“All right, you bastards!” Smoke yelled to Richards, Potter, and Stratton. “Holster your guns and step out into the street. Face me, if you’ve got the nerve.”
The sharp odor of sweat mingled with blood and gunsmoke filled the still summer air as four men stepped out into the bloody, dusty street.
Richards, Potter, and Stratton stood at one end of the block. A tall, bloody figure stood at the other. All their guns were in leather.
“You son of a bitch!” Stratton screamed, his voice as high-pitched as a woman. “You ruined it all.” He clawed at his .44.
Smoke drew and fired before Stratton’s pistol could clear leather. Potter grabbed for his pistol. Smoke shot him dead, then holstered his gun, waiting.
Richards had not moved. He stood with a faint smile on his lips, staring at Smoke.
“You ready to die?” Smoke asked the man.
“As ready as I’ll ever be, I suppose,” Richards replied. There was no fear in his voice. His hands appeared steady. “Janey gone?”
“Took your money and pulled out.”
“Been a long run, hasn’t it, Jensen?”
“It’s just about over.”
“What happens to all our holdings?”
“I don’t care what happens to the mines. The miners can have them. I’m giving all your stock to decent, honest punchers and homesteaders.”
A puzzled look spread over Richards’ face. “I don’t understand. You did…all this!” he waved his hand—“for nothing?”
Someone moaned, the sound painfully inching up the street.
“I did it for my pa, my brother, my wife, and my baby son.”
“But it won’t bring them back!”
“I know.”
“I wish I had never heard the name Jensen.”
“You’ll never hear it again after this day, Richards.”
“One way to find out,” Richards said with a smile. He drew his Colt and fired. He was snake-quick, but hurried his shot, the lead digging up dirt at Smoke’s feet.
Smoke shot him in the right shoulder, spinning the man around. Richards grabbed for his left-hand gun and Smoke fired again, the slug striking the man in the left side of his chest. He struggled to bring up his Colt. He managed to cock it before Smoke’s third shot struck him in the belly. Richards sat down hard in the bloody, dusty street.
He opened his mouth to speak. He tasted blood on his tongue. The light began to fade around him. “You’ll…meet…”
Smoke never found out who he was supposed to meet. Richards toppled over on his side and died.
Smoke looked up at the ridge where the mountain men had gathered.
They were gone, leaving as silently as the wind.
24
After MacGregor filed his report with the commanding officer at the fort, the Army made only a cursory inspection of what was left of Bury, Idaho Territory, and the burned ranches around it.
Wanted posters were put out for the outlaw and murderer Buck West. MacGregor wrote the description of the man, thus ensuring he would never be found.
A lot of small ranches sprang up around the area. Very prosperous little farms and ranchers. The ladies from the Pink House stayed. They all got married.
Sam married Becky.
The last anyone ever saw of Smoke Jensen and Sally Reynolds, the two of them were riding toward the mountains, toward the High Lonesome, leading two packhorses.
“You think we’ll ever see them again?” Becky asked Sam.
Sam did not reply.
But as Nighthawk might have said, “Ummm.”
NOTES FROM THE OLD WEST
In the small town where I grew up, there were two movie theaters. The Pavilion was one of those old-timey movie show palaces, built in the heyday of Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin—the silent era of the 1920s. By the 1950s, when I was a kid, the Pavilion was a little worn around the edges, but it was still the premier theater in town. They played all those big Technicolor biblical Cecil B. DeMille epics and corny MGM musicals. In Cinemascope.
On the other side of town was the Gem, a somewhat shabby and run-down grind house with sticky floors and torn seats. The Gem booked low-budget “B” pictures (remember the Bowery Boys?), war movies, horror flicks, and Westerns. I liked the Westerns best. I could usually be found every Saturday at the Gem, along with my best friend, Newton Trout, watching Westerns from 10 AM until my mother or father came looking for me around suppertime. (Sometimes Newton’s dad was dispatched to come fetch us.) One time, my dad came to get me right in the middle of Abilene Trail, which featured the now-forgotten Whip Wilson. My father became so engrossed in the action he sat down and watched the rest of it with us. We didn’t get home until after dark, and my mother’s meat loaf was a pan of gray ashes by the time we did. Though my father and I were both in the doghouse the next day, this remains one of my fondest childhood memories. There was John Wayne, Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, and Wild Bill Elliot, and Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers, and Tim Holt and, a little later, Rod Cameron and Audie Murphy. Of these newcomers, I never missed an Audie Murphy Western, because Audie was sort of an antihero. Sure, he stood for law and order and was an honest man, but sometimes he had to go around the law to uphold it. If he didn’t play fair, it was only because he felt ham-strung by the laws of the land. Whatever it took to get the bad guys, Audie did it. There were no finer points of law, no splitting of legal hairs. It was instant justice, devoid of long-winded lawyers, bored or biased jurors, or blackrobed, often corrupt judges.
Steal a man’s horse and you were the guest of honor at a necktie party.
Molest a good woman and you got a bullet in the heart or a rope around the gullet. Or at the very least, got the crap beat out of you. Rob a bank and face a hail of bullets or the hang-man’s noose.
Saved a lot of time and money, did frontier justice.
That’s all gone now, I’m sad to say. Now you hear, “Oh, but he had a bad childhood” or “His mother didn’t give him enough love” or “The homecoming queen wouldn’t give him a second look and he has an inferiority complex.” Or “cultural rage,” as the politically correct bright boys refer to it. How many times have you heard some self-important defense attorney moan, “The poor kids were only venting their hostilities toward an uncaring society”?
Mule fritters, I say. Nowadays, you can’t even call a punk a punk anymore. But don’t get me started.
It was “Howdy, ma’am” time too. The good guys, antihero or not, were always respectful to the ladies. They might shoot a bad guy five seconds after tipping their hat to a woman, but the code of the West demanded you be respectful to a lady.
Lots of things have changed since the heyday of the Wild West, haven’t they? Some for the good, some for the bad.
I didn’t have any idea at the time that I would someday write about the West. I just knew that I was captivated by the Old West.
When I first got the itch to write, back in the early 1970s, I didn’t write Westerns. I started by writing horror and action adventure novels. After more than two dozen novels, I began thinking about developing a Western character. From those initial musings came the novel The Last Mountain Man: Smoke Jensen. That was followed by Preacher: The First Mountain Man. A few years later, I began developing the Last Gunfighter series. Frank Morgan is a legend in his own time, the fastest gun west of the Mississippi…a title and a reputation he never wanted, but can’t get rid of.
For me, and for thousands—probably millions—of other people (although many will never publicly admit it), the old Wild West will always be a magic, mysterious place: a place we love to visit through the pages of books; characters we would like to know…from a safe distance; events we would love to take part in, again, from a safe distance. For the old Wild West was not a place for the faint of heart. It was a hard, tough, physically demanding time. There were no police to call if one faced adversity. One faced trouble alone, and handled it alone. It was rugged individualism: something that appeals to many of us.