North Country Cutthroats

by Jon Sharpe

  “There she is! Devil’s Lake dead ahead! Damn my hide, if we didn’t make it!“

  Fargo felt as though he were wearing snow-covered goggles. He couldn’t see much more before him except blowing, swirling snow. Blinking against the flakes clinging to his brows and lashes, he began to make out the vague outlines of buildings growing slowly out of the whiteness.

  The wind teased his nose with intermittent smells of burning wood.

  And then, suddenly, a half-buried cabin slithered up on his right while on the left a couple of corrals hunched against the hammering storm. Larger buildings pushed up along both sides of the trail until false-fronted, two- and three-story structures—mostly logs but some with wood frames—formed near-solid walls to the right and left of the wide, deserted street. While the town appeared like the ruins of some ancient, long-dead civilization cropping up out of the Arctic snow and ice, lantern light shone in several of the snow-pocked windows.

  The smell of the wood smoke and the wan glimpses of lantern light were the only signs of life. The residents of Devil’s Lake were no doubt swaddled in quilts and skins, and huddled around their fires. The Trailsman couldn’t wait to seek shelter and fire himself—with a big mug of hot coffee liberally spiced with hooch.

  Grizzly pulled the stage up to a low, stone hovel on the right side of the drifting street. The building’s sod roof was capped with a good three feet of snow, a frostinglike tongue licking down over the front brush arbor. The shingle flapping and screeching in the wind announced SHERIFF. Fargo turned to the jahoo with a puzzled frown.

  “Sheriff Whitaker is also the station agent,” Grizzly explained. He canted his head to the tall, wood-frame hotel sitting right of the sheriff’s office. “I’ll take the passengers into the Continental! You tell the sheriff we’re here and to send for his hostlers! I’ll be back out to help with the luggage.”

  Fargo glanced back at the Dakota Kid wedged between the strong box and Irina’s trunk. The roped, blanketed body was nearly covered in snow, the Kid’s straw-colored hair whipping in the frigid wind at the bundle’s far end. Fargo figured his own body was about half-frozen even with blood circulating; the Kid must be frozen as solid as a chunk of freshly cut lake ice.

  Climbing down to the stage’s right front wheel, Fargo hefted his rifle in his numb right hand and dropped straight down into the snow, promptly slipping in the ice beneath the snow and nearly falling. Cursing, he regained his balance, slogged through a wavelike drift, mounted the narrow front porch beneath the thickly flocked arbor, and glanced into the window left of the door.

  A light flickered, dancing shadows along the inside walls, across wanted dodgers and a chained gun rack. Fargo couldn’t wait to get inside and to feel the caress of a stoked stove.

  He crossed to the door, knocked once, then tripped the latch and shoved the door about three feet wide. A man sat behind the desk straight ahead of him—tipped so far back in a reclining swivel chair, his spurred boots crossed on the desk, that he was nearly lying down. A newspaper covered his face.

  “Whitaker,” Fargo said, loudly enough to be heard above the storm raging behind him, “stage is in!”

  The man didn’t move. The long legs, clad in striped wool, the cuffs stuffed into the tops of the stovepipe boots, didn’t so much as twitch.

  Fargo threw the door wide and strode around the end of the desk. He stopped in front of the man and swiped the newspaper away. He jerked his head back and gave a clipped, startled grunt, his gut clenching with revulsion.

  The sheriff stared up at him, wide eyes glassy, lower jaw hanging as though he were about to say something. But he’d never say anything again. His throat had been cut from ear to ear, the blood dribbling down his neck and shoulders and onto the floor beneath him. The five-pointed star on his wool vest shone with several large splatters which appeared brown in the wan light.

  Sensing someone behind him, Fargo ducked, pivoting and rocking back on his heels. There was a whirling sound of something cutting the air, and he looked up to see a knife twirling end-over-end through the space his head had occupied a half-second before.

  Falling backward, he raised his Henry, instinctively jacking a shell into the breech. As he hit the cold, earthen floor on his butt, he triggered the Henry at the large, dark-clad, fur-hatted figure standing against the wall between the open door and the window.

  Boom-rasp! Boom-rasp! Boom!

  His three quick shots echoed like a cannon around the small, rock-walled room. The Russian bellowed loudly, bolting straight back against the wall and spreading his arms high above his head.

  The echoes of the rifle blasts hadn’t ceased chasing themselves around the room before the Russian dropped his arms to his sides, as though fed up with the whole affair. He tipped his chin to his chest, rocked forward on the balls of his feet, then fell to the floor on his face with a thump and a long, liquid sigh.

  The Trailsman sat up and turned his head toward the open doorway through which wind-jostled snow swirled and plunged like feathers from a torn pillow. “It’s the Russians! Irina, stay down!”

  He scrambled back to his feet and bolted toward the door but not before a rifle cracked outside, and the girl screamed shrilly.

  14

  Fargo stopped in the open doorway and snapped his Henry’s butt to his shoulder.

  In front of the stage, R. J. Boone was clutching his upper left shoulder and falling back against his partner, who had apparently just stepped off the stage when the rifle had blasted. By the amount of blood spraying up between them, it looked as though the heavy-caliber bullet had drilled Boone through the back of his left shoulder, exited his chest, and hammered into Charley Mays’s right arm.

  As both market hunters fell back against the stage, yelling, their faces pinched with agony, Irina, who’d been about to file out behind Mays, tumbled straight back between the seats. A couple of the horses whinnied and bucked, jerking the stage ahead and back, the skis grinding snow.

  Another blast flatted out through the mewling tempest, and a fist-sized hunk of ash was ripped out of the carriage housing, just left of the flapping door. Fargo lunged forward and swung his gaze up past Grizzly Olaffson standing with the Tribbles on the hotel’s broad porch, all three half-turned toward the stage, their lower jaws hanging. On the porch roof above them, one of the Russians knelt on one knee, ejecting a brass cartridge casing from the breech of his large-caliber Sharps.

  Fargo raised the Henry and snapped off one quick shot, the slug missing the Russian as the man threw himself sideways and pinking a second-story window behind him. Fargo had started to rack another shell into the Henry’s chamber when he heard Irina scream once more, the sound lifting beneath the horses’ strident whinnies.

  The Trailsman jerked a look over his right shoulder. The girl was clawing at the stage’s open door with both mittened hands as the horses stumbled forward, jerking the stage-sleigh along behind them.

  Irina screamed something in Russian, which was no doubt, “Help!”

  “For the love of Jehovah, they’re taking off with the stage!” Grizzly shouted as Fargo dropped his rifle and, pivoting, sprinted toward the stage’s open door.

  The two market hunters, writhing in the drift before the stage, impeded the Trailsman’s path. As the horses lunged forward into their collars, the door slipped beyond Fargo’s reach. He twisted left and got both hands on the stout straps of the luggage boot.

  As the stage pulled away from the sheriff’s office and hotel, his boots grazed both squirming, cursing market hunters, and then dragged along the snowy street for about twenty yards. He sort of hop-skipped along the ground before finally hoisting himself up with his arms, climbing the boot like a lumpy wall and planting his boots on the bottom frame.

  Another rifle spoke with a sound like a stout branch snapping.

  A bullet sizzled over Fargo’s head. As he clung to the luggage boot, his feet slipping on the ice-crusted frame, his body bouncing with the stage’s pitch and sway, he glanced
left. Another Russian was perched on a low roof on the other side of the street, a rifle in his hands, his stocky frame a dark smudge behind the blowing snow curtains.

  Inside the stage, Irina screamed hysterically.

  The stage itself bounced and fishtailed over the icy ruts beneath the freshly churned snow. The stage bounced violently, lurching, and Fargo’s right hand slipped off the hide-covered frame. He groaned as he found himself clinging by only his left, flapping out in the gale like a windmill blade, jerked this way and that by the rocking stage, both feet slipping off the lower frame to dance in midair three feet above the snow.

  The buildings on both sides of the street swept past in a gauzy blur. Snow pelted his face like birdshot.

  “Unhh…shi-i-iit!“

  Fargo sucked a breath, gritted his teeth, and, wrapping his left hand more tightly around the upper wooden frame, flung himself back against the boot, smashing his cheek against the cold leather and hugging the luggage rack like a long-lost relative he’d traveled far to find. When he had his boots settled, only slipping and sliding slightly as the stage bobbed and lurched, he lunged straight up with his right hand, and grabbed the brass bar which ran around the edge of the roof.

  He tightened his grip on the bar, then, pulling up with his right hand, reached up with his left and curled that hand, too, around the bar. After that, the hard part about muscling himself straight up was maintaining his hold while the stage lurched and pitched and fishtailed beneath him. He was nearly thrown off when the racing team followed a sharp turn in the trail, and the stage’s rear swung so sharply right that it was nearly perpendicular to the hitch. Then the plowed ridge of snow at the trail’s edge nudged the skis back in a straight line behind the horses, and the violent lunge forward nearly threw the Trailsman, once again, backward off the boot.

  Somehow, heart turning somersaults in his chest, he not only hung on but slung a knee up over the rail. Then he slung the other and found himself crawling over the frozen, blanket-wrapped body of the Dakota Kid, grabbing the Kid’s body and the strongbox and steamer trunk on either side of him for purchase.

  He’d been so preoccupied with just trying to stay with the stage that he’d been only vaguely aware of Irina’s screams in the coach below. He was clearly aware of them now as, pitched with sheer, heart-stopping horror, the cries careened up through the roof like the screams of a woman set upon by rabid wolves.

  “It’s gonna be all right!” the Trailsman shouted as the stage suddenly lurched up a low rise, his words snatched from his lips by the howling wind.

  As the wind, pelting snow, and the lunging team conspired to throw him from the stage, he crawled over the Kid’s stiff feet then dropped his boots over the front rail and into the driver’s box.

  “Everything’s all right,” he said as the team slowed suddenly as it galloped up a long, low rise through sparse woods. His heart lightened as he found the reins wrapped around the brake handle, the handle having been drawn forward when the team had lunged away from the sheriff’s office. He sat down in Grizzly’s place on the sheepskin-padded seat, and reached for the reins, shouting with relieved glee, “Everything’s gonna be just fine, Irina!“

  The words had no sooner escaped his lips than the team swung sharply left, climbing the hill shoulder. The turn was too sharp, and the sleigh didn’t make it. The nose swung slightly left, but the body continued straight forward off the trail, the sides of the skis plowing snow a good seven feet high.

  The horses screamed as the rear doubletree broke and the ribbons snapped like kite strings.

  Two trees bounded up on the right, growing larger and larger until Fargo could make out the veins in the thick, black, snow-blasted bark.

  He shouted, “Shit—hooold onnnnnnn!” Then he dropped the reins that were no longer connected to anything, grabbed the dashboard, and closed his eyes.

  Spinning, the sleigh’s right side slammed into both trees, stopping the spin with a violent crash that threw Fargo sideways against one of the stout cottonwoods. He bounced off the tree, blistering pain shooting through his cheek, jaw, and shoulder, and flew sideways the other way in the driver’s box, piling up at the base of the brake handle.

  Red and blue sparklers blossomed before his eyes. A loud, off-key trombone solo began blasting both his eardrums.

  The sleigh’s nose was canted uphill, and now, as though the trees were slowly opening their hands to release it, it began sliding straight back down the hill.

  Irina screamed again.

  The stage began picking up speed as it slid downhill. Fargo crawled up from the floor, clutched the brake handle with one hand, released the catch, and pulled it back, setting it. The brake was about as effective at stopping the stage’s stubborn descent as a junebug would have been, smashing itself against the rear luggage boot.

  Fargo cursed and gritted his teeth as he clutched the brake handle with one hand, the driver’s seat with the other, feeling queasy and dizzy as the stage slid backward down the hill’s slippery slope. It picked up speed as it dropped, careening off trees and bowling over snow-flocked shrubs, the roaring storm and the slashing snow ensconcing the Trailsman in a bell jar of looming, tooth-gnashing horror and imminent peril.

  All he could do, jolted every which way as the stage bounced off trees and lurched over icy drifts and rocks, was hold on and hope the sleigh held together and came to a safe stop at the bottom of the hill.

  But then there was the sickening crunch of breaking wood, and the left side of the stage dropped abruptly. Fargo turned his head to catch a fleeting glimpse through the driving snow of the left-side ski tumbling end over end and bouncing off tree trunks. A half-second after the ski disappeared in the snow haze, Fargo was nearly thrown once again from the stage as, with a thundering crunch, the tail end whipped around so that the stage was brought perpendicular to the slope.

  Another bone-jarring thump followed, and the front of the stage was thrust suddenly straight up into the air. Fargo’s grip on the brake handle and the seat was broken instantly, and he found himself tumbling up away from the stage as though he’d been shot out of a cannon.

  He rose up into the wind-whipped snow and thrashing tree branches, the world flying past in a blue-gray blur, his body turning over and over. Before he knew it, the ground came up from below, vast and white and slanting downward, to slam against his right shoulder and hip and drive his head into the snow and the air from his lungs with a bellowing, gasping grunt.

  Hearing what sounded like a thunderstorm bearing down on him, he looked up, blinking snow from his eyes, and his loins burned with black dread.

  The stage appeared for a moment to be suspended in midair, about six feet from the ground and ten yards upslope from him. It was rolling toward him like a runaway train, the Dakota Kid, the strongbox, and Irina’s steamer trunk careening through the air before it. Knowing there was no way of escaping the certain death bearing down on him, Fargo dropped facedown in the snow, his thoughts vague but poignant: Why am I in the cold and snow and not in the warmth of Mexico with a senorita by my side?

  He lay, tensed and waiting for what seemed like minutes before a resounding, crunching smash sounded beside him, and he jerked with a violent start. He lifted his head from the snow, his face a snowbasted mask of disbelief that his bones hadn’t been crushed to bloody shards. The stage had bounced over him without so much as brushing his coat.

  Propped on his forearms, he turned to see the stage rolling down the hill on his left, bouncing and tumbling through the slanting snow before, suddenly, it stopped rolling and seemed to just float away on an off-white cloud and drift into the downy distance like a small boat casting off from shore.

  Muttering and looking around dizzily, a dozen bruises feeling like dull knives driven deep in his bones, the Trailsman drew his knees beneath him and pushed himself to his feet. He stumbled down the hill through the knee-deep snow. Blinking against the shotlike, wind-blasted flakes, he got his feet tangled up in a drift, and fell forwar
d, landing on a semisolid lump.

  He pushed up on his arms to find himself staring down into the half-open eyes of the Dakota Kid. The Kid’s blanket had been half-torn away, exposing his drawn, pasty face and the wide, grisly slash across his neck. The Kid’s mouth corners seemed to rise slightly, as though he were laughing at Fargo’s bizarre predicament, smug in his own eternal serenity, his strawyellow hair sliding around in the wind.

  Fargo grunted, drew his knees beneath him once more, stumbled back to his feet, and continued trudging through the snow until he arrived at the bottom of the hill.

  Before him lay the flat saucer of a frozen lake. The stage was a brown lump about forty yards from shore, barely discernible through the churning snow.

  Taking a deep breath, the Trailsman heeled it off across the snowcapped ice, following the broad swath the stage had plowed as it slid.

  “Irina!”

  The stage grew before him out of the heavy whiteness. It had come to rest on its side, both skis, the rear luggage boot, and the driver’s box gone.

  As he approached, he yelled the girl’s name once more but was answered by only the howling wind and the snow ticking off the brown box of the overturned carriage housing. He leaped onto the side. The door had come off in the wreck, and he peered down through the ragged opening.

  Irina lay on her back against the opposite door and the deerskin shades, arms thrown out to her sides. One leg was bent, bowing out her long, fur coat. Blood trickled from cuts in her forehead and her swollen upper lip. Snow swirled through the opening to powder her coat and hair, which lay in a tangled, brown mass beneath her.

  Fargo couldn’t tell if she was breathing.

  Taking a cautious look around, wary about the Russians—had they followed the runaway stage?—Fargo lowered his legs through the carriage door and hoisted himself down with his arms, dropping to the opposite side, his boots straddling the unconscious girl. At the thud of his boots against the ash carriage housing, the girl moaned softly and turned her head slightly.