mangled leg.
“We got to set and splint it,” Curly said. “Anybody got any whiskey?”
A bottle was handed to him. Curly gave the bottle to Cates. “Get drunk, Gates. ’Cause this is gonna hurt.”
Cates screamed until he passed out from the pain.
Gooden was not hurt bad, just painfully, the slug passing through and exiting out the fleshy part of his side. Dewey’s face was a torn, mangled mess. He was missing teeth, both eyes were swollen shut and blackened with bruises, and his nose and jaw were shattered.
“We got to get ’em, boss,” Boots said. “Both Jensen and that old coot, Charlie Starr. This is gettin’ personal with me, now. Me and Neal go way back together.”
“What you got in mind? I’m damn shore open to suggestions.”
“I go in after him on foot. Hell, he can hear horses comin’ in from a long ways off. My daddy was a trapper and a hunter up in Northwest Territories. I can Injun with the best of them.”
Lee shook his head. “I like the idea, but two would be better than one. You might get him in a crossfire.”
“I’ll go with him,” Harry Jennings volunteered.
“I’d like to skin that damn Jensen alive.”
Both Jennings and Boots were old hands in the timber, and they carried moccasins in their saddlebags. They left behind boots and spurs, took two day’s provisions and struck out, following the very faint trail that almost anyone leaves in the brush: bent-down blades of grass, a broken twig or lower limb from a scrub tree, a heel print in damp earth.
“He ain’t that far ahead of us,” Boots whispered, after having lost the trail at mid-morning and then picking it up a few minutes later. Boots was a thieving, murdering no-account through and through, but he was just about as good a trailsman as Smoke. “Grass hadn’t started springin’ back yet. No talkin’ from now on—he’s close. Real close. Come on.”
Smoke had watched his backtrail. He had felt in the back of his mind that sooner or later somebody would try him on foot. Leaving his pack on the ground in some brush, he climbed a tall tree and began scanning his backtrail with his field glasses. On his second sweep he caught the two men as they skirted a small meadow, staying near the timber.
Smoke backtracked and left a trail, not a too obvious one, for that would be a dead giveaway, but a trail a skilled woodsman would pick up. He had a hunch those two men behind him were very good in the woods, for he hadn’t been leaving much of a trail for anyone to follow.
Back at a narrow point in the game trail, he quickly rigged a swing trap, using a young sapling about as big around as his wrist. The shadowy brush-covered bend in the trail should keep even the most skilled eyes from seeing the piece of dirt-rubbed rawhide he’d placed as the trip.
Smoke carefully backed off about twenty yards and bellied down against the cool earth under some foliage and took a sip of water from his canteen. Tell the truth, he was grateful for the time to rest.
“Pssttt! he heard the call from one of the men.
He could not yet see them, but they were very near.
Stay on the trail, boys, he silently wished. Just stay on the trail. Do that, and I’ll soon have just one to contend with.
Jennings eased forward, his smile savage as he saw the just crushed foliage on the trail. He touched it; it was very fresh. Smoke Jensen was only minutes ahead of them. Just minutes away from being dead meat, and Jennings and Boots would be thousands of dollars richer.
His left boot stepped over the trip' the right toe or his boot snagged it. Jennings experienced a savage blow in his belly, just below the V of the rib cage. Then the pain hit him. The most hideous pain he had ever experienced in his life. He forced his eyes to look down. He screamed at the sight A stake had been rawhided to the sapling. He had tripped a wire or something that had released the booby trap. The stake was now buried in his belly, his blood gushing out.
“Jesus God!” Boots whispered as he crept around the dark trail and saw what Smoke Jensen had done.
“Oh, my Lord!” Jennings wailed. “l cain’t stand the pain. Shoot me, Boots. Shoot me!”
“Yeah,” Smoke’s voice came out of the thick vegetation beside the trail. “Shoot him, Boots.”
“You son of a bitch!” Boots yelled, dropping to his knees on the old trail. “You ain't no decent human bein’. This ain’t fightin’ fair a-tall.”
Smoke laughed at the protestations of the outlaw/murderer/rapist. His laughter was taunting.
Jennings’ screaming was a frightful thing to hear. He stood in the center of the game trail, afraid to move, both hands clutching the bloody end of the stake.
Smoke tossed a stick to his right. As soon as the stick hit the ground, Boots’s rifle barked three times, as fast as he could work the lever.
Smoke laughed at his efforts.
Boots cussed Smoke. Called him every ugly and profane and insulting name he could think of, anything to draw the man out where he could get a clear shot at him.
Nothing worked.
“You ain’t got no right to do this!” Boots yelled. “This ain’t the way it’s supposed to be.”
“Jesus Christ, Boots,” Jennings moaned. “You got to help me. I cain‘t stand no more of this.”
Boots thought hard for a moment. He knew there was nothing he could do for Jennings. He was dying before his eyes. Not even a doctor right now could save him. Blood was dripping from Jennings’ lips; that told Boots the stake had rammed right through the man’s stomach. The point of the stake was sticking out the man’s back.
Jennings died before Boots’ eyes. The man’s legs were spread wide, and both hands held onto the end of the stake. The thick sapling kept him in an upright position.
Boots didn’t know what the hell to do. He knew that Smoke was over yonder, just ahead and to his right . . . at least the last time he’d laughed he was. But the way the man moved, hell, he might be anywhere by now.
Boots got down on his belly and started crawling away from the bloody scene. He was scared; he wasn’t ashamed to admit it. A thrown stick landed just a few inches from his nose, and Boots almost crapped his longhandles.
“Wrong way, Bootsie,” Smoke called.
“Stand up and fight me like a man, goddamn you!” Boots yelled. “Give me a chance.”
“The same kind of chance you gave those little girls you raped and tortured and scalped and killed, Bootsie?”
“I didn’t scalp nobody! That was Dolp what done that. And you done kilt him.”
“I’m going to kill you, too, Bootsie.”
“I surrender!” Boots shouted. “I give up. You got to take me in for a trial. That’s the legal way.”
“I’m a wanted man, Bootsie,” Smoke said with a chuckle. “I’ve got murder warrants out on me. That’s why you boys are chasing me. To collect those thousands of dollars. Now how in the hell can you surrender to me?”
Boots silently cursed. Didn't do no good to cuss out loud. Jensen wasn’t gonna be rattled by that. Boots knew he was caught between a rock and a hard place. He could shuck his guns and stand up, his hands in the air. But as sure as he done that, Jensen would probably gut—shoot him. He knew how Jensen felt about criminals.
He was a thug and a punk and a lot of other sorry—assed things-—he knew that, wasn’t no point in makin’ excuses for what he’d done-but Boots was a realist, too. He knew damn well he was a dead man anyway it went. “I’m a gonna stand up, Jensen,” he called. “My rifle's on the ground. My gun’s in leather. We’ll fight this out man to man. I’ll . . .”
He screamed in fright as a hard hand closed around one ankle and jerked just as he was standing up. Boots hit the ground, belly-down, knocking the breath from him. Something with the strength of a bear flipped him over and tore the gunbelt from his waist. He watched belt and guns go sailing into the woods.
He looked up into the cold brown eyes of Smoke Jensen. God, the man was big.
“Get up,” Smoke told him.
Boots crawled to his moccasins and watched as Smoke smiled at him and lifted his hands, clenching them into big leather-gloved fists. Boots grinned. Bare-knuckle, stomp and kick fighting was something he liked. He might
