The Violent Land

by William W. Johnstone

  Smoke had ventured about twenty yards outside the circle of wagons, walking along with the mud sucking at his boots, when his right foot struck something. The yielding nature of it warned him right away what it might be.

  He took a quick step back and slid his rifle from under his slicker. Dropping into a crouch, he waited for lightning to strike again, and when it did a moment later, he saw just what he expected to see in the brief, flickering glare.

  One of the guards lay on the ground, face turned to the sky so that the hard rain washed away the blood welling from the gaping wound in his neck. His throat had been cut so deeply it had almost decapitated him.

  That meant his killer was probably inside the circle of wagons already.

  Smoke turned and dashed toward the camp. He leaped over a wagon tongue, and as his boots splashed in the thick mud, he caught a flare of light in the corner of his eye. It came from underneath one of the wagons. Smoke whirled in that direction in time to see a man holding the match he had just struck to a length of fuse attached to a stick of dynamite.

  Smoke brought the Winchester to his shoulder, aimed, and fired, all in one smooth, efficient motion. The man who had crawled under the wagon cried out in pain and surprise and dropped the dynamite. The fuse sputtered out as the explosive cylinder landed in a puddle of mud and rainwater.

  The man was down but not out of the fight. He must have clawed a revolver from its holster, because muzzle flame stabbed from underneath the wagon where he lay. With the thunder and the heavy rain, Smoke couldn’t hear the bullet and didn’t know how close to him it had come, but he wasn’t going to take a chance on the man getting off another shot.

  He pumped two more rounds under the wagon as fast as he could work the rifle’s lever.

  As if those shots were a signal, more blasts rang out, competing with the thunder just as muzzle flashes competed with the lightning strikes. These shots came from outside the circle of wagons. Smoke figured that Klaus Berger’s hired gunmen must have crept up on the camp under the cover of the storm.

  Had more than one man snuck in with dynamite? Smoke didn’t know, so he started running along the circled wagons, peering underneath all of them. When a gun went off practically in his face, he knew there was at least one more saboteur. He felt the heat of the bullet against his cheek as he dived off his feet. Rolling over in the mud, he stopped on his belly and fired under the wagon where the shot had originated. As lightning flashed again, he saw a man in a slicker going over backwards under the impact of the rifle slug.

  But as darkness dropped down again, Smoke saw sparks shooting from a lit fuse. He came up on his knees, drove himself forward with his feet, and slid through the slick mud, winding up underneath the wagon where a stick of dynamite was wedged into the vehicle’s undercarriage, out of the rain and the mud.

  The fuse was burning fast, and only a couple inches of it were left.

  With the same sort of speed that had made him one of the West’s deadliest gunmen, Smoke reached up and plucked the dynamite loose. A flick of his wrist sent the cylinder spinning out from under the wagon. He threw it toward the open prairie, where Berger’s men continued to fire at the wagons. The rain didn’t have time to put out the fuse before the dynamite went off with a huge blast.

  As the echoes of the explosion faded, Smoke heard someone screaming out there in the darkness. He hoped that the blast had caught some of Berger’s men and not Preacher or one of the other guards.

  He didn’t have to worry about Preacher. He heard the old mountain man shouting, “Stay in your wagons! Keep your heads down! Fire at any muzzle flashes you see outside the camp!”

  As usual, Preacher had kept his wits about him. At the sound of the first shots inside the camp, he had come running. Now he was here to help with the defense of the wagons.

  Smoke crawled behind one of the wagon wheels. It would give him a little cover. In the glare of the next lightning strike, he saw several men running toward the camp and almost opened fire on them before he recognized them as the other three guards. They were caught in a bad spot and just wanted to get back to the wagons.

  One man stumbled and clawed at his back, and Smoke knew he’d been shot. The lightning flash faded before Smoke could see the man fall.

  It was like a scene from a nightmare with the thunder crashing and blending with the roar of guns, the lightning flickering, orange flashes of flame from gun muzzles, men shouting and cursing, women screaming in fear.

  No, not a nightmare, Smoke amended. Like a painting by an artist who had gone mad.

  But even surrounded by chaos, he kept his head and coolly fired again and again at the muzzle flashes he saw out on the plains. His own muzzle flashes drew the fire of Berger’s men. Bullets thudded into the body of the wagon, whined off the iron rim of the wheel, and kicked up splashes of mud near him. He didn’t let any of that keep him from fighting back.

  “Smoke!”

  That was Matt’s voice. Smoke twisted his head to call back over his shoulder, “Under here!”

  A moment later, Matt and Preacher both crawled under the wagon with him.

  “Are you two all right?” Smoke asked them.

  “Other than being soaked and covered with mud again, you mean?” Matt asked. “Yeah, I’m fine, but this isn’t nearly as pleasant as sitting inside a dry wagon.”

  “Yeah, well, you nearly knocked me down and trampled me when you come jumpin’ outta that wagon, you big lummox,” Preacher said. “And if you ain’t noticed, Smoke and me are soaked and covered with mud, too!”

  “Better than having your throat cut, like the guard I found out there,” Smoke said. “I figure Berger’s men killed him, and then a couple of them slipped into camp with some dynamite.”

  “I thought that sounded like dynamite goin’ off a minute ago,” Preacher said. “Ain’t any more of the hellish stuff around, is there?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but if there was, I think we would have heard it explode by now.”

  That was what Smoke was hoping, anyway. Blowing up two of the wagons would have been enough to throw the camp into a panic, and then it would have been easier for the hired killers to charge in under cover of the storm and wreak more havoc, maybe even wiping out the immigrants in the process.

  Berger might not have enough men left to fight a straight-up battle against the baron’s people, so he had to resort to things like dynamite and the attempt to set the prairie on fire to give him an advantage. Neither of those attacks had worked, thanks to Smoke, Matt, Preacher, Dieter, and a little bit of luck.

  The immigrants were mounting a stiff defense now, pulling up the canvas on the outward-facing sides of the wagons and firing at Berger’s force. Smoke, Matt, and Preacher continued shooting from under the wagon where they had taken cover, and their superb reflexes and natural gun skill enabled them to catch sight of a hired killer, target him, and bring him down before the flash from a lightning strike faded. They kept up this deadly counterattack for several minutes, until another bolt of electrical fire clawed down from the heavens and revealed a dozen or so riders on horseback fleeing across the prairie, putting distance between themselves and the wagon camp.

  Preacher saw the same thing and let out an exultant whoop.

  “The varmints are takin’ off for the tall and uncut!” he exclaimed.

  “Look at ’em lighting a shuck out of here!” Matt added.

  “Let’s make sure they don’t dawdle,” Smoke suggested as he finished reloading his Winchester and resumed firing in the direction the attackers were fleeing. Matt and Preacher joined in, sending a barrage of lead after the hired gunmen.

  “I hope that dang Klaus fella is done for this time,” Preacher said when they finally stopped firing.

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Smoke said. “Hombres like him usually seem to be able to dodge most bullets.”

  “Yeah, well, one of ’em’s gonna have his name on it sooner or later,” Preacher insisted.

  Smoke hoped the
old mountain man was right about that. If everything Baron von Hoffman had said about Klaus Berger was true, they would probably have to kill him to stop him.

  Meanwhile, they needed to climb out from under this wagon and find out just how much damage Berger had done this time.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Several men had been wounded in this latest battle, but only two had been killed—the guard whose throat had been cut and the one Smoke had seen shot in the back as the man tried to reach the safety of the wagons.

  The lone dynamite blast had been far enough away from the wagons that it hadn’t damaged any of the vehicles.

  The two men who had tried to set off the dynamite underneath the wagons were both dead, as were three more men who had been left behind when the attackers fled. All five of them were typical hardcases, hired guns who would kill anybody if the price was right.

  The two immigrants were given a proper burial, but the bodies of the gunmen were dumped in some tall grass and left for the wolves when the wagons pulled out the next morning.

  The storm was over by dawn, which broke with a clearing sky and bright sun that sent the temperature climbing rapidly and made the still damp air muggy and miserable. Not only that, but the ground was a sea of mud. That made the going very slow, and people grew impatient and irritable.

  By midday, the wagon train had covered only a little more than a mile. On several occasions, one of the wagons had bogged down and refused to budge, and a team from one of the other wagons had to be unhitched, then hitched up to the stuck vehicle along with its original team to pull it loose. This was a time-consuming ordeal.

  So when Smoke and Preacher trotted in from their outrider positions, Smoke sought out Friedrich von Hoffman and told the baron, “It might be better just to call a halt for the day and let the ground dry out more before you start up again.”

  “That will mean wasting at least half a day,” von Hoffman said with a frown.

  “Yes, but what you’re doing is wearing out those oxen, while not covering much ground,” Smoke pointed out. “You’ll be delayed more in the long run by pushing on now. Let the stock rest this afternoon, and maybe by tomorrow morning the ground won’t be so muddy.”

  Von Hoffman thought it over for a moment, then nodded.

  “What you say makes sense, Herr Jensen,” he admitted. “I will pass the word that we are stopping for the day and making camp.”

  “That’ll give Matt and Preacher and me a chance to do a little hunting,” Smoke said as he smiled. “I reckon we could all use some fresh meat.”

  “What sort of game is to be found out here?” von Hoffman asked.

  “I thought you’d been on hunting expeditions before, Baron.”

  “I have, but it’s been several years. I’ve been told that the buffalo are all gone now.”

  “No, they’re not gone,” Smoke said, “although most of the herds have drifted on down to the Texas Panhandle. The demand for hides isn’t as high as it used to be, and since they finished the transcontinental railroad nobody hunts buffalo for meat anymore except the Indians. For a while there it looked like all the herds might be wiped out, but now I think the buffalo will survive.” Smoke shook his head. “It’ll never be like it once was, though.”

  That was sure the truth. The first time he had ventured across the plains of what was then called the Great American Desert, not long after the Civil War, he and his pa and Preacher had seen vast, seemingly limitless herds of buffalo, a veritable sea of the shaggy brown creatures that sometimes stretched from horizon to horizon.

  He recalled making camp on a hillside overlooking a valley. The next morning, a buffalo herd began passing through that valley, filling it completely as the beasts moved from one grazing ground to another. By nightfall, the herd was still moving through the valley, and the exodus continued all night and on into the next day before the last stragglers finally cleared out. It had been one of the most amazing things Smoke had ever seen.

  “I will come with you,” the baron said now, breaking into that memory.

  “What?” Smoke said.

  “I will come with you on your hunt,” von Hoffman said. “You’ll find that I’m an excellent shot.”

  “I don’t doubt that, Baron, but—”

  “I need a fresh mount,” von Hoffman went on as if he hadn’t heard the beginning of Smoke’s objection. “It won’t take me long to have another horse saddled.”

  Smoke decided it wasn’t worth the time and energy to argue with the baron. Anyway, von Hoffman might turn out to be a good hunter. He certainly seemed to believe he was.

  While von Hoffman tended to getting a fresh horse, Smoke walked over to Matt and Preacher and said, “The baron went along with the idea of stopping and letting the ground dry out some before the wagon train moves on.”

  “It’ll be a lot easier that way,” Matt said.

  “He thought it was a good idea for us to do some hunting, too.” Smoke paused. “The thing is, he wants to come with us.”

  “The baron?” Preacher said. “That dang, stuffed shirt aristocrat? Goin’ huntin’ with us?”

  “Yep,” Smoke said.

  “I don’t reckon you told him he couldn’t.”

  “Didn’t seem worth the effort.”

  Preacher snorted.

  “We’ll see about that when he scares off all the game betwixt here and the Canadian border!”

  Smoke didn’t think it would be quite that bad, but he supposed they would have to wait and see.

  Von Hoffman came over to them a few minutes later leading a leggy chestnut gelding. Smoke was an excellent judge of horseflesh, and the chestnut looked like a fine animal.

  “Ready to go, gentlemen?” the baron asked.

  Matt and Preacher still didn’t look very happy about it, but Smoke nodded and said, “Yeah, we’re ready.”

  The four men mounted up, and as they rode out of camp, they passed the wagon where Greta Schiller sat on the seat while her driver unhitched the team. She smiled at them, but the full force of the expression was directed at von Hoffman, Smoke thought.

  The attractive widow seemed to have her sights set on the baron. That was just fine with Smoke. They would probably make a good match since they’d been acquainted with each other for quite a while and came from the same sort of background.

  “I told some men to stand guard while we’re gone,” von Hoffman said.

  “That’s a good idea,” Smoke said. “I don’t think Berger is going to attack in broad daylight. We’ve whittled down his forces enough that he can’t afford to come at you head-on right now. But you can’t ever be sure what somebody else is going to do, especially a hired killer like Berger.”

  “I agree. We must still be careful.”

  “We won’t get too far away from the camp. That way we can get back there in a hurry if we need to.”

  They rode north, which allowed them to scout the trail the wagon train would be taking when the journey to Wyoming resumed, while at the same time they were searching for game. After they had gone a mile or so, Smoke held up a hand to signal a halt.

  The wagons were out of sight over the rolling hills behind them. As far as the four riders could tell from looking around, they might as well have been the only men for a hundred miles around.

  Smoke pointed and said, “Some antelope over yonder.”

  “Yeah, I seen ’em, too,” Preacher said, and Matt added a nod.

  Von Hoffman stood up in his stirrups and craned his neck as he peered in the direction Smoke had pointed.

  “Where?” he asked. “I don’t see them.”

  “Look just to the right of that little bluff,” Smoke said. “They’re grazing there.”

  Von Hoffman reached into his saddlebags and pulled out a telescope. He opened the spyglass and peered through the lenses.

  “You must have extraordinary vision, all of you,” he said as he lowered the telescope a moment later. “The antelope are there, just as you said.”

&nb
sp; “Well, we wouldn’t have no reason to lie about it,” Preacher said testily.

  “It’s not a matter of vision as much as it is training your eyes to look over long distances,” Smoke explained. “Out here it’s usually good if you can see danger coming while it’s still as far off as possible.”

  Von Hoffman nodded and said, “Yes, I understand,” as he closed the telescope and put it away. “What do we do now? Approach them with stealth?”

  “If you mean sneak up on ’em, that’s it,” Preacher said.

  “We ought to be able to get pretty close,” Smoke said. “The wind’s blowing right to carry our scent away from them.”

  They heeled their horses into motion and rode toward the ridge near where the small herd of antelope was grazing. Smoke had known it was unlikely they would run across any buffalo, although he had a feeling that was what the baron would have preferred.

  Antelope steaks were mighty good, though, and Smoke had figured there was a good chance they could find some of the fleet-footed creatures. That hunch was about to pay off, it appeared. If each of them could bring down an antelope, there would be plenty of fresh meat for the wagon train.

  When they were a couple of hundred yards away from the herd, Smoke reined in.

  “We’ll take our shots here,” he said. “You’ll probably only get one, Baron. As soon as they hear our rifles, they’ll take off, and there may not be time to try again.”

  “I understand,” von Hoffman said. “And if you’re worried that I’ll miss, don’t be. At this range, my aim will be true.”

  Preacher looked openly skeptical about that claim, but he didn’t say anything and neither did Smoke or Matt. The four men swung down from their saddles and drew their Winchesters. The antelope were in range of the repeaters.

  Von Hoffman worked the Winchester’s lever to throw a cartridge into the firing chamber, then laid the barrel of his rifle across his saddle to steady the weapon while he took aim. Smoke, Matt, and Preacher did likewise with their horses. Quietly, each man announced which of the antelope he was targeting, so that none of them would accidentally aim at the same one.