Rope Burn
Page 1
Look for these exciting Western series from
bestselling authors
WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE
and J. A. JOHNSTONE
The Mountain Man
Preacher: The First Mountain Man
Luke Jensen, Bounty Hunter
Those Jensen Boys!
The Jensen Brand
Matt Jensen
MacCallister
The Red Ryan Westerns
Perley Gates
Have Brides, Will Travel
The Hank Fallon Westerns
Will Tanner, Deputy U.S. Marshal
Shotgun Johnny
The Chuckwagon Trail
The Jackals
The Slash and Pecos Westerns
The Texas Moonshiners
AVAILABLE FROM PINNACLE BOOKS
THOSE JENSEN BOYS! ROPE BURN
WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE and J. A. JOHNSTONE
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
THE JENSEN FAMILY FIRST FAMILY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Teaser chapter
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2020 J. A. Johnstone
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
PINNACLE BOOKS, the Pinnacle logo, and the WWJ steer head logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-7860-4430-6
Electronic edition:
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4431-3 (e-book)
ISBN-10: 0-7860-4431-4 (e-book)
THE JENSEN FAMILY FIRST FAMILY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER
Smoke Jensen—The Mountain Man
The youngest of three children and orphaned as a young boy, Smoke Jensen is considered one of the fastest draws in the West. His quest to tame the lawless West has become the stuff of legend. Smoke owns the Sugarloaf Ranch in Colorado. Married to Sally Jensen, father to Denise (“Denny”) and Louis.
Preacher—The First Mountain Man
Though not a blood relative, grizzled frontiersman Preacher became a father figure to the young Smoke Jensen, teaching him how to survive in the brutal, often deadly Rocky Mountains. Fought the battles that forged his destiny. Armed with a long gun, Preacher is as fierce as the land itself.
Matt Jensen—The Last Mountain Man
Orphaned but taken in by Smoke Jensen, Matt Jensen has become like a younger brother to Smoke and even took the Jensen name. And like Smoke, Matt has carved out his destiny on the American frontier. He lives by the gun and surrenders to no man.
Luke Jensen—Bounty Hunter
Mountain Man Smoke Jensen’s long-lost brother Luke Jensen is scarred by war and a dead shot—the right qualities to be a bounty hunter. And he’s cunning, and fierce enough, to bring down the deadliest outlaws of his day.
Ace Jensen and Chance Jensen—Those Jensen Boys!
Smoke Jensen’s long-lost nephews, Ace and Chance, are a pair of young-gun twins as reckless and wild as the frontier itself . . . Their father is Luke Jensen, thought killed in the Civil War. Their uncle Smoke Jensen is one of the fiercest gunfighters the West has ever known. It’s no surprise that the inseparable Ace and Chance Jensen have a knack for taking risks—even if they have to blast their way out of them.
CHAPTER ONE
The soldier with the ugly scar on his cheek cursed and shouted, “I’m gonna whale the tar outta you, you stinkin’ little whelp!”
Ace Jensen held his hands up, palms out, and said, “Take it easy, mister. He didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Like fire I didn’t mean anything!” Chance Jensen, Ace’s brother, said. “If that lout doesn’t get his hands off her, he’s going to get the thrashing he deserves!”
Through gritted teeth and from the corner of his mouth, Ace said, “Blast it, Chance. We’re outnumbered four to one, here.”
“I don’t care. I’m not going to stand by and allow him to manhandle that poor girl like that.”
The man with the scar grinned at his fellow cavalry troopers. “This is gonna be fun, boys.”
“You want us to help you, Vince?” one of them asked.
“Naw. I won’t need any help with this little pip-squeak. Just sit back and enjoy the show.”
The soldier clenched his fists and stalked toward Ace and Chance. He had the three yellow stripes of a sergeant sewed on the sleeve of his blue uniform shirt. His brawny shoulders stretched the fabric of that shirt. His forage cap was pushed back on his bullet-shaped head.
“Fun, he calls it,” Ace muttered. “I’d like to know how come we keep winding up in so much fun.”
“Just lucky, I guess,” Chance told him.
Behind the bar, the apron-wearing drink juggler said nervously, “Sergeant MacDonald, why don’t you and these fellas take your problem outside?”
“Too late for that,” the three-striper replied. “I want Honey to see what I’m g
onna do to this little varmint.”
He rushed at Chance, swinging a roundhouse punch at the young man’s head.
Chance ducked under the sweeping blow and hammered a right hook into the sergeant’s midsection. It was like punching a wall and didn’t do a thing to slow him down. The sergeant’s momentum carried him into Chance, and his weight drove the young man against the bar. Chance cried out in pain as his back struck the hardwood’s edge.
As a general rule, Ace let his brother fight his own battles, but hearing Chance yell like that triggered anger inside Ace. He stepped in and slammed the side of his right fist against the sergeant’s skull, just above the left ear. That was enough to distract the man from his attempt to get his hands around Chance’s throat while he had him pinned to the bar.
It set off the sergeant’s companions, too. One of them yelled, “They’re gangin’ up on the sarge, boys! Let’s get ’em!”
The seven men surged out of their chairs and rushed from the table where they had been sitting and passing around a couple of bottles of forty rod. They came at Ace and Chance like a buffalo stampede. The saloon’s other customers, already edging away from the battle between Chance and the sergeant, stampeded, too—toward the batwing doors to get out of there. Behind the bar, the apron howled in dismay at the beating his establishment was about to take.
The scarred noncom still crowded Chance against the bar. Chance cupped his hands and clapped them over the man’s ears as hard as he could. The pain from that, combined with the blow to the head that Ace had given him, made the sergeant stagger back a couple of steps.
That gave Chance enough room to go after him. Knowing it wouldn’t do any good to punch the man in his rock-hard belly, Chance went after his face instead. He landed a swift left-right combination, the straight right landing solidly on the scar that ran from the left corner of the sergeant’s mouth up past his left eye. Somebody had laid his face open with a knife in some previous fracas.
Meanwhile, one of the other troopers had reached Ace. The man tried to grab him, but Ace got hold of the man’s arm instead, pivoted, threw a hip into him, bent, and hauled the man off his feet. The trooper let out a surprised yell as he flew through the air and crashed down on his back.
Over by the table where the men had been sitting, the heavily painted saloon girl who had set off this explosion of fisticuffs by yelping when the sergeant got too rough in his pawing of her clapped her hands to her cheeks and screamed. The cry had sort of a perfunctory sound to it, as if she had witnessed dozens of brawls like this and knew the part she was supposed to play in it.
Ace tried to avoid the other men who came after him, but there were too many of them. Two of them seized his arms and forced him back against the bar. Another man loomed in front of Ace, fists poised to move in and pound him while the other two held him.
Instead, Ace drew his legs up and lashed out with them. His boot heels caught the attacker in the chest and flung him backward, completely out of control. He came down atop a table, the legs of which cracked under the impact and dumped him on the floor amidst the debris.
That only worked once, though, because as Ace’s legs dropped after that kick, a second man took the first one’s place and pummeled him, throwing hard fists into the young man’s face and rocking his head back and forth. Ace tasted blood in his mouth and his vision began to blur.
A few feet away, Chance still battled with the sergeant. Chance was stronger than he looked, so he was able to stand toe to toe with the burly noncom and slug it out for a few moments. The real advantage Chance had was his quickness. He avoided some of the punches, drew the sergeant in, and then reached behind him to pluck a bottle of whiskey off the bar. He had spotted it a second earlier from the corner of his eye. Holding the bottle by the neck, he slammed it over the sergeant’s head.
Chance expected the bottle to break, but it landed with a dull thud and remained intact. The sergeant grunted and his eyes rolled up in their sockets. He managed to keep his feet, but he was only half conscious. Chance dropped the bottle, lowered his right shoulder, and rammed it into the sergeant’s chest as he drove hard with his feet. That knocked the sergeant backward into the men holding Ace.
Legs tangled, and everybody went down, including Ace and Chance. The wild melee continued on the floor now, where sawdust damp from spilled beer and spit soon coated the clothing of all the men. A fight like this had only one rule: survive. Ace and Chance punched, kicked, gouged, and even bit.
Ace scrapped his way to his feet. One of the troopers made it upright, as well, and clambered onto the bar. Ace wasn’t sure what the man had in mind, but then it became clear as the trooper started trying to kick him in the head.
Ace jerked aside and avoided the first kick. Before the soldier could try again, his other foot slipped on a puddle of beer on the bar and that leg shot out from under him. He windmilled his arms in a frantic attempt to keep his balance but toppled off the bar, bouncing on the backbar and taking down several shelves of whiskey bottles. These broke with a great shattering sound, and the liquor’s raw reek filled the air.
Chance grabbed hold of the bar and pulled himself to his feet next to Ace. The brothers, battered, filthy, in torn clothes, stood back to back and cocked their fists, ready to continue the battle if need be.
Only three of the troopers were still in any shape to fight. The others, including the scarred sergeant who seemed to be their ringleader, sprawled around in various stages of stupor, groaning and shaking their heads. The three who had suffered less stumbled upright and looked at each other, obviously unwilling to carry on but not wanting to be the ones to surrender, either, especially when they still outnumbered the two young strangers.
The boom of a shotgun blast took the decision out of their hands. Everyone in the saloon still coherent enough to do so turned to look at the entrance, where a man had just slapped the batwings aside and come into the place. He leveled the Greener in his hands, with its still unfired barrel, at the men standing in front of the bar and yelled, “The next man who moves is gettin’ a load of buckshot in his guts, and I don’t care who else gets ventilated, neither!”
CHAPTER TWO
The stocky, middle-aged newcomer had a graying mustache, a beefy face, and perhaps most important—other than the shotgun—a badge pinned to his vest. His eyes flashed with anger, and he looked perfectly capable of pulling the trigger and scything down several of the combatants with hot lead.
“Hold your fire, Marshal,” Ace said, being careful to keep his hands in plain sight, in a nonthreatening manner. Beside him, Chance did likewise. The three soldiers who were on their feet didn’t try anything, either. Nobody wanted the lawman getting trigger-happy.
The badge-toter stomped forward a couple of steps and gestured with the shotgun. “You soldier boys get over there by the bar,” he ordered. “I’d ask what’s goin’ on here, but that’s pretty obvious, ain’t it?” He raised his voice. “Hey, Putnam! Where are you?”
Ace recalled the sign painted on the saloon’s false front. He and Chance had seen it when they rode into the small settlement of Packsaddle, Arizona Territory, about an hour earlier. PUTNAM’S SALOON, the sign read, so it was reasonably safe to assume that the bartender was also the proprietor, since he’d been the only one working in the place other than the blond girl.
She spoke up now as she pointed a trembling finger toward the bar. “He’s back there, Marshal. One of those soldiers fell on him when all those bottles got knocked down and busted.”
“Putnam!” the lawman called again. When he got no response, he told Ace and Chance, “Move on down there with those troopers. Don’t try anything.”
“We won’t, Marshal,” Ace said. “We’re not looking for trouble.”
“That’s a blamed lie,” one of the soldiers said. “They came in here and picked a fight with Sergeant MacDonald for no good reason!”
Chance started to respond hotly to that, but Ace said, “Keep your shirt on. We’ll get a chance to
tell our side of the story.”
He hoped that was true.
The lawman herded Ace, Chance, and the three soldiers down to the far end of the bar, then said to the girl, “Honey, you take a look back there and see if Putnam is all right.”
She looked like she didn’t want to do that but was too scared not to obey the order. She approached the bar, rested her hands on it, and leaned forward, sticking her head out and craning her neck to see.
Then she took a fast step backward and cried out again.
“What in blazes is wrong?” the marshal demanded.
“It . . . it’s Mr. P-Putnam,” Honey said. “I think he’s dead!”
“Dead! What in blazes?”
The marshal kept the shotgun trained on his prisoners as he moved around the far end of the bar and looked along the floor behind it. He started to curse and sounded as surprised as he did angry.
Ace risked leaning over the bar to have a look for himself. He saw the sprawled body of the trooper who had fallen off the bar while trying to kick him in the head. He appeared to be out cold, but his chest rose and fell.
Underneath the trooper lay the bartender. Broken glass from the bottles and a big pool of spilled whiskey surrounded both men. At first glance, Ace couldn’t tell what Honey and the marshal were talking about, but then he looked closer, saw the unnatural angle of the bartender’s neck, and realized that the man’s eyes were open and staring sightlessly at the ceiling.
“Is he . . . ?” Chance asked in a half-whisper.
“Yeah,” Ace said. “Looks like he broke his neck when he got knocked down.”
“It was that trooper who did it—”
“That’s a lie!” a soldier yelled. “It wasn’t Haygood’s fault! That varmint right there done it!”