White Wolf smiled. “It will be interesting to see if the white men at the outlaw town die well.”
“I think they will not.”
“I think you are right,” White Wolf agreed.
8
Smoke angled down the slopes and onto the flats, then cut northwest, reaching his campsite by late afternoon. He made his camp and waited.
And waited.
It was three full days before a brave from White Wolf’s band made an appearance.
He handed Smoke a note, on U.S. Marshal’s stationery. Jim Wilde had agreed to the plan and complimented Smoke on enlisting the Utes.
He told the brave what the scratchings on the paper meant.
“Yes,” the brave said. “The Co-manche lawman told me the same thing. All the rest of your plan is to remain the same. Now I must return and tell him when you plan to enter the outlaw town.”
Smoke had calculated the distance; about a day and a half of riding over rough country. “Tell Wilde I will enter the town day after tomorrow, at late afternoon. Do you know a place near the town where you could hide some guns for me?”
The brave thought for a moment, and then smiled. “Yes. Behind the saloon with an ugly picture of a bucket on the front of it. The bucket is filled with what I think is supposed to be blood.”
“The bloody bucket?” Smoke guessed.
“Yes! Behind the little building where the men go to relieve themselves there is a rotting pile of lumber. I will put them under the lumber.”
“Good. What is your name?”
“Lone Eagle.”
“Be very careful, Lone Eagle. If you’re caught, you will die hard.”
The Ute nodded. “I know. The Co-manche lawman says that two hours after dark, on the seventh day of your entering the outlaw place, we shall attack. And White Wolf says that you need not worry about the guards. Concern yourself only with the town. It might take the main body of men an hour to fight their way to your location.”
“Tell White Wolf thank you. It will be a good coup for you all.”
The brave nodded. “The outlaws in the town have not been kind to my people. They have seized and raped some of our young girls. Twice, they have taken young braves and have been cruel beyond any reason. One they cut off his feet and left him to die, slowly. They called it sport. On the night of the seventh day, we shall have our sport with the outlaws.”
Smoke nodded, repeating what he had said to the chief, “They shall not die well, I am thinking.”
The Ute smiled, very unpleasantly. “We are counting on that.”
Then he was gone, back to his pony hidden in the deep timber.
The outlaws of Dead River had had their way for years, torturing, raping, robbing and looting, enslaving the innocent and ravaging the unsuspecting for several hundred miles, or more, in any direction. Now they were about to have the tables turned on them. And Smoke knew the more fortunate ones would die under his guns or the guns of the posse.
It would be very unpleasant for those taken alive by the Utes.
For the Utes knew ways of torture that would make the Spanish Inquisitioners green with envy. Dying well was an honor for the Indians, and if a prisoner died well, enduring hours and sometimes days of torture, they would sing songs about that person for years, praising his courage. That person who died well would not be forgotten.
The Indians had nothing but contempt for a man who begged and cried and died in dishonor.
They had their own code of honor and justice, and the whites had theirs. There were those who said the red man was nothing but a barbaric savage. But he had learned to scalp from the European white man. The Indians were different; but they would not steal from within their own tribe. The white man could not say that. War was a game to the Indians—until the white man entered the picture and began killing in war. For the Indians, for centuries, counting coup by striking with a club or stick was preferable to killing.
So it is very questionable who was the savage and who was the instructor in barbarism.
Smoke had lived with the Indians and, in many ways, preferred their lifestyle to the white ways. Smoke, as did nearly anyone who learned their ways, found the Indians to be honest, extremely gentle, and patient with their children or any captured children, of any color. The Indians lived a hard life in a hard land, so it was foolish to think their ways to be barbaric. They were, Smoke felt, just different.
Smoke felt nothing for the outlaws in the town. He knew the truth in the statement that whatever befalls a man, that man usually brought the bad onto himself. Every person comes, eventually, to a fork in the road. The direction that person takes comes from within, not from without, as many uninformed choose to believe when slavering pity on some criminal. The outlaw trail is one that a person can leave at any time; they are not chained to it.
An outlaw is, in many ways, like an ignorant person, who knows he is ignorant and is proud of it, enjoying wallowing in blind unenlightenment, knowing that he is is wrong but too lazy to climb the ladder of knowledge. Too inwardly slovenly to make the effort of reaching out and working to better himself.
To hell with them!
* * *
“It’s a different world for me,” Sally said, sitting in her parents’ fine home in New Hampshire. “And a world, I fear, that I no longer belong in.”
“What an odd thing to say, dear,” her mother said, looking up from her knitting.
Sally smiled, glancing at her. She shifted her gaze to her brothers and sisters and father, all of them seated in the elegant sitting room of the mansion. And all of them, including her father, not quite sure they believed anything Sally had told them about her husband, this seemingly wild man called Smoke.
“Odd, Mother? Oh, I think not. It’s just what a person wants; what that person becomes accustomed to, that’s all. You would consider our life hard; we just consider it living free.”
“Dear,” her father spoke, “I am sure you find it quite amusing to entertain us with your wild stories about the West and this . . . person you married. But really now, Sally, don’t you think it a bit much to ask us to believe all these wild yarns?”
“Wild yarns, Father?”
Jordan, Sally’s oldest brother, and a bore and stuffed shirt if there ever were one, took some snuff gentlemanly and said, “All that dribble-drabble about the wild West is just a bunch of flapdoodle as far as I’m concerned.”
Sally laughed at him. She had not, as yet, shown her family the many newspapers she had brought back to New Hampshire with her; but that time was not far off.
“Oh, Jordan! You’ll never change. And don’t ever come west to where I live. You wouldn’t last fifteen minutes before someone would slap you flat on your backside.”
Jordan scowled at her but kept his mouth closed.
For a change.
Sally said, “You’re all so safe and secure and comfortable here in Keene, in all your nice homes. If you had trouble, you’d shout for a constable to handle it. There must be more than a dozen police officers here in this town alone. Where I live in Colorado, there aren’t a dozen deputies within a two-thousand-square-mile radius.”
“I will accept that, Sally,” her father, John, said. “I have heard the horror stories about law and order in the West. But what amazes me is how you handle the business of law and order.”
“We handle it, Father, usually ourselves.”
“I don’t understand, Sally,” her sister Penny said. “Do you mean that where you live women are allowed to sit on juries?”
Sally laughed merrily. “No, you silly goose!” She kidded her sister. “Most of the time there isn’t even any trial.”
Her mother, Abigal, put her knitting aside and looked at her daughter. “Dear, now I’m confused. All civilized places have due process. Don’t you have due process where you live?”
“We damn sure do!” Sally shocked them all into silence with the cuss word.
Her mother began fanning herself vigorously. Her siste
rs momentarily swooned. Her brothers looked shocked, as did her brothers-in-law, Chris and Robert. Her father frowned.
“Whatever in the world do you mean, dear?” Abigal asked.
“Most of the time it’s from a Henry,” Sally attempted to explain, but only added to the confusion.
“Ah-hah!” John exclaimed. “Now we’re getting to it. This Henry person—he’s a judge, I gather.”
“No, a Henry is a rifle. Why, last year, when those TF riders roped and dragged Pearlie and then attacked the house, I knocked two of them out of the saddle from the front window of the house.”
“You struck two men?” Betsy asked, shocked. “While they were stealing your pearls?”
Sally sighed. “Pearlie is our foreman at the ranch. Some TF riders slung a loop on him and tried to drag him to death. And, hell, no, I didn’t strike them. When they attacked the house, I shot them!”
“Good Lord,” Chris blurted. “Where was your husband while this tragedy was unfolding?”
Sally thought about that. “Well, I think he was in Fontana, in the middle of a gunfight. I believe that’s where he was.”
They all looked at her as if she had suddenly grown horns and a tail.
Smiling, Sally reached into her bag and brought out a newspaper, a copy of Haywood’s paper, which detailed the incident at the Sugarloaf, where she and young Bob Colby had fought off the attackers.
“Incredible!” her father muttered. “My own daughter in a gunfight. And at the trial, dear, you were, of course, acquitted, were you not?”
Sally laughed and shook her head. They still did not understand. “Father, there was no trial.”
“An inquest, then?” John asked hopefully, leaning forward in his chair.
Sally shook her head. “No, we just hauled off the bodies and buried them on the range.”
John blinked. He was speechless. And for an attorney, as he and his sons were, that was tantamount to a phenomenon.
“Hauled off the . . . bodies,” Robert spoke slowly. “How utterly grotesque.”
“What would you have us do?” Sally asked him. “Leave them in the front yard? They would have attracted coyotes and wolves and buzzards. And smelled bad, too.” Might as well have a little fun with them, she concluded.
Robert turned an ill-looking shade of green.
And Sally was shocked to find herself thinking: what a lily-livered bunch of pansies.
Abigal covered her mouth with a handkerchief.
“Did the sheriff even come out to the house?” Walter inquired.
“No. If he had, we’d have shot him. At that time, he was in Tilden Franklin’s pocket.”
John sighed with a parent’s patience.
Penny was reading another copy of Haywood’s newspaper. “My God!” she suddenly shrieked in horror. “According to this account, there were ten people shot down in the streets of Fontana in one week.”
“Yes, Sister. Fontana was rather a rowdy place until Smoke and the gunfighters cleaned it up. You’ve heard of Louis Longmont, Father?”
He nodded numbly, not trusting his voice to speak. He wondered if, twenty-odd years ago, the doctor had handed him the wrong baby. Sally had always been a bit. . . well, free-spirited.
“Louis was there, his hands full of Colts.”
Sally’s nieces and nephews were standing in the archway, listening, their mouths open in fascination. This was stuff you only read about in the dime novels. But Aunt Sally—and this was the first time most of them could remember seeing her—had actually lived it! This was exciting stuff.
Sally grinned, knowing she had a captive audience. “There was Charlie Starr, Luke Nations, Dan Greentree, Leo Wood, Cary Webb, Pistol LeRoux, Bill Foley, Sunset Hatfield, Toot Tooner, Sutter Cordova, Red Shingle-town, Bill Flagler, Ol’ Buttermilk, Jay Church, The Apache Kid, Silver Jim, Dad Weaver, Hardrock, Linch—they all stayed at our ranch, the Sugarloaf. They were really very nice gentlemen. Courtly in manner.”
“But those men you just named!” Jordan said, his voice filled with shock and indignation. “I’ve read about them all. They’re killers!”
“No, Jordan,” Sally tried to patiently explain, all the while knowing that he, and the rest of her family, would never truly understand. “They’re gunfighters. Like my Smoke. A gunfighter. They have killed, yes; but always because they were pushed into it, or they killed for right and reason and law and order.”
“Killed for right and reason,” John muttered. His attorney’s mind was having a most difficult time comprehending that last bit.
Abigal looked like she might, at any moment, fall over from a case of the vapors. “And . . . your husband, this Smoke person, he’s killed men?”
“Oh, yes. About a hundred or so. That’s not counting Indians on the warpath. But not very many of them. You see, Smoke was raised by the mountain man, Preacher. And we get along well with the Indians.”
“Preacher,” John murmured. “The most famous, or infamous, mountain man of the West.”
“That’s him!” Sally said cheerfully. “And,” she pulled an old wanted poster out of her bag and passed it over to her father, “that’s my Smoke. Handsome, isn’t he?”
Under the drawing of Smoke’s likeness, was the lettering:
WANTED
DEAD OR ALIVE
THE OUTLAW AND MURDERER
SMOKE JENSEN
$10,000.00 REWARD
“Ye, Gods!” her father yelled, “the man is wanted by the authorities!”
Sally laughed at his expression. “No, Father, That was a put-up job. Smoke is not wanted by the law. He never has been on the dodge.”
“Thank God for small favors.” John wiped his sweaty face with a handkerchief.
Walter said, “And your husband has killed a hundred men, you say?”
“Well, thereabouts, yes. But they were all fair fights.”
The kids slipped away into the foyer and silently opened the front door, stepping out onto the large porch. Then they were racing away to tell all their friends that their uncle, Smoke Jensen, the most famous gunfighter in all the world, was coming to Keene for a visit.
Really!
Sally passed around the newspapers she had saved over the months, from both Fontana and Big Rock. The family read them, disbelief in their eyes.
“Monte Carson is your sheriff?” John questioned. “But I have seen legal papers that stated he was a notorious gunfighter.”
“He was. But he wasn’t an outlaw. And Johnny North is now a farmer/rancher and one of our neighbors and close friends.”
They had all heard of Johnny North. He was almost as famous as Smoke Jensen.
“Louis Longmont is a man of great wealth,” Jordan muttered, reading a paper. “His holdings are quite vast. Newspaper, hotels, a casino in Europe, and a major stockholder in a railroad.”
“He’s also a famous gunfighter and gambler,” Sally informed them all. “And a highly educated man and quite the gentleman.”
Shaking his head, John laid the paper aside. “When is your husband coming out for a visit, Sally?”
“As soon as he finishes with his work.”
“His work being with his guns.” It was not put as a question.
“That is correct. Why do you ask, Father?”
“I’m just wondering if I should alert the governor so he can call out the militia!”
9
On the morning he set out for Dead River, Smoke dressed in his most outlandish clothing. He even found a long hawk feather and stuck that in his silly cap. He knew he would probably be searched once inside, or maybe outside the outlaw town, and what to do with his short-barreled .44 worried him. He finally decided to roll it up in some dirty longhandles and stick it in his dirty clothes bag, storing it in his pack. He was reasonably sure it would go undetected there. It was the best idea he could come up with.
He adjusted the bonnets on Drifter and his packhorse, with Drifter giving him a look that promised trouble if this crap went on much longer. Smok
e swung into the saddle, pointing Drifter’s nose north. A few more miles and he would cut west, into the Sangre de Cristo range and into the unknown.
About two hours later, he sensed unfriendly eyes watching him as he rode. He made no effort to search out his watchers, for a foppish gent from back east would not have developed that sixth sense. But White Wolf had told him that there were guards all along the trail, long before one ever reached the road that would take him to Dead River.
Smoke rode on, singing at the top of his lungs, stopping occasionally to admire the beautiful scenery and to make a quick sketch. To ooh and aah at some spectacular wonder of nature. He was just about oohed and aahed out, and Drifter looked like he was about ready to throw Smoke and stomp on him, when he came to a road. He had no idea what to expect, but this startled him with its openness.
A sign with an arrow pointing west, and under the arrow: DEAD RIVER. Under that: IF YOU DON’T HAVE BUSINESS IN DEAD RIVER, STAY OUT!
Smoke dismounted and looked around him. There was no sign of life. Raising his voice, he called, “I say! Yoo, hoo! Oh, yoo hoo! Is anyone there who might possibly assist me?”
Drifter swung his big bonneted head around and looked at Smoke through those cold yellow eyes. Eyes that seemed to say: Have you lost your damn mind!
“Just bear with me, boy,” Smoke muttered. “It won’t be long now. I promise you.”
Drifter tried to step on his foot.
Smoke mounted up and rode on. He had huge mountains on either side of him. To the north, one reared up over fourteen thousand feet. To the south, the towering peaks rammed into the sky more than thirteen thousand feet, snow-capped year-round.
The road he was on twisted and climbed and narrowed dramatically.
The road was just wide enough for a wagon and maybe a horse to meet it, coming from the other direction. Another wagon, and somebody would have to give. But where? Then Smoke began to notice yellow flags every few hundred yards. A signal for wagon masters, he supposed, but whether they meant stop or go, he had no idea.
He had ridden a couple of miles, always west and always climbing, when a voice stopped him.
Revenge of the Mountain Man Page 7