The rifle exploded and kicked back against his shoulder. Smoke immediately pulled the gun back to him and lowered his head a couple of inches. He knew it’d take the sound of the gunshot a second or two to reach the men below, after the bullet had already landed.
The man Smoke had aimed at screamed at the top of his lungs and pitched sideways off his horse. Suddenly, most of the men below were firing their pistols and rifles in all directions as the sound of Smoke’s gunshot echoed and re-echoed around the mountainside, distorting the direction from which it had actually come.
The man Smoke knew as Cletus rode rapidly over to the wounded man, lying low along his mount’s neck to make himself less of a target.
As soon as Cletus got to the man, he jumped off his horse and held his hands up in the air, hollering, “Stop shooting! Cease firing!” as loud as he could.
The gang’s shooting slowed and finally stopped, but it was clear to Smoke from the way the men turned their heads back and forth that they were frightened. It was also clear that most of these men weren’t gunslicks or hired guns, but merely cowboys who were out of their depth in this kind of fracas.
When the men had stopped their firing, Cletus told the ones nearby to keep a sharp lookout and he bent down over Billy Free, who was lying in the snow, holding his right arm with his left hand and moaning and groaning as he writhed on the ground.
Cletus said, “Hold on, Billy. Let me take a look at where you got hit.”
Free moaned again, but moved his left hand. Cletus saw a hole in Free’s right arm just below the shoulder that was leaking blood slowly. A good sign that no major artery had been hit.
Cletus raised the arm, causing Free to clamp his jaws together and to almost shout out in pain. The bullet had gone through the arm, and was sticking in the heavy leather of Free’s fur-lined winter coat.
Cletus took Billy’s bandanna from around the boy’s neck and wrapped the arm tight enough to stop the bleeding, making Billy groan again. “Good news, Billy,” Cletus said. “The bullet went right on through and the bone ain’t broken. You should do all right if’n it don’t get infected.”
“Did anybody see where the bastard fired from?” Billy asked as he struggled to sit up in the snow.
Cletus shook his head. “No. Evidently, he was far enough away that nobody saw the muzzle flash nor heard the report until he’d ducked back in hiding.”
Suddenly, there was a loud thumping sound followed immediately by the sharp report of a rifle shot, and Wally Stevens’s horse screamed and reared up before collapsing onto a shouting Wally.
Wally hollered as loud as he could for somebody to get his damn horse off his leg.
“I . . . think it’s broken,” he sobbed, grimacing and holding his right thigh with both hands.
George Jones and Sam Jackson jumped off their horses, and struggled to lift Wally’s horse enough for him to slide his leg out.
Sure enough, the leg just below the knee was bent at an unnatural angle. Luckily, there was no bone sticking out, but the leg was going to have to be set, and it was a sure thing that Wally was not going to like that, nor the long ride back to the ranch on horseback.
Cletus waved his arms. “You men get off your horses and take cover behind trees,” he shouted. “And for God’s sake, see if you can spot where the gunshots are coming from.”
The men complied with Cletus’s order, and soon all of them were hugging trees in a wide semicircle, their eyes pointed up the hill as they looked for any sign of Jensen.
Up above, Smoke smiled and eased back away from the tree trunk he was behind. Now, he had all the men that were after him sitting around watching for him. As the temperature dropped they’d get colder and colder since they weren’t able to move around. Just what he wanted, and they wouldn’t dare gather around a fire because it would make them perfect targets.
He grinned as he eased up into his saddle and walked his horse over a ridge and away from the men below. Now, he had to find a good spot to make a fire so that when darkness fell, he’d be able to heat some coffee and finish off the last of his bacon and jerky and get some of the chill out of his bones.
An hour later, after Wally’s leg had been set and a couple of tree limbs used as a splint, Cletus looked around at his men. They were all shivering and slapping their arms against their chests as they hid behind trees looking for any sign of movement up above them.
It suddenly dawned on Cletus what Jensen was up to. The sly son of a bitch wanted his men half-frozen to death and scared to move.
Damn, he thought. He got to his feet, feeling an itchy sensation in the back of his neck as he imagined the mountain man drawing a bead on him. “Come on, men,” he shouted, waving them to their feet. “It’s gonna be dark ‘fore long an’ we gotta find a place to make camp.”
Bob Bartlett, whose face was red and chapped from the cold, stammered out, “It’s gonna get colder’n a well- digger’s belt buckle tonight, Clete.”
“Yeah,” Carl Jacoby agreed, looking up at the darkening sky, which was full of dark roiling clouds. “And it looks like more snow’s on the way too.”
“Exactly,” Cletus agreed. “That’s why we’ve got to find a place we can defend that’s protected from above so we can make a fire and get warm.”
“I ain’t sittin’ next to no fire an’ makin’ myself an easy target,” Sam Jackson said grimly.
Cletus shrugged. “Good, Sam. Then when morning comes we’ll throw your frozen carcass on the coals to thaw you out so you can sit a saddle.”
By the time darkness had fallen, Cletus had managed to find a series of large boulders that were lying in a line across the slope of the hillside. He had his men make a camp on the downhill side where they’d be safe from gunshots from above, and he built a large fire.
“Clete,” Sarah said when she saw the pile of brush and limbs he’d stacked up. “Jensen will be able to see that fire for miles.”
