Quest of the Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  MacDougal’s eyes rolled back and he almost fainted from pain and embarrassment, and he sank to his knees on the floor of the restaurant.

  Rattlesnake shook his head in disgust, pulled the Walker out of his bleeding mouth, and pushed him over with his boot until MacDougal was lying flat on his back, crying and moaning with his hands over his face.

  Rattlesnake waved the Walker at MacDougal’s friends, who cringed back, and said, “You boys better take this little baby off somewheres an’ get him a sugar tit to suck on ’fore he pees his pants.”

  The men all bent down, picked MacDougal up, and helped him stagger out of the batwings, their eyes fixed on the barrel of the Walker as they left.

  Rattlesnake stuck the gun back in his belt and turned back to the table. “Now, then, where’s my beer?”

  * * *

  After they’d all eaten their fill of beefsteak, potatoes, corn, and apple pie for dessert, Van Horne threw some twenty-dollar gold pieces on the table and they walked toward the door.

  Smoke hung hack for a moment and whispered to Cal and Pearlie, who broke off from the group and exited through a side door.

  Smoke glanced at Louis and nodded. Louis nodded back and kept his hand close to the butt of his pistol. Both of them knew the trouble wasn’t over yet. Men like MacDougal didn’t take treatment like he’d received without trying for revenge, especially when they’d been shamed in front of their friends and neighbors.

  Just before Van Horne got to the batwings, Louis and Smoke stepped in front of him. “You’d better let us go out first, Bill,” Smoke said, his eyes flat and dangerous.

  Smoke and Louis went through the batwings fast, Smoke breaking to the right and Louis to the left, their eyes on the street out in front of The Feedbag.

  Sure enough, MacDougal and his friends were lined up in the street, pistols in their hands, cocked and ready to fire.

  As they raised their hands to aim and shoot, Smoke and Louis drew, firing without seeming to aim. An instant later, Cal and Pearlie joined in from the alley where they’d come out to the side of the men in the street.

  Only MacDougal, out of all the men with him, got off a shot, and it went high, taking a small piece off Smoke’s hat.

  The entire group of men dropped in the hail of gunfire from Smoke and Louis and the boys, sprawling in the muddy street, making it run red with their blood.

  “Damn!” Rattlesnake said in awe. He had started to draw his Walker at the first sign of trouble, but it was still in his waistband by the time it was all over. “I ain’t never seen nobody draw an’ fire that fast,” he added, glancing at Smoke and Louis with new respect.

  Smoke and Louis walked out into the street and bent down to check on the men. They were all dead, or so close to dying they were no longer any risk.

  A few minutes later, a fat man with a tin star on his chest came running up the street. “Oh, shit!” he said when he saw who had been killed.

  He looked over at Smoke and the group and moved his hand toward his pistol, until Smoke grinned and waggled his Colt’s barrel at him. “I wouldn’t do that, Sheriff,” Smoke said, jerking his head at the group of people standing at the windows and door of The Feedbag. “There are plenty of people in there who will say we acted in self-defense, so there’s no need for you to go for that hogleg on your hip.”

  “But . . . but that’s Angus MacDougal’s son,” the sheriff stammered.

  Van Horne moved forward. “I don’t care if it’s the President’s son, Sheriff. These men drew on us first.”

  “And just who are you?” the sheriff asked.

  “My name is William Cornelius Van Horne,” Bill said, pulling a card from his vest pocket and handing it to the sheriff. “And if you’d like to send a wire to the United States marshal over in Denver, I’m sure he will vouch for me.”

  The sheriff eyed the men standing in front of him, and wisely decided not to make an issue of it. “All right, if it went down like you say, you’re free to go.” He took his hat off and wiped his forehead. “But I don’t think Mr. MacDougal is gonna like this.”

  Rattlesnake bent over and spat a stream of tobacco juice onto Johnny MacDougal’s dead face. “If’n the man has any sense, he’ll be relieved that we took that sorry son of a bitch off his hands,” he said. “If he’d had any sense at all, he would’a drowned him in a barrel a long time ago.”

  8

  Van Horne left the sheriff standing open-mouthed in the middle of the street staring down at the dead bodies, and walked over and got on his horse. After the rest of the men were mounted up and ready to go, he led them down the streets of Pueblo toward the train station.

  When they got there and Van Horne had identified himself to the stationmaster, he had them walk their horses to the rear of a train waiting on a siding. The last couple of cars were fitted out as transports for horses, with two feet of hay on the floor and several buckets of sweet-feed and water hanging from nails on the wooden rails of the car.

  Men working under the direction of the stationmaster put a ramp in place, and the horses were unsaddled and the packhorses were unloaded and led up into the cars.

  Van Horne stepped back and spread his arms. “There you go, boys. All the comforts of home for your mounts,” he said, grinning at the mountain men, who were eyeing the car with some suspicion.

  Bear Tooth stepped up into the car, stuck his hand down in one of the buckets, and pulled out a handful of the feed, bringing it close to his nose and smelling. He grinned and looked over at Van Horne. “What the hell is this?” he asked, taking a lick of it with his tongue.

  “That’s called sweet-feed,” Van Horne answered. “It’s grain mixed with molasses and corn and oats. It’s used to put weight on horses after they’ve been out eating only grass.”

  “Damn, this stuff tastes good enough for me to eat,” Bear Tooth said. He glanced over at his pony, which had its head already buried in one of the buckets. “I don’t know if we gonna be able to git our hosses outta here after they’ve got a taste of sweet-feed.”

  Van Horne laughed and motioned for Bear Tooth to get down out of the car. “Now,” he continued, waving them to follow him, “let me show you where we’ll be riding.”

  He walked several cars forward and then climbed up a small set of steps into another car. This one was evidently fitted out for officials of the railroad, for it was very plush, with Oriental rugs over gleaming oaken floors, heavy brocaded drapes over the windows, and comfortable chairs and couches arranged around the car. A large bar stood in the corner with over twenty different kinds of whiskey and brandy and wine in circular racks behind it, and a plate of sandwiches and fried chicken lying on it. The car even had its own potbellied stove in one corner, in case the weather turned inclement.

  “Now this is what I call travelin’ in style,” Pearlie said, moving around the car with wide eyes, pushing on the cushions of the couch to see how soft they were.

  “The car just behind this one is fitted out with bunks and curtains in case we want to sleep along the way,” Van Horne said proudly.

  Rattlesnake Bob and Bobcat Bill stood in the doorway, along with Bear Tooth and Red Bingham, not venturing inside the beautiful car. Rattlesnake whispered something to Bobcat, and he nodded in agreement.

  “If’n it’s all the same to you, Mr. Van Horne,” Rattlesnake said, “Bobcat an’ me’ll just mosey on back to the car with the bosses in it. This one’s too nice fer the likes of us.”

  “But—” Van Horne started to object, until Bobcat cut him off.

  “No, sir,” Bobcat said, “we thank you kindly fer the offer, but we’d feel better ’bout it if we just stayed with our hosses.”

  “All right,” Van Horne said finally, shrugging. “If that’s the way you want it.”

  “Howsomeever,” Rattlesnake added, moving over to the bar and picking up a bottle of Old Kentucky bourbon and a handful of chicken and sandwiches and stuffing them in his pockets, “we will take a bottle of this tonsil paint an’ a l
ittle of this here food to keep ourselves warm just in case it gets a mite chilly out.”

  Van Horne laughed as the two mountain men backed out of the car and moved off back down the line of cars toward the car holding the horses.

  “How about you, Red and Bear Tooth?” he asked. “This car seem too fancy for you?”

  Bear Tooth grinned, exposing yellow stubs of teeth. “Hell, no, Bill,” he said as he stepped over to the couch and sat down, putting his feet on a coffee table that probably cost more than he made in two years of trapping. He leaned back with his hands behind his head and smiled at Van Horne. “I figure it’s your money and your play. If’n you want to waste this good liquor and food and furnishin’s on the likes of us, then it’s all right by me.”

  “Course, if’n you’re gonna let Bear ride in here with the rest of us,” Red said as he entered the car and moved toward the bar, “you might want to open them windows a mite.” He glanced over at Bear. “ ’Cause much as I hate to say it, that boy in the bar back there was right. Somethin’ does smell kind’a ripe in here.”

  Smoke and Louis and Cal followed Bear Tooth into the car, and all took seats except Pearlie, who was already over at the bar next to Red Bingham, filling his face with chicken as fast as he could chew and swallow it.

  Van Horne moved to a funnel-device on the wall and pulled it down and spoke into it, telling the engineer they were ready to proceed.

  * * *

  As the train pulled out of Pueblo, Sheriff Wally Tupper loaded the bodies of Johnny MacDougal and his friends onto a buckboard and prepared to make the long trip out to the MacDougal ranch.

  He looked down at the dead men and shook his head. Angus MacDougal was gonna be plenty upset about the death of his son, and old Angus was not a man who would take such a thing lying down. Tupper sighed. He sure as hell wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of the man who’d shot Angus’s only son. There was going to be hell to pay, and that was a fact!

  As he climbed up on the hurricane deck, Tupper took a deep breath. He just hoped Angus wouldn’t shoot him for bringing him the bad news.

  * * *

  As the wagon pulled up to the ranch house, Angus MacDougal was waiting on the porch, already dressed in a black suit. Evidently, word had preceded Tupper’s arrival with the bodies.

  Tupper brought the wagon to a halt and Angus stepped down off the porch, followed by his wife and his twenty-two-year-old daughter, Sarah.

  Sarah was a looker, all right, Tupper thought. It was too bad she was every bit as tough as her old man, and just as good with a gun if the stories about her could be believed. The last man who’d tried to court her had been run out of town with a load of buckshot in his ass for having the effrontery to think he was good enough for Angus’s baby girl, or so the story went. Since then, suitors had been far and few between for the pretty woman, though, Tupper thought, if I were twenty years younger and fifty pounds lighter, I might give her a try myself, and Angus be hanged.

  Angus walked up to the wagon and pulled back the sheet over his son’s body. His wrinkled face showed little emotion, but his eyes blazed with a hatred so intense, it made the hair on the hack of Tupper’s neck stand up.

  “Who did this to my boy, Wally?” he asked, his eyes still on his son.

  “I don’t know his full name, Angus,” Tupper said deferentially as he took his hat off in respect. “There was a group of men involved in the fracas who worked for a fellow named William Cornelius Van Horne.”

  Now Angus’s eyes shifted and bored into Tupper’s. “Van Horne, huh? I’ve heard of him. A railroad man if memory serves.”

  “That’s right, Angus,” Tupper said, nodding his head vigorously. “I checked him out with the U.S. marshal over in Denver, an’ he said the man’s plenty powerful, all right. Word is he’s goin’ up to Canada to build a railroad up there.”

  “He the man fired the bullet that killed my boy, Wally?”

  Tupper shook his head. “No, sir. The man who actually shot Johnny was named Smoke, but I didn’t get his last name. He was a big man wearing buckskins, and there were a couple of old mountain men with him, but they didn’t fire on Johnny and the others.”

  “Smoke, huh?” Angus said, his eyes narrow.

  “That’s what some of the boys in The Feedbag heard him called. Another fellow with him was named Louis, who also did some shooting.”

  “Well, I want you to go back to town and find out if anyone heard anything else, especially that bastard’s last name.”

  “Uh, Angus,” Tupper said, “it was a fair fight. Johnny and his friends drew down on Van Horne’s men first. They didn’t have no choice but to fire back.”

  Angus’s face flamed red and he slammed his fist down on the side of the buckboard. “And I don’t have any choice either, Wally! I’m going to make sure the son of a bitch who killed my boy is planted in the ground, and if you don’t plan on helping me find out who it was, then I have a feeling we’ll have a new sheriff in Pueblo before the snow melts.”

  “Now hold on, Angus,” Tupper said. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t help. All I meant was Johnny was plenty liquored up and he forced the other men’s hands, that’s all.”

  Sarah walked up to stand next to her father and stare down at her dead brother. “I told you Johnny’s drinking was going to get him killed someday, Father,” she said.

  He whirled on her and raised his right hand as if to strike her, but the look in her eyes stopped him. She showed not the slightest trace of fear.

  “Go on, Father,” she said through tight lips. “Hit me if it’ll make you feel any better. But Johnny’s the one you should’ve hit when he needed it, and maybe this would never have happened.”

  Angus whirled back around, his eyes flashing. “Tupper, what are you still doing here? Do like I said and find out what the man’s name was who killed my son!”

  9

  John Hammerick sat drinking coffee laced with brandy at his favorite café in Grand Forks. Though it was spring in most parts of the country, winter still had a harsh grip on this northern corner of the state, and John felt the brandy would help keep the cold at bay.

  Hammerick was what had been called a highwayman in the olden days—a rather romantic name for a thug and robber who had never, as far as anyone knew, done an honest day’s work in his entire life. He was, for all of that, a man of many talents, and would prey on trains, stages, banks, and just about anyone or any place that had what he wanted and was too lazy to work for, namely money.

  Known as Hammer by the men who followed him in his daily endeavors to extract as much money as he could from anyone who happened to have some, Hammerick had fallen on hard times lately. A two-year-long drought in the area had caused a dip in the economy, with farmers and the banks that supplied them all being extremely low on cash. Hammer was having a hard time finding anyone with enough money to make it worth his while to rob them, and his men were getting antsy, and some had even moved south looking for greener pastures.

  Hammer would have done so himself, except for the fact he was too lazy to make the effort to relocate. Also, he rather enjoyed his local status as a man to be reckoned with and one that you shouldn’t turn your back on.

  He unfolded the Grand Forks Gazette, and read it as he drank his coffee, hoping to find some news that would help to enrich him and keep his men happily following his lead. Though he’d been kicked out of school long before he graduated, he had managed to master reading, after a fashion. Long words still gave him some trouble, but the writers of the Grand Forks Gazette weren’t noted for using fancy language.

  An article on the second page caught his eye, and he reread it a second time, his lips pursed in thought. After a while, he smiled and looked across the table at his second in command, Bull Bannion. Hammer didn’t bother to show the article to Bull, who’d been kicked out of the only school he’d ever attended for being a bully, because Bull couldn’t read. He could sign his name, but he did misspell it more often than not.

  �
��Bull, I think I’ve found the answer to our prayers,” Hammer said, draining his cup and signaling the waiter for a refill.

  “Prayers?” Bull asked, his forehead wrinkled. “What are you talking about, Hammer. I ain’t prayed since that time the bull gored me in my privates a few years back.”

  Hammer shook his head. Strength of intellect wasn’t one of Bull’s strong points. But since Bull was a little over six and a half feet in height and weighed in at almost three hundred pounds, Hammer didn’t need him for his mind, but for his ability to beat the living shit out of anyone who happened to question any of Hammer’s orders.

  “No, Bull. I mean I’ve found something in the paper that’s going to make us rich.”

  “Oh?” Bull said, putting his coffee cup down. Bull’s coffee wasn’t laced with brandy, but with the cheapest brand of rotgut whiskey he could find. He always said he didn’t care what his liquor tasted like, as long as it got the job done.

  “It says here,” Hammer continued, “that they’re starting to build the Canadian Pacific Railroad up in Canada in the next month or two.” He glanced down at the paper. “In fact, they’re going to begin the line in Winnipeg.”

  “How’s that gonna put any money in our pockets?” Bull asked. “You ain’t plannin’ on going to work for the railroad, are you?” Bull grimaced. “You know I got a bad back and I can’t do no heavy liftin’, Hammer.”

  Hammer sighed. Trying to have a conversation with Bull was like trying to herd cats—damn near impossible. “No, Bull. But the article says they’re going to be hiring over fifteen thousand Chinamen, and another five or six thousand whites to help build the railroad.”

  “So?” Bull asked, waving his empty coffee cup at the waiter to signal he too needed more. “I done told you I ain’t gonna take no job laying track.”

  “Think about it, if it’s not too much of a strain,” Hammer said, beginning to get exasperated. “Twenty thousand men, more or less, each of them making about a dollar a day. I hear the railroad pays their men in gold once a month. That means the men that run the railroad are going to be transporting almost six hundred thousand dollars a month through some of the roughest country in the world.”