C
HAPTER
F
IVE
Not one for riding in a buckboard, Smoke let Sally drive the rig while he rode next to it on his big Palouse stud, Stormy. The bronc's name reflected both his personality and his coloring, which was gray with a dark-spotted white rump. Without Smoke's permission, no one could come within five feet of the horse without risking serious injury.
As he rode down the trail toward town, Smoke glanced down at Sally, recalling her playfulness in the bedroom just before they left. When it suited her to do so, Sally wore men's pants, though this morning she was wearing a dress. But no matter how she was dressed, she was never without her nickel-plated .32 revolver. She wasn't a fast-draw artist, but she was smooth with it, and she always hit where she aimed. He smiled as he thought of the two men who had accosted her yesterday. The one named Speeg didn't know how lucky he was to still have his privates. If she had wanted to, she could have taken him apart, one ball at a time.
When they reached Big Rock and rode down Main Street, many of the citizens they passed called out and waved. Part of it was because the Jensens were well known and respected in the town Smoke had helped to form, and they knew most everyone by their first names. But part of it was because of the way Sally had handled herself with the two ruffians who had accosted her. Word had spread throughout the town.
Sheriff Monte Carson was sitting on the boardwalk in front of his office with a cup of coffee in one hand and his ever-present pipe in the other. He had his chair tilted back on two legs and his feet were braced on the hitching rail in front of him.
When Smoke and Sally rode past, he raised his cup in a salute and called, “Howdy.”
Smoke grinned and tipped his hat and Sally smiled and waved. “Meet you at Longmont's,” Smoke said.
Carson nodded and then he pitched his coffee onto the dirt. Smoke and Monte Carson had become very good friends over the past few years. Carson had once been a well-known gunfighter, though he had never ridden the owlhoot trail.
A local rancher, Tilden Franklin, with plans to take over the county, had hired Carson to be the sheriff of Fontana, a town just down the road from Smoke's Sugarloaf spread. When Carson learned that the man's plans were to have a sheriff who would wink at his lawlessness, he put his foot down and informed Franklin that Fontana was going to be run in a law-abiding manner from then on.
Franklin sent a bunch of his riders in to teach the upstart sheriff a lesson. The men killed Carson's two deputies and seriously wounded him, taking over the town. In retaliation, Smoke founded the town of Big Rock, and he and his band of aging gunfighters cleaned up the town of Fontana. When the fracas was over, Smoke offered the job of sheriff of Big Rock to Monte Carson. Carson married a grass widow and settled into the job like he was born to it. Neither Smoke nor the citizens of Big Rock ever had cause to regret his taking the job.
Heavyset and growing a bit of a paunch, thanks both to his wife's excellent cooking and his aversion to any real physical labor, Carson was still quick as a snake with a handgun and was as honest as a gold coin. If you obeyed the law and didn't cause any trouble in his town, you would have no trouble with him.
Down the street, Smoke dismounted and helped Sally tie the two-horse rig up to a rail in front of the general store. He went inside with her and looked around at the goods piled on tables and stacked on shelves. The store smelled of cured meat, flour, spices, candle wax, and coal oil. A large counter separated the proprietors from the customers, and on that counter was a roll of brown paper and a spool of string. Peg Johnson was behind the counter at that very moment, tending to another customer.
“Hello, Sally, Smoke,” Peg said. “I'll be with you in a moment.”
“No hurry,” Sally said as she began looking through the dry goods.
“Uh, Sally, I'm going down to the hardware store and have Pete deliver the fence posts and wire. Then I think I'll head on over to Louis's place and drink coffee while you shop.”
“All right. Do you need anything?”
“You might pick me out a couple of pair of pants and maybe some socks.”
Sally smiled and fingered his shirt, which was showing some signs of wear. “I'll pick out a couple of nice shirts too, sweetheart. Can't have the master of the Sugarloaf looking threadbare, can we?”
“All right,” he agreed, “but only in white or blue. None of those fancy colors you bought last time. I couldn't even give those away to Pearlie, and Lord knows, that boy has no clothes sense at all.”
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Sally picked up a bright red shirt with a white collar and held it up.
“How about this one?” she asked with a mischievous smile.
Smoke snorted, shook his head, and walked hurriedly out the door.
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After stopping by the hardware store to take care of his business, Smoke walked down to Longmont's and, as was his custom, once inside, stepped immediately to the side and pressed his back up against the wall. He stood there a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the lower light inside while he looked for possible trouble among the patrons. Even though he knew he was almost as safe in his friend's restaurant as he was in his own house, he'd been hunted and tracked for more than half his life, and the habit of caution was so ingrained in him that he didn't even notice he was doing it.
The owner of the saloon and restaurant, Louis Longmont, was sitting at his usual table in a corner. He watched his friend go through his regular ritual upon entering the place where Louis plied his trade of gambling, which he euphemistically called “teaching amateurs the laws of chance.”
Louis was a lean, hawk-faced man, with strong, slender hands, long fingers, and carefully manicured nails. He had jet-black hair and a black pencil-thin mustache. He was dressed in a black suit, with a white shirt and a crimson ascotâsomething he'd picked up on a trip to England some years back. He wore low-heeled boots, and a pistol hung in tied-down leather on his right side. The pistol was nickel-plated, with ivory handles, but it wasn't just for show, for Louis was snake-quick and a feared, deadly gun-hand when pushed.
Although Louis was engaged in a profession that did not have a very good reputation, he was not an evil man. He had never hired his gun out for money. And while he could make a deck of cards do almost anything, he had never cheated at poker. He didn't have to cheat. He was possessed of a phenomenal memory, could tell you the odds of filling any type of poker hand, and was an expert at the technique of card counting.
Louis was just past thirty. When he was a small boy, Louis left Louisiana and came West with his parents. His parents had died in a shantytown fire, leaving the boy to cope as best he could.
Louis had coped quite well, plying his innate intelligence and willingness to take a chance into a fortune. He owned a large ranch up in Wyoming Territory, several businesses in San Francisco, and a hefty chunk of a railroad.
Though it was a mystery to many why Louis continued to stay with his saloon and restaurant in a small town, Louis explained it very simply. “I would miss it,” he said. Smoke understood exactly what he was talking about.
Always the gambler, Louis once joked that he would like to draw against Smoke someday, just to see who was faster. Smoke allowed as how it would be close, but that he would win.
“You don't think that maybe I'm just a little faster?” Louis asked.
“Oh, I didn't say that,” Smoke replied. “Who knows, you might be just a little faster.”
“Then I don't understand. Why do you say you would win?”
“Because you are also too civilized. Your mind is distracted by visions of operas, fine foods and wines, and the odds of your winning the match. Also, your fatal flaw is that you can almost always see the good in the lowest creatures God ever made, and you refuse to believe that anyone is pure evil, without any hope of redemption.”
When Louis laughed at this description of himself, Smoke continued. “I'm different. When some snake-scum draws down on me and wants to dance, my mind is clear and focused. The only thing I think about is killing the son of a bitch.”
Louis never brought the issue up again.
Still standing just inside the door, Smoke glanced over and saw his friend smiling at him. He returned the grin, then moved across the floor to take a seat at Louis's table.
“Coffee?” Louis offered.
“You bet.”
Louis raised a hand and said, “Andre, a cup of your best for our friend here.”
Louis's French cook replied through a window into the kitchen in his thick accent, “I will give Monsieur Smoke the same coffee as everyone else,
mon ami,
and it already is the best coffee in Colorado, if not in this entire wretched country.”
Both Smoke and Louis laughed. Andre was known to think the pinnacle of culture resided in Paris, France, and the opposite end of the spectrum was America, though he had been known to say a few kind words about New York City.
“I see you're still as cautious as ever when entering a room,” Louis said as Andre placed a china cup and saucer in front of Smoke, and filled it from the silver service set that Louis always had on his table.
Smoke shrugged. “It's been so long it's the only way I know.”
Louis sighed. He was much the same way, having made more than his share of enemies over the years. “It is hardly the most enjoyable way of living, always having to look over one's shoulder for some miscreant from one's past.”
Smoke grinned. “Yes, it's a terrible way to live, but it beats the hell out of a bullet in the back.”
Louis laughed. “You always have had the most succinct way of putting things in perspective, Smoke.”
“So, what's been happening with you?” Smoke asked.
“Not much. Except for the little show your Sally put on for us the other day when she ran those two galoots off, the town's been as dull as dishwater. And it's been that way for the past few weeks. Why, I haven't had an interesting opponent in poker for the entire month.”
“But,” Smoke said, raising his eyebrows, “I'll bet that didn't keep you from taking most of their weekend pay, now, did it?”
Louis shrugged and spread his arms. “I am always willing to give lessons in the noble art of poker, even to those who will never learn from their mistakes.”
Smoke was about to say that their first mistake was sitting down across a card table from Louis Longmont, when Sheriff Monte Carson ambled through the batwings.
Louis looked over and saw that Andre had seen the sheriff arrive as well, and was already bringing another cup and saucer to the table.
Carson sat down and grimaced as he pulled his chair up to the table.
“Something ailing you, Monte?” Smoke asked as he watched Carson take a deep gulp of Andre's excellent coffee.
“It's just this rheumatiz, Smoke.” Carson gave a half smile. “Hell, at my age, if it don't hurt, it don't work.”
“You're not all that old, Monte,” Louis said, sipping his coffee with his small finger extended as if he were having high tea in Queen Victoria's garden.
“It ain't the years, Louis,” Carson replied. “It's the miles, an' I got plenty of miles on this old carcass.”
“Hell, I'll drink to that,” Smoke said, raising his cup in a mock toast.
“How about some lunch?” Louis asked.
Smoke frowned. “I'd better wait for Sally,” he said. “She's over at the general store buying clothes. That'll probably cost more than the fencing and wire I just bought.”
“At least she is still interested in looking nice for you,” Carson said. “My wife could wear burlap sacks and be just as happy.”
Louis coughed gently. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he teased. “If you two old married gents are going to reveal all the secrets of your marriages in front of this old bachelor, I'm afraid I'm going to have to take my leave before I become terminally embarrassed.”
“That'll be the day,” Smoke said, laughing.
“Yeah,” Carson said. “About the only time I ever seen Louis embarrassed was the time we was playing poker and he tried to bluff you with a king-high hand and you called him and beat him with a pair of deuces, Smoke.”
Louis flushed. “It was the correct play,” he argued, still embarrassed. “Smoke should have folded.”
“That's what you get for playing with amateurs, Louis,” Smoke said. “We don't always do what we are supposed to do.”
“Amateur, hell,” Louis said, grinning. “Give me two weeks and I could make you as good as any poker player in the country, Smoke.”
“Not my game, Louis. I'm just an ordinary old rancher now.”