CHAPTER 1

One of these days he was going to just stop coming to St. Louis, Preacher told himself as he looked down the barrel of the flintlock pistol the angry black-bearded man was pointing at him. It seemed like trouble was always waiting for him every time he set foot in civilization.

Preacher dived forward as smoke and flame spouted from the pistol. The heavy lead ball hummed through the space where his chest had been a split second earlier.

Preacher landed on a shoulder and rolled over with the lithe, athletic grace of a younger man. Preacher was approaching middle age but didn’t look or act like it. The life he had lived since leaving his family’s farm and heading for the frontier more than two decades earlier had kept him young.

As he let the momentum of the somersault carry him back up onto his feet, he considered snatching his heavy hunting knife from the fringed and beaded sheath at his waist and plunging it into the gunman’s chest.

Hell, the varmint deserved it, Preacher thought. He’d pulled a gun, after all.

But while killing this idiot wouldn’t make Preacher lose a minute’s sleep, dealing with the law afterward would be an annoyance. The authorities had started to frown on wanton slaughter, even in raucous riverfront taverns like Red Mike’s.

So Preacher left the knife where it was, balled his right fist, put the considerable power of his body behind it, and broke the stupid son of a bitch’s jaw with one punch instead.

Like a fool, the man had been trying to reload his pistol when he didn’t have nearly enough time to accomplish that task before Preacher hit him. When the mountain man’s punch exploded against his jaw, the impact drove him into the bar with bone-crunching force. The man’s arms flew wide. The empty pistol slipped from his fingers, flew across the room, and smashed into the face of a burly keelboat man.

The redheaded whore who had started the whole ruckus by screaming in pain when the black-bearded man grabbed her by the hair and jerked her up against him now threw her arms around Preacher’s neck.

“You saved me from that brute!” she gushed. She came up on her toes and planted her painted mouth on Preacher’s mouth.

Preacher didn’t have any objections to kissing a whore, but he knew better than to close his eyes while he was doing it, too. Because of that, he saw the keelboat man leap up from the table, blood running like twin rivers from his busted nose, and charge across the room like a maddened bull.

Clearly, the fella didn’t care whose fault it was that he’d gotten walloped in the snoot. The black-bearded man had collapsed in a moaning heap at the foot of the bar, so the river man headed for the combatant who was still on his feet to take out his rage.

Preacher thought about shoving the whore at the man to trip him—after all, she’d had a hand in this mess—but that wouldn’t be the chivalrous thing to do and Preacher still tried on occasion to be a gentleman.

So he took hold of the redhead under the arms, picked her up, and swung her out of the way.

“Better scoot, darlin’,” he advised her with a pat on her attractive rump.

Then he turned back to the keelboat man, whose lumbering charge was practically shaking the puncheon floor under Preacher’s boots by now.

Preacher lifted a foot and the fella’s groin ran right into it at top speed. The shriek he let out was pretty high-pitched for somebody who was almost as wide as he was tall and all muscle. He doubled over, curling around the agony he felt, and barreled into Preacher like somebody had bowled him in a game of ninepins.

As he fell, Preacher thought again that he really ought to stay away from St. Louis in the future. There were other places to sell his furs now.

Then he was down on the sawdust-littered tavern floor and several of the keelboat man’s friends came at him like a herd of stampeding buffalo.

“Get him!” one of those men cried.

“Stomp him!” another yelled.

Somebody crashed into the group from the side and with widespread arms swept the two leaders off their feet. That gave Preacher time to get his hands and knees under him and surge up to his feet once more.

He snatched a bucket of beer from a nearby table and waded into the remaining three men, swinging the bucket like a medieval flail. Two of them went down almost immediately, but the third man landed a punch to the side of Preacher’s head that made the mountain man’s ears ring. Working on keelboats gave a fella plenty of muscles.

One of the men Preacher had knocked down grabbed his leg and twisted. Preacher yelled more in annoyance than in pain and tried to kick the man free. The one who was still on his feet took advantage of the distraction and hammered a punch to Preacher’s solar plexus that knocked the air out of his lungs.

Then he tackled Preacher around the waist and dragged him to the floor.

Preacher wound up wrestling with all three of them as he rolled around in the sawdust. A pungent blend of spilled beer, vomit, unwashed flesh, and horse dung assaulted his nostrils. He clamped a hand around the throat of one opponent and banged his head against the puncheons hard enough to make the man’s eyes roll back in their sockets. He was out of the fight after that.

Another man looped an arm around Preacher’s neck from behind and squeezed. The man’s forearm was like an iron bar. Preacher was still mostly out of breath, and as long as the man was choking him like that, he couldn’t get any air in.

Everything started to go hazy around him, and Preacher knew it wasn’t just from all the pipe smoke that hung in the air inside Red Mike’s.

He felt the hot breath of the man who was choking him against the back of his neck. That meant his face was right handy. Preacher drove his head back as hard as he could. His skull was thick enough that the fella’s nose had no chance against it. Cartilage crunched and blood spurted under the impact.

That loosened the man’s grip enough for Preacher to gulp down a breath, but the man was stubborn and didn’t let go. Instead he stood up and hauled Preacher with him.

Upright again, Preacher spotted the fella who had pitched in to help him. He was part of a tangled mass of flailing fists and kicking feet a few yards away. The rest of the tavern’s patrons had grabbed their drinks and their serving wenches and gotten out of the way, clearing a space in front of the bar for the battles.

“Hang on to him, Rory! We’ll teach him he can’t treat us that way!”

The shout came from the other keelboat man still on his feet. As his friend kept up the pressure on Preacher’s throat, he closed in with his knobby, malletlike fists poised to hand the mountain man a beating.

As the man rushed in, Preacher grabbed the arm across his throat with both hands, pulled his feet off the floor, lifted his knees, and then lashed out with both legs. His boot heels caught the man in the chest with such force that he was knocked back a dozen feet before he landed on top of one of Red Mike’s rough-hewn tables and lay there with his arms and legs splayed out.

Preacher got his feet on the floor again and drove hard with them, forcing the man who held him backward. Preacher always knew where he was and what was around him. His long, dangerous life had ingrained that habit in him. Just as he expected, after a couple of steps the small of the man’s back struck the edge of the bar. This time it was enough to make him let go completely.

Preacher lifted an elbow up and back. It caught the man on the jaw and snapped his head around. Preacher pivoted, took hold of the front of the man’s linsey-woolsey shirt, and forced him up and over the bar. A shove sent him sprawling behind it.

The man who’d helped Preacher had his hands full with his two opponents. One man had him down on the floor choking him while the other man tried to kick him and stomp him in the head. Preacher laced his fingers, stepped up, and swung his clubbed hands against the back of the second man’s neck. It was a devastating blow that dropped the man like a poleaxed steer.

With the odds even now, Preacher’s ally was able to cup his hands and slap them over the ears of the man choking him, causing that varmint to turn loose and howl in pain. Freed, the man bucked up from the floor and swung a right and a left that had his opponent rolling across the puncheons. The man landed with both knees in his belly and sledged two more punches down into his face.

That ended the fight.

The brawny Irishman behind the bar, the tavern’s namesake, said in a tone of utter disgust, “Preacher, does this have to happen every time you come in here?”

Preacher had picked up the broad-brimmed, round-crowned, gray felt hat that had been knocked off his head early in the fracas. As he punched it back into its usual shape, he grinned at the proprietor and said, “Appears that it does, Mike.”

Red Mike grunted, reached down to take hold of the man Preacher had shoved behind the bar, and heaved his senseless form back over the hardwood. The man thudded onto the floor in front of the bar.

As Mike dusted his hands off, he said, “Well, I happen to know those spalpeens just got paid, so I’ll collect from ’em for the damages, and maybe a little extra for the annoyance. Why don’t the two of you move on so they won’t try to start another brouhaha when they wake up?”

“You’re chasin’ off customers?” Preacher asked, astonished. He clapped his hat on his head.

Red Mike grimaced and said, “I prefer to think of it as limitin’ the potential damage to me place.”

Preacher chuckled and turned to the man who had pitched in on his side. He intended to offer to buy the fella a drink in some other tavern—there were plenty of them along the river—when he realized that he knew this man.

“Simon Russell!” Preacher said. “What are you doin’ here?”

“Actually, I’m looking for you, Preacher,” the man said. “I want to offer you a job.”