Preacher's Hell Storm
Page 1
Look for These Exciting Series from
WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE
with J. A. Johnstone
The Mountain Man
Preacher: The First Mountain Man
Matt Jensen, the Last Mountain Man
Luke Jensen, Bounty Hunter
Those Jensen Boys!
The Family Jensen
MacCallister
Flintlock
The Brothers O’Brien
The Kerrigans: A Texas Dynasty
Sixkiller, U.S. Marshal
Hell’s Half Acre
Texas John Slaughter
Will Tanner, U.S. Deputy Marshal
Eagles
The Frontiersman
AVAILABLE FROM PINNACLE BOOKS
THE FIRST MOUNTAIN MAN PREACHER’S HELLSTORM
WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE
with J. A. Johnstone
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
THE JENSEN FAMILY FIRST FAMILY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
Teaser chapter
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2017 J. A. Johnstone
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
PINNACLE BOOKS, the Pinnacle logo, and the WWJ steer head logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-7860-4000-1
First electronic edition: January 2017
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4001-8
ISBN-10: 0-7860-4001-7
THE JENSEN FAMILY FIRST FAMILY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER
Smoke Jensen—The Mountain Man
The youngest of three children and orphaned as a young boy, Smoke Jensen is considered one of the fastest draws in the West. His quest to tame the lawless West has become the stuff of legend. Smoke owns the Sugarloaf Ranch in Colorado. Married to Sally Jensen, father to Denise (“Denny”) and Louis.
Preacher—The First Mountain Man
Though not a blood relative, grizzled frontiersman Preacher became a father figure to the young Smoke Jensen, teaching him how to survive in the brutal, often deadly Rocky Mountains. Fought the battles that forged his destiny. Armed with a long gun, Preacher is as fierce as the land itself.
Matt Jensen—The Last Mountain Man
Orphaned but taken in by Smoke Jensen, Matt Jensen has become like a younger brother to Smoke and even took the Jensen name. And like Smoke, Matt has carved out his destiny on the American frontier. He lives by the gun and surrenders to no man.
Luke Jensen—Bounty Hunter
Mountain Man Smoke Jensen’s long-lost brother, Luke Jensen, is scarred by war and a dead shot—the right qualities to be a bounty hunter. And he’s cunning, and fierce enough, to bring down the deadliest outlaws of his day.
Ace Jensen and Chance Jensen—Those Jensen Boys!
The untold story of Smoke Jensen’s long-lost nephews, Ace and Chance, a pair of young-gun twins as reckless and wild as the frontier itself . . . Their father is Luke Jensen, thought killed in the Civil War. Their uncle Smoke Jensen is one of the fiercest gunfighters the West has ever known. It’s no surprise that the inseparable Ace and Chance Jensen have a knack for taking risks—even if they have to blast their way out of them.
CHAPTER 1
Moving slowly and carefully, Preacher reached out and closed his hand around the butt of a flintlock pistol. The night was black as pitch around him, but he didn’t need to be able to see to know where the gun was. He had committed all his surroundings to memory before he rolled in his blankets and dozed off.
Another pistol lay next to the one Preacher grasped, and a flintlock rifle and a tomahawk were nearby as well. Both pistols were double-shotted and heavily charged with powder.
Let the attackers come. He was ready to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, as his friend Audie might say. The little fella had been a professor once and was fond of quoting old Bill Shakespeare.
On Preacher’s other side, the big wolflike cur he called Dog growled softly. He knew enemies were out there in the night and was eager to tear into them, but he wouldn’t attack unless Preacher gave him the go-ahead.
Preacher sat up and put his hand out, resting it on the back of Dog’s neck where the fur stood up slightly. He waited and listened, not knowing what had roused him and Dog from slumber.
Preacher’s almost supernaturally keen eyes adjusted to the darkness well enough for him to see the rangy gray stallion known as Horse. He stood not far away, head up, ears pricked forward. He’d sensed whatever it was, too. The pack mule Preacher had brought from St. Louis stood with its head down as it dozed.
A breeze drifted through the trees and carried voices to Preacher’s ears. He couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was familiar.
The voices were Indian, but they weren’t on the warpath. If they had been stalking an enemy, they would have done so in grim silence. In this case, they sounded amused.
Preacher was on the edge of Blackfoot country, which meant he didn’t see anything funny about the situation. For more than twenty years, he had been coming to the Rocky Mountains every year to harvest pelts from beaver and other fur-bearing animals, and nearly every one of those years, he’d had trouble with various Blackfoot bands.
In fact, it was the Blackfeet who were responsible for the name
he carried to this day.
Early on in his frontier sojourn, he had been captured by them and tied to a stake. Come morning, he would have been tortured and eventually burned to death.
However, something had possessed him to start talking, much like a street preacher he had seen back in St. Louis, and when the sun rose he was still going at it, spewing out words in a seemingly never-ending torrent.
Crazy people intrigued and frightened the Indians, and they figured anybody who started talking like that and wouldn’t stop had to be loco. Killing somebody who wasn’t right in the head was a sure way of bringing down bad medicine on the tribe, so they had scrapped their plans to roast the young man known at that point as Art, and let him go.
Eventually, word of the incident got around—the vast wilderness was a surprisingly small place in some ways—and other mountain men started calling him Preacher. The name stuck. He didn’t mind. Eventually, he never thought of himself any other way.
His war with the Blackfeet had continued over the years. He had killed countless numbers of warriors, some in open battle, some by creeping with such stealth into their camps at night and slitting their throats that no one knew he had been there until morning.
They called him the White Wolf, the Ghost Killer, and probably had other names for him, as well. The Blackfoot warrior who finally killed Preacher would be the most honored of his people.
Preacher figured to keep on frustrating that ambition, just as he had for a long time.
As he sat where he had gone to ground to sleep for the night, more than a mile away from where he had built a small fire to cook his supper, he knew he didn’t have any friends in those parts. The warriors who were barely within earshot would love to kill him if they got the chance.
For a moment, he considered stalking them, becoming the hunter, but he realized they weren’t hunting him. He hadn’t seen a soul in more than a week. They weren’t looking for him. They were on their way somewhere else, bound on some errand of their own, and already their voices had faded until he could barely hear them.
“Wouldn’t make sense to borrow trouble,” he whispered to Dog. “Sooner or later it always finds us on its own.”
Dog’s fur lay down. Horse went back to cropping at some grass. The crisis had passed.
Preacher rolled up in his blankets and went back to sleep, confident that his instincts and his trail companions would awaken him if danger approached again.
* * *
The rest of the night passed without incident. Preacher slept the deep, dreamless sleep of an honest man and got up in the morning ready to press on. He was headed toward an area where he hadn’t been in quite a while, hoping to have good luck in his trapping.
For more than thirty years, since a party of men under the command of a man named Manuel Lisa had started up the Missouri River in 1807, men had been coming to these mountains in search of pelts. After all that time, beaver and other fur-bearing varmints were becoming less numerous, and it took more work to find enough of them to make a trip to the Rockies profitable.
That was why Preacher was expanding the territory where he trapped. He didn’t really care that much about the money. His needs were simple and few. He loved the mountains. They were his home and had been ever since he first laid eyes on them. He would be there even if he never made a penny from his efforts.
If a fellow was going to work at something, though, he might as well do the best job he could. That was Preacher’s philosophy, although he would have scoffed at calling it that.
After a quick breakfast, he saddled Horse and set out, leading the pack mule. Dog bounded ahead of them, full of energy.
Snowcapped peaks rose to Preacher’s right and left as he headed up a broad, tree-covered valley broken up occasionally by meadows thick with wildflowers. A fast-flowing creek, fed here and there by smaller streams, ran through the center of the valley. He hoped they would be teeming with beaver.
At the far end of the valley about forty miles away rose a huge, saw-toothed mountain. Something about it stirred a memory in Preacher. After a moment, he gave a little shake of his head and stopped trying to recall the memory. Whatever the recollection might be, it proved elusive.
It would come back to him or it wouldn’t, and either way it wasn’t likely to change his plans. He intended to make his base of operations at the upper end of the valley, near that saw-toothed peak. He would work the tributaries one at a time, down one side of the valley and then back up the other. That would take him most of the summer.
In the fall he would pack up the pelts he had taken and head back to St. Louis, unless he decided to pay a visit to one of the far-flung trading posts established by the American Fur Company and sell his furs there.
If he did that, he could spend the winter in the mountains as he had done many times in the past, finding some friendly band of Indians who wouldn’t object to having him around—
He straightened abruptly in the saddle and peered toward the saw-toothed mountain in the distance. “Well, son of a . . . No wonder it seemed familiar to me.” He grinned and shook his head. “Wonder if any of ’em are still around.”
Maybe he would find out.
* * *
Preacher didn’t get in any hurry traveling up the long valley. By the middle of the next day he was about halfway to the point where he intended to set up his main camp. He still hadn’t seen another human being, although he had come across plenty of deer, a herd of moose, and a couple bears. He’d left them alone and they’d left him alone. From time to time, eagles and hawks soared overhead, riding the wind currents between the mountains.
When the sun was almost directly overhead, he stopped to let Horse and the pack mule drink from the creek. Hunkering down beside the stream, Preacher set his rifle down within easy reach, then stretched out his left hand and dipped it in the water, which was icy from snowmelt. He scooped some up and drank, thinking nothing had ever tasted better.
The current made his reflection in the water ripple and blur, but he could make out the rugged features, the thick, gray-shot mustache, the thatch of dark hair under the broad-brimmed felt hat he had pushed to the back of his head.
A few feet away, Dog lifted his dripping muzzle from the creek and stiffened. Horse stopped drinking as well.
Preacher acted like nothing had happened, but in reality, his senses had snapped to high alert. He listened intently, sniffed the air, searched the trees on the far side of the creek for any sign of movement.
There! Some branches on a bush had moved more than they would have if it was just some small animal rooting around.
Preacher still didn’t rise to his feet or give any other sign he had noticed anything. All he did was carefully and unobtrusively move his hand toward the long-barreled rifle lying on the ground beside him.
Two figures dressed in buckskin suddenly burst out of the brush and trees on the other side of the creek and raced across open ground toward him. Preacher snatched up the rifle and came upright with the swift smoothness of an uncoiling snake. He brought the flintlock to his shoulder and slid his right thumb around the hammer, ready to cock and fire.
He held off as he realized the two Indians weren’t attacking him. One was a woman, brown knees flashing under the buckskin dress, visible above the high moccasins she wore.
The other was a young man who carried a bow and had a quiver of arrows on his back but wasn’t painted for war. He probably could have outrun the woman, but he held back, staying behind her as if to protect her.
A second later, Preacher saw why. At least half a dozen more buckskin-clad figures raced out of the woods in pursuit and let out bloodcurdling war cries as they spotted not only their quarry but also the white man on the other side of the creek.
CHAPTER 2
Instantly, Preacher shifted his aim, cocked the hammer, and pressed the trigger. The hammer snapped down, the powder in the pan ignited, and the rifle boomed and bucked against his shoulder. The mountain man’s aim was true.
The heavy lead ball smashed into the chest of the man in the forefront of the attackers and drove him backwards off his feet.
Preacher dropped the rifle butt first on the creek bank so dirt wouldn’t foul the barrel. His hands swept toward the pistols tucked behind the broad leather belt around his waist as he shouted, “Get down!”
The young Indian man tackled the woman from behind and bore her to the ground. Preacher’s pistols came up and roared. Smoke and flame spurted from the muzzles as they sent their double-shotted loads over the heads of the fleeing pair.
The volley cut down three more of the attackers, although one appeared only wounded as a ball ripped through his thigh. Preacher dropped the empty pistols next to the rifle. Two more pistols were in his saddlebags, loaded and primed, but it would take too long to reach them.
He jerked his tomahawk from behind his belt and charged across the creek, water splashing around his feet and legs as he charged. Dog was right beside him, growling and snarling.
Like a streak of gray fur and flashing teeth, the big cur leaped on one of the attackers and took him down. The man began to scream as Dog ripped at his throat, but the sound was quickly cut short.
At the same time, the young man rolled up onto one knee, put a hand on the woman’s shoulder for a second in a signal for her to stay down, and then plucked an arrow from the quiver on his back and fitted it to his bowstring. A loud twang sounded as he let it fly.