Ambush of the Mountain Man

TWENTY-FIVE

Smoke had a problem. The storm had stopped and the day was clearing off, clouds disappearing as fast as they’d appeared days before. He knew that with no storm to cover his tracks, the deep snow would lead the gang that had taken him prisoner right to him. Also, his dark clothes were going to stand out against the white snow like a road sign. He was going to have to be very careful moving around to make sure he stayed under cover.

The good news was that he was a good mile and a half up the lower slope of the mountain he’d been heading for. Now the gang was going to have to come after him in his territory, where he was right at home and where they were interlopers.

As he rode, he checked his weapons. He had two pistols, each with six cartridges, and a rather old and beaten-up Winchester that looked as if its owner hadn’t cleaned it in years. He shook his head, knowing he wouldn’t be able to trust it for accuracy at much over a hundred yards.

He leaned forward, took the canteen off the saddle horn, and pulled its cork, taking a sniff of the contents. He wrinkled his nose. The man he’d killed had had his canteen filled with whiskey instead of water or coffee. That’s no good, he thought. His experience had taught him that men who drank whiskey when the weather was below freezing didn’t last too long. Instead of warming a body up, as many flatlanders thought, whiskey actually lowered the body’s resistance to freezing temperatures.

He guided the horse into the middle of a small copse of trees, so he’d be out of sight from the slopes below, and dismounted. He opened the saddlebags to see what else he’d inherited with the dead man’s horse.

Good news at last. The man had a large chunk of bacon wrapped in waxed paper in a sack along with several biscuits and a couple of pieces of jerky. There was also a small can of Arbuckle’s coffee, but no pot or skillet to use to cook either the bacon or the coffee in.

No matter, he thought. A good mountain man can always improvise.

In the other saddlebag was an old monocular scope, the kind you pulled out and looked through with one eye. It wasn’t as good as a decent pair of binoculars, but it would do. Nestled in the bag was a box of .44 cartridges for the rifle and for the pistols as well. That was an additional fifty rounds he had to add to what was already in the weapons.

In addition to the shells, there was a folded-up yellow rain cape and a small woven blanket and a box of lucifers. Along with the waterproof ground blanket folded behind the saddle, he would at least have some protection against the cold when night fell.

He nodded, grinning. All in all, not too bad, he thought. He had managed to escape and to acquire not only transportation, but also weapons and food and some shelter against the elements. He was ready now to go to war.

He took the telescope and moved to the edge of the copse of trees. He panned the scope all around the downslope area that he could see. There was no sign of any pursuit just yet, which meant he probably had enough time to fix a fire and to eat and make some coffee.

He took the reins of the horse and led it around and through the trees until he found some boulders sitting so there was a small protected space out of the chilly wind on the mountainside.

Using his boot, he scraped the snow down to where the horse could forage enough grass to fill its belly. Unfortunately, the man hadn’t carried any grain for his mount, but a few days on grass wouldn’t hurt the horse.

He took the saddle and blanket off, and used the reins to fashion a makeshift hobble for the animal, since he didn’t know if he could trust it to remain nearby if only ground-reined.

Once his horse was taken care of, he gathered up an armful of dead tree limbs and deadfall from around the boulders. He made a small pile between the boulders, with the smaller sticks on the bottom and the larger ones on top.

He opened the saddlebags and took out the woven blanket. Since the grass around was all covered with snow, it couldn’t be used to start the fire. It was too wet. So, he unraveled an inch or so of the blanket, wadded up the yarn, and stuck it under the kindling. When he lit it with a lucifer, it was only moments before he had a small fire going.

He’d picked up only long-dead wood, so there was very little smoke, though there was enough to spot if the men below were looking, and he knew he’d have to make this nooning fast.

He took out the bacon, sliced it with the skinning knife he’d taken from the man’s boot, and laid the strips out on a wide, flat rock. This he laid gently in the edge of the fire.

While the bacon was cooking, he poured the contents of the can of Arbuckle’s coffee into the sack the bacon and jerky and biscuits had been in, and then he filled the empty can with snow. He placed it near the fire so the snow would melt.

As the bacon cooked and the water began to boil, Smoke dumped a handful of coffee grounds into the water in the can. Using the skinning knife, he cut one of the biscuits open, and then speared the bacon and put it between the halves of the biscuit and began to eat.

The biscuit was very hard, but it softened a bit as the grease from the bacon soaked into it, and soon he could chew it without worrying about breaking a tooth off.

When the coffee was boiling, he wrapped the blanket around his hands and pulled the can away from the fire. He set it down and waited for it to cool down enough so he could drink it.

“All the comforts of home,” he mumbled to himself, happy to be free at last.

Thirty minutes later, he kicked snow into the fire to put it out and got back in the saddle. He’d dumped the whiskey out of the canteen after taking a sip or two, and replaced it with hot coffee. He’d also saved some of the biscuit and bacon sandwiches for an evening meal, since he doubted he’d be able to make a fire after darkness came.

He spurred the horse into motion and as it walked up the slope, he glanced behind him. Sure enough, the pine tree limbs he’d tied to the horse’s tail were dragging along, smoothing over the prints the horse was making in the snow. It wasn’t perfect, and if the men chasing him had a good tracker along, they could still follow him. But to see and follow the tracks, the tracker would have to walk—they couldn’t be seen from horseback. This would slow their chase considerably, and for every minute they delayed, the high winds of the High Lonesome were making his tracks that much harder to follow.

He moved farther and farther up the slope, wrapping his blanket around his shoulders as the temperature got colder and colder the higher he went. He glanced upward and smiled to see dense, dark clouds again forming around the distant peaks, whipped around and around by the high winds up on top of the mountain. He knew this meant more early winter storms were on the way, along with temperatures many degrees below zero.

“We’ll see how those boys like mountain weather,” he said to the back of the horse’s head as they slowly ascended toward the snow-covered peaks above them.

Several miles away, Cletus got to his feet as his men finished their noon meal. He moved over next to where the horses were tied and found Jason Biggs standing there, a pair of binoculars to his eyes.

“You see anything, Jason?” he asked as he began to build himself a cigarette.

“Couple’a elk an’ a bear, but nothin’ that looked like a rider on horseback.” He hesitated, and then he added, “I did see what looked like a thin plume of smoke, but with the winds up there it was hard to tell.”

Cletus put a match to his cigarette and nodded his head through the smoke. “Yeah, there’s just too many trees up there. A hundred men could be ridin’ around up there and if they was careful, we wouldn’t see nothin’ from down here in the flats.”

Biggs turned to him. “So, you ready to go upland an’ get us a son of a bitch?” he asked, still angry over the death of his friend Charley Blake.

Cletus nodded. “Yeah, I guess so. I was kind’a hoping Mac would’a been back from talking to Angus, but we can’t wait any longer if we want’a get up the side of that mountain ’fore dark.”

“Good, ’cause I’m itchin’ to get that sumbitch in my sights.”

Cletus put his hand on Biggs’s shoulder. “Jason, you know we’re going up there to capture Jensen, not assassinate him, don’t you?”

Biggs showed his teeth, but it was more a grimace than a real smile. “You do what you got to do, Clete, an’ I’ll do the same.”

Cletus decided to let it drop. He too was pretty pissed off about Blake, though he could understand why Jensen had done what he’d done. As he’d told Sarah, a man running for his life will do just about anything he has to in order to survive.

Cletus got his men saddled up and headed toward the steep slopes of the mountain in the distance. Like Smoke, he too noticed the clouds whipping around the peaks, and knew they were going to be in for some rough weather before too long.

When the group came to the trail leading up into the forest on the side of the slope, Cletus stopped them across the stream from a rotting one-room log cabin that looked like it hadn’t been used for years.

“Jimmy,” he said, pointing to Jimmy Corbett, “I want you to wait over there by that cabin for Mac Macklin to get here. He’ll probably have some more men from Mr. MacDougal, an’ I want you to bring ‘em on up after us when they get here.”

“Yes, sir,” Jimmy said, jerking his horse’s head to the side and riding toward the shallow, ice-encrusted stream.

“And Jimmy . . . ”

“Yeah, Boss?” the boy said, looking back over his shoulder to see what Cletus wanted.

“You’d better fire a couple of shots when you get close to let us know it’s you coming.” Cletus smiled. “I figure we got more’n a few itchy trigger fingers in this group, and you wouldn’t want to sneak up on none of ‘em.”

Jimmy grinned and touched the brim of his hat as he rode into the stream and over toward the log cabin.

“We gonna sit here all day jawin’ or we gonna go up there and git Jensen?” Jason Biggs called from the front of the group of men, where he sat impatiently in his saddle.

Cletus clenched his teeth and walked his horse over next to Biggs’s without answering.

He leaned over to put his face close to Biggs’s and said in a low voice, “You open your pie-hole like that at me one more time, Jason, an’ we’re gonna see who the best man with a gun is! You hear me boy?” he asked, his face red and his voice harsh. His flat, dangerous eyes let Biggs know he wasn’t kidding in what he said.

“Uh, I didn’t mean nothin’ by what I said, Clete, you know that,” Biggs answered, his eyes looking down and not meeting Cletus’s.

“Remember, Jason, one more time is all it’s gonna take. I won’t remind you again.”

“Yes, sir.”

As Cletus rode off, his back turned, Biggs let his hand fall to the butt of his pistol. No one could talk to him like that and get away with it.

Then he looked around at the men gathered nearby. He knew they’d blow him out of the saddle if he shot Cletus, so he relaxed and kicked his horse into following Cletus’s. There’d be plenty of time later for Clete to have an accident.