North Country Cutthroats

by Jon Sharpe

  Bold and clear as newly minted silver in the cold-scoured sky, the stars seemed to be laughing at the two men leading the packhorse and the robbers’ mounts through the rolling, snowy, frozen hills south of the stage station. When they rode into the yard over an hour later, the station house hunching low and dark amidst the glistening snow, they were both so cold that they nearly had to throw themselves out of their saddles.

  They led the mounts into the barn and, while Grizzly got a fire going in the tack room stove, Fargo began unrigging the horses and releasing the ropes tying the strongbox to the pack mount’s back. Grizzly came back out and they had the horses tended to in a few minutes, the cold of the barn and the promise of the warm fire in the tack room encouraging them like sharp-roweled spurs.

  They were so cold that they didn’t feel a bit selfconscious about lying side-by-side like an old married couple in the tack room bed, buried beneath the blankets and sharing a half bottle of rye whiskey, while the fire cracked and popped in the ticking iron stove.

  They woke less than an hour later, at the first wash of dawn, and slogged into the station house feeling less rested than if they hadn’t slept at all. Rinski and the passengers were surprised to see them, and even more surprised that they’d managed to retrieve the strongbox from, as the gleeful Rinski intoned, hugging each man in turn, “Sech a wicked band of treacherous brush wolves!”

  Irina Roskov glowed as she wrapped her arms around the Trailsman’s waist and hugged him violently. “I thought I would never see you again…that we would all be stranded out here, at the mercy of.…” She let her voice trail off, squeezing the big man harder and snuggling her head against his coat.

  “At the mercy of who?” Fargo said while the Rinski women scrambled around the dining room table with steaming bowls of eggs, potatoes, and sausage, and Grizzly Olaffson took an offered pull from Rinski’s stone jug.

  Irina lifted her head and stared up at the Trailsman, a cross-eyed scowl dimpling her plump cheeks, as though he’d just asked her the most ridiculous question she’d ever heard. “The weather,” she said, canting her head toward the door. “Hungry wolves…”

  “Oh,” Fargo said wryly, not believing a word of it and wishing like hell she’d tell him who or what she was so afraid of. If they had any more trouble on this run, he was going to start believing, like Grizzly, that he really was carrying a hex around on his shoulders. “I see.”

  He and Grizzly breakfasted with the passengers while the stocky Rinski girls hustled outside to harness a fresh six-horse hitch to the stage-sleigh. The two men padded out their bellies and imbibed liberally from Rinski’s jug, stealing themselves for another run on little shut-eye. The meal over, they headed outside to back-and-belly the strongbox to the coach’s roof before loading the passengers’ luggage—including Irina’s steamer trunk, which was nearly as heavy as the strongbox.

  Rinski himself loaded the warming bricks into the stage’s interior pockets. That done, the passengers filed out into the clear, cold morning, the wind shepherding snow snakes around their ankles, and into the warm, waiting coach.

  “You boys need any help eliminatin’ any more robbers on this stretch,” said the Dakota Kid, sticking his head out a coach window, “just give me a yell, and I’ll set my hogleg ablazin’!”

  “Thanks for the offer, Kid,” Fargo muttered, climbing over the front wheel toward the driver’s box. “Havin’ one with your pistolero skills aboard is a real comfort.”

  When he got settled in the box beside Grizzly and had laid his rifle across his lap, racking one shell in the chamber—with the way the trip was going he’d better keep a hot one ready at all times—he glanced at the sky, in which low, ragged clouds scudded with a light breeze whipping up the snow in brief, ghostly veils. Not unusual weather for this neck of the godforsaken woods. The air was cold, no doubt a good five or ten below, but the air no longer had that ominous, metallic tang foretelling a squall.

  “Well,” Grizzly said, buoyed by the big breakfast and liquor, “you ready for the next leg of our journey, Skye?”

  The Trailsman only grunted and, rubbing a gloved thumb across the Henry’s off-cocked hammer, silently dared the man to bring up the jinx.

  “See ya on the way back through, Rinski!” the driver bellowed as he released the coach’s brake and flicked the reins over the team’s steaming backs.

  “Ya, you betcha!” Rinski shouted. “And the next time, you’ll keep that snake in your pants or I’ll fry it up for your breakfast!”

  The man’s voice faded as the horses leaned into their collars and began lunging forward, jerking the stage-sleigh along as they slowly built up speed. Standing up and continuing to flick the reins with one hand and crack the blacksnake with the other, Grizzly threw his head back, laughing. “That old German’s quite a kidder!”

  Fargo turned in his seat to peer back at the yard they were just leaving and the sod shanty squatting under breeze-torn chimney smoke. Old Rinski stood in the middle of the yard in his bulky, sheepskin coat and wool hat, a corncob pipe in his mouth, his face red as an Arizona sunset, one fist in the air. His mouth moved beneath his shaggy mustache, but Fargo could no longer hear what he was saying. He had a good idea though.

  The Trailsman turned forward, hunched down in his mackinaw, and settled in for the cold ride. “I got news for you, Griz. I don’t think the old man’s kiddin’ now any more than he was when he had you floppin’ around like a landed fish in the barn.”

  Sitting down on the padded seat and dropping the whip into its holder, Grizzly glanced behind and muttered, “It’s the girl I feel bad for, Skye. To be cut off from a man like me just ain’t right.” He wagged his head sadly. “It just ain’t right.”

  Fargo snorted as Grizzly put the team across a wooden bridge over a frozen creek, then started up a long, easy slope. In spite of his lack of sleep, the Trailsman kept a sharp eye on the trail, swinging his head slowly from left to right. Every snowcapped rock, bare-naked cottonwood, and oak-stippled knoll along the trail concealed dark, shimmering apparitions wielding barn-blasters or Sharps buffalo rifles with fifty-caliber bullets snugged beneath their firing pins.

  But as the stage-sleigh was whisked across the snowy silence by the six steaming horses whose hooves thudded softly in the trail’s shallow, crusted snow, he spied little movement—nothing but a few chickadees milling around the stark, berry-spotted brush of a lonely, frozen creek bottom etched here and there with weasel or rabbit tracks, and a lone coyote lunging up a snowy hillside and turning a wary glance over its shoulder at the strange contraption creaking, whispering, and crunching along the trail behind him.

  They stopped for lunch at a crude log shanty dug into a low butte. The place was run by a portly Frenchman, a former Canadian trapper, and his equally portly wife, a Cree woman to whom the Frenchman spoke fluently in her own tongue. The couple served bear stew made possible by a rogue grizzly that, instead of hibernating this winter, had been wreaking havoc on the Frenchman’s trot lines, and whom the Frenchman caught in a pit trap along the banks of Cannonball Creek.

  After lunch, and with a load of fresh, steaming bricks warming the stage’s interior, Grizzly cracked the blacksnake’s popper over the backs of the fresh team. They lurched off once again, angling northwest through the gently rolling snowfields under a cloud-shaggy sky through which the sun was slowly beginning to penetrate, though the temperature remained so frigid that Fargo found himself shivering despite his best efforts to relax.

  As they traversed a broad creek bottom, Fargo spied a small group of Indians, either Mandans or Chippewas, hunting on foot along the far side of the brush-sheathed creek in bulky buffalo robes, heads wrapped in dyed deerskins and rabbit fur, nocked bows in their hands.

  Having recently been through a nasty Indian uprising farther west but just as far north, the Trailsman’s gut tightened at the sight of the armed party. “That’s Blue-Cloud’s crew,” Grizzly said, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, holding the ribbons as lightly as
a baby’s hand. “Their band’s probably camped along Porcupine Creek to the north. He’s right peaceable and even does some scoutin’ for the soldier boys at Fort Totten.”

  The Indians paid no more attention to the stage than they would to a flock of cawing crows. As the sleigh continued along the creek bottom, tracing a slow bend around a copse of ancient ash and cottonwood, the Trailsman exhaled a thick cloud of instantly crystallizing vapor.

  Farther on, Fargo spied three white-tail does scrambling over a ridge above a creek. Thirty yards behind them, a dozen shaggy wolves—some gunmetal gray, a few blue streaked with red—bounded up the ridge, lunging through the snow mantling the crest, snarling and yapping in anticipation of a hearty meal.

  A half hour after the next stop, a strange thing happened.

  The stage was traversing a broad bowl surrounded by low, wooded hills when the air warmed so suddenly that both Fargo and Grizzly found themselves looking around as though they’d just been slapped by an unseen hand. Almost instantly, the Trailsman stopped shivering.

  He turned to Grizzly, who was looking around, a strange smile inside his frost-caked beard, his eyes sparkling in the sudden spray of warm sunshine. “Well, I’ll be damned,” the jahoo said as even one of the horses gave an exclaiming whinny at the sudden temperature rise. “Don’t believe I’ve ever felt such a thread of warm air in these parts.” He chuckled and turned to Fargo.

  “Feels like a chinook without the wind.”

  “But, hell, chinooks are mountain winds, and we’re a good week’s ride from any mountains.”

  “Let’s hope it lasts,” Fargo said, reaching up to loosen the scarf knotted beneath his chin. The sharp contrast in temperatures was making sweat break out under his arms and down his back, and causing his head to reel from an instant case of spring fever. “But hell, I’m gonna have to lose some clothes if this keeps up!”

  “Damnation!” Grizzly said, jerking the knot loose under his own chin and pulling his wolf-pelt hat off. “Me, too.” He took a deep breath and put his face to the sun pouring out of the sky like molten gold, sending javelins of shimmering light off the snow. “I do declare, ole Jehovah is smiling down at us, at last!”

  From the carriage there rose the tick of a deerskin shade being raised, and a joyous and convivial din.

  “What’s happening, gentlemen?” Mr. Tribble called from the other side of the stage. “Have we ridden into spring?”

  “Hope not,” Grizzly yelled down to the man. “If the snow starts melting, we’re gonna get mired out here till hell freezes over once more!”

  Fargo removed his own scarf from over his hat and freed the first three buttons of his coat, enjoying the feel of the fresh air against his skin. The heady feeling was tempered by a nettling wariness, however; he’d felt warm waves like this on the Kansas and Texas plains in midwinter, and they usually warned of an oncoming storm. But as he swung his head around, taking in the entire three hundred sixty degrees of the surrounding plain, Fargo saw not a cloud in sight—only the glittering snow under a faultless, cobalt sky.

  The weather held for the rest of the day, so that Fargo found himself half-expecting to see a flock of Canada geese heading north in a squawking, flapping, arrow-shaped skein. Toward the end of the day, they climbed into rough country in which sandy buttes jutted and deep, brush-filled ravines slashed. Just before sunset they crested a butte shoulder and dropped into a canyon in which a small village nestled.

  Fargo read the worn wooden sign tilting along the trail and turned to Grizzly, a skeptical cast to his gaze. “Witch’s Keep Canyon?”

  The jahoo chuckled. The air had grown slightly colder with the waning sun, and he’d donned his hat again but let the flaps hang free along his bearded cheeks. “It’s been called that ever since Bulldog Butts and his ma, Maybelline, moved up here from Missouri. Rumor has it Bulldog’s on the dodge from the law while Maybelline’s one of them Ozark Mountain witches. She sorta looks like a witch. She brews up all kinds of healin’ concoctions to sell in her tradin’ post, and she keeps wild critters, includin’ a crow. It’s also said—now this is just another rumor and I myself think it’s as false as a politician’s pledge—it’s said that she and old Bulldog kidnap occasional travelers—gamblers with money an’ such. They kill the pilgrim, steal his money, and throw the victim to their hogs—thereby disposin’ of the body, if you get my drift.”

  “Christ,” Fargo grumbled as several rough log buildings pushed up on both sides of the trail. “I hope pork’s not on this evening’s menu.”

  11

  Grizzly Olaffson hoorahed the team over a knoll, then hauled back on the reins as a sprawling barn appeared on the left and two log houses appeared on the right—the first of which announced itself as WITCH’S KEEP CANYON LADIES AND LIQUOR, the other as WITCH’S KEEP CANYON STAGE STOP AND TRADING POST.

  As the stage pulled up in front of the barn, a wiry gray dog sprang off the covered trading post porch to nip at the stage’s slowing wheels while a birdlike woman in a denim coat yelled from a porch rocker, “Luther, git over here and leave that damn contraption alone ’fore it squashes you flatter’n a corn shuck!”

  As the stage stopped with a lurch that bounced him forward, the Trailsman cut his eyes away from the dog, frowned bewilderedly, then looked back at the dog once more. The sharply shaped head, arrowlike ears, snout steepled like a sombrero crown, and gray tail as thick and bushy as a feather duster belonged to no dog but a purebred coyote.

  As Luther trotted sheepishly back toward the skinny woman on the porch, whose crowlike face was ensconced in a heavy black scarf, a man came out of the barn—a squat fellow with three chins and heavy sheepskin cap with a pointed peak—and made for the team. Wrapping the reins around the brake handle, Grizzly leaned toward Fargo and whispered, “That’s Bulldog. He don’t talk much. Sorta even takes offense when he’s talked to. I figure he’s wary o’ strangers because of that paper on him down south.”

  “I won’t take offense if he doesn’t tell me his life story,” Fargo said, standing and taking his rifle in one hand as he began climbing down from the driver’s box with the other. Grabbing the handle of the stage door, he was unable to keep the irony from his tone when he said, “Here we are, folks. Last night on the trail, so be sure and enjoy yourselves, hear?”

  Female voices rose amid the stomps and chuffs of the horses being led away by Grizzly and Bulldog. As Fargo held the coach door open for the passengers to destage, he glanced at the three young women spilling out of the cabin right of the trading post—two blondes and a round-faced, brown-eyed brunette, all wrapped up in brightly striped blankets, white pantaloons buffeting around their legs, and fur boots or slippers on their feet. Their long hair fell seductively across their shoulders.

  “Bonjour, gentlemen, and Merry Christmas!” said the round-faced brunette, hugging a porch post seductively as she continued in a heavy French accent. “You want to make most of your time here tonight, oui? Have someone soften the aches and pains of travel? Oui? Come over and see Sonja, Cascade, and Green-Meadow for”—and with this she turned her pretty little chin to stare over the side of one snow-white shoulder which she revealed by lowering her blanket coat—“very little money considering how much entertainment you will enjoy between our very talented legs in our very warm mattress sacks!”

  The other girls pranced in place, swinging their heads this way and that, tossing their hair like horses’ manes and revealing brief glimpses of winter-pale skin, as though they were trying out for a spot in a dance troupe.

  The Tribbles were the first to destage, and as Fargo handed Mr. Tribble a couple of carpet bags from the coach’s rear luggage boot, he found the man staring toward the prancing whores with a beatific, distracted air.

  “Asa!” his stout wife intoned, smacking her hand muff against his shoulder. “Please keep your eyes from such brazen carnality, and come hither at once!”

  Mr. Tribble jerked from his trance, coloring instantly and clearing his throat, then
wheeled to follow his stumpy wife toward the trading post. Meanwhile, the birdlike woman—Miss Maybelline Boggs, Fargo assumed—cackled witchlike as she enjoyed the relatively warm air and a last ray of sunshine from her rocker, puffing the corncob pipe she held in her mouth with a gnarled, bony hand.

  She lifted her chin to yell over the low porch wall at the two market hunters and the Dakota Kid, who were chuckling amongst themselves as they scrutinized the covey of brazen carnality showing off their wares over yonder. “They’re all clean as the cleanest doxy anywhere,” the woman said around her pipe stem. “You can check ‘em yourselfs before you pay. They’re well-groomed and well-mannered—even the Frenchie, Sonja, though I had to damn near beat it into her. Go on. Don’t just stand there jackin’ your jaws. Go over and have a look. But no touchin’ till you’ve tossed me one silver cartwheel per man. They ain’t cheap but they’re all you’ll find around here!”

  With that, she threw her head back on her spindly shoulders, chuckling and puffing smoke like a St. Louis smokestack.

  “Well, what do you say, boys?” The Dakota Kid nudged a market hunter on either side of him, then, tossing his worn burlap satchel over a shoulder and hitching up his pants, heeled it for the whorehouse. “It is Christmas. Let’s go over and have a look!”

  Fargo watched as the three sauntered away. Someone tapped his shoulder and he turned to see Irina Roskov looking up at him reprovingly, wrinkling her pug nose. “Disease-ridden whores. Stay away from such vermin, or you won’t be keeping me warm this evening.” She canted her head to the stage roof, where her two-ton trunk resided with the strongbox. “My luggage, please.”

  “Right away, Your Highness.”

  When she’d wheeled and strode through the snow to the trading post, Fargo climbed onto the stage roof and back-and-bellied her trunk to the ground. Carrying the heavy beast over his shoulder, he slogged through the snow and up the porch steps, glancing at the old woman who stared at him bemusedly through her pipe smoke.