“Please, Mr. Jensen,” Sarah said in her most helpless voice, keeping it low so as not to awaken Sally. “Come with me quickly. I need your help.”
“Let me just wake Sally up,” Smoke began.
“No! There’s no time for that,” Sarah pleaded. “Come quickly. My buckboard is just up the road a ways and I have something in it you need to see.”
She turned around and moved at a fast pace down the road away from his house, not giving him time to think about it as he followed her down the dark path.
“Is someone hurt?” Smoke asked as he caught up with her and walked by her side.
“You’ll see,” Sarah said, avoiding the question. “It’s just around the corner here.”
When they came to the buckboard, Smoke leaned over the side, looking into the bed of the wagon. All he saw was a pile of blankets and some rope coiled up in the corner of the wagon. “I don’t see . . . ” he began, turning around to find Sarah standing a few yards away with a pistol in her hand aimed at his gut.
“What the . . . ?”
“Kindly put your hands up, Mr. Jensen,” she said, her voice suddenly hard and flat.
He took a tentative step toward her and she eared back the hammer on the pistol with an audible click. “Please, Mr. Jensen, don’t make me shoot you here. Just do as I say and you may live to see morning.”
Smoke frowned as he raised his hands over his head.
“Now, turn around and climb into the back of the buckboard,” Sarah ordered.
“Why don’t you tell me what this is all about?” Smoke said as he climbed up into the bed of the wagon.
“Don’t you turn around, just keep looking in that direction,” Sarah ordered.
Smoke shrugged and did as she said. “Is it all right if I ask you what this is all about?” he said without turning to look at her.
Instead of answering him, Sarah reached under the seat of the buckboard and pulled out an iron crowbar she’d put there earlier. Swinging as hard as she could with one hand, she hit Smoke in the back of the head, knocking him unconscious onto his face.
She put down her gun and climbed up into the wagon with him. Taking some short lengths of rope she’d prepared earlier, she tied his hands together behind his back and then tied his feet together. Once that was done, she took some fence wire and wound it tightly around the rope, so that he couldn’t possibly undo the knots she’d tied.
When she was finished, she noticed blood was pouring from a wound in the back of his head, so she took a handkerchief from her purse and tied a makeshift bandage around his head to slow the bleeding. Once it stopped, she checked to make sure he was still breathing. After all, she didn’t want him to die on her—that would be too easy. She wanted him to suffer for a while, and then she wanted him to know why he was being killed before he died.
She wanted him to know that killing her brother Johnny had caused his death.
She climbed up into the seat and turned the buckboard around. She had to hurry. She wanted to be a dozen miles away before Sally Jensen woke up tomorrow morning and found her husband missing. By the time the alarm was raised and they figured out what had happened, she should be almost home.
Moving as fast as she could over the road in the near-total blackness, Sarah took almost three hours to make her way to the outskirts of Big Rock, where she hoped to find the men from her father’s ranch waiting for her along with Carl and Mac.
It’d been three full days since she’d sent Mac and Carl out to wait for them, so the men certainly should have been able to make the trip from Pueblo to here in that time.
Even looking for them and expecting to see them, Sarah almost jumped out of the heavy coat she was wearing when a dark figure materialized out of the darkness and grabbed the reins to the horses pulling the buckboard.
“Is that you, Miss Sarah?” a gruff voice called.
She took a moment to catch her breath and try to calm her racing heart. “Yes. Who are you?”
“I’m Jimmy Corbett, ma’am,” the voice called back as the figure moved closer so she could make out the face.
She recognized the man then. He’d been with her father for several years, though she didn’t know him all that well personally. He was a little older than she and her brother, so Johnny had never run around with him much like he had some of the younger hands on the ranch.
“Well, Jimmy, you scared me out of two years’ growth coming up on me out of the darkness like that,” she complained, but her voice was level and there was no malice in it.
“Sorry, ma’am,” he said, taking his hat off and standing there like a schoolboy. “Clete told us to make sure it was you ‘fore we called out or anything, an’ in the darkness it was kind’a hard to tell.”
“That’s all right, Jimmy. Where is Clete?”
Jimmy pointed up a slight rise off to her right. “He’s up the top of that there hill, ma’am.” He hesitated. “It’s gonna be kind’a bumpy ridin’ that buckboard up there. You want I should take the reins and let you ride my hoss?”
Truth to tell, Sarah’s butt was aching from the long ride on the hurricane deck of the wagon, so she readily agreed. Even a saddle was better than the hard boards of the wagon seat and the continual bouncing of the wagon.
“Sure, Jimmy. Show me the way.”
It didn’t take long to get Cletus and the other men awake and some fresh coffee brewed. Though Sarah much preferred hot tea, she gratefully accepted a tin mug of the strong brew to help ward off the chill of the frigid night air. She hadn’t realized how cold it was when she’d left town heading out to the Jensen spread, and now she was about frozen clear through.
She was about half through with her cup when Cletus finished checking out Smoke Jensen in the back of the buckboard and approached her next to the fire. Carl Jacoby was sitting next to her and Dan Macklin was on the other side. Neither had asked her how she’d managed to get Jensen in the back of the wagon, both figuring she’d tell them soon enough.
“Sarah, Jensen’s more dead than alive in the back of that wagon. What’d you hit him with, an anvil?” he asked as he squatted next to her and poured himself a cup of coffee.
She cast worried eyes in the direction of the wagon. “No, just that iron crowbar under the seat.”
Cletus blew on the coffee to cool it, and then took a deep swig. He glanced at her over the rim. “I’d say it’s ‘bout fifty-fifty whether he makes it through the night, what with the blood he lost and the fact that he’s not really dressed for this cold. The man’s ‘bout near froze to death.”
“Sarah, didn’t you think to cover him with a blanket or something?” Jacoby asked from beside her.
Angry with herself for not realizing how dangerous it would be to transport him the way she did, Sarah snapped back, “No, I didn’t, Carl! It’s not every day I kidnap a killer and have to drive him halfway across the country in the dead of night.” She shook her head. She’d put blankets in the back of the buckboard, but those were to cover him with if anyone approached, and she simply had been too miserable with her own discomfort to think much about his.
She glanced over at the buckboard, hoping she hadn’t inadvertently killed the man before she could tell him why she’d kidnapped him.
“Calm down, Sarah,” Cletus said in his usual unruffled tone of voice. Sarah reflected she couldn’t ever remember Cletus being riled up about anything in all the years she’d known him.
“I’m havin’ a couple of the boys carry him over here next to the fire, an’ I’m gonna see if we can wake him up enough to get some hot coffee down him.”
She felt her face flush with shame when she saw them carry Smoke Jensen’s pale, limp body over and lay it next to the fire. Cletus was right, she thought. He does look more dead than alive.
“But Clete,” she said, glancing back and forth from Smoke to him, “we’ve got to get moving. Come morning, his wife is going to wake up and realize he’s missing. We need to be as far away when that happens as we can be.”