Preacher's Assault

CHAPTER 8

Preacher and Bartlett put on extra guard shifts for the night. The ground was too muddy to sleep on comfortably, so after their cold supper, the men who didn’t have sentry duty climbed into the wagons and tried to find enough room to stretch out. That wasn’t easy, especially for someone like Preacher with his long legs.

He managed to doze off on top of some crates, but his slumber was restless. After a while, he sat up, pulled on his boots, and climbed out of the wagon. The night was quiet and peaceful. The air had cooled off a little, and there was a breeze out of the north. It wasn’t as sticky, which boded well for the ground drying out some the next day.

Something nuzzled his hand. He looked down and saw that Dog had crawled out from under the wagon. The big cur was covered with mud. He had romped in it for an hour around dusk, deciding it was all right after all.

“You’re a mess, you know that?” Preacher said with a grin as he gave Dog’s ears an affectionate scratch. “You—”

He stopped short as Dog suddenly stiffened, growled, and pressed against his leg. The animal’s ears pricked up, and he lifted his head as he pointed his muzzle toward the north.

“Whatever that damned thing is, it’s out there again, ain’t it?” Preacher asked softly.

As if in answer, Dog growled again.

“I’ve had enough of this,” Preacher muttered to himself. Earlier, he had seen Leeman Bartlett climbing into one of the wagons to try to get some sleep. With Dog at his heels, he stalked over to that wagon and pulled the canvas back. “Bartlett!”

“What? Wh-what?” Sputtering a little, Bartlett raised up and stuck his head out through the opening. “What’s wrong, Preacher?”

“You have any newspapers or anything like that?”

“Why, as a matter of fact, I brought along a stack of Philadelphia papers. I thought the American settlers in Santa Fe might like to see them.”

“Gimme one of them,” Preacher snapped.

Bartlett hesitated, and Preacher knew the man intended to sell the papers in Santa Fe, not share them for free. But after a couple of seconds, Bartlett said, “Very well. Just a moment.”

After a minute of rustling around inside the wagon, Bartlett climbed out and handed Preacher a newspaper. He was wearing high-topped boots and a nightshirt, which gave him a rather ludicrous appearance. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Is there a problem?”

“Somethin’s been followin’ us,” Preacher replied, “and I’m sick and tired of it. I’m gonna find out what it is.”

He handed Bartlett his rifle, then took several sheets of the newspaper and twisted them into a makeshift torch. Getting out flint and steel, he struck sparks until he managed to catch the paper on fire.

Then he pulled one of the pistols from behind his belt, cocked it, and strode away from the wagons, thrusting the burning paper in front of him.

“Damn it, whoever you are, show yourself!” he bellowed.

Behind him, men began to crawl out of the wagons, awakened by the shout, and they called questions to each other as they wondered what was going on.

Preacher turned his head and barked a command. “Stay close to the wagons!”

He strode forward again, moving the burning paper from side to side. The torch wouldn’t last long, only a few more seconds, before it burned down close enough to his fingers to make him drop it.

Suddenly he saw something glow up ahead of him. Two somethings, actually, like a pair of embers in the remains of a campfire. The way the two glows were set, he knew they were eyes.

What they belonged to was another question. As Preacher thrust his pistol out in front of him, the eyes abruptly rose higher and higher and then just as abruptly disappeared. At the same time, the flames singed Preacher’s fingers and he had to drop the burning paper. It sizzled out instantly as it hit the mud.

Preacher wanted to pull the trigger, but he had never shot a gun without knowing what he was shooting at, and he didn’t want to start. He held his fire with his finger still taut on the trigger, ready to squeeze it.

He heard a few small sucking sounds. The mud tugging at the feet of whatever was out there, he thought. The thing was leaving.

But it would be back, Preacher told himself. It had been dogging their trail for several days, and he didn’t think it would stop just because he had yelled at it.

He didn’t think their stalker was human. A man would have shown himself already. Judging by the glimpse Preacher had gotten of the thing during the storm, it was too big to be a man. That meant it had to be some sort of animal, but if that were true, it had a keener intelligence than most animals, or else it would have forgotten about the wagons and wandered off by now.

Preacher stayed where he was with the pistol pointing out into the darkness until his instincts told him the thing was gone. He didn’t tuck the weapon away when he finally started back toward the wagons. In fact, he drew the other pistol and held it ready as well, just in case something came at him out of the shadows.

Nothing did. By the time he got back to the wagons, the entire camp was awake and waiting to find out what was going on. Casey, with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, came up to him and asked, “What was out there, Preacher?”

The mountain man shook his head. “I don’t know. Some sort of animal. I saw its eyes glowing in the light, but only for a second. Then it turned around and left.”

Roland Bartlett was standing beside Casey. He said, “Well, then, if it was just an animal, we don’t have to worry about it, do we?”

“I didn’t say that,” Preacher replied. “Whatever that thing is, it’s pretty big, and it’s smart, too. It’d be a good idea to keep our eyes open. But then, that’s always a good idea out here.”

The men began to head back to their wagons to get some more sleep. Casey came over to Preacher and laid a hand on his arm. “Do you really think we’re in any danger from this thing?” she asked.

Preacher smiled, but the expression didn’t hold any real humor. “We’ve been in danger from one thing or another ever since we left St. Louis,” he told her. “And if you recollect, it was a mite perilous back there, too!”

By morning, the trail was still pretty muddy, but the big puddles of standing water were beginning to dry up. The sky was mostly clear, the cool breeze from the north was still blowing, and Preacher thought maybe the trail would be dry enough by midday for the wagons to pull out.

He told Leeman Bartlett they would remain where they were for the time being, then saddled Horse and rode out to the area where he had seen the glowing eyes the night before. Dog trotted alongside him. Since the rain had stopped before Preacher went out and challenged the thing, he thought he might be able to find its tracks.

Sure enough, the marks were on the ground, leading off to the northwest. But the mud had been soft enough at the time the tracks were left that it had flowed back into them, blurring and obscuring any details. Even though Preacher dismounted and studied the tracks closely, he couldn’t tell what sort of animal had made them.

He could follow them, though, and he did so, swinging back up in the saddle. Dog ranged ahead of him as he rode northwest.

The wagons fell out of sight behind him. Preacher was a little worried about Garity and the other hard-looking men who had ridden past, but he didn’t expect them to double back and attack the wagons. They had struck him as men who wouldn’t risk anything unless the odds were on their side.

Eventually, the tracks led to a rain-swollen creek and vanished into the fast-moving water. The creature must have plunged right in, demonstrating a complete lack of fear where the flooded creek was concerned. As Preacher reined in and sat on the bank, frowning at the rushing stream, he wondered what sort of varmint would do a thing like that.

He wasn’t going to try to swim Horse across the creek. It would be too easy for both man and horse to be swept away. He turned the gray stallion and called, “Come on, Dog,” to the big cur. They headed back toward the wagons, which were several miles away.

Preacher had covered about half that distance when a series of faint popping sounds came to his ears. He stiffened in the saddle for a second as he immediately recognized the sounds for what they were.

Gunfire.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered as he leaned forward and dug his heels harder into Horse’s flanks. The animal responded by leaping into a gallop.

Preacher couldn’t hear the shots anymore over the pounding of Horse’s hooves. Maybe the situation wasn’t as bad as he thought it was, he told himself.

But he couldn’t convince himself of that, and sure enough, when he came in sight of the wagons, he saw a number of men on horseback riding back and forth, firing rifles toward them. Since the wagons weren’t pulled into a circle, the traditional defensive formation, the bullwhackers and the other men had been forced to take cover underneath the vehicles. As Preacher raced closer, he saw puffs of powdersmoke coming from under the wagons and knew Bartlett’s men were putting up a fight.

Preacher figured Garity and the men who had ridden by the day before had joined up with some others and come back to attack the freight caravan.

He was coming at them from behind, so they didn’t seem to know he was there. When he was within rifle range, he reined Horse to a halt and was out of the saddle even before the stallion stopped moving. He pulled the long-barreled flintlock rifle from the fringed sheath strapped to the saddle and rested it across Horse’s back.

Preacher eased the rifle’s hammer back and lined the sights on one of the attackers. He would be shooting the man in the back, which he didn’t like, but since the varmint was trying to kill folks Preacher had befriended, the mountain man figured he had it coming. Preacher took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger.

The black powder went off with a dull boom as the rifle kicked back hard against Preacher’s shoulder. The cloud of smoke that poured from the muzzle obscured his vision for a second, but as it cleared, he saw the man he had targeted was on the ground, kicking out his life spasmodically. The heavy lead ball had slammed into his back and driven him right out of the saddle.

Preacher didn’t try to reload the rifle. The other attackers would have noticed that one of their number had been shot down from behind. As some of them wheeled their horses around to search for the source of the new threat, Preacher jammed the rifle back in its sheath and vaulted into the saddle. He sent the stallion lunging forward again and put the reins in his teeth, guiding Horse with his knees. Preacher pulled both pistols from behind his belt.

The guns were double-shotted and carried a larger than usual charge of powder, which made them mighty lethal, but he had to get closer to use them. He was relying on Horse’s speed and elusiveness for that. As the attackers who had turned toward Preacher opened fire, the big animal swerved from side to side, responding swiftly and surely to the pressure of the mountain man’s knees on his flanks.

Preacher felt as much as heard the hum of a rifle ball passing closely by his head. The sensation was nothing new to him, so he didn’t let it spook him. Instead he kept riding, drawing ever nearer to the attackers. Soon he was close enough to recognize some of them, and just as he’d expected, the man called Garity was among them. Preacher saw clearly the man’s beard and rawboned shape.

He was also close enough to use the pistols, and as Garity tried to draw a bead on him with a rifle, Preacher whipped up his right-hand gun and fired.

The two balls spread out as they flew through the air. One of them missed Garity entirely, but the other tore through his left arm. The impact of the shot made him drop his rifle and slew around in the saddle. He had to grab his horse’s mane to keep from falling.

Preacher heard Garity yell in a hoarse voice, “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

The men turned their horses and jabbed in their boot heels. The animals took off at a run, headed west along the trail.

Preacher started to fire his second pistol after them, but he let go of the trigger before the weapon went off. The chances of him hitting any of them were slim, and he wanted to have a loaded gun handy if they happened to turn around and try another attack.

It didn’t look like that was going to be the case. The raiders showed no signs of slowing down as they gave up their attack and galloped off along the Santa Fe Trail.

Preacher rode straight to the wagons. Bartlett, Roland, Casey, and Lorenzo crawled out from under a couple vehicles and hurried to meet him. Their clothes were smeared with mud, but he didn’t see any bloodstains on them.

A wave of relief went through him as he realized the young woman and the elderly black man hadn’t been hurt. In the time he had known them, he had grown quite fond of them both.

That was true the other way around, too. Casey asked anxiously, “Preacher, are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he told her as he dismounted. “They threw a little lead at me, but none of it came close.”

Bartlett said, “It was that man Garity and his friends, the ones who were here yesterday! I got a good look at the scoundrels.”

“Yeah, it was them, all right,” Preacher said, “and a dozen other polecats to boot. Garity’s bunch must’ve been plannin’ on meetin’ up with those other fellas, and when they did, he told them about these freight wagons.”

“Were they always planning to rob us?” Roland asked.

Preacher shrugged. “No tellin’. They may have been on their way to the mountains to do some trappin’ just like Garity said, and decided to take advantage of the opportunity fate put in their way. Or they could’ve been highwaymen all along.”

“Well, the important thing is that we defeated them and sent them packing,” Bartlett said.

Preacher shook his head. “No, the important thing, the thing we got to remember, is that they’re still out there. Only one man got hisself killed.” Preacher jerked his head toward the corpse that lay on the ground about a hundred yards away. The man’s horse had deserted him, following the other horses when the rest of the bunch galloped away. “And at least one of them is wounded,” Preacher went on, “maybe more, but really, we didn’t do all that much damage to them.”

“Then you think they’ll come back?” Roland asked with a frown.

“They don’t have to,” Preacher said. He pointed west along the trail. “They’re between you and the place where you’re headed. All they’ve got to do is wait for you to come to them.”