This man was big. That much was obvious about him, even on horseback. His shoulders bulked in the lightweight jacket he wore, and his head sat like a solid block of stone on those impressive shoulders.
None of the men were really dressed appropriately for this weather, Smoke mused as he watched them. He supposed that coming from south of the border, as they did, they weren’t accustomed to or prepared for the cold, unless they came from a mountainous region—which they didn’t appear to.
The big vaquero reined in and signaled for the others to do likewise. Pedro started to crowd past him, but the man turned his head and spoke in soft, rapid Spanish. Whatever he said made Pedro halt his advance, but as he tried to control his skittish mount, he directed a hate-filled glare toward Smoke.
Smoke ignored the gunman, other than keeping half an eye on him. If Pedro tried to make a play, Smoke would be ready to draw and fire in less than the blink of an eye.
Instead, he nodded to the big vaquero and said in a cool but civil tone, “Howdy. What brings you fellas out here to the Sugarloaf?”
“Don Sebastian sent us,” the man replied. “He told us to take a look around the place. You know, señor, get an idea of how good the range is and what will need to be done.”
“I’d say that’s not any of the don’s business,” Smoke snapped. “I make the decisions around here. It’s my ranch.”
The vaquero’s heavy shoulders rose and fell. He said, “I only follow orders, Señor Jensen.”
“You know who I am, then.”
“You just said as much, did you not?”
The man’s accent was fairly thick, but he spoke good English. Childhood illness had left deep pockmarks in his dark, broad face. A mustache drooped over his upper lip, and his jaw jutted out like a slab of rock. Despite his rather brutish appearance, he was soft spoken and seemed to be an intelligent man.
“I know you’re doing what your boss told you to do, but I want you off my range,” Smoke said. “There won’t be any trouble if you turn those horses around and head back to Big Rock. I assume that’s where Aguilar is staying?”
“Don Sebastian has taken a floor in the hotel. The rest of us are here and there, some in the hotel, some in boardinghouses, some camping.”
“Mighty cold weather for that. You boys would be more comfortable if you headed back to Mexico.”
Ponderously, the big vaquero shook his head.
“We cannot do that, señor. Not unless Don Sebastian says that is the way it will be.”
Smoke regarded the man for a moment, then asked, “What’s your name, amigo?”
“I am called Berto, señor.”
Smoke was still leaning on the ax handle with his left hand. He swung it up now and said, “Well, I think maybe I like you, Berto, but you and your friends need to clear out, and don’t come back unless you’re invited. I know your boss thinks this is his land, but that hasn’t been settled yet. And when it is, he’s going to be out of luck. So right now . . . you’re trespassing.”
Sneering, Pedro edged his horse forward again.
“Let me kill him, Berto,” he urged. “We can be done with this today.”
“He is supposed to be very fast with a gun,” Berto rumbled
Pedro’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl. He said, “People say that only because of gossip and because it has been written about him. Nobody gossips or writes about me, but my speed is a fact, anyway. I am as fast as Jensen. Faster!”
Berto’s voice hardened as he said, “Not today, Pedro. The don would not like it.”
“Yes! Today!”
Pedro kneed his horse forward. Berto reached out, as if to grab his arm and stop him, but the gesture was too slow and missed. Pedro pushed out in front of the others and uncoiled lithely from the saddle.
“We settle this now, Jensen!” he said as he turned sideways and curled himself into a human question mark, with his hand poised over the grip of his holstered revolver.
Smoke glanced at Berto again. The man spread his hands and shrugged, as if to say that he didn’t like what was happening, but what could he do? Smoke was pretty sure from Berto’s commanding attitude that the vaquero was Aguilar’s foreman or at least his segundo . . . but Berto probably didn’t have any real authority over the crew of hired guns. Travis Hinton was the ramrod of that bunch.
“Hold on just a second,” Smoke said. He lifted the ax in his left hand, and with what appeared to be no more than a flick of his wrist, he sent it spinning through the air. With a solid thunk, the ax-head buried itself in the trunk of the juniper he and Cal had been cutting down.
Smoke added, “Cal, keep an eye on those other fellas.”
“Sure, Smoke,” the young cowboy said, apparently quite confident in his ability to handle that assignment. Several of the vaqueros had rifles sticking up from saddle scabbards, but none of them were packing handguns, at least not that Smoke could see. Cal was no gunfighter, but he could get the Colt on his hip unlimbered pretty quickly when he needed to, and he was a good shot and was cool under fire.
As Smoke faced Pedro, Berto moved his horse to the side and jerked his head at the other men to indicate that they should do likewise and put themselves out of the line of fire. They did so, hurriedly.
“We don’t have to do this,” Smoke said to Pedro. “You can get back on your horse and ride back to town with your friends.”
“Those men?” Pedro sneered. “They know nothing except how to eat dust and breathe in the stink of cows. They are not my amigos.”
“Well, then,” said Smoke, “maybe they won’t be too broken up about it when you’re dead.”
Pedro’s lean, scarred face twisted with rage. His hand flashed toward the gun on his hip. He’d been right about one thing: He might not have a big reputation and nobody had ever written a dime novel about him, but he was fast.
Not as fast as Smoke Jensen, though.
Pedro cleared leather and started to tip his gun up just as Smoke’s Colt came level and geysered fire. The bullet smashed into Pedro’s chest and knocked him backward. His arm kept coming up, and his finger spasmed and involuntarily jerked the trigger, but the shot sailed harmlessly into the sky. Pedro’s other hand lifted toward his chest, where a little blood welled from the hole above his heart.
Before he could press his hand to the wound—not that that would have done any good—his feet got tangled up with each other and he went down in a twisting fall that ended with him curled on his side. He managed to draw in two desperate, gasping breaths before air rattled in his throat and he lay still.
With his gun still leveled, Smoke looked over at Berto and the other vaqueros. The men were coldly expressionless and sat very still in their saddles. Berto just shook his head and said, “I tried to stop him, señor.”
To Smoke’s way of thinking, Berto hadn’t tried very hard to head off this shooting. Maybe he and Pedro had had trouble in the past. Maybe Berto was just one of those men who stolidly followed orders and never did any more, or less, than what he had been told to do. Or maybe they all knew they were no match for Smoke and Cal when it came to gunplay and simply didn’t want to die today.
“Put him back on his horse,” Smoke said. “Then take him to Big Rock and tell your boss what happened. Exactly what happened. If you try to twist things around, I reckon I’ll find out about it sooner or later. But I want Aguilar to know that this wasn’t my doing and I didn’t want to kill Pedro. He forced it. I don’t particularly want to have to kill anybody else, either.”
“I will tell him, Señor Jensen. I always tell Don Sebastian the truth.”
Berto motioned for a couple of his men to retrieve Pedro’s body. He moved his horse next to the fallen gunman’s mount and caught hold of the reins. He held the horse steady while the two vaqueros lifted the corpse and draped it over the saddle. They tied Pedro’s hands and feet together under the horse’s belly so he wouldn’t fall off. Then one of the men picked up Pedro’s sombrero, which had come off when he collap
sed, and handed it to Berto, who hung it from the saddle horn.
“Let us go,” he ordered. “We have found out what we came for.” He turned his horse and rode off, leading the animal that carried Pedro’s body. The two vaqueros who had loaded the corpse hurriedly mounted up, and they and the others followed Berto.
As Cal watched them ride off, he asked, “What did he mean by that? They found out what they came for?”
“Maybe they wanted to know if I was as fast on the draw as they’d heard.”
“Well . . . now they know.”
“Yeah,” Smoke said. “Now they know.” He holstered the gun he was still holding and turned toward the juniper with the ax stuck in its trunk. “Come on. We’ve still got a Christmas tree to cut down and drag back to the ranch house so Sally can hang baubles on it.”
CHAPTER 18
Denver
A delaide DuBois was staying in a smaller, less expensive hotel. Preacher offered to get her a room where he was staying, but she declined. They were both old enough not to care too much about appearances anymore, but some things were still beyond the bounds of propriety, Adelaide claimed.
Preacher didn’t argue with her, but he did insist on walking her back to her hotel.
“These days, Denver’s a mighty civilized place most of the time,” he said, “but you got to remember, it ain’t been much more’n twenty years since there weren’t nothin’ around here but a mess of wild, lawless gold camps. Some of that could still be lurkin’ under the surface.”
She smiled across the table at him and said, “I’m sure I’ll be safe with you, Arthur.”
“Why don’t you call me Preacher? If you keep callin’ me Arthur, I’m liable to forget it’s me you’re talkin’ to.”
“I’ll try,” she said, “but I can’t make any promises. I always thought you were such a dignified man, and the name Arthur suits you so well.”
Preacher frowned and said, “Me? Dignified? Are you sure you’re talkin’ about the right fella? I’m nothin’ but a grizzled ol’ mountain man.”
“No, you’re my friend,” Adelaide said, squeezing his hand again.
Preacher cleared his throat. His face felt slightly warm. What the hell! he thought. He hadn’t blushed in fifty years or more, he told himself, but somehow this woman sitting across the table from him had a way of making him feel like a kid again.
The walk to the hotel where Adelaide was staying took only a few minutes. When they left Preacher’s hotel, she took his arm. Neither of them had to suggest that. It just seemed like a natural gesture.
And she had taken his left arm, so he didn’t have to ask her to move to the other side so his gun hand would be free. It was a long-standing habit for him to be ready to reach for a gun if he needed to. At the moment, he carried only a two-shot .41 caliber derringer in his pocket. It packed sufficient wallop and was accurate enough for close-range work, and Preacher didn’t expect to need anything else here in town.
As they walked, his head turned slowly, unobtrusively, from side to side. His gaze was on the move, always searching for trouble. That was habit, too, but what Adelaide had told him intensified it. If that no-good grandson of hers, or anybody the varmint had hired, made a try for her, he intended to be ready to stop it. Permanently, if he had to.
Adelaide must have sensed some of what he was feeling, because she laughed a little and said, “My goodness, I feel like I’m walking down the street with a mountain lion at my side. The way you stalk along, Arthur . . . I mean, Preacher . . . you remind me of some sort of predator.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to upset you.”
“I’m not upset,” she assured him. “It’s just that most men, by the time they’re your age, tend to shuffle a little when they walk. They don’t stride along determinedly like you do. It’s almost like you’re, I don’t know, marching into battle.”
Preacher said, “I ain’t most men. And I’ve wound up in fights all my life. So far that ain’t showed any signs of changin’, no matter how old I get.”
“I can’t tell you how much safer and more confident that makes me feel. I knew I did the right thing in trying to find you . . . Preacher.”
She tightened her grip on his arm. He felt the soft warmth of her pressing against him.
You’re too old for this, you varmint, he told himself. Way the hell too old!
But thinking that was one thing, and believing it, in this moment, was another.
* * *
Preacher had planned to ride on to Big Rock and the Sugarloaf, but with Adelaide now accompanying him, he couldn’t do that. He knew there was a train to Big Rock leaving at ten o’clock the next morning. He was up early, as was also his habit, and before going into the dining room to eat breakfast, he dispatched one of the bellboys who worked at the hotel to the train station to purchase tickets on that train for him and Adelaide. When the youngster got back to the hotel and delivered the tickets to him in the dining room, Preacher tipped the boy generously.
He finished his breakfast, lingering over a second cup of coffee. Then he went up to his room, collected his war bag and his Winchester, and checked out.
“It’s been good having you with us, sir,” the clerk said. He was a different one than the man who had been on duty at the desk when Preacher checked in. “I hope you’ll come back and stay with us again.”
“If I live long enough,” Preacher said.
His next stop was the livery stable where he had left the rangy gray stallion and the big wolflike cur who traveled with him. He probably could have made arrangements to have both of his trail partners loaded onto a livestock car and shipped to Big Rock with him, but it seemed simpler just to pay the liveryman to look after them until Preacher returned to Denver after the holidays.
As usual, a couple of double eagles smoothed the path. The livery owner pocketed the coins and said, “Those two certainly seem like best friends. I don’t expect they’ll give me any trouble, although some of my customers were a little wary of that dog of yours. No offense, but he looks sort of like a wild animal. What’s his name?”
“Dog.”
“Yes, what’s the dog’s name?”
“No, Dog,” Preacher said.
The man frowned in confusion for a moment.
Then understanding dawned on him, and he said, “Oh. His name is Dog.”
“Yep.”
“What’s the horse’s name?”
“I call him Horse.”
The liveryman gave a little shake of his head and said, “Dog and Horse. I see. Well, I suppose you’re not likely to forget their names.”
“Always seemed to fit,” Preacher said.
In truth, he had ridden a number of similar-looking stallions over the years, all named Horse, and there had been even more dogs named Dog. When one of them passed on, as they inevitably did, fate seemed to lead Preacher in fairly short order to another animal who took to him right away, as if they already knew each other.
Many years earlier, Preacher had had an Indian friend, an old Absaroka called White Buffalo, who claimed to be able to converse with animals, and it had been his contention that the spirits of the original Dog and Horse had been reborn many times.
Preacher didn’t necessarily accept that notion . . . but he couldn’t disprove it, either.
He rubbed Horse’s nose and scratched Dog’s ears and said his good-byes to them, promising that he would return for them. He’d had to leave them in places like this before, but he had always come back for them, and they seemed to know that he always would.
He left his rifle at the livery stable, too, with the owner promising to look after it, but he took his war bag with him. Inside was a coiled-up shell belt with a pair of holstered Colts attached to it. Preacher wasn’t going anywhere without those guns.
He was good with the Colts, good enough that years earlier, in the days soon after the War of Northern Aggression, he had taught young Kirby Jensen how to draw and fire. Of course, Kirby—whom Prea
cher had later dubbed “Smoke”—had the natural ability to take what Preacher had taught him and elevate his skills until he was quite possibly the fastest on the draw and the deadliest shot of any man who had ever roamed the West. Preacher would have been proud of that, had he not known that it was due almost entirely to Smoke’s own ability, not anything Preacher had taught him.
So instead, Preacher was proud of the fact that Smoke had grown into the finest man he had ever known.
Soon, he would see Smoke again, along with Sally and maybe Luke and Matt. Preacher was looking forward to being reunited with those he considered his family.
He hoped they would like Adelaide. But then he told himself, Of course they would like Adelaide. They were the friendliest, best folks he knew.
When he reached the hotel where Adelaide was staying, he went into the lobby. He had left her at the door the night before, so he didn’t know her room number and she hadn’t told him. The clerk behind the desk in this hotel didn’t look displeased to see Preacher, as had happened in the place where he stayed. This hotel was shabbier and needed more business, not less.
“Help you, sir?” the man asked.
“I’m here to pick up Mrs. DuBois,” Preacher said.
The clerk looked a little disappointed. He said, “Oh. You’re not checking in.”
“Not this time, I don’t reckon.”
“Well, Mrs. DuBois is in room eleven. Is she expecting you?”
“Yep. She’s gonna be checkin’ out. Why don’t you tell me how much she owes, and I’ll just take care of that for her.”
Preacher didn’t know if Adelaide would go along with him paying the bill for her, but if he had already taken care of it before he went upstairs to get her, there wasn’t much she could do about it.
The clerk hesitated, then gave Preacher the amount. The old mountain man slid a coin across the desk and said, “I’m obliged to you, son. The extra there is for you.”
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