A Jensen Family Christmas

by William W. Johnstone

  The children gathered around the fire and extended their hands toward it. Luke had bought gloves and fur hats for them before leaving Amity, but he knew they had to be half frozen, anyway. They soaked up the fire’s warmth gratefully.

  “We’ll have bacon and biscuits for supper tonight,” he told them. “I reckon you’re too little to drink coffee, aren’t you?”

  “What’s coffee?” asked Teddy. As young as he was, if he’d spent the past several years in the Mormon community, there was a good chance he honestly didn’t know.

  “You’ll find out when you’re older,” Luke told him.

  Hannah said, “That’s what grown-ups say about everything.”

  “I guess you’re right about that, honey. It does take time to learn things.”

  “Do you have any kids, Mr. Jensen?” Bodie asked.

  “Me?” The question took Luke by surprise. “Not that I—” He stopped short. He’d almost said, “Not that I know of,” but that might have opened the door for more questions he didn’t want to answer, so he just said, “No, I sure don’t.”

  “Then how will you know how to take care of us?” asked Hannah.

  “Well, I guess I’ll, uh, have to figure it out as I go along.”

  They all gave him dubious looks, as if they didn’t have high hopes of that working out well.

  Keep ’em fed, keep ’em warm, and keep ’em safe, he told himself. If he did those three things, then everything else probably would turn out all right.

  The gray light in the sky faded out fast, so it was completely dark by the time Luke had supper ready for them. He had a pot of coffee boiling, too, and Hannah made a face at the smell.

  “I don’t think I’d want to drink anything that smelled like that,” she said.

  “You’ll feel different about it when you’re older, I promise you,” Luke told her as he handed her a tin plate with a biscuit and a couple of pieces of bacon on it.

  They sat on rocks around the campfire and ate their supper. Luke sipped on a cup of coffee and relished its heat and its strong, bracing bite. After this long, mostly unpleasant day, he welcomed that. If he had been alone, he might have laced the coffee with a dollop of bourbon from the flask in his saddlebags, but he figured he ought to set a good example.

  As good an example as a grizzled old bounty hunter with the blood of countless men on his hands could set, anyway . . .

  That thought was percolating in his mind when he suddenly heard a swift rataplan of hoofbeats somewhere not far off. As he lifted his head and listened more intently, he could tell that the fast-moving horse was coming closer.

  Out here, a rider in a hurry nearly always meant trouble. He set his cup and plate aside and said, “Kids, get under the wagon.”

  “Why?” Bodie said. “It’s warmer here by the fire.”

  “Just do what I told you,” Luke snapped. He stood up and went over to the wagon. Reaching to the floorboard of the driver’s box, he picked up the Winchester he had placed there earlier. Without wasting any time, he worked the rifle’s lever and jacked a round into the chamber.

  He looked to see that the three children had followed his instructions and had crawled underneath the wagon. Seeing that they had, he walked around the vehicle and stood on the other side, planting himself between them and whoever was galloping toward them through the night.

  Whoever the rider was, he needed to be careful. Moving that fast in the dark, he was liable to take a tumble if his horse took a misstep. . . .

  Instead, the rider skillfully brought his mount to a rearing, skidding halt as the horse loomed up out of the darkness. In the glow of the firelight, Luke leveled the Winchester at the stranger and said, “Hold it right there, mister! Any closer and I’ll blow you out of the saddle!”

  CHAPTER 21

  What happened next shocked Luke almost as much as a punch in the guts.

  “Mr. Jensen!” the rider cried. “Mr. Jensen, is that you?”

  It was a woman’s voice.

  And it sounded vaguely familiar to Luke, although he couldn’t place it right away.

  The problem was that, under the right circumstances, a woman could be just as dangerous as a man. A bullet didn’t care who fired it. So he kept the Winchester leveled and called, “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “I’m Ruth. Ruth Backstrom. From the café in Amity.”

  Luke remembered her now: the tired-looking young blond woman working behind the café’s counter. She had tried to get the proddy young man called Eli to leave Luke alone, prior to the fight between them breaking out, and from the conversation between the two of them, Luke knew that Ruth was married to Eli’s father. He wasn’t familiar enough with the Mormon faith to know if all of a man’s wives were considered stepmothers to the children they hadn’t given birth to themselves.

  “You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here,” Luke said.

  Ruth cast a frightened glance over her shoulder and then said, “Where are the children? Oh! There they are, under the wagon.”

  Luke could tell she was afraid of somebody she believed was chasing her. He said, “Who’s after you? Eli? Or your husband?”

  “Please, I . . . I came to warn you. Eli is coming after you. He has some of the men from his father’s ranch with him. After what you did to him—”

  “Defended myself from him, you mean?”

  “After you beat him in that fight . . . he couldn’t stomach that. He brooded over it all afternoon, and then he got some of the men who were in town and told them to come with him. He plans to catch up to you, and when he does . . .”

  She didn’t finish, so Luke did it for her. In a flat, hard voice, he said, “Eli intends to kill me.”

  “That’s right. His wounded pride won’t let him do anything else.”

  The perilous life Luke had led had made him a pretty good judge of character. He believed that Ruth was telling the truth. He lowered the rifle at last and let out a disgusted snort.

  “There’s nothing much more dangerous in this world than a boy’s wounded pride,” he said. “Why did you decide to come after us and warn me?”

  “I couldn’t just stand by and . . . and let him kill you.”

  “Why not? You don’t owe me a thing.”

  “Well, there are the children to consider. If something happened to you . . .”

  Luke’s voice hardened as he asked, “Are you saying Eli might kill them, too?”

  He hated for the three youngsters to have to hear this conversation, but he needed to know what sort of trouble he was facing.

  “No!” Ruth exclaimed. “I don’t believe he’d do that. I really don’t. But he’s capable of just riding away and leaving them to take care of themselves, since, after all, they’re . . . well . . .”

  “Gentiles,” Luke said. “Their father was Mormon. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  “It would have,” Ruth answered, “if their mother had raised them to follow our faith. But she didn’t really want anything to do with us or our ways. She was always an outsider.”

  This wasn’t the time or place for theological discussions, thought Luke. He listened to the night, didn’t hear anything except the wind and the quiet crackle of flames from the campfire.

  Then his ears caught a hint of distant hoofbeats, so there wasn’t really time to argue about anything. That campfire hadn’t drawn the unwanted attention of an Indian war party, but it was attracting trouble, anyway.

  “Get on around behind the wagon,” he told Ruth, “and put your horse with the others. Then keep your head down.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Whatever it takes.” Luke looked around, spotted an opening between two of the giant slabs of rock that formed the outcropping, and went on, “You kids come out of there. Go with Mrs. Backstrom and hide over there in that crevice.”

  The three youngsters crawled out from under the wagon. Hannah stared at the dark, narrow crack in the outcropping and said, “I don’t want
to go in there! There could be monsters!”

  If it had been summer, Luke would have worried about rattlesnakes being in the cleft, but at this time of year, they were all denned up. The opening wasn’t big enough for a mountain lion or a bear. He said, “Don’t worry, honey. There’s nothing in there that will hurt you.”

  “Are you sure?” Hannah asked.

  Any monsters were a lot more likely to be out here, he thought. But he said, “I’m sure. You’ll be all right. Bodie, watch out for your brother and sister and Mrs. Backstrom.”

  The boy nodded and said, “All right. Come on, Hannah. Come on, Teddy.”

  The riders were close now. Luke wished Ruth and the kids would hurry up. Bodie went into the crevice first to prove to the little ones it was safe. Hannah and Teddy disappeared into it warily; then Ruth paused at the opening to look back over her shoulder at Luke.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “I intend to,” he said. He threw some more branches on the fire so the flames blazed up brighter. He might need the light to shoot by.

  Then he got behind the wagon and waited.

  The hoofbeats were loud now. The riders were almost there. Luke waited until five men on horseback, led by Eli Backstrom, entered the circle of light cast by the fire. Then Luke thrust the Winchester over the wagon’s sideboard and fired a shot into the ground a few inches in front of Eli’s horse.

  At the crack of the shot, the horse stopped short and reared up, spooked not only by the loud noise but also by the spray of dirt the bullet kicked up when it hit the ground. Eli yelled in surprise and had to grab the saddle horn with both hands to keep from falling out of the saddle.

  Luke worked the rifle’s lever swiftly and fired a second shot, this one whining over the heads of the other men, who were hurriedly reining in their mounts. A couple of them reached for the guns they carried on their hips, but Luke jacked the lever again and shouted, “Don’t do it! I’ll put a bullet through the first man who touches a gun!”

  Eli managed to get his horse under control again and pulled the animal around in a tight circle.

  “Don’t listen to him!” he yelled to his companions. “He can’t kill all of us!”

  “Then I’ll kill you first!” Luke roared back at him.

  That made Eli hesitate. He motioned for the others to stay back, then said, “This is between you and me, Jensen. Nobody else needs to get hurt. You step out here and face me like a man, and I give you my word no harm will come to those kids.”

  He didn’t say anything about Ruth, Luke noted. Maybe that meant he didn’t know she had gotten ahead of him and had carried a warning to the man he was after. Luke wasn’t going to bring her up, either. What Eli didn’t know . . . might not hurt Ruth.

  “If I go along with what you want,” Luke said, “do you promise to take the children back to Amity?”

  “There’s no place for them there,” Eli said stiffly. “They don’t belong in Amity.”

  “They’re just kids,” Luke responded, not bothering to keep the note of outrage he felt out of his voice. “They’re innocent.”

  “They’re not of our people,” Eli said stubbornly. “I won’t hurt them, but they’ll have to find some other place to live.”

  “By themselves? In the middle of winter? And Fillmore’s the nearest settlement. That’s a Mormon town, too. Will things be any different for them there?”

  “That’s none of my business.”

  “Well, I’ve made it my business,” Luke said. “This is crazy, Eli. Why don’t you just go home and let us go on our way? We’ll all leave Utah Territory, and you won’t have to worry about me or those kids again.”

  For a second, Luke thought the young man might listen to reason. While Eli hesitated, Luke glanced at the other men. They were hard-faced, cold-eyed hombres, not professional gunmen but plenty tough, and they had the same sort of fanaticism in their faces that Eli did. Plus, they worked for Eli’s father. They would back Eli’s play, whatever it turned out to be.

  The brief moment of uncertainty passed. Angry determination and wounded pride welled up again inside Eli. Luke saw it on his face. Eli leaned forward in the saddle to make himself a smaller target, grabbed for his gun, and yelled, “Get in there and kill him!”

  Luke squeezed the Winchester’s trigger as soon as Eli moved. Eli was quick, though, and instead of the bullet plowing into his chest, it tore through his left arm, halfway between the elbow and shoulder. Eli screeched in pain, dropped the revolver he had just jerked out of its holster, and grabbed the saddle horn with his right hand.

  In the half second that passed after Luke fired, he saw the other four men slapping leather. Any hope that they might decide to stay out of the fight evaporated instantly. Luke crouched slightly behind the wagon as he swung the Winchester from left to right, working the rifle’s lever and spraying lead through the group of riders.

  Two men cried out and went backward out of their saddles without getting a shot off as Luke’s bullets pounded into them. The other two opened fire. Luke bent even lower as slugs chewed splinters from the sideboard near his head. One of the wood slivers stung his right cheek.

  The Winchester blasted again. A man’s head snapped back as the bullet bored through his forehead. He flung his arms out wide to the sides, swayed for a second, and toppled to the ground.

  The fourth man urged his horse forward and fired wildly as he tried to get around the wagon. With bullets whipping past his ears, Luke had to dive to the ground to escape the lead storm.

  He dropped the rifle as he fell and palmed out the Remingtons instead. The guns came up as he landed on his belly and raised himself on his elbows. The man on horseback loomed over him, looking gigantic from this angle. Flame gouted from both revolvers and caused the horse to shy away. That gave Luke more of an opening, and when he fired again, the bullet ripped through the man’s throat, tunneled through his brain at a sharp angle, and exploded out the back of his head. He died instantly and landed on the ground in a limp heap.

  Luke scrambled to his feet. He had killed or mortally wounded four men in about ten seconds, but Eli Backstrom was unaccounted for. Luke looked around for the young man, expecting him to attack again, but realized he didn’t see any sign of Eli.

  As the echoes of all the gun thunder died away, though, Luke heard hoofbeats receding in the distance. He uttered a heartfelt “Damn!”

  Eli had gotten away.

  And that meant there was a good chance this trouble wasn’t over, after all.

  In the now eerie quiet, Ruth called from the crevice in the rocks, “Mr. Jensen, can . . . can we come out now?”

  Luke looked at the bloody, sprawled bodies scattered around the camp and said, “No, I know it’s probably cold in there, but you and the kids best stay put until I’ve tended to a little chore out here.”

  The grim chore of dragging those corpses off into the darkness, where children’s eyes wouldn’t have to see them . . .

  * * *

  “You could come with us, you know,” Luke said as he turned to Ruth. He had just lifted Teddy into the back of the wagon and set him down next to his sister, Hannah. Bodie was on the wagon seat.

  Ruth shook her head and said, “Eli never saw me and doesn’t know I warned you. He doesn’t have any more reason to dislike me than he already did.”

  “I got the feeling you weren’t all that happy being married to his pa,” Luke said.

  That was true, but he had another motive for telling Ruth she could come along. The idea of having a woman around to look after those kids during the journey to Colorado held some appeal for him. He’d never taken care of youngsters before, and while he was willing to shoulder that responsibility, if fate saw fit to lend him a hand . . .

  “No, I’m going back to Amity,” Ruth said, dashing that hope. “We can’t always run away from the things we don’t like in our life.”

  Luke grunted. Maybe she was talking about him and his drifting ways, and maybe she wasn’t. It didn�
��t really matter either way. He wasn’t going to try to talk her into doing something she didn’t want to do. He had extended the offer, and that was as far as he would go.

  “All right,” he said. “Good luck to you.”

  “And to you, as well.” She looked at the children. “All of you.”

  More than likely, they would need it, thought Luke. It was a long way to the Sugarloaf. . . .

  CHAPTER 22

  Raton

  After their run-in with Clint Starkey and the warning from the Indian boy, Ace and Chance postponed their visit to any of Raton’s other saloons and got themselves a room in the Sierra Hotel instead.

  While they were checking in, Ace asked the short, well-fed clerk if he knew anything about Starkey.

  The man’s eyes widened as he said, “You mean Clint Starkey, the gunman?”

  “Got a reputation, does he?” Chance said.

  The clerk’s head bobbed up and down.

  “And not a good one, either. He’s killed three men since he showed up in these parts about six months ago. All in fair fights, you understand, or what the law considers fair fights, anyway. I’m not so sure about that, myself.” The clerk suddenly looked nervous. “Please, don’t repeat any of what I just said. I wouldn’t want it getting back to Starkey.”

  “You don’t have to worry about us saying anything,” Ace assured him. “What else do you know about him? How does he make his living?”

  The clerk shook his head and said, “Honestly, I don’t know. He always seems to have plenty of money. Sometimes he disappears for four or five or six days at a time, and there are rumors about . . . Well, I don’t really like to say . . .”

  “You don’t have to,” Chance said. “Starkey’s going off somewhere and holding up a stagecoach or rustling some cattle or pulling some other sort of owlhoot job. Right?”