One of the men turned away from her and looked down into the pit at Preacher “The Ghost Killer does not lie, but neither is he a friend of the Blackfeet. It will be good to see you dead.” With that, he stalked away from the pit.
The others of his tribe went with him. Eztli’s guards dragged Nazar away and the other warriors drifted off, as well.
That left Eztli standing alone on the rim of the pit, scowling down at the mountain man. Preacher tossed the war club aside, crossed his arms over his chest, and stood gazing up at her with a faint smile on his face as he waited to see which of them would break first.
He had a pretty strong hunch it wouldn’t be him.
He was right. Eztli made an angry noise and looked so exasperated he halfway expected her to stomp a sandal-clad foot at him.
She turned away and disappeared.
That left him with the three corpses. The coppery smell of freshly spilled blood filled the air, and flies were already starting to buzz around the limp, motionless forms.
Preacher went over to a corner as far from the bodies as he could get and sat down with his back against the stone wall. “Well, fellas, looks like we’re gonna be spendin’ the day together.”
CHAPTER 43
About fifteen miles to the east, on the other side of the Sawtooth Cliffs, a group of men made their way along one of the creeks that meandered through Shadow Valley. Even though the sun was shining, the usual air of gloom hung over the valley. It had been that way ever since Miles O’Grady and his companions had come to trap beaver along the fast-flowing streams. It always seemed like the sun might disappear without warning at any moment, never to return.
Working in Shadow Valley for the past couple weeks, they had done fairly well, despite O’Grady’s constant misgivings. They had worked out a system in which some of the men worked the trap lines while others stood guard and still others scouted ahead of the main party.
But not alone. Never alone. No man wanted to be by himself in that haunted place.
So far, they hadn’t lost a single man. O’Grady considered that an accomplishment. True, the young man named Boone Halliday had gone off on his own despite practically ordering him not to do so. O’Grady had no real authority to enforce it, despite being elected the captain of the group, and anyway, he suspected that Boone had gone after Preacher. O’Grady had seen the hero worship in Boone’s eyes when he looked at the legendary mountain man. If Boone had found Preacher, he was in the best possible hands.
If he hadn’t . . . well, it had been the youngster’s choice to take off on his own, although at times O’Grady was touched by pangs of regret that he hadn’t been stronger in his insistence that Boone stay with them.
During the time they had been in Shadow Valley, they hadn’t seen another human being or heard any gunshots or shouts in the distance. It was like they were the only people within a hundred miles.
The only ones who didn’t have enough sense to stay far away from Shadow Valley, O’Grady thought wryly as he called a midday halt.
Some of the men stretched out on the creek bank to drink or hunkered on their heels and chewed jerky or pemmican. Others stood guard, peering around at the countryside through narrowed eyes as they stood tensely with their thumbs looped over the hammers of their flintlock rifles, ready to cock and fire.
O’Grady was among those standing watch. They would have their turn to eat and drink when the others were finished. The group was a strong one. It had grown to two dozen men before they’d ventured into Shadow Valley. Their profits might not be great once the money from the furs was split up into that many shares, but at least they would make something . . . and they would come out alive and with whole skins, or so O’Grady hoped, anyway.
Suddenly, one of the other guards whipped his rifle to his shoulder, eared back the hammer, and pulled the trigger. The weapon went off with a loud boom as powder smoke gushed from the barrel. The heavy lead ball tore into a stand of brush about twenty yards away.
“What the bloody hell!” O’Grady exclaimed. “What are you shooting at, Dixon?”
“I thought I saw somethin’ movin’ around in the bushes over there,” Dixon replied in an excited voice. “A redskin, maybe!”
“Or maybe not,” O’Grady said. “’Tis usually a good idea to know exactly what you’re shooting at before you pull the trigger.”
Dixon scowled resentfully. “If you want to stand around and let some bloodthirsty savage sneak up on us, that’s up to you, O’Grady. I see somebody skulkin’ around, I figure they’re up to no good.”
“But that’s just it,” O’Grady said. “You didn’t really see anything, did ye? You just thought ye did. Now we have to find out, and hope that your shot doesn’t bring any unnecessary trouble down on us.”
All the men were on their feet. The blast of Dixon’s rifle had brought them upright, food and drink forgotten at the prospect of danger.
O’Grady nodded to two of them. “Holcomb, Stanton, you fellas come with me and Dixon. The rest of you boys stay back, but be ready for trouble.”
He could tell from the grim faces of the men and the way they held their rifles that they were ready, all right. If anybody tried to jump them, be it Indian war party or—something else—they’d be in for a fight.
“Come on,” he snapped at Dixon. “Let’s see what you shot at.”
“I’m pretty sure I hit it,” Dixon said in a surly voice.
“We’ll find out.”
O’Grady advanced cautiously toward the brush with the other three men right behind him. He supposed that was what he got for agreeing to be their captain. His nerves were stretched taut as cables as he reached out with his rifle and used the long barrel to part the brush. He had already pulled back the hammer, and his finger hovered over the trigger.
The groan that came from inside the thicket was almost enough to make him fire. He held off at the last second as he realized the noise didn’t sound threatening.
It sounded hurt.
It didn’t sound like an animal, either. That groan had come from a human throat.
Maybe it was a trap, O’Grady thought wildly.
Maybe savages lurked in there, trying to lure the trappers deeper into the brush by pretending that one of them was hurt. But the sound of pain had seemed genuine. O’Grady, despite his hardened frontiersman’s exterior, had a soft heart.
“Be ready,” he snapped at his companions as he forced the brush aside and stepped through the gap. He stopped short in surprise as the sight of an Indian woman lying huddled on the ground, apparently only half-conscious.
She didn’t look exactly like any Indian woman he had ever seen, O’Grady realized as he lowered his rifle. She wore a buckskin dress, but the decorations didn’t belong to any tribe that he was familiar with. She lay on her side and he could see her face. Her features had a slightly different cast to them, as well.
His eyes were drawn to the big, dark bloodstain on her side. She was hurt, all right, and as far as O’Grady could tell, she was alone.
He lowered the hammer on his rifle, dropped to a knee beside the woman, and placed the weapon on the ground. Dixon, Holcomb, and Stanton crowded up behind him.
Dixon blurted out, “Hell! It’s a squaw!”
“Looks like you shot a redskin woman, Dixon,” the gray-bearded Stanton drawled. “That’s a mighty good way to bring hellfire rainin’ down on us, when her menfolk find out what you done.”
Dixon licked his lips nervously. “Maybe they won’t find out. If we bury her—”
“She’s not dead,” O’Grady broke in. “Anyway, you didn’t shoot her, Dixon. That blood on her dress isn’t fresh. You missed—and I, for one, am thankful for that.”
“What do you mean, I missed?” Dixon sounded almost offended, even though in reality it was probably a stroke of luck.
O’Grady pulled his knife from its sheath and cut away some of the blood-soaked buckskin to expose the wound. “She’s been stabbed or cut by something. Looks pretty
bad, but if we take proper care of her, she might have a chance. Help me pick her up and carry her back to the creek. We’ll make camp there. Careful now!” he added as they moved in to lift the wounded woman.
“Say,” Holcomb said, “what sort of Injun is she? I don’t recollect seein’ any who look just like this.”
“I wondered the same thing,” O’Grady said. “Maybe if she wakes up, she can tell us.”
The other men were just as surprised when they emerged from the brush carrying the wounded woman. O’Grady told one of the men to spread a blanket on some thick grass. They placed her on it as gently as possible.
“Half of you back on guard,” O’Grady barked as he knelt beside her to patch up the wound. “If anybody comes looking for her, I want us to know about it before they find us.”
He used water from the creek and a piece of cloth cut from a spare shirt to clean away as much of the dried blood as possible. The wound in the woman’s side was long and jagged, but not as deep as he had thought. She had lost quite a bit of blood and was weak from that, but he thought she stood a good chance of recovering if the wound didn’t fester.
To that end, he made a poultice of leaves he knew would be good for that purpose and bound it in place with a strip of cloth cut from an extra shirt. He got a cup, filled it with water from the creek, and lifted her head and shoulders to try to get her to drink a little.
“Where do you reckon she came from?” one of the trappers asked.
“I have no earthly idea,” O’Grady said. “She either crawled up in the brush or else she’d been lying there for a while and tried to get up when she heard us talking. When she moved around a little, Dixon got trigger-happy.”
“Hey, if she’d been a murderin’ redskin, you’d be happy I shot her,” Dixon protested.
“But again, ye didn’t shoot her. Your impulsiveness wouldn’t have done us a bit of good, lad.”
Dixon muttered something and walked off. O’Grady kept trying to coax the woman to drink, but she was barely conscious. Finally, he managed to trickle some of the water between her lips and into her mouth. She swallowed, and her eyelids fluttered as she seemed to get a little stronger. O’Grady got her to drink more.
At last her eyes opened. O’Grady expected her to be frightened as her gaze focused on him, since he was a stranger and white, to boot, but she didn’t flinch or try to pull away from him.
“Don’t worry, lass,” he told her, trying to sound reassuring. He didn’t know if she spoke any English, and although he had a smattering of Indian tongues, he wasn’t sure which one he ought to try first. “We’ll take care of ye. Can ye tell us who ye are and where ye came from?”
The words that came from her mouth couldn’t have shocked him any more if they had been uttered in Russian or Chinese.
“Boone Halliday!” she cried. “Boone Halliday!”
CHAPTER 44
Not surprisingly, the three dead men in the pit started to stink before the day was over. The flies got worse. Dark clouds of them buzzed around the corpses. The pool of blood around the body of the decapitated man turned black because so many of the filthy little creatures settled on it.
Preacher had nothing to do, so he moved around the pit, following the little shade and dozing when he could. Every moment he slept was spent regaining his strength.
He would need it. He still planned to put up such a fight that his captors would be forced to kill him before they could sacrifice him on that bloodstained altar in the amphitheater they called the Bowl of the Gods.
From time to time, children came up to the edge of the pit and peered into it with wide, frightened but curious eyes.
To them he was probably some sort of devil, he thought, smiling at them in an attempt to make them see that wasn’t the case. That didn’t really work and they just scampered off.
A few adults came to gawk at him, too, but the guards Eztli had left behind ran them off pretty quickly.
Preacher was surprised when a woman with a water skin showed up. He had figured that Eztli wouldn’t allow him to have anything to drink.
The guards stopped the women from going too close to the pit. They had a long, animated discussion while one of the guards examined the water skin.
Preacher thought the woman looked like one of the group that was almost pure Blackfoot and wondered if she had been there the night before, during the battle in which he’d been recaptured.
Finally, the guard handed the water skin back to the woman and jerked his head toward the pit. Whatever the woman’s argument had been, she had convinced him. As she stepped up to the edge, Preacher got to his feet. She tossed down the water skin.
He had no trouble catching it. “Much obliged, ma’am,” he drawled.
Most of his attention was focused on a small piece of paper that fell into the pit when the woman threw him the water skin. It must have been hidden in her hand the whole time and she had used the water skin as an excuse to drop it into the pit.
Why would one of the women from that lost city try to get a note to him?
The answer was simple, Preacher thought—she wouldn’t. She was passing along a message from someone else.
He nodded to her, to let her know he had seen the paper, but she ignored him, turned, and scurried away.
Preacher didn’t go after the note right away. He didn’t want to draw the guards’ attention to it. He lifted the water skin to his lips and drank.
The smell in the pit had kept him from being very hungry, although in truth he would have had a hard time remembering the last meal he’d eaten. But he was thirsty, and even though the water was brackish, it tasted good to him. He lowered the water skin, leaving some for later, and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. He didn’t want it to make him sick.
The note lay close to the wall. As he drew near, he was able to confirm that it was indeed a small, folded piece of paper.
Lowering himself to the floor of the pit, he sat once again with his back against the wall. The note was under his leg. Carefully, he slid his hand along and retrieved it. Working by feel, he unfolded it and then held it where he could see it.
Written in brown letters—it looked to Preacher like dried blood, of all things—were two words. Have hope, followed by the letter A.
Only one person could have written that, Preacher thought as his heart began to slug harder in his chest. The note had to be from Audie.
Preacher had told Audie and Nighthawk to get out of the hidden valley along with the others, but if they had turned back to help him—probably after making sure that Boone, Zyanya, and the rest of the fugitives reached the passage through the cliffs safely—that wouldn’t have surprised him a bit.
After all, he wouldn’t have gone off and left them behind.
He closed his hand around the note and slipped it into the waistband of his leggings as unobtrusively as possible. In an instant, his plans had changed. Instead of dying on his feet putting up a fight, he knew he needed to stay alive until Audie and Nighthawk made their move, whatever it might be. Have hope, Audie had said, and that was exactly what Preacher intended to do.
Hope that he might get out of the valley alive.
Hope that he would get the chance to settle the score with Tenoch and Eztli before he went.
To Boone, the journey through the cliffs and on to the Aztec city seemed to take forever. Hanging from a pole, he was in pain with every step his captors took. His arms, shoulders, legs, and hips ached intolerably because of the weight hanging from them.
At long last the hellish trip ended. The party reached the same squat building where the three white men had been imprisoned earlier. The warriors took them inside and dumped them on the stone floor.
Boone looked over and saw a single prisoner tied to the iron rings on the wall. He didn’t recognize the man, whom he took to be one of the Aztecs. He certainly wasn’t a white man.
There were subtle differences in his appearance, though. Boone was so uncomfortable that it was
difficult to concentrate, but thinking was a welcome distraction. After a moment, he decided that the other prisoner was one of the inhabitants of the city who had only a little Aztec blood. More than likely, he was descended mostly from the Indians who had lived in the valley when the Aztecs conquered them.
The warriors removed the poles, lifted the captives against the wall, and tied them to the rings with their arms stretched uncomfortably over their heads as before. Without a word, the warriors went out, slammed the door behind them, and dropped the bar in its brackets.
Boone was right back where he had started, and Zyanya was dead, having given up her life for nothing. He struggled not to let despair and grief overwhelm him. Maybe it would be easier to just give up. . . .
A short time later, the door was unbarred and opened again. Two spear-carrying guards came in, dragging a stumbling figure between them. Boone recognized the short stature and the large, bald head on the thin neck. He bit back a groan.
The last time he’d seen Nazar, Preacher had been with the little priest. The sight of him caused Boone’s heart to sink. He had hoped that Preacher had gotten away.
Nazar didn’t seem any happier to see Boone. As the warriors strung him up on the wall, he stared at the young trapper, then asked in a croaking voice, “My niece . . . ?”
“I’m sorry, Nazar,” Boone said. “We ran into trouble—”
Nazar interrupted him with an outburst of words that made no sense to Boone, but he had a strong hunch Nazar was cursing him.
That was all right, he thought. He deserved it for what had happened to Zyanya.
Finally Nazar ran out of angry words. He moaned and let his head droop forward.
“I’m sorry,” Boone said. “I didn’t mean for her to be hurt. I really didn’t.”
“I wish you and Preacher had never come here,” Nazar said bitterly. “It would have been better to go on suffering under Tenoch’s yoke.”
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