He didn’t see any sign of the mysterious riders, but he knew there were hidden clearings among those thick stands of pine. The men could have a camp up in there somewhere.
He said quietly, “Let’s stay in the trees where there’s some cover. Don’t get in a hurry. We don’t want to stumble onto those fellers without any warnin’.”
They didn’t have to ride single file, but the trees made it impossible to spread out much. Pearlie remained in the lead, with Cal and Sally behind him and Hardy still bringing up the rear. They had gone about half a mile along the ridge when Pearlie suddenly halted again.
He lifted his head, took a deep breath, then turned to the others and whispered, “Take a whiff o’ that.”
Sally smelled the air and whispered, “Wood smoke. And . . . is that coffee?”
“Yep,” Pearlie replied. “Tobacco, too. They’re up ahead of us, and they ain’t far off, neither. We’ll get down here.”
They dismounted and all four of them took their rifles out. The atmosphere under the pines was tense.
“Miss Sally, you and Hardy stay here and hold the horses,” Pearlie said. “Cal and me will see if we can Injun up on those boys and find out what they’re doin’ here.”
“Why don’t you leave the kid with Miz Jensen and take me with you?” Hardy suggested.
“Because I’ve been in some tight spots with the boy before and I know I can count on him. No offense, Ben.”
“None taken,” Hardy said with a shrug.
“I don’t like not going with you,” Sally said to Pearlie.
“That was our deal,” he pointed out.
“Yes, I suppose it was. The two of you be careful.”
“I intend to.” Pearlie removed his spurs and motioned for Cal to do likewise. “Come on.”
Holding their Winchesters at the ready, they moved off through the trees, silent as Indians.
Chapter 11
During the time Cal had lived on the Sugarloaf, Pearlie had taught the youngster quite a bit about tracking and moving quietly through the woods. Smoke had helped with Cal’s education, too. He had even picked up some tips from the old master, Preacher, who in his younger years had been known to slip into Blackfoot villages at night, cut the throats of several of his enemies, and get back out again without his nocturnal vengeance being discovered until morning.
All that tutoring came in handy as Cal cat footed through the trees just as silently as Pearlie, who was impressed by his stealth.
Neither of them said anything. They communicated by hand signals.
Pearlie and Cal had been gone for a few minutes when Ben asked, “You mind if I roll myself a smoke, Miss Sally?”
Sally didn’t have to think about it. “Better not, Ben. If we can smell the tobacco smoke coming from the men we’re after, they could smell it coming from us.”
“Oh.” Hardy grunted. “Yeah, that’s true. Pretty smart of you to think of that.”
“I guess I’ve been married to Smoke for long enough that thinking strategically just comes natural to me.”
“Yeah, I reckon there’s always one ruckus or another going on, isn’t there?”
“That certainly seems to be true,” Sally said with a smile.
“I didn’t mean any offense,” Hardy said hastily.
“That’s all right,” she assured him. “I know trouble seems to follow Smoke around. I knew that when I married him.”
As the smell of a campfire grew stronger, Pearlie motioned for Cal to slow down. They crouched lower, practically crawling, until Pearlie reached a point where he could carefully part some brush and peer through the little gap at the hiding place of the three men who had been lurking up there for the past few weeks.
The camp was set up in one of those small clearings he had thought about earlier. A tiny fire crackled merrily inside a ring of stones. Several feet above the flames, the strangers had set up a framework of broken branches. The thickly needled pine boughs dispersed what little smoke came from the fire, so that no one would spot a column of it rising above the trees and be able to track them that way.
The clearing was about fifty feet wide. Three horses were picketed on the far side of it, grazing on what was left of the sparse grass at the edge of the trees. The saddles were on the ground, placed at the heads of three bedrolls to serve as pillows.
The strangers had dragged logs close to the fire where two of them took their ease, smoking quirlies and sipping coffee from tin cups. The old, dented coffeepot was placed at the fire’s edge, close enough to keep warm whatever was left inside it.
As Pearlie looked around, he felt worry percolating inside him just like the coffee in that pot. He had seen three men the day before, and three horses were on the other side of the camp, but only two men were in sight. That made him nervous. Where was the third man?
In all likelihood, he was off in the trees tending to some personal business, but Pearlie couldn’t know that for sure. As long as the third hombre was unaccounted for, he represented a potential threat, not only to the Sugarloaf ranch hands but also to Miss Sally.
Ben Hardy smiled at Sally. “Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe that I’m working for the famous Smoke Jensen.”
Sally smiled back. “Some people would say notorious, rather than famous.”
“Well, they’d be wrong,” Hardy declared. “He’s as fine a gent as I’ve ever met.”
“He is, indeed,” she agreed.
“How much longer do we have to stay here, Green?” The sudden question from one of the men at the campfire sounded startlingly loud in the stillness of the mountain.
In the bushes, Pearlie frowned and looked at Cal, who frowned right back.
Instead of answering right away, the other man took a long drag on his cigarette. The coal was almost down to the end, so he dropped the butt to the dirt and ground it out with a boot heel. “We stay until the boss shows up and tells us it’s all right to leave,” the man called Green answered in a harsh voice. “You know that, Joe.”
“Yeah, but we’ve been holed up here too long. You know it ain’t safe. Those cowboys are liable to find us—”
“I said we wait until we hear otherwise from the boss,” Green snapped. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get on that hombre’s bad side. I’ve seen some of the things he can do.”
Joe looked down at the ground and muttered, “Yeah, that’s true. I remember what happened to Lonesome Dan—”
“You just shut up about Lonesome Dan,” Green said. “None of us got any business talkin’ about that.”
A frown creased Pearlie’s forehead as he and Cal remained hidden in the brush. The conversation between the two strangers created more questions than it answered.
Who were these men and their mysterious boss who had told them to wait on Lone Pine Ridge? Who was the evidently unfortunate Lonesome Dan, and what had happened to him?
Pearlie didn’t have any idea, but he was confident he knew what sort of men the two were. He had seen plenty just like them. Hard-planed faces, beard-stubbled cheeks and jaws, sunken eyes that contained as much warmth and human feeling as a rattlesnake’s. They were outlaws and gunmen, plain and simple.
There’d been a time when his face had looked much the same as it stared back at him from a shaving mirror. He had ridden the lonely trails and heard the owl hoot at night with men just like them . . . most of whom were dead. Pearlie knew he probably would be, too, if he hadn’t been lucky enough to cross paths with Smoke Jensen.
While they waited for Pearlie and Cal to return, Hardy asked Sally, “When do you think Smoke’s going to get back to the ranch?”
“It shouldn’t be too much longer. He wired me from Arizona that they weren’t going to get in any hurry. His brother Luke had had such a rough time of it and needed to take it easy. Even so, I expect him pretty soon. Maybe another week or two.”
“It’ll be good to see him again,” Hardy said, nodding.
“It certainly will!”
She blushed a little. The thoughts she was having about Smoke’s return to Sugarloaf had to be much different from what the ranch hand was thinking.
Joe stared into the dying fire, letting a few minutes of brooding silence go by, then commented. “It seems like Larson’s been gone longer than he should have just to check those snares.”
The words made sense to Pearlie. The men didn’t want to hunt any game because gunshots up on the bench would attract the attention of the Sugarloaf crew. If they had run out of supplies, or just had a craving for fresh meat, the only practical way to get it was by setting snares. He had eaten many a roasted rabbit caught that way, back in the days when he was on the dodge.
Green was in the process of building another smoke and licked the paper to seal the quirly. “It takes a while.” He put the cigarette in his mouth, struck a match, and lit it. After a couple of puffs, he went on. “But you’re right. He should’ve been back by now.” Green stood up from the log. “Maybe we’d better go take a look for him.”
Pearlie was more worried about their missing companion than they were. Sally and Ben Hardy were back in the trees, a couple hundred yards away. They had no way of knowing that one of the outlaws was wandering around and might come across them at any moment.
Maybe it was time for him and Cal to fade back, Pearlie thought, and rejoin Sally and Hardy. They hadn’t found out everything, but at least they knew the three strangers were hardcases and not the sort they wanted lurking around the ranch.
They needed to get back to Sugarloaf headquarters, where Pearlie could gather the rest of the men, come back up, and flush those varmints out, like he’d wanted to do from the first....
Chapter 12
Sally put her hands to her face to cover up her blush and minor embarrassment. “I wonder what Pearlie and Cal found,” she mused, changing the subject of Smoke’s return.
They didn’t have a chance to continue that discussion. At that moment, a man stepped out of the trees nearby, pointed a revolver at them, and snapped, “Both of you freeze right where you are.”
Despite that command, Hardy started to reach for his gun and the carbine in Sally’s hands rose. Their reactions were instinctive.
“Damn it. I said don’t move!” The man’s finger was tight on the trigger. His thumb looped over the hammer was the only thing holding it back. He aimed the gun directly at Sally as he told Hardy, “You might kill me, mister, but even if you do, the lady’s gonna get a hole blowed through her.”
Hardy moved his hand away from his gun butt. “Take it easy. There’s no need for anybody to get hurt.”
“Reckon I’ll be the judge of that,” the stranger said as he sneered at them. “You’re the ones sneakin’ around.”
“Not really,” Sally said. “We have a right to be up here. This range is part of the Sugarloaf ranch. My husband and I own it.”
“Yeah, but this ain’t your husband.” The man wore a leering grin on his unshaven face. “I know that from listenin’ to the two of you talk. What are you doin’ up here? Come for a little slap an’ tickle on the sly, where the rest of the hands won’t know about it?”
Anger that anyone would think such a thing boiled up inside her. She knew the stranger had the drop on them, but her impulse was to swing the carbine up and start blasting anyway—which wouldn’t accomplish anything except to get her killed, and possibly Ben Hardy, too, she realized. With an effort, she suppressed the urge to start shooting.
She ignored the man’s question and coldly asked one of her own. “What are you doing up here? You don’t belong on this range.”
“Reckon my friends and me go wherever we want,” the owlhoot declared. “Now, put that rifle down on the ground, careful-like, and you, rannie, you unbuckle your gun belt and drop it, too.”
“Miz Jensen . . . ?” Hardy asked.
Sally sighed. “I suppose we’d better do what he says.” She bent over slowly to place the carbine on the ground in front of her, keeping her eyes on the gunman.
Confident that he had them right where he wanted them, he hadn’t bothered to lower his revolver and keep it trained on her. It was pointed over her head.
She dived forward and cried, “Now, Ben!” As she landed on her belly, she angled the barrel up and fired the round already levered into the chamber.
At the same time, Hardy grabbed his gun, jerked it out of its holster, and triggered the Colt twice as he moved quickly to his left, away from Sally.
Before the two men by the campfire or the pair hidden in the brush could do anything, the quiet was shattered by a swift flurry of gunshots.
Pearlie’s blood seemed to turn to ice in his veins as he realized the blasts came from the direction where Sally and Hardy waited.
The gunman let the hammer fall as bullets whipped through the air around him. His revolver belched fire. The slug tore through space a good eighteen inches above Sally’s head and plowed a furrow in the dirt behind her. She rolled over, levering the carbine again.
The stranger swung his gun toward Hardy and loosed another round. Hardy grunted and stumbled as the bullet thudded into him. Despite being hit, he stayed on his feet and triggered a third shot at the stranger.
From her prone position, Sally fired again. She was rewarded by a spray of blood from the gunman’s right arm. He howled in pain. The bullet’s impact shattered his elbow, flinging his arm out at his side. The revolver flew from suddenly nerveless fingers.
She worked the Winchester’s lever and fired a third time. The stranger was already twisting away, and he dived behind some trees as Sally’s bullet whistled past his head.
Somewhere not far away, crashing sounded in the brush.
Someone else was coming, she realized, and she had no way of knowing if it was friend or foe.
Chapter 13
The flurry of gunshots made both Pearlie and Cal stiffen as they crouched in the brush bordering the strangers’ camp.
Green was already on his feet. Joe leaped up as well. Startled curses spilled from each man’s mouth.
“Damn it. Larson must’ve run into trouble,” Green exclaimed. “Come on!”
Chances were the outlaw called Larson had run across Sally and Ben Hardy, Pearlie knew. Whatever was going on back there, Larson didn’t need reinforcements.
“Go help Miss Sally!” Pearlie snapped at Cal. “I’ll deal with these two!”
Cal obeyed the order without argument or hesitation, another sign that he wasn’t the green kid he had once been. He turned and plunged through the brush toward the sound of shooting.
At the same time, Pearlie drew his gun and sent a couple shots at Green and Joe. The outlaws had started in his direction, but as slugs kicked up dirt at their feet, they stopped short with almost comical suddenness and then dived for cover behind the log where they had been sitting.
“What the hell!” Joe shouted.
“It’s an ambush!” Green hollered. “Must be Jensen’s men!” He stuck his gun over the log and triggered twice in Pearlie’s general direction. The bullets rattled the brush but didn’t come very close to the Sugarloaf foreman.
Pearlie fired again. The slug chewed bark and splinters from the fallen tree.
As long as the two outlaws stayed behind the log, he couldn’t hit them. The best he could hope for was to keep them pinned down until Cal got back with Sally and Ben.
Pearlie wasn’t much of a praying man, but he sent up a plea that all three of his friends would be all right.
One of the outlaws raised up to try a shot. Pearlie was ready and squeezed the trigger. The man yelped as his hat flew off his head. Pearlie hoped the bullet had found more than hat, but judging by the man’s renewed cursing, that wasn’t the case.
With one ear, Pearlie listened to the other battle that was going on. He heard the heavy boom of pistol shots, mixed in with sharper cracks that probably came from Sally’s carbine. She was giving a good account of herself, anyway . . . not that Pearlie would have expected anything else.
A lull fell over the clearing. He took advantage of it to thumb fresh cartridges into the chambers he had emptied.
He heard the two outlaws behind the log talking but couldn’t make out any of their words. They were probably planning something, he thought.
A moment later, he found out as one man popped up and sprayed lead across the area where Pearlie was hidden. He got off only one shot in return before he hit the dirt and hugged the ground for dear life as slugs tore through the brush around him, rattling the branches.
He heard running footsteps and knew the other outlaw was trying to flank him. The varmint was going to be successful. Pearlie couldn’t risk raising his head to take aim at him.
If they caught him in a crossfire, he wasn’t going to stand a chance.
Cal had his rifle ready as he ran through the trees. Shooting came from both directions, in front of him and behind him. He didn’t like being in the middle. He wanted to be in one fight or the other.
He knew Pearlie was right, though. Protecting Miss Sally was always the most important thing, so he continued heading in that direction.
The shooting ahead of him tapered off, just as the other battle seemed to heat up. He heard shot after shot and knew Pearlie might be in bad trouble, but he couldn’t turn back to help his friend. He had to do what the foreman had told him.
A shape suddenly burst out of the brush in front of him. Cal didn’t have time to stop. He and the stranger ran smack-dab into each other with stunning force.
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