Honor of the Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  Louis rode with one pistol in a holster on his right leg and had two sawed-off American Arms twelve-gauges in saddle boots on either side of his saddle horn. The two-shot derringer behind his belt would be useful only in very close quarters.

  Joey had his Colt in his right-hand holster, his 36-caliber in his shoulder holster, and two short-barreled Winchester rifles, one in a saddle boot and one he carried across his saddle horn.

  Cal had the twin Colt Navy .36-caliber pistols Smoke had given him that he used while riding with Preacher. He also carried a Henry repeating rifle slung over his shoulder on a rawhide strap.

  Pearlie had double-rigged Colt Army .44s and a Greener twelve-gauge shotgun with a cut-down barrel for close-in work.

  Joey glanced around at his compatriots and laughed. “Hell, boys, if Lee’d had this much firepower at Appomattox, he wouldn’t have had to surrender.”

  Chapter 22

  The riders from the Lazy M came galloping toward Smoke’s spread like an invading horde of wild men. They started shouting and hollering and firing their weapons toward the cabin while still well out of range.

  Smoke, Joey, Louis, Cal, and Pearlie were bent low over their saddle horns behind a small rise in a group of pine trees, waiting for them to pass.

  As they rode by, Joey cut a chunk of Bull Durham and stuck it in his mouth. He chewed a moment, then spit, a disgusted look on his face. “Guess those assholes are tryin’ to scare us to death with all that yelping like injuns.”

  Cal, whose heart had hammered when he saw the number of men who rode by, took a deep breath, praying he wouldn’t disgrace himself or Smoke in the upcoming battle.

  Pearlie glanced at him and saw the sweat beginning to bead his forehead in spite of the chilliness of the early evening air. He reached over and punched Cal in the shoulder. “Don’t worry none, partner, we’re gonna teach these galoots a lesson they’ll never forget.”

  Cal nodded, relaxing a little bit, knowing he was among friends who would fight with him, side by side, against the devil himself if necessary.

  When Smoke heard gunfire being returned from the area of the cabin, he put his reins in his teeth, took his Greener ten-gauge in his left hand and his Colt .44 in his right, and spurred Horse forward, guiding the big Palouse with his knees.

  Joey looped his reins over his neck, took his short-barreled Winchester rifle in his hands, jacked the lever down to feed a shell into the chamber, and rode after Smoke.

  Louis filled both his hands with his American Arms express guns, eared back the hammers on all four barrels, and leaned forward, urging his mount over the hill.

  Pearlie winked at Cal as he grabbed his Greener cut-down shotgun in his left hand and drew his Colt with his right. Before he put the reins between his teeth, he said, “Come on, cowboy, it’s time to make some history of our own!”

  Cal drew both his Navy .36s and took off after the others, teeth bared in a grin of both exhilaration and fear.

  Murdock’s men were in the trap Smoke had devised for them, caught with the shotgun brigade hidden among boulders at their rear, and off to their left, hidden in the setting sun, the men with rifles, and to the front, the cabin with its contingent of men who, though not accurate with their weapons, were pouring lead into the outlaws at a furious rate, hitting some by mere chance.

  Cal and Pearlie had scattered a series of twenty small piles of kerosene-soaked wood across the clearing where Murdock’s men were trapped, and those were now lighted, making the area look like an army camp with its campfires.

  Just before Smoke and his band arrived from the bandits’ right side, completing their boxing-in maneuver, Monte Carson, leaning out of an upstairs window, did as he had been instructed.

  He began to fire his Henry repeating rifle, fitted with a four-powder scope, at the base of the small fires. The wood had been piled by Cal and Pearlie over cans of black powder, put in burlap sacks with horseshoe nails packed around them.

  When Monte’s molten lead entered the cans of powder, they exploded, sending hundreds of projectile-like nails in all directions and spreading smoke and cordite in a dense cloud to blind and confuse the enemy.

  Men and horses went down by the dozen. Those not killed outright were severely wounded by both explosions and nails.

  Other traps began to become effective. Several trenches had been dug, with sharpened spikes stuck in the bottoms. As first horses, then men on foot, began to step into the trenches, and horrible screams of pain from both men and animals began to ring out in the gathering darkness.

  Curly Rogers and his group of bounty hunters were directly behind Vasquez and Murdock as they approached the cabin. Rogers was firing his Colts at the ranch house as he and his men passed the pile of boulders. A sudden explosion came from between two of the rocks, and Rogers felt as if someone had kicked him in the side. He was blown out of his saddle, three buckshot pellets in his side. He bounced and quickly scrambled to his feet, barely managing to avoid being trampled by his fellow outlaws.

  Rogers clamped his left arm to his side, pulled out another gun, and ran toward the cabin, hoping to find another horse to get on. His feet went right through one of the deadfalls and his legs fell onto two sharpened spikes, sending agony racing through his body like a fire. He screamed, “Help me ... oh, dear God, somebody help me!” As he flopped on the ground, wooden stakes impaled in his legs, and a bullet from the cabin aimed at another rider missed its intended target but didn’t miss him. It severed his spine, ending his pain and leaving him lying paralyzed on the ground.

  Cates, seeing the amount of resistance at the ranch, tried to veer his horse off to the left and escape. As he passed between two pine trees, the baling wire Cal had strung nine feet off the ground caught him just under the chin. Horse and rider rode on, but Cates’s head stayed behind to fall bouncing on the ground like overripe fruit.

  The half-breeds, Sam Silverwolf and Jed Beartooth, trying to escape the fire from the cabin and the trees, whirled their horses and headed for the boulders, intending to take cover there among the rocks.

  Tyler and Billy Joe, leaders of the shotgun brigade, saw them coming and stepped into the open, guns leveled. Silverwolf got off two shots with his pistol, taking Tyler in the chest and gut, doubling him over. Billy Joe, twenty-two years old and never having fired a gun in anger before, stood his ground as slugs from the two half-breed killers and rapists pocked stone and ricocheted around him. He sighted down the barrel, waited until they were in range, and pulled both triggers at the same time. The double blast from the shotgun exploded and kicked back, knocking Billy Joe on his butt.

  When he scrambled to his feet, breaking the barrel open to shove two more shells in, he saw the breeds’ riderless horses run past. He squinted and looked up ahead of him on the ground. What he saw made him turn his head and puke. Silverwolf and Beartooth had been literally shredded by the twin loads of buckshot. There wasn’t much left of the two murderers that would even be identified as human, just piles of blood and guts and limbs and brains lying in the dirt.

  Juan Jimenez was jumping his horse over one of the small fires when Monte fired into it. Horse and rider were blown twenty feet into the air. Protected from most of the nails by his mount’s body, Jimenez, survived the blast, but both his legs were blown off below the knees, the stumps cauterized by the heat of the explosion. He landed hard, breaking his left arm in two places, white bone protruding from flesh.

  When Jimenez looked down and saw both his legs gone, he screeched and yelled and began to tear at his hair, his mind gone. His agony ended moments later when Ben Tolson took pity on him and shot him from the doorway to the cabin.

  The Silverado Kid, Blackie Bensen, and Jerry Lindy were riding next to each other. When the Kid realized the trap they were in, he yelled at his men to pull their mounts to the left. “Rush the trees over yonder, it’s our only chance to get away,” he hollered.

  The three men rode hard at the trees, guns blazing, lying low over saddle horns. Mike
and Jimmy were lying behind a log, their Henrys resting on it as they fired. Jimmy drew a bead on Blackie Bensen and fired. His first shot took Blackie in the left shoulder, spinning him sideways in the saddle. This caused Jimmy’s next shot to pierce Blackie’s right shoulder blade, entering his back and boring through into his right lung. The ruptured artery there poured blood into Blackie’s chest, causing him to drown before he had time to die from loss of blood.

  The Silverado Kid fired his Colts over his horse’s head, two shots hitting home, one in Mike’s chest, killing him instantly, the second careening off a tree to embed itself in Josh’s thigh, throwing him to the ground.

  Todd raised his Winchester ’73 and pumped two slugs into Jerry Lindy, flinging the outlaw’s arms wide before the twin hammer-blows catapulted him out of his saddle to fall under the driving hooves of the Kid’s mount, shattering his skull and putting out his lights forever.

  Jimmy’s next shot grooved the Kid’s chest on the left, causing him to rethink his objective. The Kid jerked his reins to the side and pulled his horse’s head around to head back into the melee around the cabin. He’d had enough of the rifle brigade.

  Explosions were coming one on top of another, billowing clouds of gunpowder and cordite hung over the area like ground fog on a winter morning, the screams of men hit hard and dying and those just wounded mingled to create a symphony of agony and despair.

  Into this hell rode Smoke and his friends. Joey screamed his rebel yell at the top of his lungs—“Yee-haw”—striking fear into the hearts of men who knew it to be a call for a fight to the death.

  Smoke answered with a yell of his own, and soon all five men charging the murderers and bandits were screaming, firing shotguns and pistols and rifles into the crowd as they closed ranks with them.

  The mass of men broke and splintered as Smoke and Joey and Louis and Cal and Pearlie cut a swath of death through it with their blazing firepower and raw courage.

  Smoke saw Horton and Max shooting at the cabin from horseback, while Gooden, Boots, and Art South were nearby on foot, their broncs lying dead at their feet, pierced by hundreds of horseshoe nails.

  Smoke glanced at Louis and yelled, “Remember them?” and pointed at the group of men. Louis nodded, his eyes flashing. “Damn right,” he said. Louis had been one of the men who rode up into the mountains to stand with Smoke against the bounty hunters in the Lee Slater fracas.

  Louis bared his teeth in a wide grin. “Let’s do it!” he yelled, and rode hard and fast at the killers with Smoke at his side.

  Horton and Max saw the two men coming, Colts blazing, and screamed in fear. “Oh, Jesus,” Horton shouted, “it’s Jensen and that devil Longmont.” He whirled his horse and tried to run. A slug from Louis’s Colt hit him between the shoulder blades, throwing him off his horse. It took him ten minutes to die, ten minutes of blazing pain.

  Max, less a coward than Horton, turned his mount toward Smoke and Louis and charged them, firing his pistols with both hands. Smoke fired twice with the Colt in his right hand, missing both times. Then he triggered the ten-gauge Greener he held in his left hand. It slammed back, throwing Smoke’s arm in the air, making him wonder momentarily if his wrist was broken.

  The load of buckshot and nail heads met Max head-on. The lead exploded his body into dozens of pieces, scattering blood and meat over a ten-square-yard area.

  Smoke stuck the Greener in his saddle boot and pulled his left-hand Colt. He began to alternate, firing right, then left, then right again as he continued his charge over Max’s body toward Gooden, Boots, and Art South.

  Gooden snap-shot at Louis and hit home, the slug tearing into the gambler’s left thigh but missing the big artery there.

  Louis returned the favor, punching a slug into Gooden’s gut, doubling him over and knocking him to the ground. “Oh, no,” he screamed, “not the stomach again!” He lay there, trying to keep his intestines in his abdomen, but they kept spilling out. Finally, Gooden gave up and lay back and died.

  Art South fired at Louis and missed, but nailed his horse in the right shoulder, knocking Louis to the ground. He rolled and sprang to his feet, left hand pushing his wounded left leg to keep him upright.

  Art South stepped closer to Louis and extended his hand, pointing his Colt between Louis’s eyes. “Any last words, Longmont?” South asked, grinning.

  “No,” Louis said, and he pulled his derringer out from behind his belt and shot both .44 barrels into South’s chest, blowing him backward to land at Boots’s feet.

  Boots swung his pistol toward the now-unarmed and defenseless Louis, who merely stared unflinchingly back at the outlaw.

  Boots’s lips curled up in a snarl until they disappeared into the hole Smoke blew in his face with his .44s. The bullets entered on either side of Boots’s nose, blowing his cheekbones out the back of his head.

  Smoke grabbed the reins of a riderless horse while Louis bent and picked up the Colt he had dropped. Smoke reached down and picked Louis up with one arm and swung him into the saddle.

  “Thanks, partner,” Louis shouted.

  Smoke just smiled and rode off, looking for other prey.

  Cal and Pearlie had emptied their guns and were reloading, trying to keep their mounts from shying while they punched out empty brass casing and stuffed in new ones.

  The Silverado Kid galloped over to where Bill Denver and Slim Watkins were riding, firing up into the cabin. Bill Denver shot into the second-story window, his slug taking Monte Carson in the side of the head and taking out a chunk of his scalp as it knocked him unconscious and blew him back out of sight. Two of the punchers in the room rolled Monte over and began dressing his wound, while a third picked up his rifle and took his place at the window.

  The Kid shouted, “Look, Denver, Watkins, over there.”

  He pointed toward Cal and Pearlie, off to the side of the fracas, surrounded by the gunnies they had killed. “There’s only those two young’uns between us and freedom. Let’s dust the trail on outta here, boys,” he cried.

  Denver and Watkins nodded and wheeled their mounts to follow the Kid’s lead. The three desperadoes spurred their broncs into a gallop, right at Cal and Pearlie.

  Cal shouted, “Look out, Pearlie, here they come!”

  With no time to reload his pistols, Cal dropped them and swung the Henry repeating rifle off his back and jerked the lever, firing from the hip without bothering to aim.

  Pearlie holstered his still-empty pistols and shucked his Greener twelve-gauge with the cut-down barrel from his saddle boot. He eared back the hammers and let ’em down as Cal began to fire.

  The Silverado Kid, scourge and killer of women and children, the man too tough for Tombstone, took three. 44-caliber slugs from Cal’s rifle, two in the chest and one in the left eye. His entire left side disappeared as he back-flipped over his horse’s rump to land spread-eagle and dead in the dust.

  Denver and Watkins got off four shots with their pistols. The first shot took Cal in the right hip, above the joint, and punched out his right flank, blowing him out of the saddle.

  The next shot missed, but the third and fourth both hit Pearlie, one burning a groove along his neck, and the other skimming his belly, tearing a chuck of fat off but not hitting meat.

  Pearlie gave a grunt and doubled over, then straightened up and let both his hammers down, one after the other. Denver took a full load of 00 buckshot in the face, losing his head in the bargain, and Watkins’s right arm and chest were disintegrated in a hail of hot lead from Pearlie’s express gun.

  Both men were dead before they hit the ground.

  Pearlie jumped out of his saddle and sat cradling Cal’s unconscious body in his arms while he reloaded his pistols. No one else was going to hurt his friend as long as he was alive to prevent it.

  Jerry Jackson, train robber from Kansas, screaming curse words at the top of his lungs, rode his horse at the cabin, blazing torch in one hand and Colt in the other.

  Ben Tolson stepped out of his door
way and onto the porch, his shotgun blasting back at Jackson.

  Jackson was blown off his mount at the same time his. 44 slug tore into Tolson’s chest on the right side, spinning him around and back through the door he gave his life to defend.

  Joey, his pistols and both Winchester rifles empty, stood up in his stirrups, looking for Cal and Pearlie. He wanted to make sure they were all right.

  He heard a yell from behind him and looked over his shoulder to see Colonel Waters riding at him, his sword held high above his head, blood streaming from a wound in his left shoulder.

  “Wells, prepare to die, you bastard,” Waters screamed as he bore down on the ex-rebel.

  Joey bared his teeth, let out his rebel yell again, and pulled his Arkansas Toothpick from its scabbard. He wheeled Red around and dug his spurs in, causing the big roan to rear and charge toward the Union man.

  They passed, the sword flashing toward Joey’s head. He ducked and parried with his long knife, deflecting Waters’s blade, sending sparks flying in the darkness. Both horses were turned, and again raced toward each other. At the last minute Joey nudged red with his legs, and the huge animal veered directly into Waters’s smaller one, knocking both horse and rider to the ground.

  Joey swung his leg over the saddle horn and bounded out of the saddle. He crouched, Arkansas Toothpick held waist-high in front of him, and waited for Waters to get to his feet.

  The colonel stood, sleeving blood and sweat off his face. “You killed my men, every one, Wells, and now you are going to die.”

  Joey spit tobacco juice at Waters’s feet. “Yore men, like you, Waters, were cowards who killed defenseless boys who’d given up their guns. They didn’t deserve ta live, an’ neither do you.”

  Joey waved the blade back and forth. “Come an’ taste my steel, coward!”

  Waters lunged, his sword outstretched. Joey leaned to his right, taking the point of the sword in his left shoulder while striking underhanded at Waters.