Power of the Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  Smoke ended the man’s railroad career with a sizzling. 45 slug in the heart. Smoke went forward to inspect the corpse of the man who had absorbed so many bullets. Bending low, he pulled open the shirt. Just as he had suspected: the dead man wore a fitted piece of boiler plate, its backside thickly padded with cotton quilting. Smoke’s soft lead bullets had smashed against it and spread out to the diameter of a quarter. If he ran into too many like that one, he would really be in trouble, Smoke reckoned. Another shout rose among the battling figures in the middle of the block. Smoke looked up in time to see more Tong soldiers storming down the street.

  * * *

  Jing Gow had run all the way from the Celestial Hatchets Tong club house to the Wu Fong theater, where most of the members were attending a recital by a famous Chinese lute player. They filled the balcony and two of the larger boxes to the side of the stage. Word went around quickly and nearly half of the audience walked out in the middle of the performance. Now, he trotted along Plum Seed Street with his Tong brothers toward the sounds of a fight.

  He did not feel the cuts made by the glass from when he had jumped through the window. In the second floor leap he had also sprained an ankle, and he limped painfully. All he could think of was the huge qua’lo who had burst into the room during counting time for their weekly squeeze money. That one had the ferocity of a dragon. Jing had jumped through a curtained doorway and run upstairs. Now, blood dripped down his chest and belly. When they rounded the corner to face the battle scene, Jing Gow felt light-headed. How long had be been cut and not taken care of it?

  A haze seemed to settle over the street. Jing swiped at his eyes to try to ward off the fuzzy vision. He found his hand covered with dried blood. The fog remained. It even grew darker. Jing saw the giant foreign devil and raised his hatchet. A howl of fury ripped from his throat.

  Jing Gow threw his hatchet, only the big man dodged to one side. Then a terrible force struck Jing in the chest and he saw smoke and flame gush from the qua’lo’s gun. Awful pain radiated from the area around his heart and the world turned dark for Jing Gow. He did not feel a thing when he fell face-first onto the cobblestones.

  * * *

  It appeared to Louis Longmont that every person under the age of fifty in Chinatown was a Tong member. They kept coming from buildings and down both ends of the street near the building used by the Iron Fan Tong as a headquarters. He had run dangerously low on ammunition. The thought occurred, Why hadn’t the police come?

  It didn’t matter, he decided, as he jammed a hard fist into the face of another Tong hatchetman to save on cartridges. He heard the crack of a shot from behind him and whirled to reply. In so doing, he nearly shot Brian Pullen. The young lawyer competently held a .44 Colt Lightning in his hand, a dead Tong member at his feet.

  “I heard about this Tong war and thought I’d come lend a hand,” Pullen explained.

  Louis nodded to the corpse. “You got here just in time. I hope you brought enough ammunition.”

  “I have two boxes of cartridges. Will that be enough?”

  “I doubt it. What we need is a shotgun. Something to clear the street with.”

  Brian Pullen looked blankly at Louis Longmont and snapped his fingers. “I never thought of that. Hang on, I’ll be back.” He ran through the back of the house before Louis could reply.

  Twenty minutes went by in a frenzy of fighting, the likes of which Louis had never seen. The young Chinese volunteers used a form of personal combat unlike anything he had heard of. Three of them went down, victims of hatchet blows, yet the rest continued to take a bloody, deadly toll on the Tong fighters. When Brian Pullen returned, he brought along two finely made, expensive Parker 10-gauge shotguns and a large net bag filled with brass cartridges.

  Louis Longmont hid his surprise. “That should do the job.”

  He took one, loaded it, and blasted two Tong thugs off the stoop of the building with a single round. Pullen put the other Parker to good use, ending the career of a short, squat extortionist. Quickly the men reloaded and pushed out into the street. Four more loads of buckshot broke the fanatic assault of the Tong hatchetmen. Six of their companions had been killed in a matter of seconds. The two grim-faced qua’lo did not hesitate as they advanced. They reloaded on the move, paused, and then downed more Tong members. At first, a trickle of young gangsters faded away. Then the remaining street thugs abandoned the battle and fled out of sight.

  “I think we should check the Blue Lotus Tong,” Louis calmly suggested.

  * * *

  Wang Toy had successfully hidden from the enraged priests from the Golden Harmony temple. He had watched his Tong brothers being beaten and some of them killed by those led by the old priest, Tai Chiu. The aged one had never had the proper respect for those of the Triad Society. He should have been disposed of long ago. Although the killing of priests was frowned upon by Xiang Wai Lee, Wang Toy would have been pleased to carry out that assignment.

  Now he skulked in the dusty attic of the Blue Lotus club house and worried about his own safety. When the last of his companions had run away, he had been left behind, unable to come out of hiding so long as the practitioners of kung fu remained around the building. They had left, after a short while, yet he remained in his undiscovered lair. In all his seventeen years he had never been so frightened. At last he goaded himself into opening the square hatch in the floor and lowered himself to the second-floor hallway.

  Embarrassed and shamed by his cowardly behavior, Wang Toy slunk to the stairwell and started down. At the landing, he pulled his hatchet from his belt and held it at the ready. He would find his brothers and rally them. Wang reached the last step at the same time the front door flew open. The first person through it was a qua’lo with a double-barreled shotgun. That was the last thing Wang Toy saw because Louis Longmont blew his head off with a load of buckshot.

  * * *

  Smoke Jensen had barely finished counting the number of Tong gangsters when a hoard of more young Chinese men rounded the far comer. It took him a moment to realize that several of them wore the saffron robes of the student priests. They fell on the hatchetmen from behind and began to chop and kick them with terrible efficiency. Only the guns of the railroad detectives saved the Tong members from total destruction.

  Two burly hard cases shot the same student at one time. One of them did not get to crow about it, for Smoke Jensen blasted the life out of him. His partner whirled and threw a shot in Smoke’s direction. The bullet slammed into the doorjamb behind Smoke. His assailant tried for another round, only to be blasted to perdition by a slug from the .45 Colt in Smoke’s hand. In the far distance, Smoke heard the shrill of police whistles. Recalling the incident at the bordello, he wondered whose side they would take.

  He decided to leave when the first bluecoats arrived on the scene and began to club the students with their nightsticks. “Time to be moving on,” he told Quo Chung Wu, who stood steadfastly at his side.

  “You will run from these men?” Quo asked in disbelief.

  “The last I heard, I was a wanted man. The police have gone over to the yard bulls. What do you think they will do when they reach us?”

  Quo nodded and shouted to his companions in Cantonese. “We will go to the temple. Make these men bring the fight to us.”

  At once the volunteers broke off their fighting and sprinted off down the street. Smoke Jensen and Quo Chung Wu formed the rear guard. It did not take much convincing to delay pursuit. Smoke shot one of the Tong henchmen in the leg and the whole crowd hung back. Smoke saw the last of them, shouting among themselves, as he rounded the corner into a wide boulevard that led to the market square.

  * * *

  A sharp pang of unease nearly doubled Sally Jensen over as she sat on the edge of her bed. Smoke was in dreadful danger; she had no idea from what or whom. She only knew, as clearly as the September harvest moon shone a silver pool on the braided rug which covered the smooth planks of the floor, that her man was close to losing his li
fe. She had awakened only a few moments before, and the fragments of the dream that had disturbed her still clung to her.

  She tried to make sense of the strange images which had tumbled through her dozing mind. Odd-looking lanterns bobbed in a breeze. Men in yellow robes wielded strange weapons. A heavy mist or fog hung over black water. There were screams and cries that echoed in her head. And Smoke was somehow mixed up with it all. She hadn’t seen him in that kaleidoscope of weird impressions, only sensed his involvement. Hugging herself across her stomach, she rose and headed for the kitchen. A cup of coffee might help.

  Sally scratched a lucifer to life and lighted the oil lamp on the table. Still troubled, she added wood to the stove and put water to boil in the pot. While she scooped coffee into the basket of the percolator, she tried again to piece together her premonition. To her annoyance, nothing meaningful came to the surface. She started when a soft knock came on the back door.

  “Anything wrong, Miss Sally?” Cole Travis stood, hat in hand, a worried expression on his face.

  “No,” Sally replied promptly, then added, “yes. No, I don’t know. That’s what is so bothersome, Cole.” She tried to force a smile and swiped at a stray lock of raven hair that hung over one cheek. “I’m not given to womanly vapors,” she said lightly. “But I was awakened a while ago by the strongest impression that Smoke was in trouble.”

  Their winter foreman put on a sympathetic face. “Any idea what or where?”

  Sally considered the shards of her dream. “In San Francisco, obviously. Only I can’t make sense of what I remember of the dream.” She abandoned the subject. “I was fixing coffee, Cole. Would you like a cup?”

  Despite his silver hair, Cole Travis took on the expression of an impish boy. “Would you happen to have a piece of that pie left from supper to go with it?”

  That brought the sunniness back to Sally’s face. “Of course I do. Come on in. Maybe we can figure out what is going on around Smoke.”

  * * *

  People scattered before the retreating students. Their movement through the market square set off ripples like a stone dropped in water. In the forefront of those who pursued them came the railroad police. Indifferent to the Chinese citizens of San Francisco, they roughly shoved those who impeded them out of the way. Even so, they made little headway. When the men they sought veered toward the Golden Harmony Temple, they redoubled their efforts.

  They looked on from halfway across the square as the last to arrive, Smoke Jensen and Quo Chung Wu, paused long enough to swing closed a spike-topped gate in the Moon arch that fronted the temple grounds. Snarling at this impediment, they pushed through the late-night shoppers. When they reached the closed partition, several of Murchison’s henchmen grabbed on and began to yank it furiously.

  A police sergeant and several of his subordinates shouldered their way to where the men struggled with the gateway. “Here, now,” he bellowed. “We can’t go in there. It’s sacred ground. A sanctuary.”

  “Don’t mean nothin’ to us. Mr. Murchison wants this stopped, and we reckon to do just that,” Heck Grange growled.

  The sergeant scowled at him, unmoved by the declaration. “Not with our help. We got orders, all the way down from the mayor. Treat these Chinee places with respect.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What we can; surround the temple and make sure no one gets out.”

  Granger’s voice turned nasty with contempt. “While you’re doing that, we’ll just open up this little box and see what’s inside.”

  Stubborn was the sergeant’s middle name. “You try it and we’ll arrest you. We believe there’s a wanted man in there, and he belongs to the police.”

  For the first time, Heck Grange regretted his idea about reporting the shootings to the police. If he killed Longmont and Jensen outright, it could get sticky. No matter, his thug’s brain reasoned, they wouldn’t give up without a fight. And anything could happen then. He turned a disarming smile on the lawman.

  “Go on, then. I’ll send some of my boys along to take up the slack.”

  “I appreciate that,” the sergeant said stiffly. “Don’t worry. We’ll get them if we have to wait until morning.

  “What about these Chinee fellers with the hatchets?”

  Looking around him, the sergeant shrugged. “If they want to go in there, there’s nothing I can do about it,” he dismissed.

  At once, the young Tong members started for the walls.

  * * *

  Inside the temple, Tai Chiu urged his diminished force to take the hidden passageway so as to come out behind their enemies. Smoke Jensen considered it a moment.

  “We should hold out here for as long as we can,” he advised. “Everyone could use the rest. If we only had some surprises to slow down anyone coming in after us,” he added wishfully.

  Old Tai Chiu smiled enigmatically. “There are . . . certain defenses built into the temple. They are activated by levers. We can engage them as we leave.”

  Smoke began to look around. It took a while, though finally he began to recognize a number of clever obstacles, or what might be turned into such. A large log hung suspended from two ropes. It appeared to be intended for ringing a huge brass gong. The position of the line that propelled it had been placed in such a way that it could be used to draw the thick cleaned and polished tree limb upward to one side. In front of it, a too-regular line in the flooring indicated to Smoke the presence of a pressure pad. He smiled.

  Other things came to his sight. A large candelabra hung suspended over the center of the worship area. Directly under it was another hidden trip device. He did not know that for centuries, this particular caste of warrior-monks had been harassed by the warlords in China. He did appreciate that they had become wise in the ways of secret defenses. Slits in the domed roof suggested that arrows could be fired through them, or objects dropped on unsuspecting heads. Well, now, that was fine and dandy with him. His thoughts took another line.

  Where was Louis? Had he encountered trouble? One of the volunteers hurried up to interrupt his musings. “The Triads are scaling the walls,” the young Chinese informed him.

  “All we need,” Smoke snapped. He quickly checked and reloaded his six-guns. His fingers told him he had only nine spare rounds. Well, let them come, he thought of the enemy outside. We’ll welcome them in style.

  * * *

  None of the Blue Lotus Tong returned to their club house. Louis Longmont rounded up the volunteers who had come with him. “We will go to this Celestial Hatchets building. They are the largest Tong, non?”

  He thought primarily of his friend Smoke Jensen. Smoke had taken on the greater number because that was the way Smoke Jensen did things. While the students had ransacked the Tong headquarters and scrawled signs on the wall in Chinese warning the gangsters that they were no longer welcome in Chinatown, Louis had stood guard outside. In the distance he had heard the shrill sound of police whistles. Like Smoke, his mind went to the visit by police to Francie’s. If the law joined in, it would hamper how they dealt with those who opposed them. It wouldn’t do to kill a legitimate policeman.

  When the last of the young monks had finished smashing furniture and breaking glass inside, Louis called them together and made his announcement. Eagerness shined in their eyes, though most kept their faces impassive. At once, they left in a body.

  Disappointment waited for Louis Longmont when his contingent of trash collectors reached the converted warehouse occupied by the Celestial Hatchets Tong. The place had been demolished inside. A few bodies lay about, among them some Occidentals Louis figured for railroad bulls. Silence filled both floors. Not a sign of Smoke Jensen.

  “If they had finished here, and heard the police come . . .” Quo Chung Wu suggested; then he added, “Yes, I heard their whistles, too.”

  Louis understood at once. “The only safe place would be back at the temple, or on the junk.” He paused only a moment. “I say the temple; it is closer.”

&n
bsp; They started that way. Along the route, Louis noted more injured, unconscious, or dead Tong thugs and railroad detectives in their brown bowler hats. No question that the night had taken a terrible toll on the Triad Society. It pleased him. At the edge of the market square, Louis halted his followers abruptly. He pointed toward the temple.

  “I believe we arrived a bit too late.” He noted of the swarm of police, railroad thugs, and Tong members around the walls of the temple courtyard.

  “Not necessarily,” Brian Pullen offered at the side of Louis Longmont. “I believe that is Sergeant O’Malley over there. In all that’s happened, I forgot to tell you of one piece of good news.

  “Actually, it’s the reason I made such an effort to find you and Mr. Jensen. I received an injunction against the California Central Railroad, enjoining them to cease and desist in any attempt to apprehend you or Mr. Jensen.” Pullen patted the breast pocket of his suit coat. “I also have a writ from the court ordering the police to disregard any complaint made against the two of you. All I have to do is serve them and the odds go down dramatically.”

  “What says either side will obey them?” Louis asked sensibly.

  “O’Malley will. Above all other things, he is an honest cop. He’ll take the writ back to the stationhouse and give it to his lieutenant. That will effectively end the police manhunt for the both of you.”

  “And if Murchison’s minions refuse?”

  “Not a chance. They will have been served right in front of O’Malley. If they keep at it, O’Malley and the boys in blue will arrest the lot and throw them in jail.”

  Louis called after Pullen as the young lawyer stepped off on his errand. “I wish I shared your confidence.”

  “Not a problem,” Pullen gave back jauntily.