As the dot on the landscape grew larger, Del squinted his eyes. “Smoke Jensen and the Moab Kid.”
Sandi smiled and Alice said, “I’ll make fresh coffee.”
Beans sniffed the air. “Lots of dust in the air.”
“I think Cord’s had some visitors,” Smoke replied. “Look at the hands gathered around the house.”
The men swung down and looped the reins around the hitchrail. Cord shook hands with them both and introduced Smoke to those punchers he had not met.
“Fancy seeing you, Beans,” Cord said, a twinkle in his eyes. “It’s been so long since you’ve come callin’. Hours, at least.”
Beans just grinned.
“Gather your men, Cord,” Smoke told the man. “This is something that everybody should hear.”
Cord’s three sons had just ridden in. His other four punchers were out on the range. Everybody gathered around on the porch and listened as Smoke related what Rita had told him.
“Damn!” Max summed it up, then glanced at his mother, who was giving him a warning look for the use of profanity.
“Let’s kick it around,” Smoke said. “Anybody got any suggestions?”
“Take it to them ’fore they do it to us,” Corgill said.
“No proof,” Cord said. “Only the word of Rita and she didn’t even see the men; just heard them talkin’.”
“If we don’t do something,” Cal said, “we’re just gonna be open targets, and they’ll pick us off one at a time.”
Cord shook his head. “Maybe, but I don’t think so. I think they got to do everything all at once. At night. If what Rita says is true—and I ain’t got no reason to doubt it—they’ll split their people and hit us at the same time. And they can’t leave any survivors.”
“I’ve got people bunching the cattle and moving them to high graze,” Smoke said. “They’ll scatter some, but they can be rounded up. From now on, we stay close to the ranch house.”
Cord nodded his head and looked at Willie. “Ride on out, Willie. Tell the boys to start moving them up toward summer graze. Get as much as you can done, and then you boys get on back here. We’re gonna lose some to rustlers, for a fact. But it’s either that or we all die spread out.” He glanced at Smoke. “When do you think they’ll hit us?”
Smoke shook his head. “Tonight. Next week. Next month. No way of knowing.”
Cord did some fancy cussing, while his wife listened and looked on with a disapproving frown on her face. “We may end up taking to the hills and fighting defensively.”
“I’m thinking that we will,” Smoke agreed.
“You mean leave the house?” Sandi protested. “But they’ll just move in!”
“Can’t be helped, girl,” her father told her. “We can always clean up and rebuild.”
“Or just go on over and kill Dooley Hanks,” Rock McCorkle said grimly.
“Rock!” his mother admonished.
Cord put a big hand on her shoulder. “It may come to that, Alice. God help me, I don’t want it, but we may have no choice in the matter.”
“Here comes Jake,” Del said. “And he’s a-foggin’ it.”
The puncher slowed up as he approached the house, to keep the dust down, and walked his horse up to the main house, dismounting.
“What’s up, Jake?” the foreman asked.
“I just watched about fifteen guys cut across our range, comin’ from the northeast. Hardcases, ever’ one of them. They was headin’ toward Gibson.”
Alice handed the puncher a cup of coffee and a biscuit, then looked at her husband. He wore an increasingly grim expression.
‘The damn easterners talk about law and order,” Cord said. ”Well, where is it when it comes down to the nut- cuttin’?”
Smoke pulled out his right hand Colt and held it up for all to see. “Right here, Cord. Right here.”
“The Cat Jennings gang,” Charlie said. He had been to town and back while Smoke was talking with the men and women of the Double Circle C. “He’s been up in Canada raisin’ Cain for the past few years.”
“This here thing is shapin’ up to be a power play,” Pistol said.
“Yeah,” Lujan agreed. “With us right in the middle of it.”
“Damn near seventy gunslingers,” Silver Jim mused. “And the most we can muster is twenty, and that’s stretchin’ it.”
“One thing about it,” Smoke stuck some small humor into a grim situation, “we’ve sure taken the strain off of a lot of other communities in the West.”
“Yeah,” Hardrock agreed. “Ever’ outlaw and two-bit pistol-handler from five states has done con-verged on us. And it wouldn’t do a bit of good to wire for the law. No badge-toter in his right mind would stick his face into this situation.”
“Must be at least a quarter of a million dollars worth of reward money hanging over them boys’ heads,” Silver Jim said. “And that’s something to think about.”
