“Well, well, Joe,” he said in a rumbling voice, “this is the busiest I’ve seen your place in a long time. If you keep it up, you might last another two months before you go broke, instead of just one.”
Joe had lost his friendly expression as he stood behind the counter. He said, “What can I do for you, Mr. McKendree?”
“You know what you can do for me. Sell out to me, like a reasonable man.”
“If I do that, you’ll be one step closer to owning the whole town.”
“Why shouldn’t I own it?” McKendree demanded, sounding offended. “I founded it, didn’t I?”
“That doesn’t mean you’ve got a right to own everything.”
“That’s exactly what it means,” McKendree said. “Well, you’ll come around eventually. They always do.” The man’s piggish eyes swung toward Smoke. “Who’s this?”
“I didn’t ask his name,” Joe said.
Smoke got to his feet and said, “I’m Smoke Jensen, Mr. McKendree. My spread is on the other side of Gunsight Ridge.”
“Jensen . . . Oh, I know who you are, Mr. Jensen. I know quite well. What brings you to our little town?”
“I’m on the trail of some stolen cattle,” Smoke said bluntly. “The rustlers brought them here this morning and already sold them to somebody.” Smoke’s lips curved in a thin smile as he added, “You, maybe.”
Chapter 15
McKendree’s face turned dark red with rage, but his voice was carefully controlled as he said, “Do you know who you’re talking to, sir?”
“The biggest man around these parts, I’m guessing,” Smoke drawled.
“In more ways than one. I’m Oliver McKendree. Bitter Springs is my town.”
“Then you must know everything that goes on around here. You’re probably mixed up in it as well, neck deep.”
“Be careful, Jensen,” McKendree warned. “I don’t take kindly to being accused of rustling.”
“I don’t take kindly to having my cattle stolen,” Smoke said. “If you didn’t have anything to do with it, you don’t have to be concerned, do you?”
McKendree just glared at him without saying anything. Then he looked at the counterman again and said, “Remember what I told you, Joe. I’ll pay you a fair price for this place, and you can start over somewhere else.” McKendree’s beefy shoulders rose and fell. “You could even stay on and run it for me, if you like.”
“I don’t reckon that’s gonna happen,” Joe said curtly.
McKendree shrugged again and turned away. With one last hostile glance at Smoke, he waddled out of the café.
When the town boss was gone, Joe said, “No offense, Mr. Jensen, but if I was you I’d saddle up and ride out of Bitter Springs. McKendree’s got some tough hombres working for him.”
Smoke looked at his men, smiled, and said, “So do I.”
“Yeah, but I’m talkin’ about professional gun-throwers. I’ve heard plenty about you. I know you’re supposed to be mighty fast on the shoot, but all of McKendree’s men are. Maybe not as fast as you, but probably faster than those fellas you’ve got with you. No offense.”
Pearlie snorted to show that maybe he had taken a little offense at Joe’s warning.
“What about those cows I was talking about, Joe?” Smoke asked. “Did you see them?”
The counterman sighed and nodded.
“Some fellas drove ’em up and held them a little way outside of town. A couple of shady cattle buyers hang around McKendree’s Saloon sometimes, and one of them happened to be there. He made a deal with the men who brought in the cattle. Some of them went along with the herd, and the buyer hired a few local boys as punchers, too. They’re on their way to Denver right now.”
“What about the rest of the men who brought in the cattle?”
Joe looked like he didn’t want to answer, but after a couple of seconds he said, “I reckon they’re still over at the saloon.”
“Thanks,” Smoke said with a nod.
“You’re goin’ over there, aren’t you? There’s gonna be gunplay.”
“That’ll be up to the men I want to talk to,” Smoke said. “If they tell me what I want to know, there doesn’t have to be any shooting.”
He figured the chances of that were pretty slim, though, and judging by the gloomy look on Joe’s face, so did he.
“You, uh, wouldn’t mind payin’ for the meal before you go over there, would you?” he asked.
Smoke chuckled.
“We’ll finish eating, and you’ll get paid, Joe. Don’t worry about that.”
Charles Kingston started gathering up his papers, tapping them against the tablecloth to square up the edges.
“You’re a brave man, Mr. Jensen,” he said. “I’ve only been around here for a while, but long enough to know that Oliver McKendree is a bad man to cross.”
“You’re leaving?” Smoke asked.
“Going to my hotel room to double-check some of my calculations.” Kingston smiled thinly. “Gunfire makes it rather difficult to concentrate on mathematics.”
“Yeah, I reckon it would. I didn’t know there was a hotel in this town.”
“The proprietor of the Deluxe Saloon rents out a couple of rooms in the back. I’m sure Mr. McKendree will buy him out soon, too, and then the policy may change.” Kingston looked over at the man in the sombrero. “Come on, Esteban.”
The man stirred slowly, sat up, and thumbed back the sombrero, revealing a brown, dull-featured face. He nodded and said sleepily, “Sí, señor.”
The two of them left the café. Smoke watched them go, and then finished his stew and coffee, still wondering as he did so about Kingston’s motives.
What happened in the next little while might tell him a lot, Smoke decided.
Pearlie sat down beside him and said quietly, “That fella Kingston is a mite suspicious, Smoke. He must’a been the one who uncovered the tunnel.”
Cal joined them, turning a chair around so he could straddle it.
“Yeah,” the young cowboy said, “but Mr. McKendree seemed a lot more like the sort of fella to be ramroddin’ a gang of rustlers. I’m not sure a bunch of owlhoots would ever listen to somebody like Dr. Kingston.”
They both had good points. Smoke nodded and said, “I’ll take a stroll over to the saloon once everybody’s finished eating. That might give us some answers.”
“Or some hot lead, anyway,” Pearlie muttered.
“You can tell a lot by who decides to shoot at you,” Smoke said with a smile.
A short time later, all the Sugarloaf cowboys were finished with their meals. Pearlie said something under his breath about dying with full bellies, but Smoke ignored the comment. He paid the proprietor for the food and coffee, then said, “We’ll be seeing you, Joe.”
“I surely do hope so, Mr. Jensen,” the one-armed man replied.
As the group stepped out of the café, Smoke said, “The rest of you boys stay here for a minute. I’ll go over to the saloon by myself. If I make it there all right, you can come ahead then.”
“You mean you’re gonna slap a big ol’ target right on your chest,” Pearlie said. “You ain’t goin’ out in that street alone, Smoke. No disrespect, but that just ain’t happenin’.”
Smoke thought it over for a second and then nodded. Every so often, Pearlie got so stiff-necked it was just no use arguing with him. This appeared to be one of those times.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s go. Everybody keep your eyes open.”
The two men stepped out of the shade of the café’s awning and into the bright afternoon sun. Smoke’s eyes narrowed against the glare. His vision adjusted quickly, though, and within a few steps he could see just fine.
That allowed him to spot a tiny reflection from the window built into the saloon’s false front when he and Pearlie were more than halfway across the street.
“Smoke . . .” Pearlie said warningly.
“I see it,” Smoke replied. “Better split up . . . now!”
They darted away fr
om each other, Smoke going right and Pearlie going left. At that same instant, a shot rang out and powder smoke spurted from the window in the false front. Smoke heard the bullet whine between him and his foreman. It kicked up dust behind them.
If they had turned around and tried to make it back to the café, their backs would have presented easy targets for the bushwhacker. Since they were closer to the saloon, Smoke and Pearlie charged straight toward the enemy without having to talk about the tactic.
The saloon’s front windows shattered, spraying glass over the boardwalk, as gunmen opened fire inside the building. Muzzle flame jetted over the bat wings as well.
Smoke drew his Colt as he ran and tipped the barrel up to fire from the hip. Three slugs smashed through the boards of the false front. The bushwhacker dropped his rifle through the opening as he rose up. Then he slumped forward and hung over the windowsill with his arms dangling.
Smoke dived toward the boardwalk. It was raised a couple of feet off the ground, and when he rolled up against it the thick planks offered him some protection from the would-be killers inside the saloon. A glance told him that Pearlie had done the same thing on the other side of the single step leading up from the street.
After the first few seconds, the men inside the saloon were too busy ducking to try to get a shot at Smoke or Pearlie, anyway. Cal and the other Sugarloaf punchers had opened fire, too, sending a volley of lead smashing into the front of the saloon. Some of them retreated into the café, while others took cover behind water troughs, barrels, and a parked wagon.
The men in the saloon weren’t going to give up without a fight. As Smoke and Pearlie lay there against the boardwalk’s base, scores of slugs sizzled through the air a few feet above them, going in both directions.
Smoke caught Pearlie’s eye and pointed toward the corners of the building. The foreman nodded in understanding. He started crawling toward the corner on his side. Smoke did likewise on his side.
When he reached the corner, the angle was bad for the men holed up in the saloon. Smoke was able to leap up and dash along the side of the building. There was a door back here, and some horses tied up under a couple of scrubby trees. He was about ten feet from the door when it burst open and a couple of men charged out holding guns.
They were taking off for the tall and uncut, Smoke knew, since their ambush had failed and the men from the Sugarloaf were putting up a lot stiffer fight than they had hoped for. They forgot about fleeing when they spotted him hurrying along the side of the building, though. Instead, they twisted toward him and their guns came up spouting flame.
That was a mistake, because they were facing perhaps the deadliest gunman in the West. As slugs whipped past him, Smoke fired twice, putting the first bullet in the heart of one man and sending the second one into the belly of the other.
That emptied Smoke’s Colt, so he stepped forward quickly and kicked away the weapons the two men had dropped when they collapsed with Smoke’s lead in them. The one he’d shot in the chest was already dead, while the gut-shot man was too busy screaming in agony to care about anything else.
Smoke put his back against the wall of the building and thumbed fresh shells into his gun while keeping an eye on the door. No one else came out that way. He heard a couple of shots from the other side of the saloon and knew that Pearlie was doing some business over there.
Then all the guns fell silent.
Smoke waited. The ominous quiet continued for several long moments. Then Cal called from across the street, “Smoke! Smoke, are you all right?”
Smoke didn’t answer right away. Instead, he went through the door into the saloon, ducking around the corner of it and going in low and fast with his Colt held ready to fire.
There was no need. Four men were sprawled on the floor in bloody disarray, including the one Smoke had seen watching them when they rode into town.
From a busted window on the other side of the room, Pearlie called, “You all right, Smoke?”
“Fine,” Smoke replied. “You downed these men from the window?”
“A couple of ’em,” Pearlie said. “The other two were already ventilated by our fellas across the street.”
A quavering voice pleaded, “For God’s sake, Jensen, don’t shoot anymore!”
Smoke looked over and saw Oliver McKendree peeking at him over the top of the bar, where the town boss had taken cover when the bullets started to fly. Smoke smiled tightly and said, “Not so brave now that all your hired guns are dead, are you, McKendree?”
“They’re not my hired guns! My men all took off when the shooting started. They said this wasn’t their fight.” McKendree got to his feet and wiped anxious sweat from his face. “I may have been mixed up in some shady business now and then in my life, but I’m not a rustler, Jensen. I swear it. And I didn’t have anything to do with those men opening fire on you. Sure, I let ’em drink here, but what the hell else was I going to do?”
It was a little surprising, but Smoke found himself believing McKendree. Tough gunmen like the hombres scattered around the room in various attitudes of death usually drank wherever they damned well wanted to.
But if McKendree wasn’t behind the rustling, that left only one real suspect.
Smoke went to the bat wings, but before pushing them open he called, “Cal, hold your fire! I’m coming out!”
By this time Cal and the other hands had emerged from cover and were gathered across the street. Pearlie waved them over, and they all joined Smoke in front of the saloon.
“I reckon we busted up this bunch of wideloopers, all right,” Cal said with the exuberance of youth.
“We still have to round up the boss,” Smoke said.
“It’s not McKendree?”
“I don’t think so.” Smoke jerked a thumb at the saloon. “Go drag those bodies out. This town’s too small to have an undertaker, so I reckon we’ll have to plant them ourselves.”
“Where are you goin’?” Pearlie asked as Smoke started walking toward the Deluxe Saloon, Bitter Springs’s other drinking establishment.
“To finish the job,” Smoke said over his shoulder.
He wasn’t going in the saloon’s front door. Instead, he headed around to the back. That was where those rented rooms Kingston had mentioned were located. That was where he expected to find the man he’d pegged as the ringleader of the rustlers.
He eased open a narrow door at the rear of the saloon. The short hallway just inside it was dim. Two doors opened on the corridor, one on each side. They were both closed when Smoke stepped in, but as a floorboard creaked under his weight, the door on the right was thrown open and a figure rushed out.
“Señor Jensen, look out!” a Spanish-accented voice cried. “Dr. Kingston, he is—”
Smoke was ready when Esteban jerked a knife from under the serape he wore and slashed at him. The blade would have ripped open Smoke’s belly if he had been taken unaware.
As it was, he used the Colt’s barrel to turn aside the knife and then stepped in to throw a punch with his other hand. The blow didn’t travel very far, but it landed with all the power of Smoke’s broad shoulders behind it. The impact drove Esteban’s head around and fractured his jaw. He crashed against the wall, bounced off, and landed limply on the floor at Smoke’s feet, out cold.
Smoke stepped over the sprawled form and looked into the room Esteban had come from. He saw Dr. Charles Kingston lying on the floor, and for a moment he figured the geologist was dead. He checked, though, and found that Kingston was still breathing. He had a good-sized lump on his head where Esteban had knocked him out with a gun or some other blunt instrument.
Pearlie stuck his head in the door and asked, “All over now?”
“Yep,” Smoke said. “Except for trying to get those stolen cattle back.”
By nightfall, Smoke had all the details. A sore-headed Dr. Kingston supplied most of them.
“Esteban had to boast a little before he hit me and knocked me unconscious,” Kingston explained as the
y sat in the Bitter Springs Café. McKendree’s Saloon was closed for repairs and probably would be for a while. “I never knew his last name until today. It’s Larroca. Esteban Larroca.”
“Sounds familiar,” Smoke said. “He used to run with a bunch of outlaws down in Texas, I believe.”
Kingston nodded and said, “That’s right. Actually, he was their leader, until the Rangers got on their trail and he came up here to Colorado to lie low for a while. And those are the men he recruited to come up here and start rustling your cattle, Mr. Jensen. I’m sorry about that. But when I saw that old riverbed running through the ridge, it never occurred to me that someone might employ it for that purpose. I never even thought anything about it. I’d seen such formations before.”
“But once Esteban explored it on his own and found out that it ran all the way through the ridge, he figured out right away how to put it to use,” Smoke guessed.
“Indeed. I honestly never thought he had the wits for such a thing.”
“I imagine that’s just what he wanted you and everybody else to think,” Smoke said.
“What made you suspect him?”
“I just couldn’t bring myself to believe that you were behind the rustling, Doctor.” Smoke smiled. “No offense, but you’re just too much of a tenderfoot.”
“I’ll, uh, take that as a compliment, I suppose. What are you going to do now?”
“McKendree was spooked enough after getting his place shot up that he was willing to give me the name of that crooked cattle buyer who took my herd to Denver. I plan to go after him and get either the cattle or the money and see the rest of the bunch behind bars.”
“I suspect you’ll do it, too,” Kingston said.
From behind the counter, Joe asked, “You fellas need refills on your coffee?”
“That’d be good,” Smoke said.
Before Joe could bring over the coffeepot, though, Pearlie and Cal came into the café, and they had a familiar figure with them.
“Monte!” Smoke greeted the sheriff of Big Rock. “What are you doing up here?”
“I practically wore out a horse getting here today after a rider from your ranch brought your message to me,” Monte Carson replied. “Telegram for you came in early this morning, and I figured you’d want to see it right away.”
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