Those Jensen Boys! (6 page)

The marshal's draw wasn't very fast. Either of the Jensens could have beaten it, but Ace's hand shot out and closed on Chance's arm to keep him from reacting. He wasn't sure what was going on, but getting in a shoot-out with a lawman was bound to just make things worse. “Hold on, Marshal. You don't have any call to be arresting us.”

“Yeah,” Chance said, his face flushed with anger. “We haven't done anything.”

“I'd say ambushing one of the leading citizens of this town and trying to kill him warrants being thrown in the hoosegow,” the marshal responded as he kept his revolver leveled at them. “Now shuck your guns and any other weapons you're carrying.”

“You're loco!” Chance burst out. “We never ambushed anybody.”

“But somebody
did
try to bushwhack us a little while ago, out in Shoshone Gap,” Ace added. “Sounds to me like you've been sold a bill of goods, Marshal.”

“Being impertinent is not going to get you anywhere.” The lawman gestured with the revolver he held. “I told you to drop your guns. You'd damn well better do it now, before I lose my patience.”

Chance glanced over at Ace and muttered, “You should've let me wing him.”

“Too late for that now.” Ace reached for the buckle of his gun belt, unfastened it, and lowered it to the porch.

“You, too, smart mouth,” the marshal told Chance.

Carefully, Chance reached inside his coat and removed the Lightning from his shoulder holster. He bent and placed it on the porch next to Ace's Colt.

“Step back away from 'em,” the marshal ordered. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

“I still say you're making a mistake,” Ace insisted. “We haven't done anything wrong.” An idea occurred to him. “You can go down to the depot and ask the Corcoran sisters. They'll tell you we were just trying to help them.”

“Maybe I'll do that,” the marshal said, “after you two are behind bars where you belong.”

He didn't have to wait that long. At the end of the street, Bess and Emily emerged from the depot building and stopped in stunned surprise at the sight of Ace and Chance being arrested. A second later both young women started toward the general store in a hurry.

Ace saw their reaction. “Here they come now,” he told the marshal.

Under the circumstances, the lawman couldn't do anything other than wait for Bess and Emily to get there. A crowd had started to gather, since any excuse to break the monotony in frontier settlements was always welcome.

“What's going on here?” Emily demanded as she shouldered her way through the press of townspeople with Bess close behind her. They reached a spot just in front of the porch where they could look up and see Ace, Chance, and the lawman. “Marshal Kaiser, are you arresting these men?”

“Yes, miss, I am,” the marshal said.

“Why?” Bess asked as she stepped up beside her sister. “They haven't done anything wrong.”

“How do you know that?”

Emily said, “Well, they haven't done anything wrong in the past hour, anyway. They were with Bess and me that whole time—unless they caused some sort of ruckus in the store just now, I guess, while we were up at the depot.”

“There's a vote of confidence for you,” Chance said dryly.

“They ambushed Jacob Tanner out in Shoshone Gap and tried to kill him,” Marshal Kaiser said.

Ace and Chance looked at each other, and Ace said, “Now I'm sure there's some sort of mistake, Marshal. We don't know this fella Tanner. Never heard of him. We wouldn't have any reason to try to hurt him.”

“Maybe you don't know his name, but he sure as hell knows you. Described both of you right down to a
T
.”

That statement told Ace that Tanner likely had been the bushwhacker who'd tried to kill Chance. Tanner had to have been in the gap or he wouldn't have been able to describe them.

Ace looked down at Bess and Emily. “Who's Tanner?”

“He works for the railroad,” Bess said. “He's some sort of surveyor or engineer.”

“Not the kind that drives a locomotive,” Emily added.

“All right, we've all flapped our gums enough,” Kaiser said. “You two come with me.”

Bess said, “Marshal, these two men came through the gap with us. They couldn't have attacked anybody.”

She was smart, Ace thought. She hadn't said anything about how he and Chance had been ambushed, and how the man who did it must have been Jacob Tanner. That would just muddy the waters. They could figure out later what was going on, but the first order of business was to stay out of jail.

Kaiser frowned. “Were they with you the whole time, from when you met them until you got into town?”

“Well . . . not the
whole
time,” Emily said. “They scouted ahead for a little while.” She looked at her sister, who was frowning at her, and went on, “What? I'm not going to lie to the law for a couple hombres we just met.”

Kaiser gestured with the gun and said to Ace and Chance, “Come on. You can tell your story to the judge . . . when he gets here on his regular circuit in a couple weeks.”

Chance groaned, and Ace knew why. The prospect of spending the next two weeks cooped up in a small-town jail cell was more than Chance could stand, especially since there was no guarantee they would be released after that. Actually, since their accuser was well-known around these parts and they were strangers, it was a real likelihood they would be found guilty and sentenced to prison.

They couldn't let that happen. For one thing, the Corcoran sisters needed help. They might run into trouble on the way back to Palisade. It didn't seem like anybody else was willing to help them.

Normally, Chance was the impulsive, reckless, even hot-headed brother. But before he had an opportunity to think about it too much, Ace decided he wasn't going to be locked up for something he hadn't done and leaped into action.

His left hand shot out and closed around the wrist of Marshal Kaiser's gun hand. He thrust the lawman's arm in the air.

Kaiser yelled, “Hey!” and jerked the trigger. The gun boomed and sent a slug whistling high over the false fronts of the buildings across the street.

At the same time, Ace lifted a punch to the marshal's jaw, hitting Kaiser hard enough to stun him without doing any permanent damage. The lawman sagged and would have fallen if not for Ace's grip on his wrist.

The shot made the townspeople gathered in front of the general store scatter. A couple women screamed, and several men shouted angry curses. A few of them moved forward as if they intended to climb onto the porch and tackle the young strangers.

Chance grabbed his Lightning from the porch and barked, “Stay back, boys! I don't want to hurt anybody.”

Ace wrenched the revolver out of Kaiser's hand and gave the marshal a shove that sent him sprawling. “Let's go!” he snapped at his brother.

The crowd really cleared out as the Jensen boys charged down the steps, each brandishing a gun. Two who didn't flee were Bess and Emily. Bess caught hold of Ace's sleeve and said anxiously, “What are you doing? Now you'll be fugitives!”

“Better than being locked up,” Ace told her.

Chance told Emily, “Maybe we'll see you girls later.”

“And maybe you'll get yourselves lynched, you damn fools!” she responded. Her angry attitude eased a little as she added, “Go on. Get out of here while you've got the chance.”

Even under the extreme circumstances, Chance summoned up a grin for the pretty girl as he jerked the reins loose and swung up in the saddle. Ace was right beside him. They wheeled their horses away from the hitch rack and urged them into a run, streaking through an open space in the thinning crowd.

Behind them, Marshal Kaiser recovered his wits enough to sit up on the mercantile porch and bellow, “Stop them! Somebody stop them before they get away!”

The weapons of the men on the street began to boom as the townies tried to bring down the fleeing brothers. Ace and Chance leaned forward over their horses' necks and galloped west out of Bleak Creek.

The settlement's name was certainly appropriate, Ace thought as they rode past the creek. Their luck had been nothing but bleak.

 

 

They rode hard until they reached Shoshone Gap, then slowed down or risk having their mounts give out. The horses hadn't had much time to rest while they were in the settlement. As they reined in, Ace and Chance turned to look back toward Bleak Creek.

“I don't see any dust,” Chance said. “It appears there's no posse coming after us . . . yet.”

“Kaiser's probably mad as hell, but according to his badge he's just the town marshal, not the sheriff,” Ace pointed out. “He didn't really have the authority to arrest us for something that happened outside the town limits. So he'd probably have trouble convincing enough men they ought to risk their lives by coming after us.”

“Wait a minute. Why didn't you point out that business about his jurisdiction before you grabbed his gun and walloped him?”

“It didn't occur to me until now,” Ace admitted with a sheepish smile. “Anyway, I don't think it would have done much good. Kaiser was dead set on arresting us. He would have thrown us behind bars and promised to look into the jurisdictional issues, then left us there to rot.”

“You're probably right about that. Why was he being so mule-headed, do you reckon?”

“Probably because he wants to stay in the good graces of that fella Tanner. Bess said he works for the railroad. That makes him an important man. Bleak Creek wouldn't amount to much of anything without that spur line.”

“Tanner's the fella who was waiting to ambush those gals when they took the stagecoach through this gap.”

Ace rubbed his chin and frowned in thought. After a moment, he said, “That's what I figured, but maybe not. He could have been out here earlier and seen the ambush, but not been the one who was doing the shooting.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” Chance said grudgingly, “but either way, he lied to the marshal about what happened, and damn if I can see why.”

“It doesn't make any sense to me, either, unless there's some connection between Tanner and Samuel Eagleton, and he doesn't want us helping the Corcoran girls.”

Chance shook his head and sighed. “It's too damn complicated for me. Let's get out of here, just in case the marshal decides to come looking for us after all.”

After everything that had happened, they were wary as they rode through the gap and into the valley beyond, giving them a good view of the mountains on the other side of the valley, as well as Timberline Pass where the stage road ran.

“Look at the way those cliffs jut up,” Ace said as he pointed them out to his brother. “They look a little like a stockade fence, don't they?”

“You think that's how come the town got the name Palisade?”

“It wouldn't surprise me.”

“What are we going to do, Ace? I don't know about you, but I reckon it'd rub me the wrong way to just ride away from this whole mess.”

“What would rub you the wrong way is to ride away from a couple good-looking girls in trouble,” Ace said.

Chance grinned. “Well, there's that to consider, too. If we could give Bess and Emily a hand, there's a good chance they'd be grateful to us, don't you think?”

“And you wouldn't mind that.”

“I wouldn't mind getting to know that blonde a mite better, that's for sure.”

“Emily's got about much fondness for you as she would a rattlesnake.”

“Yes, but I have a charming personality,” Chance insisted. “I can win her over.”

“I think I'd like to see you try,” Ace said. “Might be pretty entertaining. I suppose that's as good a reason as any to hang around here for a while.” He glanced at the sky. “It'll be dark before too much longer. Let's find a place to camp where that marshal won't find us if he comes looking. The stagecoach ought to be coming along here again by the middle of the morning tomorrow.”

They found a spot well off the stage road to make camp and took turns standing guard during the night, after making a cold, scanty supper out of some biscuits left over from a couple days earlier. Coffee would have been good, even though they were running low on it, but they didn't want to risk a fire. The chances of Kaiser leading a posse into the valley to search for them during the night were so small as to be almost nonexistent, but there was no point in being careless.

Just as both brothers expected, the night passed peacefully.

In the morning, they risked a fire to boil some coffee. They could buy more when they got to Palisade.

As they got ready to break camp, Ace said, “I think I'll ride back into the gap and make sure Tanner—or whoever it was—doesn't try to ambush the stagecoach again.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Chance agreed. “Let's go.”

They spent an hour combing through the gap, checking every boulder and clump of trees for hidden gunmen, but the place was deserted. By the time they had assured themselves that Bess and Emily wouldn't be driving into a trap, they could see a column of dust rising from the stage road in the distance.

“Here they come,” Chance said. “I'm looking forward to seeing those gals again.”

“I'm not so sure how happy they'll be to see us. We're probably wanted fugitives. Even if we didn't ambush Tanner, we assaulted a town marshal.”

Chance laughed. “
You're
the one who punched that law dog, brother, not me.”

“I was trying to get both of us out of that mess.”

“Yeah, but I'm innocent of that much, anyway.”

“You haven't been innocent since the day you were born,” Ace muttered as they sat their horses at the entrance to Shoshone Gap, waiting for the stagecoach to arrive.

When it did, Bess began slowing the horses as soon as she saw the Jensen brothers. Dust swirled around the coach as she brought it to a stop.

“What are you two doing here?” Emily asked. “I figured you'd be headed back where you came from, or at least putting some miles between you and Bleak Creek.”

Chance frowned. “Why, we want to make sure that you ladies get back home safely. What sort of gentlemen would we be if we didn't?”

“I wasn't aware that gentlemen went around punching peace officers,” Emily said with a pointed look at Ace.

“That so-called peace officer was going to lock us up for something we didn't do.” Ace wondered when people were going to start getting that through their heads. “Why'd he take Tanner's word over ours? Is Tanner some sort of important man around here?”

“He got the railroad to build that spur,” Bess said. “Bleak Creek was barely a wide place in the trail before that.”

Ace nodded. “I thought it must be something like that. Everybody in town wants to stay on his good side, even the marshal. But here's another question. Why would Tanner lie about us trying to kill him? We've never even met the man, unless you want to count seeing him on the back of his horse trying to get away after his ambush failed.”

Emily said, “We can't just sit here hashing all this out. We have to get back to Palisade. It'll take most of the day.”

“Do you want to come with us?” Bess asked.

“That's the idea,” Chance answered. “Eagleton might send his men to make another try for you.”

Bess slapped the lines against the backs of the team, and the horses leaned into their harness and got the stagecoach rolling again.

As Ace and Chance fell in alongside it, Ace glanced into the coach. “No passengers again today, eh?”

“We don't carry a lot of passengers,” Bess said. “Sometimes some miners going to work in the Golden Dome. That's Mr. Eagleton's mine. Or some drummers who sell merchandise to the stores. But that's about all.”

“That's why the mail contract is so important to us,” Emily elaborated. “The line probably couldn't survive just on carrying passengers. The mail keeps us afloat.”

Ace thought for a few seconds, then asked, “How does Eagleton get the ore from his mine out? Does he ship it on the stage?”

Emily laughed. “Ha. He wouldn't do business with us, except for sending and receiving mail, and he doesn't have any choice about that.”

“He has his own wagons to carry the gold,” Bess explained. “And they're heavily guarded.”

“Any problems with outlaws trying to hold up those gold wagons?” Chance asked.

Emily shook her head. “Not that I've ever heard of. The men who work for him are pretty tough. That's how come he can use them for things like harassing honest business owners who don't want to be gobbled up by his little tinpot empire.”

Ace looked over at his brother and knew that Chance was trying to figure it out, too. Maybe there was no connection between Eagleton, Tanner, and the ambush in Shoshone Gap . . . but that seemed like too much of a coincidence to the Jensens.

As they rode west across the valley, the talk turned to other things. Chance wanted to know more about the Corcoran sisters, and while Emily was taciturn, Bess was willing to fill in some of their background.

“Pa worked for the Butterfield line and for Wells Fargo for a long time. He started out as a hostler and worked his way up to managing stage stations. Emily and I were born at stage stations, different ones because Pa had been transferred in the time between. Emily was born in Julesburg, and I was born in Silver City, both down in New Mexico.”

“We've been to both places,” Chance said. “The fella who raised us moved around a lot, too.”

“Pa said he wanted to settle down in one place, but I'm not sure he really did. Our ma would have liked it, though.”

Emily said, “Too bad she died before she ever got to.”

“Yes, that seemed to change Pa,” Bess said with a sigh. “He regretted that he never gave Ma what she wanted, but he knew she thought Emily and I should have a real home, so he decided he wanted to start his own stage line, someplace with a fairly short route so he could run it and still have time for us. He saved his money, and when he heard about the boom in Palisade he moved us there right after it started and established his business. Mr. Eagleton probably would have started his own stage line when he got around to it, but Pa beat him to it.”

“That's one more reason Eagleton's so damn determined to take us over,” Emily put in. “The man can't stand losing out on anything, even if it's something that really doesn't matter that much to him.”

“What about you two?” Bess asked. “You said you never knew your real folks, and you were raised by a gambler, but surely there's more to your lives than that.”

“Not much,” Ace said with a shrug. “Doc Monday brought us up the best he could. I'm not sure he was really cut out to be raising kids, but he tried hard, I'll give him that. We always had plenty to eat, decent clothes, and a roof over our heads. He made sure we got an education, too.”

“That's right,” Chance said. “By the time I was four years old, I could shuffle a deck of cards better than most. You should've seen the way I handled those pasteboards!”

“I was thinking more of the way he always made sure we went to school, wherever we were. He said our mother had been a schoolteacher at one time, so he figured it would be important to her for us to learn as much as we could. We both like to read, so I reckon we probably got that from her.”

“Your father might have liked to read, too,” Bess suggested.

Ace shrugged. “Maybe. We don't know a thing about him. I'm not sure Doc ever knew anything about him, except that his name was Jensen.”

“Like Smoke Jensen,” Emily said. “The gunfighter. I've heard of him.”

Chance groaned. “Don't get Ace started on Smoke Jensen. As it happens, we actually met that hombre not that long ago, and he has been wondering ever since then if we might be related.”

“You met Smoke Jensen?” It was the first time in the relatively short time they had known Emily that she actually seemed impressed by something about the brothers.

“Yeah, just briefly,” Ace said. “We got in a little scrape in a town back down the trail a ways, and he stepped in to give us a hand. I think he was just passing through and happened to be in the same saloon we were.”

Emily leaned forward on the driver's seat as she asked, “Did he shoot anybody?”

“You don't have to sound so bloodthirsty,” Bess told her.

“There wasn't any shooting,” Ace replied with a shake of his head. “Just a little ruckus. He did draw his gun once, though. He just didn't have to shoot.”

“Was he as fast as everybody says?”

“Hard to tell. We were slapping leather at the same time, so we weren't really watching him. At least I wasn't.”

Chance said, “To tell you the truth, I think I shaded him just a hair.”

“You did not!” Emily cried in disbelief. “You did not outdraw Smoke Jensen.”

Chance shrugged casually. “You weren't there. I'm just tellin' you what it looked like to me.”

“How gullible do you think I am?” Emily said with a snort. “Some saddle tramp outdrawing Smoke Jensen . . . that'll be the day!”

It was after noon by the time the stagecoach reached the foot of the long climb to Timberline Pass. Making the ascent would take most of the rest of the day, Bess explained as she stopped to rest the team. Going up was a lot slower job than coming down had been.

“Of course, the last time we had to come down faster than we usually do, since Mr. Eagleton's men were chasing us and shooting to spook the horses,” she added.

“I've been thinking about that,” Ace said. “They shot over your heads deliberately, didn't they? That way, if the stagecoach went off the trail and crashed, your bodies would be found in the wreckage but wouldn't have any bullet holes in them. Nothing to tie back to Eagleton what happened. That's pretty cunning.”

“Nobody ever said Eagleton wasn't smart,” Emily put in. “Just that he's a lowdown skunk.”

“Yes, but if he'd go to that much trouble to cover his tracks, why have somebody ambush you in Shoshone Gap? If you were gunned down, everybody would know you'd been murdered.”

Emily shrugged. “Don't ask me how a varmint like Eagleton thinks.”

“One way or another,” Chance said, “he wanted you two girls to wind up dead . . . and that's something he can't get away with.”

“We can talk about that later,” Bess said. “We usually stop here and have something to eat. By the way, we picked up those supplies you boys left at the general store in Bleak Creek.”

“We appreciate that,” Ace said. “We'll pay you back for them.”

“Darn right you will,” Emily said. “We're not made out of money.”

They ate in the shade of some aspens, making do with bacon, coffee, and some biscuits the Corcoran sisters had brought from the café in Bleak Creek. It was actually a pretty pleasant meal, as even Emily relaxed and wasn't as prickly as she had been most of the time.

However, the shadow of the trouble that had been plaguing the stage line still hung over them, and none of them could quite manage to completely forget about it.

When the meal was finished and the team was rested, they started the climb to the pass. As Bess had said, it was slow going as the big draft horses strained against the harness and the stagecoach creaked and wobbled. Ace and Chance followed it on horseback, since the road wasn't wide enough for them to ride alongside.

Both brothers constantly scanned the slope above them for any sign of another ambush or any other sort of trouble. By the time the coach reached the halfway point of the climb, nothing unusual had happened.

Bess brought the vehicle to a halt on a wider, level spot where the trail doubled back on itself in one of those hairpin turns. “We always stop here for a half hour or so to let the horses blow again. Then we'll tackle the last stretch to the top.”

Ace and Chance dismounted so their horses could rest, too. From where they were, they could look out across the valley and easily see all the way to Shoshone Gap ten miles away.

“From up here it looks like the stage road runs straight as a string,” Ace commented.

“Well, not quite,” Bess said. “There are a few turns. But yes, it's almost straight. It's an easy route.”

He nodded. “That makes it good for a stagecoach. This part we're on now is the roughest part of the whole run, I reckon.”

Emily said, “That's the truth.”

“Ever have a coach go off the road on the way up or down?”

“Not yet. Hopefully not ever.”

Chance said, “If one ever did, anybody unlucky enough to be on it wouldn't survive the fall.”

“Let's not talk about that,” Bess suggested. “We know what the risks are, and we're willing to run them.” She started to pick up the reins. “The horses are probably rested enough by now—”

Before she could go on, a loud scraping noise came from somewhere above them, followed by an ominous rumble. Ace jerked his head back, looked up toward the pass, and saw dust starting to rise. That could only mean one thing.

“Avalanche!” he yelled.