Sally. He had a reputation, too, as a man who was fast on the draw, maybe the fastest on the entire frontier. Smoke had no desire to live the life of a gunfighter, though. He drew the walnut-butted .44 on his hip only when he had to…but as many men had learned to their short-lived but final regret, he didn’t cotton to being pushed around.
Just as Preacher had helped Smoke out when he was orphaned, so Smoke had taken in Matt Cavanaugh, who had lost his family at an even younger age. That was back in the days before Smoke had settled down, when he was still searching for gold in Colorado. He had found it, and since Matt helped him work the claim, Smoke felt that Matt deserved an equal share in it. He had also taught Matt everything that Preacher had taught him about how to survive on the frontier, and even more importantly, how to live his life as a decent, honorable man.
When the time came for Matt to strike out on his own, as a tribute to the man who had become like an older brother to him he had taken Smoke’s last name, and ever since he had been known as Matt Jensen. It was a name that was becoming more widely known, too, as Matt seemed drawn to danger and adventure like a moth to flame. He wasn’t reckless, but he didn’t back down when challenged.
So the three men who waited in this stifling cabin in the Big Horn Mountains shared not a drop of common blood…and yet they were family. Bonds even stronger than blood held them together, bonds forged by love and respect and shared danger. Most of the time, each of them went their own way, especially Preacher and Matt, both of whom tended to be fiddle-footed, but distance didn’t mean anything to men such as these. When one needed help, the others would come a-runnin’.
That was why it looked like the three of them might well die together.
Preacher squinted over the barrel of his Sharps through the loophole and said, “Those hombres must not have the sense God gave a badger! Here they come again!”
Whoever had built this cabin back in the old days had known what he was doing. The area around it was cleared of trees and brush for a good fifty yards around. That way no one could sneak up on the place unseen. Some thick stumps remained, though, where trees had been chopped down, and as some of the hired gunmen charged out of the trees, they threw themselves behind those stumps and opened fire, aiming at the loopholes they had spotted from the powder smoke that gushed through them from time to time.
“Son of a gun!” Matt exclaimed as slugs chewed splinters from the log wall all around the loophole he was using. He was forced to draw back momentarily. So were Smoke and Preacher.
“More coming out of the trees!” Smoke called. He saw men dart out from cover, race past their companions who were firing from behind the stumps, and then dive behind other stumps. “They’re leapfrogging at us, blast it!”
It was true. As soon as the second wave of attackers had gone to ground,
That wasn’t the only trickery going on. “Circling to your left, Matt!” Smoke said. Matt twisted in that direction, thrust the barrel of his Winchester through an opening, and began firing as fast as he could work the rifle’s lever.
Smoke bit back a curse as he spotted some of the gunmen running to his right, trying a flanking move in that direction. He wished one of his friends, Sheriff Monte Carson or the gambler and gunhawk Louis Longmont, was here to cover that fourth side, although he wouldn’t have really wished them into such a predicament as the one in which he, Matt, and Preacher found themselves.
There was only one thing to do. He leaned his Winchester against the wall, threw aside the bar that kept the door closed, drew one of the long-barreled .44s he carried in his holsters, and yanked the door open. Then he palmed out the other Colt and leaped outside, landing on his belly.
Both six-guns began to roar. Firing in two directions at once was a tricky, almost impossible thing to do, but in the hands of Smoke Jensen, guns could do almost anything. He could make ’em sing and dance if he wanted to, folks said.
He made them sing now, and it was a melody of death.
His left-hand gun slammed bullets into the bodies of the men charging head-on at the cabin. The right-hand Colt bucked and roared as it tracked the gunnies who were trying to circle in that direction. Men cried out and stumbled or spun off their feet as Smoke’s lead ripped through them.
From the corner of his eye, Matt had seen Smoke’s daring play, and he jumped into the doorway and used his rifle to mow down the men going to the left. At the back of the room, Preacher had thrown down his empty Sharps and snatched up another Winchester, and with deadly accurate fire he held off the men attacking from that direction.
For about thirty seconds, it sounded like a small war was going on as the thunderous gunfire echoed back from the peaks surrounding the beautiful little valley where the cabin was located. Then the hammers of Smoke’s guns clicked on empty chambers. With Matt covering him, he scrambled to hands and knees and dived back through the doorway. Matt hurried after him, slamming the door closed and dropping the bar in its brackets again.
“You give them ol’ boys what-for?” Preacher drawled.
“I reckon we did, Preacher,” Smoke said as he sat with his back against the wall and started reloading his Colts. “The last I saw, they were skedaddling back to the trees.”
“The ones who could still move, that is,” Matt added.
The other two knew what he meant. They had turned back this attack and done considerable damage to the enemy force. As silence fell again, they heard the pathetic moans of wounded men. Not one of the defenders wasted any sympathy on those varmints. The gunnies had known what they were getting into.
“It was a mite of a hornets’ nest in here,” Preacher said. “Plenty o’ slugs flyin’ around.” He touched a gnarled finger to his cheek, and the tip came away bloody. “Felt like one of ’em kissed me, and sure enough it did.”
That little bullet burn on Preacher’s cheek was the only injury they had suffered, however. They had been very lucky so far, and they knew it. Luck would only last so long, though, and they knew that, too.
“Bannerman must be paying those boys pretty well,” Matt commented. “That many gun-wolves don’t come cheap.”
Smoke said, “If there’s one thing Reece Bannerman has, it’s money, and plenty of it.”
“Then why’s the dang fool want more?” Preacher asked. “Why’s it so all-fired important that he steal this valley
