the darkness.
Looking around to make certain he wasn’t being observed, Smoke removed a small piece of cardboard from under his shirt. On one side the cardboard read: PEAR’S SOAP.
On the other side, Smoke had hand-lettered a sign of his own. Using his knife, he pried a nail out from the gallows, just far enough to allow him to attach the sign.
Come one, come all
Nobody is going to fall.
On Friday there will be nothing to see,
‘Cause Bobby Lee will be with me.
Smoke chuckled. All right, he conceded, it wasn’t up to the level of Longfellow, but it was certainly appropriate for the occasion.
Somewhere, a dog began yapping, and a bit closer, he could hear a baby crying. A cat jumped down off the porch from Tilghman’s Apothecary, and ran quickly and silently across the street in front of Smoke, bounding gracefully onto the front porch of Goldstein’s Feed and Seed. If anyone was watching through a window of one of the dark buildings, they would assume Smoke was riding out of town, which is exactly what he wanted them to think.
Smoke rode between the track and the river for about a mile beyond the edge of town. Just to the left of him, the river was a narrow, babbling ribbon of black, with silver highlights from the three-quarter moon that hung overhead. Out here he heard the yipping and yowling of a coyote, and the quieter, but closer hoot of an owl.
Once he had ridden far enough into the dark to be absolutely certain that he could no longer be seen by anyone who might have been watching him, he made a very big U, then came back into the town, only this time he entered Cloverdale, not on Freemont Street, which was the main street, but through the alley that ran between Freemont Street and Vaughan Lane. There was no ambient light back here, and the adjacent buildings cast shadows over the moon glow so that the alley was exceptionally dark. Smoke rode very slowly, trusting his horse, Seven, to find its way.
Smoke stopped behind Bloomberg’s Mercantile, then tied off his horse.
“Wait here, Seven, I’m about to bring you some company,” he said. Seven snorted and shook his head as if he had understood every word, and Smoke picked his way carefully through the bottle-strewn alley as he moved toward the jailhouse. When he reached the jail, he crossed the alley and stepped into a barn that was just behind the jail. It was very dark inside the barn, but he could hear, as well as smell, the horses. Removing a small candle from his pocket, he popped a match with his fingernail, then lit the candle. Wedging the candle between two boards, he used the wavering light to pick out the gray. He saw too that the saddle was still in place on the half wall.
Once he had everything located, he extinguished the candle lest someone see a light in the barn and wonder how it got there. Walking over to where he had seen the saddle, he picked it up, then felt his way into the gray’s stall. Working in the dark, he put the saddle on the horse’s back and it whickered, shook, and stomped its left front foot.
“Easy, boy,” Smoke said soothingly. He cupped the gray’s ear in his hand. “I’m a friend of Bobby Lee’s. I’m taking you to him.”
Smoke’s soothing voice had the effect of calming the horse. He cinched the saddle down, then led the gray out of the barn, and then three buildings up the alley, where he tied it off alongside Seven.
“See here, Seven, I told you I was going to bring you some company. Now you two get acquainted,” he said easily. “I want the two of you to get to know each other because if everything goes right, you’ll be spending a lot of time together.
“That is, if everything goes right,” he repeated under his breath.
From Seven’s saddlebags, he pulled out the package he had bought at the mining supply store earlier in the day, then removed the wrapper, exposing two sticks of dynamite. With dynamite in hand, he started back toward the jailhouse, leaving the horses behind him. He had tied the horses behind the Mercantile store rather than the jail because he wanted to make certain the animals were far enough away not to be hurt by the detonation of the dynamite.
There was definitely going to be an explosion, and it was going to be a big one, because Smoke planned to blow a hole in the back of the cell that Bobby Lee was occupying. The challenge would be in getting an explosion of sufficient force to blast a hole large enough for Bobby Lee to crawl through, without making it so big that it brought down the entire building and injured, or even killed, Bobby Lee. But though that might challenge most, it wouldn’t be a particular challenge to Smoke. He had done a lot of exploring, prospecting, and even mining in his young life, and he had, long ago, become an expert in the use of explosives such as nitroglycerine and dynamite.
When Smoke reached the back of the jailhouse, he stopped and listened very closely. Though muffled, he could still hear sounds from the saloon at the far end of the street, the tinkling of the piano, augmented now by the high- pitched laughter of one of the women, as well as the loud guffaws of more than one man. He could also hear crickets and other night insects. From the corral of the freight wagon company came the bray of a mule.
So far, not one person had seen him, and that was very good. He didn’t need to be arousing any suspicions now.
Smoke got down on his knees and studied the brick wall. He found one brick that was cracked all the way through. Pulling his knife from its rawhide scabbard, Smoke began working at the mortar around the brick until all of it was chipped away. With the mortar gone, it was easy to pull out the broken half of the brick. That gave Smoke a hole into which he could place the two sticks of dynamite.
Smoke put the two sticks of dynamite in the hole, wedging them back in place with the broken pieces of brick. Then he pulled the small piece of candle from his pocket again and, once more popping the match head with his
