Johnstone, W. - Last Mountain Man

Preacher spat into the street. “Damn near swallered my chaw.”

“I never seen a draw that fast,” a man spoke from his store front. “It was a blur.”

The sheriff and a deputy came out of the jail, walking down the bloody, dusty street. Both men carried Greeners: double-barreled twelve gauge shotguns.

“Right down this street,” the sheriff said pointing, “is the doctor’s office. Get yourselves patched up and then get out of town. You have one hour.”

“Sheriff, it was a fair fight,” the desk clerk said. “I seen it.”

The sheriff never took his eyes off Smoke. “One hour,” he repeated.

“We’ll be gone.” Smoke wiped a smear of blood from his cheek.

Townspeople began hauling the bodies off. The local photographer set up his cumbersome equipment and began popping flash-powder, sealing the gruesomeness for posterity. He also took a picture of Smoke.

The editor of the paper walked up to stand by the sheriff. He watched the old man and the young gun-hand walk down the street. He truly had seen it all. The old man had killed one man, wounded another. The young man had killed four men, as calmly as picking his teeth.

“What’s that young man’s name?”

“Smoke Jensen. But he’s a devil.”

Nine

There was a chill to the air when Smoke kicked off his blankets and rose to add twigs to the still smoldering coals. They were camped along the Arkansas, near Twin Lakes.

“Cold,” Preacher complained, crawling out of his buffalo robe. “Can’t be far from Leadville.”

“How do you figure that?” Smoke asked, slicing bacon into a pan and dumping a handful of coffee into the pot.

“Coldest damn town in the whole country.” Preacher put on his hat then tugged on his boots. “I’ve knowed it to snow on the Fourth of July. So damned cold ifn a man dies in the winter, best thing to do is jist prop him up in a corner for the season. Ifn you wanna bury him, you gotta use dynamite to blast a hole in the ground. Tain’t worth the bother. And I ain’t lyin’, neither.”

Smoke grinned and said nothing. He had long since ceased questioning the mountain man’s statements; upon investigation, they all proved out.

“Them names on the list, Smoke. Anymore of ’em in Colorado?”

“Only one more, but we’ll let him be. He’s in the army up at Camp Collins. An officer. Took the name of a dead man who was killed in the first days of the war. I can’t fight the whole Yankee army.”

“We goin’ back to the Hole?”

“For the time being.”

“Good. We’ll winter there. Stop along the way and pack in some grub.”

Major Powell and his detachment were gone when Preacher and Smoke reached the Hole in mid-September. Two horses were missing from the herd, and the money for them was in the cave. The soldiers had tended to the gardens, eating well from them. Emmett Jensen’s grave had been looked after. But the flowers were dying. Winter was not far off.

The two men set about making the cabin snug against the winds that would soon howl cold through the canyon, roaring out of Wyoming, sighing off Diamond Peak. Preacher did a little trapping, for all the good it did him, and for awhile, the man called Smoke seemed to be at peace with himself.

Preacher was surprised and embarrassed that Christmas morning to find a present for him when he awakened. He opened the box and aahed at the chiming railroad watch with a heavy gold fob.

“That little watch and clock shop in Oreodelphia,” Preacher recalled. “Seen you goin’ in there.” He was suddenly ill at ease. “But I dint get nothin’ for you.”

“You’ve been giving me presents for years, Preacher. You’ve taught me the wilderness and how to survive. Just being with you has been the greatest present of my life.”

Preacher looked at him. “Oh, hush up. You plumb sickenin’ when you try to be nice.” He wound the watch. “Reckon what time it is.” He turned his head so Smoke could not see the tears in his eyes.

Smoke glanced outside, “’bout seven, I reckon.”

“That’s clost enough.” He set the watch and smiled as it chimed. “Purty. Best present I ever had.”

“Oh, hush up.” Smoke smiled. “You plumb sickenin’ when you try to be nice.”

The winter wore on slowly in its cold, often white harshness. In the cabin, Preacher would sometimes sit and watch Smoke as he read and reread the few books in his possession, educating himself. He especially enjoyed the works of Shakespeare and Burns.

And sometimes he would look at the paper from his father and from Gaultier. And Preacher knew in his heart, whether the young man would admit it or not, he would never rest until he had crossed out all the names.

In the early spring of ’70, as the flowers struggled valiantly to push their colors to the warmth of the sun, Smoke began gathering his gear. Wordlessly, Preacher did the same.

“Where we goin’ in such an all-fired hurry?” he asked Smoke.

“I’ve heard you talk about the southwest part of this territory. You said it was pretty and lonely.”

“’Tis.”

“You know it well?”

“I know the Delores, and the country thereabouts.”

“Many people?”

“Not to speak of.”

“Be a good place to set up ranching, wouldn’t it?”

“Ifn a man could keep his hair. That where we goin’?”

“What is there to keep us here?”

“Nothing a-tall.”

Pushing the herd of half-broken mustangs and Appaloosa, the two men headed south into the wild country, populated mainly by Ute, but with a scattering of Navajo and Piute. They crossed the Colorado River just east of what would later become Grand Junction, then cut southeast, keeping west of the Uncompahgre Plateau. Out of Unaweep Canyon, only a few miles from the Delores River, they began to smell the first bitter whiffs as the wind changed.

Preacher brought them to a halt. While Smoke bunched the horses, Preacher stood up in his stirrups to sniff the air. “They’s more to it than wood. Sniff the air, son, tell me what you smell.”

Smoke tried to identify the mixture of strange odors. Finally he said, “Leather. And cloth. And … something else I can’t figure out.”

Preacher’s reply was grim. “I can. Burnin’ hair and flesh. You ’bout to come up on what an Injun leaves behind after an attack.” He pointed. “We’ll put the horses in that box canyon over yonder, then we’ll go take a look-see.”

Securing the open end of the canyon with brush and rope, the men rode slowly and carefully toward the smell of charred flesh, the odor becoming thicker as they rode. At the base of a small hill, they left their horses and crawled up to the crest, looking down at the horror below.

Tied by his ankles from a limb, head down over a small fire, a naked man trembled in the last moments of life. His head and face and shoulders were blackened cooked meat. The mutilated bodies of other men lay dead. One was tied to the wheel of the burned wagon. He had been tortured. All had died hard.

“You said you heared gunfire ’bout two hours ago,” Preacher whispered. “You was right. Gawdamned ‘Pache trick, that yonder is. They come up this far ever’ now and then, raidin’ the Utes.”

“How did they get a wagon this far?” Smoke asked.

“Sheer stubbornness. But I hope they weren’t no wimmin with ’em. If so. Gawd help ’em.”

The men waited for more than an hour, moving only when necessary, talking in low tones.

Finally, Preacher stirred. “They gone. Let’s go down and prowl some, give the people a Christian burial. Say a word or two.” He spat on the ground. “Gawddamned heathens.”

Smoke found a shovel, handle intact, on the ground beside the charred wagon. He dug a long, shallow grave, burying the remains of the men in one common grave, covering the mound with rocks to keep wolves and coyotes from digging up the bodies and eating them.