North Country Cutthroats

by Jon Sharpe

  “Why are they after you?”

  Her dark brows beetled over her almond-shaped brown eyes, and her pug nose wrinkled slightly.

  “Come on. The cat’s out of the bag. You have three countrymen nipping at your heels. If you want me to protect you, you better let me know why they want you so bad. It’s gotta be more than just those pretty tits they’re after.”

  She sagged farther back against the wall and drew the deerskins up beneath her chin. She dropped her troubled eyes and sat there breathing heavily for about a minute before she said, “They are bounty hunters. Lady Dolokhov sent them from Moscow.”

  “Why?”

  She rolled tolerant eyes at him. “To kill me.”

  “Why? Come on, throw all the cards on the table or Lady Dolokhov is gonna be a right happy lady.”

  She dropped her eyes again to study her feet pushing up from beneath the deerskins about three-quarters of the way down the bed. She flexed them for a while, as if considering her words, then throwing caution to the wind, she said simply and directly and with a vaguely defiant air, “I had an affair with her husband. But it was not my fault. Baron Dolokhov did not tell me he was married until his third or fourth trip out from Moscow.”

  “Them Russians came all the way from Moscow to exact revenge for a cuckolded woman?”

  “Lady Dolokhov is a spiteful, ugly old witch. And she has the money to exact revenge on anyone she pleases. Her family is one of the wealthiest in all of Russia. As wealthy as the czar.”

  Fargo dug in his shirt pocket for his makings sack. “How do you suppose they found you way out here?”

  “She has her spies. For all I know, she had someone follow me all the way from Russia. I realized I was being followed when I got to St. Louis, but I’d hoped they were farther behind me. My father and brothers would protect me once I got to their wood-cutting camp—they all come from a long line of warrior Cossacks—but obviously the bounty hunters have already caught up to me!” Irina looked at the Trailsman with bald terror in her eyes. “You will protect me, won’t you, Skye? I was told that Lady Dolokhov has ordered her henchman to kill me slowly”—her voice pinched and tears began rolling down her cheeks— “and to cut my head off and haul it back to Russia as proof of my demise!”

  “All the way back to Russia, huh?”

  Sobbing, Irina nodded sharply. “For Russians, revenge is very serious.”

  “I reckon it must be. I wonder why one of ‘em took a shot at me back in Brule City.”

  “They must have been sneaking about, peeking in the windows, and saw us together. They probably thought I’d hired you to protect me. With you out of the way, they could have grabbed me easily, taken me somewhere”—her voice grew thin, as though terrified by the images playing behind her eyes—“and tortured me slowly.”

  Fargo nodded, pensive. “Why’d you wait so long to tell me about all this?”

  “I thought that if you knew who was after me and why, I would not be allowed to travel with the others.”

  Fargo licked his quirley closed and dropped his arms. “Might be that way back east, but it ain’t like that out here.” He got up and sagged down beside her on the cot, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “Out here, we protect our damsels in distress—even those with their heads on the chopping block.” He sniffed as though ferreting out a stench. “I’d reckon their satchel would get rather whiffy on the lee side long before they got back to Russia—wouldn’t you?”

  Irina dropped her head to the deerskins and sobbed uncontrollably.

  “I was just joshin’,” Fargo said, drawing her tight against him. “Don’t worry. The lady’s boys won’t lay a hand on you.”

  She looked up at him and sniffed. “You promise?”

  “Damn right.”

  She sniffed again, then smiled, her eyes flashing in the candlelight. “I will reward you. Get undressed.”

  Fargo was bone-weary, and in far more need of rest than love-making, but he sensed that refusing the girl would only offend her. So he got up, set his unlit cigarette on the washstand, and shucked out of his clothes. Looping his gun belt around the chair back so that the .44’s grips were within easy reach of the bed, he crawled under the skins, and took her in his arms.

  Her round breasts were warm against his chest, and he realized he wasn’t as tired as he’d thought. Mashing his mouth against hers, he began to work a knee between her legs and to gently push her back against the lumpy mattress.

  “No,” she said suddenly, rolling onto her belly and sticking her round, pink butt in the air. She grabbed the end of the bed, rose up on her knees, spread them wide, and tossed her hair back over her shoulders. She gave her ass a wag. “From behind this time—like the dogs do it!”

  Fargo hadn’t been counting on having to work that hard, but he rose onto his own knees, leaned forward across her back, and cupped her sloping breasts in his hands. Rolling her swollen nipples under his thumbs, he rammed his iron-hard piston through her hot, wet portal all the way up to her belly.

  Fargo woke the next morning feeling as though he’d been pummeled to the very edge of existence by enraged sadists wielding ax handles in a cold cellar. Nevertheless, despite Irina Roskov’s nymphomania that hadn’t let him sleep for over an hour after he’d gone to bed, he still felt rested.

  He rose, built up the fire, and smoked a cigarette until the brazier had warmed the room above freezing. Then he chipped the ice off the top of the porcelain wash pan, took a short but thorough sponge bath, feeling as though his heart would stop at any moment, and dressed. On his way to the door, he kicked the bed, hearing Irina grumble and curse in Russian.

  “Rise and shine, Your Highness.”

  He went out, closed the door behind him, and headed downstairs to where Luther and Lawrence were wrestling under the long eating table, and Grizzly Olaffson sat in a rocker in front of the popping hearth, smoking a cigarette and sharpening a folding knife on a whetstone. Smoke and the smell of bacon emanated from behind a curtained doorway, as did the thump of wood being shifted in a stove belly.

  “Already had a look outside, Skye,” the grizzled giant said as he continued scraping the blade against the stone. “Clear skies far as Montany, and it ain’t much below freezing. We should have smooth sailing all the way to Devil’s Lake!”

  “With your luck, I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  Fargo opened the front door and stepped onto the porch. Dawn was a thin pearl wash above the eastern buttes, dimming all but the western stars. Grizzly was right. It was cold, but not the knife-edge cold of before.

  Fargo looked around cautiously. Spying and hearing no trouble, he yawned, hitched his gun belt high on his hips, and stepped off the end of the porch. He made his way along the shoveled path between the trading post and the still-dark brothel. Following the curving path around a barren ash and a boulder, he approached the vertical-board privy standing in a patch of clear ground and brown brush.

  He stopped, one hand on his .44’s grips, and took another cautious gander. He’d been bushwhacked once around a privy, and he wasn’t about to allow the Russians to perfect their game.

  Still, he neither saw nor heard anything but the faint scratch of weeds along the privy walls and the distant hoot of a night owl.

  The privy door stood about a foot open. Yawning again, Fargo reached for the handle. He pulled the door wide and, casting a glance into the shadowed interior, jerked with a start. He pushed the door back toward its frame.

  “Hell, Kid, you ever heard of lockin’ the door before you settle down to business?”

  He gave a caustic snort and turned away. He froze, frowned, a speculative cast in his eyes.

  Turning back to the door, he slipped his fingers around the wooden handle and drew the door open a foot, peering through the crack. His frown grew as he drew the door wider, until the thin dawn light washed into the privy, revealing the Dakota Kid sitting over the hole with his checkered wool trousers and long underwear bunched around his boots.<
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  The Kid’s skinny legs were pale and bony-kneed. His hands rested in his lap, as though he were merely waiting for a train, and his head was canted toward his shoulder. His hat had been stuffed onto his head, the crown smashed, the brim tipped over one pale eye. The open eyes stared glassily up at the Trailsman as if in a silent plea for help.

  But there would be no help for the Kid, Fargo knew even before he reached forward and touched the first two fingers of his right hand to the kid’s knife-slashed neck. He’d been cut literally from ear to ear and a good gallon of blood had washed down over his chest and belly to dribble into the privy hole under his lap.

  Fargo drew his hand away from the Kid’s ruined neck and, his heart leaping in his chest, instantly slapped leather. He raised his Colt, wheeling and stepping forward, elbowing the door back to give him a broad view of the snowy yard behind the brothel and the trading post.

  There was nothing but firewood stacked against the back walls of both buildings, chopping logs around which splinters and curled shavings lay mounded, and a few dead shrubs and crusted drifts. A deer carcass hung, bloody and frozen, from a stout box elder behind the brothel. Flanking the privy was a trash pile.

  Nothing moved. Except for the breeze gently picking up with the slowly rising sun, there was no sound whatever.

  Cocked Colt extended from his belly, the Trailsman walked around the privy and trash pile, inspecting the grounds carefully. Finding no evidence that the Russians were still in the area, he headed back toward the privy.

  A door clicked, and he turned toward the brothel’s rear, where a door opened and R. J. Boone appeared. Pulling the door closed behind him, Boone adjusted his eye patch, then stopped suddenly when he saw Fargo.

  “Jesus, you spooked me,” the market hunter grunted. Continuing toward the privy, he said, “The shitter free?”

  Fargo holstered his coat and heeled it toward the trading post. “Not exactly, but if you’ll pull the Kid out of there, it’s all yours.”

  13

  Maybelline Butts volunteered to hold onto the Kid’s carcass until kin called for it or until the ground thawed and Bulldog could bury it in the ravine behind the barn. Considering the rumors about what may or may not have been fed to the hogs in Witch’s Keep Canyon, Fargo didn’t think that was a good idea. He was glad when Grizzly Olaffson agreed, adding that they’d best haul the boy to Devil’s Lake, where he’d been headed in the first place, in case family or friends would be there to greet him.

  After a solemn breakfast during which Irina Roskov sat even closer to Fargo than usual, the passengers, luggage, and strongbox were loaded onto the stage. The blanket-wrapped body of the Dakota Kid, secured with rope to the brass rails, was loaded onto the roof with the strongbox and Irina’s heavy steamer trunk. Grizzly flicked his reins and cracked his blacksnake, the fresh team leaned into their collars, and Luther ran out from the porch to bark and nip at the churning, iron-shod wheels.

  From the trading post porch, Maybelline bellowed, “Luther, git your mangy ass back here, you foul excuse for a brush-popping.…” Her voice faded as the stage plunged down a grade to clatter across a wooden bridge before shooting up a low crease between the buttes and out onto a tapering northwestern plateau.

  A half hour out of the canyon, Fargo glanced behind him to make sure the Kid’s body was still secure. The sunlight which had lain like molten gold upon the snowfields, suddenly disappeared. He turned from the body to glance up at the sky and cursed.

  “What the hell is it?” Grizzly said, holding the reins to Fargo’s left.

  “Have a look.”

  A low, gunmetal blue mass of clouds was spreading up from the southeastern horizon. The sun shone through the wretched-looking mass—a dime-sized death’s head mask, dully glowing like the moon on a foggy night. Creamy white curtains streaked the mass, buffeting this way and that. Even as Fargo and Grizzly stared off the stage’s left rear wheel, the wind picked up. It felt as though it were whipping down from icy mountain peaks, pelting Fargo’s face with not only careening snow but frozen rain.

  “Ah, shit!” Grizzly exclaimed, standing and slapping the reins against the team’s backs. “It’s a goddamn blue norther!”

  “Looks like it’s comin’ out of the southeast to me!”

  “It’s circling!” Grizzly bellowed. He swore and cracked the blacksnake as the team lunged into a gallop. “That warm front we had must’ve been the center of it. It was swirlin’ right around us, greasin’ us for the pan! Haven’t seen one of these in years!”

  Fargo kept an eye on the storm, no longer as worried about the three Russians as the vast gray-purple cloudbank pushing toward the stage, with what appeared to be snow-twisters angling along in front of it. As fast as it was moving, there was no chance the stage could outrun it. There was no point in turning around and heading back to the canyon, either, as they’d merely run right into the teeth of the monster’s open mouth.

  The wind picked up steadily, and the snow thickened. The temperature dropped a good fifteen degrees in less than a half mile. The team’s coats rippled in the wind and shone with the snow and freezing rain, which clung to them in large, heavy scabs. Several of the horses whinnied and shook their heads. A couple turned back to regard the descending clipper, sensing the storm’s danger every bit as much as the men did.

  “How much farther to Devil’s Lake?” Fargo asked, holding his rifle with one hand and his hat on his head with the other.

  “A good fifteen miles. An hour’s ride in good weather, but if this hangs true to good blue-norther form, we ain’t gonna make it!”

  “Your optimism’s a real comfort.”

  “That’s as optimistic as I can get in this sichyation, Skye! Grab your balls—chuck hole ahead!”

  The Trailsman did as he’d been told, and the carriage bounded viciously, lifting him a good half-foot from the seat then dropping him hard before the horses continued sprinting along the gently rising and falling trail. The swirling snow clung to them, gauzelike in the air, as the temperature dropped even further and the wind began to moan. It nudged the stage from side to side and made the deerskin shades flap in the carriage below with what sounded like smallcaliber pistol reports.

  Mrs. Tribble’s terrified moans could be heard beneath the cracks and the wind’s keening.

  “There ain’t no shelter out here—no line shacks or nothin’.” Grizzly winced through his snow-flocked beard and glanced around, squinting against the pelting sleet. “We best head for a hollow…soon as we see one.”

  “And freeze to death in tit-deep snow?” Fargo shook his head. “Forget it. If we’re gonna die, let’s die on the run.”

  “Shit and damnation,” Grizzly growled, his words torn by the wind. He lowered his head and whipped the reins. “I reckon you’re right.”

  They careened around a sharp bend in the trail, and the stage fishtailed so far to the left that the rear boot raked a couple of wind-bent aspens. Mrs. Tribble’s moaning grew louder and one of the market hunters cursed sharply. The carriage continued fishtailing as the trail meandered around prairie potholes—vague white saucers in the thickening veil of falling snow—and Grizzly nearly dumped the whole thing in a deep ravine that slid up suddenly from the right.

  When the left ski finally dropped back to the trail, the jahoo answered the screams, yells, and curses from below with an inadequate, “Sorry, folks!”

  As if to punctuate the sentiment, one of the horses whinnied sharply and was answered by another.

  The horses couldn’t continue the breakneck pace for long, as within twenty minutes the snow rose above their hocks. It deepened nearly as quickly and perceptibly as water sluicing down arroyos from a mountain rain. Where the wind scalloped the snow into drifts, the stage-sleigh nearly ground to a halt, the horses pitching and shaking and screaming as they continued slogging forward, encouraged not only by Grizzly’s blacksnake but by the shrieking, blasting wind.

  “Skye!” the driver yelled, spitting snow from his
lips as the sleigh ground to a jerking, quivering halt in a drift rising nearly as high as the carriage doors.

  “I ain’t normally a man to give up, but I think we’re plum fucked better than a Santa Fe whore on the Tuesday before Lent!”

  The wind ripped Fargo’s hat up off his forehead. He grabbed it before it was snatched entirely, snugged it down, tightened the scarf knotted over it, then slid his rifle beneath the seat.

  If he’d left Fort Abercrombie just two weeks sooner, before that first blizzard had struck, he’d have right now been relaxing on the black sands along the Sea of Cortez, a dusky-skinned, bare-legged senorita bringing him tequila shots and lime wedges. The thought nipped him harshly, evoking an inner, mournful bellow.

  “I’ll lead ‘em through!” he shouted as several of the passengers yelled unintelligibly from the carriage.

  Fargo dropped into the snow, the powdery drift rising above his knees, then slogged up ahead of the jostling, shivering team. The howling wind sucked the air out of his lungs, and he had to fight to breathe against it. The snow was coming down so thickly that all he could see within twenty yards was a slanting, winddriven wall of white.

  “Come on, boys!” he yelled, grabbing the bridle strap of the left lead horse.

  He pulled. The horse pulled back and whipped its head violently, spraying snow from its ears and mane. Fargo grabbed the bridle once more, half-turned, and pulled as he ground his heels into the downy snow piled against his thighs, and after several windsnatched curses, he got the horse to move forward. The others moved, as well, albeit reluctantly, blowing and whinnying, while Grizzly cracked the blacksnake’s popper about a foot above their white-basted backs.

  After several minutes of pulling and cursing, the horses and the sleigh moved out of the snow piled high against a hill shoulder. Fargo climbed back up into the driver’s box and grabbed his rifle, and Grizzly put the horses ahead once more into the raging maelstrom.

  They crossed a long flat and descended a valley, and Fargo had to dismount and pull the team’s harnesses once more to get through another hip-deep drift at the valley bottom. After that obstacle, they followed a creek for a time, then climbed another hill through oaks. Coming out of the oaks on the other side of the hill, Grizzly bellowed like a poleaxed bull.