Rope Burn

Book 5: Those Jensen Boys!

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

JOHNSTONE COUNTRY. JAILHOUSE  TERROR. Those Jensen boys, Ace and Chance, find themselves on the wrong side of the law—and the raw end of justice—inside the meanest, dirtiest prison in the Arizona territory . . . WELCOME TO THE CHAIN GANG . . . When a barroom brawl lands Ace and Chance Jensen in jail, it’s just the beginning of a nightmare that will never end. Their jailmates are army deserters. Even worse, their jailers assume Ace and Chance are deserters, too. Which earns them even more hard time—on a brutal  prison chain gang . . . ALL TROUBLEMAKERS WILL BE SHOT. Things go from bad to worse awfully fast. One prisoner tries to escape and gets blasted in the back. Others face horrific torture at the hands of sadistic renegades. And the whole operation is run by a maniacal army major who’s working the deserters to death for his own profit. Ace and Chance have no choice but to bust out of this miserable hellhole—or die trying . . .

Release date: February 25, 2020

Publisher: Pinnacle

Print pages: 368

Sample

The soldier with the ugly scar on his cheek cursed and shouted, “I’m gonna whale the tar outta you, you stinkin’ little whelp!”

Ace Jensen held his hands up, palms out, and said, “Take it easy, mister. He didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Like fire I didn’t mean anything!” Chance Jensen, Ace’s brother, said. “If that lout doesn’t get his hands off her, he’s going to get the thrashing he deserves!”

Through gritted teeth and from the corner of his mouth, Ace said, “Blast it, Chance. We’re outnumbered four to one, here.”

“I don’t care. I’m not going to stand by and allow him to manhandle that poor girl like that.”

The man with the scar grinned at his fellow cavalry troopers. “This is gonna be fun, boys.”

“You want us to help you, Vince?” one of them asked.

“Naw. I won’t need any help with this little pip-squeak. Just sit back and enjoy the show.”

The soldier clenched his fists and stalked toward Ace and Chance. He had the three yellow stripes of a sergeant sewed on the sleeve of his blue uniform shirt. His brawny shoulders stretched the fabric of that shirt. His forage cap was pushed back on his bullet-shaped head.

“Fun, he calls it,” Ace muttered. “I’d like to know how come we keep winding up in so much fun.”

“Just lucky, I guess,” Chance told him.

Behind the bar, the apron-wearing drink juggler said nervously, “Sergeant MacDonald, why don’t you and these fellas take your problem outside?”

“Too late for that,” the three-striper replied. “I want Honey to see what I’m gonna do to this little varmint.”

He rushed at Chance, swinging a roundhouse punch at the young man’s head.

Chance ducked under the sweeping blow and hammered a right hook into the sergeant’s midsection. It was like punching a wall and didn’t do a thing to slow him down. The sergeant’s momentum carried him into Chance, and his weight drove the young man against the bar. Chance cried out in pain as his back struck the hardwood’s edge.

As a general rule, Ace let his brother fight his own battles, but hearing Chance yell like that triggered anger inside Ace. He stepped in and slammed the side of his right fist against the sergeant’s skull, just above the left ear. That was enough to distract the man from his attempt to get his hands around Chance’s throat while he had him pinned to the bar.

It set off the sergeant’s companions, too. One of them yelled, “They’re gangin’ up on the sarge, boys! Let’s get ’em!”

The seven men surged out of their chairs and rushed from the table where they had been sitting and passing around a couple of bottles of forty rod. They came at Ace and Chance like a buffalo stampede. The saloon’s other customers, already edging away from the battle between Chance and the sergeant, stampeded, too—toward the batwing doors to get out of there. Behind the bar, the apron howled in dismay at the beating his establishment was about to take.

The scarred noncom still crowded Chance against the bar. Chance cupped his hands and clapped them over the man’s ears as hard as he could. The pain from that, combined with the blow to the head that Ace had given him, made the sergeant stagger back a couple of steps.

That gave Chance enough room to go after him. Knowing it wouldn’t do any good to punch the man in his rock-hard belly, Chance went after his face instead. He landed a swift left-right combination, the straight right landing solidly on the scar that ran from the left corner of the sergeant’s mouth up past his left eye. Somebody had laid his face open with a knife in some previous fracas.

Meanwhile, one of the other troopers had reached Ace. The man tried to grab him, but Ace got hold of the man’s arm instead, pivoted, threw a hip into him, bent, and hauled the man off his feet. The trooper let out a surprised yell as he flew through the air and crashed down on his back.

Over by the table where the men had been sitting, the heavily painted saloon girl who had set off this explosion of fisticuffs by yelping when the sergeant got too rough in his pawing of her clapped her hands to her cheeks and screamed. The cry had sort of a perfunctory sound to it, as if she had witnessed dozens of brawls like this and knew the part she was supposed to play in it.

Ace tried to avoid the other men who came after him, but there were too many of them. Two of them seized his arms and forced him back against the bar. Another man loomed in front of Ace, fists poised to move in and pound him while the other two held him.

Instead, Ace drew his legs up and lashed out with them. His boot heels caught the attacker in the chest and flung him backward, completely out of control. He came down atop a table, the legs of which cracked under the impact and dumped him on the floor amidst the debris.

That only worked once, though, because as Ace’s legs dropped after that kick, a second man took the first one’s place and pummeled him, throwing hard fists into the young man’s face and rocking his head back and forth. Ace tasted blood in his mouth and his vision began to blur.

A few feet away, Chance still battled with the sergeant. Chance was stronger than he looked, so he was able to stand toe to toe with the burly noncom and slug it out for a few moments. The real advantage Chance had was his quickness. He avoided some of the punches, drew the sergeant in, and then reached behind him to pluck a bottle of whiskey off the bar. He had spotted it a second earlier from the corner of his eye. Holding the bottle by the neck, he slammed it over the sergeant’s head.

Chance expected the bottle to break, but it landed with a dull thud and remained intact. The sergeant grunted and his eyes rolled up in their sockets. He managed to keep his feet, but he was only half conscious. Chance dropped the bottle, lowered his right shoulder, and rammed it into the sergeant’s chest as he drove hard with his feet. That knocked the sergeant backward into the men holding Ace.

Legs tangled, and everybody went down, including Ace and Chance. The wild melee continued on the floor now, where sawdust damp from spilled beer and spit soon coated the clothing of all the men. A fight like this had only one rule: survive. Ace and Chance punched, kicked, gouged, and even bit.

Ace scrapped his way to his feet. One of the troopers made it upright, as well, and clambered onto the bar. Ace wasn’t sure what the man had in mind, but then it became clear as the trooper started trying to kick him in the head.

Ace jerked aside and avoided the first kick. Before the soldier could try again, his other foot slipped on a puddle of beer on the bar and that leg shot out from under him. He windmilled his arms in a frantic attempt to keep his balance but toppled off the bar, bouncing on the backbar and taking down several shelves of whiskey bottles. These broke with a great shattering sound, and the liquor’s raw reek filled the air.

Chance grabbed hold of the bar and pulled himself to his feet next to Ace. The brothers, battered, filthy, in torn clothes, stood back to back and cocked their fists, ready to continue the battle if need be.

Only three of the troopers were still in any shape to fight. The others, including the scarred sergeant who seemed to be their ringleader, sprawled around in various stages of stupor, groaning and shaking their heads. The three who had suffered less stumbled upright and looked at each other, obviously unwilling to carry on but not wanting to be the ones to surrender, either, especially when they still outnumbered the two young strangers.

The boom of a shotgun blast took the decision out of their hands. Everyone in the saloon still coherent enough to do so turned to look at the entrance, where a man had just slapped the batwings aside and come into the place. He leveled the Greener in his hands, with its still unfired barrel, at the men standing in front of the bar and yelled, “The next man who moves is gettin’ a load of buckshot in his guts, and I don’t care who else gets ventilated, neither!”

The stocky, middle-aged newcomer had a graying mustache, a beefy face, and perhaps most important—other than the shotgun—a badge pinned to his vest. His eyes flashed with anger, and he looked perfectly capable of pulling the trigger and scything down several of the combatants with hot lead.

“Hold your fire, Marshal,” Ace said, being careful to keep his hands in plain sight, in a nonthreatening manner. Beside him, Chance did likewise. The three soldiers who were on their feet didn’t try anything, either. Nobody wanted the lawman getting trigger-happy.

The badge-toter stomped forward a couple of steps and gestured with the shotgun. “You soldier boys get over there by the bar,” he ordered. “I’d ask what’s goin’ on here, but that’s pretty obvious, ain’t it?” He raised his voice. “Hey, Putnam! Where are you?”

Ace recalled the sign painted on the saloon’s false front. He and Chance had seen it when they rode into the small settlement of Packsaddle, Arizona Territory, about an hour earlier. PUTNAM’S SALOON, the sign read, so it was reasonably safe to assume that the bartender was also the proprietor, since he’d been the only one working in the place other than the blond girl.

She spoke up now as she pointed a trembling finger toward the bar. “He’s back there, Marshal. One of those soldiers fell on him when all those bottles got knocked down and busted.”

“Putnam!” the lawman called again. When he got no response, he told Ace and Chance, “Move on down there with those troopers. Don’t try anything.”

“We won’t, Marshal,” Ace said. “We’re not looking for trouble.”

“That’s a blamed lie,” one of the soldiers said. “They came in here and picked a fight with Sergeant MacDonald for no good reason!”

Chance started to respond hotly to that, but Ace said, “Keep your shirt on. We’ll get a chance to tell our side of the story.”

He hoped that was true.

The lawman herded Ace, Chance, and the three soldiers down to the far end of the bar, then said to the girl, “Honey, you take a look back there and see if Putnam is all right.”

She looked like she didn’t want to do that but was too scared not to obey the order. She approached the bar, rested her hands on it, and leaned forward, sticking her head out and craning her neck to see.

Then she took a fast step backward and cried out again.

“What in blazes is wrong?” the marshal demanded.

“It . . . it’s Mr. P-Putnam,” Honey said. “I think he’s dead!”

“Dead! What in blazes?”

The marshal kept the shotgun trained on his prisoners as he moved around the far end of the bar and looked along the floor behind it. He started to curse and sounded as surprised as he did angry.

Ace risked leaning over the bar to have a look for himself. He saw the sprawled body of the trooper who had fallen off the bar while trying to kick him in the head. He appeared to be out cold, but his chest rose and fell.

Underneath the trooper lay the bartender. Broken glass from the bottles and a big pool of spilled whiskey surrounded both men. At first glance, Ace couldn’t tell what Honey and the marshal were talking about, but then he looked closer, saw the unnatural angle of the bartender’s neck, and realized that the man’s eyes were open and staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

“Is he . . . ?” Chance asked in a half-whisper.

“Yeah,” Ace said. “Looks like he broke his neck when he got knocked down.”

“It was that trooper who did it—”

“That’s a lie!” a soldier yelled. “It wasn’t Haygood’s fault! That varmint right there done it!”

He leveled an accusing finger at Ace.

“Me?” Ace said, his eyes widening. “I didn’t do anything—”

The marshal said, “All of you, shut up. I’ll get to the bottom of this.” Without taking his eyes off Ace, Chance, and the other men, he said to the girl, “Honey, what happened here?”

“It . . . it wasn’t my fault, Marshal—”

“I didn’t say it was. Just tell me what happened.”

Honey took a deep breath, which lifted the creamy half-moons of her breasts that showed above the low neckline of her short, spangled dress. “It was just a normal evening,” she began. “Sergeant MacDonald and those other troopers from the fort came in, and those two fellas I don’t know”—nodding toward Ace and Chance—“and some other men from here in town. Vince—Sergeant MacDonald—and the others seemed to be in kind of a hurry at first, but then they started drinking and they weren’t in as much of a rush after that. Vince wanted me to sit with them . . . he’s kind of sweet on me, I think . . . and I didn’t mind, but then he pulled me onto his lap and he was getting kind of rough, and . . . and I kind of let out a yelp—”

“He was mauling her,” Chance interrupted before Ace could stop him. “And I can’t stand to see a woman being mistreated like that.”

“It was none of your business,” a trooper snapped at him.

“I made it my business,” Chance responded defiantly.

“Anyway,” Honey went on, “that stranger told Vince to leave me alone, and Vince didn’t take it kindly . . . Vince never took many things kindly, you know . . . and that was how the trouble started. Pretty soon they were all fighting, all the soldiers against those two young strangers. I . . . I really don’t know what happened after that. It was all a blur.”

“You didn’t see Putnam get killed?”

Honey shook her head emphatically as she bit at her bottom lip. “I saw that soldier fall on him, but that’s all. I didn’t have any idea he . . . he . . .”

She covered her face with her hands again. Ace wasn’t sure she was really quite as grief-stricken as she was acting, but she did seem to be genuinely shaken up.

The soldier who had blamed Ace for the saloonkeeper’s death spoke up again. “I can tell you what happened, Marshal. It’s this man’s fault, right here.” Again he pointed an accusing finger at Ace.

“How’s that possible, when it’s Private Haygood layin’ on top of Putnam?” the marshal wanted to know. “He’s got to be the one who knocked him down and broke his neck.”

“Yeah, but it was this young peckerwood who pushed Haygood and made him fall on Putnam. Poor ol’ Haygood just climbed up on the bar to try to get away from these two loco coyotes.”

“What!” Chance couldn’t hold in the startled exclamation. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard!”

“He wasn’t trying to get away,” Ace said. “He climbed up there so he could try to kick me in the head. And I didn’t push him. He slipped in a puddle of beer. What happened to Mr. Putnam was a tragic accident, Marshal.”

The three soldiers started clamoring otherwise, taking up the first one’s claim that Ace was responsible for the saloonkeeper’s death. The others were starting to come around now, including Sergeant MacDonald, and as they staggered to their feet, they added their voices to the commotion even though they probably didn’t know what they were agreeing to. But they stuck together and made Ace and Chance out to be the villains of the whole affair.

“All of you, shut your yaps!” the marshal roared after a moment. Nobody was going to argue with a man holding a shotgun, so silence fell on the barroom. The lawman went on, “I’m gonna have to talk to the other men who were in here when the trouble started. Honey, you’re gonna give me their names, as best you can remember. But until then, I’m lockin’ up the whole lot of you!”

“You can’t do that!” MacDonald said. “We’re cavalry troopers. You got no authority over us!”

“You’re wrong about that, Sergeant. My jurisdiction covers everybody in this settlement, army and civilian alike.”

MacDonald’s mouth twisted in a snarl that pulled the scar on his face even tighter. “There’s eight of us and one of you, old man.”

“Yeah, and at this range, more than likely I can only kill two or three of you with this Greener. But that’ll give me time to get my Colt out and kill two or three more of you. You want to bet that you’ll be one of the few left alive?”

Clearly, this veteran lawman still had plenty of bark on him, and none of the soldiers wanted to make that wager. The marshal took the shotgun in his left hand and drew the revolver on his hip with his right.

“Everybody put your hardware on the bar,” he ordered. “Just look like you’re thinkin’ about doing anything foolish, and you’ll get a slug for your trouble.”

Ace and Chance exchanged a glance. Ace said, “Once he talks to the other witnesses, they’ll clear us of any wrongdoing.”

“You’ve got more faith in your fellow man than I do, Ace,” Chance said sourly, “but I suppose we don’t have much choice.”

Other than a gun battle with a lawman—something neither of them wanted—that was true. Ace unbuckled the gunbelt around his hips and put it and the holstered Colt on the bar. Chance followed suit, removing the crossdraw rig he wore and the ivory-handled. 38 caliber Smith & Wesson Second Model revolver in its holster.

As a noncommissioned officer, Sergeant MacDonald was the only one of the troopers to have a handgun. With a surly glare on his face, he placed it on the bar. The soldiers gathered up their forage caps while Ace picked up his brown Stetson and Chance found his cream-colored hat on the floor. Chance made a face as he brushed sawdust from it.

“Move,” the marshal ordered. The ten prisoners filed out of the saloon with the lawman following.

“What about poor Mr. Putnam?” Honey called from behind them.

“I’ll send the undertaker to collect him,” the marshal replied. He chuckled dryly. “You boys ought to know what’s comin’ next. March!”

Ace and Chance Jensen were twins, although most folks wouldn’t think so to look at them because they were fraternal twins, not identical. Ace, born a few minutes earlier, had dark hair and broader shoulders and preferred to dress in simple range clothes. Chance, slender and sandy-haired, had a fancier taste in his garb, running toward tan suits, stylish cravats, and stickpins.

Their taste in other things differed as well. Chance had more of an eye for a pretty girl, liked to spend most of his time playing cards in saloons, and could be reckless and impulsive. Ace sometimes worried that he was too level-headed and boring, but he supposed that he and Chance balanced each other out fairly well.

Well enough, at any rate, that they had survived several years of drifting around the frontier, working when they had to, and displaying an alarming tendency, as Ace had noted, of winding up in some sort of trouble.

The cell door clanged as Marshal Hank Glennon slammed it shut behind them. Ace knew the lawman’s name because he had spotted it on some correspondence on Glennon’s desk as he goaded the prisoners through the marshal’s office into the cell block.

At least Glennon hadn’t locked them in the same cell as those troopers. There were four cells back here, two on either side of a short center aisle. The soldiers were in the cells across the way, four prisoners in each enclosure. Several of them, including Sergeant Vince MacDonald, gripped the bars and glared murderously at the Jensen brothers.

“You’ll pay for what you done,” MacDonald said. “You’ve ruined everything!”

“We were just looking for a peaceful drink, maybe a card game,” Chance said. “Don’t blame us for you being a hotheaded brute.”

MacDonald snarled and looked like he wanted to rip the bars of the cell door apart.

“Don’t waste your breath arguing with him,” Ace told his brother. “You’re not going to change anybody’s mind. Let’s just hope the marshal rounds up enough witnesses to clear us of any wrongdoing and lets us out of here.”

“He’s got to, because we didn’t do anything wrong.”

The cell had two bunks in it. Chance went over and sat down on one of them. He looked down at his suit and sighed. The breast pocket was ripped, and brown stains blotched the fabric here and there.

“I think a spittoon must have gotten knocked over during the fight,” he said as he made a face.

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

Ace sat down on the other bunk. He and his brother had drifted west from Texas, and they’d made it all the way through New Mexico Territory without encountering any problems. That had been encouraging enough to make Ace hope that maybe their luck had changed. They were fiddlefooted sorts, never content to stay in any one place for too long, but it would be nice if they could indulge their wandering ways without having to fight all the time.

Now, on their first night in Arizona Territory, they had wound up behind bars. So much for a change of luck.

Marshal Glennon had left the heavy door between the office and the cell block open, but now he closed it, plunging the cell block into darkness except for what light came through a small, barred window in the door. A moment later, Ace heard the office’s outer door close.

“He’s going out to round up those witnesses now,” Ace said. “We’ll probably be stuck in here until tomorrow morning. The marshal will charge us with disturbing the peace, and the local judge will levy a fine against us and make us pay for some of the damages to the saloon.”

“You predicting the future now, Ace?” Chance asked dryly.

“Well, it’s not like we’ve never been through this sort of thing before.” Ace stretched out on the bunk and put his hands behind his head, lacing the fingers together. “We might as well try to get some rest. And look on the bright side . . . we didn’t have to pay for a hotel room.”

On the other side of the aisle, the soldiers had gathered together on both sides of the bars that separated the two cells. They talked in low, urgent voices. Ace couldn’t make out any of the words, but they sounded upset. More upset than spending a night in jail for disturbing the peace ought to make them, Ace thought with a frown. Maybe they were worried that Private Haygood would be charged with causing the death of Putnam, the saloonkeeper. Ace wasn’t sure that would be fair. As he had told Marshal Glennon, Putnam’s death had been a tragic accident. He was confident the witnesses would bear that out.

But were there any witnesses to that part of the fight? Or had they all fled from the saloon by that time, except for Honey? Ace wasn’t sure about that. Maybe, as far as Glennon was concerned, the facts of the case weren’t as cut-and-dried as they appeared to Ace. And that was a mite worrisome . . .

“You just keep looking on the bright side, Ace,” Chance said into the gloom from the other bunk. “But me . . . I’ve got a bad feeling we may have wound up on the road to hell.”

Eventually, the troopers in the other cells fell silent—until they started snoring. At times the racket seemed loud enough to rattle the iron bars in the windows. Ace and Chance dozed off, resigned to the fact that the marshal wasn’t going to release them tonight, and slept some, but not well.

In the morning, as the gray light of a new day brightened the windows, MacDonald and the other soldiers were even more sullen, because . . .