Spirit Of The Mountain Man/ordeal Of The Mountain Man (Pinnacle Westerns) (4 page)

Men cheered at the sight. At the direction of Gus Jaeger, the stage horses were unhitched and their harness altered to serve as pack bearing tack. One iron-banded crate went on each of three, alone with some of the load from the gang’s pack animals. With loads lightened, the hard-faced men removed their bandana masks and rode off without any thought for the wounded passenger.

Spectre, Tinsdale, and Buckner remained very much on the mind of Smoke Jensen as he rode into Big Rock to telegraph the prison for more details. An emergency breeched foal and other ranch minutiae had prevented him from returning to town with Monte Carson. Now, a week later, he dwelled on the circumstances of the men whose criminal careers he had interrupted. There wasn’t a one of them who did not get what he deserved.

With such dark broodings filling his head, Smoke ambled spotted-rump Thunder onto the northern end of Central Street, the main drag of Big Rock. The recent craze for naming every street in the small community amused Smoke. He considered it
pretentious,
one of the fancy words Sally had taught him. He did not think what he discovered halfway down the first block of the business district to be pretentious, nor did it amuse him.

A burly man, a stranger to these parts, stood between the driver’s seat and dashboard of a heavy wagon. Muscles rippled in his thick shoulders as he plied a whip to lash the daylights out of a pair of scrawny, sway-backed mules, trapped in the harness of the overloaded rig they pulled.

“I’ll learn ya, gawdamnit, you stubborn, stupid critters. When I say haul, you by damnit haul. Now git to movin’.”

Smoke Jensen just naturally bristled at this unnecessary cruelty. He eased his ’Palouse stallion closer and tipped the brim of his hat back on his head. For all his sudden anger at this abuse, he kept his voice polite.

“Excuse me.” The huge teamster ignored Smoke. “I said, excuse me. I don’t think you will achieve the results you expect by beating these starved, worn-out animals any longer.”

The burly driver turned to face Smoke. “Mind yer own gawdamned business. These lazy bastids, all they do is eat and sleep and crap. Hell, they even sleep standin’ up. Now, git on outta here and leave me to what I have to do.”

When the teamster turned away and applied his whip again, Smoke edged Thunder closer to the wagon. He reached out with one big hand and lifted the man off his feet. With a touch of his heels, Smoke backed Thunder clear of the buckboard and released his grip on the astonished wagoneer. Then Smoke calmly dismounted while the astonished lout dropped to his boots in the dusty street.

Blinded by rage, the foolish man went at Smoke with the whip. In one swift move, Smoke deflected the lash with his left forearm, grabbed the braided leather scourge and yanked it from the man’s grasp. Smoke’s right hand got right busy snapping short jabs to the thick lips of the dolt. Rocked back on his heels, the errant teamster belatedly brought up his arms in an effort to end the punishment. Smoke Jensen merely changed targets.

Hard knuckles dug into the puss gut of the abusive dullard. Coughing out air, the man did manage to land one blow that stung Smoke’s left cheekbone. Smoke responded with a looping left that opened a cut on his opponent’s right brow. A red curtain lowered over the teamster’s right eye. He uttered a bull-roar of outrage and tried to grab Smoke in a bear hug.

Smoke danced back from it, and popped his target on one fat jowl. He felt teeth give beneath the layer of fat. Then the stranger tried a kick to Smoke’s groin. Smoke side-stepped it and grabbed the offending leg. He gave it a quick yank upward.

“Phaw!”
the teamster bellowed when his rump contacted the hard-packed street.

Smoke closed with him and battered his head seriously. Groggy, the owner of the mules tried to stand. Smoke knocked him flat on his back with a left to the jaw. Satisfied that he had taken all of the fight out of the man, Smoke turned his back and strode toward Thunder. He barely heard the scrabble of boot soles on the pebble-strewn street as the battered man came at Smoke with a knife.

Bert Fowler had never been given such a humiliation in his entire life. Always big for his age, he had bullied and brow-beaten even children older than himself. As he grew, he had filled out, both in muscle and in flab. Bert loved to eat. Six eggs, two pork chops, a couple of slabs of cornmeal mush, and a half dozen biscuits he considered a light breakfast. He routinely ate a whole chicken when he sat down to be serious about it. That came with the better part of a serving bowl of mashed potatoes, a quart of gravy, and more biscuits to mop up the run-over. Bert liked his run-overs.

By the time he was a man full-grown, he stood an inch over six feet and weighed 257 pounds. When Smoke Jensen lifted him off his wagon, he had increased that to an even 300. Now, bruised, cut, and bleeding, his ribs and gut aching pools of fire, Bert got set on revenge. From his boot top he retrieved a long, thin-bladed dagger and pushed himself upright. Wiping blood out of his right eye, he went directly for the back of the man who had assaulted him so viciously.

Smoke heard the rush of boot soles at the last moment. He jumped to one side and slapped instinctively at the hand that held the knife. Bert Fowler staggered a bit off course, but whirled in time to confront his enemy. Smoke Jensen saw no reason to kill this lout. Even though faced with the danger of a knife, he eschewed the use of his trusty .45 Colt Peacemaker. In the fleeting instant when both men stood in locked study of one another, he decided to give the errant teamster a taste of his own medicine.

Cat-quick, Smoke bent at the knees and recovered the handle of Fowler’s whip. He came up with the lash seething through the air in a backward motion beside his ear. He sensed when it reached its maximum extension and brought his arm forward. Fowler screamed when the nasty little lead tip he had affixed to his bullwhip bit into the flesh of his right shoulder.

He retained his grasp on the knife regardless, and lunged forward with the tip extended toward the heart of Smoke Jensen. Smoke cracked the whip again. This time he cut through the front of Fowler’s shirt and left a long, red welt on pallid flesh. Fowler howled with pain. He took two more staggering steps toward his hated opponent.

Smoke met him with another rapid, three cut criss-cross that opened the entire front of his assailant’s shirt. Blood ran from the rent flesh. Fowler reversed the knife and made to throw it. Smoke Jensen sliced the dagger from his hand. Relentlessly the flogging went on.

Smoke moved from side to side, the strap cut into the bulging shoulders of Bert Fowler, tore away the remains of his shirt and began to checker his back. He bent double, intent now on merely protecting his face. Smoke had no intention of marking him there, and laid on the flail with unemotional exactness. The trousers came next.

Long gaps in the trouser legs showed equally white human legs beneath, albeit stout as beer kegs. They did not remain so for long. By the time Smoke Jensen had cut the cloth away at mid-thigh, in the manner sometimes worn by small boys, those legs had become rivers of blood. This would be one beating Smoke determined the man would never forget. Fowler went to his knees, howled pitifully, then finally cringed into a whimpering mass of cut and bleeding flesh. Smoke Jensen relented.

Stalking over to the badly mauled teamster, Smoke tossed the bloody whip into the wagon box and stared down at the product of his efforts. “Tell me,” he asked politely, “did you enjoy feeling like your mules must have?” Then he turned away, remounted Thunder and rode off down the street.

Smoke Jensen tied off Thunder outside the telegraph office at the railroad depot in Big Rock. His boots rang on the thick two by six planks of the platform as he crossed to the door. Inside, the telegrapher sat in his bay window that overlooked the tracks. Coatless, he had sleeve garters to hold up the long sleeves of his light blue shirt with the white vertical pinstripes. Three cigars protruded from the upper pocket of his vest. A green eyeshade obscured his face. He looked up as Smoke approached the counter.

“Afternoon, Mr. Jensen. What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to send a telegraph message.”

Rising from his chair, the telegrapher came to the counter. “Do you have it written out?”

“No. I’ll do that now.”

An octagonal-faced Regulator clock ticked out the seconds while Smoke wrote his query on the yellow form. It was clear, concise, and direct. He hoped the answer would be the same, and come quickly. When he finished, he handed the missive over to the telegraph operator, who glanced at it and raised an eyebrow.

“You—ah—expecting company, Mr. Jensen?”

He remembered when the famous Smoke Jensen and Monte Carson had stood back to back and battled a nest of outlaws in the streets of Big Rock. They had cut them down mercilessly and driven the remainder out of town. The village had been right tame since then.

“I don’t think so. And, I’m going to do my best to see nothing unusual happens.”

Relief flooded the face of the railroad employee. He counted the number of words. “That’ll be two and a quarter. I’ll get this out right away. If a reply comes in soon, where can I reach you?”

“I’ll be over at Monte’s office.” Smoke paid him and left.

Back astride Thunder, Smoke ambled along the main street to the low, stone building next to the town hall. He looped the reins over the tie-rail and gained the stoop. Inside the stout, thick door, Monte Carson sat at his desk, a report form from the night man in one hand, a steaming cup of coffee in the other. He glanced up as Smoke entered.

“Didn’t take you long to decide to look into that a little more, did it?”

“No, Monte. It just sat in my head and gnawed until I had to find out all I could.”

“Pour yerself some java. Herkimer just got in some fresh beans over at the Mercantile.” Then he noticed the disarray of Smoke’s shirt. “What did you get into?”

Smoke snorted and tugged at his shirttail. While he poured, he told Monte about the stranger and his mules. Monte listened, nodded at the proper spots, and then rendered his judgment. “It’s a wonder the feller didn’t get himself a sudden case of the deads.”

“If he had pulled a gun, instead of that knife, he would have.”

“That’s cold, Smoke, downright cold,” Monte said with a twinkle in his eyes.

They drank coffee and talked about the latest goings on in Big Rock for a quarter past an hour. Monte was in mid-sentence, telling Smoke about how Bluenosed Bertha, one of the bar girls at the Follies Saloon, had gotten her finger caught in a mousetrap, when the door swung outward.

“What’s this?” the lawman demanded.

In the opening stood a boy of about eleven or twelve. Barefoot, he had a thick thatch of carroty hair above a balloon face of rusty-orange freckles. His unfastened trouser legs ended at mid-calf, which gave him the look of an urchin. “For Mr. Jensen, Sheriff. We got an answer back from the folks out in Arizona Territory.”

Smoke took the folded, yellow form and handed the boy a dime. The lad’s eyes went wide. “Oh, boy! A whole dime. Thank you, Mr Jensen.”

He scampered off down Central Street, no doubt to the general mercantile and those inviting glass jars of horehound drops and rock candy. Smoke opened the message and read from it. His eyebrows rose and he whistled softly at the conclusion. He gestured toward Monte Carson with the sheet of paper.

“They’ve learned a bit more since that first telegram. The warden verified that they killed two guards and seriously injured another in their escape. The search has been fruitless in Mexico. But a hermit, by the name of Hiram Wells, who lived up-river from the prison was found murdered and his horses missing.”

“That fits with what the warden says a trustee told him. Which is that the three of them formed an alliance to get revenge on some unnamed man responsible for them all being in prison. A man who lives somewhere up in the mountain country.”

Monte Carson looked hard at Smoke Jensen. “He didn’t have a name, huh?”

“That’s what it says. Although it doesn’t take a whiz at arithmetic to add up one and one and get two.”

Brow furrowed now in concentration, Monte reached a conclusion. “I think you an’ me, an’ a couple of good deputies had ought to ride up to the Sugarloaf and fort up. That’s what I think.”

Smoke shook his head. “No offense, Monte, but I don’t think that’s such a hot idea. No sense in bringing the fight home with us. In fact, the farther I can keep Spectre, Tinsdale, and Buckner from the Sugarloaf, the happier I will be.”

Genuine concern for his long-time friend colored Monte’s words. “What do you have in mind?”

“I reckon to head into some friendly territory up Wyoming way. Say, maybe Jackson’s Hole. I can settle in, make my presence known, and let the word get out. Then let them come.”

“Think they’ll do it on their own?”

“No, Monte, they’ll bring along help. Spectre used to run a large band of outlaws, numbered around forty. He’s known along the Owl Hoot Trail. If he feels the need, he can get all the men he needs.”

“Why do you single him out as the leader of all this, Smoke?”

“Because I came close to blowing out his brains in the showdown we had. And I killed his only son. But look at it this way. When they come for me, and they will, I’ll have these would-be avengers on ground I am well familiar with and they know little about. That’ll go a long way toward evening the odds.”

Monte could not let it go. “I hope you’re right. I sure’s hell do.”

Hanksville, in Utah, hovered on the edge of Ute country. As yet, the native dwellers of the sparse ground had not been corralled and driven onto a small, unpromising reservation in the southern corner of Colorado. They roamed free. It was doubtful that more than a handful of politicians in Washington knew that they existed. Not until the arid land they occupied offered something of value would they come under the scrutiny of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Hanksville had a white population of fifty-seven and a scattering of Mexican and halfbreed residents. It also served as a transient haven for men on the run.

Victor Spectre came there to recruit more guns for his gang. He had little difficulty in achieving that. Eleven hard cases signed on. Men with shifty eyes and a day or more growth of beard, they found the pay acceptable and the promise of a bonus for killing just a single man satisfying. There were no saloons in Hanksville, so the outlaws drank in their rooms and Victor ordered a quick departure when he had all of the reinforcements he could expect to obtain. So far their travels had paralleled the Colorado River. Here they would make a change.