North Country Cutthroats

by Jon Sharpe

  But, no matter where he was or what he was doing, he’d always been a sucker for Christmas. And Homer Rinski’s melodious, albeit slightly slurred, recitation of the ancient yarn lifted him up and carried him off to the faraway manger in a land as stark as the one in which he found himself now, if not nearly as cold. Listening to the German’s accented words while watching the stars twinkling out the frosty roadhouse windows, he felt his belly tingling contentedly, his heart lightening, and his throat swelling ever so slightly.

  When the burly German closed the book and removed his reading glasses, the awesome hush hung over the room as though the babe in swaddling clothes lay cradled in a corner with his parents. The Dakota Kid and the pie-eyed market hunters remained as silent as the others—trancelike, in fact—staring pensively into space, listening to the cold wind moan under the eaves and the fire tick and pop in the glowing potbelly stove.

  The lieutenant broke the ethereal silence with a bellowing, liquid sneeze into his handkerchief.

  “Bless you, Lieutenant,” said Mrs. Rinski, but with an admonishing air. Rising from her rocking chair, she glanced at the clock above the sofa on which Mrs. Tribble and Mrs. Otis sat. “Oh gosh—look, ladies,” she said in an accent even heavier than her husband’s. “It’s ten o’clock—time for bed!”

  Apparently, in the Rinski house, the men could retire whenever they wanted, but the women were under the authority of the matriarch. Fargo decided he, too, had had enough of one day. While the women were hazed through a flour-sack curtain into the dark sleeping area at the back of the house, the Trailsman finished his tea, rose uncertainly on wobbly feet—he didn’t know when he’d last felt this exhausted—and tapped Homer Rinski on the shoulder.

  “I’d like the key to the tack room, Rinski,” he said. He’d spied a potbelly stove and big bed out there, most likely for a hired hand, possibly for Rinski himself, when Hildegarde barred him from the cabin. “Think I’ll sleep in the manger with the strongbox.”

  “Ach! It’s cold out there! That group that tried to stop you on the trail—they’re holed up in a warm cabin in a coulee somewheres—long way from here!”

  “I’m the shotgun rider,” Fargo said. “That means the strongbox is my responsibility.” In truth, he was more concerned about getting a good night’s sleep, unharassed by females, than about the safety of the strongbox, but Rinski didn’t need to know that.

  The old man reluctantly produced the key from a cookie jar and slipped it into the Trailsman’s hand. Fargo dropped the key in his pocket, shrugged into his coat, picked up his gear, and headed outside, pausing on the snow-packed ground before the door to look around.

  The sky was clear and lit up like a Christmas tree with a billion stars, but the wind had picked up and grown some real teeth that bit through Fargo’s coat as though it were made of wax paper. The air had a coppery tang. If a storm were still blowing in, it would be a doozy.

  Spying no shadows flicking about the dark, snowswept yard, Fargo shouldered his saddlebags and made for the barn. Fifteen minutes later, he had a fire snapping in the tack room’s stove and, peeling down to his longhandles and socks, crawled into the bed still rumpled from Grizzly and Astrid’s tryst. It was a broad, comfortable bed, built for a couple and piled high with blankets and a buffalo hide. The corn shucks rustled reassuringly. He punched the pillow, dropped his head into it, and closed his eyes.

  For a minute, he listened to the silence, only the wind creaking the timbers and an occasional horse’s snort sounding from the main part of the barn. Stars glistened like huge diamonds behind the room’s single, frosted window.

  Except for the stage teams—whose company he found much more harmonious than the company of men or, when he was this tired, even women—he was alone.

  “Ahhh…” he heard himself moan before the world went dead.

  He didn’t know how long he’d slept before his head jerked up from the pillow as if drawn by a rope. He’d heard something.

  There was the soft squeak of a rusty hinge. He peered toward the door at the foot of the bed. A shadow moved. He normally slept so light that he hadn’t bothered to lock the door.

  “Irina?”

  “Not this time,” Leslie Otis whispered. “You were very naughty to run from me like that.”

  The door clicked shut and the shadow glided to the bed—bulky in a long fur coat and fur hat. As the woman stopped beside the bed, she kicked out of her slippers, removed the hat, and shook out her hair.

  “Ah, Christ,” Fargo groaned. “Lady, you’re hitched and I feel like I’ve been trampled by a herd of bull buffalo running from a prairie wildfire.”

  She chuckled and slipped the coat off her shoulders. The fire glowed around the edges of the stove door behind her, revealing the fact that she hadn’t been wearing a stitch beneath the coat.

  “I know I’m wretched,” she said, staring down at him, blond hair glowing umber in the firelight behind her. Whether from the chill or desire, the nipples of her heavy breasts were distended. “But my husband’s been only half a man since a fencing accident at West Point, and when I took one look at you, I knew you were the one who could fulfill a womanly need that’s been burning inside me for a long, long time!”

  Fargo grunted. “Well, throw another log in the stove and climb in.”

  Without hesitation, she turned, stooped over the wood box, grabbed a log, opened the stove door, and added the wood to the dancing flames within. Fargo drew the thick layer of blankets back. She crawled in beside him. As she wrapped her arms around his neck and immediately began pressing her mouth to his and kissing him with such passion he thought she was going to suck out his tonsils, he pulled the blankets back over them both and ran his hands down her slender, curving back, caressing the bulging sides of her breasts with his thumbs.

  She groaned and squirmed against him. “Your hands are warm…and large…” She reached down with both hands and grabbed his rod, which had worked its way out of the longhandles. She tugged gently, slowly pumping. “Oh, Jesus,” she exclaimed under her breath. “Your hands aren’t all. Christ!”

  She kissed him hungrily while massaging his throbbing shaft, then pulled her head down beneath the covers and, grunting like a little girl eager to open her Christmas presents, scrambled down his body and began licking and nuzzling him.

  Fargo was tired but not too tired to feel the bliss in the woman’s touch. When she wrapped her lips taut around the head of his cock, sucking gently, then slid them slowly down to the base, swallowing him with surprisingly little effort and not so much as a single gag, his heart leaped and his blood raced with excitement.

  She lifted her head, lips withdrawing from his shaft with a faint smacking sound. “That’s one beautiful instrument, Skye.” Holding his cock in front of her wet lips, she glanced up at him, eyes glinting playfully. “I can call you Skye, can’t I?”

  “Lady, you can call me anything you want.”

  She giggled, then lowered her mouth over the bulging head of his member once more, working her sweet torture until he was grabbing the mattress with his fists, grinding his heels into the corn shucks, and arching his back. He grunted and groaned against the sheer sweet torture of her hot lips and stroking tongue driving up and down, up and down, varying her speed and proving herself a true expert at the art of fellatio.

  She seemed to know instinctively when he was about to explode; chuckling, teasing, she lifted her head, scuttled out from beneath the blankets, and took her sweet time tossing another log into the stove.

  “The poor lieutenant don’t know what he’s missing,” Fargo chuffed, rolling onto his side and admiring the view of her round, firm ass as she crouched to shift the burning logs around with an iron poker.

  “Oh, yes, he does.” She laughed with evil delight.

  When she returned to the bed, his blood had cooled a few degrees, though his shaft was still as hard as the push rod on a ten-ton locomotive. He pushed her onto her back and drew the blankets up over them once again,
though with the fire and their own inner conflagrations they hardly needed them. As she spread her legs and drew her knees nearly as far back as her ears, Fargo positioned his hips between her thighs and lowered his hungry rod into her steaming depths with an unfettered groan of ecstasy.

  They were on the verge of turning Homer Rinski’s bed into a pile of sticks and splinters before they both came together, howling at the rafters and evoking frightening whinnies from the horses in the other part of the barn.

  Propped on his outstretched arms and shuddering with a few last mini-detonations between Leslie’s yawning legs, he lifted his head and opened his eyes, frowning at the wall before him. Outside rose the muffled tramp of several horses on hard-packed snow.

  A man shouted, and a gun popped three times in quick succession.

  “What the hell?”

  Fargo was about to pull back from Leslie Otis’s hot, wet core when something cold and round pressed against the underside of his chin.

  He looked down. It was his own .44. Both of Mrs. Otis’s slender hands were wrapped around the walnut grips.

  “Actually, there was no fencing accident.” White teeth and brown eyes flashed beneath Fargo as she laughed and thumbed his revolver’s hammer back, pressing the barrel harder against his chin. “I just wanted to fuck you before I killed you and took the strongbox.”

  8

  “Damn,” Fargo said, looking down at the woman holding his own revolver taut against his chin. “Something told me you were a little coarse for a lieutenant’s wife. But then, I don’t reckon he’s a lieutenant.”

  Mrs. Otis—or whoever the hell she was—laughed again, both hands wrapped tightly around the revolver’s grips, her right index finger curved against the trigger. “While I’d just love to have you impale me again with that magnificent organ of yours, I’m going to have to ask you to get up. Slow. Any sudden movements, I won’t hesitate to squeeze the trigger.”

  “Don’t go getting sentimental on me.”

  “I’ve fucked and killed before.”

  “Braggart.”

  He rose up onto his knees and dropped a leg to the floor. When he got both feet beneath him, he backed slowly toward the stove. The sounds of milling horses rose, while men shouted orders. Someone triggered another pistol shot.

  Keeping the Colt aimed at Fargo, the woman slid one long, bare leg over the side of the bed, rising gracefully. The pale, pear-shaped breasts jostled. She sucked her lower lip, smiling cunningly.

  Fargo winced at the chill pushing into the room from the cracks in the chinking between the logs. The fire in the stove had burned low. “You’re in with the gang that tried to stop the stage earlier.”

  “You’re right smart for a man who’s hung like a lamppost.”

  “Why didn’t you make your move when your gang did?”

  “Because the idiots not only struck in the wrong coulee, taking me and Scruggs by surprise—they didn’t get the stage stopped. We were supposed to subdue the passengers after the stage was stopped.” She stood naked before him, her hair piled atop her head. “Where’s the strongbox?”

  Fargo just stared back at her, wanting to lunge at her and wrap his hands around her neck. But the sudden, wily hardness he now saw in her eyes told him, like she herself had, that she’d dropped the hammer on a man before, no doubt without hesitating, and hadn’t lived to regret it.

  He sighed. “Under the bed.”

  She stepped out away from him, shivering slightly as she moved from the stove. “Get down there and pull it out.”

  Fargo stepped back over to the bed, dropped to a knee, reached under the bed, wrapped his hand through a thick leather handle, and pulled out the box. The heavy chain and padlock rattled against the stout, iron-strapped oak.

  He looked up. The woman stared down at him, slid her eyes to the box, and the corners of her mouth rose with satisfaction. Taking advantage of her distraction, Fargo bolted off his haunches and swiped his right hand at the gun.

  She bounded back, catlike. Fargo fell forward over the box, dropping to the floor on his hands and knees. He whipped his head up.

  Gritting her teeth and cursing, she swung the revolver toward him. He had no time to dodge the blow before the Colt’s butt slammed into his right temple.

  His ears rang and his vision blurred before the lights went out completely.

  Hunkered deep in her fur coat, Carrie Jocelyn “C. J.” Otis galloped to the crest of a snowy hill, then checked her line-back dun down to a halt, looking around at the wooded, rolling terrain surrounding her, lit by starlight and snow. The men rode up behind her, then spread out to each side as she jerked her head this way and that, her long frost-rimed hair jostling about her shoulders.

  “Well, Bob, where the hell is this line shack of yours? I don’t see anything out here but snow and trees and my own damn breath freezing in the air in front of my face!”

  Bob Newton, sitting his paint to her left, looked around, raking a mittened thumb across his stubbled jaw. “Let me see, now.…”

  “Well?” C.J.’s voice was taut with barely restrained fury.

  Bob turned to the girl. He was her cousin, as were the five other men around her, including Scruggs Otis, who’d been playing her army husband lieutenent aboard the stage. Tennessee-born, they’d fled poverty-stricken Appalachian farms together to rob stage lines and generally seek unfettered adventure out west, where lawmen were few and far between. Somehow—none could say exactly how—they got caught up north after winter struck, without enough money to get south.

  “Listen, C.J.” Bob’s voice was pinched with caution. “It was Lon and Dingus that told about the line shack and, well, you know that damn shotgun rider sent them both to the angels. Now, I myself never did see the place. They said it was at the base of some butte that looked like an opry hat.”

  “An opry hat,” C.J. growled. “How, for the love o’ Jehovah, are we supposed to find an opry hat out here in the damn dark?”

  A bellowing sneeze rose from her right flank. She jerked with a start, then turned to glare at her cousin Scruggs, who dabbed at his nose with his handkerchief. “Scruggs,” she said, “do you have any idea how fucking tired I am of hearing you sneeze?”

  He lifted his rheumy eyes to her, his round-rimmed spectacles glinting in the starlight. “I doubt, my dear sweet little cuz, that you’re half as tired as I am of doin’ the sneezin’!”

  “All right—that’s enough o’ this damn caterwaulin’,” Dean Otis admonished, riding up between Bob and C.J., leading the horse to which the gang had lashed the stage’s strongbox.

  He was a little gent with a babylike round face despite a thick, bushy beard. He wore a deerskin flap tied snug beneath his chin, the tip of which had been blown off two years ago by a bank teller’s hideout pistol in Council Bluffs, Iowa. “Cousin Dingus said the shack lay along a creek between the Crow Hills and the Sandy Bluffs.”

  He lifted a stubby, mittened hand, pointing. “Now, if them’re the Crow Hills in the east, and them’re the Sandy Bluffs to the west, which, having studied Dingus’s map right thorough, I believe they are, then we just need to keep heading south till we find a creek.”

  “If we don’t freeze to death first,” C.J. raked out.

  She sighed, shivered, hunched deep in her coat, and booted her horse down the hill and into a crease between wooded butte shoulders. To her amazement, a half hour later, she sat her saddle looking down into a hollow in which a crude log cabin nestled with a privy, a lean-to stable, and a small corral. A couple of horses stood in the lean-to, facing the cabin, tails hanging straight down between their legs. A large, naked cottonwood stood off the cabin’s left wall, standing stark and black against the stars.

  “You were right, Dean!” C.J. turned a flirtatious gaze on the little, bearded creature sitting on his claybank beside her. “If you weren’t my cousin, I think I’d give you a mattress dance.”

  Dean frowned, hurt. “That never stopped you from playin’ the old slap ‘n’ tickle wit
h Cousin Dingus.”

  C.J.’s eyes flashed exasperation, but before she could open her mouth to respond, Bob said, “Hold on. There’s a light in the window, and I do believe I see smoke curlin’ up from the chimney pipe.”

  “Shit,” C.J. said. “The place is occupied.”

  “What now?” Scruggs said through his stuffy nose, looking half-dead in the saddle.

  C.J. cursed and reined her horse back away from the ridge. “What the hell do you mean, what now?” She booted the dun back the way she’d come. “We circle around and unoccupy it.”

  They retraced their tracks in the snow to the bottom of the hill, then rode a long circle around the line shack, coming up behind it and tying their horses in a crease between bluffs, downwind of the stable.

  “Everybody be quiet now,” C.J. admonished, shucking a Colt Navy from under her long fur coat as the others moved up around her. “Follow me nice and slow so the snow don’t squawk under your boots. And Scruggs, if you sneeze, so help me I’m gonna blow your damn head off!”

  Scruggs jaw dropped with exasperation. “It’s a cold, C.J. I can’t help but sneeze!”

  “Cover your mouth!”

  “I always do.”

  “Shut up and come on!”

  She turned and, giving the rear of the cabin and the corral a quick scrutiny, and seeing nothing moving around outside, began slogging forward through the shin-deep drifts. Through a frosty window, she could see a shadow moving around inside, but no one appeared to look out.

  As she approached the cabin’s rear west corner, she slowed, turned to hold a finger to her lips, again admonishing the others to move quietly, then continued along the cabin’s west wall, picking up one foot at a time and setting each down carefully. She passed under the cottonwood and ducked under the window on that side of the cabin, then continued around to the front door.

  Moving to the opposite side of the door, she stopped, pressed her back to the cabin wall, and waited for her six cousins to turn the cabin’s northwest corner. When the six were lined out along the wall, beyond the front window, she motioned for Bob to move ahead to the door.