Cruel Winter of the Mountain Man

Book 50: Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

The latest action-packed installment in the national bestselling Western authors William W. Johnstone and J.A. Johnstone’s long-running Mountain Man historical series.

The 50th Book in the Bestselling Mountain Man Series!

A cold day in hell descends upon Texas when mountain man sharpshooter Smoke Jensen pins on a tin star to tackle a wild bunch of bloodthirsty outlaws in this gun-blazing novel from national bestselling authors William W. Johnstone and J.A. Johnstone.
Johnstone Country. A Glorious Land.

Jonas Madigan is dying. He spent his life taming towns and upholding justice across the west with no regrets. Along the way, Madigan took the measure of good men like Smoke Jensen, who has traveled to Salt Lick, Texas to pay his respects to the lawman. But when bandits gun down the small town’s current marshal—and Smoke sends the killers to Boot Hill—Madigan asks his friend to wear the badge and keep the peace until a permanent replacement is sworn in.
 
Turns out the bandits were members of Bishop’s Mauraders, a twenty-man gang of trigger-happy thieves led by the vicious and venomous Snake Bishop—and they’ve set their sights on Salt Lick. They’re due to arrive at the same time as a monstrous blizzard that’s covering up the countryside. Now, it’s up to Smoke to turn the townspeople into a posse to defend their lives and land from both mother nature and man’s worst nature . . .
 
Live Free. Read Hard.

 

Release date: November 29, 2022

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

Smoke Jensen was riding into a trap. He knew it. He could have gone back the way he came from, but that would have meant turning his back on trouble.

Smoke wasn’t in the habit of doing that.

So he reined in, pausing atop a slight rise for a moment to reach behind him and get the sheepskin jacket that was rolled up and lashed behind the saddle. He unrolled the jacket and shrugged into it. Nothing unusual about that, since the air had a definite chill to it today.

But the brief delay gave him a chance to look over the layout in front of him without seeming like he suspected anything was wrong.

Ahead of him, the terrain sloped gently down to a broad, level stretch of mostly sandy ground dotted with clumps of hardy grass and the occasional scrubby mesquite tree. Typical for the Texas Panhandle.

To the left of that open ground rose a rocky ridge that ran for several hundred yards, looking like the spiky backbone of some giant creature mostly buried in the earth.

To the right, the land fell away in a sweep of rugged badlands dominated by red sandstone upthrusts and riven by gullies. It was picturesque, a smaller version of the more impressive Palo Duro Canyon a good ways south of here. Smoke had been there several years earlier, visiting the famous rancher Charles Goodnight.

Out here in the middle of nowhere, border lines didn’t mean much. Smoke was pretty sure he had crossed from New Mexico Territory into Texas earlier that day, but he couldn’t have said exactly where.

All he knew was that he was headed for the town of Salt Lick, and if he kept going in this direction, he ought to find it.

Assuming he escaped the trap he was riding into, he reminded himself.

He wondered just who had laid that trap. As far as he knew, he didn’t have any enemies in these parts, but like it or not, given the adventurous life he had led, hombres who wanted his scalp could pop up almost anywhere.

That could literally be true in this case. Although the back of the Comanche resistance had been broken with their defeat at the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon several years earlier, along with the destruction of their horse herd in that same clash, small bands of warriors had been able to find enough mounts that they were still waging a sporadic war against the white settlers. They raided isolated ranches and preyed on lone pilgrims traveling across the Staked Plains.

Smoke didn’t know if the men waiting up ahead for him were red or white, and he didn’t care. They were in his way and might try to stop him. That was all that mattered.

He clucked to the big gray stallion and nudged it into motion with his knees. He’d been stopped for less than a minute to get the jacket out and put it on, but that had been plenty of time for him to take in the scene.

A few minutes earlier, his keen eyes had picked up something that most men would have missed: a tendril of gray smoke rising against the gray sky, which he now knew had been coming from that ridge to the north even though it had disappeared.

When he had topped the little rise where he had paused, he had seen a thin haze of dust settling to the right, just in front of those badlands. That had been enough to tell him immediately what had happened.

Somebody who had made camp on that ridge had spotted him approaching. Quickly, they had put out the fire, unaware that he’d already noticed the smoke. Some of them had galloped across the flat and hurried into those breaks to the south.

Had all of them abandoned the camp and fled into the badlands? Were they just trying to get away?

Smoke had no way of knowing. But his gut told him that the group had split up, some remaining hidden on the ridge, the rest taking cover in the rugged terrain to the south. That was an ambush in the making. Smoke trusted his instincts.

He also knew he was being a little foolish, riding right into a trap this way. They might outnumber him fifty to one. He had battled some pretty high odds before and come out alive and triumphant, but maybe not any quite that overwhelming.

Pretending he had no idea he was being watched, he rode forward, descending the gentle slope and starting out onto the flat.

How far would they allow him to go? He had to get far enough away from the rise behind him that he couldn’t whirl his mount around, race back up there, and go to ground in a defensive position. They would want him out in the open, with nowhere to run.

Smoke obliged them, riding steadily until the rise was at least half a mile behind him.

That was when the two groups finally broke from cover, three of them coming down the ridge at such a reckless pace that their ponies’ hooves slipped and slid on the rocky slope, four more surging up from one of the gullies at the edge of the badlands. They raced toward him, yipping and howling, Comanche warriors bent on at least a small measure of revenge on the hated whites who had usurped them as lords of the plains.

Smoke reined in sharply and hauled his Winchester from its saddle scabbard. Gunfire already boomed from the onrushing raiders to his right. Powder smoke spurted from rifle barrels.

The bullets were falling short, though. The Comanche warriors were shooting from galloping ponies and aiming too low. It would have been a miracle if any of their bullets had found the target.

Smoke didn’t intend to make that same mistake.

The gray stallion was accustomed to the racket of a gun battle and the sharp tang of powder smoke. He stood still as Smoke considered the distance and wind and drew a bead on one of the men racing toward him from the badlands. They were a little closer than the ones coming from the ridge, so they were a more immediate threat. Smoke elevated the rifle’s barrel a little more and settled the Winchester’s sights where he wanted them, then he stroked the trigger.

The rifle cracked and kicked against his shoulder. A split second later, he saw the man he had aimed at fling his arms wide and go backward off his mount as if he’d been swatted off the running pony by a giant hand.

The other three warriors slowed a little, clearly surprised that one of their little band had been shot at such a range.

They kept coming on, though, which brought them even closer. Smoke shifted his aim and fired again. One of the remaining three jerked, swayed, and would have toppled off his pony if the man riding beside him hadn’t reached out quickly and caught hold of his arm.

The shrill yips didn’t sound quite as enthusiastic now as the two unwounded warriors swung in a wide turn and headed back toward the badlands, taking the wounded man with them.

That left the three who’d been hidden on the ridge. They were still charging toward Smoke. He twisted in the saddle and aimed the Winchester. One of the Comanche peeled off before Smoke even pressed the trigger, unwilling to ride right into the face of that deadly accurate fire. The other two came on stubbornly.

The Winchester cracked again. Smoke’s shot was off the mark, but only slightly. It struck one of the ponies instead of the rider, and judging by the way the animal went down, its front legs collapsing underneath it, the bullet killed the pony instantly.

The warrior flew over the pony’s head, crashed to the ground, rolled over several times, and then lay still.

Smoke worked the rifle’s lever. It looked like the one man still attacking him wasn’t going to give up. That warrior was close now, bending forward over his pony’s neck, using the animal for cover as he fired at Smoke with a handgun. Smoke wasn’t too surprised the man was using a Colt. The Indians had picked up plenty of revolvers during raids, and some of them had gotten pretty good with the irons.

This one was good enough that one of the slugs creased Smoke’s stallion, burning along the big horse’s hip. No matter how well-trained a horse was, it was going to react to a sudden, sharp pain like that. The stallion let out a shrill whinny and reared up on its hind legs. Smoke stayed in the saddle, but he wasn’t able to fire any more shots before the attacking warrior reached him.

The two horses almost collided. The Comanche skillfully veered his mount aside at the last instant and leaped from the pony’s back as he flashed past Smoke. The warrior’s shoulder rammed into Smoke’s chest and drove him off the stallion. Both men plunged to the ground and landed hard.

The impact knocked the breath out of Smoke and jolted the rifle from his hand. He rolled over and came up on a knee, bracing himself with his left hand on the ground while he tried to drag air back into his lungs.

A few yards away, the Comanche warrior looked equally shaken as he pushed himself up from the ground. He was young, Smoke saw. Probably hadn’t seen more than twenty summers yet.

But that didn’t make him any less dangerous. He had dropped the gun, but with a savage cry he jerked a knife from a loop at the waist of his buckskin trousers and flung himself at Smoke. The knife flashed up and then down.

Smoke surged to his feet and caught the warrior’s knife wrist as the blade descended. Smoke’s powerful arm and shoulder muscles stopped that potential killing stroke before it could land.

At the same time, he hooked his right fist into the warrior’s midsection with such force that the man doubled over with a pained grunt. Smoke’s left hand clamped shut hard enough to make the bones in the warrior’s right wrist grind together. A quick twist forced him to drop the knife.

Smoke tugged down and at the same time brought up his right knee. It smashed into the Indian’s face with bone-shattering power. Blood spurted from the warrior’s flattened nose. When Smoke let go of him and stepped back, the Comanche collapsed. Crimson worms crawled from his eyes and ears, too.

He wouldn’t be getting up again, Smoke knew. The blow to the face had fractured his skull and probably driven shards of bone up into his brain, killing him.

Smoke felt a twinge of regret that one so young had to die simply because he couldn’t let go of the hate he felt. Most of the older warriors had realized by now that they couldn’t win in the long run, and they had gone to the reservations over in Indian Territory.

It was only these young firebrands who still ran wild, causing innocent folks on both sides to die.

Smoke’s hat had flown off when the warrior tackled him. He looked around now, spotted the gray Stetson lying on the ground, and picked it up.

Before he could put it on his head, another war cry rang over the plains.

Smoke dropped the hat and turned swiftly to see another young Comanche warrior rushing toward him on foot and brandishing a tomahawk. This had to be the one whose horse he had shot out from under him, Smoke realized. The fall had knocked him out momentarily, but now he had recovered enough to continue the attack.

Smoke ducked under the tomahawk as it slashed at his head. He got a shoulder in the warrior’s belly, grabbed him around the thighs, and heaved him up and over. The young man let out a startled cry as he found himself wheeling through the air. That yell was cut short as he landed hard on his back.

Smoke had already pivoted around. The warrior had managed to hang on to the tomahawk, but a well-aimed kick from Smoke sent it flying away.

Smoke stepped back as his hand dropped to the holster on his right hip. The Colt that rested there had stayed in its holster, despite all the ruckus. He palmed out the gun as the Comanche rolled over and started to scramble to his feet.

The metallic ratcheting sound as Smoke eared back the Colt’s hammer made the young man freeze.

“I don’t particularly want to kill you, son,” Smoke said, “but I will if I have to. Why don’t you take your friend’s pony and light a shuck on out of here?”

He didn’t know if the warrior spoke English, but he thought he saw understanding in the young man’s eyes . . . along with burning hate. For a second, Smoke thought the Comanche was going to charge him again, but then the man started backing off.

“That’s right,” Smoke told him. “Go home, or better yet, go join the others at the reservation. I know it’s not what you’re used to, or what you want, but it’s better than dying, isn’t it?”

The thing of it was, if Smoke had been in this young man’s position, he wasn’t sure how he would have answered that question. Some things were worse than dying, and some things were worth risking your life for.

But not today, apparently. The warrior turned abruptly and ran to the pony that stood a few yards away. He grabbed the rope hackamore, vaulted onto the pony’s back, and jerked it around. With a strident shout directed at Smoke, he kicked the pony into a run and galloped back toward the ridge where he and his friends had lurked to start with.

Smoke understood some of the Comanche tongue, but he couldn’t make out the words the young warrior had yelled at him. He was pretty sure it wasn’t anything complimentary, though.

He waited until the warrior vanished over the ridge; then, with a rueful smile, he slid the Colt back into leather.

This time when he picked up his hat, he was able to put it on without being interrupted. He found the Winchester he had dropped, checked to make sure the barrel wasn’t fouled, and replaced the cartridges he had fired before snugging it back in the saddle boot.

With that taken care of, he examined the stallion’s wound. The hide was red and sore-looking where the bullet had burned, but the injury hadn’t bled much. Smoke took a can of medicinal ointment from one of his saddlebags and daubed some of the black, smelly stuff on the wound.

“Sorry, old son,” Smoke said when the stallion tossed his head. “This’ll help it heal up.”

Once that was tended to and the medication put away, Smoke scanned the landscape around him. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that the warriors who had survived could double back and launch another attack on him.

He didn’t think it was likely, though. They had already lost two out of the seven members of their party, and another was wounded; Smoke didn’t know how badly. But Indians, more than most, considered the potential risk versus the potential reward when deciding whether or not to attack. After what had happened, they probably considered Smoke too big a chunk to bite off again.

Sure enough, he saw no signs of them. He swung up into the saddle and heeled the stallion into motion again. With any luck, he would reach Salt Lick today.

He hoped the man he was going to see would still be alive when he got there.

Big Rock, Colorado, one week earlier

“So there I was, surrounded by twenty of the mangiest, surliest, bloodthirstiest gun-wolves you’d ever hope to see . . . or hope not to see, I reckon I ought to say . . . and ever’ one of ’em filled his hand at the same time. Them guns made such a racket when they went off that it was like a thunderstorm there in that saloon, and the bullets was flyin’ around me so close I couldn’t even blink without one o’ those slugs cuttin’ off an eyelash.”

“Good Lord! How’d you ever survive such a thing as that, Pearlie?”

“I didn’t. Those varmints shot me plumb to doll rags. There wasn’t a piece o’ me left that was big enough to bother buryin’.”

Wes “Pearlie” Fontaine sipped his coffee and leaned back in his chair with a big grin on his rugged face.

Calvin Woods stared at his best friend in confusion for a moment, then scowled.

“You were just funnin’ me,” he accused. “You made up the whole blamed thing. I thought you were gonna tell me you shot your way out of there, like . . . like Smoke would’ve!”

“Smoke might’ve done something like that, all right,” Pearlie allowed. “I’m a fair hand with a gun, I won’t deny it, but when Smoke goes to shootin’, sometimes it seems plumb supernatural-like.”

Both men were sitting at a table in Louis Longmont’s restaurant and saloon, one of the best places to eat and certainly the best place to drink in Big Rock. At another table in the rear of the room, their employer, Smoke Jensen, sat with his wife Sally and Louis Longmont himself, the gambler and former gunman who owned this establishment.

Pearlie was the foreman on the Sugarloaf, the Jensen ranch located seven miles west of the settlement. A man who had made his living by hiring out his gun, a few years earlier he had found himself on the wrong side of a clash with Smoke. It hadn’t taken Pearlie long to realize that he was on the wrong side in more ways than one. He had thrown in with Smoke to help defeat that threat to peace in this beautiful valley, and they had been staunch friends ever since.

Cal had come along a few years later, just a kid, and, as he freely admitted now, a pretty dumb one at that. Broke, starving, and desperate, he had tried to rob Sally Jensen. It had been a stroke of luck for Cal that he hadn’t wound up dead. It was even more fortunate for him that Sally had extended her sympathy to him and gotten him a job on the Sugarloaf.

Given the opportunity, Cal had turned into a top hand and was second only to Pearlie among the Sugarloaf crew these days. Pearlie had let it be known that he was already preparing Cal to take over as foreman one of these days . . . although that would still be a long time in the future.

They had ridden into Big Rock with Smoke this morning, the three of them following the buckboard being driven by Sally. At the moment, the buckboard was parked in front of Goldstein’s Mercantile, where the supplies Sally had ordered would be loaded as soon as they were ready.

In the meantime, Smoke and Sally had walked up the street to Longmont’s to get some coffee and visit with their friend. Cal and Pearlie had headed for the Brown Dirt Cowboy Saloon, which most of the punchers in the area patronized when they were in town. The Brown Dirt Cowboy wasn’t fancy, but the beer was cold.

Today, however, when they got there, they found the place closed. That was almost unheard of. Emmett Brown, the owner, wasn’t the sort of man to pass up any chance to make a profit.

A man passing by in the street had noticed the two cowboys from the Sugarloaf standing in front of the saloon, looking confused. He had chuckled and said, “I reckon you boys haven’t heard.”

“Heard what?” Pearlie asked. Then, with a look of alarm on his face, he added, “Ol’ Brown ain’t closed the place down for good, has he?”

“No, no,” the townsman replied. “There was a big brawl in there last night. Place got busted up so bad that Emmett decided to just go ahead and close while repairs are being done. The carpenters are supposed to get started later today, from what I’ve heard.”

“Well, that’s a relief, I suppose.”

Cal said, “I don’t know that I’d care that much, one way or the other. Longmont’s is a lot nicer place.”

“That’s just it. Longmont’s is nice, so a fella’s got to be on his best behavior there. Even proper, respectable ladies like Miss Sally go there. Sometimes you want to go somewhere you can just cut loose your wolf, you know what I mean?”

“I suppose. But I’m not an old lobo like you, Pearlie.”

That had put a grin on Pearlie’s face. He clapped a hand on Cal’s shoulder and said, “Come on. We’ll go get some of that Cajun coffee Louis serves.”

Now as they sat in Longmont’s, where Pearlie had spun the yarn about being cornered by twenty of his enemies at once, both men were sort of glad the Brown Dirt Cowboy had been closed. This was nice.

Which meant, Pearlie reflected later, that something—or somebody—was bound to come along and ruin it.

Sally was laughing at something Longmont had said, when the double front doors swung open and three men walked in. Most of the customers didn’t pay any attention to them, since folks came in and went out of Longmont’s all the time and, at first glance, there was nothing unusual about these three.

Smoke sat up a little straighter in his chair, though, and Louis did the same thing. The instincts of both men, honed to sharp edges by the dangerous lives they’d led, had warned them that the newcomers might be trouble on the hoof.

Then Louis muttered something in French under his breath and added, “My apologies, Sally. I forgot momentarily that you speak the language.”

“That’s all right, Louis,” she said. “I assume something must be wrong, or you wouldn’t have reacted like that.”

“You know those fellas?” Smoke drawled.

Louis nodded. “One of them. And the other two appear to be cut from the same cloth.”

One of the men was slightly ahead of the other two. He was whipcord lean, with a hawkish face, dark eyes, and a narrow mustache. His gaze reached across the room and landed on Louis. He stiffened, and even though a tiny smile tugged at the corners of the mouth, the expression didn’t reach his eyes or do anything to relieve the grim cast of his face.

He started toward the table where Smoke, Sally, and Louis sat. The other two were close behind him.

“Sally, honey,” Smoke said, “why don’t you go sit with Pearlie and Cal?”

She didn’t move. “If there’s a chance of trouble, don’t you think it’ll be less likely to break out if I stay? I mean, nobody’s going to start anything with a woman sitting here, right?”

Louis said, “Normally, I might agree with you, Sally, but in this case, I concur with Smoke. I’d very much appreciate it if you’d move over there.”

Sally looked back and forth between her husband and their friend and then said, “All right.” She got to her feet and, without hurrying, walked over to the table where Pearlie and Cal sat.

The two cowboys stood up hurriedly but respectfully, and Cal held one of the empty chairs for Sally as she sat down. Pearlie leaned forward and said something to her. Smoke figured he was asking her what it was all about. Sally’s eloquent shrug was all the answer she could give.

The three men came to a stop not far from the table where Smoke and Louis sat. Louis regarded the leader coolly and said, “Hello, Stockard.”

“Longmont,” the man returned, his tone equally chilly. “I’ll wager you never thought you’d see me again.”

“To be honest, I never even gave the question any thought.” The words held a not-so-subtle undertone of contempt.

The eyes of the man called Stockard cut over to Smoke for a second. “Who’s your friend?”

“You got that right,” Smoke said. “Just a friend. Nobody important.”

Stockard’s lips curled in a sneer under the mustache. “Then you should stand up and move away from here . . . friend. Carefully. My business is with Longmont, nobody else.”

“I don’t believe we actually have any business,” Louis said.

“Damn right we do. I’m here to talk about the way you ran out on me up in the Dakota Territory, eight years ago.”

“No one ran out on you,” Louis responded sharply. “It was your own choice to turn back. You knew Crowder’s men weren’t far behind us and you might be caught.”

The sneer on Stockard’s face turned into a snarl. “I had to turn back. I had to go back for Jill. Wouldn’t you have risked getting caught for a woman you loved?”

“First of all, that woman was married and wanted nothing to do with you. You were the one obsessed with her. She’d made it plain she wanted you to leave her alone.”

S. . .