The rifle was harder to fire one-handed, and the recoil kicked the barrel high. As Smoke was bringing it down, he felt the heat of a bullet whipping past his cheek, and then in the next split second, a hammer blow smashed into his left side, high up just below the shoulder. The impact twisted him halfway around in the saddle. His left arm went numb with shock, and the rifle slipped from his fingers.
* * *
Even caught in the crossfire, only a few of the rustlers wheeled around and opened fire on the threat coming up from behind them. Most charged ahead, intent on overrunning and overwhelming the group from the Sugarloaf.
Denny heard slugs whining through the air near her head. She would have been scared half to death—if there had been time for that. She allowed her instincts to take over, veered the buckskin to the left, and kept shooting. Her bullets spooked the attackers. They peeled away and circled back toward the main fight.
The dark maw of the canyon mouth loomed on Denny’s left. She could have darted in there and hidden until the battle was over, thus staying fairly safe from stray bullets. But there was no guarantee that Smoke and his allies would win. From what she had been able to see, they were outnumbered. She wanted to help so pressed on.
The battle had broken down and spread out into smaller confrontations. Muzzle flame spurted here and there like a sprawling cloud of deadly fireflies. Denny raced toward one of those clashes, hoping she would be able to tell friend from foe. If she couldn’t, she would have to hold her fire.
* * *
Since he was already slewed to the side, Smoke didn’t have as far to bring the Colt around to meet the remaining threat. A flood of pain washed away the numbness that had gripped him when he was hit, but he tightened his jaw against it and triggered a pair of swift shots. Only a few yards away, the man who’d wounded him rocked backwards in the saddle but didn’t fall. His horse charged on, wild and out of control.
Sensing the imminent collision between the two horses, Smoke kicked his feet free of the stirrups and was thrown clear when they crashed together and went down. Unfortunately, he landed on his wounded shoulder, which caused such a blinding explosion of agony that for a moment he was unaware of anything else and unable to move.
* * *
In one of the split seconds of glare that ripped the night apart, Denny saw two horses crash together and one of the riders fly through the air, land hard, and roll over a couple times. She watched as another rider spurred toward him.
* * *
When his senses came back to him, Smoke lifted his head and saw a huge dark shape looming above him, blotting out the stars and the moon.
It was a man on horseback, who shouted, “Now you’ll die for what you’ve done, Jensen!”
The barrel of a pistol swung swiftly toward Smoke.
Denny knew the only other Jensen out there was her father. The carbine flashed up to her shoulder and barked as soon as she lined the barrel on the shadowy target. The man cried out in pain as the slug raked him somewhere. The pistol fell from his hand.
Denny worked the carbine’s lever and fired again, but the man had already bent forward in the saddle to make himself a smaller target, or he slumped that way because he was wounded. The bullet whipped harmlessly over his head. He was able to yank the horse around and jab his spurs viciously into its flanks. The animal let out a shrill scream but leaped away. Denny fired again and grimaced because she knew she had missed.
She sent the buckskin pounding toward the fallen man, leaped down while the horse was still moving, staggered forward a step, and dropped to her knees beside him. He was struggling to sit up. He had lost his hat when he fell, and in the moonlight she was able to make out the familiar features. “Pa, are you hit?” she asked as she pressed a hand against his right shoulder.
“Denny?” he exclaimed. “What the hell—” He let out a groan and twisted, favoring his left side.
Denny saw the dark stain on Smoke’s shirt and set her carbine aside so she could take hold of him and carefully eased him back to the ground. “Just lie there. You’re hurt.”
“Denny, what in blazes . . . are you doing here?”
“Saving your bacon, from the looks of it.” She groaned inwardly. Maybe that wasn’t the wisest reaction, but she was too worried about him to be thinking straight at the moment.
She turned her head and looked out across the valley. Shots still flashed here and there, but most of the fighting seemed to be over. As she watched tensely, the last of the gunfire died away. And it was too dark to tell who had won the battle.
“Denny—” Smoke began again, but she hissed at him to be quiet.
“We don’t want to bring them down on top of us,” she whispered. “Was it those rustlers who jumped you?”
“Had to be,” he said, keeping his voice as quiet as hers.
She heard the pain in his tone. Uncertainty over how badly he was hit gnawed at her, but she couldn’t risk a light to examine the wound.
Hoofbeats thudded not far off in the darkness. Denny tensed and picked up the carbine. She couldn’t remember if, in the heat of battle, she had worked the lever after the last shot she fired. There might be a round in the chamber, or there might not be, but she couldn’t risk cocking it. Not with an unknown rider so close.
A familiar voice called softly, “Smoke! Smoke, you around here?”
A shudder of relief went through Denny. Still not knowing if any of the rustlers were still around, she kept her voice quiet as she responded, “Cal! Over here!”
Horse and rider loomed out of the shadows. Cal said in evident amazement, “Miss Denise? Is that you?”
“I’m here, Cal. So is my father. He’s hurt.”
She heard a muttered curse from the foreman as he reined in. Cal dismounted in a hurry and let his horse’s reins dangle as he knelt on Smoke’s other side. “How bad is it?”
“Blast it, I’m all right,” Smoke said, but his voice sounded weak. “I caught a slug in the left side . . . just under my shoulder, but it missed my heart . . . else I’d be dead already. I don’t think it broke any bones. I’m just . . . bleeding like a stuck pig . . . You’d better get . . . Denny out of here—”
“The hell with that. I’m not going anywhere without you, Pa.” She looked across him at Cal. “What about the rustlers?”
“I’m pretty sure they all lit a shuck, except for the ones we killed.” He added grimly, “We lost some men, too, I think. I’ll round everybody up and see how bad the situation is, but right now we need to get Smoke on his horse and the two of you back to the house as quick as can be.”
“I’m going to risk a light,” Denny said. “You get ready to shoot if anybody opens up on us. Probably need to do something about this wound, though, or he’s liable to bleed to death on the way back.”
Smoke said, “She sure does . . . take to giving orders . . . doesn’t she, Cal?”
“I reckon she’s right.” Cal stood up and pulled his Winchester from its scabbard. “You go ahead, Miss Denise, and see if you can patch him up a mite. If anybody tries to give us trouble, I’ll deal with ’em.”
Denny found the little waterproof packet of matches she had taken to carrying since she got back to the ranch and struck one of them. Squinting against the glare, she looked at her father’s side and saw that his shirt was soaked with blood from just below his shoulder to the waist. He had lost a lot of it already, and it still seemed to be welling from the wound.
The match burned down. Working by feel, Denny ripped the bloody shirt and pulled it aside, then struck another match. She saw the hole where the bullet had gone in and lifted his shoulder enough to make sure there wasn’t a matching wound on Smoke’s back.
There wasn’t. The slug was still in him somewhere.
Well, that wasn’t good, she thought, but at the same time it meant she only had to stop the bleeding from one hole. She dropped the second match as the flame reached her fingers, then pulled her shirttails out from behind her belt. She had a folding knif
e in her pocket. It took her only a minute to use the blade to cut a piece of cloth from her shirttail.
She wadded the cloth into a ball, told her father, “This is going to hurt,” and jammed it into the wound, pushing down until it completely filled the hole.
Smoke’s breath hissed between his clenched teeth, but he didn’t say anything or let out any other noise.
“Hold it there,” Denny told him.
He used his right hand to do that while she cut long strips from the bottom of her shirt and bound the makeshift plug in place with them.
“Somebody coming,” Cal warned. He had his rifle ready.
A couple seconds later, a man called, “Cal? Mr. Jensen?”
“That’s Rick Yates,” Cal said, relief plain to hear in his voice. “Rick! We’re over here!”
A couple riders pounded up.
One of them asked, “Are you all right, Cal?”
“Yeah, but the boss is here, and he’s hit.”
“Son of a—! Is that Miss Denise?”
“What about those rustlers?” Denny asked as she stood up wearily.
“Gone,” Yates replied.
“Good. You can help me get my pa on his horse.”
They found Smoke’s gray, which didn’t seem to have been injured in the collision with the rustler’s mount. As carefully as possible, the cowboys lifted Smoke into the saddle.
“I’ll ride behind him to make sure he doesn’t pass out and fall off,” Denny said. “Somebody give me a hand getting up there.”
Yates held his hands to make a step for her. Denny settled herself on the horse’s back behind the saddle, put one arm around her father’s waist to steady him, and used the other hand to take the reins.
“Here’s Smoke’s Colt,” Cal said. “Looks like he dropped it.”
“Reload it,” she said.
When Cal had done so, using cartridges from his own shell belt, she put the reins between her teeth for a moment and held out a hand. “Give it here,” she ordered around the reins.
Cal handed her the revolver, butt first. She stuck it behind her belt.
“Miss Denise . . . ?” the foreman said uncertainly.
“Anybody tries to stop us, they’ll be sorry,” Denny declared and then heeled the big gray into a run. They disappeared into the night, heading south toward the ranch headquarters.
CHAPTER 18
That ride was as nerve-wracking as anything Denny had ever experienced. During the gun battle she had been too busy to be scared. Instinct and anger had fueled her actions. Now that the danger was over, reaction was setting in. She felt herself trembling inside, especially when she thought about how many bullets had slapped through the air near her head.
Not only that, but the danger wasn’t over for her father. However serious his wound was, she knew he had lost a lot of blood and that could be fatal. She tightened her arm around him and said urgently, “You hang on, Pa. Don’t you even think about dying. You hear me?”
No telling where the bullet was inside him. He had said he didn’t think it had broken any bones, but it could have glanced off one and lodged who knows where. Because of that uncertainty, she didn’t want to jolt him around too much. She didn’t run the gray at a full gallop but kept the horse’s pace at a ground-eating lope instead. Even at that, Smoke groaned from time to time, sometimes muttering words, but Denny couldn’t make them out except a couple times she heard him say her mother’s name. “Sally . . . Sally . . .”
“You’ll see her soon, Pa,” she told him, but she didn’t know if he heard her or not.
No one tried to stop them, so the revolver remained behind her belt. They didn’t encounter any other riders on the trip.
Finally, after what seemed like days, lights came into view up ahead. Denny knew they came from the ranch house and the other buildings at the ranch headquarters. “Almost there,” she told Smoke as she urged the horse on.
As the gray pounded up in front of the house, Denny eased back on the reins. “Ma! Louis! I need help out here! It’s Pa! Hello, the house!” She breathed heavily. She could feel Smoke breathing, too, so she knew he was still alive . . . but how much longer that would be true, she had no idea.
Even though she had been apart from him for most of her life, the time she had spent around him had impressed her so much that she couldn’t imagine a world without Smoke Jensen in it. He was a towering figure in her life.
The front door slammed open and Sally rushed out, a cry springing to her lips as she caught sight of the bloody, slumped figure in the saddle. She wore a silk dressing gown, and her hair was loose as if she’d been ready for bed. For a second she stopped short and raised the back of a hand to her mouth in horror, then she brought that reaction under control and visibly steeled herself to do what needed to be done. “Denny, is that you?”
“Yeah, Ma. I—”
“Explanations later. Right now we need to get your father into the house.” Sally turned and called, “Louis!”
He was already there, emerging from the house. “Mother, what is—Good Lord! Father?”
“Run out to the bunkhouse and fetch the men who are there.”
“We can get ’em here quicker than that.” Denny pulled the gun from behind her belt, pointed it at the sky, and thumbed off three shots, the universal signal for distress on the frontier. The gray danced around a little, but not much.
Men in long underwear tumbled out of the bunkhouse, some in boots but most barefoot. They all had guns and were ready to shoot it out with anybody who had dared to invade the Sugarloaf. Louis quickly set them straight, running out to meet them as they charged across the ranch yard, and telling them that Smoke had been wounded.
Callused but gentle hands reached up, took hold of him, and lifted him from the saddle. With Sally giving orders briskly, the men carried Smoke into the house and placed him on a sofa in the parlor.
She lit a lamp and looked around. “Where’s Cal?”
Denny said, “He’s with the rest of the crew, up in the big pasture by Aspen Springs. There was a fight with some rustlers. That’s how Pa got wounded.” She didn’t go into any more detail than that. The rest of the explanation could wait. “I tried to stop the bleeding as best I could.”
Sally thrust the lamp into Louis’s hands and told him to hold it where she could examine the wound. “I can see what you did,” she said to Denny. “It looks like a good job. I need to get that off of there and clean up all that blood, though. Inez!”
“Here, señora,” the cook and housekeeper said from behind the group of half-dressed cowboys. They parted hastily to let her through.
“Clean cloths and hot water,” Sally said.
“The pot is already on the stove, señora. When I heard shouting I put it on to heat. Any disturbance this late at night is likely to require hot water.”
Sally laughed, but there wasn’t much genuine humor in the sound. “That’s right. You men, thank you for your help. Now clear out and give us room to work.”
“You’ll let us know if you need anything else, Miz Sally?” one of the hands asked.
“Of course.” Sally looked at her children. “Denise, Louis, you stay here.”
The cowboys shuffled out of the parlor, some of them looking sheepish because they were dressed only in their underwear.
Sally turned to Denny. “You have blood on you.”
“It’s Pa’s,” Denny assured her mother. “I wasn’t hit.”
“You were in the middle of that fight?”
Louis murmured, “Somehow I’m not surprised.”
Smoke startled them all by saying in a faint voice, “She . . . saved us.”
Sally turned quickly to him. “Smoke, I didn’t know you were awake.”
“Just . . . came to,” he forced out. His eyelids fluttered for a second, then stayed open. His face twisted in a grimace of pain. “There were some shots . . . warned us we were . . . about to be ambushed . . . I reckon you . . . fired them . . . Denny?”
&nb
sp; “That’s right,” she said as she knelt beside the sofa. “I was trailing you and saw a bunch of hombres come out of the blind canyon behind you. I knew they had to be bushwhackers.”
“That’s because”—a faint smile curved Smoke’s lips—“because . . . you’re my daughter . . .”
Inez came in with clean rags draped over her arm and a pan of hot water in her hands.
Sally said, “Let me get to work on him.”
Denny moved aside. “Somebody needs to go to Big Rock for the doctor.”
“I imagine one of the crew is saddling up to do that right now. Louis, can you check and see about that?”
“Of course, Mother.”
“What about me?” Denny asked.
Sally said, “It sounds like we have you to thank for keeping him alive this long. Now it’s up to me to keep him that way until the doctor gets here.”
“You can do that?”
Sally glanced at her daughter and gave Denny a bleak smile. “You don’t think this is the first bullet wound I’ve patched up, do you? For heaven’s sake, I’ve been married to Smoke Jensen for more than twenty years!”
True to her word, Sally took good care of Smoke. She cleaned all the gore away from the wound and saw that the bleeding had stopped except for a little seepage. Since she didn’t know for sure how long it would be before the doctor arrived, she got a bottle of whiskey from a cabinet, soaked a rag with it, and swabbed the outer edges of the wound. That stung enough to make Smoke mutter in the stupor that had set in.
“This will hurt even worse, darling.” She turned the bottle up and poured some of the fiery liquor into the bullet hole. “Hold him down!” she told Denny and Inez as Smoke groaned and arched his back against the whiskey’s bite.
Louis said, “There are other ways to disinfect a wound, you know.”
“Bourbon’s good for what ails you,” Sally said. “Preacher taught us that. Of course, he claimed there are more medicinal uses for it than there really are . . .”
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