He looked back over his shoulder. “Now, I’ll keep an eye on those galoots down there, an’ you can get back there an’ stir up that fire. I’m thinkin’ some hot coffee’d sure go down good right now to take the chill out of my bones.”
Down below, Sally had laid Monte down on his back and was sponging his forehead with cool water from her canteen. As snowflakes began to accumulate on his shirt, she had Pearlie cover him with a blanket.
“How are you feeling, Monte?” she asked when he began to shiver.
“I . . . I don’t rightly know, Sally,” he said with a confused look in his eyes. “Where are we and what happened to me?” he asked with a groan.
“We’re on the trail after Smoke’s kidnappers, Monte, and someone shot your horse out from under you, causing you to take a bad fall.”
“Smoke’s kidnappers?” he asked, clearly still confused and unsure of what was going on.
Louis frowned and touched Sally on the shoulder, indicating he wanted to talk with her out of Monte’s hearing.
She got up and they walked a short distance away, turning their backs to the north wind to lessen the chill. “I think he’s got a concussion, Sally,” he said. “I’ve seen it before when someone got hit on the head. It makes them forget what they’ve done the past few days, and it can be very serious.”
“I know,” she said, glancing back over her shoulder at Monte’s pale face. “We’ve got to get him back to Big Rock where Dr. Spalding can take a look at him.”
“You think he’s fit to ride a horse?” Louis asked, doubt in his voice.
“Not by himself,” she answered. “But if you ride behind him and help hold him in the saddle, I think he can do it.” She glanced up at the snowflakes drifting down. “He’s going to have to, Louis. This storm looks like it’s going to be pretty bad, and I don’t know if he will survive a night of freezing temperatures, not in his condition.”
“I agree,” Louis said. He looked around at the terrain surrounding them. “Anyway, they’ve got us pretty well boxed in here, and I don’t see any way past them without a larger force of men.” He grinned sourly. “And especially not with the five of us having only three horses left.”
Sally went back over to Monte. “Monte, we’re going to try and get you up on a horse,” she said. “Louis is going to ride with you on the way back to Big Rock.”
As Pearlie and Cal helped Monte to his feet, he leaned over and vomited in the weeds. Louis glanced at Sally and shook his head. He knew from past experience this was not a good sign in men with head injuries.
It took both Cal and Pearlie to get Monte up on the horse and to hold him there while Louis climbed up behind him. “You just hold on to the saddle horn, Monte, and I’ll do the riding for both of us,” Louis said, putting his arms around Monte to grab the reins.
Since she was the lightest, Sally rode double with Cal while Pearlie had his own horse to himself.
“Pearlie, since you’re riding alone, why don’t you hightail it on back to Big Rock and see if you can get the doc to come out to meet us with a buckboard? That way he can get to see Monte sooner,” Louis suggested.
Pearlie touched his hat and put the spurs to his mount, heading back down the trail as fast as he could ride.
It was slow going as they rode toward home. Louis was afraid to push the horse too fast lest he stumble in the snow or jar Monte and cause more problems inside his head.
“Who do you think that was back there that shot us up?” Cal asked as they rode.
“It must have been some of the people that took Smoke,” Sally said.
“I wonder why they didn’t try and kill us,” Louis said. “They certainly had a good chance to do so.”
Sally shook her head. “I don’t know, Louis. Perhaps their only quarrel is with Smoke and they don’t want to kill anyone else unless they have to.”
“But if they’re that angry with Smoke, why take him?” Louis asked. “Once they had the drop on him, why didn’t they just kill him and be done with it? That would have been a lot less dangerous and would have made a lot more sense than taking him prisoner.”
“I don’t know, Louis,” Sally said, “but I do intend to find out, and God help whoever is behind this.”
Louis glanced at Sally and felt the hairs on the back of his neck stir. He’d seen that look before in Smoke’s eyes, and it always meant someone was about to die.
Suddenly, he felt very sorry for whoever had taken Smoke, for he knew their days were numbered.
TWENTY
Smoke moved through the night as fast as he could, considering the snowstorm made the darkness almost absolute and he was running through snow that was getting deeper by the minute. It was only his excellent night vision that kept him from breaking an ankle or impaling himself on a tree limb or other natural obstruction in the heavy forest he was traversing.
Knowing the storm, like most early fall storms, was coming almost directly out of the north, he realized all he had to do to keep on track was to keep the wind directly in his face. That way he avoided traveling in circles as most inexperienced men did when moving in unfamiliar territory.
Smoke knew the mountain ranges all around them were closest directly to the north, and getting up into the High Lonesome was his only chance to avoid the men who would surely be on his trail no later than daybreak.
He knew from earlier in the day that the closest mountain was about seven miles away and that he had absolutely no chance to make it before daylight, not on foot traveling through darkness in snow that was rapidly getting up to his mid-calves. The only good thing about his rapid advance was that the exertion was keeping his body temperature high enough to avoid frostbite due to exposure to the extreme cold.
The bad news was that his only weapon was a five-inch clasp knife and he was completely without any other supplies or food. He laughed out loud into the freezing north wind. Only a mountain man, and a crazy one at that, would think that he had any chance at all against more than a dozen well-armed men on horseback on his trail under these conditions.
Well, this crazy old mountain man still had a few tricks up his sleeve, and if he could keep from freezing to death long enough, he’d show them a thing or two.
The wind was howling and the snow was blowing almost horizontally when the camp began to wake up the next morning. Dawn was evident only through a general lightening up of the snow since there was no morning sun to be seen.
Cletus, as usual, was the first to arise, and he piled fresh wood onto the smoldering coals of last night’s campfire. He filled pots with water and heaping handfuls of coffee in preparation for an early breakfast. He knew from his observation the night before that Smoke Jensen had escaped his bounds, but he pretended not to notice the empty space where Smoke had lain the previous night as he busied himself around the fire.
As men slowly gathered around the fire, holding out hands to get them warm and gratefully accepting mugs of steaming coffee, he told Jimmy Corbett to get started cooking some fatback and beans in the large skillets they’d brought along.
“Don’t worry with trying to make biscuits in this storm,” he said. “We’ve still got some left from last night’s dinner that ought’a do.”
“Gonna have to dip them sinkers in coffee to get ‘em soft enough to chew,” Jason Biggs said, grinning. “Otherwise you’re liable to break a tooth on ‘em.”
Cletus was about to reply when Wally Stevens hollered from over near the tree Smoke had been under, “Hey, ever’body, Jenson’s gone!”
Cletus forced a surprised look on his face and ran over to where Smoke was supposed to be lying. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he exclaimed, straightening up and looking around with his hands on his hips. “The bastard’s not here.”