Preacher's Blood Hunt Read online

Suddenly the huge rock tipped away from them. Nature did the rest of the work as gravity took over and pulled it more off balance. With a rumbling roar, the boulder struck another and knocked it into motion, as well.

  Preacher ran to a smaller rock and heaved it down the slope for good measure. More and more boulders tumbled down the mountainside. One of them rolled right over Blood Eye’s body, leaving a gory smear on the rock.

  The Crow wouldn’t cheat death this time, Preacher thought in grim satisfaction.

  He grabbed hold of Charlotte’s hand. “Come on! We gotta get back down there!”

  CHAPTER 38

  Will’s situation had quickly turned desperate.

  He had done everything Preacher said, even though every time he’d fired one of the rifles the recoil had made pain throb through his wounded back. He had held off Pendexter’s men until the signal came for him to retreat then had moved toward the back of the canyon as fast as his battered body would carry him. He had waited for the avalanche that with any luck would wipe out their enemies.

  But the avalanche hadn’t come. Dog growled and barked as if he sensed that Preacher was in danger, and Will’s blood seemed to freeze in his veins when he heard a woman’s scream from higher on the slope.

  Charlotte!

  He would have run back along the canyon where he could look up and see what was going on, but several of Pendexter’s men reached the canyon mouth and opened fire on him. Will crouched behind a rock beside the little spring-fed pool and returned their shots.

  All he managed to do was slow down their charge, and more and more of them reached the canyon with each passing moment. They poured through the gap, and he knew it was only a matter of minutes before they overran him.

  Until that happened, he would fight.

  With his ears ringing from all the shots, he couldn’t hear much, but he felt the earth tremble underneath him. He looked up, and suddenly the sky was blotted out by a cloud of falling rocks and dust.

  “Dog!” Will cried as he threw himself as far back as he could go. The big cur pressed against him, no longer growling or snarling. He sensed that what was happening was too big for him to fight.

  A roar became louder and louder until Will wondered if it was the sound of the world ending.

  Preacher and Charlotte hurried along the ledge. Reaching the end of it, they looked over the edge. Dust hung so thick in the air that they couldn’t see into the canyon.

  “Will!” Charlotte cried. “Will, can you hear me?” She scrambled down ahead of Preacher.

  As the dust clouds began to thin, Preacher looked over his shoulder and saw that tons of rock had slid into the front part of the canyon—right where Pendexter and his men had been the last time Preacher saw them. His fervent hope was that they were still there, buried for all time under that mass of rock and dirt.

  Charlotte dropped the last six feet or so and landed lithely. The area in front of the pool was littered with small rocks, but the brunt of the avalanche had missed it as Preacher had thought it would.

  He heard her cry out again, “Will!” Then a sound came to his ears that lightened his heart.

  Dog barked a greeting.

  When Preacher reached the ground he saw Will and Charlotte embracing and kissing. The young man appeared to be all right. Better than all right, in fact, with the woman he loved in his arms again.

  Dog bounded over and reared up to rest his paws on Preacher’s shoulders. He licked the mountain man’s grizzled face until Preacher laughed.

  He scratched the big cur’s ears. “We done it again, you hairy old varmint. Escaped death by the skin of our teeth.”

  “Not quite.” Barnabas Pendexter came out of the clouds of dust with a pistol in his hand. Larrabee, the cold-blooded killer with the eye patch, was beside him and also pointed a pistol at Preacher, Will, and Charlotte.

  Pendexter was covered with dust and grime and didn’t look so elegant. Blood trickled down his face from a long scratch on his cheek, and his sleek dark hair was askew. The light of madness burned in his eyes. “I’ve come for you, Charlotte. Your loving husband has come for you at last.”

  She looked at him with horror and rage on her face. “Loving husband? You never loved me, Barnabas! You just wanted to use me, to bend me to your will like a slave!”

  Pendexter sneered. “Such is my right.”

  “You had no right to beat me as you did. You had no right to keep me a prisoner and make my life a living hell!”

  “You’ll come back home with me now,” Pendexter said as if he hadn’t heard her. “Everything will be just like it was before, you’ll see.”

  “Nothing will be the same. I’ll die first!”

  Charlotte plucked one of the pistols from behind Will’s belt. She twisted toward Pendexter and brought the gun up in both hands. Her thumbs looped over the hammer to cock it.

  “Kill the men!” Pendexter screeched to Larrabee.

  Preacher was already on the move. He darted to the side and pulled the hatchet from behind his belt. His arm flashed back and forward even as Larrabee fired. Preacher felt the heat of the pistol ball as it passed close beside his cheek.

  The hatchet revolved through the air and landed with a solid, meaty thunk! in the middle of Larrabee’s forehead. The keen blade drove through his skull and into his brain.

  At the same time two more shots roared. The ball from Pendexter’s pistol passed between Charlotte and Will and chipped stone from the wall behind them.

  Charlotte’s shot punched into Pendexter’s chest, staggering him. His eyes opened wide. His jaw sagged. He managed to rasp, “Charlotte, how . . .”

  “It wasn’t difficult at all,” she said as his eyes rolled up in their sockets.

  His knees unhinged and he collapsed in a limp heap of dead flesh.

  Charlotte dropped the gun and sagged against Will. She started to cry as he held her.

  “It’s over,” he told her as he comforted her. “It’s all over now.”

  “Is it, really? You swear?”

  Will looked over at Preacher as the mountain man bent to wrench the hatchet out of Larrabee’s skull. The man with the eye patch was dead as he could be.

  Preacher gave Will a curt nod.

  The young man stroked Charlotte’s hair. “I swear. Just like I swear to love you for the rest of my life.”

  As far as Preacher was able to determine, Pendexter and Larrabee had been the only survivors of the avalanche. If any of the other men had lived through it, they had done the smart thing and taken off for the tall and uncut.

  Climbing out of the canyon over the debris left by the avalanche wasn’t easy, especially for Will with the arrow wound in his back, but they managed and by nightfall had found a good place to camp beside a stream.

  With Jebediah Druke and his men all dead and the threat of Barnabas Pendexter ended for all time, Preacher figured it was safe to build a fire.

  By its light, Charlotte cleaned and redressed the wound in Will’s back. “You’re going to be all right,” she assured him.

  He smiled. “Of course I will be, with you to nurse me back to health.”

  Preacher had shot a rabbit and it was roasting over the fire. He looked up as he heard steady hoofbeats somewhere nearby.

  Will and Charlotte heard the sound, too. Both reached for the guns they had close at hand.

  Preacher stood up and held his rifle ready. A moment later, a broad grin broke out on his rugged face as two large, familiar shapes loomed through the shadows and came into the firelight. Dog let out a welcoming yip.

  “Figured you were around somewhere,” Preacher told Horse. He set the rifle aside and went to greet the stallion. The well-loaded pack animal followed closely behind.

  Preacher stroked the stallion’s nose. “You’ve been just waitin’ for things to settle down again, haven’t you?”

  Horse tossed his head as if agreeing.

  Preacher was glad they were all together again.

  As they ate the cooked
rabbit, he asked Will and Charlotte, “What are the two of you goin’ to do now? I reckon you can go back east if you want. The only reason you came out here was to get as far away from Pendexter as you could, wasn’t it?”

  “Not entirely,” Will said. “Like I told you, I’ve always been fascinated by the frontier. Even though a lot of terrible things have happened, most of our life here has been good.”

  “Very good,” Charlotte said as she hugged his arm. “I think we might stay for a while and see if we can earn our living as trappers.”

  Preacher chuckled. “You mean Will Gardner and Gray Otter?”

  “No. I mean Will Gardner and his wife Charlotte.” She looked over at him. “I really would like to be properly married now that we can, Will.”

  “I’d like that, too.” His voice was husky with emotion. “We’ll have go to back to civilization to do it, though.”

  “Just for a short time. I think I can stand it if you can.”

  “Oh, I can,” he assured her. “I certainly can.”

  “What about you, Preacher?” Charlotte asked as she turned to the mountain man.

  Preacher reached over to scratch behind Dog’s ears. “That money Pendexter paid me was for a stake so I could get back to trappin’ once I’d found his runaway son. Reckon I did that job as well as it could be done, so there’s no reason I can’t use those supplies with a clean conscience.”

  “If it’s trapping you want,” Will said, “you should stay here in King’s Crown. It’s one of the best places for beaver pelts you’ll ever find.”

  “Yeah, I know, but I was thinkin’ I might move on and try my luck somewhere else.”

  “Too many bad memories here, I suppose,” Charlotte said softly. “Yes, I understand the feeling. Preacher may have a point there, Will. Perhaps it would be better if we made a fresh start elsewhere.”

  “Whatever you want is fine with me. Someplace new and clean.”

  “That’s one good thing about the frontier,” Preacher said. “No shortage of hills to see the other side of.”

  He would continue answering that call of the unknown as long as the blood flowed in his veins.

  J. A. Johnstone on William W. Johnstone

  “When the Truth Becomes Legend”

  William W. Johnstone was born in southern Missouri, the youngest of four children. He was raised with strong moral and family values by his minister father, and tutored by his schoolteacher mother. Despite this, he quit school at age fifteen.

  “I have the highest respect for education,” he says, “but such is the folly of youth, and wanting to see the world beyond the four walls and the blackboard.”

  True to this vow, Bill attempted to enlist in the French Foreign Legion (“I saw Gary Cooper in Beau Geste when I was a kid and I thought the French Foreign Legion would be fun”) but was rejected, thankfully, for being underage. Instead, he joined a traveling carnival and did all kinds of odd jobs. It was listening to the veteran carny folk, some of whom had been on the circuit since the late 1800s, telling amazing tales about their experiences, which planted the storytelling seed in Bill’s imagination.

  “They were mostly honest people, despite the bad reputation traveling carny shows had back then,” Bill remembers. “Of course, there were exceptions. There was one guy named Picky, who got that name because he was a master pickpocket. He could steal a man’s socks right off his feet without him knowing. Believe me, Picky got us chased out of more than a few towns.”

  After a few months of this grueling existence, Bill returned home and finished high school. Next came stints as a deputy sheriff in the Tallulah, Louisiana, Sheriff’s Department, followed by a hitch in the U.S. Army. Then he began a career in radio broadcasting at KTLD in Tallulah, which would last sixteen years. It was there that he fine-tuned his storytelling skills. He turned to writing in 1970, but it wouldn’t be until 1979 that his first novel, The Devil’s Kiss, was published. Thus began the full-time writing career of William W. Johnstone. He wrote horror (The Uninvited), thrillers (The Last of the Dog Team), even a romance novel or two. Then, in February 1983, Out of the Ashes was published. Searching for his missing family in the aftermath of a post-apocalyptic America, rebel mercenary and patriot Ben Raines is united with the civilians of the Resistance forces and moves to the forefront of a revolution for the nation’s future.

  Out of the Ashes was a smash. The series would continue for the next twenty years, winning Bill three generations of fans all over the world. The series was often imitated but never duplicated. “We all tried to copy the Ashes series,” said one publishing executive, “but Bill’s uncanny ability, both then and now, to predict in which direction the political winds were blowing brought a certain immediacy to the table no one else could capture.” The Ashes series would end its run with more than thirty-four books and twenty million copies in print, making it one of the most successful men’s action series in American book publishing. (The Ashes series also, Bill notes with a touch of pride, got him on the FBI’s Watch List for its less than flattering portrayal of spineless politicians and the growing power of big government over our lives, among other things. In that respect, I often find myself saying, “Bill was years ahead of his time.”)

  Always steps ahead of the political curve, Bill’s recent thrillers, written with myself, include Vengeance Is Mine, Invasion USA, Border War, Jackknife, Remember the Alamo, Home Invasion, Phoenix Rising, The Blood of Patriots, The Bleeding Edge, and the upcoming Suicide Mission.

  It is with the western, though, that Bill found his greatest success and propelled him onto both the USA Today and the New York Times bestseller lists.

  Bill’s western series include The Mountain Man, Matt Jensen, the Last Mountain Man, Preacher, The Family Jensen, Luke Jensen, Bounty Hunter, Eagles, MacCallister (an Eagles spin-off), Sidewinders, The Brothers O’Brien, Sixkiller, Blood Bond, The Last Gunfighter, and the upcoming new series Flintlock and The Trail West. May 2013 saw the hardcover western Butch Cassidy, The Lost Years.

  “The Western,” Bill says, “is one of the few true art forms that is one hundred percent American. I liken the Western as America’s version of England’s Arthurian legends, like the Knights of the Round Table, or Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Starting with the 1902 publication of The Virginian by Owen Wister, and followed by the greats like Zane Grey, Max Brand, Ernest Haycox, and of course Louis L’Amour, the Western has helped to shape the cultural landscape of America.

  “I’m no goggle-eyed college academic, so when my fans ask me why the Western is as popular now as it was a century ago, I don’t offer a 200-page thesis. Instead, I can only offer this: The Western is honest. In this great country, which is suffering under the yoke of political correctness, the Western harks back to an era when justice was sure and swift. Steal a man’s horse, rustle his cattle, rob a bank, a stagecoach, or a train, you were hunted down and fitted with a hangman’s noose. One size fit all.

  “Sure, we westerners are prone to a little embellishment and exaggeration and, I admit it, occasionally play a little fast and loose with the facts. But we do so for a very good reason—to enhance the enjoyment of readers.

  “It was Owen Wister, in The Virginian who first coined the phrase ‘When you call me that, smile.’ Legend has it that Wister actually heard those words spoken by a deputy sheriff in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, when another poker player called him a son-of-a-bitch.

  “Did it really happen, or is it one of those myths that have passed down from one generation to the next? I honestly don’t know. But there’s a line in one of my favorite Westerns of all time, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where the newspaper editor tells the young reporter, ‘When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.’

  “These are the words I live by.”

  Turn the page for an exciting preview!

  USA TODAY BESTSELLING AUTHOR

  WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE

  with J. A. Johnstone

  A Blazing New Series by

  THE GREATE
ST WESTERN WRITER

  OF THE 21ST CENTURY

  FLINTLOCK

  First Time in Print!

  He is brave, tough as leather, takes no prisoners, and has left behind a trail of deadly enemies—outlaws he’s hunted down or killed with the cold heart of a man used to violence. A feared bounty hunter and the scourge of badmen ever ywhere, Flintlock carries an ancient Hawken muzzle-loader, handed down to him from the mountain man who raised him. He stands as the towering hero of a new Johnstone saga.

  BLOOD QUEST

  Busted out of prison by an outlaw friend, Flintlock joins a hunt for a fortune—a golden bell hanging in a remote monastery. But between the smoldering ruin of his former jail cell and a treasure in the Arizona mountains there will be blood at a U.S. Army fort, a horrifying brush with Apache warriors, and a dozen wild adventures with the schemers, shootists, madmen, and lost women who find their way to Flintlock’s side. From a vicious, superstitious half-breed to the great Geronimo himself, Flintlock meets the frontier’s most murderous hardcases—many who he must find a way to kill . . .

  FLINTLOCK by William W. Johnstone, with J. A. Johnstone

  On sale now, wherever Pinnacle Books are sold.

  CHAPTER 1

  “I’m gonna hang you tomorrow at sunup, Sam Flintlock, an’ I can’t guarantee to break your damned neck on account of how I never hung anybody afore,” the sheriff said. “I’ll try, lay to that, but you see how it is with me.”

  “The hammering stopped about an hour ago, so I figured my time was near,” Flintlock said.

  “A real nice gallows, you’ll like it,” Sheriff Dave Cobb said. “An’ I’ll make sure it’s hung with red, white and blue bunting so you can go out in style. You’ll draw a crowd, Sam. If’n that makes you feel better.”

  “This pissant town railroaded me into a noose, Cobb. You know it and I know it,” Flintlock said.

  “Damnit, boy, you done kilt Smilin’ Dan Sedly and just about everybody in this valley was kissin’ kin o’ his. Ol’ Dan was a well-liked man.”