“Was that boy born a damn fool?” Monte asked, pointing to the dead would-be tough, “or did he have to work at it?”
“He…fancied hisself good with a gun,” one of his shaken-up buddies said.
Monte shook his head in disgust and walked to the table. Smoke had sat down and was drinking his coffee.
“What do you think about it?” Monte asked.
“I think my coffee got cold,” Smoke replied.
Sally, Smoke’s wife, read the letters from her parents and their children, who were all in France attending school. One of their children was there for health reasons, being tended to by specialists. Smoke had picked up the letters in town and had not opened them, leaving that small pleasure for Sally.
“Any word on when they’ll come back home?” Smoke asked.
“No. When do you leave?”
“Probably next week. I’d like to take you with me, honey. But a cattle drive is rough work.”
“I’ll be fine here,” she assured him. “Just who is this Clint Black person?”
Smoke sipped his coffee for a moment. “A hard, unyielding tyrant of a man. I suspect that somebody sold this T. J. Duggan a bill of goods with this ranch he bought. Somebody wanted out of that country and found themselves a sucker. I don’t even know the man and I feel sorry for him.”
“Oh, my!” Sally said, but with a smile.
Her husband looked at her. “What’s that all about?”
“I feel a quest coming on, oh man of La Mancha.”
“Sally…!”
“I gave you the book to read.”
He looked puzzled for a moment, then a wide grin cut his face and softened his eyes. “Oh, yeah. Don Quixote.”
She gently corrected his pronunciation.
“Am I the Knight of the Woeful Figure?”
“Hardly,” she said with a laugh. “But you do have this tendency to stand up for lost causes and the little person.”
“You knew that when you married me, honey.”
She stood up and walked to him, kissing him on the cheek. “And I love you all the more for it. Now stand up and put on an apron,” she told the most feared gunfighter in all the West. “I’ll wash, you dry.”
“Yes, dear.”
Smoke Jensen had not sought out the reputation of gunfighter. Most of the known ones hadn’t. For several years after he and Sally were married, he had changed his name and lived quietly. Then outlaws come to town and he was forced to once more strap on his guns to protect hearth and home and kith and kin. He never went back to his false name. He was Smoke Jensen, a man of peace if allowed, a warrior when he had to be. Back in ’72, when he was just out of his teens, Smoke Jensen tracked down the men who had raped and killed his wife, Nicole, and had brutally murdered their baby son, Arthur. He cornered them in a raw silver-mining town in the Uncompahgre. Writers of dime novels wrote that there were fifty gunhands in the town, and balladeers sang that Smoke Jensen killed a hundred or more desperados. In a play later written about him, with Smoke portrayed in New York City by a dandy who had never been west of Philadelphia, Smoke was portrayed to have killed five hundred men on that fateful day. In reality, Smoke faced fourteen men that day. Smoke rode away, wounded a half a dozen times. The miners buried fourteen gunhands.
A month later, his wounds nearly healed, Smoke went after the men who had killed his brother and his father years back. He found them in Idaho. When he rode away, he left a burning town and the streets littered with dead.
It was there that Smoke met Sally.
No one really knew how many murderers, outlaws, rapists, and other assorted human slime had fallen under the guns of Smoke Jensen. Smoke himself didn’t know. And he didn’t worry about it. But the figure was staggeringly high.
Around Big Rock, Smoke was known as a man who loved kids and dogs and horses, who sang solos in church every now and then, and would pitch in with a barn or house-raising. He would climb a tree to rescue a cat, take in stray dogs and make sure they had good homes or keep them himself. There were at least twenty running around the fenced-in acres where the house stood on the Sugarloaf. He would help a stranger in need and had completely outfitted, at his own expense, numerous settlers who had lost everything in their march West.
But crowd him, insult his wife, make a hostile move against an innocent—as Sally had pointed out in the kitchen, even an innocent he didn’t know—hurt one of his dogs or horses, and Smoke Jensen would hunt that man down, call him out, and either beat him half to death with those huge fists, or kill him.
There is an old Western expression that men would use to test another man’s courage. It reads, “I ain’t never seen none of your graveyards.”
Nobody ever said that to Smoke Jensen.
On this drive north to Montana Territory, Smoke had hired eight boys who were out of school for the summer. One sixteen-year-old, four fifteen-year-olds, and three fourteen-year-olds. They were young, but they were good hands. Willie, Jake, Bobby, Rabbit, Louie, Dan, Sonny, and Guy. In addition to his regular hands, Smoke had hired on four more men who had drifted through. He wired their former employers—the telegraph was making life a lot easier in the West—and received replies that the men were good hands who would give a day’s work for a day’s pay. That would give him seventeen men for the drive. It wasn’t enough, for the herd was very large, but he could pick up other hands along the way.
The drive would be hard work for the boys, and it would also be an adventure for them.
Smoke was kind of looking forward to it himself.
2
On the morning of the pullout, the boys from the neighboring farms and ranches were so excited, they could hardly contain themselves. Not only were they going on a real cattle drive, clear up into Montana Territory, but they were in the company of Smoke Jensen. How much better could it get?
The boys knew they would be close to the drag most of the time, herding the remuda on either the right or left flank of the cattle, but that was all right. It was a very responsible job, and they knew it.
Smoke had figured it close as far as manpower was concerned. Some trail bosses figure one cowboy for every 400 cows. Smoke figured one cowboy for every 250 cows. They would be pushing slightly over 3,500 head, not all belonging to Smoke. A half a dozen other ranchers had put a number of their cattle up for sale as well. The price Duggan was paying was more than fair, so why not throw in with Smoke?
The remuda was made up of more than a hundred horses, so the boys would have their young hands full.
Just before pullout, Smoke found two more punchers drifting through and hired them. They were down at the heels and looked like they needed a good meal just to stay alive one more day. But their horses were in good shape and they had honest eyes and easy grins. Their hands were so calloused from handling cattle and ropes, Smoke knew they couldn’t be outlaws.
The cook was a sour-faced old coot with never a kind word for anybody. But he was the best trail cook in five counties and could be counted on to have coffee ready anytime the men wanted it. While they were in camp, that is.
“Damn bunch of snot-nosed boys gonna eat us out of grub ’fore we get fifty miles,” he had groused. “This many men, we’re gonna need another wagon and I got to have me a helper, too. That’s that, or I ain’t goin’.”
“Will I do, Denver?” Sally asked, stepping up.
“A female?” Denver shouted. “Hell, no!”
“She’s a durn sight better cook than you, you old goat,” one of Smoke’s regular hands told him.
Denver threw his hat on the ground. “That’s a tooken bet, boy!”
“Now wait just a minute,” Smoke said. “I run this outfit. I say who goes along, and Sally is not coming along on this cattle drive.”
The hands all gathered around, grinning like a bunch of fools. None of them would have missed this for a month’s wages and a little speckled pup.