The man and wife had a couple hundred head of cattle, a respectable herd of horses. They worked a large garden, canning much of what they raised for the hard winters that lashed the high country.
The man and woman stayed to themselves, socializing very little. When they did visit, it was not to the home of the kingpin who claimed to run the entire area, Tilden Franklin. Rather it was to the small farmers and ranchers who dotted the country that lay beneath the high lonesome where the man and woman lived.
There was a no-name town that was exclusively owned by Tilden Franklin. The town held a large general store, two saloons, a livery stable, and a gunsmith.
But all that was about to change.
Abruptly.
This was a land of towering mountains and lush, green valleys, sparsely populated, and it took a special breed of men and women to endure.
Many could not cope with the harshness, and they either moved on or went back to where they came from.
Those that stayed were the hardy breed.
Like Matt and Sally.
Matt was not his real name. He had not been called by his real name for so many years he never thought of it. There were those who could look at him and tell what he had once been; but this was the West, and what a man had once been did not matter. What mattered was what he was now. And all who knew Matt knew him to be a man you could ride the river with.
He had been a gunfighter. But now he rarely buckled on a short gun. Matt was not yet thirty years old and could not tell you how many men he had killed. Fifty, seventy-five, a hundred. He didn’t know. And neither did anyone else.
He had been a gunfighter, and yet had never hired out his gun. Had never killed for pleasure. His reputation had come to him as naturally as his snake-like swiftness with a short gun.
He had come West with his father, and they had teamed up with an old Mountain Man named Preacher. And the Mountain Man had taken the boy in tow and begun teaching him the way of the mountains: how to survive, how to be a man, how to live where others would die.
Preacher had been present when the boy killed his first man during an Indian attack. The old Mountain Man had seen to the boy after the boy’s dying father had left his son in his care. Preacher had seen to the boy’s last formative years. And the old Mountain Man had known that he rode with a natural gunslick.*
It was Preacher who gave the boy the name that would become legend throughout the West; the name that would be whispered around ten thousand campfires and spoken of in a thousand saloons; the name that would be spoken with the same awe as that of Bat Masterson, Ben Thompson, the Earp boys, Curly Bill.
Smoke.
Smoke’s first wife had been raped and murdered, their baby son killed. Smoke had killed them all, then ridden into the town owned by the men who had sent the outlaws out and killed those men and wiped the town from the face of Idaho history.*
Smoke Jensen then did two things, one of them voluntarily. He became the most feared man in all the West, and he dropped out of sight. And then, shortly after dropping out of sight, he married Sally.
But his disappearance did nothing to slow the rumors about him; indeed, if anything, the rumors built in flavor and fever.
Smoke had been seen in Northern California. Smoke had gunned down five outlaws in Oregon. Smoke had cleaned up a town in Nevada. Since his disappearance, Smoke, so the rumors went, had done this and that and the other thing.
In reality, Smoke had not fired a gun in anger in three years.
But all that was about to change.
A dark-haired, hazel-eyed, shapely woman stepped out of the cabin to stand by her man’s side. Something was troubling him, and she did not know what. But he would tell her in time.
This man and wife kept no secrets from each other. Their lives were shared in all things. No decisions were made by one without consulting the other.
“More coffee?” she asked.
“No, thank you. Trouble coming,” he said abruptly. “I feel it in my gut.”
A touch of panic washed over her. “Will we have to leave here?”
Smoke tossed the dregs of his coffee to the ground.
“When hell freezes over. This is our land, our home. We built it, and we’re staying.”
“How do the others feel?”
“Haven’t talked to them. Think I might do that today. You need anything from town?”
“No.”
“You want to come along?”
She smiled and shook her head. “I have so much to do around the house. You go.”
“It’ll be noon tomorrow before I can get back,” he reminded her.
“I’ll be all right.”
