and he had killed many, many men. But he had to shake his head at the cold-blooded callousness of Lassiter.
“Back away and let me finish him,” Cheyenne said, walking up. “We got it to do sooner or later.”
Doreen stood looking at it all through wide and scared eyes.
Smoke had no doubts about the old mountain man’s ability to do just what he suggested. And he knew the old man was right: they would have it to do sooner or later. But he just couldn’t kill the wounded man that way.
He shook his head. “Get him patched up, Doreen. We’ll put him in a wagon.”
He walked over to where a young man lay, gut shot. The young gunfighter, no more than a couple of years out of boyhood, lay with both hands clutching his belly. The blood seeped darkly through his fingers, glistening wetly under the light of the hunter’s moon.
“You got a mamma you want me to write, boy?”
He shook his head, wincing with the painful movement. "They throwed me out of the house a long time ago. I wasn’t about to spend the rest of my life ... sloppin’ hogs and milkin’ cows.”
“Beats what you got now,” Smoke coldly and bluntly informed him.
The young man cussed him. Smoke watched as his right hand slipped toward his large belt buckle. Smoke reached down and pulled a derringer from behind the buckle before the gunhand could reach it. The young gunfighter cursed him even more.
“How much was Jud Vale paying you, boy?”
“A hundred a month and found!” He moaned the words as the pain reached higher levels in his bullet-shattered belly.
“Maybe you can buy something in Hell.”
“They’ll kill you, Jensen! This is one fight you ain’t gonna win. Your reputation ... ain’t gonna hep you none this time around. Jud Vale’s better than you. His real name is ... is ...”
“Shet your mouth, you bastard” Lassiter shouted at the young man.
But the admonition fell on dead ears. The young gunny’s eyes rolled back in his head as his soul went winging to a fiery, smoky eternity. His boot heels and spurs drummed and jangled against the ground and then he was still.
Smoke walked over to Walt. “How long has Jud been in this area, Walt?”
“’Bout twenty-five years. He just appeared one day with that damn Jason fellow.”
“He doesn’t look that old to me.”
“He’s older than he looks. But he’s one hell of a man still. Don’t sell him short none. I’d peg him in his late forties. He might be fifty even. Hard to tell with a man like that.”
“No idea where he came from?” Smoke got the strong impression that Walt was lying. But why? “Not a clue.”
Cheyenne walked up, hearing the last of the conversation. “He come up here by way of Texas,” the old mountain man told them “But I doubt he was Texas born. I ’member when he got here. Like all them hands of his, I think he’s runnin’ from the law somewheres.”
“And you would guess ...?”
Cheyenne shrugged. “Back East. But that’s just a guess. It’d be hard to read his backtrail after all these years.”
“What’s the count on those still alive, Cheyenne?”
“Four dead and three wounded. None of them hurt too bad.”
“Can one of them drive a wagon?” “Oh, yeah.”
“Let’s hitch up a team and get them on their way. We’ll pile the dead in with them.”
“Beats the hell outta diggin’ a hole,” Cheyenne said with a wicked grin.
Walt, Smoke, and Cheyenne took turns standing guard that night, but as it turned out, they could have all slept soundly, for Jud Vale and his so-called fighting men had had quite enough of the Box T for this go-around. “Four dead,” Walt said, holding a cup of coffee in his hands, warming them against the early morning chill.
“They’ll be more,” Smoke told him. “This battle is just getting started. Now I’m afraid that some of the kids are going to be hurt.”
“I don’t think that even Jud Vale would do that. Not deliberately. One of those kids gets hurt, the whole area would turn agin him, and he knows it. But they might catch a bullet that was meant for one of us.”
“The kids desperately need the money for their families,” Smoke concluded. “I think what I’ll do is ride around the area and speak to the mothers and fathers about it. Lay it on the line. Whatever they say, that’s it.”
Walt spoke around the stem of his pipe, “With most of the herd gone, we could do without the younger ones. Whatever the parents say, Smoke.”
Smoke began seeking out and questioning the parents early the next morning, riding first to Little Chuckie’s house; if that’s what the shack could be called. It wasn’t that his parents were rawhiders, they were just having a tough time getting the farm operation going—with Jud Vale and his men no small part of that struggle.
“It would really be a blow to Chuckie’s pride iffen you was to send him home, Mr. Smoke,” the father said. His wife nodded her head in agreement. “The boy is right proud of being able to bring in some money this summer. We’ll leave it up to him.”
Smoke rode over to the parents of Matthew, the frail little boy with the thick glasses. He got the same message as before. The parents were not unconcerned about their children; it was simply that this was still the raw frontier, and one grew up and pulled his or her weight from the git-go. It was called survival.
Smoke spent that day and most of another day talking with the parents of the boys. The message he got, albeit worded differently came out to mean the same thing: it was up to the boys whether to stay or leave.
Smoke drifted on over to the railhead, arriving there about the same time as the herd. He watched through hard, chilly eyes, as the passenger car spewed forth a dozen or more booted, spurred, and two-gunned men. Smoke did not need a telegraph wire to tell him that these were the men the kid had told him about before he died in the front yard of the Box T spread.
Jud Vale was going for the brass ring this time, for Smoke recognized many of the newly arrived hired guns.
He watched as Gimpy Bonner limped off the train and made his way back to the horse cars. Gimpy was deadly quick and had no backup on him. He had a horse shot out from under him years back and the horse rolled on his leg, breaking it in several places, leaving him with a permanent limp.
Shorty DePaul, all five feet five inches of him followed Gimpy. Short he may be, but those guns of his, and his ability to use them made him as tall as the next man.
The editor of the Montpelier newspaper had walked over to stand by Smoke’s side and watch the gunfighters leave the train. “Who is that one?” he asked.
“Scott Johnson. From down Arizona way. That stocky fellow with him
