“You got my word on that, Mr. Jensen. I’m satisfied that you didn’t have anything to do with killing my pa. Makes sense to me anyway, now that I think about it. If you were guilty, there’d be paper out on you, and though I’ve looked, I haven’t seen any.”
“Let him go, Sheriff,” Smoke said.
“Go on, boy,” Sheriff Carson said. “But I’d appreciate it if you would leave town.”
“Yes, sir,” Clark said. “I really have no reason for staying now anyway.” He made a motion toward returning his pistol to his holster, then looked at the sheriff as if asking for permission.
Sheriff Carson nodded that it would be all right.
“Clark, have you ever used that gun?” Smoke asked.
“Just to shoot at varmints and such,” Clark replied. “I’ve never used it against a man.”
“Do you plan to?”
“For the last few years, all I’ve thought about was finding you, and killing you. And I didn’t even figure that would be wrong, seeing as how you had been sentenced to hang but escaped. I don’t have any plans to use it against a man, but I figure I could if it ever come to that.”
“Are you good with it?”
“Yes, sir,” Clark answered. “I’m damn good with it.”
“There will always be someone better,” Smoke said. “Remember that.”
Clark nodded. “Yes, sir. Well, I reckon you just proved that to me, didn’t you?”
Smoke and the others in the saloon watched as the young man walked out through the batwing doors. A moment later, they heard the sound of hoofbeats as he rode away. Louis Longmont was standing at the window watching, and he called back to the sheriff.
“He’s gone,” Louis said.
Not until then was the saloon reanimated as everyone began to talk at once.
“I must say, Smoke, you seemed awfully easy on him,” Sheriff Carson said.
“I reckon I was,” Smoke said. “But then I look at him, and I see myself when I was on the blood trail after the ones who killed folks that were close to me.”
“You comin’ back to the game, Smoke?” Doc Colton called from the poker table.
Smoke shook his head. “No, I expect I’d better get on back out to the ranch. I have been in town long enough.”
“What he’s saying is that he doesn’t want Miss Sally to come into town, grab him by the ear, and lead him home,” David Tobin said, and the others laughed.
“Yeah, well, if you ever had your ear grabbed by Sally, you would understand why,” Smoke said with a good- natured smile, and again the others laughed.
Smoke went outside to the hitching rail, untied his horse, then swung into the saddle. He looked in the direction young Clark had taken and saw him now, a long way out of town, growing smaller as the distance between them opened.
Smoke’s horse, Seven, whickered as Smoke approached him. Smoke squeezed his ear.
“You about ready to go back home, are you, boy?” Smoke said as untied the reins from the hitching rail. Seven dipped his head a couple of times, and Smoke laughed.
“I should have never built that new stall for you. You like it too much. You’re going to get so lazy you never want to leave it.”
Smoke swung into the saddle, then started out of town, the hollow clump of Seven’s hooves echoing back from the buildings that fronted the street. It was five miles to Sugarloaf, and because Seven seemed anxious to run, Smoke decided to give him his head.
TWO
At Smoke Jensen was leaving Big Rock, back at his ranch, Sugarloaf, his wife, Sally was sitting on a flat rock, high on an escarpment that guarded the north end of the ranch, protecting it from the icy blasts of winter. Sally had discovered this point of vigil, which she called Eagle Watch, shortly after she and Smoke were married and moved here into the High Country, to start their lives together.
Reached by a circuitous and often hidden trail, Eagle Watch was covered with a mixture of pine and deciduous trees that were green all year, while also providing a painter’s palette of color in the spring when the crabapple and plum trees bloomed, and again in the fall when the aspen and maple leaves changed. In addition, the meadow itself was blanketed with wildflowers of every hue and description.
Sally had come up here in her first week at the ranch to write a letter to her father back in Vermont, to try and give him an idea of what she felt about her new home:
It was very much like Sally to express her thoughts in such a poetic fashion. She was a young woman of education and passion, sensitive to the rugged beauty of the home she shared with her husband, and filled with unbridled enthusiasm for their future. The letter had been written some years earlier, and since that time, Colorado had become a state. But though dated, the letter still remained appropriate to the way Sally felt about this
