“Marshal!” Jack cried. “I can’t see! I’m blind. Oh, God, where’s that holy-roller. I thought he’d done come in to comfort me.”
“I’m right here, son. Are you a Saint?”
“I ain’t nothing,” Jack whispered.
The barkeep leaned over and looked at Jack Lynch. “Yeah. He’s something, all right. He’s dead!”
2
Smoke posted his letter to Sally at the hotel and left before dawn the next morning, amid a light falling of snow. The big Appaloosa he rode was rough and shaggy-looking, with his winter coat still on. His pack horse was tough and had been patiently trained by Smoke.
Smoke rode for five miles before dismounting and building a small fire to prepare the coffee and bacon he’d resupplied back in the town. After he ate the bacon he sopped chunks of bread into the grease and finished off his meal with another cup of hot, strong coffee.
He camped for the night close to a little river, with snow-capped Marsh Peak to his east. The morning dawned pristine white, with several inches of new snow on the ground.
The country he was riding through was wild and high and beautiful, but already being touched by the hand of man. Smoke remembered when he rode through this country as a boy, years back, with the legendary mountain man, Preacher. The two of them could ride for days, sometimes weeks, without ever seeing a white man. No more.
For the most part, the Indians no long posed any threat. Only occasionally would a few young bucks bust loose from some reservation and cause trouble. The west was slowly being tamed. The outlaw Jesse James had been killed, shot in the back by a man he’d called friend, so Smoke had heard. Jesse had given Smoke a pistol back during the war, when Smoke was just a boy, trying to hold on to a hard-scrabble farm back in Missouri, while his daddy was off in the fighting. John Wesley Hardin was still in prison down in Texas. Earp had killed Curly Bill Brocius just last year. Sam Bass was rotting in the grave, as was Clay Allison. Mysterious Dave was still around, but Smoke had no quarrel with him. As far as he knew, Mysterious Dave was still down in Dodge City.
But someone had been sticking close to his backtrail for two days now, and Smoke was getting a little curious as to who he, or they, might be.
He thought he was in Wyoming, but he wasn’t sure. If he was, what was left of Fort Bridger would be off to the west some few miles. Smoke didn’t know if there was anything left of the old post and wasn’t that interested in checking it out.
But he would like to know who was trailing him. And why.
He was heading up toward the Green, to a little valley where a friend of his raised cattle, good cattle, and he’d written Smoke, telling him of the bulls he had for sale. The railroads had tracks all over the country now-well, almost—and getting the bulls back to his ranch would be no problem; a short drive on either end of a rail trip. Smoke could have taken the train most of the way, but with Sally gone back East to visit her family, the kids in school in Europe, Smoke had felt that old faithful tug of the High Lonesome and decided to saddle up and ride the distance.
He began seeing familiar landmarks and knew he was in the Cedar Mountains. In a couple of days, barring any difficulties, he’d cross the Blacks Fork and then pick up the Green River and follow it all the way to his friend’s ranch.
He found a little spring bubbling out of the earth, a spot of graze for the horses around it, and made an early camp. It was still cold, but the snow was gone-at least for the present-and Smoke had killed a couple of rabbits and needed to get them on a spit, cooking.
He stripped saddle and pack from the horses and watched them roll and snort and kick and shake, then settle down for a bit of grazing. Smoke gathered up twigs to get his fire going, then laid on heavier wood and made himself a spit. He got the rabbits cooking, filled his coffee pot with cold spring water right at the mouth and fixed his coffee in the blackened old pot.
The horses abruptly stopped grazing and lifted their heads, ears pricked up. Smoke picked up his rifle and eared the hammer back.
He heard the sounds of hooves, coming from the north. Then the call. “Halloo the fire! I’m friendly and I got my own grub so’s I won’t be eatin’ none of yourn. The twilight gets lonesome without conversation. All right to come in?”
“Come on,” Smoke called.
The man looked to be in his sixties—late sixties—but he was spry and Smoke figured him to be a man of the mountains. Just a tad too young to have been a part of the heyday of mountain men, but nevertheless a man who’d probably spent his life in the High Lonesome. Smoke had been halfway raised by mountain men, and he knew the mark it left on a man. He had it himself.
“Light and sit,” Smoke told him.
“Obliged. Let me tend to my animals and then I’ll join you by the fire. My good horse here got hisself all tangled up in some of that goddamned barbed wire a couple of days ago. I got to put some salve on the cuts. The devil’s own doin’s, that’s what that stuff is.”
A lot of cowboys called barbed wire the devil’s hatband. It was used, but many despised it.
“Name’s Lute,” the old man said.
“Pleased,” Smoke said.
Lute looked under his horse at him and smiled when Smoke did not offer his name. “I got to call you somethin’,
