CHAPTER 22

Smoke lifted the Colt and triggered it twice, sending a couple of slugs sizzling through the open window and into the rifleman’s chest. The bullets’ impact threw the man backward out of sight, but he dropped his rifle and it bounced and slid off the awning over the boardwalk, spinning into the street.

Even as the first of the rustlers crossed the divide, glass shattered and sprayed outward from several other windows as the men inside the rooms didn’t take the time to open them. They just poked rifle and revolver barrels through the panes and opened fire on the men from the Sugarloaf.

Smoke veered his horse toward the boardwalk and left the saddle in a flying leap that carried him over the railing and onto the walk. His momentum made it impossible for him to stay upright when his feet hit the planks. He went down but rolled over and used the impetus of that to bring him back up on one knee.

A man wearing boots and long underwear slapped the batwings aside and rushed out of the saloon, carrying a shotgun. Before he could swing the scattergun’s twin barrels in Smoke’s direction, Smoke drilled him in the midsection. The shotgunner doubled over and his finger spasmed on both triggers, setting off the weapon with a thunderous roar. The double load of buckshot chewed a hole in the planks about a foot in front of him. He folded up on top of the cavity.

As Smoke leaped to his feet and charged toward the saloon entrance, he wished he had thought to ask old Toobin down at the general store just how many rustlers there were.

But they could count the bodies later, he supposed.

Cal and the rest of the men had followed his example and yanked their horses next to the boardwalk, so that the awning gave them some cover from the men firing from the second floor. Smoke glanced along the walk and saw that none of them were down, although he spotted bloodstains on a couple of shirts where their owners had been winged. With any luck, nothing too serious.

He dodged around the shotgunner’s body, stopped next to the entrance, and thumbed fresh rounds into the Colt, filling the wheel. Then he reached over and gave the closest batwing a sharp poke. As it swung inward with a creaking of hinges, at least a couple of men inside the saloon opened up on it and blasted it full of holes. The swinging door flew back out wildly. Smoke went under it in a dive that had him sliding along the sawdust-sprinkled floor. As he came to a stop on his belly, he saw a man standing behind the bar with a rifle while another crouched at the foot of the stairs with a six-gun in each hand.

Smoke’s Colt barked twice. The first shot ripped into the man behind the bar and knocked him back against the shelves full of whiskey bottles behind him. The shelves—and the bottles—came down with a huge crash. Smoke’s second shot roared so hard on the heels of the first one that it almost sounded like one report. That bullet shattered the right shoulder of the man next to the stairs and made him drop the gun in that hand, As he slewed halfway around, Smoke rolled to his left.

The rustler still held the gun in his left hand, and he put it to use, firing three rounds toward Smoke. The bullets plowed into the floor where Smoke had been an instant earlier and showered him with splinters. He fired while he was still on the move, and his uncanny skill allowed him to put a bullet through the rustler’s brain. The man’s head snapped back as the slug blew a large hole in his skull and painted the stair runner behind him with a gory mix of blood and gray matter. His knees buckled and he pitched forward.

Smoke got his left hand and his knees under him and surged up. Cal and several of the other men charged into the Casa de Oro just as four more gunmen appeared on the second-floor balcony and sent a hail of lead angling down into the main room.

“Scatter and hunt cover!” Smoke bellowed over the gun-thunder. He kicked a table over and crouched behind it. Bullets thudded into the wood and made it shiver, but none of them penetrated all the way through. Smoke snapped a couple of shots at the men on the balcony, but they ducked back as soon as they triggered their guns, so he didn’t have a good angle on them.

Cal took cover behind an overturned table as well, and two of the ranch hands wound up underneath the roulette wheel. Shards of red- and black-painted wood flew in the air as bullets sought for them and found the gaudy wheel instead. The other men had made it underneath the balcony, but from there they couldn’t see the rustlers any more than the rustlers could see them.

A fifth man appeared on the balcony holding a woman in front of him with his left arm clamped brutally around her neck so that her body shielded him. He thrust his right hand with a gun under her right arm and fired as he began forcing her down the stairs.

One of Smoke’s men under the roulette wheel yelled and fell backward as he clutched a bullet-drilled shoulder.

The woman had a wild mass of tangled blond hair and wore only a thin shift that ended high on her thighs. She had to be one of the soiled doves who worked there, and she’d probably been asleep with the man when all hell broke loose.

“Cover me, Smoke!” Cal called as he leaped out from behind the table. Smoke put a pair of rounds over the rustler’s head, close enough to make the man flinch and stop shooting for a second. That gave Cal enough time to charge up the stairs. He hit the rustler and the girl and knocked them apart. The dove screamed as she wound up tumbling down the rest of the way. Cal and the rustler wrestled on the stairs. The man shoved Cal against the banister, and it broke under his weight. He fell, landing on a table that collapsed underneath him and left him sprawled in its wreckage.

The rustler aimed over the edge of the stairs, poised to send a slug hammering down into Cal. But he didn’t have his human shield anymore. Smoke fired, and the rustler slumped and dropped his gun as Smoke’s bullet crashed into his head just above his left ear.

Unfortunately, another rustler had darted out onto the balcony and was aiming a rifle down at Cal. Smoke started to swing his Colt back in that direction, unsure whether or not he would be in time to save his friend’s life.

He didn’t have to. At that moment another gun roared, farther along the balcony, and the rifleman twisted around as a slug tore through him. He tried to catch himself against the railing but wound up going backward over it as blood welled from the hole in his side. He crashed facedown on the barroom floor not far from Cal, who was trying to shake the cobwebs out of his head.

“Yeee-hahhh!”

The shout came from Steve Markham, who moved along the balcony in a crouch as the gun in his fist geysered flame and smoke. He had shot the man about to kill Cal and led the charge as he and two more of the Sugarloaf hands who had been left behind at the cattle pens mopped up the rest of the rustlers. Taken by surprise by the attack from a different direction, the thieves didn’t have much of a chance. After half a minute of deafening gunfire, everything fell silent in the Casa de Oro.

Then Steve Markham, grinning as usual, stepped up to the edge of the balcony with gray tendrils of smoke curling from the muzzle of his gun, and called, “You all right down there, Mr. Jensen?”

“Yeah,” Smoke said as he got to his feet and started reloading again. “Just getting a mite too old for this.”