North Country Cutthroats

by Jon Sharpe

  Bob glanced back at the others and, holding his revolver in his bare right hand, ducked under the window and stole up to the door opposite C.J. The girl took her revolver in her left hand and removed her right-hand mitten, then shoved it into a pocket of her coat. Now taking the revolver in her right hand and wincing slightly against the cold nibbling at her tender, Southern skin, she moved her left hand forward, tripped the lever latch, and kicked the door wide.

  She stepped inside quickly, shoving a boot forward to stop the door as it bounced back from the wall, and extended the cocked revolver straight out from her shoulder. The two men sitting at a table at the far end of the cabin, before the rear window, turned to her quickly, one reaching for a pistol on the table near a pile of playing cards and an ashtray in which two quirleys smoldered.

  The man’s eyes locked on C.J.’s revolver aimed at his chest, and his hand froze atop his revolver. The other man froze, as well, mustached mouth agape, playing cards fanned out in his hands.

  C.J. laughed. “Well, lookee what we have here!”

  Her six cousins had stormed in behind her and stood to both sides, aiming their revolvers at the pair at the table, both of whom stared back at C.J. as though she were a demon loosed from the fiery bowels of hell.

  Scruggs sneezed into his arm and glanced at his female cousin. “Who do we have here, C.J.?”

  “Why,” C.J. said, grinning broadly, “it’s a couple of the gents who tried to diddle me in the woodshed back in Brule City!” She threw her head back, laughing wickedly. “Boy, am I about to have some fun!”

  9

  Fargo opened his eyes and was met with instant anguish as invisible javelins slammed through his right temple and set up a loud clanging in his ears. Someone was calling his name from far away. When his eyes focused and his senses began falling back into place, he realized he was on the tack room floor, staring up at the low, timbered ceiling.

  “Skye, you in here?” The voice belonged to Grizzly Olaffson.

  Fargo lifted his head, shivering against the room’s chill. But the chill would have been a whole lot worse had the buffalo blanket from the bed not been spread across his naked body. Compliments of Mrs. Otis, apparently—or whoever the hell she was. Instinctively, he looked around for the strongbox and, while not surprised he didn’t see it, was assaulted by a few more dull javelins of tooth-gnashing pain.

  In the barn’s main alley, boots thumped and straw crunched softly.

  “Skye, you in here?” Grizzly bellowed as he shouldered through the door. The bear-coated giant peered down at Fargo, who rose up onto his elbows, blinking against the searing pain. “You all right, old son? Appears those sonsabitches caught us all flat-footed!”

  He dropped to a knee and lifted a corner of the buffalo blanket, then snapped it back down. “Jumpin’ Jehovah, you’re as nekkid as a jaybird!”

  Wincing, Fargo rose to a sitting position, letting the robe fall to his waist, and took his head in his hands. “How long they been gone?”

  “Only about an hour or so. They had us all tied up in the cabin, but the Dakota Kid had a little shaver up his sleeve and managed to slice through the ropes.” Grizzly winced as he looked at the goose-head on Fargo’s right temple. “That’s gotta smart. I sure hope she was worth it.”

  “Shut up and give me a hand.” Fargo grabbed the big man’s arm and began hauling himself to his feet, ignoring his nakedness. “We best get after ‘em before the wind covers the tracks.”

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  When he had the floor beneath him—pitching and swaying as it may—he stumbled around, then groaned as he reached down for his longhandles. “While you’re makin’ yourself presentable,” Grizzly said, “I’ll go saddle us a couple hosses.”

  Grizzly went out and began stomping around in the barn while Fargo finished dressing, stepping gently into his boots to reduce the misery in his bruised head, and wrapping his cartridge belt around his waist. He found his revolver on the bed, still fully loaded, and dropped it into its holster. When he’d grabbed his rifle and saddlebags, he went out into the barn’s main hall where Grizzly had one horse—a big, iron gray gelding—saddled, and was slipping a bridle bit through a bay’s teeth.

  Fargo slid the Henry rifle in the iron-gray’s saddle boot and led the horse to the front of the barn. “I’ll try to cut their sign.”

  “Be out in a minute,” Grizzly said, reaching under the bay to fasten the latigo.

  Fargo opened the barn’s doors, bracing himself as the cold breeze slammed against him and sucked the air from his lungs. His cheeks instantly felt as though they were raked with sandpaper. He toed a stirrup and, his head throbbing as his heart quickened, swung into the leather. Leaning out from the saddle and turning his head this way and that, he scrutinized the fresh tracks in the snow between the barn and the cabin.

  Grizzly found him at the west end of the yard, staring off at the tracks forking from the main trail.

  “Heading south?” Grizzly said, incredulous. “Hell, there’s nothin’ out that way for miles and miles, and even then I don’t know what they’d find!”

  “No use palaverin’ about it.” Fargo booted the iron-gray off the trail and up a gently sloping hill shoulder pocked with the fresh tracks. “Let’s find out.”

  The tracks weren’t hard to follow, though the breeze on hilltops had nearly filled them in. The Trailsman and Grizzly Olaffson picked them up again in creases between buttes, where the breeze wasn’t as strong.

  Both men rode hunkered deep in their coats, frost quickly riming Grizzly’s beard and Fargo’s stubble. Fargo’s head began to ache more than pound, the cold having numbed him, but the bone-splintering chill did nothing to alleviate his chagrin for having been tricked.

  He never would have suspected that the “Lieutenant” and “Mrs. Otis” were part of the stage-robbing group, and getting caught with his pants not only down but off, was a tale he hoped he could persuade Grizzly never to tell.

  They were on the trail for over an hour, and Fargo was beginning to wonder if he’d ever feel his toes again, when they came upon the robbers’ trail backtracking itself from atop a dome-crested hill rising in front of them.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Grizzly muttered, scanning the mess of overlaid tracks with his eyes. “What the hell they doin’?”

  “Stay here.” Fargo tossed the big man his horse’s reins. “I’ll check it out.”

  Fargo slogged up the hill shoulder and returned a minute later, slipping and sliding and trying to break his momentum by grabbing naked shrubs poking above the drifts. “They found a shack.”

  Grizzly tossed his reins, and Fargo grabbed them, crawled into the saddle, and followed the robbers’ tracks around the base of the snowy hill. They traced a fold in the hills, swerved around a knoll west of the shack and, smelling the aroma of burning wood and boiling coffee, continued across the rolling terrain until they stood in the boot tracks the robbers had made when they’d pulled up behind the crude wooden cabin.

  Their horses tied in the same brush patch in which the robbers had tied theirs, Grizzly squatted in the snow beside Fargo and scratched at the frost on his bearded cheek. “How you wanna play it, Skye?”

  The Trailsman studied the brush-roofed cabin, the lean-to stable and corral to the left where several horses milled, and the big cottonwood to the right. Something long hung from a branch of the cottonwood—probably a food cache of some sort.

  Smoke billowed from the tin chimney pipe angling out of the snow-covered brush roof, skeining nearly straight up in the frosty air.

  Fargo glanced at Grizzly, a cunning grin lifting his mouth corners. “I’ll climb the roof and plug up that chimney pipe. You position yourself just outside the front door. When the cabin starts to fill with smoke, I’ll order ‘em out with their hands in the air.”

  Grizzly fumbled his coat open and pulled out his sawed-off barn-blaster. “Let’s do it before we freeze in our boots.”

  Gripping his Henry in
both hands, Fargo ran crouching through the snow, keeping an eye on the cabin’s back window where occasional shadows jostled. He continued past the cabin’s northwest corner and moved along the west wall, under the cottonwood’s naked boughs. He was staring up at the cabin roof when something brushed his shoulder, and he turned sharply.

  A pair of man’s worn boots hung in the air beside him.

  He lifted his eyes up past the boots and denim-clad legs to the blue plaid shirt and the unshaven face of the man called Casey, who’d attacked “Mrs. Otis” in the woodshed back in Brule City. A rope was knotted around Casey’s neck, drawing the man’s chin down against his chest. Casey’s swollen blue tongue protruded a good six inches from his mouth. The blue eyes stared down at Fargo, glistening faintly in the light from the window on this side of the cabin.

  Another man hung to Casey’s right, the other man Fargo had ordered to hightail it from the woodshed. He twisted slowly back and forth in the breeze, his mouth drawn wide in a long, silent scream.

  Fargo turned to Grizzly, who was scowling up at the dead men. “Help me onto the roof.”

  His eyes glued on the dead men, Grizzly shook his head, then sighed and stooped low, grabbing his wrists to form a step. Fargo placed his left boot into the makeshift step and reached for the low roof. Grizzly boosted him up until he got a knee on the roof edge.

  Moving as slowly and quietly as possible, he hooked his other knee on the roof edge and began crawling ever so gently toward the tin chimney pipe, plowing snow with his forearms and thighs.

  He stopped before the pipe and turned toward the front of the cabin. Grizzly was hunkered down before a wheelless buckboard wagon half-buried in the snow, about thirty yards from the cabin’s front door. Grizzly waved his sawed-off shotgun high in the air above his head, giving the all-ready signal.

  The Trailsman shucked his gloves and grabbed up two handfuls of snow, holding the snow over the smoking chimney pipe to harden it as he shaped a ball. When the ball had the size and consistency he desired—just large enough to fit over the top of the pipe, and hard enough to stay there—he set it over the pipe.

  It stayed there, immediately stopping the smoke flow.

  Fargo waited, listening.

  Silence.

  The roof was so thick with sod and snow that he couldn’t hear much, but then a voice rose sharply, and then another. Someone coughed. In spite of his battered head and near-frozen limbs, the Trailsman grinned. He grabbed his rifle and had turned to begin crawling back the way he’d come when the snow dropped a few inches beneath him.

  He stopped, heart thudding.

  He couldn’t tell if it was the upper, crusted layer of snow suddenly giving way—or the roof itself. He leaned forward but hadn’t taken one more crawling step before the roof sagged sharply beneath him again—so sharply this time that he found himself throwing his arms out to grab something but finding only snow and frozen weeds.

  Shouts and choking sounds rose beneath him.

  The roof sagged a good foot, and he clawed once more for a purchase, grabbing only snow before the roof and sod and timbers opened like a mine mouth. It sucked him straight down into the cabin, and he felt a rush of warm air and smoke stinging his eyes, before his boots crashed through a table, snow and sod and timbers raining down around him as he hit the floor on his right shoulder.

  His aching head ached again in earnest. Frigid snow slithered under his coat collar as sod, dirt, and timbers pelted him from above. In the periphery of his vision he saw man-shaped shadows springing back away from the table he’d smashed as a cacophony of coughs, shouts, and epithets assaulted his ringing ears.

  Amid the din a female voice rose, shrill with indignation. “Shoot him!”

  A gun popped and flashed amid the smoke cloud filling the room. The bullet barked into the floor beside Fargo’s head.

  As men yelled, boots thumped, and spurs chinged on the rough board floor, most of the shadows moving toward the open door, Fargo found that he was still holding onto his rifle. As another gun popped and thumped a slug into the wall behind him, he thumbed back the Henry’s hammer and fired at the spot in the smoke from which the pistol had flashed, then fired several more at darting shadows and angry voices.

  A girl screamed. Men groaned.

  Fargo racked another shell and, as Grizzly Olaffson’s voice boomed outside the cabin’s open door, he spied another revolver aimed in his direction through the wisping smoke.

  Fargo whipped the Henry toward the revolver, and fired two quick rounds, triggering and levering, wincing as the revolver barked and smacked into the snow and sod debris to his left.

  As Fargo ejected a shell from the Henry’s breech, a shotgun thundered outside, sounding like a cannon and followed by a shrill shout from one man and a clipped curse from another. Before the first report had ceased echoing around the dense, winter night and smoky cabin, Grizzly triggered the second barrel, evoking another grunt and the thud of a body hitting the snow.

  Seating a fresh shell in his rifle’s breech, Fargo jerked his head this way and that, tracking with the Henry’s barrel, looking for any more guns angled toward him or robbers bearing down on him. All he saw, however, was the brown blur of the walls behind the thick white smoke pouring from around the doors of the woodstove behind him, and the tears streaming from his stinging eyes.

  Grizzly Olaffson’s voice bellowed through the black rectangle of doorway, “Skye, you still kickin’, old son? It’s all clear out here!”

  Coughing into his gloved hand, Fargo rose from his heels and, stumbling over the debris mounded in the cabin’s center, heeled it toward the door. He dove outside and into the snow beyond the hitchrack, well clear of the smoke, and dropped to his knees, coughing as though he were about to hack his very lungs up out of his burning chest.

  Crunching footsteps rose off his right flank. Sitting back on his heels, he turned to see the big, bearlike figure of Grizzly Olaffson staring down at him, thumbing fresh wads into the barrels of his broken-open gut-shredder.

  “Shit,” the big driver intoned. “That ain’t how I woulda done it, but I reckon it’s one way to skin a cat!”

  10

  When Fargo got the smoke cleared out of his lungs, Grizzly Olaffson shot the snowball off the chimney pipe, beginning the slow process of clearing the smoke from the cabin as well. The two men hauled the bodies of the dead robbers, including the girl, whom Fargo had drilled through the center of her evil heart, into the snowy brush behind the cabin.

  They had no way of disposing of the bodies in this frigid weather, and since loading them onto their horses and leading them back to Homer Rinski’s relay station would take too much time, not to mention strain, they left the robbers to God and, no doubt, winter-hungry coyotes and wolves.

  Which was no less than they deserved.

  Fargo found the strongbox in prime condition under a cabin cot. When he opened the lid, it didn’t appear that so much as a single gold coin had been removed from any of the six fat burlap pouches marked U.S. ARMY in large black letters.

  The two men stoked the cabin’s stove until it was roaring, and brewed a pot of coffee, then sat huddled beside the fire-breathing dragon, with the debris from the cabin roof piled about their feet. They sipped the coffee, which Grizzly had made strong enough to grow hair on a rifle breech, and continued to add wood to the stove until the blood had not only returned to their fingers, toes, and cheek nubs, but they were sweating inside their heavy coats—in spite of their breath puffs being visible in the air before them, and the cold stars twinkling through the hole in the roof above.

  Problem was, despite the coffee, the warmth made them drowsy. So it was with heavy feet and heavy eyelids, grumbling and cursing under their breath, that they tossed the coffee grounds onto the snowy rubble before them and gained their feet.

  “Never, ever had this much trouble on a stage run,” Grizzly complained as he and the Trailsman sidled up to opposite ends of the strongbox. They each hooked a hand throug
h a thick leather handle, straightened their legs, and raised the stout box up from the floor.

  As they shuffled out the door and angled toward the corral and lean-to stable, the big man said, “I don’t believe I ever even had this much trouble when I drove for a line in Comanche country down in Texas!”

  As they ducked through the peeled log corral slats, Fargo grumbled, “And I suppose you’re going to attribute the run of bad luck to me.”

  “Well, son, I hate to say so—hell, I hate to even think as much, considerin’ how far back we go and what we been through together—but it does make a body wonder if some evil spirit or maybe an Injun witch done put a hex on you.” They set the box down in the snow to prepare a rope harness with which to carry it on a horse’s back. “Say, you haven’t been down to Cajun country recent, have you…maybe diddled the wrong Cajun’s daughter?”

  Fargo chuffed and threw the man a length of the same rope the robbers had used to pack the box, keeping half of the stout hemp for himself. “I suppose you’re saying it’s my jinx that caused you to diddle Rinski’s daughter and damn near get yourself shot up like a coffee can.”

  “I’m sayin’—and again, I don’t much like to think it much less say it,” Grizzly said as he and Fargo deftly shaped diamond rope hitches, “but I might not have been caught if it hadn’t been for you and your sour luck. Shit, I been diddlin’ that little polecat thrice a month for the past two years, and never even come close to bein’ caught by so much as a straw rat!”

  Fargo threw his rope over the horse’s back. “Griz?”

  “Say what?”

  “You talk anymore about my jinx, so that I start giving it serious consideration myself, I’m gonna gun you with both barrels of your own gut-shredder and bury your smelly hide in a snowdrift.”

  “Well,” Grizzly said, scowling between the furry flaps of his wolf hat, his beard already riming with frost, “that’s some way to talk to a friend!”