Louis sighed and drained his tumbler, refilling it from the bottle of scotch. “Smoke, it’s 1878. The West is changing. “The day of the gunfighter, men like you and me, is coming to a close. There is still a great rowdy element moving westward, but by and large, the people who are now coming here are demanding peace. Soon there will he no place for men like us.”
“And? So?”
“What are you going to do then?”
“I’ll be right out there on the Sugarloaf, Louis, ranching and farming and raising horses. And,” he said with a smile, “probably raising a family of my own.”
“Not if you’re dead, Smoke.” The gambler’s words were softly offered.
Smoke drained his tumbler and stood up, tall and straight and heavily muscled. “The Sugarloaf is my home, Louis. Sally’s and mine. And here is where we’ll stay. Peacefully working the land, or buried in it.”
He walked out the door.
10
Smoke made his Spartan camp some five miles outside of Fontana. With Drifter acting as guard, Smoke slept soundly. He had sent Pearlie to his ranch earlier that night, carrying a hand-written note introducing him to Sally. One of the older ranchers in the area, a man who was aligned on neither side, had told Smoke that Pearlie was a good boy who had just fallen in with the wrong crowd, that Pearlie had spoken with him a couple of times about leaving the Circle TF.
Smoke did not worry about Pearlie making any un-gentlemanly advances toward Sally, for she would shoot him stone dead if he tried.
Across the yard from the cabin, Smoke and Sally had built a small bunkhouse, thinking of the day when they would need extra hands. Pearlie would sleep there.
Smoke bathed—very quickly—in a small, rushing creek and changed clothes: a gray shirt, dark trousers. He drank the last of his pot of coffee, extinguished the small fire, and saddled Drifter.
He turned Drifter’s head toward Fontana, but angling slightly north of the town, planning on coming in from a different direction.
It would give those people he knew would be watching him something to think about.
About half a mile from Fontana, Smoke came up on a small series of just-begun buildings; tents lay behind the construction site. He sat his horse and looked at Preacher Morrow swinging an axe. The preacher had removed his shirt and was clad only in his short-sleeve undershirt. Smoke’s eyes took in the man’s heavy musculature and the fluid way he handled the axe.
A lot more to him than meets the eyes, Smoke thought. A whole lot more.
Then Smoke’s eyes began to inspect the building site. Not bad, he thought. Jackson’s big store across the road, and the offices of the others in one long building on the opposite side of the road. The cabins would be behind the offices, while Jackson and his wife and brother would live in quarters behind but connected to the store.
Smoke’s eyes caught movement to his left.
“Everything meet with your approval, Mister Jensen?”
Smoke turned Drifter toward the voice. Ed Jackson. “Looks good. The preacher’s a pretty good hand with an axe, wouldn’t you say?”
“Oh…him? ’Bout the only thing he’s good at. He’s a sissy.”
Smoke smiled, thinking: Shopkeeper, I hope you never push that preacher too hard, ’cause he’ll damn sure break you like a match stick.
Hunt, Colton, Haywood, and their wives walked out to where Smoke sat Drifter. He greeted the men and took his hat off to the ladies. Bountiful was not with the group and Smoke was grateful for that. The woman was trouble.
Then he wondered where the shopkeeper’s brother was. He wondered if Bountiful and Paul might be…
He sighed and put his hat back on, pushing those thoughts from him. He dismounted and ground-reined Drifter.
“Going into town to vote, Mister Jensen?” Hunt asked.
“No point in it. One-sided race from what I hear.”
“Oh, no!” Colton told him. “We have several running for mayor, half a dozen running for sheriff, and two running for city judge.”
“Tilden Franklin’s men will win, believe me.”
“Mister Franklin seems like a very nice person to me,” Ed said, adding, “not that I’ve ever met the gentleman, of course. Just from what I’ve heard about him.”
“Yeah, he’s a real prince of a fellow,” Smoke said, with enough sarcasm in his voice to cover hotcakes thicker than molasses. “Why just a few days ago he was nice enough to send his boys up into the high country to burn out a small rancher-farmer named Wilbur Mason. Shot Wilbur and scattered his wife and kids. He’s made his boast that he’ll either run me out or kill me, and then he’ll have my wife. Yeah, Tilden is a sweet fellow, all right.”
“I don’t believe that!” Ed said, puffing up.
Smoke’s eyes narrowed and his face hardened. Haywood looked at the young man and both saw and felt danger emanating from him. He instinctively put an arm around his wife’s shoulders and drew her to him.
Smoke said, his eyes boring into Ed’s eyes, “Shopkeeper, I’ll let that slide this one time. But let me give you a friendly piece of advice.” He cut his eyes, taking in, one at a time, all the newcomers to the West. “You folks came here from the East. You do things differently back East. I didn’t say better, just different. Out here, you call a man a liar, you’d better be ready to do one of two things: either stand and slug it out with him or go strap on iron.
“Now you all think about that, and you’ll see both the right and wrong in it. I live here. Me and my wife been
