“Damn right you are.”
Chambers shuffled off into the darkness. Cobey turned back to Juanita and reached for her again. “You and me gonna have some fun, Señorita,” he said.
“Cobey.”
The voice came from behind him. When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw Wick rising from the ground like a mountain in miniature erupting from the earth.
“Go back to sleep, Wick,” Cobey ordered. “This don’t concern you.”
“I don’t think you should be botherin’ the señorita, Cobey,” Wick said stubbornly.
With a savage snarl, Cobey said, “I told you, this don’t concern you.”
“Yeah, but it does. You said for me to keep Miss Juanita safe.”
“I told you not to let her run off.”
“You said to keep her safe,” Wick insisted. “That’s what I figure on doin’.”
Impatient and frustrated, Cobey stepped over to confront Wick. “Well, now I’m tellin’ you to leave me the hell alone! Can you understand that, or are you too damn dumb?”
Wick drew back as if Cobey had slapped him. “You never called me dumb before,” he said. “Ever’body else did, but you never did, Cobey.”
“Then stop actin’ dumb. What I’m gonna do to the gal ain’t gonna hurt her—”
“It will, Wick,” Juanita cut in. “It will hurt me very badly.”
Cobey twisted toward her. His hand flashed up and cracked across her face, knocking her sprawling back on the rock. “Shut up, you greaser bitch!” he roared. Juanita whimpered in pain and shock.
And then, as Cobey swung back around toward Wick, the giant rumbled in rage and fell on him like the mountain he so resembled.
Preacher glided noiselessly through the shadows and knelt beside Esteban again. “It’s two o’ Cobey’s men, like I thought,” he whispered to the young man. “And they’re gonna camp here until sunup, so they can see which way the padre went.”
“They’re staying here?” Esteban whispered back.
Preacher grimaced in the darkness. “Yep. They’re about twenty yards over yonder.”
“But will they not discover us?”
“Maybe, maybe not. It all depends—”
That was when one of the men’s mounts must have caught Horse’s scent, because a shrill whinny ripped through the night. Preacher came up from his crouch and clapped a hand over Horse’s nose to prevent the stallion from answering.
Even without that, though, Arnie and the other hard case realized something was wrong. Preacher heard Arnie’s exclamation. “Must be somebody else around here, George! Come on! Hit ’em hard!”
The two men flung themselves back on their horses and charged toward Preacher and Esteban. “Split up!” Preacher snapped at Esteban as he darted to the right. Esteban rolled over, came to his feet, and went to the left.
The two hard cases on horseback charged between them. Preacher saw a stray beam of moonlight reflect off a gun barrel.
“Dog!” he said.
With a growl, the big cur launched himself off the ground and grabbed one of the riders by the arm. The man screamed as Dog’s teeth tore into his flesh. The impact of the heavy beast knocked him out of the saddle. He fell to the ground with a heavy thud. Dog landed on top of him and continued savaging his arm, snarling and snapping. The man screamed and tried to scuttle away.
At the same time, Preacher leaped toward the second man, who was trying to wheel his horse around. Reversing his rifle, Preacher drove the weapon’s butt into the man’s stomach. The man slewed sideways but managed to remain mounted. Preacher had to jump out of the way to avoid being trampled by the man’s horse. He saw the pistol swinging toward him and rolled to the side as the gun roared. The heavy lead ball smacked into the ground where Preacher had been an instant earlier.
Preacher yanked one of his pistols from behind his belt and cocked it as he raised it. Aiming in bad light like this was always a chancy proposition, but he tried for the man’s shoulder. He didn’t want to kill the hard case, but wanted to wound him instead, taking him alive so that he could be questioned.
Unfortunately, just as Preacher pulled the trigger, the man’s horse, spooked by the previous shot, danced skittishly to the side. Preacher saw the man’s hat leap into the air as the shot caught him squarely in the face and blew off a large chunk of his head.
“Damn it!” Preacher growled as the man’s limp body hit the ground like a sack of potatoes. Preacher stood up and turned toward Dog and the other man.
Only they weren’t there anymore. The big cur’s snarling had stopped, and Preacher didn’t see any sign of him or the man he had gone after.
“Dog!”
There was no response.
“Esteban! You here?”
Nothing. The night was quiet except for a few faintly fading echoes of the two shots.
Preacher hurried toward the spot where he had last seen Dog. His foot hit something soft and yielding in the darkness, and he almost fell. Catching his balance, he lowered himself to a knee and reached out. His hand touched thick fur. With worry stretching his nerves taut, Preacher explored along the bundle of fur and muscles until he came to Dog’s head. His fingers encountered a sticky, swollen lump. A moment later he found a strong pulse beating in the animal’s neck. Dog was all right, just knocked out. The man he had been fighting with must have clouted him with a gun barrel. Even as Preacher prodded around on him, searching for other, more serious wounds, Dog began to stir. He whimpered, lifted his head, and moved his legs. Preacher helped him roll onto his belly.
“You all right, Dog?” he asked.
Dog raised his head even more and licked Preacher in the face. Relief flooded through the mountain man. Dog had been his friend as long as any human had been, and a better friend than most, at that.
But there was still the question of Esteban’s disappearance. Preacher told Dog to stay where he was and stood up. Calling Esteban’s name a couple of times still produced no results. He looked around. The moon was lower in the sky by now, with the approach of dawn, but there was still enough light for Preacher to see. He quickly came to the conclusion that Esteban was gone.
And that led to another conclusion that was pretty troublesome. Preacher checked the body of the man he had killed. He thought maybe it had belonged to one of the men who had been with Professor Chambers at the old mission, the two so-called guides. It was hard to be sure because of the damage the pistol ball had done to his face. But he wasn’t fat, which meant that it was Arnie who had gotten away.
Preacher recalled how deceptively dangerous Arnie was in a fight. The fat man must have stumbled into Esteban in the darkness after knocking Dog out, and even injured, he had been able to take the young man with him as he fled, either knocking Esteban unconscious, too, or simply forcing him to go along at gunpoint. The dead man’s horse was still here, but Arnie’s mount wasn’t. Chances were, the fat man was on his way back to join Cobey and the others right now.
Only he wasn’t alone. Preacher’s enemies now had two hostages instead of one, as both of the Alvarez siblings were now their prisoners.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Juanita cried out again as Wick’s rush knocked Cobey back onto the rock against her. “I said leave her alone!” Wick roared, sounding like a grizzly bear. He looked sort of like a grizzly bear, too, as he loomed over Cobey for a second and then lunged down on him, wrapping his big hands around Cobey’s throat.
Cobey fought back desperately, bringing a knee up into Wick’s groin and hammering punches to his head. Wick didn’t seem to feel the punches, but the knee made him grunt in pain and relax his grip on Cobey’s throat. Though Cobey was considerably smaller than the giant, he was still a big, powerful man, and when he clubbed his hands together and drove them hard against Wick’s jaw, he was able to knock the larger man to the side.
Wick shook off that blow in a hurry, though, and a backhanded cuff to Cobey’s head packed enough of an impact to knock Cobey into Juanita again. Both of them
slid off the rock and fell to the ground beside it. Cobey landed on top of Juanita. His weight knocked the breath out of her and made it difficult for her to drag more air into her lungs. Panic went through her at the thought that she might suffocate underneath him.
He wasn’t there long enough for that, however. Still yelling incoherently, Wick reached down, grabbed the front of Cobey’s buckskin shirt, and jerked him upright again. Gratefully, Juanita gasped for breath. Several smaller rocks dug painfully into her body where she had fallen on them, but she ignored that.
Wick shook Cobey like a terrier shaking a rat. “You shouldn’t’a hit her!” he bellowed. “You shouldn’t’a done it!”
“H-help!” Cobey shouted. “He’s g-gone crazy!”
Juanita rolled over and became aware that Bert McDermott and Chuck Stilson had rushed up, drawn by Wick’s yelling and the sounds of the fight. Professor Chambers was there, too, but he hung back, obviously reluctant to take a hand in the struggle.
Bert and Stilson were not so hesitant. They both leaped at Wick from behind, Bert grabbing him around the shoulders while Stilson tackled him around the waist. Again reminiscent of a bear, Wick simply shrugged them off and sent them flying through the air while he continued shaking Cobey.
Juanita found herself hoping that in his rage, Wick would kill the gang’s leader. Without Cobey around, it would be that much easier for Preacher and Esteban to rescue her later on. And if Wick killed Cobey for trying to molest her, it would insure that the others would all be too afraid to bother her as long as she was under the giant’s protection. As she watched Cobey’s head loll violently back and forth, she hoped that his neck snapped.
That wasn’t to be. Bert surged back to his feet, drew his pistol, and slammed the weapon against Wick’s head with all the strength in his wiry body. Stilson followed suit, crashing a blow on Wick’s head with his pistol. The two men took turns hammering on Wick’s skull with their weapons, and after a moment, Wick’s grip on Cobey’s shirt relaxed and Cobey slipped free. He dropped to the ground, half-conscious at best.
Wick tried to turn toward Bert and Stilson. He stumbled as they hit him again. Juanita’s heart went out to him as he fell to his knees. Bert kicked him in the face, but that just made him lean backward. As he straightened, Stilson hit him again, on top of the head this time. Wick pawed feebly at the two men. He let out a rumble of pain and confusion, and then he pitched forward on his face. After twitching a couple of times, he lay still. For a second Juanita was afraid that he was dead, and she knew that if he was gone, her chances of surviving had just dropped dramatically. But then she heard the harsh sound of his breathing and knew that he was still alive. Even though he had been dealt an incredible amount of damage, his massive frame and thick skull had been able to absorb it.
Juanita turned her head toward Chambers, thinking that this might be the perfect time for the professor to strike. He could kill Cobey while the man was helpless and probably cow Bert and Stilson into cooperating with him.
Chambers, however, wasn’t making a move to do any such thing, and Juanita thought she knew why. Chambers didn’t want to turn on his supposed allies until they had their hands on the treasure. It might take all of them to get the gold and silver and the old relics away from Preacher. Everyone was waiting, using the others and stringing them along, until they had obtained what they had come here to the Sangre de Cristos to steal. Then it might well be every man for himself.
“Son of a bitch!” Bert said. “It was like tryin’ to knock down a damn mountain!”
Stilson cocked his pistol and pointed it at Wick’s head. “I’ll blow his damn brains out!”
Bert grabbed the gun barrel and forced it to the side. “Don’t be a fool!” he snapped. “Once Wick wakes up, he’ll be calmed down again. We may need him ’fore this is all over.”
“Are you crazy?” Stilson argued. “If I don’t kill him, Cobey’s gonna as soon as he wakes up.”
“Don’t be so sure about that. Gimme a hand.” Bert knelt next to Cobey and started to lift him to a sitting position. He glanced at Chambers and went on. “Professor, see about gettin’ the señorita off the ground.”
“Of course,” Chambers said, stepping forward at last. He got hold of Juanita and lifted her onto her feet. She couldn’t walk because her ankles were bound, but with Chambers’s help she was able to get back onto the flat rock where she had been lying earlier. She sat on it now and watched as Bert and Stilson lifted Cobey and held him up, kneeling on either side of him as he sat on the ground.
Bert slapped Cobey’s face lightly and said, “Hey. Hey, Cobey. You all right?”
Groggily, Cobey shook his head and groaned. He pawed at his face and said thickly, “Wha . . . wha . . . happened?”
“Wick tore into you,” Bert said. “I ain’t quite sure why. Chuck and me didn’t know what was goin’ on until Wick had hold of you and was treatin’ you like a mama grizz goin’ after somebody who’d bothered her cubs.”
“Yeah . . . yeah, I remember. . . .” Cobey looked around. “Where is he?”
“Layin’ over there on the ground. He’s knocked out, but I don’t reckon he’s hurt too bad. Chuck and me walloped him a bunch of times with our pistols, but you know how thick that big bastard’s skull is. Prob’ly didn’t even put a dent in it.”
“Want me to kill him, Cobey?” Stilson asked.
“What?” Cobey said. “Kill who? Wick? Hell, no!”
Stilson was a little taken aback. “I figured after what he did—”
“He lost his head,” Cobey cut in harshly, “and I’ll have a talk with him about it. But he’s too valuable to us to just kill him.”
Bert looked at Stilson as if he were saying that he’d told him as much.
“Help me up,” Cobey went on. “I just want to get back to my bedroll and lay down for a while. Then one of you stand guard over the señorita, since Wick’s out cold.”
“Sure, Cobey,” Bert said. Together, the two men helped Cobey to his feet.
Juanita heaved a sigh of relief. Cobey was too shaken up to bother her again, at least for the rest of this night.
But there was no way of knowing what new ordeals morning would bring.
Preacher saddled Horse and got ready to ride. Then he hunkered on his heels and gnawed on a strip of jerky from his possibles bag while he waited for the gray of dawn to advance across the sky. As soon as it was light enough to see even a little bit, he stood up and started looking around, his keen eyes examining the ground intently.
It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for. The wheels of a pair of wagons had left definite marks on the ground, heading east, while a single horse had pounded off to the west.
He stood there for a long moment staring at the wagon tracks. It seemed unlikely that there would be a pair of wagons in the Sangre de Cristos other than the ones brought up here by the Alvarez party. Not impossible, of course, but certainly unlikely. The day before, those wagons had been in the hands of Cobey Larson, Professor Chambers, and the rest of that bunch. Preacher didn’t think that Cobey and the others would have brought the wagons back along here. The fact that Arnie had taken off in the opposite direction with Esteban added to the strength of that theory.
That left only one good explanation. Once Father Hortensio and the two Yaquis had reached the bottom of the ledge, Pablo and Joaquin had left the padre here with the treasure and gone to steal back the wagons. It had probably still been daylight then, and Father Hortensio would have known that Cobey, Chambers, and the others were likely to be up on the shelf, trying to trade Juanita for the treasure. They might have left someone down below to guard the wagons, but chances were they hadn’t.
That priest was tricky enough to have thought of all that, Preacher decided. And it was the only thing that really made sense. The Yaquis had brought the wagons back here, loaded the treasure on them, and then they and Father Hortensio had lit a shuck back the way the party had come in the first place, heading out of th
e mountains as fast as they could push the teams.
Father Hortensio was taking the treasure back where it belonged, to Mission Santo Domingo.
But that still left Juanita Alvarez and now her brother Esteban as prisoners.
Preacher wasn’t given to agonizing over decisions. He looked at a situation, weighed all the angles quickly but carefully, and then made up his mind. Now, he swung up into his saddle and rode west, following the tracks left by the fleeing Arnie Ross. He knew where to find Father Hortensio and the treasure when the time came; for now he had to see about getting Esteban and Juanita out of the hands of the hard cases who had captured them.
While the sun was still just peeking over the eastern horizon, Preacher reached the Purgatoire River. Not surprisingly, the tracks he had been following turned to parallel the river. The fat man was running back to his comrades as fast as he could. Preacher rode along the river, too, but he veered away from it until he was a couple of hundred yards away from the stream. He didn’t want to run head-on into Cobey’s bunch. Chances were, as soon as they heard about Arnie’s encounter with Preacher and Esteban, they would backtrack the fat man and try to pick up the trail of the treasure where the fight had taken place. By now they would know that the wagons were gone, and both Cobey and Chambers were cunning enough to figure out what had happened to them.
Preacher had only gone a mile or so when the skin on the back of his neck began to prickle. It was an instinctive reaction, and one that he had experienced many times in the past. He considered it a sort of alarm system.
Somebody was watching him.
Without slowing Horse or being too obvious about it, Preacher looked around, searching for any signs of whoever was following him. He didn’t see anything, which didn’t mean they weren’t there. It just meant that they were good at what they were doing.
The valley of the Purgatoire was about half a mile wide along here. Steep bluffs rose on both sides, and the mountains climbed above them. A few miles ahead, the valley narrowed down more, and that was where the twisting canyon leading up to the shelf where the treasure had been hidden was located. The landscape where Preacher rode was hilly and dotted with thick stands of pine. Plenty of places to hide, in other words. He might be riding right into an ambush.
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