Fed, warm, and secure, the child then slept beside its mother.
“You sleep, too,” Smoke told her. “I’ll stand watch.”
“If baby Arthur starts to cry,” she said wearily, “just take him.”
“What am I supposed to
She smiled at him. “It will come natural to you. Just keep your hand under his head for support.”
“Oh, Lord,” Smoke said.
Nicole drifted off into sleep and after an hour, the child awakened. With much trepidation, the young man took his son in his big, work-hardened hands and held it gently.
“Now what do I do?” he said.
The baby looked up at him.
“Arthur,” Smoke said. “You behave, now.”
And the baby, like his namesake, promptly started squalling and grousing.
Winter locked in the valley and Smoke knew, as long as the hard winter held, the three of them would be safe from the stalled pursuit of the bounty hunters. But in the spring, their coming would be inevitable and relentless. Smoke would have to move his family to a safer place.
But where?
His smile was grim. Sure, why not. Right under their noses would be the last place they would look. Idaho. He would have to hang up his .36s — maybe get a new Remington or Colt — carry just one gun. Use Seven for breeding, never for riding. Maybe, he thought, they could pull it off.
Preacher drifted into his mind. God, how he missed that ornery old man, so full of common sense and mountain wisdom. He would have been a great companion for the baby.
Smoke shook his head. But Preacher was gone. And the living have to go on living. Preacher told him that.
He struggled to remember what Preacher had told him about Idaho Territory. He recalled Preacher telling him there was a lake on the eastern pan (Gray’s Lake). So wild and beautiful and lonely it had to be seen to be believed. No white men lived there, Preacher said. So that’s where Smoke would take his family to live, hopefully, in peace.
But he wondered if he could ever live in peace. And that ever present speculation haunted him, especially when he looked at his wife and son.
If anything ever happened to them …
Baby Arthur cooed and gurgled and grew healthy and strong and much loved during the winter of 1871–72. He would be big-boned and strong, with blond hair and blue eyes that flashed when he grew angry.
The three of them waited out the winter, making plans to leave the valley in late spring, when the baby was six months old, and they felt he could stand the trip. They both agreed it would be taking a chance, but one they had to take.
In a settlement that would soon wear the name of Telluride, in the primitive area of the Uncompahgre Forest, bounty hunters also waited for spring. They were a surly, quarrelsome bunch as the cold days and bitter nights drifted toward spring. With them, a young man who called himself Kid Austin. Kid was quick with a pistol — perhaps the quickest of them all — but the only man he had ever killed was a drunken old Mexican sheepherder. Even with the knowledge that the Kid was untested, the bounty hunters left him alone. For he was uncommonly fast and quick-tempered. And because the man they hunted was a friend of the old mountain man who had humiliated the Kid in front of that saloon. Kid Austin thus hated the man called Smoke. He dreamed of killing this Smoke, of facing him down in a street, beating him to the draw, and watching him die hard in the dirt, crying and begging for mercy, while men stood on the boardwalks and feared him, and women stood and wanted him. Those were his dreams — all his dreams. Kid Austin was not a very imaginative young man. And he would not live to dream many more of his wild dreams of glory and power.
Felter was a patient man, who shared none of the Kid’s dreams. Felter didn’t know how many white men he had killed. He thought it to be around twenty-five, and nobody gave a damn how many Indians. He slowly spun the cylinder of his Colt. “They got to be in that valley, southwest of the San Juan’s. Everything points in that direction.”
“That old Ute we talked to,” Canning said. “He said something ’bout a blond-haired woman called Little Lightning. That could be Smoke’s woman.” He grinned. “You boys can have the gunfighter; I’ll take me a taste of his wife. I’d like to hump me a yeller-haired white woman. Man gits tired of them greasy squaws.”
“You rape all the squaws you take a mind to,” a bounty hunter named Grissom told him. “Don’t nobody give a damn ’bout them. But you bother a white woman, you gonna get yourself hung.”
Canning’s grin spread across his unshaven face. “Not ifn I don’t leave her alive to talk about it, I won’t.”
“That there is a thought to think about,” Grissom agreed. “But that Ute said she was all swole up with kid, gettin’ ready to turn fresh.”
“So?”
“What about the kid?”
Canning shrugged that off. “I ’member the time up in north Colorado when we hit an Injun camp — surprised them. That were fun. After we had our fun with some young squaws, I found me a papoose just a-hollerin’ and grabbed him up by the heels. Swung him agin a tree. Head popped like a pistol shot.”
“That were a Injun kid. This here be a white baby.”
“No never-mind. Richards said to kill ’em all. Don’t want to leave no youngun around to grow up and git mean.”
The bounty hunters all agreed that made sense. And they would pleasure themselves with the woman — then kill her.
“I want Smoke,” Kid Austin said. The older bounty hunters smiled. “I want him face on so’s I can beat him at
