Ordeal of the Mountain Man Read online

  By then, the other two had unlimbered their revolvers and now attempted to bring them up in line with this unnervingly fast stranger. They failed miserably in the attempt. Smoke’s second round punched into the right side of the chest of the gunman nearest to him and shattered his shoulder blade. The thug’s Smith American went flying in reflex to the pain that exploded in his body.

  His companion thought better of further aggression. He turned his horse, spurred it to a gallop and sprinted for the top of the rise. As he disappeared over the crest, Smoke Jensen walked Cougar over close to the wounded man.

  “Now, tell me. Who are you ridin’ for?”

  Groaning, the trash looked up at Smoke through a haze of pain. “We ain’t workin’ for nobody. We—we only figgered to cut out a few head and make a little money off ’em. That’s all, mister.”

  Smoke’s expression registered disappointment. “Why is it I don’t believe you? Well, in the event you all of a sudden remember who it is, you can tell him the reason you got shot up is that you ran into Smoke Jensen.”

  His shock-pale skin went even whiter. “Oh, Jesus.”

  “He can’t help you. You ride on out of here while I pick up that six-gun. We’ve got a herd to deliver.”

  Three

  A great, bloated, orange sun hung on the eastern horizon over Muddy Gap. The smoke from wood-burning cookstoves streamed from stovepipes. Shrill voices of children, out to do their chores, could be heard in the backyards of their homes.

  A small girl in a paisley dress called from the hen yard. “Chick—chick, here chick-chick-chick!”

  A boy, somewhat older than she, could be heard in a low barn. “Soo-oo, Bossy. Hold still. I gotta milk you.”

  From a spanking-new carriage house, another boy announced cheerily, “Here’s your oats, Prince.”

  On a hillside overlooking the town, Hubble Volker sat his mount at the center of a crescent formed by the Yurian gang. Together, they gazed down on the scene of domesticity. Volker waved a hand in the direction of Muddy Gap.

  “We’ll give ’em a little more time. Let the shops open up, and the bank. Then we make our move. Too bad the boss couldn’t come along. He’d have enjoyed this.”

  Hairy Joe spoke over the rumble of his stomach. “I smell biscuits bakin’. Sure could use some of them.”

  Volker gave him an amused look. “Maybe you can he’p yerself to some when we clean out the town.”

  Pleading sounded in Joe’s voice. “But, I’m hongry now. What we gonna eat?”

  “Air, if you didn’t bring something along,” Volker told him with a snort. “Me, I’ve got me some corn bread from last night, an’ some fried fatback. Shore gonna taste good. You gotta plan ahead, Hairy Joe.”

  Hairy Joe appealed to a generosity that did not exist. “Least let me have shares in some of that, Hub.”

  “Nope. Ain’t got enough. Ask the other boys. They only brung enough for theyselves, too.”

  Scowling, Hairy Joe subsided. He cut envy-filled eyes to the rest of the gang while they munched on their leftovers. Unappeased, his stomach continued to growl. For solace, he rolled a quirley and puffed it to life. The smoke wreathed his head.

  Two hours later, the main street began to bustle with merchants and their employees. Doors opened and shades went up. A few early customers rolled into town on buckboards or on horseback. Hubble Volker looked on, weighing the right time. It would not be long, that much he knew.

  Riding in twos, as directed by Yurian’s second in command, the gang entered the main street of Muddy Gap from different directions. Each pair went to an assigned business front. Hub Volker and Garth Evans entered the bank. One teller looked up and peered at them from under a green eyeshade, a welcoming smile already forming on his lips. Then he saw the weapons in their hands and the masks over their faces.

  “OHMYGOD!” he blurted.

  Volker took immediate command. “That’s right, folks, this is a holdup. Everybody put your hands over your heads. You tellers, fill money bags with everything in your tills. You, Mister Banker”—he gestured with the muzzle of his Merwin and Hulbert revolver to the portly gentleman seated in a glass cubicle behind the tellers’ cages—“you be so kind as to step over to the vault and empty it out.”

  Stammering, the banker refused to comply. “You can’t get away with this. The marshal will come running, and the sheriff is back in town. I’ll not help you steal from these good people.”

  “In that case, we don’t have any more use for you,” Volker told him.

  Hub raised the Merwin and Hulbert, and it roared loudly in the confined space. Glass bulged inward and showered musically to the floor as the bullet passed through the dividing window and struck the banker in the forehead. He flew backward out of his padded, horse-hide swivel chair and crashed noisily against a file cabinet.

  Three women customers began a chorus of shrieks and wails at the sight. Volker shoved through the swinging gate that divided the lobby from the working end of the bank and yanked a bug-eyed clerk from his desk. He shoved him toward the big safe. “You’ll do. Get busy stuffin’ these bags with money.”

  “We’d better work fast, boss,” Evans advised. “That shot’s sure to bring the law.”

  Volker’s bandanna masked his nasty smile. “Good. Then we won’t have to waste time huntin’ them down.”

  Muffled, yet recognizable yells of alarm came from other businesses. A man in shirtsleeves ran from the haberdashery. “Help! I’m being robbed.”

  A second later, a sharp report ended his appeal for aid. The clothing merchant staggered in the middle of the street, went rubber-legged and fell in a heap. From the general mercantile came the cymbal crash of disturbed galvanized washtubs and buckets. Moments later, two masked men swaggered out onto the street. One clutched a fat cloth bag. Behind them, the proprietor appeared in the doorway, a shotgun in his hands.

  Swiftly he brought the weapon to his shoulder and fired. He had been too hasty. Only three pellets entered the back of the robber with the loot. Most of the shot tore into the cloth sack. It erupted in shreds; coin and paper currency flew in all directions. Three of the gang, left to cover the street, turned their revolvers on the storekeeper and cut him down in a hail of lead. Most of the nasty work had been done by then. Two-thirds of the Yurian gang had gathered in the middle of the block, ready to ride out.

  At last, Hub and his cohort stepped out of the bank, arms filled with canvas money satchels. “All right, boys, mount up,” Hub called.

  Belatedly the law showed up in the person of Sheriff Hutchins and two deputies. Hub slung the drawstrings of his money pouches over his saddle horn and turned to respond to the warning shot and the shouted demand to surrender.

  Filling his hand with the Merwin and Hulbert, he triggered a round that nicked a nasty gouge along the point of the sheriff’s shoulder. To his left, another member of the gang threw a hasty shot at one of the deputies. Then bullets flew from both sides. The sheriff took cover behind a rain barrel and fired around one side.

  Gundersen, a chubby outlaw originally from Norway, grunted and clutched his belly. Hub shouted to the man closest to Gundersen. “Give him a hand getting mounted. We’ve got to get outta here. ”

  In the next instant, Hub Volker saw his chance and raised the Merwin and Hulbert to sighting position. He squeezed off a shot and watched in satisfaction as the bullet struck the sheriff full in the mouth. A spray of blood, bone, hair and tissue erupted from the back of the lawman’s head.

  By then, the shock had worn off some of the townsmen. A new crackle of gunfire rippled down the street. One of those offering resistance was the mayor, Lester Norton. Determined to contain them until the law and volunteers could act, he alternately fired and ducked from obstruction to obstruction as he steadily advanced on the gang. He was in midstride when a bullet fired by Evans smashed into his right shoulder and knocked the Winchester from his hands. Wisely, he went down and played dead. The gang had had enough. Ducking low, the final few s
wung into their saddles.

  Firing wildly, the outlaws put spurs to their horses and thundered along the main street while citizens ducked and shot blindly back. Two men from the Sorry Place saloon ran to the side of the sheriff and knelt to give him aid. They soon saw that he needed none.

  One of them immediately lost his breakfast. The other stood and cursed the outlaws as they stormed out of town. Only a scatter of stray shots pursued them. In a minute, except for a thin dust cloud, nothing marked their presence at all.

  In the aftermath, while the wounded received care and the dead were carried off to the undertaking and used furniture parlor, Boyne Kelso sought out Mayor Norton. He found the mayor being patched up by Doc Vogt outside Harbinson’s General Mercantile. Arranging his features into his best expression of concern and outrage, he took the mayor aside to the saloon-bar of the hotel. There, amid much hand wringing and gesticulating, he poured out his prepared spiel.

  “Lester, I am deeply concerned by this. Why, only a handful of volunteers went out as a posse, led by our least experienced deputy. The sheriff is dead, and Grover Larsen is cowering at home, afraid the outlaws will come back. What I said about the stage robbery only last Friday goes double for this assault on our very homes.”

  Lester Norton cut his eyes to Boyne Kelso in a sideways glance. “You mean you’ll put up a thousand dollar reward?”

  Kelso mopped his brow and took a long pull on his cup of coffee. “Yes, of course. Two thousand if that is what it takes. I’ve talked to Ralph at the bank. He’s president now, I suppose. They’ll put up money for the reward also. Eb Harbinson is still picking up cartwheels and gold eagles, but he offered a hundred. Got most of his back, even if they did kill his father. But the point is not that.”

  Norton took a swallow of coffee. “What is it?”

  Kelso polished off the last in his cup and poured for both of them. “What is most important is that we must reinforce the law in this town. We have to find a replacement for Walt Hutchins immediately. We both know that Larsen is too old for his job. He’s slow and the sound of gunfire frightens him. He needs to be replaced as well as the sheriff. Believe me, until we do, this town is terribly vulnerable.” His warning was not lost on Mayor Norton.

  Since early morning it had been building. Smoke Jensen kept a watchful eye on the towering clouds to the southwest. Slowly they progressed across the eastern downslopes of the Rocky Mountains and spread out across the high plains country. The storm had all the looks of a vicious, straight-line squall. Among land-born storms, such a phenomenon ranked second only to a tornado in ferocity. Smoke had encountered only four in all his years in the High Lonesome. One of the old fraternity of mountain men had tried to explain it to him once.

  “It happens when a whole passel of cold air spills down the face of the mountains to collide with warm, moist air slidin’ up from hotter country in Texas and New Mexico and the desert of Chihuahua,” Smoke had been told. “When they impact it births tre—men—dous thunderstorms, Wal, boy, hail, lightnin’ an’ goose-drowner rains roar across the prairie. Sometimes some of them form slightly concave straight-line winds of fearsome velocity,” old Spec Dawes had continued his description to a rapt Smoke Jensen. “Like their big brothers, the twisters, they can strip the roof off a building, lift a cow off its hooves and drive straws through a tree trunk.

  “Anything movable, an’ a lot that ain’t,” Smoke had been told, “is driven ahead of the powerful blast rather than being lifted into the sky. Bowled over and rolled like a chile’s ball, a man can easily be reduced to a pulpy bag of broken bones.”

  Memory of that description, and the storms he had actually experienced, made a tiny flicker of unease in Smoke’s mind. It also kept him extra watchful.

  Shortly before the nooning, the light zephyrs that had brushed the manes and tails of their horses dropped abruptly, then picked up as a stronger breeze from a slightly different quarter. Smoke frowned and again cut his eyes to the dust cloud. What he saw decided him to ride ahead a ways and look for a sheltered gully or basin where they could hold the remounts and wait out the storm. His search proved harder than he had expected.

  Two miles ahead he found a ravine that was too small. Determined, he rode on. Cougar began to sense the change in the atmosphere. He rolled big, blue eyes and snorted, his ears twitched, his tail swished nervously, and his spotted rump writhed as though snakes crawled under it. Another mile went by without any likely spot. Smoke had about decided to turn back after covering what he estimated to be half a mile more. Then he saw it.

  Sunlight cast stark shadows over a cut in a hill. A fold, eroded into the rising mound, lay behind. Perfect, Smoke saw when he entered. The high side of the bluff lay between the direction of the storm and the small, closed valley formed by rushing water in ancient days. At once he turned back to lead the horses there.

  “There’s shelter ahead that we can use,” Smoke told Harkness when he returned to the gather of animals. He cast a precautionary gaze at the approaching storm. “If we have time, that is.”

  Over the next hour the dingy brown mass swirling in the air extended upward and out over the drovers as they worked Smoke’s horses toward the sheltered valley. The stout breeze stiffened into a harsh wind, chill and turbulent. Uprooted sagebrush bounded along the ground. Small dust devils formed and raised dirt, leaves, and pebbles into the air, only to dissipate and spew their content across the faces of the men and the coats of their mounts.

  Steadily the force increased. Invisible hands tugged at the sheepskin coat Smoke Jensen had shrugged into when the temperature had dropped drastically. The gale acquired a voice. Shrill and eerily mournful, it moaned around the ears of the ranch hands. Riderless, the remounts flicked their ears in agitation. It would not take much more to spook them, Smoke knew, and only a third of them had been driven into the narrow passage that led to the valley beyond.

  Suddenly the western horizon washed a blinding white. Sheet lightning sizzled and crackled through the air, followed by a cataclysmic bellow of thunder. Caught in the strobing effect, the legs of the half-broken horses went all akimbo. For a second they appeared to skid in place. Then they broke in every direction. Panic reigned as the straight-line, cyclonic storm slammed into them. Rapidly the remounts ran before the punishing tumult. At once the men went after them.

  With only a third of the two hundred horses headed into the little valley, the hands had no choice but to pursue. Battered by rain blown nearly horizontal, the Sugarloaf riders streamed helplessly after the frightened critters. Blinded by the huge, silver streaks that fell with sodden determination, they made poor headway against the vicious bursts of frigid air. Realizing the impossibility of it, Smoke Jensen shouted himself hoarse in an effort to call back his men.

  Slowly they gave up, knowing that they would have an even harder time recovering the animals after the storm had blown beyond them. Together they sought shelter in the valley along with Smoke. Above their heads the sky turned an ominous black.

  In half an hour the trailing edge of the storm spattered itself out on the leaves of cottonwoods that ringed the valley. With Caleb Noonan left behind to watch over the sixty horses that had not fled the storm, the rest set out to search for the scattered remounts. Smoke had no doubt that they had a long, hard task ahead of them.

  “We’ll spread out and work in circles,” he suggested. “Bring them back as you find them.”

  After a fruitless afternoon of search, Smoke had a flash of inspiration. While the others speared chunks of fatback from tin plates and chewed glumly, he outlined his idea.

  “Tomorrow morning we’re going to try it another way. Luke, I want you to go back to that valley after you eat. Bring up a couple of mares. It would be best if you can bag at least one that is in season.”

  Grinning riders cut their eyes from Smoke to one another in knowing glances. So long as the wind held from the southwest, that would sure as shootin’ work. Smoke came to his boots and went to the nearby stream to
scrub his plate clean with sand. Luke Britton left with a good two hours’ light remaining.

  Later, with the sun only a pink memory on thin bands of purple clouds in the west, the tired hands rolled up to rest until morning. Smoke Jensen sat alone, smoking a cigar beyond the glow of dying coals. Lost in deep thought, his reverie was not disturbed even by the mournful hoot of an owl in a pine nearby.

  Luke Britton considered himself lucky to find one mare in heat. He brought back three others, and wily horse experts, Jerry Harkness and Utah Jack Grubbs, offered advice on how to make the most advantage of this. What they came up with required a rather indelicate procedure involving some old cheesecloth from a side of bacon and a bit of messy work around the tail end of each mare. When they had finished, Smoke sent the dozen men out in groups of three.

  Within half an hour, Jerry Harkness rode in with a dozen snorting, skittering young stallions in tow, led by ropes around their necks. He gave Smoke a cheery wave. “It worked, all right. What do we do with them now?”

  “I’ll hold them here. Go on back and find me some more. Ah—Jerry, you did good. Any more on the way?”

  “Sure enough. Jeff is about twenty minutes behind me. He has a string of twenty.”

  Smoke brightened. “At this rate, we might be on the trail again by this time tomorrow.”

  Sunlight twinkled down on the puddles in the ranch yard thirty miles to the northeast of Muddy Gap. Elmer Godwin looked out from the barn, where he had been mucking out stalls. He liked working for Sven Olsen, an even-handed, fair-minded man who paid well and whose young wife set a good table. He also had a true friend in Sven’s oldest son, Tommy. A gangling orphan in his late teens, Elmer had grown close to Tommy over the past nine months he had worked for the Olsens.