“I put it all together just this morning, after the news about Cosgrove. I had me a hunch all along, and that just sewed it up in my mind.”
“What?” Utah moved closer. He had a hunch he knew.
“Jensen don’t wanna kill no more, Utah. I think he’s run out of nerve.”
“But I been hearin’ you tellin’ them counts and dukes and such that . . .”
“I know what I been tellin’ them. I been doin’ that deliberate, tryin’ to get them skittish. I want Jensen myself, Utah. I want him bad.”
“I see what you mean. I had the same feelin’ this mornin’.”
“Think about it. Jensen’s probably gonna slip into camp and scare the drawers offen them ladies. But he ain’t gonna kill, Utah. He ain’t got it in him no more. He’s all burned out. If Tom Lilly had faced Jensen last year, Jensen would have shot him without blinkin’. That rummy from the town told us that Jensen shot Tom in the arm. In the arm! That ain’t the Smoke Jensen I been hearin’ songs sung about and books writ about and stories bein’ told. You see what I mean?”
“You right, John T.” He grinned in the lightly falling mist. “You gonna be famous, John T. I can see it now. The man who kilt Smoke Jensen.”
“That’s right. I want you boys to just stand back when we corner him. I want him, Utah. Me. Understood?”
“You got it, John T. He’s all yourn.”
Maria did not stir at the slight bumping sound in the night. The bumping sound was Smoke laying the butt of a
.44 against Gunter’s head. Hard. She did not even stir when the lightly falling rain and the cold winds entered through the slit in the back of their tent. What did get her full attention was when a hard hand clamped over her mouth and another hand grabbed her by her long blonde hair and jerked her halfway out of the blankets.
Her wide open and frightened eyes looked into the coldest, meanest eyes she thought she had ever seen in her life.
“I’m Jensen,” the big man said in a whisper. “You didn’t pull out after I roped and trussed-up and warned your hired skunk today, so I thought I’d pay you a visit and tell you personally. No, your man’s not dead. I just conked him on the noggin. He’ll have a headache, but nothing else when he wakes up. But if you continue to chase me, he will be dead. Do you understand that, lady?”
She nodded her head.
Outside, the sky rumbled darkly with deep thunder and the rain picked up.
Smoke looked through the very dim light at the badly frightened woman. Gunter snored in his Smoke-induced unconsciousness. “I want to be left alone, lady. That’s all I want. You people leave these mountains now. Do it tomorrow... first thing. I don’t want to see any of you women hurt. But if you keep on chasing me, odds are you’ll get hurt. You understand?”
She nodded her head.
Smoke turned her head with the biggest and hardest and roughest hands she had ever felt in her life. She looked at his guns. He had two in holsters, and two stuck down in his gunbelt. “Now what you’ll do, lady, is this: I’m leaving. You’re going to count to one hundred and then you can squall and holler all you want to. But if you start screaming before that real slow hundred count is over, I’m going to turn around and fill this tent so full of lead there isn’t a chance you won’t catch at least one slug. Do you understand all that?”
Again, she nodded her head.
Smoke lowered her head back to the silk pillows and pulled the covers up to her eyes. “Goodbye, your ladyship. I really hope I never see you again.”
Then he was gone, moving silently through the rainy night.
Maria lay in her warm blankets and dutifully counted to one hundred. Then she started bellowing like a lost calf in a hail storm.
The camp was filled with men in various stages of dress and undress.
“Smoke Jensen!” Maria screamed. “He was in my tent. He manhandled me and hit Gunter on the head.” Then she lost all her expensive finishing school training. “Five thousand dollars to the man who kills that son of a bitch!”
The night erupted in gunfire, with nobody hitting anything except raindrops. But in the two minutes that Smoke had been gone, he had covered a lot of ground, far out of range of even the best rifle made. He had not heard Maria’s offer for his head. An hour later, Smoke had dried off, changed clothes, and was snug in his lean-to.
He had built a hat-sized fire, boiled his coffee and fried some bacon, and then put out the fire. He leaned back amid the sweet-smelling boughs that lined the ground under his ground sheet and blankets.
He chuckled. If he hadn’t been mistaken, Princess Maria had been so scared she had peed in her expensive drawers.
The morning brought with it a mountain downpour. There was no way anybody was leaving camp in all this fury. Gunter was nursing a headache to go with the lump on the side of his head and Maria was still cussing, furious because a damn commoner had dared put his filthy hands on her.
“You was right, John T.,” Utah said. “Jensen could have kilt a dozen of us last night. He’s lost it.”
John T. nodded his head in agreement. “But it shore shook them noblepeople up, didn’t it. Even ol’ ramrod-up- the-butt von Hausen is lookin’ at Jensen in a different light. We got it made, Utah. Got it made, man!”
But John T. was wrong about von Hausen’s different attitude.
“Nothing that Jensen has done so far agrees with all the talk about him,” von Hausen told his group. “The man could have demoralized the camp last night. He could have killed a dozen men. He didn’t. Why?”
Gunter shook his head and grimaced at the pain.
Hans shrugged his shoulders.
