“Larry Noonan.”
“Oh, yeah!” Smoke said, his voice filled with scorn. “I know enough about you to know you’re a yellow little two-bit punk. You killed an unarmed sheepherder. Shot him in the back, so I recall reading on the dodger.”
Noonan flushed but did not deny the damning charges.
“I still got something to settle with this loud-mouthed, sassy pig-farmer’s kid!” Smith said. “You gonna interfere with that, Jensen?”
“No. I’m as aware as you concerning a fair shoot out between two armed men. In this case a man and a boy. But I’ll kill any of your buddies who try to step in.”
“You ready, punk?” Smith sneered at the boy.
Matt had stepped to the edge of the porch. Smoke glanced at him. There was no fear to be seen about the boy. His face was impassive and his hands were steady. He stared at Smith through his thick spectacles.
“Too bad, boy,” Smith tried to rattle Matt. “You got about ten seconds left to live.”
“I have a whole lifetime ahead of me, Mr. Smith. Let’s just say this is payback time for you.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t you remember that time you and those other hooligans rode your horses over my mother’s garden? Ruined it. We didn’t eat very good that winter, Mr. Smith. It was too late to replant. I remember it very well.”
“You gonna bawl about it, kid?” Smith sneered at him.
“No, sir. But I am going to kill you.”
Smith stared at the boy while something crawled slowly across his face. He wanted to brush away the invisible sensation, for he knew what it was. Fear.
“My baby sister died that winter, Mr. Smith. I won’t say it was all because of what you done, even though you did kill our milk cow. She needed milk bad. You had a hand in her dying.”
Smith said nothing. There wasn’t very much left to say.
“Goddamn nesters should have stayed out this area,” Smoke heard one of the cattlemen in the bar say.
Smoke ignored him for the time being. The man had his own conscience to live with. Providing he had one at all.
“Are you ready, Mr. Smith?” Matthew asked, very politely.
“Smith,” one of the Bar V hands spoke softly. “Back away. I don’t like this. The kid’s too damn sure of hisself.”
“I ain’t backin’ up for no damn snot-nose pig farmer’s whelp!” He stared at Matt. “All right, boy. You’ve made your brags. Now do something ’sides talk!”
“After you, Mr. Smith.”
Smith hesitated. Something was terribly, awfully wrong here. He’d seen any number of two-bit, show-off, would-be gunhands in his time. At the last minute, they always backed down. And even before they backed down, they were nervous, their voices shrill, faces shiny with the sweat of fear. But not this kid. Kid, hell! He was just a
“My little sister suffered, Mr. Smith. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.”
“Shut your mouth, damn you!” Smith screamed. “Draw, you punk!”
Matt waited, waited in his worn-out, low-heeled farmer’s boots. In his faded and patched old jeans and carefully mother-mended shirt. His eyes were calm behind his thick glasses.
Smith jerked iron. He just managed to clear leather as Man’s pistol belched and roared smoke and sparks. The first slug hit him in the belly, spinning him around in the dirt. The second slug struck him in the side and knocked him down to one knee. The expression on his face was one of utter disbelief that this could be happening to him. The third slug hit him in the face, entering between nose and upper lip and making one Godawful mess. Smith trembled once and died.
The three remaining Bar V hands stood in open-mouthed shock, all of them knowing they were not nearly as fast as this fresh-faced, as-yet-to-shave farmer’s kid standing on the porch of the store, and all of them so very, very glad they had not tried to brace him.
Leroy stepped out of the store, his short-barreled .44-.40, hammer back, in his hands. The barrel of the carbine was pointed straight and rock-steady at the belly of a Bar V hand.
“I’m out of this, kid!” the hand said quickly.
“You interfere in the fight between Mr. Smoke and Noonan and you’ll be out of it forever,” Leroy told him, his young voice holding hard steel.
Matt had quickly reloaded and holstered the Peacemaker. His calm eyes, magnified behind the thick glasses, looked at the other Bar V hand.
“That goes for me, too, kid!” the hand said.
“Mr. Smoke?” Matt said.
“Matt?”
“If you’ll excuse me for a minute, I got to go behind the building and throw up!” “Go on, Matt.” The boy ran from the porch.
“I done the same thing my first man,” a Bar V rider admitted. “It ain’t nothin’ to be ’shamed of.” He didn’t know what else to do with his hands—only wanting to keep them as far away from his pistol as possible—so he stuck them into the back pockets of his jeans.
