Far in the distance, the faint sounds of gunshots drifted to them.
“I think we’d better forego breakfast,” Larry said.
“Let them bang away,” Smoke said. “They’re far out of range and shooting uphill. All they’re doing is wasting ammunition.”
Louis lay behind cover and counted puffs of smoke until he grew tired of counting. He looked at Smoke. “Over thirty down there.”
“And more coming,” Smoke replied, cutting his eyes to the East.
Sally was looking through field glasses. “Eleven of them. And another bunch right behind them.”
“How many in the second bunch, honey?”
“They’re too far off to make out yet. Now they’ve disappeared into the timber.”
“Gathering like blowflies on a carcass,” Louis said, his words filled with contempt. “Blowflies one day and maggots the next.”
The three of them were in a natural rock depression with a clear field of fire in all directions except the rear. They had hauled in branches and dead logs the previous afternoon and stacked them to their rear, against the stone face. The wood would soak up slugs and would prevent any ricochets. They had lain in a goodly supply of dry dead wood and had eaten a hardy breakfast and had a fresh pot of hot coffee ready to drink.
Sally suddenly giggled. Smoke looked at her.
“You want to tell me what’s so funny about this situation?”
“You remember me telling you about a man named Larry Tibbson?”
“The lawyer fellow from New York who tried to spark you when you both were in college?”
“That’s him.”
“What about him?”
She brought him up to date.
Smoke chuckled, the humor touching his eyes. “He’s got nerve, I’ll give him that. Does he have any idea what might have happened to him had I been home?”
“I think he does now.”
Louis poured them all coffee in tin cups and passed them around. The air was cold early in the morning; the hot coffee and the small fire felt good to them as they waited.
The firing stopped.
“They’ll be moving soon,” Louis said. His eyes touched the eyes of Smoke. The gambler minutely nodded his head. While Sally had slept, Smoke and Louis had talked. Smoke and Sally’s children could get along without a father, but they needed a mother. If bad turned to worse, Louis was to take Sally and make a run for it, even if he had to punch her unconscious to do it. The dynamite was in place, and if Smoke was trapped on this side of the narrow pass, so be it.
“They’re moving,” Sally said. “They’ll be able to get within range of us.”
“Yes. Then we’ll start picking them off,” Louis said. “We have all the advantage. Our position is like a fort. We’re shooting downhill, and that is easier to compensate for than shooting uphill. We have food and water and warmth. Know this now, Sally: come the night, they’d overrun us. At dusk, we’re going to start the avalanche and make a run for it. I . . .”
“I heard you both talking last night,” she said softly. “You won’t have to knock me out to make me go.” She opened her pack and took out a smaller package wrapped in canvas. “These are medicines and bandages, Smoke. Potions to help relieve pain and to fight infection. I did not include any laudanum. I knew even if you were badly hurt, you wouldn’t take it.”
He kissed her gently while Louis discreetly looked away, a smile on his lips. She clung to him for a moment, then pulled back and squared her shoulders and took several deep breaths, getting her emotions under control and blinking away the tears that had gathered. “You come back to me now, you hear me, Smoke Jensen?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Smoke smiled at her. “I’m going to take some lead, honey,” Smoke told her. “I’d have to be the luckiest man alive not to. But I’ll make it out of this. And that’s a promise.”
A slug thudded into the logs they had place against the rock wall behind them.
“They’re in range,” Louis said.
Smoke and Sally moved into position. Sally had lain aside her short-barreled carbine and had taken a longer- barreled, more accurate lever action from the saddle boot of a dead outlaw. She lined up the sights on part of a leg that was sticking out from behind a large rock and squeezed off a round.
The man started screaming hideously.
“You busted his knee, baby,” Smoke told her.
“That’s too bad,” she said with a wicked grin. “I was aiming a little higher than that.”
Chapter Nineteen
“Cease and desist,” Mills shouted to a group of riders. “I’m a United States Marshal.”
The riders all jerked iron and began pouring lead at the marshals and Larry. They dove for cover, leading their horses into timber.
“I’m a deputy sheriff of this county!” Larry shouted. “I order you in the name of the law to stop this immediately.”
A slug howled past his nose and slammed into a tree, spraying him with bits of bark and bloodying his chin.
“Cretinous son of a bitch!” Larry mumbled, from his suddenly attained position flat on his belly on the ground. “No respect for law and order.”
“You’re learning,” Mills said. “I had to.”
The riders dismounted and took cover, continuing their firing at the marshals and Larry.
“Did you recognize any of them?” Winston asked.
“No. I think they’re bounty hunters. But that doesn’t make any difference now.” Mills cared back the hammer on his Winchester.
“What do you mean?” Larry asked.
“They were warned as to who we are; they ignored that and fired at lawmen. That makes them criminals.” Mills sighted in one of the manhunters who had taken cover behind a tree that was just a tiny bit too small. He shot the man and knocked him sprawling. “Fire, damnit!” he ordered his men.
Two of the outlaws, or bounty hunters—the trio on the mountain didn’t know and didn’t care which—tried to carry the man with the busted knee down the slope. Smoke and Louis dropped them. The wounded man began his long rolling slide down the slope, screaming in pain as he hit rocks and scrub bushes. When he reached a flat, he lay still, either dead or unconscious.
“Riders coming,” Sally announced, handing Smoke the field glasses.
Smoke studied the men. “Luttie Charles and his bunch. I count . . . ten, no, eleven of them.”
“Getting crowded down there,” Louis remarked, biting the end off of an expensive imported cigar he’d taken from a silver holder and lighting up. When the ash was to his liking he laid the stogie aside and punched two more rounds into his rifle and jacked back the hammer, sighting in on an exposed forearm.
“That’s a good hundred and fifty yards,” Smoke
said. “Five dollars says you can’t make the shot.”
'You just lost five dollars,” the millionaire industrialist/adventurer/gambler said, and squeezed the trigger.
The man yelled as the slug rendered his arm useless. He rolled to one side and exposed a boot. Smoke shot him in the foot, and the outlaw began the slow slide down the slope, hollering and screaming as he rolled and slid downward.
One man jumped out from cover to stop his buddy and Smoke, Sally, and Louis dusted the ground all around him. It was too far for accurate shooting, but after doing a little dancing, the outlaw jumped back into cover, unhit but with a new respect for those three on the mountain.
The arm and foot-shot outlaw rolled off a plateau and fell screaming for several hundred feet. His screaming stopped when he impacted with solid rock. It sounded like a big watermelon dropped from a rooftop to a brick