Bounty Hunter lj-1 Read online

  Luke pushed the batwings aside and stepped in with his usual caution. A man in his line of work never knew when he might run into an old enemy, although most of the men Luke tried to take into custody put up a fight and wound up dead.

  A long mahogany bar ran down the left side of the room, with gambling layouts to the right and tables in between. At the far end of the room was an open area where people could dance and a small stage for performers, which was empty at the moment. Men sat at about half the tables, drinking, and the bar was pretty busy, too, although there were plenty of open spots. A couple poker games were going on, and the click and clatter of a roulette wheel mixed with the sounds of talk and laughter. Luke liked the looks of the Buffalo Butt, inelegant moniker and all.

  A staircase next to the stage led up to the second floor. If the place was like most saloons, the girls who worked downstairs delivering drinks also worked upstairs delivering something else. Luke glanced at the women moving around the room. Unlike some saloon girls, they were fully dressed in nice gowns cut low enough to reveal the swells of their breasts. Luke might have tried to single out one of them for his attentions later, but a man at a nearby table tilted his head back to look up and said, “Lord have mercy, who’s that?”

  Luke instinctively followed the direction of the man’s gaze. His breath caught in his throat and he stiffened as he saw a woman standing at the railing on the second-floor balcony, looking down at the room. She wore a dark red dress tight enough to reveal her splendid figure, and a thick mass of curly blond hair spilled around her shoulders.

  Luke knew her instantly. Marcy hadn’t changed much in the seven years since he’d ridden away from Wichita, leaving her in that hotel room.

  He saw her suddenly clutch the railing and knew she had recognized him, too. He started toward the stairs, weaving among the tables, as she came along the balcony. He went up the stairs as she came down, and they met halfway, embracing with a desperate urgency as their mouths met.

  “Aw, hell!” That disappointed exclamation came from the man who Luke had heard speak when he entered the saloon. “Looks like she’s already took.”

  Luke and Marcy kissed for a long moment, and Luke felt the dull emotional pain that dogged his steps flow out of him. The unexpected reunion was like being plunged into a clean, icy mountain stream.

  Then Marcy pulled back a little, lifted her hand, and pressed the barrel of a derringer against the side of his head. “Damn you, Luke Smith. I ought to put a bullet in your brain.”

  Most of the time, if somebody pointed a gun at him, he reacted violently. He suppressed that urge and smiled instead. “You’d probably be justified. I knew you’d be upset that I left you in Wichita. On the other hand, you appear to be doing well for yourself.”

  He remembered what the liveryman had said about the owner of the Buffalo Butt being one of the prettiest women in Deadwood. Wherever Marcy was, she would fall into the category. “This is your saloon, isn’t it?”

  “What if it is?”

  “You wouldn’t be the owner of a successful business if you hadn’t gotten a start from your half of that reward money, would you?”

  She let out a snort. “That shows what you know. I used that money to buy an interest in a whorehouse in Wichita. Then it burned down and I lost everything. I had to start over. But by then I’d learned I was pretty good at running things. It took me a while, but I’m doing all right again.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Luke said. “Now, if you’re not going to pull the trigger on that popgun, I’d appreciate it if you took it away from my head. It might go off by accident.”

  “I don’t do anything by accident.”

  As Marcy lowered the derringer and let its hammer down carefully, Luke became aware the saloon had gone deathly quiet. He supposed someone had noticed her holding a gun to his head and pointed it out, and as the news spread, everyone stopped what they were doing to watch.

  Marcy kissed Luke again, and someone let out a cheer, breaking the silence. Customers returned to their drinking and gambling, filling the saloon with noise once more.

  Marcy took Luke by the hand and led him upstairs so they could get reacquainted properly.

  That evening, Luke sat with Marcy at her private table in the rear corner of the saloon’s main room. One of her bartenders had brought supper over from the dining room of the Grand Central Hotel. It was the best food in the Black Hills, she had explained, and Luke had to admit she was probably right. The roast beef was as good as any he’d had in a long time.

  As they ate, washing down the food with sips of fine wine, they talked about everything that had happened since they’d seen each other last.

  “I don’t have much to tell,” Luke told her. “I’m a bounty hunter, have been ever since that run-in with the Gammon brothers.”

  “I know. I’ve heard talk about you from time to time. You have quite a reputation.” Marcy smiled. “Did you know I named this place after the Gammons?”

  “I wondered how come you called it the Buffalo Butt.”

  “In those buffalo coats, they were as ugly and smelly as buffalo rumps.”

  “I can’t disagree with that,” Luke said.

  “Even though I didn’t want to admit it to you this afternoon, I reckon that was when my life started to change for the better. So I felt like I ought to commemorate the occasion.”

  Luke thought about it and decided the name was appropriate after all. He lifted his wineglass. “To the good that can come from ugly, inelegant things.”

  “I’ll drink to that.” Marcy clinked her glass against his, and he thought her eyes had a meaningful, mischievous twinkle in them as she looked at him.

  He was ugly and inelegant, he thought. He had so much blood on his hands he could never wash it off, even if he tried.

  But he had done some good in his life, too. He had saved Emily and her grandfather from Vincent Wolford. If the carpetbagger had lived, he wouldn’t have stopped going after them until he got what he wanted.

  And Luke had helped Marcy escape a life that would have eventually killed her if she hadn’t gotten out of it. Some people might consider owning a saloon in a frontier town like Deadwood to be pretty disreputable, but those folks just didn’t know how low people really could sink. Marcy was better off. He was sure of it.

  “What are you going to do now?” she asked.

  “I thought I’d have another glass of this surprisingly good wine,” he replied with a smile.

  “No, I mean with your life. Blast it, Luke, you know that.”

  He poured the wine and set the bottle aside. “I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing. I don’t see any reason to change now. I’m not sure I could change, even if I wanted to.”

  “I did,” Marcy said.

  “You wanted to.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to have a normal life? Maybe a business? Like . . . half interest in a saloon?”

  He saw the hope in her eyes and knew it would be kinder to dash it right away, rather than letting it linger and grow. He shook his head. “I’m not going to settle down. I can’t. Now that I know you’re here, I might try to drift this way more often—”

  “Don’t put yourself out on my account.” Her expression turned cold, like a blue norther blowing down across the plains.

  “You don’t understand. I can’t be who you want me to be, Marcy, but knowing that I have a friend somewhere. . . well, it might make those cold nights out on the prairie a little easier to bear.”

  She wasn’t going to give in easily. “I’ll think about it.” Her voice and body remained stiff with disappointment and anger.

  Luke lifted his glass to her. “That’s all I can ask.”

  She came to him that night seemingly as passionate as ever, but he sensed she was holding something back. His declaration that he would be riding on had changed whatever had been between them.

  And how could it fail to do so? he asked himself, regretting it had happened.

  Late that
night, as Luke was dozing off with Marcy’s head pillowed on his shoulder, he heard her whisper, “If you run out on me in the morning without saying good-bye again, I’ll hunt you down and kill you.”

  He laughed softly and promised, “I’ll be here.”

  He was sound asleep when his instincts took over and warned him. Maybe it was the faint creak of a floorboard, but whatever the reason, his eyes snapped open and caught a flicker of movement in the shadows of the room.

  Reacting with the speed that had saved his life many times, Luke shoved a startled Marcy out of bed and rolled the other way. With a boom like a crash of thunder, a shotgun went off, twin gouts of flame erupting from its barrels.

  Luke snatched up the Remington he had left lying on a chair right beside the bed and thumbed two shots just above the muzzle flash from the scattergun. Momentarily deaf from the shotgun’s roar, he couldn’t hear if his target cried out or dropped the weapon.

  Keeping himself low to the ground, he crept forward. After only a couple steps, Luke tripped on something and stumbled. He put his left hand out to catch himself and it landed on something hot and sticky. He pulled it back and lashed out with the revolver, thudding against something soft.

  “Get a light on,” Luke told Marcy, hoping none of the buckshot had winged her.

  A lucifer flared to life. He squinted against the glare, his eyes adjusting as she lit a lamp on the table beside the bed. Light filled the room and revealed Luke kneeling beside a gaunt man with a scar shaped like a half-moon on his chin. The would-be killer’s chest was a bloody mess from the two slugs that had torn through it.

  “Who is he?” Marcy asked. “Do you know him?”

  Luke heard the question indicating his hearing had come back. He shook his head. “We never met, but I know who he is. His name’s Fescoe. I’ve been on his trail for a while. Somebody must have told him I was in town looking for him, so he asked around until he figured out where he could find me. Thought he’d get me off his trail permanently.”

  Luke was going to have a talk with that liveryman, who had obviously double-crossed him.

  Marcy put her hands on her hips. “My bed’s ruined from that shotgun blast, and he’s getting blood on the rug, too.”

  Luke stood up. “I’ll send you money for the damages once I’ve gotten the reward. I’ll have to ride back down to Yankton to collect.”

  “But you won’t be coming back?”

  “Not for a while. Not after this.”

  “I’ve seen men die before, you know. I’ve even had them try to kill me.”

  “Death doesn’t follow you around, though. Not like it does with me.”

  Marcy sighed as one of the bartenders pounded on the door and called out to see if she was all right.

  “I can’t decide if you’re the best man I know, Luke Smith, or just a sorry SOB.”

  Luke walked to the chair by the side of the bed and slipped the Remington back into the holster. “It’s a good question. I don’t know the answer myself.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Even though his visit to Deadwood had a more bittersweet ending than he would have preferred, Luke took some good memories away from there. He knew Marcy was not only still alive but thriving, and that eased one of the worries he had carried around with him for years. He made himself a promise to drift up to the Black Hills every now and then to visit her and hoped the next time they met, she would still be glad to see him.

  The next year, in the summer of 1878, he was in Santa Fe when he saw another familiar face across a crowded cantina. He picked up his mug of beer and made his way across the room until he reached the table where a thick-bodied man with graying fair hair and beard sat nursing a glass of tequila.

  “Hello, Marshal,” Luke said to Jasper Thornapple.

  The two of them had crossed trails several times over the years. Luke had turned over to Thornapple a few fugitives he’d captured and sometimes it was sheer coincidence how they met. The frontier, for all its vastness, could sometimes seem like a small place.

  The lawman looked up with a pleased smile. “Luke! I was hoping I’d run into you again one of these days. I’ve got some news for you.” Thornapple gestured for Luke to have a seat at the table. “Heard about it from another deputy marshal.”

  Luke settled down into the chair. “What kind of news?”

  “Remember a long time ago, the first time we met up in Kansas, you asked me about four men?”

  Luke stiffened. “You mean Potter, Stratton, Richards, and Casey?”

  “Those are the ones. You never found them, did you?”

  Luke frowned but didn’t say anything. His mind was too full of bitter memories. He had looked for the four men who had betrayed him, betrayed their country, murdered his friends, nearly killed him, and stolen the gold. As much as he roamed, as many people as he met during his travels, he had thought it was inevitable that he would pick up their trail.

  But instead he had run into stone wall after stone wall. Nobody knew the men he was looking for. Maybe they were all dead already, he often told himself, but never really believed that. It was as if fate had conspired with those four no-good deserters to keep them safe from his vengeance.

  Finally, in a quiet voice, he told Thornapple, “No, I never found them. To tell you the truth, after a while I quit looking so hard.” He looked at the marshal, his pulse quickening. “Do you know where they are?”

  “I do,” Thornapple said, then dashed Luke’s hopes. “They’re in the ground. They’re all dead, Luke.”

  A strange feeling washed through Luke. It wasn’t disappointment, really, or even relief, but rather an odd, hollow mixture of the two. He wanted them dead, but he took no real satisfaction from knowing that they were.

  “What happened to them?” he asked Thornapple, although he didn’t really care.

  “They were killed up in Idaho Territory a while back, at a settlement called Bury. The name turned out to be fitting. They started the town and ran everything in the area. Ran roughshod over everybody in those parts, too. A gunfighter calling himself Buck West rode in and raised hell. Wound up killing all of them. Turns out that wasn’t really West’s name at all. He was really a fella named Smoke Jensen.”

  The surprise Luke had felt at hearing his enemies were dead was nothing compared to the shock that went through him upon hearing his family name. It had been so long since he’d used the name Jensen it seemed like he had always been Luke Smith.

  Despite that, he had never forgotten his family. Sometimes it was hard to remember what his ma and pa had looked like. They might both be dead. Probably were. And Janey and Kirby would be grown. He might pass them on the street and never know them.

  But who in blazes was Smoke Jensen?

  Luke shook his head. “I haven’t heard of him.”

  “No reason you would have,” Thornapple said. “There were wanted posters out on him for a while, especially while he was calling himself Buck West, but from what I hear there are no charges against him now.”

  “Did you ever see him?”

  Thornapple shook his head. “Nope. Supposed to be a big, sandy-haired fella who’s really fast with his guns. He’d have to be, because from what I’ve heard, not only did he kill those men you were looking for, but he and some old mountain man friends of his wiped out a small army of hired killers who worked for Potter and the others, too. It was a full-fledged war up there.”

  Kirby had ash-blond hair, Luke recalled. If he’d grown big enough, he might fit the description of Smoke Jensen. But why in the world would he have taken that name?

  Why not? That wry thought crossed Luke’s mind. I took a different name, and for a good reason, didn’t I? Maybe Kirby did, too.

  “You know where he is now?”

  “Jensen?” Thornapple shook his head. “No idea. The way I heard it, he rode away from Bury with some good-looking gal he met up there, and they never came back. Do you want to find him?”

  “I thought I might look him up. Thank hi
m for doing my job for me.”

  “I had a feeling you had a score to settle with those hombres you asked about,” Thornapple said. “Well, it’s done, so you can forget about it now.”

  “I suppose so.” Luke drank down the rest of his beer and set the empty mug on the table. Inside he felt as empty as that mug.

  He continued to ride, drifting from one place to another. Over time that feeling faded. Glad Potter and the others were dead, Luke would have liked to have been the one to pull the trigger and send them to hell, but nobody ever said life was fair. Justice had caught up to them, and he had to be satisfied with that. He had other killers to hunt down and bring in. But as he went about it, he kept his ears open and learned everything he could about the man called Smoke Jensen.

  Smoke was said to be fast with a gun, mighty fast. Maybe the slickest on the draw in the entire West. Luke heard stories about some of the battles Smoke had had with a wide assortment of outlaws and cold-blooded killers, and Smoke always emerged triumphant.

  But those who had met him, without fail, said Smoke Jensen was no arrogant, vicious gunman, but rather a stalwart friend, a decent man, and a loving husband to his wife Sally. They had a successful ranch somewhere in Colorado called Sugarloaf, and judging by all the stories Luke heard about the man, Smoke wanted to live a peaceful life and never went out looking for trouble.

  He sure didn’t back down from it, though, and just about the worst mistake anybody could ever make was to threaten one of Smoke’s friends or relatives. That was a mighty quick way to wind up dead.

  Yes, Smoke Jensen sounded like the sort of man Luke would be proud to know, but despite what he had told Thornapple, he never made any attempt to find Jensen. Maybe the famous gunfighter really was his little brother Kirby, or maybe he wasn’t, but either way, he figured Smoke wouldn’t want a bloody-handed bounty hunter showing up on his doorstep claiming to be kinfolk. Luke felt sure if any of his family had even thought about him during the long years since the end of the Civil War, they must have assumed he was dead.