Those thoughts flashed through Preacher’s brain in less than the blink of an eye as he broke into a run toward the stairs. He didn’t know who the two men were, and he didn’t really give a damn. They had killed Abby and tried to kill him, and he was going to settle those scores if he could.
Skidding a little because his feet were wet from the water dripping off his body, he reached the top of the stairs. Startled shouts came from the main room below. The tavern’s patrons had heard the shots, and then they had seen the two murderers rushing out.
Now a tall, mostly pale, completely naked gent with long hair and a beard came charging down the stairs with a pistol in each hand. It was no wonder that the people in the tavern yelled in alarm and got the hell out of his way.
Preacher ran out into the street. St. Louis was pretty dark after nightfall. The light that came from the doors and windows of some of the buildings furnished the only illumination in the street. Preacher couldn’t see the men he was pursuing, but he could hear them, running away to his right. He went after them. An occasional startled cry came from folks on the street as the naked, gun-toting mountain man charged past.
Preacher spotted a couple of running figures ahead of him as they passed through a rectangle of light that spilled from an open door. They were in sight only for a second, not long enough for him to draw a bead on them. He kept running.
But only for a moment, because muzzle flame suddenly bloomed in the darkness ahead of him. Something sledgehammered into Preacher’s head, and he went backward as if he had just run into a wall. One of the men he was after must have reloaded on the run.
That was the last thought that went through his mind before a black tide claimed him.
* * *
Panting heavily, Schuyler Mims and Colin Fairfax paused in the stygian darkness of an alley. “Are you sure . . . sure you hit him?” Fairfax gasped.
“I saw him . . . go down,” Schuyler replied as he bent over and rested his hands on his knees. “How could we have missed him . . . with all three shots in the tavern?”
Fairfax was getting his breath back now. “We couldn’t have known that bitch would get in the way. And then I never saw anyone move as fast as Preacher did when you tried for him again. It was just bad luck all the way around, damned bad luck.”
“Especially for that whore,” Schuyler said.
Fairfax grimaced in the darkness. “That wasn’t our fault. Blame Preacher for taking her up there.”
That didn’t make a whole lot of sense to Schuyler, but he didn’t waste any breath pointing that out. Instead he asked, “What do we do now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Preacher’s liable to come after us.”
“You shot him, remember?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know if he’s dead,” Schuyler said. “I got a feelin’ he takes a heap o’ killin’.”
“Come along,” Fairfax said. He led the way toward the far end of the alley, which was marked by a faint glow from the street. “Even if he’s still alive, I doubt that he got a good look at us. He doesn’t know who we are, so we don’t have to worry about him finding us. In fact, we could make another try for him—”
“Not hardly,” Schuyler said, for once standing up to his partner. “We’ve tried to kill Preacher twice, which is probably one more time than most folks ever get a chance to try. I ain’t goin’ after him a third time.”
Fairfax scowled as they emerged from the alley onto another of St. Louis’s hard-packed dirt streets. He didn’t like it when anybody disagreed with him or refused to go along with his suggestions. But Schuyler sounded adamant about this, so Fairfax decided not to push the issue.
“I suppose it would be best to avoid the man from now on,” he admitted in a grudging tone. “But we have to do something for money. We’re almost flat broke now.”
“We could go see Shad Beaumont. He’s always lookin’ for good men.”
Fairfax fingered his rather pointed chin and frowned in thought as he considered the suggestion. “Beaumont’s a dangerous man,” he pointed out.
“Well, hell, so are we. Ain’t we?”
Neither of them were too sure about that, considering how their last two endeavors had turned out. But they had to do something, unless they wanted to resort to begging or honest work, and those things didn’t appeal to them at all.
“All right,” Fairfax said with a decisive nod. “We’ll go see Shad Beaumont, and even if that bastard Preacher is still alive, with any luck we’ll never see him again.”
* * *
Preacher was alive. His head hurt too damned much for him to be dead.
“Disgraceful! Utterly disgraceful! Why, he probably came straight from some harlot’s bed before passing out in his besotted iniquity.”
Preacher didn’t know about his besotted iniquity, whatever the hell that was, but he had sure enough passed out in his birthday suit. He could feel a warm summer breeze blowing all over him. Might’ve been pleasant under other circumstances, but not here and now.
“Shameful!”
Whoever was doing all that yammering wasn’t helping matters either. In fact, Preacher thought it made his head throb even worse listening to the varmint. So he pushed himself up into a sitting position, blinked his bleary eyes open, and said, “Shut the hell up, why don’t you, mister?”
Several people were standing nearby in the street. One of them carried a lantern, and even though its light was dim, Preacher squinted because it seemed like a glare to his eyes. His head spun dizzily from sitting up, but it settled down after a few seconds. There were four men and two women standing there, all of them soberly dressed in dark clothes. Probably on their way to or from a prayer meetin’, he thought. And almost certainly they hadn’t expected to run into a naked man along the way.
That thought reminded him that he was bare-ass, and he sort of hunched over trying to cover things up. His pistols lay nearby in the street. When he lifted a hand to his head and gingerly touched the spot on his skull that hurt the worst, the fingertips came away smeared with blood.
Mutters of disapproval still came from the little group of citizens. Preacher snapped, “Are you folks blind? Can’t you see I been shot?”
“Oh, dear,” one of the women said. “I do believe he is hurt. We have to help him.”
The man who had been going on at length before said, “He was probably injured in some drunken brawl over a woman of ill repute, Martha.” Preacher knew it was him because he recognized the shrill, hectoring tone.
“That doesn’t matter, Walter,” the woman insisted as she took a step toward Preacher. “The Lord said for us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. The Good Samaritan stopped to help without asking who that poor man was or what had happened to him.”
Preacher hunched over more as the woman approached. “Ma’am, I appreciate the sentiment, I surely do,” he rasped, “but I’d be obliged if you and the other lady would move along and let your menfolks give me a hand. It’d be more fittin’ and proper.”
“Nonsense,” she said as she reached his side and bent down to take hold of his arm. “Let me help you up.”
She was a hefty woman, and Preacher didn’t have much choice except to go along with her. With her supporting him, he climbed to his feet. The dizziness got to him again for a second, causing him to sag against her. He put a hand on her shoulder to steady himself.
“Here now! Stop that! Good heavens, sir, have you no shame?” That was Walter again. Preacher figured he was probably Martha’s husband.
“Sorry, ma’am,” he murmured as he straightened. “I was a mite out of my head there for a minute. Didn’t mean to give no offense.”
“That’s quite all right,” she told him. “How badly are you injured? Do you need us to take you to a physician?”
Preacher felt of the wound on his scalp again. It was just a short, shallow furrow where the pistol ball had barely grazed him. That had been enough to knock him down and make him pass out for
a few minutes, but that seemed to be the extent of the damage.
“I reckon I’ll be all right,” he told the woman. “That shot just nicked me, and this old skull o’ mine is pretty darned thick.”
Walter snorted, as if to say that he certainly believed that.
“At least take my husband’s coat,” Martha said.
This time Walter said, “What! Martha, you can’t just offer my coat to this . . . this reprobate!”
Preacher’s head felt steady enough now for him to bend over and pick up his pistols. As he straightened, he saw Walter peeling off the long black coat.
“Now we’re being robbed!” Walter said. “Here, take the coat. Just don’t hurt any of us, I implore you, sir!”
Preacher wanted to ask the fella if he was touched in the head, but he was tired of this whole encounter and just took the coat instead, saying, “I ain’t stealin’ your coat. You can come down to Fargo’s tavern any time you want and get it back. I’ll leave it with ol’ Ford.”
Walter swallowed hard and said, “That’s all right. I . . . I’ve heard of that tavern. I wouldn’t set foot in a place like that!”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a little boy name of Jake, would you?” Preacher muttered as he shrugged into the borrowed coat. Walter was built sort of stout, so the garment hung pretty loosely on him, but it was long enough to cover the essentials.
“What? I don’t have any children.”
“More’s the pity,” Martha said.
Preacher wasn’t so sure about that. If he was a kid, he wouldn’t want a stiff-necked varmint like Walter for his pa. But folks didn’t really get a choice about things like that, he supposed.
The important thing was that the two men who had killed Abby were long gone by now, and Preacher had no idea where to look for them. He wasn’t even sure he would recognize them if he saw them again, although he thought there was a pretty good chance he would. While he was still in St. Louis, he would be keeping an eye out for a pair of gents, one short and one tall. He thought the tall one had been wearing buckskins, and the short one had sported that beaver hat he’d caught a glimpse of going down the stairs in the tavern.
He said good night to the folks who had found him and started back toward Fargo’s, the tails of Walter’s coat flapping around his legs. He felt pretty foolish walking into the tavern that way, but even though some of the patrons looked mighty hard at him, nobody snickered. In fact, an air of gloom hung over the place, and Preacher figured out why as a couple of men started down the stairs from the second floor, carrying a blanket-shrouded shape.
“Abby?” Preacher said to Fargo.
The burly tavern keeper nodded. “Yeah. I reckon you knew she was dead when you went chasin’ out of here after those fellas. They the ones who shot her?”
“That’s right,” Preacher said. “They were aimin’ for me. Abby just happened to be in the way.”
Fargo shook his head as the men carried Abby’s body on out of the tavern. “Damned shame. She was a fine gal, for a whore. Hell, she would’ve been a fine gal even if she hadn’t been a whore.”
“Did you see the two bastards who done it?”
“Yeah, but I never paid much attention to ’em. Think I’d seen ’em somewhere before, but I ain’t sure about that. And when they ran outta here, they were movin’ so fast and everything was so confused I didn’t get a good look at ’em even then.”
Preacher bit back a curse. The two men had been close enough to him to fire at almost point-blank range, and yet they were still strangers.
Carrying his pistols, Preacher went back upstairs. Small puddles of water still lay on the floor of his room where they had splashed out of the tub during the ruckus. He grimaced at the sight of them, tossed the long black coat on the bed, and began pulling on his buckskins.
When he was dressed, he returned to the tavern’s main room and asked all the other customers about the two killers. Nobody had gotten a really good look at them, but the questioning confirmed that the taller man had been dressed in buckskins and the smaller one wore a beaver hat and a black suit that had seen better days. Those descriptions didn’t mean anything to Preacher, and they were vague enough that they might have fit almost anybody.
He had to wonder if the two men would try again to kill him. He hoped so.
Preacher was looking forward to making their acquaintance over the barrels of his guns.
Four
Preacher’s sleep was restless that night, haunted by dreams of the stunned expression on Abby’s face as the pistol balls tore through her and stole her life away. He had lost friends and even loved ones to violence in the past, like Jennie and the Shoshone woman Mountain Mist, and it never got any easier.
When he awoke the next morning, the pounding throb in his head had subsided to a dull ache, but it was still there, fueled by the bullet graze and the bad memories. He pulled on his buckskins and high-topped moccasins and stumbled downstairs, drawn by the smell of coffee.
The main room of the tavern was empty except for Ford Fargo, who leaned on the bar sipping from a steaming cup. “Pour me one o’ those,” Preacher said.
Fargo went over to the big iron stove where the coffeepot simmered, and complied with Preacher’s request. He carried it back to Preacher, who grasped the cup eagerly and gulped down some of the contents. The coffee was hot enough to blister his mouth, but he didn’t much care at the moment.
“Abby’s service will be later today,” Fargo said. “Couldn’t find a preacher who was willin’ to say words over a gal like her, so I figured on doin’ it myself.” He paused. “Unless you’d like to do it. You got the name for it and all.”
Preacher shook his head. “You knew her a hell of a lot longer than I did, so any speechifyin’ that’s to be done, you need to do it. Besides, I ain’t a real preacher.”
“If I was, I ain’t sure I’d claim it. Don’t the Good Book say we ain’t supposed to judge other folks? I figure Abby deserves to be laid to rest proper, but all the churchgoin’ folks just turned their noses up at the idea. Good thing we got a public cemetery here in St. Louis now. They can’t stop me from buryin’ her there.” Again Fargo paused. “I reckon she’d like it if you was there.”
“Why? Because I’m the one who got her killed?”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, I do. Those bastards were after me. I just don’t know why yet, or who they were. But one of these days I’ll find out.”
Fargo shook his head. “I’ll bet they’re not even here in the settlement anymore. If I tried to kill you and botched the job, I’d be runnin’ as far and fast as I could.”
A chilly smile played over Preacher’s face. “And it wouldn’t do you any good.”
“Yeah. That’s what I’d be afraid of.”
The tavern keeper fried up some salt jowl and flapjacks for his breakfast and shared them with Preacher. After eating, the mountain man said that he was going to see about replenishing his supplies before setting out for the wilderness again.
“I don’t figure on stayin’ here in town any longer than I have to,” he added. “Bad things happen in towns.”
He knew he was oversimplifying matters, but there was no disputing the truth of his statement. Of course, bad things could happen anywhere, but at least out there on the frontier, Preacher was better able to guard against them. He knew the dangers that lurked on the prairie and in the mountains better than he did the ones in the settlement.
“The buryin’ will be at noon,” Fargo told him as he went out. Without looking back, Preacher waved to show that he had heard.
He spent the morning visiting one of the general stores and telling the proprietor what he wanted. The man promised to gather the supplies together and have them ready whenever Preacher wanted to pick them up. Then Preacher went to the office of the fur company where Joel Larson worked.
“I heard about what happened,” Larson said as the two men shook hands. “Sorry about the girl. Why do you think tho
se men attacked you?”
Preacher shrugged. “Don’t know. I’ve made a lot of enemies in my time. Also, somebody took a shot at me while I was still on the river yesterday afternoon, about a mile north of the settlement. Could be that whoever it was made another try for me.”
Larson sat down behind his desk and clasped his hands together. “Here’s another possibility. They might have seen us strike a deal for your pelts, or they could have been in the tavern when I paid you. It’s possible that they were just thieves after your money.”
Preacher frowned as he considered that suggestion. Of all the things to die for, money seemed just about the most ridiculous to him. But he knew not everybody felt that way. Not by a long shot.
“I reckon you could be right,” he said with a nod. “I don’t know for sure what those two fellas looked like, but I got an idea. Wanted to know if maybe you’d seen them around.” He gave Larson as good a description of the killers as he had.
The fur company man listened carefully, but shook his head when Preacher was finished. “Sorry. That doesn’t ring a bell. There are probably hundreds of men in St. Louis wearing buckskins or shabby suits and beaver hats.”
“Yeah, I know.” Preacher stood up and added with a decisive nod, “But I’ll find ’em. I aim to settle the score for Abby. I ain’t overly fond o’ lettin’ gents get away with shootin’ at me neither.”
Larson got to his feet and shook hands again. “Well, good luck to you, Preacher. If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.”
“Sure will.”
Preacher left the office. Something Larson had said had gotten him to thinking. That boy Jake he had talked to the day before, down by the river, had seemed like an observant little cuss. Maybe if the men who had killed Abby had been down there, too, and had seen Preacher strike the deal with Joel Larson, as Larson had suggested, then Jake might have seen the men who’d been watching Preacher. He had to admit that it was a long shot but he believed it was worth checking out.
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