Trek of the Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

It took him almost twenty-four hours of continual riding to arrive at the small village of Silver Cliff, a town built up to supply the many miners in the area with food and mining utensils and such. Like most mining towns, Silver Cliff consisted mainly of saloons, gambling parlors, and a couple of general stores, along with a ramshackle hotel for the miners to stay in when they visited the town to buy supplies and blow off steam from their isolation the rest of the year.

  All but asleep on his horse after his long journey, Smoke decided he wouldn’t be much good to Sally when he found the kidnappers unless he was rested, so he got a room in the hotel and asked the proprietor if a hot bath was available.

  The man chuckled. “Yeah, we got a bathtub, mister, but it ain’t used much this time of year. Most of the miners don’t bathe much between September and April.”

  Smoke nodded. He knew how that went. When he’d lived up in the mountains with Preacher years before, the man had told him it was plumb unhealthy to bathe more than once or twice a year.

  “How long will it take you to get the water heated?” Smoke asked.

  “Oh, ’bout an hour, if I crank up the stove now.”

  “Is there any place in town that serves good food while I wait?”

  “That depends on what you mean by good,” the man answered with a straight face. “If you mean can you eat it without getting’ poisoned, yeah, there is. If you mean does it taste good, well, that’s a different story.”

  Smoke laughed. He liked this man, who seemed to have a good sense of humor, which was sometimes rare in a mining town where everyone usually seemed to be eaten up with gold fever.

  The man came out from behind his counter and walked to the front door. He leaned out and pointed down the muddy main street toward a small clapboard building at the edge of town, sandwiched in between what appeared to be a whorehouse and a saloon. “That there is called Ma’s Place, though if the old lady who runs it was ever a mother, I’ll eat my hat.”

  Smoke glanced at the big Regulator clock that hung on the wall behind the counter. “I’ll be back in an hour for that bath,” he said.

  “I’ll have the water hot enough to take the feathers off a chicken by then,” the man promised.

  Smoke walked down the roughshod lumber along the street that served as a boardwalk until he was across from the building with the sign on it that read MA’S PLACE. Seeing no help for it, he hopped across the mud puddles still rimmed with ice that covered the middle of Main Street and entered the eating establishment.

  True to the hotel man’s word, almost every table was taken up by miners and workers eager to have some cooking that they hadn’t done themselves for a change.

  A portly woman in an apron, with hair that hadn’t seen a comb in some time, walked up to Smoke. “Table, mister?” she asked.

  The only empty table was in the center of the room. Since his gunfighting days, Smoke had made it a practice never to sit with his back to a door or window or where someone could sit behind him. He glanced over at the corner table and saw that the four men sitting there were finished eating and were talking and smoking over final cups of coffee.

  He nodded his head toward them. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll wait until that table is unoccupied,” he said.

  Ma looked over at the table, and then she stared back at Smoke. Her eyes fell to how he wore his twin holsters low on his hips, the left-hand gun butt-first and the right hand one butt-back. “Oh, so it’s like that, is it?” she asked, a knowing look on her face.

  Smoke shrugged.

  She grinned and stuck out her hand. “My name’s Ellie May, but everyone around here just calls me Ma.”

  He took her hand. “I’m Smoke Jensen,” he said.

  Her eyes widened a bit, showing that even here in this backwater town she’d heard the name before. “I’ll see what I can do, Mr. Jensen.”

  “Just Smoke,” he said.

  She smiled back over her shoulder, revealing teeth that showed it’d been as long since she’d seen a dentist as it had since she’d been to a hairdresser.

  She went over to the table, leaned over, and said something to the men in a low voice. As all their heads turned to stare at Smoke, he nodded at them in friendly greeting.

  They hurriedly got to their feet, picked up their coffee cups, and moved to the center table, leaving theirs vacant.

  As he walked past them, Smoke tipped his hat. “Much obliged, gentlemen,” he said.

  One of the men put out his hand and touched Smoke’s arm. “Is it true, Mr. Jensen, that you’ve kilt over a hundred men?” he asked.

  Smoke took a deep breath and stopped to look down at the man. “I don’t know, mister. I don’t keep count,” he answered. “Putting a number on a man’s life trivializes killing. And killing is never trivial.”

  Smoke turned his back and walked to take a seat at the vacant table by the window, with his back to the corner. Questions like that used to make him angry, but as he got older and more famous, he got used to it. Ever since he’d been featured in several of Erastus Beadle’s dime novels, it had only gotten worse.

  Ma walked over. “What’ll it be, Smoke?” she asked. “It’s a little late for breakfast and a mite early for lunch.”

  Smoke smiled. “How about we compromise? Some eggs, a couple of flapjacks, and a small steak on the side would be excellent.”

  “Elk steak or beef steak?” she asked. “I’ve got both.”

  “Elk, please.”

  She nodded. “And to drink? I’ve got some fresh milk just brought in an hour ago.”

  Smoke’s mouth watered. He’d drunk so much coffee on the trail his gut was burning. “That would be great, Ma.”

  “It’ll be right out.”

  While Smoke waited for his food, he built himself a cigarette. More to keep himself awake than because he felt the urge for one.

  As he bent over the lucifer to light it, he noticed the men he’d talked to at the table stop on their way out of the café and talk to a couple of young boys at the far side of the room.

  One was dressed in black shirt and trousers and had a black leather vest on with silver conchos around the edges as decoration. Smoke noticed he wore a brace of pearl-handled Colt Peacemakers on his hips and had them tied down low on his leg.

  When the boy, who couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, stared over at him, Smoke knew there was going to be trouble. Damn, he thought, I knew I shouldn’t have given my right name.

  Ma appeared from the kitchen with a tall glass of milk in one hand and a platter of biscuits in the other. She put them on Smoke’s table. “Here you go, Smoke. You can nibble on these till that steak is done. Won’t be long.”

  Smoke cut his eyes toward the far table. “Who is that at that table over there, Ma?” he asked.

  She looked, and then she frowned when she looked back at Smoke. “That there is trouble,” she said. “Trouble with a capital T. He calls himself the Silver Kid, and he’s always going around trying to pick fights with someone so he can show how fast he is with those six-guns on his hips.”

  “And his friend?”

  “Oh, he’s Buck Johansson. He follows the other one around like a lapdog, trying to act as tough as his friend, but he ain’t near as mean as he tries to make out.”

  While Smoke was listening to Ma, he heard a chair scrape back from across the room and saw the Silver Kid approaching out of the corner of his eye. “Better get on back in the kitchen, Ma. I think there’s going to be trouble.”

  Before she could reply, the Silver Kid brushed her aside and stood in front of Smoke with his hands on his hips. “I just can’t hardly believe it, boys,” he said, talking loud so everyone in the room could hear him. “The great Smoke Jensen drinking milk like a little bitty baby.”

  Smoke leaned back, loosening the hammer thong on his right-hand Colt under the table and straightening out his right leg so he could draw faster if he needed to. “And you are?” he asked.

  “I’m known as the Si
lver Kid,” the boy answered, letting his chest puff out a little.

  Smoke noticed the Kid’s friend standing behind him and a little off to one side, sweat tricking down his face. He clearly wanted no part of this.

  Smoke reached out and took a deep drink of the milk, using his left hand. He smiled. “That’s funny,” he said. “I’ve never heard of you.”

  The Kid blushed. “Well, everbody’s gonna know my name after I kill Smoke Jensen,” he said, his voice cracking on the word kill.

  Smoke smiled, slowly shaking his head. “How old are you, son?” he asked, not unkindly.

  “Uh, I’m almost nineteen,” the boy answered, making his voice lower this time.

  Smoke nodded. “That’s a good age. It’d be a shame if you don’t live to see it.”

  The Kid grinned insolently. “Oh, I’ll live to see it, Jensen. It’s you that’s gonna die today.”

  At these words, the men at the surrounding tables all got up and moved out of the line of fire.

  Smoke shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “But let me show you something first. All right?”

  The Kid looked puzzled. “Show me what?” he asked, his right hand hanging next to the butt of his pistol, his fingers twitching.

  Smoke got to his feet and faced the boy, his hands out in front of him at waist level. “Hold your hands like this,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Just do it,” Smoke said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  The Kid blushed and did as Smoke asked, his hands out a foot or so apart.

  Smoke clapped his hands together. “Now, do that,” he said, a half smile on his face. “As fast as you can.”

  The Kid smirked and slapped his hands together with a loud snap.

  “Now,” Smoke said, his hands still out in front of him. “Do it again, faster this time.”

  The Kid did it, but this time, so fast no one saw his hands move, Smoke drew his right-hand Colt and had it out and cocked so that the boy’s hands clapped on it.

  “Jesus!” the Johansson boy breathed. “I never even saw him clear leather.”

  The Kid’s face paled at the speed of Smoke’s draw. “You want to try it one more time?” Smoke asked, holstering his Colt.

  The Kid nodded and spread his hands, closer together this time.

  Smoke nodded and the boy moved, but this time Smoke drew his left-hand gun and had it between the Kid’s hands before they could come together.

  Now it was the Kid’s face that had sweat trickling down off his forehead.

  “I have an idea,” Smoke said as he holstered his Colt for a second time. “Why don’t you boys join me and I’ll buy you some breakfast?”

  Buck Johansson nodded and slapped the Kid on the shoulder. “Gee, that’d be great, Mr. Jensen.”

  Smoke sat back down. “Call me Smoke, Buck.”

  The two boys took seats at Smoke’s table and everyone else went back to their eating.

  Ma came out of the kitchen with a large platter with Smoke’s food on it and gave him a wink as she put it on the table.

  “I think we’re gonna need some more eggs and steak, Ma. These are growing boys and they need some good grub,” Smoke said.

  The Kid grinned. “Golly, Smoke, I ain’t never seen nobody as fast as that before.”

  Smoke began to dig into his food. “Fast is overrated, Kid,” he said. “Accuracy is what counts when you’re facing a man that wants to kill you. Being able to put that first bullet where it’ll do the most good is what keeps a man forked-end-down instead of the other way around.”

  The rest of the breakfast was spent with the boys asking Smoke questions about what it was like in the “old” days, something that made Smoke laugh, and at the same time made him wish he was twenty years younger and still back up in the mountains with Preacher.

  Still, he did his best around mouthfuls of food to give the boys some idea of what it’d been like back when white men were as rare in the High Lonesome as hen’s teeth.

  He told them of Preacher, a man who’d spent his entire adult life living alone in the mountains until he took Smoke under his wing as his “adopted” son, and had them laughing until they cried at tales of Puma Buck, Beartooth, Powder Pete, and Deadhead, men who lived life to the fullest and still had time to laugh at the vagaries of life in the mountains of Colorado Territory.

  At one point, the Silver Kid asked Smoke if he ever kept in touch with the old men and if many of them were still alive.

  Smoke’s face grew sad at the question. “I still see a few of the younger ones, boys,” he said, “though most are in their seventies or eighties. Unfortunately, their way of life has just about passed away with the ones who’ve died. There are just too many people around now, and the Indians who still live in the mountains have been so corrupted by the white man’s ways that it just isn’t the same anymore.”

  When they finished eating, he got up and shook the boys’ hands. “Let me give you some advice, boys,” he said. “Killing a man, taking from him all that he has or ever will have, is not something to wish for. Once you’ve done that, you’ll never be the same. You can live with it if it’s forced on you and you don’t have a choice in the matter. But if you go out looking for it for no good reason other than to build a reputation, it sours something deep inside and you’ll regret it for the rest of your lives. You’ll be as dead inside as that man you planted in Boot Hill.”

  10

  When Smoke pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket and peeled a couple of bills off the top to give to Ma for their breakfast, he didn’t notice a group of four men sitting at a nearby table watching.

  One of the men, a hard case named Jeremiah Jones, punched the man next to him with his elbow. “Hey, Willy, would you look at the size of that man’s stash?” he said, his eyes wide.

  Willy Boatman, Bob Causey, and Sam Bottoms, Jones’s partners in a failed mining venture, had been in the surrounding mountains for almost a year and had little to show for their efforts. They’d come to Colorado Territory expecting to find gold lying around for the taking, with very little knowledge of how and where to dig for it.

  Desperate now, down to their last few dollars, and unable to find anyone who would stake them to another try, they’d been talking about trying to rob a store or a bank, but had as little knowledge about that as they did about how to go about finding honest work.

  Willy nodded, his eyes hard. “How about we follow him and see if maybe he’ll agree to share some of that with us?” he said, chuckling at his wit.

  “Sure,” Bob Causey agreed, “we shouldn’t have no problems with it bein’ four agin one.”

  * * *

  Smoke walked back to the hotel, with the four men following a short distance behind.

  “Is my bath ready?” he asked the proprietor when he entered the hotel lobby.

  “Sure is, mister,” he said. “I got that water so hot you can take a steam bath if you want to.”

  Smoke handed him a dollar. “Thanks for your trouble,” he said. “I’ll leave my things in my room while I bathe. Could you have a boy take my horses over to the livery and get them some grain and a good rubdown?”

  “Sure thing, Mr. Jensen,” the proprietor answered, taking a key from the rack behind the counter. “Your room is 312, up on the third floor. Same floor as the bath.”

  Neither man noticed the man standing just inside the door listening as the proprietor told Smoke his room number.

  Smoke dropped his saddlebags and the larger bag containing his supplies and extra weapons on his bed, locked the door, and went looking for the bathtub down the hall.

  Smoke found the room and tested the water in the tub with his hand. True to the proprietor’s word, the water was steaming hot, and there was a pile of towels, a bar of soap, and a bath brush on a chair next to it ready for his use.

  Smoke stripped out of his clothes, hanging them along with his gunbelt on a peg on the wall next to the door. Out of longtime habit, he took one of his Colts from its holster
and placed it under one of the towels, then slipped into the hot water, sighing with relief as the heat began to loosen muscles stiff from a day and night of constant riding.

  He leaned his head back against the tub and closed his eyes, luxuriating in the feeling of a hot bath.

  * * *

  Jeremiah Jones took out his pistol and quietly knocked on the door to Room 312. When there was no answer, he tried the doorknob and found it locked. “Damn,” he muttered under his breath.

  “I told you he was gonna take a bath,” Bottoms said.

  “We could kick the door in,” Causey offered.

  “Naw,” Jones answered. “He’s probably got his money with him anyway. Let’s just go find him and git it.”

  They eased down the hall, walking on tiptoes so as not to warn Smoke of their approach. When they got to the room with a hand-painted sign on it that read BATH, Jones held his gun out in front of him and opened the door.

  At the sound of the door opening, Smoke opened his eyes and sat up in the tub, letting his right hand hang over the side next to the pile of towels.

  He smiled when he saw the hard-looking men enter, each with a pistol in their hands. “Sorry, gentlemen,” Smoke said easily, with no fear in his eyes. “This bath is already spoken for.”

  “Shut your mouth, asshole,” Jones growled. “We didn’t come for no bath.”

  Smoke wrinkled his nose at the men’s ripe odor. “I can see that, though it might be a good idea for you all to take one,” Smoke said, his fingers inching under the towel slowly. “You all smell like you’ve been sleeping with skunks.”

  Jones’s face flushed red at the insult. “Where’s the money, sumbitch?” he asked, relaxing a little when he saw Smoke’s gunbelt hanging on the peg next to the door. He didn’t notice that one of the pistols was missing.

  “Oh, you mean my money?” Smoke asked, planning in his mind the order in which he was going to kill the four men.

  “No, I mean our money,” Jones replied, letting his eyes roam over Smoke’s clothes on the peg.

  Suddenly, from the hall behind the men, a voice called out, “Drop them guns and get your hands in the air!”