“Sure we did,” Potter yelled. “But we hired him away from Richards. Last night. Richards brought him in to kill us.”
“You’re crazy!” Wilson yelled. “Just hold on a second. Everybody stop shootin’. We got to talk about this.”
“I don’t trust you!” Potter screamed. “You’re up to something.”
“I ain’t up to nothin’, you fat hog!” Wilson yelled. “You and Stratton was the ones who wanted it all. Ya’ll caused all this trouble.”
Wilson stood up from behind the boulder.
Sheriff Reese lifted his rifle and shot the man in the stomach. The .44 round knocked the gunhand backward. He died with a scream on his bloody tongue.
A Crooked Snake rider shot Cannon, the newspaper editor, in the center of his forehead. Cannon was dead before he hit the rocky ground of the pass road.
Levi Pass erupted and rocked with pistol and rifle fire. Britt, a rider for the Crooked Snake, crouched behind his cover and mulled matters over in his mind. He was getting the feeling that that damned Smoke Jensen had set them all up; made fools out of everybody; sitting back and laughing while they were shooting at each other.
He slipped from his cover and inched his way toward the timber, where the horses were tied. He spurred his mount, heading for the PSR spread. He wanted to tell his boss what he’d just heard.
Behind him, the savage gunfight continued, the air filled with shouts and curses and the screaming of the wounded and the silence of the dead.
“Now wait a minute!” Josh said. “Tell me again what you heard back at the pass.”
Britt repeated what he’d heard between Wilson, Stratton, and Potter.
Lansing went to a window of the mansion and looked toward the town. Though miles away, he could clearly see the black smoke pouring into the sky. “Shore nuff on fire,” he said.
“He played us against each other,” Richards said. “And I played right into his hands. He set me up like a kid with a string toy. That damn gunhawk
“He shore done ’er though,” Marshall rubbed it in a bit. Marshall and the other ranchers were every bit as tough as Richards, with no back-up in them. They were all thieves and murderers, their pasts as black as midnight.
Richards’s gaze was bleak. “Gather up the men. We’re ridin’.”
“Richards is anything but a fool, Smoke,” Sally told him. Standing beside her, Sam solemnly nodded his head. “If he puts all this together, then you’ve lost your element of surprise.”
“I don’t think either side wiped the other out in that pass,” Preacher opined. “And we ain’t heared no gunfire in more’un an hour. I think they got to talkin’ and figured things out.”
Smoke looked at Tenneysee. “The supplies hidden?”
“B’ar couldn’t find ’em.”
“We’ll get the women over to Becky’s place and leave them there. We’ll head for the timber and make them come after us.”
“The ranches lay in a half circle around Bury,” Sam said. “Marshall, Lansing, and Brown will have most of their men out looking for you; only a handful will be at the ranches. The real cowhands and punchers will be with the herds. They’re cowboys, not gunslicks.”
“Then we’ll leave them be,” Smoke said. “When we get ready to scatter the herds, we’ll tell the punchers to take off for new ground.”
“They’ll go,” Sam said.
“Let’s ride.”
Leaving what was once the Idaho Territory town of Bury still smoking and burning behind them, the outnumbered band of ancient mountain men, gunhands, and ladies saddled up and drifted into the deep timber, with Sam leading the way. At Becky’s small farm, Sam explained the situation to Becky and she agreed to help any way she could. Little Ben introduced the kids to the mountain men. Becky’s kids had seen a lot during their time in the west, but absolutely nothing compared with the sight of the old mountain men, all dressed in buckskins and colorful sashes and armed to the teeth. And they certainly had never seen anything to match Audie. No taller than the children, the tiny mountain man captivated the kids. When he jumped up on a stump and began telling fairy tales, the kids sat around him listening, spellbound.
Sally and Smoke walked a short distance from the cabin. “Do we talk now, Smoke?” she asked.
“I reckon so.” He waited for her to correct his grammar. She did not.
“Very well. I want to see the west, Smoke. And I want you to show it to me.”
“Dangerous, Sally. And not very ladylike. You’d have to ride astride.”
She hid her smile. Her father had paddled her behind several times as a child for doing just that. “I’m sure I could cope.”
Buck let that alone. “What is it you want to see?”
“The high lonesome,” she said without hesitation.
“It’s all around you here.”
“You know what I mean, Smoke. The real high lonesome. The one you and the other mountain men talk about. When you speak of that, your voice becomes soft and your eyes hold a certain light. That’s the high lonesome I would like to see.”
