“All right, Cyrus. We have little choice anyway. I suggest we make an effort to block the trail further on. Anything to slow them. I gather that this gorge narrows, the farther up we go?” At Murchison’s nod, he outlined an idea that had worked in the gold fields against a band of outlaws led by the notorious Mexican bandit Gilberto Oliveras. “When we reach the top, we should close off the entire pass. Fell trees and build firing stands of them. Move rocks, boulders, seal off the trail. Then we can hold off that scum until they run out of ammunition.”
Murchison considered that a moment. “Good idea, Titus. Where did you come up with this?”
Hobson showed a hint of modesty. “I was at the Battle of Wheeler’s Meadow.”
“My Lord, I never knew that. Well, old fellow, I propose you take charge of our delaying actions and the fortifications. Is it true that there were only seventeen of you against nearly a hundred Mexican bandits?”
“Yes. But we had all the tools and we built well. They couldn’t get to us. We held them until they ran out of powder and shot. Simple after that.”
“I like that. I do like that. We’ll do it your way, and watch Smoke Jensen dash his brains out against our stout walls.”
* * *
Smoke Jensen stood with his right fist on his hip, his left hand on the slanted holster high on his left side. Fallen trees blocked the trail ahead. Louis Longmont joined him while the volunteers labored to clear the obstacles. With a shout from Brian Pullen, horses strained on ropes attached to the first trunk and it swung slowly, ponderously.
“What are you thinking, mon ami?”
“They are waiting for us up ahead. I’d bet my last cigar that we’ll run into more of these roadblocks, and finally reach the place they’re forted up.”
Louis nodded. “I think you are right. And no doubt you are going out there to find them tonight. This time I’m going with you.”
Smoke made a fake shocked expression. “Louis, you astonish me. Whatever brought you to this? How can you think of risking that elegant neck?”
Louis produced a look of such wounded pride, only to be spoiled by the laughter that bubbled up deep inside himself. “I know you prefer to work alone, my friend. But they have grown bold after breaking out of our nice little trap, non? It would be well that for tonight you had someone to watch your back.”
Without a show of any reluctance, Smoke agreed. His spirit lightened when the second downed pine had been dragged clear of the narrow spot in the trail. Smoke took the lead, with Louis at his side. Brian Pullen and Quo Chung Wu brought up the rear. Already Smoke’s fertile imagination labored to concoct new nastiness to inflict upon Murchison and his henchmen.
* * *
Three more blockades had to be torn down by the time Smoke Jensen called a halt for the day. He had ridden ahead and scouted out the fortifications erected by Murchison’s mongrels. Murchison, or someone, had chosen well. Located at the restricted point, at the crest of the high pass, it had taken little effort to build a thick, impenetrable wall. They seemed determined to stand and fight, he reasoned. It might be he could change their minds.
Smoke would have liked to use fire. If he did, he knew, he took the risk that the whole of the forest would be wiped out. Sort of like swatting a fly with a scoop shovel, he reckoned it. That left him with the three other elements as the Indians saw their universe: air, earth, and water. By the time he had returned to discuss it with Louis, he had made up his mind which they would use.
The breeze cooperated nicely, having whipped up into a stiff blow. It would mask any sounds they might make. Thankfully, it held even after the sun had set. Clouds had built up over the late afternoon, another gift of nature, and blotted out the blanket of stars and the thin crescent of moon. Smoke and Louis set out when total darkness descended.
They left their horses three hundred yards from the barrier erected by the hard cases. When they stealthily approached, they found that, rather than looming over them, the bulwark had been built only to shoulder height. All the better, Smoke saw it. He held a whispered conference with Louis and they took position near one end.
Less than five minutes went by before a roving sentry appeared on the opposite side of the barricade. Louis Longmont waited until he went past, then rose on tiptoe to stare over the wall.
“Psssst!” Louis hissed.
Galvanized by the unexpected sound, the hard case spun in Louis’s direction, his rifle headed for his shoulder. Smoke Jensen came up behind him and clamped one hand over his mouth, the other on his throat, and yanked him over the wall. Louis stepped close and rapped the man on the head with the butt of his revolver. Smoke tied him tightly and they moved along the wall to wait again.
Another lookout paced his bit of the defenses, his attention wandering between the convivial firelight behind and the thick blackness beyond the bastion. Louis popped up and hissed again when the guard looked inward. He turned abruptly and Smoke hauled him off his feet. He wound up as tightly bound as the first one, unconscious on the outside of the partition.
Smoke and Louis repeated their little ruse until every watcher had been removed from the rampart. With that accomplished, they stole off into the night. When the thugs found their friends in the morning, they might not be so sure the wall would protect them.
* * *
“Here they come!” one lookout shouted from the barricade.
Cyrus Murchison and his riff-raff had only finished cussing and stomping about the waylaid sentries of the night before and gone back to breakfast. That clever bastard, Cyrus Murchison thought of Smoke Jensen. He would be smart enough to wait for the last shift to pull that. They weren’t even missed until daylight. Now, before a man could even enjoy a decent breakfast, the whole lot of that rabble is attacking. With a regretful sigh, Murchison set aside his plate and reached for the rifle resting against a boulder beside him.
“Hold your fire until they get in close,” Heck Grange advised. “Pick a few of them out of the saddle and the rest will turn tail. I know these bumpkins.”
It turned out he didn’t know them as well as he believed. Twenty-four strong, led by Smoke Jensen and Louis Longmont, the vigilante posse rode up toward the barrier. At a hundred yards, those with rifles opened fire. Anyone shooting from a moving horse had to be blessed with a lot of luck. It turned out two of the avengers were.
One hard case made a strangled cry when a bullet tore through his throat. He went down in a welter of blood. Off to the left, a second thug made a harsh grunt when a slug angled off the top of the receiver of his rifle and popped through his right eye. Already misshapen, the hunk of lead shredded a path through his brain and blew out the back of his skull.
That ended all restraint. Rifles crackled along the wall of earth and logs. One volunteer flew from his saddle, shot through the heart. He bounced twice when he reached the ground. Another took a bullet in the shoulder and slumped forward along the neck of his mount. A third, gut-shot, made a pitiful cry and turned his horse aside.
That caused several others to falter. Singly, at first, then the whole body spun their mounts and streaked off downhill to the shelter of a cluster of trees. For the time being, the fight turned into a contest of long-range sniping. Not for long, though.
After half an hour, Smoke Jensen’s Winchester Express flattened a hard case who had bent over to pour a cup of coffee across the fire pit. When several of his comrades ran to his rescue, Smoke exhorted his volunteers.
“Time to hit them again. Mount up and let’s ride.”
21
Whooping like wild Indians, the vigilantes charged the fortifications. Caught unprepared, clearly half of the gunmen were wolfing down biscuits and gulping fresh coffee. Three of them did not make it back to the barrier.
At one hundred yards, the posse opened up again. The exposed men died in that first fusillade. At fifty yards, the toughs who manned the wall began to return fire. At first, they had little effect. Then their jangled nerves smoothed and their bullets began
to find flesh.
Two of Smoke’s volunteers took slugs, one in the shoulder, the other through a thigh. His horse didn’t fare well, either. The hot lead punched through its hide and into a lung. Pink froth appeared on its muzzle and lips and it faltered abruptly, then its legs folded under it and the wounded rider pitched over its head.
“Get me outta here,” he wailed.
A farmer, who fancied himself a good hand at horsemanship, cut to his right and bent at the waist. Arm hooked, he snagged the injured man and yanked him up behind.
“Ow, damn it!” the victim complained ungratefully. “That hurt worse than bein’ shot.”
“Be glad I looked out for you, you old fool,” his rescuer grumped.
Tyler Estes found shooting from horseback to be rather a pain. He had just gotten the hang of it when all the targets disappeared. “Show yourselves and fight like a man,” he challenged, as he jumped his horse to within thirty yards of the wall.
A head appeared, followed by shoulders and a rifle. The gunman fired and cut the hat from the head of Estes. His eyes went wide and he let out a little bleat before he clapped the cheek plate of his rifle to his face and took aim. His horse obediently halted for him and Tyler Estes released the reins for a moment to steady the barrel of his long gun. The .44 Winchester cracked sharply and the head of the thug who had shot at him snapped backward in a shower of red spray.
“That’ll learn ya,” Estes chortled, then wheeled away to find another target.
Another posseman cut across in front of Smoke Jensen, causing the last mountain man to rein in sharply. That saved Smoke’s life, although it did not do much for the unfortunate eager one. He died in Smoke’s place, drilled through the head. The suddenness of it changed Smoke Jensen’s mind. They could never outlast the number of guns they faced.
“Pull back!” he shouted over the crackle of gunfire. “Pull back to the trees.”
* * *
Smoke Jensen led the way to a campsite well out of sight of the forted-up gunmen. When the last of the wounded limped in, Smoke called the posse together. His face wore a serious, concerned expression. The losses they had taken preyed on his mind. These men deserved the opportunity to clean up their own yards, he reckoned. Yet they deserved to live. This fight belonged to him and Louis alone. From here on they would carry it through that way. He told that to them in a calm, quiet voice.
Brian Pullen spoke up forcefully. “Don’t think you are going to get rid of me that easily. I’m in to the end.”
“These . . . honored gentlemen have . . . families . . . and property . . . to care for. It is . . . reasonable that they return to them at this time. But,” Quo Chung Wu went on with a fleeting smile, “it would be . . . unmanly for a priest . . . with neither wife and child . . . nor even a home . . . of my own . . . to take the path of . . . safety. I . . . too . . . will stay . . . beside you.” He bowed to Smoke.
“There’s no need,” Smoke started his protest. Then he correctly read the expression on Quo’s face. “I am honored to have your help,” he amended.
Consternation ran among the men from the Central Valley. “What about us? Ain’t we got a say in this?” one complained.
Smoke Jensen shook his head. “Five of you are dead and seven wounded. You’ve done your share. Now is the time for you to leave the rest to those who are trained for the killing game. Believe me, what we are going to have to do you don’t want on your consciences.”
“You mean you’re goin’ to lynch them all?” Tyler Estes blurted.
“No,” Smoke answered levelly. “Those who give up we’ll let the law handle.”
“When do you want us to leave?” a disappointed posseman asked.
“You don’t have to leave. Come morning, I’m sure Murchison will believe he won a big victory and pull out. We’ll be going after them. You can stay here, rest up for a day or two, and give the wounded a chance to knit some before heading to your homes.”
Tyler Estes scratched the balding spot on the crown of his head, and summed up for all of them. “Well, it’ll be nice to get back to the shop. I reckon little Joey Pitchel will be needin’ a trim, before them red locks o’ his turns into long sissy curls.”
That brought an understanding laugh, yet a gloomy pall settled over the volunteers, even though they faced the happy prospect of safely returning to their homes and families. Smoke Jensen sat long into the night, thinking about it.
* * *
Emboldened by their apparent easy success, particularly when nothing happened during the night, Cyrus Murchison pushed on with his surviving henchmen. He left two men behind to report of the defeated posse. They waited in the shade of a big oak a ways behind the wall, which had been left in place. The drowsy warmth of mid-morning got to them and they soon dozed off.
They heard nothing when the four riders approached. Smoke Jensen saw them at once and halted. Signing the other three to remain silent, he eased over the wall and cautiously closed in on the sleeping men. A fly buzzed around a thick lock of hair that hung down on the forehead of one lout. It had made three more circles by the time Smoke reached the slumbering hard case. Then, as Smoke stepped up to him, it landed on his nose.
With a start and a sodden mutter, the thug took a blind swipe at the offending insect. His last conscious thought must have been that for a darned fly, it sure packed a wallop. Still clutching the cylinder of his .45 Colt, Smoke turned to the other snoozing lout and smacked him on the head also.
* * *
“We’ll take their horses,” he called back to the others. “Without mounts, they won’t go forward. If they move fast, they can catch up to the posse before those fellers leave.”
“That’s cold, Smoke,” Brian Pullen objected. “Leaving a man without a horse in this country can get him killed.”
“Only if he’s stupid. The old mountain men, like Preacher, walked the whole of the High Lonesome more than one time.”
“Mr. Smoke . . . is right, Mr. Brian,” Quo Chung Wu offered. “This is . . . the first time I know of... that one of our Order has . . . ever ridden anywhere. We walked . . . for centuries in China. It is . . . a requirement,” he added with his cheeks flushed.
“I am sure that Tai Chiu will forgive you,” Louis Longmont told Quo Chung Wu.
Quo blushed again. “He . . . already has . . . before we . . . left. I was . . . thinking . . . of the . . . Lord Buddha.”
Smoke pulled a face. “Well, considerin’ what we’re headed into, now’s sure the time to get religion, as Preacher would say.”
Louis Longmont looked from the wall to the unconscious thugs. “Too bad you knocked out those scrudy trash. Now we have to clear the trail ourselves.”
“Allergic to hard, dirty work, Louis?” Smoke jibed.
Louis wrinkled his nose. “Only when I can’t get a bath. We had better proceed.”
It took the four companions an hour to open a pathway through the barricade. With that accomplished, they struck out on the wide trail left by Murchison and his mob. Most of the day’s travel was downhill with only a single file of peaks between them and the long, deceptive grade through a lush meadow that led to Donner Pass.
Smoke estimated they would catch up to Murchison’s gang at that fateful spot where less than forty years ago, men and women stranded by an early blizzard had been forced to commit the most appalling of human failings. Starving in the snow-blocked pass, they had fallen upon the corpses of their fellows to sustain their lives. How ironic it would be if Cyrus Murchison met his end there, Smoke mused.
He would find out, Smoke promised himself, two days from now.
* * *
Shouts of disgust and outrage awakened Cyrus Murchison the next morning. He pulled on trousers and boots and fumbled with sleep-numbed fingers to button his shirt. A quick splash of frigid water removed the gumminess from his eyes. He had gone to bed feeling rather better about their enforced exile.
When the two men left behind to spy out the posse had not returned by nightf
all, he preferred to assume that they had nothing to report so far. Which would indicate, he convinced himself, that Jensen and Longmont and those local malcontents had turned back. Now, this, whatever it turned out to be, riling up the men. He reached for his hat as the flap opened and Heck Grange entered, his face grim, lips drawn in a hard line.
“What is it out there that has them all stirred up?”
Words clipped and sharp-edged, Heck Grange told him. “We’re not shut of Smoke Jensen yet. He was here sometime last night. He left us three of my men as a warning.” Finally the enormity of what he had seen overcame his forced restraint. “Goddamnit, they were strung up by the ankles, throats slit, and bled out like sheep.”
For all his cruel nature, that affected Cyrus Murchison more than anything else. His face went white, his mouth sagged, and he placed the hat on his head with a shaking hand. “That’s an abomination,” he gasped out.
“You haven’t actually seen it as yet. Which you’ll have to do soon or we’ll lose men like rats off a swamped barge.” Grange went on to instruct his employer. “One thing you should point out is that it looks like one of the boys got a piece of Jensen. His knife is bloody.”
Murchison pursed his thick lips. “More likely, Jensen used it to do for them.”
Grange studied on that a moment. “I don’t think so. The knife was on the ground, right below his outstretched hand, which was bloody, too.”
Cyrus drew himself up. “Well, then, we’ll dwell on that. Anything to keep the men together.”
It proved to be too little, too late. Already, three of Huntley’s remaining longshoremen had pulled stakes and left camp. By nightfall, five more would desert the cause.
* * *
Tom, Dick, and Harry Newcomb—their father obviously had a twisted sense of humor—topped the first rise outside Murchison’s camp and started on the long downgrade to the valley floor. For defeated men, they showed considerable energy in the way they kept their heads up and studied their surroundings in great detail. It did them little good, though. They rode right past two men sheltered in a thicket of brush along the trail.
Power of the Mountain Man Page 48