Brotherhood of Evil (10 page)

Chapter 21

Sally was still engrossed in the story of the
Nautilus
, Captain Nemo, and Professor Aronnax, when she heard the dull boom of gunshots outside, interspersed with the sharper cracking of rifle fire. Reacting instantly, she bolted up from the comfortable chair. The leather-bound volume fell to the floor at her feet, already forgotten. She lunged across the room to a gun rack mounted on the wall.

The rack held several different types of long arms: shotguns, Winchester repeaters, an old Henry, an even older Sharps .50 caliber buffalo rifle, and a couple shorter-barreled Winchester carbines she always carried with her as a saddle gun whenever she went riding.

The weapons were all loaded, although the Winchesters and the Henry usually didn't have a round in the chamber. She remedied that in the carbine she took down and worked the lever with practiced ease. The carbine was ready to fire.

She ran out of the study and along the hall toward the front of the house, knowing better than to rush outside blindly. That was a good way to run smack-dab into a bullet. Hurrying into the darkened parlor, she pushed a curtain aside, and looked out.

She was in time to see a man wearing thick gloves to protect his hands throw some sort of burning object through a broken window into the bunkhouse. Other men on horseback galloped back and forth, firing handguns and rifles toward the windows. Sally caught her breath as an orange glare shot up inside the building. Those crude incendiary bombs had started fires inside the bunkhouse.

She saw at least twenty attackers, and from the sound of all the shooting going on, at least that many more were joining the assault on the Sugarloaf's headquarters. Even without proof, there was no doubt in her mind that it was connected somehow to the three men who'd been lurking around the place earlier. Her instincts told her it was true.

One group of riders peeled off from the others and charged toward the house. Knowing that she was probably in great danger, Sally didn't hesitate to break out the window glass with the carbine's barrel. She brought the weapon to her shoulder and began to fire through the opening. She aimed at the charging horsemen and cranked off five rounds.

One man went backwards off his horse like he'd been slapped out of the saddle by a giant hand. Another reeled to the side, obviously wounded, and would have fallen if he hadn't dropped his gun and grabbed the saddle horn.

That left three of them. As they reached the house, they vaulted from their saddles and leaped onto the porch. She tried to angle the carbine to fire at them, but they were too close to the wall. She heard one of them kicking at the door.

They weren't going to get in very easily that way. Smoke had built the house to be defended. The door was thick and barred, and a man could kick it all day without busting it down.

Unfortunately, the same thing couldn't be said of the windows. They were secure enough when the shutters were closed, but she hadn't had time to do that. She gasped as she heard glass crash in another room and knew she had to keep a cool head.

The lamps in the front room weren't lit. The only light came from the hallway, and that originated in the study so it wasn't very bright.

Sally glided toward the closest corner where thick shadows lay and let the darkness wrap itself around her. With the carbine ready for action, she stood with her back pressed against the wall and waited.

She heard stealthy sounds from the hall. The men were trying to move silently, but they were a little too clumsy.

Shadows moved near the entrance to the front room. She brought the carbine to her shoulder and aimed it in that direction.

A moment later a man said in a harsh whisper, “Be careful! We don't know who-all's in here.”

“Somebody is,” another man replied, “and he blew Johnny Clark right outta his saddle!”

Sally smiled grimly. They assumed that because whoever was in the house had gunned down one of their companions, that person had to be a man. If they gave her a chance, they would soon discover that a woman could be a good shot, too.

The second man went on. “Duke, you and Corbin go upstairs and have a look around. The Jensen woman's probably up there hidin'. Remember, whatever you do, don't hurt her.”

“Not even a little bit, Nichols?”

“No more than you have to,” the gunman replied. “Pike said the doctor was mighty clear about that.”

That brief exchange told Sally quite a bit. They had attacked the Sugarloaf because they were looking for her. The fact that they wanted to take her alive indicated that they intended to use her for leverage against Smoke. His enemies had tried that before, always to their great regret.

Most of the time it had been their
last
regret.

The mention of a doctor was puzzling. She couldn't recall any physician who had a grudge against her husband. Maybe the men meant a professor, although that seemed unlikely. Most of the time out on the frontier, anybody who used the word
doctor
was talking about a sawbones.

None of that mattered, Sally reminded herself. What was important was that she was in danger, regardless of the motive or the source, and that men who worked for her and Smoke, their friends as well as their employees, might well be dying trying to fight off the unexpected invasion.

That thought reminded her of the men who had killed Ben Hardy. Evidently, they had been the advance scouts. The whole thing smacked of a military operation, and she realized if the attacking force was big enough, she and the crew couldn't fight it off. She had to start thinking in terms of escape.

With dozens of ruthless, well-armed invaders right outside the house—and some of them inside—that wasn't going to be easy.

One of those shadows from the hall suddenly loomed blackly in the entrance to the front room. The man whispered to his companions, “I'm pretty sure those shots were coming from in here.”

“Why don't we just spray the whole place with lead?” another man asked.

“Because Mrs. Jensen might be in here, you damn fool!” Nichols snapped. He raised his voice. “Mrs. Jensen. Sally Jensen. Are you in here?”

Sally held her breath. She didn't say anything, didn't move. Her finger was taut on the trigger.

Nichols cursed and told his companions, “Get ready, I'm gonna strike a match—”

Sally heard the rasp of a lucifer being struck. She knew she couldn't hide anymore, so there was no point in further stealth. As sparks began to spurt from the match, she aimed a short distance above it and fired the carbine.

Chapter 22

The muzzle flash lit up the room. In that shaved heartbeat of brightness, she saw that the man with the match was holding it out well away from his body. The bullet from her carbine smacked harmlessly into the wallpaper. He'd been trying to draw her fire, she realized. He had meant for her to hear what he was saying.

“Rush her now!” the man shouted as he dropped the match.

Desperately, Sally worked the carbine's lever as footsteps pounded across the room toward her. She pulled the trigger again. The weapon blasted, and a man screamed.

Somebody grabbed the carbine's barrel and wrenched it to the side. Sally cried out as the man tore it from her grasp.

That wasn't the only way she could fight back. She was in her own home, and her familiarity with it came in handy. As the man loomed up in front of her, she grabbed a vase off a side table and swung it at his head. The vase shattered with a huge crash. The man groaned, stumbled, and fell.

The carbine clattered on the floor.

“Grab her!” Nichols yelled.

Sally dived for the carbine. It was too dark in the room to see anything, so all she could aim for was the sound she had heard as it fell.

Her hand struck the weapon and it slid across the floor. Booted feet stomped heavily around her as she scrambled after the carbine on hands and knees. In the back of her mind was the knowledge that she couldn't win the fight—there were just too many of them—but she didn't have it in her to surrender. Smoke never gave up hope, no matter how bad the odds against him were, and she wasn't going to, either. One of the things she had learned from him was to always keep fighting.

She wrapped her hands around the carbine just as somebody grabbed her robe from behind and started to pull her backwards. The man yelled, “Here she is! I got her!”

Sally twisted and lashed out with the carbine's barrel, sweeping it through the air above her. It thudded solidly against something, and the man holding her robe let go. She rolled onto her bottom and scooted backwards on the floor, pushing hard with her feet.

She bumped into a pair of legs. A hand swiped at her and tangled in her hair for a second. When it came loose, so did a few strands of her hair. Pain made her yelp. It also made her angry. She worked the carbine's lever.

The hardcases who had invaded the ranch knew that sound. A man shouted, “Look out! She's gonna—”

His words were drowned out by shots smashing from the carbine. She didn't worry about shooting anybody who didn't have it coming. She swung the barrel from left to right and kept firing as she scooted until her back hit the wall.

She didn't know how many of the men she had hit, if any. She pushed herself up, heard someone charging her again, and pulled the trigger. The carbine's hammer clicked on an empty chamber. She was out of bullets.

She threw the carbine in front of her as hard as she could and heard it hit something. A man grunted in pain. She hoped she had broken his nose or even his skull. She twisted away and lunged through the shadows.

She had to get out of the house.

It was her only chance. As long as she was confined in there, sooner or later, they would overwhelm her by sheer force of numbers, if nothing else. By all rights, they should have captured her already. She had been lucky—and they probably hadn't expected her to put up such a fierce fight.

They should have expected it, she thought. She was married to Smoke Jensen, wasn't she?

Her feet were bare, so she moved without making much noise. She saw the glow that marked the doorway with the light coming from the study. Flitting like a phantom, she darted into the hallway.

A man yelled behind her, “There she goes! She's headed for the back of the house!”

She knew how steep the odds against her were, but she hoped that if she could get out of the house, she might be able to reach the trees and then make her way into the mountains. Unarmed, barefoot, dressed only in a robe and nightdress, spending a chilly night in the mountains wasn't an appealing prospect at all, but it sure beat being captured by men who had to be up to no good.

Some of the hands might get away, too. The battle was still going on. She heard the furious gunfire from the direction of the bunkhouse. If she could join forces with Pearlie and Cal, they could still make a fight of it . . .

She ran past the study door and on into the kitchen. It was dark, but she knew where everything was. She found a meat cleaver and clutched its wooden handle tightly. At close quarters, it would be a vicious weapon.

Men blundered around elsewhere in the house, searching for her. She heard footsteps upstairs, too. She wasn't sure what they were looking for up there, since it should have been obvious to all of them that she was downstairs. Maybe they thought there were some back stairs and wanted to keep her from slipping up them.

Getting trapped on the second floor was the last thing she wanted. She wanted
out
, out where she would have the freedom to move around. She edged toward the back door, feeling her way along.

It opened before she could get there. Dark shapes filled the doorway, silhouetted by the light from the moon and stars.

“Get that lantern lit, damn it,” a man growled.

She didn't wait for them to be able to see what they were doing. She let out a bloodcurdling scream—Preacher had told her that would make almost any man jump and think twice about what he was doing—and charged among them, slashing back and forth with the cleaver.

Men yelled in surprise and pain. Sally kept her head down and rammed into a man with her shoulder. Under normal circumstances she might not have been able to budge him, but he wasn't braced for the impact and went over backwards with a startled shout.

She bounded through the door and into the clear.

It was a matter of outrunning the pursuit, reaching the trees, and giving the men the slip as she worked her way up the thickly wooded slopes behind Sugarloaf's headquarters. She raced like the wind.

Hoofbeats thundered to her right. Sally tried to shy away from them, but it was too late. A man on horseback loomed up out of the night. He turned his mount so that it came alongside her, leaned down from the saddle, wrapped his arm around her waist, and jerked her off the ground.

She cried out and tried to twist so she could strike at him with the cleaver. He was a good rider, though, and seemed to be controlling the horse with his knees, leaving both hands free. One arm was tight around her and the other hand caught hold of her wrist as she tried to wield the cleaver. A vicious twist made her gasp in pain and drop it.

With that threat disposed of, the man grasped his reins again and slowed the horse. His arm was like an iron band around her, holding her in front of him on the horse and pressing her tightly against him. “You put up a good fight, Mrs. Jensen, but it's over.” He turned the horse.

“My husband will kill you,” she said through clenched teeth. “That's if I don't get a chance to do it first.”

He laughed and sounded genuinely amused. “Smoke Jensen won't do anything but what we tell him to, as long as he wants to keep his wife, his crew, and all his friends in Big Rock from dying.”

Sally's heart sank. They had attacked Big Rock, too? Had they taken over the town? How many people had been killed?

“So just take it easy, stop fighting, and make it easier on all of us,” her captor went on. “It's time you met the doctor.”