William Johnstone: Butchery of the Mountain Man

“Here to gloat, Abe?” Flintlock said. “Gettin’ even for old times?”

“Hell, no, I got nothing agin you, Sam. You got me two years in Yuma but you treated me fair and square. An’ you gave my old lady money the whole time I was inside. Now why did you do a dumb thing like that?”

“You had growing young ’uns. Them kids had to be fed and clothed.”

“Yeah, but why the hell did you do it?”

“I just told you.”

“I got no liking for bounty hunters, Sammy, but you was a true-blue white man, taking care of my family like that.” Roper was silent for a moment, then said, “Sally and the kids passed about three years ago from the cholera.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Flintlock said. “I can close my eyes and still see their faces.”

“It was a hurtful thing, Sam, and me being away on the scout at the time.”

“You gonna stick around for the hanging, Abe?” Flintlock said.

“Hell, no, and neither are you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there’s a barrel of gunpowder against this wall and it’s due to go up in”—Roper looked down briefly—“oh, I’d say less than half a minute.”

The man waved a quick hand. “Hell, I got to light a shuck.”

Flintlock stood rooted to the spot for a moment. Then he yelled a startled curse at Roper, grabbed the rifle off his cot and pulled the mattress on top of him.

A couple of seconds later the Mason City jail blew up with such force its shingle roof soared into the air and landed intact twenty yards away on top of the brand-new gallows. The jail roof and the gallows collapsed in a cloud of dust and killed Sheriff Cobb’s pregnant sow that had been wallowing in the mud under the platform.

A shattering shower of adobe and splintered wood rained down on Flintlock and acrid dust filled his lungs. He threw the mattress aside and staggered to his feet, just as Abe Roper kicked aside debris and stepped through the hole in the jailhouse wall.

“Sam, get the hell out of there,” Roper said. “I got your hoss outside.”

Flintlock grabbed the Hawken, none the worse for wear, and stumbled outside.

As Roper swung into the saddle, Chinese Charlie Fong, grinning as always, tossed Flintlock the reins of a paint.

“Good to see you again, Sammy,” Fong said.

“Feeling’s mutual, Charlie,” Flintlock said.

He mounted quickly and ate Roper’s dust as he followed the outlaw out of town at a canter.

Roper turned in the saddle. “Crackerjack bang, Sammy, huh? Have you ever seen the like?”

“Son of a gun, you could’ve killed me,” Flintlock said.

“So what? Who the hell would miss ya?” Roper said.

“Somebody’s gonna miss this paint pony I’m riding,” Flintlock said.

“Hell, yeah, it’s the sheriff’s hoss,” Roper grinned. “Better than the ten-dollar mustang you rode in on, Sam.”

“Damn you, Abe, Cobb’s gonna hang me, then hang me all over again for hoss theft,” Flintlock said.

“Well, he’ll have to catch you first,” Roper said, kicking his mount into a gallop.

After an hour of riding through the southern foothills of the Chuska Mountains, the massive rampart of red sandstone buttes and peaks that runs north all the way to the Utah border, Roper drew rein and he and Flintlock waited until Charlie Fong caught up.

“Where are we headed, Abe?” Flintlock said. “I hope you’ve got a good hideout all picked out.”

He and Roper were holed up in a stand of mixed juniper and piñon. A nearby high meadow was thick with yellow bells and wild strawberry, and the waning afternoon air smelled sweet of pine and wildflowers.

“We’re headed for Fort Defiance, up in the old Navajo country. It’s been abandoned for years but the army’s moved back, temporary-like, until ol’ Geronimo is either penned up or dead.”

Flintlock scratched at a bug bite under his buckskin shirt and said, “Is that wise, me riding into an army fort when I’m on the scout?”

“There ain’t no fightin’ sodjers there, Sammy, just cooks an’ quartermasters an’ the like,” Roper said. “All the cavalry is out, lookin’ fer Geronimo an’ them.”

“We gonna stay in an army barracks?” Flintlock said. “Say it ain’t so.”

“Nah, me an’ Charlie got us a cabin near the officers’ quarters, a cozy enough berth if you’re not a complainin’ man.”

Roper peered hard at Flintlock’s rugged, unshaven face and then his throat. “Damnit, Sam, I never did get used to looking at that big bird, even when we rode together.”

“I was raised rough,” Flintlock said. “You know that.”

“Old Barnabas do that to you?” Roper said, passing the makings.

“He wanted it done, but when I was twelve he got an Assiniboine woman to do the tattooing. As I recollect, it hurt considerable.”

“What the hell is it? Some kind of eagle?”

Flintlock built his cigarette and Roper gave him a match. “It’s a thunderbird.” He thumbed the match into flame and lit his cigarette. “Barnabas wanted a black and red thunderbird, on account of how the Indians reckon it’s a sacred bird.”

“He wanted it that big? Hell, it pretty much covers your neck and down into your chest.”

“Barnabas said folks would remember me because of the bird. He told me that a man folks don’t remember is of no account.”

“He was a hard old man, was Barnabas, him and them other mountain men he hung with. A tough, mean bunch as ever was.”

“They taught me,” Flintlock said. “Each one of them taught me something.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“They taught me about whores and whiskey and how to tell the good ones from the bad. They taught me how to stalk a man and how to kill him. And they taught me to never answer a bunch of damned fool questions.”

Roper laughed. “Sounds like old Barnabas and his pals all right.”

“One more thing, Abe. You saved my life today, and they taught me to never forget a thing like that.”

Roper, smiling, watched a hawk in flight against the dark blue sky, then again directed his attention to Flintlock.

“You ever heard of the Golden Bell of Santa Elena, Sam?” he said.

“Can’t say as I have.”

“You will. And after I tell you about it, I’ll ask you to repay the favor you owe me.”

CHAPTER THREE

“Are you sure you saw deer out here, Captain Shaw? It might have been a shadow among the trees.”

“Look at the tracks in the wash, Major. Deer have passed this way and not long ago.”

“I see tracks all right,” Major Philip Ashton said. He looked around him. “But I’m damned if I see any deer.”

“Sir, may I suggest we move farther up the wash as far as the foothills,” Captain Owen Shaw said. “Going on dusk the deer will move out of the timber.”

Ashton, a small, compact man with a florid face, an affable disposition and a taste for bonded whiskey, nodded. “As good a suggestion as any, Captain. We’ll wait until dark and if we don’t see a deer we’ll leave it for another day.”

“As you say, sir,” Shaw said.

He watched the major walk ahead of him. Like himself, Ashton wore civilian clothes but he carried a regulation Model 1873 Trapdoor Springfield rifle. Shaw was armed with a .44-40 Winchester because he wanted nothing to go wrong on this venture, no awkward questions to be answered later.

Major Ashton, who had never held a combat command, carried his rifle at the slant, as though advancing on an entrenched enemy and not a herd of nonexistent mule deer.

Shaw was thirty years old that spring. He’d served in a frontier cavalry regiment, but he’d been banished to Fort Defiance as a commissary officer after a passionate, though reckless, affair with the young wife of a farrier sergeant.