“We are two hundred ten strong as of this morning, Excellency,” Ignacio Quintero informed him.
“Will we be any stronger this time tomorrow, or the day after?”
“Who is to say, Excellency? There are men coming in all the time.”
“Humm. So, we wait a while. To the end of this week. We will attack on Sunday morning, just in time for Mass, eh?”
Although greatly weakened, Smoke Jensen made an inspection of the defensive works the next morning. Warm fall sun on his back did wonders to restore him. By noon he felt nearly his old self. He took the noon meal with his friends.
“You’ve done a good job,” he praised. “There isn’t anything I would change. All we have to do is wait. We could use a little scout-around to see Carvajal’s degree of readiness.”
“I’ll send some of the vaqueros,” Martine offered. “They know how to get around unseen.”
“No. I think I need to do this myself.”
“Impossible, Smoke,” Carbone protested. “You nearly died only days ago. You are in no condition to undertake any long ride around Carvajal’s army.”
“Esteban is right, Smoke,” Martine added his support. “Think what would happen if the dysentery came back.”
“It’s not,” Smoke spoke decisively. “I’m drinking only boiled water and peeled, cooked vegetables. No more flirting with Montezuma. Besides, I figure to reduce the odds a bit on this trip, spread a little worry among the hardcases.”
Sighing, Carbone cut his eyes to Martine, who shared his expression of resignation. Short of tying him down, they could do nothing to stop Smoke Jensen.
After Smoke’s departure, four spies, in the employ of Gustavo Carvajal, managed to evade discovery and snuck out of Pueblo Viejo. Once certain they had not been followed, they stopped to decide their course of action. One made a troublesome suggestion.
“It will be easy. He will not be expecting us. We can sneak up and kill Smoke Jensen and take his head to El Rey del Norte for the five thousand peso reward.”
“You are crazy. Have you not seen or heard of the terrible speed of his gun?” one of the quartet objected. “We would not stand a chance.”
“Yes, we do. He has to sleep sometime. We can sneak up then and all shoot into him at once.”
“I say we go make our report on what has been done to the village. It is important for El Rey to know these things.”
“You, too, Chatto?” the bloodthirsty one said sadly. “Listen to me. How much bigger our reward if we kill Smoke Jensen, too? Think about that, hombre.”
“You have a point, Geraldo. It would be like opening a big old safe and finding something in it,” Alberto suggested.
“Exactly. In our case it will be a big stack of ten peso gold pieces,” Geraldo described for them.
“Still, I think, the report …”
“Be quiet, Chatto,” Alberto griped. “I say we can do it. You are ready to lead us, Geraldo?”
“Of a certainty. We can follow him easily. Then, tonight we can do it.”
“We must do it quickly,” Chatto pointed out.
“Of course,” Geraldo responded warmly, satisfied he had won over the other three. “That’s the way we do it. Quick like a cat, eh?”
Smoke Jensen heard the soft crunch of gravel under bull-hide sandal soles. Quietly he eased back the hammer of his .44, and waited, unmoving. The fire burned low, nothing more than a bed of embers. An owl hooted. Far off another nightbird gave a cry of victory as it seized its small prey off the ground. Four youthful figures appeared around the edge of the lighted area. As one they raised the revolvers in their hands and pumped three rounds each into the figure reclining under a blanket.
It jumped and twitched with the impact. In the shocking silence that followed, a voice sounded eerie as it came from a dark jumble of boulders. “Picked the wrong target. I’m over here.”
Horror filled Chatto as all four turned at once, raising the muzzles of their .45 Mendozas. Bright yellow-orange lighted a crevice in the nearest boulder as a powerful Winchester .45-70-500 Express fired at them. Alberto screamed and went down, shot through the hips. It had been a lucky shot, Smoke Jensen knew as he released the end of the twine attached to the trigger.
Hot lead howled off rock as the traitors of Pueblo Viejo blasted in response to the wounding shot. By then, Smoke had circled from the jumble of rocks and appeared at the edge of firelight on their right flank.
“Not your night,” he told them, then shot Chatto through the chest.
Immediately he dived into the covering darkness and crawled away from the spot. Geraldo and his friend, the surviving pair, reacted instantly. Frantically, they emptied their six-guns in the wrong direction. Silence came, broken by the click of their cylinders as they reloaded and soft sobs from the wounded Alberto.
“Can you still shoot?” Geraldo asked him.
“Yes. I think I can. If someone can sit me up, against those rocks.”
“Do it, Valdez,” Geraldo commanded.
“I think this is crazy,” Valdez protested. “We should take Alberto and get away from here.”
“Wise words,” Smoke said from behind them.
They whirled together. Geraldo fired a split second before Smoke. His bullet came close enough to Smoke that he could feel the wind of its passage. It clipped bark from a tree and howled off into the night. Smoke’s slug took Geraldo in the stomach. He went to his knees. In desperation, Valdez discharged his Mendoza wildly. Bullets peppered the air. Two cracked close by Smoke’s ear, and he shot the panicked spy between the eyes. Smoke started forward to where Geraldo tottered and tried feebly to raise his six-gun.
A shot blasted from the base of the rocks. It tore skin over the top of Smoke’s left shoulder. Careless, he blamed himself. He had not been watching the wounded Alberto. Must still be fog in his brain from his illness. He noticed Alberto now, .44 tracking onto the pelvis-shattered traitor.
Wide-eyed in terror, Alberto threw out his hands in appeal, palms facing Smoke Jensen. “No!” he shrieked.
Smoke’s bullet punched a neat hole through Alberto’s left palm before it smacked into his chest and burst his heart. He gave a mighty shudder and relaxed against the rocks in death.
“You knew we were after you,” Geraldo panted through his agony.
“I saw you go over the wall,” Smoke told him. “Kept an eye on you from then on.”
“We—we walked into a trap.”
“You were stupid. And I suspect greedy,” Smoke gave him without pity.
Geraldo tried to speak again, but a fountain of blood welled up in his throat and spilled from his lips. He bent at the waist and ended up a human arch, with his forehead on the ground.
“Carvajal needs to pick a better caliber of men,” Smoke Jensen observed to the dead.
Mid-morning heat made the bullet scrape sting on Smoke’s shoulder. He endured it until he identified the type of moss he wanted, removed it from the tree and soaked it in water. This he applied and the discomfort reduced to a level he could handle. Having hovered so close to death recently, Smoke’s thoughts began to weigh up the close scrapes he had endured over the years.
There had been too many, he allowed. Far and away he saw the figure of Preacher standing in a clearing and a skinny, if wide-shouldered, kid looking up at him in awe.
“You mean you can make the hurt go out of a cut or somethin’ with that?” the young Smoke Jensen asked.
“Sure’s shootin’,” Preacher advised. “Ol’ Injun trick. They use roots and herbs and such for medicine. Now our fancy doctors pooh-pooh that sort of thing. But it’s worked for the Cheyenne an’ Blackfeet an’ such for more years than I can think about. Say you got a big head from some pop-skull at Rendezvous. You gather a little red willow bark, scrape the lining off of the inside and pound it in a mortar. Mix it with some coffee or such-like and swaller her down. Next thing you know, the headache is gone.”
“You know most about everything, don’t you, Preacher.”
“I wouldn’t say that, youngin’. But I know a little somethin’ about most things. Now lemme put this moss on your head there. Sure that fall from the tree didn’t make you a little addle-pated?”
“Huh? I’m not dizzy or anything, if that’s what you mean. Does that sting?”
“Nope.”
“Then I’m ready,” young Smoke offered.
To this day, a small white scar remained on his forehead from where he’d struck a rock after a fall from a bee tree. The multiple stings he had received, in an attempt to raid the honey in the tree, Preacher treated with a paste of alum and willow bark. Smoke smiled fondly at the recollection. If he hadn’t been so light, a condition that mountain man cooking soon rectified, Preacher had sworn he would have been squashed like a bug when he hit the ground. Close call number one.
If one didn’t count his childhood. Smoke rarely looked beyond the mental veil he had put between life with and life before Preacher. Now he admitted as he rode along that it had been something out of that buried past that had opened his compassionate nature to Bobby Harris. For the hundredth time, Smoke wondered how Sally was taking to the boy.
Yes, there had been days of danger, violence and death when he had traveled the far fringes of the frontier with Preacher. Some of his greatest memories of beauty and serenity came during those years, too. Smoke mulled over the dangerous time, many years later, when that lunatic German count had set up an expedition to hunt him down like a wild animal. That had been one hell of a cattle-buying trip.
He recalled the troubles that had taken him to Montana to settle the hash for Clint Black. It had started out as a trail drive of 3,500 head to a buyer in Montana. Smoke had taken literal cowboys along, lads hired from local ranches aged from fourteen to sixteen. Some had gotten murdered by riders for the Circle .45 Ranch of Clint Black. Others became men in the fight to avenge their friends and end the rein of terror conducted by Black. His ruminations brought Smoke to a surprising conclusion.
Taken in all, Smoke worked around the burgeoning idea, the essence of growing up, or growing older, is not that one acquires wisdom. Rather that one has memories, a sort of scale in which to balance the experiences of life. If a man could keep that balance level, he could be said to have had a rich life indeed.
Smoke Jensen took a circuitous route to the valley campsite. He arrived to find it deserted. All that remained were the litter, scars, and destruction caused by careless, indifferent men. Smoke searched around and found a few ammunition and food caches. Apparently the outlaw army intended to return. He rigged them with bundles of blasting powder and long fuses. After lighting them, he got well clear and let them blow.
Reasoning rightly that the army was on the move, Smoke chose the direct trail out of the mountains. In the open, he would be more vulnerable, Smoke assumed. He hated to admit it to himself, but his body rebelled against further strain. Less than three days away from delirium and fever, he had already come close to taxing his reserve of energy to the maximum. He pondered the wisdom of heading directly for Pueblo Viejo.
Naah, his fighting spirit urged him. Much better that Carvajal’s army arrive to put the village under siege in a demoralized condition. He recalled a story Preacher had told him about the Cheyenne. It had happened in the olden times, before the horse.
Warfare had been carried out then on foot. A Cheyenne war party had set out to revenge some child-stealing by a band of Flatheads, according to Preacher. They made their outward journey without incident. Carefully the leader planned their attack on the village.
While the Flatheads slept, the Cheyennes scaled the lodge pole pine stockade around the enemy camp. Like shadows they flitted through the open spaces between birch bark lodges. “One old man who couldn’t sleep got clonked on the noggin,” Preacher related. “Other than that, them fellers found all but one of their stolen children and strode out the main gate bold as brass.”
They went down a swift river in stolen canoes. The old man survived and described the raiders to his brother Flatheads. A party set out at once. A count of damaged canoes left behind told them the number taken by the Cheyenne. They ran along the bank of the river until they found the place where their enemy had come ashore. Then they took off with the speed of a wolfpack.
“They caught up to the Cheyennes, who were slowed by the youngins. The fighting was fierce. The Cheyennes broke off and got to a narrow pass that led down out of Flathead country,” Preacher told Smoke. “Two of them had been so badly wounded they could not keep on the trail. They stayed behind to hold off the Flatheads while their friends took the kids home.
“Well, sir, their defense was so awesome that the Flatheads lost heart and quit the fight. They never went after the raiding party. The bones of the two heroes were recovered the next summer. Now the point of all that, Smoke, is that even if you are bad hurt, but can still demoralize your enemy, chances are he’ll not carry on the fight. Those warriors gave their lives for their brothers, but at such a cost the Flatheads didn’t want any part of unwounded Cheyennes.”
Smoke Jensen smiled at his reverie. Leave it to old Preacher to have as many parables as the Carpenter from Nazareth. Though Preacher’s stories of life and how to live it were a considerable lot more bloody than those told on the shores of Galilee. Which brought his thoughts around to something that had been nudging him since his bout of dysentery.
He and Sally attended church irregularly at best. Having been reared and educated for the most part in the High Lonesome, the white man’s God seemed not so practical as the beliefs of the Indian tribes he had encountered, or the quiet, often unspoken, reverence of the mountain men. Yet, dredged from his delirium, Smoke held a vague memory of the finger of God reaching out of a cloud to touch him when he lay at his lowest point, teetering on the lip of death. He would have to look into that, ponder it. Perhaps he would even share the imperfectly recalled experience with Sally.
Steeling himself to fatigue and discomfort, Smoke put aside his study of mysticism and directed Sidewinder into a ground-eating lope. He wanted to catch up to Carvajal’s army as far from their intended target as possible.
By his second night out, he knew he could not be far away. The signs had grown fresher, men long in the saddle had grown incautious. Directed by their outlaw natures, lacking the discipline of seasoned soldiers, they began to cast off broken gear, the corn husk wrappings of tamales, papers that had held tortillas. Smoke had a regular trash trail to follow. He made camp early, so as to be able to eat a warm meal and enjoy coffee before darkness fell.
After the meal, his tiny, smokeless fire buried under handfuls of dirt, Smoke settled in to wait. The onset of darkness gave him confirmation of his closeness to the bandit horde. Many fires put an orange glow on the horizon. Once the blazes died down, and the lethargy of midnight settled over the enemy camp, Smoke made his move.
Twenty-four
True to form, Carvajal had sentries out riding circuit around the camp. Smoke found them as sloppy and inattentive as ever. After careful study of their circuits, and a positive count of numbers, he angled into position to intercept the first of his victims.
Smoke first came upon a pair, who had drifted together to share a smoke, a bottle and some chatter. He worked up a wide lariat loop and dropped it over the both of them when one leaned close to accept a light for his small, crooked cigar.
Sidewinder’s jump-start yanked them off their mounts with enough force to drive the air from their lungs. Smoke followed up his advantage by trotting back on them, the line kept taut. The black eye of his .44 muzzle looked down on the pair, who struggled for breath.
“Do you two like what you’re doing?” Smoke asked quietly.
“For one, Señor, I have done more pleasant things,” a slender, rat-faced individual replied with equal quiet, forcing his lungs to fill again.
“Would you like to go back to doing them? Think hard. Your life depends on it.”
The other hardcase worked his mustache-encircled
mouth into a sneer of contempt. “You would not use your gun, Señor.”
“No. I’d get down and slit your throats,” Smoke told him coldly.
Frightened, the rodent-faced one blurted, “He means it, Anuncio.”
Anuncio Conti spat at the hoofs of Smoke’s horse. “He hasn’t the cojónes for that.”
Still covering them with the .44 Colt, Smoke dismounted and crouched close to Conti. His Bowie appeared in his left hand, the keen edge glowed a wicked blue in the pale light of the new moon.
“I’ve got balls enough,” Smoke told him levelly. “Do you want to try me?”
“Jesus, Maria, y José,” Conti’s small companion squeaked. “Look what your mouth has brought on us, Anuncio.”
Still defiant, Conti snarled at him, “And you run your mouth like a frightened woman, Gabriel. Do your worst, gringo.”
Smoke laid the barrel of his .44 against Conti’s temple with enough force to make a deep give in the bone. Gabriel watched wide-eyed. He swallowed with difficulty.
“It is he who said those things, Señor, not I. I would be most grateful to leave this madman’s army and go back to my home.”
“And where is that?”
“Jalisco.”
“What did you do there?”
“I—I was a—a bandit.”
“Too bad,” Smoke informed him, then batted Gabriel alongside the head.
Quickly he stripped them naked and tied them with short lengths of rope. Smoke hefted them belly down over their saddles and secured ankles to wrists. The small one would awaken with a powerful headache. Conti would wake up in Hell. That accomplished, he faded off into the night.
Three boys, not a one over seventeen, drew comfort from the presence of one another. They had come because their fathers had answered a call to join El Rey del Norte. In the presence of the hard-bitten outlaws they swaggered and made loud noises about what they would do to Miguel Martine and Esteban Carbone. Alone on sentry duty they admitted to themselves that it was all show. They sought each other in the night to inflate their courage. What they found was Smoke Jensen.
Fury of the Mountain Man Page 23
