North Country Cutthroats

by Jon Sharpe

  “Irina?” Fargo knelt beside her, snaked his right arm under her head, gently jostling her. “Irina, wake up.”

  She moaned again, and her eyelids fluttered until they stayed open. Her brown eyes stared up at him, bewildered.

  “I gotta get you out of here—can you move?”

  She jerked with a sudden start, as if surprised to find herself in such a bizarre situation, not quite sure how she got there. As she lifted her head to look around, she raised her mittened hands to her temples and stretched her lips back from her teeth.

  She muttered something in Russian which he translated as “Ah…my head!”

  Fargo inspected her head closely, relieved to see no open cracks and no blood, though she’d no doubt taken one hell of a braining while rolling around in the somersaulting stage like a marble in a tin can. When he’d run his hands across her body, evoking only low grunts and curses, nothing to indicate she’d broken any bones, he said, “I’m gonna stand you up, pull you over my shoulder. We gotta get back to town.”

  She winced again, and he thumbed a lock of hair from her eyes. “You ready?”

  She muttered something again in Russian which he took to mean that she was as ready as she’d ever be. Fargo grabbed both her arms and gently lifted her to a standing position. She scowled and groaned, continuing to mutter in her native tongue, but was able to stand on her own.

  “I’m gonna climb up through the door, and then I’m gonna reach down for you, and pull you up.”

  When she nodded dully, Fargo leaped up through the door, spreading his elbows across the open doorway and hoisting himself up and out. He glanced around, again seeing little but snow the color of oily rags tumbling over the stage as the wind tore at the brim of his tied-down hat. The snow was so thick he could barely see the shoreline. Beyond it, the slope rose into gauzy gray.

  Reaching down through the door, he told Irina to reach up to him, and then, grabbing her arms, he gently hoisted her up and onto the side of the carriage, where she knelt on her knees, lowered her battered head to her mittened hands, and groaned.

  Fargo climbed down from the stage and stood in the snow, looking around, trying to get his bearings in the near whiteout. Finally deciding that the only way to keep from getting lost was to backtrack, at the risk of encountering the Russians, he reached up for Irina and gently pulled her toward him.

  He’d moved her about a foot when something smashed into the carriage housing just left of the door and about six inches from the girl, making the whole stage jerk.

  Irina gave a startled cry and leaped into Fargo’s arms as the report of the heavy-caliber rifle rolled across the howling wind and falling snow.

  15

  As the rifle report was swallowed by the keening wind, Fargo shoved the girl against the underside of the smashed, overturned carriage. “Stay down!”

  He reached under his buckskin and grabbed his Colt from its holster, then lifted a glance over the carriage. The report had come from the hillside, but as Fargo squinted that way through the storm, he saw little but vague outlines of the stage’s tracks and the dark smudges of occasional trees and bushes pushing up from the snow.

  Nothing moved. At least, nothing he could see through the storm.

  The shooter had to be on the hillside, though. Or maybe he was making his way along the shoreline, circling, trying to get closer.…

  Fargo looked straight out over the side of the stage. He thought he could make out the outline of a ravine in what he figured—and hoped—was the general direction of town. Such a declivity would offer cover as he and the girl headed back toward Devil’s Lake. Once he got Irina tucked safely away, he’d get the Russians off her trail once and for all.

  Fargo ducked down beside the girl, lifted her chin with his left hand. “Irina, we’re gonna make a run for shore. You up to it?”

  She nodded again dully, as if only half understanding what he was saying.

  Fargo grabbed her hand and led her around the rear of the stage. He stopped, triggered a couple of shots back in the direction they’d come, hoping to buy him and the girl a few seconds’ head start, then began running toward the trees along the shore. The girl ran behind him, faster than he’d thought she was capable of in her condition.

  Snow puffed up about two feet in front of Fargo, followed by the angry, muffled report of the Sharps. Fargo kept running, jerking the girl along behind him, and triggering a shot in the direction of the boom. The shooter was too far away for the Colt to be effective, but triggering lead in his direction would give him something to consider, anyway.

  Lifting his boots from the deep, grabbing snow, Fargo heard the whistle of a heavy slug in front of him, and a half-second later another bullet screamed over his head. Both reports, too close together for only one shooter with a single-shot Sharps, originated from somewhere off to his right.

  Both Russians were on his and Irina’s trail.

  Another bullet smacked a tree trunk four feet away, blowing up bark shards, as he and the girl gained the shore and climbed a hill, angling across the shoulder toward the ravine he’d spied from the stage. Fargo dropped over the side of the ravine, slipping in the snow-covered brush and rocks, and pulled Irina down beside him.

  They moved along the ravine’s floor until they came to a steep wall about six feet high. The Trailsman shoved Irina down to the base of the wall, then edged a look over the rim, scrutinizing the scattered shrubs and trees through the gauzy veils of falling snow and that which the wind whipped up from the ground.

  The wind moaned, and the trees thrashed wildly.

  He’d been watching for over a minute when a thin, dark shadow moved amidst the trees at the very edge of visibility. It was one of the Russians, angling up from the lakeshore. Behind him, another shadow moved—a vague silhouette of a man holding a rifle in his arms. Both silhouettes, stepping from tree to tree, drifted up the hill through the swirling whiteness.

  When they were both out of sight to the Trailsman’s left—they must figure Fargo and Irina were heading for the trail the stage had taken, intending to follow it back to town—Fargo dropped down beside Irina. He flipped open the Colt’s loading gate and filled the empty chambers from his cartridge belt. Nudging the gate closed, he took the gun in his right hand and grabbed the girl’s arm with his left.

  “You ready?” he said above the howling wind. “We’re gonna make a run—”

  The girl’s eyes were closed, her head canted back against the frozen roots and clay of the ravine wall. Fargo shucked his left glove off, set a finger against her neck. She was still alive. The exertion coupled with the braining she’d taken in the stage had overcome her.

  He had to get her somewhere warm, fast.

  Fargo holstered the Colt, dropped the coat flap down over the holster then took the girl in his arms. Rising, holding the girl across his chest, one arm under her neck, the other under her knees, he moved up ravine until he found a trough in the opposite wall. Climbing the wall, he began legging it across the hill’s shoulder, meandering through the trees, kicking up snow around his thighs, heading back in the general direction of town.

  He ground his molars as a heavy bullet clipped a branch above and to his right, then thumped into a tree bole ahead and left. The report sounded upslope on his right flank, maybe thirty, forty yards away.

  The sons of bitches had found him.

  The Trailsman was already winded by the hard run through the deep snow with the girl in his arms, but he lifted his knees higher, increasing his pace. As more heavy-caliber slugs ripped into the trees around him, he traced a meandering course around the boles, using shrub thickets or snow-flocked boulders for cover.

  He couldn’t stop and return fire without risking getting himself surrounded. One man with a Colt was no match for two Big Fifties. Besides, if he didn’t get Irina somewhere warm fast, she’d die.

  As he ran, huffing and puffing, feeling as though someone were working his lungs over with coarse sandpaper, one bullet clipped th
e slack of his right cuff. Ignoring it, he kept moving, bounding through the drifts, sucking air and gritting his teeth against the pain in his thighs and calf muscles.

  Behind him, a wolflike howl rose. It was followed by a slightly higher-pitched yip. The Russians sensed they were getting close to taking down their quarry. This storm was probably just another windy day on the Russian steppe, and they were feeling their oats. Soon, they’d be sitting around a hot fire sipping vodka and laughing over the kill.

  Another bullet plunked into the snow two feet to Fargo’s left, but just then an especially loud wind gust rose, drowning out the report. It also apparently obliterated Fargo and Irina from the Russian’s view, because he didn’t hear any more rifle fire, though the Russians’ angry, incredulous exclamations could occasionally be heard on a swirling gust.

  Tramping over the crest of a hogback, Fargo saw a sod-roofed cabin before him, flanked by a couple of pens and a privy. Beyond lay what appeared to be a tall barn. Apparently, he’d made it to the outskirts of Devil’s Lake, though the wind-churned snow obliterated the rest of the town.

  Heeling it down the hillside, slipping once in the deep snow and dropping to his knees, Fargo made for the barn. It would be relatively warm for Irina, and whoever ran the place would probably have a rifle or a shotgun—something handier against the well-armed Russians than Fargo’s revolver.

  As he trudged behind the cabin, which appeared abandoned with its shuttered windows and no smoke issuing from the stone stack, the Trailsman glanced behind him. No sign of the Russians. His own tracks were filling in quickly. Hopefully the stalkers wouldn’t be able to track him into the barn, but if they did, he’d have the advantage.

  Reaching the barn’s rear doors, he gently set Irina down against the wall. He grabbed one of the two handles and gave the door a jerk. It came open with an angry rasp against the snowy ground. Fargo picked up Irina, carried her inside, set her limp body down against a square-hewn joist, then poked his head outside once more.

  Again seeing no sign of the Russians, he drew the door closed, dropped a wooden bar through the locking braces, then returned to the girl, who leaned back against the post, her eyelids fluttering slightly.

  Still out cold.

  Fargo looked around and breathed a curse. The place wasn’t a barn—at least, not a barn with individual stalls, a loft, and possibly a tack room—but a warehouse of some kind. And a near-empty warehouse, at that, with only a few empty crates and barrels standing around, about a dozen sacks of parched corn stacked against the far wall. Not only that, but the walls weren’t log but whip-sawed boards laid vertically against a wooden frame. Wind and snow whipped through the cracks between the boards, offering little more protection than a canvas lean-to.

  The warehouse was a giant, one-room box with little or no cover, and it was maybe one or two degrees less frigid than outside. All it really offered was a break from the wind.

  A loud string of Russian sounded just beyond the door to the Trailsman’s right, muffled only slightly by the storm and the wood. The words owned a mocking tone. The bastards had followed Fargo’s tracks, after all. The Russian jerked on the door, but the locking bar held fast.

  Fargo stood, lifted his coat flap, and grabbed his Colt. He raked the hammer back, and fired two quick rounds through the door, just above the locking bar.

  The Russian gave an indignant yowl. There were five seconds of relative silence, with only the warehouse creaking and the wind howling.

  K-BLAMM!

  The blast sounded like the report of a small cannon, blowing a fist-sized hole in the door through which Fargo had entered, spraying slivers. The slug continued past the Trailsman’s head with an angry whine, and smashed through the doors at the warehouse’s opposite end.

  He jerked back, cursing, then raised his Colt once more, and raked the hammer back. But he held fire. No point in giving away his position. Let the bastards come on in, if they wanted him so bad.

  He carried Irina over and set her against the left wall, about midway between the front and back. She tossed her head and muttered in Russian. Her teeth clattered as she shivered. Fargo said, “Easy—I’ll get you warm soon,” then sat down beside her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders.

  He replaced the spent shell in his Colt with a fresh one from his cartridge belt. He knew he couldn’t expect any help. The storm was muffling the shots from most of the people in the town, and anyone who heard them would leave the trouble to the sheriff, not knowing he was dead.

  As the Trailsman flipped the loading gate closed, another blast ripped a hole in the warehouse’s opposite wall, shattering an unlit lantern and chewing into a post with a shuddering bark. Irina yelped and buried her cheek against Fargo’s arm.

  The other Russian chimed in with his own Big Fifty, blowing a second hole in the door to Fargo’s right. The shot was angled so that the slug traversed the room from back to front, and bored a hole in a vertical board just right of the front double doors. Laughter followed, and the men called to each other, joking, their words twisted and torn by the wind.

  KA-BOOM!

  Another hole appeared in the wall opposite Fargo, the slug smashing into the wall six feet to his left, making the boards shudder behind his head.

  More laughter followed by another loud, tooth-gnashing report, opening up another hole in the double doors, this slug ricocheting off a post and crunching out the opposite wall near the front. Irina gave another cry, and Fargo slid his hand over her mouth, afraid the Russians would key on the noise.

  Another blast rocked the barn, and though he’d known it was coming, Fargo tensed with a start. After that, the shots came more quickly, blasting through the boards as though they were only rice paper, threading the air of the warehouse like black flies searching for blood. A couple came so close that Fargo decided to make a run for it. The Russians obviously had a surplus of cartridges, and if they continued at this rate, the warehouse would soon be honeycombed.

  Fargo holstered his Colt, drew Irina into his arms once more, ignoring her protests, and stumbled through the dim warehouse to the double front doors. Slugs tore through the walls and whistled around his head, one skidding off the earthen floor to drill a barrel just behind him.

  Fargo held Irina one-armed as he used his other hand to remove the locking bar. He kicked the doors partway open, peered outside, looking both ways. The shooting continued from the warehouse’s rear and side. Fargo carried Irina through the gap and moved left, kicking through a drift as, squinting his eyes against the pelting snow, he headed up the storm-ravaged street.

  The next building, a small log, shake-roofed structure nearly buried in a drift, was a tonsorial parlor and a bath house. There was a closed sign in the window, but Fargo could smell smoke emanating from the all-but-buried chimney pipe. He pounded the door with the butt of his .44 until the door jerked with a wooden rasp, then opened a couple of inches. A watery blue eye peered through the crack.

  “Go away!” the old man barked. “I want no part of that shootin’!”

  As the old man began to draw the door closed, Fargo rammed his foot into the crack, then drew his boot back, pulling the handle out of the old man’s gnarled hand. The old man gave a startled scream as the Trailsman bounded into the place, the girl in his arms.

  “So much for Devil’s Lake chivalry,” Fargo grunted, taking a quick look around at the barber’s chair in the front room and a curtained doorway at the back. “Show me a bed I can lay her in.”

  The old man drew back—a short, bald gent with a thin gray beard and a face as worn as an old privy door—shuttling his gaze between Fargo and Irina. He wore suit pants and a white shirt with a string tie, a blanket draped over his shoulders. “She a part of that shootin’, too?”

  Fargo stomped through the main room and pushed through the curtain. He stopped and took a quick look around at the small but well-furnished room lit by a railroad lantern and heated by a small, sheet-iron stove. A brass bed lay against the right wall,
opposite a small table on which the lantern burned. Laying the girl on the bed, Fargo turned to the old man peering at him angrily from the curtained doorway.

  “You have a rifle?”

  “No!”

  “A pistol?”

  “Now, look here…!”

  “Fetch it or you gonna be a part of the shootin’ a hell of a lot sooner than you think!”

  16

  Fargo shoved the barber’s extra revolver behind his cartridge belt, ordered the man to keep Irina warm, to lock his doors, and to open them for no one but him. He went out the back, through the empty bathhouse with its two copper tubs, into the ceaselessly raging clipper.

  As he stood on the hovel’s back stoop which was buried under three feet of sugary snow, he could still hear the loud, intermittent blasts of the two Sharps rifles. Visibility was only about thirty yards. Since the shooter behind the barn was a good sixty yards from the barbershop, Fargo figured the storm itself should cover him long enough to circle around behind the man.

  He ran straight out from the bathhouse, his Colt in his gloved right hand, index finger snugged against the trigger. He paused by the privy, looking around as another blast from the Sharps careened through the mewling storm, then continued jogging straight out from the bathhouse. He traced a broad arc behind the man and came up to the rear of the barn from the north.

  One of the Russians was hunkered down behind a half-buried pile of split firewood. He was lounging there on his ass, legs spread before him, a handkerchief piled with long, brass cartridges, and a hide-wrapped flask nestled in a hollow of the wood to his right. Fargo approached on cat feet, cocked Colt extended before him, squinting against the storm.