“On the way where?
Jeeter looked at Keno, then ran his hand through his hair. “Look, do you want in on this or not?”
“You say I can make some money and get back at Jensen?”
“Yes.”
Keno nodded his head. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, whatever it is, I want in on it.”
“Good. Just don’t ask so damn many questions. You’ll find out everything you need to know soon enough.”
“What time you reckon it is?” Cal asked as he and Pearlie rode under the arch that marked the beginning of the road up to the Big House.
“Oh, it’s a little after ten o’clock, I reckon,” Pearlie answered.
“Ha,” Cal said. “We’re some big partygoers we are, comin’ back home by ten o’clock. And here we told Smoke we’d be gone till early mornin’.”
“Ah, I don’t reckon he thought we’d really be gone all that long,” Pearlie said. “Besides, iffen we’re goin’ to be punchin’ cows come first light, I’d as soon go ahead and get a little sleep anyway.”
“I reckon you’re right,” Cal agreed.
The two boys rode on into the barn, dismounted, took the saddles off, then gave their horses some oats before turning them into the corral. It was a short walk from the barn to the bunkhouse.
“Hey, Pearlie,” Cal asked as they started toward the bunkhouse. “Do you think Moe was right?”
“Right? Right about what?”
“The hatband,” Cal said. “Do you think if I had a fancy hatband, the girls would pay more attention to me?”
Pearlie chuckled. “Hell, Cal, you don’t need nothin’ fancy. All you need to do is be a little more friendly at these dances. The girls look at you and get scared off.”
“I don’t ever know what to say to a girl,” Cal said. “I’m shy. I don’t know. Maybe Moe is right. Maybe if I had me somethin’ like a fancy hatband, I could do better.”
When dawn broke the next morning, Smoke, Pearlie, and Cal were in the saddle, cutting fifteen hundred head away from the main herd. They weren’t alone at this point, for many of Smoke’s Mexican hands were with them, dressed as vaqueros, wearing large sombreros and, in some cases, serapes as they dashed about, forming the cows into a manageable herd.
Sally was working with them as well, and she slapped her legs against the side of her horse urging it into a gallop as she dashed alongside the slowly moving herd until she reached the front, where a few cows were trying to break away from the right-hand side. Expertly, she pushed them back into position.
Cal was the flank rider on the left side, near the front, and Juan was on the same side, riding in the swing position, or near the rear. Pearlie was riding swing on the right, which would be his position once they were under way. For the moment, Carlos was riding flank on the right. Sally was in the point position, which would be Smoke’s position.
Smiling, Smoke slapped his legs against the side of his horse, then gave a shout.
“All right, boys, we’ll take it from here,” he called out to the hands who would remain at the ranch.
“Who are you calling boy?” Sally asked, riding over to join him.
“Darlin’, I might call you many things,” Smoke said. “But boy ain’t one of them.”
“Ain’t?” Sally replied with a wince. “Smoke Jensen, you know that everyone on this ranch looks up to you. How am I ever going to teach proper grammar if you don’t set the example?”
“Sally, if they all look up to me, they have a sorry example, I’m afraid.”
“False modesty does not become you. And they do look up to you, and you should be cognizant of that at all times.”
“Cognizant?” Smoke said. He laughed again.
“Yes, cognizant,” Sally repeated. “What do you find so funny.”
“You,” Smoke said.
“Oh?”
“Look at you,” Smoke said. Taking his handkerchief from his pocket, he reached out to wipe a smudge of dirt from Sally’s face. “I’ll bet when you were a little girl growing up in New Hampshire, the daughter of a rich man, you thought you would be president of the garden club, hosting teas and the like. Never in your life would you have imagined yourself riding astride and pushing cattle.”
“Well, that’s where you are wrong, Smoke Jensen. I’m doing exactly what I used to imagine myself doing,” Sally insisted.
Smoke chuckled again. “Now that I think about it, I’ll just bet you are.”
“Let me come with you,” Sally said.
“No need. Pearlie, Cal, and I can handle it.”
“But it would be easier with me along, and you know it would.”
“Sally, someone has to stay and watch the place.”
“Carlos can do that.”
“What about school? Don’t you have some kids depending on you to teach school?”
Sally sighed. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I do. But it’s not fair,” she pouted.
Smoke leaned over and kissed her.
“I won’t be gone long,” he promised. “And when I come back, why, we can go into Big Rock and you can go shopping.”
“Big Rock my hind foot,” Sally replied with a smile. “If I’m going shopping, I’m going to do it up right. We’ll be going into Denver. Denver? Heck, we might even go all the way back to New York.”
“Whoa, let’s not get carried away with all this,” Smoke said.
“Hurry back to me,” Sally said. Then she let out a loud, piercing whistle. “Carlos, Juan!” she shouted. “Let’s go!”
Turning her horse, she urged it into a quick gallop as she started back toward the house. Smoke watched, appreciating the easy way she sat the saddle and the way like she seemed to almost share the musculature of the horse so that the gallop was like a ballet involving horse and rider.
Smoke knew a lot of good horsemen, but he had never met anyone who was better than Sally.
Chapter Eleven
As they got under way to Frisco, the herd moved across the land, not in one large mass, but in a long plodding column, generally no more than three or four abreast. While it was on the move, flankers would ride on either side of the herd, keeping it moving, while one man rode drag. Drag was the least desirable position because the cowboy who rode behind the herd had to swallow all the dust. In many outfits, Cal, being the youngest and the least experienced, would have been selected to ride drag every day. But Smoke was fair about it, and he rotated the position, even taking drag himself when it was his turn.
Smoke had scouted all of the best places to camp for the night when he had ridden to Frisco the first time. As a result, there was no need to send anyone ahead, as one would during a normal drive. Smoke had carefully selected the nightly encampments to be about fifteen miles apart. That way he knew that they would cover the seventy-five miles in five nights, arriving at Frisco by mid-morning of the sixth day.
The hardest part of the drive was to get the cows moving each morning. By design, the campsites were picked where there was plenty of grass and water. In addition, there would be an occasional tree or an overhanging bluff to provide some respite from the sun, and that combination made the cows reluctant to leave. Each morning, they had every intention of staying right where they were.
In order to get the herd moving, Smoke, Pearlie, and Cal would have to shout, probe the animals with sticks, and ride at a gallop alongside, swinging ropes overhead. Eventually, their efforts would pay off, and the herd would begin to move. Then, once the herd was under way, it would change from fifteen hundred individual creatures into a single entity with a single purpose. The inertia Smoke, Pearlie, and Cal needed to overcome to get the herd moving in the first place now worked in their favor as the cows would plod along all day long at a steady clip, showing no inclination to stop.
There was a distinctive aroma to a herd this size. The smells came from sun on the hides, the dust in the air, and most pungently from the animals’ droppings and urine.
While the odor was strong and, no doubt to most p
eople, unpleasant, to Smoke, it was a scent as familiar and almost as agreeable as the fragrance of flour and cinnamon on Sally’s apron.
It would be a long and labor-intensive journey for just three men to drive a herd this size, but as far as Smoke was concerned, there was no place in the world he would rather be than right here, right now.
Putrid Wells
At on time there had actually been a town called Putrid Wells, built during a silver strike in the nearby buttes. But the silver had played out quickly, so the townspeople had moved on. A score or more of abandoned buildings remained, some of wood and turning gray, others of adobe and disintegrating under the heat of the summer sun and the blows of winter. Of the buildings that lined both sides of a single street, only one was still occupied.
The one remaining business establishment was the Silver Strike Saloon. The Silver Strike, which was built of adobe brick, was the largest building in town. Nippy Jones, its owner, insisted to all who passed by that the silver was still there, still ready to be pulled from the mine. Only a few die-hard prospectors believed him. In fact, he didn’t believe it himself. It was just his way of trying to breathe life back into the town. He managed to stay in business by providing drink and food to the few prospectors who did remain, hoping to find the mother lode, and to travelers who just happened through.
When Toby Jeeter and Lucas Keno rode up to the Silver Strike Saloon, there were at least eight other horses tied up out front.
“Damn,” Keno said as he dismounted. “Who would think this place would be doing this much business?”
“This ain’t normal,” Jeeter said. “We’re meetin’ some folks in here.”
Inside, there were two men standing at the bar, though as they were at opposite ends, they were obviously not together. There were six more men who were together, though, and they were sitting in the back of the room at a couple of tables that had been pulled together. One of the men sitting at the tables was the whitest person Keno had ever seen, and he stopped for a moment to stare in curiosity.
Jeeter noticed Keno staring. “I told you he was pale,” Jeeter said under his breath.
“You said pale, you didn’t say white.”
“Yeah, well, don’t say nothin’ to him about it. He gets a bit peekid when folks carry on about it.”
“I wasn’t goin’ to say nothin’. I was just lookin’, that’s all.”
“Come on, I’ll introduce you to him.”
“Hello, Jeeter,” the very white man said as Jeeter and Keno approached the table. “Is this the man you told us about?”
“Yeah,” Jeeter said. “This here is Lucas Keno. He used to work for Smoke Jensen. Keno, this is Van Arndt. He’s the boss.”
“The boss of what?” Keno asked.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” Jeeter said. He introduced the others. “This here is Peters.”
Peters was short and swarthy, with dark, beady eyes.
“Boswell,” Jeeter continued, pointing to a man who had a purple scar running from his left eye down to the corner of his lip.
“Shardeen.”
Shardeen suffered from hyperthyroidism, though it had never been diagnosed. The visual symptom, however, was quite clear in the bulging eyes that were his most prominent feature.
Kingsley and Miller, the last two men Jeeter introduced to Keno, were unremarkable in appearance, being of average size and coloring, and without any visible scars or abnormalities.
“I understand you worked for Smoke Jensen,” Van Arndt said.
“I used to, yeah. I don’t work for him anymore.”
“You got any loyalties left for your old boss?”
“Loyalties?”
“Yeah. Any reason why you wouldn’t want to steal anything from him?”
“Are you kidding?” Keno replied. “If I could, I would steal the nickels off the son of a bitch’s eyes after he’s dead. In fact, I wish I could do that very thing,” Keno added, then chuckled at the humor of his remark.
Van Arndt chuckled as well. “Then I reckon you can ride with us,” he said.
“What is all this about?”
Van Arndt looked at Jeeter. “You didn’t tell him anything?”
Jeeter shook his head. “I figured you’d want to do that,” he said.
Van Arndt nodded, then looked back at Keno. “We’re goin’ to take his herd,” he said.
“Take his herd? Impossible. He has more than thirty thousand on the hoof scattered over a fifteen thousand acre ranch,” Keno said.
“Not that herd,” Van Arndt said. “Jensen and two of his cowboys are taking fifteen hundred cows to Frisco to sell to a cattle buyer there.”
“Why is he taking them all the way to Frisco? Why not just take them into the railhead at Big Rock?”
“The buyer at Frisco is paying five dollars more per head,” Van Arndt said. “That means he’s paying forty five thousand dollars for those cows.”
“Wheew,” Keno whistled. “That’s a lot of money.”
“Yes, it is,” Van Arndt replied. “And if you ask me, it’s far too much money to be wasted on the likes of Smoke Jensen.”
“So what is the plan?” Keno asked.
“It’s a simple enough plan,” Van Arndt replied. “There are only three of them taking the herd in. There are eight of us.”
“Yeah—I don’t know,” Keno said, stroking his chin.
“What’s there not to know? Eight against three seems like pretty good odds to me.”
“What you don’t understand is, them’s not just any three men,” Keno said. “Smoke Jensen may be the best man with a gun there is. And I don’t reckon Pearlie and Cal are any too bad.”
“I heard that you was pretty good with a gun,” Van Arndt said. “Is that a lie?”
“No, that ain’t no lie,” he said. “I am good with a gun.”
“Better than Jensen?”
“Yeah, I think I am,” Jeeter said, recalling his “challenge” of Smoke a few weeks earlier. “And I know damn well I am better than Pearlie or Cal.”
“Then there is no problem,” Van Arndt said in a matter of fact tone of voice. “You can take out Pearlie and Cal, that will leave the rest of us to handle Jensen.”
“When is all this supposed to happen?” Keno asked.
“The herd will come close by here tomorrow.” Van Arndt answered. He looked over toward the bar. “Hey, barkeep,” he called.
“Yes, sir. More liquor?” Nippy replied.
“How much will it cost for us to spend the night here in the saloon?”
“I got rooms upstairs, only cost you fifteen cents a room,” Nippy replied.
“Nah, not upstairs. We don’t need no rooms. We’ll sleep here, on the floor,” Van Arndt said.
“Well, sir, that won’t cost you no more’n a nickel apiece,” Nippy said. “Forty cents, I reckon.”
“Here’s four dimes. Come get ’em,” Van Arndt said, holding out the money.
Nippy stepped around the bar, then walked over to get the money. “I won’t be providin’ no blankets or nothin’,” he said. “Not at this price.”
“We don’t need no blankets,” Van Arndt said.
As Nippy returned to the bar, Van Arndt continued explaining his plan to the others. “We’ll spend the night here and hit ’em at mid-morning. They won’t be lookin’ for us, so we’ll just ride in and kill Jensen and the two with him. Once they’re dead, it won’t be nothin’ for us to then take the herd and drive ’em on in to Frisco our ownselves.”
“You sure we can sell the herd?” Keno asked. “I mean, isn’t the buyer expecting Jensen to deliver the herd?”
“From what I know, the buyer needs all the beef he can get for a contract he has with the army,” Van Arndt said. “I expect he’ll buy from the first person who shows up.” Van Arndt smiled, but the smile, instead of lessening his macabre appearance, stretched the white skin to the point that it made his head look almost like a living skull.
Up at the bar, one of the men w
ho had watched and heard everything that transpired made a signal to the owner. “Nippy, you have any of that horehound candy left?”
“Yeah, Taylor, I have some left, but damn if you don’t keep me run out of it most of the time. I swear, you are sure like a kid, what with always wantin’ some of that horehound candy.”
“What can I say, Nippy? I like horehound candy,” Taylor said. “Fact is, when I strike silver, I plan to build me a factory making nothing but horehound candy, and I don’t plan to sell none of it. I’ll be eatin’ it all my own self.”
Nippy laughed, then dropped several pieces of the amber candy into a bag and handed it to the old prospector. “When you get that horehound candy factory built, you come tell me about it, Taylor. That is somethin’ I would pure dee like to see.”
“I’ll do that.” Taylor popped a piece of candy into his mouth. “I’ll be back in a month or so,” he said as he ambled slowly toward the door.
“You take care out there, old-timer,” Nippy called to him.
“Hey, bartender,” Van Arndt called.
“Yes, sir? More whiskey?”
“No. Who was that fella that just left?”
“His name is Taylor,” Nippy said.
“Seems to me like he was a might too interested in what we was talkin’ about,” Van Arndt said.
Nippy laughed.
“Hell, you don’t have to worry none about that old-timer. Truth is, I think he’s been out in the sun too long. He’s a bit addled in the head if you ask me. He’s been prospecting for gold and silver for ten years or more.”
“Has he ever found anything?” Boswell asked.
“Oh, I think he finds enough leavin’s from the tailings of the old mine to stay alive, but he ain’t never found nothin’ to write home about,” Nippy said. “Why do you ask? Are you interested in doing some mining? Because if you are, I’ve got some maps I’ll sell you.”
“Could be that I’m interested,” Boswell began, but Van Arndt interrupted him.
“Nah, we ain’t interested in nothin’ like that,” Van Arndt said, glaring at Boswell. “We got other things to think about.”
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