Rage of the Mountain Man (8 page)

“You brute!” Priscilla screeched, and made to rake Waldron’s face with her long nails.

“No, Miss Priscilla,” Sally cautioned firmly. “It would only get you hurt also.”

“You’ve got some smarts, Miss Sally,” Waldron offered.

While Priscilla Henning recovered her demeanor, Sally bored hot blue eyes into Waldron. “You still haven’t told us your names. With those masks on, we don’t know a thing about you.”

Rucker and Dorne snickered. “That’s the idea, Sally-gal,” Rucker said, as though informing her of something she did not know.

“Don’t see any harm in it, boys,” Waldron proclaimed. “M’name’s Buck Waldron. This is part of my gang. We rob trains for a living.”

“How odd,” Priscilla gave him. “Why do you rob trains?”

Buck Waldron shrugged. “Because they’re where the money is.”

Wincing at his atrocious grammar, Priscilla attempted to ignore the lewd stares of the other four. Sally Jensen tried again to bait Buck Waldron.

“I’m sure it takes men of abounding courage to menace two helpless young women.”

Buck scratched behind one ear. “Sally, you don’t talk like a maid. You sound more like someone used to giving a maid orders.”

Sally lowered her eyes and backed off. She had gone too far, she realized. “I suppose that after a number of years listening to my mistress’s orders, I’ve taken some of her ways of speaking.”

“There’s somethin’ rotten about people who have servants,” Waldron declared in a rare philosophical moment. “Enough of this,” he dismissed their testy confrontation. “Tell us where the valuables are kept and we’ll help ourselves.”

“There’s nothing, really,” Sally said, as she moved casually to the loveseat where she had concealed the .38 Colt.

“People like your ‘mistress,’” Waldron sneered the word Sally had used, “don’t travel without a lot of fussy stuff. That much I know. So, Sally-gal, be real good and tell us.”

Sally held her breath as she sank into the cushion. She sighed it out before answering, indicating her surrender. “Anything you might want can be found in their compartment.”

“Sally!” Priscilla cried in alarm at her newfound friend’s betrayal.

“Number Four,” Sally concluded, without a blink of an eye.

Silently, Sally prayed that Priscilla would not let relief flood over her face and give away the ruse. Surely, now that the train ran backward, Smoke would be here soon, she told herself. She tensed herself, primed for the right moment to bring her Lightning into play.

“Dorne, go get it,” Waldron commanded.

“I—ah—I got somethin’ else in mind, Buck. Here’s a tasty young thing just beggin’ to be loved proper. Stands to reason this sorry excuse of a husband can’t satisfy her.” “And you figure you can?” Waldron taunted.

“I
know
I can,” Dorne riposted hotly. “Gimme a chance and I’ll prove it.”

Buck Waldron considered that a moment. “Lovell, go fetch the jewels and cash. Go ahead, Dorne, have your try.” 

“No!”
Thomas Henning shouted suddenly, the by-play between the robbers registering on his dulled mind at last. He leaped to his feet and rushed at the one called Dorne.

Grinning, Drone waited until the slightly built Thomas close in to a suitable distance. Then he unloaded a hard-knuckled right uppercut that came out of the cellar. It closed Thomas’s rage-distorted mouth with a loud clop. The handsome young fashion plate stopped his charge in midstride as his head snapped back and his longish light brown hair swayed alarmingly. His green eyes rolled up in their sockets. A terrified scream came from Priscilla.

Thomas uttered a soft sigh and did a pratfall on the floor of the coach. Dorne turned away from him and started for Priscilla. Rucker left his place beside the bar and kicked Thomas in the chest to knock him flat. He twisted the waxed ends of his mustache on the face he revealed by removing his bandana and started in Sally’s direction.

“I think I’ll try a sample of sweet little Sally here,” he advised through a leer.

Smoke Jensen heard a terrified wail from inside the car on which he lay. Cautiously he worked his way to the dome of the skylight and peered inside. He saw the unconscious form of Thomas Henning stretched out below. Beyond, he observed the head and shoulders of a man nearly as big as himself, his back turned toward Smoke. Faintly, he heard soft, whimpering sounds rising from a point out of sight.

Then he caught sight of Sally’s dress and legs on the small loveseat near a window on the right side. That decided him. Smoke moved with all the speed he could and still remain silent. When he reached the proper position, he hooked his boot toes over a protruding grab-iron and lowered himself head first, arms in the lead.

Smoke popped into view, upside down, in the window nearest Sally. One man stood apart from the others in the room, his back to Smoke. The set of his shoulders indicated he waited impatiently for someone to appear out of the passageway. Smoke rotated his head and focused on two more hard cases who bent over the whimpering young Priscilla Henning. One of them fondled a breast, while the other pawed her body in obvious lust.

Then Sally saw Smoke. With effort, she kept a straight face, but winked to acknowledge him. A man started toward Sally and wiped a bandana off his face. Immediately Smoke pulled himself out of sight. He used powerful muscles developed over years of hard, demanding labor to handwalk back up the side of the car. When he was able, he grabbed onto a protrusion and pushed himself upright.

Swaying precariously, Smoke Jensen righted himself and got his boots under him. Stealthily he hastened to the place of his next planned appearance.

Rucker stepped over the prostrate form of Thomas Henning and advanced on Sally. Banning joined him and had snatched her left forearm when a shadow filled the largely glassed portion of the door to the observation platform. He looked up with a startled expression when it slammed open.

“Let go!” Smoke Jensen commanded with the voice of doom.

In the same second, Sally Jensen yanked her hand from the space between the cushion and the arm of the loveseat. She took quick aim with the .38 Colt Lightning and squeezed the double, action trigger. The Long Colt cartridge, far superior to the .38 Smith and Wesson, held plenty of punch for the 142-grain, round-nosed slug that splatted into Rucker’s chest and punched through his heart.

At the sound of the shot, Buck Waldron spun around in time to see his most trusted gunhawk bend forward as though making a courtly bow to the attractive woman beyond him. He saw the powder smoke rising between the two a moment before Banning reacted.

Smoke Jensen had not anticipated the shot from Sally at that particular point, though he did accurately gauge who would be first to recover. His own .45 Colt sounded loudly in the confined space of the parlor. Banning jolted from the impact, but continued to raise his sixgun. He got off a round that burned a painful swath along the outside point of Smoke’s shoulder.

He still tried to cock his weapon when Smoke Jensen sent him off to join Rucker with a swift, sure safety shot right between the eyes. Recocking, he pivoted and put a round through the elbow of a slow-moving Dorne, who had turned from his lewd fondling of Priscilla Henning.

Dorne howled and his shotgun went flying. Buck Waldron blinked at the incredible speed and accuracy and belatedly made his move.

His hand halted its downward thrust when Sally Jensen swung the muzzle of her deadly Lightning to cover him. “Uh-uh,” she grunted tersely.

Smoke Jensen had advanced two steps into the car by then and put another round into Dorne’s belly as the robber went for a holdout gun in the small of his back. Reflex powered Dorne’s legs as he did a backward leap that cleared the chair on which Priscilla sat. She let out a squeal of alarm.

With the odds rapidly diminishing, Smoke centered his muzzle on Miller, the other outlaw who sought to have his way with the bride. Priscilla’s eyes widened as she took in the deadly steel glint in Smoke’s eyes. She raised a hand as though to intercede for her attacker. At the same moment, Miller made a desperate try for his Colt.

Hot lead spat from the muzzle of Smoke’s .45. It pinwheeled the tough, rangey bandit, who absorbed the impact with a grunt and a blink. He hauled his iron clear of leather and fired in haste. His slug dug a hole in the flooring, two inches from Thomas Henning’s head.

Quickly Miller adjusted his aim as Smoke Jensen shot him again. For some reason it grew unusually dark for mid-morning. Miller felt overwhelmingly tired; he wanted to find a place for a nice snooze. To those watching, he sagged, reeled three steps, and dropped to his knees. Smoke turned his attention back to Buck Waldron.

In a crazed moment of desperation, Waldron tried his luck anyway. He cleared leather and swung his upper body at the hips to line up on Smoke Jensen, who had cast a quick glance over one shoulder at the vanquished Miller. The hammer came back noisily and Buck Waldron produced a nasty leer of triumph.

Sally’s second shot took Waldron in the upper flare of his hip bone. He howled in agony and completed his draw. Sally shot again and missed. Then Smoke’s Peacemaker boomed a third time.

Buck Waldron’s .45 made a dull thud when it hit the Oriental carpeting of the parlor section. Eyes wide; the pupils already rolling upward, he swayed on his feet, an expression of curious disbelief on his face as he idly reached up to cover the hole in his chest.

Incredibly, Miller summoned reserves in the elapsed time to try for Smoke Jensen’s back, now turned toward him. Another loud roar came from the door to the observation platform. Liam Quincannon stood, spread-legged, in the doorframe and cocked his weapon again, in case of need. He had none he saw as his slug struck Miller’s upper lip, directly under his nose; and hastened him off to whatever eternity held for his likes.

“What the hell!” Lovell blurted, as he exited from the compartment shared by Smoke and Sally, his arms full of baubles.

He dropped them at once, as Buck Waldron sank to his knees. Never a slouch at hauling out iron, Lovell managed to clear leather and have his weapon pointed in the general direction of Smoke Jensen when Smoke blew the last thoughts out of Lovell’s mind with a .45 bullet that shattered the back of the outlaw’s skull and exited with a stream of gore. Dying, Lovell triggered a round that popped a neat hole in the skylight dome before he fell, face-first, on the floor.

“I could have handled it,” Sally spoke with a mock pout.

“Of course you could, darling,” Smoke answered dryly.

Thomas Henning had regained consciousness in time to stare groggily as Smoke Jensen finished off Lovell. His dry-throated reaction came across gummy lips. “My lord, that’s barbaric, it’s . . . inhuman. How could you know the man didn’t intend to surrender?”

Smoke Jensen regarded him like a specimen from under a rock. “If he did, he picked a hell of a strange way to go about it.”

Then Thomas saw the still-smoking revolver in Sally’s hand. “You didn’t . . . use that, did you?” he gulped in horror.

Sally nodded affirmatively. “Killed one, wounded another,” she tallied her score.

Thomas Henning swallowed with difficulty and looked around him at the corpses and the welter of blood, bone, and tissue. “I think . . . I’m going ... to be sick,” he gulped out as he struggled to rise. His face ashen, he made an unsteady course through the parlor section and out onto the observation platform, where he bent over the safety rail and offered up his breakfast.

Liam Quincannon looked uncertainly from the young man he’d been paid handsomely to protect to Smoke Jensen. Smoke nodded to the eastern dandy, who continued to void the contents of his gut.

“No stomach for a fight, I’d say,” Smoke observed.

Sally groaned and Liam eyed him with twinkling amusement. “Me mither told me never to trust a man who made bad puns.”

“What did she say about men who made good puns?” Smoke asked, enjoying the exchange as tension eased out of him.

“Ah, the sainted dear,” Liam exclaimed. “She said never to trust them, either.”

He and Smoke began to laugh, to be interrupted by hysterical sobs from Priscilla Henning, who still sat between the corpses of the two men who had been molesting her. Smoke Jensen started her way when Thomas Henning recovered himself and brushed past him with a petulant snarl. “Don’t touch her, you depraved animal.”

New anger kindled in Smoke’s deep chest. This yellow-bellied punk had more than his share of nerve when the shooting was over. “Well, pardon the hell out of me, asshole,” Smoke sent after him.

Typical of his mouthy ilk, Thomas cringed, then ignored him. “I’m right here, darling. Let me help you out of this . . . this charnel house.”

“Don’t touch me, you spineless poltroon!” Priscilla wailed, her voice roughened by disgust, rather than the horror of her experience.

“But, dear one . . ." Thomas implored, as he recoiled in shock.

“If you had been man enough to accept a gun and fight like you should, Sally and I would never had been subjected to such degrading attentions.”

“But. . . but, you know how I hate those terribly wicked things,” Thomas offered ineffectually in a whine. “A truly civilized man is above the use of such animalistic means of settling disputes.”

Scorn darkened Priscilla’s tearstained face. “Sure as God made billy goats, it wasn’t your high-blown ideals that saved me from a fate worse than death. It was Smoke Jensen and his ‘terribly wicked’ guns.” She glanced at Sally, who had risen, her .38 Lightning still in hand. “And, of course, Sally and that cute little gun of hers.”

Cute? Smoke thought he’d been caught in a flashback. Did every woman think like Sally about that lady’s hand-cannon? He cut his eyes to his wife, who smirked like a cream-fed pussycat. Priscilla, it seemed, had only begun to warm to her topic.

Arctic ice filled her tone and her reddened eyes. “You’ve shown me a side of you I never suspected. Frankly, Thomas, I’m shocked and disappointed.”

Wounded, Thomas made a poor choice of means to plead his case. “How can you say that? Surely you cannot advocate such wanton taking of human life? Surely those men . . .
these
men,” he corrected with a weak wave at the sprawled bodies, “could have been reasoned into surrender.”