The West was changing rapidly. Oh, there would be a few more wild and woolly years, but probably no more than a decade before law and order settled in. Law and order was changing everything and everybody west of the Mississippi. Jesse James was dead, killed in 1882. Clell Miller had been dead for years. Clay Allison had died a very ignoble death back in ‘77. Sam Bass was gone. Curley Bill Brocius had been killed by Wyatt Earp in Tombstone in ’82. John Wesley Hardin was in a Texas prison. Rowdy Joe Lowe had met his end in Denver, killed in a gunfight over his wife. Mysterious Dave Mather had vanished about a year back and no one knew where he was.
Smoke doubted Dave would ever resurface. Probably changed his name and was living respectable.
Smoke rode the old trails, alive with the ghosts of mountain men who had come and gone years back, blazing the very trails he now rode. He thought of all the gunfighters and outlaws that were gone.
Charlie Storms was dead—and not too many folks mourned his passing. Charlie had been sitting at the table in Deadwood back in ‘76 when Cross-Eyed Jack McCall walked up behind Wild Bill and blew his brains out. Charlie tried to brace Luke Short in Tombstone back in ’81. He rolled twelve.
I’ve known them all, Smoke mused. The good and the bad and that curious combination of both.
Dallas Stoudenmire finally saw the elephant back in ’82.
Ben Thompson had been killed just the year back, Smoke recalled, down in San Antonio. Killed while watching a play.
The list was a long one, and getting longer.
And me? Smoke reflected. How many men have gone down under my guns?
He really didn’t know. But he knew the count was awesomely high. He knew that he was rated as the number-one gunfighter in all the West; knew that he had killed a hundred men—or more. Probably more.
He shook those thoughts out of his head. There was no point in dwelling on them, and no point in trying to even think that he could live without his guns. There was no telling how many tin-horn punks and would-be gunslicks would be coming after him after the news of Gibson hit the campfires and the saloons of the West.
He stopped at a small four-store town and bought himself a couple of sacks of tobacco and rolling papers. He cut himself a wedge of cheese and got him a pickle from the barrel and a sackful of crackers. He went outside to sit on the porch of the store to have his late-afternoon snack.
“That there’s Smoke Hensen.” The words came to him from inside the store.
“No!”
“Yeah. He’s killed a thousand men. Young, ain’t he?”
“A thousand men?”
“Yeah. ’Course, that ain’t countin’ Indians.”
Small children came to stand by the edge of the store to stare at him through wide eyes. Smoke knew how a freak in a carnival must feel. But he couldn’t blame the kids. He’d been written about so much in the penny dreadfuls and other books of the time that the kids didn’t know what to think of him.
Or the adults, either, for that matter.
Damn! but he was tired. Tired both physically and mentally.
Once he got back to Sally and the Sugar loaf, he didn’t think he’d ever leave her side until she got a broom and ran him off.
He offered a cracker to a shy little girl and she slowly took it.
“Jeanne!” her mother squalled from a house across the dusty street. “You get away from him!”
Jeanne smiled at Smoke, grabbed the cracker and took off.
Smoke looked up at the sounds of horses walking toward him. He sighed heavily. The two-bit punk who called himself Larado and that pair of no-goods, Johnny and Brett, were heading his way.
He slipped the thongs off his hammers and called over his shoulder, “Shopkeep! Get these kids out of here—right now!”
Within half a minute, the street was deserted.
Smoke stood up as the trio dismounted and began walking toward him.
“Back off, boys!” Smoke called. “This doesn’t have to be.”
Larado snorted. “What’s the matter, Jensen? You done turned yeller on us?”
“Don’t be a fool!” Smoke’s words were hard. “I’m tryin’ to make you see that there is no point to this.”
“The point is, Mister Big-Shot,” Johnny said, and Smoke could smell the whiskey from all them even at this distance, “we gonna kill you.”
Smoke shook his head. “No, you’re not, boys. If you drag iron, you’re dead. All of you.” He started walking toward them.
Bret’s eyes widened in fear. Johnny and Larado wore looks of indecision on their young faces.
“Well!” Smoke snapped, closing the distance. “At this range we’re all going to die, you know that don’t you boys?”
They knew it, and it literally scared the pee out of Bret.
Smoke slapped Larado with a hard open palm, knocking the young man’s hat off and bloodying his mouth. He backhanded Johnny with the same hand and drove his left fist into Bret’s stomach.
Reaching out, he tore the gunbelt from Larado and hit the young man in the face with it, breaking his nose and knocking him to the ground.
Smoke tossed the gunbelt and pistols into a watering trough. He looked down at the young men, lying on the ground.
“It’s not as easy as the books make it out to be, is it, boys?” Smoke asked them. He expected no reply and got none.
Smoke reached down and jerked guns from leather, tossing them into the same trough.
“You can keep your rifles. Keep them and ride out. Go on back home and learn you a trade. Go to school; make something out of yourselves. But don’t ever brace me again. For if you do, I’ll kill you without hesitation. I’m giving you a chance. Take it.”
The young men slowly picked themselves up off the ground and mounted up. They rode out without looking back.
“Mighty fine thing you done there, Mister Smoke,” a man said. “Mighty fine. You could have killed them all.”
Smoke looked at the citizen. “I’m tired of killing. I know that I’ll have to kill again, but I’m not looking forward to it.”
“The wife is fixin’ a pot roast for supper. We’d be proud to have you sit at our table. She’s a good cook, my old woman is. And the kids would just be beside themselves if you was to come on over. Don’t a home-cooked meal sound good to you?”
A smile slowly creased Smoke’s lips. “It sure does.”
Smoke did not leave the Sugarloaf for a week. He got reacquainted with Sally every time she bumped into him... and she bumped into him a lot.
He rolled on the floor with the babies and acted a fool with them, making faces at them, letting them ride his back like a horse, and in general, settling back into the routine of being a husband, father, and rancher.
On the morning that he decided to ride into town, Sally’s voice stopped him in the door.
“Aren t you forgetting something, Smoke.”
He turned. She was holding his guns in her hands.
He stared at her.
“I know, honey,” she said. “I’ve known for a long time that you’re tired of the killing.”
“It just seems like a man ought to be able to ride into town without strapping on a gun.”
“I don’t know whether that day will ever come, honey. As long as you are Smoke Jensen, the last mountain man, there will be people riding to try you. And you know that.” She came to him and pressed against him. “And speaking very selfishly, I kind of like to have you around.”
Smoke smiled and took the gunbelt, hooking it on a peg.
She looked up at him, questions in her eyes.
He whispered in her ear.
She laughed and bumped into him again.
Table of Contents
DEADLY CHALLENGE
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