Massacre Canyon Page 7

  “All right,” Payne said after a few minutes. “Move the wagon.”

  One of the men climbed to the driver’s seat and lifted the reins. The team of horses hauled the wagon out of the way, and for the first time Luke got a good look at the main house. It sat behind a flagstone patio at the top of about twenty terracelike steps. At each end of each of those steps sat a potted cactus.

  The house itself was big and sprawling, with a red tile roof in the Spanish style and a walled balcony on the second floor. The windows were decorated with wrought iron. It might have been the home of a Spanish don outside Seville, Luke thought.

  The man waiting at the top of the steps was a far cry from a nobleman, though. He was an outlaw, plain and simple, an evil man with a hawklike face and a dark mustache. Luke recognized him from plenty of wanted posters.

  Rudolph Kroll.

  Standing behind Kroll and to one side was a massive bear of a man wearing a long, beaded vest and a flat-crowned brown hat. Probably Kroll’s segundo, Luke thought.

  Kroll had his arms crossed over his chest as he looked down the steps and regarded Luke with an expression of pure hatred. Clearly, he was waiting for something.

  “All right, Jensen,” Payne said as he prodded Luke in the back with a rifle barrel. “Up you go.”

  Luke didn’t know if he could make it up the steps, but pride stiffened his back and his legs. He lifted his right foot and felt the muscles trembling, but they obeyed his commands well enough for him to set the foot on the first step. Now to see if the leg would support his weight when he started up.

  It did. The steps were wide enough that he had to plant both feet on each one, shuffle forward, lift his right foot and then his left foot to the next one, and repeat the process. It was slow going, but he kept his head up and met Rudolph Kroll’s cold stare with an equally chilly, defiant one of his own.

  Kroll might be about to kill him, but whatever his fate might be, Luke was going to meet it on his own two feet, and he was thankful for that.

  It seemed to take an hour for him to climb the steps, although he knew it wasn’t really that long. Finally, he lifted a foot to the patio and forced his body up for the last time. He stood there facing Kroll, who stood ten feet away.

  “Luke Jensen,” Kroll said, his voice deep and powerful but with an undertone of harshness that made it sound almost like the growl of an animal. “I’ve been looking forward to this meeting.”

  “That makes one of us,” Luke rasped. He hadn’t used his voice much during the journey here. It sounded like the squalling of a rusty gate to his ears.

  “Do you know why I’ve had you brought to Massacre Canyon?”

  “That’s what you call this place?”

  “The hacienda probably had some other name. Don’t ask me what it was. But the area is known among the Apaches as Massacre Canyon, which probably refers to something that happened here, I don’t know.” Kroll gave a curt shake of his head. “None of that’s important. I had you brought here because of two brothers.”

  “You and Mordecai,” Luke said. “Tell me, have they stretched his neck at the end of a hang rope yet?”

  Luke didn’t want to be tortured any more than he already had been. He would rather goad Kroll into pulling a gun and shooting him, if it came down to a choice like that. A quick, clean death, even if it was at the hands of an ugly bastard.

  But surprisingly, Rudolph Kroll smiled. He said, “You’re only half right, Jensen. This is about Mordecai, all right. And no, they haven’t hanged him. I’ve paid off enough lawyers and politicians to keep him alive for a while. It’s really about two other brothers, though: you and your brother Smoke.”

  Luke’s breath froze in his throat. His heart seemed to stop in his chest. Was Kroll going to go after Smoke to complete his vengeance?

  He might wind up with more trouble on his hands than he expected if he did that.

  “You see, I know all about the famous Smoke Jensen,” Kroll went on, obviously very pleased with himself now. “His exploits are legendary. If everything that’s been written about him is true, there’s never been anyone else like him in the history of the frontier.”

  “All those yarns just scratch the surface,” Luke muttered.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Kroll said. “It makes me even more convinced that I made the right decision. You see, I figure if there’s anyone who can get my brother, Mordecai, out of the hands of the law and bring him back here safely to me, it’s the famous Smoke Jensen. And that’s exactly what he’s going to do.”

  Kroll’s face twisted into a hate-filled snarl.

  “Or else I’ll send his own brother back to him carved into bloody little pieces. Isn’t that right, Galt?”

  The bearlike man in the beaded vest fingered the handle of a machete tucked behind the red sash around his waist and smiled in anticipation.

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter 12

  The smell of wood smoke drifted through the night air to the men who sat their saddles in the thick shadows under a grove of trees. Somewhere not far away, a campfire burned.

  “Varmints have got confident they lost us,” one of the riders said quietly, his voice barely above a whisper. “They figure they don’t have to cover their trail no more.”

  “They’re wrong about that,” another man said with the eagerness of youth. “They’re gonna find out just how wrong. Isn’t that right, Smoke?”

  “I intend to get back those horses they stole, Cal,” Smoke Jensen said. “Whether or not we do that peace-fullike . . . well, that’s up to them.”

  The first man who had spoken said, “It won’t be peaceful. They’re horse thieves. They know we’ll just string ’em up if they surrender, so they’ll fight.”

  That brought a chuckle from Smoke.

  “Don’t be so bloodthirsty, Pearlie,” he told his foreman. “Don’t you know the days of hang-rope law are over? Just read the editorials in the newspapers.”

  Pearlie snorted.

  “I got a better use from them dang editorials and the papers they’re printed in. It has to do with a little buildin’ with a quarter-moon cut in the door.”

  Smoke smiled in the darkness. Pearlie wasn’t long on patience.

  But he was probably right about what was going to happen, Smoke reflected. The eight men who had hit the Sugarloaf’s horse herd a few nights earlier and run off more than forty fine saddle mounts weren’t very likely to give up peacefully. Their natural response to a challenge would be to slap leather.

  Pearlie knew that because he was kin to their breed. In the past, he had been an outlaw and a hired gun, although he had never stooped so low as to steal horses. Meeting Smoke Jensen had changed his life, but the lessons learned in those old, wild days were still with him.

  Smoke had heard the owl hoot on dark, lonely trails himself, back when he was younger. In the days following the death of his first wife, Nicole, he had been outlawed for a time. Wanted posters with his name and likeness on them had circulated among the frontier law offices, and rewards had also been posted on “Buck West,” the name Smoke had used for a while.

  All the charges against him were bogus, but he’d had to live as if they weren’t in order to survive. He had lived among men who had no regard for the law, and he knew how they thought.

  In a firm voice, Smoke said, “We’re going to give them a chance to surrender. If they will, we’ll take them back to Big Rock, turn them over to Monte Carson, and let the law take its course.”

  Monte Carson was the sheriff in Big Rock and one of Smoke’s best friends.

  Smoke paused, then before his foreman could object he continued. “But Pearlie’s right. In all likelihood they’ll put up a fight. If any of you boys aren’t ready for that, you can wait here and nobody will think any the worse of you.”

  That wasn’t strictly true, of course. Anybody who backed out would be an object of scorn among the other hands who rode for the Sugarloaf.

  None of the other seven men spoke
up. After a moment, young Calvin Woods said, “Shoot, Smoke, you know better than that. Let’s go get the sons of—”

  “Hold on there, son,” Pearlie cut in. “You know Miss Sally don’t like you cussin’.”

  “Dang it, I’m not a little kid, Pearlie! I’m about to ride in there and trade shots with a bunch of no-good horse rustlers, aren’t I?”

  Smoke knew his friends would squabble for as long as he would let them, so he said quietly, “Come on. Let’s go take a look at the layout.”

  The nine riders moved slowly up the draw they had been following. The smell of smoke from a campfire grew stronger. They were too close to the horse thieves’ camp for talking and it was too dark to see more than a few feet, so Smoke signaled to Pearlie to stop and dismount. Pearlie passed that signal on to Cal, who passed it on to the next man and so on, until the party from the Sugarloaf had come to a halt and the men had swung down from their saddles.

  With a faint whisper of steel on leather, the men withdrew their rifles from saddle sheaths.

  They left the horses there and continued on foot. Smoke led the way, slipping along the draw with a stealth that would have done an Indian proud. The men who came behind him were almost as quiet. He spotted an orange glow up ahead and knew they had almost reached their destination.

  The horse thieves had pushed their four-legged loot hard during the past few days. Smoke and the men with him had been on the trail first thing the next morning after the raid and probably could have caught up sooner, but Smoke had wanted to lull the thieves into thinking they had escaped pursuit. That would make it easier to take them by surprise and maybe avoid a fight.

  He wasn’t worried about his own hide if it came down to gunplay. He had already dodged so many bullets in his life that he figured he was living on borrowed time. Nor did the thought of taking the law into his own hands and dealing out hot lead justice to the horse thieves bother him.

  But even though they were always ready to back his play, whatever it was, Smoke wanted to lessen the risk to Pearlie and Cal and his other men. Cal had suffered a couple of serious bullet wounds in the past, and since Smoke’s wife, Sally, regarded the young man almost as an adopted little brother, he didn’t want Cal to get shot up again.

  When it came down to the nub, though, Smoke would do what he had to do. He wasn’t going to let those thieves get away with his horses.

  The draw opened up into a flat about fifty yards wide. On the far side was a ridge with trees growing on top of it that stretched for several hundred yards in each direction. A little creek tumbled down the ridge in a waterfall and formed a pool at the bottom. Smoke could see all that in the glow from the campfire.

  Off to the right, the thieves had built a corral out of poles and brush that backed up to the ridge. The stolen horses were in there, docile at the moment because the wind carried the scent of the other horses away from them. Smoke hadn’t planned it that way, but he was canny enough to take advantage of it.

  A couple of men stood near the corral, holding rifles and puffing on cigarettes. Two more sat beside the fire passing a flask back and forth. The other four thieves were stretched out in their bedrolls, asleep. At least two of them were snoring.

  Smoke and his men were beyond the reach of the light from the campfire. He motioned for them to spread out and encircle the camp. They ought to be able to pin the horse thieves against the bluff and with any luck force them to surrender.

  “Pearlie, stay with me,” he whispered to his foreman. “We’ll brace them head-on.”

  “Now you’re talkin’,” the former gunhawk breathed.

  Smoke’s keen eyes followed the other men as they worked their way to right and left, keeping to the shadows as much as possible. After a minute, he lost sight of all of them, but he knew where they were and how long it would take them to get into position.

  When he judged that he had allowed enough time, he nodded to Pearlie, who whispered, “You sure you don’t want to just cut loose on them varmints, Smoke?”

  “I don’t bushwhack anybody, even horse thieves,” Smoke replied. “Come on.”

  He stepped out of the darkness at the head of the draw and walked toward the fire. When he was just outside the circle of light, he stopped and called, “Hello, the camp!”

  The two guards near the corral stiffened and lifted their rifles. The two who had been drinking by the fire bolted to their feet and reached for their guns. The four who’d been asleep started thrashing around in their bedrolls.

  “Stand where you are and keep your hands away from your guns!” Smoke shouted. “You’re covered!”

  From the darkness sounded the metallic ratcheting of Winchester levers being worked. The familiar, menacing sound made the horse thieves freeze.

  “What the hell is this?” one of the men beside the fire called angrily. “Who are you, mister, and what gives you the right to throw down on us?”

  Smoke moved forward into the light. He was a man of medium height with sandy hair under his brown Stetson, and the most impressive thing about him physically was the unusual width of his shoulders, which were powerfully muscled, as well as his arms.

  Yet some indefinable something about him said that here was a man to stand aside from. It might have been the utter calm and confidence with which he carried himself. That confidence never spilled over into arrogance, though. Smoke had learned humility early on in his life, and he had never lost that quality.

  Plenty of men could claim to be fast on the draw, but none were faster than Smoke Jensen. Not Frank Morgan, Ben Thompson, Matt Bodine, Luke Short, or any of the other legendary gunmen known from one end of the frontier to the other. Not even Smoke’s adopted brother Matt, who had already developed quite a reputation as a shootist after only a few years, could match his speed and deadly accuracy with the twin Colts he wore.

  So when he answered the outlaw’s question by saying, “My name is Smoke Jensen,” everybody in the camp instantly knew the name. He added, “I’m the man who owns those horses you stole, so that’s what gives me the right. I’m calling on you right now to throw down your guns and surrender.”

  The man at the fire sneered. He had a pointed, fox-like face, and long dirty hair tumbled from under the battered hat he wore with its front brim turned up. He said, “Yeah, well, I’m callin’ on you, Jensen. I’m callin’ on you to eat lead and die!”

  No sooner had that shout rung out from the horse thief than guns began to roar along the top of the bluff. Muzzle flame bloomed in the darkness like crimson flowers and slugs whipped past the heads of Smoke and Pearlie, prompting the foreman to yell, “Damn it! It’s a trap!”

  Chapter 13

  Eight men had stolen the horses from the Sugarloaf and drove them this far. Smoke was certain of that from the tracks he and his men had followed.

  But nothing prevented those horse thieves from joining up with another bunch of outlaws. Obviously, that was what had happened. And they had set a trap of their own, leaving the original eight by the campfire while settling down atop the bluff to ambush any pursuers that caught up.

  Too fast for the eye to follow, Smoke’s hands swooped to the butts of his guns and brought the Colts out of their holsters. The barrels came level and smoke and fire began to belch from their muzzles. The hail of lead that erupted from his guns scythed through the men around the campfire. They jerked and jittered as .45 slugs ripped bloody holes in them.

  Despite giving up his gunfighting ways, Pearlie was still faster on the draw than most men, too. His revolver blasted and brought down one of the guards near the corral. The other man fired his rifle, but he hurried his shot and the bullet went over the heads of Smoke and Pearlie.

  The sudden racket, along with the smells of powder smoke and blood that abruptly filled the air, spooked the stolen horses. They began to lunge back and forth in the makeshift corral as they tried to find a way out. The barriers erected by the rustlers wouldn’t hold up under such punishment for long.

  Smoke and Pear
lie backed away as they continued trading shots with the men who had been left in the camp. Cal and the other Sugarloaf hands, who were spread out to the sides, concentrated their fire on the riflemen up on the bluff. The battle might as well have been a terrible storm, with gun thunder substituting for the regular kind and muzzle flashes clawing through the darkness like bolts of lightning.

  The men who had been sleeping near the fire had managed to throw off their blankets and leap to their feet, only to run into bullets from Smoke and Pearlie’s guns that knocked them down again. In a matter of chaos-filled seconds, all eight of the horse thieves were on the ground.

  One man reared up again. Blood from a wound streaked his face, but he had guns in both hands and roared curses as he triggered the weapons at Smoke and Pearlie.

  Smoke snapped a shot at the man with his left-hand Colt. The outlaw’s head jerked back as the .45 round bored into his brain. He swayed on his knees for a second, then pitched forward onto his face.

  Rifle bullets from the top of the bluff kicked up dirt around Smoke’s boots as some of the riflemen up there tracked him in their sights. Cal and the other men were making things hot for those bushwhackers, but they hadn’t given up the fight.

  At that moment the brush barrier collapsed and the horses stampeded out of the wrecked corral. Smoke and Pearlie had to leap backwards to avoid being trampled as the panic-stricken animals pounded between them and the fire.

  The surging mass of horseflesh provided cover for them, however, and so did the roiling cloud of dust kicked up by the hooves of the stampeding horses. The dust filled the air all around the camp and made it impossible to see. Smoke and Pearlie took advantage of that to fall back into the mouth of the draw. Smoke bellowed, “Sugarloaf, come on!”

  Cal and the other cowboys began converging on the draw, firing their rifles on the run as they fell back. Smoke kept calling out so they could home in on his voice through the choking, blinding cloud of dust. Bullets still whined here and there, but they were like phantoms because no one could tell exactly where they were.