That advantage would disappear as soon as Clinton realized he could send men up onto the rims to fire down at them.
It seemed like they kept slipping out of one trap only to find themselves in another, Smoke thought. But as long as they still had an opportunity to fight, that was all he really asked for.
As Preacher had said, the ledge got wider, which allowed them to move a little faster. Eventually it was ten feet wide, with some brush growing along the base of the wall beside it.
The sound of Dog’s barking floated down from above them. Preacher grinned and said, “This is where I climbed down. I had to leave the old fella up there.”
“It’s a good thing you did,” Darcy said. “When I found him, I knew I was on the right track.”
Smoke said, “You two ladies see if you can climb out. The rest of us will stay here and keep Clinton and his men back.” He thought there might be time for Darcy and Valencia to get away before the fighting got too hot and heavy.
“I’m staying,” Darcy said. “I’ve proven that I can use a gun.”
“She can,” Matt said.
A shot blasted and a slug whined off the rock wall above their heads.
“Well, miss, it looks like you’re about to get your chance,” Smoke said. “Preacher, give her back her carbine. Everybody take cover!”
Unfortunately, there wasn’t an abundance of cover to be found down here in the gorge. They spread out among the rocks and brush and fired along the ledge at Clinton’s men, who hugged the wall and stepped out just long enough to trigger shots at the fugitives. Gun-thunder from both sides filled the ravine with such an overpowering roar it seemed like the whole world was shaking.
A couple of Clinton’s men were hit and toppled off the ledge into the creek, where the current caught their bodies and propelled them downstream toward the canyon. Clinton had plenty of men, though, and from what Smoke could see they were gathering along the ledge to rush the fugitives. Smoke knew that he and his companions wouldn’t be able to bring down all the attackers. They were minutes away from having their position overrun, and that would mean the end for all of them.
Then a chunk of rock about two feet in diameter sailed down from somewhere above and crashed into the killers clustered along the ledge. The terrible impact killed two men instantly, crushing their skulls, and knocked several more off into the creek, where the current slammed them into rocks and knocked them out to drown. Another missile, just as deadly as the first, followed a few seconds later while the startled hardcases were still shouting curses and questions at each other.
Smoke looked up as the bombardment continued to wreak havoc among Clinton’s men. A huge figure stood on the rim, throwing the rocks down into the gorge. It was impossible to mistake the man. That was Galt up there.
Smoke had figured Clinton or one of the others had finished off the majordomo. Galt must have played possum, Smoke thought, and gotten up there somehow to heave the rocks at Clinton’s men. If there was a way to reach the rim quickly, Galt would probably know it.
In a matter of moments, Galt had dealt some major damage to Clinton’s force. The ones still on the ledge realized where the rocks were coming from, though, and tilted their guns up to open fire on Galt. Smoke saw the big man jerk as slugs pounded into him, but he didn’t fall, and he didn’t stop the bombardment, either. He hefted a particularly large rock over his head and heaved it, and when it landed on the ledge, it not only crushed one of the killers to bloody pulp, it knocked a big chunk out of the ledge itself. That trapped several men, including Jesse Clinton, ahead of where the ledge collapsed and cut them off from the rest of the gang.
That was enough for the men behind the newly formed gap. They turned to abandon the attack and started back toward the canyon.
“Come back here, damn you!” Clinton yelled at them. His cocksure grin was gone now that the odds were suddenly against him. Screaming incoherently in rage, he thrust his arm up and fired again at Galt.
The big man staggered, swayed, and then plunged off the brink as Valencia screamed. Galt plummeted down and landed in the creek with a huge splash. When he surfaced, he was floating facedown, and the current quickly carried him out of sight that way.
Smoke called, “Clinton! You and the men with you throw down your guns and surrender! Nobody else has to die here today!”
Clinton had seen a fortune snatched out of his hands, and that must have affected his mind. He roared, “You go to hell, Jensen!” and charged the brush with a gun in each hand spouting flame and lead. The two men he had left were right behind him with their own guns blazing.
Smoke slammed two bullets into Clinton’s body and knocked the man off his feet. Matt cut down one of the other gunmen, and Preacher ventilated the other. Both men tumbled to the rocky ground. One rolled off into the creek and was washed away. The other lay motionless.
Clinton’s hate and greed somehow allowed him the strength to keep moving. He pushed himself onto his knees and raised his gun for another shot at Smoke. Luke fired first and punched a slug into the center of Clinton’s forehead. The killer’s head snapped back from the impact, and this time when he fell he didn’t move again.
Luke had taken his gun off the Krolls to fire that shot, and Mordecai, despite being wounded, struck with the speed and strength of crazed desperation. He tackled Luke, who, weakened by the long ordeal he had suffered, was unable to stop Mordecai from wrenching the revolver out of his hand. Mordecai surged up and started to swing the gun barrel in line with Luke’s head.
Smoke, Matt, and Preacher all fired at once, but even as their bullets whipped toward Mordecai, Rudolph lunged in front of his younger brother, crying, “Mord, look ou—”
The slugs slammed into him and knocked him back into Mordecai, causing the gun in the younger man’s hand to jerk to the side just as he pulled the trigger. The bullet struck the ground a foot to the left of Luke’s head instead of blowing his brains out.
Mordecai staggered under the impact but didn’t fall. He caught his balance, saw his brother’s bloody body lying crumpled on the ground at his feet, and howled in rage. Screaming curses, he snapped a wild shot at Smoke, Matt, and Preacher, and this time when they returned his fire there was no one to get in the way. The bullets smashed into Mordecai and lifted him on his toes in a grotesque, jittering dance for a second before he dropped the gun and folded up like a rag doll.
The echoes of the shots slowly faded, and the clouds of powder smoke in the air drifted over the creek. Peace settled down over this place of desolation and death, and the silence was marred only by the sobbing of Valencia, who had crawled over to Rudolph’s body and pulled his head into her lap as she bent over him and mourned.
Chapter 49
The canyon was empty of life when they reached it again later that day. The survivors who had ridden with Clinton had lit a shuck out of there, no doubt figuring that their gamble for a small fortune had not paid off and it made more sense to leave. Clinton was dead, but that sort of drifting hardcase never felt much loyalty, anyway, except to themselves and their next payday, wherever it might be.
The women who had come to the canyon with the outlaws were gone, too. There was a good chance they had left with Clinton’s remaining hired guns, Smoke thought.
They found Simon Ford’s body in the gallery at the front of the ranch house, shot so full of holes that it was impossible to count the wounds. An empty six-gun lay next to each of Ford’s hands and dead men were piled in front of him, offering mute but eloquent proof that he had died fighting.
Galt’s body was among the many that washed downstream into the canyon. Corpses littered the terraces and a number of them were sprawled in the house, as well.
“We’ll be diggin’ graves for a week,” Preacher muttered when he saw the extent of the carnage. “Danged if it don’t look like somebody fought a war here.”
Matt canted his Winchester back over his right shoulder and said, “We figured on rescuing Luke and maybe nabbing the Kro
ll brothers if we were lucky. Instead, the whole gang is wiped out, and most of Clinton’s bunch on top of it. Hell sure has a habit of breaking loose when the three of us get together.”
“The four of us now,” Smoke said as he placed a hand on Luke’s shoulder.
“Yeah, well, I hope you gents won’t be offended if I don’t attend too many of these little family reunions,” Luke said dryly. “They get a little too rambunctious for my taste.”
That drew laughs from Smoke and Matt. Preacher just shook his head and looked disgusted.
They took Valencia and Darcy Garnett to Phoenix. Valencia had relatives there, and after they said their good-byes, none of them ever saw her again.
Darcy holed up in a hotel room and wrote furiously for ten days straight while Luke rested up and Smoke sent wires to Governor Frémont in Prescott and the Chief Marshal for the Western District in Denver, explaining everything that had happened and asking that Simon Ford be posthumously reinstated as a deputy United States marshal. As far as Smoke was concerned, Ford had died doing his duty as a lawman, and that was how the record ought to read. Frémont promised to use whatever influence he had to make that come about.
The only time Darcy emerged from her writing marathon was to have dinner in the hotel dining room with Matt. The two of them seemed to enjoy each other’s company quite a bit, and beyond that, Smoke didn’t speculate or ask questions. Eventually, he and Luke returned to the Sugarloaf in Colorado, where Luke was able to recuperate and regain his strength. His iron constitution allowed him to recover fairly quickly, and it wasn’t long before he said his farewells and returned to his life as a bounty hunter.
Before he left, though, he told Smoke, “I’ll stay in touch so you’ll have an idea where to find me. And if you ever run into more trouble than you can handle alone . . .”
“I’ll give you a holler,” Smoke said with a grin. “Just like with Matt and Preacher.”
Luke nodded solemnly. The brothers clasped hands, pounded each other on the back, and then Luke swung into the saddle and rode away.
The Battle at Casa del Diablo; or, The Destruction of the Nefarious Kroll Brothers Gang was published as a yellowback dime novel by Beadle & Adams under the byline D. J. Garnett and sold well enough that it proved more lucrative than writing an article for Harper’s Weekly. The final passage of it read:
As for the alleged abandoned mine where the desperados Rudolph and Mordecai Kroll hid the ill-gotten gains from their many crimes, it has never been located, if indeed it ever existed at all.
It remains just one more mystery hidden among the fear-shrouded peaks of the Superstition Mountains.
J. A. Johnstone on William W. Johnstone “When the Truth Becomes Legend”
William W. Johnstone was born in southern Missouri, the youngest of four children. He was raised with strong moral and family values by his minister father, and tutored by his schoolteacher mother. Despite this, he quit school at age fifteen.
“I have the highest respect for education,” he says, “but such is the folly of youth, and wanting to see the world beyond the four walls and the blackboard.”
True to this vow, Bill attempted to enlist in the French Foreign Legion (“I saw Gary Cooper in Beau Geste when I was a kid and I thought the French Foreign Legion would be fun”) but was rejected, thankfully, for being underage. Instead, he joined a traveling carnival and did all kinds of odd jobs. It was listening to the veteran carny folk, some of whom had been on the circuit since the late 1800s, telling amazing tales about their experiences, that planted the storytelling seed in Bill’s imagination.
“They were mostly honest people, despite the bad reputation traveling carny shows had back then,” Bill remembers. “Of course, there were exceptions. There was one guy named Picky, who got that name because he was a master pickpocket. He could steal a man’s socks right off his feet without him knowing. Believe me, Picky got us chased out of more than a few towns.”
After a few months of this grueling existence, Bill returned home and finished high school. Next came stints as a deputy sheriff in the Tallulah, Louisiana, Sheriff’s Department, followed by a hitch in the U.S. Army. Then he began a career in radio broadcasting at KTLD in Tallulah, which would last sixteen years. It was there that he fine-tuned his storytelling skills. He turned to writing in 1970, but it wouldn’t be until 1979 that his first novel, The Devil’s Kiss, was published. Thus began the full-time writing career of William W. Johnstone. He wrote horror (The Uninvited), thrillers (The Last of the Dog Team), even a romance novel or two. Then, in February 1983, Out of the Ashes was published. Searching for his missing family in a post-apocalyptic America, rebel mercenary and patriot Ben Raines is united with the civilians of the Resistance forces and moves to the forefront of a revolution for the nation’s future.
Out of the Ashes was a smash. The series would continue for the next twenty years, winning Bill three generations of fans all over the world. The series was often imitated but never duplicated. “We all tried to copy the Ashes series,” said one publishing executive, “but Bill’s uncanny ability, both then and now, to predict in which direction the political winds were blowing brought a certain immediacy to the table no one else could capture.” The Ashes series would end its run with more than thirty-four books and twenty million copies in print, making it one of the most successful men’s action series in American book publishing. (The Ashes series also, Bill notes with a touch of pride, got him on the FBI’s Watch List for its less than flattering portrayal of spineless politicians and the growing power of big government over our lives, among other things. In that respect, I often find myself saying, “Bill was years ahead of his time.”)
Always steps ahead of the political curve, Bill’s recent thrillers, written with myself, include Vengeance Is Mine, Invasion USA, Border War, Jackknife, Remember the Alamo, Home Invasion, Phoenix Rising, The Blood of Patriots, The Bleeding Edge, and the upcoming Suicide Mission.
It is with the western, though, that Bill found his greatest success. His westerns propelled him onto both the USA Today and the New York Times bestseller lists.
Bill’s western series include The Mountain Man, Matt Jensen, the Last Mountain Man, Preacher, The Family Jensen, Luke Jensen, Bounty Hunter, Eagles, MacCallister (an Eagles spin-off), Sidewinders, The Brothers O’Brien, Sixkiller, Blood Bond, The Last Gunfighter, and the upcoming new series Flintlock and The Trail West. May 2013 saw the hardcover western Butch Cassidy, The Lost Years.
“The Western,” Bill says, “is one of the few true art forms that is one hundred percent American. I liken the Western as America’s version of England’s Arthurian legends, like the Knights of the Round Table, or Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Starting with the 1902 publication of The Virginian by Owen Wister, and followed by the greats like Zane Grey, Max Brand, Ernest Haycox, and of course Louis L’Amour, the Western has helped to shape the cultural landscape of America.
“I’m no goggle-eyed college academic, so when my fans ask me why the Western is as popular now as it was a century ago, I don’t offer a 200-page thesis. Instead, I can only offer this: The Western is honest. In this great country, which is suffering under the yoke of political correctness, the Western harks back to an era when justice was sure and swift. Steal a man’s horse, rustle his cattle, rob a bank, a stagecoach, or a train, you were hunted down and fitted with a hangman’s noose. One size fit all.
“Sure, we westerners are prone to a little embellishment and exaggeration and, I admit it, occasionally play a little fast and loose with the facts. But we do so for a very good reason—to enhance the enjoyment of readers.
“It was Owen Wister, in The Virginian who first coined the phrase ‘When you call me that, smile.’ Legend has it that Wister actually heard those words spoken by a deputy sheriff in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, when another poker player called him a son of a bitch.
“Did it really happen, or is it one of those myths that have passed down from one generation to the next? I honestly don’t kno
w. But there’s a line in one of my favorite Westerns of all time, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where the newspaper editor tells the young reporter, ‘When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.’
“These are the words I live by.”
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2014 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.
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 and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off. The WWJ steer head logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.
ISBN: 978-0-7860-3348-5
First electronic edition: May 2014
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