Smoke counted the men as they ran into the draw. When he reached the right number, he ordered, “Back to our saddle mounts, boys. We’ll have to round up those horses.”
“What about the horse thieves?” Pearlie asked. “We gonna round them up, too?”
“I haven’t forgotten about them,” Smoke replied with a grim note in his voice. “Anybody hurt?”
A couple of the men had been grazed by flying lead, but the injuries weren’t serious. The wounds could be tied up with bandannas, and the men would be fine until they got back to the ranch.
Cal said, “Smoke, I think I heard hoofbeats up on that ridge a minute ago, and I know there weren’t as many men shootin’ at us there at the end as there were at first. Some of them lit a shuck. Wouldn’t surprise me if all of them have by now.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me, either,” Smoke agreed. “Once they saw their trap didn’t work and the horses broke out of the corral and stampeded, they decided to cut their losses and run.”
When they reached the spot where they had left their mounts, Smoke said, “Pearlie, you and Cal come with me. The rest of you fellas follow the horses, gather them up, and start ’em back to the Sugarloaf. There are a half dozen of you. You ought to be able to handle them.”
“Where are you going, Mr. Jensen?” one of the cowboys asked.
“To see if we can find those fellas who bushwhacked us.” Smoke’s voice was hard as flint as he added, “I don’t like being bushwhacked.”
Somebody was going to find that out before too much longer, to their everlasting regret.
Smoke and his two companions climbed their horses out of the draw and headed one way in the night while the rest of the group from the Sugarloaf set off in the other direction to look for the stolen horses.
The horses might have run a mile or so when they stampeded, but probably not much farther than that, if any. They might have scattered some, though, which would make them more of a challenge to round up. It could easily be morning before the Sugarloaf hands had them all gathered and on the way back to the ranch.
While the shooting was going on, Smoke had tried to count the number of muzzle flashes he had seen on top of the ridge. Of course, he had been a mite busy at the time, gunning down the horse thieves by the campfire and the corral, but he was fairly certain he had seen rifle fire coming from six different locations up there. If all the ambushers had survived, that meant he and Pearlie and Cal would be facing two-to-one odds if they caught up to the men.
Smoke had faced worse odds in his time. Much worse.
They circled wide of the horse thieves’ camp. Some of the outlaws might have still been alive, although Smoke doubted it. He was in no mood to check on them, however. They could fend for themselves. The important thing as far as Smoke was concerned was that they were all too shot up to represent a threat anymore.
The moon and stars provided enough light for the three men to see where they were going. Smoke found a place where their horses could climb to the top of the ridge. With rifles held ready, they rode slowly along it until they reached a spot overlooking the rustlers’ camp. Sure enough, all eight bodies were sprawled around the fire, which was burning down now with no one left alive to tend it.
“This is where those varmints were lurkin’, all right,” Pearlie said. “Reckon we can pick up their trail?”
“We’re going to try,” Smoke said.
He dismounted, struck a match, and used its light to look around. A few yards away, he found some empty shell casings. The brass gleamed dully in the matchlight.
A few yards back from that point Smoke spotted hoofprints. He hunkered on his heels, snapped a fresh lucifer to life with his thumbnail, and closely studied the tracks.
Every set of hoofprints was different, although sometimes the things that set them apart might be so small that most people would never see them. Smoke had been taught how to track by one of the canniest scouts who had ever lived, the old mountain man known as Preacher, so to his eyes a set of hoofprints might as well have been a sign chalked onto a blackboard. He could read them that easily.
Pearlie and Cal knew what Smoke was doing as he ranged along the bluff and continued his search by matchlight. When he returned to the horses, he swung up into his saddle and gave a decisive nod.
“Looks to me like they came in from the east and headed back the same way,” he said.
“What’s in that direction?” Cal asked.
“There’s a settlement about fifteen miles yonder,” Pearlie said. “You been there, Cal. Place called Fletcher’s Gap.”
“Oh, yeah,” Cal said. Moonlight gleamed on white teeth as he grinned. “Not much to it, just a wide place in the trail, but the fella who runs the one store has a pretty daughter, right?”
Pearlie snorted.
“Trust you to remember that, boy,” he said.
Smoke turned his horse’s head to the east and said, “That’ll be our first stop. Maybe somebody there will know something about the men we’re looking for.”
“And if they don’t?” Pearlie asked.
“We’ll keep looking.”
Chapter 14
The sun wasn’t up yet as Smoke, Pearlie, and Cal approached Fletcher’s Gap several hours later, but the eastern sky was rosy with impending dawn.
They had come down out of the mountains a short time earlier, through a pass that Smoke knew gave the little settlement its name. Fletcher’s Gap. The town, although calling it by that designation was generous, was about a mile out on the flats, where the grassy plains began that stretched all the way to the Kansas border and beyond.
Smoke had spotted the settlement as they rode down the sloping trail and had counted six buildings. He thought back to previous visits and remembered a trading post, a livery stable and a blacksmith shop run by the same man, and a saloon. The other two buildings were houses. Another memory came back to him. The trading post and saloon were owned by a pair of brothers, each man operating one of the businesses.
Nothing much here to attract a bunch of horse thieves, or men in the market to buy some stolen horses. Smoke figured the hombres he and his friends were tracking fell into one of those categories. But they might have stopped to pick up some supplies.
There was also a chance some of them had been wounded during the ruckus several hours earlier and could have stopped here in search of medical help.
They weren’t likely to find much along those lines in a place as small as Fletcher’s Gap.
Now that the light was better and growing brighter by the minute, Smoke cast back and forth looking for tracks, just to make sure they were going in the right direction. It took him about a quarter of an hour to locate a number of hoofprints left by horses heading east. He dismounted, studied the tracks for only a moment, and then nodded to Pearlie and Cal.
“This is them, all right,” he said. “They probably took off from the ambush one by one, but they’ve rendezvoused and are traveling together again. And they’re headed for the settlement, all right.”
He mounted up and they trotted toward Fletcher’s Gap. Out here on the wide-open plains there wasn’t much cover, so anybody who was up and about in the settlement and looked to the west would see them coming.
That worried Smoke a little. The three of them might be riding into another ambush. But they would deal with that when the time came, if they had to.
Smoke didn’t see any activity around the buildings, nor were there any wagons parked in front of them or horses tied up at the hitch racks. Pearlie and Cal noticed the same. Cal said, “Looks like a ghost town.”
“Yeah,” Pearlie said, “but I don’t recollect hearin’ anything about the place bein’ abandoned.”
“Could be everybody’s still asleep,” Smoke said. “It’s still early.”
“Maybe. I don’t have a good feelin’ about this, though.”
Smoke couldn’t argue with his foreman. He didn’t have a good feeling about the situation, either.
When
they were within a hundred yards of the nearest building, which was the blacksmith shop, Smoke said quietly, “We’re going to split up. Cal, you head left. Pearlie, go right. I’m going straight up the middle. When you go, take off in a hurry.”
“You reckon on drawin’ their fire, if they’re waitin’ for us,” Pearlie said.
“That’s right. Ready . . . now!”
He dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and sent the animal leaping forward. At the same time he leaned forward in the saddle, pulled his Winchester from its sheath, and worked the repeater’s lever to throw a cartridge into its chamber.
The flat crack of a shot sounded in the early morning air.
Smoke spotted the puff of powder smoke from a corner of the blacksmith shop. He returned the fire, cranking off two quick rounds. Shooting from the back of a galloping horse, he didn’t expect to hit anything unless it was by sheer, blind luck, but he knew he could come close enough to make the bushwhacker duck for cover.
More shots rang out. Smoke glanced to the right and left and saw Pearlie and Cal riding hellbent-for-leather. They were throwing lead toward the settlement, too. Smoke hoped any innocent folks kept their heads down.
The horses belonging to the men they were pursuing had to be hidden inside the livery barn. As Smoke charged into the settlement, he saw a man lean out from the opening into the hayloft and fire a rifle at him. Guiding the horse with his knees, he snapped the Winchester to his shoulder and pressed the trigger. The rifle went off with a wicked crack, and at this range it was a different story. The man in the hayloft doubled over and dropped his rifle as the slug punched into his belly. He toppled out of the opening.
Smoke had already flashed past by the time the bushwhacker hit the ground in the limp sprawl of death.
He couldn’t see Cal and Pearlie anymore. His friends were around behind the other buildings. Smoke knew he could trust them to take care of themselves, and besides, he had his own problems to handle. More shots blasted from the front porch of the trading post. Smoke’s gaze swung in that direction and spotted a man crouched behind a rain barrel, firing a six-shooter at him.
Smoke’s Winchester spouted flame again. The high-powered rounds tore through the upper part of the rain barrel and into the man behind it. If the barrel had been full of water it might have slowed down the slugs enough to stop them, but a recent dry spell had left the level low. Smoke had figured that would be the case when he aimed his shots.
The force of the bullets threw the man back against the trading post’s front window. The glass shattered and sprayed glittering shards into the air. The bushwhacker landed with his legs still hanging over the window sill and didn’t move again.
That was two of them down, Smoke thought, and from the sounds of gunfire echoing from other parts of the settlement he figured Pearlie and Cal were doing some damage as well. He would have liked to take one of the enemy alive in order to question him and find out more about who was responsible for the theft of the horses, but that might not turn out to be possible.
Somebody had shot at him from the rear of the blacksmith shop, Smoke recalled. That couldn’t have been the man he shot out of the hayloft. That hombre hadn’t had time to get up there. As that thought went through Smoke’s brain, he wheeled his horse back toward the smithy.
The shop door stood open. Smoke dropped from his saddle and ran toward it at an angle, stopping before he got there to press himself against the building’s front wall.
“If you’re in there, mister, throw your gun out and come out behind it with your hands in the air,” Smoke called. “Nobody’s going to shoot you if you give yourself up.”
Silence came from the shop.
Smoke reached out with the barrel of his Winchester, hooked the partially open door with it, and threw the door all the way back. That didn’t draw any fire.
But a second later he heard a sudden curse, followed immediately by a shot and a howl of pain. Somebody was hurt in there, possibly an innocent citizen of Fletcher’s Gap.
Either that or it was a trick.
Smoke couldn’t afford to take that chance. He went through the door low and fast.
Another shot blasted, the muzzle flash bright and garish in the gloom of the shop’s interior. Smoke spotted the big forge. A man crouched on the far side of it and aimed a revolver at him for a second try.
Before the man could pull the trigger again, a shape loomed up behind him. A big, balding man with blood on his shirt and his right arm hanging limp swung a hammer in his left hand. The hammer smashed into the gunman’s left shoulder and drove him to the ground, shrieking in agony. Smoke figured that terrible blow had shattered every bone in the man’s shoulder.
He took a quick step and used the Winchester’s barrel to knock the gun out of the man’s other hand. The bushwhacker collapsed, no doubt passing out from the pain of his injury.
“Hold your fire, mister,” rumbled the big man who had struck him down. “I reckon if this fella’s out to kill you, we must be on the same side.”
“I’d say the same thing about that bullet hole in your arm,” Smoke replied. “Are you all right?”
The big man glanced down at his injury. He shrugged his other shoulder and said, “I will be. This don’t amount to much.”
Outside, Pearlie yelled, “Smoke! Smoke, where are you?”
“In here, Pearlie,” Smoke called. He looked at the big man again and went on. “You’re the blacksmith and liveryman here, aren’t you?”
“That’s right. Jasper Hargrove. And you’re Mr. Jensen, from the Sugarloaf. We’ve met a time or two.” Hargrove grinned. “When I heard a couple of these damned fools talking about buying some horses stolen from your ranch, I knew you’d be along directly to hand ’em their needin’s.”
Smoke smiled. Pearlie came into the barn and reported, “Me an’ Cal cleaned out the rest of these rats, Smoke. Hope you didn’t figure on any of ’em livin’ through the altercation.”
“This one did,” Smoke said with a nod toward the man Hargrove had struck down. “We’ll have a talk with him when he wakes up.”
Pearlie squinted at the unconscious man and said, “I’ll fetch a bucket of water. See if we can’t hurry that along a mite.”
As Smoke suspected, a couple of the men they had followed to Fletcher’s Gap had been wounded in the earlier fight, and the group had stopped here to patch up their injured and wait to see if anybody was coming after them. While they were doing that, they had herded all of the settlement’s inhabitants into the saloon and had been keeping them there at gunpoint, with the exception of Jasper Hargrove, who was the unofficial “mayor” of Fletcher’s Gap. He had hidden in the livery stable, in a storm cellar hollowed out under the tack room. When the shooting started, he had crept out and slipped into the blacksmith shop to try to get the drop on the man posted there.
That hadn’t worked out, at least not at first, as Hargrove collected a bullet through the arm for his trouble. But he had gotten a second crack at the gunman and put the opportunity to good use.
While the storekeeper’s daughter—who was as pretty as Cal had said but obviously smitten with the burly blacksmith—was bandaging Hargrove’s arm, Smoke questioned the gunman with the broken shoulder. The man spent most of his time groaning in pain but finally admitted that he and his companions had met the horse thieves to take the stolen animals off their hands.
“Everybody knows the Sugarloaf raises some fine horses,” the man said through teeth gritted against the pain. “And Josiah, he said that all those stories about you were just so much hot air, Jensen. He said we didn’t have to worry about you comin’ after us.” The man moaned again. “That damned fool!”
“Who’s Josiah?” Smoke asked.
“Big hombre, wears a buffalo coat and a hat with a feather on it, like a Injun.”
That matched the description of the man he had knocked through the trading post window with a couple of bullets, Smoke recalled. Josiah wouldn’t be making any more unwis
e plans.
That seemed to be the end of it. Hargrove promised they would tend to the injured man as best they could and send a rider to the next town over, where both a doctor and a deputy sheriff could be found. Smoke was more than happy to leave the citizens of Fletcher’s Gap with that responsibility.
He was tired and just wanted to go home.
It was late in the afternoon before he and Pearlie and Cal rode up to the big ranch house that was home to Smoke and his beautiful, dark-haired wife, Sally. A number of the cowboys had gathered around to greet the three men, anxious to hear about whether or not they had caught up to the bushwhackers, and one of the men must have told Sally that Smoke was back because she was waiting on the porch for him.
She wasn’t alone, however. Smoke had already spotted a familiar horse tied to the hitching post in front of the house. Monte Carson stood next to Sally. The big lawman had a solemn look on his face, and that was enough to make Smoke’s instincts start warning him that more trouble loomed.
The other hands clustered around Pearlie and Cal to get the story from them. Smoke stepped up on the porch, took Sally into his arms, and kissed her. The passion between them had never dimmed and never would. As she leaned back a little in his arms, she asked, “Are you all right, Smoke?”
“Right as rain,” he told her.
“Then so am I.” She moved aside but kept an arm around his waist. “Monte rode out earlier. He has a message for you.”
“What is it, Monte?” Smoke asked, his voice calm and level despite the alarm bells going off in his brain.
“Well, now . . . I don’t rightly know,” Carson replied. He took an envelope from his shirt pocket and held it out.
“You delivering the mail now in addition to being sheriff?” Smoke asked dryly.
“This didn’t come by regular mail. A man came to my office, said he knew that you and I are friends, and asked if I’d see to it you got it. Something was off about him, Smoke. I never saw him before, but I could tell he was a wrong one.”
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