Honor of the Mountain Man Read online

  She was unconscious, still clasping their three-year-old son in her arms. One of the bandit’s bullets had torn through little Tom’s right leg and into Betty’s chest. The boy was moaning, barely conscious, and his leg hung at a funny angle. Joey whipped his bandanna off and tied it in a tight knot around the leg, slowing the bleeding to a trickle. He rolled Betty on her side, pulled a long, wicked-looking Arkansas Toothpick from a scabbard at the rear of his belt, and cut away her dress.

  The bullet had entered her chest just below her left breast, hit a rib, and skidded around her rib cage just under the skin to exit out her back. There was no bloody froth on her lips, and her breathing was rapid but deep, without whistling. Joey knew from close association with gunshot wounds that hers was not immediately life-threatening.

  He took a slab of fatback from the cupboard and placed it over her wound to slow the bleeding and tied it in place with what was left of her blouse.

  He sat back on his heels, staring at his wife and son and their blood staining the dirt floor of their home, remembering what had happened to his first wife and son....

  * * *

  It seemed almost to have happened to someone else instead of him, that day in 1858. Joey was young, but men married young in the mountains of Missouri in those days. He was a mountain man, as were his relatives who hailed from the blue ridges of Virginia, the peaks of Tennessee, and the broken crags of the Ozarks. The mountains and their ways of life were ingrained blood-deep in him: independence, self-reliance, and strength led to the peculiar code of the mountain man. To rectify a wrong, to seek vengeance for a hurt, was as all-important as returning a favor or keeping one’s word once given. It was as strong as religion, and sometimes stronger, and the way of the Missouri Feud lived as long as the man did.

  Joey Wells had come to Sutton County, Missouri, and brought forty acres, a quarter section, of bottom land with soil as black and rich as any in the state. His creek was full and his crops were growing as fast and tall as his new baby boy. If things continued to go his way, he’d buy the forty acres adjacent to the ones he now tilled.

  That early spring day was cold, with wind swirling through wet pines and making a sound like a widow moaning at her man’s funeral. The rain hit with the force of bullets, causing his lead mule to dance and stamp his feet, wanting the warm sanctuary of the half-finished barn.

  Joey didn’t mind the weather. His life was as full as he could hope, and he needed to get the crops in and well established before the spring rains began to fall and turned his fields into mud holes too wet to work. He hitched his mules to the turning plow while the sun was still minutes away from rising and the temperature only a few degrees above freezing. He cut a plug of tobacco and stuffed it in his mouth, chewing and waiting for the dawn so he could see to plow.

  It was midmorning before Joey smelled smoke on the freshening breeze. He pulled back on the double reins and hollered, “Whoa there, mules, whoa there.”

  He followed his nose and saw the black clouds rising in giant puffs over the wooded ridge between him and his house. As he looked, he heard shots, and his blood turned cold with fear. His wife and son were in the cabin alone.

  He left the mules where they stood, running wildly across the three miles to his house through briars and stinging nettle and brush, his face bloodied by branches unfelt in his hurry home. He splashed through his creek, staining the water with blood from his bare feet, clambering up the gully on the far side, pulling at roots and trees and grass to speed his progress.

  He screamed in agony at the sight that befell him as he charged into the small clearing surrounding his house. He fell, exhausted and panting, to his knees, his voice a keening wail of sorrow. The timbers of his cabin were fallen in, flames eating what was left of Joey’s dream of hearth and home. He scrambled to his feet and charged the fire until he was driven back, his face blistered and burned, his coveralls smoldering from the intense heat. He circled the cabin, screaming his wife’s and boy’s names over and over, until his voice was raspy and his soot-filled throat closed, as if that would somehow make them appear, alive and healthy.

  It was almost nightfall before the flames subsided enough for him to search the ruins. He found them in what had been their bedroom. They were lying next to each other, the fire-blackened arms of his baby boy stretched out, his small fingers searching for his mother’s, which would remain forever just out of reach. Sobbing and choking, Joey wrapped their bodies in burlap sacks and carried them to a large oak tree near the creek. He dug a single grave and placed them tenderly in the dirt. As the sun sank to the west and the stars broke through scattered clouds, he recited what he could remembered of a Christian burial ceremony. His final words were “An eye fer an eye, an’ a tooth fer a tooth.”

  As tears made furrows in his soot-blackened cheeks, and sobs racked his lungs, Joey turned his face upward toward a slender moon and vowed revenge. It was the last time Joey Wells would cry.

  * * *

  Joey shook his head, snapping his mind back to the present. He had work to do if he wanted to save his wife’s and his boy’s lives. Walking quickly across sun-baked dirt, he went first to check on Carlos and Ricardo, his hired hands. They were both dead, killed instantly in the first rush of battle.

  Joey turned, wearing a death grimace, pulled his Arkansas Toothpick from its scabbard, and walked slowly to check the six bodies lying in various locations around his house. Four were dead, two still breathing but unconscious.

  He knelt next to the first one and, with a rapid back-and-forth motion slapped his face until the man opened pain-filled eyes. Joey leaned close to him, growling, “Who did this? Who is your leader?”

  The Apache half-breed grinned, baring bloodstained teeth. “Fuck you, gringo, I tell you nothing!”

  Joey didn’t say anything, just grabbed the wounded man’s collar and dragged him over to where the other man lay. This one, a Mexican, was conscious but unable to move. His spine was shattered where Joey’s slug tore through it.

  Joey asked him the same question. “Who is your leader, and why did you hit my place?”

  The man gritted his teeth and shook his head. Evidently, he wasn’t inclined to speak either.

  Joey said, “Watch ...” He pulled the Apache’s head up by its hair and quickly sliced off both ears, causing the man to scream until his eyes bulged out. Joey grinned, a grin with no humor in it, at the other man. “Guess it’s not true what they say about injuns not showin’ any pain, huh?”

  When the Mexican bandit again shook his head, Joey shrugged and with a lightning-quick motion moved his knife around the half-breed’s head, then ripped his scalp off with a wet, sucking sound. One last scream, and the Apache died.

  Joey turned again to the wounded man, who was wearing a dirty Mexican Rurale uniform. He slowly wiped his blade on the bandit’s shirt. “Now, we kin do this one o’ two ways... an easy way an’ a hard way.” He inclined his head and raised his eyebrows. “My wife an’ kid’re in that house, both shot by you bastards. I hope ya choose the hard way.”

  The Mexican licked his lips, his eyes flicking from the bloody knife blade to Joey’s eyes, cold as stones. “It was Emilio Vasquez, El Machete, who bring us here. We just wanted your cattle, for money.”

  “Where they headin’ next?”

  “I do not know, señor.”

  Joey swung the knife down, penetrating the killer’s hand and impaling it to the dirt. As he screamed and tried to pull it away, Joey said, “Wanna try thet question again?”

  “Bracketville ... they go to Bracketville to sell cattle. Aiyeee ... my hand . . .”

  “Hurts, does it?” Joey asked. When the man nodded, Joey watched his eyes as he jerked the knife free and swung it backhanded across the man’s throat, slitting it from ear to ear.

  He didn’t turn to watch the bandit die, drowning in his own blood, but walked rapidly to the corral to attach his two horses to his buckboard. He needed to get his wife and son to Del Rio as soon as he could. T
he Mexican town of Jimenez was closer and on his side of the Rio Grande, but Joey knew there was no doctor there, at least none he would trust with his family.

  It took him almost four hours to load his wife and son in the buckboard and make the trip to Del Rio. He was relived to hear that both would survive, though the doctor couldn’t tell if the boy would ever be able to walk on his shattered leg. “It’s in God’s hands,” the man said.

  Joey nodded, his face grim. “I’ll leave the healin’ ta Him, long as He leaves the killin’ ta me.” He gave the doctor a handful of gold coins. “Take care o’ my kin, doc, till I git back.”

  “But . . . where are you going. Your family needs you. . . .”

  The look of naked hatred and fury in Joey’s eyes stopped him in midsentence. “I gotta bury my hands and close up my house. Then I’m gonna kill every mother’s son who had a hand in hurtin’ me and mine. Tell Betty and little Tom I’ll be back fer ’em when I’m done. She’ll understand.” He set his hat tight on his head. “She knows the way o’ the Missouri Feud.”

  Chapter 1

  Three days later Joey rode his big roan stallion, Red, into Bracketville. It was a small cattle town twenty-five miles northwest of Del Rio, and a gathering place where ranchers from nearby spreads bought and sold stock of all kinds.

  Joey was loaded for bear. He wore a brace of Colt .44s tied down low on his thighs, a shoulder holster with a Navy. 36 under his left arm, his Arkansas Toothpick at his back, and he carried a Henry repeating rifle across his saddle horn and a Greener ten-gauge sawed-off shotgun in a saddle boot.

  As he rode down the main street, his eyes flicked back and forth, covering his approach on both sides, including rooftops. It was a habit learned young, when after the Civil War he spent two years hunting and killing Kansas Redlegs until there were none left.

  The war and its aftermath had turned young Joey Wells into a vicious killing machine, until he met Betty and tried to change his life. Now he was back on the trail, hunting nature’s most deadly animals, other men.

  He cut a corner off a slab of Bull Durham and stuck it in his mouth. He felt the familiar surge of adrenaline—a quickening of the heart, a dryness of the mouth, a quiver of muscles ready to act on a moment’s notice. A minute later he leaned to the side and spit, thinking, “God help me, but I’ve missed this,” as his mind drifted back to 1858....

  * * *

  It didn’t take Joey Wells long to discover who had burned his cabin and killed his wife and son, and why. There had been raids along the Missouri-Kansas border since 1854, but the burning of Wells’s cabin had been the first incursion of the Kansas Redleg raids to hit Sutton County. The Redlegs were becoming infamous, leading raiders and killers and rapists into Missouri. Their leaders were infamous as well—Doc Jamison, Johnny Sutter, and a colonel named Waters. These men and the thugs they commanded hid behind a “cause,” but they really cared only about killing and looting and burning.

  After burying his family, Joey took to the bush, where he found others like himself—men who had been burned out, families either killed or driven off, men who had lost everything except the need for vengeance.

  By the time the actual War Between the States began, these men, and Joey, were seasoned guerrilla fighters, men as at home on horseback or lying covered in leaves and bushes in thick timber as they were around a campfire. They could live for weeks on berries and squirrels and birds, and could sneak up to a man and steal his dinner from his plate without being seen. They were also mean and deadly as snakes, and just as quick to kill.

  To these warriors there were no rules, no lines of battle, no command structure. It was simply kill or be killed, but be damned sure to take some with you when you shot your final load.

  Finally, Union General Ewing made his biggest mistake of the war. He issued an order to arrest womenfolk, burn their homes, and kill everyone along the Missouri-Kansas border. This caused hundreds, even thousands, to join the guerrilla ranks of the Missouri Volunteers. Names began to be carved into history and legend, names written in the blood of hundreds of Union soldiers and sympathizers. Quantrill, Bloody Bill Anderson, Dave Johanson, George Tilden, Joey Wells; mere mention of these men could make grown men blanch and pale, and women grab their children and run for cover.

  After Union raiders killed a mother and her young son in one of their many raids, her other two sons joined the ranks of the Missouri Volunteers, to ride with Bloody Bill Anderson. They were Frank and Jesse James.

  These Volunteers perfected the art of guerrilla warfare. They used pistols mostly. Riding with reins in their teeth, guiding their mounts with their knees, a Colt pistol in each hand, they charged forces superior in numbers and weaponry time and again, to defeat them by sheer raw courage and fearlessness.

  * * *

  Joey reined Red in before a saloon with a sign over the front entrance lettered THE BULL AND COW. He flipped the reins around a hitching rail, slung his Henry over his shoulder, and stepped through the batwings. He stood just inside for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the smoky gloom, checking right and left, evaluating whether there was any immediate danger. He saw no group of men who could be the ones he was trailing and relaxed slightly, ambling to the bar, putting his Henry in front of him, its hammer back.

  “Whiskey,” he growled, watching other patrons behind his back in a big mirror over the bar. None seemed to be taking any great notice of him.

  The barman placed a bottle in front of him and a glass so dirty he couldn’t see through it. Joey fixed him with a stare, eyes narrow. “You want me ta clean thet glass on yore shirt?”

  The bartender blanched and hastily replaced the glass with a clean one. “An’ gimme a bottle with a label on it, I don’t want none o’ this hoss piss here.”

  The man nodded rapidly. “Yessir, Old Kentucky okay?”

  Joey didn’t answer. He took the bottle and poured a tumblerful, drinking it down in one swallow. “Leave the jug.”

  “Yessir.” The bartender took a rag and began wiping down the far end of the bar, as far away from Joey as he could get, head down, eyes averted, as if he could smell danger on him.

  Joey took the bottle and walked to an empty table in a corner of the saloon, one where he had his back to a wall, and he sat facing the other tables, drinking slowly, watching and waiting.

  At midnight a door slammed on the second story of the saloon and a very drunk, fat Mexican staggered down the stairs, an almost empty bottle of tequila in one hand and his sweat-stained sombrero in the other. He wore a Mexican Rurale uniform still covered with trail dust. At the bottom of the stairs he upended the bottle and drank the last of its contents, then let out a loud belch and stumbled toward the bar.

  Joey called softly, “Amigo, over here, por favor.”

  The drunk looked through bloodshot, bleary eyes toward Joey as he walked toward him. “What you want, mister?”

  Joey inclined his head toward his bottle. “I got this here whiskey an’ I don’t like ta drink alone.”

  The man glared suspiciously at him. Evidently he wasn’t used to Anglo strangers offering him free drinks. Joey whispered, “An’ I’d like ta know ’bout the girls here. They worth a couple o’ dollars?”

  A grin spread across the Mexican’s face, and he plopped down in a chair across from Joey. “Si, señor. They not so young, but what you do in town this small?”

  Joey signaled the barman for another glass and poured it full when it arrived. The fat man drank half of it down in one gulp, then hiccupped and laughed. “Not so much fire as tequila, but . . .” He shrugged.

  Joey grinned. “Yeah, I know what you mean. Still, it’ll git the job done, all right.”

  “My name is Tomás. Tomás Rodriguez.” He nodded at Joey and drank the rest of the bourbon without pausing.

  Joey sipped his, watching through slitted eyes. “I’m headin’ on down Del Rio way. You ever been there?”

  He nodded drunkenly. “Sí. Much better cantina in Del Rio. Muchas señorit
as, muchas tequila. ”

  “I’m lookin’ ta buy some longhorns. You know anybody down that way might have some ta sell?”

  Rodriguez shook his head. “You want longhorns? Too bad. Mi compadres just sold ours two days before.”

  Joey smiled again. “You mean those cattle Vasquez sold here?”

  The man looked up quickly, suspicion in his pig eyes. “You know Vasquez?”

  Joey shrugged. “Sure, old friend of mine. Used ta call ’im El Machete back when I knowed him.”

  Rodriguez smiled broadly, showing several missing teeth. “Oh, you been to Chihuahua?”

  “Yeah, once or twice.”

  Rodriguez leaned across the table and put his finger to his lips as if he were about to tell a secret. “Vasquez not in Chihuahua no more.” He shook his head. “He goin’ to Colorado, and I join him there.”

  “Colorado, huh? Why’s ol’ Machete goin’ all the way ta Colorado?”

  “Big jefe in Pueblo named Murdock going to hire us. Need vaqueros good with pistolas. ”Rodriguez held up the empty bottle. “You got more whiskey?”

  “Sure, it’s across the street at the hotel, in my room. Come on and I’ll get us another bottle.”

  Joey threw his arm around the drunk’s shoulders and they stepped through the batwings, the Mexican singing some folksong in Spanish that Joey had never heard before. He walked him around a corner of the saloon and into the darkness of an alley. As the man realized something was wrong and straightened, pulling away, Joey pulled out his Arkansas Toothpick and held the point under Rodriguez’s chin.

  The fat man slowly raised his hands. “Why for you do this, gringo?”

  “The only reason I ain’t killin’ ya right now, bastardo, is I don’t want the U.S. law on my trail while I track down an’ kill yore murderin’ friends.” The knife flashed and severed all four of the fingers on Rodriguez’s right hand, then, with a backhanded swipe, Joey hit him dead in the middle of his forehead with the butt of the knife, knocking him instantly unconscious before he had time to scream. He dropped like a stone, blood pouring from his ruined hand.