rifle, he lunged to his feet and swung around, earing the hammer back to full cock. Preacher scrambled up, too, and saw the barrel swinging relentlessly toward him.
The survival instinct took over then. Preacher still gripped the tomahawk in his left hand, but he was almost as deadly with his left hand as he was with his right. His arm swept up and back and then flashed forward.
The ’hawk spun across the space between the two men with blinding speed and landed with a meaty thunk! just as the man pulled the trigger. The flintlock roared, but its owner was already going over backward, his skull split open by the tomahawk that had landed with terrific force in the middle of his forehead. He fell on his back and lay there twitching as blood and brains oozed out around the blade.
“Well, hell!” Preacher said with heartfelt disgust. The man wouldn’t be answering any questions now.
And Preacher still had no earthly idea why the two varmints wanted him dead.
Chapter 2
The settlement had no name. It wasn’t even much of a settlement, at least so far. And it would be just fine with Preacher if it stayed that way.
First had come the trading post established by a pair of cousins, Corliss and Jerome Hart, who had been brought here to this beautiful valley in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains by Preacher. They’d had some mishaps and adventures along the way, but things had finally settled down once they got here. Corliss and his wife Deborah had even unofficially adopted the boy Jake, who had run away from his brute of a father in St. Louis and come along on the wagon train journey that had ended here.
Another wagon train had followed close behind, bringing with it a handful of settlers—and customers for the trading post, which was doing a brisk business even before the building that housed it was completed.
Word of the trading post and tiny settlement had spread among the fur trappers and traders who made their living from the beavers and other animals in the mountains. There had been other trading posts out here far beyond the normal reach of civilization—one in almost the same spot as the Hart cousins’ venture, in fact, some twenty years earlier, not long after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark returned from their epic journey to explore the Louisiana Purchase.
None of those posts had lasted for more than a few years, though. Savage Indians, brutal weather, disease…something had always happened to either wipe out the businesses or send their owners fleeing back to civilization.
Corliss and Jerome Hart swore that their trading post would be different. They would stick it out, they said, come hell or high water. The fact that Preacher had befriended them during their journey West gave their claims some credence. Everybody west of the Mississippi and north of the Rio Grande knew Preacher, knew the sort of man he was.
So the trappers came to the post, and so did the traders. Some of them had Indian wives, and they built a handful of cabins near the post, sturdy log cabins that reminded them of the homes they had left behind back East.
Of course, not all the men wanted to be reminded of such things. Some of them had come West to get away from unpleasantness back East. But the little no-name settlement grew anyway. A few of the trappers even went back to St. Louis and brought out their real wives, the ones they had married in a church or a judge’s chambers instead of the ones they just shared buffalo robes with in lodges made of hides.
There had been a minister with that first wagon train, and as time went by more missionaries showed up. Not black-robed Jesuits like the ones who had been some of the first white men to penetrate the vast Canadian wilderness and on across the border into the northern reaches of the United States. No, these missionaries were Baptists, and they brought their wives and even their children with them. Within a year, nigh on to a hundred people lived within rifle shot of the Harts’ trading post.
It made Preacher’s skin crawl to think about it. Having so many people around in St. Louis was bad enough, but he could handle it because he made the trip down the Missouri River only once or twice a year. But he visited the trading post more often than that, and whenever he did he felt cramped, like he didn’t have any elbow room, and it seemed like there were too many folks breathing the mountain air. They might use it up, he worried, although that seemed unlikely when he looked at the vast blue arch of the sky above the mountains.
He could see the trading post and the settlement far below him as he rode through South Pass. The big, sure-footed horse he had named Horse—Preacher was nothing if not a practical man—picked its way down the trail with ease. The shaggy, wolflike cur Preacher had dubbed Dog bounded ahead.
Preacher was leading three horses: his own packhorse, which carried his supplies and the load of pelts he had taken since his last visit to the trading post, and the two that belonged to the pair of dead bushwhackers. He had found the animals tied to a tree not far from the spot where the men had ambushed him, but there had been nothing in their belongings to tell him who they were or why they had tried to kill him.
The would-be killers were lashed facedown over their saddles. Preacher had thought seriously about leaving their carcasses for the wolves. He had even considered burying them. But in the end, he had decided to bring them with him since he was less than a day’s ride from the trading post and the dry, cool, high country air helped keep dead varmints from rottin’ too fast.
He wanted to see if anybody at the settlement recognized them.
It took him almost an hour to make his way down from the pass to the broad, grassy park where the trading post was located. Folks had seen him coming. Dogs barked and kids ran out to meet him. Most of the youngsters were ’breeds, the children of trappers and their Indian mates, but some belonged to families that had come out here from St. Louis and other places in the East, looking for a place to call their own.
A stocky, round-faced boy of eleven or twelve grinned at him and called, “Hey, Preacher! What you got there?”
“Couple o’ skunks in human form, Jake,” Preacher answered the boy as he reined to a stop. “Ever seen either one of ’em before?”
Some folks would’ve tried to keep the boy away and not expose him to the sight of the dead bodies, but Preacher figured anybody who was going to live in these mountains had to be tough enough to handle such things. Death was a fact of life, and it didn’t do any good to coddle young’uns and try to hide that fact from them.
Jake wasn’t bothered by it. He’d been through hard times already despite his young age. He grasped the hair on one of the dangling heads and lifted it so he could see the man’s face. After a moment, Jake let go and the head flopped down again.
“Nope,” Jake said. “He’s a plumb stranger to me, Preacher. Lemme look at the other one.”
Jake studied the face of the second corpse with the same result. Other kids crowded around him while he was holding the man’s head up, and Preacher asked the same question of them, only to have all of them shake their heads in the negative. It was beginning to appear that the two bushwhackers hadn’t visited the settlement before coming after Preacher.
He hadn’t asked any of the grown-ups yet, though, so he hitched Horse into motion again and rode toward the big log building that was the center of the community.
Corliss and Jerome Hart’s trading post was solidly built, with thick walls that had been notched out here and there to create plenty of rifle slots. In addition, a stockade fence made of vertical logs with sharpened tops had been erected around the place, with watchtowers at the corners and a parapet that ran inside
