Revenge of the Mountain Man Page 23

  He is insane, Smoke thought. But crazy like that much-talked-about fox.

  “That doesn’t answer my question, Davidson. How about it? You and me in a face-off?”

  “You trust that crud, Smoke?” Johnny North asked, edging close to Smoke.

  “No, I just want to see what he’ll do.”

  They all got that answer quickly. All the hemmed-in outlaws began pumping lead in Smoke’s direction. But all they managed to do was waste a lot of lead and powder and hit a lot of air.

  “So much for that,” Smoke said, after the hard gunfire had ceased.

  He had no sooner gotten the words out of his mouth when Harry and Bob opened up from the west side of the canyon wall. Several screams and howls of pain told the posse members the marksmanship of the men on the rim was true.

  “That got their attention,” Monte said with a grim smile.

  They heard the clatter of a falling rifle and knew that at least one of the outlaws had been hard hit and probably killed.

  “You have no honor, Jester!” Davidson screamed. “You’re a foul person. You’re trash, Jester.”

  “And you’re a coward, Davidson!” Smoke called.

  “How dare you call me a coward!”

  “You hide behind the guns of a child rapist. You’re afraid to fight your own battles.”

  “You talkin’ about Dagget?” Johnny asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Johnny grimaced and spat on the ground, as if trying to clear his mouth of a bad taste. “Them kind of people is pure filth. I want him, Smoke.”

  “He’s all mine, Johnny. Personal reasons.”

  “You got him.”

  “Dagget!” Smoke yelled. “Do you have any bigger bolas than your cowardly boss?”

  There was a long moment of silence. Dagget called out, “Name your poison, Jensen!”

  “Face me, Dagget. One on one. I don’t think you’ve got the guts to do it.”

  Another moment of silence. “How do we work it out, Jensen?”

  “You call it, Dagget.”

  Another period of silence. Longer than the others. Smoke felt that Dagget was talking with Davidson and he soon found that his guess was correct.

  “I reckon you boys got ropes already noosed and knotted for us, right, Jensen?” another voice called.

  “I reckon.”

  “Who’s that?” Monte asked.

  “I think it’s Paul Rycroft.”

  “I ain’t lookin’ to get hung!” Rycroft yelled.

  Smoke said nothing.

  “Jensen? Slim Bothwell here. Your snipers got us pegged out and pinned down. Cain’t none of us move more’un two/three inches either way without gettin’ drilled. It ain’t no fittin’ way for a man to go out. I got me an idea. You interested?”

  “Keep talking, Slim.”

  “I step out down to the canyon floor. One of your men steps out. One of us, one of you. We do that until we’re all facin’ each other. Anybody tries anything funny, your men on the ridge can drop them already out. And since I’ll be the first one out . . . well, you get the pitcher, don’t you?”

  Smoke looked back at the posse members. “They’re asking for a showdown. But a lot of you men aren’t gunslicks. I can’t ask you to put your life on the line.”

  “A lot of them ol’ boys in there ain’t gunslicks, neither,” Beaconfield said. “They’re just trash. Let’s go for it.”

  Every member of the posse concurred without hesitation. The minister, Ralph Morrow, was the second to agree.

  “All right, Bothwell. You and Rycroft step out with me and Pearlie.”

  “That’s a deal. Let’s do ’er.”

  Each taking a deep breath, Smoke and Pearlie stepped out to face the two outlaws. Several hundred feet separated the men. The others on both sides quickly followed, the outlaws fully aware that if just one of them screwed up, the riflemen on the skyline of the canyon would take a terrible toll.

  Davidson and Dagget were the last two down from the rocks. Davidson was giggling as he minced down to the canyon floor.

  And Davidson and Dagget positioned themselves so they both were facing Smoke.

  “And now we find out something I have always known,” Davidson called to Smoke.

  “What’s that, stupid?” Smoke deliberately needled the man.

  “Who’s the better man, of course!” Davidson called.

  “Hell, Davidson. I’ve known that since the first time I laid eyes on you. You couldn’t shine my boots.”

  Davidson flushed and waved his hand. “Forward, troops!” he shouted. “Advance and wipe out the mongrels!”

  “Loony as a monkey!” Garrett muttered.

  “But dangerous as a rattlesnake.” Smoke advised. “Let’s go, boys.”

  The lines of men began to walk slowly toward each other, their boots making their progress in the muddy, snowy canyon floor.

  The men behind their rifles on the canyon skyline kept the muzzles of their guns trained on the outlaws.

  No one called out any signals. No one spoke a word. All knew that when they were about sixty feet apart, it was time to open the dance. Rycroft’s hands jerked at the pistol butts and Beaconfield drilled him dead center just as Bothwell grabbed for his guns. Minister Morrow lifted the muzzle of his Henry and shot the outlaw through the belly, levered in another round, and finished the job.

  The canyon floor roared and boomed and filled with gunsmoke as the two sides hammered at each other.

  Smoke pulled both .44s, his speed enabling him to get off the first and accurate shots.

  One slug turned Dagget sideways and the other slug hit Davidson in the hip, striking the big bone and knocking the man to the ground.

  Smoke felt the lash of a bullet impact with his left leg. He steadied himself and continued letting the hot lead fly. He saw Dagget go down just as Davidson leveled his six-gun and fired. The bullet clipped Smoke’s right arm, stinging and drawing the blood. Smoke leveled his left-hand. 44 and shot Davidson in the head, the bullet striking him just about his right eye.

  Dagget was down on his knees, still fighting. Smoke walked toward the man, cocking and firing. He was close enough to see the slugs pop dirt from the man’s shirt and jacket as they struck.

  Dagget suddenly rose up to one knee and his fingers loosened their hold on his guns. He fell forward on his face just as Smoke slumped against a huge boulder, his left leg suddenly aching, unable to hold his weight.

  Smoke punched out empties and reloaded as the firing wound down. He watched as Pearlie emptied both Colts into the chests of two men; Minister Morrow knocked yet another outlaw to the ground with fire and lead from his Henry.

  And then the canyon floor fell silent.

  Somewhere a man coughed and spat. Another man groaned in deep pain. Yet another man tried to get up from the line of fallen outlaws. He tried then gave it up, falling back into the boot-churned mud.

  The outlaw line lay bloody and still.

  “My wife told me to finish it this morning,” Smoke said, his voice seeming unnaturally loud in the sudden stillness.

  “Anything my wife tells me to do, I do it,” Garrett spoke.

  “Looks like we done it,” Johnny summed it up.

  27

  Beaconfield and Garrett called in some of their hands and the outlaws were buried in a mass grave. Reverend Ralph Morrow spoke a few words over the gravesite.

  Damn few words.

  Smoke tied off the wound in his leg and the men swung into the saddles. This part of Colorado was peaceful again, for a time.

  The men turned their horses and headed for home. No one looked back at the now-quiet-but-once-roaring-and-bloody canyon floor. No one would return to mark the massive grave. The men of the posse had left the outlaws’ guns on top of the mound of fresh earth.

  Marker enough.

  * * *

  York would make it, but it would be a long, slow healing time. But as Dr. Spalding pointed out, Martha would make a fine nurse.

  Y
ork had been ambushed in the late afternoon, but he’d somehow managed to stay in the saddle and finally made the ranch. He had crawled into some hay by the barn and that had probably saved his life.

  “We’ll call our ranch the Circle BM,” York told her.

  Martha thought about that. “No,” she said with a smile. “Let’s call it the Circle YM. It . . . sounds a little bit better.”

  Spring came to the High Lonesome, and with the coming of the renewal of the cycle, a peaceful warm breeze blew across the meadows and the canyons and the homes of those who chose to brave the high country, to carve out their destiny, working the land, moving the cattle, raising their families, and trying their best to live their lives as decently and as kindly as the circumstances would permit them.

  Martha would be hired as the new schoolmarm, and in the summer, she and York would wed. Her teaching would be interrupted every now and then, for they would have six children.

  Six to add to Smoke and Sally’s five.

  Five?

  Yes, but that’s another story . . . along the trail of the last mountain man.

  Keep reading for a special excerpt of the new Western series from William W. Johnstone and J.A. Johnstone

  SAWBONES

  On the blood-stained battlefields of a divided nation, Dr.

  Samuel Knight used his surgical skills to treat wounded

  Confederate soldiers. In the brutal prison camps of the

  Union Army, he offered his healing services to fellow

  captives who’d given up hope. But now, with the war over

  and the South in ruins, the good doctor faces his hardest

  challenge yet: to save himself...

  Penniless and hungry, Knight has to beg, borrow, and steal to survive in a post-war hell that used to be his country. By the time he reaches his home in East Texas, it’s been taken over. Ruthless Union soldiers rule over the town with an iron fist. A Yankee carpetbagger is living in his old house—and the jackal has forced Knight’s wife to marry him. A normal man might give up, but Dr. Samuel Knight is going to take back what belongs to him. With a heartfull of grit and a hunger for revenge and with swift, surgical precision, he’ll stick a bullet in every dead man walking . . .

  Look for Sawbones whereever books are sold.

  CHAPTER 1

  Dr. Samuel Knight doubled over as pain drove into his belly, worse than any knife wound. He forced himself to stand upright. Sweat beaded his forehead, and it wasn’t from the sultry late spring day in East Texas. He was used to such weather. He had grown up in the Piney Woods. The agony came from the void in his stomach from lack of food.

  Or maybe he had poisoned himself with the weeds he had eaten the day before. His time spent in the Yankee prison camp at Elmira, New York—Hellmira, the starving, disease-ridden inmates had called it—had hardly been as bad. There the tainted food caused different symptoms. Diarrhea. Vomiting.

  He gasped when stomach pain doubled him over again.

  “Must have been hemlock and not wild carrot I ate.” Desperation had made him careless. Wild carrot leaves looked fuzzy, hemlock didn’t. But with his vision blurred at times from lack of food, making such a mistake was all too easy because the leaves were similar. The only luck he had was being alive. Hemlock killed as surely as a Yankee minié ball to the head.

  He talked to himself to get his mind on something other than the pain threatening to swamp him. It worked, concentrating on his wife and the homecoming she would give him when he got to Pine Knob. How they would celebrate! All night. For a week!

  It had been years since he had seen Victoria and almost as long since he had written her a letter. The Yankees hadn’t permitted their prisoners to send or receive letters, even if Victoria had known where to write him. The more he thought of her, the better he felt. The brutal pain died down enough to let him keep walking along the muddy road. He had no particular destination in mind today. But soon, soon he would be back in Pine Knob and home. All he had to do was to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  Home. Where he had grown up. The house. His wife, Victoria. His heart beat faster as he concentrated on his mental image of her. The pocket watch case with her picture had been stolen by a bluecoat the first day he had been taken prisoner after the Battle of the Wilderness. The watch had never kept good time, but her picture was the real reason he kept the battered gold case.

  Closing his eyes, he pictured her waving weakly to him the day he had ridden from Pine Knob on his way to Richmond and the Louisiana Hospital located there. He had begun as an assistant surgeon and quickly found himself teaching classes to first-year medical students. Too few of them had any aptitude, but Surgeon General Samuel Preston Moore had assigned most of them to forward units under the Bonnie Blue flag. Attrition in medical ranks proved almost as great as among those on the front lines.

  Disease ran rampant, not caring if a doctor or private or butternut-uniformed general suffered.

  His feet moved a little faster. He knew what he’d left behind back East, and he knew what lay ahead. Home and hearth and Victoria.

  Hunger pangs tore at him again when a tantalizing odor made his nostrils flare. Without realizing it, he left the road, cut across a grassy yard and found a game trail leading through the pines to a small, well-kept house. His mouth watered. It had been too long—a lifetime—since he had tasted freshly baked peach pie. Knight stumbled forward, ignoring everything around him but the pie set on the windowsill to cool.

  He braced himself, hands on either side of the window, as he leaned forward, closed his eyes and took a deep whiff. He turned giddy with anticipation. Eyes popping open, he looked around. Stealing a pie was wrong. Stealing was wrong, but starving to death had to be a sin of some sort, too. Hands trembling, he picked up the pie. The pain as heat stung his fingers proved far less than the knife thrusts of hunger in his belly.

  He turned to steal away with his booty. Not ten feet away a girl, hardly six years old, looking all pert and small, dressed in a plain brown gingham dress, gazed up at him. Her stricken look froze him in place.

  “That’s for my birthday party,” she said in a choked voice. “Please, mister, don’t take it. I ain’t got anything else.” She shuffled her bare feet and looked at the ground. Her shoulders shook as she tried to hold back sobs.

  “I just wanted to get a better look at it. It smells wonderful.” He held out the pie. His belly grumbled.

  “Mama made it special for me. She got the peaches fresh from Mr. Frost. He’s got an orchard of fruit trees. Apple, pear. Peaches are my favorite.” She took a step back.

  He knew what she saw. Knight might have been a scarecrow come to life. Standing almost six feet tall, he was down to a hundred and twenty pounds, ribs poking out, face gaunt, his long, unkempt dark hair greasy and pushed back out of his feverish eyes. Scarecrows in the field were dressed better, too. His trousers hung in tatters, his shirt had more holes than a woodpecker’s dinner, and his coat would fall apart if he dared to remove it. He wished for the first time in months that he still wore his Confederate uniform. It had been presentable, but it had rotted away in the harsh winter spent at the prison camp.

  She stared into his eyes and took another step back. Her small hand covered her mouth in horror. He knew his blue eyes were sunken and bloodshot, turning him into a bogeyman.

  A bogeyman stealing her birthday pie.

  “It’s a mighty fine-looking pie.” Knight turned and placed the pie back on the windowsill. “Happy birthday.” His hands shook, as much from emotion as from hunger. Not daring to look back, he hurried away, found the path through the woods and got onto the road again.

  Tears ran down his cadaverous cheeks. “I’m reduced to stealing from a little girl. No, no, no.”

  He stumbled on, trying to convince himself he was a good man, only driven to desperate acts by all that had happened to him. Life in the prison camp had been harsh. When the Confederacy finally capitulated, they had no resources to help those prisoners
kept by the Federals. He and all the others had been turned out, put on trains going south, and then abandoned in Richmond without food, money, or hope. Those civilians in the onetime Confederate capital were hardly better off. They certainly did not want diseased ex-prisoners in their city.

  “I’m better than that,” he told himself aloud. “I am.”

  “Reckon you might be, if I knowed what you was talkin’ ’bout.”

  Knight took a few more steps before he realized the voice was not coming from inside his own head. He stopped and looked around. Undergrowth started only a few feet from the road. Sparse trees quickly grew into a dense forest blocking his view after more than a dozen yards. A rustling made him home in on the short, tattered man emerging from behind a barberry bush.

  Knight knew he wasn’t the only one down on his luck. This man, with his scratched face and tangled, sandy hair, was in no better condition. As he hobbled out, Knight realized he was in even worse shape. The right leg twisted outward so the foot plowed up the dirt as he came forward.

  “You don’t look like no threat to me,” the stranger said. “Are you?”

  Knight shook his head and immediately regretted it. Dizziness hit him from the simple movement. Surprisingly strong arms circled his shoulders and held him upright.

  “Sorry. Been a while since I had anything to eat.”

  “You got the look of a soldier about you, but not exactly. Hard to put my finger on it.” The man steered Knight to the side of the road and a stump, where he collapsed. “You some kind of officer for the Rebs?”

  “Captain,” Knight said, seeing no reason to hide it. “I was a doctor attached to Jeb Stuart’s cavalry unit.”

  “You’re nuthin’ but skin and bones. You ain’t sick now, are you?”

  “Hungry. Can’t get anyone to give me the time of day, much less a decent meal. I’ve walked most of the way from Richmond. A few gave me rides in a wagon, but not many. Not enough.” He thrust out his stick-thin legs.