CHAPTER 53
Sam Brant lowered the field glasses from his eyes and grated a bitter curse. He had been watching the attack from a hilltop about a quarter of a mile from the Sugarloaf ranch house, and so far he didn’t like what he had seen.
“That’s Smoke Jensen down there!” Brant exclaimed. “He’s supposed to be dead—or at least in Montana!”
Two members of the gang were with him, but he had thrown the rest of his force against the ranch, splitting them into two equal groups. Jensen and the other man who had ridden up to the house with him had taken a considerable toll on the bunch that had attacked from the front. Brant wasn’t sure how it was going in the back, but a lot of gunfire was coming from that direction, so his men hadn’t waltzed in and taken over as he had hoped. As would have happened if everything had gone according to plan.
Brant was a tall, gaunt, hawk-faced man with gray hair under his steeple-crowned hat. He and his partner Bert Rome had served in the army together, twenty-five years earlier, before they had decided that it would be more profitable selling guns to the Indians instead of fighting the savages.
That enterprise had led to other criminal activities, and eventually a third partner had joined them, a man named Eli Markham, better known as the Santa Rosa Kid. The Kid was a former hired gun who had drifted all the way across the line into full-blown outlawry, and he was as useful a tool as Brant and Rome had ever picked up.
Even though the Kid got an equal share, the other two men did all the thinking for the trio. What the Kid was good for was killing. Point him at anybody they wanted dead, and the Kid would take care of it, usually grinning and laughing while he did it.
What no one knew except Brant and Rome was that when they’d decided the Kid had outlived his usefulness, they were the ones who tipped off the law where to find him. They figured the Kid would never let himself be taken alive. He had been, but that hadn’t helped him. He’d been tried and convicted and hanged, all in pretty short order.
Fortunately, Steve Markham was just as dense as his old man had been. They had been able to recruit him for the gang and convince him to be their inside man on the Jensen ranch without any trouble. Somewhere along the way, they would have betrayed him, too . . . but only after they’d gotten their hands on the fortune in ransom money they intended to demand from Sally Jensen.
But Smoke Jensen wasn’t dead after all. Brant had worried about that when he hadn’t heard from Rome, who was in charge of the Montana part of the operation, or from Steve Markham. He’d told himself that Rome just hadn’t had time to get to a telegraph office yet, but he hadn’t been able to fully believe that. For some reason, misgivings had gnawed at Brant’s guts, which never happened when they were pulling a job.
His worries had been justified, and for a fleeting moment, Brant wondered if he ought to just cut his losses and ride away. Maybe some plans just weren’t meant to work.
“What’re we gonna do, Sam?” Sherm Winslow asked.
Winslow was short and fair and balding, with a pot gut and a permanently sunburned face. He didn’t look all that threatening, but he was the best man with a shotgun Brant had ever seen.
And the last thing anybody saw who was unlucky enough to find themselves looking down the barrels of Winslow’s Greener.
Brant’s other companion was a mountain of a man named Reese Butler. More than one hombre had made the mistake of thinking that Butler was just a slow-moving tub of lard. They generally got their ribs crushed or their necks snapped for making that mistake.
In answer to Winslow’s question, Brant said, “We’re going down there.” He shoved the field glasses back in his saddlebags. “I haven’t seen any sign of Louis Jensen. Maybe he and his wife didn’t get back when they were supposed to.”
“Ain’t he a sickly sort, though?” asked Butler. “Maybe he just stays in the house and don’t never come outside.”
Brant ignored that and went on. “There might be something almost as good in the barn, though. Remember that kid we saw going in there?”
“Yeah, I think so,” said Winslow.
“Well, he didn’t come back out, so he’s still in there. And he’s Louis Jensen’s stepson, according to what Steve Markham told us. That means he’s Smoke Jensen’s stepgrandson. He ought to be worth a hell of a lot of ransom, too.”
Winslow frowned “I dunno, Sam. He ain’t a blood relative. Anyway, you said Smoke Jensen wouldn’t pay any ransom, that he’d be more likely to track us down and kill us if we took his kid. That’s why you decided to wait until he was gone before we hit the ranch and grabbed Louis. And then killin’ him up in Montana would really open the door for us to collect from his widow.”
Brant forced down the irritation he felt welling up inside him. “You’re not doing anything except telling me things I already know, Sherm. A man’s got to be able to adapt when things don’t work out like he’s planned. Jensen’s not dead, and he’s not gone. He’s here, and we’ve got to deal with him. And I don’t believe he’d be as likely to risk a kid’s life by being stubborn.”
In reality, that was just a hope on Brant’s part. He didn’t know how Smoke Jensen would react to the kidnapping of his new grandson. But the way things had worked out, short of abandoning the whole plan that was all Brant and his men could do.
Brant hitched his horse into motion and started down the hill. Winslow and Butler fell in on either side of him.
“We’ll go in the back of the barn,” Brant said. “Whatever you do, don’t kill the kid. Anybody else who’s in there, though . . . blow ’em to hell.”
* * *
Brad cowered inside an empty stall as he listened to the thunderous roar of guns that filled the barn. Whenever it got too loud, he clapped his hands over his ears. He just wanted it to end.
At the same time, he felt a strong sense of shame eating away at his insides. He knew there was at least one more rifle on the rack inside the tack room. He ought to go in there and get it, he told himself, so he could fight back against the evil men who had invaded the Sugarloaf.
But he was afraid. He was a kid, after all. He couldn’t fight grown men, especially ones who didn’t hesitate to gun down their enemies. He had seen Jack Floren lying out there where he had fallen from the hayloft, not moving, with a dark puddle forming under and around him. That was blood, Brad knew, and Floren was dead.
Besides, Hank Sinclair had told him to go back there and hide. “Crawl under the straw if you have to,” he had said. “It’ll stink like hell, but you don’t want those varmints to find you.”
No, he didn’t want that, thought Brad. He sure didn’t.
It seemed like the shooting had been going on forever, but it had only been a few minutes. Brad wished his mother was there, but as soon as that thought went through his head, he was glad she wasn’t. Wherever she and Louis were, they were safe.
The person Brad really wished was in the barn with him was Smoke. That would make all the difference in the world. Smoke would never let anything bad happen to him.
Brad’s head jerked up as he heard a sound from the back of the barn. Fred Judson, the wrangler, had barred the door there so nobody could get in, then Fred had joined Hank Sinclair at the front of the barn so they could shoot at the attackers. But it sounded like somebody was trying to get in back there, and although the bar had looked secure to Brad, the thought still scared him . . .
He ought to go and tell Hank and Fred, he thought. They would know what to do.
He scrambled to his feet and had just stepped out of the stall into the center aisle when a loud crash sounded and the barn’s back door flew open, the brackets that held the bar having been torn from the wall by the impact. The huge man who had just broken down the door stumbled through the opening and weaved to the side so two more men could charge in right behind him. One held a rifle, the other a shotgun.
Hank Sinclair and Fred Judson had heard the crash. Both men raced into the aisle carrying their rifles. The intruder with the shotgun fired first, bracing the terrible weapon’s stock against his hip. The double charge of buckshot smashed into Judson’s chest and shredded it to bloody ribbons. He flew backward as if a giant had just yanked a string attached to his back.
The third attacker had his rifle at his shoulder. From just outside the stall where he’d been hidden, Brad watched in horror as flame lanced from the Winchester’s muzzle and split the gloom inside the barn with orange flashes. The rifle cracked three times, and with each shot, Hank Sinclair jerked and twisted. Finally, he collapsed onto his knees and then folded to the ground.
The huge man who had broken down the door spotted Brad and rumbled, “There’s the kid!” He made a grab for Brad’s arm and moved with such surprising speed that Brad didn’t have a chance to dart away. The man gathered him in, lifting him and holding him wrapped up in arms like tree trunks.
The rifleman who had just killed Hank Sinclair stepped up and gave Brad an ugly grin. “You’re coming with us, Brad, and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.”
The fact that the man knew his name didn’t make Brad feel one bit better. In fact, he was so scared that he was numb all over and was convinced that he was about to die.