Preacher shook his head. “Not hardly, ma’am. It’s just when I, uh, saw you dressed like that—”
Helena waved a hand. “I have never been a believer in false modesty. I’m proud of my body.”
“You got every reason to be, I reckon, but I ain’t the one you need to ask about goin’ along on the hunt. Hank’s in charge of that.”
“But you and Mr. Wilkerson are good friends. I thought perhaps you might be able to influence him in his decision.”
“Oh, I get it now. You’ve already asked him, and he said nothin’ doin’.”
Anger flashed in Helena’s blue eyes as she sat up, abandoning her casual pose. “I can shoot a rifle every bit as well as my husband,” she declared. “Probably better. There’s no reason why Alexi should have all the enjoyment of this trip. He’s dragged me halfway around the world to this Godforsaken wilderness—” She stopped short and took a deep breath. “I just hoped that you would put in a word on my behalf with Mr. Wilkerson, that’s all.”
“Personally, ma’am, it strikes me as too dangerous for you to go along. Of course, it don’t seem too smart to me for your husband and them other muckety-mucks to be gallivantin’ around looking for things to shoot, neither. Meanin’ no offense about your husband, that is.”
Helena shook her head and summoned up a smile again. “None taken. Alexi is a ‘mucketymuck’ as you called them, if there ever was one. You can throw in ‘pompous stuffed shirt’ while you’re at it.”
“You’d know better’n me, ma’am.” Preacher eased toward the door.
Helena didn’t try to stop him. He heaved a sigh of relief as he stepped onto the car’s rear platform without bumping into Count Markova.
“Preacher, what in blazes were you doin’ in there?” a harsh voice demanded. “You danged old goat!”
Preacher turned to see Hank Wilkerson standing on the ground next to the platform, a horrified look on his whiskery face. Swinging down from the platform to join his friend, Preacher said, “It ain’t like that at all.”
“I thought you was too old for such shenanigans!”
“If I was, I wouldn’t admit it to the likes o’ you, you ol’ badger,” Preacher snapped. “The countess sent for me. She wanted to ask me a question.”
“What sort of question?”
“She wanted me to convince you to let her go along on the huntin’ party this afternoon.”
“Oh, Lord!” Wilkerson rolled his eyes. “I’m startin’ to wish I’d never signed on with this bunch.”
Preacher knew the feeling. He had learned from hard experience that no good usually came from agreeing to take tenderfeet into the badlands. He had been part of several such expeditions, and they invariably ended up in shooting scrapes.
He had gone along that time purely as a favor to his old friend. He and Hank Wilkerson had spent several seasons in the mountains, trapping together. They had fought the Blackfeet together, each saving the other’s life more than once, creating a bond that could never be broken.
Even so, when Preacher had heard about the hunting expedition, put together by some newspaper back east hungry for increased circulation, he should have run the other direction as fast as his old legs would carry him. The newspaper had put together quite a bunch: politicians, business tycoons, and to spice things up a mite, Russian nobility. The famous journalist Jasper McCormick had come along, too, in order to send back dispatches to the newspaper that was footing the bill.
Preacher saw McCormick coming toward him and Wilkerson. He warned his friend, who muttered a curse and something about blasted newspaper scribblers.
“Gentlemen,” McCormick greeted them. He was a relatively young man in a brown tweed suit and brown derby, clean-shaven, with dark hair and intense eyes. “Did I just see you come out of Count Markova’s private car, Preacher? I thought the count was up in the dining car.”
“No, you must’ve been mistaken,” Preacher said. “I was on the other side of the train, spotted Hank on this side, and cut across on the platform of the count’s car. That’s all.”
McCormick frowned. “But I would have sworn—”
“Then you’d be wrong.” Preacher’s tone of voice made it clear he didn’t want to discuss the subject.
“Oh, well, it doesn’t really matter. Do you think we’ll find some good game today?”
“Ought to,” Wilkerson replied. “There’s plenty o’ game all over this part of the country.”
The train was parked on a siding in southern Wyoming, serving as the headquarters for the expedition. Every day the rich, powerful men who had signed on for the hunt rode out in search of buffalo, antelope, elk, moose, and anything else they could find to shoot at. Preacher hoped fervently that wouldn’t include Indians. The tribes in the area were relatively peaceful at the moment, but all it would take to put them on the warpath was some dang-fool Easterner panicking at the wrong moment and shooting a “redskin.”
Preacher sometimes wondered why everybody east of the Mississippi seemed to think there were only two kinds of Indians: the mistreated, exploited, and oppressed “Mister Lo,” and the bloodthirsty savage intent only on scalping and mutilating every white he came across. They couldn’t seem to understand Indians were like any other group of people, some good, some bad, some smart, some dumb as rocks.
So far the expedition had been lucky. They hadn’t encountered any Indians. Preacher hoped it stayed that way.
He stopped thinking about that and turned his attention back to McCormick as he heard the journalist say something about “overnight.”
“What was that?” Preacher asked.
McCormick frowned at him. “I just said that maybe we’d have better luck since we’ll be staying out overnight this time.”
“Hold on a minute,” Wilkerson said. “Nobody told me anything about that.”
“Oh, it was Count Markova’s idea. He wants to take tents and enough supplies for us to stay out on the plains tonight. Maybe for several nights.”
“And the rest of the bunch is goin’ along with that?”
“Senator Olson thought it was a splendid idea.”
“That jack wagon would,” Wilkerson muttered.
McCormick leaned closer. “Excuse me?”
“Nothin’, nothin’,” Wilkerson said quickly. “I was just sayin’ it’d be easier to do that if we had a wagon.”
“Oh. Well, we can use one of the saddle mounts as a pack horse, I suppose. We have a number of extras.”
Wilkerson glanced at Preacher. The old mountain man knew what his friend was thinking. Hank hadn’t let those pilgrims get too far away from the train, for safety’s sake, and they came back to the train every night for the same reason.
“I’m not sure about this,” Wilkerson said.
McCormick’s voice hardened as he said, “It’s been decided, Hank. May I remind you that you’re an employee of the newspaper, the same as I am?”
“Your publisher’s more’n a thousand miles away from here.”
“And I’m his representative,” McCormick snapped. His voice took on a more conciliatory tone. “I don’t want this to cause a problem, Hank, but I believe it’s a good idea and I know my superiors would go along with it. Why don’t we try it for one night and see how it goes? If there’s no trouble, maybe we can make a longer trip next time.”
“Well”—Wilkerson gave the journalist a grudging nod—“all right. I reckon we can give it a try. That is, if Preacher agrees to come along.” He looked at Preacher and waited for an answer.
Preacher wondered if Countess Markova had known about the overnight trip when she asked him to intercede with Wilkerson on her behalf. It seemed likely, since it was her husband who had come up with the hare-brained notion to start with.
Preacher wanted to wash his hands of the whole blamed bunch, but he couldn’t do that to Hank. He sighed, nodded, and said, “Sure, I’ll come along.”
“Excellent!” McCormick said. “I’ll pass the word for everyone to be ready to r
ide out this afternoon. Thank you, gentlemen.”
As the journalist strode away, Wilkerson said quietly, “I hope we ain’t making the biggest mistake of our lives, Preacher.”
“Me, too,” the old mountain man said with a slow nod. “Me, too.”
Chapter 23
Born around the time the eighteenth century was turning to the nineteenth, Preacher had been just a boy named Arthur when he slipped out of his family’s farmhouse one night and headed west to see the elephant. In the almost seven decades since then, he and that ol’ elephant had become good friends. He had fought the British with Andy Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, then accompanied some trappers into the Rocky Mountains in the first of what would be scores of such journeys.
As a young man, he had been captured by the Blackfeet, who hated him because he had killed so many of them in battle. Slated to be burned at the stake, Art had taken a desperate chance and started preaching in a loud voice, falling back on memories of a street preacher he had seen in St. Louis. He kept up the ranting for hours on end, until the Blackfeet became convinced he was touched by the spirits and therefore under their protection. They had spared his life and let him go, and as soon as the story got around, as stories always did among the mountain men, someone had dubbed him Preacher and the name had stuck. He had carried it around for so long now that sometimes it was difficult for him to remember his real name.
Age had not bent his back. He still stood tall and straight in his buckskins and moved with the vigor of a much younger man. His hair and beard were white as snow, but his eyes were clear and he could still bring down a bird on the wing with his old, long-barreled flintlock rifle. These days he carried a Winchester repeater as well, and he had traded his brace of double-shotted flintlock pistols for a pair of Remington revolvers. As a fast draw, he wasn’t in the same class as Smoke and Matt Jensen, but he could get the heavy guns out quicker than most men and was still a deadly accurate shot. He knew there would come a time when the years finally caught up to him . . . but he was holding it off as long as he could.
Yes, he had seen plenty of elephants in his life, but he had never stopped looking for another one.
It was sort of a circus he was mixed up with now, he thought as he looked at the riders getting ready to set out on the hunting trip. There weren’t any elephants in sight. Just jackasses.
Senator Sherwood P. Olson was all silver hair and gleaming teeth. He had a secretary and a couple aides with him; the secretary, a meek little man named Gearhart, wasn’t going along on the hunting trip, but the assistants, Curtis and Jennings, were. Two Congressmen from Olson’s home state were part of the group, as were Milton Packard, the mining magnate, J.P. “Jiggers” Dunlop, who’d inherited a vast fortune from his father, the founder of the Dunlop Shipping Line, and Benjamin Skillern, the patent medicine king. There were several other rich men Preacher didn’t know, and they all had their toadies with them. All told, there were almost two dozen of them.
Preacher and Hank were part of the group, along with four other plainsmen Hank had hired to come along on the expedition. They helped with the horses, skinned game, and did any other chores that needed to be done. They were all heavily armed, to protect their civilized charges.
Preacher was riding a rangy gray stallion called Horse, one in a long line of mounts he had dubbed with that name. He sat up straighter in the saddle and frowned when he saw the brightly clad figure of Countess Helena Markova ride out to join the others assembling beside the train. She rode astride like a man in a pair of tight, cream-colored trousers, a brilliant red jacket, and boots. A matching hat with a feather on it perched on her blond curls.
He looked at her for a moment, then turned Horse and rode over to where Hank Wilkerson was sitting on his mount. “I thought the countess wasn’t comin’ along.”
Wilkerson sighed. “She insisted, and so did her husband. And of course that prissy son of a gun McCormick took their side. What can I do, Preacher? They told me I’d be the boss on this trip, but it’s plain as the nose on your face that I ain’t.”
“That’s your horse, and this old son is mine. I see some mountains over yonder. We could just ride off and leave this bunch o’ nincompoops to fend for their own selves.”
“I don’t take a job unless I intend to see it through,” Wilkerson said stubbornly, “even when the rules get changed on me.” He shook his head. “Anyway, I can’t just abandon this bunch of greenhorns. They’re loco enough to go off on their own, and if they did that, they might not ever get back.”
Preacher glared at his old friend. He knew Wilkerson was right, but didn’t have to admit it, or like it, for that matter. “All right. But this is liable to be the death of us.”
Wilkerson grinned. “Tell you what, Preacher. If you wind up gettin’ killed, I’ll see to it that you’re paid double what I promised you, all right?”
“What if you’re the one who winds up dead?”
“Then I’ll pay you triple!”
“Deal!” Preacher said.
To those Easterners, getting up early meant rising at ten o’clock in the morning instead of noon, so it came as no surprise to Preacher that it was well after noon before they rode away from the train. They headed north over rolling hills, into a wide valley between two mountain ranges. It was pretty country, lush with buffalo grass and wildflowers, and Preacher would have enjoyed being there if he was alone, or if it had just been him and Hank or another of his old friends.
Of course, most of his old friends were dead, he reminded himself, and the only youngsters he could stand to be around for any length of time were Smoke and Matt. One thing about living to such a ripe old age . . . it got a mite lonely sometimes. Why, he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d run into any of the fellas who had gone down the mighty Mississipp’ with him to fight the bloody British at New Orleans. The ones who were left were probably all sitting in rocking chairs somewhere, being coddled by their grandkids.
Not for him, by jingo. If he ever got that bad off, they could just go ahead and shoot him.
Preacher and Hank took the lead. The rich folks and their helpers came next, followed by the hired men leading pack horses loaded down with tents and supplies. Preacher wasn’t sure what they needed all that gear for. This country was so lush, he could have lived off it for weeks with only a few handfuls of sugar, salt, flour, and coffee. But he supposed they knew more about how to get along in Washington, New York, Boston, and wherever the hell it was those Russians came from than he did.
Around the middle of the afternoon, Preacher and Hank spotted a herd of antelope grazing up ahead. The wind was out of the north, so the animals hadn’t scented the approaching humans and horses. Hank called a halt and instructed the hunters on how to sneak up on a rise overlooking the stretch where the elk were grazing.
“Those critters ain’t dumb like buffalo,” he told them. “They’ll take off lickety-split at the first sign of trouble, so you’ll only get one shot each. Line your sights and get ready. You all fire at the same time, when I give the word.”
No one argued with him. Preacher had to give them credit for doing as they were told. He sat back on Horse and watched as the hunters set up their fancy rifles on stands. Even Helena Markova had one of the long-barreled foreign weapons.
“Steady, steady,” Hank said quietly. “Everybody got your bead? Speak up if you don’t.”
The hunters were quiet, indicating they were ready.
“Take a deep breath and squeeze the trigger a little, just a little,” Hank went on. “All right . . . fire!”
Almost as one, more than a dozen high-powered rifles went off, the vicious whipcracks of their reports blending into a wicked sound. Down below, five of the antelopes leaped in the air as bullets struck them. Before the wounded animals hit the ground, the other members of the herd were streaking away, bounding over the grassy earth in a blur of motion.
“Good shootin’, folks,” Wilkerson told them. “We’ll have us some ant
elope steaks tonight.”
“Why don’t we go after the rest of them?” Jiggers Dunlop suggested.
“Because they’ll be a couple miles away before we could get mounted up,” Wilkerson explained. “Anyway, you got some.”
“Yes, but most of us appear to have missed,” Senator Olson said.
“Well, maybe you’ll be luckier next time.”
McCormick spoke up, saying, “If the group wants to pursue those animals—”
“It’d be a waste of time,” Preacher cut in from horseback. “Them antelope won’t stop runnin’ until they’re ten miles from here, and it won’t take ’em long to cover that much ground, neither.”
“We’ll find something better,” Wilkerson promised. “Meanwhile, we know we’ve got some meat for supper tonight.”
And a lot that would be left for scavengers to feed on, Preacher thought bitterly. He hated to see so much meat go to waste.
The hunters stowed their guns away—or rather, their helpers did it for them—and the party moved on. Game seemed to be scarce from that point. Preacher and Hank knew the shooting had scared it off, but neither mentioned that.
The rich folks grew impatient and irritated. “I thought this land was supposed to be teeming with wildlife,” Milton Packard complained during a stop to rest the horses. “We’ve hardly even seen any birds the past couple hours.”
“We’ll find something good,” Wilkerson promised. “Just wait and see.”
When the group started moving again, Preacher asked Wilkerson as they rode ahead of the others, “Are you lookin’ for anything in particular, Hank?”
“I’ve heard rumors there are buffalo up this way, and that’s what these folks really want. They’ve heard all about buffalo hunts. Bill Cody’s made the idea mighty popular back east with those shows of his.”
Preacher grunted. Bill Cody was a good hombre, and most of the exploits he bragged about had at least some basis in truth, no matter how small. But he made hunting buffalo sound like a glamorous, exciting adventure, when in reality it was a grim, bloody, sordid business. Nothing stunk worse than a field full of butchered buffalo. Somehow that never came across in Cody’s extravaganzas.
The Family Jensen Page 17