Shootout of the Mountain Man (22 page)

“Yeah, well, just remember who your real pard is,” Conklin said, glaring at Clark.

“We’re still pards, Conklin,” Dodd said. “As long as you do what I tell you to do. And I’m tellin’ you that we ain’t goin’ to be spendin’ any of this money anytime soon.”

“Yeah, I guess you are right,” Conklin said. “But I don’t mind tellin’ you, it sure don’t set right in my craw knowin’ how much money we got and all, but not bein’ able to even go into town an’ buy us a decent meal.”

As Clark, Conklin, and Dodd were discussing their take from the stagecoach, Smoke was in the Gold Strike Saloon, just finishing his supper.

“That was a good meal.” He pushed his empty plate to one side and picked up his cup of coffee.

“I’ll tell Mrs. Allen,” Minnie said. “She works so hard in the kitchen all the time and she never gets any recognition.”

“Mrs. Allen, you say?”

“Yes.”

Smoke set his cup down, then walked to the door that led to the kitchen and pushed it open. It was very hot in the kitchen, the heat coming from the huge cookstove that sat on the side wall. An older woman was bent over at the waist, looking into the oven. Smoke waited until she closed the oven door, then turned around. Her eyes were tired, and there was a patina of sweat on her face.

“Mrs. Allen?”

Mrs. Allen looked up. “Yes, sir?”

“I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed my supper. The biscuits were so light they nearly floated off my plate. The ham was delicious, and the potatoes were just right.”

The cook smiled and, for a moment, the tiredness left her eyes. “Why, I thank you, sir,” she said.

“But if you ever meet my wife, don’t tell her I told you this. I’m afraid she would be very jealous of you.”

Mrs. Allen laughed out loud as she pushed an errant fall of white hair back from her forehead. “I hardly think, sir, that your wife could ever be jealous of me.”

Smoke nodded, then returned to his table.

“That was nice of you to do that,” Minnie said.

“It is easy to be nice to nice people,” Smoke replied. He picked up his cup and saw that it had been refreshed with hot coffee.

“I thought it might get cold while you were talking to Mrs. Allen.”

“Thanks.”

“You spoke to Bobby Lee today, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him to be ready.”

“Be ready for what?”

“Just be ready,” Smoke said.

“Tonight?” she asked.

Smoke took a swallow of his coffee and looked at Minnie over the rim. Girls like Minnie referred to their profession as being “on the line.” Minnie had been on the line for two years, but dissipation had not yet set in, and she was still very pretty. She had long blond hair, deep blue eyes, high cheekbones, and unblemished skin. The clothes she wore while working displayed smooth shoulders and the creamy tops of well-formed breasts.

She didn’t look anything at all like most of the soiled doves one found working in saloons and cribs across the West. She looked as if she could have been a next-door neighbor back at Sugarloaf Ranch, someone who would visit with Sally and swap recipes or join other women in a quilting bee. She could be any young rancher’s wife, raising children and helping her husband build a life for their family.

But she wasn’t some young rancher’s wife. Minnie Smith was a whore.

Smoke wanted to ask her how she ever got into the business in the first place, but he thought the question might offend her, so he held his tongue.

“It is tonight, isn’t it?” Minnie asked again after the long silence.

“I can’t tell you that,” Smoke said.

“How are you going to do it?”

“Minnie, don’t ask me any more questions,” Smoke said. “Get too closely involved, even if it is only by prior knowledge, and you can be charged with complicity.”

“All right,” Minnie said with a nod of her head. “I understand.” She put her hand across the table to rest it on Smoke’s hand. “Bobby Lee is lucky to have a friend like you,” she said.

It was much later that same night when Smoke rode his horse down to the far end of Fremont Street. Because of the lateness of the hour, most of the town was asleep, though the sound of the piano could be heard spilling out onto the street from the Gold Strike Saloon. As far as Smoke could tell, he was the only one outside, and almost every building was dark, though from a few houses that sat back off the main street, there could be seen the dim glow of a lantern or candle.

Smoke rode by the gallows, looming large and ominous in the night. The sign containing the doggerel about the hanging, written by some clever, if morose, bard, was still in place. Fortunately, it was unreadable now because of the darkness.

Looking around to make certain he wasn’t being observed, Smoke removed a small piece of cardboard from under his shirt. On one side the cardboard read: PEAR’S SOAP.

On the other side, Smoke had hand-lettered a sign of his own. Using his knife, he pried a nail out from the gallows, just far enough to allow him to attach the sign.

Come one, come all
Nobody is going to fall.
On Friday there will be nothing to see,
‘Cause Bobby Lee will be with me.

Smoke chuckled. All right, he conceded, it wasn’t up to the level of Longfellow, but it was certainly appropriate for the occasion.

Somewhere, a dog began yapping, and a bit closer, he could hear a baby crying. A cat jumped down off the porch from Tilghman’s Apothecary, and ran quickly and silently across the street in front of Smoke, bounding gracefully onto the front porch of Goldstein’s Feed and Seed. If anyone was watching through a window of one of the dark buildings, they would assume Smoke was riding out of town, which is exactly what he wanted them to think.

Smoke rode between the track and the river for about a mile beyond the edge of town. Just to the left of him, the river was a narrow, babbling ribbon of black, with silver highlights from the three-quarter moon that hung overhead. Out here he heard the yipping and yowling of a coyote, and the quieter, but closer hoot of an owl.

Once he had ridden far enough into the dark to be absolutely certain that he could no longer be seen by anyone who might have been watching him, he made a very big U, then came back into the town, only this time he entered Cloverdale, not on Freemont Street, which was the main street, but through the alley that ran between Freemont Street and Vaughan Lane. There was no ambient light back here, and the adjacent buildings cast shadows over the moon glow so that the alley was exceptionally dark. Smoke rode very slowly, trusting his horse, Seven, to find its way.

“There are other names for horses, you know,” Sally had told him when he bought the horse and announced its name.

“I know.”

“This is your third horse named Seven. And you’ve had three named Drifter. ”

“I like the names. ”

“Evidently. But you can’t just keep naming every horse the same thing. ”

“Why not? Didn’t you tell me that England had eight kings named Henry?”

Sally started to respond, then shook her head and laughed. “You win,” she said. “How can I argue with that?”

Smoke stopped behind Bloomberg’s Mercantile, then tied off his horse.

“Wait here, Seven, I’m about to bring you some company,” he said. Seven snorted and shook his head as if he had understood every word, and Smoke picked his way carefully through the bottle-strewn alley as he moved toward the jailhouse. When he reached the jail, he crossed the alley and stepped into a barn that was just behind the jail. It was very dark inside the barn, but he could hear, as well as smell, the horses. Removing a small candle from his pocket, he popped a match with his fingernail, then lit the candle. Wedging the candle between two boards, he used the wavering light to pick out the gray. He saw too that the saddle was still in place on the half wall.

Once he had everything located, he extinguished the candle lest someone see a light in the barn and wonder how it got there. Walking over to where he had seen the saddle, he picked it up, then felt his way into the gray’s stall. Working in the dark, he put the saddle on the horse’s back and it whickered, shook, and stomped its left front foot.

“Easy, boy,” Smoke said soothingly. He cupped the gray’s ear in his hand. “I’m a friend of Bobby Lee’s. I’m taking you to him.”

Smoke’s soothing voice had the effect of calming the horse. He cinched the saddle down, then led the gray out of the barn, and then three buildings up the alley, where he tied it off alongside Seven.

“See here, Seven, I told you I was going to bring you some company. Now you two get acquainted,” he said easily. “I want the two of you to get to know each other because if everything goes right, you’ll be spending a lot of time together.

“That is, if everything goes right,” he repeated under his breath.

From Seven’s saddlebags, he pulled out the package he had bought at the mining supply store earlier in the day, then removed the wrapper, exposing two sticks of dynamite. With dynamite in hand, he started back toward the jailhouse, leaving the horses behind him. He had tied the horses behind the Mercantile store rather than the jail because he wanted to make certain the animals were far enough away not to be hurt by the detonation of the dynamite.

There was definitely going to be an explosion, and it was going to be a big one, because Smoke planned to blow a hole in the back of the cell that Bobby Lee was occupying. The challenge would be in getting an explosion of sufficient force to blast a hole large enough for Bobby Lee to crawl through, without making it so big that it brought down the entire building and injured, or even killed, Bobby Lee. But though that might challenge most, it wouldn’t be a particular challenge to Smoke. He had done a lot of exploring, prospecting, and even mining in his young life, and he had, long ago, become an expert in the use of explosives such as nitroglycerine and dynamite.

When Smoke reached the back of the jailhouse, he stopped and listened very closely. Though muffled, he could still hear sounds from the saloon at the far end of the street, the tinkling of the piano, augmented now by the high-pitched laughter of one of the women, as well as the loud guffaws of more than one man. He could also hear crickets and other night insects. From the corral of the freight wagon company came the bray of a mule.

So far, not one person had seen him, and that was very good. He didn’t need to be arousing any suspicions now.

Smoke got down on his knees and studied the brick wall. He found one brick that was cracked all the way through. Pulling his knife from its rawhide scabbard, Smoke began working at the mortar around the brick until all of it was chipped away. With the mortar gone, it was easy to pull out the broken half of the brick. That gave Smoke a hole into which he could place the two sticks of dynamite.

Smoke put the two sticks of dynamite in the hole, wedging them back in place with the broken pieces of brick. Then he pulled the small piece of candle from his pocket again and, once more popping the match head with his thumbnail, lit the wick. Using his hat to shield the light of the candle from unwanted view, he checked the time on his pocket watch.

It was four minutes after eleven.

Inside the jail cell, Bobby Lee wondered what was going on. He had heard nothing from Smoke since the quick meeting he’d had with him earlier today.

That made him feel a bit uneasy. He wished he would have heard from him again, at least one more time, just to reassure him that everything was still in place. But as his cell had no rear window, there was no easy way Smoke could have made contact with him. He just had to assume that Smoke would keep his word, and from what he remembered of the man who had once been married to his sister, Smoke Jensen was a man of his word.

Bobby Lee checked the clock on the wall for at least the tenth time in the last four minutes. When it reached four minutes after eleven, he pulled the mattress from his bunk, then moved to the front of the cell and lay as close to the cell bars as he could. Smoke had told him only to be here at five after, but Bobby Lee was taking no chances on the clock having lost time during the day.

Holding the mattress over him securely, he waited.

The clock was ticking loudly, but not as loudly as the snores of Deputy Jackson, who had the night duty, and who was sleeping in his chair in the front office.

He wanted to look at the clock again, but he couldn’t do so without raising his head up from under the mattress, and he was afraid to do that. Smoke had said specifically, “If it doesn’t kill us both.” Bobby Lee was sure he intended to blast out the back wall, and he didn’t want to take a chance on sticking his head out at the exact moment of the blast.

How long should he stay here?

What if Smoke was five minutes late? An hour late? What if he didn’t show up at all?

He would show up. Bobby Lee was sure he would show up and if he had to, he would lay right here, on the floor, until daylight tomorrow morning.

The steady ticking of the clock and the loud, ripping snores of the deputy continued.

The Gold Strike normally did a very brisk business between ten p.m. and midnight, and it being nearly five after eleven, the saloon was filled with customers. Arnie Sage was grinding away at the piano, a couple of the girls were dancing with the customers, and the other three were moving around the room smiling and serving drinks.

Doc Baker was playing a game of chess with Byron Hughes, the pharmacist. Paul, the bartender, was busier than he had been all night, and Nabors, who, for much of the night had been helping out behind the bar, had just walked away to take a break. He saw Minnie sitting alone and he crossed over to join her.

“What’s wrong with all the men in here that not one of them will sit with a pretty girl?” Nabors asked. “I can’t believe you are all alone.”

“Several have come over, but I’ve sent them away. I’m sorry, Nate, I know I should be more friendly, I mean it’s your business and all,” Minnie said, “but I’m just too nervous right now.”