“Let’s get gone from here!” Curly yelled.
“What about Taylor?” Thumbs asked, pulling splinters and wiping blood from his face.
“Hell with him.”
With Curly supporting the ass-shot Bud, and Thumbs helping Bell, the outlaws made it back to their horses and took off at a gallop, Bud shrieking in pain as the saddle abused his shot-up butt.
Smoke lay in the timber and listened to the outlaws beat their retreat, then stepped out into his camp. He looked at Lake. The outlaw was dead. Smoke took his ammo belt and tossed his guns into the brush. He walked over to Taylor, who had passed out from the pain in his ruined legs. He took his ammunition, tossed his guns into the brush, and then jerked the stakes out of the man’s legs. The man moaned in unconsciousness.
Smoke found the horses of the men, took the food from the saddlebags, and led one animal back to the campsite. He poured a canteen full of water on Taylor. The man moaned and opened his eyes.
“Ride,” Smoke told him. “If I ever see you again, I’ll kill you.”
“I cain’t get up on no horse,” Taylor sobbed. “My legs is ruint.”
Smoke jacked back the hammer on his .44. “Then I guess I’d better put you out of your misery.”
Taylor screamed in fear and crawled to his horse, pulling himself up by clinging to the stirrup and the fender of the saddle. He managed to get in the saddle after several tries. His face was white with pain. He looked down at Smoke.
“You ain’t no decent human bein’. What you’re doin’ to me ain’t right. I need a doctor. You a devil, Jensen!”
“Then you pass that word, pusbag. You make damn sure all your scummy buddies know I don’t play by the rules. Now, ride, you bastard, before I change my mind and kill you!”
Taylor was gone in a gallop.
Smoke shoved Lake’s body over the side of the small plateau and began throwing dirt over the fire, making certain it was out. Then he sat down, rolled a cigarette, and had a cup of coffee.
All in all, he concluded, it had been a very productive morning.
Chapter Thirteen
The townspeople all turned out for the funeral parade that morning. Bobby had had enough money on him to have a fine funeral, complete with some Wailers the Reverend Muckelmort had hired. He’d found someone with a bass drum and a fellow who played the trumpet. It was a sight to see, what with the thumping of the bass drum and the tootin’ on the trumpet.
Muckelmort was something of a windbag. By the time he’d finished with his lengthy graveside harangue, nobody was left but the wailers—they were paid to stay—everybody else had retired to the saloon.
Nobody knew the second punk’s name, and herd only had ten dollars on him, so he was wrapped in a blanket and stuck in an‘ un-marked hole. Two dollars went to the gravedigger, two dollars for the blanket, two dollars for the preacher, and the remaining four bucks went to buy drinks after the service. Somebody recalled that four of them had ridden into town together. But the other two had split just after the shooting. One of them was heard to say that milkin’ cows wasn’t all that bad after all. He was headin’ back to the farm.
The RCMP had ridden in and collected the last prisoner, and the jail was empty.
When the morning stage rolled in, it was filled with reporters, all from back East. “Be another stage in this afternoon,” the driver told Earl. “We’re gonna be runnin’ two a day while this lasts. We must have passed five hundred people on the road, all headin’ this way.”
Sheriff Silva rode in, looked around, cussed, and then commented to Earl that he reckoned he’d better hire some more deputies. Fifteen minutes later, he swore in Louis, Johnny, and Cotton. Louis asked him if he’d received warrants for Smoke’s arrest.
“I tossed ’em in the trash can,” the sheriff said.
“There ain’t no lawman out here gonna try to arrest Smoke Jensen. Not none that has a lick of sense. I know all about that shootin’ in Idaho years ago. It was a fair fight, if you wanna call Smoke bein’ out-numbered twenty to one fair. Those warrants are bogus.”
A miner riding into town loping his mule as hard as he could cut off the conversation. He pulled up short at the sight of all the activity. When he’d been here last month there hadn’t been more than seventy-five people in the whole damn town. Now it looked to him like there was more than a thousand.
With a confused look on his face, he tried to kick the mule into movement. But the mule was smarter than the rider. When a mule is tired or is loaded too heavily, it just won’t move and no amount of cussing or kicking or threatening will make it move. The miner slid out of the saddle and ran up to Sheriff Silva and the other deputies.
The mule sat down in the street.
“Big shootin’ about ten miles out of town, Sheriff,” the miner said, pointing. “I don’t know if they was outlaws or bounty hunters—one and the same if town, strip it bare, and leave this part of the country?”
“It’s a possibility that I’ve considered. At first I think his plan was to hit the miners and the stages carrying gold and silver out. Maybe he might still do that. But I think now that Jensen has his brother’s men out looking for him, he just might turn his back on Lee and use the men he has to wipe this town clean.”
“Brotherly love doesn’t run very deep in that family, does it?” Earl said softly.
Silva shrugged. “That’s just a guess on my part. Who the hell really knows what Lee and Luttie will do?”
The men fell silent in the noisy, busy town, their eyes on the mountains that loomed around them. All of them had one overriding thought: Could Smoke pull this off?
Charlie Starr watched with some amusement in his hard eyes as Curly’s group tried to treat the wounded. He had left his horse and walked to within fifty yards of the outlaw band’s camp, casually leaning up against a tree at the edge of the clearing.
Bud was lying on his stomach, his britches down around his boots, his bare butt shinin’ in the sunlight, while Thumbs Morton poured alcohol on the bullet holes. That set Bud off, Jerking and squalling.
One side of Thumb’s face was swollen and red-looking.
Bell Harrison had a bloody bandage wrapped around his head, and Taylor’s legs, from the knees down, were wrapped in dirty, bloody bandages.
“I’m a-gonna kill that son of a bitch!” Bell said, considerable heat in his voice. “Torture him. Make it last. Burn him. I’ll start with his feet in a fire and work up. I hate Smoke Jensen.”
Charlie grinned. Smoke had really done a job on this bunch of no-goods.
“My legs is real hot, boys,” Taylor said with a moan. “I’m burnin’ up. I think Jensen put something on them stakepoints. Poison, maybe.”
Probably so, Charlie thought. He probably found him some bear shit and smeared the points with it. Or he might have used some poisonous plant leaves. Ol’ Preacher taught him every mean and dirty trick in the book when it came to survival. You boys done grabbed hold of a grizzly bear’s tail when you decided to take on Smoke Jensen.
“I can’t do no more for you, Bud,” Thumbs said.
“I hate Smoke Jensen!” Bell said.
Charlie worked his way around the clearing until he had reached a spot about twenty yards from the bitching and moaning group of deadbeats. He pulled both .44s from leather and jacked the hammers back.
“What the hell was that?” Curly said, grabbing up a rifle and looking all around him.
“I didn’t hear nothin’,” Taylor said.
“I wonder if Jensen give Lake a decent buryin’?” Thumbs said.
“About the same as I’m gonna give you,” Charlie said, and stepped out and started shooting.
Curly recognized the man at once. Charlie Starr! He jumped away from the group and headed for the horses, none of whom had been unsaddled. Curly wanted no part of Charlie Starr. Smoke Jensen was bad enough, but combine him with Charlie, and that was just too much.
Curly left his fearless little group to fight it out by themselves.
Charlie’s first slug knocked Bell sprawling, his right arm hanging broken and useless by his side. Thumbs Morton was hit in the right side, the bullet shattering a rib and angling off to tear through a kidney. He lifted his six-gun, a curse forming on his lips, and got off one round, which missed.
