Preacher's Blood Hunt

by William W. Johnstone

  Papa Voertmann stood behind the counter. He held a slate in his hand and used a piece of charcoal to do some ciphering, obviously quite a chore for him. The tip of his tongue stuck out the left corner of his mouth and wiggled around as he frowned in thought. Several men stood in front of the counter, evidently waiting for him to finish his figuring.

  The white-bearded Dutchman glanced up from the slate, looked between two of his customers, and spotted Preacher. He uttered an exclamation in Dutch and then said, “Preacher! Ja! You have come back.”

  It had been three or four years since Preacher had visited the trading post. Papa hadn’t changed a bit in that time, and Preacher supposed he hadn’t, either, since the fat old man had recognized him instantly. He grinned and nodded. “Howdy, Papa.”

  “You must go in the tavern and say hello to Mama.” Voertmann pointed to the wide, arched doorway on the left, which led into the tavern area. “You know how fond she is of you.”

  To the best of Preacher’s recollection, Mama Voertmann had never looked at him without wearing an expression like he was something she wanted to scrape off the bottom of her shoe, but she had never tried to stab, shoot, or poison him, either, so he supposed that might mean she was fond of him. He nodded again. “I’ll do that before I leave, Papa.”

  One of the customers loudly tapped his fingertip on the counter. “You’re supposed to be waitin’ on us, old man, not gabbin’ with your friends.”

  Good Lord, Preacher thought. That fella had to be a stranger in these parts, to talk like that to Papa Voertmann.

  “Och, so? You are impatient for me to figure up your bill?”

  “Just tell us what we owe you, so we can get on about our business. There’s beaver out there just waitin’ for us to trap and skin ’em.”

  Papa set the piece of charcoal aside and picked up a rag. He began to wipe the slate clean. “You will trap these beaver without any assistance from me.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” demanded the disgruntled customer. He was ugly, with a patchy beard and a nose that had been broken and set badly sometime in the past. The three men with him were much the same sort, although not quite as rough-looking.

  “It means,” Papa Voertmann said, stiff with offended dignity, “that I will sell you no supplies. Your money is no good here. I will not take payment from louts.”

  Papa had taken payment from louts—and much worse—before, thought Preacher, but that was when those fellas had treated him with respect.

  “Listen here, you damned Dutchie,” the loudmouth said. “We need provisions, and there ain’t no other place around here to buy ’em!”

  Papa sniffed. “You should have thought of that before you spoke so rudely to me, ja?”

  “I’ll do a lot more than speak rude to you!”

  The man lunged across the counter and grabbed Voertmann’s apron, bunching his fingers up in the canvas. He drew back his other fist and poised it to punch the trading post owner in the face.

  Preacher didn’t make a move. He knew Papa still had things under control.

  As proof of that, the fat, jolly old Dutchman shoved both sawed-off barrels of the scattergun he took from under the counter into the belly of the man holding him and snarled curses in his native tongue. The man’s fist stayed where it was, frozen where he had pulled it back for a punch that would never be thrown.

  “This gun is loaded with rock salt,” Papa went on in English, “but at this range it will blow a hole in your belly anyway, and you will die a slow, agonizing death. I will fire in two seconds if you do not release me.”

  Broken Nose let go of Papa’s apron.

  Preacher moved up to the counter, to one side of the four men, and casually leaned an elbow on the planks. He saw that Broken Nose’s ugly face was as pale and washed out as could be.

  Having the barrels of a scattergun shoved in your belly usually had that effect on a man, Preacher reflected wryly.

  Broken Nose’s companions had stiffened. One of them edged a hand toward the butt of a pistol. Preacher caught the man’s eye, rested his hand on his hunting knife, and slowly shook his head.

  The man moved his hand away from the gun.

  “You got no call to treat us this way,” Broken Nose said in a hollow voice. “We didn’t do nothin’ to you.”

  “You insulted me, and you insulted my friend,” Papa responded.

  “I didn’t even say anything to him!”

  “I was insulted anyway,” Preacher drawled. “Bein’ around stupid folks usually has that effect on me. Don’t you know who this is?”

  The nostrils in that crooked nose flared angrily. “Some Dutchman.”

  “This is Papa Voertmann. He may look like a friendly ol’ soul, but he ain’t. He’s a touchy hombre who’ll skin a man alive if the varmint looks at him sideways. Ain’t that right, Papa?”

  “Ja,” Voertmann said.

  “And his wife is even tougher,” Preacher went on. “You boys are lucky that she must be busy over in the tavern. If she was in here when you talked to her husband like that, you’d be bleedin’ already. Papa’s inclined to let you turn around and walk out of here, though. You know why?”

  Papa grinned. “I hate scrubbing bloodstains off the floor, ja! ”

  “All right. We’ll go,” Broken Nose said. “But this ain’t over.”

  Preacher had heard threats like that so many times they just made him tired. He sighed. “If you’ve got any sense, it better be.”

  The four men backed away from the counter, then turned and filed out of the trading post, but not without casting several hate-filled glances over their shoulders.

  A few moments later, Preacher heard the drumming hoofbeats of their horses as they rode off. “You got to watch out for idiots like that, Papa. They might come back and try to make trouble.”

  “Idiots is right,” Papa said. “One of them mentioned they were bound for King’s Crown. I should have sold them supplies anyway and let them go. A dead man’s gold spends as well as any other!”

  A frown creased the mountain man’s forehead. “What do you mean, a dead man’s gold? What’s wrong with King’s Crown?”

  “My friend, you have been away too long! You have not heard of Jebediah Druke?”

  Preacher shook his head. “Tell me.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Papa Voertmann told Preacher about Druke over buckets of beer at a table in the tavern while his wife hovered solicitiously nearby. Mama Voertmann might be pure poison to everybody else, but she doted on her big, magnificently bearded husband.

  “This man Druke, I remember him stopping here on his way to the mountains,” Papa said. “He caused no trouble, but I remember when I looked at him, a chill went through me. Something about his eyes, I think it was. They were cold and dead . . . like a snake’s eyes. He frightened me. Me!”

  Preacher agreed that that reaction was astonishing. Papa Voertmann might look fat and soft, but in reality he was one of the toughest men Preacher had ever known.

  “Ja, me as well,” Mama Voertmann put in, which was even more amazing. Preacher figured the feisty little woman would spit in the eye of Satan himself. If Jebediah Druke had scared her, he had to be really bad.

  “The men with him were much the same,” Voertmann went on. “But he was definitely the leader and they were followers. They stopped, bought a few supplies, had a few drinks in the tavern, and then moved on. I sighed a big sigh of relief when they rode away!”

  Mama nodded solemnly to indicate that she had, too.

  “They said they were headed for King’s Crown?” Preacher asked.

  “Ja. Druke mentioned that he had heard how plentiful the beaver were there. They planned to make a fortune trapping. In that respect, he and his friends were no different from hundreds of other men who have stopped here.”

  “What’s happened since then?”

  Voertmann lifted the bucket to his mouth, took a big swallow of beer, then wiped his mouth and beard with a corner of his apron.
“About a month after that, a couple trappers came through here on their way back east. One of them had a broken arm. They had been in King’s Crown, and they’d had some sort of trouble with Druke. He broke the man’s arm in a fight. Then he and his friends pointed their guns at the trappers and told them that if they didn’t leave the valley right away, they were dead men. They fled, leaving behind their traps, the pelts they had taken, and everything else. They were genuinely afraid for their lives, I could tell.”

  Preacher frowned. “Mountain men generally don’t stand for things like that.”

  “Of course not. As Druke continued trying to run roughshod over the other men in the valley, some of them fought back.” Voertmann paused. “Those men vanished as if they had fallen off the face of the earth. Each time that happened, the other trappers in the valley were less inclined to stand up to Druke and his heavy-handed tactics.”

  Preacher took a drink of beer and mulled over what Papa had just told him. For several reasons, he didn’t like the sound of it. He didn’t cotton to bullies, and that’s what Jebediah Druke was, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Nor did he like it when folks allowed themselves to be bullied because they were scared. He could sympathize with them to a certain extent, he supposed, but he couldn’t comprehend it.

  There was no backup in his nature. When somebody struck at him, he hit back, harder and faster. That was just the way he had always been. “So this has been goin’ on ever since?”

  “Ja, some seven or eight months now. Some of the men in the valley Druke didn’t run off. He must have been able to tell that they were kindred spirits, so he recruited them. Now he has more than a dozen men following him. One trapper told me they have built cabins and formed a little stronghold they call Fort Druke.”

  Preacher snorted. That sounded damned silly to him. He supposed it wasn’t so silly to the honest trappers in the valley who were menaced by Druke and his cohorts.

  “Druke says that King’s Crown belongs to him now,” Papa Voertmann went on. “He has made himself king, and the mountains are his crown.”

  “We’ll just see about—” Preacher started to say.

  When he stopped, Papa frowned in puzzlement. “What were you about to say, Preacher? Are you going to confront this evil man?”

  That was Preacher’s first impulse, all right. He would have liked to go into King’s Crown, get the honest trappers together, and deal with the threat of Jebediah Druke once and for all. He had been forced to do such things before, to take action and stand up for what was right.

  At the moment, though, he had another job taking him to the valley known as King’s Crown. He had taken Barnabas Pendexter’s money to outfit himself for the journey, so the only honest thing for him to do was to carry out the mission he had been given.

  Once that was done, though . . .

  “Let me ask you about somebody else, Papa.” Preacher described Pendexter’s missing son. “He would have come through these parts a few months before Druke did. A young man in his early twenties. Tall, sort of good-looking, I suppose, with brown hair. He would have looked like a greenhorn, because that’s exactly what he was. Oh, and he has a birthmark on the back of his neck, shaped like a half moon.”

  Voertmann’s chair creaked a little under his great weight as he leaned back and spread his hands. “What can I tell you, Preacher? There might have been dozens of men who fit that description in this trading post in the past year. I cannot remember them all.”

  “What about you, Mama?” Preacher asked.

  She pursed her lips and shook her head. “Like Papa says, there are too many trappers. Too many young men who think they will journey west and become rich. If they make no trouble, we take their money and they move on, and I have no memory of them.”

  Preacher sighed and nodded. “That’s what I was afraid of, but I didn’t figure it would hurt to ask.”

  Papa said, “This young man you seek, does he have a name?”

  “William Pendexter.”

  Papa thought about it and shook his head again. “The name means nothing to me. Why are you searching for him?”

  “His father hired me to look for him,” Preacher said. That wasn’t exactly true. Barnabas Pendexter had grubstaked him, rather than paying wages or promising a reward, but the end result was the same.

  Papa smiled ,”Ah, a boy who runs away from home seeking adventure! It was much like that with me, you know.”

  “Nope, I didn’t.”

  “When I was young, I left my home and ran away to sea.” A shudder went through Voertmann’s big frame. “A horrible, horrible mistake. Such an existence a naïve young lad should never have to endure. But in the end it was worth it, I suppose. I left the ship in New York and met a beautiful young girl.”

  Preacher grinned. “Mama, I do believe you’re blushin’.”

  She glared back at him. “Mind your tongue, Arthur.”

  Preacher looked down at the table and muttered, “Yes’m.” Hardly anybody west of Ohio ever used his real name anymore. Only a handful of folks even knew it. And only Mama Voertmann could make it sound so much like a threat.

  “Her family had been there for many years,” Papa went on. “New York was once called New Amsterdam, did you know that?”

  “Seems like I recollect Audie sayin’ something like that one time.”

  “Ah, the little man. Is he well?”

  “Last time I saw him, he was fine and dandy. Him and Nighthawk both.”

  “And the Indian, as talkative as ever, I suppose?”

  Preacher had to grin again. Nighthawk seldom said anything except “Umm,” but that was enough for him and Audie to carry on long conversations.

  “Yep, I reckon. I’ll run into ’em again one of these days, I expect. Wouldn’t mind havin’ them with me when I go into King’s Crown, but I don’t reckon that’s meant to be.”

  “You are going there?” Papa asked with a look of concern. “After everything I told you about Druke?”

  “Somebody told William Pendexter’s pa that the boy came through here on his way to King’s Crown, so I reckon that’s where I need to start lookin’ for him.”

  Papa shook his head gloomily. “If this young man was still there when Druke and his minions arrived, there is a good chance he is dead now, Preacher. If he was as inexperienced as you say, he would have been no match for them. Even a man such as yourself—” Voertmann stopped short.

  It was Preacher’s turn to ask, “What were you about to say, Papa?”

  Reluctantly, Voertmann answered. “I mean no offense, but even a man such as yourself may not be a match for a dozen or more killers led by a man like Jebediah Druke.”

  Preacher took another drink of beer and licked the foam from his mustache. “Reckon there’s a good chance we might find out.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Preacher spent most of the afternoon at the trading post. Late in the day, he loaded up the supplies he had bought, swung up into Horse’s saddle, and rode west along the stream that led toward the mountains. He didn’t go far before making camp in a grove of aspens about half a mile from the Voertmann place.

  He could have spent the night at the trading post, but if the weather was good, he preferred to be out in the open rather than having a roof over his head.

  After unsaddling Horse and picketing the stallion and the pack animal, he built a small fire to brew some coffee and cook his supper. Even though he didn’t expect any trouble, he was in the habit of not having a fire after dark unless absolutely necessary, so he ate his supper and extinguished the flames while dusk was still settling down over the prairie.

  He stretched out on his bedroll and watched through the branches of the aspens as the sky darkened and the stars began to appear overhead. There was no telling how many nights he had watched the same spectacular display without ever tiring of it. He was that rarest of creatures—a man utterly content with his life.

  He was in no hurry to leave it, of course, and yet if it ended tonight, he knew
he would die without any regrets, without mourning for things left undone. He had loved some good women. He had enjoyed the company of the best friends a man could ever have. He had lived his life on his own terms, doing the things he loved to do. He had stood in the high places and gazed out on breathtaking beauty, and he had breathed deeply of the clean mountain air. Nothing on earth lasts forever, he thought, but he had the satisfaction of knowing that none of his deeds had been done in vain. When he was gone, the world might soon forget him, but his life had meant something, if only to him.

  He grinned in the gathering darkness, put the philosophical woolgathering aside, and rolled over to go to sleep with his head on his saddle.

  He had barely closed his eyes when he heard the shots.

  Preacher sat up. Without even thinking about it, the two flintlock pistols he had placed beside his bedroll were in his hands, his thumbs looping over the hammers to pull them back. He listened intently for a couple seconds.

  There had been two shots, but that was all. They came from the direction of the trading post. That didn’t have to mean anything. Wolves roamed the plains sometimes. Papa Voertmann could have taken a couple potshots at some lobo skulking around the pens where the milk cow and her calves, the chickens, and the pigs were.

  Preacher shook his head. The problem with that idea was that if a wolf came within a mile of where he was, Horse or Dog or both would have scented it and alerted him.

  Dog had been out roaming the night, as usual. He padded up out of the darkness, stood tensely near Preacher, and growled deep in his throat. Preacher and the big cur had been trail partners for so long that the mountain man could understand Dog’s growls almost as well as if they had been words.

  It wasn’t the sort of growl Dog would have let out if there was a wild animal that might be a threat somewhere nearby. The deep, rumbling noise warned of a different sort of predator.