stumbled into Pete’s view, which was blurry now because his spectacles had fallen off. Pete could still see well enough to know that Manning was clutching himself where he’d been kicked, and Pete felt a little bit of satisfaction from that, anyway.
Manning went on in a pain-wracked voice, “Let me … work on him. He’ll tell us … what we want to know.”
“Yeah,” Deaver said. “That’s a good idea. Let’s cut these trousers off of him.”
Pete started to bellow in outrage even before he felt the touch of the cold steel. Once he did, the bellows turned to shrieks of pain.
And in the end, of course, he told them how the mountain man and his companions had talked about spending the winter in the Assiniboine village. Deaver and Manning believed him this time. After being tortured like that, no man could have uttered anything except the truth.
Pete knew there was no hope for him now. He was hurt too badly to recover. But he managed to husk out, “Go ahead … and kill me.”
Deaver shook his head and grinned.
“I don’t think so. That’d be too easy. There are some knives over there in a case, Caleb. Get a couple of them and we’ll stake him out.”
They spread his arms, and Manning drove a knife through the palm of each hand, then used a maul to hammer the blades even more deeply into the floor.
“What about his feet?”
Deaver shook his head.
“He ain’t goin’ anywhere, just like that.” He jerked a thumb at the rooms in the back. “Go check those out and make sure nobody else is back there. We’re not leavin’ anybody alive except for the Dutchman here, and he won’t be alive for very long once we burn this place down around him.”
Pete groaned. Bad enough they were going to kill him, but did they have to destroy the business he had worked so hard to build, too?
Clearly, nothing was beyond the viciousness of animals such as these.
A moment later, through the red haze that was beginning to fill his head, Pete heard a pistol shot. He knew that Manning had just murdered that other fur trapper. Now no one would ever know what had happened here or who was responsible for this atrocity.
“I threw around some coal oil,” he heard Deaver say. “Get that candle. We’ll light it and get out of here.”
A moment later, Pete heard the whoosh of flames and felt their heat against his face. In a matter of seconds, they were all around him, rapidly turning into an inferno.
The roaring blaze behind them turned the night sky an ugly, garish shade of orange as Deaver, Manning, and the other three men rode away from the trading post. Manning shifted uncomfortably in his saddle, and Deaver asked, “Feelin’ any better?”
“Not much. That old man deserved everything he got.”
“Yeah, but at least he told us where to find Preacher.”
Manning hesitated, then said, “We don’t have time to go after him right now, Willie. You know that. We’ve got to rendezvous with those other fellas. I was willin’ to come back here tonight, but—”
“Don’t worry,” Deaver broke in impatiently. “I haven’t forgotten about that business we have to take care of. But Pete said Preacher was plannin’ to winter with Bent Leg’s bunch of redskins. And our business won’t take us all winter. There’ll be plenty of time later on to teach that son of a bitch and his friends a lesson they’ll never forget.”
“All right,” Manning said with a grin and a nod. “I like the sound of that.”
They rode on as the flames leaped high behind them, consuming Blind Pete’s Place and everything in it.
Yes, sir, Deaver thought, it was going to be a long winter.
Especially for Preacher.
CHAPTER 4
A storm roared down out of Canada a few days later, bringing with it a biting wind and hard pellets of sleet that pelted down, making life miserable for man and horse alike.
Because of that, Preacher considered them lucky to have found a cave where they could get out of the weather. It was empty, so they didn’t have to share it with a hibernating grizzly bear.
People had used the chamber in the side of a rocky hillside for shelter in the past. That was obvious because of the charred ring on the floor where campfires had been built. The ceiling of the cave had a crack in it that ran all the way to the surface of the hill to carry away smoke. Nighthawk built a fire, and the heat from the flames, along with that put out by the horses, warmed the cave so that it was quite comfortable.
“Have you ever been here before, Preacher?” Audie asked as the four men sat around the fire that first night.
“Not that I recollect,” the mountain man answered. “I recall ridin’ through this valley before, but I must not’ve stopped and looked around any. How about you?”
Audie shook his head and said, “No, it’s all new to me as well.”
Nighthawk said, “Umm.”
Audie turned to him.
“What’s that you say? You’ve been here before? Eight winters ago?”
“Umm.”
Lorenzo frowned and asked Preacher, “How’s he do that? I never heard that Injun do nothin’ except make that sound like he’s tryin’ to pass somethin’ that hurts.”
“They got their own way of communicatin’, I reckon,” Preacher said.
“Yes, I agree that it’s a fine place,” Audie went on. “We should be able to wait here until the storm blows over.” He turned to Lorenzo. “Why don’t you tell us how you and Preacher came to meet, my friend?”
“It’s a long story,” Lorenzo said, “and it ain’t a particularly pretty one.”
Audie smiled and spread his hands.
“Until the weather gods smile upon us again, we have nothing but time.”
“Well, I reckon that’s true enough.” Lorenzo looked at Preacher. “You mind if I tell the story?”
Preacher waved a hand.
“Like Audie says, we got nothin’ but time.”
“Well, it was back in St. Louis, you see,” Lorenzo began, “and I was workin’ for a fella who was nothin’ but a lowdown, dyed-in-the-wool varmint.”
“You were his slave?” Audie asked.
“No, sir. I’m a freed man. But Mr. Shad Beaumont, he was as bad or worse than any plantation owner who might’ve put me to work pickin’ cotton.”
Lorenzo continued with the story of how
