Smoke rubbed his aching leg. “I’d hate to have to do it again. ”
Beans squatted down beside Smoke. When he spoke his voice was low. “Kirby, I don’t know who you really are, but I shore don’t never want to make you mad.”
Smoke looked at him. “Hell, I’m not angry!” He pointed to the man called Ring. “He’s the one who wanted to fight, not me.”
“Lord, have mercy!” Beans said. “All this and you wasn’t even mad.”
Ring groaned and heaved himself out of the horse trough.
Smoke picked up a broken two-by-four and walked over to where Ring lay on the soaked ground. “Mister Ring, I want your attention for a moment. If you have any thoughts at all about getting up off that ground and having a go at me, I’m going to bust your head wide open with this two-by-four. You understand all that?”
Ring rolled over onto his back and grinned up at Smoke. One eye was swollen shut and his nose and lips were a mess. He held up a hand. “Hows ’bout you and me bein’ friends. I shore don’t want you for an enemy!”
Three
The three of them pulled out the next morning, Ring riding the biggest mule Smoke had ever seen.
“Satan’s his name,” Ring explained. “Man was going to kill him till I come along. I swapped him a good horse and a gun for him. One thing, boys: don’t never get behind him if you vegot a hostile thought. He’ll sense it and kick you clear into Canada.”
There was no turning Ring back. He had found someone to look up to in Smoke. And Smoke had found a friend for life.
“I just can’t handle whiskey,” Ring said. “I can drink beer all day long and get mellow. One drink of whiskey and I’ll turn mean as a snake.”
“I figured ou were just another bully,” Beans said.
“Oh, no! I love everybody till I get to drinkin’ whiskey. Then I don’t even like myself.”
“No more whiskey for you, Ring,” Smoke told him.
“Yes, sir, Mister Kirby. Whatever you say is fine with me.”
They were getting too far east, so when they left Buffalo, they cut west and crossed the Bighorn Mountains, skirting north of Cloud Peak, the thirteen-thousand-foot mountain rearing up majestically, snow-capped year round. Cutting south at Granite Pass, the men turned north, pointing their horses’ noses toward Montana Territory.
“Mister Kirby?” Ring asked.
“Just Kirby, Ring. Please. Just Kirby.”
“OK ... Kirby. Why is it we’re going to Montana?”
“the sights. Ring”
“OK. Whatever you say. I ain’t got nothin’ but time.”
“We might find us a job punchin’ cows,” Beans said.
“I don’t know nothin’ about cows,” Ring admitted. “But I can make a nine-pound hammer sing all day long. I can work the mines or dig a ditch. There ain’t a team of horses or mules that I can’t handle. But I don’t know nothin’ about cows.”
“You ever done any smithing?” Smoke asked.
“Oh, sure. I’m good with animals. I like animals. I love puppy dogs and kitty cats. I don’t like to see people mistreat animals. Makes me mad. And when I get mad, I hurt people. I seen a man beatin’ a poor little dog one time back in Kansas when I was passin’ through drivin freight. That man killed that little dog. And for no good reason.”
“What’d you do?” Smoke asked him.
“Got down off that wagon and broke his back. Left him there and drove on. After I buried the little dog.”
Beans shuddered.
“Dogs and cats and the like can’t help bein’ what they are. God made them that way. If God had wanted them different, He’d have made ’em different. Men can think. I don’t know about women, but men can think. Man shouldn’t be cruel to animals. It ain’t right and I don’t like it.”
“I have never been mean to a dog in my life,” Beans quickly pointed out.
“Good. Then you’re a nice person. You show me a man who is mean to animals, and I’ll show you a low-down person at heart.”
Smoke agreed with that. “You born out here, Ring?”
“No. Born in Pennsylvania. I killed a man there and done time. He was a no-good man. Mean-hearted man. He cheated my mother out of her farm through some legal shenanigans. Put her on the road with nothin’ but the clothes on her back. I come home from the mines to visit and found my mother in the poor farm, dying. After the funeral, I looked that man up and beat him to death. The judge gimme life in prison.”
“You get pardoned?” Beans asked.
“No. I got tired of it and jerked the bars out of the bricks, tied the guard up, climbed over the walls and walked away one night.”
“Your secret is safe with us,” Smoke assured him.
“I figured it would be.”
They forded the Yellowstone and were in Montana Territory, but still had a mighty long way to go before they reached Gibson.
Smoke and Beans had both figured out that Ring was no great shakes when it came to thinking, but he was an incredibly gentle man—as long as you kept him away from the whiskey. Birds would come to him when he held out his arms. Squirrels would scamper up and take food from his fingers. And he almost cried one day when he shot a deer for food. He left the entrails for the wolves and the coyotes and spent the rest of the journey working on the hide, making them all moccasins and gloves.
Ring was truly one of a kind.
He stood six feet six inches and weighed three hundred pounds, very little of it fat. He could read and write only a little, but he said it didn’t matter. He didn’t have anyone to write to noways, and nobody ever wrote to him.
At a small village on the Boulder, Smoke resupplied and they all had a hot bath. Ring was so big he made the wooden tub look like a bucket.
But Smoke had a bad feeling about the village; not about the village itself, but at what might be coming at them if they stayed. Smoke had played on his hunches before; they had kept him alive more than once. And this one kept nagging at him.
After carefully shaving, leaving his mustache intact, he went to his pack horse and took out his .44’s, belting them around his lean hips, tying down the right hand gun. He carefully checked them, wiping them clean with a cloth and checking the loads. He usually kept the chamber under the hammer empty; this time he loaded them both up full. He stepped out from behind the wooden partition by the wooden tubs and walked into the rear of the store, conscious of the eyes of Beans and Ring on him; they had never seen him wear a short gun, much less two of them, one butt forward for a cross draw.
“Five boxes of .44’s,” Smoke told the clerk.
“You plannin’ on startin’ a war?” the clerk said, sticking his mouth into something that didn’t concern him.
Smoke’s only reply was to fix his cold brown eyes on the man and stare at him. The clerk got the message and turned away, a flush on his face.
He placed the ammunition on the counter and asked no more questions. Smoke bought three cans of peaches and paid for his purchases. He walked out onto the shaded porch, Ring and Beans right behind him. The three of them sat down and opened the peaches with their knives, enjoying a midmorning sweet-syruped snack.
“Don’t see too many people wearin’ twin guns thataway,” Beans observed, looking at Smoke’s rig.
“Not too many,” Smoke agreed, and ate a peach.
“Riders coming,” Ring said quietly. “From the south.”
The men sat on the porch, eating peaches, and watching the riders come closer.
“You recognize any of them?” Smoke tossed the question out.
Beans took it. “Nope. You?”
“That one on the right is Park. Gunfighter from over in the Dakotas. Man next to him is Tabor. Gunhawk from Oklahoma. I don’t know the others.”
“They know you?” Ring asked.
“They know of me.” Smoke’s words were softly spoken.