Northwoods Nightmare

by Jon Sharpe

  “No. Please. I truly cared for him.”

  “Care for him in hell.”

  The shot snapped Cosmo’s head back. As his legs gave way, blood and fluid leaked from a hole in the middle of his forehead.

  Fargo took a step but Edith turned, sweeping her revolver from side to side, covering as many as she could. “I’ll shoot. So help me I will.” She began to back away.

  “Mother!” Angeline pressed through the ring and gaped in horror at her father. “What have you done?”

  “What I should have done long ago,” Edith replied. She waved her pistol at those in her path and they hastily moved aside. “If I had, maybe your brother would never have left home. He wouldn’t have come here and taken up with a red savage.”

  “You know about that?”

  “Who do you think it was stuck that knife in his throat?” Edith rejoined.

  Angeline put a hand to her forehead and swayed on her feet. “Dear God, no. Not you?”

  “No son of mine was going to take a squaw for his wife. I told him that. I begged him to forget her and come back with us but Kenneth wouldn’t have it. He said he loved her. Loved her more than his own family. More than his father and more than me.”

  Confused, bewildered, Angeline said, “But how—where—when—?”

  “When did I talk to Kenneth? After he arranged with Fargo to bring you to him. Apparently he told Fargo he didn’t care to talk to your father or me, but he changed his mind. About me, at least. He came down and got me, and I went back up with him. That’s when I learned of his squaw.” Edith’s eyes moistened but she blinked the tears away. “I tried to get him to see reason. I did everything but get down on my knees and beg. But he refused. He intended to spend the rest of his life living with Indians. Can you imagine?”

  “So you killed him?”

  “It was the last straw, coming as it did on top of everything else. Before I knew what I was doing, I had my knife in my hands and I buried it in his neck.”

  Angeline let out a loud sob. “Oh, Mother. How could you? Your own son? Your firstborn?”

  “What do you know?” Edith rasped, and wagged her pistol. “What do any of you know about a mother’s love? About a wife’s devotion? About the heartbreak when your son and your husband turn their backs on you.”

  “What now, Mother? You can’t kill all of us.”

  Edith continued to back away. “I haven’t thought that far ahead. But I know that now that your father is gone, and that despicable creature who took my place, I stand to inherit a great deal of money. Enough to ensure I never spend a day in jail.”

  Fargo realized she was moving toward the horse string. So did Angeline.

  “Mother, I can’t let you go. You must answer for what you’ve done. I owe that much to Kenneth and to Father.”

  “Stay where you are. I mean it.”

  To distract her, Fargo broke in. “Listen to your daughter. You’ll never make it back to San Francisco alone. Hell, you won’t even make it out of the canyon.”

  “I might surprise you,” Edith said.

  Suddenly Angeline ran toward her, crying, “No, Mother! No! It ends here!”

  Fargo took two long bounds and was reaching for Angeline’s arm when the nickel-plated .32 cracked.

  Angeline stopped and bleated, “Oh my!” She covered her stomach with both hands. She looked at him in disbelief and said, “I didn’t think she would do it. Oh, Skye.” And just like that, she collapsed.

  Fargo caught her and gently eased her down. In the few seconds it took, her dress became soaked with crimson. He was conscious of others gathering around, of McKern saying something. Sliding his hand under his pants leg and into his boot, he drew the Arkansas toothpick and went to cut the dress to see how bad the wound was.

  “No,” Angeline said, weakly gripping his wrist. “Don’t bother.”

  “Maybe I can dig out the slug,” Fargo said. “We can stitch you up if we get to it quick enough.”

  Angeline coughed and blood dribbled over her lower lip and down her chin. “It’s already too late. I’m bleeding inside. I can feel it.” She switched her grip to his hand. “Oh, God. Hold on to me, please.”

  Fargo obliged her.

  “Skye? Are you there? It’s so dark. Why did it have to be like this? I had my whole life ahead of me.” Angeline groaned.” I don’t want to die,” she said, and did.

  Fargo slowly stood. Those nearest him drew back as if afraid. “Where?” he asked in a voice that wasn’t his.

  “She took a horse and is making for Yale,” Rohan answered.

  The saddle creaked under Fargo as he climbed on the Ovaro.

  “Wait!” McKern said. “I’ll get my horse and go with you.”

  “No.”

  Rohan said, “You shouldn’t go alone.”

  Fargo didn’t reply. He used his spurs. As much as he wanted to fly in pursuit, it was night and the trail was narrow and he would be damned if he would risk the Ovaro. He rode with caution.

  Fargo strained his ears but did not hear her horse. He rounded a sharp bend and the dark ahead thundered twice and lead buzzed his head. Hunching over the saddle horn, he kept going. Her revolver was empty now. There was just Edith and him.

  Hooves clattered. She was galloping away.

  Fargo continued to use caution. The clatter faded and grew faint with distance. She would have to ride all night to reach Yale by dawn, and he doubted she would make it.

  It was an hour later that Fargo came on her exhausted horse standing near the edge of a precipice, the reins dangling. It was caked with dirt as if from a spill.

  Wary of a trick, he slicked his Colt out and climbed down. He stood at the brink and from below came a sob. Just one, then silence.

  Fargo sat on a boulder. For the rest of the night he didn’t move or speak. Not until the sky brightened enough for him to climb down.

  She was at the bottom. She had missed the water by a few yards and hit among boulders. Any bones not shattered or fractured were the exceptions. Half her face had been caved in.

  He nudged her with his boot and she opened her eyes.

  “Fargo? Is that you? Shoot me. Please. The pain. Oh, Lord, the pain.”

  Fargo turned and started back up.

  The screams lasted a good long while.

  LOOKING FORWARD!

  The following is the opening

  section of the next novel in the exciting

  Trailsman series from Signet:

  THE TRAILSMAN #332

  BEARTOOTH INCIDENT

  The Beartooth Range, 1861—where no one ever went

  because the few who had never came back.

  It was the worst blizzard Skye Fargo had ever seen, and it was killing him.

  Fargo was deep in the rugged Beartooth Range. Mountains so far from anywhere, few white men had ever visited them. He was there on behalf of the army.

  “Scout around,” Major Wilson had requested. “Let us know what the country is like. Keep on the lookout for Indian sign. And for God’s sake, be careful.”

  It was known that the Blackfeet passed through the range now and then. So, too, did the Crows. Rumor had it another, smaller tribe lived far into the Beartooths, but no one knew anything about them. Like many tribes, they wanted nothing to do with the white man or his ways.

  So far Fargo hadn’t seen any Indians. He’d been exploring for six days when the first snow fell. It was just a few light flakes. Since snow in early September seldom amounted to much, he kept on exploring. But the light flakes became heavy flakes, the kind that stuck and stayed if the temperature was right, the kind that piled up fast. Within two hours of the first flake falling, the snow was two feet deep, and rising.

  Fargo kept thinking it would stop. He was so sure of it, he went on riding even when a tiny voice in his mind warned him to seek shelter. A big man, he favored buckskins, a white hat, and a red bandanna. In a holster on his right hip nestled a Colt. Under his right pants leg, snug in his boot, was an Arkansa
s toothpick in an ankle sheath. From the saddle scabbard jutted the stock of a Henry rifle.

  A frontiersman, folks would call him. It showed in the bronzed cast of his features, in the hawkish gleam to his lake blue eyes, in the sinewy muscles that rippled under his buckskins. Here was a man as much a part of the wild land he liked to roam as any man could be. Here was a man who had never been tamed, never been broken.

  The blizzard worried him, though. Fargo had a bedroll but no extra blankets, and no buffalo robe, as he sometimes used in the winter. He didn’t bring a lot of food because he’d intended to fill his supper pot with whatever was handy.

  Drawing rein, Fargo glared at the snow-filled sky. A deluge of snow, the flakes so thick there was barely a whisker’s space between them, the heaviest snow he ever saw, and that was saying a lot since he had seen a lot. He could see his breath, too, which meant the temperature was dropping, and if it fell far enough, he was in serious trouble.

  “Damn,” Fargo said out loud.

  The Ovaro stamped a hoof. The stallion didn’t like the snow, either. Great puffs of breath blew from its nostrils, and it shivered slightly.

  Fargo shivered, too. Annoyed at himself, he gigged the Ovaro on. As near as he could tell, he was high on a ridge littered with boulders. Humped white shapes hemmed him in. The game trail he had been following when the storm broke was getting harder to stick to. He hoped it would take him lower, into a valley where he could find a haven from the weather until the worst of was over. Shifting in the saddle, he gazed about. There were no landmarks of any kind.

  All there was, was the snow. Visibility was six feet, if that.

  Fargo’s fingers were growing numb and he took to sticking one hand or the other under an arm to warm it. He tried not to think of his toes. He knew a fellow scout who lost all the toes on one foot once to frostbite, and now the man walked with an odd rolling gait but otherwise claimed he didn’t miss his toes much. Fargo would miss his. He was fond of his body parts and intended to keep them in one piece.

  Since he couldn’t see the sun he had to rely on his inner clock for a sense of time. He reckoned it was about one in the afternoon but it could be later. If the snow was still falling when night fell, he was in desperate trouble. He tried not to think of that, either.

  Fargo wasn’t a worrier by nature. He didn’t fret over what might be. He did what he had to, and if it didn’t work out, so be it. Some people were different. They worried over every little thing. They worried over what they should wear, and what they should eat, and what they should say to people they met, and they worried over how much money they made, and whether they were gaining too much weight or going gray or a thousand and one other anxieties. They amused him no end. All the worry in the world never stopped a bad thing from happening. But Fargo had cause to worry now. He would die if he didn’t find somewhere to lie low until the worst was over. He would succumb to the cold and his flesh would rot from his bones and one day, perhaps, a wandering Indian or white man would come on his skull and a few other bones and wonder who he had been and what he had been doing in the middle of nowhere and why he had died.

  “Enough of that,” Fargo scolded.

  It helped to hear his own voice. To remind himself he was alive, and a man, able to solve any problem Nature threw at him. He had never been short of confidence.

  So on Fargo rode, looking, always looking, for a spot to stop. An overhang would do. A stand of trees, even. A cave would be ideal but it had been his experience life was sparing with its miracles.

  More time passed. The only sound was the swish of the falling snow and the dull clomp of the Ovaro’s heavy hooves.

  The cold ate into Fargo. By now the snow was three feet deep in most places, with higher drifts. The drifts he avoided, if he could. They taxed the Ovaro too much, and he must spare the stallion.

  Huge white shapes appeared. Boulder as big as log cabins.

  Fargo had no choice but to ride between them. As he came out the other side, he nearly collided with a rider coming the other way. Instantly, he drew rein. So did the other man.

  Squinting against the lash of snow, Fargo could make out the dark outline of the man and the horse, but nothing else. His hand on his Colt, he kneed the Ovaro alongside.

  It was an Indian.

  An old warrior, his hair nearly as white as the snow, his craggy face a testament to a life lived long and lived hard, studied Fargo as Fargo was studying him. He, too, wore buckskins, only his had beads on them. His mount was a pinto. It had black-and-white markings, like the Ovaro, only the patterns were different.

  Fargo stared at the old warrior and the old warrior stared at him, and neither said anything. Fargo didn’t see a weapon but no one, red or white, went anywhere unarmed.

  The old man trembled. Not from fear, for there wasn’t a trace of it on his face, but from the bitter cold.

  Fargo looked closer and realized the old man was gaunt from hunger and haggard from near exhaustion. The eyes, though, were filled with a sort of peaceful vitality. They were wise eyes. Kind eyes.

  “Do you speak the white tongue?”

  The old warrior simply sat there, a shivering statue.

  “I reckon not,” Fargo said. Twisting, he fumbled with his cold fingers at a saddlebag and got it open. Rummaging inside, he found a small bundle of rabbit fur. Carefully opening it, he counted the pieces. He had six left. That was all. Without hesitation he took three out. He wrapped the rest and put the fur back in his saddlebag, then held out his hand to the old warrior.

  “For you.”

  The old man didn’t move.

  “It’s pemmican.” Fargo motioned as if putting a piece in his mouth, and then exaggerated chewing. He held the pieces out again. “They’re yours if you want them.”

  Caked with snow, flakes clinging to his hair and his seamed face, the old warrior stared at the pemmican and then at Fargo and then at the pemmican again. Slowly, as if wary of a trick, he extended his hand.

  Fargo placed the pieces in the old man’s palm. He asked in Crow who the old warrior was and then in the Blackfoot tongue and then the Sioux language, which he knew perhaps best of all Indian tongues from the time he lived with the Sioux. He tried a smattering of other Indian languages he knew.

  The old warrior just sat there.

  Fargo resorted to sign language. Fingers flowing, he made the sign for “friend” and asked the man’s name.

  The old warrior never moved nor spoke.

  “I don’t blame you for not trusting me,” Fargo told him. Not given how most whites treated Indians. “I’ll be on my way, then.” He didn’t want to. The warrior might know where to find shelter from the storm.

  Touching his hat brim, Fargo rode on. He didn’t anticipate an arrow in the back, but he glanced over his shoulder to be safe and saw the old warrior staring after him. Then the snow closed in.

  Fargo sighed. He had half a mind to turn around and follow him. The old man must know the mountains well. But it was plain the warrior didn’t want anything to do with him.

  Suddenly the Ovaro slipped. It recovered almost instantly, and stopped.

  Fargo leaned to one side and then the other, bending low to examine the ground. He couldn’t be sure because of the snow but they appeared to be starting down a slope. The footing was bound to be treacherous and would become even more so if ice formed.

  “Some days it doesn’t pay to wake up,” Fargo grumbled. He gigged the Ovaro.

  The next hour was the worst. The snow never let up. Twice the Ovaro slipped, and each time Fargo feared he would hear the snap of a leg bone and a terrified squeal.

  He was terribly cold. His skin was ice and when he breathed, he would swear icicles formed in his lungs. His feet were numb, his hands slightly less so. He shivered a lot. His body temperature was dropping, and once it reached a certain point, he was as good as dead. There was a word for it, a word he couldn’t recollect. But the word didn’t matter. A person died no matter what the word was.

/>   Fargo never thought he would end it like this. He’d always imagined going down with a bullet to his brain or his heart, or maybe an arrow or a lance. But not in the cold and the snow. Not by freezing to death.

  The Ovaro slipped again, and this time it wasn’t able to regain its balance. Fargo felt it buckle and he instinctively threw himself clear of the saddle. Or tried to. For in pushing off, he slipped on the snow-slick cantle and pitched headlong to the ground. He figured the snow would cushion his fall but he didn’t land in snow; he came down hard on a snow-hidden boulder, his shoulder bearing the brunt, and pain shot clear through him.

  The next moment he was tumbling and sliding.

  Fargo envisioned sliding over a precipice and plummeting to his doom. He clawed at the ground but all he could grab were handfuls of snow.

  A white mound loomed, another boulder, and he careened off it and hurtled lower.

  Dazed and hurting, Fargo sought to focus. He thrust his hands into the snow but it had no effect. In fact, he was gaining speed, going faster every second. Fargo swore. Sometimes a man did all he could and it wasn’t enough. Some folks gave up at that point. They figured, What was the use? But Fargo never gave up. So long as he had breath in body, he fought to go on breathing.

  Rolling onto his stomach, he jammed both arms and both legs into the snow.

  It didn’t work. The snow was too deep. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t reach the ground. He couldn’t find purchase. All there was was snow and more snow.

  Fargo had lost sight of the Ovaro. It could be lying above him with a broken leg. Or maybe it was sliding down the mountain, too. He vowed to go look for it. Provided he survived.

  Another mound loomed. Fargo threw himself to one side but the snow had other ideas. His other shoulder slammed hard. The pain was worse than the first time. Now both of his arms were numb. He had to struggle to move them even a little.

  And he was still sliding.

  His hat was gone, too. That made him mad. A hat was as necessary as footwear. It shielded a man from the heat of the sun and the wind-whipped dust and falling rain. He’d had that hat for a couple of years now and managed to keep it in fairly good shape.