This time her laugh was hearty, despite her injuries. “Smoke, do you know the furor your presence would arouse in Keene, New Hampshire?”
“If
“For sure, bands would play, you would be a celebrity, and the police would be upset.”
“Why? I ain’t wanted back there, or anywhere else for that matter.”
She could but smile at him. If he knew, he had dismissed the fact that he was the most famous gunfighter in all of the West; that books—penny dreadfuls—had been and still were being written about his exploits—some of them fact, many of them fiction. That he had been written up in tabloids all over the world, and not just in the English- speaking countries. Her mother and father had sent Sally articles about her husband from all over the world. To say that they had been a little concerned about her safety—for a while—would be putting it mildly.
“People don’t really believe all that crap that’s been written about me, do they? Hell, Sally, I’ve been reported at fourteen different places at once, according to those stories.”
“If they just believed the real things you’ve done, Smoke, that is enough to make people very afraid of you.”
“That’s silly! I never hurt anybody who wasn’t trying to hurt me. People don’t have any reason to be afraid of me.”
“Well, I’m not afraid of you, Smoke. You’re sort of special to me.”
He smiled. “Oh, yeah? Well, I’d have to give it a lot of thought if someone was to offer to trade me a spotted pony for you, Sally.”
2
Smoke Jensen and Sally Reynolds, gunfighter and schoolteacher, had met several years back, in Idaho. Just before Smoke had very nearly wiped out a town and all the people in it for killing his first wife and their child, Nicole and Baby Arthur; the boy named after Smoke’s friend and mentor, the old mountain man, Preacher.
Smoke and Sally had married, living in peace for several years in the high lonesome, vast and beautiful mountains of Colorado. Then a man named Tilden Franklin had wanted to be king of the entire valley…and he had coveted Smoke’s wife, making it public news.
Gold had been discovered in the valley, and a bitter, bloody war had ensued.
And in the end, all Tilden Franklin got was a half-a-dozen slugs in the belly, from the guns of Smoke Jensen, and six feet of hard cold ground.
That had been almost two years back; two years of peace in the valley and in Smoke and Sally’s high-up ranch called the Sugarloaf.
Now that had been shattered.
On the morning of the first full week after the assault on Sally, Smoke sat on the bench outside the snug cabin and sipped his coffee.
Late spring in the mountains.
1880, and the West was slowly changing. There would be another full decade of lawlessness, of wild and woolly days and nights; but the law was making its mark felt all over the area. And Smoke, like so many other western men, knew that was both good and bad. For years, a commonsense type of justice had prevailed, for the most part, in the West, and usually—not always, but usually—it worked. Swiftly and oftentimes brutally, but it worked. Now, things were changing. Lawyers with big words and fancy tongues were twisting facts, hiding the guilt to win a case. And Smoke, like most thinking people, thought that to be wrong.
The coming of courts and laws and lawyers would prove to be both a blessing and a curse.
Smoke, like most western men, just figured that if someone tried to do you a harm or a meanness, just shoot the son of a bitch and have done with it. ’Cause odds were, the guilty party wasn’t worth a damn to begin with. And damn few were ever going to miss them.
Smoke, like so many western men, judged other men by what they gave to society as opposed to what they took away from it. If your neighbor’s house or barn burned down or was blown down in a storm, you helped him rebuild. If his crops were bad or his herd destroyed, you helped him out until next season or loaned him some cows and a few bulls. If he and his family were hungry through no fault of their own, you helped out with food and clothing.
And so on down the line of doing things right.
And if a man wouldn’t help out, chances were he was trash, and the sooner you got rid of him, the better.
Western justice and common sense.
And if people back east couldn’t see that—well, Smoke thought…Well, he really didn’t know what to think about people like that. He’d reserve judgment until he got to know a few of them.
He sipped his coffee and let his eyes drift over that part of his land that he could see from his front yard. And that was a lot of land, but just a small portion of all that he and Sally owned…free and clear.
There was a lot to do before Smoke put Sally on the steam trains and saw her off to the East—and before he started after those who had attacked her like rabid human beasts in the night.
And there was only one thing you could do with a rabid beast.
Kill it.
Billy stepped out of the house and took a seat on the bench beside his adopted father. The boy had been legally adopted by the Jensens; Judge Proctor had seen to that. Billy was pushing hard at his teen years, soon turning thirteen. Already he was a top hand and, even though Smoke discouraged it, a good hand with a gun. Uncommon quick. Smoke and Sally had adopted the boy shortly after the shoot-out in Fontana, and now Billy pulled his weight and then some around the Sugarloaf.
“You and Miss Sally both gonna go away?” Billy asked, his voice full of gloom.
