Prairie Fire, page 23
The matches stayed in his grip as he slowly pulled his hands free. There were two of them trapped there. His eyeballs began to ache suddenly. He had a moment of panic as he realized the moisture in his eyes was freezing. He had no idea how far below freezing the temperature had to be to do that. Wyoming in winter was murderous.
His vision was gray and fading as he held the matches before him. His arms swayed. Carefully, he reached out and pressed the tips against the metal furnace. If these didn’t light, he didn’t think he’d have the strength left to dig more matches out of his pocket. This was it.
He laid the match heads against the metal. He couldn’t press too hard because the sticks might break. But there had to be enough friction to strike the head. He pressed. His body convulsed with a sudden shudder. The matchsticks snapped.
He groaned but couldn’t curse through his sealed mouth.
The matches were still in his grip, just broken partway down. He realized his feet and legs were no longer cold. He felt nothing at all below his belly.
He dragged the matches across the metal.
CHAPTER 29
They caught.
He touched the flame to the coal dust and it burst to life. The hungry fire spread readily to the crumbles and then to the lumps. Soon a proper fire was going in the furnace. He leaned close to the open door and let the lifesaving heat wash out over him.
Once he was properly warm, Luke draped his buffalo coat over the window to stop snow falling inside. The metal interior of the locomotive cab held the furnace heat fairly well. He was almost comfortable. First the ice melted from him, then his clothes dried.
Now that he wasn’t in danger of immediate death, he needed a plan.
He closed his eyes and leaned toward the firebox, letting more warmth seep into him. He dozed, waking every so often to shove more of the coal on the edges into the center where the fire burned.
The fire would not last forever. Only until dawn perhaps. While there were loose piles of coal collected in the corners of the locomotive cab, thrown there from the tender during the derailment, there wasn’t enough to keep a decent fire going for more than several hours. He’d have to make the most out of the time he had.
When he’d thawed and dozed, he slid past the buffalo coat and crawled out of the window. The sun was coming up pale and yellow over the edges of the horizon on the east. It was slightly warmer than it had been during the night, but still bitter cold.
It had stopped snowing, so he took the robe, which now stank of smoke, and put it on. He set out to locate the dead man he’d found last night. The snowfall had obliterated everything. He paused for a moment, studying the mountains rising above him.
Luck was with him. The dawn was still new enough that darkness clung in the valleys and hollows. And there, up on the mountainside, he saw the winking yellow light of a fire.
He marked the place in his mind. He’d have no trail of snowshoes to track. He’d have to use dead reckoning. He trudged toward the spot where he thought he’d last seen the dead man and began looking in the snow.
The physical exercise kept him warm enough, and he soon found the body before the cold had gotten a real grip on him. The man was stiff as a board and his ears and back of his neck showed blue-black with lividity. Luke stooped and grabbed his ankles like the handles of a wheelbarrow and began dragging him.
It was brutally hard work, but it kept him warm. Once he got back to his hole, he climbed back down and spread his coat over the opening again. When he was sure the coal fire was still going in the furnace, he took several clumps of snow and ate them.
That way of getting water would have been ill-advised if he hadn’t been close to an external source of warmth. Eating snow for the moisture could cool a man’s core by several degrees and hasten death.
After he’d replenished himself as best he could, he crawled out and began stripping the body. He had to wrench a kneecap out of place and break an arm at the elbow to get the man’s clothes off. When he was done, he laid the garments next to the furnace to thaw.
He used the last of the coal to stoke the fire and waited for the clothes to dry. After a little while, he methodically began dressing for his journey. He wasted nothing. Every bit of covering could be the difference between life or death. It would be a race against the cold.
He layered the dead man’s clothes over his own. When Luke had gone back for the body, he’d realized the man was indeed the fireman and not the engineer. On his first look, he’d failed to notice the long leather protective apron the man wore. That would be helpful on his journey.
He doubled his socks. Doubled his long johns. Doubled his shirts and then put on the heavy leather apron. Over that the buffalo coat. For weapons, he only had the Remington, fifteen extra shells, and his knife. He’d done more with less, he reckoned.
He’d have to keep his hands inside his coat as much as possible. He had brought gloves, but they’d been placed inside his warbag.
His life, or at the very least a few fingers and toes, absolutely depended on how quickly he made it to town. He’d find the track and follow it up the mountain. He figured another five miles. If a storm didn’t come, he thought he’d make it.
He knew that once the train didn’t arrive, search parties would be sent out. There was a possibility he’d meet them on the tracks. He couldn’t afford to dawdle, but he felt good about his chances.
When he climbed out of the locomotive, he saw storm clouds piling up against the mountaintops above the valley.
* * *
Walking got easier once he made it past the avalanche and onto the track. The snow was knee deep here, and the ground relatively flat. It turned out the train had been much closer to Cedar Falls than Luke had first realized.
He came up over a slight rise in the saddle between two granite cliffs and saw the town below him. He breathed in sharply. The place looked in ruins. Smoke hung in a haze above charred, burned-out buildings. Timbers and joists leaned drunkenly, like blackened skeletons. Mounds of soot and ash stood out in sharp contrast to the snow.
The scent of fire and gunsmoke hung in the air. Here and there lonely, isolated buildings stood untouched by whatever conflagration had ripped through the mining town. Those structures were few and far between.
* * *
Goldsmith’s come full circle in his mind, Luke realized. He’s bringing Sherman’s March to the frontier.
He was now convinced the explosion he’d heard during the train ambush had been set off by Goldsmith. Maybe a few owlhoots would dynamite tracks or a bridge to derail a train, but only a lunatic like Goldsmith would take the time to burn a whole damn town.
Luke studied the scene below him, soaking it in. Cedar Falls hadn’t been large. Its boom had been relatively small. Built next to the rail line, it had boasted only one main street and no more than ten or twelve buildings. It wasn’t as small as Craig’s Fork, but it had never been close to the population of Golgotha Rock. He guessed it had held maybe a hundred full-time citizens with up to three or four times that number on mine paydays.
No one moved among the ruins and debris. No smoke curled from the two remaining homesteads to indicate survivors huddled around stoves for warmth. No lost children or stunned witnesses to the apocalypse wandered the street searching for loved ones. All was still. All was silent.
Cedar Falls was a graveyard. The bitter cold kept the lingering smoke close to the ground instead of letting it trail up into the gunmetal gray sky. The quiet was uncanny. Steeling himself for what he feared he’d find, Luke began walking.
Behind the clouds the weak, reddish-yellow smear of the sun was sliding toward the horizon and twilight. Luke had spent most of the day just thawing out and warming up and then getting here. With evening would come another killing cold. Luke could not afford to be caught without shelter and heat, or the winter would kill him long before he ever faced Goldsmith.
Closer to the town, he began coming across footprints. Fresh snowfall had filled the indentations in somewhat, but hadn’t yet obliterated them. He found a line of snowshoe tracks coming out of the woods from the direction of a now frozen stream and going toward the town.
He followed them in closer and found himself not approaching by the main road, but coming up behind the line of buildings running perpendicular to the small train platform. It was impossible to tell how many men with snowshoes had begun this approach, but Luke was willing to bet one of them was Goldsmith.
The water tower beside the track had been shot to hell. A coal bin had been placed beneath it to keep the water unfrozen. The dozens of bullet holes had caused water to spill out and freeze in a pond around the tower. The ice gleamed a shade of blue much different from the snow.
There was the body of a railway worker frozen in the floored area. The face of the corpse was black, and the fingers, curled into claws and reaching upward, looked brittle as glass. Blood had pumped from the back of his head and pooled around him. It formed a scarlet and pink halo in the ice.
Luke noticed something sticking out from under the corpse. It looked like the finger of a glove. He reached down and tried to tug it free, but it was stuck. Grimacing, Luke tugged up on the dead man’s coat until the body moved a little. He pulled out a pair of gloves the man probably had dropped when he died.
Those gloves might save Luke’s fingers . . . and his fingers might save his life.
Luke skirted the frozen lake, eyes searching the burned-out buildings and charred ruins. He needed to keep the gloves on because of the cold, but he drew the Remington. The metallic click of the hammer going back was unnaturally loud.
He turned slowly, scanning the rubble. His breath sounded loud in the unnatural stillness. It formed silvery clouds in front of his face. The air tasted of ash. He stalked forward, coming down the narrow alley between two buildings. He looked through the rib cage of struts and charred timber.
Two corpses lay on the floor of the building to the left. By the size difference, he guessed a man and woman. They’d died in each other’s arms. Their flesh and hair had burned away, leaving grinning teeth exposed.
He came out on the main street. A few feet away a flash of color caught his eye. A woman in a red dress that would only have ever been worn by a saloon girl lay facedown in the snow. Raw meat and bone fragments showed in the little mounds the bullet wounds had made of her flesh. She was stiff as old stone.
He waited, but after a short time he felt himself starting to shiver and had to get moving again. He wandered like a ghost through the charred wreckage, taking note of the eternally quiet bodies. Everywhere was the stink of old smoke.
Suddenly, from across the town, he heard the sound of a door slamming shut. The sound was so abrupt and unexpected it caused Luke to jump as if he’d been attacked. His finger tightened on the trigger in automatic response, but he was too experienced to accidentally trigger the weapon.
Using the jagged remnants of walls and collapsed roofs for cover, Luke edged his way toward the far side of town from which he’d heard the sound. There, a short distance from where the livery stable’s corral stood, was a log homestead. A dead man in a red flannel shirt was sprawled, frozen, across a wood pile.
Eyeing the way the cabin windows faced, Luke slipped forward at an angle. If there were survivors, they’d probably shoot first and ask questions later. He didn’t blame them. If it was Goldsmith or any men low enough to ride with him, then Luke could expect nothing but death. Which he was ready to return.
He set his feet down carefully, not wanting the sound of his boots pushing through the snow crust to carry. Step, step, stop. Listen. Wait. Step, step, stop. He stalked the occupants of the homestead the way a cougar does its prey. As he drew closer, he thought he heard the sound of a man’s voice. Then laughter.
At least two then.
He remembered the battle at the trading post. There were similarities here. He needed to make sure what kind of people he was dealing with. The last thing he wanted to do was bring more pain and violence to this town. Or what was left of it.
He continued stalking forward.
Coming up to the homestead, he put his back against a wall and waited. Over his head icicles the size of Bowie knives hung like stalactites from the eaves. Luke’s nose burned from the cold. First chance he got, he needed to find something to cover his face. Carefully, he inched his way toward a glass window.
He paused, listening.
“The colonel will be back by nightfall,” one of the voices said.
“So what?” a second voice answered. Luke could tell he was drunk. “Horses aren’t going to help us in this weather. That crazy hombre burned down the town we have to hole up in for the winter. We ain’t riding no damn horses past that avalanche, either. Leastwise not until spring.”
“Colonel will think of something.”
“To hell with that! I ain’t no soldier boy like you. I don’t believe just because he was some damn big deal officer that he’s always right!”
Maybe they’ll kill each other and save me the trouble, Luke thought.
“Well,” the first voice said, “either way he’s coming. When he does, you can just give him your opinion to his face.”
“To hell with that,” the second voice snapped. “It won’t be just him coming. He’ll be bringing those outlaw Crow with him.”
“So?”
“So they’re going to want the girl, and there’s five of them.”
“I reckon we better all have our fun before then,” the other man said with a crude laugh.
“Hell yeah, we should!”
“Then we should kill her so they can’t get none.”
This declaration came out in a hacking guffaw. A feminine voice began sobbing, her terror obvious.
Luke eased a slow, even breath out through his nose. He had to act.
CHAPTER 30
Luke had found that there were several types of outlaws. Owlhoots like the James-Younger gang for example, were dangerous, no doubt about that. They stole at the point of a gun, and if you crossed them at the wrong moment, you could wind up in a pine box. But they held to their own sense of ethics, and would offer no insult to a woman.
They were criminals, but not degenerates. They didn’t torture, they avoided bloodshed, and they did not rape. They needed to be brought to justice, but they were not despicable human beings. Quite a few outlaws were like that. Often the horse thieves and cattle rustlers operated under this rough code.
Then there were the marauders.
Marauders were remnants of a frontier before the war. They came out of a hundred years of lawless borderlands. Their raids were like guerrilla strikes that left all in their path slaughtered. They killed with callous impunity and sadistic pleasure. Rape was as much the goal as gold. They sold their victims, Mexican, Indian, or white, into the slave trade south of the border.
Marauders were men who’d come to the wilderness and lost their humanity. Since the end of the war and the push of the railroads, those sorts had diminished even as hostile natives had also been reduced. But they were far from gone.
Luke had seen more than enough of varmints like that in his quest to extinguish the evil wolves plaguing decent folks. But he was hardened to his work. He knew it was common among the men he hunted. It was, in part, integral to why he hunted them in the first place. The callous abuse of women made him see red.
He risked a glance through the window. Seething hate warmed his body. The woman wasn’t old enough to be called a woman. She was a girl. Dressed in only a gingham dress, she shivered as she fed kindling into a potbellied stove. Her arms were purple and black, her young face swollen. There were bite marks on her neck. And she was cold, shaking with it.
Two men in buffalo robe coats watched her, passing a jug of what Luke assumed was corn whiskey back and forth. He didn’t recognize them from Goldsmith’s gang. He was pretty sure he’d killed or scattered most of those men. Goldsmith had recruited more scum.
He forced himself to stay calm and take stock of the situation. He decided quickly that the cabin served as some kind of supply cache for Goldsmith. Barrels and crates of dry goods were stacked along a back wall. Rows of rifles in various calibers had been put together in piles like Indian wickiups. Piles of furs sat on the floor. There were kegs of beer and numerous liquor bottles. As far as Luke could tell, it seemed the loot from the town had been stored here.
Pulling back from the window, he leaned against the wall. Given the amount of supplies, these two had to be rear guards. That meant Goldsmith could be returning, possibly very soon, with whatever constituted the rest of his outfit.
The girl cried out. Luke heard the men’s rough laughter. He closed his eyes. He wasn’t going to leave her. He drew the Remington and cocked it. Without bothering to disguise the sound of his footsteps through the snow, he tromped around to the front door. Placing the pistol behind his leg, he pounded on the door with his other hand.
“Open up, damn it!” he hollered. “I got word from Goldsmith.”
There was a long, pregnant pause, followed by the sounds of heavy boots on the floorboards. Luke pounded the door again.
“Hurry the hell up!”
The footsteps stopped at the door. The wooden dowel handle that worked the sliding bolt slammed backward and the heavy door swung open. In the doorway stood a big man, well over six feet. Even in the bulky buffalo robe coat it was easy to tell he weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds. His skin was a burnt copper that, along with his beardless face, suggested he bore a lot of Indian blood. His eyes, red-veined and muddy brown, opened wide in surprise when he saw Luke standing in front of the cabin.
Luke lifted the Remington from behind his leg and shot him in the face.
Time slowed down for Luke Jensen.
The outlaw jerked backward. The Remington boomed again. The girl screamed. The shriek rang out, high and clear as a musical note.
The body twisted as it fell, and as Luke came into the homestead he stepped over the bloody corpse. His head moved on a swivel, eyes hunting, the barrel of the .45 tracking. He caught a flash of motion and turned. The second man lunged for a .30 caliber Sharps rifle lying on a butcher block table.
His vision was gray and fading as he held the matches before him. His arms swayed. Carefully, he reached out and pressed the tips against the metal furnace. If these didn’t light, he didn’t think he’d have the strength left to dig more matches out of his pocket. This was it.
He laid the match heads against the metal. He couldn’t press too hard because the sticks might break. But there had to be enough friction to strike the head. He pressed. His body convulsed with a sudden shudder. The matchsticks snapped.
He groaned but couldn’t curse through his sealed mouth.
The matches were still in his grip, just broken partway down. He realized his feet and legs were no longer cold. He felt nothing at all below his belly.
He dragged the matches across the metal.
CHAPTER 29
They caught.
He touched the flame to the coal dust and it burst to life. The hungry fire spread readily to the crumbles and then to the lumps. Soon a proper fire was going in the furnace. He leaned close to the open door and let the lifesaving heat wash out over him.
Once he was properly warm, Luke draped his buffalo coat over the window to stop snow falling inside. The metal interior of the locomotive cab held the furnace heat fairly well. He was almost comfortable. First the ice melted from him, then his clothes dried.
Now that he wasn’t in danger of immediate death, he needed a plan.
He closed his eyes and leaned toward the firebox, letting more warmth seep into him. He dozed, waking every so often to shove more of the coal on the edges into the center where the fire burned.
The fire would not last forever. Only until dawn perhaps. While there were loose piles of coal collected in the corners of the locomotive cab, thrown there from the tender during the derailment, there wasn’t enough to keep a decent fire going for more than several hours. He’d have to make the most out of the time he had.
When he’d thawed and dozed, he slid past the buffalo coat and crawled out of the window. The sun was coming up pale and yellow over the edges of the horizon on the east. It was slightly warmer than it had been during the night, but still bitter cold.
It had stopped snowing, so he took the robe, which now stank of smoke, and put it on. He set out to locate the dead man he’d found last night. The snowfall had obliterated everything. He paused for a moment, studying the mountains rising above him.
Luck was with him. The dawn was still new enough that darkness clung in the valleys and hollows. And there, up on the mountainside, he saw the winking yellow light of a fire.
He marked the place in his mind. He’d have no trail of snowshoes to track. He’d have to use dead reckoning. He trudged toward the spot where he thought he’d last seen the dead man and began looking in the snow.
The physical exercise kept him warm enough, and he soon found the body before the cold had gotten a real grip on him. The man was stiff as a board and his ears and back of his neck showed blue-black with lividity. Luke stooped and grabbed his ankles like the handles of a wheelbarrow and began dragging him.
It was brutally hard work, but it kept him warm. Once he got back to his hole, he climbed back down and spread his coat over the opening again. When he was sure the coal fire was still going in the furnace, he took several clumps of snow and ate them.
That way of getting water would have been ill-advised if he hadn’t been close to an external source of warmth. Eating snow for the moisture could cool a man’s core by several degrees and hasten death.
After he’d replenished himself as best he could, he crawled out and began stripping the body. He had to wrench a kneecap out of place and break an arm at the elbow to get the man’s clothes off. When he was done, he laid the garments next to the furnace to thaw.
He used the last of the coal to stoke the fire and waited for the clothes to dry. After a little while, he methodically began dressing for his journey. He wasted nothing. Every bit of covering could be the difference between life or death. It would be a race against the cold.
He layered the dead man’s clothes over his own. When Luke had gone back for the body, he’d realized the man was indeed the fireman and not the engineer. On his first look, he’d failed to notice the long leather protective apron the man wore. That would be helpful on his journey.
He doubled his socks. Doubled his long johns. Doubled his shirts and then put on the heavy leather apron. Over that the buffalo coat. For weapons, he only had the Remington, fifteen extra shells, and his knife. He’d done more with less, he reckoned.
He’d have to keep his hands inside his coat as much as possible. He had brought gloves, but they’d been placed inside his warbag.
His life, or at the very least a few fingers and toes, absolutely depended on how quickly he made it to town. He’d find the track and follow it up the mountain. He figured another five miles. If a storm didn’t come, he thought he’d make it.
He knew that once the train didn’t arrive, search parties would be sent out. There was a possibility he’d meet them on the tracks. He couldn’t afford to dawdle, but he felt good about his chances.
When he climbed out of the locomotive, he saw storm clouds piling up against the mountaintops above the valley.
* * *
Walking got easier once he made it past the avalanche and onto the track. The snow was knee deep here, and the ground relatively flat. It turned out the train had been much closer to Cedar Falls than Luke had first realized.
He came up over a slight rise in the saddle between two granite cliffs and saw the town below him. He breathed in sharply. The place looked in ruins. Smoke hung in a haze above charred, burned-out buildings. Timbers and joists leaned drunkenly, like blackened skeletons. Mounds of soot and ash stood out in sharp contrast to the snow.
The scent of fire and gunsmoke hung in the air. Here and there lonely, isolated buildings stood untouched by whatever conflagration had ripped through the mining town. Those structures were few and far between.
* * *
Goldsmith’s come full circle in his mind, Luke realized. He’s bringing Sherman’s March to the frontier.
He was now convinced the explosion he’d heard during the train ambush had been set off by Goldsmith. Maybe a few owlhoots would dynamite tracks or a bridge to derail a train, but only a lunatic like Goldsmith would take the time to burn a whole damn town.
Luke studied the scene below him, soaking it in. Cedar Falls hadn’t been large. Its boom had been relatively small. Built next to the rail line, it had boasted only one main street and no more than ten or twelve buildings. It wasn’t as small as Craig’s Fork, but it had never been close to the population of Golgotha Rock. He guessed it had held maybe a hundred full-time citizens with up to three or four times that number on mine paydays.
No one moved among the ruins and debris. No smoke curled from the two remaining homesteads to indicate survivors huddled around stoves for warmth. No lost children or stunned witnesses to the apocalypse wandered the street searching for loved ones. All was still. All was silent.
Cedar Falls was a graveyard. The bitter cold kept the lingering smoke close to the ground instead of letting it trail up into the gunmetal gray sky. The quiet was uncanny. Steeling himself for what he feared he’d find, Luke began walking.
Behind the clouds the weak, reddish-yellow smear of the sun was sliding toward the horizon and twilight. Luke had spent most of the day just thawing out and warming up and then getting here. With evening would come another killing cold. Luke could not afford to be caught without shelter and heat, or the winter would kill him long before he ever faced Goldsmith.
Closer to the town, he began coming across footprints. Fresh snowfall had filled the indentations in somewhat, but hadn’t yet obliterated them. He found a line of snowshoe tracks coming out of the woods from the direction of a now frozen stream and going toward the town.
He followed them in closer and found himself not approaching by the main road, but coming up behind the line of buildings running perpendicular to the small train platform. It was impossible to tell how many men with snowshoes had begun this approach, but Luke was willing to bet one of them was Goldsmith.
The water tower beside the track had been shot to hell. A coal bin had been placed beneath it to keep the water unfrozen. The dozens of bullet holes had caused water to spill out and freeze in a pond around the tower. The ice gleamed a shade of blue much different from the snow.
There was the body of a railway worker frozen in the floored area. The face of the corpse was black, and the fingers, curled into claws and reaching upward, looked brittle as glass. Blood had pumped from the back of his head and pooled around him. It formed a scarlet and pink halo in the ice.
Luke noticed something sticking out from under the corpse. It looked like the finger of a glove. He reached down and tried to tug it free, but it was stuck. Grimacing, Luke tugged up on the dead man’s coat until the body moved a little. He pulled out a pair of gloves the man probably had dropped when he died.
Those gloves might save Luke’s fingers . . . and his fingers might save his life.
Luke skirted the frozen lake, eyes searching the burned-out buildings and charred ruins. He needed to keep the gloves on because of the cold, but he drew the Remington. The metallic click of the hammer going back was unnaturally loud.
He turned slowly, scanning the rubble. His breath sounded loud in the unnatural stillness. It formed silvery clouds in front of his face. The air tasted of ash. He stalked forward, coming down the narrow alley between two buildings. He looked through the rib cage of struts and charred timber.
Two corpses lay on the floor of the building to the left. By the size difference, he guessed a man and woman. They’d died in each other’s arms. Their flesh and hair had burned away, leaving grinning teeth exposed.
He came out on the main street. A few feet away a flash of color caught his eye. A woman in a red dress that would only have ever been worn by a saloon girl lay facedown in the snow. Raw meat and bone fragments showed in the little mounds the bullet wounds had made of her flesh. She was stiff as old stone.
He waited, but after a short time he felt himself starting to shiver and had to get moving again. He wandered like a ghost through the charred wreckage, taking note of the eternally quiet bodies. Everywhere was the stink of old smoke.
Suddenly, from across the town, he heard the sound of a door slamming shut. The sound was so abrupt and unexpected it caused Luke to jump as if he’d been attacked. His finger tightened on the trigger in automatic response, but he was too experienced to accidentally trigger the weapon.
Using the jagged remnants of walls and collapsed roofs for cover, Luke edged his way toward the far side of town from which he’d heard the sound. There, a short distance from where the livery stable’s corral stood, was a log homestead. A dead man in a red flannel shirt was sprawled, frozen, across a wood pile.
Eyeing the way the cabin windows faced, Luke slipped forward at an angle. If there were survivors, they’d probably shoot first and ask questions later. He didn’t blame them. If it was Goldsmith or any men low enough to ride with him, then Luke could expect nothing but death. Which he was ready to return.
He set his feet down carefully, not wanting the sound of his boots pushing through the snow crust to carry. Step, step, stop. Listen. Wait. Step, step, stop. He stalked the occupants of the homestead the way a cougar does its prey. As he drew closer, he thought he heard the sound of a man’s voice. Then laughter.
At least two then.
He remembered the battle at the trading post. There were similarities here. He needed to make sure what kind of people he was dealing with. The last thing he wanted to do was bring more pain and violence to this town. Or what was left of it.
He continued stalking forward.
Coming up to the homestead, he put his back against a wall and waited. Over his head icicles the size of Bowie knives hung like stalactites from the eaves. Luke’s nose burned from the cold. First chance he got, he needed to find something to cover his face. Carefully, he inched his way toward a glass window.
He paused, listening.
“The colonel will be back by nightfall,” one of the voices said.
“So what?” a second voice answered. Luke could tell he was drunk. “Horses aren’t going to help us in this weather. That crazy hombre burned down the town we have to hole up in for the winter. We ain’t riding no damn horses past that avalanche, either. Leastwise not until spring.”
“Colonel will think of something.”
“To hell with that! I ain’t no soldier boy like you. I don’t believe just because he was some damn big deal officer that he’s always right!”
Maybe they’ll kill each other and save me the trouble, Luke thought.
“Well,” the first voice said, “either way he’s coming. When he does, you can just give him your opinion to his face.”
“To hell with that,” the second voice snapped. “It won’t be just him coming. He’ll be bringing those outlaw Crow with him.”
“So?”
“So they’re going to want the girl, and there’s five of them.”
“I reckon we better all have our fun before then,” the other man said with a crude laugh.
“Hell yeah, we should!”
“Then we should kill her so they can’t get none.”
This declaration came out in a hacking guffaw. A feminine voice began sobbing, her terror obvious.
Luke eased a slow, even breath out through his nose. He had to act.
CHAPTER 30
Luke had found that there were several types of outlaws. Owlhoots like the James-Younger gang for example, were dangerous, no doubt about that. They stole at the point of a gun, and if you crossed them at the wrong moment, you could wind up in a pine box. But they held to their own sense of ethics, and would offer no insult to a woman.
They were criminals, but not degenerates. They didn’t torture, they avoided bloodshed, and they did not rape. They needed to be brought to justice, but they were not despicable human beings. Quite a few outlaws were like that. Often the horse thieves and cattle rustlers operated under this rough code.
Then there were the marauders.
Marauders were remnants of a frontier before the war. They came out of a hundred years of lawless borderlands. Their raids were like guerrilla strikes that left all in their path slaughtered. They killed with callous impunity and sadistic pleasure. Rape was as much the goal as gold. They sold their victims, Mexican, Indian, or white, into the slave trade south of the border.
Marauders were men who’d come to the wilderness and lost their humanity. Since the end of the war and the push of the railroads, those sorts had diminished even as hostile natives had also been reduced. But they were far from gone.
Luke had seen more than enough of varmints like that in his quest to extinguish the evil wolves plaguing decent folks. But he was hardened to his work. He knew it was common among the men he hunted. It was, in part, integral to why he hunted them in the first place. The callous abuse of women made him see red.
He risked a glance through the window. Seething hate warmed his body. The woman wasn’t old enough to be called a woman. She was a girl. Dressed in only a gingham dress, she shivered as she fed kindling into a potbellied stove. Her arms were purple and black, her young face swollen. There were bite marks on her neck. And she was cold, shaking with it.
Two men in buffalo robe coats watched her, passing a jug of what Luke assumed was corn whiskey back and forth. He didn’t recognize them from Goldsmith’s gang. He was pretty sure he’d killed or scattered most of those men. Goldsmith had recruited more scum.
He forced himself to stay calm and take stock of the situation. He decided quickly that the cabin served as some kind of supply cache for Goldsmith. Barrels and crates of dry goods were stacked along a back wall. Rows of rifles in various calibers had been put together in piles like Indian wickiups. Piles of furs sat on the floor. There were kegs of beer and numerous liquor bottles. As far as Luke could tell, it seemed the loot from the town had been stored here.
Pulling back from the window, he leaned against the wall. Given the amount of supplies, these two had to be rear guards. That meant Goldsmith could be returning, possibly very soon, with whatever constituted the rest of his outfit.
The girl cried out. Luke heard the men’s rough laughter. He closed his eyes. He wasn’t going to leave her. He drew the Remington and cocked it. Without bothering to disguise the sound of his footsteps through the snow, he tromped around to the front door. Placing the pistol behind his leg, he pounded on the door with his other hand.
“Open up, damn it!” he hollered. “I got word from Goldsmith.”
There was a long, pregnant pause, followed by the sounds of heavy boots on the floorboards. Luke pounded the door again.
“Hurry the hell up!”
The footsteps stopped at the door. The wooden dowel handle that worked the sliding bolt slammed backward and the heavy door swung open. In the doorway stood a big man, well over six feet. Even in the bulky buffalo robe coat it was easy to tell he weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds. His skin was a burnt copper that, along with his beardless face, suggested he bore a lot of Indian blood. His eyes, red-veined and muddy brown, opened wide in surprise when he saw Luke standing in front of the cabin.
Luke lifted the Remington from behind his leg and shot him in the face.
Time slowed down for Luke Jensen.
The outlaw jerked backward. The Remington boomed again. The girl screamed. The shriek rang out, high and clear as a musical note.
The body twisted as it fell, and as Luke came into the homestead he stepped over the bloody corpse. His head moved on a swivel, eyes hunting, the barrel of the .45 tracking. He caught a flash of motion and turned. The second man lunged for a .30 caliber Sharps rifle lying on a butcher block table.
