“I don’t know, and that’s the God’s truth. Somewheres along the river is all I know. Them Frenchies with Bedell said they knowed a place.”
Preacher stared at the man for a moment. “When did you join up with Bedell?”
“I didn’t leave out from Missouri with him, if that’s what you mean. And I didn’t have nothin’ to do with the ambushin’ of the train and the usin’ of the women. I ride the dark trails, I’ll admit that. But I ain’t no rapist.”
“But I only got your word for that.”
“That’s true. But I got me a tintype of my mother in my purse. How many outlaws you know would do that?”
Preacher grunted. “You got you two pistols outside your coat. How many you got inside your coat?”
“None.”
Preacher leveled the Hawken, the muzzle straight at the man’s belly. “If you’re lyin’, you’re dead. Drop them pistols on the ground and open your coat.”
The man did exactly as he was told. He was carrying no other weapon save a knife on his belt.
“Dress out that deer and fix us something to eat,” Preacher told him, sitting down on a large rock. “You cook me a nice meal and I might just go on and leave you be. I’m a man who ’ppreciates good food.”
“I’ll fix you a feast!”
“You better.”
He did. After Preacher had eaten enough for two men, he belched and wiped his hands on his buckskins. “You missed your callin’, man. You ought to open you a eatin’ place.”
“You let me go, and I will. I’ll swear on the Bible and my mother’s picture.”
Preacher thought about that for a moment. “You pack your gear and get gone from here. Take the south trail out of the Hole. They’s a tradin’ post south and some east of here. On the Green. If the Injuns ain’t burned it down, that is. Follow the Green on down and you’ll find the trail back east. West is the cutoff, east is back home. Go back home. Don’t never let me see you west of the Mississippi again.”
“You’re lettin’ me go?”
“Git!”
Fifteen minutes later the man was gone. Preacher had let him take his rifle, his pistols, and a bait of grub.
Preacher followed the man for a-ways, and then brought his horses in close and cleaned out the lean-to, laying down fresh boughs for his bed. Then he set about jerking some of the venison. He fixed another steak for his supper, hung the meat up high, away from his camp, so’s the bears couldn’t get at it, and lay down to rest, his rifle and pistols at hand just in case the man he’d cut loose had a change of heart. He rested well that night and awakened fresh and ready to go.
A light snow had dusted the Hole during the night, but Preacher knew it would be gone by midmorning. The sky was blue and nearly cloudless and the sun was bright. He had him another venison steak for his breakfast and stowed his smoked meat, leaving the deer carcass for the animals. They had to eat too. He pulled out, taking the west trail, following Cottonwood Creek up to Jenny Lake. There, he camped for the night, after eating enough fresh-caught fish to grow gills. Five miles out of camp the next morning, he smelled smoke, and it wasn’t no little one-man fire, neither. He felt he’d finally come up on the breakaway band of Bedell’s men that the outlaw he’d cut loose had told him about. Checking his rifle and pistols, Preacher set out on foot.
“Now, by God,” he muttered. “I start riddin’ the land of two-legged vermin.”
3
Preacher approached the outlaw camp cautiously. He was already sure that’s what it was, for Indians had told him several times that no trappers were in the Hole or in the land that thunders up north of the Hole.
Three men and a woman were sitting around the fire. But there were five saddle horses at the picket line. Preacher sank down in the brush and waited. He was not close enough to make out what they were saying, only able to catch a word or so every now and then. They would all laugh from time to time. It was a dirty sort of laughter, followed by a lot of profanity, exactly what he’d expect from the low-life types in the rough camp. Preacher winced at some of the language being spoken. Preacher and his friends were no angels, and they could cuss with the best of them, but the language being used around the fire was of the sewer variety, and the words from the woman’s mouth were just as bad, or worse, as the filth coming from the men.
When the fifth man finally made his appearance, coming in from the north, Preacher used the noise the man made settling in, as a cover to move in close enough to catch all the words being spoken. The newcomer poured a cup of coffee and sat wearily down with the group. “I went up high,” he said; now Preacher could hear the words clearly. “No signs of anybody else in here with us. No smoke, no movement. Nothing. I think we’re clear.”
“Curtis’s camp ain’t that far to the south,” a man said. “He’d have smoke from a fire.”
“I ’spect he pulled out shortly after he left us,” another man offered. “He never did have no stomach for this kind of work. He was a cook back east.”
“But he killed three people!” the woman protested.
“He poisoned them,” yet another man spoke.
Oh, wonderful! Preacher thought. And I et up his cookin’ like a starvin’ hog.
“Curtis never did like it out here,” the first man said. “He wanted to go back to civilization. Hell with him. I don’t trust no poisoner no way.”
“You reckon Preacher give up the hunt?” the woman asked.
“I ’spect he did, Nelly. There ain’t no one man gonna take out after no twenty men alone. I just wish we’d have brung along some of them women we had. I liked to hear ’um holler when all of us started humpin’ ’um.”
Then the men and the woman started mouthing and laughing about some of the most perverse and vulgar remembrances of the kidnapping, and the days and nights that followed. It made Preacher’s stomach churn. He lifted his rifle and ended the foul discussion by putting a ball right between the eyes of one of the men. The outlaw’s head snapped back and for a moment, he had a very odd expression on his face, before his heart told his brain he was dead. Then the man fell forward, face-first into the fire.
Preacher jerked out his pistols and let them roar just as the outlaw’s hair caught on fire with a flaming, whooshing sound. Preacher was now standing up, a pistol in each hand, and he was cocking and firing the complicated weapons as fast as he could. When the pistols had emptied, Preacher stood completely enveloped in a thick cloud of gunsmoke and the campsite was littered with the dead, the screaming, and the dying.
Preacher shifted positions and reloaded, paying no attention to the howling of the badly wounded. The woman was screaming vile curses at him—the worst language he had ever heard come out of a woman’s mouth. He reloaded his rifle last and then stepped into the clearing. Two were left alive, a man and the woman, and they would not be long for this earth.
The first dead man’s head had cooked to steaming and it was a dreadful smell. Preacher pulled him out of the fire and rolled the carcass off to one side.
Nelly, screaming the vilest of curses at Preacher, reached for a gun and cocked it. Preacher quickly leveled a pistol and put an end to the profane shrieking.
The camp was suddenly very silent. The one mortally wounded survivor lay on the ground, shot twice through the stomach, and stared in silence at Preacher.
“You got anything to say,” Preacher told him, “I ’spect you better get it said quick-like. ’Cause you sure ain’t long for this world.”
The last words out of the man’s mouth were horrible curses, all directed at Preacher. Then he gasped, closed his eyes, and died.