Spirit Of The Mountain Man/ordeal Of The Mountain Man (Pinnacle Westerns) (20 page)

“Most likely they did,” Ezra agreed, sniffing the air.

“I owe you two,” Smoke announced as they came up to him. “I owe you big.”

Zeke worked his whiskered mouth a moment before replying. “Well, we was enjoyin’ it mightily, watchin’ you clean their plows, but then that dirty little sneak tried to pop you from the side. So we figgered it best to take a hand.”

Smoke nodded shortly. “Glad you did. I’d be dead as these fellers.” Smoke made a sweeping gesture.

One of the supposed corpses groaned. “I ain’t dead yet, you bastard.”

Ezra Sampson reached him in three swift strides. He roughly jammed the muzzle of his Sharps under the thug’s nose. “Don’t you think you oughtta call him Mr. Jensen, before he comes over and finishes the job?”

Herman Ogilvey tried to brazen it out. “Go ahead, shoot me, you old fart.”

BANG!

Ezra Sampson gave him what he wanted.

Smoke Jensen winced, but spared no more sympathy for the dead man. Instead, he asked the question that had been at the forefront of his mind since he first had an inkling of who had come to his aid. “What brought you two out here?”

Zeke and Ezra exchanged embarrassed glances, two school boys caught by the school marm peeping in the girls’ side of the outhouse. Zeke studied the toes of his boots. “Thing is, we came over to thank you for the jug of the other night and found yer camp empty. We sorta figgered what you had in mind, so we decided to tag along and see how it all worked out.”

“We also wanted to thank you for the hind-quarter of venison you gave us,” Ezra added, as though that had anything to do with it.

Smoke broke out in a genuine grin. “You two old frauds. You reckoned I’d need some help. And as it turned out, I did. For which I shall always be grateful. Now, let’s gather up these weapons and get on back to the Hole.”

Shortly before sundown, the self-appointed posse of Sugarloaf riders reached the Wind River Reservation to find Monte Carson already there. Ike grinned sheepishly when he shook the hand of the lawman.

“Seems we had the same idea, Monte. When did you leave?”

“About two days before you, I’d judge, Ike,” Monte answered with a chuckle.

Tom Brokenhorn escorted them to places by the Council fire. “We are meeting to decide what to do,” he explained. “You will not understand our words, so I will tell you what we discuss. I am worried that our friend, Smoke Jensen, is in more trouble now than even he can be aware of. I have asked the Council to reach a consensus on sending a war party to give what help we can.” He paused and gave a fleeting smile. “I have only two more to win over.”

A protracted debate followed, in the musical Shoshoni language, ripe with its Athapaskan root origins. At last, the single hold-out lowered his eagle-wing fan and gave a curt nod. Smiling, the chief turned back to his white visitors. “It is done. I will immediately select a war chief and he will gather men to ride north to the Snake Basin. You may go with them, if you wish.”

Monte nodded thoughtfully. “I think that would be good. Especially if the army stumbled on your braves. As a lawman, if I accompany them, I can give lawful reason for their being off the reservation.”

“It is as though Smoke Jensen spoke those words. Thank you, Lawman Carson.” To the Sugarloaf hands, he added, “I will give you a beaded belt as safe passage through my people scattered on the reservation. I wish you all well.”

Nate Miller and his motley crew rode into Dubois half an hour before sundown. Word had not yet reached the town about the defeat of the gunmen sent after Smoke Jensen. Many of the hard cases hooted and called insults to Sally Jensen as the rabble gathered to gawk. Nate Miller pushed his way through the mob, to clear a path for Sally to follow. Her protector on the journey, Sam Hutchins, took her gently by one elbow and escorted her beyond the slobbering louts.

“Pay them no mind, ma’am, they’re nothin’ but trash.”

And what are you?
Sally asked herself silently, then gave him a brief smile. “Thank you, Sam. And, thanks for the support. I’m afraid I’m a little stiff after being tied to my horse all this time.”

“It’ll go away. I heard Mr. Spectre tell Nate jist now that he’ll put you up in the hotel. A room to yourself.”

Sally could not resist a flash of sarcasm. “How very thoughtful.” Then she relented on Sam’s behalf. He had been respectful, even kind, during the long trek. “What do you know about this monster who so cavalierly orders men to kidnap a woman and bring her to him?”

Sam frowned. “I wouldn’t call him a monster, ma’am. He’s a good leader. Has this whole thing thought out real clever. Why, look at this town. Don’t look like a shot was fired when they took it over.”

Sally seized on that at once. “What sort of man would want to take a town away from the people who rightfully own it, its residents?”

A big smile grew on Sam’s face. “You ever hear of politicians, ma’am?”

Blushing at being outsmarted so easily, Sally put on a good front. “Besides them, then, if you will.”

“Now you have me there, ma’am. All I know is he said it was necessary in order to get your husband to come at him.”

Sally smiled sweetly. “I thought that was why I was kidnapped.”

Sam looked glum. “Yeah. There’s that, too.”

Stopping abruptly, Sally stamped a foot. “Doesn’t he realize that whether I am here or whether he has the town or not, Smoke will come after him?”

With an effort of mental gymnastics Sam rejected the truth of what she said. He chose to change the subject. “Come along, ma’am, I’ll see you to the hotel.”

Victor Spectre waited for Sally Jensen in the lobby. Ignoring her foreknowledge, Sally hotly demanded to know for what reason she had been brought there. Smirking, Spectre allowed as how it surprised him that she had not figured it out already.

“You have a special role in my immediate future. You are my cheese.”

“Cheese?”

“Yes, dear lady, cheese. As in mousetrap. In this case, the mouse is your husband, Smoke Jensen.”

Thinking it wise, Smoke Jensen moved his camp south to a smaller portion of the basin. Double Peak thrust up due east of him. Once he had set up, he sighed regretfully over the duplicated work he faced to rebuild his smoker. And he needed to get another deer.

He hunted with a bow again, disturbing little in nature with his kill. A larger animal this time. Smoke dressed it and hung it in a tree, then set about the thankless task of building a new smoker. He had no idea how much longer he would be there, and any meat he had left over, he could give to Zeke and Ezra. Sundown caught up to him and he fried some of the liver. He would finish tomorrow.

Near noon the next day, Smoke stretched to his full height after lighting a smudgy, green wood, hickory fire in the chamber to one side of his smoker. He froze at the faint crackle of a stepped-on twig nearby. It took only one stride to retrieve his Winchester. He held it cradled loosely in his left arm when a man’s head appeared over the tops of some low, new-growth aspen. The stranger held his rifle up by the stock, a white cloth tied to the barrel. Smoke surmised it might be a napkin.

“Hello, the camp. You be Smoke Jensen?”

“I am.”

“I’m comin’ in under a flag of truce. Will you honor that?”

“I will. Ride on in.”

From the looks of the man, up close, Smoke wondered how he had ever been able to find the camp. He wore a derby hat, cocked jauntily to one side, a striped suit, with a collarless shirt, made gaudy by wide, vertical red stripes, separated by thin white ones, and carriage boots, with the cuffs of his pants stuffed in. A city dude, Smoke put him as being.

“I have something to show you, Jensen,” he declared.

Smoke motioned him to the picket line. “Tie off and I’ll take a look.”

After the cityfied thug dismounted and secured his horse, he came forward with his saddlebags over one shoulder. He opened the buckles on one side and delved within. He came out with a fine gold chain, from which hung a cameo. It was one Smoke Jensen knew only too well. Next came the .38 Colt Lightning Smoke had purchased for her when they had first become available in Denver. It took every bit of Smoke’s will to keep his face impassive. When the gunsel reached into the bag for something else, Smoke raised a hand to halt him.

“I’ve seen enough. Where is Sally?”

Over-confident, the rogue made a stupid decision to taunt Smoke. “Who?”

An instant later he found his shirt-front bunched in one powerful fist of Smoke Jensen, his feet off the ground, dangling. “Where…is…my wife?”

“All right—all right, leggo me. I’ll tell you what I was told to say.” When Smoke released him, the suddenly nervous, smaller man fussily adjusted his clothing in an effort to regain his composure and get the quaver out of his voice.

“Make it good. And make it fast,” Smoke growled.

“I was told by Mr. Spectre to tell you that if you want your wife to live, you will ride into Dubois within two days. You are to come alone and unarmed. If you bring help, she will be killed on the spot. Remember, two days. Come in by then, or on the third day, your Sally dies.”

Without a word, Smoke took Sally’s possessions from the messenger, spun him around and roughly shoved him toward his horse. “Get out of here, you outhouse rat, and don’t look back.”

After the messenger departed, Smoke reviewed the brief, fateful message. Fat chance of either of them surviving if he believed any of that, he considered. He would have to get Sally out of there on his own, then bring in help to deal with Victor Spectre. To do that, he needed a better look at Dubois.

In camp, outside Togwatee Pass, Bobby Harris sat apart from the hands who had treated him like an equal for more than a year. On their journey northward, his pose of manhood had slipped as time wore on. The boy had been buoyed up by a spirit of adventure alone for the last two days. Now he rested an elbow on his knee, his chin cupped in an open hand. His lower lip protruded in a typical little-boy pout. Ike Mitchell found him there as long shafts of orange speared through the trees and the eastern sky turned blue to purple.

“You’re looking sort of glum. Want to talk about it?”

Bobby looked up rapidly, his face an open bloom of hope. “Yes—er—no. Yes, I do, Ike,” the boy concluded, his features crumpled into despair again.

“Well, then, where do you want to start?”

“At the beginning, I guess. I should have gone with Smoke.”

Disappointment clouded Ike’s eyes. “Don’t start on that again.”

Bobby darted out a hand and put it on the foreman’s arm to stay further complaint. “No, please, Ike, let me tell it my way.” At Ike’s dubious nod, he went on. “I wanted to show Smoke and everyone that I was big enough to do a man’s job. So, I should have gone, because afterward I got to feelin’ like the other hands were laughing at me. That I was nothing but a little boy to them. Then, when those men took Sal—Mom, I couldn’t stand it any longer. See, if I had gone with Smoke, we would have moved a lot slower than him alone. We could have been close enough to take after those bas—devils right away.

“They went the same way Smoke did, you said so. We might even have run into them on the way, fought it out, and they would never have taken m-my mother.” He paused, eyes begging for understanding. “Anyway, I could have been more useful…than…I am now. And I’m worried about her. I’m afraid something bad will happen.” Bobby’s eyes filled and he sniffled softly in a fight to keep back the tears.

Reminded of his own turmoils at the threshold of puberty, Ike impulsively reached out and hugged Bobby to him. With rough compassion, he ruffled the straw-blond hair. “Smoke knows you are a big man now,” he spoke reassuringly. “Smoke’ll be almightily exercised over you coming along, but he’ll know it was your worry over Miss Sally.”

“He’s got the right of that, boy,” Monte Carson, who had come up quietly behind them during the painful exchange, said gruffly.

Setting aside the tin cup, Smoke Jensen praised the coffee, then turned to the real reason for his visit to the camp of Zeke and Ezra. “Could you two carry a message for me?”

“I don’t know why not. Who’s it go to?”

Smoke answered tightly, unsure how they would receive the news. “There’s two people, really, Chief Tom Brokenhorn of the Shoshoni, and Chief Blackrobe of the Arapaho. They are camped on the Wind River Reservation. I’ll write it out for you and you can leave in the morning.”

Zeke cocked an eyebrow, pursed lips. “Kin they read writin’?”

“Tom Brokenhorn can. You’ll have to tell Blackrobe.”

“All right. What’s this gonna say, this message?” Zeke accepted.

“That they are to send as many warriors as possible right away. They are to meet me to the east of Togwatee Pass, on the plain, ten miles from Dubois.”

Ezra puckered his lips, which made his mustache waggle like a furry snake. “We—ah—sorta reckoned to get in on that affair.”

“You still can. Ride back here with the Indians and you’ll be in plenty of time.”

Zeke asked for both of them. “What are you fixin’ to do now?”

“I leave this afternoon to get another look at Dubois.”

Ezra whistled softly. “Sounds to me like you’re a sucker for danger.”

A cold, bleak look filled Smoke’s yellow-brown eyes. “Could be
I’m
the danger.”

Smoke Jensen left the eastern grade to Togwatee Pass shortly after the moon rose. Its pale, silver light washed the land with enough brightness to see. He would be close to Dubois before mid-morning, Smoke estimated. Thunder trotted along the well-used trail, which ran five miles north of the camp where Monte Carson and Ike Mitchell slept through the night, eager to reach Smoke’s camp in Jackson’s Hole the next day. Neither the ex-mountain man nor the posse knew of the others’ presence.

And Smoke could have used them, had he but known.

Over the past three days, fourteen more gunfighters and bounty hunters had drifted into Dubois, which brought the total to well above fifty-five. They dozed late into the mornings, and lounged in the saloons through the afternoons and each night. With the town in the hands of the man who had hired them, most had not known such peace and security since childhood.

Much to the disgust of Tim O’Roarke, most of the outlaw horde made the Watering Hole a sort of headquarters. Fully three dozen lounged in the saloon on a lazy, warm afternoon. Half a dozen more had gone upstairs with some of the soiled doves. Most of them would be down before long, Tim knew. For all their bragging about what bad actors they were, and what gifts they were to womanhood, they were actually more like little boys with short fuses. How different they were from Smoke Jensen.

That thought gave O’Roarke pause. He wondered where Smoke was right then, what he was doing.

Nestled down into a depression outside Dubois, a pair of field glasses to his eyes. Smoke Jensen slowly swept the lenses along the buildings nearest to him. For two blocks they were residences. All of them had two things in common, Smoke observed. No one worked in the flower beds, the gardens, or went to and from the stables at the rear of the lots. Only two had lank washing, which fluttered listlessly in an indifferent breeze, on lines in backyards. Yet each house had a scruffy-looking hard case propped back in a chair on the porch. He went back over them again, then a third time.

The people who live there are prisoners in their own homes, Smoke realized as he looked on. Then he changed his point of focus to the first of the commercial buildings. He at once noted a greater density of outlaws among the people on the street he viewed now. They swaggered through the vanquished residents, who scurried away with furtive backward glances. Smoke spotted several faces he recognized from earlier encounters with Spectre’s minions. He would have to move to sweep the main street.

Fortunately a shallow ravine ran parallel with the face of the town where Smoke observed. After he satisfied his curiosity enough, Smoke shifted into the fissure and worked north along it until he reached a culvert where the main roadway crossed it. There he removed his hat and raised up enough to scan the main street with ease. What he saw deeply troubled him. In the same heartbeat it relieved him of an earlier anxiety. At least now he knew where Spectre held Sally.

Heavily armed outlaws, in roving patrols of two and three, alertly prowled around the hotel. More sat in chairs on the balcony and under its canopy on the boardwalk. The saloons received good play also, he perceived. Small wonder. A collection of this sort, used to some space between themselves and others, needed an outlet for the tension their closeness would surely create. Easing down, Smoke took out a sheet of paper and began to sketch in the location of each nest of hard cases with a stub of pencil. With that accomplished, he moved again.

Throughout the remainder of the day, Smoke timed the movements of the outlaws, entered the positions of lookout posts and the length of the watch duty. No doubt Spectre thought their presence would keep him from getting rough when he made his move to save Sally.

“How little he knows,” Smoke said wryly to himself.

When he withdrew, well into the night, he had an idea of where every lookout had been placed, where Spectre himself spent the night, and how many men could be expected in the saloons. With however many guns he had at his disposal, Smoke decided he would go in after Sally at the time specified. That would provide time for the warriors to get here. Once he had her clear of town, Spectre and his gang would be swept out of town in a way that would give nightmares for the rest of their lives to any who survived, Smoke vowed silently to himself.