Preacher's Bloodbath

by Johnstone, William W.

  The blade went into Tenoch’s chest, all the way to the carved handle.

  Preacher kept the pressure on as he used his other arm to bat the war club out of Tenoch’s suddenly weak grip. Tenoch’s eyes widened with pain and shock as Preacher leaned over him.

  “How’s it feel, old son?” Preacher asked as his lips drew back from his teeth in a savage snarl. “How’s it feel to have that knife in your chest for a change? I reckon I could carve your heart out . . . but I wouldn’t want to touch the filthy thing.”

  Even though he knew it wasn’t possible, Preacher would have sworn that Tenoch understood everything he said. The realization that he had lost, that he was about to die, shone brightly in the high priest’s bulging eyes.

  Then the light of life went out of those eyes.

  Preacher let go of the knife, leaving it buried in Tenoch’s chest, and straightened to see that Nazar and Eztli were dead, too.

  But Audie, Nighthawk, Boone, Elk Horn, and most of the trappers were still alive. The fight was over. The few warriors who hadn’t been killed were being guarded by Miles O’Grady’s men.

  O’Grady himself strode up to the altar and exclaimed, “Preacher! Thank the Lord we got here in time. Are ye all right?”

  “Yeah, I reckon I will be, Miles,” Preacher replied. “How in blazes did you wind up in this valley?”

  O’Grady grinned. “A girl told us how to find ye and said ye needed help. I believe her name is Zyanya, or something like that, although at first she wouldn’t say anything except to call out the name of our young friend here.”

  Boone had let out a stunned, inarticulate cry at the mention of Zyanya’s name. He grabbed O’Grady’s arm and babbled, “Is . . . is she all right, Miles?”

  “Well, she was wounded and had lost some blood,” O’Grady said, “but I left a couple men to take care of her, and I expect she’ll be fine by the time we get back. She really perked up when I promised her we’d come here and find ye. I’m mighty glad I don’t have to disappoint her.”

  “Take me to her,” Boone said. “You’ve got to take me to her!”

  “First thing in the morning—”

  “No. Tonight. We’ll take torches to light our way through the cliffs.” Preacher looked around. The sun had slipped behind the mountains, but the sky above them still seemed to drip with blood from the red glare. “I want to put this damned place behind me.”

  CHAPTER 47

  There was no sign of the Blackfoot chiefs from the outside. They hadn’t been at the sacrifice, and Preacher figured they must have slipped out of the valley and headed home when they heard that Tenoch and Eztli were dead and their followers’ hold on the city was broken.

  Just as well, Preacher thought. They might have turned Elk Horn against him—and he was happy to call the man a friend, even though the valley was the only place in the world where it would be true.

  Elk Horn was sort of in charge, but it was possible some other bunch of priests, followers of some other Aztec god, might wangle their way into power. Preacher hoped not, but it wasn’t for him to work out. He shook hands with Elk Horn, wished him well, and left with Audie, Nighthawk, Boone, Miles O’Grady, and the rest of the party.

  With torches blazing, they entered the passage through the cliffs. Preacher, Audie, and Nighthawk hung back to bring up the rear. As they paused, they turned to look back at the valley, shrouded by night.

  “I wish there was some way to call up another earthquake once we’re outta here and close off this place forever,” Preacher said. “I hate to think about the evil that’s in there slitherin’ out like a snake again.”

  “I don’t think that will happen,” Audie said. “I know from talking to Nazar that with each generation, the number of people with almost pure Aztec blood drops significantly. Now that the Blackfeet outside the valley know they’re here, there’s a good chance that some of them will move in and dilute the Aztec bloodlines even more. Give it thirty years and these people will be Blackfoot, not Aztec.” A slightly wistful tone came into the former professor’s voice. “In fifty years, no one will know the Aztecs were ever here. People will look back from a more civilized time, and they’ll have no idea of the terrors and wonders that were once hidden in these mountains.”

  “Umm,” Nighthawk said.

  With torches held high, the three men turned and disappeared into the great slash leading through the cliffs, heading back toward the life on the wild frontier they all knew and loved.

  TURN THE PAGE FOR AN EXCITING PREVIEW!

  A boy with a borrowed badge. An Indian lawman with a new kind of firearm. And an outlaw gang that wants these pilgrims dead. WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE and J. A. JOHNSTONE tell the story of the frontier in a brilliant new series based on the guns of the West—and those who used them to survive.

  It’s a repeater. It’s a shotgun.

  In the wrong hands, it’s one deadly weapon.

  Young James Mann came from Texas to find his missing uncle in the lawless Indian Territory. Then the boy’s father came after him. Now they’ve earned the wrath of the vicious McCoy-Maxwell gang, who are about to pull off their most savage attack. But the Manns of Texas have a secret weapon: a deputy

  marshal named Jackson Sixpersons. While repeating rifles are spreading across the frontier, Sixpersons carries an oddity: a 12-gauge, lever-action Winchester shotgun. Soon Sixpersons will use his smoothbore to blow a hole in the outlaw gang. And when the gun smoke and blood clear, a boy must pick up the gun and use it like a man . . . to kill.

  WINCHESTER 1887

  by USA TODAY AND NEW YORK TIMES

  BEST-SELLING AUTHORS

  WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE

  with J. A. Johnstone

  On sale now, wherever Pinnacle Books are sold.

  PROLOGUE

  Tascosa, Texas, late spring 1895

  He swore softly and chuckled again. “That was . . . some . . . journey.”

  And Jimmy Mann closed his eyes one last time.

  CHAPTER 1

  Randall County, Texas

  Usually, Millard Mann found the sight of his home comforting—not that it was much of a place. A converted boxcar, the wheelbase and carriage long carried off, the rooms separated by rugs or blankets. The only heat came from a Windsor range, and when it turned cold—winters could be brutal—there wasn’t much heat.

  But the lodging came free, compliments of the Fort Worth–Denver City Railroad, although Millard figured he and his family would be moving on before too long. He wasn’t even sure if he would get paid again since the railroad had entered receivership—whatever that was—during the Panic a couple years back, and although it was being reorganized . . . well . . . Millard sighed.

  The landscape didn’t look any better than that makeshift home. Bleak and barren was the Texas Panhandle. Rugged, brutal. Sometimes he wished the white men hadn’t driven the Comanches and Kiowas out of it.

  His horse snorted. He closed his eyes, trying to summon up the courage he would need to face his family. His wife stood down there, trying to hang clothes on the line that stretched from the boxcar’s grab irons to the corral fence. She fought against that fierce wind, which always blew, hot during the summer, cold during the winter. Out there, the calendar revealed only two seasons, summer and winter, the weather always extreme.

  Libbie, his wife, must have sensed him. She turned, lowering a union suit into the basket of clothes and dodging a blue and white striped shirt that slapped at her face with one of its sleeves. Looking up, she shielded her eyes from the sun.

  Again, his horse snorted. Millard lowered his hand, which brushed against the stock of the Winchester Model 1886 lever-action rifle in the scabbard. A lump formed in his throat. He grimaced, and once again had to stop the tears that wanted to flood down his beard-stubbled face.

  He would not cry. He could not cry. He was too old to cry.

  Facing Libbie was one thing. He could do that, could tell her about Jimmy, his kid brother. He could even handle his two yo
ungest children, Kris and Jacob. But facing James? Sighing, Millard muttered a short prayer, and kicked the horse down what passed in those parts for a mesa, leaning back in the saddle and giving the horse plenty of rein to pick its own path down the incline.

  He figured Libbie would be smiling, stepping away from the laundry, calling toward the boxcar. Yet Millard couldn’t hear her voice, the wind carrying her words south across the Llano Estacado, Texas’s Staked Plains in the Panhandle. Kris, the girl, and Jacob, the youngest, appeared in the boxcar’s “front” door and then leaped onto the ground.

  The horse’s hoofs clopped along. Millard’s face tightened.

  Next, James Mann, strapping and good-looking at seventeen years old, stepped into the doorway, left open to allow a breeze through the stifling boxcar.

  The sight of his oldest son caused Millard to suck in a deep breath. His heart felt as if a Comanche lance had pierced it. James looked just like his uncle, Millard’s brother, Jimmy. Millard and Libbie had named their firstborn after Millard’s youngest brother. Millard himself was the middle-born. The only son of Wilbur and Lucretia Mann left alive.

  His wife’s face lost its joy, its brightness, when Millard rode close enough for her to read his face, and she quickly moved over to stand between Kris and Jacob, putting hands on the children’s shoulders. James had started for him, but also stopped, probably detecting something different, something foreboding, in his father.

  “Whoa, boy.” Millard reined in the horse and made himself take a deep breath.

  “Hi, Pa!” Kris sang out.

  Even that did not boost Millard’s spirits.

  “What is it?” his wife asked. “What’s the matter?”

  He shot a glance at the sheathed rifle and then lifted his gaze, first at Libbie, but finally finding his oldest son.

  Their eyes locked.

  Millard dismounted. “It’s Jimmy.”

  Jimmy Mann, the youngest of the Mann brothers, had been a deputy U.S. marshal in the Western District of Arkansas including the Indian Nations, the jurisdiction of Judge Isaac Parker, the famous “Hanging Judge” based in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Jimmy had been around thirty-five years old when he had ridden up to the boxcar Millard and his family called home sometime late summer. When was that? Millard could scarcely believe it. Not even a full year ago.

  Sitting at the table, he glanced around what they used as the kitchen. It was hard to remember all the particulars, but James had been playing that little kids game with his younger siblings, using the Montgomery Ward & Co. catalog to pick out gifts they would love for Christmas—James doing it to pacify Jacob and Kris. Millard had been on some stretch of the railroad, and Libbie had been in McAdam, a block of buildings and vacant lots that passed for a town and served as a stop on the railroad.

  Jimmy, taking a leave from his marshaling job, had found Millard, and they had ridden home together, to surprise the children. James had been interested in a rifle sold by the catalog, a Winchester Model 1886 repeating rifle in .45-70 caliber.

  Millard frowned. What was it Jimmy had said in jest? Oh, yeah. “In case y’all get attacked by a herd of dragons . . .” Millard smiled at the memory.

  Most rifles out there were .44 caliber or thereabouts. A .45-70 was used in the Army or in old buffalo rifles, and those were single shots. The Winchester ’86 was the first successful repeating rifle strong enough to handle that big a load.

  Millard’s weary smile faded. A rifle like that would cost a good sum even considering the discounted prices at Montgomery Ward, but Jimmy had given James a lesson shooting Jimmy’s Winchester ’73 .44-40-caliber carbine. Millard couldn’t understand it, but there had always been a strong bond between James and his uncle. Jimmy had always seen something in Millard’s son that, try as he might, Millard just could not find.

  His right hand left his coffee cup and fell against the mule-ear pocket of his trousers and Jimmy’s badge that was inside. His eyes closed as he remembered Jimmy’s dying words back on that hilltop cemetery in Tascosa.

  “You’ll give . . . this to . . . James . . . you hear?”

  Millard looked again at the beaten-up Winchester ’86. Jimmy’s head was cradled by that sharpshooting cardsharper Shirley Something-or-other. He couldn’t recall her last name, and never quite grasped the relationship between her and his brother. But he knew that rifle. Jimmy had tracked the notorious outlaw Danny Waco across half the West trying to get that rifle. Danny Waco’s lifeless, bloody body lay in a crimson lake just a few feet from Jimmy.

  Millard said softly, “I hear you.”

  Other men from Tascosa climbed up the hill. Waco and some of his boys had tried robbing the bank, only to get shot to pieces. Jimmy would have—could have—killed Waco in town, but some kid got in the way. Jimmy took a bullet that would have killed the boy, and then went after Waco.

  Jimmy killed Waco, but Waco’s bullet killed Jimmy Mann.

  Death rattled in Jimmy’s throat. Townspeople and lawmen stopped gawking and gathered around . . . like vultures . . . to watch Jimmy breathe his last.

  “Might give . . . him my . . . badge, too.” The end for Jimmy Mann was coming quickly.

  Millard didn’t see how his kid brother had even managed to get that far.

  “Maybe . . . Millard, you . . .” Jimmy coughed, but once that spell passed, his eyes opened and he said, “Gonna be . . . one . . . cold . . . winter.” He shivered. “Already . . . freezing.”

  On that day, the temperature in Tascosa topped ninety degrees. Winter would come, but not for several months.

  “You rest, Jimmy,” Millard said. The next words were the hardest he ever spoke. “You deserve a long rest, Brother. You’ve traveled far.”

  Millard had learned just how far. From the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory to Kansas, north to Nebraska, into the Dakotas, to Wyoming, New Mexico, and finally in the Texas Panhandle. Chasing Danny Waco and the Winchester ’86 that the outlaw had stolen during a train holdup in Indian Territory.

  If only he had ordered that foolish long gun from the catalog, but Jimmy knew how tight money came with Millard. Through his connections in Arkansas and the Indian Nations, Jimmy had promised that he could find a rifle cheaper than even Montgomery Ward offered.

  That had brought the oldest Mann brother, Borden, into the mix.

  He’d worked for the Adams Express Company, usually traveling on Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad—commonly known as the Katy—trains. In Parsons, Kansas, he had found the rifle, not a .45-70—which Millard thought too much rifle for his son—but a. 50-100-450, one of the first Winchester had produced in that massive caliber.

  Jimmy and Borden had decided it would be a fine joke, sending that cannon of a rifle to their nephew. So Borden agreed to take it by rail and have it shipped up to McAdam for James.

  It never made it. Danny Waco had robbed the train and killed Borden. Murdered him. With the big rifle.

  It was why Jimmy had trailed Danny Waco for so many months, miles, and lives.

  Again, Millard thought back to that awful day on that bloody hill in Tascosa.

  “He’ll be a better man than me, Millard,” Jimmy said. “Me and . . . you . . . both. Badge and . . . this rifle. You hear?”

  “I hear.”

  Heard, yes. Millard could hear his brother. But understand him? No, not really.

  “That was . . . some . . . journey,” Jimmy said, and then he was gone.

  Millard could hear the younger ones, Jacob and Kris, sobbing through the old blankets that separated the kitchen from the children’s bedroom, Libbie trying to comfort them. James sat across the table from Millard, tears streaming down his cheeks. Sad, but his eyes were cold, piercing, frightening. Like Jimmy’s could be when he got riled.

  “Where is he?” James said at last.

  Millard frowned. “We buried him. In Tascosa.”

  “You left him there?” James sprang out of the chair, knocking it over, bracing himself against the table with his hands.

 
; The crying in the children’s room stopped.

  “Yes,” was all Millard said.

  James swore.

  Millard let it pass, no matter how much that language would offend Libbie.

  “You told me yourself that Tascosa’s dying, won’t be anything but memories and dust in a year or two. Why did you bury Uncle Jimmy there? Why didn’t you bring him home?”

  Because, Millard thought, in a year or two, all that will be left here are memories and dust. “It’s not where a man’s buried. Or how. It’s how he died that matters. More important, it’s how he lived. You’ve got your memories. So have I.”

  Reluctantly, he pushed the rifle toward his son. “He wanted you to have this.”

  “I don’t want it.” Tears fell harder, and James had to look away, wipe his face, and blow his nose.

  “I don’t have any shells for it,” Millard said.

  “I don’t want it.” The anger returned. His son whirled. “I want Uncle Jimmy. I want him alive. You don’t know how it feels. I lost—”

  “I feel a lot more pain than you, boy.” Millard came to his feet, only the rickety table separating the two hotheads. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the curtain move, saw Libbie’s face, the worry in her eyes. He ignored his wife.

  “You lost your uncle. I lost Jimmy, my kid brother. I also lost Borden, my big brother. Two brothers. Dead. Murdered. Because of this gun! Because—” He stopped himself, choked back the words that would have cursed him for the rest of his life.

  Because you wanted this gun.