Rampage of the Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  But he knew that Preacher was considered one of the most dangerous men west of the Mississippi…or east of it, for that matter.

  “That’s where he said he was goin’,” the boy went on. “I heard him tell Mr. Larson. So I reckon he’s in there, if you’re lookin’ for him.”

  “Perhaps I’ll get together with him later,” Fairfax said. “We’re old friends, but we haven’t seen each other for a long time, so I’d like to surprise him. If you see him, don’t mention that you spoke to me, all right?”

  “Sure, mister. I don’t reckon I’ll be seein’ him, though. My pa will be mad enough at me for slippin’ out after supper like this. He’d tan my hide good if he ever caught me sneakin’ into a tavern. He says that good, God-fearin’ folks don’t never venture into such places.”

  “How does one know which places to avoid if one never visits them?” Fairfax murmured.

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind, lad.” He took one of the precious few coins he and Mims had to their names and pressed it into the boy’s hand. “Here, take this and run along.”

  The boy bit the coin to make sure it was real, then beamed. “This has been a good day,” he said, and then he hurried away through the gathering shadows.

  Fairfax went back across the street to rejoin his partner. “I found out our quarry’s name,” he told Schuyler.

  “What is it?”

  “Preacher.”

  Schuyler’s eyes widened. “Oh, Lordy. We better forget about it, Colin. Even them red savages don’t mess with Preacher most of the time. He’s all wolf and a yard wide.”

  “He’s just a man like any other,” Fairfax snapped. “And he shot me, damn his eyes. I’ve a score to settle.”

  Schuyler grunted. “Yeah, and once Larson brings his money for them plews, he’ll have a considerable amount of cash on him, I’m thinkin’. I ain’t sure it’s worth gettin’ killed over, though. There’s other ways to make money.”

  Fairfax glared and shook his head. “Preacher’s never seen us before. We can walk right in there, and he won’t have the slightest notion that we’ve a grudge against him. It’s just a matter of waiting for the proper time to strike. Any man can be defeated if he’s taken by surprise by an enemy who’s ruthless enough.”

  “Well…maybe.”

  “I’ll go after him by myself if I have to.”

  “Now, don’t take on like that,” Schuyler said. “We been partners for a good while, Colin. I ain’t a’gonna desert you now.” The taller man nodded. “We’ll take him. Let’s go on in and see what he’s doin’.”

  They started across the street, but stopped as they saw Joel Larson approaching. Drawing back into the shadows, they waited while the fur merchant entered the tavern. Larson wasn’t inside for long, and when he left again, Fairfax said, “He must have paid Preacher off for those pelts. That’s what we’ve been waiting for.”

  Schuyler nodded, but he still looked nervous about what they were planning to do. He knew better than to suggest again that they give up on squaring the score with Preacher. Fairfax wouldn’t stand for that, and he usually did the thinking for both of them.

  Preacher was sitting at a table in the corner with a fleshy, redheaded young woman in his lap when the partners came into the tavern. Schuyler and Fairfax went to the bar and spent the last of their money on a couple of drinks they could nurse along for a while.

  A short time later, Preacher and the whore went upstairs, pausing at the bar to speak to the proprietor for a moment. From the overheard conversation, the two men learned that Preacher was about to take a bath. That was good, because it meant that he would be naked. That wasn’t exactly the same thing as unarmed, but at least he would have to take off his weapons and put them aside before he climbed into the washtub. When you were dealing with a man like Preacher, any edge was better than none, no matter how slight it might be.

  Schuyler put his head close to Fairfax’s and said in a low voice, “We can’t just go traipsin’ upstairs. Fargo rents them rooms out, and if we start up there, he’ll holler after us and try to make us pay.”

  “I recall seeing some stairs in the rear,” Fairfax said. “We’ll make our entrance that way.” He tossed back the little bit of liquor that remained in his cup.

  Schuyler followed suit, and then the two men turned and left the tavern. No one paid them any mind.

  They hurried around the building. Full night had fallen by now, and they had to find the back stairs in the dark. Schuyler tripped over something and nearly fell, and Fairfax cursed under his breath and told him to be careful. Then they came to the stairs and began a slow, careful ascent.

  They reached the door at the top of the stairs and slipped inside. They found themselves in a narrow corridor with doors on both sides. The hallway was lit by a single candle stuck on a shelf at the far end, where the landing for the main staircase was. Thick shadows cloaked this end of the corridor.

  Fairfax motioned for Schuyler to take the lead. Schuyler hesitated, then grimaced and started walking carefully along the hall, staying close to the wall. He paused at each door he came to and pressed his ear to the panel. Finally, at the third door on the right, he motioned for Fairfax to follow him.

  “I can hear ’em splashin’ around in there,” Schuyler whispered in his partner’s ear. “Sounds like they’re havin’ a fine old time.”

  Fairfax reached under his coat and drew out a short-barreled pistol. “It’s about to get finer…for us,” he said as he drew back the weapon’s hammer.

  Preacher took the two pistols from behind his belt and placed them on a chair near the tub, along with the heavy-bladed hunting knife in its fringed sheath and the tomahawk he also carried. His long rifle was leaned against the wall in a corner. Then he stripped off his greasy, dirty buckskins and tossed them in a different corner of the room.

  By that time, Abby had peeled her homespun dress up and over her head, along with the thin shift she wore underneath it. That left her naked as a jaybird. She was cuter than a jaybird, Preacher thought. He stepped into the tub, wincing a little as his foot touched the hot water. He climbed the rest of the way in and sank down, motioning for Abby to join him.

  Considering that she was a pretty solidly built young woman, her movements were a mite dainty as she got into the tub and lowered herself onto Preacher’s lap. They embraced and kissed again, shifting around to make themselves more comfortable in the close confines of the tub. Some of the water sloshed over the sides.

  Preacher luxuriated in the heat, letting it soak away all the aches and pains he had stored up in his lanky body during the long months spent in the wilderness. Abby did a lot of kissing and playing around, but he was almost too tired to really get into the spirit of the thing. He was thinking about telling her that they ought to consider postponing the rest of their get-together until the next night, when he heard a floorboard creak in the hallway outside the door.

  Preacher’s thick, dark eyebrows drew down in a frown. The sound didn’t have to mean anything. Just somebody else who had rented one of Fargo’s rooms passing by in the corridor, that was all.

  But the creak had been right outside the door, almost like somebody was standing there and had shifted his weight a little, and Preacher couldn’t think of any reason why somebody should be doing such a thing.

  Unless, of course, they were up to no good.

  Now that he thought about it, he realized that he’d had a tiny feeling of unease ever since he had arrived in St. Louis. He had put it down to the fact that he was in a settlement again, with people all around, rather than out by himself on the high, lonesome plains or in the rugged, isolated mountains. He had figured that nobody was really watching him.

  But maybe he’d been wrong about that. Maybe that uneasy feeling had been a warning that trouble was lurking in those crowds.

  Preacher sat up a little straighter in the tub and took his hands off Abby’s heavy breasts. He reached for the butts of the pistols on the nearby chair instead
, and she frowned and asked, “What’s wrong, honey?”

  Before Preacher could answer, the door to the corridor slammed open and two men rushed into the room, each of them brandishing a gun.

  Chapter Three

  Preacher filled his hands about as fast as it was possible for any man to do so, leaning to the side out of the washtub as he did so.

  But at that same moment, Abby cried out in surprise and started to stand up, even though Preacher yelled for her to stay down.

  The warning came too late. Both of the intruders fired, and as their pistols roared and powder smoke spouted from the muzzles, the heavy lead balls slammed into the young redhead’s back.

  Abby was thrown forward by the horrible impact. She crashed against Preacher, who was trying to stand up now that he was armed. The combination of the collision and the wet tub made his feet slip out from under him. He fell backward, out of the tub.

  Images and impressions were jumbled together in his brain. He saw the blood spurting from the holes in Abby’s chest where the pistol balls had gone all the way through her body and torn their way out. He saw the look of pain and shock filling her wide green eyes. He saw the two killers, one short, one tall, but that was all that had registered during the quick glimpse he had gotten of them. And he saw the ceiling of the room as he smashed down on his back on the floor.

  Instinct saved his life then, causing his muscles to spring into action even though he was too stunned to think about what he was doing at that moment. He rolled to the side as another gun roared. At least one of the assassins had a second pistol. The ball chewed splinters from the floorboards near his head. He felt several of the little wood slivers sting his face. He came to a stop on his belly, the pistols in his hands tilted up but still unfired.

  There was nothing to shoot at, Preacher realized. The two intruders were gone. They must have realized that to stand around and try to reload was to invite certain death at his hands. He heard swift footsteps in the corridor and knew they were fleeing.

  As he leaped to his feet, he saw Abby draped over the side of the washtub. She had fallen to her knees and then pitched forward, so that the upper half of her body dangled outside the tub and the tangled strands of her long, wet red hair hung down and brushed the floor. Preacher had seen the extent of the terrible wounds she had suffered and knew she was dead. Nobody survived having a couple of fist-sized holes blown through their chest.

  Ignoring the fact that he was still naked, he lunged toward the door and slid out into the hallway. Movement from the stairs caught his eye. He saw a beaver hat disappearing down the staircase and almost snapped a shot at it, but he held off on the trigger. He didn’t want to waste powder and shot on a hat unless he could be sure of ventilating the head under it, too.

  He hadn’t known Abby for more than a couple of hours, but he was filled with rage at her useless death. He supposed the two bastards who’d interrupted his bath had been gunning for him and the girl had been killed by accident…but at the same time, he wasn’t sure why anybody wanted to blow holes in him either. He hadn’t had any run-ins with anybody since arriving in St. Louis earlier in the day.

  Of course, there had been that attempt to bushwhack him while he was still on the river, he recalled. Maybe somebody held a grudge against him because of that. Or maybe some old enemy had spotted him. He had a few of them, although most of his enemies had a habit of winding up dead.

  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.