William Johnstone - Battle of the Mountain Man

Three riderless horses galloped onto the prairie, one with blood dripping from its withers, where its owner had bled before he fell.

The rattle of rifle fire became a din, a constant wall of noise as more than two hundred longhorn heifers scattered with their tails in the air, snorting through their muzzles as the stampede Smoke had been worrying about began. He could see the gentler Herefords milling about, but for the moment they stayed together in a tight bunch.

A rifle popped from a clump of bunch grass near the picketed horses. One of Evans’s men floated away from his galloping horse with both hands pressed to his face.

“Nice shot,” Smoke muttered, shouldering his rifle to begin dropping as many oncoming raiders as he could.

Leading a moving target with his rifle sights, he fired at a cowboy on a speeding pinto. A miss, and it made him angry as he levered another round into place.

“I’ve gotta get closer,” he said savagely.

Two of Evans’s men noticed him for the first time and swung their horses in his direction, bearing down on him as fast as their horses could run.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” Smoke whispered, taking very careful aim.

His Winchester slammed into his shoulder, and the report made his ears ring. But mild discomfort did nothing to take away from the satisfaction when a cowboy tumbled into the grass, his horse swerving away from the noise.

Smoke killed the second horseman with a bullet through the crown of his hat, which also sliced through the top of his skull, permanently parting the gunman’s hair down the middle before he rolled off the rump of his horse.

“Time to move,” Smoke spat, ducking down as he left the tree at a run, heading straight for the middle of the fight. Thirty-five

Billy Morton spurred his horse relentlessly to catch up to Jessie, and when Jessie saw him angling across the prairie, he wondered where the others were, the dozen men Billy was supposed to lead into the attack from the southwest. Billy was all alone, and he shouldn’t have been. Dodging stampeding longhorns, Jessie motioned to Pickett and the men behind him to continue charging Jensen and his cowboys while he reined off to find out what Billy was in such a hurry to tell him.

Billy hauled back on his reins, bringing his lathered sorrel to a sliding stop when he rode up to Jessie. Jessie saw a look on Billy’s face that could only be fear.

“He got behind us again!” Billy shouted to be heard above the bang of guns and the bawling of runaway cattle.

“Who?” Jessie demanded.

“That feller Jensen. It’s gotta be him. A big son of a bitch with two pistols. I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it in all my horned days, Jessie. We was ready to charge out here when this big bastard appeared out of nowhere, both pistols blazin’. He killed everybody! ’Cept me. I was lucky to get out with my skin. One man ain’t supposed to be able to do what he did. He killed twelve goddamn men, Jessie, in less time than it takes me to tell it”

Despite the battle going on in front of him, Jessie stared at the spot where Billy and a mix of pistoleros from Vasquez’s bunch and Pedro Lopez’s gang were supposed to have entered the fight. He couldn’t quite make himself believe what Billy had told him just now. “Had to be some others shootin’,” he said, as the crack of a rifle close by made him flinch, a wild shot taken by one of the young Apaches galloping by. Sighting the Apache, Jessie wondered where the other Indians were now. Only two of them were out on the prairie doing any shooting, and their leader, Little Horse, wasn’t among them.

“Just him, Jessie. I swear to it,” Billy said. “Ain’t no man on earth can kill twelve men like he done, only I seen it with my own two eyes while I was gettin’ the hell away from there fast as this horse could run.”

“How come nobody shot him?” Jessie asked, feeling a touch of worry growing in the pit of his stomach.

“Wasn’t time. He stood up behind this bush an’ emptied both guns as fast as he could pull them triggers. Men was droppin’ like flies.” Billy looked over his shoulder quickly as a group of terrified longhorns raced by. “That ain’t even the worst of it,” Billy continued, his voice with an unusually high pitch. “Just when I was comin’ to tell you what happened to us, I saw that half-breed, Raul Jones, come ridin’ out of them trees yonder with a couple of Pedro’s men. Somebody cut ’em down before you could blink. I figure it had to be Jensen.”

It wasn’t possible, what Billy was telling him, how one man could be so lucky. Or was he that good? He couldn’t be, not an ordinary cattleman from some place up in Colorado.

Now Jessie looked at the fight going on around Jensen’s camp and he saw two more of his men fall from their saddles. Pickett and Tom Hill had already swung their horses around when rifle fire from Jensen’s cowboys proved too accurate. Pickett was no coward, but out in the open like he was, he and Tom were sitting ducks.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, Jessie,” Billy said, “tangling with Smoke Jensen. He ain’t the tinhorn everybody claimed he was. The big son of a bitch can damn sure shoot. .I seen it for myself.”

“I ain’t never met a man I backed down from,” Jessie growled, with more resolve than he truly felt at the moment, after finding out how many more lives this Jensen had taken, all in a matter of minutes, before the attack had really gotten started. Now he found himself wondering if Jensen had gotten Little Horse and his four scouts. He could see their assault on the cowboys’ camp was doing little beyond running off Jensen’s herd. “Maybe it wasn’t such a good plan to come at them out in the open like this. We’ll pull back an’ find another way. Ride a wide circle an’ tell the men to head north. It’s gonna take Jensen awhile to round up these cattle, an’ that’ll give us time to come up with a better idea. They’re headed north to Colorado with this herd, so we’ll look for a place north of here to set up an ambush that can’t fail.”

Bill Pickett and Tom Hill galloped up as Billy was leaving to give Jessie’s order to withdraw. Pickett’s face was a mask of hatred.

“Half your damn gunslicks ran off before we rushed ’em,” he said. “Look out yonder. There ain’t but fifteen or twenty of us, an’ we come here with more’n forty. So few of us can’t get close enough to find anything to shoot at. Them cowboys are all layin’ down in the grass where we can’t see ’em, an’ we’re out in the open.”

“Some of ’em didn’t run off,” Jessie said quietly, as most of the gunfire stopped when Billy began motioning men to pull out and follow him northward. “Billy told me Jensen killed twelve men in that ravine where they was waitin’ for my signal, an’ then he got three more, includin’ Raul. He may have killed Little Horse an’ our scouts. Ain’t seen ’em since before the fight started…” As he was speaking to Pickett, he saw a hatless man carrying a rifle running on foot toward the cowboy camp. “That must be Jensen right there. If I had a Sharps buffalo gun…”

Pickett saw the running figure too. He squinted to see him more clearly in the bright morning sunlight. “He’s just one man, Jessie. He may be good, but there’s always somebody who’s a little better. If he done what Billy claimed he did, then he’s pretty damn good. Only, I’m promisin’ you I can kill him if I get to pick the place, an’ the time.”

“I’m gonna give you that opportunity,” Jessie remarked as a final gunshot popped in the distance. “You can pick the spot. I don’t give a damn how you do it I just want Jensen dead. We’ll skirt their camp an’ head north, the direction they’ve got to go to get to Colorado. You can start lookin’ for the right place on the way up.”