by John Benteen
“You’re crazy!” Jane grated. “Turn me loose, you bastard.” She writhed in his grip, brought up her knee like a practiced barroom fighter.
Whetstone grunted with pain. “Why, you slut!” His grip slackened. He swung the gun barrel. It hit her on the side of the head. She crumpled; and in that instant Fargo launched himself at Whetstone. He plowed into the other man like a cougar hitting its prey, and his big hand went around Whetstone’s wrist, closed. Whetstone cried out and the .44, as his wrist was crushed, dropped to the floor. Then both men went over backward, Fargo on top.
“Holt!” yelled Whetstone. “Case! Come here!”
Fargo never knew where Whetstone’s two prize gun-hands had been lurking. But even as he and Whetstone wrestled for the .44, he heard the thump of feet on the floor of the store’s front room. He chopped a quick, short blow at Whetstone’s jaw; the man went limp. Then Fargo was on his feet, lunging for the shotgun. At that instant, a Colt roared. He ducked, jerked back. His hand had missed the grab at the ten-gauge, but it had scooped up the Batangas knife lying on top of it. A flip of his wrist and the handles snapped back into his palm, latched, and all ten inches of deadly steel glinted. Fargo threw it, with a sideways jerk, almost like a man tossing a horseshoe. Holt, balding, with a face like a skull, stopped in his tracks as he crowded through the door to the back room, hammer eared back for another shot. The blade, razor-keen and needle-pointed, caught him in the one spot where, clad in thick furs, he was vulnerable.
As it slid through the soft part of his throat, just under the chin, he dropped his gun, caught at the handles, and turned, falling into Case, behind him. That gave Fargo time to make it to the shotgun. Holt let out a formless strangled cry and Case cursed. Those were the last sounds they ever made. Fargo scooped up the Fox, pointed it, pulled both triggers, and it bucked hard in his hands. The withering sleet of buckshot caught both men in their middles and threw them backward. They sprawled in a tangle on the floor of the main room of the store, dead before they hit it. Fargo, panting, straightened up, whirled.
He was too late. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a blur of motion. Then Whetstone, back on his feet, brought down the barrel of the .44 and brought it down hard. The world seemed to explode in front of Fargo’s eyes. Then he fell forward into blackness.
Chapter Eight
First, Fargo was aware that his face was cold. Then he felt the pain—as if someone were drilling through his brain with a brace and bit. Vaguely, he became aware of the barking dogs, and then of motion, smooth and easy, beneath him. At last he dared open his eyes. They were immediately salted with snow: he was, he realized at last, on a sled, and being borne into the teeth of a storm that had abated only a little since he had come in from it at Circle City.
Ahead of him, the big Malamutes ran briskly, tails up. Beside them, a man made good time on snowshoes. Fargo’s vision cleared as he recognized what was slung over the man’s fur clad shoulder—the ten-gauge Fox shotgun.
He tried, carefully, to move. That enabled him to discover that hands and feet alike were tightly bound. Except for his face, he was warm enough, under a robe. He tried hard to remember what had happened to him. It came back gradually. He turned his head, gingerly. Another man snowshoed along right beside him, and he became aware of yet another behind the sled. Then Fargo tensed as he saw, on the belt of the man beside him, his Batangas knife. His mouth curled. He supposed the one behind had his rifle and his pistol.
Covertly, he turned his head in the other direction. There was another sled, another guard of three men moving along with it. And it too bore a burden, nestled deep in furs. Another human being, but whether male or female, he could not tell. The snow swirled between the two sleds, making vision tricky. Right now, his vision was not of the best, anyhow. He closed his eyes, gave himself time for his strength to come back. He assumed these men were Whetstone’s, but he could not guess where they were taking him and the person on the other sled. He was in no hurry to attract their attention; he wanted time to recuperate. So he remained silent for a long time, as the throbbing in his head slowly diminished.
Then the sleds halted. It was getting dark. The furry, snow-laden boughs of a cedar brake closed around him. “All right,” he heard someone yell above the wind, “we’ll make camp here.”
He remained quiescent on the sled, here was scurrying around, the sound of an ax chopping; the yellow flame of a sheltered fire pierced the gathering gloom. Then a face loomed over Fargo. A hand slapped his cheek, hard.
Fargo opened his eyes. The face was square, with long, dark mustaches, the nose battered, the teeth bad. He knew the man: Ralston, another one of Whetstone’s crew. After Holt and Case, he was Whetstone’s best. Or at least Whetstone’s toughest.
“So you’re awake, huh?” Ralston said.
“Yeah.” The single word came harder than Fargo had thought.
“Good. We wouldn’t want you to be out cold when the time came; Whetstone was afraid he’d hurt your head and you wouldn’t come to.”
“When what time comes?”
Ralston chuckled, a metallic, rattling sound like gravel being shaken in a can. “You’ll see. Don’t be so damn eager.” Then he unlashed and jerked back the robe that covered Fargo. “All right. On your feet and off the sled.”
It took a long time, with Ralston pulling at him, before Fargo could get off the sled, stand upright. His hands and feet, still bound, were numb and, he was afraid, perhaps even frozen, though he had on both mittens and mukluks. He stood unsteadily in the snow, without snowshoes, while the other five men unharnessed the dogs, fed them, cut wood and made camp. Ralston was the one carrying Fargo’s shotgun, and he unslung it and kept it trained on Fargo while the others worked. “This is a fine piece,” he said. “Jason said I could keep it for my own. Too bad you ain’t gonna have a chance to show me those fancy tricks you do with it, but I reckon I can figure it out for myself.” Then he rammed Fargo with the barrel. “All right, you want any chow tonight, over there by the fire.”
Fargo lurched awkwardly through the snow. Now the person on the other sled was being rousted out, much as he had been. Fargo stared, recognizing by the size, even muffled in fur as it was, that this was a woman. Jane? Then she turned her face toward him, and he saw that it was Belle Dalton.
“What the hell—” Fargo blurted as the girl looked at him despairingly.
Ralston gave that metallic chuckle again. “Why, you’re gonna have company tomorrow, Fargo. When you go out, she’ll got out with you.”
“Go out?” Fargo repeated blankly.
“Die,” Ralston said.
Fargo looked around the cedar brake, which cut off the worst of the wind, made some computations in his head, realized how far they had come since the fight in the store; they must already be at least twenty miles from Circle City if they had been traveling steadily for the best part of the afternoon. “It’s a long way to take a man to kill ‘im,” he said.
“Got a longer way to go, you and the lady. O’course, she’s gonna get a good workin’ over tonight, she is. You ask me, shame to kill off such a fine-lookin’ dame, so we’re gonna get our share of her before she checks out, cold as it is. Then tomorrow—well, tomorrow, you can have her.” He made that sound once more, that laugh. “Without a stitch on, Fargo. You can have her. Way I figure it, we’ll be at Granite Valley tomorrow about three. The storm don’t look like it’s gonna let up. And the temperature ought to be down to about fifteen below. The two of you’ll shore have to make each other cozy then.”
Fargo stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“You shouldn’t have hit Jason. You shoulda gone along with him, let him take your woman. Then you’d be all right. But now—” the mockery went out of his eyes; they were ugly, without mercy. “Tomorrow, when we got you in the lonesomest place in this whole country, so far from even the nearest trap line that there’s no hope of anybody findin’ you or hearin’ you holler, much less of you makin’ it to help—wh
y, then, you undress, Fargo. So does she. And the two of you will be standin’ there in the snow, naked as the day you both were born, when we wave bye-bye to you and head back to Circle. I calculate, if you’re real strong, you’ll last maybe a half hour, maybe a little longer. We’ll try to make it longer. We’ll give you plenty of good nourishin’ food tonight. Jason’s orders. He wants the business of freezin’ to death to last as long as possible, for both of you. So you’ll have plenty of time to think about it.” He fished inside his parka, found a cigar, bit off its end and spat it into the snow. “Jason’s a bad man to cross. About the time you start turnin’ blue, you’ll realize that.” His eyes were narrow. “Holt was a friend of mine. He and me come over Chilkoot Pass together back in the old days. Been together ever since. So don’t think that just because Whetstone ain’t along anybody’s gonna be easy on you, Fargo.” He bent and picked up a firebrand, lit the smoke. “Not any easier than we gonna be on the little lady there.” And his gaze fastened on her face. “Baby, you’re gonna die happy,” he rasped. “We’re gonna make you real happy tonight—all six of us.”
Belle just stared back at him. Then, lips curling, she spat suddenly, directly into his face.
Ralston knocked the spittle away. Then he hit her, sent her sprawling into the snow. “Okay, you bitch. You get double rough treatment for that!”
Fargo started forward, was tripped by bound feet, dropped to his knees. Ralston laughed, raised the shotgun butt, chopped him on the head with it. Fargo pitched forward into the snow. Then Ralston was dragging him up. “No, you don’t. You stay awake. You eat a good supper. You take a nice long time to die tomorrow. We might even leave you a few clothes. Just enough to stretch it out—” Then he shoved Fargo to a sitting position by the fire. Belle Dalton was pushed down by him.
“How could I have been so wrong?” she whispered. She was not even talking to him, she was talking to herself. “About Jason, about everything—”
Fargo said: “What happened?”
“Last night, Dad had the ... the dead drop on Jason. He came into the back room at the store, had the gun pointed right at Jason. But he was ... so drunk. And then Jason drew. It was fast, fast as lightning. And before Daddy could even pull the trigger, Jason had shot him between the eyes.”
She drew in a long, shuddering breath. “It was ... horrible. And suddenly I saw Jason for what he was—and saw myself, too. And then ... then Jason laughed and tried to touch me and I threw myself on him and if I could have, I’d have clawed his eyes out of their sockets. I cursed him, called him all sorts of names. Then he hit me with his fist, knocked me out. I wish he had killed me then and there. This morning, Jane, your woman, came down to the store. She said she was looking for me. I don’t think she was looking for me at all, it was Jason she wanted. But he was rough with her and she lost her nerve or changed her mind. Then you came in. Oh, he was raging after you worked him over and killed his men. He locked her in the back room of the store and he called the other men in and told them to take us out to Granite Valley, like he had done once with a man called Dolan.”
“Yes,” Fargo said. “I know about Dolan.”
“And strip us and leave us to die.”
“All right,” Fargo said, “Don’t give up. We’re not dead yet. There’s always a chance as long as you’re not dead.”
“I don’t care about dying,” she said. “I don’t care what happens to me.” Her voice broke. “I ... I was so lonely before Jason came to Circle. We used to live in Seattle before ... before Daddy started drinking so much and—” she shook her head uncomprehendingly. “Something happened to him, they took away his license or something. The shock, the disgrace killed Mother and we came to Alaska, and after Seattle it was so ... so empty. So different. The men were like ... well, animals, after a winter out on the creeks. Then Jason came, and he was different. So handsome and always so clean, and so smooth. He had no trouble making me fall in love with him. He wanted me to be his woman, and I was glad to do anything he asked of me. And now—” she broke off. And after that, she only sat wordlessly, staring at the leaping flames of the fire, while the wind whipped around the cedar brake and, in the distance, wolves howled. Presently, with their hands still bound, they were fed. They got a lot of food, shoveled roughly into their mouths by Ralston and a man named Wake. Meanwhile, the others pitched a small tent and bedded it deep with cedar boughs and threw a robe over them and another robe on top of that. Then Belle Dalton was hustled to her feet and pulled into the tent by Ralston. Fargo sat by the fire, under guard, continually alert for any chance to escape. There was none: these were professionals. Belle made no outcry. One by one, the men went into the tent, and then they began the procession over again; and still there was no sound from within. Before it was over, Fargo was shoved back onto the sled, bedded snugly in robes. He worked with his bonds for a long time, but they would not come loose. When he had exhausted every possibility, he gave up and slept. He had no trouble falling asleep. It was not only the terrible day he’d had. It was that he knew he would need every ounce of strength for tomorrow. Like an animal, he lived in the present when he could; and he had meant it when he’d told Belle that there was always a chance as long as they were not dead. When and if it came, he wanted to be at the peak of his form to seize it.
But there was no chance. He was not even allowed out of the sled for breakfast; Ralston crammed it down his throat from a tin plate. Belle, silent, dead-looking, came from the tent, was pushed down into the other sled. The dogs were harnessed, strained into their traces, and the sleds moved out of the cedars onto a vast, level expanse of snow that had drifted fifteen or twenty feet deep in places. And it was still snowing, sharp, granular particles that cut like sand.
But the dogs were strong ones and went smartly; and the men were experienced sourdoughs and kept pace easily on their snowshoes. They made good time, and now they were in as wild and desolate a terrain as Fargo had ever seen: the jagged foothills of the Brooks Range, bearing northeast toward the Canadian border. Jason Whetstone was indeed taking no chances; he had learned his lesson from Dolan.
Then they eased down into a valley, with high, serrated, granite foothills on either side. The snow blasted their faces; the wind cut like razors and howled like a demon, funneled as it was by the rocky cliffs on either side. Then Ralston gave the command to halt, and he unslung the shotgun.
Fargo was taken off the sled. Ralston’s lips curled back from half-rotten teeth. “Don’t think that if you make a break you’ll git shot dead quick and git off easy. It don’t work that way. I’ll blast your legs, that’s all. Then you won’t even be able to move to keep the circulation goin’. Now: take off that parka.”
Fargo did not move, only looked at him. The snow stretched away on either side, and then the gaunt cliffs towered. The wind rose, whipped the snow harder.
“You want it in the laigs?” Ralston asked. He tilted the shotgun downward. “You got two seconds to move.”
Fargo fumbled awkwardly at the parka with bound hands. The moment its protective fur slipped above his waist, the wind was at him like a maddened animal, gnawing, biting. But he took it off and stood there in flannel shirt, beneath which there was woolen underwear. Immediately, he began to shiver, as the cold pierced him to the bone.
Ralston gave that gravel-rattling laugh. “I’ll help you with the pants and mukluks.” He hit Fargo with the shotgun butt, and Fargo went backward into snow that almost engulfed him. Then Ralston’s sheath knife had slit the bonds around Fargo’s ankles. His hands jerked away Fargo’s mukluks. Next, he seized the woolen pants, pulled them off, as Fargo struggled dazedly, helplessly, to hoist himself out of the deep snow. When he finally made his feet, he sank in up to his knees before an old crust caught him and bore his weight. There was no hope of jumping Ralston; without furs, he was spastic, ineffective from cold.
Ralston saw that. “All right,” he jeered. “I was gonna strip you nekkid, but you’d be dead in three minutes in this weather. S
o you git to keep what you got on. I’ll tell you what. If you can walk forty miles or fifty back to Circle City in your socks and without no furs, you deserve to live.” He turned to the others. “Git that slut’s clothes off her!” he yelled.
The man with Fargo’s Batangas knife giggled. “You betcha!” He whipped out the knife and it sliced the fur parka cleanly. He threw it aside and then his hand ripped the flannel shirt off Belle. She crossed her arms over her breasts, suddenly racked by helpless shivering, as the wind bit through the woolen underwear, which was all that remained between her naked flesh and the bitter cold. The Batangas knife flashed again; the pants were slit; she was pushed over in the snow as Fargo had been, her mukluks pulled off, the pants following. When she scrambled to her feet, hands still tied, as Fargo’s were, she wore nothing but the long underwear, molded tightly to every line and curve and jut of her body. She bent over, huddled with back to the raw blast of wind; and even from thirty feet away, Fargo could hear her teeth chattering.
“Okay.” Ralston said, making his metallic laugh. “That does it, and an extra two hundred from Jason Whetstone to each of us. I hope you two’ll be real happy together.” He stepped on the back of the sled; there was the lash of a dog whip. “Let’s mush the hell outa here! Hiyaaa, dogs!”
The Malamutes strained forward in their traces. Ralston laughed again. The men on snowshoes hastened after the sleds, turning to look at Fargo and Belle over their shoulders.