Pearlie nodded, grinning. “And then they’ll be trapped out here in the middle of nowhere with nothing to ride off on. Good idea, Smoke.”
When the train finally ground to a complete stop, Louis turned a big easy chair around until it was facing the door, and then took a seat, the express gun across his knees and his pistols on a small table next to the chair. He pulled a long black cigar out of his coat pocket and lit it, sending clouds of fragrant blue smoke into the air. He pulled his hat down tight on his head and leaned back, crossing his legs and smoking as if he were waiting for a friend to visit.
“Good hunting, gentlemen,” he called as he eared back the twin hammers on the shotgun.
“You be careful, you hear?” Smoke said, tipping his head at his friend.
“It is not I that should be careful, pal,” Louis replied, his voice turning hard. “It is those miscreants that are interrupting our trip who should be saying their prayers at this time.”
As Smoke and the boys slipped out of the car and moved slowly down the line of cars toward the front of the train, Cal asked in a low voice, “Smoke, what’s a miscreant?”
Smoke chuckled. “It’s someone without a shred of decency in their character, Cal.”
“Oh,” Cal said, glancing at Pearlie walking next to him. “You mean like someone who’d take the last spoonful of sugar in the bowl and not leave any for his friends?”
“Now Cal, boy,” Pearlie said in a soothing voice, “that there bowl wasn’t near half-full to begin with.”
As they neared the car just behind the engine that contained wood to be burned in the boiler, Smoke heard a harsh voice say, “Watch the hosses, Johnny. We’ll get the passengers’ money and be right back.”
Smoke gave the robbers time to climb aboard the train before he put the Henry in his left hand, sauntered out from between two cars, and walked slowly toward the outlaws’ horses, which were being tended by a large, fat man with a full beard and a ragged, sweat-stained hat set low on his head.
The outlaw’s eyes widened and his hand moved toward his belt as he said, “Who the hell . . . ?”
Smoke drew his Colt in one lightning fast motion and shot the man in the face, blowing him backward off his horse to land facedown in the dirt next to the track, his gun still in its leather.
The other horses jumped and crow-hopped at the sound of the pistol shot until Cal and Pearlie untied them from where they had been hitched to the rail on the railroad car and shooed them away by waving their arms and shouting.
Soon, only the dead outlaw was left next to the tracks, blood still oozing into a puddle under his head.
Smoke moved up to the engine and found the engineer lying on his side, holding his left arm, a bullet hole in his left shoulder.
Smoke knelt next to him. “Are you gonna be all right?”
The engineer nodded. “Yeah, but somebody needs to put some wood in the boiler or we’re gonna lose all our steam.”
Smoke glanced over his shoulder. “Cal, would you help this man and do what he says while Pearlie and I go after the robbers?”
“Aw shucks, Smoke,” Cal groused as he climbed up into the cab of the engine. “Pearlie gets to have all the fun.”
“We just don’t want you getting yourself shot again an’ bleedin’ all over Mr. Hill’s fine car,” Pearlie teased, “you bein’ such a magnet for lead an’ all.”
“Now Pearlie,” Cal argued, his face turning red. “I ain’t been shot in over three weeks now.”
Smoke laughed. “That might be because we haven’t been in any gunfights for three weeks, Cal.”
Cal bent and helped the engineer to his feet as Pearlie and Smoke jumped down out of the engine and headed back along the tracks toward the passenger cars.
They eased up into the first one, and Smoke was surprised when a female passenger threw up her hands and screamed, “Oh, no, they’ve come back to rape and kill us!”
Smoke smiled and motioned for her to put her hands down. “No, ma’am. We’re here after the robbers,” he explained as he and Pearlie moved down the aisle between the seats.
She took one look at Smoke’s handsome face and broad shoulders and her voice seemed a mite disappointed when she said, “Then you aren’t going to rob the men and rape the women?”
“Not this time,” Smoke called back over his shoulder with a grin.
Smoke and Pearlie moved through three more cars before catching up to the robbers in the car just before Hill’s private one that Louis was in.
Smoke motioned for Pearlie to kneel down in front of the door, and then stood over him as he jerked the door open.
The crowd of robbers in the aisle collecting passengers’ money and jewels glanced back over their shoulders in time to see Smoke and Pearlie open fire, Smoke working the lever of the Henry so fast his shots seemed to be one long explosion.
Six outlaws went down before the others could return fire, and then it was wild and poorly aimed as they shouted and screamed and backed through the far door of the car, which was so filled with gun-smoke they could barely be seen.
The bandits in the lead jerked the door to Hill’s car open and rushed inside, to be met by the thundering explosion of twin ten-gauge barrels hurling buckshot at them.
Four more men went down, shredded and almost cut in half by the horrendous power of the express gun.
The seven men remaining alive dove off the train out of the connecting door to the cars, and began running as fast as they could back up the tracks to where they thought their horses were tied.
They slowed and looked around with puzzled expressions when they came to Johnny’s dead body.
“Where the hell are the hosses?” one of the men hollered, whirling around and looking in all directions.
From thirty feet behind him, Smoke said, “They’re gone, you bastards!”
The robbers turned and saw Smoke and Pearlie and Louis standing there, side by side, their hands full of iron.
“There’s only three of them, boys, let’s take ‘em!” one of the men shouted.
“Uh-uh,” came a voice from behind the outlaws. Cal stood there just outside the engine, his Colt in his hand. “There’s four of us,” he said, a wide grin of fierce anticipation on his young face.
Nevertheless, the outlaws swung their pistols up and opened fire.
In less than fifteen seconds it was all over and every gunman lay either dead or dying next to the train. Blood pooled and saturated the dry earth of the tracks.
Smoke and Pearlie and Louis approached the group of bodies on the ground cautiously, kicking pistols and rifles out of reach of the wounded men who were groaning and writhing on the ground.
Cal said softly, “Dagnabit!” as he glanced down at his thigh, noting a thin line of red where a bullet had creased his upper leg, burning rather than tearing a hole in his trousers.
He quickly turned to the side so his friends couldn’t see the wound, calling, “I’m just gonna go on up and make sure the engineer is all right.”
When the engineer looked at the blood staining Cal’s pants leg, Cal shook his head. “Don’t say nothin’ ‘bout this to my friends, all right?”
The wounded engineer just grinned, having heard what Pearlie and Smoke had said about Cal being a magnet for lead. “I promise not to say nothin’, if you’ll be so kind as to build me a cigarette while we wait for the steam to build.”
TWO
Carl Jacoby sat staring out of the train window next to his seat, sweat beading on his forehead and running down his cheeks as he thought about just how fast with a gun Smoke Jensen and his friends had proved to be.
Jacoby was one of Johnny MacDougal’s best friends . . . or at least he had been until Jensen and his men had shot his friend down in the streets of Pueblo, Colorado, last year. Jacoby hadn’t been there, being sick with the grippe at the time, but he’d been told Jensen had shot Johnny down in cold blood without even giving him a chance to clear leather.