Preacher pushed himself up and studied the man’s pain-twisted face for a second. Just as he expected, the fella was a stranger, just like the ones who had tried to kill him a few days earlier. However, the familiar voice he had heard giving orders told him that not everyone involved was a stranger. Somebody had a grudge against him.
Well, the odds had been cut down by one anyway, he thought with a glance at the dead man.
Preacher retrieved his rifle and began making his way along the gully, moving as stealthily as an Indian. A wind sprang up and soughed through the branches of the pines, making them rustle and covering up any small sounds he might make.
Unfortunately, it also kept him from hearing all the noises the men were making as they searched for him. He could still hear some of them blundering around, but he worried that others might be moving a little more quietly.
That proved to be the case as a man somewhere nearby suddenly called, “Hey, maybe he’s in this gully over here! I’ll take a look!”
With that, the man stepped over the edge and slid down the slope maybe ten feet in front of Preacher.
Preacher still had the bloody knife in his right hand. The man barely had time to register the mountain man’s presence and try to lift his rifle, before the knife left Preacher’s hand and flashed across the intervening distance. It was thrown so hard that the razor-sharp blade went all the way through the man’s throat and stuck out a couple of inches from the back of his neck. He staggered against the side of the gully, and made choking sounds as he dropped his gun and pawed at the knife’s handle, finally ripping it free. That was a mistake. Blood fountained from the wound.
Not that it really mattered. The varmint was a dead man either way. He dropped to his knees and then pitched forward on his face.
Preacher hurried to the man’s side. He had fallen on the knife. Preacher rolled him onto his back and picked up the weapon, then wiped the blade clean on the corpse’s shirt. Two down, he thought grimly…but Lord knows how many there were left.
A rifle roared somewhere behind him. The ball clipped a branch from one of the bushes that grew out of the gully wall only a couple of feet from Preacher’s head. Preacher slid the knife back into its sheath as he whirled around. His right hand closed around the rifle’s stock as he brought it smoothly to his shoulder and peered over the long barrel. He saw a man about thirty feet away frantically trying to reload. The man glanced up, and then his eyes widened in horror as he saw Preacher squinting and drawing a bead on him.
Preacher fired. The man’s head snapped back as the ball caught him in the forehead and bored on into his brain. He fell against the side of the gully and slid down it like a puppet with its strings cut.
For half a second before pressing the trigger, Preacher had considered running over there and killing the man with his hands, rather than risking the sound of a shot.
But even if he had done that, he couldn’t have gotten there in time to keep the fella from shouting for help from his friends. This way, there was at least a chance that the others would think one of them had fired the shot.
“Did you get him? Did you get the bastard?”
The shouted question came from at least fifty yards away. Roughening his voice, Preacher called a reply. “Naw, I thought it was him, but it was just a damn badger!”
“Be careful! He’s around here somewhere! He has to be!”
That was the fella who knew him. Preacher wished he could figure out who the voice belonged to.
He didn’t let the fact that he had killed three of his enemies make him overconfident. In listening to them search for him, he had revised his estimate of their numbers upward. There were at least twenty of them, maybe more. His luck wouldn’t stay with him forever. Sooner or later, those odds would catch up to him.
The thing to do was to slip out of this trap and live to kill more of them later. To that end, he continued making his way along the gully in close to absolute silence.
As the minutes passed, the sound of the voices calling back and forth grew fainter. He was leaving the hunters behind, slowly but surely. To go with all their other failings, they weren’t very good trackers either.
Only one thing made sense, Preacher decided as he continued making his way up the side of the mountain that loomed above him. Somebody with a grudge against him had hired a gang of killers back east somewhere—St. Louis, more than likely, but they could have come from someplace else—and come out here looking for him. They had planned on hunting him down like a dog.
They had discovered today, though, that this dog had teeth, just like on the other occasions when they had come after him. He had no doubt the same bunch was responsible for the earlier attempts on his life.
What the motive could be, he had no idea. Right now, it was enough to know that somebody hated him enough, wanted him dead badly enough, to go to so much trouble. He wouldn’t underestimate them in the future, not that he had so far.
He wouldn’t just stand around and give them an easy target either. From now on, he would be on the move, always on the alert for trouble. He’d been getting soft, he told himself. Thinkin’ too much about beautiful gals and gettin’ married.
He wouldn’t make that mistake twice.
Runoff from the snowmelt every spring had carved the gully into the mountainside, so naturally it led upward. Preacher followed it until it petered out, and when it did, he judged that he was a good mile above the valley where the men had ambushed him. He knew he had left his pursuers far below him. He climbed out onto a rocky knob that had a commanding view and sprawled on his belly to study the beautiful but rugged landscape below him. He saw the green expanses of trees, the grassy parks, the winding streams sparkling in the sun. Finally, movement drew his keen-eyed gaze, and he spotted a line of horsemen riding across a broad clearing. He wished he had a spyglass so he could get a better look at them, but he was able to count them before they disappeared.
Twenty-two. Twenty-two varmints who wanted to kill him…because he had no doubt this was the same bunch that had ambushed him earlier.
Twenty-two-to-one odds.
He could whittle that down some, Preacher thought.
He waited until the men were completely out of sight before starting down the mountainside. It was possible that they had left someone behind to keep an eye out for him, but he considered that unlikely. He didn’t believe they would even think of that. Three of them had died today, mostly in silence, and he figured they were considerably spooked and just wanted to get away so they could try for him another day.
He hadn’t seen Dog or Horse since the shooting started, and he hoped his trail partners and old friends were all right and hadn’t been hit by any of the wild shots. He headed back toward the spot where the ambush had taken place. Before he even got there, he heard Horse’s excited neigh of greeting. A moment later, the stallion came trotting through a grove of trees, followed by Dog.
They were as glad to see him as he was to see them. Horse nudged his arm while Dog reared up, placed his paws on Preacher’s shoulders, and proceeded to lick the mountain man’s lean, bristly face. Preacher laughed, rubbed Dog’s ears, and patted Horse on the shoulder.
“Sure is good to see you fellas again,” he told them. He looked them over good to make sure that neither animal was wounded. The inspection quickly confirmed that they had escaped without a scratch. They were a little luckier in that respect than Preacher was. He had that bullet burn on his leg, and branches and brambles had clawed at his skin and left him bleeding in several places.
He would be all right, though. He had been banged up a lot worse than this many times. He wouldn’t even need any time to recover before he set off on the important task that lay before him.
Namely, tracking down those bastards, finding out who they were, and why they wanted him dead.
They didn’t know it yet…but the hunters had just become the hunted.
Chapter 11
As the group of men rode back toward their c
amp, Colin Fairfax couldn’t remember ever being so angry. Preacher had been right there—right there!—across the creek, unaware of the danger he was in, with two dozen rifles lined up on him, and still, somehow, he had escaped with his life.
Fairfax had passed along the orders in a whisper. He was to take the first and hopefully only shot. The honor of killing Preacher would go to him, and only if he failed would the others open fire.
Well, he had failed, all right, because that damned dog and horse had caught wind of the men skulking on the other side of the stream and known instinctively that they meant to harm Preacher. That had caused the mountain man to move just as Fairfax pressed the trigger, and instead of Preacher’s brains being splattered all over the tree trunk, the only damage the ball had done was to pulverize some pine bark.
Then, to make matters worse, Preacher had managed to avoid all the other shots when the rest of the men opened up. At first glance that seemed impossible, but Preacher had been moving so fast that it was hard for the eye to follow him.
Not only that, but none of the men with Fairfax were experienced frontiersmen. Brutal and ruthless, yes, and not men to shy away from murder, but their killings in the past had been done in smoky taverns and dark back alleys, with pistols or knives or bare hands. Shad Beaumont had made a tactical error by not sending with Fairfax at least a few men who knew the ways of the West, men who knew better how to handle a rifle.
However, Fairfax was well aware that he would have to play the hand that had been dealt him. With the odds still overwhelmingly on his side, he was confident that sooner or later he would have the pleasure of watching that damned Preacher die.
“He sure is a lucky son of a bitch.”
The words brought Fairfax out of the hazy vision he was having of Preacher’s bloody corpse stretched out on the ground. He looked over at Sherwood, who had spoken, and feeling contrary, said, “Luck has nothing to do with it. He’s good, that’s all. Very good at what he does, and very dangerous. I won’t underestimate him again.”
“Shad wants him dead.”
“I’m well aware of that,” Fairfax snapped, “but he doesn’t want Preacher dead any more than I do. He couldn’t possibly.”
“I’m just sayin’, that’s all. Shad Beaumont ain’t a good man to disappoint.”
“Neither am I. You’d do well to remember that.”
Anger flared in Sherwood’s eyes. “It ain’t my fault you missed with that first shot.”
“We all missed,” Fairfax pointed out. “And three of us paid the price for that.”
Sherwood grimaced at the reminder that Preacher had killed three of them before slipping completely out of the trap. They had come out here with thirty men, and now eight of them were gone. Everyone assumed that the two men who vanished had done so because they’d run into Preacher.
“We’ll get him,” Sherwood vowed. “This was just a job to me at first, to be honest with you, Boss, but now I’m gonna take particular pleasure in watchin’ that bastard die.”
“Soon,” Fairfax said between tightly clenched teeth. “Very soon.”
For a man of Preacher’s instincts and experience, picking up the trail of the men who had tried to kill him was no problem. He found the park where he had seen them riding away and followed them from there. That many men on horseback left so much sign that a blind man could have followed it, Preacher thought.
The odds against him didn’t bother him. He’d had entire tribes of Indians after him in the past, and he had managed to survive. Not without some bumps and bruises along the way, of course, but he was still drawing breath and that was all that mattered. So the idea of facing twenty or more white men—none of whom appeared to be very good shots with a rifle—wasn’t all that intimidating.
All he had to do was cut those odds down…one at a time if necessary.
He stayed on their trail all day as they moved northward through the valleys between the snowcapped mountains. It was magnificent country, and Preacher wondered if the men he was following appreciated its beauty as much as he did. He doubted that. If they came from back East somewhere as he suspected, they were probably more accustomed to the squalor of the cities. Accustomed to the press of crowds and the stink of smoke, unwashed flesh, and rotting garbage. He couldn’t imagine how folks could live like that all the time. He didn’t want to imagine it.
Late in the afternoon, the group of riders reached a large clearing where they appeared to have been staying for several days, judging from the size of the campfire that had burned there. By that time, Preacher was only about a quarter of a mile behind them, skillfully using all the cover he could find to close in on his quarry without any of them being aware that he was anywhere nearby. When he smelled the smoke, he dismounted and stole forward on foot, taking Dog with him.
A few moments later, when he parted some brush to peer through the tiny gap, Preacher saw the men moving around the clearing. Some were still unsaddling and tending to their horses. A couple of others had rekindled the fire. They talked loudly and profanely, several of them complaining about their failure to kill him earlier in the day.
Considering the size of that fire and the amount of racket they were making, Preacher thought that maybe he should just steal away and leave them here. Sooner or later, a war party of hostiles would come along and wipe them out, just on general principles.
That might take too long, though, and the varmints might get up to other mischief or cause more damage before then. Hell, they might start a forest fire, the way the flames were leaping so high in their campfire. It would be better, Preacher decided, to go ahead and deal with them now.
Not at this exact moment, of course. He would wait until nightfall. Under the cover of darkness, he could slip into the camp and kill several of them. He had used that tactic before with the Blackfeet, which was one reason they hated and feared him. His ability to get in and out of camps like a phantom and leave dead men behind always spooked his enemies. Maybe after he paid a visit to this bunch, the ones who were left would be so afraid that they’d hightail it out of the high country without him having to kill the rest of them.
He was mulling that over when he suddenly stiffened at the sight of one of the men stalking across the clearing. The man was a little under medium height and not impressive physically. He had a beaver hat shoved back on a head that appeared to be mostly bald.
It was the bald head and the beaver hat that struck a chord of recognition in Preacher. Dog must have known him, too, because the big cur growled softly until Preacher rested a hand on the back of his neck and said, “Shhh.”
The previous year, Preacher had had several run-ins with a man who looked like that, first in St. Louis and then later out here on the frontier. The fella had been partnered up with a tall, skinny, gawky gent. Neither of them looked very threatening, but they had caused Preacher and the Hart cousins no end of trouble before a final showdown in which the tall man had been killed.
After that battle, Preacher had looked for the body of the man in the beaver hat but hadn’t found it. He’d assumed that such a man wouldn’t be able to survive for very long in the wilderness on his own. If the Indians didn’t get him, the bears would. If the bears didn’t, the mountain lions would. If the mountain lions didn’t, the weather—
Preacher remembered that line of reasoning very well; there was no need to rehash it all now. And even though the conclusion he’d reached had been a logical one, obviously it had been wrong.
Because there the man was, big as life and twice as ugly, an angry expression on his pinched face as he confronted one of the other men.
“I thought I told you to post guards all around the camp as soon as we got back.”
The other man, who was huskier and younger than the man in the beaver hat, nodded and said, “I’m goin’ to, Boss. Just hadn’t quite got around to it yet.”
“Do it now, damn it. Preacher could be out there somewhere. He could have followed us.”
“After nearly
gettin’ his head blowed off and then bein’ lucky enough to get away, I’ll bet he’s still runnin’,” the second man said.
“You don’t know Preacher.”
That was for damned sure, Preacher thought as he continued to look on from the brush.
“I wouldn’t put anything past him,” the man in the beaver hat went on. “He ruined every plan that Schuyler and I had.”
Schuyler would have been the tall, gawky gent, Preacher told himself. He had never heard the man’s name, despite all the time they clashed.
“All right, Mr. Fairfax,” the burly subordinate said. “I’ll get those guards posted right now.”
Fairfax jerked his head in a curt nod, but still didn’t look happy. He struck Preacher as the sort who never looked happy, except maybe when he was causing somebody some misery.
Preacher was still surprised that the fella had made it back to civilization alive. He had to be stronger and tougher than he looked.
And he hated Preacher, that was for sure. Probably blamed him for Schuyler’s death. Even so, Preacher wouldn’t have expected the gent to come back out here with more than two dozen men just to try to settle the score with him. That was some powerful hate, if that was all there was to it.
As the burly man began picking out sentries, Preacher faded back into the woods, taking Dog with him. He didn’t want to take a chance on being discovered just yet.
When he was well out of earshot of the camp, he said aloud, “I didn’t ever expect to see that baldheaded polecat again, Dog. Fairfax, his name is, accordin’ to that other fella. I could’ve done without seein’ him, too. He’s been nothin’ but trouble ever since the first time I run into him.”
Dog looked up at him.
“Yeah, I know, you wanted to kill him. But if I’d let you go chew his throat out, then I’d’ve had to fight all the rest o’ them fellas, and there might’ve been too many of ’em, even for me. Best we wait and try to improve the odds a mite.”
Preacher's Pursuit (The First Mountain Man) Page 8