Rage of the Mountain Man (18 page)

Smoke Jensen jammed hard knuckles into the ribcage of his attacker. The longshoreman grunted and gave a twist of his hook that tore the Peacemaker out of Smoke’s right hand. Although everyone agreed that there was no backdown in Smoke Jensen, he did make a tactical retreat to regain balance and fill his hand with his other sixgun. Incorrectly sensing weakness, the hard-faced dock worker pushed his slim advantage.

A bad mistake, he soon learned, when the tip of his weapon snagged the front of Smoke Jensen’s coat and bit on through to the shirt. An instant later, fire literally blasted into his gut as Smoke triggered another shot. Hot gases, burning flecks of powder, and of course a 240-grain lead slug blew through the hole that had been made in his belly. A vicious yank downward on the hook ripped apart Smoke’s clothing and left a thin red line on his chest.

It turned out to be the final act of a dying man. His eyes rolled up and the stevedore gave a terrible shudder, then fell into Smoke’s arms. Lacking any sympathy for the would-be murderer, and intent on maintaining a whole skin, Smoke dropped him at once. He turned to find the others attacking Oliver Johnson.

“Behind you, Ollie,” Smoke barked, as he raised the Colt into action again.

Oliver Johnson did something Smoke Jensen would never have imagined could work: he raised his gun arm and bent it backward over his shoulder. The small .38 barked loudly and a hole appeared under the nose of his assailant. Smoke’s .45 blasted a fraction of a second later.

His bullet found a home in tender flesh, which ended the career of a budding dockside thug. “Thanks, I needed that,” Oliver Johnson called out cheerily.

His jovial manner, coupled with Smoke Jensen’s deadly efficiency, put the survivors to flight. Smoke started at once for the door to the warehouse. “If Sally is here, we’ll find her,” he promised. He didn’t even notice the missing Seamas O’Boyle.

Seamas O’Boyle had crawled through the doorway into the warehouse and took long, painful seconds to pull himself upright. He staggered as he hurried to the small office cubicle where his boss held the woman captive. The long, oily locks of his jet-black hair hung in dirty disarray. He had a wild-eyed appearance when he burst through the door and confronted Sean O’Boyle.

“Well? Is it over, then?” O’Boyle asked, eyes glassy from drink.

“Yeah. Only, not like you’d expected, it ain’t. They’re all down. Every man-jack of them. That Smoke Jensen is a terror. An’ there was two of them.”

O’Boyle blanched. He didn’t think for even a second about using Sally Jensen as a hostage. “We’ve gotta get out of here, we do,” he blurted, coming unsteadily to his feet.

“There’s a back way,” Connor O’Fallon suggested.

“Damn it, man, don’t you think I know that?” O’Boyle snapped.

“We had best be takin' it, we had.”

“What about the woman?” Seamas Quern asked.

“Leave her. She’d only slow us down.”

“Yer the boss, Sean,” Quern allowed.

Quickly the trio left the office. Only they didn’t move quite fast enough. Their leather brogues made loud, clicking sounds on the hard oak planks of the warehouse floor. From the direction of the quayside door they heard a sharp exclamation.

“There they go, Smoke.”

Twin muzzle blooms winked in the darkened building. A bullet cracked past uncomfortably close to the ear of Sean O’Boyle. It did a great lot toward sobering him. He turned to run backward while he emptied the five shots in his diminutive .32 Smith and Wesson. Fired by a booze-soaked, frightened man, the small lead pellets struck at random, without doing harm.

Smoke Jensen fired again, to be rewarded by a startled cry when the .45 slug tore a gouge in Sean O’Boyle’s right ear. Smoke and Oliver began to run now, guided by the dim yellow glow of a lamp in the office. Smoke ignored the fleeing felons. Only one goal directed him.

He had to know the whereabouts of Sally. Would he find her still alive in that office? Anger and anxiety distracted him from the idea of apprehending the culprits. Chances were, he could find them later. First, he had to locate Sally and free her.

In his haste to depart, Sean O’Boyle had roughly shoved the castored chair to which Sally Jensen had been tied out of the way, into the shadows, between two tall, wooden file cabinets. After the principal conspirators had hastily departed, Sally sat in apprehension as she heard gunshots and shouts from outside. Running footsteps faded in her ears, to be replaced by the clump of fast-moving boots approaching. Only which belonged to whom?

Suddenly the door flew open and a broad-shouldered figure dived inside, its progress led by the muzzle of a .45 Colt. The force of the entry dislodged the coal-oil lamp from the desk. It fell to the floor and smashed, the wick drowned to darkness in a flood of kerosene. Her heart surged in her chest. It had to be her beloved Smoke. A moment later she had confirmation as his familiar profile rose in silhouette above a desk, head swiveling to let his eyes take in the entire room.

With her lips sealed by a bandage made of a man’s shirt-tail and sticking plaster, Sally had no means of calling out to her husband. Her hands had been tied to the arms of the chair and her feet bound together. She thought frantically of some means of letting him know where she was. When it came to her in a flash of embarrassed enlightenment, she cursed herself silently for not seeing it at first. All she had to do was kick one of the file cabinets.

Sally’s initial thumps had a muffled quality. Her captors had removed her shoes. Well, damn it, she thought, and let go a stronger kick. A sharp pain shot up her legs from her toes, although she was much different today from the eastern tenderfoot who had married the handsome mountain man so long ago.

“Sally? Is that you?” Smoke’s deep, familiar voice demanded.

“Ummf! Mugguh! Aaaugh!”
Sally tried to respond through her gag.

Smoke came to her in a rush. He bent and swiftly cut through the bonds that restrained her hands, then knelt to slice the heavy cord that secured her ankles. Then he rose again and put gentle fingers to the sides of her mouth.

“This is going to smart some,” he advised her.

Then he edged the corner of the sticking plaster away from her skin, peeled back enough to get a good grasp, and yanked with a swift, sure movement. Sally yelped at the insult to her skin, then sprang into Smoke’s arms. Her legs would not hold her and her fingers had gone numb long ago. She clung, though, while Smoke hugged her back.

“You could have taken that nasty thing out of my mouth

first,” she made mock complaint. “At least that way I could have told you my arms and legs were numb.”

“It’s all right, Sal. You’re safe now,” Smoke told her, as he nuzzled her graceful neck.

“I may be, but you’re not,” Sally snapped back, more in her normal mode.

“Those who could ran away,” Smoke rejected her worry. “That’s not what I mean.” Quickly Sally recounted what the inebriated Sean O’Boyle had said about Phineas Lathrop and his grand design on the High Lonesome. “That terrible man O’Boyle said Lathrop plans to make his headquarters at the Sugarloaf,” she wound down. “To do that, he knew he had to have you killed. In fact, that avalanche was planned to kill us both.”

“His men have tried a couple of times since, and failed. I don’t imagine we’ll see Mr. O’Boyle again.”

“There’s more, Smoke, honey. Lathrop is related to someone who came very near to killing you. He’s half-brother to Rex Davidson, and considers this a personal affair between you and him.”

Smoke looked at her hard, trying to read her expression in the dimness of the office. “I’ll worry about that later. Now, let’s get you out of here.”

None of the trio who fled the warehouse could be called coward. Sean O’Boyle had grown up on the wharfs and docks of Boston, a scrapper and hard-nose almost from birth. His widowed mother and an uncle had brought him there from County Cork, after his father had been killed in one of the uprisings. He’d never lost his brogue nor his old country manner of speech. Neither had Connor O’Fallon, who had come to American with one of his older brothers, a priest, and had immediately gone wild. He and Sean O’Boyle had fought back-to-back as boys, carving out a place for themselves among the other waifs of Boston’s waterfront.

Early on they had attracted a follower in the form of Seamas Quern. Seamas was some four years younger, the son of a waterfront whore and a visiting Irish sailor. He had been on his own since he was old enough to walk and feed himself. By the age of thirteen, he’d led one wing of Sea O’Boyle’s mob of street hustlers, pickpockets, and sneak-thieves. As they grew older, their crimes became more serious and more violent. All three had killed grown men before they’d reached their fifteenth birthdays.

When, at 18, most Irish lads of recent immigration looked toward the Army Recruiting Office for a means out of the squalor of the East Coast tenement neighborhoods, Sean O’Boyle and those of his gang, which now numbered close to fifty, turned to the piers to improve their standard of living. They did that by stealing from the ships, from the docks, and out of the warehouses where they worked. All three had served time in Railford by the time they reached the majority. They had also accumulated considerable wealth by their standards.

It was along about then that first Rex Davidson, then his half-brother, Phineas Lathrop, took Sean O’Boyle as a protege. The relationship had not been one made in heaven. Even so, O’Boyle now sat at the head of a union of 350 longshoremen and stevedores, nearly half of whom were hardened criminals.

With a little coaching from Lathrop, O’Boyle and his thugs steadily bled the ship owners, shipping companies, warehouse owners, and merchants of Boston for a healthy share of the profits. These added costs brought on by the pillage naturally had to be passed on to customers on everything brought into Boston by ship.

Sale of the pilfered merchandise—sometimes items as large as whole cargo pallets of lumber—contributed significantly to the coffers of Phineas Lathrop and had financed the initial stages of his western dream of an empire of crime. Only two flaws marred Lathrop’s grand design.

First, so accustomed were Phineas Lathrop and his partners, associates, and henchmen to the manner of “doing business” in the East—everyone seemed to have his hand out and could be counted on to look the other way when the palm was properly crossed with silver—that they could not see that things were done differently in the West. Not even when they were presented with deadly evidence of it.

The second flaw was Smoke Jensen. Determined to carry out their assigned task of eliminating the famous gunfighter, the three hard cases set out to locate more of their men. Three blocks from the warehouse, they came upon fifteen of O’Boyle’s bully-boys.

“Go on to Seventh Street,” O’Boyle commanded. He added a description of Smoke and Sally Jensen, and Seamas Quern contributed details on Oliver Johnson. “Seamas, you go back with them,” he added, much to Quern’s disappointment. “I want ye to make sure not a one of them leaves there alive,” O’Boyle concluded ominously.

While they made a hasty exit from the warehouse, Smoke Jensen introduced Sally to Oliver Johnson. He immediately became “Ollie” to her. They had only rounded the shoreward end of the building when sixteen burly longshoremen appeared inside the gate.

“There they are!” a voice shouted. “Let’s get ’em, boys.” Smoke Jensen made an immediate estimate of the situation. “Back to the warehouse. We’ll have a better chance there.”

Sally Jensen found she could not run fast enough to keep up with Ollie Johnson. Smoke slowed his pace to keep beside her. A bullet sped by them, well off target, followed by the crack of a small-caliber revolver.

“These easterners are the lousiest shots I’ve ever seen,” Smoke observed to Oliver.

“Not much opportunity for practice in the big cities,” the reporter informed Smoke.

“I can see that,” Smoke agreed, as they banged through a narrow doorway. “But I’d think they could go out in the country and improve their skill.”

“Most of that bunch would be lost a mile away from the Charles River. Besides, do you seriously want them to be better marksmen?”

Smoke laughed. “You have me there.”

He called for a stop to check the loads in their weapons. Smoke had retrieved his primary .45 and reloaded before they set off. Now he tended to the iron in its cross-draw rig. Oliver Johnson frowned as he groped in a pocket for loose cartridges.

“Damn, I didn’t count on a protracted gunfight,” the Boston
Herald
staffer complained to himself.

“Does that thing chamber thirty-eight Long Colt, Ollie?” Sally asked sweetly. “I have half a box in my purse.”

Ollie gave her a startled look in the twilight dimness of the warehouse. “No, damn it. It’s a Smith.” He groped again in his coat pocket. “I have enough rounds for two reloads, Smoke,” he announced.

“I’m not much better off. I’m glad you have your Lightning along, Sal. How is it they didn’t take it off you?”

“Never knew I had it. They might be a pack of hardened criminals, but being easterners, they wouldn’t think of a lady carrying a gun.”

Oliver Johnson gaped openly at Sally Jensen: A loud banging and muffled curses announced the arrival of the fresh pack of thugs at the door. Smoke had had the presence of mind to slide the bar before they’d delved into the darkness of the warehouse.

“That won’t hold them long,” Smoke announced. “I suggest we find places among these stacks of cargo and make them come to us. Sally, dear, it might be better if you took up a place above, on that catwalk.”

“Think I’ve forgotten how to hit what I shoot at?” she asked testily.

“No, damn it, I only want you out of the way of any danger.”

Sally produced a hint of a pout. “I’ve handled worse bastards than this pack,” she snapped.

“You’re our back-up, all right?” Smoke barked back at her.

She scurried off to the cast-iron stairway at the other side of the building. Oliver Johnson found a convenient hiding place atop a mound of tarpaulin-covered machine parts. Smoke Jensen surveyed the positions, made careful note of where Sally hunkered down behind a concealing plank on the catwalk, then faded into the mounds of unidentified items.