Warpath of the Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  “Have you thought about that?” Smoke asked. He walked over to mount his horse. Tom and Pearlie mounted as well.

  “Sort of curious, isn’t it,” Tom replied.

  “Very curious,” Smoke agreed. “I mean, here we find arrows all over the place, which means they were armed with bows. Wouldn’t you think they would want to replace those bows with guns?”

  “So, what do you think all this means?”

  “I believe it means someone wants us to think it was Indians.”

  “Think we’ll be able to follow the trial, Smoke?” Cal asked.

  “I don’t see why not. They didn’t make any effort to cover it up,” Smoke said. “Let’s see where it leads us.”

  11

  The sun was high overhead at Sugarloaf, a brilliant white orb fixed in the bright blue sky. Pigiron McCord, Jason Harding, and Dirk Wheeler looked down on the ranch from atop a nearby hill. As they watched, a woman came out onto the back porch. There, in broad daylight, she took off her shirt, and would have been naked from the waist up had it not been for the fact that she was wearing a camisole.

  “Goddamn!” Pigiron said, nearly choking on the word. “Look at that!”

  The woman poured water into a basin, then began washing her hair.

  “Is that Jensen’s woman?” Wheeler asked.

  “Who else would it be?” Pigiron replied.

  “You think she’s alone?”

  “’Course she is. If they was some hired hands here, you think she’d be out on the back porch damn near nekkid?” Pigiron chuckled.

  “What is it?” Wheeler asked. “What are you laughing about?”

  “I’m laughing about Jensen,” Pigiron said. “He’s out looking for us, and we’re here with his woman.” Pigiron rubbed himself. “You know what? I think I’m going to enjoy this more than I would have enjoyed killing Jensen back in town.”

  “We goin’ to take turns with her, aren’t we?” Harding asked.

  “Yeah,” Wheeler said. “We are going to take turns, aren’t we? I mean, I ain’t plannin’ on just standin’ by and watchin’ you have all the fun. I figure to get in on it too.”

  “Don’t worry, you will. We’ll take turns,” Pigiron said. “Long as you boys both know that I’m first.”

  * * *

  Sally looked at the pile of towels she had brought out onto the back porch with her. Under the top towel was a loaded pistol. She looked at it to reassure herself by its presence, then, without being too obvious, checked the progress of the three riders who were coming toward the house.

  What Pigiron and the others didn’t realize was that Sally and Cal knew they were there. A few minutes earlier Cal had gone up into the loft of the barn to push down a couple of bales of hay. While he was up there, he just happened to walk over and stand in the attic opening to have a look back toward the distant tree line. He didn’t know what made him walk over there, or what made him look, but whatever it was was fortuitous, because that was when he saw the three riders coming.

  The way they were approaching—avoiding the road, staying back in the trees, and never crossing a hill in silhouette—told Cal that whoever they were, they were up to no good. He hurried to the house to tell Sally.

  “Cal, do you think you could manage to get around behind them without being seen?” Sally asked.

  Cal nodded. “Yeah, I think I can. I can get across to the ridgeline before they are close enough to see me cross in the open. The ridge will give me cover until I reach Bushy Draw. By then, they’ll be beyond Bushy Draw, which will put me behind them.”

  “All right, you do that. And while you’re sneaking around behind them, I’ll do something to keep their attention here.”

  Cal hurried back to the barn, saddled his horse quickly, then rode hard to get across a field that would let him go along the back side of the ridge. He figured to come back down behind them about the time they hit the edge of the south pasture.

  Sally decided to get their attention by washing her hair. And to make certain that she kept their attention, she upped the ante a little by taking off her shirt. It would also give her the opportunity to carry a pistol outside without anyone knowing she had it, by slipping the revolver in between the towels.

  In the meantime, Cal reached Bushy Draw, a pass through the ridgeline. Bushy Draw was so well protected by vegetation that unless someone knew it was there, they would never see it. In fact, even knowing it was there, one had to be right on it to see it. Because of that, Cal was able to get within twenty yards of the riders, close enough to hear them talking.

  “They said she was a good-lookin’ woman,” one of the men said. “I reckon I just didn’t know how good-lookin’ she was until I seen her.”

  One of the others laughed. “Hell, Wheeler, what difference does it make to you whether or not she’s a good-lookin’ woman? I’ve seen you with women that was so ugly they’d gag a maggot on the gut wagon.”

  “Yeah, but just once, I’d like to have me a good-lookin’ woman,” the one called Wheeler replied.

  “Well, you boys better enjoy her while you can,” the third man said. “’Cause I don’t aim to leave her alive.”

  “You goin’ to kill a good-lookin’ woman like that? Why? Seems to me like we could take her with us. That way, anytime we wanted to, why, we could just take our pleasure with her.”

  “Nah, she’d just be getting in the way all the time. And I don’t aim to leave her here where she can talk.”

  “Yeah, I reckon you’re right.”

  Cal pulled his pistol. “You fellas just hold it right there,” he called.

  “What the hell? Where’d you come from?” Harding hissed, startled by Cal’s sudden appearance.

  “Who are you?” Cal asked.

  “What’s it to you?” Harding asked.

  Cal fired at Harding. His bullet clipped Harding’s earlobe, sending out a misty spray of blood and leaving a bloody wound.

  “Ahhh!” Harding yelled in pain, slapping his hand to his ear. “Are you crazy, mister?”

  “If somebody doesn’t answer me really quick, I’m going to take off another earlobe,” Cal said. He smiled. “Only, I’m going to let you three guess which earlobe it will be. Am I going to take your other one?” He pointed his pistol at Harding. “Or one of yours?” He pointed to the other two. “Now, I’m askin’ again. Who are you?”

  Suddenly there was an angry buzz, then the thocking sound of a heavy bullet tearing into flesh. A fountain of blood squirted up from the neck of Cal’s horse and the animal went down on its front knees, then collapsed onto its right side. It was a good half second after the strike of the bullet before the heavy boom of a distant rifle reached Cal’s ears.

  The fall pinned Cal’s leg under his horse. He also dropped his pistol on the way down, and now it lay just out of reach of his grasping fingers.

  “What the hell? Who’s that shooting?” Wheeler shouted, pulling hard on the reins of his horse, which, though not hit, was spooked by seeing another horse go down.

  “Who the hell cares?” Harding shouted back. “Look at him! He’s pinned down!” Harding drew his gun and fired at Cal.

  Though Cal’s right leg was still pinned, he was able to flip his left leg over the saddle and lay down behind his horse, thus providing himself with some cover. Harding’s bullet dug into his saddle and sent up a little puff of dust, but did no further damage.

  “Shit!” Harding said. “I can’t get to him from this angle.”

  “Come on, let’s get the woman and get out of here!” Pigiron shouted.

  “Not till I put a bullet in that son of a bitch!” Harding insisted. “The son of a bitch shot off my ear!” Harding slapped his legs against the side of his horse and moved around to get a better shot at Cal.

  Cal made one more desperate grab for his pistol, but it was still out of reach. His rifle, however, was in the saddle sheath on the side of the horse that was on the ground, and Call could see about six inches of the stock sticking out. H
e grabbed it, gratified when it pulled free. He jerked it from the sheath and jacked a shell into the chamber, just as Harding came around to get into position to shoot him.

  “Good-bye, asshole!” Harding said, raising his pistol and taking careful aim. The smile left his face as he saw the business end of Cal’s rifle come up and spit a finger of flame. The bullet from Cal’s rifle hit Harding just under the chin, then exited the back of his head, taking with it a pink spray of blood and bone as Harding tumbled off his horse.

  “He got Jason!” Wheeler shouted.

  “Let’s get out of here!” Pigiron shouted.

  Pigiron and Wheeler started riding away hard now, forgetting all about their original intention of going after Jensen’s wife. They didn’t even bother to look back to see what happened to Harding. In the meantime, another bullet whistled by from the distant rifle. When Cal located the source of the shooting, he saw a mounted man with one leg thrown casually across his saddle. Using that leg to provide a stable firing platform, the shooter raised his rifle to fire again. There was a flash of light, the man rolled back from the recoil, then the bullet whizzed by so close to Cal’s head that it made his ears pop. All this before the report of the rifle actually reached him. With a gasp of disbelief, Cal realized that the man was shooting at him from over five hundred yards away.

  Suddenly Cal heard hoofbeats and, looking around, he saw Sally riding hard toward him.

  “No! Sally, get back!” he shouted.

  The distant rifleman also saw Sally approaching, and his next shot went toward her. Cal watched with alarm as dust puffed up from her hat, and he was sure she had been hit. He was greatly relieved when she reached his fallen horse, leaped down with a rifle in her hand, and slapped her own animal on the rump to get him out of the way. She dropped to the ground behind Cal’s horse.

  “Thank God you weren’t hit!” Cal said. “When I saw that bullet hit your hat, I thought you were a goner.”

  “The bullet hit my hat?” Sally asked. Reaching up to pull it off, she saw the hole in the felt. “Oh, my, that was very close, wasn’t it?”

  Another bullet whizzed by, this one so close that both of them could hear the air pop as it passed.

  “We’ve got to get you out from under that horse and over on this side,” Sally said.

  Cal tried to pull his leg free, but couldn’t. Then he got an idea. He stuck the stock of the rifle just under the horse’s side and grabbed the barrel. Using the rifle as a lever, he pushed up and wedged just enough space between the horse’s flesh and the ground to allow him to slip his leg free.

  “Is your leg broken?” Sally asked.

  Cal felt it. “No, I don’t think so. But the blood circulation was cut off and now it’s numb.”

  “Let’s try and make it over to the dry streambed,” Sally suggested, pointing to a depression that snaked its way across the ground. Only in the freshet season was the channel a stream. Then it caught the runoff waters from the snow of the higher elevations. Now it was just a low spot in the ground, but if they could reach it, it would give them more protection from the distant shooter.

  Crawling on their bellies, Sally and Cal slithered and twisted their way down to the dry streambed. They reached the bank and rolled over behind the berm just as another bullet ploughed into the dirt beside them. Then they twisted around behind the bank and looked back up toward the place where the shots were coming from.

  “Well, with this cover and the rifles, we aren’t easy targets,” Sally said. “And if he tries to come any closer, he’ll be playing with our deck of cards.”

  The shooter, whoever he was, had come to the same realization, because he put his rifle back in the saddle sheath, then turned and rode away as casually as if he were riding down Main Street. And why not? There was no way Cal and Sally could reach him from where they were.

  * * *

  As Pigiron and Wheeler got close to the rifleman who had rescued them, they recognized him. He was easy to recognize. His skin shone black in the sun.

  “Jim!” Pigiron said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Tatum sent me after you.”

  “What does he want?”

  “He didn’t say,” Jim said.

  “Well, I’m glad you come when you did,” Wheeler said. “I reckon we owe you.”

  Jim, always a man of few words, didn’t answer.

  12

  Pigiron and the others rejoined Tatum just before dark that night. Tatum was sitting on a fallen log near a fire, eating beans. He looked up as they arrived.

  “Find out anything?”

  “Yeah,” Pigiron said. “They’ve raised ’em an army. A fella by the name of Covington is leading it.”

  “Covington?” Tatum asked. “A lawyer?”

  “Yeah, a lawyer.”

  Tatum laughed out loud. “Well, what do you know. My lawyer leading the army. Why, this couldn’t have worked out better if I’d planned it.”

  Tatum looked around, as if just noticing that someone was missing. “Where is Harding?” he asked.

  Pigiron and Wheeler glanced at each other, hesitant to answer.

  “I said, where’s Harding?” Tatum repeated.

  “We, uh, run into some trouble,” Pigiron finally said.

  “What kind of trouble? I told you to lay low when you were in town. Last time you were there you got yourself whipped by Smoke Jensen, as I recall. So what happened, did you run across him again?”

  “Not exactly,” Pigiron replied.

  “Not exactly. What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, Jim was there, weren’t you, Jim?” Wheeler said.

  Jim just stared at Wheeler with an absolutely emotionless expression. Then, without saying a word, he got his kit from his saddlebag, went over to the pot, and spooned out a serving of beans.

  “Hah!” Tatum said. “I can just see the kind of fracas Jim might get into, him being black and so talkative and all. Now I’m going to ask you one last time to tell me what the hell happened to Harding.”

  “We went out to Smoke Jensen’s ranch,” Pigiron said.

  “Did I tell you to go to his ranch? No. What I said was, hang around town and see what was going on.”

  “I know you didn’t tell us to, but I figured maybe we could find out something out there too.”

  “Bullshit, Pigiron. You figured you would get even with him for beating you up,” Tatum said. “Hell, I don’t blame you none for that. Truth is, I’d like to see the son of a bitch dead myself, and when all this is over, I may just arrange that. So, did you kill him?”

  “He wasn’t there,” Pigiron replied. “There wasn’t no one there except his wife and some hired hand, a kid.”

  “Well, did you kill them?”

  “No,” Pigiron admitted.

  “Wait a minute,” Tatum said, stroking his chin. “Let me get this straight. There was no one there except Jensen’s wife and a kid, but Harding is the one who wound up gettin’ hisself kilt?”

  “Yeah,” Pigiron said. “That’s about the size of it.”

  “What did Jim have to do with it?”

  “Well, the kid . . . uh . . . he got the drop on Harding. . . .”

  “He got the drop on Harding?”

  “Yeah, he got the drop on Harding, and when he did, well, he sort of had us over a barrel too. He was going to kill Harding unless we give up to him.”

  “So you let him kill Harding,” Tatum said. “Yeah, I can see that. Two for one, that’s a pretty good exchange.”

  This wasn’t at all where Pigiron was going with the story, but when Tatum accepted it this way, Pigiron looked over at Wheeler in a silent suggestion that they let him believe it this way.

  “Yeah,” Wheeler said, catching on quickly. “That’s exactly the way it happened. Then, ole Jim here come along with his rifle and he kilt the kid’s horse. That gave us a chance to get away.”

  “Get away? You didn’t kill the kid?”

  “No. Jensen’s wife was comin’
by then. She had a long gun, we only had pistols. We didn’t have no choice but to leave.”

  * * *

  Some miles away, Smoke, Pearlie, and Tom Burke were also sitting around the fire. They had eaten well tonight, for Smoke had killed a turkey, and the aroma of its cooking still hung in the air. Tom was cleaning his .52-caliber Spencer rifle.

  “I’ll be damned,” Smoke said, nodding toward the rifle. “You’ve still got that rifle.”

  “Yep,” Tom answered.

  “What rifle?” Pearlie asked.

  “The rifle he made the shot with,” Smoke answered.

  “The shot?”

  “You mean you’ve never heard about the shot? The shot that won the battle of Adobe Springs?” Smoke asked. “How far was it, Tom?”

  “They measured it later, said it was twelve hundred yards.”

  “Wait a minute,” Pearlie said. “Are you trying to tell us he made a shot from twelve hundred yards?”

  “At least that far,” Smoke said. “To tell the truth, it looked even farther to me.”

  “To you? Wait a minute, you mean you were there too?”

  “Oh, yes,” Smoke replied. He looked at Pearlie. “I can’t believe I’ve never told you the story.”

  “No, but I have a feeling I’m going to hear about it now,” Pearlie said, smiling.

  “Tom was a buffer then, and from time to time I would do a little of it myself.”

  “A buffer?” Pearlie asked.

  “That’s what they called buffalo hunters,” Smoke explained. “Anyway, about fifteen of us just happened to wind up in a stage depot called Adobe Springs.”

  As Smoke told the story, he did so with such vivid imagery that Pearlie could almost see himself in the little adobe trading post where the fifteen buffalo hunters had come together.

  * * *

  It was early in the morning and Smoke had just awakened. Spread out all over the floor of the little stage way station were the bedrolls of other buffers who had gathered there. Some of them had whiskey and one of them had a guitar. In addition, there were two women passengers from the stagecoach, headed for Denver. They were saloon girls, known to nearly all the buffalo hunters, so most had stayed awake, drinking and singing far into the night. As a result, nearly everyone else was still asleep this morning.