William Johnstone: Code of the Mountain Man

“Dammit!” Sheriff Silva said, getting to his boots. “I been shot twice in my life and both times in the same damn arm!”

“No, it ain’t over!” the scream came from up the street.

Everybody looked. Pecos stood there, his hands over the butts of his fancy engraved .45s.

“Oh, crap!” Smoke said.

“Don’t do it, kid!” Carbone called from the boardwalk. “It’s over. He’ll kill you, boy.”

“Hell with you, you greasy son of a bitch!” Pecos yelled.

Carbone stiffened. Cut his eyes to Smoke.

“Man sure shouldn’t have to take a cut like that, Carbone,” Smoke told him.

Carbone stepped out into the street, his big silver spurs jingling. “Kid, you can insult me all day. But you cannot insult my mother.”

Pecos laughed and told him what he thought about Carbone’s sister, too.

Carbone shot him before the kid could even clear leather. The Pecos Kid died in the dusty street of a town that would be gone in ten years. He was buried in an unmarked grave.

“If you hurry, Carbone,” Smoke called, “I think you could catch up with Martine. Me and him smoked a cigarette together a few minutes ago, and he told me he was going back to Chihuahua to visit his folks.”

Carbone grinned and saluted Smoke. A minute later he was riding out of town, heading south.

Chapter Twenty-three

Smoke soaked in a hot tub of water for a hour before he would let the doctor tend to his wounds.

“You’re a lucky man,” the doctor told him, after shaking his head in amazement at the old bullet scars that dotted Smoke’s body. “That side wound could have killed you.”

‘What happened to John Scale and the others?” Smoke asked the sheriff, who was lying on the other table in the makeshift operating room.

“I gave them an option: a ride or a rope. They chose to take a ride. What are you going to do about all those reporters gathered outside like a gaggle of geese?”

“What I’ve always clone. Ignore them.”

“You plan on staying around here for any length of time?”

“Two days and I'm gone.”

“Good. Maybe then this county will settle down.”

“You can’t ride in two days!” the doctor protested.

“Watch me,” Smoke told him.

Two days later, Smoke and Sally rode out with Johnny North. Smoke on Buck, Sally on the blue steele stallion.

Charlie Starr stood with Lilly and Earl and Louis on the boardwalk and watched them leave. Cotton and Mills and Larry stood with them.

“That’s a hell of a man there,” Larry said, looking at Smoke Jensen.

Louis smiled. “The last mountain man.”