Hangtown Hellcat by Jon Sharpe

recognized the two men in the chairs.
    “I’m not too impressed with your competence, Butch,” Jenny teased him. “El Burro and Norton managed to do what you and half your men could not.”
    “The hell is this, Little Britches?” he demanded as if he had a right to know. “They here for tea and biscuits?”
    McDade was the blustering type, Fargo realized, who had to work himself up to the kill. It was Cruz, more taciturn and calculating, he watched the closest. He wore leather
chivarra
trousers, a low shako hat, and a rawhide vest. But Fargo was most interested in the Spanish dag with a cord-wrapped hilt and a wide blade—spade shaped and perfectly balanced for the quick toss—that protruded from his boot.
    “No need to rise on your hind legs, Butch,” Jenny said in the soothing tone one uses with a dangerous horse. “I have a fertile mind when it comes to profiteering, and I assure you the situation is under control.”
    “Then why ain’t these two cold as a wagon wheel? Them geldings of yours shoulda lopped off their heads by now.”
    “Everything in its own time.”
    Cruz saw Fargo watching him and flashed him a lips-only smile. “With
this
one, Senorita Lavoy,” he advised, “the only good time is now.”
    “Nonsense, Lupe. He’s stripped of his weapons and a prisoner in Hangtown. A man can’t be more helpless than that—or more hopeless.”
    McDade grunted and shifted his glance to Buckshot. “Who’s this piece of half-breed shit?”
    “Ask your mother,” Buckshot piped up. “She knows me real good.”
    McDade snarled and crossed toward Buckshot’s chair, right hand balling into a fist. Fargo shot one long leg out and tripped him. McDade crashed heavily to the floor. He sprang up cursing, but as he reached for the walnut-gripped Remington in his tied-down holster, loud, menacing clicks stopped him. El Burro and Norton held all four of the Colts aimed at him.
    “This is not the Bucket of Blood,” Jenny scolded him as if he were a rambunctious schoolboy. “There’ll be no clash-of-stags roughhousing in my home.”
    “What is this shit?” McDade demanded. “You’re the onesaid Fargo would dance on air if he was fool enough to enter Hangtown. Now here you are—putting
me
under the gun!”
    “Miss Lavoy,” Fargo spoke up, “you must have dredged mighty deep to come up with this sweet outfit.”
    Cruz grinned while McDade flushed with anger from his neck to his scalp. “You don’t come into this gulch swinging your eggs, buckskins!”
    “Butch is right, Mr. Fargo,” Jenny warned. “Remember that power balance I warned you about. Right now your life is hanging by a thread.”
    She looked at McDade again. “I’m not protecting Fargo, Butch. I’m protecting a valuable asset.”
    “I don’t savvy.”
    “Yes, you generally don’t. Did you yourself not call Fargo a newspaper darling?”
    “Sure, on account he is. You’d think he was ten inches taller than God, the way they gush over him.”
    Jenny nodded. “You’re making my argument for me. Wouldn’t you agree that Skye Fargo stories are good for newspaper circulation? And wouldn’t you also agree that the merchant capitalists who own the newspapers want to make money?”
    “Hell, who don’t?”
    “Exactly. Imagine millions of readers back east eagerly following the story about how a group of powerful, influential newspapers have agreed to pay a ransom to free their darling. A ransom of, say, ten thousand dollars—a paltry sum to them but a windfall for us.”
    McDade pulled on the point of his chin as her point sank home. Waldo Tate—McDade’s missing brain, according to Jenny—spoke up for the first time. Fargo noticed that an ugly carbuncle bulged one side of his neck.
    “Little Britches is right, Butch. That ten thousand would earn the crapsheets ten times that much in profits. It’s smart business for them.”
    “Maybe it would be at that,” he admitted. “But they ain’t like the families we’re shaking