Beyond Squaw Creek by Jon Sharpe

Author:Jon Sharpe [Sharpe, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

9

Rising to a knee, Fargo looked to his right, in the direction from which Valeria had screamed.

“Skye!” she cried again.

About thirty yards away, a howling brave broke out from between the hay stables, sprinting toward a ladder leaning against the stockade wall, carrying Valeria across his right shoulder.

“The major’s daughter!” a soldier shouted beyond the running Indian, his voice nearly drowned by the gunfire and yowling savages.

Fargo slipped his Arkansas toothpick from his boot and sprinted after the girl. Above and left, a brave leaped over the wall and dropped onto the shooting platform. The brave loosed an arrow at Fargo. He ducked as the arrow shrieked over his head and plunked into a stable wall. Another brave leaped off the shooting wall and into Fargo’s path. Fargo stopped, pulled his hips back as the Indian slashed at him with a bone-handled knife, then drove the toothpick into the brave’s bare belly.

The Indian howled like a gut-shot coyote.

Shoving the brave back against the stockade wall, Fargo pulled his toothpick free of the man’s entrails, and continued sprinting. The Indian carrying Valeria was halfway up the wall when Fargo reached the ladder. Pounding her fists against the Indian’s bare, glistening back, Valeria’s gaze met Fargo’s, her green eyes alight with bone-rending terror.

“Skyyyyyyyye!”

Fargo leaped up the ladder, slashing at the Indian’s calves with the toothpick but missing, catching the toothpick’s sharp blade into the hide attaching the rungs to the two cottonwood poles. Around him, men were shooting and shouting. Out of nowhere, an Indian grabbed Fargo from behind and pulled him down the ladder, battering the Trailsman’s head and shoulders with his bare fists.

At the base of the ladder, Fargo whipped around and drove his right boot into the Indian’s jaw. As the brave stumbled straight back, groaning and clutching his face, Fargo lunged up the ladder’s squawking rungs, using his arms as much as his feet.

Above, the Indian carrying Valeria dropped a leg over the stockade wall. Valeria clutched the pointed log tips as the Indian pulled her over the top. Fargo thrust his right arm at Valeria’s hand, wrapped his fingers around hers.

The girl screamed as her fingers slipped from Fargo’s. Fargo lunged for her hand once more. But it was gone, leaving only the sharpened log ends she’d been clutching and a couple of strands of long red hair wisping from slivers.

The shooting ledge bounced and shuddered beneath the Trailsman’s boots. He looked around. Braves ran toward him from both sides of the ledge.

Fargo grabbed a Colt revolver from the holster of a dead soldier on the ledge, thumbed back the hammer, and triggered one shot left, another right. Then he bounded up and over the stockade wall, dropping down the other side and landing on both feet, bending his knees to absorb the shock with his boots.

The girl screamed once more—a thin, vibrating rattle dwindling into the distance. The Trailsman turned to see the brave running north through the ankle-high grass, a gray shadow in the dying light, the girl flopping down his back, red hair flying.

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