Last Mountain Man Read online

  Last Mountain Man

  Johnstone, William W.

  The Last Mountain Man

  William W. Johnstone

  An [ e - reads ] Book

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 1984 by William W. Johnstone

  First e-reads publication 1999

  www.e-reads.com

  ISBN 0-7592-0455-1

  Author Biography

  Bill Johnstone has been the leading author in Kensington’s line of men’s adventure fiction for more than 25 years. Besides the four long-running adventure series (“Mountain Man,” “The First Mountain Man,” “Ashes” and “Eagles”) he has also written more than a dozen novels on suspense and horror themes. Always on the cutting edge, Johnstone has had his own author website for several years now. He lives in Shrevesport, Louisiana.

  Other works by William W. Johnstone also available in e-reads editions

  Out of the Ashes

  We were victims of circumstances. We were drove to it.

  Cole Younger, 1876

  Author’s note: The mountains and valleys and creeks and springs described in this novel are real. The rendezvous of aging mountain men at Bent’s Fort reportedly did take place around 1865. The grave with the gold buried alongside the man supposedly exists, but it is not at Brown’s Hole. To the best of my knowledge there is no town in Idaho called Bury. The story is pure Western fiction, and any resemblance to actual living persons is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Epilogue

  The Last Mountain Man

  Prologue

  He was sixteen when his father returned from that bloody insurrection known to the North as the Civil War. The War Between the States to those who wore the gray.

  Kirby Jensen was almost a man grown at sixteen, for he had worked the farm during his father’s absence, taking over all the work when his mother fell ill and was confined to bed.

  And it had been backbreaking work, attempting to scratch a living out of the rocky Ozark Mountain earth of southwestern Missouri. There never was enough food. The boy was thin, but rawhide tough, for the work had hardened his muscles and the pure act of survival had sharpened his mind. His hands were large and callused from using an axe, handling trace chains on the mule team, and manhandling rocks from the rolling acres of land he, and he alone, had farmed since age twelve.

  It was June, 1865; the war had been over and done for better than two months. If his father was coming home, he should be along anytime, now. If he was coming home.

  Kirby wondered what his Pa would say when he learned his daughter had run off with a peddler? He wondered if he knew his oldest boy was dead? And he wondered what his reaction would be when Kirby told him of Ma’s dying?

  The plow hit a rock and jolted the boy back to his surroundings, popping his teeth together and wrenching his arms.

  The boy swore. Made him feel more grown-up to cuss a little.

  He unhooked the plow, running the lines through the eyes of the singletree, and left the plow sitting in the middle of the field. He was late getting the crops in, but no later than anyone else in the hollows and valleys of this part of Missouri. The rains had come, and stayed, making field work impossible. But he had to try to get something up.

  It was a matter of survival.

  Folding and shortening the traces, Kirby jumped on the back of one of the big Missouri Reds, the one called Ange, and kicked the mule into movement. It really didn’t make any difference how much you kicked ol’ Ange, for the mule would prod along at its own pace, oblivious to the thumping heels in its side. But if you kicked too much, ol’ Ange would dump a body on his butt, then stand over you and bray, kind of like mule laughter. Made you feel like a fool.

  Then you had a devil of a time getting back on Ange.

  Kirby plodded down the turn row on the east side of the field. Dust from the road caught his eyes. One rider pulling up to the house, leading a saddleless, riderless horse. A bay. The boy touched the smooth butt of the Navy .36 stuck behind his wide belt. A man just couldn’t be too careful these days, what with some of those Kansas Jayhawkers still around, killing and looting and raping. But, he reminded himself, some of the Missouri Redlegs were just as bad as the Jayhawkers. Seems like war brought out the poison in some and the good in others.

  Kirby’s father hadn’t held much with slavery, but he did feel a state had a right to set and uphold its own laws, so he had ridden off to fight with the Gray. His Pa’s brother, up in Iowa, whom Kirby had not seen but one time in his life, was a farmer, like most of the Jensen men. But he had marched off to fight with the Blue. He had gotten killed, so Kirby had heard, in Chancellorsville, back in ’63.

  At sixteen, Kirby didn’t believe a man had the right to keep another in chains, as a slave, although there hadn’t been much of that in this part of Missouri: everybody was too poor, just a day to day struggle keeping body and soul together.

  But he did believe, like this father, probably because of his father, that the government in far-off Washington on the river didn’t have the right to tell a state what it could and couldn’t do in all matters.

  Didn’t seem right.

  Had Kirby been old enough, and not had his Ma to look after, he would have ridden for the Gray.

  As Ange plodded closer to the house, Kirby could make out the figure in the front yard. It was his father.

  One

  “Boy,” Emmett Jensen said looking at his son, “I swear you’ve grown two feet.”

  Kirby had slid off Ange and walked to the man. “You’ve been gone four years, Pa.” He wanted to throw his arms around his Pa, but didn’t, ’cause his Pa didn’t hold with a lot of touching between men. Kirby stuck out his hand and his Pa shook it.

  “Strong, too,” Emmett commented.

  “Thank you, Pa.”

  “Crops is late, Kirby.”

  “Yes, sir. Rains come and stayed.”

  “I wasn’t faultin’ you, boy.” Emmett let his eyes sweep the land. He coughed, a dry hacking. “I seen a cross on the hill overlookin’ the creek. Would that be your Ma?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When’d she pass?”

  “Spring of last year. Doc Blanchard said it was her lungs and a bad heart.” And grief, the boy thought, but kept that to himself.

  “She go hard?”

  “No, sir. Went on in her sleep. I found her the next morning when I brung her coffee and grits.”

  “Good coffee’s scarce. What’d you do with the coffee?”

  “Drank it,” the boy replied honestly. “Then went to get the doc.”

  “Right nice service?”

  “Folks come from all over to see her off.”

  Emmett cleared his throat and then coughed. “Well, I think I’ll go up to the hill and sit with your ma for a time. You put up them horses and rub them down. We’ll talk over supper.”

  Emmett’s eyes flicked over the .36 stuck beh
ind his son’s belt. He said nothing about it.

  “Pa?”

  The father looked at his son.

  “I’m glad you’re back.”

  The father stepped forward, put his arms around his son, and held him.

  Over greens and fried squirrel and panbread, the father and son ate and talked through the years that they had both lost and gained. There were a few moments of uncomfortable silence between them until they both adjusted to the time and place, and then they were once more father and son.

  “We done our best,” Emmett said. “Can’t nobody say we didn’t. And there ain’t nobody got nothing to be ashamed of. I thought it wrong for the Yankees to burn folks’ homes like they did. But it was war, and terrible things happen in war. But the bluebellies just kept on comin’. Shoot one and five’d take his place. They weren’t near ’bout the riflemen we was, nor the riders, but they whipped us fair and square and now it’s time to put all that behind us and get on with livin’.” He sopped a piece of panbread through the juice of his greens. He chewed for a time. “You know your brother, Luke, is dead, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. I didn’t know if you did, or not. I heard he was killed in the Wilderness, last year. Fightin’ with Lee, wasn’t he?”

  Luke had always been Pa’s favorite, so Kirby had felt.

  Emmett nodded. “Yeah. Tryin’ to get back to the Wilderness, so I heard.” Something in his eyes clouded, as if he knew more about his son’s death than he was telling. “I don’t see no sign of your sister, Janey, and you ain’t brought up her name. What are you holding back, Kirby?”

  The moment the boy had been dreading. “She run off, Pa. Last year. Run off with a tinker, so he called himself. But he was a gambler, I’d say.”

  “Smooth-talker, I’d wager.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’d his hands look like?”

  “Soft.”

  “Gambler. How’d your Ma take it?”

  “Hard.”

  “Probably helped kill her.” He said it flatly, then shook his head. “Well, past is past, no point dwellin’ on it.” He rose from the table. “I’ve ridden a piece these last weeks — wanted to get home. Now I’m home, and I’m tired. Reckon you are, too, son. We’ll get some sleep, talk in the morning. I got a plan.” He covered his mouth and coughed.

  Breakfast was meager: fried mush and coffee that was mostly chicory. A piece of leftover panbread.

  “I don’t think it good to stay here, boy,” Emmett said, surprising the boy. “Too many memories. Land’s got too many rocks to farm. I think it best for us to pack it up, sell what we can, and head west. We’ll sell the mules, buy some pack horses. The mules is gettin’ too old for where we’re goin’. What is today, boy?”

  “Wednesday, Pa.” West! he thought. The frontier he’d read about in the dime novels. Buffalo and mountain men. Then he sobered as he thought: Indians on the warpath.

  Emmett pushed his plate from him and put his elbows on the table. “We’ll ride into town today, boy. Ask around some. Kirby, I brought that bay out yonder home for you.”

  Kirby mumbled his thanks, pleased but embarrassed. He had never had such a grand gift.

  “How far you been from this holler, boy?”

  “A good piece, Pa. I went to Springfield once. Took us a good bit of travelin’ to get there, too.”

  Seventy miles.

  Emmett stuffed his pipe and lit it, then pushed his rawhide-bottomed chair back and looked at his son. “Toward the end of the war, Kirby, some Texicans and some mountain men joined up with us. Them mountain men had been all the way to the Pacific Ocean; but they talked a lot about a place the Shoshone Indians call I-dee-ho. Or something like that. I’d like to see it, and all the country between here and there. I been all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, boy — you never seen so much water. You just got no idea how big this country is. But west is where the people’s got to go. I figure we’ll just head on out that way, too.”

  “Pa? How will we know when we get to where it is we’re goin’?”

  “We’ll know,” the man replied, a mysterious quality to his voice, as if he was holding back from his son.

  Kirby met his father’s eyes. “Whatever you say. Pa.”

  They pulled out the following Sunday morning, just as the sun was touching the eastern rim of the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. Kirby rode the bay, sitting on a worn-out McClellan saddle; not the most comfortable saddle ever invented. The saddle had been bought from a down-on-his-luck Confederate soldier trying to get back to Louisiana.

  In Kirby’s saddlebags, in addition to an extra pair of trousers, shirt, long handle underwear, and two pairs of socks, a worn McGuffey’s reader his Pa had purchased for a penny — much to Kirby’s disgust. He thought he was all done with schooling.

  The boy had no way of knowing that his education was just beginning.

  The McGuffey’s reader was heavy on his mind. As they rode, he turned to his father. “I can read and cipher.” He knew his protests would fall on deaf ears. Once his father made up his mind, forget any objections … just do it.

  “I ’spect you can,” Emmett said, his eyes still on the little valley below them. His eyes lifted, touching the now tiny cross on the faraway knoll. He touched his boot heels to his mount and father and son headed west. “What’s a verb?”

  Kirby looked at him. “Huh? I mean, sir?”

  “A verb, boy. Tell me what it is.”

  Kirby frantically searched his memory. “Well,” he admitted. “Reckon I forgot. You brung it up, so you tell me.”

  “Don’t sass me, boy.” But there was a twinkle in the father’s eyes. “I asked you first.”

  “Then I reckon we’ll find out together, Pa.”

  “I reckon we will at that, boy.” Emmett turned once, twisting in the saddle to look for the last time at the cross on the knoll. He straightened in the saddle, assuming the cavalryman’s stiff-backed position. He asked his son, “You got any regrets, Kirby? Leavin’ this place, I mean.”

  “Hard work, not always enough food, Jayhawkers, Yankees, cold winters, and some bad memories,” the boy replied honestly, as was his fashion. “If that’s regrets, I’m happy to leave them behind.”

  Emmett’s reply was unusually soft. “You was just a boy when I pulled out with the Grays. I reckon I done you and your Ma a disservice — like half a million other men done their loved ones. I didn’t leave you no time for youthful foolishness; no time to be a young boy. You had to be a man at twelve. I don’t know if I can make up for that, but I aim to try. From now on, son, it’ll be you and me.” For a little while, he silently added. He coughed.

  Together they rode, edging slightly northward as they went. They skirted Joplin, a town on the Ozark plateau. It was a young town, only twenty-five years old in 1865. Joplin had a few years to go before it would become the metropolis of a three-state lead and zinc field. Kirby wanted to ride in and see the town; the only other big town he’d ever seen was Springfield. But his father refused, said there were dens of iniquity in there.

  “What’s a den of in … in … what’d you say, Pa?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough, I reckon.”

  “Why don’t you tell me, Pa?”

  “’cause I ain’t of a mind to, that’s why.” The father seemed embarrassed.

  “Sure must be something pretty danged good.”

  Emmett smiled. “Some folks would say so, I’m sure. Never been to one myself. And don’t cuss. It ain’t seemly and you might slip and do so around a lady. Ladies don’t like cussin’.”

  “You say hell’s fire, Pa,” he reminded.

  “That’s different.”

  “How come?”

  “Boy, you sure ask a lot of questions. Worrisome.”

  “Well, how else am I to learn?”

  “I can cuss now and then ’cause I’m older than you, that’s why.”

  “How long will it be ’fore I can cuss, Pa?”

  The father shook his head an
d hacked his dry cough. “Lord have mercy on a poor veteran and give me strength.” But he was smiling as he said it.

  They had left the cool valleys and hills of Missouri, with rushing creeks and shade trees. They rode into a hot Kansas summer. Only four years into the Union, much of Kansas was unsettled, with almost the entire western half the territory of the Kiowa and Pawnee; the Kiowa to the south, the Pawnee to the north.

  The pair rode slowly, the pack horses trailing from lead ropes. The father and son had no deadline to meet, no place in particular to go … or so the boy thought.

  They crossed through Osage country without encountering any hostile Indians. They saw a few — and probably a lot more saw them than they realized — but those the father and son spotted were always at a distance, or were not interested in the pair.

  “They may be huntin’,” Emmett said. “I hear tell Indians is notional folks. Hard for a white man to understand their way of life. I’m told the same band that might leave us alone today, might try to kill us tomorrow.”

  “Why, Pa?”

  “Damned if I know, boy.”

  “You cussin’ again.”

  “I’m older.”

  When they reached the Arkansas River, later on that afternoon, Emmett pulled them up and made camp early.

  “We got ample powder and shot and paper cartridges, boy. I figure more’n we’ll need to get through. According to them I talked with, from here on, it gets mean.”

  “How’s that. Pa?”

  “We’re headin’ west and north as we go. Like this,” he drew a line in the dirt with a stick. “This’ll take us, I hope, right between the Kiowa and the Pawnee. The white man’s been pushin’ the Indian hard the past few years, takin’ land the Indians say belongs to them. The savages is gettin’ right ugly about it, so I’m told.”

  “Who does the land belong to, Pa?”