full up. He patted the steeldust on the neck and spoke to it for a moment, then he started to move out.
Movement on the other side of the creek halted him. He squatted down and watched. He was sure he had seen movement. Or had he? He waited. There! He’d been right. Somebody, or something, was sure enough down there. He went back to his saddlebags and got his field glasses.
He moved several hundred yards closer to the mansion, adjusted the glasses for range and once more settled down to wait. Then he picked out the shape of a man. It startled him as the face of the man came into view. It was almost like looking into a mirror. There was some difference, of course, but the facial features of the man were startlingly similar to Smoke’s own.
Clint Perkins. It had to be. But what the devil was he up to?
He watched as the man left the creek and ran to one of several privies behind the house. The privies surprised Smoke. He thought Jud would have installed some of those new fangled indoor water closets he’d seen back East.
Clint began working his way closer to the mansion, finally ducking into a shed not far from the back porch. The call of a meadowlark drifted to Smoke, and Smoke could tell the call was not real. Within a moment, a young woman stepped out onto the porch, shaking out a small rug.
Someone must have said something from inside the house, for the girl turned her head. Smoke could see her lips move in reply. She had an angry expression on her face. Her reply must have satisfied the questioner for she moved off the porch and walked toward an outhouse.
She angled toward the privy just behind the shed; that move would effectively block the view of anyone watching from the house, but not from the ridge and Smoke’s magnified eyes.
The girl did not go into the outhouse. But she did disappear from view. So the shed either had a back door or a couple of loosened boards. Clint Perkins, the so-called Robin Hood of the West either had him a girlfriend, or was planning to rescue the lady from the sweaty evil clutches of Jud Vale. Probably a combination of both, Smoke thought. This Clint Perkins, as it was turning out, was quite the ladies’ man.
Smoke wondered just how many starry-eyed women Clint had loved and left and how many woods’ colts this dubious Robin Hood had in his back trail?
After only a few moments, a man wearing two guns belted around his waist stepped onto the porch and, judging from the expression on his face, started yelling. The girl appeared, seeming to come from out of the privy. And from the expression on her face, she seemed to be yelling at the man. When she reached the porch, the man slapped her, staggering her, only the railing preventing her from falling off the porch. He grabbed her by the arm and hurried her into the house, slamming the door behind them.
Interesting, Smoke thought. Then he wondered how many more young ladies Jud Vale was keeping against their will in the huge mansion?
Smoke settled back in a more comfortable position, his back to a tree, his hat on the ground beside him and waited and watched. This might prove to be a very interesting morning.
And Smoke might not have to do anything for a change. Except enjoy the show.
12
Smoke shifted his attentions to the front of the mansion as Jud Vale stepped out onto the porch with a cup of coffee in his hand and took a chair. Smoke envied him that cup of coffee, for a fact. His had been a cold camp the night before, and he sorely missed his usual full pot of hot, strong, black cowboy coffee upon waking up.
He contended himself by chewing on a biscuit sandwich made with fried salt pork and chasing it down with sips of water from his canteen.
The girl Smoke had seen meeting with Clint Perkins came out onto the porch and began talking to Jud, gesturing with her hands.
Jud shook his head a couple of times and then, with an angry expression on his face, pointed toward the door. The girl, her shoulders slumped in defeat, walked back inside the house.
Jud stood up and hollered something; Smoke could see his lips move but could not make out the words. Three men stepped out of a bunkhouse and walked toward the house. Three more men, with the girl in tow, quite unwillingly, Smoke noted, by the way one held onto her arm, came out of the mansion to stand by Jud on the porch.
The man holding onto the girl nodded his head and the three went back into the mansion. Shifting his glasses. Smoke watched as Clint ran the short distance from shed to back porch and then disappeared into the mansion.
Gong to get interesting very soon, Smoke thought.
Jud’s horse was saddled and led to the porch, and Jud and three of his bodyguards rode off. Smoke finished his biscuit and salt meat and waited for something to start popping.
It wasn’t long in coming.
One man was suddenly hurled through a side window, the side of his head bloody. Gunfire shattered the early morning quiet and one of Jud’s bodyguards came staggering out onto the back porch. He fell over the railing and lay still.
More gunfire came from within the house and the third bodyguard fell out of the front door, on his back, on the porch. The front of his shirt was bloody.
Wisps of smoke began leaking out of an open window in the rear of the house as Clint and the girl ran out the back door and toward the creek. Several moments later, Smoke watched as two horses pounded away, the girl riding astride. They topped a hill and were gone.
“Robin Hood strikes again,” Smoke muttered, as he took out another biscuit and settled back, just as Jud Vale and his bodyguards came galloping back to the ranch.
The fire had been confined to the kitchen and had been extinguished in a few minutes. Jud was talking to the man who had been bashed on the noggin and tossed out the side window.
