Return of the Mountain Man

20

Levi Pass lay sullen under the heat of the sun. Bodies littered the pass; men and animals sprawled in soon-to-be bloated death. The first contingent of men, led by Deputy Payton, had been knocked from their saddles in a hard burst of rifle fire from the rocks above the pass. Among the first to die were Rosten, the stable manager; Simmons, who ran the general store; and Deputy Payton. A sheriff back in Iowa would never learn that he could destroy the murder warrant he held for Payton.

Among the gunhands in the rocks, McNeil and a rider from the Crooked Snake and Triangle lay dead. The moaning of the wounded, on both sides, softly drifted out of and above the dust and gunsmoke of the pass.

Then the men saw the smoke belching into the skies.

“What the hell?” Wilson muttered from behind his shoulder on the ridge.

“That bastard Jensen has torched the town!” Potter said.

“Oh, my God!” Stratton said, his face dusty and his elegant clothing torn and dirty. “All our records.”

Wilson laughed. “Looks like your boy done turned on you!” he called down into the pass.

“Our boy!” Potter yelled. “He started out workin’ for you.”

“You lie!” Wilson yelled. “You brung him in!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Stratton screamed.

Wilson’s long-unused gray cells began working. “Now wait just a minute,” he called. “You tryin’ to claim you didn’t hire Jensen?”

“Sure we did,” Potter yelled. “But we hired him away from Richards. Last night. Richards brought him in to kill us.”

“You’re crazy!” Wilson yelled. “Just hold on a second. Everybody stop shootin’. We got to talk about this.”

“I don’t trust you!” Potter screamed. “You’re up to something.”

“I ain’t up to nothin’, you fat hog!” Wilson yelled. “You and Stratton was the ones who wanted it all. Ya’ll caused all this trouble.”

Wilson stood up from behind the boulder.

Sheriff Reese lifted his rifle and shot the man in the stomach. The .44 round knocked the gunhand backward. He died with a scream on his bloody tongue.

A Crooked Snake rider shot Cannon, the newspaper editor, in the center of his forehead. Cannon was dead before he hit the rocky ground of the pass road.

Levi Pass erupted and rocked with pistol and rifle fire. Britt, a rider for the Crooked Snake, crouched behind his cover and mulled matters over in his mind. He was getting the feeling that that damned Smoke Jensen had set them all up; made fools out of everybody; sitting back and laughing while they were shooting at each other.

He slipped from his cover and inched his way toward the timber, where the horses were tied. He spurred his mount, heading for the PSR spread. He wanted to tell his boss what he’d just heard.

Behind him, the savage gunfight continued, the air filled with shouts and curses and the screaming of the wounded and the silence of the dead.

“Now wait a minute!” Josh said. “Tell me again what you heard back at the pass.”

Britt repeated what he’d heard between Wilson, Stratton, and Potter.

Lansing went to a window of the mansion and looked toward the town. Though miles away, he could clearly see the black smoke pouring into the sky. “Shore nuff on fire,” he said.

“He played us against each other,” Richards said. “And I played right into his hands. He set me up like a kid with a string toy. That damn gunhawk knew what I’d do.” He sat down heavily. “I don’t like being made a fool of. I don’t like it worth a damn!”

“He shore done ’er though,” Marshall rubbed it in a bit. Marshall and the other ranchers were every bit as tough as Richards, with no back-up in them. They were all thieves and murderers, their pasts as black as midnight.

Richards’s gaze was bleak. “Gather up the men. We’re ridin’.”

“Richards is anything but a fool, Smoke,” Sally told him. Standing beside her, Sam solemnly nodded his head. “If he puts all this together, then you’ve lost your element of surprise.”

“I don’t think either side wiped the other out in that pass,” Preacher opined. “And we ain’t heared no gunfire in more’un an hour. I think they got to talkin’ and figured things out.”

Smoke looked at Tenneysee. “The supplies hidden?”

“B’ar couldn’t find ’em.”

“We’ll get the women over to Becky’s place and leave them there. We’ll head for the timber and make them come after us.”

“The ranches lay in a half circle around Bury,” Sam said. “Marshall, Lansing, and Brown will have most of their men out looking for you; only a handful will be at the ranches. The real cowhands and punchers will be with the herds. They’re cowboys, not gunslicks.”

“Then we’ll leave them be,” Smoke said. “When we get ready to scatter the herds, we’ll tell the punchers to take off for new ground.”

“They’ll go,” Sam said.

“Let’s ride.”

Leaving what was once the Idaho Territory town of Bury still smoking and burning behind them, the outnumbered band of ancient mountain men, gunhands, and ladies saddled up and drifted into the deep timber, with Sam leading the way. At Becky’s small farm, Sam explained the situation to Becky and she agreed to help any way she could. Little Ben introduced the kids to the mountain men. Becky’s kids had seen a lot during their time in the west, but absolutely nothing compared with the sight of the old mountain men, all dressed in buckskins and colorful sashes and armed to the teeth. And they certainly had never seen anything to match Audie. No taller than the children, the tiny mountain man captivated the kids. When he jumped up on a stump and began telling fairy tales, the kids sat around him listening, spellbound.

Sally and Smoke walked a short distance from the cabin. “Do we talk now, Smoke?” she asked.

“I reckon so.” He waited for her to correct his grammar. She did not.

“Very well. I want to see the west, Smoke. And I want you to show it to me.”

“Dangerous, Sally. And not very ladylike. You’d have to ride astride.”

She hid her smile. Her father had paddled her behind several times as a child for doing just that. “I’m sure I could cope.”

Buck let that alone. “What is it you want to see?”

“The high lonesome,” she said without hesitation.

“It’s all around you here.”

“You know what I mean, Smoke. The real high lonesome. The one you and the other mountain men talk about. When you speak of that, your voice becomes soft and your eyes hold a certain light. That’s the high lonesome I would like to see.”

“You’ll have to learn to shoot,” Smoke said dubiously.

“Then I shall.”

“Camp and live out in the wilderness.”

“All right.”

“It won’t be easy. Your skin will be tanned and your hands will become hard with calluses.”

“I expect that.”

Smoke kept his face noncommittal. He had hoped Sally would want to see his world; the world that he knew was slowly vanishing. There would be time.

He hoped.

“All right,” he said.

She rose up on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. “You come back to me,” she said.

He did not reply. That was something he could not guarantee.

“Nothing left, Boss,” Long reported back to Josh Richards. “Jensen burned the whole place to the ground.”

Potter and Stratton were now once more joined with Richards. The opposing sides had ceased fighting in Levi Pass and begun talking. The men were chatting amicably when Richards, Marshall, Lansing, and Brown rode up with their men.

“Nothing?” Burton asked. “My apothecary shop is gone?”

“There ain’t nothing left,” Long said. “And Jensen and them old bastards is gone. Took the women and left. I cut their sign but lost it in the rocks.”

“Sam?” Richards asked.

“No sign of him.”

“That was a nice hotel,” Morgan said wistfully.

“Beautiful church,” Necker said. “Takes a heathen to destroy a house of God.”

Simpson spat on the ground. “You damned fake!” he told Necker. “You ain’t no more no preacher than I is. I knowed all along I’d seen you ’fore. Now I remember. I knowed you up in Montana Territory. Elkhorn. You was dealing stud and pimpin’. You kilt Jack Harris when he caught you cold-deckin’ him.”

“You must be mistaken, my good man,” Necker said. But his face was flushed. “I came from—”

“Shut up, Necker. Or whatever your name is,” Lansing said. “Now I’m gonna tell you all something. Or remind you of it. Remind you all of a lot of things. They ain’t none of us clean. We all—all of us—got dodgers out on us. Now we can’t none of us afford to lose this fight. ’Cause you all know damn well when that stage reports the town is burnt, the Army’s gonna come in here and start askin’ a bucket full of questions. That means all them pig farmers and nesters in this area’s gotta go in the ground. Cain’t none of ’em be allowed to live and flap their gums.” He glared at Richards. “I tole you time after time that I didn’t trust that there Scotsman. He ain’t what he appears to be. Bet on it. When the trouble started, he shore wanted to leave in a hurry, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he did,” Stratton said. “And it appeared that he and Smoke Jensen were friends.”

“They got to die,” Marshall said. “All of them.”

“What about them farmers’ kids?” a gunhand asked.

“Them, too,” Brown said. “Cain’t nobody be left alive to point no finger at us.”

“I want Smoke Jensen!” Dickerson gasped from his blankets on the ground. Still gravely wounded, the outlaw had insisted upon coming to the pass rather than leaving with the men Smoke had ordered out before burning the town.

The men ignored him. Dickerson’s wounds had reopened, and all those present knew the outlaw and murderer was not long for this world.

“Ya’ll hear me?” Dickerson said.

“Aw, shut up and die!” Necker told him. “We’re busy.”

Dickerson fell back on his dirty blankets and died.

Smoke, Sam, and the mountain men rode west, toward Marshall’s Crooked Snake spread. The Frenchman, Dupre, was ranging ahead of the main body of men. About two miles from the ranch, Smoke pulled up, waiting for Dupre to return with a scouting report.

During this quiet, which, all knew, would soon become very rare, Preacher talked with Smoke. “You beginnin’ to feel all the hate leave your craw, boy?”

“Yes,” Smoke admitted.

“That’s good. That’s a mighty fine little gal back yonder at that nester place.”

“She wants to see the high lonesome.”

“Be tough on a woman. You gonna show her?”

Smoke hesitated. “Yes.”

Preacher spat a stream of brown tobacco juice on the ground, drowning a bug. “Soon as this here affair is done, you two best git goin’. High lonesome will soon be gone. Civil-lie-say-shon done be takin’ over, pilgrims ruinin’ everything. Be a fine thing to show that woman, though. She’s tough, got lots of spunk. She’ll stand by you, I’s thinkin’.”

“Us, you mean, don’t you?”

“You mean the boy?”

Smoke shook his head. “I mean Sally, Little Ben, me, and you.”

“No, Smoke,” Preacher said. “I’ll be leavin’ with my pards. They’s still some corners of this land that’s high and lonesome. No nesters with their gawddamned barbed wire and pigs and plows. Me and Tenneysee and Audie and Nighthawk and all the rest—wal, our time’s done past us, boy. Mayhaps you’ll see me agin—mayhaps not. But when my time is nigh, I’ll be headin’ back to that little valley where you hammered my name in that stone. There, I’ll jist lay me down and look at the elephant. I’ll warn you now, son. This will be the last ride for Deadlead and Matt. They done tole me that. They real sick. Got that disease that eats from the inside out.”

“Cancer?”

“That’d be it, I reckon. They gonna go out with the reins in they teeth and they fists full of smokin’ iron. They’ll know when it’s time. You a gunhand, boy; you understand why they want it thataway, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“All right. It’s all said then. When it’s time for me and the boys to leave, I don’t want no blubberin’, you understand?”

“Have you ever seen me blubber?”

“Damn close to it.”

“You tell lies, old man.”

Preacher’s eyes twinkled. “Mayhaps one or two, from time to time.”

“Here comes Dupre.”

“We gonna be runnin’ and ridin’ hard for the next two-three days, son. We’ll speak no more of this. When this is over, me and boys will just fade out. ’Member all I taught you, and you treat that there woman right. You hear?”

“I hear.”

“Let’s go bring this to an end, boy.”