Winter Kill

Chapter 16

Frank whirled toward the sound and saw to his surprise that he and Meg had walked so far along the beach the others were now out of sight. The shots were definitely coming from that direction, though. He broke into a run along the hard-packed sand, calling over his shoulder to Meg, “Stay here!”

“No!” she said as she hustled after him. “You may need my help!”

Frank knew there was no time to argue with her. He wanted to get back to the rest of the survivors as fast as he could. It was possible that they had just spotted a bear or a moose and were blazing away at it, but he had a bad feeling that this was something worse.

A point of land jutted out into the water ahead of them. Frank and Meg had walked around it without him really noticing it. That point cut off the view down the beach.

Instinct suddenly send Frank veering toward the trees on the point. “Follow me!” he called to Meg. He didn’t want to go charging blindly around there until he knew what the situation was. He whistled Dog back beside him, too.

They slowed as they reached the trees. The shooting stopped, and an ominous silence fell over the beach. Frank crouched and held the Winchester at the ready as he weaved his way through the trunks. The thick carpet of decaying pine needles muffled his footsteps. Meg started to say something, but Frank made a curt gesture that silenced her. He didn’t want to give away their presence.

As they neared the far edge of the trees, he went to his belly and motioned for Meg to do likewise. They crawled forward until they could look along the beach and see what was happening.

Meg’s breath hissed between her teeth in surprise. Frank didn’t make a sound, but his jaw tightened. He watched as eight roughly dressed, heavily armed hardcases rounded up Fiona and the nine remaining young women. Conway, Neville, and the other three cheechakos were sprawled limply on the sand. Frank saw blood staining their clothes, and none of them moved.

“My God,” Meg whispered. “Oh, Frank—”

“Shhh.”

She cast an anguished look over at him. “But we have to help them!”

“If we do anything to let those varmints know we’re here, they’ll just kill me and take you prisoner, too,” Frank whispered, leaning over to put his mouth close to her ear. “The only way we can help them is by waiting for a better chance.”

“But you’re a gunfighter—”

“And there would be eight to one odds against me,” he said. “I’d get half of them, maybe more, but they’d get me, too.” He shook his head. “I don’t like it any more than you do, Meg, but we have to bide our time.”

She bit her lip as she thought about what he’d said. Then she nodded. “What do you think happened?” she asked as the men started forcing their prisoners into the trees at gunpoint. The hardcases had picked up all the packs of supplies and were carrying them as well.

“Those hombres ambushed our bunch. Conway and the other men put up a fight, but they didn’t stand a chance.”

“Who are those men?”

“Outlaws, most likely.” Frank had been studying the men. They wore fur coats and a mixture of headgear ranging from Stetsons to derbies to fur caps. Each man carried a rifle, and when their coats hung open, he saw holstered six-guns on each man as well, not to mention knives and a couple of hatchets.

“Did they do it to steal our supplies?”

“I’m sure that’s part of it.”

“Then why are they taking Mrs. Devereaux and the other—Oh. Oh, no.”

Frank nodded. “Yeah, they either plan to keep the girls for themselves or maybe sell them. Maybe both, eventually. Sorry to be so plainspoken about it.”

“This is no time for worrying about propriety,” Meg said. “What are we going to do?”

“Wait until they’re gone, then check on Conway and the other men to see if any of them are still alive. Then we’ll figure out some way of getting the prisoners away from those no-good scoundrels.”

“Why don’t you just call them no-good bastards instead? That’s what they are.”

Frank couldn’t dispute that. He smiled tightly and went on. “Even if we can free the prisoners, we’ll have to do something to keep those men from coming after us. Otherwise we’re liable to be in pretty much the same fix we are now.”

“You mean to kill them?”

“They can’t come after us if they’re dead,” Frank said.

Meg nodded and said, “All right. I’ll help you. Just tell me what to do.”

Frank motioned for her to be quiet again. He listened intently and heard hoofbeats in the distance. The outlaws had horses with them, and now they were riding away with their prisoners. Frank listened as the hoofbeats faded.

“Come on,” he said as he got to his feet.

With Dog following them, he and Meg hurried out of the trees and across the sand toward the bodies of Conway and the other men. Frank reached Neville first and saw that the little New Yorker was shot at least three times through the body. He grimaced in regret. Although there had been friction between the two of them at first, some mutual respect had developed, too.

The other three cheechakos were dead. Frank came to Conway, who lay facedown in a pool of blood. Frank rolled the young man onto his back, expecting to find a bullet hole in the middle of Conway’s face.

Instead he saw a deep gash on the side of Conway’s forehead with blood still seeping from it. But Conway was breathing, Frank realized. Head wounds always bled like crazy, but from the looks of it, the slug had glanced off Conway’s skull, knocking him out but not killing him. The outlaws must have seen all that blood and assumed that he was a goner, though.

“Pete’s alive!” Frank called.

Meg exclaimed in surprise and rushed over to him, dropping to her knees beside Conway. “What can I do?”

“Rip a piece of cloth off your dress and use it to try to stop that bleeding from his head. Hold it on there tight. Dog and I will go have a look around.”

With Dog’s sensitive nose to help him, it didn’t take long for Frank to find the place where someone had waited with the horses while the attack took place. That meant there were at least nine of the outlaws. Frank smiled tightly. The odds were already bad enough that one more hombre didn’t make all that much difference.

Dog was able to follow the trail without any trouble. He led Frank through the woods to the northeast. After a few minutes, Frank spotted a rocky ridge in the distance as he peered through the trees. The outlaws’ trail seemed to lead straight toward it.

They probably had a hideout somewhere over there around that ridge, Frank thought. He was confident that Dog could find it later, so for now he called out to the big cur and turned around to head back to the beach.

He hadn’t seen any sign of Stormy and Goldy so far, but he wasn’t surprised when he got to the beach and found both horses waiting there with Meg and Conway. They weren’t the sort to let themselves be captured. They had probably run off as soon as the shooting started.

Frank was glad to see that Conway was conscious again and sitting up. He held the torn piece of cloth from Meg’s dress to his injured head. His face was drawn and haggard with pain, grief, and anger.

“We didn’t have a chance, Frank,” he said. “They opened up on us from the trees before we even knew they were there. All I remember after that is what felt like the whole world falling on my head.”

“That was when a bullet clipped you,” Frank said. “Did Meg tell you that Fiona and the rest of the women were taken prisoner?”

“Yeah.” Conway looked up at him. “What are we going to do, Frank?”

“What do you think we’re going to do?” Frank looked toward the northeast, toward the ridge where he had a hunch they would find the outlaws. “We’re going to get them back.”

With the thick overcast that clogged the sky nearly every day, the high northern latitudes at which they found themselves, and the time of year it was, darkness came very early these days. It began to settle down over the rugged landscape as Frank, Conway, Meg, and Dog made their way toward the ridge. Frank and Meg led the two horses. Dog ranged ahead, following the scent left by the outlaws and their prisoners.

As they approached the ridge, Frank saw an orange glow lighting up the sky. “Looks like they’ve got a big bonfire burning,” he said quietly to his companions. “Probably celebrating their good luck.”

Carefully, they moved closer until they could peer through some brush toward the foot of the ridge. That was where the fire was located, in a large open area where the trees had been cleared away and all the vegetation had been burned off. The big pile of wood blazed fiercely, with flames jumping up at least ten feet in the air. At the base of the ridge itself stood several log cabins, and off to one side was a corral made of peeled pine poles where the horses were kept.

Most of the outlaws congregated around the fire and passed bottles of whiskey back and forth as they laughed and talked about their good fortune, but a couple of hardcases armed with rifles stood just outside one of the cabins. Frank pointed that out to Conway and Meg and whispered, “I’ll bet a hat that’s where the prisoners are being held.”

“You’ll have to make it to Skagway and buy a hat before you have one to bet,” Meg whispered back to him, causing Frank to grin. The girl had spunk, and he, for one, admired that.

“How do we get them out of there?” Conway asked.

Frank studied the face of the ridge. It was fairly steep and dotted with trees, but he saw a few boulders here and there, too. Not enough to cause an avalanche if he started one of them rolling, though. Anyway, a rock slide might crush the cabin where the prisoners were.

An idea began to form in his head. Meg still had her revolver, and Frank had given Conway his Winchester, leaving him armed with one of the .32s he had kept for himself. He was used to a heavier gun, but a .32 slug was enough to kill a man if it hit him in the right place—and nobody was better than Frank Morgan at hitting the places he wanted to hit.

What they needed was a distraction, something to shake the outlaws up so bad they wouldn’t know what was going on until Frank, Conway, and Meg had had a chance to cut down some of them and even up the odds a little. Frank thought he saw a way to do that.

But first he had to be sure of his allies. He looked at them in the faint light that reached into the brush from the bonfire and asked, “Meg, can you kill a man?”

“I can kill more than one if I get the chance,” she answered without hesitation.

“How good a shot are you? Have you ever used a pistol? I was going to give all of you ladies some tips on gun-handling while we were on the Montclair, but the weather was too bad and you were all too sick most of the time.”

“I can shoot a pistol,” she said. “I used to plink at foxes and other varmints back on the farm.”

Frank nodded. “All right. How about you, Pete?”

“I’m a good shot,” the young man said.

“Ever kill a man?”

“Well…no. But I’ve been thinking about everything those poor gals have gone through already and how terrified they must be right now.” Conway swallowed. “I can pull the trigger when I need to, Frank. Don’t worry about that.”

“All right, then. Here’s what I’m going to do…”

Quickly, he explained his plan to them, and when he was sure they understood their part in it, he left them there and started circling wide around the outlaw stronghold, taking Dog with him. Once he was sure they were out of reach of the light from the fire, Frank darted to the base of the ridge and started climbing it. It was steep enough to be tough going, and he was a little out of breath before he got as high as he needed to be.

He began working his way back along the ridge until he was above the fire and the cabins. Once he reached the right spot, he studied the terrain again, just to make sure he had figured things correctly and his plan had a chance of working. After a moment, he nodded to himself, satisfied that what he was about to do was the only chance they had of freeing the prisoners and dealing with the outlaws. He went to the boulder that was the key to everything and turned around so that he could put his back against it. Then he planted his feet against the slope and started to push.

He didn’t have to worry about giving a signal to Conway and Meg. If this worked, they would know when to go into action.

Frank groaned with effort as he strained hard against the big rock. At first it didn’t want to budge. Then it rocked a little, no more than an inch or two. Frank redoubled his efforts. Cords of muscle stood out in his neck as he strained. The boulder shifted again, and this time he didn’t let it rock back. He was able to keep it moving instead. He heard a scraping sound, and then suddenly the boulder fell away from him as it overbalanced and began to roll down the ridge.

Frank dropped to the ground as the boulder’s resistance vanished. He sprang up in time to see the outlaws around the bonfire looking up. They must have heard the rumble of the massive rock coming toward them. Someone down below shouted.

Then, just as it began to build up some speed, the boulder reached the little hummock of ground Frank had spotted earlier. Like it was launched from a ramp, the big rock shot up into the air, arching out away from the face of the ridge. It seemed to hang there for a second, suspended, before its weight sent it plummeting down…

To crash right in the middle of the bonfire and send burning brands flying everywhere like a bundle of dynamite had just gone off.