“Yep, when I kicked you and knocked you over, you busted somethin’ in your back when you fell,” Preacher went on. “You won’t ever walk again. We can leave you alive here, but I reckon that ain’t somethin’ I’d want if I was in your place. I’d rather get it over with quick-like.”
The man closed his eyes. More tears ran down his cheeks. He nodded. Sounds came from him. Preacher could tell he was trying to form words—curses, maybe, or prayers—but his broken jaw wouldn’t let him. He kept his eyes closed, so he didn’t see it when Preacher stood up and nodded to Hawk.
They finished breaking camp and departed not long after that, heading north and leaving eight dead men behind them.
CHAPTER 2
Jefferson Scarrow lifted his head and listened. He thought he heard faint reports of gunfire drifting in from a good distance away to the south, but in the mountains, being sure of such a thing was difficult. The steep slopes and the narrow, wooded valleys played tricks with sound.
If he was right, though, quite a bit of shooting was going on. The thought of that put a faint smile on the man’s slightly lantern-jawed face. His men would return later in the morning bearing a good load of pelts . . . if all went according to plan.
Scarrow knelt beside the fire and poured himself another cup of coffee. Men went busily about their tasks around him, but he didn’t pay much attention to the bustle of activity. He was thinking about money, and when such thoughts occupied Jefferson Scarrow’s head, not much room remained for anything else.
“Damn it, Jeff. The fellas are gettin’ impatient. They can understand you wantin’ first crack at that squaw, but you ain’t lettin’ anybody else enjoy her nor havin’ sport with her yourself.”
The gravelly voice broke into Scarrow’s mental ciphering. He had been trying to add up how much money they would make by selling all the pelts they planned to gather this season, once they got back to St. Louis. As the enticing figures evaporated from Scarrow’s brain, he turned his head to glare up at his unofficial second in command, Hogarth Plumlee.
With a name like Hogarth, folks just naturally called him Hog, and in one of life’s appropriate coincidences, the name suited him. He was short and broad and pink-skinned—he had never tanned despite years of being outdoors—and his large, tipped-up nose resembled a snout. Also like a hog, Plumlee would eat anything put before him, and a thick layer of dirt caked his clothes and his body. Bristly, rust-colored hair stuck out from under the broad-brimmed felt hat he wore.
Scarrow straightened to his full height, nearly a head taller than Plumlee. His voice held just a hint of a British accent these days, since he had jumped ship in Boston more than ten years earlier and had been in America ever since.
“There’s one squaw and thirty of us. We either all take turns, in which case she gets worn out and probably dies within a day or two . . . or we all leave her alone and suffer our deprivation equally. That’s only fair, Hog.”
In the two years Scarrow had known him, Plumlee had never shown any signs of disliking the name Hog. He just shrugged. “When you say it, it makes sense, Jeff. It always does, no matter what. But good common sense don’t have nothin’ to do with the gnawin’ a fella feels in his guts when he looks at a gal like that Injun.”
Plumlee was right about that. The young Indian woman who had stumbled into their camp two nights earlier was very attractive. Not just attractive for a squaw, either. Matched up against the women back in St. Louis or even farther east, she still would have been pretty enough to take a man’s breath away.
She had been running away from something or someone. That was obvious. But as she stopped short and looked around at the circle of roughly dressed, hard-bitten men made to look even more harsh by the garish wash of firelight, she must have realized her situation wasn’t going to be any better. She’d tried to turn and flee, but one of the group, a young man called Clete, had been too fast for her. He’d lunged and caught her with both arms around her waist. She kicked her legs and cried out as he swung her off her feet, but she was no match for his strength.
“Hey, fellas!” he had shouted with a big grin on his face. “Look what I found!”
Scarrow hadn’t let that stand. His quick brain told him he couldn’t allow Clete to claim the Indian girl for his own. That would just cause hard feelings and trouble, maybe even a fight. He didn’t want anybody cut or shot. He had stood up and said in a flat, hard tone that allowed for no argument, “I’m sorry, Clete, but she’s not yours.”
Clete had looked at him, started to protest that he was the one who had grabbed the girl before she could get away, then thought better of it. Like the rest of the men, he respected Jefferson Scarrow and was more than a little scared of him. Scarrow had killed at least nine men, not counting Indians, and nobody wanted to cross him. He was the unquestioned leader of this bunch that had drifted together and headed west to make their fortunes the old-fashioned way—by stealing and killing.
Since then, the squaw’s hands and feet had been tied so she couldn’t run away, and usually she was roped to a tree as well. Scarrow had tried to talk to her, using the bits and pieces of Indian languages he had picked up, but she wouldn’t respond to him. Either she didn’t understand what he was saying, or she was just too stubborn and prideful to cooperate.
He would have liked to know what she had been running from, but if she wouldn’t tell him, he wasn’t going to worry too much about it. He had a large, well-armed force and would pit it against almost any enemy.
However, he had never seen the point in fighting when he didn’t have to, which prompted him to say to Plumlee, “There’s another reason to hang on to her and not mistreat her, Hog. So far we’ve been fortunate and haven’t encountered any bands of hostiles. Sooner or later, though, we’re bound to, and perhaps when we do, we can use the girl to help us negotiate with them.”
“She ain’t friendly enough to want to help us,” Plumlee said. “Fact is, she looks at us like she’d be mighty tickled to lift our hair.”
“I wasn’t talking about that. I meant we might be able to trade her for safe passage or something like that.” Scarrow smiled again. “I imagine some wrinkled tribal elder, or even a young buck of a war chief, might want such a delectable morsel warming their buffalo robes at night.”
Plumlee rubbed his bristly jaw, frowned in thought, and finally nodded. “Could be you’re right about that. I’ll have a talk with the boys and let ’em know why you’re doin’ what you’re doin’. I ain’t sayin’ that’ll fix everything, but it’s worth a try.”
“To tell the truth,” Scarrow said, “I’m more concerned about Lopez and the men who went with him.”
“They ain’t hardly been gone long enough to worry about ’em yet. I ain’t really expectin’ ’em back until the middle of the mornin’.”
“I know, but I suddenly had a feeling that everything might not be right with them. I heard shooting a little while ago, or at least I believe I did, and enough of it that I know it didn’t come from some trapper hunting his breakfast.”
“You did? You got good ears, Jeff. I didn’t hear a thing.” A puzzled frown creased Plumlee’s grimy forehead above his bushy eyebrows. “But shootin’s good, ain’t it? It means Lopez and the other boys found that bunch our scouts spotted the other day and wiped ’em out. Don’t it?”
“It should,” Scarrow agreed. “We sent eight good men to deal with five, and one of them was an old Indian who looked feeble and not able to put up much of a fight, according to the scouts. The odds definitely should have been on our side. And yet . . .” He shrugged.
“Oh, Lord,” Plumlee breathed. “You’ve got a hunch, don’t you?”
Scarrow nodded and said, “Yes. It came out of nowhere just now, while we were talking.”
“I ain’t never knowed one o’ your hunches to be wrong,” Plumlee said, shaking his head. “What do you reckon we should do?”
Scarrow considered the question for a moment, then said, “Pack up. I hate to abandon
this camp. It’s been a good one. But I think I’d be more comfortable if we were on the move.”
“What about Lopez and the others? If nothin’ bad has happened and they do come back—”
“We’ll leave a man here to keep an eye on the place, and if Lopez and the others return successfully from their mission, he can tell them which direction we went and they can follow us. If they don’t come back . . . if someone else shows up instead . . . he should be able to slip away without being spotted. So pick someone dependable for the job.”
“Gordie Hemming will do,” Plumlee said. “He don’t spook easy, and he’s good at sneakin’ through the woods.”
“All right. Pass the word to the men.”
“If you’re sure.”
“I am,” Scarrow said. The certainty had been growing inside him as he and Plumlee talked, and he had no doubt about it. Something had gone wrong.
Plumlee hurried off to give orders and get the men busy as Scarrow looked around with regret at the camp. Located on the western bank of a fast-flowing creek, the site provided plenty of good water and also an abundant supply of trout. Steep, talus-covered ridges to the north and south made it impossible for anybody to sneak up from those directions without setting off enough of a clatter to warn the occupants. A sheer cliff rose to the west. Across the creek to the east was a large, open meadow, making it impossible to approach from that direction without being seen.
Scarrow couldn’t have asked for a better spot to make his headquarters. For several weeks, his men had been spreading out from there, ambushing small groups of trappers and the occasional lone man, killing them and stealing their pelts. The operation was simple but profitable. Men who remained in camp dried and bundled the furs, and a large pile of them had already grown up. If Lopez and the men who had gone with him were successful, the number of pelts soon would grow significantly, because the five men they’d targeted appeared to have done quite well so far.
Scarrow tried to tell himself that he was worrying for nothing, but better to be careful, he supposed. While the other men began loading the furs in the canoes, along with the supplies that had been taken out, Scarrow walked across the camp toward the tree where the captive was tied.
The Indian woman noticed him coming toward her and glared at him. Scarrow wasn’t sure how old she was, but no more than late teens, certainly. She was slender, not running to fat like so many of the savages did, and the long buckskin dress she wore clung to a good figure. Her hair, dark and slicked with bear grease, was long and straight.
Scarrow knelt in front of her, but not so close that she could kick out at him with her bound feet. He searched for fear in her eyes but didn’t see any, only anger and defiance.
“We’re going to be leaving here soon, and you’re coming with us,” he told her. “No one will harm you as long as you behave and don’t give us any trouble. You’re safe . . . for now.” He paused. “I wish I knew whether or not you understand a word I’m saying to you.”
She gave no sign that she did. He was convinced that she didn’t understand the white man’s tongue.
He smiled at her and said, “I know your secret, girl. None of the others have noticed, because they’re too busy lusting after you, but I know. And I’m starting to have a hunch that perhaps you don’t even know. It’s been too long, hasn’t it?”
She turned her head, glared away from him, and refused to look back at him.
After a moment, he laughed. “All right. Be that way. It doesn’t really matter. You’re ours, and you’ll stay ours until we can make some good use of you. Better use than what most of those louts would like to do. A girl like you, out here on the frontier . . . you have some real value, whether you know it or not. Someday you’ll see. You probably won’t like it, but you’ll see.”
He wasn’t going to waste any more time talking to her when there were things to be done. He straightened and walked to the stream’s edge to peer southward along it. Lopez and the other men had gone that direction last night, to work their way close to the camp they were going to attack early this morning. The shots had come from that direction . . . if Scarrow was right and he truly had heard shots.
Gazing that way, he felt a chill go through him, and he turned away from the creek and snapped at Plumlee and the other men. “Keep moving. I want to get out of here while we have the chance.”
CHAPTER 3
Preacher and his friends were traveling by horseback rather than using canoes like some trappers did. They had built a couple of travois on which to carry the pelts they’d taken and could easily put together more of the conveyances if they needed to. However, before much longer, Preacher had intended to head for a trading post he knew of so they could sell the furs and then head out again to trap more.
Unfortunately, the grim errand on which they were bound was going to interfere with that plan.
He led the way on a rangy gray stallion he called Horse. Aaron Buckley and Charlie Todd rode a short distance behind him, with their horses pulling the pair of travois. White Buffalo was next in line, and Hawk brought up the rear. The riders were arranged that way for a good reason. Preacher and Hawk had the sharpest eyes and the keenest senses, so if trouble approached from either in front or behind, they would spot it sooner than the others. White Buffalo liked to boast of being eagle-eyed, but in truth his eyesight was not what it once was.
“She was brokenhearted,” the old man was saying as the party rode north along the eastern bank of a creek.
Charlie turned his head to look back at White Buffalo. “Who?”
“Yellow Sky.”
Aaron joined the conversation by asking, “That’s the Crow woman you married, right? The widow?”
“The woman I made very happy,” White Buffalo said with a smirk on his wrinkled face. “So happy that when I told her I felt the need to say farewell, her heart was broken. But the lure of the far trails and the call of the eagle soaring high in the sky were too strong for me to resist any longer.”
“Are you sure that’s the reason you left?” Charlie asked. “Or was Yellow Sky just tired of listening to your boasting so she kicked you out?”
White Buffalo glared and drew himself up in an offended stance on his pony’s back. “Boasting?” he repeated. “Boasting? Not one word has ever passed these lips that was not truthful!”
“No?” Aaron said. “How about the time you told us you killed a whole pack of wolves bare-handed?”
“I would show you their pelts, but I long since passed them out to all the women who have shared my robes.”
“Now, that’s another thing,” Charlie said. “Yellow Sky is pretty young, you know.”
“Twenty-five summers,” White Buffalo agreed.
“And you really expect us to believe that you were able to, uh, satisfy all her needs . . . ?”
White Buffalo sniffed. “Never were tears of disappointment shed in the lodge we shared.”
Aaron was about to make some rejoinder to that, but Preacher hipped around in the saddle and lifted a hand to motion for silence. He reined in. The others followed suit.
Up ahead, a shaggy gray shape emerged ghostlike from the shadows under some trees and then trotted toward them. At first glance, the creature resembled a wolf, but Preacher knew better. The newcomer was Dog, the big cur that had been one of his trail partners for a long time.
Dog had been off hunting somewhere when the men attacked the camp that morning, or he would have been in the thick of the fight, wreaking havoc with his sharp, flashing fangs.
He bounded up to Preacher and the others, stopped, sat down on his haunches, and turned his head to look toward the north. A low growl rumbled in his throat.
White Buffalo nudged his horse forward. “Dog, my old friend,” he greeted the cur. “Tell us what you have seen.”
The elderly Absaroka claimed to have the ability to speak to animals, and to have them speak to him in ways that each could understand. Preacher had his doubts about that, but sometimes he wa
sn’t sure.
In this case, however, he didn’t see any need for White Buffalo to translate. He communicated pretty well with Dog himself and knew what the big cur’s actions meant. “You saw some enemies up there, didn’t you?”
Dog had an uncanny ability to sniff out evil men. He barked, sprang up, whirled around, and ran about ten yards back from the direction he had come. Then he stopped and looked at Preacher and the others.
“He says we should follow him, and he will lead us to the men we seek,” White Buffalo announced.
“Yeah, I got that idea,” Preacher said dryly. He looked at Aaron and Charlie. “I’ve been thinkin’. Maybe it’d be best if you two took those pelts and headed on to the tradin’ post I had in mind where we’d sell ’em. I can tell you how to find it, and I figure you could get there all right. You boys have spent some time out here in the mountains by yourselves. You know what you’re doin’.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Charlie said, frowning. “True, we managed to survive while you and Hawk went back to St. Louis and White Buffalo stayed with Yellow Sky and her people, but I wouldn’t say we ever felt all that comfortable about it.”
“Anyway,” Aaron said, “you know what that man said. The bunch he and the others came from still numbers more than twenty men. That’s too many for you and Hawk to take on by yourselves.”
“They will not be alone,” White Buffalo said. “They will have a great warrior with them, a warrior worth more in battle than ten white men!”
Preacher ignored the old-timer’s immodest comment. “I’ll leave it up to you boys, but if you want to come with us, we need to find somewhere to cache them pelts. We can’t be haulin’ around a couple of travois full of furs if we’re gonna have a big fight on our hands.”
Charlie nodded. “That makes sense. Do you know of a good place?”
Preacher leaned forward in the saddle and looked around. After a moment, he said, “It’s been a while since I’ve been through these parts, but I seem to recollect there’s a cave over east of here a ways. Won’t be no bears denned up in it this time of year, so I reckon that’d suit us.”
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