FOUR
A lone rider, tall and rawhide lean, sat his saddle easily as the horse picked its way down from the high country. Preacher was riding one horse and leading two more. The pack animals were carrying five hundred plews each, beaver pelts perfectly skinned, dried, and stretched so as to be of the finest quality.
The trail followed alongside a meandering brook where cool, sweet water broke white over rocks as it rushed downhill. At the end of the trail there would be Rendezvous, a gathering of mountain men and traders, trappers and fur dealers, Indians, whiskey drummers, Bible salesmen, whores, friends and strangers.
Many a mountain man spent his entire winter thinking ahead to the next Rendezvous, using it as an incentive to help him through the long period of isolation. Preacher wasn’t one of them. He reveled in his isolation, and enjoyed being alone in the vastness of the Rocky Mountains. There were times, during the winter, when he would see, another trapper in the distance. Some would go out of their way to close that distance, to visit and palaver.
Preacher would not. In fact, he often changed trails to avoid these occasional meetings. For him, Rendezvous was a necessary part of doing business. It was not two weeks of drinking, gambling, and whoring.
Those who knew Preacher best understood this about him, and accepted it. He wasn’t exactly a misanthrope—he was friendly enough when he was with others, and no one could want a better friend than Preacher. He had been known to have more than a few drinks on occasion, would bet on an honest game of cards or a shooting match, and was not without experience with women. But for the most part, he was sober, upright, honest, and hardworking. These attributes were admired by all, but few could emulate them.
Preacher could smell the Rendezvous first, the aroma of coffee and cooking meat, the smell of wood and tobacco smoke, and the more unpleasant odor of scores of bodies, unwashed for months, gathered in one place.
Next, he could hear it. The sounds of people began to intrude upon the sounds of nature until soon, the babbling brook was completely overpowered by loud, boisterous talk, raucous laughter, and the high, skirling sound of a fiddle.
Finally, he rode into a clearing and saw it: men and women clad in buckskin and feathers, homespun and store-bought suits, bits of color, flashes of beads, silver and gold. Dozens of tents and temporary shelters had been erected, many of them little more than canvas flaps protruding from the wagons that had brought the traders, dealers, and goods here from back East.
In front of him, and slightly to the right, Preacher suddenly saw a flash of light and a puff of smoke At almost the same instant he heard the shot and the sound of a ball whistling past his ear.
Looking over in surprise, he saw Henri Mouchette toss his rifle aside, clawing for the pistol he had stuck down in his trousers. This was Preacher’s third encounter with Mouchette this year, and it looked like this one was going to settle the score between them—one way, or the other.
Preacher leaped from his horse, not away from Mouchette, as Mouchette, might have suspected, but directly toward him. Mouchette was caught off guard by Preacher’s unexpected reaction. Rather than pulling his pistol cleanly, he dropped it as he jerked it from his trousers. Preacher shoved him hard, and Mouchette staggered back, a tree breaking his fall.
Mouchette pulled his knife and held it in front of him, palm up, the knife moving back and forth slowly, like the head of a coiled snake.
“That’s all right,” Mouchette said. “I’d rather gut you than shoot you anyway. Shootin’ kills too fast.”
Preacher held a hand out in front of him, as if warding Mouchette off. He pointed at Mouchette.
“That was you that tried to shoot me a couple of months back, wasn’t it?” Preacher asked.
“You’re damn right it was,” Mouchette answered. He nodded toward the pack horses Preacher had brought in. “By rights, them should be my plews. You pulled my traps out of the water and set your own.”
“We went through all of that,” Preacher said. “My traps were there first. You pulled them out and replaced them with yours. I was only returning the favor.”
“Who give you title to that creek anyway?” Mouchette asked.
“Nobody has title to any land up here,” Preacher replied. “It’s first come, first served, same as it’s always been. And I was first there.”
“You wouldn’t even have know’d about it iffen you hadn’t heard me talkin’ about it last year.”
“That’s not true, and you know it. I’ve trapped that same creek for five winters now,” Preacher said. “You can ask anyone here.”
“That’s right, Mouchette. I know he was there three years ago ’cause he took me in for the winter when I got stoved up,” one of the trappers said. He, like several others, had been drawn in to the commotion. From other parts of the camp, people were moving as well, coming quickly to see what was going on.
“Yeah, well, it don’t matter none now ’cause he ain’t goin’ to be trappin’ it no more. I aim to split him open from his gullet to his pecker.”
Mouchette lunged forward and made a swipe with his knife. The move was unexpectedly quick, and Preacher barely managed to dance back out of the way.
“Mouchette, I don’t want to fight you,” he said. “If you’ve got a dispute with me, we can take it up with the trappers’ court.”
Trapper’s court wasn’t an official court; it was just a group of trappers who would hear arguments from both sides of a dispute, then suggest a settlement. Their suggestions had no power of law, only the power of public opinion, but for most mountain men, that was binding enough.
“Yeah, Mouchette, take it up with trappers’ court,” one of the others said, picking up on Preacher’s suggestion.
“Nah,” Mouchette replied, his evil grin spreading. “I think I’ll just kill the son of a bitch, then there won’t be nothing to settle.” He lunged forward again, but this time Preacher was ready for him, and he easily slipped the knife thrust, then countered with a hard blow to Mouchette’s ear.
Mouchette jumped back, then put his hand to his ear.
That gave Preacher the opening he needed, and he reached for his knife, only to discover that it wasn’t on his belt. He looked back toward his horse and saw that his knife was in a scabbard on a belt that was hanging around the saddle pommel. His rifle was in the rifle boot, and his pistol was in the saddlebag. He was bare-handed against Mouchette.
“Well, now,” Mouchette said when he noticed Preacher’s predicament. “Ain’t this somethin’? ’Peers to me like you’ve come to a knife fight without a knife.”
Mouchette crouched over and held the knife in front of him, still moving it back and forth. The smile that spread across his face wasn’t one of mirth, but rather one of smug satisfaction. Mouchette, who was from New Orleans, had grown up with the knife. Even in a fair fight, he might have had an advantage. But as Preacher was unarmed, there was nothing fair about this fight.
Suddenly, a knife whizzed by in front of Preacher and stuck in the tree beside him.
Preacher had no idea who it came from, and didn’t know who to thank. But at this point, he had no time to consider such things. He pulled the knife from the tree, then faced Mouchette. The easy, confident smile left Mouchette’s face, but the determination did not.
“Good,” Mouchette said. “I like it better this way. Wouldn’t be no fun in killin’ you ’lessen you fight back some.”
Armed, Preacher was no longer at a disadvantage. His posture mirrored that of Mouchette’s. He came up on the balls of his feet, crouching slightly, holding the knife firmly—but not too tightly—palm-up in his right hand. The two men began moving around each other warily, now entirely circled by people who had come from all over the Rendezvous, drawn to the spectacle of a fight to the death.
Mouchette moved in, raised his left hand as if to shield what he was going to do, then raised his knife hand to come in behind that shield. Preacher raised his left hand to block. Seeing the smile of triumph on Mouchette’s face, Preacher realized, almost too late, that he had been suckered. He had reacted exactly as Mouchette wanted him to react.
Mouchette moved his knife hand back down swiftly, as quickly as a striking snake, and he thrust toward Preacher. Preacher managed to twist away, barely avoiding the killing thrust, but not escaping entirely. He felt the knife burn as it opened a cut on his side.
Even as Preacher was avoiding Mouchette’s deadly stab, he responded with a quick counterthrust. Mouchette, thinking he had won, wasn’t prepared for the instantaneous response. He was wide-open to Preacher’s attack. Preacher’s knife went under Mouchette’s ribs, slipping in cleanly, easily, all the way to the hilt. Mouchette let out a grunt, as if he’d had the breath knocked out of him. The two men stood together for a second. Then Preacher felt Mouchette falling as his body tore itself off the knife, ripping open an even larger wound.
Mouchette fell onto his side, then rolled over onto his back. He looked up at Preacher.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “Boys, I come here to kill this son of a bitch. Instead, he kilt me. Now, ain’t that a hell of thing?”
Mouchette wheezed a few times; then the ragged breathing stopped and his eyes, still open, glazed over.
“Whose knife?” Preacher asked, holding up the knife he had used to kill Mouchette.
When nobody spoke up, Preacher looked over toward the tree where he had gotten the knife. Grasping the point of the blade with his thumb and forefinger, he threw the knife at the tree, sticking it in the trunk in almost the same place from which he had pulled it a moment earlier.
“You done what you had to do,” one of the trappers said, and several others agreed.
“Mouchette was a pain in the ass,” another insisted. “If there was ever any son of a bitch needed killin’, it was him.”
Nodding, but with no verbal response, Preacher walked over to his horse. Taking off his shirt, he lay it across the saddle while he examined the wound on his side. Fortunately, the cut wasn’t very deep, and already it had stopped bleeding. He was putting his shirt back on as someone approached him. Preacher could tell by the way he was dressed that this was one of the traders from back East.
The trader looked over the pack animals. “Looks like you had a good season,” he said.
“Tolerable,” Preacher replied.
The trader looked at the pelts more closely, folding them back to examine several of them.
“More than tolerable, I’d say. These are some of the best I’ve seen brought in since I been here.”
“Thanks.”
“You the one they call Preacher?” the man asked.
“I am,” Preacher said.
“I work for Mr. Ashley. William Ashley? I believe you know him.”
“Yes, I know him,” Preacher said.
Preacher had done business with Ashley many times before. In fact, he had once negotiated a peace with the Indians for Ashley and his traders. In this world of few contacts, and even fewer friends, William Ashley was a man that Preacher would count as a friend.
“Mr. Ashley said to treat you fair.”
“He always has. That’s his way,” Preacher replied.
“Oh, and I almost forgot. He told me to give this to you,” the trader added, handing an envelope to Preacher.
“Thanks,” Preacher said.
“Hey, Preacher,” one of the others called. “We got us a shootin’ match comin’ up tonight. Ever’one puts in a dollar, winner take all. What do you say?”
“What are you invitin’ him for, Drew?” one of the others said. “You know he always wins.”
“I know,” Drew said. “But they’s always them that’ll bet he won’t win, so what I lose by not winnin’ myself, I make up by bettin’ on a sure thing.”
“Yeah, I never thought of that. What about it, Preacher? You aim to get in on the shootin’?”
“I reckon not,” Preacher responded. He put some moss onto the cut, then put on a fresh shirt. “But thanks for the invite.”
As the trader continued to look through the pelts, Preacher sat on a fallen log. Setting the envelope down, he took out his pipe, poured in some tobacco, tamped it down, lit it, and took a few puffs before he turned his attention back to the letter. Finally, he reached for it, opened the envelope, pulled out the letter, and began to read.
Dear Preacher,
It is with great sadness that I must inform you of the death of our mutual friend, Jennie.
“Oh, shit,” Preacher said, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Somethin’ wrong?” the trader asked.
“You don’t know what’s in this letter?” Preacher asked, holding it up.
The trader shook his head. “Wasn’t my letter, wasn’t my place to read it,” he said.
“How long ago was it written?”
“I’m not sure. Six weeks, two months maybe. I’ve had it at least six weeks.”
Six weeks, Preacher thought. Jennie had been dead for at least six weeks, and he didn’t even know it. Several times, something would happen that would remind him of her, and he would hear her laugh, or see her smile—if only in his memory. But the ability to enjoy his thoughts and remembrances of her only worked if she was alive.
“Say, Preacher, do you mind if I take these pelts on over to my wagon so I can count and grade them?”
“What? No, no, go ahead, I don’t mind,” Preacher replied distractedly. Reluctantly, he returned to the letter.
I wish I could tell you that Jennie died peacefully, but I cannot. She was murdered, Preacher, in a way so vile as to defy any attempt to describe by written words. There were two of them, but one of them got away.
I’m sure you remember Ben Caviness, for you had such a difficult time with him when he was part of your trapping party. Nobody knows for sure who the one is that got away, but I believe it was Ben Caviness.
The problem is, what with Jennie being a whore and all, I’m afraid there will be no justice.
Preacher, I know what store you set by Miss Jennie, and I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you such sad news, but I knew you would want to know.
Your friend,
William Ashley
Folding the letter, Preacher got up and walked over to stick it down into his saddlebag. He glanced over toward where the fight had taken place, and saw that a couple of men were already digging a grave for Mouchette.
How odd, this sensation. Moments earlier, he had been locked in a life-and-death struggle, a struggle that he barely survived. Yet now, it seemed so remote to him that it could have happened to someone else. His thoughts were only of Jennie.
He wondered where Jennie was buried, and if anyone had shown up to say a few words over her. He hoped that they had, but he knew that it would take a brave preacher to risk the ire of his parishioners in order to pray over one of St. Louis’s most notorious women.
Preacher felt an overwhelming sense of sorrow over her loss. Then, as he considered the fact that she’d been was murdered, the sorrow gave way to anger.
He walked over to the trader’s wagon, where the trader was busy counting out and sorting Preacher’s pelts.
“It’s amazing,” the trader said. “All of your pelts are of the very highest quality.”
“How quickly can you pay me for them?” Preacher asked.
“Well, if you will take a marker against Ashley, I can pay you right away.”
“I’ll take his marker,” Preacher said.
“Very well, I’ll make one out for you.”
“Before you left St. Louis, did you hear about Jennie getting killed?”
“Oh, heavens, yes,” the trader replied. “It was all anyone talked about for a while. It’s a shame about her. Such a pretty young girl.”
“Yeah, a shame,” Preacher said.
He thought about what Ashley said in his letter about Jennie not getting justice. William Ashley was wrong. There would be justice, all right. It would be Preacher’s Justice.