Massacre Canyon (15 page)

Bitter anger filled Deputy United States Marshal Simon Ford as he stood at the bar in a Prescott saloon and nursed a glass of bourbon from his home state of Kentucky. All the long, hard months he had spent pursuing the Kroll gang, he thought, and he had been cast aside like he was nothing.

Once a spring blizzard had caught him by surprise in Wyoming after they had robbed a bank in Laramie, and he had come perilously close to freezing to death before he found shelter.

Another time he had been following their trail across the Texas Panhandle when a sudden thunderstorm swooped up and a tornado descended from the clouds and nearly snatched him up. He'd had to pull his horse into a little wash and force the animal to lie down. Then he'd flattened himself as much as possible while the twister roared past only yards away like a runaway freight train.

Then there was the time some of the outlaws lingered behind the others and bushwhacked him. When the weather was damp, his side still ached where the bullet had drilled him. He'd been forced to hole up in some rocks and had nearly bled to death before the human buzzards finally left. He was pretty sure Mordecai Kroll had been among the men who ambushed him.

Ford could come up with a dozen more instances like those, occasions when he had almost caught up with the gang or when he had almost lost his own life trying to bring them to justice.

The knowledge that a bounty hunter—one of the lowest forms of life on the face of the earth as far as Simon Ford was concerned—had brought in Mordecai Kroll was like a knife in the gut to him. He could have lived with it, though, since Rudolph and the rest of the gang were still out there somewhere and he could continue devoting his efforts to tracking them down.

But then this Smoke Jensen—brother to the bounty hunter and a gunslinger and former fugitive from justice himself—had to show up and convince Governor Frémont to let Mordecai go. The crazy scheme that Jensen had hatched would never work. Ford was certain of that. All it would accomplish was having Mordecai Kroll free in the world again to rob and rape and kill.

Ford picked up the shot glass in front of him and threw back the rest of the bourbon.

“You drink that like a man who has some serious business to attend to.”

Ford frowned and looked over to see who had spoken. A young, attractive, dark-haired woman stood there with a half-smile on her richly curved red lips. She wore a gray traveling outfit that she made look elegant, despite the fact that it wasn't terribly expensive.

“A saloon like this is no place for a respectable woman,” Ford told her. He hadn't downed enough bourbon to be drunk, but he felt the liquor a little.

“I'm not a respectable woman,” she said. “I'm a reporter.”

“Newspaper?”

“Magazine. I write for
Harper's Weekly
.”

“Impressive,” Ford said. He signaled for the bartender to refill the glass. “You're wrong about me having serious business to attend to, though. Right now drinking is the only business I have.”

The bartender came over with a bottle, but the young woman put her hand over the top of Ford's glass and coolly said, “You're the one who's wrong, Marshal. Your business is talking with me. I'd like to interview you.”

That took Ford by surprise.

“Why in the world would you want to do that?” he asked her.

“You're Simon Ford, the famous lawman who's devoted his life to tracking down the Kroll gang. A lot of people know about you, and yet you've never been interviewed for a national magazine. I'm sure there are many facts about your life and work that would interest the readers of
Harper's
.”

Ford grunted and said, “You mean I'm the man who's had the job of tracking down the Kroll gang taken away from him.”

“I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about.”

Ford waved a hand and shook his head.

“Forget it,” he told her. “It's a sad, sordid story, not worth the telling.”

“Sometimes those are the best kind,” she said as she leaned in closer to him. “Does this have anything to do with your meeting with Governor Frémont and District Attorney Hampton from Apache County? That's the county where Mordecai Kroll was tried, isn't it?”

“How do you know I talked to the governor?” Ford asked, somewhat surprised.

“A good reporter has her sources, and she doesn't reveal them,” the young woman murmured. “I know there was another man at that meeting, too, but I haven't been able to determine who he was. Why did the governor order you to stop pursuing the Kroll gang, Marshal?”

“Who told you that?”

“You did, just a minute ago. You said the job was taken away from you, and I know you met with Governor Frémont, so I just assumed . . .”

“You're smart.”

“For a woman, you mean?” she said, and this time her voice had a trace of waspishness in it.

“No, I just mean that you're smart. Being a woman doesn't have anything to do with anything. Except the fact that you're good-looking, and you can't deny that.”

She laughed and said, “I had no intention of denying it. So, Marshal, will you give me that interview?”

“Here?” He waved a hand to indicate the saloon around them, which was handy to the territorial capital but a far cry from fancy.

“I'm staying at a hotel not far from here. But before you get the wrong idea,” she went on quickly, “I was suggesting that we talk in the lobby there.”

“Of course,” Ford said, although for a brief moment he had entertained other ideas. “Before we continue this conversation, though, I really think you should tell me your name.”

“It's Darcy,” she said with a smile. “Darcy Garnett.”

 

 

Darcy wouldn't have said that it was easy to get Marshal Simon Ford to tell her what she wanted to know . . . but it wasn't all that difficult, either. Despite his reputation as a tireless manhunter, he was still a man, and Darcy knew how to bend them to her will. The right combination of flattery and hints of a possible romantic interest would get any man to talk.

“I grew up in Kentucky,” he said as they sat in armchairs in the hotel lobby. “My father was a horse trainer, but I never had the knack for it. I can ride the beasts, but that's about all. When I was old enough I went to work as a deputy sheriff. It didn't take me long to discover that was where my real talents lay. Enforcing the law, tracking down outlaws, seeing that justice is done . . . those are the things I'm good at, if I do say so myself.”

“Everyone else says the same thing about you, Marshal,” Darcy told him.

“Well, I never set out to make a big reputation for myself. All I was ever interested in is doing my job.”

“After bringing in as many outlaws as you have, it must have been very frustrating to have the Kroll gang elude capture.”

He frowned, and Darcy hoped she hadn't gone too far. But no, her instincts had led her correctly, she saw as he said, “It wasn't really frustration I felt. It was determination. I figured I could do the job better than anyone else.”

“But then Luke Jensen captured Mordecai Kroll.”

“Luke Jensen was lucky,” Ford spat out. His face darkened with anger, and Darcy wasn't sure whom he hated more, Mordecai Kroll for being an outlaw or Luke Jensen for catching him. “And, of course, the most important thing is that an evil man like that was no longer free to harm innocent people. That's what I really care about the most.”

He was lying, Darcy thought. She had no doubt about that. But she just nodded sympathetically instead of saying anything. After a moment Ford continued, as she expected.

“Rudolph Kroll and the rest of the gang are still on the loose, you know.”

“I'm sure you planned to continue your pursuit of them.”

“Yes, of course. I'll never rest until the whole terrible lot of them are either dead or behind bars where they belong.”

“But Governor Frémont doesn't agree with that.”

“Frémont was taken in by a crazy scheme,” Ford said bitterly. He took a cigar from his vest pocket and stuck it in his mouth, clamping his teeth down on the cylinder of tobacco without lighting it. He asked around it, “Do you know who Smoke Jensen is?”

“There's a notorious gunfighter by that name.” Darcy sat up straighter as genuine surprise gripped her. “Wait a minute. Is Smoke Jensen related to Luke Jensen?”

“Evidently they're brothers.”

“I should have known,” she murmured.

“Why? Jensen isn't that uncommon a name. There's even a third brother, a young gunman named Matt. Although I gather that he's adopted, not a blood relation.”

Matt Jensen's name was vaguely familiar to Darcy, too. She said, “What do those two men have to do with Luke Jensen, other than being related to him?”

“Jensen's been captured by the Kroll gang,” Ford blurted out.

Thank goodness for liquor and jealousy, Darcy thought . . . the reporter's best friends.

“You mean Luke Jensen?”

“Yeah. And his brother Smoke has hatched this wild plan to rescue him by breaking Mordecai Kroll out of jail and taking him to the gang's hideout to return him to Rudolph.”

Darcy's heart was racing now, but she made an effort not to let the marshal see how excited she was. She said, “Smoke Jensen was the other man at that meeting with Governor Frémont and District Attorney Hampton?”

“Yeah.” Ford rolled the cheroot from one corner of his mouth to the other. “I thought Frémont was too smart to go along with Jensen's plan, but Jensen talked him into it.”

Darcy listened avidly as the details of Smoke's plan poured out of Ford's mouth. When he sobered up in the morning, he might regret spilling all this to a reporter . . . if he even remembered doing it.

Actually, he started to look a little wary now as he asked, “Are you going to write about all this for
Harper's
?”

“Oh, someday, perhaps,” she replied easily. “Right now it's just background, so I can get the whole picture, you know.”

Ford nodded and said, “Good. I don't normally talk like this . . . especially to reporters.”

She smiled warmly at him.

“I'm not just any reporter,” she said. “I feel like you and I are already friends, Marshal Ford.”

“Yeah.”

She could practically see the wheels of his brain turning. He was wondering whether or not to suggest that they have a drink together in her room . . . or his.

She stood up and said, “Thank you so much for talking to me. I'll keep all this confidential for the moment, I assure you.”

He had gotten to his feet when she did. He nodded and said, “That would probably be a good idea. If there's anything else . . .”

“No, I have all I need for now. Thank you again.”

She put a gloved hand on his forearm for a second, smiled again, and turned to leave.

“You didn't make any notes while we were talking,” he said.

She looked back at him and said, “I didn't need to.” She tapped the side of her head. “It's all up here.”

And so was the use to which she was going to put the information he had given her. She hadn't lied to him; she wasn't going to write about Smoke Jensen's plan and Governor Frémont's decision to remove Ford from the case. Not yet.

Not when the rest of the story was out there just waiting for her.

Smoke's messages to Matt and Preacher had asked them to get in touch with Sheriff Monte Carson when they received the telegrams, and since starting out for Prescott, Smoke had sent wires to Monte himself, keeping the lawman up to date on his progress. When Monte heard from Matt and Preacher, he was supposed to instruct them to meet Smoke in Prescott.

As it turned out, Matt was closer and reached Prescott first. He had been riding shotgun for Wells Fargo, he explained to Smoke when they met in the hotel, and had broken up a gang of unusual stagecoach robbers just before getting Smoke's telegram.

“But that story can wait for later,” Matt said. “What's this all about, Smoke? The Indian Ring acting up again?”

“Actually, I'd rather wait until Preacher gets here, so I'll only have to tell it once,” Smoke said. “The whole thing's a mite complicated.”

“When do you expect him?”

“I'm not sure. When Monte heard from him, he was up in Dakota Territory, at Deadwood, so it's going to take a little longer for him to get here.”

When Monte had let the old mountain man know that Smoke was going to be meeting with Governor Frémont, even without knowing what it was all about Preacher had suggested that Smoke bring up the time he and Frémont and Kit Carson had stood up to those Cheyenne horse thieves. Monte had passed that along, and Smoke had made good use of it. Now he was anxious for Preacher to arrive so the three of them could put their heads together and work out the details of the plan.

As it turned out, Preacher reached Prescott only a little more than a day after Matt. He had been able to take the train part of the way, which had cut down on the time he needed to get there. That evening the three of them sat down to supper in Smoke's hotel room, the meal having been brought up from the kitchen. Smoke was staying in the best place in Prescott. Despite his utter lack of pretension, the Sugarloaf had made him a wealthy man.

“The first thing I have to do,” Smoke began, “is tell you about Luke Jensen.”

“Your older brother who was killed in the war,” Matt said.

“Well, that's just it,” Smoke said slowly. “Turns out Luke wasn't killed after all.”

Both of the other men looked surprised. Matt exclaimed, “What?”

“Luke was badly wounded when some men he thought were his friends betrayed him. They shot him and left him for dead.”

Preacher squinted at him and said, “You're talkin' about them varmints you killed up yonder in Idaho a while back.”

“That's right,” Smoke said. “In fact, I believed that you were dead then, too.”
²

“I'm pretty hard to kill.”

“Turns out Luke was, too. He survived, and he's been living for the past fifteen years under another name.”

“Why would he do that?” Matt asked. “How come he never got in touch with you?”

Smoke shrugged and said, “He had his reasons. They seemed like good ones to him, I reckon. He called himself Luke Smith, and he made his living as a bounty hunter. Still does, although he's calling himself Jensen again now.”

“I reckon the two o' you must'a run into each other,” Preacher said.

“He gave me a hand with some trouble a while back,” Smoke said. “And we've tried to keep in touch, although I have to say he's not very good at it. I guess he's just gotten too used to being a loner after all these years.”

Matt said, “Did you ever intend to introduce us to him, Smoke?”

“Of course, I did,” Smoke said. He thought Matt sounded a little put out. “The three of us just haven't gotten together for a while, and I wanted to tell you about this face to face, instead of in a letter or telegram.”

“Well, I guess that makes sense,” Matt said, mollified by the explanation. “But now the reason you asked us to meet you here has something to do with Luke, doesn't it?”

“That's right.”

Quickly, Smoke sketched in the history of the situation, beginning with Luke's capture of Mordecai Kroll. When he was finished, Preacher said, “I figured you sent us them wires 'cause of some shenanigans the Indian Ring was pullin', but this ain't got nothin' to do with them, does it?”

“Not this time,” Smoke said. “This time it's personal Jensen family business. They can't go after one of us—”

“Without going after all of us,” Matt finished.

“But you and Preacher haven't even met Luke,” Smoke pointed out. “Are you sure you want to risk your necks by going up against a whole gang of vicious outlaws like the Kroll bunch, just to maybe save his life?”

“He's a Jensen, ain't he?” Preacher said.

“He's family,” Matt added. “Simple as that.” Smoke grinned and said, “I pretty well figured you'd feel that way, both of you.”

“All right,” Matt said. “Now that that's settled, fill us in on what we're going to do.”

 

 

Simon Ford stopped with the pencil in his hand poised over the telegraph form he had spread out on the counter. He read the words he had just printed on the form. Just ten words, but they were enough to change the world.
His
world, anyway.

Surprisingly, he discovered that he didn't really have to think about what he was doing. His mind was made up, and he was confident that he was taking the right course of action, the same natural confidence that had carried him through a long, successful career as a lawman.

Following the other words, he printed: STOP SIMON FORD.

That brought a grim smile to his lips under the drooping mustache.

Nobody was going to stop Simon Ford from doing what was right. Not Governor John Charles Frémont, not some backwater district attorney, and sure as hell not a gunslinger like Smoke Jensen.

He didn't work for Frémont, of course, but rather for the United States Justice Department. The governor couldn't order him to step away from his pursuit of the Kroll gang.

But Frémont could make a formal request that he do so, and as the governor of the territory his request would be honored by Washington. It would carry even more weight because of who Frémont was, his own illustrious background, and the fact that his late father-in-law was Thomas Hart Benton, the powerful, long-time senator from Missouri. Benton had been dead for more than twenty years, but his reputation still cast a shadow in Washington. All of that insured that the Justice Department would go along with Frémont's wishes.

Ford couldn't abide that. He put down the pencil, picked up the telegraph form, and carried it over to the window where he handed it to the telegrapher.

“That goes to the Chief Marshal for the Western District at the Denver Federal Building,” Ford told the Western Union man.

The telegrapher read the message, then glanced up at Ford from under his green eyeshade.

“I'm not really supposed to ask this,” he said, “but are you sure you really want to send this, Marshal?”

“I wouldn't have written it and given it to you if I wasn't sure,” Ford snapped.

“Of course,” the man said. He reached for his key and started tapping out the message.

When Ford left the Western Union office a couple of minutes later after paying for the telegram out of his own pocket, he felt as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. With that chore taken care of, he could get on with his work. His
real
work.

As he walked along the street, he thought briefly about the young woman called Darcy Garnett. He remembered her name and that she was a journalist who wrote for
Harper's Weekly
. He recalled meeting her in the saloon and then sitting and talking with her in the lobby of her hotel. She was a beautiful, intelligent young woman, he knew that much.

What he didn't know was exactly how much he had told her about the Kroll case and the plan Smoke Jensen wanted to put into effect soon. Ford supposed he had had a bit more to drink that night than he'd thought at the time, because his memories of the conversation with Miss Garnett were fuzzy.

Since that conversation several nights earlier, he had hoped to see her again so he could sound her out about what he'd said and maybe ask her again to keep everything confidential for the time being. She had checked out of the hotel, however, and although he had looked from one end of Prescott to the other, he found no sign of her. Clearly, she had left town.

He couldn't do anything about that. He would have to trust her judgment. When faced with a problem he couldn't solve, Simon Ford didn't linger on it or brood about it. Instead, he put it behind him and moved on to the next challenge.

That was what he did now. His career as a lawman had given him a great many odd bits of information, and he had filed them all away in his mind because a man never knew what might come in handy. He had asked around Prescott and had been given the name of a man, a name he recognized. The sort of a man he would have arrested under normal circumstances, but as far as Ford knew, he wasn't wanted, despite all the rumors about his previous activities.

And these were far from normal circumstances, too. Sometimes you had to make a deal with a lesser devil in order to catch a greater one.

He went into a saloon and looked around. He'd been told that the man he wanted to talk to could be found here most of the time. The description he had was a good one. The man sat at a table in the back, drinking and playing cards with two other men. The pot in the center of the table looked small, meaning the stakes were low and the game was a friendly one.

The man was slouched in his chair, but even so, Ford could tell that he was tall and well-built. He was dressed all in dusty black range clothes, from the boots on his feet to the hat pushed back on a tangle of sandy curls. He was a handsome man, Ford supposed; the former marshal was no real judge of such things.

One of the other men at the table gave Ford a twitchy glance as he approached. He said, “Lawdog.” He and the third man, whose face seemed as lean and sharp as an ax blade, tensed and sat up straighter.

Their black-clad companion didn't seem bothered, though. He barely spared Ford a glance, then put down his cards and said, “Three jacks, boys. I don't think you'll beat that.”

The other two tossed in their cards. The man in black grinned and raked the pot to him. Then he looked up and asked, “Something I can do for you, Marshal Ford?”

“You know who I am,” Ford said.

“Sure. Just like you know who I am. We're sort of in the same line of work, just on different sides.” The man chuckled. “Although, nobody's been able to prove that yet.”

“You haven't heard the latest news. I'm not a marshal anymore.”

The man cocked a bushy eyebrow and said, “Oh? As of when?”

“As of about ten minutes ago. I just sent my resignation to the chief marshal in Denver. I'm just a private citizen now, Clinton, and it's as a private citizen I want to discuss a business proposition with you.”

If the notorious gunman Jesse Clinton was surprised by that, he didn't show it. Instead, he said to his companions, “Clear out, boys. It looks like Marshal—I mean, Mister—Simon Ford and I are gonna talk turkey.”