Johnstone, W. - Last Mountain Man

“I’ll take him!” Canning snarled. “Rest of you ride on up ’bout a mile or two. Get set in case I miss.” He grinned. “But I ain’t gonna do that, boys.”

Felter nodded. “See you in a couple of hours.”

Smoke had dismounted just inside the box canyon, ground reining Seven. Smoke removed his boots and slipped on moccasins. Then he went on the prowl, as silent as death. He held a skinning knife in his left hand.

“No shots,” Austin said. “And it’s been three hours.”

Sam sat quietly. Everything about this job had turned sour.

“Horse comin’,” Felter said.

“There he is!” Austin said. “And it’s Canning. By God, he said he’d get him, and he did.”

But Felter wasn’t sure about that. He’d smelled wood smoke about an hour back. That didn’t fit any pattern. And Canning wasn’t sitting his horse right. Then the screaming drifted to them. Canning was hollering in agony.

“What’s he hollerin’ for?” Kid asked. “I hurt a lot more’un anything he could have wrong with him.”

“Don’t bet on that,” Felter told him. He scrambled down the gravel and brush-covered slope to halt Canning’s frightened horse.

Felter recoiled in horror at the sight of Canning’s blood-soaked crotch.

“My privates!” Canning squalled. “Smoke waylaid me and gelded me! He cauterized me with a runnin’ iron.” Canning passed out, tumbling from the saddle.

Felter and Sam dragged the man into the brush and looked at the awful wound. Smoke had heated a running iron and seared the wound, stopping most of the bleeding. Felter thought Canning would live, but his raping days were over.

And Felter knew, with a sudden realization, that he wanted no more of the man called Smoke. Not without about twenty men backing him up, that is.

Using a spare shirt from his saddlebags, Felter made a crude bandage for Canning. But it was going to be hell on the man sitting a saddle. He looked around him. That fool Kid Austin was walking down the floor of the canyon, his hands poised over his twin Colts. An empty laudanum bottle lay on the ground.

“Get back here, you fool!” Felter shouted.

Austin ignored him. “Come on, Smoke!” he yelled. “I’m goin’ to kill you.”

“Hell with you, Kid,” Sam muttered.

They tied Canning in the saddle and rode off, up the slope of the canyon wall, high up, near the crest. There they found a hole that just might get them free. Raking their horses’s sides, the animals fought for footing, digging and sliding in the loose rock. The horses realized they had to make it — or die. With one final lunge, the horses cleared the crest and stood on firm ground, trembling from fear and exhaustion.

As they rested the animals, they looked for the Kid. Austin was lost from sight.

They rode off to the north, toward a mining camp where Richards had said he would leave word, or send more men should this crew fail.

Well, Felter reflected bitterly, we damn sure failed.

Austin, his horse forgotten, his mind numbed by overdoses of laudanum, stumbled down the rocky floor of the canyon, screaming and cursing Smoke. He pulled up short when he spotted his quarry.

Smoke sat calmly on a huge rock, munching on a cold biscuit.

“Get up!” the Kid shouted. “Get on your feet and face me like a man oughtta.”

Smoke finished his meager meal, then rose to his feet. He was smiling.

Kid Austin walked on, narrowing the distance, finally stopping about thirty feet from Smoke. “I’ll be known as the man who killed Smoke,” he said. “Me! Kid Austin.”

Smoke laughed at him.

The Kid flushed. “I done it to your wife, too, Jensen. She liked it so much she asked me to do it to ’er some more. So I obliged ’er. I took your woman, now I’m gonna take you.” He dipped his right hand downward.

Smoke drew his right-hand .44 with blinding speed, drawing, cocking, firing, before Austin could realize what was taking place in front of his eyes. The would-be gunfighter felt two lead fists of pain strike him in the belly, one below his belt buckle, the other just above the ornate silver buckle. The hammerlike blows dropped him to his knees. Hurt began creeping into his groin and stomach. He tried to pull his guns from leather, but his hands would not respond to the commands from his brain.

“I’m Kid Austin,” he managed to say. “You can’t do this to me.”

“Looks like I did, though,” Smoke said. He turned away from the dying man and walked back to Seven, swinging into the saddle. He rode off without looking back.

“Momma!” the Kid called, as the pain in his belly grew more intense. “It hurts, Momma. Help me.”

But only the animals and the canyon heard his cries for help. They alone witnessed his begging. The clop of Seven’s hooves grew fainter.

His intestines mangled, one kidney shattered, and his spleen ruptured, the Kid died on his knees in the rocky canyon, in a vague praying position. He remained that way for a long time, until his horse picked up its master’s scent and found him, nudging him with its nose, toppling the Kid over on his side. The horse bolted from the blood smell, running down the canyon. One Colt fell from a holster, clattering on the rocks, to shine in the thin sunlight filtering through the timber of the narrow canyon.

Then the canyon was quiet, with only the sighing of the wind.

Smoke rode back to the cabin in the valley and packed his belongings, covering the pack frame with a ground sheet. He rubbed Seven down and fed him grain and hay, stabling him in the lean-to.

He cleaned his guns and made camp outside the cabin. He could not bear to sleep inside that house of death and torture and rape. His sleep was restless during those starry nights of the first week back in the valley; his sleep troubled by nightmares of Nicole calling out his name, of the baby’s dying.

The second week was no better, his sleep interrupted by the same nightmares. So when he kicked out of his blankets on this final morning in the valley, his body covered with sweat, Smoke knew he would never rest well until the men who were responsible for this tragedy were dead — Potter, Stratton, Richards.

Smoke bathed in the creek, doing so quickly, for the creek and the mossy bank also held memories. He saddled Seven and cinched the pack on a pack horse, then went to the graves by the cabin, hat in hand, to visit with his wife and son.

“I don’t know that I will ever return,” he spoke quietly. “I wish it could have been different, Nicole. I wish we could have lived out our lives in peace, together, raising our family. I wish a lot of things, Nicole. Goodbye.”

With tears in his eyes, he mounted Seven and rode away, pointing the nose of the big spotted horse north.

But in a settlement on the banks of the Uncompahgre, Felter and Sam and Canning were telling a much different version of what happened in the cabin in the valley.

Fifteen

“I’m tellin’ you boys,” Felter said to the miners, “I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it. Them murderin’ Utes raped the woman, killed her and the baby, then scalped ’em. It was terrible.”

“Yeah,” Sam picked up the lie. “Then that outlaw, Smoke Jensen, he all of a sudden comes up on us — shootin’. He kilt Grissom and Poker and Evans right off. Just shot ’em dead for no reason. He went crazy, I guess. Stampeded our horses and Felter and me took cover in a waller. He took our horses.”

“Time we worked our way out,” Felter said, “this Smoke had killed the rest of our crew and staked out Clark on an anthill, stripped him neked and poured honey all over him.” He hung his head in sorrow. “Wasn’t nothin’ we could do for him. You boys know how hard a man dies like that.”