Rage of the Mountain Man by William W. Johnstone

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