the law to Lord Blackford and Mr. Aldritch. You aren’t good enough to lace their boots, now, are you?”

“I’ll leave that to you, hangman,” Fargo replied. “And after you lace them you can lick them. Englishmen are natural-born toadies.”

“You bloody wanker,” Derek snarled, moving toward Fargo with his fists curled like an exhibition boxer. “I’ll knock you sick and silly.”

“Derek!” Aldritch barked. “You and Skeets are stinking drunk! Get to your tent. And I told you to launder your talk around the ladies.”

“Just you wait, Fargo,” Derek muttered before he left. “The worm will turn.”

“Worms usually do,” Fargo agreed pleasantly.

“It’s a good thing you intervened, Sylvester,” Lady Blackford remarked as she put the finishing touches on her sketch.

“Yes, he would have left Fargo crippled for life.”

“I didn’t mean that,” she disagreed in a pleasant voice, watching Fargo with great interest. “I mean that you quite likely saved Derek’s life. Mr. Fargo is quiet of manner and strikingly handsome, but he is the quintessential American frontiersman, civil to most but servile to none. Derek’s hard-hitting fists cannot shatter his implacable will. Mr. Fargo has been gallantly practicing forbearance for the sake of us ladies, but I feel he is going to kill Derek, and perhaps Skeets, before this foolish expedition terminates. I truly hope I am there to see it, for I confess I have always wanted to see an evil man killed for his crimes.”

Slappy, Montoya, Fargo, Aldritch, and Lord Blackford all dropped their mouths open in sheer astonishment.

Blackford looked at his wife. “I say,” he mumbled. “I say.”

3

After the rest had retired to their tents, Fargo, Montoya, and Slappy finished off the day’s coffee.

“That Lady Blackford is a plumb good sort,” Slappy opined. “But that little speech she just made about you Fargo—that knocked me into a cocked hat.”

“The way you say,” Fargo agreed. “I’m after thinking it was a warning to me.”

“Skeets and Derek are murderers,” Montoya asserted. “I have seen their kind often in Santa Fe. A man cannot have a sporting brawl with this kind—especially Derek. We call them kill-fighters in Mexico—no sense of humor or sport in them.”

Fargo, his back against his saddle, nodded. “Jessica is right—Aldritch hired them for the dirtiest of the dirt work. The only difference between him and his bully boys is that he can afford to hire the killings out.”

“And what about this earl, Blackford?” Montoya asked. “He is friends with Aldritch. Is he one of the murderers also?”

“I been studying on that,” Fargo replied. “Blackford ain’t really friends with Aldritch. Aldritch has loaned him big sums, and it looks to me like Blackford can’t scrape up the legem pone to pay him back. So Aldritch has got his eye on Blackford’s sister-in-law—and Rebecca is mighty easy to look at.”

“All three of these gals are a huckleberry above a persimmon,” Slappy pronounced. “I been tryin’ to wangle a way to see ’em naked, but they keep that foldin’ bathtub of theirs inside the tent when they wash. When they go out for necessary trips at night, the other two keeps watch.”

Montoya snorted. “Vaya, loco! What could you hope to see when a woman relieves herself? They do not undress for this.”

“Nah, but there’s somethin’ sorter excitin’ ’bout watching a woman voiding. Most especial, women of the Quality. Hell, I growed up thinking rich women don’t do that like the rest of us.”

Fargo looked at Montoya and both men shook their heads.

Montoya suddenly tossed out the dregs of his cup. “Damn! You could cut a plug off of this coffee!”

“Fat lot you Mexers know—Christ, you ruin it with brown sugar. Coffee ain’t ready till it’ll float a horseshoe. Ain’t that the straight, Fargo?”

“Right as rain,” Fargo said absently, watching one of the men—he couldn’t tell who in the darkness—leave the tent and disappear in the shadows beyond the edge of camp. Ericka Blackford’s words snapped in his memory like burning twigs: “I confess I have always wanted to see an evil man killed for his crimes.”

“I must allow, Slappy,” Montoya said, “that you are a fine cook. And you did good work rigging the fodder wagon.”

Slappy had nailed a chuck box—a stout cupboard—onto the back of the wagon and reinforced it to withstand tough terrain. He had also rigged a cooney—a cowhide sling—for sticks, “prairie coal” or buffalo chips, and kindling to tide them on the treeless plains.