A High Sierra Christmas

by William W. Johnstone

  Next to her stood a man Smoke didn’t know, although something about him seemed vaguely familiar. Smoke wondered if he had seen the man in the hotel, or maybe on the train.

  Although he wasn’t happy about whatever new developments these people represented, Smoke was happy to see that Salty appeared ready to go.

  As the carriage came to a stop, Smoke swung down from it and strode over to the two old-timers.

  “I hope you haven’t gone and opened a ticket office, Fred,” he said. He glanced back at Denny, who was climbing down from the carriage, and remembered her mocking comment about selling tickets.

  “I swear to you, Smoke, I didn’t do anything of the sort,” Davis replied as he held up his hands, palms out. He nodded toward Stansfield. “It was all this fella’s doin’.” A slightly shamefaced look came over Davis’s rugged countenance. “Although maybe I did talk a mite too freely when he came around here yesterday afternoon asking questions.”

  “You followed me here, didn’t you, Mr. Stansfield?” Smoke said. “In fact, I suspect you’ve been on my trail all the way from San Francisco. Not to brag on my own skills, but a fella’s doing pretty good when he can keep me from realizing that I’m being followed.”

  Stansfield said, “I take that as a high compliment from a man of your caliber, Mr. Jensen . . . no witticism or comment on your reputation as a gunman intended. It’s true I’ve been hoping for a chance to speak with you again before you set out on this historic journey.”

  “So you can ask me if you can come along and write about the trip,” Smoke said. “I read that story of yours, too. The answer is no.”

  By this time, the others had gotten out of the carriage and followed Smoke over to the stagecoach. Stansfield looked past him at them and said, “It appears you’ve already taken on some extra passengers.”

  “All we’ve got room for. And it’s none of your business who else goes on this trip.”

  “On the contrary. I’ve looked into it, and a stagecoach of this size can carry nine people in relative comfort, three on each seat and three more on the bench in the middle.” Stansfield made a show of counting, pointing out each of them including Alma Lewiston and the man Smoke didn’t know. “I believe there are exactly nine of us, not counting our intrepid driver.”

  Salty spoke up, frowning and blustering, “Are you callin’ me old, mister?”

  “Not at all, sir. Intrepid means courageous, valiant, daring. I believe the word you’re thinking of is decrepit.”

  “Oh,” Salty said. “Well, in that case, go on.”

  Before Stansfield could say anything else, Smoke turned aside from the reporter and touched a finger to the brim of his hat as he nodded to Alma Lewiston.

  “I didn’t expect to see you here today, Mrs. Lewiston.”

  “I told you, there’s no good reason for me to go back to San Francisco,” she said. “Gordon can be laid to rest whether I’m there or not. I did my mourning for him a long time ago. I don’t have any more tears to shed. And there’s nothing else to hold me there. So I’ve decided to start a new life somewhere else . . . in Reno.”

  “With this fella?” Smoke asked bluntly as he nodded toward the hard-faced man with the drooping black mustache.

  “Frank Colbert,” the stranger introduced himself. He didn’t offer to shake hands, and neither did Smoke. “And don’t assume too much, mister, especially when it means you’ll be insulting a lady if you do.”

  Smoke inclined his head in acknowledgment of that point and said, “I apologize, Mrs. Lewiston. I meant no offense. You just took me by surprise by showing up here, is all. The two of you want to come along to Reno with us, is that right?”

  “Some of my business associates are waiting for me there, and it’s vital that I reach them as soon as possible,” Colbert said. “A great deal of money may depend on it.”

  “There are other ways to get there,” Smoke pointed out. “Other routes that the railroad takes.”

  “That go all the way around by way of Texas.” Colbert made a slashing gesture with one hand. “I can’t risk not getting there in time.”

  “Mister, this whole trip is a risk.”

  “Maybe, but I’m willing to chance it.”

  Smoke and Colbert stood there, two big, tough men sizing each other up. Smoke didn’t like the looks of the hombre, but despite the fact that he still felt no responsibility for Gordon Lewiston’s death, he did have some sympathy for the man’s widow. He thought it was a little cold-blooded of her to have taken up with Colbert so soon, which she had obviously done . . . but her personal life was none of his business.

  He turned his head to look at Salty and asked, “What do you think? Will the extra weight slow us down?”

  The old-timer frowned in thought for a moment, then said, “No, I don’t reckon so. I looked over all them horses, and they’s good, strong animals. We got plenty of food. If we run into any patches where there’s ice on the trail instead of snow, havin’ some extra weight in the coach might even come in handy and keep us from slippin’ and slidin’ around as much.”

  Smoke heaved a sigh. “All right. Since Salty doesn’t think it’ll be a problem, I suppose it won’t hurt anything. You other folks can come along.”

  “Does that include me?” Stansfield asked quickly.

  “If we don’t take you, you’ll probably try to follow us, and then you’ll freeze to death somewhere along the way. So yeah, you can come too, mister.” Smoke’s voice hardened. “Just don’t get on my nerves too much, or I’ll pitch you out and leave you in the middle of the Sierra Nevadas.”

  He wouldn’t actually do such a thing, of course, but he wouldn’t mind if Stansfield worried some about the possibility. It might make the reporter a little less obnoxious . . . although probably not.

  Smoke turned away from the stagecoach, waved an arm at the vehicle, and told the gathering, “Load up your things and climb aboard. I want to get on the trail before anybody else shows up asking for a ride to Reno!”

  BOOK TWO

  CHAPTER 20

  Gila Crossing, Arizona

  A curtain of beads hung across the entrance to the cantina in this little border settlement. The beads swung back and forth and made a faint clattering noise as Luke Jensen brushed them aside and stepped into the building.

  The thick adobe walls kept the air in here cool despite the bright sunshine and heat outside. Winter might be in full swing elsewhere in the country, but here, less than a mile from the Mexican border, the days were still sultry.

  Luke paused to let his eyes adjust to the dimness. He wasn’t expecting trouble—well, not too much, anyway—but in his line of work, a man always had to be careful.

  After all these years of manhunting, he didn’t want to do something stupid and get his light blown out now.

  He was closing in on sixty, too old for this job, really, but what else did he know? Ranching held no appeal for him, and clerking in a store would be pure misery, and he damn sure didn’t want to go sit in a rocking chair on some porch and wait for death to kindly stop for him.

  So he would keep hunting men who had a price on their heads, and if the risks inherent in that caught up to him someday. . . well, hell, it was the life he had chosen, wasn’t it?

  Or at least, the life fate had chosen for him.

  Luke was a tall man, still ruggedly built despite his age. His craggy, deeply tanned face showed the wear and tear of decades spent mostly outside. His dark clothes were gray from trail dust. He wore two long-barreled .44 Remington revolvers, butt forward in their holsters.

  The guns were old, like him, but could still kill a man just fine. Also like him.

  Luke’s keen eyes needed only a second to account for everyone in the cantina, six men and two women.

  A man and a woman stood behind the bar, both of them short and fat, the woman looking more Indian than Mexican. The other woman, more of a girl, really, since she couldn’t be a day over fifteen, stood in front of the bar.

  D
espite her youth, her shape was womanly already, with her full, brown breasts mostly exposed by the low-cut blouse she wore. The daughter or granddaughter of the couple behind the bar, Luke thought.

  Two men stood at the bar with mugs of beer in front of them. Cowboys from one of the local spreads, by the looks of them. Neither wore a gun where Luke could see it.

  At a table sat two more men, older, maybe vaqueros, maybe bandits from across the border. They had glasses and a half-empty bottle of tequila on the table. Gun belts were strapped around their waists, with holstered revolvers attached.

  Luke wasn’t after them, but they were unknown quantities. They might try to kill him if they decided he posed a potential threat. Or they might just feel like killing him.

  He would need to keep an eye on them.

  It was the sixth man in the cantina who interested him, the man sitting at a table in the corner, slumped forward, snoring. Luke couldn’t see his face, just silvery hair askew.

  That was the man Luke was after . . . if the information he’d been given in Tucson was correct.

  The fat man behind the bar spoke to the girl. She hesitated, and the man gave her an emphatic, imperative nod. She picked up a round wooden tray from the bar and came toward Luke, holding the tray in front of her.

  “Something to drink, señor?” she asked him.

  “Perhaps later, señorita. Right now I seek information.”

  She tossed her head defiantly, making her thick mass of raven hair swirl around sleek shoulders left bare by the blouse. “We sell beer and tequila and whiskey, not information,” she said.

  “Not even for the right price?” Luke said.

  “Not everything has a price, señor.”

  “I’ve never run across anything that didn’t.”

  Her dark eyes flashed at him as she said, “And I am not for sale, either.”

  Luke felt a thousand years old. He let out a little grunt of laughter and told her, “That’s good. Stick to it as long as you can. But for now, tell me if that slumbering gentleman over there in the corner is Jefferson Gillette.”

  The girl looked a little surprised, and genuinely puzzled. Luke supposed it was possible that no one here in this tiny settlement knew Gillette’s real name. He might have given them one of his aliases, or no name at all.

  “We call him Old Tiger. Tigre. That is all.”

  With his left hand—his right never strayed far from the butt of a gun—Luke took a folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket and held it out to the girl. By now, everyone in the cantina except the sleeping man was watching this conversation.

  She unfolded the paper, revealing it to be a reward poster for one Jefferson Gillette, wanted for numerous armed robberies and murders across the southwest. The girl caught her breath when she saw the drawing of the man on the paper, and Luke knew she recognized him. Her eyes even darted toward the man in the corner.

  “How old is this?” she asked.

  “Twelve years,” Luke said. “But the rewards have never been lifted. I’m sure he’s changed some since then, but that man is the one you know as Old Tiger, isn’t he?”

  “You should go,” the girl said as she thrust the wanted poster at Luke. When he didn’t take it, she dropped it on the floor between them. “We want no trouble here.”

  “I don’t want trouble either, but it’s my job to bring lawbreakers to justice.”

  The two vaqueros—or bandidos—stood up from the table. One of them said, “Your job is to suck blood money from the bones of good men, cabron.”

  “I’ve no quarrel with you,” Luke said.

  “You should leave now, hombre,” the second man said. “You do, and we let you live.”

  “No man lets me live,” Luke said. “My life is mine, and anybody who tries to take it gets what’s coming to him.”

  “Carmencita!” the fat man behind the bar blurted out. In rapid Spanish, he told the girl to come away from where she was. Her bare feet slapped the floor quickly as she obeyed the order.

  Over at the bar, the two gringo cowboys edged away, putting themselves out of the line of fire as much as they could.

  The man in the corner kept snoring.

  Luke stood calmly where he was, waiting for the men who faced him to call the tune. He wasn’t going to push them into a fight, and he wasn’t going to let them prod him into drawing first, either.

  The nerve of the man on Luke’s right broke first. He snarled a curse and clawed at the gun on his hip.

  Luke’s arms flashed as he pulled both Remingtons from the cross-draw rig. Time had shaved the tiniest fraction of speed from his draw, but facing these two, it wasn’t enough to matter. They were cruel, ruthless men, but they weren’t really fast.

  The right-hand Remington boomed and bucked against Luke’s palm. The .44 slug bored into the man’s chest and burst his heart. He had just cleared leather. His finger jerked the trigger involuntarily and he blew his right big toe off, but he was already too dead to feel it.

  The gun in Luke’s left hand went off so soon after the first shot that it was hard to tell them apart. Luke’s aim was a little high—he had never been quite as good with his left hand—so the bullet ripped through the side of the man’s throat. Blood spurted in a high arc from a severed artery.

  The wound didn’t kill the man instantly, though, and he was able to bring his gun up and trigger a round in Luke’s direction. The bullet whined past Luke’s ear. He didn’t want to risk the man getting off a second shot, so he put a slug between the hombre’s eyes. That knocked him down.

  With all that gun thunder echoing from the cantina’s low ceiling, Luke couldn’t have heard the scrape of the chair’s legs on the floor as Jefferson Gillette—Old Tiger—surged up and swept a sawed-off shotgun from under the filthy poncho he wore. It must have been instinct that warned Luke to twist and dive out of the way of the blast.

  Gillette might have actually been asleep when Luke came in, but he had woken up at some point in the proceedings, enough to be aware that a day of reckoning had arrived at last. He wasn’t completely drunk, either; otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to react as quickly as he did now. He tracked the figure rolling swiftly across the floor and fired the sawed-off’s second barrel.

  Luke kicked an empty table over as he rolled. It absorbed the buckshot from the second blast. As he came up on one knee and tried to bring the Remingtons to bear on Gillette, the man slung the empty scattergun at his head. Luke had to duck.

  When he did that, Gillette leaped onto a table with an agility that belied his years and dived at him.

  The old outlaw’s shoulder rammed into Luke’s chest and drove him over backward. Luke’s head hit the floor hard enough to make the cantina spin crazily around him.

  The impact also caused the Remingtons to fly out of his hands. He lay there stunned for a second with Gillette’s weight pinning him down, and when he got his wits back about him, he looked up to see that the man had pulled out a big knife and was about to plunge it into his chest.

  As the deadly thrust fell, Luke grabbed Gillette’s wrist just in time to keep the cold steel from ripping into his body. It took both hands to stop the knife.

  That left Gillette’s other hand free to hammer punches into Luke’s face. He jerked his head from side to side, avoiding the blows as much as he could, but enough of them landed that he felt consciousness slipping away from him.

  If he passed out, Gillette would gut him like a fish. Luke knew that. He brought his right leg up, bones and muscles creaking and resisting more than they used to, and hooked his ankle across Gillette’s throat. When he swung his leg back, that ripped Gillette off of him.

  Luke rolled over onto hands and knees and looked around for his Remingtons. He spotted one of the revolvers lying on the floor nearby and made a grab for it.

  He had to jerk his hand back as Gillette brought the knife down and almost impaled it. The tip of the blade stuck in the floor, though, and Gillette couldn’t wrench it free right away
. He grunted with the effort as he tried to do so.

  That gave Luke a chance to slide across the floor on his belly the other way and scoop up the second Remington, which he had just spotted. As he closed his left hand around the revolver, he rolled onto that side and thrust the barrel toward Gillette.

  The outlaw had just pulled the knife loose from the floor and lifted it with a triumphant grin on his weather-beaten face when Luke pulled the trigger. The bullet smashed through the yellow stubs of teeth revealed by Gillette’s expression and on out the back of his head, taking a good-sized chunk of skull with it.

  Gillette stayed there on his knees for a second before he fell forward onto his face with a thump, the third dead man to hit the floor in not much more than a minute.

  Breathing hard, Luke lay there hoping that his heart, which was racing a mile a minute, wouldn’t burst. His pulse beat a loud, swift tattoo inside his head.

  Over that racket, he heard the furious shout from the fat man behind the bar.

  “You killed El Tigre!”

  Luke saw the man come around the end of the bar holding a machete, of all things. A great weariness flooded through him. He didn’t want to kill this cantina owner, who was probably an honest, hardworking man who felt sorry for the old outlaw and doubtless had no idea what a bloody-handed scoundrel Gillette had been.

  He certainly didn’t want to kill the man in front of his wife and daughter—or granddaughter, as the case might be.

  Luckily, he didn’t have to. The two cowboys caught hold of the fat man’s arms and halted his charge toward Luke. One of them yelled, “Paco! Stop it! That hombre’ll kill you, you damn fool!”

  The other man told Luke, “Mister, you better get outta here while you got the chance.”

  “Not without . . . what I came for.”

  Luke climbed to his feet, holstered the Remington he held, picked up the other iron and pouched it as well. He found his hat and put it on.

  Standing beside Gillette’s body, he asked, “Does he have a horse?”

  The girl—Carmencita, the fat man had called her—looked disgusted and said, “A horse? He has nothing. Only the pity of the people in this place.”