Johnstone, W. - Last Mountain Man

The one TC rider alive pulled himself up on one elbow. Blood poured through two chest wounds, the blood pink and frothy, one .36 ball passing through both lungs, taking the rider as he turned in the saddle.

“Heard you was comin’,” he gasped. “You quick, no doubt ’bout that. Your brother was easy.” He smiled a bloody smile. “Potter shot him low in the back; took him a long time to die.” The rider closed his eyes and fell back to the ground.

“Let’s go clean out the rest of nest of snakes,” Smoke said.

“There may be men at the ranch didn’t have nothin’ to do with your Pa and your brother dyin’.”

“Yes. I have thought about that. I would say they have a small problem.”

“Figured you’d say that, too.”

“He that lies with the dogs, riseth with fleas,” Smoke said with a smile.

“Huh?”

“It was in one of those books I read at the cabin on the Fork.”

“Shoulda burned them gawddamned things. I knowed it all along.”

Stopping in a stand of timber a couple of hundred yards from the ranch house, Preacher said, “There she is. Got any plans?”

“Start shooting.”

“The house and out-buildin’s?”

“Burn them to the ground.”

“You a hard youngun, Smoke.”

“I suppose I am.” He smiled at Preacher. “But I had a good teacher, didn’t I?”

“The best around,” the mountain man replied.

The house and bunkhouse were built of logs, with sod roofs. Burn easy, Smoke thought. He yelled, “Casey! Get out here.”

“Who are you?” a shout came from the house.

“Smoke Jensen.”

A rifle bullet wanged through the trees. High.

“Lousy shot,” Preacher muttered.

The rifle cracked again, the slug humming closer.

“They might git lucky and hit one of the horses,” Preacher said.

“You tuck them in that ravine over there,” Smoke said, dismounting. “I think I’ll ease around to the back.”

Preacher slid off his mustang. “I’ll stay here and worry ’em some. You be careful now.”

“Don’t worry.”

“’Course not,” the old man replied sarcastically. “Why in the world would I do that?” He glanced up at the sky. “Seven, maybe eight hours till dark.”

“We’ll be through before then.” Smoke slipped into an arroyo that half circled the house, ending at the rear of the ranch house.

Fifty yards behind the house, he found cover in a small clump of trees and settled down to pick his targets.

A man got careless inside the house and offered part of his forearm on a sill. Smoke shattered it with one round from his Henry. In front of the house, Preacher found a target and cut loose with his Henry. From the screams of pain drifting to Smoke, someone had been hard hit.

“You hands!” Smoke called. “You sure you want to die for Casey? A couple of your buddies already bought it a few miles back. One of them wearing a black shirt.”

Silence for a few seconds. “Your Daddy ride with Mosby?” a voice yelled from the house.

“That’s right.”

“Your brother named Luke?”

“Yeah. He was shot in the back and the gold he was guarding stolen.”

“Potter shot him — not me! You got no call to do this. Ride on out and forgit it.”

Smoke’s reply to that was to put several rounds of .44s through the windows of the house.

Wild cursing came from the house.

“Jensen? The name is Barry. I come from Nevada. Dint have nothin’ to do with no war. Never been no further east than the Ladder in Kansas. Nuther feller here is the same as me. We herd cattle; don’t git no fightin’ wages. You let us ride out?”

“Get your horses and ride on out!” Smoke called.

Barry and his partner made it to the center of the backyard before they were shot in the back by someone in the ranch house. One of them died hard, screaming his life away in the dust of southeast Colorado.

“Nice folks in there,” Preacher muttered.

Smoke followed the arroyo until the bunkhouse was between him and the main house. In a pile behind the bunkhouse, he found sticks and rags; in the bunkhouse, a jar of coal oil. He tied the rags around a stake, soaked it in coal oil, lighted it, then tossed it onto the roof of the ranch house. He waited, Henry at the ready, watching the house slowly catch on fire.

Shouts and hard coughing came from inside the ranch house as the logs caught and smoldered, the rooms filling with fumes. One man broke from the cabin and Preacher cut him down in the front yard. Another raced from the back door and Smoke doubled him over with a .44 slug in the guts.

Only one man appeared to still be shooting from the house. Two on the range, at least two hit in the house, and two in the yard. That didn’t add up to eight, but maybe, Smoke thought, they had hit more in the house than they thought.

“All right, Casey,” he shouted over the crackling of burning wood. “Burn to death, shot, or hung — it’s up to you.”

Casey waited until the roof was caving in before he stumbled into the yard, eyes blind from fumes. He fired wildly as he staggered about, hitting nothing except earth and air. When his pistol was empty, Smoke walked up to the man and knocked him down, tying his hands behind him with rawhide.

“What do you figure on doin’ with him?” Preacher asked, shoving fresh loads into his Henry.

“I intend to take him just outside of town, by that creek, and hang him.”

“I just can’t figure where you got that mean streak, boy. Seein’ as how you was raised — partly — by a gentle old man like me.”

Despite the death he had brought and the destruction wrought, Smoke had to laugh at that. Preacher was known throughout the West as one of the most dangerous men ever to roam the high country and vast Plains. The mountain man had once spent two years of his life tracking down and killing — one by one — a group of men who had ambushed and killed a friend of his, taking the man’s furs.

“’Course you never went on the hunt for anyone?” Smoke asked, dumping the unconscious Casey across a saddled horse, tying the man on.

The house was now engulfed in flames, black smoke spewing into the endless sky.

“Well … mayhaps once or twice. But that was years back. I’ve mellowed.”

“Sure.” The young man grinned. Preacher was still as mean as a cornered puma.

By the banks of a little creek, some distance outside the town limits, Smoke dumped the badly frightened Casey on the ground. A crowd had gathered, silent for the most part, watching the young man carefully build a noose.

“I could order you to stop this,” Marshal Crowell said. “But I suppose you’d only tell me I have no jurisdiction outside of town.”

“Either that or shoot you if you try to interfere,” Smoke told him.

“The man has not been tried!”

“Yeah, he has. He admitted to me what he done,” Smoke told the marshal.

“Lots of smoke to the southeast,” Crowell observed. “’bout gone now.”

“House fire,” Preacher said. “Poor feller lost ever’thing.”

“Two men in the back of the house,” Smoke said. “Shot in the back. Casey and his men did that. One died hard.”

“That does not excuse what you’re about to do,” the marshal said. He looked around him. “Is anybody goin’ to help me stop this lynchin’?”

No one stepped forward. Casey spat in the direction of the crowd. He cursed them.

“No matter what you call this,” Crowell said, “I still intend to file a report callin’ it murder.”

“Halp!” Casey hollered.

“Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord!” said the local minister. “Lord, hear my prayer for this poor wretch of a man.” He began intoning a prayer, his eyes lifted upward.