hand.
Sarah waited until Smoke had finished half his cigar and most of his coffee, giving Sally time to get to sleep, before she moved around and walked up to the porch.
When Smoke noticed her, he got to his feet, a slight frown on his face. “Why, hello, Sarah,” he said, concern in his voice. “Is anything wrong?”
“Please, Mr. Jensen,” Sarah said in her most helpless voice, keeping it low so as not to awaken Sally. “Come with me quickly. I need your help.”
“Let me just wake Sally up,” Smoke began.
“No! There’s no time for that,” Sarah pleaded. “Come quickly. My buckboard is just up the road a ways and I have something in it you need to see.”
She turned around and moved at a fast pace down the road away from his house, not giving him time to think about it as he followed her down the dark path.
“Is someone hurt?” Smoke asked as he caught up with her and walked by her side.
“You’ll see,” Sarah said, avoiding the question. “It’s just around the corner here.”
When they came to the buckboard, Smoke leaned over the side, looking into the bed of the wagon. All he saw was a pile of blankets and some rope coiled up in the corner of the wagon. “I don’t see . . . ” he began, turning around to find Sarah standing a few yards away with a pistol in her hand aimed at his gut.
“What the . . . ?”
“Kindly put your hands up, Mr. Jensen,” she said, her voice suddenly hard and flat.
He took a tentative step toward her and she eared back the hammer on the pistol with an audible click. “Please, Mr. Jensen, don’t make me shoot you here. Just do as I say and you may live to see morning.”
Smoke frowned as he raised his hands over his head.
“Now, turn around and climb into the back of the buckboard,” Sarah ordered.
“Why don’t you tell me what this is all about?” Smoke said as he climbed up into the bed of the wagon.
“Don’t you turn around, just keep looking in that direction,” Sarah ordered.
Smoke shrugged and did as she said. “Is it all right if I ask you what this is all about?” he said without turning to look at her.
Instead of answering him, Sarah reached under the seat of the buckboard and pulled out an iron crowbar she’d put there earlier. Swinging as hard as she could with one hand, she hit Smoke in the back of the head, knocking him unconscious onto his face.
She put down her gun and climbed up into the wagon with him. Taking some short lengths of rope she’d prepared earlier, she tied his hands together behind his back and then tied his feet together. Once that was done, she took some fence wire and wound it tightly around the rope, so that he couldn’t possibly undo the knots she’d tied.
When she was finished, she noticed blood was pouring from a wound in the back of his head, so she took a handkerchief from her purse and tied a makeshift bandage around his head to slow the bleeding. Once it stopped, she checked to make sure he was still breathing. After all, she didn’t want him to die on her—that would be too easy. She wanted him to suffer for a while, and then she wanted him to know why he was being killed before he died.
She wanted him to know that killing her brother Johnny had caused his death.
She climbed up into the seat and turned the buckboard around. She had to hurry. She wanted to be a dozen miles away before Sally Jensen woke up tomorrow morning and found her husband missing. By the time the alarm was raised and they figured out what had happened, she should be almost home.
Moving as fast as she could over the road in the near-total blackness, Sarah took almost three hours to make her way to the outskirts of Big Rock, where she hoped to find the men from her father’s ranch waiting for her along with Carl and Mac.
It’d been three full days since she’d sent Mac and Carl out to wait for them, so the men certainly should have been able to make the trip from Pueblo to here in that time.
Even looking for them and expecting to see them, Sarah almost jumped out of the heavy coat she was wearing when a dark figure materialized out of the darkness and grabbed the reins to the horses pulling the buckboard.
“Is that you, Miss Sarah?” a gruff voice called.
She took a moment to catch her breath and try to calm her racing heart. “Yes. Who are you?”
“I’m Jimmy Corbett, ma’am,” the voice called back as the figure moved closer so she could make out the face.
She recognized the man then. He’d been with her father for several years, though she didn’t know him all that well personally. He was a little older than she and her brother, so Johnny had never run around with him much like he had some of the younger hands on the ranch.
“Well, Jimmy, you scared me out of two years’ growth coming up on me out of the darkness like that,” she complained, but her voice was level and there was no malice in it.
“Sorry, ma’am,” he said, taking his hat off and standing there like a schoolboy. “Clete told us to make sure it was you ‘fore we called out or anything, an’ in the darkness it was kind’a hard to tell.”
“That’s all right, Jimmy. Where is Clete?”
Jimmy pointed up a slight rise off to her right. “He’s up the top of that there hill, ma’am.” He hesitated. “It’s gonna be kind’a bumpy ridin’ that buckboard up there. You want I should take the reins and let you ride my hoss?”
Truth to tell, Sarah’s butt was aching from the long ride on the hurricane deck of the wagon, so she readily
