Preacher figured Hawk was aiming at Tall Bull’s broad chest, and the missile might have found its target if the scout, whose back was to Hawk, hadn’t taken a step just then that unwittingly brought him into the path of the arrow. The head struck him in the middle of the back with such force it ripped all the way through his body and emerged from his chest, along with several inches of the bloody shaft.
The scout let out a cry of pain, arched his back, and stood there like that for a split second before flopping forward on his face.
By the time he hit the ground, the ball was wide-open.
Preacher had lined up his shot and took aim through the brush concealing him. The rifle’s sights were on the man standing just behind Tall Bull to the war chief’s right. The long-barreled flintlock boomed and kicked against Preacher’s shoulder as it spewed flame and black smoke from its muzzle.
The Blackfoot warrior went over backwards as the heavy lead ball smashed into his chest.
Preacher set the rifle down and picked up two of the pistols he had ready. He rose to his feet and fired both guns into the mass of Blackfoot warriors, which had already surged forward, led by a furiously shouting Tall Bull.
At the same time, Hawk whipped arrows into their ranks as fast as he could draw the shafts from his quiver and fit them to the bowstring.
Arrows flew from the charging Blackfeet in return. Preacher heard their deadly whispers as they sliced through the air around him. He saw two more warriors go down as the pistol balls scythed into the ranks of the Blackfeet.
A cry came from above, and when Preacher glanced up he spotted White Buffalo holding Horse’s reins and urging the stallion around in a tight turn. Horse’s rump slammed into the deadfall, and the four logs slid off the rim and plummeted into the canyon.
The men caught in their path shouted and tried to get out of the way. Most of them made it, but three warriors didn’t. The logs fell on them with crushing force. The air inside the canyon was already getting thick with dust and powder smoke, but he didn’t expect those warriors to be getting up again any time soon, if ever.
The falling logs had scattered and disoriented the remaining warriors, so Preacher was able to grab his other pistols and blow two more of them into eternity. Another pair fell, skewered by Hawk’s arrows.
Preacher bounded into the open, knowing he couldn’t allow the Blackfeet to regroup and launch another concerted charge. He and Hawk wouldn’t be able to stand up to that. As far as the mountain man could tell, none of the Blackfeet had fled from the ambush, so he and Hawk still faced plenty of foes.
Tomahawk in one hand, knife in the other, Preacher went among them like a whirlwind, moving almost too fast for the eye to follow. A slash of the knife opened a warrior’s throat. A swift strike with the tomahawk shattered another man’s skull.
Hawk had run out of arrows by now and joined the desperate hand-to-hand battle. His tomahawk landed with such force on the side of one man’s neck that the warrior’s head was almost sheared off his shoulders. Hawk kicked the corpse aside and leaped toward another man.
Preacher saw that from the corner of his eye and figured Hawk was trying to find Tall Bull in the confusion. Preacher had been looking for the war chief, too, but he’d lost sight of him with so much dust in the air. He buried his knife in the chest of another man, ripped it free, and turned to meet his next foe.
He felt the fiery touch of an arrow tearing across his ribs but it didn’t penetrate, just left a bloody scrape behind. Preacher ignored the wound, blocked a tomahawk stroke coming at his head, and kicked the man wielding it in the belly. When the warrior bent over, Preacher crushed the back of his skull with a blindingly fast blow.
A deafening bellow made Preacher glance up. Tall Bull had closed with Hawk. The war chief was evil, but he was also a hell of a fighter. He seemed almost twice Hawk’s size as he loomed over the younger man. The war club flashed around with a speed no normal man could have achieved with such a heavy weapon and batted the tomahawk out of Hawk’s hand.
Hawk tried to dart in and strike with his knife, but Tall Bull twisted aside. He let go of the war club with one hand and grabbed Hawk’s arm while the young warrior was off balance.
Preacher lunged toward them. He knew he was turning his back on the rest of the Blackfeet, but he had to help Hawk.
Before the mountain man could reach them, Tall Bull pivoted, turning and heaving on Hawk’s arm, and in a prodigious display of strength, he lifted the young man off his feet and literally flung him into Preacher.
The collision was hard enough to stun both of them and send them sprawling to the ground. Preacher dropped his knife but managed to hang on to his tomahawk. As he gathered his wits, he tried to push Hawk off himself and get up in time to continue the fight.
Just as Preacher got clear, Tall Bull’s foot slammed down on his chest, pinning him to the ground. The war club knocked the tomahawk from his hand, seemingly with just a flick of the chief’s wrist.
Preacher expected to die as the next stroke would surely crush his skull, but Tall Bull held off as his surviving warriors thronged around. “Wait!” he shouted as his men lifted knives and tomahawks. “A quick death is more than dogs like these deserve! They must pay for the suffering they have inflicted on the noble Blackfeet!”
Preacher knew what that meant. Tall Bull intended to torture him and Hawk to death, or burn them at the stake, or some other fate equally as horrible. The only question was whether he would do it there or take them back to the village.
Either way, although they had fought a good fight against overwhelming odds, their luck had finally run out and they were doomed.
CHAPTER 41
Hawk was still a little stunned from slamming into Preacher. As the Blackfeet took hold of them and hauled them roughly to their feet, Hawk shook his head and peered around groggily.
The sight of his Blackfoot captors surrounding him cleared the cobwebs from the young warrior’s brain. His lips twisted in a snarl, and he tried to pull free from the strong hands holding him.
The effort was futile. The Blackfeet weren’t going to let either of the prisoners escape. After all the misery Preacher and Hawk had dealt out to them in the past couple weeks, it was all Tall Bull could do to keep his men from gutting the two of them and using tomahawks to pound them into something only vaguely resembling humans.
Tall Bull swaggered up in front of them and sneered at Preacher. “The fearsome Ghost Killer. You are now helpless in the hands of the Blackfeet.”
“Ain’t the first time I been took prisoner,” Preacher said. “And as long as I’m drawin’ breath, I ain’t helpless.”
“You will not be drawing breath much longer.” With that threat, Tall Bull turned his attention to Hawk. “This young one is of the Absaroka. You must be all that is left of that pathetic band south of Beartooth.”
Hawk strained against the men holding him. “Tell your men to let me go,” he said as he bared his teeth at Tall Bull. “Fight me if you dare, Blackfoot! Man-to-man!”
Tall Bull threw back his head and laughed. “You are mad,” he told Hawk. “I could have killed you before with a mere swing of my war club. You are like a tiny mountain lion cub, hissing and spitting at a grizzly bear. A swipe of my hand would destroy you! You are a sad little boy, nothing more.” Tall Bull paused, then said, “But I would know why you and this white man wage war on me and my people.”
“To avenge our loved ones! Your men killed the woman who gave birth to me, as well as the woman I intended to marry. The spirits of the slain cry out for justice!”
“Death is justice for the filthy Absaroka.” Tall Bull spat at Hawk’s feet to demonstrate his contempt, then made a curt gesture to his men. “Take them back to the village, so the women can spit on them and the children can throw stones at them. Tonight we will teach them the folly of attacking the Blackfeet, and then . . . they will burn.”
Their captors used rawhide thongs to bind their wrists behind their backs then prodded Pr
eacher and Hawk out of the canyon.
As they passed the brushy ledges where Aaron Buckley and Charlie Todd lay hidden, Preacher gave a tiny shake of his head in the hope the two young men would see it and understand he was telling them not to open fire. They wouldn’t stand much of a chance by themselves against the warriors, and tied up like Preacher and Hawk were, there wouldn’t be anything they could do to help.
Tall Bull’s arrogance had led him to make what Preacher hoped might be a fatal mistake. He had assumed Preacher and Hawk had acted on their own and had no allies. He hadn’t even sent any of his warriors to see why those logs had fallen from the rim when they did. It was possible he assumed Preacher had somehow rigged them to fall.
While he and Hawk were being tied up, the mountain man had glanced up at the rim and been relieved White Buffalo was nowhere to be seen. The old-timer was still on the loose, too.
As they left the canyon, Preacher thought there was a chance White Buffalo would rejoin Buckley and Todd.
What those three could accomplish against the Blackfeet, Preacher didn’t know, but he suspected they would try something.
He and Hawk would have to be ready whenever that happened.
The women and children howled with glee when they saw the prisoners being herded into the village beside the lake. Preacher had learned a long time ago it was better to be killed in battle than to be captured and turned over to the women. They took more pleasure in torturing captives than their men did. The children could be almost as vicious.
As Tall Bull had predicted, the young ones began pelting Preacher and Hawk with rocks and sticks as soon as they entered the village. The prisoners did their best to ignore the assault. Preacher was proud to see the way Hawk kept his head up with an emotionless mask on his face, even when one of the rocks clipped him on the forehead and left a scratch from which a trickle of blood welled.
They were taken to a pair of trees near the lake and tied there with their wrists still bound behind their backs. Strands of rawhide were passed around their bodies, lashing them to the rough trunks so they faced the village.
Throwing things at them was less of a challenge now that they were tied to the trees, so the children quickly grew bored and went back to doing other things. The women gathered around, though, cackling with laughter as they talked about what they would do to the prisoners. Although Hawk had to be hearing the grisly details as well as Preacher was, his face remained expressionless.
The women, too, tired of the verbal torment and wandered off. The actual torture wouldn’t begin until evening, when the Blackfeet would build a large fire near the prisoners to illuminate their bloody sport.
When they could speak without being overheard, Hawk said bitterly, “I wish we had been able to kill Tall Bull before they captured us. Now nothing has changed. My mother, Little Pine, the rest of my people . . . have not been avenged.”
“We’ve killed dozens of the sons o’ bitches,” Preacher pointed out. “The Blackfeet have paid a price for what they did. There’s got to be some discontent among the warriors about how many of them Tall Bull’s gotten killed.”
“But now he has captured us, and once we are dead, the others will soon forget,” Hawk said. “Tall Bull will remain their war chief, and their ranks will be restored and grow. His plans have been delayed, but not stopped.”
What Hawk said was true, but he wasn’t taking into account everything Preacher was. “Maybe it ain’t over yet,” the mountain man said.
Hawk glanced sharply at him. “What do you mean? What can we do—” He stopped short and frowned at Preacher. “You cannot mean you place any faith in White Buffalo and those two white men?”
“They’re still out there somewhere, on the loose.”
“Right now they are fleeing as fast as they can, trying to get as far away from this place as possible.”
“You really believe that?”
Hawk hesitated before answering, then said, “Perhaps not White Buffalo. He hates the Blackfeet so much he may not be able to abandon his hopes of revenge. But he is an old man, full of words and little else. What can he do?”
“You said yourself Aaron and Charlie were learnin’ a lot. Maybe they learned not to turn their backs on their friends.”
“But alone . . . or even with White Buffalo’s help . . . they are no match for Tall Bull and his warriors.”
“There are only a handful of ’em left. The odds ain’t that bad.”
Hawk just shook his head with a bleak, fatalistic look on his face.
“And if the two of us could get loose somehow, the odds wouldn’t be bad at all,” Preacher added.
“The Blackfeet will never be careless enough to let that happen.”
“Unless they think it’s their idea.”
Hawk’s forehead creased in a confused frown, but Preacher didn’t offer any explanations and Hawk didn’t press the issue.
They simply stood there, waiting for night to fall and their ordeal to begin.
* * *
Darkness descended swiftly on the rugged landscape once the sun plunged behind the western mountains. As night fell, the women of the village built a large fire not far from the trees where the prisoners were tied, as Preacher had expected.
He had dozed a little during the day. Like most veteran frontiersman, he had developed the ability to snatch some sleep whenever he had the chance, even under arduous conditions. He was pretty sure Hawk had remained awake. The boy couldn’t relax enough to sleep, and under the circumstances, Preacher couldn’t really blame him for that.
Since there were no Blackfeet near them at the moment other than two guards standing about twenty feet away, watching them, Preacher asked from the side of his mouth, “You seen any sign of our friends?”
“No. I told you, they have fled.”
“Could be. Can’t hardly blame ’em if they did, can you?”
“The white men had no reason to remain. They care nothing for the red men and see us only as savages.”
“You might be wrong about that, but I reckon we’ll have to wait and see.”
After a moment, Hawk said, “I tried to free myself from my bonds, but I failed. All I did was tear the skin of my wrists until they bled.”
“I figured as much, so I didn’t try. I can tell when I’m tied up good an’ proper. Like I told Tall Bull, this ain’t the first time I’ve been in such a pre-dicament.”
“And how did you save yourself those other times?”
Preacher thought back to when he’d first been captured by the Blackfeet. He didn’t figure going on a preaching spree would do him any good. Tall Bull hated him so much the war chief wouldn’t care whether Preacher was touched in the head. He wanted the mountain man dead.
“Reckon we’ll have to come up with some other way,” he said quietly.
Hawk just let out a disgusted grunt.
A few minutes later, a group of warriors emerged from one of the largest tepees. Preacher figured it belonged to Tall Bull, who led the delegation as they strode toward the lake. More than likely, the men had been in council, deciding exactly what to do with the prisoners who had caused so much trouble for the tribe. The Blackfoot women and children followed, making plenty of noise to show they were eager for whatever was going to happen next.
Tall Bull carried his war club as usual. The buffalo horns clattered against each other as he came to a stop in front of Preacher and Hawk and sneered. “You are as powerless as infants. Beg for mercy, and perhaps I will kill you quickly instead of letting the women have you and then burning what is left when next the sun rises.”
“Beggin’ ain’t exactly in my line,” Preacher said, “but I might strike a bargain with you.”
Tall Bull frowned in surprise and repeated, “A bargain? You have nothing to bargain with, Ghost Killer!”
“Don’t I?” Preacher asked calmly. “How about givin’ you the chance to boast about how you killed the legendary Ghost Killer in single combat?”
“Pr
eacher . . .” Hawk said in a warning tone.
Tall Bull laughed. “Why would I worry about such a thing?”
“Because after all the Blackfoot warriors I’ve killed lately, some o’ these other fellas must’ve got to wonderin’ just how good an idea it is to keep you on as war chief.”
Tall Bull wasn’t laughing any longer. As several of the men behind him stirred, obviously in acknowledgment of what Preacher had just said, rage darkened Tall Bull’s face and he stepped closer to Preacher, raising the war club. “I could crush your skull—”
“Hell, I’m tied up! Anybody in the village who’s strong enough to lift that blasted club could do the same, even some of the women. Probably even some o’ the kids!”
Tall Bull looked like he understood exactly what Preacher was doing, but at the same time, he couldn’t allow the mountain man to compare him to women and children and get away with it.
Through clenched teeth, the war chief said, “Your so-called bargain is a lie. You are only trying to force me to kill you quickly.”
Preacher shook his head. “Oh, no, I need better stakes than that. My bargain is this. You and I battle it out, man-to-man. If you kill me . . . well, there’s nothin’ I can do about whatever happens next. But if I kill you . . . you let this Absaroka boy go.”
He didn’t want Tall Bull to know Hawk was his son. That might change everything.
“And what of you, if you kill me?” Tall Bull demanded. “Not that there is any chance of that!”
Preacher shrugged as best he could, tied to the tree the way he was. “Then your warriors can do whatever they want to me. I ask only for freedom for Hawk That Soars.”
“Preacher, no!” Hawk yelled. “You cannot—”
“How about it, Tall Bull?” Preacher said, overriding Hawk’s protest. “I’ll fight you any way you want. War clubs, tomahawks, knives . . . hell, I’ll even take you on hand-to-hand, if you want.”
“With freedom for this filthy Absaroka alone at stake, nothing for you?”
“That’s the deal,” Preacher said.
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