Arkansas Assault (The Trailsman No. 263)

Arkansas Assault is a 2003 novel attributed to Jon Sharpe, no. 263 in the Trailsman series of short adult-themed westerns. Created by John Joseph Messmann, who wrote the majority of the first 200 books, the series centers upon the eponymous Trailsman, Skye Fargo, and his various adventures across the nineteenth-century United States and Canada. The Trailsman series began publication in 1980 and continued through 2014, ending with no. 398, Arizona Ambushers. Various authors have contributed to the series, all writing under the name Jon Sharpe, and multiple volumes were set in Arkansas, including Ozarks Onslaught (no. 275), Arkansas Ambush (no. 346), Death Devil (no. 363), Devil’s Den (no. 390), and Night Terror (no. 391).

The story opens around the Fourth of July in 1858, with Fargo—a “wandering and solitary man” whose best friend is his Overo stallion—being pursued by notorious bounty hunter Jeb Adams. He corners Adams, intent upon turning him in to local law enforcement for having tried to poison Fargo’s horse the night before, but Adams tells him that the sheriff in the nearest town (the fictional Arkansas town of Tillman) is his cousin. But the two end up in a shootout, with Fargo killing Adams. Fargo takes the deceased man to Tillman, which has a population of 3,500—for comparison, Little Rock (Pulaski County) at the time of the 1860 federal census recorded a population of 3,727, so Tillman, located in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, would have rivaled the state’s capital city. The town is owned by Noah Tillman, whose stepson, Tom, is the sheriff.

Fargo takes a room for the night at one of the hotels but finds hiding in his closet a “buxom young woman” named Daisy who is afraid of “the kidnappers,” saying that her brother Clem was kidnapped after they “run off from the farm” to attend the festivities. Fargo agrees to let her stay there but wakes up to her seducing him, and while they are having sex, two men—one white (Karl Ekert), one Mexican (Lopez)—break in and knock the pair out. When Fargo wakes, Daisy is gone. A deputy named Mike Queeg tells Fargo that there have long been disappearances around July 4 and implies that these events somehow are related to a private island Noah Tillman owns called Skeleton Key. Liz Turner, editor of the local Clarion newspaper, has taken up an investigation into the site after her husband was killed doing the same. (Outside of fiction, it is unlikely that a sufficiently large island might have been located in a river near the Ozark Mountains prior to the twentieth-century construction of dams along the White and Little Red rivers.)

Outside of town, Fargo comes under fire from the Mexican kidnapper and kills him, and then he finds the recently buried body of Daisy, which he takes to the fancy restaurant where Sheriff Tillman is dining and dumps it on his table. Then he returns to his hotel and has sex with the Mexican chambermaid, Maria Veldez. Later, a man named Jefferson Tolan approaches Fargo to beg him to look for his own missing daughters at Skeleton Key. Fargo visits the one-eyed tugboat operator Harold Perkins (a.k.a. Cap’n Billy) to ask about transport to the island, and he suggests that Fargo let himself be captured and taken there. Fargo infiltrates Noah Tillman’s plantation but is apprehended in the process. Noah tries to convince Fargo that the story of missing people is all simply a legend and, afterward, lets Fargo go, but on the way back home, he encounters Aaron Tillman, Noah’s reprobate brother, who tells him that Skeleton Key is overseen by a brutal man named Deke Burgade. Later that night, Ekert and another man (McGrath) break into Fargo’s hotel room and capture him, taking him—and Aaron Tillman—to the island.

Tom Tillman and Liz Turner, after comparing notes about the disappearances, resolve to find a way onto the island. Burgade, who has just tortured and killed Daisy’s brother for having attempted to escape, tells the assembled captives—which includes the two Tolan sisters, Nancy and Stephanie, who have been imprisoned as sex slaves on the island for the past few years—that Noah Tillman conducts a hunt of human beings every Fourth of July. Nancy seduces Fargo that evening. The next day, Burgade lets them survey the island so that they will present enough of a challenge for Noah. When Noah shows up, he immediately sics the dogs on his brother, killing Aaron.

While this is transpiring, Tom and Liz sneak onto the island, Liz armed with an Italian-made dagger said to have been blessed by the pope, but one of Burgade’s dogs, Voodoo, kills both of them in a frenzy. Burgade returns to tell Noah, and while the two go to see the carnage, Fargo and the two women escape through a rotten patch in the roof of their prison. The dogs, having gone mad, tree Noah and Burgade and, after waiting awhile, wander off and hide in his boat. The tree branch holding the two men eventually snaps, and when Noah goes to his boat to escape, the dogs eat him. Fargo kills the rest of the dogs with Burgade’s rifle, and he and the two sisters watch the Fourth of July fireworks as they take the boat back to land.

For additional information:
Sharpe, Jon. Arkansas Assault. New York: Signet, 2003.

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas