Ambush of the Mountain Man

FOURTEEN

Smoke struggled up on one elbow and looked up at the angry young woman standing over him. His head felt like a blacksmith had been pounding on it, and his eyes kept blurring and trying to cross. He concentrated, pushing the pain and nausea aside and thought about her question. The name Johnny MacDougal did stir some memories, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on them just yet.

He started to shake his head in a negative reply, but he stopped when the movement caused a red-hot pain to shoot through his skull. He reached up and gingerly felt the back of his head. There was a large, squashy lump there with what felt like dried blood scabbing it over. Evidently someone, probably the very same young woman standing before him now, had hit him from behind. He’d have to get to feeling better to die, he thought.

In a hoarse voice, he croaked, “Sarah, the name is familiar to me, but I don’t quite remember just why.”

At her astonished glare, her eyes filled with even more hatred, he asked gently, “You want to tell me about it?”

She opened her mouth to speak, and he held up his hand, swaying slightly back and forth on his elbow as he lay there. “Just a minute, Sarah,” he said, coughing. “Could I first have some water or coffee? My throat feels as dry as the desert right now.”

Sarah glanced at Cletus without saying anything, and he got to his feet, poured some coffee into a tin mug, and handed it to Smoke. “Here ya go,” he said, “but drink it slow so it don’t come back up on ya.”

While Smoke drank, Sarah put her hands on her hips and stared down at him. “For your information, Mr. Smoke Jensen, Johnny MacDougal was my brother, and last year about this time you beat him up and knocked out his teeth and then you shot him and some friends of his down in cold blood in Pueblo.”

Smoke’s eyes widened over the rim of the cup. He slowly lowered it and struggled up to a sitting position, trying to move his head as little as possible, his face wincing at the pain the movement caused. “That was your brother, the one dressed all in black?”

Sarah nodded, her eyes as hard as flint. Smoke let his head fall into his hands and fought back nausea the coffee had caused as he thought back about that day the previous year when William Cornelius Van Horne had offered to take Smoke and his friends to lunch....

Van Horne pulled the head of his Morgan toward a dining place with a sign over the door that said simply THE FEEDBAG, and the others followed, tying their mounts and packhorses to a hitching rail in front of the building.

The Feedbag was set up similarly to Longmont’s Saloon back in Big Rock. It consisted of a large room with eating tables on one side, and a bar and smaller tables for the men who just wanted to drink their meals on the other side. It was about three quarters full. Most of the men wore the canvas trousers of miners, but there was a smattering of men dressed in chaps and flannel shirts and leather vests who were obviously cowboys from nearby ranches.

Van Horne pushed through the batwings and walked directly toward a large table in the front corner of the room, while Smoke, Pearlie, Cal, and Louis spread out just inside the door with their backs to the wall waiting for their eyes to adjust to the gloomy lighting. The two mountain men stopped and eyed Smoke with raised eyebrows.

“You expectin’ trouble, Smoke?” Rattlesnake Bob asked, his hand dropping to the old Walker Colt stuck in the waistband of his buckskins.

Smoke smiled as his eyes searched the room for anyone who might be giving him special attention. “No, Rattlesnake, but I’ve found the best way to avoid trouble is to be ready for it when it appears.”

When he saw no one was looking their way, Smoke walked on over to the table where Van Horne was already sitting down talking to a waiter, and took his usual seat with his back to the wall and his face to the rest of the room.

As they all took their seats, Bill said, “I ordered us a couple of pitchers of beer to start with while we decide what to order for lunch.”

Bear Tooth smacked his lips. “That sounds mighty good, Bill. I ain’t had me no beer since last spring.”

Before Bill could answer, a loud voice came from a group of men standing at the bar across the room. “God Almighty! What the hell is that smell?” a man called loudly, looking over at their table. “Did somebody drag a passel of skunks in here?”

The young man, who appeared to be about twenty years old, was wearing a black shirt and vest with a silver lining, and had a brace of nickel-plated Colt Peacemakers tied down low on his hips. He had four other men standing next to him, all wearing their guns in a similar manner, and all were laughing as if he’d just said something extremely funny.

Rattlesnake Bob glanced at Bear Tooth and grimaced. “I hate it when that happens,” he said in a low, dangerous voice. “Now we’re gonna have to kill somebody ‘fore we’ve even had our beer.”

“Take it easy, Rattlesnake,” Smoke said. “He’s just some young tough who’s letting his whiskey do his thinking for him.”

Rattlesnake eased back down in his chair. “You’re right, Smoke,” he said, smiling. “If’n ever’ man who was drunk-dumb got kilt, there wouldn’t hardly be none of us left.”

Smoke continued to keep an eye on the man across the room as the bartender tried to get him to be quiet, without much success.

When their waiter appeared with the beer and glasses, Smoke asked him, “Who’s the man with the big mouth over there at the bar?”

The waiter glanced nervously over his shoulder, and then he whispered, “That’s Johnny MacDougal. His father owns the biggest ranch in these parts.”

“Well, I don’t care if’n his daddy owns Colorado Territory,” Bear Tooth growled. “You go on over there an’ tell the little snot if’n he wants to see his next birthday he’d better keep his pie-hole shut.”

The waiter’s face paled and he shook his head rapidly back and forth. “I couldn’t do that, sir,” he said.

“Why not?” Rattlesnake asked.

“Just last week Johnny shot a man for stepping on his boots.” The waiter hesitated, and then he added, “And the man wasn’t even armed at the time.”

“How come he’s not in jail then?” Louis asked.

“Uh, his father carries a lot of water in Pueblo,” the waiter said. “The sheriff came in and said it was in self-defense, though it was plain to everyone in the place that the man wasn’t wearing a gun.”

“So that’s the lay of the land,” Van Horne said, pursing his lips.

“Yes, sir,” the waiter said, and hurried off back to the kitchen before these tough-looking men could get him in trouble, or worse yet, get him shot.

A few minutes later, after he’d downed another glass of whiskey, the young tough and his friends began to swagger across the room toward Smoke’s table.

Smoke and Louis both eased their chairs back, took the hammer thongs off their Colts, and waited expectantly for the trouble they knew was coming. Smoke eased his right leg out straight under the table so he’d have quicker access if he had to draw.

MacDougal stopped a few feet behind Rattlesnake’s chair and made a production of holding his nose. “Whew, something’s awfully ripe in here,” he said loudly, looking around the room to make sure he had an appreciative audience. “I think something done crawled in here and died.”

Rattlesnake eased his hand down to the butt of the big Walker Colt in his belt, and as quick as a snake striking he whipped it out, stood up, and whirled around, slashing the young man viciously across the face with the barrel.

MacDougal screamed and grabbed his face as blood spurted onto his vest. Before the other men could react, Rattlesnake grabbed MacDougal by the hair, jerked his head back, and jammed the barrel of the gun in his mouth, knocking out his two front teeth.

As MacDougal’s eyes opened wide and he moaned in pain, Rattlesnake eared back the hammer and grinned, his face inches from the young tough’s. “Now, what was it you was sayin’, mister?” he growled. “Somethin’ ‘bout somebody smelling overly ripe, I believe?”

As one of MacDougal’s friends dropped his hand to his pistol, Bear Tooth stood up, and had his skinning knife against the man’s throat before he could draw. “Do you really want some of this?” he asked, smiling wickedly at the man. “’Cause if’n you do, you’ll have a smile that stretches from ear to ear ‘fore I’m done with you.”

“Uh, no, sir!” the man said, moving his hand quickly away from his pistol butt.

MacDougal’s eyes rolled back and he almost fainted from pain and embarrassment, and he sank to his knees on the floor of the restaurant.

Rattlesnake shook his head in disgust, pulled the Walker out of his bleeding mouth, and pushed him over with his boot until MacDougal was lying flat on his back, crying and moaning with his hands over his face.

Rattlesnake waved the Walker at MacDougal’s friends, who cringed back, and said, “You boys better take this little baby off somewheres an’ get him a sugar tit to suck on ‘fore he pees his pants.”

The men all bent down, picked MacDougal up, and helped him stagger out the batwings, their eyes fixed on the barrel of the Walker as they left.

Rattlesnake stuck the gun back in his belt and turned back to the table. “Now then, where’s my beer?”

After they’d all eaten their fill of beefsteak, potatoes, corn, and apple pie for dessert, Van Horne threw some twenty-dollar gold pieces on the table and they walked toward the door.

Smoke hung back for a moment and whispered to Cal and Pearlie, who broke off from the group and exited through a side door.

He glanced at Louis and nodded. Louis nodded back and kept his hand close to the butt of his pistol. Both of them knew the trouble wasn’t over yet. Men like MacDougal didn’t take treatment like he’d received without trying for revenge, especially when they’d been shamed in front of their friends and neighbors.

Just before Van Horne got to the batwings, Louis and Smoke stepped in front of him. “You’d better let us go out first, Bill,” Smoke said, his eyes flat and dangerous.

Smoke and Louis went through the batwings fast, Smoke breaking to the right and Louis to the left, their eyes on the street out in front of The Feedbag.

Sure enough, MacDougal and his friends were lined up in the street, pistols in their hands, cocked and ready to fire.

As they raised their hands to aim and shoot, Smoke and Louis drew, firing without seeming to aim. An instant later, Cal and Pearlie joined in from the alley where they’d come out to the side of the men in the street.

Only MacDougal, out of all the men with him, got off a shot, and it went high, taking a small piece off Smoke’s hat.

The entire group of men dropped in the hail of gunfire from Smoke and Louis and the boys, sprawling in the muddy street, making it run red with their blood.

“Damn!” Rattlesnake said in awe. He had started to draw his Walker at the first sign of trouble, but it was still in his waistband by the time it was all over. “I ain’t never seen nobody draw an’ fire that fast,” he added, glancing at Smoke and Louis with new respect.

Smoke and Louis walked out into the street and bent down to check on the men. They were all dead, or so close to dying they were no longer any risk.

A few minutes later a fat man with a tin star on his chest came running up the street. “Oh, shit!” he said when he saw who had been killed.

He looked over at Smoke and the group and moved his hand toward his pistol, until Smoke grinned and waggled his Colt’s barrel at him. “I wouldn’t do that, Sheriff,” Smoke said, jerking his head at the group of people standing at the windows and door of The Feedbag. “There are plenty of people in there who will say we acted in self-defense, so there’s no need for you to go for that hog-leg on your hip.”

“But . . . but that’s Angus MacDougal’s son,” the sheriff stammered.

Van Horne moved forward. “I don’t care if it’s the President’s son, Sheriff. These men drew on us first.”

“And just who are you?” the sheriff asked.

“My name is William Cornelius Van Horne,” Bill said, pulling a card from his vest pocket and handing it to the sheriff. “And if you’d like to send a wire to the United States marshall over in Denver, I’m sure he will vouch for me.”

The sheriff eyed the men standing in front of him, and wisely decided not to make an issue of it. “All right, if it went down like you say, you’re free to go.” He took his hat off and wiped his forehead. “But I don’t think Mr. MacDougal is gonna like this.”

Rattlesnake bent over and spit a stream of tobacco juice onto Johnny MacDougal’s dead face. “If’n the man has any sense, he’ll be relieved that we took that sorry son of a bitch off his hands,” he said. “If he’d had any sense at all, he would’a drowned him in a barrel a long time ago.”

Smoke hadn’t remembered Johnny MacDougal’s name, but he still remembered the young man’s lifeless, cold eyes that barely held a hint of humanity in them as he shot off his mouth in the saloon that day. The boy was evidently spoiled rotten, and had never had to face up to the fact that people feared him because of his father’s wealth, not out of any respect for him or because of any doing of his own.

He raised his eyes to Sarah’s. “But his name was MacDougal and yours is . . . ”

“Mine is MacDougal too,” Sarah said. “I lied when I told your wife it was Johnson.”

Smoke sighed and drained the last of his coffee from the cup, hoping it would stay down. “Well, if Johnny was your brother, then you know how unreasonable and stupid he was when he was drinking,” Smoke said, though his gentle voice took some of the sting out of what he said.

“What?” Sarah almost screamed, stepping closer to Smoke and raising her hand as if she was about to hit him.

Smoke smiled grimly at her. “Think about it, Sarah,” he said. “How many times before had he gotten drunk and caused trouble, assaulted or hurt someone? Why, the day he forced us to draw on him, I heard he’d killed an unarmed man the week before.”

When Sarah’s face flushed, Smoke continued. “Did anyone from your family go and tell that poor man’s wife and kids you were sorry for what your brother had done, or did you just use your father’s influence to sweep it all under the rug?”

“You son of a—” Sarah began.

“And did anyone from that man’s family come out to the ranch and try and take Johnny prisoner or shoot him for what he’d done to their father?” he asked, his eyes boring into hers as he spoke.

“You know that was different,” she almost screamed. “The man drew on Johnny first . . . ” she was saying.

Smoke started to interrupt her, but his vision suddenly narrowed and everything became dark and fuzzy, and then he tipped over and fell headfirst into a deep, black pool.

Cletus rushed to his side and felt the pulse in Smoke’s neck. “He’s just fainted,” he said, looking up at Sarah. “Probably from loss of blood, though God only knows if you’ve managed to scramble his brains with that crowbar.”

“It’d serve the bastard right,” Sarah said, moving toward the fire and the coffeepot to get herself another cup. “Especially after what he said about Johnny.”

Cletus’s eyes softened with sorrow, for he knew that Sarah knew that what Jensen had said was the truth, as painful as it was for her to hear it spoken out loud.

They’d all tried to maintain the fiction that the man Johnny killed had been armed, but they’d never spoken of it, and the sheriff had covered up the truth from the townspeople. But out at the ranch they’d all known how it really went down.