The First Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  “I got to see this. I cain’t hardly wait to see this.”

  Preacher warbled a bird’s call. None of the four men so much as looked around.

  Stupid worthless trash, Preacher thought. Outlaw scum can’t even tell the difference between a man’s call and a real bird. Mine echoed, you idiots.

  “Hell, let’s ride!” and outlaw declared.

  “Hell, let’s die!” Preacher shouted, and opened fire.

  4

  Preacher’s yell startled them all. When he shot a big lard-butted, pus-gutted ruffian in the belly with his .54 Hawken, that really got their attention. The outlaw folded up like he’d been kicked by a mule and hit the ground, squallin’ and bellerin’, both hands holding his tore-up belly.

  Preacher fired his double-shotted pistol and the muzzle exploded in fire and smoke. Both balls struck Rod in the face, and suddenly the outlaw no longer had a face. He fell back dead without uttering a sound.

  Preacher dropped his Hawken and jerked out a pistol. It misfired and he found himself acing two pistols ready to discharge. Preacher leaped back into the brush just as the outlaws fired. He rolled fast, then came to his feet, holding his last charged pistol.

  One of the two remaining outlaws threw good sense to the breeze and came hollering and crashing and cussing into the brush after the mountain man. Preacher opened him up from belly to gullet with his knife. He wiped the blade on the dying man’s jacket and charged his weapons. He took his time, working fast but carefully. The dying man watched him and used some of his last breath.

  “He’s here, Jason!” he managed to gasp. “He done me in, I say. Oh, it hurts something fierce.”

  Preacher glanced at him and winked. “Have a pleasant journey to hell, child-raper.”

  “Damn your cold black heart!”

  But Preacher was gone, slithering away soundlessly, working his way north of the last man on the trail, who, by now, must be getting real nervous.

  “Who are you?” the last outlaw shouted. “Some brigand? Hell, join us. They’s no point in anymore shootin’.”

  Preacher was standing about twenty yards from the man, by a tree. The man he’d belly shot with the Hawken was jerking and crying on the ground. But his cries were becoming weaker.

  “It’s Preacher!” the outlaw Preacher had opened up with his knife hollered weakly. “I knowed I’d seen him somewheres afore. Kill him for me, Jason. Avenge me, boy. Avenge your old partner!”

  Preacher lifted his freshly charged and cocked pistol. “Yeah, Jason,” he said. “Why don’t you do that?”

  Jason whirled, his face pale with fright and with a very nervous trigger finger. His shot went wide. Preacher’s did not. Preacher coolly fired, the ball striking the young man in the chest. He screamed, dropped his pistol, and went down, both hands holding his bloody chest, covering the mortal wound.

  Preacher charged his pistol, stood for a moment listening, and only then slowly walked over to the young man, guessing him to be in his early twenties. He stood over the man, his tanned and rugged face as set and hard as his eyes. “Gonna be a big tough outlaw, huh, boy? Didn’t quite work out the way you had it planned, did it?”

  “The old Devil take you!” the young man gasped. “Damn you to the pits of hell for killin’ me.”

  Preacher snorted. “Well, if it wasn’t me that put a ball in you it’d been someone else, I reckon. You got a ma you want to speak any last words to?”

  “Hell with her and you.”

  Preacher shook his head in disgust. “You’re a real no-good, ain’t you?”

  “It’s gettin’ dark!”

  “It’s gonna get a hell of a lot darker, boy. And you can trust me on that.”

  “I hate you!”

  “Man shouldn’t go to meet his Maker with hate in his heart. That’s just another mark agin you, lad.”

  “I still hate you.”

  “Whatever.” Preacher turned away and began gathering up the outlaw’s horses. And they were good horses too. That’s one thing you could count on about outlaws—due to their way of life, they had to have horses with a lot of bottom to them, so they always stole only the best.

  “You ain’t gonna leave me to die alone, is you?” the young man called.

  “I thought you hated me?”

  “I do. But I want somebody here when I pass.”

  “I’ll stay. But I ain’t gonna get too close. I might get a hotfoot when you expire.”

  But Preacher was talking to a dead man. He closed the lad’s staring eyes and with a sigh, dragged him and the one with no face off the trail and into the timber. Then he went to see if the one he’d carved on was still alive. He was, and moaning.

  “I hate you,” the man said in a surprisingly strong voice. His eyes were very bright with pain.

  “This is gettin’ to be like an echo,” Preacher told him. “You keep sayin’ bad things about me, I ain’t gonna say no words over y’all’s restin’ spot.”

  “You gonna bury us?”

  “Yeah. I’ll pile some rocks over you so’s the varmits can’t worry you. You got airy person you might want to know about your fate?”

  “Damn bitchy wife and a shackful of squallin’ kids back in the Missouri bottoms around New Madrid.”

  “You should have stayed to home.”

  “Fine time to tell me that” He closed his eyes, jerked once, then passed.

  Preacher piled them all into a natural depression and tossed rocks and small logs over their bodies until he had them covered best he could ... or wanted to. He took off Dupre’s hat and said, “Oh, Lord, here these misbegotten, worthless, trashy, no-count, and misguided souls is. Do whatever the hell you want to with them. Amen.”

  He sat down and built a hat-sized fire and boiled some water for coffee. While that was heatin’ up, he went through the possessions he’d taken from the outlaws’ pockets. Between the four of them, they had three dollars and fifteen cents cash money.

  “The glamorous life of an outlaw,” Preacher said, and pocketed the money.

  Their sleeping blankets were all ragged and full of fleas, so he tossed them aside. But their saddlebags were filled with pocket watches and rings and brooches and all sorts of jewelry, also some gold teeth, which they’d pried out of the mouths of the dead they’d robbed. A real nice bunch of people, these four.

  Preacher took the ill-gotten booty and threw it all into the timber and brush.

  He sat for a time, drinking his coffee and letting his nerves settle down. He knew there was no point in kidding himself, Bum and Red Hand were not going to give up simply because he had killed another of their gang. The quick way one of the gang—now lying dead—had recruited others showed him how easy it was to find those inclined to rob and rape and murder. The wilderness was not only attracting decent men and women and their families to settle and work the land and be good citizens, it was also attracting the thieves and murderers and the like.

  And it would only get worser, Preacher figured.

  Preacher carefully put out his fire, poured water on what remained, and stirred the ashes with a stick to make sure it was completely out. He squatted for a time, his mind busy on the problems facing the wagon train. He did not have one idea in all of billy-hell how he was going to get all those wagons through and past the south rim and then across the Snake. These pilgrims just didn’t know what faced them.

  Preacher knew that the missionary, Whitman, had tried it—and he guessed succeeded—the year before. But he’d been forced, so Preacher had heard, to abandon his wagons and transfer everything to pack animals. But these folks Preacher was guiding wasn’t about to give up their possessions—it was all they had.

  Well, he thought with a sigh, he’d just have to find a way. That was all there was to it.

  * * *

  “That’s some fine-looking horseflesh there, Preacher,” Dupre said, inspecting the animals Preacher brought into the encampment. “Their riders decided to walk the rest of the way and just given ’em to you
, hey?”

  “Something like that,” Preacher replied, giving Dupre back his hat and settling his own on his head. He took the plate of food handed to him by a settler woman and sat down on the ground to eat. Nobody asked him anything until he had finished filling his stomach. Mealtime was serious business and there wasn’t no point in chit-chatting until a man was done eating.

  When he’d set his plate aside and hottened up his coffee, Preacher leaned back against a wagon wheel and told the others what had happened.”

  “The wilderness is fillin’ up with scalawags,” Beartooth opined. “I knowed when towns started up they’d be fillin’ up with foot-padders and back-shooters and the like.”

  “What towns?” Preacher asked.

  “Over in Oregon and Washington Territory. Why, I seen one town this last trip had more’un two dozen buildin’s. Dupre said one of ’em had a ladies’ dress shop that was spelt with two p’s.”

  “Why?”

  “Damned if I know.” Beartooth scratched his woolly head. “How many p’s is it ’posed to have?”

  “Boys,” Preacher said, “how in the hell are we gonna get these wagons acrost the south rim and over the Snake?”

  “I talked to Tom Fitzpatrick not long ago,” Dupre said. “He told me how he thought it could be done. He said Tom McKay had done it last year, but they had to leave the wagons at the Snake River Gorge. I think they’s a way, but it’s gonna be a rough one.”

  “What happens when we reach the Dalles on the Columbia?” Beartooth asked. “That is one evil place.”

  “We portage it,” Preacher said.

  “With the wagons?” Nighthawk broke his silence. “It’s never been done.”

  “It’s either that or float them,” Preacher said.

  “I reckon we could build rafts to ferry the people.”

  “With the wagons on them?” Nighthawk again spoke. He shook his head, “Ummm.”

  “Look,” Dupre said, freshening his coffee. “Let’s get these folks through the south rim and out of the gorge first.” He looked over at Preacher.

  Preacher nodded his head in agreement. “We’ll take ’er one day at a time. I don’t know of no other way to do it. Hell with it. I’m going to sleep.”

  * * *

  “My God!” Swift exclaimed, as he stood with Preacher and the other mountain men, looking at the brutal terrain of the Snake’s south rim.

  “Get the winch out,” Preacher told the wagonmaster. “The heaviest ropes. We’re gonna be here for several days gettin’ all these wagons acrost this mess. Get your strongest men to work the winch and put others unloadin’ the wagons and totin’ the possessions up that trail. We ain’t gonna do it by standin’ here jawin’. Let’s go to work.”

  “How many of these steep rocky trails lie ahead of us, Preacher?” Richard asked.

  “Oh, ’bout a thousand or so,” he replied, then walked off.

  “And he ain’t kiddin’,” Dupre told the missionary.

  “Just be glad some trappers found a way around Hell’s Canyon,” Preacher called over his shoulder. Laughing, he walked on.

  “What’s that all about?” Swift asked.

  “A place you don’t even wanna look at,” Dupre said. “Let’s get to work.”

  And work they did. It was either that, or turn around and take the California Trail, which no one in the party wanted to do. Using ropes and muscle and winches, and sometimes doubling the mules and oxen, one by one the wagons reached the summit of the peak ... only to discover another seemingly insurmountable, boulder-strewn steep mountain trail was what faced them.

  So they squared their shoulders, rubbed sore and aching muscles, and faced the task. The men and women worked all that day, and managed to make three miles.

  Richard and Edmond had lost their city flabbiness. Their waists and hips were leaner and their chests and arms and shoulders much more muscular. Now they didn’t look so stupid strutting around in their buckskins.

  No one sang songs around the fires that night. Directly after supper, nearly everyone except the sentries rolled up in their blankets and were snoring in two minutes.

  “You gotta hand it to them, Preacher,” Dupre said. “If this bunch here is gonna be the breed comin’ from the East, we gonna be all right, to my way of thinkin’. I’m right proud of these pilgrims.”

  Preacher nodded his head in agreement, but he was still deep in thought.

  “Spit it out, Preacher,” Beartooth said.

  “We’re goin’ over the Cascades,” Preacher said.

  Nighthawk looked across the dying fire at the mountain man. “Still got the fast water to cross.”

  “Rafts. We’ll take the wagons apart. I’m talkin’ about right down to the box. We’ll make the box waterproof with tarps and tallow. From this moment on, save the candle drippin’s. We’ll use that to fill the small cracks and holes in the beds of the wagons. That way, should a raft get ripped apart, the wagon beds will still float.”

  “You a genius, Preacher!” Dupre said. “Hell, I’d a-never thought of that. But why not just stay on the rafts and head on down the Columbia?”

  “Bum Kelley and Red Hand, and them warrin’ Cayuses. We’d be sittin’ ducks a-bobbin’ around in the river. ’Sides, if the Cayuses is up in arms, the Snakes and others will be, too. I’ve made up my mind. We go over the Cascades.”

  “It’s a hard two hundred and fifty miles through them mountains,” Beartooth reminded his friend.

  “And nobody every took no wagon train through them, neither,” Dupre added.

  “Well, boys,” Preacher said, standing up and stretching. “The likes of us has been the first to do a lot of things. We’ve climbed up through mountain passes that no other white man ever done before us and gazed upon land that was wild and pure. We’ve seen the eruptin’ steam holes in the high-up country and we’ve crossed the wild deserts to the south of us. We’ve drunk our fill from cold pure streams where no white man ever bellied down afore us. We’re the ones who blazed the trails and forded the rivers and laid it all out and made it easier for them others we knowed would come a-snortin’ and a-blowin’ after we blazed the way. How many nights has we laid up in our buffler robes whilst the snow blowed all around us and was the first white men to be sung to by the wolves and the coyotes. We were, boys. Us. The very first mountain men. Nobody else ’ceptin’ us. And there ain’t never gonna be no one else like us. Bet on that. How can there be? We already done it.

  “It was us who was the first to make friends with the Injuns—them that would let us—and the by-God first to do near ’bouts everything else that’s been done by white men out here. We was the first. So the way I look at it, why, hell, boys, this little adventure we lookin’ at now won’t be nothin’ compared to what already lays behind us.”

  “Damn, ain’t that purty?” Dupre said. “You shore do talk nice when you’re a mind to do so.”

  Beartooth was so moved he wiped a tear from his eye.

  “Ummm!” Nighthawk grunted, getting to his feet to head for the bushes. Speaking of getting moved.

  5

  “He ain’t comin’ back, Bum,” Slug told the outlaw leader. “And them Injuns is gettin’ jumpy. They ain’t likin’ movin’ so far out of their territory.”

  Bum nodded his head. He was rapidly getting a gut full of the mountain man called Preacher. But the thought of calling off the chase never entered his mind. He could not, however, afford to lose the support of Red Hand. Without Red Hand’s braves, they would have no chance against the wagon train.

  Bum knew Slug was right: Rod was not coming back. But that didn’t necessarily mean he was dead. He might have developed a yellow streak and went the other way, rather than face Preacher alone. But Bum didn’t think that was what happened. Rod just got careless and Preacher finished him.

  Bum went to see Red Hand. He had been working out a plan in his mind and now was the time to see if it would work.

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you took your people and r
un back to the Portneufs,” Bum told the renegade. “That’s a mighty mean man we’re chasin’. Lots of folks is scared of Preacher. So you take your boys and run away, if you’re a mind to.”

  Red hand drew himself up tall and glowered at the outlaw. “Red Hand does not run away from an enemy.” The Blackfoot spoke the words contemptuously. “Why would you think I would even consider such a cowardly act?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Just come to me, that’s all. You gettin’ so far away from home country, I reckon. And we ain’t been doin’ so good agin Preacher.”

  “You worry about the cowards among your own group,” Red Hand told him. “And do not ever again question my courage or the bravery of my people.”

  “Fine,” Bum said, ducking his head to hide his smile. “That suits me, Red Hand.”

  The Blackfoot stalked away, his back stiff from the insult against him. Bum went back to his own group. He squatted down by the fire and poured coffee.

  “How’d it go?” Beckman asked.

  “Red Hand wouldn’t quit now no matter what happens or how far we have to travel. He’s in it all the way.”

  “When do we hit the train?”

  “Between the Blues and the Wallowa. Right along the Powder, I’ll toss it to Red Hand and before it’s over, he’ll be thinkin’ he suggested it.”

  “Why don’t we hit them on the Columbia?” Moses suggested. “You know they got to take the river.”

  “Maybe not. Preacher ain’t never done nothin’ the easy way; so I been told. I got it in my mind that he’s gonna try to take them acrost the Cascades.”

  “That’d be plumb stupid!” Bull said. “Ain’t nobody ever took no damn wagon acrost them mountains. Ain’t nobody ever goin’ to, neither.”

  “I don’t know of no one who ever tried it,” Bum said. “But if anyone can do it, it’ll be Preacher.”

  “So when do we ride for the Blues?”

  “I’ll give Red Hand an hour or so to get over his mad, then talk to him. I ’magine we’ll pull out in the mornin’. We’ll get there in plenty of time to lay out an ambush site and get all rested up.”