Wild Wind Westward

by Vanessa Royall

  “Darling, no,” she cried.

  “No? No? If he took her, he deserves to die. Even if he didn’t he deserves to die on general principles.”

  “But you’ll just get deeply into trouble, and nothing will be solved.”

  Kristin was truly worried about him now. His rage, although understandable, made him appear to be what she had always feared: a man like Rolfson himself. No good to tell him, however, that this was what he had promised her he would never become.

  “Something is on your mind?” he asked, gently now, studying her expression. “What is it?”

  “I, too, thought Rolfson had planned the kidnapping at first,” she began.

  “But?”

  “But I have thought much about it. About nothing else, as you might guess. Haakon was Gustav’s pride, true. And I am sure he will eventually try to do something to get him back. But kidnapping?”

  “Exactly what he would do,” Eric declared. “To open up a divorce proceeding, a custody trial, would dirty the air for himself as well as for us. If he is trying to establish himself in business again, he would not want that.”

  “Nor would he shrink from it if he decided such a course might be successful,” Kristin pointed out. “We both know the Rolfson method. They have always maneuvered their adversaries into positions so distasteful that most gave up without a fight. No, he would not first attempt kidnapping. He would threaten to take me before the good people of St. Paul as a wicked woman. I wonder how long the reputation for which you have worked would last once it were learned that I am still legally married to him?”

  Eric came to her and took her into his embrace.

  “I’ll kill him for that, too,” he vowed.

  “No. It is natural to want to do so, but such an act would be more disastrous even than finding my name in the public prints. It would seem we have been living a sham all along, when in fact our life here has been the best I’ve ever known. Until…”

  “Until Elizabeth was taken.”

  Kristin nodded morosely. “Sheriff Bonwit was encouraging, though. A city man in a fine hat was observed two weeks ago in St. Cloud.” That was a fledgling town, about seventy miles upriver from Minneapolis.

  “As if a man of civilized tastes did not once in a while stumble upon St. Cloud,” scoffed Eric. “That proves nothing, and Bonwit should know it, too. No, I’m leaving for Chicago tomorrow.”

  The butler, Sven Engstrom, appeared in the doorway then. “Gentleman to see you, Mr. Gunnarson, Mrs. Gunnarson,” he announced. “Dennis Willoughby. He says he is a lawyer from Chicago.”

  “Chicago?” exclaimed Eric, with a glance at his wife.

  “Show the man in,” Kristin said.

  A lanky, sharp-eyed man in a good woolen suit strode into the room. His manners were impeccable, but he did not seem at all friendly. He studied Kristin with extraordinary interest.

  “You are Mrs. Gustav Rolfson, I presume?” he asked.

  Eric, his passions already exacerbated by Elizabeth’s disappearance, and his hatred of Rolfson, stepped forward, grabbed Willoughby beneath the armpits, and slammed him into the wall. Two paintings came off their hooks and fell, one of them knocking over a kerosene lamp.

  Willoughby looked startled, but he did not lose his nerve.

  “And you are Gunnarson, no doubt,” he said, with a faintly amused tone.

  “That I am.”

  “If you unhand me, sir, I will tell you why I have been sent. You are not, I assure you, aiding anyone by this display.”

  Eric stared straight into his eyes, and at length the other man averted his gaze.

  “My entrance,” he said, by way of apology, “was somewhat abrupt. Mr. and Mrs. Gunnarson,” he stated, “I am here on an important matter which concerns you and a child—’”

  Kristin noted how he said a child.

  “—so I ask your leave to speak.”

  Eric released the man, and he dropped down to the floor, straightening his clothing.

  “You are in my home,” Eric warned him, “so do not presume too much familiarity.” He motioned the man to a chair, and when Willoughby was seated, sat down as well. Kristin came to his side.

  “I represent Gustav Rolfson,” Willoughby began, nervously now. “I am his lawyer.”

  He waited. Kristin and Eric looked at him.

  “I come in the matter of the child,” Willoughby went on, still more shakily now, trying not to look directly into Eric’s fiery eyes.

  “Which child is that?” asked Kristin, in a hollow voice.

  “Why, Haakon, who else?” returned the lawyer, seemingly puzzled. “What other child is there?”

  Eric and Kristin exchanged glances again. Did this mean Rolfson had had nothing to do with Elizabeth’s disappearance? If so, it meant that some unknown—or even random—enemy had taken the little girl, for reasons equally unknown or random.

  Kristin measured the lawyer carefully. Her nerves were taut to the breaking point, but she had, as a result of being in a state of extreme tension, that rare, heightened perception which enhances intuition. She sensed that the lawyer was telling the truth. He knew nothing about Elizabeth.

  “State your business,” she said.

  “Mrs…ah…Gunnarson, your husband is suing you for divorce. Or, shall I say, he will institute proceedings unless you agree to his condition.”

  “Condition?” asked Eric warily, surprised by the singular.

  “The boy Haakon is to go immediately to live with his father in Chicago. For now and for always. All you have to do is agree, and a divorce will be handled without”—he made an expansive gesture with his right hand—“undue public attention.”

  “There is one small matter your client has failed to tell you about,” Eric said. “Haakon is my son by Kristin. Rolfson knows this.”

  The lawyer set his mouth. He was prepared for this particular obstacle.

  “Yes, Mr. Rolfson told me you would maintain this argument. And so I shall have to explain a few things to you. The boy was born while his mother was in domicile with Mr. Rolfson, as his legal wife. The boy was christened Haakon Rolfson, and is in the eyes of the law.”

  “I don’t give a damn about the eyes of the law,” said Eric, half-rising.

  Willoughby shrank back a little, as if he feared an attack.

  “Don’t worry,” Eric told him settling back into his chair, “it’s not you I want to get my hands on.”

  “I regret your attitude, Mr. Gunnarson,” said the lawyer piously.

  “You’ll regret a lot more if you—”

  “Tell me, Mr. Willoughby,” interrupted Kristin, “what is Rolfson prepared to do if we do not accede to his…condition?”

  Willoughby shrugged. He glanced at Eric, still fearful of being set upon by the big Norseman. “Rolfson has asked me tp inform you that he will bring suit here in St. Paul. Suit for divorce on the grounds of desertion. Suit for custody of the child on grounds that neither of you is a fit parent—”

  “What?” cried Eric.

  “Listen,” Kristen said.

  “—that neither of you is a fit parent. You, Mrs…ah…Gunnarson, by reason of adultery, and you, Mr. Gunnarson, by reason of homicidal criminality.”

  “Oh, my God!” Kristin exclaimed. The past had come crashing into the present. It seemed that Eric stood here in the room, his Viking axe poised above the squat skull of Subsheriff Johanson.

  But Eric held his temper. “It would seem your client has much to prove,” he said. “And I expect that he knows how little good a public trial would gain him. He is, as you must know, attempting to set himself up in business. Again,” he added.

  “Yes, Mr. Gunnarson,” rejoined the lawyer, “but bear in mind that the trial will be held here in St. Paul, not in Chicago, where my client resides. To whom, then, would most of the damage accrue? Now, take my advice and give over the child.”

  “Never!” Kristin declared. “Never! You can go back to Chicago and tell Rolfson that—”

 
; Eric lifted his hand to cut off her speech, and she desisted.

  The lawyer was not especially surprised, but he feigned an exaggerated astonishment. “What?” he cried. “I cannot believe this. Do you realize that you will be branded adulterers, right here in the town you have impressed to such a great extent with your decency and enterprise? Think how you will feel—”

  “I know how I would feel if I gave over my son to a monster like Rolfson,” Eric told him. “Now, get out of my house.”

  Willoughby was astute enough to know that any agreement was out of the question. He rose to leave.

  “My client is a long-suffering man—” he started to explain.

  “Good,” said Eric, “then I expect he is prepared to suffer a long time. That is what I guarantee for him, and I trust that you will pass along to him this promise of mine.”

  “Yes, I shall,” said Willoughby, leaving the room. “Yes, I shall certainly tell him, and you may be guaranteed of that, too.”

  “Adultery and homicide,” said Kristin bitterly, after Willoughby had gone. “And both charges true enough, if regarded in the bleakest light”

  “That is just it,” replied Eric, oddly calm, in spite of the situation. “Perhaps, at long last, I have come to learn something”

  “What is that?”

  “All along, ever since Lesja, I have regarded things exactly so. Bleak, fraught with ill luck and tribulation. And, true, how much more terrible have things ever been? Our little girl is”—he did not go on—“and now a trial that will surely give many of our new friends pause. But…but I am finished being the one who waits for the lightning to strike. Now it is I…it is we…who shall wield the thunderbolt. Rolfson is no god. He is scarcely a man. Sc he chooses to hold us up to public contumely in a court of law, does he? Well, I shall fight him every step of the way, with everything we know about him. Kristin, listen carefully. Recall everything you can about Gustav. Everything. He will never get Haakon, that I promise you, upon the strength of my beating heart! Even if he wins in court, we shall go out to California, or on to Australia, if need be. Never will he get our son! And we shall have Elizabeth back as well, wherever she may be.”

  Eric was standing there, in the room before her, and Kristin saw him not only as the man she loved, but as a person somehow transformed by trial and life. All the past struggles, and the bitterness engendered thereby, seemed suddenly to have flown.

  “To find Elizabeth,” he was saying, “I am this day going to hire the best detectives in the United States. We have but one clue, a man in a dress hat last seen in St. Cloud. But St. Cloud is no place for a man in a dress hat, so that is a good clue. There must be more, and we will find them, just as we will find Elizabeth.”

  “Oh, darling,” she said, and flew to his arms, his strength.

  “I am going to telegraph Phil Phettle in Pennsylvania, and ask him to come here and help us at the trial. He is a good lawyer, and a better man. We will do it.” He held her tight, and looked down into her eyes. “We will win.” Kristin saw the light shining there, the light of strength and hope and promise, and she fed on it.

  “We will win,” she affirmed. “And I have just now begun to recollect Rolfson’s unsavory past. Perhaps I shall have a telegram of my own to send.”

  V

  Phil Phettle arrived from Pennsylvania prepared to do battle against Rolfson.

  “So, Gunnarson, you are in hot water again, are you? Well, don’t worry. We’ll be ready for whatever that fellow throws at us.”

  But, surprisingly, Rolfson threw nothing whatever. Not at first. It was almost as if he were hesitating or having second thoughts. Willoughby had called at Windward in August of 1871. Phil Phettle arrived there in September. When no legal action had been forthcoming from Willoughby by October, Phil wrote the Chicagoan a formal letter of inquiry, the response to which came with the first snows of the year. Yes, Mr. Rolfson would file suit, Willoughby wrote, but not until the weather lifted.

  “What does that mean, do you think?” Kristin wanted to know.

  “I’m not sure. I think he hesitated for a reason, but whatever that reason was, he has discounted it. We’ll go to court in spring. As to his remark about the weather, just look around you.”

  The winter of 1871–72 had come down brutally upon the land, creating a trackless empire of ice and blowing snow that stretched from pine forests in the far north to the sandstone cliffs along the Mississippi, hard by Red Wing, where peace pipes once were passed. Snow drifted, too, rock hard and twenty feet deep, out on the southwestern plains, leaving visible only the tops of a few hardy windbreak trees, like stragglers of a ruined army slouching across a wasteland. The same wind that howled triumphantly in the brittle pines roared down upon the fragile huts of settlers, trappers, farmers, icing them and icing, too, the rivers and the fabled ten thousand lakes, and for months on end neither man nor animal strayed far from home or barn. The cold was constant, a bitter, living presence that seemed to freeze the very air, holding the world in thrall. Days were short and pale, and at twilight the sun dogs appeared in the western sky, twin mirages, ghosts of the sun herself, flanking their mother as she sank beneath the dim, ice-crested horizon. When darkness had fallen, the Milky Way exploded across the face of the firmament, and northern lights shot colored fire from star to star, a wild, untamed heaven run riot with eerie, heart-stopping beauty. At the top of the sky reigned the North Star, for which this land was named, the star proud, remote, and pitiless, as if to say: This empire belongs only to those strong enough to bear it.

  But then, just when it seemed impossible that the sun would ever be warm again, the wind ceased. The wind that had whished down from the northwest all winter long was, suddenly, no more. A man might go out to hitch his team to a wagon upon some shivering morning, and he would smell the hint of change in the air. By noon the wind would have ceased, and icicles melted from eaves in the fleet brave pale sun of noon. The night would be cold again, but the change had begun, and it would not stop. Wind rose now from the east, a wet, warm wind, bringing rain. Drifts melted, almost immeasurably at first, until—incredibly—small brown patches of earth peeked out, harbingers of the land reborn. Ice broke then upon the countless lakes, and finally the rivers flowed again out of the north, and it was spring.

  Rolfson struck in the spring.

  “Willoughby’s in town,” called Phil Phettle, rushing into Windward one April afternoon. “He’s over at the courthouse now.”

  Hurriedly, he came striding into the sitting room, to find Eric and Kristin in conversation with a rough-looking white man in a business suit, and an even more dangerous-looking Indian in buckskins.

  “Excuse me,” PM said, turning to leave.

  “No, that’s all right,” said Eric, standing. “Pierce Trifle, Big Elk, this is my attorney, Mr. Phettle.”

  The Indian remained seated, glaring darkly at Phil, but Trifle rose to shake hands.

  “Pierce and Big Elk have been on the trail of Elizabeth for us,” Kristin explained. “Pierce is with the Pinkertons and Big Elk is with Pierce.”

  “I hope the news is good,” observed Phettle. “As I was about to say, Willoughby is filing Rolfson’s divorce suit”

  “That can wait for a moment” said Kristin. “Mr. Trifle, would you please continue?”

  The detective glanced at Phettle, as if he were not entirely to be trusted, but then went on with his report.

  “I made several inquiries in and around the town of St. Cloud,” he said. “A well-dressed man in a derby hat crossed the Mississippi on the Sauk Rapids ferry, bought supplies, and then returned. He was on horseback, and apparently alone. But he purchased a considerable quantity of foodstuffs, and paid in new bills. Currency of any kind is rare in these parts, as you know. Most of the transactions are handled by trade or barter. But few ask questions in the face of hard cash. The man, however, also bought three blankets.”

  He looked at the Gunnarsons. There were no questions, so he continued.

&n
bsp; “After recrossing the river he rode east. I took that same route myself, stopping at every farm or settlement and asking whether anyone had seen him. It is sparsely settled country. No one had seen any strangers. Then”—he nodded toward the Indian—“I sent Big Elk up into the Indian villages around Mille Lacs Lake. And he hit pay dirt.”

  Big Elk looked dour and proud.

  “It was in late September,” Pierce Trifle said, consulting a yellow notepad. “Two white men and a small child were seen camping on the southeastern shore of the lake. They prepared a meal, ate, and bedded down. One of the white men was awake for a while, and then his partner—”

  “Was the child boy or girl?” Kristin blurted.

  “We have no eyewitness account, but I think it would not be incorrect to surmise that the child was Elizabeth.”

  “Then what?” Phil Phettle prodded.

  “Big Elk and I pushed on. We went north first, but found neither trace of a trail nor anyone, white or red, who had seen the three. Then I made a calculation, which I probably ought to have done from the beginning. Assuming there was some purpose to your daughter’s abduction, and operating under the knowledge that she was being taken to a definite destination, I went back to Mille Lacs Lake, and headed toward the only large settlement in that entire region.

  “Duluth,” he concluded.

  “Yes,” said Eric. Duluth, a small settlement on the westernmost shore of Lake Superior, was possessed of a fine port. He knew it well. If there were to be any future in iron ore, the metal would have to be shipped from Duluth to manufacturing centers now being built in the east. Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario: These lakes were the highways of industrial destiny.

  “And in Duluth?” Kristin asked.

  “Duluth, no luck,” Big Elk grunted. “Lose all trail in Duluth.”

  “Assuming they did go there,” Trifle expanded, “there are two probabilities. Either they managed to get a boat east before winter set in, a boat to some unknown destination, or they have managed to stay in the town all winter. That accepted, there are two further probabilities: Either they are still in Duluth, or they are planning to leave. The ice has not yet broken up completely in the north. So Big Elk and I are off for the north again.”