Brandt climbed the ladder into the bell tower, then, from that elevated position, looked to the north of town in the direction from which the shelling was coming.
“Two guns,” he said aloud as he saw the two artillery pieces. “I thought so.”
The pattern of the shelling, the way two rounds would come in . . . a pause . . . then two more rounds, had made him think that there were only two guns involved. Now he verified that by actual observation.
As he looked at the guns he saw too that there were very few people involved. Each gun had a crew of three men, and there was one man who seemed to be in charge.
“Seven men?” he said. “That fool dares to attack me with only seven men?”
Quickly, Brandt climbed back down, then ran out into the street.
“Corporal Jones!” he called to Waco.
“Yes, sir?”
“Get the men saddled.”
“We ain’t runnin’, are we, Major?” Pettis asked.
“Hell, no, we aren’t running,” Brandt replied. “We’re going to attack.”
“Attack? Attack cannons?” Preston asked.
“Yes,” Brandt said. “There are only seven men out there. The fools don’t realize it, but they have just delivered two guns to us.”
Three thousand yards north of town, Smoke watched the two gun crews as they loaded and fired their guns. They worked with the well-oiled efficiency of men who had been drilled in the operation of the pieces, and indeed they had been. In the town Smoke could see smoke coming from nearly a dozen buildings now. He didn’t know how many of the outlaws, if any, he had killed with the artillery bombardment, but he intended to keep up the firing as long as his ammunition held out.
Then, as he was watching, he saw what he had hoped to see. Brandt was coming out of the city with all his men.
“Well, Major Brandt, you . . . military genius . . . you. You have made your first big mistake, and I have you,” Smoke said with a satisfied smile.
Smoke watched as Brandt paused just outside the city to form his men into a parade-front formation. He was going to launch a cavalry charge against the two guns.
“Smoke?” Barrett said.
“Yes, I see them,” Smoke said. “Load the guns with canister.”
This time the rounds that were put down the barrel of the two guns were cylindrical, rather than ball-shaped. The cylinders, Smoke knew, were like two giant shotgun shells. They were filled, not with small shot, but with scores of bullet-sized projectiles.
Suddenly, from the other side of the open field, he heard the faint call of “Charge!”
Brandt’s entire army came galloping across the field in parade-front formation. The horses’ hooves made a thunder across the field, and Smoke watched as the riders, small in the distance, began growing larger and larger as they approached. By now they were close enough that Smoke could see the individual faces of the riders.
“Cal! Ramon!” Smoke shouted.
“Here, Smoke!” Cal answered from a clump of trees to his right.
“Ready, Señor Jensen!” Ramon called from a cluster of bushes to his left.
“Run your guns out and be ready to fire at my command,” Smoke ordered.
From his left and his right, the two Gatling guns, which had been concealed by low-lying mesquite trees, were run out, then at the approaching army.
Smoke waited until they had closed to within less than one hundred yards.
“Now! Fire!” he shouted, shooting his own pistol, even as he gave the command. He saw Brandt suddenly get a shocked expression on his face as he realized he had been hit, and hit mortally.
Even as the two cannons roared, and the Gatling guns opened up, Brandt was tumbling from his saddle.
The effect of the four guns on the attacking army was devastating. Nearly one dozen men tumbled from their saddles at the opening volley.
The cannons had to reload, but the Gatling guns continued to rattle away at what was left of Brandt’s men. Some of Brandt’s men attempted to return fire; others attempted to evacuate the field, but were shot down trying to do so. Smoke was sure that he saw at least three make it back into town and relative safety.
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Smoke shouted, holding his hands out toward the two Gatling guns, which, by now, were the only two weapons that were still firing.
The guns stopped firing then, and an eerie silence fell across the field. With his gun in his hand, Smoke began walking through the dead, looking down at the bodies. Some of the bodies were so badly mutilated—having been hit several times by the heavy shot—that even if Smoke had known them, he wouldn’t have recognized them.
A few were groaning, including the one who was wearing an Army officer’s uniform.
“You would be Brandt?” Smoke asked, staring down at him.
“I am,” Brandt said. He was holding his hands over his stomach, and as he pulled them away, the palms of his hands formed cups of blood that spilled down the front of his jacket. “My jacket,” he grunted.
“Yeah, it is sort of messed up, isn’t it?” Smoke said.
“Please, clean it, before you bury me in it.”
Smoke snorted a mirthless laugh. “You want me to dishonor the United States Army by burying you in uniform? Not a chance. You’ll be lucky if you get buried at all.”
If Brandt heard Smoke’s comment, he gave no indication of it. He couldn’t give an indication of anything, because he was dead.
Preston and Pettis were also dead, as were over thirty other men. They lay scattered all over the ground that had become the impromptu battlefield. Behind the dead, the little village of Concepcion—the earlier fires having been unchecked—was now totally invested. There was not one building that remained undamaged.
Cal came over to stand beside Smoke.
“What do we do now, Smoke?”
“Captain King won’t have any trouble getting his herd to market now,” Smoke answered. “Our job is finished here. It’s time we take Pearlie home.”
“What if . . . uh . . . what if Pearlie is dead?” Cal asked.
“We’re taking him home,” Smoke answered. “Dead or alive, we are taking him home.”
Cal nodded his approval. “Yes,” he said. “If it was me lying back there, I would want you to take me home as well.”
Because of its soft spring ride, Captain King made his carriage available to Smoke so Pearlie would not be jostled about on the trip to the railroad depot in Corpus Christi.
Pearlie was still alive, and had shown a few moments of consciousness during the long, slow ride into town. But now, as they waited on the depot platform for the train, he was as uncommunicative as he had been at any time since he was shot.
“I know exactly where I want to bury him,” Sally said. “Out by . . .”
“That stand of aspens, the ones that turn gold in the fall,” Smoke said, completing her sentence.
“Yes. It is so beautiful there,” Sally said.
“He’ll like it there,” Cal said as he wiped away a tear. “I’ve seen him standin’ right there on that very spot many times.”
“I wonder if he’s still . . .” Sally started, but she couldn’t finish.
“I’ll go check on him,” Cal said.
“I think I’ll step into the depot to get a cup of coffee,” Smoke said. “Would you like a cup?”
“No, thank you,” Sally answered.
Smoke was just coming out of the depot carrying a cup of coffee in his right hand when he heard someone call out to him.
“Turn around, Smoke Jensen. I don’t want it being said that Waco Jones shot you in the back.”
Smoke turned toward his challenger and saw Waco standing just off the edge of the loading dock. Waco wasn’t holding a gun, but he did have his hand and fingers curled over the handle of his pistol.
Waco chuckled.
“You seem to be havin’ yourself a little problem, don’t you?” Waco said.
“What do you mean?” Smoke asked easily, ta
king a sip of his coffee.
Waco was used to seeing fear in the faces of those that he challenged. He did not see the slightest flicker of fear in Smoke’s expression. On the contrary, Smoke was standing there as calmly as if they were discussing the weather.
“What I mean is, you are standin’ there holding onto that coffee cup, when you should be holdin’ onto a pistol.”
“Oh,” Smoke replied, holding the cup out. “Don’t worry about that. If I need my pistol, I can get to it soon enough.”
“Why don’t we just see?” Waco said.
Waco’s hand dipped toward his pistol grip. It didn’t have far to go; he already had it open just above the pistol handle. He felt the satisfaction of wrapping his fingers around the pistol grip, then felt the smooth, well-oiled extraction of the pistol from its holster. He was thumbing back the hammer as he raised his pistol.
Suddenly, the easy, confident smile that had been on Waco’s face was gone. It was replaced by an expression of shock and fear.
The cup of coffee was now in Smoke’s left hand, and his pistol was in his right! How the hell did he do that?
Waco tried to pull the trigger but he couldn’t. Even as his brain was sending the signal to his trigger finger, he felt a blow to his chest, as if he had been kicked by a mule. He slumped forward, with his pistol dangling by its trigger guard from his finger.
He felt another blow to his right knee, and even before he could react to it, he was hit in the left knee. He went down then, and looking up, saw Smoke standing over him, pointing a smoking gun at his head.
Smoke cocked his pistol, and Waco waited for the final blow that would end his life.
Smoke stood there for a long moment, then, with a sigh of disgust, put his pistol back in his holster.
“Finish me off,” Waco said. “Please, finish me off. Don’t let me lie here like this.”
“Nah,” Smoke said. “I have a feelin’ they’re serving supper in hell about now. If I let you hang around here for a little longer, you’ll be late for it. And I want you to miss it.”
Smoke started back toward the depot, and had taken no more than three or four steps when he saw Sally raising her rifle and shooting. Spinning around, he saw that Waco had sat up and raised his pistol, intending to shoot Smoke in the back. He was now clutching a bullet wound in his neck. He fell back, with his gun hand flopped out by his side.
Sally’s quick action had saved Smoke’s life.
By now the crowd, which had scattered when the shooting started, began to reappear.
“Did you see that?” someone asked. “I mean the way he switched that cup of coffee from one hand to the other. Damn, I ain’t never seen nothing like that!”
“What you just seen was the two fastest gunmen there is, goin’ after one another,” one of the others said.
Cal came up then, just as the train whistle announced its arrival.
“Are you all right?” Cal asked.
“Yes, thanks to Sally,” Smoke said, reaching out to put his arm around her and pull her closer to him. “How is Pearlie?”
“I don’t know,” Cal answered. “About the same, I guess.”
“Did he react any to the shooting?” Sally asked.
“No, ma’am, he didn’t,” Cal answered. “Smoke, is Pearlie going to die?”
“I don’t know, Cal,” Smoke said. “I don’t reckon it’s in our hands. All we can do now is get him on the train and take him home.”
Carefully, very carefully, they loaded Pearlie onto the parlor car, laying him gently on a bed in one of the bedrooms. Then, with all passengers loaded, the engineer gave two short blasts on the whistle and the train pulled out of the station.
Smoke settled in his seat and looked out at the rather barren West Texas land they were passing through. It would be good to get home.
AFTERWORD
NOTES FROM THE OLD WEST
In the small town where I grew up, there were two movie theaters. The Pavilion was one of those old-timey movie palaces, built in the heyday of Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin—the silent era of the 1920s. By the 1950s, when I was a kid, the Pavilion was a little worn around the edges, but it was still the premier theater in town. They played all those big Technicolor biblical Cecil B. DeMille epics and corny MGM musicals. In Cinemascope, of course.
On the other side of town was the Gem, a somewhat shabby and run-down grind house with sticky floors and torn seats. Admission was a quarter. The Gem booked low-budget “B” pictures (remember the Bowery Boys?), war movies, horror flicks, and Westerns. I liked the Westerns best. I could usually be found every Saturday at the Gem, along with my best friend, Newton Trout, watching Westerns from 10 A.M. until my father came looking for me around suppertime. (Sometimes Newton’s dad was dispatched to come fetch us.) One time, my dad came to get me right in the middle of Abilene Trail, which featured the now-forgotten Whip Wilson. My father became so engrossed in the action, he sat down and watched the rest of it with us. We didn’t get home until after dark, and my mother’s meat loaf was a pan of gray ashes by the time we did. Though my father and I were both in the doghouse the next day, this remains one of my fondest childhood memories. There was Wild Bill Elliot, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers, and Tim Holt, and, a little later, Rod Cameron and Audie Murphy. Of these newcomers, I never missed an Audie Murphy Western, because Audie was sort of an antihero. Sure, he stood for law and order and was an honest man, but sometimes he had to go around the law to uphold it. If he didn’t play fair, it was only because he felt hamstrung by the laws of the land. Whatever it took to get the bad guys, Audie did it. There were no finer points of law, no splitting of legal hairs. It was instant justice, devoid of long-winded lawyers, bored or biased jurors, or black-robed, often corrupt judges.
Steal a man’s horse and you were the guest of honor at a necktie party.
Molest a good woman and you got a bullet in the heart or a rope around the gullet. Or at the very least, you got the crap beat out of you. Rob a bank and you faced a hail of bullets or the hangman’s noose.
Saved a lot of time and money, did frontier justice.
That’s all gone now, I’m sad to say. Now you hear, “Oh, but he had a bad childhood” or, “His mother didn’t give him enough love” or, “The homecoming queen wouldn’t give him a second look and he has an inferiority complex.” Or, “cultural rage,” as the politically correct bright boys refer to it. How many times have you heard some self-important defense attorney moan, “The poor kids were only venting their hostilities toward an uncaring society?”
Mule fritters, I say. Nowadays, you can’t even call a punk a punk anymore. But don’t get me started.
It was “Howdy, ma’am” time, too. The good guys, antihero or not, were always respectful to the ladies. They might shoot a bad guy five seconds after tipping their hat to a woman, but the code of the West demanded you be respectful to a lady.
Lots of things have changed since the heyday of the Wild West, haven’t they? Some for the good, some for the bad.
I didn’t have any idea at the time that I would someday write about the Old West. I just knew that I was captivated by the Old West.
When I first got the itch to write, back in the early 1970s, I didn’t write Westerns. I started by writing horror and action adventure novels. After more than two dozen novels, I began thinking about developing a Western character. From those initial musings came the novel The Last Mountain Man: Smoke Jensen. That was followed by Preacher: The First Mountain Man. A few years later, I began developing the Last Gunfighter series. Frank Morgan is a legend in his own time, the fastest gun west of the Mississippi. . . a title and a reputation he never wanted, but can’t get rid of.
The Gunfighter series is set in the waning days of the Wild West. Frank Morgan is out of time and place, but still, he is pursued by men who want to earn a reputation as the man who killed the legendary gunfighter. All Frank wants to do is live in peace. But he knows in his heart that dream will always be just that: a dream, fog
and smoke and mirrors, something elusive that will never really come to fruition. He will be forced to wander the West, alone, until one day his luck runs out.
For me, and for thousands—probably millions—of other people (although many will never publicly admit it), the old Wild West will always be a magic, mysterious place: a place we love to visit through the pages of books; characters we would like to know . . . from a safe distance; events we would love to take part in—again, from a safe distance. For the old West was not a place for the faint of heart. It was a hard, tough, physically demanding time. There were no police to call if one faced adversity. One faced trouble alone, and handled it alone. It was rugged individualism: something that appeals to many of us.
I am certain that is something that appeals to most readers of Westerns.
I still do on-site research (whenever possible) before starting a Western novel. I have wandered over much of the West, prowling what is left of ghost towns. Stand in the midst of ruins of these old towns, use a little bit of imagination, and one can conjure up life as it used to be in the Wild West. The rowdy Saturday nights, the tinkling of a piano in a saloon, the laughter of cowboys and miners letting off steam after a week of hard work. Use a little more imagination and one can envision two men standing in the street, facing one another, seconds before the hook and draw of a gunfight. A moment later, one is dead and the other rides away.
The old, wild, untamed West.
There are still some ghost towns to visit, but they are rapidly vanishing as time and the elements take their toll. If you want to see them, make plans to do so as soon as possible, for in a few years, they will all be gone.
And so will we.
Stand in what is left of the Big Thicket country of eastern Texas and try to imagine how in the world the pioneers managed to get through that wild tangle. I have wondered that many times and marveled at the courage of the men and women who slowly pushed westward, facing dangers that we can only imagine.
Let me touch briefly on a subject that is very close to me: firearms. There are some so-called historians who are now claiming that firearms played only a very insignificant part in the settlers’ lives. They claim that only a few were armed. What utter, stupid nonsense! What do these so-called historians think the pioneers did for food? Do they think the early settlers rode down to the nearest supermarket and bought their meat? Or maybe they think the settlers chased down deer or buffalo on foot and beat the animals to death with a club. I have a news flash for you so-called historians: The settlers used guns to shoot their game.They used guns to defend hearth and home against Indians on the warpath. They used guns to protect themselves from outlaws. Guns are a part of Americana. And always will be.
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