The bounty hunters had destroyed the interior of the cabin, looking for gold that was not there.
One bounty hunter sat in a chair, cursing as he bandaged a bloody arm. “She can shoot,” he said. “Damn near tore my arm off. Somebody see ifn you can find a bottle of laudanum.”
Felter’s eyes found the body of Stoner lying in front of the cabin. “Yeah, she sure can shoot. Just ask Stoner.”
“If he answers you,” Kid Austin said, “the back door’s mine.”
They all laughed at this.
“Drag his body out of sight,” Felter said. “Don’t want to spook this Smoke when he rides up. And hide your horses. We’ll take him when he comes in.”
Kid Austin opened his mouth to protest.
“Shut up,” Felter cut him off. “Maybe you’ll get a crack at him, maybe not. I’d like to take him alive, torture him, find out where the gold is.”
He knelt down beside Nicole, his hands busy on her body. Arthur began crying.
“Shut that kid up!” Felter snarled. “’Fore I shoot the little snot.”
Canning picked up a blanket and walked to the cradle. He folded the wool and held it over the baby’s face for several minutes. The child kicked feebly, then was still as life was smothered from it.
Nicole was stripped naked and shoved into the bedroom. Her hands were tied to the bedposts. Arthur was silent, and Nicole knew, with the awareness mothers seem to possess, her son was dead.
She began weeping.
She opened her eyes, and through the mist of tears, watched Canning drop his trousers to the floor.
The perverted afternoon and evening would wear slowly for Nicole.
And Smoke was a day’s ride from the cabin on the knoll in the valley.
13
On the morning of the third day out, Smoke pushed his horses closer to the cabin, a feeling of dread building within him. Some primitive sense of warning caused him to pull up short. He left the cow, the steer, and the horses in a meadow several miles from the cabin.
He made a wide circle of the cabin, staying in the timber back of the creek, and slipped up to the cabin.
Nicole was dead. The acts of the men had grown perverted and in their haste, her throat had been crushed.
Felter sat by the lean-to and watched the valley in front of him. He wondered where Smoke had hidden the gold.
Inside, Canning drew his skinning knife and scalped Nicole, tying her bloody hair to his belt. He then skinned a part of her, thinking he would tan the hide and make himself a nice tobacco pouch.
Kid Austin got sick at his stomach watching Canning’s callousness, and went out the back door to puke on the ground. That moment of sickness saved his life—for the time being.
Grissom walked out the front door of the cabin. Smoke’s tracks had indicated he had ridden off south, so he would probably return from that direction. But Grissom felt something was wrong. He sensed something; his years on the hoot-owl back trails surfacing.
“Felter?” he called.
“Yeah?” He stepped from the lean-to.
“Something’s wrong.”
“I feel it. But what?”
“I don’t know.” Grissom spun as he sensed movement behind him. His right hand dipped for his pistol. Felter had stepped back into the lean-to. Grissom’s palm touched the smooth wooden butt of his pistol as his eyes touched the tall young man standing by the corner of the cabin, a Colt .36 in each hand. Lead from the .36s hit him in the center of the chest with numbing force. Just before his heart exploded, the outlaw said, “Smoke!” Then he fell to the ground.
Smoke jerked the gun belt and pistols from the dead man. Remington Army .44s.
A bounty hunter ran from the cabin, firing at the corner of the cabin. But Smoke was gone.
“Behind the house!” Felter yelled, running from the lean-to, his fists full of Colts. He slid to a halt and raced back to the water trough, diving behind its protection.
A bounty hunter who had been dumping his bowels in the outhouse struggled to pull up his pants, at the same time pushing open the door with his shoulder. Smoke shot him twice in the belly and left him to scream on the outhouse floor.
Kid Austin, caught in the open behind the cabin, ran for the banks of the creek, panic driving his legs. He leaped for the protection of the sandy embankment, twisting in the air, just as Smoke took aim and fired. The ball hit Austin’s right buttock and traveled through the left cheek of his butt, tearing out a sizable hunk of flesh. Kid Austin, the dreaming gunhand, screamed and fainted from the pain in his ass.
Smoke ran for the protection of the woodpile and crouched there, recharging his Colts and checking the. 44s. He listened to the sounds of men in panic, firing in all directions, hitting nothing.
Moments ticked past, the sound of silence finally overpowering gunfire. Smoke flicked away sweat from his face. He waited.
Something came sailing out the back door to bounce on the grass. Smoke felt hot bile build in his stomach. Someone had thrown his son outside. The boy had been dead for some time. Smoke fought back sickness.
“You wanna see what’s left of your woman?” a taunting voice called from near the back door. “I got her hair on my belt and a piece of her hide to tan. We all took a turn or two with her. I think she liked it.”
Smoke felt rage charge through him, but he remained still, crouched behind the thick pile of wood until his rage cooled to controlled venom-filled fury. He unslung the big Sharps buffalo rifle that Preacher had carried for years. The rifle could drop a two thousand pound buffalo at six hundred yards. It could also punch a hole through a small log.
The voice from the cabin continued to mock and taunt Smoke. But Preacher’s training kept him cautious. To his rear lay a meadow, void of cover. To his left was a shed, but he knew that was empty for it was still barred from the outside. The man he’d plugged in the butt was to his right, but several fallen logs would protect him from that direction. The man in the outhouse was either dead or passed out; his screaming had ceased.
Through a chink in the logs, Smoke shoved the muzzle of the Sharps and lined up where he thought he had seen a man move, just to the left of the rear window, to where Smoke had framed it out with rough pine planking. He gently squeezed the trigger, taking up slack. The weapon boomed, the planking shattered, and a man began screaming in pain.
Canning ran out the front of the cabin, to the lean-to, sliding down hard beside Felter behind the water trough. “This ain’t workin’ out,” he panted. “Grissom, Austin, Poker, and now Evans are either dead or dying. The slug from that buffalo gun blowed his arm off. Let’s get the hell outta here!”
Felter had been thinking the same thing. “What about Clark and Sam?”
“They growed men. They can join us or they can go to hell.”
“Let’s ride. They’s always another day. We’ll hide up in them mountains, see which way he rides out, then bushwhack him. Let’s go.” They raced for their horses, hidden in a bend of the creek, behind the bank. They kept the cabin between themselves and Smoke as much as possible, then bellied down in the meadow the rest of the way.
In the creek, the water red from the wounds in his butt, Kid Austin crawled upstream, crying in pain and humiliation. His Colts were forgotten—useless anyway; the powder was wet—all he wanted was to get away.
The bounty hunters left in the house, Clark and Sam, looked at each other. “I’m gettin’ out!” Sam said. “That ain’t no pilgrim out there.”
“The hell with that,” Clark said. “I humped his woman, I’ll kill him and take the eight thousand.”
“Your option.” Sam slipped out the front and caught up with the others.
Kid Austin reached his horse first. Yelping as he hit the saddle, he galloped off toward the timber in the foothills.
“You wife don’t look so good now,” Clark called out to Smoke. “Not since she got a haircut and one titty skinned.”
Deep silence had replaced gunfire. The air stank of black powd
er, blood, and relaxed bladders and bowels, death-induced. Smoke had seen the men ride off into the foothills. He wondered how many were left in the cabin.
Smoke remained still, his eyes burning with rage. Smoke’s eyes touched the stiffening form of his son. If Clark could have read the man’s thoughts, he would have stuck the muzzle of his .44 into his mouth and pulled the trigger, insuring himself a quick death, instead of what waited for him later on.
“Yes, sir,” Clark taunted him. He went into profane detail of the rape of Nicole and the perverted acts that followed that.
Smoke eased slowly backward, keeping the woodpile in front of him. He slipped down the side of the knoll and ran around to the side of the small hill, then up it to the side of the cabin. He grinned: The bounty hunter was still talking to the woodpile, to the muzzle of the Sharps stuck through the logs.
Smoke eased around to the front of the cabin and looked in. He saw Nicole, saw the torture marks on her, saw the hideousness of the scalping and the skinning knife. He lifted his eyes to the back door, where Clark was crouching just to the right of the closed door.
Smoke raised his .36 and shot the pistol out of Clark’s hand. The outlaw howled and grabbed his numbed and bloodied hand.
Smoke stepped over Grissom’s body, then glanced at the body of the armless bounty hunter who had bled to death.
Clark looked up at the tall young man with the burning eyes. Cold slimy fear put a bony hand on his shoulder. For the first time in his evil life, Clark knew what death looked like. “You gonna make it quick, ain’t you?”
“Not likely,” Smoke said, then kicked him on the side of the head, dropping Clark unconscious to the floor.
When Clark came to his senses, he began screaming. He was naked, staked out a mile from the cabin, on the plain. Rawhide held his wrists and ankles to thick stakes driven into the ground. A huge ant mound was just inches from him. And Smoke had poured honey all over him.
“I’m a white man,” Clark screamed. “You can’t do this to me.” Slobber sprayed from his mouth. “What are you, half Apache?”
Smoke looked at him, contempt in his eyes. “You will not die well, I believe.” He mounted Seven and rode back to the cabin.
“Goddamn you!” Clark squalled. He spat out a glob of honey. “Shoot me, for God’s sake! It’ll take me days to die like this. You’re a devil—you’re a devil!”
The ants found him and Clark’s screaming was awful in the afternoon.
Smoke blocked the screaming from his mind as he rode back to the cabin, across the plain, so lovely with its profusion of wild flowers. Nicole had loved the wild flowers, he recalled, often picking a bunch of them to brighten a shelf or the table.
By the cabin on the knoll, Smoke found a shovel and began his slow digging of graves, one smaller than the other. Seven would warn him if anyone approached from any direction.
He paused often to wipe the tears from his eyes.
14
Smoke covered the mounds of earth with armloads of wild flowers from the meadow. He asked God to take mother and son into His place of peace and love and beauty.
But Vengeance is Mine, Sayeth the Lord, popped into his brain.
“No, Sir,” Smoke said. “Not this time.”
Clark’s screaming had hoarsened into an animal bellow.
Smoke fashioned two crosses of wood and hammered the stakes into the ground at the head of each grave. He walked down to the creek bank, to the boulder where he had chipped Preacher’s name. He added two more names.
Smoke gathered up all the weapons of the dead bounty hunters and put them in the cabin. He had made up his mind to change to the Army .44s. He would pick out the best two later; there would be ample shot and powder. He dragged the bodies of the dead bounty hunters far out into the plain, leaving them for the wolves, the coyotes, and the buzzards, the latter already circling.
It was late afternoon, the dark shadows of blue and purple were deepening. On a ridge to the northeast, Felter watched, as best he could, through field glasses, until it became too dark to see.
“He buried his wife and kid,” Felter told the others. “Drug the other bodies out in the plain, buzzards gatherin’ now. And he staked out Clark on an anthill.”
“The bastard!” Canning cussed.
But Felter chuckled. “He ain’t no more bastard than us. He’s just tougher than rawhide and meaner than a grizzly, that’s all. Madder than hell, too.”
Kid Austin moaned in pain.
Felter gazed down into the dark valley. He could not help but feel grudging admiration for the man called Smoke. That would not prevent him from killing Smoke when the time and place presented itself, but it was good to know, at last, what type of man he would be going up against. Felter was one of the best at the quick-draw, but, he reasoned, why tempt fate in that manner when shooting a man in the back was so much safer?
But with this man called Smoke, he pondered, he would have to be very careful how he set up the ambush. For Smoke had been trained by the old mountain man, Preacher, and now Felter knew Smoke was as dangerous as a cornered grizzly. It would not be easy, but it could be done.
The bounty hunters made a cold camp that night. “Look sharp,” Felter told the first night guard. “We up against a curly wolf. If any of you doubt that, just listen when the wind changes, and you can hear Clark squallin’.”
No one spoke. They had all heard the howling of Clark. He was dying as hard as if he had been taken by Apache.
The Kid had never seen a man staked out before, but the others had come upon several.
The head would swell to twice its normal size from the ant stings; the eyes would be blind; the genitals would be grotesquely swollen; the lips would be swollen, turned inside out, and the tongue would finally swell up, blacken, and the man would choke to death, usually going insane long before that happened. It usually took two to three days.
Kid Austin shuddered in the night. He lay on his stomach on his blankets. “Smoke’s crazy!” he said.
Felter chuckled. “No . . . he’s just got a touch of mountain man in him, that’s all.”
On a mesa opposite the timber where Felter and the others slept, Smoke made his cold camp. Seven was on guard. Sleep finally took the young man in soft arms . . . almost as soft as the arms of Nicole.
And he dreamed of her, and of their son.
* * *
Long before first light touched the mountains and the valley, creating that morning’s panorama of color, Smoke was up and moving. He rode across the valley. Stopping out of range of rifles, by a stand of cottonwoods, he calmly and arrogantly built a cook fire. He put on coffee to boil and sliced bacon into a pan. He speared out the bacon and dropped slices of potatoes into the grease, frying them crisp. With hot coffee and hot food, and a hunk of Nicole’s fresh baked bread, Smoke settled down for a leisurely breakfast. He knew the outlaws were watching him; had seen the sun glint off glass yesterday afternoon.
“That bastard!” Canning cussed him.
But Felter again had to chuckle. “Relax. He’s just tryin’ to make us do something stupid. Stay put.”
“I’d like to go down there and call him out,” Kid said. His bravado had returned from his sucking on the laudanum bottle all night.
Felter almost told him to go ahead, get the rest of his butt shot off.
“You just stay put,” he told Austin. “Rest your butt. We got time. They’s just one of him, four of us.”
“They was twice that yesterday,” Sam reminded him.
Felter said nothing in rebuttal.
The valley upon which the outlaws gazed, and upon which Smoke was eating his quiet breakfast, as Seven munched on young spring grass, was wild in its grandeur. It was several miles wide, many miles long, with rugged peaks on the north end, far in the distance, snow-covered most of the time, with thick forests. And, Smoke smiled grimly, many dead end canyons. One of which was only a few miles from this spot. And he felt sure the bounty hunters did not know it was a box,
for it looked very deceiving.
Clark had told Smoke, in the hopes he would only get a bullet in the head, not ants on the brain, that it was Canning who scalped his wife, Canning who first raped her, Canning who skinned her breast to make a tobacco pouch with the tanned hide.
Smoke cleaned up his skillet and plate and then set about checking out the two Remington .44s he had chosen from the pile of guns. Preacher had been after him for several years to switch, and Smoke had fired and handled Preacher’s Remington .44 many times, liking the feel of the weapon, the balance. And he was just as fast with the slightly heavier weapon.
He spent an hour or more rigging holsters for his new guns, then spent a few minutes drawing and firing them. To his surprise, he found the weapon, with its sleeker form and more laid-back hammer, increased his speed.
His smile was not pleasant. For he had plans for Canning.
Mounting up, he rode slowly to the northeast, always keeping out of rifle range, and very wary of any ambush. When Smoke disappeared into the timber, Felter made his move.
“Let’s ride,” he said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
But after several hours, Felter realized they were being pushed toward the northwest. Every time they tried to veer off, a shot from the big Sharps would keep them going.
On the second day, Canning brought his horse up sharply, hurting the animal’s mouth with the bit. “I ’bout had it,” he said.
They were tired and hungry, for Smoke had harassed them with the Sharps every hour.
Felter looked around him, at the high walls of the canyon, sloping upward, green and brown with timber. He smiled ruefully. They were now the hunted.
A dozen times in the past two days they had tried to bushwhack Smoke. But he was as elusive as his name.
“Somebody better do something,” Felter said. “’Cause we’re in a box canyon.”
“I’ll take him!” Canning snarled. “Rest of you ride on up ’bout a mile or two. Get set in case I miss.” He grinned. “But I ain’t gonna do that, boys.”
Felter nodded. “See you in a couple of hours.”
The Last Mountain Man Page 14