Wyoming Winterkill (11 page)

20

Jacob Coarse was the last to succumb to slumber. Along about ten he closed his eyes and was breathing heavily.

Josephine had pretended to turn in so that, as she put it, “Hortense won't suspect I'm about to be naughty.” As soon as Coarse started snoring, she cast off her blanket and sat up and winked at Fargo. “Now it's just you and me,” she whispered.

Fargo had something to do first. “I'll be right back.” Rising, he moved to the trees and was doing what a lot of coffee gave every man the urge to do when Josephine came up behind him.

“We have to find somewhere they can't see us in case one of them wakes up.”

“It will be hard to find a dry spot in all this snow,” Fargo mentioned.

“I'm sure you'll think of something.”

“You're awful cheerful,” Fargo remarked as he stuffed himself into his pants.

“Why wouldn't I be? You coming along has been a godsend.”

“Treach wouldn't think so.”

“He shouldn't have tried to draw on you.”

“Hortense would—” Fargo began, and got no farther. She stepped up close, wrapped her arms around his waist, and pressed her cheek to his bearskin coat.

“You smell like bear,” she said.

“Wonder why.”

“This isn't something I would ordinarily do.”

“Make love?”

“No,” Josephine said, stepping back.

Fargo felt her hands move and looked down. His holster was empty. “Damn.”

Josephine pointed his Colt and cocked it. “Please don't try anything. I'd rather not shoot you if I can help it.”

“It was a trick,” Fargo said, furious at himself over how gullible he'd been.

“I'm sorry. But mark my words. I will shoot if you force me.”

The mix of firelight and shadow gave her face a steely cast.

“I don't doubt it,” Fargo said.

“It's Hortense. I can't bear to see her treated like that. You have to set her free. And while you're at it, set Mr. Coarse and the others free, as well.”

“I thought you didn't trust him.”

“I don't. But better the devil you know than one you've just met.”

“And if you're wrong?”

“I'll have to live with the consequences.” Josephine motioned. “Come on. Slowly, if you please. I wouldn't want to squeeze this trigger by mistake.”

“I wouldn't want you to, either.”

The rest were fast asleep, Coarse snoring loud enough to shake buildings.

“Hortense first,” Josephine said. “And please don't try anything. For your own good.”

“I wouldn't think of it,” Fargo said. When in truth he had been thinking of nothing but and waiting for the perfect chance. She gave it to him by coming closer as he bent over Hortense. With a swiftness that startled her, he whirled, grabbed the Colt and slipped his thumb under the hammer to prevent her from firing, and wrenched the six-gun from her hand.

“Oh! How did you do that?”

“Quickly,” Fargo said.

“What now? Will you shoot me?”

“And here I'd pegged you as the one with brains,” Fargo said wearily. He made her lie down, tied her wrists, and pulled her blanket up to keep her warm.

“I don't suppose if I gave you my word I'd behave that you'd set me free?”

“I try not to make the same mistake twice.” Reclaiming his seat, Fargo finished the last of the coffee.

The night was as quiet as before. Not a single howl or hoot disturbed the abyss.

By the North Star it was pushing one when he added wood to the fire, curled on his side, and let himself drift off. He needed rest. It promised to be a long day tomorrow.

Cold woke him. The fire had almost gone out and dawn wasn't far off.

Sitting up, Fargo stretched and shivered and set about his morning ritual of stoking the embers and putting more coffee on. He sometimes wondered which he drank more of, coffee or whiskey. He figured it was coffee but not by much.

The crackling and the aroma woke the others.

Hortense and Jacob Coarse took up where they'd left off, and glared.

Treach groaned and asked for water and Fargo gave him some.

“That was nice of you,” Josephine said. “Maybe I was wrong. An outlaw wouldn't be so considerate.”

“Buttering me up won't work a second time,” Fargo said.

“How about some food?” Jacob Coarse demanded. “Or do you aim to starve us?”

“There's a notion,” Fargo said.

“What
are
your plans?” Josephine asked.

“To head out and find the soldiers.”

“Not them again,” Hortense said. “Can't you come up with any new lies?”

That was when a horse whinnied off in the forest and the clatter of accoutrements heralded the arrival of Jules and Sergeant Petrie and the troopers under him. They looked as if they had been through hell.

Private Benton's left arm was in a sling with a large bloodstain.

Jules drew rein, pushed his hat back on his head, and regarded the figures sprawled around the fire. “Starting a collection of your own?”

Hortense's eyes were saucers of white. “There really
are
soldiers!” she exclaimed.

“Tired ones,” Sergeant Petrie said. He dismounted and accepted a cup of coffee from Fargo. “We both have some explaining to do. How about I go first?”

“Fletcher and Margaret got away,” Fargo guessed.

Petrie nodded. “He had a knife hid on him somewhere and cut his bonds. Benton was standing guard while the rest of us were in the trees trying to find firewood. Fletcher stabbed him and knocked him down with his own rifle, and freed the woman. We chased them most of the day and lost their trail when they took to a stream. So we turned around and came back.”

“Hold on,” Fargo said, and looked around. “Where's Captain Griffin?”

“You didn't see it?” Jules asked.

“See what?”

Jules reined over to a long white hump where the trees met the clearing. “We buried him shallow and covered the body with snow. It was the best we could do with the ground froze.”

“The captain had stayed in camp,” Sergeant Petrie said. “He must have tried to stop Fletcher and the woman and one or the other stabbed him in the heart.”

“Want to bet they find her brother and join up with him?” Jules speculated.

“If anyone knows where Tar is hiding out, it's her,” Petrie agreed, and turned to Fargo. “Your turn.”

It didn't take long for Fargo to relate all that had happened since he had left the day before.

“We've both been busy,” Petrie said wearily. He proceeded to give orders. While two troopers saw to their horses, two others untied the women and the wagon master and his men.

Jacob Coarse seemed dazed. He stared at the soldiers as if he couldn't quite believe they were real.

“Don't you worry, Mr. Coarse,” Sergeant Petrie assured him. “We'll see your people safely down these mountains and all the way to Fort Laramie.”

Coarse had been strangely quiet but he found his voice to say, “We're headed in the other direction.”

“I know. You're bound for Oregon. But your people will need to rest up after their ordeal. The fort is the safest place around.”

“I'll have to think it over.”

“You don't have a say,” Petrie informed him. “I'm under orders to take you and your wagons down, and that's exactly what I'm going to do.”

“It's high-handed of the army,” Coarse complained.

“Not when it's in your own best interests.”

Since the troopers had ridden half the night, they were permitted to sleep until noon. Jules turned in, as well.

Coarse wanted to head back to his train but Petrie told him they'd all go together.

Fargo was left pretty much on his own and liked it that way. He roosted on a log and was nibbling on pemmican when Josephine and Hortense walked over. “Go away,” he said.

“We're sorry,” Josephine said.

“Go away anyway.”

“We were wrong about you,” Josephine said, “and we apologize.”

“Do you, now.”

“You don't have to be so prickly about it,” Hortense said. “Don't you ever make mistakes?”

“I try to limit myself to one a day.”

“Hardy-har-har,” Hortense said. “We're sincere. It wouldn't hurt you to be more understanding and gracious about it.”

“Gracious?” Fargo laughed. “You have me confused with someone else.”

Hortense harrumphed, wheeled, and stalked away.

“Did you have to do that?” Josephine asked.

“She tried to ride me down.”

“She's always been impetuous.”

“She tried to claw out my eyes.”

“You have to admit she doesn't do things by half.”

Despite himself, Fargo laughed.

“We should put all that's happened behind us,” Josephine proposed. “Forgive and forget.”

“I never forget,” Fargo said. “But I'll try if she does.”

The sky had cleared and the bright sunshine made the snow hard to look at. The temperature climbed, too, and by midday some of the snow was melting.

By one o'clock the soldiers were up and everyone was in the saddle and headed for the high country meadow where the wagons were stranded.

Josephine gigged her horse next to the Ovaro and breathed in the rarefied air. “It's a beautiful day, isn't it? Wait until everyone sees the soldiers. They'll be giddy that their nightmare is finally and truly over.”

“Let's hope,” Fargo said.

21

It took three days.

Awash in the bright light of the afternoon sun, the valley was a quarter mile wide and barely that long. A series of gradual slopes led up to it, which explained how the heavy wagons were able to climb so high. But once there they had nowhere to go. The west end was blocked by the thickly timbered slope of a towering mountain.

In the distance, Fargo saw the wagons arranged in a giant circle. Or the tops of them, anyway. They were buried up to their beds in snow.

“Some leader you are,” Jules Vallee remarked as they sat their winded horses after climbing the last slope.

“Watch what you say, old man,” Jacob Coarse said. “How was I to know this valley was a dead end?”

“You never should have brought those pilgrims up here,” Jules said.

“I told you to have a care,” Coarse said, and placed his hand on his revolver.

Fargo hadn't wanted to return their weapons, not after Treach pulled on him. But Sergeant Petrie insisted. Now he dropped his own hand to his Colt and said, “You should think twice.”

Coarse jerked his hand off his six-shooter. “And you should tell this old buzzard to stop insulting me.”

“Time's a-wasting,” Josephine declared. “We have to give everyone the good news.” She gigged her horse and Hortense did likewise with her mare.

Coarse motioned at his men and they rode on ahead, too.

Fargo followed at a walk. Jules and the troopers were in no hurry, either.

“I'll be glad when this is over,” Sergeant Petrie said. “That wagon master rubs me wrong.”

“I get the feeling he's mad at me,” Jules responded. “And not just over what I just said.”

“You reported Coarse to the army,” Fargo reminded him. “You're the reason we're here.”

“Why would us coming to save his hash make him mad?” Jules wondered.

“Could be he's upset at having his nose rubbed in how stupid he's been,” Sergeant Petrie said.

Fargo squinted against the glare, seeking sign of people moving about, and campfire smoke. “That's strange.”

“What is, pard?” Jules asked.

“Where is everybody?”

Jules shielded his eyes and Petrie stared and the latter said, “Damned odd. I don't see a living soul.”

Josephine and Hortense reached the train first and commenced to shout, calling out names.

Sergeant Petrie jabbed his spurs. “If anything has happened to these people—”

Canvas rustled in the wind but not a solitary head poked out as they approached. The inside of the circle had been cleared of snow. Two large cooking pots hung on bipods over the charcoal remnants of fires.

Josephine and Hortense had climbed down and were running from wagon to wagon.

“No one!” Josephine cried as she peered into another. “They're all gone.”

“They were here when we left,” Hortense said, equally anxious.

Petrie instructed his men to conduct a thorough sweep, and joined them.

Fargo noticed that Jacob Coarse hadn't dismounted and seemed the least agitated by the absence of those he'd been hired to guide. “Don't you care that everyone is gone?”

“Of course I do,” Coarse said grumpily. “Mind your own business. Come on, boys.” He led his men toward the far side of the circle.

Jules said, “You know what this means, don't you, pard?”

“About Coarse?”

“About Blackjack Tar. He must have caught the pilgrims with their britches down.”

“Where are the bodies?”

Jules had no answer to that. Nor did anyone else. Every wagon was searched, every square inch of ground. The wagons were undamaged, the possessions piled inside intact.

It was a bewildered group that gathered in the center.

“Don't this beat all?” Jules said. “All these folks, up and disappearing.”

“We told you,” Josephine said. “People have been vanishing all along.”

“Maybe they wandered off and got lost,” Jacob Coarse suggested.

“All of them at the same time?” Sergeant Petrie said. “Don't spout nonsense.”

“Their teams are gone too,” Fargo mentioned.

Everyone else glanced around as if realizing it for the first time.

“I'll be damned,” Jules said.

“Maybe it was hostiles.” Jacob Coarse offered another reason. “The Blackfeet like to steal horses almost as much as they like to kill whites.”

“We haven't come across a lick of Injun sign,” Jules said.

By now, Fargo reckoned, the Ovaro had rested enough. He stepped to the stallion, swung up, and announced, “I might be gone a day or two.”

“Where the hell are you off to?” Jacob Coarse asked gruffly.

“Where the hell do you think?”

“Hold on,” Petrie said. “I'll send a couple of my men along.”

“It's better if it's just me.” To forestall a debate, Fargo left the circle. Since the west end of the valley was blocked and they had entered it from the east and not seen signs of a mass exodus, that left north and south. He looped south.

He figured to find a wide swath of trampled snow. Instead, he found a narrow line of tracks where the people from the train had walked in single file. Or, rather, been forced to walk.

On both sides of the line were the hoofprints of their captors.

It boggled the brain.

Based on what Josephine and Hortense had told him, there were close to three dozen emigrants left, three dozen men, women, and children who were now in the clutches of the terror of the territory. Blackjack Tar could do with them as he pleased, and by all accounts, what pleased him most was torture and killing.

Where Tar could be taking them, Fargo had no idea.

The tracks were two to three days old.

Fargo half expected the trail would take him deep into the mountains but he hadn't been at it an hour when he spied gray spirals.

The proximity to the canyon where the wagon train became stranded fueled a suspicion he'd been harboring.

Fargo slowed.

The smoke rose from a slight escarpment that overlooked the surrounding countryside. If not for the snow, tracking them would have been considerably harder. The ground was bedrock, or mostly so.

The escarpment was crisscrossed with bluffs, creating a virtual maze. The outlaws had made the pilgrims slog along a winding path with more twists and turns than a slithering snake.

When he smelled smoke, Fargo shucked the Henry from the saddle scabbard and levered a round into the chamber. There were bound to be lookouts, he reasoned. He scanned the bluffs on either side but saw no one.

A whinny brought him to a stop. He strained his ears and heard voices, too.

At the base of a bluff to his left were several boulders the size of outhouses. He reined in among them. They didn't hide the stallion completely but it was the best he could do.

From there he advanced on foot. He wasn't worried about the tracks he left; they were only a few among scores.

Staying close to the bluff, Fargo came to a bend. He took off his hat and peered around.

He was boggled a second time.

A broad open area was hemmed by other bluffs, creating a sort of natural bowl. A ribbon of a stream had been dammed to make a pond that had partly frozen over. A long lean-to constructed from pine boughs served as a stable. Two cabins, crude but stout, told Fargo that this was what lawmen and the army would give anything to find: Blackjack Tar's hideout.

The bluff walls were unusual. They were pockmarked with hollows that lent them the look of beehives. At first glance Fargo thought they were caves. Then he saw that the holes didn't go in more than a dozen feet. And in many of them figures were sprawled, bound hand and foot.

He had found the emigrants. The children were conspicuous by their small size.

Fargo's jaw muscles clenched. He had a reputation for being as hard as nails. Maybe he was. But there were certain lines he didn't cross and doing harm to kids was one of them.

The outlaws were so confident they were safe in their sanctuary, they'd built not one, not two, but three fires. It made more sense for them to be in the cabins where they'd be snug and warm, only then they couldn't keep an eye on their captives.

Fargo counted twelve. He'd heard enough about Blackjack Tar to know that none of those at the fires fit Tar's description.

Then a cabin door opened and out strode a man who did. Blackjack Tar was a two-legged bear. Everything about him was bearish, from his enormous bulk and his bristly hair and beard to the hell-lit eyes that blazed from a face so bearlike, the resemblance was uncanny. The bearskin coat he wore heightened the effect, especially since it hadn't been fashioned from a black bear hide, like Fargo's, but from a grizzly's. A brace of pistols was strapped around his waist as was a pair of knives, and the hilt of a third knife stuck from the top of a boot.

Tar moved like a bear, too, with a ponderous gait that was deceptive. Fargo had heard the man was quick on his feet.

Two people came out of the cabin after him: Margaret and Fletcher.

“Well, now,” Fargo said under his breath.

Blackjack Tar walked to a fire and held his big hands out to warm them. He stared at the hollows in the bluffs and said in a voice that boomed twice as loud as most, “I reckon it's getting on to time, boys.”

“Starting in a little early today, ain't you?” asked a man who wore a mackinaw.

“We got so many,” Blackjack Tar said.

“Hell, we got 'em to spare,” declared another outlaw, and laughed.

Margaret was bundled in a coat, her hands in the pockets. “Do I get to join in the fun?”

“When do I ever tell you no, sis?” Blackjack Tar replied. He bent and drew the knife from his boot and held it so it caught the sun and the blade gleamed. “I think I'll start with a female, boys. Go fetch me one.”