Matt Jensen, The Last Mountain Man Savage Territory

by J. A. Johnstone

  “Hey, Pogue, I can see the dust,” Philbin called down. “The stage is a-comin’.”

  Willis took the last mouthful of beans, wiped the spoon clean on his shirt, then stuck it in his pocket. He tossed the can over his shoulder and it landed with a soft clanking sound. He stood up and brushed his hands together.

  “Come on down, Philbin,” Willis called. “Meechum, Cantrell, Oliver, you three get over here.”

  Meechum, Cantrell, and Oliver came over to join Willis as Philbin came down from the ridge.

  “Now, do all of you have it straight as to what each one of you is goin’ to do?” Willis asked.

  “Yeah,” Philbin said. “We pull a log across the road to stop the stage. When it stops, you and Meechum will be up here on the rock keepin’ an eye open while I brace the driver and shotgun guard and Oliver and Cantrell pull all the folks out of the coach. We’ll take whatever money they got, plus the money pouch.”

  “Right,” Willis said. “Any questions?”

  “Yeah, I got a question,” Oliver said. “You ain’t never said how much money you think this here coach will be carryin’?”

  “Who knows how much it’s carryin’?” Willis answered. “That ain’t nothin’ you can ever tell till you open the money pouch and look.”

  “Yeah, but how much do you think?”

  “How much money you got now?” Willis asked.

  “About half a dollar,” Oliver answered.

  “More than likely the coach is carryin’ more than half a dollar,” Willis said, and the others laughed.

  “Look here, Oliver, you don’t want to do this, you just ride on out of there now and I’ll take your share,” Philbin teased.

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t goin’ to do this.”

  “Yeah, I thought you might come around.”

  “All right, enough talkin’. Get the log across the road,” Willis said. “Ever’one get ready.”

  Aboard the Sun Valley stagecoach

  The team was pulling the coach down a slight downgrade so that the coach was moving at a fairly brisk pace. The driver, Moses Turner, was handling the ribbons with a very delicate touch.

  Hal “Pinkie” Floyd, the shotgun guard, saw it first.

  “Moses!” he said. “Look up! There’s somethin’ a-layin’ across the road up there.”

  “Damn. It’s a log,” Moses said as he started hauling back on the reins. “It wasn’t there this morning. How did it get there? There ain’t no trees nearby to fall across the road like that.”

  “I don’t know,” Pinkie said. “But I sure don’t like the looks of it.” Pinkie picked up the shotgun, broke it down to make certain it was loaded, then snapped it back and held it, barrels up, with the butt on the seat right beside him.

  “Whoa!” Moses called to the team. He put his foot on the brake as the coach slowed to a stop.

  “Son of a bitch! It’s a holdup!” Pinkie said as three masked riders appeared on the road. He raised his shotgun to his shoulder.

  Chapter Sixteen

  There were six passengers in the coach: Bixby, Cynthia, Hendel, Matt, a whiskey drummer, and a young man who was returning to school at Tempe Normal. Matt was napping when he heard a loud shout, then the unmistakable discharge of a double-barrel shotgun as well as several pistol shots.

  Matt awoke with a start.

  “Oh, what is it?” Cynthia asked, her voice edged with fear.

  Though Matt hadn’t seen anything, when he heard gunshots and loud guttural voices outside, he surmised at once what was going on. He loosened the pistol in his holster.

  A masked man’s head suddenly appeared in the window. He stuck a gun inside.

  “Ever’one out of the coach!” he shouted.

  “See here! What is this?” Bixby shouted indignantly as he stepped down from the coach. “Do you know who I am?”

  “You are the man I’m robbin’,” the gunman replied. He brought his pistol down sharply over Bixby’s head. Bixby groaned and fell back against the coach, though he didn’t fall down.

  “Jay!” Cynthia cried out in alarm.

  “Anybody else?” the gunman challenged. “Maybe you folks didn’t hear me when I said everyone get out of the coach.”

  Another gunman came around to join the first. He was also wearing a mask.

  “Philbin’s dead,” the second gunman said. “The shotgun guard killed him.”

  “We get the money pouch?”

  “We’ll clean these folks out first,” the second gunman said. He took off his hat. “Folks, what I want you to do is pretend you are in church and the plate is being passed. I want you to put all your money and valuables in this here hat. If you try and hold out on me, I’ll shoot you. We’ll start with you, mister,” he said to Bixby, who, though streaks of blood were sliding down from the wound on top of his head, had managed to stay on his feet.

  Bixby took out his wallet and put it in the hat.

  “Your pocket watch, too.”

  Grumbling, Bixby disconnected his watch from his vest and dropped that in the hat as well.

  “Hurry up down there!” someone called from the top of a large rock. Glancing up, Matt saw two masked men standing up there, looking down at the proceedings.

  “We’re hurryin’, we’re hurryin’,” the gunman with the hat said.

  “That bauble you’re wearin’ around your neck looks real pretty there,” the robber said to Cynthia. “But it’s goin’ to look even prettier in my hat.” He giggled at his own joke.

  When he got to Hendel, Hendel dropped in his own wallet and watch without complaint.

  “You folks are doin’ just real fine,” the robber said. He stopped in front of Matt, but Matt had nothing in his hand.

  “How come you are standin’ here empty-handed?” the robber said. “What have you got to give me?”

  “Just a bullet in the stomach if you don’t give these folks their money back and ride away from here,” Matt said.

  “Ha! Hey, Oliver, did you hear what this fella just said?”

  “Just shoot him and be done with it,” Oliver said.

  “Yeah, I reckon that’s best,” Cantrell said. He cocked his pistol.

  What happened next happened so fast that it surprised everyone, robbers and passengers both. Even though both robbers were holding pistols pointed in the general direction of the coach passengers, Matt drew and fired so quickly that both were dead before either realized they were in danger.

  Looking up to where the other two men were standing, Matt raised his pistol, but both dropped down out of sight on the other side of the rock. Matt climbed the rock and looked for them, but by the time he reached the top of the rock, they were already too far away for a good shot.

  Putting his gun away, Matt climbed back down to the stage. Bixby, Cynthia, Hendel, and the other two passengers were gathered around the bodies of the two men he had shot. The body of the robber the guard had shot was lying on the road in front of the coach.

  The guard was also dead, slumped over the edge of the seat with his arm hanging down. His shotgun was lying on the ground alongside the left front wheel, the stock of the gun red with his blood.

  The driver was also slumped forward.

  “How bad are you hit?” Matt called up to the driver.

  “I don’t rightly know,” the driver answered, his voice racked with pain. “All I know is it hurts like hell.”

  Matt climbed up on the wheel to take a look. The driver was holding his hand over his side. Matt moved the driver’s hand to one side, then breathed a sigh of relief.

  “It looks like it cut a pretty good crease, but it didn’t poke a hole in you,” Matt said. He looked at the seat just behind the driver and saw a bullet buried in the front of the coach. Taking out a pocket knife, he pried out the bullet. “And it didn’t stay in you,” he said, holding the bullet out for the driver’s inspection.

  “Damn,” the driver said. “That’s as close as I ever want to come to getting’ shot dead.” The driver look
ed over at the shotgun guard. “Poor Pinkie. He wasn’t as lucky.”

  “The robbers are gone. Do you feel up to driving?”

  “Yeah, I reckon so,” the driver said.

  “We need to get you patched up first,” Matt said.

  “You know somethin’ about doctorin’, do you?” the driver asked.

  “I’ve patched a few bullet holes in my day,” Matt replied. “A couple of them on myself. I wonder if you are carrying anything we can use as a bandage.”

  Cynthia, who was tending to the wound on Bixby’s head, looked up toward Matt when she heard him say he needed something for a bandage. “I can give you something to use as a bandage,” she called up to him.

  “What have you got that you could possibly give him?” Bixby asked.

  “Just watch,” Cynthia replied.

  Reaching up under the hem of her skirt, she began to wriggle around a bit.

  “Cynthia, stop that!” Bixby ordered. “You are disgracing yourself!”

  After a few more moments of wriggling, she pulled a large piece of silk from under her skirt.

  “How about this?” she asked Matt. “A silk petticoat.”

  “Cynthia!” Bixby gasped. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Oh, don’t be silly, Jay,” Cynthia replied as she handed the slip up to Matt. “I have two more on.”

  Up on the driver’s seat, Matt unbuttoned Moses’s shirt, then pulled it away from him. Some of the coagulating blood had caused the shirt to stick to the wound, and Moses winced in pain when the shirt was pulled away.

  “I know that probably stung a bit,” Matt said. “But the truth is, sticking to your wound like that is probably what saved your life. It acted like a bandage and it stopped the bleeding. If it hadn’t, you might have bled to death.”

  As Matt worked to apply a bandage to the stagecoach driver, the drummer and the young student pulled the masks off the dead robbers.

  “Look at them,” the student said. “They are mean-looking, aren’t they?”

  The whiskey drummer chuckled. “They’re mean-enough-lookin’ all right, but I’d say these boys picked the wrong coach to try and rob.”

  “They did that, all right,” the student said.

  “Wait a minute,” Matt said, looking down at the three bodies. “I know these men.”

  “You know them?” Hendel asked, surprised by the announcement.

  “Sort of. I don’t actually know them by name,” Matt said. “But I’ve seen them before.”

  These were the same men Matt had encountered at Ian Crocker’s ranch almost two months earlier.

  “I would imagine they were up to no good then as well,” the drummer said.

  “You are right about that,” Matt replied.

  “What are we going to do with them now?” the student asked.

  “Well, if you two men will give me a hand, we’ll lift them up onto the roof of the coach. I hate to lay the shotgun guard out there with the others, but we don’t have much of a choice.”

  “You can put the shotgun guard inside the coach with us,” Hendel suggested.

  “What? How dare you make such a suggestion?” Bixby shouted, angrily. “Anyway, there is no room for him inside.”

  “There will be,” Matt said. “I intend to finish the trip by riding up here with the driver.”

  “You will not put that dead man in the coach with us! I will not allow it!” Bixby said.

  “You won’t allow it?” the driver called down. “Mister, I’ll have you know that as the driver of this coach, I am in charge. Me. Not you. Now, either Pinkie rides in there with you, or you can ride up on top of the coach with the dead outlaws, or you can walk. It’s up to you.”

  “Your employer will hear from me, my good man! You can count on that,” Bixby said.

  “Oh, Jay, for heaven’s sake. Be quiet, will you?” Cynthia said. She was cleaning his wound and she pressed down hard on the bump.

  “Ouch!” Bixby called out. “What are you trying to do, kill me?”

  “Don’t give her any ideas, mister,” the whiskey drummer said, and the student laughed out loud at his joke.

  “Well, I’ll be!” Bixby said, his face turning red in anger and embarrassment over being the butt of a joke.

  Both Cynthia and Hendel managed to hide their smiles.

  With the bandage applied to the driver’s side, Matt climbed up onto the top of the coach, then called down to the drummer.

  “You two start passing them up to me, I’ll lay them out up here.”

  “I’ll help,” Hendel offered and, over the next few minutes, the three dead outlaws were lifted up to the top of the coach, then laid out side by side. After that, the student climbed up and helped Matt pass the dead guard down to Hendel and the whiskey drummer.

  “Now we have to get the log moved,” Matt said.

  Once the log was moved, Moses picked up the reins, gave the team a whistle, and they resumed their run into Phoenix.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Can you believe that?” Bixby asked after they got under way once more. “Mr. Jensen has just killed two men. Two men, mind you, yet to look at him and to hear him talk, you would think nothing had happened.”

  Bixby had a large, discolored bump on his head, clearly visible because of his baldness.

  “To think that we had befriended him,” Bixby continued.

  “Surely, you aren’t condemning him, are you, Mr. Bixby?” Hendel asked.

  “I am indeed.”

  “But why? He saved our money, if not our lives.”

  “He is as savage as the others,” Bixby said.

  “I think he was courageous, even heroic,” Cynthia said.

  “Of course you would think such a thing, my dear,” Bixby said. “As empty as your head is, you probably see him as a knight in shining armor. But I’m telling you now that someone who can kill as easily as he can is not someone with whom we need to associate. And I forbid you to speak to him again.”

  “But Jay,” Cynthia said.

  “Not another word. When we get to Phoenix, we shall go our way and, no doubt, he shall go his.”

  “It isn’t as if I want to invite him over for tea,” Cynthia said. “But I do think that you are wrong in your judgment of him, and I agree with Mr. Hendel. I think we are obligated to him for our very safety.”

  After leaving the aborted stagecoach robbery, Pogue Willis and Billy Meechum rode hard, dismounting occasionally to give the horses a blow. Even then they didn’t stop, but continued to walk, always putting distance behind them. They did pause briefly late in the afternoon in order to eat a few bites of jerky and to take a few swallows of water.

  Meechum chewed on the leathery jerky, then took a drink of tepid water from his canteen. He spat the water out in disgust, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Here we are, drinking water that tastes like horse piss and chewing on jerky that tastes like saddle leather. You said we was all goin’ to get rich. Well, the only thing that we got was my cousin kilt, two of my pards dead. And for all that we got nothin’.”

  “Quit your bitchin’,” Willis said. “You got out alive, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I’m alive, as long as I don’t starve to death or die of thirst,” Meechum said. “There’s got to be a town near here. Listen, Pogue, don’t you think there’s a town around here somewhere?”

  “What if there is?”

  “Well, if there is, I was thinkin’ we could go in an’ get somethin’ fit to eat an’ decent to drink,” Meechum said.

  “You was thinkin’, was you? What makes you believe you have enough brains to think?” Willis asked.

  “You got no right to talk to me like that.”

  “Anytime you want to call me on it, why, feel free to try,” Willis said.

  “No, you ain’t goin’ to goad me into pullin’ a gun against you, no matter how hard you try. Maybe I ain’t the smartest man around, but I got more sense than to do anything like that.”
/>   “Then try to have enough sense to keep your mouth shut for a while,” Willis said. “I’m gettin’ just real tired of listenin’ to you.”

  Meechum seethed with frustrated anger, but he said nothing.

  “Now, that’s more like it,” Willis said. “We’re goin’ to Phoenix. I figure if we didn’t get the money while it was on the coach, then we’ll take it from the bank.”

  “If we couldn’t get it from the coach, what makes you think we can get it from a bank?” Meechum asked.

  “Stagecoaches are moving, banks are still,” Willis replied, as if that answered everything. “Get mounted, we have a long way to go yet.”

  Phoenix

  It was late afternoon by the time the coach reached Phoenix. As they were coming into town, the driver shouted down toward the passengers. “Phoenix! This is Phoenix, folks!” he called.

  Matt put his hand on Moses’s forehead. He was relieved to discover that the driver had no fever.

  “What?” the driver asked.

  “I was just checking to see if you had any fever,” Matt said.

  “Do I?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Good.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “My side is hurtin’ like hell,” Moses said. He smiled, then looked down at the bandage wrapped around his waist. “And I’m going to have one heck of a time explainin’ to my wife why I’m wearin’ a woman’s petticoat.”

  Matt laughed. “If you’ve still got a sense of humor after all this, Moses, I think you are going to be all right.”

  After he climbed down from the coach, Matt walked over and stood against the wall of the stage depot, watching as some men pulled the three outlaws off the top of the coach and laid them out on the wooden platform. The moment the bodies were laid out, several people went over to look down at them. The crowd grew quickly as more and more people, not only employees of the stage depot, but citizens from the city, began congregating to look at the morbid show.