This Violent Land

A ware of the new “responsibilities” Preacher had charged him with, Smoke worked long hours in the summer, gathering his precious herd of horses, putting them in a blind canyon where they could be held while he searched for others. He’d also found a cow and an old brindle steer that had wandered up with her. Probably the only survivors of an Indian attack on a wagon train. He figured having milk would be good for the baby.

During the late afternoon of a day out, he thought he heard the faint sounds of gunfire carrying on the wind, blowing from the north, but he couldn’t be certain. He listened intently for several moments but could hear nothing except the wind sighing from a long way off, far in the mountains. He returned to his work, picking out a young colt that he was going to raise and gentle for Little Art.

Smoke wasn’t much of a daydreamer, but he enjoyed picturing his son on that horse, first as a young child, then as a teen-aged boy, and finally as a young man, riding at Smoke’s side. He would teach him to ride and to shoot. Maybe, he thought, the day would come when he would resume his quest for the men who had killed his father . . . and Art would be there with him.

Smoke didn’t realize that, even as he was gathering his herd of horses, the eight men Richards had hired were at his house. At least, six and a half were. They weren’t having an easy time of it. Nicole fought well. One of the attackers was lying out front, dead, and another, Clark, had a bad arm wound.

He was sitting in a chair cursing as he attempted, without help from any of the others, to bandage his bloody arm. “That damn woman can shoot. She damn near tore my arm off. Somebody see if you can find a bottle of laudanum.”

Felter’s eyes found the body of Stoner lying in front of the cabin. “Yeah, she sure can shoot. Just ask Stoner.”

“How we gonna do that?” Poker asked. “She done shot Stoner dead.”

“Yeah, well, you have to say this about her. She is one damn fine-lookin’ woman,” Canning said, looking at Nicole sprawled semiconscious on the floor. His eyes lingered on her bare breasts and legs exposed to the lustful gaze of the hired killers. The bodice of her dress had been ripped open and her dress had slipped all the way up to her thighs when she’d been knocked to the floor.

Canning licked his lips and repeated,”Yes, sir, she is just real fine.”

“Yeah, well, let’s find Jensen’s gold,” Felter snapped. “Then you can buy yourself a dozen women like that.”

It wasn’t until after they had started their pursuit of Smoke that they’d heard he had tens of thousands of dollars in gold, stolen from the Confederacy at the end of the war. That would be a much greater reward than the eight thousand dollars Richards, Potter, and Stratton had promised them. They didn’t know if the three wealthy ranchers even knew about the gold or not, but the gunman had no intention of sharing it with them.

Soon the interior of the cabin was in shambles. They had literally destroyed it in their search for the gold that wasn’t there.

“Drag Stoner’s body out of sight,” Felter ordered. “We don’t want to spook Jensen when he comes ridin’ up. And hide your horses so he can’t see ’em. We’ll grab him when he comes in.”

“What do you mean we’ll grab him when he comes in? You mean we’ll shoot ’im, don’t you?” Austin asked.

“No, I want to take him alive.”

“Why the hell would you want to do that?” Clark asked.

“We ain’t found the gold yet, so I figure that, more than likely, it ain’t nowhere in this house,” Felter replied. “What I aim to do is torture him till he tells us where the gold is.”

Canning knelt down beside Nicole, his hands busy on her body. The baby began crying.

“Will somebody shut that kid up before I shoot the little snot?” Felter snarled.

“I’ll shut the brat up.” Grissom picked up a blanket and walked over to the cradle. Folding it over, he held it over the baby’s face for a long time....

* * *

On the morning of his third day out, Smoke began to have a prickly awareness of something being wrong. A feeling of dread was building up within him, and some primitive warning called on him to cut the roundup short. He left the cow, the steer, and the horses, which for the last two days had been so important to him, and headed for home, pushing Seven as fast as he dared.

As he came closer to the cabin he made a wide circle, staying in the timber on the opposite side of the creek that ran behind the house. If anyone was there who shouldn’t be, he could slip up on them, unseen.

If Smoke had come one day earlier, he might have been able to save his wife, but he was too late.

Nicole was dead.

He ground tethered Seven. Taking the big Sharps buffalo rifle that Preacher had carried for years, Smoke crept closer. Seeing no one, he cautiously made his way to the woodpile.

Inside the cabin, the brutality that was still going on made Kid Austin sick to his stomach. He raced out the back door, stopping quickly and turning left to puke on the ground.

At least one, Smoke thought as he turned quietly around the back corner of the cabin.

Grissom walked out the front door of the cabin, sure Smoke would return from the south—the same direction his tracks had indicated when the gunmen first arrived. And why not? He had no reason to suspect that anything was amiss.

But even as Grissom stood there in the front doorway, he began to feel a little uneasy. His years on the owlhoot trail told him that something was wrong. “Felter?” he called over his shoulder.

Felter was rolling a quirly and stepped outside. “Yeah?”

“I got me a feelin’ there’s somethin’ here that ain’t quite right.”

“Yeah. I got me that feelin’, too. But what is it?”

“I don’t know, but I do have this feelin’.”

Felter stepped back into the house and looked at the dead woman lying on a blood-soaked bed. He wished she wasn’t dead. He had enjoyed his times with her, and if they hadn’t killed her, he could be with her again.

Grissom’s feeling that something was wrong intensified, and the hair stood up on the back of his neck. He started to call out for Felter again, when he sensed a movement behind him. Even as he was turning, he reached for his pistol and saw the tall young man standing at the corner of the cabin, Colt in hand.

The young man fired, and Grissom felt a numbing blow in his chest. Hearing the pistol shot, Felter ran from the cabin, firing at the corner.

But Smoke was gone.

“Behind the house!” Felter yelled. Gun in hand, he ducked behind the water trough.

Smoke dived behind the woodpile.

In the outhouse, Poker made the foolish mistake of opening the door to see what was going on. Smoke shot him twice, leaving him to die on the outhouse floor.

Still leaning against the back of the cabin, Kid Austin, who had insisted many times over that he wanted to face Smoke down, ran for the banks of the creek, panic driving his legs. Smoke shot at him, the ball hitting him in the right buttock and traveling through the left cheek, tearing out a sizable hunk of flesh. Austin screamed, then fainted from the pain, falling into a rolling sprawl.

The men in the cabin were firing wildly in all directions.

“Where the hell is he?” Evans shouted.

“I don’t know!” Canning cried.

“Well, keep looking!” Clark ordered.

The shooting stopped, and moments ticked by in silence. Smoke wiped the sweat from his face and waited, knowing without having to be told that Nicole was dead. He also knew that, for the moment, he had the advantage.

Something came sailing out the back door to bounce on the grass, and when he saw it, he fought back the urge to vomit from pure anger. It was the body of his son, and the boy had been dead for some time.

“You want to see what’s left of your woman?” Canning called from near the back door. “I got her hair hangin’ on my belt. If you’d like, I’ll throw it out to you, just so’s you can have a keepsake.

“I’ll tell you this! She sure was a good one all right, near ’bout the best I ever had. We all took a time or two with her. And you know what? I think she liked it. No, I don’t just think she liked, I know she liked it. Why do you think that was, Jensen? You think maybe that was because you wasn’t man enough for her? You wasn’t able to take care of her like a man should?”

Rage charged through Smoke, but he remained still behind the thick pile of wood, forcing himself to control his fury. It wasn’t by happenstance that when he left the corner of the house he had taken shelter behind the woodpile. Before the shooting started, he’d left Preacher’s buffalo rifle behind the woodpile. It could drop a two-thousand-pound buffalo from six hundred yards away. It could also punch a hole through a small log.

The voices from the cabin continued to call out, mocking him, trying to draw him out. But Smoke remained quiet, refusing to give in to the urge to hurl curses at them. He looked around. To his right was the meadow, which was totally devoid of cover. To his left was the shed. He knew it was empty of men because it was still barred from the outside. The man he shot in the butt was to his right, and the man in the outhouse was either dead or passed out and dying, because his screaming had ceased.

Smoke aimed the Sharps at a chink in the log wall where he thought he had seen a man move, just to the left of the rear window. He squeezed the trigger and the weapon boomed, the planking shattered, and a man began screaming in pain.

Canning ran out the front door of the cabin, sliding down beside Felter behind the water trough.

“This ain’t working out,” Canning panted. “Grissom, Stoner, and Poker are dead, Clark is wounded, and Evans is either dead or dying. The slug from that buffalo gun ’bout blew his arm off.”

Felter had been thinking the same thing. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“What about Austin?” Canning asked.

“Austin is a growed man. He can either join us or he can go to hell.”

“Let’s ride. There’s always another day. We’ll hide up in the mountains, see which way Jensen runs out, then bushwhack him. Let’s go.”

The two men rushed for the horses hidden in the bend of the creek, behind the bank. They kept the cabin between themselves and Smoke until they were deep in the meadow and could belly down without him seeing them.

In the creek, the water red from the wounds in his butt, Kid Austin crawled upstream, crying in pain and humiliation. His pistols were forgotten, but they were useless anyway. The powder was wet. All he wanted to do was get away.

Left in the house, the two wounded men looked at each other.

“Help me,” Evans said, his voice weak. “Help me get out of here.”

Clarke frowned. “What for? You’re hit a lot worse than me. You’ll more’n likely be dead soon. Besides, I ain’t goin’ nowhere. I plan to kill Jensen and take the rest of the reward money for my ownself.”

Outside and some distance from the cabin, Kid Austin finally managed to reach his horse hidden in the woods. Looking around, he realized that Smoke had not seen him.

He was getting away!

He stepped into the stirrups, hoisted himself in the saddle, and cried out in pain as his wound hit the saddle.