Preacher's Journey (7 page)

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Authors: William W. Johnstone

BOOK: Preacher's Journey
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ELEVEN
The afternoon passed as peacefully as the morning had. Preacher kept the group moving at as fast a pace as possible. He spent more time behind the wagons than he did in front of them today, since now he had not only the Arikara war party to worry about but also Mart Hawley as well. Preacher didn't believe Hawley would just let it go. Hawley would want vengeance for his partner.
Nobody suggested cards after supper that night, if there was even a deck anywhere amongst the party's belongings.
The sky had begun to clear late in the afternoon, and the winds were light. They were in for the coldest night yet, Preacher knew. There was no cave, no bluff, no cliff to shield them. They stopped beside a creek that had ice beginning to form along its edges. They had to build their fire out in the open, and the terrain was flat enough so that it could be seen for a long distance. Preacher didn't like it, but he had no choice in the matter. Without the fire, they would all be frozen by morning.
The temperature dropped as sharply as he expected. By morning the air was so cold it took the breath away and seemed to chill a man all way to his marrow. But at least no one had attacked them during the night. That was something to be grateful for, Preacher thought.
Everyone was sluggish and slow to get moving because of the cold, even the young'uns. Preacher hustled them up as best he could. They would feel better once their blood was pumping faster. Preacher boiled coffee, fried bacon, hitched up the mules, and said impatiently, “Let's go, let's go.”
Peter Galloway scowled in irritation as he cupped his gloved hands around a cup of hot coffee. “What's all the damned hurry?” he complained. “Everybody's cold. Give us a little time to get warmed up.”
“You'll warm up a whole heap faster if you're doin' something,” Preacher told him. “And you can bet if there are more o' them Arikara after us, they ain't loafin' around this mornin'. They'll be on the move already.”
“Do you think there are more hostiles pursuing us?” Jonathan asked.
“I sure wouldn't rule it out.”
Not only that, Preacher thought, but if the Arikara were back there, there was a good chance they would have seen the fire last night, and they could be closing in at this very moment.
“Dog, take a look around,” Preacher went on, and Dog trotted off to scout the area around the camp.
Geoffrey stared after the animal. “It's like he understood every word you said,” he commented to Preacher, sounding surprised.
“Well, I don't reckon he understood the words so much as he figured out what I wanted. We been together for quite a few years now, so we know each other pretty well.”
“Can you communicate with any other woodland animals?”
Preacher couldn't help but grin, even as worried as he was. “It ain't like I sit around havin' deep conversations with squirrels . . . although I've knowed a few fellas who didn't draw the line at talkin' to critters. But you can learn something from almost every creature that lives in the wild, if you just pay attention to 'em. They'll nearly always tell you when somebody's skulkin' around and is up to no good. Animals got a way o' sensin' that. You just got to learn how to look and listen right.”
Jonathan asked, “Could you teach us?”
Preacher frowned at him. “Teach you to be frontiersmen, you mean?”
“That's right,” Jonathan said with an eager nod. “If we're going to live out here, we need to learn how to get along properly in the wild.”
Preacher shrugged and said, “I reckon I could teach you a few things. Mostly, though, it's just a matter of payin' heed to what's goin' on around you.”
And the frontier was the best teacher of all, he added to himself. Only problem was, it was also a harsh teacher, and anyone who failed to learn its lessons usually wound up dead before very long. But those who survived learned a hell of a lot, that was for damned sure.
Dog came loping back a little later, and his attitude told Preacher that he hadn't found anything suspicious. If the Indians were out there—and Preacher's instincts still told him they were—they hadn't closed in yet.
The wagons finally got rolling, a good half hour after Preacher thought they should have. The sky was clear as a bell and achingly blue. The sun shone on the snow-covered ground and glittered on the snow and ice in the trees. The breath of men and mules and horses plumed in front of their faces. Preacher pointed the wagons toward a saddle of ground between two hills, and then dropped back a ways to look over the country behind them.
He had seen very little of Angela Galloway this morning, and he was glad of that. She was pretty and nice and he didn't need to be reminded of that. He made up his mind that when they got to Garvey's, he would move on and winter somewhere else. If he stayed around Angela for months, he would just get more uncomfortable. And although he was no expert when it came to women, he thought she was a mite interested in him too, and he didn't want her to have to feel the same vague guilt and unease that he was experiencing. Better for him to just go on his way and leave her to her husband and her kids, where she belonged.
The sun climbed higher, but didn't do much to warm the frigid landscape. Once, Preacher thought he saw a lone rider far behind them, but even with his keen eyesight, he couldn't be sure. Hawley, he thought, trailing them but not getting too close. Either the trapper had taken Preacher's warning to heart . . . or he was being cagey and biding his time before he tried to get his revenge. Either way he wasn't an immediate concern.
 
 
Mart Hawley was nervous. He didn't know if that was because of the cold, or the isolation, or something else that he couldn't pin down. He wasn't used to riding alone, and despite the anger he had felt toward Ed Watson, he wished the son of a bitch was still around. Ed hadn't been very bright, and except when he lost his temper he talked only a little more than a rock, but by Godfrey, he'd been better than nothing as far as companions went. Maybe not much, but still better.
Hawley asked himself if he really wanted to try to kill Preacher. The man had quite a reputation, despite his relative youth. He was mean as a he-coon and strong as a grizz, quick as a panther and sharp-eyed as an eagle, and he just flat out had not an ounce of back up in him. He was pure pizen. Was avenging Ed Watson's death really worth it?
Hawley shivered in his capote and his thick buffalo robe as his horse plodded along. He was following the tracks of the wagons because he didn't know what else to do. He'd spent a miserable night huddled by a tiny fire, convinced he was going to freeze to death before morning. Maybe if he waited another day or two and let Preacher and the others get over being mad at him, they would allow him to rejoin their party.
Or more than likely, Preacher would just shoot him out of the saddle as soon as he got within rifle range.
Hawley might have to take that chance. He wasn't convinced he could make it to Garvey's Fort on his own. And his resolve to kill Preacher was wavering a whole heap. Hawley knew that he had a streak of pure meanness inside him and wasn't afraid to admit that about himself. He would have enjoyed watching Preacher die, and if things had happened differently, if he had been able to seize the chance to do it, he would have gladly jumped on that Miz Galloway, with her pretty face and that hair the color of honey. He had raped women and girls before, although only Injuns, and one white whore back in St. Louis, and they didn't hardly count in his mind. But despite all that, he was a practical man, and he could put the urge for vengeance and all them other urges away for the time being, if it was a matter of either behaving himself or freezing and starving to death. Hell, just give him a chance, and he'd be as sweet and innocent as any angel.
Hawley was so lost in thought he didn't see the buckskin-clad figures until they seemed to rise up out of the very ground all around him. But as his horse whinnied in fear and shied away from them, he saw the dark, stony faces with their daubs of war paint and knew that no matter how you looked at it, he was in the worst fix of his life.
He had time to utter one heartfelt “Shit!” before the Injuns pulled him out of the saddle.
 
 
The cold didn't let up all day, but Preacher knew it was only a matter of time. Tonight or tomorrow, the wind would shift back around to the south and the icy grip of the storm would be broken. The snow would begin to melt. Of course, it might not be but a day or two before another cold snap blew through, but at least there would be a little respite.
“How many more days before we get out of the foothills?” Roger Galloway asked him that afternoon as Preacher rode for a while alongside Roger's wagon.
“We'll probably reach the plains day after tomorrow, or maybe the day after that,” Preacher said. “I never traveled through these parts with wagons before, so I ain't rightly sure how long it'll take.”
“You could move a lot faster if you were on your own, couldn't you? Helping us has really slowed you down.”
“Well, that's one thing about bein' a fella like me, who drifts around a lot. I ain't generally in a hurry to get where I'm goin'. One place is about the same as another, far as I'm concerned. As long as I ain't too crowded, I'm happy.”
“You don't like people very much, though.”
“I never said that. I like people just fine. Got lots of friends up here in these mountains, like ol' Jeb Law. I always enjoy goin' to Rendezvous and catchin' up with what ever'body's been doin'. But I don't have to have people around to be happy. I got a good horse and a good dog, and there's places I ain't been yet, and places I been but want to go back to. That's all it really takes for a man like me.”
Roger shook his head. “I envy you. You live a life of almost perfect freedom, with no one to tie you down or make a claim on you.”
And that need for freedom, Preacher thought, was what had always stood between him and Jennie and kept them from being together for more than a short time. Preacher had known even then that he could never settle down, and Jennie had deserved more than a man who was never home.
“You got a wife and a young'un and another on the way,” Preacher pointed out. “Some fellas would be en-vyin' you.”
“I suppose.” Roger glanced back over his shoulder into the wagon. Lowering his voice, he said, “I'm worried about Dorothy. She's sleeping now, but this has been a terrible ordeal for her. I . . . I can't help but hope that once the baby is born, things will be easier for her.”
Since Roger seemed to be in a talkative mood, Preacher indulged his curiosity and asked, “Why were you and your brother so all-fired anxious to get to Oregon that it couldn't wait until spring?”
“We just . . . We thought there would be time, I suppose. We knew we'd be cutting it close, but we thought that if we were lucky, we'd get there and have our choice of the land to settle. Do you know what's going on back East?”
“Not really,” Preacher said. “We don't get much news out here, and when we do, it ain't recent.”
“Interest in immigration and settling the West is growing rapidly. Next year you're liable to see wagon trains like you've never seen them before. There's speculation that thousands of families will start west. Within a year or two, there should be a well-marked, well-traveled trail all the way from Missouri to Oregon.”
The Indians wouldn't be too happy if that happened, Preacher thought, and neither would some of the fur trappers. “And you folks wanted to get a jump on that,” he said.
“That's right. I suppose that makes us greedy.”
Preacher shrugged. “I ain't in the business o' passin' judgment on anybody. I reckon you had your reasons, and they were good enough for you. You should've thought twice about it, though.”
“I know that now,” Roger said.
Preacher heeled the dun into a trot and moved out in front of the wagons. He wasn't sure he believed what Roger had told him. That story about getting to Oregon before the rush and claiming some prime land was probably true as far as it went, but Preacher sensed there was still something unsaid, some other reason why the Galloway brothers, their father, and their uncles had started west at the wrong time of year. Greed just wasn't a strong enough motive.
But fear might be.
Question was, what were they afraid of?
TWELVE
Mart Hawley had never been so scared in all his borned days.
At the same time, he was utterly astounded that he was still alive, but the fright overwhelmed him and kept him from being grateful that the Indians hadn't killed him yet.
The Arikara warriors had bound his hands and feet and tossed him back on his horse, only belly-down across the saddle so that he was sick as a dog by the time they finally stopped. They dumped him on the ground then, and he lay there in the snow retching his guts out, convinced that at any moment they would crush his skull with a war club or chop his head open with a tomahawk or drive a lance right through him and pin him to the ground or pincushion him with arrows. The terror just made him sicker, until there was nothing left inside him to come out. After that he had the dry heaves for a while.
Night had fallen by the time he realized they weren't going to kill him, at least not right away.
He lay huddled against a rock. Now that the fear had subsided a little, he was aware of the cold seeping into his bones. The Injuns hadn't made a fire. How could they survive in weather like this without a fire? It just went to prove what he had long suspected, that Injuns weren't really human like white folks. They were a whole different species. They didn't even seem to feel the cold. They just sat around gnawing on dried meat like animals.
Starlight glittered on the snow and provided enough illumination for Hawley to see one of the warriors stand up and walk toward him. This was it, he thought with a soft moan. The Injun was gonna kill him now.
Instead, the man hunkered on his heels in front of Hawley and spoke. His English was broken, but he supplemented it with sign talk, which was pretty much universal among the tribes. Hawley understood well enough to know what the Injun was getting at.
“You know . . . Preacher?”
“Preacher?” Hawley repeated as he goggled at the Indian. “You mean like a minister, or . . . or the man
called
Preacher?”
“You know Preacher?” the Indian asked again, and this time he sounded a mite impatient.
Hawley heard that and knew he couldn't afford to give the wrong answer. He nodded his head and said emphatically, “Yes, I know Preacher.”
“Preacher . . . friend?”
Hawley thought back desperately to everything that had been said while he and Watson were in camp with the immigrants. He recalled that they had had some Injun trouble, and Preacher and that damn wolf-dog of his had wiped out a whole scouting party by their lonesomes. If
those
Injuns had been part of the same bunch as
these
Injuns . . .
“No,” he said even more vehemently than before. “Preacher not friend.”
The Indian grunted. Hawley wasn't sure what that meant, but the fact that they still hadn't killed him had to be good.
“Hate Preacher,” Hawley went on. “Want to watch Preacher die.”
“You not friend to other white men?”
Hawley thought back again. Preacher had said that the Indians he'd killed were 'Rees. Hawley was no expert at telling the tribes apart, and besides, it was too dark to make out some of the details, but he thought he recognized the way these savages wore their hair.
“Hawley friend to Arikara,” he said, knowing that he was taking a big chance. If his captors weren't 'Rees, if they were some of that tribe's traditional enemies, then he had just signed and sealed his own death warrant.
After a moment, the big, ugly fella, who was probably the chief of this bunch, nodded. “You know where find Preacher and other white men?”
“I know right where they're goin',” Hawley answered without hesitation, seizing on this opportunity to maybe save his life. “I can take you right to 'em.”
“You help kill?”
“Just give me a chance. I'll scalp that sumbitch Preacher my own self, if you'll just take me with you.”
“We talk,” the Indian said. “Decide whether you live or die. Swift Arrow say you live.”
Hawley knew what that meant. He wasn't out of the woods yet. Swift Arrow, this redskin here, thought they ought to keep him around to help them catch up to the immigrants and take their vengeance on Preacher. But even if he was the chief as Hawley suspected, he would still have to talk the matter over with the others and get them to agree with him. He couldn't just decree that they weren't going to kill this captive.
But Hawley still felt so relieved he almost pissed himself. He wasn't going to die, he just knew it.
And even better, he was going to get to take his revenge on Preacher after all.
 
 
Preacher found a gully for them to camp in that night, a dry wash about ten feet deep and twenty yards across. The banks were caved in here and there, and one of those places allowed the wagons to get down into the wash. Preacher wouldn't have camped in such a location at a different time of year, because a big rainstorm could cause a flash flood that might wash them all away, but that wasn't going to happen now. They couldn't get out in a hurry either, because it would take time to work the wagons back up those caved-in banks, but he had to admit that they couldn't do
anything
in a hurry when dealing with wagons.
More importantly, the walls of the gully gave them some shelter from the wind and they could build a bigger fire without it being seen.
While Jonathan and Geoffrey unhitched the teams and tended to the mules, Preacher sought out Peter Galloway and said, “Let's you and me go get some wood.”
“Can't somebody else do that? I'm tired.”
“So's ever'body else,” Preacher pointed out, trying not to sound as irritated as he felt at Peter's attitude. “Your brother needs to spend the time with his wife, I reckon, and I don't know where your pa is.” Simon was hiding out in one of the wagons, dodging chores as usual, Preacher suspected. “And I sure ain't sendin' the young'uns out on their own.”
“All right, all right,” Peter said grudgingly. “Let me get my rifle, just in case any more savages show up.”
Preacher figured that was only a matter of time. The Arikara were still behind them somewhere. But he didn't think they were close yet.
A few minutes later, Preacher and Peter walked out of the gully and headed toward some nearby trees where they could probably find enough broken branches for the fire. Each man carried a rifle, and Preacher had a brace of pistols tucked behind his belt. Dog bounded ahead of them, always energetic. It was late in the day, with the sun only barely above the mountains to the west. Darkness would fall quickly.
“My wife talks about you all the time,” Peter said.
The blunt statement took Preacher a little by surprise. “What?”
“She's very impressed by you, Preacher.” There was a friendly tone in Peter's voice, but Preacher could tell it wasn't genuine. “She thinks you're quite a man.”
“I'm sure Miz Galloway's a fine woman.”
“And a fine-looking woman too, don't you think?”
“I ain't paid that much attention,” Preacher lied.
“Oh, surely you have. You're a man, after all. You couldn't help but notice an attractive woman.”
“I don't go around lookin' at other fellas' wives,” Preacher said stiffly.
Peter's voice took on a hard edge as he said, “Well, she looks at you. A great deal, in fact.”
Preacher shook his head. “I wouldn't know nothin' about that.”
“No, and you wouldn't even think about stealing a kiss from her, would you?”
Preacher stopped short and turned to look at Peter, saying curtly, “If you got somethin' you want to say, mister, best you go ahead and just spit it out.”
“All right, I will,” Peter said as he stopped and turned to glare at Preacher. “Stay away from my wife. Stop talking to her. And if you lay one hand on her, I swear I'll kill you.”
“You oughta be more careful who you go around threatenin' to kill. Folks tend to take that serious out here.”
“I'm completely serious,” Peter said. “Dead serious.”
Preacher's whole body was taut with anger. Peter Galloway put his teeth on edge under the best of circumstances. The way the man was acting now just made it worse.
But in the back of his mind, Preacher was all too aware of how he had reacted to Angela Galloway, and the way she had reacted to him. No matter how much Preacher disliked the fella, Peter was just acting as any normal man would who thought his marriage was threatened. With an effort, Preacher reined in his temper and said, “You ain't got anything to worry about, Galloway. I ain't got no designs on your wife, and I reckon a fine lady like her could never be interested in a scruffy ol' mossback like me.”
“You're not old. Hell, you're not much more than thirty, are you?”
“It ain't the years,” Preacher said with a faint smile. “It's the miles.”
For a long moment, Peter still glared at him, and there was a tense silence between the two men. Then Peter nodded and said, “All right, I'll take your word that there's nothing going on. But remember what I said about staying away from Angela.”
Preacher couldn't resist commenting in return. “You pay her enough attention and you won't have to worry about such things.”
For a second he thought that was going to start the argument all over again, but then Peter nodded a second time and stalked toward the woods without looking back at him. Preacher followed, shaking his head. As far as he was concerned, they had just wasted several minutes of the daylight that was left.
“Slow down a mite,” Preacher warned as they neared the trees. “It ain't smart to go chargin' in some place when you don't know what might be hidin' there.”
“You mean there might be Indians in there?”
“Or a bear. Old Ephraim and most of his kin are hiber-natin' at this time of year, but there could still be a few roamin' around, lookin' to fill their bellies 'fore they go to sleep for the winter.”
“Who the hell is Old Ephraim?”
“That's what some fellas call any grizzly bear, I reckon because somebody once saw a grizz and thought it looked like somebody he knew named Ephraim.”
“I don't want to run into a bear,” Peter said, casting a wary glance toward the trees.
“Could be panthers or wolves too.”
“My God! Is there something lying in wait to kill you every time you turn around out here?”
“Now you're startin' to understand,” Preacher said solemnly.
A minute later, after Dog had run into the woods and then back out again, Preacher went on. “It's safe enough, else we would'a heard Dog carryin' on in there. Gather up the biggest armload of wood you can carry, and let's get back to camp quick as we can.”
They went to work, picking up broken branches that had fallen on the ground. Preacher tucked his Hawken under his arm and gathered up a sizable load of firewood. Peter followed his example, and after a few minutes, they were ready to start back.
They had covered only about half the distance to the gully when in the fading light Preacher saw someone emerge from the wash and start toward them at a run. The figure was too small to be any of the men, and after a second, Preacher realized it was the oldest boy Nate, the son of Roger and Dorothy.
Peter recognized him at the same moment. “That's Nate!” he exclaimed. “Something must be wrong!”
Preacher thought the same thing. He had given the children strict orders to stay near the wagons and never to venture off by themselves. Something important must have happened to make Nate disobey that command. They hurried forward as Nate continued running toward them, kicking up snow from his heels.
“Preacher!” he called. “Uncle Peter! Come quick!”
“What is it, Nate?” Preacher asked sharply as the youngster pounded up to them.
“It's my ma,” Nate replied breathlessly. “She's about to have that darned baby, and Aunt Angela says it's really gonna be born this time, come hell or high water!”

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