Cunning of the Mountain Man Read Free

down the mahogany to where Payne Finney stood doing serious damage to a bottle of Waterfill-Frazier.
    “Is Quint Stalker in town?”
    Payne Finney gave the sheriff a cold, gimlet stare. “I wouldn’t know.”
    “I find that odd, considerin’ you’re his—ah—foreman, so’s to speak.”
    “I’ve got me a terrible mem’ry, when it comes to talkin’ with lawdogs.”
    Sheriff Reno gave a friendly pat to Finney’s shoulder. “Come now, Finney, we’re workin’ on the same side, as of. . . uh . . .” He consulted the big, white face with the black Roman numerals in the hexagonal, wooden case of the Regulator pendulum clock over the bar. “Ten minutes ago.”
    Finney’s cool gaze turned to fishy disbelief. “That so, huh? Name me some names.”
    Jake Reno bent close to Payne Finney’s ear and lowered his voice. The names came out in the softest of whispers. Finney heard them well enough and nodded.
    “I guess you wouldn’t know them, if you weren’t mixed up in it. What is it you want?”
    Sheriff Reno spoke in a hearty fashion after gulping his whiskey. “Thing is, of late, I’ve come to not trust the justice system to always function in the desired way”
    “That a fact, Sheriff?” Finney shot back, toying with the lawman. “And you such a fine, upstanding pillar of the law. Now, what is it you don’t trust about the way justice is done in the Territory?”
    “Well, there’s more of these smooth-talking lawyers comin’ out here from back East. They got silver tongues that all too often win freedom for men who should damn-well hang.”
    “You may have a point,” Finney allowed cautiously.
    “Of course, I do. An’ it’s time something was done about it.”
    “Such as what?”
    “Well, you take that jasper I’ve got locked up right now. Think how it would distress that poor Widow Tucker if some oily haired, silver-tongued devil twisted the facts an’ got him off scot-free? It’d vex her mightily, you can be sure.”
    “What are you suggesting?” Finney pressed, certain he would enjoy the answer.
    “Depends on whether you think you’re the man to be up to it. For my part, I’d sleep a lot better knowin’ some alternative means had been thought up to see that Smoke Jensen gets the rope he deserves.”
Two
    Ranch hands, local idlers, and a scattering of strangers crowded into the two saloons closest to the Socorro jail by midafternoon. Talk centered on only one topic—the killer the sheriff had locked up in the hoosegow.
    “That back-shooter’s needin’ some frontier justice, you ask me,” a florid-faced, paunchy man in a brocaded red vest and striped pants declared hotly from the front of the bar in the Hang Dog Saloon.
    “Damn right, Hub,” the man on his left agreed.
    Several angry, whiskey-tinged voices rose in furtherance of this outcome. Payne Finney kept the fires stoked as he flitted from group to group in the barroom. “This Smoke Jensen is a crazy man. He’s killed more’n three hunnard men, shot most in the back, like poor Lawrence Tucker.”
    Finney added to his lies as he joined a trio of wranglers at the back end of the bar. “Remember when it was in the papers how he killed Rebel Tyree?” He put an elbow to the ribs of one cowhand and winked. “In the back. Not like the paper said, but in the back.”
    “Hell, I didn’t even know you could read, Payne.”
    “Shut up, Tom. You never got past the fourth grade, nohow. I tell you, this Jensen is as bloodthirsty as Billy Bonney.”
    “Bite yer tongue, Finney,” Tom snapped. “Billy Bonney is much favored in these parts. He done right by avengin’ Mr. Tunstill.”
    Payne Finney gave Tom Granger a fish eye. “And who’s gonna avenge Mr. Lawrence Tucker?”
    “Why, the law’ll see to that.”
    “An’ pigs fly, Tom. You can take my word for it, somethin’ ought to be done.”
    “You talkin’ lynch law, Payne?” The question came from a big, quiet man standing at a table in the middle of the