Its coolness embraced him. When his clothes had become thoroughly wet, he removed them and washed out the salt and dust. His thoughts snapped back to young Tommy Olsen doing exactly the same thing not so long ago. Wringing out his garments, he flung them up on the grassy bank. The cool water exhilarated him, and he noticed his skin had turned a rosy pink. Satisfied, he climbed out and let his effluvium drift away before filling the canteen.
Then he gained the embankment and spread his clothes on a hawthorn bush to sun dry. He would continue to use the pebble in order to preserve his water, he reminded himself. While he dried off, he drank deeply, but slowly, from the canteen. When his limbs stopped trembling, he returned to the creek to refill the canteen. He turned his clothes once and was soon dressed and ready.
Fastening his cartridge belt around his waist and easing his weapons into place, Smoke started off. He had a goodly ways to go before dark. Idly, he wondered what he might find to eat along the way.
Well over eight feet long, the sleek, fat diamondback lay torpid on a large, flat rock. Drowsed by the lowering sun, the serpent only vaguely felt pangs of hunger. It had killed and eaten a jackrabbit three days ago. Now the time had come to hunt and feed again. So innervated had the viper become from the late afternoon sun that it only sporadically employed its early warning system. After a long two minutes, the forked tongue flicked out, sensing the vibrations and flavors of its surroundings. Then it flicked out again, the creature suddenly alert.
So silently did Smoke Jensen move that the rattlesnake did not sense his approach until the man nearly came into sight. Lethargically, the viper roused itself and began to coil for a strike at what seemed a huge food source. Ancient instincts stirred, and it completed its spiral with renewed alacrity. The upper third of its body arched into the air; the snake swayed backward, prepared to strike.
That was when Smoke Jensen saw it. Despite the debilitating effects of no food and little water, a man of Smoke’s prowess and speed had ample time to unlimber his right-hand Colt and blow the triangular head off the viper as it arched toward him. Deprived of command, the huge body writhed and twisted across the ground.
Instinct caused it to try to recoil, but the necessary command center no longer existed, and it all but tied itself in knots. Smoke stood well clear while the reptile’s violent motions slowed, his .45 Peacemaker ready. He well knew that prairie rattlers like this one frequently traveled in mated pairs. A bull this size was sure to have a harem.
When the creature’s spasms reduced to an occasional twitch, he grabbed the body below the rattles and held it at shoulder height while he walked quickly to a stunted oak that rode the top of a low knob. Using a fringe thong from his shirt, Smoke tied the snake upside down from a low limb. Expertly applying his Greenriver sheath knife, he slit the skin from neck to rattles, peeled it back, then opened the pinky white body from severed end to its bung. He used his boot heel to dig a small hole to dispose of the guts, then washed the meat with a little of his dwindling water supply. With that accomplished, he looked all around, scanning the horizon for any human presence besides himself.
Satisfied that he was alone, he made a fire ring, gathered dead fall from the oak and kindled it to life from a tinder box he habitually carried. When the blaze took, he fed it twigs until a decent bed of coals appeared. Nearly smokeless, the fire under the spreading limbs of the oak gave off no telltale column of smoke. After threading the snake on a green branch he had cut, Smoke Jensen placed it over the fire. He wished for salt, then banished the desire. While his meat cooked, he located a chokecherry bush and stripped it of a handful of berries.
He would crush these and rub them into the meat while it roasted. The bitter-sweet tang of the fruit would make a fair substitute for salt. When all had been accomplished, he feasted ravenously of the whole body, buried his fire, and made ready to leave. He had a lot of distance to cover before dark.
Smoke Jensen’s lean, muscular figure cast a long shadow to his right when he saw the dust cloud ahead. He had caught up to the herd. He grew more cautious. Deserting the trail, Smoke bent low and drifted through the tall buffalo grass, skirted sage and hawthorn, and advanced obliquely on the rustlers. When the drag riders came into view, Smoke sank down and disappeared in the waving sea of grass. A quarter hour had gone by when he heard a faint “halloo” from far ahead. Those in the lead were halting the herd for the night. Smoke would wait until dusk to move again.
When the last thin, orange crescent sank in the west and only the afterglow fought against the encroachment of night, Smoke Jensen left his hiding place and made a circuit of the herd. It took him five minutes shy of an hour to complete the journey. He made careful note of the location of herd guards and, most importantly, their degree of alertness. While he ghosted from rock to tree to underbrush, Smoke concentrated on what choices he had. Looming large in his considerations was his need to know exactly how many men occupied the night camp. He would have to pay them a visit soon, but in order for that to happen, these outer guards would have to be drowsy and distracted.
Once he knew what he stood against, Smoke had several alternatives. He could run the herd off and make a break for it, leaving the Olsens to their fate. Or he could run the herd off, along with all the outlaws’s horses, and possibly get the Olsens out with him.
Better still, Smoke reckoned, the ideal would be to locate the Olsens, get them mounted, and drive off all the other horses, leaving the rustlers afoot. He would have the remounts to Buffalo and beyond before the bandits could reorganize. From there, he would force the herd to greater speed, say twenty or twenty-five miles a day. At that rate, he would deliver them to the fort after a hard, three-day drive. Not bad. Smoke confidently believed that the stranded rustlers could not possibly close with them before then. Patiently, Smoke bided his time until shortly after midnight. Then he set out for the camp.
He slid past the inattentive herd guards with ease. Not until he drew close to the restive outlaws around their fires did he have to exert his greatest skill. They had picked their site wisely, Smoke noted. Two trees stood at enough distance apart to run a picket line to accommodate all of the horses not in use by the perimeter sentries. Good. That made his job much easier. Near the inner edge of the herd, Smoke caught a flash of a gray-and-black-spotted rump and recognized Cougar. At least they would all be properly mounted when the time came to take the herd.
Tommy Olsen had worked out in his mind what he could do to protect his mother and sisters. That being the case, he went in search of firewood rather than send Sarah-Jane. In the small stand of alders to one side of the camp, he searched the ground in the dim light. He had about given up for this night when his eyes picked out a gleam of starshine from the smooth surface of a rock.
At once, Tommy set down his armload of deadfall branches and used nimble fingers to pry the stone from the grasp of the earth. It came away at last and turned out to be slightly larger than fist-sized.
“Perfect,” Tommy whispered to himself.
Quickly he rubbed it free of dirt and tucked it away inside his shirt. Tommy figured rightly that if any of the outlaws tried something funny, the rock could get him a gun, and that could sure fix any of them with designs on his mother and sisters.
“Yes!” he said aloud. “Yessss!” Visions of the rock crashing against the skull of a lustful hard case excited the boy. Then he would take the thug’s gun and there would be hell to pay. Tommy never considered the very real possibility that he would be shot full of holes. When one was fourteen and just sensing the ebb and flow of manly sap within, one thought oneself immortal.
Two hours before dawn, Smoke Jensen considered that the optimum time had come for his move to recover his horses and free the Olsens. All during the night, while he waited and mentally rehearsed his actions, the sky to the northwest had grown incredibly black, and huge columns rose to blot out the stars. Ominous rumbles rolled over the craggy country in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. Smoke cast his gaze that di
rection more often as the hours wore on. Conscious of the impending storm, Smoke made a quick revise in his plans. When the thunder grew even closer, he used it to muffle his movements as he closed in on the slumbering gang.
Thirteen
A searing flash of forked-tail white split the sky asunder as Smoke Jensen stepped into the clearing where the gang lay. An instant later, a ripe crackling rippled the air, followed by a ground-shaking boom. With the swiftness of a mountain lion’s pounce, a torrential thunderstorm broke loose overhead.
Fat rain drops fell wetly upon everyone and everything in sight. The torrent descended at a rate of three inches per hour, too fast to allow much water to sink into the parched ground. Rather it ran off to form miniature streams that gushed and gurgled. Smoke turned his back on most of the outlaws and froze in place. Grumbling, the rustlers wisely moved away from any trees, natural targets for lightning strikes.
In so doing, they exposed themselves to even more danger. With a loud clatter, like the unshod hooves of the demons in hell, barter-sized hail slashed down to bruise and punish flesh, even that covered by thick woolen blankets. The outlaw trash complained loudly, though few raised their heads to see the cause. Quickly the ice balls covered the ground with a two-inch-thick carpet of white.
Grumbling at this unexpected misfortune, Smoke Jensen eased his way out of a camp that was quickly becoming aroused. Men had to be called out to help contain the herd, or the storm would scatter them. His plan would have to wait for a better time.
By dawn, the tempest was only a memory. After containing the livestock and waiting out the half hour of determined rain, the soaking wet rustlers could not get settled down in soggy blankets. Instead, they took dry wood from under the chuck wagon and the Olsen wagon and kindled a large, roaring fire, then stood close to dry themselves. From his hidden vantage point, Smoke Jensen observed the morning routine. When the first, faint streaks of gray bloomed in the east, outlaw voices could be clearly heard.
“Yer right. Not a sign of him.”
“You’re sure? No chance he’s hidin’?”
“None at all.”
“Turn out some of the men and widen the search.”
From his observation place, Smoke Jensen studied the flamboyant figure of Reno Jim Yurian. Again he felt a flash of having seen the man somewhere in the past. Following the exchange, the camp began to fume with activity. Several men rushed about, peering behind bushes and into small ravines. Still others grabbed up their horses and set out in widening circles around the campsite. Curious as to the reason, Smoke left his concealed spot to move in on a pair of searchers, who sat their mounts and looked back along the trail they had covered the previous day.
One of them removed his hat and mopped his brow. High humidity, left by the rain, combined with a burning sun to make it feel much hotter than the regular temperature. The hatless one spoke with fire in his voice.
“Damn that little brat. I’ll bet he hauled his butt along our back trail.”
“Yeah, Darin, you might be right. He smacked Phipps over the head with somethin’, took his gun and stole a horse. Damn, how I hate a horse thief.”
That brought a round of chuckles from both thugs. And it set Smoke to thinking along the correct trail. They had to be talking about Tommy Olsen. The gutsy little guy must have clobbered one of them and made an escape. Smoke pondered that a moment. Why hadn’t he taken his mother and the girls? He would have to find the boy to learn the answer, Smoke reasoned.
No time like now to start that, he acknowledged. It would make it easier if he no longer had to go afoot. To solve that immediate problem, he must seek out a lone searcher. Smoke found himself one twenty minutes later and three miles from the outlaw camp.
Oblivious to Smoke’s presence, Ainsley Burk ambled his mount past where the last mountain man lay in the buffalo grass that grew belly-high to a horse. When Burk presented his back to Smoke, the lean, hard man came to his boots and uncoiled his powerful leg muscles.
He vaulted onto the rump of Ainsley Burk’s dapple gray, his Colt Peacemaker in hand and ready. It collided with the side of Burk’s head and sent him off to sleepy times. Smoke shoved the unconscious Burk forward onto the neck of his horse, tied the outlaw’s hands behind his back, and unceremoniously dumped Burk from the saddle.
With a horse under him again, Smoke felt much better. Even if it was a knot-headed gelding, it would make do. At once, Smoke Jensen set off in search of Tommy Olsen.
Tommy Olsen regretted his rash action when three of the outlaws struck his trail and came hard after him. He’d been riding all night, and his stolen horse was on its last legs. Still, Tommy ran him from gully to gully and over yet another ridge, in his effort to evade recapture. Inexorably the hard cases closed in on him.
In a last, desperate effort, Tommy began to take shots at them, although he felt sure they remained out of range. He had eared back the hammer once again when a fourth outlaw appeared behind the others, riding hard to close the gap.
His fourth bullet kicked up dust at the forehooves of the lead bandit’s horse. The animal reared and whinnied in fright. Tommy cocked the Colt again. When he started to take sight, he saw a puff of smoke appear at the end of the trailing rider’s arm. The thug nearest to the stranger arched his back and then flung forward off his mount to land face-first on the ground.
And then the stranger ceased to be an unknown for Tommy Olsen. It had to be Smoke Jensen! That left the remaining three who rode hard toward Tommy. He took more careful aim and clipped the hat from the head of one man, then prepared to fire his final round. The firing pin fell on an empty chamber. A moment later they closed on the boy and surrounded him.
Though not for long. Smoke Jensen shot one through the shoulder and swung a wide loop from the lariat that had been attached to his saddle skirt. It settled over the shoulders of another hard case at the same time Tommy used the Winchester he had brought along, carried over his legs on the bareback mount. Without time to aim or fire, he wielded the rifle like a club to knock the third rustler to the ground with the butt.
An instant later, Smoke yanked tight the rope and hauled his target out of the saddle. The thug landed with a bone-jarring thud. Tommy kneed his mount over close to Smoke. “Smoke! Am I glad to see you.”
“I imagine so,” Smoke replied drily. “They are bound to have heard those shots back in camp. Let’s gather up the horses and hightail it out of here.”
Tommy gave him a blank, incredulous stare. “You mean, we’re gonna run?”
“Just so. I counted a tad over thirty men in that camp last night.”
“More like forty-two, by my count,” Tommy added. “Still, we gotta get Maw and my sisters out of there.”
“We will. But not if forty-some hard cases fall on us like these did. We need to be well out of sight by the time they get here. And, these extra horses will help confuse them as to who we are and where we went. We’ll tie bodies on each of them so they have the weight of a man.”
“Why do we need to do that?”
“To confuse them, Tommy. Even outlaws have smarts enough to be able to tell if a horse is carrying a rider or not. We’ll take them out a mile or two and then send them off in different directions. That’ll make the rustlers think there is a whole lot of us and we split up.”
Tommy looked on Smoke with new awe. “You’re right smart, Smoke. Think it will work?”
“If it don’t, we’ll be up to our a—ears in outlaws before nightfall. Now, get goin’.”
Twenty minutes later, they rode away, the outlaws, the living and the dead, slung over their individual saddles. A quick look downward gave Smoke Jensen the satisfaction of noting the authentic appearance of the tracks left behind. Frequent checks of their back trail showed no sign of close pursuit.
Sundown found Smoke Jensen and Tommy Olsen in a cold camp amid a heaped mound of boulders. They had with them three outlaw horses, which had not strayed far from their course during the day. They had left the wounded h
ard cases tied up on the ground before they abruptly changed directions and headed northward, back toward the camp. While they munched on biscuits and fatback taken from two pair of outlaw saddlebags, Smoke listened to Tommy’s account of his escape.
“I had gotten this rock, see? It was to use if any of them decided to pester my maw or the girls. Oh, they’d talked about that before an’ I knew what they meant. I figgered to clobber one and get his gun. So when that storm broke out, I wondered why not get a gun and a horse, and come find you? It worked, sort of.”
Smoke snorted in reply; then Tommy went on. “Oh, one other thing. That feller with you, Utah Jack? Well, he’s a turncoat. Seems he was workin’ with the rustlers all along. I’d like to fix him good.”
Smoke gave him a short nod. “His time will come, right enough. Now, let me tell you how I figure we’re going about getting your mother and sisters out of there.”
For the next twenty-five minutes, Smoke went over in detail what he had in mind. He emphasized what he expected of Tommy by two repetitions and concluded with a third. “You will take the three extra horses to the spot I determine to be best and hold them there for your family. You are to do nothing, absolutely nothing, else. Now, repeat that for me.”
Tommy did and Smoke pressed him further. “Is that clear? No room open for second guessing what I expect of you, Tommy?”
“It’s clear, sir. I’ll do what you say.”
“Good. We’ll be ready to head out at one in the morning. Now roll up and get some sleep.”
Far from the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, Sally Jensen watched from her darkened living room while three scruffy men, who even in her most charitable of moods Sally would have to call saddle bums, walked their mounts to the tie rail outside the bunkhouse. They dismounted and threw their reins over the crossbar and looped them loosely. They started for the door in the yellow light of a kerosene lantern hung from a peg in the front wall. As they progressed, they eased their six-guns in their soft pouch holsters.
Ordeal of the Mountain Man Page 13