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.
Presently, when it was all over, he knew that the plan was the only chance, and that it had to be put into effect immediately. He came back to the fire, to see Belle and Dolan looking at each other in curious fashion, their eyes meeting, then sliding away. He said: “I’m ready to talk. I’ve got a sort of plan. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. But the only way to find out is to try it.”
Dolan, with effort, wrenched his eyes away from Belle. “What is it?”
Fargo said: “Whetstone’s got an army. We need one, too. If we can get one together, we’ll hit him.”
Dolan’s mouth twisted and he spat into the fire. “An army; Where would we get an army?”
Fargo grinned. “You know the country?”
“Every creek and valley.”
“Then we get our army from every creek and valley,” Fargo said.
And he talked, telling Dolan what he thought. When he was through, Dolan was silent for a long time. Then he said: “Maybe it will work.”
Before Fargo could answer, Belle said, with a strange, metallic tone: “Don’t leave me out. I know how to use a gun.”
Dolan got up, came around the fire, put his hand on hers. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
She looked up at him. “Jason Whetstone killed my father. Six of his men raped me twice each, night before last. He left me in the snow to die. You have steel in you? Don’t you think I have steel in me?”
Dolan stared down at her. Then he took his hand away. “Yes,” he said. “All right. You come with us.” He turned to Fargo. “When do you want to leave ?”
“Right now,” Fargo said, and he got to his feet, slinging the shotgun.
“I’ll harness up the dogs,” Dolan said.
MacReady was a trapper. It had taken him all summer to get ready for the trapping season: hauling steel traps and supplies out to the lonesome valley forty or fifty miles from Circle, making caches, preparing cabins along his line. Then, as winter settled down, he had strung his steel: tree sets for marten and fisher; cubby sets for lynx and fox and wolverine. In the spring, he chopped through the ice and placed beaver traps, and as the ice thawed, he went after mink, muskrat, and otter. It was a hard, lonesome, dangerous job, spending the winter in the remote valley with nothing but his dogs for companions, but already he had brought in a lot of fur, and the prospect of more was promising. “This ought to be the best catch I’ve ever had,” he said, deftly ripping the silky pelt from a pine marten.
“And what good will it do you,” Fargo said, sitting across the table from him in the trap line cabin, “if you bring it into Circle and get so much money from it that it attracts Whetstone’s attention? You think he’ll let you keep it?”
MacReady stood up, throwing aside the skinned carcass. His black eyes glittered beneath bushy brows. “After the way I’ve worked for this catch, nobody had better try to cheat me out of it.”
Fargo’s mouth twisted. “All you’ll get for your season is a rifle butt alongside the head and a chance to freeze to death out in Granite Valley. Like Dolan. Like Miss Dalton and me.”
MacReady drew in a long breath that made his deep chest swell. “I’ve lived in the North for a long time. I’ve never heard of anything like that before.”
“When Whetstone’s dead,” Fargo said, “you’ll never hear of anything like it again. But I won’t lie to you. There’s risk. Lots of risk. You might get killed.”
MacReady looked at him. “There’s excitement, too,” he said at last. “It gets pretty dull out on a trap line. Sometimes it almost drives you out of your mind. Besides, I make a good living here. I don’t trap it all out, I leave plenty for seed. I want to keep coming back and coming back. I have to use Circle as a base for that. And as I understand it, with Whetstone there, it’s not a town anymore. It’s just a hangout for outlaws and thieves.”
“That’s the size of it,” Dolan said.
“Then I won’t be able to live in this country anymore,” MacReady said. He got up, looked through the tiny window of the cabin at the vast and lonesome expanse of wooded valley. “It’s the only country left where you don’t have somebody’s foot on your neck nowadays. The only place where, by God, if you’ve got the guts and the muscle ... I don’t like cities, you understand? Cities stink, and they got too many people in ’em. I came here to get away from cities. But I do want to be able to walk into Circle and not have to tote a gun or worry about somebody hijacking my catch.” He turned away from the window, stood there in silence for a moment. Then he said: “All right. I’ll go with you.”
Dolan stood up. “Fine. You won’t regret it.”
“Sometimes,” MacReady said, “it looks like a man has to fight just for the right to be left alone.”
Fargo also arose. “You know most of the other trappers in this territory?”
“All of ’em,” MacReady said.
“Then you’ll come with us when we talk to ’em?”
MacReady nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll come with you.”
And so it went, throughout all that territory, they scoured the valleys and the creek bottoms. They crossed the Yukon and swung south of Circle City. It was a lot of traveling, behind dogs and sleds, through cold so intense that tree limbs popped like rifle shots, through blasting blizzards. But they missed not even the most remote trapper, the most isolated miner wintering on his claim, resolutely chopping wood and burning it to thaw the gravel to continue his operations. They went up Birch Creek and O’Brien Creek and Seventy-Mile Creek; traversed the Ketchumstock Hills and the Tanana Hills and Beaver Creek. They hit the Kantik River and the banks of the Yukon, and they missed no one. MacReady was a good spokesman. So was Dolan. Fargo, used to raising armies and training them, was the best of all; he knew how to rouse men to action. Their numbers grew. As they traveled from valley to valley and creek to creek—each man with dogs, sled, and gear—they did, indeed, begin to resemble an army.
It was hard traveling for a woman. Belle Dalton rode always muffled in furs on Dolan’s sled. And, at night, she slept in Dolan’s ten—the one he had taken from the men he had killed in Granite Valley, the one in which she had been violated and violated again. Nobody came near her without Dolan’s permission. That made Fargo think of Jane Deering. She had been with Whetstone for nearly three weeks now. He supposed that she would get along, accept the inevitable.
At the end of a month, they had a hundred men. Maybe it was enough, maybe not. There were many more hundreds in Circle, and all tough, gun swift hard cases. But there was nothing soft about the hundred who followed Fargo and Dolan, either. They had wrenched and wrested their living from the North for years. They were like men made of steel.
And then there came a night when, having finished their swing, Dolan and Fargo sat across a campfire from each other, thirty miles or one good day’s travel from Circle City. Other fires glimmered in the basin where they had halted. Fargo blew cigar smoke through his nostrils. “All right,” he said. “Tomorrow night, we hit ’em.”
“Night?”
“About two o’clock in the morning.” Fargo spoke from long experience. “A man’s at his lowest then. Rumors will have traveled; Whetstone will know there’s something afoot. He’ll have guards posted. But even guards sag about two. We’ll time our travel to hit them then. It’ll mean taking off about four tomorrow morning to get into position.”
“Any time you say,” Dolan muttered. He had shaved, during this interval, though he had left some beard, and Fargo saw now the features of a man in his early thirties, weathered, regular, handsome. The beard, Fargo guessed, was to hide a weak chin. But Fargo didn’t worry about that. Billy the Kid had had a weak chin, too; but he had left his mark on the New Mexico in which Fargo had grown up. “You’re the commander in chief,” Dolan added. “Christ, Fargo, if it hadn’t been for you, I’d never have figured out how to get at Whetstone. I shot that note to him into Circle with a bow and arrow; but I didn’t have the guts to go into the town itself and take on his whole crew.”
“Don’t worry about that; only a fool would have, and you’re not a fool. But there’s one thing we have to talk about. Jane.”
“Yeah,” Dolan said; and he took out another cigar and lit it with a brand from the fire. “Jane. Okay, maybe I wasn’t much of a husband to her. But she wasn’t much of a wife, either. She liked to hop in bed with other men, and she was one of these women who can’t rest unless—you know. They’re not happy unless they cut your balls off. She had this thing going in the movies, and she didn’t give a damn about me. That was one reason I took off to Alaska, when I had a chance to work on the preliminary survey team that was to supply Congress with the data about the feasibility of the Alaskan railroad. I was tired of being the woman in the marriage.” His eyes flickered toward the tent where Belle Dalton slept. “Okay. I’ve got some oil money coming to me. I’d give Jane a quarter of a million of it to be free of her. There’s another woman, now. A real woman ... with a quarter of a million and maybe more coming in, we can live well. Damned well. Besides, I’m a man now, not a damned jellyfish. I know how to earn a living, and I know how hard it can be.” He blew smoke. “All the same, I don’t want to see anything happen to Jane.”
“Maybe nothing will,” Fargo said. He thought about Jane Deering, of her lush body and the many times he had enjoyed her; and he wanted her again. “No,” he said, “we won’t let anything happen to her. But for now, let’s turn in. Tomorrow’s gonna be a hell of a day.”
They started at false dawn, a hundred men, each with dog team and sled, each with rifle and pistol and plenty of ammunition. The dogs barked and yapped as they drew the sleds across the gleaming, crusted snow of the valleys and creek bottoms, where the traveling was easier. They fell silent as they hauled their burdens up the high, boulder-strewn glacial ridges. They mushed all day, except for a nooning where pannikins of tea were boiled and rations of pemmican consumed, rich bear and moose fat, with service berries, raisins, currants, whatever sources of sugar could be compounded into it. Then it was up again, and out with the dogs across the glittering, snow-covered flats that would blind a man without goggles. An army of a hundred men whooping to its dogs; six hundred, maybe more, of Malamutes and Huskies yapping and barking. It seemed as if the noise could be heard all the way to Circle. Yet, when arriving early, they camped on a ridge five miles from town, they had met no opposition. Sitting by a campfire, Fargo gloated. Still, Whetstone must be wondering at the lull. There was a chance—just a chance—that now Fargo’s army could catch Circle City off-guard.
A kind of electricity seemed to crackle over the area where they were camped. It was the expectancy of men about to go into battle, something Fargo had felt dozens, maybe hundreds, of times. Nobody slept. Then, when the time came, Fargo got up from beside the fire, slogged around the area on his snowshoes, and roused his troops. It was a quarter past one. At two, they would hit Circle City.
Dogs were harnessed. Dolan, passing by Fargo, said: “Okay. This is the big one.”
“Yeah,” Fargo said. “With luck, the decent element in Circle will join in, once they figure out what’s happening. Maybe another thirty, forty men. Anyhow, it all goes now. On this roll of the dice.”
He went on. “You take the north group, I take the south.” He had decided to split his forces, hit the town from both ends at once. The southern group would wait until the northern one got into position, then attack.
Belle Dalton was on Dolan’s sled as Dolan moved out at the head of his command. Fargo thumbed from his pocket a railroad watch, something else that had belonged to him that Whetstone’s men had taken when they had pushed Belle and him out into Granite Valley to die. It was remorselessly accurate, made for trainmen to whom every second was precious. He held his complement of fifty men on leash as the minutes ticked away with excruciating slowness. Then the appointed time came. Fargo stepped behind his sled, braced himself on its runners. He brought his upraised arm down, hard. “Move out!” he bawled, and then, with rifle and shotgun slung across his parka, the cartridges in his bandoliers clicking in the cold, the sheathed Colt—it was a .45; he did not know where his .38 was—at his waist, he cracked his dog-whip. The Malamutes plunged into their traces; the sled went smoothly across the crusted snow.
Behind Fargo, his army whipped across the snow-covered wastelands. They swooped down a ridge, the last barrier that separated Circle City from Birch Creek, to the southwest. As they traveled smoothly down into flats, Fargo saw, in the fishbelly Arctic dawn a few lights burning below, beside the Yukon. That was Circle.
Then, as they moved in, Fargo realized what sort of opponent he was up against. Despite all the time that had passed, Whetstone had never let down his guard. There were sentries, troops of them, on watch. First there came a crackle of gunfire from the north, as Dolan hit opposition. Then a line of stunted willows ahead of Fargo’s charging dog team soldiers spouted flame. Men yelled, dogs howled and ki-yiied as bullets plunked into flesh. At least a dozen gunmen were holed up down there; and there was going to be only one way to take them: the hard way. Targets against the snow, his forces had to go in fast.
The shotgun in his right hand, a dog whip in his left, Fargo bellowed orders. Cold wind bit his cheeks as his team ran forward and he rode the sled. He bent low, as lead whined around his head. A glance over his shoulder told him that his men were following, shooting as they came. Their fire laced the willows. Fargo himself, in range now, unlimbered the shotgun. Its deep bass roar was a new sound in the bedlam of the night as he raked the line of trees, reloaded, fired again and again. The counter fire from the willows diminished. Then Fargo heard someone bellow: “Fall back, goddammit! Fall back to town!” He kept on shooting as the dogs plunged into the trees, branches lashed his fur clad body like whips. Bodies lay among the willows. Then he was across the frozen creek, the dogs hurrying up its far bank; and then he was out of the trees completely, and he saw the remnant of the guard fleeing into the main street of the town, out of the shotgun’s range. Fargo never slackened speed; he slung the weapon, levered a shell into his Winchester. As the dogs raced on, he fired at the retreating guard, saw men go down as they crowded into the town. Behind him, his army whooped to its dogs and its rifle fire made a crashing in the dawn.
Then they had reached the outskirts of town—those who had survived. Dogs barked and growled, jamming, as the teams hit the end of the street all at once. Fargo cursed, jumped off the sled, turned to bring order out of the attack. Then the night seemed to blow itself apart with gunfire; Malamutes howled as they died under a sleet of lead, and the street’s end was hopelessly clogged. Fargo hit the snow instinctively, rolled over; and then he saw what had happened.
Fearing attack, Whetstone had recruited every tough in town. Now they boiled out of their cabins, formed a great mass in the main street, dozens of them, hundreds, pouring fire in each direction. Fargo’s own men screamed and broke and fell and ran, disorganized, shaken, by that terrible blast of lead.
Fargo cursed, crouching close to earth. That phalanx could never be broken head-on. It had to be taken from the side, the flank, before either his men or Dolan’s could move again. And it was up to him to do it.
He began to crawl. It took every ounce of courage to move forward into that blast of fire. He sheltered behind plunging dogs; some of them snapped at him in their bullet-ripped agony, ripping his furs, which protected him from their teeth. He did not fire back at Whetstone’s men, not daring to draw their fury.
Then he made it; an alleyway between the last two houses at the end of the main street, the ones across from the cabin he and Jane had occupied. He slithered on his belly into the shelter, jumped to his feet. At that instant, the sash of a window in one of the cabins went up. In its lighted square, Fargo saw a bearded face, a pointed handgun. He heard a tatter of words: “—gotcha, now!” His reaction was instinctive; he tipped the rifle barrel, fired. Lead whipped at the hood of his parka as the face turned bright red, then disappeared. Fargo ran, awkwardly, having discarded snowshoes, through the deep snow between the houses. He slung the rifle, brought the shotgun into action, prayed its barrels were unclogged with snow.
He made the back street. Ahead, in the changing light, he saw two men on one side, another across from them. Guns up, they converged on him, spotting him in that instant. Fargo threw the shotgun to his shoulder, aimed. The right barrel roared, its nine slugs plowing into the pair dead ahead. He pivoted from the waist, pulled the left trigger, and the other enemy seemed to dissolve under the impact, just as he raised his pistol.
Then he was in the clear. He ran down the street, halted, selected footholds. Then, like a squirrel, weapons dangling from their slings, he went up the back of a cabin, fingers and toes digging into the chinked spaces between its logs. He pulled himself up on the snow-burdened roof, lay there panting. Then he drew his Colt, reloaded the shotgun, and crawled forward. When he was in position, he cleared a small hole in the snow, all the way down to the sod of the roof, thumbed shells from the shotgun bandolier, stacked them there.
Now he was looking over the forward edge of the roof. Below, in the main street, Whetstone’s men were bunched up, the thunder of their guns deafening as they fired with practiced speed and accuracy. At the north end of town, Dolan’s men were retreating; at the south, Fargo’s men had scattered. Fargo’s teeth showed; it was not a grin, it was a snarl. He poked the shotgun over the edge of the roof with his right hand, the Colt with his left. Then his fingers pulled three triggers at once.
With all those men in a solid block, there was no way he could miss. When the shotgun blast hit the crowd, it was like a scythe going through ripe wheat. And already Fargo had reloaded, was firing again.
Even in the cold, hampered by mittens, his practiced hands could get off two rounds every four seconds. In half a minute, the street below was a slaughterhouse. After a few heartbeats of paralyzed surprise, the men on his side broke and ran; that left the men on the other side vulnerable. Even as they raked the roof with a blast of lead, Fargo fired and fired again, crouched low, protected by the angle of the eaves.
Then he heard Dolan’s cry from the north! “They’re breaking! Hit ’em!” At the same moment, Macready’s voice bellowed from the south, “Come on, you creek-rats! Now’s our chance!” And there was the heartening, staccato blast of renewed gunfire from each direction.
But to keep them coming, Fargo had to take the risk every battle leader must take sooner or later if he would win. He threw back the parka hood, and cold wind lashed his face. He reloaded the shotgun—and then he stood up, exposing himself to fire below. He waved the shotgun high, making a foolish, careless, inspiring, fearless target of himself. “Come on!” he bellowed. “Charge!”
His men responded. They rushed forward. Whetstone’s crowd had broken, scattered, run for cover: doorways, house-corners, alleys. A few bullets whined around Fargo. He could not shoot down into the street now for fear of hitting his own men. Satisfied, still snarling like a maddened timber wolf, he fell down, slid to the back of the cabin, dropped off into a drift behind the house.
Like a lynx, he landed on his feet, never losing balance. Then he was running down the street. A man stepped out of a cabin, saw him, cursed, raised a rifle. Before he could line it, Fargo jumped to one side, punched a shot at him. The .45 slug picked him up, knocked him backward. Fargo had the eerie sensation for a moment that he was back on a movie set, talking to Roy Hughes. Then the snarl of a bullet past his ear reminded him that this was real. He pivoted, punched another shot. The man who’d fired at him from an alley cried out and dropped.
Fargo ran in, toward Whetstone’s store. There had been no sign of either Jason or Jane. But, undoubtedly, Whetstone was holed up in there, probably with fighting men. He would not risk his neck on the street; he’d fort himself in that thick log structure.
When Fargo dodged out onto the main street, only a few hundred feet from Whetstone’s, he saw that his men were converging on the store from both directions. Running alongside Dolan was Belle, stopping to fire every now and again. Something prickled the back of Fargo’s neck. It was all easy, too easy. He was about to yell a warning when it happened.
Fargo was not the only man in the North with a shotgun. Whetstone’s store was stocked with them, and with ammunition. And suddenly it spouted flame, noise, and lead from every window, every door. The buckshot raked the street like a charge of canister, and men Fargo’s men screamed and went down. Before their screams had died, another volley roared from the log building.
“Back!” Fargo yelled above the noise, the roar of gunfire, the cries of wounded. “Take cover!”
His men needed no urging. They scattered dodging behind the corners of houses. Their bullets thudded uselessly into the heavy logs of the store.
Fargo sheltered himself behind a house corner. For a moment, he lowered his guns, fumbled in his parka. He took out a cigar, thrust it between his teeth. His brow furrowed with thought as he lit it. Then he saw Belle Dalton, sheltered by Hal Dolan’s enfolding arm, at the corner of another house. Fargo ran down the back street, came up beside them. He seized Belle’s shoulder, jerked her around. The cigar, smoking, wagged as he talked. “Your father’s office! Come with me.”
Belle stared at him. Dolan was about to speak, but Fargo jerked her loose from Dolan’s grasp. “Let’s go!” She ran with him, through the alley between the cabins, down the back street. In a moment more, they reached the log house which bore Dalton’s shingle. The door was unlocked; Fargo dragged Belle in with him.
“I want everything in your father’s medicine supply that stinks,” he rasped. “Sulphur, asafetida, anything else that burns and smells like hell. You ought to know what he’s got here.”
She stared at him with dawning comprehension. “Yes,” she said, then, and she ran to a back room. She returned with a cloth sack, of the kind made to hold flour on the trail; it was, perhaps, of fifteen pounds’ capacity. She gave it to Fargo, its mouth open. “Hold this!” Then she began to empty canisters and bottles.
Fargo recognized the sulphur, and there were at least five pounds of it, probably more. It went into the bag first, a couple of pounds of the stinking asafetida following. Then there were other chemicals and medicines, all powders. “Manganese,” he heard Belle mutter. “It burns and stinks. And this and this—” She sniffed the jars and canisters as she poured them into the bag, throwing only a few aside.
In seconds the bag was full. “Will that do it?” she asked.
“It’ll have to. Come on.” She and Fargo ran to the sound of gunfire, the siege of the store. Fargo came up behind Dolan, tapped him on the shoulder. Dolan jumped and turned, gun up.
Fargo rolled his cigar across his mouth. “Get your men coordinated. Tell ’em to cover me. I’m gonna make a dash for the store.”
Dolan stared. “You’ll never get there.”
“I will if you people pour lead through every opening.” Fargo’s eyes flared with anger. “Goddam it, don’t stand there like a damn fool! Do what I tell you to!”
Dolan’s paralysis broke. “It’s your hide.” He ran out of the alley. Fargo waited there, smoking his cigar down, punching shots through the windows and door of the store with deadly accuracy. He hoped Jane was in a safe place in there. Beyond that, he felt good. This was what he lived for: fighting, the long chance, the big risk. Every nerve and muscle in his body tingled with jubilant life.
Then Dolan was back. “All set. When you make your run, they open up!”
“Right!” Fargo held the sack in his left hand; his Colt in his right. He let the cigar drop from his lips, pushed it into the snow with a foot. Then he rasped: “Here we go!” And, bent low, he ran out into the wide, snow-packed street.
That was when all hell broke loose. From behind came a fusillade of fire, terrifying in its intensity, as Dolan’s men pumped lead into every window and door of the store. Even so, the men in there with shotguns did not need to expose themselves to aim at Fargo, and as he zigzagged, the air was full of the ugly rush of buckshot. How he ever got through its pattern, he never knew, for it was like charging into a wall of lead. One pellet did rake his shoulder, another plucked at his hood. But then he was across, throwing himself flat, sliding across the glazed snow to the corner of the store, where there was a pathetic measure of shelter. He sheathed the Colt, got to his feet, crowding up against the logs. Then, carrying the sack, he began to go up the notched log-ends like a monkey.
It took him two minutes, the longest two of his life, and during that time, he was a sitting duck and knew it. He was vaguely aware of the whine and snarl of lead, of redoubled gunfire from Dolan, covering him. Then he had reached the overhang of the roof. He threw the bag up and over, caught a firm grip through the snow, and braced himself. Then, with a lithe and catlike twist of long, lean legs, he got himself up over the eaves.
He was still not safe. Whetstone’s men, those who had taken cover in the street, sent slugs searching for him. Fargo crawled up the slope of the roof, holding tightly to the bag. Then he had made it to the stovepipe protruding through the sod and snow and billowing smoke. Fargo laid the bag aside, unslung his rifle. He got to his knees, swung the weapon like a baseball bat. It smashed into the stovepipe, sent the rain hood flying. Fargo laughed, picked up the bag of chemicals, and poured its contents down the pipe.
Then he slid on his belly back toward the front of the roof and waited, guns ready.
It took a moment. Then he could hear coughing, cursing. Wisps of yellow smoke curled out of the smashed windows of the store, through the chinks between the logs, as the load of chemicals smothered the fire and began to give off fumes. Then the wisps turned to billows and suddenly the billows were clouds, and Fargo caught the terrible, acrid stink, and he grinned fiercely. Now they would have to come out; no human could stay in there for long.
Smoke from the broken stovepipe swirled around him; and it made him cough, gag, too. Still, he did not move, waiting. Then they came.
The door burst open. Shotguns roared as men poured through it. But they were blinded, gagging, vomiting, and their aim was wild. The fire of Dolan’s, MacReady’s men increased in fury, cutting them down as they came. As soon as they hit the street, they were slaughtered.
But not Whetstone. Fargo watched, and Whetstone did not come out—nor did Jane.
Fargo cursed. “Dolan!” he bellowed, when no more men emerged. “Dolan—dammit, hold your fire!”
The shooting thinned, died. When it had faded, Fargo dropped off the roof, landing like a lynx, plastering up against the logs of its side for shelter. Dolan was already zigzagging toward him across the street, webs discarded, floundering in the snow. “You fool!” Fargo bellowed. “Get back!”
But it was too late. A gun roared from inside the store. Clutching suddenly at his chest, Dolan fell.
Then Whetstone’s voice was a bellow from the doorway. “Fargo! Call off your dogs! I’ve got the girl and I’m coming out! One shot fired and she dies, I promise you!”
Fargo fell back behind the corner of the store. Yellow smoke rolled in a great cloud from the door, making a screen. “Jane!” he called. “This is Fargo! Are you there?”
Her cry was thin, frightened. “Yes! Yes, he’s holding me! For God’s sake, don’t shoot!”
Fargo cursed softly. Then he roared: “MacReady, all the rest of you! Hold your fire! Whetstone’s coming out! He’s got a woman with him and he’ll kill her if you shoot! Do you understand? Dammit, hold your fire! I’ll kill the man who fires a shot!”
“That’s it, Fargo!” Whetstone called back from the cloud of smoke, his voice jubilant, even though he coughed, gagged. Then Fargo heard him grate: “Move, you bitch!”
Figures swirled in the billowing yellow-green. Then there was gray mixed with it and the crackle of flames: in trying to stifle the smoke, Whetstone’s men must have scattered coals—the store was on fire now. The figures became sharper, clearer. Whetstone’s voice rang out again. “Fargo! Where are you? I want you where I can see you. In the middle of the street—”
Fargo hesitated. Jane’s voice came, quavering: “Fargo, please—he means it!”
Fargo drew in a deep breath. “All right, Whetstone,” he called. He left the corner of the store. With the shotgun dangling from one hand, the Colt from the other, he moved out into the open, facing the doorway of the store, and now he could see Jane and Whetstone, the girl held tightly by a hammerlock in front of the man, Whetstone’s .44 shoved under her arm, cocked. The two of them emerged from the smoke, and Whetstone was grinning. “You’re smart, Fargo. Damned smart. I know about your deal with her. Well, there’s Dolan, dead in the snow; I killed him for you. That’s your thirty thousand, if she lives. But if I don’t live, she doesn’t, and you’re out of the money. So you’re going to let me pass by, Fargo. You’re going to let me take a team and a sled. And you’re going to let me out of Circle City. And you’re not going to chase me. When I’ve made twenty miles head start, I’ll leave her behind, in good shape. Good enough, anyhow, to pay you your thirty grand. Right? But if there’s one false move, she dies. So my life’s worth money to you, Fargo. Lots of money.”
Fargo calculated the chances. The girl was tightly plastered against Whetstone, her eyes streaming from the smoke, her hair a tangle. There seemed no strength left in her to try to escape on her own, even if she had a chance. And he could not shoot, he dared not. Even a bullet from the back might go all the way through Whetstone, kill Jane.
The street was deadly quiet, except for the whine of dawn wind as Fargo nodded. “All right, Jason,” he said. “You hold the whip hand.”
“Always do,” Whetstone grinned. “Stick around Circle, Fargo. I’ll leave, but I’ll be coming back. We’ll have another go.”
“Maybe,” Fargo said. His voice rang out in the silence. “Don’t anybody move, don’t anybody lift a hand.”
“Right,” Whetstone said. He sidled down the street, pulling Jane with him, swinging the gun. MacReady’s team, harnessed, lay in the snow before a sled, only a few hundred feet away. Fargo held his breath as Jason and the girl crab walked toward it. Fargo heard MacReady growl in impotence: “God damn it....” The store was burning brightly now, illuminating the dawn with yellow, flickering light. It shone on Dolan’s body, lying in the middle of the street, in the midst of bloodstained snow.
And then, Fargo saw from the corner of his eye, Dolan’s body begin to move. Whetstone’s gaze was shuttling back and forth, from Fargo and MacReady to the sled. There were so many other bodies in the street, a few still writhing and groaning with their wounds, that there was no reason for Whetstone to pay attention to Dolan any more. And slowly, painfully, like a swimmer fighting against a strong current, Dolan plowed his prone body through the snow, leaving a trail of red behind.
Fargo watched him covertly, determined not to betray him in any way to Whetstone, who was almost at the sled.
Inch by inch Dolan crawled. Then his body vanished into the pall of smoke pouring from the burning store, swirling up and down the street.
Whetstone was at the sled, now, his grip still tight on Jane. He said: “I’ll need webs, Fargo. Drop your guns, all of them. Then bring me a pair of snowshoes.”
Fargo felt a little throb of excitement. Now Dolan had more time. Slowly, he dumped his weapons. He bent, took a pair of snowshoes off a corpse. Straightening up, he walked toward Whetstone without any haste. “Hurry up, dammit,” the man grated. “I ain’t got all day.”
Then a voice said, from behind him, “No, Jason, you sure as hell ain’t!” And something that could have been an animal launched itself from the space between two houses, and Fargo saw the blade in its hand winking in the firelight, and he himself hurtled to one side and landed in the snow as Whetstone’s Colt roared and its slug ripped through the air where he had been.
Then Dolan was on Whetstone from the rear, the knife blade slashing. Everything happened at once. Then Whetstone screamed: in that instant, Jane wrenched loose, threw herself across the sled, rolled to its other side, took cover. And Whetstone was down in the snow, and Dolan was straddling him, and Whetstone screamed again as the knife blade rose and fell and rose and fell.
Dolan’s voice was a roar, an insane litany of hate. “This is for Granite Valley, damn you! This is for four years out of my life! This is for all the freezing, all the starving—” And the knife blade hacked and hacked and Whetstone now was silent.
Then Jane was on her feet. She stared at Dolan, still sitting astride the dead man, chopping him with the razor-edged steel of the knife that had once saved Dolan’s life. And chopping and chopping, in furious madness, as if Dolan would cut what was left of Whetstone into even smaller pieces. And she ran to Dolan, seized his knife arm. “Hal!” Her voice carried clearly in the silence. “Hal! Stop it! He’s dead! Stop it, do you hear?”
And Dolan’s arm froze, upraised. He shook his head, his face a bloody mask in the firelight. He stared at Jane. Then he looked down at Whetstone. As Fargo came up to them, Dolan got slowly to his feet, the front of his parka stained with red. What he had left of Whetstone was not much.
Then Dolan let out a long shuddering breath. “All right,” he whispered. “I’m all right, now.”
“Thank God,” Jane whispered. Then she was holding him. “Oh, Hal. It’s been so long. It’s so good—” She pressed herself tightly against him.
Dolan let her cling to him a moment. Then he holstered the knife. He caught her wrist and shoved her backward, hard, roughly. His eyes were full of hatred as he stared at her. “Get away from me, you bitch.”
She fell sprawling in the snow. “Hal, I don’t understand—” her voice quavered.
But he turned away from her, stood there swaying, red-stained. “It’s not you I want,” he whispered. Then his voice rose. “Belle! Belle! Where are you, Belle?”
She stood at the other end of the street, motionless, for long seconds. His voice rang out again: “Belle! Where are you?”
And then her paralysis broke. She ran toward him awkwardly through the snow, her face both radiant and incredulous beneath the hood of her parka. “Here I am, Hal. Here I am!” She came up to him, and he put out his arms, and she went into them—and she caught him just as he fell.