The French chef placed a plate before Smoke. Smoke looked at the food on the plate. Damned if he knew what it was. He said as much.
Then the chef reached down with a lighted match, set fire to the stuff, and Smoke jumped out of his chair.
Louis had a good laugh out of that. “Sit down, Smoke. Enjoy your breakfast.”
“Hell, I can’t eat fire!”
The flames abated and the chef departed, chuckling. Louis smiled. “Those are crepes suzette, my young friend. This dish.” He tapped another plate with a knife blade. “Is an au jambon.”
“Do tell?”
“An omelette, with bits of ham,” Louis explained. “Now eat and enjoy.”
Them crap susies was a tad too sweet for Smoke’s taste, but the omelette was tasty. He made a mental note to tell Sally about what he had had for a late breakfast. Maybe she’d heard of them; damned if he ever had.
“Either way,” Smoke said, “I think we’re all looking at a lot of trouble just up the road.”
“I share your feelings, Smoke. But why not postpone it as long as possible. You know this strike is not going to last. In six months it will have seen its heyday.”
“I can’t figure you, Louis. I never…” He bit off the words just at the last possible second.
The gambler-gunfighter did not take umbrage at what he suspected Smoke had been about to say. Instead, he smiled and finished it for him. “Never knew me to back off from trouble, Smoke?”
“I apologize for thinking it, Louis.”
Louis smiled and shook his head. “No need for any of that—not between friends.” He sighed. “But you’re right, Smoke. I am trying to avoid trouble. Not for my sake,” he was quick to add. “But for yours.”
Smoke laid down his fork. “My sake?”
“Listen to me, my young friend. How many guns do you have? A dozen? Maybe fifteen at the most? Tilden has seventy-five hardcases right now and can pull in two hundred more anytime he wishes, and will. Talk is that Luis Chamba is on his way here. And where Luis goes, Sanderson and Kane go with him. Think about it.”
Smoke thought about it, and the more he thought about it the madder he got. Louis saw his expression change and tried to calm the young man down.
“No, Louis. No. Don’t you see what Tilden is trying to pull?”
“Of course I do, boy! But give it time. In six months this area of the country will be right back where it was a month ago. Farm and ranch country. This town will dry up with only a few of the businesses remaining. I’m betting Tilden won’t want to be king of nothing.”
“He won’t be king of nothing, Louis. For if we don’t fight, he’ll kill us all one by one. He’ll make some grand gesture of buying out the widows or the kids—through some goddamned lawyer—and then he’ll own this entire section of the state of Colorado. Everything!”
Louis nodded his head. “Maybe you’re right, Smoke. Maybe you’re right. If that’s the case, then you’ve got to start hiring guns of your own. You and your wife have the means to do so; if you don’t, let me advance you the money.”
Suddenly, Smoke thought of something. In a way it was a cruel thought, but it was also a way for a lot of broke, aging men to gather in one final blaze of glory. The more he thought about it, the better he liked it, and his mood began to lighten. But he’d have to bounce it off Charlie first.
“Why are you smiling, Smoke?” Louis asked.
“Louis, you’re one of the best gamblers around, aren’t you?”
“Some say I am one of the best in the world, Smoke. I should think my numerous bank accounts would back up that claim. Why do you ask?”
“Suppose you suddenly learned you were dying, or suppose some…well, call it fate…started dealing you bad hands and you ended up broke and old—anything along that line—and then someone offered you the chance to once more live in glory. Your kind of glory. Would you take it, Louis, or would you think the offer to be cruel?”
“What an interesting thought! Say now…cruel? Oh, no. Not at all. I would jump at the opportunity. But…what are you thinking of, Smoke? I’m not following this line of questioning at all.”
“You will, Louis.” Smoke stood up and smiled. His smile seemed to Louis to be rather mysterious “You will. And I think you’ll find it to your liking. I really believe you will.”
Long after Smoke had plopped his hat on his head, left the gaming room, and ridden out of town, Louis Longmont had sat at the table and thought about what his young friend had said.
Then he began smiling. Soon the smile had turned to chuckling and the chuckling to hard laughter.
“Oh…” he managed to say over the pealing laughter. “I love it!”
17
Smoke sat with Sally, Pearlie, and Charlie. Charlie listened to what Smoke had on his mind and then leaned back in his chair, a broad smile on his face. He laughed and slapped his knee.
“Smoke, that’s the bes’ idee I’ve heard of in a long, long time. Cruel? No, sir. It ain’t cruel. What you’re talkin’ about is what they do bes’. You give me the wherewithal and I’ll have an even dozen here in a week, soon as I can get to a telegraph and get hold of them and get some money to them.”
“Name them, Charlie.”
“Oh…well, there’s Luke Nations, Pistol Le Roux, Bill Foley, Dan Greentree, Leo Wood, Cary Webb, Sunset Hatfield, Crooked John Simmons, Bull Flagler, Toot Tooner, Sutter Cordova, Red Shingletown…give me time and I’ll name some more.”
Pearlie said, “But all them old boys is dead!”
“No, they ain’t neither,” Charlie corrected. “They just retared is all.”
“Well…” Pearlie thought a moment. “Then they mus’ be a hundred years old!”
“Naw!” Charlie scoffed at that. “You jus’ a kid, is all. They all in their sixties.”
“I’ve met some of them. Charlie, I don’t want to be responsible for any of them going to their deaths.”
“Smoke…it’s the way they’d want it. If they all died, they’d go out thankin’ you for the opportunity to show the world they still had it in them. Let them go out in a blaze of glory, Smoke.”
Smoke thought about it. That was the way Preacher would have wanted to go. And those old Mountain Men three years back, that’s how they had wanted it. “All right, Charlie. We’ll give you the money and you can pull out at first light. Me and Pearlie will start adding on to the bunkhouse. How many do you think will be here?”
“When the word gets out, I’d look for about twenty-five or so.” Charlie said it with a smile. “You gonna have to hire you a cook to help Miss Sally. Or you’ll work her to a frazzle, Smoke.”
“All right. Do you know an old camp cook?”
“Shore do. Dad Weaver. He can cook and he can still pull a trigger too. One about as good as the other.”
“Hire him. Oh, ’fore I forget.” He looked at Sally. “I had a late breakfast with Louis Longmont. His chef fed me crap susies.”
“Fed you what?” Sally said.
“The chef set it on fire before he served me. I thought he’d lost his mind.”
“You didn’t eat it, did you?” Pearlie asked.
“Oh, yeah! It was pretty good. Real sweet.”
“Crepes suzette,” Sally said.
“That’s it,” Smoke said. “Say it again.”
“You pronounce it…krehp sue-zeht. You all try to say it.”
They all tried. It sounded like three monkeys trying to master French.
“I feel like a plumb idiot!” Charlie said.
“What’re those damned nesters up to?” Tilden Franklin asked his foreman.
“I can’t figure it,” Clint said. “They’ve all rode out and told the miners there wouldn’t be no trouble as long as the miners don’t spook their herds or trample their crops. They was firm, but in a nice way.”