“You’ll have to learn to shoot,” Smoke said dubiously.
“Then I shall.”
“Camp and live out in the wilderness.”
“All right.”
“It won’t be easy. Your skin will be tanned and your hands will become hard with calluses.”
“I expect that.”
Smoke kept his face noncommittal. He had hoped Sally would want to see his world; the world that he knew was slowly vanishing. There would be time.
He hoped.
“All right,” he said.
She rose up on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. “You come back to me,” she said.
He did not reply. That was something he could not guarantee.
“Nothing left, Boss,” Long reported back to Josh Richards. “Jensen burned the whole place to the ground.”
Potter and Stratton were now once more joined with Richards. The opposing sides had ceased fighting in Levi Pass and begun talking. The men were chatting amicably when Richards, Marshall, Lansing, and Brown rode up with their men.
“Nothing?” Burton asked. “My apothecary shop is gone?”
“There ain’t nothing left,” Long said. “And Jensen and them old bastards is gone. Took the women and left. I cut their sign but lost it in the rocks.”
“Sam?” Richards asked.
“No sign of him.”
“That was a nice hotel,” Morgan said wistfully.
“Beautiful church,” Necker said. “Takes a heathen to destroy a house of God.”
Simpson spat on the ground. “You damned fake!” he told Necker. “You ain’t no more no preacher than I is. I knowed all along I’d seen you ’fore. Now I remember. I knowed you up in Montana Territory. Elkhorn. You was dealing stud and pimpin’. You kilt Jack Harris when he caught you cold-deckin’ him.”
“You must be mistaken, my good man,” Necker said. But his face was flushed. “I came from—”
“Shut up, Necker. Or whatever your name is,” Lansing said. “Now I’m gonna tell you all something. Or remind you of it. Remind you all of a lot of things. They ain’t none of us clean. We all—
“Yes, he did,” Stratton said. “And it appeared that he and Smoke Jensen were friends.”
“They got to die,” Marshall said. “All of them.”
“What about them farmers’ kids?” a gunhand asked.
“Them, too,” Brown said. “Cain’t nobody be left alive to point no finger at us.”
“I want Smoke Jensen!” Dickerson gasped from his blankets on the ground. Still gravely wounded, the outlaw had insisted upon coming to the pass rather than leaving with the men Smoke had ordered out before burning the town.
The men ignored him. Dickerson’s wounds had reopened, and all those present knew the outlaw and murderer was not long for this world.
“Ya’ll hear me?” Dickerson said.
“Aw, shut up and die!” Necker told him. “We’re busy.”
Dickerson fell back on his dirty blankets and died.
Smoke, Sam, and the mountain men rode west, toward Marshall’s Crooked Snake spread. The Frenchman, Dupre, was ranging ahead of the main body of men. About two miles from the ranch, Smoke pulled up, waiting for Dupre to return with a scouting report.
During this quiet, which, all knew, would soon become very rare, Preacher talked with Smoke. “You beginnin’ to feel all the hate leave your craw, boy?”
“Yes,” Smoke admitted.
“That’s good. That’s a mighty fine little gal back yonder at that nester place.”
“She wants to see the high lonesome.”
“Be tough on a woman. You gonna show her?”
Smoke hesitated. “Yes.”
Preacher spat a stream of brown tobacco juice on the ground, drowning a bug. “Soon as this here affair is done, you two best git goin’. High lonesome will soon be gone. Civil-lie-say-shon done be takin’ over, pilgrims ruinin’ everything. Be a fine thing to show that woman, though. She’s tough, got lots of spunk. She’ll stand by you, I’s thinkin’.”
