by John Benteen
Presently, when it was all over, he knew that the plan was the only chance, and that it had to be put into effect immediately. He came back to the fire, to see Belle and Dolan looking at each other in curious fashion, their eyes meeting, then sliding away. He said: “I’m ready to talk. I’ve got a sort of plan. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. But the only way to find out is to try it.”
Dolan, with effort, wrenched his eyes away from Belle. “What is it?”
Fargo said: “Whetstone’s got an army. We need one, too. If we can get one together, we’ll hit him.”
Dolan’s mouth twisted and he spat into the fire. “An army; Where would we get an army?”
Fargo grinned. “You know the country?”
“Every creek and valley.”
“Then we get our army from every creek and valley,” Fargo said.
And he talked, telling Dolan what he thought. When he was through, Dolan was silent for a long time. Then he said: “Maybe it will work.”
Before Fargo could answer, Belle said, with a strange, metallic tone: “Don’t leave me out. I know how to use a gun.”
Dolan got up, came around the fire, put his hand on hers. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
She looked up at him. “Jason Whetstone killed my father. Six of his men raped me twice each, night before last. He left me in the snow to die. You have steel in you? Don’t you think I have steel in me?”
Dolan stared down at her. Then he took his hand away. “Yes,” he said. “All right. You come with us.” He turned to Fargo. “When do you want to leave ?”
“Right now,” Fargo said, and he got to his feet, slinging the shotgun.
“I’ll harness up the dogs,” Dolan said.
MacReady was a trapper. It had taken him all summer to get ready for the trapping season: hauling steel traps and supplies out to the lonesome valley forty or fifty miles from Circle, making caches, preparing cabins along his line. Then, as winter settled down, he had strung his steel: tree sets for marten and fisher; cubby sets for lynx and fox and wolverine. In the spring, he chopped through the ice and placed beaver traps, and as the ice thawed, he went after mink, muskrat, and otter. It was a hard, lonesome, dangerous job, spending the winter in the remote valley with nothing but his dogs for companions, but already he had brought in a lot of fur, and the prospect of more was promising. “This ought to be the best catch I’ve ever had,” he said, deftly ripping the silky pelt from a pine marten.
“And what good will it do you,” Fargo said, sitting across the table from him in the trap line cabin, “if you bring it into Circle and get so much money from it that it attracts Whetstone’s attention? You think he’ll let you keep it?”
MacReady stood up, throwing aside the skinned carcass. His black eyes glittered beneath bushy brows. “After the way I’ve worked for this catch, nobody had better try to cheat me out of it.”
Fargo’s mouth twisted. “All you’ll get for your season is a rifle butt alongside the head and a chance to freeze to death out in Granite Valley. Like Dolan. Like Miss Dalton and me.”
MacReady drew in a long breath that made his deep chest swell. “I’ve lived in the North for a long time. I’ve never heard of anything like that before.”
“When Whetstone’s dead,” Fargo said, “you’ll never hear of anything like it again. But I won’t lie to you. There’s risk. Lots of risk. You might get killed.”
MacReady looked at him. “There’s excitement, too,” he said at last. “It gets pretty dull out on a trap line. Sometimes it almost drives you out of your mind. Besides, I make a good living here. I don’t trap it all out, I leave plenty for seed. I want to keep coming back and coming back. I have to use Circle as a base for that. And as I understand it, with Whetstone there, it’s not a town anymore. It’s just a hangout for outlaws and thieves.”
“That’s the size of it,” Dolan said.
“Then I won’t be able to live in this country anymore,” MacReady said. He got up, looked through the tiny window of the cabin at the vast and lonesome expanse of wooded valley. “It’s the only country left where you don’t have somebody’s foot on your neck nowadays. The only place where, by God, if you’ve got the guts and the muscle ... I don’t like cities, you understand? Cities stink, and they got too many people in ’em. I came here to get away from cities. But I do want to be able to walk into Circle and not have to tote a gun or worry about somebody hijacking my catch.” He turned away from the window, stood there in silence for a moment. Then he said: “All right. I’ll go with you.”
Dolan stood up. “Fine. You won’t regret it.”
“Sometimes,” MacReady said, “it looks like a man has to fight just for the right to be left alone.”
Fargo also arose. “You know most of the other trappers in this territory?”
“All of ’em,” MacReady said.
“Then you’ll come with us when we talk to ’em?”
MacReady nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll come with you.”
And so it went, throughout all that territory, they scoured the valleys and the creek bottoms. They crossed the Yukon and swung south of Circle City. It was a lot of traveling, behind dogs and sleds, through cold so intense that tree limbs popped like rifle shots, through blasting blizzards. But they missed not even the most remote trapper, the most isolated miner wintering on his claim, resolutely chopping wood and burning it to thaw the gravel to continue his operations. They went up Birch Creek and O’Brien Creek and Seventy-Mile Creek; traversed the Ketchumstock Hills and the Tanana Hills and Beaver Creek. They hit the Kantik River and the banks of the Yukon, and they missed no one. MacReady was a good spokesman. So was Dolan. Fargo, used to raising armies and training them, was the best of all; he knew how to rouse men to action. Their numbers grew. As they traveled from valley to valley and creek to creek—each man with dogs, sled, and gear—they did, indeed, begin to resemble an army.
It was hard traveling for a woman. Belle Dalton rode always muffled in furs on Dolan’s sled. And, at night, she slept in Dolan’s ten—the one he had taken from the men he had killed in Granite Valley, the one in which she had been violated and violated again. Nobody came near her without Dolan’s permission. That made Fargo think of Jane Deering. She had been with Whetstone for nearly three weeks now. He supposed that she would get along, accept the inevitable.
At the end of a month, they had a hundred men. Maybe it was enough, maybe not. There were many more hundreds in Circle, and all tough, gun swift hard cases. But there was nothing soft about the hundred who followed Fargo and Dolan, either. They had wrenched and wrested their living from the North for years. They were like men made of steel.
And then there came a night when, having finished their swing, Dolan and Fargo sat across a campfire from each other, thirty miles or one good day’s travel from Circle City. Other fires glimmered in the basin where they had halted. Fargo blew cigar smoke through his nostrils. “All right,” he said. “Tomorrow night, we hit ’em.”
“Night?”
“About two o’clock in the morning.” Fargo spoke from long experience. “A man’s at his lowest then. Rumors will have traveled; Whetstone will know there’s something afoot. He’ll have guards posted. But even guards sag about two. We’ll time our travel to hit them then. It’ll mean taking off about four tomorrow morning to get into position.”
“Any time you say,” Dolan muttered. He had shaved, during this interval, though he had left some beard, and Fargo saw now the features of a man in his early thirties, weathered, regular, handsome. The beard, Fargo guessed, was to hide a weak chin. But Fargo didn’t worry about that. Billy the Kid had had a weak chin, too; but he had left his mark on the New Mexico in which Fargo had grown up. “You’re the commander in chief,” Dolan added. “Christ, Fargo, if it hadn’t been for you, I’d never have figured out how to get at Whetstone. I shot that note to him into Circle with a bow and arrow; but I didn’t have the guts to go into the town itself and take on his whole crew.”
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“Don’t worry about that; only a fool would have, and you’re not a fool. But there’s one thing we have to talk about. Jane.”
“Yeah,” Dolan said; and he took out another cigar and lit it with a brand from the fire. “Jane. Okay, maybe I wasn’t much of a husband to her. But she wasn’t much of a wife, either. She liked to hop in bed with other men, and she was one of these women who can’t rest unless—you know. They’re not happy unless they cut your balls off. She had this thing going in the movies, and she didn’t give a damn about me. That was one reason I took off to Alaska, when I had a chance to work on the preliminary survey team that was to supply Congress with the data about the feasibility of the Alaskan railroad. I was tired of being the woman in the marriage.” His eyes flickered toward the tent where Belle Dalton slept. “Okay. I’ve got some oil money coming to me. I’d give Jane a quarter of a million of it to be free of her. There’s another woman, now. A real woman ... with a quarter of a million and maybe more coming in, we can live well. Damned well. Besides, I’m a man now, not a damned jellyfish. I know how to earn a living, and I know how hard it can be.” He blew smoke. “All the same, I don’t want to see anything happen to Jane.”
“Maybe nothing will,” Fargo said. He thought about Jane Deering, of her lush body and the many times he had enjoyed her; and he wanted her again. “No,” he said, “we won’t let anything happen to her. But for now, let’s turn in. Tomorrow’s gonna be a hell of a day.”
They started at false dawn, a hundred men, each with dog team and sled, each with rifle and pistol and plenty of ammunition. The dogs barked and yapped as they drew the sleds across the gleaming, crusted snow of the valleys and creek bottoms, where the traveling was easier. They fell silent as they hauled their burdens up the high, boulder-strewn glacial ridges. They mushed all day, except for a nooning where pannikins of tea were boiled and rations of pemmican consumed, rich bear and moose fat, with service berries, raisins, currants, whatever sources of sugar could be compounded into it. Then it was up again, and out with the dogs across the glittering, snow-covered flats that would blind a man without goggles. An army of a hundred men whooping to its dogs; six hundred, maybe more, of Malamutes and Huskies yapping and barking. It seemed as if the noise could be heard all the way to Circle. Yet, when arriving early, they camped on a ridge five miles from town, they had met no opposition. Sitting by a campfire, Fargo gloated. Still, Whetstone must be wondering at the lull. There was a chance—just a chance—that now Fargo’s army could catch Circle City off-guard.
A kind of electricity seemed to crackle over the area where they were camped. It was the expectancy of men about to go into battle, something Fargo had felt dozens, maybe hundreds, of times. Nobody slept. Then, when the time came, Fargo got up from beside the fire, slogged around the area on his snowshoes, and roused his troops. It was a quarter past one. At two, they would hit Circle City.
Dogs were harnessed. Dolan, passing by Fargo, said: “Okay. This is the big one.”
“Yeah,” Fargo said. “With luck, the decent element in Circle will join in, once they figure out what’s happening. Maybe another thirty, forty men. Anyhow, it all goes now. On this roll of the dice.”
He went on. “You take the north group, I take the south.” He had decided to split his forces, hit the town from both ends at once. The southern group would wait until the northern one got into position, then attack.
Belle Dalton was on Dolan’s sled as Dolan moved out at the head of his command. Fargo thumbed from his pocket a railroad watch, something else that had belonged to him that Whetstone’s men had taken when they had pushed Belle and him out into Granite Valley to die. It was remorselessly accurate, made for trainmen to whom every second was precious. He held his complement of fifty men on leash as the minutes ticked away with excruciating slowness. Then the appointed time came. Fargo stepped behind his sled, braced himself on its runners. He brought his upraised arm down, hard. “Move out!” he bawled, and then, with rifle and shotgun slung across his parka, the cartridges in his bandoliers clicking in the cold, the sheathed Colt—it was a .45; he did not know where his .38 was—at his waist, he cracked his dog-whip. The Malamutes plunged into their traces; the sled went smoothly across the crusted snow.
Behind Fargo, his army whipped across the snow-covered wastelands. They swooped down a ridge, the last barrier that separated Circle City from Birch Creek, to the southwest. As they traveled smoothly down into flats, Fargo saw, in the fishbelly Arctic dawn a few lights burning below, beside the Yukon. That was Circle.
Then, as they moved in, Fargo realized what sort of opponent he was up against. Despite all the time that had passed, Whetstone had never let down his guard. There were sentries, troops of them, on watch. First there came a crackle of gunfire from the north, as Dolan hit opposition. Then a line of stunted willows ahead of Fargo’s charging dog team soldiers spouted flame. Men yelled, dogs howled and ki-yiied as bullets plunked into flesh. At least a dozen gunmen were holed up down there; and there was going to be only one way to take them: the hard way. Targets against the snow, his forces had to go in fast.
The shotgun in his right hand, a dog whip in his left, Fargo bellowed orders. Cold wind bit his cheeks as his team ran forward and he rode the sled. He bent low, as lead whined around his head. A glance over his shoulder told him that his men were following, shooting as they came. Their fire laced the willows. Fargo himself, in range now, unlimbered the shotgun. Its deep bass roar was a new sound in the bedlam of the night as he raked the line of trees, reloaded, fired again and again. The counter fire from the willows diminished. Then Fargo heard someone bellow: “Fall back, goddammit! Fall back to town!” He kept on shooting as the dogs plunged into the trees, branches lashed his fur clad body like whips. Bodies lay among the willows. Then he was across the frozen creek, the dogs hurrying up its far bank; and then he was out of the trees completely, and he saw the remnant of the guard fleeing into the main street of the town, out of the shotgun’s range. Fargo never slackened speed; he slung the weapon, levered a shell into his Winchester. As the dogs raced on, he fired at the retreating guard, saw men go down as they crowded into the town. Behind him, his army whooped to its dogs and its rifle fire made a crashing in the dawn.
Then they had reached the outskirts of town—those who had survived. Dogs barked and growled, jamming, as the teams hit the end of the street all at once. Fargo cursed, jumped off the sled, turned to bring order out of the attack. Then the night seemed to blow itself apart with gunfire; Malamutes howled as they died under a sleet of lead, and the street’s end was hopelessly clogged. Fargo hit the snow instinctively, rolled over; and then he saw what had happened.
Fearing attack, Whetstone had recruited every tough in town. Now they boiled out of their cabins, formed a great mass in the main street, dozens of them, hundreds, pouring fire in each direction. Fargo’s own men screamed and broke and fell and ran, disorganized, shaken, by that terrible blast of lead.
Fargo cursed, crouching close to earth. That phalanx could never be broken head-on. It had to be taken from the side, the flank, before either his men or Dolan’s could move again. And it was up to him to do it.
He began to crawl. It took every ounce of courage to move forward into that blast of fire. He sheltered behind plunging dogs; some of them snapped at him in their bullet-ripped agony, ripping his furs, which protected him from their teeth. He did not fire back at Whetstone’s men, not daring to draw their fury.
Then he made it; an alleyway between the last two houses at the end of the main street, the ones across from the cabin he and Jane had occupied. He slithered on his belly into the shelter, jumped to his feet. At that instant, the sash of a window in one of the cabins went up. In its lighted square, Fargo saw a bearded face, a pointed handgun. He heard a tatter of words: “—gotcha, now!” His reaction was instinctive; he tipped the rifle barrel, fired. Lead whipped at the hood of his parka as the face turned bright red, then disappeared. Fargo ran, awkwardly, having discar
ded snowshoes, through the deep snow between the houses. He slung the rifle, brought the shotgun into action, prayed its barrels were unclogged with snow.
He made the back street. Ahead, in the changing light, he saw two men on one side, another across from them. Guns up, they converged on him, spotting him in that instant. Fargo threw the shotgun to his shoulder, aimed. The right barrel roared, its nine slugs plowing into the pair dead ahead. He pivoted from the waist, pulled the left trigger, and the other enemy seemed to dissolve under the impact, just as he raised his pistol.
Then he was in the clear. He ran down the street, halted, selected footholds. Then, like a squirrel, weapons dangling from their slings, he went up the back of a cabin, fingers and toes digging into the chinked spaces between its logs. He pulled himself up on the snow-burdened roof, lay there panting. Then he drew his Colt, reloaded the shotgun, and crawled forward. When he was in position, he cleared a small hole in the snow, all the way down to the sod of the roof, thumbed shells from the shotgun bandolier, stacked them there.
Now he was looking over the forward edge of the roof. Below, in the main street, Whetstone’s men were bunched up, the thunder of their guns deafening as they fired with practiced speed and accuracy. At the north end of town, Dolan’s men were retreating; at the south, Fargo’s men had scattered. Fargo’s teeth showed; it was not a grin, it was a snarl. He poked the shotgun over the edge of the roof with his right hand, the Colt with his left. Then his fingers pulled three triggers at once.
