Those Jensen Boys! (19 page)

“Don't keep me waiting, boys!” the voice called again.

Ace lifted his voice. “You come out where we can see you! I want to know that Emily's all right!”

“She is—for now! Tell them!”

Emily cried, “Ace! Chance! Don't cooperate with him—”

The sharp sound of a slap silenced her. Chance's face flushed with fury. He jerked the Lightning from under his coat and started to slide down off the boulder, ignoring Ace's gesture for him to stay where he was.

Ace went off his boulder the other way, dropping to the ground where the man who had captured Emily couldn't see him. He didn't know who the man was, possibly that gunfighter Buckhorn, but whoever he was, he was pretty canny, fooling them with the horse trick while he circled around and grabbed Emily.

If they surrendered to him, it would be all over. The man would take them back to Palisade as prisoners and turn them over to Marshal Kaiser. Surrounded by the posse from Bleak Creek, they would have no chance to escape. They would be facing years in prison.

And the Corcorans would be facing ruin. No one else in Palisade was going to help them. The stage line would be crushed and swallowed up by the greedy maw of Samuel Eagleton.

Somewhere on the other side of the boulders, Chance shouted, “Come on out, damn you! If you hurt Emily, I'll kill you!”

Keep raising that racket, Ace thought as he began circling through the rocks. He didn't know if his brother was doing it deliberately to distract Emily's captor or if Chance was really just too scared and angry to think about anything else.

Either way, it was giving Ace the opportunity to move around without being heard. The odds against him would still be high . . . but the only other option was surrender.

For a Jensen, even one not named Smoke, that was just no option at all.

 

 

Chance struggled to get control of his emotions as he pressed himself against a little shoulder of rock and watched the bend in the trail where Emily had been hidden. He wanted to just blaze away as soon as he got a shot at the one who had captured her, but that was a good way to get her killed, and probably him, too.

They all had to stay alive. Ace hadn't come down with him, so that meant his brother was trying to get in position to turn the tables on their enemy. To give Ace that opportunity, Chance tried another tack. “Listen, mister. Step out so I can see that Emily's all right, and I'll throw down my gun! I give you my word on that. We'll cooperate. Just don't hurt her.”

“What about your brother? Is he willing to make the same promise?”

“Sure he is,” Chance said, mentally cursing even as he answered. He knew that next, Emily's captor would demand to hear Ace pledge to surrender, too.

The man surprised him. “Don't try anything funny. Miss Corcoran will be sorry if you do.” With that, Buckhorn moved out into the open, holding Emily in front of him with his left arm looped around her neck and pressing cruelly against her throat. His right hand held a Colt so that the barrel dug into her side. The man seemed casual, but Chance figured he was anything but.

Over Emily's shoulder, he took in the bowler hat and the craggy, rough-hewn features of the gunslinger, Eagleton's own personal killer. The man had plenty of blood on his hands already. Spilling some of Emily's probably wouldn't bother him.

Buckhorn didn't seem surprised to see that Chance was alone. In fact, he chuckled at the sight. “Well, you didn't disappoint me, Jensen. I knew your brother wouldn't be here. Did he take off for the tall and uncut, or is he trying to sneak around and get behind me? You know damn well there's nothing he can do, don't you?”

Buckhorn's voice was loud enough to carry to Ace's ears somewhere in the rocks. He was trying to get Ace to give up, too.

“Look at the thumb on my gun hand, Jensen,” Buckhorn went on. “By the way, which one are you?”

Chance's mouth was dry, but he managed to say, “I'm Chance.”

“Look at my thumb, Chance. It's the only thing holding back the hammer on this gun. Your brother might be the best shot in the world. I don't know. He might be able to put a bullet in my head from wherever he is. But if he does, this gun's going off, too, and Miss Corcoran will get a slug through her guts. You don't want that, do you?”

Chance's jaw was too tight with rage for him to speak.

Buckhorn nodded. “Why don't we start by you throwing that gun down? Go ahead and do it now.”

Chance's pulse pounded in his head. He had to play along with the gunfighter for the time being and stepped out from the rock and leaned over to set the Lightning on the rocky ground at his feet.

“Back away from it,” Buckhorn ordered. “Got any hideout guns, knives, anything like that?”

“No,” Chance managed to say. “That's the only weapon I carry.”

“I don't know if I believe you, but it doesn't really matter. Not as long as I've got this gun in Miss Corcoran's side.”

“Did Eagleton send you after us?” Chance wanted to keep Buckhorn talking.

“Of course he did. Why else would I be here?”

“He sent you to kill us all, didn't he?”

Buckhorn sounded amused as he replied. “No. Actually, he sent me to kill just you and your brother. He told me to bring Emily back to him.”

“What does he want with her? Does he want to kill her himself?”

Buckhorn frowned. “You've got it all wrong, Chance. Eagleton's not a killer. He's a businessman. He'll use Emily as leverage to force her father to sign the stage line over to him. That way he wins. I reckon that's what he cares about more than anything.”

As his heart continued to slug hard in his chest, Chance said, “If you were supposed to kill me and Ace, why haven't you shot me?”

Buckhorn's voice hardened slightly. “Because Samuel Eagleton doesn't always have to get
everything
he wants. I'm thinking I'll take the two of you back to Palisade and turn you over to Marshal Kaiser. He'll see to it that you're convicted of whatever charges he's got against you and sent to prison. That'll get rid of you just as well as gunning you down.”

Chance frowned. It almost sounded like Buckhorn didn't want any more killings on his conscience. Was that even possible? Could a cold-blooded hired killer ever reach the point where he didn't want to see any more men fall to his gun?

Was Buckhorn that sick of the smell of gun smoke?

It probably wouldn't be a good idea to put that theory to the test, not when Emily's life hung in the balance. But maybe somewhere along the line would come a moment when the tables could be turned, when Buckhorn might hesitate just for the split second that could change everything....

It was about as slim a hope as any Chance had ever clung to, but it was better than nothing.

“All right, you've stalled long enough,” Buckhorn said abruptly. “Ace Jensen, I know you can hear me! Come on out and throw your gun down, or I won't be responsible for what happens to Miss Corcoran!”

Ace slid out of a crack in the rock about fifteen feet behind Buckhorn. “Yes, you will.” He aimed the Colt in his hand at the gunfighter's head. “And if anything—anything at all—happens to her, you'll be dead half a second later.”

 

 

Ace wasn't bluffing. He would blow Buckhorn's brains out if the man hurt Emily. He didn't want it to come to that, though. “You don't want to die for Samuel Eagleton, Buckhorn. If you don't want to kill for him anymore, you sure as hell don't want to die.”

“Who says I don't want to kill?” Buckhorn growled.

“If you wanted Chance dead, you could have shot him by now. You could have put a bullet through him as soon as he stepped out into the open.”

“Good idea, reminding him of that,” Chance muttered.

“I mean it,” Ace said. “Your heart's not in it, Buckhorn. And why should it be? You probably know what kind of man Eagleton is better than anyone else.”

“Maybe not anyone,” Buckhorn said under his breath, but loud enough for Ace to hear it.

“You know he's power-mad, but really it's worse than that. He's not crazy, Buckhorn. He's smart. He knows he can make a fortune by taking over the stagecoach line.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Buckhorn sounded confused, and Ace could imagine the puzzled frown on the gunfighter's face. “The money Eagleton could make off the stage line is nothing compared to what he's taken out of the Golden Dome.”

Ace took a deep breath. A lot of what he was about to say was still supposition on his part, but it made sense and explained why Eagleton was so anxious to get his hands on the Corcoran Stage Line. “The Golden Dome is about to play out, but there's an even bigger gold mine down in the valley . . . the valley itself. But to make it pay off, Eagleton needs the stage line. Or to be more precise, he needs the
road
.”

Chance's eyes widened as his keen brain grasped the implications of what his brother was saying. “It's the railroad! Tanner's going to build a spur line across the valley, and the stage road is the perfect route for it!”

“That's the way I've got it figured,” Ace said. “Brian Corcoran owns the right-of-way on that land, and if he signed over the stagecoach company, Eagleton would get it. His silent partner Tanner will then use it to build a spur line across the valley to the new town that Eagleton establishes at the foot of Timberline Pass. I figure Eagleton already has other partners lined up to bring in cattle and start ranches in the valley. It'll boom, and so will Eagleton's new town. He'll build stockyards and make this a shipping center not only for the valley but for this whole part of the territory. It won't be as flashy as the riches from the mine, but it'll last longer and make more money in the end. The old Palisade up on the bench will be a ghost town.”

Frowning, Buckhorn turned and backed against the rock so he could look back and forth at the Jensen brothers. Emily looked shocked by the things Ace had said, too.

“That's an interesting story, kid,” Buckhorn said, “but I don't see how it changes anything. If you're right, Eagleton will wind up even richer than he already is. How's that supposed to make me turn against him?”

“You know Tanner's going to get a big cut of the money. So will the men who bring in the cattle. But you're still working for wages, aren't you, Buckhorn? Eagleton never offered to cut you in for a share, did he? If he had, you'd already know about all this, and I can tell that you didn't.”

Buckhorn grimaced. “That doesn't matter. So I'm working for wages. That's what I've always done.”

“Well, like you said,” Ace shrugged, homing in on a comment Buckhorn had made earlier. “Eagleton gets everything. That's just the way life works, isn't it?”

Buckhorn turned his head to scowl at Ace, drifting the muzzle of the gun he held away from Emily's side. “You don't know what you're—”

Emily drove her elbow back and to the side to knock the gun farther away from her, jolting Buckhorn's thumb off the hammer. She threw her head backward and butted Buckhorn in the face, loosening his grip enough for her to tear free and dive forward, out of the line of fire, just as the shot blasted out.

At the same instant, Ace's Colt roared. The slug smashed into Buckhorn's shoulder and knocked him back against the boulder behind him. His gun slipped from suddenly nerveless fingers and thudded to the ground.

Chance scooped up the Lightning and trained it on the wounded gunfighter.

With Buckhorn covered from two directions, there was nothing he could do except clutch his bloody shoulder with his other hand and snarl at the Jensens. “I'll kill you two,” he vowed. “Whatever it takes, I'll kill you.”

“Not today you won't,” Chance said.

Emily scrambled to her feet. The palms of her hands were scraped a little from catching herself when she dived to the rocky ground, but other than that she seemed fine.

A great relief considering that a minute or so earlier she'd had a cold-blooded killer pressing a gun into her side, Ace thought.

She picked up the gun Buckhorn had dropped. “We have another problem now. Everybody down in Palisade will have heard those shots.”

Ace said, “Which means—”

“Yeah,” Emily broke in. “Marshal Kaiser and that posse of his will be on their way up here as soon as they can grab their horses.”

Chance frowned at Buckhorn. “We need to get moving again—but what do we do with him?”

Emily said, “The simplest thing to do would be just to shoot him.” The gun in her hand—Buckhorn's own that she had picked up—was already pointed in his general direction. “One more shot won't bring the posse down on us any faster.”

Buckhorn sneered at her. “Trust me, girl, I know cold-blooded killers when I see them . . . and none of you three fit that description.”

“He's right,” Ace said. “We can't kill him. But we can do this.” Without any more warning than that, he stepped forward, reversed the Colt in his hand, and slammed the butt against Buckhorn's head.

The gunfighter's knees buckled and he fell to the ground, stunned.

Ace holstered his gun and knelt to search inside Buckhorn's coat.

Emily frowned. “What are you doing? We need to get out of here!”

Ace found a handkerchief, balled it up, and thrust it into the bullet wound in Buckhorn's shoulder. “We can't leave him here unconscious without doing something to slow down the bleeding from that wound. Otherwise, he might die before anybody finds him. And I don't want him being able to tell the posse which way we went, so I had to knock him out.”

“Well, I guess that makes sense, but when you get right down to it, there's only one way for us to go.” She pointed. “Up.”

“I'll get the horses.” Chance headed in their direction.

She took off her bandanna and handed it to Ace. “Here, use this to tie that bandage in place. If we're going to save his life, we might as well do a decent job of it. But if it was up to me, after the way he stuck that gun in my side . . . I might've let him bleed to death.”

“Don't think I didn't consider it,” Ace said under his breath as he knotted the bandanna around Buckhorn's shoulder.

A moment later, the fugitives were all mounted and the brothers were following Emily up another of the twisting mountain trails. Soon they were in such a barren, rocky wasteland it might as well have been the surface of the moon.

Ace turned in the saddle and looked down the mountainside, but couldn't see where the pursuit was. That was a good thing, he told himself. It meant the posse couldn't see them, either. He and Chance had to trust Emily's instincts and her knowledge of the terrain. She hadn't let them down so far.

“We're higher than the entrance to the Golden Dome now,” Emily told them when they stopped to rest the mounts from the hard climb. “Do you really think it's about to play out, Ace?”

“That's just a guess on my part,” he admitted, “but I'm confident I'm right about Eagleton wanting the right-of-way the stage road would give him to extend the spur line across the valley from Bleak Creek and Shoshone Gap.” Ace leveled an arm and pointed out across the landscape far below them. “Look how perfectly it lines up. You can see it from here.”

“Yeah, you can,” Chance said. “I think you're right about the valley being good ranching land, too . . . although that's not something I'm really all that familiar with.”

“Not many cattle inside saloons, are there?” Emily asked him with a smile.

“That's true.”

She turned back to Ace. “Even if you're right about everything, what good does it do us to figure that out? What Eagleton's doing isn't any more illegal than it already was. The only difference is that now we know
why
he's been trying to take over the stage line. We still can't do anything to stop him.”

“Tanner's bosses at the railroad might not like it if they knew he was scheming with Eagleton to ruin your father's business in order to take over that right-of-way. Sharp business is one thing, attempted murder is another. He's tried to have you and Bess killed more than once.”

“So how do we let them know about it?” Chance asked.

“There's a telegraph office in Bleak Creek,” Ace said. “I saw the poles and the wires. We can send a telegram to the home office of the railroad and tell them about what's going on here.”

Emily said skeptically, “Do you really think they'd believe some stranger over what Tanner tells them? He's a trusted employee, after all, and a successful one, to boot. Would they even care if he's crooked?”

“I don't know,” Ace replied honestly. “But I can't think of anything else we can do.”

Chance scratched his jaw. “There's another problem. You'd have to go into Bleak Creek to send that wire. They don't like us there, remember?”

Emily shook her head. “No, Bess could do it.”

Ace nodded slowly. “Yeah, if we could write the message and get it to Bess somehow, she could send it when she rides over there to get the mail in a couple days.”

“Oh!” Emily ran her fingers through her hair in exasperation. “I forgot. We were going with her to make sure she got there and back safely. Kaiser's bound to think of that. He'll be watching Bess to make sure we don't meet up with her between Palisade and Bleak Creek.”

“That's good,” Chance said quickly. “Eagleton's men can't make any moves against her if she's got the law watching over her. Our problem will be getting the message to her so she can send it over the telegraph.”

“I'll take it to her,” Emily declared. “I'm the best one to do it. I know the back trails and you boys don't.”

“You'd be the one running the risk of being arrested if Kaiser nabbed you,” Chance said with a frown. “I don't like that idea.”

“Well, that's too bad. It's not your decision to make.” Emily nodded so vehemently it made her hair give a defiant toss. “We'll find a good place for the two of you to hide, then I'll head back down to Palisade tonight with the message for Bess.”

“What if you're arrested?” Chance asked. “How will we know?”

“If I don't come back, you'll know,” Emily said, adding grimly, “Either that or I'll be dead.”

 

 

Buckhorn came to slowly. Before moving, he listened carefully. Hearing nothing, he opened his eyes and looked around, and then sat up and propped his back against one of the rocks. His wounded shoulder hurt like blazes. He'd lost enough blood that his head spun like one of the tops he had made, back when he was a kid.

He didn't think he'd been unconscious for very long, probably just a few minutes, but it was long enough for Emily Corcoran and those damn Jensen boys to have gotten away from him. He didn't know which way they had gone, although he figured he might be able to pick up their trail again.

He glared and cursed under his breath. He didn't need to be thinking about his miserable childhood. The only thing on his mind ought to be Ace and Chance Jensen and how he was going to kill them when he found them again.

He turned his head and looked down at his shoulder. His own handkerchief was stuffed into the bullet wound to stop the bleeding, he realized, and it had been tied in place with Emily Corcoran's bandanna. A frown creased his forehead. He might well have bled to death if the three fugitives had just left him lying there unconscious. Instead, they had taken the time to bind up his wound and possibly save his life.

His frown deepened. Why the hell had they done that?

A better question was why hadn't he killed the Jensen brothers as Eagleton told him to do? It might have been tricky, but he was confident he could have done it. Those two could be lying right where he was, dead, and Emily would be his prisoner.

Instead, he had allowed his resentment over Eagleton's high-handed ways and his jealousy of the man over Rose Demarcus to cloud his judgment. He had decided to capture Ace and Chance and turn them over to the law, knowing it would annoy Eagleton. In the end, that had been his undoing, along with his own momentary carelessness.

That was quite some yarn the kid had spun, Buckhorn thought. Was there any truth to it? He didn't know. Eagleton was cunning enough to have struck a secret deal with Jacob Tanner to bring a railroad spur across the valley to a new town at the foot of the mountain. Palisade existed in its current location simply because it was convenient to the mine—no other real reason for it to be where it was. If indeed the mine was played out, it might make sense to Eagleton to abandon Palisade and start over down in the valley, basing the new settlement around the cattle industry.

None of that mattered to Buckhorn. He wasn't a rancher any more than he was a miner. He was a hired gun. That was all.

It really was galling, though, to think about Samuel Eagleton sailing through life, always getting what he wanted. A lucrative gold mine, a new town when he didn't need the old one anymore, the most beautiful woman Joe Buckhorn had ever seen . . .

The sound of horses' hooves and men calling to each other broke into his bitter thoughts. He couldn't tell how far away the riders were, but if he could hear them, they could hear him. He lifted his head and bellowed, “Hey! Over here!”

The noises got louder. A couple minutes later, several men rode into sight along the twisting trail through the rocks. Buckhorn recognized the two marshals, Jed Kaiser from Bleak Creek and Claude Wheeler from Palisade. They had three posse members with them.

“Buckhorn!” Wheeler exclaimed as they rode up to him. “What are you doing here?”

“Doing your job for you,” Buckhorn snapped. “I found the Jensen brothers and Emily Corcoran.”

“Is that so?” Kaiser asked with his usual superior sneer. “I don't see them.”

“Ace Jensen shot me and they got away, damn it,” Buckhorn said. “But I had them. That's more than any of you can say.”

Kaiser refuted it. “That's not true. Ace Jensen was locked up in my jail—”

“He's not now.”

“Both of you take it easy,” Wheeler said. “The important thing now is finding them. Did you see which way they went, Buckhorn?”

“Only one way they could have gone.” The gunfighter started to lift his right arm so he could jerk his thumb over his shoulder, then paused and winced at the pain that caused. He lowered the arm carefully and used the other arm to complete the gesture, pointing up.

Wheeler frowned. “On up the mountain, you mean?”

Sarcastically, Buckhorn said, “You didn't meet them coming down, did you?”

“All right. We'll keep searching. How bad are you hurt?”

“Bad enough.” Buckhorn didn't like to admit it, but he wasn't a big enough fool to deny the truth. “I need a sawbones.”

Wheeler turned to the men behind him. “A couple of you boys find Buckhorn's horse and take him back down to town.”

“Those are
my
posse men,” Kaiser snapped. “You can't give them orders.”

“Well, we're a lot closer to my town than to yours, so if anybody's got jurisdiction here, it's me,” Wheeler said in a patient tone as if he were explaining something to a child. “I don't want to have to tell Samuel Eagleton that we left one of his most trusted men here on the mountainside to die.”

“I'm not gonna die,” Buckhorn muttered. “Just need some patching up.”

“Oh, all right.” Kaiser jerked his head at the men Wheeler had picked out. “Go ahead and help him.”

“It's liable to be a mighty long chase,” Wheeler said with a sigh. “All the way to the top of this damn mountain.”

 

 

It seemed to Ace like they had climbed halfway to heaven. The snow that capped the top of the mountain didn't seem to be very far off, although he knew it was still several hundred feet above them. The wind was stronger and the air was colder, too. Chance wore a coat, but Ace had just his buckskin shirt over his denim trousers.

“I shot a bighorn sheep up here last fall. I have a coat lined with its hide back home.” Emily shivered a little. “Wouldn't mind having it with me right now.”

Chance said, “I'm not sure freezing to death is a lot better than taking our chances with that posse.”

“You're not going to freeze to death,” Emily told him. “It won't get that cold up here tonight. You'll just be a mite chilly, is all.”

“I'm
already
a mite chilly.”

“Do you have a place in mind for us to go?” Ace asked. “Or are we just looking for a good spot?”

“I have a place,” she said. “I camped there before, too. It won't be much longer.”

She was as good as her word.

A short time later, they followed a slanting trail up to a broad ledge with a great brow of rock looming above it. The overhang formed a cave-like area with plenty of room for several people and horses. A ring of stones had been arranged to form a fire circle, and a pile of dry branches and brush sat against the rear wall of the area.

Ace dismounted and looked around.

Emily slid off her horse, giving it a quick rest. “You can build a fire tonight without worrying about it being seen. There's nobody up high enough to see it for fifty or sixty miles, at least. So you ought to be warm enough, anyway.”

“But hungry.” Chance followed suit. They had been in such a hurry to get out of Palisade before the posse caught them that they hadn't had time to gather any supplies. He and Ace had a few strips of jerky they carried in their saddlebags, but that was all.

“You won't starve to death in one night,” Emily said. “You have canteens, so you don't have to worry about water. I'll try to get back up here tomorrow with some provisions, since there's no telling how long you'll have to hide out here.”

“What if you get caught in Palisade?” he asked.

She smiled at him. “Then I guess you and your brother will have to figure out which one of you is turning cannibal.”