Code of the Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  “Not really,” Mills told him, a tight smile on his lips. “It means anyone who will follow another’s orders for money – such as a thug or a mercenary.”

  Smoke was half turned, his left side facing the crowded table area. “When he gets up, Mills,” he whispered, his lips just barely moving, “kill him.”

  Mills shook his head minutely. “I can’t do that, Smoke.”

  The cowboy pushed back his chair. “Are you callin’ me a thug, Whisde-Britches?”

  “Get ready,” Smoke whispered. “Cock that Greener, Mills.”

  “Actually, no,” Mills raised his voice. “I was merely explaining to you the dictionary definition of a hireling. If you take exception to my remark, then you must have a low opinion of yourself.”

  “Huh?” the cowboy said.

  “Charlie,” another hand said. “I think he done insulted you. But I ain’t real sure.”

  Luttie and Jake were staying out of it. Luttie had voiced his objections about his hands’ needling any further, so in a court of law, he would be clear of any wrongdoing. But courts of law didn’t impress Smoke Jensen. Six-gun action was much more to his liking.

  “That remark of mine would only be taken as a blot on one’s escutcheon if the party to whom it was directed was in actuality, a thug or mercenary,” Mills further confused the cowboy and most of his buddies, including his boss and the foreman.

  “What’d he say?” Jake whispered to Luttie.

  “Hell, don’t ask me. Sounded dirty.”

  “Gawddam, boy!” another Seven Slash hand said. “Cain’t you talk English?”

  “I was,” Mills responded.

  “A blot on one’s escutcheon comes from medieval times,” a man spoke from a corner table. Smoke cut his eyes. The man wore a dark suit with a white shirt and string tie. He’d seen him get off the stage earlier. “An escutcheon is a shield, upon which a coat of arms was painted. In other words, it means a stain on one’s honor.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Charlie demanded.

  “No one who would associate with the likes of you,” the stranger said.

  “Damn, Charlie,” a hand said. “I think the stranger done insulted you, too.”

  “Now, look here,” Charlie said. “I’m gettin’ tarred of being in-sulted.”

  “You could always leave,” Smoke offered him an option.

  “And you could always shut your trap,” Charlie told him.

  “I’m right here, Charlie,” Smoke told him. “Anytime you think you have the cojones to brace me without all your buddies to back you up.”

  Nice way of making him stand alone whether he fishes or cuts bait, Moss thought. I’ll keep that in mind.

  The cowboy looked hard at Smoke and then sat down without another word.

  “You just saved your own life, cowboy,” the stranger said, rifling a deck of cards.

  Charlie mumbled something and concentrated on his beer.

  It isn’t going to work, Luttie thought, staring at Smoke. The man is just too damn sure of himself and has the reputation to back it up. He’s ... Luttie couldn’t think of the word, right off.

  “Intimidating” was what he was searching for.

  And who in the devil was that stranger sitting over there? He didn’t think Jensen knew who he was either.

  Smoke could sense the steam going out of the hardcases seated around the saloon. Four double-barreled Greeners at this distance would take out about half the crowd, inflicting horrible wounds on those they didn’t kill outright. He’d seen men soak up five .44 caliber slugs and still stay on their boots and keep on coming. He had never seen anybody take a close-up shotgun blast and keep going.

  Smoke watched as Luttie and Jake exchanged glances. Both men knew that whatever momentum they might have had was gone.

  “Drink your drinks, play cards, do some tobacco buying or whatever,” Smoke told them. “First one of you that makes trouble, I either put in jail or kill. Let’s go, boys.”

  Before he could leave the bar, a young man jumped to his boots. “They call me Sandy!” he yelled. “And I say without that shotgun, you ain’t nothin’, Jensen.”

  “Don’t be a fool, lad,” the stranger said. “You don’t have a prayer. Sit down and shut up and live.”

  “You don’t show me nothin’ either, mister!” Sandy said.

  “Don’t crowd me, lad,” the stranger said. “I came into town to do some gambling and some relaxing on my way to California. I have no quarrel with you. So don’t crowd me.”

  “Stand up, you funny talkin’ dude!” Sandy yelled.

  Smoke placed the man then. The accent had been worrying him. Earl Sutcliffe. And the Earl was not a first name. He really was an earl over in England. At least he had been until he killed a man after a game of chance (the man had been cheating); The man had been a duke, which was higher than an earl, and a man of considerable power. A murder warrant had been issued for Sutcliffe, and he had fled to America. Here he had made a name for himself as a very good and very honest gambler... and one hell of a gunfighter.

  “That’s Earl Sutcliffe, Sandy,” Smoke said. “Sit down and finish your beer, and there’ll be no hard feelings.”

  Earl Sutcliffe! Luttie thought. Now what in the hell was he doing in this jerkwater town?

  “Stand up, Sutcliffe!” Sandy yelled the words that would start his dying on this day.

  “Here now!” Mills said. “You men stop this immediately.”

  “Shut up,” Smoke told him. “This is none of your affair.”

  Mills gave him a dirty look. But he closed his mouth.

  “I said stand up!” Sandy yelled.

  Earl put down the deck of cards and pushed back from the table. He slowly stood up, brushing back his coat on the right side.

  “Primitive rites of manhood,” Mills said in a whisper.

  “Young man,” Earl said. “I do not wish to kill you.”

  “You kill me?” Sandy snorted the words. “Dude, you the one that’s gonna die.”

  “I don’t think so. But I suppose stranger things have happened.” Without taking his eyes off of Sandy, Earl spoke to Luttie. “You are his employer. You could order him to stop this madness.”

  “Sorry, Earl. The kid’s on his own time today. What’s the matter, you afraid of him?”

  Earl smiled. “One more time, lad: give this up.”

  Sandy smiled, sure of himself, his youthfulness overriding caution. The young think of death only as something that happens to someone else, never themselves. “Anytime you’re ready,” he told the Englishman.

  Sutcliffe shot him. The draw was as fast as a striking rattler. The kid never had a chance to clear leather. The slug took him in high in the chest, driving through a lung and slamming him back, sitting him back down in the chair he should have stayed in ... with his mouth closed.

  He opened his mouth and blood stained his lips as he struggled to speak. “You! ...” he managed to gasp.

  “Sorry, lad,” Earl said, holstering his six-gun. “I tried to tell you.”

  “Tell me! ...” Sandy said.

  “It’s too late, now,” Earl’s words were softly offered.

  “I’m cold,” Sandy said.

  Mills shook his head as he watched the young man hover between life and death, with death racing to embrace him, rudely shoving life aside.

  Luttie’s hands sat silent, occasionally letting their eyes shift to the muzzles of those deadly sawed-off shotguns, all four of them pointed in their direction. To a man they wanted blood-revenge, but to a man they all knew that this was not the time or the place.

  “I’ll be damned!” Sandy suddenly blurted. “Would you just look at that!”

  “What are you seein’?” Charlie asked him, his words just above a whisper.

  “You hear that?” the kid said, as blood dripped from his mouth onto his shirt front.

  “What are you hearin’?” Charlie asked him.

  Sandy’s head lolled to one side, and he closed his eyes
.

  “Nothing, now,” Mills said. “He just died.”

  * * *

  The Seven Slash men rode out shortly after Sandy died. They took the body with them, to be buried on Seven Slash range.

  “They’ll be back,” Smoke said. “Tomorrow, next week, next month. But they’ll be back. And when they come back, they’ll do their damnest to tear this town apart.”

  “I concur,” Mills said.

  “That was pushed on me,” Earl said. He had sat back down and was shuffling a deck of cards. “I really did not want to kill the lad.”

  “I know it,” Smoke told him. “I’ve had a hundred pushed on me.”

  “What’s going on in this town?” the Englishman asked. “I stopped here because it seemed so peaceful.”

  Smoke had the barkeep draw him a mug of beer and carried it over to Earl’s table, pulling out a chair and sitting down. “How’d you like to be a deputy sheriff of this county?”

  Earl looked startled. “I beg your pardon?”

  Smoke smiled and Mills laughed out loud.

  “If you’ve got some time to spare, I’m authorized to pay you fifty dollars a month as a deputy.”

  “Fifty dollars a month?” Earl said, a smile not only on his lips but also reaching his eyes. “My, how could I possibly refuse such a generous offer?”

  “There is a bedroom in the back of the jail,” Smoke said. “And you can take your meals over at Bonnie’s Cafe. Providing the cook isn’t drunk.”

  “Oh, I say, now. And bed and board is included too. I suppose I could spare a couple of weeks to lend a hand in the keeping of law and order.”

  “We’ll be facing anywhere from fifty to seventy-five hardcases, Earl,” Smoke felt obliged to tell the man. “Maybe more than that.”

  Earl arched one eyebrow. “This sounds intriguing. You have certainly piqued my curiosity, Mr. Jensen.”

  “Smoke.”

  “Very well ... Smoke, it is. Let’s take a stroll over to the livery and choose a mount for me. I’m very picky when it comes to horseflesh.”

  “Then you’ll take the job?”

  “But of course!”

  Mills shook his head. He wondered how many warrants were out on Earl Sutcliffe. This was certainly an odd way to maintain law and order. Quite novel. He would have to do a paper on this and perhaps submit it to a New York newspaper for publication. The West certainly was a strange place, he concluded. He’d never seen anyplace quite like it.

  The bartender was throwing sawdust on the pool of blood on the floor by the chair where Sandy had died as the men walked out the batwings.

  Chapter Eight

  Earl Sutcliffe looked at the star pinned to his shirt and chuckled.

  “You find something amusing about being on the side of law and order?” Mills asked.

  “Oh, I’ve always been on the side of law and order,” the Englishman replied. “Providing it is good, fair, and just law and order.”

  “And in England? ...” Mills left that open.

  “In my case justice did not prevail.”

  “What can I say? It happens here, too.”

  Earl patted the butt of his six-gun. “It will never again happen to me.”

  “That isn’t justice.”

  Earl smiled. “Oh, that depends entirely upon who is giving and who is receiving, doesn’t it?”

  “How did? ... I mean ...” Mills didn’t know exactly how to phrase the question.

  “How did an English nobleman become a gunfighter of dubious reputation in the wild American West?” Earl smiled at the U.S. Marshal.

  “Thank you, yes.”

  “I have always been good with cards, and lucky. I soon realized that if I was going to earn my living as a gambler I had better learn to be more than proficient with a firearm. There are people who, when someone is winning, will always cry cheat.”

  “And you don’t cheat?”

  “No. That is not to say I don’t know how, because I certainly do. But I don’t have to cheat to win. And I don’t win all the time. Just enough of the time so I earn a nice income.”

  “And this?” Mills waved his hand at the town.

  “Why am I doing it? Why don’t we just say that there is as much Robin Hood in me as there is in Smoke Jensen. Neither one of us particularly cares for the rich who use their power to remain above the law.”

  “I can understand your feelings on the subject. But I’m not aware of any rich person who ever wronged Smoke. Besides, Smoke is a wealthy man in his own right.”

  Earl laughed. “Oh, so am I, Mr. Walsdorf. My home in England has forty-five rooms. My inheritance was enormous. But what does that have to do with justice?”

  Mills walked away, muttering to himself.

  Smoke had been listening from a doorway and stepped out to stand by the Englishman. “He’s a good man, Earl. And damn tough, too. He’s just hooked on Eastern law enforcement. Or, most probably, what Eastern lawyers are teaching.”

  “And it’s spreading, Smoke. It’ll be another ten years or so before it really makes an impact out here. But it’s coming.”

  Smoke grimaced. “First time a man gives me an order telling me I can’t protect what is mine with a gun, he better get ready for a showdown.”

  “It’s coming.”

  Smoke shook his head and changed the subject. “Mills is no spring chicken. He’s been with the Marshal’s Service since getting out of college. I can’t understand why he hasn’t had some of those ideas of his kicked out of his head.”

  “He’s not been a field man for very long, I should imagine. And that is perhaps where the promotions are.”

  “You may be right. Well, let’s get some supper and talk over some options.”

  “Why don’t we just locate the outlaws and go in shooting?” Earl suggested.

  Smoke chuckled. “A man after my own heart. I suggested that to Mills. He says that is not the proper way to go about bringing men to justice.”

  Earl gave Smoke a quick, bemused glance. “The man does have a lot to learn, doesn’t he?”

  Smoke nodded his head in agreement. “I just hope he stays alive long enough to learn it.”

  * * *

  “I came as soon as I heard about this terrible act of violence against you, Sally,” the man said.

  “Thank you, Larry,” Sally Jensen said. She was sitting in the parlor in a rocker, her arm in a sling.

  The preacher’s wife, Bountiful, was sitting in the next room, but well within earshot. It just wasn’t proper for a woman, especially a married woman, to receive a man alone. Besides, Bountiful didn’t trust this slick-haired New York City man, all duded up and smelling of bay rum and the like. He had something up his sleeve and she would bet on that.

  Sally looked at Lawrence Tibbson and wondered what in the world he was doing out here in Colorado. She hadn’t seen him in several years. And she’d been with her mother then, shopping in the city. She had allowed Larry to escort her to a few functions in college, very few, but he had never – by any stretch of the imagination – been her beau. Although he would have liked to have been.

  “All your old college chums are very worried about you, Sally,” Larry said.

  “Worried about me?” Sally asked. “Why, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Well, my word, Sally! You’ve been shot! Living out here in this wild, lawless, God-forsaken place. And ...” He shook his head.

  “And what, Larry?”

  He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Nothing, Sally.”

  “Larry,” she said coyly, and batted her eyes at him. That used to do it in college.

  It did it this time, too. He sighed and said, “Sally, the word is that . . . well, how to say this?”

  “Just come right out and say it, Larry. That’s the way out here.”

  “The day of the wild west is over, Sally. It’s finished, or soon will be. Despite the play and all the articles and Penny Dreadfuls written about Smoke, the people back East are beginning to look upon him
as a cold-blooded killer. And you are being dragged in the dirt as well.”

  It didn’t come as any surprise to Sally. She’d allready heard from some of her old college friends. There was a not-so-subtle movement on in some quarters back East to discredit Smoke, and mark him as a mad-dog killer without conscience. Some were even calling for a federal investigation of him, including sending some United States Marshals out West. She didn’t know whether anything had come of that suggestion.

  “Go on, Larry.”

  “I know your parents are abroad, and plan to stay for some time, but your brother Jordan is very upset about all this awful talk about you.”

  “Pure flapdoodle, Larry. That’s all it is.”

  Bountiful listened for another five minutes, and then with a frown on her face she walked silently to the doorway and stepped outside. She waved at a hand coiling a rope by the corral.

  “Yes, ma’am?” he said, after running over to the house.

  “Ride!” she told him. “Get into town, find Monte and find out where Smoke is. Get word to him.” She told him what she had overheard.

  The hand threw the rope down, his face tight with anger. “I’ll go in there and stomp that varmint right now!”

  “No!” Bountiful told him. “Finding Smoke is more important. He might be in danger of being taken back East to stand trial in some federal court. There are in U.S. Marshals after him. They might already be with him, and he doesn’t know they’re to arrest him.”

  The hand nodded his head. “You watch that skunk in yonder, Miss Bountiful. He’s just too slick for my likin’.”

  “I’ll watch him for me and Sally. You ride.”

  “I’m gone!”

  She stepped back into the house in time to hear Sally ask, “Larry, exactly why did you come all the way out here from the city?”

  “Why . . . to take you back where you belong, Sally.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Sally’s words were filled with astonishment.

  “Sally, this is still a wild and savage land. You don’t belong out here. There is no culture, nothing that even resembles refinement ... the nicer things in life. I have come to ask you to leave this place and return to the city. Not necessarily to be with me, although that is my highest aspiration. Sally, I believe once there, out of this horrible place, you will see things in a much different light and ...”