by John Benteen
Whetstone grinned coldly. “You might argue with this .44. You won’t argue with that ten-gauge riot gun.”
They turned their heads, looked. Fargo kept the huge bores of the shotgun on them, unwavering. Then Redbeard swallowed. “All right, Whetstone. Whatever you say. We can’t fight that damn shotgun.”
“Now you’re smart,” Whetstone said. “I’ll credit you with this dust on the books. Just sign tabs in any of my places.”
“We want cash,” Redbeard said.
Whetstone moved the muzzle of the gun. “If you had cash, you might spend it somewhere where I wouldn’t get the benefit of it. Jason Whetstone can supply you with anything you need in Circle City. No call for you to fritter your money away with anybody else.” He grinned at them over the barrel of the gun. “Is there?”
He was a cool one: Fargo had to give him that. It was as much his manner as the weapons trained on them that made the two back down. But back down they did, mumbling and grunting. Whetstone put the dust away under the counter and kept his gun on them until they had gone out. Then he said, “Thanks, Fargo. You’re doing exactly what I hoped you would. Ten per cent of this dust is yours, you know.”
“I took that into consideration,” Fargo said. “But if you treat all the roughnecks that have checked into this town like that, you’re gonna have ’em all down on you before the winter’s over.”
“Not all of ’em,” Whetstone said. “Just the stupid stumblebums get that treatment. The smart ones and the ones that’re good with their guns, I’m real careful to get on my side. But bozos like those are too easy pickin’s to let get away. Anyhow, they’ll get their money’s worth—almost.” He took out cigars, gave Fargo one. “You and your woman settled in?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a good-lookin’ dame. She make Belle look like somethin’ the cat dragged in. You wouldn’t wanta trade for a while, would you?”
“No,” Fargo said.
Whetstone laughed. “Okay. We’ll wait ’til the middle of the winter. Then maybe you’ll feel different.” He sobered. “What do you aim to do now ?”
“Just mosey around town. Maybe play some poker.”
“Fine. Just what I want you to do. Keep your eyes and ears open. Anything you hear you think I ought to know, come tell me right away.”
“Sure,” Fargo said.
“You want whiskey, it’s on the house at either one of the dancehalls. I own ’em both.”
“Thanks,” Fargo said, and he went out.
A flake or two of snow drifted down as he strode along the sidewalk. What he sought was the doctor’s office. First he would size up its location; then he would figure how to get into it unseen. But it was not on the main street; it would have to be on one of the side streets. He turned a corner. Then he halted.
Coming toward him along the sidewalk were the two men he had helped Whetstone brace in the store. Fifty feet away, they stopped short as they saw Fargo. Then Redbeard rasped: “Lee. You see what I see?”
“Whetstone’s dog-robber,” the other snarled.
Fargo said, “Boys, I don’t want trouble—”
“Too bad,” Redbeard snapped. “You got it, you damn thief!” His hands swooped down to his Colts, as the other threw up the .45-70.
Fargo twitched the shotgun sling. The weapon jerked, its barrels whipped up under his arm. His hand flew across his body, tripped both triggers. The blast of the gun was thunderous. It mingled with the roar of Lee’s rifle.
The double load of buckshot sprayed down the sidewalk in a spreading pattern. Both men went backward under the impact as if struck by mighty fists. Redbeard fell into the street, Colts dropping from dead hands, lay motionless, face down on the dirt. Lee, hit hard, landed on his back, the rifle falling, put his hands to his belly. “God!” he screamed. “Oh, God, I’m shot! I’m shot!” His booted feet kicked spastically on the split logs of the sidewalk. “Oh, help me, I’m shot. I’m—” his voice trailed off. His hands slid away from his belly; his head rolled to one side. Then he was silent.
Fargo slipped the shotgun off his shoulder. Panting, he broke it. Smoke curled from the breech as he ejected the empties. He thumbed two rounds from the bandolier, crammed them into the gun. Then he clicked it shut. Only when he moved his arm to put it back on his shoulder did he realize that he himself had been wounded, that Lee’s rifle-shot had not missed completely.
He could feel warm liquid running down his forearm inside the parka, and there was beginning to be pain. He looked at his left sleeve. There was not really a hole in it, more of a slice. He probed with his fingers. The rifle bullet had raked across the fleshy part of his upper arm. He knew at once that it was not a bad wound; he’d had worse and tended them himself. But now, as men began to flock around him, brought by the sound of gunfire, staring at the two corpses on the sidewalk, Fargo grinned faintly. This particular wound might be just the one he needed.
Then footsteps drummed behind him, and Whetstone’s voice rapped: “What the hell ? My God, you killed them both.”
“Yeah,” Fargo said, turning. “They drew on me.”
Whetstone was silent for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Well, their dust is all clear profit now. Hey ... you’re bleedin’. They nicked you.”
“Yeah,” Fargo said. “Where’s that doctor hang out? Belle’s father.”
“Dalton? You don’t want to go to him.”
“There another one in town?”
“No.”
“Then I want to go to him,” Fargo said. “I don’t take chances with my gun arm.”
Whetstone’s lips thinned. “Just watch out the old bastard don’t cut it off. His place is around the corner, third buildin’ down. Want me to go along?”
“I’ll manage. You have your Indians plant these stiffs.” The crowd parted as Fargo walked forward, made way for him. He heard one man mutter, “Hell. I wouldn’t wanta get in front of that damn sawed-off ...” And somebody else said: “I saw it. He shot the damn thing upside down, from under his arm!”
“Man, a double-barrel don’t have to be right side up to spray lead all over hell and half of Texas!”
He walked on, turned the corner. The arm was, indeed, beginning to hurt a little. He came to the log cabin with its sign: R. B. Dalton, Doctor & Dentist, He pushed open the door, entered, then stopped short, nose wrinkling.
The place was sealed and airless, and the stench in here, part whiskey, part medicine, part unwashed human, would have choked even a fish fed Aleut. Dalton, sitting at a table, shelves full of bottled chemicals behind him, a jug of whiskey before him, looked up blearily, made a deliberate attempt to focus his eyes. “Go ’way. I’m drunk.”
“And I’m shot,” Fargo said.
“Put bandage on it y’self. You damn hard cases don’t die, you just kill other people. You ...” His eyes cleared a little. Then he said, “I know you. Yesterday. Whetstone’s place.”
“Right,” Fargo said. He unbuckled the bandolier, laid the shotgun aside, well out of the doctor’s reach, pulled off the parka. “I want a bandage and a little bit of conversation. In fact, I will put the bandage on myself if you give me the conversation. You got any bandages here?”
“In that drawer.” Dalton gestured, then poured himself another drink. “But I got nothing to talk to you about. You’re Whetstone’s man.”
Fargo found the bandages. His ambidexterity came in handy, as he put a compress on the bullet slash, which was minor, wrapped it tight with gauze. The doctor watched the expert way he did it. “Maybe I’m Whetstone’s man,” Fargo said, drawing the knot with his teeth. “And maybe I ain’t.” He slipped his arm back inside the long underwear he wore beneath his shirt and the parka, and then took cigars from his shirt. He gave the doctor one, lit one himself. “And maybe you won’t know what I am until after we talk, and maybe you won’t know even then. But I’m interested in finding out about a man named Dolan.”
The doctor’s face, bruised from the beating Whetstone had given him, went p
ale beneath the purple.
“Dolan,” he whispered. “Dolan’s dead ...”
“Is he?”
The doctor’s hand shook as he poured another drink. “No, but that’s what the Committee of Ten says. Wants to think, anyhow.”
“The Committee of Ten ... who is it? What is it?”
“There’s only one left alive in Circle City now—Jason Whetstone. The rest are either dead or gone outside. Hannon. Denny Lucas.” The whiskey sloshed from the glass as he brought it up to his mouth with both hands. He drank violently, convulsively, and shuddered. He reached for the bottle again, but Fargo whisked it away before his hand could touch it.
“Lay off that stuff,” Fargo said. He stared at the doctor with narrowed, appraising eyes.
“Why should I talk to you?” mumbled Dalton. “Especially about the Committee of Ten, about Dolan. Jason ever finds out I told you ... he’ll kill me. You, too.”
Fargo’s mouth twisted. “Not me.”
The doctor slumped back in his chair, stared at Fargo. “About me, it wouldn’t make no difference. And if he did brace you and you killed him, Belle would be free of him ... ” His eyes cleared, he sat up straight. “What do you want to know about the Committee of Ten? Dolan?”
“Everything.”
Doctor Dalton nodded. “All right. For better or for worse, whoever you are, and whatever you want the information for, I’m gonna tell you. I don’t give a damn what happens to me anymore. All I want is to get my daughter back. She was a good girl before that bastard moved in on her and corrupted her.”
“Okay,” Fargo said. “Start talking.”
“Yes. The Committee of Ten. Well, there were ten of ’em all right. Whetstone, Hannon, Lucas, Rolfe, Davidson, some others. Tough men, tough men all. We had no law here. They set themselves up as a bunch of vigilantes to be the law, enforce it. The rest of us approved at the time. We didn’t know that what they were really gonna do was to hit anybody who made a strike or had some money, frame him, execute him ... and then divide up his belongings or take his claim. But that’s the way it turned out—and for a whole winter, they ramrodded this town, and it got to the point where nobody dared speak out against them or buck ’em in any way. Then Dolan drifted in.”
“He went against ’em?”
The doctor shook his head. “No. He was just this side of a hobo, not much of a worker, certainly no fighter. But he had luck. He stumbled into a pocket over on Birch Creek that everybody else had somehow missed. Took out a hell of a lot of dust. Came to town, got drunk, made brags about it; the Committee of Ten picked him for one of its pigeons. They accused him of robbing a cache on a trap line near the Creek’s headwaters. You know what that means up here—it’s like horse-stealing used to be in the West, years ago. He tried to fight ’em, then, like a cornered rat, slugged Whetstone, made Whetstone mad. Instead of hanging him like he had done with the rest, Whetstone and the Committee told him he was gonna die slow. They tied him, loaded him on a sled, mushed out with him to Granite Valley—it’s a place fifty miles from here, rough country all the way. It was dead of winter, a hell of a blizzard. Out there in Granite Valley, they stripped him of everything but his underwear—all his furs, his boots, everything. Then they abandoned him. They—” he reached for the whiskey bottle—“talk makes me dry.”
Fargo let him have a drink. He poured it down and shuddered, smacked his lips.
“They went off and left him. Impossible for him to survive in that country, that kind of weather, no gun, no knife, no anything. Absolutely impossible. Couldn’t possibly have lasted more than two, three hours after they got out of sight.”
“Did he?”
The old man shrugged. “I don’t know. Nobody has seen him since. Nobody that’s still alive, that is—except Denny Lucas. And he went out of his head, so you can’t really tell about him.”
“Denny Lucas isn’t alive anymore.”
“What happened to him?”
“I shot him. Now go on with your story.”
“All right. Two, three months passed. Then Bart Rolfe, one of the Ten, was found dead in his cabin. Carved up with a butcher knife, cut to ribbons. A note on his chest, all it said was: Number One. Dolan.
“Sam Davidson had a claim out on Lynx Creek. He was wintering out there. Injun stopped off to beg some tobacco. Found Sam chopped to pieces. Somebody had used a mighty sharp ax on him. Like Rolfe, it must have taken him a long time to die. There was a note stuck in ... the head’s mouth. The head wasn’t anywhere near the body. The note said: Number Two. Dolan.”
“And the others?”
“One by one,” the doctor said. “Cates—they found him where he’d tried to crawl back to his cabin along his trap line. Somebody had held him down and cut his hamstrings. It was winter, deep snow. You can’t walk with the tendons in your legs cut, much less use snowshoes ... Then Walters, he burned up when his cabin caught fire. He didn’t have much of a chance to get out of it. Somebody had tied his hands and feet with trap chain. And Norris. Whoever it was caught him in the summertime and spread-eagled him on the ground out on the muskeg. You know how the mosquitoes and black flies are on the muskeg? They’ll drain the blood from a man’s body. Norris was naked, stark naked, when they found him. If he was lucky, he was dead before the eagles got to his eyes and the foxes to his guts. Schweitzer, the big German—he was tied up in his cabin, too, good and tight. Then all his Malamutes were shut up in there with him. You know how starving sled dogs are. They’ll kill and eat anything when they get hungry enough ... And the dogs couldn’t get out ... And Murphy. He was the last. Not really the last, but the last to die. Whoever caught him tied him up tight, found a grizzly’s fresh kill, left Murphy right on top of it. You know, a bear don’t eat a whole caribou in one night. He comes back to it, and God help anything that’s between him and it ... That’s how Murphy died.”
Fargo stared at the old man through cigar smoke. “And Lucas? Hannon? Whetstone?”
“Denny Lucas was, besides Whetstone and Hannon, the toughest of the bunch. Despite what happened to all the others, he wintered alone up Rocky Fork one winter. Snowed in, couldn’t get out, Nobody really knows what went on that winter ... but the next spring we found him stark, staring mad, his hair turned gray ... Mind gone completely. We sent him down to Nome on the riverboat.”
Fargo thought of the note in the hotel. “Maybe his mind wasn’t as completely gone as you thought.”
“Maybe not. Or maybe it got better. I don’t know, haven’t seen him, and now you say you killed him.”
“Yes.” Fargo told him about Hannon, the note, the gunfight with Denny.
“The name of Dolan was probably enough to trigger all that off. Likely you’re right, that he left the note. And maybe he thought you were Dolan, maybe he figured you were gathering evidence against him and Hannon and Whetstone for murder. Anyhow, Hannon, after that wouldn’t go outside of town, and a couple of years ago he pulled out completely. Whetstone—well, you see how he operates. To begin with, he’s a gunman, maybe the best in this end of Alaska. And he has bodyguards. Matter of fact, I figured that’s what you were. His new bodyguard. Anyhow, he don’t go anywhere without a small army siding him. And he don’t go out on the creeks at all, nor anywhere else outside of town, if he can help it.”
“I see.” Fargo crushed out his cigar. “And when did all this happen?”
“It was four years ago they stranded Dolan out in the bush. The other killings took a period of a couple of years.”
“And nobody’s seen Dolan since?”
“Like I said, nobody alive. Maybe he’s given up, left the country.”
“You think he has?” Fargo asked.
The doctor finished his drink. “No. Not as long as Whetstone’s drawing breath. Unless something’s happened to Dolan, he’s probably still out in the bush. Maybe not far from here. Waiting, watching ...”
“How would he live?”
“He killed seven men, took their goods. He’s probably robb
ed some caches. And by this time, he ought to be a damned good hunter. Just northeast of here, there’s a hell of a lot of open country. All that country north of Dawson and all the way up to the Porcupine River. The Mounties wouldn’t bother him if he didn’t bother them, and they ain’t interested in, or have any jurisdiction over, killin’s on this side of the line.”
Instinctively Fargo looked through the window. “So he’s still out there somewhere, huh?”
“I’d bet my boots on it,” the doctor said. “Now. S’pose you tell me how come you’re so interested in Dolan.”
“Sorry,” Fargo said. He picked up the shotgun, strapped it on, after he had donned shirt, parka and bandolier. Then he turned to the doctor, who was pouring another drink. “But the way to find Dolan,” he said, “would be to get Whetstone out in the open, where Dolan could get to him.”
“Yes,” the doctor said. His eyes gleamed. “That would draw Dolan. And if he had any chance at all, he’d kill Whetstone then.”
“Who knows,” Fargo said. “That might happen.”
Then he went out.
Chapter Seven
As predicted, the freeze came early, and so did the blizzards.
Overnight, the temperature plummeted; the Yukon turned solid and so did every creek. The wind howled down out of the north like a pack of gaunt, hard-traveling wolves and brought snow that piled three, four feet high and deeper in the drifts. Out in the bush, moose yarded in the cedar swamps, and real wolves came after them, their hunting cries almost as chilling as the night winds that carried them. And now Circle City was cut off totally from the outside world, except by dog-sled.
Fargo strode among the swollen population of toughs and hard cases, bandits and murderers, without being challenged. After his killing of Redbeard and Lee, nobody wanted to face that riot gun. He was Whetstone’s trusted enforcer; and though the hard-bitten rabble fought and sometimes slaughtered one another regularly in drunken argument, they gave Whetstone no trouble. Of course, Whetstone had plenty of other gunmen in his pay, but it was Fargo who actually bossed them, receiving and transmitting orders from Whetstone.
