That was why it looked like the three of them might well die together.
Preacher squinted over the barrel of his Sharps through the loophole and said, “Those hombres must not have the sense God gave a badger! Here they come again!”
Whoever had built this cabin back in the old days had known what he was doing. The area around it was cleared of trees and brush for a good fifty yards around. That way no one could sneak up on the place unseen. Some thick stumps remained, though, where trees had been chopped down, and as some of the hired gunmen charged out of the trees, they threw themselves behind those stumps and opened fire, aiming at the loopholes they had spotted from the powder smoke that gushed through them from time to time.
“Son of a gun!” Matt exclaimed as slugs chewed splinters from the log wall all around the loophole he was using. He was forced to draw back momentarily. So were Smoke and Preacher.
“More coming out of the trees!” Smoke called. He saw men dart out from cover, race past their companions who were firing from behind the stumps, and then dive behind other stumps. “They’re leapfrogging at us, blast it!”
It was true. As soon as the second wave of attackers had gone to ground, they opened up on the cabin, allowing the first ones to advance past them.
That wasn’t the only trickery going on. “Circling to your left, Matt!” Smoke said. Matt twisted in that direction, thrust the barrel of his Winchester through an opening, and began firing as fast as he could work the rifle’s lever.
Smoke bit back a curse as he spotted some of the gunmen running to his right, trying a flanking move in that direction. He wished one of his friends, Sheriff Monte Carson or the gambler and gunhawk Louis Longmont, was here to cover that fourth side, although he wouldn’t have really wished them into such a predicament as the one in which he, Matt, and Preacher found themselves.
There was only one thing to do. He leaned his Winchester against the wall, threw aside the bar that kept the door closed, drew one of the long-barreled .44s he carried in his holsters, and yanked the door open. Then he palmed out the other Colt and leaped outside, landing on his belly.
Both six-guns began to roar. Firing in two directions at once was a tricky, almost impossible thing to do, but in the hands of Smoke Jensen, guns could do almost anything. He could make ’em sing and dance if he wanted to, folks said.
He made them sing now, and it was a melody of death.
His left-hand gun slammed bullets into the bodies of the men charging head-on at the cabin. The right-hand Colt bucked and roared as it tracked the gunnies who were trying to circle in that direction. Men cried out and stumbled or spun off their feet as Smoke’s lead ripped through them.
From the corner of his eye, Matt had seen Smoke’s daring play, and he jumped into the doorway and used his rifle to mow down the men going to the left. At the back of the room, Preacher had thrown down his empty Sharps and snatched up another Winchester, and with deadly accurate fire he held off the men attacking from that direction.
For about thirty seconds, it sounded like a small war was going on as the thunderous gunfire echoed back from the peaks surrounding the beautiful little valley where the cabin was located. Then the hammers of Smoke’s guns clicked on empty chambers. With Matt covering him, he scrambled to hands and knees and dived back through the doorway. Matt hurried after him, slamming the door closed and dropping the bar in its brackets again.
“You give them ol’ boys what-for?” Preacher drawled.
“I reckon we did, Preacher,” Smoke said as he sat with his back against the wall and started reloading his Colts. “The last I saw, they were skedaddling back to the trees.”
“The ones who could still move, that is,” Matt added.
The other two knew what he meant. They had turned back this attack and done considerable damage to the enemy force. As silence fell again, they heard the pathetic moans of wounded men. Not one of the defenders wasted any sympathy on those varmints. The gunnies had known what they were getting into.
“It was a mite of a hornets’ nest in here,” Preacher said. “Plenty o’ slugs flyin’ around.” He touched a gnarled finger to his cheek, and the tip came away bloody. “Felt like one of ’em kissed me, and sure enough it did.”
That little bullet burn on Preacher’s cheek was the only injury they had suffered, however. They had been very lucky so far, and they knew it. Luck would only last so long, though, and they knew that, too.
“Bannerman must be paying those boys pretty well,” Matt commented. “That many gun-wolves don’t come cheap.”
Smoke said, “If there’s one thing Reece Bannerman has, it’s money, and plenty of it.”
“Then why’s the dang fool want more?” Preacher asked. “Why’s it so all-fired important that he steal this valley from Crazy Bear’s people?”
Smoke had finished reloading his guns, and now he picked up his rifle again and took his place at the loophole. As he peered out at the silent trees where the gunmen were hidden, he said, “I guess some men never get enough, no matter how much they have.”
“Well, I ain’t a-gonna let it happen,” Preacher declared. “We’re gonna get outta this fix somehow and show Bannerman he can’t get away with it. I owe Crazy Bear a whole heap o’ thanks for what he done for me. That’s why I come a-runnin’ when I heard he was in trouble.”
“Crazy Bear’s a good man,” Smoke agreed. “I was glad to help out when I got your letter, Preacher.”
“And it’s a good thing I was visiting Smoke at Sugarloaf at the time,” Matt added, “because I want to be in on this, too.”
“You just want to see that daughter of his again,” Smoke said with a smile.
“I won’t deny that,” Matt said.
Preacher snorted. “You young fellas may be fond o’ Crazy Bear, but I owe the ol’ rapscallion my life. I ever tell you that story, Smoke?”
“I don’t think so,” Smoke said, although as a matter of fact, Preacher had told him the story before. It was a pretty good yarn, though, and they needed something to pass the time while they waited for Bannerman’s hired guns to attack again.
So as the three men stood and watched and the heat grew worse in the cabin, Preacher drawled, “It was about thirty year ago, I reckon, and I was on my way through this same valley. Weren’t no ranches nor towns hereabouts in those days, though. ’Twas still mighty wild country, and it might cost a man his hide if’n he didn’t keep his eyes open…”
BOOK ONE
Chapter 1
An eagle soared through the vast blue sky overhead. The tall man in buckskins saw it as he rode along the edge of the trees, just as he saw the chipmunk that raised its head from a burrow in the clearing fifty yards to his left and the squirrel that bounded from branch to branch in a pine tree off to his right. He saw a dozen moose grazing half a mile ahead of him, and he saw the wolf slinking toward them through tall grass. A bear lumbered across a hillside nearly a mile away, and Preacher saw it, too.
But he never saw the man who shot him.
The heavy blast of the rifle echoed across the landscape and up the canyons that cut through the mountains. Preacher didn’t hear it until after the slug smashed into his body and drove him forward in the saddle, over the neck of the rangy gray stallion. He tried to grab on to something and stay on the horse, but his whole body seemed to have gone numb from the bullet’s impact and his muscles refused to work the way he wanted them to. As the horse shied, Preacher toppled from the saddle.
Even though his body wouldn’t cooperate, his mind still worked. He kicked his feet free of the stirrups just before he fell. He didn’t think the horse would bolt, but he hadn’t had the animal all that long and didn’t have complete confidence in him yet.
Preacher wasn’t completely numb. He felt the jolt as he landed heavily on the ground. Somehow he kept the fingers of his right hand clamped around the long-barreled flintlock rifle he’d been carrying across the saddle in front of him. He had a couple of those new-fangled Colt’s D
ragoon revolvers that he’d picked up in St. Louis tucked behind his belt, too. If he could get to cover, he knew he could give a good accounting of himself.
Making it to cover might not be easy, though. Feeling began to flow back into Preacher’s body, but it brought with it waves of paralyzing pain.
Preacher knew how to deal with pain. If a man wanted to live, he learned how to ignore it. Whether it was in body or spirit, in this life hardly a day went by without something hurting. The trick was not to give in to it.
Still clutching the rifle, Preacher rolled to his right, closer to the trees. It was a good thing that he moved when he did, because another shot sounded and a heavy lead ball smacked into the ground where he had been lying a heartbeat earlier. Preacher kept rolling, even though every movement sent fresh bursts of pain stabbing through his body.
He was within a few feet of the trees now. He came up onto his hands and knees, then got his feet under him and launched into a dive that carried him to the edge of the pines. Vaguely, he heard another shot and felt a ball tug at his buckskin shirt as he flew through the air. He slammed into the ground again, the impact softened slightly by the carpet of fallen pine needles on which he landed.
More shots sounded, coming close enough together now that Preacher knew there was more than one bushwhacker. He scrambled around to the other side of a thick-trunked pine and rested his back against the rough bark. He tried to take a deep breath, but that made the pain in his left side worse.
All right, he told himself, he had a busted rib, or a cracked one, anyway. Probably just cracked, because if it actually was broken, all that falling and rolling and jumping around surely would have plunged the jagged end of a bone into his left lung and he’d be drowning in his own blood by now. So, he decided, the rib was cracked but still hurt like hell, and it could still break easily if he wasn’t careful.
Then there was the fact that his left side was covered with warm, sticky wetness. He might bleed to death if the hole wasn’t bound up soon. And any time a fella was shot, he had to worry about the wound festering. There were just all kinds of ways to die out here on the frontier.
Holes, he corrected himself as he gingerly poked around on his side. The rifle ball had struck him in the back, on the left side, glanced off that rib, and torn its way out the front of his body. He was lucky the bone had deflected it outward, rather than bouncing it through his guts. He really would have been a goner then.
Breathing shallowly through clenched teeth, he pulled up his buckskin shirt and used the heavy hunting knife that was sheathed on his hip to cut off two pieces from his long underwear. It wasn’t easy to do, because his left arm was still partially numb and he couldn’t use it very well. He managed to wad one of the pieces of woolen fabric into a ball and shove it into the exit wound. He couldn’t reach the place where the ball had gone in with his right hand, though, because it was around on his back. He had to grit his teeth even harder and force his left arm to work. It took a few minutes that seemed more like an hour, but finally he pushed the wadded-up cloth into the bullet hole.
That would help slow down the bleeding. He knew if he lost too much blood, he would pass out, and if that happened, chances were he would never wake up again. His enemies would slip up on him and cut his throat.
He didn’t know how many there were. The shooting had stopped now, but from the sound of the volley a few minutes earlier, he figured five or six.
Nor did he know who they were. He had spent five decades on this earth, as testified to by the leathery skin of his face and the numerous silver strands in his dark hair and beard, and few men lived that long without making enemies. Preacher had probably made more than his share, although he had also left many of them dead behind him, either in shallow graves or out in the open for the scavengers and the elements to take care of. It depended on how put out with them he’d been when he killed them.
But there were still plenty of folks out there carrying grudges against him, and obviously he had crossed trails with some of them today.
Unless the bushwhackers were just no-good thieves who wanted to kill him and take his outfit. He had a good horse, a sizable batch of supplies on the pack-horse he’d been leading, and some fine weapons. No pelts yet; it was too early in the season for that. These days, not many people would bother stealing furs, either. The mountains weren’t trapped out yet, far from it, but the fur trade wasn’t what it used to be. The last great rendezvous had been eight years earlier, in ’42. A lot of the mountain men had gone back east to be with their long-neglected families. Others had headed west to look for gold in California.
But Preacher had no intention of leaving the mountains for good. When his time came, he intended to die here.
Maybe today.
He listened intently. The woods were quiet. The shooting had scared off all the animals. If the bushwhackers started skulking around, he would hear them.
He was disgusted with himself for letting somebody shoot him in the back like that. He didn’t know where they’d been hidden or how carefully they had concealed themselves, but he didn’t care. He should have known they were there, lying in wait for him.
Was a time when he would have known, because Dog would have smelled the sons of bitches, and Horse probably would have, too. But the big wolf-like cur was gone, and so was the gray stallion that looked a lot like Preacher’s current mount.
Over the years, Dog had tangled with outlaws, savages, grizzlies, panthers, and lobo wolves. He had gotten chewed up, shot, half-drowned, and mostly froze. None of that had killed him, but time had. The years always won in the end.
Horse, at least, was still alive as far as Preacher knew. He had left the stallion back in Missouri with an old friend who had promised to make Horse’s final years as comfortable and pleasant as possible. Preacher wasn’t sure he had done the right thing, though. Being put out to pasture was a hard destiny. Maybe he should have brought Horse back to the mountains with him one last time.
If he had, he woudn’t be sitting here with a couple of bullet holes in him, he told himself. Because Horse’s keen senses would have alerted him that there were enemies nearby.
Off to his left a ways, something rustled in the brush.
A grin that was half-grimace drew Preacher’s lips back from his teeth. He reached to his waist and drew out one of the Dragoons. It was a fine weapon, well balanced, with a seven-and-a-half-inch octagonal barrel and a cylinder that held six .44 caliber loads, although Preacher always left one chamber empty for the hammer to rest on. Engraved on that blued steel cylinder was a scene of Texas Rangers battling Comanches. Preacher figured it was based on the fight at Bandera Pass a few years back. Captain Jack Hays, who’d been in command of the troop of Rangers involved, had told Preacher all about that ruckus one time when he was down in San Antonio de Bexar.
Yes, sir, a mighty fine gun. It shot straight and true, and between the two revolvers and the flintlock rifle, he had eleven rounds ready to go. More than enough to kill every one of those damn bushwhackers.
Of course, they’d probably kill him, too, Preacher reflected, but they wouldn’t live to brag about it.
Another rustle, to his right this time. They had him surrounded. And they were so confident that they had him trapped, one of them was bold enough to call out, “We’re gonna kill you, old man, if you ain’t dead already. You got anything to say?”
Preacher didn’t respond, except to draw his other Dragoon. His left arm was still a little weak, but he was able to hold the revolver fairly steady.
“You should’ve minded your own business back at that trading post, old man. You must be soft in the head. Who in his right mind would kick up such a fuss over a damned Indian whore?”
So that was why they wanted him dead, Preacher thought. They had trailed him all the way out here, a week or more, over some fracas at a trading post? He supposed that the fella whose guts he’d spilled on the ground meant something to them. A friend or maybe even kinfolk. Even so, the man
had been a sorry son of a bitch, hardly worth dying over. Seemed like they were bound and determined to do just that, though.
“Shut up, Riley,” another voice, older and harsher, said. “That’s enough. Let’s get this done. You boys ready?”
Preacher was ready. He braced his back against the tree trunk and raised both Dragoons in front of him.
That was when a cry rang out through the trees, half-laugh, half-scream, a jagged, nerve-scraping sound that was one of the craziest things Preacher had ever heard.
Chapter 2
The eerie cry made some of the bushwhackers let out surprised yells. Getting ready to charge Preacher must have drawn their nerves pretty tight, and that shriek startled them into pulling triggers. Shots blasted through the woods, but the wail continued. It didn’t even sound human.
Bullets whipped through the branches and thudded into tree trunks, but none of them came close to Preacher. He spotted a muzzle flash off to his right and reacted instantly, angling the Dragoon that direction and dropping the hammer. The heavy revolver roared and smoke and flame erupted from its muzzle. Somewhere in the woods, a man screamed. Preacher didn’t know if his shot had found its target, or if whatever was making that unholy noise had gotten hold of the man.
With his back against the tree to brace himself, Preacher pushed to his feet. He didn’t know exactly what was going on, but there was still a good chance he would die here today. If that turned out to be true, he planned to go out standing on his own two feet with shooting irons in his hands.
“What the hell is that?” a man shouted. There was a great thrashing in the brush. “Look ou—yahhhhh!”
The howl of pain just made the bushwhackers shoot even more. A grim smile tugged at Preacher’s mouth again. If they kept this up, they’d all ventilate each other and save him the trouble, he thought. That would be just fine with him.
The older voice he’d heard giving orders earlier bellowed, “Head for the horses! Let’s get the hell out of here!”
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