A second later, the big .45 roared in the night, a long yellow-white tongue of flame spearing from the muzzle. Firing in the dark and from above had him at a disadvantage. The hot slug tore a ragged, agonizing trench across the upper portion of the nearest assailant’s right shoulder. Howling, he let go of his longshoreman’s hook and looked around for the source of the shot.
“Up there. On the side of the building,” he yelled a second later, just as Smoke adjusted his aim and fired again.
This time the bullet smacked solidly into the chest of the other hook wielder. He let out a sharp, short cry and pitched face-first onto the rough, splintered planks of the dock. His boot toes drummed a sharp tattoo while Oliver Johnson hauled out his own sixgun. Smoke let go and dropped the rest of the way to the dock flooring. By that time, he saw Oliver Johnson had recovered from his shocked discovery of men lurking to kill him.
He had his revolver out of the coat pocket and aimed doubtfully toward a darkened doorway in the side of the warehouse. Three men came pouring out toward him, one with an even smaller revolver than Johnson’s on the way to line up with the reporter’s chest.
Johnson fired twice. One .38 slug caught an attacker in the thigh and spilled him onto the dock to squirm, crablike, away from the fray. Flickers of muzzle flame lit up the area before the door and Oliver Johnson spotted Smoke Jensen.
“Oh, shit, I think there’s more of them than we expected,” Johnson called to his resourceful partner.
Fourteen
Only when he realized his carefully worked out plan had failed did Seamas Quern hasten to summon five of the longshoremen assigned to guard Sally Jensen. That would leave the wife of Smoke Jensen in the custody of Connor O’Fallon and Sean O'Boyle.
Both men had been drinking heavily, celebrating the anticipated demise of Sally’s husband. That provided Sally with an opportunity to learn something of what lay behind these attacks on Smoke and her. Throughout her ordeal, Sally kept her wits about her. She had no longer resisted her captors after being trundled into the furniture van. Once at the warehouse, she’d remained silent and out of the way.
When the drinking started, Sally noted, her wardens tended toward ignoring her presence. They spoke freely about their role in the dock strike and in the plans of someone named Lathrop. By the time the ambush went awry'. O’Boyle and O’Fallon completely lacked the judgment to guard their tongues.
“Wha’ th’hell does Lathrop want this Smoke Jensen dead for, anyway?” O’Fallon asked, after a long pull on a bottle of Irish whiskey.
O'Boyle gave his an owlish stare and accepted the bottle. “It’s all part of a grand plan, it is. What got us into it is, a boyo workin’ for Mr. Lathrop didn't do his job right. Both th’ Jensens’ was to die in an avalanche, they was.”
O’Fallon paled. "Good Lord, any man who can walk away from tons of snow is more than I want to cross knuckles with.”
O’Boyle winked at him. “Don’t ye worry, lad. This ruckus’ll be over in a few minutes an’ the door will be wide open.”
O’Fallon belched whiskey fumes. “What door, damn it, Sean?”
Horrified by the revelation O’Boyle had made, Sally rallied her spirits and grew coldly determined to survive her captivity and see them all brought to justice. All she had to do was bide her time. Smoke would be here.
“Why, the door to the entire West, bucko,” O’Boyle stated grandly, after another swig from the bottle, the liquor adding to his own importance in the scheme and loosening his tongue even more. “Ye know yerself that the big-time fixers, and most of the boys on the dodge on the East Coast, have come to the same conclusion that Mr. Lathrop has, don’t ye? The police are gettin’ too much power. Now they’ve made it against the law for a man to carry a gun in near every city—not even honest folk are safe from their oppression, they’re not. Once Smoke Jensen is taken care of, our Irish gangs and others of the brotherhood will be ready to pull out of here and head west.”
“When’s all this to happen?”
“We’re supposed to go soon’s Jensen is taken care of, we are. Mr. Lathrop and two of his partners, Middleton and Asher, are to leave from New York City before the end of the week and join up with twenty men, hand-picked by me, in some place called Dodge City, they are. Think of it, bucko! We’ll all be rich as an English lord, we will.”
“A pox on those damned English lords,” O’Fallon growled. “They had me Pap strung up, they did.”
“Ah, did they now? ’Tis a cryin’ shame.”
“That’s true, it is. Only, what makes Smoke Jensen so important he has to be killed?”
O’Boyle winked roguishly. “Now, that’s something in itself, it is. Seems this Jensen is some sort of leader among the folks out there in Colorado. They look up to him, they do. Alone, they say, he’s a power to deal with, he is. If he led the locals against us, we’d be in a bad position. Lathrop figures they could run us clear the hell an’ gone outta there. There’s lots of land out there in those mountains, there is. More than a hunnerd an’ fifty miles on a side, Lathrop told me. He wants to make his headquarters at the ranch owned by Jensen, the Sugarloaf, he does. With Jensen gone, it’s all ours for the takin’.”
That’s when Seamas Quern burst in with the news that the ambush had failed. “B’God, he’s done for three of the boys in the twinklin’ of an eye.”
O’Boyle recovered enough of his senses to blink blearily and wave a hand at the others in the room. “You boys go along and give Seamas a hand.” After they left, he bent toward O’Fallon and spoke in a conspiratorial manner. “There’s another reason Lathrop wants Smoke Jensen to die.”
“Oh? An’ what would that be?” O’Fallon asked. Speaking in a hushed tone, O’Boyle replied, “Though I don’t have the whole of it, I gather there’s bad blood betwixt the two of them. Lathrop has this half-brother who ran afoul of Jensen some while back. He had sort of a little empire goin’, much like what Lathrop wants to do, only a lot smaller. He crossed Smoke Jensen and paid the price. Jensen killed him.”
O’Fallon considered that a moment. “It’s said Jensen’s killed a lot of men. Any idea which one it might’ve been?” “Oh, I’ve the name, right enough. Phineas Lathrop’s half-brother was named Rex Davidson.”
Mention of the name sent a chill through Sally’s heart.
Five more men came in a rush from the doorway behind Smoke Jensen. They had remained out of sight in the bowels of the warehouse during the initial attempt to ambush the mountain man gunfighter. Now they spread out and closed on Smoke and Oliver. Three held longshoremen’s hooks. Moonlight flashed off the keen edges of the long, slim knives in the hands of the other two. At Oliver Johnson’s exclamation, Smoke Jensen turned to face them.
Smoke’s first inclination was to holster his Colt and take them on a more even standing. Then Seamas Quern joined his last upright fighters and Smoke saw the revolver in his hand. That decided his course of action. Only ten feet separated Smoke from the reinforcements, with more like thirty between him and Quern. Smoke snapped a fast round at Quern as one of the stevedores lunged at him with a wicked hook.
Hot outrage ripped through Seamas Quern’s side and he cried out in pain. He dropped to the planking of the dock as Smoke Jensen backpeddled and brought his .45 Colt up to parry a swishing question mark of death in the hand of the nearest assailant. Metal screeched as the two objects met. Seamas felt a lightheaded dizziness sweep over him and he slowly edged himself away from the developing fight.
Smoke Jensen jammed hard knuckles into the ribcage of his attacker. The longshoreman grunted and gave a twist of his hook that tore the Peacemaker out of Smoke’s right hand. Although everyone agreed that there was no backdown in Smoke Jensen, he did make a tactical retreat to regain balance and fill his hand with his other sixgun. Incorrectly sensing weakness, the hard-faced dock worker pushed his slim advantage.
A bad mistake, he soon learned, when the tip of his weapon snagged the front of Smoke Jensen’s coat and bit on through to the shi
rt. An instant later, fire literally blasted into his gut as Smoke triggered another shot. Hot gases, burning flecks of powder, and of course a 240-grain lead slug blew through the hole that had been made in his belly. A vicious yank downward on the hook ripped apart Smoke’s clothing and left a thin red line on his chest.
It turned out to be the final act of a dying man. His eyes rolled up and the stevedore gave a terrible shudder, then fell into Smoke’s arms. Lacking any sympathy for the would-be murderer, and intent on maintaining a whole skin, Smoke dropped him at once. He turned to find the others attacking Oliver Johnson.
“Behind you, Ollie,” Smoke barked, as he raised the Colt into action again.
Oliver Johnson did something Smoke Jensen would never have imagined could work: he raised his gun arm and bent it backward over his shoulder. The small .38 barked loudly and a hole appeared under the nose of his assailant. Smoke’s .45 blasted a fraction of a second later.
His bullet found a home in tender flesh, which ended the career of a budding dockside thug. “Thanks, I needed that,” Oliver Johnson called out cheerily.
His jovial manner, coupled with Smoke Jensen’s deadly efficiency, put the survivors to flight. Smoke started at once for the door to the warehouse. “If Sally is here, we’ll find her,” he promised. He didn’t even notice the missing Seamas O’Boyle.
Seamas O’Boyle had crawled through the doorway into the warehouse and took long, painful seconds to pull himself upright. He staggered as he hurried to the small office cubicle where his boss held the woman captive. The long, oily locks of his jet-black hair hung in dirty disarray. He had a wild-eyed appearance when he burst through the door and confronted Sean O’Boyle.
“Well? Is it over, then?” O’Boyle asked, eyes glassy from drink.
“Yeah. Only, not like you’d expected, it ain’t. They’re all down. Every man-jack of them. That Smoke Jensen is a terror. An’ there was two of them.”
O’Boyle blanched. He didn’t think for even a second about using Sally Jensen as a hostage. “We’ve gotta get out of here, we do,” he blurted, coming unsteadily to his feet.
“There’s a back way,” Connor O’Fallon suggested.
“Damn it, man, don’t you think I know that?” O’Boyle snapped.
“We had best be takin' it, we had.”
“What about the woman?” Seamas Quern asked.
“Leave her. She’d only slow us down.”
“Yer the boss, Sean,” Quern allowed.
Quickly the trio left the office. Only they didn’t move quite fast enough. Their leather brogues made loud, clicking sounds on the hard oak planks of the warehouse floor. From the direction of the quayside door they heard a sharp exclamation.
“There they go, Smoke.”
Twin muzzle blooms winked in the darkened building. A bullet cracked past uncomfortably close to the ear of Sean O’Boyle. It did a great lot toward sobering him. He turned to run backward while he emptied the five shots in his diminutive .32 Smith and Wesson. Fired by a booze-soaked, frightened man, the small lead pellets struck at random, without doing harm.
Smoke Jensen fired again, to be rewarded by a startled cry when the .45 slug tore a gouge in Sean O’Boyle’s right ear. Smoke and Oliver began to run now, guided by the dim yellow glow of a lamp in the office. Smoke ignored the fleeing felons. Only one goal directed him.
He had to know the whereabouts of Sally. Would he find her still alive in that office? Anger and anxiety distracted him from the idea of apprehending the culprits. Chances were, he could find them later. First, he had to locate Sally and free her.
In his haste to depart, Sean O’Boyle had roughly shoved the castored chair to which Sally Jensen had been tied out of the way, into the shadows, between two tall, wooden file cabinets. After the principal conspirators had hastily departed, Sally sat in apprehension as she heard gunshots and shouts from outside. Running footsteps faded in her ears, to be replaced by the clump of fast-moving boots approaching. Only which belonged to whom?
Suddenly the door flew open and a broad-shouldered figure dived inside, its progress led by the muzzle of a .45 Colt. The force of the entry dislodged the coal-oil lamp from the desk. It fell to the floor and smashed, the wick drowned to darkness in a flood of kerosene. Her heart surged in her chest. It had to be her beloved Smoke. A moment later she had confirmation as his familiar profile rose in silhouette above a desk, head swiveling to let his eyes take in the entire room.
With her lips sealed by a bandage made of a man’s shirt-tail and sticking plaster, Sally had no means of calling out to her husband. Her hands had been tied to the arms of the chair and her feet bound together. She thought frantically of some means of letting him know where she was. When it came to her in a flash of embarrassed enlightenment, she cursed herself silently for not seeing it at first. All she had to do was kick one of the file cabinets.
Sally’s initial thumps had a muffled quality. Her captors had removed her shoes. Well, damn it, she thought, and let go a stronger kick. A sharp pain shot up her legs from her toes, although she was much different today from the eastern tenderfoot who had married the handsome mountain man so long ago.
“Sally? Is that you?” Smoke’s deep, familiar voice demanded.
“Ummf! Mugguh! Aaaugh!” Sally tried to respond through her gag.
Smoke came to her in a rush. He bent and swiftly cut through the bonds that restrained her hands, then knelt to slice the heavy cord that secured her ankles. Then he rose again and put gentle fingers to the sides of her mouth.
“This is going to smart some,” he advised her.
Then he edged the corner of the sticking plaster away from her skin, peeled back enough to get a good grasp, and yanked with a swift, sure movement. Sally yelped at the insult to her skin, then sprang into Smoke’s arms. Her legs would not hold her and her fingers had gone numb long ago. She clung, though, while Smoke hugged her back.
“You could have taken that nasty thing out of my mouth
first,” she made mock complaint. “At least that way I could have told you my arms and legs were numb.”
“It’s all right, Sal. You’re safe now,” Smoke told her, as he nuzzled her graceful neck.
“I may be, but you’re not,” Sally snapped back, more in her normal mode.
“Those who could ran away,” Smoke rejected her worry. “That’s not what I mean.” Quickly Sally recounted what the inebriated Sean O’Boyle had said about Phineas Lathrop and his grand design on the High Lonesome. “That terrible man O’Boyle said Lathrop plans to make his headquarters at the Sugarloaf,” she wound down. “To do that, he knew he had to have you killed. In fact, that avalanche was planned to kill us both.”
“His men have tried a couple of times since, and failed. I don’t imagine we’ll see Mr. O’Boyle again.”
“There’s more, Smoke, honey. Lathrop is related to someone who came very near to killing you. He’s half-brother to Rex Davidson, and considers this a personal affair between you and him.”
Smoke looked at her hard, trying to read her expression in the dimness of the office. “I’ll worry about that later. Now, let’s get you out of here.”
None of the trio who fled the warehouse could be called coward. Sean O’Boyle had grown up on the wharfs and docks of Boston, a scrapper and hard-nose almost from birth. His widowed mother and an uncle had brought him there from County Cork, after his father had been killed in one of the uprisings. He’d never lost his brogue nor his old country manner of speech. Neither had Connor O’Fallon, who had come to American with one of his older brothers, a priest, and had immediately gone wild. He and Sean O’Boyle had fought back-to-back as boys, carving out a place for themselves among the other waifs of Boston’s waterfront.
Early on they had attracted a follower in the form of Seamas Quern. Seamas was some four years younger, the son of a waterfront whore and a visiting Irish sailor. He had been on his own since he was old enough to walk and feed himself. By the age of thirteen, he’d led one w
ing of Sea O’Boyle’s mob of street hustlers, pickpockets, and sneak-thieves. As they grew older, their crimes became more serious and more violent. All three had killed grown men before they’d reached their fifteenth birthdays.
When, at 18, most Irish lads of recent immigration looked toward the Army Recruiting Office for a means out of the squalor of the East Coast tenement neighborhoods, Sean O’Boyle and those of his gang, which now numbered close to fifty, turned to the piers to improve their standard of living. They did that by stealing from the ships, from the docks, and out of the warehouses where they worked. All three had served time in Railford by the time they reached the majority. They had also accumulated considerable wealth by their standards.
It was along about then that first Rex Davidson, then his half-brother, Phineas Lathrop, took Sean O’Boyle as a protege. The relationship had not been one made in heaven. Even so, O’Boyle now sat at the head of a union of 350 longshoremen and stevedores, nearly half of whom were hardened criminals.
With a little coaching from Lathrop, O’Boyle and his thugs steadily bled the ship owners, shipping companies, warehouse owners, and merchants of Boston for a healthy share of the profits. These added costs brought on by the pillage naturally had to be passed on to customers on everything brought into Boston by ship.
Sale of the pilfered merchandise—sometimes items as large as whole cargo pallets of lumber—contributed significantly to the coffers of Phineas Lathrop and had financed the initial stages of his western dream of an empire of crime. Only two flaws marred Lathrop’s grand design.
First, so accustomed were Phineas Lathrop and his partners, associates, and henchmen to the manner of “doing business” in the East—everyone seemed to have his hand out and could be counted on to look the other way when the palm was properly crossed with silver—that they could not see that things were done differently in the West. Not even when they were presented with deadly evidence of it.
Rage of the Mountain Man Page 14
