inclining his head toward the mount. “You’ll notice he ain’t wearin’ no guns, and if I’m not mistaken, he probably had a long gun or two in his saddle boots on his horse.”
“Yeah, so what?” Biggs asked sarcastically. “That just means that son of a bitch Jensen stole ‘em.”
“What it means,” Cletus tried to explain, “is if we go charging up into those mountains, Jensen is gonna pick us off like flies. He’s an experienced mountain man who knows what he’s doing, and now that we know he’s armed with a long gun and a couple of six-killers, we have to be smarter and more careful than we’ve ever been before or most of us ain’t gonna be coming home.”
“You sound like you’re plumb scared to death of that son of a bitch, Clete,” Sam Jackson said, disgust in his voice.
“Respecting the abilities of your enemies ain’t being scared, Sam,” Cletus answered, not rising to the bait in Jackson’s tone, “it’s being smart. You want to go hightailing it up into those woods, yelling and screaming and not paying caution no mind, you go right ahead. I’ll do my best to find your dead carcass and get it back to your wife so she and your kids can plant you proper.”
Cletus’s words sobered the men and quieted them down a bit so they weren’t so boisterous. “Now, I’m still the leader of this group, an’ anybody don’t think so is welcome to mosey on along by themselves, but whoever stays is gonna do what I say or I’ll put a bullet in their head myself. You all got my drift?” he asked.
There were mumbles of assent, but no one left and no one disputed his right of leadership. “Now, here’s what we’re gonna do,” he said, motioning the men to draw closer so they could hear his plans.
“First off, we’re gonna pair up. No one rides alone or gets out of sight of his partner. Secondly, we’re gonna ride with our weapons in our hands, loaded up six and six and the hammer cocked at all times. We’re not going to give Jensen a chance to take any more of us out without a fight.”
As the men nodded their agreement, he went on with his attack strategy. “Now that the storm has quit, he won’t be able to move around the mountain without leaving tracks, so we’ve got to be careful not to get crosswise with one another and spoil his trail. We’re gonna spread out, each pair staying in eye contact with another pair, and we’re gonna criss-cross those woods until we pick up his trail, and then we’re gonna dog him until we catch him.”
“And then we’re gonna blow his damn head off!” Billy Free shouted.
Cletus silenced him with a glare. “No, and then we’re going to try and capture him, if we can do it without losing any more men,” Cletus said. “Angus MacDougal is still paying for this trip and he wants Jensen alive, if at all possible. So, if we can, we’re going to try and take him back to the ranch in one piece.”
“What if he don’t agree to that proposition, Boss?” George Jones asked.
Cletus smiled grimly. “Then we’ll blow his ass to hell and back!”
When the men all laughed at this, Cletus said, “Now, let’s make a quick camp and get some hot coffee and some good grub into our bellies. It’s gonna get awful cold tonight, and I don’t want to give our position away by making any campfires. We’ll eat a hot meal now, and tonight we’ll try and have a cold camp.”
“And I want to add another hundred dollars to the man who gets the drop on Jensen so we can capture him,” Sarah said.
“What does a man get who puts lead in the son of a bitch?” Billy Free asked sarcastically.
Sarah stared at him. “I’ll let my daddy deal with that man,” she said, “but I don’t think he’ll appreciate what my daddy does.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Smoke had a problem. The storm had stopped and the day was clearing off, clouds disappearing as fast as they’d appeared days before. He knew that with no storm to cover his tracks, the deep snow would lead the gang that had taken him prisoner right to him. Also, his dark clothes were going to stand out against the white snow like a road sign. He was going to have to be very careful moving around to make sure he stayed under cover.
The good news was that he was a good mile and a half up the lower slope of the mountain he’d been heading for. Now the gang was going to have to come after him in his territory, where he was right at home and where they were interlopers.
As he rode, he checked his weapons. He had two pistols, each with six cartridges, and a rather old and beaten-up Winchester that looked as if its owner hadn’t cleaned it in years. He shook his head, knowing he wouldn’t be able to trust it for accuracy at much over a hundred yards.
He leaned forward, took the canteen off the saddle horn, and pulled its cork, taking a sniff of the contents. He wrinkled his nose. The man he’d killed had had his canteen filled with whiskey instead of water or coffee. That’s no good, he thought. His experience had taught him that men who drank whiskey when the weather was below freezing didn’t last too long. Instead of warming a body up, as many flatlanders thought, whiskey actually lowered the body’s resistance to freezing temperatures.
He guided the horse into the middle of a small copse of trees, so he’d be out of sight from the slopes below, and dismounted. He opened the saddlebags to see what else he’d inherited with the dead man’s horse.
Good news at last. The man had a large chunk of bacon wrapped in waxed paper in a sack along with several biscuits and a couple of pieces of jerky. There was also a small can of Arbuckle’s coffee, but no pot or skillet to use to cook either the bacon or the coffee in.
No matter, he thought. A good mountain man can always improvise.
In the other saddlebag was an old monocular scope, the kind you pulled out and looked through with one eye. It wasn’t as good as a decent pair of binoculars, but it would do. Nestled in the bag was a box of .44 cartridges for the rifle and for the pistols as well. That was an additional fifty rounds he had to add to what was already in the weapons.
In addition to the shells, there was a folded-up yellow rain cape and a small woven blanket and a box of lucifers. Along with the waterproof ground blanket folded behind the saddle, he would at least have some protection against the cold when night fell.
He nodded, grinning. All in all, not too bad, he thought. He had managed to escape and to acquire not only
