Richards had not moved. He stood with a faint smile on his lips, staring at Smoke.
“You ready to die?” Smoke asked him.
“As ready as I’ll ever be.” There was no fear in his voice that Smoke could detect. Richards was good with a short gun, and Smoke kept that in mind. Richards’s hands were steady. “Janey gone?”
“Took your money and pulled out.”
Richards laughed. “Well, it’s been a long run, hasn’t it Smoke?”
“It’s just about over.”
“What happens to all our—” He looked down at his dead partners.
“I don’t care what happens to the mines. The miners can have them. I’m giving all your stock to decent honest punchers and homesteaders.”
A puzzled look crawled over Richards’s face. “I don’t understand. You mean, you did all…
Someone moaned, the sound painfully inching up the bloody, dusty, gunsmoke-filled street.
“I did it for my pa, my brother, my wife, and my baby son. You, or your hired guns, killed them all.”
“But it won’t bring them back!”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I wish I had never heard the name of Jensen.”
“After this day, Richards, you’ll never hear it again.”
“One way to find out,” he replied with a smile, and went for his Colt. He cleared leather fast and fired. He was snake-quick, but he hurried his shot, the lead digging up dirt at Smoke’s feet.
Smoke shot him in the right shoulder, spinning the man around. Richards drew his left-hand gun and Smoke fired again, the slug striking the man in the left side of his chest. He struggled to bring up his Colt. He managed to cock it before Smoke’s third shot struck him in the belly. Richards sat down in the street, the pistol slipping from suddenly numbed fingers.
He opened his mouth to speak, and tasted blood on his tongue. The light began to fade around him. “You’ll… meet…”
Smoke never found out, that day, who he was supposed to meet. Richards toppled over on his side and died.
Smoke looked up at the ridge where the Mountain Men had gathered.
They were gone, leaving as silently as the wind.
And to this day, he had never seen or heard from any of them again.
“You been gone a time, boy,” Marshal Mitchell said.
Smoke sighed. “Just a few years. Bloody ones, though.”
He told the marshal about that day in the ghost town.
“I never knew the straight of it, Smoke. But you did play hell back then. That person Richards told you you’d meet?”
“Yeah?”
“He was talkin’ about the man who will be faster than you. We who live by the gun all have them in our future.”
Smoke nodded his head. “Yeah, I know. And yeah, I know who would pay to see me dead.”
“Oh?”
“My sister. Janey.”
10
“Your own sister would pay to have you killed!” Bountiful said, appalled at just the thought. “How dreadful. What kind of person is she?”
Ralph and Bountiful were having supper with Smoke and Sally. “She must have a lot of hate in her heart,” Ralph said.
“I reckon,” Smoke said. “Well, I’ll just have to be more careful and keep looking over my shoulder from now on.” He smiled. “That’s something I’m used to doing.”
Then he remembered Utah Slim. The man had aligned with no side in the mountain country war. No, Smoke thought, he didn’t have to. He already had a job.
U.S. Marshal Mitchell had told Smoke that his office had received word that a gunslick had been paid to kill Jensen. But none of their usual sources could, or would, shed any light on who that gunslick might be.
Or why.
Smoke felt he knew the answer to both questions.
Utah Slim.
“You’ve got a funny look in your eyes, Smoke,” Sally said, looking at her husband.
“I’m not going to sit around and wait for a bullet, Sally. I just made up my mind on that.”
“I felt that was coming too.”
