Ambush of the Mountain Man Read online

  Just as she’d about resigned herself to going into the house, she heard Sally say, “I’m going to bed, dear. Are you coming?”

  Sarah’s heart began to beat faster when she heard Smoke reply, “Not just yet, sweetheart. I think I’ll have a cigar out on the porch and another cup of coffee first.”

  Sarah peeked in the window and saw Sally give Smoke a quick kiss. “Good night then. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Smoke laughed. “Unless I wake you up when I come to bed,” he joked.

  “Don’t you dare,” Sally said with a mock frown. And then she smiled coyly and added, “Unless you plan to make it worth my while.”

  “Don’t I always?” Smoke called as he laughed and moved out onto the front porch with a coffee cup in his hand.

  Sarah waited until Smoke had finished half his cigar and most of his coffee, giving Sally time to get to sleep, before she moved around and walked up to the porch.

  When Smoke noticed her, he got to his feet, a slight frown on his face. “Why, hello, Sarah,” he said, concern in his voice. “Is anything wrong?”

  “Please, Mr. Jensen,” Sarah said in her most helpless voice, keeping it low so as not to awaken Sally. “Come with me quickly. I need your help.”

  “Let me just wake Sally up,” Smoke began.

  “No! There’s no time for that,” Sarah pleaded. “Come quickly. My buckboard is just up the road a ways and I have something in it you need to see.”

  She turned around and moved at a fast pace down the road away from his house, not giving him time to think about it as he followed her down the dark path.

  “Is someone hurt?” Smoke asked as he caught up with her and walked by her side.

  “You’ll see,” Sarah said, avoiding the question. “It’s just around the corner here.”

  When they came to the buckboard, Smoke leaned over the side, looking into the bed of the wagon. All he saw was a pile of blankets and some rope coiled up in the corner of the wagon. “I don’t see . . . ” he began, turning around to find Sarah standing a few yards away with a pistol in her hand aimed at his gut.

  “What the . . . ?”

  “Kindly put your hands up, Mr. Jensen,” she said, her voice suddenly hard and flat.

  He took a tentative step toward her and she eared back the hammer on the pistol with an audible click. “Please, Mr. Jensen, don’t make me shoot you here. Just do as I say and you may live to see morning.”

  Smoke frowned as he raised his hands over his head.

  “Now, turn around and climb into the back of the buckboard,” Sarah ordered.

  “Why don’t you tell me what this is all about?” Smoke said as he climbed up into the bed of the wagon.

  “Don’t you turn around, just keep looking in that direction,” Sarah ordered.

  Smoke shrugged and did as she said. “Is it all right if I ask you what this is all about?” he said without turning to look at her.

  Instead of answering him, Sarah reached under the seat of the buckboard and pulled out an iron crowbar she’d put there earlier. Swinging as hard as she could with one hand, she hit Smoke in the back of the head, knocking him unconscious onto his face.

  She put down her gun and climbed up into the wagon with him. Taking some short lengths of rope she’d prepared earlier, she tied his hands together behind his back and then tied his feet together. Once that was done, she took some fence wire and wound it tightly around the rope, so that he couldn’t possibly undo the knots she’d tied.

  When she was finished, she noticed blood was pouring from a wound in the back of his head, so she took a handkerchief from her purse and tied a makeshift bandage around his head to slow the bleeding. Once it stopped, she checked to make sure he was still breathing. After all, she didn’t want him to die on her—that would be too easy. She wanted him to suffer for a while, and then she wanted him to know why he was being killed before he died.

  She wanted him to know that killing her brother Johnny had caused his death.

  She climbed up into the seat and turned the buckboard around. She had to hurry. She wanted to be a dozen miles away before Sally Jensen woke up tomorrow morning and found her husband missing. By the time the alarm was raised and they figured out what had happened, she should be almost home.

  Moving as fast as she could over the road in the near-total blackness, Sarah took almost three hours to make her way to the outskirts of Big Rock, where she hoped to find the men from her father’s ranch waiting for her along with Carl and Mac.

  It’d been three full days since she’d sent Mac and Carl out to wait for them, so the men certainly should have been able to make the trip from Pueblo to here in that time.

  Even looking for them and expecting to see them, Sarah almost jumped out of the heavy coat she was wearing when a dark figure materialized out of the darkness and grabbed the reins to the horses pulling the buckboard.

  “Is that you, Miss Sarah?” a gruff voice called.

  She took a moment to catch her breath and try to calm her racing heart. “Yes. Who are you?”

  “I’m Jimmy Corbett, ma’am,” the voice called back as the figure moved closer so she could make out the face.

  She recognized the man then. He’d been with her father for several years, though she didn’t know him all that well personally. He was a little older than she and her brother, so Johnny had never run around with him much like he had some of the younger hands on the ranch.

  “Well, Jimmy, you scared me out of two years’ growth coming up on me out of the darkness like that,” she complained, but her voice was level and there was no malice in it.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he said, taking his hat off and standing there like a schoolboy. “Clete told us to make sure it was you ‘fore we called out or anything, an’ in the darkness it was kind’a hard to tell.”

  “That’s all right, Jimmy. Where is Clete?”

  Jimmy pointed up a slight rise off to her right. “He’s up the top of that there hill, ma’am.” He hesitated. “It’s gonna be kind’a bumpy ridin’ that buckboard up there. You want I should take the reins and let you ride my hoss?”

  Truth to tell, Sarah’s butt was aching from the long ride on the hurricane deck of the wagon, so she readily agreed. Even a saddle was better than the hard boards of the wagon seat and the continual bouncing of the wagon.

  “Sure, Jimmy. Show me the way.”

  It didn’t take long to get Cletus and the other men awake and some fresh coffee brewed. Though Sarah much preferred hot tea, she gratefully accepted a tin mug of the strong brew to help ward off the chill of the frigid night air. She hadn’t realized how cold it was when she’d left town heading out to the Jensen spread, and now she was about frozen clear through.

  She was about half through with her cup when Cletus finished checking out Smoke Jensen in the back of the buckboard and approached her next to the fire. Carl Jacoby was sitting next to her and Dan Macklin was on the other side. Neither had asked her how she’d managed to get Jensen in the back of the wagon, both figuring she’d tell them soon enough.

  “Sarah, Jensen’s more dead than alive in the back of that wagon. What’d you hit him with, an anvil?” he asked as he squatted next to her and poured himself a cup of coffee.

  She cast worried eyes in the direction of the wagon. “No, just that iron crowbar under the seat.”

  Cletus blew on the coffee to cool it, and then took a deep swig. He glanced at her over the rim. “I’d say it’s ‘bout fifty-fifty whether he makes it through the night, what with the blood he lost and the fact that he’s not really dressed for this cold. The man’s ‘bout near froze to death.”

  “Sarah, didn’t you think to cover him with a blanket or something?” Jacoby asked from beside her.

  Angry with herself for not realizing how dangerous it would be to transport him the way she did, Sarah snapped back, “No, I didn’t, Carl! It’s not every day I kidnap a killer and have to drive him halfway across the country in the dead of night.” S
he shook her head. She’d put blankets in the back of the buckboard, but those were to cover him with if anyone approached, and she simply had been too miserable with her own discomfort to think much about his.

  She glanced over at the buckboard, hoping she hadn’t inadvertently killed the man before she could tell him why she’d kidnapped him.

  “Calm down, Sarah,” Cletus said in his usual unruffled tone of voice. Sarah reflected she couldn’t ever remember Cletus being riled up about anything in all the years she’d known him.

  “I’m havin’ a couple of the boys carry him over here next to the fire, an’ I’m gonna see if we can wake him up enough to get some hot coffee down him.”

  She felt her face flush with shame when she saw them carry Smoke Jensen’s pale, limp body over and lay it next to the fire. Cletus was right, she thought. He does look more dead than alive.

  “But Clete,” she said, glancing back and forth from Smoke to him, “we’ve got to get moving. Come morning, his wife is going to wake up and realize he’s missing. We need to be as far away when that happens as we can be.”

  Cletus took a deep breath and sipped more of his coffee. “Won’t matter none if we kill him in the takin’, Miss Sarah. If we don’t get him warmed up a little an’ some fluids down to replace the blood he lost, he won’t make it five miles in the back of that wagon.”

  Just then, Smoke moaned and moved his head slightly, wincing at the pain the movement caused.

  He looked around him at the campfire and the men gathered around it until his eyes landed on Sarah.

  “Why?” he croaked, trying to make some sense of her attack on him.

  Blushing, she got to her feet and moved to stand over him. “Does the name Johnny MacDougal mean anything to you?” she asked, venom dripping from her voice.

  FOURTEEN

  Smoke struggled up on one elbow and looked up at the angry young woman standing over him. His head felt like a blacksmith had been pounding on it, and his eyes kept blurring and trying to cross. He concentrated, pushing the pain and nausea aside and thought about her question. The name Johnny MacDougal did stir some memories, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on them just yet.

  He started to shake his head in a negative reply, but he stopped when the movement caused a red-hot pain to shoot through his skull. He reached up and gingerly felt the back of his head. There was a large, squashy lump there with what felt like dried blood scabbing it over. Evidently someone, probably the very same young woman standing before him now, had hit him from behind. He’d have to get to feeling better to die, he thought.

  In a hoarse voice, he croaked, “Sarah, the name is familiar to me, but I don’t quite remember just why.”

  At her astonished glare, her eyes filled with even more hatred, he asked gently, “You want to tell me about it?”

  She opened her mouth to speak, and he held up his hand, swaying slightly back and forth on his elbow as he lay there. “Just a minute, Sarah,” he said, coughing. “Could I first have some water or coffee? My throat feels as dry as the desert right now.”

  Sarah glanced at Cletus without saying anything, and he got to his feet, poured some coffee into a tin mug, and handed it to Smoke. “Here ya go,” he said, “but drink it slow so it don’t come back up on ya.”

  While Smoke drank, Sarah put her hands on her hips and stared down at him. “For your information, Mr. Smoke Jensen, Johnny MacDougal was my brother, and last year about this time you beat him up and knocked out his teeth and then you shot him and some friends of his down in cold blood in Pueblo.”

  Smoke’s eyes widened over the rim of the cup. He slowly lowered it and struggled up to a sitting position, trying to move his head as little as possible, his face wincing at the pain the movement caused. “That was your brother, the one dressed all in black?”

  Sarah nodded, her eyes as hard as flint. Smoke let his head fall into his hands and fought back nausea the coffee had caused as he thought back about that day the previous year when William Cornelius Van Horne had offered to take Smoke and his friends to lunch....

  Van Horne pulled the head of his Morgan toward a dining place with a sign over the door that said simply THE FEEDBAG, and the others followed, tying their mounts and packhorses to a hitching rail in front of the building.

  The Feedbag was set up similarly to Longmont’s Saloon back in Big Rock. It consisted of a large room with eating tables on one side, and a bar and smaller tables for the men who just wanted to drink their meals on the other side. It was about three quarters full. Most of the men wore the canvas trousers of miners, but there was a smattering of men dressed in chaps and flannel shirts and leather vests who were obviously cowboys from nearby ranches.

  Van Horne pushed through the batwings and walked directly toward a large table in the front corner of the room, while Smoke, Pearlie, Cal, and Louis spread out just inside the door with their backs to the wall waiting for their eyes to adjust to the gloomy lighting. The two mountain men stopped and eyed Smoke with raised eyebrows.

  “You expectin’ trouble, Smoke?” Rattlesnake Bob asked, his hand dropping to the old Walker Colt stuck in the waistband of his buckskins.

  Smoke smiled as his eyes searched the room for anyone who might be giving him special attention. “No, Rattlesnake, but I’ve found the best way to avoid trouble is to be ready for it when it appears.”

  When he saw no one was looking their way, Smoke walked on over to the table where Van Horne was already sitting down talking to a waiter, and took his usual seat with his back to the wall and his face to the rest of the room.

  As they all took their seats, Bill said, “I ordered us a couple of pitchers of beer to start with while we decide what to order for lunch.”

  Bear Tooth smacked his lips. “That sounds mighty good, Bill. I ain’t had me no beer since last spring.”

  Before Bill could answer, a loud voice came from a group of men standing at the bar across the room. “God Almighty! What the hell is that smell?” a man called loudly, looking over at their table. “Did somebody drag a passel of skunks in here?”

  The young man, who appeared to be about twenty years old, was wearing a black shirt and vest with a silver lining, and had a brace of nickel-plated Colt Peacemakers tied down low on his hips. He had four other men standing next to him, all wearing their guns in a similar manner, and all were laughing as if he’d just said something extremely funny.

  Rattlesnake Bob glanced at Bear Tooth and grimaced. “I hate it when that happens,” he said in a low, dangerous voice. “Now we’re gonna have to kill somebody ‘fore we’ve even had our beer.”

  “Take it easy, Rattlesnake,” Smoke said. “He’s just some young tough who’s letting his whiskey do his thinking for him.”

  Rattlesnake eased back down in his chair. “You’re right, Smoke,” he said, smiling. “If’n ever’ man who was drunk-dumb got kilt, there wouldn’t hardly be none of us left.”

  Smoke continued to keep an eye on the man across the room as the bartender tried to get him to be quiet, without much success.

  When their waiter appeared with the beer and glasses, Smoke asked him, “Who’s the man with the big mouth over there at the bar?”

  The waiter glanced nervously over his shoulder, and then he whispered, “That’s Johnny MacDougal. His father owns the biggest ranch in these parts.”

  “Well, I don’t care if’n his daddy owns Colorado Territory,” Bear Tooth growled. “You go on over there an’ tell the little snot if’n he wants to see his next birthday he’d better keep his pie-hole shut.”

  The waiter’s face paled and he shook his head rapidly back and forth. “I couldn’t do that, sir,” he said.

  “Why not?” Rattlesnake asked.

  “Just last week Johnny shot a man for stepping on his boots.” The waiter hesitated, and then he added, “And the man wasn’t even armed at the time.”

  “How come he’s not in jail then?” Louis asked.

  “Uh, his father carries a lot of water
in Pueblo,” the waiter said. “The sheriff came in and said it was in self-defense, though it was plain to everyone in the place that the man wasn’t wearing a gun.”

  “So that’s the lay of the land,” Van Horne said, pursing his lips.

  “Yes, sir,” the waiter said, and hurried off back to the kitchen before these tough-looking men could get him in trouble, or worse yet, get him shot.

  A few minutes later, after he’d downed another glass of whiskey, the young tough and his friends began to swagger across the room toward Smoke’s table.

  Smoke and Louis both eased their chairs back, took the hammer thongs off their Colts, and waited expectantly for the trouble they knew was coming. Smoke eased his right leg out straight under the table so he’d have quicker access if he had to draw.

  MacDougal stopped a few feet behind Rattlesnake’s chair and made a production of holding his nose. “Whew, something’s awfully ripe in here,” he said loudly, looking around the room to make sure he had an appreciative audience. “I think something done crawled in here and died.”

  Rattlesnake eased his hand down to the butt of the big Walker Colt in his belt, and as quick as a snake striking he whipped it out, stood up, and whirled around, slashing the young man viciously across the face with the barrel.

  MacDougal screamed and grabbed his face as blood spurted onto his vest. Before the other men could react, Rattlesnake grabbed MacDougal by the hair, jerked his head back, and jammed the barrel of the gun in his mouth, knocking out his two front teeth.