Hard Ride to Hell

Book 4: Family Jensen

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Westerns

Synopsis

Smoke Jensen and his adopted son Matt are cooling their heels in Colorado when they are called to the Dakotas. Preacher, the legendary mountain man, is in the midst of a vicious struggle. Someone has kidnapped a proud Indian chief’s daughter and grandchild. When the kidnapping turns to murder, and Preacher vanishes after clashing with a ruthless Union colonel turned railroad king, Matt sets out to infiltrate the Colonel's gang of killers; Smoke seeks out the only honest citizens in the crooked town of Hammerhead. It will take brave men to blow Hammerhead wide open and force the Colonel and his gunmen on a hard ride into a killing ground.

Release date: May 1, 2013

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

The two men stood facing each other. One was red, the other white, but both were tall and lean, and the stiff, wary stance in which they held themselves belied their advanced years. They were both ready for trouble, and they didn’t care who knew it.

Both wore buckskins, as well, and their faces were lined and leathery from long decades spent out in the weather. Silver and white streaked their hair.

The white man had a gun belt strapped around his waist, with a holstered Colt revolver riding on each hip. His thumbs were hooked in the belt close to each holster, and you could tell by looking at him that he was ready to hook and draw. Given the necessity, his hands would flash to the well-worn walnut butts of those guns with blinding speed, especially for a man of his age.

He wasn’t the only one with a menacing attitude. The Indian had his hand near the tomahawk that was thrust behind the sash at his waist. To anyone watching, it would appear that both of these men were ready to try to kill each other.

Then a grin suddenly stretched across the whiskery face of the white man, and he said, “Two Bears, you old red heathen.”

“Preacher, you pale-faced scoundrel,” Two Bears replied. He smiled, too, and stepped forward. The two men clasped each other in a rough embrace and slapped each other on the back.

The large group of warriors standing nearby visibly relaxed at this display of affection between the two men. For the most part, the Assiniboine had been friendly with white men for many, many years. But even so, it wasn’t that common for a white man to come riding boldly into their village as the one called Preacher had done.

Some of the men smiled now, because they had known all along what was coming. The legendary mountain man Preacher, who was famous—or in some cases infamous—from one end of the frontier to the other, had been friends with their chief Two Bears for more than three decades, and he had visited the village on occasion in the past.

The two men hadn’t always been so cordial with each other. They had started out as rivals for the affections of the beautiful Assiniboine woman Raven’s Wing. For Two Bears, that rivalry had escalated to the point of bitter hostility.

All that had been put aside when it became necessary for them to join forces to rescue Raven’s Wing from a group of brutal kidnappers and gunrunners.1 Since that long-ago time when they were forced to become allies, they had gradually become friends as well.

Preacher stepped back and rested his hands on Two Bears’s shoulders.

“I hear that Raven’s Wing has passed,” he said solemnly.

“Yes, last winter,” Two Bears replied with an equally grave nod. “It was her time. She left this world peacefully, with a smile on her face.”

“That’s good to hear,” Preacher said. “I never knew a finer lady.”

“I miss her. Every time the sun rises or sets, every time the wind blows, every time I hear a wolf howl or see a bird soaring through the sky, I long to be with her again. But when the day is done and we are to be together again, we will be. This I know in my heart. Until then . . .” Two Bears smiled again. “Until then I can still see her in the fine strong sons she bore me, and the daughters who have given me grandchildren.” He nodded toward a young woman standing nearby, who stood with an infant in her arms. “You remember my youngest daughter, Wildflower?”

“I do,” Preacher said, “although the last time I saw her, I reckon she wasn’t much bigger’n that sprout with her.”

“My grandson,” Two Bears said proudly. “Little Hawk.”

Preacher took off his battered, floppy-brimmed felt hat and nodded politely to the woman.

“Wildflower,” he said. “It’s good to see you again.” He looked at the boy. “And howdy to you, too, Little Hawk.”

The baby didn’t respond to Preacher, of course, but he watched the mountain man with huge, dark eyes.

“He has not seen that many white men in his life,” Two Bears said. “You look strange, even to one so young.”

Preacher snorted and said, “If it wasn’t for this beard of mine, I’d look just about as much like an Injun as any of you do.”

Two Bears half-turned and motioned to one of the lodges.

“Come. We will go to my lodge and smoke a pipe and talk. I would know what brings you to our village, Preacher.”

“Horse, the same as usual,” Preacher said as he jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the big gray stallion that stood with his reins dangling. A large, wolflike cur sat on his haunches next to the stallion.

“How many horses called Horse and dogs called Dog have you had in your life, Preacher?” Two Bears asked with amusement sparkling in his eyes.

“Too many to count, I reckon,” Preacher replied. “But I figure if a name works just fine once, there ain’t no reason it won’t work again.”

“How do you keep finding them?”

“It ain’t so much me findin’ them as it is them findin’ me. Somehow they just show up. I’d call it fate, if I believed in such a thing.”

“You do not believe in fate?”

“I believe in hot lead and cold steel,” Preacher said. “Anything beyond that’s just a guess.”

Preacher didn’t have any goal in visiting the Assiniboine village other than visiting an old friend. He had been drifting around the frontier for more than fifty years now, most of the time without any plan other than seeing what was on the far side of the hill.

When he had first set out from his folks’ farm as a boy, the West had been a huge, relatively empty place, populated only by scattered bands of Indians and a handful of white fur trappers. At that time less than ten years had gone by since Lewis and Clark returned from their epic, history-changing journey up the Missouri River to the Pacific.

During the decades since then, Preacher had seen the West’s population grow tremendously. Rail lines crisscrossed the country, and there were cities, towns, and settlements almost everywhere. Civilization had come to the frontier.

Much of the time, Preacher wasn’t a hundred percent sure if that was a good thing or not.

But there was no taking it back, no returning things to the way they used to be, and besides, if not for the great westward expansion that had fundamentally changed the face of the nation, he never would have met the two fine young men he had come to consider his sons: Smoke and Matt Jensen.

It had been a while since Preacher had seen Smoke and Matt. He assumed that Smoke was down in Colorado, on his ranch called the Sugarloaf near the town of Big Rock. Once wrongly branded an outlaw, Smoke Jensen was perhaps the fastest man with a gun to ever walk the West. Most of the time he didn’t go looking for trouble, but it seemed to find him anyway, despite all his best intentions to live a peaceful life on his ranch with his beautiful, spirited wife, Sally.

There was no telling where Matt was. He could be anywhere from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border. He and Smoke weren’t brothers by blood. The bond between them was actually deeper than that. Matt had been born Matt Cavanaugh, but he had taken the name Jensen as a young man to honor Smoke, who had helped out an orphaned boy and molded him into a fine man.

Since Matt had set out on his own, he had been a drifter, scouting for the army, working as a stagecoach guard, pinning on a badge a few times as a lawman. . . . As long as it kept him on the move and held a promise of possible adventure, that was all it took to keep Matt interested in a job, at least for a while. But he never stayed in one place for very long, and at this point in his life he had no interest in putting down roots, as Smoke had done.

Because of that, Matt actually had more in common with Preacher than Smoke did, but all three of them were close. The problem was, whenever they got together trouble seemed to follow, and it usually wasn’t long before the air had the smell of gunsmoke in it.

Right now the only smoke in Two Bears’s lodge came from the small fire in the center of it and the pipe that Preacher and the Assiniboine chief passed back and forth. The two men were silent, their friendship not needing words all the time.

Two women were in the lodge as well, preparing a meal. They were Two Bears’s wives, the former wives of his brothers he had taken in when the women were widowed, as a good brother was expected to do. The smells coming from the pot they had on the fire were mighty appetizing, Preacher thought. The stew was bound to be good.

A swift rataplan of hoofbeats came from outside and made both Preacher and Two Bears raise their heads. Neither man seemed alarmed. As seasoned veterans of the frontier, they had too much experience for that. But they also knew that whenever someone was moving fast, there was a chance it was because of trouble.

The sudden babble of voices that followed the abrupt halt of the hoofbeats seemed to indicate the same thing.

“You want to go see what that’s about?” Preacher asked Two Bears, inclining his head toward the lodge’s entrance.

Two Bears took another unhurried puff on the pipe in his hands before he set it aside.

“If my people wish to see me, they know where I am to be found,” he said.

Preacher couldn’t argue with that. But the sounds had gotten his curiosity stirred up, so he was glad when someone thrust aside the buffalo hide flap over the lodge’s entrance. A broad-shouldered, powerful-looking warrior strode into the lodge, then stopped short at the sight of a white man sitting there cross-legged beside the fire with the chief.

“Two Bears, I must speak with you,” the newcomer said.

“This is Standing Rock,” Two Bears said to Preacher. “He is married to my daughter Wildflower.”

That would make him the father of the little fella Preacher had seen with Wildflower earlier. He nodded and said, “Howdy, Standing Rock.”

The warrior just looked annoyed, like he wasn’t interested in introductions right now. He looked at the chief and began, “Two Bears—”

“Is there trouble?”

“Blue Bull has disappeared.”

Blue Bull, it turned out, wasn’t a bull at all, not that Preacher really thought he was. That was the name of one of the Assiniboine warriors who belonged to this band, and he and Standing Rock were good friends.

They had been out hunting in the hills west of the village and had split up when Blue Bull decided to follow the tracks of a small antelope herd while Standing Rock took another path. They had agreed to meet back at the spot where Blue Bull had taken up the antelope trail.

When Standing Rock returned there later, he saw no sign of Blue Bull. A couple of hours passed, and Blue Bull still didn’t show up. Growing worried that something might have happened to his friend, Standing Rock went to look for him.

This part of the country was peaceful for the most part, but a man alone who ran into a mountain lion or a bear might be in for trouble. Also, ravines cut across the landscape in places, and if a pony shied at the wrong time, its rider could be tossed off and fall into one of those deep, rugged gullies.

“You were unable to find him?” Two Bears asked when his son-in-law paused in the story.

“The antelope tracks led into a narrow canyon, and so did Blue Bull’s,” Standing Rock replied. “The ground was rocky, and I lost the trail.”

The young warrior wore a surly expression. Preacher figured that he didn’t like admitting failure. Standing Rock was a proud man. You could tell that just by looking at him.

But he was genuinely worried about his friend, too. He proved that by saying, “I came back to get more men, so we can search for him. He may be hurt.”

Two Bears nodded and got to his feet.

“Gather a dozen men,” he ordered crisply. “We will ride in search of Blue Bull while there is still light.”

Preacher stood up, too, and said, “I’ll come with you.”

“This is a matter for the Assiniboine,” Standing Rock said, his voice stiff with dislike. Preacher didn’t understand it, but the young fella definitely hadn’t taken a shine to him. Just the opposite, in fact.

“Preacher is a friend to the Assiniboine and has been for more years than you have been walking this earth, Standing Rock,” Two Bears snapped. “I would not ask him to involve himself in our trouble, but if he wishes to, I will not deny him.”

“I just want to lend a hand if I can,” Preacher said as he looked at Standing Rock. He didn’t really care if the young man liked him or not. His friendship for Two Bears and for Two Bears’s people was the only things that really mattered to him here.

Standing Rock didn’t say anything else. He just stared back coldly at Preacher for a second, then turned and left the lodge to gather the search party as Two Bears had told him to.

The chief looked at Preacher and said, “The hot blood of young men sometimes overpowers what should be the coolness of their thoughts.”

“That’s fine with me, old friend. Like I said, I just want to help.”

As they left the lodge, Preacher pointed to the big cur that had come with him to the village and went on, “Dog there is about as good a tracker as you’re ever gonna find. When we get to the spot where Standin’ Rock lost the trail, if you’ve got something that belonged to Blue Bull we can give Dog the scent and he’s liable to lead us right to him.”

Two Bears nodded.

“I will speak to Blue Bull’s wife and make sure we take something of his with us.”

Several of the warriors were getting ready to ride. That didn’t take much preparation, considering that all they had to do was throw blankets over their ponies’ backs and rig rope halters. Preacher had planned to spend a few days in the Assiniboine village, but he hadn’t unsaddled Horse yet so the stallion was ready to go as well.

The news of Blue Bull’s disappearance had gotten around the village. A lot of people were standing nearby with worried looks on their faces as the members of the search party mounted up. Two Bears went over to talk to one of the women, who hurried off to a lodge and came back with a buckskin shirt. She was Blue Bull’s wife, Preacher figured, and the garment belonged to the missing warrior.

Two Bears swung up onto his pony with the lithe ease of a man considerably younger than he really was. He gave a curt nod, and the search party set out from the village with the chief, Standing Rock, and Preacher in the lead.

Standing Rock pointed out the route for them, and they lost no time in riding into the hills where the two warriors had been hunting. Preacher glanced at the sky and saw that they had about three hours of daylight left. He hoped that would be enough time to find Blue Bull.

Of course, it was possible that nothing bad had happened to Blue Bull at all, Preacher reflected. The warrior could have gotten carried away in pursuit of the antelope and lost track of the time. They might even run into him on his way back to the village. If that happened, Preacher would be glad that everything had turned out well.

Something was stirring in his guts, though, some instinctive warning that told him they might not be so lucky. Over the years Preacher had learned to trust those hunches. At this point, he wasn’t going to say anything to Two Bears, Standing Rock, or the other Assiniboine, but he had a bad feeling about this search for Blue Bull.

Standing Rock pointed out the tracks of the antelope herd when the search party reached them.

“You can see they lead higher into the hills,” he said. “Blue Bull followed them while I went to the north. He wanted to bring one of the antelope back to the village.”

“Why did you not go with him?” Two Bears asked. “Why did you go north?”

Standing Rock looked sullen again as he replied, “I know a valley up there where the antelope like to graze. I thought they might circle back to it.”

Two Bears just nodded, but Preacher knew that his old friend was just as aware as he was of what had really happened here. Standing Rock had thought he could beat Blue Bull to the antelope by going a different way. Such rivalry was not uncommon among friends.

“Did you see the antelope?” Two Bears asked.

Standing Rock shook his head.

“No. My thought proved to be wrong.”

Two Bears’s silence in response was as meaningful and damning as anything he could have said. Standing Rock angrily jerked his pony into motion and trotted away, following the same path as the antelope had earlier.

Preacher, Two Bears, and the rest of the search party went the same way at a slower pace. Quietly, Two Bears said, “If anything happened to Blue Bull, Standing Rock will believe that it was his fault for not going with his friend.”

“He wants to impress you, don’t he?” Preacher said. “Must not be easy, bein’ married to the chief’s daughter.”

“He is a good warrior, but he does not always know that.”

Preacher nodded in understanding. He had always possessed confidence in himself and his abilities, and he had learned not to second-guess the decisions he made. But he had seen doubts consume other men from the inside until there was nothing left of them but empty shells.

Eventually Standing Rock settled down a little and slowed enough for the rest of the search party to catch up to him. The antelope herd had followed a twisting path into the hills, and so had Blue Bull as he trailed them. Preacher had no trouble picking out the unshod hoofprints of the warrior’s pony.

The slopes became steeper, the landscape more rugged. In the distance, the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains loomed, starkly beautiful in the light from the lowering sun. They were dozens of miles away, even though they looked almost close enough to reach out and touch. Preacher knew that Blue Bull’s trail wouldn’t lead that far.

The tracks brought them to a long, jagged ridge that was split by a canyon cutting through it. Standing Rock reined his pony to a halt and pointed to the opening.

“That is where Blue Bull went,” he said. “The tracks vanished on the rocks inside the canyon.”

“Did you follow it to the other end?” Two Bears asked.

“I did. But the tracks of Blue Bull’s pony did not come out.”

“A man cannot go into a place and not come out of it, one way or another.”

Standing Rock looked a little offended at Two Bears for pointing that out, thought Preacher, but he wasn’t going to say anything. For one thing, Two Bears was the chief, and for another, he was Standing Rock’s father-in-law.

“Let’s have a look,” Preacher suggested. “We can give Dog a whiff of Blue Bull’s shirt. He ought to be able to tell us where the fella went.”

The big cur had bounded along happily beside Preacher and Horse during the search. He still had the exuberance of youth, dashing off several times to chase after small animals.

They rode on to the canyon entrance, where they stopped to peer at the ground. The surface had already gotten quite rocky, so the tracks weren’t as easy to see as they had been. But Preacher noticed something immediately.

“Some of those antelope tracks are headed back out of the canyon,” he said to Two Bears. “The critters went in there, then turned around and came out. They were in a hurry, too. Something must’ve spooked ’em.”

Standing Rock said, “There are many antelope in these hills. Perhaps the tracks going the other direction were made at another time.”

Preacher swung down from the saddle and knelt to take a closer look at the hoofprints. After a moment of study, he shook his head.

“They look the same to me,” he said. “I think they were all made today, comin’ and goin’.”

He knew that wasn’t going to make Standing Rock like him any better, but he was going to tell things the way he saw them to Two Bears. He had always been honest with his old friend and saw no need to change that policy now.

“What about the tracks of Blue Bull’s pony?” Two Bears asked.

“He went on into the canyon,” Preacher said. “Can’t see that he came back out, so I agree with Standin’ Rock on that. The way it looks to me, Blue Bull followed those antelope here and rode up in time to see ’em come boltin’ back out. He was curious and wanted to see what stampeded ’em like that. So he rode in to find out.”

“It must have been a bear,” Standing Rock said. “Blue Bull would not have been so foolish.”

“Blue Bull has always been curious,” Two Bears said. “I can imagine him doing as Preacher has said.” He looked at the mountain man. “As you would say, old friend, there is one way to find out.”

“Yep,” Preacher agreed. “Let Dog have Blue Bull’s scent. If there’s anybody who can lead us right to him, it’s that big, shaggy varmint.”

Two Bears took out the shirt Blue Bull’s wife had given him from the pouch where he had put it and handed it to Preacher. Preacher called Dog to him, knelt beside the big cur, and let Dog get a good whiff of the shirt.

“Find the fella who wore this,” Preacher said. “Find him!”

Dog ran into the canyon, pausing about fifty yards in to look back at Preacher, and then resuming the hunt.

Preacher swung up onto Horse’s back and nodded to Two Bears.

“He’s got the scent. All we have to do is follow him.”

They rode into the canyon, moving fairly rapidly to keep up with Dog. Now that they were relying on Dog’s sense of smell rather than trying to follow tracks, they could set a slightly faster pace.

The canyon was about fifty yards wide, with rocky walls that were too steep for a horse to climb, although a man might be able to. Although there were places, Preacher noted, where the walls had collapsed partially and horses might be able to pick their way up and down as long as they were careful.

Preacher frowned slightly as he spotted a shiny place on a flat rock. The mark was small, barely noticeable. Preacher knew that the most likely explanation for it was that a shod hoof had nicked the rock in the fairly recent past. Blue Bull, like the rest of the Assiniboine, would have been riding an unshod pony when he came through here.

So another rider, most likely a white man, had been in the canyon recently. Preacher couldn’t be sure it was today, but the evidence pointed in that direction. The antelope herd had started through the canyon, only to encounter a man on horseback. That had startled the animals into bolting back the way they had come from.

Then, Blue Bull’s curiosity aroused by the behavior of the antelope, the Assiniboine warrior had ridden into the canyon as well, and . . .

Preacher couldn’t finish that thought. He had no way of knowing what had happened then. Blue Bull could have run into the same hombre. There might have even been more than one man riding through the canyon.

This was Indian land, maybe not by treaty but by tradition, and the ranchers in the area had always respected that because of the long history of peace between the whites and the Assiniboine. They had never stopped white men from crossing their hunting grounds, as long as everyone treated each other with respect. It was possible some cattle had strayed up here from one of the ranches, and cowboys from that spread had come to look for the missing stock.

However, that bad feeling still lurked in Preacher’s gut. It grew even stronger when he saw Dog veer toward a cluster of rocks at the base of one of those caved-in places along the canyon’s left-hand wall. There was no hesitation about the big cur’s movements. He went straight to the rocks and started nosing around and pawing at them.

“Your animal has lost the scent,” Standing Rock said. “There is nothing there.”

“We better take a closer look,” Preacher said. He glanced over at Two Bears, who nodded. The chief’s face was set in grim lines, and Preacher knew that his old friend had a bad feeling about this situation, too.

The search party rode over to the side of the canyon. Nothing was visible except a pile of loose, broken rocks, some of them pretty big, but the way Dog continued to paw at the stones told Preacher most of what he needed to know.

“Move those rocks,” Two Bears ordered.

“But—” Standing Rock began. He fell silent when Two Bears gave him a hard look. Scowling, Standing Rock dismounted. He went to the rocks and started lifting them and tossing them aside. Several other warriors got down from their ponies and moved to help him.

They hadn’t been working for very long before Standing Rock suddenly let out a startled exclamation and stepped back sharply as if he had just uncovered a rattlesnake.

Preacher leaned forward in the saddle to peer into the jumble of stone. He had a pretty good idea it wasn’t a snake that Standing Rock had come across.

It was a foot.

Visible from the ankle down, the foot had a moccasin on it. The rest of the leg to which it was attached was hidden under the rocks.

The other warriors had recoiled from the grim discovery as well. Curtly, Two Bears ordered them to get back to moving the rocks. They did so with obvious reluctance.

Everybody knew what they were going to find. It didn’t take long to uncover the rest of the body. It belonged to a young Assiniboine warrior. The rock slide that had covered him up had done quite a bit of damage to his features, but he was still recognizable. Standing Rock said in a voice choked with emotion, “It is Blue Bull.”

“He must have been standing here when those rocks fell on him and killed him,” one of the other men said.

“Why did he not get out of the way?” another man wanted to know.

“There must not have been time,” Standing Rock said. “My . . . my friend . . .”

Deep creases appeared in Preacher’s forehead as the mountain man frowned. He said to Two Bears, “Somethin’ ain’t right here. You mind if I take a closer look?”

“Go ahead,” the chief said with a nod.

Preacher dismounted and approached the dead man. Standing Rock turned to face him. The warrior’s stubborn expression made it clear he didn’t want Preacher disturbing his friend’s body. Like all the other tri. . .