North Country Cutthroats Read online

  What caught the brunt of Fargo’s attention were the three horses tied on the cabin’s right side, before the split cordwood stacked along the cabin wall. Two duns and a black with a white-spotted rump.

  No use in pointing out the horses to Grizzly, however. The old jahoo would have called him a worrywart and a nancy boy, and poured some brandy down his throat.

  The team knew the route so well that it took no rein-sawing to stop them between the log lodge on the trail’s right side and the unchinked log barn on the other. Before Grizzly had set the brake, three men filed out of the lodge—a big black man in a hide coat and coonskin cap and two burly white men dressed similarly, though one walked with a pronounced limp. He nibbled a strip of jerky as he followed the others off the lodge’s porch to the front of the stomping, snorting team, the steam lifting from the team’s backs as though from a half-frozen stream.

  “Treat ‘em right, boys,” Grizzly shouted, dropping the ribbons over the dashboard. “They done good!”

  Fargo lifted his cold, aching ass from the seat—hard as marble though padded with sheepskin—and was about to crawl off the stage, when Grizzly grabbed his forearm. “Help the passengers into the building, will ya, Skye? Make sure none of the women slip and fall on their asses. I gotta slip around behind the barn and yellow some snow.” He shook his head and sighed, his long beard and mustache raking icicles across his face. “Takes longer every trip!”

  “I’ll see to it,” Fargo said, lowering himself down to the stage’s right front wheel. When he leaped from there to the ground, he felt as though his legs were going to shatter like frozen glass. He fingered a cheek, which felt like sandpaper, and wondered if he’d ever get blood to it again.

  Damn cold weather to be driving a six-horse hitch. He’d traveled to every Territory and all the northern Mexican provinces, and he’d never found a tougher, hardier breed than those who lived in cold country year-round.

  He opened the stage door and helped the women out. The warming bricks had long since cooled, and all the passengers were frost-rimed and rosycheeked.

  When the men had destaged and were tramping stiffly toward the lodge, flanking Mrs. Otis and Mrs. Tribble, Fargo closed the door to find Irina Roskov looking around again, brown eyes wide and guarded. She glanced at the Trailsman over her shoulder, shaped a reassured smile, then, holding her hands in the muff before her, began climbing the lodge’s broad, half-log steps.

  Standing beside the stage as the hostlers unharnessed the team, his breath steaming around his head, Fargo found himself looking around as Irina had done, apprehension tightening his gut. He was the one who’d been shot at. What was she so skittish about?

  Time to get to the bottom of it.

  He’d just started toward the lodge when a hoarse voice raked out, “Hello there, handsome. Got time for a poke?”

  Fargo shuttled his gaze to the left end of the porch fronting the lodge. A bulky figure in a long, black fur coat and misshapen fur hat sat in a rocking chair about four feet left of a gutted whitetail buck hanging from the porch ceiling, its ribbed, red cavity gaping, its graybrown fur dusted with snow. The rocker creaked softly as the person—man or woman, Fargo couldn’t tell—pushed off a fur-booted foot while keeping his or her legs crossed beneath the ratty coat.

  “Don’t worry—I don’t mean myself,” the person said, loosing a raking cackle, the high pitch of which bespoke a woman—albeit a woman with a husky, manly voice.

  Red hair capped red brows in a face which, the Trailsman could see now upon closer inspection, appeared mannish but marginally female. The stalky redhead jerked a mittened glove at the two-story, wood-frame building west of the lodge, the snow-spotted shingle of which announced DAKOTA QUEEN WHOREHOUSE AND TOBACCO SHOP.

  “I went out of business since I got so damn ugly I was scarin’ business away!” She laughed hoarsely, the chair creaking as she rocked. “No, I got three girls yonder, and they can do you fast, before Larsen’s swampers even get the fresh team led outta the barn. You won’t have no problem.” She ran her blue eyes up and down the Trailsman’s tall, broad frame, and stretched her pink lips back from small, even teeth. “You look like the kinda man that can get it up fast and get right to work with it.”

  “Obliged,” Fargo said with a cordial nod. “But I reckon—”

  A man’s sudden, jubilant whoop rose from the whorehouse’s second story, followed by a woman’s scream. The woman’s scream was clipped by two pistol shots fired in quick succession. There was another scream amid the tinny clatter of breaking glass.

  The woman on the porch stopped rocking and twisted around in the chair. “Goddamn it!”

  There was another pistol shot, and the woman struggled up out of her chair, red-faced and puffing, to stride down the steps at the end of the porch, moving quickly while holding the hem of her coat above her ankles. “I knew I shouldn’t have let Crazy Vern on the premises again! I just knew it!”

  “You need any help over there?” Fargo said as a man’s muffled laugh sounded from the whorehouse, followed by a girl’s softer chuckle.

  Ignoring his offer, the redheaded madam continued marching furiously across the gap between the buildings. She stomped up the steps of the whorehouse’s front porch and disappeared inside.

  “Reckon not,” Fargo said, hearing the woman’s hoarse shouts thundering from inside the brothel. He removed his hand from the walnut grips of his .44, then strode up the station lodge’s steps and inside the lodge, closing the heavy door behind him as a great breath of hot air thick with the smell of roasting meat, wet wool, and leather heaved against him.

  He turned and blinked into the shadows, relieved only by the wan gray light slanting through a couple of frosty, sashed windows. There was a bar to the left, flanked with overstuffed shelves, and several tables to the right, reaching back to a staircase at the far end of the room. A bullet-shaped iron stove roared like a giant panther in the middle of the room, the black door glowing copper, while the stage passengers milled around four tables near the heat.

  Two men sat at stools at the bar, eating hungrily, fur caps and mittens on the bar beside them, while another stood at the bar to their right. He was arguing with the middle-aged man standing on the other side of the bar—a stout gent with thinning hair and a cherry red handlebar mustache, a wolf-fur cloak wrapped around his bald shoulders, and a bloodstained apron bowing out from his paunch.

  “Listen, Landusky,” the stout man said, shaking his head, “I done told you, I’ll buy that buck off you for two dollars and not a penny more!”

  “Two dollars?” said the gent standing beside the two eaters. “Why, that’s a damn crime!”

  Just then a woman burst through the swinging doors at the far end of the bar. “The crime is you charging two dollars for a deer I can shoot my ownself just out back of the privy!” she scolded, carrying three steaming, food-laden plates in her hands and arm toward the tables where the stage passengers waited to be served—the two saddle tramps occupying themselves with a card game, a small, hide-wrapped flask on the table near the one with the eye patch.

  “Hellfire, this time of the year they wander so close to the village,” she said, setting the plates down in front of Irina and Mr. and Mrs. Otis, “that I can pink a deer from my bedroom window!”

  Turning back to the kitchen, she glanced at the Trailsman and flicked a damp lock of gray-blond hair back from her stitched brow. “Where’s Tweed?”

  Fargo shrugged. “Singin’ with the angels. I’m the new shotgunner, for now.”

  “Well, the door don’t need holdin’ up. Sit your butt down and I’ll bring you a plate. The hostlers’ll have the new team harnessed in ten minutes. They say there’s a squall blowin’ in, so you’ll wanna make fast time!”

  With that, the small, wiry woman—Mrs. Larsen, Fargo presumed—strode busily back into the kitchen, long skirts fluttering about her legs, leaving her husband to argue with the market hunter standing across the bar from him.

  Fargo sag
ged down on a chair near Irina, though he didn’t have time to ask her who or what she seemed so wary of before Mrs. Larsen returned with several more plates, including one for him. He dug into the venison steaks and gravy-drenched potatoes with mute glee, the cold having hollowed him out and thrashed him with hunger pangs.

  His fingers and toes ached as they thawed.

  As Fargo padded his belly with the dry but tasty meat, following each bite with a sip of hot coffee, Mr. Larsen and the market hunter came to an agreement that included two dollars for the buck hanging outside, with their noon lunches thrown in for free. That settled, the hunters wolfed their food and, grumbling and hefting their rifles and hitching up their cartridge belts under their blanket coats and mackinaws, raked their lusty gazes across Irina and Mrs. Otis, shuttling grins among themselves, and headed back out into the cold.

  Fargo was relieved to hear their horses clomping off along the snowy trail, heading in the opposite direction the stage was pointed.

  He was nearly through with his plate when Grizzly came in, grumbling about his bad plumbing system, and began wolfing a plate set down by the cranky Mrs. Larsen. “You go ahead and load the passengers, Skye,” the jahoo said, shoving a wad of gravy-drenched bread into his mouth. “The boys done near got the team all hitched. I’ll be along in two minutes. Appears we might be in for a few flurries later. Best split tail.”

  “What about the bricks?”

  “The boys got fresh, hot stones in the barn yonder. They’re loadin’ ‘em now.”

  “All right.” Fargo sighed, throwing back the last of his coffee, none too pleased with the prospect of heading back into that bone-chilling cold. He’d like to shove a couple of those hot bricks down the tops of his own moccasins.

  “I will stay with you until we leave,” Irina said, sitting to Fargo’s right and sliding her thigh up snug against his.

  He looked down at her, her head only inches away from his shoulder. “Why is that?”

  She looked up at him demurely, her wide brown eyes turning soft, the corners of her rich mouth rising. “You are big, warm man.” The eyes twinkled devilishly as she added in a lusty whisper. “Like a Cossack!”

  Grizzly chuffed, eyeing Fargo skeptically from across the table. “Cossack, huh?”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Fargo said, sliding back his chair and announcing that the stage would be pulling out in five minutes.

  He was moving toward the door, Irina following close behind, when Lieutenant Otis cleared his throat, sneezed wetly, then looked at Fargo from his seat closest to the roaring stove. “We must wait for Mrs. Otis. She is…uh”—flushing with embarrassment, he jerked a thumb toward the back of the lodge—“tending nature out back.”

  “Why don’t you mosey out and remind your wife we got a timetable to keep?” Fargo said, ushering the other passengers toward the door, who grumbled as they buttoned up and shrugged down in their heavy gear.

  The lieutenant, who wore an ankle-length buffalo hide coat and a heavy red scarf knotted around his neck, sneezed into his handkerchief again, instantly fogging his glasses. Groaning wetly and wiping his nose, he said, “I’m sure she’ll be along shortly.”

  Fargo followed the passengers outside, Irina staying as close as a love-struck schoolgirl, and held the door while they boarded the stage-sleigh. The two saddle tramps—whom Fargo, having overheard bits of their conversation, had figured out were market hunters heading to a Canadian outpost along the border—raked their lusty, smirking gazes across Irina’s pert, shapely form in her long fur coat, then sized up the Trailsman with both resentment and more than a tad of jealousy.

  The man with the eye patch, especially, seemed to slather at the prospect of the comely, earthy Russian warming his blankets this evening. Fargo couldn’t blame him. She’d been the only grace note in his new job so far, but he was damn curious about what had her on edge, her not seeming the edgy type.

  That conversation would have to wait.

  All the passengers except Mrs. Otis were aboard and he was waiting by the coach’s closed door when Grizzly came out, belching loudly and donning his mittens, a cold-air downdraft obscuring his tall, burly frame with blue wood smoke from the lodge’s chimney pipe.

  He glanced at Skye. “How come you ain’t in the driver’s box?”

  “Waitin’ on Mrs. Otis.”

  “Get her, fer Chrissakes. I don’t wanna get caught in that clipper. There was a group travelin’ out here a few years ago. They got caught in a five-day whiteout and had to start eatin’ each other.”

  “Christ,” Fargo muttered, casting a glance into the stage, where Lieutenant Otis yawned, sick and bored, as he read a newspaper. The other passengers glanced back at the Trailsman, brows ridged impatiently.

  The Trailsman cursed again and strode off around the corner of the lodge, heading toward the rear via a well-tramped trail through the snow spotted here and there with yellow ice laid down, probably, by men who didn’t want to make the long trip to the privy in the cold.

  Fargo was turning the corner around the back of the lodge when he lifted his chin and stopped suddenly. The privy stood in a clear patch of windswept ground about thirty yards behind the lodge, and the privy’s door trimmed with the traditional half moon was hanging half open, shifting back and forth in the breeze.

  Fargo looked around, spying little but snowdrifts, trash piles, and half-buried shrubs.

  He was about to call the woman’s name when a muffled groan rose on the breeze. A woman’s groan, originating from somewhere ahead and right, where chicken coops and pens stood amid the scalloped drifts and occasional cottonwoods.

  A man cursed sharply, and there was the smack of a hand against flesh—small sounds torn by the breeze, ground up by distance.

  Fargo palmed his .44 and moved forward, picking up a fresh trail in the snow. Three or four sets of slashed and cluttered tracks. He followed the trail through the drifts, jogging, snow splashing up around his thighs, breath vapor rising like a veil around his face.

  “No!” a woman cried. “Please…no…!”

  There was another, lighter smack followed by a man’s chuckle.

  Fargo stopped. The sounds were coming from a brush-roofed log shed. A slender ash stood by the shed, and a squirrel chattered angrily in the naked branches.

  Fargo clicked the Colt’s hammer back and, jaws set hard, jogged ahead.

  5

  Fargo was twenty feet from the shed when a man’s voice said, “Casey, get out there and keep watch!”

  Fargo stopped, cocked Colt extended.

  There was a brief argument while the woman moaned and grunted and wooden thuds sounded from within the shed. But then a bearded man in a soiled blanket coat and leather watch cap stepped out of the open door. One of the deer hunters, he was tall and lanky and his beard, streaked with frozen breadcrumbs and gravy, hung well below his jawline. His gloved hands were empty, and when his eyes found Fargo, they widened briefly as he tensed and lurched back with a start.

  Fargo regarded him flintily over the Colt’s barrel. He canted his head toward the shed where another sharp slap resounded, followed by the screech of cloth being ripped.

  “You fucking bastards!” the woman shrieked, her voice shaking with fury.

  Keeping his eyes on the Colt aimed at his belly, Casey said, “Um…boys…think you better get out here.”

  The only response was grunts, angry protests, the shuffling of boots on frozen earth, and the grinding of stacked cordwood.

  Fargo canted his head toward the shed once more.

  “Fellas,” Casey said, louder, “I really think you oughta get out here. I’m starin’ down the maw of a fucking .44!”

  Silence.

  The woman groaned. A man whispered something Fargo couldn’t hear. Just outside the open doors, gloved hands raised to his chest, Casey glanced inside the shed, then shuffled sideways from the door.

  Fargo smiled icily.

  Inside, the woman sobbed and cursed like an
Irish sailor.

  In the tree to Fargo’s right, about halfway up, a squirrel chortled furiously.

  A figure sprang sideways out of the shed—the man who’d been arguing in the lodge with Larsen over the cost of the dead deer. He threw himself sideways, bearded lips stretched, blue eyes flashing rage. The revolver extending straight out from his waist exploded, blossoming smoke and flames—but not until a half second after Fargo’s own revolver had done the same, punching a hole through the man’s chest, between the flaps of his rat-hair coat, and throwing his shot wide.

  He flew sideways and back with a grunt, hit the snow on his back, and let the revolver sag beside him. Blood bubbled up from the hole in his chest. He tipped his blond head to look down at it, kicking his legs. “Shit,” he grunted, and let his head fall back in the snow.

  “Ah, Jesus,” Casey groused, making a face as he stared down at his dying friend.

  “You in the shed,” Fargo said, holding his cocked pistol on Casey. “Get out here empty-handed, or join your friend in leadville.”

  Boots scraped. A spur rang softly. Curled fingers appeared first in the doorway to the Trailsman’s left, and then the palms.

  The funnel-brimmed hat followed, the mustached face beneath it peering out with a mixture of shame and anger in the cold eyes. Vapor jetted from the man’s broad nose and thin lips. He glanced at the still figure on the ground before him, at Casey, then back at the Trailsman.

  “Don’t shoot.”

  “You boys hightail it,” Fargo said, wagging his .44. “I see you again, I’ll kill you both.”

  The man in the doorway glanced at Casey, then at the Trailsman. Slowly lowering his hands, he stepped out of the shed. He circled the dead man warily.

  Both Casey and the man from the shed glanced at Fargo again, their eyes skeptical. With nervous grunts and chuffs, they took off at a dead run through the scalloped drifts, heading along the rear of the buildings, snow flying up around their knees. They each stumbled in turn, nearly fell, helped each other up, and continued on.