North Country Cutthroats

by Jon Sharpe

  Fargo peered inside the shed. Mrs. Otis was sprawled atop a low woodpile, reclining on her elbows, a hurt, angry look on her pretty, oval face. Her hair hung in rich curls from her bun, spilling about her shoulders. Her corset was torn, the camisole pushed up around her neck, exposing the pale, pear-shaped breasts steaming in the shed’s cold air and murky shadows. Her skirts were pushed up around her waist, revealing long, pale, well sculpted thighs.

  She glanced at Fargo, who was staring at her. She scowled and flushed indignantly. “Do you mind?” Pulling her twisted camisole down over her breasts, she pushed her skirts over her knees.

  “Savages,” she groused. “Then you’re standing there, ogling me.”

  “Call it my Christmas present. It’s about all I’m going to get this year.”

  Leaving her corset hanging, irreparably torn, she gave her skirts another shove and pulled her rabbit-fur coat closed.

  “You all right?” Fargo asked, taking her arm and helping her down from the woodpile, dislodging several sticks.

  Buttoning her coat, she glanced outside at the man lying dead in the bloody snow. “Is he dead?”

  “Deadern’ hell.”

  “Good!” With that, she stumbled out of the shed and began making her way back through the disheveled snow, mussed hair bobbing on her shoulders. Grizzly Olaffson was jogging their way, his double-barreled greener held out in front of his coat. He turned his head to stare at Mrs. Otis as he passed her, then continued on toward Fargo, rosy cheeks showing above his beard.

  “What the fuck happened?”

  “The deer hunters decided to take Mrs. Otis to the dance.”

  “Shit.”

  Fargo glanced at Grizzly. “I thought you said this was a boring run.”

  “It was!” the driver exclaimed, lifting his gaze from the dead man to fix Fargo with an indignant look. He turned away, tucking his shotgun into his coat, and slogging back through the snow. “Till you came on board!”

  Only fifteen minutes behind schedule, the stage-sleigh pulled out of Crow Hollow and cut a beeline across the open prairie. The skis kneaded the snow under a sky only slightly brighter than the one in the morning—more the color of dusty silver bars than fresh rifle bluing. The sun hung moonlike behind clouds, dark and shrunken but here and there throwing out a strand of pink light against the moody, crenellated heavens.

  The cold, dense air made sound carry, so that Fargo could hear the murmur of desultory conversation in the stage below, the crinkle of a newspaper, the snap of a watch being closed, and the frequent riffle of shuffled playing cards.

  To Fargo’s right, Grizzly Olaffson ran the arm of his bear coat across his frosty beard and glanced at the sky, squinting pensively. He winced as his mind apparently snagged on a barbed thought, and shook his head, putting the team up a pass between porcelain white hogbacks.

  Fargo snorted. “You gonna tell me what’s got your brows so caterpillared or you wanna just keep makin’ a show of it?”

  “I’m just wonderin’—no offense now, you understand—if it’s possible you might be a jinx.”

  “Huh?”

  “Now, don’t get offended, Skye.” Grizzly shook the reins over the team when they began to slow as they climbed the rise. “It happens occasionally. A man just turns out, for whatever reason, to jinx the others in his party. Somethin’ about the sun and moon and the alignment of the stars. Shit, sometimes it all has to do with the tide, and some even say the wind.”

  “Old hide hunter’s superstition.”

  “Now, I know you’ve had plenty of good luck on your scouting parties. But it might just be that you and me or one of the passengers, say—our destinies are sorta mismatched, or matched in a way that ain’t right. That would throw things out of kilter, if you will.”

  “I might be throwin’ things out of kilter?” Fargo snorted. He plucked Grizzly’s flask from the man’s pocket and popped the cork. “It wasn’t I that attacked Mrs. Otis.”

  “No, but it might be your presence that’s callin’ bad luck down on us. I mean, so far since you’ve thrown in with the stage line—less than twenty-four hours ago—you done been shot at and shot two people, killin’ one of ‘em. Now, that ain’t bad luck for some good-weather lines, but shit, we’ve always had smooth sailin’ through these parts in December. On account o’ the cold or Christmas or just so few people hereabouts this time of the year, everybody’s always minded their p’s and q’s!”

  “What about Tweed gettin’ cored by his old lady?”

  “Shit, I never thought about that. Then you come along!”

  “Ah, hell.” Fargo took a long pull of the blackberry brandy. “You’re so full of shit, Griz, you’ll float when the river rises.”

  Grizzly glanced at him, arching one frosted brow. “What day were you born?”

  Fargo sighed. “Hell.”

  “Come on—what day were you born?”

  “The seventeenth, I think.”

  “Oh, no! The seventeenth? I was born on the seventh.”

  “So?”

  “That’s the unluckiest combination there is.” Grizzly shook his head broadly and grimaced as though someone had just told him his mother had been sold into sex slavery. “I just betcha one of the folks below had their breath spanked into them on the twenty-seventh—probably that pretty little Russian you diddled—and if that’s so, we’re all pure-dee cornholed, buggered, and screwed seven ways from sun-down!”

  Fargo stared at him skeptically. “Grizzly?”

  “What?”

  “Shut up and drive.”

  Around three in the afternoon, Mr. Tribble poked his head out the stage window to complain that Mrs. Tribble had caught a powerful chill, and couldn’t feel her hands or her feet. Grizzly cursed fatefully, as if Mrs. Tribble’s condition was just another aspect of Fargo’s jinx, and halted the stage in a wooded crease between two buttes.

  Fargo and Grizzly gathered dry branches, cleared snow with shovels from along the trail, and built a bonfire. The group gathered around the leaping, snapping flames, sighing luxuriously at the warmth.

  The two market hunters, Charley Mays and R. J. Boone, stood in a clump with the Dakota Kid, passing a bottle and laughing, while Mr. Tribble and Lieutenant Otis remained close to their wives, truckling in the husbandly fashion, the lieutenant no doubt trying to appease his wife’s resentment over her attack at Crow Station.

  Irina Roskov sat on a log, keeping her own dark council as she stared into the flames.

  Cradling his Henry in his arms, Fargo started off through the trees, stepping over snow-buried deadfall.

  “Where do you go?” Irina called behind him, above the whooping and laughing of the men and the fire’s breathy, popping roar.

  “Take a look around.”

  “May I come?”

  “Stay by the fire.”

  She chuffed haughtily behind him as he continued through the tangled trunks, which looked black as ink against the white snow and the gray sky. When a broad, frozen stream opened before him, its edges stippled with cattails poking their yellow tips above the snow, he stopped.

  He spied movement in the woods on the other side of the stream and heard the muffled crunch of feet and the crackle of brush. Three or four Indian women, bundled in deerskins and furs, moved slowly through the woods gathering firewood, bent forward with bundled branches strapped to their backs. They murmured to themselves softly, the sounds carrying clearly in the cold, dense air.

  There must be a Sioux camp nearby, probably nestled in the low ground sloping off behind the woods. Fargo was glad that, for the time being, the Sioux and the whites were on reasonably good terms.

  He turned and strode back to the stage and baked himself by the fire. Wheeling slowly to warm his backside, he spied Mrs. Otis half turned toward him, her blue eyes raking him appraisingly. When her eyes met his, she turned away quickly, flushing, to snap automatically at her husband, who’d sneezed into his handkerchief.

  Fargo remembered the large, pe
ar-shaped breasts he’d spied under the twisted camisole, and snorted deprecatingly at his own lust. The woman was married, for Chrissakes.

  When they’d all boarded the stage again, they hadn’t pushed more than a mile down the road, rising and falling through wooded hills, when Grizzly Olaffson cursed again in that nettling, fatalistic tone he’d adopted to let Fargo know that every setback, no matter how minor, was caused by him.

  “What?” Fargo growled.

  He’d been watching the bur oak–covered hills on the right side of the trail. Now, as he turned forward, his heart quickened.

  Seven horseback riders pulled out of the woods and onto the trail, turning their horses toward the stage. They all wielded rifles, stocks snugged against thighs. They were a hard-eyed, unshaven lot—owlhoots, if ever there were any—Fargo saw as the stage team drew near. Several of the horses nickered nervously, tossing their manes.

  “Ah, shit,” Grizzly said. “What now?”

  “If you hadn’t told me what a boring run this was gonna be,” Fargo said, running a gloved hand across his jaw, “I’d say it was a holdup.”

  6

  “Halooo the stage and Merry Christmas!” a man in the middle of the seven hardcases whooped, stretching an icy smile. The red muffler framing his jaws, tying his hat to his head, gave his narrow-eyed, beardstubbled face a bizarrely infantile look.

  “Hello, yourself!” Fargo shouted, rising up in the box as he levered a fresh shell in the Henry’s breech and snapped the rifle’s butt to his shoulder. “Whip ‘em up, Griz!”

  As Grizzly rose up in the driver’s box and roared like the bear he was named for, viciously whipping the ribbons across the backs of the six-horse hitch, the faces of the seven riders blanched with jaw-dropping incredulity. Instantly deciding not to give the seven gun-toters the benefit of the doubt that they were merely stopping the stage to ask directions, Fargo laid a bead on the leader’s shoulder and fired.

  The man yelped and gritted his teeth as the bullet hit its target, the man’s horse rising off its front hooves as it saw the stage bearing down on it. The other horses reacted similarly as the seven men—one yelling, “Jesus Christ, clear the trail!”—reined and booted their mounts in a panicked frenzy to get out of the way. Only one took the time to drop his Spencer’s barrel and send a bullet whistling through the air between Fargo and Grizzly.

  He paid for it with a slug from the Trailsman’s repeater drilled through his upper thigh. Cursing, the shooter reined his claybank off the trail but not before the right front stage-puller clipped the clay’s forequarter, sending horse and rider both screaming and tumbling into the snow.

  “Crazy son of a bitch!” shouted a man to the left as the stage blasted up the trail, leaving the riders shouting and yelling and complaining behind them, trying to get their frightened mounts under control.

  Fargo swung around, raking his gaze across the disheveled group. In the carriage below, a couple of the men were whooping and hollering while Mrs. Tribble was screaming, “Highwaymen!”

  One of the would-be robbers leaped out of his saddle and, holding the reins of his crow-hopping paint in one hand, dropped to a knee and rested his rifle barrel atop his forearm, aiming at the stage. Fargo fired but the lurching stage threw his shot low, blowing up snow in front of the man, whose own rifle puffed and barked.

  The bullet smacked into Irina’s bulky steamer trunk a few feet in front of Fargo.

  Fargo cocked and fired once more, his slug drilling the shooter’s upraised knee cap, sending the man pitching and flopping wildly back in the snow. The highwayman tossed his rifle aside to hug the ruined knee with both arms, screaming.

  As the stage team opened a wide gap between the stage and the riders, Fargo fired a couple more rounds to discourage pursuit. It didn’t do much good. When the five healthy riders got their mounts under control, they booted them up the trail, firing their rifles over their horses’ lunging heads.

  “Haul ass, you mangy sonsabitches!” Grizzly bellowed as he cracked his blacksnake over the team.

  Fargo held fire as the stage dipped into a hollow. When it had leveled out again, crossing a vast, flat plain unblemished by a single cottonwood for as far as the eye could see, a galloping rider rose out of the hollow behind, then another, followed by two galloping abreast, then the last.

  As the riders triggered lead toward the stage, a couple of slugs grinding into the wooden carriage housing, Fargo returned several shots, levering and firing quickly, the empty brass casings clattering onto the dashboard behind him. The lead rider drew within thirty yards, hunched low over his horse’s head and firing one-handed. Fargo racked a fresh shell and drilled a round just left of the lead mount’s scissoring hooves.

  The horse shied, wide-eyed, at the shot. It drifted into the deep snow right of the trail and plunged head first into the ground, its hindquarters careening skyward, sending its rider in a matching tumble high over its head—hooves, man, hat, and snow flying as though blown up by a cannon ball.

  “Ha-ha!” Grizzly roared again, peering over his shoulder. “Serves him right, the sonofabitch!”

  The other riders slowed to help the man who’d gone down, except one who continued at full gallop toward the stage, triggering pistols in both hands as his horse’s hooves ripped large gouts of snow from the plowed trail. A couple of the pistol rounds tore into the stage roof and luggage, one sparking off the brass rail a foot away from Fargo. The Trailsman squeezed off several more rounds, until the sixteen-shot Henry clicked empty, and the rider suddenly sawed back on his own reins, glancing behind to see that the rest of his gang—those still standing—were clotted a good hundred yards back along the trail.

  “Ha-ha!” Grizzly bellowed again, still standing and snapping the blacksnake over the lunging team’s smoking backs. “Now that’s the way to handle road agents.”

  The Trailsman sat down, rested the Henry across his thighs, and immediately went to work reloading. “I thought you said you never had any trouble with road agents out here.”

  “Never have. Leastways, not as long as I been workin’ the line. Not this time of the year.” The big man shook his grizzled head and roared once more. “Not till…”

  “Yeah, I know,” Fargo growled, thumbing forty-four shells into the Henry’s distended loading tube. “Not till I came along and jinxed the line.”

  “It ain’t all bad,” Grizzly said, casting another cautious glance over his shoulder. Then, satisfied the gang had been properly discouraged, he sat down in the seat beside Fargo. “Somethin’ like that does get the blood movin’!”

  When Fargo had reloaded the Henry, one round sitting in the chamber, the hammer at half-cock, he leaned down to yell into the carriage, asking if everyone was all right. The Dakota Kid yelled up that all was fine though he himself had caught a bullet burn across his cheek but assured the Trailsman that if they were attacked again he’d have his pistols ready. He’d squeezed off a couple of shots, he said, but the stage was bouncing too much for him to hit anything.

  “Thanks for the help,” Fargo muttered. As much as the Dakota Kid and the market hunters were imbibing, he’d just as soon they kept their weapons sheathed.

  Nearly an hour later, as the sun fell in the west, throwing a painter’s palette of vivid colors into the mind-numbingly empty sky, they pulled into the next relay station—some unknown place with a large sod shanty in the notch between two buttes to the left of the trail, and a log, sod-roofed barn and corrals to the right. A vast white saucer flanked the barn—probably a frozen slough buried under about two feet of hard-packed snow.

  Low buttes rose around the slough, with one low tree standing black and solemn on a little knoll above the slough’s far northeast corner. Drawn by an artist, it would have consisted of about three light pencil strokes.

  Fargo shivered inside his coat.

  The station was a lonely place, with the sky darkening, the first stars kindling in the east, and the cold falling unimpeded from outer space—chill as the
farthest planet from the sun.

  As Grizzly brought the team to a halt in front of the barn, the shanty door opened and a lantern appeared in an outstretched hand.

  “Ah, this is my favorite stop on the trail,” Grizzly said through a long, relieved sigh, glancing toward the shanty. “Yessir, it don’t get any better than this.”

  Fargo couldn’t imagine what the grizzled jahoo was talking about. The cold and loneliness of the place made his scrotum shrivel and draw up taut between his legs. Grizzly had obviously been fogging the north trails too long and needed to spend a winter in Santa Cruz.

  He told him as much. Grizzly only chuckled as he set the brake and wrapped the ribbons around the handle. “Why don’t you unthaw our customers while I help these three lovelies with the horses?”

  Fargo started crawling stiffly down from the driver’s box, amazed his limbs still moved without splintering. Lovelies? He glanced behind. The three bundled, scarved, and booted figures crunching toward the team, their movements impeded by the bulky clothes, didn’t seem of the female persuasion until, scrutinizing them, he saw the distinctly female faces peering out from under the wool hats and scarves, and the formless lumps pushing out from their chests.

  He couldn’t tell whether they were lovely or not—they seemed a little too large and fleshy for the Trailsman’s taste—but then, his and Grizzly’s ideas of “lovely” had not always matched.

  “My pleasure,” Fargo said, leaping down and opening the coach’s door, hearing Mrs. Tribble sniffling and sobbing.

  “I’ve never been so terrified in my entire life! Stage robbers! I’ve heard what those ghastly, depraved men do to women!”

  “I don’t think you have anything to worry about, ma’am,” Fargo grumbled before he could catch himself.

  He’d just helped the bulky woman down when she jerked her rosy-cheeked face toward him, eyes slitted. “And just what do you mean by that, Mr. Fargo?”