Smoke had calculated the distance; about a day and a half of riding over rough country. “Tell Wilde I will enter the town day after tomorrow, at late afternoon. Do you know a place near the town where you could hide some guns for me?”
The brave thought for a moment, and then smiled. “Yes. Behind the saloon with an ugly picture of a bucket on the front of it. The bucket is filled with what I think is supposed to be blood.”
“The bloody bucket?” Smoke guessed.
“Yes! Behind the little building where the men go to relieve themselves there is a rotting pile of lumber. I will put them under the lumber.”
“Good. What is your name?”
“Lone Eagle.”
“Be very careful, Lone Eagle. If you’re caught, you will die hard.”
The Ute nodded. “I know. The Co-manche lawman says that two hours after dark, on the seventh day of your entering the outlaw place, we shall attack. And White Wolf says that you need not worry about the guards. Concern yourself only with the town. It might take the main body of men an hour to fight their way to your location.”
“Tell White Wolf thank you. It will be a good coup for you all.”
The brave nodded. “The outlaws in the town have not been kind to my people. They have seized and raped some of our young girls. Twice, they have taken young braves and have been cruel beyond any reason. One they cut off his feet and left him to die, slowly. They called it sport. On the night of the seventh day, we shall have our sport with the outlaws.”
Smoke nodded, repeating what he had said to the chief, “They shall not die well, I am thinking.”
The Ute smiled, very unpleasantly. “We are counting on that.”
Then he was gone, back to his pony hidden in the deep timber.
The outlaws of Dead River had had their way for years, torturing, raping, robbing and looting, enslaving the innocent and ravaging the unsuspecting for several hundred miles, or more, in any direction. Now they were about to have the tables turned on them. And Smoke knew the more fortunate ones would die under his guns or the guns of the posse.
It would be very unpleasant for those taken alive by the Utes.
For the Utes knew ways of torture that would make the Spanish Inquisitioners green with envy. Dying well was an honor for the Indians, and if a prisoner died well, enduring hours and sometimes days of torture, they would sing songs about that person for years, praising his courage. That person who died well would not be forgotten.
The Indians had nothing but contempt for a man who begged and cried and died in dishonor.
They had their own code of honor and justice, and the whites had theirs. There were those who said the red man was nothing but a barbaric savage. But he had learned to scalp from the European white man. The Indians were different; but they would not steal from within their own tribe. The white man could not say that. War was a game to the Indians—until the white man entered the picture and began killing in war. For the Indians, for centuries, counting coup by striking with a club or stick was preferable to killing.
So it is very questionable who was the savage and who was the instructor in barbarism.
Smoke had lived with the Indians and, in many ways, preferred their lifestyle to the white ways. Smoke, as did nearly anyone who learned their ways, found the Indians to be honest, extremely gentle, and patient with their children or any captured children, of any color. The Indians lived a hard life in a hard land, so it was foolish to think their ways to be barbaric. They were, Smoke felt, just different.
Smoke felt nothing for the outlaws in the town. He knew the truth in the statement that whatever befalls a man, that man usually brought the bad onto himself. Every person comes, eventually, to a fork in the road. The direction that person takes comes from within, not from without, as many uninformed choose to believe when slavering pity on some criminal. The outlaw trail is one that a person can leave at any time; they are not chained to it.
An outlaw is, in many ways, like an ignorant person, who knows he is ignorant and is proud of it, enjoying wallowing in blind unenlightenment, knowing that he is is wrong but too lazy to climb the ladder of knowledge. Too inwardly slovenly to make the effort of reaching out and working to better himself.
To hell with them!
“It’s a different world for me,” Sally said, sitting in her parents’ fine home in New Hampshire. “And a world, I fear, that I no longer belong in.”
“What an odd thing to say, dear,” her mother said, looking up from her knitting.
Sally smiled, glancing at her. She shifted her gaze to her brothers and sisters and father, all of them seated in the elegant sitting room of the mansion. And all of them, including her father, not quite sure they believed anything Sally had told them about her husband, this seemingly wild man called Smoke.
“Odd, Mother? Oh, I think not. It’s just what a person wants; what that person becomes accustomed to, that’s all. You would consider our life hard; we just consider it living free.”
“Dear,” her father spoke, “I am sure you find it quite amusing to entertain us with your wild stories about the West and this…person you married. But really now, Sally, don’t you think it a bit much to ask us to believe all these wild yarns?”
“Wild yarns, Father?”
Jordan, Sally’s oldest brother, and a bore and stuffed shirt if there ever were one, took some snuff gentlemanly and said, “All that dribble-drabble about the wild West is just a bunch of flapdoodle as far as I’m concerned.”
Sally laughed at him. She had not, as yet, shown her family the many newspapers she had brought back to New Hampshire with her; but that time was not far off.
“Oh, Jordan! You’ll never change. And don’t ever come west to where I live. You wouldn’t last fifteen minutes before someone would slap you flat on your backside.”
Jordan scowled at her but kept his mouth closed.
For a change.
Sally said, “You’re all so safe and secure and comfortable here in Keene, in all your nice homes. If you had trouble, you’d shout for a constable to handle it. There must be more than a dozen police officers here in this town alone. Where I live in Colorado, there aren’t a dozen deputies within a two-thousand-square-mile radius.”
“I will accept that, Sally,” her father, John, said. “I have heard the horror stories about law and order in the West. But what amazes me is how you handle the business of law and order.”
“We handle it, Father, usually ourselves.”
“I don’t understand, Sally,” her sister Penny said. “Do you mean that where you live women are allowed to sit on juries?”
Sally laughed merrily. “No, you silly goose!” She kidded her sister. “Most of the time there isn’t even any trial.”
Her mother, Abigal, put her knitting aside and looked at her daughter. “Dear, now I’m confused. All civilized places have due process. Don’t you have due process where you live?”
“We damn sure do!” Sally shocked them all into silence with the cuss word.
Her mother began fanning herself vigorously. Her sisters momentarily swooned. Her brothers looked shocked, as did her brothers-in-law, Chris and Robert. Her father frowned.
“Whatever in the world do you mean, dear?” Abigal asked.
“Most of the time it’s from a Henry,” Sally attempted to explain, but only added to the confusion.
“Ah-hah!” John exclaimed. “Now we’re getting to it. This Henry person—he’s a judge, I gather.”
“No, a Henry is a rifle. Why, last year, when those TF riders roped and dragged Pearlie and then attacked the house, I knocked two of them out of the saddle from the front window of the house.”
“You struck two men?” Betsy asked, shocked. “While they were stealing your pearls?”
Sally sighed. “Pearlie is our foreman at the ranch. Some TF riders slung a loop on him and tried to drag him to death. And, hell, no, I didn’t strike them. When they attacked the house, I shot them!”