“I’m done with it!” a man shouted from the dynamite-ruined and bullet-pocked house. “Lemme ride out and I’m gone.”
“Take what’s on your back and clear out!” Smoke yelled. “How ’bout you other men?”
“There ain’t no other men,” the man shouted, a bitter edge to his voice. “Two was in the bunkhouse. Rafter got another in here. Lead took the others. I’m it!”
“Clear out and don’t come back.”
“You just watch my dust, Jensen.”
They watched it fade out, the gunhand riding toward the west. He did not look back.
“Check the house for wounded, then burn it all,” Smoke said.
“You got a mean streak in you,” Preacher said. “Shore didn’t git it from me.”
Smoke grinned at the man who had helped raise him. Preacher was as mean and vindictive as a wounded grizzly.
“I allow as to how we ain’t gonna bury them gunhawks in the house,” Preacher said, not putting it in question form.
“Somewhere, sometime, they had a ma,” Smoke said. “She’d wanna know her boy was buried proper.”
“I’d afraid you say that,” Preacher bitched. “I ain’t never found no shovel to fit my hand.”
“There goes my ranch,” Marshall said, looking west into the sky. There was no bitterness in his voice, only a grudging admiration.
The hundred-odd men sat their saddles and stared at the black smoke pluming into the sky.
“We can still save the cattle,” one of his men said.
“You want them, you save them,” Marshall replied. “I’m headin’ out.”
“Where the hell you think you goin’?” Lansing asked.
“I’m pullin’ out. You boys got any smarts, you’ll do the same. I just realized that we ain’t gonna stop this Jensen. If’n a man’s right, and he jist keeps on comin’, ain’t nothing or nobody gonna stop him. And you know what, boys? Jensen’s right.”
“
Marshall chuckled grimly. “That’s it, boys. Everything we got we built on stole money and the blood of others. Hell with it. I’m pullin’ out.” He wheeled his horse and turned his back to the others.
Josh Richards jerked up his rifle and shot the man in the back. Marshall fell from the saddle, his spine severed. He lay on the ground, looking at the men through pain-filled eyes. “Should have known one of you would do that,” he gasped.
Stratton shot the man between the eyes.
Potter looked at what remained of Marshall’s men. “Stay with us. All his cattle, his mine holdings—everything is yours if we win this fight.”
“We’ll stay,” one hard-faced Crooked Snake gunnie said. “I never liked Marshall no how.”
“Let’s ride.”
“What do we do with the cattle?” Audie asked.
“Leave them for those cowboys,” Smoke said. “They seemed like pretty decent boys to me.”
“The cattle on Richards’s place?” Tenneysee asked.
“That’s another story. We’ll give them to the nesters and the miners.”
“Seems fair enough,” Lobo said. “I damned shore don’t want ’um.”
“Someone has to meet the stage and turn it around,” Smoke said. “Any volunteers?”
“MacGregor said he’d do it,” Sam spoke. “But I don’t like the idee of one man waitin’ out there all alone with a hundred or so gunhands on the prowl.”
“You go back and meet the stage with him,” Audie suggested. “I should imagine you and your ladyfriend will be settling in this area. So the less you have to do with this matter, the better. Agreed, Smoke?”
“Good idea. Take off, Sam. I’ll see you when this is over.”
Reluctantly, Sam agreed and rode out, back to Becky’s cabin.
“Lansing’s Triangle is almost due north from here,” Matt said. “We hit there next?”
“That’s what they would expect us to do, isn’t it?” Smoke asked, a hard grin on his lips.
“Oh, you sneaky, boy!” Preacher said. “You as sneaky as a rattler.”
“Whut you two jawin’ about?” Phew asked.
“We head straight east,” Smoke explained. “For Brown’s Double Bar B. I’m betting Richards and all the rest are high-tailing right now to set up an ambush around Lansing’s spread.”
“At’s rat good thankin’, boy,” Beartooth said. “I can tell Preacher hepped raise you.”
Preacher stuck out his skinny chest. “Done a damn good job of ’er, too.”
