The star-packer might be going to the store or just headed in their general direction on some other errand, but as he drew nearer it became obvious that his intent, steely-eyed gaze was fixed on the Jensen brothers. They straightened from their casual stances as the man climbed the steps to the porch and approached them.
Without preamble, the lawman said, “You boys are new to Bleak Creek, aren’t you?”
“Just rode in a little while ago,” Ace confirmed.
“What are your names, and what’s your business here?”
Chance said, “Do you ask those questions of every stranger who rides into your town, Marshal . . . or do you have some reason for picking on us?”
“I’m not picking on you,” the lawman snapped. “And I ask what I want of whoever I want. I expect answers, too.”
“My name’s Ace Jensen. This is my brother Chance. As for what brought us here, we’re friends of Bess and Emily Corcoran. We came in with them.”
Claiming that they were friends of the Corcoran sisters might be stretching it a bit, since they’d only been acquainted for about an hour.
“You rode in on the stagecoach?” the Bleak Creek marshal asked.
“No, we were on horseback. We just rode with them.”
“Through Shoshone Gap?”
“Well, that’s just about the only way to get here from the other side of the mountains, isn’t it, Marshal?” Chance drawled. His insolent tone made the lawman get more stiff-necked.
“Those are your horses?” he asked as he jerked his head toward the two mounts tied at the hitch rack.
Ace didn’t like the way this conversation was going, but he didn’t see any way to get it on another track. Before Chance could frame some sarcastic response, he said, “That’s right.”
The lawman nodded in apparent satisfaction. “Then I reckon I’ve heard enough.” He stepped back, pulled his gun, and leveled it from the hip at the brothers. “You two are under arrest.”
CHAPTER SIX
The marshal’s draw wasn’t very fast. Either of the Jensens could have beaten it, but Ace’s hand shot out and closed on Chance’s arm to keep him from reacting. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but getting in a shoot-out with a lawman was bound to just make things worse. “Hold on, Marshal. You don’t have any call to be arresting us.”
“Yeah,” Chance said, his face flushed with anger. “We haven’t done anything.”
“I’d say ambushing one of the leading citizens of this town and trying to kill him warrants being thrown in the hoosegow,” the marshal responded as he kept his revolver leveled at them. “Now shuck your guns and any other weapons you’re carrying.”
“You’re loco!” Chance burst out. “We never ambushed anybody.”
“But somebody did try to bushwhack us a little while ago, out in Shoshone Gap,” Ace added. “Sounds to me like you’ve been sold a bill of goods, Marshal.”
“Being impertinent is not going to get you anywhere.” The lawman gestured with the revolver he held. “I told you to drop your guns. You’d damn well better do it now, before I lose my patience.”
Chance glanced over at Ace and muttered, “You should’ve let me wing him.”
“Too late for that now.” Ace reached for the buckle of his gun belt, unfastened it, and lowered it to the porch.
“You, too, smart mouth,” the marshal told Chance.
Carefully, Chance reached inside his coat and removed the Lightning from his shoulder holster. He bent and placed it on the porch next to Ace’s Colt.
“Step back away from ’em,” the marshal ordered. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
“I still say you’re making a mistake,” Ace insisted. “We haven’t done anything wrong.” An idea occurred to him. “You can go down to the depot and ask the Corcoran sisters. They’ll tell you we were just trying to help them.”
“Maybe I’ll do that,” the marshal said, “after you two are behind bars where you belong.”
He didn’t have to wait that long. At the end of the street, Bess and Emily emerged from the depot building and stopped in stunned surprise at the sight of Ace and Chance being arrested. A second later both young women started toward the general store in a hurry.
Ace saw their reaction. “Here they come now,” he told the marshal.
Under the circumstances, the lawman couldn’t do anything other than wait for Bess and Emily to get there. A crowd had started to gather, since any excuse to break the monotony in frontier settlements was always welcome.
“What’s going on here?” Emily demanded as she shouldered her way through the press of townspeople with Bess close behind her. They reached a spot just in front of the porch where they could look up and see Ace, Chance, and the lawman. “Marshal Kaiser, are you arresting these men?”
“Yes, miss, I am,” the marshal said.
“Why?” Bess asked as she stepped up beside her sister. “They haven’t done anything wrong.”
“How do you know that?”
Emily said, “Well, they haven’t done anything wrong in the past hour, anyway. They were with Bess and me that whole time—unless they caused some sort of ruckus in the store just now, I guess, while we were up at the depot.”
“There’s a vote of confidence for you,” Chance said dryly.
“They ambushed Jacob Tanner out in Shoshone Gap and tried to kill him,” Marshal Kaiser said.
Ace and Chance looked at each other, and Ace said, “Now I’m sure there’s some sort of mistake, Marshal. We don’t know this fella Tanner. Never heard of him. We wouldn’t have any reason to try to hurt him.”
“Maybe you don’t know his name, but he sure as hell knows you. Described both of you right down to a T.”
That statement told Ace that Tanner likely had been the bushwhacker who’d tried to kill Chance. Tanner had to have been in the gap or he wouldn’t have been able to describe them.
Ace looked down at Bess and Emily. “Who’s Tanner?”
“He works for the railroad,” Bess said. “He’s some sort of surveyor or engineer.”
“Not the kind that drives a locomotive,” Emily added.
“All right, we’ve all flapped our gums enough,” Kaiser said. “You two come with me.”
Bess said, “Marshal, these two men came through the gap with us. They couldn’t have attacked anybody.”
She was smart, Ace thought. She hadn’t said anything about how he and Chance had been ambushed, and how the man who did it must have been Jacob Tanner. That would just muddy the waters. They could figure out later what was going on, but the first order of business was to stay out of jail.
Kaiser frowned. “Were they with you the whole time, from when you met them until you got into town?”
“Well . . . not the whole time,” Emily said. “They scouted ahead for a little while.” She looked at her sister, who was frowning at her, and went on, “What? I’m not going to lie to the law for a couple hombres we just met.”
Kaiser gestured with the gun and said to Ace and Chance, “Come on. You can tell your story to the judge . . . when he gets here on his regular circuit in a couple weeks.”
Chance groaned, and Ace knew why. The prospect of spending the next two weeks cooped up in a small-town jail cell was more than Chance could stand, especially since there was no guarantee they would be released after that. Actually, since their accuser was well-known around these parts and they were strangers, it was a real likelihood they would be found guilty and sentenced to prison.
They couldn’t let that happen. For one thing, the Corcoran sisters needed help. They might run into trouble on the way back to Palisade. It didn’t seem like anybody else was willing to help them.
Normally, Chance was the impulsive, reckless, even hot-headed brother. But before he had an opportunity to think about it too much, Ace decided he wasn’t going to be locked up for something he hadn’t done and leaped into action.
His left hand shot out and closed around the wrist of Marshal Kaise
r’s gun hand. He thrust the lawman’s arm in the air.
Kaiser yelled, “Hey!” and jerked the trigger. The gun boomed and sent a slug whistling high over the false fronts of the buildings across the street.
At the same time, Ace lifted a punch to the marshal’s jaw, hitting Kaiser hard enough to stun him without doing any permanent damage. The lawman sagged and would have fallen if not for Ace’s grip on his wrist.
The shot made the townspeople gathered in front of the general store scatter. A couple women screamed, and several men shouted angry curses. A few of them moved forward as if they intended to climb onto the porch and tackle the young strangers.
Chance grabbed his Lightning from the porch and barked, “Stay back, boys! I don’t want to hurt anybody.”
Ace wrenched the revolver out of Kaiser’s hand and gave the marshal a shove that sent him sprawling. “Let’s go!” he snapped at his brother.
The crowd really cleared out as the Jensen boys charged down the steps, each brandishing a gun. Two who didn’t flee were Bess and Emily. Bess caught hold of Ace’s sleeve and said anxiously, “What are you doing? Now you’ll be fugitives!”
“Better than being locked up,” Ace told her.
Chance told Emily, “Maybe we’ll see you girls later.”
“And maybe you’ll get yourselves lynched, you damn fools!” she responded. Her angry attitude eased a little as she added, “Go on. Get out of here while you’ve got the chance.”
Even under the extreme circumstances, Chance summoned up a grin for the pretty girl as he jerked the reins loose and swung up in the saddle. Ace was right beside him. They wheeled their horses away from the hitch rack and urged them into a run, streaking through an open space in the thinning crowd.
Behind them, Marshal Kaiser recovered his wits enough to sit up on the mercantile porch and bellow, “Stop them! Somebody stop them before they get away!”
The weapons of the men on the street began to boom as the townies tried to bring down the fleeing brothers. Ace and Chance leaned forward over their horses’ necks and galloped west out of Bleak Creek.
The settlement’s name was certainly appropriate, Ace thought as they rode past the creek. Their luck had been nothing but bleak.
They rode hard until they reached Shoshone Gap, then slowed down or risk having their mounts give out. The horses hadn’t had much time to rest while they were in the settlement. As they reined in, Ace and Chance turned to look back toward Bleak Creek.
“I don’t see any dust,” Chance said. “It appears there’s no posse coming after us . . . yet.”
“Kaiser’s probably mad as hell, but according to his badge he’s just the town marshal, not the sheriff,” Ace pointed out. “He didn’t really have the authority to arrest us for something that happened outside the town limits. So he’d probably have trouble convincing enough men they ought to risk their lives by coming after us.”
“Wait a minute. Why didn’t you point out that business about his jurisdiction before you grabbed his gun and walloped him?”
“It didn’t occur to me until now,” Ace admitted with a sheepish smile. “Anyway, I don’t think it would have done much good. Kaiser was dead set on arresting us. He would have thrown us behind bars and promised to look into the jurisdictional issues, then left us there to rot.”
“You’re probably right about that. Why was he being so mule-headed, do you reckon?”
“Probably because he wants to stay in the good graces of that fella Tanner. Bess said he works for the railroad. That makes him an important man. Bleak Creek wouldn’t amount to much of anything without that spur line.”
“Tanner’s the fella who was waiting to ambush those gals when they took the stagecoach through this gap.”
Ace rubbed his chin and frowned in thought. After a moment, he said, “That’s what I figured, but maybe not. He could have been out here earlier and seen the ambush, but not been the one who was doing the shooting.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” Chance said grudgingly, “but either way, he lied to the marshal about what happened, and damn if I can see why.”
“It doesn’t make any sense to me, either, unless there’s some connection between Tanner and Samuel Eagleton, and he doesn’t want us helping the Corcoran girls.”
Chance shook his head and sighed. “It’s too damn complicated for me. Let’s get out of here, just in case the marshal decides to come looking for us after all.”
After everything that had happened, they were wary as they rode through the gap and into the valley beyond, giving them a good view of the mountains on the other side of the valley, as well as Timberline Pass where the stage road ran.
“Look at the way those cliffs jut up,” Ace said as he pointed them out to his brother. “They look a little like a stockade fence, don’t they?”
“You think that’s how come the town got the name Palisade?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me.”
“What are we going to do, Ace? I don’t know about you, but I reckon it’d rub me the wrong way to just ride away from this whole mess.”
“What would rub you the wrong way is to ride away from a couple good-looking girls in trouble,” Ace said.
Chance grinned. “Well, there’s that to consider, too. If we could give Bess and Emily a hand, there’s a good chance they’d be grateful to us, don’t you think?”
“And you wouldn’t mind that.”
“I wouldn’t mind getting to know that blonde a mite better, that’s for sure.”
“Emily’s got about much fondness for you as she would a rattlesnake.”
“Yes, but I have a charming personality,” Chance insisted. “I can win her over.”
“I think I’d like to see you try,” Ace said. “Might be pretty entertaining. I suppose that’s as good a reason as any to hang around here for a while.” He glanced at the sky. “It’ll be dark before too much longer. Let’s find a place to camp where that marshal won’t find us if he comes looking. The stagecoach ought to be coming along here again by the middle of the morning tomorrow.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
They found a spot well off the stage road to make camp and took turns standing guard during the night, after making a cold, scanty supper out of some biscuits left over from a couple days earlier. Coffee would have been good, even though they were running low on it, but they didn’t want to risk a fire. The chances of Kaiser leading a posse into the valley to search for them during the night were so small as to be almost nonexistent, but there was no point in being careless.
Just as both brothers expected, the night passed peacefully.
In the morning, they risked a fire to boil some coffee. They could buy more when they got to Palisade.
As they got ready to break camp, Ace said, “I think I’ll ride back into the gap and make sure Tanner—or whoever it was—doesn’t try to ambush the stagecoach again.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Chance agreed. “Let’s go.”
They spent an hour combing through the gap, checking every boulder and clump of trees for hidden gunmen, but the place was deserted. By the time they had assured themselves that Bess and Emily wouldn’t be driving into a trap, they could see a column of dust rising from the stage road in the distance.
“Here they come,” Chance said. “I’m looking forward to seeing those gals again.”
“I’m not so sure how happy they’ll be to see us. We’re probably wanted fugitives. Even if we didn’t ambush Tanner, we assaulted a town marshal.”
Chance laughed. “You’re the one who punched that law dog, brother, not me.”
“I was trying to get both of us out of that mess.”
“Yeah, but I’m innocent of that much, anyway.”
“You haven’t been innocent since the day you were born,” Ace muttered as they sat their horses at the entrance to Shoshone Gap, waiting for the stagecoach to arrive.
When it did, Bess began slowing the horses as soon as she saw the Jensen brothers. Dust s
wirled around the coach as she brought it to a stop.
“What are you two doing here?” Emily asked. “I figured you’d be headed back where you came from, or at least putting some miles between you and Bleak Creek.”
Chance frowned. “Why, we want to make sure that you ladies get back home safely. What sort of gentlemen would we be if we didn’t?”
“I wasn’t aware that gentlemen went around punching peace officers,” Emily said with a pointed look at Ace.
“That so-called peace officer was going to lock us up for something we didn’t do.” Ace wondered when people were going to start getting that through their heads. “Why’d he take Tanner’s word over ours? Is Tanner some sort of important man around here?”
“He got the railroad to build that spur,” Bess said. “Bleak Creek was barely a wide place in the trail before that.”
Ace nodded. “I thought it must be something like that. Everybody in town wants to stay on his good side, even the marshal. But here’s another question. Why would Tanner lie about us trying to kill him? We’ve never even met the man, unless you want to count seeing him on the back of his horse trying to get away after his ambush failed.”
Emily said, “We can’t just sit here hashing all this out. We have to get back to Palisade. It’ll take most of the day.”
“Do you want to come with us?” Bess asked.
“That’s the idea,” Chance answered. “Eagleton might send his men to make another try for you.”
Bess slapped the lines against the backs of the team, and the horses leaned into their harness and got the stagecoach rolling again.
As Ace and Chance fell in alongside it, Ace glanced into the coach. “No passengers again today, eh?”
“We don’t carry a lot of passengers,” Bess said. “Sometimes some miners going to work in the Golden Dome. That’s Mr. Eagleton’s mine. Or some drummers who sell merchandise to the stores. But that’s about all.”
Those Jensen Boys! Page 5