The Family Jensen (12 page)

Smoke and Calhoun left from in front of Dr. Neal’s house a quarter of an hour later and rode to the schoolhouse to pick up the trail.

“That Injun woke up while the doc was tending to my arm,” Calhoun said. “When he found out that Thorn and Harley carried off Miss Garrard, it was all the doc could do to hold him down. He wanted to come with us. Doc said that’d be too dangerous for him with a head wound like that. He gave the redskin somethin’ to make him sleep.”

Smoke nodded. “That was probably best. We don’t need a wounded man to look after any more than we need a posse tagging along.”

“Yeah, you’re right about that. You ought to be able to handle two men, especially when one of ’em is wounded. You’re pretty slick when it comes to handlin’ a gun, ain’t you, West?”

Smoke shrugged. “I’m still here.”

“Yeah, that’s sort of what you have to go by, ain’t it?” Calhoun paused. “You know, West, I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot the way we did. You may not believe it, but it’s important to me that I keep the peace in my town. I’ve been around long enough to know trouble when I see it…and mister, you got it writ all over you.”

“I don’t go looking for trouble,” Smoke said. That was stretching the truth a little, because in one special case, he was definitely looking for trouble.

“You don’t back away from it when it comes callin’, though, do you?”

“The Good Lord didn’t put much back-up in me when He made me,” Smoke admitted.

“See, that’s just what I mean. I took one look at you and knew things’d be more peaceful in Buffalo Flat if you just kept ridin’.”

“More peaceful for Jason Garrard, you mean.”

“Mr. Garrard’s the most important man in town, and I won’t apologize for lookin’ out for his interests. The more successful he is, the better off the town is.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” Smoke said. “Other folks might not see it that way.”

They had reached the school. Earl Ballew’s body was gone, having been carted away by the local undertaker. Smoke swung down from the saddle and hunkered on his heels to study the hoofprints on the ground in front of the building. The children’s feet had worn the grass away and it was easy to see the prints in the dirt.

Every set of horseshoes had its own distinctive array of nicks and scratches that showed up in the tracks it left. Smoke was able to pick out the prints left by Thorn’s and Harley’s mounts, and he committed them to memory so that he would know them when he saw them again.

“They were headed north when they left here,” he told Calhoun when he was back on the Appaloosa. “Got any idea where they could have been headed in that direction?”

Calhoun shook his head. “No, but if they curved west, that’d put them in the Big Horns, and there are plenty of places to hide up there.”

“The Crow village is in that direction, isn’t it? And Bannerman’s ranch?”

“Yeah,” Calhoun said, “but they could avoid those places easy enough. It’s a big mountain range.”

Smoke had been over some of it with Preacher and knew that the marshal was right. If they lost the trail, they might never find Thorn and Harley. They didn’t have any time to waste.

“We’ll be pushin’ pretty hard,” he warned Calhoun. “You’ll have to keep up, wounded arm or no wounded arm.”

“You just do what you have to do, West. I’ll stick, don’t you worry.”

Smoke wondered why Calhoun’s attitude had changed so dramatically. He wasn’t sure he trusted the man and resolved to keep an eye on him. Of course, he would have done that anyway, since he didn’t trust anybody all that much since Preacher was dead.

“You never did deputize me,” he reminded Calhoun as they rode.

“No, I sure didn’t. Forgot all about it. You swear to uphold the law?”

“I do.”

“Then I hearby appoint you a deputy marshal of Buffalo Flat, Wyomin’ Territory. That good enough, you reckon?”

“It’ll do,” Smoke said.

Calhoun hadn’t really predicted that Thorn and Harley would head for the mountains, just suggested the possibility, but it turned out to be true. The farther away he and Smoke got from town, the more the trail they were following angled toward the Big Horns.

By midday, when Smoke called a halt to study the tracks again, he thought they had narrowed down the lead somewhat, but their quarry was still quite a ways in front of them. Smoke glanced narrow-eyed at the foothills looming closer.

“We won’t be able to stop them before they reach the mountains,” he told Calhoun.

“Will you be able to find ’em once they get there?”

“Do my best,” Smoke promised. Not for the first time, he wished Preacher was still with him. The old man could follow a gnat through a hurricane. His tracking abilities bordered on the mystical, at least as far as Smoke could tell.

“I sure don’t want to go back to town and have to tell Mr. Garrard we couldn’t find his gal.”

“I don’t want that, either, although I don’t give a damn about Garrard,” Smoke said. “Miss Robin struck me as a mighty nice young woman.”

“She is,” Calhoun agreed. “For the life o’ me, I can’t see somebody like her mixed up with a dirty Injun. Half-breed, at that. I heard tell old Crazy Bear’s squaw is a gypsy woman.”

Without responding to the lawman’s comments Smoke swung up into the saddle again and took up the trail once more.

They reached the foothills around mid-afternoon and started climbing. Smoke’s keen eyes were able to pick up enough signs so they didn’t lose the trail, but following it was becoming more difficult. Thorn and Harley hadn’t been trying to conceal their tracks. They’d been interested in putting as much distance as possible between them and the settlement. Smoke could tell that had changed and they were trying to throw off any pursuit.

Late that afternoon, the hoofprints merged with the tracks left by half a dozen more horses. Smoke reined in and pointed them out to Calhoun.

“An Injun war party, maybe?” Calhoun suggested nervously.

Smoke shook his head. “No, those mounts were shod. They weren’t Indian ponies. From the looks of it, Thorn and Harley joined up with them on purpose.”

“Who could that other bunch be? And how’d Thorn know they were up here so he could rendezvous with ’em?”

“I don’t know,” Smoke said. “I reckon the odds against us have just gone up.”

“Maybe we should’ve brought that posse with us after all.”

“No, it’s better this way. The others might’ve blundered into a trap if we’d brought them with us.”

It was harder for the riders in the larger group to hide their tracks. Smoke didn’t have any trouble following them until the sun dipped behind the mountains and dusk began to settle down over the rugged terrain. He called a halt. “We’ll have to wait until morning and pick up the trail then.”

“They’ll have a whole night to gain on us,” Calhoun warned.

“No, they won’t,” Smoke replied with a shake of his head. “They’ll have to stop and camp for the night. It’s too big a risk to go blundering around in these mountains after dark. You might fall into a ravine or something like that.”

“I hope you’re right, West.”

Smoke found a place to camp in a small depression. Since full dark hadn’t fallen yet, he built a tiny, almost smokeless fire that he used to boil a pot of coffee and fry some bacon. When they were finished with the sparse meal, Smoke put out the fire.

“Need me to change the dressing on that arm?” he asked.

“You’d do that?”

Smoke gave a grim chuckle. “I put the hole there,” he said. “I might as well tend to it.”

“I’d be obliged,” Calhoun said. “Doc Neal told me I needed to change it at least once a day, and I hadn’t quite figured out how I was gonna do that. I can fire a gun just fine with my left hand, but it ain’t much good for little stuff.”

Smoke had noticed Calhoun had replaced his regular holster with a crossdraw rig that he still wore on the right side, so he could use his left hand to draw the gun. “Where’d you get the holster?” he asked.

“Hell, I got a whole drawerful of different kinds of holsters in the office. When Buffalo Flat first got started, it was rough as a cob for a few months. Hombres would get themselves in gunfights and wind up dead, and whatever was left over from their gear that the undertaker didn’t claim for plantin’ ’em usually wound up bein’ confiscated by the marshal.” Calhoun grinned. “That’d be me.”

Smoke grunted. Calhoun was different from most lawmen he’d run into. He almost seemed to take pride in his low-level corruption.

“You don’t think much o’ me, do you?” Calhoun went on as if he had read Smoke’s thoughts.

“I think the citizens of Buffalo Flat could find themselves a better marshal,” Smoke said bluntly.

“Really? Did you see how fast the town was growin’? Did you hear any commotion from the saloons last night?”

“No, but I was up at the school. I might not have been able to hear it.”

Calhoun snorted. “There wasn’t nothin’ to hear. Even Bannerman’s wild Texas cowboys behave themselves when they’re in town. That’s because of me, West. They know I won’t stand for any foolishness.”

“Except from Garrard’s men.”

“I told you, Garrard’s the biggest man in these parts. If it wasn’t for him, the town wouldn’t have enough money to pay my wages. Damn right I’m gonna look out for him and his men.” Calhoun waved a hand dismissively in the gathering shadows. “Ah, hell, forget it. You and me ain’t ever gonna see eye to eye on anything except wantin’ to get Miss Robin back safe and sound. Let’s let it go at that.”

“Sounds good to me,” Smoke agreed. “Would you rather stand first watch or second?”

“Second’s fine by me.”

With that settled, Calhoun turned in, rolling up in his blankets. Smoke sat down with his back against a rock and his rifle across his knees. He worked the Henry’s lever so the chamber had a cartridge in it, ready to fire if needed.

The night was quiet enough that Smoke heard the whisper of wings as an owl glided overhead in search of prey. He peered into the darkness and wondered what else was out there looking for something to kill. He was a predator, too, he thought, a man who lived only for the deaths of other men, three in particular.

Yet that wasn’t completely true. He was risking his life by going after Robin Garrard. If he died tonight, tomorrow, or the next day, the job of avenging Nicole, Arthur, and Preacher would never be finished. Did he have any right to take a chance on that?

Would he have a right to call himself a man if he didn’t?

He couldn’t answer those questions, and he wasn’t the sort of hombre to sit around brooding about them—especially when he heard a small noise somewhere near the camp. It was a faint rustle in the grass, but enough to tell him that something—or someone—was out there.

They were coming closer, he realized when he heard the sound again a moment later.

In utter silence, Smoke came to his feet. His finger curled around the trigger of his rifle.

Convinced it was a person, not an animal, he waited, motionless, as whoever it was approached.

A shadowy shape loomed up in the darkness and stepped past him. The intruder didn’t even know he was there, Smoke realized. Moving once again in complete silence, he set the rifle on the ground at his feet, then drew his right-hand Colt. He stepped forward, looped his left arm around the intruder’s neck, and jerked him backward. At the same time, he pressed the revolver’s barrel against the side of the man’s head.

“No!” the man exclaimed before Smoke’s arm across his throat cut off any more sound. The voice was familiar, and when the muzzle of Smoke’s gun prodded against something soft—like a thick bandage—he realized who it was he had grabbed.

“Sandy,” Smoke said disgustedly, “what in blazes are you doing here?”

Smoke’s voice awakened Calhoun. The marshal thrashed from his blankets and reached for his gun. “What the hell!” he exploded.

“Take it easy, Calhoun,” Smoke said, making his voice sharp so it would penetrate Calhoun’s confusion. “You don’t need to draw.” He let go of Sandy and stepped back. “We’ve got an unexpected visitor, that’s all.”

Sandy rubbed his neck where Smoke had grabbed him. “You didn’t have to try to choke me,” he said.

“You’re lucky I didn’t wallop you with my gun,” Smoke told him. “On top of that bullet graze, it might’ve been too much even for that thick skull of yours. How’d you manage to follow us out here?”

“I’m a Crow warrior, remember? Well, half of one, anyway. My father taught me how to follow a trail when I was young. Plus I had a pretty good idea Thorn and Harley would head for the mountains. When I got close enough, I just followed the smell of the coffee. I didn’t know if I was closing in on your camp, or that of Thorn and Harley.”

“If it had been their camp, you would have walked right in there and gotten yourself killed. That would have done Robin a whole heap of good.”

“You don’t understand!” Sandy protested. “I love her. I’d run any risk for her.”

Smoke understood, all right, a lot better than Sandy gave him credit for. But he said, “Those two bastards have joined up with another group. I don’t know who they are, but the odds went up by half a dozen.”

“Not exactly,” Sandy said. “I’m here to help now.”

Smoke rolled his eyes, though it was dark and Sandy couldn’t see him. He said, “I don’t think it’s gonna make that much difference. You’re wounded.”

“So is Marshal Calhoun. I can handle a gun—a rifle, anyway. I’ve never been much good with a pistol.”

“Kid’s got a point,” Calhoun said, surprising Smoke a little. “I don’t care much for redskins, but he’d be an extra gun. You
did
bring a gun with you, Injun?”

“It’s on my horse,” Sandy said. “I left it tied to a bush a couple hundred yards east of here.”

“What good was a rifle going to do you if it’s back there?” Smoke asked. It wasn’t a question that required an answer. “Go get it,” he went on. “We can’t take you all the way back to Buffalo Flat, and I don’t want you wanderin’ around out here by yourself. That might wind up causing us more trouble. I reckon you’ll ride with us, but you’ll have to keep up.”

“Of course,” Sandy replied. “I’ll fetch my horse.”

He came back a few minutes later leading the animal. Smoke asked, “Did you bring any supplies with you?”

Sandy hesitated before saying, “Well…no. I left the settlement in such a hurry after slipping out of Dr. Neal’s house, I didn’t think about it.”

“How’d you get out, anyway?” Calhoun wanted to know. “I saw the doc give you somethin’ to put you to sleep.”

Sandy shook his head. “The powder he mixed up in water didn’t work. It must have been old and lost some of its potency. It made me a little drowsy for a while, then wore off. When he stepped out of the room, I left through the window.” He put his hand to his bandaged head. “I have quite a headache, but that’s all. And that doesn’t matter a bit, compared to Robin’s safety.”

“All right, we’ve got some jerky you can have,” Smoke said. “That’ll have to do, because I’m not lighting a fire again. Too much chance the varmints we’re after might spot it.”

“I understand. Thank you.”

Smoke grunted. “No thanks necessary. You’ll carry your weight when the time comes.”

“I hope so.”

“So do I,” Smoke said, “because if you don’t, we may all die.”

Sandy hadn’t brought a bedroll with him, either. It wasn’t too cold at that time of year, but in the mountains the night air always held a chill. Smoke loaned the young man an extra blanket. Sandy rolled up in it and soon went to sleep. Calhoun turned in again, too.

The rest of Smoke’s watch was uneventful. When he judged by the stars that the night was a little more than half over, he nudged Calhoun’s shoulder with the rifle barrel.

“Wake up, Marshal,” he said. “Your turn to stand guard.”

Calhoun grumbled and sat up, shaking his head in an effort to get rid of the cobwebs of sleep. “I’m awake,” he said. He threw his blankets aside and climbed to his feet, awkwardly because of his wounded arm. He sat down on the rock where Smoke had been leaning earlier.

“If you hear anything, don’t hesitate to wake me,” Smoke told him.

“Sure, sure.”

Smoke slipped into his bedroll and placed the Henry on the ground close beside him. Using his saddle for a pillow, he lay there with his eyes slitted for a while, watching Calhoun. He didn’t know the lawman well enough to trust that he would stay awake.

But Smoke wasn’t relying totally on Calhoun. If anyone came lurking around, Seven would notice and make a racket. The Appaloosa was a good sentry.

Half an hour later Calhoun was still alert, looking around and standing up from time to time to roll his shoulders and shake his head. Smoke had to have some rest, so he chanced closing his eyes.

He fell into a light sleep. During his time with Preacher he had mastered the ability to come awake instantly, fully aware of his surroundings, ready to move fast, if anything disturbed him. He owed the old mountain man a debt greater than he could ever repay, even if Preacher had lived. Smoke knew he wouldn’t be there if not for Preacher’s help and teachings.

The sound of a soft nicker and a stomped hoof from Seven brought Smoke out of his slumber sometime later. A glance at the eastern sky showed him the black night had faded to gray. He heard deep, regular breathing and looked toward the rock. Calhoun had slid down it and sat on the ground. Slumped against it, he was sound asleep. Smoke reached for his rifle.

The ominous sound of a gun hammer ratcheting back stopped him.

“Go ahead,” said a voice he recognized as Mitch Thorn’s. “I’d like nothing better than to blow you all to hell and gone.”

Without turning his head, Smoke cut his eyes toward the voice. In the dim, pre-dawn light, he saw Thorn’s booted feet about five feet away. Smoke’s gaze traveled up Thorn’s legs to the man’s body. Thorn had his wounded right arm under the twin barrels of a shotgun, bracing it while he gripped the stock with his left hand. The Greener’s barrels and part of the stock had been sawed off, making the weapon short enough that Thorn could handle it mostly one-handed. The recoil would be hard on his left wrist, but if he touched off both barrels, the blast would be so tremendous it would wipe out anybody in front of him for ten yards or more. He wouldn’t need to reload and fire again.

At the range he was from Smoke, the double charge of buckshot wouldn’t leave enough to recognize as human.

Seven whinnied again as more men moved in from the chilly gloom. A couple covered Sandy, while one man reached down and plucked the revolver from the crossdraw rig worn by Marshal Calhoun. The lawman came awake then, sputtering and cursing. He lunged up, but one of the intruders planted a boot in his chest and shoved him back against the rock.

“Stay put, mister,” the man ordered. “Nobody’ll get hurt as long as all of you cooperate.”

The voices woke Sandy. The young man started to sit up, then reacted with shock as he saw the men pointing their guns at him. He exclaimed something in his gypsy mother’s language. At least Smoke assumed that was what it was. The words certainly weren’t in English or Crow.

Thorn sauntered forward, still covering Smoke with the sawed-off shotgun. “Now that we got you boys’ attention, listen up,” he said. “This is how it’s gonna be. We’re gonna take your horses, your guns, and all your supplies.”

“And then leave us out here?” Calhoun asked. “Hell! We’ll never make it.”

“Well, then, maybe we should just go ahead and kill you right now,” Thorn said with a smirk.

Smoke said, “Take it easy. You’ve got the upper hand, Thorn, so keep talking.”

Thorn shrugged. “There’s not much more to say. I’ve told you the deal.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Smoke replied with a shake of his head. “Who are these other hombres? How’d you come to meet up with them? And how did you find us?”

Thorn considered for a moment, then shrugged again. “Might as well indulge your curiosity, I suppose. That last question is the easiest. I figured you were stubborn enough to come after us, West, so we sent a man circling around to keep an eye on our back trail. He spotted you, and when he knew where you’d camped, he came and told us. Then it was just a matter of waiting for that lump of lard who calls himself a marshal to fall asleep. I knew he wouldn’t be able to stay awake.”

“You got no call to be talkin’ about me like that,” Calhoun complained. “I covered up for you and Harley and Ballew a whole heap of times, Thorn, and kept you out of trouble when most star packers would’ve thrown you behind bars!”

Thorn sneered at him. “And you were well paid for it, too. You were never a real lawman. You were just Garrard’s lapdog.”

“Same thing’s true of you,” Calhoun said.

“Not hardly. I always had my own plans. Garrard just didn’t know about them. That’s why I sent for these fellas and had them wait up here in the hills for me until the time was right.”

Smoke guessed, “You were going to double-cross Garrard, raid the town, and loot it.”

“No, you’re wrong, West. I could only do something like that once. But Garrard’s making money hand over fist, and it’s been piling up in the safe in his office. He plans to ship it back to the bank in Casper before much longer because there isn’t a bank in Buffalo Flat yet.”

“Your gang was going to hit the stagecoach when Garrard’s money was on it,” Smoke said as he began to understand.

“That’s right. They’d make it look good, too, before I drove them away and saved the money. Garrard would have been so grateful to me for saving his money that he’d convince Robin to marry me.”

Sandy burst out, “She would never marry you, you…you…” More curses in the gypsy tongue came from the young man.

“Shut up that jabbering, redskin,” Thorn said. “She wouldn’t have had much choice in the matter. After all, I’d be the man who saved her father from being ruined.”

Smoke put the rest of the plan together in his head. “Then once you were married to her, Garrard would’ve had some sort of fatal accident…leaving you in charge of the whole town.”

“That’s right,” Thorn said. “We’d have bled it dry, too, and left there as rich men.” His face contorted with anger and hate. “But you and this filthy Indian ruined all that, West. Now it’ll never happen.”

“You mean you ruined it for yourself when you lost your head yesterday morning,” Smoke said.

“Well, what the hell would you do if you walked in and found the woman you loved bein’ pawed by a dirty ’breed?” Thorn demanded.

Smoke smiled grimly. “You didn’t count on fallin’ in love with her, did you, Thorn? She was just supposed to be part of the plan, a means to an end. Now you’ve risked everything because you fell in love with her.”

“Shut up!” Thorn lifted the sawed-off greener. “Just shut up, West. I’ve changed my mind. We’re not going to let you bastards live. The only way we can salvage anything is by looting the town, the way you said, and I’d just as soon not have you behind me somewhere while I’m doin’ that.”

“So you’re going to kill us?”

Thorn smiled. “That’s the new plan.”

“Where’s Robin?”

“Don’t worry about her. She’s close by. I’ve got a man keeping an eye on her.”

“You’ll have to kill her, too, you know.”

“No!” Sandy cried.

Thorn shook his head. “No, she’ll come with us. She’ll understand that’s the only thing she can do. Might take her a while, but she’ll come around.”

“Why don’t you bring her in?” Smoke suggested. “At least let her say good-bye to Sandy here?”

“Why the hell would I want to do that? Let this redskin slobber on her some more? I don’t think so.”

The sun wasn’t quite up, but it was high enough so that reddish-gold light flooded the sky. Smoke looked around, his eyes searching intently over the hills that surrounded the campsite. He smiled again.

“It’s a beautiful morning,” he said. “A good day to die.”

Thorn’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a savage grin. “That’s one way for you to look at it,” he said.

“Nope, not me,” Smoke said. “You’re the one who’s going to die, Thorn.”

The grin became a snarl. “We’ll just see about that!” Thorn said as he swung the shotgun up, his finger tightening on the trigger.