William Johnstone - Triumph of the Mountain Man

On two sides of town, Don Diego’s vaqueros labored valiantly to keep more of the trash from entering Taos. The dapper senior Alvarado shouted encouragement to his cowboys. “ Buena suerte, compañeros. Shoot their eyes out.”

Gradually, men caught by surprise on the west side of town began to calm and take better stock of their situation. Smoke Jensen quickly exhorted them. “This isn’t the end of it. Not unless you want to go belly-up. Get some backbone, dammit. All of you there, quit milling around and form up to drive and trap those who got past the barricades in the center of town.”

Slowly they began to respond. As the first remotivated men spread out, more joined them. Before long they had enough to ring the business district and began to close in. From the moment of the first encounter, the fighting grew more fierce with each passing minute.

* * *

Smoke Jensen soon saw that the outer defenses had been completely breached. The vaqueros fought valiantly as they retreated street by street from the pressure put on them by the Quinn gang. Here and there they managed to rally as those facing them turned out to be drifting bits of frontier trash with no deep-set loyalties. That sort crumbled rapidly, especially when confronted with a revival cry from the Mexican cowboys.

“Con nuestra Señora, Santa Maria de Guadalupe! Matenlos maten!”

Even Smoke Jensen developed chills down his spine the first time he heard it and translated the words. With our lady, Holy Mother of Guadalupe! Kill them, kill! He had to admit it had a galvanizing effect. The vaqueros swarmed back down the street, a wall of death with six-gun, rifle and knife. At one point, a saddle tramp who had become overwhelmed by their ferocity dropped to his knees and began to howl like a dog. It did him little good. He got his throat slit anyway.

On the next street over, the vaqueros put a full dozen to flight. Horses surged into one another and spilled two riders to face the advancing fury of the Mexican cowboys. They screamed a long time as they died.

* * *

Paddy Quinn shoved his way into a cantina to catch his breath and reload. He found Garth Thompson there ahead of him. Whitewater Paddy flashed a big grin. “We’re doin’ fine. Another half hour and the town will be ours.”

Thompson looked at him in consternation. “Are you kidding? We have men dying out there by the handful. It doesn’t make sense. These townies are fighting back like mad men.”

“Awh, Garth me bucko, yer not seein’ clear, yer not. Most of those who are being killed are not part of the gang. What that trash is here for is to soak up bullets for us, it is. Let’s go upstairs where we can better see what’s really happenin’. Ye’ll be surprised how good it’s goin’, ye will.”

* * *

Two blocks down, in a narrow alley, three of Quinn’s men found the situation more like Garth Thompson saw it than their boss. Seven Tua warriors rounded the corner and started toward them. Clearly they had heard the rumors started by Smoke Jensen. The trio cut their eyes to the Indians and began to run in the opposite direction. Not a one made an effort to fire a weapon.

“Lou, Lou, we gotta get out of here. They’re gonna scalp us.”

Lou looked ahead and paled. The rear of a building closed off their escape route from the narrow alley. “We’re trapped,” he wailed.

The others saw it, too. Unnerved by his belief in the scalping story, one of the outlaws turned his gun on himself. His body had hardly hit the ground when Santan Tossa and his brother Tuas opened fire. One of Quinn’s men jerked spastically, staggered two paces to his left and keeled over. The other got off a shot before Tossa put a bullet through his screaming mouth.

“They were cowards,” the Tua policeman pronounced over the cooling corpses.

* * *

Gradually the tide turned. The shock of their earlier failure began to wear off, and the men of Taos ceased in their headlong flight from the threat of the gunmen. They turned back in twos and threes in one place, half a dozen in two others. Instead of two men fighting a desperate rear guard, while the others fled, the mass of harried men turned about and lashed out at their enemy.

At first it did not look like much. Then an angry growl raced through the defenders, until it became one voice. Five of the gang rounded a corner, laughing and firing blindly. Halfway down the block a solid mass of growling, snarling men began to run toward them. A high, clear cry raised above the roar of their discontent.

“Fire! Open fire!”

A ragged volley crackled from the weapons in the hands of shop keepers and clerks, bank tellers, and wheelwrights. A stream of lead scythed into the startled outlaws and they began to die. Two of the gunhawks wisely opted to flee. One made it to the corner they had rounded half a minute before. The other one took two faltering steps along his escape route before he fell over dead.

Throughout town the spirit of defeat disappeared as he died. Shouting, the defenders charged in a massive counterattack. Determined men soon swept the byways of Taos of the dregs of humanity who had attacked them. The only resistance that remained centered around the saloon named Cantina del Sol. Smoke Jensen reached that strong point in the vanguard of the revived defenders.

* * *

Curly Lasher and eight relatively capable gunfighters had been stationed outside the cantina to protect their leaders. He and his underlings listened to the shift in mood among the defenders with growing apprehension. When four of them rounded the corner with a determined stride, the outlaws realized that the seeming ease of their capture of the town was an illusion. Weapons already in hand, the townsfolk had the advantage when the hard cases reached for their six-guns.

Curly had time to shout only brief advice. “Spread out!”

Gunfire roared in the confines between two-story buildings. Two of the outlaws went down. Curly Lasher took cover behind a watering trough and traded shots with the aroused residents of Taos. That lasted until Smoke Jensen and six vaqueros rounded the other corner and closed in on them.

“Make for the saloon,” Curly yelled to his surviving men.

Curly backed up the steps to the portico over the entrance to the cantina. A quick check showed that the others had preceded him. He had almost disappeared through the glassbead curtain that screened the doorway when Smoke Jensen stepped out into the center of the street and pointed his left index finger at the outlaw leader.

“Curly Lasher, you yellow-bellied piss ant, come out and face me like a man.”

* * *

Smoke Jensen had recognized Curly Lasher the moment the man came to his boots and started for the cantina. Although quite young, Lasher had a respectable reputation as a gunfighter. He was reputed to have killed ten men in face-downs in Texas and New Mexico. Rumor had it his total number of kills included three for-hire assassinations and a dozen ambush shootings. At the age of twenty-three, he was about as good as they came these days. But not in Smoke Jensen’s book.

The way Smoke saw it, it was time to cancel Curly’s pay book. After issuing his challenge, Smoke waited now, ignoring the random bullets, fired by Lasher’s henchmen, that cracked into the ground near him. A second stretched interminably long, then another. Smoke counted to five before Curly waved a grubby, rumpled bit of cloth out the opening to La Cantina del Sol.

“You make those others stop shootin’ at me an’ I’ll face you, Jensen. Hell, you’re an old man. You can’t be much good anymore.”

There it was again, old man. Smoke’s expression grew grim. “We’ll see, won’t we? And have those back-shooting gun trash with you holster their irons.”