pull loose. Preacher and Dog padded off into the darkness.
The Indians knew Preacher by many names, most of them having to do with his expertise at killing. They frightened their children with tales of this white man who came in the night like a phantom and left death behind him, silent and lethal. Preacher knew this and did nothing to discourage it. A reputation as a dangerous man could be an annoyance at times, but mostly it came in handy.
Dog at his side, he moved through the night with an uncanny stealth practiced over many perilous years on the frontier. The glow of the campfire was visible through the trees from time to time, but Preacher didn’t really need to see it or smell the smoke. Now that he knew where he was going, his uncanny sense of direction would have taken him right to his destination without anything else.
He and Dog didn’t make a sound as they closed in on the camp. When Preacher was close enough to hear the men talking, he went to the ground and tugged Dog down beside him. They lay there listening. Preacher hoped that the men would drop some hints into their conversation about why they had tried to kill him.
The tone of their voices told him he’d been right about them having a jug. It sounded like they’d been passing it around for a while. Most of their comments were profane observations about the talents of various whores who plied their trade in the waterfront taverns of St. Louis. That confirmed another of Preacher’s suppositions, that they weren’t frontiersmen. They had come out here from back East, probably recently.
Had they come all this way just to kill him? That was crazy, he told himself, and yet he couldn’t rule it out.
They finally got around to talking about their attempt on his life. One of the men said in a slightly whiskey-slurred voice, “Wish I could’a seen that damn Preacher’s face when all those rocks started comin’ at him.”
“Prob’ly shit right in his pants,” another man said with a giggle that put Preacher’s teeth on edge.
The third man said, “Important thing is that he’s dead. Thass all that matters. Now gimme that damn jug!”
“Get your hands off it! You been hoggin’ it all night!”
“The hell you say! I’ll learn you to talk to me like that!”
“Dadgum it, Parker!” That was the first man, trying to make peace between the other two. “You can’t just—Oh, shit! No!”
The roar of a gunshot drowned out his voice, then another shot blasted and somebody screamed.
Preacher bit back a curse of his own.
So much for that plan, he thought bitterly.
Chapter 5
He lunged to his feet and burst out of the brush surrounding the clearing where the camp was located. His keen eyes took in the scene instantly, noting the rocks and the logs scattered around that the men had been using for seats by the fire in the center of the clearing.
One man lay on his back, kicking and thrashing as he screamed. His hands pawed at his chest, where blood bubbled and spurted between his fingers from a wound. Preacher figured the first shot had downed that gent.
He couldn’t tell who had fired the second shot or what the result of it had been, because the other two men were rolling around on the ground on the other side of the fire. The red light from the flames glittered on the knives they held. Each man was trying to bury his blade in the other’s body, and as Preacher entered the clearing, one of them succeeded. He managed to get on top and drive his knife down into the chest of the other man, who howled in pain as the steel penetrated his body. He jerked and shuddered and then went limp. Preacher could tell from the knife’s location that it had pierced the man’s heart.
Just then the man on the other side of the fire gave a gurgling gasp and fell silent. Preacher figured that one was dead, too.
That left only the one fella, who left his knife in the body of the man he had just killed and staggered to his feet. He didn’t seem to realize at first that Preacher was there, but then Dog let out a low, rumbling growl and the man stiffened. He turned slowly, his eyes widening in horror as he realized who was standing there.
“You didn’t figure I’d let you get away with it, did you?” Preacher asked.
The man started to back up. He was tall and slender, but had a potbelly. His hat had come off during the struggle, revealing a mostly bald head. His mouth worked, but no sound came out for a moment. Then he managed to say, “You…you can’t be here. You’re dead. You’re dead!”
“Not hardly,” Preacher said.
The man had blood on his shirt. Preacher figured he’d been nicked by that second shot, which must have been fired by the man who now had the knife in his chest. Even though Preacher hadn’t seen it, he had a pretty idea how the fight had played out. This fella and the one on the other side of the fire had argued over the jug, which lay broken near the flames. The survivor had whipped out a pistol and shot the man he was arguing with. Then the third varmint had shot this one, who wasn’t wounded badly enough to stop him from pulling a knife and going after that third man…
Preacher had seen men kill each other in equally senseless arguments during rendezvous. The apparently limitless capacity of human beings to do stupid things had long since ceased to surprise him.
He stalked forward as the man began to back away. The man raised a trembling hand and held it out in front of him as if to ward off Preacher’s inexorable advance.
“Go away!” he cried. “You’re supposed to be dead!”
Preacher had never seen the man before. The two who had already died here were strangers to him as well, just like the day before.
“Why’d you try to kill me?” Preacher demanded. Beside him, the big cur growled, and Preacher added, “Talk or I’ll turn Dog loose on you.”
He had seen the primitive fear in the man’s eyes, and knew that the bastard was probably more afraid of Dog than he was of him. That was all right with Preacher. He just wanted to know why it was suddenly open season on him and didn’t care what loosened the man’s tongue.
“I…I swear, Preacher,” the man stammered. “I got nothin’ against you. I just wanted—”
What he wanted would remain a mystery forever, because at that moment a crimson flood welled from his mouth and washed down over his chest. He swayed back and forth for a second, made a strangling noise, and then pitched forward on his face. Blood began to pool around his head.
“Well, son of a bitch,” Preacher said. The man had been hit worse than he’d thought. The pistol ball must have done a lot of damage inside him, but the man’s anger had allowed him to ignore it long enough for him to kill the fella who had shot him. It had caught up to him in the end, though.
And Preacher was still no closer to finding out who wanted him dead, and why, than he had been when he took up the trail earlier in the day.
About five miles to the north, an even larger campfire burned. Twenty men were gathered around it. Four more were posted around the camp, standing guard.
The man who led this group had just enough experience on the frontier to know that such a fire might attract the attention
