Alaska Steel (A Neal Fargo Adventure #3)

by John Benteen

  Fargo was freezing and he had more clothes on than the girl. “Belle,” he yelled, as they pulled away. “Dammit, don’t give up!” It was a foolish, crazy thing to yell. In fifteen minutes, his feet would be frozen stumps that, even if he survived, would drop off like overripe, blackened fruit. And yet, there was this thing in him: life. While it beat, while his heart pumped, he would not be defeated.

  As the sleds drew away, he slogged awkwardly toward her through the deep snow. Once the crust far below the surface broke, and he went in up to his chest, but managed to scramble out. He floundered on, got behind her, between her and the wind’s cut. He put his arms around her, pulled her to him, her warmth against his. “Don’t!” he yelled, his words distorted by the chattering of his teeth, barely audible above the click of hers. “Don’t quit!” He gestured wildly toward the barren, snow-laced granite upthrusts that formed the walls of the valley. “If we can get over there ...” he yelled above the rising howl of the terrible wind, “maybe a rock, a cave, some shelter ... ” Then he seized her arm. “Come on!”

  They floundered toward the valley wall. The wind tore at them with claws of steel. A few steps and Fargo knew that there was no hope of making it, no prayer of crossing the half mile of blizzard-veiled snow that separated them from hope of shelter. He stopped. “No use!” he squalled above the tear of the wind, and then, with his bound hands, he began to dig like an animal. “Help me! Help me dig! We’ll make a snow hole!”

  Belle only stared at him blankly, shivering, all color gone from her face, as he made the snow fly like an animal burying a bone. The sleds, the men, were black dots, barely visible through the storm’s swirl, at the far end of the valley. Then, as if at last understanding, Belle stumbled forward to dig beside him.

  They worked furiously, frantically, making a burrow in the snow. It was a pathetic shelter at best, without a fire, but it would postpone death for minutes, perhaps hours. Fargo’s hands, totally numb with cold and the constriction of his bonds, were cut by the crust and left red marks on the snow, but he could feel nothing.

  Then, after frantic minutes, they had a sort of cave scooped out. They tumbled in it together, huddling, the girl up tight against Fargo; and it was astonishing; out of the wind, it was almost warm. But only by comparison, Fargo knew; the insulation of the snow would trap some of their body heat and raise the temperature in this hole a few degrees. But only a few; it would remain below freezing—and in a matter of time, they would freeze.

  But for now, it was all they had. In its shelter, Fargo, his fingers past responding, failed when he tried to strip off his shirt to give to the girl, his socks. He could not help her, except to hold her tightly against him. He did that, their bodies racked with uncontrollable shivering. Then, as they breathed and radiated heat in their tiny cave, it grew a little warmer.

  Or at least Fargo thought it did. It seemed to him that it was growing cozier every minute. So warm, so cozy, indeed, that it was making him drowsy. Even as he shivered, he yawned uncontrollably, and he realized that the girl was doing the same. And then a different kind of cold seized him, the chill of fear. What was happening was that they were freezing to death. It came on you this way, the drowsiness, the lassitude, the sense of well-being. Suddenly, brutally, he jerked the girl around and hit her in the face with his bound hands. “Wake up!” he snarled. “Goddammit, wake up!” And he hit her again. “You hit me! Like that. Understand?” His hands slammed her face again.

  Dazedly, she comprehended. She hit him in the face, too, not very hard, but as hard as she could. They crouched there in the snow hole for minutes, insane minutes that seemed to stretch into hours, beating each other to keep each other awake. Then they both ran out of strength.

  The girl fell back in the snow. Her voice was a drowsy, almost inaudible whisper. “Can’t. So tired.”

  Fargo made a supreme effort of will. “Belle. You’ve got to—” He tried to hit her again. But he could not even raise his hands. There was not an ounce of strength left in him. But he felt good, he felt wonderful, warm at last, and drowsy. He would sleep for a while. Then he would awake and try again. But for now ... his head fell forward on her breasts.

  Then he had a dream. In the dream, someone pulled him out of the snow hole. He didn’t want to leave, because he was so utterly relaxed, sleeping so well, but rough hands yanked him into the unchecked raw blast of the wind, anyhow. And after that, he was suddenly swathed, engulfed, in soft, warm fur. And he could even feel again. There were mukluks on his feet, the parka’s hood shielding his head. And Belle was there beside him, like himself, dressed in furs and standing, swaying, up to her thighs in snow.

  Then something raw and hot trickled down Fargo’s throat, pouring between clenched teeth. It hit his stomach, exploded in a burst of incredible warmth in his belly. The world swam, came into focus. He found himself staring into a face burnt leathery, and peeling from cold and wind. It was almost all beard, but the eyes in that face were what seized his attention. They were dark blue and glowing like coals, and lit with something that looked like insanity.

  Fargo reached for the whiskey bottle again with his own unbound hands. He took another long swig.

  The creature in furs and beard standing before him was real. Fargo swayed. His cold-blistered lips peeled back from his teeth. “Who’re you?”

  “I’m Dolan,” the man said, and he took the bottle and turned and crammed the neck of it into Belle’s mouth.

  Fargo fought back a scream.

  The agony was excruciating. It was like being burned alive. Vaguely, he realized that Belle was screaming, too, as circulation returned to frostbitten hands and feet.

  It was warm here, but not too warm, and his extremities were being massaged furiously. That was what made them hurt so terribly. He focused his eyes again and saw the rock walls of a cave, lit by leaping flames. Belle screamed once more.

  Fargo had a vague memory of a sled. It had moved under him, and Belle had lain against him in it, beneath fur robes. It had not traveled very far—or he had passed out. He remembered climbing, too, on feet that were like chunks of wood. That was all he remembered, until the pain seared him back to full consciousness.

  “Christ,” he heard a voice say, “I got you just in time. Another five minutes and these toes would have been past saving.”

  Belle went on screaming.

  Fargo wrestled himself into a sitting position. Yes, he was in a firelit cave. He heard his own voice from very far away. “Gimme some more of that whiskey.”

  “There isn’t much.”

  “I’ll get you plenty more when I go back to Circle City.”

  There was a short, sharp bark, like a fox’s yap. It was a laugh. “Maybe you will.” The neck of the whiskey bottle touched Fargo’s lips again.

  He drank long, deeply, greedily. Once the stuff exploded in his gut again, he was all right. “I can do it,” he said. “See to her.” He began to rub his own feet with his hands. It hurt like hell, but he did it fiercely.

  Dolan scuttled across the cave. Belle’s screaming died, but she moaned with the pain, as circulation returned, as the man rubbed her extremities. Once he took the bottle away from Fargo, poured a lot of what remained in it down her throat. At last, she sat up, breathing hard. “I’m all right,” she whispered wonderingly. “I’m all right. I really am.”

  “Good,” the man said. He turned away from her, went to the fire and piled on more wood. “You can come close now and get warm.”

  Fargo and Belle hitched up to the blaze. The cave, Fargo saw, was big and deep, but its mouth was very small, only a slit.

  Then he looked at Dolan, squatting across the fire. Dolan was not at all as Fargo had imagined him. He was big and brawny, and, shagged all over with furs, he looked like some great animal peering across the flames. His eyes reinforced that impression; they were keen and totally savage. Fargo could not see much of his actual features; they were obscured by an unkempt beard.

  There was a rifle cradled acr
oss Dolan’s thighs. He turned the muzzle of it toward Fargo. “Now,” he said. “I want to know who you are and what you’re doing here. Why did Whetstone’s men drag you out here to freeze like they did me? It’s been a long time since he’s done that to anybody.” White teeth gleamed in the bush of his beard. “I was the last one.”

  “It’s a long story,” Fargo said. “But there was a time when you had a wife. Now she’s in Circle City.”

  The pupils of Dolan’s eyes, firelit, turned yellow as he stared at Fargo. His lips formed a single word: Jane. Then he whispered: “You’re lying. Either you’re lying or I’m crazy. Jane’s not in Circle City.”

  “She is,” Fargo said.

  Dolan worked the cocking lever of the rifle and raised the gun, thrusting it forward. “Then you’d better tell me how and why,” he said.

  And so Fargo told him. It took a while. As he talked, Dolan blinked, his eyes growing large in wonder. His posture changed, he dropped back to a sitting position, the gun pointed away, its hammer eased down. When Fargo was through, Dolan’s mouth was wry, bitter. “But it wasn’t me she came after. It was the money.”

  “Yes,” Fargo said.

  Dolan got to his feet; with the rifle in his hand, he began to pace the cave. “Well, I can’t blame her for that. I was never any good to her. It takes a lot of man for a woman like her, and I wasn’t much of a man—in the old days. Always running away, dodging responsibility, afraid of my own shadow....”

  “You’ve changed.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’ve changed. Before, I didn’t have any steel in my soul. But Alaska ... what happened to me here ... either you turn into steel or you break.”

  Fargo drew on a cigar Dolan had given him; the smoke was absolutely delicious after what he’d been through. “What happened to you? I know some of it—”

  “I wrote Jane that I was onto something. What happened was that I hit a pocket of gold up toward the Porcupine River. Like a fool, instead of going to Dawson, I came back to Circle; I had debts to pay there. Brought fifteen thousand in dust with me. That was a lot of money to me in those days. Whetstone found out I had it and he wanted it, framed me for cache robbing. Then he and his Committee of Ten passed judgment on me. They brought me out here just like they did you, stripped me of my furs, of everything, left me to die.”

  “How’d you survive?”

  “By a damned miracle. One of ’em was careless, left a knife where I could get to it. I managed to hide it all the way down inside a buckskin sock, and they missed it when they searched me for it. They left fewer clothes on me than they did on you, stripped me down to long-johns and socks, and it was colder then than now. But ... I wasn’t about to die. When they went off and left me, something happened inside of me. The hate I felt—for Whetstone, the Committee, his whole crowd. It was like a fire in me, and I knew I wasn’t going to give up. I knew that somehow I was going to live until I had my revenge on all of ’em.”

  He paused. “That was when the steel came into my soul, I think. That was when I turned to steel inside, you understand? Well, never mind that. Anyhow, there was a miracle they didn’t count on; the knife and something else. They were just clear of the valley, and I was huddled in a snow hole, like you—and then the wolves and the moose came.”

  He took out a cigar, squatted before the fire, lit it. “It was a big bull a pack of wolves had been chasing for a long time through deep snow. Finally it gave out, not a hundred yards from where I was, turned on ’em. There were five, six wolves; they kept at the bull until they brought it down. But it killed two of them while they were at it, split their skulls with its hoofs. Then they went at the carcass, and when that happened, I charged in. It was a crazy thing to do, of course, but what the hell? As well let the wolves finish me as freeze—”

  “Generally, wolves will run from a man,” Fargo said. “But not when he’s trying to chase ’em off their kill.”

  “They didn’t run—at first. I could show you the scars down under here.” He tapped the parka. “But the moose had accounted for two, I got two more with the knife in the fight, and the other two were just pups; they took off. Of course, by that time, I was about to freeze. Seconds more and I would have. I took the knife and ripped open the moose’s belly, crawled inside it. There was enough body heat left to save me. I dragged the dead wolves there with me, managed somehow to get the skins off of ’em. They helped. I lay inside that dead moose all night, in its blood and in its guts, and by the next morning, the snow had stopped, the wind died. Then I got out, with the wolf skins wrapped around me. I managed to skin part of the moose, make a kind of cloak out of that. It took me all morning to get across the valley, climb this wall, find this cave. By then, I was more dead than alive ... but I made it.”

  Belle Dalton was staring at him. “But fire,” she said. “You needed fire.”

  “I made it. The knife blade and flint, and tinder from rats’ nests—and there was wood. Some Indians must have use the cave once; they left a little behind. They always try to do that, you know, in case they have to come back.”

  He blew smoke through his nostrils. “Well, to make a long story short, I used every part of that dead moose and those wolves. I laced together a sort of parka out of wolf skins and moose hide, using the back and the hind leg sinews and moose-hide thongs, like the Indians. It was stiff, but it kept me from freezing. I managed to rig some snowshoes, crude, laced with moose hide. I ate those critters while I did this, every scrap of meat down to the guts. When I could move out, I carried fire with me, in a moose-hide bucket lined with rocks, and plenty of dry tinder in case it went out.”

  He sighed. “The trip wasn’t easy. I never want to go through anything like that again. I was afraid they’d come back to check on me, catch me unarmed and finish me off. So I kept to cover as much as I could. But finally I made it down out of the foothills far enough to hit the end of somebody’s trap line. There was a cache there, up on poles. Okay, I’d been convicted of cache robbing; now I really did it. That man had provided for everything. There were furs, extra snowshoes—and a pistol and a box of ammunition. So now I was set ... And I knew where Rolfe was wintering—he was one of the Committee and his place was closest. I caught him coming in off his trap line and—well, he was number one, and after I had his goods, his rifle, his snowshoes, his dogs and everything—I went after the others. They’re all dead now, except for Hannon, Lucas—and Whetstone.”

  “What did you do to Lucas? To Denny?”

  Dolan’s teeth showed in a terrible grin. “He was the weakest one of all. He was also the one who protested what they did to me—not much, but just a little. I decided to let him live. But he was snowed in, and I haunted him like a ghost. He never knew when I was going to strike. Every time he tried to step outside that cabin, I drove him back in with lead. Finally he quit coming outside. Spring came, I moved in on him. He was a blithering idiot by then. You see, he never got the iron into him, like I did, he couldn’t stand it. Anyhow, I figured I’d taken care of him and although I could have shot him like a pig, I spared him.”

  He threw the cigar butt into the fire. “Hannon went outside. Ran. That left Whetstone.” His eyes glittered. “Whetstone’s the one I want, the one I’ve been waiting for. But he keeps himself shut up tight in Circle, gunmen all around him. I haven’t been able to get to him ... One man couldn’t do it by himself. But—” he looked at Fargo. “Maybe I’ve got help now.”

  Fargo also threw his cigar away.

  “You give me something to shoot with,” he said, “and you’ve got help.”

  “I’ll give you something,” Dolan said with a grin. He got up, went to the back of the cave. He came back carrying an armload of weapons, put them down carefully by the fire. Fargo made a sound when he saw his Fox shotgun and its bandolier of shells, his Batangas knife, among the armament. “Where the hell—?”

  “Whetstone’s men,” Dolan said in a cold voice. “They didn’t get far. I was waiting for ’em at the mouth of the valley
with a rifle and good cover. They were out in the open and it was like a shooting gallery. That’s where the furs you two are wearing came from, too. I don’t ever leave anything behind, Fargo. What I can’t use right away, I cache. I’ve got caches all over this territory, guns, furs, snowshoes, waterproof matches—”

  Fargo picked up the shotgun, caressed it like a lover touching his woman. Its cold steel felt good in his big hands; all at once, he was whole, complete again. He made his wolf’s grin. “Then don’t worry,” he said. “Jason Whetstone don’t know it yet—but as of this minute, he’s a dead man.”

  Chapter Nine

  But it was not, Fargo knew, going to be easy. Whetstone had an unlimited supply of fighting men. There was not one of the hard cases on the dodge from Canada who would not sign on with Whetstone for a hundred bucks worth of dust—and when his men failed to return from Granite Valley, Whetstone would know something was up. He would gather men to him until he had an army, maybe even realizing that now he had Fargo against him as well as Dolan. And, on top of everything else, there was the safety of Jane to worry about. Whetstone held her as hostage; and neither Dolan nor Fargo wanted to see her killed. Somehow they would have to get Whetstone without jeopardizing her.

  Fargo ate massively, drank quarts of hot tea, an occasional shot of liquor, and let warmth soak through him to the bone, while he considered the situation. This was his meat and drink: warfare, against long odds. His mind worked like a machine, tallying this, that, and slowly the outlines of a plan took shape. But he did not discuss it with Dolan immediately: he wanted to make sure it would work, first.

  Meanwhile, Belle thawed, too. It was warm enough in the cave to allow her to shed her furs; she moved around in the tight-fitting underwear, which revealed every curve of her body; and Fargo did not miss the way Dolan’s eyes followed her. It had, he guessed, been a very long time since Dolan had had a woman—perhaps years. There came a time when Dolan stood up and went to her, as she worked in the back of the cave, preparing food. They were obscured in shadows; Fargo heard only a tatter of words. And they were from Belle. “Why not? You saved us. And after all those others—” Fargo went to the mouth of the cave, rifle and shotgun cradled in his arms. He looked out over the windswept valley. The sun had come out, briefly, and made the snow glint brightly. Fargo lay there and thought, keeping guard and trying not to hear the sounds that came from the pile of fur robes in the back of the cave.