North Country Cutthroats

by Jon Sharpe

  “Ouch.”

  “You mean Walleye or Ella?”

  “I mean Ella,” Fargo said, draping his saddlebags atop the bar, then picking up one of the two glasses of whiskey Bascomb had just filled for him and Grizzly. “Walleye probably didn’t feel a thing.”

  Grizzly chuckled as he removed a mitten and picked up his own glass. “You got that right, Skye. Hell, I found Walleye’s shredded heart in Ella’s rose patch a good thirty feet away!” He threw back the entire shot, then set the glass on the bar, gesturing for a refill. “She only did a night in jail as nobody felt Walleye was worth getting the judge up here from Fargo.”

  When Bascomb solemnly allowed that Grizzly was right, he refilled Grizzly’s and Fargo’s glasses once more, then corked the bottle. He picked up the bloody meat cleaver, turned to one of the sage hens, and hacked off a leg. “You can have room three upstairs, Fargo. Free room and board as long as you work for the company. Free whiskey, too, though that doesn’t go for Grizzly, as he’d drink me out of a business.”

  Grizzly cursed and swabbed his glass out with his tongue. Bascomb hacked off another sage hen leg. “You’ll be on the road five nights—two goin’, one at the end of the line in Devil’s Lake, two more comin’ back, so pack plenty of warm socks. Only thing different about tomorrow’s run is the Army strongbox. I got it under my bed in the back room. We’ll load it on the stage tomorrow, first thing.”

  Fargo reached for his saddlebags, stopped, and turned to Bascomb, who’d continued cutting up the hens and tossing the parts in an iron stew pot. “Strongbox?”

  “Yeah, we ship payroll coins to the fort up near Devil’s Lake—Fort Totten—on occasion. ’Bout fifteen thousand dollars’ worth. Shouldn’t be any trouble. Owlhoots are generally holed up in the southern settlements this time of the year. There’s no one out in the Dakoty countryside after Thanksgiving ’cept the wolves, Norski farmers, and blanket Injuns, and none of them is better armed than you’ll be. Nah,” Bascomb said, hacking a sage hen breast in two equal halves, “it’s a damn easy run.”

  “If it’s such an easy run,” Fargo said, pulling his saddlebags off the bar, “why do you need a shotgun rider in the first place?”

  Bascomb opened his mouth to speak but stopped when the latch clicked and the timbered front door opened with a squawk, letting in a howling blast of winter wind. The shadows danced as the fire lunged in the stone hearth and the candles were reduced to sparks.

  Fargo followed Bascomb’s and Grizzly’s gazes to the front of the room. A young woman with glistening, snow-powdered black hair pulled the door closed, frowning and cursing the wind in what Fargo thought was Russian, before turning to the room, the fire dancing in her lustrous, fear-pinched eyes.

  2

  The girl wore a long, rabbit-fur coat and matching rabbit-fur hat, her hands shoved into the rabbit-fur muff in front of her. She wore soft mink boots on her delicate feet, and even with the boots’ two-inch heels, she couldn’t have been much over five feet tall.

  What Fargo could see of her shape inside the heavy coat upon which snowflakes glistened as they melted seemed full, well-rounded, and large-breasted without being stocky. There was an alluring, rosy-cheeked, dark-eyed sensuality about her that bit Fargo, who hadn’t had a woman in several weeks, down deep in his loins.

  “I am seek ticket on stage to Devil’s Lake,” she said in her heavy Russian accent, her full red lips opening and closing delightfully around each ruffled vowel and flinty consonant. “I am told this is the place, correct?”

  Craw Bascomb shared a bemused, speculative glance with Fargo and Grizzly Olaffson, who stood with their backs to the bar, admiring the girl’s exotic beauty. “This is the place, all right, miss.”

  He turned and grabbed a leather-bound tablet off a shelf behind him, turned back to the girl, licked his thumb, and flipped pages. “How many in your party?”

  The girl descended the steps, crossed the sunken area and, moving gracefully on her high heels but keeping her hands inside the muff, ascended the three steps to the bar. “One ticket, please. I am traveling alone, and I will need a room for this evening.”

  She glanced at the Trailsman—her eyes coolly taking his measure before acquiring the haughty cast of the high-bred speaking to an inferior. “Perhaps this one would take my trunk to room?”

  Behind Fargo, Grizzly chuckled, nudged his back playfully.

  “This one?” Fargo doffed his hat indulgently, then set his rifle and saddlebags atop the bar. “This one would be right honored, miss.”

  “It’s on the porch. Please be careful. There are breakable objects inside.”

  “Of course.”

  Grizzly still chuckling behind him, Fargo headed toward the front door, stepped outside, and found a large, leather-covered steamer trunk, which was adorned with several shipping tickets in languages he couldn’t read, gathering a thin layer of snow on the broad front porch. He grabbed an end handle and, turning to heft the trunk onto his back, grunted, veins popping out in his forehead. The thing had to weigh close to sixty pounds.

  When he’d returned to the bar holding the trunk against his back, the girl was folding the stage ticket. Plucking coins from the counter, Bascomb glanced at Fargo. “Room four, next to yours.”

  “Be careful, please,” the girl admonished again, pointedly not looking into the Trailsman’s eyes, then strode through the flickering shadows toward the stairs at the back of the room.

  With his free hand, Fargo grabbed his saddlebags and rifle, then, grunting and stumbling under the weight of the trunk on his back, began following the girl. Grizzly chuckled behind him. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Skye. I gotta go say good-bye to my girl on the other side of town!”

  “Sleep well,” Fargo grunted.

  “Come on back down, Fargo, and I’ll fix you a plate of vittles for supper,” Bascomb called behind him.

  Fargo raised his rifle in acknowledgment, then mounted the stairs behind the girl, admiring the way her round bottom sashayed fluidly behind the heavy coat. When they’d gained the second story, lit by only a couple of smoky wall tapers, Fargo set the trunk down in front of room four with a sigh.

  “What do you have in there?” he asked the girl, straightening, working the kinks out of his lower back. “Bricks from the old home place?”

  Tripping the timbered door’s lever latch, she stepped slowly into the room, turning her head from left to right, as though making sure the room was vacant.

  Satisfied, she stepped back out and settled that cool, haughty gaze on Fargo once again. “You are…stage guard?”

  “That’s right. But I don’t mind breaking my back for beautiful young ladies.”

  “You are…well-armed?“

  “Some seem to think so.”

  She frowned, puzzled.

  Fargo snorted. “Don’t worry. I carry some iron.” When she stood staring up at him, pensively, as if reluctant to be left alone, he said, “Russian?”

  She nodded.

  “What brings you to this neck of the prairie?”

  “My brothers cut wood at Fort Totten. I will join them there to clean, cook.…”

  Fargo doffed his hat and held it across his chest. “Fargo’s my handle. Skye Fargo.” He let his eyes wander up and down the rabbit coat, feeling the needling prick in his loins. He’d have given up a good night’s sleep to see what she looked like, spread out naked across the buffalo-robe-covered bed in the shadows. “Unless there’s anything else you need this evening, I’ll haul this boat anchor into your room and head downstairs for supper.”

  “Of course.”

  She stepped into the room, drawing the door wide, then moved to the single frosted window and stared out at the cold black night. She had a frightened, pensive air, and Fargo didn’t blame her. The prospect of spending a winter in this godforsaken country didn’t appeal to him, either.

  He slid the trunk into the room. “You didn’t tell me your name.”

  She turned to him quickly, as though st
artled. Her eyes swept across his chest and shoulders; then, a flush rising up from her neck, she dropped her gaze to the floor. “Irina Roskov.”

  Fargo nodded as he struck a match on his belt buckle. He crossed the room and lit a candle on the dresser near the bed. Turning to her, he blew out the match. “Sleep tight, Miss Roskov. I reckon we’ll be seeing each other again at first light.”

  He strode to the door and stepped out. “In the meantime, I’ll be right next door.” He pulled the door closed behind him, catching a last glimpse of the wan candlelight burning in her large brown eyes.

  When the Trailsman had stowed his gear in his room next to the Russian girl’s, he went downstairs and found a plate of rabbit stew steaming on the bar, fronted with a schooner of frothy beer and a shot glass filled to the brim with whiskey. He took the food and drink to a table near the fire and dug in. He didn’t mingle with the half dozen people—tomorrow’s stage passengers, no doubt—sitting around him, even though one was a pretty, blue-eyed blonde sitting alone on a leather couch, occupied with only a couple of crochet hooks.

  He was tired, hungry, and thirsty, and he’d have plenty of time to mingle once the stage set out for Devil’s Lake.

  The piping hot stew went down like an elixir, washed down with the whiskey and beer, instantly quelling the hunger pangs that had bedeviled him for the last several hours. When he’d finished, Fargo pushed his plate away and killed the second half of his beer in a single draft.

  Because the blonde sat nearby, he quelled a belch, then donned his hat, buttoned his coat, and headed outside, stopping on the porch to glance at the sky, which was suddenly cold-scoured clear and starstudded. The snow had stopped, but the wind was still throwing it around in ghostly veils, and the temperature must have dropped a good ten degrees since he’d been out.

  Raising the collar of his wool-lined buckskin, he crossed the yard to the barn, where he threw a blanket over the Ovaro’s back. Then, making a mental note to instruct the stable boys of the horse’s feeding and watering requirements while Fargo was on the trail, he trudged back around behind the stage station to the single-hole privy poking up from a wind-scalloped snowdrift, like flotsam tossed down by a gale.

  When Fargo had finished in the privy, a wind gust tore the handle from his gloved grip and slammed the door against the privy wall with a report like that of a large-caliber rifle. Reaching for the door, Fargo saw an inky shadow halt suddenly in the alley about forty yards to his right, then, crouching, scuttle back behind the wall of a chicken coop.

  Fargo blinked against the stinging wind peppering his face with pellet-sized snow, and cursed inwardly. Grizzly again?

  Fargo latched the door and dug under his buckskin for his .44. He walked northward down the alley, staying within the shadows of the buggy sheds, stables, and woodpiles, and slipped along the wall of the chicken coop behind which the shadow had disappeared. As snow slid up around his ankles, he squeezed the Colt’s walnut grips in his gloved right hand.

  He’d been the butt of one of the burly stage driver’s practical jokes already this evening, but that didn’t mean Grizzly was finished. Fargo knew from previous experience that Grizzly was one of those indefatigable practical jokers for whom drastic discouraging measures were often required.

  Fargo ratcheted back the Colt’s hammer, the metallic scrape lost beneath the wind’s sighs and moans, and continued to the chicken coop’s rear corner. He edged a glance around the back wall, against which a canoe-sized snowdrift was curled.

  In the spindly willows and saw grass a good forty yards behind the shed, a gun flashed. The bullet tore into the chicken coop a half second behind the revolver’s muffled crash.

  Wincing against the flying wood slivers, Fargo jerked the Colt up and, spreading his boots, fired three quick rounds at the spot in the inky, snowy darkness. Amidst the brush, a shadow jerked suddenly, as though staggering, then slipped off through the deeper brush sheathing the river.

  Fargo ran toward it, leaping snow-shrouded thickets, and stopped beside a thick-trunked cottonwood. Tracks ruffled the snow around the trunk, and amid the tracks lay a dark liquid streak. Fargo reached down, removed a glove, and touched his fingers to the already cooling blood seeping into the snow.

  The Trailsman grunted with satisfaction as he peered off into the brush. He considered going after the bushwhacker, but the man was no doubt laying as low as a white-tail doe in that heavy brush along the river, impossible to find in the dark.

  Whoever he was and whatever had riled him enough to try to clean Fargo’s clock, the Trailsman had marked him, maybe even caused him to reflect on the error of his ways.

  Straightening, he stepped straight back through the snow, retracing his own footsteps to the privy while keeping his eyes and his .44 aimed in the direction in which the drygulcher had disappeared. He swung around the privy and, holstering his .44, headed back to the lodge.

  Who the hell had tried to shoot him, and why? Grizzly had been erased from the list of suspects, but that left no list at all. The only men Fargo had crossed in recent weeks was a gaggle of Sioux braves who’d tried to steal his pinto while he’d been napping along a branch of the Red. He’d killed one of them, no doubt piss-burning the others, but the Sioux had had ample opportunity in much better weather to even the score.

  Inside the lodge, Fargo found the common room vacant, the fire banked. Aside from the popping fire, wind-creaking rafters, and the muffled clatter of pots and pans floating out from the kitchen, the place was tomb quiet. He made his way up the narrow stairs to his room, his senses sharper now that someone had tried to ventilate him. Men’s snores rose from behind closed doors up and down the hall.

  He stepped quietly into his room, closed the door, then felt around in the dark for a chair, which he propped under the latch. Striking a match, he lit a candle poking up from a sand-filled coffee tin. He shucked out of his coat, laid it on the chair, then whipped around at the sound of a soft, muffled groan behind him.

  Instantly, the .44 was in his hand, cocked, and angled toward the bed on which a curled human figure lumped the heavy buffalo-robe covering. Thick, curly black hair spilled in a tangled mass across the flour-sack pillow.

  Fargo’s brows ridged. “What the hell?”

  The hair moved, and a face appeared above the robe—round and pug-nosed, eyes blinking sleepily. Miss Irina Roskov swiped the hair back from her eye with one hand. “Where have you been? I thought you would never come!”

  Fargo depressed the Colt’s hammer. “I’d swear I left you in the next room.”

  Her voice was husky, vaguely pouting. “Hurry. Build a fire. Come to bed.”

  Fargo gazed back at her while she regarded him beseechingly with her lustrous brown eyes, her hair tangled about her pale, naked shoulders. Nonchalantly, tipping her head to one side, she shoved the buffalo robe down to reveal the deep, dark valley between her breasts.

  “Nice,” he said, holstering the Colt. “I reckon I missed my guess. You don’t look like a workin’ girl.”

  She jerked the robe up to her neck. “I am not whore!” Her full lips set in a pout. “Why is it men can have what they want, and they are only more manly? When a woman merely wants to stay warm on a cold night, she is whore.”

  “All right, all right. Don’t get your bloomers in a knot.”

  Chuckling, he turned to the sheet-iron stove in the corner, opened the door, and tossed in some paper and small branches from a milk crate. When he had a couple of stout cottonwood logs burning, he shut the door, adjusted the damper, and turned to the bed. The girl lay curled on her side, the robe drawn up to her neck, her hair fanned out across the pillow behind her in rich, cascading swirls.

  She watched him as though transfixed, her brown eyes at once brooding and pleading. There was a secret in them, but Fargo only vaguely wondered what it was. At the moment, the length of time he’d been without a woman spoke more loudly.

  He shucked out of his buckskins, socks, and longhandles in less than a minute
, and moved toward the bed. The girl’s eyes followed his swollen member jutting before him. He crouched to peel the buffalo robe back from her body, but she held it taut against her chest with one splayed hand. Smiling mysteriously, she lifted the other hand and wrapped her fingers around his dong.

  She squeezed.

  Fargo grunted.

  Her lips parted as her sparkling eyes rose slowly from his dong, up his hard, flat belly and the twin slabs of his broad chest to his face. Then she opened her hand and, scuttling sideways to make room for him, opened the robe to reveal her spunky, pert body, beguiling in its full-fleshed, rounded vitality.

  Propping her head on one elbow, she cupped one of her full, round breasts, lifting the nipple and surprisingly large pink areola. “You like?”

  3

  “Damn right, I like,” Fargo said, crawling into bed beside the girl’s silky, fleshy warmth, then drawing the robe up over them both.

  He leaned toward her, ran his hands across her shoulders and down her back, drawing her brusquely toward him and closing his mouth over hers while pushing her down against the corn-shuck mattress.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck and opened her mouth for him, entangling her hot tongue with his, groaning quietly, squirming enticingly, until he could feel her hot nest grinding against his iron-hard member, pressing it flat against his belly.

  He rose onto a knee and began positioning himself between her legs.

  “No,” she complained, placing both hands on his chest and pushing against him. “I want on top.”

  It figured that she’d want the dominant position.

  With a rueful snort, he sagged onto his back. Holding the robe up against her with one hand, tenting it over them both, she straddled him, smiling down lustily, eyes sparkling. She bent over him, nibbled his lips for a time, running her hands through his hair, pulling gently, before scooting down, kissing and licking his chest and belly like a she-lion tending her young. She lifted her face, smiling devilishly, chuckled, then pulled her head under the robe.