Winter Kill

Chapter 17

Some of the outlaws screamed as the red-hot ashes and burning branches pelted them. A couple of the fur coats worn by the men blazed up as they caught on fire. Others ran around waving guns, looking for something to shoot even though it must have seemed to them like the boulder had dropped magically out of the sky into the fire.

Frank lined the sights of the .32 and began to fire, targeting the guards by the cabin. They hadn’t been injured when the fire scattered, since they were farther away from it, so they represented the greatest threats. The range was long for a handgun, but The Drifter was a superb marksman. He tried for headshots, and both of the outlaws went down as Frank’s bullets bored through their brains.

At the same time, Conway and Meg opened fire from the brush where they were hidden. Two more of the hardcases stumbled and fell because of that volley. That left five of the outlaws on their feet. Of that five, two were on fire, staggering around and screaming as they slapped at the flames engulfing their clothes, and another man shrieked as he pawed at his eyes, which had evidently been blinded by the spray of hot ashes. The final two fired back at Conway and Meg in the brush. They must not have spotted Frank on the slope behind them. He drew a bead and shot one of the men in the back, the slug driving the outlaw forward onto his face as it ripped through him. That made the other one whirl toward the ridge and fire his rifle wildly. Lead whipped through the trees near Frank.

Then two more shots roared out from the brush. Both of them found their target, knocking the outlaw off his feet.

Less than thirty seconds had passed since the boulder slammed into the fire. Six of the nine outlaws were down. As Frank reloaded swiftly and efficiently, the two men in the burning coats finally succeeded in ripping the garments off themselves. Before they could do anything else, though, Frank snapped the cylinder of his revolver closed, lifted the gun, and fired two more shots—one, two! Both men staggered and collapsed.

That left only the blinded man. As the echoes of the shots died away, he fell onto his knees and screamed, “Don’t kill me! Please, don’t kill me!”

Frank was sure the man wouldn’t have shown any mercy if the circumstances had been reversed. But that didn’t really matter. He wasn’t a cold-blooded killer and never had been. He stood up and called to Conway and Meg, “Hold your fire!”

He kept his gun trained on the remaining outlaw as he made his way down the steep slope. Conway and Meg emerged from the brush. “Cover the others!” Frank told them. “They might not all be dead!”

He reached level ground and strode over to the blinded man. The outlaw must have heard Frank coming, because he took his hands away from his scorched eyes and held them out in front of him as he pleaded, “Oh, God, don’t kill me, mister!”

Frank stopped in front of the man and drew back the Colt’s hammer so that the outlaw could hear it being cocked. “Are the women in that cabin where the guards were?” he asked.

“Y-yeah. I swear!”

“Have any of them been molested or hurt in any other way?”

“No! I swear, mister, I swear! Nobody laid a finger on ’em!”

“Yet,” Frank said coldly.

“Well…yeah. We…we were gonna—”

Frank pressed the gun’s muzzle against the man’s forehead, shutting him up. “Don’t tell me what you were going to do,” he said. “You don’t have to.”

“I…I’m sorry, mister. We didn’t know the women was yours.”

“How far are we from Skagway?”

The question seemed to take the outlaw by surprise. “Skagway?”

“That’s right.” Frank increased the pressure with the gun barrel.

“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot! It’s about five miles on up the coast, that’s all! Not far at all, mister!”

Frank had already seen that the door to the cabin where the women were being held was closed off with a simple bar, so he wouldn’t need a key to unlock it. There were still a few things he wanted to know, though.

“What’s your name?”

The man licked his lips. “Jennings. B-Bart Jennings.”

“Were you the boss of this bunch, Jennings?”

“No, sir. That was Ben Cregar. It was all his idea to grab them women, I swear!”

“You swear a lot,” Frank said. “Are there any more men in this gang, or were you all here tonight?”

“This is it. This is all of us.”

“Got any friends or relatives in these parts who’ll be looking to even the score for you?”

“Nary a one. We…we all come up here to Alaska to look for gold, but—”

“But that was hard work, wasn’t it?” Frank said. “So you turned to being outlaws instead.”

“Mister, I’m blind,” Jennings moaned. “I can’t see a damned thing. I know why you was askin’ them questions. You’re plannin’ on killin’ me to cover your trail. But you don’t have to. I never saw your face. I don’t know who you are.”

“You’re bound to hear about a man who brought a dozen women to Skagway, though.”

Jennings began to shake. Clearly, he was convinced that he was only seconds away from death.

Frank leaned closer and said in a low voice, “You know what I did here tonight, Jennings. You think I couldn’t get to a blind man any time I wanted? You know what’ll happen if you tell anybody about this?”

“I…I know! You don’t have to worry about me, mister! Nobody’ll ever hear about it from me!”

“Is there any law in Skagway?”

“Law?” That question took Jennings by surprise, too. “N-no, none to speak of. A fella by the name of Soapy Smith sort of runs the town, I guess you’d say. You don’t have to worry about the law up here, mister.”

“That means there’s nobody to save you if you go back on your word to me,” Frank warned.

“I wouldn’t do that! Not ever!”

“Remember that, Jennings,” Frank said, then reversed the Colt and slammed the butt against the man’s head, knocking him out cold and sending him sprawling on the ground.

Conway said, “Miss Goodwin and I checked the others, Frank. They’re all dead.” The young man’s voice was a little hollow, probably because he wasn’t accustomed to the sight of so much death, but he and Meg had handled their part of the chore just fine, Frank thought.

“Let’s go get those ladies out of there,” he said. “They’ve been locked up long enough.”

The prisoners must have heard the crash of the boulder landing, followed by the shouting and the gunfire, then the silence, and Frank figured that silence must have sounded pretty ominous to them. So as he and Conway and Meg approached the cabin, he called out, “Fiona! Can you hear me? It’s all right, ladies!”

“Frank!” Fiona’s excited shout came from inside, muffled somewhat by the thick, log wall and the heavy door. “Oh, Lord, Frank, is it really you?”

“Grab the other end of that bar, Pete, and we’ll lift it out of its brackets,” Frank told Conway. “Hang on in there! We’ll have you out in just a minute!”

They removed the bar and lifted the latch, and the door swung out, revealing that there was no handle for the latch on the inside. Ben Cregar and his gang had used this cabin for locking up prisoners in the past, and Frank didn’t want to think about the unfortunate folks who had wound up as prisoners of the outlaws. Chances were, none of them had come to a good end.

Fiona came out first, followed by the nine young women. She threw her arms around Frank, while Jessica cried, “Pete!” and ran to him. The others hugged Meg, who patted them on the back and assured them that everything was going to be all right.

Fiona stepped back a little, looked up at Frank, then raised herself on her toes so that she could kiss him hard on the mouth. She pulled away after a moment and asked, “How in the world did you find us?”

Frank glanced over at Meg, who gave him that crooked grin of hers. She seemed amused by Fiona’s demonstration of gratitude. He cleared his throat and said, “Finding you wasn’t the problem. Dog took care of that. It was getting the drop on those varmints who took you that was a mite difficult.”

“I see that you managed, though,” Fiona said as she looked around the clearing. “Are…are they all dead?”

“All but one, and he won’t cause any trouble for us or anybody else.”

“What are we going to do now?” A shudder went through her. “I’d like to get away from here.”

“That’s what I figured. Those fellas don’t need their horses anymore, and we do. So we’re taking them, and we’ll ride into Skagway first thing tomorrow morning. It’s only about five miles from here.”

“We made it almost all the way, then.”

Frank nodded. “We did. We’ve come through hell. But it’ll be over soon.”

With Stormy and Goldy, they now had almost enough horses for everybody. Some of the young women could ride double. They saddled the mounts and led them back to the beach where the bodies of Neville and the other three cheechakos still lay. In the morning, they wrapped those bodies in blankets brought from the cabins, carried them into the woods, and buried them in graves that Frank and Conway dug with shovels they also found at the outlaw camp.

Frank had collected the gang’s guns and ammunition as well, along with all the supplies he found. It felt good to have a fine Colt .45 riding in his holster again. The gun was nearly new, so he figured the man he’d taken it from had either bought it or more likely stolen it recently.

They were a well-equipped group now, especially for the short journey to Skagway that they faced. Frank surprised his companions by taking Bart Jennings with them. He had thought it over, and he couldn’t leave the blinded man to wander around in the woods alone. That was a sure death sentence. He had bathed Jennings’s scorched eyes with fresh water, then tied a rag around the man’s head to cover them and protect them from further injury.

“You got a friend for life if you want one, mister,” Jennings declared fervently. “I never should’ve fell in with that bad bunch to start with. The way I see it, you could’ve killed me and you didn’t, so I owe you my life.”

Later, Conway told Frank in a quiet voice, “I wouldn’t trust him if I was you, Frank. Once an outlaw, always an outlaw.”

Frank wasn’t sure that was always completely true. He had known some badmen who had reformed and walked the straight and narrow. He himself was considered a badman by some, simply because of his reputation as a fast gun. But he planned to keep a close eye on Jennings anyway. It never hurt to be careful. Because of that, he had Jennings double up with him on Stormy.

They rode up the beach, the young women using the outlaws’ saddles, and it was a lot easier and faster than trudging along on foot. As the miles fell behind them, the hills on the other side of the water drew closer. The inlet was getting narrower. Skagway was at the end of it, Frank recalled from Captain Hoffman’s maps.

The sky was still thickly overcast, with a cold wind blowing from the north. Jennings licked his lips as he rode in front of Frank on Stormy. He said, “There’s snow comin’. I can taste it.”

“We’ll be in Skagway before it gets here,” Frank said. He had spotted several columns of white smoke rising against the gray clouds and knew they came from the settlement.

A short time later, Conway let out a whoop as he spotted the buildings. “There it is!” he said, tightening his arm around Jessica’s waist as she rode in front of him. “We made it, by God! We made it!”

The women were excited to be reaching Skagway, too, even though it wasn’t their final destination. That was still Whitehorse, Fiona insisted. Frank reckoned she didn’t want to lose the fees she had been promised, and after all she had gone through to get here, he didn’t suppose he could blame her.

The settlement wasn’t very impressive-looking as they came closer. It was a jumble of muddy streets lined with tents, tar-paper shacks, and crude buildings constructed of raw, unplaned lumber. Plank sidewalks ran in front of the buildings and tall pines loomed over them. The waters of the inlet washed against several docks that were probably the sturdiest-looking structures in town.

From the looks on the faces of Fiona and her charges, though, it might as well have been San Francisco or Boston. They were that happy to be here.

Up ahead and to the right, Frank spotted a building with a sign over its door that read CLANCY’S SALOON. Three men leaned against one of the hitch rails in front of it. When they saw Frank and his companions riding into the settlement, they straightened from their casual poses and walked forward to meet them, the mud sucking at their boots. They had the look of a semiofficial welcoming committee.

The man in the center, who was slightly in the lead, was slender, with a close-cropped black beard, gaunt features, and deep-set, piercing eyes. He wore a dark suit and broad-brimmed hat. One of his companions was a burly, mustachioed gent in a derby. The other wore a cloth cap on the back of his head and had a clean-shaven face that reminded Frank of a ferret.

The black-bearded man raised a hand in greeting as Frank and the others reined in. His eyes took in Fiona and the young women, and his eyebrows rose in surprise. He had probably never seen this many eligible women in this rugged place before.

“Howdy, folks,” he said with a smile that didn’t reach his chilly eyes. “Welcome to Skagway. They call me Soapy Smith.”