“I’m fine,” Will said. “A little sore from the thrashing Druke gave me, but that’s all.”
“He won’t thrash anybody else,” Preacher said. “Somebody shot him through the head.”
Charlotte shuddered. “I know. I think some of his . . . cranial matter got on me.”
“Better wash it off as soon as you get the chance,” Preacher advised dryly. “It’s liable to eat a hole in your clothes.”
As if that reminded Charlotte that her current outfit was hardly modest, she pulled the ripped shirt closed and held it that way with one hand.
Will peeled his own shirt over his head. “Mine’s too big and it’s got blood on it, but I’ll trade you.”
Preacher turned his back while they switched garments. Will’s shirt was too big on Charlotte, as he had said, but at least it covered her decently. He ripped even more away from her shirt and fashioned it into a crude vest.
“What happened down there?” Will asked. “Who are those men?”
“I don’t know. They showed up at a mighty handy time for us, though.” Preacher looked at Charlotte. “Good thing you were able to get Will loose.”
“I had to kill a man with his own gun and take his knife to cut the bonds,” she said coolly. She seemed to be one of those rare individuals whose nerves got steadier the more desperate the action around her. “But luck was with me.”
“I’m not sure how much of it was luck,” Will said.
The shooting had continued down at the fort, but it began to dwindle. The big campfire still burned, and so did some of the torches, creating enough light for them to see the men on horseback mopping up.
Bodies littered the ground in the aftermath of battle. One of the riders dismounted and began checking them. Preacher’s eyes narrowed as the man came to one of Druke’s followers who was still alive.
The stranger lifted a pistol and finished off Druke’s man with a shot to the head.
Will and Charlotte were watching, too. She gasped, and he exclaimed, “Good Lord! That was cold-blooded murder. I mean, Druke’s men deserve to die and I’ve shot some of them from ambush myself, but . . .”
“Cold-blooded is right,” Preacher agreed. The man who had just carried out the execution turned so that Preacher got a better look at his face. Preacher couldn’t make out any details except the black patch that covered the man’s left eye.
Something was familiar about him. The eye patch sent a tingle of recognition through Preacher, but at that moment he couldn’t remember where he had seen the man before.
For the next few minutes, the stranger stalked around the area and dispatched three more wounded men. Then he said something to a man still on horseback, and that rider turned his mount and galloped off.
“I’m starting not to like the looks of this,” Will said.
Preacher felt the same way, but he said, “Let’s just wait and see what happens.”
They didn’t have long to wait. Dog had followed them up the slope and then sat down at the end of the outcropping. He growled as the man who had ridden off came back a few minutes later with another man riding beside him.
The way Preacher figured it, the one with the eye patch had sent a subordinate to tell their boss it was safe to ride in. All of Druke’s men were dead.
The invaders all wore buckskins and homespun, coonskin caps, and broad-brimmed felt hats. The latest arrival was dressed in store-bought clothes and wore a stylish beaver hat.
Even at a distance, it was easy to tell that he was rich.
When he took off his hat and spoke to the man with the eye patch, Preacher felt that shock of recognition again, and he had a name to go with it. “Pendexter!”
Beside him, Charlotte let out the same sort of choked, horrified gasp that Blood Eye had prompted from her. Will just stared, stunned.
“You know Barnabas Pendexter?” Preacher asked Charlotte.
“I’m afraid I do,” she replied in a hollow voice. “He’s my husband.”
CHAPTER 33
Recognizing Barnabas Pendexter had jogged other memories in Preacher’s brain. He knew where he had seen the man with the eye patch before.
“Teach him a lesson,” the leader grated.
Preacher caught a glimpse as the man leaned in, clutching a bloody left arm. He had a craggy, big-nosed face. A black patch covered his left eye.
With a shake of his head, Preacher came back from that shadowy alley outside Kilroy’s tavern in St. Louis. The man had been in charge of the robbers who had attacked him. It looked like the varmint had recovered from the slashed arm Preacher had given him.
Just a few minutes after that encounter, Preacher had been introduced to Barnabas Pendexter inside the tavern. He realized that encounter hadn’t been an accident. Pendexter had known where to find him.
And he had known that Preacher would be broke and in need of a stake to return to the mountains. Pendexter had been Johnny-on-the-spot with the offer of a job and a sad story about how his son had run away to be a mountain man. . . .
Those memories and the theory that sprang from them took only a moment to wheel rapidly through Preacher’s brain. He uttered a heartfelt, “That filthy liar!”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Will Gardner said.
The whole thing was starting to make sense, Preacher thought. He looked at Will and Charlotte. “Pendexter set me up to find the two of you.”
“Of course he did,” Charlotte agreed. Her voice was still a little shaky from the sight of Pendexter. “That’s the sort of diabolical mastermind Barnabas is. He likes to believe he can manipulate anyone into doing whatever he wants.” She paused, then added bitterly, “With some justification, I suppose. He convinced me that he loved me and that I should marry him, after all. I had no idea at the time that I was just a . . . a toy to him. A plaything, nothing more.”
“Seems hard to believe any fella could feel that way about a gal like you,” Preacher said.
“You’re being gallant. But I was a much different individual back then. I had no idea what I was capable of.”
Preacher looked over at Will. “I reckon you were tellin’ me the truth about not bein’ Pendexter’s son.”
“The very thought is revolting. I worked for him, that’s all. That’s how I . . . got to know Charlotte.”
“Will was at the house quite often, discussing business matters with Barnabas. He was Barnabas’s chief clerk.”
Preacher grunted. “No offense, Will, but you don’t really strike me as a clerk.”
“Like Charlotte, at that point in my life I had no idea what I might be capable of. But I’d always been interested in the frontier. I’d read novels about it—”
“Pendexter was tellin’ the truth about that part of it, anyway,” Preacher said. “So the two of you fell in love and decided to run away together.”
“Not exactly,” Charlotte said. “That makes me sound so . . . brazen. We struck up a friendship. That’s all it was at first.”
Maybe as far as she was concerned that was true, Preacher thought. But no young man became friends with a woman as beautiful as Charlotte without having a few other thoughts in mind, too.
“Barnabas had started to treat me very badly. Will was aware of that, and eventually he suggested that if I wanted to get away, he’d be glad to help me.” She put an affectionate hand on his arm. “We didn’t actually fall in love until we had spent more time together.”
While Preacher listened to their story, he also kept one eye on what was happening down below in the valley. Barnabas Pendexter stalked around, checked all the cabins, and circulated among his men. He seemed to be asking them questions, and he didn’t like the answers he got. He appeared animated, even angry, as he waved his arms in the air while he spoke to his men.
Will saw that, too. “Pendexter has figured out that you’re not anywhere down there, darling. He wants to know how his men managed to let you get away.”
“They underestimated us.” Charlotte glanced at Preacher. �
�They can’t see us up here, can they?”
“Not very likely,” the mountain man said. “I wouldn’t mind if we were up higher, but it’s dark and we’ve got good cover here.”
Will said, “I’m still not clear how and why you were involved with this, Preacher.”
For the next few minutes, Preacher told them about how he’d been attacked and robbed back in St. Louis and how he had met Barnabas Pendexter shortly after that.
“It was his men who jumped me,” Preacher said. “That fella down yonder with the eye patch was the one in charge. Pendexter must’ve known he couldn’t hire me to come looking for you unless I needed somebody to provide a stake for me. He also must’ve found out enough about me by askin’ around to figure that I wouldn’t take the job even then if I knew I was really lookin’ for his runaway wife. So he made up that story about Will here bein’ his son. When I agreed to take the job, him and his hired killers trailed along behind and waited for me to find the two of you. Once they were sure I had, they stepped in to wipe out Druke’s bunch and grab you both. That’s where they didn’t quite pull it off.”
“No offense intended, Preacher,” Will said, “but why go to so much trouble just to trick you into working for him? Obviously he was able to hire a large group of ruffians. Why didn’t he just give them the job of finding Charlotte and me?”
“I can answer that,” Charlotte said. “As I mentioned before, Barnabas is diabolical. Setting up such a ruse is exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to him. Besides, when he sets out to do something, he likes to use the best available tools for the job.”
“Which means he don’t consider me anything more than a tool,” Preacher said. “If I didn’t have enough reasons to dislike the fella already, I reckon that’s another one.”
Charlotte told him, “Don’t be too insulted, Preacher. Barnabas sees everyone that way, as little more than chess pieces to be moved around the board in moves of his choosing.”
The faint sound of shouting drifted to them. They looked down on the scene of battle again and saw that Pendexter’s men had mounted up. They began to ride out in different directions.
“He’s told ’em to spread out and find you,” Preacher said. “We’d better get movin’ while we can and put some distance between us and them. We’ll find a hidey-hole where we can put up a fight if we need to.”
“We have a bow, a handful of arrows, a knife, and two pistols,” Will pointed out. “How much of a fight can we put up, no matter where we are?”
“That’s all we’ve got right now. Well, that and Dog.” Preacher smiled in the darkness. “But there are a lot more weapons in this valley, and unless I miss my guess, they’re gonna be comin’ to us.”
Preacher knew they wouldn’t be lucky enough to find another cave like the one miles from there that had sheltered Will and Charlotte for months. Anyway, in the end that hideout hadn’t worked out so well. They had been tracked to it and captured.
As they climbed higher on the mountain, Preacher kept his eye out for some other place where they could hole up. Along toward dawn, he finally found it. They had come to an almost sheer bluff. He studied it, thinking the climb wasn’t really a difficult one, but it couldn’t be done quickly and anyone who attempted it would be out in the open, completely exposed to fire from above . . . or rocks dropped on his head. If they could get to the top of the bluff, they might be able to hold out against Pendexter’s men, he pointed out to Will and Charlotte, but likely they would be better off if they were armed with weapons that weren’t quite so primitive.
Will insisted that he be the one to climb first to check it out. “If something happens to one of us, Charlotte has a better chance of coming out of this alive if she’s with you, Preacher.”
“I ain’t sure but what this little gal is tougher’n both of us,” Preacher said with a smile.
“Maybe so, but I want to do this,” Will said, overriding Charlotte’s objections. He handed Preacher one of the pistols he’d picked up after the battle.
Preacher and Charlotte spent a tense few minutes at the base of the slope after Will disappeared at the top. It was a relief when he called down to them, “There’s nothing up here! No wild animals or anything else that should bother us!”
“All right,” Preacher said to Charlotte. “Up you go.”
She made the climb and he followed. Reaching the top, Preacher discovered they were in a narrow, steep-sided canyon barely fifty yards deep. A tiny spring bubbled out of the rock at the far end. As the sky in the east turned gray and gradually lightened, they explored. There wasn’t much to find except some hardy brush and the spring, which was a stroke of luck.
“I think I can fashion some more arrows from branches,” Charlotte said. “They’ll be crude because I’ll have to whittle them down to sharp points with the knife, instead of putting flint heads on them, and I don’t know what I’ll do for fletching, but I can give it a try.”
“That’ll be better than nothing,” Will told her.
“And I’ll come up with some more guns,” Preacher added. “The way Pendexter’s men spread out, I ought to be able to jump one or two of them and help myself to whatever they’re carryin’. Fact is, I’d better get back down there ’fore it gets any lighter. You two try to get some rest . . . but not at the same time. Somebody’s always on guard.”
“We understand,” Will said. “We’ve had to be vigilant for a long time now.”
With a nod of farewell, Preacher slid back down the slope to join Dog, who had stayed at the base of the bluff. The two of them trotted off into the predawn gloom.
Preacher crouched on the thick lower limb of a pine tree. The needles that surrounded him were a little bristly, but he could put up with that discomfort for a while. The important thing was that the man riding up the slope toward him couldn’t see him in the shadows amid the tree’s thick growth.
He waited for Pendexter’s man to pass underneath him. Dog was hidden in the brush nearby, ready to come at Preacher’s call and help if need be.
Preacher wanted to take care of the hired killer without a gunshot that would draw the attention of the other searchers. They shouldn’t have scattered quite so much. If he had given the orders instead of Pendexter or the man with the eye patch, he would have insisted that they stay in pairs.
Lucky for him somebody hadn’t thought that through.
Preacher glanced through a gap in the branches toward the mountainside about half a mile away. He knew the canyon where he had left Will and Charlotte was up there, even though he couldn’t see it from where he was. He hoped they were all right.
Then he didn’t have time to think about that anymore. His unsuspecting quarry was almost in position. Preacher held his breath as the rider, a burly man with a sand-colored, soup-strainer mustache, moved directly beneath him.
Preacher dropped from the branch, doom hurtling down from above.
CHAPTER 34
Will felt exhaustion creeping up on him, but when he looked at Charlotte he could tell that she was even more tired. He had forgotten the last time he’d actually slept, as opposed to being knocked unconscious, but all he’d had to endure were beatings and the threat of being tortured to death by a madman.
The ordeal Charlotte had undergone was . . . worse.
He pushed that thought out of his head. Ever since they had escaped, he hadn’t allowed himself to dwell on it. He said to her, “Why don’t you find a comfortable place to lie down and get some sleep?”
“I’m really not that tired,” she said, which he knew was a lie. “I can stand the first watch.”
“No, it’s all right. I’d feel better if you slept first.”
She smiled at him. “If you’re sure . . .”
“I’m sure.”
She was close enough to come up on her toes, lean forward, and kiss him. Her arms wrapped around his waist.
When he had thought they were both going to die, he would have given anything to take her in his arms and feel he
r warm, sweet lips pressed to his again. He drew her closer. It was a wonderful sensation.
She stiffened suddenly and pulled back.
“What’s wrong?” he asked hoarsely.
Charlotte shook her head. “Nothing. Nothing at all. We’re going to be fine now, aren’t we, Will?”
“Of course we are. We’ll get out of this.”
“Barnabas—”
“Barnabas will never bother you again,” he said with his voice as firm as he could make it. “I give you my word on that, Charlotte.”
A forced smile appeared on her face. “I’ll sleep for an hour or so. But then you wake me up.”
“I will,” he promised.
He didn’t intend to keep that pledge. He would let her sleep as long as she could. Charlotte needed rest.
And he needed to think.
She found a nice grassy spot where some bushes would shade her from the glare of the rising sun and stretched out on her side. She pillowed her head on her arms and closed her eyes, and a few minutes later Will could tell by the regular rising and falling of her back that she was asleep.
He walked closer to the mouth of the canyon. Even though he was extremely curious about what was going on down below in the valley, he knew better than to stand in the opening. It would be too easy for Pendexter’s men to spot him there.
He hunkered behind some rocks, close enough to the canyon mouth so that he would hear if anyone rode up to the base of the bluff.
He warned himself not to think about what had happened the previous day, but as dawn crept over the rugged landscape, he couldn’t stop the ugly images from creeping into his mind.
Blood Eye had had Charlotte as his captive for an entire long day. It was obvious the renegade Crow lusted after her, and she had been powerless to stop him from doing whatever he wanted.
It wasn’t her fault. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Will knew that, and he knew it shouldn’t make any difference in the way he felt about her. He didn’t want it to make any difference. The best thing to do was put it behind them and pretend it hadn’t even happened. They had to concentrate on getting out of this mess alive.
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