The Last Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  One of Canning’s slugs hit Smoke in the left side, passing through the fleshy part and exiting out the back as he knelt on his knees, firing. The shock spun him around and knocked him down. Smoke raised up on one elbow and leveled a .44, taking careful aim. He shot Canning in the right eye, taking off part of his face. Canning’s legs jerked out from under him and he fell on his back, his left eye open and staring in disbelief.

  Smoke jerked pistols from the headless outlaw’s belt and hand just as Sam and another man ran into the smoky, dusty street, trying to find a target through the din and the haze. Smoke fired at them just as they found him and began shooting. A slug ricocheted off a rock in the street, part of the lead hitting Smoke in the chest, bringing blood and a grunt of pain.

  Smoke dragged himself into an alleyway and quickly reloaded all four .44s. He was bleeding from wounds in his side, his leg, his face, and his chest, but he was also mad as hell. He looked around for a target, shoving the fully loaded spare .44s behind his belt.

  Sam was on his knees in the middle of the street, one arm broken by a .44 slug. The outlaw screamed curses at Smoke and lifted a pistol, the hammer back. Smoke shot him in the chest. Sam jerked but refused to die. He pulled the trigger of his pistol, the lead plowing up the street and enveloping the man in dust. Smoke shot him again, in the belly. Sam doubled over, dropping his pistol. He died in the center of the street, in a bowing position, his head resting on the dirt, his hat blowing away as a gust of wind whipped between the tents and shacks.

  Lead began whining down the alley, and Smoke limped and ran behind a building, pausing to reload and to catch his breath. It has been said that it’s hard to stop a man who knows he’s in the right and just keeps on coming. Smoke knew he was right—and he kept on coming.

  Another of Felter’s men ran across the street and down the dirt walkway and into the open alleyway just as Smoke stepped away from the building.

  Smoke shot him twice in the belly and kept on coming.

  The miners were shouting and cheering and betting on who would be the last man on his feet when the fight was over. Bets against Smoke were getting hard to place.

  Sam’s partner stepped out and called to Smoke, firing as he yelled. One slug spun Smoke around as it struck the handle of a .44 stuck behind his belt. Pain doubled him over for a second. He lifted his Remingtons and dropped the man to the dirt.

  The sounds of a horse galloping hard away came to Smoke as Felter’s last man still on his feet ran out of a shack behind Smoke. Smoke coolly lifted a .44 and shot him six times, duckwalking the man across the street, the slugs sending dust popping from the man’s shirtfront with each impact.

  It was almost over.

  Smoke reloaded his Remingtons, dropped the spare. 44s to the dirt, and took a deep breath, feeling a twinge of pain from at least one broken rib, maybe two.

  Felter had sat behind kegs of beer in the tent saloon and watched it all. He had had a dozen or more opportunities to shoot Smoke from ambush—but he could not bring himself to do it. Jensen was just too much of a man for that. He poured himself a glass of whiskey and shook his head.

  What he had seen was the stuff legends are made of; it was rare—but it was not unknown to the West for one man to take on impossible odds and win.

  He stood up. “I believe I can take you now, Smoke,” he muttered. “You got to be runnin’ out of steam.”

  “Felter!” Smoke called. “Step out here and face me.” Blood dripped from his wounds to plop in the dust. His face was bloody and blood and sweat stained his clothing.

  Smoke carefully wiped his hands free of sweat just as Felter stepped out of the tent saloon. Both men’s guns were in leather. Felter held a shot glass full of whiskey in his left hand. Smoke’s right thumb was hooked behind his gunbelt, just over the buckle. Twenty-five feet separated them when Felter stopped. The miners were silent, almost breathless on the hillside, watching this last showdown—for one of the men.

  “I seen it, but it’s tough for me to believe. You played hell with my men.”

  Smoke said nothing.

  “You and me, now, huh, kid?”

  “That’s it, and then I take out your bosses.”

  Felter laughed at him and sipped his whiskey. “I just don’t think you can beat me, kid.”

  “One way to find out.”

  “I think you’re scared, Smoke.”

  “I’m not afraid of you or of any other man on the face of this earth.”

  His words chilled the outlaw. He mentally shook away that damnable edge of fear that touched him.

  Felter drained the shot glass. Whiskey and blood would be the last thing he would taste on this earth. “Your wife sure looked pretty nekked.”

  Smoke’s grin was ugly. “I’m glad you think so, Felter—’cause you’ll never see another woman.”

  Felter flushed. Damn the man’s eyes! he thought. I can’t make him mad. “You ready, Smoke?”

  “Anytime.”

  Felter braced himself. “Now!”

  The air blurred in front of Felter, then filled with the thunderous roar of gunfire and black smoke. The bounty hunter was on his feet, but something was very wrong. There was something pressing against his back. He felt with his hands. A hitch-rail.

  Empty hands! Empty?

  My hands can’t be empty, he thought. “What . . . ?” he managed to say. Then the shock of his wounds hit him hard.

  Why . . . I didn’t even clear leather, he thought. The damn kid pulled a cross-draw and beat me! Me!

  Felter steadied his eyes to see if he could be wrong. Smoke’s left hand holster was empty. He watched the kid shove the .44 back into leather.

  “No way!” Felter said. He reached for his Colt and lifted it. His movements seemed so slow. He jacked back the hammer and something blurred in front of him.

  Then the sound reached his ears and the fury of the slug in his stomach brought a scream from his lips. Felter again lifted his Colt and a booming blow struck him on the breastbone, somersaulting him over the hitch-rail, to land on his backside under the striped pole of a tent barber shop.

  But Felter was a tough, barrel-chested man, and would not die easily. Unable to rise, he struggled to pull his left hand Colt. He managed to get the pistol up, hammer back, and pointed. Then Smoke’s .44 roared one more time, the slug hitting Felter in the jaw, taking off most of the outlaw’s face. The slug whined off bone and hit the striped barber pole, spinning it.

  The street was quiet. The battle was over.

  The barber pole squeaked and turned, then was silent.

  Smoke sank to his knees in the dirt.

  * * *

  “You hard hit, son,” a miner told him. Unnecessary information, for Smoke knew he was hurt. “You can’t just ride out bleedin’ like that.”

  Smoke swung into the saddle, gathering the reins in his left hand, the pack horse rope in his right. “I’ll be all right.”

  He had cleaned his wounds in town; now he wanted the high country, where he would make poultices of herbs and wild flowers, as Preacher had taught him.

  The mountain man’s words returned to him. “Nature’s way is the best, son. You let old Mother Nature take care of you. They’s a whole medicine chest right out there in that field. All a man’s gotta do is learn ’em.”

  “When you boys plant them,” Smoke told the crowd, “put on their headboards that Smoke Jensen was right and they were wrong.”

  He rode off to the west.

  “Boys,” a miner said. “We just seen us a livin’ legend. You remember his name, ’cause we all gonna be hearin’ a lot more about that young feller.”

  EPILOGUE

  For a month Smoke tended to his wounds and rested at his camp on the banks of the San Miguel, on the west side of the Uncompahgre Forest. He rested and treated his wounds with poultices.

  He ate well of venison, fished in the river, and made stews of wild potatoes and onions and rabbit and squirrel. He slept twelve to fifteen hours a day, feeling hi
s strength slowly returning to him. And he dreamed his dreams of Nicole, her soft arms soothing him, melting away the hurt and fever, calming his sleep, loving him back to health.

  At the beginning of the fifth week, he knew he was ready to ride, ready to move, and he carefully checked his guns, cleaning them, rubbing oil into the pockets of his holsters, until the deadly .44s fitted in and out smoothly.

  Then he packed his gear and rode out.

  In the southwestern corner of Wyoming, a wanted poster tacked to a tree brought him up short.

  WANTED

  DEAD OR ALIVE

  THE OUTLAW AND MURDERER

  SMOKE JENSEN

  10,000.00 REWARD

  Contact the Sheriff at Bury, Idaho Territory

  Smoke removed the wanted flyer and carefully folded it, tucking it in his pocket. He looked up to watch an eagle soar high above him, gliding majestically northwestward.

  “Take a message with you, eagle,” Smoke said. “Tell Potter and Richards and Stratton and all their gun-hands I’m coming to kill them. For my Pa, for Preacher, for my son, and for making me an outlaw. And they’ll die just as hard as Nicole did. You tell them, eagle. I’m coming after them.”

  The eagle dipped its wings and flew on.

  Keep reading for a special excerpt of the new western

  from William W. and J.A. Johnstone.

  FRONTIER OF VIOLENCE

  a

  A RATTLESNAKE WELLS,

  WYOMING WESTERN

  Welcome to the most dangerous town in the West. For Marshal Bob Hatfield, that means rough justice and a hundred ways to die . . .

  In the shadow of the Prophecy Mountains, the ramshackle boomtown of Rattlesnake Wells draws schemers, predators, and desperate pilgrims. As for the law, that’s the town marshal, a former Texas outlaw trying to make a new life for himself. But Sundown Bob Hatfield knows a man who’s slick on the draw can’t escape trouble for long. In Rattlesnake Wells, you fight fire with fire—and a new one has just exploded.

  An enterprising saloon owner stages a shooting contest with a matched pair of gold-plated revolvers as first prize. But some contestants don’t play by the rules, and these aren’t just any old gold-plated guns. Now the guns are gone, innocent hostages have been taken for a violent ride, and a chase is on into the vast Wyoming wilderness—where a terrifying dark secret will be exposed, much blood will be spilled, and a fast-gun marshal will bring the real outlaws to their knees . . .

  Look for it now, where ever books are sold.

  CHAPTER 1

  Things had been relatively peaceful in Rattlesnake Wells, Wyoming. In recent days there were the usual quota of saloon brawls, a few incidents of drunks discharging firearms mainly to see folks scatter, and a domestic squabble or two. But nothing more serious than that.

  Not to say, however, there wasn’t still an undercurrent of excitement running through the town, due primarily to the announced opening of a spanking brand-new saloon in the New Town section on the north end of the city.

  A saloon, especially in that part of town, wasn’t particularly newsworthy in and of itself. The difference in this case was the much-ballyhooed opulence of the new business—as opposed to the quickly thrown-up tent saloons and gambling joints currently blighting the boom area as a result of the gold strike up in the Prophecy Mountains.

  But, despite the general excitement, certain folks around town were neither happy nor impressed by what they were hearing—opulence be damned.

  “It ain’t that I mind facing tough competition,” declared Mike Bullock, owner of the cleverly named Bullock’s Saloon. “Hell, I’ve done that plenty of times before, in plenty of different places.” He paused, his broad face bunching into a scowl. “But this Gafford character is starting to really get under my skin. I mean, a whole brand-new building, a fancy la-di-da name, an imported bar, even dance hall girls . . . you’d think that oughta be about enough, wouldn’t you? But now this”—Bullock held up a poster emblazoned with large letters and colorful images and gave it a rattling shake—“this is pushing things too blasted far, says I!”

  The paper Bullock was waving in the faces of Marshal Bob Hatfield and Maudie Sartain was an advertising flyer heralding the scheduled grand opening of the new saloon. The flyer featured all of the things Bullock had just mentioned in his agitated spiel, but with a bit more detail—like how the name of the new establishment would be the Crystal Diamond; how its main hall would feature an ornate cherrywood bar and a spectacular crystal chandelier both specially delivered all the way from San Francisco; and how the highlight of each evening’s entertainment would be Miss Alora Dane and her Diamond Dollies performing dazzling song-and-dance routines.

  But the real focal point of the flyer—the “this” that seemed to have Bullock on the brink of blowing his stack—was the event newly announced to kick off the Crystal Diamond’s big opening. It was to be a shooting competition, open to all comers, offering as the first prize a matched set of gold-plated pistols with diamond-encrusted grips. Adding to the lure of the words, a picture of the pistols was prominently displayed.

  “Gafford sure knows how to draw interest—you can’t deny him that,” said Maudie.

  “I saw some of those flyers earlier. They’re going up all over town,” said the marshal. “I just hope that, in the process of drawing interest, those jeweled pistols don’t also draw a heap of trouble. You combine a prize like that with a bunch of shooters and shootin’ irons and a saloonful of who-hit-John, you got the makings for just about anything.”

  “There you go!” exclaimed Bullock, slapping the flyer down onto the table and pointing a thick finger at the marshal. “You’d be well within your rights to shut the whole shindig down, says I, as a public nuisance almost certain to start a riot.”

  Bob shook his head. “Come on, Mike. You can’t be serious.”

  “You said yourself—”

  “I said there’d be the makings of trouble. I didn’t say it was a certainty or a guarantee, and therefore it’s not something I can take legal action against. Comes right down to it, your place here—not to mention any one of the tent saloons or gambling joints along Gold Avenue—has got the same makings on just about any night of the week.” Bob shrugged. “Minus the jeweled pistols and with smaller, more manageable crowds, that’s all.”

  This discussion was taking place at a rear table in Bullock’s Saloon, the oldest and most popular drinking establishment in Rattlesnake Wells. Except for a quartet of old-timers who sat quietly smoking and nursing their drinks as they played cards at a table toward the center of the room, the place was empty during this lull period in the middle of a weekday afternoon.

  Mike Bullock was a balding, bullet-headed Irishman, only average in height but with a beer keg torso and thick, almost apelike arms ending in mallet-sized fists that had ended more than a few arguments and helped to quell many a brawl. Quick as his temper and fists were, however, he could also at times be bighearted and generous to a fault.

  Maudie Sartain was his dependable right hand who helped with the day-to-day running of things—her duties ranging the gamut from tending bar when needed to ordering stock to serving as a sort of house mother to the hostesses Bullock employed to serve drinks and otherwise entertain male customers. A curvaceous, jet-haired beauty who made a habit of wearing dresses that proudly displayed ample cleavage, she’d long ago mastered the fine art of flirting without promising too much or allowing things to get out of hand. When some hombres got the wrong idea and tried to get too friendly with their hands because they were either too drunk or just plain too dumb, Maudie had also mastered the sharp-tongued reprimand or, if that wasn’t enough, a sharp elbow where it would do the most good.

  Tall, solid, square-shouldered Bob Hatfield—called “Sundown Bob” by some, due to the flaming red color of his hair—in addition to looking in on all local businesses from time to time in his role as town marshal, made particularly frequent stops at Bullock’s. It wasn’t that the marshal was a heavy
drinker or anything. He hardly imbibed at all, in fact, and especially not when on duty. He simply enjoyed the company of Mike and Maudie. Usually when he stopped in and lingered for any amount of time, he’d have a cup or two of Maudie’s excellent coffee, as opposed to the dreadful brew he and his deputies made at the marshal’s office, or sometimes some of the tea that she herself preferred.

  Such was the case today, in fact, as he found himself sipping from a new blend that Maudie had insisted he try. It wasn’t bad, but neither was it something he’d make a point of requesting the next time he came around. Yet, even at that, it was still better than what was waiting in the pot back at his office.

  “Yeah, let Gafford go ahead and have his silly contest and draw his big, splashy crowd,” grumbled Bullock, continuing his bitter lament. “Let’s see how long all that lasts after the novelty has worn off. The ranchers and miners in these parts are hardworking men who want a fair measure to their drinks and a friendly atmosphere where they can bend an elbow, lay down a few cards in an honest game, and maybe pat a hostess on the bottom once in a while. They don’t need all the hoopla of glittery chandeliers and high-kickin’ dancing girls while they’re being served watered-down drinks at jacked-up prices.

  “What’s more, when the Prophecies have coughed out their last gasp of gold dust—like always happens in booms like the one we’re going through—then how long do you think August Gafford and his Crystal Claptrap will even be around? I was here before the first vein was tapped up in those mountains and I’ll still be here when the last pickax is thrown down in frustration. Folks will remember that, and will keep it in mind. You’ll see.”