by Jon Sharpe
Warm breath bathed his cock. Her tongue flicked against it. Then her lips closed over it until Fargo felt himself sliding down her throat.
He grunted, flattened his hands against the mattress, blood surging through his loins.
The girl may not have been a working girl, but she knew her work. About ten seconds before he exploded, she slid her mouth off his shaft, muffled chuckles rising from under the robe. She slid her head out from under the robe and scooted back up to his waist. She leaned over him, braced herself on her outstretched arms, and kissed his nose.
Fargo closed his hands over her full, muscular thighs—she must have done some horse riding back on the old Russian steppe—and tried to muscle her equipment into position for impalement.
She grunted and snarled, slapping his hands away.
“We wait till your blood cools,” she ordered sharply. “I want good, long ride!”
“You’ll get your ride!” Fargo growled.
The girl gave a startled shriek as he threw her onto her back then, holding her down, mashing his lips against hers. He crawled between her thrashing legs. She was so ready for him that his shaft slid into her like a hot dagger through tallow.
She dug her fingernails into his back and closed her mouth over his shoulder, groaning. When he began thrusting in and out, she threw her head back on the pillow and loosed a ripping shriek like that of a trapped timber wolf, rattling Fargo’s eardrums.
“Hold it down in there, fer Chrissake!” a man shouted from down the hall.
Clamping a hand over Irina’s mouth, feeling her tongue and teeth against his palm, Fargo bucked against her—in and out, in and out—only half aware of the bed frame smashing the wall ahead of him, making the whole room jump and loosing dust from the rafters…only vaguely hearing someone angrily pound the wall from the other side.
Irina sobbed beneath Fargo’s hand and wrapped her strong legs around his waist, bucking up against him furiously. She clawed his back and kneaded his shoulders, several times tipping her head back to groan loudly into Fargo’s wet palm.
He removed his hand from her mouth to prop himself up on his arms, rising onto his toes and driving deep for the grand finale. Her mouth flew open and her head snapped back once more, but Fargo managed to clamp a hand over her lips, muffling her primal shriek as they both came at the same time, shuddering as though lightning-struck.
From down the hall—the opposite end from last time—a man’s voice admonished, “There’s respectable women on the premises!”
“Oh, God,” Irina panted, keeping her legs wrapped tightly around the Trailsman’s back and kneading his biceps. “You fuck like a Cossack!”
“Right back at you.” Fargo nuzzled her sweaty breasts, nibbling her nipples. “Assuming Cossack women fuck like rabid minks.”
She laughed huskily and pulled his hair.
Fargo played with her full, round breasts for a while before his eyes grew heavy, then closed. He rolled over onto his back, resting his head against his pillow, and drifted into a shallow sleep before Irina nibbled his right ear and massaged his member, waking him.
He tried to fight her off, but the girl was too much for him in his depleted state, and they made love once more—if you could call it love; it felt more like a long tumble down a steep, rocky bluff—before Fargo drifted off to sleep, once more half hearing a man outside his door barking admonishments while a woman muttered angrily beside him.
Irina was still in his bed when Fargo woke the next morning before dawn. He got himself untangled from her strong limbs, then crawled out of bed, the cold wrapping itself around him like a deep, half-frozen lake, and built a fire in the woodstove. He dressed before the fire heated the room, and would have splashed some cold water in his face, but the water in his wooden washbowl was frozen solid.
Cursing and shivering, he shrugged into his buckskin mackinaw, grabbed his saddlebags and rifle, and went downstairs where he could smell coffee boiling in the kitchen, but as yet could smell no food.
Leaving his gear on a table in the night-dark saloon hall, he went out to the barn to feed the Ovaro and to chip the ice out of its trough. The stable boys were there, half asleep and mucking out stalls, their breath jetting in the barn’s musty shadows.
Fargo instructed the pair—two brothers about twelve and fourteen, both speaking with heavy German accents—on how to care for his prized mustang while he was off on his stage run, then gave the horse a parting pat. Looking around cautiously for any more would-be bushwhackers, he headed back toward the lodge as dawn paled the eastern prairie. Several stars still glistened in the clear, cold sky, the air so toothcracking brittle that the snow grumbled like dried leaves under his boots.
As he threw open the lodge door, kicking through a drift the wind had tufted against the lodge’s front wall, his nostrils delighted in the smell of meat, eggs, fried potatoes, and coffee. Craw Bascomb stood before a table occupied by big Grizzly Olaffson, the stage line owner holding a dented coffee pot and telling the big jahoo that it was so cold that just before he’d gone to bed last night he heard trees pop along the river behind the lodge.
“Snapping and popping just like gunfire!” Bascomb intoned.
He’d started back toward the kitchen when Fargo kicked the door closed and announced, “It was gunfire.”
Bascomb stopped and turned toward him. So did Grizzly Olaffson, steam curling up from the big stone mug in his ham-sized hands. He wore his wolf-pelt hat tipped back on his curly blond head, and a cigarette smoldered in the corner of his broad, thin-lipped mouth.
“What’s that?” Bascomb said.
“Someone musta thought I looked a little warm in spite of this lousy weather and decided to ventilate my hide.” Fargo removed his gloves and strode toward Grizzly’s table, a rueful smile stretching his lips. “Would have taken a shot at me coming out of the privy, but the cold wind grabbed the door and saved my life.”
“Well, hell, Skye, I’m sorry you got such a rude welcome to our fair region,” Grizzly said, his gruff voice booming about the room. “But it probably ain’t the first time some hombre’s decided you need some coolin’ off!”
Bascomb set his jaw and jerked the coffee pot toward the stairs at the back of the room. “Perhaps that little Russian gal has a beau.” He cursed and blinked his sleep-crusted eyes. “I’d of been pissed to lose my shotgun rider but none too pissed to get a good night’s rest! Great Jehovah, did you two leave anything in the room still standing?”
Dragging a chair back from Grizzly’s table, Fargo said, “Whoever took the shot at me took it before I went back to my room.”
“Wait a minute,” Grizzly said, squinting one eye across the table at Fargo as Bascomb retreated into the kitchen. “Am I to understand you spent the night with that little Russian gal?”
“You know I don’t talk out of school, Griz. Getting back to the matter of considerable more importance—at least to me—you haven’t overheard anyone hereabouts grumbling around about blowing my wick, have you?”
“Not that I can recollect,” Grizzly said, removing the quirley from his lips to sip his coffee. “But my memory ain’t what it used to be. I wouldn’t worry about it, though. Prob’ly some drunk, grub-line cowpoke got his drunk ass kicked out of a whorehouse and wanted to take his miseries out on the first person he seen. There’s a lot of misery around here, don’t ya know. ’Specially in the winter when money’s scarce an’ the whores’ prices go up.”
Fargo allowed the big man might be right, but his instincts, which rarely failed him, told him he wasn’t. There wasn’t much he could do about it now except keep his hand close to his .44 and a sharp eye on his back…and look for someone sporting a recent bullet wound. By the amount of blood he’d seen in the snow, he’d more than just grazed the son of a bitch.
Later, when he and Grizzly had both washed down Bascomb’s eggs, fried antelope steaks, and potatoes with coffee thick enough to float a gold ingot, they headed out to the lean-to shed off the barn and hitch
ed six horses to the stage-sleigh—a traditional stage coach on which skis had replaced the wheels.
“Pretty fittin’ contraption for this here country,” Grizzly said as he and Fargo snapped the harness straps and adjusted the heavy collars over the horses’ necks. “As long as the team can get through the snow, the stage will.”
“Of course, all the passengers’ll probably be frozen solid by the time they reach Devil’s Lake, but at least we’ll get their carcasses through.”
“Got that covered, too,” Grizzly said. “Bascomb’s got bricks heatin’ in his fireplace to put along the floorboards. Makes for a nice, toasty ride!”
“You boys thought of everything.”
As if on cue, the lodge door opened and Bascomb stuck his head out, his long hair wafting in the morning breeze. “Time to load the bricks, fellas. The passengers done ate their breakfast, and they’re ready to go. Griz, you gotta be to the Cottonwood Station for Mrs. Larsen’s noon lunch or she’ll bore you another asshole!”
He winced, turning his head toward the open door behind him to mutter, “Uh…pardon my French, ladies.” He went in and kicked the door closed.
Fargo and Grizzly finished up with the team, then used blacksmith tongs to load the glowing bricks from the fireplace into tin-lined milk crates in which they carried the hot bricks to the stage, arranging them under the buffalo-robe rug on the floor and into the hide pockets stitched into the seat ends. Then they loaded the iron-strapped, padlocked strongbox and the passengers’ luggage, including Irina Roskov’s backbreaking steamer trunk, into the luggage boot and onto the roof.
That done, Craw Bascomb led the passengers out from the lodge. Fargo held the coach’s door while Bascomb checked each passenger off his list, calling out their names.
First to board were the pretty blonde whom Fargo had seen in the common room last night, Mrs. Leslie Otis and her husband, Lieutenant Hamlin Otis, both from Virginia and, Fargo figured, headed to Fort Totten, the Army outpost nestled in the hills near Devil’s Lake. The lieutenant was a pale, scrawny gent affecting a dragoon-style mustache which made his long, angular, bespectacled face look bottom-heavy. He sniffled into a handkerchief as he boarded the stage, his poor health no doubt the reason why his brown-eyed, buxom wife—who wore a flowing white fur coat with matching hat and doe-skin boots—had been crocheting alone by the fire.
Next was a couple of saddle tramps in woolly chaps and toting sheathed Sharps rifles—a tall rannie named Charley Mays and his diminutive, bushy-haired partner, R. J. Boone, who sported an eye patch under which a long knife scar angled. Neither man, each with a battered hat tied to his head with ratty scarves, said anything as they mounted the stage. They merely rolled tobacco quids around in their cheeks and grunted against the cold.
After them a middle-aged, well-dressed couple boarded—Mr. Asa Tribble and his stout wife, Pearl, who held a pill-shaped beaver hat to her head, shivering, while her husband and the Trailsman back-and-bellied her through the door. Earlier, Fargo had heard Tribble complain to Bascomb that if his brother-in-law was going to die and leave him his Devil’s Lake mercantile, why for God’s sake did he have to do it in December? Apparently, Tribble’s own trading post had been burned by the Sioux on the other side of the Red, and he and his wife had no choice but to head north.
Behind the Tribbles came a dapper youngster in a long wolf coat and bowler hat, the two lumps under his coat bespeaking sidearms. He was clean-shaven, not much over five seven, with scrawny muttonchops framing his pale, hollow-cheeked face. When Bascomb called his name, Robert T. Jones III, the kid paused with one hand-tooled boot on the stage step, and offered the stage line owner an indulgent, broken-toothed grin.
“Old man, I’m known around here as the Dakota Kid,” he announced proudly. “You may have heard of me if you ever read the papers or poked your nose out of Brule City.”
“The Dakota Kid, huh?” said Bascomb with a sardonic chuff, glancing at Fargo as he checked the lad’s name off the list.
“What does your ma call you, Kid?” Fargo asked.
The Kid turned to him, scowling. “Bobby.”
“Well, Bobby,” Fargo said, “you best get your skinny ass aboard the stage, less’n you want Mrs. Larsen to skewer you a new blowhole.”
The Kid curled his lip as his pinched eyes took the Trailsman’s measure. Apparently not liking how he sized up in comparison, he gave a caustic grunt and climbed into the stage.
“Irina Roskov,” said the Russian girl, who was last to leave the lodge. She gave Fargo a smoky look, her hands shoved into her muff.
“And you’ll be getting off where?” asked Bascomb.
“Fort Totten, sir,” Irina said, her brazen gaze making Fargo feel uncomfortable.
“All right, then, miss. Enjoy your trip.”
“I’m sure I will.”
She smiled at Fargo; then, taking his hand, she climbed up into the coach. Doing so, she swung her head from side to side, the same wary look she’d worn when he first saw her etched again on her brow, as if she were being stalked. Inside, she turned around and gave the Trailsman a meaningful look through the door’s open window, then slid into a vacant seat across from the saddle tramps.
“What appalling behavior,” said the pretty blonde, Mrs. Otis, in her butter-smooth Southern accent. Sitting in the window seat facing forward, she shuttled her haughty brown-eyed gaze from the Russian girl to Fargo, who latched the door.
“That’s nothing,” Fargo said, pinching his hat brim at the woman. “You should’ve seen her last night.”
On the stage roof, where he was doing some lastminute shifting of luggage, Grizzly chuckled. Fargo set his fur boot on a brass rung jutting from the carriage housing and climbed up into the driver’s box.
A minute later, they were off.
4
The stage-sleigh rose up out of the hollow in which Brule City nestled, and, skis sounding like a long, unbroken whisper in the chill, elemental silence, followed the river north under a slate gray sky from which small snowflakes fell like drifting ash.
Grizzly cursed the skittish, six-hitch team across a wooden bridge, then turned them west along the north bank of a frozen tributary of the Red. They followed the broad valley into the low, rolling, snow-flocked hills of the remote Dakota prairie, where the wintry vastness was broken occasionally by lone cottonwoods or sloughs bordered with wheat-colored saw grass and cattails, with a sod shanty, barn, and corral huddled here and there in the snow under wafting chimney smoke.
They weren’t far from town when, passing a cabin dug into the side of a butte, with a milk cow standing above the door, they met a dray driven by a bundled, frost-rimed couple hauling two children, a barking dog, and a cedar tree they’d no doubt cut in a river bottom and would trim with candles and popcorn balls.
“Merry Christmas, Lanski!” Grizzly shouted as he pulled the team around the sleigh.
The red-faced, gray-mustached gent driving the sleigh pinched the leather brim of his coalman hat while the woman stared stone-faced, the children waved, and the dog yipped at the horses.
The stage rose up out of the river valley and followed the plowed trail across a gently undulating bench where the snow was whipped like frosting along the depressions, leaving the knoll crests bare. Glancing around, Fargo spotted three horseback riders mounting a snowy hillock behind them, near a sprawling cottonwood crowded with cawing blackbirds.
The riders trotted toward them on two duns and a black.
Fargo turned forward and lifted his voice above the team’s snow-crunching hooves and the skis’ unvaried hiss. “Three riders a half mile behind.”
“So?” Grizzly leaned forward, ribbons in his mittened hands, elbows on his bony knees. Foggy breath puffed from his frost-rimed beard. “The stage company don’t own the road.”
“I’m just sayin’ there’s three riders behind us, and they’re too far away to tell for sure, but it looks like they’re carryin’ rifle scabbards.”
“Probably marke
t hunters or ranch hands lookin’ to fill their larders with deer meat.” Grizzly chuckled. “You worry too much, Skye. This here is a big empty country home to a few cold folks intent only on makin’ it through another winter alive. No one’s gonna trouble themselves with relievin’ us of that strongbox.”
“If you say so.”
“Relax,” Grizzly said, fumbling in his coat pocket for a tin flask. He bit the cork out, dropped it into his left mitten, then offered the flask to Fargo. “The only thing you got to worry about is freezin’ to death or goin’ crazy as a sheepherder from boredom. Here—this’ll help you keep your wits about ye.”
Fargo took a swig, and his eyes watered as the pungent blackberry brandy seared his tonsils and took some of the chill from his cheeks, fingers, and toes. Returning the flask to Grizzly, who tipped it back for a good three seconds, he blinked.
The riders were gone. Nothing but the pale ribbon of plowed trail meandering across the knolls, under a sky the color of rifle bluing.
He turned forward, unconsciously caressing the Henry’s hammer with his thumb, then raked his eyes to either side of the trail, seeing nothing in either the north or the south but snowy prairie and steel-colored sky with a twisting snow devil here and there.
It was close to eleven when the stage dropped over a ridge and began descending a vast hollow filled with gray cottonwoods. The trail cleaved the woods, and along both sides of the trail stood a half dozen barns and sheds, a couple of whipsawed buildings with false fronts, and a shake-roofed cabin.
“Crow Station dead ahead, folks!” Grizzly yowled above the clomp of the hooves, squawk of the thoroughbraces, and creak of the tack. “Prepare to destage and fill your gullets!” the giant roared, throwing his frosty head back on his shoulders and shaking the ribbons across the horses’ backs.
As the horses bottomed out in the hollow and the trees, and pushed up along the trail, Fargo saw the sign over the log lodge—CROW HOLLOW STAGE STATION AND TRADING POST. A smaller sign below read CARL LARSEN, PROP.
