“All right,” Smoke said, “providing the doc here can get you patched up pretty quickly so we can get started trailing them.”
Dr. Neal glanced around. “I’m almost finished with the young man. I’ve cleaned his wound and checked for damage to the skull. There doesn’t seem to be any. I’ll put a dressing on there, and then I can tend to Marshal Calhoun.”
Garrard said to Smoke, “What can I do to help? You need guns, ammunition, any other supplies? Anything Hammond has in his store, I’ll buy it.”
“How about you promise to leave Hammond alone and not try to put him out of business?”
Garrard’s mouth tightened in response to Smoke’s suggestion. “You can’t dictate to a man how he’s supposed to do business.”
“You can if you’re plannin’ to risk your life trying to rescue his daughter from outlaws,” Smoke said.
Garrard glared at him again, but then gave him a curt nod. “It’s a deal. Bring Robin back safely to me, and I won’t open a store to compete with Hammond. You have my word on it.”
Smoke didn’t know how good Garrard’s word was, but he had to accept it for the time being.
Dr. Neal got to work on Calhoun’s arm. The wound was a shallow one. The bullet had missed the bone, so all Neal had to do was swab out the hole and bind it up.
Smoke left the doctor’s office, intending to return to the school and saddle Seven for the pursuit of Thorn and Harley. Garrard followed him. They found a large crowd waiting for them outside.
“Is it true that Miss Robin’s been kidnapped?” a man called.
Garrard nodded. “It’s true. But Mr. West here and Marshal Calhoun are going after the men who did it and bring her back.”
Several men stepped forward. One of them said, “If you’re puttin’ together a posse, Mr. Garrard, we’d be happy to come along. Everybody in town thinks mighty highly of Miss Robin.”
“That’s right,” a woman put in. “She does a fine job teaching the children.”
Garrard looked over at Smoke. “What do you think, West?”
Smoke shook his head and said, “I appreciate the offer, folks, but we’re just after two men. A posse would complicate things more than it would help. The marshal and I will handle this.”
“You don’t reckon those two varmints would just give up if they saw a big bunch after them?” a man asked.
“I think if they saw that, they’d be more likely to go ahead and kill Miss Garrard so she couldn’t slow them down while they made their getaway,” Smoke said bluntly. He turned to Garrard and went on, “Get a couple boxes of .44s, enough supplies for several days and meet me back here. Tell Calhoun to get his horse ready. We’ll ride in about fifteen minutes.”
Garrard nodded. “All right. West…I can’t thank you enough for—”
“Save it,” Smoke said. Garrard might be sincere in his gratitude, but Smoke didn’t want to hear it. The man still reminded him too much of his old enemies Richards, Potter, and Stratton. Smoke had told the truth when he said he wasn’t doing it for Garrard. He was doing it for Robin, pure and simple, and maybe a little for Sandy, too.
They would have trouble, now that their romance was out in the open, but Smoke couldn’t do anything about that. His only worry was bringing Robin back safely to Buffalo Flat. Once he had done that, and settled things with Thorn and Harley, he intended to ride on without wasting any more time.
His destiny still waited for him in the rough frontier town of Bury, Idaho.
Chapter 18
Smoke and Calhoun left from in front of Dr. Neal’s house a quarter of an hour later and rode to the schoolhouse to pick up the trail.
“That Injun woke up while the doc was tending to my arm,” Calhoun said. “When he found out that Thorn and Harley carried off Miss Garrard, it was all the doc could do to hold him down. He wanted to come with us. Doc said that’d be too dangerous for him with a head wound like that. He gave the redskin somethin’ to make him sleep.”
Smoke nodded. “That was probably best. We don’t need a wounded man to look after any more than we need a posse tagging along.”
“Yeah, you’re right about that. You ought to be able to handle two men, especially when one of ’em is wounded. You’re pretty slick when it comes to handlin’ a gun, ain’t you, West?”
Smoke shrugged. “I’m still here.”
“Yeah, that’s sort of what you have to go by, ain’t it?” Calhoun paused. “You know, West, I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot the way we did. You may not believe it, but it’s important to me that I keep the peace in my town. I’ve been around long enough to know trouble when I see it…and mister, you got it writ all over you.”
“I don’t go looking for trouble,” Smoke said. That was stretching the truth a little, because in one special case, he was definitely looking for trouble.
“You don’t back away from it when it comes callin’, though, do you?”
“The Good Lord didn’t put much back-up in me when He made me,” Smoke admitted.
“See, that’s just what I mean. I took one look at you and knew things’d be more peaceful in Buffalo Flat if you just kept ridin’.”
“More peaceful for Jason Garrard, you mean.”
“Mr. Garrard’s the most important man in town, and I won’t apologize for lookin’ out for his interests. The more successful he is, the better off the town is.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Smoke said. “Other folks might not see it that way.”
They had reached the school. Earl Ballew’s body was gone, having been carted away by the local undertaker. Smoke swung down from the saddle and hunkered on his heels to study the hoofprints on the ground in front of the building. The children’s feet had worn the grass away and it was easy to see the prints in the dirt.
Every set of horseshoes had its own distinctive array of nicks and scratches that showed up in the tracks it left. Smoke was able to pick out the prints left by Thorn’s and Harley’s mounts, and he committed them to memory so that he would know them when he saw them again.
“They were headed north when they left here,” he told Calhoun when he was back on the Appaloosa. “Got any idea where they could have been headed in that direction?”
Calhoun shook his head. “No, but if they curved west, that’d put them in the Big Horns, and there are plenty of places to hide up there.”
“The Crow village is in that direction, isn’t it? And Bannerman’s ranch?”
“Yeah,” Calhoun said, “but they could avoid those places easy enough. It’s a big mountain range.”
Smoke had been over some of it with Preacher and knew that the marshal was right. If they lost the trail, they might never find Thorn and Harley. They didn’t have any time to waste.
“We’ll be pushin’ pretty hard,” he warned Calhoun. “You’ll have to keep up, wounded arm or no wounded arm.”
“You just do what you have to do, West. I’ll stick, don’t you worry.”
Smoke wondered why Calhoun’s attitude had changed so dramatically. He wasn’t sure he trusted the man and resolved to keep an eye on him. Of course, he would have done that anyway, since he didn’t trust anybody all that much since Preacher was dead.
“You never did deputize me,” he reminded Calhoun as they rode.
“No, I sure didn’t. Forgot all about it. You swear to uphold the law?”
“I do.”
“Then I hearby appoint you a deputy marshal of Buffalo Flat, Wyomin’ Territory. That good enough, you reckon?”
“It’ll do,” Smoke said.
Calhoun hadn’t really predicted that Thorn and Harley would head for the mountains, just suggested the possibility, but it turned out to be true. The farther away he and Smoke got from town, the more the trail they were following angled toward the Big Horns.
By midday, when Smoke called a halt to study the tracks again, he thought they had narrowed down the lead somewhat, but their quarry was still quite a ways in front of them. Smoke glanced n
arrow-eyed at the foothills looming closer.
“We won’t be able to stop them before they reach the mountains,” he told Calhoun.
“Will you be able to find ’em once they get there?”
“Do my best,” Smoke promised. Not for the first time, he wished Preacher was still with him. The old man could follow a gnat through a hurricane. His tracking abilities bordered on the mystical, at least as far as Smoke could tell.
“I sure don’t want to go back to town and have to tell Mr. Garrard we couldn’t find his gal.”
“I don’t want that, either, although I don’t give a damn about Garrard,” Smoke said. “Miss Robin struck me as a mighty nice young woman.”
“She is,” Calhoun agreed. “For the life o’ me, I can’t see somebody like her mixed up with a dirty Injun. Half-breed, at that. I heard tell old Crazy Bear’s squaw is a gypsy woman.”
Without responding to the lawman’s comments Smoke swung up into the saddle again and took up the trail once more.
They reached the foothills around mid-afternoon and started climbing. Smoke’s keen eyes were able to pick up enough signs so they didn’t lose the trail, but following it was becoming more difficult. Thorn and Harley hadn’t been trying to conceal their tracks. They’d been interested in putting as much distance as possible between them and the settlement. Smoke could tell that had changed and they were trying to throw off any pursuit.
Late that afternoon, the hoofprints merged with the tracks left by half a dozen more horses. Smoke reined in and pointed them out to Calhoun.
“An Injun war party, maybe?” Calhoun suggested nervously.
Smoke shook his head. “No, those mounts were shod. They weren’t Indian ponies. From the looks of it, Thorn and Harley joined up with them on purpose.”
“Who could that other bunch be? And how’d Thorn know they were up here so he could rendezvous with ’em?”
“I don’t know,” Smoke said. “I reckon the odds against us have just gone up.”
“Maybe we should’ve brought that posse with us after all.”
“No, it’s better this way. The others might’ve blundered into a trap if we’d brought them with us.”
It was harder for the riders in the larger group to hide their tracks. Smoke didn’t have any trouble following them until the sun dipped behind the mountains and dusk began to settle down over the rugged terrain. He called a halt. “We’ll have to wait until morning and pick up the trail then.”
“They’ll have a whole night to gain on us,” Calhoun warned.
“No, they won’t,” Smoke replied with a shake of his head. “They’ll have to stop and camp for the night. It’s too big a risk to go blundering around in these mountains after dark. You might fall into a ravine or something like that.”
“I hope you’re right, West.”
Smoke found a place to camp in a small depression. Since full dark hadn’t fallen yet, he built a tiny, almost smokeless fire that he used to boil a pot of coffee and fry some bacon. When they were finished with the sparse meal, Smoke put out the fire.
“Need me to change the dressing on that arm?” he asked.
“You’d do that?”
Smoke gave a grim chuckle. “I put the hole there,” he said. “I might as well tend to it.”
“I’d be obliged,” Calhoun said. “Doc Neal told me I needed to change it at least once a day, and I hadn’t quite figured out how I was gonna do that. I can fire a gun just fine with my left hand, but it ain’t much good for little stuff.”
Smoke had noticed Calhoun had replaced his regular holster with a crossdraw rig that he still wore on the right side, so he could use his left hand to draw the gun. “Where’d you get the holster?” he asked.
“Hell, I got a whole drawerful of different kinds of holsters in the office. When Buffalo Flat first got started, it was rough as a cob for a few months. Hombres would get themselves in gunfights and wind up dead, and whatever was left over from their gear that the undertaker didn’t claim for plantin’ ’em usually wound up bein’ confiscated by the marshal.” Calhoun grinned. “That’d be me.”
Smoke grunted. Calhoun was different from most lawmen he’d run into. He almost seemed to take pride in his low-level corruption.
“You don’t think much o’ me, do you?” Calhoun went on as if he had read Smoke’s thoughts.
“I think the citizens of Buffalo Flat could find themselves a better marshal,” Smoke said bluntly.
“Really? Did you see how fast the town was growin’? Did you hear any commotion from the saloons last night?”
“No, but I was up at the school. I might not have been able to hear it.”
Calhoun snorted. “There wasn’t nothin’ to hear. Even Bannerman’s wild Texas cowboys behave themselves when they’re in town. That’s because of me, West. They know I won’t stand for any foolishness.”
“Except from Garrard’s men.”
“I told you, Garrard’s the biggest man in these parts. If it wasn’t for him, the town wouldn’t have enough money to pay my wages. Damn right I’m gonna look out for him and his men.” Calhoun waved a hand dismissively in the gathering shadows. “Ah, hell, forget it. You and me ain’t ever gonna see eye to eye on anything except wantin’ to get Miss Robin back safe and sound. Let’s let it go at that.”
“Sounds good to me,” Smoke agreed. “Would you rather stand first watch or second?”
“Second’s fine by me.”
With that settled, Calhoun turned in, rolling up in his blankets. Smoke sat down with his back against a rock and his rifle across his knees. He worked the Henry’s lever so the chamber had a cartridge in it, ready to fire if needed.
The night was quiet enough that Smoke heard the whisper of wings as an owl glided overhead in search of prey. He peered into the darkness and wondered what else was out there looking for something to kill. He was a predator, too, he thought, a man who lived only for the deaths of other men, three in particular.
Yet that wasn’t completely true. He was risking his life by going after Robin Garrard. If he died tonight, tomorrow, or the next day, the job of avenging Nicole, Arthur, and Preacher would never be finished. Did he have any right to take a chance on that?
Would he have a right to call himself a man if he didn’t?
He couldn’t answer those questions, and he wasn’t the sort of hombre to sit around brooding about them—especially when he heard a small noise somewhere near the camp. It was a faint rustle in the grass, but enough to tell him that something—or someone—was out there.
They were coming closer, he realized when he heard the sound again a moment later.
In utter silence, Smoke came to his feet. His finger curled around the trigger of his rifle.
Convinced it was a person, not an animal, he waited, motionless, as whoever it was approached.
A shadowy shape loomed up in the darkness and stepped past him. The intruder didn’t even know he was there, Smoke realized. Moving once again in complete silence, he set the rifle on the ground at his feet, then drew his right-hand Colt. He stepped forward, looped his left arm around the intruder’s neck, and jerked him backward. At the same time, he pressed the revolver’s barrel against the side of the man’s head.
“No!” the man exclaimed before Smoke’s arm across his throat cut off any more sound. The voice was familiar, and when the muzzle of Smoke’s gun prodded against something soft—like a thick bandage—he realized who it was he had grabbed.
“Sandy,” Smoke said disgustedly, “what in blazes are you doing here?”
Chapter 19
Smoke’s voice awakened Calhoun. The marshal thrashed from his blankets and reached for his gun. “What the hell!” he exploded.
“Take it easy, Calhoun,” Smoke said, making his voice sharp so it would penetrate Calhoun’s confusion. “You don’t need to draw.” He let go of Sandy and stepped back. “We’ve got an unexpected visitor, that’s all.”
Sandy rubbed his neck where Smoke had grabbe
d him. “You didn’t have to try to choke me,” he said.
“You’re lucky I didn’t wallop you with my gun,” Smoke told him. “On top of that bullet graze, it might’ve been too much even for that thick skull of yours. How’d you manage to follow us out here?”
“I’m a Crow warrior, remember? Well, half of one, anyway. My father taught me how to follow a trail when I was young. Plus I had a pretty good idea Thorn and Harley would head for the mountains. When I got close enough, I just followed the smell of the coffee. I didn’t know if I was closing in on your camp, or that of Thorn and Harley.”
“If it had been their camp, you would have walked right in there and gotten yourself killed. That would have done Robin a whole heap of good.”
“You don’t understand!” Sandy protested. “I love her. I’d run any risk for her.”
Smoke understood, all right, a lot better than Sandy gave him credit for. But he said, “Those two bastards have joined up with another group. I don’t know who they are, but the odds went up by half a dozen.”
“Not exactly,” Sandy said. “I’m here to help now.”
Smoke rolled his eyes, though it was dark and Sandy couldn’t see him. He said, “I don’t think it’s gonna make that much difference. You’re wounded.”
“So is Marshal Calhoun. I can handle a gun—a rifle, anyway. I’ve never been much good with a pistol.”
“Kid’s got a point,” Calhoun said, surprising Smoke a little. “I don’t care much for redskins, but he’d be an extra gun. You did bring a gun with you, Injun?”
“It’s on my horse,” Sandy said. “I left it tied to a bush a couple hundred yards east of here.”
“What good was a rifle going to do you if it’s back there?” Smoke asked. It wasn’t a question that required an answer. “Go get it,” he went on. “We can’t take you all the way back to Buffalo Flat, and I don’t want you wanderin’ around out here by yourself. That might wind up causing us more trouble. I reckon you’ll ride with us, but you’ll have to keep up.”
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