Vengeance of the Mountain Man Read online

  Goddammit, thought Morgan, run out of another town, thanks to that bastard Smoke Jensen and the way he marked me for life.

  He scrapped his winnings into his hat and left the saloon with as much dignity as he could muster.

  Not having anywhere else to go, he mounted and walked his horse over the wooden bridge across the Rio Grande into Mexico and pulled up at the first saloon he could find, El Caballero Cantina, where he swung down.

  The clientele here was a mixed bag of Mexican vaqueros, professional and semi-professional outlaws, both Mexican and American, and cowboys so down on their luck they couldn’t afford to drink on the American side.

  Sundance sat alone in a corner, his back to the wall as usual, and began to observe his fellow drinkers. He was formulating a plan to get even with Smoke Jensen, but he needed just the right sort of men: men who were born with the bark on; men who were as hard as the sun-baked chalice of the Sonoran desert; men who would kill for a dollar and give you change. Evidently, the others he had sent to kill Jensen had not been up to the task. Time to get some men who were used to earning their keep with their guns. The Mexicans had a word for them: buscaderos. Tough, pistol-toting gunslicks who lived only to kill. If it was the last thing he ever did, he would make Jensen pay for ruining his life.

  By midnight he had made his selection. First, he picked a Mexican who went by the name El Gato, the cat. To a Mexican, the only cat worth mentioning is the puma, or mountain lion. El Gato lived up to his name. He was big for a Mexican, over six feet tall. With wide shoulders and massive arms, and a belly to match, he looked like he weighed over three hundred pounds. He had a drooping moustache and smelled like he didn’t believe in bathwater. He drank his tequila straight, laughing at the gringos who had to cut it with salt and lime juice. In the last hour alone he had knocked two men out cold who didn’t laugh with him at one of his jokes. His English was tolerable, and he wore two pistols and acted like he knew how to use them.

  The next man Sundance picked was an American who answered to the name Toothpick. He was thin and wiry, all gristle and muscle without an ounce of fat on his body. He wore a thick, hand-tooled belt with a pistol on the left side with the butt forward, and a knife scabbard on the right. At first Sundance thought he got his name either because he was never without a toothpick between his lips, even when he smoked or drank, or on account of his thinness. Then, about an hour before midnight, one of the Mexican peons in the bar spilled his beer on Toothpick’s boots. In the blink of an eye, Toothpick pulled a long, narrow-bladed knife out of the scabbard on his belt and sliced the man’s moustache off. When El Gato complimented him on the knife, Toothpick said, “Yeah, this is my Arkansas Toothpick. I never go anywhere without it.” As he looked at the knife, his hands unconsciously caressed it, as if it were a woman, and his eyes glittered with madness. He was just the sort of man Sundance was looking for.

  The third man Sundance chose that night was quieter. He stood at the bar without drawing attention to himself, just watching the other patrons through narrow, suspicious eyes. He was stockily built, more square than long, and had hugely muscled arms more suited to a blacksmith than a cowboy. Sundance recognized him from a Wanted poster he had seen in Laredo. His name was Lightning Jack Warner. He rode at one time with Quantrill’s Raiders, until his savagery and ruthlessness made him unwelcome even among that bloodthirsty crowd. He was called Lightning not because he was fast with a gun, but because he was originally from Alabama, and had an inordinate fondness and need for moonshine whiskey, or white lightning. He was mean as a snake when sober, and even worse when drunk. Sundance remembered hearing that he was nearsighted and therefore used a Greener ten-gauge shotgun as his weapon of choice. It was never out of his reach, and could be seen leaning against the bar next to him.

  When the Regulator clock on the saloon wall struck midnight, Sundance made his move. He sauntered over to the bar and invited El Gato, Toothpick, and Lightning Jack to have a drink with him at his table. They were suspicious at first, until he said, “Give me five minutes of your time and you get a free drink. What have you got to lose?”

  When the men were seated around his table in the rear corner of the saloon, Sundance got a bottle of tequila and a handful of limes from the bartender. While Toothpick sliced the limes with his slender knife, Sundance filled everyone’s glass. Lightning Jack took a deep draught, coughed once, then whispered, “Smooth. Bitter, but smooth,” in a rasping voice.

  El Gato laughed and clapped the Southerner on the back. “I like this gringo. He knows how to drink the fruit of the cactus . . . quick and deep, like a man should take a woman.”

  Toothpick sipped his drink, made a face, and quickly sucked on a lime. He blew through his mouth once to cool it, then looked at Sundance with a furrowed brow. “Okay, Sundance, or whatever you call yourself. We’re here, and we’ve had our drinks. Now what?”

  Sundance took a cigar from his pocket and struck a match on his spur. As he held it under the end of the stogie, puffing it to life, he peered over the flame at the men who sat around the table looking at him expectantly.

  “First, let me tell you about me.” He drew deeply on the cigar and let the smoke trail out of his nostrils as he spoke, eyes unfocused and almost dreamy as he recalled his past. “A few years ago, I was just a kid, dreaming of becoming a famous gunfighter. I bought me some fancy clothes and a couple of pearl-handled Peacemaker Colts, and went on the prod to make my reputation. I hired out my gun to a rancher named Tilden Franklin, who planned to take over his town. Things were goin’ pretty good until this bastard named Smoke Jensen got a bunch of old broken-down gunslicks to back his play against Franklin.”

  At the mention of Smoke’s name, Toothpick’s eyes narrowed and Lightning Jack snorted, a half-smile on his face. El Gato just sat there, staring into his tequila.

  Sundance continued, as if talking to himself, his mind in the past. “During the final shoot-out, I happened to get the drop on one of Jensen’s old friends, a man named Luke Nations . . .”

  * * *

  They all heard the shot and whirled around. Luke Nations lay crumpled on the boardwalk, a large hole in the center of his back.

  Sundance stepped out of a building, a pistol in his hand. He looked up and grinned.

  “I did it!” he hollered. “Me. Sundance. I kilt Luke Nations!”

  “You goddamned back-shootin’ asshole!” Charlie Starr said, lifting his pistol.

  “No!” Smoke’s voice stopped him. “Don’t, Charlie.” Smoke walked over to Sundance, one hand holding his bleeding side. He backhanded the dandy, knocking him sprawling. Sundance landed on his butt in the street. His mouth was busted, blood leaking from one corner. He looked up at Smoke, raw fear in his wide eyes.

  “You gonna kill me, ain’t you?” he hissed.

  The smile on Smoke’s face was not pleasant. “What’s your name, lowlife?”

  “Les . . . Sundance. That’s me, Sundance!”

  “Well, Sundance!” Smoke put enough dirt on the name to make it very ugly. “You wanna live, do you?”

  “Yeah!”

  “And you wanna be known as a top gunhand, right, Sundance?”

  “Yeah!”

  Smoke kicked Sundance in the mouth. The young man rolled on the ground, moaning.

  “What’s your last name, craphead?”

  “M . . . Morgan!”

  “All right, Les Sundance Morgan. I’ll let you live. And Les, I’m going to have your name spread all over the West. Les Sundance Morgan. The man with one ear. He’s the man who killed the famed gunfighter Luke Nations.”

  “But,” his face wrinkled in puzzlement. “I got both ears!”

  Before his words could fade from sound, Smoke had drawn and fired, the bullet clipping off Sundance’s left ear. The action forever branded him.

  Sundance rolled in the dirt, crying and hollering.

  “Top gun, huh, bushwhacker?” Smoke said. “Right, that’s you, Sundance.” He looked toward Johnny North. “Ge
t some whiskey and fix his ear, will you, Johnny?”

  Sundance really started hollering when the raw booze hit where his ear had been. He passed out from the pain. Johnny took that time to bandage the ugly wound.

  Then Smoke kicked him awake. Sundance lay on the blood- and whiskey-soaked ground, looking up at Smoke.

  “What you do this to me for?” he croaked.

  “So everybody, no matter where you go, can know who you are, punk. The man who killed Luke Nations. Now, you listen to me, you son of a bitch! You want to know how it feels to be a top gun? Well, just look around you, ask anybody.”

  Sundance’s eyes found Charlie Starr. “You’re Charlie Starr. You’re more famous than Luke Nations. But I’m gonna be famous too, ain’t I?”

  Charlie slowly rolled a cigarette and stuck it between Sundance’s lips. He held the match while Sundance puffed. Charlie straightened up and smiled sadly.

  “How is it, you ask? Oh, well, it’s a real grand time being a well-known gunfighter. You can’t sit with your back to no empty space, always to a wall. Lots of backshooters out there. You don’t never make your fire, cook, and then sleep in the same spot. You always move before you bed down, ’cause somebody is always lookin’ to gun you down ... for a reputation.

  “You ain’t never gonna marry, kid. ’Cause if you do, it won’t last. You got to stay on the move, all the time. ’Cause you’re the man who kilt Luke Nations, dogscrap. And there’s gonna be a thousand other piles of dogscrap just like you lookin’ for you.

  “You drift, boy. You drift all the time, and you might near always ride alone, lessen you can find a pard that you know you can trust not to shoot you when you’re in your blankets.

  “And a lot of towns won’t want you, back-shooter. The marshal and the townspeople will meet you with rifles and shotguns and point you the way out. ’Cause they don’t want no gunfighter in their town.

  “And after a time, if you live, you’ll do damn near anything so’s people won’t know who you are. But they always seem to find out. Then you’ll change your name agin. And agin. Just lookin’ for a little peace and quiet.

  “But you ain’t never gonna find it.

  “You might git good enough to live for a long time, mister Sundance Morgan. I hope you do. I hope you ride ten thousand lonely miles, you back-shootin’ bastard. Ten thousand miles of lookin’ over your back. Ten thousand towns that you’ll ride in and out of in the dead of night. Eatin’ your meals just at closin’ time . . . if you can find a eatin’ place that’ll serve you.

  “A million hours that you’ll wish you could somehow change your life ... but you cain’t. You cain’t change, ’cause they won’t let you.

  “Only job you’ll be able to find is one with the gun, if you’re good enough. ’Cause you’re the man who kilt Luke Nations. You got your rep, boy. You wanted it so damned bad, you got ’er.” He glanced at Johnny North.

  Johnny said, “I had me a good woman one time. We married and I hung up my guns, sonny. Some goddamned bounty hunters shot into my cabin one night. Killed my wife. I’d never broke no law until then. But I tracked them so-called lawmen down and hung ’em, one by one. I was on the owlhoot trail for years after that. I had both the law and the reputation hunters after me. Sounds like a real fine life, don’t it? I hope you enjoy it.”

  Smoke kicked Sundance to his feet. “Get your horse and ride, you pile of crap! ’Fore one of us here takes a notion to brace the man who killed Luke Nations.”

  Crying, Sundance stumbled from the street and found his horse in back of the building that once housed a gun shop.

  “It ain’t like that!” the gunfighters, the gambler, the ranchers, and the minister heard Sundance yell as he rode off. “It ain’t none at all like what you say it was. I’ll have women a-throwin’ themselves at me. I’ll have money and I’ll have . . .”

  His horse’s hooves drummed out the rest.

  “What a story this will make,” Haywood Arden, the newspaperman said, his eyes wide as he looked at the bullet-pocked buildings and empty shell casings on the ground.

  “Yeah,” Smoke said wearily. “You be sure and write it, Haywood. And be sure you spell one name right.”

  “Who is that?” the newspaperman asked.

  “Lester Morgan, known as Sundance.”

  “What’d he do?” Haywood was writing on a tablet as fast as he could write.

  Smoke described Sundance, ending with, “And he ain’t got but one ear. That’ll make him easy to spot.”

  “But what did this Lester Sundance Morgan do?”

  “Why . . . he’s the gunfighter who killed Luke Nations.”4

  * * *

  Lightning Jack interrupted Sundance’s reverie. “Luke Nations? I heard that old man was a mean sonofabitch about as fast on the draw as anybody.”

  Sundance studied the glowing end of his cigar. “Well, he weren’t fast enough. Anyway, after I dusted him, Smoke Jensen stuck his nose in and drew down on me when I wasn’t ready. He wounded me, then shot off my ear.”

  El Gato looked up from his tequila and stared at the lump of scar tissue on Sundance’s head. “He shot off your ear, man? Santa Maria! Why he do such a thing?”

  “He said it was to teach me a lesson. He wanted to mark me so that all the other young guns who were on the prod to make a reputation would come after me, hoping to make their name by killing the man who shot Luke Nations.”

  El Gato’s lips curled in an evil smile. “Ah. I see.”

  Sundance paused to refill their glasses with tequila, then went on. “Well, it happened just like he said. For the last few years I haven’t been able to take a breath without some gun-happy hombre trying to kill me. I’ve been on the owlhoot trail ridin’ low, and haven’t been able to spend more’n two nights in a row in any town since then.”

  Lightning Jack chugged his drink down without a blink. “This is all real interestin’, Sundance, but what the hell does it have to do with us?”

  Sundance stabbed his cigar out on the table, face turning red. “Just this. Since I have to live as an outlaw anyway, I decided to make it pay. I’ve robbed lots of banks, stages, and pilgrims in the years I’ve been on the trail. I can’t go into town and live it up, so I still have most of the money I’ve stolen. I plan to use every cent of that money to get even with Smoke Jensen.”

  Toothpick’s eyebrows raised. “Just how much money are we talkin’ about, Sundance?”

  “Twenty thousand and change.”

  “So just what is your proposal?”

  Sundance took a swallow of tequila and leaned his head back and squeezed a lime into his mouth. After a deep breath, he croaked, “I want to put together a gang of men to go up into the Colorado mountains and put Jensen in the ground. I figure it’ll take between thirty and forty men to get the job done.”

  Toothpick shook his head. “Twenty thousand isn’t a lot of money to go around among that many hands.”

  Sundance grinned “The twenty’s just seed money to get us started. With all the cattle around here sick with Mexican Tick Fever, most of the big spreads haven’t been buying any beef. They’re fat with cash and have let most of their punchers go since there’s not any work to be done. I figure with a gang of the right sort of men, we could hit a few spreads here and there and anything else that interested us between Texas and Colorado. By the time we get to Jensen’s ranch, we’d probably have twenty thousand for every member of our group.”

  Lightning Jack whistled. “That’s a mighty ambitious plan, but that much activity would bring down a lot of heat on us. Every lawman in Texas would be after us.”

  Sundance shrugged. “So what? If we keep on the move, hit and run, they’ll never catch up to us. By the time they know where we are, we won’t be there anymore.”

  Just as he finished speaking, the batwings flew open and a group of ten men walked in, laughing and talking. Their leader was a short Mexican with a huge potbelly. He was unshaven, had a large black moustache, and was wearing crossed cart
ridge belts on his chest and a double-holster rig around his ample waist. He had a long purple scar running down his face from his left eyebrow to the corner of his mouth. The men with him were covered with trail dust and looked as tough as horseshoe nails.

  El Gato cursed under his breath and pulled his hat down to shadow his face. Sundance leaned over and asked him, “What’s the matter? Who’s that?”

  He whispered, “That’s Benito Valdez, the meanest hombre in Mexico, and he swore to kill me the next time he saw me.”

  Sundance shrugged and leaned back in his chair. “Don’t worry, El Gato, you’re with me now.” He reached under the table and loosened his pistol in its holster, leaving his hand wrapped around the butt.

  Valdez took the drink the bartender poured him and turned, leaning back with his elbows on the bar. After a moment, he saw El Gato and called, “Hey, amigos, look who’s here. It is El Gato.” As his men turned and stared, Valdez growled, “How’re you doin’, pussy cat? You remember what I said I was going to do if I saw you again?” He let his hand drop to his pistol.

  Before he could do anything, Sundance gave a big yawn. He flipped a handful of change on the floor at Valdez’s feet. “Hey lardbutt. How about bringing my friends and me another bottle of tequila? We’ve about finished this one off.”

  Valdez’s eyes slitted and he glared hate. “What means lardbutt?”

  Sundance grinned. “It means your ass is so fat that I bet you have to tie two horses together to ride anywhere. Now are you going to bring me my drink or am I going to have to kick your fat ass outta here?”

  Valdez screamed, “Filthy gringo,” and grabbed for his gun.

  Sundance kicked his chair over sideways and rolled once on the floor, coming up in a crouch, both hands filled with iron. Before Valdez’s pistol cleared his holster, Sundance opened fire.

  Twin holes blossomed in Valdez’s chest, the bullets punching through his body and out his back to star the mirror over the bar. Valdez was knocked off his heels, bounced once against the bar, and fell to the floor.

  His men drew and began to fire just as El Gato, Toothpick, and Lightning Jack opened up on them. The big Greener in Lightning Jack’s hands boomed twice, spitting death and cutting two of the Mexicans almost in half and showering the others with blood and guts.