Trek of the Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  As the outlaws began to get to their feet and two men escorted Sally into her cabin, Smoke moved back from the ledge. “Damn,” he said, “I guess that means we don’t try and get Sally out tonight.”

  “So, what are we gonna do?” Pearlie asked.

  Smoke’s eyes were hard as flint. “We’re going to set up some surprises for those men back down the trail so when I meet with them tomorrow, we’ll have the upper hand.”

  As they moved away from the ledge, he relaxed a little. “But first, I’m going to make us a fire and we’re going to eat some food and drink some coffee.” He smiled at Cal, who was grinning in relief. “Preacher always said you can’t do battle on an empty stomach.”

  Pearlie looked at Cal. “We brung you some steaks and biscuits and beans from town.”

  “Right now, I’d settle for some rawhide to chew on I’m so hungry,” Cal said.

  Smoke gave a low chuckle. “Now you’re starting to sound like Pearlie.”

  23

  Smoke and the boys gathered up all their supplies and the packhorse and horse they’d brought for Sally, and they moved off down the mountain about a quarter of a mile. It was fairly easy going as the night was one of those only seen in early winter: crystal-clear skies, bright starlight, and a crescent moon shedding just enough light so the path through the high mountain forest could be easily seen.

  Smoke pulled his fur-lined buckskin coat tight around him. “It’s gonna get mighty chilly tonight, boys,” he said. “With no cloud cover or snow, the temperature is going to drop like a stone.”

  Once they’d circled around the slope of the mountain so as to be away from where the outlaws might spot their campfire glow, Smoke dismounted. “Cal, see if you can find some really dry wood, the kind that doesn’t make much smoke,” he said.

  While Smoke was arranging some stones in a small circle next to a large outcropping of boulders so the fire would be out of the wind, Pearlie got the cooking gear off the packhorse along with the food he and Smoke had gotten in Pueblo.

  Before long, coffee was brewing, steaks were sizzling in one pan, day-old biscuits steaming in another, while beans were heating in a kettle. When he poured the coffee in their tin mugs, Pearlie looked at Cal and smiled as he pulled a small paper bag out of his pocket. “I brung you somethin’ special, Cal, ’cause of how you had to starve yourself watchin’ those outlaws.”

  He handed the paper bag to Cal, who immediately opened it. “Jiminy,” he said, “real sugar for my coffee.”

  Though on the trail Cal often had to drink his coffee black, Pearlie knew he much preferred to lace it with generous amounts of sugar, changing it into what Pearlie called black syrup.

  As Smoke poured coffee all around, being up in the High Lonesome brought thoughts of Puma Buck to mind. The old mountain man, a decades-long friend of Smoke’s, had been killed some years earlier while helping Smoke out of a jam.

  He filled Cal’s cup, saying, “Remember what Puma Buck said about coffee, boys?”

  “Sure do,” Cal replied with a nostalgic smile. “The thing ’bout makin’ good mountain coffee is it don’t take near as much water as you think it do.”

  Pearlie chuckled at the memory. The boys had only known Puma for a short while, but had come to love him as much as Smoke did. “He also said,” Pearlie added, “that coffee that wouldn’t float a horseshoe wasn’t worth drinkin’.”

  “I think them steaks are ’bout ready,” Cal said, eyeing the pan with the steaks in it hungrily. “At least, they’ve quit moving.”

  Cal liked his steaks rare.

  Smoke picked one of the pieces of meat out of the pan with the point of his bowie knife and placed it on a plate on Cal’s lap. “You’ll have to get your own biscuit and beans,” he said, picking out another steak for Pearlie.

  Soon, they were all chowing down, relishing the flavor of food cooked outdoors under a starry sky.

  After a while, their talk turned to what Smoke proposed to do about the men who held Sally prisoner.

  “You know if’n you go to that meeting with Pike carryin’ ten thousand dollars, he’s just gonna kill you and steal the money and then do no telling what to Miss Sally,” Pearlie said around a mouthful of biscuit soaked in steak juice.

  “That’s right, Smoke,” Cal agreed. “If what you say ’bout this hombre is true, he didn’t take Sally for the money, but to draw you out where he could take you down.”

  Smoke nodded. “I know that’s his plan, boys, but planning on killing me and actually doing it are two very different things.”

  “If you go in there by yourself, with eight of his men drawing down on you, how are you going to keep him from killing you, Smoke?” Cal asked. “Heck fire, you won’t even be able to see most of ’em.”

  Smoke grinned. “Easy,” he answered. “I’m going to have two aces up my sleeve.”

  “I take it by that you mean Cal and me?” Pearlie asked after washing down his food with a drink of coffee and glancing around to make sure he hadn’t missed any tasty morsels.

  “That’s right, Pearlie. And when the time comes, both my life and Sally’s will depend on you two doing exactly what we’ve planned.”

  Cal and Pearlie glanced at each other, sobered by this responsibility. After a moment, Pearlie inclined his head. “Then let’s get down to the plannin’,” he said seriously.

  “All right,” Smoke said. He moved off a short distance from the fire and picked up a stick. Using the flat of his hand, he smoothed out the dirt in front of where he was squatting. He drew a crude map in the dust and dirt, indicating the position of the outlaws’ camp, the trail down the mountain alongside Fountain Creek, and the proposed meeting place.

  “Now,” he said after they’d had a chance to look at the map, “Pike and his men are going to have to head down to the meeting place at least a few hours before noon.”

  “Why is that, Smoke?” Cal asked, clearly puzzled about how Smoke knew what Pike was going to do.

  Smoke looked at him and smiled, thinking sometimes he forgot just how young and inexperienced in such matters Cal was. “They’re going to have to get there early because Pike figures I’m going to be there early to check the area out,” Smoke said. “He’ll also need to send a couple of men ahead to make sure I don’t show up with reinforcements intending to overpower them and take Sally by force.”

  “So, he’ll want to have his men in place a good while before you get there so you won’t know where they’re hiding,” Pearlie observed.

  “Exactly,” Smoke answered. “Once they’ve come down the mountain from their camp to the meeting place, that will give us some time to work on the trail, both above and below the meeting place, to set some traps I have in mind for them.”

  “Then what’re we gonna do after we’ve set all the traps an’ such?” Cal asked.

  “You and Pearlie will set up where I tell you, where you’ll have a good line of fire down on the clearing where I’ll be meeting with Pike and on the places where we figure his men will be stationed.”

  “What do we do then?” Pearlie asked.

  Smoke got to his feet. “Come on, and I’ll show you. We’ve got to set some surprises around the meeting place tonight, before they go there tomorrow morning. Once that’s done, I have a feeling you’ll know what I want you to do.”

  * * *

  While Pike was in the cabin where Sally was to be kept for the night, under continuous guard, the rest of the men gathered around the fire, speaking in low tones so he couldn’t hear them.

  Sergeant Rutledge was angry and let everyone in the gang know it. “I think that son of a bitch Pike lied to us about the reward money just to get us to come along on this trip. You can’t tell me he didn’t know all along Jensen wasn’t really wanted.”

  Rufus Gordon looked down at his ruined hand and then up at Rutledge. “So what, Sarge? He told us we’d be splittin’ up ten thousand dollars, an’ that’s exactly what we’re gonna be doin’. What the hell do you care if it’s rew
ard money or money we get from Jensen?”

  “It’s the principle of the thing, Rufe,” Rutledge answered angrily. “Why didn’t he just tell us the real plan to begin with?”

  Zeke Thompson, heavily into his bottle of whiskey, glanced up from the far end of the fire. “Quit your bellyaching, Rutledge,” he growled, clearly more drunk than sober. “Would you have come if Bill told you he intended to try and get the money from Jensen himself in trade for his wife?”

  Hank Snow laughed sourly. “Hell, no!” He shook his head. “I don’t know nobody who’d pay that kinda money to get their wife back.” He hesitated and then with a chuckle, he added, “Most of the men I know would more likely pay it to get someone to take their wife away ’stead of bringin’ ’em back.”

  Zeke nodded and took another drink. “And that’s exactly why Bill kept his plan to himself. He’d been askin’ around about Jensen, and he knew the man had plenty of cash and that he loved his wife more than he loved the money, but Bill knew you boys wouldn’t believe that, so he made up a little story to get you here. It don’t matter a damn where the money’s comin’ from long as you get your share, right?” he asked.

  Slim Cartwright, a cattle thief and footpad from Galveston nodded his head. “I do believe Jensen’s money will spend just as good as the sheriff’s, boys.”

  Larry Jackson, nicknamed Razor because of the straight razor he carried in his boot and enjoyed using on dance hall girls, agreed. “Yeah. And the best part of the whole deal is after we kill Jensen, we get the woman too.”

  Blackie Johnson’s head came up at that remark and he winced. He was no angel and he’d done his share of bad things, but raping and killing women wasn’t one of them. Besides, he’d come to like Mrs. Jensen and he hated to think of what was going to happen to her after her husband was killed. Trouble was, he didn’t have the faintest idea of what he could do to prevent it, if anything.

  * * *

  Sally was half-sitting and half-reclining on the bed in “her” cabin, her left wrist and ankle tied to a post, while Bill Pike was sitting across the room at a broken-down table. He was leaning back in an old handmade chair, smoking a long black cigar and drinking coffee. He’d offered a cup to Sally but she’d declined, thinking she needed a good night’s sleep to be able to deal with what was going to happen the next day.

  “You don’t seem particularly worried about tomorrow, Mrs. Jensen,” Pike said in a conversational tone of voice, sounding extremely confident.

  Sally’s hazel eyes stared into his, her expression bland and unconcerned. “I’m not, Mr. Pike,” she answered calmly, pulling her heavy coat close around her against the chill in the room. It was so cold in the cabin they could see their breath as they talked.

  Pike held the cup in both hands to gather the warmth from the scalding coffee. He cocked his head. “Oh? I would think the prospect of losing your husband might concern you, not to mention what we have planned for you afterwards,” he said, trying to get a rise out of her. The calmness of her demeanor was starting to get to him and he wanted to shake her up a little.

  Sally straightened up in the bed and smiled slightly, almost sadly at Pike. “Mr. Pike, when you were planning this assault on my family, did you take the time to find anything out about Smoke Jensen?”

  Pike shrugged. “Well, I figured out he could afford to try and buy you back.” He grinned. “I don’t care a whit about the money, Mrs. Jensen, it’s killing your husband that’s my goal, but I need something for my men.”

  “You really should have paid more attention to the stories I’m sure you heard about Smoke, Mr. Pike.”

  “Why is that, Mrs. Jensen?”

  “Then you would have learned that Smoke came out here when he was just a boy. He lived up in these mountains when there wasn’t more than one white man per thousand square miles and the Indians were thicker than fleas on a hound dog. Do you have any idea why Smoke not only survived this wilderness but thrived when hundreds of other men died in the attempt?”

  “I hadn’t really thought much about it, Mrs. Jensen,” Pike answered as if he could care less.

  “You should, Mr. Pike. Smoke survived when many others didn’t because he is smart, tough, and when he sets his mind to do something, heaven help those who stand in his way, be it Indians or criminals.”

  “Well, back then he didn’t have you to worry about, did he, Mrs. Jensen. Oh, I’ll agree that he might get the best of us if it were just him and us up here in the mountains. But we have you and your husband knows I’ll kill you if he doesn’t agree to my conditions.”

  Sally smiled and lay back against the wall at the head of the bed and closed her eyes. “I hope you will remember, in those seconds before Smoke cuts your heart out, that I did warn you, Mr. Pike,” she said, and then she turned on her side with her back to him.

  Pike felt his heart flutter with fear at her words and the confidence with which she spoke them. He’d never met a woman as strong and as loyal to her man as this one, and he gave a short prayer that he hadn’t underestimated Smoke Jensen.

  24

  While Pike and his men sat around their fire drinking whiskey and telling each other lies, Smoke and the boys traveled back down the mountain toward the rendezvous place so Smoke could set up some surprises for their meeting the next day.

  Once they arrived across the creek from the clearing, Smoke had Pearlie bring the packhorse across the water and into the clearing. The moon had become slightly larger over the past week and there were only ragged bunches of snow clouds to hide the brilliant starlight.

  Smoke unpacked the pony carrying the supplies he’d had Pearlie and Cal buy and laid them out on the ground. He used a small hammer to break the top of the keg of horseshoe nails that had so puzzled Pearlie when he obtained them. He then opened a keg of gunpowder and laid out several empty Arbuckle’s coffee cans in a row. One by one, he filled the cans with a mixture of gunpowder and horseshoe nails, and then he sealed the tops of the cans. Once that was done, he took an old white shirt of his out of his saddlebag and stuck it under his belt.

  Picking up a can under each arm, he indicated Cal and Pearlie should do the same thing and for them to follow him. He walked up the steep slope at the rear of the clearing until he came to one of the larger boulders sticking out of the side of the mountain. Looking for the exact right spot, he finally stooped down and placed the can up next to the boulder where it could be seen from across the creek. He shoveled a mixture of dirt and pine needles over the can until it could barely be seen, and then he ripped off a piece of the shirt and stuck it in the dirt just over the can.

  He straightened up and dusted off his hands. Looking at Cal and Pearlie he asked, “Do you think you can see that from that grove of trees where you’re going to be hiding?”

  Pearlie looked back across the creek and then down at the white scrap of cloth in the ground. After a few seconds, he nodded. “Yep, an’ the next question you’re gonna ask is can I hit it with that Sharps, ain’t it?”

  Smoke nodded. “Yeah, and both Sally’s and my life depends on your being able to plug it dead center.”

  Pearlie slowly nodded. “All right, no problem. How about you, Cal?” he asked, turning to Cal.

  Cal grinned. “You may be a mite faster on the draw and a little more accurate with a handgun than me, Pearlie, but you know I’m miles better’n you with a long gun.” He looked up at Smoke. “Don’t worry, Smoke, when you give the signal, we’ll get the job done.”

  Smoke smiled. “I know you will, boys, or I wouldn’t put Sally’s life in your hands. Now all we have to do is figure out all the likely places those bastards will pick to hide in and we’ll plant us some more Arbuckle’s cans nearby.”

  They spent the next hour and a half walking around the clearing and looking at it from all angles. They found several more boulders and outcroppings of rock that looked like likely candidates for hiding places, and even put one can in front of a small group of misshapen trees and brush just in case one
of the men tried to lie down in it. They even put one can on top of the roof of the small, dilapidated cabin in the clearing just in case some of the men tried to take refuge in it.

  Finally, Smoke was satisfied with their efforts in the area around the clearing. “Now we get to work on the trails to and from this place,” he said, leading them back across Fountain Creek.

  “First, we’ll go down the mountain a ways and get things ready there,” he said once they were on the trail. After he was about fifty yards past the clearing, he got down off Joker, took the pick and shovel he’d had Pearlie buy off the packhorse, and began to dig up a hole in the center of the trail. While he was digging, he looked up and said, “Get me some of those tent stakes out of the pack, Cal, and bring ’em over here.”

  In the soft gravely sand and dirt of the mountainside, it only took him a few minutes to dig a pit two feet deep and four feet wide. He took the tent stakes from Cal and kneeled down next to the pit. One by one, he stuck them down into the ground at the bottom of the pit with their sharp ends up, until he had the entire bottom of the pit covered with sharpened stakes pointing upward. Pointing to the sides of the trail, which had thick layers of pine boughs and needles lying on the ground, he told Cal and Pearlie to gather some up and to fill in the pit, and then to scatter dirt around so it looked like a normal part of the trail.

  “Jiminy, I’d hate to be ridin’ the bronc that steps in that hole,” Cal said, rubbing his jaw.

  “The stakes are in case the hole itself doesn’t break the horse’s legs,” Smoke said. He shook his head. “I hate like hell to do that to any animal, but sometimes when you’re dealing with pond scum you have to do things you don’t like.

  “We’ll dig a couple more of these at fifty-yard intervals down the trail, and there are a couple of other things I want to do in between the pits,” he added.

  He rode down the trail with Cal and Pearlie following for another twenty yards, until he came to a place where there were trees close on either side of the trail. He got down and pulled the bail of barbed wire off the back of the packhorse along with some wire cutters.