Live by the West, Die by the West Page 4

  “We understand, Hans,” Smoke said. “But we are not taking sides with either McCorkle or Hanks. I do not hire my guns and neither does Beans here.” He jerked his thumb toward the Moab Kid. “And Ring doesn’t even carry a short gun.

  “Uummph!” the German grunted. “Den dat vill be a velcome change. You vant breakfast?”

  “Please.”

  “Good! I vill start you gentlemen vith hot oatmeal vith lots of fresh cream and sugar. Den ham and eggs and fried potatoes and lots of coffee. Olga! Tree oatmeals and tree breakfasts, liebling.”

  “What’d he call her?” Beans whispered.

  “Darling,” Ring told him.

  Smoke looked up. “You speak German, Ring?”

  “My parents were German. Born in the old country. My last name is Kruger.”

  The oatmeal was placed before them, huge bowls of steaming oatmeal covered with cream and sugar. Ring looked up. “Danke.”

  The two men then proceeded to converse in rapid-fire German. To Beans it sounded like a couple of bullfrogs with laryngitis.

  Then, to the total amazement of Smoke and Beans, the two big men proceeded to slap each other across the face several times, grinning all the time.

  Hans laughed and returned to the kitchen. “Y’ all fixin’ to fight, Ring?” Beans asked.

  Ring laughed at the expression on their faces. “Oh, no. That is a form of greeting in certain parts of the old country. It means we like each other.”

  “That is certainly a good thing to know,” Smoke remarked drily. “In case I ever take a notion to travel to Germany.”

  The men fell to eating the delicious oatmeal. When they pushed the empty bowls away, Hans was there with huge platters of food and the contest was on.

  “Guten appetit, gentlemans.”

  “What’d he say?” Beans asked Ring.

  “Eat!” He smiled. “More or less.”

  Olga stepped out of the kitchen to stand watching the men eat, a smile on her face. She was just as ample as Hans. Between the two of them they’d weigh a good five hundred pounds. Another lady stepped out of the kitchen. Make that seven hundred and fifty pounds.

  When they had finished, as full as ticks, Ring looked up and said, “Prima! Grobartig!” He lifted his coffee mug and toasted their good health. “Auf Ihre Gesundheit!”

  Olga and the other lady giggled.

  “I didn’t hear nobody sneeze.” Beans looked around.

  * * *

  Ring stayed in the restaurant, talking with Hans and Olga and Hilda and drinking coffee. Beans sat down in a wooden chair in front of the place, staring across the street at the gunhawks who were staring at him. Smoke walked up to the church that doubled as a schoolhouse. The kids were playing out front so he figured it was recess time.

  The children looked at him, a passing glance, and resumed their playing. Smoke walked up the steps.

  Smoke stood in the open doorway, the outside light making him almost impossible to view clearly from the inside. He felt a pang of . . . some kind of emotion. He wasn’t sure. But there was no doubt: he was looking at family.

  The schoolteacher looked up from his grading papers. “Yes?”

  “Parnell Jensen?”

  “Yes. Whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

  Smoke had to chew on that for a few seconds. “I reckon I’m your cousin, Parnell. I’m Smoke Jensen.”

  * * *

  Parnell gave Smoke directions to the ranch and said he would be out at three-thirty. And he would be prompt about it. “I am a very punctilious person,” Parnell added.

  And a prissy sort too, Smoke thought. “Uh-huh. Right.” He’d have to remember to ask somebody what punch-till-eous meant.

  He was walking up the boardwalk just as the thunder of hooves coming hard reached him. The hooves drummed across the bridge at the west end of town and didn’t slow up. A dozen hard-ridden horses can kick up a lot of dust.

  Smoke had found out from Parnell that McCorkle’s spread was west and north of town, Hanks’s spread was east and north of town. Fae’s spread, and it was no little spread, ran on both sides of the Smith River; for about fifteen miles on either side of it. McCorkle hated Hanks, Hanks hated McCorkle, and both men had threatened to dam up the Smith and dry Fae out if she didn’t sell out to one of them.

  “And then what are they going to do?” Smoke asked.

  “Fight each other for control of the entire area between the Big Belt and the Little Belt Mountains. They’ve been fighting for twenty years. They came here together in ’62. Hated each other at first sight.” Parnell flapped his hand in disgust. “It’s just a dreadful situation. I wish we had never come to this barbaric land.”

  “Why did you?”

  “My sister wanted to farm and ranch. She’s always been a tomboy. The man who owned the ranch before us hired me— I was teaching at a lovely private institution in Illinois, close to Chicago—and told Fae that he had no children and would give us the ranch upon his death. I think more to spite McCorkle and Hanks than out of any kindness of heart.”

  Smoke leaned against a storefront and watched as King Cord McCorkle—as Parnell called him—and his crew came to a halt in a cloud of dust in front of the Pussycat. When the dust had settled, Jason Bright stepped off the boardwalk and walked to Cord’s side, speaking softly to him.

  Parnell’s words returned: “I have always had to look after my sister. She is so flighty. I wish she would marry and then I could return to civilization. It’s so primitive out here!” He sighed. “But I fear that the man who gets my sister will have to beat her three times a day.”

  Cord turned his big head and broad face toward Smoke and stared at him. Smoke pegged the man to be in his early forties; a bull of a man. Just about Smoke’s height, maybe twenty pounds heavier.

  Cord blinked first, turning his head away with a curse that just reached Smoke. Smoke cut his eyes to the Hangout. Diego and Pablo Gomez and another man stood there. Smoke finally recognized the third man. Lujan, the Chihuahua gunfighter. Probably the fastest gun—that as yet had built a reputation—in all of Mexico. But not a cold-blooded killer like Diego and Pablo.

  Lujan tipped his hat at Smoke and Smoke lifted a hand in acknowledgment and smiled. Lujan returned the smile, then turned and walked into the saloon.

  Smoke again felt eyes on him. Cord was once more staring at him.

  “You there! The man supposed to be Smoke Jensen. Git down here. I wanna talk to you.”

  “You got two legs and a horse, mister!” Smoke called over the distance. “So you can either walk or ride up here.”

  Pablo and Diego laughed at that.

  “Damned greasers!” Cord spat the words.

  The Mexicans stiffened, hands dropping to the butts of their guns.

  A dozen gunhands in front of the Pussycat stood up.

  A little boy, about four or five years old, accompanied by his dog, froze in the middle of the street, right in the line of fire.

  Lujan opened the batwings and stepped out. “We—all of us—have no right to bring bloodshed to the innocent people of this town.” His voice carried across the street. He stepped into the street and walked to the boy’s side. “You and your dog go home, muchacho. Quickly, now.”

  Lujan stood alone in the street. “A man who would deliberately injure a child is not fit to live. So, McCorkle, it is a good day to die, is it not?”

  Smoke walked out into the street to stand by Lujan’s side. A smile creased the Mexican’s lips. “You are taking a side, Smoke?”

  “No. I just don’t like McCorkle, and I probably won’t like Hanks either.”

  “So, McCorkle,” Lujan called. “You see before you two men who have not taken a side, but who are more than willing to open the baile. Are you ready?”

  “Make that three people,” Beans’s voice rang out.

  “Who the hell are you?” McCorkle shouted.

  “Some people call me the Moab Kid.”

  “Make that four people,” Ring
said. He held his Winchester in his big hands.

  “Funf!” Hans shouted, stepping out into the street. He held the sawed-off in his hands.

  The window above the café opened and Olga leaned out, a pistol with a barrel about a foot and a half long in her hand. She jacked back the hammer to show them all she knew how to use it. And would.

  “All right, all right!” Cord shouted. “Hell’s bells! Nobody was going to hurt the kid. Come on, boys, I’ll buy the drinks.” He turned and bulled his way through his men.

  At the far end of the street, Parnell stepped back from the open doorway and fanned himself vigorously. “Heavens!” he said.

  FIVE

  “Almost come a showdown in town this morning, Boss,” Dooley Hanks’s foreman said.

  Hanks eyeballed the man. “Between who?”

  Gage told his boss what a hand had relayed to him only moments earlier.

  Hanks slumped back in his chair. “Smoke Jensen,” he whispered the word. “I never even thought about Fae and Parnell bein’ related to him. And the Moab Kid and Lujan sided with him?”

  “Or vicey-versy.”

  “This ain’t good. That damn Lujan is poison enough. But add Smoke Jensen to the pot . . . might as well be lookin’ the devil in the eyeballs. I don’t know nothin’ about Ring, except he’s unbeatable in a fight. And the Moab Gunfighter has made a name for hisself in half a dozen states. All right, Gage. We got to get us a backshooter in here. Send a rider to Helena. Wire Danny Rouge; he’s over in Missoula. Tell him to come a-foggin’.”

  “Yes. sir.”

  “Where’s them damn boys of mine?”

  “Pushin’ cattle up to new pasture.”

  “You mean they actually doin’ some work?”

  Gage grinned. “Yes, sir.”

  Hanks shook his head in disbelief. “Thank you, Gage.”

  Gage left, hollering for a rider to saddle up. Hanks walked to a window in his office. He had swore he would be kingpin of this area, and he intended to be just that. Even if he bankrupted himself doing it. Even if he had to kill half the people in the area attaining it.

  * * *

  Cord McCorkle had ridden out of town shortly after his facedown with Smoke and Lujan and the others. He did not feel that he had backed down. It was simply a matter of survival. Nobody but a fool willingly steps into his own coffin.

  His hands would have killed Smoke and Lujan and the others, for a fact. But it was also hard fact that Cord would have gone down in the first volley . . . and what the hell would that have proved?

  Nothing. Except to get dead.

  Cord knew that men like Smoke and Lujan could soak up lead and still stay on their feet, pulling the trigger. He had personally witnessed a gunfighter get hit nine times with. 45 slugs and before he died still kill several of the men he was facing.

  Cord sat on the front porch of his ranch house and looked around him. He wanted for nothing. He had everything a man could want. It had sickened him when Dooley had OK’d the dragging of that young Box T puncher. Scattering someone’s cattle was one thing. Murder was another. He was glad that Jensen had come along. But he didn’t believe anyone could ever talk sense into Hanks.

  * * *

  Smoke, Ring, and Beans sat their horses on the knoll overlooking the ranch house of Fae and Parnell Jensen. Fae might well be a bad-mouthed woman with a double-edged tongue, but she kept a neat place. Flowers surrounded the house, the lawn was freshly cut, and the place itself was attractive.

  Even at this distance, a good mile off, Smoke could see two men, with what he guessed were rifles in their hands, take up positions around the bunkhouse and barn. A woman—he guessed it was a woman, she was dressed in britches—came out onto the porch. She also carried a rifle. Smoke waved at her and waited for her to give them some signal to ride on in.

  Finally the woman stepped off the porch and motioned for them to come on.

  The men walked their horses down to the house, stopping at the hitchrail but not dismounting. The woman looked at Smoke. Finally she smiled.

  “I saw a tintype of your daddy once. You look like him. You’d be Kirby Jensen.”

  “And you’d be Cousin Fae. I got your letter. I picked up these galoots along the way.” He introduced Beans and Ring.

  “Put your horses in the barn, boys, and come on into the house. It’s about dinnertime. I got fresh doughnuts; ‘bear-sign’ as you call them out here.”

  Fae Jensen was more than a comely lass; she was really quite pretty and shapely. But unlike most women of the time, her face and arms were tanned from hours in the sun, doing a man’s work. And her hands were calloused.

  Smoke had met Fae’s two remaining ranch hands, Spring and Pat. Both men in their early sixties, he guessed. But still leather-tough. They both gave him a good eyeballing, passed him through inspection, and returned to their jobs.

  Over dinner—Sally called it lunch—Smoke began asking his questions while Beans skipped the regular food and began attacking a platter of bear-sign, washed down with hot strong western coffee.

  How many head of cattle?

  Started out with a thousand. Probably down to less than five hundred now, due to Hanks and McCorkle’s boys running them off.

  Would she have any objections to Smoke getting her cattle back?

  She looked hard at him. Finally shook her head. No objections at all.

  “Ring will stay here at the ranch and start doing some much needed repair work,” Smoke told her. “Beans and me will start working the cattle, moving them closer in. Then we’ll get your other beeves back. Tell me the boundaries of this spread.”

  She produced a map and pointed out her spread, and it was not a little one. It had good graze and excellent water. The brand was the Box T; she had not changed it since taking over several years back.

  “If you’ll pack us some food,” Smoke said, “me and Beans will head out right now; get the lay of the land. We’ll stay out a couple of days—maybe longer. This situation is shaping up to be a bad one. The lid could blow off at any moment. Beans, shake out your rope and pick us out a couple of fresh horses. Let’s give ours a few days’ rest. They’ve earned it.”

  “I’ll start putting together some food,” Fae said. She looked at Smoke. “I appreciate this. More than you know.”

  “Sorry family that don’t stick together.”

  They rode out an hour later, Smoke on a buckskin a good seventeen hands high that looked as though it could go all day and all night and still want to travel.

  The old man who had given the spread to Fae had known his business—Smoke still wondered about how she’d gotten it. He decided to pursue that further when he had the time.

  About ten miles from the ranch, they crossed the Smith and rode up to several men working Box T cattle toward the northwest.

  They wheeled around at Smoke’s approach.

  “Right nice of you boys to take such an interest in our cattle,” Smoke told a hard-eyed puncher. “But you’re pushing them the wrong way. Now move them back across the river.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” the man challenged him.

  “Jensen.”

  The man spat on the ground. “I like the direction we’re movin’ them better.” He grabbed iron.

  Smoke drew, cocked, and fired in one blindingly fast move. The .44 slug took the man in the center of his chest and knocked him out of the saddle. He tried to rise up but did not have the strength. With a groan, he fell back on the ground, dead. Beans held a pistol on the other McCorkle riders; they were all looking a little white around the mouth.

  “Jack Waters,” Smoke said. “He’s wanted for murder in two states. I’ve seen the flyers in Monte’s office.”

  “Yeah,” Beans said glumly. “And he’s got three brothers just as bad as he is. Waco, Hatley, and Collis.”

  “You won’t last a week on this range, Jensen,” a mouthy McCorkle rider said.

  Smoke moved closer to him and backhanded the rider out of his sad
dle. He hit the ground and opened his mouth to cuss. Then he closed his mouth as the truth came home. Jensen. Smoke Jensen.

  “All of you shuck outta them gun belts,” Beans ordered. “When you’ve done that, start movin’ them cattle back across the river.”

  “Then we’re going to take a ride,” Smoke added. “To see Cord.”

  While the Circle Double C boys pushed the cattle back across the river, Smoke lashed the body of Jack Waters across his saddle and Beans picked up the guns, stuffing guns, belts, and all into a gunny sack and tying it on his saddle horn. The riders returned, a sullen lot, and Smoke told them to head out for the ranch.

  A hand hollered for Cord to come out long before Smoke and Beans entered the front yard. “Stay in the house,” Cord told his wife and daughter. “I don’t want you to see any of this.”

  Beans stayed in the saddle, a Winchester .44 across his saddle horn. Smoke untied the ropes and slung Jack Waters over his shoulder, and Jack was not a small man. He walked across the lawn and dumped the body on the ground, by Cord’s feet.

  Cord was livid, his face flushed and the veins in his neck standing out like ropes. He was breathing like an enraged bull.

  “We caught Jack and these other hands on Box T range, rustling cattle. Now you know the law out here, Cord: we were within our rights to hang every one of them. But I gave them a chance to ride on. Waters decided to drag iron.”

  Cord nodded his head, not trusting his voice to speak.

  “Now, Cord,” Smoke told him, “I don’t care if you and Hanks fight until you kill each other. I don’t think either of you remember what it is you’re fighting about. But the war against the Box T is over. Fae and Parnell Jensen have no interest in your war, and nothing to do with it. Leave . . . them . . . alone!”

  Smoke’s last three words cracked like whips; several hard-nosed punchers winced at the sound.