CHAPTER 17

Eloise was among the curious crowd that had gathered in front of the Rusty Hinge. When she saw Salty come out of the alley, she threw her arms around him, hugged him, and cried, “Oh my God, Salty, are you all right?”

“A whole heap better now,” Salty replied, beaming, “but if you was to hug me a mite tighter, it’d probably help some.”

“What?” She drew back, frowned, then said, “Oh, you!” But she laughed and hugged him again, just like he asked.

Smoke started walking along the street, causing the policeman with the lantern to say, “Hey, you! I told you, I’ve got questions to ask you.”

“Then come along with me and ask ’em,” Smoke said. “I’m responsible for the horse I was riding, and I want to make sure it wasn’t hurt too badly.”

The exasperated officer followed him, and Smoke was glad for the lantern light. It helped him locate the rented horse, which had stopped about a hundred yards along the road.

The still-spooked animal tried to shy away, but Smoke was a top hand when it came to horses. He spoke softly in a calm, soothing voice and soon had hold of the horse’s headstall.

“Bring that light closer,” Smoke told the officer. He pointed to a red streak on the horse’s rump that was visible in the lantern’s glow. “Either a bullet or a piece of buckshot grazed him when those boys threw down on me. You can see it’s a fresh injury. I reckon that proves my story about them shooting at me first.”

“Maybe,” the policeman admitted grudgingly. “Or maybe they were just shootin’ back at you after you attacked them.”

“You said yourself there were four of them and one of me. Do you believe I’d deliberately go after four armed men?”

Of course, that was exactly the sort of thing Smoke would—and had—done many times in the past. But the policeman didn’t know that, so he shrugged and said, “It ain’t very likely, I guess.”

With Smoke leading the horse, they returned to the saloon. The other officers were standing there keeping the morbidly curious bystanders away from the corpses. One of the uniformed men said, “We’ve already sent for the wagon, Sarge.”

The man with the lantern grunted and said, “Good.” He jerked his head toward the door and told Smoke, “Let’s go inside out of the cold air.”

Once in the saloon, Salty and Eloise joined them, and it didn’t take long to lay out the whole story for the police sergeant. When they were finished, the officer told Smoke, “It sounds like you’re not going to be in any trouble for this, since it’s a pretty clear case of self-defense, but you’ll have to stay in town for the coroner’s inquest.”

“Sorry,” Smoke said. “Salty and I are leaving for Reno first thing in the morning.”

“You can’t do that,” the sergeant insisted. “Not only is there the matter of the inquest, but I’ve heard that the pass through the mountains is closed. The train can’t get through.”

Salty grinned and said, “We ain’t takin’ the train. We’re takin’ a stagecoach around the old McCulley Cutoff!”

The officer stared at him as if Salty had lost his mind. Smoke said, “We’ll write out official statements and swear to them, Sergeant. Any more questions can be referred to my attorney in San Francisco, Claudius Turnbuckle.”

The officer didn’t like that, but he agreed to pass the information along to his captain.

“I may get in trouble for not taking you into custody,” he said, “but it’s pretty obvious you didn’t do anything except defend yourself from four would-be murderers. The coroner’s jury will likely see it the same way.”

Salty said, “If anybody needs to talk to Smoke later, they won’t have no trouble findin’ him. He’s just the owner of one o’ the biggest ranches in Colorado, after all!”

“Well, the law’s the same for him as it is for anybody else.” The sergeant paused. “But if I’m bein’ honest, I can’t say that I’ll get too worked up about somebody ridding these parts of those damn Stoermer brothers. They’ve been in trouble with the law plenty of times, and even though we were never able to pin any of it on them, it’s likely they were mixed up in plenty of strong-arm stuff. Robberies, a protection racket, and even a few killin’s. So you’ve done the neighborhood a favor, Jensen.”

“I was just trying not to collect any bullet holes in my hide,” Smoke said.

* * *

There was nothing wrong with the stagecoach currently sitting in Fred Davis’s barn. The note that had been delivered to Smoke at the hotel was pure fiction, dictated to Salty by one of the Stoermer brothers while they held him at gunpoint.

Even that, along with more roughing up than Salty would admit to, hadn’t been enough to get the old-timer to cooperate. He hadn’t given his captors what they wanted until they had threatened to kill Eloise.

“I knew they’d do it, too,” Salty told Smoke later, after the police sergeant was gone. He looked toward the bar, where the blonde was talking to the bartender. “As for some o’ the other things they said they’d do to her first . . . well, I ain’t ever gonna talk about that, and I sure as shootin’ won’t tell her. But even so, I feel like I done let you down, Smoke.”

“Don’t give that another thought,” Smoke said. “I would have done the same thing if I’d been in your place, if someone was threatening Sally.”

“Yeah, maybe. But more’n likely, you would’ve found some way to turn the tables on those bastards and kill ’em all before it ever got that far.”

That was exactly what Smoke would have tried to do, but there was no way of knowing how that would have worked out, so he didn’t see any point in dwelling on it.

He said his good nights to Salty and Eloise, once she had returned to the table, then told Salty they would meet at Fred Davis’s place at eight o’clock the next morning.

Smoke rode back toward the hotel, stopping a few blocks away at the livery stable to return the horse.

“There was a little bit of trouble,” he told the hostler as he pointed out the minor wound on the horse’s rump. “You’ll want to daub something on that, but it ought to heal up just fine.”

“I dunno, mister,” the hostler said as he scratched his head. “That’s extra trouble, and the owner’s liable to be upset, you bringin’ back a mount injured this way. . . .”

Smoke handed the man a five-dollar gold piece.

“You reckon that’ll soothe the owner’s feelings and cover your extra trouble?”

The coin disappeared instantly into a pocket of the man’s overalls. Smoke knew the owner would never see any of the money. The hostler said, “Oh, yeah, I reckon that’ll make everything just fine.”

It would be nice if every problem in life could be taken care of so easily, Smoke mused as he walked the remaining short distance to the hotel.

When he walked into the lobby, he was surprised to see Louis sitting in one of the chairs with a folded newspaper in his lap. Louis stood up and moved to meet him.

“What was wrong with the stagecoach?” Louis asked.

“Nothing,” Smoke replied with a shake of his head. He hadn’t told Louis and Denny about the earlier brawl with the Stoermer brothers, and neither of them had seemed to notice his bruised knuckles. Explaining what had happened tonight would take too long right now, he decided. He could tell them about it later. “Just a misunderstanding. What are you doing still up? I figured you would have turned in by now.”

“I thought you might like to see the late afternoon edition,” Louis said as he held out the newspaper.

Smoke took the paper and scanned the headlines, his eyes stopping at one that read: LEGENDARY PISTOLEER TO UNDERTAKE EPIC STAGECOACH JOURNEY—NOTORIOUS GUNFIGHTER RISKING LIFE AND LIMB TO CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS WITH FAMILY—HISTORIC CROSSING OF THE SIERRA NEVADAS IN WINTER. Each succeeding section was in slightly smaller type. Below them in dense print was the story.

Smoke Jensen, the hero of a thousand fights and fast-draw artist par excellence, who at various stages of his checkered career as a Westerner and frontiersman has been both outlaw and lawman and is now one of the leading cattle barons of Colorado, has come to Sacramento to embark upon an unheard of journey across the majestic mountains that form the veritable spine of the great Golden State. Mr. Jensen, accompanied by his grown children, Mr. Louis Arthur Jensen and Miss Denise Nicole Jensen, will attempt to travel from this fair city to the bustling settlement of Reno, Nevada, by the outdated conveyance known as a stagecoach.

Such stagecoaches, now rendered all but obsolete by the glittering steel network of the railroads, once traversed trails far and wide across the West, but no one uses them in these more modern times. Mr. Jensen’s perilous attempt is motivated by the desire for he and his children to reunite with his wife in time for Christmas, with the rendezvous to take place in Reno, which is approximately halfway between here and Mr. Jensen’s sprawling ranch, known as the Sugarloaf, located near the town of Big Rock, Colorado.

The wisdom of such an undertaking is open to great debate, given the current uncertain state of the weather and the arduous conditions under which the stagecoach will be forced to travel. Two nights previous to this, a great blizzard precipitated an avalanche in Donner Pass that inflicted great damage to the railroad tracks and blocked the pass. It will be several weeks before trains will be able to travel through the pass, at the very earliest.

Mr. Jensen claims to know of another route and has accordingly arranged for the use of a stagecoach belonging to Mr. Frederick C. Davis, formerly a successful operator of several stage lines. Mr. Jensen has also engaged the services of an experienced driver for said stagecoach.

It remains to be seen whether such an ambitious undertaking can be concluded successfully, but this reporter intends to travel with Mr. Jensen and his family members on the historic journey in order to maintain a journal and produce a volume telling the story of this adventure, in the great literary tradition of Mr. Mark Twain’s Roughing It and other such stirring tales.—Peter Stansfield.

Smoke’s grip on the newspaper had tightened as he read. He was breathing a little harder by the time he finished, but from anger, not exertion.

Louis said, “I can tell you’re not pleased, Father.”

“Not pleased is putting it pretty mildly.” Smoke rolled up the newspaper and smacked it against the palm of his left hand. “How in blazes did that scribbler find out about this?”

“And perhaps more importantly, do you intend to allow him to come with us?”

“Not hardly,” Smoke snapped.

“How are you going to stop him?”

“It’s a private coach, or what amounts to it,” Smoke pointed out. “It’s not like when Fred Davis or anybody else was running a regular stage line, where folks who could afford to buy a ticket had a right to ride. I can tell this persistent varmint Stansfield to—”

Smoke stopped short, since he wasn’t inclined to engage in language that was too colorful or profane . . . and that was certainly what he was feeling at the moment.

“You can tell him that, of course,” Louis agreed, “but if you do, he’s just going to write more newspaper stories that make you look bad.”

Smoke snorted. “You reckon I care about that?”

“I know you don’t. But Mother might.”

“Your mother would tell him to go climb a stump. And then she’d grab a shotgun and threaten to dust his butt with birdshot if he didn’t leave us alone.”

“It’s a new century,” Louis argued. “Some would say a whole new world. The newspapers reach a lot more people than they used to. They mold public opinion.” He gestured toward the paper still clutched in Smoke’s hand. “In that story, he paints you two different ways. He calls you a hero . . . but he refers to you as notorious as well. He makes you sound like a good family man, but he points out that you were once considered an outlaw, too.”

“That was a long time ago,” Smoke said.

“Very true, but does the average reader of this newspaper know that? And it’s certainly possible that the story will be picked up and run in other places in the country as well. It could spread all the way to the East Coast.”

“Like I said before, I don’t care.”

“Read between the lines,” Louis said, “and you can see where Stansfield makes it sound like this is going to be a very dangerous trip. He all but says that you’re putting your children’s lives at risk unnecessarily. I hate to say it, Father, but that’s not good for business. And since you want me to handle that end of the ranch’s operation at some point, I’d like to think that you’d give my opinion some weight.”

“Are you saying you think I don’t trust you?”

“I’m saying if you let this reporter come along, then he’ll see what sort of man you really are, and that’s what he’ll write in the future.” Louis shrugged. “It really can’t hurt anything.”

Smoke wasn’t so sure about that. But Louis was right about one thing: if Smoke was going to put his faith in the youngster to handle the ranch’s business affairs, he had to learn how to pay attention to him.

Smoke brandished the newspaper and said, “Stansfield says he wants to come with us, but he hasn’t shown up and asked me yet. If he does before we leave in the morning, I’ll think about it. But if he’s late, I won’t wait for him. As soon as that team gets there and we’ve got them hitched up, that stagecoach is rolling for Reno!”