Trek of the Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  Pearlie dropped the shotgun and drew his pistol in one quick movement. Just as one slug tore through his coat and another grazed his neck, Pearlie returned fire. His second shot hit the man full in the chest, knocking him backward off his horse with a harsh grunt.

  Hearing the gunfire in the woods, Pike screamed out as loud as he could, “Charge the house!”

  Zeke Thompson bent over against the wind and struck a lucifer on his pants leg, and then he held it to the torch he was carrying. He was going to burn that bastard Smoke Jensen out of his house.

  Just as he started to put the spurs to his mount, a man stepped out in front of him, his teeth gleaming whitely in the gentle light from the sky. “Don’t you know a grown man shouldn’t play with fire?” the cultured voice asked.

  “Why you . . .” Zeke yelled as he pulled his pistol up.

  The Colt in the dark man’s hand exploded and Zeke felt as if he’d been kicked in the chest. The force of the gunshot rocked him back in his saddle, but he didn’t fall.

  He grunted with effort and looked down to see a fine stream of blood that looked black in the darkness pumping out of a hole in his chest.

  “Son of a bitch!” he growled, trying to raise his pistol again.

  Louis chuckled. “Leave my mother out of this,” he remarked as he shot from the hip and put a bullet directly into the bridge of Zeke’s nose, snapping his head back and putting out his lights forever.

  * * *

  Just as the moon came out from behind the clouds, Cutter Williams lit his torch and spurred his mount toward the house, yelling, “Burn the bastards out!”

  Blackie Johnson, outraged by this tactic, which would surely mean the death of Mrs. Jensen, kicked his horse forward after Williams. When he saw he couldn’t catch him, Blackie drew his pistol and shot him in the back, knocking him off his horse.

  Sally, in the house and fixing to shoot Williams, saw what Blackie did and a small smile creased her lips. She knew he wasn’t as bad as the others, she thought, lowering her rifle.

  Just then, Bill Pike and Sergeant Joe Rutledge rode out of the forest toward the house, each carrying torches. When Pike saw what Blackie did, his aimed his pistol at him and fired twice, knocking Blackie to the ground.

  Rutledge was almost to the front porch when the door opened and Cal stepped out, his hands full of iron. He fired from the hips with both guns, hitting Rutledge in the chest and stomach three times before the man flopped off his horse and fell across the hitching rail in front of the house.

  He looked up, his hand rising with a gun in it. “You don’t have to do that,” Cal said, hoping the man would drop the pistol.

  Rutledge grinned through bloodstained teeth. “Yes, I do.”

  Cal fired once more and blew the back of Joe’s head off.

  Pike jerked on his reins and snapped off a shot at the man standing on the porch, grinning tightly when he saw the man go down.

  Hell with this, he thought, jerking his reins around and galloping across the pasture away from the house.

  Smoke ran out of the woods and over to the porch to kneel beside Cal.

  Cal was doubled over, his hands pressed against his side, trying to stop the flow of blood from a wound in his flank.

  “Sally, get me a hot iron!” Smoke yelled as he cradled Cal’s head in his arms.

  In preparation for the upcoming fight, Smoke had told Sally to keep a couple of pokers ready in the stove in case a wound needed cauterizing.

  Just as Sally appeared on the porch with the iron, Pearlie and Louis came running out of the woods. Louis stood on the porch facing outward in case of another attack, both hands filled with Colts.

  Pearlie squatted down next to Cal. “Damn it, Cal!” he groused, his eyes filled with worry. “You just can’t seem to join in a fight without getting shot up.”

  Cal grinned weakly, still in shock from the bullet wound. “I didn’t want to disappoint you, podnah,” he croaked.

  As Sally bent over and Smoke pulled the shirt back to expose the wound, Pearlie took a bear sign out of his sack. “Here, pal, chomp on this. It’ll help ease the pain.”

  Sally, who’d been through this many times with Smoke, put the red-hot end of the poker against the bleeding hole. Cal grunted and bucked against the pain, but didn’t yell.

  After the hole sizzled and smoked until it was cauterized shut, Sally threw the poker aside and eased Smoke out of the way as she sat down and took Cal’s head into her arms, holding him tight.

  “Hold the fort, boys,” Smoke growled, with one last look at Cal. “I’m going after that bastard.”

  He took a running jump, vaulted up on the back of Rutledge’s horse, and took off after Pike.

  When he was gone, Sally looked up at Pearlie. “Pearlie, would you go and check on that man lying over there?” she said, indicating the place where Blackie Johnson had fallen. “That man helped save us tonight.”

  Pearlie nodded and walked over to check on Blackie Johnson and see if he was still alive.

  * * *

  It took Smoke almost five miles to catch up to Pike. As Smoke neared the man’s horse, Pike reached back and took several shots at Smoke with his pistol, missing narrowly a couple of times.

  When his gun was empty, he threw it at Smoke, also missing his mark.

  Smoke pulled his horse up next to Pike’s and dove across the mount, knocking Pike to the ground.

  When they’d both stopped rolling and tumbling across the snow, each man got to his feet, facing the other.

  Pike jerked a long, thin knife from his boot and crouched in the typical knife-fighter’s stance.

  Smoke bared his teeth in a savage grin, pulling out his bowie knife and beginning to circle the other man.

  Suddenly, Pike dropped his knife and stood up straight, seeing something in Smoke’s eyes that scared the shit out of him.

  “All right, Jensen, you got me. I give up,” he said, raising his hands.

  Smoke slowly shook his head. “No, Pike. You don’t get off that easy. I’m going to cut you into little pieces, knife or no knife.”

  “But you can’t kill an unarmed man,” Pike protested.

  “Then arm yourself, coward,” Smoke spat.

  Reluctantly, Pike picked up his knife and moved quickly toward Smoke, slashing wildly back and forth.

  Smoke leaned to the side, Pike’s knife so close to him that it sliced through his shirt.

  Smoke made a lightning-quick move with his hand and his bowie knife cut the tendons in Pike’s right hand down to the bone, causing him to drop the knife.

  Pike grabbed his right arm with his left. “All right, I’m done.”

  Again Smoke shook his head. “Pick up the knife, Pike,” he ordered.

  Pike shook his head. “No.”

  Smoke grinned. “You ever seen a man scalped alive, Pike. It is not a pretty sight.”

  “You wouldn’t . . .”

  “Remember your two men in the mountains, Pike?” Smoke asked. “That’s how you’re going to look in a few minutes.”

  Pike screamed in fear and frustration, grabbed the knife off the ground with his left hand, and ran at Smoke.

  Smoke stepped to the side and as Pike passed he backhanded him across the throat with the edge of his Bowie knife, slicing through his larynx as if it were butter.

  Pike dropped to his knees and grabbed at his throat, trying to stop the bleeding.

  Smoke stepped around and squatted in front of him. “I’m going to sit here and watch you drown on your own blood, you bastard,” he said.

  Pike’s eyes were terrified, and his last thoughts were that he wished he’d never heard of Smoke Jensen, Mountain Man.

  * * *

  When Smoke got back to the cabin, he found Cal inside on their bed and another man lying on their couch.

  He looked at Sally. “How is Cal?”

  She nodded, smiling. “He’s going to be fine. The bullet tore a chunk of fat off his flank, but it didn’t enter the abdomen. He’ll be bac
k at work within a week.”

  Smoke turned his attention to the other man. As he stood looking down at him, Sally said, “Smoke, this is Blackie Johnson. When I was being held prisoner, he treated me with respect, and tonight he helped to save our new house.”

  “How are his wounds?” Smoke asked, though his expression showed he didn’t care so much as Sally did.

  Louis looked up from bandaging Johnson’s wounds. “He took one in the ribs, but it didn’t hit the lung. I think he’s going to be all right.”

  Smoke walked over to address the man on the couch. “Mr. Johnson, my wife is a pretty good judge of character. If she thinks you are worth saving, then I am not inclined to argue. You can stay here until your wounds are healed, and then you will be free to go.”

  Blackie’s eyes shifted from Smoke to Sally and he tried to smile, though the pain caused it to be more of a grimace. “Thank you kindly, ma’am,” he said.

  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.

&
nbsp; “I’m better than that,” he told himself aloud. “I am.”

  “Reckon you might be, if I knowed what you was talkin’ ’bout.”

  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.

  The man came around and put his foot up against the sole of Knight’s shoe, then bent and got a closer look.

  “Our feet’s ’bout the same size, but you got a hole in that shoe big enough to shove a silver dollar through.” He reached over and poked with his finger. “That anything more’n old, rottin’ newspaper you got shoved in there?”