Smoke sat down on the floor, his back to an overturned table as the lead really began to fly in his direction. He ate one of the salt meat biscuits and sipped water from his canteen and let the attackers expel all the ammunition they wanted to.
After a time, the hostile fire slacked off and then died. Smoke smiled a grim curving of the lips and moved to the window. He let out a long groan. He waited, and then groaned again.
“We got him!” a man shouted. “We really got the bassard this time!”
“Oh, yeah?” came the sarcasm-filled question. "And who wants to be the one to walk up and look inside the cabin to be sure?"
No one replied.
“That’s what I figured,” the man said.
Smoke removed the bar from the door and moved back to the overturned table laying his rifle on the floor, pulling his Colts and easing back the hammers. He waited. When they opened that door—and he figured they would come all bunched up for moral support—more than a few of them were going to be in for a very nasty surprise.
Once more, the outside air was filled with lead. Smoke waited.
“Hell, he’s had it,” a man called. “I’m goin’ in.”
“I’ll go with you,” another called, and several more added their agreement to that.
Smoke waited.
He heard the jingle of spurs as the hired guns and bounty hunters approached the cabin. Smoke had removed his boots and arranged them behind the table, placing them so it appeared he was lying dead, his body concealed behind the table. He slipped on moccasins and then stepped back into the shadows of another room.
The front door was pushed open with the barrel of a rifle.
“See anything?” a man asked.
“Hell, are you crazy? I ain’t stickin’ my head in yonder!”
“I see his boots,” another said, looking through a gun slit. “He’s all sprawled out and stone cold dead behind a table.”
The room crowded with men.
Smoke opened fire, the Colts belching sparks and flame and death. He pulled the pistol he’d taken from the saddlebags and ended the lopsided gunfight. One lone gun hand tried to rise up and shoot him. Smoke shot him between the eyes. “Your mamma should have told you there’d be days like this,” Smoke said.
He then counted the bodies. Six. He figured maybe three were left on the outside still alive, and that included the badly wounded man by the corral.
He reloaded and moved toward the open door, staying close to the log wall. “Come on, boys!” he shouted. “Come join the party.”
“Hell with you, Jensen!” a man shouted. "They’s always another day. We’re gone!”
“Then ride, scumbag!”
The man cursed him. A moment later, the sounds of horses galloping away reached Smoke.
Smoke gathered up all the weapons and tied the rifles together. He found a bounty hunter’s horse and stuffed the saddlebags full of pistols and gun belts, looping some over the saddle horn. He secured the rifles to the saddle and led the horse to the cabin. Shoving the dead out of the doorway, Smoke led his own horse outside and mounted up. He walked his horse over to the corral and looked down at the man lying on the ground. The man was dead. He left him there and rode out into the plain. The first man he’d shot put of the saddle was lying on the ground, on his back, his eyes open and staring at Smoke. His shirt front was covered with blood.
“You’re a devil” the man gasped.
“I’ve been called worse,” Smoke acknowledged from the saddle.
“I ain’t gonna make it, am I?”
“Not likely.”
The man cussed him but made no attempt to reach for the pistol still in leather.
Smoke waited until the man stopped cussing and tried to catch his breath. "Anything you want me to do for you?"
“Fall out of the saddle dead!”
Jud Vale had hired hardcases, for sure. No give in them. “Would you really have shot one of those little boys over at the Box T?”
“Just as fast as I’d shoot you, Jensen.”
“Then I don’t think I’ll turn my back to you.”
“It wouldn’t be a smart thing to do, for a fact.”
Smoke sat his saddle for a few minutes. The gunny began to cough up blood. Twice he tried to pull his pistol. But the thong covered the hammer and he could not clear leather. The gunny died with a curse on his lips.
Smoke turned his horse and slowly rode toward Box T range.
17
Jud Vale pulled in his horns, so to speak. Even with his monumental ego and glaring arrogance, he was shocked to the bone at the havoc and carnage that Smoke Jensen had wreaked upon his possessions and hired guns. He had not believed it possible that one man could do so much.
A half dozen of his older and wiser hardcases drew their time and drifted out of Southeastern Idaho, wanting no more of Smoke Jensen. Had most of those who left known Jensen was involved in this matter, they would not have signed on in the first place.
Jud spent a lot of time on his front porch—while his back porch was being rebuilt, again—drinking coffee and wallowing in his festering anger. He had sent out the word that he was still hiring men at fighting wages, and men were drifting in. But even Jud Vale could see that most of them were trash and scum. That made no difference; he hired them anyway.
And then the gunfighter Barry Almond and his four brothers came riding up to the mansion. They were dressed in long dusters and were unshaven, with cruel eyes their hat brims could not conceal.
Jud sat on the porch staring at the men while Barry sat his saddle and met the man’s eyes.
“I’m Barry Almond,” the gun slick finally broke the silence.
“I know who you are.”
“That ten thousand dollars still on Smoke Jensen’s head?”
“It’s still there.”
“Me and my brothers come to claim it.” “I’ve heard that from fifty other men over the weeks,” Jud snorted.
“This is the first time you’ve heard it from me, though.”
Jud nodded his head in agreement with that. “All right, you’re all on the payroll.”
“I ain’t punchin’ no gawddamn cows,” Barry bluntly told him.
The rancher laughed, but the short bark was void of humor. “Nobody else is either,” Jud replied, the bitterness thick on his tongue. Ranch was going to hell in a bucket. “So what else is new?”
“We'll just drift around some.”
“You do that.” Jud poured another cup of coffee and watched the gunfighter brothers head for the long new bunkhouse which Jud had been forced to build because of the overflow of hired guns and because Jensen had destroyed one end of the other bunkhouse.
Jud silently cursed Smoke Jensen. It made him feel better. But not much.
On the day that Smoke accompanied the supply wagon to the trading post, Blackjack Morgan, Lassiter, and four bounty hunters headed for the post for a drink of whiskey. The men were in a bad mood and ready for a killing. Especially if it was Smoke Jensen or some of those snot-nosed brats on the Box T payroll. . . .
Clint Perkins lay on his ground sheet in his hidden camp and tried with all his might to fight the madness that once more began to slowly muddle his brain. He lost the battle. Clint stood up, pulled on his boots and buckled his gun belt around his waist. With a strange smile on his lips and an odd look in his eyes, he saddled up and went looking for trouble. . . .
Matthew and Cheyenne were moving some strays toward the huge box canyon that was the home for what was left of Walt’s herds. The old gunfighter and the young boy had become good friends in a short time. . ..
Doreen slipped out the back door of the ranch house to go walking toward a meadow about a mile back of the house. She had seen some lovely wildflowers there and felt that a bunch of them would look very nice on the kitchen table. She didn’t think Jud would be foolish enough to try anything in the daylight. . . .