As he turned around, a man behind him let out a little surprised noise and stepped back hurriedly. “It’s just me, Mr. Preacher. Boone Halliday.”
“You can forget about that mister business. It’s just Preacher. And it ain’t wise sneakin’ up behind a man, kid.”
“I’m sorry, Mister—I mean, Preacher. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. I guess I just naturally move sort of quiet-like.”
Preacher scowled. He should have heard Boone’s approach. He shouldn’t have had to be alerted to the young man’s presence by Dog and Horse. That meant one of two things. Either the youngster was as good as he said or Preacher was slipping.
He hoped Boone was that good, although it seemed unlikely given how green the young man was.
“What do you want?” Preacher asked.
“I was thinking about what you said . . . about how you’re going over into Shadow Valley to look for your friends . . .”
“Yeah?”
“I think I want to go with you.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“Well, I’ve heard the men talking about you. Not just tonight, since you came into camp, but other times, too. They say that nobody’s ever been better at being a mountain man. Not even John Colter or Jim Bridger.”
Preacher grunted. “Folks like to talk. That don’t mean what they say is actually true.”
“Maybe not, but when it comes to surviving in these mountains, I can’t think of anybody it would be better to watch and learn from than you.”
“I ain’t in the business of teachin’ greenhorns,” Preacher said curtly.
If Boone was offended by that description, he gave no sign of it. “I could give you a hand with your search, although I’m sure you don’t really need any help.”
“That’s right, I don’t.” Preacher turned back to Horse and started scratching the stallion’s nose again. “These two critters are generally the only partners I’ve got travelin’ with me.” He smiled faintly in the darkness. “Besides, didn’t you hear Miles? You go over into Shadow Valley and some monster that lives in the ground is liable to crawl up out of its hole and get you.”
“No offense to Mr. O’Grady—I know the two of you are friends—but I think that’s just a story. I don’t believe there are monsters who used to be men living in the earth.”
“Well, we agree on that, anyway. It’s more likely Injuns causin’ the trouble, like the other fellas said.”
“So how about it?” Boone persisted. “I learn quick and I won’t give you any trouble—”
“No,” Preacher said, his voice flat and final. “I don’t know what I’m gonna run into over there, but even if it ain’t monsters, it’s liable to be somethin’ pretty bad, else all those fellas wouldn’t have turned up dead or disappeared. I don’t need to be havin’ to watch out for somebody who’s wet behind the ears.”
For the first time, Boone showed a spark of anger. “I’m not—” He stopped and paused for a moment before he went on. “I suppose there’s no point in arguing with you.”
“Not a one in the world,” Preacher said.
Boone shrugged. “All right. Maybe some other time.”
“Yeah.” Preacher knew better than to count on that, however. Too many things could happen.
“If you change your mind . . .”
“I won’t.”
Boone nodded and started to turn away, then paused again and turned back toward Preacher. “What are you going to do if you find out that something’s happened to your friends?”
“I’ll track down whoever’s to blame for it, and then I’ll make the varmint wish that he’d never been born.”
CHAPTER 6
The night passed quietly, and the men in the group were rather subdued when morning came. Breakfast was a quiet affair, punctuated by an occasional sigh or muttered curse. Preacher suspected that was mostly because they had put away such copious amounts of whiskey the night before. At least half the trappers had hangovers.
“What are you fellas gonna do now?” he asked Miles O’Grady.
“We’re planning to stick together until this area is trapped out for the season. ’Tis true that some of the men will take less pelts that way than they would have otherwise, but there’s safety in numbers.”
“I reckon,” Preacher said with a shrug.
“I suppose there’s no point in asking if you’d care to throw in with us. As I recall, you never joined large groups even under other circumstances.”
Preacher shook his head. “I’ll go my own way.”
“Good luck to you, then,” O’Grady said as he stuck his hand out. “We’ll all be hoping that you don’t vanish in Shadow Valley, too.”
One of the other men laughed. “Any critter crazy enough to try to get hold of ol’ Preacher ’ll soon wish it had steered clear of him.”
Preacher loaded his supplies on the pack animal and said his farewells. He noticed that Boone Halliday didn’t have much to say, and he supposed the young man was still a little upset about being told he couldn’t come along.
That was just too bad. Where he was going, Preacher wouldn’t need the extra distraction.
He swung up into the saddle and left the trappers’ camp behind, heading for the ridge beyond which lay Shadow Valley.
The sun was almost directly overhead when he reached the crest. He reined in and gazed out over the valley, which was thickly covered in pine trees. Despite the sunshine, the valley had an aura of gloom about it. Recalling that from his previous visit, it was clear it hadn’t changed.
The Sawtooth Cliffs reared up on the far side of the valley, miles away. They were particularly ugly, adding to the valley’s sinister aspect. Not for a second did he believe O’Grady’s story about foul creatures living in the earth, but if there were such things, it would be a good home for them.
The hair on the back of Preacher’s neck suddenly stood up, and the skin prickled. Horse shifted slightly. The stallion wasn’t given to skittishness at all; he had stood still in the middle of furious battles with guns going off all around him. But something seemed to have spooked him a little.
Dog growled, too, and when Preacher glanced down he saw that the big cur’s ruff was stiff with anger and agitation.
“Yeah, I know. You two would just as soon turn around and go back. Well, I ain’t gonna lie to you. Part of me feels the same way. But Audie and Nighthawk been through a hell of a lot with me, and I got to find out if they’re all right. Sure does seem like somebody’s watchin’ us, though, and it ain’t a good feelin’.”
Despite that, Preacher heeled the stallion into motion. He rode slowly down the far side of the ridge into the valley, his eyes constantly in motion as his gaze roved over the landscape. It wasn’t long before the trees closed in around him and he couldn’t see very far in any direction. The thick growth blocked most of the sun.
Preacher seemed to be riding in a world of never-ending twilight. He listened for birds and the sounds of small animals in the brush but didn’t hear any. He and his trail companions might as well have been the only living beings within miles, although he didn’t believe that was true.
Somebody was out there. Or something.
“Dang it, you’re startin’ to think like that loco Irishman,” he muttered to himself. He rode with the flintlock rifle held ready across the saddle in front of him.
He came to a little creek, one of several that meandered through the valley, and as Horse splashed through the water, Preacher looked along the stream and spotted a beaver dam about a hundred yards away. A couple of its architects sat on top of it, watching him.
“Don’t you two look fat and sassy,” Preacher said to the beaver. They were the first animals he had seen since entering the valley. From the looks of them, the trapping would be good, if a man could take some pelts without losing his own hide.
The beaver suddenly disappeared, and he heard their tails slapping the water in warning. A frown creased the mountain man’s face. They hadn’
t reacted like that to the sight of him. He was far enough away that they hadn’t seemed bothered by him.
Something else had spooked them.
Even as that thought crossed Preacher’s mind, he reacted instantly, leaning forward in the saddle and jabbing his heels into Horse’s flanks to make the stallion leap ahead. At the same time, he heard a faint fluttering sound and glanced around in time to see a spear slice through the air a couple feet behind him. Its sharp point would have driven into his body if he hadn’t moved so quickly.
The threat wasn’t over. Another spear flew out of the trees to his left. He ducked and let it go over his head. Then a whole flurry of spears came from both directions. Horse’s speed was the only thing that saved him from getting skewered. Dog was running low to the ground, so all the deadly missiles went well above him.
A figure in buckskin ran out in front of the stallion, yelling and brandishing a war club studded with sharp stones. Before he could swing the weapon, Horse’s shoulder rammed into him and sent him flying.
More shrill cries sounded as several other warriors swarmed out of the trees and joined the attack. Preacher saw the buckskins and the red-hued skin and knew they were Indians, although first glance at their clothes and markings he couldn’t tell which tribe. In fact, they wore some sort of leather necklaces the likes of which he had never seen before.
One-handed, he thrust the rifle at a howling face and pulled the trigger. The explosion caved in the man’s forehead and blew him backwards.
Preacher swung the rifle and smashed another man’s skull. He shoved it back in its sling and jerked out both pistols as he twisted in the saddle to avoid a spear thrust. The roar of the pistols was deafening under the trees. The double-shotted loads scythed down three more Indians.
Dog dashed among them, neatly avoiding the spears, and hamstrung a couple warriors. Normally, he would have paused to rip out their throats as well, but he kept moving. He was close behind Preacher and Horse as they broke out of the ambush.
Preacher had to leave the pack horse behind. It had gone down screaming as warriors drove their spears into it, and he had no choice but to let go of the rope and abandon the animal. He hated to lose the supplies, but he still had plenty of powder and shot loaded on Horse. As long as that was true, he would never go hungry in the woods. For that matter, as long as he had his wits, he wouldn’t starve, since he could rig snares for small animals and eat berries and roots.
Of course, starvation wasn’t his biggest worry at the moment....
A few more spears flew after him, but Horse easily outdistanced them. They had come through the fight in good shape, but Preacher knew that wasn’t the end of it. He had killed several warriors, and the others likely wouldn’t rest until they had avenged those deaths.
At least he could forget all about those spooky stories Miles O’Grady had been spinning. Preacher might not know which tribe his enemies belonged to, but he was certain they were flesh and blood, just as he had suspected all along.
By midafternoon, Preacher was nearing the western edge of the valley. The Sawtooth Cliffs rose sheer above him. From a distance, they’d appeared smooth and unbroken, but now that he was closer, he could see just how rough and rugged they were. Deep fissures cut into the stone. The mind boggled at the tremendous forces which had lifted the towering ridge in ages past.
Stopping at a spring, he and Dog and Horse drank their fill, and then Preacher ate some pemmican. It had been a long time since breakfast at the trappers’ camp that morning, and the Indian delicacy tasted good.
As he hunkered next to the little pool formed by the spring, he looked around. Something moving in the brush on the other side of the pool caught his eye. Frowning, he straightened and walked around to see what it was.
The atmosphere was stifling without much breeze under the trees, but the air was moving just enough to flutter the thing Preacher had seen. He reached down and pulled it loose. It was a page torn from a book that had gotten caught on a branch. It had the title written on it—Paul Clifford—but no author’s name, just a note that it was by the same fella who had written a couple other books.
Preacher could read and cipher fairly well, but he had never been much of one to read books. He knew somebody who was, though. Audie.
In fact, as his heart began to pound harder, he remembered Audie reading that very book and telling him about it—a piece of popular fiction about some highwayman in England. According to the former professor, no great shakes as literature, but he had found it highly entertaining and had mentioned it to Preacher several times. That had been a few years earlier, and it wouldn’t have surprised him that Audie had carried it with him ever since. The little man usually had a pack full of books with him.
Preacher poked around in the brush and came up with several more pages, all of them ragged on the side where they had been ripped loose from their binding. Clearly, somebody had destroyed the book on purpose, tearing it apart violently. That was something that Audie would never do. He had too much respect for the written word.
Audie wouldn’t just stand by and allow somebody to rip up a book, either. He hadn’t been able to prevent it, and neither had Nighthawk, who would have intervened. He knew such destruction would bother his friend.
Preacher stood there looking grimly at the torn pages in his hand and drew an inescapable conclusion. Something had happened to Audie and Nighthawk, and whoever was responsible had gone through Audie’s gear and destroyed the book in some sort of frenzy. Somebody would have to be crazy or filled with hate to do that.
Preacher could only hope that his friends were prisoners—and that they hadn’t been ripped apart, too.
CHAPTER 7
Since finding the pages of the book indicated that Audie and Nighthawk had run into trouble, Preacher intensified his search along the base of the cliffs. He didn’t find any bodies, so he took that to mean his friends were alive and looked for a clue to which way their captors had taken them.
The ground was rocky and didn’t take many tracks, but he found a few marks that looked like something had been dragged along through the trees. That wasn’t much, but it was all he had to go by, so he followed the faint trail and started north along the cliffs.
The sun dropped behind the rugged, sawtoothed rimrock and threw the area where Preacher was into shadow even though the rays still shone brightly out in the rest of the valley. That shadow crept inexorably across the valley and the light dimmed more and more, until he was forced to admit that he wasn’t going to find anything else that day.
He made a cold camp. With those strange, murderous Indians on the loose, he couldn’t risk a fire. He had jerky and pemmican, and although it was a meager supper, it would have to do. There was enough grass for Horse to graze, and Dog disappeared into the woods to hunt for his supper. He came back a short time later licking his chops, so Preacher assumed he had found something.
Even though it was early summer, nights at that elevation were chilly. He rolled up in a blanket and dozed off, knowing Dog and Horse would alert him if anything was wrong.
He had no idea how long he had been asleep when he heard the big cur growl. He came awake instantly, and his hand reached out unerringly in the darkness to close around the butt of the pistol he had placed beside him.
A cry shrill enough to wake the dead ripped out of the night. Preacher’s eyes were fully adjusted to the darkness, so he had no trouble spotting the shape hurtling toward him with a war club poised to smash his brains out. The mountain man brought the pistol up and pressed the trigger. With a flash and a boom, the gun went off and drove its pair of lead balls into the attacker’s chest. The flash gave him a glimpse of the warrior’s stunned, hate-twisted face.
The man’s momentum carried him forward, causing Preacher to roll aside quickly to avoid having the corpse land on him and pin him to the ground. As he came up on his knees, he used his left hand to grab the war club the Indian had dropped and swung it around at another figure he spotted fro
m the corner of his eye. Bone snapped under the impact of the powerful swing as he batted the second man aside.
He tried to stand up, but somebody landed on his back and knocked him forward and down onto his knees again. Preacher dropped the club and the empty pistol and reached back with both hands to the man’s long, greasy hair. He heaved as he bent forward and used the attacker’s own weight against him. The man howled in surprise and pain as he flew through the air and bowled over two of his companions who were charging into the fight.
Preacher scrambled upright, grabbing the war club in both hands and flailing it around him. The warriors who didn’t jerk back felt it batter them and went sprawling.
Somewhere close by, Dog growled ferociously as a man screamed. The scream was cut short by a hideous gurgle, and Preacher knew the big cur had just ripped out an enemy’s throat.
Horse whinnied angrily. Steel-shod hooves lashed out as the big stallion reared. Between those deadly hooves and Horse’s teeth, Preacher knew none of the Indians would be able to get near him.
Since he didn’t have to worry about his trail partners, he concentrated on his own attackers. He wasn’t surprised that the war party had found him. He hadn’t gone to a lot of trouble to conceal his tracks, and they probably knew the valley better than he did. It had never been his nature to run away from trouble. Besides, his attackers were connected to the ones who had taken Audie and Nighthawk. Preacher had no doubt of that. If he could capture one of them, he might be able to force the man to tell him where his friends were.
Of course, in order to do that he had to avoid being captured or killed himself. . . .
Yelling in a language the likes of which he had never heard before, the men pulled back.
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