“I reckon so.” He waited for her to correct his grammar. She did not.
“Very well. I want to see the west, Smoke. And I want you to show it to me.”
“Dangerous, Sally. And not very ladylike. You’d have to ride astride.”
She hid her smile. Her father had paddled her behind several times as a child for doing just that. “I’m sure I could cope.”
Buck let that alone. “What is it you want to see?”
“The high lonesome,” she said without hesitation.
“It’s all around you here.”
“You know what I mean, Smoke. The real high lonesome. The one you and the other mountain men talk about. When you speak of that, your voice becomes soft and your eyes hold a certain light. That’s the high lonesome I would like to see.”
“You’ll have to learn to shoot,” Smoke said dubiously.
“Then I shall.”
“Camp and live out in the wilderness.”
“All right.”
“It won’t be easy. Your skin will be tanned and your hands will become hard with calluses.”
“I expect that.”
Smoke kept his face noncommittal. He had hoped Sally would want to see his world; the world that he knew was slowly vanishing. There would be time.
He hoped.
“All right,” he said.
She rose up on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. “You come back to me,” she said.
He did not reply. That was something he could not guarantee.
“Nothing left, Boss,” Long reported back to Josh Richards. “Jensen burned the whole place to the ground.”
Potter and Stratton were now once more joined with Richards. The opposing sides had ceased fighting in Levi Pass and begun talking. The men were chatting amicably when Richards, Marshall, Lansing, and Brown rode up with their men.
“Nothing?” Burton asked. “My apothecary shop is gone?”
“There ain’t nothing left,” Long said. “And Jensen and them old bastards is gone. Took the women and left. I cut their sign but lost it in the rocks.”
“Sam?” Richards asked.
“No sign of him.”
“That was a nice hotel,” Morgan said wistfully.
“Beautiful church,” Necker said. “Takes a heathen to destroy a house of God.”
Simpson spat on the ground. “You damned fake!” he told Necker. “You ain’t no more no preacher than I is. I knowed all along I’d seen you ’fore. Now I remember. I knowed you up in Montana Territory. Elkhorn. You was dealing stud and pimpin’. You kilt Jack Harris when he caught you cold-deckin’ him.”
“You must be mistaken, my good man,” Necker said. But his face was flushed. “I came from—”
“Shut up, Necker. Or whatever your name is,” Lansing said. “Now I’m gonna tell you all something. Or remind you of it. Remind you all of a lot of things. They ain’t none of us clean. We all—all of us—got dodgers out on us. Now we can’t none of us afford to lose this fight. ’Cause you all know damn well when that stage reports the town is burnt, the Army’s gonna come in here and start askin’ a bucket full of questions. That means all them pig farmers and nesters in this area’s gotta go in the ground. Cain’t none of ’em be allowed to live and flap their gums.” He glared at Richards. “I tole you time after time that I didn’t trust that there Scotsman. He ain’t what he appears to be. Bet on it. When the trouble started, he shore wanted to leave in a hurry, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he did,” Stratton said. “And it appeared that he and Smoke Jensen were friends.”
“They got to die,” Marshall said. “All of them.”
“What about them farmers’ kids?” a gunhand asked.
“Them, too,” Brown said. “Cain’t nobody be left alive to point no finger at us.”
“I want Smoke Jensen!” Dickerson gasped from his blankets on the ground. Still gravely wounded, the outlaw had insisted upon coming to the pass rather than leaving with the men Smoke had ordered out before burning the town.
The men ignored him. Dickerson’s wounds had reopened, and all those present knew the outlaw and murderer was not long for this world.
“Ya’ll hear me?” Dickerson said.
“Aw, shut up and die!” Necker told him. “We’re busy.”
Dickerson fell back on his dirty blankets and died.
Smoke, Sam, and the mountain men rode west, toward Marshall’s Crooked Snake spread. The Frenchman, Dupre, was ranging ahead of the main body of men. About two miles from the ranch, Smoke pulled up, waiting for Dupre to return with a scouting report.
During this quiet, which, all knew, would soon become very rare, Preacher talked with Smoke. “You beginnin’ to feel all the hate leave your craw, boy?”
“Yes,” Smoke admitted.
“That’s good. That’s a mighty fine little gal back yonder at that nester place.”
“She wants to see the high lonesome.”
“Be tough on a woman. You gonna show her?”
Smoke hesitated. “Yes.”
Preacher spat a stream of brown tobacco juice on the ground, drowning a bug. “Soon as this here affair is done, you two best git goin’. High lonesome will soon be gone. Civil-lie-say-shon done be takin’ over, pilgrims ruinin’ everything. Be a fine thing to show that woman, though. She’s tough, got lots of spunk. She’ll stand by you, I’s thinkin’.”
“Us, you mean, don’t you?”
“You mean the boy?”
Smoke shook his head. “I mean Sally, Little Ben, me, and you.”
“No, Smoke,” Preacher said. “I’ll be leavin’ with my pards. They’s still some corners of this land that’s high and lonesome. No nesters with their gawddamned barbed wire and pigs and plows. Me and Tenneysee and Audie and Nighthawk and all the rest—wal, our time’s done past us, boy. Mayhaps you’ll see me agin—mayhaps not. But when my time is nigh, I’ll be headin’ back to that little valley where you hammered my name in that stone. There, I’ll jist lay me down and look at the elephant. I’ll warn you now, son. This will be the last ride for Deadlead and Matt. They done tole me that. They real sick. Got that disease that eats from the inside out.”
“Cancer?”
“That’d be it, I reckon. They gonna go out with the reins in they teeth and they fists full of smokin’ iron. They’ll know when it’s time. You a gunhand, boy; you understand why they want it thataway, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“All right. It’s all said then. When it’s time for me and the boys to leave, I don’t want no blubberin’, you understand?”
“Have you ever seen me blubber?”
“Damn close to it.”
“You tell lies, old man.”
Preacher’s eyes twinkled. “Mayhaps one or two, from time to time.”
“Here comes Dupre.”
“We gonna be runnin’ and ridin’ hard for the next two-three days, son. We’ll speak no more of this. When this is over, me and boys will just fade out. ’Member all I taught you, and you treat that there woman right. You hear?”
“I hear.”
“Let’s go bring this to an end, boy.”
21
“If you’re cowboys, turn those ponies’ noses west and ride out. If you’re gunhands, make your play,” Smoke said.
The three riders on the Crooked Snake range slowly turned their horses, being very careful to keep their hands away from sixguns. They sat and stared at the mountain men and at Smoke.
“We’re drawin’ thirty a month and found,” one said. “That ain’t exactly fightin’ pay.”
“You got anything back at the bunkhouse worth dyin’ over?”
“Not a thing.”
“You boys ride out. If you’ve a mind to, come back in three-four days. They’ll be a lot of cattle wandering around with no owners. You might want to start up some small spreads in this area.”
“You be the outlaw, Smoke Jensen?” a cowboy asked.
“I’m Jensen. But I’m no outlaw.”
“Mister, if you say you’re an African go-riller, you ain’t gonna git no argument from me,” another cowboy said.