He tried to keep his spirits up, but it wasn’t easy.
Gray Otter didn’t seem to have regained consciousness. Blood Eye hoisted the buckskin-clad figure over his shoulder and carried it to the other post. He set Gray Otter on the ground, then repeated the same sort of tying job he had done on Will.
There was one difference, however. When Blood Eye was finished, he cupped a hand over Gray Otter’s cheek.
The gesture was a fleeting one and lasted only a second, but Will saw it and felt his heart sink even more. Blood Eye’s touch, plus the fact that the Crow wouldn’t let any of the rest of Druke’s men get too close to the prisoners, told Will all he needed to know.
Somehow, Blood Eye had discovered the truth.
Druke’s eyes narrowed as he watched Blood Eye tying the two prisoners to the posts near the corral. The Crow wasn’t being any too gentle with them, but compared to what would come later, his treatment of them was nothing to complain about.
When Druke thought about how much trouble those two had caused him since his arrival in King’s Crown, he looked forward to watching and listening as they died. He figured he could count on Blood Eye to make it last a long, agonizing time.
Blood Eye bent over to finish tightening Gray Otter’s bonds. When he was finished, he reached up toward Gray Otter’s face.
“I wouldn’t trade places with those two for ten thousand dollars.”
The comment came from beside Druke and distracted him enough that he turned his head and looked over at Sam Turner.
“Of course not,” Druke said. “They’ll be dead in less than a day. Money wouldn’t do you any good if you were in their place.” He laughed. “Anyway, I didn’t know you could count as high as ten thousand, Sam.”
“I can count money,” Turner said. “That’s the only kind of cipherin’ I’m any good at.”
When Druke turned back to look at the prisoners, Blood Eye had left them tied to the posts and moved over to his pony. He took the mount’s reins and led it away. He didn’t keep his pony with the other horses, just another example of how he didn’t associate with Druke’s men any more than he had to.
To be honest, Druke thought, his men were probably glad about that. They didn’t want to be around the Crow any more than was necessary, either.
It appeared that Gray Otter was still unconscious. Gardner was awake, though. Druke walked toward him, prompted by the urge to make some pointed comments about the torment Gardner would soon be forced to endure.
Blood Eye appeared as if out of nowhere. He planted himself between Druke and Gardner and shook his head. “I take care of the prisoners.”
Druke scowled. “I just wanted to let Gardner know what he’s in for.”
“No one comes near the prisoners but me.”
Blood Eye’s high-handed attitude got under Druke’s skin. Without thinking, he said, “I think you’ve forgotten who’s the boss here, Blood Eye. You work for me, remember?”
Behind Druke, Sam Turner took a sharply indrawn breath, as if he expected to see sudden violence and bloodshed erupt any second.
Blood Eye just smiled—or what passed for a smile on his hideous face, anyway. “We are allies, Druke. We work together. You are not my master. No man is.”
Druke reined in his temper. He didn’t need Blood Eye at the moment, since Gardner and Gray Otter were already his prisoners. The Crow hadn’t even had to track them down; the two troublemakers had deposited themselves right into Druke’s hands.
But there was no telling when he might need help from Blood Eye in the future. The smart thing to do was to stay on the renegade’s good side as much as possible.
Realizing that, Druke forced himself to say, “You’re right, of course, Blood Eye. I meant no insult. If you want to be in charge of the prisoners, that’s fine. Just let me know when you’re ready to start working on them. I want to see that.”
Blood Eye grunted.
Druke didn’t know what he meant by that, but it was better to assume that they were in agreement. If things turned out to be different, he would deal with the problem then.
To keep the peace, Druke turned to Turner. “Pass the word, Sam. Everybody is to steer well clear of the prisoners. Blood Eye is the only one who goes near them. Got it?”
“Got it, boss,” Turner agreed. He hurried off to do Druke’s bidding.
None of it really mattered, Druke told himself. What was important was that the last real threat to his reign was just about done for. Once Gardner and Gray Otter were dead, nobody would be left in King’s Crown who would dare stand up to him.
Nobody.
CHAPTER 22
Preacher had only the vaguest idea where Fort Druke was. Under different circumstances, he might have waited until morning before he started his search for the place, but as long as Will Gardner and Gray Otter were Druke’s prisoners, he didn’t have that luxury. If he waited, the two of them might well be dead before he found Druke’s stronghold.
He knew the cabins were somewhere close to the mountains that ringed the valley. It made sense to follow their great curving circle, since he was fairly close to those mountains when he’d finished burying Pete Karnes and the other trappers who’d been ambushed by Druke’s men.
Sooner or later he was bound to come to Fort Druke.
He didn’t say any words over the graves, just mounted up and rode away. Words sometimes made a difference, he supposed, at least for the folks left behind when somebody died, but in this case they wouldn’t.
Any loved ones the trappers had were hundreds of miles away. The best thing Preacher could do for them, whether they ever knew it or not, was to see that justice was done.
With darkness cloaking the valley, the going was maddeningly slow. The floor of the broad depression that formed King’s Crown wasn’t flat and level. Hills, ridges, gullies, and ravines blocked Preacher’s path from time to time and forced him to detour.
In addition, weariness settled into his bones. The day had been a long one, and he wasn’t as young as he’d once been. He was far from being old, but he wasn’t a wild young hellion anymore.
The stars wheeled through the ebony skies overhead as Preacher searched for Fort Druke. Hours passed.
It might take him until morning to locate Druke’s hideout, he mused. He was keenly aware that Blood Eye might be torturing the prisoners while he searched.
He couldn’t do anything about that except keep going, Preacher told himself.
Dog ranged far ahead of him. Most of the time, Preacher didn’t know where the big cur was. But long after midnight—judging by the stars—Dog came bounding up to him and barked.
Preached hauled back on Horse’s reins and brought the stallion to a halt. Dog sat down on his haunches and whined.
“You find something, Dog?” If Preacher had had something belonging to Gardner or Gray Otter, he could have given Dog the scent and told him to hunt. If Dog had been searching for the fort, it was because he had picked up on what Preacher wanted. At times it seemed that Dog and Horse were connected to him in an almost supernatural way.
Dog barked again in answer to Preacher’s question.
Preacher swung down from the saddle. “All right, let’s go take a look.”
He tied Horse and the pack animal to a tree, took his rifle, and set off on foot after Dog. The big, wolf like creature stayed close enough for Preacher to follow, instead of vanishing into the darkness.
Preacher figured they had gone about half a mile when he caught a whiff of wood smoke. Out on the frontier that could mean one of only two things. Either a forest fire, which Preacher ruled out because the smoke would have been stronger, he would have seen the orange glow of flames in the sky, and would have been able to hear the crackling.
Or a campfire, which was much more likely.
Didn’t have to be Fort Druke even if the smoke was coming from a campfire, he reminded himself. The fire might belong to some innocent trapper who hadn’t run afoul of Druke’s bunch yet.
/> But it had to be checked out. Preacher advanced cautiously through the pine trees and undergrowth, coming to a large open area at least half a mile wide. Mountains rose on the other side of it. Between the woods where Preacher stood and those slopes on the far side, a large fire burned in the middle of a straggling group of cabins.
It wasn’t much of a fort, Preacher reflected wryly, but he was pretty sure he had found what he was looking for.
Dog pressed against Preacher’s leg and growled. He wanted to charge in there and see what he could rip up.
Preacher scratched the big cur’s head. “Not just yet, varmint,” he said quietly. “We gotta get the lay of the land first. Find out what’s what.”
His keen eyes studied the so-called fort. He didn’t see anyone moving around, but he figured Druke had guards posted out of sight. He couldn’t just waltz in without somebody sounding the alarm.
His gaze came to rest on a couple posts not far from the corral. He could think of only one reason why somebody had stripped those tree trunks and then pounded them into the ground. They were there so prisoners could be tied to them and tortured.
Sure enough, two buckskin-clad figures were bound to the posts. They were sitting with their backs to the posts and their arms behind them. Their heads drooped forward.
The prisoners were either dead or asleep, their hands lashed behind the poles, Preacher thought. Since he couldn’t see any blood on their clothes, he figured they were asleep.
He hoped that was the case, anyway.
The captives were several hundred yards away, so he couldn’t make out any details, but he was convinced he was looking at Will Gardner and Gray Otter.
Seeing them tied to the posts brought back some vivid memories for him. When he was much younger, Blackfoot warriors had captured him and taken him back to their village. There he was tied to a similar post, and the Blackfeet, who hated and feared him, planned to heap branches around his feet and burn him alive the next morning.
Preacher had had something to say about that. In fact, he’d had a lot to say. He remembered a street preacher he had seen in St. Louis and had started to imitate the man. He let the words flow from him in a seemingly endless stream. It didn’t really matter what he said as long as he kept talking.
Curious, the Blackfeet had gathered around to listen to him, even though most of them had no idea what he was saying. He talked all night and on into the next day, and as the hours passed and the Indians hadn’t killed him, he began to realize that his plan was working.
They believed he was loco, and the Blackfeet, like most tribes, would not harm someone they considered to be touched in the head. To do so was to invite the wrath of the spirits. Madness made even their most hated enemy immune from their vengeance.
The ploy had saved his life. Once the story had gotten around among the other mountain men, the young trapper called Art had been dubbed “Preacher,” and the name had stuck ever since.
As he looked at Gardner and Gray Otter, he wondered if Blood Eye planned to burn them at the stake. It didn’t seem likely.
From what he had seen of Blood Eye’s work, the renegade Crow seemed to prefer using a knife.
As late as the hour was, Preacher thought that maybe Blood Eye planned to wait until daybreak to start torturing the prisoners. He was skillful enough at it to make the gruesome spectacle last all day.
Preacher gave serious consideration. He might have until dawn to free the two captives . . . but he couldn’t afford to waste any time.
The open area around the cabins was going to make it difficult to approach them without being seen. What he needed was a distraction.
He thought he could circle the cabins and come at them from the direction of the mountains. He would be less likely to be spotted that way, with the dark backdrop of the peaks behind him.
If he could reach one of the cabins, he could set it on fire and free Gardner and Gray Otter while Druke and the others were occupied with fighting the blaze.
The corral was close by, and that was good. Once Gardner and Gray Otter were free, they could jump on three of the horses and scatter the others to slow down pursuit.
The one he’d really have to watch out for was Blood Eye. He wasn’t sure the renegade Crow would be fooled by the fire.
Preacher considered the plan from every angle and decided that it stood a good chance of working. He couldn’t come up with anything better, and there was no point in waiting. It was the time of night when most men slept the soundest.
“All right, Dog. Let’s go.” Preacher didn’t waste any time. They worked their way through the trees and circled toward the looming peaks.
Within an hour they had gotten around to the other side of the fort. Preacher used every bit of shadow to cover their approach, and when they were within two hundred yards of the closest cabin, he stopped and whispered to Dog, “Stay.”
Dog whined quietly, deep in his throat.
“I know you want to be in the big middle of it, old son, but you got to stay here,” Preacher told the cur. “When hell starts to pop, I’ll whistle for you.”
Confident that Dog would follow his commands, Preacher went to his belly and began to crawl toward the cabin.
He didn’t get in any hurry. Moving too fast would draw attention to him. To any sentry who happened to glance in his direction, he wanted to be nothing more than a slowly shifting patch of shadow on the ground.
Finally he reached the cabin’s rear wall. Gaps between some of the logs where they hadn’t been chinked very well allowed him to hear what sounded like several men snoring inside.
Preacher took out his knife and used the razor-sharp blade to carve quite a few strips of wood from the bottom log to serve as kindling. When he had a nice-sized pile, he poured powder from his powder horn around and on top of the pile. He didn’t want to waste a lot of time getting the blaze started good.
With that done, he poured a thin train of powder as he backed away from the cabin. After about ten feet, he stopped and took out flint and steel from the possibles pouch at his waist.
One spark would do the job.
He was about to strike it when he caught a faint scent and recognized it as a mixture of bear grease and unwashed human flesh.
It was all the warning he needed to make him twist around, grab his rifle, and lunge up from the ground as Blood Eye hurtled out of the darkness at him.
CHAPTER 23
Preacher didn’t know how Blood Eye had spotted him, but he didn’t have time to worry about that. Nor could he be sure that his attacker was the renegade Crow, even though all his instincts told him that was the case.
Again, it didn’t matter.
What was important was the tomahawk descending toward his head at blinding speed.
The mountain man jerked his rifle up and blocked the blow with the barrel. The tomahawk’s handle hit the rifle with such force it almost drove the weapon out of Preacher’s hands.
He hung on to it and pivoted at the waist as he rammed the stock at Blood Eye’s head. Blood Eye darted aside just in time to avoid the blow and whipped the tomahawk at Preacher again, in a back-handed slash.
Preacher swayed away from it. If the tomahawk had come any closer to his chin it would have given him a shave. But the miss threw Blood Eye off balance for a second, and that opening allowed Preacher to raise a knee into the Crow’s belly.
Blood Eye doubled over, trying to turn that to his advantage by charging forward with his head lowered. He butted Preacher in the chest and sent the mountain man staggering backward.
Preacher figured Blood Eye would start raising a racket at any second, but instead the Crow fought in grim silence. Too proud to yell for help, Preacher decided.
That was fine with him. They would settle this man to man.
Preacher could have raised the rifle and shot Blood Eye as the Crow charged in again, slashing with the tomahawk and the knife he had pulled from its sheath. But a gunshot would have alerted Druke and his men more th
an a shout, and Preacher didn’t want that. He whipped the rifle back and forth to parry the blows. Steel rang against steel, loud enough to risk alerting the guards without any shots being fired.
Blood Eye suddenly changed tacks. Close enough to kick Preacher in the right knee, he knocked Preacher’s leg out from under him. He fell but caught himself on his left knee.
Blood Eye bulled into him and drove him over backward. That tactic backfired as Preacher planted his left foot in the Indian’s belly and levered him up and over. Blood Eye sailed through the air and crashed down on his back.
Preacher rolled over swiftly and pushed up off the ground. His knee hurt where he’d been kicked, but the leg supported his weight. As Blood Eye started to get up, Preacher smashed the rifle stock into his jaw again. The blow stretched the renegade on the ground, out cold.
For a second, Preacher considered drawing his knife and cutting Blood Eye’s throat. Some people would consider that cold-blooded murder, but to Preacher’s mind it was more a case of justified execution.
Besides that, it would keep Blood Eye from getting on his trail later and seeking revenge.
But before Preacher could do that or anything else, he heard voices behind him.
“I tell you, I heard something movin’ around back here.”
“It was probably just an animal. I promise you, since we got Gardner and that Injun tied up, there ain’t nobody else in this valley brave enough—or stupid enough—to come sneakin’ up to the fort.”
By the time the two men walked around the cabin’s rear corner, Preacher had leaned the rifle against the wall and pulled both pistols from behind his belt. As the men stepped into view, he moved like a shadow behind them and slammed the guns down on their heads. The two men dropped like sacks of flour.
Irritated at the time he’d already been forced to waste, Preacher tucked the pistols away and hurried to find the end of the powder trail he had laid a few minutes earlier.
He dropped to one knee beside the line of powder, leaned over and used flint and steel to strike sparks. Several of them fell on the powder and ignited it. With a menacing hiss, fire crawled toward the pile of powder and twigs he had built against the rear wall of the cabin.
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