Preacher's Pursuit (The First Mountain Man)

by William W. Johnstone

  “So I figured I’d come back here to the mountains where folks don’t get so upset about things that don’t matter. Only, that gal’s brother caught up to me before I rode out. Said he was gonna give me a thrashin’ for hurtin’ his sister.”

  Flagg’s voice had a rusty rasp to it now, as if he weren’t accustomed to speaking this much. Laura watched him raptly, eager to know what had happened next.

  “So there was a fight?”

  “You couldn’t hardly call it that. He hit me and I hit him back and he went over backwards and hit his head on a log.”

  “He was badly hurt?”

  “Stove his skull right in. I didn’t mean to kill him, but he wasn’t any less dead ’cause o’ that. I lit out for the tall and uncut.” He waved a hand to indicate the wilderness surrounding them. “I reckon I’m wanted for murder back in Ohio. Not that I give a damn. I don’t figure on ever goin’ back.”

  The story didn’t surprise Laura all that much. She had known from her first look at Flagg that he was a cold, dangerous man. She had seen death in his eyes.

  “That sweetheart of yours was a simpering fool,” she said. “I’ll tell you something else, Mr. Flagg. She was probably no more faithful to you while you were gone than you were to her.”

  Flagg frowned. “But she said—”

  “She lied to you. I don’t know that for certain, of course, but I feel sure of it. The self-righteous, those who are so quick to judge others, are usually the wickedest of all.”

  Flagg appeared to be thinking it over for a long moment, and then he nodded. “Could be that you’re right,” he said. “It don’t matter now, though. Ain’t no goin’ back.”

  Laura thought about her own life and said, “There never is.”

  Chief Walks Like a Bear and the surviving members of the war party were still with Laura, Mallory, Flagg, and Weeping Willow when they made camp that evening.

  Laura was grateful for the presence of the Indians since they provided protection from wild animals and other savages, but at the same time they made her nervous.

  She felt them looking at her, and while she was accustomed to such scrutiny from white men, it was different somehow when the men looking at her were red. They weren’t bound by the rules—written and unwritten—of a civilized society.

  There was no way of knowing what they might do. That very unpredictability was what worried Laura. She knew that she could nearly always get a white man to do whatever she wanted, simply because she was beautiful.

  The Blackfeet kept their distance, though. Evidently, they were going to honor whatever arrangement they had made with Flagg.

  The Indians built a small fire and heated some food, but they didn’t offer to share it with the whites. They left Flagg to make another fire, and then Willow fried some bacon from a slab of it she took out of her saddlebags. She made some sort of flat, fried bread to go with the bacon.

  She walked over to where Laura sat on a log and offered her several strips of bacon piled on a piece of the bread. Laura smiled, reached up, and took the food.

  “Thank you, Willow,” she said to the Indian woman.

  Willow’s face never changed expression and she made no reply.

  “You’re wastin’ your time.”

  Laura looked over at Flagg, who sat cross-legged on the other side of the fire, smoking a pipe.

  “What did you say, Mr. Flagg?”

  He puffed on the pipe again and then took it out of his mouth. “Said you’re wastin’ your time talkin’ to Willow. She won’t talk to you.”

  Clyde Mallory asked, “Does she not speak English?”

  “Don’t know,” Flagg said. “I never asked her.”

  “Perhaps something is wrong with her hearing,” Laura suggested. “She might be deaf.”

  Flagg shook his head. “She ain’t deaf. I tell her to do somethin’, she does it. I know she hears me. But she never talks to me either. Ain’t said a single word since she’s been with me.”

  Laura could hardly fathom such a thing. “But that’s…terrible!”

  Flagg shrugged. “It has its benefits. I don’t have to put up with a lot o’ useless jabberin’.”

  Clyde rubbed his jaw and frowned in thought. “Perhaps she has some sort of physical disability that prevents her from talking.”

  Flagg had his pipe in his mouth again now. With his teeth clamped on the stem, he said around it, “Maybe so. I never took the time to check.”

  Laura rolled her eyes and shook her head. She had felt a few pangs of sympathy for Flagg that afternoon when he’d told her what happened to him the last time he returned to his home, but she put those feelings aside now.

  He didn’t deserve her pity. He was a heartless man, concerned only with money. Some people might think that she and Clyde were terrible because of some of the things they’d done, but at least they had done those things because they loved England…and hated the bloody Americans.

  She didn’t attempt to talk to Willow anymore, and she ignored Flagg. The food was greasy and not very good, but it filled the gnawing ache in Laura’s belly, and after a while, she rolled up her blankets beside the log and went to sleep.

  She was not the pampered beauty she appeared to be. This was not the first time in her life she had slept on the ground. This grassy hillside, for all its primitiveness, was better than a squalid London alley.

  Laura slept fairly soundly, confident that if any trouble tried to creep up on them during the night, the Indians would be aware of it and would take steps to deal with it.

  When trouble came, though, it was from within, not without. Laura woke up with someone’s hot breath in her face and a hand groping roughly at her breast.

  She tried to jerk away, but the weight of a man’s body pinned her to the ground. She opened her mouth to scream. The hand that had been pawing at her clamped over her mouth instead, silencing her.

  “Just be quiet, ma’am,” Ezra Flagg whispered to her, his breath sour with pipe tobacco and whiskey. He reached down with his other hand and started fumbling with her skirt, trying to pull it up. “You just lie still and there won’t be no trouble.” He chuckled. “You might even enjoy it.”

  Despite the warning he had just given her, she began to struggle, twisting her head back and forth and pushing at him. He made a growling sound in his throat, and the fingers of the hand over her mouth pressed harder and more painfully into her cheeks.

  “Damn it, woman! You want that brother o’ yours to die? The chief and his men will do whatever I tell ’em, and if you give me trouble I’ll tell ’em to kill Clyde. Then you’ll be mine from now on.”

  That made Laura’s struggles cease, at least momentarily. She didn’t doubt that Flagg meant exactly what he said, but he hadn’t thought it through.

  If Clyde was dead, Flagg would never get the rest of the money that had been promised to him. She had to make him understand that, but she couldn’t do it with his filthy hand pressed over her mouth.

  She nodded, hoping he would think she was agreeing with what he wanted.

  He put his mouth close to her ear. “You ain’t gonna fight?”

  Laura shook her head.

  “Now you’re showin’ some sense. And it ain’t gonna be too bad for you. I promise.” He started to take his hand away, then paused while it was still on her mouth. “Don’t you scream now.”

  She shook her head again.

  He lifted his hand.

  Immediately, she whispered, “Please don’t do this, Mr. Flagg. It’s not right. You have a woman—”

  “A squaw,” Flagg said. “A filthy, stinkin’ squaw. You know how long it’s been since I been with a white woman?”

  Laura didn’t know and didn’t care. All she wanted was to talk Flagg out of what he intended to do.

  “You may think that Weeping Willow has no feelings because she doesn’t talk, but I assure you she does—”

  “Hush up now. I don’t want a lot of jabber from you, either. Just move your legs a mite�
�”

  He was trying to get her skirt up again. Laura saw that he wasn’t going to be persuaded to leave her alone. She had no choice now.

  She let him feel the point of the knife she had gone to sleep clutching in her hand. She let him feel it at his most sensitive spot, too, pressing the blade to the front of his buckskin trousers.

  Flagg stiffened. In the faint light of the fire, which had burned down quite a bit while she was asleep, she saw his eyes widen in surprise. She couldn’t see his face very well because of the curtain of his long dark hair that hung down on each side of it, but she knew he was shocked.

  “This knife is sharp enough to go through buckskin, Mr. Flagg,” Laura told him. “And it will go right through what’s underneath the buckskin, too.”

  “You bitch!” he snarled. “I’ll break your neck—”

  “And I’ll be dead, but you’ll never be a man again. Think about it, Mr. Flagg. Is it truly worth the cost?”

  After a moment of silence, he asked, “What do you want? You want me to leave you alone?”

  “Exactly. Go back to your own blankets and we won’t speak of this again.”

  “You won’t tell your brother?”

  “I can take care of myself.” Her tone was crisp and cool. “I don’t always need Clyde to save me, you know.”

  “You’re makin’ a mistake.”

  “I’m confident that I’m not.” She increased the pressure on the knife slightly and said, “Well?”

  “All right, all right, damn it!”

  “Get off me. Now.”

  He pushed himself up and rolled off of her at the same time. As she sat up and pulled down her skirt, he grumbled, “You don’t have to be so blasted persnickety. I wasn’t gonna hurt you. Just wanted to have a little fun.”

  “I choose when and where I have my ‘fun,’ Mr. Flagg,” she said. “You’d do well to remember that.”

  “I reckon I will.” Flagg sat a couple of feet away and shook his head. “Where’d you get that knife? What do you do, sleep with it in your hand?”

  “That’s exactly what I do. You should remember that, too.”

  Flagg grunted. He stood up and moved around to the other side of the embers that remained from the campfire. He glanced back at her once and shook his head again, as if he couldn’t believe that he had underestimated her so badly.

  He wouldn’t make that mistake again, Laura told herself. She didn’t trust Flagg. Didn’t believe that he wouldn’t try something again if he thought he could get away with it.

  But he would find that taking her by surprise was going to be difficult.

  She hadn’t survived those back alleys in London by being careless. Clyde hadn’t always been there to look out for her. She had gone through some bad experiences, but she had learned from them. Painful lessons, but valuable ones.

  Like the fact that having several inches of sharp, cold steel pressed to his balls would make just about any man back off, Laura thought to herself with a smile as she lay back down and drifted off to sleep again.

  Chapter 24

  The puzzled concern that plagued Preacher grew stronger during the afternoon when he found the spot where the tracks of seven or eight horses with unshod hooves crossed those of the other two horses.

  “Lookee there,” Uncle Dan said as he pointed to the tracks. Despite his age, he had the second-sharpest pair of eyes in the group, right behind Preacher. “’Twas Injun ponies left that sign.”

  Preacher agreed. “I reckon those must’ve been the survivors from the war party.”

  “And now they’re trailin’ that Englisher and his sister.”

  So Clyde and Laura Mallory were in danger from the Blackfeet yet again, Preacher thought.

  Pete Sanderson brought his horse up alongside those of Preacher and his uncle. “How do we know these Injuns are from the same bunch that raided the settlement?” he asked.

  “We don’t,” Preacher admitted, “but havin’ a Blackfoot war party o’ the size that one was roamin’ around would make all the other Indians in the area lay low for a while.”

  He recalled the survivor of the Crow hunting party he had encountered. Even though those Crows had been wiped out, Preacher was confident that the word still would have gotten around about a Blackfoot war party moving down the valley.

  “I think this is the same bunch,” he went on, “but we won’t know for sure until we catch up to ’em.”

  Something else occurred to him as he and his companions took up the trail. He frowned as he considered the droppings left behind by the horses they were following. To his experienced eye, all the piles appeared to have been there about the same amount of time.

  He couldn’t stand being curious, so finally in the late afternoon he reined Horse to a halt.

  “What’s wrong?” Uncle Dan asked.

  “Somethin’ ain’t right,” Preacher said. He swung down from the saddle, moving a little more awkwardly than usual because his splinted left arm was strapped to his side. He hunkered on his heels to study several deposits of horse droppings.

  “You seem mighty interested considerin’ that’s horseshit you’re lookin’ at, Preacher,” Sanderson commented.

  Preacher ignored the man. He scooped up some of the brown stuff from one pile and rubbed it between his fingers, testing its consistency. Then, he lifted his fingers to his nose and took a good whiff.

  Sanderson made a face and said, “You gone loco, Preacher?”

  Still ignoring him, Preacher wiped his hand on the grass and performed the same tests on several other piles. Then, he cleaned his hand again and straightened.

  “I see what you’re gettin’ at,” Uncle Dan said. “They was all left at the same time, right?”

  “Near enough,” Preacher said. He pointed to the tracks and went on, “All the horses stopped here to rest, both the shod horses and the Indian ponies. That means we’re chasin’ one bunch again, not followin’ the Blackfeet whilst they follow Clyde Mallory and Miss Laura.”

  Sanderson nodded in understanding. “So you’re sayin’ the Injuns already caught up to those folks and took ’em prisoner again.”

  “That’s the way it looks to me,” Preacher agreed, a grim expression on his rugged face.

  Sanderson shrugged and said, “So things are right back to the way we thought they were when we left the settlement. It don’t change nothin’. We’re still gonna track down those Blackfeet and kill ’em, ain’t we?”

  Preacher nodded. “That’s the plan.”

  He still had a hunch that things weren’t as simple as they seemed…but until they caught up to their quarry, all they could do was keep following the trail.

  Colin Fairfax paced back and forth anxiously as he waited for Sherwood to return from the settlement. Fairfax’s second in command had been gone longer than he had expected.

  Finally, though, one of the men called, “Here he comes!” Fairfax swung around to see Sherwood striding across the grassy floor of the valley toward them.

  “What took you so damned long?” he demanded as Sherwood came up to him a few minutes later.

  Sherwood frowned at the sharply voiced question. “I didn’t want to make anybody suspicious,” he said. “How would it have looked if I’d gone in there, asked where Preacher was, and then rushed off again?”

  Fairfax waved a hand impatiently. “Never mind that. Just tell me what you found out. Is he still there?”

  Sherwood shook his head and said, “Nope. He and a group of men rode out earlier today on the trail of the Blackfeet who survived the battle. The Injuns took a couple o’ prisoners with them, and Preacher wants to rescue them.”

  “He would,” Fairfax said with a contemptuous snort. “Do you know who the prisoners were?”

  “An Englishman and his sister. Mallory, I think their names were.”

  That meant nothing to Fairfax. He wasn’t surprised that an Englishman would be out here on the American frontier. That was common enough. The prisoners were important only beca
use they had caused Preacher to give chase to their red-skinned captors.

  “That ain’t all,” Sherwood went on. “I spent some time with Jerome Hart. He’s a talkative bastard.”

  “What did he tell you?” Fairfax asked, forcing himself to suppress the impatience he felt at the way Sherwood was dragging this out.

  “Preacher’s hurt. His left arm is busted, he’s got a bum knee, and he was slashed all over with knives durin’ the fightin’. Got barked on the head with a rifle ball, too.”

  “But he went after the Blackfeet anyway, even with all those injuries?” Fairfax asked.

  “Damn right. From the way Hart was talkin’, wild horses couldn’t have held Preacher back from chasin’ those Injuns.”

  That was just like him, Fairfax thought. Preacher always had to be the hero. Some might think he was simply displaying courage and determination, but Fairfax figured that the mountain man was simply a glory hound.

  “Which way did the rescue party go?”

  Sherwood waved a hand. “Off toward the northeast. They picked up the trail at one of the burned-out cabins on the edge of the settlement. I know where it started and which direction it was going, so we should be able to find it, too. And as long as we stay on it, we ought to be on Preacher’s trail, too.”

  Fairfax nodded. Sherwood really had done a good job, but Fairfax wasn’t going to tell him that. He still didn’t fully trust the man, even now.

  He knew that Sherwood’s first loyalty lay with Shad Beaumont. If Beaumont hadn’t wanted Preacher dead, too, he never would have sent these men with Fairfax.

  And for all Fairfax knew, Sherwood had secret orders from Beaumont. As long as those orders didn’t conflict with what Fairfax wanted, then Fairfax didn’t care.

  But if it ever came down to a decision, he knew that Sherwood would do what Beaumont wanted. That could cause problems.

  Fairfax shoved those thoughts out of his head, telling himself that he was just borrowing trouble where there might not really be any. He would wait and see and not place too much trust in Sherwood or anyone else.