“I don’t know,” Luttie said. “And what about them U.S. Marshals? You reckon they’re on to us?”
“How could they be?” another hand asked, surprise and anger in his eyes. “Not even the sheriff suspects anything.”
“I don’t like it,” Jake said.
“Well, hell! How do you think I feel about it? Come on. Let’s ride.”
“You push hard, Mr. Jensen,” Mills said. “There might have been a killing.”
“You figure his death would be a great crushing blow to humanity?”
Mills chuckled. “Sometimes your speech is so homey it’s sickening. Other times it appears to come straight from the classics. I’m new to the West, Mr. Jensen . . .”
“Smoke. Just Smoke.”
“Very well. Smoke. I have much to learn about the West and its people.” .
‘We saddle our own horses and kill our own snakes.”
“And the law?”
“We obey it for the most part. Where there is law. But when you come up on people rustling your stock, a man don’t usually have the time to ride fifty miles to get a sheriff. Things tend to get hot and heavy real quick. Someone starts shooting you, you shoot back.”
“I can understand that,” Mills said. He smiled at Smoke’s startled expression “I’m not the legal stickler you think I am, Smoke. There are times when a person must defend oneself. I understand that. But there are other times when men knowingly take the law into their own hands, and that’s what I’m opposed to.”
“Like you think I’m doing?”
Mills smiled. “As you have been doing,” he corrected. “Now you are sworn in as an officer of the law. That makes all the difference.”
“And you really believe that?”
“In most cases, yes. In your case, no.”
Smoke laughed.
“You became legal—in a manner of speaking—simply as a means to achieve an end. The end of Lee Slater and his gang. What would you do should Lee and his men attack this town, right now?”
“Empty a lot of saddles.”
“And be killed doing it?”
“Not likely. I’m no Viking berserker. Anyway, I don’t think he’s going to attack this town.”
“Oh? When did you change your mind?”
“During the course of the day.”
“And what do you think he’s going to do?”
“I have an idea. But it’s just a thought. I’ll let you know when I have it all worked out. And I will let you in on it, Mills. You have my word.”
“Fair enough.”
“Are some of you going to be in town tomorrow?”
“Yes. We’re waiting on word from the home office. We sent word where we’d be from that little settlement on the Rio Grande. The stage runs in a couple of days.”
“I appreciate you staying close. I’ll pull out early in the morning to do some snooping. Be back late tomorrow night.”
Smoke could tell the man had a dozen questions he would like to ask. But he held them in check. “I’ll see you then.”
Smoke pulled out several hours before dawn, pointing Buck’s nose toward the east, staying on the south side of the Alamosa River. Luttie’s Seven Slash Ranch lay about twenty miles south of the town.
Luttie was up to something besides ranching. Those hands of his were more than cowboys; Smoke had a hunch they were drawing fighting wages. If that was true, who were they fighting, and why?
At the first coloring of dawn, Smoke was on a hill overlooking Luttie’s ranchhouse. He studied the men as they exited the bunkhouse heading for chow in a building next to it. He counted fifteen men. Say three or four were not in yet from nightherding; that was a hell of a lot of cowboys for a spread this size.
So what was Luttie up to?
Smoke stayed on the ridges as long as he dared, looking things over through field glasses. For a working ranch, there didn’t seem to be much going on. And he found that odd. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen any cattle on his way in. What he had seen were a lot of signs proclaiming this area to be “posted” and “no trespassing allowed.” Odd. Too many odd things cropping up about the Seven Slash Ranch.
It was time to move on; his position on the ridge was just too vulnerable. He tightened the cinch and swung into the saddle. He hadn’t learned much, but he had learned that something very odd was going on at the Seven Slash Ranch. And Smoke didn’t think it had a damn thing to do with cattle.
“So what is going on?” Mills asked.
The men were sitting on the boardwalk in front of the saloon, enjoying the night air. Mills was contentedly puffing on his pipe, and Smoke had rolled a cigarette.
“I don’t know. Luttie could say he stripped his range during roundup, and a range detective would probably accept that. But he hasn’t run any cattle in several years on the ground that I covered today. Any cattleman could see that. So why does he have the big crew, all of them fighting men?” Smoke smiled. “Maybe I know.”
“Share it with me?”
“It’s just a guess.”
“A lot of good police work starts right there.”
“It might be that he’s hit a silver strike and wants it all for himself, mining it out in secret. But a better guess is that he’s running a front for stolen goods.”
“I like the second one. But I have some questions about that theory. Why? is one. He’s a rancher who has done very well, from all indications. He is a reasonably monied man. I suppose we could chalk it up to greed; however, I think, assuming you’re correct, there must be other reasons.”
“Why, after all the years of outlawing on the west coast, would Lee Slater put together a gang and come to Colorado?' Smoke questioned. “The west coast is where all his contacts and hiding places would be.” '
“Where are you going with this, Smoke?”
“I don’t know. I’m just trying to put all the pieces together. I may be completely off-base and accusing an innocent man of a crime. All I’ve got is gut hunches. Can you do some background work?”
“Certainly. But on whom?”
“Luttie Charles and Lee Slater.”
That got Mills’ attention. He took the pipe out of his mouth and stared at Smoke. “How could they be connected?”
“Maybe by blood.”
The Lee Slater gang seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth. Five days went by with no word of any outlaw activity in the area.
The sheriff of the county and two of his deputies rode into town, and Sheriff Silva almost had a heart attack when he learned that Smoke Jensen was the new town marshal.
“By God, it is you!” he said, standing in the door to the town marshal’s small office. He frowned. “But why here, of all places?”
Smoke laid it out for the man, but said nothing of his suspicions of Luttie Charles.
The sheriff nodded his head. “We heard he was in this area. If he is, he's found him a dandy hidey hole.”
Smoke had him an idea just where that might be. But he kept that to himself. “Can you make me a deputy sheriff of this county?”
“Sure can. It’d be a honor. Stand up and raise your right hand.”
After being sworn in, Smoke and Sheriff Dick Silva sat in the office and drank coffee and chatted. Mills and his men were out of town, roaming around, looking for signs of the Slater gang.
“It could be,” the sheriff said, “that Slater learned about the new silver strikes to the north and east of here. The big one’s up around Creede, but we’ve got some dandy smaller ones in this area.”
“Any gold?”
“A few producing mines, yeah. The stage line is putting on more people, and they’ll be running through here
