Free Pursuit Of The Mountain Man by William W. Johnstone Page A

badly frightened woman. Gunter snored in his Smoke-induced unconsciousness. “I want to be left alone, lady. That’s all I want. You people leave these mountains now. Do it tomorrow... first thing. I don’t want to see any of you women hurt. But if you keep on chasing me, odds are you’ll get hurt. You understand?”
    She nodded her head.
    Smoke turned her head with the biggest and hardest and roughest hands she had ever felt in her life. She looked at his guns. He had two in holsters, and two stuck down in his gunbelt. “Now what you’ll do, lady, is this: I’m leaving. You’re going to count to one hundred and then you can squall and holler all you want to. But if you start screaming before that real slow hundred count is over, I’m going to turn around and fill this tent so full of lead there isn’t a chance you won’t catch at least one slug. Do you understand all that?”
    Again, she nodded her head.
    Smoke lowered her head back to the silk pillows and pulled the covers up to her eyes. “Goodbye, your ladyship. I really hope I never see you again.”
    Then he was gone, moving silently through the rainy night.
    Maria lay in her warm blankets and dutifully counted to one hundred. Then she started bellowing like a lost calf in a hail storm.
    The camp was filled with men in various stages of dress and undress.
    “Smoke Jensen!” Maria screamed. “He was in my tent. He manhandled me and hit Gunter on the head.” Then she lost all her expensive finishing school training. “Five thousand dollars to the man who kills that son of a bitch!”
    The night erupted in gunfire, with nobody hitting anything except raindrops. But in the two minutes that Smoke had been gone, he had covered a lot of ground, far out of range of even the best rifle made. He had not heard Maria’s offer for his head. An hour later, Smoke had dried off, changed clothes, and was snug in his lean-to.
    He had built a hat-sized fire, boiled his coffee and fried some bacon, and then put out the fire. He leaned back amid the sweet-smelling boughs that lined the ground under his ground sheet and blankets.
    He chuckled. If he hadn’t been mistaken, Princess Maria had been so scared she had peed in her expensive drawers.
     
     
    The morning brought with it a mountain downpour. There was no way anybody was leaving camp in all this fury. Gunter was nursing a headache to go with the lump on the side of his head and Maria was still cussing, furious because a damn commoner had dared put his filthy hands on her.
    “You was right, John T.,” Utah said. “Jensen could have kilt a dozen of us last night. He’s lost it.”
    John T. nodded his head in agreement. “But it shore shook them noblepeople up, didn’t it. Even ol’ ramrod-up-the-butt von Hausen is lookin’ at Jensen in a different light. We got it made, Utah. Got it made, man!”
    But John T. was wrong about von Hausen’s different attitude.
    “Nothing that Jensen has done so far agrees with all the talk about him,” von Hausen told his group. “The man could have demoralized the camp last night. He could have killed a dozen men. He didn’t. Why?”
    Gunter shook his head and grimaced at the pain.
    Hans shrugged his shoulders.
    Maria cussed.
    “He hasn’t lost his nerve, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Marlene said. “That took a lot of cold nerve to come into an armed camp.”
    “Oh, no,” Frederick said. “He still has plenty of courage. But he can’t kill anymore!”
    That got everybody’s attention.
    “Add it up. That chap we met on the trail several days back. He told us about that young hooligan in that saloon back south that braced Smoke. According to what the drifter heard, Smoke refused to be goaded into fighting him; actually walked away from the young hoodlum. A gambler killed the loud-mouth moments later. And that thug, Tom Lilly. That old drunk said Smoke shot him in the arm. Smoke Jensen never shot anybody in the arm in his life. He fired at us the other day.