Hard Ride to Hell (9780786031191)

by Johnstone, William W.

  “And the Colonel will make the biggest fortune of all.”

  “Well, sure. That’s only fittin’, ain’t it?”

  It would be, Preacher thought, if the man had gone about things the right way, without resorting to murder and kidnapping. He had seen men of Ritchie’s stripe before, though, former military commanders who had never gotten over the power they had wielded during the war. They regarded anybody who got in the way of their plans as an enemy to be destroyed, just the same as they had destroyed their enemies during that great conflict.

  McFarland chuckled and said, “You ain’t payin’ enough attention to your moves, friend.” He jumped one of Preacher’s checkers and picked it up.

  “Yeah, I reckon not,” Preacher said. He reached out and jumped all five of McFarland’s remaining checkers, ending the game.

  Too bad it probably wouldn’t be that easy getting what he wanted from Colonel Hudson Ritchie.

  Chapter 30

  The dining table was big enough for twenty people, but the Colonel sat at it alone, a plate full of roast beef and potatoes in front of him. A glass of fine wine was at his elbow as he ate. Mrs. Dayton stood by, ready to refill the glass if need be or provide anything else he wanted.

  After eating in silence for several minutes, the Colonel asked, “Where’s the child?”

  “Sleeping, sir.”

  He wasn’t sure why he asked. The child’s welfare was of no real concern to him. As long as Two Bears believed that he had both hostages in his power and did what the Colonel wanted, the ultimate fate of Wildflower and Little Hawk didn’t matter at all.

  Idle curiosity had prompted the question, he supposed. There had never been a baby in this house before. In all likelihood there never would be again. He was much too old for fatherhood, and the prospect never really interested him, anyway. Family responsibilities would just get in the way of all the great things he was meant to accomplish.

  However, that thought made something stir in his brain. Earlier he had been pondering the possibility of someday residing in the White House. All the presidents except one had been married, the Colonel realized with a slight frown, and that one—James Buchanan—had been an incompetent boob. The public expected the nation’s leader to have a wife, a First Lady who would serve as the hostess for all the important state functions held in the White House.

  His gaze turned speculatively to Mrs. Dayton. She was an intelligent, attractive woman. Her late husband had been an officer who served under his command. A bit of a dullard, but a competent officer. Following the man’s death, she might have been destitute had it not been for the Colonel taking her into his service, so she had always been exceedingly grateful to him. His eyes narrowed as he considered the possibilities.

  She noticed him studying her. She always noticed things. That was one of her talents. With a smile, she asked, “Do you need something, Colonel?”

  He gave a brusque shake of his head.

  “No, no, everything’s fine,” he said. “I was just contemplating something. Forgive me if I was staring. You know how absorbed I become with my thoughts, Mrs. Dayton. Often I don’t even see what I’m looking at.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. Her smile faltered slightly. “I know.”

  “Perhaps some more wine . . .”

  “Of course, sir.”

  She came over to pour it. As she did, the Colonel realized how ludicrous his thoughts of a moment earlier had been. Attractive or not, the woman was a servant, certainly not suitable to be the wife of the President of the United States. She was good enough for cooking and cleaning, as well as caring for an Indian baby. She was even an acceptable, compliant bed partner for those times when the Colonel needed to slake his unavoidable human lusts. But anything else . . . ?

  No. Definitely not.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Dayton,” he muttered as she withdrew from his side after filling his glass.

  The sound of a faint cry floated through the open doors into the opulent dining room.

  “He’s awake,” she said. “I had better go see to him.”

  The Colonel waved a hand negligently.

  “Go ahead,” he told her. “I’m fine here.”

  With hooded eyes, he watched her leave the room. Once he got to Washington, he thought, there would be other widows in the city, more suitable widows. Women who had been married to politicians or diplomats, women who knew how things worked in the halls of power and would be content to stay in their place, happy in the luxury and celebrity of being First Lady. He would find a woman who would make no real demands on him and turn a blind eye whenever he paid a nighttime visit to the quarters of his housekeeper. It would all work out....

  With enough money and power, everything always worked out, the Colonel thought as he cut off another bite of rare roast beef and popped it into his mouth.

  Preacher ate supper in a hash house on Main Street and then drifted back into the Emerald Palace Saloon for another beer to let the hour get a little later before he scouted the Colonel’s mansion. He checked by looking over the bat wings first to make sure Randall wasn’t in the saloon. Not seeing any sign of the big gunman, he went on inside.

  Archibald Ingersoll stood at the bar this time instead of outside trying to drum up business. He lifted a hand in greeting and said, “Hello, old-timer. Did you get your free drink?”

  “I sure did,” Preacher said. He laid a coin on the bar. “Now I figured on buyin’ one.”

  Ingersoll chuckled.

  “That’s the idea, my friend.” He waved the bartender over. “What are you having?”

  “Beer’s fine.”

  “Draw a mug for our amigo here,” Ingersoll instructed the bartender, who wasn’t the same one Preacher had talked to earlier in the day.

  As Preacher sipped the beer, Ingersoll went on, “What do you think of our town so far?”

  “It’s all right, I reckon.”

  “Think you might want to settle down here?”

  Preacher smiled and said, “You wouldn’t want me as a citizen. I ain’t the settlin’-down type.”

  “Too fiddle-footed, eh? I understand. I used to be the same way, always looking for a new place, searching for something better. But I’ve found it here, I do believe.”

  “Even though this Colonel fella owns everything in sight?”

  The saloonkeeper shrugged and said, “He seems to be a fair man. The rent he charges me for this building is reasonable enough. And he’s promised to bring the railroad in, which will make us all rich men.”

  “It’ll make the Colonel rich, all right. I ain’t so sure about anybody else.” Preacher downed some more of the beer. “You ever been up there to that fancy house of his?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have. A while back he ordered some wine from my suppliers, and I delivered it to him. Well, to his housekeeper, Mrs. Dayton. Wonderful woman. Nice as she can be.”

  “So everybody keeps tellin’ me.”

  “It’s the truth. If you ever meet her, I’m sure you’ll like her, too.”

  “Why in the world would I ever meet up with the Colonel’s housekeeper?”

  “I don’t know,” Ingersoll said. “I was just saying that she’s a fine woman.”

  “Does he have any other servants?”

  “The Colonel? Not really. There are a couple of women who come in and help Mrs. Dayton with the cleaning, I believe, but that’s all. Oh, and he has a bookkeeper, but that fellow spends most of his time in the Colonel’s office here in town, not up at the house. The Colonel keeps his buggy and his horses at McFarland’s livery, so there’s no need for him to have a hostler of his own.”

  None of this chatter was getting Preacher the information he really needed. He said, “I never seen a rich man yet who didn’t keep a bunch of bodyguards around.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. It wouldn’t surprise me too much, though, if there were a couple of men patrolling the grounds around the mansion at night.” Ingersoll lowered his voice. “You didn’t
hear it from me, mind you, but some of the men who work for the Colonel are professional gunmen. Tough hombres, too. You wouldn’t want to cross them.”

  “I don’t intend to,” Preacher said, and he wasn’t lying. Under the circumstances he preferred to avoid the Colonel’s gun-wolves. He wasn’t scared of the varmints, but he was more interested in getting Little Hawk away from there safely and finding out what had happened to Wildflower. A shoot-out during the rescue would just endanger the tyke.

  He took his time with the beer, chatting idly with Ingersoll while he nursed it. He wanted things quiet and settled down before he made his move. When he was finished, he pushed the empty mug across the bar, prompting Ingersoll to ask, “Want another?”

  Preacher shook his head and said, “One’s my limit, I reckon. I ain’t as young as I used to be.”

  “None of us are, my friend, none of us are.”

  “I’ll see you around,” the mountain man said, although he knew that if everything went the way he wanted it to, that wouldn’t be the case. He wouldn’t see Ingersoll or anybody else in Hammerhead.

  At least not for a while. Not until he came back with Smoke and Matt, cleaned out this rats’ nest, and settled things with the Colonel.

  He left the saloon and turned west, toward the big house on the edge of the settlement. It loomed there on top of the rise, with the yellow glow of lamplight in a couple of windows. Not everyone up there had gone to bed yet, Preacher mused, but he was tired of waiting. He wasn’t as patient as he had been when he was a young man.

  His steps carried him toward the mansion, and as he walked he slipped into the shadows, disappearing with the practiced ease of a man whose life had often depended on stealth.

  Randall stood in the doorway of a room on the second floor of the Emerald Palace. Behind him, the whore he had just been with was getting dressed. Randall had already given her a couple of silver dollars and had been just about to leave when he spotted the old man in buckskins standing at the bar talking to Archibald Ingersoll.

  Even though he couldn’t see the old-timer’s face from here, something about him was familiar, Randall thought. That puzzling sensation was enough to make him pause in the doorway instead of stepping out onto the balcony that ran around the rear of the barroom. He moved the door so that it was still open but cast a shadow over him.

  “Something wrong, honey?” the soiled dove asked.

  “No,” Randall said. “Be quiet.”

  “Because if there’s anything else you want to do, I reckon a few more minutes wouldn’t hurt anything—”

  “Shut up,” Randall snapped.

  He heard her sniff. Even a whore could get her feelings hurt. He didn’t care. All the instincts he had developed over the past two decades were telling him it was important to find out more about the man at the bar.

  The old-timer finished his beer. Ingersoll said something to him, and the man turned his head slightly as he replied.

  Randall stiffened and drew in a deep breath through his nose. He could see enough of the man’s face now to know that it was familiar. It took him only a couple of seconds to remember where he had seen those leathery, bearded features before.

  In Two Bears’s village, on the night of the raid. The old man was the one who had ridden in during the fighting and pursued him. Randall had gotten a fairly good look at the man’s face in the firelight, and he was certain this was the same one.

  The old man turned and walked out of the saloon.

  Randall didn’t believe for a second that it was a coincidence the old-timer was here. He had followed them all the way from the Assiniboine village to Hammerhead, and that had to mean he planned to rescue the prisoners. Well, there was only one hostage now, Randall reminded himself, but the old man wouldn’t know that.

  Had some of the Indians come with him? That seemed likely, Randall decided. The savages would be waiting somewhere outside of town, staying out of sight, while the old man tried to locate Wildflower and Little Hawk.

  The Colonel needed to know about this, even though Randall didn’t regard either the old-timer or a ragtag bunch of redskins as much of a threat. They could become an annoyance, though, and the Colonel disliked annoyances.

  “You gonna stand there all night, honey?” the woman asked. “I got work to do, you know.”

  Randall restrained the impulse to turn around and slap the whiny bitch. Instead, he said, “I’ve got work, too.”

  Killing work.

  Chapter 31

  Preacher cut through alleys and circled around so that he left the town behind. He aimed to approach the Colonel’s mansion from the south. Several clumps of trees in that direction would give him some cover. However, he had noticed earlier that all the trees right around the house had been cleared away, so that it sat in the open on the hilltop.

  That was a sure sign of a military man, Preacher reflected. One of the first things the commander of a new fort always did was to make sure the area around it was open. That made it a lot harder for anybody to sneak up on the sentries.

  Preacher had the ability to blend into whatever shadows were available, though, and he didn’t mind crawling on the ground if he had to.

  He still caught glimpses of the front of the mansion through the trees as he approached. The lighted windows went dark. It looked like the Colonel and his housekeeper were turning in, Preacher thought.

  Another window on the back of the house, on the second floor, was lit up, though.

  Preacher didn’t have any idea where Little Hawk was being kept. He was worried that Wildflower wouldn’t be here, too. It was possible the Colonel had split up mother and child to make sure that Wildflower followed his orders, and he could be holding her somewhere else.

  First things first, he told himself. Get the little boy and take him back to Standing Rock. Then he could figure out what to do next.

  He was nearing the edge of the trees, about fifty yards from the back of the house, when he stopped and stood absolutely still. The smell of tobacco smoke drifted to him.

  Not far away, someone was smoking a quirly. That meant a guard, and he was likely somewhere in these trees.

  The Colonel’s men were supposed to be professionals, but it was a pretty sloppy mistake for a guard to give away his position like that. The man probably thought there was no real danger here in Hammerhead, so he had gotten careless.

  He was about to find out what a mistake that was.

  Preacher moved again, more slowly and quietly than ever. He followed the scent until he spotted the tiny orange glow of the coal at the end of the guard’s cigarette. The man stood with his shoulder leaning against a tree trunk, which made his shape blend with that of the tree, but after a moment of studying the patch of darkness Preacher had them sorted out.

  His fingertips caressed the handle of the Bowie knife at his waist. He knew the sentry had no idea how close danger was lurking. Preacher could step up behind the man, clap a hand over his mouth to stifle any outcry, and bury a foot of cold steel in his vitals before the hombre ever knew what was going on.

  Remembering what had happened in the Assiniboine village, the old mountain man was tempted to do exactly that. If he knew for sure that the guard had taken part in the raid, he would have.

  But it was possible that the man hadn’t killed anybody, even though he worked for the Colonel. Preacher drew his right-hand gun instead of the knife. He reversed the weapon and struck as swiftly and silently as a snake, bringing the butt crashing down on the guard’s head.

  The man’s hat cushioned the blow a little; otherwise, Preacher would have busted his skull open. As it was, the fella’s knees unhinged and dropped him straight down. He toppled forward on his face, out cold. When he woke up, he would have one hell of a headache, but if he knew how close he had come to dying, he would have counted himself mighty lucky.

  The quirly the man had dropped was still smoldering. Preacher ground it out with the toe of his boot. A fire might have made a good distraction, b
ut it was too risky to take chances with anything like that.

  Preacher scouted along the edge of the trees, searching for more guards. He didn’t find any, which told him that the Colonel was pretty confident.

  Too much confidence could sometimes get a man killed, Preacher thought with a grim smile as he dropped to his belly and started crawling toward the house.

  The Colonel stood in front of the door in his dressing gown, frowning as he hesitated. This was his house. He owned everything in it, and no doors were barred to him. Yet he still felt the impulse to knock, as if he had to request permission to enter. He didn’t like that feeling. He had always been one to take whatever he wanted.

  But he had been raised to be a gentleman, and those lessons learned at an early age were not easily forgotten. He took a deep breath, raised his hand, and knocked.

  Mrs. Dayton opened the door almost instantly, as if she had been waiting for him. She wore a dressing gown, too, belted tightly around her waist. With the door open about a foot, she smiled and said, “Yes, Colonel? Is there something I can do for you?”

  She knew damned good and well what she could do for him, but despite that there was always this give-and-take, this little game that sought for some pretense for him to be here. It made him impatient sometimes, but he had become accustomed to it, like the steps of a dance.

  “You have the redskin child in there with you?” he asked. The brat was as good an excuse as any to get him into her room.

  “I do,” Mrs. Dayton said, moving back a step and opening the door wider. She gestured toward a crate on the floor next to her bed. “I made a crib out of it.”

  “I’d like to take a look at him.”

  She stepped back even more and said, “Of course. Come in.”

  The Colonel went over to the crate and looked down at the sleeping child. Little Hawk appeared to be resting comfortably.

  “You got the Mexican woman to come and nurse him?”

  “Yes. She was glad to do anything she could to help you, Colonel.”