Moonshine Massacre

Chapter 2

The eerie cry made some of the bushwhackers let out surprised yells. Getting ready to charge Preacher must have drawn their nerves pretty tight, and that shriek startled them into pulling triggers. Shots blasted through the woods, but the wail continued. It didn’t even sound human.

Bullets whipped through the branches and thudded into tree trunks, but none of them came close to Preacher. He spotted a muzzle flash off to his right and reacted instantly, angling the Dragoon that direction and dropping the hammer. The heavy revolver roared and smoke and flame erupted from its muzzle. Somewhere in the woods, a man screamed. Preacher didn’t know if his shot had found its target, or if whatever was making that unholy noise had gotten hold of the man.

With his back against the tree to brace himself, Preacher pushed to his feet. He didn’t know exactly what was going on, but there was still a good chance he would die here today. If that turned out to be true, he planned to go out standing on his own two feet with shooting irons in his hands.

“What the hell is that?” a man shouted. There was a great thrashing in the brush. “Look ou—yahhhhh!”

The howl of pain just made the bushwhackers shoot even more. A grim smile tugged at Preacher’s mouth again. If they kept this up, they’d all ventilate each other and save him the trouble, he thought. That would be just fine with him.

The older voice he’d heard giving orders earlier bellowed, “Head for the horses! Let’s get the hell out of here!”

Preacher aimed at the voice and thumbed off two more rounds from the Dragoon. He figured the chances of him hitting anything in these thick woods were pretty slim, but it wouldn’t hurt anything to try. There were still so many guns going off, the bushwhackers likely wouldn’t even notice two more shots.

The gunfire died away, but Preacher could still hear men crashing through the brush. He let them go without sending any more lead after them. Blood still oozed from the holes in his side, and he was starting to get a little dizzy. Best to let those varmints take off for the tall and uncut right now, he decided.

Once he got his strength back, though, he might just try to track them down. He didn’t cotton to the idea of letting anybody get away with shooting him.

And there was also whatever kind of wild creature had made that sound, he reminded himself. He might have to deal with it, too.

The swift rataplan of hoofbeats drifted through the woods to his ears. The bushwhackers had reached their horses and were putting some ground behind them. As the hoofbeats faded into the distance until he could no longer hear them, silence settled once more over the valley.

Then Preacher heard a crackling in the brush. Something was coming toward him. Something big, from the sound of it.

He felt his legs weakening underneath him. His head spun, and each of the guns in his hands seemed to weigh a ton. It was all he could do to hold them up. When he felt himself slipping, he tried to stiffen his legs, but it didn’t work. He had lost too much blood, and his strength had leaked out of him along with the crimson fluid. Slowly, inexorably, he slid down the tree trunk until he was sitting on the ground at its base again.

The thing came closer, stepping around trees and pushing brush aside. A gray veil seemed to have slipped down over Preacher’s eyes, making it difficult for him to see. He could make out the massive, looming shape, but that was all. The Dragoons had sunk into his lap. His thumbs were still looped over the hammers, though. He struggled to lift the weapons. If he could just manage to raise the guns, when the thing stooped to reach out for him with its clawed, misshapen paws, he would blow a couple of fist-sized holes in it. Anything that big had to be a grizzly bear, his fevered brain decided…but he had never heard a griz make that kind of a noise.

He was wrong. The looming shape finally came to a stop directly in front of him, and as Preacher gazed up at it, his vision cleared enough for him to realize that it wasn’t a grizzly bear after all.

It was the biggest, ugliest Indian Preacher had ever laid eyes on.

That was the last thing Preacher saw as consciousness fled from him. He didn’t even feel it when his head fell back against the tree trunk with a solid thud.

The aromatic smell of woodsmoke filling his nostrils was the first thing Preacher recognized as awareness began to seep back into his brain. Then, not surprisingly, he heard the crackle of flames and felt warmth on his face. After a moment he figured out that he was lying on something soft, near a fire.

He kept his eyes closed and his breathing regular. Even though he had just come to, his instincts were already working again. Since he didn’t know where he was or what was going on around him, the smart thing to do was to not let on that he was awake.

He moved a hand slightly and felt something soft yet bristly. A thick fur robe of some sort, he decided. He sniffed the air and under the woodsmoke smelled bear grease and something else, a faintly musky scent.

A woman. She began to sing softly to herself, under her breath, confirming Preacher’s guess.

All these sensations were intimately familiar to him. He had spent many winters with various tribes, sharing a lodge or a tepee with a comely squaw. Sometimes when he visited those tribes again a few years later, he found young’uns trailing after those squaws who’d wintered with him. He never tried to be a pa to those kids, though. He’d always figured that a restless varmint like him who would probably come to a bad end didn’t have any business trying to act like a father. Might as well ask the wind to be a good parent. It wasn’t going to happen.

Now, Preacher thought about what he remembered from earlier and decided that that big, ugly Indian must have brought him back to a village rather than killing him. He kept his eyes closed and shifted his body a little. That told him that he had bandages wrapped tightly around his torso. His side felt stiff and hot where the rifle ball had torn through it, but whoever had tended to the wounds had probably packed each of them with a healing poultice. Preacher knew that with time and proper care, he would heal.

Of course, it was possible that the redskins were just trying to save his life so that they could kill him in their own way, in their own sweet time. He knew such things happened.

Maybe not here, though. Preacher hadn’t gotten a very good look at the beadwork and decorations on the big Indian’s buckskins, but he thought they might indicate that the man was a Crow. The Crow got along with white men about as well as any of the tribes did, and better than some. They didn’t hate everybody with a white skin, as the Blackfeet did, nor were they devoted to war like the Sioux. Preacher had always gotten along well with the Crow, and he hoped that the impression he’d gotten from that brief glimpse was correct.

The woman stopped singing. He heard her moving around, and then she was beside him. He felt the cool touch of a wet cloth on his skin as she wiped his face with it. He thought he might as well go ahead and take a chance.

He opened his eyes.

The woman drew back with a little gasp when she saw that he was awake. In her own tongue, she said, “He lives.”

“I do live,” Preacher replied in the same language, which he had recognized instantly as Crow. He was fluent in the lingo. “Thanks to you.”

The woman shook her head. She was young, probably no more than twenty summers, and had a round, pretty face, with dark eyes and hair as black as a raven’s wing, slick with bear grease, parted in the center and pulled into braids on each side of her head.

“You live because of Crazy Bear,” she told Preacher. “He is the one who brought you here.”

“You bound up my wounds?”

She nodded. “Yes, after packing them with moss and herbs that will heal them.”

“Then I owe you a debt of gratitude as well. How are you called?”

The woman hesitated, then said, “Bright Leaf.”

“Thank you, Bright Leaf. I am called Preacher.”

She leaned back again. Her breath hissed between her teeth. “Ghost-Killer,” she whispered. He saw fright in her big, dark eyes.

Preacher shook his head, wanting to reassure her even though the movement made his surroundings spin madly around him for a few seconds. “That is one of the names the Blackfeet know me by,” he said. “But I have never been an enemy to the Crow.”

Early in his career as a mountain man, he had mastered the art of slipping undetected into a village and cutting the throats of some of the warriors, then getting out again without anyone knowing he had been there until the bodies were discovered the next morning. That demoralized his enemies and made them regard him with the respect they would give a supernatural creature. Many of the tribes already thought he was special because the story had spread about how he had talked all day and all night to save himself from being burned at the stake. That incident had given him the name of Preacher.

Despite his words, Bright Leaf scooted away from him and then stood up, backing away around the fire ring in the center of the tepee. “I will go and tell Crazy Bear that you have returned to life,” she said. “Stay there. Rest.”

Preacher sighed. There wasn’t much else he could do except follow her orders, because right now he felt as weak as a newborn kitten. Even if he could make it to his feet, he doubted if he could walk across the tepee, let alone go outside and wander off.

“I will stay,” he told Bright Leaf.

She nodded, then bent over and pushed aside the flap of hide that covered the tepee’s entrance. Preacher was able to look outside for a second. He saw darkness, edged with the flickering glare of a fire. Night had fallen, and since it had been the middle of the afternoon when he was shot, that meant he had been unconscious for several hours, at the very least.

A tide of weariness washed over him. He lay there struggling to keep his eyes open. He knew that if he closed them, he would probably fall asleep. He wanted to stay awake until Crazy Bear got here, so he could talk to the man.

Luckily, Crazy Bear must have been close by, because only a couple of minutes passed before the hide flap was swept aside again, this time by a muscular arm as big around as the trunk of a small tree. The warrior who came into the tepee had to stoop low to make it through the entrance. When he straightened to his full height, he had to stand near the center of the tepee, otherwise his head would have poked against the sloping hide wall.

In the glow of the fire, he didn’t seem quite as ugly as he had in broad daylight. It softened the harsh planes and angles of his face, made the scars less noticeable, and the broken, crooked lump of a nose didn’t dominate his features quite as much. He still looked like the sort of figure that a mother might describe to her children and then threaten them with to get them to behave.

Bright Leaf came into the tepee behind the man and peeked timidly around his massive form at Preacher.

The Crow warrior regarded Preacher impassively for a moment and then said, “Bright Leaf tells me you are the one called Ghost-Killer.”

“This is true,” Preacher said, then continued, “But as I told her, the Crow are not my enemies.”

He could have been wrong, but he thought for a second that he saw a smile play over the man’s twisted lips.

“This is good. Our village will not have to fear you.”

“Nope,” Preacher agreed. “You got nothin’ to fear from me. I’m plumb friendly.”

The warrior hunkered on his heels beside the fire. “I am called Crazy Bear. I lead this band of my people.”

So he was a chief, Preacher thought. That wasn’t surprising, considering the elaborate decorations on his buckskins and the beads tied into the braids in which he wore his hair.

“Thank you for saving my life.”

“I did not save your life,” Crazy Bear said. “The Ghost-Killer cannot die.”

“You saw how much blood I lost, Crazy Bear. If you hadn’t helped me, I would have died. Believe me. But even before I could bleed to death, those men would have killed me. Thank you for stopping them.” Preacher paused. “I suppose it was you who made that terrible noise?”

This time the massive Indian definitely smiled. “You call the laugh of Crazy Bear terrible?” Then he folded his arms across his broad chest and shrugged. “There were six of the white men, and I was alone. I thought it best to make them afraid, in hopes that they would flee.”

“You were right about that. You got hold of at least one of them, didn’t you?”

“Two had broken arms when they fled.”

“You should’ve broken their necks,” Preacher muttered.

“We will kill them another day, eh, Ghost-Killer?” Crazy Bear extended his hand, white man fashion, as if to seal the agreement.

Preacher didn’t hesitate. He reached up, grasped the man’s hand, and said, “You got a deal, Crazy Bear. We’ll kill them another day.”