CHAPTER 22
The men and horses were protected in a dry wash that twisted across the prairie. Up against the northern wall of it, they were protected from the worst of the icy wind.
Even so, the conditions were fairly miserable, and the men weren’t happy. They had been upset already because the female prisoners they had taken from Thatcher’s Crossing had proven not to have much stamina. All four gals were already dead, three from the rough treatment they had suffered, the fourth because she’d gotten her hands on a knife and cut her own throat.
The unexpected cash they had found in the front boot of that stagecoach had perked the boys up for a while, but then Snake Bishop had decided to wait before launching the raid on Salt Lick. Bishop had seen the blue norther coming and figured to turn the weather to their advantage.
“We’ll wait until the whole town is hunkered down because of the storm,” he had told them after calling a halt in this arroyo. He wasn’t in the habit of explaining his decisions, but it seemed warranted in this case. “They won’t be expecting a thing. We can wipe out half of them before they even know anything is going on.”
“I never saw a bunch of townies put up much of a fight, anyway,” an outlaw named Clyde said, “whether they knew trouble was coming or not.”
Bishop had nodded, seeming reasonable, but his hand had strayed to the thick but flexible handle of the coiled whip fastened to his gunbelt. He saw the way Clyde’s face paled as he ran his palm along that handle.
“Of course, if waiting’s what you want to do, Snake, then I’m sure that’s the best thing,” Clyde said hurriedly. “I never meant to sound like I thought otherwise. You . . . you’ve always known what to do.”
“Never steered you boys wrong, have I?”
“No, sir, you never—”
The whip came up and lashed out, then leaped backward with a sharp crack. Clyde jumped as his eyes bugged out in terror. Then he slowly lifted a hand to his cheek, ran his fingertips along it, and then looked at them in amazement, as if he couldn’t believe there was no blood on them. His rugged face was unmarked.
The rest of the outlaws looked on impassively. They knew good and well that Bishop could have put Clyde’s eye out or laid his cheek open to the bone just as easily if he’d wanted to. The message was plain.
Don’t question the boss’s orders.
Muttering to himself, visibly spooked, Clyde had gone over to sit down with his back against the arroyo wall. The other men also settled down to wait until Bishop gave the order to move.
Unfortunately, it just got colder, and it was hard to think too much about how close Clyde had come to losing an eye when a fella’s teeth were chattering and the sky was like twilight in the middle of the afternoon. More and more sullen, resentful looks were cast toward their leader as he paced back and forth, toying with the ever-present whip.
Finally, a lean-faced man with the deeply brown skin of a Mexican but the green eyes of his Irish father came over to join Bishop.
“The fellas are getting pretty restless, Snake,” Paco O’Shannon said quietly. He wasn’t exactly the second in command—Bishop wouldn’t allow any of his men to aspire to such a position because it might make them too ambitious—but he had ridden with Bishop for longer than any of the others and could get away with things the others couldn’t. “Maybe we’d better start thinking about moving on to Salt Lick.”
“What if I want to wait until after dark?” Bishop snapped.
“Then we’ll wait until after dark,” O’Shannon replied with a shrug. “But we might have a harder time finding the place if it’s started to snow by then. You’ve seen some of these Panhandle blizzards, Snake. A man might as well be blind if he gets caught in one of them.”
O’Shannon had a good point, Bishop knew, and he had raised it without being too challenging about it. Bishop never let any of the men get away with defiance because he was smart enough to know that there was only one of him and more than three dozen of them. And every man there was a hardened killer in his own right. So they had to stay scared of him, always uncertain what he might do.
But no matter how scared of him they were, if he pushed them too far, they might turn on him.
“All right,” he told O’Shannon with a nod. “It’s time.”
A grin split O’Shannon’s wolfish face. He turned and called over the sound of the wind, “Mount up, boys! We’re headed for Salt Lick!”
* * *
Not surprisingly, as the wind rose and the temperature dropped, the streets had cleared, for the most part. A few people still hurried here and there, bent on some last-minute errand, but now that the blue norther had arrived, most folks were staying inside.
Smoke and Windy walked from one end of the settlement to the other. Wagons barricaded the northern and southern ends of the main street. The cross streets also had been blocked by vehicles, including some buggies and buckboards, at their eastern and western ends.
That arrangement formed a defensive ring around the town that would prevent a straight ahead charge by raiders on horseback, at least in theory. Men in heavy coats, with hats tugged down and scarves wrapped around their throats, stood watch, a single man at each point who would fire a warning shot if he saw any trouble approaching. More men were on the roofs of half a dozen buildings scattered around Salt Lick, not just the bank now.
“Lookee there,” Windy said, pointing up into the air ahead of them as he and Smoke walked along the main street. Several snowflakes whipped past, spit down from the clouds and moving almost horizontally because of the wind. As Smoke watched, the number of flakes increased, although they were still just flurries.
“It’s here, all right,” he said. “Makes yesterday seem like a lot longer ago than that, doesn’t it?”
“Durned right it does. Once a blue norther hits, it’s hard to even imagine when it wasn’t cold and blowin’ like a son of a gun.”
Rufus Spencer hailed them then from the partially open door of the livery stable. When they walked over to him, the blacksmith said, “Marshal, I need you to give me a hand with something.”
“Of course, Mr. Spencer,” Smoke replied with a nod. “What is it?”
Spencer waved a big hand toward the slender figure standing behind him to one side in the barn. “Tell this girl of mine that if those outlaws attack, she needs to head for the bank.”
“With all the women and children?” Tommy Spencer said scathingly. She snorted. “Not hardly! I can use a rifle just as good as you can, Pa. Probably better, when you get right down to it.”
“That bank has nice, thick walls,” her father said. “It’s the safest place in town. Besides, there’ll be men there to protect it and the folks who take shelter there.”
“You’d think that by now, you’d realize I don’t need to be protected, Pa,” Tommy insisted.
“That’s just it, Miss Spencer,” Smoke said. “It doesn’t matter how old your children are, or how capable they are, it’s a parent’s instinct to protect his or her young’uns. And that never changes.”
“You have children, Mr. Jensen?”
Smoke felt a pang deep inside at that question. Several years had passed since his first wife Nicole and their infant son Arthur had been murdered by a gang of Smoke’s enemies. He had avenged their deaths, but of course that hadn’t brought them back and it hadn’t really eased the grief he felt. Only time had done that . . . time, and his marriage to Sally, and the fine life they had built together on the Sugarloaf.
“I had a son,” he said with a solemn smile. “He passed away . . . in part because I didn’t do enough to protect him.”
“Oh.” Tommy’s eyes widened. “I’m sorry, Marshal, I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s all right,” Smoke broke in to tell her. “You walk down the street and see fifty different people, they’ll have at least fifty different tragedies they’re carrying around inside them that most folks don’t know about. That’s just part of the state of being human. We can’t let it consume us. But that doesn’t change my point that your pa is just doing what he’s meant to do by looking out for you.”
Tommy drew in a deep breath, frowned, and said with obvious reluctance, “All right, I guess if there’s trouble, I can go to the bank with the others. But I’m takin’ my rifle with me! You said there’d be men there to protect the place, Mr. Jensen, and there’s nothing wrong with me helping them.”
“Not a thing in the world,” Smoke agreed with a nod.
Rufus Spencer said, “All right, that’s settled. How are things looking out there, Marshal?”
“You mean the weather?”
“It’s snowin’,” Windy said, “and it’s fixin’ to start snowin’ a lot harder pretty soon, you can mark my words on that!”
“Actually, I was talking more about those outlaws—” Spencer began.
If the blacksmith had been able to finish the question, Smoke would have told them there was no sign of Snake Bishop’s gang yet.
But the three rifle shots that suddenly slammed through the cold air were both an interruption—and an answer!
“Three shots,” Smoke snapped. “That’s the signal from the men on the bank roof.”
“We’d better get down there,” Windy said.
“And I’m getting my rifle!” Tommy exclaimed as she turned to dash deeper into the barn.
Spencer reached over to pick up a double-barreled shotgun that was leaning against a wall. “My post is at the barricade on the southern end of town,” he said. “Good luck, Marshal.”
“To you, as well,” Smoke told him.
“We’re all liable to need it,” Windy muttered.
With that, Smoke and Windy hurried out of the barn and trotted toward the bank. Instead of taking the time to climb the ladder, Smoke stood in front of the building, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted over the steady hum of the wind, “Hello, up there! What did you see?”
One of the lookouts appeared at the front edge of the roof and called, “Riders comin’ from the south, Marshal! Looks like a dozen or more of them! They’re still too far away to make out any details, but they’re comin’ fast!”
“That’ll be Snake,” Windy said grimly. “He figures we don’t know he’s anywhere around these parts. He plans on hittin’ Salt Lick hard and fast and killin’ enough folks to keep us from puttin’ up a fight.”
“Then he has a surprise of his own waiting for him, doesn’t he?” Smoke said. He returned his attention to the men on the roof and went on, “Hold your fire up there until the shooting starts down here. We don’t want to open the ball too soon!”
The lookout waved to acknowledge the order and disappeared from the edge. Smoke knew that all the riflemen hidden on the rooftops had been instructed not to open fire until someone down below did. That would probably be Sarge Shaw, who was in charge of the barricade at the southern end of the street. Apple Jack was in command of the barricade on the other end of town.
Smoke and Windy ducked into the marshal’s office to grab the fully loaded Winchesters waiting there. Each man shoved a box of cartridges into a coat pocket. They would be able to fight for quite a while without running out of ammunition.
Jonas Madigan and Miriam Dollinger weren’t there anymore. Smoke didn’t know if Miriam had persuaded the old lawman to return to his house, but he hoped so. This weather was too raw for Madigan to be out in it . . . although, as he himself had pointed out, in the long run it wasn’t going to matter much.
As they hurried out of the office, Windy said, “That fella on the bank said there was a dozen of the varmints headed this way. Snake’s gang is bigger than that. Sometimes he’d split the bunch and hit a town from more than one direction at a time.”
“Do you think that’s what he’s planning to do here?”
Windy shook his head. “There ain’t no way of knowin’ until he does it. But I got a hunch that might be what he has in mind.”
“Then we need to warn the men on the other sides of town to be alert. Let’s split up and do that.”
Windy frowned at him and asked, “You trust me to do that, Smoke?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because of what I told you earlier ’bout me ridin’ with Bishop’s gang.”
“You also told me that those days were in the past and that you’d gone straight since then,” Smoke reminded him. “And I don’t see any reason not to believe you.”
“I ain’t gonna give you any reason not to believe, neither,” Windy muttered. “I’m much obliged to you for this chance, Smoke.”
“Let’s both put it to good use.”
With curt nods to each other, they split up to visit the other defensive points and warn the men posted there that Snake Bishop’s gang could be attacking from different directions.
Smoke didn’t know how long it would take the outlaws to arrive, but it wouldn’t be very long, he was certain of that. If the attackers to the south were already in sight, Sarge Shaw and his men would be drawing beads on them right about now. But Sarge would wait until the enemy was good and close . . .
“They’re coming?” Apple Jack asked as Smoke hurried up to him at the northern end of town.
“The men on the bank spotted about a dozen riders headed this way from the south, coming hell for leather.”
“Only a dozen?” Apple Jack asked. Knowing the size that the Bishop gang had been reported to be in the past, his strategic mind had leaped immediately to the same possibility Windy had voiced. “They’re going to hit us from all sides.”
“Could be.”
Apple Jack turned his head and crisply ordered the men with him, “Get to your places and be ready.” He lifted his voice to call to the defenders posted in nearby buildings, “Everybody get ready!”
High-pitched the words might be, but they contained an undeniable sound of command. Rifle barrels poked out of open windows and from behind full water barrels.
Smoke nodded to Apple Jack, satisfied with what he had seen, then turned and headed the other way. He and Windy had agreed to rendezvous at the southern end of town, at Sarge Shaw’s barricade, because they knew at least some of the outlaws would strike there.
Windy hadn’t arrived yet when Smoke reached the barricade, but Shaw greeted Smoke with a grim nod.
“We can see them coming through field glasses,” he reported. “They’re no more than half a mile away. They’ll be here in a matter of minutes.” The former non-com frowned worriedly. “What if they spot the wagons in the street and realize we’re waiting for them? Once that happens, we’ve lost the element of surprise.”
“If they try to break off their charge or even start to slow down, go ahead and open fire,” Smoke advised. “We won’t get a better chance to wipe out some of them. If Bishop goes down in the first volley, the others might give up the attack, or if he survives but loses enough men right away, he might decide that Salt Lick’s not worth it.”
“You really think a loco owlhoot like Snake Bishop is supposed to do something that reasonable?” Shaw asked.
“Well . . . probably not,” Smoke admitted. “But there’s nothing wrong with us hoping.”
“Hope is a good thing,” Shaw said, “as long as it’s accompanied by plenty of hot lead.”
Smoke couldn’t argue with that. But before he could say anything else, even in agreement, shouts of alarm came from the other end of town, carried to him and Shaw by the wind from that direction. Both men turned. Shaw’s breath hissed through his teeth as he drew in air in a sharp, alarmed reaction.
It took a lot to shock Smoke Jensen, but the sight that met his eyes just now accomplished that. A huge, towering, grayish-white wall loomed over Salt Lick, barreling down on the settlement with unbelievable speed. It looked almost like a gigantic wave from the ocean . . . but this moisture was in different form. It was just as unstoppable as a tidal wave, however.
Then, before anyone could do more than gasp in horror, the blizzard crashed over the town.