Rage of the Mountain Man (24 page)

Smoke cut his eyes to the right in time to see Monte Carson lever three fast rounds through his Winchester repeater, which spooked half a dozen horses, improperly tied off to a picket line. A flicker of an approving smile raised the corner of Smoke’s mouth. Immediately he sighted in on a barrel-chested stevedore who stood in his path, a rifle raised to his left shoulder.

Time slowed to a crawl by Smoke’s perception as the rifle discharged and the thug’s shoulder rippled from excessive recoil.
Must not have held the butt tightly enough
, Smoke thought fleetingly.
That feller isn’t going to hit what he aimed at.

A sudden hot stinging along the outer surface of Smoke’s upper left arm told him that the shooter had more control than he’d thought. The big Peacemaker in Smoke’s hand bucked, and at less than ten yards, delivered a lead messenger to the New York crook. A dark hole appeared between bushy eyebrows and then disappeared as the rest of the head disintegrated in a crimson shower. Smoke, back astride Dandy, flashed on past the corpse.

“Over this way,” Oliver Johnson shouted. “Some of them are getting away.”

Eddie Meeks didn’t know how he’d let himself in for this “going west” thing. He hated horses, empty land where a guy could see forever without a sign of a building. Manhattan was his town. Why in hell had he ever left there? And this dockyard trash with him. The sons of bitches let three lousy guys put them on the run.

He was running, too, wasn’t he? Hell, yes. It made sense. Whoever these lunatics on the horses were, they knew how to shoot. Over his shoulder, Eddie saw one bearing down on him now. His eyes locked on the twin black circles of a shotgun muzzle. Fear sweat popped out on Eddie’s forehead and he found he could not take his eyes off that terrible weapon.

Still racing through the knee-high grass, Eddie felt his left boot make contact with a hidden rock and he went ass-over-ears in a dusty sprawl. Quick as he could, he came to one knee. Shaken, he raised empty hands over his head.

“Don’t shoot,” he yelled. “Oh, Jesus, don’t shoot me!”

Ollie Johnson reined up in a fog of flying clods. After a precarious moment, he steadied the Greener on the chest of the frightened hard case. He looped the reins over the saddlehorn and took a soft leather sap from his lefthand coat pocket. Smiling in a rictus of an adrenaline high, he bent toward Eddie Meeks and smacked him solidly on the temple.

“One less,” Oliver muttered, as he started off after another fleeing enemy.

Still thinking in terms of their experience with the law in the East, the newly created gunhands made a show of resistance, then most quickly surrendered. Only three of the eleven died in the brief fight, with two wounded. When the last who had fled were brought to the meadow, Smoke Jensen made a quick evaluation.

“We can’t drag this garbage along with us. We'd get nothing done but guarding them. Ollie, you can find your way back to Howard Daley’s ranch without trouble, can’t you?”

“Sure. You want me to go for help?”

“No. I want you to escort the prisoners to there, stay overnight, then get Daley’s help taking them on in to Big Rock. Then I want you to go on to the Sugarloaf, keep an eye on Sally.”

Oliver’s face printed his disappointment. “Trying to get rid of me again?”

“Not at all. I have something for you to do,” Smoke told him. “I’ll send along a note to my foreman. I want Line to arm the hands, put a round-the-clock watch on the ranch. The note will also tell him to send Sam Waters, Harb Yates, and Zeke Tucker with you, to make a sweep south and west, to close off any escape route for the rest of these polecats. That badge Monte gave you gives you the authority to deputize them. Once everyone is in place and we have their backs against the mountains, the roundup should be easy.”

Oliver Johnson gusted out the breath he had been holding and nodded, then gestured toward the simmering pots that had not been disturbed. “What say, the first thing we fill our bellies?”

Smoke chuckled. “Spoken like a true frontiersman.”

Early the next morning, Smoke Jensen and Monte Carson happened upon a dozen of the neophytes. It hadn’t been difficult. The greenhorns had blundered around making enough noise to drive away all the game for five miles around, and had it been a few years earlier, gotten their hair lifted by the Arapaho. One actually managed to ride his horse into a tree. If the weapons they carried in great quantity had not packed so much potential death and destruction, it would have been laughable.

Their ineptitude allowed Smoke and Monte to remain out of their sight or ken as the babes in the woods thrashed their way by the canny frontier marshal and Preacher-trained gunfighter. Once the tenderfeet had gone out of earshot of any but themselves, Smoke revealed his hastily assembled plan to Monte.

“I’ll go in among them tonight, well after dark. My bet is, they won’t even have night riders out guarding the camp.” Monte spat a stream of red-brown tobacco juice. “Won’t take that bet. I reckon yore right.”

“I figure a few cut cinch straps, a couple of them hog-tied, and such will give those boys something more to worry about.”

Monte chuckled. “Smoke, you could glide in there and slit all their throats while they slept, yet you always open yer dance with these shenanigans.”

“Way I figure, not all of them are killers. Most, in fact, are only overgrowed spoiled brats with guns in their hands. They find out there’s someone around who’s meaner, tougher, and smarter than they are, they’ll light out sure enough. Better that way. I don’t enjoy taking a man’s life,” Smoke added, in a rare flash of introspection.

Smoke and Monte gnawed cold biscuits and strips of jerky while the bunglers stumbled through the pines and Douglas fir forest that blanketed the swollen bosom of the mountains. They ate more while the flatlanders roasted a deer haunch over a poorly made, smoky fire.

“Hope they like the taste of pine resin with their meat,” Monte observed jokingly. “When you headin’ out?”

“Let them all get to sleep.”

The two lawmen sat in silence after that, listening to the distant sounds of the easterners as they dwindled into quiet. A sliver of moon added only slightly to the frosted starlight that shimmered down on the grassy clearing where the out-landers had settled for the night. Then, with a soft runt and a light hand on Monte’s shoulder, Smoke faded into the darkness on foot.

Smoke Jensen found his first candidate within five hundred yards of where Monte waited. For whatever reason, the man had wandered off from the others to sleep alone. Smoke crouched beside him for two long minutes before ensuring a long, deep slumber by the application of the barrel of his .45 Colt to the greenhorn’s head.

Quickly he trussed up the unconscious object lesson with a piggin’ string and the victim’s belt. A dirty sock and a strip of the man’s shirt served for a gag. Smiling to himself, Smoke Jensen took all the weapons with him as he moved away into the dim light of the stars. He found two restless souls further in toward the camp. Unable to sleep, they had come away from those who could to talk about their lives in the East. Smoke positioned himself and called to them in a hushed whisper.

“Pssst! Over here.”

“Who’s that?” one asked in mild alarm.

“Luke.”

“Oh. Sure, you’re one of the Seventh Avenue gang, right?”

“Right. Come here,” Smoke coaxed.

“You go,” the talkative one urged his companion.

“No, you go.”

“You’re closer. You go.”

"Don't take all night,” Smoke hastened them along. “Both of you come here.”

Grumbling under their breath, both young hoodlums got to their boots and headed toward the sound of his voice. The first to reach the place found the muzzle of a revolver stuffed in his ear.

“Quiet now. No sudden noises,” Smoke suggested. Quickly he relieved them of their sidearms. “Do you know the way out of here?” To their shaken heads, he added, pointing south, “It’s that way. I suggest you start walking and don’t look back. It’s about ten miles to the nearest ranch. You should make it about daylight. From there, it’ll be easy for you to find the nearest train and get the hell back to New York.”

“Who do you think you are?” the lippy one demanded.

“Smoke Jensen.”

His name had the desired effect. “Oh, shit! H-h-how’d you get up on us like that?” the youth with lesser bravado asked.

“These mountains have been my home since I was younger than you. I’m not going to let some street scum take them from me. I’ll put it in the simplest terms, so you can understand it. You leave ... or you die.”

“We’re gone. We’re already out of here,” the nervous one gasped out.

“
Dennis
, ” his braver companion protested. He left rather rapidly with his friend a moment later when he heard the loud clicks of a Colt’s hammer being pulled back and remembered the muzzle of that gun still pressed into his ear.

Nick diMenfi didn’t like being out in these woods alone. No matter what that English bastard Lathrop said, there were wild Indians on the loose around here; he knew it. Hadn’t he read it a hundred times in those books by Ned Buntline? Nick’s family had immigrated from their home in Menfi, Sicily, when his father was a young man with a new bride. Their name had been Struviato, but that had been too much for the immigration guy, his father had laughingly recounted at hundreds of family gatherings. So, this English-speaking guy had listed him as Hubert diMenfi and his wife as Carla.

As the fourth of seven sons born to Humberdo and Carlotta, Nicolo diMenfi had grown up fast and tough in some of the roughest streets in New York City. With big, wise brown eyes, he had watched the old Sicilian dons squeeze money from the shop owners, whores, and street gangs that had just naturally begun to form among the young Italian, Jewish, and Irish boys in the mixed neighborhood.

At eight, Nick had joined the junior auxiliary of the Tony Frescotti Family. He graduated to the exalted position of a runner for policy slips at age 13. He knew which cops on the beat were on the pad, which sergeants, lieutenants, and even captains received the discreet small white envelopes each Sunday afternoon in Tony Frescotti’s restaurant, where they all went with their families to a table-groaning feast.

Proudly, Nick made his bones with the Frescotti family at 17, when he knifed to death a sneaky mick gunsel who was lining up on Don Tony Frescotti from a dark doorway of the brownstone in which the diMenfi family lived. He had been hidden out for three weeks by one of Frescotti’s underbosses. Then, in a windowless room, with walls draped in black, and illuminated only by two candles on a kind of altar, he had sworn by Saint Ann to live by the knife and the gun and to die by the knife and the gun. His finger had been pricked and he had signed the compact with his blood.

Word on the streets had it that a new force of Irish from Boston and New York was forming, for some unknown reason, and it bothered the families of New York City. Although warring among themselves, they joined at a sit-down to mutually agree to do something about this. At the recommendation of Don Tony Frescotti, Nick had been given the task of getting inside this outfit and learning all he could.

Which is what had brought him out to this godforsaken country in the first place. And, oh, how he hated it. No cobblestone streets, no brick sidewalks. And no buildings. Nick saw himself as one of his family’s best soldiers. What was he doin’ lost in the trees?

A slight rustling of leaves attracted his attention. Curious, his streetwise instincts aroused, Nick pulled the .32 Smith & Wesson from his coat pocket and walked through the leaves and fallen branches with less-than-satisfactory silence. In the dim starlight he noticed a bush that swayed and rattled wildly. Nick braced himself and raised his revolver to eye level.

“Okay, come out of there, smartass,” Nick challenged, in proper street hood style.

The bush only vibrated with greater violence. Nick jumped to one side and quickly rounded the suspected area. There he found two of the Irish gang hanging upside down from an alder limb over the bush. They were tied and gagged and flexed their bodies from the hips in a desperate attempt to attract attention.

Nick hastened to their side. “Jeez, what happened to you two?” he asked in a low whisper.

“I did,” an equally soft reply came from behind Nick.

“What th’ fu—” Nick began, as he whirled and came face-to-face with the biggest, broadest man he had ever seen. Starlight gleamed off the barrel of a huge .45 Colt revolver lined on Nick’s chest. “Who th’ hell are you?” he managed to croak.

“I’m your worst nightmare. But I answer to Smoke Jensen.”

“Oooh . . . shit,” Nick breathed out slowly. Something told him he was going to die in this lonesome place, far from his Brooklyn neighborhood.

“If you want to stay alive,” the man called Smoke Jensen told the Black Hand kid from Brooklyn, “do as I say.” Quick of wit, as well as with a knife or gun, Nick diMenfi swiftly evaluated the situation. “Yeah—yeah, sure. What do you want?”

“Mr. Jensen. What do you want, Mr. Jensen?” Smoke taunted.

“ ‘What do you want, Mr. Jensen?’ ”

“I’ve already told you that. You can begin by handing me that toy in your fist, before you hurt yourself.”

Pride in being a button man for the Frescotti mob momentarily flared. “I know how to handle a gun.”

“I was thinking of what a mess a forty-five slug would make of your chest.”

“You wouldn’t dare shoot. You don’t have a chance if you do. There’s fifteen of us out here, all with guns,” Nick continued in defiance.

“Wrong. You and three others are all that’s left who aren’t tied up or otherwise disposed of,” Smoke Jensen gave him the bitter news.

“What’s . . . ‘otherwise disposed of?” Nick queried, as he numbly handed over his revolver. He held a dread that he knew the answer before he heard it.

“Three of them gave me some trouble. They’re dead. Five of them saw the light. They’re on the way home. You’d be wise to make the same choice.”

“Naw, I think I’ll stay. Free my buddies and hunt your ass down.”

“Talk about not having a chance!” Smoke hissed at him. His patience had worn to the thinnest. “Listen, you little guttersnipe, how do you think I managed to move around and through all of you, fix the wagon of eleven, and not make a sound? I can guarantee that after tonight, not a one of you New York trash that stays in the High Lonesome is going to leave here other than in chains or dead.”