Absaroka Ambush

1

Smoke Jensen stepped out of the café on the main street of Big Rock, Colorado. He leaned against an awning post and rolled a cigarette, lighting it just as Sheriff Monte Carson strolled up.

“Need to talk with you, Smoke,” the sheriff said. “You like a beer?”

“No,” the ruggedly handsome man with the cold eyes said with a smile. “But I’ll watch you drink one.”

The sheriff and the most feared gunhandler in all the West walked to the saloon, pushed open the batwings, and stepped inside. Monte ordered a beer and Smoke ordered coffee.

“I hear you’re selling your stock, Smoke.”

“Most of it. I’m going to raise horses, Monte. Oh, I’ll keep a small herd. But nothing like we’ve had out on the Sugarloaf.”

“You using the rails?”

“I wish, Monte. No. This will be a hard drive. All the way up to Montana. Into a big valley. Town’s called Blackstown. Fellow up there name of T. J. Duggan wants the whole damn herd.”

“The whole herd? Why?”

Smoke shrugged heavy muscular shoulders. “Beats me. He’s an Eastern fellow. Said he was in a hurry to get into ranching. He’s paying me good money, Monte. I couldn’t turn down the offer.”

“How about your hands once the drive is over?”

Smoke chuckled. “A few want to drift; you know cowboys. But I couldn’t run most of them off with a shotgun. I’m going to be running a lot of horses, Monte. You know how I love the appaloosas. I’ll be needing hands.”

“When will you pull out?”

“Oh, about ten days, I think. Why? You want to come along and do some honest work for a change?”

“Hell, man! I’d love to. But no. We have trials set for all of next month. Smoke, you know you’re going up into Clint Black’s country.”

“Clint Black doesn’t bother me. I don’t even know the man. All I know is he’s a rancher who thinks he owns the whole damn Montana Territory.”

“He’s got some rough ol’ boys ridin’ for him, Smoke.”

“I’ve run up against some rough ol’ boys a time or two in my life, Monte.” Smoke spoke the words softly. But there was lead and fire and gunsmoke behind them.

Clint Black better rein in his hands and his mouth when he meets up with Smoke Jensen, the sheriff thought. If you aggravate him too much, Smoke will come after you lookin’ like a demon out of Hell.

Both men watched as three young riders came walking their horses slowly up the street. Both men noted that the riders sat on Texas saddles—without the wide skirt, the saddle horn was thicker and stronger for roping, and the stirrups were of the heavy-duty type. The brands were unfamiliar. All three cowboys wore their holsters tied down. One of the trio wore two guns.

“You know them,” Smoke asked.

“Never saw them before this day. What do you think?”

“Wild and woolly and full of fleas, probably. Might even be on the prod, looking for trouble. They’re young. Oldest one’s not out of his early twenties, I’d say.”

“This place does have a back door,” Monte said with a wide smile. But there was a hopeful note in his voice. If the three young punchers wanted trouble, Smoke Jensen was the last man in the world they should brace. He didn’t want trouble in Big Rock, and if it started, Smoke would not have initiated it. But there would be three dead rowdies on the barroom floor when the silence prevailed.

Smoke chuckled. “Then use it.”

Sheriff Monte Carson laughed softly. “I was rather hoping you would.”

Boots sounded heavily on the boardwalks and spurs jingled.

“Too late now.”

The riders took off their hats and beat the trail dust from their clothing before stepping into the saloon. The one leading the pack slammed open the batwings, and that irritated Monte. He looked at Smoke. There was no change in his expression.

The trio ordered whiskey with a beer chaser. Their voices were too loud and too demanding.

“Huntin’ trouble,” Monte said softly.

“They came to the right place,” Smoke replied in a soft voice.

“Hey!” one of the riders yelled. “What you two whisperin’ about over yonder? You talkin’ about us, maybe?”

Monte was sitting in a way that only presented one side of his torso to the bar. He shoved back his chair and stood up. His badge was now visible. He walked to the three young would-be gunhands and faced them.

“The name is Carson. Sheriff Monte Carson.”

The trio stiffened. Monte Carson had been one of the West’s premier gunfighters until he married and settled down in Big Rock. Everybody had heard of Monte Carson.

“If you boys are lookin’ for a drink, some food, and a place to spend the night, you found it, right here in Big Rock. If you boys are lookin’ for trouble, you found that. Right here and right now!”

One of Monte’s deputies had seen the rowdies ride in. The back door of the saloon creaked. One of the young Texas toughs cut his eyes. The deputy stood behind them, a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun in his hands. He cocked both hammers. The slight sound was enormous in the now-quiet room.

“I’ll take this punk here,” Monte said, his temper rising. “Jimmy, you blow the guts out of two-gun over there by the bar…”

“And I’ll take Tall Boy,” Smoke said, pushing back his chair and standing up. It seemed like he never would get through standing up. Smoke Jensen was several inches over six feet, with the weight to go with it. Huge hands and wrists. Thickly muscled with massive shoulders and a barrel chest, he was lean at the hips, and his jeans bunched with powerful leg muscles. His hair was ash blond, worn short; his eyes were brown and cold. Smoke wore two guns, .44s, the left-hand gun worn high and butt forward, the right-hand gun low and tied down. He was snake-quick with either pistol. He carried a long-bladed Bowie knife behind his left-hand six-shooter. He could and did shave with it. Or fight with it, didn’t make any difference to Smoke. “The name is Jensen. Smoke Jensen.”

A sigh came from Tall Boy. Slowly he let his hands drift to the bar, where he placed them palms down. “Fightin’ Monte Carson would be bad enough,” he said. “A deputy with a Greener makes it worser. Add Smoke Jensen and a body’d be a damn pure idiot.”

“Drink your drinks, get something to eat, and behave,” Monte told them, his anger fading. He turned his back to them and started to the table and his unfinished beer.

“No, Jack!” Tall Boy yelled. “Don’t do it.”

Jack was grabbing for his gun. The sawed-off roared. The heavy charges nearly cut the Texas boy in two, flinging him against the wall and leaving a bloody smear as he slid down to stop butt-first on the floor. He died with his eyes wide open, staring into a terribly bleak eternity.

“I’m out of this!” the third rider screamed. “Jesus Christ, I’m clear out.”

Folks came running, for gunfights were not a common thing in Big Rock, not with Monte Carson, Smoke Jensen, Pearlie, Johnny North, and half a dozen other heavy-duty gunslicks, who had turned into respectable citizens, only a breath away.

Dr. Colton Spalding stepped into the saloon. He needed only one look at the puncher. “Get the undertaker,” he told the barkeep.

“Was that boy born a damn fool?” Monte asked, pointing to the dead would-be tough, “or did he have to work at it?”

“He…fancied hisself good with a gun,” one of his shaken-up buddies said.

Monte shook his head in disgust and walked to the table. Smoke had sat down and was drinking his coffee.

“What do you think about it?” Monte asked.

“I think my coffee got cold,” Smoke replied.

Sally, Smoke’s wife, read the letters from her parents and their children, who were all in France attending school. One of their children was there for health reasons, being tended to by specialists. Smoke had picked up the letters in town and had not opened them, leaving that small pleasure for Sally.

“Any word on when they’ll come back home?” Smoke asked.

“No. When do you leave?”

“Probably next week. I’d like to take you with me, honey. But a cattle drive is rough work.”

“I’ll be fine here,” she assured him. “Just who is this Clint Black person?”

Smoke sipped his coffee for a moment. “A hard, unyielding tyrant of a man. I suspect that somebody sold this T. J. Duggan a bill of goods with this ranch he bought. Somebody wanted out of that country and found themselves a sucker. I don’t even know the man and I feel sorry for him.”

“Oh, my!” Sally said, but with a smile.

Her husband looked at her. “What’s that all about?”

“I feel a quest coming on, oh man of La Mancha.”

“Sally…!”

“I gave you the book to read.”

He looked puzzled for a moment, then a wide grin cut his face and softened his eyes. “Oh, yeah. Don Quixote.”

She gently corrected his pronunciation.

“Am I the Knight of the Woeful Figure?”

“Hardly,” she said with a laugh. “But you do have this tendency to stand up for lost causes and the little person.”

“You knew that when you married me, honey.”

She stood up and walked to him, kissing him on the cheek. “And I love you all the more for it. Now stand up and put on an apron,” she told the most feared gunfighter in all the West. “I’ll wash, you dry.”

“Yes, dear.”

Smoke Jensen had not sought out the reputation of gunfighter. Most of the known ones hadn’t. For several years after he and Sally were married, he had changed his name and lived quietly. Then outlaws come to town and he was forced to once more strap on his guns to protect hearth and home and kith and kin. He never went back to his false name. He was Smoke Jensen, a man of peace if allowed, a warrior when he had to be. Back in ’72, when he was just out of his teens, Smoke Jensen tracked down the men who had raped and killed his wife, Nicole, and had brutally murdered their baby son, Arthur. He cornered them in a raw silver-mining town in the Uncompahgre. Writers of dime novels wrote that there were fifty gunhands in the town, and balladeers sang that Smoke Jensen killed a hundred or more desperados. In a play later written about him, with Smoke portrayed in New York City by a dandy who had never been west of Philadelphia, Smoke was portrayed to have killed five hundred men on that fateful day. In reality, Smoke faced fourteen men that day. Smoke rode away, wounded a half a dozen times. The miners buried fourteen gunhands.

A month later, his wounds nearly healed, Smoke went after the men who had killed his brother and his father years back. He found them in Idaho. When he rode away, he left a burning town and the streets littered with dead.

It was there that Smoke met Sally.

No one really knew how many murderers, outlaws, rapists, and other assorted human slime had fallen under the guns of Smoke Jensen. Smoke himself didn’t know. And he didn’t worry about it. But the figure was staggeringly high.

Around Big Rock, Smoke was known as a man who loved kids and dogs and horses, who sang solos in church every now and then, and would pitch in with a barn or house-raising. He would climb a tree to rescue a cat, take in stray dogs and make sure they had good homes or keep them himself. There were at least twenty running around the fenced-in acres where the house stood on the Sugarloaf. He would help a stranger in need and had completely outfitted, at his own expense, numerous settlers who had lost everything in their march West.

But crowd him, insult his wife, make a hostile move against an innocent—as Sally had pointed out in the kitchen, even an innocent he didn’t know—hurt one of his dogs or horses, and Smoke Jensen would hunt that man down, call him out, and either beat him half to death with those huge fists, or kill him.

There is an old Western expression that men would use to test another man’s courage. It reads, “I ain’t never seen none of your graveyards.”

Nobody ever said that to Smoke Jensen.

On this drive north to Montana Territory, Smoke had hired eight boys who were out of school for the summer. One sixteen-year-old, four fifteen-year-olds, and three fourteen-year-olds. They were young, but they were good hands. Willie, Jake, Bobby, Rabbit, Louie, Dan, Sonny, and Guy. In addition to his regular hands, Smoke had hired on four more men who had drifted through. He wired their former employers—the telegraph was making life a lot easier in the West—and received replies that the men were good hands who would give a day’s work for a day’s pay. That would give him seventeen men for the drive. It wasn’t enough, for the herd was very large, but he could pick up other hands along the way.

The drive would be hard work for the boys, and it would also be an adventure for them.

Smoke was kind of looking forward to it himself.