Trek of the Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  While his men tied Sally’s arms behind her and saddled up one of the horses in the nearby corral, Pike wrote a note to Smoke, and then he pinned it to Sam Curry’s shirt.

  Blackie, who was watching him, asked, “Why don’t you leave it in the cabin, Boss?”

  Pike grinned maliciously. “’Cause I’ve got other plans for the house,” he said.

  Once the men had Sally up on the horse and had bandaged Rufus Gordon’s right hand, Pike went into the cabin. He stripped the sheets off the bed and piled them in the middle of the kitchen floor, poured kerosene on them from the lanterns, and then put a match to the pile of cloth.

  By the time he was on his horse and they’d ridden out into the pasture toward the distant mountains, bright orange flames were licking the roof of the cabin sending clouds of dark smoke into the overcast sky.

  Sally glanced back over her shoulder, tears of loss and frustration in her eyes.

  4

  Peg Jackson, owner of the general store in Big Rock along with her husband, Ed, checked the list in her hand for a final time while Emmit Walsh looked on.

  “Well, Emmit,” Peg said, “I think we’ve gotten just about all of the things Sally sent you into town for, with the exception of the gingham cloth she wanted. Just tell her I’m expecting that in on the next shipment from Colorado Springs and it ought to be here next week.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Emmit said as he filled his arms with some of the packages of foodstuffs and canned goods Sally Jensen had asked him to get from the store.

  “You want Ed to help you load those things?” Peg asked.

  Emmit shook his head. “No, ma’am, thank you. I can handle it.”

  He carried the bags out to the buckboard parked in front of the store where the other men from the Sugarloaf were waiting for him.

  The back of the buckboard was stuffed with bales of wire, stacks of fence posts, buckets of nails, four salt-lick blocks, and other sundry ranching necessities they’d picked up from the feed store down the street.

  “That about got it?” Josey McComb, another of the hired hands, asked.

  “Yep,” Emmit replied.

  Monte Carson, sheriff of Big Rock, ambled by, taking a stroll down the boardwalk. He was, as usual, smoking his pipe and sending clouds of evil-smelling smoke into the chilly autumn air.

  He stepped over to the buckboard and stopped to lean his arms on the sides of the wagon. “Looks like Smoke’s gonna have you boys busy doing some fencing ’fore the winter snows come,” he observed cheerfully.

  When Emmit and Josey nodded, Carson added, “Well, don’t let Smoke work you too hard.”

  Emmit laughed. “Oh, Smoke’s not there right now, Sheriff. He and Cal and Pearlie are taking some beeves over to the Wiley spread to help them out after all their cattle died of tick fever. It’s Miss Sally that’s being the slave driver. I’ve never seen a woman work so hard to make a place look good.”

  Carson grinned. “Yeah, Sally Jensen is a perfectionist all right, but they’ve got a right nice place to show for it.”

  “You can say that again,” Josey said. “She’s even got us putting little wooden tags with numbers on ’em on the beeves’ ears so we’ll know when each one of ’em drops their calves. She keeps it all in a little book up at the cabin.”

  “That’s what you get for working for an ex-schoolmarm,” Carson said, shaking his head. “Teachers like to keep things neat and orderly.”

  “I don’t mind,” Emmit said. “The Jensens are about the nicest folks I’ve ever worked for, and the food is the best in the area.”

  Carson nodded. “Especially those bear sign Sally’s so famous for, huh?”

  “Stop it, Sheriff,” Josey said. “You’re makin’ my mouth water just thinkin’ ’bout ’em.”

  Carson tapped out his pipe on the side of the buckboard, put it in his shirt pocket, and moved back to the boardwalk. “Well, see ya later, boys,” he called, waving over his shoulder.

  “See ya, Sheriff,” they answered, and Emmit jumped up on the hurricane deck of the wagon and slapped the horses with the reins to get them started back toward the Sugarloaf.

  Josey and the other two cowboys followed on their horses, singing old campfire tunes as Josey played on his mouth-harp.

  As they passed the city limits sign, Emmit pulled out his pocket watch. “Looks like we’ll be back home just in time for lunch.”

  “I sure hope Miss Sally has that fried chicken ready when we get there,” Josey said.

  * * *

  When the buckboard crested a small rise about ten miles from the Sugarloaf, Emmit jerked back on the reins. “Oh, shit!” he called.

  “What is it?” Josey asked, letting his horse come up even with Emmit.

  “Looky there,” Emmit said, pointing up ahead.

  Josey followed his gesture and saw a large cloud of black smoke rising and spreading across the sky.

  “Damn!” he exclaimed. “That looks like it’s comin’ from the cabin area.”

  “Josey,” Emmit said, “you hightail it on back to town and get the sheriff and anyone else you can find an’ bring ’em out to the Sugarloaf. Tell ’em it looks like Miss Sally’s in trouble.”

  “Jim,” he said to one of the cowboys as he jumped down off the buckboard, “give me your mount an’ you bring the buckboard on along. I’m gonna ride as fast as I can to see if’n there’s anything I can do until we get some help.”

  He swung up onto Jim’s saddle and whipped the horse with the reins as he dug his spurs into its flanks. “Giddy up, hoss!” he yelled as he and the other cowboy bent over their mounts’ necks and raced toward the ranch.

  * * *

  Monte Carson was in his office, sitting leaned back in his chair with his feet up on his desk, enjoying his fifth cup of coffee of the morning, when Josey burst through his door.

  When the door burst open and slammed back against the wall, the noise startled Carson so much he jumped and spilled coffee all down his shirt.

  “God damn!” he yelped, and hurriedly brushed at the scalding liquid as it burned his chest.

  “Sheriff, you got to come quick!” Josey McComb yelled. “There’s a big fire out at the Sugarloaf.”

  Carson stopped fussing with his shirt and stared at Josey. “What?” he asked.

  “On the way out to the ranch we saw a big cloud of smoke coming from the area of the cabin,” Josey said, still breathing hard from his ride into town.

  “Is Sally all right?” Carson asked as he grabbed his hat off a rack next to the door.

  “Don’t know, Sheriff. Emmit told me to get back here an’ get some help to come out to the ranch.”

  Carson ran out of the door and stopped on the boardwalk. “You go on over to the general store and get Ed and Peg! I’ll get Doc Spalding and anyone else I can find!”

  As Monte Carson ran down the street toward Dr. Colton Spalding’s office, his heart was filled with dread to think that something might have happened to Sally Jensen. Smoke and Sally were his closest friends in Big Rock, and were responsible for him being sheriff.

  Before he came to Big Rock, Carson had been a well-known gunfighter, though he had never ridden the owlhoot trail.

  A local rancher, with plans to take over the county, had hired Carson to be the sheriff of Fontana, a town just down the road from Smoke’s Sugarloaf spread. Carson went along with the man’s plans for a while, till he couldn’t stomach the rapings and killings any longer. He put his foot down and let it be known that Fontana was going to be run in a law-abiding manner from then on.

  The rancher, Tilden Franklin, sent a bunch of riders in to teach the upstart sheriff a lesson. The men killed Carson’s two deputies and seriously wounded Carson, taking over the town. In retaliation, Smoke founded the town of Big Rock, and he and his band of aging gunfighters cleaned house in Fontana.

  When the fracas was over, Smoke offered the job of sheriff of Big Rock to Monte Carson. Monte married a grass widow and settled into the job like he was born
to it. Neither Smoke nor the citizens of Big Rock ever had cause to regret his taking the job.

  Monte Carson knew he owed the Jensens a debt he could never repay, and he’d be damned if he was going to let anything happen to Sally while Smoke was away.

  * * *

  Louis Longmont, owner of Longmont’s Saloon, was sitting at his usual table, sipping on a china cup filled with his favorite chicory-flavored coffee. Even though it was still mid-morning, he was playing poker with three trail hands who’d come to town the previous night. The game had been going on for over twelve hours, and showed no signs of stopping anytime soon. He was in the process of what he called teaching amateurs the laws of chance.

  Louis was a lean, hawk-faced man, with strong, slender hands and long fingers, nails carefully manicured, hands clean. He had jet-black hair and a black pencil-thin mustache. He was, as usual, dressed in a black suit, with white shirt and dark ascot—something he’d picked up on a trip to England some years back. He wore low-heeled boots, and a pistol hung in tied-down leather on his right side. It was not for show, for Louis was snake-quick with a short gun and was a feared, deadly gunhand when pushed.

  Louis was not an evil man. He had never hired his gun out for money. And while he could make a deck of cards do almost anything, he did not cheat at poker. He did not have to cheat. He was possessed of a phenomenal memory and could tell you the odds of filling any type of poker hand, and was one of the first to use the new method of card counting.

  He was just past forty years of age. He had come to the West as a very small boy, with his parents, arriving from Louisiana. His parents had died in a shantytown fire, leaving the boy to cope as best he could.

  He had coped quite well, plying his innate intelligence and willingness to take a chance into a fortune. He owned a large ranch up in Wyoming Territory, several businesses in San Francisco, and a hefty chunk of a railroad.

  Though it was a mystery to many why Longmont stayed with the hard life he had chosen, his best friend Smoke Jensen thought he understood. Once, Louis had said to him, “Smoke, I would miss my life every bit as much as you would miss the dry-mouthed moment before the draw, the challenge of facing and besting those miscreants who would kill you or others, and the so-called loneliness of the owlhoot trail.”

  Sometimes Louis joked that he would like to draw against Smoke someday, just to see who was faster. Smoke allowed as how it would be close, but that he would win. “You see, Louis, you’re just too civilized,” he had told him on many occasions. “Your mind is distracted by visions of operas, fine foods and wines, and the odds of your winning the match. Also, your fatal flaw is that you can almost always see the good in the lowest creatures God ever made, and you refuse to believe that anyone is pure evil and without hope of redemption.”

  When Louis laughed at this description of himself, Smoke would continue. “Me, on the other hand, when some snake-scum draws down on me and wants to dance, the only thing I have on my mind is teaching him that when you dance, someone has to pay the band. My mind is clear and focused on only one problem, how to put that stump-sucker across his horse toes-down.”

  Louis had tried his best not to take all of the cowhands’ money during the long night, though it would have been relatively easy for him. He knew the men had worked over three months on the trail to amass the money they were now risking in the poker game, and he had no desire to take all of it from them. However, he didn’t mind taking enough to pay for his time and to teach the men that poker wasn’t really a game of chance so much as a game of skill.

  The man across the table from him raised Louis’s bet. Louis was considering whether to let the man have the pot so he’d be able to stay in the game a while longer, or whether he should just go on and clean him out so he could go home and get some sleep, when Monte Carson and Doc Spalding rushed through the batwings as if their pants were on fire.

  Louis turned his head and raised his eyebrows in question. It wasn’t like Monte to get so riled up this early in the morning.

  “Louis,” Carson said, rushing over to the table. “There’s a fire out at the Sugarloaf. Emmit says it looks like it might be the house, and Sally’s there alone.”

  Without a second thought, Louis flipped his cards onto the table. “I’m out of the game, gentlemen.”

  As he stood up, the man across the table scowled. “You can’t leave now,” he growled. “You got to give me a chance to win my money back.”

  “It took you twelve hours to lose it, pilgrim,” Louis said as he scooped the money in front of him into his pocket. “How long do you think it’d take you to win it back?”

  “That ain’t the point,” the man said, jumping to his feet with his hand next to the butt of his pistol.

  Before he could blink, Louis had drawn his Colt and cocked it and had the barrel inches from the man’s nose. “You might want to reconsider your words, mister,” Louis said in a low voice. “I’m in a bit of a hurry, so either pull that hog-leg and go to work, or shut up and sit down.”

  The man gulped and sat down, his face pale and sweating.

  Louis smiled and holstered his weapon. “Andre,” he called to his French chef. “Fix these men anything they want to eat and put it on my bill,” he said, and then he whirled around and raced out of the saloon behind Carson and the doctor.

  When he got on his horse, Louis noticed it looked like half the town was in the street heading out toward the Sugarloaf. The Jensens were well liked in Big Rock and the citizens were on their way to help.

  5

  By the time Sheriff Monte Carson and Louis Longmont and the rest of the people from Big Rock arrived at the Sugarloaf, Smoke and Sally’s cabin had burned to the ground.

  Monte got off his horse and walked over to where Emmit Walsh and Jim Sanders were standing over the bodies of Will Bagby and Sam Curry, lying next to the bunkhouse. Their hats were in their hands and expressions of sorrow were on their faces.

  Doc Spalding ran over, and knelt down next to the bodies and examined them for a moment, taking note of the gunshot wounds. He glanced up at Emmit and then over at the smoldering ruins of the cabin. “Any sign of Sally, boys?” he asked, dreading the answer.

  Emmit shook his head. “No, sir. We even checked the bunkhouse just to make sure she wasn’t in there.”

  Monte followed his gaze toward the pile of smoking logs and wood where the cabin used to stand. “I guess we’re gonna have to comb through the rubble to see if Sally’s in there somewhere.”

  Louis walked up, stood next to Monte, and stared down at the bodies. He noticed a piece of paper stuck on the front of Sam’s shirt. He pointed his finger. “You might want to take a look at that, Monte,” he said.

  Monte bent down and took the paper, holding it up so he could read it. “Smoke Jensen,” he read out loud, “we got your wife. Come to Pueblo one week from today and go to one of the saloons. Come alone if you ever want to see her alive again. If you bring the law, you’ll find pieces of her scattered all over the mountains.”

  Monte glanced at Louis. “Son of a bitch!” he said, his voice tight with anger. “They’ve taken Sally.”

  “Is there a signature on the paper?” Louis asked.

  Monte nodded. “Yeah, it’s signed W. Pike.”

  “W. Pike? Have you ever heard Smoke mention that name, Monte?” Louis asked, his expression puzzled.

  Monte shook his head. “Not that I remember.”

  Doc Spalding stood up. “Sam Curry wasn’t armed, Monte,” he said, “but it looks like Will had a shotgun.” He inclined his head toward the scattergun lying next to Will’s body.

  “Sam never wore a gun, Sheriff,” Emmit said. “He kept one in his saddlebags in case of snakes or wolves or such, but he didn’t believe in wearing one.”

  “It looks like Will was shot in the back, Monte, and Sam was shot in the face,” Doc Spalding said.

  Monte shook his head. “Bastards gunned them down without giving them a chance.”

  Louis looked at
Emmit. “When was Smoke due to arrive at the Wileys’ ranch?” he asked. Everyone in town was aware of the Jensens’ charitable gift to the Wileys, and a couple of other ranchers had donated some cattle for Smoke to add to the ones he was taking there.

  “He should be gettin’ there today sometime,” Emmit answered.

  Louis looked at Monte. “We’d better head on over there and let Smoke know what’s happened,” he said. “Maybe he’ll know who this Pike is and why he’d want to do this.”

  “I’ll take care of the bodies and see that they get a proper burial,” Doc Spalding said.

  Ed Jackson stepped forward. “Tell Smoke the people of Big Rock will take care of cleaning up the cabin. We’ll save whatever we can.”

  Monte and Louis swung up into their saddles. “Peg, would you let my wife know where I’m goin’?” Monte said. He and his wife lived a short way out of town on a small spread, and she wouldn’t have heard what was going on yet.

  “Sure, Monte. Ed and I’ll go by there on our way back to town.”

  “Just a minute, Sheriff,” Emmit said, and he ran over to the corral behind the bunkhouse. He returned a few minutes later with two horses with dally ropes on their halters. “Take these broncs with you. That way you can change hosses when yours get tired.”

  Monte and Louis each took a dally rope in their hands, and jerked their horses’ heads around and put the spurs to them, heading off toward the Wiley ranch. It would normally be a two- or three-day ride, but if they pushed it and used the extra horses, they could make it in a day and a half.

  * * *

  Smoke and Cal and Pearlie pushed the beeves they were herding over a crest above a valley, and looked down at the Wiley ranch in the distance. It wasn’t a particularly large spread, just big enough for Mr. and Mrs. Wiley and one hired hand to run by themselves.

  Cal moved up from the drag position on the herd next to Smoke. “Jiminy, what’s that smell?” he asked, wrinkling his nose up at the smell of charred and burning flesh.

  Smoke pointed off to the side of one of the Wileys’ pastures. A large pile of what looked like cattle was being burned. “Mr. Wiley is burning the carcasses of his cattle that died from tick fever,” he said. “That’s about the only way to stop the fever from infecting other cattle he puts on the ranch.”