Matt Jensen, The Last Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  It was getting colder, and Spirit blew clouds of vapor that drifted away in feathery wisps. Matt headed south. He didn’t care much for the cold.

  J. A. Johnstone on William W. Johnstone:

  “When the Truth Becomes Legend”

  William W. Johnstone was born in southern Missouri, the youngest of four children. He was raised with strong moral and family values by his minister father, and tutored by his schoolteacher mother. Despite this, he quit school at age fifteen.

  “I have the highest respect for education,” he says, “but such is the folly of youth, and wanting to see the world beyond the four walls and the blackboard.” True to this vow, Bill attempted to enlist in the French Foreign Legion (“I saw Gary Cooper in Beau Geste when I was a kid and I thought the French Foreign Legion would be fun”) but was rejected, thankfully, for being underage. Instead, he joined a traveling carnival and did all kinds of odd jobs. It was listening to the veteran carny folk, some of whom had been on the circuit since the late 1800s, telling amazing tales about their experiences which planted the storytelling seed in Bill’s imagination.

  “They were honest people, despite the bad reputation traveling carny shows had back then,” Bill remembers. “Of course, there were exceptions. There was one guy named Picky, who got that name because he was a master pickpocket. He could steal a man’s socks right off his feet without him knowing. Believe me, Picky got us chased out of more than a few towns.”

  After a few months of this grueling existence, Bill returned home and finished high school. Next came stints as a deputy sheriff in the Tallulah, LA. Sheriff ’s Department, followed by a hitch in the U.S. Army. Then he began a career in radio broadcasting at KTLD in Tallulah, Louisiana, that would last sixteen years. It was here that he fine-tuned his storytelling skills. He turned to writing in 1970, but it wouldn’t be until 1979 until his first novel, The Devil’s Kiss, was published. Thus began the full-time writing career of William W. Johnstone. He wrote horror (The Uninvited), thrillers (The Last of the Dog Team), even a romance novel or two. Then, in February 1983, Out of the Ashes was published. Searching for his missing family in the aftermath of a post-apocalyptic America, rebel mercenary and patriot Ben Raines is united with the civilians of the Resistance forces and moves to the forefront of a revolution for the nation’s future.

  Out of the Ashes was a smash. The series would continue for the next twenty years, winning Bill three generations of fans all over the world. The series was often imitated but never duplicated. “We all tried to copy The Ashes series,” said one publishing executive, “but Bill’s uncanny ability, both then and now, to predict in which direction the political winds were blowing, brought a dead-on timeliness to the table no one else could capture.” The Ashes series would end its run with more than thirty-four books and twenty million copies in print, making it one of the most successful men’s action series in American book publishing. (The Ashes series also, Bill notes with a touch of pride, got him on the FBI’s Watch List for its less than flattering portrayal of spineless politicians and the growing power of big government over our lives, among other things. “In that respect,” says collaborator J. A. Johnstone, “Bill was years ahead of his time.”)

  Always steps ahead of the political curve, Bill’s recent thrillers, written with J. A. Johnstone, include Vengeance Is Mine, Invasion USA, Border War, Jackknife, Remember the Alamo, Home Invasion, Phoenix Rising, The Blood of Patriots, The Bleeding Edge, and the upcoming Suicide Mission.

  It is with the Western, though, that Bill found his greatest success and propelled him onto both the USA Today and New York Times bestseller lists.

  Bill’s western series, co-authored by J. A. Johnstone, include The Mountain Man, Matt Jensen the Last Mountain Man, Preacher, The Family Jensen, Luke Jensen Bounty Hunter, Eagles, MacCallister (an Eagles spin-off), Sidewinders, The Brothers O’Brien, Sixkiller, Blood Bond, The Last Gunfighter, and the upcoming new series Flintlock and The Trail West. Coming in May 2013 is the hardcover western Butch Cassidy, The Lost Years.

  “The Western,” Bill says, “is one of the few true art forms that is one hundred percent American. I liken the Western as America’s version of England’s Arthurian legends, like the Knights of the Round Table or Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Starting with the 1902 publication of The Virginian by Owen Wister, and followed by the greats like Zane Grey, Max Brand, Ernest Haycox, and of course Louis L’Amour, the Western has helped to shape define the cultural landscape of America.

  “I’m no goggle-eyed college academic, so when my fans ask me why the Western is as popular now as it was a century ago, I don’t offer a 200-page thesis. Instead, I can only offer this: The Western is honest. In this great country, which is suffering under the yoke of political correctness, the Western harks back to an era when justice was sure and swift. Steal a man’s horse, rustle his cattle, rob a bank, a stagecoach, or a train, you were hunted down and fitted with a hangman’s noose. One size fit all.

  “Sure, we westerners are prone to a little embellishment and exaggeration and, I admit it, occasionally play a little fast and loose with the facts. But we do so for a very good reason—to enhance the enjoyment of readers.

  “It was Owen Wister, in The Virginian who first coined the phrase ‘When you call me that, smile.’ Legend has it that Wister actually heard those words spoken by a deputy sheriff in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, when another poker player called him a son-of-a-bitch.

  “Did it really happen, or is it one of those myths that have passed down from one generation to the next? I honestly don’t know. But there’s a line in one of my favorite Westerns of all time, The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, where the newspaper editor tells the young reporter, ‘When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.’

  “These are the words I live by.”

  Turn the page for an exciting preview!

  The Family Jensen

  HARD RIDE TO HELL

  by

  USA TODAY BESTSELLING AUTHORS

  William W. Johnstone

  with J. A. Johnstone

  The Epic New Series from the authors of

  The Mountain Man

  The Jensen clan is William W. Johnstone’s epic creation—

  God-fearing pioneers bound by blood on an untamed

  and beautiful land. Once more, Preacher, Smoke,

  and Matt are reunited in a clash of cultures and

  a brutal all-out fight for justice. . . .

  HELL TO PAY

  Smoke Jensen and his adopted son Matt are cooling

  their heels in Colorado when they are called to the Dakotas.

  Preacher, the legendary mountain man, is in the midst of

  a vicious struggle. Someone has kidnapped a proud Indian

  chief ’s daughter and grandchild. When the kidnapping

  turns to murder, and Preacher vanishes after clashing

  with a ruthless Union colonel turned railroad king,

  Matt sets out to infiltrate the Colonel’s gang of killers;

  Smoke seeks out the only honest citizens in the crooked

  town of Hammerhead. It will take brave men to blow

  Hammerhead wide open and force the Colonel and

  his gunmen on a hard ride into a killing ground.

  And the Family Jensen will make sure there is hell to pay . . .

  On sale May 2013, wherever Pinnacle Books are sold!

  Chapter One

  The two men stood facing each other. One was red, the other white, but both were tall and lean, and the stiff, wary stance in which they held themselves belied their advanced years. They were both ready for trouble, and they didn’t care who knew it.

  Both wore buckskins, as well, and their faces were lined and leathery from long decades spent out in the weather. Silver and white streaked their hair.

  The white man had a gun belt strapped around his waist, with a holstered Colt revolver riding on each hip. His thumbs were hooked in the belt close to each holster, and you could tell by loo
king at him that he was ready to hook and draw. Given the necessity, his hands would flash to the well-worn walnut butts of those guns with blinding speed, especially for a man of his age.

  He wasn’t the only one with a menacing attitude. The Indian had his hand near the tomahawk that was thrust behind the sash at his waist. To anyone watching, it would appear that both of these men were ready to try to kill each other.

  Then a grin suddenly stretched across the whiskery face of the white man, and he said, “Two Bears, you old red heathen.”

  “Preacher, you pale-faced scoundrel,” Two Bears replied. He smiled, too, and stepped forward. The two men clasped each other in a rough embrace and slapped each other on the back.

  The large group of warriors standing nearby visibly relaxed at this display of affection between the two men. For the most part, the Assiniboine had been friendly with white men for many, many years. But even so, it wasn’t that common for a white man to come riding boldly into their village as the one called Preacher had done.

  Some of the men smiled now, because they had known all along what was coming. The legendary mountain man Preacher, who was famous—or in some cases infamous—from one end of the frontier to the other, had been friends with their chief Two Bears for more than three decades, and he had visited the village on occasion in the past.

  The two men hadn’t always been so cordial with each other. They had started out as rivals for the affections of the beautiful Assiniboine woman Raven’s Wing. For Two Bears, that rivalry had escalated to the point of bitter hostility.

  All that had been put aside when it became necessary for them to join forces to rescue Raven’s Wing from a group of brutal kidnappers and gunrunners.1 Since that long-ago time when they were forced to become allies, they had gradually become friends as well.

  Preacher stepped back and rested his hands on Two Bears’s shoulders.

  “I hear that Raven’s Wing has passed,” he said solemnly.

  “Yes, last winter,” Two Bears replied with an equally grave nod. “It was her time. She left this world peacefully, with a smile on her face.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Preacher said. “I never knew a finer lady.”

  “I miss her. Every time the sun rises or sets, every time the wind blows, every time I hear a wolf howl or see a bird soaring through the sky, I long to be with her again. But when the day is done and we are to be together again, we will be. This I know in my heart. Until then . . .” Two Bears smiled again. “Until then I can still see her in the fine strong sons she bore me, and the daughters who have given me grandchildren.” He nodded toward a young woman standing nearby, who stood with an infant in her arms. “You remember my youngest daughter, Wildflower?”

  “I do,” Preacher said, “although the last time I saw her, I reckon she wasn’t much bigger’n that sprout with her.”

  “My grandson,” Two Bears said proudly. “Little Hawk.”

  Preacher took off his battered, floppy-brimmed felt hat and nodded politely to the woman.

  “Wildflower,” he said. “It’s good to see you again.” He looked at the boy. “And howdy to you, too, Little Hawk.”

  The baby didn’t respond to Preacher, of course, but he watched the mountain man with huge, dark eyes.

  “He has not seen that many white men in his life,” Two Bears said. “You look strange, even to one so young.”

  Preacher snorted and said, “If it wasn’t for this beard of mine, I’d look just about as much like an Injun as any of you do.”

  Two Bears half-turned and motioned to one of the lodges.

  “Come. We will go to my lodge and smoke a pipe and talk. I would know what brings you to our village, Preacher.”

  “Horse, the same as usual,” Preacher said as he jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the big gray stallion that stood with his reins dangling. A large, wolflike cur sat on his haunches next to the stallion.

  “How many horses called Horse and dogs called Dog have you had in your life, Preacher?” Two Bears asked with amusement sparkling in his eyes.

  “Too many to count, I reckon,” Preacher replied. “But I figure if a name works just fine once, there ain’t no reason it won’t work again.”

  “How do you keep finding them?”

  “It ain’t so much me findin’ them as it is them findin’ me. Somehow they just show up. I’d call it fate, if I believed in such a thing.”

  “You do not believe in fate?”

  “I believe in hot lead and cold steel,” Preacher said. “Anything beyond that’s just a guess.”

  Preacher didn’t have any goal in visiting the Assiniboine village other than visiting an old friend. He had been drifting around the frontier for more than fifty years now, most of the time without any plan other than seeing what was on the far side of the hill.

  When he had first set out from his folks’ farm as a boy, the West had been a huge, relatively empty place, populated only by scattered bands of Indians and a handful of white fur trappers. At that time less than ten years had gone by since Lewis and Clark returned from their epic, history-changing journey up the Missouri River to the Pacific.

  During the decades since then, Preacher had seen the West’s population grow tremendously. Rail lines criss-crossed the country, and there were cities, towns, and settlements almost everywhere. Civilization had come to the frontier.

  Much of the time, Preacher wasn’t a hundred percent sure if that was a good thing or not.

  But there was no taking it back, no returning things to the way they used to be, and besides, if not for the great westward expansion that had fundamentally changed the face of the nation, he never would have met the two fine young men he had come to consider his sons: Smoke and Matt Jensen.

  It had been a while since Preacher had seen Smoke and Matt. He assumed that Smoke was down in Colorado, on his ranch called the Sugarloaf near the town of Big Rock. Once wrongly branded an outlaw, Smoke Jensen was perhaps the fastest man with a gun to ever walk the West. Most of the time he didn’t go looking for trouble, but it seemed to find him anyway, despite all his best intentions to live a peaceful life on his ranch with his beautiful, spirited wife, Sally.

  There was no telling where Matt was. He could be anywhere from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border. He and Smoke weren’t brothers by blood. The bond between them was actually deeper than that. Matt had been born Matt Cavanaugh, but he had taken the name Jensen as a young man to honor Smoke, who had helped out an orphaned boy and molded him into a fine man.

  Since Matt had set out on his own, he had been a drifter, scouting for the army, working as a stagecoach guard, pinning on a badge a few times as a lawman. . . . As long as it kept him on the move and held a promise of possible adventure, that was all it took to keep Matt interested in a job, at least for a while. But he never stayed in one place for very long, and at this point in his life he had no interest in putting down roots, as Smoke had done.

  Because of that, Matt actually had more in common with Preacher than Smoke did, but all three of them were close. The problem was, whenever they got together trouble seemed to follow, and it usually wasn’t long before the air had the smell of gunsmoke in it.

  Right now the only smoke in Two Bears’s lodge came from the small fire in the center of it and the pipe that Preacher and the Assiniboine chief passed back and forth. The two men were silent, their friendship not needing words all the time.

  Two women were in the lodge as well, preparing a meal. They were Two Bears’s wives, the former wives of his brothers he had taken in when the women were widowed, as a good brother was expected to do. The smells coming from the pot they had on the fire were mighty appetizing, Preacher thought. The stew was bound to be good.

  A swift rataplan of hoofbeats came from outside and made both Preacher and Two Bears raise their heads. Neither man seemed alarmed. As seasoned veterans of the frontier, they had too much experience for that. But they also knew that whenever someone was moving fast, there was a chance i
t was because of trouble.

  The sudden babble of voices that followed the abrupt halt of the hoofbeats seemed to indicate the same thing.

  “You want to go see what that’s about?” Preacher asked Two Bears, inclining his head toward the lodge’s entrance.

  Two Bears took another unhurried puff on the pipe in his hands before he set it aside.

  “If my people wish to see me, they know where I am to be found,” he said.

  Preacher couldn’t argue with that. But the sounds had gotten his curiosity stirred up, so he was glad when someone thrust aside the buffalo hide flap over the lodge’s entrance. A broad-shouldered, powerful-looking warrior strode into the lodge, then stopped short at the sight of a white man sitting there cross-legged beside the fire with the chief.

  “Two Bears, I must speak with you,” the newcomer said.

  “This is Standing Rock,” Two Bears said to Preacher. “He is married to my daughter Wildflower.”

  That would make him the father of the little fella Preacher had seen with Wildflower earlier. He nodded and said, “Howdy, Standing Rock.”

  The warrior just looked annoyed, like he wasn’t interested in introductions right now. He looked at the chief and began, “Two Bears—”

  “Is there trouble?”

  “Blue Bull has disappeared.”

  Chapter Two

  Blue Bull, it turned out, wasn’t a bull at all, not that Preacher really thought he was. That was the name of one of the Assiniboine warriors who belonged to this band, and he and Standing Rock were good friends.

  They had been out hunting in the hills west of the village and had split up when Blue Bull decided to follow the tracks of a small antelope herd while Standing Rock took another path. They had agreed to meet back at the spot where Blue Bull had taken up the antelope trail.