the rug?”
“You son of a—” Sarah began.
“And did anyone from that man’s family come out to the ranch and try and take Johnny prisoner or shoot him for what he’d done to their father?” he asked, his eyes boring into hers as he spoke.
“You know that was different,” she almost screamed. “The man drew on Johnny first . . . ” she was saying.
Smoke started to interrupt her, but his vision suddenly narrowed and everything became dark and fuzzy, and then he tipped over and fell headfirst into a deep, black pool.
Cletus rushed to his side and felt the pulse in Smoke’s neck. “He’s just fainted,” he said, looking up at Sarah. “Probably from loss of blood, though God only knows if you’ve managed to scramble his brains with that crowbar.”
“It’d serve the bastard right,” Sarah said, moving toward the fire and the coffeepot to get herself another cup. “Especially after what he said about Johnny.”
Cletus’s eyes softened with sorrow, for he knew that Sarah knew that what Jensen had said was the truth, as painful as it was for her to hear it spoken out loud.
They’d all tried to maintain the fiction that the man Johnny killed had been armed, but they’d never spoken of it, and the sheriff had covered up the truth from the townspeople. But out at the ranch they’d all known how it really went down.
FIFTEEN
Sarah sat there, staring into the campfire over the rim of her cup, with an occasional sideways glance at Smoke. He lay still, his chest barely rising and falling, his skin as pale as the moon on a summer night. He could hardly have looked any more lifeless if he were dead.
How dare that man denigrate the memory of her brother, a man he’d callously shot down in the streets of his own town? Why, just because Johnny was a little spoiled and liked to drink and throw his weight around a little too much, that didn’t mean he was a bad man. And as for that man he’d shot and killed the week before he died, her father had told her the man had a gun and that Johnny hadn’t had any choice but to shoot him in self-defense.
Jensen was lying about him being unarmed; he must be, she thought as she swallowed the last of her coffee. Otherwise, the sheriff would surely have arrested Johnny. “Cletus, come here a minute, will you?” she asked as she got to her feet and moved away from the fire and the other men from the ranch.
Cletus followed her over into the darkness at the edge of camp. “Yes?”
“What Jensen said about that man Johnny shot being unarmed, that was a lie, wasn’t it?” she asked, hating the whining, hopeful tone in her voice, as if she didn’t really believe it herself.
Cletus pursed his lips and avoided her gaze, staring up at the stars while debating within himself how to answer her question. On the one hand, he wanted to tell her the truth, but on the other, Angus had sworn him to secrecy.
Sarah was no fool. She heard him hesitate and saw the pain in his eyes when he turned them back to her. “Oh, Clete,” she said before he could answer. “Why didn’t Daddy tell me the truth?”
He shrugged, glad he hadn’t had to lie to her after all. “I don’t know, Missy,” he said, using the pet name he’d given her when she was just a toddler. “I suppose he felt it was best that you didn’t know.”
She looked over her shoulder at Jensen, who still hadn’t moved. “Then he was right about Johnny, wasn’t he?” she asked, her voice low and sad.
Cletus put his hand on her shoulder. “Now, Missy, just because Johnny was a little rough around the edges sometimes didn’t give anyone the right to shoot him down in cold blood, no matter how drunk he was or what he may have said to them.”
Sarah nodded distractedly, but she was thinking, What if Johnny did more than just shoot his mouth off? What if he’d drawn on Jensen and his men as Jensen maintained he did? What would she do then? Could she stand to take this man to her father where he would be killed if he were in fact innocent of any wrongdoing?
She moved over closer to the fire, chilled by more than the freezing air around her. She had some tough decisions to make, and for once, she wouldn’t have her father to guide her in the making of them. Somehow, before they arrived back at the ranch, she would have to decide just who was telling the truth about what had happened last year in the streets of Pueblo.
She turned to Cletus. “We’d better get a move on, Clete,” she said. “Jensen’s wife is going to wake up before too long, and then we’re going to have a posse to deal with if we’re not a lot of miles away from here.”
Cletus looked over at Jensen, whose chest was rising and falling rapidly with shallow breaths. “I don’t know, Missy. If we move him now, he’s liable to start to bleedin’ inside his head or something.” He turned back to her. “Angus ain’t gonna like it if’n we bring him back a corpse.”
She turned to face him, putting her hands on her hips and looking him right in the eye. “He also won’t like it much if his only daughter is arrested and hung for kidnapping, Clete. Now, either we get a move on and Jensen takes his chances, or we shoot him here and leave him for the buzzards to find.”
Cletus shook his head and spit out, “Damn, but you’re just like your old man—headstrong and stubborn as a mule!”
Sarah smiled and reached up to pat Cletus’s cheek, something a man would have gotten shot trying. “I take that as a compliment, Clete. Now, get a move on . . . Please.”
Three hours later, just as the sun was edging over mountain peaks to the east, Smoke rolled over in the back of the buckboard and got up on his hands and knees. His head hung down, and he vomited until he thought he was going to bring up his toes.
Cletus, who was riding on the hurricane deck, looked back over his shoulder and grimaced at the nasty sight. “Shit,” he said, “now you’re gonna have to ride in that the rest of the way home.”
Smoke glared up at him, his face pasty and pale, his eyes sunken and surrounded by black. Suddenly, his lips
