North Country Cutthroats

by Jon Sharpe

Singing softly to himself—a rousing, old-country tune, no doubt—the Russian fired a round into the barn’s back wall, which was already pocked with a good twenty holes around and through the doors. He ejected the spent cartridge casing, which smoked back over his shoulder and disappeared in the snow behind him with a soft sizzle, then reached for the flask.

  He threw his head back on his shoulders, loosed a jubilant howl then lifted the flask to his lips. Fargo drew within ten feet, slowly taking up the slack in his trigger finger. Something in him wouldn’t let him shoot the man in the back, however. As he took another two steps forward, he depressed the Colt’s hammer, flipped the gun around in his hand, and drew it back.

  With his left hand, he swiped off the man’s sable hat. With his right, he smashed the Colt’s butt against the man’s head, just above his right ear.

  There was a satisfying smack.

  The man’s head jerked left. He gave an indignant grunt and half-turned toward Fargo, mustachioed lips drawn back from his teeth.

  Fargo had delivered a blow that would have felled a horse, so he wasn’t prepared for the man to swing back toward him as though propelled by springs. Before the Trailsman knew what was happening, the man had swiped Fargo’s boots out from beneath him, and Fargo found himself hitting the ground on his back, exhaling the air from his lungs with a sharp whuff!

  He’d just started to take another breath when the Russian grabbed his rifle and leaped on top of him, wedging the rifle’s breech under Fargo’s chin, grunting and cursing as he pressed the rifle down hard against Fargo’s throat.

  The man’s broad, tan face, his beard and brows gray with snow and frost, was six inches from Fargo’s. The veins in his forehead forked with fury as, baring his large, yellow teeth, he blew his sour vodka breath and jerked down hard against Fargo’s throat.

  The Trailsman felt as though his head were being slowly ripped off his shoulders and his windpipe pinched closed. He fumbled in the snow beside him with his Colt. Large, black circles were beginning to form in front of his eyes. He figured he had about two seconds of consciousness left. He snaked his finger through the revolver’s trigger guard, rammed the Colt’s barrel into the Russian’s ribcage, and fired.

  The report sounded little louder than a small twig snapping against the man’s heavy coat.

  The brown eyes boring into Fargo’s snapped wide with shock, but he continued pressing down on the rifle, keeping Fargo’s windpipe shut. The Trailsman quickly thumbed the Colt’s hammer back and, holding the barrel snug against the Russian’s ribs, fired once more.

  The Russian’s eyes blinked as his body jerked.

  As the pressure on the rifle began to ease, Fargo angled the Colt’s barrel up toward the man’s heart, and fired again. The pressure on the rifle eased more as the Russian jerked once again and, his eyes slowly closing, dropped his head and began sagging down toward Fargo.

  The Trailsman dropped his Colt in the snow, grabbed the heavy Sharps with both hands, and flung it and the Russian’s body sideways till the Russian lay back down on the ground, blood seeping through the grizzly fur of his coat, his legs quivering, arms thrashing slightly.

  Grabbing his battered throat and trying to swallow between ragged breaths, Fargo gained a knee. Remembering the other shooter, he jerked his head around and reached for his Colt.

  He froze. The other rifle had fallen silent. There was only the wind’s howl and the snow ticking against his hat. Around him, he saw only oily whiteness and the gray outline of the warehouse, the vaguer outline of the barbershop and bathhouse to its left.

  Fargo snatched the Colt out of the snow, stumbled to his feet, and, holding the Colt out before him, moved around to the warehouse’s right side. The wind buffeted him, the snow and penetrating cold stinging his cheeks as he looked around between the warehouse and the cabin and corrals for the other shooter.

  He found the tracks in the snow, near an overturned wheelbarrow, where the man had sat triggering his Sharps. The wind was quickly covering the dozen or so brass casings around the wheelbarrow with snow.

  Following the man’s shaggy footprints, Fargo slogged through the drifts to the front of the warehouse. He stopped where the man had stopped before the open doors, and then an icy needle pricked him when he saw the tracks continuing past the warehouse toward the barbershop.

  A girl’s shrill scream whipped around on the wind.

  Fargo lunged forward, sprinting across the gap between the warehouse and the log cabin, then taking the three steps in a single lunge, bulling through the half-open door. He stopped suddenly. The barber lay on the floor near the barber chair, blood trickling from a nasty cut on his left temple. Raising the Colt, Fargo ran across the room and through the curtained doorway, stopping just inside the bedroom and swinging the Colt toward the bed.

  He stopped, a frown hooding his brows.

  Irina lay face down on the bed, her head in her hands, sobbing.

  Behind him, in the main room, a boot thudded as a man said something in Russian. Fargo turned his head. The Russian stepped out from behind the open front door, lifting his Sharps rifle to his shoulder. He was slighter than the others, with a thick auburn mustache and goatee, a nasty pink scar on his chin, and devilishly slanted eyes. He grinned as he stepped slowly toward Fargo, revealing two gold-capped front teeth beneath the mustache.

  Fargo still had his Colt aimed at the wall over the bed. The hammer was drawn back on the Russian’s Sharps. Fargo had no time to swing around; the man had the drop on him. The knowledge tightened his belly and sent goose flesh crawling along his spine.

  The man’s eyes slanted even more as he stopped ten feet away, staring down the rifle’s long, octagonal barrel, and drew a bead on Fargo’s forehead.

  What sounded like a thunderclap rocked the room, feeling like two cupped palms slapped against Fargo’s ears. The Russian’s eyes snapped wide and his mouth made an O as big around as a china saucer as blood and viscera sprayed out of his chest. He rose two feet in the air and flew toward Fargo as though drawn by an unseen rope pulled by twenty lunging horses.

  The Russian hit the Trailsman and drove him straight back onto the bed, flopping on top of him for a moment before slowly twitching still. His entire weight pressed the Trailsman into the corn shuck mattress inches from Irina’s feet.

  Peering over the man’s shoulder, Fargo saw Grizzly Olaffson standing in the open doorway, his sawed-off barn-blaster extended straight out from his side. Smoke curled thickly from both yawning maws.

  Inside his ragged, snowy beard, a grin stetched the giant’s lips.

  “Shit and damnation,” Grizzly growled. “I saddle a horse and go ridin’ out in that frozen hell lookin’ fer ya only to find you all cozied up in a warm bed!”

  When Fargo managed to haul himself out from under the Russian, who’d nearly been cut in two by the shotgun blast, he and Grizzly dragged the dead man out in the snow behind the bathhouse. The barber followed, rubbing the goose egg on his temple and wondering aloud what the world was coming to, when people couldn’t sit quietly inside and behave themselves even during a snowstorm.

  When the Russian had been thrown to the wolves, Fargo carried Irina, who was drifting in and out of consciousness, over to the Continental and got her snuggled up in a bed. Grizzly summoned the doctor, who was patching up both market hunters, both of whom had been drilled by a single fifty-caliber bullet. Then the men, though nearly frozen solid and dead on their feet, hired a local woodcutter to harness his dray to four beefy mules and drive them out to pick up the strongbox, the Kid’s frozen carcass, and what they could find of the passengers’ luggage.

  The stage itself, crushed as though by the hand of a malevolent giant, wasn’t worth salvaging. Grizzly thought the skis still might be useful—they could attach them to a stage here in Devil’s Lake and be back on the trail as soon as the route was plowed—so he threw them onto the dray, and the men headed back to town as the storm finally began to lighten, a few stars twinkling behind the clouds
.

  It turned out the woodcutter knew Irina’s father and brothers, who cut wood for the Army at Fort Totten, on the north side of Devil’s Lake. He promised to summon the Russians to town for the girl as soon as the weather cleared.

  When Fargo and Grizzly had hauled all the gear and the Dakota Kid’s body into the Continental, Fargo headed upstairs with his rifle, saddlebags, and Irina’s steamer trunk, which felt as heavy as a locomotive after all he’d been through. He set the trunk clumsily onto the floor beside her bed. The girl stirred as the trunk tipped onto its side, its latches springing open, the lid opening just enough for a small burlap bag to slip out. It dropped onto the thick, wine red rug, and what appeared to be dirt dribbled out from its neck.

  The girl, humped beneath the bed’s thick quilts, gasped with a start and opened her eyes as Fargo set his rifle and saddlebags down, then crouched over the steamer trunk. “What the hell…?”

  “Oh, my dirt,” Irina said casually, squirming beneath the quilts and peering over the edge of the bed. The doctor had said she’d suffered a light concussion but was mostly fatigued from all the sundry but minor bruises she’d endured in the wreck. She’d be on her feet after a day or two of ample rest. “Please put it back in the trunk, please, Skye.”

  “ ‘Please put it back in the trunk, please, Skye,’ “ Fargo mimicked, running his hands through the black dirt spilled on the floor.

  He opened the trunk and rummaged around to find a good fifteen, maybe twenty, similar sacks buried under clothes, a couple of framed pictures, a cooking pot, and shoes. Wedged amidst the dirt sacks were two stout rocks, like any old rock you’d clear from a cornfield.

  Hunkered down over the trunk, the Trailsman lifted his incredulous gaze to the girl who’d fallen back once more against her pillow, her thick hair flowing about her pale, naked shoulders.

  “You mean, I’ve been haulin’ dirt around…from the stage roof to the relay stations then back up to the damn stage roof again?” Fargo blinked with disbelief. “Dirt and rocks?”

  She opened her eyes, frowning at him as if at just another in a long line of petty annoyances. “It is rich soil from the motherland…and rocks from my mother’s rose patch. I will have a similar patch here, and the dirt will grow the healthiest roses in all of Dakota.” She sniffed, yawned. “Now, please, Skye, put the dirt back and crawl into bed with me. I am growing cold.”

  Fargo sighed. And then, standing and beginning to shuck off his clothes, stumbling around as though drunk but cold and tired right down to his marrow, he laughed.

  He continued to laugh as he crawled into bed beside the girl.

  He was laughing at his own weakness for a pair of lustrous brown eyes and a nice set of tits. He was laughing because he knew there would be no remedy for his condition anytime soon.

  Grizzly was right. The Trailsman was jinxed.

  But he wouldn’t trade the curse for the best luck in the world.

  As his laughter died to a soft chuckle, he moved up behind Irina, spooned his cold, aching body against the girl’s soft, warm one, and took her round breasts in his hands. He nuzzled her neck, rested his chin against her shoulder, and closed his eyes.

  The girl reached over her hip to squeeze his shaft. It was iron-hard.

  “You are a Cossack!” she grunted.

  But the Trailsman hadn’t heard her. He was fast asleep.

  LOOKING FORWARD!

  The following is the opening

  section from the next novel in the exciting

  Trailsman series from Signet:

  THE TRAILSMAN #315

  MISSOURI MANHUNT

  The lush green state of Missouri, 1861—where

  the deep woods hid the dark heart of evil,

  and death awaited the unwary.

  If there was anything worse than a drunk spoiling for a fight, it was a drunk with a knife spoiling for a fight.

  Skye Fargo coldly regarded the angry man in front of him. Fargo had been about to enter Bassiter’s, a popular saloon along the public square in Springfield, Missouri. He had stepped to the batwings just as the drunk did the same on the other side. Neither had been watching what they were doing. Fargo was admiring a lovely lady who happened to be strolling by. The drunk was staring at his own feet. Fargo pushed on the batwings a split second before the drunk, with the result that the batwings caught the man flush in the face. With a startled grunt, the man had whipped his knife from a belt sheath on his hip, and now here they stood, Fargo with one hand on an open batwing, the man glaring and swaying and reeking of liquor.

  “You damn near busted my nose, you son of a bitch!”

  Fargo did not want trouble. He was on his way west and had stopped in Springfield for the night to treat himself to whiskey, women, and cards. But neither did he like being insulted. “Not on purpose.”

  “I don’t care,” the drunk belligerently snarled. “I have half a mind to cut you.” The man was almost as tall as Fargo but not as broad at the shoulders. He had droopy jowls and a paunch. His clothes, which were in need of a washing and mending, and his scuffed shoes with holes in them, marked him as a townsman, someone who, if he held a job, spent most of his money on his pet vice.

  “You are drunk, mister,” Fargo told him. “Put that pigsticker away before someone gets hurt.”

  “I already am hurt,” the man declared, slurring his words. “Now it is your turn.”

  It was pushing nine o’clock and the street was alive with people enjoying Springfield’s nightlife. A few stopped to watch, idly curious as to the outcome.

  One was the lovely young woman Fargo had been admiring. She was a brunette with as shapely a figure as a man could ask for, and full red lips that reminded Fargo of ripe cherries. She had lively brown eyes and full cheeks, and when she spoke, her voice was a throaty purr that would make any man tingle.

  “Harve Koons, you let this gentleman be, you hear?”

  The drunk squinted at her. Her beauty apparently made no impression. “Mind your own business, Lucille Sparks. I don’t tell you what to do and you will not tell me.”

  “I saw the whole thing,” the young woman responded. “It was an accident, plain and simple.”

  “He hurt me and I don’t like being hurt.” Harve Koons wagged his knife at Fargo. “Back up, mister, and do it real slow. The cutting is about to commence.”

  “I will go for the law,” Lucille Sparks said.

  “Do whatever you want, girl. It won’t change anything. I will have this bastard’s nose for a keepsake.”

  Fargo kept his eyes on the knife. He had a knife of his own, in an ankle sheath, and a Colt strapped to his waist, but he did not want to resort to either if he could help it. “I don’t want any trouble,” he said. Particularly with the law.

  “Isn’t that a shame,” Koons mocked him, “because you have trouble, and plenty. Ask anyone. Ask Lucy there. I am not a man to be trifled with.”

  Fargo simmered with rising anger. What he had here was a local tough who felt the need to prove how tough he was. “For the last time, I am asking you, polite like, to put that knife back in its sheath. I will even buy you a drink to show you there are no hard feelings on my part.”

  “There are hard feelings on mine, plainsman.”

  Koons’s comment referred to the fact Fargo was dressed in buckskins, the trademark of a frontiersman. Fargo also wore a white hat, now brown with trail dust, and boots equally as dusty. A red bandanna added a splash of color.

  “If you know what I am,” Fargo said, “you know I won’t stand for being pushed around.” Frontiersmen were a hardy breed. They had to be. Living on the raw edge day in and day out tended to weed out the weak. It honed those who survived to a razor’s edge of steely sinews and sharp reflexes.

  “You long-haired types are all the same,” Koons snapped. “You strut around like you own the world.”

  “My hair is not all that long,” Fargo noted. Neither was his beard.

  “Enough jawing!” Koons wagged his knife. �
��Back up, I say, or I will gut you where you stand!”

  Lucille Sparks made a sniffing sound. “You are despicable, Harve Koons. I want you to know that.”

  “I thought you were going for a tin star, Lucy,” Koons countered, and snickered. “Or could it be you have a hankering to share a drink with me after I am through with this peckerwood?”

  “I would rather eat dirt.”

  Koons laughed and glanced at her, and the instant his bloodshot eyes were off Fargo, Fargo struck. With a lightning lunge, Fargo had Koons by the wrist. Fargo jerked him through the batwings with a powerful wrench. Koons bleated in surprise and swung his fist, but Fargo easily blocked it and drove his knee up and in.

  Gurgling and wheezing, Harve Koons fell to his knees. Spittle dribbled over his lower lip as he clutched himself and turned the same shade as a turnip.

  Now it was Lucille Sparks who snickered. “Oh my. But if ever a simpleton deserved it, he did.”

  That was when Fargo made his mistake. He assumed Koons was in too much pain to do anything, and he started to turn toward her to thank her for trying to help. Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed movement and instinctively sidestepped just as Koons slashed at his leg. The knife missed by a mere whisker’s width.

  Fury gripped Fargo. Sheer, pounding fury. He had tried to go easy on the lunkhead, but now his Colt leaped into his hand and he brought the barrel smashing down once, twice, three times. After the third blow, Koons’s nose and cheek were blood-spattered pulp. Uttering a low groan, Harve Koons pitched onto his face, twitched a bit, and was still.

  None of the onlookers or passersby were disposed to come to his aid. In fact, one man commented, “About time that jackass got what he deserved.”

  Fargo bent and wiped the Colt clean on Koons’s shirt. As he was sliding it into his holster, he noticed the young lovely staring at him, appraising him much as a horse buyer might appraise a fine stallion. “It is too bad you had to see that, ma’am.”

  “I have seen a lot worse,” Lucille Sparks said, and smiled. “Well, I should be going.”