“I’m comin’, Evans!” he bellowed, knowing no one could hear him in the melee, racing along the edge of the forest with a killing fever burning in his brain.
An unexpected bit of good fortune presented itself just as he was nearing a thick oak trunk. Three riders came charging out of the trees with guns blazing, unaware that Smoke was only a few dozen yards away.
Smoke stumbled to a halt and drew a bead on the first rider with a pistol, firing too quickly, shooting high and wide. He triggered off a second shot as all three men turned toward the sound of his gun.
A man in a dirty brown Stetson flipped off his horse when Smoke’s second bullet found its mark. Smoke fired again at another gunman, more careful with his aim now. A Mexican with cartridge belts across his chest went down, his sombrero fluttering away while he fell.
The third rider fired at Smoke, a hurried shot from the back of a moving horse. A molten slug screamed high above Smoke’s head. Smoke downed him with a booming pistol, watching another Mexican gunman fly out of his saddle with his face twisted in pain.
Three riderless horses galloped onto the prairie, one with blood dripping from its withers, where its owner had bled before he fell.
The rattle of rifle fire became a din, a constant wall of noise as more than two hundred longhorn heifers scattered with their tails in the air, snorting through their muzzles as the stampede Smoke had been worrying about began. He could see the gentler Herefords milling about, but for the moment they stayed together in a tight bunch.
A rifle popped from a clump of bunch grass near the picketed horses. One of Evans’s men floated away from his galloping horse with both hands pressed to his face.
“Nice shot,” Smoke muttered, shouldering his rifle to begin dropping as many oncoming raiders as he could.
Leading a moving target with his rifle sights, he fired at a cowboy on a speeding pinto. A miss, and it made him angry as he levered another round into place.
“I’ve gotta get closer,” he said savagely.
Two of Evans’s men noticed him for the first time and swung their horses in his direction, bearing down on him as fast as their horses could run.
“Thank you, gentlemen,” Smoke whispered, taking very careful aim.
His Winchester slammed into his shoulder, and the report made his ears ring. But mild discomfort did nothing to take away from the satisfaction when a cowboy tumbled into the grass, his horse swerving away from the noise.
Smoke killed the second horseman with a bullet through the crown of his hat, which also sliced through the top of his skull, permanently parting the gunman’s hair down the middle before he rolled off the rump of his horse.
“Time to move,” Smoke spat, ducking down as he left the tree at a run, heading straight for the middle of the fight.Thirty-five
Billy Morton spurred his horse relentlessly to catch up to Jessie, and when Jessie saw him angling across the prairie, he wondered where the others were, the dozen men Billy was supposed to lead into the attack from the southwest. Billy was all alone, and he shouldn’t have been. Dodging stampeding longhorns, Jessie motioned to Pickett and the men behind him to continue charging Jensen and his cowboys while he reined off to find out what Billy was in such a hurry to tell him.
Billy hauled back on his reins, bringing his lathered sorrel to a sliding stop when he rode up to Jessie. Jessie saw a look on Billy’s face that could only be fear.
“He got behind us again!” Billy shouted to be heard above the bang of guns and the bawling of runaway cattle.
“Who?” Jessie demanded.
“That feller Jensen. It’s gotta be him. A big son of a bitch with two pistols. I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it in all my horned days, Jessie. We was ready to charge out here when this big bastard appeared out of nowhere, both pistols blazin’. He killed everybody! ’Cept me. I was lucky to get out with my skin. One man ain’t supposed to be able to do what he did. He killed twelve goddamn men, Jessie, in less time than it takes me to tell it”
Despite the battle going on in front of him, Jessie stared at the spot where Billy and a mix of
“Just him, Jessie. I swear to it,” Billy said. “Ain’t no man on earth can kill twelve men like he done, only I seen it with my own two eyes while I was gettin’ the hell away from there fast as this horse could run.”
“How come nobody shot him?” Jessie asked, feeling a touch of worry growing in the pit of his stomach.
“Wasn’t time. He stood up behind this bush an’ emptied both guns as fast as he could pull them triggers. Men was droppin’ like flies.” Billy looked over his shoulder quickly as a group of terrified longhorns raced by. “That ain’t even the worst of it,” Billy continued, his voice with an unusually high pitch. “Just when I was comin’ to tell you what happened to us, I saw that half-breed, Raul Jones, come ridin’ out of them trees yonder with a couple of Pedro’s men. Somebody cut ’em down before you could blink. I figure it had to be Jensen.”
It wasn’t possible, what Billy was telling him, how one man could be so lucky. Or was he that good? He couldn’t be, not an ordinary cattleman from some place up in Colorado.
Now Jessie looked at the fight going on around Jensen’s camp and he saw two more of his men fall from their saddles. Pickett and Tom Hill had already swung their horses around when rifle fire from Jensen’s cowboys proved too accurate. Pickett was no coward, but out in the open like he was, he and Tom were sitting ducks.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, Jessie,” Billy said, “tangling with Smoke Jensen. He ain’t the tinhorn everybody claimed he was. The big son of a bitch can damn sure shoot. .I seen it for myself.”
“I ain’t never met a man I backed down from,” Jessie growled, with more resolve than he truly felt at the
