Too soon to die, p.10
Too Soon to Die, page 10
“Smoke!” Andy called in his gravelly voice. “Smoke, we got trouble!”
The air around them cleared as a breeze carried the dust away.
Smoke strode forward and asked, “What is it?”
Andy swallowed hard, tried to find his voice again and couldn’t.
Tex poked a thumb at the wagon bed and said in his laconic fashion, “Back there.”
Smoke walked alongside the wagon and peered over the sideboards. Most of the supplies the men had started with that morning were still there, but they had been rearranged to make some room. Filling that space were two blanket-shrouded shapes. The sight of them made Smoke’s heart sink, as did the all-too-familiar smell that filled his nose.
Andy found his voice again and said, “The Pitchfork line camp was our second stop, Smoke. We could tell somethin’ was wrong soon as we got there, ’cause all the horses were in the corral and they acted spooked. We found Joe Bob and Harley inside the shack. They was dead. Shot all to hell!”
CHAPTER 20
The bodies of Joe Bob Stanton and Harley Briggs had been taken out of the wagon and placed in the barn, and a rider was dispatched to Big Rock to summon the undertaker and Sheriff Monte Carson. The two ranch hands had been dead for several days when Andy and Tex found them. Rats had been at the bodies, and the coffins would remain closed when the men were laid to rest in the Sugarloaf’s private cemetery about half a mile from the ranch house. Both men had families elsewhere, but under the circumstances, shipping the bodies back to them wasn’t an option.
Smoke had his gun belt strapped on as he stepped out of the house, gripping the Winchester in his left hand.
Sally came out of the house behind him and put a hand on his right arm as she said, “Smoke, there’s no chance the men who did this are still anywhere around that line camp. Why don’t you wait for Monte to get here?”
Smoke shook his head. “The trail’s already too cold. If we’re going to catch up to those killers, we need to get after them as soon as possible.”
“Do you really think you can catch them after this much time?”
“We sure can’t catch them if we don’t go after them,” Smoke snapped. Realizing that he had spoken more sharply than he intended to, he softened his voice. “I’m sorry, Sally. We dealt with this sort of thing a lot in the old days . . . too much, in fact . . . but it seems like since the turn of the century, things should’ve settled down some.” He shook his head. “I guess as long as men are greedy and don’t want to work for their money, there’ll always be rustlers and killers.”
The screen door banged as Denny came through it. She was in boots, jeans, man’s shirt, and Stetson, although her hair was loose under the hat. Like her father, she had a gun belt strapped around her hips, with a Colt riding in the attached holster.
Sally turned to face her daughter and shook her head. “Denise, you’re not—”
“I happen to know that you put on trousers and picked up a gun and rode out with Pa to hunt down bad hombres more than once, Ma,” Denny said, “so arguing with me isn’t going to do you a lot of good.”
“Yes, I did those things,” admitted Sally, “but it was a different time then. The only law and order around here was what we imposed ourselves. The valley is civilized now—”
“Tell that to Joe Bob and Harley,” Denny broke in.
Sally’s face flushed with anger.
Smoke said to Denny, “Don’t talk to your mother like that.”
“Sorry,” Denny muttered, but she didn’t sound completely sincere.
“You should stay here,” Smoke went on. “We don’t know how long we’ll be on the trail.”
“I’ve camped out before, plenty of times.”
“I know that, but I’ll feel better knowing that you’re here keeping an eye on things. I’m not expecting any trouble here at the ranch, but you never know.”
Denny narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re just saying that to get me to agree to stay behind.”
“It’s the truth,” Smoke insisted. “Pearlie’s staying here, too. He can’t spend all day in the saddle like he used to. Between the two of you, I’m confident you can handle anything that might crop up.”
For a long moment, Denny stood there looking argumentative, switching her gaze back and forth between her mother and father. Finally, she said, “All right. I’ll stay. But I don’t like it.”
“Nobody said you had to,” Smoke told her.
The door opened again and Brad rushed out onto the porch. “Can I come?”
“You know better than that,” Sally said.
Brad pointed at Denny. “But she’s goin’. Look, she’s wearin’ a gun!”
“Forget it, kid,” Denny told him. “They’re making me stay here, too.” She summoned up a smile. “But I’m in charge of defending the ranch if there’s any trouble”—Smoke let that claim go by—“and I’m making you my deputy.”
Brad’s eyes widened. “A deputy? Really?”
“That’s right.”
He frowned slightly and pointed out, “But you’re not a sheriff or a marshal.”
“Look, do you want to be my deputy or not?”
“Sure, whatever you say, Denny.”
A group of cowboys rode toward the house from the barn, with Cal in the forefront leading a saddled horse for Smoke. Behind him came a dozen members of the Sugarloaf crew—all of them grim-faced and ready to avenge the murder of their friends. All except Steve Markham, who looked solemn enough but had never met Joe Bob Stanton or Harley Briggs. They all rode for the same brand, though, and that was what really counted with knights of the range. Each of the men wore a handgun and had a rifle sticking up from a saddle boot. They were packing considerable firepower.
“We’re ready to ride, Smoke,” Cal reported.
Smoke kissed Sally on the lips and Denny on the forehead and clapped a hand on Brad’s shoulder for a second. Then he went down the steps, swung up into the saddle of the horse Cal was holding, and led the group out of the ranch yard toward the trail up to the high pastures. He didn’t look back but knew his wife, daughter, and brand-new grandson were watching from the porch.
* * *
It was early afternoon before the group of riders approached the Pitchfork line camp. Smoke firmly believed the killers were long gone, but just in case he was wrong, he pulled the Winchester from its sheath and rode with it held across the saddle in front of him as he scanned the high ridges around them for any sign of an ambush.
Nothing happened as they rode up to the line shack. Smoke saw the dark patch of ground over by the corral that Andy and Tex had spoken of seeing. They had said it looked like a lot of blood had been spilled there. Smoke figured one of the cowboys had been killed there and then the murderers had tossed the body back in the shack.
Smoke reined in, studied the layout, and then said to Cal, “One of the boys was headed out to the corral when they gunned him. The other one probably heard the shots and they got him when he came out to see what was going on. Could’ve been at night.”
“That would explain why they put the bodies back in the cabin,” Cal said as he leaned forward to ease his muscles. “If they had left corpses out in the open, the buzzards would have started to circle as soon as the sun came up. That might have drawn attention from some of the other line camps, and what happened here would have been discovered sooner than they wanted. Same reason they didn’t bother to burn the line shack. This way, they had several days to make their getaway.”
“That’s the way it looks to me,” said Smoke. “There are so many tracks around, studying them probably won’t do any good, but let’s have a look anyway.”
The two of them dismounted and spent a while intently surveying the ground around the shack and the corral. Smoke saw dozens of boot prints, but there was nothing special about any of them, nothing that would help him identify any of the wearers in the future.
He stepped into the shack and looked around there, too. Other than dark stains where blood had soaked into the puncheon floor, nothing seemed unusual. The killers—and it was obvious there had to have been more than one—had done their bloody work and then disappeared.
“Let’s check on the stock,” Smoke said, although he had a pretty good idea what they would find—or wouldn’t find.
Sure enough, the pastures that normally would be monitored by the hands assigned to the line camp were empty.
“How many head should be here?” Smoke asked Cal.
“Close to a hundred and fifty,” the foreman answered. “The bastards made a pretty good haul.”
Smoke was bothered more by the two lives lost than he was by having that many cows stolen, but the rustling added insult to injury. Jaw tight with anger, he said, “Let’s see if we can pick up their trail.”
The rustlers couldn’t have taken the stock lower down. Smoke and his companions would have run into signs of that if they had. That meant the stolen cattle had been pushed still higher. Prophet Pass was up above them, Smoke knew. A hard climb, especially pushing a hundred and fifty beeves, but if the thieves had been able to get over the pass, they could hit a trail on the other side that led to the southwest through rugged country and eventually came to some of the mining settlements west of Denver. Even though the boom of the previous decade was largely over, many of the mines were still being worked, and men who performed hard labor underground all day were hungry when they came back up into the light. A good market for beef still existed over there.
That seemed the most likely explanation to Smoke, and when he and the other men from the Sugarloaf began climbing toward Prophet Pass, it wasn’t long before they spotted signs of cattle being driven in that direction.
“Danged if we ain’t on their trail, boys,” Steve Markham exclaimed.
Smoke looked back over his shoulder at the new hand. “You probably didn’t figure on winding up in a jackpot like this so soon after signing on, did you, Markham?”
“I don’t know as I’d say that, sir,” the young cowboy replied with a grin. “As soon as I found out I’d be ridin’ for Smoke Jensen, I figured hell ’d be a-poppin’ sooner rather than later!”
CHAPTER 21
The trail through Prophet Pass was so rocky that it wouldn’t take hoofprints, but Smoke saw some shiny places where horseshoes had nicked the stone recently. Along with fairly fresh droppings from cattle and horses, that was enough to tell him that several riders and a considerable amount of livestock had gone through there. He couldn’t prove that it was the rustlers and the stolen herd that had left those signs in the pass, but he was confident they couldn’t have gone anywhere else yet.
The tracks they found late that afternoon, heading southwest toward those mining settlements, confirmed his theory. They couldn’t miss the signs that a group of cattle had gone through there several days earlier.
As they stopped to let their horses rest, Cal said, “They’ve probably sold those cows already, Smoke. We’re not going to get them back.”
“You’re right,” Smoke agreed. “The chances of that are pretty slim. But the bunch that stole them might still be hanging around somewhere down there, enjoying the money they got for them.”
“And you want to catch up to them.”
“They came onto Sugarloaf range,” Smoke said, “killed two men who rode for me, and stole my beef. I don’t much cotton to the idea of them getting away with any of that.”
Mutters of agreement came from several of the other men, and Markham said fervently, “Damn right!”
They pushed on until it was too dark to see the trail, then stopped to rest the horses again, brew coffee, and eat some of the jerky and biscuits they had brought along. The men slept a while after that, until the moon rose and Smoke woke everyone. The wash of silvery light was enough to keep them from getting lost.
Smoke was pushing them hard and he knew it, but the need to settle the score for Joe Bob Stanton and Harley Briggs burned within all of them. The need to keep from ruining the horses was all that slowed them down the rest of that night, all the next day, and through the night after that.
Black Hawk
More than forty hours had passed since leaving the Sugarloaf when they rode into the settlement. It was early in the morning, not long after sunup, and the town really hadn’t started coming to life yet, although thumping could be heard from the stamp mills at the mines up in the nearby mountains.
Smoke heard something else, too, that caused him to rein in and lift his hand in a signal for the others to stop. He said to Cal, “Listen.”
“Good Lord!” the foreman exclaimed after a moment. “That sounds like a good-sized bunch of cattle.”
The lowing was unmistakable, all right. Smoke nudged his horse into motion again and followed it to some large pens on the eastern edge of town. At least a hundred cows milled around inside the fences.
“That’s them!” one of the Sugarloaf hands said excitedly. “I’d know that old brindle cow anywhere. She was in a bunch I hazed up to that pasture below Pitchfork Ridge.”
Smoke hadn’t expected to be able to recover any of the stolen stock, but at least two-thirds of the herd was still there. He hipped around in the saddle and told the others, “Half of you boys stay here and keep an eye on these cows. The rest of you, come with Cal and me. We’re going to see if we can locate the men who drove them here.”
Cal quickly called out half a dozen names, among them Steve Markham’s, and gave them the job of guarding the rustled cattle. Then he and the other hands followed Smoke along the street toward the single business block, which was surrounded by a scattering of crude miners’ cabins and a few more substantial dwellings.
A man in a canvas apron was sweeping the boardwalk in front of a general store. A sign on the building read TOOBIN’S EMPORIUM. As Smoke, Cal, and the other riders drew up in front of the business, the balding proprietor leaned on his broom and blinked at them through thick spectacles that kept sliding down his nose. He pushed them up and appeared rather alarmed to be confronted with such a group of beard-stubbled, well-armed, tough-looking hombres so early in the morning.
“You boys ain’t here to loot the town, are you?” he asked. “You’re liable to be a mite disappointed if you are.”
“No, sir,” Smoke told him. “We’re from a ranch up in Eagle County called the Sugarloaf. We’ve been on the trail of some stolen stock, and I reckon we’ve found it.”
The storekeeper raised bushy gray eyebrows. “The Sugarloaf,” he repeated. “Seems like I’ve heard of that spread. Belongs to Smoke Jensen, don’t it?”
“That’s right. I’m Jensen.”
The eyebrows climbed even higher. “Lordy! Smoke Jensen his own self, right here in Black Hawk. Here I thought the town was about to dry up and blow away, and now all sorts of excitement is goin’ on.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked Smoke as he rested his crossed hands on the saddle horn. “Are you talking about that herd of cattle being driven in?”
“Well, that ain’t all that unusual. Enough of the mines are still goin’ concerns that there’s a market for beef here, sure enough. I was talkin’ more about the fact that we had a deppity United States marshal come through here a few days back, leadin’ a horse haulin’ the carcass of an outlaw he’d tracked down and killed. That was the most excitement we’d had here in a while.”
Smoke didn’t really care about some lawman passing through the former boomtown, although he wondered briefly if it might have been Brice Rogers. Brice had missed Louis’s wedding because he was off chasing some owlhoot, according to Monte Carson.
Smoke was more interested in the rustlers, so he said, “What about those cows? Are the men who brought them in still here in town?”
“Reckon so. From what I’ve heard, they were sorta disappointed that nobody would take the whole herd off their hands at once. They sold off some o’ the stock to a few of the smaller mines. Jack Buell, the superintendent of the Fountain Mine, will be in town in a few days, though, and he’ll likely take the rest of the cows.” The garrulous old storekeeper frowned and blinked behind the spectacles. “No, wait, you said them cows was rustled. So Mr. Buell won’t be buyin’ ’em from the fellas who brought ’em in.”
“No,” Smoke said. “No, he won’t.” He straightened in the saddle. “Where can we find those men?”
The storekeeper started looking nervous again. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth before he answered, “They’re, uh, they’re stayin’ at the Casa de Oro, I believe. We had a hotel, but it done closed down a couple months ago. Not many other places to stay in Black Hawk right now.”
Smoke inclined his head. “The Casa de Oro. That’s the saloon down at the end of the block?”
“Yes, sir. I’m, uh . . . I’m gonna go back inside now and close the door.”
“Not a bad idea,” Cal commented as he turned his horse to follow Smoke toward the other end of the long block.
Nobody else was moving around on the street that early. The saddlemaker stepped out of his shop and started to stretch the night’s kinks out of his back, then stopped as he caught sight of the group of riders moving along the street. He ducked back inside and hurriedly shut the door behind him.
As they approached the Casa de Oro, the saloon’s double doors at the corner opened and a man stepped out. The pail of water he carried and then threw out into the street marked him as the saloon’s swamper and indicated that he’d just finished mopping up the place. He had halfway turned around to go back inside the building when he saw Smoke and the others and stopped short. He stared pop-eyed at them for a heartbeat, then dropped the empty bucket with a clatter and dashed back through the batwings.
“Blast it,” Cal burst out. “Those rustlers probably paid him to keep his eyes open and warn them if any strangers rode into town. They knew somebody might be coming after them!”
