Quest of the Mountain Man
Page 21
When he got to the dead men’s horses, Smoke reined his own mount in, fished a cigar from his breast pocket, and lit it with a lucifer.
As he puffed it into life, a shotgun roared from off to his left and he felt the tug in his coat as buckshot shredded the back of it, burning furrows of white-hot pain across his shoulder blades.
The force of the blow almost unseated him, but Smoke fell forward over his saddle horn and kicked his horse forward just as more shots rang out, barely missing him as he fled.
Three more men pulled onto the trail behind him, firing as they rode, some of the bullets coming uncomfortably close to Smoke’s head.
As he rode, he reached down into his saddlebag and pulled out a stick of dynamite. Holding the fuse to the tip of his cigar until it caught, he twisted in the saddle and flipped it at the men behind him.
The dynamite went off just as their horses straddled it. The explosion blew men and horses into thousands of pieces, which rained down together in a bloody mix of horseflesh and human tissue for several seconds.
Hammer and Bull and Spotted Dog were the only members of the gang left alive. They’d survived this long because after Hammer sent his men searching for Jensen, he’d signaled the two to follow him while he rode in the opposite direction. He’d remembered the story the judge had told about Jensen and how tough he was, and he wanted to see if his men could take care of Jensen before he tried it himself.
Now, as he peered into the forest in front of him, the filtered moonlight revealed a solitary figure moving slowly toward him, the glowing tip of a cigar between his teeth.
“Bull,” Hammer whispered, “you move on off to the right. Dog, you take off to the left. When he gets between you, we’ll have him cornered and we can all let go at the same time. He won’t stand a chance.”
Smoke, whose eyes were as sharp as an eagle’s, saw the shadows up ahead as they parted and spread out to his right and his left. He grinned as he moved his horse into the shadows cast by a large ponderosa pine tree, and he slipped out of his saddle.
He pulled the Henry out and steadied the barrel against the trunk of the tree while he took careful aim at the figure to his right. He aimed low, intending to wound rather than kill. Slowly, breathing out and holding it, he caressed the trigger. The Henry exploded and bucked and a second later, a horrible scream rang throughout the forest.
“Oh, Jesus!” Spotted Dog yelled as he toppled from his saddle, “I’m gutshot! Help me, Boss, please, I don’t want to die . . . help me!”
Smoke was glad to hear the man call for his boss. That meant Hammerick was still alive and wasn’t one of the men he’d already killed.
“You hear that, Hammerick?” Smoke yelled from behind the tree. “Your man is calling for you. Are you going to help him or just let him die?”
“Shut up, Jensen, you bastard!” Hammerick yelled from up ahead.
While Hammer was talking, Smoke took off his hat and hung it from a short branch on the pine tree. Then he took his cigar and wedged it just under the hat behind a piece of bark. Once that was done, he got down on his hands and knees, crawled ten yards away from the tree, and lay on his belly, his Henry aimed out to his left, waiting.
“Did you hear me, Jensen?” Hammer yelled again. “I’m coming to kill you!”
Smoke didn’t answer Hammer’s taunt; he just waited.
Two minutes later, a shot rang out from Smoke’s left and the slug tore his hat off the tree.
Aiming just above the muzzle flash, Smoke squeezed the trigger of the Henry. Like an echo to the gunshot, a scream rang out and a huge figure stumbled out from next to a tree, fired his gun two more times, hitting nothing but air, and then fell onto his face. Bull was dead.
Smoke stood up and retrieved his cigar, and was bending over to pick up his hat when Hammer fired from twenty feet away. His bullets took Smoke in the left shoulder and tore a chunk of flesh from his chest, spinning him around and up against his horse, the Henry flying from his grasp.
As he sank to his knees, Smoke grabbed his saddlebags and pulled them down with him onto the ground.
“How’d you like that, Jensen, you asshole?” Hammer yelled gleefully. “1 thought you were tough, mountain man!” he said scornfully as he walked toward where Smoke lay on the ground.
Unable to get to his pistols, Smoke eased the rocket from the saddlebags and positioned it pointing toward the dark shape approaching him. He would only get one chance, so he had to make it right.
Smoke let his head flop down next to the fuse, his eyes squinting along the length of the rocket, taking aim.
“Don’t try and play possum on me, Jensen,” Hammer growled, raising his pistol and pointing it at Smoke. “I know you ain’t dead yet.”
“You got that right, killer,” Smoke muttered, and he moved his head to touch the fuse with the end of his cigar.
As Hammer grinned, his teeth glowing in the moonlight, he eased back the hammer on his pistol.
With a sudden whoosh, the rocket ignited and streaked toward Hammer like lightning.
Hammer’s eyes opened wide and he grunted as the rocket struck him in the middle of his gut, doubling him over and knocking him two steps backward.
He straightened up and stared down at his stomach, where the rocket was buried halfway into his abdomen.
He had time to say, “Oh, shit!” before the rocket exploded, sending Hammer to hell in a heartbeat.
30
EPILOGUE
Three months later, his arm and chest healed and their work for the Canadian Pacific Railroad completed, Smoke, Louis, Cal, and Pearlie rode into the town of Noyes, Minnesota.
Accompanying them were two U.S. marshals and four deputy marshals.
As they came abreast of the sheriff’s office, Luke McCain stepped out, a cup of coffee in his hand. His face paled when he saw the marshal badges on the chests of the men with Smoke, and his hand dropped near the butt of his pistol.
“Please, Luke,” Smoke said, his teeth bared in a grin of anticipation, “go for your gun and give me the satisfaction of putting a bullet through that badge that you’ve dishonored that you wear on your chest.”
McCain thought about it for a moment, then smiled ruefully and held his hands up. “Sorry, Jensen, I won’t give you that pleasure.”
Smoke shrugged. “Then I guess I’ll just have to be content to watch you hang.”
“Hang?” McCain asked as one of the deputy marshals took his guns. “But all I did was let some men outta jail. I didn’t kill nobody.”
“No, Mr. McCain, you didn’t,” the U.S. marshal said, “but the men you let out of jail did, and that makes you what the law calls an accessory.”
“And the punishment for an accessory is the same as for the man who pulled the trigger,” Louis said with satisfaction. “Hanging from a rope until you are dead.”
As they turned their horses toward the courthouse, Smoke could see a wide figure outlined in the window of the judge’s chambers.
When they got in front of the building, they heard a shot ring out from behind the window. Smoke looked at the others and turned his horse’s head south toward Colorado and Sally. “I guess our job here is done, men,” he said, and they all rode south toward home.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
William Cornelius Van Horne was born on February 3, 1843. In 1881 he was asked to be general manager of the Canadian Pacific Railway. His contract was to connect British Columbia to the rest of Canada by building the Trans Canada Railway, at the time the most ambitious project in the world. Van Horne started the railroad in 1882, and completed the project three years later when Donald Smith drove the last spike at Craigellachie, B.C. on November 7, 1885.
He started work in Winnipeg and worked west from there, making about three miles every day, crossing over six hundred miles of mountains in the process.
In the first year alone, over 1500 miles of track was laid. In 1888, Van Horne was named president of the CPR, and was also appointed chairman of the board.
He was awarded a knighthood for his achievements, and spent the last twenty-five years of his life on Ministers Island, which he had purchased. He died on September 11, 1915, in Montreal, and was buried in his hometown of Joliet, Illinois.
In 1882, guided by a Stony Indian, Canadian Pacific Railroad packer (i.e. trailsman) Tom Wilson was the first white man to see Lake Louise. He named it Emerald Lake (later to be named Lake Louise after the daughter of Queen Victoria).
In 1883, railway workers William McCardell, Thomas McCardell, and Frank McCabe discovered hot springs (known today as the Cave and Basin) at the foot of Sulphur Mountain, near Banff.
In 1888, the original log-framed Banff Springs Hotel was opened for business by the CPR.
In 1889, Van Horne and the CPR brought in Swiss guides to the Rockies to lead tourists to the summits of the mountains.
Keep reading for a special excerpt of the new Western series from William W. Johnstone and J.A. Johnstone
SAWBONES
On the blood-stained battlefields of a divided nation, Dr. Samuel Knight used his surgical skills to treat wounded Confederate soldiers. In the brutal prison camps of the Union Army, he offered his healing services to fellow captives who’d given up hope. But now, with the war over and the South in ruins, the good doctor faces his hardest challenge yet: to save himself...
Penniless and hungry, Knight has to beg, borrow, and steal to survive in a post-war hell that used to be his country. By the time he reaches his home in East Texas, it’s been taken over. Ruthless Union soldiers rule over the town with an iron fist. A Yankee carpetbagger is living in his old house—and the jackal has forced Knight’s wife to marry him. A normal man might give up, but Dr. Samuel Knight is going to take back what belongs to him. With a heartfull of grit and a hunger for revenge and with swift, surgical precision, he’ll stick a bullet in every dead man walking . . .
Look for Sawbones whereever books are sold.
CHAPTER 1
Dr. Samuel Knight doubled over as pain drove into his belly, worse than any knife wound. He forced himself to stand upright. Sweat beaded his forehead, and it wasn’t from the sultry late spring day in East Texas. He was used to such weather. He had grown up in the Piney Woods. The agony came from the void in his stomach from lack of food.
Or maybe he had poisoned himself with the weeds he had eaten the day before. His time spent in the Yankee prison camp at Elmira, New York—Hellmira, the starving, disease-ridden inmates had called it—had hardly been as bad. There the tainted food caused different symptoms. Diarrhea. Vomiting.
He gasped when stomach pain doubled him over again.
“Must have been hemlock and not wild carrot I ate.” Desperation had made him careless. Wild carrot leaves looked fuzzy, hemlock didn’t. But with his vision blurred at times from lack of food, making such a mistake was all too easy because the leaves were similar. The only luck he had was being alive. Hemlock killed as surely as a Yankee minié ball to the head.
He talked to himself to get his mind on something other than the pain threatening to swamp him. It worked, concentrating on his wife and the homecoming she would give him when he got to Pine Knob. How they would celebrate! All night. For a week!
It had been years since he had seen Victoria and almost as long since he had written her a letter. The Yankees hadn’t permitted their prisoners to send or receive letters, even if Victoria had known where to write him. The more he thought of her, the better he felt. The brutal pain died down enough to let him keep walking along the muddy road. He had no particular destination in mind today. But soon, soon he would be back in Pine Knob and home. All he had to do was to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Home. Where he had grown up. The house. His wife, Victoria. His heart beat faster as he concentrated on his mental image of her. The pocket watch case with her picture had been stolen by a bluecoat the first day he had been taken prisoner after the Battle of the Wilderness. The watch had never kept good time, but her picture was the real reason he kept the battered gold case.
Closing his eyes, he pictured her waving weakly to him the day he had ridden from Pine Knob on his way to Richmond and the Louisiana Hospital located there. He had begun as an assistant surgeon and quickly found himself teaching classes to first-year medical students. Too few of them had any aptitude, but Surgeon General Samuel Preston Moore had assigned most of them to forward units under the Bonnie Blue flag. Attrition in medical ranks proved almost as great as among those on the front lines.
Disease ran rampant, not caring if a doctor or private or butternut-uniformed general suffered.
His feet moved a little faster. He knew what he’d left behind back East, and he knew what lay ahead. Home and hearth and Victoria.
Hunger pangs tore at him again when a tantalizing odor made his nostrils flare. Without realizing it, he left the road, cut across a grassy yard and found a game trail leading through the pines to a small, well-kept house. His mouth watered. It had been too long—a lifetime—since he had tasted freshly baked peach pie. Knight stumbled forward, ignoring everything around him but the pie set on the windowsill to cool.
He braced himself, hands on either side of the window, as he leaned forward, closed his eyes and took a deep whiff. He turned giddy with anticipation. Eyes popping open, he looked around. Stealing a pie was wrong. Stealing was wrong, but starving to death had to be a sin of some sort, too. Hands trembling, he picked up the pie. The pain as heat stung his fingers proved far less than the knife thrusts of hunger in his belly.
He turned to steal away with his booty. Not ten feet away a girl, hardly six years old, looking all pert and small, dressed in a plain brown gingham dress, gazed up at him. Her stricken look froze him in place.
“That’s for my birthday party,” she said in a choked voice. “Please, mister, don’t take it. I ain’t got anything else.” She shuffled her bare feet and looked at the ground. Her shoulders shook as she tried to hold back sobs.
“I just wanted to get a better look at it. It smells wonderful.” He held out the pie. His belly grumbled.
“Mama made it special for me. She got the peaches fresh from Mr. Frost. He’s got an orchard of fruit trees. Apple, pear. Peaches are my favorite.” She took a step back.
He knew what she saw. Knight might have been a scarecrow come to life. Standing almost six feet tall, he was down to a hundred and twenty pounds, ribs poking out, face gaunt, his long, unkempt dark hair greasy and pushed back out of his feverish eyes. Scarecrows in the field were dressed better, too. His trousers hung in tatters, his shirt had more holes than a woodpecker’s dinner, and his coat would fall apart if he dared to remove it. He wished for the first time in months that he still wore his Confederate uniform. It had been presentable, but it had rotted away in the harsh winter spent at the prison camp.
She stared into his eyes and took another step back. Her small hand covered her mouth in horror. He knew his blue eyes were sunken and bloodshot, turning him into a bogeyman.
A bogeyman stealing her birthday pie.
“It’s a mighty fine-looking pie.” Knight turned and placed the pie back on the windowsill. “Happy birthday.” His hands shook, as much from emotion as from hunger. Not daring to look back, he hurried away, found the path through the woods and got onto the road again.
Tears ran down his cadaverous cheeks. “I’m reduced to stealing from a little girl. No, no, no.”
He stumbled on, trying to convince himself he was a good man, only driven to desperate acts by all that had happened to him. Life in the prison camp had been harsh. When the Confederacy finally capitulated, they had no resources to help those prisoners kept by the Federals. He and all the others had been turned out, put on trains going south, and then abandoned in Richmond without food, money, or hope. Those civilians in the onetime Confederate capital were hardly better off. They certainly did not want diseased ex-prisoners in their city.
“I’m better than that,” he told himself aloud. “I am.”
Knight took a few more steps before he realized the voice was not coming from inside his own head. He stopped and looked around. Undergrowth started only a few feet from the road. Sparse trees quickly grew into a dense forest blocking his view after more than a dozen yards. A rustling made him home in on the short, tattered man emerging from behind a barberry bush.
Knight knew he wasn’t the only one down on his luck. This man, with his scratched face and tangled, sandy hair, was in no better condition. As he hobbled out, Knight realized he was in even worse shape. The right leg twisted outward so the foot plowed up the dirt as he came forward.
“You don’t look like no threat to me,” the stranger said. “Are you?”
Knight shook his head and immediately regretted it. Dizziness hit him from the simple movement. Surprisingly strong arms circled his shoulders and held him upright.
“Sorry. Been a while since I had anything to eat.”
“You got the look of a soldier about you, but not exactly. Hard to put my finger on it.” The man steered Knight to the side of the road and a stump, where he collapsed. “You some kind of officer for the Rebs?”
“Captain,” Knight said, seeing no reason to hide it. “I was a doctor attached to Jeb Stuart’s cavalry unit.”
“You’re nuthin’ but skin and bones. You ain’t sick now, are you?”
“Hungry. Can’t get anyone to give me the time of day, much less a decent meal. I’ve walked most of the way from Richmond. A few gave me rides in a wagon, but not many. Not enough.” He thrust out his stick-thin legs.