Ambush of the Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  “Hey, Boss,” George Jones called from the middle of the pack.

  “Yeah, George?” Cletus answered, twisting in his saddle to see what the man wanted.

  “Maybe it’d be a good idea if we spread out ‘stead of riding in a line like this. In this storm, it’s better’n even odds Jensen froze to death last night. It’d be a shame to ride past his carcass and not know it.”

  Cletus had to admit the man had a good point. Though he didn’t for a minute think a mountain man would ever freeze to death in a minor storm like this, Cletus knew that Jensen might well have gone to ground somewhere between here and the mountain hoping they’d ride right on past him.

  “That’s a good idea, George,” Cletus said, stopping his horse. He waved his hands to both sides. “I want you men to spread out, and keep a sharp eye for any sign of Jensen along the way,” he called. “And be sure to stay in sight of the men on either side of you. I don’t want Jensen to be able to slip between us.”

  In a lower voice, he said, “Sarah, I want you to stay next to me. Your daddy’d have my hide if I let anything happen to you.”

  Sarah gave him a gentle smile. They both knew she could shoot every bit as straight as him and she was probably a lot faster on the draw. Still and all, he’d been a good and loyal friend to both her and her father, so she didn’t point this out to him. “All right, Clete. I’ll stay close so you can protect me from the big, bad Smoke Jensen.”

  He frowned at her, knowing she was putting him on. “Don’t underestimate this man, Sarah. I know you don’t think he is a really bad man, but men who are desperate to live will sometimes do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do—and that includes Smoke Jensen.”

  Sarah had a hard time imagining Smoke Jensen would ever be desperate, but she kept her mouth shut and rode alongside Cletus as he moved northward toward the nearest mountain. She pulled her heavy, fur-lined deerskin coat tight around her shoulders as they rode into the freezing wind, wondering how Jensen, who was dressed only in buckskins, would be able to survive the brutal conditions.

  Even though they were downwind, Smoke heard the approaching riders when they were still over a hundred yards away, and he came instantly awake. Years living in the High Lonesome had trained him to be able to hear and see things most normal men couldn’t, and he could respond to them instinctively without having to think about it beforehand.

  It was a trait that’d saved his life on more than one occasion when he and Preacher were living up in the High Lonesome.

  He eased to the edge of his tree-limb hideout and glanced around to make sure the snow had covered all signs of the struggle with the big cat. He nodded in satisfaction to see a pristine blanket of fresh snow around the jumble of fallen trees he was in. He was also relieved to see that the storm was still fairly heavy. He was counting on it to mask his next moves.

  He readied himself by moving to the very edge of his hideout so that he could exit it quickly and silently when the time came, and then he got out the clasp knife and opened it. He was going to need it very soon now.

  Trying to keep a straight line of riders going into a storm and weaving back and forth in a fairly thick forest is impossible. Thus, the line of riders coursing through the woods toward Smoke was ragged and uneven, with some men being fifty or sixty yards ahead of or behind the others on either side of them. The fury of the storm kept conversation between the riders at a minimum, and most were riding with their heads down and their hats pulled low over their brows to try to keep the worst of the wind and snow out of their faces.

  Smoke knew he could just lie still, and odds were that the men would pass him by and he’d be safe for a while. But he’d still be without a horse, and this put him at a terrible disadvantage in the deadly game of hide and seek they were playing. No, he couldn’t afford to let them go by. He needed both weapons and a horse if he was going to survive this death hunt.

  He hated the idea of killing a man he didn’t even know, but the man must’ve known what he was doing when he signed on to take another man to his certain death. Smoke knew it was much too dangerous with the other men so close to try to take a man’s guns and horse and leave him alive, so he steeled himself to the inevitable; he was going to have to hit fast and hard and not worry about the consequences.

  Smoke waited until a figure on horseback was directly opposite his hiding place. As the man moved just past him, Smoke eased out of the tree limbs and took a running jump up on the back of the man’s horse. As he landed, he wrapped his left arm around the man’s face and, with the knife in his right hand, he made a rapid slashing motion across the man’s throat.

  The horse reared up and whinnied, but the sound was lost in the howling of the wind.

  Smoke held on tight as the man’s body struggled for a few seconds and then became limp as his hot blood spurted across Smoke’s forearm.

  When he was completely limp, Smoke eased the man’s hat off and put it firmly on his own head, throwing his own hat to the ground. Next, he took the man’s gun belt and holster and put it around his waist. The hardest part was removing the man’s thick rawhide and fur coat without letting his body fall off the horse, which Smoke kept moving by gentle nudges of his heels, guiding the animal with his knees.

  When he had the man’s hat, guns, and coat on, Smoke started to let the body fall, and then thought better of it. Leaning to the side, he felt in the man’s right boot. Sure enough, there was a long-bladed skinning knife there. It would be of much more use to Smoke than the small clasp knife he’d used to kill the man.

  Looking to both sides to make sure he’d been unobserved so far, Smoke waited until a particularly strong flurry of snow came, and then let the man’s body fall to the side, where it landed in a snowbank with a soft thud inaudible from more than a few feet away.

  Slowly, so as not to draw too much attention to himself, Smoke let the horse he was riding ease on out ahead of the line of men. Before long, the men on either side of him were barely visible in the blowing snow. Smoke knew the storm couldn’t last too much longer, and he planned to be well away before the snow stopped and he became fully visible to the others. He hoped with the limited visibility of the storm, the man’s hat and coat would fool his friends into thinking Smoke was him.

  Suddenly, a voice called from about forty yards behind him. “Hey, Charlie, what’s your hurry?”

  Smoke hunched over, tightening his grip on the reins. He knew he didn’t have much longer before his ruse was discovered.

  “Yeah, Blake,” another voice on the other side hollered. “Get your ass back here with the rest of us ‘fore we accidentally put a bullet in your butt thinkin’ you’re Jensen.”

  As he passed a tight grove of trees, Smoke leaned forward and dug his heels into his mount, causing it to break into a full gallop ahead.

  “Hey, what the . . . ?” a voice yelled.

  And then, another screamed, “Yo, Clete! Somethin’s wrong with Charlie Blake. He’s ridin’ like a bat outta hell!”

  The man on Smoke’s right kicked his horse into a gallop also, wanting to see why his friend was racing ahead. As he pulled closer, he realized it wasn’t Charlie Blake on the horse ahead of him.

  “Damn! That ain’t Charlie, fellers, that’s Jensen,” he screamed, pulling his pistol out and opening fire.

  He might have caught Smoke, but a branch suddenly appeared in front of him and whipped across his face, drawing blood and making him slow his horse to keep from falling off.

  The ghostly figure on horseback in front of him disappeared into the gloomy snowstorm ahead.

  Cletus and Sarah rode over to Sam Jackson. “You all right, Sam?” Cletus asked.

  Jackson sleeved blood off his face where the tree limb had slashed his cheek. “Yeah, I’ll be all right,” he growled, leaning over to spit blood from his mouth.

  “You say that wasn’t Charlie up there?” Sarah asked, looking ahead into the snow flurries.

  “Naw, I don’t think so,” Jackson said. “He had
Charlie’s coat on, but he didn’t sit a horse like Charlie an’ he looked to be about thirty pounds heavier and five or six inches taller.”

  “But how did he get Charlie’s coat and horse?” Cletus asked.

  Jackson looked back over his shoulder. “I don’t know, Boss, but I’ll bet we ain’t gonna find out what happened from Charlie either.”

  Cletus nodded. “All right, men, let’s double back a ways and see if we can find Charlie’s body.”

  Sarah took a deep breath and felt a deep sorrow. She didn’t know Charlie Blake well, but if he was dead, then it was her fault for letting Smoke Jensen escape.

  She shook her head as she pulled her horse’s head around. How was she going to live with herself if more men were killed because of her? she wondered.

  TWENTY-THREE

  As he rode hell-bent-for-leather through the deepening snow and into the teeth of the freezing north wind after capturing the man’s horse, Smoke leaned as close to his mount’s head as he could to avoid being scraped out of the saddle by a tree limb. He had to trust the horse’s instinct not to run headlong into a tree or off a cliff, and so all he could do for the first couple of hundred yards of their flight was to hang on for dear life and hope for the best.

  At least it beat a bullet in the back.

  After about ten minutes at a full gallop, Smoke raised his head and looked back over his shoulder. The snow was still blowing, and all he could see was a solid sheet of white behind him.

  He slowed the horse and cocked his head to the side, listening to see if he could hear any pursuit over the howling of the wind.

  Nothing. He turned back around, pulled his hat down tight, and rode on into the wind toward the mountain up ahead, moving slower now to give his horse a rest. He knew that if he could make the slopes up ahead before his captors caught up to him, he would have the advantage for the first time since this adventure began.

  He smiled grimly. And then it would be time to pay them back.

  Angus MacDougal was just sitting down to a solitary supper, served by his housekeeper/cook, when the door banged open and a breathless Daniel Macklin barged in.

  Angus threw down his napkin and smiled, evidently thinking the group of men had arrived with Smoke Jensen as their prisoner.

  “Where is that son of a bitch?” Angus growled, moving toward the hat rack in the corner with his belt and holstered pistol hanging on it.

  Macklin didn’t understand at first what Angus was referring to. “Uh . . . where is who?” he asked, taking his hat off and holding it in front of him like a shield.

  Angus sighed as he buckled on his gun belt. “Jensen, of course,” he answered. “You remember him, don’t you? The bastard who gunned my Johnny down? The man you went to Big Rock to get for me?”

  “Uh . . . that’s what I come to tell you, Mr. MacDougal.” Few men in the world called Angus MacDougal by his first name, and certainly not an employee as low as Daniel Macklin.

  Angus knew something was wrong. “Well, spit it out, man. What the hell’s going on?”

  “We were ‘bout half a day’s ride from here when Jensen somehow managed to get loose and run away,” Macklin finally managed to say.

  “What?” Angus yelled, advancing on Macklin as if he were about to kill him.

  Macklin held up his hands. “Now wait a minute, Mr. MacDougal. He ain’t gotten away—leastways not all the way away.”

  Angus slapped his thigh with his hand. “Now just what the hell does that mean?” he growled.

  “He didn’t get no horse, an’ he’s on foot in a bad storm some miles from the nearest mountain. He’s runnin’ on foot through the woods with Cletus and the rest of the men on horseback after him.”

  The redness began to fade a little bit from Angus’s face at this news. “Oh, well, then, it shouldn’t take Clete long to run him down then, should it?”

  Macklin shook his head. “No, sir, I don’t think so.”

  Suddenly Angus cocked an eyebrow at Macklin. “If that’s so, then why did Clete send you here?”

  “Well, the fact of the matter is that Jensen used to be a mountain man, sir, and we . . . that is, Cletus thought that if he did manage to make the mountains, we might ought’a have a few more men out looking for him.”

  Angus took a couple of long, slow breaths to try to calm himself. He found he did his best thinking when he was calm, not when he was in a fit of rage.

  After a moment, he nodded. “I guess I can’t argue with that logic,” he said. “Let me see, you got about ten, eleven men up there now. Another ten or so ought’a be plenty. With twenty men I can run a search of the mountain that a squirrel couldn’t get through.”

  He pulled out his pocket watch and opened the gold clasp. “Well, it’s too late now to round up any good men. We’ll get to bed early and be in Pueblo at dawn. We should be able to find ten men who want to make a little extra money without any problem.”

  Or who want to make the richest rancher for a hundred miles happy, Macklin thought.

  “You have anything to eat ‘fore you got on the way here?” he asked, suddenly in a better frame of mind now that he knew he’d have the personal pleasure of hunting Jensen down like the dog he was. Hell, it might even be fun running the bastard down like a deer or a bear.

  “No, sir,” Macklin answered, his mouth watering at the smell of the pot roast and fresh vegetables he could smell on the table in the next room.

  Angus nodded. “Well, then, head on over to the bunkhouse and I’ll have my cook send you over a plate.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Macklin said, trying to hide his anger. Here he was busting his butt to help the old man out and he wasn’t good enough to break bread with him in his house. The ungrateful asshole!

  The next morning, just as the sun was peeking over the eastern slope mountains, Angus and Macklin were knocking on Sheriff Wally Tupper’s door in Pueblo.

  A sleepy Wally opened the door, his hair disarranged and his face creased with wrinkles from his pillow. “Yeah?” he asked gruffly before he saw who was on his doorstep.

  Then it was, “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. MacDougal. Come on in and I’ll have the wife fix you up some coffee and breakfast.”

  “Don’t have time for that, Wally,” Angus said, brushing past the sheriff into his house as if he owned it. “I need you to get dressed and help me round up ten or fifteen hard men to go on the trail with me.”

  “You mean, like a posse?” Wally asked, covering a wide yawn with the back of his hand.

  “Kind’a,” Angus replied enigmatically.

  “Why . . . what for, Mr. MacDougal?” Wally asked as he pulled his trousers up under his nightshirt and sat on a couch to put on his socks.

  “We’re going polecat hunting,” Angus said with an evil grin.

  “What?” Wally asked again, pausing with one sock on and the other in his hand.

  “My men were on the way back here with Smoke Jensen in tow, when he managed to get away. He’s on foot and running for the mountains as we speak. I need some men to help me roust him out of those woods if Cletus doesn’t find him first.”

  “But Mr. MacDougal, Jensen ain’t broke no laws that I know of.”

  “So what?” Angus asked.

  “Well, I can’t hardly send no posse after a man who ain’t done nothing wrong.”

  Angus reached over, grabbed the front of Wally’s nightshirt, and jerked his face close. “Wallace Tupper, if you don’t want to spend the rest of your miserable life shooting stray dogs for fifty cents a piece in this town instead of being sheriff, you’d better make up your mind who you’re gonna listen to . . . me or those goddamned law books you’re always reading!”

  “But Mr. MacDougal,” Wally protested.

  “But nothing, Wally,” Angus growled. “Now I’m gonna go on over to the café on Main Street and have myself some coffee and maybe some eggs and bacon. If you aren’t there with at least ten good men, by the time I finish, I’ll assume you’re out hunting for dogs to shoot.�
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  Less than an hour later, while Angus was still sopping up egg yolks with a folded piece of pancake, Wally Tupper appeared at the café with twelve men. All of the men had a hard look about them and all were armed to the teeth.

  Wally walked into the café, his hat in his hands. “Uh, I managed to get you twelve men, Mr. MacDougal,” he said, not willing to meet Angus’s eyes directly.

  “That’s a good man, Wally. I knew you’d come through for me as usual.”

  “I told ‘em since this wasn’t an official posse, that you’d be paying them for the trip,” Wally said, his voice low and uncertain, as if he were asking Angus instead of telling him how it was going to be.

  Angus waved a hand. “No problem, Wally. Since this is personal, I really can’t expect the town to pay for it, now can I?”

  “Uh . . . no, sir. I guess not.”

  “Now, while I’m finishing up here, I want you to get a couple of packhorses and go on over to the general store and get a couple of crates of dynamite, some cans of black powder, lots of extra ammunition of various calibers, and enough grub for the men to be gone a week or so.”

  “Is there anything else?” Wally asked, struggling to keep his anger at being ordered around like he was one of Angus’s employees out of his voice.

  Angus shook his head. “No, I think that ought to do it for right now.”

  Wally put his hat on and walked from the café. As he walked toward the general store, he thought to himself, Crazy old coot! Serve his ass right if Jensen somehow manages to blow his fool head off. And just where does he get off ordering me around like I’m some ranch hand anyway?

  By the time he got to the store, he was so mad he could hardly unclench his teeth to say hello to the proprietor when greeted.

  He pointed behind the counter at the hundreds of boxes of ammunition. “Seymour, I’m gonna need a bunch of cartridges and other things, and I’m gonna need ‘em fast.”