Rage of the Mountain Man (23 page)

“Boston. That’s the way people from Boston sometimes talk,” Smoke informed the lawman.

“Hmmm. I see. Or then again, I don’t see. What are a lot of single rough-lookin’ fellers headed to Denver for?” “Maybe to work in the mines, but I doubt it,” Smoke offered.

“D’you want to talk to the prisoner?”

“That’s what I came here for,” Smoke said, rising. “I shouldn’t be long.”

“Take your time,” McRaney offered generously.

Once in the cell, Smoke Jensen looked over a crestfallen, pain-wracked Seamas Quern. “I know you,” the mountain man charged. “You were in the warehouse with my wife.” “Don’t know what yer talkin’ about, lad,” Quern evaded. “I’m Smoke Jensen. Does that refresh your memory?” Quern blanched. His jaw sagged and his lower lip began to tremble. Agitated beyond the agony in his wounds, he jumped up and grabbed desperately at the bars. “Jailer! Hey, Jailer, help me. I’m being murdered!”

Smoke grabbed Quern by the shoulder, spun him around. “The turnkey’s developed a hearing problem. There’s just you and me in here. Quern.”

“How’d you know my name?”

“I got it from the sheriff. You are Seamas Quern, aren’t you? You’re in Sean O’Boyle’s gang of dockyard thugs? What are you doing headed toward Denver?”

Quern turned surly again. “You know so goddamned much, you answer your questions.”

Smoke hit him in the gut, where it would not show, hard enough, though, to double over the cocky longshoreman. “Did you know they still consider stagecoach robbery a hanging offense out here?”

Gagging, gasping for air, Seamas Quern looked up at the hard face of Smoke Jensen. His eyes watered and he worked full lips to form low, breathy words. “Th-that’s not true, is it?”

There hadn’t been anyone hanged for a stage robbery that didn’t include a killing since the territories had become states, yet Smoke recognized that running a bluff would work with this dock rat from Boston. He nodded wordlessly.

“Oh, Jesus. I—I never counted on a rope around me neck, I didn’t. Is there . . . isn’t there any way . . . anything I can do to get the judge to go easy on me?”

“You can try cooperating. Tell me what I want to know and I’ll put in a good word for you. What you and your guttersnipe friends didn’t know is that I am a deputy U. S. Marshal. My word can carry a lot of weight with the courts.”

From that point on, it went a lot easier than even Smoke Jensen had anticipated. Within half an hour, he had learned everything Seamas Quern knew or had guessed about Phineas Lathrop’s operation and his eventual goal. Sally had not been misled by the danger to herself, and Ollie had been right in labeling it a criminal empire.

With nearly fifty men to swell his ranks, Lathrop had every possibility of achieving his purpose. Smoke Jensen chafed at the delay of the train to Denver. He saw Lathrop as the greatest threat ever to the High Lonesome. And only he could do something about it.

Phineas Lathrop cut a sour gaze around his dingy surroundings. He had been forced into hiding out at this third-rate fleabag hotel in Denver by the unbelievable stupidity of Sean O’Boyle. How could anyone be so stupid, so inept? The foiled stage robbery had left them with one man alive and in custody. How much Seamas Quern knew of his actual plans, Lathrop had no way of knowing. The anger that had smoldered ever since flashed to new flame as he considered it.

When O’Boyle and his wounded henchman O’Fallon caught up to the column, Lathrop had personally administered a savage beating as object lesson to O’Boyle and anyone else who might have delusions that criminal activity on the frontier was no different than back East. Fools! They had been damned fools, and gotten one man killed and two others wounded, one of them locked away in jail.

Victor Middleton interrupted his dismal thoughts. “Let’s get out of this disgusting pigsty and get some fresh air, something to eat, a good, stiff drink.”

“All right,” Phineas Lathrop agreed. “We have to be careful, though. We don’t know what that lout Quern has told the law.”

“To hell with him. He may have bled to death by the time he got to Dodge City. Here in Denver, we’re simply honest businessmen, going about our affairs like anyone else.”

“That’s why we’re living in this rat’s nest,” Lathrop grumbled. Yet his spirits rose somewhat on a promising thought.

His ignominious station in life would be a short one, Phineas consoled himself. Already his imported gunmen from the East had dispersed to carry out the land grab necessary to spell triumph for him and his associates. Even if Smoke Jensen came directly back to Colorado, he would arrive too late to prevent their enterprise from a successful conclusion. By the time Jensen could organize any sort of resistance, all of the northwest corner of Colorado would belong to their consortium. He could not lose!

Smoke Jensen caught up with his wife and the Boston
Globe
reporter at the Brown Palace in Denver late the next day. They had a late, sumptuous dinner, stayed the night, and caught the early-morning milk train to Big Rock. Monte Carson had been alerted by telegraph and met the trio of weary travelers on the depot platform. Immediately Smoke noted a changed, charged atmosphere about the people waiting for the return run to Denver.

Particularly among those who knew him. The women shielded their faces with fans or gloved hands; some of the men deliberately turned their backs on him. When the luggage had been unloaded from the baggage car, Monte led the way to his office. There he glowered his suspicion at Oliver Johnson. He addressed his remarks to Smoke Jensen.

“ ’Pears you got some influential people riled at you, Smoke. Some of those eastern reporters have been filing stories with the papers in Denver, Pueblo, Dodge City, Saint Louie, near everywhere west of the Mississippi, I’d reckon. They ain’t sayin’ nice things ’bout you, either.” “We got enough of that back there, Monte.”

Monte’s eyes narrowed even more, a dark glitter sparking out from lowered lids. “That’s why I can’t work out why ’n hell you brung one along with you, Smoke.”

“Ollie’s okay, Monte. He filed five favorable stories. Three of them even got published.”

“Ain’t hardly a fart in a cyclone, Smoke. For every good word he wrote about you, there’s a hundred bad ones . . . and they all got in print.”

“Is that why I noticed a coolness from my good neighbors at the depot?” Smoke asked, his concern growing.

“You could say that. Seems they forgot real quick that out here we judge a man by how tall he walks and how much sand he’s got, not by what some East Coast asshole writes about him . . . er, sorry, ma’am,” Monte added, for Sally’s benefit.

“Oh, that’s quite all right, Monte. I agree with you entirely,” Sally replied, without even a hint of a blush.

Smoke broke in to change the subject to that of his greatest concern: “Has there been a lot of strangers showing up around town lately? Pale faces, with arms and shoulders too big for the rest of them, say?”

Monte Carson’s brow wrinkled. “There’s . . . been a few. Can’t rightly place what’s oddest about them. You’re right about some of them’s shape. Heck, they’ve got wrists the size of some men’s biceps.”

“Longshoremen,” Smoke explained, convinced now of the imminent danger to the people of his beloved High Lonesome. “Dock workers from Boston and New York City. When they’re working at their regular jobs, they wrestle around bales of cargo all day that it would take you and me both to move. Let me guess—the ones from New York arrived first, right?”

“Yes. Only, they didn’t hang around town long. Looked sorry as hell to be on a horse’s back, but they grained and rested their mounts overnight and took off to the northwest. You ask me, they’d have been happier walkin’.”

“Don’t underestimate them, Sheriff. They’re dangerous,” Oliver Johnson contributed.

“How’s that? Oh, they had plenty of shootin’ irons along, but the experiences of a lifetime tell me they didn’t have too much idea of how best to use them.”

“Ollie’s right, Monte,” Smoke took up the narrative. He explained what had happened in Boston and New York, of the bungled stage robbery outside Dodge City, and some of what he had learned of the Eastern criminal network from Oliver Johnson. Monte shook his head more than once during the recitation.

“So what yer sayin’ is that these boys could be a real threat to folks hereabouts? Well, there’s been some unsavory deals struck, I can tell you that. Folks won’t talk about it much. Seem real scared. But they sold their places anyhow and left the area.”

“I’m liking this even less,” Smoke growled.

Monte rose, crossed to the potbellied stove in the corner by his desk, and poured four cups of coffee. “Now that you’re back, Smoke, I suppose there’s nothing for it but you an’ me go out and find these eastern hard cases of yours.” “That’s my idea exactly. But first, I’d fight a whole litter of wildcats for some of your coffee,” Smoke spoke with rekindled enthusiasm.

Looking wounded, Oliver Johnson entered his protest. “You’re not leaving me out.”

Smoke’s cool, level gaze cut to the young reporter. “No. I wouldn’t dream of it. As soon as we get Sally back to the Sugarloaf, the three of us are going out and kick hell out of Lathrop’s hooligans.”

Thin tendrils of smoke rose from the tree-shrouded clearing ahead. Off to the right, a pair of redheaded woodpeckers made Gatling gun rat-a-tats on the grizzled bark of a tall, old pine. Lowering the brass-bound field glasses from his eyes, Smoke Jensen nodded and pointed ahead to their quarry’s night camp, already laid out at not quite four-thirty in the afternoon. Typical eastern dudes, tenderfeet, he thought scornfully.

He, Monte Carson, and Oliver Johnson had left the deep valley that sheltered the Sugarloaf two days earlier, by way of Vail Pass. Monte had taken the customary frontier way of legitimizing the reporter’s presence by deputizing him. They angled along the Arapaho Pike trail north and westward. The three lawmen had found immediate evidence of the presence of Lathrop’s henchmen.

A burned-out barn and vacant house told them a clear story. Similar, apparently abandoned properties added to their store of knowledge. They had encountered their first living resisters at twilight the previous night. Monte Carson went forward to talk with the crusty, hard-bitten rancher in his dooryard, faintly illuminated by the spill from a single, low-burning coal-oil lamp inside the cabin. Smoke’s name came up in the course of their conversation.

“Smoke Jensen’s gone plumb crazy back East,” the gnarled, bent old man stated as fact. “Even if he was out here, he’d as like line up with them that’s giving’ me grief, least, that’s what the papers say.”

Monte laughed. “Howard, how long’s it been since you saw a newspaper?”

Howard Daley frowned. “Saw one last week, when me and the mizus went for supplies. All about yer friend Jensen killing helpless women and chillun in some park in New York City.”

“He’s your friend, too, Howard. At least, he used to be.” Daley took Monte’s gentle chiding in stride. “Used to be is the right of it. Got no truck with someone’d harm a woman or chile.”

Smoke Jensen chose that moment to walk into the yellow shaft of lamplight. “Howard, I’d never kill a woman or a kid, unless they were tryin’ to kill me. And you know that.” “Love o’ God, it’s you, Smoke Jensen.” Suspicion colored Daley’s next words. “You come to run me off, too?” 

“No such thing. How’s your ammunition holdin’ out?” Smoke asked in his slow, deep drawl. “And we could use a place to rest our mouths, fix some supper.”

Smoke’s offer of replenishing his ammunition won over the mercurial rancher. Daley stepped toward Smoke with his hand outstretched to offer his apology. “Gotta say I’m sorry for them harsh words I laid on Monte, here. I shoulda knowed better. I
do
know better. I’m right shamed, Smoke.”

“No offense, Howard. If you’ve the need, we can leave off a couple of boxes of forty-fours for that Winchester of yours. We have plenty along.”

Daley cut his eyes between Smoke and Monte. “You up to trackin’ down them that wants to run us out?” “Something like that.”

“Then you’re as welcome as the first rains of spring. C’mon in. The mizus has got some pie set back. There’s venison stew, greens, and cornbread. You can doss down in the barn, if it’s right by you.”

“Couldn’t have better. And thanks to you,” Smoke accepted the generous change of heart magnanimously.

They had eaten a good breakfast before riding out from the Daley spread that morning. Now the faint odor of boiling coffee and cooking meat tormented Oliver Johnson’s belly and reminded Smoke and Monte of their own lack of solid food for the rest of the day.

“That’s our first bunch,” Smoke stated softly. “What say we go down and relieve them of supper?”

Eleven of the eastern gangsters, their rumps tender and their thighs aching from saddle-soreness, gathered around three cook fires. Two of them already picked disinterestedly at plates of food, their appetites numbed by discomfort. The first any of them knew of their troubles came from the distant rumble of many hooves.

At least to them it sounded like a lot. Three men suddenly appeared, from as many directions, over a rise in the grassy meadow where they had made camp. Three ex-longshoremen, thinking it might be more of their kind, came upright from their efforts to fill tin plates. They looked hard at the swiftly approaching riders and decided too late that these were unwelcome guests. One of them shouted an alarm and reached clumsily for the sixgun strapped around his waist.

Smoke Jensen had wisely decided that arming Oliver Johnson with a shotgun would provide the best chance of the reporter hitting something. Especially when firing from horseback. The big Greener ten-gauge roared off to Smoke’s left and ten of the 15 OO buckshot pellets struck the chest of an outlaw who had dropped his supper and gone for his gun.

Lifted off the ground, the novice gunman fell backward into the fire pit. So massive was the shock dealt him by the .33-caliber lead balls that he did not even scream from contact with the flames and glowing coals. His companions at the nearby fire jumped aside.

That spoiled Smoke’s first shot, which cracked past and punched a hole in the blue granite coffeepot on the gridiron over the second pit. Scalding brown liquid splashed onto four slow-reacting New York hoodlums. Skin blistered in an instant, they shrieked their pain. All thought of resistance vanished as they ripped at sodden clothing in an attempt to end the agony.