CHAPTER THREE
Wyoming Territory, 1885
Ace and Chance kept a close eye on their back trail for several days after their run-in with Mayor Harrington’s men, but eventually it became obvious that the corrupt politician hadn’t sent any of his hired hardcases after them.
It wasn’t really a surprise. Nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of Smoke Jensen. If even half the stories told about him were true, making an enemy out of Smoke would be a good way to wind up dead in a hurry.
One night as they sat next to their campfire in some foothills butted up against a range of low but rugged mountains, the subject of the famous gunfighter came up again.
Ace sipped coffee from his cup. “You know, I’ve been thinking about Smoke Jensen.”
“Well, you might as well forget about that,” Chance said. “He’s not our pa.”
“I never said he was!”
“You know my theory.”
“Yeah, I do,” Ace said with a nod. “But don’t you think that if Doc was really our father, he would have told us?”
Chance shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. What if he promised our ma that he wouldn’t?”
“Why in the world would she ask him to do that?”
“Hell, I don’t know. We never met her, so we can’t really say what she would or wouldn’t have done, can we?”
It was a question that had haunted the brothers their entire lives. Never knowing their mother had left a big hole. All they knew of her was what Doc Monday had told them . . . and the one photograph that he had of her, a small portrait that showed a pretty, dark-haired woman in her twenties and revealed absolutely nothing else about her.
Ace peered into the darkness. He knew better than to stare directly into the fire. The glare from the flames would ruin a fellow’s night vision quicker than anything. If trouble broke out, that momentary blindness would be a distinct disadvantage. Maybe a fatal disadvantage. They had found themselves in enough scrapes over the years that both brothers had gotten into the habit of being careful.
“I’ve always had my doubts about Doc being our pa,” Ace mused. “Neither of us really looks like him.”
“Yeah, well, we don’t really look alike, either, and that doesn’t stop us from being brothers. Twins, at that.”
It was true. There was a certain family resemblance, but no one would ever have any trouble telling the two Jensen boys apart. As Doc had explained when they were old enough to understand it, they were what were called fraternal twins, instead of identical. They had looked a great deal alike when they were infants, but as they grew older they began to take on more distinct characteristics.
They shared one quality common to most twins, however. Often, they seemed to know what the other brother was thinking, and if they weren’t together and one was in trouble, the other one knew it, somehow. That had come in handy on more than one occasion.
“I never said I thought Smoke Jensen was our pa,” Ace went on. “I don’t think he’s really old enough for that. But he could be a distant relative.”
“I suppose. Next time we’re down in Colorado maybe we ought to pay a visit to that big ranch of his. What’s it called? The Sugarloaf? Just ride up and say, ‘Howdy, Cousin Smoke. Remember us? We’re your long-lost cousins Ace and Chance.’”
Ace grinned, picked up a stick from the pile of branches they’d gathered for firewood, and threw it across the fire at his brother. Chance ducked easily.
“Now you’re just bein’ loco. Smoke Jensen would never claim a couple of fiddle-footed saddle tramps like us, even if he was related to us.”
“Speak for your own self.” Chance straightened the lapels of his coat. “I may be fiddle-footed, but I’m not a saddle tramp. I’m a gambler.”
“Yeah . . . a tinhorn gambler, to hear most folks tell it.”
“Honest as the day is long,” Chance said with a grin.
“I hear tell that up in Alaska, the days only last about four hours.”
“I can manage to be honest for that long,” Chance said. “If I really work at it.”
Ace laughed, shook his head, and finished off his coffee. They had been on the trail for a while, and he thought they ought to be coming to a settlement soon. That would be good, because their supplies were running a little low. It might be nice to spend a night in a hotel, too. Sleep in a real bed again.
Most of the time when they were young, he and Chance had lived in cities. Doc Monday wasn’t what anybody would call a frontiersman. He liked his creature comforts, as he called them. A soft bed, a fire in the grate, a good meal, a glass of bourbon to sip, a fine cigar . . . For Doc, those were the things that made life worth living. That was why he had adopted the profession of gambler.
It was only when Ace and Chance were nearly grown, when Doc had gotten sick and gone off for a rest cure, that they had started drifting. All their lives, they’d had restless natures, and now they could indulge those urges. For several years, they had ridden a lot of lonely trails, supporting themselves with odd jobs and Chance’s poker playing ability, sending money back to the sanitarium where Doc was staying whenever they could.
They assumed he was still there. It had been quite a while since they had been to see him. It had been too painful to witness what the ravages of age and illness had done to the once vital man who had raised them.
Neither of them thought any more about Smoke Jensen that night, and the subject was pretty well forgotten as they moved on the next day, following a trail that led higher into the mountains.
Riding next to a creek that bubbled and sang along a little valley, Ace suddenly reined in and pointed up at the slope that rose to their left. “Look up there,” he told Chance with worry in his voice.
Chance looked and let out a low whistle of surprise. “That jehu better be careful or he’ll drive that stagecoach right off that blasted mountain!”
From down in the valley, they watched as a stagecoach careened along the road above that zigzagged back and forth down the pine-dotted slope. It seemed that the man was taking the hairpin turns too fast. The coach had stayed on the road so far, but the way it leaned over on each turn showed that it was in danger of tipping over.
“He’s going to wreck if he doesn’t slow down,” Ace said with alarm in his voice.
“Yeah, I reckon you’re right, but there’s not a blasted thing we can do from down here,” Chance said.
It was true. The stagecoach was several hundred yards away and still a hundred yards above the valley floor. Three sharp turns remained to navigate before the vehicle would reach the relatively level terrain of the valley.
“There!” Ace exclaimed as he pointed again. “That’s why the driver’s running his team so hard!”
Several men on horseback had come into view as they pursued the stagecoach. The way the road twisted back and forth, they were above it, and they fired down toward the coach with six-guns. The booming reports echoed back and forth between the mountains that loomed on either side of the valley.
“They’ve got to be outlaws,” Ace went on as he pulled his Winchester from the sheath strapped to his saddle.
“Maybe not,” Chance argued. “What if bandits held up the stage and stole it, and those are lawmen chasing them?”
“Stole the whole stage, not just the express box? Why in blazes would anybody do that?”
“I don’t know! I’m just saying we can’t be sure those fellas on horseback are up to no good.”
While they were talking, the stagecoach hurtled hell-bent for leather around another hairpin turn, with the team running full blast to stay ahead of the speeding coach. Ace didn’t figure the horses or the coach would be able to make the next turn if they kept going that fast. He levered a round into the rifle’s chamber, raised it to his shoulder, and fired, aiming above the galloping riders.
The whip crack of the shot joined the other echoes. He saw dirt and rock fly up from the slope where his bullet hit. He levered the Winchester and fired again.
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nbsp; “Oh, hell,” Chance muttered. He hauled out his rifle and joined in the fusillade.
Both brothers cranked off a handful of rounds in a matter of seconds, spraying lead over and around the men on horseback.
That got the riders’ attention. They hauled back on their reins and twisted in their saddles to return the fire. The range was too great for handguns, though, so their shots fell well short of the Jensens. Ace and Chance renewed their efforts and peppered the edge of the road just below the horses’ hooves with slugs. The dirt and gravel that sprayed up made the mounts dance around skittishly.
One of the riders waved an arm and probably shouted something, but with the racket from the earlier shots Ace and Chance couldn’t hear anything else. They saw the results, though. The men wheeled their horses around, not as easy as it might sound on the narrow road, and charged back up toward the pass.
The brothers let them go.
Ace lowered his Winchester and looked to see how the stagecoach was doing. It was still dashing down the mountainside. Holding his breath, he watched it sway around the next-to-last turn.
“The brake must be broken,” Chance said. “Otherwise that driver would have slowed down by now.”
“He would have if he has any sense,” Ace said. “Look, there’s a guard on there, too.”
It was true. A second figure clung to the driver’s box on the front of the stage, hanging on for dear life to keep from getting thrown off.
“That jehu’s doing some mighty fancy driving,” Chance said. “Some of the best I’ve ever seen, in fact. Most fellas would have piled up that coach already.”
Ace looked up at the pass. The men who had been chasing the stagecoach were gone, although a haze of dust hung in the air at the top of the pass where they had disappeared. “Let’s go meet that coach,” he suggested. “Those fellas might need some help.”
They followed the creek that led in the direction they wanted to go, keeping their horses moving at a fast clip. Up ahead, a wooden bridge came into view.
The echoes of the gunshots had died away, and Ace and Chance were close enough to hear the hoofbeats from the team, along with the rattle and squeal of the coach’s wheels and the squeaking of the broad leather thoroughbraces underneath the coach. As they reached the bridge, the driver successfully negotiated the last turn.
Once the coach was on level ground it began to slow down. It wasn’t crowding the team, anymore. The driver hauled back on the reins and slowed the vehicle even more.
“Look at the long hair on that shotgun guard,” Chance commented as he and Ace reined their horses to a halt at the edge of the road at the west end of the bridge. “Must be ol’ Wild Bill Hickok come back to life.”
Neither of them had ever met or even seen the so-called Prince of Pistoleers while he was alive, but Doc Monday claimed to have sat in on a poker game with Wild Bill one time in Cheyenne. Ace and Chance never knew how much credence to give that story. At one time or another, Doc claimed to have met almost every famous person on the frontier.
While Ace didn’t believe that the shotgun guard on the approaching stage was the reincarnation of Wild Bill Hickok, the man did have long hair tumbling over his shoulders. A broad-brimmed brown hat was crammed down on the curly mass. He wore a buckskin jacket and had the butt of a coach gun resting on the seat so that the barrels pointed upward.
Ace frowned as he studied the guard. Something about that fella just didn’t look right....
“Wait a minute. Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Look at the way that jehu is built.” Chance had noticed the same thing his brother had, although he was looking at the checked flannel shirt the stagecoach driver wore, rather than the guard’s buckskin jacket. But the vehicle was close enough to see that the shapes underneath those garments definitely weren’t masculine.
That stagecoach was being driven and guarded by a couple women.
CHAPTER FOUR
Young women, at that, the brothers saw as the coach came to a stop about thirty feet from them.
The guard with the thick, curly blond hair lowered the coach gun until the barrels were pointed at them. “You two better not be a pair of road agents,” she called to them in a clear, sweet voice.
“I told you, they helped us.” The driver’s voice was musical, too. “They ran off Mr. Eagleton’s men. You saw that with your own eyes, Emily.”
“Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean they ain’t road agents who want to hold us up themselves.”
“Well, I suppose you’re right about that,” the driver admitted.
Chance started to move his horse forward.
The young woman called Emily lifted her coach gun even more and trained the weapon on him. “That’s far enough, mister, until you tell us who you are and what you want!”
Chance made sure both hands remained in plain sight. He didn’t want to risk making her trigger-happy. He put a smile on his face and thumbed back his brown hat, being careful not to move too fast about it. “You’ve misjudged us, ma’am. We saw those fellas chasing you and just wanted to help. That’s why we drove them back over the pass.”
Emily snorted. “If you really wanted to help, you should’ve ventilated a few of them. I don’t reckon Eagleton would’ve missed a couple gun-wolves. He can always hire more.”
Ace said, “We’re not in the habit of gunning down anybody when we don’t really know what’s going on. I reckon they must have been bandits?”
The driver said, “They didn’t want to rob us, exactly, although I don’t doubt they would have looted whatever they could find on the stage after we crashed. What they really wanted was to wreck us.”
She was more slender than the blonde, with short, dark hair under her hat. She wore baggy denim trousers, high-topped boots, and a flannel shirt. The butt of a revolver stuck up from an old holster attached to a gun belt around her waist.
Chance said, “Why in blazes would anybody want to wreck you? That doesn’t even make any sense.”
“It does if you work for Samuel Eagleton,” the driver said. “Emily, put down that gun. These men don’t mean us any harm.”
“Well, if that turns out not to be true, it’s on your head, Bess,” Emily muttered. She lowered the shotgun until the barrels were pointed at the floorboards of the driver’s box.
Ace and Chance eased their horses forward. The two young women watched them closely but didn’t seem spooked, even after that harrowing run down the mountainside. Both of them were so self-possessed, Ace had a feeling it would take a great deal to spook them.
He reached up and tugged on his hat brim. “My name is Ace Jensen, ladies. This is my brother Chance.”
“Ace and Chance?” Emily repeated, a look of amused disbelief on her face. “Really? Those are your names?”
“Well . . . that’s what we’re called, anyway.” Both brothers knew their real names, of course, but Doc had always called them by the nicknames he had given them and that was how they had thought of themselves ever since they were old enough to understand such things.
“Those are perfectly good names,” Bess said. “I’m Bess Corcoran, and this is my sister Emily.”
“A pair of brothers and a pair of sisters,” Chance said. “That’s mighty cozy.”
“No, it ain’t,” Emily snapped. “And don’t go thinkin’ it is, Jensen. Now, if we’re all through jawin’, my sister and I have a schedule to keep. The Corcoran Stage Line has the mail contract between Palisade and Bleak Creek, and the government’s a mite picky about things like bein’ reliable and prompt.”
Ace had already noticed the Corcoran name painted on one of the stagecoach’s doors. “You ladies own the stage line?”
“Our pa does,” Bess said. “We just work for him.”
“Because nobody else will do it,” Emily said with a bitter note in her voice. “Eagleton’s scared off everybody else with his hired guns.”
Chance said, “From the sound of it, I don’t like this Eagleton fella, and I never even met the gent.”
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“You will if you go on to Palisade,” Bess said. “He owns practically everything in and around the town.”
“Except the stage line,” Ace guessed. He was starting to see how things were laid out.
“And a few other small businesses,” Bess agreed with a nod. “He’ll get around to the others sooner or later, I suppose. Right now, he’s got his eyes set on our father’s operation.”
Chance pointed up at the pass. “So this Palisade place is higher up in the mountains?”
“That’s right. It’s a mining town, and I suppose it’s no surprise Mr. Eagleton owns just about everything, since he’s the one who made the first strike around here. There wouldn’t be a settlement if it wasn’t for him and his mine.”
Emily said, “That doesn’t give him the right to run roughshod over everybody who came after him.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Ace agreed. “And you’re headed for someplace called Bleak Creek?”
“That’s right,” Bess said. “It’s on the other side of those mountains to the east. There’s a railroad spur there that connects up with the Union Pacific. We deliver the mail there and pick up any mail bound for Palisade.”
Emily regarded the Jensen brothers with a suspicious glare. “You boys are mighty curious about our business.”
“You have to be curious to learn anything,” Chance pointed out.
Ace said, “I was just wondering about Eagleton. If he sent men after you to try to wreck the coach as you came down from the pass, could he have sent other men ahead to set up an ambush in case the first bunch failed?”
Emily and Bess glanced worriedly at each other.
Ace thought the possibility he had just brought up probably hadn’t occurred to them. But now that he had mentioned it, they didn’t like the idea.
“We do have to go through Shoshone Gap,” Bess said.
“And it’s a good spot for a bushwhackin’,” Emily agreed. “We’ll have to be careful.”
Those Jensen Boys! Page 3