“Then you must be the best marble player in all of Big Rock.”
“I’m…good, right enough. Sammy an’ me played some when I boarded at his folks’ house.”
Here, in a land of big and early snows, school was held on a reversed schedule, from the fifteenth of April until the fifteenth of October. Tutoring made up for the other three months of class work. Sally Jensen, who had taught school at one time, held group lessons for Bobby, the children of ranch hands, and neighboring youngsters. It vexed her students mightily, Smoke knew, yet they showed up and behaved extraordinarily well. A broken leg had prevented Bobby from starting in Big Rock this April and, now out of his cast, cabin fever had set in.
What else would account for the boy undertaking the hazards of breaking mustangs? Smoke asked himself. Well, in a week, two at most, he would be headed for Big Rock and the little red schoolhouse at the end of Main Street. It had been arranged for him to live with his best friend, Sammy, and the Weisers expected him no later than that. For all Bobby’s protestations, Smoke noted, he and Sammy had managed to get enough time away from the classroom the last summer to acquire a decent browning of their hides. A faint yellow-brown tinge of high altitude tan still colored Bobby’s cheeks and forearms. Given this summer, he would be free forever of the unhealthy pallor which had accompanied the boy to the Sugarloaf. The high altitude sun soon cured normal skin like leather, with about the same color.
“We gonna build a lean-to or sleep out under the stars?” Bobby asked.
Smoke smiled back. “We can do whatever you want.”
An animated face answered Smoke. “Then can you tell me some stories about you and Preacher? About back when you were my age?”
Smoke leaned over and lightly tapped Bobby on one shoulder point. “I didn’t know Preacher when I was your age. I was fourteen, I think, when I wound up lost out here and on my own.”
“So? Go on.”
“Tonight, over fish and biscuits.”
“That’s a promise, Smoke?”
“Promise.”
Toward mid-afternoon, Smoke Jensen called a halt to their journey. A small stand of silver-barked aspen beckoned. On his own land, Smoke could be certain of being safe, yet training and experience compelled him to pass up that inviting shelter. Instead, he used a short-handled axe to cut down a dozen forearm-thick saplings, bundled them and tied them off behind the packhorse. They traveled on to a moderate clearing, with plenty of grass for the horses, and shaded by a big old blue spruce.
It towered a good sixty feet into the air, and had, for at least 250 years, miraculously escaped the attention of the fierce lightning that crashed through these mountains and valleys each summer. With Bobby’s help, he quickly constructed a roomy lean-to and covered the long, slant back and square sides with overlapped layers of pine bough. They stood back, hands on hips, and admired their handiwork.
“Not bad for a couple of amateurs, eh?” Smoke opined teasingly.
Bobby made a face that indicated he knew his leg was being pulled. “Aw, Smoke, you must have made hundreds of these before.”
“Thousands, more like,” Smoke agreed. “Now, it’s your job to fetch firewood, while I bring stones from the creek for the fire ring.”
Bobby cocked an eyebrow. “Who says we’re gonna catch anything?”
“We have to cook something, don’t we?”
“Yep. But who says I’ve got to get the firewood?”
“I says. Is that good enough for you?”
Bobby gave a fake gulp. “Yes, sir, yes it is.”
He scampered off to do as bidden. Smoke turned toward the creek, located a suitable distance from their camp to muffle its noisy gurgling. As he neared the bank he heard lazy splashes from the sparkling water of Silver Creek. The rainbow trout would be thick enough to almost walk on, and hungry after the long winter.
An hour before sundown everything had been laid out in readiness. Outfitted with a Mason jar of live dragonflies and some of the newfangled artificial dry flies hooked into their shirt collars, man and boy set off to the east bank of Silver Creek.
At first sight, Bobby almost forgot himself and cried out in excitement. The water swarmed with mossy green backs. Hundreds of finny creatures filled the stream. Their deep color faded along their sides to the dividing line of rainbow colors. Beyond that their white, speckled bellies flashed brightly when one or another would roll gracefully after surfacing to snap up a winged insect. Bobby’s eyes danced.
“Let’s get to work,” Smoke suggested.
Within half an hour they had a dozen pan-sized trout. The larger ones they had unhooked and thrown back. Those they caught tomorrow would be filleted and smoked. This intimate time together would teach Bobby many mountain man tricks. Smoke got the fire going while Bobby cleaned the fish. Smoke made biscuits and put the pot of beans he had put to soaking over the fire on a trestle arm. Bobby looked on and asked endless questions about camp cooking, while he peeled onions brought from the root cellar at the Sugarloaf headquarters, washed and sliced potatoes, and put a large skillet of them on to fry. At last, when the coals undulated with just the right red-orange glow, he put the fish on to fry.
They ate it all, wiped the skillets with biscuit halves, belched and patted full bellies. Then Smoke leaned back and lighted a thin, hard, dry cigar. Bobby returned to his first interest.
“Tell me about you an’ Preacher.”
“Oh, my, where to begin? I had to be about fourteen when Preacher hooked up with me and Pa in Kansas. Now, mind, we did not hit it off at the first. Preacher was old. Nearly as old as God, the way I saw it. He was crotchety, set in his ways, and about as foul-mouthed as any ten men could get. He could fill the air with blue smoke when he took to cussin’.” Smoke paused to consider. Yep, Preacher had been all of that, and much, much more, too. “He was the best friend anyone could have, man or boy.
“Preacher was also kind, loyal, astonishingly intelligent, and absolutely convinced that life, as he lived it in the High Lonesome, was the best sort of life anyone could ever have. He took me in after Pa died.”
“Tell me about one of you and Preacher’s famous gun-fights, Smoke?” Bobby interrupted.
Smoke sighed. “All right. Just this once. I recall the time when Preacher and I had to fight off eleven tough outlaws, the last of a gang that had been preying on immigrant trains along the North Platte. It was in the ‘Sixties then, and the Army had mostly gone back east to fight for the Union. So, boarder riff raff grew bolder and bolder. This particular bunch had holed up in one of the trading posts they had also victimized. Preacher an’ me had to go in after them….”
Preacher eased his head up over the fallen log and peered closely at the tumble-down shack that housed the eleven vicious highwaymen. This weren’t no dance for a seventeen-year-old tadpole to join into, he reckoned. But Smoke was here and rarin’ for a fight, so what could he do? He cut his eyes to where Smoke Jensen crouched between some fat granite boulders, some twenty yards away.
Good boy, Preacher thought approvingly. He’d learned the lad about not bunchin’ up right early in their time together. “The main idea is to give whoever is shootin’ at ya more air than meat for targets,” the mountain man had explained to a wide-eyed boy of almost fifteen. “Fact is, they’s always more air than meat, as you’ll find out when you are on the give side of that equation.”
That had been near four years ago. Now all the lessons on surviving in the Big Empty were about to be put to the test. Preacher fervently wished that Charlie Three-Toes and some of those other never-quitters among the trapping fraternity had come along for this showdown. Best to have all sides of a building covered. Whatever, there was nothin’ for it now. Preacher slid the barrel of his .56 Hawken over the fallen tree and took aim on a square of thinly scraped hide that served as a window pane. Behind it, kerosene lamps and flickering candles projected the head and shoulders of a human figure. Preacher eared back the hammer of the Hawken.
Sure, he could hav
e hollered out for these scoundrels to surrender, to come out with their hands up, but he reckoned that such a move would only bring him and his young companion to more grief. So he fined his sight picture and squeezed the trigger. The Hawken made a sharp, clean report and shoved into Preacher’s shoulder. The conical bullet went straight and true.
From his vantage point, Smoke Jensen saw a small black dot appear in the skin window and a moment later the human figure popped out of sight as though pulled by a rope. As instructed, he fired at the doorway when the flimsy pine board panel flew open. An unseen man screamed and then Preacher bellowed at the top of his lungs.
“That’s two down! You men in there best come out and surrender. We’ve got you surrounded.”
Well, at least on two sides, Preacher eased his conscience over straying from the whole truth.
“Like hell we will,” came a belligerent reply. “We been watchin’. There’s more of us than you.”
By then Preacher had his Hawken reloaded. “Not for long,” he bantered back as he again took aim on the window.
A crash and tinkle, and one clear, bell-like note followed his shot. To Preacher’s right, Smoke put a round through the open doorway. His reward came in hurried orders.
“Drag Rafe back out of there, we’ve gotta close that door.”
Weak, though clearly audible to Smoke Jensen, Rafe spoke from the floor of the shack. “I’m gut-shot, Doolie. I ain’t gonna make it.”
Anger, colored by fear, filled the reply. “Then crawl outten that door so’s we can close it.”
“It hurts too much, Doolie.”
The crack of a pistol shot answered him, then Doolie’s growl. “Now, drag that body outten the way an’ let’s get to business.”
Preacher had trained him well. Smoke was ready for that. He winged another man who bent over the dead Rafe. The hard case made a yelp and a startled frog-leap obliquely to the doorway. “Oh, dang, they got me in the cheek, Doolie.”
“Can’t be much, you can talk all right,” the outlaw leader muttered.
“It’s the other cheek, Doolie. Oh, damn, it hurts.”
“Stop yer belly-achin’. We got to get ’em. By my count, they’s only two. I say we rush them.”
Doolie and his henchmen did not get the chance. Preacher’s next blind shot through the opaque window shattered a kerosene lamp and the whole shelter went up in flames. Clothes afire, two men ran from the doorway, their weapons forgotten. Preacher dropped first one, then another with a pistol ball from his Model ’60 Colt. Smoke fired at a third who went to one knee, shot through the side. Smoke’s rifle sights still had him shooting low. Doolie and a couple more stubbornly insisted on fighting it out from inside.
When it was all over, only five of the eleven remained alive, all wounded. The shack burned to the ground with Doolie in it. And that’s how Preacher handled that….
Smoke Jensen looked down at Bobby Harris to find the boy with his head on one crooked arm, eyes closed, breathing deeply in a sound sleep. Smoke chuckled, then asked himself aloud, “Was I that boring?”
The boy did have a long, hard day of it, he reasoned. Tomorrow there would be more adventures. Smoke settled in his soogans and closed his eyes under the starry sky.
2
Darkness lay in a heavy blanket over the Yuma Territorial Prison compound. Droopy-eyed guards stood watch in the eight turretlike towers atop the walls at each corner and in the middle of each span. The two on the river side would be their targets, it had been decided. When he judged that alertness had sufficiently drained from the sentries, Victor Spectre forced a spate of coughing that would signal the other two to put their plan into operation.
Spectre’s plan was simplicity in its most distilled form. They would incapacitate the turnkey, get out of the cell block, knock out the guards and pitch them over the side, then follow them on ropes made of torn blankets. To that end, when the cough ended, Buckner began to bang the bars of the cell he shared with Tinsdale with a tin cup. When he received no response, he called out.
“Hey! Hey, turnkey. There’s a man sick in here.”
No answer. Not even a light at the end of the corridor outside the open-fronted cells. Buckner, the most guileful, drew breath and yelled again. “Damnit, I mean it. He’s powerful sick.”
At last a light came, weakly from a hooded kerosene lantern. “Stow that racket.”
“My cell-mate is powerful sick,” Buckner wheedled. “It’s that rotten pork we had at supper. He’s about to die on me.”
“Have him report to the infirmary in the morning.”
“He is not going to last until morning, Boss. Please, come take a look for yourself. He’s all gray and green, eyes are rolled up. Hurry!”
Grumbling, the turnkey complied. He had a rolling gait, a leftover from his years before the mast on a clipper ship. When he had left the clipper ship service, he swore he never again wanted to see a body of water he could not hurl a rock across from bank to bank. He wound up here, at the top of the Rio Colorado delta, where the river ran a mile wide. He muttered to himself about the whims and petty annoyances of his charges as he approached the cell. He looked inside and saw a man who could indeed be on the edge of death.
Unadvisedly, he unlocked the cell and stepped inside. To his credit, he locked it behind him before he crossed to the bunk. He had no way of knowing that the pale, gray-green face had been achieved by mixing whitewash powder with scrapings from an ancient copper deposit in the quarry. When he bent to get a closer look, Olin Buckner snaked an arm around his neck and began to squeeze.
In less than two minutes Buckner had quite thoroughly throttled the prison guard. Ralph Tinsdale took the man’s keys and helped to lift him onto the bunk in his own place. They gathered their makeshift ropes and slung the coils over both shoulders. Then Tinsdale unlocked the door and stepped out under the overhang of the second tier catwalk. Buckner followed and they locked the cell behind them.
They went directly to the cell that held Victor Spectre. Spectre waited for them at the bars. His cell-mate had awakened and suddenly realized what was at hand. “Take me along,” he pleaded. “Hell, man, I’m doin’ life like the rest of you. You gotta take me.”
“We do not have to take you anywhere,” Spectre told him coldly.
A crafty light glimmered in close-set eyes. “You don’t take me, I’ll make a fuss, get you caught. It’s a floggin’ an’ another five years for attempted escape. Best be takin’ me.”
Resignation blossomed on the face of Victor Spectre. He nodded curtly, and gestured toward the cell door. “You win. To prove there’s no hard feelings, you can go out first.”
A lust for freedom glowed in pale blue eyes. “Now, that’s mighty white of you.”
When he stepped forward to stand at the door, Victor Spectre slid a hand-fashioned stone shank out of the sleeve of his shirt, gripped the cloth-wrapped hilt, and drove the needle point deep into the right kidney of the other prisoner. Swiftly he slashed from side to side, withdrew it, and destroyed the second vital organ. The man would bleed to death internally in less than four minutes, Spectre knew.
“Let’s get going,” he commanded as he eased the wounded man onto a bunk.
Once outside, the trio headed for the barred stairway at the opposite end of the corridor from where the turnkey had appeared. They moved on tiptoes to reduce any chance of discovery. Fortunately for them, the prison authorities insisted that all metal objects be well tended and frequently oiled, to ensure swift entry into the yard or cell blocks in the event of trouble. The key turned noiselessly and the bolt slid back.
Stealthily, the three escapees traversed the stairs and came upon the first guard in his corner tower. His chin rested on his chest and soft, wet snores rumbled up from his throat. Buckner bashed him in the side of the head to ensure he would not awaken for a while, then hoisted the slumped body and dumped him over the side. The other pair crawled along the parapet to the middle watch post. They found this guard staring out toward
the river, contrary to his standing orders to look inward at the prison.
On a signal from Spectre, they swarmed over him and knocked him out without raising any alarm from the other watchers. In a second, he joined his fellow guard at the foot of the wall. Spectre motioned Buckner forward and began to fasten one end of his rope to a roof support of the mid-wall tower. Tinsdale did the same as did Buckner when he reached them. They slid down the rampart with surprising ease, only to find their ropes some fifteen feet short. The barrier had been footed in bedrock and the yard was that much higher than the ground outside.
Not liking it, though liking the alternatives even less, Victor Spectre let go and dropped to the rocky ground below. Good fortune went with him. He did not twist an ankle on any loose stones. Tinsdale came next and hit on his rump with a solid whump. Lastly, Buckner let go and plummeted to earth. Sharp pain shot through his left ankle.
He had severely sprained it. “What do we do now?” he bleated.
“Go on as planned. Ralph and I will find a boat, bring it here, and pick you up.”
Twenty minutes later, the blunt prow of a river punt came into view through the limited starlight. Biting back shafts of pain, Buckner hobbled to the gunwale and his companions hauled him aboard. Cloth-padded oarlocks moved with a soft rumble and thump as they pushed out into the stream, leaving the guards behind, one with a broken neck. They headed northeastward, although Mexico lay a scant few miles the other direction. It had been Tinsdale’s contribution that they would stand a better chance by going the long way, which would be least expected, rather than south into sure capture by the Rurales in Mexico. All in all, it proved a clever twist in their plan.
On this third day of their fishing trip, Smoke Jensen sat on a large, water-smoothed, flat rock and watched Bobby cast his line in lazy serpentines across the surface of Honey Spring. Smoke leaned on one elbow, took a puff on a cigar, and reflected on their time alone together as the gray white streamers drifted upward from his mouth. He felt he had made some progress with the boy.
Spirit Of The Mountain Man/ordeal Of The Mountain Man (Pinnacle Westerns) Page 2