He was taking his last walk.
Smoke wiped his bloody blade clean on the dead man’s shirt and shifted positions after rolling the body under some brush. He moved right to the edge of the encampment, very close to where an outlaw lay on his dirty blankets, his head on a knapsack probably filled with his possibles.
Smoke edged closer and looked with disgust at what was tied to the man’s saddle. A human scalp. Blonde hair. Long blonde hair. He knew where that came from, too. One of the little girls he’d buried.
Smoke cut the man’s throat with a movement as furtive as a ghost and as fast and as deadly as a viper. He eased the man’s head down until his chin was resting on his chest. With the bloody knife in his hand, Smoke backed away, again shifting positions, working his way around to the other side of the camp. He paused along the way to wipe his blade clean on some grass.
“Hey, Frank!” one outlaw yelled. “Did you get lost out in them woods?”
Frank lay as silent as the woods.
“Frank?” the call was repeated several times by half a dozen of the thugs.
The outlaws looked at one another, suspicion and a touch of fear entering their eyes.
“Dolp ain’t moved none,” one outlaw observed, looking at the man with his head on his chest.
“All that hollerin’ would have been shore to wake him up,” another remarked.
“Well, he ain’t moved. Somebody go over yonder and kick him a time or two.”
A man walked over to Dolp and nudged him with the toe of his boot. Dolp’s head lolled to one side and he fell over, the movement exposing the horrible wound on his neck.
Smoke eared back the hammer on his Winchester.
The outlaw screamed, “His throat’s been cut.”
Smoke shot him, the .44 slug severing his spine. The man slumped to the ground in a boneless heap.
The camp erupted in a mass of yelling, running men, all grabbing for their weapons and firing in every conceivable direction, hitting nothing but air.
Smoke shot one in the belly, doubling him over, and dotted another’s left eye with lead. He decided it was time to haul out of there; he’d pushed his luck and skill far enough.
He left behind him a camp filled with frightened and confused outlaws. They were still shooting at shadows and hitting no more than that. However, Smoke thought, if he was lucky, two or three of them might shoot one of their own.
“They had a bad home environment,” he muttered, as he silently made his way back toward his horses. “I’m going to have to remember to tell Sally about this new excuse for becoming a criminal. She probably could use a good laugh.”
An hour later he rolled up in his blankets and was asleep in two minutes. He did not worry about the outlaws finding his camp. They were probably still trying to figure out what had hit them on what they considered to be home ground. And had they been more careful, it would have been safe ground. It was rugged country; no country for a tenderfoot. And a man could easily live off the land—there were bear, deer, elk, and plenty of streams in which to fish. But an outlaw wasn’t going to do anything like that; they were too damn lazy and sorry. If they couldn’t steal it, they didn’t want it.
Smoke woke up to the sounds of a jaybird fussing at him, telling him it was a pretty day and to stop all that lollygagging around in the bed. As was his custom, Smoke did not move for a moment, letting his eyes sweep the terrain around him for trouble. He spotted nothing to indicate trouble. Birds were singing, and the squirrels were jumping and dancing from limb to limb. He rolled out of his blankets and pulled on his boots, put his hat on his head, and slung his guns around his waist.
He chanced a very small fire to boil his coffee. When the coffee was ready, he put out the fire and contented himself with a cold breakfast of bread and some berries he’d picked from nearby bushes.
By now, he figured, riders would have gone out from the camps he’d attacked, and Lee Slater, if he was not a stupid man, and Smoke didn’t think he was—just a no-good, sorry excuse for a human being—would be pulling in his people, massing them for some planning. That was fine. Smoke figured he’d done enough head-hunting in this area. Today he would begin his ride over to the Seven Slash range and see what mischief he could get into there.
He pondered his future as he sipped his coffee. It would be at least another day or two before his friend, the federal judge up in Denver, received his letter. Another day or two before whatever action he took—if any, and that was something Smoke had to consider—went into effect.
But a much more dangerous aspect of his situation had to be taken into consideration: bounty hunters. As soon as word hit the country that a reward was out for Smoke Jensen and judge Richards probably made it dead or alive—the country would be swarming with bounty hunters and those looking for a reputation as the man who killed Smoke Jensen.
Well, he thought, I’ve done this before, so it’s nothing new to me. I’ll just have to ride with my guns loose and my eyes missing nothing.
He broke camp, saddled up, and headed for Seven Slash range.
“Had to be Jensen,” Lee Slater spoke to some of his men. “Nobody else would be that stupid . . .”
It never occurred to Lee that stupid had nothing to do with it. “Skilled” was the word he should have used in describing Smoke’s attack on his camps.
“. . . He’s got to be tooken out. And tooken out damn quick. He could screw up the whole plan.”
“What plan?” a gunny who called himself Tap demanded. “All we been doin’ for clays is sittin’ around on our butts. If somethin’ don’t happen pretty damn quick, I’m pullin’ out for greener pastures.”
Zack nodded his head in agreement. “I’m with Tap. We got money in our pockets and no place to spend it. They’s thousands of dollars worth of gold and silver in this area, and we ain’t doin’ a damn thing about takin’ it. I’m tarred of sittin’ around. Let’s get into action, Lee.”
Lee knew he could not hold his men back much longer. Not and keep his gang together And he knew he had to do that because there was strength in numbers. Luttie was moving too slow to suit Lee. He couldn’t understand why his brother was dragging his boots. He needed to see Luttie, but it was risky leaving the mountains just for a visit.
“Couple more days, Zack,” the outlaw leader said.
“I promise you . . .”
The men all looked up at the sound of a rider coming into camp. “I got news!” the rider yelled.
He swung down and poured himself a cup of coffee, then walked over to Lee, waving the other men close in.
“Well?” Lee demanded. “What news?”
“Lemme drink some coffee, man!" the outlaw said. “Catch my breath. I been ridin’ all night to get here.” He drained his cup and tossed the dredges. “A federal judge back East done put out warrants on Smoke Jensen. Murder warrants from that shootin’ over to Idaho some years back. Three warrants. The reward money totals over thirty thousand dollars to the man who brings him in—dead or alive.”
“Well. now,” Lee said, sitting down on a log. ‘Ain't that something? What’s Jensen doin’ about this sicheation?"
‘He’s on the run. Somewhere betwix here and the border.”
Lee brought the man up to date on the attacks of the previous night.
“Thirty thousand dollars,” outlaw Boots Pierson whispered. “That’s a fortune. A man could live real good for a long time with that money.”
“They’s more news,” the man who brought the word said, pouring himself more coffee. “The word is out, and bounty hunters from all over is comin’ in. If we’re gonna do something about Jensen, we damn well better get movin’ ’fore all them other hardcases come a-lookin’.”
“That there’s a puredee fact,” Tom Post said.
Lee looked at his men, knowing that any plans he might have had were now gone with the wind. All his men were thinking about was that thirty thousand dollars reward and the reputation that went with being the man who brung in Sm
oke Jensen belly down acrost a saddle.
The camp of crud and no-goods broke up into small groups, all talking at once about what all that reward money could buy them. Women, whiskey, and gambling, for the most part.
“All right, all right!” Lee finally managed to shout the camp silent. “Let’s plan. Now for sure we can’t go after him in a bunch. He’d see and hear us coming miles away So let’s split up into groups of six. That’d be damn near ten groups workin’ the mountains. Y'all talk it over and form up with men you wanna ride with. Then we’ll settle down and go over what group is gonna cover what area.”
The men split up into groups of six and seven, each group made up of men who had known each other for a long time, or who knew the other’s reputation.
Lee had started out with a small army of crud, over seventy-five men. He was now down to nine groups of six each. Fifty-six men. He thought about that for a minute. Fifty-four men. Whatever!
Lee found him a stump of pencil and sat down, scribbling on a dirty envelope. Four were either in jail or being transported back to states that had warrants on them. Jensen had killed two on the trail coming into town. A half a dozen had left the gang after the raid against Big Rock. That meant that Jensen had killed about ten the previous night . . . give or take two or three. The man was a devil, for a fact, but he was still only one man. They would find him, and they would kill him.
Lee waved his group over to him. To his mind, he had chosen well the five men who would ride with him. They were all vicious killers. Curt Holt, Ed Malone, Boots Pierson, Harry Jennings, and Blackjack Simpson.
The young punks had banded together, as Lee had figured they would, with the punk kid Pecos their leader. All the other groups were electing leaders. Curly Rogers was bossing one group, Al Martine another. Whit was fronting another group and Ray yet another. The last two were being led by Crocker and Graham.
Personally, Lee didn’t give a damn which group got Smoke Jensen, just as long as somebody got him. Not that he didn’t think thirty thousand was a lot of money. It was. But there was a lot more than that to be had in these mountains once Jensen was out of the way.
Lee stood up and hitched at his gunbelt. “Let’s ride, boys. We got us a legend to kill.”
Chapter Eleven
But legends oftentimes grow out of fact. And Smoke Jensen was not an easy man to kill. There had been many over the long and bloody years who had thought that fact not to be true. Somebody had buried them all.
Smoke rode the big buckskin through the windy and lonely high country, once again a man with a price on his head. But this time, the price came from a corrupt judge. And Smoke would deal with him when this little matter in the mountains was settled. He didn’t know just how he would deal with him, but deal with him he damn sure would.
Smoke sat the saddle like a man born to it. His back was straight and his eyes constantly moving, scanning the terrain ahead of him and on both sides.
He stopped to rest on a bluff high above the road that led to the little village, and he was not surprised to see wagon after wagon heading for the town. There were wagons and buggies of all descriptions and men on horseback, all heading for the town. It wasn’t gold or silver that drew them there—although that was a part of it. It was the news that Smoke Jensen was a wanted man.
Smoke rested his horses and squatted down, his field glasses in his big hands, and studied the passing parade unfolding far below him.
He grunted as he picked out two of the West's most notorious bounty hunters: Ace Reilly and Big Bob Masters. They were riding together.
There was Lilly LaFevere in her fancy buggy, with several wagon loads of ladies of the evening right behind her. He saw several well-known gamblers that he was on speaking terms with.
Then he laughed aloud. There was Louis Longmont, riding a beautiful high-stepping black, with a wagon pulled by four big mules right behind him,
driven by his personal valet and cook . . . he wondered if it was still Andre? Louis Longmont, a millionaire professional gambler who owned a casino in Monte Carlo, who owned banks and railroads and entire blocks of cities, and who was one of the most feared gunfighters in all the world. In the wagon would be jars of caviar, cases of fine French wines, and plenty of Louis’ favorite scotch whiskey, Glenlivet.
Smoke felt a lump knot up in his throat as he scanned the road below. There was Cotton Pickens from up in Puma County, Wyoming. Their paths had crossed a time or two, when Smoke had pulled Cotton out of a couple of bad spots. Now he’d come to help out Smoke.
“Well, I’ll just be damned!” Smoke whispered, as he focused his glasses on Johnny North, who had a ranch about twenty miles from Smoke and Sally’s Sugarloaf. Johnny had married the Widow Colby and hung up his six-shooters years back. Now he had cleaned them up, oiled the leather, and strapped them on and was coming to help his neighbor.
“My God!” Smoke said, as his eyes touched upon a man with gray shoulder—length hair. “I was told you were dead!”
He was looking at the legendary Charlie Starr.
Smoke chuckled. “Going to get real interesting around the town very soon,” he muttered. “Real interesting.”
Smoke leaned back against a huge boulder and rolled a cigarette, lighting up. If he was right in his thinking, Lee Slater was probably right now splitting up his gang into small groups and starting a concentrated search for their prey . . . that being Smoke Jensen. Smoke smiled. He hoped Lee would do that. Small groups were easier to handle.
He smoked his cigarette and carefully extinguished it. He took his field glasses and once more studied the increasing traffic on the road below.
The town was going to boom for a time. The stage line would put on more stages and roll them in and out at least once a day from north and south, and maybe more than that.
“Well, now,” Smoke said, as he picked out Dan Diamond, another bounty hunter. The man riding with him was familiar, but it took Smoke a minute or so to put a name on the face. Nap Jacobs. Nap was a thoroughly bad man. Fast with a gun and seemingly without a nerve or a scruple in his entire body. And he didn’t like Smoke at all. And there was Morris Pattin, another bounty hunter who hated Smoke Jensen.
Smoke tightened the cinch on Buck and put the pack back on the pack animal. “Time to go, boys. I’m going to find you both a nice little box canyon, with good graze and water and let you both rest for a time. Then I’m going to lay out some ambushes.”
* * *
“Good to see you again, Earl!” Louis said, stepping up on the boardwalk and shaking hands with the Englishman.
“By the Lord! It’s grand to see you, Louis. It’s going to get rather interesting around this little village before very long. Who are your friends?”
“Johnny North, a neighbor of Smoke Jensen's.
Cotton Pickens, a rancher from up Wyoming way, and this, Earl, is Charlie Starr.”
“I am awed and humbled, sir,” Earl said, with genuine emotion in his voice. “You rank among the few men who have become a legend in your own time.”
“Thank you, sir,” Charlie replied, shaking hands with the gambler/gunfighter. “I may take it that you are a friend of Smoke Jensen?”
“You may. Let’s go into my office, and I’ll bring you up to date on Smoke’s troubles.”
Larry Tibbson had taken the first stage out of Big Rock, heading down to where Smoke was hiding out. He kept a very low profile and kept his big mouth shut concerning his opinions of Smoke Jensen. He decided that since the town was growing so quickly—he didn’t have sense enough to know what was causing the rapid growth, nor that it would very likely bust as quickly as it boomed-he would hang out his shingle in the newly named town of Rio. Everybody needed the services of a good attorney from time to time, and this looked like the ideal spot to make some quick money.
But my word! Larry thought, stepping off the stage, it was so rowdy here. All these rough-looking fellows carrying guns and knives right out in the open. Shocking! He had never seen anything
like it.
And their boorish behavior was offensive to someone of Larry’s gentle sensibilities. All the more reason to stay, he thought. Bring some refinement to the savages.
He managed to get the last room available in the hotel—and he did that by paying five times the usual going rate.
“Them sheets ain’t been slept on but three times,” the man told him, in protest over Larry’s demand for clean sheets. “The last feller used ’em didn’t appear to have no fleas."
“Change the sheets!”
“All right, all right,” the newly hired room clerk grumbled.
Larry turned to the stairs and was stopped in his tracks at the sight of Louis Longmont dismounting and shaking hands with what appeared to be a constable of some sort. It was hard to tell in this barbaric setting, since lawmen, for the most part, did not wear uniforms denoting their profession, as was the case in more civilized parts of the nation.
Louis Longmont . . . here? Larry walked to the window of the saloon and looked out, seeing the six-guns belted around the millionaire’s waist. So the rumors were true after all, Larry mused. The man was an adventurer. But was he here to hunt down Smoke Jensen, or to aid the gunfighter?
And who was that long-haired, grizzled-looking older man shaking hands with the constable? Obviously some sort of gunfighter, but it was hard to tell, since all those gathered around the constable wore two guns, tied down. It was so confusing out here.
With a sigh, Larry turned to climb the stairs. He angled over and spoke to the room clerk, whose small station was at the end of the bar.
“Do you have inside facilities?” Larry inquired.
“Huh?”
“Water closets inside.”
“Hell, no!”
Larry shook his head and headed for the room.
“You forgot your bags,” the room clerk called.
“Carry them up for me.”
“Tote your own damn bags, mister!”
Larry climbed the stairs, sweating under the load of his trunk. All in all, he thought, the West just had to be the most barbaric and inhospitable place he had ever traveled.
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