Preacher's Showdown Read online

  He reached up to help her down from the vehicle. “Well, you don’t have to worry anymore. The savages are gone. Better not look out there, though. There are quite a few bodies lying around.”

  Deborah shuddered at the thought of the ground being littered with the corpses of the warriors.

  “Don’t be so sure the trouble’s over,” Preacher advised Corliss.

  “What do you mean? The Indians left.”

  “For right now. Ain’t nothin’ stoppin’ ’em from comin’ back.”

  Corliss and Jerome both frowned. Clearly, they hadn’t thought about that. Jerome said, “How likely is that? They lost quite a few of their men. Surely they won’t risk attacking us again.”

  “Not unless they go back and get a bunch more warriors to come with them next time. As war parties go, this was a small one. They were probably just hopin’ to steal some ponies from another tribe or somethin’ like that. They didn’t expect to run across a wagon train. They should’ve passed us by. They won’t make the mistake of hittin’ us with a small group again.”

  “But they might not come back at all, right?” Corliss asked.

  “They might not,” Preacher admitted. “You can’t ever tell which way an Indian’s gonna jump.”

  A quick check of the other men confirmed that the arrow wound in Lars Neilson’s arm was the only injury the defenders had suffered. A couple of the oxen were dead and would have to be replaced on the teams. Preacher got the uninjured drivers busy tending to that while he looked at Neilson’s arm.

  “Take it out, yah?” the Swede asked in a voice thinned by pain.

  “Yeah, but it ain’t gonna be pleasant,” Preacher warned as he sat Neilson down on a lowered tailgate. “I can’t just pull it out, ’cause the barbs on the arrow will cause more damage that way. I’ll have to push it all the way through.”

  Neilson’s eyes widened with fear at that prospect, but he swallowed hard and said, “Do what you bane have to do.”

  Preacher took hold of the shaft and snapped it off close to where the arrowhead was buried in Neilson’s arm. But not too close, because he had to leave enough so that he could push the arrowhead all the way through. “Hang on,” he said as he took hold of Neilson’s arm with his left hand, put his right hand against the arrow, and shoved as hard as he could.

  Neilson screamed and jerked as the bloody arrowhead finished tearing a channel all the way through his arm and popped out on the other side. Preached grabbed it and pulled what was left of the shaft the rest of the way through. Neilson’s eyes rolled up in his head. He might have passed out and fallen off the tailgate if not for Preacher’s firm grip on his arm.

  The ordeal wasn’t over for Neilson. Preacher called for Jerome to bring over the jug of whiskey that was kept in the lead wagon for things just like this. Neilson whimpered as Preacher poured the fiery liquor through the wound. Then Preacher said, “Jake, fetch me a powder horn.”

  “Gott hilfen mir!” Neilson gasped. Preacher figured the words meant God help me. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Got to fix these wounds so they’ll heal up and not fester,” Preacher explained as he sprinkled black powder around the bloody openings. Then he took an unloaded pistol, cocked it, and held it close enough to the entrance wound so that when he clicked the hammer against the flint, one of the sparks set off the powder with a flash. The stink of burned meat filled the air as Neilson yelled again. Preacher repeated the process with the exit wound.

  “They ought to be all right now,” he assured the shaken Neilson, “but we’ll keep an eye on ’em, just to be sure.”

  “Them Gott-damned redskins,” the Swede choked out. “This is their fault. I almost wish they would come back so I could kill some more of them.”

  Preacher laughed. “Well, I hope you don’t get your wish, Lars.” He turned to Jake. “Can you get some clean strips of cloth, wrap ’em around Mr. Neilson’s arm, and tie ’em good an’ tight?”

  “Sure, Preacher,” the boy said. He hurried off to find some makeshift bandages while Preacher went back to the other men.

  “We’ll be pullin’ out as soon as we can,” he told them.

  Corliss waved a hand at the Pawnee corpses. “What about them?”

  “The rest of the bunch will be comin’ back to get their bodies,” Preacher said with a nod. “That’s one reason we don’t want to be here when they do. Let’s put some ground between us and them.”

  “That sounds like a good idea to me,” Jerome said. He shuddered a little as he glanced at the sprawled bodies. “We were lucky, weren’t we, Preacher?”

  Preacher nodded. “Damned lucky,” he said.

  Twenty-three

  Schuyler Mims, Colin Fairfax, and the rest of Shad Beaumont’s men heard the firing to the south and stopped to look worriedly in that direction.

  “Sounds like a damn battle goin’ on,” Schuyler said. “What do you reckon it is, Colin?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s got to involve that wagon train,” Fairfax replied with a scowl. “They might have run into some Indians, or something like that. We’d better go see about it. By God, nobody better try to steal those trade goods before we do!”

  Fairfax decided that only a small party would investigate, because they would be less likely to be spotted by Preacher or any other members of the Hart expedition. The rest of the men would wait right where they were until the scouts came back.

  Schuyler, Fairfax, and two other men, Burns and Loomis, rode south toward the towering spire of rock they had spotted earlier. The shots seemed to be coming from that direction. After they had gone a mile or so, the shooting gradually died away. Schuyler looked over at Fairfax and said, “Now it sounds like the battle’s over.”

  “Yes, but we don’t know what that means,” Fairfax said. “Preacher and the others could have been wiped out. Someone could be stealing those wagons right out from under our very noses!”

  His tone made it clear that he wasn’t going to stand for that. He urged his horse to greater speed.

  Schuyler hoped that they weren’t riding right into more trouble than they could handle.

  A few minutes later, they spotted a dust cloud moving off to the east. “Lot o’ riders headed that way,” Loomis commented.

  Fairfax nodded. “Yes, but the wagons aren’t with them. The dust is moving too fast for that.”

  The four men kept riding. They circled around the rock spire, which was a stark, striated reddish-brown. The broad base was the same color, but it was streaked with green on its lower levels where the grass from the plains had crawled up onto the rocky surface.

  Shortly after riding around the towering rock chimney, they spotted dark shapes lying on the ground ahead of them. “Damn,” Schuyler said in a hushed voice. “Are those what I think they are?”

  “They appear to be bodies,” Fairfax said. He kept his horse moving. When the other three men slowed a little, he looked back over his shoulder at them and snapped, “Well, come on! Those men can’t hurt you. They’re all dead.”

  “You can’t be sure of that,” Schuyler pointed out.

  “If they’re not dead, they’re so close to it that they’re no danger to us. You don’t see them jumping up and capering around, do you?”

  “Maybe all of ’em are dead,” Burns said. “Some o’ their friends could still be around.”

  “If they are, we’ll see them coming in time to get away.”

  Schuyler wished he could be as sure of that as Fairfax sounded. Fairfax wasn’t backing down, though, so Schuyler didn’t have any choice except to urge his mount into a trot and catch up. Even more reluctantly, Burns and Loomis followed suit.

  As they neared the bodies, Schuyler saw the buckskins and the feathers and the war paint. The dead men all had thick, midnight-dark hair smeared with some sort of grease. They were Indians, all right. Schuyler had no idea which tribe they belonged to. He didn’t know how to identify such things. There were also a couple of dead oxen, their bodies feather
ed with arrows.

  Fairfax rode boldly past the Indians and pointed to marks on the ground. “See the wheel ruts?” he said. “The wagons were here. It looks like they circled up, then moved out again.”

  “They had to stop and fight Indians,” Schuyler said. “And they must’ve won or they wouldn’t have kept goin’.” He nodded toward the grisly shapes on the ground. “And all these dead fellas wouldn’t still be layin’ here.”

  “Boss, we’d better get outta here,” Loomis said in a worried tone. “I don’t know a whole heap about Injuns, but I know they don’t leave their dead behind. If any of ’em were left alive, they’re gonna come back for these bodies.”

  Burns nodded. “He’s right, Mr. Fairfax. We need to light a shuck while we still can.”

  Fairfax considered the suggestion and then agreed. “There’s no sign that any members of the Hart party were killed,” he said. “No fresh graves or anything like that. So we can assume that they’re still at full strength and still headed for the mountains, just as they have been all along.”

  “So we join up with the rest of the fellas and go set up that ambush, like we figured to do all along?” Schuyler asked.

  “That’s right. Let’s get moving.”

  The men turned their horses and rode back toward the rock tower. A short time later, they circled around it and continued on their way north.

  Because of that, they didn’t see the lone figure on horseback who rode up to the bodies of the fallen Pawnee a few minutes after the white men had gone out of sight. He studied the warriors’ bodies without any sympathy in his cold, dark eyes, then hitched his pony into motion again and followed the four whites.

  * * *

  Scott’s Bluff was a massive parapet of sandstone carved by wind and weather into bizarre, twisted shapes. It was even more impressive than Chimney Rock had been as the wagons passed by it and through an opening Preacher called Mitchell’s Pass. It had taken most of two days to reach here from Chimney Rock, and Preacher intended to call a halt and set up camp as soon as they were through the pass.

  Beyond it, close but still farther away than they appeared to be, were the Laramie Mountains. The trail would take the wagons through the foothills, but they would avoid the more rugged terrain, at least for now. Despite that, from here on out, they would be climbing most of the time. They had reached the end of the plains.

  “I never saw anything like this back in Missouri,” Jake said as the wagons rolled through the pass.

  “Before you’re done, you’ll see a lot o’ things you never saw back in Missouri,” Preacher said with a grin. “There are some pretty good hills in the Ozarks, but they ain’t nothin’ compared to the Rockies.”

  Once the wagons were clear of the pass, they were pulled into a circle as usual. The atmosphere in camp that night was quiet and subdued. No one had forgotten the Indian attack the day before, and Preacher had decided that tonight, as they had on the previous night, they would have a cold camp with no fire. That made the pilgrims even more depressed. Even during summer, there was nothing like cheerful, dancing flames to perk up people’s spirits.

  It had bothered Deborah that the bodies of the Indians had been left behind without any sort of burial. Preacher had explained to her that the surviving Pawnee would take care of those who had fallen. Burying them in white man’s fashion would have been a terrible insult. Deborah said she understood, but Preacher wasn’t sure that she really did. She still seemed shaken tonight as she sat next to Corliss and gnawed on some jerky for supper. At least she didn’t complain about the tough strips of dried meat, as some women would have.

  The men had pulled all the arrows out of the wagons. Pete Carey had gathered them up, tied a cord around them, and tossed them in the back of one of the vehicles, along with several bows he picked up from the ground. Preacher wasn’t sure what Carey intended to do with them, but throwing the bows and arrows away would have been wasteful. Preacher thought maybe he would try to teach Jake how to shoot one of the native weapons. That was a good skill for any boy to know, not just the red ones.

  Preacher was musing on that when Jerome suddenly said, “I think we need to talk.”

  Preacher looked around in the gathering dusk, seeing that Jerome was talking to Corliss and Deborah, not him. The tension in Jerome’s voice told Preacher that trouble might be about to crop up again.

  “Talk about what?” Corliss asked.

  “The three of us.”

  Corliss smirked. Now that he had won Deborah’s heart back, some of his old arrogance had returned. Preacher wondered if sooner or later that would be enough to drive Deborah away from Corliss again. Not that he cared one way or the other.

  “What is there to say?” Corliss asked. “We’re still business partners, and Deborah is back where she belongs.”

  Jerome stood facing the two of them. “Let me get this straight. When you thought that Deborah had chosen me over you, you wanted to dissolve our partnership, split up the goods and the wagons, and establish two separate trading posts.”

  “What’s your point, Jerome?” Corliss snapped.

  Jerome took a deep breath. “If that was a fair reaction from you, why shouldn’t it be my reaction as well? I’m just as hurt by Deborah’s rejection of me as you were when you thought she had rejected you.”

  “Oh, don’t take it that way, Jerome!” Deborah said, lifting a hand toward him. “I still think you’re a fine man, and I care about you a great deal.”

  “Please,” Corliss said with a scornful chuckle. “You tried to woo Deborah for a few days, and you think that makes what you’re feeling the equal of the pain I felt when I thought the two of you were betraying me?”

  Jerome sniffed. “Betrayal is betrayal, and for a heart to break doesn’t require that a great deal of time be spent with the one doing the . . . breaking.”

  “Stop it, Jerome,” Deborah said. “You know I never meant to hurt you.”

  “Yes, stop it,” Corliss agreed. “You always were a poor loser, even when we were children.”

  For a second, Preacher thought Jerome was going to hurl himself at Corliss, and then he would have another fracas between the cousins to break up. Instead, Jerome controlled himself with a visible effort and said, “I want the same thing you wanted, Corliss. I want to establish my own trading post so that I won’t have to see the two of you together, especially all winter.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Preacher told us it would be dangerous for us to split up our party now.”

  “I’m not talking about splitting up the party,” Jerome said. “I’ll wait until we get to South Pass, as planned. I’ll even give you the prime location, Corliss, because I want to see you succeed . . . for Deborah’s sake. But I’m going to take three of the wagons and some of the trade goods and find a place of my own.”

  Corliss looked over at the mountain man. “What do you think of this idea, Preacher?”

  “It don’t make no never-mind to me what you folks do once you get to where you’re goin’,” Preacher said with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “All I’m concerned about is gettin’ you there with your hair still attached to your heads and all the trade goods in them wagons.” He scratched at his bearded jaw. “I’ll say this, though . . . you fellas will have a whole lot better chance o’ makin’ it if you stick together. Split up and you’ll be that much easier targets for every bloodthirsty Indian and renegade white man in this part o’ the country.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Jerome said, his jaw set stubbornly. “That’s better than being constantly reminded of . . . what I lost.”

  Preacher couldn’t understand feeling that way, but he could tell that Jerome was sincere. He would do his best to talk Jerome out of the idea once they got to South Pass. But since Jerome had said that he didn’t intend to disrupt the rest of the journey by insisting on splitting up with his cousin right now, Preacher was prepared to let the whole thing ride for the time being. It could all be sorted out later, after they got where
they were going.

  He settled for saying, “Well, you think about it mighty hard before you make up your mind,” to Jerome, then added, “Everybody might as well get some sleep, ’cept for me and Robinson. We’ll be standin’ the first watch.”

  While everyone was getting ready to turn in, some inside the wagons and some on the ground underneath them, Preacher went over to Lars Neilson and asked the Swede, “How’s the arm tonight?”

  “Very stiff and sore, yah,” Neilson said. He flexed his wounded arm back and forth to demonstrate that he could move it. “But I bane all right. I can still use it.”

  “I’ll take a look at the wounds in the mornin’,” Preacher decided. “Got to make sure they don’t go to putrefyin’. You’ll lose your arm if they do.”

  Neilson gave a solemn shake of his head. “I do not want that.”

  “Neither do I, old son. Now get some rest.”

  Preacher took his rifle and went to one side of the circle while Robinson posted himself on the other side. Everybody was still a little on edge from the Indian fight the day before, so Preacher didn’t think he had to worry about anyone dozing off while standing guard.

  The night passed quietly, and early the next morning the wagon train moved on, leaving Scott’s Bluff behind and beginning its approach to the foothills of the Laramie Mountains. Although not steep, the ground had a steady upward slope to it. The oxen strained against their traces to haul the heavily loaded vehicles.

  “Why don’t we just go all the way around the mountains?” Jerome asked while Preacher was riding beside the lead wagon at midday.

  Preacher shook his head. “Too far. We’d have to swing too far north and then back to the south to hit the pass between this range of mountains and the next.”

  Jake asked, “Is that the South Pass you been talkin’ about, Preacher?”

  “Nope. South Pass, the place we’re headin’ for, is a heap farther on.”

  “How much farther?” Jerome asked, more than a hint of impatience in his voice.