No one replied.
“That’s what I figured,” the man said.
Smoke removed the bar from the door and moved back to the overturned table laying his rifle on the floor, pulling his Colts and easing back the hammers. He waited. When they opened that door—and he figured they would come all bunched up for moral support—more than a few of them were going to be in for a very nasty surprise.
Once more, the outside air was filled with lead. Smoke waited.
“Hell, he’s had it,” a man called. “I’m goin’ in.”
“I’ll go with you,” another called, and several more added their agreement to that.
Smoke waited.
He heard the jingle of spurs as the hired guns and bounty hunters approached the cabin. Smoke had removed his boots and arranged them behind the table, placing them so it appeared he was lying dead, his body concealed behind the table. He slipped on moccasins and then stepped back into the shadows of another room.
The front door was pushed open with the barrel of a rifle.
“See anything?” a man asked.
“Hell, are you crazy? I ain’t stickin’ my head in yonder!”
“I see his boots,” another said, looking through a gun slit. “He’s all sprawled out and stone cold dead behind a table.”
The room crowded with men.
Smoke opened fire, the Colts belching sparks and flame and death. He pulled the pistol he’d taken from the saddlebags and ended the lopsided gunfight. One lone gun hand tried to rise up and shoot him. Smoke shot him between the eyes. “Your mamma should have told you there’d be days like this,” Smoke said.
He then counted the bodies. Six. He figured maybe three were left on the outside still alive, and that included the badly wounded man by the corral.
He reloaded and moved toward the open door, staying close to the log wall. “Come on, boys!” he shouted. “Come join the party.”
“Hell with you, Jensen!” a man shouted. 'They’s always another day. We’re gone!”
“Then ride, scumbag!”
The man cursed him. A moment later, the sounds of horses galloping away reached Smoke.
Smoke gathered up all the weapons and tied the rifles together. He found a bounty hunter’s horse and stuffed the saddlebags full of pistols and gun belts, looping some over the saddle horn. He secured the rifles to the saddle and led the horse to the cabin. Shoving the dead out of the doorway, Smoke led his own horse outside and mounted up. He walked his horse over to the corral and looked down at the man lying on the ground. The man was dead. He left him there and rode out into the plain. The first man he’d shot put of the saddle was lying on the ground, on his back, his eyes open and staring at Smoke. His shirt front was covered with blood.
“You’re a devil” the man gasped.
“I’ve been called worse,” Smoke acknowledged from the saddle.
“I ain’t gonna make it, am I?”
“Not likely.”
The man cussed him but made no attempt to reach for the pistol still in leather.
Smoke waited until the man stopped cussing and tried to catch his breath. 'Anything you want me to do for you?'
“Fall out of the saddle dead!”
Jud Vale had hired hardcases, for sure. No give in them. “Would you really have shot one of those little boys over at the Box T?”
“Just as fast as I’d shoot you, Jensen.”
“Then I don’t think I’ll turn my back to you.”
“It wouldn’t be a smart thing to do, for a fact.”
Smoke sat his saddle for a few minutes. The gunny began to cough up blood. Twice he tried to pull his pistol. But the thong covered the hammer and he could not clear leather. The gunny died with a curse on his lips.
Smoke turned his horse and slowly rode toward Box T range.
17
Jud Vale pulled in his horns, so to speak. Even with his monumental ego and glaring arrogance, he was shocked to the bone at the havoc and carnage that Smoke Jensen had wreaked upon his possessions and hired guns. He had not believed it possible that one man could do so much.
A half dozen of his older and wiser hardcases drew their time and drifted out of Southeastern Idaho, wanting no more of Smoke Jensen. Had most of those who left known Jensen was involved in this matter, they would not have signed on in the first place.
Jud spent a lot of time on his front porch—while his back porch was being rebuilt, again—drinking coffee and wallowing in his festering anger. He had sent out the word that he was still hiring men at fighting wages, and men were drifting in. But even Jud Vale could see that most of them were trash and scum. That made no difference; he
