She ran out of the study and along the hall toward the front of the house, knowing better than to rush outside blindly. That was a good way to run smack-dab into a bullet. Hurrying into the darkened parlor, she pushed a curtain aside, and looked out.
She was in time to see a man wearing thick gloves to protect his hands throw some sort of burning object through a broken window into the bunkhouse. Other men on horseback galloped back and forth, firing handguns and rifles toward the windows. Sally caught her breath as an orange glare shot up inside the building. Those crude incendiary bombs had started fires inside the bunkhouse.
She saw at least twenty attackers, and from the sound of all the shooting going on, at least that many more were joining the assault on the Sugarloaf’s headquarters. Even without proof, there was no doubt in her mind that it was connected somehow to the three men who’d been lurking around the place earlier. Her instincts told her it was true.
One group of riders peeled off from the others and charged toward the house. Knowing that she was probably in great danger, Sally didn’t hesitate to break out the window glass with the carbine’s barrel. She brought the weapon to her shoulder and began to fire through the opening. She aimed at the charging horsemen and cranked off five rounds.
One man went backwards off his horse like he’d been slapped out of the saddle by a giant hand. Another reeled to the side, obviously wounded, and would have fallen if he hadn’t dropped his gun and grabbed the saddle horn.
That left three of them. As they reached the house, they vaulted from their saddles and leaped onto the porch. She tried to angle the carbine to fire at them, but they were too close to the wall. She heard one of them kicking at the door.
They weren’t going to get in very easily that way. Smoke had built the house to be defended. The door was thick and barred, and a man could kick it all day without busting it down.
Unfortunately, the same thing couldn’t be said of the windows. They were secure enough when the shutters were closed, but she hadn’t had time to do that. She gasped as she heard glass crash in another room and knew she had to keep a cool head.
The lamps in the front room weren’t lit. The only light came from the hallway, and that originated in the study so it wasn’t very bright.
Sally glided toward the closest corner where thick shadows lay and let the darkness wrap itself around her. With the carbine ready for action, she stood with her back pressed against the wall and waited.
She heard stealthy sounds from the hall. The men were trying to move silently, but they were a little too clumsy.
Shadows moved near the entrance to the front room. She brought the carbine to her shoulder and aimed it in that direction.
A moment later a man said in a harsh whisper, “Be careful! We don’t know who-all’s in here.”
“Somebody is,” another man replied, “and he blew Johnny Clark right outta his saddle!”
Sally smiled grimly. They assumed that because whoever was in the house had gunned down one of their companions, that person had to be a man. If they gave her a chance, they would soon discover that a woman could be a good shot, too.
The second man went on. “Duke, you and Corbin go upstairs and have a look around. The Jensen woman’s probably up there hidin’. Remember, whatever you do, don’t hurt her.”
“Not even a little bit, Nichols?”
“No more than you have to,” the gunman replied. “Pike said the doctor was mighty clear about that.”
That brief exchange told Sally quite a bit. They had attacked the Sugarloaf because they were looking for her. The fact that they wanted to take her alive indicated that they intended to use her for leverage against Smoke. His enemies had tried that before, always to their great regret.
Most of the time it had been their last regret.
The mention of a doctor was puzzling. She couldn’t recall any physician who had a grudge against her husband. Maybe the men meant a professor, although that seemed unlikely. Most of the time out on the frontier, anybody who used the word doctor was talking about a sawbones.
None of that mattered, Sally reminded herself. What was important was that she was in danger, regardless of the motive or the source, and that men who worked for her and Smoke, their friends as well as their employees, might well be dying trying to fight off the unexpected invasion.
That thought reminded her of the men who had killed Ben Hardy. Evidently, they had been the advance scouts. The whole thing smacked of a military operation, and she realized if the attacking force was big enough, she and the crew couldn’t fight it off. She had to start thinking in terms of escape.
With dozens of ruthless, well-armed invaders right outside the house—and some of them inside—that wasn’t going to be easy.
One of those shadows from the hall suddenly loomed blackly in the entrance to the front room. The man whispered to his companions, “I’m pretty sure those shots were coming from in here.”
“Why don’t we just spray the whole place with lead?” another man asked.
“Because Mrs. Jensen might be in here, you damn fool!” Nichols snapped. He raised his voice. “Mrs. Jensen. Sally Jensen. Are you in here?”
Sally held her breath. She didn’t say anything, didn’t move. Her finger was taut on the trigger.
Nichols cursed and told his companions, “Get ready, I’m gonna strike a match—”
Sally heard the rasp of a lucifer being struck. She knew she couldn’t hide anymore, so there was no point in further stealth. As sparks began to spurt from the match, she aimed a short distance above it and fired the carbine.
Chapter 22
The muzzle flash lit up the room. In that shaved heartbeat of brightness, she saw that the man with the match was holding it out well away from his body. The bullet from her carbine smacked harmlessly into the wallpaper. He’d been trying to draw her fire, she realized. He had meant for her to hear what he was saying.
“Rush her now!” the man shouted as he dropped the match.
Desperately, Sally worked the carbine’s lever as footsteps pounded across the room toward her. She pulled the trigger again. The weapon blasted, and a man screamed.
Somebody grabbed the carbine’s barrel and wrenched it to the side. Sally cried out as the man tore it from her grasp.
That wasn’t the only way she could fight back. She was in her own home, and her familiarity with it came in handy. As the man loomed up in front of her, she grabbed a vase off a side table and swung it at his head. The vase shattered with a huge crash. The man groaned, stumbled, and fell.
The carbine clattered on the floor.
“Grab her!” Nichols yelled.
Sally dived for the carbine. It was too dark in the room to see anything, so all she could aim for was the sound she had heard as it fell.
Her hand struck the weapon and it slid across the floor. Booted feet stomped heavily around her as she scrambled after the carbine on hands and knees. In the back of her mind was the knowledge that she couldn’t win the fight—there were just too many of them—but she didn’t have it in her to surrender. Smoke never gave up hope, no matter how bad the odds against him were, and she wasn’t going to, either. One of the things she had learned from him was to always keep fighting.
She wrapped her hands around the carbine just as somebody grabbed her robe from behind and started to pull her backwards. The man yelled, “Here she is! I got her!”
Sally twisted and lashed out with the carbine’s barrel, sweeping it through the air above her. It thudded solidly against something, and the man holding her robe let go. She rolled onto her bottom and scooted backwards on the floor, pushing hard with her feet.
She bumped into a pair of legs. A hand swiped at her and tangled in her hair for a second. When it came loose, so did a few strands of her hair. Pain made her yelp. It also made her angry. She worked the carbine’s lever.
The hardcases who had invaded the ranch knew that sound. A man shouted, “Look out! She’s gonna—”
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br /> His words were drowned out by shots smashing from the carbine. She didn’t worry about shooting anybody who didn’t have it coming. She swung the barrel from left to right and kept firing as she scooted until her back hit the wall.
She didn’t know how many of the men she had hit, if any. She pushed herself up, heard someone charging her again, and pulled the trigger. The carbine’s hammer clicked on an empty chamber. She was out of bullets.
She threw the carbine in front of her as hard as she could and heard it hit something. A man grunted in pain. She hoped she had broken his nose or even his skull. She twisted away and lunged through the shadows.
She had to get out of the house.
It was her only chance. As long as she was confined in there, sooner or later, they would overwhelm her by sheer force of numbers, if nothing else. By all rights, they should have captured her already. She had been lucky—and they probably hadn’t expected her to put up such a fierce fight.
They should have expected it, she thought. She was married to Smoke Jensen, wasn’t she?
Her feet were bare, so she moved without making much noise. She saw the glow that marked the doorway with the light coming from the study. Flitting like a phantom, she darted into the hallway.
A man yelled behind her, “There she goes! She’s headed for the back of the house!”
She knew how steep the odds against her were, but she hoped that if she could get out of the house, she might be able to reach the trees and then make her way into the mountains. Unarmed, barefoot, dressed only in a robe and nightdress, spending a chilly night in the mountains wasn’t an appealing prospect at all, but it sure beat being captured by men who had to be up to no good.
Some of the hands might get away, too. The battle was still going on. She heard the furious gunfire from the direction of the bunkhouse. If she could join forces with Pearlie and Cal, they could still make a fight of it . . .
She ran past the study door and on into the kitchen. It was dark, but she knew where everything was. She found a meat cleaver and clutched its wooden handle tightly. At close quarters, it would be a vicious weapon.
Men blundered around elsewhere in the house, searching for her. She heard footsteps upstairs, too. She wasn’t sure what they were looking for up there, since it should have been obvious to all of them that she was downstairs. Maybe they thought there were some back stairs and wanted to keep her from slipping up them.
Getting trapped on the second floor was the last thing she wanted. She wanted out, out where she would have the freedom to move around. She edged toward the back door, feeling her way along.
It opened before she could get there. Dark shapes filled the doorway, silhouetted by the light from the moon and stars.
“Get that lantern lit, damn it,” a man growled.
She didn’t wait for them to be able to see what they were doing. She let out a bloodcurdling scream—Preacher had told her that would make almost any man jump and think twice about what he was doing—and charged among them, slashing back and forth with the cleaver.
Men yelled in surprise and pain. Sally kept her head down and rammed into a man with her shoulder. Under normal circumstances she might not have been able to budge him, but he wasn’t braced for the impact and went over backwards with a startled shout.
She bounded through the door and into the clear.
It was a matter of outrunning the pursuit, reaching the trees, and giving the men the slip as she worked her way up the thickly wooded slopes behind Sugarloaf’s headquarters. She raced like the wind.
Hoofbeats thundered to her right. Sally tried to shy away from them, but it was too late. A man on horseback loomed up out of the night. He turned his mount so that it came alongside her, leaned down from the saddle, wrapped his arm around her waist, and jerked her off the ground.
She cried out and tried to twist so she could strike at him with the cleaver. He was a good rider, though, and seemed to be controlling the horse with his knees, leaving both hands free. One arm was tight around her and the other hand caught hold of her wrist as she tried to wield the cleaver. A vicious twist made her gasp in pain and drop it.
With that threat disposed of, the man grasped his reins again and slowed the horse. His arm was like an iron band around her, holding her in front of him on the horse and pressing her tightly against him. “You put up a good fight, Mrs. Jensen, but it’s over.” He turned the horse.
“My husband will kill you,” she said through clenched teeth. “That’s if I don’t get a chance to do it first.”
He laughed and sounded genuinely amused. “Smoke Jensen won’t do anything but what we tell him to, as long as he wants to keep his wife, his crew, and all his friends in Big Rock from dying.”
Sally’s heart sank. They had attacked Big Rock, too? Had they taken over the town? How many people had been killed?
“So just take it easy, stop fighting, and make it easier on all of us,” her captor went on. “It’s time you met the doctor.”
Chapter 23
Out in the bunkhouse, things were starting to get desperate.
All the fires were out, so the place wasn’t in danger of burning down anymore, but the flying lead had killed a couple men and several more were badly wounded. Pearlie and Cal had come through unscathed so far, but they knew that couldn’t last much longer.
“Kid,” Pearlie said as he thumbed fresh cartridges into his Winchester, “we gotta make a break for it.”
“How are we gonna do that?” Cal asked. “There are too many of them out there!”
“We’re gonna turn their own tactics against ’em. Keep fightin’. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Staying low because bullets were still coming through the broken windows, he made his way to a small closet at the far end of the bunkhouse and felt around inside its darkened interior until he found what he wanted—the jug of kerosene they used to fill the lanterns.
On his way back to the window with the jug, he stopped at his bunk to pull on his clothes, stomp into his boots, and buckle on his gun belt. He told the other men to take turns doing the same thing while continuing to battle the invaders.
“Are we gettin’ out of here, Pearlie?” one of the cowboys asked.
“We dang sure are,” Pearlie said, adding under his breath, “one way or the other.”
Back to the window where he had left Cal, he told the youngster to go get dressed. “Don’t waste no time about it, neither,” Pearlie warned. “I got a hunch those hombres out there might be gettin’ tired of this. They’re liable to launch an all-out attack any time now.”
“I understand.”
While Cal was dressing, Pearlie cut a strip of cloth off the tail of his flannel shirt and stuffed one end of it into the neck of the kerosene jug, which was nearly new and almost full.
Cal was as good as his words, making it back to the window in only a few moments, dressed in boots, jeans, and a buckskin shirt. His gun belt was strapped around his lean hips. He exclaimed, “You’re making a bomb!”
“Yep. Don’t know if it’ll be enough to turn the tables on those varmints, but I reckon it’s just about our only chance.”
“What do we do?”
“You stay here and keep an eye on ’em. I’m gonna unbar that door and wait for them to charge us again. When they do, I intend to pitch that jug right in amongst ’em. If it explodes like I hope, it’ll blow some of ’em to hell and distract the others enough for us to go out shootin’. Once we’re out, everybody scatter. With any luck, some of us will get away and can keep on fightin’.”
Cal nodded again, then said wistfully, “I sure wish Smoke was here.”
Pearlie sighed. “So do I, kid. So do I.”
Satisfied that the strip of flannel had soaked up enough kerosene to serve as a makeshift fuse, Pearlie went around the room explaining the plan to the rest of the defenders, all of whom nodded in grim-faced understanding. Even if Pearlie’s plan didn’t work, they would go out fighting. Most of those tough
, veteran cowboys wouldn’t ask for anything else.
Pearlie unbarred the door, then held the jug in one hand and a lucifer in the other as he looked toward the window where Cal stood vigil and fired an occasional shot.
After a few minutes, Cal called, “Looks like they’re forming up for a charge, Pearlie!”
“I knew it,” Pearlie said. “They got us outnumbered, and they never set out to have no siege.”
“Here they come!”
Pearlie used his thumbnail to snap the match to life. He held the flame to the kerosene-soaked rag, which caught instantly. He had to move fast to keep the jug from exploding in his hand. He dropped the match, jerked the door open, and pitched the jug toward the attackers as hard as he could.
The group of riders had just surged forward, shooting as they came, when the jug sailed among them and erupted in a huge ball of flame.
The explosion engulfed several men and horses and seared some of the other mounts enough to make them jump around wildly. In the blink of an eye, a well-coordinated attack turned into wild chaos.
“Come on!” Pearlie yelled as he burst out of the bunkhouse. He’d grabbed his rifle from where he had leaned it against the wall beside the door, and the Winchester spurted fire and lead as his shots raked the invaders.
Cal and the rest of the crew were close behind him. Rifles and pistols roared as they spread out. Their bullets tore through several of the attackers and knocked them off their out-of-control horses.
But there were just too many gunmen. Reinforcements closed in from all sides. Sugarloaf cowboys were gunned down and ridden down. The battle quickly began to turn into a slaughter.
Pearlie was headed for the barn. He thought maybe if he could get in there, he might be able to slip out the back and then circle around toward the house. He was still worried about Sally. Some of the invaders had charged the house, and although he had seen muzzle flashes from one of the windows and knew that Sally was fighting back, he had no idea how that part of the fracas had turned out.
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