A High Sierra Christmas

by William W. Johnstone

  Ace grunted and said, “Depends on how you define progress, I reckon.”

  Before the discussion could continue, one of the saloon doors opened. They were closed because of the cold December weather. A gust of chilly air accompanied the man who hurried in.

  “There’s about to be a fight over at the Brown Dirt Cowboy,” he reported excitedly. “Those gents who came into town on the noisemaker machines are tanglin’ with some o’ Ab Tuggle’s men.”

  Ace glanced at Longmont. “Who’s he talking about?”

  “Abner Tuggle,” Longmont replied with a sigh. “One of the local ranchers. His hands are a bit on the rowdy side. That’s why they prefer the Brown Dirt Cowboy Saloon to here.”

  Ace recalled the Brown Dirt Cowboy Saloon, although he and Chance had been there only a few times. For two decades, it had been Big Rock’s most notorious watering hole, and it hadn’t changed since Claude Brown, the nephew of the original owner, had taken over the place.

  “What happens in there is none of our look-out,” Chance said as he picked up his beer.

  Ace couldn’t argue with that. He didn’t know any of Tuggle’s men, and Edward Collinsworth and his friends could look after themselves. If the rest of that bunch was like Collinsworth, he wasn’t surprised that their arrogant attitudes had sparked a fight.

  The man who had brought the news had reached the bar by now, and a number of curious customers flocked around him. Reveling in the attention, the man said, “I overheard Chet Lewis say that if Sheriff Carson gets in the middle of the ruckus, they’ll whale the tar outta him, too.”

  Ace asked Longmont, “Who’s Chet Lewis?”

  “Tuggle’s foreman. A vicious brute, I’m sad to say.” Longmont shook his head. “He’s the sort of man who’s always glad for an excuse to hurt someone.”

  Ace looked at Chance. “You know Monte Carson. He’ll try to break things up before they get too far out of hand.”

  “Yes, but he has deputies to help him,” Chance pointed out. “That’s no reason for us to get mixed up in any trouble.”

  “Sheriff Carson is one of Smoke’s best friends, and Smoke is family.”

  “That doesn’t mean Carson is.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Ace turned away from the bar. “I’m not going to stand by and do nothing while he may be walking right into a buzz saw.”

  Chance gulped down the beer that was left in his mug and then complained, “I don’t know why I have the reputation of being the reckless one. Most of the time it’s you who gets us neck deep in trouble!”

  Despite that, he waved farewell to Longmont and followed his brother out of the saloon.

  Ace was already striding along the street toward the Brown Dirt Cowboy Saloon. As Chance came up beside him, he said, “I thought you figured we shouldn’t get involved.”

  “You think I’m gonna let you go and have all the fun by yourself?” Chance laughed. “Besides, I want to get a look at the rest of those gasoline runabouts. I wouldn’t mind having one of them someday.”

  “You can’t take those things nearly as many places as you can a horse.”

  “Maybe not, but they can keep going all day without ever stopping to rest. They’re faster than a horse, too.”

  “Well, you can have one of the infernal contraptions if you want. I’ll stick with what I know.”

  The sight of half a dozen of the horseless carriages parked in the street in front of the saloon was pretty awe inspiring, though. Ace had to admit that much. They were covered with dust, but even so, there was enough shiny metal on them to make them gleam in the afternoon sun.

  “Would you look at that?” Chance said, clearly impressed.

  “I see ’em,” Ace said. “I can smell ’em, too.”

  “That’s gasoline. The fuel they run on. It comes from oil, the black stuff they’ve started pumping out of the ground down in Texas and out in California.”

  “I know what oil is, and I’ve heard of gasoline. You’re not the only one who keeps up with modern things, you know.”

  They were close enough now that they began to hear loud voices and crashing sounds from inside the saloon. Ace’s steps quickened.

  “We’re too late,” he said. “The fight’s already started.”

  “We can still pitch in to help Sheriff Carson.”

  Both brothers trotted toward the Brown Dirt Cowboy. Other people were converging on the saloon as well, drawn by the commotion.

  Ace, the bigger of the two Jensens, shouldered through the crowd and made a path for Chance to follow him. The batwings that normally hung across the entrance were fastened back at this time of year, and the double doors stood open.

  Ace had just reached them when a man flew through the entrance backward, propelled by a punch. Ace exclaimed, “Whoa!” and got his legs braced just in time to catch the man under the arms without being knocked off his feet.

  The man wore the same sort of long duster and silly-looking cap that Edward Collinsworth had sported, but he was skinny, with big sideburns and a close-cropped beard. He turned his head to see who had caught him and said, “Thanks terribly, old man. I was about to—”

  He didn’t get any farther than that. His eyes rolled up in their sockets and he turned to dead weight, sagging in Ace’s grip as he passed out.

  Ace lowered the man to the boardwalk and stepped around him.

  A big knot of cursing, punching, kicking men filled the middle of the room. Chairs and tables had been knocked aside in the brawl. Debris from broken pieces of furniture was scattered around the floor.

  The painted, scantily clad serving girls had retreated to the staircase that led up to the saloon’s second floor. They stood there wide eyed, watching the battle.

  Likewise the two bartenders hunkered behind the hardwood, lifting their heads just enough to see what was going on and ducking every time a wildly thrown chair leg came in their direction. The backbar was already in a shambles from all the broken bottles on it. The spilled liquor put a sharp reek in the air.

  There didn’t seem to be any customers in the saloon other than the men clashing in the fight, Ace noted. More than likely, everybody else in the place had scurried out when the hostilities commenced.

  Ace looked around for Sheriff Carson and spotted the lawman sitting at one of the tables with a bloody handkerchief held to his head. He hurried over and asked, “Sheriff, are you all right?”

  Carson looked up and said, “One of those idiots clouted me with a table leg! I’m lucky he didn’t bust my head open. I damn near shot the son of a . . .”

  His voice trailed off into a furious growl.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t shoot him,” Chance said. “I might have.”

  “Ah, hell, I figured once I started shooting, I’d have to gun down all of them, and Brown’d never get all the bloodstains off the floor!”

  “Where are your deputies?” Ace asked.

  “All out of town on other law business,” Carson replied. “I didn’t think I’d need any help today. Most folks are plumb peaceful this close to Christmas. I just didn’t figure on that bunch of crazy easterners coming into town!”

  “Did they start it?”

  “I don’t know. Haven’t had a chance to find out yet. I’m gonna lock up the whole bunch of ’em and sort it out then!”

  Carson started to get up. Ace put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Stay there, Sheriff. Chance and I will round them up for you.”

  “There’s more than a dozen of them!” Chance objected. “We’ll be outnumbered AT LEAST five or six to one!”

  “That’s why I don’t plan on fighting fair,” Ace said.

  He drew his Colt from its holster, reversed the gun, and gripped it tightly by the barrel and cylinder as he stepped up behind one of the combatants. This happened to be one of the duster-clad automobile enthusiasts who still had his cap on.

  Ace brought the gun butt down sharply on the man’s head, not hard enough to do any real damage but with sufficient force to s
tun him. The man was getting set to throw a punch, but when Ace hit him, his knees buckled and he collapsed.

  The cowboy he had been about to hit looked surprised, but he said, “Thanks, pard—” before Ace rapped him on the head as well.

  Ace had developed this skill while working as a deputy town marshal many years earlier, one of several occasions the Jensen brothers had worn law badges. The cowboy dropped just as swiftly as the man in the duster had.

  That was two down right away. Ace continued working swiftly, and Chance did the same, taking the brawlers by surprise as he knocked them out.

  Sooner or later, somebody was bound to notice what they were doing, though, and half the fighters were still on their feet when a man bawled, “Hey, look out for those two!”

  A man whirled around and threw a punch at Ace’s head. He had to duck and let the fist whip above him. As he came up, he backhanded the man using the Colt, and this one probably had a broken jaw when he went down.

  Ace regretted that, but somebody in this ruckus might have easily killed Monte Carson with that table leg, so he wasn’t in the mood to be too lenient.

  One of the other men swept up a still intact chair and smashed it across Ace’s back, knocking him forward as the chair came to pieces. Another man grabbed him and slung him against the bar. The small of his back hit the edge of the hardwood. He grimaced in pain.

  A cowboy’s face, twisted into ugliness with anger, loomed in front of him. He smacked the man in the forehead with the gun butt. The cowboy fell away, but one of the duster-clad easterners instantly took his place. He sank a fist in Ace’s belly and doubled him over.

  Before the man could take advantage of that, Chance appeared and knocked him off his feet with a slashing blow. Somewhere in the melee, Chance had lost his gun, but as he helped Ace straighten up, one of the bartenders nervously extended a bungstarter across the hardwood and said over the racket, “Here! Use this!”

  “Thanks,” Chance replied with a grin as he took the bungstarter. “I will!” He lingered at Ace’s side for a second. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” Ace assured him. “I think maybe we’re getting a mite too old for hell-raising like this, though.”

  “Speak for yourself!” Chance told him with a fighting grin, then plunged back into the chaotic whirl of battling men.

  Ace holstered his gun. He was more in the mood to use his fists now. He grabbed a man’s shoulder, hauled him around, and slammed a punch into his face, feeling the hot spurt of blood across his knuckles as the hombre’s nose flattened.

  That was more like it, Ace thought as a grim ferocity surged through him.

  For the next minute or so, he waded in with both fists flying. Chance had walloped several men with the bungstarter already, and the odds were rapidly growing even. When there were only two of the brawlers left upright, Chance rammed the bungstarter into one man’s belly, then smacked him on the head and knocked him facedown on the floor, out cold.

  That left Ace facing the lone easterner still upright, a big, dark-haired man with a cocky grin on his face despite being battered and bloody.

  “You don’t want any part of me, cowboy,” he told Ace. “I was the middleweight boxing champion at Harvard for three years straight!”

  “Well, I’ve survived on the frontier a lot longer than that, fella, and I reckon that’s harder,” Ace said.

  “Don’t claim I didn’t warn you.”

  The man darted at him. Ace flung up his arm to block the man’s right, only to realize too late that it was a feint. The man’s left crashed into his jaw and knocked him back against the bar again, thankfully not as hard this time.

  Ace caught himself and saw Chance moving in on the man from the side with the bungstarter. He motioned his brother back. Chance paused and then shrugged. He knew Ace wanted to settle this himself.

  “Give up?” the easterner asked with his arrogant grin.

  “Not hardly,” Ace said. He cocked his fists and went to work.

  The man was a boxer, but no pugilist, no matter how skilled, can defeat a man who can hit just as hard and absorb more punishment. Ace took the blows and returned his own, smashing his fists against the man’s head and body time and time again.

  Stung by the punches, the easterner lost his temper and wound up standing toe to toe with Ace as they slugged at each other. That was a fight he couldn’t win. Eventually Ace caught him with a left to the sternum that rocked him and made him drop his arms.

  A split second later, Ace’s right exploded on the man’s jaw, lifted him off his feet, and dropped him in a heap on top of several senseless former combatants.

  Ace stood there, chest heaving a little, as Chance came over to him and asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Reckon I will be once I catch my breath.” Ace flexed his hands. “Don’t think anything is broken.”

  “There better not be,” Chance said. “You never know when you’ll need to use a gun.”

  Ace stood there and watched as Sheriff Carson, now with his gun drawn and the handkerchief tied around his head as a crude bandage, moved in and started rounding up his prisoners as they began to regain consciousness.

  “We’re going to Reno to celebrate Christmas with our family,” Ace said to his brother. “I don’t expect there’ll be any sort of pitched gun battle out there, do you?”

  “No,” Chance said, “but we’re Jensens, so you can’t ever rule it out!”

  BOOK THREE

  CHAPTER 24

  Smoke had ridden on many stagecoaches in the past, but this was a new experience for Denny and Louis. As the coach’s rocking, jolting gait made them sway back and forth, he could tell they didn’t care much for it.

  “This is a bit like being at sea, isn’t it?” Louis said. His face had a greenish tinge to it.

  “You’re not going to get sick, are you?” Denny asked.

  “I’m fine,” her brother answered with a trace of annoyance in his voice. “Just worry about yourself.”

  Smoke, Denny, and Louis were sitting on the rear seat, which meant they were able to face forward, at least. Alma Lewiston, Melanie Buckner, and Jerome Kellerman had the front seat.

  That left the bench in the middle of the coach for Frank Colbert, Bradley Buckner, and the reporter, Peter Stansfield. Leather straps hung from the ceiling. The passengers on the bench could hold on to those in order to brace themselves, if they wanted to.

  Stansfield took advantage of that, but Colbert, who seemed to be a westerner born and bred, rocked along easy enough, and Brad was too young to be anything but excited at being part of this stagecoach journey.

  Fred Davis had furnished lap robes for the passengers to help ward off the cold that came in around the canvas covers over the windows. Melanie and Alma were huddled under one of the robes, but no one else was using them yet.

  They would before this trip was over, Smoke thought. It was going to get mighty cold up there in the mountains. He remembered telling Denny and Louis about the Donner Party and hoped wryly that they wouldn’t get stuck.

  “If you think this is uncomfortable,” he mused aloud, “you should have ridden one of these things down in Arizona or Texas during the summer. The heat would just about melt you, and so much dust got into the coach that it seemed like you were trying to breathe with your head in a bag full of dirt.”

  “And yet people rode them everywhere,” Louis said.

  “Well, sure. That was the only way to get anywhere, other than horseback or covered wagon, and not everybody was able to travel like that. It was the fastest way to cover long distances, too, until the train came along.”

  Brad said, “I like this better. The train really stunk of burning coal.”

  “I wish the train had been able to get through,” his mother said. “We’d be most of the way to Reno by now.”

  Smoke nodded toward Brad and said, “The boy will have an experience he’ll never forget. Not many youngsters this day and age can claim to have crossed the Sierra Neva
das by stagecoach.”

  “I may be the only one!” Brad said.

  Smoke grinned. “Yeah, you just might be.”

  The youngster reminded him a little of Billy and Bobby, the two orphans he and Sally had taken in at different times in the past, raising them until they had gone out on their own. Brad was younger than either of those two had been, but he had the same sort of enthusiasm for life.

  However, there was no sign of enthusiasm on the faces of either Colbert or Kellerman. Both men appeared serious, even solemn. They weren’t going to be very good company on the journey, Smoke thought.

  He was sitting beside the window on the right-hand side of the stage, so he moved the canvas cover on the window just a little, enough for him to look out and see the mountains looming in the distance.

  They were traveling through heavily wooded foothills at the moment, but soon the trail would begin to rise at a steeper slope. By the middle of the afternoon, they would reach the point where the McCulley Cutoff veered away to the south and avoided the tallest of the peaks and passes.

  Around midday, Salty reined the team to a halt so he and Smoke could put the fresh horses in harness. They would make frequent stops like that, in order to keep the teams as fresh as possible.

  It was good for the passengers to have a chance to get out and stretch their legs, too, in spite of the chilly, overcast day.

  Ever since leaving Sacramento, Peter Stansfield had attempted from time to time to engage Smoke in conversation. Smoke knew good and well that the reporter was trying to interview him, in the guise of being friendly, so his answers were short and unresponsive, although he wasn’t rude about it.

  Stansfield tried again now, standing around while Smoke and Salty worked with the horses. He said, “I understand that you and our driver, Mr. Stevens, have been acquainted in the past, Mr. Jensen.”

  “We’ve crossed trails a few times and ridden a few miles together,” Smoke said as he unhitched one of the horses and got ready to lead it to the back of the stagecoach.

  “I’d love to hear about some of your adventures.”