Two hard cases ran out of the mouth of an alley and randomly discharged their weapons upward toward second-floor windows. Mac pulled a quick bead and let fly another. 44 slug. One of the outlaws continued to run forward while the other did a crazy little jig and crashed blindly into a rain barrel. He died before he hit the tile walk.
Mac charged his rifle again and sighted on the remaining gunman. The Winchester bucked, and Mac remembered this time to shove three fresh cartridges through the loading gate. He ejected the empty and chambered a loaded one. If this kept up, they could easily reduce the enemy by half, he speculated.
* * *
Someone else had figured out the same thing. Shouts to pull back went from one outlaw to the next. Slowly they began to withdraw from town, yet they continued to pour a withering fire on the defenders from a distance outside Taos. Whitewater Paddy Quinn sought out his second in command.
“We'll give it a little time, then go back again. I want to get that bastid Smoke Jensen in me sights, an' that's a fact.”
Garth Thompson did not sound so eager. “I've heard he is hard to kill. So far, I have no reason to doubt that. How many did we lose?”
Quinn raised a hand and swept the hillside. “That's what I want you to find out, boy-o. Didn't seem to me that half the lads what went in there came back. With losses like that, we can't keep this up for long. Whether Mr. Satterlee likes it or not, we may have to use fire to drive those stubborn folk out.”
“He'll have a fit if we do. But, I agree with you. We can't let them whittle us down like that much longer. When do we go back?”
Quinn rubbed a powder-grimed hand across his brow. “Find out where we stand an' we'll give it an hour.”
* * *
Ezekial Crowder and Ed Hubbard had taken positions on the south side of town, close to Smoke Jensen. They looked first to the sky when they heard a distant rumble. When they found it to be clear and bright, they lowered their gaze to observe the ominous approach of a large body of outlaws. They exchanged a worried glance and tightened the grip on their weapons. Over the growing thunder of hooves, they could hear the voice of Smoke Jensen, low and calm.
“Steady . . . hold it . . . let 'em come in real close. Make every shot count.”
Smoke knew it would not happen that way. Excitement or fear would make the inexperienced men fire carelessly. They would rush their aim and no doubt jerk the trigger. It would only get worse when the outlaws opened fire. Some, though, he knew would make good account of themselves. Like young Mac, who had shouted to him during the brief respite.
“Hey, Smoke, I got three of them. Those two down there and another on his horse outside town.”
“Good shootin',” Smoke praised. He continued on his way to check the other defenses. His inspection gave him the impression that some twenty outlaws had gotten inside the town. Perimeter defenses had to be shored up. He had arranged for that, though only just in time.
They were going to have to keep the gang from entering town this time, Smoke thought as he watched the outlaws close once again. A few seconds later, Ed Hubbard proved a better gunhand than expected when he cleared two saddles in rapid succession.
“Did ya see that?” Hubbard called out, surprised by his own success. He took aim again.
With a loud crash, the hard cases opened up. It drowned out Ed's third shot, which hit Dutch Volker in the side. It was a severe enough wound to put him out of the action. With a blistering backward look and a hot curse, Dutch steered his mount away from the conflict. He would get patched up and come back, Dutch thought.
Smoke Jensen had other ideas for him. Careful aim with his .45-70-500 Winchester Express paid a dividend to Smoke. For enough time to make it count, the head of Dutch Volker sat like a hairy ball on the top of the front blade sight. The upright post rested in the notch of the rear, buckhorn sight. Smoke squeezed the trigger. Volker's head snapped forward and back as the bullet bore through his brain and exited the front, taking with it his entire forehead. A fountain of gore splashed on his horse. Without a controlling hand, it went berserk.
Crow hopping and squealing in fright over the smell of blood and brain tissue, the animal cut crossways to the advance, scattered several other riders and at last dislodged its odious burden in a thicket of mesquite. Already, Smoke Jensen tracked another outlaw. The volume of defending fire increased from other points as Smoke concentrated on his aim. He discharged a round that missed one hard case by a finger's width and drove into the shoulder of the man behind him. Smoke risked a quick glance toward Hubbard and Crowder while he cycled his lever action.
Both men so far remained calm. They took time to aim, worked the action of their rifles in a controlled manner and shoved fresh cartridges into the magazine between shots. Hubbard spoke up loudly enough for Smoke to hear him above the rattle of gunfire.
“You're doin' all right for a fireman.”
Crowder grinned. “So are you . . . shopkeeper. I'd sell my soul for a shot of whiskey and a cool beer.”
“If I was the devil, I'd take you up on that.” Hubbard broke off to fire his Winchester again. “Got another one,” he commented.
“The way they're comin', this could last until sundown,” opined Zeke Crowder.
Hubbard blinked and swallowed hard. “It had better not.”
* * *
Sheriff Banner thought much the same as Chief Crowder. From his vantage point he watched the huge gang swirl around Taos. Here and there, one would slump in the saddle or fall to the ground. Not nearly enough, though, the lawman concluded. He watched as three of them charged a barricade made of two overturned wagons.
Their mounts easily cleared the obstacle, and he had one of the men in his sights before the hooves touched ground. An easy squeeze and the sheriff's rifle fired. His bullet drilled the outlaw through the chest. Quickly Banner worked the action and sighted in on another. Before he could fire, one of Diego Alvarado's vaqueros dashed into the street. He carried a large yellow and magenta cape. Swiftly he unfurled it and billowed it out into a fat curve; the skirt flapped in the breeze his motion created.
At once the horses sat back on their haunches and reared. One rider fell off; the second barely hung on. And then not for long. Another rippling pass put the animal in a walleyed frenzy. The rider had all he could do to regain control. While thus occupied, Sheriff Banner shot the hard case through the heart.
* * *
Fierce fighting continued through the afternoon. Smoke Jensen made periodic visits to the defenders positioned on the outer edges of Taos. He always had a word of encouragement and usually replacement ammunition. Braving the chance of a bullet, the older boys of the town, organized by Wally Gower, brought food and water to the fighting men. The fury promised to go on forever.
When night fell, the gang withdrew, much to the relief of everyone. To their immediate discomfort, the defenders of Taos soon discovered that the enemy had not gone far enough so that anyone could escape.
Smoke Jensen's words were not greeted with enthusiasm when he made his dark prediction. “They'll be back tomorrow.”
23
“They're comin' back!”
Early the next morning the shouts of the lookouts roused the wearied protectors of Taos from uneasy sleep. Too many of the townspeople moved with a lethargy that they would soon regret. Caught between their homes and fighting stations, most looked on in numbed horror as the outlaws easily penetrated the thin defenses and streamed into town.
“We ain't got a chance this time,” one less courageous townie wailed.
“We're gonners for sure,” the faint-hearted barber took up the cry.
Smoke Jensen would hear none of it. He seemed to be everywhere at once as he worked to rally the resistance of the battle-tired people. “Quit your whining,” he growled at the timid souls. “Take your weapons and form up in the streets. We can stop them easier when they don't have room to maneuver.”
“Say, that's right,” one of the more imaginative townies declared. “We can trap them between the buildings. It'll be like shootin' fish in a water trough.”
Smoke moved on, praising the idea over his shoulder. “That's the idea. Get to it.” Smoke's confidence rose more when he came upon the more reliant among the defenders.
Those Tua warriors not on water watch were the first to respond. Santan Tossa stood on one side of the Plaza de Armas and directed his fighting men to vantage points on the roofs of buildings. Unaccustomed to the Spanish tile roofing material, one of the Tua men put a moccasin on a loose one and all but fell.
“Be careful,” Tossa cautioned. Then he produced a fleeting smile at that choice of words in the face of an all-out assault by men determined to kill them all.
On two sides of town, Don Diego's vaqueros labored valiantly to keep more of the trash from entering Taos. The dapper senior Alvarado shouted encouragement to his cowboys. “
Buena suerte, compañeros.
Shoot their eyes out.”
Gradually, men caught by surprise on the west side of town began to calm and take better stock of their situation. Smoke Jensen quickly exhorted them. “This isn't the end of it. Not unless you want to go belly-up. Get some backbone, dammit. All of you there, quit milling around and form up to drive and trap those who got past the barricades in the center of town.”
Slowly they began to respond. As the first remotivated men spread out, more joined them. Before long they had enough to ring the business district and began to close in. From the moment of the first encounter, the fighting grew more fierce with each passing minute.
* * *
Smoke Jensen soon saw that the outer defenses had been completely breached. The vaqueros fought valiantly as they retreated street by street from the pressure put on them by the Quinn gang. Here and there they managed to rally as those facing them turned out to be drifting bits of frontier trash with no deep-set loyalties. That sort crumbled rapidly, especially when confronted with a revival cry from the Mexican cowboys.
“Con nuestra Señora, Santa Maria de Guadalupe! Matenlos maten!”
Even Smoke Jensen developed chills down his spine the first time he heard it and translated the words.
With our lady, Holy Mother of Guadalupe! Kill them, kill!
He had to admit it had a galvanizing effect. The vaqueros swarmed back down the street, a wall of death with six-gun, rifle and knife. At one point, a saddle tramp who had become overwhelmed by their ferocity dropped to his knees and began to howl like a dog. It did him little good. He got his throat slit anyway.
On the next street over, the vaqueros put a full dozen to flight. Horses surged into one another and spilled two riders to face the advancing fury of the Mexican cowboys. They screamed a long time as they died.
* * *
Paddy Quinn shoved his way into a cantina to catch his breath and reload. He found Garth Thompson there ahead of him. Whitewater Paddy flashed a big grin. “We're doin' fine. Another half hour and the town will be ours.”
Thompson looked at him in consternation. “Are you kidding? We have men dying out there by the handful. It doesn't make sense. These townies are fighting back like mad men.”
“Awh, Garth me bucko, yer not seein' clear, yer not. Most of those who are being killed are not part of the gang. What that trash is here for is to soak up bullets for us, it is. Let's go upstairs where we can better see what's really happenin'. Ye'll be surprised how good it's goin', ye will.”
* * *
Two blocks down, in a narrow alley, three of Quinn's men found the situation more like Garth Thompson saw it than their boss. Seven Tua warriors rounded the corner and started toward them. Clearly they had heard the rumors started by Smoke Jensen. The trio cut their eyes to the Indians and began to run in the opposite direction. Not a one made an effort to fire a weapon.
“Lou, Lou, we gotta get out of here. They're gonna scalp us.”
Lou looked ahead and paled. The rear of a building closed off their escape route from the narrow alley. “We're trapped,” he wailed.
The others saw it, too. Unnerved by his belief in the scalping story, one of the outlaws turned his gun on himself. His body had hardly hit the ground when Santan Tossa and his brother Tuas opened fire. One of Quinn's men jerked spastically, staggered two paces to his left and keeled over. The other got off a shot before Tossa put a bullet through his screaming mouth.
“They were cowards,” the Tua policeman pronounced over the cooling corpses.
* * *
Gradually the tide turned. The shock of their earlier failure began to wear off, and the men of Taos ceased in their headlong flight from the threat of the gunmen. They turned back in twos and threes in one place, half a dozen in two others. Instead of two men fighting a desperate rear guard, while the others fled, the mass of harried men turned about and lashed out at their enemy.
At first it did not look like much. Then an angry growl raced through the defenders, until it became one voice. Five of the gang rounded a corner, laughing and firing blindly. Halfway down the block a solid mass of growling, snarling men began to run toward them. A high, clear cry raised above the roar of their discontent.
“Fire! Open fire!”
A ragged volley crackled from the weapons in the hands of shop keepers and clerks, bank tellers, and wheelwrights. A stream of lead scythed into the startled outlaws and they began to die. Two of the gunhawks wisely opted to flee. One made it to the corner they had rounded half a minute before. The other one took two faltering steps along his escape route before he fell over dead.
Throughout town the spirit of defeat disappeared as he died. Shouting, the defenders charged in a massive counterattack. Determined men soon swept the byways of Taos of the dregs of humanity who had attacked them. The only resistance that remained centered around the saloon named Cantina del Sol. Smoke Jensen reached that strong point in the vanguard of the revived defenders.
* * *
Curly Lasher and eight relatively capable gunfighters had been stationed outside the cantina to protect their leaders. He and his underlings listened to the shift in mood among the defenders with growing apprehension. When four of them rounded the corner with a determined stride, the outlaws realized that the seeming ease of their capture of the town was an illusion. Weapons already in hand, the townsfolk had the advantage when the hard cases reached for their six-guns.
Curly had time to shout only brief advice. “Spread out!”
Gunfire roared in the confines between two-story buildings. Two of the outlaws went down. Curly Lasher took cover behind a watering trough and traded shots with the aroused residents of Taos. That lasted until Smoke Jensen and six vaqueros rounded the other corner and closed in on them.
“Make for the saloon,” Curly yelled to his surviving men.
Curly backed up the steps to the portico over the entrance to the cantina. A quick check showed that the others had preceded him. He had almost disappeared through the glassbead curtain that screened the doorway when Smoke Jensen stepped out into the center of the street and pointed his left index finger at the outlaw leader.
“Curly Lasher, you yellow-bellied piss ant, come out and face me like a man.”
* * *
Smoke Jensen had recognized Curly Lasher the moment the man came to his boots and started for the cantina. Although quite young, Lasher had a respectable reputation as a gunfighter. He was reputed to have killed ten men in face-downs in Texas and New Mexico. Rumor had it his total number of kills included three for-hire assassinations and a dozen ambush shootings. At the age of twenty-three, he was about as good as they came these days. But not in Smoke Jensen's book.
The way Smoke saw it, it was time to cancel Curly's pay book. After issuing his challenge, Smoke waited now, ignoring the random bullets, fired by Lasher's henchmen, that cracked into the ground near him. A second stretched interminably long, then another. Smoke counted to five before Curly waved a grubby, rumpled bit of cloth out the opening to La Cantina del Sol.
“You make those others stop shootin' at me an' I'll face you, Jensen. Hell, you're an old man. You can't be much good anymore.”
There it was again,
old man.
Smoke's expression grew grim. “We'll see, won't we? And have those back-shooting gun trash with you holster their irons.”
Another second went by. “You heard him, boys. Put 'em up.” A nervous giggle escaped Curly. “This is between Smoke Jensen an' me.”
With that, Curly Lasher stepped out into the street. He looked formidable enough, except for the muscle tic that twitched his left eye. Smoke Jensen side-stepped to line up with Curly Lasher. Curly's hand hovered over the butt-grip of his Smith and Wesson .44 American. He nodded evenly to Smoke.
“Your play, Jensen.”
“No, you go first. I want this to be fair.”
Another giggle burst from Curly's throat. “Fair? Hell, Jensen, you better be pickin' out your coffin right now.”
“You reckon to jaw me to death? If so, it'll be like ol' Samson, eh? Killed with the jawbone of an ass.”
That tripped Curly's hair-trigger temper. “Goddamn you, Smoke Jensen, kiss your tail goodbye.”
Curly Lasher drew then, confident that he had beaten Smoke Jensen by a good half second. Not until a stunning force slammed into his chest did he realize how terribly mistaken he had been. His lips formed a perfect
O,
and his legs went rubbery. Enormous pain spread through his body, followed instantly by a frightening numbness. Try as his brain might to send signals to his heart, they never arrived. A fat, 230 grain .45 slug had destroyed that vital organ.
His eyes rolled up in their sockets, Curly discharged a round into the street and fell in a crumpled heap. In the moment after he fired, Smoke Jensen moved. He waved at the astonished townies to follow him.
“Come on, let's get in that saloon.”
“B'God, that was fast,” Warren Engals muttered. “I never seen his hand move.”
“Neither did that cocky gunhawk,” Buell Spencer snorted in satisfaction.
* * *
Mid-morning came and went. Still the fighting lingered, as Smoke Jensen and five of the men from town entered La Cantina del Sol. Theirs could hardly be called a conventional means of entry. Smoke sent four vaqueros around to the rear to make a show of breaking in through the service door. He gave them enough time to be convincing, then dived low through the front doorway. Smoke hit the floor and did a roll, to come up with his Colt blazing. He got immediate results.
One hard case slammed into the bar, his back arched to the point of breaking his spine. Smoke fired again and the bones cracked. The outlaw dropped to flop on the floor like a headless chicken. A townsman and one of Diego's vaqueros entered behind the last mountain man. Flame gushed from the muzzles of their six-guns.
Another hard case died in their hail of lead. A third had dived for cover behind the bar when Smoke first entered. He popped up now and shot Ransom Clover between the eyes. The feed store proprietor died on his feet. But not before Smoke Jensen sent the killer off to eternity with a similar wound. Terrible discordance came from the upright piano in one corner as another thug hastily fired a bullet at Smoke's back.
Smoke ducked and spun on one boot heel. The muzzle of his Peacemaker tracked with him, and he squeezed off a round the moment the back shooter came into view. Hot lead punched through thick leather and then did awful damage to the hip bone of the man. By then, Smoke had cocked his .45 and put a second slug into the chest of his assailant. Restricted by the muslin safeguards suspended below the ceiling, viscous layers of powder smoke undulated in the room, obscuring the whereabouts of other enemies.
Ears ringing from the enclosed gunfire, Smoke made for the stairway. There had to be some reason why a fairly reliable gunfighter like Curly Lasher and eight men had been guarding this place. He had reached the first riser with a boot toe when another of the gunmen appeared at the top of the stairs. Smoke acted at once.
So close to the wall, the force of his gun blast nearly ruptured Jensen's eardrum. Yet he did not even flinch as he recocked his six-gun and sent another .45 round winging upward to seal the fate of the hard case who menaced him. Hit twice in less than half a minute, the outlaw staggered back and rammed slack shoulders into the wall of the upper hallway. Smoke paused at the landing and called back to the ground floor to one of the vaqueros.
“Juaquin, come up here with me.” When the slender, boyish-faced cowboy reached the top of the stairs, Smoke gave terse instructions. “Stay here. Watch my back.”
Smoke set off to search the rooms in the rear portion of the second floor. Someone of importance had to be up here, his gut feeling told him. He readied himself at the first door, cocked his leg and plated a boot beside the doorknob. A loud crack followed and the panel flew inward. Following his six-gun, Smoke entered the room in a crouch.