Smoke Jensen, The Beginning

Book 1: Smoke Jensen Novel of the West

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

For the first time, an epic account of a boy born into a struggle for survival on the harsh and unforgiving American frontier, the story behind the legend of Smoke Jensen.... On the eve of the Civil War, Kirby Jensen is the youngest of three children living on a hardscrabble ranch in Southwestern Missouri. But in 1861, shots were fired in Charleston harbor, and Kirby's father and brother went to war.

Smoke Jensen, the Beginning follows the Jensen clan during these volatile years, from Civil War battles to border state raids to the kind of frontier justice achieved only by bullets and blood. William W. Johnstone chronicles the early years of Kirby Jensen - soon to be nicknamed Smoke - as he journeys from boyhood innocence into a manhood shaped by violence and a young man's thirst for justice. Filled with actual historical events and legendary characters, the story of Smoke Jensen's early years is a powerful, brutal and amazing American saga - the crowning achievement of America's most popular living Western writer.

Release date: October 1, 2015

Publisher: Recorded Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

Early October, Stone County, Missouri

Election season of 1860 was the most contentious election season in the history of the United States. Newspaper editorials and campaign speeches suggested that there would be major consequences, depending upon the results. Four candidates were running for President, the major two being Abraham Lincoln as a Republican and John Breckenridge as a Southern Democrat. In addition, two other candidates were in the race. Stephen Douglas was a Democrat and John Bell was running on the Constitutional Union ticket.

Several of the Southern states had already made the threat to secede if Lincoln won, and tensions were running high.

Missouri was a slave state with almost 120,000 slaves, but as of the latest count, only sixteen resided in all of Stone County. Emmett Jensen didn’t have any slaves, but he did own a forty-acre farm of loam and rock adjacent to Shoal Creek. The farm required a great deal of work just to make it productive enough to feed a family of five. At twelve years old, Kirby was the youngest of Emmett and Pearl Jensen’s three children. Janey was fourteen and Luke was eighteen.

The institution of slavery had an effect on the lives of almost everyone in Missouri and Kansas, a free state. The question of slave or free had gone far beyond mere debate, erupting into actual fighting between armed partisans of the two states.

The guerrillas from Kansas called themselves Jayhawkers. Their counterparts in Missouri were known as Bushwhackers, and for some time, shooting had been taking place between the groups. Led by Asa Briggs, the Missouri Bushwhackers called themselves the Ghost Riders. The Jayhawkers from southeast Kansas were led by Angus Shardeen.

Shardeen once rode with John Brown, and personally took part in the Pottawatomie Massacre in which several pro-slave sympathizers were murdered. Since John Brown’s death, Shardeen had started his own group, and was making his presence known by burning homes and killing innocents in southwest Missouri, all in the name of abolition.

“There’s a big war acomin,’ ” Tom Byrd told Emmett the afternoon he went to Byrd’s farm to retrieve the two mules he had rented to his neighbor for the afternoon. “You mark my words. It’s acomin’.”

“Maybe not,” Emmett replied, his response motivated more by hope than reason. “Maybe cooler heads will prevail.”

“No, they won’t. The Republican, Abraham Lincoln, is going to be elected, ’n that’s all it’s agoin’ to take. Once that ape becomes president, there’s going to be war sure as a gun is iron.”

Emmett shared some of the conversation with Pearl and the rest of his family over supper that night.

“If war does come, Pa, which way do you think Missouri is goin’ to go?” Luke asked.

“Well, seein’ as Missouri is a slave state, I don’t see it goin’ any other way except for the South.”

“Yes, sir. That’s what I was athinkin’ too,” Luke said.

“But Pa, you said many times, that you don’t hold with ownin’ slaves,” Kirby said.

“I don’t hold with anyone holdin’ another man like that, be the man black or white. But that ain’t the only thing that’s causin’ the trouble. People ought to have the right to say what goes on in their state, and the federal government’s got no right stickin’ its nose into our business. I reckon if it comes to it, ’n all my friends and neighbors go off to join up with the South, why then that’s the way I’ll have to go.”

“That’s sort of what I was figurin’ too,” Kirby said. “If war comes, we’ll be fighting for the South.”

“There is no we about it, boy. You’re too young to even be thinking about such things.”

“I ain’t always goin’ to be too young,” Kirby said.

“Well, you are too young now.”

“Maybe Kirby is, but I ain’t,” Luke said. “If war comes, I’ll be ridin’ off to join up with the South. You can bet on that.”

“I’m so tired of hearing everyone talkin’ about the war,” Pearl said. “Can’t we at least talk about somethin’ else here in our own home?”

“I hear what you’re sayin’, Pearl. But let’s hope that it don’t get no further than just talkin’ about,” Emmett said.

When Emmett first built the house back in 1841, it had only two bedrooms, one for him and Pearl, and one for the child he was sure they would have. Luke came along the first year, then four years later Janey was born, so Emmett put up a wall right down through the middle of the room, dividing it into two cubicles, each barely large enough to hold a bed. That arrangement gave Luke and Janey their privacy. Kirby came along two years after Janey. There was no place to put him, so Emmett built a small shelf just under the eaves of the house in order to make a sleeping loft.

It was a long time before Kirby was able to go to sleep that night. He was thinking too much about the supper conversation. Was it actually going to come to a war? Some might have said the skirmishes between the Bushwhackers and the Jayhawkers meant a war was already occurring, but that wasn’t the kind of war he was wondering about. He was thinking of a real war, like the kind he had read about in books.

He knew about the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the two Mexican Wars. The man that owned the leather store in town, Marvin Butrum, had been in both of the Mexican wars. He was with Sam Houston at San Jacinto during the Texas Revolution, and he had been with Robert E. Lee in the Mexican American War.

Kirby wondered what it would be like to be in a war. He pictured himself in a uniform astride a white horse, holding his saber high, and leading men into battle.

Well, it probably wouldn’t really be like that. He was pretty sure that a twelve-year-old would not be entrusted to actually command an army. That realization caused the image he had projected in his mind to fade away.

He rolled over. But wait. The battle was in his imagination! While in his imagination, he could be anything he wanted, including a captain or a general or a sergeant; he wasn’t sure enough about ranks to know what he wanted to be. But, whatever he was, he smiled as he remounted the white horse, lifted the saber, and gave the order to charge.

The next morning, Kirby and Janey went out to the barn to milk the two cows.

“You should be the one that does all the milkin’,” Kirby complained.

“Why?”

“Because you’re a girl, and milkin’ cows is girl’s work.”

“What makes you think it’s girl’s work?”

“Pa don’t never milk a cow, ’n neither does Luke. They plow and plant and harvest, but they don’t milk cows.”

“No, and they don’t gather eggs either, but you do. Let’s face it, Kirby. Pa prob’ly thinks you are a girl.” Janey laughed at him.

“Yeah? Well, would a girl do this?” Kirby picked up a double handful of straw and dumped it on her.

“Don’t do that! You’ll get straw all in my hair.”

Kirby laughed.

The cows, Ada and Bridget, were back to back in a stall, waiting to be milked. Kirby and Janey put the milk stools in place, then sat down to milk.

“I bet I finish first,” Kirby said.

“It isn’t a contest, Kirby,” Janey replied.

Kirby did finish first, then he got an idea. He had been milking Ada while Janey was with Bridget. Reaching over to grab Bridget’s tail, he lifted it up, then did the same thing with Ada’s tail. Using the hairy twitches at the ends of their tails, he tied them together.

Janey had been concentrating so much on the milking that she didn’t notice what he had done.

“Want me to carry your bucket for you?” Kirby asked, diverting her attention.

“Well, that’s very nice of you,” Janey said, handing the bucket of milk to him.

They started back toward the house when the two cows began bellowing behind them.

“What in the world is wrong with those two?” Janey turned around. The two cows were trying to go in opposite directions, but couldn’t because their tails were tied together. “Kirby! What did you do?”

“I don’t know how it happened, Pa,” Kirby tried to explain a while later. “As near as I can figure, they was just swattin’ at flies ’n their tails musta got tangled up somehow. That’s all I can figure.”

“Are you trying to tell me they tied their own tails together?”

“Think about it, Pa. I mean, here are these two cows, just standin’ there gettin’ milked ’n all, and they sort of start swingin’ their tails back and forth, not payin’ no attention to each other. The next thing you know, why, their twitches has got all tangled up. Don’t you think maybe it coulda happened that way?”

“I tell you what, Kirby. You go paint the barn, and while you’re painting it, you might just come up with a lot better explanation than that cock and bull story you just tried to pass off on me.”

“I thought you wasn’t goin’ to paint the barn till next summer.”

“I changed my mind.”

“All right, Pa.”

Janey stuck her tongue out at Kirby.

Emmett watched his youngest son leave the house, and not until he was sure Kirby was well out of earshot, did he turn to Luke. “Who would ever think to tie a couple cows together by their tails?” he asked, laughing.

“Nobody but my little brother, I’m thinking,” Luke answered, laughing as well.

McMullen School was a one-room school accommodating twenty-two students in grades one through eight. Kirby was in the sixth grade. He was naturally a big boy, bigger than anyone else in the school, including the two boys in the seventh, and the one boy in the eighth grade. In addition to his natural size, hard work on the family farm had made him strong.

In the eighth grade, Janey was a beautiful girl with black hair, dark brown eyes, full lips, and prominent cheekbones. But it didn’t stop there. Her body was already fully matured to the point that visitors to the school sometimes mistakenly assumed that she was the teacher. Aware that her looks and body had an effect on men, Janey wasn’t above being a sexual tease when she could do so to her benefit.

After completing the fifth grade several years ago, Luke had left school to help his father work the farm. After he completed the fifth grade last spring, Kirby had petitioned his father to let him do the same thing.

On the crisp fall day, Kirby was recalling that conversation as he sat at his desk, staring through the window.

“I can already read, write, and cipher,” Kirby told his father and older brother. “I don’t see any sense in me staying in school any longer, when I could be helping out on the farm.”

“You are going to stay in school,” Emmett insisted.

Kirby continued staring at a distant flight of geese. Very high in the sky, the geese were maintaining a perfect V formation as they headed south for the coming winter. He imagined himself down at Shoal Creek with a shotgun. He could bring home a goose, and his mother could—

“Kirby? Kirby, have you suddenly gone deaf?”

The others in the classroom laughed, and it wasn’t until that moment that Kirby was even aware he was being spoken to by his teacher.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Margrabe?”

“I just gave you an assignment. From the McGuffey Reader, I want you to spell, define, and tell what part of speech is, the word fluctuate.”

“F-L-U-C-T-U-A-T-E,” Kirby said, spelling the word carefully.

“Very good, Kirby. And it means?”

“It means somethin’ is moving back and forth, but it can also mean that somebody can’t make up their mind about somethin’, like if I’m tryin’ to decide whether I want a piece of cherry pie or apple pie.”

“And what part of speech is it?”

“It’s an intransitive verb.”

Miss Margrabe smiled and nodded. “Very good, Kirby. You were paying attention after all.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kirby said.

“All right, children, I’m going to be working with the first and second graders now. The rest of you know what your assignments are, so please study at your desk.”

The assigned work for the sixth grade was math, and Kirby was working on a problem of long division. He hated long division, particularly when the answer never came out even. The lesson was that it had to be carried out at least four decimal points. Kirby found such problems frustrating, and he was still working on them when Miss Margrabe stopped by his desk to look at his work.

“Very good, Kirby. You wouldn’t happen to know if... uh . . . Luke might be—” Miss Margrabe stopped in mid-sentence, then gave what could only be described as a self-deprecating chuckle.

“Might be what?”

“Never mind. It was quite inappropriate of me to ask. Keep up the good work; you have an excellent math paper here.”

“Thank you.” Kirby smiled as Miss Margrabe walked away. He and Janey knew that their teacher liked Luke. Kirby would never say a word about it, but Janey wasn’t above teasing her brother.

Returning to his work, Kirby finished the last problem, then turned his attention outside again. A group of riders were coming toward the school, riding fast and all bunched up. That alone was enough to arouse his curiosity, but one of the men was carrying a flaming torch. Because it was the middle of the day, that made their approach even more curious.

As they drew closer, the rumble of hoofbeats became a thunder and soon everyone in the school was aware of the galloping band of horses. They looked at each other in confusion, and Kirby got up from his seat and moved to the window.

“Kirby, take your seat, please,” Miss Margrabe said.

“Somethin’ ain’t right,” Kirby said.

“Isn’t right,” Miss Margrabe corrected automatically.

The riders came within twenty yards of the school building, then stopped. The leader of the band had red hair, a red beard, and a very prominent purple scar on his face. His description was well-known. It was Angus Shardeen.

“It’s Jayhawkers!” Kirby shouted.

Several of the riders began shooting toward the school, and the bullets crashed through the windows. The students started screaming.

“Get down on the floor!” Kirby shouted as he ran to his sister and pulled her down, just as a bullet slammed into the desk where she had been sitting.

“Don’t they know this is a schoolhouse?” Miss Margrabe cried.

“Miss Margrabe, no! You’ll get killed!” Kirby shouted. Leaving Janey lying on the floor, he ran to his teacher and pulled her down as well, though not in time to keep her from being shot in the shoulder.

“Burn in hell!” someone shouted from outside. A second later a flaming torch came in through one of the windows that had been shot out. The other students screamed and shouted and ran away from the flames. Only Kirby had the presence of mind to grab the pail of drinking water and toss the water onto the torch, extinguishing it.

“They’re leavin’!” a seventh-grade boy shouted. “They’re ridin’ away!”

With the fire under control, Kirby hurried over to Miss Margrabe, who was on the floor, leaning up against the wall under the blackboard. She was holding her hand over the shoulder wound, and blood was coming between her fingers, though she wasn’t bleeding profusely.

“Janey, come look at this, will you?” Kirby called. When Janey didn’t respond right away, he called again. “Come here and take a look at Miss Margrabe’s shoulder. You can get up now. The Jayhawkers is gone.”

“Are gone,” Miss Margrabe corrected through clenched teeth.

“Yes’m they surely are.”

Janey went over to them, then knelt beside the teacher and examined the bloody wound. The bullet hadn’t actually hit her shoulder, but high up on her right arm.

“Kirby, use your knife to cut the sleeve off,” Janey said.

“Must I bare my arm?” Miss Margrabe asked.

Janey nodded. “Yes’m. I’m afraid you’re going to have to.”

Kirby took a jackknife from his pocket and cut away the sleeve. He pulled the severed sleeve down across the teacher’s hand, giving Janey an unrestricted view of the wound.

“It looks like it just cut a ridge in your arm, but I don’t think the bullet is still there. Kenny, bring me some coal oil,” Janey ordered one of the seventh grade boys. Boldly, she pulled up her skirt.

“Kirby, cut off enough of my chemise to make a bandage.”

“Janey, that’ll leave your legs bare,” Kirby replied.

“Either cut enough for me to use as a bandage and bare my legs, or I’ll take the whole thing off and bare my butt,” Janey said. “Now do it.”

Kirby took the bottom of Janey’s chemise in his hands, but before he began to cut, he looked at the other boys in the room, all of whom had come closer for a look. “Every boy in here turn around, right now. If I catch any of you lookin’ at my sister, I’ll black your eye, and that’s for sure and certain.”

Reluctantly the boys turned away.

“Here’s the coal oil,” Kenny said, handing the can to Janey.

“You turn around, too,” Kirby ordered.

A moment later, Kirby had cut a two-inch strip from all the way around the bottom of Janey’s chemise.

“Now, cut a little piece off the end, so I can use it as a wiping cloth,” Janey ordered.

After Kirby did so, Janey soaked the cloth in kerosene and used it to clean the wound. Then, pouring a little more kerosene over the wound, she made a bandage by wrapping the rest of the material around the teacher’s arm, and tying it in place.

The sheriff and at least half a dozen other men came dashing into the school. Their sudden entrance frightened some of the other students until they realized who it was.

“We heard shooting!” the sheriff said. “What happened here?”

“It was Jayhawkers, Sheriff,” one of the students said.

“Any of the kids hurt? We brought Doc Blanchard with us.”

“Ain’t none of the kids hurt, but they shot Miss Margrabe,” Kenny said.

“There aren’t any children hurt,” Miss Margrabe corrected.

“Doc, get over here ’n look at the teacher, will you?” the sheriff asked.

“I’m real proud of both of you,” Emmett said at supper that evening. “Kirby, the sheriff says that if you hadn’t acted real quick, the whole school could have burned down. And Janey, Doc Blanchard said all he had to do was change the bandage. You did a fine job of nursin’ Miss Margrabe.”

“I stopped by to see Lettie,” Luke said, speaking of Miss Margrabe. “Your teacher had nothin’ but praise for the two of you.”

“Praises for us, and kisses for you, I bet,” Janey teased.

Luke smirked. “That’s for me to know, and you to find out.”

“I can’t imagine any group of men so evil as to do something like that,” Kirby’s mother said.

“Never underestimate a man’s capacity for cruelty,” Emmett said.

“That’s some real elegant words, Pa. Where’d you come up with ’em?” Kirby asked.

Emmett grinned. “I heard Governor Price say ’em durin’ some of his speechifyin’.”

“Pa, they’s some fellas I know that’s plannin’ on joinin’ up with Asa Briggs and ridin’ over into Kansas to set things right,” Luke said. “And I aim to go with ’em.”

“No, you ain’t,” Emmett said.

“Pa, we can’t just let ’em get away with somethin’ like this.”

“You ain’t goin’,” Emmett said again.

“It ain’t like I’m plannin’ on defyin’ you or anythin’ like that, but I’m full growed, Pa. And I reckon if I was to really take a mind to do it, there wouldn’t be nothin’ you could actual do about it.”

“And I reckon you’re right. But I would sure hope you wouldn’t. It ain’t our fight, boy.”

“The hell it ain’t! They attacked the school where Janey ’n Kirby was. They’re family. They also shot Lettie. To my way of thinkin’, it just don’t seem right lettin’ them Jayhawkers get away with doin’ what they done.”

“Thanks to your brother and sister, they didn’t do much of anything. Kirby kept the schoolhouse from burnin’ down, ’n Janey kept Miss Margrabe’s wound from gettin’ any worse. No need for you to be goin’ over to Kansas with anyone when I need you here on the farm. Besides that, what do you mean when you say you plan to ‘make things right’?”

“Just what it sounds like. Give ’em a taste of their own medicine,” Luke said.

“You mean you plan to do the same thing to innocent folks over there, that the Jayhawkers have been doin’ over here? Are you goin’ to burn a few houses, and maybe shoot some women and kids? Because it’s for damn certain that you won’t be runnin’ into any of the ones who actually done this.”

“It just don’t seem right, Pa, to let ’em get away with it and do nothin’ at all.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right, son, and if you’ll think about it, you’ll see what I mean.”

“All right, Pa.”

“I tell you what. If you’re all that anxious to shoot somethin’, there’s a covey o’ quail down in the south pasture. I thought maybe me, you, ’n Kirby could go down there just after dawn tomorrow mornin’ and shoot a few of ’em. I’d love nothin’ better ’n a mess o’ fried quail, gravy, and biscuits. That is, if Pearl ’n Janey would cook ’em up for us.” Emmett winked at his wife.

“I’m not a very good cook, Pa. You know that,” Janey complained.

“It’s ’bout time you learned, don’t you think? You’re ’most a woman now, ’n you’ll be takin’ on a husband afore you know it. When you do, you’re goin’ to have to cook for ’im.”

“I’m not ever goin’ to have a husband, because I’m not ever goin’ to get married,” Janey said.

“Why not?”

“I have no intention of being a farmer’s wife.”

“What’s wrong with being a farmer’s wife?” Pearl asked sharply.

“Nothin’ at all is wrong with it, Ma, if all you want to do is stay home, cook for your husband, and raise a passel of brats. But no, ma’am. That just ain’t somethin’ I want to do. I don’t plan on staying around here. I’m goin’ somewhere exciting, like New Orleans, or St. Louis, or maybe even Chicago.”

“Well, right now you are in Stone County, Missouri,” Emmett said. “And, whether you ever get married or not, you’re goin’ to learn to cook, if for no other reason than I told you to. And you can start tomorrow.”

“What makes you think you’ll get anything, anyway? Arnold Parker and a couple of others from school went quail hunting last week, and they didn’t get anything.”

“They aren’t Jensens,” Emmett said easily.

The Ozark Mountains could have been an artist’s palette, alive as they were with color—yellow, orange, red, green, and brown. A crisp coolness to the morning could be felt as Kirby, his father, and brother walked across a recently harvested cornfield. Somewhere a woodpecker drummed against a tree, the rapid staccato beat of its beak echoing through the woods.

Suddenly, a brace of quail flew up in front of them, filling the air with the loud flutter of their wings. Quickly and smoothly, Kirby brought the double-barrel twelve-gauge shotgun to his shoulder and pulled first one trigger, then the other.

The double boom of the exploding cartridges caused the sounds of nature to pale in comparison. Feathers flew from two birds as they tumbled from the sky.

“Good shooting, Kirby!” Emmett shouted as the boy started forward to retrieve his two birds.

An hour . . .