Spirit Of The Mountain Man/ordeal Of The Mountain Man (Pinnacle Westerns) (19 page)

Brokenhorn spread his full lips in a wide, white smile. “So he does of you, Monte Carson.” He made the name sound like one word.

“Please, call me Monte.”

“I am Tom.”

“Are you Christian, then, Tom?”

A dry chuckle came from Chief Brokenhorn. “In name only. My mother was attracted to the words of the Black-robes from the Queen-Mother land before I was born. She had the sacred water sprinkled on her. And, she gave me one of your white men’s names. For a while, the Black-robes kept a mission among our people. When I was little, I went to school there, taught by the Fathers. I learned
Français
and English. Also a little of the tongue called Latin. The Fathers wanted me to become the first red man priest. But I knew I was not made to be a medicine man, I was to be chief.”

Monte grinned at him. “Funny the grand ideas a feller has when he’s a little boy. I always wanted to be a lawman…or a famous outlaw.”

Brokenhorn nodded. “And we both had our dreams become real, Monte.”

Nodding, Monte agreed with him. “So we did. Though I never became a
famous
outlaw, Tom. No stomach for it.”

Chief Brokenhorn laughed aloud. “That is why I am a civil chief. I have taken the war trail many times in the past, was head man of my warrior society, but I never liked the stealing and killing.”

“You are a wise man, Tom. Now, tell me about Smoke.”

“He came through here five suns ago. Bad men came before him. Nearly eight hands—er—forty of them. I suspect that our friend, Smoke Jensen, hunted them. And I also think that they hunted him.”

Monte nodded. “You’re right there, Tom. That’s why Hank there and me came after him.”

“I have warriors keeping watch. The bad men are in the white village of Dubois.” He pronounced the town’s name in the French manner, as
Du-bwoah.

A grim expression darkened Monte’s face. “Then Smoke will be goin’ there before long.”

“Monte, Smoke told me he would be going to the basin the white trapper, Jackson, found many years ago.”

“Yes. He told me the same, Tom. I’ll go there first.”

“I will send warriors with you, men to replace the watchers. First, though, you must stay with us a while, rest your horses and let them grow fat again. It is not known if there are more bad men coming, but our neighbors, the Arapaho,” he made the name sound unclean, “say that some do, by two or three in a group. We must learn what we can before you go.”

Monte nodded. “I agree. Looks like Smoke’s stumbled into another hornet’s nest,” he added grimly.

A pot of beans bubbled over the small fire on the vast breast of the mountain slope. Nearby, the whole carcass of a young antelope turned on a green wooden spit. Ike Mitchell and the hands from the Sugarloaf had arrived on the southeastern face of the Rattlesnake Hills shortly before sundown. Without being bidden, Bobby Harris began to gather dry wood for the cookfire. The small stone ring radiated heat as the temperature dropped with the coming of night. Several of the men complained over the past few days about the food.

With good cause, Bobby thought as he sat on a flat-topped boulder, staring out across an ocean of grass. The hams they had brought along had run out two days earlier. That left a slab of bacon, already green around the edges and slickly white on the rind. It smelled sour while being cooked and tasted the same way. Until today they had not taken time to hunt and dress out game for the cook pot. This afternoon, when two men had upchucked their noon meal, and three others had refused to eat, necessity had forced it.

It slowed progress. Yet Ike reckoned they had closed a lot of ground and, since losing the trail of the kidnappers, they might catch up to Smoke within a few days. They had better, and before the army of outlaws did, Bobby thought in irritation and impatience. He had toughed a lot, the boy realized. No longer did his thighs and crotch ache through the night, keeping him awake. He slept so hard now that he did not even hear the snores of the tired hands. They just had to find Smoke. He’d know how to get Sally back. Bobby stirred and broke off his distant stare across the rolling steppe of Shoshoni Basin when Ike stopped beside him and gave his shoulder a firm squeeze.

“A nickel for your thoughts, Bobby.”

Bobby forced a warm smile. It was hard not liking this strong, silent man. “The price has gone up,” he observed cheerily. “I was…thinkin’ about Sally an’ where she is. And…about Smoke.”

Ike nodded. “Ain’t a man among us that has anything else on his mind. You worried we won’t find her?”

Bobby drew a deep breath. “I’m worried we’ll find her all alone and…too late.” He shuddered, his thin shoulders heaving.

“No, Bobby. I can’t let myself believe that could happen. She’ll be all right. She’s a tough lady. Smoke’s taught her how to be a survivor.”

“I hope she remembers what she learned,” Bobby sighed. “And—and she’s not young anymore.”

Ike laughed softly. “Now, that depends on your point of view. There’s men ridin’ with us who’d see Miss Sally as a spry girl, compared to themselves. Thinkin’ like that’s for a small boy—rather than a growed-up member of a volunteer possee,” he hastily added, lest Bobby explode again. “I come to tell you, grub’s ready.”

Bobby’s blue eyes glowed in the firelight. “Yum. I can taste that antelope now.”

“Over-growed goat, you ask me,” Ike muttered as he led the way back to the cookfire. There still being some left, he thought, they might pop a buffalo out on the basin. Now that’d be some real eatin’.

When Buck Ballard and Liam Quinn reached Dubois, their spirits hung below their horses’ fetlocks. Dirty, sweaty, faces powder-grimed, they presented a disreputable spectacle that Victor Spectre watched coldly as they paraded down the main street. They halted before the Full Bucket Saloon and asked directions to locate Spectre. When they entered the lobby of the hotel, they looked even more like whipped dogs.

“We’re lookin’ for Mr. Spectre,” Liam Quinn mumbled.

“I am he,” Spectre stated icily. “Who are you?”

“I’m Liam Quinn, an’ this is Buck Ballard. We’re what’s left of seven men comin’ to sign on to hunt Smoke Jensen.”

“Where are the others?” Ralph Tinsdale demanded from beside Victor Spectre.

Quinn shrugged. “Back in Jackson’s Hole, dead as far as I know.”

Olin Buckner sniffed with distaste. “What happened?”

“It seems, we already ran into Smoke Jensen.”

Victor Spectre retook the initiative. “How do you know that?”

Liam Quinn studied his boot toes. “He—ah—sent you a message, Mr. Spectre.”

Face twisted in contempt for Smoke Jensen, Ralph Tinsdale snapped, “What possibly could he have to say to you, Victor?”

Quinn told them what Smoke had said. Buckner and Tinsdale exploded with outrage. Buckner swore blackly, hate blistering the air as he called Smoke everything but a man. Tinsdale took exception to Smoke’s claim to be better than the best guns they could hire. He called the last mountain man a two-bit, tinhorn, has-been. They would have said more, had not Victor Spectre cut them off in mid-tirade.

“Relax. We still hold the reins. Let Jensen think he has us off balance, quivering in our boots, afraid of shadows.” He turned to Ballard and Quinn. “Do you men still intend to join us?”

“Yes, sir,” Quinn answered for them both.

Spectre sniffed the effluvium that emanated from them. “Then get yourselves cleaned up. You’re disreputable.” He turned on his partners. “Make no mistake, we are in control. When the men with Nate Miller get back from Colorado, Smoke Jensen will come crawling. And when he does, he will die.”

Smoke Jensen came to Dubois much sooner than Victor Spectre expected. Two nights after Ballard and Quinn reached the captive town, Smoke joined a group of would-be hard cases drinking in the Watering Hole Saloon in Dubois. He stood alone at the darkened end of the bar and sipped a beer. None of the louts and trash had recognized him when he entered. He continued to taste his brew while they bragged about how ferocious they would be when they got their hands on Smoke Jensen.

Obviously amateurs, they began to amuse him. One fellow in particular: a florid-face, a fat-gut spilling over the buckle of his cartridge belt, a big, porous wart of a nose, a mouth too wide and thin-lipped, a regular toad of a man, who had a new opinion of what to do with every sloppy swallow from his schooner of beer. If only silly words counted in a gunfight, Smoke thought.

Unaware of the contempt of Smoke Jensen, the slob brayed on. “I say the first thing we do is hold him down and cut off his tallywhacker. That’ll make him squirm.”

Sweet fellow,
Smoke Jensen thought. Another gulp and he was off again.

“Yah, then we feed it to him.” That brought a lot of laughs.

“Naw, that wouldn’t work,” another lout contradicted. “He’d bleed to death before we could hurt him more. Mr. Spectre wants him brought in alive. Speakin’ of that, Prager, when are you goin’ out after Jensen?”

The lard tub interrupted a swallow of suds to gape at his interrogator. “Me? Hell, Woodson, I ain’t goin’ anywhere until the free board and room and the beer run out. If Jensen wants to take me on, he can come to me.”

In the silence that followed, Olin Buckner entered the saloon. He made a long sweep of the men arranged along the bar and came to an eye-bulging halt on the distant figure of Smoke Jensen. Instantly in shock, his mouth worked a second before he could sound words.

“He already has, you idiot!” he yelled at Harlan Prager, a trembling finger pointed at Smoke Jensen. “He’s right down there.” With tremendous will, he broke his paralysis and grabbed for the 1875 Smith and Wesson, Schofield, Wells Fargo Model .45 at his hip.

The first thing Smoke did was shoot Buckner. Then he shot out the lights. In the process of taking out the five kerosene lamps, he dived for the floor. Confusion broke out at once. Thugs slammed into one another shouting. Shots slammed the walls, echoed and re-echoed. His six-gun empty, Smoke reholstered it and drew the second. He crawled through the maze of churning legs, tables, and chairs toward the open end of the bar. Muzzle flashes continued to momentarily illuminate the scene of struggling men, all intent on reaching the corner of the bar where Smoke had stood. In a double flame brightness, Smoke found himself face-to-face with Harlan Prager. The lard-tub gaped and opened his mouth to shout to the others.

“B’god, here h—”

Smoke shot Prager in the gut. Moaning, the fat outlaw fumbled to draw his own weapon. He did, only much too late. Prager fired a round that smacked into the shoulder of a fellow hard case. Blood spouted, along with dust and bits of cloth. Prager’s eyes went wide. He raised the six-gun again.

Smoke Jensen fired his second round. It bored a hole in the chest of Harlan Prager. Thrown sideways, Prager fought to keep himself erect, while his knees sagged beneath his weight. He groaned loudly, feebly raised his long-barreled revolver, and died as Smoke Jensen expended a third round on him. In the confusion, Smoke moved on.

He soon found his goal.

A black void stretched behind the mahogany. Smoke crawled into it. Sure enough, as he had expected, he soon found a “priest’s hole” in the outer wall of the saloon. It soon became obvious, because of its gaping openness, that the bartender had preceded him. Quickly, Smoke wedged his shoulders through the small doorway and out into the cool night. He found himself in a narrow alley that paralleled the long sidewall of the liquor emporium. Smoke sensed the presence of someone else in the passageway and had his Colt out and pressed into a yielding stomach before the barkeep whispered urgently.

“Don’t shoot, Mr. Jensen. I live here an’ I know you’re an all right guy. I was here when you cleaned up the town. I want you to know I shot out the lamps at the ends of the bar.” He breathed a gusty sigh of relief when the pressure of the six-gun eased off.

“Thank you for that.”

“You’ll need a way out of here. I’ll show you where to go.”

“My horse is out front,” Smoke told him.

“I’ll get him for you.”

Smoke’s soft chuckle sounded loud in the tense atmosphere. “He won’t let you. I’ll go get him. Wait here.”

Thunder remained where Smoke had tied him off half a block from the saloon. Sounds of chaos still came from the darkened barroom. Smoke walked over, unmolested, and retrieved the ’Palouse stallion. In seconds he disappeared into the alley. While he accomplished this, a question occurred to him.

“Why did you wait for me in this alley?”

“I figured you might know about the priest’s hole.”

Smoke tipped back his hat while the barman led the way away from the saloon. “I’m flattered. What I want to know is why did you have one handy?”

“I’m a Catholic, so I knew about them from church history. You know, the persecutions in England and Holland a long time ago? So, I had one put in the Watering Hole when I bought it.”

“Clever.”

A half dozen twists and turns later, the bartender pointed down a long, dark residential street. “Keep goin’ along there and you come to the edge of town. My name’s O’Roarke and it’s been an honor to assist you.”

“Thank you, O’Roarke. I’ll never forget a fellow student of history.”

Smoke went on alone. He would be exiting on the south side of town, but he could easily swing west and then north, to head back toward the Absaroka Range and Togwatee Pass. The Hole lay just beyond.

Early the next morning, Spectre’s army of riffraff and thugs forced the citizens of Dubois to assemble at gunpoint. The place where they gathered was before five houses on the downwind edge of town. After a long wait, Victor Spectre stepped up onto the porch of the middle structure and addressed the crowd.

“The reason we are here this morning is for you to witness an object lesson. This is in payment for the audacity of Smoke Jensen to actually enter this town and brazenly create a riot in a respectable saloon. To show you and him that we are serious about maintaining order in Dubois, we are going to burn these five houses to the ground.”

An elderly, white-haired man, back bent with age and rheumatism, stumbled forward out of the press of people. “No, please. Don’t do that. It cost me every cent I had to build that house. It’s for my sunset years.”

Victor Spectre stared icily at him. “It’s too bad you picked such an unruly town in which to settle. Torch them, men.”

Wails of anguish rose from the victims as the flames spread. Their neighbors consoled them as much as they could, being under the guns of the outlaws. When the flames reached the roof-tops, Victor Spectre and Ralph Tinsdale moved away. Spectre caught the eye of Gus Jaeger and signaled him to join them.

When they had gathered off to one side, Spectre spoke quietly to them. “Until now, we have given no thought to going after Smoke Jensen. Now he has come to us without the bait even being in place. Furthermore, with Olin Buckner in bed, gut-shot and not expected to live, I think the insult is great enough that we should take the battle to him. Augustus, I want you to select a dozen men and send them after Jensen. Pick up his trail. It will be devious, but it can be done. I suspect he is hiding in Jackson’s Hole. Have them pursue him relentlessly. I do not want a repeat of this sort of thing. Tell them to pin him to the ground and send word. We will come wherever they are and kill him there. If that is not possible, have him killed on the spot.”

Anticipating pursuit, Smoke Jensen made it easy for the outlaws to find his trail and follow him. At least he did until mid-morning, the next day, when he reached the foothills that led to the sheer peaks of the Absaroka Range that buttressed Togwatee Pass. From there, the signs of his passage became few and far apart. It would, he felt assured, whet their appetite for finding him. Some two miles short of the summit of the Pass—which formed the transition from the Absarokas to the Gross Ventre Range, which surrounded Jackson’s Hole—Smoke halted and explored a tangle of dead-fall and boulders located fifty yards up-slope from the pathway.

With his Winchester and ample ammunition in place, Smoke returned to the trail below, and created signs that led past his picked spot and on toward the notch. Then he left the traveled roadway and wiped out all indications of his presence. With that completed, he returned and settled in among the rocks and tree trunks. He had a long wait.

Smoke munched alternately on a cold biscuit and strip of jerky, the sun slanted far down in the west, when a trio of hard cases cantered into view over a down-curve in the trail. More quickly followed, until Smoke counted an even dozen. He let them get right in close, then sprang his ambush.

During the long, lonesome day, he had taken the time to rig a dead-fall, which he let fly first. Then he yanked out the three sticks that propped up a loose boulder, which rolled down with amazing speed on the surprised outlaws. The swinging tree trunk cleaned two riders from their saddles. Only one had time to yelp in pain and surprise. The huge granite stone jinked at the last moment and crushed to death three men who had abandoned their saddles, certain that their horses would be struck.

With five hard cases taken out of action, Smoke Jensen opened up with his Winchester. Another member of Victor Spectre’s outlaw army threw up his arms and uttered a pitiful shriek before he fell forward over the neck of his horse. Panicked by the unaccustomed weight and the smell of blood, the animal went berserk. Squalling, it crow-hopped and sun-fished until it dislodged the morbid burden, then sprinted off down the trail. It crashed into three mounted border trash. Their mounts reared and one man lost his seat. He hit the ground hard and bounced once.

By then, the human rubbish had recovered enough to return fire. Their slugs screeched and moaned off the mound of granite boulders. Smoke had shifted slightly and began to shove cartridges into the loading gate of his rifle. When he had filled the tubular magazine, he shouldered the weapon and began a rapid fire salvo that pinned the gunmen to the ground. Surprise had served him well enough at the outset. Now, the remaining seven men recovered enough to think through their situation.

Quickly they split up and began to move obliquely up the hill toward Smoke’s position from different directions. Their rush caused Smoke to draw back to his secondary position in a jackstraw pile of down-fall, where he would make his final stand.

“By God, there must be a dozen of them up there,” Farlee Huntoon yelled in confusion as he worked his way up the slope.

Liam Quinn, who knew from experience, answered him. “Nope. Just Smoke Jensen. Sure an’ he’s one heller with a gun.”

“Cain’t be,” Farlee objected, unwilling to face the truth. “Any one man shoots that fast cain’t hit nothin’, nohow.”

“Jensen can,” Liam assured him, then ducked as another fusillade cut twigs from the brush beside his head. From behind him, Liam heard a man yelp and go down to thrash in a tangle of wild blackberry.

Farlee Huntoon groaned in fear. “Awh, gawdamnit, that’s six of us he’s kilt already an’ we ain’t even put a slug in him.”

Liam Quinn, who knew only too well how efficient a killing machine was Smoke Jensen, mocked the frightened lout from West Virginia. “Well, why don’t you just go up there and do something about that?”

Huntoon drew himself up, smarting from the contempt in the Irish outlaw’s voice. “All right, I will.”

He started forward when two others decided the same thing. One went down without a sound, the second fled for the protection of a pine trunk. Farlee Huntoon hugged the ground and shivered violently.

Smoke still held his own against the remaining five outlaws. A moment after he broke the charge of the incautious pair who had risen from the grass, he paused to feed fresh cartridges to his Winchester. When he did, one of the crew managed to flank him and knelt behind the trunk of a fallen pine. He rested his elbow on the rough bark on the top and took aim at the side of Smoke’s head. Oblivious to the danger, Smoke remained ignorant of the gunman’s proximity until he heard a meaty smack, followed a moment later by the flat report of an old, long-barreled Sharps buffalo rifle.

Smoke cut his eyes to the left, where the danger lay, in time to see a shower of hair, skin, blood, and bone as the sniper lost the back of his head. The shot had come from uphill. Everyone went motionless as they took in this new factor. Then another old Sharps opened up on the group on Smoke’s right.

A big, .56 caliber slug took down another of the thugs. His piercing screams echoed through the pass as he writhed on the ground, gut-shot and dying. A second later, Smoke Jensen’s Winchester barked and Farlee Huntoon flooded his trousers as he desperately tried to sink into the turf. The hidden marksmen with their Sharps rifles knocked over two more hard cases and the resolve of the remainder vanished.

Three of the rabble turned back to form a rear guard. They died at almost the same instant, as Smoke and his unseen allies fired nearly as one. With Farlee Huntoon far in the lead, Liam Quinn and Dorcus Carpenter fled.

Smoke sent a .44-40 slug after them, then came out into the open. Shading his eyes with his hand—his hat had been knocked off by a close bullet—he stared up-slope toward the positions of his rescuers. With the exception of the one who had tried to blind-side him, he could have handled the twelve men easily. That did not diminish the depth of the gratitude he felt for his helpers. While his gaze roved over the rising ground, two figures rose from the underbrush, Sharps rifles held over their heads in a sign of victory.

Zeke Duncan and Ezra Sampson long-legged it down to where Smoke waited for them. Zeke began cackling while still fifty yards away. “Them fellers musta filled their britches ’fore they could get out of here.”