Matt Jensen, The Last Mountain Man The Eyes of Texas

by William W. Johnstone

  When Matt reached the roof, he saw Carter looking cautiously around the false front of the building.

  “You must be Carter,” he said.

  “What the hell!” Carter spun around, firing as he did so. He came close, closer than anyone had in a long time, because the bullet passed so near to his ear that Matt could feel the wind pressure. Matt fired back. Carter grabbed the wound in his belly, fell forward, then slid down the slope of the roof and off.

  Quickly, Matt climbed back down the ladder. He tried the back door of the Pig Palace, but it was locked. That meant he was going to have to go in through the front.

  He had been inside the Pig Palace before, so he had an idea of how far he would have to go from the door to the edge of the bar. So, taking a deep breath, and with a good grip on the pistol, he dashed through the door and dived across the floor toward the bar.

  Durbin was holding a shotgun, and he let go with both barrels as Matt slid across the floor. The ball and buckshot passed over Matt’s head and took out the window with a loud crash. From his position on the floor, Matt looked into the mirror. He saw Durbin with the shotgun broken open, trying to reload.

  Matt raised up from behind the bar and fired. Durbin went down.

  Upstairs, Annabelle watched Prichard pull his pistol and step up to the door. He was trying to see what was going on downstairs without exposing himself. Then, unexpectedly, Annabelle felt something at her right wrist, and turning her head, she saw that the prostitute was untying her.

  With her right hand untied, she was able to quickly free her left hand, then her ankles. Free now, she looked around for a weapon, and seeing a heavy water vase on the chest of drawers, she picked it up, stepped up quietly behind Prichard, and brought it down, hard, on his head.

  Prichard went down, and Annabelle grabbed his pistol, then ran out to the overhanging balcony to look down on the floor. She saw Matt moving slowly across the floor; then she saw Bramley behind the piano. Bramley was aiming at Matt, who hadn’t seen him!

  Annabelle raised the pistol and squeezed the trigger. She hit Bramley, but it wasn’t a killing shot, and with a bellow of rage, Bramley turned his gun on her. Matt shot Bramley before he could shoot; then, looking up toward Annabelle, Matt shot again.

  Annabelle let out a little squeal, wondering if he had shot before he looked. Then she heard a sound beside her, and saw Prichard tumble over the banister to crash down onto the piano, the instrument giving off a loud, discordant sound.

  Matt had to stay a week longer for the five-thousand-dollar reward money to be paid for Mutt Crowley. The five-thousand-dollar reward for Prichard Crowley was going to Annabelle. The rewards for Bill Carter, Lenny Fletcher, Dax Williams, and Titus Carmichael came to six thousand dollars, and Annabelle divided that money up between Barb and Monica, the two surviving prostitutes who had worked at the Pig Palace. She did that for two reasons: to give them a new start in life, and because she believed that Monica and, to a degree, Barb had saved her life.

  With his money in his saddlebag, Matt stopped by to tell Annabelle good-bye. No longer the city marshal, Annabelle was once more dressed in the finery that she wore to advertise her work.

  “You could stay here, you know,” Annabelle said.

  “I can’t.”

  A slow smile spread across her face. “I know you can’t,” she said. “And I even know why you can’t. But do me a favor, will you?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Think of me from time to time.”

  “I always do,” Matt said with an enigmatic smile.

  Annabelle chuckled then, because she knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “I don’t mean think of me when you think of the other women. I want you to give me my own space in your memories.”

  “I will,” Matt said. “I promise you, I will.”

  As Matt rode out of town, he gave Spirit his head, and Spirit started north.

  “It figures, you dumb horse,” Matt said with a little laugh. “You brought me south in the heat of summer. Winter is coming on, so which way do we head? North.

  “One of these days, I’m going to have to give you a lesson in weather and geography. It’s hot in the summer, and it’s hotter in the South. It’s cold in the winter . . . and it’s colder in the North.”

  Spirit whickered.

  “I know, I know, you keep telling me. You can’t talk.”

  Horse and rider rode north until they could no longer be seen by anyone in the now peaceful town of Shady Rest.

  WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE

  THE GREATEST WESTERN WRITER OF THE 21ST CENTURY

  In 1848, Dooley Monahan, son of struggling Iowa pioneers, went off to pick up a new milk cow. Young Dooley never came home. Now, nearly three decades later, Dooley Monahan has become an accidental legend, managing to plant a bullet in the chest of a dangerous outlaw. All Dooley really wants is to claim his reward at a bank in Phoenix and make his way north to a gold strike he read about in a newspaper. But fate has other plans. It starts with a family slaughtered by Apaches, a dog smarter than most humans Dooley knows, and a girl with a wounded soul. And the blood-hungry brothers of the outlaw Dooley killed will not give up their pursuit until they’ve avenged his death.

  The more Dooley tries to head north, the more destiny pushes him west. His trail is populated by strange friends and dangerous enemies, strewn with bad luck and bad blood—and frequently interrupted by sudden storms of gunfire.

  THE TRAIL WEST

  by William W. Johnstone

  with J. A. Johnstone

  A GRITTY, AUTHENTIC NEW SAGA

  FROM THE MASTER OF THE WESTERN NOVEL!

  On sale now, wherever Pinnacle Books are sold.

  Turn the page for an exciting preview!

  Prologue

  In the year 1848, when he was but twenty years old, young Dooley Monahan, last born and only living offspring of Janine and David Monahan, struggling Iowa farmers who had joined the first wave of pioneers, found himself fallen in with bad company.

  It was a simple enough thing. Dooley had ridden south to a town near the Missouri border to pick up a new milk cow for his pa. She was a purebred Jersey—a rare breed at that time and place, and one which was renowned for producing rich milk. She was already paid for, and all he had to do to claim her was show proof of who he was. He was all set to do just that, with an introductory letter from his pa, enough chuck in his saddlebags to get him there and home again, and fifty cents emergency money in his pocket. “Just in case,” David Monahan had said as he pressed the worn coins into his son’s hand.

  Dooley’s father was always chock-full of “justin-cases.”

  But Dooley—tall, handsome, and always with a twinkle in his chestnut eyes—had nodded, taken the cash, mounted up, and set off. At twenty, he was already running half of the farm. He had forty acres in corn, twenty acres in oats, twenty acres in hay, twenty acres in cattle pasture, and responsibility for all the hogs. In another year or so, he imagined he’d take over the place.

  He thought about all that while riding the two days south to Corydon and half of another to reach his goal: the small farm town of Accord. There, he bartered at length with the liveryman to trade a good morning mucking out the stalls in exchange for one night’s resting place for himself and his horse.

  They sealed the deal with a handshake, and Dooley gave his old gelding a thorough rubdown before he grabbed his hunting rifle and the last bites of his ma’s good apple pie, and headed out into the dying rays of the sun to have a look around.

  There wasn’t much to look at besides darkened windows and CLOSED signs until he came to the mouth of an alley, from which muted laughter and man talk burbled out onto the street along with the soft glow of lantern light. Dooley was a curious lad, and, gulping down the last of his pie, he stuck his head around the corner and peered in.

  A packing crate, topped with a horse blanket and centered by a small mound of coins, sat back about a dozen feet from the street. Seated o
n boxes or nail kegs surrounding the crate were four men, each staring at a handful of cards.

  “Damned if you didn’t deal us out a mess, Usher,” Dooley heard, just before the man with his back to him punched the speaker in the arm. Well, more like gave him little shove, Dooley guessed. Leastwise, it all looked real friendly.

  At least, that was what he thought then.

  If he had known who they were or what they would eventually do to him, and worse, the path they would set the gangly Iowa farm boy traveling down—a path filled with pain and questions and heartbreak beyond measure, and one that would change his life forever—he wouldn’t have been so eager to call out a friendly, “Hello there, fellers!” But Dooley was no fortune-teller, and so he grinned and called to them, and they waved him in.

  They played poker until the morning light, though Dooley didn’t remember it in much detail. They’d had a jug of homemade hooch they’d passed around too often for him to keep track. When he came into himself again, it was late the next morning and they were outside town. Old Tony, the aged chestnut gelding his father had given him on his thirteenth birthday, was safely hitched to their picket line, and Dooley was sick to his stomach as he’d ever been. He also began to realize he’d fallen in with dangerous men.

  He looked around. Usher, the one who’d been punched the night before, was a tallish fellow with oily, red hair curling into his eyes and down his back. He looked quite a bit cruder than he had in the lamplight. Dexter, the one who’d punched him, was a little shorter with close-cropped, dark brown hair and a scar running high across his forehead, like somebody had started to scalp him but got interrupted. Dexter looked like he’d skin his own mama for sneezing during Sunday service. Well, that wasn’t right—Dexter looked to never have been to Sunday service in his life—but Dooley couldn’t think of anything meaner right off the top of his head.

  The third man, a short blond with a droopy mustache and a permanent scowl, was across the way, angrily and jerkily stropping a knife blade back and forth across a length of leather. His name was Grubb. A fitting name if ever Dooley had heard one.

  The last of the four—and the roughest, young Dooley guessed, if you took any mind of the scar on the side of his face—was another tallish fellow, his once dark hair graying already, whose name was either George Vince or Vince George. He answered to either one singly, and Dooley hadn’t heard anyone call him by both names. At least, not in the correct order, whatever that was. But despite his obvious lack of hygiene (Dooley could smell him clear across camp), he seemed the happiest that Dooley was “one of them,” whoever they were. Dooley was running a little shy on the details. They seemed to be some kind of a group, and they seemed to have plans.

  Later that afternoon, Dooley discovered just what their plan was: to rob the First Iowa Bank of Corydon. By the time he figured out what they were up to, he was in too deep to crawl back out.

  That’s how Dooley Monahan came to be one of Monty’s Raiders (the original Monty having been lost in the mists of time), a gang of cheap rowdies who, before the Civil War, terrorized the central plains.

  Against his will, he stayed with the raiders until late the next year, when his complaining and pleas to leave and go home finally rankled the nerves of the gang to their frazzling point. One night, Vince George (which had turned out to be his proper name) with the help of Red Usher, took it upon themselves to beat Dooley senseless and leave him for dead in a ditch near a northern Missouri field.

  They left him without a dime from the monies he helped them steal or his wallet, which still held the fifty cents that had been his father’s final gift to him. All they left with him was Old Tony who, at twenty-five, was too old to do anybody any good. And they took his saddle.

  For three days Dooley lay in the ditch, not moving, passing in and out of fuzzy consciousness, until he was found by a passerby on her way to a neighbor’s. Battered and bruised and barely conscious, he was saved by a woman named Kathleen.

  Chapter One

  North Dakota, Fall 1869

  The pot wouldn’t have been considered a big one in town. In fact, it would have been laughable. But it was rich for a bunkhouse when the players were still a week and a half from payday and hurting bad for something to do. A dollar and fourteen cents, twenty-six matches, an old whorehouse token, and a train-flattened nickel sat in the center of the table. Dooley Monahan held exactly two pairs—tens and deuces.

  Being unlucky at cards, it was the best hand he’d had in months. He dug deep into pockets linty with disuse and finally dug out a dime, his last. He looked across the table at Bob Smith, a summer name if he’d ever heard one, then flipped the dime onto the table. “Call, and raise you a five-cent nickel.”

  The other players had folded already and looked on eagerly while Smith scowled. He was the only other player left in the game, and universally disliked by the other hands.

  Smith, a dull, hulking fellow with a Southern accent and a hair-trigger temper, growled, “All’s I got is matches.”

  Everybody knew the matches would be redeemed, come payday, for a penny apiece. Monahan nodded “Fine by me, Smith.” He turned to the old codger sitting next to him. “You keepin’ track, Cookie?”

  Holding a folded-up piece of paper and a crooked stick of raw lead, Cookie licked the makeshift pencil. “Yup. That’s five more matches for Smith. Right, Smith?”

  Smith grunted and tossed five more sulphur tips on the pile. “Call,” he barked. “Let’s see ’em, Monahan.”

  Carefully, Monahan lay down the battered pasteboards to the boys’ enthusiastic hum.

  Smith set down his cards, but facedown. “You lose, Monahan,” he growled, and started to rake in the pot.

  Cookie, who was seventy-something and old enough . . . or dumb enough . . . to be brave in the face of a tough hombre like Smith—braver than Monahan was, in any case—grabbed Smith’s arm. “Hold on, there. Let’s have a look-see.”

  Monahan wasn’t exactly sure what occurred over the next couple seconds, but he recalled something about Smith calling him a cheat who lost more at cards than most men lose trying to put a size eight boot on a size ten foot! He thought he pushed Cookie out of the way right about the time Smith drew his gun, and he was a bit fuzzy about pulling his own.

  But Monahan remembered the way it ended up, all right.

  Smith lay dead, shot through the heart by Monahan, a man who normally couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with a handful of beans, and Monahan himself was shot in the left hip. It wasn’t bad, just a graze really, but it sure hurt like hell.

  And he remembered everybody whooping and hollering and cheering.

  As for Monahan? He hadn’t liked Smith much, but he felt awful bad about the whole mess. He’d seen far too many deaths in his life to feel marginally good about causing yet another.

  A couple weeks later the U.S. marshal came by, and from the men’s description—and the wrinkled poster he carried in his wallet—he identified Smith not as Smith, but as Jason Baylor, a man wanted in three states and two territories for everything from robbery to aggravated assault to cold-blooded murder. Make that multiple murders.

  “The last was when him and his brothers killed a couple fellers down in Colorado.” Marshal Tobin sat in the good chair on the boss’s porch with the boss and all the hands—including the still-limping Monahan—all huddled around. “Wounded three more, too. Bank job gone bad.” He shook his head. “If I was you, Dooley, I’d change my name and beat it out of here. Them Baylor boys is like rabid skunks. Reckon they’re split up now, waitin’ for the heat to die down from that Colorado job, but eventually they’ve got a plan to meet up. And when Jason don’t show . . .”

  “That’s right, Dooley,” said Cookie, nodding sagely. “They’ll come lookin’ for you, sure as anything. And that Alf Baylor? I hear he’s plumb crazy!”

  “Dev ain’t exactly normal, either,” muttered the marshal.

  Monahan scrunched up his face. “Just how many brothers did the feller
have, anyhow?”

  Marshal Tobin frowned. “Just the two, Dooley, just the two. But you’ll feel like you’re in the hands of the legions of Satan if they catch you up. They’re bad business. Real bad.”

  Monahan simply said, “Aw, crud.” He was nearly forty-one and well past his prime. He’d been thinking—hoping, more like—he’d outlived what little reputation he had, and could get on with the peaceful business of living out the rest of his life and dying in relative obscurity.

  Didn’t seem the dice were going to roll his way, though.

  Marshal Tobin scribbled on a piece of paper, and handed it to Monahan. “Reward voucher. There was plenty of paper out on Jason Baylor. Five hundred dollars’ worth.”

  Collectively, the boys gasped and Monahan knew why. It was near two years’ wages for a top cowhand.

  “You can cash that in any place that has a bank and a telegraph, but I’d do it a far piece from here, if I was you. Think you know why. Hey, Charlie”—the marshal turned to the boss—“don’t suppose you got anything stronger than coffee to drink around here, do you? Like to celebrate sayin’ adios to at least one o’ those damned Baylor boys.”

  Monahan left the next day, with a pillow under his left hip and the voucher in his pocket.

  Chapter Two

  Three years later

  Dooley Monahan dozed, half asleep beside his dying campfire, beneath the pewter-gray of a barely dawn sky in the piney Arizona mountains. He’d been dreaming a warm dream twenty-some years old, dreaming of Kathy and soft quilts and that old feather bed, when he was roused by the crawling sense that somebody was staring at him.