Authors: William W. Johnstone

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BOOK: Destiny Of The Mountain Man

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“Yeah,” Manning said. “Yeah, I am.”

“You ain't sayin' that just 'cause you know I could kill you, are you?”

Manning shook his head. “No,” he said. “I've never seen anything faster'n that.”

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

Although King and his party had actually reached the ranch, they did not make it all the way back to the house on the first day of their travel. They camped out on Chilripin Creek that first evening, and the entourage was so well equipped that their supper was anything but the kind of fare one might normally expect while camping.

Two of the men traveling with the entourage were cooks, and one of the wagons was carrying a cooking stove and oven. The cooks prepared salt pork with fried apples and potatoes, sliced cucumbers, and a black walnut chess pie.

“Look at Pearlie,” Cal said. “He is in hog heaven.”

Pearlie didn't even hear the comment, so intent was he on the food.

During the meal, King entertained the others with the story of his past . . . which Smoke had to admit was as colorful as his own.

“I was born in New York City on July 10, 1824, to Irish parents who didn't have a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it through,” King began.

“Richard!” Henrietta gasped.

King laughed. “I'm sorry, my dear, but when folks see all this”âhe took in the land with a sweep of his handâ“I want them to know it wasn't given to me.”

King continued his story, telling how he ran away from his indentured servitude, stowed away on a ship, and wound up buying land in Texas.

He chuckled. “But that was during my adventurous years. I've calmed down a lot since then. The most exciting thing I do now is develop new breeds of cattle.”

“Yes,” Smoke said. “I've heard of your Santa Gertrudis breed. They say it is one of the finest breeds of cattle around.”

“It's a good breed, if I do say so myself,” King said. “They are as sturdy as longhorns, as meaty as Herefords. And right now they bring top dollar at the markets.”

“Which is why you are being targeted by rustlers, no doubt,” Smoke said.

“Well, you would think so, wouldn't you?” King said. “But the ones who hit us didn't steal any cattle. They killed several head, but they didn't steal any.”

“Why would they kill your cattle and not take them?”

“To answer that question, you would have to understand the minds of the men who did this.”

“Tell me about them,” Smoke said.

“Smoke, do we have to talk about such things tonight?” Sally asked. “The food is delicious, the company good, the night is beautiful . . . couldn't we just enjoy the moment?”

“Sally's right. I didn't mean to bring up any unpleasantness,” Smoke apologized.

“No, no, it's quite all right. I think it is something you should know, and there is no time better than the present to tell you about it,” King said. He looked at Sally. “That is, with your permission, ma'am. The story does have its terrible moments.”

Sally nodded. “Of course you can tell the story. If Smoke is going to help you, he is going to have to know as much about these people as he possibly can.”

“Thank you. I will . . . uh . . . tell the story in as delicate a fashion as I can.”

“Oh, nonsense,” Sally replied. “Smoke will tell you, I am not faint of heart.”

Smoke laughed. “She's telling the truth there,” he said.

With supper finished and pipes and cigars lit, King began his story, telling of the raid against his ranch during the war.

“I suppose that the ranch was a legitimate target,” he conceded. “I was running the Union blockade to sell Confederate cotton to the British . . . and I was buying arms and ammunition to sell to the South. I didn't know I had done that much for the Southern war effort, but it did catch someone's attention because we were the target of a raid by Union troops.”

King paused for a few moments and took several puffs from his pipe before he went on, obviously trying to compose himself.

“Unfortunately, the leader of that attack was a man named Jack Brandt. Major Jack Brandt had a particularly nasty habit of using his sword to decapitate his victims.” Again he paused. “But not until he let his men rape the women and young girls. In all, he killed twenty-three innocent men, women, and children.”

“What happened to Brandt?” Smoke asked.

“He went to prison,” King said. “I thought he would be hanged, or at the very least, given a life sentence.”

“But he is out now?” Smoke asked, anticipating where the story was going.

“He's out,” Kleberg said, answering for King. “I checked with the authorities. He and Wiley Stone were released at the same time.”

“I take it Stone was one of the men with him,” Smoke said.

“Yes. Stone was his sergeant,” King said. He sighed. “I believe these same two men have come back to plague me,” King said.

“Do you have any proof of thatâthat he is the one who attacked your men?” Pearlie asked.

King shook his head. “No. All I have is a gut feeling.”

“I've known a lot of good men in my life,” Smoke said. “And I've learned to trust their feelings. So that's good enough for me.”

“I appreciate that,” King said. “But what bothers me now is the fact that we are having cattle roundups back at the ranch. I've told Ramon to get as many cattle moved to the north end of the range as possible. I intend to cut ten thousand head out and drive them north.”

“How long will it take you to have your roundup and get your herd under way?” Smoke asked.

“I think we should be able to get the drive started within two weeks,” King said. “And during those two weeks we will be pretty vulnerable.”

“Maybe we can figure out a way to make you less vulnerable,” Smoke said.

“Mr. Jensen,” King began.

“Please, call me Smoke.”

“Smoke,” King corrected. “I want you to know how much I appreciate this . . . especially when I was so dumb as to refuse to accept your help.”

“Ah, think nothing of it,” Smoke said. “Just consider it one rancher helping another.”

Later that night, two large tents were erected, one for Richard King and his family along with Bob Kleberg, and the other for Smoke, Sally, Pearlie, and Cal. The tents were well ventilated, and furnished with canvas cots so that the occupants didn't have to sleep on the ground.

The ranch hands who were riding with the entourage slept on the ground, or in the wagon.

“Captain King is a very rich man, isn't he?” Sally asked that night as they settled into their cots.

“He's rich, I guess. But he's no richer than I am,” Smoke replied.

“What?” Sally replied in surprise. “How can you say that? Captain King has thousands of acres of land . . . hundreds of thousands of acres. And who knows how many head of cattle? Now, unless Sugarloaf is a lot bigger than you have told me, Captain King is a lot richer than you are.”

Smoke chuckled. “Well, my dear, I suppose it is all in how you measure wealth.”

“What do you mean? How many ways are there to measure wealth?”

“Well, you could say that because I have you, and my freedom to enjoy you, that I am the wealthiest man in the world,” Smoke said.

Sally gasped, then was quiet for a long moment.

“Are you all right?” Smoke asked.

“Yes,” Sally answered. She was quiet for another long moment before she spoke again, her voice coming from the dark, filled with awe.

“Smoke. I do believe that is the nicest thing you have ever said to me.”

In the predawn darkness, several riders appeared. Their leader held up his hand and, like the precision military formation they were, the riders came to a halt.

“There they are,” Preston said, pointing.

“You are sure that is King?” Brandt asked.

“Yes,” Preston said. “I seen his coach while I was in town. That's it, right there. And who else would be travelin' with a coach, three wagons, and two big tents?”

“I think you are right,” Brandt said. “I believe it is King.”

“What are we going to do, Major?” Stone asked.

“We're going to attack,” Brandt replied.

“I thought you didn't want to kill him yet.”

“Sergeant Stone, you were in the war, same as I was,” Brandt replied. “You know as well as anybody that battle plans are fluid, and always subject to change.”

“Yes, sir,” Stone replied.

“Spread the men out and commence shooting upon my first shot,” Brandt ordered.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

Even before the fusillade that followed Brandt's signal shot, Smoke was out of his cot with his gun in hand. He heard bullets popping through the canvas wall of the tent.

“Out of your cots!” he shouted. “Everyone get down on the ground and stay low!”

By now there were so many guns being fired that the shooting made one sustained roar. In addition to the sound of the gunfire, there was the buzzing of bullets as they punched in through one side of the tent, then poked out the other side.

Smoke crawled to the edge of the tent, then lifted the canvas up from the bottom. He could see flashes in the night as a veritable army was firing toward them. He didn't know how many were out there, but from the number of flashes, and the rapidity of the firing, he knew that there were quite a few.

Smoke chose one of the flashes and, taking a chance on the shooter being right-handed, fired just to the right of the flame pattern. He didn't hear anything, nor could he see anything, but he was gratified to see that there were no more muzzle flashes emanating from that particular location.

By now, Pearlie and Cal had also poked their heads and shoulders from under the tent and, like Smoke, they were returning fire. Smoke could hear other gunshots coming from King's party, a very good demonstration coming from the cowboys who were accompanying the train, but also, he was gratified to hear shots from Captain King's tent. That meant that they were not above carrying the fight themselves.

Bullets continued to whistle through the night. Many of them made little fireballs as they struck stone, then whined off into the darkness.

The firing continued very intensely for nearly a full minute.

“Right flank, continue to put down covering fire!” Smoke heard a commanding voice shouting from the darkness. “Left flank, pull back in an orderly withdrawal!”

The incoming fire decreased by about half. Then that firing halted, to be replaced by shooting from further away. Smoke was surprised by the orderliness of the withdrawal. After a few minutes, there was no more incoming fire at all, though people within King's party were still shooting.

“Cease fire!” Smoke called. “Don't waste any more ammunition, you are shooting into the dark!”

The firing eased off, not sharply, but raggedly.

“Cease tiroteo!”
King called.
“Cease tiroteo!”

The last shot was fired.

“Is anyone hurt?” Smoke called into the dark.

“
SÃ, seÃ±or. Mi amigo,
Vincente, he is hurt.”

“I'll see to him,” Sally said.

“Wait,” Smoke said. “Let me check out the area first. Pearlie, you go around to our people and tell them not to move around yet. All we need now is for someone to kill one of our own people.”

“What are you going to do?” Pearlie asked.

“I'm going to go out there and have a look around,” Smoke said as he began poking out the spent cartridges from his cylinder and replacing them with fresh shells.

“You're the one who had better be careful then,” Pearlie said.

Smoke snorted, which may have been a laugh.

“You're right,” he said. “Look, stop by everyone's post. Tell them that I'm going to be out there, so don't get itchy.”

“All right,” Pearlie said.

“Hold up, Pearlie, I'll come with you,” Cal said. “With both of us going, we can get to everyone twice as fast.”

The two young men slipped through the front flap of the tent, then, running bent over, started along the line of wagons.

“Don't shoot, don't shoot!” Pearlie shouted as he approached the others. Cal was doing the same thing while running in the opposite direction.

Smoke waited until both Pearlie and Cal were gone before he slipped out under the tent wall. He crawled through rocks, sand, and various types of cactusâhis way covered by darknessâclosing his mind to the pricks and stabs of everything from sharp-edged stone to long, very pointed cactus needles.

As Smoke moved through the night toward where he had heard the sound of guns, he could see puffs of white gun smoke hanging in the black night air over where the raiders had been. He could also smell the acrid bitterness of burnt powder.

He moved closer, his unobserved approach as silent as the moon shadows. Then, by the light of the moon, he saw two men waiting, staring toward the King encampment. The pullback had been a ruse.

“Did you two men get left behind, or what?” Smoke called out.

“What the hell?” one of them shouted in alarm. Both men turned toward Smoke and fired; though, as Smoke had moved after he called out to them, they were shooting toward the sound of where his voice had been.

Smoke had a better target, and it took him only two shots to take care of both of them. As soon as he fired, he moved from his location again, knowing that the muzzle flashes would give him away to anyone else who might be hiding out. There was no more shooting, but Smoke remained quietly in his new location, sheltered behind a rock, hidden by the deep shadows of predawn darkness.

Gradually, the black turned to gray . . . then the first pink fingers of dawn touched the mesquite, and the light was soft and the air was cool. The last morning star made a bright pinpoint of light over a line of mountains, lying in a ragged line far to the west.

A rustle of wind through feathers caused him to look up just in time to see a golden eagle diving on its prey. The eagle swooped back into the air, carrying a tiny desert mouse kicking fearfully in the eagle's claws. A Gila monster scurried beneath a nearby mesquite tree, which was itself dying under the burden of parasitic mistletoe.

Smoke stayed where he was. Then, as the sun reached two fingers above the eastern horizon, nearly every shadow was eliminated and he could see two bodies lying on the ground. Then something caught his eye . . . a movement behind a low-lying mesquite tree. He saw someone raise up and aim a rifle, and when Smoke looked in the direction the man was aiming, he saw that Alice King was standing just outside the King tent.

The son of a bitch was about to shoot a woman!

“Drop that gun!” Smoke called.

Instead of dropping his rifle, the man swung it toward Smoke and fired. The bullet was uncomfortably close, so close that it actually left a burn mark on Smoke's neck. Smoke returned fire, and the man threw up his rifle as he tumbled backward.

Smoke waited for a long moment before he exposed himself again. Then he heard someone coming and, with gun drawn, he swung toward him.

“No, Smoke, it's me!” Pearlie shouted in alarm.

“I told you to stay back there,” Smoke said gruffly. He was angry and frightened that he had almost shot Pearlie.

“We heard all the shooting,” Pearlie said. “Miss Sally was going to come check on you herself. The only way I could get her to stay back was to promise her that I would do it.”

Smoke's irritation dissipated. He knew how hard it was to resist Sally once she made her mind up to something. He smiled. “Well, as you can see, I'm all right.”

Pearlie looked around at the bodies lying on the ground.

“Yeah, well, that's more than we can say about these fellas, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” Smoke said. “I'll say this for them. They were determined. Come on, let's get back. Unless you think someone might shoot us as we come in.”

“I told 'em to look for me at that rock over there,” Pearlie said, pointing toward a rather large rock.

“Good idea to tell them where to expect us,” Smoke said.

It took no more than a couple of minutes to return to the encampment, where Sally greeted Smoke with a welcoming kiss that was almost embarrassing in its intensity. He winced when she wrapped her arms around his neck, and startled by his reaction, Sally drew back to examine his wound.

“You were hit!” Sally said.

Smoke put his hand up to his neck. “Just a graze, no blood,” he said. “It left me with me a burn, like a rope burn.”

“Let me put some cold cream on it,” she said.

As the two tents were struck, Smoke sat on a wagon tongue, letting Sally apply cold cream to his wound. King came over to talk to him.

“We heard a little activity out there this morning,” King said.

“Yes. Three of them were left back. I think the plan was to open up on us, once we thought we were safe and under way again.”

“Where are the three now?” King asked.

“They're still out there,” Smoke said. “But I don't think they will be bothering anyone again.”

“No, I don't suppose they will either. By chance, none of them was wearing an Army jacket, was he?

“No,” Smoke said.

“Too bad.”

Smoke saw that Vincente had been tended to, and was now sitting up with his shirt off and a bandage wrapped around his upper arm.

“How is he?” Smoke said, nodding toward the wounded man.

“He'll be fine, if he doesn't get the gangrene,” King said.

“Was he the only man we have who was wounded?” Smoke asked.

“Yes. But we lost a couple of horses,” King said.

“By the way, I do believe you when you say that this man Brandt is the one behind all this.”

“You do? You saw him?”

Smoke shook his head. “No, I didn't see him.”

King looked confused. “Then what makes you think he is the one behind all this?”

“I think this because of the way they withdrew this morning,” Smoke said. “I clearly heard the order for one half of the men to provide cover while the other half of the men pulled back. It was a very precise maneuver. Add to that the fact that they set up an ambush and it makes me think the person we are dealing with has a military background.”

“Major Jack Brandt,” King said.

“I think you are right,” Smoke replied.

“Three men killed!” Brandt said. “We surprise an encampment of civilians in the middle of the night, and we had three men killed? We should have killed all of them without so much as a scratch, but we were lucky to get out alive.”

“Yeah,” Preston said.

“You want to tell me just how the hell that happened? It was the perfect ambush plan. What could possibly have gone wrong?”

“Well, we was waitin' back there, like you said, waitin' for daylight so's we could pick 'em off when they started out. Only he come out in the night to find us. It's like he knew we was goin' to be out there.”

“He came out,” Brandt said. “Who came out?”

“Jensen. Smoke Jensen,” Preston said. “You know. He's the one I told you about.”

“How many men did he bring out with him?” Brandt asked.

“He didn't bring nobody with him. It was just him,” Preston said.

“Well, if he came out all by himself, why didn't you kill him when you had a chance?”

“You don't understand,” Preston said.

“What is it I don't understand?”

“He's not like just one man. Fact is, he's not like anything I've ever seen before. We never really got a chance to kill him,” Preston replied. “I mean, Dewey and Houston, they got themselves kilt right off. Then Evans, he got hisself kilt right after first light. That left me as the only one.”

“How is it you weren't killed?” Brandt asked.

“ 'Cause I wasn't about to show myself,” Preston said. “Like I told you, by then I was the only one left. Any man who would go up ag'in Smoke Jensen all by hisself is a damn fool.”

“Who is Smoke Jensen anyway? I've never even heard of him,” Brandt said.

“He's just one of the most famous gunfighters there is, is all,” Preston said. “How can it possibly be that you have never heard of him? Why, they've even wrote dime novels about him.”

“I was in prison for over fifteen years,” Brandt said. “We didn't get a lot of dime novels in prison.”

“Well, take my word for it, Major. Smoke Jensen ain't somebody you want to run up against alone.”

“I'm not afraid of him,” Waco said. “I'll face him alone.”

“Really?” Brandt said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

“You damn right I would.”

“Now, why would you want to do that?” Brandt asked.

“Why, to prove that I am better than he is,” Waco said.

BOOK: Destiny Of The Mountain Man

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