Battle of the Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  “The yellow bastard hired every gun in Lincoln County,” Smoke growled, running faster, hurrying toward a position where he could help Pearlie and Cal and Johnny and his neighbors by firing from the enemy’s flank. Until he was in range, he dared not waste a shot, telling Evans and the others where he was.

  Answering fire came from Smoke’s friends, only a few shots at a time right then. In his heart, Smoke doubted everyone in his crew could make it through a war like this without a scratch, and the thought saddened him momentarily, until blind rage overtook his sorrow.

  “I’m comin’, Evans!” he bellowed, knowing no one could hear him in the melee, racing along the edge of the forest with a killing fever burning in his brain.

  An unexpected bit of good fortune presented itself just as he was nearing a thick oak trunk. Three riders came charging out of the trees with guns blazing, unaware that Smoke was only a few dozen yards away.

  Smoke stumbled to a halt and drew a bead on the first rider with a pistol, firing too quickly, shooting high and wide. He triggered off a second shot as all three men turned toward the sound of his gun.

  A man in a dirty brown Stetson flipped off his horse when Smoke’s second bullet found its mark. Smoke fired again at another gunman, more careful with his aim now. A Mexican with cartridge belts across his chest went down, his sombrero fluttering away while he fell.

  The third rider fired at Smoke, a hurried shot from the back of a moving horse. A molten slug screamed high above Smoke’s head. Smoke downed him with a booming pistol, watching another Mexican gunman fly out of his saddle with his face twisted in pain.

  Three riderless horses galloped onto the prairie, one with blood dripping from its withers, where its owner had bled before he fell.

  The rattle of rifle fire became a din, a constant wall of noise as more than two hundred longhorn heifers scattered with their tails in the air, snorting through their muzzles as the stampede Smoke had been worrying about began. He could see the gentler Herefords milling about, but for the moment they stayed together in a tight bunch.

  A rifle popped from a clump of bunch grass near the picketed horses. One of Evans’s men floated away from his galloping horse with both hands pressed to his face.

  “Nice shot,” Smoke muttered, shouldering his rifle to begin dropping as many oncoming raiders as he could.

  Leading a moving target with his rifle sights, he fired at a cowboy on a speeding pinto. A miss, and it made him angry as he levered another round into place.

  “I’ve gotta get closer,” he said savagely.

  Two of Evans’s men noticed him for the first time and swung their horses in his direction, bearing down on him as fast as their horses could run.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” Smoke whispered, taking very careful aim.

  His Winchester slammed into his shoulder, and the report made his ears ring. But mild discomfort did nothing to take away from the satisfaction when a cowboy tumbled into the grass, his horse swerving away from the noise.

  Smoke killed the second horseman with a bullet through the crown of his hat, which also sliced through the top of his skull, permanently parting the gunman’s hair down the middle before he rolled off the rump of his horse.

  “Time to move,” Smoke spat, ducking down as he left the tree at a run, heading straight for the middle of the fight.

  Thirty-five

  Billy Morton spurred his horse relentlessly to catch up to Jessie, and when Jessie saw him angling across the prairie, he wondered where the others were, the dozen men Billy was supposed to lead into the attack from the southwest. Billy was all alone, and he shouldn’t have been. Dodging stampeding longhorns, Jessie motioned to Pickett and the men behind him to continue charging Jensen and his cowboys while he reined off to find out what Billy was in such a hurry to tell him.

  Billy hauled back on his reins, bringing his lathered sorrel to a sliding stop when he rode up to Jessie. Jessie saw a look on Billy’s face that could only be fear.

  “He got behind us again!” Billy shouted to be heard above the bang of guns and the bawling of runaway cattle.

  “Who?” Jessie demanded.

  “That feller Jensen. It’s gotta be him. A big son of a bitch with two pistols. I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it in all my horned days, Jessie. We was ready to charge out here when this big bastard appeared out of nowhere, both pistols blazin’. He killed everybody! ’Cept me. I was lucky to get out with my skin. One man ain’t supposed to be able to do what he did. He killed twelve goddamn men, Jessie, in less time than it takes me to tell it”

  Despite the battle going on in front of him, Jessie stared at the spot where Billy and a mix of pistoleros from Vasquez’s bunch and Pedro Lopez’s gang were supposed to have entered the fight. He couldn’t quite make himself believe what Billy had told him just now. “Had to be some others shootin’,” he said, as the crack of a rifle close by made him flinch, a wild shot taken by one of the young Apaches galloping by. Sighting the Apache, Jessie wondered where the other Indians were now. Only two of them were out on the prairie doing any shooting, and their leader, Little Horse, wasn’t among them.

  “Just him, Jessie. I swear to it,” Billy said. “Ain’t no man on earth can kill twelve men like he done, only I seen it with my own two eyes while I was gettin’ the hell away from there fast as this horse could run.”

  “How come nobody shot him?” Jessie asked, feeling a touch of worry growing in the pit of his stomach.

  “Wasn’t time. He stood up behind this bush an’ emptied both guns as fast as he could pull them triggers. Men was droppin’ like flies.” Billy looked over his shoulder quickly as a group of terrified longhorns raced by. “That ain’t even the worst of it,” Billy continued, his voice with an unusually high pitch. “Just when I was comin’ to tell you what happened to us, I saw that half-breed, Raul Jones, come ridin’ out of them trees yonder with a couple of Pedro’s men. Somebody cut ’em down before you could blink. I figure it had to be Jensen.”

  It wasn’t possible, what Billy was telling him, how one man could be so lucky. Or was he that good? He couldn’t be, not an ordinary cattleman from some place up in Colorado.

  Now Jessie looked at the fight going on around Jensen’s camp and he saw two more of his men fall from their saddles. Pickett and Tom Hill had already swung their horses around when rifle fire from Jensen’s cowboys proved too accurate. Pickett was no coward, but out in the open like he was, he and Tom were sitting ducks.

  “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, Jessie,” Billy said, “tangling with Smoke Jensen. He ain’t the tinhorn everybody claimed he was. The big son of a bitch can damn sure shoot. .I seen it for myself.”

  “I ain’t never met a man I backed down from,” Jessie growled, with more resolve than he truly felt at the moment, after finding out how many more lives this Jensen had taken, all in a matter of minutes, before the attack had really gotten started. Now he found himself wondering if Jensen had gotten Little Horse and his four scouts. He could see their assault on the cowboys’ camp was doing little beyond running off Jensen’s herd. “Maybe it wasn’t such a good plan to come at them out in the open like this. We’ll pull back an’ find another way. Ride a wide circle an’ tell the men to head north. It’s gonna take Jensen awhile to round up these cattle, an’ that’ll give us time to come up with a better idea. They’re headed north to Colorado with this herd, so we’ll look for a place north of here to set up an ambush that can’t fail.”

  Bill Pickett and Tom Hill galloped up as Billy was leaving to give Jessie’s order to withdraw. Pickett’s face was a mask of hatred.

  “Half your damn gunslicks ran off before we rushed ’em,” he said. “Look out yonder. There ain’t but fifteen or twenty of us, an’ we come here with more’n forty. So few of us can’t get close enough to find anything to shoot at. Them cowboys are all layin’ down in the grass where we can’t see ’em, an’ we’re out in the open.”

  “Some of ’em didn’t run off,” Jessie
said quietly, as most of the gunfire stopped when Billy began motioning men to pull out and follow him northward. “Billy told me Jensen killed twelve men in that ravine where they was waitin’ for my signal, an’ then he got three more, includin’ Raul. He may have killed Little Horse an’ our scouts. Ain’t seen ’em since before the fight started…” As he was speaking to Pickett, he saw a hatless man carrying a rifle running on foot toward the cowboy camp. “That must be Jensen right there. If I had a Sharps buffalo gun…”

  Pickett saw the running figure too. He squinted to see him more clearly in the bright morning sunlight. “He’s just one man, Jessie. He may be good, but there’s always somebody who’s a little better. If he done what Billy claimed he did, then he’s pretty damn good. Only, I’m promisin’ you I can kill him if I get to pick the place, an’ the time.”

  “I’m gonna give you that opportunity,” Jessie remarked as a final gunshot popped in the distance. “You can pick the spot. I don’t give a damn how you do it I just want Jensen dead. We’ll skirt their camp an’ head north, the direction they’ve got to go to get to Colorado. You can start lookin’ for the right place on the way up.”

  The man Jessie believed to be Jensen disappeared into a tall stand of bunch grass near a group of tethered horses still pawing the ground, prancing as a result of loud gunfire coming from all directions.

  “I’ll kill him for you,” Pickett promised again. “You just let me do it my way.”

  Unconsciously Jessie shook his head in disbelief when he got a count of the men Billy was leading north, scarcely more than a dozen. Was it possible that Jensen could have killed so many men himself? It went against everything Jessie knew about paid shootists. Even the best of them in tough border towns like Laredo could barely claim a dozen kills over a lifetime. Jensen had killed at least that many in a matter of minutes.

  Tom Hill spoke his mind. “Whoever Jensen is, he ain’t got any stake in this range war, really. We could let him ride back to Colorado an’ git on with rustlin’ Chisum out of business, so don’t no more of us git killed.”

  “Are you turnin’ yellow on me, Tom?” Jessie asked.

  “Nope,” Tom replied with conviction. “I’ve done my share of killin’ over the years, but there’s always come a few times when I knowed to toss in my cards an’ git out of the game. You ain’t asked me, but I’ve got this funny feelin’ about tryin’Jensen again. Never was all that superstitious myself, but I’ve seen with my own fwo eyes what this feller Jensen can do. Some men are borned with a knack fer killin’. It comes natural to ’em, same as breathin’ air.”

  Pickett’s jaw tightened. “He’ll bleed same as any man”

  “Maybe,” Tom said. “First, somebody’s got to git close enough to put a bullet in him. Since he come here, that ain’t been too awful easy.”

  Pickett glared at Tom, as though he’d been insuited by the remark. “Ain’t nobody with backbone tried yet. These yellow sons of bitches Jessie hired don’t know the first thing ’bout killin’ a man, seems to me.”

  Before Jessie lifted his reins to ride off, he caught a glimpse of an Indian riding out of trees to the west. It was Dreamer, if Jessie remembered right. “Yonder’s one of them Apaches. If he speaks any English, I’ll ask him what come of Little Horse an’ all the others.”

  “My money says they cut an’ run,” Pickett growled. “I told you a goddamn Injun ain’t worth the gunpowder it takes to kill ’em when it comes down to cases.”

  The Indian came galloping up on a piebald paint pony. He looked at Jessie for a moment as if trying to think of the right words to say.

  Jessie grew impatient. “What the hell happened to Little Horse an’ the rest?”

  “All dead,” Dreamer answered, making an odd slashing motion with his hand across the top of his scalp. “Chop head, like this. Come see.”

  “I don’t need to see it,” Jessie snapped, when his grim prediction proved to be true.

  Tom swallowed. “I didn’t know Jensen used a woodcutter’s ax in a fight like this. Most Apaches are mighty damn hard to sneak up on, ’specially fer a white man.”

  “Let’s ride,” Jessie said, weary of hearing more bad news. “We’ll catch up with Billy an’ the others an’ then we’ll decide what to do.”

  “I’ve already decided,” Pickett said as he turned his horse to follow Jessie. “I’m gonna kill that son of a bitch myself, an’ when I blow his goddamn head all to pieces with ol’ Betsy here, you’ll see Mr. Smoke Jensen wasn’t nothin’ but lucky he didn’t run into me first.”

  As they rode around the cowboy camp Jessie wasn’t so sure of Pickett’s judgment when it came to Jensen. There was a ring of truth to what Tom had said, about some men having a natural gift when it came to killing. He recalled a time down in West Texas a few years ago, when he saw Clay Allison in action. Allison could draw and shoot as quickly as Jessie, and for that reason, Jessie left him completely alone until an offer of a job in New Mexico took him out of Sanderson.

  He gave Jensen’s camp a last look before he urged his horse into a thin line of trees to the northeast. Jessie couldn’t help remembering what Dreamer had just told him, that Little Horse and his Apaches died from split skulls. Tom was right about one thing, that an Apache was hard to slip up on from behind. It was beginning to seem like Jensen was always finding a way to get behind them.

  Thirty-six

  Smoke crept up to camp and spoke before he showed himself. “It’s me. Is everybody okay?”

  Pearlie rose up from his grassy hiding place. “Johnny took a bullet in the leg, but it’s hardly more’n a scratch. I tied his bandanna ’round it till we could fix a proper bandage. He’s lyin’ over yonder next to the horses.” He pointed north. “All of ’em cleared out, leastways the ones we could see. Wasn’t near as many of ’em as I figured there’d be.”

  Smoke didn’t bother to explain how he’d reduced the odds considerably. “Let’s get the horses saddled and round up as many of our cows as we can.” He examined the bunched Herefords not far away. “One of our young bulls caught a stray bullet in the neck, and we’ll probably have to put him down.”

  “I seen it up close,” Bob called from a spot near the bulls, “an’ it’s in his brisket. Bullet passed clean through. It don’t hardly bleed any now, an’ I’m bettin’ he’ll make it.”

  “That’s good news,” Smoke replied tiredly, sinking to the ground to put on his riding boots and place the bloody tomahawk in his saddlebags.

  One by one, the cowboys stood up, when it was clear Evans and his men were gone. “We damn sure held ’em off,” Cletus said, as Johnny limped over to their blackened firepit with pain written across his face. “ ’Cept fer Johnny, I’d say we was lucky.”

  Johnny agreed. “I was also lucky. That slug could have hit me in worse places. I’ll mend.”

  Longhorn heifers were scattered from one end of the plain to the other, while many had run into the trees to escape the loud banging noises.

  “We’ll be all day gittin’ ’em rounded up,” Pearlie said, as he carried his saddle to the picket ropes.

  Duke was the last to come in from his hiding place in the grass. “I figured they was gonna run over us like a locomotive for a spell. Somethin’ must have changed their minds.”

  Pearlie gave Smoke a knowing look. “I imagine Mr. Jensen can tell us what it was, ifn he’s of a mind to talk about it.”

  “I got a few,” Smoke replied, pulling on his boots before he stood up with his saddle and bridle. “Everybody ride careful out there, just in case there’s some who ain’t dead, or still have some fight left.”

  Cal’s face was ghostly white when he spoke up. “What do we do if we find a wounded man, boss?”

  “Leave the son of a bitch right where he is. We haven’t got time to be doctorin’ men who just tried to kill us. Let ’em rot for all I care.”

  “I shot one,” Cal added quietly, “a big feller in a sombrero with belts on his chest. Makes two so far on this trip. I sure do h
ope there ain’t no more to my credit later on.”

  “You were doing what you had to do to help protect your friends and the cattle herd, son,” Smoke told him. “Don’t let it eat on you so hard.”

  “I’m tryin’ not to think about it.” Cal lifted his saddie to go to the picket line. “But I seen his face when I shot him. His eyes got big as fried turkey eggs, an’ then there was blood all over his face. He dropped the rifle he was carryin’ an’ put his hands over his eyes just before he fell off his horse. It damn near made me sick all over again.”

  “I’m bettin’ a month’s pay you ain’t sick enough to keep from cleanin’ your plate tonight, young ’un. Don’t nothin’ make you that belly-sick.”

  In spite of Johnny’s obvious pain, he chuckled. “That’s damn sure one thing about Cal, all right. He can eat no matter what.”

  Cal pretended not to be listening, saddling his horse as quickly as he could.

  Smoke was in for a pleasant surprise as the morning wore on, for it seemed the longhorns were willing to gather on the prairie without much urging. Most of them settled quickly and began to graze alongside the Hereford bulls.

  As the cow work continued, Smoke thought about the direction the Evans gang had ridden… north, making it logical they would try again farther up the trail. He wondered how much convincing Jessie Evans needed.

  Pearlie and Duke came trotting over to a grove of oaks where Smoke had just driven out three longhorns, helping him push them toward the main bunch.

  “That makes over a hundred an’ thirty head so far,” Duke said. “This is easier than it looked like it was gonna be when we first got started.”

  Smoke nodded his agreement as he saw Cletus and Cal bringing five more cows from the east. Two more strays came out of the woods farther north on their own. “Some of ’em are volunteering to come back themselves.”