“I would think it’s because the doctor told you to. But you won’t be going anywhere for weeks. You were hard hit.” He smiled. “I’ve been there, too.” He kissed her mouth. “Now, you rest.”
Mona and Belle stayed for three days; Bountiful lived just over the hill and could come and go with ease. On the morning of the fourth day, Sally was sitting up in bed, her color back. She was still in some pain and very weak, and would be for several more weeks.
Smoke finally brought up the subject. “The Doc is sure that you’re with child?”
“Both of us are,” she smiled with her reply. “I knew before the doctor.”
Discussion of women’s inner workings embarrassed Smoke. He dropped that part of it. “Now tell me why you think you might have to go back east.”
“I have several pieces of lead in me, Smoke. Colton could not get them all. And he does not have the expertise nor the facilities to perform the next operation. And also, I have a small pelvis; the birth might be a difficult one. There is a new—well, a more highly refined procedure that is being used back east. I won’t go into detail about that.”
“Thank you,” Smoke said dryly. “’Cause so far I don’t have much idea of what you’re talking about.”
She laughed softly at her husband. A loving laugh and a knowing laugh. Smoke knew perfectly well what she was saying. He was, for the most part, until they had married, a self-taught man. And over the past few years, she had been tutoring him. He was widely read, and to her delight and surprise, although few others knew it, Smoke was a very good actor, with a surprising range of voices and inflections. She was continually drawing out that side of him.
“Mona’s from back east, isn’t she?”
“I’m way ahead of you, Smoke. Yes, she is. And if I have to go—and I’m thinking it might be best, and you know why, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the baby or the operation—Mona will make all the arrangements and travel most of the way with me.”
“That’ll be good, Sally. Yes. I think you should plan on traveling east.” She knew the set of that chin. Her leaving was settled; her husband had things to do. “You haven’t seen your folks in almost five years. It’s time to visit. Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll come out for you when it’s time for you and the baby to return.”
This time her laugh was hearty, despite her injuries. “Smoke, do you know the furor your presence would arouse in Keene, New Hampshire?”
“If fu-ror means what I think it does, why should people get all in a sweat about me coming east?”
“For sure, bands would play, you would be a celebrity, and the police would be upset.”
“Why? I ain’t wanted back there, or anywhere else for that matter.”
She could but smile at him. If he knew, he had dismissed the fact that he was the most famous gunfighter in all of the West; that books—penny dreadfuls—had been and still were being written about his exploits—some of them fact, many of them fiction. That he had been written up in tabloids all over the world, and not just in the English-speaking countries. Her mother and father had sent Sally articles about her husband from all over the world. To say that they had been a little concerned about her safety—for a while—would be putting it mildly.
“People don’t really believe all that crap that’s been written about me, do they? Hell, Sally, I’ve been reported at fourteen different places at once, according to those stories.”
“If they just believed the real things you’ve done, Smoke, that is enough to make people very afraid of you.”
“That’s silly! I never hurt anybody who wasn’t trying to hurt me. People don’t have any reason to be afraid of me.”
“Well, I’m not afraid of you, Smoke. You’re sort of special to me.”
He smiled. “Oh, yeah? Well, I’d have to give it a lot of thought if someone was to offer to trade me a spotted pony for you, Sally.”
2
Smoke Jensen and Sally Reynolds, gunfighter and schoolteacher, had met several years back, in Idaho. Just before Smoke had very nearly wiped out a town and all the people in it for killing his first wife and their child, Nicole and Baby Arthur; the boy named after Smoke’s friend and mentor, the old mountain man, Preacher.
Smoke and Sally had married, living in peace for several years in the high lonesome, vast and beautiful mountains of Colorado. Then a man named Tilden Franklin had wanted to be king of the entire valley…and he had coveted Smoke’s wife, making it public news.
Gold had been discovered in the valley, and a bitter, bloody war had ensued.
And in the end, all Tilden Franklin got was a half-a-dozen slugs in the belly, from the guns of Smoke Jensen, and six feet of hard cold ground.
That had been almost two years back; two years of peace in the valley and in Smoke and Sally’s high-up ranch called the Sugarloaf.
Now that had been shattered.
On the morning of the first full week after the assault on Sally, Smoke sat on the bench outside the snug cabin and sipped his coffee.
Late spring in the mountains.
1880, and the West was slowly changing. There would be another full decade of lawlessness, of wild and woolly days and nights; but the law was making its mark felt all over the area. And Smoke, like so many other western men, knew that was both good and bad. For years, a commonsense type of justice had prevailed, for the most part, in the West, and usually—not always, but usually—it worked. Swiftly and oftentimes brutally, but it worked. Now, things were changing. Lawyers with big words and fancy tongues were twisting facts, hiding the guilt to win a case. And Smoke, like most thinking people, thought that to be wrong.
The coming of courts and laws and lawyers would prove to be both a blessing and a curse.
Smoke, like most western men, just figured that if someone tried to do you a harm or a meanness, just shoot the son of a bitch and have done with it. ’Cause odds were, the guilty party wasn’t worth a damn to begin with. And damn few were ever going to miss them.
Smoke, like so many western men, judged other men by what they gave to society as opposed to what they took away from it. If your neighbor’s house or barn burned down or was blown down in a storm, you helped him rebuild. If his crops were bad or his herd destroyed, you helped him out until next season or loaned him some cows and a few bulls. If he and his family were hungry through no fault of their own, you helped out with food and clothing.
And so on down the line of doing things right.
And if a man wouldn’t help out, chances were he was trash, and the sooner you got rid of him, the better.
Western justice and common sense.
And if people back east couldn’t see that—well, Smoke thought…Well, he really didn’t know what to think about people like that. He’d reserve judgment until he got to know a few of them.
He sipped his coffee and let his eyes drift over that part of his land that he could see from his front yard. And that was a lot of land, but just a small portion of all that he and Sally owned…free and clear.
There was a lot to do before Smoke put Sally on the steam trains and saw her off to the East—and before he started after those who had attacked her like rabid human beasts in the night.
And there was only one thing you could do with a rabid beast.
Kill it.
Billy stepped out of the house and took a seat on the bench beside his adopted father. The boy had been legally adopted by the Jensens; Judge Proctor had seen to that. Billy was pushing hard at his teen years, soon turning thirteen. Already he was a top hand and, even though Smoke discouraged it, a good hand with a gun. Uncommon quick. Smoke and Sally had adopted the boy shortly after the shoot-out in Fontana, and now Billy pulled his weight and then some around the Sugarloaf.