foothills.
“You wife don’t look so good now,” Clark called out to Smoke. “Not since she got a haircut and one titty skinned.”
Deep silence had replaced gunfire. The air stank of black powder, blood, and relaxed bladders and bowels, death-induced. Smoke had seen the men ride off into the foothills. He wondered how many were left in the cabin.
Smoke remained still, his eyes burning with rage. Smoke’s eyes touched the stiffening form of his son. If Clark could have read the man’s thoughts, he would have stuck the muzzle of his .44 into his mouth and pulled the trigger, ensuring himself a quick death, instead of what waited for him later on.
“Yes, sir,” Clark taunted him. He went into profane detail of the rape of Nicole and the perverted acts that followed that.
Smoke eased slowly backward, keeping the woodpile in front of him. He slipped down the side of the knoll and ran around to the side of the small hill, then up it to the side of the cabin. He grinned: The bounty hunter was still talking to the woodpile, to the muzzle of the Sharps stuck through the logs.
Smoke eased around to the front of the cabin and looked in. He saw Nicole, saw the torture marks on her, saw the hideousness of the scalping and the skinning knife. He lifted his eyes to the back door, where dark was crouching just to the right of the closed door.
Smoke raised his .36 and shot the pistol out of Clark’s hand. The outlaw howled and grabbed his numbed and bloodied hand.
Smoke stepped over Grissom’s body, then glanced at the body of the armless bounty hunter who had bled to death.
Clark looked up at the tall young man with the burning eyes. Cold slimy fear put a bony hand on his shoulder. For the first time in his evil life, Clark knew what death looked like. “You gonna make it quick, ain’t you?”
“Not likely,” Smoke said, then kicked him on the side of the head, dropping Clark unconscious to the floor.
When Clark came to his senses, he began screaming. He was naked, staked out a mile from the cabin, on the plain. Rawhide held his wrists and ankles to thick stakes driven into the ground. A huge ant mound was just inches from him. And Smoke had poured honey all over him.
“I’m a white man,” Clark screamed. “You can’t do this to me.” Slobber sprayed from his mouth. “What are you, half Apache?”
Smoke looked at him, contempt in his eyes. “You will not die well, I believe.” He mounted Seven and rode back to the cabin.
“Goddamn you!” Clark squalled. He spat out a glob of honey. “Shoot me, for God’s sake! It’ll take me days to die like this. You’re a devil — you’re a devil!”
The ants found him and Clark’s screaming was awful in the afternoon.
Smoke blocked the screaming from his mind as he rode back to the cabin, across the plain, so lovely with its profusion of wildflowers. Nicole had loved the wildflowers, he recalled, often picking a bunch of them to brighten a shelf or the table.
By the cabin on the knoll, Smoke found a shovel and began his slow digging of graves, one smaller than the other. Seven would warn him if anyone approached from any direction.
He paused often to wipe the tears from his eyes.
Fourteen
Smoke covered the mounds of earth with armloads of wildflowers from the meadow. He asked God to take mother and son into His place of peace and love and beauty.
But Vengeance is Mine, Sayeth the Lord, popped into his brain.
“No, Sir,” Smoke said. “Not this time.”
Clark’s screaming had hoarsened into an animal bellow.
Smoke fashioned two crosses of wood and hammered the stakes into the ground at the head of each grave. He walked down to the creek bank, to the boulder where he had chipped Preacher’s name. He added two more names.
Smoke gathered up all the weapons of the dead bounty hunters and put them in the cabin. He had made up his mind to change to the Army .44s. He would pick out the best two later; there would be ample shot and powder. He dragged the bodies of the dead bounty hunters far out into the plain, leaving them for the wolves, the coyotes, and the buzzards, the latter already circling.
It was late afternoon, the dark shadows of blue and purple were deepening. On a ridge to the northeast, Felter watched, as best he could, through field glasses, until it became too dark to see.
“He buried his wife and kid,” Felter told the others. “Drug the other bodies out in the plain, buzzards gatherin’ now. And he staked out Clark on an anthill.”
“The bastard!” Canning cussed.
But Felter chuckled. “He ain’t no more bastard than us. He’s just tougher than rawhide and meaner than a grizzly, that’s all. Madder than hell, too.”
Kid Austin moaned in pain.
Felter gazed down into the dark valley. He could not help but feel grudging admiration for the man called Smoke. That would not prevent him from killing Smoke when the time and place presented itself, but it was good to know, at last, what type of man he would be going up against. Felter was one of the best at the quick-draw, but, he reasoned, why tempt fate in that manner when shooting a man in the back was so much safer?
But with this man called Smoke, he pondered, he would have to be very careful how he set up the ambush. For Smoke had been trained by the old mountain man, Preacher, and now Felter knew Smoke was as dangerous as a cornered grizzly. It would not be easy, but it could be done.
